Weekend Economists Hear the People Sing September 9-11, 2011

[Demeter]

""Les Misérables" (literally "The Miserable Ones")is an 1862 French novel by author Victor Hugo, widely considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. It follows the lives and interactions of several French characters over a seventeen-year period in the early nineteenth century, starting in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion.

The novel focuses on the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption. It examines the nature of law and grace, and expatiates upon the history of France, architecture of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. The story is historical fiction because it contains factual and historic events. Contrary to what some believe, it does not use the French Revolution as a backdrop. The French Revolution took place in the eighteenth century; Les Miserables takes place in the nineteenth. The only "revolution" depicted is the June Rebellion, a student uprising.

Les Misérables contains many plots, but the main thread is the story of ex-convict, Jean Valjean (known by his prison number, 24601), who becomes a force for good in the world, but cannot escape his dark past. The novel is divided into five volumes, each volume divided into books, and subdivided into chapters (for a total of three hundred sixty-five chapters). Each chapter is relatively short, usually no longer than a few pages. Nevertheless, the novel as a whole is quite lengthy by modern standards, exceeding fourteen hundred pages in unabridged editions (nineteen hundred pages in French). Within the borders of the novel's story, Hugo fills many pages with his thoughts on religion, politics, and society, including several lengthy digressions, one being a discussion on enclosed religious orders, one on the construction of the Paris sewers, another being on argot, and most famously, his retelling of the Battle of Waterloo."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Mis%C3%A9rables

"The first two volumes of Les Misérables were published on 3 April 1862, heralded by a massive advertising campaign; the remainder of the novel appeared on 15 May 1862. At the time, Victor Hugo enjoyed a reputation as one of France's foremost poets, and the appearance of the novel was a highly anticipated event. Critical reactions were wide-ranging and often negative; some critics found the subject matter immoral, others complained of its excessive sentimentality, and still others were disquieted by its apparent sympathy with the revolutionaries. The Goncourt brothers expressed their great dissatisfaction, judging the novel artificial and disappointing. Flaubert could find within it "neither truth nor greatness." French poet Charles Baudelaire reviewed the work glowingly in newspapers, but in private castigated it as "tasteless and inept."

The book was a great commercial success. The shortest correspondence in history is between Hugo and his publisher Hurst & Blackett in 1862. It is said Hugo was on vacation when Les Misérables (which is over 1200 pages) was published. He telegraphed the single-character message "?" to his publisher, who replied with a single "!". First translated into foreign languages (including Italian, Greek, and Portuguese) the same year it originally appeared, it proved popular not only in France, but across Europe. It has been a popular book ever since it was published, and was a great favourite among the Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War, who occasionally called themselves "Lee's Miserables" (a reference to their deteriorating conditions under General Robert E. Lee). Its popularity continues to this day, and many view it as one of the most important novels ever written."

The story has been retold endlessly on film and stage and most languages, but today we will focus on the musical first performed at the Barbican Centre in London, England on 8 October 1985....and its hallmark song for our times:



Les Miserables - Do You Hear the People Sing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B9HJ7fUPAM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_V0NXFpSSA&feature=related

This song was the focus of flash mobbing in Madison, Wisconsin during the union-busting earlier this year, and it will likely be the focus of many more civic events in the years to come.

Do you hear the people sing from Les Misérables -- chinese unofficial version 中文 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t2OUXiUPos&feature=related

SO THIS WEEK WE FEATURE REPORTS FROM A CROWD OF ANGRY MEN AND WOMEN. JOIN US AS WE RAIL AGAINST INJUSTICE, CRIMINALITY, AND YES, STUPIDITY!

[Demeter]

1. WATCH THIS SPOT FOR BANK FAILURES

Starting early because it's Euchre Night! I don't care if the world ends, I'm still going.

[DemReadingDU]

20. Euchre Night, Yay for you!

Spouse decides this morning we need to see a movie. Kinda like date night, but this was an afternoon matinee. Anyway, he says 'The Debt' sounded good. So me, thinking Debt is somehow about the world financial crisis, thinks it might be interesting.

Here is a brief summary, no spoilers, and you can see, it is not anything about banksters, lol


The espionage thriller begins in 1997, as shocking news reaches retired Mossad secret agents Rachel (Helen Mirren) and Stefan (Tom Wilkinson) about their former colleague David (Ciarán Hinds). All three have been venerated for decades by their country because of the mission that they undertook back in 1966, when the trio (portrayed, respectively, by Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, and Sam Worthington) tracked down Nazi war criminal Vogel (Jesper Christensen) in East Berlin. At great risk, and at considerable personal cost, the team's mission was accomplished - or was it? The suspense builds in and across two different time periods, with startling action and surprising revelations.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226753/

[Demeter]

26. Any thumbs up?

Did you like the flick? Would I like the flick? How about the Kid?

[DemReadingDU]

31. It's more of a drama

Since I had no clue about this movie, it took me awhile to figure out what the plot was. It goes back and forth between the present, and what happened 30 years ago. I liked it, has many twists. Apparently it is a re-make of the same movie that was made in Israel in 2007.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0990427/

[Demeter]

40. As long as it's not a 3 hanky chick flic

I hate those.

[DemReadingDU]

48. Definitely not a chik flic, n/t

[ixion]

24. Florida Bank goes down

Regulators Shut Florida Bank

BY JOAN E. SOLSMAN

U.S. regulators closed another bank in Florida, which, with 11 failures, is the second most failure-prone state this year behind Georgia.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said First National Bank of Florida, based in the city of Milton, was ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903285704576561204049684120.html

[Demeter]

25. ONLY ONE BANK DOWN TONIGHT

The First National Bank of Florida, Milton, Florida, was closed today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with CharterBank, West Point, Georgia, to assume all of the deposits of The First National Bank of Florida.

The eight branches of The First National Bank of Florida will reopen during their normal business hours beginning Saturday as branches of CharterBank...As of June 30, 2011, The First National Bank of Florida had approximately $296.8 million in total assets and $280.1 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the failed bank, CharterBank agreed to purchase essentially all of the assets.

The FDIC and CharterBank entered into a loss-share transaction on $216.3 million of The First National Bank of Florida's assets...The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $46.9 million. Compared to other alternatives, CharterBank's acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. The First National Bank of Florida is the 71st FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the eleventh in Florida. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was Lydian Private Bank, Palm Beach, on August 19, 2011.

[Demeter]

2. Les Miserables--and me

I encountered Victor Hugo's epic in 10th grade English, in a short and rather awful translation considered suitable for the young, growing, innocent minds of 1970 (and earlier--children used to be sheltered from "adult" content), so the bones of the plot were there, but not much else. I am certain that nothing of Hugo's actual voice made it across the barrier.

Alas, I never studied French, mostly because looking at it, I decided I would never be able to spell or pronounce it correctly. Give me a good Germanic or Slavic language with well defined consonants and limited vowels any day. Not even to read Hugo in the original was I willing to undergo French class! If I didn't grow up in America, I probably wouldn't have tried to learn English, either.

And the teaching of the novel left a lot to be desired--no historical background, no supplemental trivia, nothing. In those pre-internet days, in a small suburban backwater with limited library resources, we were left to flounder through it unassisted. I did go on to attempt another Hugo novel, we know it as "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", mainly because its plot is also riveting and it forms part of the common culture that has been translated to film.

I'd do it differently today, if a good translation can be recommended. In the meanwhile, I'm going on the films...

What was your take on the novel? English class? The French language?

[Demeter]

3. Let's Just Raid Social Security

http://www.testosteronepit.com/home/2011/9/7/lets-just-raid-social-security.html

Out of one side of its mouth, our political system talks about reforming Social Security to preserve it for a few more years, and out of the other side of its mouth, it proposes to expedite its demise. As rational observer, you'd just like to get a big roll of duct tape and close off all these orifices for a while.

There are rumblings everywhere about a one-year extension of the "temporary" payroll-tax cut. Effective for all of 2011, it reduces the employee portion of the Social Security tax from 6.2% to 4.2%, thus giving us a little extra spending money. And collectively, it's more than a little: $100 billion for the year. The idea is that we'd spend this extra money, which would nudge up GDP and create jobs somehow somewhere. Yep, GDP and consumer spending are up a bit, despite dropping real wages and sagging consumer confidence. Yes, the inexplicable American consumer...However, the mind-boggling U.S. trade deficit, particularly in consumer goods, sees to it that much of this extra money is going overseas. And it certainly hasn't created many jobs in the U.S., as we know from our dismal jobs reports.

But here is one thing the payroll-tax cut did do very effectively: It raided Social Security by $100 billion. And now, they're proposing to raid it again. But to be fair, let's include an employer portion. Combined, it would amount to $200 billion for next year. And why not make it permanent? Because letting it expire would be decried, much like today, as a huge jobs-destroying "tax hike," while the $2.6 trillion Social Security Trust Fund just sits there, fat and plump with all this "money." So, if we wanted to phase out our Social Security Trust Fund, that would be one way of doing it. After a decade or so, it would be gone. China would have a quarter or more of it, and the rest would be spread around. End of story. We'd finally be rid of it...It's like raiding your 401k. Just clean it out, buy some stuff, and go on. Don't worry about later. To heck with retirement. Sure, that's one way to proceed. And if that's what we want, let's say it outright. Let's state clearly that we want to phase out our Social Security Trust Fund, that we want to bankrupt the Social Security system on an expedited time line, and that this payroll-tax cut is a way to accomplish that in an efficient manner.

But if we want to preserve our Social Security system, we need to keep inflows and outflows in balance over time. When inflation, job losses, and demographics throw the system out of whack, we need to adjust it. Alas, that adjusting is called the "third rail" of politics. How much easier and how much politically more expedient it is to raid it! So, let's just go do that instead.

[bread_and_roses]

19. "The Payroll Tax Holiday: Talk about a Ponzi Scheme!"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/09-4

Published on Friday, September 9, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
The Payroll Tax Holiday: Talk about a Ponzi Scheme!
by Wendy Mink

Is President Obama trying to kill Social Security without explicitly saying so? He put Social Security "on the table" for consideration by his Deficit Commission -- even though Social Security has not contributed to creating or sustaining the deficit/debt in the first place. He kept Social Security on the table when he made a deal to delegate deficit reduction authority over entitlements to an undemocratic Super Committee. Now, in a speech reportedly about jobs, he proposed to extend and increase the ill-considered FICA tax cut he embraced last December -- a tax cut that directly undermines the financial integrity of Social Security

Plenty around here telling us how it's all good, though .... thankfully, many also seeing right through it.

I may be almost 61, but I am not willing to sell out my fellow workers and citizens just because I am older thsn they are. Not to mention our children and grandchildren - in the ever-less-likely chance they live under conditions remotely resembling civilized in the near future.

[Demeter]

4. Postal Workers: The Last Union

http://www.truth-out.org/last-union/1315492298

TOM HARTMAN VIDEO REPORT AT LINK

The recent attacks against the United States Postal Service (USPS) are more than signs of desperate times - a natural sunset moment for a service rendered archaic by FedEx and UPS. Rather, the Postal Service has been under constant, vicious assault for years from the right, who views this as an epic battle with the goal of finally taking down the strongest union in the country, the second largest employer in the United States (second only to Wal-Mart,) and a means to roll the country ever closer toward the abyss of privatization.

The Postal Service, which is older than the Constitution itself, stands at a precipice. If this great institution, which provides one of the oldest, most reliable services in the country, is permitted to fall and Congress kills its great union, then truly no collective bargaining rights, no worker contract, no union will be safe within the United States.

As the USPS spirals toward default, the historically uncontroversial mail service system has suddenly become a hot-button issue. It's an unlikely organization to inspire such hysteria. The Postal Service isn't paid for by taxpayer dollars, but rather fully funded by the sale of stamps. It's easy to forget what a marvel this is - that today, in 2011, one can still mail a letter clear across the country for less than 50 cents. And if the impressiveness of that feat still hasn't sunk in, attempt this brain exercise: consider what else you can buy for $0.44.

It was only a few years ago that the USPS was considered not only stable, but thriving. The biggest volume in pieces of mail handled by the Postal Service in its 236-year history was in 2006. The second and third busiest years were in 2005 and 2007, respectively. But it was two events: one crafted during the Bush years and another supervised by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, that would cripple this once great institution.

Perhaps it was its booming history that first drew Congress' attention to the Postal Service in 2006 when it passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA), which mandated that the Postal Service would have to fully fund retiree health benefits for future retirees. That's right. Congress was demanding universal health care coverage.

But it even went beyond that. Congress was mandating coverage for future human beings.

"It's almost hard to comprehend what they're talking about, but basically they said that the Postal Service would have to fully fund future retirees' health benefits for the next 75 years and they would have to do it within a ten-year window," says Chuck Zlatkin, political director of the New York Metro Area Postal Union.

It was an impossible order, and strangely, a task unshared by any other government service, agency, corporation or organization within the United States. The act meant that every September 30th, the USPS had to cough up $5.5 billion to the Treasury for the pre-funding of future retirees' health benefits, meaning the Postal Service pays for employees 75 years into the future. The USPS is funding the retirement packages of people who haven't even been born yet.

