January 17, 2015

If gas is so cheap, why do retail sales stink?

from Fortune:



Some analysts argue that we shouldn’t be so thrilled about cheap oil.

Stocks are up modestly Thursday, following a four-day slump capped by a more than 1% decline in the Dow Jones Index on Wednesday. The market dip came on the heels of a Census report on retail sales that showed a big drop in spending by Americans in December.

So, where is the bounce the economy was supposed to get from cheap gas at the pump?

Some analysts argue that consumers have simply been pocketing the extra money they have been saving on gas, using it to pay down debt or bolster their savings. Others have a far gloomier story to tell. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://fortune.com/2015/01/15/gas-prices-retail-sales/

January 17, 2015

Richard Wolff: We Can Do Better Than Capitalism

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January 17, 2015

Neoliberalism has made you a disposable human being

Listen to the interview: https://soundcloud.com/this-is-hell/832henrygiroux


The future demands a new political consciousness. We can't just wait for neoliberal economics to tear apart society and then build from scratch. Cultural critic Henry Giroux published his thoughts in the Truthout analysis article Authoritarianism, Class Warfare and the Advance of Neoliberal Austerity Policies. Author and cultural critic Henry Giroux holds the Global Television Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies.


http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/28600-searching-for-radical-democracy-in-the-ruins-of-capitalism-s-economic-depravity

January 17, 2015

Money Dries Up for Oil and Gas, Layoffs Spread, Write-Offs Start

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street


When money was growing on trees even for junk-rated companies, and when Wall Street still performed miracles for a fee, thanks to the greatest credit bubble in US history, oil and gas drillers grabbed this money channeled to them from investors and refilled the ever deeper holes fracking was drilling into their balance sheets.

But the prices for crude oil, US natural gas, and natural gas liquids have all plunged. Revenues from unhedged production are down 40% or 50%, or more from just seven months ago. And when the hedges expire, the problem will get worse. The industry has been through this before. It knows what to do.

Layoffs are cascading through the oil and gas sector. On Tuesday, the Dallas Fed projected that in Texas alone, 140,000 jobs could be eliminated. Halliburton said that it was axing an undisclosed number of people in Houston. Suncor Energy, Canada’s largest oil producer, will dump 1,000 workers in its tar-sands projects. Helmerich & Payne is idling rigs and cutting jobs. Smaller companies are slashing projects and jobs at an even faster pace. And now Slumberger, the world’s biggest oilfield-services company, will cut 9,000 jobs.

It had had an earnings debacle. It announced that Q4 EPS grew by 11% year-over-year to $1.50, “excluding charges and credits.” In reality, its net income plunged 81% to $302 million, after $1.8 billion in write-offs that included its production assets in Texas. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/money-dries-up-for-oil-money-dries-up-for-oil-and-gas-layoffs-spread-write-offs-start-gas-layoffs-spread-write-offs-start.html

January 17, 2015

Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Class

from In These Times:


Portrait of the Artist as a Dying Class
Scott Timberg argues that we’ve lost the scaffolding of middle-class jobs—record-store clerk, critic, roadie—that made creative scenes thrive.

BY JOANNA SCUTTS


Though Scott Timberg’s impassioned Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class focuses on the struggles of musicians, writers and designers, it’s not just a story about (the impossibility of) making a living making art in modern America. More urgently, it’s another chapter in America’s central economic story today, of plutocracy versus penury and the evisceration of the middle class.

Timberg lost his job as an arts reporter at the Los Angeles Times in 2008 after real-estate mogul Sam Zell purchased the paper and gutted its staff. But newspapers are experiencing a natural dieoff, right? Wrong, says Timberg. He cites statistics showing that newspaper profits remained fat into the 21st century—peaking at an average of 22.3 percent in 2002—as the industry began slashing staff. The problem isn’t profitability but shareholder greed, and the fact that we’ve ceded so much authority to the gurus of economic efficiency that we’ve failed to check their math.

