Is anyone actually rooting for a recession?

[tcfrogs]

Found this at Media Matters:

O'Reilly accused NY Times of "rooting for a recession"
http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200711270010?f=h_late...

I certainly dislike the current mis-administration as much as anyone. However, I certainly don't have any vested interest in seeing the economy fall apart. Myself along with many others here have a considerable amount of money invested in stocks, 401k, and real estate.

The O'Leilly piece was directed at the NY Times, not DU. I've also heard that other idiot pundits such as Limbaugh and Hannity claim that the Democrats want the economy to "tank" to improve their election chances in 2008.

Some of the posts I've noticed here today and recently almost seem to be happy that bad economic indicators are emerging more and more daily. Perhaps that's a small minority of DU'ers, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting people's posts. Bad economic news cuts both ways politically, considering that there is a Democratic House and Senate currently in control along with the Republican White House.

So I'll just ask again point-blank: Is anyone actually rooting for a recession or economic collapse? Is so, why?

[whistle]

1. The Queen of England along with the British Empire power elite

...would to see nothing better than a full blown economic meltdown in the U.S.

[Teaser]

8. what

.

[rockymountaindem]

14. Is that you LaRouche?

I didn't know you posted here...

[Odin2005]

15. Lyndon Larouche, is that you?

[whistle]

25. No, but that would be a good person to have on board to expose and get to the root

...of this whole financial mess

[Ganja Ninja]

2. The economy isn't going to tank because someone wishes it.

It will tank because the government's fiscal policies allowed it to tank.

[The2ndWheel]

3. Are we serious about this global warming stuff or not?

If we are, we have to do less, and the economy has to contract.

If we're not, then we can continue to rip apart the planet.

However, it has to be done voluntarily. You can't force anyone either way, especially contraction, since force is how we got here.

[whistle]

26. Since when is going into another dark age a solution, that's neocon talk

[The2ndWheel]

36. Then we'll keep making things worse

Neocons want to force people to do what they want. I do not. Yes, I want a habitat to live in, but who am I to tell however many people who want this and that that they can't do or have what they want. I'm not anyone.

So we'll keep making things worse. Then when it finally catches back up with us, we'll come up with a better way to control life, and make the problem worse, and it keeps going on like that. That's what we've been doing for thousands of years, and there isn't much that will stop that momentum. We'll turn the world inside out before we stop.

[whistle]

41. Yes, you do have a point...we now have over 6.5 billion people in the world

...of which 80% are poor and a third go to bed hungry every night.

At the beginning of the 20th century World population stood at 1.633 billions and by 1950 it had not quite doubled to 2.557 billions.

http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html

The next 50 years witnessed a world population explosion when in 2000 world population passed the 6.070 billions mark and continues to push the limits of all of the world's resources as the current level of world population on November 29, 2007 at 1:39PM EST stands at 6,765,341,286 persons

http://www.ibiblio.org/lunarbin/worldpop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Under current trends the next 100 years will most likely see a slowing in population growth, but by 2050 there will possibly be as many as 9.0 billion persons on this planet.

A recent report issued in 2003 by the United Nations on World Population trends through the year 2300, suggests that is fertility rates continued at the same levels as they were from 1975 to 2000, the world's population would go totally out of control producing vastly unsupportable population levels that could hit 244 billion persons by the year 2150 exceed 134 trillion persons by the year 2300, a scenario that would be hardly possible.

http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange...

So, where does all this leave us? Neocons and their ilk wish to exploit the situation to their own selfish and opportunistic ends by keeping the world in constant conflict and wars enlarging their own power and control while using genocidal policies to selectively reduce and eliminate large sectors of populations to meet their own ends of imperialistic one world domination.

I think they are wrong and must be prevented from having any further influence in world or even national U.S. affairs. I believe the U.S. can play a vital role in solving the problems throughout the world beginning with the next democratic administration and Congressional majority which can address these and many other national and global problems in a sane and humanitarian way. We begin with a return to the policies of FDR and the New Deal and a total overhaul of a new Bretton Woods agreement(1) of fixed foreign exchange with the U.S. dollar as the base currency and fair trade agreements between the U.S. and the largest Eurasian powers of Russia, China and India. We move away from further expanded reliance on fossil fuels and begin developing 4th generation nuclear power which will provide safe efficient electrical power, fresh cheap water from the oceans, hydrogen for powering automobiles and sustainable employment on a mass scale for the next two generations. By the year 2025 fusion technology will have become commercially feasible, so the all of the older power generating plants including the plutonium producing nuclear reactors could be retired and disassembled and the next generation of fusion reactors could go into construction and operation adding what we have not been able to do in the past on a mass scale, producing basic elementary particles and isotopes which would allow an endless supply of all elements needed to sustain our planet and way of life. This is no longer science fiction, but in fact is reality. All that is needed it the will and the focus to accomplish this for humanity.


