Tuesday Reads
Posted: November 9, 2010 Filed under: morning reads, New Orleans 42 CommentsGood Morning!
I spent the evening at Spotted Cat chatting up my Saints and jass lovin’ Uncle Lionel Baptiste and Doctor Daughter and her Doctor significant other who has never known what it means to miss New Orleans until now. The cool fall weather is delightful and I’m remembering why I just absolutely love my hood. Uncle Lionel was talkin’ bout sendin’ off Bunchy still and I was asking about sending off the late great Walter Payton. You can see both Uncle Lionel and Walter on that last link. I wanted to take Doctor Daughter to see my friend Mikki do her retro Japanese jazz thing on Frenchman at Yuki’s last night but missed it ’cause I spent way too much time with Uncle Lionel. I’m thinking it’s about time I get a regular gig since Jindal’s destroyed higher education in Louisiana. I can always gig and I can always teach piano. I also own a little tiny bit of the upper ninth ward and I want to keep it as long as I can.
My favorite Uncle Lionel story is when he was sitting next to me on the piano bench at Vaughn’s right after Katrina and I was playing away. Some tourist came up and said to him that no one plays like that ‘cept down here with that twinkle in the eye that meant I did not come with that extra appendage and such. That’s always a reference to some or other attributes that I do not possess if you get my drift. My uncle Lionel looked up to him, straight up, and told him that his ears might work but his eyeballs were a bit distracted by trifflin’ things. ‘Nuf said.
Let’s get to the news out side my beloved ninth ward after I treat you with something from the HBO series Treme. Oh, and I promise that this week on a Treat link I will give up some secrets for cajun/creole delights.
As the man says, “that moment can’t happen in New York”.
Speaking of interesting developments, the congressional black caucus still hasn’t figured out what to do with a tea party candidate that qualifies for the club. This should be one of those Kodak Moments.
The Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) is staying silent about a Tea Party Republican’s bid to join the group.
Rep.-elect Allen West (R-Fla.) indicated last week he intends to join the CBC to challenge the group’s “monolithic voice.”
“I plan on joining, I’m not gonna ask for permission or whatever, I’m gonna find out when they meet and I will be a member of the Congressional Black Caucus,” West, one of two black Republicans elected to Congress last Tuesday, told WOR radio. “I meet all of the criteria, and it’s so important that we break down this monolithic voice that continues to talk about victimization and dependency in the black community.
“We’ve got to turn this thing around, and I think it’s time for some different voices to be in that body politic.”
Here’s Bloomberg’s take on the Potus trip to Indonesia.
“We see in Indonesia the intersection of a lot of key American interests,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said. The partnership “is very important to the future of American interests in Asia and the world.”
As China’s economic and diplomatic clout grows, Obama has made a priority of engaging other Asian nations, particularly the 10 countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. With a population of about 600 million, Southeast Asia was America’s fifth-largest trading partner and the fourth- biggest market for U.S. goods last year.
The Times of India has an interesting bit about Obama’s visit there. You can find it here.
Speaking at a town hall meeting in Mumbai, he said, “I do think that one of the challenges that we are going face in the US, at a time when we are still recovering from the financial crisis is, how do we respond to some of the challenges of globalisation? The fact of the matter is that for most of my lifetime and I’ll turn 50 next year – the US was such an enormously dominant economic power, we were such a large market, our industry, our technology, our manufacturing was so significant that we always met the rest of the world economically on our terms. And now because of the incredible rise of India and China and Brazil and other countries, the US remains the largest economy and the largest market, but there is real competition.”“This will keep America on its toes. America is going to have to compete. There is going to be a tug-of-war within the US between those who see globalisation as a threat and those who accept we live in a open integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities.”
The US leader disagreed with those who saw globalisation as unmitigated evil. But while acknowledging that the Chindia factor had made the world flatter, he said protectionist impulses in US will get stronger if people don’t see trade bringing in gains for them.
“If the American people feel that trade is just a one-way street where everybody is selling to the enormous US market but we can never sell what we make anywhere else, then the people of the US will start thinking that this is a bad deal for us and it could end up leading to a more protectionist instinct in both parties, not just among Democrats but also Republicans. So, that we have to guard against,” he said.
