via Hawk

"Welcome to a regular Tuesday at school in America"

It's The GreedFlation, Stoopid

The Dirty Fuels Cartel got tired of fighting The OPEC Cartel, so they they got in bed together, and little while later, the 10-dollar gallon of gas was born.

Better But Not Good Yet

The "conservative" attack on education over the last 40 years is having the desired effect. People don't care much about things like politics and government and economics because they're not being taught the importance of knowing something about that stuff to begin with, and once they get out into the real world, they're so tied up trying to make their lives work they get frustrated and start looking for somebody to blame, and that makes them vulnerable to the constant flow of propaganda flowing from "the right" (mostly).

And it'd be so gosh darned nice if the Press Poodles would remember to include corporate profits in the calculations of how shittily people are being treated, and how our attitudes are being cynically manipulated so we blame all the wrong people for all the wrong things.

Corporate America has blown past a brief wobble to its bottom line.

Driving the news:

The latest numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, out Wednesday, showed that total corporate profits in the third quarter grew 3.3% to an annualized rate of $3.28 trillion.

That's just shy of the all-time peak of $3.3 trillion reached in Q3 2022.

Why it matters:

The rise in profits last quarter shows that U.S. companies have been able to adjust to the post-COVID operating environment, which includes higher wages and higher borrowing costs.

So of course corporate critters are doing just fine

But then we have to remember: "The news" is a corporate profit center, so the "coverage" might be just a tiny bit skewed.

‘Excess profits’ at big energy and consumer companies pushed up inflation, report claims

KEY POINTS

• New research argues that the impact of companies maintaining margins by passing on higher prices to consumers should not be overlooked as a contributing factor to inflation.
• Researchers say this has made inflation “peak higher and remain more persistent.”
• They note that corporate profits are not the sole cause of inflation and did not cause shocks such as that to the energy market, but note that big international energy and food firms have an outsized influence on the wider economy.

The economy is improving under Biden. But many voters aren’t giving him credit

Despite the statistics, the kitchen-table experience of Biden’s first term has meant that many voters have experienced the last few years as a time of relative economic hardship

LAS VEGAS — Near the base of the Rainbow Mountains, Daniel Busby looks up longingly at his two-story “dream” townhouse, with the sliding glass door on its second floor, the balcony that wraps around the master bedroom, the five-minute walk from his kids’ elementary school.

“I just fell in love,” said Busby, 33, doing a chef’s kiss and smacking his lips together. “And then we started doing the math.”

The gregarious fry cook has enjoyed the windfalls of pandemic economic recovery overseen by President Biden. The president’s stimulus plan gave lower-wage workers more leverage to demand higher pay from their employers, with those in the service sector — like Busby — seeing particularly robust gains.

He went from being unemployed and working part-time at $15 an hour during the pandemic to a full-time job at the Paris Hotel, mostly at the Martha Stewart franchise, earning $19 an hour preparing a risotto dish and, his favorite, the whole chicken dinner. Busby and his wife now make a combined salary of just under six figures — a previously unimaginable sum.

But the gains have not kept up with rising costs, and that has become a major issue for voters like him. When Biden took the oath of office in January 2021, the average monthly mortgage payment in Las Vegas was about $1,200, according to calculations by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. That number, for new mortgages, has soared to $2,350 today due to rising interest rates and robust housing prices — the outer edge of what Busby was willing to spend.

By many measures, the U.S. economy is a great success story — recession fears have fallen, along with gas prices and the unemployment rate, while manufacturing construction is up along with nominal wages and the stock market. The United States has grown faster since covid-19 than any peer country. Gas prices, once averaging over $5 a gallon, are now approaching $3. The Federal Reserve projects three interest rate cuts in 2024 that could help buyers like Busby.

