The Great Recession Drags on and Krugman Says "nobody in power cares!"

From a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

Third Depression Watch

Last year I warned that we seemed to be heading into the “Third Depression” — by which I meant a prolonged period of economic weakness:

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

Brad DeLong points us to Macro Advisers, which has now downgraded its estimates for second-quarter growth. As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of “recovery” that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it’s actually producing.

And nobody in power cares!

The suffering of the unemployed and under-employed is ignored by Washington politicians while they curry favour with the rich and powerful by showing great concern over "inflation", the read worry of every bond coupon clipper. Just shows that government ignores "the little people" while it runs in circles and jumps through hoops to entertain the rich and powerful.

Oh... and there is this from Krugman:

Who You Gonna Bet On? An Update

It’s not quite a year yet since Business Week ran a piece ridiculing my concerns about prolonged economic weakness, comparing it to the wisdom of John Paulson, who saw a boom — particularly in housing — just around the corner. Still, it seems worth revisiting.

How do you think it’s going?

The media in the US are the lapdogs of the rich and powerful. They make sure that truth and fact is not heard. Instead they spread the lies and dogma that the elites need to keep the "little people" confused and cowed.

How Do We Know that High Oil Prices are Speculation?

Here is a bit from a post by Matt Taibbi on his Rolling Stone blog that provides the secret decoder ring to help us spot speculative hoarding. Notice the bit about "finding it hard to find buyers of oil"? Strange. If oil prices are driven up by excessive demand, there should be lots of buyers out there demanding more. But that's not what the Saudis reported in 2008:

When oil prices surged to a ridiculous $147 a barrel in the summer of 2008, conventional wisdom held that normal supply and demand issues were the cause. Both the Bush administration (in the form of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission) and most of Wall Street (through both media figures and market analysts) blamed such factors as increases in oil demand from the Chinese industrial machine, and the failure of Americans to conserve, for the surge in crude prices.

Goldman Sachs, while outrageously predicting a "super spike" that might cause oil to reach as high as $200 a barrel, blamed piggish American consumers and preached conservation as a bulwark against oil supply disruptions. The bank's "Oracle of Oil," Arjun Murti, even broadcast the fact that he owned two hybrid cars.

Well, thanks to Wikileaks, we now know that when the Bush administration reached out to the Saudis in the summer of '08 to ask them to increase oil production to lower prices, the Saudis responded by saying they were having a hard time finding buyers for their oil as it was, and instead asked the Bush administration to rein in Wall Street speculators.

Matt Taibbi goes on to provide more details. Read the whole article.

I'm guessing the current price spike is just another "manipulation of the market". The good news is that the US has anti-trust laws that stop this illegal manipulation of the market. So don't hold your breath. I'm sure that Obama will sick the Justice Department out there to investigate all those Wall Street firms (think Goldman Sachs) that are milking the market. I'm sure the feds are eager to put the squeeze on Obama's main political backers, you know, the ones who provide lots of campaign "donations". Obama is just as eager as the Republicans before him to stop this illegal behaviour because the politicians in Washington hold their duty to the American citizen as their highest duty, their solemn obligation, way up there... almost as high as their obligation to keep their business buddies who provide the soft funds and under the table money happy.

The wonderful thing is that America has finally rid itself of the ugly side of democracy, where you have to go out and meet & greet people, make promises to the electorate, and actually serve as a "representative". They've streamlined this into a one-stop shopping service for the ultra-rich who simply buy and sell politicians. No fuss, no worry.

Political Rights in America

The US loves to flaunt its "freedoms" that are Constitutionally "protected". Here is an example of "freedom in action"...



I love it when the cop says "I can do whatever I want" as he arrested a CBC camera man covering a peaceful protest by citizens in Newark, New Jersey about street shootings that have left innocent people dead. The "law" in the US says you have the right to assemble peacefully, but apparently the police are unaware of this "fact". They obviously haven't heard of the US Constitution and its 1st Amendement:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Under the Newark N.J. police interpretation of citizen "rights", you have a right to try to peacefully assemble for redress of grievances, but if you actually get onto the street, then the police can "do whatever they want" and arrest you, manhandle you, throw you into jail, etc. So much for "freedoms" and "rights" in America.

Making the Country Safe for Private Exploitation, uh, "Enterprise"

The Canadian government... oops, I forgot, it is now officially "The Harper Government"... has decided that providing troops in an emergency is wrong because it would inhibit the chance of "private enterprise" to profit from misery and suffering with the Quebec floods.

From the Globe and Mail:

At a time when distressed flood victims in Quebec’s Richelieu Valley were urging the federal government for more troops to help deal with the crisis, Ottawa refused to send in additional soldiers, saying it would put them “in competition with the private sector.”

In a letter sent to the Quebec government last Friday, federal Public Safety Minister Vic Toews explained that the Canadian Forces were too busy with “defence activities” to respond to their demands and denied the province’s request for more troops.

It is good to see that Stephen Harper knows his priorities. When there is a choice between helping the victims of a natural disaster or giving his private enterprise buddies a chance to gouge desperate people by selling them "assistance" during the disaster, Harper has picked his ideological favourite: the rights of business over the rights of the people.

I'm guessing this isn't just Harper letting his greedy buddies exploit the suffering. I'm guessing this is Harper being vindictive about the fact that the Quebeckers aren't sufficiently enamoured with his government to vote in more Conservative MPs. This is the way Harper punishes them for not voting "correctly". It is a new concept in government services: you get service if you vote for the government party, otherwise you twist slowly in the wind hung by your recalcitrance and refusal to understand the proper mechanics of Canadian "democracy".