Labor demand has been growing in the United States, reflected in a modest increase in private payroll employment this year and a more substantial increase in private-sector job vacancies over the past 12 months. Despite these signs of improvement, the unemployment rate has declined only slightly. Some analysts have raised the specter of a fundamental mismatch between the supply of labor in terms of workers’ skills and demand for labor in terms of employers’ skill requirements. Such a mismatch between available workers and available jobs could increase the level of structural unemployment. To the extent that structural unemployment is actually rising, the phenomenon poses a dilemma for policymakers. It cannot be ameliorated through conventional monetary and fiscal policy. And it implies an increase in the lowest unemployment rate associated with stable inflation, often identified by the acronym NAIRU, which stands for the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment.
It’s true that things aren’t as bad as they were during the worst of the Depression. But that’s not saying much. And as in the 1930s, every proposal to do something to improve the situation is met with a firestorm of opposition and criticism. As a result, by the time the actual policy emerges, it’s watered down to such an extent that it’s almost guaranteed to fail.
We’ve already seen this happen with fiscal policy: fearing opposition in Congress, the Obama administration offered an inadequate plan, only to see the plan weakened further in the Senate. In the end, the small rise in federal spending was effectively offset by cuts at the state and local level, so that there was no real stimulus to the economy.
Now the same thing is happening to monetary policy.
The case for a more expansionary policy by the Fed is overwhelming. Unemployment is disastrously high, while U.S. inflation data over the past few years almost perfectly match the early stages of Japan’s relentless slide into corrosive deflation.
Unfortunately, conventional monetary policy is no longer available: the short-term interest rates the Fed normally targets are already close to zero. So the Fed is shifting from its usual policy of buying only short-term debt, and is now buying long-term debt — a policy generally referred to as “quantitative easing.” (Why? Don’t ask.)
There’s nothing outlandish about this action. As Mr. Bernanke tried to explain Saturday, “This is just monetary policy,” adding, “It will work or not work in much the same way that ordinary, more conventional, familiar monetary policy works.”
Yet the Pain Caucus — my term for those who have opposed every effort to break out of our economic trap — is going wild.
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
ecocatwoman
mablue2
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Maybe the Republicans in Washington will read about how China did it with a large enough stimulus and convince them to do another stimulus that’s well thought out to fix our infrastructure. It’s not gonna happen, but it would be nice.
The CBC called West’s bluff and released a statement saying the two Repubs can join, so good to see he’s not letting reality intrude on his cheesy publicity stunt. lol It’s refreshing to see the Repubs retaliating with stupid, out-of-touch stunts that reveal the comparative gravitas in inviting fictional characters to testify at Congressional hearings.
This may be a weird time to be an economist, but also one in which good economists are more needed than ever. That said, I don’t blame you for wanting to spend more time with your Steinway.
I think Ben Rhodes is one of those speechwriters in the photo of the fondling of of the Hillary cutout. Yep: looks like he moved up in the hierarchy after his boys will be boys moment.
http://www.whorunsgov.com/Profiles/Ben_Rhodes
Doesn’t sound like he has all that much going on upstairs.
I came across more substantive statements in typing class exercises.
Well his previous expertise involved getting drunk and grabbing cardboard boobs. Dakinikat and I researched the people in that picture way back when, and I remembered his name.
Then he’s perfectly qualified to be Obama’s deputy national security adviser!
/snark
Actually his full title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. 🙄
LOL
dang nesting!
that LOL was meant for
Zaladonis says:
November 9, 2010 at 8:17 am
This will keep America on its toes. America is going to have to compete. There is going to be a tug-of-war within the US between those who see globalisation as a threat and those who accept we live in a open integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities BO
The tug-of-war will be between the working class and the super wealthy….Guess who’s side Obama is on? That statement is a bazooka aimed at what’s left of the US middle class by its own POTUS .
