Everyone needs one of these:
She’s holding down the fort while I clean the carpets.
by John Cole| 66 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Everyone needs one of these:
She’s holding down the fort while I clean the carpets.
by Kay| 75 Comments
This post is in: #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, Decline and Fall
Here’s media favorite Professor Newt Gingrich opining on the US economy, last week:
REP. GINGRICH: Well, it’s very simple. He has policies—and I used a very direct analogy. He follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit. I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas. You know, Texas two out of the last four years created more jobs than the other 49 states combined. I’m suggesting we know how to create jobs. Ronald Reagan did it. I was part of that. We know how to create jobs. We did it when I was speaker. And, and the way you create jobs is you have lower taxes, you have less regulation, you have litigation reform….
I know Gingrich was dog whistling, and this isn’t about Detroit or food stamps, but let’s pretend the mass volume of words he produces have actual, ordinary meaning and see about Detroit and paychecks and Michigan and food stamps:
Soon after taking office in 2009, President Obama was looking for a place to dramatize America’s economic woes, and tout his administration’s plan to turn things around. He picked Elkhart, Indiana, a struggling city in a state which then placed 42nd out of the 50 states in unemployment rates. Obama could also have picked a location in Michigan, which had a jobless rate of 13.3 percent that year, the highest in the nation. Or perhaps somewhere in Ohio or Illinois, which ranked 40th and 39th respectively.
As a region, the industrial Midwest has become synonymous in the public mind with the loss of manufacturing jobs, and a potent symbol of U.S. economic decline. So it might come as a shock to learn that over the last year, those four Midwestern states led the pack in reducing their jobless rates. And behind that trend is an emerging body of evidence that supports a much more optimistic view not just of the industrial Midwest region, but of the future of U.S. manufacturing.
Between this March and last, Michigan’s jobless rate dropped from 13.3 percent to 10.3 percent, according to Labor Department numbers. That 3 percentage-point decline led the nation. Illinois and Indiana were second and third–with rates that went from 11 percent to 8.8 percent, and 10.6 percent to 8.5 percent, respectively. And Ohio was tied for fourth, with a 1.6 percentage-point drop. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio now all have jobless rates below the national average of 9 percent.As one analyst put it: “The economy would be limping along, at best, without the strong manufacturing sector.”
At least for Michigan, another surprising factor may also be playing a role in the turnaround. According to a recent analysis, the fastest-growing market for tech jobs–the sector that, more than any other, may represent the economy of the future–isn’t San Jose, Austin, or North Carolina’s Research Triangle. Instead, it’s the city that’s become our leading icon of industrial decline and urban decay: Detroit.
Gingrich doesn’t know anything about any of the places he talks about, and he doesn’t know anything about food stamps, either.
While Michigan had 18.8% of residents receiving food stamps in 2010, Texas had 15.3% of residents receiving food stamps in 2010, hardly a number for Rick Perry to brag about. Newt’s home state of Georgia, with tort reform, lax regulation and tax breaks, comes in at 17%.
If you hear it on Meet The Press, assume it isn’t truePost + Comments (75)
by John Cole| 38 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Assholes, Our Failed Media Experiment
Roger Lowenstein has a big piece out in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, an apology for Wall Street—duly celebrated by The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin on Twitter as “courageous” and “probably right”—arguing “Wall Street: Not Guilty.”
What’s with our elite financial journalists?
Problem is, this piece is based on a straw man: that fire-breathing critics of Wall Street like Taibbi and, um, Joe Nocera and, well, the news reporters at The New York Times and NPR, think that the crisis was caused by financial fraud alone.
But none of them—not even Taibbi—thinks fraud was the sole cause of the crisis, which had many contributing factors, including excess Chinese savings, regulatory capture, financial wizardry, and, yes, fraud.
The whole system- the traders, the banks, the ratings agencies, the regulators, and the media who covers them- is corrupt.
by John Cole| 48 Comments
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything
This is nice to hear:
The New York attorney general has requested information and documents in recent weeks from three major Wall Street banks about their mortgage securities operations during the credit boom, indicating the existence of a new investigation into practices that contributed to billions in mortgage losses.
Officials in Eric T. Schneiderman’s, office have also requested meetings with representatives from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly. The inquiry appears to be quite broad, with the attorney general’s requests for information covering many aspects of the banks’ loan pooling operations. They bundled thousands of home loans into securities that were then sold to investors such as pension funds, mutual funds and insurance companies.
It is unclear which parts of the byzantine securitization process Mr. Schneiderman is focusing on. His spokesman said the attorney general would not comment on the investigation, which is in its early stages.