The hopeless task was made even more daunting when Wall Street blew up the world's economies. It was this, and not the invention of email, that became the Postal Service's death knell. Zlatkin finds the whole "blame it on the Internet" excuse amusing. The Internet had already existed for quite a while in 2006, the USPS's busiest year, not to mention that every item purchased on Amazon and eBay - every piece of information addressed to stockholders and bank customers - still needs to be snail mailed, which is enough volume to keep the Postal Service prosperous.

"I've yet to figure out a way to mail a shirt through a computer," he chuckles.

When Wall Street's derivatives gamble blew up the country, businesses slowed their operations during the recession and, as such, the Postal Service was no longer handling historically high volumes of mail. The boom was over and the death spiral began.

At the same time, the USPS was bleeding money by overpaying into worker pension funds. An audit done by the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General came up with the figure of $75 billion in pension overpayments. Then, the Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that actually received more autonomous power under PAEA, commissioned its own independent audit. The commission placed the overpayment at $50 billion.

Taking these figures into consideration, the projected $9 billion deficit the USPS now faces seems like chump change that could easily be corrected with some minor accounting tweaks.

"You could actually transfer over payment from the pension funds to the healthcare retirement funds," says Zlatkin. "And it wouldn't cost taxpayers a single penny."

H.R. 1351, the United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011, is a piece of legislation sponsored by Massachusetts Congressman Stephen Lynch. The act calls for the Office of Personal Management to do the definitive audit, come up with the actual figure of overpayment and then apply that to the ridiculous system of prepayment funding expenses. The Postal Service would then have that $5.5 billion a year to use for running its services and improving mail delivery.

This would eliminate the need to terminate Saturday mail delivery service, close down mail processing centers and there would be no need to lay off 120,000 workers (the Postal Service work force has already been reduced through attrition by over 100,000 employees over the last four years).

But there are political opponents that have no desire to see the USPS survive what is, for all intents and purposes, a stupid accounting maneuver. Namely, the GOP and moderate Democrats were the players behind the PAEA, and are now the same forces peddling the narrative that the Postal Service is broke, the union too demanding and the only solution is cuts, cuts and, oh yes, more cuts.

Zlatkin says the name "Darrell Issa" like he just smelled something seriously foul. He had his first encounter with the Congressman in May soon after the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) and the Postal Service reached a collective bargaining agreement. The agreement, through givebacks that the union offered, guaranteed the Postal Service over $4 billion in cost savings on employees over the life of a contract. At the time, Postmaster Patrick Donahoe hailed this as a victory for the Postal Service, its employees and the people they serve.

However, as the union was preparing to vote on the agreement, Issa called a hearing on the contract. The move was completely unprecedented. Here was a Republican chair of the Oversight Committee grilling the postmaster general about an agreement (Issa called the contract too generous) upon which a union was currently voting. "Talk about tampering with elections," says Zlatkin.

For Zlatkin, the only other name that inspires as much contempt is Dennis Ross (R-Florida), another member of the Oversight Committee. "Issa's henchman," as Zlatkin calls him, went after the postmaster for settling on the agreement, demanding to know why he didn't negotiate the contract.

"The bigger issue is really the longer-term changes we need to make to the Postal Service in terms of its viability," Ross said to Donahoe. "I hope we can empower you to do more."

Side note: It's interesting to hear the GOP refer to the Postal Service as if it's a business rather than an entity that provides a public service. The Postal Service is not designed to churn profits.

What empower meant was to starve the Postal Service and its union. Since that day, Donahoe has abdicated his responsibility as the postmaster general, according to Zlatkin. The APWU's collective bargaining agreements in the past have included layoff protections, which Donahoe immediately offered up as sacrifice to his Republican masters when he asked to bypass worker protection so he might obliterate 220,000 career positions from the workforce by 2015.

"All he's trying to do is appease that committee. He's violated a contract he's signed. He's violated labor law. From my understanding, by going to Congress and having them change the laws to change our contracts, he's violating the Constitution of the United States."

In fact, Zlatkin says his local union chapter is so disillusioned with the postmaster's behavior that they're putting out a press release to call for his resignation or termination. "He is either a well-meaning incompetent or a duplicitous front man for the people who want to privatize the postal service," says Zlatkin.

Soon after meeting with Donahoe, Issa introduced the Postal Reform Act to Congress, a bill that Zlatkin says would "Wisconsin" the Postal Service. " give them the kinds of powers that the Super Committee is having to just go in there temporarily and do what has to be done: rip into the contracts, close post offices without hearings. It's basically the Postal Service Destruction Act." The bill has one co-sponsor: Dennis Ross. And both men just happen to be in charge of the House Oversight Committee. Between the "Save The Postal Service" H.R. 1351 and the Postal Service Destruction Act, Zlatkin asks rhetorically, "which is gonna come to a vote?"

It makes sense that the Postal Service has become the target of rich, overwhelmingly white politicians. As former Deputy Assistant and Deputy Press Secretary to former President George W. Bush, Tony Fratto so eloquently tweeted: "Over the past 10 yrs I might have visited a post office 10 times, total."

When you can hand off parcels to your assistant who then ships it off at FedEx's higher rates, then yeah, the post office might not be for you. But as Marcy Wheeler explains, there are still tons of people who need the USPS's services: poorer people, people using a post office box, rural people who live outside delivery areas, eBay-type entrepreneurs, immigrants sending care packages to people from their country of origin and nonprofits.

"It's part of the class war and it's against the poor and it's a class war against working people," says Zlatkin. Of the 34 post offices the USPS is considering closing in New York City, 17 are in the Bronx. The South Bronx district ranks as the poorest Congressional district in America.

"Any time a post office is rumored to be closing, it's devastating to the neighborhood that it's in," says Zlatkin, "what happens when we get involved with elected officials and community people to try and keep a post office open, it's always the same people who turn out: elderly people, disabled people, poor people and small business owners. They're the people who are the ones who that depend on the postal service that they can't really afford or have access to alternatives."

UPS and FedEx aren't required to do what the Postal Service does and that is deliver the mail to every place, even if the recipient is located in hard-to-reach rural terrain, or an inner-city neighborhood deemed too "dangerous" for other services, like taxi cabs, in which to travel. If the USPS falls, it will be another strike in the class war where poor people are yet again cut off from a service that used to belong to everyone.

So, here we have a service that caters primarily to the economically disadvantaged and employs over 574,000 union members. No wonder it became such a mouth-watering target for the GOP. It would be quite a feather in the cap of Darrell "the liberal hunter" Issa to take out one of the largest unions in the country and simultaneously give the US a nudge in the direction of total privatization by crippling one of the last great public services.

"Obama is gonna have a job talk for the country," says Zlatkin. "Is he gonna talk about the necessity for maintaining the 120,000 postal jobs, or is he going to ignore it? I would guess he would ignore it. We were the second union to endorse Obama, the APWU and since that time, he hasn't been a, what we call, good friend to the postal workers, or the people they work for."

**********************************************************


This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[plumbob]

29. Post Office is established in the Constitution.

Of course, it's just a rag, anyway, so what the fuck?

[Demeter]

41. The Post Office May Be in the Constitution, But Unions Aren't

an oversight that must be rectified soon.

[Demeter]

5. Predicting Global Economic Volatility This Week

http://www.truth-out.org/predicting-global-economic-volatility-week/1315507039

This week, September 6-10, may prove one of the most volatile economically and financially since the global banking panic of September 2008 - both in the US and worldwide.

At the end of last week, stock markets in the US and around the world staggered on the news of the US August jobs report. That report showed zero jobs created last month, according to one of the Labor Department's jobs survey. The same Labor Department's second job survey - the one that didn't gain much attention in the press - was even worse. It showed more than 212,500 jobs lost. Stocks plummeted.

What was overlooked with the big stock market drop-off at the close of last week was a growing instability in the bond markets, both government and corporate, that has also been emerging. Bond markets are far more important economically than stock markets. They dwarf the size of all world stock markets combined by several magnitudes of trillions of dollars.

Not just government bonds, but corporate bonds as well. And not just bond markets in the US, but in Europe, too, where it appears that the most recent "bail out" of Greece once again is about to collapse - just a few weeks after it was announced. This is the third Greek bailout. Or is it the fourth? Depends on your definition. However defined, the Greek default crises are now coming faster and more furious. There is no way the eurozone can save Greece now from default and they are just beginning to realize that fact. The key question is, as the French say, "apres le deluge, quoi" - after the fall what/who?

The bankers and their politicians in Europe, UK and the USA would no doubt prefer to allow Greece simply to leave the eurozone. But they can't. They are uncertain of its impact on the euro currency, which would likely collapse below parity with the US dollar. That would wipe out trillions of euro-denominated securities overnight - a terrifying thought for bondholders and other euro and global investors. So, they stumble along with bailout to bailout for Greece. And the bond markets begin to quiver.

Then there's Italy and maybe Spain - and maybe even thereafter Belgium and France. If either of the four candidates enter a sovereign-bank crisis, then almost certainly another "Lehman-event" reminiscent of the crash of the Lehman Brothers investment bank back in 2008 will likely occur.

This was all foreseen by this writer back in late 2009, when the book, "Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression" (Pluto Press and Palgrave May 2010) was completed by this writer. To quote some of my predictions of two years ago:

"The Obama 2009 recovery program will, at best, result in a drawn-out economic stagnation, a period of weak and short recoveries followed by short and shallow declines; i.e. a 'W' shaped or 'double dip' recovery scenario. Or, at worst, will result in an eventual further collapse of the economy following a renewed financial crisis event." {Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression, p. 314.}

Or the following prediction in January 2010 of a second banking crisis sometime in 2011-14:

"The euro financial system will be shaken in 2010 by one or more defaults on its periphery ... The possibility of a second banking crisis and panic in 2011-14 is high." {Z magazine, January 1, 2010.}

A year later, in 2011, this same theme was taken up once again, where this writer predicted further:

"The eurozone sovereign debt crisis will spread beyond the current four economies (Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece) and engulf Italy, Belgium and potentially (though less likely France" ... "A restructuring of the EU currency system will result in a kind of two-tier euro currency." {Z Magazine, January 1, 2011.}

And then this past spring:

"The US and other major global economies are once again on the cusp of a significant slowdown."

And two weeks ago:

"The big economic engines of Europe (France, Germany, UK) are all about to tip into recession themselves in the coming quarter" ... "If Italy, or even Spain, are among the two (Euro sovereign defaults), it is almost certain one or more French or Swiss Banks will become the 'next Lehman'."

The week of September 6-10 may prove to be the most economically volatile in some time. In the eurozone, unions are finally stirring in Italy. The reason: Prime Minister Berlusconi's "austerity package" was abruptly changed after promises made to labor to include austerity for all, including the wealthy. Their taxes were to be raised. Then he reneged. No tax increases for the rich, but austerity for workers and the rest. Understandably the Italian workers felt betrayed. Promises of sharing of equal sacrifices were shown to be a sham. Berlusconi was no doubt told by his rich supporters he had to change the terms over the weekend.

This backtracking by Berlusconi reveals the central fundamental issue in all the "austerity programs" being launched across the globe - in the US (called deficit cutting here) and Europe. These programs are fundamentally about two things:

First, imposing austerity is so that bondholders and their banks don't have to take any losses. Make the people pay for the bailouts of those same banks and investors that, by the way, caused the crisis in the first place. Banks and bondholders refuse to take any losses.

Second, austerity means cutting social programs, wages, benefits only - without any tax hikes. In other words, once again, make everyone else pay, but don't touch the tax cuts of the rich. That was clear in Berlusconi's reversal over the weekend. It's also abundantly obvious in US Republican and Tea Party politicians refusal to accept any form of tax hike for the rich and corporations. Austerity is for the bottom 95 percent households, not for the top 5 percent.

So, watch Italy this week, the Italian unions and the rest of the eurozone bondholders and banks. Watch Greece. Watch what happens in the capitols of Paris, Berlin and London in response to coming events this week. As that crisis deepens in Europe this week and next, the financial instability will deepen further in Europe. It will have repercussions for US stock and bond markets, without a doubt. Stock market swings of 300-500 points a day will occur in response, in part, to the eurozone crisis.

The eurozone crisis comes at an inopportune time, as instability in the US also ratchets up this week for domestic reasons. All ears are on what Obama will announce on Thursday, September 8. But don't hold your breath. It will prove underwhelming. And the markets will react accordingly.

The president will rummage into his policy bag of two years ago, dust off what he didn't offer then and announce it later this week - just about when the crisis in Europe intensifies. What we're likely to see are: an infrastructure bank financed by private interests, more tax cuts for business, more deregulation of business, more payroll tax cuts, call to conclude new free trade agreements. In short, the stuff his corporate advisers have been recommending to him.

How the stock and bond markets will react this week to the deepening euro crisis and to the Obama jobs proposals will prove interesting. How bank stocks respond will be especially interesting. Already Bank of America and Citigroup, two of the biggest, are experiencing a freefall in their stock price. Both banks have been technically insolvent for the past two years. The upheaval in Europe and US domestic events may push their stock prices down further, to low single-digit levels. That collapse in their capitalization means eventually the need for more bailouts.

