A Ray of Hope for the Instant Gratification Generation

Professor Stephen Valdes

Most of what you hear about the economy can be right or wrong depending on yourself interest, whether it is Democrat, Republican, cable and radio news entertainers or Tea Party. And because we have midterm elections coming up.

America is too big and diverse to be described by blanket statements. We are 50 states on 3.7 million square miles with 307 million people who produce $14 trillion in annual GDP and privately hold $54 trillion in net assets.

You can’t argue the facts that the economy which was set to collapse under the previous administration began to recover in the spring / summer of 2009. Third quarter of 09 it was up 2.9% and 4^th quarter boomed at 6%. This pattern has stuck and is slowly moving forward with a first quarter of 3.5% and moving up slowly. Too slow for those who expect everything to be solved in a half  hour sitcom

Many doubt the way it’s being done with deficit spending, and government intervention. We all want simple answers to complex problems. And in the mist of our materialistic credit orgy, our educational system failed to give us the intellect needed to look at the problems we have made for ourselves in rational terms. So many of us turn to the false gods of pundit entertainers for answers.

Blame it on the government! Excuse me? Blame it on ourselves for letting it happen! As long as our credit cards were good, no one questioned. But as the house of cards crumbled we have to blame someone or some institution, rightly or wrongly. Not my fault. I put a yellow ribbon on my car, and brought a big screen TV on credit.

The latest Rasmussen pole tells us that only 23% of the people of the United States believe that the Federal government has the consent of the governed. This is what sparked a popular uprising of folks to become the Tea Party. A populist movement that is increasingly alarmed at the explosion of earmarks, bailouts and government spending that marked the waning years of the Bush administration, and continues  with the Obama administration.  The Tea party reminds us all, Democrat, and Republican alike that America was founded on the revolutionary concept of citizen participation, activism and the primacy of the individual over its government. The major divisions in this country are no longer between parties but between political elites financed by global corporations and we the people.

Unfortunately 60 % of us don’t vote, and of the 40% that do, less than 15% understand the issues. We have lost our revolution at the take out window of McDonalds, and the easy money the Feds gave us to buy things we couldn’t afford. We were seduced by Madison Avenue, and Wall Street. 73% of our economy is driven by consumption, so if you aren’t spending, the economy is hurting. The American dream isn’t about materialism, but the spirituality of man. It’s a shame that we have to learn our lessons the hard way, but who ever said life was fair.

One of the fundamentals in this dilemma we find ourselves in is confidence. Confidence in our leadership, confidence in the economy, and confidence in our ability to see the future. Business managers are reluctant to commit to new hires, and added inventory. The average consumer is only spending necessities, and investors are freaked at every bit of negative news.

All is not doom and gloom.  The Kiplinger letter out of Washington D.C., which forecasts for management decision making, stated that the bad news we heard in  August arises from temporary woes not persistent problems. Labor Layoffs in June and July were mostly of short term Census workers, and the expiration of tax credits for home buyers, and the European financial crisis.  Neither of these influences will be permanent, and the trend of increases in imports and exports from 9%-12% will reassert itself in the coming year. Housing isn’t fixed, but it took 20 years to get there.

Most of the components of growth are here. Big banks have the funds to lend thanks to shrinking loan losses and strong earnings, and $275 billion in excess liquidity as of the first quarter. What’s more, profits for the S&P 500 were up 46% from second quarter 2009. Lastly consumers are getting their budgets in order. 19% of household income went to debt payment in 2007. Today, 17%, the lowest since 1998.

So for those in the Instant Gratification Generation who have been lead to believe that the global economy will recover in two years or less by TV entertainers, and  politicians that want their power back, start reading more, look for answers, rather than affirmations of your own opinions. And look to where left and right can converge, and demand accountability of your politicians, and get involved in being an American.  

24 Hour News Cycle

24 Hour News Cycle, Where Opinions are Facts
Professor Stephen Valdes

The media lynch mob for Shirley Sherrod, an anonymous agriculture department bureaucrat, serves as a great example for the 24 hour cable news cycle, and how it is manipulated by political power brokers to manage how you perceive the reality of so called fair and balanced portrayal of the news
An obscure right wing blogger decided to spin a highly edited video to embarrass the administration of a black president condoning the use of black racism to supposedly destroy our very social fabric. Using nothing less than a three minutes edit of a 45 minute speech to the NAACP, the Sharks of cable news ran with it for all it was worth till the white farmer, the supposed victim of this reverse racism, told the truth to the cable mob, the administration and the public. Ops, the media screwed up again. The government fired a career employee for fear of any backlash in the coming midterm election, and Fox News pulled in its horns, and many of us believed it…
The persistence belief that the stuff of daily political reporting is actually truth, rather than objective journalism is again laid bare. Objective reporting of political news is not dramatic and partisan enough for many of us out in TV land. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests that issues and truth doesn’t matter because voters are often deeply ill informed, and less than 40% even bother to vote. This is what happens when people get their news from “ideological noise machines” rather than from real news outlets.
In a totalitarian state, the propagandist works hand in glove with the secret police to hammer home their agendas, and keep the mob in check. Here however something much worse is eroding our free press. We, the news consumers are also part of the problem.
Studies conducted in 2005 and 2006 at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, it often made their beliefs in the inaccuracy stronger, particularly if those beliefs were politically partisan.
We look at Fox news with only nine hours of news content a day, and the rest devoted to conservative opinion programming, and blogging from the right and left with no regard for accuracy or content. Now we have left leaning MSNBC shooting back its own attacks, and for the rest of the so called corporate driven news outlets, the logical perception is to give their customers what they want, partisan political soap opera to reinforce whatever opinions they have. How many other politicians and public figures have been thrown to the lions in this manner only to have careers and their working futures destroyed by the rush to judgment? Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald summed it up when he spoke of reporting facts by saying. “You only quantify for the benefit of the head. You toss the raw meat of emotion for the benefit of the heart”, and that’s what sells. We need the balance of the center, what we now might call the silent majority, with a non partisan sense reality.
At the dawn of the internet age we were awed by being the first generation of people to have the entire tapestry of human knowledge within our grasp and at our computer key board. We instead find ourselves stranded in a Misinformation Age where truth is multiple choice based on whatever you chose to believe in. we no longer are burdened with the need for facts or verification , we have become intellectually lazy. After all, it was on the internet…