Economy
Related: About this forum"Now is the winter of our discontent" Weekend Economists: November 30-Dec 2, 2012
Richard III Quote (Act I, Scene I). Wm. Shakespeare The Life and Death of King Richard III (c. 1591)
I was listening to the BBC when this report came out: Archaeologists think they have found the skeleton of the 15th century monarch Richard III...
I was greatly surprised. I didn't know they had lost him in the first place...England being the cradle of history that it is, I thought they kept track of things like that. Especially monarchs. Even the "bad" ones. Here are reports on the subject:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-19575558
...Archaeologists began a dig searching for his last resting place on 25 August under a car park in Leicester. The excavation has uncovered the remains of a church which is thought to be where he was buried...
It is described as a "powerful and historic story" with "shades of Dan Brown". Clues at the dig for Richard III, archaeologists suggest, point to a skeleton's discovery being one of the most remarkable find ever made in England. Ahead of DNA confirmation, those who were there have reflected on what could be their own place in history.
Archaeologist Mathew Morris, described how they made the first discovery in one end of a 30m-long trench.
"We found one of his legs, sticking out into the trench from the side," he said. "You expect to find bits of bone in a churchyard because things get mixed up, so you then look for something connected to the leg and once you have that you know you have a burial. We weren't entirely sure we were in the church at that point, we could have been in the graveyard outside the church, so we actually waited for a few days to be sure of where it was before we to looked at it."
Work continued though, when the skeleton's location within the building was confirmed.
Mr Morris said: "It was a very simple grave, we don't think there was a coffin he was just wrapped in a shroud but he was laid carefully in the grave, it was done with respect. We cleaned all the other parts first but - because it is one of the fiddliest parts - we left the spine to last moment. So it was right after we had the rest of him uncovered, and [the spine] was really obviously curved and we looked at each other and said 'Wow, this is a really good candidate'. And when we lifted the spine, we found an arrowhead!"
Dr Jo Appleby, University of Leicester osteoarchaeologist, said they were still sceptical even as the excavation was being carried out.
"We thought it was pretty unlikely to be Richard III," she said. "So it was quite a shock when it began to show the characteristics it did. We found the damage to the head and that set a few alarm bells ringing - but of course we live in a world where you just don't find dead kings! I told myself it was just coincidence, it was some other guy, lots of medieval people were involved in battles. Pieces of medieval masonry recovered from the site Fragments of masonry showed the dig was on the site of a high status building...But when we got to the spine and we saw that kink in it, it was incredible. If you had a tick list of what you wanted to find, this was it."
The bones also provide powerful evidence of a violent death.
"We haven't looked at all of the skull yet but we have two wounds so far," said Dr Appleby. "Basically, a slice has been taken off the back of the head and there is also wound to the top of the head, very small on the outside but causing a lot of damage inside, caused by something more pointy."
Mr Morris said the team's achievement was not clear at first.
"We didn't get off-site until seven in the evening, with the sun going down and we were under such pressure to do it properly that we didn't think about it much," he said. "But driving home that evening it began to sink in what we might have done. It was a surreal evening...As an archaeologist people always ask what the best thing you have ever found is. I used to have to think about that, not any more."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20116118
The government has confirmed a skeleton that could be that of Richard III will be interred in Leicester if it is confirmed as the 15th Century king...Leicester, Nottinghamshire and York MPs discussed a permanent grave on Friday. In a written answer, justice minister Helen Grant said the skeleton would be interred at Leicester Cathedral if tests proved it was Richard III. In response to a question posed by Dan Jarvis, Labour MP for Barnsley, Ms Grant wrote:
"My Department issued a licence to exhume human remains which could be those of Richard III...Remains have now been exhumed and archaeologists are currently carrying out tests to determine the identity of the remains. Should they be found to be those of Richard III, the current plan is for them to be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral."
DNA results on the bones are being compared to that of living descendants of Richard's eldest sister, Anne of York.
Richard died at the hands of forces of Henry Tudor near Market Bosworth, Leicestershire. His grave, in the church of Greyfriars in Leicester, was lost during centuries of redevelopment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-20391935
Archaeologists who discovered a skeleton thought to be Richard III have said it could be January before tests confirm whether it is the former king...
