By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Meet the new global elite. They're pretty much the same as the old global elite, only richer and more smug.
Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews business reporter Chrystia Freeland about her cover story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly on the new ruling class. She says that today's ultra-rich are more likely to have earned their fortunes in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street than previous generations of plutocrats, who were more likely to have inherited money or established companies.
As a result, she argues, today's global aristocracy believes itself to be the product of a meritocracy. The old sense of noblesse oblige among the ultra-rich is giving way to the attitude that if the ultra-rich could do it, everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Ironically, Freeland points out that many of the new elite got rich from government bailouts of their failed banks. It's unclear why this counts as earning one's fortune, or what kind of meritocracy reserves its most lavish rewards for its most spectacular failures.
Class warfare on public sector pensions
In The Nation, Eric Alterman assails the Republican-controlled Congress's decision to scrap the popular and effective Build America Bonds program as an act of little-noticed class warfare:
These bonds, which make up roughly 20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them. The death of the program could prove devastating to states' future borrowing.
Alterman notes that the states could face up to $130 billion shortfall next year. States can't deficit spend like the federal government, which made the Build America Bonds program a lifeline to the states.
According to Alterman, Republicans want the states to run out of money so that they will be unable to pay the pensions of public sector workers. He notes that Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) are also co-sponsoring a bill to force state and local governments to "recalculate" their pension obligations to public sector workers.
Divide and conquer
Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times explains how conservatives use misleading statistics to pit private sector workers against their brothers and sisters in the public sector. If the public believes that teachers, firefighters, meter readers and snowplow drivers are parasites, they'll feel more comfortable yanking their pensions out from under them.
Hence the misleading statistic that public sector workers earn $11.90 more per hour than "comparable" private sector workers. However, when you take education and work experience into account, employees of state and local governments typically earn 11% to 12% less than private sector workers with comparable qualifications.
Public sector workers have better benefits plans, but only for as long as governments can afford to keep their contractual obligations.
Who's screwing whom?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is calling for a sense of perspective on public sector wages and benefits. In AlterNet he argues that the people who are really making a killing in this economy are the ultra-rich, not school teachers and garbage collectors:
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
Signs of hope?
The economic future looks pretty bleak these days. Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.8% in December, but the economy added only 103,000, a far cry from the 300,000 jobs economists say the economy really needs to add to pull the country out its economic doldrums.
Andy Kroll points out in Mother Jones that it will take 20 years to replace the jobs lost in this recession, if current trends continue.
Worse yet, what looks like job growth could actually be chronic unemployment in disguise. The unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people who are actively looking for work. Kroll worries that the apparent drop in the unemployment rate could simply reflect more people giving up their job searches.
For an counterweight to the doom and gloom, check out Tim Fernholtz's new piece in The American Prospect. He argues that the new unemployment numbers are among several hopeful signs for economic recovery in 2011. However, he stresses that his self-proclaimed rosy forecast is contingent upon avoiding several huge pitfalls, including drastic cuts in public spending.
With the GOP in Congress seemingly determined to starve the states for cash, the future might not be so rosy after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Frank Rich and Rachel Maddow discussed the very dark tone coming from the Republicans' response to the State of the Union address, what their strategy is going to be for the next two years, and whether it's going to resonate with most of the voters.
MADDOW: The State of the Union is being lauded as a statement of centrism. I think that‘s fair. And I also think that President Obama‘s version of the center is turning out to be a much more Democratic place than where Bill Clinton found the center, big “D” Democratic. What do you think about that?
RICH: I agree with you. I wish I could debate it with you, but I think—he‘s always been a centrist, but a little bit to the left of the triangulated Clinton. And he held firm on that last night. And the problem of the Republicans is they‘ve moved so far to the right. You know, your Eisenhower analogy, we forget that the John Birch Society, which still exists and is supporting the Tea Party, called Eisenhower a communist dupe --
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: -- back when he was in the White House. So—
MADDOW: You know, you look at the Republican responses last night, and the thing that surprised me the most, I‘m not too much of a tone person, I tend to be the person who reads the transcripts rather than watches the tape, but the Republican responses were really dark, almost apocalyptic, I thought about, you know, America being a failure, nothing working now, nothing‘s going to work, we‘re reaching this point of no return.
Does that reflect a decision by Republicans to just sort of try to goose their base and not try to go for a broader audience? What did you make of that?
RICH: It certainly doesn‘t go for a broad audience. What‘s really odd about it is they‘ve ceded Reagan optimism to Obama.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: So, last night, he could talk about corporate profits hitting new records. He could talk, perhaps excessively about the beginnings of a recovery, but in a slightly over-optimistic way. And meanwhile, it‘s the apocalypse at hand and everything‘s gone to hell, and, you know, we‘re going to be Greece before we know it, and not the musical, the country.