If stocks tank at this coming Friday after Obama's jobs announcement, or earlier due to the euro-Italy-Greece crisis, all eyes will then turn to the Federal Reserve once again in the mistaken hope it can prevent the economy from sinking further. Investors will expect another "Quantitative Easing" (QE) program. But this time, they may not get the money injection they expect. The Fed has an internal revolt of its own now underway. At best, it may provide a QE 2.5, which will boost stocks a little for a short while. But that will soon fade as well, as the stock markets realize there is no further injection of hundreds of billions of dollars coming from the Fed this time around. The last short-lived stock boomlet of earlier this year was driven largely by the Fed's preceding QE2, initiated last October 2010 and concluded this past June 2011. It pumped up stocks and commodities speculation in oil, metals, cotton, food grains, which has translated into rising gasoline and food prices for the general consumer and falling real wages in turn. But QE2 did nothing for housing or jobs recovery. The same results can be expected from any new version of QE 2.5 as well.

Capitalist policymakers from Washington to Berlin to Paris to Rome are fast running out of policy bullets to contain a crisis that is once again beginning to show early signs of spinning out of control. The bullets to date have aimed only at social programs, wages, benefits and John Q. Taxpayer. None have been intended for bondholders, investors, bankers or big multinational corporations. All austerity programs today everywhere - US, Europe etc. - have targeted everyone but the bond holdings of the rich, their tax rates, loopholes and tax havens or their record accumulated cash on hand. That may soon prove impossible to continue.

How soon their privileged exclusion from paying for the crisis ends depends on how much those targeted - workers, consumers, unions - resist and how hard they push back. Perhaps what happens in Italy and Italian unions this coming week will be an early sign.

There are only three ways to resolve the global financial crisis with its mountain of bank, corporate and government debt. One is to grow out of the crisis. But economic growth is not on the horizon. In fact, quite the opposite. The second is to squeeze the taxpayer, the worker, the consumer, the retiree and make them pay. But that just may radicalize folks and push them out of the electoral orbit of the dominant political parties and into the arms of the new parties that challenge their old control. The third is to make the bond and debt holders take their losses, expunge their debt, pay them the pennies on the dollar their bad assets are worth, or none at all and move on. The latter third option is the quickest and most certain. But investors, wealthy bondholders and corporations will fight to the finish to prevent it.

It's all about "who pays." Austerity solutions mean the rich get to keep their tax cuts and the rest have to pay the bill for their excesses that caused the crisis. Austerity never resolved a financial or economic crisis, however. It only makes it worse. Don't believe me? Look at Greece today. Italy and eurozone tomorrow. And USA thereafter.

In the meantime, get ready for an economic volatility roller coaster this week and the weeks and months immediately ahead.

*******************************************************************


Creative Commons License

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[Demeter]

6. Georgia Works May Work, But It Sure Doesn’t Pay

http://www.truth-out.org/georgia-works-may-work-it-sure-doesnt-pay/1315492549

...In Washington it is much easier to blame unemployed workers for their supposed lack of skills than to blame the bankers whose avarice fueled the housing bubble that eventually brought down the financial system and the economy with it. Creating training programs is also easier and cheaper than creating jobs. The President is said to be impressed with the Georgia Works program, a voluntary program that assigns workers to a workplace for six weeks of training by an employer. The program doesn’t cost employers anything and it costs the government very little. The reason it’s so cheap? Workers are unpaid – they simply get their unemployment benefits plus a small stipend of $240 to cover travel costs.

The problem to which this is a solution, or so we are told, is that too many unemployed workers lack ‘middleskills’ – skills that require more than a high school degree but less than college. A report released last week by the National Skills Coalition claims that Southern states are suffering from a shortage of workers with ‘middleskills’ to fill a range of good paying jobs. The report argues that the recession has accelerated the shift to a knowledge-based economy. It identifies “thirty middle-skill jobs the American South can’t live without.” The jobs include nuclear technicians, aircraft mechanics, electricians, plumbers, operating engineers, nurses, dental hygienists, respiratory therapists, diagnostic medical sonographers and 20 more, paying between $31,000 and $68,000 a year....The report provides no evidence, such as rapidly rising wages for these middle-skill jobs, that employers in the South can’t find workers with these skills. But let’s ignore this inconvenient fact for the moment and examine the kinds of jobs the Georgia Works program trains participants for.

A review of data for the Georgia Works trainees who found employment between November 24, 2009 and September 30, 2010 shows two-fifths found jobs doing general clerical work. Hundreds more found jobs as non-professional child care workers, janitors, retail sales persons, restaurant and fast food workers, hotel clerks and maids, or drivers and chauffeurs. In total, 70 percent of the trainees hired after the end of the training program found employment in these or similar low-wage jobs...The list of higher-paying jobs that trainees found after completing the 8-week Georgia Works program includes child care teachers, auto repair workers, social workers, barbers and attorneys. These are not jobs that can be mastered in six weeks at a workplace, working under the employer’s watchful eye. In other words, at best a small fraction of Georgia Works alums graduate into middle-class jobs as a result of the training received in the program.

There is nothing wrong with using a period of high unemployment to provide workers with meaningful training for jobs that pay high wages . But the Georgia Works program seems ill-equipped to do this. We should be under no illusion that even excellent training programs will solve the nation’s short-term unemployment problem. It will take strong demand to encourage employers to create ‘middleskill’ jobs – and restraints on corporate greed to assure that those jobs are fairly paid...



********************************************

Dr. Eileen Appelbaum

Dr. Eileen Appelbaum is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She previously served as director of the Rutgers Center for Women and Work. During her tenure, Dr. Appelbaum built the Center into a major locus for research on women's advancement in the labor market and at the workplace. The Center undertook numerous projects that were aimed at understanding and improving the lives of working women at all income levels. Prior to taking over the Center at Rutgers she was the research director at the Economic Policy Institute. She previously had been a professor of economics at Temple University.

[Demeter]

10. End the Wars, Save 400,000 Jobs

http://www.truth-out.org/jobs-plan-end-wars-save-400000-jobs/1315495268


by: Robert Naiman, Truthout | News Analysis

President Obama is preparing to deliver a major address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday, outlining his plans for spending and tax cuts to create jobs.

Here's a plan that would likely save at least 400,000 jobs over the next ten years, without increasing the deficit or raising a dollar of additional revenue: bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan as previously scheduled, and use the savings to reduce the debt in place of proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare benefits - or other cuts in domestic spending.

The total savings to the federal budget of using the chained Consumer Price Index (CPI) as a measure of inflation (including cuts in Social Security benefits) and raising the Medicare retirement age appear to be on the order of $200 billion over 2012-2021. This proposal was a key feature of the deal that President Obama and Speaker Boehner agreed to in the debt ceiling negotiations. The deal collapsed, because Speaker Boehner could not deliver the House on the deal, since it also included revenue increases. Judging from press reports, the president and others would like to revive this deal. So - unfortunately, from the point of view of the values and interests of the overwhelming majority of Americans - this proposal appears to still be on the table.

As good fortune would have it, $200 billion is a conservative estimate of the savings to the federal budget from 2012-2021 of withdrawing all US troops from Iraq this December (as previously agreed) and withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan after 2014 (as previously announced.) It's a conservative estimate for at least three reasons: because it assumes that the Pentagon's plan is to keep 25,000 troops in Afghanistan after 2014, which is towards the low end of the estimates that have appeared in press reports; because it uses the current average cost of keeping troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the average cost is likely to be higher when troop levels are lower; and because it is only based on current appropriations, not future implied costs of current action, like veterans' health care.

In addition to the direct benefit to the overwhelming majority of Americans of protecting Social Security and Medicare benefits from any cuts, taking the money from the military rather than Social Security and Medicare would have the effect of protecting US employment, since spending money in the domestic economy creates more US employment than military spending in general and war spending in particular.

Here is a rough estimate of the effect this proposal would have on saving jobs.

In a 2007 paper, Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the University of Massachusetts estimated the impact of an additional billion dollars in military spending on employment compared to other uses, using a standard input-output model of the US economy.

They found that an additional billion dollars in military spending would create 8,555 jobs. In contrast, an additional billion in tax cuts for personal consumption would create 10,779 jobs. Other categories of federal spending examined - education, health, mass transit - created more jobs than tax cuts for personal consumption. (See table 1, page 6.)

Thus, the net effect of moving one billion dollars from the domestic economy to military spending would be to destroy at least 2,224 jobs; moving $200 billion from the domestic economy to military spending would destroy at least 444,800 jobs. Conversely, saving $200 billion by ending the wars as previously scheduled, rather than saving it from the federal budget by using the chained CPI and raising the Medicare retirement age, would save more than 400,000 jobs.

What does saving 444,800 jobs mean in the context of the US economy? The US labor force is about 150 million people, so 400,000 jobs represents about 0.3 percent of the labor force. If those jobs were added to the economy today, the measured unemployment rate, instead of being 9.1 percent, would be 8.8 percent. Not at all where we want to be, obviously, but still a significant improvement - for hundreds of thousands of people - from where we are now.

Of course, there are much more savings to be had by cutting the military budget. We could draw troops down in Afghanistan between now and 2015 faster than the Pentagon wants. Every year we have 25,000 fewer troops in Afghanistan, we save more than $17 billion. As David Ignatius notes in The Washington Post, according to the analysts of the CIA, we're currently spending $100 billion a year in Afghanistan for "stalemate."

And then there is the question of cutting the "base," nonwar, Pentagon budget. Under the automatic trigger, currently projected Pentagon spending would be cut by roughly $600 billion over ten years, in addition to the $350 billion reduction that the administration and press reports say was implied by the previous debt reduction agreement. Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has said this additional reduction in projected Pentagon spending would be unacceptable and the money should come from "entitlements" - the Social Security and Medicare benefits we have already paid for through our payroll taxes - instead.

But if taking $200 billion out of the military instead of domestic spending would save 444,800 jobs, then taking $600 billion out of the military instead of domestic spending would save 1,334,400 jobs. If you added 1,334,400 jobs to the economy today, the unemployment rate would be 8.2 percent, rather than 9.1 percent. If we end the wars as scheduled and cut projected Pentagon spending by an additional $600 billion, instead of taking money out of the domestic economy, that would save 1,779,200 jobs, an effect akin to reducing the unemployment rate today from 9.1 percent to 7.9 percent.

Ending the wars and cutting the base military budget by $600 billion will not by itself solve our unemployment problem. But failing to end the wars and failing to cut the base military budget and cutting domestic spending instead, will, so long as we have an unemployment problem, make our unemployment problem significantly worse; and ending the wars and cutting the base Pentagon budget will have the effect of significantly lowering unemployment relative to taking cuts from the domestic economy.

Here's another way of looking at the stimulus effects of moving money from the military to the domestic budget. If you find a billion dollars lying on the sidewalk, you can use that to create 10,779 jobs through tax cuts for personal consumption, the least efficient means of creating jobs besides military spending. If you move a billion dollars from military spending to domestic spending, you create 2,224 jobs. Thus, every time you move a billion dollars from the military budget to domestic spending it's as if you found $206 million lying on the sidewalk to use for economic stimulus. If you move $800 billion to the domestic economy by ending the wars and cutting projected Pentagon spending it's as if you found $165 billion lying on the sidewalk to use for economic stimulus.

You can urge Congress to end the wars as part of the deal to reduce the nation's debt here: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1439/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=7623

***********************************************************************

Creative Commons License

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[Demeter]

11. Let’s Cancel 9/11: Bury the War State's Blank Check at Sea

http://www.truth-out.org/lets-cancel-911-bury-war-states-blank-check-sea/1315488002

Tom Engelhardt, Tom Dispatch | Op-Ed



Let’s bag it.

I’m talking about the tenth anniversary ceremonies for 9/11, and everything that goes with them: the solemn reading of the names of the dead, the tolling of bells, the honoring of first responders, the gathering of presidents, the dedication of the new memorial, the moments of silence. The works.

Let’s just can it all. Shut down Ground Zero. Lock out the tourists. Close “Reflecting Absence,” the memorial built in the “footprints” of the former towers with its grove of trees, giant pools, and multiple waterfalls before it can be unveiled this Sunday. Discontinue work on the underground National September 11 Museum due to open in 2012. Tear down the Freedom Tower (redubbed 1 World Trade Center after our “freedom” wars went awry), 102 stories of “the most expensive skyscraper ever constructed in the United States.” (Estimated price tag: $3.3 billion.) Eliminate that still-being-constructed, hubris-filled 1,776 feet of building, planned in the heyday of George W. Bush and soaring into the Manhattan sky like a nyaah-nyaah invitation to future terrorists. Dismantle the other three office towers being built there as part of an $11 billion government-sponsored construction program. Let’s get rid of it all. If we had wanted a memorial to 9/11, it would have been more appropriate to leave one of the giant shards of broken tower there untouched.

Ask yourself this: ten years into the post-9/11 era, haven't we had enough of ourselves? If we have any respect for history or humanity or decency left, isn’t it time to rip the Band-Aid off the wound, to remove 9/11 from our collective consciousness? No more invocations of those attacks to explain otherwise inexplicable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and our oh-so-global war on terror. No more invocations of 9/11 to keep the Pentagon and the national security state flooded with money. No more invocations of 9/11 to justify every encroachment on liberty, every new step in the surveillance of Americans, every advance in pat-downs and wand-downs and strip downs that keeps fear high and the homeland security state afloat.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were in every sense abusive, horrific acts. And the saddest thing is that the victims of those suicidal monstrosities have been misused here ever since under the guise of pious remembrance. This country has become dependent on the dead of 9/11 -- who have no way of defending themselves against how they have been used -- as an all-purpose explanation for our own goodness and the horrors we’ve visited on others, for the many towers-worth of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere whose blood is on our hands.

