Job One
Filed Under Bullshit, Work | Leave a Comment
One of the bedrocks of being alive and being anywhere near ‘successful,’ is having a job — working a wage.
And although job openings in the U.S. rose in March to the highest level in more than three years, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker noted yesterday unemployment remains at “a very elevated rate“ and the whole process will take time — a long time.
Numbers involving employment can be way-deceiving, creating a picture that’s more Pablo Picasso than Norman Rockwell.
(Illustration found here).
Arithmetic is nowhere near my strong suit.
Bloomberg explains:
The Labor Department reported that as of April, 58.4 percent of the U.S. population was gainfully employed.
That’s down from 58.6 percent in February, and exactly where the employment-to-population ratio stood a year ago.
The decline reflects the fact that job gains aren’t keeping up with population growth.
It also demonstrates the illusory nature of April’s reduction in the unemployment rate, to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent in March.
The Labor Department, in its monthly household survey, counts people as unemployed only if they’re in the labor force, meaning they’re actively looking for work.
In April, the estimated number of people in the labor force fell by 342,000.
So the unemployment rate fell, too, even though the survey counted 169,000 fewer people with jobs.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s about 12.5 million US peoples unemployed right now with about 5.1 million of those on what’s called ‘long-term unemployment’ (27 weeks or more) and those guys are the in the pits.
Despite all that, US employers added 3.74 million job openings in March, the highest in nearly four years, to create a sense of a kind of sunshine: That means an average of 3.4 people competed for each open job. While that’s far better than the nearly 7-to-1 ratio when the recession ended. In a healthy job market, the ratio is usually around 2 to 1.
Jobs are still hard to come by and customers at the liquor store I manage are always waxing sad about finding a job — the unemployment rate up here in northern California is way above the average at about 11.3 percent, pretty heady.
Along with the precarious job market, there’s the assholes working to strip what’s left off the bones.
In the defeat yesterday of Indiana’s Dick Lugar to a Tea Party nit-twit is just another sampling of what’s in store for the job market.
GOP peoples blame the jobless for being without a job.
One asshole Tea-Bagger is Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, who blubbered that to get these shiftless people off their asses is to gut unemployment benefits.
(Via Think Progress):
There is such thing as a free lunch, but you’re picking up the tab.
Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government.
I am compassionate and committed to our children, our elderly, and our disabled.
But to all you able-bodied people out there, get off the couch and get yourself a job.
What a liar — compassionate?
Paul Krugman in his new book — “End This Depression Now!” — discusses the job market and how being employed is part and parcel of the so-called American Dream.
In an excerpt found at HuffPost, Krugman talks about working and how the GOP/Tea Party looks at the jobless, as in ‘involuntary unemployment’ and how to gaze back at them:
The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
Quite.
Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings.
Roughly a million people applied.
Later, he offers up this insight between the 1930s and the nowadays:
Nor is America immune.
Can anyone deny that the Republican Party has become far more extreme over the past few years?
And it has a reasonable chance of taking both Congress and the White House later this year, despite its radicalism, because extremism flourishes in an environment in which respectable voices offer no solutions as the population suffers.
Krugman paints a picture worse than we think it is, and although he claims the problems can be lessened with more cash flowing into US peoples pockets, this country is still a Tea Party world, and those with the biggest mouth, whether lying or not, still gets the most attention.
A full-time job just listening to the shit.
Ugly Is As Ugly Does
Filed Under Cloud gazing, Everything, Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Nowadays, don’t US politics — and politics in general — make you sick to your bowels?
In the midst of most-likely the biggest, nastiest, piece-of-shit economic condition since I-don’t-know-when (common term, ‘not since the Great Depression‘), the political systems on this entire, whacked-out planet has gone way-bonkers.
This morning, for instance, there’s a general strike beginning in Greece, a suck-hole of all things financial, in protest to the latest round of government austerity measures that’s already known to be creating higher taxes, pay cuts and job losses.
