Weekend Economists "Lest We Forget" 11/11/11

[Demeter]

"Recessional" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which he composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The poem, on the one hand, expresses pride in the British Empire, but, on the other, expresses an underlying sadness that the Empire might go the way of all previous empires. Kipling recognizes that boasting and jingoism – faults of which he was often accused – were inappropriate and vain in light of God's dominion over the world.

Kipling had previously composed his more famous poem "The White Man's Burden" for Victoria's jubilee, but replaced it with "Recessional". "Burden" was published two years later, altered to fit the theme of the American imperialist expansion after the Spanish-American War.


"Recessional" by Rudyard Kipling

God of our fathers, known of old—
Lord of our far-flung battle line—
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies—
The Captains and the Kings depart—
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called our navies melt away—
On dune and headland sinks the fire—
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Amen.



In Flanders Fields


by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.



Remembrance Day (also known as Poppy Day, Armistice Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth countries since the end of World War I to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty. This day, or alternative dates, are also recognized as special days for war remembrances in many non-Commonwealth countries. Remembrance Day is observed on 11 November to recall the official end of World War I on that date in 1918; hostilities formally ended "at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month" of 1918 with the German signing of the Armistice ("at the 11th hour" refers to the passing of the 11th hour, or 11:00 a.m.)

The day was specifically dedicated by King George V on 7 November 1919 as a day of remembrance of members of the armed forces who were killed during World War I. This was possibly done upon the suggestion of Edward George Honey to Wellesley Tudor Pole, who established two ceremonial periods of remembrance based on events in 1917.<1>

The red remembrance poppy has become a familiar emblem of Remembrance Day due to the poem "In Flanders Fields". These poppies bloomed across some of the worst battlefields of Flanders in World War I, their brilliant red colour an appropriate symbol for the blood spilled in the war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

LET NO ONE THINK FOR A MOMENT THAT ANYTHING HAS CHANGED SINCE THAT FIRST REMEMBRANCE DAY.

[Demeter]

1. ONE BANK FAILURE THIS WEEKEND--FOR A CHANGE, IN GEORGIA

Community Bank of Rockmart, Rockmart, Georgia, was closed today by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with Century Bank of Georgia, Cartersville, Georgia, to assume all of the deposits of Community Bank of Rockmart.

In observance of the Veterans' Day holiday, the sole branch of Community Bank of Rockmart will reopen during normal business hours on Saturday, November 12, as a branch of Century Bank of Georgia...As of September 30, 2011, Community Bank of Rockmart had approximately $62.4 million in total assets and $55.9 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits, Century Bank of Georgia agreed to purchase approximately $40.7 million of the failed bank's assets. The FDIC will retain the remaining assets for later disposition...The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $14.5 million. Compared to other alternatives, Century Bank of Georgia's acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. Community Bank of Rockmart is the 88th FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the 23rd in Georgia. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was Decatur First Bank, Decatur, on October 21, 2011.

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26. Jefferson County files for bankruptcy

The largest such municipal filing in US history came after a deal with creditors owed more than $3bn ran into trouble in recent weeks

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/7AKUXD/JQU4J/JE9E8F/KQ37LN/GX/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

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2. IMF chief fears economic 'lost decade'

http://english.aljazeera.net//news/asia-pacific/2011/11/201111910351655317.html

Christine Lagarde says global economy risks plunging into a "downward spiral of uncertainty and financial instability"...The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said that Europe's debt crisis risks plunging the global economy into a "lost decade", saying it was rich nations' responsiblity to shoulder the burden of restoring growth and confidence. Christine Lagarde told a financial forum in Beijing on Wednesday that European plans to bolster a rescue package for Greece were a "step in the right direction", but that the outlook for the world economy remained dangerous and uncertain. "There are clearly clouds on the horizon. Clouds on the horizon particularly in the advanced economies and particularly so in the European Union and the United States," Lagarde said.

Speaking on the first of a two-day visit to China, Lagarde said Asia was not immune to the problems currently sweeping the eurozone. "Our sense is that if we don't act boldly, and if we don't act together, the economy around the world runs the risk of a downward spiral of uncertainty, financial instability and potential collapse of global demand ... We could run the risk of what some commentators are already calling the lost decade," she said.

The "lost decade" reference carries echoes of Japan's experience of persistent deflation, mounting debts and economic weakness through the 1990s and beyond after its real estate bubble burst - an outcome many analysts fear could be repeated given the debt and property origins of Europe's problems.

[JDPriestly]

3. Thanks for the poems.

[Demeter]

4. Occupy Movement is Spreading and Growing By Dave Johnson

http://www.nationofchange.org/occupy-movement-spreading-and-growing-1320853000

Our captured government won’t do its job. It doesn't keep Wall Street and banks and giant corporations from ripping us off and doesn't prosecute them after they do. It doesn't stop polluters - even as the effects of climate change increase. It doesn't enforce employment and labor laws, so all of us who work fall further and further behind. It doesn't take care of those in need even as more and more of us are in greater and greater need. It just helps the connected rich get richer. So people finally got fed up, and started "occupying." Now the occupy movement is spreading to more and more cities, growing with more and more people, and expanding people's understanding of the power that comes from speaking out.

It started with Occupy Wall Street, people rising up over the greed and inequality, the1% vs 99%. Labor joined, adding their voice and grievances. Veterans, teachers and others are showing up in greater and greater numbers now. Others are joining. Now it's everywhere: Hundreds of towns like Occupy Orlando and Chicago and Portland and Nashville and Asheville and Oakland and even little towns like Redwood City.

People are getting arrested as the powers-that-be react to the spreading and growing crowds. According to Chris Bowers at Daily Kos,

Arrests in Chicago, New York City, Fresno, Eureka, Denver, Portland, Boston, Seattle, Oakland, Ashville, Riverside and more cities over the weekend has brought the total number of arrests of Occupy protesters over 3,350.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

5. The globalisation of protest BY Joseph E Stiglitz

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111151200703378.html

The protest movement that began in Tunisia in January, subsequently spreading to Egypt and then to Spain, has now become global - with the protests engulfing Wall Street and cities across America. Globalisation and modern technology now enables social movements to transcend borders as rapidly as ideas can. And social protest has found fertile ground everywhere: A sense that the "system" has failed, and the conviction that even in a democracy, the electoral process will not set things right - at least not without strong pressure from the street.

In May, I went to the site of the Tunisian protests; in July, I talked to Spain's indignados; from there, I went to meet the young Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo's Tahrir Square; and, a few weeks ago, I talked with Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York. There is a common theme, expressed by the OWS movement in a simple phrase: "We are the 99%." That slogan echoes the title of an article that I recently published, entitled "Of the 1%, for the 1%, and by the 1%", describing the enormous increase in inequality in the United States: 1 per cent of the population controls more than 40 per cent of the wealth and receives more than 20 per cent of the income. And those in this rarefied stratum often are rewarded so richly not because they have contributed more to society - bonuses and bailouts neatly gutted that justification for inequality - but because they are, to put it bluntly, successful (and sometimes corrupt) rent-seekers.

This is not to deny that some of the 1% have contributed a great deal. Indeed, the social benefits of many real innovations (as opposed to the novel financial "products" that ended up unleashing havoc on the world economy) typically far exceed what their innovators receive. But, around the world, political influence and anti-competitive practices (often sustained through politics) have been central to the increase in economic inequality. And tax systems in which a billionaire like Warren Buffett pays less tax (as a percentage of his income) than his secretary, or in which speculators, who helped to bring down the global economy, are taxed at lower rates than those who work for their income, have reinforced the trend.

Research in recent years has shown how important and ingrained notions of fairness are. Spain's protesters, and those in other countries, are right to be indignant: Here is a system in which the bankers got bailed out, while those whom they preyed upon have been left to fend for themselves. Worse, the bankers are now back at their desks, earning bonuses that amount to more than most workers hope to earn in a lifetime, while young people who studied hard and played by the rules see no prospects for fulfilling employment.

The rise in inequality is the product of a vicious spiral: The rich rent-seekers use their wealth to shape legislation in order to protect and increase their wealth - and their influence. The US Supreme Court, in its notorious Citizens United decision, has given corporations free rein to use their money to influence the direction of politics. But, while the wealthy can use their money to amplify their views, back on the street, police wouldn't allow me to address the OWS protesters through a megaphone...The contrast between overregulated democracy and unregulated bankers did not go unnoticed. But the protesters are ingenious: They echoed what I said through the crowd, so that all could hear. And, to avoid interrupting the "dialogue" by clapping, they used forceful hand signals to express their agreement. MORE

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6. Seniors Join Occupy Chicago, Protest Cuts To Medicare, Social Security (VIDEO, PHOTOS)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/07/seniors-join-occupy-chica_n_1079553.html?ref=chicago#2_senior-march-blocks-traffic-

More than 1,000 senior citizens and their supporters marched from Chicago's Federal Plaza to the intersection of Jackson and Clark Street Monday morning to protest proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and Housing and Urban Development (HUD). At the intersection, more than 40 protesters, 15 of them seniors affiliated with the Jane Addams Senior Caucus, stood or sat in the street, arms linked, blocking traffic.

Amid chants demanding that the cuts be forestalled -- with suggestions for alternatives, including tax hikes -- 43 demonstrators were escorted from the intersection (see video, above) by police and issued citations for pedestrian failure to "exercise due care," or for blocking traffic. Those cited included four protesters using assisted mobility devices and at least one centenarian.

Judy Moses said she was glad to receive the citation--her second in her quest to maintain funding for programs that benefit seniors, following an arrest for blocking traffic in December at a similar protest.

"When I was younger, I never did protests," she said. "I was a silent majority. Now, I'm ready to make noise."

[Demeter]

7. Wall Street is out $60 billion, and we can inflict more pain

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/07/1034108/-Wall-Street-is-out-$60-billion,-and-we-can-inflict-more-pain?detail=hide

The bankers are laughing at the Occupy protesters.

“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager.

“It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”

They wish. In fact, it's this inability to accept reality that led to their pigheaded efforts to charge people for using their ATM cards. The reality:

More consumers flocked to credit unions last month than in all of 2010 combined, likely in part due to the controversy surrounding debit card fees.

At least 650,000 customers opened new accounts at credit unions since September 29, the day Bank of America announced it would charge customers a $5 per month fee to use their debit card for purchases starting in 2012, the Credit Union National Association estimates. If that number holds true, it would be more than the 600,000 consumers that joined credit unions in all of 2010.

That's just October and doesn't account for this weekend's Bank Transfer Day. So what does that mean for Wall Street?

CUNA Chief Economist Bill Hampel said the growth from Bank Transfer Day and the events leading up to it could cause the credit union system to now have more than $1 trillion in total assets.

The industry had $942.5 billion in assets as of June 30, according to the NCUA.

Got that? That's $60 billion out of Wall Street and into non-profit credit unions. That doesn't include non-profit community banks, either. Not bad for a movement "with no message", is it? And it's not ending here. "Bank Transfer Day" is now "Bank Transfer Mondays", because it's always a good time to transfer. I've got my brand spanking new account at a non-profit bank, and am just waiting for our ATM cards before fully closing down my BoA accounts. Feels awesome. There are also talk of a "Balance Transfer Day", urging people to move their money from too-big-to-fail banks to credit cards issued by non-profit financial institutions.

And if you are investor type, there's this:

John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group and the first index mutual fund, doesn’t necessarily support the protesters. He does, however, think their anger toward Wall Street is justified and that indexing could be an effective means of boycotting the Street’s most speculative firms. “Indexing fulfills the Adam Smith-ian argument that if you do best for yourself, you will serve society well,” Bogle says. “The implication of that is if many more people indexed, there’d be much less trading in the market, and that’s good because it's costly. There’d also be much less big payoffs to investment managers, and that’s good for the returns earned by investors and good for our society, too.” <...>

While saving a $105 a year in management fees and a few dollars more in trading commissions may not seem like a lot, collectively the costs are huge. According to "The Cost of Active Investing," a 2008 study by Dartmouth economic professor Kenneth French, the annual all-in management and trading costs for actively managed mutual funds, hedge funds, and other institutional investors rose from $7 billion in 1980 to $101.8 billion in 2006. If every portfolio were indexed instead, French estimates that the total annual cost would be $8.9 billion.

Moving your money into index funds—which typically outperform managed trading—could take out billions more from Wall Street, and would no longer subsidize the kind of risky trading behavior that got us into this mess anyway...Move to a non-profit community bank or credit union. Move your credit card balances to cards issued by same institutions. Move to indexed funds or manage your own portfolio.

Enough people do those three things, and you won't see Wall Street laughing anymore.