Isn’t it finally time to go cold turkey? To let go of the dead? Why keep repeating our 9/11 mantra as if it were some kind of old-time religion, when we’ve proven that we, as a nation, can’t handle it -- and worse yet, that we don’t deserve it?

We would have been better off consigning our memories of 9/11 to oblivion, forgetting it all if only we could. We can’t, of course. But we could stop the anniversary remembrances. We could stop invoking 9/11 in every imaginable way so many years later. We could stop using it to make ourselves feel like a far better country than we are. We could, in short, leave the dead in peace and take a good, hard look at ourselves, the living, in the nearest mirror.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

12. Way Worse Than Zero

http://www.truth-out.org/august-jobs-worse-zero/1315407127

Jack Rasmus, Truthout | News Analysis



Last Friday, September 2, 2011, the latest jobs report was released by the US Labor Department. It showed no jobs created for the month of August. Zero. Zip. The report confirmed the growing evidence that the US economy was on a track toward a serious economic relapse, at minimum, or a possible even worse double-dip recession. The stock market went into another tailspin. Bond markets globally reeled.

Those trying to downplay the August jobs report noted the August numbers included 45,000 Verizon telephone workers who were on strike and who subsequently have returned to work. That would mean, apologists argued, there were actually 45,000 jobs created last month. Big deal. It takes 150,000 new jobs a month just to absorb new entrants into the labor force.

It is important also to note that the "zero" number was the very best of the various job numbers that might have been reported, not the worst. Other data show the August jobs situation was not stagnant, with no jobs created, but actually much worse. Here's why.

The zero jobs number for August is taken from just one of the two Labor Department jobs surveys - what is called the Current Establishment Survey (CES), which focuses mostly on large companies and doesn't pick up smaller companies very well, where more than half of all jobs are either created or lost. The other Labor Department jobs survey, the Current Population Survey (CPS), is typically not mentioned in the press commentary on the jobs situation. That was true last August, once again. The CPS, however, is a more accurate reflection of the condition of jobs today in the US

The CPS shows, for example, how many workers are leaving the labor force because they can't find jobs. The CPS also shows a truer more accurate unemployment rate, called the "U-6" rate, which includes jobless workers who are discouraged or missing from the labor force and workers being converted from full-time jobs to involuntary part-time jobs. It also shows the duration of the long-term unemployed. In short, it provides a deeper and more comprehensive picture of the condition of jobs in the US last month

So, let's look at just a few of the interesting facts about August jobs from the CPS survey for last month.

To begin with, in August, an alarming additional 430,000 workers were hired as involuntary part timers, bringing their total to more than 8.8 million. That sharp rise in involuntary part-time work means several things. First, it means employers are reducing workers on full-time status to half-time status in growing numbers. That conversion of full-time to part-time work typically represents the first step many companies take before reverting to direct layoffs in greater numbers. A huge increase in part-time jobs occurred in 2008, as a prelude to eventual massive layoffs that followed. Last month's major rise in part-time employment, in other words, may just be the "canary in the mineshaft" indicating mass layoffs to come in a few more months.

Second, the rise of 430,000 part-time jobs represents an actual reduction of up to 215,000 jobs, as hundreds of thousands of workers are converted from full-time to part-time work involuntarily. The August job numbers were, therefore, "less than zero" - i.e. up to a loss of potentially 215,000 jobs. It's not that no jobs were created in August. More accurately, up to 215,000 jobs were lost in August.

Third, last month's jobs data also showed a growing dangerous trend. Over the last three months, there has been a significant rise in the number of discouraged and marginally attached workers in the labor force. In fact, 266,000 have "left the labor force" the past three months alone - in addition to the 430,000 converted to part-time work last month.

Rising numbers of discouraged workers leaving the labor force is often the first sign of a deteriorating labor market and more actual layoffs to come down the road. In addition, rising numbers for involuntary part-time work is often the next, further indication of coming layoffs as companies convert full-time to part-time jobs as an interim step to full layoffs about to occur in the near future.

Thus, these two indicators - rising discouraged workers' numbers and rising part-time employment - are both "canaries in the mineshaft," i.e. giving off warnings of worst to come in direct layoffs. And both are getting worse.

Both the discouraged and involuntary part-time numbers are reflected in the Labor Department's more accurate "U-6" unemployment rate that isn't often reported by the press, which always de-emphasizes the severity of the jobless situation by referring to the more conservative "U-3" jobless numbers that ignore the discouraged and part-time employment trends.

The more accurate U-6 jobless numbers rose by 212,520 in August. That means, instead of zero jobs created in August, there were actually 212,520 jobs lost in August.

Furthermore, since May 2011, the U-6 jobless numbers have risen by 598,734. In short, nearly 600,000 more workers have become unemployed the past three months alone.

For non-supervisory workers still with jobs this past August, the recent Labor Department shows their average hourly wage and average weekly pay both declined - and that decline was in absolute pay levels - i.e. before even further adjustment downward to account for inflation. If you were fortunate enough to hold onto your job in August, you nonetheless had a significant reduction in pay.

To summarize, the numbers of importance in the August jobs report are not the zero jobs growth reported in August. The numbers that reflect the real condition of jobs today are the 212,500 increase in the unemployed, the 430,000 shifted to involuntary part-time employment, the escalating number of 598,000 discouraged and marginally attached workers in recent months and the sharp decline in real pay levels in just one month.

All these numbers are called "forward looking" - that is, all are a harbinger of much worse employment conditions in the months to come. It is important to focus on future indications of trends, not just one month current data like the "zero" jobs created number reported in the most conservative of the Labor Department's data survey (CES) and U-3 unemployment rate.

In a few days, Obama will address the nation and presumably offer a program for jobs. However, his past track record shows clearly his proposals will likely be "more of the same." That means more tax cuts for business in the hope they will create jobs, despite the fact business is now sitting on $2 trillion and refusing to create jobs anyway. So, let's give them a couple hundred billion dollars more and maybe they will change their minds. Obama's proposals will also likely include some long-term infrastructure job creation, most of which won't take effect until after the next election in order to satisfy the "deficit cutters" in both political parties. That also won't do much for the jobs crisis now deepening further. Cutting business regulations will purport to represent another way to create jobs, as the president's current stable of ex-corporate advisers have been demanding. Plus, the free trade bills will parade as another false job creation proposal, when it is clear free trade has devastated jobs, not created them.

Missing will be the necessary proposal for a 21st century direct government jobs creation program patterned on the experience of the 1930s Works Progress Administration, or how to pay for that direct job creation program with a fundamental restructuring of the tax system in the US to make wealthy investors, households and their corporations pay for it all.

*************************************************************************


Creative Commons License

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

[Demeter]

15. Black unemployment: Highest in 27 years

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/news/economy/black_unemployment_rate/index.htm

[Demeter]

16. The Jobs Crisis NYT MAKES SENSE! (CHECK FOR 4 HORSES)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/opinion/sunday/the-jobs-crisis.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

The August employment report, released on Friday, is bleak on all counts, but at least it leaves no doubt that the United States is in the grip of a severe and worsening jobs crisis...Mr. Obama does not need to alert Americans to the dire situation; they have been telling pollsters for months that job creation — not budget cuts — should be policy makers’ top priority. This is his chance to present a plan big enough to ramp up job growth in the near term, while initiating long-term fixes to improve the economy and sustain employment...He should not calibrate his policies to fit what he hopes will be acceptable to his Republican opponents. The House Republicans are never going to give Mr. Obama anything, and they are ideologically opposed to the government’s acting on the scale that is needed...The American people will understand if Mr. Obama makes his case clearly and powerfully. The Republicans will refuse to, and the president should speak candidly about their disregard for workers. (Last week, the Republicans showed their disregard for the presidency by fighting over the timing of the address.)

The first step is to not make matters worse. The main cause of unemployment now is a lack of consumer demand. Americans — unemployed, underemployed, underwater in their debts, and understandably anxious about the future — are unwilling or unable to spend. To counteract that, it is vital to extend federal unemployment benefits and the temporary payroll tax cut for employees beyond year’s end, a move that would put some $160 billion into Americans’ pockets and preserve some 1.5 million jobs.

The next step is to create jobs. The highway trust fund must be reauthorized before it expires at the end of September, a step that would prevent furloughs of current workers and create some 120,000 jobs a year over the next three years via investments in transportation. In addition, a $50 billion school renovation program would employ 500,000 workers, out of 1.5 million unemployed construction workers, and could be easily scaled up.

[]The federal government must also stop the hemorrhaging of state budgets, which has led to the elimination of nearly 700,000 teaching jobs and other government positions in the last three years. Analysts estimate that for every government job lost, at least one job is lost in the private sector, as laid-off government workers stop spending and private contractors lose work. The fastest way to get aid to states is to increase the federal Medicaid share. The states will then have money to pay employees and contractors.

MORE GOOD SOUND ECONOMIC ADVICE AT LINK...NONE OF WHICH THE PRESIDENT DEIGNS TO HEAR, LET ALONE FOLLOW...

[Fuddnik]

7. 1960's version

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SboRijhWFDU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxA3Q96a8XE

Up against the wall........

[Demeter]

8. American Exceptionalism OP ED FROM A REALLY ANGRY MAN

http://www.truth-out.org/american-exceptionalism/1314637228

Rick Perry links the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s to the struggle of the Republican Party to absolve the wealthiest Americans from paying a fair share of their debt to their country. He also thinks it's legitimate to secede from the USA. To the Perry version of American exceptionalism, add some others: Sarah Palin finds us exceptional because she can have her guns; Michelle Bachmann seems to define American exceptionalism as our ability to achieve just about anything we set our sights on, no matter how unlikely, as long as our oversized, overregulating government only gets out of the way.

For Mitt Romney, American exceptionalism seems to turn on the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate and make a ton of money, even if we're selling off bits and pieces of once-healthy companies. For TV host Chris Matthews, (I'm paraphrasing) it's exemplified by Obama being born of mixed race and yet making it to the presidency. Chris says this couldn't happen in any other country in the world. "You can't go to China or Japan and become Chinese or Japanese. Obama came to the US and became an American and is now in the White House. (Chris leaves out the minor truth that Obama didn't have to become American - he already was, having been born in Hawaii.)

Virtually since the beginning of our Republic, we have been spinning a variety of narratives to reassure ourselves that we are the greatest nation ever invented and that no other comes even close. That, presumably, is one of the reasons we seem to have this irresistible urge to teach the rest of the world how to be exceptional, too...those folks who believe in American exceptionalism - or think they're simply good for political aspirations - are wont to blame the messenger who brings actual proof that Americans may once have been exceptional, but today that achievement is crumbling and our favorites narratives with it. Professor Speth has produced an index that should embarrass the exceptionalists by shining a bit of light on those areas where we're not so exceptional. For example, among the 20 major advanced countries America now has:

the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;

the greatest inequality of incomes;

the lowest government spending as a percentage of GDP on social programs for the disadvantaged;

the lowest number of paid holiday, annual and maternity leaves;

the lowest score on the United Nations' index of "material well-being of children";

the worst score on the United Nations' gender inequality index;

the lowest social mobility;

the highest public and private expenditure on health care as a portion of GDP;

the highest infant mortality rate; prevalence of mental health problems; obesity rate; portion of people going without health care due to cost; low-birth-weight children per capita (except for Japan); consumption of antidepressants per capita;

the shortest life expectancy at birth (except for Denmark and Portugal);

the highest carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption per capita;

the lowest score on the World Economic Forum's environmental performance index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Belgium and Denmark);

the highest rate of failing to ratify international agreements;

the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of GDP;

the highest military spending as a portion of GDP; the largest international arms sales;

the most negative balance of payments (except New Zealand, Spain and Portugal);

the lowest scores for student performance in math (except for Portugal and Italy) (and far from the top in both science and reading);

the highest high school dropout rate (except for Spain);

the highest homicide rate;

and the largest prison population per capita.

Now, this is a pretty sorry score sheet for our country - which used to excel in many of these categories...The reasons for our fall from positive exceptionalism are far too lengthy to explore here, but some of the major factors, in no particular order, are inadequate education; globalization; the voracious greed and dishonesty of banks, mortgage brokers, government institutions and rating agencies, their actions creating a bubble which they knew was as unsustainable as were the insurance guarantees they issued bogus. Then, there's the US Tax Code, which encourages foreign investment and demands local, not American, labor; a health care system that provides first-rate health to the very wealthy or the very old - but not to the poor, who have no health insurance; unemployment and underemployment, partly because of the Great Recession, but starting long before that catastrophe as a result of the increase in worker productivity caused by substituting machines for humans in the workplace; and the consequent widening income disparity between the very rich and the very poor...The possibility of system change suggests there can be a very bright light at the end of this gloomy tunnel. America is in the midst of a period of decline and it hasn't hit bottom yet. The imperatives its citizens face are therefore fourfold:

to slow and then halt the descent, minimizing human suffering and planetary damage along the way;

to prevent a collapse, the emergence of a fortress world, or any of the dark scenarios that have been plotted for us in science fiction and, increasingly, in serious analysis;

to minimize the time at the bottom and to start the climb upward, building a new operating system; and

to complete, inhabit and flourish in the diversity of alternative social arrangements, each far superior to what we will have left behind.


