Friday Reads
Posted: April 15, 2011 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: Bob Dylan, Don't Look Back, Labor marekts, Labor Unions, unemployment 44 Comments
Good Morning!
It’s the end of the work week for those of you that still have jobs. Also, it’s the ides of April. Have you filed your taxes yet with the IRS? Better yet, do you actually have a job and can you report income this year? If so, you’re running against the wind these days. It’s not like most of our elected officials any where notice these days. Jobs, unemployment, and collective bargaining rights appear to the farthest things from their little minds. They’re still trying to figure out whose ass or fist is tightest. A few fighters remain. I’m going to start out with a 12 pack salute to those who still care for the working guy and gal.
Is a picture worth a 1000 words or can words make a picture too? NY Congressman Bob Crowley copied Bob Dylan’s famous “Don’t Look Back” short film to make a few points.
Politico reports on the purpose of Crowley’s show of words.
The video prompted MSNBC’s Luke Russert to tweet, “Rep. Joe Crowley channels his own Bob Dylan “Don’t Look Back” on the House floor.”
But Crowley Communications Director Courtney Gidner says that wasn’t the point of the exercise.
“While my boss is certainly a huge fan of Bob Dylan, the inspiration behind his ‘speechless’ speech was the GOP’s failure to produce a jobs-focused bill.”
I posted this in a down thread conversation but wanted to make sure you read this analysis from USA Today just in case you missed it. Huge numbers of Americans are leaving the work force. This is really worrisome.
The share of the population that is working fell to its lowest level last year since women started entering the workforce in large numbers three decades ago, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Only 45.4% of Americans had jobs in 2010, the lowest rate since 1983 and down from a peak of 49.3% in 2000. Last year, just 66.8% of men had jobs, the lowest on record.
The bad economy, an aging population and a plateau in women working are contributing to changes that pose serious challenges for financing the nation’s social programs.
Over half of the the population is not working. Working-age men are dropping out like flies. This is not good for maintenance of programs like social security that rely on an increase in workers to fund current benefits. It’s also a game change from 30-40 years ago. I’ll be waiting to see what labor economists have to say about this.
Meanwhile, 1000s of workers protested the roll back of worker rights and budget cuts in Michigan. Working men and women in states all over the country have taken to the streets to protect their rights to participate in determining their work environment and compensation.
Thousands of people rallied at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing on Wednesday to protest Republican proposals to roll back labor rights and cut government services. Organizers put attendance at more than 10,000. Herb Sanders of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees urged the crowd to begin recall campaigns against Gov. Rick Snyder and other top Republicans.
Herb Sanders: “We will recall the scoundrels one by one. If their agenda is keeping money in the pocket of fat-cat corporate CEOs, as opposed to keeping working Americans employed in fair wages with decent healthcare and decent schools in our neighborhoods, they’ve got to go.”
It appears that many voters have remorse over sending Tea Party candidates to elected office. Florida is a stand out case.
Only three months removed from Governor Rick Scott’s (R) inauguration, a majority of Florida voters now say the state is headed in the wrong direction and that, if they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t have elected Scott in the first place, according to a new Suffolk University poll.
In the poll, 54% of voters said the state was headed in the wrong direction, compared to 30% who said it was going the right way. Further, just under half (49%) of all voters said they disapproved of Scott’s job performance, versus only 28% who said they approved.
Scott’s approval rating is so bad that the poll found him losing a hypothetical do-over election to Democrat Alex Sink by a ten-point margin, 41% to 31%.
Previous polls have also found Scott’s job approval deep underwater, including a Quinnipiac poll released earlier this month that pegged his approval to disapproval split at 35% to 48%. A March PPP poll showed Scott with an even worse 32%-55% split, and found him losing a do-over election — by a 20-point margin.
Scott was one of several freshman GOP governors swept into office last year amid the Republican wave nationwide. But since taking office, voters have rapidly soured on Scott as he’s pursued some drastic — and deeply unpopular — policies.
Labor leaders are none too happy with the President or Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Neither of the legacy parties have workers’ interests in mind these days.
“Now, not only are we getting screwed by the Republicans but the Democrats are doing it too,” said one union official, characterizing the mood at a summit of labor leaders who are worried that Democrats seem unlikely to go to the mat for them as an election year approaches.
Presidents of several unions and an AFL-CIO spokesman declined to repeat their private criticism to a reporter Tuesday, a sign that labor feels it must still try to maintain a relationship with the Democratic Party, even if it’s deeply troubled . With Republicans increasingly shifting from private antagonism toward open war with organized labor, unreliable Democratic allies are the only allies the movement has, and it remains unclear whether disappointments will dampen enthusiasm among union activists and voters in the 2012 elections.