[Demeter]

8. The Occupied Super Committee Hearing of the 99%

http://october2011.org/event/2011-11-09/occupied-super-committee-hearing-99

OccupyWashingtonDC to hold Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99%
Wednesday, November 9th at 11:00 AM

OccupyWashingtonDC.org will hold a hearing on the economy for the 99% that will examine how to create a fair economy for all Americans. The Occupied Hearing will contrast with hearings on Capitol Hill which are destined to enrich the 1% and protect major donors.

The Occupied Super Committee Hearing for the 99% will examine critical issues facing the economy and the federal budget. The hearing will include testimony from people with great understanding of the issues facing the country as well as comments from the 99% who are directly affected by the economy.

One week after the hearing, OccupyWashingtonDC.org will put forward proposals that should be enacted to fairly fix the economy -- these proposals should not be considered our demands as our demands are much more transformative than a short-term fix of the economy and budget.

[Demeter]

9. YouTube Town Hall: Rep. Keith Ellison on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeojbNJyjSM&feature=player_embedded

[Demeter]

49. Beyond the Banks: 3 More Ways to Move Your Money Away from Corporations

http://www.alternet.org/story/153008/beyond_the_banks%3A_3_more_ways_to_move_your_money_away_from_corporations_?page=entire


Is there a move-your-money equivalent for corporate power? Can we organize to actively—and sustainably—move our money from the corporations that control our political systems to sustain their greed, and invest in more just and sustainable economies?

Yes.

A few Americans have chosen to live full-time at occupations—enjoying the free food, medical care and childcare in the “ideal” society created by the Occupy movement—but most of us are still living and working in a capitalist society, where we need to buy things. What we buy, and more importantly, where we buy it, could be a collective, quiet revolution that begins to fight corporate control and infiltrates our broken economic system with the beginnings of a new, conscientious economy oriented around economic justice.

1. Buy Local

Corporate chain retailers homogenize communities, taking what was once local money and transforming it into corporate revenue. Supporting locally owned businesses does not only preserve communities--it makes the difference between local economic growth and fueling corporate greed. For every $100 spent at a locally owned business, $45 remains in the local economy. If this money is spent at a big-box mart or chain store, only $14 remains while the rest is redistributed at corporate headquarters. This works because local businesses typically follow what has become known as the “local multiplier effect”—instead of outsourcing labor and redirecting profits to the corporate machine, local business owners invest in local labor and keep their profits in the local economy...Introducing a chain retailer to a community—for example, a Barnes and Nobles in a town that already has two local bookstores—diverts profits from the pre-existing stores and severely reduces local economic impact. Though merchandise sales increase, over half of the revenue that would have been enjoyed by the local bookstores is pumped into the corporate chain, ultimately forcing the smaller retailers out of business and seriously limiting local economic growth.

This is easy to change. The 3/50 Project calls upon people to choose three local businesses, and spend their $50 at these businesses instead of at chain retailers. The campaign even recently released an iPhone app, Look Local, to help people locate and support nearby small business retailers.

2. Buy Union Made

It is not news that corporations often eschew labor regulations in favor of maximizing profits, outsourcing manufacturing jobs overseas to workers who are willing to work long hours for minimal wages. For many of these products—cars, clothing and other manufactured goods—there is an alternative brand that is manufactured in the United States by a unionized labor force. Supporting these union-made products, instead of foreign-made products of unregulated labor and sweatshops, fuels American jobs, and supports the unions that organize and fight to make sure these jobs have fair pay, benefits and proper working conditions. There are many different ways to support union-made products, and several resources listing what is and isn't union-made...If you are in the market for a new car, consider American brands such as Ford, GM or Chrysler. Though they sell less than half of the cars bought in the United States, two-thirds of their parts are manufactured here. These cars use significantly more domestic parts than foreign car companies—which translates into over one million jobs in the domestic manufacturing sector. Here is the 2011 Union-Made vehicles list.

There are many other Web sites advertising union-made products, union-made clothing and even union-made political campaign buttons. In addition to boycotting mega-corporations, purchasing these products finances an economy that supports good jobs and sustains the middle class.

3. Buy Green

Occupy Wall Street is already protesting corporate disregard for environmental regulations and justice by integrating sustainability and consciousness-raising initiatives into its greater model for economic justice at Liberty Plaza in New York. Recycling bins are set up. The sanitation group specifically uses and requests environmentally friendly cleaning products. Chefs at the kitchen station hold signs warning against the dangers of genetically modified organisms. Just this past week, after the NYPD stripped the occupation of its generators, occupiers invested in bicycle-powered alternative energy generators, harnessing pedal power to stay warm and power their daily lives...The majority of us are not actively occupying Zuccotti Park, but we can still follow their example and support green and alternative energy to both lessen our environmental impact, resisting and eventually replacing corporate power.

Buying local and buying American-made is already buying green by default. Transporting goods a short distance, rather than flying merchandise around the world reduces fuel consumption and environmental impact in addition to divesting our money from corporate power. This dualism can be enjoyed in many ways--supporting local farmers’ markets rather than genetically modified corporate food products is healthy, reduces fuel consumption and generates local economic growth. Purchasing products that are made in the United States reduces carbon emissions through international travel, and when union-made, generates and supports good, local jobs. There are many other ways to support sustainability initiatives. Using a car-share program, such as Zipcar, resists consumption and pollution, while investing in a transportation economy based in utility and sustainability. Simply driving less, and using less gasoline, and diverting this money toward public transportation, is as much an anti-corporate statement as an environmental statement...Buying local can be as minimal as patronizing your neighborhood coffee shop instead of Starbucks. It keeps money in the local economy, rather than lining the pockets of a CEO. Buying union-made is the difference between investing in a Ford or a Chrysler instead of a Honda or Toyota—and keeps essential manufacturing jobs in the United States. Buying green can be either the decision between two cleaning products, shopping at a farmer’s market instead of a grocery store, or purchasing a bus pass instead of driving to work—it keeps money out of big oil companies and invests in an economy that values environmental health and sustainability over corporate profit.

AND THEN THERE IS THE ULTIMATE BLOW--DON'T BUY AT ALL. MANY OF US ARE REDUCED TO THAT, NOT BECAUSE OF CONVICTION, BUT BECAUSE OF POVERTY.

[Demeter]

32. Man Outed as Undercover Cop at Occupy Oakland Condemns Police Brutality, Supports the Movement

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/729686/man_outed_as_undercover_cop_at_occupy_oakland_condemns_police_brutality%2C_supports_the_movement/#paragraph3

Across the country, police have used undercover and/or plainsclothed police officers to monitor occupations and protests that are a part of the 99 Percent Movement. Earlier today, the Tennessean published excerpts from emails sent by the Tennessee Highway Patrol that confirmed not only that police were infiltrating Occupy Nashville but that they were hoping for the movement’s demise.

In a video released last month, Oakland Police Officer Fred Shavies was outed as one of these plainsclothed officers at Occupy Oakland. Watch it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VrvMzqopHH0

Now, in an interview with Justin Warren, Shavies said that he was just doing his job and that he actually supports the movement. He said that the police brutality that occurred could be our generation’s Birmingham — referring to the civil rights struggle in the South — and that he hopes the movement is a turning point for changing the country:

SHAVIES: I’m a police officer. I’m part of the 99 percent. <...> In the ’60s when people would protest, would gather in order to bring about change, right? Those protests were nonviolent they were peaceful assemblies. They were broken up with dogs, hoses, sticks. <...> It looks like there was a square, and police shot tear gas. That could be the photograph or the video for our generation. That’s our Birmingham. So, twenty years from now this movement could be the turning point, the tipping point, right. It’s about time your generation stood up for something. It’s about time young people are in the streets. <...> Ya’ll don’t need to throw gas canisters into a group of people occupying an intersection.

Shavies’ brave words make him one of the few police officers who has publicly stepped forward to question heavy-handed police tactics and to openly support the 99 Percent.

[Demeter]

34. Obama Administration Has Many Ties to Big Banks--And Protesters Occupying Wall Street Know It

http://www.alternet.org/story/152669/obama_administration_has_many_ties_to_big_banks--and_protesters_occupying_wall_street_know_it?page=entire

The president has been left behind by a fast-growing movement that considers the Democratic Party closer to the banks than to the 99 percent...Let’s face it: the Obama administration is in trouble. It did not foresee Occupy Wall Street and its brothers and sisters across the nation or the radical demand they represent to liberate Democratic politics from domination by corporate wealth. It did not know that the political pressure welling up in the fall of 2011, three years after the collapse of the financial sector, would be one of fervent opposition to corporatism that cannot be bought off with empty podium-pounding about “fat cats.” It thought it could play the liberal game (upholding the corporatist system while making overtures of support and sympathy for its victims) without suffering any political consequences. So now that the protesters in the streets are demanding more than just the publication of a birth certificate or the legislative codification of Islamophobia, now that the protesters are actually getting to the meat of American misery, now that the protestors have set their sights on undoing the corrupt system Obama has spent his first term fortifying, all the president can offer is the kind of on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other rhetoric that pisses off everyone and energizes no one. Bummer for him.

His empathy moment: “I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country ... and yet you're still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place."

Kind words like these ring hollow from the Obama administration. It’s just too obviously in bed with Wall Street to be credible on this issue. First, there are the Wall Street folks Obama hired to craft and implement his financial and economic policies. Fresh off the financial disaster of three years ago, even before his inauguration, Obama brought Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers on board...Geithner’s devotion to deregulation and closeness to bankers made him just what the soon-to-be-president was looking for to clean up a financial sector positively bubbling over with fraudulence and mendacity. How’s that working out? As for Summers, his major career achievement in the 1990’s was preserving the lawlessness of the financial derivatives market that demolished the American economy. After this feat, he began accepting exorbitant speaking fees from the most ruthless Wall Street firms, including $135,000 for a one-day engagement at Goldman Sachs, in April 2008 (when he was basically a shoo-in for a Washington job) and $45,000 for a similar event at Merrill Lynch, after Obama was already elected. (Gene Sperling, Summers’ successor, was also one of the Goldman boys.) Anyone who thinks that Washington will compel Wall Street crooks to make restitution to the American people should consider that Obama’s chief-of-staff, the primary mover of the White House’s legislative agenda, is former JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive Bill Daley. Chase was one of the primary recipients of TARP bailout cash, and Daley a major public opponent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Daley replaced Rahm Emanuel, who worked for Goldman as a liaison with the 1992 Clinton campaign.)

But the metaphor is of a revolving door, not a one-way street.

Business Week reports that Jim Milstein, “the U.S. Treasury Department’s former chief restructuring officer who helped oversee the bailouts of AIG and Citigroup Inc.” is taking his privileged knowledge of Treasury’s secretive bailout procedures and starting a private turnaround advisory firm. Milstein is just the latest in a long line of Obama folks who have tried out the whole “public service” gig and then decided that they’d rather get fabulously rich in the private sector with the connections they made in Washington...Remember, less than a year ago, Obama’s high-profile budget director, Peter Orszag, cashed out by moving to Citi. James Fallows of the Atlantic wrote at the time:

“The idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution -- and then, less than two years after his administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably will call on knowledge and contacts Orszag developed while in recent public service -- this says something bad about what is taken for granted in American public life.”

...Before that, Greg Craig, Obama's White House counsel, fled for the greener pastures of Goldman Sachs. This was just days after the SEC charged Goldman with securities fraud, alleging it snuck in a crooked subprime mortgage scheme before the collapse of the housing market. Everyone can be reasonably certain that it was useful having a lawyer well connected with the White House, despite Goldman’s insistence, credible to no one, that he was hired merely for his competence as a lawyer.

The first time around, Obama dominated in the field of raising Wall Street cash, his haul from Goldman eventually totaling some ten times what Enron contributed to Bush. It appears that the bankers will be heading back to the Republican side this time around, Mitt Romney having raised more than twice the Wall Street cash Obama has. But don’t let the fundraising situation fool you: President Obama’s personnel and legislative priorities have shown very clearly what side he is on, and it isn’t with the 99 percent. The president is good at producing nice words, but don’t expect (as right-wing pundits Tim Carney and David Freddoso do) the occupiers of Wall Street to get in line with the Obama 2012 campaign. Even the unions that have declared solidarity with the Liberty Plaza Park campers appear ready to treat the Democratic Party as an entity hostile to the needs of the 99 percent. Obama sowed rotten seeds on this one early on. If he reaps a rotten political crop later on, he’ll have no one to blame but himself.

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

J.A. Myerson is the executive editor of The Busy Signal and a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus.