MADDOW: Right. Because if we were “Grease” the musical, I would become a Republican.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: I would sign up.
RICH: I‘m with you on that.
MADDOW: When the president made the case for investment, right, he didn‘t just say—he made the case about cutting spending, we need to take deficits and debt seriously. And that‘s fine.
But then he made what amounted to half the speech-long pitch for the government actually spending some money and doing stuff, for the role of government in investing in the economic health of the country, and investing—as the Republicans are correctly pointing out—does mean spending in a lot of cases.
Was that sort of a core principles case for what Democrats think government is good for?
RICH: Yes, he really pulled it off. I think it was—finally, he was making this narrative about the government, or finally for recent times, whereas the other party was just saying, let‘s cut, let‘s do nothing.
I mean, Paul Ryan‘s speech basically said, except for national defense, and apparently, preventing abortion, there was no point to a federal government. You know, he even said that the safety net could turn into a hammock for the lazy and indolent Americans who don‘t deserve it. So, it was the most stripped down, pared down bunker version of government versus a—you know, a centrist version of essentially Democratic governance, that was not the era of big government is over or anything like that.
MADDOW: I was—the hammock line was sort of an eye opener. I think that‘s the thing that people are going to take away from this Republican response, if they take away anything. And that‘s a really specific attitude, that we‘ve seen from some parts of the Republican Party. We saw it when they not only were saying no to unemployment benefits, but we saw some Republicans float the idea of drug testing people if they want to get unemployment benefits.
We saw one Republican member of Congress saying that unemployment insurance was turning us into a nation of hobos. Sharron Angle talking about how it was taking away, essentially, our competitive spirit.
The sort of “kick the unemployed” thing, how does that work? Why—they keep doing it, so I think they think it works.
RICH: They must think it‘s a throwback to sort of the Reagan era‘s welfare queen rhetoric.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: But it doesn‘t work now, because, first of all, that welfare world is over, because it was ended under Clinton. And now they‘re referring to, what, 16 percent of Americans, when all said and done, who are really unemployed, and including those who have stopped looking for work. So, they‘re really hitting people‘s, you know, cousins and uncles and brothers and sister across the board demographically, you know, white and black, every conceivable walk of life. So, I think it‘s stupid.
MADDOW: Well, one of the—one of the—I think there‘s a divide, in political science. And some people think that—in political science think that politics matter. And some people think that really politics is sort of a show that we put on, like a circus for the entertainment of the population. Sort of a way we get our yayas out about the culture war.
But, really, the thing that determines the elections is the unemployment rate. The number of people that are unemployed determines whether or not the party in power stays in power. Do you—what do you think on that?
RICH: I tend to feel that‘s the case. But if you have politics that are really nutty and a party that moves as for to the right as Republicans, it could, you know, vary that equation. But the economy is going to always be the most determinative factor.
But, you know, when you have people like Michele Bachmann walking around and giving these, you know, crazy remarks, the politics can have a factor—be a factor, too.
MADDOW: So, the lame-duck session was good for the president in terms of his approval ratings. It made not just the base happy, but the rest of the country sort of much—pretty happy with him, too. I think the State of the Union was, at least in the short-term, well-received, and the dueling Republican responses were—I think, in the long run, are not going to help them out.
I, sort of, feel like the Democrats are on a roll. If the
Republicans are going to come back again this year, how are they going to do it? What are they going to do that‘s going to turn this—turn their fortunes around?
RICH: I don‘t want see any idea out there that is moderate or that people could rally around. It‘s all about just balancing the budget and repealing Obamacare. If you look at any poll, health care isn‘t even a top priority, or health—you know, dealing with the health care bill or rescinding it or whatever doesn‘t even really register.
MADDOW: People see it as a done deal.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: And so—and furthermore, you have the other problems of the Republican Party, those who are running for the presidency, seriously are not, are almost all to the right of even the Republican leadership in Congress.
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: So they‘re going to have a lot of internal fighting as they‘re pulled further and further away from centrism, if you will.
MADDOW: I wonder, one of the things that will be interesting to watch is whether the Republican powers that be try to keep the Republican jockeying for the nomination, try to keep it kind of quiet and inside the party for a while because they think those politics aren‘t going to play with independents.
RICH: I think they‘re trying, but unfortunately, everyone has a contract with FOX.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Yes. That‘s right. It all happens out loud.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: That‘s the big problem.