The story of print journalism’s demise is hardly new, but Timberg’s LA-based perspective brings architecture, film and music into the conversation, exposing the fallacy of the East Coast conviction that Hollywood is the place where all the money is hiding. Movie studios today are as risk-averse and profit-minded as the big New York publishing houses, throwing their muscle behind one or two stars and proven projects (sequels and remakes) rather than nurturing a deep bench of talent.

For aspiring stars to believe that they may yet become the next Kanye or Kardashian is as unrealistic as treating a casino as a viable path to wealth. Not only that, but when all the money and attention cluster around a handful of stars, there’s less variation, less invention, less risk-taking. Timberg notes that the common understanding of the “creative class,” coined by Richard Florida in 2002, encompasses “anyone who works with their mind at a high level,” including doctors, lawyers and software engineers. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17522/portrait_of_the_dying_creative_class

January 17, 2015

100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’

from In These Times:


100 Years Old Today: The Story Behind ‘Solidarity Forever’
BY JONATHAN ROSENBLUM


On a windblown, gray Chicago day exactly 100 years ago today, Ralph Chaplin left his home on the city’s South Side for a raucous poor people’s rally at Hull House, the famed settlement house co-founded by Jane Addams. He asked a visiting friend he'd met organizing coal miners with Mother Jones to listen to the lyrics of a new tune he had been working on:

“Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

Solidarity Forever,

For the union makes us strong!”

The self-described Chicago “stiff” and “rebel editor” merely wanted to write a song that could be for workers what “John Brown's Body” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” were for abolitionists. In fact, he borrowed the very melody.

One hundred years later, despite the rise and precipitous fall of workers’ movements in the U.S., Chaplin's song is a classic still widely sung with fists raised and demands for justice submitted. It's an international and national anthem, still regularly belted out by “Occupy” and sung every weekday by crowds from 20 to 100 protesters at the Wisconsin State Capitol rotunda.

.....(snip).....

As the IWW's radical antiwar and pro-wildcat strike tactics got the union increasingly on government enemy lists, Chaplin ended up in Chicago’s Cook County jail and then Leavenworth on a conspiracy rap while his song slowly made its way into the labor canon.

With the workers' success at winning better terms and the powerful growth of unions, “Solidarity Forever” spread in an arc that would take it across the United States, adopted as the official anthem of the United Auto Workers, and into Canada, France, Latin America and even Australia (one of the early IWW leaders fled there while under suspicion of communist activities; Australian Labor Party leader and former Prime minister Bob Hawke was known to sing it from memory). The French sing it as “Solidarite mes freres et mes soeurs.” A Spanish version can be found in the renowned manual of American community singalongs, “Rise Up Singing.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17542/solidarity_forever

January 17, 2015

Princeton study determines America is a DINO -- Democracy In Name Only

This won’t come as a total shock, but there’s some new hard data to back up what we already suspect anecdotally: Our democracy is really an oligarchy.

Looking at actual policy and polling, researchers at Princeton concluded that the wealthiest Americans tend to get what they want, or at least they did between 1981 and 2002 (the time frame on which the study focuses).

“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” write Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”

Another quote from the peer-reviewed study: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.” .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/there_goes_the_democracy_20150116

January 16, 2015

Whole Foods Worker Fired for ‘Stealing’ a Sweater—Though It Never Left the Store

from In These Times:


Whole Foods Worker Fired for ‘Stealing’ a Sweater—Though It Never Left the Store
BY TRISH KAHLE


Janette Belandres worked at Whole Foods Market in Chicago's Lincoln Park for more than three years. A small woman with a wide, pleasant smile, she was a favorite among coworkers and customers, and had a sterling work record. That is, until she was fired on December 28, 2014.

(Full disclosure: The author worked with Belandres at Whole Foods from July 2012 to January 2014 and was a leader of an organizing campaign there, which Belandres supported.)

