Monday Reads
Posted: August 8, 2011 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: AFL-CIO, double dip recession, Jackie O Tapes, market turmoil, Merce Cunningham, Timothy Geither, Trade agreements 31 Comments
Good Morning!
All eyes are on global markets for bonds, commodities, currencies, and equities. Gold futures were hanging around $1700 a troy ounce last night when the Asian markets opened. Silver is also moving up. The US dollar set a record low against the Swiss Franc. There’s the down grade to US Treasuries and the negative outlook given to the US to reprice and there’s still consideration for a second recession which could be much worse than the last one.
“It would be disastrous if we entered into a recession at this stage, given that we haven’t yet made up for the last recession,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics.
When the last downturn hit, the credit bubble left Americans with lots of fat to cut, but a new one would force families to cut from the bone. Making things worse, policy makers used most of the economic tools at their disposal to combat the last recession, and have few options available.
Anxiety and uncertainty have increased in the last few days after the decision by Standard & Poor’s to downgrade the country’s credit rating and as Europe continues its desperate attempt to stem its debt crisis.
Good news for investment banks. Timothy Geithner has agreed to stay on as Treasury Secretary.
Geithner told the president Friday morning that he would remain in his post. Hours later, he had to go to the White House to meet with Obama again and tell him the nation would likely lose its AAA credit rating.
On Sunday afternoon, Geithner joined an emergency conference call involving the seven major economic powers to discuss the impact of the downgrade.
“Secretary Geithner has let the president know that he plans to stay on in his position at Treasury,” Treasury spokeswoman Jenni LeCompte said in a statement. “He looks forward to the important work ahead on the challenges facing our great country.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “The president asked Secretary Geithner to stay on at Treasury and welcomes his decision.”
So, let me change the topic to real Camelot Days and The Daily Mail who claims that there’s some Jackie O tapes with some interesting gossip from back in the day.
Jackie Onassis believed that Lyndon B Johnson and a cabal of Texas tycoons were involved in the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy, ‘explosive’ recordings are set to reveal.
The secret tapes will show that the former first lady felt that her husband’s successor was at the heart of the plot to murder him.
She became convinced that the then vice president, along with businessmen in the South, had orchestrated the Dallas shooting, with gunman Lee Harvey Oswald – long claimed to have been a lone assassin – merely part of a much larger conspiracy.
Texas-born Mr Johnson, who served as the state’s governor and senator, completed Mr Kennedy’s term and went on to be elected president in his own right.
The tapes were recorded with leading historian Arthur Schlesinger Jnr within months of the assassination on November 22, 1963, and had been sealed in a vault at the Kennedy Library in Boston.
The President and Republicans in Congress may want full speed ahead on trade agreements but labor organizations are trying to put on the brakes. There are agreements with Panama, Colombia and South Korea in the pipe.
“We’ll be talking to every legislator out there about the trade deals,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Friday.
The AFL-CIO will hold more than 450 events across the country this month where the deals will be discussed, and it has started a petition “urging politicians to bring the same urgency to the jobs crisis that they brought to the politically manufactured crisis over the deficit,” Trumka said.
The fight over the agreements is splitting President Obama from unions and other liberal groups at a time when there is already tension between the White House and the left over the debt-ceiling deal.
Supporters of the trade deals in the administration, Congress and the business community argue they will create jobs and help the economy recover.
Juno began its journey to Jupiter on the 5th of this month. Juno is a solar-powered probe with a mission to study the origins of our solar system.
Juno is set to unite with Jupiter on July 4, 2016, when the spacecraft will enter orbit around the largest planet in our solar system. As the spacecraft circles Jupiter 33 times over the course of one year, passing over the planet’s poles, Juno will gather information about its atmosphere, magnetic field and structure.
Of all the planets in the solar system, astronomers think that Jupiter formed first, and its strong, clingy gravitational field means that any scraps of primordial material it snatched up then may still be present today—and in 2016, when Juno arrives at the gas giant. By measuring Jupiter’s chemical content, Juno could aid in scientists’ understanding of what this solar system looked like when it first formed.
Two years ago, my brother-in-law’s uncle died, but his dance troupe and legacy live on. There’s a wonderful article on the legacy of Merce Cunningham at NPR that includes a beautiful photo of the troupe performing Antic Meet. It’s a wonderful narrative of dancers committed to keeping the spirit and vision of the famed choreographer alive.