Frank Rich, “New York Times” columnist and someone I really enjoy talking to—thanks for being here, Frank.
RICH: Nice talking to you.
benchcraft company scam
Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
Fashion <b>News</b> - Week in Review: Kate Moss Gets Engaged, Gisele <b>...</b>
Here's all the fashion news that's fit to print! Enjoy!
benchcraft company portland or
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Meet the new global elite. They're pretty much the same as the old global elite, only richer and more smug.
Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews business reporter Chrystia Freeland about her cover story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly on the new ruling class. She says that today's ultra-rich are more likely to have earned their fortunes in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street than previous generations of plutocrats, who were more likely to have inherited money or established companies.
As a result, she argues, today's global aristocracy believes itself to be the product of a meritocracy. The old sense of noblesse oblige among the ultra-rich is giving way to the attitude that if the ultra-rich could do it, everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Ironically, Freeland points out that many of the new elite got rich from government bailouts of their failed banks. It's unclear why this counts as earning one's fortune, or what kind of meritocracy reserves its most lavish rewards for its most spectacular failures.
Class warfare on public sector pensions
In The Nation, Eric Alterman assails the Republican-controlled Congress's decision to scrap the popular and effective Build America Bonds program as an act of little-noticed class warfare:
These bonds, which make up roughly 20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them. The death of the program could prove devastating to states' future borrowing.
Alterman notes that the states could face up to $130 billion shortfall next year. States can't deficit spend like the federal government, which made the Build America Bonds program a lifeline to the states.
According to Alterman, Republicans want the states to run out of money so that they will be unable to pay the pensions of public sector workers. He notes that Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) are also co-sponsoring a bill to force state and local governments to "recalculate" their pension obligations to public sector workers.
Divide and conquer
Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times explains how conservatives use misleading statistics to pit private sector workers against their brothers and sisters in the public sector. If the public believes that teachers, firefighters, meter readers and snowplow drivers are parasites, they'll feel more comfortable yanking their pensions out from under them.
Hence the misleading statistic that public sector workers earn $11.90 more per hour than "comparable" private sector workers. However, when you take education and work experience into account, employees of state and local governments typically earn 11% to 12% less than private sector workers with comparable qualifications.
Public sector workers have better benefits plans, but only for as long as governments can afford to keep their contractual obligations.
Who's screwing whom?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is calling for a sense of perspective on public sector wages and benefits. In AlterNet he argues that the people who are really making a killing in this economy are the ultra-rich, not school teachers and garbage collectors:
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
Signs of hope?
The economic future looks pretty bleak these days. Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.8% in December, but the economy added only 103,000, a far cry from the 300,000 jobs economists say the economy really needs to add to pull the country out its economic doldrums.
Andy Kroll points out in Mother Jones that it will take 20 years to replace the jobs lost in this recession, if current trends continue.
Worse yet, what looks like job growth could actually be chronic unemployment in disguise. The unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people who are actively looking for work. Kroll worries that the apparent drop in the unemployment rate could simply reflect more people giving up their job searches.
For an counterweight to the doom and gloom, check out Tim Fernholtz's new piece in The American Prospect. He argues that the new unemployment numbers are among several hopeful signs for economic recovery in 2011. However, he stresses that his self-proclaimed rosy forecast is contingent upon avoiding several huge pitfalls, including drastic cuts in public spending.
With the GOP in Congress seemingly determined to starve the states for cash, the future might not be so rosy after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Frank Rich and Rachel Maddow discussed the very dark tone coming from the Republicans' response to the State of the Union address, what their strategy is going to be for the next two years, and whether it's going to resonate with most of the voters.
MADDOW: The State of the Union is being lauded as a statement of centrism. I think that‘s fair. And I also think that President Obama‘s version of the center is turning out to be a much more Democratic place than where Bill Clinton found the center, big “D” Democratic. What do you think about that?
RICH: I agree with you. I wish I could debate it with you, but I think—he‘s always been a centrist, but a little bit to the left of the triangulated Clinton. And he held firm on that last night. And the problem of the Republicans is they‘ve moved so far to the right. You know, your Eisenhower analogy, we forget that the John Birch Society, which still exists and is supporting the Tea Party, called Eisenhower a communist dupe --
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: -- back when he was in the White House. So—
MADDOW: You know, you look at the Republican responses last night, and the thing that surprised me the most, I‘m not too much of a tone person, I tend to be the person who reads the transcripts rather than watches the tape, but the Republican responses were really dark, almost apocalyptic, I thought about, you know, America being a failure, nothing working now, nothing‘s going to work, we‘re reaching this point of no return.