"There is hope especially in three things. The decline now occurring will progressively delegitimize the current order. Who wants an operating system that is capable of generating and perpetuating such suffering and destruction? The one good thing about the decline of today's political economy is that it opens the door to something much better. Second, people will eventually rise up, raise a loud shout and demand major changes. That is already happening with some people in some places. Eventually, the chorus will grow to become a national and global movement for transformation. And third, Americans are already busy with numerous, mostly local initiatives that point the way to the future....Amid ongoing decline, Americans must now summon the hope and courage to dream up something new and better and to fight for it. It has been said that the genius of America is to turn crisis into opportunity. Let us now dream a new America, the country we want for our grandchildren."

--Doug Speth, or more formally, James Gustave Speth. A Rhodes scholar, graduate of Yale Law School, and so much more...

SEE LINK FOR MORE DETAIL

***********************************************************

William Fisher

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. Fisher also served in the international affairs area during the Kennedy administration. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.

[Demeter]

9. It's an Economy, Not a Corporate Venture by: Paul Krugman

PAUL KRUGMAN ISN'T AN ANGRY MAN, COMPARED TO MOST. BUT I THINK HE IS LOSING HIS COOL A BIT LATELY. NOT THAT I BLAME HIM--IF ONE IS ELEVATED TO A NOBEL ECONOMICS PRIZE BY ONE'S PEERS, IT IS IRRITATING TO HAVE SOME RED-NECK ILLITERATE WITH NO COMPREHENSION OF HIS NATIVE ENGLISH, OR MATHEMATICS, OR ECONOMICS, OR ANYTHING, PICK APART AN ELEGANT PIECE OF DESCRIPTIVE AND PRESCRIPTIVE WORK INTENDED FOR PEOPLE WHO CARE ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD...

http://www.truth-out.org/its-economy-not-corporate-venture/1315489637

Matt Yglesias, the political commentator, is mildly upset over a report that President Barack Obama is turning to the investor Warren E. Buffett and Alan Mulally, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, for economic advice.

“My hope is that this is more about a search for ‘validators’ than a search for policy advice,” Mr. Yglesias wrote Aug. 23 on the blog ThinkProgress. “Yet it seems to me that both inside the administration and outside of it there’s a shortage of turning to economists with specific expertise in recessions for advice on coping with the recession.”

It’s not clear how much to make of the report. But it’s always good to remember that businessmen — even great businessmen — don’t necessarily know much about how to make the macroeconomy work...Realistically, even very large corporations don’t have to worry very much about, for example, the extent to which laying off workers will reduce demand for the company’s product. They don’t have to worry about the extent to which cutting wages will reduce purchasing power and the ability to repay debt.

(I DON'T AGREE, PAUL--AFTER ALL, DIDN'T HENRY FORD HIMSELF REALIZE THAT HE HAD TO ACTUALLY PAY HIS WORKERS IF HE WANTED TO SELL CARS TO MORE THAN JUST THE OBSCENELY WEALTHY? OF COURSE, HENRY WAS ECCENTRIC--CRAZY, WOULD BE THE MODERN DIAGNOSIS)

Sorry, but captains of industry don’t have common-sense wisdom about what makes recessions and recoveries happen. And as Mr. Yglesias says, none of them have any experience with a liquidity-trap economy. If they know anything useful, it’s mainly because they studied, well, economics....And as I keep trying to point out, basic macroeconomics has performed very well in this crisis, even though nobody wants to believe it.

[Demeter]

13. 25% of Money Raised by Romney Came Straight From the Banksters, and More Thom Hartmann

http://www.truth-out.org/news-thom-hartmann-twenty-five-percent-money-raised-romney-came-straight-banksters-and-more/13149783

VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT AT LINK

[Demeter]

14. Time to up the Ante: Restrict Individual Assets in US to One Billion Dollars.

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12982

If progressives -- who for the most part pretty much advocate for democracy and a level playing field for the economy -- are going to be accused of being radical socialists, why not have at it and restrict individual acquisition of wealth in the US to one billion dollars?

Now, already you can hear the outraged squawking from the right-wing media echo chamber about how treasonous and un-American such a proposal would be. But as a recent commentary pointed out in Mother Jones, the right wing gets away with proposing wholesale changes in the Constitution, the suppression of voting rights, the end of the direct election of senators etc., and the candidates proposing such radical extremist measures are still regarded by the media as "serious" contenders. Yet, if an American advocates for increased pay for workers and more manufacturing and less Wall Street manipulation of financial "paper," they are labeled as followers of Lenin.

So, take a look at the latest Forbes list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. The top ten include Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the Koch brothers, the Walton (Wal-Mart) family and Michael Bloomberg (with a measly $18 billion in net worth).

So, if progressives who simply advocate democracy, compassion and economic fairness are going to be called fringe ideologues - while right-wing John Birchers on steroids are now considered within the mainstream - then maybe it's time to push the edge of the envelope. Maybe the counterpoint to a Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Eric Cantor is to put on the table limiting individuals to the accumulation of no more than $1 billion in personal assets. Any funds beyond that would be fully taxed and used to underwrite a national infrastructure, job training and an alternative energy development bank run by the US Department of the Treasury...If Perry can advocate secession for Texas from the US, then it's about time to formally propose that wealth and greed should have its limits in order to help America move forward.

[Demeter]

17. The Levers of Power and Wealth Are No Longer Connected to Anything Real

http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12984

"Pay no attention to man behind the curtain."

That was the famous line from Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy caught a glimpse of the fake wizard desperately pulling switches and punching buttons in a vain attempt to impress his visitors of his power. I think about that scene a lot lately. I see that image in my head when I read about of one attempt after another by our leaders, or other leaders around the world, furiously trying every old trick in the book to get things back to "normal." So far nothing has worked. Nothing is normal any more, anywhere. If Chicken Little were around today he'd be booked solid on cable talk shows. Hell, he'd probably have his own show.

I've felt for some time now that this turmoil we're experiencing is a horse of an entirely different color -- something we've never live through before. This is no recession -- at least no recession I've seen in my 66-years. I hardly noticed any of our previously declared recessions. I sure as hell notice this one...Whatever the hell this is, it's no recession. It's something else. One of the biggest distinctions between this -- let's just call it a "mess" -- and previous recessions is the number of things going wrong all at the same time.

If it were just the banks and bankers getting caught one again with their grimy mitts in the till, we have survived those kind of muggings many times before...If it were just another cyclical disruption in domestic labor markets, we've seen that before too and, after a few lock-outs, some worker protests and strikes, things settled back down and everyone went back to work. But this time the meltdown of financial markets exposed some breathtaking evidence; an enormous hunk of what had been counted as "wealth" was actually just valueless concoctions, the value of which depended entirely on the current holder finding a greater fool to pay more for it than they did. When we ran out of fools, those assets immediately morphed into liabilities. (As Warren Buffet put it recently, "You never really know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out.") Trillions of dollars in "wealth" vanished at the click of mouse.

Then there's the job market. Outsourcing -- oh it was all great fun until someone lost an eye. In our case that eye was nearly the entire US manufacturing base. With that went jobs.. millions and millions and millions of jobs. America, which less than 70 years earlier had been dubbed "the arsenal of democracy," for our vast ability to produce, has become instead the arsenal of bickering, bluster and bullshit.

Then there's the rest of the world...SEE LINK FOR MORE...So, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. We are in for it. And, the man, men, women, World Bank, IMF, the Fed -- you see furiously working behind those curtains, can pull those levers and buttons all they want. It won't do any good this time. Because those levers are no longer connected to anything real.

[bread_and_roses]

21. and..."The Poor: Still Here, Still Poor"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/09-7

Published on Friday, September 9, 2011 by The Nation
The Poor: Still Here, Still Poor
by Katha Pollitt

What ever happened to poor people? Even on the left, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley’s Poverty Tour was an exception. Mostly, the talk is of the “middle class”—its stagnant wages, foreclosed houses, maxed-out credit cards and adult kids still living in their childhood bedrooms. The New York Times’s Bob Herbert, the last columnist who covered poverty consistently and with passion, is gone. Among progressive organizations, Rebuild the Dream, a new group co-founded with much fanfare by Van Jones and MoveOn, is typical. It bills its mission as “rebuilding the middle class”—i.e., the “people willing to work hard and play by the rules.” (What are those rules? I always wonder. And do middle-class people really work all that hard compared with a home health aide or a waitress, who cannot get ahead no matter how hard she works and how many rules she plays by?)

... Rebuild the Dream’s contract has nothing to say about these women, or their brothers: nothing about childcare, income support, housing, the drug wars that have destroyed so many black communities, the prisonification of America or, for that matter, racism and sexism, which still structure the labor market, including for “middle class” people. But it’s a free-market fantasy that all single mothers can work full time and raise a family in decency without significant government help. Once again, on the left as on the right, the ideal worker is conceived of as unencumbered, with the needs and circumstances of mothers, especially single mothers, ignored. But women are half the workforce now, and the vast majority of women have kids.

Having been privy (way way wayyyyyy on the outskirts, to be sure) to some of the thinking behind not "Rebuild the dream" but similar "initiatives" I can tell Katha (what she already I'm sure knows) that all this "middle-class" nonsense is about what polls well - since everyone wants to believe they are "middle-class" they respond better in focus groups to that phrase.

However, I would contend that you cannot have a "left" unless you talk about workers, the working class, and the poor.

Once again, our "liberal" establishment sells out, hoping for a few more donor $$, for a little more or access to power or to at least maintain their seat wayyyyyyyy below the salt and not be cast into outer darkness altogether.

Worthless (not Pollitt's article, which is pretty good).

Until we can name our true state, we will be helpless, hopeless, rolled, screwed, and futile. And our "liberals" are utterly complicit with our Corporate Overlords in keeping us so.

[Demeter]

18. I'm taking a break now

carry on, WEEkenders!

[Pale Blue Dot]

22. Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe to sing their meaty hearts out in Les Misérables

Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe will make an argument for the masculinity of musical theater in next year’s Les Misérables, with Jackman imbuing the role of Jean Valjean with the same virile swagger he brought to his roles in shows like Oklahoma!, and, of course, Viva Laughlin, and Crowe channeling the gruff-yet-sensitive soulfulness of his 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts gig into playing Inspector Javert. As previously reported, The King’s Speech director Tom Hooper will head up this adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg’s famed musical—itself, of course, derived from Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, which had far less singing. The film’s just-announced December 7, 2012 release puts it squarely alongside The Hobbit, as well as several other classic literary adaptations that are headed for the winter 2012 season, including the Keira Knightley-starring Anna Karenina and Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D version of The Great Gatsby, making it a decidedly CliffsNotes Christmas for people who don’t like to read. Anyway, to get some idea of what sort of musical chemistry Jackman and Crowe might stir up, try playing these two videos simultaneously.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/hugh-jackman-and-russell-crowe-to-sing-their-meaty,61549/

I'm kind of intrigued...

[jotsy]

23. A modern day translation from distant but familiar voices echo.

<http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x625913>

Recommended

[Demeter]

27. Graham Summers: Let’s have a look at the REAL situation in the financial system. DRDU REPOST!

Let’s have a look at the REAL situation in the financial system.

1) Greece is bankrupt. It has been for years. The market has finally stopped being moronic and figure out the obvious (so much for the “efficient” hypothesis).

2) Greece WILL default. This WILL crush German and French banks.

3) The EU in its current form (as well as the Euro) are DONE.

4) The US banking system is similarly fragile and on the verge of collapse.

5) The US economy is in a DE-pression and rolling over in a big way AGAIN. All the economic data is being massaged to look better than it is. Look around you, does the economy look OK to you?

6) The US Government is broke. Obama’s jobs plans is absurd. Where’s the money going to come from?

7) Bank of America (as well as the other TBTFs) is insolvent. The only reason they’re still in business is rampant fraud, lies, and theft. What’s happening in Greece is coming to them soon.

8) The Federal Reserve has lost control of the markets. QE 3, IF it comes, will accomplish nothing. Bernanke will be stepping down within 18 months and possibly facing legal battles.

Those are ALL FACTS. That’s the deal. The claims that all is well and that the market will hold up are lies. The Fed gave TRILLIONS of Dollars from the public to those who perpetuated the biggest theft and fraud in history. And they FIXED NOTHING in the process.

So here we are, the Fed is out of bullets entirely (Operation Twist 2 won’t do anything, low rates haven’t helping the economy OR the mortgage markets… and QE 3 is not going to happen without systemic collapse) and losing control of the markets by the day.

Look at Bernanke’s track record. He’s been wrong about EVERYTHING for years. Do you think he has ANY ideas or solutions to what’s happening NOW? The guy doesn’t even believe inflation is an issue. He’s either stupid or a liar. Neither of those are indicative of someone who can fix things.

In plain terms, we’re heading into the END GAME for the markets. What’s coming will see debt defaults in Europe and the US, a stock market Crash that makes 2008 look like a picnic, civil unrest and more.

http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/real-deal

[Demeter]

28. DRDU REPOST #2 Denninger: It's Over

It's Over

Seriously.

There is persistent chatter about a Greek default over the weekend, which Greece denied, but the denier refused to be named. If it's not true, then put your damned name on the statement or be considered what you are - liars. Greece failed to place their short-term bill rollover. That's a declaration by the market that even for short-term paper the market has utterly lost confidence in Greece and the Euro.