[Demeter]

50. Has Obama Just Kicked Off Another Oil War -- This Time in Africa?

http://www.alternet.org/story/152976/has_obama_just_kicked_off_another_oil_war_--_this_time_in_africa?page=entire

...The mainstream media, at least those who have covered this new U.S. military adventure, have taken the Obama administration at face value on its stated claim that JSOC troops are necessary in Uganda and neighboring countries, for the purpose of murdering the elusive and brutal war criminal-at-large, Joseph Kony. But is this the true motive for sending JSOC troops into the region? A probe into the last several years of geopolitical posturing in Africa by the United States reveals another tale. It is the tale of a 21st century "scramble for Africa" for the procurement of oil, using imperial tools, such as drones, mercenaries and military bases, in a desperate effort to gain control of this valuable commodity.

An African Scramble for Oil

In October 2008, AFRICOM, the United States Africa Command, became the U.S. military's sixth regional Unified Combatant Command center, joining those already housed in South America (SOUTHCOM), North America (NORTHCOM), Europe (EUCOM), the Middle East (CENTCOM), and the Pacific (USPACOM). The Unified Combatant Command centers serve as regional strategic hubs for the U.S. military planners to plot and implement the ways in which the U.S. will dominate these various regions for whatever it might deem to be in line with the national interest or national security purposes.

AFRICOM, though, did not come out of the blue and was years in the making before its realization. Not long after 9/11, in early January 2002, a key symposium titled "African Oil: A Priority for U.S. National Security and African Development" took place in Washington, DC; it was hosted by the neoconservative think-tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS).

IASPS is most famous for its authorship of a paper called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," a 1996 paper that, among other things, called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, foreshadowing the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the neoconservative-lead Bush administration foreign policy team. At the symposium, then Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Walter Kantsteiner III, stated, "African oil is a national strategic interest... it's people like you who will...bring the oil home."

[Demeter]

71. The Obama Doctrine: Making a Virtue of Necessity By James Petras

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29667.htm

After nearly 3 years in deep pursuit of the colonial wars initiated by ex-President Bush, the Obama regime has finally recognized the catastrophic domestic and foreign consequences. As a result the “reality principle” has taken hold; the maintenance of the US Empire requires modification of tactics and strategies, to cut political, military and diplomatic losses...In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators. This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries, academic exiles, gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price. Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity” remains to be seen.

We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures which set the context for the “rethinking” of the Bush-Obama policies in mid- 2011. We will then point out the ‘reality principle’ – the deep crises and rising pressures – which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare . Obama’s changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies. The third section will describe these changes as they have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature – improvised- as unfavorable circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.

The final section will critically evaluate Obama’s new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.... SEE LINK FOR DEVELOPMENT OF THESE ISSUES

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

James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, Le Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.

[Demeter]

72. Murder Inc - Licensed to Kill US Assassination Drones & Targeted Killings

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29666.htm

The CIA and the U.S. military have used unmanned aerial vehicles known as drones to target and kill “suspected militants” in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya. Drone operations have become a hallmark of the Obama administration's "counterterrorism campaign." He ordered the first drone strike of his presidency just 72 hours after he took office.

SEE LINK FOR MORE THAN YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT THE US DRONES. THEN WEEP.

[Demeter]

68. Occupy America By Michael Parenti

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29672.htm

The most common and effective mode of news repression is omission...For the first two weeks, the corporate-owned mainstream media along with NPR did what they usually do with progressive protests: they ignored them. These were the same media that had given the Tea Party supporters saturation coverage for weeks on end, ordaining them “a major political force.”
...By saying nothing or next to nothing about dissenting events, movements, candidates, or incidents, the media consign them to oblivion.

When the Occupy movement spread across the country and could no longer be ignored, the media moved to the second manipulative method: trivialization and marginalization. So we heard that the protestors were unclear about what they were protesting and they were “far removed from the mainstream.” Media cameras focused on the clown who danced on Wall Street in full-blown circus costume, and the youths who pounded bongo drums: “a carnival atmosphere” “youngsters out on a spree,” with “no connection to the millions of middle Americans” who supposedly watched with puzzlement and alarm...Such coverage, again, was in sharp contrast to the respectful reportage accorded the Tea Party. House Majority Leader, the reactionary Republican Eric Cantor, described the Occupy movement as “growing mobs.” This is the same Cantor who hailed the Tea Party as an unexcelled affirmation of democracy.

The big November 2 demonstration in Oakland that succeeded in closing the port was reported by many media outlets, almost all of whom focused on the violence against property committed by a few small groups. Many of those perpetrators were appearing for the first time at the Oakland site. Some were suspected of being undercover police provocateurs. Their actions seemed timed to overshadow the successful shutdown of the nation’s fourth largest port...Time and again, the media made the protestors the issue rather than the things they were protesting. The occupiers were falsely described as hippie holdovers and mindless youthful activists. In fact, there was a wide range of ages, socio-ethnic backgrounds, and lifestyles, from homeless to well-paid professionals, along with substantial numbers of labor union members. Far from being a jumble of confused loudmouths prone to violence, they held general assemblies, organized themselves into committees, and systematically took care of encampment questions, food, security, and sanitation...The Occupy movement has promulgated a variety of messages. With a daring plunge into class realities, the occupiers talk of the 1% who are exploiting the 99%, a brilliant propaganda formula, simple to use, yet saying so much, now widely embraced even by some media commentators. The protestors carried signs condemning the republic’s terrible underemployment and the empire’s endless wars, the environmental abuses perpetrated by giant corporations, the tax loopholes enjoyed by oil companies, the growing inequality of incomes, and the banksters and other gangsters who feed so lavishly from the public trough. Some occupiers even denounced capitalism as a system and hailed socialism as a humane alternative. In all, the Occupy movement revealed an awareness of systemic politico-economic injustices not usually seen in U.S. protests. Remember, the initial and prime target was Wall Street, finance capital’s home base.

..............................

But demonstrations should evolve into other forms of action. This has already been happening with the Occupy movement. It is more than a demonstration because its protestors did not go home at the end of the day. In substantial numbers they remained downtown, putting their bodies on the line, imposing a discomfort on officialdom just by their numbers and presence. At a number of Occupy sites there have been civil disobedience actions, followed by arrests. In various cities the police have been unleashed with violent results that sometimes have backfired. In Oakland ex-Marine Scott Olsen was hit by a police teargas canister that busted his skull and left him hospitalized and unable to speak for a week. At best, he faces a long slow recovery. The day after Olsen was hit, hundreds of indignant new protestors joined the Occupy Oakland site. Police brutality incites a public reaction, often bringing more people out, just the opposite of what officials want.

Where does this movement go? What is to be done? The answers are already arising from the actions of the 99%:

• Discourage military recruitment and support conscientious objectors. Starve the empire of its legions. Organize massive tax resistance in protest of corrupt, wasteful, unlawful, and destructive Pentagon spending
  
  
• Transfer funds from corporate banks to credit unions and community banks. Support programs that assist the unemployed and the dispossessed. It was Giulio Tremonti, Italy’s embattled finance minister who declared: “Salvate il popolo, non le banche” (“Save the people, not the banks”). It would be nice to hear such sentiments emanating from the U.S. Treasury Department or the White House.
  
  
• Coordinate actions with organized labor. Unions still are the 99%’s largest and best financed groups. Consider what was done in Oakland: occupiers joined with longshoremen, truckers, and other workers to close the port. Already there are plans for a general strike in various communities. Such actions improve greatly if organized labor is playing a role.
  
  
• We need new electoral strategies, a viable third party, proportional representation, and even a new Constitution, one that establishes firm rules for an egalitarian democracy and is not a rigmarole designed to protect the moneyed class. The call for a constitutional convention (a perfectly legitimate procedure under the present U.S. Constitution) seems long overdo.
  
  
• Perhaps most of all, we need ideological education regarding the relationship between wealth and power, the nature of capitalism, and the crimes of an unbridled profit-driven financial system. And again the occupiers seem to be moving in that direction: in early November 2011, people nationwide began gathering to join teach-ins on “How the 1% Crashed the Economy.” We need to explicitly invite the African-American, Latino, and Asian communities into the fight, reminding everyone that the Great Recession victimizes everyone but comes down especially hard on the ethnic poor. We need to educate ourselves regarding the beneficial realities of publicly owned nonprofit utilities, publicly directed environmental protections, public nonprofit medical services and hospitals, public libraries, schools, colleges, housing, and transportation--all those things that work so well in better known in some quarters as socialism.

There is much to do. Still it is rather impressive how the battle is already being waged on so many fronts. Meanwhile the corporate media ignore the content of our protest while continuing to fulminate about the occupiers’ violent ways and lack of a precise agenda. Do not for one moment think that the top policymakers and plutocrats don’t care what you think. That is the only thing about you that wins their concern. They don’t care about the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink, or how happy or unhappy or stressed and unhealthy or poor you might be. But they do want to know your thoughts about public affairs, if only to get a handle on your mind. Every day they launch waves of disinformation to bloat your brains, from the Pentagon to Fox News without stint. When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen. It is already happening. It may eventually fade away or it may create a new chapter in our history. Even if it does not achieve its major goals, the Occupy movement has already registered upon our rulers the anger and unhappiness of a populace betrayed.

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

Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation’s leading progressive political analysts. www.michaelparenti.org/

[Demeter]

69. The US is a Police State By Prof. John McMurtry

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29671.htm

Many readers may have thought the U.S. is “like a police state” - - think of the security dress down of everyone boarding a flight within the U.S. sphere of control. Political scientist Andrew Kolin goes far beyond hasty analogue. He argues with rich factual substantiation that the U.S is a police state all the way down – not only since the stolen elections and war state of George Bush Jr., but before and since in a cumulative throughline of bureaucratized despotism across borders.

Documented examples are reported in detail from 1950 on to disclose a record that is as systematic in suppressing public dissent as its client dictatorships elsewhere – albeit far more successfully kept out of public and scholarly attention. Since the electoral contests of, by and for the rich in America are proclaimed as “the leader of the Free World” in the ad-vehicle media many still watch and read, an example helps to clarify the reality not reported. When three nuns protested before the war-criminal bombing of Iraq in 2002 where no war crime was left undone, “they were arrested, handcuffed, left on the ground for three hours and then jailed for seven months before trial - - for sabotage and obstruction of justice”.

Every step of their police repression was within the laws that had been concocted before and after 9-11, in particular by the provisions of “the Patriot Act” – with here as elsewhere the legislative title as integral to the Orwellian language of rule. The symbolic action of the nuns - painting blood on a missile silo – was in fact backed by international law against the “supreme crime” of non-defensive armed invasion of another country. Indeed their protest occurred just before the saturation bombing of civilian Baghdad which ended in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. But mass-murderous facts, citizen responsibility, moral courage and peaceful expression of the law of nations do not detain U.S. legal machinery. It is this legal machinery that Kolin focuses on to make his case that the U.S. is a police state.

What is a police state? Kolin states no criterion, but it can be deduced as unlimited state power of armed force freely discharged without citizen right to stop it. Anyone who has lived in the U.S. or its client dictatorships may recognize the concrete phenomena, but what is featured in this account are the laws and directives which empower the police state norms. While the men at the top always proclaim their devotion to the defence of freedom as armed force assaults on domestic dissent and dissident countries increase, none have been found guilty of breaking the law or repressing freedom of speech or assembly. It is U.S. laws and policies which form the U.S. police state, the argument is, and they are continuously made to enable an endless litany of crimes against human life. The sustaining concern of this work, however, is not to define ordering principles, but to track the bureaucratic trails of legally terrorist offices, directives, and channels. The result is a detailed history of the inner workings of the U.S. state which exposes the legal suppression of democratic speech and action (omitting the use of laws against harmless non-pharmaceuticals as lettres de cachet to imprison the poor and the rebellious by the millions). Beneath continuous corporate-state and media proclamation of America’s freedoms and simultaneous academic fear to expose the lines of despotism, this work largely succeeds in providing the procedural workings of the U.S. police state building both before, and dramatically after, the turning point of 9-11.

MUCH MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

10. WHERE IS OUR FEARLESS LEADER?

[Tansy_Gold]

27. Um, Demeter's right here, posting all kinds of goodies to WEE

:evilgrin:

[Demeter]

28. Very Funny

I am the Anti=Leader. If I want anyone to follow me, I have to put puppy treats in my pocket.

Of course, that's what most successful leaders do....

Tonight was Euchre Night. My cards were so awful, I ended up getting the pot of quarters, $4 worth (entry fee is $5), and three of those quarters were mine, for not making bids.

Going for some shut=eye now. See you all in the morning.

[Tansy_Gold]

29. I figured we needed a little humor

since everything else is gloom and doom and shit.

Glad you had fun playin' cards. it's been a gazillion years since I've played euchre, not even sure I'd remember how.

I'm one up on you, though -- dogs follow me even without cookies. People, eh, not so much, but dogs love me!

And now, like you, I'm heading for bed.

