Tuesday Reads: Freedom Riders, Rape as a Weapon of War, Meltdowns, and Trump in Trouble

Posted: May 17, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 43 Comments

Good Morning!!

Last night I watched an inspiring and moving documentary on PBS’ American Experience about the Freedom Rides of 1961–50 years ago this month. If you didn’t watch it last night, please try to find a way to do so. It was wonderful. There were a number of articles published to coincide with the premiere of the documentary last night.

CNN published a fascinating piece about James Zwerg, who is also interviewed in the PBS documentary. Here’s just a bit of it, but the entire article is well worth reading.

Looking out the window, Zwerg could see men gripping baseball bats, chains and clubs. They had sealed off the streets leading to the bus station and chased away news photographers. They didn’t want anyone to witness what they were about to do.

Zwerg accepted his worst fear: He was going to die today.

Only the night before, Zwerg had prayed for the strength to not strike back in anger. He was among the 18 white and black college students from Nashville who had decided to take the bus trip through the segregated South in 1961. They called themselves Freedom Riders. Their goal was to desegregate public transportation.

[….]

The Greyhound bus doors hissed open. Zwerg had volunteered to go first. The mob swarmed him as he stepped off the bus, yelling, “Nigger lover! Nigger lover!”

Then, as the mob grabbed him, Zwerg closed his eyes and bowed his head to pray. “The Lord is my light and salvation, of whom shall I fear … ”

The mob dragged him away.

John Lewis (L) and James Zwerg, freedom riders

New Orleans was the final destination of the freedom rides, and NOLA.com has an article about a 2011 reenactment organized by PBS to coincide with the documentary. Five of the original freedom riders joined college students for the event.

The Public Broadcasting Service’s Freedom Riders bus pulled into New Orleans Monday with five of the hundreds of people who rode buses through the South in 1961 to test court rulings that had desegregated interstate transportation. Many southern states ignored the rulings, and the first buses never made it to their New Orleans destination because of the violence inflicted from mobs in Alabama.

Forty college students joined them on this year’s ride from May 6 to Monday, retracing the route of the first Freedom Ride from Washington D.C. and completing the unfinished trek.

The 2011 ride was organized by PBS in conjunction with last night’s premiere of a documentary about the Freedom Riders. Both the film and the ride are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first Freedom Ride and subsequent rides it inspired in 1961.

Curtis Valentine at Huffpo asks if the graduating classes of 2011 can be today’s freedom riders. I really hate to be a cynic, but good luck with that. I just hope a few of them watch the documentary. Those students back in 1961 were unbelievably brave and idealistic–and they changed America.

Another truly courageous person, Eman al-Obeidi gave an interview today to one of the journalists (Jonathan Miller) who tried to protect her when she rushed into their headquarters in Tripoli and told them of the ordeal she had suffered after being kidnapped by Gaddafi’s thugs. Here is just a bit of the interview.

She speaks matter-of-factly about the extreme sexual violence to which she claims she was subjected. It is clearly distressing for her to recount her ordeal, but she persists, despite my assurances that she need not go on.

She cannot control the floods of her tears as she talks about why she believes she was singled out. It’s because she was from Benghazi, she says. Her accent and ID card betrayed her.

“They asked me: ‘Where are the men from the east? Let them come and see what we do to their women. Let them see how we rape their women, and humiliate them.’”

She pauses to reach for a tissue as tears continue to roll down her cheeks. “They wanted to take revenge because I’m from the east. Nothing more, nothing less. They were drunk.”

Under international law, the use of rape as a weapon of war is a war crime. Women are protected in both international and internal conflicts under the Geneva Conventions. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court also outlaws rape as an act of war.

Here is Jonathan Miller’s report of his first encounter with al-Obeidi:

Finally it is coming out in the mainstream media–the situation at the Fukushima plant is far worse than we have previously been led to believe. At least one of the reactors completely melted down and the cores of three of the reactors are damaged, and there is a good chance that the containments have been breached. From the Wall Street Journal:

The pressure vessel, a cylindrical steel container that holds nuclear fuel, “is likely to be damaged and leaking water at units Nos. 2 and 3,” said Junichi Matsumoto, Tepco spokesman on nuclear issues, in a news briefing Sunday.

