Paul Krugman wrote an article today that hits on something many have observed for quite some time: the spreading wave of despair and darkness over average Americans’ lives, in this case, particularly middle-aged whites. This is not a new revelation, but it is something mainstream economists and commentators like Krugman are starting to catch wind of in their thought, at least in the academic/statistical realm. On a side note, while eschewing any exacerbation of this problem by the left and then subsequently blaming the “volatility of right-wing politics,” he still makes some good points, without offering any solutions. Regardless, to point, Krugman writes this:
Tag: New York Times
“Brian McLaren and his ilk of the emerging church [i.e. Rob Bell] … all it is is 19th, 20th century liberalism in a postmodern dress. There isn’t anything new in it at all. And the only reason they can get away with it is because people are so a-historical and ignorant of theologies of the past.” – David Robertson, Emergent Calvinism (MP3). One of the biggest surprises with this Rob Bell universalism/inclusivism controversy isn’t that Bell is affirming universalism. The response of evangelicals, particularly younger generations, including mine, and their response has been the most surprising aspect.
However, I shouldn’t be that surprised. It’s what happened to J. Gresham Machen in the 1920’s and 30’s in which he received the most push back from the moderates of theological liberalism who were willing to tolerate individuals who wholesale rejected anything resembling Biblical Christianity. We are now back at one of those points.
The ‘D’ word is being uttered in the mainstream now. Despite whatever the media says concerning the ‘jobless recovery’ we’re in (which is a complete oxymoron) or the ‘summer recovery’ we’ve begun that Obama touted as truth last month, all indicators are pointing to the fact that the US is officially entering an era of economic depression, something not seen in my or my dad’s generation.
The numbers tell the story. A couple of articles in particular are pointing to this fact. One on CNBC, the other by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the Telegraph. In addition, even liberal, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman from the New York Times is calling this the beginning of the Third Depression, as I talked about in my last entry. He is dead wrong on how to fix it, but his diagnosis is correct.
I’m not a big Glenn Beck fan, not so much because of the content (since I too am puzzled by many of the same things presented in his recent “questioning” series), but rather I’m not a fan because of the entertainment/drama meets news thing. Regardless, this was worth posting.
The stakes in the climate change/global warming debate are getting raised to levels many of us should really be concerned about now. As if the cap and trade/tax bill wasn’t enough to cause concern for the stability of our economy, there is now a treaty to be signed in Copenhagen at a UN meeting. Some are saying it would cede U.S. sovereignty and accountability to a global government who would essentially be in charge of redistributing wealth from the Western world to third world countries as a sort of penance for our assumed climate crimes.
Many are speaking out on this issue. On the one hand you have the skeptics, such as myself, whose voices are growing, even from within the scientific community (700 dissenting scientists from within the IPCC), who are very concerned about the real intentions of this treaty. On the other hand, you have those, such as Al Gore and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, who are boldly saying we are all in agreement, all on the same page concerning the evidence as well as what needs to be done.
This really makes you wonder who is really running the engine of this nation now: from politics to corporations to the media, it really seems to be the moneychangers now, the banks and major investment firms. And instead of the Fed addressing the “too big to fail” issue, the bailed out banks are even bigger than before after all of these tax-payer funded bailouts.
Don’t believe everything you read in the headlines out there about the state of things in the economy, or in this case the bailouts. It is not rosy nor can we determine the state of the economy based solely upon what the stock market is doing, as some seem bent on doing.
It seems alternative media are more faithful these days to doing actual economic and financial journalism than many of the big hitters, including blogs like Naked Capitalism, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis and Calculated Risk. In addition, though Alex Jones may be the leader of conspiratorial hype movement in the alternative media world, where everyone and their dog is an agent of the Fed and the global elitist interests that are coming to enslave us, he at least has one thing completely right that I agree on: we are in an information war of vast proportions against some wealthy stake holders in this country now.
Take for example this from Naked Capitalism: More Bogus Bailout Reporting: “As Big Banks Repay Bailout Money, U.S. Sees a Profit” (Archive)
“Clearly, the spin is in. As a post earlier today discusses, the Financial Times is running a story that claims that the Fed made money on its rescue programs, then slips in all the tidbits in the body of the article to let discerning readers know that the reporter understands that the analysis is utter rubbish while looking like it is not crossing the Fed.