[DemReadingDU]

35. Good morning!

I love Euchre, whether win or lose, it's a fun game!

[Demeter]

30. HERE HE IS

[Demeter]

11. Italy's senate swings behind reform

Italy’s senate on Friday approved reforms to cut the budget deficit and liberalise the economy, setting the stage for the expected resignation of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister over the weekend and his replacement by an interim government led by technocrats.

The measures – contained in the form of a “maxi-amendment” to the 2012 financial stability law -- passed with 156 votes in favour, 12 against and one abstention. The opposition Democratic and centrist UDC parties did not vote. A second and final vote on the whole bill, which is usually a formality, is expected in the Senate in the early afternoon before the legislation passes to the lower house for final approval on Saturday.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/M2ZOXX/TU69A7/MJTKN/GDIDBO/7AKVZZ/PJ/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

16. Nouriel Roubini: Why Italy’s days in the eurozone may be numbered

With interest rates on its sovereign debt surging well above seven per cent, there is a rising risk that Italy may soon lose market access. Given that it is too-big-to-fail but also too-big-to-save, this could lead to a forced restructuring of its public debt of €1,900bn.

That would partially address its “stock” problem of large and unsustainable debt but it would not resolve its “flow” problem, a large current account deficit, lack of external competitiveness and a worsening plunge in gross domestic product and economic activity.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/DHGUVV/U1OIBG/06MUC/JE9E86/B5I0BQ/D5/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

24. Berlusconi’s travails knock Mediaset

The private broadcaster owned by the Italian prime minister has been hit by a double whammy

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/0QSDPP/HYFCTK/HI3M9/HYI7WJ/97DBFO/JY/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

12. Market spikes eurozone’s guns

The market upheaval in Europe has made it difficult to increase the firepower of the eurozone’s €440bn rescue fund to the €1,000bn that the bloc’s leaders had hoped for, the fund’s chief executive said on Thursday

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/73UJGG/EXS0KG/1O51V/16OUHI/B5IC7E/D5/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

15. Business confidence evaporates, says Barometer survey

Business confidence in the global economy has evaporated amid the escalating eurozone crisis, according to a survey of executives, leaving a prevailing mood of pessimism in many emerging markets as well as in Europe. More than half the 1,600 business executives surveyed by the FT/Economist Global Business Barometer in October expected global conditions to get worse in the next six months.

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/L9U7W4/87I64/97M6VF/16ZUBY/YT/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

"What is the matter with you?" cried Peter, suddenly afraid.

"It was poisoned, Peter," she told him softly; "and now I am going to be dead."

"O Tink, did you drink it to save me?"

"Yes."

"But why, Tink?"

Her wings would scarcely carry her now, but in reply she alighted on his shoulder and gave his nose a loving bite. She whispered in his ear "You silly ass," and then, tottering to her chamber, lay down on the bed.

His head almost filled the fourth wall of her little room as he knelt near her in distress. Every moment her light was growing fainter; and he knew that if it went out she would be no more. She liked his tears so much that she put out her beautiful finger and let them run over it.

Her voice was so low that at first he could not make out what she said. Then he made it out. She was saying that she thought she could get well again if children believed in fairies.

Peter flung out his arms. There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think: boys and girls in their nighties, and naked papooses in their baskets hung from trees.

"Do you believe?" he cried.

Tink sat up in bed almost briskly to listen to her fate.

She fancied she heard answers in the affirmative, and then again she wasn't sure.

"What do you think?" she asked Peter.

"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."

[Demeter]

13. Syria stops payments to Shell and Total

Syria has stopped paying for oil produced within the country by Royal Dutch Shell and Total, highlighting the economic tensions affecting Bashar al-Assad’s regime after months of pro-democracy protests

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/305P5F/1O51V/KQSQ67/EX9AW2/E4/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

14. Exxon signs Kurd exploration contracts

ExxonMobil has become the first of the “supermajor” oil companies to venture into Kurdistan, in a controversial move that will be seen as a huge vote of confidence in the semi-autonomous region of Iraq but could spark a backlash in Baghdad

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/8P1R88/ORTWJD/A5Q0X/FKYKT0/EX9AWX/YT/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

17. Olympus put on watch for TSE delisting

Japanese group says it will not meet its mandated deadline to release latest results, while local reports say police are now investigating the company

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/LVA6WW/08ZNGU/EKRAI/4C2C98/C4EVR6/9A/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

18. Eurozone woes curb Crédit Agricole profit

French bank reports 65 per cent drop in third-quarter net profits after a bigger than expected hit on Greek sovereign bonds

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/LVA6WW/08ZNGU/EKRAI/4C2C98/PFTI6K/9A/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

19. UBS settles claim on records of short selling

Swiss bank pays $8m over alleged violations of rules aimed at preventing abusive trading, in what could be the first of many cases

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/LVA6WW/08ZNGU/EKRAI/4C2C98/FKSZ35/9A/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

23. Subprime loans come back to haunt HSBC

UK bank faces another bout of losses linked to subprime mortgages in the US as borrowers stop paying their mortgages

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/0QSDPP/HYFCTK/HI3M9/HYI7WJ/L9PM6D/JY/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

20. Thai floods may force decline in PC market

Severe damage to manufacturing facilities and infrastructure have followed monsoons in the country that produces more than 40% of hard-disk drives

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/LVA6WW/08ZNGU/EKRAI/4C2C98/MSUKBE/9A/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

21. Leaders needed, not just managers

In Greece and Italy, a coalition of the old elite, led by a technocrat, will not provide a miracle fix to deeply rooted problems

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/WTC93W/B49CK/5VAVSG/XHCN76/MQ/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

22. Brussels cuts eurozone growth forecasts

European Commission sharply downgrades 2012 growth forecasts for the single currency bloc from 1.8% to 0.5%

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/P75VYY/WTC93W/B49CK/5VAVSG/GDJ7PI/MQ/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=11

[Demeter]

25. Europeans clutch at technocratic fixes

The deeper Europe’s debt crisis becomes, the more European policymakers are clutching at solutions that substitute technocratic government for democracy

Read more >>
http://link.ft.com/r/KC2844/7AKUXD/JQU4J/JE9E8F/JENZ1L/GX/t?a1=2011&a2=11&a3=10

[Demeter]

31. Arms and the Corrupt Man By ANDREW FEINSTEIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/opinion/arms-and-the-corrupt-man.html

London

LAST week’s conviction of Viktor Bout, the so-called Merchant of Death, was a rare moment of triumph in the fight against the illicit arms trade...But it points to the fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of the global trade in weapons: Governments protect corrupt and dangerous arms dealers as long as they need them and then throw them behind bars when they are no longer useful. Arms deals stretch across a continuum of legality and ethics from the formal trade to the gray and black markets. In practice, the boundaries between the three markets are fuzzy. With bribery and corruption de rigueur — a Transparency International study estimated that the arms trade accounted for almost 40 percent of corruption in all global trade — there are very few arms transactions that do not involve illegality, most often through middlemen, agents or dealers like Mr. Bout.

Mr. Bout made fortunes providing “transport and logistical” services — an oft-used euphemism favored by arms dealers — to conflict zones around the world on behalf of governments, the United Nations, large listed companies and myriad covert operators. His clients included, among others, the Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, the Northern Alliance and then the Taliban in Afghanistan, a number of the protagonists in the Balkans, the Angolan government and its mortal enemy the Unita rebel movement, and all sides in the complex conflict that continues to rage in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Bout clearly lived out the credo of the arms merchant: “Sell to anyone who can pay.”

In 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, the American military faced a major problem getting supplies into Baghdad, as planes came under fire and landing conditions became treacherous. The United States and its contractors turned to a range of air cargo suppliers. One of the most consistently used was Irbis Air — an airline owned by Mr. Bout. From 2003 to 2004 alone, Irbis Air conducted hundreds of runs to Baghdad and other Iraqi airports, carrying everything from boots to bullets. Irbis Air landed in Baghdad 92 times between January and May 2004, while also conducting deliveries elsewhere in Iraq. Mr. Bout earned $60 million between 2003 and 2005 — in addition to the free fuel that the United States military gave to regular cargo operators. Mr. Bout’s client list in Iraq made for intriguing and damning reading: The United States Air Mobility Command, Federal Express, Fluor and KBR, among others. At the time Mr. Bout was supposedly wanted by the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as being the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant. Mr. Bout and his airlines were also on the verge of being placed on an American Treasury Asset Freeze list and the Foreign Assets Control list, which outlaws the use of certain contractors. The United States military’s Central Command asked for a week’s delay. It was granted, allowing Mr. Bout to deliver a final shipment of arms and ammunition. Clearly, years later, Washington decided that Mr. Bout’s evils outweighed his benefits, and so began the sting operation that ultimately netted the Russian in 2008.

But as his cell door clanks shut, it is crucial to remember that there are many Viktor Bouts out there, some protected by their own governments, or the governments and intelligence agencies to whom they are useful. Governments must impose greater transparency on the use of middlemen, agents and brokers, including public disclosure of what they are paid and the details of the specific work they have undertaken. Much of this could be addressed by passing a robust version of the International Arms Trade Treaty currently being negotiated at the United Nations...Similarly, banning the use of so-called economic offsets in procurement decisions — promises by arms manufacturers to invest in the buying country’s economy — would close down a major route of bribe payments...And finally, given the close and complex relationships between defense contractors and arms dealers and governments and intelligence agencies, any party participating in arms deals should be banned from making political contributions — a practice that fuels corruption...These changes require political will, which will materialize only if taxpayers who unwittingly bankroll the arms trade make clear to their elected representatives that current practices are unacceptable. Until then, the arms trade will remain hidden behind a veil of national-security-imposed secrecy, continuing to undermine democratic accountability, the rule of law and sometimes even the very national security it is meant to bolster.

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

Andrew Feinstein, a former member of the South African Parliament, is the author of “The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade.”

[xchrom]

33. morning! i'm glad you had fun at euchre...

:donut:

[Demeter]

37. It was so nice to get away from the Crazy

I've been out of the Corporate World for so long, my tolerance for Stupid is non-existent. At least half the Euchre group are Mensans, and the other half Mensa-tolerant. It makes a big difference from the condo board....

[xchrom]

38. ooooh -- i'm jealous -- it really does sound fun.

and to play w/ smart people? even better.

my friends fixed yummy carnitas last night -- so that was my 11-11-11.

[Tansy_Gold]

55. oooooh, ¡carnitas! n/t

[xchrom]

60. i was guilty of gluttony.

there was a lot of it -- and i ate a lot of it.

[xchrom]

36. Staring into the abyss

http://www.economist.com/node/21536872

WHEN BRITAIN ABANDONED the gold standard in 1931, it was not only forsaking a system for managing the currency but also acknowledging that it could no longer bear the mantle of empire. When America broke the dollar’s peg with gold in 1971, it ushered in a decline that continued until Paul Volcker re-established confidence in the currency in the early 1980s. As Joseph Schumpeter, the great Austrian economist, once wrote: “The monetary system of a people reflects everything that the nation wants, does, suffers, is.”

In the same way, the crisis that has engulfed the European Union (EU) is about much more than the euro. As government bonds, share prices and banks swoon and global recession knocks on the door, the first fear is of financial and economic collapse. But to understand what is happening to the currency you also need to look at what is happening to Europe.

The euro will not be safe until Europe answers some fundamental questions that it has run away from for many years. At their root is how its nations should respond to a world that is rapidly changing around them. What will it do as globalisation strips the West of the monopoly over the technologies that have made it rich, and an ageing Europe starts to look increasingly like the western peninsula of a resurgent Asia?

Some Europeans would like to put up carefully designed fences around the EU’s still vast and wealthy market. Others, including a growing number of populist politicians, want to turn their nations inward and shut out not just the world but also the elites’ project of European integration. And a few—from among those same elites, mostly—argue that the only means of paying for Europe’s distinctive way of life is not to evade globalisation but to embrace it wholeheartedly.

[Demeter]

41. Nice Map!

Specious arguments, though. Globalization will turn Europe into America, without the tradition of open arms for emigrants that we used to have.

Britain more or less adapted to having colonials resettle on the Island. But France is simmering with riots, Germans have two classes of people, and the rest are also uneasy.

Europeans are more likely, given their history, to built moats and let down the portcullis.

[xchrom]

43. yeah. -- i think the more homogenous, culture burdened? europe has had

problems w/ immigration, migration, -- how ever you want to view that -- but like in france for example -- it's too late. middle east/african culture is now bone deep.

on november 20 the PP will take over in spain -- THAT should be interesting.

