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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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

High rates for everyone

By Dave Anderson:


The Wall Street Journal reports on how high rates are impacting Wall Street:


$135 billion is also the record amount of money the 25 biggest publicly traded Wall Street banks and securities firms laid out in 2010 for employee pay and benefits, as our Deal Journal colleagues reported today. That�s a 5.7% increase from those companies� total pay and benefits for 2009.


Even if the levels of compensation have crept back above pre-financial crisis level


And then the high rates for the rest of us:


Interest rates on credit cards now hover near record highs, averaging over 14%. For consumers with bad credit, rates could rise as high as 59.9% APR.


This is despite record low short term rates and very cheap credit for Wall Street and the banks to parasitically leach value from. 


 Beating down on Wall Street would have been good policy and good politics if the goal was to rebalance the economy and increase the probability that the bottom 95% of the population in the United States had a chance to get ahead.  However, doing that would hurt the feelings of our betters, and divert campaign cash from corporatist Democrats to completely captured Republicans (but hey that happened anyways.)  As Ian said earlier this week, this is what most of the Democratic elite is "good" for:


Cuomo�s job is to make sure that the people who hollowed out the US economy and caused the financial crash don�t pay the price of their evil, but in fact stay in charge of society despite causing a Depression and being  bankrupt (but we�ll all pretend they aren�t, so it doesn�t count.)



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