Corporate profits are up! The stock market is on the rise. Obama is moving to the right. What better time is there to freeze government spending?

Let me get this straight. Obama wants to cut spending, but instead of cutting where the greatest waste, fraud and unnecessary expenses are (Defense), he decides it's better to cut what little table scraps are left for the vast majority of Americans (Entitlements)?

What planet did this guy come from? Haven't we all seen with our own eyes that trickle down economics doesn't work? The rich have more income than they ever had in the history of this nation, yet they aren't really increasing their hiring. Unless you call hiring part time temps with no benefits as hiring.

Obama reminds me of the Sheriff of Nottingham from "Robin Hood:Prince of Thieves" who said: "That's it then! Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings. And call off Christmas!"

No this isn't about common sense or what is just or proper. This is about paying off his corporate masters. Unless the working class get off their rear ends and start striking and demonstrating on a mass scale (ala France) more resources will get pushed to the rich.

Great commentary by Robert Scheer!

I did not watch the speech because I knew it would be condescending sophistry. It proves one more time that there is no difference at all between the Donkeys & Elephants.

I watched about half of the speech.
Gag!

Did he even mention the wars?
I didn't see a word about the wars in the political commentary.

At what point will progressives finally get it, this guy is spineless, bought and paid for, and has no intention of doing anything that goes outside of the Washington narrative. It's hopeless to think this guy will try to move the needle. This was Mr. Obama's 2012 kick off speech. This speech was designed to reinforce the new "business friendly" (i.e. give me campaign cash) approach to governance. In other words, Regan is still in the white house, he's now just a black man pretending to be a progressive.

Mr. Scheer is yet another person commenting on the SOTU who is avoiding the elephant in the room; WAR.

$1,000,000,000,000.00 That is a trillion dollars. That's a lot of zeros. We spend that every year on WAR.

Until this is addressed, the US will continue to sink morally, spiritually, and economically, and deserves to do so.

" We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people."

Obomba left unmentioned that corporations are enjoying a profits recovery, are fat with cash to invest and don't need(much less deserve) any taxpayer subsidies.
.
.
"we want to prepare 100,000 new teachers in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math."

That sounds great for all those "countless new" laid off 50 year-old scientists and engineers who can't land a interview, much less a job. Although, seeing that persons experiences with the job market may persuade their students to seek another career path.

I had to miss the Half-time Pep rally.
By that, I mean I HAD to miss it.

I've heard they sort-of pulled off that "pyramid" routine, but I don't think it's quite so impressive when the cheerleaders are all cheering for the same team because there has only been one team on the field supposedly playing for and against itself.

No wonder "unity" was the theme.

Maybe if they all put on skirts and had shinier pom-poms.
YES, THAT would be worth watching!

Barack Obama has the honor of being our first President composed of anti-matter.

Trylon

"It wasn't the students struggling at community colleges who came up with the financial gimmicks that produced the Great Recession, but rather the super-whiz-kid graduates of the top business and law schools. ...

... it was the highest-achieving graduates of our elite colleges who designed and sold the financial gimmicks that created this crisis."

I don't know why anyone would think Barack H. Obomber would do any different, he is one of these elites, he attended the Ivy school, he is a part of the Oligarchs club. This is who he is and what he does.

Don't let his appearance fool you, that is in fact his greatest weapon.

State of the Union speech? Utter vacuity.

Obama? A small man in a large job.

But blaming him for not mentioning cutting military spending? The republicans with their none binding vote to roll back spending levels to 2008 don't include it either. Lets be fair and blame all the Washington pol's.

Michael Moore? It's amusing to see this idiot held up as an Icon of the downtrodden as he retreats behind his gated community which is all white apparently, rides in large gas guzzlers to every event, flies in his private jet, eats in the finest resturants, gets his health care NOT in Cuba but in the best hospitals here...in short fits every criteria of the Capitalist elite that are supposed to be despised for the very same actions and lives that lifestyle to the hilt.

The difference between the Donkey's and Elephants? As pointed out wisely above...none.

That spending is going to be cut is a given. Its an accomplished fact only fool's could ignore or be unaware of. Paul Ryan we already know is going to be a driving force and any that underestimate this kid are too stupid to walk and chew gum at the same time.

There is a lot of "head time" in the sand on the left these days emulating their democratic hero's, it had better stop soon.

the bankers did this and we better figure out what to do about the bankers.

Wow the comments here do show why we're in such trouble. An endless argument with dopey Jake, pessimism that there is nothing peopel can do but wait for the bootheel, lots of guys trying to show they know more and are more cynical than Mr. Scheer. Most depressing set of comments yet.

Bottom line:

Global militarism continues, invasions and occupations continue,
the counter-productive and misnamed “wars on drugs and terror” continue,
while alongside the support for drug lords and dictators continues.

Trillion dollar handouts, front door and back door, to the financial cartel continue.

Unchecked rise in medical costs continues compounded by legislated largesse to insurance, pharmaceutical, and health industries.

Job loss and wage debasement continues with “free trade” labor arbitrage.

The expansion of martial laws, domestic surveillance, “homeland” policing, and widespread imprisonment continues.

The inequities of wealth and political power continue as a consequence to the preceding.
The global Pentagon and MIC remain unchecked as the worst polluters of the planet.

Because all the above continue, needed domestic investment is impossible:

Promises of domestic investment are patently false.
Cities and states have been bankrupted, investments by colleges and pension funds have lost worth,
and education cuts loom everywhere.
Professional engineers warn the roads, rails, electrical grid, sewage systems, dams, levees, water pipelines, and bridges have not been maintained, repaired, or replaced as needed. Trillions of dollars are needed just to bring the systems up to minimal standards of safety and usage. Trillions and trillions more to upgrade to what‘s needed for a first-rate economy.