Does that reflect a decision by Republicans to just sort of try to goose their base and not try to go for a broader audience? What did you make of that?
RICH: It certainly doesn‘t go for a broad audience. What‘s really odd about it is they‘ve ceded Reagan optimism to Obama.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: So, last night, he could talk about corporate profits hitting new records. He could talk, perhaps excessively about the beginnings of a recovery, but in a slightly over-optimistic way. And meanwhile, it‘s the apocalypse at hand and everything‘s gone to hell, and, you know, we‘re going to be Greece before we know it, and not the musical, the country.
MADDOW: Right. Because if we were “Grease” the musical, I would become a Republican.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: I would sign up.
RICH: I‘m with you on that.
MADDOW: When the president made the case for investment, right, he didn‘t just say—he made the case about cutting spending, we need to take deficits and debt seriously. And that‘s fine.
But then he made what amounted to half the speech-long pitch for the government actually spending some money and doing stuff, for the role of government in investing in the economic health of the country, and investing—as the Republicans are correctly pointing out—does mean spending in a lot of cases.
Was that sort of a core principles case for what Democrats think government is good for?
RICH: Yes, he really pulled it off. I think it was—finally, he was making this narrative about the government, or finally for recent times, whereas the other party was just saying, let‘s cut, let‘s do nothing.
I mean, Paul Ryan‘s speech basically said, except for national defense, and apparently, preventing abortion, there was no point to a federal government. You know, he even said that the safety net could turn into a hammock for the lazy and indolent Americans who don‘t deserve it. So, it was the most stripped down, pared down bunker version of government versus a—you know, a centrist version of essentially Democratic governance, that was not the era of big government is over or anything like that.
MADDOW: I was—the hammock line was sort of an eye opener. I think that‘s the thing that people are going to take away from this Republican response, if they take away anything. And that‘s a really specific attitude, that we‘ve seen from some parts of the Republican Party. We saw it when they not only were saying no to unemployment benefits, but we saw some Republicans float the idea of drug testing people if they want to get unemployment benefits.
We saw one Republican member of Congress saying that unemployment insurance was turning us into a nation of hobos. Sharron Angle talking about how it was taking away, essentially, our competitive spirit.
The sort of “kick the unemployed” thing, how does that work? Why—they keep doing it, so I think they think it works.
RICH: They must think it‘s a throwback to sort of the Reagan era‘s welfare queen rhetoric.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: But it doesn‘t work now, because, first of all, that welfare world is over, because it was ended under Clinton. And now they‘re referring to, what, 16 percent of Americans, when all said and done, who are really unemployed, and including those who have stopped looking for work. So, they‘re really hitting people‘s, you know, cousins and uncles and brothers and sister across the board demographically, you know, white and black, every conceivable walk of life. So, I think it‘s stupid.
MADDOW: Well, one of the—one of the—I think there‘s a divide, in political science. And some people think that—in political science think that politics matter. And some people think that really politics is sort of a show that we put on, like a circus for the entertainment of the population. Sort of a way we get our yayas out about the culture war.
But, really, the thing that determines the elections is the unemployment rate. The number of people that are unemployed determines whether or not the party in power stays in power. Do you—what do you think on that?
RICH: I tend to feel that‘s the case. But if you have politics that are really nutty and a party that moves as for to the right as Republicans, it could, you know, vary that equation. But the economy is going to always be the most determinative factor.
But, you know, when you have people like Michele Bachmann walking around and giving these, you know, crazy remarks, the politics can have a factor—be a factor, too.
MADDOW: So, the lame-duck session was good for the president in terms of his approval ratings. It made not just the base happy, but the rest of the country sort of much—pretty happy with him, too. I think the State of the Union was, at least in the short-term, well-received, and the dueling Republican responses were—I think, in the long run, are not going to help them out.
I, sort of, feel like the Democrats are on a roll. If the
Republicans are going to come back again this year, how are they going to do it? What are they going to do that‘s going to turn this—turn their fortunes around?
RICH: I don‘t want see any idea out there that is moderate or that people could rally around. It‘s all about just balancing the budget and repealing Obamacare. If you look at any poll, health care isn‘t even a top priority, or health—you know, dealing with the health care bill or rescinding it or whatever doesn‘t even really register.
MADDOW: People see it as a done deal.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: And so—and furthermore, you have the other problems of the Republican Party, those who are running for the presidency, seriously are not, are almost all to the right of even the Republican leadership in Congress.
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: So they‘re going to have a lot of internal fighting as they‘re pulled further and further away from centrism, if you will.
