September 14, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

KATRINA AND INSURANCE COMPANIES

Insurance companies are like casinos. Just as casinos can calculate the odds and come out ahead, so do insurance companies. Then something inconvenient like Hurricane Katrina comes along and changes the odds. So the insurance companies turn to their big law firms and look for a technicality so they don't have to pay an avalanche of claims due to the hurricane. The business press, like the media in general, take the side of big corporations. This article by Dean Starkman is at www.cjr.org:

The disgraceful state of the Gulf’s recovery can be traced in large measure to insurers’ wholesale-and I mean, by the tens of thousands-violations of their legal obligations to policyholders. While many blame the government, and I’m sure with good reason, it is worth noting that the recovery of Mississippi, which has an efficient state government under a Republican governor with close ties to Washington and two smart, active and influential Republican senators, has been only marginally more successful than Louisiana’s, where basically none of that is true, except Louisiana has one prominent Republican official, Sen. Very Serious Sin.

The common thread in these two states is insurance.

I was largely correct about the business press, too, I’m afraid. Somehow, national outlets devoted to business news, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Business Week, and the Financial Times barely notice that 2005-year of the worst-ever insured loss in the history of the world-was also the most profitable insurance year ever, by a long shot. No one asked how that could be so.

CONSUMER CONFIDENCE DROPS

I think I'm the economy in microcosm. I haven't had a raise in over two years. In the meantime, rent has gone up, gas prices have gone up, and food prices have gone up. The catalogs arrive in the mail, but I don't have the extra money to buy stuff from catalogs. If there are lots of people like me, then the people at the catalog companies are hurting. They will reduce their spending and the ripple effect will spread through the whole economy. What we're seeing now is that people can't keep borrowing forever. There comes a point you have to stop spending, especially when there is no good news on the economic front. When we see how much this administration has lied about everything and how the war in Iraq has been so dismally mismanaged, why we would be confident in the government's ability to steward the economy? This article by Froma Harrop is at seattletimes.nwsource.com:

The new numbers on consumer confidence are out. They show American consumers very confident that the economy is going down the tubes.

Over in Asia and Europe, stocks plunged on fears that Americans may no longer be able to find the second jobs and recklessly borrow the money needed to buy imported stuff. Economists now freely use the "recession" word following the report that American payrolls fell in August, the first monthly decline in four years.

American consumers, in other words, are all dried up. And the discussion has begun on what kind of baloney economy kept them lubricated for so long.