He also said there could be far less cooling water in the pressure vessels of Nos. 2 and 3, indicating there are holes at the bottom of these vessels, with thousands of tons of water pumped into these reactors mostly leaking out.

Tepco found the basement of the unit No. 1 reactor building flooded with 4.2 meters of water. It isn’t clear where the water came from, but leaks are suspected in pipes running in and out of the containment vessel, a beaker-shaped steel structure that holds the pressure vessel.

The water flooding the basement is believed to be highly radioactive. Workers were unable to observe the flooding situation because of strong radiation coming out of the water, Tepco said.

Time Magazine asks if Fukushima “was a China syndrome.”

The China Syndrome refers to a scenario in which a molten nuclear reactor core could could fission its way through its containment vessel, melt through the basement of the power plant and down into the earth. While a molten reactor core wouldn’t burn “all the way through to China” it could enter the soil and water table and cause huge contamination in the crops and drinking water around the power plant. It’s a nightmare scenario,the stuff of movies. And it might just have happened at Fukushima.
Last week, plant operator Tepco sent engineers in to recalibrate water level gauges in reactor number 1. They made an alarming discovery: virtually all the fuel in the core had melted down. That means that the zirconium alloy tubes that hold the uranium fuel and the fuel itself lies in a clump—either at the bottom of the pressure vessel, or in the basement below or possibly even outside the containment building. Engineers don’t know for sure, though current temperature readings suggest that fission inside the reactor core has definitely ceased for good (i.e. there will be no further melting).

Anecdotal evidence doesn’t bode well for how far the fuel melted: Tepco has been pumping thousands of tons of water onto reactor 1 to try to cool it—yet the water level in the containment vessel is too low to run an emergency cooling system. That means the water is escaping somewhere on a course cut by molten fuel–probably into the basement of the reactor building, though it’s also possible it melted through everything into the earth.

At Huffpo, Michael Shaw says the MSM is still mostly uninterested in the horrible situation at Fukushima. He’s right. The story is just barely breaking through as of now. Our government had to be part of the coverup, because the U.S. had helicopters surveying the damage. If you’d like to read a very good article that spells out the current situation in a clear and fairly calm matter, check out this piece by Chris Martenson. It’s excellent.

I’ll leave you with this piece about Donald Trump by Michael Isakoff: Trump escapes further scrutiny by pulling the presidential plug — Real estate developer faced steady drip of disclosures in dozens of suits.

Donald Trump’s decision not to run for president will permit him to avoid making a full public disclosure of his finances and escape further national media scrutiny of business practices that were being litigated in courtrooms across the country.

[….]

Trump abruptly pulled back over the weekend, just days after receiving private polling numbers from Republican pollster John McLaughlin showing that Republican voters were souring on the idea of his candidacy and that his standing had now fallen into the single digits, according to two Republican consultants who were briefed on the poll results.

The decision also came after an unfavorable court decision in Florida last Friday in which a federal magistrate ordered him to turn over a series of business licensing arrangements for his hotel and office building projects that he has long fought to keep confidential, according to court documents reviewed by NBC News.

Read the Florida court decision (.pdf)

“At the end of the day, he was going to face a degree of scrutiny of his business practices that he’s not accustomed to,” said Kenneth Turkel, a lawyer who is representing a group of condo investors who are suing Trump over a Trump-named project that has gone bust in Tampa, Fla. “We were the tip of the iceberg.”

Personally, I hope all those courts throw the book at him. So what are you reading and blogging about today?

How Long Has Dominique Strauss-Kahn Been Getting Away with Rape?

Posted: May 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: just because | 71 Comments

Dominique Strauss-Kahn flanked by NYPD officers

I’m sure no one here at Sky Dancing is surprised to learn that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who was arrested for attacking a maid at a NYC hotel, now faces another charge of sexual assault–this one from back in 2002. From the Guardian UK:

A local official of the Socialist party claimed that Strauss-Kahn had attacked her daughter, who is goddaughter to Strauss-Kahn’s second wife, in 2002.

Tristane Banon was in her 20s and writing a book when she approached Strauss-Kahn for an interview in 2002. In a TV programme in 2007, in which Strauss-Kahn’s name had been bleeped out, Banon allegedly described him as a “rutting chimpanzee” and described how she was forced to fight him off. “It finished badly … very violently … I kicked him,” Banon said. “When we were fighting, I mentioned the word ‘rape’ to make him afraid, but it didn’t have any effect. I managed to get out.”