Prof Lynn Foxhall, from the University of Leicester, said the team has got to be sure of its facts before it confirmed whether it was the monarch. The results of DNA tests on the bones had been expected in mid-December.Prof Foxhall said:
"We always said once we got the DNA going it would take a minimum of 12 weeks, I think that is still the case. There are quite a lot of different experts involved, mostly around the University of Leicester, but outside experts as well, and there's loads of things to check up."
She said each bone can take eight hours to scan in order to give a detailed X-ray. "It's not like CSI [Crime Scene Investigation], it just takes a long time," she said. "But the evidence is looking really good."
MORE DETAILS AS THEY UNFOLD...
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Demeter
(85,373 posts)Perhaps the FDIC is recovering from Black Friday...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It was small, and I got to talk and listen and as questions and eat hors d'oeuvres and drink two glasses of wine (no, I did not drive). The condo president drove, and won a $25 VISA card door prize, which paid for the gas, at least. It was nice to dress up, play an important adult, etc. It was about as much business socializing as I could tolerate...
So, that's why this thread is as late as it is.
Richard III's skeleton forms the backbone of this thread, so go all medieval on it!
Warpy
(111,255 posts)He was only on the throne for two years following a noteworthy career as a military leader. In those two years, he faced two rebellions, one by his elder brother's widow and partisans who were annoyed that his elder brother's sons had been declared illegitimate due to the king's precontract with another woman, and the second by the Lancastrians, who cost him his life and his throne at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
It's hard to say what he might have done had he been able to do anything but fight for the top of the dunghill. The intrigues and counter intrigues at that court would have made Machiavelli blush.
As for keeping them all in the Tower, we need to remember that the royal apartments there were lush by the standards of the time. It might have been a prison, but it was lined with ermine and well attended by servants.
Needless to say, I love the history of that period. Those folks make the machinations of the Koch boys look like playground activities.
Thank goodness.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Think about it. While Italy was in its Renaissance, England's nobility was still bashing each other over kingship...
Tansy_Gold
(17,857 posts)Last edited Sun Dec 2, 2012, 09:43 AM - Edit history (1)
Lots of little city-states, tiny kingdoms, Borgias and Sforzas and Medicis all over the place, not to mention all those popes who were often much more interested in earthly kingdoms than heavenly ones. The age of Macchiavelli and da Vinci, too. Lots of "bashing each other over kingship" and poisoning and stabbing and burning.
Speaking of burning:
William Caxton, author, translator, merchant, and printer, set up the first printing press in England under the Plantagenets; he'd been attached to the Burgundian court under Edward and Richard's sister Margaret and learned the art of printing in Germany, which he brought back to England
About that same time, the "Italians" were thrilling to the burning of books and other "vanities" (as well as people) encouraged by the ever so pious Girolamo Savonarola.
Michelangelo was only 10 years old when Richard died at Bosworth; Raphael only two. Botticelli would paint The Birth of Venus a year later.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)about 5 minutes before I post it....
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)Btw, from above -
"England being the cradle of history that it is, I thought they kept track of things like that."
For us it's history. For them it's "crazy uncle ricky down the road". So perhaps that familiarity leads to a little laxness on the locations of remains.
Tansy_Gold
(17,857 posts)And Henry Tudor (aka Henry VII) won at Bosworth. Richard was killed in the battle and his body was apparently buried in the church at Leicester. That much was pretty well known.
And that was 1485.
But there was no CNN, no NYT to spread the news. Caxton had only set up his first English printing press in the 1470s, so literacy was not yet very widespread anyway. News traveled very, very, very slowly, and often stopped traveling at all before it had got very far from the actual events. In the course of those travels, "facts" were often distorted.
Henry's legitimate claim to the throne was virtually non-existent, nowhere near as strong as Richard's, the young princes', or even Henry's eventual wife, the young princes' sister Elizabeth. The country had been engaged in civil war for years and years and years (The Wars of the Roses) and it would have been expedient of Henry not only to eliminate direct rivals and their supporters, but also to prevent any future insurrections in the name of the vanquished. There would be no venerating of Richard and his grave.
