Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label economic politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economic politics. Show all posts

Sunday, January 14, 2024

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 jalapeƱos 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.

Monday, November 15, 2021

Nature Bats Last

A rising tide lifts all boats.

Rising sea level drowns all coastal areas and low-lying islands.

Hank Green - The SciShow


The bit at the end - even brutally efficient predators like smilodons had enough sense (or maybe heart) to look out for the less fortunate among them.

Saturday, July 31, 2021

Love Of Wisdom

If we should have government at all, what kind of government should it be?

How do we construct a just society? John Rawls, and The Veil Of Ignorance.

The Big Think - Intro to political philosophy, Tamara Gendler, Yale Univ:


Justice is the first virtue of social institutions as truth is of systems of thought.
A scientific theory, even if it's elegant, is useless if it's false.
A political structure, even if it's efficient, is illegitimate if it's unjust.
--John Rawls

This guy Nozick presents everything that's wrong with the way we've been doing things the last 40 years - all the toxic shit Nancy MacLean is trying to warn us about in Democracy In Chains.


Sunday, December 18, 2016

Beyond Words


After Aleppo, Russians prepare to defy Trump re: their Iran Alliance
the left-leaning Lebanese newspaper al-Safir [Ambassador] reports that the armed resistance to the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the East Aleppo pocket is finished. Reports from Wednesday morning say that the ceasefire that Russia and the regime signed onto in hopes that the few hundred hold-outs among the guerrillas would leave has now broken down amid heavy fire. Civilians also continue to flee the areas under rebel control, though the humanitarian corridors promised by Russia appear never to have materialized. The plan had been to allow some rebels to flee to Idlib, where the rebels led by al-Qaeda have a perch. Nevertheless, hundreds of rebels attempted to flee East Aleppo, as did noncombatants.
The Russian victory in Syria against fundamentalist Sunni Arab militias was made possible in part by Iran. Russian fighter jets simply bombing from on high would have been useless. It was Iran that directed the Lebanese Hizbullah and the Iraqi Shiite militias to join the fight, backing up the some 35,000 to 50,000 Syrian soldiers who remain and have not defected. The Russians gave these forces air support, bombing rebel positions until the Shiite militias and the remnants of the Syrian Arab Army could over-run them.
Nobody has any real idea what's going on in Syria except that Putin is reaping benefits by way of adding Client States to his sphere of influence, so it makes sense to me that Trump is on board - wherever there is crisis, there is opportunity.  It makes sense because it makes money, and the element of human tragedy provides Trump et al plenty of cover by allowing them to blame Obama for the whole mess (and notice, we're back to blaming Obama for everything now that Hillary has been dispatched - convenient, it ain't it?).

This looks a lot like we're taking the rise of the Authoritarians to a new level.  On a few occasions, we pay some lip service to the people caught in the middle, but the point for these assholes sounds pretty simple: 

"If those people were worthy of survival, they'd be strong like us. They aren't strong, so they're not like us, so they're not worthy. Let the snowflakes and the women and the libtards worry about weaklings - we're too busy being awesome, so fuck 'em."

Friday, July 10, 2015

No - I'm Not Back Yet

...I just had to post a coupla videos.

Yeah, it's Russia TV so we hafta to be maybe a touch more skeptical than usual, but I'll take a nugget of truth wherever I can find it:



Sunday, February 15, 2015

Today's Facebook Wingnut

This came across from an ex-FB-Friend (which was commented on by a current FB Friend, which is how it showed up where I could see it), and it's what everybody used to get in an email that had enough "FWD"s and "RE:"s attached to it that it looked like god's own phone book.

I took a break from this shit for a while, but sometimes, I just cain't hep muhsef.

code = the Wingnutty Nonsense is in black, and my oh-so-clever rebuttals are in blue.  You prob'ly coulda guessed that much so I'll step aside and let you reap the benefit of my extraordinary wit.


