The Story of Economics, US Edition

Here is an insightful video into how manipulative the Republicans have been in selling their voodoo economics:



The above is an excellent antidote to the noxious nonsense that the recent debt ceiling "debate" polluted the economic debate with.

Here is some detailed accounting for the growth of the US national debt:

Sizing Up the Problem

Here is a way to look at the unemployment problem in the US.

This is from a Wall Street Journal blog by David Wessel:

There are 13.9 million unemployed people in the U.S. – and that just counts those looking for work. That works out to 9.1% of the labor force, the widely publicized unemployed rate.

But here are a few more ways to look at it.

There are more unemployed people in the U.S. than there are people in the state of Illinois, the fifth largest state.

In fact there, there are more unemployed people in the U.S. than there are people in 46 of the 50 states, all but Florida, New York, Texas and California.

There are more unemployed than the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Idaho and the District of Columbia.

If they were a country, the 13.9 million unemployed Americans would be the 68th largest country in the world, bigger than the population of Greece or Portugal (each of which has 10.8 million people) and more than twice the population of Norway (4.7 million.)

And this ignores the fact that the true unemployment level in the US is 25 million if you include the discouraged workers, i.e. people who have stopped actively looking because there is no work or who have taken a part time job simply to have some income during bad times.

It always helps to have additional perspective on a problem. Sadly, the political leadership in the US has their head in the sand and ideological blinkers on. They refuse to see the whole problem. They are too busy winning their petty political skirmishes while the bigger picture is that the US is in peril and problems are going unaddressed.

Selfish Redefinition of a Problem

Here is a bit from a post by Paul Krugman in his NY Times blog that catches the bad faith "solution" that the elite in the US is proposing as a way of fixing the Social Security entitlement "problem":

Whatever the reasons, however, in recent years some of us have watched in horror as obviously bad ideas somehow sweep elite opinion. Top of the list right now is the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age.

It’s a terrible idea on multiple grounds. First, the underlying notion — Americans are living longer, so retirement programs should start later — is true only of the upper half of the income distribution. Life expectancy for the other half has not risen much:

Click to Enlarge
It is astonishing that the top half of the population has extended its life by 5 years over the last 30 years. That is dramatic. But I really empathize with those with the tough demanding physical jobs who aren't seeing their lifetimes extended, but are now subject to the demands of the elite that they work longer and delay getting any pension benefits until much later in life. It is grotesquely unfair.

I remember trying to explain to my mother, a retired teacher, that one reason why her teaching pension could be as rich as it was came from the fact that some teachers paid into the fund and either died before retirement or shortly after, so their dollars were making a much more comfortable retirement for her. She simply was not open to this argument. Her viewpoint was always "I paid for my retirement through my pension deductions". She never understood the impact of pension investment (good for her as the economy grew 1950-1990, bad for people retiring over the next couple of decades because of the economic bubbles and the stock market collapse 2000-2011+) and the effect of early death among the pension pool. She made it very clear to me the power of Upton Sinclair's famous quote:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

My mother wasn't greedy and she wasn't hard hearted. She simply wanted to believe that she had fully funded her own pension through her individual pension contributions. She didn't want to hear that she was inadvertently benefiting from the misfortune of others.

Rising Rage in America

Here is one of several stories told by McCamy Taylor in his blog on Daily Kos. His message: rage is rising in America and a time of change is coming.

In 1927, the waters of the Mississippi rose, flooding ten states. Blacks were forced at gunpoint to build levees. Those who resisted were shot. When the floods came anyway, sweeping workers to their death, the press reported jubilantly that no whites had died. During the flooding, Black sharecroppers were locked in barns and warehouses by their “masters”---the white folks who owned their farms. The bosses were afraid that their tenants might run away, and then who would work their land once the flood waters receded? Herbert Hoover persuaded prominent African-Americans to suppress the story. In exchange, he would give them expanded rights. He broke his promise, and American Blacks broke with the Republican Party, never to return, just as thousands of African-Americans left the south, never to return. They had seen too much violence, too much starvation, too much inhumanity. They were pushed over the edge, and those who survived said “Enough!”

In 2005, the levees broke again, and the world watched, aghast, as the poor inhabitants of New Orleans clung to rooftops. Those who tried to flee the flooded city were shot. The right wing mocked. Rescue efforts were delayed. Aid was withheld, just like in 1927, but with one important change. This time, it was all captured on film. Middle America cried. It was too much. Once again, we had been pushed over the edge. Bush’s approval rating plummeted, never to rise again.

Go read all the stories.

Change is coming. You can push a people only so far before they have had enough. The push back probably won't come in the phony astro turf style of the Tea Party. It will come from people who simply find a way to work around government and take back the functions of government from the political hacks who are so intent on selling them out to the ultra-rich, bought-and-paid-for politics of America. It may come from a revival of real religion (not the send-me-your-dollars televangelist) or it may come from a revival of local institutions. It may come from people organizing self-help institutions that bypass the broken political system. It may come with a revival of unionism. Who knows. But it is coming.

Obama's Claim of "Transparent" Government

In 2008 Barack Obama promised so many wonderful things he would do if elected. It is 2.5 years later and he has done precious little of what he promised.

Here's a post by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine that highlights Obama's failure at "transparency":

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

...