The sight to behold:
One striker, university lecturer Yannis Zabetakis, told the BBC: “We are now living in a taxation Armageddon and the economy is dying.
Along with the economy, we are dying.
The austerity measures are not working and our best people are being forced to go abroad.”
The words, ‘austerity measures,’ has become the catch-phrase, linchpin for how Europe is handling the spreading financial crisis, an approach scorned by almost all economists worth their salt — from a couple of Nobel-prize winners.
Paul Krugman echoes the sensibility: Because tax increases and cuts in government spending would depress economies further, worsening unemployment. And cutting spending in a deeply depressed economy is largely self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: any savings achieved at the front end are partly offset by lower revenue, as the economy shrinks.
Joseph Stiglitz agrees: “Austerity is an experiment that has been tried before with the same results,” Stiglitz said today in a speech in Copenhagen. Cutting budgets in low-growth cycles leads to higher unemployment and hampers recovery, he said.
Thus, Europe is f*cked.
So far, in the US the cuts haven’t reached European size, but it’s not that the GOP ain’t trying.
Last night, another Republican blow-hard debate, and once again, these clowns showcased the cruel reality they really don’t have a portent of a clue about how to handle the American economy.
Hot Herman Cain’s infamous ’999′ tax program would make it that 84% of U.S. households would pay more than they do under current tax policies, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonpartisan research group. And the impact would be felt most heavily by the lowest income groups.
And Mitt Romney’s proposal to increase US Navy ships would would add $35 to $40 million to an already dangerous national bottom line, plus Romney doesn’t explain where he’d get the money.
Out of the ass of we-the-people, that’s where.
And if I hear these frackin’ assholes call the rich/wealthy/the 1 percent “job creators” I might just holler, slobber, pound the floor and rend my garments — makes one go crazy.
The horrible part is that President Obama ain’t much better.
From the Washington Post:
By mid-2011, it was clear that Obama had done little to address the nation’s fundamental economic problems.
As had not been the case during previous recoveries, America’s major corporations and banks were investing abroad rather than at home.
Unemployment still exceeded 9 percent.
Almost all the growth the nation had experienced since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009 had gone to profits; wages during that time actually declined.
Their incomes diminished and mired in debt, Americans were unable to purchase enough to get the economy going.
Even if their purchases had increased, a lot of their funds would simply have flowed to the nations that made the things they purchased.
No wonder the US economy is floating down the financial river.
And no wonder the Occupy Wall Street movement has gained so much traction in the last few weeks — US peoples really know what is happening, despite what’s coming out of Obama’s White House.
He’s off campaigning, but it won’t do much good, for him, or this country.
Once again, Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture pretty much summed it:
Today’s NYT notes the gloom that has descended over consumers, and they suggest it may be home prices.
I think they are wrong — in my experience, the sort of generalized rage and frustration comes about when people realize the institutions they have trusted have betrayed them.
Humans deal with financial losses in a very specific way — and its not fury.
This is about a fundamental breakdown of the role of government, courts, and leadership in the nation.
And it all traces back to the bailouts of reckless bankers, and the refusal to hold then in any way accountable.
There will not be a fundamental economic recovery until that is recognized.
Hence, it might get even more ugly.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does…
Filed Under Bullshit, Environment, Politics | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Fifty percent of the US political system is eaten completely up with hardcore dumb ass — and to make it even far worse, apparently that half don’t give a shit.
Not only do Republicans have no sense of government, they are allowing the most-horrendous problem this earth and its inhabitants have ever faced in all of history to get much, much worse — climate change.
And they act like that cartoon above — either they’re asshole liars or they’re just plain, friggin’ stupid.
Crazed-face Michele Bachmann wants to bring back $2-gallon gas and in turn liquidate the US EPA because its a “job killer;” Loony Texas Gov. Rick Perry don’t believe in no global warming, despite his state burning alive as climate change is “still a scientific theory that has not been proven … [and] is more and more being put into question.”
