Weekend Economists Back in Business! November 23-25, 2012

[Demeter]

Well, in honor of the occasion, the DJIA pole vaulted to 13,000 again. Ben Bernanke had to do something to earn his Xmas (Hanukkah?) bonus...what's a QE for, anyway? Certainly not for the homeless, hungry, sick or unemployed....

So, I guess the theme today is Cynicism. And the subject is turkeys.

Yes, this is where you get to post them:

1. Turkeys of ideas

2. Turkeys of businesses, and/or business people

3. Political turkeys

4. Turkeys you have known, personally (do try to be discreet and not violate privacy, if they are of the human kind)

5. Actual turkeys (for the literalists and those who haven't had enough yet)

6. Anything else that appeals. It's a big tent kind of thread.

&feature=related

[Demeter]

1. History of the Wild Turkey in North America

http://www.nwtf.org/conservation/bulletins/bulletin_14.pdf

The wild turkey, native to the North American continent, was the largest ground nesting bird found by the first European immigrants. But the abundant numbers of wild turkey written about in early historical accounts declined with colonization until its continued existence was questionable. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the restoration of the wild turkey was heralded as a wildlife management comeback marvel.

Early settlers found the wild turkey in a variety of habitats as they pushed westward and felled forests with the axe and saw. Wild turkey populations dipped to their lowest numbers between the end of the 19th century and the 1930s, surviving only in the most inaccessible habitats.

As forest stands regenerated following the Great Depression, the stage was set for the return of the wild turkey to former ranges. After World War II, active restoration programs and research efforts by state agencies eventually led to wild turkey populations in every state except Alaska. In 1991, spring wild turkey hunting seasons were for the first time open in every one of the 49 states having turkey populations. Spring hunting seasons are also held in Ontario and other Canadian provinces as well as in Mexico...

MORE THAN YOU WILL EVER WANT OR NEED TO KNOW AT LINK

[Demeter]

2. I Doubt that Any Banks Will Fail This Weekend

After all, the FDIC needs to take a holiday once in a while.

[Demeter]

3. Getting Economics to Acknowledge Rentier Finance FROM SEPT. 11

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/getting-economics-to-acknowledge-rentier-finance.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29



The economics discipline has for the most part managed to ignore the 800 pound gorilla in the room: that of the role that the financial services industry has come to play. Astonishingly, even though the reengineering of the world economy along the lines preferred by mainstream economists resulted in a prosperity-wrecking global financial crisis and a soft coup by financiers, the discipline carries on methodologically as if nothing much had happened. And one of its huge blind spots is its refusal to acknowledge the role of banking and finance in modern commerce. Interest rates are simply an input into the preferred form of macro models, DSGE (dynamic stochastic equilibrium models). Economies are assumed to be self correcting, and to automagically “correct” to full employment. All shocks to the system are exogenous. In other words, boom-bust credit cycles are simply omitted because they are ideologically inconvenient and instability is too hard to model.

Various heterodox economists (as well as some empirically oriented economists that come out of the mainstream, most notably Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England and Claudio Borio and Piti Disyatat of the Bank of International Settlements) are making a concerted effort to represent the role of the finance in modern economies. A new paper by Michael Hudson (University of Missouri at Kansas City) and Dirk Bezemer (University of Groningen, Netherlands) makes an important contribution by looking at financial services from a Classical economics perspective. Classical economists took a decidedly dim view of what they saw as unproductive rent-seeking, with “rent” seen as the dead hand of the feudal aristocracy weighing on current production:

Rentiers are those who benefit from control over assets that the economy needs to function, and who, therefore, grow disproportionately rich as the economy develops. These proceeds are rents – revenues from ownership “without working, risking, or economizing”, as John Stuart Mill (1848) wrote of the landlords of his day, explaining that “they grow richer, as it were in their sleep”. Classical economics from Adam Smith onwards analysed rents, its effects, and policies towards rents, but the very concept is lost on today’s economics.

Just as landlords were the archetypal rentiers of their agricultural societies, so investors, financiers and bankers are in the largest rentier sector of today’s financialized economies: finance controls the economy’s engine of growth, which is credit in all its forms. Economies obviously need banking services, insurance services, and real estate development and so, of course, not all of finance is “without working, risking, or economizing”. The problem today remains what it was in the 13th century: how to isolate what is socially necessary for ‘retail’ banking – processing payments by checks and credit cards, deciding how to relend savings and new credit under normal (non-speculative) conditions – from extortionate charges such as 29% interest on credit cards, penalty fees and other charges in excess of what is socially necessary cost-value.

Hudson and Bezemer argue that the failure to distinguish between productive activity versus rent seeking distorts and overstates the accounting for national output:

Creating a more realistic model of today’s financialized economies to trace this phenomenon requires a breakdown of the national income and product accounts (NIPA) to see the economy as a set of distinct sectors interacting with each other. These accounts juxtapose the private and public sectors as far as current spending, saving and taxation is concerned. But the implication is that government budget deficits inflate the private-sector economy as a whole. However, a budget deficit that takes the form of transfer payments to banks, as in the case of the post-September 2008 bank bailout, the Federal Reserve’s $2 trillion in cash-for-trash financial swaps and the $700 billion QE2 credit creation by the Federal Reserve to lend to banks at 0.25% interest in 2011, has a different effect from deficits that reflect social spending programs, Social Security and Medicare, public infrastructure investment or the purchase of other goods and services. The effect of transfer payments to the financial sector – as well as the $5.3 trillion increase in US Treasury debt from taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac onto the public balance sheet – is to support asset prices (above all those of the banking system), not inflate commodity prices and wages. Similarly, the 2009 ‘quantitative easing’ policy in Britain confused loans used in the real economy (which were stagnating or falling throughout the experiment) with boosting bank balances with the Bank of England which quadrupled over 2009 (Graph 3). Bezemer and Gardiner (2010) show that neither bank loans nor spending nor GDP increased noticeably during or after the exercise, but there was a curious stock market rally during 2009.

The authors describe how much the financial sector has grown relative to the productive economy. Financial sector total financial assets (as in the asset side of bank balance sheets and off balance sheet vehicles) was one times US GDP in the early 1950s and is roughly 4.5 times GDP now. Financial sector earnings were 10% of total corporate profits in the 1950s and 1950s and rose to 40% in the early 2000s. Yet despite the sorry record, in terms of falling growth rates, stagnant average worker wages, and increasingly frequent and severe financial crises, orthodox economists look favorably upon financial “deepening,” meaning the proliferation of financial products and services (aka “innovation”). To put it more simply, the rentiers have the firm backing of mainstream economists, despite the evidenced of its destructiveness:

Just as debt deflation diverts income to pay interest and other financial charges – often at the cost of paying so much corporate cash flow that assets must be sold off to pay creditors – so the phenomenon leads to stripping the natural environment. The so-called ‘debt-resource-hypothesis’ suggests that high indebtedness leads to increased natural resource exploitation as well as more unsustainable patterns of resource use (Neumayer 2012, pp. 127-141)…

Demographically, the effect of debt deflation is emigration and other negative effects. For example, after Latvian property prices soared as Swedish bank branches fueled the real estate bubble, living standards plunged. Families had to take on a lifetime of debt in order to gain the housing that was bequeathed to the country debt-free when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. When Latvia’s government imposed neoliberal austerity policies in 2009-10, wage levels plunged by 30 percent in the public sector, and private-sector wages followed the decline (Sommers et al 2010). Emigration and capital flight accelerated: the Economist (2010) reported that an estimated 30,000 Latvians were leaving every year, on a 2.2m population. In debt-strapped Iceland, the census reported in 2011 that 8% of the population had emigrated (mainly to Norway).

The irony of Hudson’s and Bezemer’s need to look back to the early days of economics is that a view that was widely shared then was the importance of usury ceilings. Why? If bankers were free to seek out the highest yielding loans, they would. And the people who would pay the most would not be businessmen but rich gamblers. So the fact that unconstrained banking would wind up promoting speculation rather than investment was seen as obvious centuries ago, yet supposedly more sophisticated modern economists seem to prefer to truck with Dr. Pangloss and tell us that the system they’ve helped create is both inevitable and virtuous, when neither is true.

[Demeter]

4. As Low Rates Depress Savers, Governments Reap Benefits By CATHERINE RAMPELL

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/business/as-low-rates-depress-savers-governments-reap-the-benefits.html?_r=2&ref=business&


A consumer complaint is ricocheting around the world: low interest rates are eating away at savings.

Bill Taren, a retiree near Orlando, Fla., discovered in August that his credit union would pay only 0.4 percent annual interest on his saving account, even though inflation averaged 2.8 percent over the last year. So he and his wife decided to just stuff their money in the mattress, he says, because at least there “we can see the cash when we want.”

Jeanne and André Bussière, in Annecy, France, have a stable pension and a bank account that pays 2 percent interest — “almost nothing,” they say — even though the consumer price index rose an average of 2.5 percent over the last year.

Jiang Rong, an information technology professional in Xiamen, China, decided to dive back into the speculative real estate market rather than watch his savings wither at the bank. In China, too, the cost of living is outrunning savings, as local restaurants nearly double their prices.

The fact that interest yields are so low in so many parts of the world is no coincidence. Rates are determined not only by markets, but also by government policy. And right now many governments say they have good reason to keep their own borrowing costs as low as they possibly can. Just last week, the government’s report on job growth in the United States showed continued weakness, and an international forecasting group warned that the European economic powerhouse, Germany, will fall into recession later this year.

Though bad for people trying to live off their savings, low interest rates happen to be quite good for anyone borrowing money, like governments themselves. Over time, interest rates below the inflation rate allow governments to refinance, erode or liquidate their debt, making it easier to live within their budgets without having to resort to more unpalatable spending cuts or tax increases. Along with keeping rates low, governments are using a variety of tactics to encourage captive audiences, like pension funds and banks, to buy their debt. Consumers, in other words, are subtly subsidizing governments without even knowing it. Economists have compared this phenomenon to a hidden tax on people’s wealth.

“If you ask a central banker is that what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it, they’ll say ‘No, we’re just trying to get the economy going by making it easier for the private sector to borrow,’ ” said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse. “But I have a syllogism for you: The government makes the rules. The government needs the money. So why should it surprise if the rules encourage you to lend the government money?”

This is not the first time governments have benefited by depressing interest rates, something economists refer to by the ominous name of “financial repression.” In the three and a half decades after World War II, interest rates in the developed world were on average below zero after adjusting for inflation, according to Carmen M. Reinhart, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. This helped Europe, the United States and Japan slowly whittle away much of their war debt as their economies grew faster than their debt burden.

“The difference is that the postwar period was one of strong growth, when rebuilding and capital investment was going on across the Continent, and there were strong demographics,” said Stefan Hofrichter, the chief economist at Allianz Global Investors. “But these elements are not necessarily in place today.”

For that reason, economists are less certain that the success of the strategy will be repeated. Many major economies are already slowing down, if not outright contracting. And the actions taken by governments to keep interest rates low can restrain how much savers have to spend and force fragile banks and pension funds to take on more risk. Ultimately, it could crowd out private borrowing. Governments have different mechanisms to keep their borrowing costs artificially low. The Chinese government can just make a call to banks and dictate how much they will lend and at what interest rate.

“By forcing them to lend at low interest rates, China’s central bank is taxing banks at high rates,” said Nicholas R. Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They make it up to the banks by dictating that banks pay depositors even lower rates, so consumers are getting taxed too.”

Inflation-adjusted interest rates on one-year deposits have been below zero since late 2003, he said. China tightly controls how much money can leave the country, so individuals cannot seek higher yields elsewhere. As a result, Chinese families have been investing their growing incomes in real estate, which has led to a huge real estate bubble in some Chinese cities.

Democracies use more roundabout techniques.

“They have to work with their captive audiences — the pension funds, domestic insurance policies, banks, any domestic buyers they can find — to force-feed sovereign debt, sometimes under the euphemism of ‘macroprudential regulation,’ ” said Professor Reinhart.

Ireland and France, for example, have required or “encouraged” pension funds to invest in more government debt.

In Spain, fragile banks have been arm-twisted into lending to the government, which forces down the interest rates that the banks can pay to depositors. The Spanish government also capped the amount of cash that could be withdrawn from bank accounts, which prevented people from seeking higher yields elsewhere.

And in the United States, the Federal Reserve is buying up government debt to keep interest rates even lower than what markets would otherwise pay (and rates were low to begin with because investors from all over the world are buying up American debt because it seems relatively safe). In the nearly four years that the Fed set its benchmark interest rate at zero, the government has saved trillions of dollars in interest payments. If interest rates today were what they were in 2007, the Treasury would be paying about twice as much to service its debt. Inflation in the United States is very low by historical standards, but interest rates are so paltry that savers are losing money anyway.

“I got hit a couple of years ago pretty badly in the stock market, so now my savings are weighted mostly toward bonds,” said Dorothy L. Brooks, 65, who lives in Garland, Tex., and retired about a decade ago. She recently decided to go back to work as an assistant at a local school. “Now both investments are terrible. And I can’t put my money in a money-market account because that’s crazy. That just pays nothing.”

Of course, any economic policy will produce winners and losers, and it seems unlikely that policy makers are deliberately sacrificing retirees either to stimulate the economy or to grind down government debt. More likely, older Americans and other savers are just unintended casualties of policies aimed at other economic targets, particularly the policy making it easier for consumers and companies to borrow.

“If you care about the distribution effects of these policies, and being fairer to the elderly or other people, that seems to argue for carefully designed fiscal stimulus,” said Robert J. Shiller, an economics professor at Yale. “With fiscal stimulus you have more control over who gets taxed at what rate and so on. At least it’s more transparent anyhow.”

BUT WHERE'S THE FUN IN THAT? TURKEYS!

But, he added, “the whole reason we like using monetary policy is that it avoids those very political discussions of who gets taxed.”

[Demeter]

5. How central banks contributed to the financial crisis Michael Biggs, Thomas Mayer

http://www.voxeu.org/article/how-central-banks-contributed-financial-crisis

Even before the crisis, there were some who stressed that monetary policy should keep an eye on asset bubbles and the growth of credit. This column argues that the policy of inflation targeting, used widely in the 1990s and 2000s, did indeed lead to excessive credit growth that eventually bred financial instability.

As numerous studies over the last two decades have shown, interest rate policies of a large number of central banks can be explained by the so-called Taylor Rule. According to this rule, which is consistent with inflation targeting, the policy rate is determined by a neutral real rate, the target inflation rate, the output gap, and the deviation of inflation from the target (or expected) rate. In this formula, the output gap can be interpreted as a leading indicator for inflation, as suggested by an augmented Phillips-curve inflation model, where the deviation of actual inflation from the target has the character of an error-correction term.