So why didn’t Banon press charges after the attack? She thought about it and even talked to a lawyer, but decided that she “didn’t want to be known to the end of my days as the girl who had a problem with the politician.” In addition, her mother thought the attack must have been a rare exception to Strauss-Kahn’s normally “warm” and “sympathetic” behavior.

“Today I am sorry to have discouraged my daughter from complaining. I bear a heavy responsibility,” she said….[because] the attack left her daughter depressed and traumatised. “My daughter, despite the passing years, is still shocked by these facts. Her life was completely upset by this affair and she was depressed for a long time.” She added that it was clear Strauss-Kahn had “difficulty controlling his urges”.

Unfortunately, this man has very likely been getting away with sexually assaulting women for most of his life. Men who rape rarely do it just once. Sure enough multiple media outlets are now reporting that Strauss-Kahn was widely known to have difficulty controlling his impulses with women. From MSNBC:

Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s reputation with women earned him the nickname “the great seducer,” and not even an affair with a subordinate could knock the International Monetary Fund leader off a political path pointed in the direction of the French presidency.

The trouble is that the “affair with a subordinate” wasn’t really an “affair,” as I understand that term. Here is how the situation is described by the Guardian:

…in 2008, after a well-documented affair with Piroska Nagy a Hungarian economist and a junior colleague at the IMF, he was forced to publicly apologise for “an error of judgment”, but was cleared of abusing his position. He insisted the relationship was consensual, but when his wife, journalist Anne Sinclair, described it as a “one-night stand”, an indignant Nagy wrote to investigators saying: “I was not prepared for the advances of the IMF director general. I didn’t know what to do … I felt damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” Nagy left her job at the IMF after the affair, and hinted at harassment of female staff, adding that her boss had “without question” used his position to seduce her.

The Guardian also quotes Thierry Saussez, a former adviser to French President Nicholas Sarkozy, as saying that no one should be surprised by Strauss-Kahn’s behavior with a hotel maid in NYC–that it is well known that Strauss-Kahn “has a problem” and that female journalists are loathe to interview him.

More information has come out about what actually happened during that hotel “assault,” and it is much worse than originally reported. From New York Magazine:

IMO, forcing someone to perform oral sex is, in fact, rape. If that isn’t in the definition of rape in the criminal codes, it needs to be included. I’m beginning to think we really do need a new definition of rape–and not the one the Republicans proposed awhile back.

Monday Reads

Posted: May 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Economy, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, fundamentalist Christians, Global Financial Crisis, income inequality, Medicare, religion, religious extremists, Republican politics, Republican presidential politics, Team Obama, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 52 Comments

Good Morning!

Are you reading for the end of the world next Saturday?  Nope, it’s not 2012 yet and we’re not talking about the Mayan Prophecy. Harold Campaign has convinced  a group of evangelicals that the date is May 21, 2011.  I wonder if any of them would like me to take care of their left behind pets for all their money?  You can read more about the man and his end of days wishes at Salon.

The self-appointed harbingers are not tied to any particular church — they claim organized religion has been corrupted by the devil — but rather to Internet- and radio-based ministries. And their lone mission is to tell anyone and everyone that the end of days is May 21. That’s when, they insist, God’s true believers will be lifted into heaven and saved, during a biblical event widely referred to as the Rapture.

The finer points of Christian eschatology have long been the subject of dispute (not to mention the inspiration for movies and books, like the blockbuster “Left Behind” series). Though mainstream churches reject the the notion that doomsday can be predicted by any man, fringe scholars continue to work feverishly pinpointing the moment of the final, divine revelation. And one such man — 89-year-old radio host Harold Camping — has been at the game for decades.

In the early ’90s, Camping published a book titled “1994?,” which claimed judgment day would arrive in September of that year. When confronted with such a staggering anticlimax — the world, after all, kept on spinning — Camping chose not to be discouraged, but to learn from his mistakes. (He hadn’t considered the Book of Jeremiah, he says.) A civil engineer by trade, Camping went back to the drawing board and continued to crunch the numbers, before arriving at the adamant determination that Rapture would come on May 21, 2011. He began to spread the word through his broadcasting network, Family Radio, in 2009, and quickly built up a fervid following.

