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Labor Day: Struggles of the Great Recession with a lot of Depression

Posted: September 2, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , |35 Comments

mattiseGood Morning!

I certainly hope this Labor Day is being kinder to you than me.  I am struggling without air conditioning for the third day in a row and it’s not pleasant.  Hopefully, by this time tomorrow relief will be on the way in the form of a new condenser.  After being totally fleeced by the same people who sold me all these units to begin with a week ago, my long time bestie from Virginia Beach found a great guy who has found mercy in his small business owning heart to deal me a deal and do it right.  I am scrambling right now for the money because I do know it is a deal and AC is the one thing you cannot be without in the deep south. I would like to say that the kindness of people still does exist in abundant quantities when you deal with people and not with those enslaved to corporations.  BostonBoomer is holding me together after I decided to emotionally quit my relationship as are several other friends and family members.  I have spent the last few weeks being pretty miserable without adding this big headache on top of everything.  But again, I just would like to say that if you cultivate friends and real people, the rewards will be ongoing.  You always find out who cares about you when troubles are beating down your door.  Some times you give a lot away and it doesn’t come back to you from quite the same place.  It comes back from the quiet work of day-to-day life and relationship building and the kindness shown to others who pay it forward.   I am sending very hot but very sincere blessings out to every one today.  Life can turn on a dime.

Bill Moyer’s Essay on “The End Game for Democracy” is the one thing I really think you should listen to or read this morning.  It has the feel of a sermon and a populist political meeting rolled into one.

We are so close to losing our democracy to the mercenary class, it’s as if we are leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon and all that’s needed is a swift kick in the pants. Look out below.

The predators in Washington are only this far from monopoly control of our government. They have bought the political system, lock, stock and pork barrel, making change from within impossible. That’s the real joke.

Sometimes I long for the wit of a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. They treat this town as burlesque, and with satire and parody show it the disrespect it deserves. We laugh, and punch each other on the arm, and tweet that the rascals got their just dessert. Still, the last laugh always seems to go to the boldface names that populate this town. To them belong the spoils of a looted city. They get the tax breaks, the loopholes, the contracts, the payoffs.

They fix the system so multimillionaire hedge fund managers and private equity tycoons pay less of a tax rate on their income than school teachers, police and fire fighters, secretaries and janitors. They give subsidies to rich corporate farms and cut food stamps for working people facing hunger. They remove oversight of the wall street casinos, bail out the bankers who torpedo the economy, fight the modest reforms of Dodd-Frank, prolong tax havens for multinationals, and stick it to consumers while rewarding corporations.

We pay. We pay at the grocery store. We pay at the gas pump. We pay the taxes they write off. Our low-wage workers pay with sweat and deprivation because this town – aloof, self-obsessed, bought off and doing very well, thank you – feels no pain.

The journalists who could tell us these things rarely do – and some, never. They aren’t blind, simply bedazzled. Watch the evening news – any evening news – or the Sunday talk shows. Listen to the chit-chat of the early risers on morning TV — and ask yourself if you are learning anything about how this town actually works.

Another equally good essay from Jonathan Holland at the same adress is “A Plutocracy Ruled By Self-Centered Jerks”.  (This one’s for you BB)

Two studies released last week confirmed what most of us already knew: the ultra-wealthy tend to be narcissistic and have a greater sense of entitlement than the rest of us, and Congress only pays attention to their interests. Both studies are consistent with earlier research.

In the first study, published in the currentPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Paul Piff of UC Berkeley conducted five experiments which demonstrated that “higher social class is associated with increased entitlement and narcissism.” Given the opportunity, Piff also found that they were more likely to check themselves out in a mirror than were those of lesser means.

Piff looked at how participants scored on a standard scale of “psychological entitlement,” and found that those of a high social class — based on income levels, education and occupational prestige — were more likely to say “I honestly feel I’m just more deserving than others,” while people further down the social ladder were likelier to respond, “I do not necessarily deserve special treatment.”

In an earlier study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Piff and four researchers from the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments which found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals.” This included being more likely to “display unethical decision-making,” steal, lie during a negotiation and cheat in order to win a contest.