MADDOW: I wonder, one of the things that will be interesting to watch is whether the Republican powers that be try to keep the Republican jockeying for the nomination, try to keep it kind of quiet and inside the party for a while because they think those politics aren‘t going to play with independents.
RICH: I think they‘re trying, but unfortunately, everyone has a contract with FOX.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Yes. That‘s right. It all happens out loud.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: That‘s the big problem.
Frank Rich, “New York Times” columnist and someone I really enjoy talking to—thanks for being here, Frank.
RICH: Nice talking to you.
benchcraft company portland or
Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
Fashion <b>News</b> - Week in Review: Kate Moss Gets Engaged, Gisele <b>...</b>
Here's all the fashion news that's fit to print! Enjoy!
benchcraft company scam
[reefeed]
benchcraft company scam
benchcraft company portland or
Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
Fashion <b>News</b> - Week in Review: Kate Moss Gets Engaged, Gisele <b>...</b>
Here's all the fashion news that's fit to print! Enjoy!
bench craft company reviews
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Meet the new global elite. They're pretty much the same as the old global elite, only richer and more smug.
Laura Flanders of GritTV interviews business reporter Chrystia Freeland about her cover story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly on the new ruling class. She says that today's ultra-rich are more likely to have earned their fortunes in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street than previous generations of plutocrats, who were more likely to have inherited money or established companies.
As a result, she argues, today's global aristocracy believes itself to be the product of a meritocracy. The old sense of noblesse oblige among the ultra-rich is giving way to the attitude that if the ultra-rich could do it, everyone else should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Ironically, Freeland points out that many of the new elite got rich from government bailouts of their failed banks. It's unclear why this counts as earning one's fortune, or what kind of meritocracy reserves its most lavish rewards for its most spectacular failures.
Class warfare on public sector pensions
In The Nation, Eric Alterman assails the Republican-controlled Congress's decision to scrap the popular and effective Build America Bonds program as an act of little-noticed class warfare:
These bonds, which make up roughly 20 percent of all new debt sold by states and local governments because of a federal subsidy equivalent to some 35 percent of interest costs, ended on December 31, as Republicans proved unwilling even to consider renewing them. The death of the program could prove devastating to states' future borrowing.
Alterman notes that the states could face up to $130 billion shortfall next year. States can't deficit spend like the federal government, which made the Build America Bonds program a lifeline to the states.
According to Alterman, Republicans want the states to run out of money so that they will be unable to pay the pensions of public sector workers. He notes that Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) are also co-sponsoring a bill to force state and local governments to "recalculate" their pension obligations to public sector workers.
Divide and conquer
Kari Lydersen of Working In These Times explains how conservatives use misleading statistics to pit private sector workers against their brothers and sisters in the public sector. If the public believes that teachers, firefighters, meter readers and snowplow drivers are parasites, they'll feel more comfortable yanking their pensions out from under them.
Hence the misleading statistic that public sector workers earn $11.90 more per hour than "comparable" private sector workers. However, when you take education and work experience into account, employees of state and local governments typically earn 11% to 12% less than private sector workers with comparable qualifications.
Public sector workers have better benefits plans, but only for as long as governments can afford to keep their contractual obligations.
Who's screwing whom?
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich is calling for a sense of perspective on public sector wages and benefits. In AlterNet he argues that the people who are really making a killing in this economy are the ultra-rich, not school teachers and garbage collectors:
Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don't want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they'd like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.
Signs of hope?
The economic future looks pretty bleak these days. Yes, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.4% from 9.8% in December, but the economy added only 103,000, a far cry from the 300,000 jobs economists say the economy really needs to add to pull the country out its economic doldrums.
Andy Kroll points out in Mother Jones that it will take 20 years to replace the jobs lost in this recession, if current trends continue.
Worse yet, what looks like job growth could actually be chronic unemployment in disguise. The unemployment rate is calculated based on the number of people who are actively looking for work. Kroll worries that the apparent drop in the unemployment rate could simply reflect more people giving up their job searches.
For an counterweight to the doom and gloom, check out Tim Fernholtz's new piece in The American Prospect. He argues that the new unemployment numbers are among several hopeful signs for economic recovery in 2011. However, he stresses that his self-proclaimed rosy forecast is contingent upon avoiding several huge pitfalls, including drastic cuts in public spending.
With the GOP in Congress seemingly determined to starve the states for cash, the future might not be so rosy after all.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Frank Rich and Rachel Maddow discussed the very dark tone coming from the Republicans' response to the State of the Union address, what their strategy is going to be for the next two years, and whether it's going to resonate with most of the voters.