There is no room for financial variables, such as money, credit, or asset prices, in this policy rule.

Leading economists and central bankers have indeed suggested that monetary policy should abstain from trying to prick asset price bubbles, but stand ready to support banks and financial markets when the bubbles burst (Bernanke and Gertler 2001).

Only a minority have seen this differently and argued that monetary policy should lean against asset price inflation and monitor credit developments closely to this effect (ECB 2005).

As technical progress and global trade integration depressed prices in the 1990s and 2000s the Taylor Rule suggested that policy rates be kept low over an extended period of time despite strong credit growth and asset price increases. In this column we show how the policy of inflation targeting, which essentially implies that the central bank minimise the output gap, has led to excessive credit growth that eventually bred financial instability...

[Demeter]

6. As One Who Regularly Sneers at Massachusetts, I Take Great Satisfaction

in noting that the state game bird of Massachusetts is: THE WILD TURKEY!

(You'd have to live there a while to really appreciate the irony)

http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/Massachusetts/bird_wild_turkey.html

FAQ about the wild turkey:

http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/wildlife/facts/birds/turkey/turkey_faqs.htm

[Po_d Mainiac]

15. Ben Franklin preferred the Wild Turkey over the Bald Eagle.

In this area, large numbers of deer ticks (Lyme disease carriers) and turkeys showed up about the same time.

I can live without either.

[Demeter]

17. What did the turkey ever do to you, Po?

We had a large hen stroll through our parking lot last month. Came to visit for Thanksgiving....

[Po_d Mainiac]

43. I'm blaming the turkeys for transporting ticks.

[Demeter]

44. Oh! Okay

I thought white tail deer got that rap.

[Po_d Mainiac]

72. Any warm blooded creature can draw/carry ticks

High numbers of wild turkeys were imported into Maine from regions of Southern NE and New York state where Lyme disease was well established.

Prior to the arrival of turkeys, it was extremely rare to even find a tick on the pets. Now it's a common occurance to find one chomping on me. Coincidence? Perhaps. Distict possibility? IMHO, likely.

[bread_and_roses]

45. Friends - please pass on the StateSymbolsUSA link!

Demeter linked the turkey page, here is the home page: http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/index.html

The site was created and is owned, operated, updated, maintained by someone near and dear to me. It's a terrific resource for schoolkids, teachers, and is great fun just to browse around. Really beautiful photos and lots of "fun facts." Check out your home state symbols.

My favorites are the state animal pages (lots of them have videos), and the state rocks and state gems.

Thanks for letting me put in this plug - the creator is a lovely and hard-working person, and I like to help spread the word about the site.

[DemReadingDU]

46. Thanks, I will bookmark this link! n/t

[Demeter]

7. Anonymous: behind the masks of the cyber insurgents

NOW THERE'S A GROUP THAT MAKES TURKEYS OF SO MANY POMPOUS PINHEADS...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/08/anonymous-behind-masks-cyber-insurgents

Since 2008, the internet collective have hacked the CIA, the Sun newspaper, the Church of Scientology and a host of other large corporations, sparking a global police crackdown last year. But who and what are Anonymous? A radical new form of activism – or just bored teenagers? We talk to some of the 'hacktivists' and the experts who tracked them down in the deep web...

For a period in 2011, LulzSec – an offshoot of Anonymous, the internet "hacktivist" collective who came to prominence around the time of the Wikileaks affair – wreaked a trail of chaos across the web. Their actions ranged from the transgressive – they had taken down the CIA's website and hacked into Sony's database and released more than a million user names and passwords – to the absurd: after the American network PBS aired a critical documentary about Julian Assange, LulzSec hacked into their website and replaced the homepage with an article about Tupac Shakur, the (very much dead) rapper, which bore the headline "Tupac Still Alive in New Zealand". During the Arab spring, members of the group hacked and defaced Tunisian and Egyptian government sites. One hacker, Tflow (later discovered to be a 16-year-old London schoolboy), allegedly wrote a webscript that enabled activists to circumvent government snooping.

LulzSec had also hacked into the website of Soca, the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, and replaced the front page of the Sun online with a "report" that Rupert Murdoch had been found dead (with a helpful hint for the FBI in the closing paragraph: he'd been found, it said, "in his famous topiary garden&quot .

For a time, LulzSec demanded and caught the world's attention. Their tweets made headlines. Their jokes were retweeted by thousands. And there, waiting for me at Spalding station, is LulzSec's PR guru. "Look out for the pale kid that needs a haircut," he'd texted me. And he's not wrong. He is quite pale and could do with a haircut. And he's impossibly young: just 19. A skinny teenager with a soft Scottish accent who – for a period of time last year, during "the 50 days of Lulz" – ran rings around law enforcement agencies on several continents....

[Demeter]

10. Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age

NOW YOU CAN LEARN TO HACK AT GOVERNMENT EXPENSE...HAVE THESE TURKEYS REALLY THOUGHT THIS THROUGH TO ITS LOGICAL CONCLUSION?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cyber-school-20121123,0,7345893.story

At the University of Tulsa school, students learn to write computer viruses, hack digital networks and mine data from broken cellphones. Many graduates head to the CIA or NSA...AND WHEN YOU SCREW THEM OVER, THEN WHAT HAPPENS?

Jim Thavisay is secretly stalking one of his classmates. And one of them is spying on him. "I have an idea who it is, but I'm not 100% sure yet," said Thavisay, a 25-year-old former casino blackjack dealer. Stalking is part of the curriculum in the Cyber Corps, an unusual two-year program at the University of Tulsa that teaches students how to spy in cyberspace, the latest frontier in espionage.

Students learn not only how to rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars and plant false information on Facebook. They also are taught to write computer viruses, hack digital networks, crack passwords, plant listening devices and mine data from broken cellphones and flash drives.

It may sound like a Jason Bourne movie, but the little-known program has funneled most of its graduates to the CIA and the Pentagon's National Security Agency, which conducts America's digital spying. Other graduates have taken positions with the FBI, NASA and the Department of Homeland Security...

[Demeter]

14. A Stinging Rebuke of the DOJ on Access to Counsel at Gitmo By Scott Horton

http://harpers.org/blog/2012/09/a-stinging-rebuke-of-the-doj-on-access-to-counsel-at-gitmo/

The Bush Administration originally created special-detention facilities at Guantánamo on the theory that—given the unique historical provenance of the base, which was secured under a lease at the end of the war with Spain on terms Havana no longer recognizes—no court anywhere in the world would have jurisdiction to deal with the complaints of prisoners held there. Consequently, it would be easier to subject the prisoners to torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment the likes of which America’s prisoners in wartime had never before experienced. The Supreme Court soon put an end to this exercise, and a series of court rulings ensured that indeed there would be a form of court review and that prisoners would have access to counsel.

While Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to end torture and to humanize and then close Guantánamo, this promise has been left unfulfilled, in part because of Obama’s lack of resolve and in part because of the obstructionist games practiced by Republicans. Obama has chosen to disengage from the Guantánamo issue, and in doing so has essentially placed operations there on autopilot. And that has produced a remarkable degree of backsliding to the practices of the Bush era.

A clear-cut example recently emerged when lawyers serving as defense counsel at Guantánamo discovered that they were arbitrarily being denied access to their clients on the orders of a military commandant, despite a series of court orders dating back to 2004 that had guaranteed them access. The Obama Administration had put in place new rules under which only those prisoners who are actively challenging their detention are guaranteed the right to talk to counsel; otherwise the commandant has the right to deny access. Moreover, to have any access to clients at all, the lawyers were being pressed to sign a “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Department of Defense under which they consented to these new rules.

But the Guantánamo bar took the Obama Administration to court, and yesterday they won a resounding victory. Chief Judge Royce Lamberth’s decision (.pdf) was not only an uncompromising vindication of the posture of lawyers who have provided pro bono counsel to Gitmo inmates for years, it was also caustic in its dismissal of the arrogant and meritless arguments of the Justice Department:

“The Government’s reasoning is substantially flawed and confuses the role of the jailer and the judiciary in our separation-of-powers scheme.”

“The Court is somewhat nonplussed as to why the counsel-access issue is being re-litigated at all,” in light of the existence of a court order that the government was obviously attempting to subvert.

The court explained why counsel was needed: “These petitioners, who speak no English, have no legal training, and who cannot be expected to remain up to date with new legal and political developments can have the requisite tools to bring habeas petitions without access to counsel.”

Dealing head-on with the government’s claims that it could change the court order through its military-power fiat, Lamberth wrote “The Government actions thus far demonstrate that it cannot be trusted with such power.”

He dispatched the Justice Department’s argument that the prisoners could act pro se (without counsel) as “quite preposterous,” stating that “the Court cannot take this contention seriously.”

....Barack Obama seemed at one point to appreciate this focal lesson. On the other hand, his Justice Department is so obsessed with the vindication of arbitrary and capricious exercises of power that it seems to have concluded that upholding the laws and the Constitution—to the extent that they impose obligations on, rather than grant rights to, the government—is a secondary consideration. And that, in a nutshell, explains the public’s current lack of confidence in the Justice Department.

[Demeter]

8. It Is Impossible For The US To Default

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johntharvey/2012/09/10/impossible-to-default/

With so many economic, political, and social problems facing us today, there is little point in focusing attention on something that is not one. The false fear of which I speak is the chance of US debt default. There is no need to speculate on what that likelihood is, I can give you the exact number:

there is 0% chance that the US will be forced to default on the debt.

We could choose to do so, just as a person trapped in a warehouse full of food could choose to starve, but we could never be forced to. This is not a theory or conjecture, it is cold, hard fact. The reason the US could never be forced to default is that every single bit of the debt is owed in the currency that we and only we can issue: dollars. Unlike Greece, we don’t have to try to earn foreign exchange via exports or beg for better terms. There is simply no level of debt we could not repay with a keystroke.

Don’t take my word for it. Here are just a few folks from across the political spectrum and in different walks of life saying the same thing:

“The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.” Alan Greenspan

“In the case of United States, default is absolutely impossible. All U.S. government debt is denominated in U.S. dollar assets.” Peter Zeihan, Vice President of Analysis for STRATFOR

“In the case of governments boasting monetary sovereignty and debt denominated in its own currency, like the United States (but also Japan and the UK), it is technically impossible to fall into debt default.” Erwan Mahe, European asset allocation and options strategies adviser

“There is never a risk of default for a sovereign nation that issues its own free-floating currency and where its debts are denominated in that currency.” Mike Norman, Chief Economist for John Thomas Financial

“There is no inherent limit on federal expenses and therefore on federal spending…When the U.S. government decides to spend fiat money, it adds to its banking reserve system and when it taxes or borrows (issues Treasury securities) it drains reserves from its banking system. These reserve operations are done solely to maintain the target Federal Funds rate.” Monty Agarwal , managing partner and chief investment officer of MA Managed Futures Fund

“As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bills. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis

“A sovereign government can always make payments as they come due by crediting bank accounts — something recognized by Chairman Ben Bernanke when he said the Fed spends by marking up the size of the reserve accounts of banks.” L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute

Mind you, that doesn’t mean there might not be other economic or political consequences. Inflation and currency depreciation, for example, are possibilities. Also from Dr. Wray:

“Government needs to be concerned about pressures on inflation and the exchange rate should its spending become excessive. And it should avoid “crowding out” private initiative by moving too many resources to our public sector. However, with high unemployment and idle plant and equipment, no one can reasonably argue that these dangers are imminent.”

Indeed, we have seen neither hide nor hair of inflation or high interest rates during the current run up of the debt. It is critical to bear in mind, too, that these deficits are not a result of the government trying to buy something it cannot otherwise afford (as would be the case for you or me). Rather, they are setting out to generate sufficient demand for goods and services to employ all those willing to work (that said, not every kind of government spending does this effectively, but that’s a different question). As there is no limit to how much debt we can successfully carry, we should be aggressively pursuing the latter goal rather than talking about being “fiscally responsible.” There is nothing responsible about leaving over 12 million Americans out of work.

We have plenty of problems in the world. No point in making one up.

[Demeter]

9. Why 'Black Friday' Has Dark Roots by Alan Greenblatt

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/11/21/165662876/why-black-friday-has-dark-roots?ft=1&f=1001

Black Friday may not yet be a bigger holiday than Thanksgiving, but it certainly has a bigger marketing budget. Retailers may have needed it to overcome the term's long and negative history. And that's well before you get to talk of striking Walmart workers, or violence involving impatient shoppers in recent years. Older generations may still associate "Black Friday" with the stock market crash of 1929, which triggered the Great Depression. But the connotation of financial distress dates back even further, to the collapse of the U.S. gold market on Sept. 24, 1869.

"The term Black Friday survived to be used again and again for various disasters and unfortunate evens, including a 1910 incident in England where police assaulted several hundred suffragettes at a protest," notes Richard Townley in The Washington Times.

What does any of this have to do with shopping? Perhaps nothing. But even the earliest references to Black Friday as a post-Thanksgiving retail spree were negative. The term appears to have originated about 50 years ago among police in Philadelphia inconvenienced by downtown crowds kicking off the holiday shopping season. Those crowds added to congestion from traffic in town for the Army-Navy football game, which in that era was generally played in Philly the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Black Friday "was not a happy term," department store historian Michael J. Lisicky told CBS News last year. "The stores were just too crowded, the streets were crowded, the buses and the police were just on overcall and extra duty." Even a sales manager at the department store Gimbels in Philadelphia back in 1975 acknowledged the term's negative connotation and link to traffic headaches. "That's why the bus drivers and cab drivers call today 'Black Friday,' " she told The Associated Press, while watching a policeman struggle with a crowd of jaywalkers. "They think in terms of the headaches it gives them."

"

Prior to the mid-1980s, the term 'Black Friday' was always used for some calamitous event," columnist Paul Mulshine wrote in New Jersey's Star-Ledger. "All of that negativity makes sense. 'Black Friday' has a naturally gloomy sound to it."