And that’s just two of the GOPers with the biggest and most-stupidest mouth. (stupidest?)
Bill Clinton says the GOPers are worse than stupid and making the rest of the entire world get a big laugh out of US peoples — he thinks it’s no laughing matter.
From CBS News:
“I mean, it makes us – we look like a joke, right?
You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right?
That disqualifies you from doing it? You could really help us there,” Clinton said.
“We need the debate in America and every country between people who are a little bit to the right and people who are a little bit to the left about what the best way is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what is the best, most economical way to do it, what will get more done quicker,” he continued.
“So if you want to save the planet, the best way to rebuke the global warmers is to be able to point to every single solitary community to a specific example where changing the way we produce and consume energy increased, not decreased, employment.”
Clinton tells US citizens: “If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial.”
Just don’t be stupid.
Despite dumb, stupid is worse than dull, it always survives.
A look at stupid from Science 2.0 (h/t The Big Picture), which examines ‘The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity,’ a 1976 essay by Italian economic historian Carlo Cipolla — and The first basic law of human stupidity asserts without ambiguity that: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
Other thoughts on stupid:
“A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.”
“Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals.
In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.”
Which leads to Hanlon’s razor, an over-look at stupid: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
In the case of the bat-shit crazy Republicans, however, there is malice a forethought — made real by big oil money and bad journalism.
Last week, Eric Alterman at The Nation looked at stupidity in US media.
Even with the obvious on global warming and the rest of the entire world seeking some solution, MSM peoples are locked in the same dumb-ass, stupid and airless room as the GOP:
No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious.
The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.
…
The great irony of the above is that it’s hard to imagine even any Wisconsin public school fifth grader uttering such errant and obvious nonsense.
To be fair, however, nobody’s paying them the big bucks to “balance” the insanity of America’s ascendant right wing with, um… real life.
And like the truly stupid, the GOP nit-twits might be moving the mass of US peoples in the right direction.
From Reuters:
More Americans than last year believe the world is warming and the change is likely influenced by the Republican presidential debates, a Reuters/Ipsos poll said on Thursday.
The percentage of Americans who believe the Earth has been warming rose to 83 percent from 75 percent last year in the poll conducted Sept 8-12.
…
As Americans watch Republicans debate the issue, they are forced to mull over what they think about global warming, said Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University.
And what they think is also influenced by reports this year that global temperatures in 2010 were tied with 2005 to be the warmest year since the 1880s.
“That is exactly the kind of situation that will provoke the public to think about the issue in a way that they haven’t before,” Krosnick said about news reports on the Republicans denying climate change science.
What, me stupid?
USA — RIP
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Politics | Leave a Comment
“It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.”
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(Illustration found here).
Early Sunday and deep, wet fog here on California’s north coast, but unlike a lot of other shit going on right now, my natural environment will get better, much better: The fog will burn off in a couple of hours revealing a sunshine-bright environment — even our Alaska-bred wind, usually twirling up cold and sharp in the afternoon, has been the last few days most agreeable, friendly and warm.
A nice, possibly-good day coming.
Not so for a whole-lot of other stuff.
Especially for this most-ridiculous, but yet apparently most-Titanic-the-ship situation in US financial history, the debt ceiling.
Despite what’s been considered a near-mundane point of economic government — this same item done some 78 times since 1960 (49 times under Republican presidents), President Obama himself has already raised the debt ceiling three times, the last in February 2010, and absolutely no nasty shit-storm about none of it.
This time, however, there’s the insanely-strong influence off people-full-of shit — the so-called Tea Party.
From The Australian posted online down yonder, where right now it’s already tomorrow:
With Barack Obama facing the greatest crisis of his presidency, the Republican Party torn asunder and the US on the verge of its first default, a small group of novice congressmen was celebrating a stunning political coup at the weekend.