Germany's DAX market relative to the United States just hit a five year low today.

To add to the "liar liar pants on fire" calls Germany is now reported to be working a plan to recapitalize their banks if Greece defaults.
.
.
I believe the alarm has now rung. The market calls all bluffs and that's exactly what it's doing right here, right now, today. The lies have been overwhelmed by the functional facts - that you cannot make payroll or pay the light bill with imaginary money - you need real money, and there isn't any.
.
.
You have one final opportunity to choose America: Watch Dancing With the Stars or demand and enforce your demand that this crap stop right now.

Just be aware - if you choose "Dancing With The Stars" that it won't be long before you have no job, no money and perhaps no electricity with which to power your TV and no "free stuff" coming from a bankrupt government either. Yes, it can happen here, and if you think not you're dumber than a box-of-rocks and deserve exactly what is coming.

Choose now, choose here and choose wisely.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=193872

[DemReadingDU]

32. G-7 most likely to intervene

9/9/11
The G-7 is in full panic mode. The organization for the prevention of harm to the Status Quo was expected to release a communique possibly over the weekend, but the speed with which one was dropped for mass circulation is stunning and confirms that its members are in full meltdown as the weekend comes. It is now certain that the G-7 will attempt some major intervention over the next 48 hours to inject a last dose of hope into capital markets, or else the Monday open will be an epic collapse.

click to read the G-7 statement
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/g7-issues-communique-tackling-slowdown-supporting-banks-says-central-banks-ready-provide-liquid

and thanks for re-posting the articles that I posted late to the Friday thread.
:hi:

[Demeter]

39. They were too good to let disappear

Panic mode? Well, it's about time somebody in authority joined the masses.

[pnorman]

30. I bought the unabridged Audible.com version last year.

But it was verrry lengthy (8 parts!), so I never got around to downloading it. This thread jogged my memory, so I'll probably get to it next week or so. Thanks!

[Demeter]

42. You mean the book Les Miserable?

Let us know how it is...

[pnorman]

47. The unabridged Audible.com version of the book.

It might take me a while to get to a book of that size. Here it is:
http://www.audible.com/pd/ref=sr_1_1?asin=B002V8L8KA&qid=1315677618&sr=1-1

You can listen to an excerpt to to see if the narration is satisfactory. Most there are excellent (in my judgement), and that one sounds pretty good to me. Some of those books are quite pricey, but if you purchase a "Plan", then each is just ~$13 a book, REGARDLESS of list price

[DemReadingDU]

33. BBC Interview - The Indignants of Greece

9/9/11 From the BBC Assignment Program
The Indignants of Greece

As the Greek government struggles to tackle it's massive debt crisis, Ed Butler travels to Athens for Assignment to investigate the so-called Indignants - the popular protest movement gathering pace across the country.

click to download from this link
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive/all

or link to listen directly
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20110908-0500a.mp3


Interesting program to hear the perspective from the 'Indignants', appx 26 minutes

[xchrom]

34. a very good morning --

:donut: excellent, excellent thread. -- i am very much looking forward to hugh jackman in miserables.

but i look forward to seeing him in anything.

[DemReadingDU]

35. Jesse: Psychopaths Among Us

9/9/11 Psychopaths Among Us

Jesse says...

I might have found the remarks about the Vancouver stock exchange a little more shocking and less credible than in my idealistic youth, except later in life I had the unfortunate experience of working more closely with a few of the resident sociopaths, psychopaths, and narcissists there. I am still processing some of the things that I learned in that experience, and some others I had afterwards in the higher echelons of the corporate world, and national politics.

It takes a little while to catch on, because they can seem so normal, so charming. Good people think most people are rational and basically honest, just like them. But they wrong, there are very sick people out there, bu they do not seem sick, do not ask for help. They do not want help, or rules, or anything else that gets in their way.

And they are particularly good at bending the rules to shape the system to help fulfill their need to feed. They are naturally drawn to positions of power, and are often verbally acute, and willing to say and do almost anything to get their way. And they seem to be gaining traction, getting better, and finding kindred spirits in the growing partnership between corporations and the government.


"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths," says Bob Hare. "But they flourish because the characteristics that define the disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."


"Three decades of these studies, by Hare and others, has confirmed that psychopaths' brains work differently from ours, especially when processing emotion and language.

lots more...
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2011/09/psychopaths-among-us.html

[DemReadingDU]

36. Interview with Jesse at the Café Américain

Does anyone know who Jesse is? Does he have a last name?
I found this interview but it is 2 years old.

10/20/09
Interview with Jesse at the Café Américain By Ilene

Ilene: Jesse, thank you for doing this interview with me. I’ve been visiting your Americain Cafe now for over a year and have greatly enjoyed the experience. Your site makes me feel like I’m in a real Cafe and have just picked up an interesting article to read with my coffee. However, as it is a virtual meeting spot, we haven’t been formally introduced yet. Will you tell me a little bit about yourself and how the Cafe got started?

Jesse: I am pleased that you are enjoying the Cafe as it has been intended. Too much information about the markets and the economy is hurriedly snatched and gulped down, like American ‘takeaway.’ Sometimes it is valuable to sample information from diverse sources, taste it from different methods of preparation that do not hide its true flavor, and digest it properly. Otherwise we tend to move from bite to bite, with a broadly shallow appreciation of current events, driven by those who shape the mainstream menu offerings.

In 2000 I had taken an early retirement from corporate work, where I had been a vice president at a Fortune 500 company. My intention was to take ten years off to study economics in greater depth, but primarily to spend more time with my family.

I had always been fascinated with economics from the time I had studied it at the university when I went back for an MBA. I am originally an engineer by trade with a background in mathematics and the natural sciences, and while finance was my favorite subject, economics was a fascination. It was clearly a nascent science, full of competing theories, and struggling to find a footing.

Even with my limited background, I could tell that we were approaching an historic period in economic history. The bubble in tech was obvious to anyone who was able to read a chart, and look at the rationale for the boom with a historically skeptical eye.

I had started to study bubbles and crashes in 1998. One of the benefits of traveling for business is that one can become a voracious reader, and so I read quite a few books on bubbles and crashes to supplement what I already had known.

In 2000 I discovered the world of financial chat boards. It was interesting to find a group of people who also did not believe in ‘the bubble.’ This was a chat board at a place online called ‘Fall Street.’ I had been studying technical charting for some time, and looked into most of the methods. I liked the classic charting method, and gained quite a bit of knowledge from Ken Shaleen. I found my own style of charting with what I called ‘the Babson method’ which had been used by the economist, Roger Babson.

There were requests to see these charts, which I was generating on a variety of timeframes. I started posting the charts, which included quite of bit of hand drawn features, for viewing at Yahoo Geocities at a site simply called Jesse’s Charts.

Early in 2001, I started taking things I wrote for the chat board and turned them into small essays, and placing them as text images along with the charts on this site, since the chat board was impermanent and not readily searchable. At that time, blogs were not so readily available. The name of the site was changed to Jesse’s Crossroad Cafe.

The site was intended to be entertaining and visually appealing, often funny, as well as informative. This made it more interesting to me to produce, and the idea was to educate people while providing an interesting diversion. Education does not have to be dry and painful to be effective. There is a wonderful experience to be had in the joy of learning, the ecstasy of understanding. It merely needs some encouragement to occur.

The format on Geocities was a single page, with a background wallpaper and music that changed every few days. The documents and charts were presented as links arranged around the page. It was visually appealing but difficult to maintain and with no search or long term archiving capability.

Yahoo Geocities decided to end their site hosting business in the autumn of 2007, and essentially shut down the Crossroads Cafe over a weekend. At first I was devastated as all the information I had stored there was lost.

I decided to find a new venue, and blogging seemed an even more effective method of providing information of various types in an attractive format with searchable qualities.

Le Café Américain as it is today opened in February 2008. And so here we are today.

click to read the rest of the interview
http://www.philstockworld.com/2009/10/20/interview-with-jesse-at-the-cafe-americain/

[Demeter]

43. A Kindred Spirit!

I have similar feelings about readability and humor and searchability and all that.

[xchrom]

37. Risk of a global recession is up 50%, says nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/risk-of-a-global-recession-is-up-50-says-nobel-prize-winning-economist-paul-krugman/articleshow/9930157.cms

MOSCOW: The risk of another global recession has increased to one-in-two, said Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman. "There is a pretty good chance of an actual stall which would lead the global economy to slide backward," he said in an interview in Yaroslav, central Russia, on Thursday , describing the risk of a recession as "quite high, maybe 50%."

Krugman, who last month said the risk of a global decline may be "a bit higher" than one-in-three, urged advanced economies to reverse fiscal belt-tightening and central banks to adopt a more expansionary monetary policy.

Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the global recovery is faltering and the euro-region debt crisis is roiling markets and clouding growth prospects across the 17-nation euro region.

"They need to realize that for those countries which are not having financing problems -- at least five of the G-7 are able to borrow quite freely -- that they need to postpone austerity measures on the fiscal side and that the central banks need to be expanding, not tightening," Krugman said, referring to the Group of Seven major industrialized nations.

[bread_and_roses]

38. There was no recovery. We are in a depression, not a recession

I wish Krugman - who is often good, if still too timid and too ready to give our quisling Ds more credit than they are due (IMHO) would not use this false language.

and PS on edit - I don't care what the technical definitions of "recession" and "depression" are - if not all, then huge swaths of our populace are in a depression - what else do we call the wipe-out of the little bit of "wealth" that had been accumulated in the black community, the rates of unemployment among people of color and the young, elders working into their 70's because they can't afford to retire? I call it Depression.

[Demeter]

44. That's funny, I'd put it at @ 2 to 1.

[Demeter]

45. Been slaying dragons all morning, sorry

This is no way to get the inbox empty.

On the other hand, I MIGHT be able to park in the garage this winter, and I've yet to put in the faucet, although I did buy it Friday...

[Demeter]

46. Nepal’s Women Farmers Discard Imported Hybrid Seeds and Husband Local Varieties in Co-Op Seed Banks

http://www.truth-out.org/nepals-women-farmers-discard-imported-hybrid-seeds-and-husband-local-varieties-co-op-seed-banks/131

Learning a lesson from crop failures attributed to climate change, Nepal’s women farmers are discarding imported hybrid seeds and husbanding hardier local varieties in cooperative seed banks.

"I had a crop failure two years ago," says Shobha Devkota, 32, from Jibjibe village in Rasuwa, a hilly district in central Nepal which is part of the Langtang National Park, a protected area encompassing two more districts, Nuwakot and Sindhupalchowk. "The maize was attacked by pests, the paddy had no grain and the soil grew hard. I had a tough time trying to feed my three daughters and sending them to school."

Since her marriage 17 years ago, Shobha had been sharing farming chores with her husband Ram Krishna. However, when he left for Dubai four years ago to work as a security guard, farming became her responsibility entirely. Though she has never been to school and can only scrawl her name, Shobha and other women in the village who share similar backgrounds, are keenly aware of changing climate and its adverse impact on livelihoods.

"Daytime temperatures are rising, rainfall has become erratic and there are frequent landslides and hailstorms," she says.

[xchrom]

49. Yay! Love this story. Nt

[bread_and_roses]

50. Good for them! (n/t)

[bread_and_roses]

51. Greece on verge of default as doubt grows over €8bn bailout

Shamelessly stolen from LBN - and I have no clue if it's worth a read or not - posting just a few snips in case it is:

Greece on verge of default as doubt grows over €8bn bailout

Greece's embattled prime minister, George Papandreou, has moved to counter growing fears that Athens is about to default on its debts, saying there was a clear route back to economic health.

... Despite strong denials that the country is heading for a default, rumours have grown that the end game is approaching.

... The latest sell-off in financial markets came after a rumour emerged that Germany was drawing up plans to protect its banking sector in the event of a Greek default

[Demeter]

52. Some Humor, While We Wait for The 3rd Act of this Farce

I can't help it, Dilbert speaks to me

[Demeter]

53. FDA panel backs new Bayer stroke drug

The recommendation on Xarelto, an anti-clotting medicine, came in spite of a contrary recommendation from the FDA’s own specialists against approving the drug

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/EXIFRK/K91WR/HYKFWD/L9RJAG/E4/t?a1=2011&a2=9&a3=9

YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK

[Demeter]

54. Correlation of US stocks highest since 1987 crash

Spike in movement of biggest 250 companies raises fears of sustained volatility with traders forced to sell and further postponements of IPOs

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/EXIFRK/K91WR/HYKFWD/627ZUW/E4/t?a1=2011&a2=9&a3=9

[Demeter]

55. Chinese inflation falls in August to 6.2%

China’s attempts to cool persistent price increases appear to be taking effect as the pace of inflation slowed in August

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/WT8AVV/T10SH/GDXR4X/8Z5MTA/ID/t?a1=2011&a2=9&a3=9

WONDER IF THEY COOK THEIR NUMBERS, TOO

[Demeter]

56. Gaddafi regime sold $1bn of gold

Central Bank governor says funds from the 29 tonnes of gold sold to local traders in April were used to pay salaries

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/WT8AVV/T10SH/GDXR4X/DWDK6D/ID/t?a1=2011&a2=9&a3=9

LET THE LOOTING BEGIN

[Demeter]

74. $4 bln down the drain: Libyan rebels won’t buy Russian arms

http://rt.com/news/arms-russia-contracts-libya-099/

Libya’s rebel governing body does not plan to buy weapons from Russia because the country will not need them in the future. The estimated amount of all signed and planned military contracts of Gaddafi’s government with Russia was $4 billion.