Of course retailers have long since embraced it, holding that the "black" in "Black Friday" is borrowed from accounting, meaning they hope to get "in the black" for the year by dint of holiday sales. Some accounts credit this meaning to Peter Strawbridge, president of Strawbridge & Clothier, a now-defunct retailer that was based in Philadelphia. But it doesn't seem that Strawbridge himself liked "Black Friday" much. "It sounds like the end of the world, and we really like the day," he told The Philadelphia Inquirer back in 1984. "If anything, we should call it 'Green Friday.' "

[Demeter]

11. Netanyahu Agreed to Ceasefire after Obama Promised US troops in Sinai Next Week?

ANYBODY ELSE HEARD OF THIS? OR AM I THE LAST TO NOTICE?

http://rt.com/usa/news/ceasefire-us-sinai-israel-435/

Israel and Palestine are momentarily at a ceasefire, but the potential reasoning behind the recess could have some real international implications. Israel’s Debka reports that the pause in fighting comes after the US promised to send troops to Sinai. According to Debka, US troops will soon be en route to the Sinai peninsula, Egyptian territory in North Africa that’s framed by the Suez Canal on the West and Israel on the East. In its northeast most point, Sinai is but a stone’s throw from Palestinian-controlled Gaza, and according to Debka, Hamas fighters there have been relying on Iranian arms smugglers to supply them with weaponry by way of Egypt. Debka reports this week that Sinai will soon be occupied by US troops, who were promised by President Barack Obama to Israel’s leaders as a condition that a ceasefire be called. Once deployed, the Americans will intervene with the rumored arms trade orchestrated by Iranians, ideally cutting off supplies for Hamas while at the same time serving as a thorn in the side of Iran.

“Once the missile and arms consignments depart Iranian ports or Libyan arms bazaars, Tehran has no direct control of their transit from point to point through Egypt until they reach Sinai and their Gaza destination,” Debka reports. “All the same, a US special forces operation against the Sinai segment of the Iranian smuggling route would count as the first overt American military strike against an Iranian military interest.”

The decision to send US troops to Sinai in exchange for a ceasefire was reportedly arranged early Wednesday morning after Pres. Obama made a deal over the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the days prior, Israel was relentless in targeting Gaza, killing more than 100 persons — including civilians — during a renewed assault on Hamas. A ceasefire has since been called after a week of fight, but more military action could soon occur, claims Israel, if the flow of weapons to Gaza is not stopped. Netanyahu has been adamant with his pleas for the United States to strike Iran in an effort to disrupt its nuclear enrichment facilities, a demand which up until now has been brushed aside by Pres. Obama. The White House has up until now insisted on diplomatic measures in order to make an impact on any Iranian output, but Debka’s sources suggest that US troops may now have to intervene in Sinai if any smugglers should attempt to move weapons into Gaza.

“By opening the Sinai door to an American troop deployment for Israel’s defense, recognizes that the US force also insures Israel against Cairo revoking or failing to honor the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979,” adds Debka.

According to their sources, US troops are expected in Egypt early next week. Meanwhile, American forces have all but surrounded Iran and are stationed in countless bases across the Middle East.

[Demeter]

12. Posthumous book claims Ford knew of CIA coverup in Kennedy assassination

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Pres._Fords_final_words_fuel_JFK_1121.html

Did the CIA orchestrate a cover-up in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

According to the publisher of a new book, who appeared on Fox News Wednesday morning, the last living words of former President Gerald Ford fingered the CIA in the orchestration a cover-up of Kennedy's assassination.

Ford, who died late last year, was the longest surviving member of the Warren Commission, which investigated Kennedy's assassination. The new book, "A Presidential Legacy and the Warren Commission," was written by Ford before his death, its publisher claims.

"This book, actually authored by Gerald Ford, finally proves once and for all that the CIA, our government, did destroy documents and cover-up many facts that day in Dallas," publisher Tim Miller told Fox & Friends Wednesday morning...

[Demeter]

13. A Reason to Give Thanks: The Return of the Wild Turkey

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/11/1119_wildturkey.html

IT'S A BLESSING: TO WAKE EVERY MORNING, KNOWING THAT THE US OF A WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF TURKEYS...

AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT ANY WAY YOU LIKE

[kickysnana]

16. Just a year ago I witnessed an army of turkeys

My Aunt has a home on the wooded bluffs overlooking the St Croix River. We were sitting in her kitchen last November having coffee when the parade started. Turkeys, mostly single file walking up the hill to the top of the bluff and they just kept going, and going, and going.

The year before my Dad's neighbor had photographed a mama turkey leading her brood across my Dad's yard, all 11 of them. We may never run out of turkeys as wild ones are quite tough and gamey.

This year one of the news stations showed a video of a young turkey somewhere in the Twin Cities suburbs coming up to cars that stopped at a stop sign, looking for something, they thought possibly a friend or a home. I looked for the video but looking for a specific turkey video this week is impossible.

Turkey was was one of my endearments for my rascally sons. And that is about I have to say on this matter.

[Demeter]

18. It's hard to soar like an eagle, when you work with a bunch of turkeys

[Demeter]

19. SPEAKING OF TURKEYS: 117 ALEC Members Voted Out of Office in 2012

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12914-117-alec-members-voted-out-of-office-in-2012

In primary and general elections in 2012 and recall elections in 2011 and 2012, a total of 117 members and alumni of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) were voted out of office, according to research and analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), ColorOfChange, and others.

Arizona Down 14 ALEC Members

Wisconsin Down 11 ALEC Members and Alumni

Minnesota Down 11 ALEC Members

Other States' Reduced ALEC Membership

In New Hampshire, five of the state's 31 known ALEC members were not re-elected to their seats for 2013: Rep. Jennifer Coffey (R-6), Rep. Beverly T. Rodeschin (R-2), Rep. Will Smith (R-18), Rep. Joseph Thomas (R-19), and Rep. J. Gail Barry (R-16).

In Rhode Island, both of the state's "ALEC State Chairmen," Rep. Jon Brien (D-50) and Sen. Frank Maher (R-34), were voted out of office.

A list of ALEC legislators who were up for election on November 6, updated with wins and losses, is available from ColorOfChange.

What's Ahead?

In state legislative campaigns in Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Washington State, membership in and support of ALEC has become a public campaign issue in the last year and a half. During that time, 70 state legislators nationwide have publicly cut ties to ALEC. Many ALEC legislators, however, were reelected, and it is unknown how many newly elected state legislators will be drafted by ALEC this coming year. In 2010, Republicans gained "trifecta" control (meaning members of one political party hold the governorship as well as the majority in both bodies of the state legislature) over 21 states. After the 2012 election, there are now 23 states with Republican trifectas. Although ALEC claims to be nonpartisan, its legislative membership is overwhelmingly Republican. As CMD has reported, after the 2010 election a flood of nearly identical bills emerged from statehouses under Republican control. When CMD launched ALECexposed.org in July 2011, the public was able to view over 800 "model" bills directly attributable to ALEC for the first time, and link many of these proposals to their ALEC templates.

It is expected that 2012 will generate a new raft of ALEC legislation, including bills to roll back taxes and starve state government, bills to privatize public schools, bills to privatize public pensions and other government services and, of course, bills to defund and dismantle unions. What has changed is that now there are active citizen groups across the nation tracking ALEC members, bills and conferences and helping to shed a light on this organization that allows corporate lobbyists to vote as equals with legislators behind closed doors on proposals to change your rights and obligations under the law.

[Demeter]

20. The Fake Election: 10 Arguments The Republicans Aren’t Making Matt Stoller

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/10-arguments-the-republicans-arent-making-or-why-the-gop-doesnt-mind-losing-in-2012.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Even authoritarian systems require legitimacy to retain the support of the governed, and the new authoritarian America is no exception...In fact, elections, over the past few years, have become mechanisms for sustaining the legitimacy of this political class, not contests designed to be won by either side. Neither side would ever admit to not trying to win, at least publicly. Privately, political consultants will count their winnings happily after each election, regardless of the outcome. So the way to see the lack of competitiveness now is to examine the moves that both parties are not making.

The Republicans have a clear strategy to win, which they are not using... Would it be dishonest for Republicans to promise populist policies they have no intention of following through on? Sure! Has that ever stopped them before? Of course not! Remember George W. Bush and compassionate conservatism? Now that was some artful lying. The Republicans were really trying to win that time. This time, not so much. If the Republicans were interested in winning, you’d see a very different campaign. Here are ten ironclad arguments you’d see. These are arguments the Republicans could make, but aren’t.

1) The Tax Cheat Administration – When the Obama campaign brought out Bain and tax avoidance, the GOP would have gone after health care czar Tom Daschle ‘s tax cheating and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tax problems. Daschle didn’t pay over $120,000 of taxes, and had to withdraw from consideration for the cabinet. Yet Obama still used him as a health care czar, even as he was on the payroll of big law firms. And Geithner’s problems were worse. As Neil Barofsky noted in Bailout, Geithner’s tax problems weren’t simple mistakes, they were more ominous than that, and revealed someone willing to cheat to keep a few more bucks. Geithner hadn’t been paying his full amount of taxes for several years. This was discovered, and he paid back taxes. But at first, he only paid back taxes for the years the statute of limitations hadn’t expire, keeping his tax cheat winnings for prior years. Only when prodded by the administration did he make up the full amount.

2) Obama Doesn’t Keep His Promises to You – During the 2008 primary, Obama promised to renegotiate NAFTA. He didn’t. Obama also promised to raise the minimum wage, and index it to inflation. He didn’t. The NAFTA promise is especially powerful, because anti-NAFTA sentiment cuts across party lines, and Obama pretty clearly was lying in 2008 when it emerged that his campaign economist Austan Goolsbee had assured the Canadians that Obama did not intend to honor his campaign promises.

3) Obama Administration, Brought to You By Wall Street – The Obama administration has very few high level Treasury officials who don’t have significant experience in large too big to fail banks. His chief of staff Bill Daley came from JP Morgan, an Jack Lew came from Citigroup. The revolving door argument is a natural television advertisement. The Republicans even cut an ad to portray Obama this way, but never put any real dollars behind it.

4) Obama Administration’s Handling of the Foreclosure Crisis – The Obama administration said that its main housing program would help 4 million homeowners. It came nowhere close. Recently, we’ve learned that the entire premise of the administration’s housing efforts was based on helping the banks, or “foaming the runway”, as Geithner put it, rather than stopping foreclosures. This is directly at odds from what the administration presented to the public. This is particularly significant in certain swing states, like Florida, Nevada, and Ohio. The Republicans could simply make this a broken promise argument, and again, the ad writes itself.

5) Inequality Skyrocketing Under Obama – Growth of inequality is higher under Obama than under Bush. This is because Obama reflated financial assets and not housing assets, and has compounded that by legalizing fraud among elite financial actors. The lack of prosecution angle isn’t just an ad that writes itself, it was an Academy Award winning documentary (Inside Job).

6) Obama Administration Is Corrupt – The examples here are numerous. There was the secret deal with pharma to spend money on elections if pharma got certain multi-billion dollar concessions in Obamacare. There’s the pay to play revolving door, such as Peter Orszag going to Citigroup after running OMB. In the first chapter of Bailout, Herb Allison essentially offered a bribe to Neil Barofsky if he’d go easier on Treasury around TARP. This is corruption. It’s not hard to prove.

7) Obama Pushing Offshoring of American Jobs – The massive Trans-Pacific Partnership, or NAFTA on steroids, is a global secret deal to subordinate American sovereignty to international tribunals of private corporate lawyers and offshoring whatever jobs are left in America. I’m not kidding. It’s that bad. And it’s being negotiated right now.

8) Subversion of the Rule of Law - This is everything from refusing to prosecuting Wall Street bankers to having a kill list to destroying real estate law through the mortgage settlement. Any number of eminent lawyers or thinkers could, or has, made this point.

9) Suppression of Dissent - The administration’s DHS collaborated with local and state law enforcement to get rid of Occupy encampments.

10) Endless war – Obama’s national security apparatus has been keeping us in Afghanistan, at higher troop levels, than Bush did.


...The Republicans don’t want to discuss tax cheating, offshoring, corruption, inequality, dissent, the rule of law, endless war, or Wall Street criminality. They’d rather lose. It’s not that they want to lose in 2012, it’s just that they aren’t going to go after every vote. It’s the same reason no one talks about how Romney is a flip-flopper anymore, or points out that Romney is the architect of Obamacare, or was a moderate Republican governor in Massachusetts. Those arguments are worse for the political class, and better for the public. And that is how elections operate in authoritarian America. The secondary goal is to win the election, the primary goal is to keep the public out of the deal-making.

[snot]

39. REC!!! if I cd.

[bread_and_roses]

47. ... and then there's those comfortable shoes ....

Over at CommonDreams Amy Dean writes that we should help Obama find his shoes You know, the usual ...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/22-3

Published on Thursday, November 22, 2012 by In These Times
Help Obama Find His Shoes
Progressives need to pressure Obama to stick up for workers as promised.
by Amy Dean

I'm not going to bother excerpting it - you can all surmise what it says.

However, I will quote one comment, which I found not only hilarious but also spot-on and relates to the post above, even if tangentially ...

Yes! We just need to help Obama find his shoes (kind of reminds me of Bush looking for Iraqi WMDs).

So.. on with the Easter Egg hunt! I'll toss out a few places we could look:

1 -- Perhaps one of Obama's Three Banksters Chief of Staff might have some clues?

2 -- Hows about those Obama selected negotiators who put a nail in the 99%'s coffin by pushing forward Obama's Free Trade Job Off-shoring deals with S. Korea, Columbia, and Panama?

3 -- Maybe we should check with those guys Obama has who are secretly negotiating the Free Trade deal known as the Trans Pacific Partnership?

4 -- Wait! I know! Let's check with Bernanke, Summers, Geithner, Holder, Alan Simpson!

5 -- Perchance Obama's Monsanto Executive Lobbyist appointee to the FDA might know where the shoes are?

6 -- Maybe we just need to wait for the 99% to have a good ol' big slice of "Shared Sacrifice" after 30 years of sacrificing whilst the 1% engorged themselves? Perhaps the shoes are hidden in Obama's Shared Sacrifice Pie?

7 -- Mayhap Obama's Deficit Commission, stacked with anti-99% zealots, would know?

8 -- Maybe we should check with the Heritage Foundation? After all, Obama stole (well the healthcare Executive who authored Obamacare was the actual perp) their "reform" idea from their reform policy thoughts in the 90's... who knows? Maybe the Heritage Foundation decided tit-for-tat and stole Obama's walking shoes as payback?

9 -- Maybe the shoes were lost in the chaos of Obama's Homeland Security coordinating the crackdown against the 99%'s Occupy Movement, after it was determined it couldn't be co-opted by the Democratic wing of the DemoThuglican Party?

Sure. We just need to help Obama find his comfortable shoes. That's it. ...

[Demeter]

58. Somehow I don't think those shoes are that comfortable

Maybe a nice, squishy couch, instead? Or a high-tech, ergonomic "gaming" chair with built-in drone controls?