[xchrom]

39. Debt and democracy

http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2011/11/technocrats-take-charge

IT HAS been a very turbulent week for the markets but also a very important week for democracy. The solutions to the European debt crisis seem to sidestep democratic government. The Greeks have appointed a former banker, Lucas Papademos, as prime minister and the Italians seem to be heading for Mario Monti, an academic and former EU commissioner. The idea, presumably, is that these candidates – who stand above the political fray – will be able to take the unpopular decisions that other politicians shrink from.

But using the term “unpopular” for policies implies that most voters don’t agree with them. Perhaps this is an inevitable problem with democracy. Politicians secure support from voters by offering them goodies – benefits, jobs in the public sector, tax breaks for particular activities (like home ownership) and so on. Once granted, these goodies are regarded as rights, and the recipients become a powerful constituency against change.

It is hard to form a constituency for reform. Taxpayers are not a uniform group; many will also be recipients of public largesse. This is true of the corporate sector, as well, which benefits from tax-deductibility of interest payments, defence spending, infrastructure spending and so on. So taxpayers may be in favour of deficit-cutting in aggregate but against specific proposals for cuts.

In the US, deficit-cutting has been punted to a super-committee to get round this problem, with the threat of across-the-board cuts if they fail to agree. This is at least democratic, in the sense that Congress voted for it. But rules that one Congress agreed to, another can set aside.



*** this is interesting to me -- because i believe our {The West} democratic institutions have failed -- and that we are in an in between space of what ever comes next.

[Demeter]

42. Failed--or Been Sabotaged?

The guardians of our democracies have been bought, corrupted, and not to benefit our nations, but to support Banksters in their little games of Empire-building.

To see one bankster after another steal a sovereign nation as his own little play-toy, is to see a future world in flames, as the Banksters as a class are killed in hot-blooded revolutions. Banksters have no interest in people. But nation-states are not corporations.

I think this will be the lesson that Banksters never grasped before, because before, they never had the delusion that they knew anything about government. Government is people, and banksters don't handle people--they destroy them. It would be very amusing, if I were an alien from another star system, watching from the safety of outer space....

[xchrom]

45. i'm thinking it's both.

i think the BP spill will long reign as one giant example of failure -- as well as the banksters.

all of my neighbors are EPA employees -- oy, the stories they tell.
it's one fucked up place.

[Demeter]

47. I had a friend in the 80's who worked for EPA

It was just as bad then.

[xchrom]

48. it's turned into a kind of monument to our corruption, ineptness,

complacency, etc...

maybe i'm crazy -- but it seems to me we used to be able to govern better -- let reason and rationality over ride interests.

[Demeter]

40. Mayor "1%" Bloomberg Tries to Make it Harder for Homeless to Get Into Shelters (Temporary Reprieve )

http://www.alternet.org/story/153040/mayor_%221%22_bloomberg%27s_administration_tries_to_make_it_harder_for_homeless_to_get_into_shelters_%28temporary_reprieve_granted%29?page=entire

New York's Department of Homeless Services has tried to launch a new policy restricting access to shelters. Last week the Bloomberg administration announced new eligibility rules that would make it harder for homeless people to get into city shelters, a cost-cutting measure astutely timed to coincide with the approach of winter. After a major outcry by homeless advocates and city council members including Speaker Christine Quinn, the city agreed last night to delay the measure pending a court review on December 9th...Under the policy, originally set to go into effect next week, the city could refuse someone a bed at a shelter unless they proved they had no other housing options, such as staying with relatives or friends. Department of Homeless Services commissioner Seth Diamond claimed the new eligibility guidelines would prevent people who have alternatives to the shelter (like a princely spot on someone's floor) from filling up space reserved for the chronically homeless. Critics pointed out that redefining what counts as "homeless" and throwing bureaucratic obstacles at people in desperate financial straits is not the same thing as actually combatting homelessness.

Council member Annabel Palma and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn slammed the policy in a joint statement, saying it is, "cruel, risky, unacceptable, and will not reduce homelessness in the city of New York. Denying people shelter because they have found another option for some period of time is punishing people for trying to do the right thing...The recession has had a real effect on unemployment and on people's ability to stay in their homes -- our charge is to find ways to help these people -- not to send them into the streets with nowhere to turn to for help," the statement continued. The Legal Aid Society and Coalition for the Homeless vowed to fight the new guidelines in court, claiming they violate a three-decade old decree established by the court case Callahan v. Carey guaranteeing the availability of shelter for the homeless.

Mary Brosnahan, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement in response to the city's temporary hold, "Today's agreement is a welcome reprieve from the mayor's dangerous proposal that would have meant more homeless sleeping in the streets and the subways this winter. Instead of erecting barriers to shelter, the Bloomberg administration should focus on reducing the record levels of homelessness in New York City."

....

Meanwhile, a report by Coalition for the Homeless released Wednesday found that the numbers of unhoused New Yorkers have shot up to their highest in three decades -- 41,000 adults and kids sleeping in shelters -- according to data analyzed by the group's researchers. The Coalition points out that the Bloomberg administration's decision last spring to eliminate housing assistance programs for homeless families has not helped matters.

.....

"It's an unbelievably dangerous policy that will result in vulnerable New Yorkers being denied emergency shelter. With the winter cold, sleeping on the streets can be a matter of life and death," Patrick Markee, senior policy researcher at Coalition for the Homeless, told AlterNet. "It's just a new mechanism by which the city can deny shelter, even when there's not evidence these people have options," he continued...A report prepared by the City Council ahead of a Wednesday hearing on the measure laid out the process that would be used to determine eligibility. Applicants have to fill out papers and undergo a two-hour interview, detailing their housing history for the past two years, which could be tough for people living on the street, as Markee points out. The added bureaucracy could discourage the mentally ill or people with substance abuse problems from applying. Applicants deemed uncooperative can be disqualified. A letter from an applicant's family stating that they are not, in fact, willing to take them in, does not constitute proof of need. Similar eligibility requirements have been in place for unhoused families for years -- long enough for housing advocates to study the impact of the policy. The results are not impressive, according to the city's report, which says DHS regularly fails to accurately assess whether families have viable alternatives to the shelter. Families denied access to homeless facilities often ended up reapplying, suggesting that they did not have anywhere else to go...That does not bode well for the new rules, which are just the latest in a long string of controversial homelessness policies initiated by the Bloomberg administration; others include making people pay rent to stay at a shelter and eliminating housing vouchers for homeless families.

"More New Yorkers have experienced homelessness under Bloomberg than any mayor since homelessness began," said Markee, calling the administration's policies "An absolute and historic failure."

I NOMINATE MAYOR BLOOMBERG FOR THE FRSP!

[Demeter]

44. 3 Ways Elites Rig the System

http://www.alternet.org/story/153025/3_ways_elites_rig_the_system?page=entire


From low capital gains taxes to stock buy-backs, here are the ways the elites ensure the markets benefit them...A growing number of Americans suspect that the American economic system is rigged in favor of the rich and merely affluent. That growing number of Americans is right. Here are three of the many ways that markets for compensation are rigged to benefit not only the top 1 percent but also the top 10 percent, a group that includes many well-paid professionals:

• Financial sector compensation. By now the phrase “too big to fail” has become so familiar that it is known by its acronym: TBTF. What needs to be emphasized is that TBTF is the basis for the huge bonuses paid to elite American bankers who benefit from a government that socializes their losses while allowing them to keep their profits. Here’s their business model: “We place highly leveraged bets, sometimes as much as 35 or 40 to 1. In return, the government implicitly agrees to bail out our banks, and if we’re fired, we’ve negotiated sweetheart deals with golden parachutes. If we bet right, then our banks keep the windfall profits and we get big bonuses. If we bet wrong, not to worry — the taxpayers will bail out our banks and the government will pay for the cost of the bailouts by cutting Social Security and Medicare. Suckers!” While TBTF rigs pre-tax income for financial elites, American tax law rigs their after-tax income to their benefit. In the 1980s, capital gains tax rates were equal to income tax rates. But then in the 1990s Clinton and the Republican Congress lowered the capital gains rates. So billionaires who derive most of their money from their investments and savings pay taxes at a lower rate than the majority of Americans, who, like Warren Buffett’s proverbial secretary, rely on their labor income.
  
  Andrew Mellon, who dominated American economic policymaking as treasury secretary in the 1920s during the administrations of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, was denounced by the liberal reformers of his day as the embodiment of plutocracy. But here is what he had to say about taxing capital versus wages in his 1924 book, “Taxation: The People’s Business”:

  The fairness of taxing more lightly income from wages, salaries or from investments is beyond question. In the first case, the income is uncertain and limited in duration; sickness or death destroys it and old age diminishes it; in the other, the source of income continues; the income may be disposed of during a man’s life and it descends to his heirs.
  
  Surely we can afford to make a distinction between the people whose only capital is their mental and physical energy and the people whose income is derived from investments. Such a distinction would mean much to millions of American workers and would be an added inspiration to the man who must provide a competence during his few productive years to care for himself and his family when his earnings capacity is at an end.

  To which today’s conservatives, no doubt, would reply: “Andrew Mellon was a liberal!”
  
  
• CEO compensation. In the last generation, American CEOs have been much better paid than their European and Asian counterparts, without having done remarkably better jobs. American CEO compensation is rigged with perfect legality by two practices. The first is allowing the compensation of CEOs to be determined by boards of directors, whose members are frequently cronies of the CEO. Well-paid cronies, in many cases. You can be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for attending a few board meetings and rubber-stamping whatever your friend the CEO wants. When the Sarbanes-Oxley Act sought to impose more responsibility on board members, this was denounced as an assault on the foundations of free enterprise. Freebie enterprise, is more like it...CEO compensation is also inflated by the practice of stock buy-backs. Several decades ago, the practice of rewarding CEOs with company stock options was supposed to improve the performance of their companies and of the American economy as a whole. American companies routinely and legally drive up the prices of their stock by buying back shares in the stock market. This is the equivalent of a celebrity author buying mass quantities of his or her own book, in the hope of driving it up best-seller lists. Stock buy-backs do not strengthen the company or lead to innovation. They merely inflate the wealth of the CEO and other company employees who are paid with stock options...Long-term shareholders might object, but they are a dying breed. Most shareholders want to maximize the price of stocks before they cash out by selling them to the proverbial “greater fool.” Thanks to buy-backs, stock options have aligned the interests of CEOs and shareholders — but at the expense of prudent, long-term investment in American companies and American industries.
  
  
• Professional compensation. Bailed-out bankers and crony capitalist CEOs are not the only Americans who benefit from rigged markets for compensation. Let’s not forget the professional class, which makes up roughly 10 percent of the population (the approximate number of Americans with graduate or professional degrees)...The professions are guilds. To put it another way, they are the most powerful unions in America. They are unions for the affluent. They rig labor markets the way that guilds have always done — by preventing anybody who doesn’t belong to the guild from practicing the trade...In most states of the Union, you can’t practice law or medicine without both passing exams and possessing a medical degree or a law degree. In the early 20th century, law was an undergraduate degree. Then law schools began requiring four-year college education as a prerequisite, in order to keep the lawyer labor market tight by weeding out Americans who can’t afford at least seven years of higher education. While raking in rents from their credentials, America’s affluent professionals are delegating more and more of their work to poorly paid subordinates — nurses and health aides, paralegals, adjuncts. While gouging students and parents with high tuitions, today’s universities and colleges assign more and more teaching to “freeway fliers” — often graduate students paid near-poverty wages or affluent professionals who teach as a hobby. God forbid that a well-paid, tenured professor should have to teach undergraduates, instead of jetting to conferences in luxury hotels.

Note that none of these methods of rigging the market to artificially inflate incomes — TBTF, stock buy-backs that drive up stock options, the professional credentials cartel — can be blamed on capitalism or markets. There are still genuine entrepreneurs who get rich by founding companies that provide new and useful goods and services, and there are still genuine capitalists who get rich by investing in them. But getting rich the old-fashioned way by getting customers to buy what you sell is hard, compared to paying politicians to rig markets and tax policies in your favor....Once upon a time, rigged market capitalism in America benefited the many, and not just the few. Between the 1930s, the New Deal raised the wages of working-class Americans by rigging labor markets in their favor. From the 1920s the New Dealers inherited a system of low immigration, which lasted until the 1970s and helped to create tighter labor markets at the bottom. The black Southern poor who moved North in the Great Migration benefited disproportionately when jobs were opened up for them by the cutoff of mass European immigration. The New Deal’s minimum wage and maximum hours legislation helped millions of the working poor to join the working class or middle class. And liberal New Deal Democrats promoted unions in peace and war, with the result that by the 1950s about a third of the private sector workforce was unionized (today it is less than 7 percent).