But the kitchen-table experience of Biden’s first term — a roller coaster of covid adjustment and international shocks — has meant that many voters have experienced the last few years as a time of relative economic hardship. Despite rising wages, voters as a group lost spending power during 2021 and 2022 and have only recently climbed out of the hole. And even though wages are now outpacing inflation, prices are still continuing to rise: The latest government report showed inflation up 3.4 percent relative to the year before, fueling the anxiety even amid positive economic indicators.

A broad and diverse cross-section of American voters say they are experiencing the Biden economy as a challenging time of rising prices and high interest rates, according to interviews with more than 80 voters in four parts of the country — Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Phoenix and rural Georgia — that will play a major role in choosing the next president.

Adjusted for inflation, the per capita disposable income of U.S. residents rose nearly 1 percent from October 2021 to October 2023, a period that excludes the extraordinary one-time stimulus payments when Biden arrived, according to calculation by Robert Shapiro, a Democratic economist who advised Bill Clinton as president. By comparison, per capita disposable income, after inflation, grew about 7 percent under Donald Trump, during the first 34 months of his presidency.

The good news for Democrats is that the growth in spending power has been picking up over the last year at 3.7 percent through November, potentially setting the stage for a banner 2024, when wages will continue to grow even as the rate of inflation continues to fall.

“If incomes continue to rise rapidly over the next year, people will accept it by the election, especially since Biden’s record on jobs and growth is so much stronger,” Shapiro predicts. “Biden can overcome the fact that his income record — the growth of income — will not be strong over the whole term.”

But that is not the nation’s present-day reality. Biden’s polling on the economy has fallen with consumer confidence since he got into office, only recently stabilizing as confidence has begun to rebound. Wages are up, but the sting of higher grocery, coffee and restaurant bills remain. The president is still looking for credit from the budding manufacturing renaissance brought about by recent bipartisan legislation, though relatively few projects have been announced or begun production yet.

White House advisers are optimistic that the American public will soon internalize the good news and give the president credit before November. His political advisers note that other presidents who won reelection, like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, overcame challenging first-term economic conditions.

“We’re seeing real progress,” said Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, in a statement. “We have more work to do as we execute President Biden’s agenda, a sharp contrast with congressional Republicans’ plans to cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations while raising health care and prescription drug costs for hard-working American families.”

People like Busby, who voted twice for Obama before sitting out the 2016 and 2020 elections, are not sure they will vote for Biden in 2024 — indecision that could tip the scale in a narrowly divided country. He has chosen, for the moment, to stay with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and 6, in their 1,100-square-foot Vegas apartment, where the rent recently jumped from $1,100 to $1,600 a month.

After touring more than 30 houses, relentlessly monitoring Zillow and Redfin, and investigating all the first-time home buyer programs they could find, they have put their dream on hold.

“We work full-time hours, but we still can’t afford things. You think, ‘I work full time. I should be able to afford a house,'” he said. “I don’t want to come home one day and then realize I have to pack up and leave. It’s that sense of stability we’re missing.”

Barbers cut hair at Gee’s Clippers on Nov. 26. (Alex Wroblewski for The Washington Post)
‘It’s really hard to keep up’
Milwaukee

‘It’s really hard to keep up’

Milwaukee WI:

Ceree Huley, 75, looked around Gee’s Clippers, the Black-owned Milwaukee barber shop where he works. “This place on a Thursday would be full of people,” he said of the those years before the pandemic.

“I don’t know what the reason they’re not here. … A lot of people are going to do it to themselves,” Huley said, referring to individual haircuts. “Or are they hiding from the costs of the prices that went up 10 dollars or 5 dollars? That could be a factor too.”

After 50 years as a barber, Huley has seen his own wages go up recently but is also paying more for rent after moving to a new place. Unlike some of his customers, he doesn’t blame Biden for his economic situation.

“I don’t know why it is, it seems like the economy gets worse,” said Zontayveon Mosley, a 21-year-old warehouse supervisor, who had come in for a cut. “For the average person who’s making $45,000 to $50,000 a year, it’s really hard to keep up.”

