Obama is a Third Bush Term so far

This is a completely on point article here. Yes, it might as well be a third Bush term. There would be almost no difference if it was. Voting for Obama was a complete waste of time.

What we have is a moneytocracy: dictatorship by the rich. Strictly speaking, I would not use the increasingly common "corporatocracy” term, because (a) there are many small corporations that have small amounts of money and capitalization and little if any political power, and (b) even within the large corporations, it's only the large shareholders, the executives and the directors at the top who have political power.

It goes without saying that a new political order is needed. Whether that comes from new laws, new parties, or new something else is well beyond the scope of this comment.

The article writer could have added that the economy is almost exactly the same as it would have been if Bush was still the President. For one thing, Bush in 2009 would have had another stimulus package too.

There are already and there will increasingly be claims that the economy is recovering, and eventually there will be claims that the economy has recovered. Take all of these claims with a grain of salt unless you have a whole lot of money.

The US inequality is so extreme that it is indisputable that there are at least two largely unconnected economies in the country. There is an economy for the rich and high income individuals, and there is an economy for everyone else. The high end economy serves the "upper crust," roughly 15-20% of the population. The low end economy serves the lower crust, roughly 80-85% of the population. (You could waste a lot of time arguing about the cut-off points.) There are more people in the upper crust than many people believe, but nonetheless, it is still only a small minority.

It is quite simple to determine whether you are in the upper crust or the lower. If you now or will within say, the next five years, have to have some kind of a traditional job for basic economic well being, you are in the low end. If you don't need a job for basic economic well being now or in the next five or so years, you are in the high end.

Obviously, the number of jobs in existence, the changes over time in that number, the pay for the jobs that are in existence, and the changes in the pay over time, are the primary factors for the low end economy. So for 80-85% of the population, those things are what matter the most.

For the upper crust, what matters are such things as executive pay rates, corporate profits, the price of stock shares, dividends, capital gain tax rates, income tax rates, and so forth. As long as the jobless are not rioting or striking en masse, the number of jobs is of little concern to the upper crust, at least to the extent that profit can be wrung out of an economy regardless of the number of jobs and regardless of the payroll of that economy.

Unfortunately, as the radical right wing US has been increasingly demonstrating in the past few decades, it is possible to some extent, at least in the short term, for an economy built around the rich to extract a substantial amount of profit regardless of the number of jobs and the amount of payroll.

Any and all talk about "economic recovery" for the foreseeable future (for at leas the next 12 months) will be referring to a recovery for the upper crust. The factors that affect the lower crust will still be in recession or depression during at least the next 12 months, and it appears at this time for much longer than that.