The business deals signed under the ousted Libyan leader will be reviewed, according to Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chair of the National Transitional Council (NTC), which heads the rebel forces.

“We respect all deals with other nations, but they will all be reviewed, since many of the deals were signed thanks to corruption,” the former Justice Minister under Gaddafi said on Thursday in an interview with RIA Novosti news agency.

He said price terms of many of the contracts are too high, and such contracts will be subject to alteration. Among Gaddafi’s deals, which apparently will not be accepted by the new Libyan administration, are multibillion-dollar arms deals with Russia...

[Demeter]

57. Lagarde backs down on European banks

Christine Lagarde has backed down on the amount of capital needed by European banks, as finance ministers and central bankers from the leading advanced economies sought to calm febrile markets at the weekend.

Ms Lagarde, IMF managing director, confirmed that the Fund was revising its estimates of the loss of tangible equity in European banks on Saturday, saying the estimated capital losses of €200bn were “tentative” and the Fund was “in discussions with our European partners to assess the global methodology” until the final estimates are published in a Fund paper released shortly before
its annual meetings in a fortnight.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/M2ZOXX/HY9LS0/K91WR/GDX36K/2OV77X/JY/t?a1=2011&a2=9&a3=10

REALITY IS A BITCH, CHRISTINE

[Demeter]

58. LEST WE FORGET (NOT THAT ANYONE WILL LET US)

"On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. - I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.

"The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities."

-- Karen Kwiatkowski - (1960-) retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, included duties as Pentagon desk officer and a variety of roles for the National Security Agency, author, columnist - 9 Sep 2011

[Demeter]

70. How I’ll Remember 9-11 This Year By Karen Kwiatkowski

It’s been a decade since the attacks of 9-11. Since that time, the cost of the American government has more than doubled while American economic output has drastically slowed. Communication and public speech has suffered under the weight of the Patriot Act, and today, most Americans understand that their government tracks them and spies upon them. Travel across this beautiful land has been made more expensive, as fuel and food costs have skyrocketed. The new and wholly un-American Department of Homeland Security has settled in for the long war, apparently against the American people and American traditions of liberty. A recent Frontline television program outlined the research effort by two reporters at the Washington Post in describing a "Top Secret" America. The real federal jobs program in the last decade has been in surveillance, monitoring, and intelligence-development – of Americans on American soil.

In the decade after 9-11, Washington, D.C. launched repeated land wars, government takeovers, and nation-building, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, and later in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and now Libya. None of these wars, all sold as "wars against terrorism" were granted any public congressional debate, and none entailed a Congressional declaration of war. In terms of truly discovering the facts of the events of 9-11, and the subsequent anthrax attacks, we saw a government reluctance to delve deeply, and a government desire to pack up the "stories" as quickly as possible. President Bush opposed and worked to delay the official 9-11 Commission, and its published results were then later partially disavowed by the very political appointees who led it. The FBI’s investigation into the Amerithrax case also followed a well-worn path. Select a culprit, publicize the name of the suspect, and harass that individual until they confess. The first FBI target was no coward, nor was he guilty. He successfully sued the federal government and was later awarded millions of tax-payer dollars for the FBI’s miscalculation and arrogance. A second FBI target was named and harassed until he committed suicide, and the case was immediately closed...

There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. Trillions of dollars have been wasted, more trillions in value have evaporated, and many thousands of lives have been needlessly sacrificed, all in the name of a post-9-11 era. The Founders believed that the Creator granted all men the right to a government that they themselves owned, and could hold accountable. The Founders believed that the people had the duty to dissolve that government when it no longer followed the law or conducted itself morally, in the best interest of the people. The Founders believed we could withdraw our consent. Today, you can’t even decline to be physically assaulted by a government agent in order to fly on a commercial aircraft using a ticket you bought with your own money.

The federal response to the attacks of 9-11 reflected a real government fear. Not of more attacks, but rather, a fear of average Americans who would begin to see the truth about their government in the 21st century. The truth is that this government does not exist to serve us, and it will not and cannot protect us. I believe our government – outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution, and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name – cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law, and liberty....

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29093.htm

[Demeter]

59. Worker Cooperatives Reduce "Hard-Core" Unemployment

http://www.truth-out.org/worker-cooperatives-reduce-hard-core-unemployment/1314896213

Buenos Aires - During the social and economic collapse of 2002-2003, the Argentine state encouraged the formation of workers' cooperatives, which helped mitigate the worst effects of the crisis, reduced hard-core unemployment, and now as independent, democratic, worker-controlled organisations are providing services to the public and private sectors.

"Business enterprises are only interested in profits," Cristián Miño, a cooperative movement activist, told IPS. "In contrast, in a cooperative there is comradeship: we are all owners together, and if one of us gets into difficulties, the cooperative is there to help out."

......

Under the pilot programme, the centre-left government of the late President Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) created 50 cooperatives, each with 16 members, to build housing in Florencio Varela as one of several experiments to combat joblessness. At the peak of the crisis, the unemployment rate was over 24 percent, and more than 54 percent of the population was living in poverty... Nearly all of the cooperatives work in the construction industry, although some grow plants in nurseries, carry out afforestation projects, or are involved in producing inputs for the building industry, like pre-moulded fences, furniture, ironwork, windows and doors. In 2006, FECOOTRAUN had 1,500 members. But working together is not easy, Miño said. "It's difficult to organise. Not all the cooperatives are still active and successful; there is normally a certain attrition rate," he said. However, the Florencio Varela cooperatives are currently contracted to build infrastructure for different levels of the government (local, provincial, and national) and for private companies that have been awarded government contracts for public works...Among members of the cooperatives, "no one earns less than 2,000 pesos (500 dollars) a month," Miño said. That is nearly twice the pay level for new workers recruited by state-sponsored cooperatives. The pilot project in Florencio Varela shows that the cooperative movement, even when it is promoted by the state instead of by workers on their own, can be a tool to rescue people from poverty and joblessness.

THE WAR ON TERROR IN THE MIDDLE EAST ENDED, OR AT LEAST CURTAILED THE WAR ON TERROR IN SOUTH AMERICA...THE DISASTER CAPITALISTS WILL NEVER REGAIN THAT LOST BEACH HEAD.

[Demeter]

60. The Great Experiment in Spending by: Paul Krugman

http://www.truth-out.org/great-experiment-spending/1314884388

World War II was the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to a depressed economy. Christy Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the former chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, is very much on the same wavelength.

It’s especially relevant because in the 1930s, as today, many wise heads insisted that unemployment was structural, that many of the unemployed could not be gainfully employed no matter how much demand increased.

Then demand actually did increase, and, as Ms. Romer wrote in a commentary article in The New York Times earlier this month: “World War II has something to tell us here, too. Because nearly 10 million men of prime working age were drafted into the military, there was a huge skills gap between the jobs that needed to be done on the home front and the remaining work force. Yet businesses and workers found a way to get the job done. Factories simplified production methods and housewives learned to rivet. Here the lesson is that demand is crucial — and that jobs don’t go unfilled for long.”

Oddly, however, people on the right have taken to claiming that World War II actually weakens the case for stimulus. One line, attributable to Robert Barro, a Harvard economist, is that it shows fiscal expansion failing because private spending actually fell. Duh....

[Demeter]

61. Eastern US Earthquake shook North Anna nuclear plant in Virginia more than it was designed to handle

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/43223

....Neither the company nor the NRC have found signs of serious damage to safety systems at the North Anna nuclear plant, although inspections by both sides continue.

NRC experts from a variety of nuclear engineering disciplines peppered Dominion counterparts with questions about the impact to fuel in the core, the strength of welds in plant steels, and the resilience of underground pipes....

[Demeter]

62. Longshoremen storm Wash. state port, damage RR

http://news.yahoo.com/longshoremen-storm-wash-state-port-damage-rr-144921214.html

Hundreds of Longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview early Thursday, overpowered and held security guards, damaged railroad cars, and dumped grain that is the center of a labor dispute, said Longview Police Chief Jim Duscha.

Six guards were held hostage for a couple of hours after 500 or more Longshoremen broke down gates about 4:30 a.m. and smashed windows in the guard shack, he said.

No one was hurt, and nobody has been arrested. Most of the protesters returned to their union hall after cutting brake lines and spilling grain from car at the EGT terminal, Duscha said.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union believes it has the right to work at the facility, but the company has hired a contractor that's staffing a workforce of other union laborers...

[Demeter]

63. Les Miserables Flash Mob IN WISCONSIN (ONE OF MANY POSTED)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYOTe7V2DlA&NR=1

[Demeter]

64. Susan Boyle - I Dreamed A Dream - Les Miserables

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0I7M_I1Fp0

[Demeter]

65. [Les Miserables] 10th anniversary - On My Own

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuS1cCnG8xc

A THEME SONG FOR THE DISAFFECTED IN THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

[Demeter]

66. [Les Miserables] 10th anniversary - Castle on a Cloud

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u9QNYjYvYQ

[Hotler]

84. Please don't send me out alone.

Castles on clouds are far and few between these days.

[DemReadingDU]

79. yep

[Demeter]

67. Senator Kyl says opposes any new defense cuts

http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110908/pl_nm/us_usa_debt_defense_kyl

Senator Jon Kyl, a Republican member of the "super committee" deficit-reduction panel in Congress on Thursday said he would quit the panel if new defense spending cuts are considered...

HERE'S YOUR HAT--WHAT YOUR HURRY?

[Demeter]

68. Senate Approves $500 Billion Increase in Borrowing Authority

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/09/08/senate-approves-500-billion-increase-in-borrowing-authority/?mod=google_news_blog

The U.S. Senate, in an unusual procedure, cleared the way Thursday for the U.S. to lift its borrowing authority by $500 billion to $15.19 trillion, enough to keep the support federal government borrowing through late January or early February.

The action came under an unusual legislative procedure spelled out under the August agreement to raise the U.S. debt ceiling and avoid a U.S. credit default. In a 52-45 vote, the Senate blocked an attempt by Republicans to slow down the process that will result in the $500 billion debt-ceiling increase.

The increase stems from a deal between Congress and the White House, finalized last month, that spells out how the borrowing limit would be increased by $500 billion. Under the process, lawmakers in both the House and Senate must vote on a resolution of disapproval against the increase in the borrowing limit. President Barack Obama would then have to veto the resolution of disapproval, and Congress would then vote to try and override that veto.

The complicated procedure, designed by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), would allow an increase of the borrowing limit while allowing most Republicans to vote against such an increase...

[Demeter]

69. Insurers sue Saudi Arabia seeking 9/11 reimbursements

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11252/1173372-100.stm#ixzz1XcmG6m2D

A subsidiary of the British insurer Lloyd's of London Thursday sued the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, several of its government agencies and banks, and a handful of prominent individuals in U.S. District Court in Johnstown, saying they are liable for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (Lloyd's Syndicate 3500 and affiliates paid out $215 million in insurance claims stemming from the attacks, according to the complaint. They want the money back.)

The 154-page complaint summarizes scholarship on the roots of the al-Qaida organization, focusing on the financing it used to build a global network capable of carrying out actions. Al-Qaida needed "lavish sponsorship" from its supporters, who became participants in its "jihad against the United States, its nationals and allies," the complaint said. It noted that al-Qaida started out as a resistance organization against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan, then adapted to the needs of Islamic fighters in Kosovo, Chechnya, India and the Philippines....Meanwhile Saudi political factions agreed to support modernization only if the government backed anti-Western efforts.

U.S. investigators, it said, unearthed a list of al-Qaida's financial backers known as the "Golden Chain."..."When Osama bin Laden formed al-Quida," the complaint said, "many of these financiers became champions of bin Laden's new mission to wage jihad globally"...The September 11th Attacks were a direct, intended, and foreseeable product of " al-Qaida's "global jihad," it continued. Thus the financial backers "bear primary responsibility for the injuries resulting from the September 11th Attacks" and must pay the costs, it said.

The Saudi embassy in Washington had no immediate response.

Similar legal theories have failed in other courts. The complaint was filed in Johnstown because the federal court office there has responsibility for the Shanksville area, where one of four planes seized by the 19 al-Qaida terrorists on Sept. 11 crashed.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11252/1173372-100.stm#ixzz1XcmSw100


Read the complaint against Saudi Arabia. PDF AT LINK

WHAT NEXT? WILL LLOYDS GO AFTER THE CIA?

[raouldukelives]

82. Good for them. Wish we'd go after the people behind 9/11

But sadly all America needed was to spill blood, any blood, to feel satisfied. Many of us still haven't forgotten that day and that no justice has been done.

[Demeter]

71. "believe nothing until it has been officially denied"

WORDS TO LIVE BY, IN THESE DECEPTIVE TIMES

[DemReadingDU]

80. The Greece default

Seems like many have officially denied that one, so it must be true
:eyes:

[Demeter]

72. BofA IS DOOMED, Says Chris Whalen—Stop Firing People And Just Declare Bankruptcy

http://www.businessinsider.com/bank-of-america-bankruptcy-whalen-2011-9

Bank of America is doomed, says bank analyst Chris Whalen, the founder and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics. (See video AT LINK) Importantly, this dour outlook has nothing to do with the company's operating businesses, which Whalen thinks are fine. In fact, says Whalen, there's no need for the bank to be restructuring them and firing thousands of employees (40,000 is the latest estimate) to improve its bottom line.