…
What most of the world sees as a deadlock and a crisis, the Tea Party sees as victory, its members having done exactly what they had said they would do when they were voted in at the mid-term elections.
“Last November I told my constituents (in Minnesota) that I’m a numbers guy,” explained Republican congressman Chip Cravaack, after voting against his own party’s bill on Friday night.
“I gave them my promise that if the numbers don’t add up, I’m not voting for it.”
…
Since then, they have become increasingly unco-operative, leading some to refer to them as the “Tea Party Taliban”. Over the past few days they have left the leadership of both parties reeling at their readiness to play brinkmanship with the country’s credit rating.
“There’s an old JFK line: those who ride the back of the tiger often end up inside it,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bob Shrum.
“What we’re seeing is one-fifth of the House of Representatives trying to run the country.
It’s a constitutional coup d’etat.”
Mark Meckler, national co-ordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, hailed their action as a success. “The Tea Party is already victorious,” Meckler said.
“What we were looking to do was change the terms of national debate and we’ve completely changed it.”
Yeah right.
Along with all that bullshit, stir in the long-time creep, conservative strategist Grover Norquist and his half-crazed tax pledges, and you’ve got a recipe of pure disaster not yet seen by US peoples, who are in for a bad-ass, shit-kicking, slap-in-the-face.
One thing for sure: We as a peoples are wading around in a living, breathing train wreck.
A poll from CNN last week found that not only do 84 percent of Americans feel the economy is bad, a majority 59 percent are gloomy about the country’s economic future: “That’s a very significant, and very discouraging change in public attitudes toward the economy,” CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. “It’s unclear what caused this newfound pessimism. The length of the current economic downturn and concerns over the chances that the debt ceiling will go unresolved are probably contributing factors.”
And since then, the whole DC/economic scenario has gotten worse.
Just on Friday, a report the US is not only not gaining any recovery traction, the whole ‘Great Recession‘ shebang was/is more severe that first thought: To adopt the president’s favorite metaphor of the ditch and the driver: The ditch was a 33 percent deeper than we thought. And we’re driving 33 percent slower than we hoped.
Sweet.
Paul Krugman waxing on the terrible ‘no light at the end of this tunnel‘ routine this morning on ABC News (via Raw Story):
“From the perspective of a rational person, we shouldn’t even be talking about spending cuts at all now,” Krugman told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
“We have nine percent unemployment.
These spending cuts are going to worsen unemployment… If you have a situation in which you are permanently going to raise the unemployment rate — which is what this is going to do — that’s actually going to reduce future revenues.”
“These spending cuts are even going to hurt the long-run fiscal position, let alone cause lots of misery. Then on top of that, we’ve got these budget cuts, which are entirely — basically the Republicans [saying], ‘We’ll blow up the world economy unless you give us exactly what you want’ and the president said, ‘Okay.’ That’s what happened.”
“We used to talk about the Japanese and their lost decade.
We’re going to look to them as a role model.
They did better than we’re doing,” he added.
“There is no light at the end of this tunnel.
We’re having a debate in Washington which is all about, ‘Gee, we’re going to make this economy worse, but are we going to make it worse on 90 percent the Republicans’ terms or 100 percent the Republicans’ terms?’ The answer is 100 percent.”
And real reality of this debt ceiling drama is it created an open showcase for US peoples to witness the screwed-up mess of government as it strangles itself and dies.
Truss the Trust
Filed Under Bullshit, Double Standard, Politics | Leave a Comment
As the financial clock ticks away on this Friday morn, the political platoons playing pitter-pat in DC and losing the hope of US peoples in our current form of government — if you want to call what’s happening now as government.
Why and how were these assholes elected?
(Illustration found here).
As John ‘The Boner” Boehner’s great and daring debt ceiling plan collapsed late Thursday, the whole process stinks of pure stupid — even upchucking, clueless mush-faced Mitch McConnell blubbering and whinning that “Democrats are playing with fire here. It’s hard to conclude that they’re doing it for any other reason than politics,” he said.
