Not sure exactly what all is on it, but I'll accept Reid's statement that there are NO CONSTRAINTS on the Politburo's actions.

Lambert at Corrente discusses, with links, while fighting nausea.

So, McCaskill clearly is misleading the public. Damn these lying liars and the lies they tell.

Now, what nickname best describes the Super Congress? Twelve Caesars or Politburo?

important is that Obama has got his catfood commission back.

Back in prerevolutionary France, there was plenty of wilderness in France, mostly reserved for the hunting of the royalty and nobility. After the revolution the peasants got land reform and ended up trying to cultivate much sensitive or marginal land with devastating environmental results. So in a sense, I think this kind of oligarchic structure may be better at culling the herd of us proles (but how that model works in an industrial economy may actually work against the environment, since nature is now a commodity in the hands of the rich, like the mountains that get reduced to slag heaps all over this country).

On the other hand, the repressive nature of oligarchy will also prevent any sort of needed innovations or advances that might help with the environmental challenges facing us.

IF Europe and Japan were not going through the exact same exercise. Europe in fact is in far worse shape than the US. I'd add our imports are at record highs, so somehow folks are finding the money to buy crap.

But I do agree the energy and environmental issues at some point are going to HAVE TO pinch this all in. Then entitlement nations (er, consumer nations) everywhere will go into the death throe withdrawals. Consumer nations without their stupid crap will look like heroin addicts going through withdrawal.

But the conservative cabal leader, Obama, had already been voted in. What did folks voting him in expect? A fair number of us knew and said he was a vampire back during that election. All the signs were there in his history. Unfortunately I do understand this level of brainlessness, having had my nose rubbed in it, and my sympathy has gone to the floor.

Oh and by the way, progress on universal healthcare insurance company profits isn't even what most people are the most mad at.

but now we have more job killing legislation. Biden says now they can concentrate on jobs. Really? Three years in and now they want to talk jobs. Of course McConnell has other ideas.

that anyone was going to even *acknowledge* the direct strategic impact of their position, far less refrain from repeating it, did you?

But I forgot. One of the Agonist's loudest editorial positions was that they're all the same party - the Money Party - so it really made no difference even though we can now clearly see it did.

is the Tea Party chewed through their leash.(Chamber of Commerce even came out for it)

So the people who didn't think that the healthcare bill went far enough voted for conservatives, but then got mad at those conservatives because they didn't raise taxes?

Or is it that the people who thought the healthcare bill went too far voted in conservatives, but then got mad at those conservatives because they didn't raise taxes?

Come on, you know how that plays out.

But to be more specific, it's been called catabolic collapse by at least one very well informed observer and we've already been living through it: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html

I've been a deflationista since the early Aughts, based on my reading of the 1930s Depression and the underlying collapse of the credit system. Since I was part of the banking world - specifically the derivatives system - I could see what was happening, though some of the excesses in the credit default products certainly shocked me. Also, I began to notice that home prices decoupled from their traditional relationship to consumer price inflation, which was highly unusual and seemed to connect to the invention of the home equity line of credit (a way to "commoditize" the family home). Things seemed to be in place for a credit bubble, on a global basis once securitization took hold.

Having lived through the Herstatt, Continental Bank, and Penn Central bankruptcies, it wasn't hard to predict how this bubble would burst. They always reach their climax with a credit event, typically an unexpected bankruptcy. Back in September 2005, I wrote about the probability that this event would occur in the mortgage backed securities market, which was the locus of the housing securitization frenzy, and sure enough Bear Stearns obliged 18 months later.

The depressing thing about these credit/deflationary crises is how unavoidable they are once the bubble pops. The economic system seems to have an unstoppable urge to reach a new equilibrium where asset values meet up eventually with earnings capacity. This takes a while to work out, but often the asset decline is 50% or more. Government intervention can slow the process and give momentary impressions of growth, but ultimately the deflationary pressures return until the equilibrium point is reached.

The observation that credit deflation is cumulative is spot on. The process develops a vicious cycle as one asset sale leads to another. People don't recognize that this is nothing more than the unwinding of the virtuous cycle that creates the bubble, when for example your neighbor's record-high sales price of their home pulls everybody else's values up.

This happens to be a massive global deflationary collapse, unseen before since the global economy only recently came into existence. You could say that the fundamental dynamic of this deflation is the necessity of developed world living standards collapsing to meet up with emerging market living standards, as new competitors enter the system to steal market share from the West. While this is a long term process, I'm surprised that it is more telescoped that what would normally be expected. We seem to be compressing most of the pain into this decade. By the way, this week's announcement that Foxconn is going to be replacing many of its 800,000 factory workers in China with robots is an important turning point. Global labor arbitrage has now reached the one country that invented it. We now seem to be coming to the end of the arbitrage process, at the same time we are entering a dangerous phase of the deflationary collapse as China suffers multiple blows: the loss of its major trading partners, the loss of its labor arbitrage advantages, and the social upheaval from increases in unemployment.

Of course, what has made this deflationary cycle much worse is the West's attempts for 20 years to avoid the pain through asset inflation, leading to bubbles. Nothing could have been worse than Greenspan refusing to acknowledge the existence of asset inflation or bubbles - in fact he is still touting it as a good thing for the economy. A very misguided and ultimately costly illusion.

Finally, overlaying the deflationary process is the existence of raw material and energy shortages. As the deflationary cycle proceeds in waves, there are periodic episodes of apparent bottoming and growth. This time though, they are met with a superimposed sine wave of price spikes from scarce raw materials and energy supplies, which abort these expansions prematurely. Then commodity prices head down, giving the impression that the shortages are gone, which in many cases is not true. The true nature of the shortages will only become apparent when this deflationary cycle finally bottoms, which should be around 2016 or a bit later.

You could say, then, that peak energy and contracting credit are going to combine to make this deflationary collapse one of the worst in centuries. This is one reason I've held on to my view that the bottom of the cycle will coincide with a bottom in the Dow anywhere from 1,000 to 3,600. This seems preposterous now, of course, with the Dow at 11,800, but really we're talking about setting a new low just a few thousand points below the 2009 low of 6,600. Once we reach that low, there will be some very good buying opportunities in stocks and it will be time to get bullish again. But not in real estate. That asset will linger along on the bottom for many years afterwards.

It seems in the past two weeks the stock market has kicked off the next and most vicious aspect of the deflationary collapse. We could well see the collapse of many major banks and most small ones. This is the point where widespread social disorder sets in, and where no asset is safe, even your cash if it is in a weak bank. What seems especially important is that the decline in stocks is occuring around the globe, and austerity has taken hold everywhere. These are the perfect conditions for the worst phase of this deflationary collapse. In the US, we will know it is upon us when the market gives up on the Fed being of any help. We are almost there. Today's announcement by Don Kohn that the Fed will seriously consider QE3 bides some time, but it is quite possible the market will either force gold and commodities even higher in response, which will force the Fed to give up on QE, or the market will anticipate it and sell off everything in despair.

Well, I hope that cheers you up!