I guess it takes all kinds.  That’s what my mother used to tell me when she was alive, anyway. Speaking of that, MoJo has a great list of Newtisms that will take you a trip back in time with Gingrich’s greatest tongue trips.  Here’s some of his earliest hits.

1978 In an address to College Republicans before he was elected to the House, Gingrich says: “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words.” He added, “Richard Nixon…Gerald Ford…They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, in my lifetime—I was born in 1943—we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever.”

1980 On the House floor, Gingrich states, “The reality is that this country is in greater danger than at any time since 1939.”

1980 Gingrich says: “We need a military four times the size of our present defense system.” (See 1984.)

1983 A major milestone: Gingrich cites former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on the House floor: “If in fact we are to follow the Chamberlain liberal Democratic line of withdrawal from the planet,” he explains, “we would truly have tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children.”

What is it that Republicans put in their formula that turns out people like this?  Newt was on Meet the Press yesterday where he mouthed off on a number of subject’s including Paul Ryan’s Medicare pogrome.  This is the National Review’s take so read with caution.

Newt Gingrich’s appearance on “Meet the Press” today could leave some wondering which party’s nomination he is running for. The former speaker had some harsh words for Paul Ryan’s (and by extension, nearly every House Republican’s) plan to reform Medicare, calling it “radical.”

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said when asked about Ryan’s plan to transition to a “premium support” model for Medicare. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/Reid/Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.

“I think what you want to have is a system where people voluntarily migrate to better outcomes, better solutions, better options,” Gingrich said. Ryan’s plan was simply “too big a jump.”

He even went so far as to compare it the Obama health-care plan.”I’m against Obamacare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change.”

I have to say that having Trump, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul all debating each other on one stage would probably be highly entertaining.   They could have a contest for who would make the craziest old uncle.

The White House is out on the road trying to head off problems with the national debt ceiling.  Timothy Geithner says that the economy will double-dip if the Republicans don’t raise the ceiling.

In a heavily-anticipated response to Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., who asked Geithner to document the economic and fiscal impacts of failing to lift the statutory debt limit, the Treasury secretary detailed a chain reaction that would cripple the economy, costing jobs and income.

“A default would inflict catastrophic far-reaching damage on our nation’s economy, significantly reducing growth and increasing unemployment,” said Geithner in the letter to Bennet which was dated May 13. “Even a short-term default could cause irrevocable damage to the economy.”

Geithner has imposed an August deadline for Congress to lift the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, but lawmakers are still negotiating over Republican demands to tie the move to spending cuts. And a portion of the GOP still remains skeptical about the need to act by the deadline at all, arguing that the consequences have been overstates.

Economist Mark Thoma has a better explanation of how the refusal to increase the debt ceiling would impact the economy on CBS Money Watch.  This explanation is much more precise.

If politicians fail to reach a deal to increase the debt ceiling, there would be a large fall in federal spending. The decline in federal purchases of private sector goods and services would reduce aggregate demand, and this could slow or even reverse the recovery (it could also threaten the delivery of critical services that some people depend upon). In addition, the failure to pay wages to federal workers would disrupt household finances and cause a further decline in demand, as would the failure of the government to pay its bills for the goods and services it has already purchased from the private sector (and it could even threaten some households and businesses with bankruptcy should the problem persist). There may be some room for the Treasury to use accounting tricks to avoid the worst problems, at least for a time, but it is not at all clear how well this would work to insulate the economy from problems and eventually this strategy will come to an end.

That’s potentially bad enough, but it’s far from the end of the problems that could occur. Failure to raise the debt ceiling could also undermine faith in the safety of US Treasury bills. If we default on bond payments, or appear willing to do so even if it doesn’t actually occur and investors lose faith in US Treasury Bills, they will begin demanding higher interest rates to cover the increased perception of risk. This could be very costly. We depend upon the rest of the world to finance our debt at extremely low interest rates. If the willingness of other countries to do this diminishes, then the cost of financing our debt would rise substantially. And that’s not all. In addition to increased debt servicing costs, an increase in interest rates would also choke off business investment potentially lowering economic growth, and the consumption of durable goods by households would fall as well. Rising interest rates would also be bad for the housing recovery (such as it is). Thus, failure to reach an agreement could be very costly.