The Right Not to be Groped Goes Down in Flames

I'm no fan of the right wing fanatics in the US, but I was a fan of the Texas attempt to tell the US government that they should abide by the US Constitution's 4th Amendement which prohibits:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But under the "war on terror" (a war which by very definition can never end because there will always be some "terrorist" somewhere), the US government has told Texas it can have its law or it can have its airports, but it can't have both.

From the Texas Tribune:

A threat from the federal government to shut down Texas airports or cancel flights may have killed legislation by Tea Party conservatives in the Texas Capitol to prohibit federal Transportation Security Administration agents from conducting "invasive searches."

“I don’t cave in to heavy handed threats by the federal government,” said an angry Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, the Senate sponsor of the bill, who ultimately withdrew the bill.

House Bill 1937, which was passed by the House earlier this month, would make it a misdemeanor offense for a federal security agent to “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly [touch] the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of the other person, including touching through clothing, or touching the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person.”

Two TSA officials visited Patrick at the Capitol earlier today to discuss the legislation. They warned him that the legislation “could close down all the airports in Texas,” he said. After their departure, U.S. Attorney John E. Murphy sent a letter to Speaker of the House Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst saying the bill would “conflict directly with federal law” and that if it became law, “TSA would likely be required to cancel any flight or series of flights for which it could not ensure the safety of passengers and crew” until the agency could seek a court order stopping the measure from being carried out.

It looks like Texans have chosen to keep their airports while giving up their freedoms. Chalk up another victory for Al Qaeda.

America the "Free"

Yes... freedom for the big boys to run roughshod over the "little people". Not only do they buy and sell politicians to get ever more "tax cuts" for billionaires and gazillionaires. They are into making sure that workers never get a break.

From cnet news:

A new California lawsuit accuses Apple, Google, Adobe Systems, Intel, and other tech companies of violating antitrust laws by allegedly conspiring to fix employee pay, as well as working out "no solicitation" deals with one another.

The suit (PDF), which seeks class action status, was filed today with the California Superior Court in Alameda County and alleges that because senior executives from Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Lucasfilm, and Pixar "entered into an interconnected web of express agreements to eliminate competition among them for skilled labor," affected employees from those companies are entitled to compensation.

Yep... the lawsuit includes the "do no evil" Google, the company founded by two idealistic computer students from Stanford who, once they became billionaires, decided that billions are not enough. And that "the law" doesn't apply when you are massively rich. The rules only apply to the little people.

Even though the companies were found guilty of collusion and "the little people" were left missing dollars out of their pocket, the legal system in its infinite wisdom didn't feel that these companies had to compensate the victims. So they are back with a lawsuit:

In the complaint, Hariharan seeks restitution for lost compensation as well as treble damages for those who are a part of the suit, which includes salaried employees from the companies during January 1, 2005, to January 1, 2010.

The suit focuses specifically on the companies targeted by a 2009 antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. That investigation, and the civil lawsuit that followed, were settled back in September of last year, with the aforementioned companies agreeing to discontinue the use of "do not cold call" lists. Nonetheless, the suit says the companies are still profiting in the aftermath of the practice.

"The DOJ has confirmed that it will not seek to compensate employees who were injured by defendants' agreements," the suit says. "Without this class action, plaintiff and members of the class will not receive compensation for their injuries, and defendants will continue to retain the benefits of their unlawful collusion."

Have you ever heard of a bank robber not being required to give up the ill-gotten loot from his robbery? Neither have I. But these big companies have bent the legal system so that they can be found "guilty" but get to keep the loot. The poor victims are forced to go and pursue their own legal case to try to get restitution of what was stolen from them.

Yep... America, land of the free. Those free to rob the little people.

Locked Out

I just suffered three days of being unable to log in to my blogger account. There is nothing at the Blogger status page about this problem, but if you do look under "known issues" they have this very short, very unhelpful bit:

We're investigating an issue which is preventing login and comment posting for some users, and hope to have a fix released shortly.

Thanks for your patience in the meantime. — LATEST UPDATE ON TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2011

LABELS: comments, login, outstanding

from: http://knownissues.blogspot.com/search/label/login

Given the service outage two weeks ago that kept blogging down for a day and meant that items posted on May 12 only showed up slowly over the next week with no explanation, this indicates to me that Google has "lost interest" in Blogger. I guess it isn't making the big bucks that the overpaid employees and over-compensated stock holders of Google need to keep the lifestyles to which they have become "accustomed".

I find the number of bugs and failings of Google's Blogger to be outrageous. I worked in the industry building systems where 10 to maybe 100 people would use the systems we built. We built sound software and when something did go wrong (and our sites were around the world so service was sometimes very hard) we got things back up in hours and at most a day or two. Blogger has tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of users, and the quality of the software is truly crappy compared to what I'm used to producing. And to cap this off, Google, Apple, and Microsoft -- all the big boys -- love to pound themselves on the back about hiring "the best" and being "the brightest". I don't think so. They seem slightly better than mediocre but they certainly strike me as overpaid and far too cosseted with management treating them like little princes and princesses.

I simply can't trust that Blogger will be available or reliable. Don't be surprised if this blog simply comes to an end one day either because Goggle can't be bothered to fix its own bugs or because I've simply grown too frustrated with "service" to continue posting thoughts on this increasingly unreliable tool.