MADDOW: The State of the Union is being lauded as a statement of centrism. I think that‘s fair. And I also think that President Obama‘s version of the center is turning out to be a much more Democratic place than where Bill Clinton found the center, big “D” Democratic. What do you think about that?
RICH: I agree with you. I wish I could debate it with you, but I think—he‘s always been a centrist, but a little bit to the left of the triangulated Clinton. And he held firm on that last night. And the problem of the Republicans is they‘ve moved so far to the right. You know, your Eisenhower analogy, we forget that the John Birch Society, which still exists and is supporting the Tea Party, called Eisenhower a communist dupe --
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: -- back when he was in the White House. So—
MADDOW: You know, you look at the Republican responses last night, and the thing that surprised me the most, I‘m not too much of a tone person, I tend to be the person who reads the transcripts rather than watches the tape, but the Republican responses were really dark, almost apocalyptic, I thought about, you know, America being a failure, nothing working now, nothing‘s going to work, we‘re reaching this point of no return.
Does that reflect a decision by Republicans to just sort of try to goose their base and not try to go for a broader audience? What did you make of that?
RICH: It certainly doesn‘t go for a broad audience. What‘s really odd about it is they‘ve ceded Reagan optimism to Obama.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: So, last night, he could talk about corporate profits hitting new records. He could talk, perhaps excessively about the beginnings of a recovery, but in a slightly over-optimistic way. And meanwhile, it‘s the apocalypse at hand and everything‘s gone to hell, and, you know, we‘re going to be Greece before we know it, and not the musical, the country.
MADDOW: Right. Because if we were “Grease” the musical, I would become a Republican.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: I would sign up.
RICH: I‘m with you on that.
MADDOW: When the president made the case for investment, right, he didn‘t just say—he made the case about cutting spending, we need to take deficits and debt seriously. And that‘s fine.
But then he made what amounted to half the speech-long pitch for the government actually spending some money and doing stuff, for the role of government in investing in the economic health of the country, and investing—as the Republicans are correctly pointing out—does mean spending in a lot of cases.
Was that sort of a core principles case for what Democrats think government is good for?
RICH: Yes, he really pulled it off. I think it was—finally, he was making this narrative about the government, or finally for recent times, whereas the other party was just saying, let‘s cut, let‘s do nothing.
I mean, Paul Ryan‘s speech basically said, except for national defense, and apparently, preventing abortion, there was no point to a federal government. You know, he even said that the safety net could turn into a hammock for the lazy and indolent Americans who don‘t deserve it. So, it was the most stripped down, pared down bunker version of government versus a—you know, a centrist version of essentially Democratic governance, that was not the era of big government is over or anything like that.
MADDOW: I was—the hammock line was sort of an eye opener. I think that‘s the thing that people are going to take away from this Republican response, if they take away anything. And that‘s a really specific attitude, that we‘ve seen from some parts of the Republican Party. We saw it when they not only were saying no to unemployment benefits, but we saw some Republicans float the idea of drug testing people if they want to get unemployment benefits.
We saw one Republican member of Congress saying that unemployment insurance was turning us into a nation of hobos. Sharron Angle talking about how it was taking away, essentially, our competitive spirit.
The sort of “kick the unemployed” thing, how does that work? Why—they keep doing it, so I think they think it works.
RICH: They must think it‘s a throwback to sort of the Reagan era‘s welfare queen rhetoric.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: But it doesn‘t work now, because, first of all, that welfare world is over, because it was ended under Clinton. And now they‘re referring to, what, 16 percent of Americans, when all said and done, who are really unemployed, and including those who have stopped looking for work. So, they‘re really hitting people‘s, you know, cousins and uncles and brothers and sister across the board demographically, you know, white and black, every conceivable walk of life. So, I think it‘s stupid.
MADDOW: Well, one of the—one of the—I think there‘s a divide, in political science. And some people think that—in political science think that politics matter. And some people think that really politics is sort of a show that we put on, like a circus for the entertainment of the population. Sort of a way we get our yayas out about the culture war.
But, really, the thing that determines the elections is the unemployment rate. The number of people that are unemployed determines whether or not the party in power stays in power. Do you—what do you think on that?
RICH: I tend to feel that‘s the case. But if you have politics that are really nutty and a party that moves as for to the right as Republicans, it could, you know, vary that equation. But the economy is going to always be the most determinative factor.
But, you know, when you have people like Michele Bachmann walking around and giving these, you know, crazy remarks, the politics can have a factor—be a factor, too.