Beginning with Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government has systematically derigged labor markets for the many while rigging compensation markets even more for the elite few. Mass immigration, including mass illegal immigration, resumed after the 1960s, lowering wages for the poorest workers and weakening the ability of unions to organize. In the late 20th century, Congress allowed inflation to erode the real value of the minimum wage. Even after several increases, it is still lower, in real terms, than it was in the 1960s. And having effectively destroyed private-sector unions, the right is now trying to eliminate public sector unions, on the theory that schoolteachers and emergency responders are a much greater threat to the American economy than the reckless bankers who created a near-Depression and the CEOs who are rewarded for offshoring one industry after another. What is rigged can be derigged; that is the lesson of the derigging of the institutions that raised the incomes of the American middle and working classes, between the Great Depression and the 1980s. TBTF can be eliminated, either by allowing giant, interconnected financial institutions to fail, or, more realistically, by turning them into tightly regulated public utilities that don’t make risky bets. CEO compensation practices can be reformed by law. Corporations are creations of the governments that charter them, and charters can contain any rules that lawmakers choose to put into them. And the rents extracted by the academic-professional complex can be reduced, by lowering the barriers to entry to the professions or, more radically, by reorganizing medicine, law and university teaching so that they are no longer structured as trades run by medieval guilds.

Of course, to succeed, this agenda has to be promoted by politicians, many of whom are members of the credentialed professional guilds, dependent on campaign donations from financial and corporate elites whose compensation depends to a large degree on markets that are legally rigged.

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

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."

[Demeter]

46. Resolution That Would Have Overturned Net Neutrality Rules Is Blocked in Senate

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/729373/score_one_for_the_open_internet%3A_resolution_that_would_have_overturned_net_neutrality_rules_is_blocked_in_senate/#paragraph6

Some great news today on the net neutrality front:

The Senate voted, 46-52, against moving forward with a resolution that would overturn federal regulations that govern anticompetitive behavior online....

Democrats opposed the resolution, arguing that the FCC’s rules are necessary to prevent large corporations from throttling Internet access.

“The FCC’s Open Internet rules mean that small entrepreneurs will not have to seek permission from broadband providers to reach new markets and consumers with innovative products and services,” Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said during debate on the Senate floor on Wednesday. “Far from preventing investment, the FCC’s Open Internet rules will foster small businesses and support their demonstrated ability to create jobs.”

If you'd like to learn more about why net neutrality matters, check out this excellent primer from the Save the Internet Coalition.

http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/11/11/03/net-neutrality-what-you-need-know

[Po_d Mainiac]

62. This wood be a no-brainer if it wasn't for NFLX.

But their business plan revolves around choking off available bandwidth without building additional infrastructure. The same is true for some ad feeds.

This may or may not be a problem in urban areas. But when you're on the end of the line, and just inside the DSL availability zone, the wires look like a python swallowing a pig.
YMMV

[Demeter]

65. Morning, Po!

How's the snow? We actually saw flakes this week, but the ground's too warm for it to stick. The ponds haven't even frozen a bit yet.

[Demeter]

51. Europe’s Crash Landing By Mike Whitney

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article29693.htm

“Italy is now mathematically beyond the point of no return.”

–Barclays Capital

November 11, 2011 -- The situation in Europe gets more depressing by the day. Policymakers have waited too long and now events are beyond their control. The only way to avert a disorderly breakup and another Great Depression is by deploying the European Central Bank (ECB) to backstop the debt of the individual countries, and even that might not work. New ECB chief Mario Draghi must announce his intention to keep interest rates down regardless of the cost. Blanket guarantees are the only way to stop the bleeding. But acting as lender of last resort will not stop the contagion; it will merely minimize the damage. The dissolution of the eurozone is a foregone conclusion. It’s only a matter of time. Here’s an excerpt from an article by Edward Harrison over at Credit Writedowns:

“… it’s game over for the euro zone. The extend and pretend stuff ain’t gonna work…. if you are an investor, this is the moment of truth. Everything – every asset class – depends on how the euro zone performs in the Italian Job. There are only two outcomes, here. If Italy blows up, a Depression is upon us; banks would be insolvent, CDS triggers would implode the system, bank runs would begin, stock markets would crash, and you will would see sovereign debt yields go to unbelievable lows for nations with a lender of last resort.” (“Italy, Italy, Italy”, Edward Harrison, Credit Writedowns)

Yields on Italian debt are soaring while overall economic conditions continue to deteriorate. The eurozone is sliding fast into recession if it isn’t in one already. The EU’s ill-considered austerity measures have increased deflationary pressures and slowed growth. Credit is shrinking while bank balance sheets dip deeper into the red. This is why the ECB intervened in Thursday’s auction of Italian and Spanish debt and loaded up on both hoping to calm the markets and stop the panic. This is from Reuters:

“Traders said the European Central Bank increased its bond buying, but the ECB’s hard-line chief economist told regional governments not to expect the bank to rescue them with unlimited funds.

A sale on Italian debt went smoothly, but worries persisted that Italy’s borrowing costs were unsustainable. The pullback in yields helped support market sentiment.” (Reuters)

Stocks rose on the news that the ECB would announce more bond purchases in a press statement later on Thursday, but expectations are probably too high. Demand has dropped off sharply while the rout continues apace. This is from Der Spiegel:

“Run for your lives” is the new motto in Europe, and not just among banks and insurance companies, which are selling off southern European bonds as quickly as they can, but also among ordinary holders of savings accounts. Banks and regulatory agencies are noticing that anxious citizens throughout Europe are trying to bring their money to safety. The flight of capital from Italy, Spain and Greece is in full swing.

Aside from the ECB, there are no longer many buyers of Italian treasury bonds. It is clear that most investors are trying to reduce their inventories — if they can find someone to take the paper off their hands. It is almost as if buyers were boycotting Italian bonds. (‘Run For Your Lives’; Euro Zone Considers Solution of Last Resort, Der Spiegel)

The ECB has been playing cat-and-mouse with its bond purchases, waiting for the Italian parliament to signal it would pass economic reforms on pensions and labor. These punitive reforms will be pushed through by the man who will likely replace deposed PM Silvio Berlusconi, Mario Monti, who was formerly the European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission and a member of the Bilderberg Group...Berlusconi’s abdication has had no noticeable effect on the markets nor has the so-called “breakthrough” agreement that was announced more than 2 weeks ago in Brussels. The plan called for the establishment of a $1 trillion eurozone financial emergency fund (EFSF) to address problems that flare up like the Italian bond crisis. As expected, there’s a good deal of disagreement about how the fund should be implemented or from where the resources will come. So far, the only country to purchase bonds from the EFSF has been Japan, and they’ve already lost money on the deal. That’s not an encouraging sign for a fund that is supposed to save the eurozone.

Imagine if Henry Paulson–instead of nationalizing Fannie and Freddie when they were about to blow–had decided to set up a structured investment vehicle funded by issuing bonds to China that would cover 20 per cent first-loss provision on Fannie mortgage-backed securities. Do you think investors still would have held on to their Fannie bonds? No way. There would have been a run on the bank. And yet, this absurd invention is the Eurocrats’ solution to the crisis...The reason that investors are ditching Italian debt is not because of Italy’s debt-to-GDP ratio (which is currently 120 percent.) No, it’s much simpler than that. Investors purchase government bonds because they believe they are risk-free. Now, however, they’ve discovered that Italian bonds are not risk free, in fact, a default could mean that they would retrieve very little of their original outlay. So, why buy them?

The problem is easy to fix. It’s just a matter of allowing the ECB to act as guarantor of the debt of the individual states. (which is what the Fed did for the entire financial system after Lehman collapsed) But the ECB doesn’t want this power because it would preclude the bank from imposing its austerity regime on the member-states while claiming it has no choice to act otherwise. As it stands, the ECB is the perfect tool for spreading neoliberalism throughout the eurozone, and that is precisely what it’s doing...What’s remarkable about the “debt crisis” is that it was entirely predictable. Many economists warned from the very onset that the monetary union was structurally flawed and wouldn’t work without greater political and fiscal integration. Many critics, like Wynne Godley, focused on the eurozone’s absence of a lender of last resort. Here’s how he summed it up back in 1992:

“If a government does not have its own central bank on which it can draw cheques freely, its expenditures can be financed only by borrowing in the open market in competition with businesses, and this may prove excessively expensive or even impossible, particularly under conditions of extreme emergency….The danger then, is that the budgetary restraint to which governments are individually committed will impart a disinflationary bias that locks Europe as a whole into a depression it is powerless to lift.” (“The Greatest Prediction of the last 20 Years,” Pragmatic Capitalism)

Indeed. Italy and the other countries are in dire straits because they do not control their own currency and, thus, cannot control their own fate. They are entirely at the mercy of the ECB. Is it any wonder why restructuring is never seriously considered (because it would cost the banks and bondholders money) or why there’s been no attempt to create a stimulus program that will lift the struggling states in the south out of their slump and back into the black? The ECB refuses to use the tools that are available to it because its overall policy objectives are already being achieved. Internal devaluation and belt-tightening are the path to privatization, fewer social services, and cheaper labor, exactly what the bankers want.

So, where is all this headed?

I’ll let The Economist have the last word. This is from an article by Ryan Avent in the current issue titled “Finito?”:

“I have been examining and re-examining the situation, trying to find the potential happy ending. It isn’t there. The euro zone is in a death spiral. Markets are abandoning the periphery, including Italy, which is the world’s eighth largest economy and third largest bond market. This is triggering margin calls and leading banks to pull credit from the European market. This, in turn, is damaging the European economy, which is already being squeezed by the austerity programmes adopted in every large euro-zone economy. A weakening economy will damage revenues, undermining efforts at fiscal consolidation, further driving away investors and potentially triggering more austerity. The cycle will continue until something breaks. Eventually, one economy or another will face a true bank run and severe capital flight and will be forced to adopt capital controls. At that point, it will effectively be out of the euro area. What happens next isn’t clear, but it’s unlikely to be pretty.” (“Finito?, The Economist)

The chances of the eurozone surviving in its present form are slim to none.

[Demeter]

52. The Phantom of the Opera- The Point of No Return

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jwXUn89SIo

[Demeter]

53. Congress Members Took Part in Insider Trading: Abramoff By Eamon Javers

http://www.cnbc.com/id/45249857

As many as a dozen members of Congress and their aides took part in insider trading based on foreknowledge of market moving information on Capitol Hill, disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff told CNBC in an interview.

Abramoff, who was once one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbyists in Washington before a corruption scandal sent him to federal prison for more than three years, said that many of those members of Congress bragged to him about their stock trading prowess while dining at the exclusive restaurant he owned on Pennsylvania Avenue.

But Abramoff, whose black trench coat and fedora became one of the most notorious images in recent Washington history after his fall from grace, said he didn't play the stock market himself — he considered it an inherently unfair "casino" in which the house had far more information than the players. Abramoff made most of his fortune representing — and, as it turned out, duping — Native American tribes rich with cash from casino operations.

The former lobbyist said the amounts members of Congress earned trading off their inside knowledge ranged from as little as $2,000 to, as much as "several hundred thousand dollars," that was claimed by one member of Congress.

Abramoff declined to name the members of Congress...

[xchrom]

54. US CEOs meet with China president

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_APEC_US_CHINA?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-11-12-00-27-51

HONOLULU (AP) -- A small group of executives from some of the largest U.S. companies met privately with Chinese President Hu Jintao on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation CEO Summit to discuss trade, protecting intellectual property rights and challenges facing the world's two largest economies.

The meeting late Thursday included heads of 14 companies, including Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Johnson & Johnson Chairman and CEO William Weldon, Eli Lily and Co. Chairman, President and CEO John Lechleiter, Walmart Asia President and CEO Scott Price and Dow Chemical Co. Asia Pacific President Pat Dawson.

The group raised various issues with Hu, who was in Hawaii to attend the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

"Certainly the economic giants, China and the United States, will be competing with each other for many, many years to come. We need to find a way to do that within the parameters of the international trading schemes," said Doug Oberhelman, chairman and CEO of Caterpillar, who participated. "And if we do that, the pie will get bigger and I think and that was one of his key messages."

[Demeter]

57. Some Kind of Shakedown / Intimidation, I'll Wager

Typical Corporate Subtlety.

[xchrom]

58. it seems to me that modern china -- post mao china -- is built on the wealth

of european and american corporations.

i kinda feel like there is no 'america' or 'china' -- it's one massive corporate amoeba.

[Demeter]

61. Numbers, xchrom

Numerical superiority. It's not like the West could do a Libya on mainland China. The Corporations have bit off more than they can chew.