(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system

[Newsjock]

4. Not a full-blown recession, but ...

I fervently hope and pray that the ultra-rich, who have amassed obscene wealth largely through deliberate destruction of the middle class in America, are forced to pay for their actions.

I'm not talking about Biff and Muffy with their $95,000 income and their four-bedroom suburban home, either.

[blondeatlast]

5. Yep. I've no love or respect for the One Percenters. They don't do a damned thing to move my economy

forward--they don';t spend a disproportionate amount of their incomes on sheer living expenses and the only jobs they really create anymore are service ones with no future.

[rurallib]

10. My guess is that the 1%ers would be least affected and

most able to weather a storm unless EVERYTHING got wiped out.

[LSparkle]

6. Agreed

I've personally suffered economic decline during the past 7 years and have seen most of my friends go through the same. However, I see executives in my own company every day who are doing extremely well, yet who seem to have less and less sympathy for those of us who have been negatively impacted by the policies of this administration. We are at war; we are in deficits; China owes our debt and we are headed for the Day of Reckoning. All I want is to see a SHARED sacrifice, something to remind even the bigwigs that we are ALL in this together ...

[tcfrogs]

24. Thank goodness my name isn't Bill or Muffy

[Teaser]

7. Sure. I could always use less money

.

[Robbien]

9. What a white and black world O'Reilly etal lives in

People here at DU are not reveling in the bad news. It is just that the real events happening in the world are being severely downplayed by MSM and we are inundated with all the happy talk of O'Reilly and his ilk.

We look around us and see with our own eyes that people are in trouble, but the news is telling us to be cheerful, everything is bright and gay. Go shopping.

DU is a place to come and find affirmation of what one knows is happening.

[blondeatlast]

13. Exactly. The current Black Friday spin? "Less shoppers but spending more. All is peachy."

I worked retail for years and still follow it closely. That means less money regardless of how it's spun and more retailers unable to make paint 2007 in the black.

People here can see that as well--but the lap-dog MSM keeps telling us how wonderful it all is that "people are spending more money this year." don't you believe it. Retailers make more when more people spend (even appreciably) less because it saves on overhead.

[whistle]

27. Has "Black Friday" come and gone this season and how did it go?

[blondeatlast]

37. According to my sources, less shoppers but spending more money. In other words,

badly.

It means the upper incomes were shopping while the vast majority of the middle class stayed home--and that's very, very bad news for retailers, regardless of what the MSM financial racket cheerleadeers like to say.

It used to be that Black Friday alone could put a retailer in the black for the year (hence the phrase), in fact, they counted on it and it nearly always succeeded. This quelled a bit during the Reagan years, picked up in the Bush ! and Clinton years, but is absolutely no longer the case in the past 3 years or so.

Some major retailers (Bombay Company, for instance) couldn't even make it to Black Friday. They announced a complete closure in late October and nearly all stores were shuttered a few weeks before BF. Most retailers would have strived to make it until BF in the hopes of eking it out. That they didn't even try, considering how close it was, is very bad news...

[rurallib]

11. I am not an economist but I will vet there are some vultures

more than ready to snap up cheap property and equipment etc. As with anything, follow the money.

[gratuitous]

19. Yes indeed

The short sellers, the bottom feeders, the contrarians, whatever you want to call them. Investors who have money today who can afford to plunk some of that into something that will turn a profit for them if the commodity they're investing in goes further south.

Under ordinary circumstances, a sale of stock is made by a seller who thinks its price is about to go down to a buyer who thinks the stock price is about to go up. One of them is right. But is the mere act of selling a share or block of shares of stock evidence that the seller is "rooting" for the share price to go down?

It's rather a silly argument, but since it's being advanced by Billo, I guess I wasn't expecting anything else.

[thereismore]

12. Hillary. She will make a killing on cattle futures.

[Initech]

16. That talking point makes about as much sense as when they say "we're rooting to lose in Iraq".

We're not rooting to lose in Iraq.

We're not rooting for a recession.

They must think we're fucking nuts.

[The Stranger]

17. What reactionary propaganda.

As if those recognizing the problem are somehow the cause of it.

[Javaman]

18. My one wish...

Soylent green is rich people!!!

I can live with that. LOL

[sandnsea]

20. God no - but here's the deal

Some of the bottom 50% know the economy is screwed up and favors the upper 10-20% so drastically that there's nothing left for us at all - not even homes. So if the housing market needs to correct drastically downward, well then some of us don't see that as a bad thing. But if it accompanied a total economic collapse, well no, nobody wants that.