He said he would have backed Biden in 2020, but didn’t vote. He added that he will not vote for him this year and would consider supporting Trump, citing U.S. aid to other countries and the economy.

“Like giving billions of dollars to support others, when we have people that can’t eat, we have people that can’t pay bills, it’s just insane to me,” he said. “I feel like most Black people just lean towards Democrats. But I don’t know, entering the workforce and making money, I own a home. I’ve got to worry about interest rates and all of that. I feel like Trump is a better businessman.”

A stream of Black customers provided a nuanced take on the economy under Biden as they came in and out of the barber shop — decorated with basketball hoops, framed photos of athletes and the forest green Milwaukee Bucks logo sprawled across a gymnasium-style floor, razors buzzing in the background.

Posters decorate an employee breakroom at Gee’s Clippers, a basketball-themed barbershop owned by Ceree “Gee” Huley, in Milwaukee. (Alex Wroblewski for The Washington Post)

The economy here has largely tracked national trends, with weekly wages just below the national average and a nearly identical unemployment rate. William Robinson, a 47-year-old FedEx package handler, said he ends the month with less money than he starts, and it’s “kind of more survival than living” when he goes food shopping. He supported Obama both in 2008 and 2012, but said he will not vote for either Biden or Trump in 2024, describing them as “pretty much the same.”

“You can’t set prices. Inflation, you really don’t control none of that. Really it’s all the stuff that I can’t control that’s kind of making it difficult,” said Robinson, who added that he now needs to make adjustments between wants and needs. “Everybody got their little cheat foods, you know what I’m saying? Like the little cakes outside of the nutritious stuff. You just can’t enjoy it. And even with the stuff that’s nutritious, you got to prioritize, you know?”

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, said that voter views of the president and the economy “moved in tandem with objective economic indicators tolerably well up until the early 2000s.” Since then, partisanship has become more powerful and the link has begun to break.

In a recent survey, twice as many respondents said they’d heard about inflation compared with the unemployment rate. As for voters’ current perceptions of the economy, Franklin sees a combination of partisan bias and the effect of inflation on real disposable income, especially “coming after this sugar high of transfer payments in the pandemic years.”

It’s a trend that cuts both ways. Ken McClendon, a 51-year-old in the health-care-manufacturing business, said his wages have gone up but his economic situation was better before covid, given that “everything is more expensive now.”

Biden’s handling of the economy was a “little shaky,” he said, before adding, “You have to realize what he walked into.” If the election comes down to a choice between Biden and Trump?

Biden “all the way,” he said.

‘Who gets credit for a dumb idea?’

Dalton, GA:

One of Biden’s legislative triumphs can be seen through the trees 80 miles north of Atlanta along Interstate 75, a gray, low-slung roof factory of Qcells North America.

The South Korean-owned plant expanded after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, adding 510 jobs to the growing solar industry. The panels its workers make in a 12-hour shift can produce as much solar power annually as the Hoover Dam’s peak output.

But few at the Oakwood Cafe in nearby Dalton have noticed in this conservative corner of the state, represented by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R). Dalton Mayor David Pennington (R) dismissed the government support of solar panels as the pet project of politicians, embraced both by Vice President Harris, who visited the plant in April, and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R).

“Who gets credit for a dumb idea?” Pennington said, laughing. “When both sides are agreeing on something, it probably proves it is a stupid idea.”

When a guy deliberately misunderstands what's going on, and he shits on the simple fact that more of his constituents are getting fairly decent jobs, we see how intellectually corrupt way too many Republicans and Libertarians have become.

Pennington says residents most often ask him what he’s doing to help address the falling test scores of the city’s students. Families tell him that their grocery bills have gone up in the last three years. Pennington said that the night before, after a governmental meeting, he and his wife went to Krystal, a regional fast food joint, and ordered burgers, fries and drinks for $23, a meal he remembers costing $12 five years ago.