So anyway - for old times' sake I guess:
Free people are not equal. Equal people are not free.
Because this is a nation of, by, & for thoughtless dolts who can’t think beyond simplistic bumper stickers.
"A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don't have one, you'll probably never need one again."
When was the last time some kid killed his little brother with a parachute that accidentally worked exactly the way it was supposed to work?  Please take a bit more care in choosing your analogies.
The definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.
Well, not really - a conundrum is a difficult or confusing problem - one with no simple solution.  I’m sensing you're about to encounter some trouble getting your “logic” to connect up (especially when you leave out a fairly important piece of your premise), but anyway, please do continue.
Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:
1. America is capitalist and greedy - yet half of the population is subsidized.
We can leave aside your apparent ignorance of Latin plurals - no need to get overly pedantic - and concentrate on translating that sentence for ya: The ruling and elitist top ½% of America is capitalist and greedy - and so half of the population is in need of being subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized - yet they think they are victims.
Actually, they know full well they’re being preyed upon and victimized by a class structure kept in place by a ruling and elitist ½%, so we're not sure why you keep flogging that particular (and particularly dead) horse.
3. They think they are victims - yet their representatives run the government.
“Their” representatives are bought and paid for by the ½%.
4. Their representatives run the government - yet the poor keep getting poorer.
(see #3 above, and suddenly we know exactly why they’re getting poorer)
5. The poor keep getting poorer - yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
So, you’re threatening to make people’s lives even worse if they don’t kiss your ass?  And in slightly different terms: You're gonna shit on my head, and then I'm supposed to say, "thanks for the hat".  Is that it?
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about - yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
This is called Cherry Picking - there’re plenty of other countries where “regular” people are a helluva lot better off than they are here, and it’s mostly because they know that Government by Economic System is a really stupid idea that’s never worked as advertised. Ever.
And BTW, we’re pretty sure nobody but you wants things to get any worse (see #5 above).
Think about it! And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century.
Makes you wonder who is doing the math.
And that, my friends pretty much sums up why you're not going to arrive at a true conclusion when you start from a false premise.  
These three, short sentences tell you a lot about the direction of our current government and cultural environment:
1. We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works.
Tell ya what, Quickdraw, get the numbers of Gun Deaths in America down around the numbers of Terrorism Deaths in America, and then we can talk.
2. Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out of money. But we never hear about welfare or food stamps running out of money? What's interesting is the first group "worked for" their money, but the second didn't.
This is the “entitlement” bit, right? OK, so how hard did you work to be born into middle-class white suburban America?  You’ve been cashin’ in on that one for a good long time - what did you do to earn the life-long privileges of that randomly fortuitous event?  
Think about it.....and last but not least:
3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, no pay raises for our military and cutting our army to a level lower than before WWII, but we are not stopping the payments or benefits to illegal aliens.
Make up your friggin’ mind, ditzoid.  Belly-ache about spending too much, or belly-ache about not spending enough.  You don’t get to occupy both positions at the same time.  
Oh, wait - you do wanna spend a shitload of tax dollars on “your guys”, which of course benefits you and yours because you’re totally entitled to be dependent on funneling those tasty tax dollars into your own pockets by way of your uber-patriotic National Security Inc.  
But really, you just can’t stand spending anything on “those people”.  Yeah. We get it.  Known about that one for a while now.  Think about getting some new material.

And speaking of new material - here's some that isn't new at all, but it's so good I can't stop listening to it.

Monday, September 29, 2014

A Question Of Power

Sometimes we all stand around wondering what the hell's wrong with the world, and why does it seem like so many people aren't willing to do what they need to do to make things work anymore.

Through the paradigm of broken windows policing (also known as quality of life policing), "We have come to identify certain acts - graffiti spraying, litter, panhandling, turnstile jumping, and prostitution - and not others - police brutality, accounting scams, and tax evasion - as disorderly and connected to broader patterns of serious crime," writes Bernard Harcourt in Policing Disorder. Harcourt is one of the few academics that has been shouting in the dark for 20 years, but now that broken windows is back in the headlines, his work seems more prescient than ever.
"Why does broken windows focus on the dollar-fifty turnstile jump," Harcourt writes, "rather than on the hundred-million dollar accounting scam?"
The literal-minded would answer that it's because of jurisdiction. Police don't handle massive accounting scams; that's the job of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But Harcourt's question is rhetorical and speaks to a deeper issue of perception: Why are habits borne of material deprivation - begging for money, evading a train fare, dancing for tips on the subway, or selling untaxed cigarettes - more criminalized, in our laws and minds, then things that hurt more people and fundamentally undermine the institutions that make up an orderly society?
--and--
The hedge-fund industry oversaw a record $2.8 trillion in assets at the end of the second quarter, according to industry tracker HFR Inc. That marked the eighth consecutive quarterly record for industrywide assets under management, up from $2.7 trillion at the end of the first quarter.
--and--
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) are both calling for Congress to investigate the New York Federal Reserve Bank after recently releasedsecret recordings show the central bank allegedly going light on firms it was supposed to regulate.