In one telling experiment, the researchers observed a busy intersection, and found that drivers of luxury cars were more likely to cut off other drivers and less likely to stop for pedestrians crossing the street than those behind the wheels of more modest vehicles.  “In our crosswalk study, none of the cars in the beater-car category drove through the crosswalk,” Piff told The New York Times. “But you see this huge boost in a driver’s likelihood to commit infractions in more expensive cars.” He added: “BMW drivers are the worst.”

Summing up previous research on the topic, Piff notes that upper-class individuals also “showed reduced sensitivity to others’ suffering” as compared with working- and middle-class people.

So let me dally about in my own area and The Economist’s Club at Project Syndicate where Mohamed A El-Arian reminds us that we’re approaching the fifth mattise fishbowlyear anniversary of the Lehman death rattle.  The essay is about their morbid legacy.

…

I hope that we will also see another genre: analyses of the previously unthinkable outcomes that have become reality – with profound implications for current and future generations – and that our systems of governance have yet to address properly. With this in mind, let me offer four.

The first such outcome, and by far the most consequential, is the continuing difficulty that Western economies face in generating robust economic growth and sufficient job creation. Notwithstanding the initial sharp drop in GDP in the last quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, too many Western economies have yet to rebound properly, let alone sustain growth rates that would make up fully for lost jobs and income. More generally, only a few have decisively overcome the trifecta of maladies that the crisis exposed: inadequate and unbalanced aggregate demand, insufficient structural resilience and agility, and persistent debt overhangs.

The net result goes beyond the weak growth, worsening income inequality, high long-term unemployment, and alarming youth joblessness of the here and now. Five years after the global financial crisis, too many countries are being held back by exhausted and out-dated growth engines. As a result, prospects for a rapid, durable, and inclusive economic recovery remain a serious concern.

Given this harsh reality, it is not surprising that the second previously unthinkable outcome concerns inadequate policy responses – namely, the large and persistent imbalance between the hyperactivity of central banks and the frustrating passivity of other policymakers.

The big surprise here is not that central banks acted decisively and boldly when financial markets froze and economic activity plummeted. Given their relatively unrestricted access to the printing press and their high degree of operational autonomy, one would expect central banks to be active and effective first responders. And they responded in an impressive and globally coordinated fashion.

What is surprising is that, five years after the crisis, and four years after disrupted financial markets resumed their normal functioning, Western economies still overwhelmingly rely on central banks to avoid even worse economic performance. This has pushed central banks away from their core competencies as they have been forced to use partial and imperfect policy tools for quite a long time.

This outcome reflects domestic political polarization in the United States and the complexity of regional interactions in Europe, which have blocked comprehensive and balanced policy approaches. To appreciate the extent of the problem, consider the repeated failure of the US Congress to pass an annual budget (let alone deliver medium-term reforms) or incomplete eurozone-wide initiatives at a time of alarming unemployment and residual threats of financial disruptions.

Such political dysfunction has undermined the responsiveness of other policymaking entities, including those that possess better tools than central banks. This has compelled central bankers to remain in the policy forefront, building one bridge extension after another as they wait for other policymakers to get their act together. The result has been to expose Western economies to ever-more experimental measures, with considerable uncertainty about the longer-term impact of operating sophisticated market-based systems on the basis of artificial constructs.

This is something to reflect up as Congress returns in a few weeks to tell us that it’s the deficit or high taxes on businesses and the rich that have created our current problems.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

One last item to share.  This is from the Boston Globe Book Review.  It will give you something to think about this Labor Day.  I give you the link to Katherine Whitmore’s review “A More Perfect Union.”

The state of the union is not good. Organized labor has been “reduced to a whisper of its former greatness,” admits author Phillip Dray. “No one can divine or guarantee its future,” he adds, “but we can know its past.” And what an inspiring, doleful, and switchbacking past that is. Dray’s wonderful “There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America”(Anchor, 2011) pans back to explain the original sin that made America less receptive than other Western countries to unions; we were a capitalist power before we had a countervailing strong central government. The deck was stacked for business here, but things played out quite differently in older First World nations. Note the modern results: in Sweden, 67.5 percent of workers are unionized, in Belgium 50.4 percent, and in Ireland 31.2 percent.

In the United States, we live in an especially anti-union climate now, partly because we’ve shot from a factory economy to a finance and service economy, partly because (as Dray admits) labor has sometimes been “its own worst enemy.” Many unions were historically harsh to minorities and women, for instance, or sank into appalling corruption (see Hoffa, Jimmy). But Dray asks us to strip down to fundamentals: In a country 1-matisse-odalisque-1922-grangerfounded on the concept of checks and balances, surely unions make inherent sense. Who else can stand up to The Man?