[Demeter]

21. We’re Not Broke and the Clinton Surpluses Destroyed the US Economy

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/were-not-broke-and-the-clinton-surpluses-destroyed-the-us-economy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

Two of our nation’s most influential progressive journalists — Slate’s Matt Yglesias and Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal — just took on two powerful economic myths.

1. The Myth that The US Government is Out of Money

2. The Myth that A Government Surplus is a Sign of Fiscal Responsibility

It’s hard to imagine a more empowering message. As word spreads, elected officials in both parties will lose their primary excuse for inaction on on a whole range of neglected and underfunded programs. “I’d love to help, but I’m all tapped out,” simply won’t sell. Nor will the desperate calls for “shared sacrifice” and “entitlement reform” in the name of fiscal responsibility...A very big thank you to these men, who will undoubtedly suffer the slings and arrows of many of their progressive followers, who have long considered the Clinton surpluses the crowning achievement of modern Democratic governance.

* * *

Yglesias once more mainstreams the MMT principle that no nation that is sovereign in its own currency can “run out of money,” writing:

but the US government has the ability to create US currency in unlimited quantities. It hasn’t run out of money and won’t ever run out of money. It would be nice for people to understand this point separately from controversies over whether public sector programs are wise or just. In principle, the US government could print up or borrow a ton of money, hand it to state governments, and then have all the money used to cut taxes rather than to finance programs.

And Weisenthal shows the power of MMT analytical tools as well. Scott Fulwiler tweeted: “Broader point is recognition of sectoral balances approach rather than household budget/deficit analogy to govt’s fiscal position.”...

Again, the point is not that Yglesias or Weisenthal conform in detail to MMT as its proponents practice it, but rather to show how MMT concepts are being picked up by the mainstream. Just in time for the Grand Bargain debate!

[Demeter]

22. Modern Monetary Theory, an unconventional take on economic strategy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/modern-monetary-theory-is-an-unconventional-take-on-economic-strategy/2012/02/15/gIQAR8uPMR_story.html

About 11 years ago, James K. “Jamie” Galbraith recalls, hundreds of his fellow economists laughed at him. To his face. In the White House...Most viewed the budget surplus as opportune: a chance to pay down the national debt, cut taxes, shore up entitlements or pursue new spending programs. He viewed it as a danger: If the government is running a surplus, money is accruing in government coffers rather than in the hands of ordinary people and companies, where it might be spent and help the economy.

“I said economists used to understand that the running of a surplus was fiscal (economic) drag,” he said, “and with 250 economists, they giggled.”

Galbraith says the 2001 recession — which followed a few years of surpluses — proves he was right...

A decade later, as the soaring federal budget deficit has sharpened political and economic differences in Washington, Galbraith is mostly concerned about the dangers of keeping it too small. He’s a key figure in a core debate among economists about whether deficits are important and in what way. The issue has divided the nation’s best-known economists and inspired pockets of passion in academic circles. Any embrace by policymakers of one view or the other could affect everything from employment to the price of goods to the tax code.

In contrast to “deficit hawks” who want spending cuts and revenue increases now in order to temper the deficit, and “deficit doves” who want to hold off on austerity measures until the economy has recovered, Galbraith is a deficit owl. Owls certainly don’t think we need to balance the budget soon. Indeed, they don’t concede we need to balance it at all. Owls see government spending that leads to deficits as integral to economic growth, even in good times.

A LEISURELY WALK THROUGH MMT....SEE LINK FOR MORE

[Demeter]

23. Ian Welsh: Some basics on the economy

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/some-basics-on-the-economy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

1) the majority of new jobs are bad.

2) the economy has still not recovered all lost jobs, either in absolute #s or as a percentage of the population

3) so there are fewer jobs, and what new jobs have been created are worse. They pay worse.

4) The upper middle class job market has recovered, which is why those folks are no longer panicking and are telling you that the economy isn’t so bad as all that.

5) the failure to force the rich to take their losses and to break up the banks means that the same people who caused the 2007/8 financial crisis still control the economy and the government.

6) failure to restructure the economy to get off oil and over to an electrical economy means that the US (and the world) are caught in the oil price dilemna: any real recovery increases oil price and will be derailed by those high oil prices.

7) Europe, ex. Germany, is in recession.

8 ) the developed world is in depression, it never left depression. During depressions there are recoveries (such as they are) and recessions, but the overall economy is in depression.

9) China’s economy is slowing down. Since China is the main engine of the world economy, followed by the US, this is really bad. If it goes into an actual recession, bend over and kiss your butt goodbye.

10) Austerity is a means by which the rich can buy up assets which are not normally on the market for cheap.

11) the wealth of the rich and major corporations has recovered and in many countries exceeded its prior highs. They are doing fine. Austerity is not hurting them. They control your politicians. The depression will not end until it is in their interest for it to do so, or their wealth and power is broken.

12) The US play is as follows: frack. Frack some more. Frack even more. They are trying the Reagan play, temporize while new supplies of hydrocarbons come on line. Their bet is that they’ll get another boom out of that. If they’re right, it’ll be a lousy boom. If they’re wrong (and the Saudis think they are, and the Saudis have been eating their lunch since 2001) then you won’t even get that. Either way, though, they’ll devastate the environment, by which I mean the water you drink and grow crops with.

13) For people earning less than about 80K, the economy never really recovered.

14) If you’re out of work more than 2 months your odds of getting another job drop through the floor. If you do get one, odds are it will pay much less than your previous job.

15) Canada is undergoing austerity madness at all levels of government, and the corporations, with historically low tax rates, are not going to spend either. With Chinese demand for commodities dropping, expect a nasty recession.

16) Australia, having tied itself completely to China is about to reap the downside of that decision.

17) Wages are being systematically broken in the developed world. The rich do not believe they need you, except as wage-slave labor. You will all be company store slaves, paying rental streams to everyone to be allowed to continued to eke out a miserable existence.

18) Since the US sells protected works (so called “intellectual property”) you will continue to see a massive attempt to break anyone who doesn’t pay IP rent to the US. Some countries (Sweden, Germany, among others) are going along. But there are signs of rebellion. Apple may have won against Samsung in their ridiculous attempt to enforce patents on obvious solutions, but both Japanese and Korean courts threw the cases out. Paying rent to America, the hegemon, when the world system is working is one thing, paying rent when the world isn’t working is another.

19) Stirling Newberry says, and I agree, that none of this is stable, but it will last as long as the majority of the baby boom, the silents and a good chunk of the Xers still think they can hang on to their little piece of the pie, and screw everyone else. It will most likely break down in 2020/24, which is when the demographics turn. Young people today are completely screwed, they have astronomical student loans, no or shitty jobs, can’t afford a house and can’t afford to start a family. Note that the places where revolutions, peaceful or otherwise, are happening, are places where the majority of the population is young. Latin America, the Middle East.

Addendum

20) The economic numbers you hear don’t mean squat. Headline inflation does not matter, ask yourself instead “what are my fixed expenses?” Start with food. Jobless claims #s cannot be compared to prior numbers because less people have the sorts of jobs that let you make those claims. For the #s to make sense you’d have to adjust them for the reduced # of jobs which allow claims. The unemployment rate has dropped even though there are, in absolute terms, less jobs, because people have given up looking.

21) The money the Fed floods into the financial markets (quantitative easing, among others) is mostly NOT getting to ordinary people, and whatever Bernanke and his apologists say, it was never intended to. It is intended to prop up financial actors, and keep the rich richer. It has done what it is supposed to do.

[Demeter]

26. Why the Country's Top Economists Keep Making Wildly Stupid Claims By Dean Baker

http://www.alternet.org/economy/why-countrys-top-economists-keep-making-wildly-stupid-claims?akid=9714.227380.GWxBeV&rd=1&src=newsletter749245&t=16&paging=off

Underwater homeowners can't explain the weak recovery. It's reduced demand and wiped out housing wealth...Anyone wanting to learn about the economy who talked to the nation's top economists in 2006 would have been wasting their time. Almost none of them had any clue that the collapse of the $8 trillion housing bubble was going to wreck the economy. This presumably reflects a rigid dogmatism and conformity on the part of these economists, since it should have been both very easy to recognize an unprecedented run-up in house prices as a bubble and also to understand that the collapse of the bubble, which was quite evidently driving growth, would lead to a severe downturn...Remarkably, it seems ...that many of the country's top economists have no better understanding of the economy today than in 2006.The claim is the drop-off in consumption due to the debt burden of these homeowners explains the weakness of the recovery.

Some simple arithmetic shows the absurdity of this view. The amount of underwater equity is estimated at between $700 billion (Core Logic) and $1.1 trillion (Zilliow). Suppose that we can disappear this debt through some decree, how much additional consumption would we see? If we assume that these households spend an incredibly large share of this increase in their net wealth, say 15 cents on the dollar, this would imply additional consumption of between $105 billion (Core Logic estimate) and $165 billion a year (Zillow estimate).

However we would have also destroyed the wealth of the mortgage holders. Let's assume that they just spend 2 cents on the dollar of their wealth. This would imply a net boost to demand of $91 billion to $143 billion. While this would be a helpful boost to the economy, equivalent to a government stimulus program of this size, this would hardly be sufficent to make up a shortfall in annual output that the Congressional Budget Office puts at close to $1 trillion. Furthermore, even this gain is almost certainly a huge exaggeration of the actual effect. With 11 million homeowners underwater, the above calculaton implies an increase in average annual consumption of between $9,500 and $15,000 a year. The median homeowner has an income of less than $70,000 a year. It doesn't seem likely that such a family would either have this amount of savings each year that they could instead decide to consume if they were no longer underwater in their mortgage or that they could borrow this amount on any sort of sustained basis. In short, the numbers in my calculation above almost certainly hugely overstate the economic impact of eliminating underwater mortgage debt.

In fact, there is no need to turn to implausible underwater mortgage debt explanations for the weakness of the economy. The economy is acting exactly as those who warned of the bubble predicted. We saw a sharp falloff of residential construction as we went from a near record boom, with construction exceeding more than 6.0 percent of GDP at the 2005 peak, to a bust where it fell below 2.0 percent of GDP. This meant a loss in annual demand of more than $600 billion a year. We also saw a large falloff in consumption due to the loss of $8 trillion in housing wealth. The housing wealth effect is one of the oldest and most widely accepted concepts in economics. It is generally estimated people spend between 5 and 7 cents each year per dollar of housing wealth. This means that the collapse of the bubble would be expected to cost the economy between $400 billion and $560 billion in annual demand. There is no mechanism that would allow the economy to easily replace the combined loss of between $1 trillion and 1.2 trillion in demand that would be predicted from the collapse of the housing bubble. Therefore it is hard to see why anyone would feel the need to look to explanations involving the indebtedness of underwater homeowners, the whole downturn is easily and simply explained by the collapse of the bubble.

..........................................................................................................................

The economics profession did an astounding amount of damage to the country as a result of its complete failure to see the housing bubble and the dangers it posed to the economy. Economic reporters also failed the country by not being able to exercise any independent of thought to understand that the bulk of the profession was missing something important. (There were prominent economists like Robert Shiller at Yale and Paul Krugman who did warn of the bubble.) It is unfortunate that economics reporters still write pieces that rely exclusively on economists who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble....Btw, we certainly should be trying to help underwater homeowners as a simple matter of fairness. We bailed out Wall Street billionaires, it seems a pretty minimal proposition to offer assistance to homeowners who bought into a bubble that all the top economists insisted did not exist.

[Demeter]

27. Homeowners Still Waiting on Billions in Foreclosure Relief

http://newamericamedia.org/2012/11/homeowners-hopeful-but-still-waiting-on-foreclosure-relief.php

Thanks to a federal program, homeowner Pretti Hilton could be getting just what she needs to resolve her longstanding foreclosure case: a referee...Under the Independent Foreclosure Review program, eligible homeowners can request a review of their foreclosure file by a third-party consultant. If the independent auditor finds that the bank made errors in processing their foreclosure, the homeowner can recoup money – from $500 to as much as $125,000.

For Hilton, who has been fighting foreclosure of her home for nearly four years, the program offers a ray of hope. So far, her attempts to work with her lender, Bank of America, on modifying her home loan to produce a lower monthly mortgage payment have failed. In fact, the bank tried to auction off her property several times. If she were to lose her two-bedroom home in Moreno Valley, California, says Hilton, she and her two sons -- a 15-year-old and a disabled 27-year-old – would be on the street.

“The stress is astronomical,” she says, adding that she is taking medication for hypertension, something she’d never done before. “I don’t believe I was blessed with a house in order to lose it…. I will not go down without a fight.”

A home health worker, Hilton says her income took a hit with state budget cuts to programs that subsidize in-home care. When she got back on her feet, she resumed making mortgage payments, which by then included late fees. But even after paying off the late charges, she says, her bank did not lower the monthly payment back to the original amount. Because of that discrepancy and others, Hilton says she hasn’t paid her mortgage for three years, and her case is still in limbo. Then Hilton received a letter in the mail about the Independent Foreclosure Review program run by the Federal Reserve Bank and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Hilton applied for the program two months ago, and says she’s “expecting to hear something soon.”

But the wait could be longer than Hilton originally expected.

More than a year after its launch, the program has yet to pay out any compensation, and just a fraction of the requested reviews have been completed.


...Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for the OCC, says about 260,000 reviews are underway. According to an interim report released in June, consultants had completed just 11,000 reviews.

“No compensation has been approved yet because we have not reached that point in the review process,” Hubbard says.

MORE


GOOD INFORMATION ON THE TORTURE BY TURKEYS THAT AMERICA ENDURES

[hamerfan]

24. Musical Interlude

Cold Turkey by John Lennon:

[Demeter]

25. TURKEY CALL: The Banks Are Bluffing – They Aren’t Moving Anywhere

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/the-banks-are-bluffing-they-arent-moving-anywhere.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

YVES SMITH SAYS:

...Banks occasionally harrumph that if regulators are too mean, they’ll just pack up and go somewhere else. That’s complete bluster as far as TBTF banks are concerned. Any major bank needs to be backstopped by a real central bank. The Caymans don’t begin to cut it. And central banks are actually not all that welcoming of world scale players trying to take advantage of the slack they give to banks they’ve been in bed with a long time. UBS considered splitting in two and relocating its investment banking operations when the Swiss National Bank announced it would impost 20% equity requirements. It has concluded it has to stay put.

Andrew Newton debunks another sort of threat made by large banks: that they will move significant activities out of particular financial centers like London...

....................................................................................................................

