Tag: ek Politics

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

“I’m optimistic!”

That was the message from Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor, in response to a jobs report that can only be described as appalling.

The Obama administration is in a complete disconnect from the Main Street economy and Ms. Solis looked pathetic and frantic as she denied reality on behalf of her employer.  It’s really not a good sign when you let a CNBC reporter PWN you like this.

Unless Obama can change these numbers (or at least the stink of failure that permeates his record) he is doomed no matter what nut job the Thugs put up.

The Mistake of 2010

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: June 2, 2011

In fact, in important ways we have already repeated the mistake of 1937. Call it the mistake of 2010: a “pivot” away from jobs to other concerns, whose wrongheadedness has been highlighted by recent economic data.

…

Back when the original 2009 Obama stimulus was enacted, some of us warned that it was both too small and too short-lived. In particular, the effects of the stimulus would start fading out in 2010 – and given the fact that financial crises are usually followed by prolonged slumps, it was unlikely that the economy would have a vigorous self-sustaining recovery under way by then.

By the beginning of 2010, it was already obvious that these concerns had been justified. Yet somehow an overwhelming consensus emerged among policy makers and pundits that nothing more should be done to create jobs, that, on the contrary, there should be a turn toward fiscal austerity.

…

(T)he news has, indeed, been bad. As the stimulus has faded out, so have hopes of strong economic recovery. Yes, there has been some job creation – but at a pace barely keeping up with population growth. The percentage of American adults with jobs, which plunged between 2007 and 2009, has barely budged since then. And the latest numbers suggest that even this modest, inadequate job growth is sputtering out.

…

(T)he mistake of 2010 may yet be followed by an even bigger mistake. Even if that doesn’t happen, however, the fact is that the policy response to the crisis was and remains vastly inadequate.

Somewhat corrected transcript below.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

More job seekers give up, reducing unemployment

By PAUL WISEMAN, AP Economics Writer

19 mins ago

The percentage of adults in the labor force is a figure that economists call the participation rate. It is 64.2 percent, the smallest since 1984. And that’s become a mystery to economists. Normally after a recession, an improving economy lures job seekers back into the labor market. This time, many are staying on the sidelines.

Their decision not to seek work means the drop in unemployment from 9.8 percent in November to 9 percent in April isn’t as good as it looks.

If the 529,000 missing workers had been out scavenging for a job without success, the unemployment rate would have been 9.3 percent in April, not the reported rate of 9 percent. And if the participation rate were as high as it was when the recession began, 66 percent, in December 2007, the unemployment rate could have been as high as 11.5 percent.

Electoral Victory my ass!

Employment Data May Be the Key to the President’s Job

By BINYAMIN APPELBAUM, The New York Times

Published: June 1, 2011

WASHINGTON – No American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.

…

More than 13.7 million Americans were unable to find work in April; most had been seeking jobs for months. Millions more have stopped trying. Their inability to earn money is a personal catastrophe; studies show that the chance of finding new work slips away with time. It is also a strain on their families, charities and public support programs.

…

Ten presidents have stood for re-election since Mr. Roosevelt. In four instances the unemployment rate stood above 6 percent on Election Day. Three presidents lost: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush. But Ronald Reagan won, despite 7.2 percent unemployment in November 1984, because the rate was falling and voters decided he was fixing the problem.

How to Get Washington’s Attention

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The stock market is dropping because corporate earnings are slowing. Corporate earnings are slowing because consumers are pulling back. Consumers are pulling back because they don’t have enough jobs or adequate wages.

…

The economy needs 125,000 new jobs a month just to tread water, given that at least 125,000 people join the potential labor force every month. Simply put, if new hires are in the range of five digits, American consumers will not have enough purchasing power to buy what the private sector can produce.

The leaders of the Street and big business may now have to wake up to a reality they’ve tried to avoid – that the central economic problem of our time isn’t the long-term budget deficit but the immediate deficit in aggregate demand.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Krugman–

(T)he ECB keeps saying that restructuring is unthinkable. Yet austerity programs are not working; the prospect of a return to normal financing is receding rather than approaching.

If you ask me, the water level has now dropped so far that the fuel rods are exposed. We really are in meltdown territory.

How is that austerity thing working out for you?