A good comparison would be the way the American "North," though victorious in the Civil War of the 1860s, allowed the "South" to venerate its martyrs and glorify its "heritage," and we all know how that has turned out. Henry had to consolidate his power and that meant demonizing and discrediting his present enemies as well as demoralizing any in the future.
His task was posthumously assisted by his son, Henry VIII, who broke with the Roman church over the Catherine of Aragon divorce. (Did you know she was the daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand of the whole Columbus thing?) Henry VIII took royal possession of all Church lands, parceled a lot of them out to his supporters, and left a lot to rot. With no history books, no printed matter to spread The Truth (aka "the daughter of time" from which Tey drew her title), the actual location Richard's burial place became lost.
Thomas More and Shakespeare, the O'Reilly and Hannity of their time, were vulnerable to royal displeasure under the early Tudors and would have written what amounted to popular propaganda . Neither was writing at the time of the events, so they were not witnesses to the "history" as it happened.
The whole thing is really quite fascinating, as is the subsequent dynastic mess with the Stuarts.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)And
"Thomas More and Shakespeare, the O'Reilly and Hannity of their time"
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)In France, socialism isn’t a political movement that swept the elections this year, and it isn’t an economic philosophy that moved once again to the forefront, but it’s part of the DNA of much of the population. And it produces classic knee-jerk reactions to the current economic morass—such as the nationalization of tottering automaker Peugeot.
French automakers are in a death spiral, within a market that is morose. In October, auto sales fell 7.8% from prior year, and a breath-taking 15.8% once the two extra selling days this October (23 instead 21) are taken into account. Year to date, sales are down 13.3%. PSA Peugeot Citroën dropped 5% for the month and 17.2% for the year. Its captive finance subsidiary, Banque PSA Finance, was bailed out by the taxpayer last week to the tune of €5 to €7 billion. More bailouts are on the horizon. Layoffs loom, but political resistance is enormous, and it might be impossible to shrink PSA’s capacity down to reality. Renault crashed. October sales were down a catastrophic 26.4%, for a decline of 20.5% so far this year. All hopes rest on the arrival of its miracle car, the new Clio 4, which would not only stimulate Renault’s sales but goose the entire market. Good luck. In a few days, the company will start discussions with unions on how to improve its “competitiveness”—and everyone knows what that means for the hapless workers. The killer? In October, the French brands together plunged 15.2% ... but foreign brands rose 2.5%. For the year, the market is down 13.3%, a horrid figure, but PSA is down 17.2% and Renault 20.5%. They’re getting killed at home! You can blame the decomposing market on the government or on the debt crisis or on the weather, but if your market share is plummeting, you can only blame yourself—and if you don’t fix the problem, you become irrelevant.
Hence the ingenious idea to poll the French on what they thought about nationalizing Peugeot. Not bailing it out. Not resurrecting it from a pre-packaged bankruptcy, as the US had done with GM. But nationalizing it upfront. It would turn the manufacturer into a political entity. Layoffs would become impossible. As would success. And the French DNA spoke:
Overall, 56.7% were either for nationalizing it or didn’t care (32.2% and 24.5%). Only 43.3% were against it. Among workers, 64.8% were either for it or didn’t care (51% in favor, 13.8% shrugging it off). Even among managers and professionals, 33.7% were for it, though 58% opposed it, and only 8.2% didn’t know.
WOLF RICHTER LOOKS DOWN ON THIS NOTION, BUT...
If it weren’t for EU rules that pried open markets, carved up national monopolies, and introduced competition, many of the largest French corporations would still be owned by the state. Yet, lots of vestiges remain—in a country where the central government’s big footprint amounts to 56.3% of GDP (2013 budget). Air France, for example, was “privatized,” but even after its merger with KLM, the government still owns 18.6% of the group. Renault was privatized in 1996. Crédit Lyonnais, once the largest bank in France, was majority owned by the state when it almost went bankrupt in 1993; it was acquired by Crédit Agricole in 2003. EDF is still a state-owned mega utility that owns, among other things, all of France’s 58 active nuclear reactors. Any suggestion by intrepid politicians of taking some baby steps towards privatizing it can trigger strikes, and sometimes a few cables mysteriously get cut. You don’t joke about privatizing EDF. France Telecom was privatized in January 1998 under Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Resistance was huge, and only a Socialist could overcome it. But then came the stock offering. I was living in France at the time. It was one heck of a hoopla. Shares were hyped for months. Everybody wanted a piece of the pie. It was the dot-com bubble, even in France. The stock soared. In March 2000, it hit €219 a share, and people felt rich and smart. It now trades for around €11. Employee suicides have become a problem. And the government still owns 27% of it ... and names the CEO. Because it’s in the French DNA.