I’ll tell you that I have no idea where to go any more. I’m torn between ‘throw the bums out’ and ‘none of the above’. I’m beginning to think my dog knows more about economics than any one in the District beltway these days.
A lot of folks are arguing that the retirement age in developed nations should be raised to 70. They want to work us until we drop dead, folks! Here’s some on that from The Economist.
Yet too many people see longer working lives as a worry rather than an opportunity—and not just because they are going to be chained to their desks. Some fret that there will not be enough jobs to go around. This misapprehension, known to economists as the “lump of labour fallacy”, was once used to argue that women should stay at home and leave all the jobs for breadwinning males. Now lump-of-labourites say that keeping the old at work would deprive the young of employment. The idea that society can become more prosperous by paying more of its citizens to be idle is clearly nonsensical. On that reasoning, if the retirement age came down to 25 we would all be as rich as Croesus.
Raising the official retirement age is only part of the solution, for many workers retire before the official age. Martin Baily and Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, reckon that raising actual EU retirement ages to the official age would offset the impact of an ageing population over the next 20 years.
For that to happen, working practices and attitudes need to change. Western managers worry too much about the quality of older workers (see Schumpeter). In physically demanding occupations, it is true, some may be unable to work into their late 60s. The incapacitated will need disability benefits. Others will need to find a different job. But this should be less of a problem than it used to be now that economies are based on services not manufacturing. In knowledge-based jobs, age is less of a disadvantage. Although older people reason more slowly, they have more experience and, by and large, better personal skills. Even so, most people’s productivity does eventually decline with age; and pay needs to reflect this falling-off. Traditional seniority systems, under which people get promoted and paid more as they age, therefore need to change.
So, they’re going to work us until we drop and PAY us less for being old. What a deal!!! I frequently joke with my students that I will die at the podium and the administration will have to pry my cold, dead fingers off. I have to admit that this is a melodramatic image, however, to die standing at a podium is better than being chained to a desk in the private sector again. There’s only so many bad senior management decisions that one person should be forced to join in on in one life time. I’ve been party to opening too many of their eyes to their short roads to bankruptcy to do the private sector stupidity again. They all get away with those bad decisions too since they get to leave with good severance packages. I’d rather die poor than die inflicting pain and stupidity on people just because some guy went to seminar and got a wild hair.
Not that any of these old dudes ever pay for their bad mistakes or their lies. Here’s a good example via Naked Capitalism and Yves: Senator Levin Claims Goldman Execs Perjured Themselves Before Congress on Mortgage Testimony.
Senator Carl Levin, in releasing the report, took aim at Goldman’s truthiness in its testimony before Congress and called on Federal prosecutors to examine whether Goldman committed perjury. Two issues are at stake. First it the Goldman claim that it lost money on its housing bets and was not net short housing (or at least not for long). Second is the notion that the firm was acting merely as a market marker, which basically means caveat emptor, if clients made bad bets, Goldman was merely acting as a neutral middleman.
While Goldman made the usual pious denials, the evidence in the report supports the Levin charges. It notes:
Overall in 2007, its net short position produced record profits totaling $3.7
billion for Goldman’s Structured Products Group, which when combined with other mortgage
losses, produced record net revenues of $1.2 billion for the Mortgage Department as a whole.2007 was the critical year when the market turned decisively south and all dealers were dumping mortgage-related inventory. Goldman had been further ahead in the process and appears to be the only firm to put on very sizeable short positions. The magnitude of the profits on the short side lend credence to the charge that Goldman was substantially and successfully net short.
This would basically mean that Goldman Sachs was not acting as a ‘market-maker’. This was the claim made by GS executives during the hearing. I was some what appalled by the inability of the congress critters on the committee to fully comprehend what market makers do and ask intelligent questions. Now that we’ve got the details, it’s pretty clear GS was not acting as an intermediary for client orders. They were basically speculating and the report is evidently full of aggressive marketing and sales pushes to move CDOs and other highly risky financial instruments on which they had an offsetting corporate position. This should be investigated by the DOJ. However, given the cozy relationship between shadow banking and Timothy Geithner, I doubt Obama will move on it at all.
Meanwhile, “Food, Gas And Rent Push Consumer Prices Higher” so ordinary working people are feeling the pinch from both lower incomes and higher prices. I’m thinking we’re seeing those bubbles I’ve been warning about frankly. Rich people have a tremendous amount of money right now and they’re taxes are way down so they’re not investing in businesses but looking for quick arbitrage profits by trading paper back and forth. Unfortunately, the real world is under that paper some where.