Passing on Cunningham’s legacy is crucial to more than just the world of dance. In the 1950s, Cunningham broke with the basic notion of dance being inspired by drama and emotion, as he and his partner, the composer John Cage, moved dance into a new era of abstraction. Their work was a key part of the art world’s seismic shift to post-modernism; Cunningham is now seen as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, on a par with Picasso and Stravinsky.
By the end of his 90 years, Cunningham was in a wheelchair, and instead of creating new dances, he finally began to think about saving the ones he had already made. His longtime friend Laura Kuhn says she urged him to plan for his legacy before it was too late.
“He was making new work up until the end of his life,” Kuhn says. “But the making of new work was less possible — it became less and less possible for him. So I think it became clear to him that in order for his work to survive, someone was going to have to step in.”
So Kuhn and others close to Cunningham helped him set up the Merce Cunningham Trust, which will maintain an archive of his work and license his pieces, and employ former dancers, like longtime Cunningham dancer Rob Swinston, to teach them to other troupes.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
Hey Dak, thanks for that link to Merce Cunningham. As a guy that has no balance to even walk a straight line I’m in awe od those dancers. Had a friend who was a dancer, worked very hard and made no money although he did shows nightly at a Vegas – style venue and traveled alot. The athletics involved are amazing. As much as I can’t stand TV, I have taken to watching that stupid Dancing (not the with the stars show) show just to see the talent these kids bring and finally see them get some recognition for their talent. Truly a lost art, almost. Anyway, I watched all of Cunningham’s stuff on Youtube there. Pretty interesting how it was presented. Glad it will be saved for posterity.
Thanks again for a nice distraction from that little squirt staying on at Treasury.
Regarding Kennedy – we need to recall that Kennedy used Judith Campbell Exner (girlfriend) to make the contact with the mob to try to assasinate Castro. This was after the Bay of Pigs. Recall Oswald went to Russia and then Cuba before shooting Kennedy. What is amazing is how Oswald was accurate at that distance. The lone gunman has been challenged but never disproved.
It probably years before we know what realy happened. I think the lesson to be learned is that when you are involved in assasination, you never know what can happen.
We’ll never know what happened for sure because there was too much obfuscation in the attempt to cover up. Nevertheless, enough is known to be sure that Oswald didn’t fire all the shots–if he fired any. There has been a great deal of recent scholarship based on information released in the past ten years. Most people don’t seem to be aware of how much is actually known about CIA involvement with Oswald, for example.
Bobby Kennedy never believed Oswald acted alone either. It simply makes no sense, frankly. And it certainly makes no sense that Ruby somehow got into the Dallas PD with now official help and silenced Oswald because he admired the Kennedys. LOL
I could go on, but I know most people aren’t really interested….Joseph Cannon has written a lot of useful stuff though for anyone who is interested.
I’ve said this many times, and I’ll say it again. The killing of JFK was essentially a coup, and we’ve never recovered. He had already signed the order to pull all of the “advisers” out of Vietnam. That could not be permitted. Things have only gone from bad to worse since that day.
I’ve believed that LBJ was involved since the day it happened.
I don’t know whether I trust this source, though. It’s either ignorant enough or sloppy enough to identify Johnson as a former Governor of Texas, which he never was. If he’s confusing Conolly, who was in the car with JFK, with Johnson, no telling what else he’s confused about.
Interesting – I remember my mom saying she thought Johnson was behind Kennedy’s assasination and hung on to that belief until the day she died.
Paul Ryan claims U.S. credit downgrade vindicates his budget plan.
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/08/ryan-claims-downgrade-is-vindication-of-gop/
The GOP always does this…it is their SOP. Here’s how it works:
1) Make a patently false argument, like “The New Deal is why we went into the Great Depression.”
2) Eviscerate the New Deal.
3) We go into a recession because they eviscerate the New Deal.
4) Falsely claim that the reason that we went into a recession is because we still have too much of the New Deal in place.
Voila! They have a false, but clear and understandable argument for their followers to parrot.
As that great article by Drew Westen stated, Obama refuses to make a counter-argument as to why these lunatics are wrong. That is why we keep careening into insanity.
I have actually been saying this since Clinton left office. He and Hillary are the last of the fighting Dems, who actually know how to frame arguments as well as the Repubs do – and take actions to support those arguments.
Hey, Check this out…I got a message from my rep, the one and only Saxby Chambliss…What a load this man is pushing. I can only imagine the same shit from other GOPs. Oh and just a note, my other reps, Tom Graves and Johnny Isakson just sent me a “we got your message” notice. It was nothing like this one below.