By Andrew Newton, a former bank compliance officer. Cross posted from Huffington Post

It’s official: London is the hub of banking cool. In August, Chicago-based CME Group Inc announced it was applying to open a new derivatives exchange in London’s already competitive financial center in order to offer traders “regulatory choice”. Back in June, in US congressional hearings on JPMorgan’s $6bn trading loss, Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York reported that many banks in his jurisdiction were threatening to leave the US for Britain to profit from the “London loophole” alleged to underlie the “London Whale”. Even French bankers want to leave Paris for London. But wait. Banks noting the British regulator’s “overreaction” to a string of London-based scandals are talking about leaving London. The global financial crisis prompted what to most onlookers was a long-overdue review of regulatory controls on banking, as well as use of the tax regime to redistribute profit from the banks to the taxpayers they had harmed. As a result, threats to leave London have been made by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and Barclays. Even HSBC, which moved to London from Hong Kong in 1994 in advance of the Chinese handover, has responded to these scandal-driven regulatory initiatives by threatening to move its domicile repeatedly through 2010 and most of 2011.

So if not to London, where will banks go? Well, strangely enough, Europe’s ahead-of-the-global-regulatory-curve focus on pay reforms – specifically regarding the clawback of remuneration in the event of failure – means some European bankers including those in London are thinking of moving to – wait for it – the US, that excessively tight jurisdiction from which bankers are supposedly tempted to lax London. Barclays was apparently planning to move its headquarters there. Perhaps noting the apparent circularity of all this, Jamie Dimon, in his response to representative Carolyn Maloney berating the “London Loophole”, insisted that overzealous regulation in the US would lead to an exodus of business not to London but to Singapore. Threats to relocate based on regulatory arbitrage – the lure of a more lax jurisdiction – are far from new. In 1986 when London’s ‘Big Bang’ financial reforms made it a more liberated place for banks to do business originating and trading securities, US banks flocked to buy up the old London partnerships. They then used their new freedom of choice to pressure the Fed to lift key restrictions on banks in the US. The Fed obliged within a year, long before the repeal of Glass-Steagall. But whatever arbitrage manoeuvres might have made sense at the neoliberal dawn of deeply financialized capitalism, few now look plausible in the wake of late financialization’s progeny, the global financial crisis.

We should distinguish between two levels of arbitrage, the location of the bank headquarters and the location of particular financial activities. The first signifies which government is on the hook for any bailout stemming from a future financial crisis, and that government sets rules for the bank’s capital reserves and overall structure – so-called ‘prudential’ regulation – as well as tax on the financial firm’s overall group-wide profits. The second determines which governments get to say whether the financial system can be put at risk by permitting particular kinds of activity and remuneration structure – known as ‘conduct of business’ regulation – and the taxation of particular transactions. Moving activities around to the least onerous jurisdiction is relatively easy and a time-honored pastime. Jamie Dimon’s assertion that activities will move to Singapore is plausible, up to a point. Asian financial centers other than Japan are expected to leap forward in importance over the next decade, and recent surveys appear to confirm that bankers would prefer to work in Singapore than London or New York, although that story has been getting an outing with oddly insistent regularity of late. Noting that Asia’s financial centers are growing in importance is one thing. Arguing that this presents banks with substantial opportunities for regulatory arbitrage in the conduct of business is another. After all, the recent regulatory tightening of remuneration structures and derivatives trading is born out of a demonstrable need to rein in bankers’ excessive risk-taking. The consequences of that risk-taking were no more desired and just as criticized post-crisis in Asia as in the West. All the major Asian financial centers including Singapore have already demonstrated a desire over the last decade to tighten up on standards in finance and to build greater capacity to enforce them. Even if Asian financial centers would welcome an influx of Western bankers in the short-term, they will have little political appetite to indulge bankers’ self-destructive excesses over the medium to long term. Whatever temporary regulatory relief Asia’s financial centers might be prepared to extend the West’s weary bankers surely amounts to the regulatory equivalent of predatory lending: ensnaring desperate bankers with a low regulatory bar and then raising that bar once the banks are locked in.

... any jurisdiction that wants to attract (or, for that matter, retain) the headquarters of major banking institutions with the incentive of lower standards of prudential regulation or light taxation, however, had better have very deep pockets for the substantial public-funded bailout that indulgent regime – and the banks’ current subsidized cost of capital - implies. And that jurisdiction will also need a compliant population from which to extract the bill. Does Dubai really fit this profile? Does prudent Singapore? For its part it doesn’t seem to think so. Does Hong Kong? Hong Kong may look relatively free-wheeling now, but in the end it must look over its shoulder at China. Nothing in the 63-year history of the People’s Republic indicates an inclination towards being “hands off”, especially if they might be on the hook to provide a bailout. All in all, you have to wonder why the US or UK governments would entertain these threats to an extent that makes the threat worth making. Politicians in hock to the financial sector for campaign contributions presumably love the relocation threat story because it deflects attention away from their own inaction towards those mean-but-oh-so-importantly-big banks. Banks in turn deflect attention to “a few of their biggest shareholders” who are demanding that the bank’s location be put back into question.

MORE

[Demeter]

28. How Renewable Energy Is Rescuing Schools from Budget Cuts

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12916-how-renewable-energy-is-rescuing-schools-from-budget-cuts

...Richardsville Elementary would... inspire ... school districts around the world. When Richardsville opened its doors in fall 2010, it was the first “net zero” school in the nation, meaning that the school produces more energy on-site than it uses in a year....Solar tubes piping sunlight directly into classrooms eliminate much of the school’s demand for electric light, while a combination of geothermal and solar power cut down on the rest of the energy bill. Concrete floors treated with a soy-based stain don’t need buffing. The kitchen, which in most schools contributes to 20 percent of the energy bill, houses a combi-oven that cooks healthier meals and eliminates frying. This means an exhaust fan doesn’t pipe the school’s temperature-controlled air to the outdoors all day long. Meanwhile, “green screens” in the front hall track the school’s energy usage so kids can see the impact of turning off a light in real time.

These and other innovations make Richardsville better than net zero. It actually earns about $2,000 a month selling excess energy to the Tennessee Valley Authority. But building a green school isn’t enough, according to architect Philip C. Gayhart, principal in the architecture firm Sherman Carter Barnhart, which built Richardsville and has helped the Warren County School District achieve Energy Star ratings for 17 of its 24 schools. Three factors are essential to making a green school work: First, you need the participation of the community and the local power company; second, you can’t forget that a school is a dynamic learning environment; and third, you need to speak the language of money.

MORE AT LINK

[Demeter]

29. How Solar-Based Microgrids Could Bring Power to Millions

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429529/how-solar-based-microgrids-could-bring-power-to-millions/

The village of Tanjung Batu Laut seems to grow out of a mangrove swamp on an island off the coast of Malaysian Borneo. The houses, propped up over the water on stilts, are cobbled together from old plywood, corrugated steel, and rusted chicken wire. But walk inland and you reach a clearing covered with an array of a hundred solar panels mounted atop bright new metal frames. Thick cables transmit power from the panels into a sturdy building with new doors and windows. Step inside and the heavy humidity gives way to cool, dry air. Fluorescent lights illuminate a row of steel cabinets holding flashing lights and computer displays.

The building is the control center for a small, two-year-old power-generating facility that provides electricity to the approximately 200 people in the village. Computers manage power coming from the solar panels and from diesel generators, storing some of it in large lead-acid batteries and dispatching the rest to meet the growing local demand. Before the tiny plant was installed, the village had no access to reliable electricity, though a few families had small diesel generators. Now all the residents have virtually unlimited power 24 hours a day.

Many of the corrugated-steel roofs in the village incongruously bear television satellite dishes. Some homes, with sagging roofs and crude holes in the walls for windows, contain flat-screen televisions, ceiling fans, power-hungry appliances like irons and rice cookers, and devices that need to run day and night, like freezers. On a Saturday afternoon this summer, kids roamed around with cool wedges of watermelon they'd bought from Tenggiri Bawal, the owner of a tiny store located off one of the most unstable parts of the elevated wooden walkways that link the houses. Three days before, she'd taken delivery of a refrigerator, where she now keeps watermelon, sodas, and other goods. Bawal smiled as the children clustered outside her store and said, in her limited English, "Business is good."

MORE

[Demeter]

38. While Germany Is Headed for 80% Renewable Energy, We're Getting Left in the Dust

http://www.alternet.org/environment/while-germany-headed-80-renewable-energy-were-getting-left-dust?akid=9715.227380.gil-oC&rd=1&src=newsletter749268&t=14&paging=off

When you think of places with great potential for solar energy, what comes to mind? Maybe the American Southwest, perhaps the Middle East. What probably doesn’t come to mind is Germany — and yet Germany is leading a global revolution in renewable energy, with solar playing a key part....In the U.S., we now get 6 percent of our energy from renewables, which is exactly where Germany was in 2000. And then it passed the Renewable Energy Act and jumpstarted a movement known as Energiewende. Twelve years later, Germany gets over 25 percent of its energy from renewables and it is surpassing all of its benchmarks to be 80 percent renewable-powered by 2050.

In his new book, Clean Break: The Story of Germany’s Energy Transformation and What Americans Can Learn From It, Osha Gray Davidson explains how Germany made such a significant leap. Here are some shocking numbers he breaks down in the book:

25 percent of Germany’s electricity now comes from solar, wind and biomass. A third of the world’s installed solar capacity is found in Germany, a nation that gets roughly the same amount of sunlight as Alaska. A whopping 65 percent of the country’s total renewable power capacity is now owned by individuals, cooperatives and communities, leaving Germany’s once all-powerful utilities with just a sliver (6.5 percent) of this burgeoning sector.

AlterNet interviewed Davidson about his new book, and got his take on whether or not the U.S. can catch up to the green energy revolution:


Osha Gray Davidson: No matter how much I read about it beforehand, it couldn’t prepare me for what I saw. I write in the book about traveling by train from Hamburg in the north down to Freiburg in the very south. It was something like a five-hour train ride but there wasn’t more than 15 minutes that went by without seeing either wind turbines on the hills or farm fields or solar panels on roofs of houses, barns, anything that had a south-facing roof. Even knowing how much energy they get — now it is 26 percent — from renewables, it doesn’t prepare you for what’s it’s like to live or visit a society that is moving in a big way to renewable energy...

When you look at how much money they’re putting into this and how it’s designed, and it’s not universal support, but there is overwhelming support for this transformation throughout Germany. Knowing all that, yes, I can see them getting to 80 percent by 2050... they made a decision to do this and I think when a government and a population make a decision to do something and it’s widespread, that changes a whole lot because it’s always a matter of political will, not technological will, that makes the difference. The support is key and the way that they got that support is they designed policies that would give everybody — all residents of Germany — a way to have skin in the game. Sixty-five percent of all renewable energy in Germany is owned by individuals and cooperatives and groups of small investors. Germany gets unfairly tarred as doing this as a command-and-control program — the energy transformation — according to its critics, mostly in the United States, say it’s a socialist program, and nothing could be further from the truth. It is incredibly market-based, far more than our energy policies, to the extent that we actually have any. Everybody in Germany has a chance to participate; they can become a utility essentially. If you want to put solar panels on your roof, or if you’re a renter and want to get together with a group of friends and invest in solar panels or a windmill or a windfarm or chuches ... I saw many churches in Germany covered in solar panels and found out they’ve lowered their electricity bills by a huge extent by taking part in this. Giving everyone the financial incentive in making this work is really key... it’s distributed rather than centralized. It’s disappointing in the United States that we don’t really have that conversation at all. It’s just assumed here that energy, whether it’s fossil fuel, nuclear or renewable, is going to be produced by a large utility.

In Germany, the large utilities — the Big Four, they’re called — they have about 6 percent renewable energy capacity. But that is by design. When the Renewable Energy Act was written and then passed in 2000, one of the keys was understanding that you have to give everybody an incentive. Even though Germans, to a greater extent than Americans, know that global warming is a huge problem and that it needs to be solved, that isn’t enough to make an energy transformation. A lot of people here who understand it and know that climate change is a problem can’t really do much about it because even if they put solar panels up — what is that going to do — it’s one tiny piece of something. In Germany they know that they’re plugging into a much larger movement that is going to have an effect and beside from that, you do get a financial benefit; you earn money by putting solar panels on the roof.

To install a similar sized array on a rooftop in Germany costs half as much as it does in the States even though the hardware costs are all the same. It’s the process of putting it up that’s much cheaper — the soft costs. And then you earn money. As opposed to here, where the best you can do with net metering is lower your utility bill to zero. But there, beyond that, you can actually make some coin off of it. Anybody can.... that’s another part of the policy design from the Renewable Energy Act that you’re guaranteed a certain price for the power you produce for 20 years. So businesses, including individuals, know exactly how long it will take them to recoup the costs and start earning money on it — and how much they’ll make for the next 20 years. A lot of small businesses are doing this because there is policy certainty. In the U.S. we’ve just seen here with the Wind Production Tax Credit, the fact that it’s going to expire here on December 31st unless Congress extends it, wind manufacturers have already laid off several hundred people in the United States because of that policy uncertainty.... But this was really a bottom-up movement that forced politicians to get behind it, politicians from across the spectrum. So the center-right governing party now, Angel Merkel’s party, they are for the Energiewende. They are not doing it very effectively, they’re mismanaging it. But it’s fascinating, I just got used to in the United States if you see someone who has solar or wind you generally know politically where they’re going to be on the spectrum in the United States. In Germany you have absolutely no idea from someone’s involvement in renewable energy, where they are on the political spectrum.

MORE AT LINK

***********************************************************

Osha Gray Davidson's new book Clean Break: The Story of Germany’s Energy Transformation and What Americans Can Learn From It (InsideClimate News, 2012), is available as an e-book:

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Break-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B00A4IEJ5K/

[bread_and_roses]

51. 18 Turkeys (nine Dems) urge POTUS to approve Keystone pipeline

Though "turkey" is far too mild a term for these ghouls - NINE of them DEMS - and an insult to the wild bird:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/meet-bi-partisan-group-senators-pressuring-obama-speed-destruction-planet

Here they are:

18 U.S. Senators Happy to Risk the Planet

The White House has not yet responded to the letter from 18 Senators urging the President to approve the Keystone pipeline as soon as possible. The nine Democrats (left) and nine Republicans are mostly from oil states:

Max Baucus (D-Mont.)

John Hoeven (R-N.D.)

Jon Tester (D-Mont.)

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Kent Conrad (D-N.D.)

Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas)

Mary Landrieu (D-LA)

Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska)

Mark Pryor (D-Ark.)