Warren and Brown, both members of the Senate Banking Committee, called for an investigation of the New York Fed after Carmen Segarra, a former examiner at the bank, released secretly recorded tapes that she claims show her superiors telling her to go easy on private banks. Segarra says that she was fired from her job in 2012 for refusing to overlook Goldman’s lack of a conflict of interest policy and other questionable practices that should have brought tougher regulatory scrutiny.
Unfortunately, the inoculation process has been successful - Gubmint is bad; investigations are just political theater (see Whitewater and Benghazi); politicians are all the same; both sides do it; all we need is for Congress to get out of the way; etc etc etc.

Generally, we act and react according to the examples we see every day.  If the people with all the power and money get to behave like they're not bound by the rules, and they can make money on the work of others, and they can use the money to buy the power they need to close the circle and make that big bamboozle go 'round again - then why should it be any different for everybody else?  

Unfortunately, on the political side of things, that translates to a widening refusal to participate, so we don't vote.  And it just gets a little worse.

But mostly, it seems to come down to the hostage metaphor.  We want somebody to do something, but the hostage-takers won't allow anybody to do the things that have helped in the past - infrastructure improvements, and education, and wage support; all that Keanesian stuff that actually works.  Unfortunately, we've got a pretty bad pathology going on that centers around self-loathing and punishment and austerity, and we're being conditioned to believe that if we can just get our minds right, we can be happy with our crappy little lives because at least the masters aren't beating us with sticks quite as often.

Stop wondering why so many people just wanna see it all burn.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

A Question

If it's wrong to steal the wealth from rich people in order to make poor people less poor, then it's just as wrong to steal the labor from poor people in order to make rich people richer.

Having believed that first part while purposefully ignoring the second part is what haunts me about my own career history, and what leads me to believe that the flirtation with economic justice we've indulged in since the 1930s is all but over.  We're sliding back into the old ways of doing things and so we need to call our system by it's more suitable name: Kleptonomics.

I've had a bad feeling when thinking about the downward pressure on real wages and earnings here in the US over the last few decades.  It's almost as if somebody wants us to feel guilty about our success in order to make us more willing to do more and to accept less in return for it; while workers in other countries are portrayed as making "great strides" and how they're humble and so they're grateful for whatever crumbs the noble job-creators are willing to let fall from their tables; and so "why can't you spoiled rotten Americans just take whatever we give you and shut up about it?"

While we're being distracted by game shows and disaster porn and attention whores, the real meanings and merits of Socialism and Capitalism are being flipped and perverted until we have no idea what any of it means at all.

In confusion there is opportunity - somebody benefits while the credit and the culpability are shifted to those who least deserve them.

It all sounds way too conspiracy-theory-ish, but y'know, I may be paranoid but that don't mean nobody's out to get me.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

The KrugMan Speaks


Another Bad Story Bites The Dust

One of the remarkable things about the ongoing economic crisis is the endless search for explanations of something that’s actually quite simple — the sluggish pace of recovery. You have a large overhang of private debt; you have a still-depressed housing sector; and you have contractionary fiscal policy. Add to this the well-established fact that recovery tends to be slow after recessions caused not by tight money but by private-sector overreach, and there’s just no mystery that needs explaining.
Yet we’ve seen an endless series of analyses declaring that there is indeed a deep mystery, and it must be Obama’s Fault. Probably the most influential of these analyses was the claim that Obama was creating “uncertainty”, and this was holding everything back.
Larry Mishel did a thorough debunking of this meme almost two years ago. And sure enough, the index of uncertainty that everyone was pointing to has plunged, with no visible boost to the economy.
Will anyone who bought into this story engage in some serious self-analysis? Why am I even asking?

That last line is the dominant theme of our current dysfunction, and I'm trying hard not to think we can just slap some sense into people.  

Sunday, June 02, 2013

Ah Yes, I See It Now

Wes Clark's a pretty smart guy.  I haven't checked on any of this, but I'll bet it's at least as close to The Truth as anything you're gonna get talking to anybody else.

We spend about 1/2 a TRILLION dollars every year trying to secure the flow of oil into the US.

You're a pretty smart cookie too, so I'm sure you're wondering, why is it OK for us to spend all that money every year?  Two basic reasons:
1) The US economy is designed, engineered and marketed as Petroleum-Based.
$15 Trillion dollars per year in GDP, and prob'ly 80-90% of it depends on relatively inexpensive oil products in one way or another.  $500 Billion (aka 1/30th of your "gross revenue") sounds like cheap insurance to some of these pricks.