This is why I no longer watch Talking Head Sundays.  Krugman opines–

(E)ven I am surprised by this. When the gaping holes in the Ryan plan were revealed, I expected the Very Serious People to move on and find a new GOP daddy to idolize. Instead, however, they’ve mostly dug in, condemning anyone who points out that the plan is a piece of junk as being somehow out of bounds.

Steve Benen (whom Krugman hat tips) says–

It’s exasperating, but it’s worth reemphasizing what too many establishment types simply refuse to understand: Democrats are telling the truth. Indeed, Dems are doing what the media is reluctant to do: offering an accurate assessment of the Republican plan for Medicare. If voters find the GOP proposal frightening, the problem is with the plan, not with Democrats’ rhetoric.

I’m at a loss to understand what, exactly, Ruth Marcus, David Brooks, and their cohorts would have Dems do. Congressional Republicans have a plan to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher scheme. The proposal would not only help rewrite the social contract, it would also shift crushing costs onto the backs of seniors, freeing up money for tax breaks for the wealthy. The plan is needlessly cruel, and any serious evaluation of the GOP’s arithmetic shows that the policy is a fraud.

Which part of this description is false? None of it, but apparently, Democrats just aren’t supposed to mention any of this.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Even in Connecticut $400,000 a year is wealthy.

Deficit May Snap 12-Year Tax Winning Streak for Top-Earning Americans

By Margaret Collins, Bloomberg News

May 25, 2011 1:57 PM ET

For a married couple with two children in Connecticut, which has the third-highest state and local tax burden in the U.S., the increase in rates Obama has proposed, along with levies from health-care reform, mean their tax bill may jump to $142,160 in 2013 from $126,410 this year, or 12.5 percent, according to an analysis Fleming ran for Bloomberg News.

That’s based on $485,000 in earnings, $2,000 in interest on investments, $3,000 in dividend income and $10,000 in long-term capital gains, and the following deductions: $20,000 in mortgage interest and charitable donations of $10,000, said Fleming, who works for PwC’s private company services tax group in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut.

…

Under the tax-cut compromise passed in December, individuals generally may gift up to $5 million during their lifetime without paying tax. That threshold will revert to $1 million in 2013 unless Congress acts.

“Move that $5 million now to your children or grandchildren to lock that in if you’re afraid that will go away,” Beerman said. That way the appreciation on those assets is out of an estate, Beerman said.

…

The biggest federal tax breaks for individuals include those for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, state and local taxes, incentives for retirement savings and the exclusion for employer-provided health care, said Clint Stretch, managing principal of tax policy at Deloitte Tax LLP in Washington. Each of them would be “politically pretty toxic” to eliminate or reduce, Stretch said.

Phasing out the mortgage interest deduction would increase federal revenue by $214.6 billion over the next 10 years, according to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation in a March report by the CBO. Curtailing deductions for charitable giving would raise an estimated $219 billion over the next decade, the CBO study said.

Did I mention their $400,000 McMansion?

Judge Strikes Down Wisconsin Law Curbing Unions

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: May 26, 2011

Ruling that Republicans in the State Senate had violated the state’s open meetings law, a judge in Wisconsin dealt a blow to them and to Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday by granting a permanent injunction striking down a new law curbing collective bargaining rights for many state and local employees.

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Republican senators asserted that they had enacted the collective bargaining law under emergency conditions, obviating the need to comply with the open meetings law. But Judge Sumi said she found no official evidence of emergency conditions or notice.

…

She (Judge Sumi) said the evidence demonstrated a failure to obey even the two-hour notice allowed for good cause if a 24-hour notice was impossible or impractical.

Perhaps temporarily-

“There’s still a much larger separation-of-powers issue: whether one Madison judge can stand in the way of the other two democratically elected branches of government,” he (Republican Scott Fitzgerald, Senate Majority Leader) said in a statement. “The Supreme Court is going to have the ultimate ruling.”

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I have 6 Aces.

The world’s most reckless central bankers

By Colin Barr, Fortune Magazine

May 25, 2011: 6:32 AM ET

Euro area President Jean-Claude Juncker said last month he is willing to mislead the public if the price in terms of market stability is right.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” Juncker said. Either that, or you have to get serious. No prizes for guessing which course Europe will choose.

…

As Ireland’s post-bailout death spiral makes clear, austerity alone simply is not going to do the trick. Balancing a budget that is as out of whack as Greece’s “has been known to cause riots if done in a single year,” warns Paolo Manasse, an economics professor at the University of Bologna.