The part of Bank of America that's not fine, in Whalen's view, is the ongoing liability from the mortgage underwriting that Bank of America's subsidiaries did during the housing bubble. The litigation exposure from this could be so humongous, Whalen argues, that it will bankrupt the company, forcing regulators to step in and restructure it.

And Whalen doesn't think the country should wait for that day.

Instead, Whalen says, the government should just seize Bank of America and restructure its debt, equity, and legal obligations now. The company's operating businesses—branches, commercial lending, wealth management, and so forth—should continue operating, and the company could then be refloated with a new ownership structure. This would leave Bank of America clean, lean, and competitive—just like the strengthened GM after the forced auto-company bankruptcy.

But in the meantime, none of this is under discussion. Instead, says Whalen, Bank of America is rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. And firing thousands of people who don't need to be fired.

[Demeter]

73. How the Middle Class Becomes Downwardly Mobile

http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/how-the-middle-class-becomes-downwardly-mobile/2209

Being born into a middle-class family is no guarantee that you’ll keep that status, says a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. Instead, the report finds that a full third of those who are born into the middle class actually slip below middle-class income levels as adults.

The Pew Report does not say if those born into middle class families are more or less likely to become downwardly mobile now than they were, say, 20 years ago. Instead, the report provides a snapshot in time-and one that uses data from 2004 and 2006, before the financial crisis and Great Recession.

Who, exactly, is the middle class? According to the researchers, it’s those in the 30th to 70th income percentiles. In 2010, this roughly translates as a family of four with two children with an income of $32,900 to $64,000.

Losing status

Why do people fall out of the middle class? Pew researchers identified these factors:

Marital status.
Education.
Race and test scores.
Race and Sex.
Drug use.

DETAILS AT LINK

[Demeter]

75. Fake Assets By Keiser Report TOO GOOD TO NOT REPEAT

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29063.htm

EVEN MORE RELEVANT THAN WHEN FIRST POSTED.

[Demeter]

76. Wanna Bet Obama Doesn't "Go Big" Tonight? By Mike Whitney

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29068.htm

Lets get something straight before President Pangloss delivers his speech tonight. Two-thirds of the $300 billion "stimulus package" he'll be asking for (to reduce unemployment) is just an extension of programs that are already in place, like the payroll tax cut and extension of unemployment benefits. So, what Obama would characterize as a "bold attack on joblessness" is just a big nothingburger, just old wine in new bottles. The plan has no oomph at all; it won't put a dent in unemployment nor will it revive the flagging economy which is presently skittering towards another recession. So why is the White House wasting our time with this nonsense? Do they really think that Obama is going to get a bump in the ratings just by waving his hand at the horizon and mouthing the same old platitudes?

Don't count on it. Recent surveys show that Obama's approval ratings have hit the skids bigtime while those of his Confederate-Theocratic rival, Perry, continue to rise. It will take a miracle for Obama to squeak-by in 2012, especially now, with the recovery in a shambles. This is from the Wall Street Journal:

"Macroeconomic Advisers projects that extending the tax cut for another year would increase U.S. employment by 400,000 jobs next year and add half a percentage point to the pace of economic growth, at a cost about $120 billion."("Payroll Tax Cut Won't Be Easy Sell", Wall Street Journal)

Okay, so Obama's plan will put 400,000 people back to work. Big deal. That's the number of jobless claims that are presently being filed every week. And--guess what--that number is not only rising, but will rise higher-still when the economy drops dead from lack of demand. And the reason demand is weak, is because wages are frozen and too many people can't find a damn job. It's inexcusable that a Democratic president would refuse to lift a finger to help the 25 million people who--through no fault of their own--can't find work. Instead, Obama is focused laserlike on the budget deficits...

[bread_and_roses]

81. ROFL - "President Pangloss"

- that might be the best one yet. I posted a snip from this in another thread -

Look, all Obama needs to whoop-the-tar out of crackpot Perry in 2012, is just to be the guy that everyone thought they were voting for in 2008. That's all. No more kowtowing to Wall Street, no more pandering to the GOP, no more bipartisan claptrap. Just focus on three things: "Jobs, jobs, and jobs". That's the ticket for a landslide victory and the admiration of 300 million working Americans.

Because it's so true - but didn't credit here - figured why invite contention? I feel pretty sure this thread is on a "list" somewhere, since it, as well as SMW daily, always has a "net" before the count practically from the moment it goes up.

[Demeter]

77. Employers Diss Obama Job Plan

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/employers-diss-obama-job-plan.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Wow, this is just embarrassing. A raspberry from businesses, the object of Obama’s tender ministrations. And the reason? Basically, too little demand, something that tax cuts won’t remedy...This is why, as yours truly and others have said, we need more debt restructurings and writedowns to get the debt overhang resolved faster, and fiscal deficits to offset the deflationary effects. Monetary policy is not an adequate substitute, as we have seen, and barely stimulative stimulus programs, like inadequate doses of medicine, destroy faith in the remedy when the flaw is in how it is being administered.

Even if the Republicans do serve up one of their more extreme candidates as their presidential nominee, the economy’s certain-to-be-lousy-if-not-even-more-Godawful performance next may well seal his fate. It’s hard to get your base to turn out when you look so dedicated to doing the wrong thing.

[Demeter]

78. Banks Blow Off, Doom Foreclosure Fraud Settlement With AGs )GOOD NEWS AT LAST?)

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/09/09/banks-blow-off-doom-foreclosure-fraud-settlement-with-ags/

...news on the housing/foreclosure front was the final nail in the coffin of this increasingly farcical 50-state AG settlement. The banks are miffed about the FHFA’s lawsuit against them over representations and warrants on mortgage backed securities, particularly because the suit holds over 130 individuals responsible for the crimes, which is just not done. So these banks blew off the latest scheduled meeting with the AGs in a fit of pique....

The five biggest mortgage servicers have cancelled a planned negotiating session with representatives of the 50 State Attorneys General in apparent protest over a federal regulator filing suit against them, a source familiar with the matter tells TIME.

The banks canceled the meeting on Tuesday afternoon in protest over the announcement last Friday that the Federal Housing Finance Agency would bring a broad case against 17 firms, including those in talks with the State AGs. The FHFA, which oversees mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, alleges the firms violated securities law by misrepresenting the value of bundles of high-risk mortgages they sold. FHFA did not say how much the case might be worth, but outside analysts have said it could potentially produce billions of dollars in compensatory damages from the firms.

http://swampland.time.com/2011/09/08/vexed-by-securitization-suit-banks-pull-out-of-mortgage-fraud-settlement-meeting/

Massimo Calabresi intimates that the FHFA suit has ruined the AG settlement, but that’s a bit of 20/20 hindsight. The settlement was already going nowhere well before the FHFA lawsuit. The banks want full immunity on everything, and enough AGs were unwilling to give that up that the two sides could never come together. What’s more, AGs couldn’t possibly release the banks from liability lawsuits from private investors, or even quasi-private ones like Fannie and Freddie.

This is just a hissy fit from the banks, and probably an excuse to end settlement talks that will not give them what they need. Indeed, the banks are probably searching for a Plan B at this point. They don’t want to have to give up a dime on robo-signing, conserving cash for the future legal fights ahead. Some banks, like Bank of America, are engaging in restructuring and firing of top executives, essentially to create a smaller and more focused operation. BofA is actually trying to get itself small enough to fail, because with their exposure they cannot afford to be too big. They plan to cut 30,000 jobs and significantly separate the commercial and investment banking sectors of the business.

Meanwhile, the lawsuits and the exposure keeps coming...

[Demeter]

83. Translating the WaPo's Bank-Talking-Point Editorial

http://abigailcfield.com/?p=288

SEPTEMBER 6TH the Washington Post ran a grotesquely bank-skewed editorial chastising New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman for his refusal to play ball with the hush money “50 state AG” settlement on the table. Matt Stoller pointed out that the Washington Post owns Kaplan schools, a for profit network of schools, and Schneiderman’s investigating for-profit schools, a fact that the WaPo didn’t disclose. But the Kaplan connection is important in another way too, as it probably explains why the WaPo had so much empathy for the banks in the editorial, and displayed so little understanding of the banks’ victims.

For profit schools of the Kaplan type result in extremely unsustainable student debt because of very high tuition, low quality of education and particularly nasty practices. All schools like Kaplan care about is the access to the student loans; the loans are Kaplan’s (and the WaPo’s) profit center. The schools don’t care if the loans are repaid. Sounds a lot like the banks’ position vis a vis mortgages made during the securitization-fueled housing bubble.

But with student loans, the situation’s worse. The students default, but they can never escape the debt because they can’t discharge it in bankruptcy except in extreme circumstances. Thus students are punished for decades for the naïve and wrong decision to rely on the marketing of Kaplan and similar schools. Seems brutally disproportionate to me. The people running a corporation willing to use those student loans as its profit center have no compassion, no decency. Yes I want the Washington Post to stay in business, yes, journalism is a hard-to-profit in business. But the human misery inflicted to get that stream of money isn’t justified.

Of course, if bankruptcy was reformed to allow the loans to be discharged, the punishment for the bad decision to rely on the schools’ marketing would be less onerous. Even better would be transforming the schools into products worth their price simply by refusing to give loans to their students without the changes. No loans, no cash spigot. Oh wait, The Department of Education tried that. The results were weak. Will Congress solve the problem? I’m not holding my breath....MORE AT LINK

[Hotler]

85. Thank you Demeter for Weekend Economists. n/t

[Demeter]

86. You're Welcome; My Pleasure

Thanks for showing up and reading through....

[Demeter]

87. Aiding the Success of Failure / Bailouts to Bubbles in a Government-Centric America By Eric Fry

http://dailyreckoning.com/from-bailouts-to-bubbles-in-a-government-centric-america/

...Topping the list of tragedies, 4,683 US soldiers and 100,000-plus Afghani and Iraqi civilians have perished since the launch of “Operation Enduring Freedom” on October 7, 2001. Lesser tragedies would include the death of various American civil liberties, the creation of the Transportation Safety Administration and the rebranding of the “US Customs Service” as “US Customs and Border Protection.”

“Customs Service” sounds civilized and helpful, “Customs and Border Protection” sounds savage and paranoid. Perhaps the subtle name change means nothing at all, or perhaps it means everything about where we are heading as a nation.

US customs agents strut around the baggage claim area of international flights, packing loaded SIG-Sauer P229Rs on their hip. Really? Is this necessary? When was the last time you read about a shootout at baggage claim?

Couldn’t a friendly guy or gal, armed only with a smile, get the job done just as well...or better?

Not anymore, apparently. Not in post-9/11 America.

[Demeter]

88. Banks May Fight Banks as Mortgage Securities Investors Seek Class Status

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-09/banks-may-fight-banks-as-mortgage-securities-investors-try-for-class-suits?category=/news/law/

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and other banks may pay more to resolve claims over their alleged roles in the collapse of a $2.3 trillion mortgage- backed securities market if sophisticated investors are allowed to sue as a group along with less savvy ones...Class-action status allows investors to pool financial and legal resources, giving them greater leverage to win larger settlements or verdicts. The banks, however, have a court ruling on their side that may help fend off such blockbuster cases. It says class status is barred because some investors are too sophisticated -- in fact, because some of them are other banks, including JPMorgan.

“It is possible to be both an alleged perpetrator and victim at the same time,” said Jacob S. Frenkel, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer now in private practice in Potomac, Maryland. “It’s unprecedented that you have the most sophisticated institutions as victims, to be in a position where their losses are so great that they have sued.”

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer Jr. in Manhattan, favoring defendants Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS) and Ally Financial Inc., held that investors may not sue as a class in part because some of them are being sued over the same claims. Last month, that ruling was countered by two judges in Baer’s courthouse, both of whom ruled that investors in home- loan backed securities may sue as a class....

HERE'S ANOTHER FINE MESS THEY'VE GOTTEN US INTO!

[Demeter]

89. Shorter Obama Jobs Speech (IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE FUNNY, BUT ALAS, IT'S TRUE)

http://www.discourse.net/2011/09/shorter-obama-jobs-speech.html

“Attention GOP: I’m going to start counting and you better pass my bill of GOP-endorsed tax cuts and popular spending before I get to 10; meanwhile, here’s a preemptive concession on Medicare. And as part of my commitment to transparency, and to ensure that my plan isn’t really all that stimulative to the economy, we’ll ask the Congressional Super-Committee to meet in secret to decide even more cuts to pay for it.”

[bread_and_roses]

90. Alas, indeed (n/t)

[hamerfan]

91. Musical Interlude

I'd Love To Change The World. Ten Years After.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0NFxXjxacc&feature=related

And a very cool video to go with the song.

[Demeter]

92. That's a Wrap, Folks. Sorry It's So Short a Thread

They held up the presses for the U 0f M / Notre Dame night time game results...So I'm screwed up timewise...and no, the faucet didn't get installed.
If I'm going to do surgery, I need steady hands, and eyes that can open all the way....

Have a good week, and think what would be the logical topic for next Weekend...
If there is any logic left in this crazy world. In a pinch, whimsy will do! Or
Escapism, even.