MADDOW: So, the lame-duck session was good for the president in terms of his approval ratings. It made not just the base happy, but the rest of the country sort of much—pretty happy with him, too. I think the State of the Union was, at least in the short-term, well-received, and the dueling Republican responses were—I think, in the long run, are not going to help them out.
I, sort of, feel like the Democrats are on a roll. If the
Republicans are going to come back again this year, how are they going to do it? What are they going to do that‘s going to turn this—turn their fortunes around?
RICH: I don‘t want see any idea out there that is moderate or that people could rally around. It‘s all about just balancing the budget and repealing Obamacare. If you look at any poll, health care isn‘t even a top priority, or health—you know, dealing with the health care bill or rescinding it or whatever doesn‘t even really register.
MADDOW: People see it as a done deal.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: Yes.
RICH: And so—and furthermore, you have the other problems of the Republican Party, those who are running for the presidency, seriously are not, are almost all to the right of even the Republican leadership in Congress.
MADDOW: Right.
RICH: So they‘re going to have a lot of internal fighting as they‘re pulled further and further away from centrism, if you will.
MADDOW: I wonder, one of the things that will be interesting to watch is whether the Republican powers that be try to keep the Republican jockeying for the nomination, try to keep it kind of quiet and inside the party for a while because they think those politics aren‘t going to play with independents.
RICH: I think they‘re trying, but unfortunately, everyone has a contract with FOX.
(LAUGHTER)
MADDOW: Yes. That‘s right. It all happens out loud.
RICH: Yes.
MADDOW: That‘s the big problem.
Frank Rich, “New York Times” columnist and someone I really enjoy talking to—thanks for being here, Frank.
RICH: Nice talking to you.
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Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
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Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
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Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
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There are suddenly celebrity economists running around most of whom just joined the celebrity economist club because they predicted and warned of the present financial collapse starting with the home real estate bubble. The question then might be is if these guys actually made any money by putting their own money on their predictions ahead of the actual fall out? There would have been no better way of becoming an instant billionaire faster than having advance knowledge that the entire world financial market would fall to pieces? There is Krugman, Shiller, Roubini and others who one might expect should have become extremely rich taking advantage of their prophecy of doom before the actual realization. It seems that publication fees and lectures is where these guys are probably making their big bucks now ?
That raises questions about just how much they actually believed their predictions were coming true. Most prediction makers will temper and hedge their bets just like any good fortune teller. The idea of saying sooner or later the markets will crash is a really easy general statement anyone can make. The interesting thing is how many years the real estate / leverage bubbles grew and grew before collapsing. Why should it necessarily end in ten years or twenty? Going back and looking at many years of predictions for the current economist hero's it appears they one the bet for one or two years but lost the bet in other periods of time much more frequently. If stock prices are down 40 percent for the last ten years that does not mean that some can't still be up over 3000 percent or more over the past 60 years. There are different ways to judge stock market progress because some one holding the same stocks held for longer term cap gains and receiving fairly stable dividends is not the same as a short term speculator. Speculation is where the real money would have been with real advance knowledge of a coming collapse.
THE MAIN POINT IS: ANY ONE WHO REALLY PREDICTED THE FINANCIAL PANIC AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS LEADING TO THE SUBSEQUENT SEVERE ECONOMIC CONTRACTION SHOULD HAVE MADE A FORTUNE FOR HIM OR HER SELF. SHOW ME THE MONEY.
The victors in the great depression snapped up assets on the cheap. One story that illustrates the power of short sellers then is how virtually new state of the art buildings became owned by those that profited from the market collapse and depression. The Chicago Merchandise Mart, then the largest building on earth, was purchased by the Kennedy Family I believe from the more financially stressed Field Family.
No one can expect the psychology of fear to make much sense except to say that it does become clear that people fear possible unrecoverable losses much more than they are likely to be able to get the deal of a life time by being greedy. The psychology feeds on itself until the entire financial system is decimated by a panic to get out at any cost. It may still not be the optimal time to buy but every sale of share or bond does have a corresponding buyer. What is most interesting and overlooked about the end of 2008 is how stocks decided gernally around 30-40 percent. Selling appreciated assets before the panic and crash would have cut into net gains by a smaller percentage or at least 15 %. So paper losses were not as bad as they might otherwise have been.
There are complicated tax issues in calculating net from trading the market that can cost a lot of one's financial gains shorting the markets. The big geniuses who did predict the market panic and crash should emerge as the new class of American Billionaires as the complexities that stop everyone else from achieving that status should be something true genius can cause to work out in their own favor.
