The business press just can't understand why the Federal Reserve decided not to raise interest rates on Thursday. After all, these alleged journalists have been telling us for months bordering on years that U.S. economy is really in good shape. So it should be able to handle a rate hike, especially after over seven years of rates at essentially zero. The problem is that they now believe their own bogus blather. The U.S. economy is not in good shape, and data seen during the past several weeks show that the situation is deteriorating, not improving.

Excerpts from an early Friday report at the Associated Press by Josh Boak illustrate how out of touch the business press really is (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

In his MSNBC show The Last Word Tuesday evening, Lawrence O’Donnell dedicated a segment to describing his opinion of what “good and bad socialism” looks like. Naturally his example of “good” socialism included the man and policies Bernie Sanders. It also included a 6 year old cover from Newsweek magazine that proclaimed “We Are All Socialists now,” which detailed how it's becoming normal (and good) for America to fund massive socialist policies like Social Security and Medicaid. Bad socialism is, of course, allowing the government to “socialize” the sports industry by subsidizing the construction of new stadiums for rich and greedy team owners and the millionaire athletes they employ.

The current headline at a June 29 New York Times story by Peter Eavis, also appearing on the front page of today's print edition, is "Loads of Debt: A Global Ailment With Few Cures."

But the last portion of the story's web address is "... trillions-spent-but-crises-like-greeces-persist.html." That's because the original headline, the one used at the Times's Twitter account — was "Trillions Spent But Crises Like Greece Persist." Of course without admitting it, Eavis's writeup is an ode to the worldwide failure of Keynesian economics — a term which naturally never appears in any form — and the closed minds of those who don't understand why shoveling vast sums of money created out of thin air into the financial system is only marginally helpful in the short-term, and serious harmful, over the long-term.

When it comes to the word “freedom,” liberals and conservatives long have told each other, in effect, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Take Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, who in a Tuesday Washington Post column urged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to endorse a “far more expansive” concept of freedom than the right’s “constrained notion” that’s held sway in America since the Reagan era.

Market-oriented, anti-government ideas about freedom, vanden Heuvel claimed, have brought about “an economy serving the few, and a politics corrupted by money,” whereas Hillary can become an ideological heir to FDR if she “take[s] on the economic royalists of this day” by calling for measures such as “fair taxes on the rich and corporations,” “vital public investments…in new energy, in infrastructure, in education and training,” and expanded Social Security.

Even Charles Babington at the Associated Press, for once not the completely beholden Administration's Press, seemed to be having a hard time buying what Democrats at a meeting in Philadelphia were selling. Unfortunately, he decided to let Joe Biden's direct contradiction of his party's congressional delegation's sunnyside-up stance on the economy go unreported.

In a video carried at the Weekly Standard, Biden said, "To state the obvious, the past six years have been really, really hard for this country, And they've been really tough for our party. Just ask [former DCCC chair] Steve [Israel]. They've been really tough for our party. And together we made some really, really tough decisions -- decisions that weren't at all popular, hard to explain." Despite how "really, really hard" it has all been, the party is attempting an "in your face" at those who want to claim that it has been that way because of the Obama administration's economic policies. Excerpts from Babington's AP report follow the jump (bolds and numbered tags are mine):