Sheer used to be a big booster of Obama. Looks like he sees the light.

Just a thought.

“You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the eternal God, I will rout you out.”

(Compare this vitriolic, but heartfelt rhetoric to Obama's boring "sermons" ...now the "vipers and thieves" have become chief presidential "advisors" ...)

Andrew Jackson (1767–1845) 7th US President, to a delegation of bankers discussing the Bank Renewal Bill, 1832 [ by the way... The U.S. federal debt has not been paid off since the days of Andrew Jackson...]

---------

.... An effective banking system should channel resources into financially sound investment that creates social value without causing environmental degradation. ....
Can a largely unchanged banking industry deliver on this investment requirement, and given its track record over the past decade can we entrust the credit allocation to vital industrial sectors of the future entirely to commercial banks? Have they earned their privilege of credit creation and allocation? [...] The belief has been that were the government to create all the money in the economy, it would lead to three negative consequences:

1) it would do a very bad job of choosing economically useful projects to spend the money on;

2) it would be unable to resist the temptation to create too much money, leading to inflation or even hyper-inflation; and

3) the end result would be a financial crisis.

Instead it has been an article of faith that governments must not create money, that the independent central bank should try to control inflation only through the indirect tools of interest rates and money market operations, and that clever and professional private bankers should use their skills to assess the quality of each application for credit and ensure that it is an economically viable loan.
Unfortunately the events of 2008 have revealed that the privatised system of money creation HAS led to the three negative consequences [as mentioned above]

[...]

Fundamental institutional reform is required ... it is time to review the current monetary system that puts the power of credit creation almost entirely in the hands of commercial banks ...

Source: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/where-did-our-money-go
See also: http://publicbanking.wordpress.com/

“From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits.[...] In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, ... This decade, it reached 41 percent.

Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 % of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 % in 2007.

[...] the first age of banking oligarchs came to an end with the passage of significant banking regulation in response to the Great Depression; the reemergence of an American financial oligarchy is quite recent. One channel of influence was, of course, the flow of individuals between Wall Street and Washington ... (Rubin, Summers, Greenspan, Geithner, etc.)

... Throughout my time at the IMF, I was struck by the easy access of leading financiers to the highest U.S. government officials, and the interweaving of the two career tracks. [...]

A whole generation of policy makers has been mesmerized by Wall Street, always and utterly convinced that whatever the banks said was true. Alan Greenspan’s pronouncements in favor of unregulated financial markets are well known.

As more and more of the rich made their money in finance, the cult of finance seeped into the culture at large. Works like Barbarians at the Gate, Wall Street, and Bonfire of the Vanities—all intended as cautionary tales—served only to increase Wall Street’s mystique.

Michael Lewis noted in Portfolio last year that when he wrote LIAR’S POKER, an insider’s account of the financial industry, in 1989, he had hoped the book might provoke OUTRAGE at Wall Street’s hubris and excess. Instead, he found himself “knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share… THEY’D READ MY BOOK AS A HOW-TO MANUAL.” Even Wall Street’s criminals, like Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, became larger than life.

IN A SOCIETY THAT CELEBRATES THE IDEA OF MAKING MONEY,

it was easy to infer that the interests of the financial sector were the same as the interests of the country—and that the winners in the financial sector knew better what was good for America than did the career civil servants in Washington. Faith in free financial markets grew into conventional wisdom—trumpeted on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal and on the floor of Congress. ....”

Simon Johnson >> http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/760

Jackson's words are still extremely relevant today ...:

"This monied aristocracy ... is silencing opposition, by its corrupting influence, & preparing for a renewal of its charter, which I view as the death blow to our liberty.”

"It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society-the farmers, mechanics, and laborers-who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.[...]"

"The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole."

In fact, the U.S. Government didn't spend trillions on making bankers whole. It basically lent them many billions and almost all of it has now been paid back, with a handsome return because Obama wanted to exact potent controls on the bankers who had borrowed the money (it's rumored that Goldman initially declined the offered loan but was told it had to take so as not be the only outlier), and the bankers wanted to get out of Obama's clutches.

In the auto industry, on the other hand, Obama and his crooked lieutenant, Steven Rattner (think NY Pension Fund probes), screwed the secured creditors (think pension funds, endowments and other holder) to benefit the union swine at the UAW.

Stop shopping the war machine. Vote at the check out counter in your community. Avoid mulit-nationals that produce over seas like the plague; ride with your neighbor or co-worker...just a day or two a week. SPEND LESS ON OIL and that means check yourself; almost EVERYTHING we buy consists of oil. In fact, how does MSM say it..."some people say", we pretty much exist only to consume the stuff so stop doing as much of it as you can. Let's all do it -- protest in the streets with our pocketbook and general common sense at a local market. Don't buy from Big Oil stations and refuse to support any fast food giant or other industry that profits from war contracts. If we care about change, we have to stop sniveling that someone promised it and didn't give it. Barrack is pruchased just like every president before him; purchase order approved, so to speak and for those of you here who feel we elect presidents anymore needs to get off the Koolaid (TV). They get elected alright but not by the people, they get elected by the personhoods..aka, corporations. Thank you Mr. Scheer; again.

Yes indeed, two years of hogwash, a year of "jobless recovery" while jobs continue to be shipped abroad, while the patriot act is about to be renewed, while social security is about to meet the axe, while unjust wars rage on, while bankers pay themselves generously for their role in the ruin of our economy. It's all just political theatre, yet already we are starting to see the editorial apologetics for Obama. Monday on Truthdig, the same source as the article I'm posting on, "Without Obama, We Lose So Much More Than an Election" from Bill Boyarsky. Already with the illusion that Obama has to be reelected to keep republicans out of office. Already with the disproved notion that there is any difference between the two parties other than rhetoric.