WELL, MAYBE THE FAULT LIES NOT IN THE SOCIALISM, BUT IN THE PRIVATIZATION, WOLF...OR PERHAPS:
“Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis'd at first to keep the strong in awe:
Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law.
March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell;
If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard III
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Waypoint Real Estate Group LLC, a major investor in U.S. foreclosed homes, has secured a $65 million loan from Citigroup Inc. to help add to its portfolio of properties, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bankers and investors said the debt-financing deal is a milestone for the burgeoning business of renting out houses that were previously in foreclosure.
Waypoint, an Oakland, Calif., investment firm, is working with Citigroup on a bigger, longer-term financing deal that is expected to close in the coming weeks, the people said...
...As they do in bonds backed by mortgages and other assets, banks would pool the rents of thousands of tenants living in the formerly foreclosed properties and sell to investors a promised return based on the income the homes produce. The sale of such a bond would help foreclosed-home investors like Waypoint pay back their lenders while raising funds they can use to buy more houses.
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
OR, AS SHAKESPEARE HAS RICHARD III SAY:
“I have set my life upon a cast,
And I will stand the hazard of the die.”
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Imagine America without unions. This shouldn’t be hard. In much of America unions have already disappeared. In the rest of America they’re battling for their lives.
Unions have been declining for decades. In the early 1950s, one out of three American workers belonged to them, four out of ten in the private sector. Today, only 11.8 percent of American workers are union members; in the private sector, just 6.9 percent. The vanishing act varies by region—in the South, it’s almost total—but proceeds relentlessly everywhere. Since 1983, the number of states in which at least 10 percent of private-sector workers have union contracts has shrunk from 42 to 8.
Following the 2010 elections, a number of newly elected Republican governors and legislatures in the industrial Midwest, long a union stronghold, moved to reduce labor’s numbers to the trace-element levels that exist in the South. A cold political logic spurred their attacks: Labor was the chief source of funding and volunteers for their Democratic opponents, and working-class whites, who still constitute a sizable share of the electorate in their states, were far more likely to vote Democratic if they belonged to a union. The fiscal crisis of the states provided the pretext for Republicans to try to take out their foremost adversaries, public-employee unions.
In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels signed a “right to work” law giving nonunion members who enjoyed the benefits of a union contract the right to withhold dues to the union, making Indiana the first Midwestern state to pass such legislation. In Ohio, Governor John Kasich signed a bill repealing collective-bargaining rights for all public employees, but voters overturned that law at the polls. In Wisconsin, which had been the first state to extend those rights to public-sector workers, Governor Scott Walker also repealed those rights, but more selectively than Kasich: He kept them for police and firefighters. When outraged unionists and their allies mounted a recall campaign against him, Walker beat them back handily. In the nation’s capital, Republican senators and congressmen refused to confirm President Barack Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, which adjudicates labor-management relations in the private sector....
LOTS MORE WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH
Demeter
(85,373 posts)While the emblems of Wendy’s, McDonald’s, KFC, Domino’s and other greasy dynasties are hard to escape in the American landscape, those who cook, clean, ring up orders and otherwise serve as the fulcrum of these franchises often go unnoticed. These workers, however, were hard to miss today as they stepped off burger assembly lines across New York City and into the street, picketing in front of their workplaces. The strike, which took place at numerous restaurants across the city, is the start of the largest effort to unionize fast food workers in American history. Organizers are calling the campaign Fast Food Forward.