The Economist‘s Blog on American Politics: Democracy in America has an interesting  post right now on ‘The Road to Plutocracy’.  It’s an interesting read with a lot of quotes from other pundits.

THE word “plutocracy” is in the air these days. Some say the era of the de facto rule of the mighty top 10%, or top 1%, or whatever insidious sliver of the income distribution is thought to constitute the moneyed power elite, is upon us, or nearly so. I’m not so sure. I am sold on the proposition that there’s something deeply whacked about the American financial system, and that whatever that’s whacked about it is significantly responsible for the top 1% pulling so far away from the rest of the income distribution. This needs to be fixed, whatever its other consequences. It’s not clear to me, however, what exactly is whacked. I don’t know whether to sign up for Tyler Cowen’s “going short on volatility” story, Daron Acemoglu’s “financial-sector lobbying and campaign contributions ‘bought’ an enriching (and destabilising) regulatory structure” story, or some other story. No doubt the truth is in some subtle combination of stories. In any case, accounts such as Mr Acemoglu’s, according to which big players in certain sectors over time manage to rig the regulatory climate to their advantage, are quite compelling for reasons both theoretical and empirical

Newsweek has an interesting article up on why the megarich manage to have such a sweet tax deal.  Even if we raise their income taxes, it really doesn’t hit them where it counts.  Here’s why.

It drives economist Bruce Bartlett crazy every time he hears another bazillionaire announce he’s in favor of paying higher taxes. Most recently it was Mark Zuckerberg who got Bartlett’s blood boiling when the Facebook founder declared himself “cool” with paying more in federal taxes, joining such tycoons as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Ted Turner, and even a stray hedge-fund manager or two.

Bartlett, a former member of the Reagan White House, isn’t against the wealthy paying higher taxes. He’s that rare conservative who thinks higher taxes need to be part of the deficit debate. His beef? It’s a hollow gesture to say the federal government should raise the tax rate on the country’s top wage earners when the likes of Zuckerberg have most of their wealth tied up in stock. Many of the super-rich see virtually all their income as capital gains, and capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate—15 percent—than ordinary income. When Warren Buffett talks about paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, that’s because she sees most of her pay through a paycheck, while the bulk of his compensation comes in the form of capital gains and dividends. In 2006, for instance, Buffett paid 17.7 percent in taxes on the $46 million he booked that year, while his secretary lost 30 percent of her $60,000 salary to the government.

“It’s easy to say ‘Raise taxes’ when you know you’re not going to have to pay those taxes,” Bartlett says. “What I don’t hear is ‘Let’s raise the capital-gains tax.’” Instead the focus has been on the federal tax rate paid by those with an annual income of $250,000 or more—the top 3 percent of earners. Bartlett argues that while raising taxes on the country’s richest individuals would go a long way in easing the debt crisis, it makes no sense to treat the professional making a few hundred thousand dollars a year the same as the Richie Rich set. Maybe it’s hard to muster sympathy for an executive pulling down $1 million a year. But ours is a tax system where a person in the top tax bracket (those earning more than $374,000 in 2010) pays a tax rate of 35 percent on the upper portions of his or her income (37.9 percent if you include Medicare), whereas a hedge-fund manager or mogul earning 10 or 100 times that amount pays less than half that tax rate.

Well, now I’m thinking we’re all just so f’ked that I might as well stop while I’m ahead.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Late Night Open Thread: Two Disgraced NYPD Cops are Possible Suspects in Long Island Murders

Posted: May 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Crime | Tags: , , , , | 11 Comments

According to Brad Hamilton at the New York Post, one former and one current member of the NYPD may be suspects in the Long Island serial killer case.

One cop was forced out of the job in the 1990s when his supervisors learned he spent time pursuing hookers and paying street walkers and down-and-out women for sex while he was supposed to be on patrol.

An internal investigation led to his resigning under pressure, one source said.

The other officer still works for the NYPD but was stripped of his gun and badge years ago because he allegedly assaulted a prostitute and got arrested during a sting operation….

The patrolman was allowed to return to the force, they said, though he was placed on modified duty — transferred to a paper-pushing job in Manhattan where he’s not allowed to make arrests or respond to emergencies.

Yikes! That’s creepy. There is no evidence the two cops knew each other. They are not the only suspects investigators are looking at either.