At a nearby table, Eric Azua, a local Realtor and registered Republican, made the same point: He has benefited himself from the Qcells expansion. He said he has sold homes to workers who are able to afford more given higher wages, offering Azua better commissions. But he credits local officials for the new jobs, rather than the Biden administration. Like many others in the area, Azua plans to vote for Trump.

“He needs to be replaced,” he said of Biden.

In 2018, Trump’s steep tariffs on solar panels from China prompted Qcells to build the facility in Dalton. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — including a provision by Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) — provided tax credits for every stage of the solar manufacturing supply chain, incentivizing Qcells to expand.

Such expansions of U.S. manufacturing have been happening around the country in recent years, spurred by federal incentives supported by Biden. Monthly manufacturing construction spending rose from $77 million to $207 million between January 2021 and October 2023, a jump of 170 percent, according to census data. It’s progress that Biden has highlighted in his television ads this fall, talking about new manufacturing jobs, new green energy to lower power costs.

“For Joe Biden, it’s about restoring the sense of security working people deserve,” says one Biden spot that has run in Georgia.

The industrial park near the highway that cuts through Dalton has boomed since Qcells first opened there. Beside the first Qcells facility at the site, a second sleek, brightly lit warehouse has popped up, where workers are assembling commercial and residential solar panels with the help of automated machines.

“There are not other jobs similar in the area,” said Lisa Nash, general manager of the Qcells factory. “We can take high school students, people who have made other products, and if they have an aptitude, we can train them. And it’s upskilling.”

Other jobs have come downstream. Mary Sumner, who voted for Biden in 2020, recently started working for the local janitorial company that contracts with Qcells as an extra source of income aside from her job managing an apartment complex. She knows she is part of a minority in her family of 10 and hometown that would give any credit to Biden for anything positive, including the new source of money she receives.

“Four more years and there’s even better things to come,” Sumner said.

Jan Pourquoi, a Democrat and owner of a small Dalton carpet company, attended Harris’s visit to the site. When he looked around the room, he didn’t see anyone who lived in Dalton.

His neighbors and friends tell him they are worse off financially than they were under Trump and they believe Republicans are doing more to address immigration and drugs — or at least they seem to talk about it more. In the last local election, 9 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. In 2024, Pourquoi expects there won’t be any surge of voters supporting Biden, especially for the solar initiatives.

“There are more people aware of Qcells outside this area than in this area,” he said. “What it definitely will not do is change anything on the political dial.”

‘Everything has gone up in price’

Phoenix AZ:

Martha Isela Rodriguez remembers when she would go just once a week to buy her groceries at the Fry’s right around the corner from her house.

Now, she checks her mail daily to see the weekly ads with specials and coupons for grocery stores. El Rancho Market has deals on fruits and vegetables on Wednesdays and meat on Thursdays. On the weekend, Food City tends to have some good specials, too.

For Rodriguez, it has become the norm to visit three grocery stores a week — and even then, she’s still paying more than before.

Standing in the kitchen heating tortillas on a comal, a cast-iron skillet, Rodriguez recalled how she used to pay much less for groceries when Trump was president. Everything, from the chuletas de cerdo to the jalapeños she uses for her salsa, was cheaper. And that $380 electricity bill she just paid? It had never been so high, she remarked.

For her, all these higher costs spell trouble for Biden, who she voted for and knocked on doors to get elected in 2020. Her home county of Maricopa went for Trump in 2016 by under three percentage points and then backed Biden in 2020 by just over two percentage points. But she’s skeptical that Biden will win Arizona — or the 2024 election.

“Personally, I see it difficult for Biden to win. There’s already so many people who feel he hasn’t done anything, that the economy isn’t working,” Rodriguez, 48, said as she passed her 1-year-old granddaughter, Maria Daniela, an apple, mango and spinach baby food puree as a snack.

She was hearing it from her co-workers whom she had convinced to vote for Biden in 2020. Now, they either say they won’t vote this year or they’re considering backing Trump. They taunt her for pushing them to support Biden in 2020 — complaining to her about how bad inflation was under Biden and how he was letting in too many migrants and helping them when he wasn’t helping the undocumented immigrants already living here.