[xchrom]

64. ain't that right! nt

[Demeter]

56. U.S. Tourism's 'Lost Decade' Cost Some 500,000 Jobs

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/11/10/us-tourisms-lost-decade-cost-some-500000-jobs

NOT TO MENTION THE THOUSANDS OF SMALL BUSINESSES

The travel industry today became the latest to slam federal rules and bureaucracy, charging that tough visa rules for potential tourists have robbed the nation of $600 billion and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Two grim facts: More Chinese now visit France than the United States, in part because it's hard to get a U.S. visitors visa. And while the U.S. used to be the destination for 17 percent of the world's tourists in 2000, that's dropped to 12.4 percent and shows no sign of changing.

"Even as world travel grew by more than 60 million travelers between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. share of the market remained essentially flat. During this 'lost decade,' our economy squandered an opportunity to gain $606 billion in total spending from 78 million additional visitors—enough to support 467,000 more jobs annually," said a new report out this afternoon from the U.S. Travel Association....The key issue: The U.S. is slow to issue visas, especially since 9/11, and visitors from distant nations are going elsewhere. Among the key problems are the post-9/11 requirement that visa applicants be interviewed before traveling and a lack of visa offices. In China, for example, 20 cities with 20 million or more citizens have no U.S. visa office.

To reverse the slide, travel officials today unveiled a broad plan to speed the issuance of visas, potentially leading to the creation of 1.3 million new jobs and additional economic output of over $850 billion. The key suggestions on the plan dubbed "Ready for Takeoff" include:

— A presidential directive to boost tourism from countries like China, Brazil, and India.

— Have the State Department do more to promote travel to the United States.

— Hire 440 new consular offices and put them in China, Brazil, and India over the next five years.

— Allow existing visa holders, including many business travelers and student and exchange visitors, to renew visas in the United States instead of returning to their home countries to do so.

— Utilize demand management tools and techniques to analyze and predict periods of high user demand and lower wait times.

AND IT DOESN'T DO ANYTHING FOR THE US REPUTATION, EITHER. VISITORS CAN BE FRIENDS BY EXPOSURE TO OUR COUNTRY....

[Demeter]

59. MUSICAL INTERLUDE FOR OUR FALLEN

If I Die Tomorrow (military music video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDh5eoiRJlk&feature=related

Band of Brothers - Won't Back Down - Eminem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvRLLoa2FzQ&feature=related

U.S. Army Rangers - Till I Collapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--hO9w8a2TA&feature=fvwrel

[Demeter]

63. Military Wives Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZEb5Ohry1Q

[Demeter]

66. In The End-Military Music Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l0Oy8WbazQ

[Demeter]

67. Official US Propaganda Movie "Prelude to War" Video WWII

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=D06nAlndT10

[Demeter]

70. Why We Fight (VIDEO)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=c_VD0pE37vo

- http://documentariestowatch.blogspot.com/

[Demeter]

75. Bullet With A Name (military music video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVvYkx8vX0M

[Demeter]

77. 47 military bands are on the Red Square

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0bH8tizNEc&feature=relmfu

Watch elite Kremlin guards on parade

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JKs3OmiwiY&feature=relmfu

Military parade on Red Square - full version!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0VU3KXJaRU&feature=relmfu

FULL VIDEO of Military Parade in Moscow on Victory Day 2010 - Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxPAdmlZCHI&feature=relmfu

[xchrom]

73. "Junk" beckons after S&P negative shift for Hungary

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/uk-hungary-ratings-sp-idUKTRE7AB0EA20111112

(Reuters) - Standard and Poor's has placed Hungary's sovereign rating on negative credit watch, citing unpredictable policy moves and a weak growth outlook and increasing the chances of a cut to "junk" status also threatened on Friday by fellow agency Fitch.

Hungary's centre-right government, which shocked markets with a string of unorthodox policy moves since deciding not to renew a funding agreement with international lenders last year, said a downgrade would not be justified.

"Just two days ago the European Commission declared that the Hungarian budget deficit will be below 3 percent, which only seven European Union member states will be able to show next year," the Prime Minister's spokesman, Peter Szijjarto said in a statement.

Analysts said the growing prospect of a downgrade to "junk" could weaken the forint currency and push government bond yields higher when markets reopen on Monday, even if investors have already factored in the possibility to some extent.

[xchrom]

74. Insight: China commods gamble heightens property threat

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/11/us-china-commodities-financing-idUKTRE7AA0E820111111

(Reuters) - Sitting in China's copper and steel warehouses is a hidden risk to the world's second-largest economy -- banks' indirect exposure to a property market that is showing signs of stress.

Since late 2010, Chinese entrepreneurs and state firms have used trade loans to import goods such as copper and soybeans, which they have then quickly sold or used as collateral for further loans, skirting government credit curbs.

Many lent that cash in informal markets, earning as much as 70 percent interest -- a nice return given that bank fees and commissions on letters of credit (LC) can be as low as 3 percent for established companies, and allow payment some six months down the line.

With a chunk of their loans business in lockdown after Beijing clamped down on lending, especially for the property sector, banks found such trade financing an attractive alternative as it had not fallen under the central bank's ever-tightening restrictions.

[xchrom]

76. Calls for more WTO-style reforms in China

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/us-china-summit-preview-idUKTRE7AB0AD20111112

(Reuters) - Ten years after joining the World Trade Organization, China has clearly gained -- it is now the world's second-biggest economy -- but foreign multinationals and Chinese reformers alike worry that the drive to open its markets has stalled.

Rather than building on its WTO commitments to open new sectors, the focus has shifted to regulations designed to protect domestic state-owned champions, the critics argue.

That complaint has taken on new urgency given the darkening clouds over the European and U.S. economies. Both multinationals and China's mostly private export firms will now have to rely on the Chinese market for growth.

"This problem (of favoring the state sector at the expense of private businesses) still has not been resolved, and that could lead to real problems as China's market and economy develop," Long Yongtu, the lead negotiator in China's WTO entry, told a recent conference.

[Demeter]

78. Washington vs the Rest of America: When Will Politicians Realize the 99% Demand a Just System?

BY Robert Reich

http://www.alternet.org/story/152965/washington_vs_the_rest_of_america%3A_when_will_politicians_realize_the_99_demand_a_just_system%2C_not_cynical_tinkering_at_the_edges?akid=7820.227380.tHOpsh&rd=1&t=15

I'D GUESS---WHEN JUSTICE IS FINALLY DONE UNTO THEM! DEMETER



The biggest question in America these days is how to revive the economy. The biggest question among activists now occupying Wall Street and dozens of other cities is how to strike back against the nation’s almost unprecedented concentration of income, wealth, and political power in the top 1 percent....The two questions are related. With so much income and wealth concentrated at the top, the vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. (People could pretend otherwise as long as they could treat their homes as ATMs, but those days are now gone.) The result is prolonged stagnation and high unemployment as far as the eye can see. Until we reverse the trend toward inequality, the economy can’t be revived.

But the biggest question in our nation’s capital right now has nothing to do with any of this. It’s whether Congress’s so-called “Supercommittee” – six Democrats and six Republicans charged with coming up with $1.2 trillion in budget savings — will reach agreement in time for the Congressional Budget Office to score its proposal, which must then be approved by Congress before Christmas recess in order to avoid an automatic $1.5 trillion in budget savings requiring major across-the-board cuts starting in 2013. Have your eyes already glazed over? Diffident Democrats on the Supercommittee have already signaled a willingness to cut Medicare, Social Security, and much else that Americans depend on. The deal is being held up by Regressive Republicans who won’t raise taxes on the rich – not even a tiny bit. President Obama, meanwhile, is out on the stump trying to sell his “jobs bill” – which would, by the White House’s own estimate, create fewer than 2 million jobs. Yet 14 million people are out of work, and another 10 million are working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs. Republicans have already voted down his jobs bill anyway. The disconnect between Washington and the rest of the nation hasn’t been this wide since the late 1960s.

The two worlds are on a collision course: Americans who are losing their jobs or their pay and can’t pay their bills are growing increasingly desperate. Washington insiders, deficit hawks, regressive Republicans, diffident Democrats, well-coiffed lobbyists, and the lobbyists’ wealthy patrons on Wall Street and in corporate suites haven’t a clue or couldn’t care less. I can’t tell you when the collision will occur but I’d guess 2012. Look elsewhere around the world and you see a similar collision unfolding. The details differ but the larger forces are similar. You see it in Spain, Greece, and Italy, whose citizens are being squeezed by bankers insisting on austerity. You see it in Chile and Israel, whose young people are in revolt. In the Middle East, whose “Arab spring” is becoming a complex Arab fall and winter. Even in China, whose young and hourly workers are demanding more – and whose surge toward inequality in recent years has been as breathtaking as is its surge toward modern capitalism.

Will 2012 go down in history like other years that shook the foundations of the world’s political economy – 1968 and 1989? I spent part of yesterday in Oakland, California. The Occupier movement is still in its infancy in the United States, but it cannot be stopped. Here, as elsewhere, people are outraged at what feels like a rigged game – an economy that won’t respond, a democracy that won’t listen, and a financial sector that holds all the cards. Here, as elsewhere, the people are rising.

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

Robert B. Reich has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He also served on President Obama's transition advisory board. His latest book is Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. His homepage is www.robertreich.org.

[Demeter]

79. Why David Brooks Is Totally Wrong About Income Inequality and the 99%

http://www.alternet.org/story/152980/why_david_brooks_is_totally_wrong_about_income_inequality_and_the_99?page=entire

Brooks' latest tries to dismiss the conflict between the 99% and the 1% -- here's why he gets it wrong....When I saw that the most-emailed article at the New York Times a couple of days ago was a David Brooks piece titled “The Wrong Inequality,” my heart sank a little. After I read the article, in which Brooks claims that the focus on “blue state” inequality between the super-elite and the rest has crowded out discussion of “red state” inequality between people who have and haven’t graduated from college, my heart sank a little more.

Brooks is peddling a premise—that differing levels of education are the cause of the most important inequalities in America today— that threatens to give ammunition to those who would seek to weaken the power of the 99 percent...Brooks claims there are "two inequalities" in America today: "Blue Inquality," as experienced in big cities, where a tiny fraction of elites have zoomed ahead of everyone else, and "Red Inequality," as experienced in the rest of the country, where the main divide is between college graduates and high school graduates. While the Occupy protests have focused attention on the former inequality, Brooks argues, the latter is actually more important. Of course, it's true that there are significant differences in income and quality of life among the 99 percent that the slogan can obscure. The gap in opportunity between those with and without college educations remains problematic, even if it’s not growing anywhere near as fast as that between the 1 percent and the rest. Not going to college should not doom you to a lifetime of unemployment, poor nutrition and inadequate healthcare. It’s also true that family structure and educational attainment are often replicated across generations.

Usually, I'd be thrilled that Brooks is writing about this kind of inequality—that is, if he weren’t suggesting we forget about the “blue state” inequality between the 1 percent and the 99 percent in the process. What Brooks fails to mention is that these two forms of inequality fundamentally stem from the same imbalance in the American economy and political system--you don't have to live in the same city as the 1 percent to have been negatively affected by their meteoric rise....Paul Krugman, though he doesn’t explicitly take Brooks to task, totally dismantles his argument with a couple of simple graphs (SEE FOLLOWING POST) showing that while the gap between the college-educated and the non-educated has risen slightly over the past 20 years, the gap between the top 1 percent and everyone else has positively exploded. There’s a reason the slogan is “We are the 99 percent,” and it’s not just that snobby liberal arts majors in blue state cities (like, er, Houston?) are scornful of business-school types.

Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explicitly made this point in a largely sympathetic critique of Larry Bartels’s study of inequality and political power, Unequal Democracy, noting that while Bartels measured the growth in inequality between those at the 80th percentile of income and those at the 20th, the real growth was undeniably among the top 1 percent of earners. And as economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have emphasized, inequality gets even worse the higher you go. That is, the top 10 percent of the 1 percent earns an even more disproportionate amount of income, with the top .1 percent of Americans receiving an astonishing 7.7 percent of total income. And the gain in income among the top 1 percent came almost entirely at the expense of the bottom 80 percent--not solely at the expense of those without college educations. Plus, while Brooks trots out a favorite conservative explanation for income disparity—family structure—single parenthood bears basically zero responsibility for the massive growth in income inequality, as Timothy Noah explained in his excellent series on inequality at Slate a few months back. As Noah points out, a 2008 study by Harvard sociologists Bruce Western, Deirdre Bloome and Christine Percheski demonstrates that while single parenthood did contribute to increased income inequality between 1975-2005, the effect was canceled out by the increased employment among single mothers, while within-group inequality rose regardless of family structure. As they write, “shifts in educational inequality, family structure, and women’s employment explain only a little of the growth in income inequality….no skill level or family type was spared from the rising heterogeneity of incomes.” Indeed, the relationship between single parenthood and income inequality may go the other way around. As Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect notes, the influential sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that the decline of the two-parent family structure in the black community, and increasingly among working-class whites, resulted from the decline in well-paying, stable, blue-collar jobs, itself a result of deunionization and deregulation. And make no mistake: deunionization and deregulation have affected everyone, even those who aren’t members of unions. While the college-educated have fared better than those without college degrees, the status of even well-educated and upper-middle-class households is more precarious than ever. As Gabriel Winant wrote on Salon back in May, the cross-class alliances that progressives are trying to build now are based on increasing recognition that people from a wide variety of educational and professional backgrounds are, as Winant puts it, “in the same fight”—the fight to protect jobs and benefits against the encroaching new norm of casual, part-time, and insecure work and consumption fueled by debt while upper management and administrative salaries continue to rise. This kind of analysis presents a problem for Brooks’ solution, which is actually not that Americans should be able to live a decent life without going to college, but that everyone should just go to college. Again, I’m not necessarily opposed to this argument—I don’t think you should have to go to college to get by, but I do think it should be possible for everyone who wants more education to afford it. But even I realize that increasing the supply of college-educated workers is not going to increase the demand for them. In fact, on its own, it’s likely to put even the college-educated at a greater disadvantage in the workforce, resulting in the same kind of hollowing-out that’s decimated the working class over the past 30 years.