Here’s how Belandres recalls the incident: On December 27, the store was short-staffed and carts weren't being returned quickly enough to keep up with the Saturday morning rush, so a manager sent Belandres to round up carts in the store's parking areas.

Being “on carts,” as workers call it, is a demanding task, especially in winter weather. Typically, only one or two employees cover the Lincoln Park store’s 400-car parking garage. They collect the carts, load them into an elevator, pick out any trash, and wheel a stiff column of six or more carts to the front of the store, navigating an obstacle course of customers and displays.

As she was bringing in a column of carts, Belandres noticed a black sweater, turned inside out, hanging on a hook by a bathroom near the cart elevator. When the sweater still hadn't been removed an hour later, she guessed an employee had taken it off to use the bathroom and then forgotten it. She says it’s typical to find lost items and take them to customer service, although the store has no official policy on how team members should handle lost-and-found.

“I wanted to turn it in to Customer Service,” Belandres says, “but I couldn't take the time.” (At the Lincoln Park store, one of the largest Whole Foods in the country, a trip to the front desk from across the store can take 5 or 10 minutes). Instead, she says, she tied the sweater around her waist and continued to work, planning to turn it in when she get a break. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17523/whole_foods_worker_fired_for_stealing_a_sweater_thought_it_never_left_the_s

January 16, 2015

David Sirota: Should Rahm Emanuel Be Exempt From Ethics Laws?

from In These Times:


Should Rahm Emanuel Be Exempt From Ethics Laws?
Executives at firms managing Chicago pension money have made more than $600,000 in donations to the mayor, despite a city ordinance—and an executive order by Emanuel himself—restricting contributions from city contractors.

BY DAVID SIROTA


On its face, Chicago’s municipal pension system is an integral part of the Chicago city government. The system is included in the city’s budget, it is directly funded by the city, and its various boards of trustees include city officials and mayoral appointees. Yet, when it comes to enforcing the city’s anti-corruption laws in advance of the Chicago’s closely watched 2015 municipal election, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration is suddenly arguing that the pension funds are not part of the city government at all.

The counterintuitive declaration came last month from the mayor-appointed ethics commission, responding to Chicago aldermen’s request for an investigation of campaign contributions to Emanuel from the financial industry. The request followed disclosures that executives at firms managing Chicago pension money have made more than $600,000 worth of donations to Emanuel. The contributions flowed to the mayor despite a city ordinance—and an executive order by Emanuel himself—restricting mayoral campaign contributions from city contractors.

Brushing off the lawmakers’ complaint about Emanuel’s donations from the financial industry, the mayor’s ethics commission issued a nonbinding legal opinion arguing that Chicago's pension systems are “not agencies or departments of the city, and thus firms that contract with them are not doing or seeking to do business with the city.” The commission’s interpretation means financial firms’ business with Chicago pension funds should be considered exempt from city ethics laws.

With the aldermen’s complaint about campaign contributions generating headlines and potentially complicating Emanuel’s already tough race for re-election, the Emanuel-appointed commission was unusually frank about its motives: It said the release of its opinion was designed “to attempt to ensure that no ethical clouds are hanging over any candidate’s head.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/17530/rahm_emanuel_ethics_laws

January 16, 2015

Charlotte Streetcar Opening Delayed Until June

Jan. 15--The opening of Charlotte's streetcar has been delayed by three months until June, the result of errors made by the contractor, a joint venture between Balfour Beatty and Blythe Development, the city said Wednesday.

Jeb Blackwell, the city's engineer, said the contractors had put extra crews on the project but were unable to catch up after falling behind last summer. In December, the contractors had to remove 700 feet of track on Trade Street that had been improperly installed and was off by a half inch.

The city said the contractor is being fined $1,000 a day for the delay until the project is finished. The fines started Dec. 23.

The city expects construction to wrap up at the end of February. The city will then begin testing the 1.5-mile streetcar line, which will run from Time Warner Cable Arena to Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/11804902/charlotte-streetcar-opening-delayed-until-june