Excluding the volatile food and gas categories, the so-called core index rose 0.1 percent and it is up only 1.2 percent in the past year.
But steep food and gas prices are hitting consumers hard.
Gasoline jumped 5.6 percent last month and has risen nearly 28 percent in the past year. Consumers paid an average price of $3.81 a gallon nationwide on Friday according to the travel group AAA.
Food prices rose 0.8 percent last month, the largest increase in almost three years. Prices for fruits and vegetables, dairy products, chicken and beef all increased. Coffee costs rose 3.5 percent.
So, anyway, I continue to be amazed at how much labor is getting screwed compared to how many breaks capital gets these days. I seriously think that the elected officials are trying to completely remove taxes from capital owners and load it solidly on to the backs of working men and women. The time to sharpen pitchforks nears. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows …
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Great reads Dak…Politico has 3 new articles about the BP spill:
Congress AWOL on BP spill response – Darren Goode – POLITICO.com
How pols navigated the Gulf spill – Bob King – POLITICO.com
Opinion: Use BP spill to save Gulf wetlands – Sen. Mary Landrieu – POLITICO.com
And at Guardian, there is a slide show of pictures of wildlife. One of the pictures is a dead sea turtle on the shore of Miss. They mention the dolphins and other sea life deaths that are due to the spill.
The week in wildlife – in pictures | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Take a look at the pictures. The eagle is impressive and the spider is downright freakishly big!
And one more for you, this from Guardian:
Emails expose BP’s attempts to control research into impact of Gulf oil spill | Environment | guardian.co.uk
Click on the link, they have copies of the emails…
I just heard that there was a oil platform collapse in the Mexican waters (don’t know which) but have heard anything about it on the news. Anyone know anything?
Good morning Dak! Thanks for a terrific post. It appears that a lot of the tea party voters didn’t really understand what they were getting into.
You’d think some Dems would try to take advantage of this situation by getting on the “right side of history.” But I guess they are prepared to go down with the ship for the bankers along with the Repubs.
BTW, taxes are due on the 18th this year. In MA it’s the 19th, because Monday is a holiday.
Oops. I did my taxes the moment I had all my documents. I’ve had huge refunds over about the past five years so I no longer wait until the last moment.
Lucky you!!
The mortgage deduction really pays off big time for me.
I just got that news about the 18th being the due date 😆 , from the tax preparer and I was going bunkers until 5pm yesterday before he told me. I only have one, OK two items to check on, and boy do I wish the bank would post the checks via on-line banking, that they no longer send back to us.
Their leaders are on TV saying they plan to primary big spending republicans. I think many of the folks that originally showed up for the rallies were just mad and didn’t see the big picture.
What’s the chance of that mortgage deduction still being ther next year??
I’m hoping that deductions are allowed for first houses at the median price of homes (or maybe slightly over) and would like to see one car added to that equation. They should remove the deductions on second homes, boats, etc. The deduction should just be for ‘average’ home owners and should be capped. That would put a hold on housing bubbles, among other things. The Real Estate agents are a fairly powerful lobby. My guess is that one stays.
We are so accustomed to lies that we don’t pay much attention anymore. This is all we get, day after tiring day, lies, lies, and more lies coming out of the mouths of the leadership from both sides.
It used to be “shameful” to be caught in one but the praise is now reserved for those who can tell the best whopper.
The average person believes in the unreality of “reality tv” which makes it just that much easier to swallow whole whenever the latest lie is marched out and presented.
Diogenes would be wasting valuable time searching for the truth with this crowd.
The Lie Olympics. Gold goes to the Biggest Liars.
Did you hear that Snookie gets $100,000 and episode and an extra $25,000 each time she goes out to a bar and drinks and parties? That’ll put American life as we know it in perspective. Plus, we’ve got TWO reality TV stars on deck for being the Republican nominee for President. Both of them hardly had any money until they got on TV. Donald Trump is a serial Bankruptcy offender having gone through his father’s billions and tons of government subsidies on the way to finally getting a pay check for being obnoxious. The art of the deal, indeed. Just go bankrupt and let the government bail you out.
Most business people don’t have this option
and most have never filed for bankruptcy. Should we really give him a crack at bankrupting America? NOOOOO!
Actually I wouldn’t mind seeing reality tv in Congress…
“You stupid b!&@&! You stole my boyfriend!!” SMACK!
