Where is the US economy headed?

Wow, all seven of those "problems" are mirrored (or worse) in the US, though at least China punishes corruption in their politicians. In the US, they get promoted.

Shares of JC Penney are exploding in after-hours trade after the retailer reported holiday same-store sales that jumped 3.7% from the same period last year.
In after-hours trade, shares were up as much as 15%, to $7.24. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $6.24.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/jc-penney-holiday-sales-2015-1#ixzz3O5UyDm4w

Proves you know very little about the ups and downs of business. What is important is how they perform now and in the future. Not what you 'think' is important.

There is nothing more photogenic and metaphorical than a dead mall — all those hushed escalators, abandoned mannequins and empty parking lots veined with weeds. The New York Times had a lovely slideshow of just such scenes over the weekend, accompanying another story (of which there are now many) on the demise of the suburban shopping mecca.

The lesson in these images invariably has to do with decay: Look at all that wasted land and the dried-up commerce. As the Times writes, mall trends reflect American income inequality: high-end retail hubs are thriving, while places that once catered to the middle class are closing down. Demographics and technology are implicated in the decline, too. Baby boomers in the suburbs no longer have teens who want to hang out in shopping malls. And physical stores have, supposedly, lost their allure to the Internet.

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You don't seem to know the definition of the word corruption.

While one can disagree with policy that doesn't make enacting the policy corruption.

You don't seem to know the definition of the word corruption.

While it is true that you don’t typically have to bribe your postman to deliver the mail in the US, in many key ways America’s political and financial practices make it in absolute terms far more corrupt than the usual global South suspects. After all, the US economy is worth over $16 trillion a year, so in our corruption a lot more money changes hands.

1. Instead of having short, publicly-funded political campaigns with limited and/or free advertising (as a number of Western European countries do), the US has long political campaigns in which candidates are dunned big bucks for advertising. They are therefore forced to spend much of their time fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes. All American politicians are basically on the take, though many are honorable people. They are forced into it by the system. House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.

When French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in 2012, soon thereafter French police actually went into his private residence searching for an alleged $50,000 in illicit campaign contributions from the L’Oreale heiress. I thought to myself, seriously? $50,000 in a presidential campaign? Our presidential campaigns cost a billion dollars each! $50,000 is a rounding error, not a basis for police action. Why, George W. Bush took millions from arms manufacturers and then ginned up a war for them, and the police haven’t been anywhere near his house.

American politicians don’t represent “the people.” With a few honorable exceptions, they represent the the 1%. American democracy is being corrupted out of existence.

2. That politicians can be bribed to reduce regulation of industries like banking (what is called “regulatory capture”) means that they will be so bribed. Billions were spent and 3,000 lobbyists employed by bankers to remove cumbersome rules in the zeroes. Thus, political corruption enabled financial corruption (in some cases legalizing it!) Without regulations and government auditing, the finance sector went wild and engaged in corrupt practices that caused the 2008 crash. Too bad the poor Afghans can’t just legislate their corruption out of existence by regularizing it, the way Wall street did.

3. That the chief villains of the 2008 meltdown (from which 90% of Americans have not recovered) have not been prosecuted is itself a form of corruption.

4. The US military budget is bloated and enormous, bigger than the military budgets of the next twelve major states. What isn’t usually realized is that perhaps half of it is spent on outsourced services, not on the military. It is corporate welfare on a cosmic scale. I’ve seen with my own eyes how officers in the military get out and then form companies to sell things to their former colleagues still on the inside.

5. The US has a vast gulag of 2.2 million prisoners in jail and penitentiary. There is an increasing tendency for prisons to be privatized, and this tendency is corrupting the system. It is wrong for people to profit from putting and keeping human beings behind bars. This troubling trend is made all the more troubling by the move to give extra-long sentences for minor crimes, to deny parole and to imprison people for life for e,g, three small thefts.

6. The rich are well placed to bribe our politicians to reduce taxes on the rich. This and other government policies has produced a situation where 400 American billionaires are worth $2 trillion, as much as the bottom 150 million Americans. That kind of wealth inequality hasn’t been seen in the US since the age of the robber barons in the nineteenth century. Both eras are marked by extreme corruption.

7. The National Security Agency’s domestic spying is a form of corruption in itself, and lends itself to corruption. With some 4 million government employees and private contractors engaged in this surveillance, it is highly unlikely that various forms of insider trading and other corrupt practices are not being committed. If you knew who Warren Buffett and George Soros were calling every day, that alone could make you a killing. The American political class wouldn’t be defending this indefensible invasion of citizens’ privacy so vigorously if someone somewhere weren’t making money on it.

8. As for insider trading, it turns out Congress undid much of the law it hastily passed forbidding members, rather belatedly, to engage in insider trading (buying and selling stock based on their privileged knowledge of future government policy). That this practice only became an issue recently is another sign of how corrupt the system is.

9. Asset forfeiture in the ‘drug war’ is corrupting police departments and the judiciary.

10. Money and corruption have seeped so far into our media system that people can with a straight face assert that scientists aren’t sure human carbon emissions are causing global warming. Fox Cable News is among the more corrupt institutions in American society, purveying outright lies for the benefit of the billionaire class. The US is so corrupt that it is resisting the obvious urgency to slash carbon production. Even our relatively progressive president talks about exploiting all sources of energy, as though hydrocarbons were just as valuable as green energy and as though hydrocarbons weren’t poisoning the earth.