David Vitter (R-La.)

Jim Webb (D-VA)

John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)

Mark Begich (D-Alaska)

Mike Johanns (R-Neb.

Kay Hagan (D-N.C.)

Richard Lugar (R-Ind.)

Joe Manchin (D-W.V.)

Rob Portman (R-Ohio)

edit because list did not copy correctly

[Demeter]

30. Will President Obama Restore the Rule of Law During His Second Term?

https://www.google.com/search?q=IMAGE+CARTOON+LAUGHING&hl=en&client=firefox-a&hs=Wes&tbo=u&rls=org.mozilla:en-US fficial&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=t5KwUP3CFaWMygG82IHgCw&ved=0CC4QsAQ&biw=1024&bih=675

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/12913-will-president-obama-restore-the-rule-of-law-during-his-second-term

SHORT ANSWER: NO. WHY START NOW? LAWLESSNESS IS WORKING FOR HIM

[Demeter]

31. MORE BLACK HUMOR FOR A BLACK FRIDAY

http://www.alternet.org/world/alternet-comics-tom-tomorrow-how-david-petraeus-made-droney-sad?akid=9714.227380.GWxBeV&rd=1&src=newsletter749245&t=8

[kickysnana]

33. Waiting to be able to read Tom Tomorrow after my last flare...

the print just does not compute and I hate when this happens.

For once in my life I have my eye doctor appointment scheduled on Monday when my eyes are doing this.

[Demeter]

34. That's the largest I could get it, sorry

I really ought to learn some modern software languages....

[kickysnana]

35. My problem not yours, I am just so grateful for everything you do here....

[snot]

40. Ditto what kickysnana said.

[Demeter]

32. Free Bird: The History of Presidential Turkey Pardoning

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/107104

Each year before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States formally pardons a live turkey presented to him by the National Turkey Federation. It’s a tradition that’s seemingly been around forever, and while the NTF has been supplying the White House with holiday birds since the 1940s, the pardoning bit is actually a pretty new development.




A lot of people point to Harry Truman as pardoning the first turkey in 1947, but the record keepers at the Truman Library can’t find any “documents, speeches, newspaper clippings, photographs, or other contemporary records” tying Truman to the custom. What’s more, the first turkey Truman supposedly pardoned wasn’t even for Thanksgiving — it was given to him at Christmas. The Truman family ate it.

Another origin story says that Abraham Lincoln interrupted a Cabinet meeting in 1863 to grant a turkey named Jack, which his son had befriended, an order of reprieve for “execution” in the kitchen. As with Truman, though, there’s no documentation supporting the story, and it may be just another Lincoln tall tale.

The first president after Truman to spare a turkey was John F. Kennedy. But JFK did not grant a formal “pardon” to the bird presented to him the week before Thanksgiving in 1963. He simply suggested the family “just keep him” and announced he would not eat the bird. (“It’s our Thanksgiving present to him,” Kennedy said.) According to a contemporary New York Times report, the bird was returned to a farm for breeding. Kennedy tragically didn’t live to see Thanksgiving — he was assassinated on November 22.






Ronald Reagan spared a turkey named Charlie from the White House kitchen, but only joked about giving it a pardon as he tried to deflect questions about the Iran-Contra affair. Formalized turkey pardoning, it turns out, has only been around since 1989, when President George H.W. Bush looked at his turkey and said, “Let me assure this fine tom he will not end up on anyone’s dinner table. Not this guy. He’s been granted a presidential pardon as of right now, allowing him to live out his days on a farm not far from here.”

THAT FIGURES...FIRST BUSH PARDON FOR A NATURAL CRONY

[Demeter]

36. While you all "digest" the above posts

I will be off working in the freezing wind, and then,

http://assets.amuniversal.com/b6d6254000e40130f787001dd8b71c47?width=900.0

So, with any luck, see you all on Sunday.

Post something in my absence...this is a potluck, after all!

[Demeter]

37. I'm surprised nobody posted this one

[hamerfan]

41. Musical Interlude II

I'll Fly Away by Willie Nelson:

[Demeter]

42. Flying turkeys, eh?

[Demeter]

48. Well, It's been a Quiet Week in Lake Wobegon and Elsewhere

And in Ann Arbor, it's snowed, again. It looks to stick around for a while...just enough to slicken every walkable or drivable surface. We're up to 28-29F at 9 AM.
But it should warm a bit in the coming week. Looks like the snowfall is over for a while.

But I think it's definitely, firmly winter, now. No more Indian summer to come, just hope of a January thaw. And the promise of spring to come.

I pruned off all the frozen rosebuds that crazy bush grew last week. There were 8.

[Demeter]

49. Helping poor farmers help themselves against drought

http://www.voxeu.org/article/helping-poor-farmers-help-themselves-against-drought

The worst drought in the US in decades has been making many headlines. While crop yields are suffering drastically, the impact on crop farmers’ income is likely to be much more muted. With the vast majority of US crop farmers benefiting from higher prices and subsidised crop insurance, it is mostly the insurance companies that are taking the losses. This is why much of the discussion has focused on the impact of the drought on world food and ethanol prices, on how the drought feeds into the climate change debate, or on its impact on US economic growth and the budget deficit.

Similar droughts are happening in much more disadvantaged parts of the world, for instance in India and in the Sahel. These have received less attention in the media, even if income and welfare consequences for those affected are dire. Indeed, empirical evidence from many parts of the developing world has established large welfare losses following weather shocks in developing countries ... Agricultural households are often particularly vulnerable, as weather shocks can wipe out a large part of their annual income. And there is a growing sense that exposure to risk is further increasing for many rural households in developing countries. Climate change is making weather more unpredictable. Temperatures are increasing, rainfall is becoming more variable, and extreme events (floods or droughts) are becoming more frequent. Moreover, changing weather patterns are disturbing traditional agricultural seasons. As a consequence, traditional rules of thumb on optimal practices, often passed on from generation to generation, might become useless guidelines for present-day farmers.

Policies to help farmers in poor nations

Many questions remain about which policies can help households adapt to these increasingly risky environments. Different options of agricultural adaptation, such as irrigation, adoption of drought resistant varieties or changes in cropping practices, are often discussed as policy responses. To complement adaptation strategies, social safety nets such as food aid, cash transfers or food-for-work programmes have become widespread. Many governments are now wondering how to adjust these approaches to help households protect themselves against shocks and become more resilient even after they exit such programmes.

One way households can protect themselves against consumption shocks is by engaging in multiple income-generating activities, so that even if agricultural income fails, there are other ways to get by. But many farmers have little or no source of income other than their crops and may lack the skills or materials necessary to engage in other income-generating activities, leaving them extremely vulnerable to droughts or severe weather. Is it possible to help households protect themselves by facilitating income diversification through provision of training or capital? In recent work (Macours et al. 2012) we discuss a randomised control trial (RCT) designed to answer this question...


Conclusion

The evidence of this experiment shows:

Basic cash transfers can help families cope in the short-term, but they may not offer long-term protection after being removed.

Enhancing the safety net with productive interventions proved to be an effective strategy to help households successfully develop other income-generating activities and prevent consumption declines when shocks hit.

Food consumption was also protected, even if the shock directly affected the main food crops.

Adaptation through changes in non-agricultural activities, a possible alternative to changes in agricultural practices themselves, does not have to come at the cost of higher food insecurity. Productive safety nets can hence help households protect themselves against weather variability and provide opportunities for higher earnings in the longer term, beyond providing short-term support in times of shocks.

[Demeter]

50. 6 Reasons the Fiscal Cliff is a Scam By James K. Galbraith

http://www.alternet.org/economy/6-reasons-fiscal-cliff-scam?akid=9711.227380.qiD_Lk&rd=1&src=newsletter748976&t=5

Stripped to essentials, the fiscal cliff is a device constructed to force a rollback of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as the price of avoiding tax increases and disruptive cuts in federal civilian programs and in the military. It was policy-making by hostage-taking, timed for the lame duck session, a contrived crisis, the plain idea now unfolding was to force a stampede. In the nature of stampedes arguments become confused; panic flows from fear, when multiple forces – economic and political in this instance – all appear to push the same way. It is therefore useful to sort through those forces, breaking them down into separate questions, and to ask whether any of them justify the voices of doom.

First, is there a looming crisis of debt or deficits, such that sacrifices in general are necessary? No, there is not. Not in the short run – as almost everyone agrees. But also: not in the long run. What we have are computer projections, based on arbitrary – and in fact capricious – assumptions. But even the computer projections no longer show much of a crisis. CBO has adjusted its interest rate forecast, and even under its “alternative fiscal scenario” the debt/GDP ratio now stabilizes after a few years.

Second, is there a looming crisis of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, such that these programs must be reformed? No, there is not. Social insurance programs are not businesses. They are not required to make a profit; they need not be funded from any particular stream of tax revenues over any particular time horizon. Reasonable control of health care costs – public and private – is necessary and also sufficient to keep the costs of Medicare and Medicaid within bounds.

Third, would the military sequestration programmed to start in January be a disaster? No, it would not be. Military spending is set in any event to decline – and it should decline as we adjust our military programs to our national security needs. The sequester is at worst harmless; at best it's an invitation to speed the process of moving away from a Cold War force structure to one suited to the modern world.

Fourth, would the upper-end tax increases programmed to take effect in January be a disaster? No, they would not be. There is no evidence that the low tax rates on the wealthy encourage them to spend or invest, no evidence that higher tax rates would deter the spending and investment that they might otherwise do.

Fifth, would the middle-class tax increases, end of unemployment insurance and the abrupt end of the payroll tax holiday programmed for the end of January risk cutting into the main lines of consumer spending, business profits and economic growth? Yes, over time it would. But the effects in the first few weeks will be minimal, and Congress could act on these matters separately, with a clean bill either before the end of the year or early in the new one.

Sixth, what about all the other cuts in discretionary federal spending? Yes, some of these would be very damaging if allowed. Simple solution: don't allow them.

In short, Members of Congress: if you can, just pass the President's bill on middle-class taxes, and, if you can, eliminate the domestic sequester. Then, please go home. Enjoy the holidays. Come back in January prepared to extend unemployment insurance, to phase out the payroll tax holiday gradually, to restore stable funding to necessary programs and to start dealing with our real problems: jobs, foreclosures, infrastructure and climate change.

**********************************************************

James K. Galbraith is the author of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, and of a new preface to The Great Crash, 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith. He teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.

[Demeter]

53. Our Enemy, the Payroll Tax By ROSS DOUTHAT

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/opinion/sunday/douthat-our-enemy-the-payroll-tax.html?_r=0

WE have two political parties in America, runs a saying that conservatives like to quote. One is stupid, the other is evil. And when they join forces to do something that’s both stupid and evil — well, that’s what we call “bipartisanship.”

The payroll tax holiday that passed Congress in the winter of 2010 was a rare exception to this pessimistic rule. Cutting the payroll tax was good short-term politics for both Democrats and Republicans: it was a tax cut that liberals hoped would double as stimulus, and a boost to the middle class that conservatives could support without embracing new federal spending. But more important, it opened the door to what would be good long-term policy as well — because more than almost any feature of the American tax code, the payroll tax deserves to be pared away into extinction...But now Washington is in danger of practicing payroll-tax bipartisanship of a more destructive sort. While the White House and Congressional Republicans wrestle over where to set income tax rates and how and whether to cut spending, the payroll tax holiday has been orphaned. Lacking noisy champions and press attention, it’s in danger of expiring at the end of the year out of political indifference.

That outcome would be unfortunate. Payroll taxes are a relic of New Deal Machiavellianism: by taking a bite of every worker’s paycheck and promising postretirement returns, Franklin Roosevelt effectively disguised Social Security as a pay-as-you-go system, even though the program actually redistributes from rich to poor and young to old. That disguise has helped keep Social Security sacrosanct — hailed by Democrats because it protects the poor and backed by Republicans as a reward for steady work. But the costs of this disguise have grown too great to bear. Whatever its past political advantages, the payroll tax now imposes an unnecessary burden on a stagnating economy. In an era of mass unemployment, mediocre wage growth and weak mobility from the bottom of the income ladder, it makes no sense to finance our retirement system with a tax that falls directly on wages and hiring and imposes particular burdens on small business and the working class.

What’s more, the payroll tax as it exists today can’t cover the program’s projected liabilities anyway, and the pay-as-you-go myth stands in the way of the changes required to keep Social Security solvent. All of the components of a sensible Social Security reform — means-testing for wealthier beneficiaries, changing the way benefits adjust for inflation, a slow increase in the retirement age — become easier if the program is treated as normal safety-net spending rather than an untouchable entitlement with a dedicated funding stream. By cutting the tax rate and promising to make up the difference out of general revenue, the payroll tax holiday took a big step in this direction — and letting it expire would take a big step back. Republicans have every reason to recognize this reality: their long-term size-of-government goals require Social Security reform, and the illusions fostered by the payroll tax are an obstacle — originally created by their political enemies! — to any restraint in what the program spends...

So there is only one question conservatives should be asking about the payroll tax holiday: How do we make it permanent?

WELL, FOR A REPUBLICAN, HE'S MAYBE HALF-RIGHT.....

[Demeter]

66. More Than 2 Million to Lose Extended Unemployment Benefits if the Nation Tumbles off the "Fiscal Cli

http://truth-out.org/news/item/12905-on-the-news-with-thom-hartmann-more-than-2-million-to-lose-extended-unemployment-benefits-if-the-nation-tumbles-off-the-fiscal-cliff-and-more

FROM TRANSCRIPT...VIDEO AT LINK

...More than 2 million Americans are set to lose extended unemployment benefits at the end of the year if the nation tumbles off the so-called "fiscal cliff." And Republicans who consider such things as mere "gifts" that, they say, the nation can't afford, appear more than happy to let it happen. But as The Atlantic recently reported, the United States actually provides less generous unemployment benefits than most of the other developed nations in the world. Looking at numbers from the OECD, the United States ranks lower than Japan, Italy, Spain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Norway, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Israel when it comes to providing the unemployed with benefits. It's time for Conservatives in the United States to understand who the real "job creators" are. They aren't rich people demanding more tax cuts to stash in Swiss bank accounts. They're working class Americans who spend money, and thus keep the economy churning. That's why it's crucial to help these working-class Americans when they lose their jobs – and keep the economy going for the rest of us...

[xchrom]

52. post holiday bad attitude....

[Demeter]

59. I've always got the same attitude

and it's BAAAAD. Also, depressing.

Can't imagine why. Must be the wild, carefree life I don't lead.