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

80. A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Lose PAUL KRUGMAN

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/a-mind-is-a-terrible-thing-to-lose/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto

OK, I see that some people are doubling down on the claim that rising inequality is all about education — when what the CBO report drives home is that this is all wrong, the big increase has come from gains at the very top. I have to admit that I have a sneaking suspicion that this is in part driven by KDS (DS for derangement syndrome): some people will rush to take a position precisely because I have debunked it. But anyway, it’s really, really wrong.

Here’s the CBO result:



Notice that the 81-99 percentiles have seen only modest gains; it’s really the top 1 percent that drives the story.

For comparison, here’s some data on wages of men by education from EPI:



Not the perfect comparison, but good enough. Notice the difference in scales. College graduates have made only modest gains, and basically nothing after 2000; even advanced degrees weren’t giving anything like the gains we see for the top 1 percent (and the much bigger gains of the top 0.1 percent).

Yes, college grads have done better than non; but inequality in America is mainly a story about a small elite pulling away from everyone else, including ordinary college grads. And we’ve know this for a long time! There is no excuse for getting it wrong.

[Demeter]

81. Economic Future Looks Dark as the Faux Economic Recovery is Primarily Low-Paying Jobs

http://www.alternet.org/story/152929/the_economic_future_looks_dark_as_the_faux_economic_recovery_is_primarily_low-paying_jobs_?page=entire

Major newspapers last week reported a trend that won’t come as a surprise to working Americans: incomes are falling. In fact, median household income, adjusted for inflation, has fallen faster since the recession ended than during the recession itself. Analysts point to high unemployment and weak economic growth as the culprits, but that is only part of the story.

Just as the country struggles to confront a seemingly insurmountable jobs deficit, America’s chronic low-wage problem is reasserting itself with a vengeance. Here are three ways to understand just how severe the problem is. First, the current recovery is actually deepening our deficit of good jobs. During the Great Recession, the jobs we lost were concentrated in mid-wage occupations like paralegals, health technicians, administrative assistants and bus drivers, making $15 to $20 an hour. But so far in this weak recovery, employment growth has largely come from low-wage occupations like retail workers, office and stock clerks, restaurant staff and child care aids – most making $8 to $10 an hour. There has been only minimal growth in mid-wage occupations, and net losses in those that pay higher. In part, this unbalanced growth is a byproduct of the Great Recession. The financial crash and bursting of the housing bubble caused big job losses in construction, finance, insurance and real estate, and these better-paying industries are having a harder time coming back than low-wage industries such as retail trade, restaurants, temp agencies, and nursing homes. But there are also other factors at work, such as the long-standing decline in manufacturing and outmoded telecommunications industries (again, better-paying sectors). The slashing of state and local public jobs has also continued unabated during the recovery, dragging down middle-class employment.

Second, the paychecks of workers in low-wage occupations are shrinking. While real wages for the average American worker have been essentially flat (adjusted for inflation) since the start of the recession, wages for Americans in low-wage occupations have actually declined by 2.3 percent. That’s a troubling pattern for jobs that are also growing the fastest.

Finally, job quality was already a problem in the U.S. labor market even before the Great Recession began. From 2001 through 2008, low-wage and high-wage occupations grew significantly more than mid-wage occupations. In fact, mid-wage occupations constituted only 6 percent of net job gains during this period, continuing the increase in economic inequality in America that dates all the way back to the late 1970s....Putting aside the abysmal political context for a moment, it is clear that the U.S. needs to work on dual fronts and tackle both job creation and job quality. There are plenty of ideas out there: rebuilding and modernizing America’s infrastructure, incubating green jobs sectors, creating universal pre-K, sending more fiscal relief to the states to avoid lay-offs, and more. We can also strengthen the wage floor by raising the minimum wage and putting more resources towards fighting wage theft, an endemic problem in low-wage service industries...



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

Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project, is currently on leave as a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.

[xchrom]

82. Exclusive - Greece turns to Iranian oil

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/11/uk-greece-iran-oil-newspro-idUKTRE7AA4ON20111111

(Reuters) - Greece is relying on Iran for most of its oil as traders pull the plug on supplies and banks refuse to provide financing for fear that Athens will default on its debt.

Traders said Greece has turned to Iran as the supplier of last resort despite rising pressure from Washington and Brussels to stifle trade as part of a campaign against Tehran's nuclear programme.

The near paralysis of oil dealings with Greece, which has four refineries, shows how trade in Europe could stall due to a breakdown in trust caused by the euro zone debt crisis, which is threatening to spread to further countries.

"Companies like us cannot deal with them. There is too much risk. Maybe independent traders are more geared up for that," said a trader with a major international oil company.

[Demeter]

84. THE PRETEXT!

Next up---invasion of Iran....

[Demeter]

83. What Happened When I Tried to Get Some Answers About the Creepy NYPD Watchtower Monitoring OWS

http://www.alternet.org/story/152954/what_happened_when_i_tried_to_get_some_answers_about_the_creepy_nypd_watchtower_monitoring_ows?akid=7820.227380.tHOpsh&rd=1&t=9

YOU HAVE TO READ THIS--A POST-HALLOWEEN, APOCALYPTIC HORROR STORY

[Demeter]

85. I need some breakfast...and then it's back to Reality

carry on in my absence, please!

[bread_and_roses]

86. K&R (n/t)

[Fuddnik]

87. Kick and Rec!

[snot]

88. Did you kids see this?? Is it for real??

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2290967

Seriously -- some investment intermediary can pledge my bonds without my knowledge, and lose them, and I'm out of luck? It's not their property; a thief gives no title! Still, they keep the profits; I bear their losses (again)? Do I have to keep my stuff in my mattress?

[DemReadingDU]

90. Scary stuff

It's as if our meager savings are going to be stolen one way or another.
All for them TPTB, and none for us.
:mad:

[Demeter]

98. Obama has singlehandedly abandoned the Rule of Law

He started with the bailout and letting the war criminals walk free. And he hasn't changed his mind, either.

[bread_and_roses]

89. The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori

Wilfred Owen

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/Owena.html#short-biog_owen

Born Oswestry, Shropshire. Educated at Birkenhead Institute and Shrewsbury Technical College.

From the age of nineteen Owen wanted to be a poet and immersed himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley. He wrote almost no poetry of importance until he saw action in France in 1917.

... 1916 in a tent in France joining the Second Manchesters. He was full of boyish high spirits at being a soldier.

Within a week he had been transported to the front line in a cattle wagon and was "sleeping" 70 or 80 yards from a heavy gun which fired every minute or so. He was soon wading miles along trenches two feet deep in water. Within a few days he was experiencing gas attacks and was horrified by the stench of the rotting dead; his sentry was blinded, his company then slept out in deep snow and intense frost till the end of January. That month was a profound shock for him: he now understood the meaning of war. "The people of England needn't hope. They must agitate," he wrote home...

... On 4th November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors. The news of his death reached his parents home as the Armistice bells were ringing on 11 November 1918.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen
8 October 1917 - March, 1918

[saras]

94. This is how I first learned of Wilfred Owen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOEcl-9yNhg">Natalie Merchant sings (well, mangles, but nicely) Wilfred Owen with her band 10,000 Maniacs

[xchrom]

91. sweet sunday -- few if any phone calls, no mail -- not outisde world interruptions...

:donut:

[xchrom]

92. Major yuan rise no cure for U.S. economic ills: China's Hu

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/11/13/businesspro-us-china-us-hu-idUKTRE7AC0BC20111113

(Reuters) - U.S. trade and employment problems would not be solved by even a major appreciation of China's yuan versus the dollar, Chinese President Hu Jintao was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"The trade deficit and unemployment problems are not caused by the yuan exchange rate. Even a major appreciation of the yuan would not resolve the problems facing the United States," Hu was quoted as saying on Chinanews.com.

Chinanews said Hu made the comments when he met U.S. President Barack Obama at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) group summit in Hawaii.

A subsequent statement on the website of China's Foreign Ministry carried the same comment.


***Hu's on First.

[bread_and_roses]

93. Infant mortality in Milwaukee

stolen from poster hatrack

http://www.jsonline.com/features/health/economic-decline-elevated-infant-mortality-go-handinhand-in-53210-zip-code-mh2kv7l-133758368.html

Empty Cradles | Confronting Our Infant Mortality Crisis
Where city factories, and now babies, die

The southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has mastered many of the trades Milwaukee championed in the last century: machinery, motors, metalworking. Guangzhou's boom has coincided with the sunset of manufacturing in Milwaukee, which in mere decades lost one of the nation's densest concentrations of mass production.

The two cities crisscross in another way:

Babies in China's industrial heartland now have a far better chance of reaching their first birthday.

In Milwaukee, one baby under the age of 12 months dies for every 95 who live, making it one of America's most fatal cities for infants. A generation ago, Milwaukee was one of the safest.

Among registered residents of Guangzhou, one baby dies for every 210 who live. The Chinese data, vetted by the World Bank and United Nations, often miss migrant workers in factories, but their infant survival rates are improving markedly as well.

Infant survival and economic competitiveness tend to move on the same sliding scale. Study after study reveals survival chances increase in communities and nations with rising wealth and stability - just as young life is threatened by economic crisis and upheaval.

Even though I know this stuff, it still hits me like a sledgehammer every time I read another article about it.

[bread_and_roses]

95. when I first read "the white man's burden" in 8th grade

I thought it was a parody. I simply could not believe anyone would write such with a straight face. This was in about 1963 or so - I was very naive.

[Demeter]

97. It is a product of its times

Born in British India in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was educated in England before returning to India in 1882, where his father was a museum director and authority on Indian arts and crafts. Thus Kipling was thoroughly immersed in Indian culture: by 1890 he had published in English about 80 stories and ballads previously unknown outside India. As a result of financial misfortune, from 1892-96 he and his wife, the daughter of an American publisher, lived in Vermont, where he wrote the two Jungle Books. After returning to England, he published "The White Man's Burden" in 1899, an appeal to the United States to assume the task of developing the Philippines, recently won in the Spanish-American War. As a writer, Kipling perhaps lived too long: by the time of his death in 1936, he had come to be reviled as the poet of British imperialism, though being regarded as a beloved children's book author. Today he might yet gain appreciation as a transmitter of Indian culture to the West.

What is it today's reader finds so repugnant about Kipling's poem? If you were a citizen of a colonized territory, how would you respond to Kipling?

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden (1899)

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another's profit,
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden--
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke (1) your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Have done with childish days--
The lightly proferred laurel, (2)
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

(1) Cloak, cover.
(2) Since the days of Classical Greece, a laurel wreath has been a symbolic victory prize.

http://public.wsu.edu/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/kipling.html

[Tansy_Gold]

99. I read it on my own the first time, not in a classroom

and I read it as bitter satire, Kipling telling his peers -- I knew nothing of the poem as a message to the American victors -- they had screwed up, they were wrong, they were basically imperious asses. And I came to that conclusion because I always thought of Kipling -- though I could have and might have been totally wrong -- as having an understanding of what India really was.

To me "Bind your sons to exile" is not a call to service but a bitter depiction of what price imperialism demands of the victors.

". . .And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard--"
In other words, know that you will never be loved, always hated, always reviled, because that is what happens to the colonizers. Why should the subject peoples love you? What have you done for them but, at best, replace one tyrant over them with another, yourselves? How do you know that you've "bettered" their lives? By whose standards? With whose permission? At whose cost?


Anyway, that was my take on Kipling. I could be wrong. I frequently am.




TG

[Demeter]

96. I'm wiped, folks

Have a good week!