Even Qatar, its economy based on natural gas, freely admits the challenge of human-induced climate change. American politicians like Jim Inhofe are openly ridiculed when they travel to Europe for their know-nothingism on climate.

So don’t tell the Philippines or the other victims of American corruption how corrupt they are for taking a few petty bribes. Americans are not seen as corrupt because we only deal in the big denominations. Steal $2 trillion and you aren’t corrupt, you’re respectable.

fundraising, which is to say, seeking bribes.

House Majority leader John Boehner has actually just handed out cash on the floor of the House from the tobacco industry to other representatives.

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You don't seem to know the definition of the word corruption.

What's troubling you here? Calling it "Citizens United" when it has nothing to do with the Citizens? Bribes are bribes are bribes. You can tell a lie a million times, but it doesn't become truth. The president himself has sold out. Keep waving that flag, though. It's a great sales point.

It’s simply ludicrous for Obama to rationalize his actions on the grounds that he obtained permission from the U.N., NATO or the Arab League. The U.S. Constitution neither requires nor allows any of that; though it does require that Obama get permission – an explicit war declaration – from the U.S. Congress. He hasn’t done this, which is an impeachable offense, regardless of whether his predecessors committed the same wrong.

Fund raising is not a bribe. Fund raising is raising money for campaigns. Politicians can't use the funds they raise for personal purposes. While it might seem kinda cool to refer to campaign funds as bribes that is not legally or technically accurate.

The only stories I can find refer to Boehner handing out campaign contribution checks on the floor. While it is a violation of the House rules, it isn't bribery to accept campaign contributions.

Boehner hands out 'tobacco checks' on floor of House

In late June of 1995 then-GOP Conference Chairman John Boehner handed out "about a half-dozen" checks from the political action committee of tobacco company Brown & Williamson Corp. to fellow Republicans on the floor of the House.

Boehner's chief of staff Barry Jackson stated, "We were trying to help guys who needed to get their June 30th numbers up, their cash-on-hand numbers up. All leadership does this. We have to raise money for people and help them raise money."

Boehner was forced to stop handing out the checks when two freshmen Republicans, "appalled by it," confronted him and voiced their displeasure. Boehner's reaction was one of tempered apology, "I thought, 'Yeah, I can imagine why somebody would be upset. It sure doesn't look good.' It's not an excuse, but the floor is the only place you get to see your colleagues. It was a matter of convenience. You make a mistake, admit it and go on. I just feel bad about it." (Associated Press, 5/10/96)

Your arguments are nothing but opinion calling campaign contributions bribes. That is nonsense. While the campaign laws may be bad in some respects it doesn't automatically make following the laws bribery.

Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

That’s a big claim. In their conclusion, Gilens and Page go even further, asserting that “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover … even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it"

Most countries have problems with bribes and corruption, and when caught are charged with the crimes.

...the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word “fraud” no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a “systemic breakdown,” not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.

As the commission found, the signs of fraud were everywhere to be seen, with the number of reports of suspected mortgage fraud rising twenty-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then doubling again in the next four years. As early as 2004, FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker was publicly warning of the “pervasive problem” of mortgage fraud, driven by the voracious demand for mortgage-backed securities. Similar warnings, many from within the financial community, were disregarded, not because they were viewed as inaccurate, but because, as one high-level banker put it, “A decision was made that ‘We’re going to have to hold our nose and start buying the stated product if we want to stay in business.’”

But he was specifically stating campaign contributions were corruption.

The overriding concern behind the enactment of statutes such as the Federal Corrupt Practices Act was the problem of corruption of elected representatives through the creation of political debts. The importance of the governmental interest in preventing this occurrence has never been doubted.[20]

Here again the Court seems to go beyond the concern about quid pro quo vote-trading, this time to characterize corruption as "the creation of political debts." Four years later, in FEC v. National to Right Work Committee, the Court again discussed the need to insure that corporate "war chests" not be used to create "political debts."[21]

For the most part in these early cases the Court does little to explain its notion of corruption, and we are left to read between the lines. But in the 1984 case of FEC v. National Conservative Political Action Committee, the majority opinion by Justice Rehnquist offers a definition:

Corruption is a subversion of the political process. Elected officials are influenced to act contrary to their obligations of office by the prospect of financial gain to themselves or infusions of money into their campaigns. The hallmark of corruption is the financial quid pro quo: dollars for political favors.[22]

Here a much wider standard of corruption appears with a restatement of the familiar quid pro quo as a "hallmark." Rehnquist says that elected officials violate their public trust when they are influenced by the "prospect of financial gain to themselves or infusions of money into their campaigns." If Rehnquist had wanted to limit the corruption interest to quid pro quos, he could simply have said so. Instead he calls quid pro quo vote-trading the "hallmark" of political corruption. Again in this passage the Court seems to be acknowledging the second standard, the monetary influence standard of corruption.

The basic premise underlying the Court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its “identity” as a corporation. While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law. Nor does it tell us when a corporation may engage in electioneering that some of its shareholders oppose. It does not even resolve the specific question whether Citizens United may be required to finance some of its messages with the money in its PAC. The conceit that corporations must be treated identically to natural persons in the political sphere is not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify the Court’s disposition of this case.