Minx – I lost him at the first graf:
IIf that’s the case, then I’m sure that Admiral Mullen would agree that we should cut the debt and deficit by drastically the trillions we are currently spending on our many wars in the Middle East.
Or maybe, just maybe, he isn’t an economist, so he’s not really that much of an authority on the debt and deficit?
Good grief! Mike Mullen, macroeconomist. Not!
Second recession could be much worse than the first–NYT
To me, the much more interesting info from the Jackie O story was that she had an affair with William Holden.
I didn’t hear that………..the actor right?
It’s in the article Dak posted. Yes, the actor.
@BB, yes that is more interesting too. I so loved William Holden.
I cannot say how very excited I am that Tim Geithner is staying on. Because I am not excited at all. . . . Perhaps after some coffee. Thank you.
well I had coffee and it didn’t help 😦
I haven’t been able to stay awake for the past 3-4 days. I thought it was the weather, but maybe it was the knowledge that Timmy will be with us for sooooo much longer. Ugh.
yeah, and now Donald Trump is talking about what he’d do as Treasury Secretary. I think the country’s gone mad. Multiple cups aren’t helping me.
Very interesting post , Dak – and it will prove to be a very interesting day, I’m sure.
Stocks already dropping.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-07/u-s-stock-futures-fall-amid-concern-s-p-cut-may-worsen-economic-slowdown.html
Sunday evening was hard on me, three deaths…………………one was my friend’s, nephew, who was serving this country as Navy Seals elite……………Salute to the 30 who lost their lives, and
to Jesse Pittman, R.I.P.
Oh no. I’m so sorry for your losses, Fannie. Please take good care of yourself.
My condolence to you, that is tough, and the Navy Seals deaths, has been on everyone’s minds. I hope their bodies flight home is covered, as we have been too absent of the cost via lack of media coverage. Nancy Grace is one of the few that goes out of her way to cover the service men/women who died. RIP.
Take care and know you are in our thoughts.
Can someone explain to me why the press seeks out the likes of McCain or Palin to utter their nonsense regarding the economic position of the U.S.?
It is clear that they have no grasp of the issue at large yet everytime I turn on the tv I find one or the other commenting about subjects well beyond their scope of understanding. As far back as 2008 McCain even admitted to having little knowledge of the economic breakdown at that time.
As for Palin, what she doesn’t know covers such a huge terrain that it is comical to listen her “analysis” of anything.
This is what is so egregiously wrong with the MSM today. Seeking to fill a 24 hour news cycle they are willing to waste actual reporting on morons without a clue. A grumpy and bitter old man and an egotistical airhead who add nothing but hot hair and no solutions.
No wonder we are at the impossible impasse we are in today if this is the best we have to offer. Finding answers among the clueless. Their answer to everything is to lower the debt ceiling even further, attack entitlements, and leave the rich alone.
Brilliant!
The really interesting info in the Jackie O. story was in this comment:
“Just after Johnson was sworn in following the assassination, he recalled and had destroyed all the US Treasury notes that JFK had put into circulation. I still have one of these and it is not a Silver Certificate, but a US Treasury greenback. These are dollars authorized by the US Constitution, and they carry no debt. They completely bypass the Federal Reserve system by not having to be borrowed into circulation. Just imagine had this assassination not occurred, there would be no US debt crisis! The people every two years vote on their representatives, and these Congresssional representatives make the budgets. If they go hog wild, they get voted out; but by bypassing them with the privately owned Bankster concerns, there is no longer direct accountability, and we have an immense alleged debt.
– andyandersonusa, Bremerton, Washington, USA, 7/8/2011 19:38
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023418/Jackie-O-tapes-reveal-JFKs-affairs-believed-death.html#ixzz1USFpT678“
Yeah, that was another thing JFK tried to do that the powers that be did not like.
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Hillary Clinton: Mad As Hell/Bitch by ShutTheFreudUp
THE AUDIO IS BACK!
The Dow is down over 400 points now. It’s heading for under 11,000. Wow, am I glad a sold out of stuff a few weeks a go. Norway’s krone and the Australia and New Zealand dollars appear to be the refuge currencies. Switzerland and Japan Central banks have worked to offset the increase in their currencies via the dollar
The market is just in shambles.
It’s like they finally woke up and realized that the economy is in shambles and that recent corporate profits are due to nothing but massive layoffs and pare-backs.