[xchrom]

60. i feel ya! nt

[DemReadingDU]

67. Me too

Is there a smiley for bad attitude?

[xchrom]

54. The Egyptian Stock Market Got DESTROYED Today

http://www.businessinsider.com/egyptian-stock-market-falls-nearly-10-after-morsi-decrees-2012-11

On its first day of trading following the surprise Thursday evening announcement that President Morsi would expand his power in significant ways, raising the specter that the Democratic revolution that ousted Mubarak could go be set back, Egypt's stock market got destroyed by nearly 10% (HT: AP).
Here's a one-day chart of Egypt's CASE-30 index via Bloomberg.

[Demeter]

61. Sounds like Mubarak's Minions Panicked

If they lose the Constitution battle, then the Judiciary, where will the cronies go?

Dubai?

[Demeter]

55. Three Things You Need To Know About The New Obamacare Rules

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/three-things-you-need-know-about-new-obamacare-rules?akid=9711.227380.qiD_Lk&rd=1&src=newsletter748976&t=17&paging=off

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a slew of important new Obamacare rules and regulations this week, continuing a widely expected post-election effort to successfully implement President Obama’s landmark health care reform law by 2014. In a call with reporters, CMS and HHS outlined the new proposed rules, which instruct insurers, providers, and governmental institutions on how they must proceed in implementing Obamacare measures — ranging from a ban on discriminating against Americans with pre-existing medical conditions to public wellness initiatives such as coverage for employees’ gym use. Here are the three most important things you need to know about the new rules:

1) Insurers will be prohibited from discriminating against Americans with pre-existing conditions. Long considered one of the health insurance industry’s most odious practices, refusing to extend coverage to Americans suffering from a pre-existing medical condition will soon be a thing of the past. The first of CMS’s proposed rules mandates that insurance companies will need to base their premium rates solely on an individual’s age, family size, geography, and history of tobacco use — preventing discrimination against Americans for any other reason, such as their gender or their chronic illnesses. The rule will also set strict limits on how much insurers can vary the premiums they charge Americans based on these factors, marking an end to gender rating practices that charged women more than men for the same medical services. This will be a boon to the over 120 million Americans who suffer from a pre-existing condition in one form or another.

2) State exchanges will establish a standard of “essential health benefits” that every plan will be required to cover. Obamacare will require the plans offered under state-wide health insurance exchanges in 2014 to clear federal benchmarks across ten “essential health benefit” categories, including access to maternal care, mental health services, preventative health care, and prescription drug coverage. These assured benefits — which are supposed to reflect the level of coverage offered by a typical employer-sponsored plan — will help correct for spotty coverage that does not actually meet Americans’ medical needs. CMS’s proposed rule requires state exchanges to offer to the same level of coverage as a statewide benchmark health plan of the state’s choosing. If a state’s chosen benchmark plan does not cover all of Obamacare’s required benefit categories — for instance, by not offering mental health services — then the federal government will intervene and supplement that plan so that it does meet the health law’s coverage requirements. The rule also creates standards for prescription drug coverage so that such coverage actually meets Americans’ health care needs and prohibits health plans from designing their benefits in a way that discriminates against certain groups of Americans.

3) Wellness programs will help promote public health and curb health care costs. The last of the three proposed rules is joint guidance from HHS, the Treasury, and the Department of Labor regarding sponsorship of workplace wellness programs. Obamacare encourages preventative health initiatives and a transition from “sick care” to actual “health care” in an effort to both improve Americans’ quality of life and lower national health spending. Under the proposed rule, employers are encouraged to continue both participatory and health-contingent wellness programs — such as subsidizing the cost of employees’ fitness center memberships or enrolling employees in tobacco-cessation programs — in exchange for federal rewards.

These rules will give states more clarity as they move forward in implementing the Affordable Care Act. Although many Obamacare details must still be worked out — particularly regarding the statewide insurance exchanges — the reform law has madeenormous strides in the last year that will result in a fairer, more accessible, and more affordable American health care system that is a marked improvement over the pre-Obamacare era. “It’s important to remember what this market looked like back in 2009… We were definitely headed in the wrong direction,” HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on the conference call.

[Demeter]

56. AND WHAT WON'T GET FIXED: Health insurer sued over disclosure of exclusions

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-healthmarkets-insurance-20121124,0,4892336.story

A health insurer owned by two Wall Street giants is headed to trial next week over claims it misled a San Bernardino County couple into buying a policy that left them with more than $140,000 in unpaid medical bills from cancer treatment. Norman and Kathleen Carter of Yucaipa are battling their insurance company, even as Kathleen continues to fight abdominal cancer. The couple sued a unit of HealthMarkets Inc. in August 2011 in Superior Court for fraud and breach of contract, accusing the company and its insurance agent of deliberately misrepresenting the health plan benefits. The insurer has denied any wrongdoing in court filings, and the case is scheduled for trial Wednesday...HealthMarkets and its three subsidiaries, Mid-West National, Mega Life and Health and Chesapeake Life, cater to individual policyholders and the self-employed, and they have run into regulatory trouble for years.

The San Bernardino County case highlights the struggles many consumers face trying to understand the benefits and limits of coverage when choosing a health plan. In 2014, the federal healthcare law imposes new rules aimed at preventing insurers from selling policies with confusing exclusions that can result in large, unforeseen medical expenses for consumers.

The Carters said they purchased a Cover America plan from Mid-West National in 2004 to provide coverage for major illnesses and protect them from incurring significant medical debt. They said one of the company's insurance agents, Joseph Bertino, assured them they were purchasing up to $1 million in coverage...Early last year, Kathleen Carter was diagnosed with a form of abdominal cancer called primary peritoneal carcinoma. The dental hygienist, 63 at the time, spent nearly four weeks in the hospital, underwent surgery and began chemotherapy. Kathleen Carter said she was shocked when she opened a bill showing that her insurer had labeled most of her care as "miscellaneous" hospital charges, for which her policy would pay only up to $18,000 per hospital stay. The insurance company paid roughly $30,000 toward her care, according to the lawsuit. The Carters said that left them owing more than $140,000 to Loma Linda University Medical Center and other providers. Her 64-year-old husband, Norman, is an orthodontist in Chino and both of them taught at Loma Linda University...Kathleen Carter, who recently turned 65 and became eligible for Medicare, is now undergoing a second round of chemotherapy.

HealthMarkets, based in North Richland Hills, Texas, paid $20 million in 2008 to settle an investigation involving California and 47 other states that accused it of deceptive business practices and misrepresentations. In 2009, HealthMarkets paid $17 million to resolve similar allegations brought by the Massachusetts attorney general and was banned from selling policies in that state for five years. The Los Angeles city attorney's office sued HealthMarkets in 2010 in state court over allegations of unfair business practices after it reviewed numerous consumer complaints. No trial date has been set. HealthMarkets declined to comment on the city's suit. Private equity firm Blackstone Group and the private equity arm of investment bank Goldman Sachs Group Inc. bought a majority stake in HealthMarkets in 2006. A spokeswoman for Goldman declined to comment and a representative for Blackstone couldn't be reached. Washington state regulators, who led the previous multistate investigation into HealthMarkets, levied an additional $325,000 fine earlier this year because the company failed to satisfy some requirements of the 2008 settlement related to agent training and oversight William Shernoff, a lawyer in Claremont representing the Carters, said the tougher regulations in the federal healthcare law are needed to better protect consumers. "People may think they have good coverage," he said, "and it may be too late when they find out that's not the case."

[Egalitarian Thug]

73. But, nobody could've predicted...

The next couple of years are going to expose so many of the disasters-in-waiting of this health care insurance "reform" it could ruin the Democratic Party for years. Then where will we be?

Interesting times...

[Demeter]

76. I agree entirely. Universal, single payer is the only answer.

and Obamacare is nothing like it. Nor could it ever be. Because it isn't intended to be health care. It's intended to be insurance company care.

[Demeter]

57. The Endangered Repairman By Shannon Hayes

http://www.nationofchange.org/endangered-repairman-1353766053

If there is one piece of electronic equipment in our house that every member of the family equally enjoys, it is our stereo. Listening to music and radio is one of our greatest pleasures. Bob and I purchased it shortly after we got married with gift money we’d received. We chose carefully, selecting a system that had been manufactured in this country, one we felt would last us for the next fifty years...It lasted ten. Soon, little buttons stopped working, then a few speaker wires shorted out. This past year, we decided to get it fixed. We contacted the manufacturer.

“Those systems can’t be repaired any longer,” the company representative informed me. But lucky for Bob and me, the company, keen on seeming “green,” has a buy-back program for their old electronic products. They’d take my stereo away, and in exchange, they’d award me a $500 credit toward a new stereo system. I asked if the new ones were still manufactured here. The representative faltered, “Well, no….”...We decided to visit a nearby independently owned store that specialized in home entertainment systems. We explained we were looking for a stereo. A good one. There, we learned that stereos were a thing of the past. We were supposed to be listening to music through new wireless blue-tooth speakers that spoke directly to our computers, which would channel the radio stations and music over the internet. We should just throw out our old stereo and buy the new technology.

“But our internet is really slow,” I started to explain, “and we don’t have internet on the side of the house where we live.”

The salesman cut me off. He had an answer in the form of an additional electronic device that would magnify the wireless signal and push it into the side of the house where we lived.

“But I don’t want to leave my computers and internet turned on while I’m listening to the radio. And I don’t want to have the internet in that side of my house.” Call me kooky, but I don’t like to be “connected” at all times. I also don’t want to be operating four pieces of electronic equipment (a router, a computer, a signal amplifier and a blue-tooth sound system) just so I can listen to some local folk music over the airwaves.

“What are you lady, Amish? Times are changing!” The salesman snapped at me.

Needless to say, he didn’t make the sale.

It was my mom who reminded us that we should call Mr. Kleinberger. For years, he and his wife had operated an electronics store on Main Street in Cobleskill. I remember going in there as a girl. He had two or three televisions in stock, maybe three or four radios. New products were not his mainstay. His real bread and butter was in repairing electronics. Any electronics: televisions, radios, VCRs, electric fence chargers. Eventually, the repair business fell away.

“Factories don’t authorize repair people anymore,” Mr. Kleinberger explained to me over the phone. “It used to be that we’d get trained by the manufacturers to repair and maintain their equipment. Nobody does that anymore. They wanna sell you the next new thing. I can look at your stereo,” he said, “but I can’t make any promises.”

Bob and I figured we had nothing to lose. We brought it over to his farmhouse, where he directed us to leave it on his kitchen counter, next to a pile of fence chargers the local farmers had brought in.

A few weeks later, I called to see how he was progressing. “Nobody at the company will talk to me,” he complained. “I called the manufacturer twice to find out how I’m supposed to open the casing on this thing without breaking it, and they tell me they’re under strict orders not to release the information. But they’ll give you money for it if you wanna buy a new system. Seems a waste, though, because if I could open this up, I’m pretty sure the repair would be just a few dollars’ worth of parts. A new system would cost you thousands.”

Mr. Kleinberger didn’t give up. He kept calling the manufacturer, and kept calling, and kept calling. One day a few weeks back, my phone rang. I picked up the receiver, and heard classical music playing.

“Ya hear that?” Mr. Kleinberger’s voice came over the line. “That’s your stereo. It’s a beautiful piece of machinery, that thing is. Every single part is a standard American part, made here and easily replaced.”

He went on to tell me his story of the repair. He’d made six different phone calls to the manufacturer, each time trying to get the same information: how to open the housing of the stereo without breaking it. Each time, the answer was the same: “We don’t service those stereos anymore, and we don’t have that information. But we’d be happy to tell you about our buy-back program.”
...Eventually, Mr. Kleinberger decided that, since he likes to talk, he’d wear them down with talking. “I told them my whole life story,” he said. He talked about his repair shop, about his wife, who has Alzheimer’s, who he takes care of; about how he fixes electronics out of his house; about the history of electronics repairs and manufacturing in this country, about his cats.

“I figured I’d make ’em crazy,” he told me. I could hear his smile, even through the receiver. “And maybe they’d transfer me to someone else. And they did. And I just kept doing it to the next person and the next person. But the first question I’d ask was ‘how long have you worked there?’ I finally found one guy, Josh, who’d worked there about as long as you had that stereo. That was the longest time of anyone I’d spoken with. I figured I had my man. He remembered when the stereos were manufactured here.”

Josh wasn’t authorized to release the pertinent information. But, like Mr. Kleinberger, he had a love for electronics. This love isn’t the narrow obsession with technology that drives so many folks to buy things they don’t need. Josh and Mr. Kleinberger had a mutual passion for the way things are made, the way the right parts make for a quality piece of equipment, the excitement of deciphering a problem and figuring out a repair. Josh held out as long as he could. He reminded Mr. Kleinberger he was under strict orders not to release the information. He told him about the buy-back offer. But with their mutual passion, the information Mr. Kleinberger needed eventually came out. And the stereo was repaired.


Locally-owned repair shops help to circulate money throughout the community, but also help residents lower their cost of living, in addition to reducing the volume of consumerism. With people like that around, I think I could easily get another fifty years out of this stereo…maybe even more. Who knows? Sigh. It seems they just don’t make stereos, or people, like that anymore.

************************************************************

Shannon Hayes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Shannon is the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture, The Grassfed Gourmet andThe Farmer and the Grill. Her newest book is Long Way on a Little: An Earth Lover's Companion for Enjoying Meat, Pinching Pennies and Living Deliciously. She is the host ofGrassfedcooking.com and RadicalHomemakers.com. Hayes works with her family on Sap Bush Hollow Farm in Upstate New York.

[Demeter]

63. Just like the Cell phone scams

or the way wheel bearings are now "sealed units" so they can't be opened, repacked, and maintained.

Or my dishwasher, which the repairman won't service because he doesn't do Amanas.

Or the G-D refrigerator, which LG made really cheaply, for too much money. I bought a refrigerator in 1981, had the repairman fix it when the fan seized up, watched what he did. I said, "Next time, I can fix that myself". He said: "Next time, buy a new one."

What kind of attitude it that?

I don't WANT a smart phone, I just want a phone. It doesn't have to take pictures, I'll even forgo the texting option. I don't want to lug around a fragile, overpriced computer at an exorbitant monthly rate.

I JUST WANT A PORTABLE PHONE FOR A REASONABLE, FAIR COST!

[DemReadingDU]

69. Seems like just about everything is a scam nowadays

Anything to take our money




P.S. Aren't there plain phones that can be bought that use cards where you load up for a specific number of minutes, for a small price. A while back, my brother bought that type of phone, I think it was from a drugstore(?).