This inherency, in fact, crystallized in the late-19th-century term “industrial democracy,” meaning that democracy is only authentic if it infuses our work lives as well as our civic lives. For isn’t the pursuit of happiness a farce if you work for slave wages, in unsafe conditions, with no security? Steps forward and steps back, of course: Dray pistons through the big turning points, from the disaster of Chicago’s Haymarket bombing of 1886, for which four labor activists were hanged, to the breakthroughs of United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis (the “stormy petrel of labor”) and the National Farm Workers founder Cesar Chavez. The Chavez material is remarkable. I never knew, for instance, that Southern pols would only pass 1935’s union-friendly Wagner Act if it excluded migrant workers. Or that antagonistic California farmers actually crop-dusted grape pickers during the 1960s protests.

I have spent a lot of time recently listening to my father who turns 90 in a month as he has begun to reflect on many things.  Recently, he is worried a lot about the world he’s going to leave behind.  He has decided that Al Gore is right and that global warming is real and a serious problem.  He doesn’t like any of the political parties and thinks that they are destroying the many great things he know about this country.  These are strong words coming from a dustbowl Okie who also flew bombing missions over Germany during World War 2.  He thinks that all of us will make out.  But, he worries about the country at large and wonders if Congress will nab his medicare or social security.  He started paying the first day you could pay into social security so he is truly vested in the program.  I tell him not to worry that he’s done his part on everything and just relax.  But I can’t say that I don’t feel the same way whenever I watch the news.  We really need to take some time today to think about the ways we can reclaim the great things about our heritage.  We should tend to our Victory Gardens, so to speak, and find pleasure in the last bits of summer.

Whatever our labor may be today, may it be at least a labor of love.  May it perfect something quiet and gentle inside of all of us and may that gentleness shine on a world in sore need of it.  The one thing I have to say about all of us here is that we care deeply.  Have a good holiday my friends.

What’s on you reading and blogging list today?

35 Comments on “Labor Day: Struggles of the Great Recession with a lot of Depression”

  1. foxyladi14's avatar foxyladi14 says:
    September 2, 2013 at 8:33 am

    Good morning Dak. Did you get my donation alright?
    I used the Donate button on the forum.
    I am sure all our SKy Dancers will help out. 🙂

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      September 2, 2013 at 9:14 am

      That’s very kind of you, Foxyladi. Dak has really been hit from all sides lately. And why do these plumbing, heating, and cooling problems always seem to happen on long weekends?!

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      September 2, 2013 at 11:49 am

      Yes I did and thank you! I have to get this fixed. Even the cats made a run for the outdoors last night when I was trying to cool the place off. Thankfully, I found the old fat one in the back and the little one turned up about 1 1/2 hours later but it is getting miserably hot in here again.

  2. Beata's avatar Beata says:
    September 2, 2013 at 8:39 am

    Thanks for the great post, Dak. I am so glad to hear about the new AC condenser.

    Please promise us that you will stop beating yourself up about things that are going on in your life ( or as my Mama would say “Stop kicking yourself around the block!” ). Be kind to yourself as you would be kind to your closest loved ones and try not to worry. You are an amazing person and we are blessed to have you in our lives. You are a wonderful teacher in so many ways.

    As for me, I will continue to relentlessly pursue my dream of being a NFL quarterback. I deserve nothing less.

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      September 2, 2013 at 9:16 am

      Yes, I agree with Beata. Please stop beating yourself up and realize how much you have accomplished in your life, how many people care about you, and the inner strength you are displaying by managing to deal with all this. This too shall pass.

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      September 2, 2013 at 11:52 am

      NFL quarterback? Not rock star? Who would have thought it? I am trying to fight back the lesser angels right now including the ones that love watching me have a good slugfest with myself.

    • RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
      September 2, 2013 at 12:25 pm

      Nothing but Super Bowl wins ahead for that NFL quarterback!

    • Beata's avatar Beata says:
      September 2, 2013 at 1:22 pm

      Re: my NFL quarterback statement. I was making fun of a quote by Tim Tebow ( sp? ) who refuses to leave us all alone and vows to continue to fight on for his rightful place in life. Ugh.