“They tell me things like, ‘Look at the gas. It hasn’t gone down at all since your Biden came into power.’ Your Biden, they tell me,” she said. “They say the same with a box of eggs or a gallon of milk. ‘Now that your Biden is around, the prices are up and the salaries don’t match it.’”

“And what can I say? Yes, it’s true,” she added. “Everything has gone up in price.”

Due to inflation, it cost an Arizona family over $2,700 a year more to purchase the same goods and services last August as it would have cost in August 2022, according to an analysis in September by the nonpartisan Common Sense Institute.

The sharpest increases came in distinct sectors, including gas prices, which rocketed higher in early 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, and have since fallen back to 2021 levels. The pain of those increases was felt especially in suburban and rural areas, where people like Rodriguez drive long distances on a daily basis.

Rodriguez said she knew it wasn’t necessarily Biden’s fault that inflation remained an issue in Phoenix, as she’d heard of it being a challenge globally. But she said she wished he would project more confidence and stability like Obama, the politician whom she said she became a U.S. citizen just to vote for. In her eyes, she said, Obama was handed a terrible economy after George W. Bush’s administration and was able to turn it around.

“Biden just doesn’t have that magic, that energy to get things done,” she said.

In a matchup between Biden and Trump, Rodriguez said she’ll vote for Biden again. It won’t be because he’s done a good job, she said, but because of just how strongly she dislikes Trump.

She added, however, that she doesn’t plan to repeat her election-year summer of knocking on doors in the Phoenix heat to get other Latinos out to vote for Biden this time.

Today's Oy

We are the stoopid country.

In what has to be the absolute epitome of elitist bullshit, we've decided corporations can be tried for, and convicted of, and punished for their crimes as if they are in fact people - but somehow the people who benefit greatly from the illegal operations of those corporations just kinda skate by.

To be sure, Weisselberg isn't skating - even a few months at Riker's Island is a possible life sentence for a 75-year-old - but these decisions, and the way the law apparently works, makes it look like he's just the patsy on this caper, and the company gets barely a slap on the wrist, having been ordered to pay a lousy million-six for 15 years of fraud.

Fifteen years

And excuse me, but what about the guy whose name is on the letterhead? 

Can somebody please tell me - what's the fuckin' point here?

Donald Trump's company to be sentenced for 15-year tax fraud

NEW YORK, Jan 13 (Reuters) - Donald Trump on Friday will learn how the company that bears the former U.S. president's name will be punished after being found guilty of scheming to defraud tax authorities for 15 years.

A New York state judge will impose the sentence after jurors in Manhattan found two Trump Organization affiliates guilty of 17 criminal charges last month.

The sentencing comes three days after Justice Juan Merchan of the Manhattan criminal court ordered Allen Weisselberg, who worked for Trump's family for a half-century and was the company's former chief financial officer, to jail for five months after he testified as the prosecution's star witness.

Trump's company faces only a maximum $1.6 million penalty, but has said it plans to appeal. No one else was charged or faces jail time in the case.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, which brought the case, is still conducting a criminal probe into Trump's business practices.

Bill Black, a professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law specializing in white-collar crime, called the expected penalty a "rounding error" that offers "zero deterrence" to others, including Trump.

"This is a farce," he said. "No one will stop committing these kinds of crimes because of this sentence."

The case has long been a thorn in the side of the Republican former president, who calls it part of a witch hunt by Democrats who dislike him and his politics.

Trump also faces a $250 million civil lawsuit by state Attorney General Letitia James accusing him and his adult children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump of inflating his net worth and the value of his company's assets to save money on loans and insurance.

Bragg and James are Democrats, as is Bragg's predecessor Cyrus Vance, who brought the criminal case. Trump is seeking the presidency in 2024, after losing his re-election bid in 2020.