[whistle]

29. The economy has been screwed up for average Americans beginning

...the day Bush Jr took office in January 2001. After that everything that has happened and that Shrub* has done has made things worse for average Americans

[sandnsea]

33. It's been screwed up since Nixon took office

We had a reprieve for a few years in the 90's, but Bush really went into high gear.

[whistle]

43. Nixon took the country totally off the gold standard, allowed central banks

...to has complete control over money supply and removed virtually all control for fiscal policy making and new infrastructure development from the hands of Congress and the President. That created the stagflation of the 1970s and Ronnie Reagan's Star Wars defense system and military expansion as the only outlets for government spending.

So, you are correct, it began with Richard Nixon who lied to the American people in order to get elected by saying he had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, only to continue and expand that war for another seven years costing 40,000 more American lives and another $400.0 billion and several million Southeast Asian lives as well.

[book_worm]

21. No, because it hurts the poor and middle class more than anybody.

[BelgianMadCow]

22. You bet! Carlyle!

and some seven other offshored investement funds own 50% of all "bear shares" on the US market - shares that go UP when the market goes down. Read this yesterday on DU.

Things that make you go hmmmm...

[Bozita]

28. That was my first thought when reading the title of the OP

[BelgianMadCow]

34. This documentary made it all the more real:

http://stopcarlyle.ifrance.com/archives1.htm

First two minutes in dutch, the rest is in english

[alfredo]

23. Businesses love recessions. It shift power from the worker to the bosses.

[Deja Q]

30. No way.

What is going on is an incentive for all of us to learn and do more and think outside the box.

As long as a shake-up doesn't break the eggs, it will do people some good and re-think their priorities.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

31. Rooting for a recession? You've got to be kidding.

As for as economic collapse, that's laughable. I have a kid in college that relies on the food industry to make a living (she's a waitress). She's already seen a reduction in her income. I have in mine also and I'm in a different field of the service industry.

I keep hoping day after day that something will happen to mend our failing economy. Right now, however, things simply aren't looking that great for our short term economic outcome. Hell, our long term is on shaky ground if things continue as they've been.

The reason you're hearing this type of talk from these idiot pundits is because people have been expressing more and more concern in polls about the sagging economy. These pundits know that it's going to become an issue in 2008 and they're looking for a way to lay it at the feet of the Democrats, or at least poison it for the Democrats. In other words they fear another 1992 style defeat.

If Americans actually vote with their pocketbooks and not based on manufactured fear as they did in 2004, the likes of Rudy Giuliani won't have a leg to stand on.

As amazing as it may seem, for all the atrocities that the Bush administration has committed in the past 7 years, the one thing that may once again be the death sentence for Republicans in 2008 could be the economy.

[DaveJ]

32. Well... No, but I'd like to see real-estate prices go down tremendously

Real-estate is massively overvalued, and the idea of buying real estate in order to get rich quick just makes it more unlikely that younger generations will ever own anything, which I think is at least morally suspect.

[leftofthedial]

35. we can't save the people

until this rotten capitalist system destroys itself

americans are too lazy and apathetic to bring it down, so economic collapse is the only hope for the future of our species

[sicksicksick_N_tired]

38. ACKNOWLEDGING a recession is NOT ROOTING for one, you asshole!!!!

Those punk-assed pundits are simply doing what they do best and LYING THEIR ASSES OFF to their audience.

Screw them!!!

[Mike03]

39. There are people who are rooting for it because they have been

planning for it for twenty years. They are survivalists and goldbugs who want the right to say "I told you so."

But there is a huge difference between sadism and vindication.

Many economists, investors and just plain observant people have anticipated recession for the better part of the past five years. I doubt they are "happy" that it is here; but I know they deserve a lot of apologies from the gung-ho criminally-negligent talking heads who have continually encouraged naive investors to get into this incredibly dangerous market, or to spend-spend-spend themselves into oblivion.

[Mike03]

40. I wish you had also asked if Recession "is necessary?"

Because we desperately need monetary contraction. There's no other way. Our nation is bankrupt. Our currency is worthless. We don't save, or can't save.

The choice was always between a soft landing and a hard landing, but people didn't get a clue and stop spending. Now it's going to hurt, big time.

[whistle]

42. In any society that does not want to stagnate, change is necessary

...but change can be accomplished without the negative and imbalanced impact which traditional recessions and more serious depressions cause. Fiscal policy and central planning offers smooth transitions like the U.S. had from 1933 under FDR's New Deal all the way to 1963 with the assassination of JFK. After that monetary policy began to take hold and has brought the country to where we are now, facing the worst economic meltdown and financial collapse in history.

[spanone]

44. bill is a dumbasss