      Sometimes my comments don’t make much sense, I know. Except to me. Lol.

  3. bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
    September 2, 2013 at 9:18 am

    I’m going to have to check out those studies about rich people. I remember when the one about rich people being less empathetic came out awhile back. I wonder how many really upper class participants they were able to get into the studies?

    • bostonboomer's avatar bostonboomer says:
      September 2, 2013 at 9:43 am

      The participants in the first psychological study were recruited from an on-line forum, and social class was determined by self-report measures. I’m pretty sure people tend to overestimate their social class relative to others; but the second study did use an objective measures of social class (parental education). My guess is if researchers could get really super-rich people to participate in one of these studies (unlikely), the results would be even more robust.

      The other study on how Senators respond to constituents of different classes is really telling–and it’s true of both parties. From the article:

      According to OpenSecrets, the average net worth of senators in 2011 was $11.9 million, so it could be a matter of legislators advancing their own interests and those of the people with whom they socialize and associate.

      But MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who co-authored Why Nations Fail with Harvard’s James Robinson, says that this kind of political inequality is a product of widening economic disparities. “It’s a general pattern throughout history,” he told Think Progress. “When economic inequality increases, the people who have become economically more powerful will often attempt to use that power in order to gain even more political power. And once they are able to monopolize political power, they will start using that for changing the rules in their favor. And that sort of political inequality is the real danger that’s facing the United States.”

    • dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
      September 2, 2013 at 11:55 am

      Glad to see you checking them out. I figured you would be able to analyze them for us. Anectdotally, I have always seen my richest relatives as the ones most clueless about humanity and the basis of real problems and issues.

  4. ecocatwoman's avatar ecocatwoman says:
    September 2, 2013 at 10:51 am

    Great post, as usual, kat. Such an inclusive collection of pieces. The studies cited reminded me of a story on NPR recently by Shanka Vedantam about how people with bigger cars are more likely to be rude, acting like they have special privileges on the road. As much as I drive, I’ve noticed this myself, but thought maybe I was being prejudiced. Here’s the story: http://www.npr.org/2013/08/23/214723178/spacious-car-study.

    In looking for the story, I found a couple of others about charitable giving. Again those struck a chord, especially since we recently hired a new Development Director at work. She’s one of those who feels she holds the “keys to the kingdom” & the rest of us are amateurs & idiots. Her focus is on the “major donors” although I’ve seen that it is the average people that are our bread & butter supporters. If interested in just who gives to charities take a look at these: http://www.npr.org/2012/08/20/158947667/study-reveals-the-geography-of-charitable-giving (Paul Piff is quoted in the story) & Piff is interviewed in this story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129068241

    Thanks for another terrific reading buffet.

  5. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    September 2, 2013 at 11:35 am

    Larry Summers Is ‘The Great Unifier’ — Of People Who Oppose Larry Summers

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/larry-summers-is-the-grea_b_3843478.html

    It takes a special kind of magic to bring together groups as diverse as progressive Democrats, Californians, conservative Republicans, feminists, a number of prominent economists, and a large chunk of the global investment community.

    Lawrence Summers has that kind of magic.

    These groups oppose the choice of Summers to lead the Federal Reserve, a move the White House has been pushing all summer. Resistance among progressives has been broad and deep, as reflected in this petition against the Summers nomination. Their opposition was unsurprising given Summers’ pivotal role in disastrous Wall Street deregulation, and his history of personal enrichment from the same banks he empowered as Treasury Secretary.

    But the independent left is not the only hotbed of anti-Summers opinion. Key Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Senators Jeff Merkley, Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, have expressed their opposition as well.

    It’s probably fair to say that most feminists also oppose Summers. It’s not just that the person most people assumed would get the nod is a woman, Fed vice-chair Janet Yellen, and the Administration appears to be sidestepping her. Summers’ problems with the women’s movement date back to 2005 when, as Harvard University president, he suggested that there may be fewer women scientists because of “innate differences” in “aptitude” — presumably meaning skills such as mathematics and analytical reasoning.

    Summers also has a history of opposing, hectoring, and marginalizing women in his field — women who were later proved to be right. In 2008 Summers famously prevented President-elect Obama from even seeing economist Christina Romer’s estimate of the stimulus needed to repair the economy. At Summers’ insistence, Romer’s $1.8 trillion number was reduced to $1.2 trillion — and the stimulus package did, in fact, prove to be inadequate.