Yet officials at the ECB insist the alternative — inflicting losses on bondholders who until recently were all too happy to foot the bills for the big, fat Greek consumption party — is still too damaging to even contemplate. Taking a book out of the Tim Geithner playbook, ECB board member Juergen Stark last week called a possible restructuring a “catastrophe” because it would do bad things to the banks.

Meanwhile the real catastrophe plays out before our eyes. Every day that goes by without a restructuring that forces investors to share European taxpayers’ pain, the ultimate cleanup tab rises. You only have to survey the mess that is the U.S. housing market — or the wreck that once was the Irish economy — to see how that movie ends.

“You cannot really afford to keep buying time, because it is so expensive,” says Daniel Gros, who runs the Center for European Policy Studies think tank in Brussels. “Paying out 100% to existing bondholders is just too big a burden to bear in this situation.”

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I often find it’s better to read him bottom to top, like stack language or a blog.

The ‘elite’ economists are arrogant morons-

If Greek banks collapse, that might well force Greece out of the euro area – and it’s all too easy to see how it could start financial dominoes falling across much of Europe. So what is the E.C.B. thinking?

My guess is that it’s just not willing to face up to the failure of its fantasies.

What are those fantasies?

European leaders offered emergency loans to nations in crisis, but only in exchange for promises to impose savage austerity programs, mainly consisting of huge spending cuts. Objections that these programs would be self-defeating – not only would they impose large direct pain, but they also would, by worsening the economic slump, reduce revenues – were waved away. Austerity would actually be expansionary, it was claimed, because it would improve confidence.

What are the results?

(T)he confidence fairy hasn’t shown up. Europe’s troubled debtor nations are, as we should have expected, suffering further economic decline thanks to those austerity programs, and confidence is plunging instead of rising. It’s now clear that Greece, Ireland and Portugal can’t and won’t repay their debts in full, although Spain might manage to tough it out.

Realistically, then, Europe needs to prepare for some kind of debt reduction, involving a combination of aid from stronger economies and “haircuts” imposed on private creditors, who will have to accept less than full repayment. Realism, however, appears to be in short supply.

Clinging to a thin reed of hope.

I often complain, with reason, about the state of economic discussion in the United States. And the irresponsibility of certain politicians – like those Republicans claiming that defaulting on U.S. debt would be no big deal – is scary.

But at least in America members of the pain caucus, those who claim that raising interest rates and slashing government spending in the face of mass unemployment will somehow make things better instead of worse, get some pushback from the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.

“Realism, however, appears to be in short supply.”

State and local governments may cut 450,000 jobs in FY2012

Reuters

Mon May 23, 4:23 pm ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Around 450,000 people who work for U.S. states, counties, cities, towns and villages could get pink slips in fiscal 2012, sharply up from the 300,000 positions shed this year, a report said on Monday.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Tibet celebrates 60th anniversary of peaceful liberation

Xinhua

2011-05-24

On May 23rd, 1951, representatives of both the central government and the former local government of Tibet signed a 17-Article Agreement in Beijing, marking the region’s peaceful liberation. It fundamentally expelled imperialist forces, safeguarded the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, cracked down on various secessionist forces and maintained national unification and ethnic unity.

China Focus: Tibet marks 60th anniversary of peaceful liberation

Xinhua

2011-05-23

“It’s a historic date for all the Tibetans,” said Qiangba Puncog, chairman of Tibet’s regional legislature, while addressing the crowd. “Tibet’s peaceful liberation laid a solid foundation for the subsequent democratic reform, building of socialism and the modernization drive.”

…

The number of serfs and slaves accounted for 95 percent of the Tibetan population in 1951. The lords, including the Dalai Lama’s relatives, owned all the land, forests, rivers and slaves. The lords could torture and even kill the serfs and slaves freely, though all were devout Buddhists.

…

“Rumors had it that the PLA were cannibals — some of them wore face masks that kept them from eating humans alive,” said Tseten Dorje, 76. Those frightening cannibals, he said, turned out to be friendly and even offered candies and biscuits to the children.

…

Ngapoi Ngawang Jigme himself wrote in an article entitled “Return to the warm embrace of the Motherland” published in 1981: “We held earnest and friendly negotiations on the basis of equality and consultation…and correctly resolved all complicated issues according to the policy of the Chinese Communist Party on resolving issues related to domestic ethnic groups and in line with the special conditions in Tibet.”