Let me translate
a open integrated world, which has challenges and opportunities
We are supposed to willingly accept the challenge and
opportunity of competing with Vietnam in labor costs .
If this keeps up, Jeb will win in a landslide and he won’t have to cheat either .
The sad part is watching a supposed Dem do the GOP dirty work .
I think you’re right. It means we’re just supposed to surrender to our corporate overlords and get back to toting that bail and pulling that plow.
I wonder, I just wonder, if we aren’t going to get a new party out of all these convulsions.
Hopefully there’ll still be a middle class then.
I guess we are supposed to feel that he is on top of things now, huh?
Asshat.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101109/ap_on_re_us/obama_asia
Nice roundup, Dak. You must be thrilled to hear that the economic stress in this country has dropped. Yaay!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101109/ap_on_bi_ge/us_stress_map
Hillary 2012
great links, thx!
Kat,
I have a swf video I’d like to upload in a post. You know you to do that?
Anybody here knows?
I’m not sure how to do that but let me dig out some old instructions I got sent about other video formats and wordpress.
see if you can make sense of this:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/embedded-video-with-link/
I don’t know if you have to install some plug-in to make it possible. This is killing me because my entire post depends on that video. It contains a lot of material for a sober discussion.
Dak – your energy level is so high – wonderful social life – terrific brain.
The contrast between Bo’s messianic journey and Hillary’s true statesman’s visits – full of knowledge and care – so stark and heartbreaking. This administration is truly tone deaf and woefully inadequate. Hill and Bill don’t even break a sweat – it looks effortless. That’s what 18 million of us wanted but were denied in the most egregious manner. It was never be forgiven nor forgotten.
Agree with everything you said!
… mis-phrasing notwithstanding. 😉
It was…It will…sigh
BO just wasn’t prepared for responsibilities at this level. The ready on day one ad campaign said it all. Too bad that no on in the DNC listened.
What I’ve been reading today-international rankings The 2010 Legatum Prosperity Index. (US is 10th, Canada 7th, Finland 3rd, Norway 1st)
http://www.prosperity.com/country.aspx?id=US
Anyone see this? Missile launched off the coast of SoCal. The military says they didn’t do it.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/mystery-missile-launch-los-angeles-no-threat-national-security.html
No, how weird and strange!!!
I giggled at this.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/gingrichsayspelosimakingpoorstrategicmoveinremainingspeakerofthehouse;_ylt=AlfOZ1nh20OlD4f.e6e4Xtas0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFlMXRudmZnBHBvcwM3OQRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX3BvbGl0aWNzBHNsawNnaW5ncmljaHNheXM-
Yeah we should listen to Gingrich because we all know this is a guy that has the best interests of the Democratic Party at heart. LOL
Thanks for the “concern” Newt.
Ah, what would we do with out the wisdom of the Newster?
So Clyburn is openly fighting with Hoyer for Minority Whip position. Frankly, Clyburn seems too old to hold even the third position.
And, after the primary when that Judas helped with the “Clinton are racists” fraud he can just suck my dick.
oh wait, I don’t have one
That’s OK, he can suck your clit.
ewww
I don’t blame you.
Please don’t be offended, I thought it was just a figure of speech, such as “kiss my a$$.” (It would be pretty yucky to have him kiss your a$$ too, wouldn’t it? I know it would for me.)
oh, Branjor!…LOL!
I responded but spammy ate (sucked) it.
It was just a one word response. Don’t think spammy really wanted it cause it was not a “bad” word.
Found this while surfing:
Hillary charms a couple of Aussie comedians…
“>
Shame about the canned laughter.
uh, fail.
try again…
Totaly enjoyed. Thanks for posting.
Looks like there may be an extended version. Have you looked for it? I would but I am supposed to be in a meeting right now.
Didn’t you love the news anchor at the end?
I checked the station’s site for an extended version, but it won’t play vids outside Australia.
“She’s such a clarse act.”
“… we should snap her up!”
“Please, send us one!”
Lol! But the latter they can forget about. She’s one of a kind!
Hi, Pips!
“clarse”…lol!
Yeah, she’s *REAL*, and that quality always shines through.