    Summers also prevented Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (and a woman), from regulating the swaps which eventually proved so decisive a factor in the 2008 financial crisis.

    Californians of both genders have an axe to grind against the former Treasury Secretary. In 2000 Summers rejected the idea that market manipulations like Enron’s could contribute to that state’s energy crisis. He opposed Gov. Gray Davis’ plan for price controls and said, “This is classic supply and demand. The only way to fix this is ultimately by allowing retail prices to go wherever they have to go.”

    That isn’t just wrong. It’s economic voodoo.

    In a chummy letter to Enron CEO Ken Lay (or “Ken,” as Summers addresses him), incoming Treasury Secretary Summers even promised to “keep my eye on power deregulation and energy-market infrastructure issues” for the soon-to-be-arrested executive. And an investigation of Enron’s lobbying efforts by Public Citizen revealed that Summers used his influence to block regulation of energy dealers like Enron.

    keep reading for me …

    brb … I have to get into the bath tub to cool down

  6. RalphB's avatar RalphB says:
    September 2, 2013 at 12:44 pm

    Now for something completely different but very cool.

    The wireless network with a mile-wide range that the “internet of things” could be built on

    The result is an in-the-works project called Flutter. It’s what Taylor calls a “second network”—an alternative to Wi-Fi that can cover 100 times as great an area, with a range of 3,200 feet, using relatively little power, and is either the future of the way that all our connected devices will talk to each other or a reasonable prototype for it.
    …
    “I think the internet of things is not going to start with products, but projects,” says Taylor. His goal is to use the current crowd-funding effort for Flutter to pay for the coding of the software protocol that will run Flutter, since the microchips it uses are already available from manufacturers. The resulting software will allow Flutter to create a “mesh network,” which would allow individual Flutter radios to re-transmit data from any other Flutter radio that’s in range, potentially giving hobbyists or startups the ability to cover whole cities with networks of Flutter radios and their attached sensors.

    Taylor’s ultimate goal is to create a system that answers the fundamental needs of all objects in the internet of things, including good range, low power consumption, and just enough speed to get the job done—up to 600 kilobits a second, or about 1/20th the speed of a typical home Wi-Fi connection. One reason for that slow speed is that lower-bandwidth signals, transmitted in the 915 Mhz range in which Flutter operates, travel further. These speeds are more than sufficient when the goal is transmitting sensor readings, which are typically very short strings of data.

  7. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    September 2, 2013 at 1:43 pm

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/02/diana-nyad-swim-cuba-florida-complete_n_3856821.html

    Diana Nyad Completes Cuba To Florida Swim At Age 64 (PHOTOS)

  8. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    September 2, 2013 at 1:47 pm

    Revealed: Britain sold nerve gas chemicals to Syria 10 months after ‘civil unrest’ began

    1 Sep 2013 07:21
    FURIOUS politicians have demanded Prime Minister David Cameron explain why chemical export licences were granted to firms last January – 10 months after the Syrian uprising began.

    http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/revealed-britain-sold-nerve-gas-2242520

    This is unbelievable.

  9. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    September 2, 2013 at 1:53 pm

    Crews make major progress on Yosemite #rimfire, now 60% contained. http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Crews-make-overnight-gains-on-Yosemite-wildfire-4780508.php?cmpid=twitter …

  10. Sweet Sue's avatar Sweet Sue says:
    September 2, 2013 at 2:23 pm

    Diana did it! What an achievement -what a woman!

  11. dakinikat's avatar dakinikat says:
    September 2, 2013 at 2:41 pm

    Obama overrules new foreign policy team in first major test http://huff.to/1fuQJVz

  12. Mary Luke's avatar Mary Luke says:
    September 2, 2013 at 4:10 pm

    The Holland essay excerpt is fascinating. To me, it seems to explain the connection between upper class sense of entitlement and the behaviors necessary to achieve and maintain that status. It explains why so many highly intelligent, very well-educated people are not particularly wealthy, or even “successful” in strictly material terms. Most of the upper class will maintain their status by having been born into affluence, but a few, if they have the requisite combination of entitlement and ruthlessness may manage to rise to the upper class by their raw ambition and lack of scruples, combined with a certain amount of intelligence.

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