I awoke this AM to a nightmare on my TV screen. I had to find confirmation – I did. Here is a link to BO speaking at the Navy Pier last night. I am LDA – did not trust the CC’s which are questionable a lot of the time.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/PresidentialRemarks29
What I could not believe – besides all the lies he spoke and his facial expressions – were the cheers and applause(oil spill, nuclear, ending the Iraq war, all he has done to make all citizens safe, LGBT – it is unbelievable) – pathological lying – flagrant, slick, sick, whining about all the problems he has had to deal with, but what a great job he has done. I understand it is a campaign speech – who are those idiots who cheered and applauded? Are there that many with abg’s mentality?
We must be a nation of brain dead zombies. In my quest for confirmation, I unfortunately found a site that only idiots could stomach. It lists BO’s accomplishments since taking office. Horrors – it is compiled – they call it “crowd compilation”. There are 23 listed endeavors – I only checked three – basically empty – just like the cypher. I won’t sully your blog with naming it – unless I do it off line. There is no hope for this country that is now seemingly populated by idiots and crooks.
If/when they remove the internet – and they will have to because there are a few who know and will fight. Well, as long as we have lights, food, heat.
Dak – thanks for your post – MM thanks for the animal connections you have been providing… some escapism.
What’s an LDA, the CC’s and abg?
❓
LDA – late deafened adult CC – closed captioned
abg – extreme idiot commenter(IMO) TGW gave him lots of rope for a couple of years, much appreciated by this mean commenter for a while – it was fun – now he is just pathetic. BTD let him spew for awhile at TL – caused lots of posts in protest(their readership has almost evaporated – wonder why?)Now even he will call him on his absurd statements. I just go to check for a pulse(TL), read Anne.
Thanks, Boo Radly. I think I know who abg is now. I would also have known CC if I had known LDA, but I didn’t know LDA.
Oh, memories, ABG, who would follow me to every blog… Interestingly he hasn’t come here, but throwing water past my back 😉 just in case… 😆
ABG is paid, I would bet most of the ‘audience’ was too.
That’s what I was thinking…finally job creation! :trained seal clapping for BO
😯
I found some links on this:
President Obama – Open Mic – You Think We’re Stupid? | VIDEO | Mediaite
And this from Jake Tapper”
Obama Uncensored: President Caught on Open Mic at Fundraiser – Political Punch
Oops, I think these links are different from what you were talking about Boo…am I right?
MM – you are different. At CSpan2 they had a notice that it was shortened due to “technical difficulties”, cough cough.
Dang, I thought so after I posted it. My computer is giving me some problems. I think the adapter is going…BB had that problem a few weeks ago. So the computer flickers on and off and it is giving me problems with those c-span videos. Yuck.
Have we ever had a candidate who came out of Rehab? There must be one waiting in the wings ready to “confess all” to Oprah.
Well Bush was a drunk, but I don’t think he went to rehab–just became a fundy.
Traded one addiction for another …
the two big O,S can confess to each other 😆
The whole idea of modifying the tax code is kind of hazy. Here is a opening discussion by Laura Tyson with a couple of options adn parameters to be conssidered
http://bloom.bg/h4URK6#ooid=MwazllMjrkL5av6uuvIDMBjsmitmF9iz
I’ve always hated the way politicians want to treat labor income differently from income from capital investment. I don’t think some kinds of speculative income should be given favorable tax treatment at all that would include income from arbitraging derivatives. It’s destabilizing to financial markets and encouraging it is crazy. They always argue that it provides ‘liquidity’ to markets and gives funds to people that want to hedge for risk purposes but it’s gotten completely out of hand and I think preferential tax treatment could be why. Taxes are part of the equation for these things more than normal business investments.
I absolutely agree on the labor vs investment differential. Any opinion on the estate tax, My rationale is that if you own land and it appreciates, you owe tax on income just as you do on capital. If you die and it goes to the kids with zero tax, it is effectively mot paying taxes on the capital gains.
Of course the question comess up if the parents die and want to leave the farm to the daughter and she wants to farm, that may be a large bill for her to swallow. I uderstand some relief. I understand you cna deduct a million dollars before you pay an estate tax.
income is basically income … giving preferential treatment to inherited wealth is a throw back to aristocracy days, imho.
The ides fall on the 13th in April.
I wonder why the ides of March are such a big deal, but not the ides of any other month.
Maybe because of the famous quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar?
Thanks, I didn’t know that. I’ve read very little Shakespeare.
What are “ides” anyway?
The 15th day of March, may, July and October and the 13th day of other months of the old Roman calendar, probably related to the full moon – days of howling and going crazy.
They’re the eighth day after the Nones, which fall on the 7th in March, May, Quintilis (“July” after 46 BCE), and October (the only months in the Roman calendar with 31 days). In all other months, the Nones fall on the 5th and therefore the Ides fall on the 13th.