[Demeter]

71. I'm going to Radio Shack This Week, See what they have to offer

I'm telling the world, this cannot continue. It's abuse.

[xchrom]

62. Paying Retail Workers A Little More Could Help Spur Our Economic Recovery

http://www.businessinsider.com/increasing-retail-wages-helps-recovery-2012-11



As Americans across the country head out en masse to malls and shopping centers to kickoff the holiday spending season today, it's important to remember that too many of the retail workers bringing us those deals earn meager wages.

The ranks of America's retail workforce have surged to more than 4.5 million workers, making it one of the nation's largest job categories.

Their numbers swell further during the holiday crush, as stores take on additional seasonal employees.
The U.S. is expected to add another 740,000 of retail jobs by 2020.


Read more: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/11/paying-retail-workers-little-better-can-make-huge-difference/3966/#ixzz2DFSznGjS

[Demeter]

64. Why So Secretive? The Trans-Pacific Partnership as Global Corporate Coup

http://www.nationofchange.org/why-so-secretive-trans-pacific-partnership-global-corporate-coup-1353687546


For example, public interest groups have been warning that the TPP could result in millions of lost jobs. As a letter from Congress to United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk stated, the TPP “will create binding policies on future Congresses in numerous areas,” including “those related to labor, patent and copyright, land use, food, agriculture and product standards, natural resources, the environment, professional licensing, state-owned enterprises and government procurement policies, as well as financial, healthcare, energy, telecommunications and other service sector regulations.” In other words, as promised, the TPP goes far beyond “trade.” Dubbed by many as “NAFTA on steroids” and a “corporate coup,” only two of the TPP’s 26 chapters actually have anything to do with trade. Most of it grants far-reaching new rights and privileges to corporations, specifically related to intellectual property rights (copyright and patent laws), as well as constraints on government regulations. The leaked documents revealed that the Obama administration “intends to bestow radical new political powers upon multinational corporations,” as Obama and Kirk have emerged as strong advocates “for policies that environmental activists, financial reform advocates and labor unions have long rejected for eroding key protections currently in domestic laws.” In other words, the already ineffective and mostly toothless environmental, financial, and labor regulations that exist are unacceptable to the Obama administration and the 600 corporations aligned with the TPP who are giving him his orders. The agreement stipulates that foreign corporations operating in the United States would no longer be subject to domestic U.S. laws regarding protections for the environment, finance or labor rights, and could appeal to an “international tribunal” which would be given the power to overrule American law and impose sanctions on the U.S. for violating the new “rights” of corporations. The “international tribunal” that would dictate the laws of the countries would be staffed by corporate lawyers acting as “judges,” thus ensuring that cases taken before them have a “fair and balanced” hearing – fairly balanced in favor of corporate rights above anything else.

A public interest coalition known as Citizens Trade Campaign published a draft of the TPP chapter on “investment” revealing information about the “international tribunal” which would allow corporations to directly sue governments that have barriers to “potential profits.” Arthur Stamoulis, the executive director of Citizens Trade Campaign, explained that the draft texts “clearly contain proposals designed to give transnational corporations special rights that go far beyond those possessed by domestic businesses and American citizens... A proposal that could have such broad effects on environmental, consumer safety and other public interest regulations deserves public scrutiny and debate. It shouldn’t be crafted behind closed doors.” Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a public interest organization, undertook an analysis of the leaked document on investment and explained that the international corporate tribunal would allow corporations to overturn national laws and regulations or demand enormous sums in compensation, with the tribunal “empowered to order payment of unlimited government Treasury funds to foreign investors over TPP claims.” Even under NAFTA, over $350 million has been paid by NAFTA-aligned governments to corporations for “barriers” to investment “rights,” including toxic waste dumps, logging rules, as well as bans on various toxic chemicals.

Because let’s be clear: for corporations, such regulations and concerns over health, safety and environmental issues are perceived solely as “barriers” to investment and profit. Thus their “government” would sue the foreign government on behalf of the corporation, on the premise that such regulations led to potential lost profits, for which the corporation should be compensated. The TPP allows the corporations to directly sue the government in question. All of the TPP member countries, except for Australia, have agreed to adhere to the jurisdiction of this international tribunal, an unelected, anti-democratic and corporate-staffed kangaroo-court with legal authority over at least ten nations and their populations. Further, TPP countries have not agreed on a set of obligations for corporations to meet in relation to health, labor or environmental standards, and thus a door is opened for corporations to obtain even more rights and privileges to plunder and exploit. Where corporate rights are extended, human and democratic rights are dismantled.

One of the most important areas in which the TPP has a profound effect is in relation to intellectual property rights, or copyright and patent laws. Corporations have been strong advocates of expanding intellectual property rights, namely, their intellectual property rights. Pharmaceutical corporations are major proponents of these rights and are likely to be among the major beneficiaries of the intellectual property chapter of the TPP. The pharmaceutical industry ensured that strong patent rules were included in the 1995 World Trade Organization agreement, but ultimately felt that those rules did not go far enough. Dean Baker, writing in the Guardian, explained that stronger patent rules establish “a government-granted monopoly, often as long as 14 years, that prohibits generic competitors from entering a market based on another company’s test results that show a drug to be safe and effective.” Baker noted that such laws are actually “the opposite of free trade” since they “involve increased government intervention in the market” and “restrict competition and lead to higher prices for consumers.” Essentially, what this means is that in poor countries where more people need access to life-saving drugs, and at cheaper cost, it would be impossible for companies or governments to manufacture and sell cheaper generic brands of successful drugs held by multinational corporate patents. Such an agreement would hand over a monopoly of price-controls to these corporations, allowing them to set the prices as they deem fit, thus making the drugs incredibly expensive and often inaccessible to the people who need them most.

As U.S. Congressman Henry Waxman correctly noted, “In many parts of the world, access to generic drugs means the difference between life and death.”


BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! AND IT GETS WORSE!

[Demeter]

65. HOW BAD CAN IT GET?

The TPP is expected to increase such corporate patent rights more than any other agreement in history. Generic drug manufacturers in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia would suffer. So would sales of larger generics manufacturers in the U.S., Canada, and Australia, which supply low-cost drugs to much of the world. While the United States has given up the right to negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical corporations (hence the exorbitant price for drugs purchased in the U.S.), countries like New Zealand and even Canada to a lesser extent negotiate drug prices in order to keep the costs down for consumers. The TPP will grant new negotiating privileges to corporations, allowing them to appeal decisions by governments to challenge the high cost of drugs or to go with cheap alternatives. Referring to these changes, the U.S. manager of Doctors Without Borders’ Access to Medicines Campaign stated, “Bush was better than Obama on this.”

But that’s not all the TPP threatens: Internet freedom is also a major target .The Council of Canadians and OpenMedia, major campaigners for Internet freedom, have warned that the TPP would “criminalize some everyday uses of the Internet,” including music downloads as well as the combining of different media works. OpenMedia warned that the TPP would “force service providers to collect and hand over your private data without privacy safeguards, and give media conglomerates more power to send you fines in the mail, remove online content – including entire websites – and even terminate your access to the Internet.” Also advanced under the TPP chapter on intellectual property rights, new laws would have to be put in place by governments to regulate Internet usage. OpenMedia further warned that, from the leaked documents on intellectual property rights, “there can be heavy fines for average citizens online,” adding: “you could be fined for clicking on a link, people could be knocked off the Internet and web sites could be locked off.” The TPP, warned OpenMedia founder Steve Anderson, “will limit innovation and free expression.” Under the TPP, there is no distinction between commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. Thus, users who download music for personal use would face the same penalties as those who sell pirated music for profit. Information that is created or shared on social networking sites could have Internet users fined, have their computers seized, their Internet usage terminated, or even get them a jail sentence. The TPP imposes a “three strikes” system for copyright infringement, where three violations would result in the termination of a household’s Internet access.

So, why all the secrecy? Corporate and political decision-makers study public opinion very closely; they know how to manipulate the public based upon what the majority think and believe. When it comes to “free trade” agreements, public opinion has forced negotiators into the darkness of back-room deals and unaccountable secrecy precisely because populations are so overwhelmingly against such agreements. An opinion poll from 2011 revealed that the American public has – just over the previous few years – moved from “broad opposition” to “overwhelming opposition” toward NAFTA-style trade deals. A major NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll from September of 2010 revealed that “the impact of trade and outsourcing is one of the only issues on which Americans of different classes, occupations and political persuasions agree,” with 86% saying that outsourcing jobs by U.S. companies to poor countries was “a top cause of our economic woes,” with 69% thinking that “free trade agreements between the United States and other countries cost the U.S. jobs.” Only 17% of Americans in 2010 felt that “free trade agreements” benefit the U.S., compared to 28% in 2007...Because public opinion is strongly – and increasingly – against “free trade agreements,” secrecy is required in order to prevent the public from even knowing about, let alone actively opposing, agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And this, as U.S. Trade Representative Kirk explained, is a very “practical” reason for all the secrecy.


I KNOW WHAT WE CAN DO WITH THOSE "COMFORTABLE SHOES", BUT IT'S NOT FIT FOR PUBLIC DISCLOSURE...

[Demeter]

68. The euro zone can still blow up even after unlimited purchases (SEPTEMBER)

http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2012/09/the-euro-zone-can-still-blow-up-even-after-unlimited-purchases.html

NOT THAT ANGELA IS PERMITTING THOSE PURCHASES ANYWAY,...

There appears to be an emerging consensus that the euro will survive, especially now that Mario Draghi has apparently grasped the nettle and persuaded his colleagues that the ECB is prepared to initiate unlimited purchases of national government bonds in order to underwrite their solvency. Of course, as usual with the ECB, there’s a sting in the tail, the sting being additional “conditionality” (for which one can read more fiscal austerity) as a quid pro quo. It’s like dealing with Hannibal Lecter.

Greece is the implied fate of anybody who dares to flout the rules. Maybe the country isn’t washed down with a Chianti and some fava beans, but it’s getting pretty close. And whilst nobody wants to appear to be the triggerman who finally kills off Greek membership in the currency union, the country is increasingly being placed in an untenable position, which will almost certainly set it up for future failure.

The problem is that the currency union is only as strong as its weakest link. Lopping off the weakest part of the Eurozone is not akin to removing a cancerous lesion from an otherwise healthy body, but more like the puncturing of an important blood vessel, which could well destroy the patient. True, Greece has been historically ridden with corruption and tax evasion (a recent report from the organisation, “Global Financial Integrity” – suggests that the Greek economy lost US$261 billion to crime, corruption, and tax evasion from 2003-2011). But the country has more recent made strenuous efforts to cut its deficit is by cutting public sector wages and pensions, a step that has exacerbated the size of its public deficits by decreasing incomes and employment. Were Greece to leave the Eurozone, it is almost certain that speculators would move to pick off another member country—Portugal, Italy, or Spain— all of which could face the same metaphoric fate as Hannibal Lecter’s victims. And so it goes.

Of course, the idea at this stage isn’t to rescue Greece. It is to provide an abject lesson to any other country which in the future considers flouting the country’s perverse rules. According to a recent report in the Guardian, the eurozone creditors are now saying the Greek government must tighten the universal neoliberal screws even further by imposing a six day work week and perhaps reducing wages as well, as a condition for the Greeks getting another “bailout.” Of course, unemployment and underemployment in Greece are rising rapidly, so it is hard to see how extending the work week for the already employed can be the kind of “tough love” that will create an increase in the total number of jobs or improve the economy. In the creditor’s eyes, however, that is unimportant; the real problem is Greece’s dysfunctional culture of work and profligacy. So the neoliberal policy solution for turning around the Greek economy is to improve the culture of work is to introduce a kind of debt peonage by taking the Greeks back to the 19th Century. And what happens when the six-day work week and wage reductions do not work, as they inevitably won’t? What comes next? Charles Dickens knew the answer — improve the culture of work by relaxing child labour laws to reduce wages further and/or privatize the Aegean islands, Delphi, and the Acropolis. No problem. Greece, to be sure, has its share of self-inflicted economic problems, but austerity economics is pushing Greece into a death spiral. Europe is cutting its nose to spite its face as it convert one Eurozone economy after another into a barter state. One already sees that with Spain as well....MORE

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About Marshall Auerback

Marshall Auerback, has 29 years experience in the investment management business, serving as a global portfolio strategist for Madison Street Partners, LLC, a Denver based hedge fund. He also has also worked as an economic consultant to PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund management group. He is a Fellow at the Economists for Peace and Security, a Research Associate at the Levy Institute, and a non-executive director of Pinetree Capital in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

[Demeter]

70. FOLKS, I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE TURKEYS!

I don't want to lose my appetite for tonight's feast...

I'll check back to see what else you've put up, and see you on SMW Monday!

[bread_and_roses]

74. "The $250,000 Question: Poll Shows Obama’s Tax Plan Is Widely Misunderstood"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/25-5

Published on Sunday, November 25, 2012 by The Nation
The $250,000 Question: Poll Shows Obama’s Tax Plan Is Widely Misunderstood
by Leslie Savan

For the last four years, President Obama has been pushing his plan to raise tax rates on people’s income over $250,000, but a new poll indicates that most people still don’t understand one of the plan’s most basic concepts.

... Here’s the Obama plan in brief. ... for example, if you make $300,000, your tax rate would rise a few percentage points, to the Clinton-era rates, but only on the portion above $250,000; in this case, only on $50,000. Bottom line: no one—not a billionaire, not someone making $251,000—would have to pay more taxes on that first $250,000.

There’s a widespread misconception ... the faulty belief that if your income is above $250,000, you’d have to pay the higher rates on all your income, as if you were suddenly being moved entirely into a higher tax bracket. That is wrong.

... You can also blame the media and Obama himself.

... Yes, he sometimes explains that taxes will rise only on income over $250,000 or that no one will see tax hikes on their first quarter-million. But he hasn’t done so consistently or forcefully. More often he short-hands it, as the media do, talking about raising rates on people making more than $250K rather than on their income over that amount....

The Obama team not only needs to explain, repeatedly, how the plan works...

It beggars the imagination to suppose that neither Obama nor his I'm-quite-sure-VERY-highly-paid media messaging team cannot come up with a concise, sound-bite phrasing to promote this. Which means they don't want to. Which means we have to ask who does it serve for the public to be confused and muddled about it?

[bread_and_roses]

75. And now I'm spending the rest of the weekend with Jane Austin

"Persuasion," to be precise, re-reading for the umpteenth time, to be less than quite precise. Austin's last and in some ways most nuanced novel.

Thanks for all the good reads, Demeter and all.