At a four-week trial, prosecutors offered evidence that Trump's company covered personal expenses such as rent and car leases for executives without reporting them as income, and pretended that Christmas bonuses were non-employee compensation.

Trump himself signed bonus checks, prosecutors said, as well as the lease on Weisselberg's luxury Manhattan apartment and private school tuition for the CFO's grandchildren.

"The whole narrative that Donald Trump was blissfully ignorant is just not real," Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass told jurors in his closing argument.

Weisselberg's testimony helped convict the company, though he said Trump was not part of the fraud scheme. He also refused to help Bragg in his broader investigation into Trump.

The Trump Organization had put Weisselberg on paid leave until they severed ties this week. His lawyer said the split, announced on Tuesday, was amicable.

Weisselberg, 75, is serving his sentence in New York City's notorious Rikers Island jail.

State law limits the penalties that Justice Merchan can impose on Trump's company. A corporation can be fined up to $250,000 for each tax-related count and $10,000 for each non-tax count.

Trump faces several other legal woes, including probes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House, and efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss in Georgia.

The Intertoobz

Like everything else in the world, some people are intent on turning the whole thing into one enormous cesspool - which, unfortunately, means there's money to be made on helping the bad actors float their shit.

WaPo:

Zuckerberg acknowledges Facebook erred by not removing a post that urged armed action in Kenosha

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a video post Friday that the company erred by not taking down an event listing for a militia group that encouraged armed civilians to defend the streets of Kenosha, Wis., from civil unrest before the fatal shooting of two people this week.

Facebook removed the page for the “Kenosha Guard” and an event listing for “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property” after the shootings Tuesday night in which Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, allegedly killed two men and seriously wounded a third.

Looking somber in a blue T-shirt and speaking in a slow, halting manner, Zuckerberg said the page and event listing violated Facebook’s policies and should have been removed after the company received numerous complaints about their violent nature. He called the error “largely an operational mistake.”

“The contractors, the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically, didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said. “And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

Zuckerberg didn’t say if the contractors had been disciplined for not removing the page and event listing or if Facebook would undertake additional training or consider changes to policies as a result of the event. He did not make an apology to the victims of the violence or their families in the video post.

Zuckerberg said there was no evidence that Rittenhouse followed the Kenosha Guard page or that he had been invited to the event page calling for an armed response to protests in the city.

There's his main defense - basically, "We just didn't know." And yes, I get it, with more than a billion user accounts, how do you police it all?

That's one of the big problems now though. Marketplace Consolidation has given rise to the SuperMegaGiant Company, and the Radical Libertarian business model makes for an atmosphere that encourages corporations to be a little lazy in holding up their end of the social contract.

But here's the thing: Corporations are considered people (according to SCOTUS). They have to be held to account when they fail in their obligations to a civil society. 

If they can't or won't take real steps to put effective self-governing mechanisms in place for themselves, then they deserve the same fate as any other "person" under the law.

It's not unreasonable to expect Facebook to be investigated for possible indictment for Criminal Negligence, Reckless Endangerment and Accessory To Homicide.

At the very least, the families of Rittenhouse's victims are entitled to recompense for Wrongful Death and Malicious Wounding, etc.

"...with liberty and justice (ie: accountability) for all."

Austerity Broke The Contract

Jonathan Pie, on "the average Leave Voter" - which sounds a lot like our own Press Poodles' obsession with the MAGA rubes.

The system is not broken -

it's fixed

We're on that slippery slope - the one that's greased with unrealized dreams due to the broken promises of an ever-decreasing number of ruling elites holding an ever-increasing share of wealth and power.

We Do What We Want

Feelin' Kinda Cynical

In a democracy, you're the customer and the boss. 

As a customer, you pay money in and you get services out.  

As the boss you hire managers to run the joint for you - what we still like to call elections.

In this Oligarchy/Corporatocracy, you're no longer considered the customer. If you're the customer, they'd listen to your input. Now  the only time you get to talk to them is when they give you a chance to agree with decisions they've already made - a lot like those company meetings we all love so much.