In related news, police suspect the body of a young Asian male found recently beside Ocean Parkway recently may be the remains of a missing college student, Jimmy Tsui. Tsui disappeared without a trace in 1998.

Yim Yeung Tsui (“Jimmy”), 19, a student at Stony Brook University was headed into his junior year. He was last seen leaving his residence in New Hyde Park, New York on 8/26/98 when he disappeared under unknown circumstances. He has not been seen since.

Jimmy Tsui went missing in New York less than 3 months after Yeshiva University student Joshua Bender disappeared.

Apparently, there were a series of mysterious disappearances of young men, and their bodies later turned up in various bodies of water in NYC.

Misery Index hits Reagan Years High

Posted: May 15, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Economy, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , | 9 Comments

One of the measurements of economic well-being that got some play in the Carter/Reagan years was the Misery Index.  It basically measures the impact of price increases and unemployment on people. There’s some new information coming out of this index. It seems it’s as bad as it was in 1983.

John Williams, over at Shadow Stats, compiles economic data for inflation and unemployment the way it used to be calculated pre-1990. Based on that data, the CPI inflation rate is over 10%, and the unemployment rate is over 15% (see charts). The Misery Index is the sum of the current inflation rate and the unemployment rate.  If it were to be calculated using the older methods, the Index would now be over 25, a record high. It surpasses the old index high of 21.98, which occurred in June 1980, when Jimmy Carter was president. Most believe the height of the Index along with the Iranian hostage crisis is what caused Carter to lose his re-election bid.

We’ve changed a lot of the way we measure inflation and unemployment since then partially because we’ve tried to focus more narrowly on measures of both inflation and unemployment but also because the measures were consistently high during the 1970s and 1980s.  The inflation rate as stated by the CPI was frequently overstated because of its use of a base market basket that didn’t always reflect the introduction of new goods and services, the places people shop, and the switching or substitution behavior of people.  It had a fix budget apportionment that was used to weight prices and those weights were frequently stale.

The changes in the way the unemployment rate was measured had to do with the shift away from  reliance on the traditional 40 hour work week job by both businesses and job seekers.  The unemployment rate was changed so that you only had to work at least one hour a week at paid work to be excluded.   This is why economists look at a bunch of different statistics to get a handle on the job market.  People that don’t want to work part time but are stuck there are now considered underemployed and are tracked separately.  If you visit Shadow Government Statistics you can see comparisons of the old and the new way of doing things.

Some of the most salient points are that long-term, discouraged workers were taken out of the unemployment statistic in 1994.  SGS calls this being “defined out of existence”.  Again, the statistic is still being tracked so you have to go look for it at the BLS.  I will say that economics reporters have been doing a better job of providing more than just the unemployment rate in their analysis.  You  have to look at the underemployed and the discouraged worker to get a good idea of what’s going on.  We’ve talked about the changes in the make up of the labor force around here because it’s one of the reasons that you’re seeing the unemployment rate go up and down recently.  When discouraged workers re-enter the labor force, the new unemployment rate will go up because the number of people in the labor force–the denominator in the statistic–goes up.

I actually have less problems with the changes in the inflation right but then again, the problem is that people need to realize that the definitions of the measures have changed and narrowed so it is important to look at more than just one rate.  This does explain, however, why people whose budgets are being impacted by food and gas prices  aren’t seeing the pain in the new inflation rates.  We’ve talked about this before also.

So, what does this mean?  I think it’s significant that the Misery Index is basically at similar levels to the last time the country was expressing discontent with the economy because it gives us a historical perspective. Ronald Reagan probably would not have won a second term if the Federal Reserve didn’t start significantly loosing monetary policy during that same time which brought down the inflation included in the Misery Index.The first Reagan term was the last time the economy was this bad.  Changes in monetary policy were the real reason for the worst of the Carter Recession and much of the eventual Reagan Recovery although some of the Reagan Recovery was due to the incredible increase in government purchases which are typical Keynesian economic aggregate demand stimulation policies.   Paul Volcker and the Fed brought on a recession by increasing interest rates in an attempt to reign in inflation and inflation expectations.  They did so. It happened with some extreme economic pain and that was what the Misery Index was supposed to reflect at the time.  The drivers for the misery right now are different.  We have record loose monetary policy.  The incredible shock to the economy of the financial crisis is the root of our issues now.

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