Newshoggers Archive: Put out the FIRE

Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.

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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Put out the FIRE

By Dave Anderson:

Forbes has just published its Fortune 400. It is a celebration of excessive consumption, speculation and unreality as Forbes argues that ever greater accumulations of wealth at the top of the income spectrum encourages innovation as a winner takes all economy encourages more people to enter the race. Bullshit, but I'll save that rant for another day.

Instead, I want to highlight two somethings that CNN points out in its coverage of the list:

Despite the recession, finance and investment industries continued to
dominate the list; 55 members are from the finance industry, while 54
are from the investments sector.

About a quarter of the country's wealthiest people are in the FIRE sector which is mostly a non-value adding sector. That is a big problem as they are collecting a skim despite crashing the economy as a class because they were too stupid, greedy and/or arrogant to believe that they could either be wrong or be caught holding the bag when they were wrong. Our political system is enabling them as a class to hand the bag off to us in the form of a lost decade.

AND

Christy Walton took the No. 4 spot, while members of her family --
whose fortune comes from Wal-Mart (WMT,
Fortune
500) -- took spots 7 through 9.
Charles and David Koch, of
private energy conglomerate Koch Industries, tied for No. 5 at $21.5
billion each. Both men saw their wealth skyrocket by $5.5 billion from
2009.

Hardcore wingnuts make up the 4th through 9th spots on this list. And we wonder why the Democrats cave on politically easy and popular proposals to not bust the long term budget by extending tax cuts to people who don't need them and whose marginal propensity to consume is almost nil. We wonder why Blanche Lincoln can argue with a straight face that the public option was too expensive (despite being a CBO deficit reducer) but it is critical to exempt estates from taxation. Sout

1 comment:

T. GreerSeptember 24, 2010 at 4:28 PM
It is a celebration of excessive consumption, speculation and unreality as Forbes argues that ever greater accumulations of wealth at the top of the income spectrum encourages innovation as a winner takes all economy encourages more people to enter the race. Bullshit, but I'll save that rant for another day.
It is a rant I'd love to hear, however. Here is one vote for you writing it.
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