Witnessing "arrival of dawn" — memories of Tibet’s peaceful liberation in 1951

by Xinhua writers Yuan Ye, Bai Xu, Li Keyong

2011-05-24

In January 1950, merely three months after the establishment of the PRC, Mao Zedong and the Central Military Commission made the decision to liberate Tibet, a move resisted by Tibet’s aristocrats who intended to seek support from Britain and the United States.

From the very beginning the central government made clear that “every effort must be made to realize negotiations with the local Tibetan government” for a peaceful liberation, said Qie Jinwu, a former high-ranking officer at the 18th Corps.

But the envoys sent to Lhasa for peace talks were all turned away. One of them, highly respected living Buddha Gedar Tulku, was even poisoned to death in Qamdo.

“We’ve made every effort. Even the purpose of Qamdo Battle in October 1950 was to urge the Kasha to come to the negotiation table,” said Qie, now 91.

The battle in the eastern Tibet town, in which the PLA defeated the Tibetan regional government’s army, quickly shook the Tibetan rulers’ confidence to resist.

…

But after his exile to India in 1959, the Dalai Lama insisted the agreement had been signed under duress.

Phundre said he did not agree with the “duress” claim because both sides were allowed to debate, sometimes fiercely, for the final version of the agreement.

…

In September 1950, a small fight broke out between a detachment of the 18th Corps and a dozen Tibetan soldiers in Dorje Chosphel’s home village of Kamthok, Jomda County.

“Bullets flew over my head, yet I managed to pick up a cartridge case out of curiosity,” said the now 79-year-old man. The Tibetan soldiers were soon defeated and fled.

…

“The successful entry of the 18th Corps is the result of a complete and earnest implementation of the central government’s policies toward Tibet and accordingly, the sincere support from the people,” said Ngawang Tenzin.

…

In the course of entering Tibet’s plateau region, known as “the world’ s roof,” more than 3,000 PLA soldiers died of high altitude sickness, hunger, or accidents while building roads.

…

Now even the most remote village in Tibet could be connected with the outside world with satellite TV and mobile phones.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Fukushima Update- Part 1

First of all let’s survey the damage.  Reactors 1, 2, and 3 suffered core meltdowns that breached the steel containment vessels leaving leaks that have been releasing highly radioactive cooling water AND molten nuclear fuel into the concrete basement below the vessel.

This is kind of a containment vessel too and while there are no current indications that nuclear reactions are continuing in the escaped fuel slag that would burn through this floor and into the uncontained earth foundation of the plants, they’re not waterproof and there is no doubt at all that millions of gallons of highly radioactive water and perhaps some fine particulates are leaking into the environment uncontrolled.

This has led to a re-evaluation of cooling and clean-up strategies that continues because there are no really good answers.  Several radiation peaks indicating continued nuclear reactions in the melted and puddled fuel mean you can’t stop pumping water and the leaking makes it difficult to maintain a sufficient amount in the containment vessel to moderate the reaction (that’s why you get the peaks when the level dips too low).

There’s a continued risk of hydrogen explosions too and one of the reasons I mention that is because the one bit of good news is that it does not look as if the large spent fuel pond at the non working (at the time of the accident) Reactor 4 is having uncontrolled reactions.

At the moment.

A lot of the damage was caused by hydrogen explosions which in turn was caused by malfunctioning vents of the same type currently in use at many U.S. Nuclear Power Plants

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Oh… wait.

Spain’s Governing Party Suffers Heavy Losses

By RAPHAEL MINDER, The New York Times

Published: May 22, 2011

MADRID – The governing Socialist Party suffered heavy losses on Sunday in regional and municipal elections, even as tens of thousands of Spaniards calling themselves the “indignant” said they would pursue their protests to force an overhaul of the country’s political system.

Conceding defeat on Sunday night, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said that his Socialist Party had been understandably punished by voters for overseeing an economic crisis that had left Spain with a 21 percent jobless rate, more than twice the European average.

…

Mr. Zapatero, who has been in office since 2004, announced in April that he would not seek a third term, and the extent of the Socialists’ loss suggests that, even with a new leader, the party will struggle to hold on to power in the general election, expected next March.

Never mind.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

I’m rooting for the guy you don’t see in the Tigers cap (not the one with the mustache in the Ferrari).