Several civil suits have been filed by federal and state regulators since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, some of which have generated settlements and fines, most prominently a $550 million deal between Goldman Sachs and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Better late than never, I guess.
For the Love of Everything Holy, Stay Away From the HookersPost + Comments (48)
This post is in: Domestic Politics
You can count me as one who really doesn’t get the angst over the banning of incandescent lightbulbs. I completely quit using them several years ago, switched to the spiral looking ones (dunno the official name) and saw no change other than it takes a half second for them to come on and that they last forever. Literally every new bulb I am using has been in place for two years or more. If they are more energy efficient and last forever have no noticeable difference in light output (for me at least) and are widely available, what is the problem? If anything, I like the light that comes from them more, and I love not having to replace lightbulbs every couple of months.
They are also dirt cheap- you can get eight 60 watt bulbs for ten bucks on Amazon, and considering they last FOREVER, you are saving money in terms of energy usage and replacement costs. What is the problem here? Is this just some generic anger over the “heavy hand of government?” If that’s the case, I’ll spare my rage for more egregious examples. Or this (via the comments).
BTW- speaking of outstanding products, I highly recommend this. I’ve basically cut my consumption of anything but tea and water to zero, and am drinking much, much more water than I ever used to in the past. I’ve only had it about two months, but I would bet for the first time in my life (outside the military) I am actually drinking the amount of water that doctors recommend. The water just seems so much crisper and refreshing, and our city water is actually very good by most standards before even using the filter.
by Kay| 70 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, #notintendedtobeafactualstatement, Blatant Liars and the Lies They Tell, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
I saw DougJ’s post on the effort currently underway at the Washington Post to browbeat us all into handing over our anticipated Social Security benefits and then I recalled this from last week, where we found out that Alan Simpson doesn’t know anything about Social Security, and that reminded me of this, from the last round of Social Security mania, where we found out former President Bush didn’t know anything about Social Security, either.
The message to blacks is that Social Security screws them because they die younger. By all accounts, that’s what Bush told black business and community leaders at a two-hour private meeting on Jan. 25. It’s also the centerpiece of black community town halls and speeches to black audiences by GOP chairman Ken Mehlman, according to the Los Angeles Times.
As Paul Krugman has explained, remaining life expectancy for a 65-year-old black man is 14.6 years, not two. It’s true that black male life expectancy at birth is only 69, but black-white mortality differences trail off throughout life. (By the late stages, black men outlive white men of the same age.) So, while blacks are likely to spend fewer years taking money out, they’re also likely to spend fewer years paying in.
Here’s Paul Krugman on the last round of lies about Social Security:
Let’s start with the facts. Mr. Bush’s argument goes back at least seven years, to a report issued by the Heritage Foundation – a report so badly misleading that the deputy chief actuary (now the chief actuary) of the Social Security Administration wrote a memo pointing out “major errors in the methodology.” That’s actuary-speak for “damned lies.”
Here’s why. First, Mr. Bush’s remarks on African-Americans perpetuate a crude misunderstanding about what life expectancy means. It’s true that the current life expectancy for black males at birth is only 68.8 years – but that doesn’t mean that a black man who has worked all his life can expect to die after collecting only a few years’ worth of Social Security benefits. Blacks’ low life expectancy is largely due to high death rates in childhood and young adulthood. African-American men who make it to age 65 can expect to live, and collect benefits, for an additional 14.6 years – not that far short of the 16.6-year figure for white men.
So, both former President Bush and Alan Simpson don’t understand life expectancy, and they simply apply that misunderstanding to advance whatever policy goal they hope to achieve. People die younger, people die older, whatever, don’t bother them with details. They’ll use younger (like Bush did) when it fits the push to privatize, but they may also use older (like Simpson did) because that slots in nicely this round.
This cavalier attitude towards a program that tens of millions of working people will rely on doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. There’s a history here. We have been misled on Social Security in the past. That happened. Those of out here in the cheap seats watched it happen, and there wasn’t any crisis that last time other than the crisis created by the people who hoped to push privatization hurry-up-quick, before we noticed.
The crowd that don’t and won’t have to rely on Social Security and their opinion-page mouthpieces have a credibility deficit on social programs, it’s been accruing over years, and they never seriously address it. I’ll get serious when they do.
People die every day, but life expectancy myths live foreverPost + Comments (70)
This post is in: Science & Technology, Assholes
At this point, you would think the media would begin to question why it is that everyone attacking the existence of climate change turns out to be a liar, a fraud, or both.