And whatever else you may be, you're sure as fuck not the boss anymore.

So if you're not the customer and you're not the boss, I think that makes you the product. 

They're farming you for your tax dollars.  They harvest your money and divvy it up with their buddies and their campaign donors.

Because Contributors get them elected, not voters.

"Leadership"

Because if we're conditioned to believe made up bullshit to start with, we're a lot easier to manipulate in new and exciting ways.

The Task At Hand

How come the people in charge are so often the ones who don't know a fucking thing about what makes something work?



I can't count the number of times I've been in meetings like this.  I just wish I could honestly say I was never a good example of everybody except the guy in the blue shirt.

A Difference Of Ethos

(not an April Fools thing)

There is no Chief Ethics Officer.
This is not a democracy.
The free market is morally neutral - as God intended.
You get along by going along.
Conform and be dull.
Embrace the Noble Lie.
Watch more TV.  Go out to a movie.
Stay safe - take the blue pill.



DecodeDC

The KrugMan Speaks

Paul Krugman takes down the bullshit from Jamie Dimon - that the reason you're not finding a decent job is your own damned fault - stoopid losers.

From his piece in NYT:

“Today, nearly 11 million Americans are unemployed. Yet, at the same time, 4 million jobs sit unfilled” — supposedly demonstrating “the gulf between the skills job seekers currently have and the skills employers need.”

Actually, in an ever-changing economy there are always some positions unfilled even while some workers are unemployed, and the current ratio of vacancies to unemployed workers is far below normal. Meanwhile, multiple careful studies have found no support for claims that inadequate worker skills explain high unemployment.

But the belief that America suffers from a severe “skills gap” is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true. It’s a prime example of a zombie idea — an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.

Hat tip = Salon

Jamie Dimon lives in his little bubble with a variety of others who occupy similarly lofty stations in USAmerica Inc.  And there's a handful of other bubbles occupied by Big Power Wielders - mostly, those bubbles are filled with people holding C-Level positions in Politics and Military Branches and Law Enforcement etc.  Then, you can add in the bubbles from the rest of the planet, and feed it all a constant stream of talking points and rebuttal arguments from a cluster of Media Bubbles (DumFux News, NRO, AEI, WSJ, etc), which gives us the now-infamous Echo Chamber Effect, because, remember now, Press Poodles get their "news" from the newsmakers, and those newsmakers are all inside one of those bubbles - and before your very eyes the world is transformed into a 1950s Disney cartoon with no grounding in reality at all.

Can you say 'entropy'?


So the Zombie-Think Dr Krugman talks about is an important phenomenon to watch.  It's one thing for the rubes to buy in - hell, ya gotta get the rubes to go along with it, or it won't work - but when it looks like the guys who're supposed to be running the scam start believing their own bullshit, it's time to call in the dogs and piss on the fire cuz this hunt is over.

America - Made In China

"American Icon" has become the perfect realization of style over substance; that the symbol is now more important than whatever the symbol is supposed to represent.

The uniforms worn by the 2012 US Olympic Team were made in China.  That's not news, of course, but when I ponder that one, it seems more than a little warped that we just let it go by, with the only result of the complaints and pushback being that the winter team unis were "American Made" (and just look how that turned out), while the stampede of jobs to foreign locations continues not only unrestrained but encouraged; and even "required" under the interpretation of certain laws.

I realize I'm a fogey at this point in time, and it's always a possibility I'm worrying about a few BBs in a boxcar but does it really mean nothing to anyone that we don't do anything other than "manage the brand" anymore?  We're being sold a pocketful of mumbles.

Made In China:

Today In Absurdity

Ms Forlano mentions something about mammography and a recent study that the authors have said suggests annual screening isn't as vital as we've been told.  I haven't found a lot about that study, so I'm kinda talking out my ass here, but when you're trying to make a judgement call on practically anything medical ya gotta look at the outcomes first, and then work your way back thru all the treatment options.  Outcome is what matters, and evidence - what you can prove - is what has to drive those treatment decisions.