We go back in history to the beginning of the financial crisis and the beginning was sub-prime nonsense. Less than ten percent of the total mortgage market. Around the same time a commodity bubble is still rising . Some people making lots of predictions who seemed right about the housing bubble were leading their flocks to invest in red hot commodities at that time. Every one has a short memory there. Then out of the blue that bubble pops and strangely it is not exactly the normal post war depression since it seems the war is still ongoing though maybe scaled back a bit, Then there are the prophets predicting that the whole banking system is doomed because of credit swap derivatives and somehow they got proven to be correct, sort of, as the major banks then start to fail. Then out of the blue the US Dollar becomes the world currency of safe harbor, more than even gold does and then a lot of prophets get taken out to the back of the barn and shot because their predictions did not exactly make the mark. The big failed prediction so far was that the Japanese and Chinese would completely break the US treasury by cashing out all their treasury notes and taking the money home. That turned out to be nonsense, though it is still possible.
The Yen and the Yuan both look like they need government devaluation to keep their manufactured goods trades dollar surplus balance of payments going. It is like trying to predict all the feedbacks in the weather and somehow model the earth's weather system to find it is suffering from global warming or cooling on average.
A few economists and traders seemed to get it right. Then there is George Soros who seems to have ended up with a mixed back result and not a cut and dry win like he has been famous for in the past.
The point is that forget what everyone is saying about the market in the financial media and find out who is actually making money , not just treading water as the real indicator of who is the great prophet and predator of the financial future.
I am not about to predict any particular outcome except more much more of the unexpected. That also includes the weather.
I attempted to go to my old economic history books to see what might really be likely to happen and here are some possibilities that would seem likely:
Most of the world will continue to suffer from financial declines in unison and the highest rate growth countries will probably be the last to slip into the decline mode with the rest.
All sorts of charlatans will emerge to take power and voters will sheepishly give it to them because they feel their financial future is threatened or ruined. The charlatans are really only interested in their own financial well being as the trade off to the community for their valuable services. Governments will pretend that their failed solutions really worked when they do the opposite.
A major world war will result if the economics circumstances continue to decline.
Strange new investment successes will emerge, as will new major banks and new investment houses.
The US Government will end up as broke as California and will realize it has to sell real asset and not just print dollars for a change. These assets include drilling rights, national parks, public land, water rights, Toll road rights of way and maybe even NASA.
The people who most want a new era of national socialism and green Eco-socialism will be the most sorry for getting the country into the mess they do. Discredited and impoverished , academic tenure lost when their global warming climate hoax is exposed as pre biased junk science. US history is full of academic nonsense that self destructs given enough time for it to do so. This greenhouse gas warming nonsense will be the most costly absurd chapter ever in the history of junk science because of legislation soon promised to be in compliance with idiotic international conventions designed to shut down the industrial world. Hitler's Eugenics science was probably the last time something as idiotic as global warming became a legal issue.
Those predicting the failed US economy should have made their first fortune now that they correctly predicted the panic and crash and their second fortune awaits as they should be first to profit from saving the earth with alternative energy resource development and then they should be the first out at the top because they correctly predicted that their theory today is a scam tomorrow.
Already a lot of their hopes are dashed with the price of crude oil falling the way it has. Alternative energy resources make much more sense and are economically feasible only when petroleum is scarce and expensive. Add to the monetary inflation we are already seeing as some jobs are being lost but wages are not really declining any more than grocery prices are and then the anti monetarists will still be pretending that inflation has to do with market price levels and not the money supply.
That leads to some new religion being founded every time in history. This time the environmental anti monetarist religion will probably be replaced with something no one but a paranoid schizophrenic can predict when he is tripping on LSD. Al Gore is making a fortune on carbon offset credits. Will he have to return the money once people realize that carbon causes no global warming and no harm?
Nope, the rich get richer even when they are just trying to save the rest of us.
The country will re-emerge as the economic powerhouse it is destined to remain.
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Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
Fashion <b>News</b> - Week in Review: Kate Moss Gets Engaged, Gisele <b>...</b>
Here's all the fashion news that's fit to print! Enjoy!
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Verizon asks employees to delay iPhone purchases | Apple - CNET <b>News</b>
Wireless carrier cites 'unprecedented' demand for the device in asking employees to postpone purchase plans, according to a memo obtained by AppleInsider. Read this blog post by Steven Musil on Apple.
Econbrowser: The employment <b>news</b> is good (I think)
The employment news is good (I think). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday that the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% in November to 9.0% in January, as big a two-month drop as we've seen in the last 50 years (hooray! ...
Fashion <b>News</b> - Week in Review: Kate Moss Gets Engaged, Gisele <b>...</b>
Here's all the fashion news that's fit to print! Enjoy!
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