2) Clark says there's something like $170 Trillion worth of oil still in the ground.



And, oh yeah - 3) Most of the various layers of Government in the US reflect the "realities" of our Petro-Based economy, and the political community has again been corporatized to the point where it's not much more than just another Business Unit.

Knowledge is Power?  Not here.  Not anymore.

from WhoWhatWhy ( a new one for me) with a hat tip to Democratic Underground

Thursday, May 02, 2013

The Krugman Speaks

Captured in its entirety at NYT:


Speaking of Getting It Wrong


My heart goes out to Brad DeLong, who
debated Alan Reynolds and discovered that his opponent really doesn’t understand at all how either fiscal or monetary policy work.

But here’s what I find remarkable about Reynolds and people like him: they have a track record. Here’s Reynolds in 2009 ridiculing my claims that we were in a liquidity trap, so that even large increases in the monetary base would not be inflationary. Here he is in 2010 declaring that Ireland’s embrace of harsh spending cuts will produce an economic boom.

And here we are in 2013, with the Fed’s balance sheet up by more than 200 percent and no inflation, with Ireland still mired in a deep slump with at best slight hints of an upturn. And Reynolds remains quite sure that he knows The Truth about macroeconomics and that Keynesians are fools.

It’s quite impressive, really.

If you're gonna have a debate that actually means something, then both sides hafta know what they're talking about.

In way too many instances, the "conservatives" keep trying to tell us they know something when it's obvious they don't.

I imagine we'll eventually hear somebody come right out and say, "Austerity didn't fail - we failed austerity".

Wednesday, January 09, 2013

The Krugman Speaks

The true sign of competence (if not genius) is the ability to explain some of the high-brain complicated stuff in a way that makes it understandable to guys like me.

(This not to be confused with the usual mode of Repubs to dumb everything down so as to give the rubes the comfortable feeling that anybody with a GED and the "common sense of the country-folk" could run this joint).

Anyway - Paul Krugman at NYT (re: the Trillion Dollar Coin):
There seem to be two kinds of objections. One is that it would be undignified. Here’s how to think about that: we have a situation in which a terrorist may be about to walk into a crowded room and threaten to blow up a bomb he’s holding. It turns out, however, that the Secret Service has figured out a way to disarm this maniac — a way that for some reason will require that the Secretary of the Treasury briefly wear a clown suit. (My fictional plotting skills have let me down, but there has to be some way to work this in). And the response of the nervous Nellies is, “My god, we can’t dress the secretary up as a clown!” Even when it will make him a hero who saves the day?
The other objection is the apparently primordial fear that mocking the monetary gods will bring terrible retribution.
 --and--
The other side of this debate has been predicting runaway inflation for more than four years, as the monetary base has tripled. The same people predicted soaring interest rates from government borrowing. Meanwhile, the liquidity-trap people like me predicted what would actually happen: low inflation and low rates. This has to be the most decisive real-world test of opposing theories ever.
"Them Damned Libruls" have been right about a lot.

Monday, December 31, 2012

We Just Don't Know

Except we kinda do know - or at least we're getting to where we have to be starting to think there has to be something to it. There's always whatever small probability that it could be a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc, but c'mon - at what point do we just have to say those damned hippies were right all along?
From The Rocky Mountain Arsenal:

Deep well injection for liquid waste has been safely used for many years at sites throughout the United States without documented damage to human health or the environment. After an extensive study of deep injection wells across the country by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), it was concluded that this procedure is effective and protective of the environment.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal deep injection well was constructed in 1961, and was drilled to a depth of 12,045 feet. The well was cased and sealed to a depth of 11,975 feet, with the remaining 70 feet left as an open hole for the injection of Basin F liquids. For testing purposes, the well was injected with approximately 568,000 gallons of city water prior to injecting any waste. However, when the Basin F liquids were actually introduced, the process required more time than anticipated to complete because of the impermeability of the rock. The end result was approximately 165 million gallons of Basin F liquid waste being injected into the well during the period from 1962 through 1966.
The waste fluid chemistry is not known precisely. However, the Army estimates that the waste was a more dilute version of the Basin F liquid which is now being incinerated. Current Basin F liquid consists of very salty water that includes some metals, chlorides, wastewater and toxic organics. From 1962 -- 1963, the fluids were pumped from Basin F into the well. From 1964 -- 1966, waste was removed from an isolated section of Basin F and was combined with waste from a pre-treatment plant, located near Basin F, and then pumped into the well. The waste from the pre-treatment plant was generally a solution containing 13,000 parts per million sodium chloride (salt), with a pH ranging from 3.5 to 11.5. The organic content of the solution was high but is largely unknown.
The injected fluids had very little potential for reaching the surface or useable groundwater supply since the injection point had 11,900 feet of rock above it and was sealed at the opening. The Army discontinued use of the well in Feb. 1966 because of the possibility that the fluid injection was triggering earthquakes in the area. The well remained unused for nearly 20 years.
In 1985 the Army permanently sealed the disposal well in stages. First, the well casing was tested to evaluate its integrity. Any detected voids behind the casing were cemented to prevent possible contamination of other formations. Next, the injection zone at the bottom 70 feet of the well was closed by plugging with cement. Additional cement barriers were placed inside the casing across zones that could access water-bearing formations (aquifers). The final step was adding Bentonite, a heavy clay mud that later solidified, to close the rest of the hole up to the ground surface.
I was 14, living in Arvada Colorado in August 1967, and I remember very clearly at the time that nobody wasn't convinced the earthquakes were being caused by the US Army pumping tons of toxic waste into those wells.  The Army didn't deny it although they were pretty cagey about what they were willing to say about it in public.

Historic Earthquakes

Denver, Colorado
1967 08 09 13:25
Magnitude 5.3

The main damage occurred in Northglenn, a northern suburb of Denver, but minor damage occurred in many area towns. At Northglenn, concrete pillars were damaged at a church; foundations, concrete floors, and walls cracked; windows broke; and tile fell at a school. At one residence, a piano shifted about 15 cm and a television set overturned. Some bricks fell from a chimney in downtown Denver, damaging a car. This was the largest of a series of earthquakes in the northeast Denver area that were believed to be induced by pumping of waste fluids into a deep disposal well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. The Colorado School of Mines recorded more than 300 earthquakes from this zone during 1967. Felt north to Laramie, Wyoming, south to Pueblo, west to Vail, and east to Sterling.
Cracks in highway overpass pillar in the Denver, Colorado, area caused by the August 9, 1967, earthquake. (Photograph by the Denver Post.)

And then this, from Up With Chris Hayes:
Indeed, energy independence–and the economic opportunities that come with it–may be an admirable goal. But then there’s this: fracking is causing earthquakes. Federal scientists presented a new study this week to the American Geophysical Union that suggests natural gas drilling is the likely culprit behind a skyrocketing number of earthquakes in the Raton Basin in Colorado and New Mexico. From 1970 to 2001, there were just five earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater in that region. Then, companies began injecting what’s called “wastewater fluid” from natural gas drilling into the Earth. After that, from 2001 to 2011, there were a total of 95 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater–an increase of 1,900%. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey concluded in their report that “the majority, if not all of the earthquakes since August 2001 have been triggered by the deep injection of wastewater related to the production of natural gas from the coal-bed methane field.”
This has to stop.

Friday, December 07, 2012

Just Keep Pluggin' Away

Repubs lost big last month, but you wouldn't know it by their behavior lately.  Right now, they're concentrating on The Fiscal "Cliff" - which I'm sure you already know is really more of a gentle incline, but hey, we need something to angst about so let's pump up the high school fuck-around drama to maintain some level of interest.  If We The People aren't tuned in on the issues, then the politicians have to admit the thing's a bit of a scam.  But if we "really know what's going on", then we'd be able to see for ourselves what a scam it is, and that's even worse.  So Politicians and Press Poodles come up with ways of framing the issues and reporting the proceedings that keep voters lined up in support of one side or the other.  Red Pols need to point at their numbers to make their claims of "the American people are with us..." and the Blue Pols do basically the same from their side.  The big difference here is that the Red Pol Supporters are almost always on board with bullshit - Climate Change is a hoax; Eric Holder is confiscating guns; tax cut equals tax revenue increase; democracy is threatened because too many people are voting; etc.  Repubs haven't stopped promoting all that crap because The Big Lie works, and we're seeing it in action.

I guess we should expect more of the same as the fight for party control in the GOP continues.