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished.

Go read the original to get the whole article and the embedded links.

The treatment of Ali Soufan is sleazy and criminal. So much for "constitutional lawyer" Obama and his promises about transparency. This demonstrates that Obama has no respect for the law or for democracy. He is just another "politician" like Bush and the rest of the Republicans and a majority of the Democrats. They give lip service to democracy, but ultimately they don't believe in government "of the people. by the people, and for the people". They believe in government of the bureaucracy, by the office-holders, and for the vested interests.

Dowd Dresses Down Dick Cheney

Maureen Dowd is at her witty best in taking down Dick Cheney in an op-ed in the NY Times. Here are some choice bits:

WHY is it not a surprise to learn that Dick Cheney’s ancestor, Samuel Fletcher Cheney, was a Civil War soldier who marched with Sherman to the sea?

Scorched earth runs in the family.

Having lost the power to heedlessly bomb the world, Cheney has turned his attention to heedlessly bombing old colleagues.

Vice’s new memoir, “In My Time,” veers unpleasantly between spin, insisting he was always right, and score-settling, insisting that anyone who opposed him was wrong.

His knife-in-her-teeth daughter, Elizabeth Cheney, helped write the book. The second most famous Liz & Dick combo do such an excellent job of cherry-picking the facts, it makes the cherry-picking on the Iraq war intelligence seem picayune.

...

He acts like he is America. But America didn’t like Dick Cheney.

It’s easier for someone who believes that he is America incarnate to permit himself to do things that hurt America — like torture, domestic spying, pushing America into endless wars, and flouting the Geneva Conventions.

Mostly, Cheney grumbles about having his power checked. It’s bad enough when the president does it, much less Congress and the courts.

A person who is always for the use of military force is as doctrinaire and irrelevant as a person who is always opposed to the use of military force.

Cheney shows contempt for Tenet, Colin Powell and Rice, whom he disparages in a sexist way for crying, and condescension for W. when he won’t be guided to the path of most destruction.

He’s churlish about President Obama, who took the hunt for Osama bin Laden off the back burner and actually did what W. promised to do with his little bullhorn — catch the real villain of 9/11.

“Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities,” Cheney writes. “I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.”

Tacky.

I fervently hope that Dick Cheney takes a trip to Europe and discovers the pleasures of the ICC (International Criminal Court). I really want to see Cheney and Henry Kissinger as cellmates at the ICC.

How to Present "Facts" to Change Opinions

Here is a post from Geoffrey Styles on his Energy Outlook blog that looks at how environmental crazies are trying to pitch the downsizing of the Marcellus shale deposit in a way that would minimize it and allow them to successfully shut down the exploitation of this resource:

I see in The Hill that some critics of shale gas drilling are pointing to a revised estimate of the shale gas resources in the Marcellus formation as evidence that there's not enough gas to justify any risk from hydraulic fracturing. Earlier this week the US Geological Survey updated its previous estimate to 84 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, a figure substantially less than the estimate of 410 TCF from the Department of Energy. Now, I'd have thought that even without doing the math on this, 84 TCF would still sound like a heck of a lot of gas, even if trillions have become the new billions in another context.

Perhaps cubic feet of gas don't convey quite the same degree of familiarity as barrels of oil, which most people can visualize, so it might be useful to think of this gas in its oil-equivalent terms. Using standard conversion factors, that 84 TCF in the Marcellus equates to roughly 14.5 billion barrels of oil. For comparison, that's half again as big as the original estimate of 9.6 billion barrels for the Prudhoe Bay field on the Alaskan North Slope. (FYI, Prudhoe Bay had produced a cumulative 11.5 billion barrels as of the end of 2007 and was still estimated to have a few billion barrels to go.) In that light, does anyone still want to argue that the Marcellus resource is inconsequential?

I could use the same argument for agriculture. Farmers only produce enough food to put about about 3000 calories of food per person on your plate. But who is going to miss 3000 calories? There is plenty of food. So let's shut down the farms! The only problem is that if you multiply 3000 calories by the whole population, that is a lot of food and sure enough people will miss it.

If you remove 14.5 billion barrels of oil, that is only 609 billion gallons of oil or roughly 2,000 gallons for every man, woman, and child in America. Who is going to miss that? Sure, shut it down so we can "save the environment"!

If production of the Marcellus field was a true danger, I would agree, shut it down! But it isn't. With proper regulation, production can be safely executed. But it requires a belief in government and a willingness to put regulators, rules, and inspectors in place to ensure safe production. You are no more likely to get "safe" production from fracking wells than you are to get "safe" banking from Wall Street where regulators ignore the slice-and-dice free-for-all of mortgage securitization and the liar's loans given by mortgage brokers, and the under the table payola and not-so-subtle threats used by Wall Street banks to get the ratings agency to find AAA gold in all those sub-prime and alt-A mortgages.

I put the environmental nuts in the same camp as the right wing nuts. They are extremists. They aren't open to reason. They have their "cause" and they see the world through their prejudices and are not open to argument or to be influenced by facts. Sadly, the world is overpopulated with fanatics these days. I want desperately to go back to the simpler days when people were decent to each other, willing to live-and-let-live, and were open to simple democracy to come to agreements to run a civil society.