Talk about a double dose of double-standard bullshit — a butt-hole calling the ass an asshole!
From Time magazine’s Joe Klein:
Let us not put too fine a point on it: Thursday’s House vote on Speaker John Boehner’s debt ceiling proposal is a joke.
If it passes the House, Harry Reid has said it is dead on arrival in the Senate.
If it somehow passes the Senate, which it won’t, President Obama will veto it.
It is, therefore, a symbolic act that is wasting precious time.
It follows last week’s Republican theatrics, the passage of the Cut and Demolish Act (or whatever they called it), which also was a waste of time.
These are the actions of a party that has completely lost track of reality — and of a leader, John Boehner, who has lost the support of his party.
Reality pretty-much in a nutshell.
And US peoples are also pretty-much fed up with all this.
After President Obama asked for citizens to call Congress earlier this week, they responded: A spokesman for the office of the chief administrative officer said that at the peak, House offices received a combined 40,000 calls in an hour — twice the typical volume. Some callers got a busy signal, but the number was not significant, spokesman Dan Weiser said.
The entire situation is a shame — and no matter what the outcome this self-created crisis will vibrate the stock market, overseas economies and the average Joe on a US street way on down the financial road of ruin.
This debt limit showcase has been around since 1917 and has had its share of political fights over the years, but nothing like this go-around.
President Dwight Eisenhower was the first to encounter trouble with the ceiling — in July 1953, Ike asked the Republican-controlled Congress to raise the debt limit from $275 billion to $290 billion, but it took a year and the bottom line was lower than Eisenhower asked.
In 1995, a big blow-out let the government shut down, but time moved on.
However, there’s nothing like this particular episode:
Yet in one sense the latest showdown is different from all the others.
The gulf between the White House and Congress is wider than ever — not only because of a huge ideological chasm but also because the nation’s debt is growing so dangerously fast.
It’s now set to top $14.3 trillion.
“I’d say this is the worst debt-ceiling crisis in U.S. history because it is linked to the most serious fiscal crisis since the Civil War, and the debt ceiling is, of course, a 20th-century concoction,” said economist historian Robert Wright of Augustana College in South Dakota.
Trust in government is about shot.
And it’s this economics of trust that keeps the US afloat and operating, though, and this debt ceiling madness doesn’t really help the public gain this trust at all.
A study of trust, however, reveals there’s self-centered greed involved.
From Wired magazine:
Instead, I think the current breakdown in Washington highlights the fragility of a human capability we’ve long taken for granted: trust.
While economists have begun focusing on trust as a crucial factor in economic development — a country without trust can’t build the institutions that make growth possible — trust is also an essential component of effective politics.
Democracies, after all, depend on compromise. And compromise requires trust.
…
The moral is that trust is ultimately about the expectation of rewards.
We see trust as such a noble trait, but it’s ultimately rooted in a greedy calculation, emanating from our primal dopaminergic circuitry.
In other words, we don’t trust people because they seem nice or virtuous or trustworthy, whatever those adjectives mean.
We trust them because they get us the good stuff, delivering what Montague refers to as the “social juice” of reciprocity.
When we say we trust someone, what we’re really saying is that they’re a reliable source of what we want. I scratch your back, you scratch mine.
And this returns us to the present dysfunction in Washington.
If trust is about the distribution of rewards — about learning to expect bonuses from others — then it’s going to be a lot harder to share those rewards in an age of scarcity and deficits.
For the first time in decades, congresspeople aren’t trading pork barrel projects and tax breaks — they’re negotiating steep budget cuts.
Those cuts might be necessary, but they’re aren’t going to excite the caudate or generate that requisite burst of “social juice.”
The traditional means of developing trust among Congresspeople have disappeared.
And how this effects the future (and the 2012 elections) will have to be seen, but I can tell you, I wouldn’t trust The Boner as far as I could throw him, which ain’t far.
Trust is for puppies.