The problem, of course is that we'll be presented various choices from the menu of "very serious GOP intellectuals" who have to carry several tons of Tea Party baggage (which they won't be allowed to offload any time soon), and who'll have to pretend all that dead weight is actually a good thing because it represents good old American Values blah blah blah - which means they'll either never get out of The Bubble, or by the time they're allowed to talk about what they really wanna do, we'll know they don't really know what the fuck they're talking about anyway.  Reality can really harsh your mellow.

Enjoy a little Krugman right now:
As Jonathan Chait points out, Bobby Jindal — who is supposed to be one of the intellectual leaders of his party — has just published an op-ed on the cliff that sure looks as if he has no idea whatsoever what the cliff is about. There’s nothing in that piece even hinting that the looming problem is spending cuts and tax increases that will shrink the deficit too soon; and his big policy ideas would actually make the lurch to austerity worse. It’s not just the idea of a balanced budget amendment, which would force harsh austerity every time the economy goes into recession; putting a cap on spending as share of GDP would do the same, because you’d have to cut spending whenever GDP went down.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

It Starts To Make Sense

When lots of people said, "We invaded Iraq because of the oil", I was willing to consider it as one possible reason, but it also had the hollow ring of empty rhetoric for me, especially as we failed to produce a decent flow of crude.
(3.5M bbl/day pre-war, 1.5M bbl/day now)

It seems I was pretty wrong on that one.  Almost crazy stupid wrong.  For one thing, while invading Iraq was indeed about securing the supply, more importantly it was about controlling the flow (but that's just a little bonus info - read on).

A book review by Matt Stoller via Naked Capitalism:
The use of coal and oil in the context of industrialization has always been about who has the power to profit from the surplus these energy forms produce, but until now, no one has pulled the various historical details together into a historical narrative laying bare the fascinating power dynamics behind the rise of Western political systems and their relationship with energy. Carbon Democracy is an examination of our civilization’s 400 hundred year use of carbon-based energy fueling sources, and the political systems that grew up intertwined with them. Rather than presenting energy and democracy as separate things, like a battery and a device, Mitchell discusses the political architecture of the Western world and the developing world as inherently tied to fueling sources. The thesis is that elites have always sought to maximize not the amount of energy they could extract and use, but the profit stream from those energy sources. They struggled to ensure they would be able to burn carbon and profit, without having to rely on the people who extract and burned it for them. Carbon-based fuels thus cannot be understood except in the context of labor, imperialism and democracy.
--and--

And oil companies operated not to maximize production, but to sabotage it. Mitchell wrote, “The companies had learned from Standard Oil that it was easier to control the means of transportation. Building railways and pipelines required negotiating rights from the government, which typically granted the further right to prevent the establishing of competing lines. After obtaining the rights, the aim was usually to delay construction, but without losing the right. Iraq became the key place to sabotage the production of oil. It would retain that role through much of the twentieth century, and reacquire it in a different way in the twenty-first century.”

So it turns out that all the Geopolitics and whatever nuevo-jargon maneuverings you care to mention over the last 50 years or so is just the same old imperial game of grab the cash and make a stash?

Same shit, new day.  And Jesus wept.

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Without Apology - Part 2

(con'd from Without Apology - below)

If I argue "when healthcare coverage is outlawed, only outlaws will have healthcare coverage", I suspect "conservatives" to scoff and tell me I'm stupid to think they're trying to "outlaw" healthcare coverage.

But they're wrong.  Being against HealthCare Reform and against ObamaCare (and and and) almost always goes with a package that includes being in favor of Free Market Solutions. These guys will always spout the standard suite of platitudes:
  • the market will always find a fair balance on its own
  • the market brings innovation to satisfy all needs of every market segment
  • the competition of the market will force prices down so everybody can get it on the benefits
  • everything is good as long as government stays out of it completely
etc.

But outlawing coverage is (effectively) exactly what happens.  In a system of completely unfettered capitalism, the Market is the law, and your paycheck is Law Enforcement.

In that system, what's the difference between being unable to buy it and being forbidden by law to possess it?

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Twilight Of The Elites

I guess I really need to read the book.

From a blurb by Chris Hayes about his new book:
But extreme inequality of the particular kind that we have produces its own particular kind of elite pathology: it makes elites less accountable, more prone to corruption and self-dealing, more status-obsessed and less empathic, more blinkered and removed from informational feedback crucial to effective decision making. For this reason, extreme inequality produces elites that are less competent and more corrupt than a more egalitarian social order would. This is the fundamental paradoxical outcome that several decades of failed meritocratic production have revealed: As American society grows more elitist, it produces a lesser caliber of elites.