The study, which included nearly 90,000 women ages 40 to 59, is the latest to question the value of routine mammography. The researchers found the same number of women died of breast cancer over 25 years, regardless of whether they underwent yearly mammograms or not.

I'm always gonna start from a skeptical viewpoint. eg: The Cancer Treatment Industry has a dog in this fight, so there's some probability for us to see at least a little self-promotion on their part when they push back.

Of course, it's all a shitload more complex than that.  Take a ride thru The Placebo Effect some time and tell me it didn't make you just a tiny bit dizzy.  (Try this one too)

The more we learn, the more we understand how little we know.

What We'll Prob'ly Not See Today

Today is the climax of the Festival In Superbowl-y Triumph, when the entire world can enjoy watching America FIST-ing itself on hi-def TV, thanks almost solely to a squad of Corporate Slags who'll give 3 or 4 million dollars to some other Corporate Slags to air a 30-second spot, placed by even more Corporate Slags at the ad agencies who've been whipping the armies of minimum-wage interns mornin' noon and night in order to come up with the little gems that we'll be raving about for a good two weeks, while we're slaving away to make the money we'll need to give to the beer companies and the insurance companies and the car companies and the sports franchises (and to the governments so they can give even more to those companies and franchises in direct and indirect ways) - just so we come right back here next year and do it all over again.  America - 'cuz FUCK YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's one piece that I'm betting didn't make the cut.

Connections

Like the man said - follow the money.  Wall Street, Capitol Street, K Street, Main Street - they're all connected by rivers of money.  If you have enough money, you can buy your way into or out of just about anything.

From Addicting Info:

Fact is, the food industry is only as safe as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lets it be. It was not that long ago that food companies were found to be doing such things as adding sawdust to bread. Food fraud is rampant, with companies willing to do anything to make a buck. And with the continuing effort to eliminate the powers of the FDA in the name of profits, it is clear that the “free market,” as coined by Milton Friedman, does not work, period.

I'll quibble just a bit with "free market...doesn't work, period".  If the free market is hollowing out the middle class and making it more and more difficult for more and more people to make the end of the month match up with the end of the money, then The Free Market is actually working pretty much as designed.

Making just a slight turn in the road - from Business Insider:

In its early days, the National Rifle Association was a grassroots social club that prided itself on independence from corporate influence.
While that is still part of the organization's core function, today less than half of the NRA's revenues come from program fees and membership dues.
The bulk of the group's money now comes in the form of contributions, grants, royalty income, and advertising, much of it originating from gun industry sources.

Since 2005, the gun industry and its corporate allies have given between $20 million and $52.6 million to it through the NRA Ring of Freedom sponsor program. Donors include firearm companies like Midway USA, Springfield Armory Inc, Pierce Bullet Seal Target Systems, and Beretta USA Corporation. Other supporters from the gun industry include Cabala's, Sturm Rugar & Co, and Smith & Wesson.

The NRA also made $20.9 million — about 10 percent of its revenue — from selling advertising to industry companies marketing products in its many publications in 2010, according to the IRS Form 990.

Additionally, some companies donate portions of sales directly to the NRA. Crimson Trace, which makes laser sights, donates 10 percent of each sale to the NRA. Taurus buys an NRA membership for everyone who buys one of their guns. Sturm Rugar gives $1 to the NRA for each gun sold, which amounts to millions. The NRA's revenues are intrinsically linked to the success of the gun business.

Guns, Oil, Finance, Ag, Defense - even the apparatus of the 2 major parties.  Taking just a quick stroll around Google, you can stumble across an amazing array of organizations and companies that are very very busily making your government their bitch.





And those vids are kinda old now, but y'know what?  $14 Billion to fund all the campaigns of all the congress critters sounds like a fuckin' bargain to me.

Somethin's gotta give.