Revenues in the fast food industry are expected to near $200 billion this year. Yet the demands of their workers are modest: $15 an hour and the right to unionize with the Fast Food Workers Committee.
“We’re out here for better wages, better working conditions, and union protection,” said Michael, an 18-year-old employee of a Burger King located not far from Wall Street. Michael says that growing up he was encouraged to “go the right way and get a job,” but now that he has a job he’s having trouble getting by. “There’s people my age that try to let this stabilize them. We got bills, we got rent. We’re living from check to check, hoping the next one will be better and it’s not. We can’t live on this.”
Gregory, an East Harlem KFC worker several years older than Michael, said he and his coworkers earn minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), receive food stamps and still don’t have enough to get by and provide for their kids. Gregory lives in Rockaway, Queens — an area that was inundated with floodwaters from Superstorm Sandy. When he sought back pay from his employer for time lost during the storm, his request was denied. He was given a meal on the house instead....
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Here's a WIKI article on the strike - I might question some of it, but honestly have not studied the strike so can't claim to know better
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_strike_of_1959
...but I remember that strike. I was eight, turning nine the October of the strike. My father was USW. That was the year I remember our Aunts bringing a groceries over to our house, my mother taking a big ham out and sinking into a kitchen chair, her hands to her face, weeping. She had not known how she was going to feed us that day, or the next. She was crying from relief.
With so few people in unions now, and strikes so rare, I encounter the notion among non-union workers that strikes are somehow frivolous, that workers are "OK" on strike and hold all the cards because the union "takes care of them." There is generally a strike fund, to be sure, but it's not wages, and strikes are a terrible hardship on the members and their families. The members don't undertake them lightly.
Unions are not perfect, our leadership is all too often too expedient, and FAR too married to the Democrats as a result of largely giving up worksite action for political maneuvering. (IMHO, that is - and also IMHO, the "business unionism" model has been a disaster on multiple levels - among them that same marriage to the Dems but primarily in diverting workers from a solid class-consciousness.) But for all our failings, unions are still among our last best hopes.
And that the labor movement somehow failed to "seize the day" during the Bankster propelled collapse is a mystery ... I am not sure what went wrong, though I think protecting Obama and the Dems was part of it .... no one remembers that Labor had a "make the banks pay" campaign years before Occupy - it went nowhere for some reason ...messaging? tactics? Our energies diverted and spread out? I honestly don't know.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)And I am about your same age, born in 1949.
I just don't recall my town being affected by that huge strike. Perhaps because my town didn't have any big factories?
But I remember the early 70s. Spouse was a union Ironworker. They were on strike for health benefits. I remember him coming home with a box of government food...cans of food with white paper w/ black letters. But the cheese was 5 pound block from Land o Lakes.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)than much of the food we buy in the supermarket today, sad to say. Yes, the cheese was good! (LOL has now changed it's cheese formula to a "cheese food" sort of product - I know this because I know people who receive WIC - which dictates the brands it can be used for - and LOL can no longer be purchased with WIC checks because it is not real cheese).
The peanut butter was non-homogenized and mixing it was really, REALLY hard because it too came in 5 lb cans - but it tasted good. Even the beef in the can was not bad - some sort of chuck - made OK stew and Shepard's Pie.
Our food has been so adulterated with garbage fats and corn syrup, our meat so altered by feeding antibiotics and hormones to the livestock that almost everything tastes unpleasant in some way to me unless I buy organic.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and costs more than real.
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)- for all I know, there is more than one, but the thread's theme sent me looking for the title of a novel exonerating R_III which I remember enjoying very much - though, thankfully, by the age I read it I'd learned not to let one book determine my opinion on something I knew next to nothing about it. It is a fun and interesting novel, though: "The Daughter of Time," by Josephine Tey.
I have no opinion of R_III, never having studied him or the era.
The page I came across - first hit actually on my search - is here http://www.richardiii.net/dot.htm
Here's the home page of the society itself, and the Greyfriars Dig is on the home page, also this:
And here is the American Branch of the R_III Society: http://www.r3.org/
The dig on home page there too.
"The Winter of our Discontent" is a brilliant theme for this day a week from Walmart workers protesting, a day from fast food workers walking out protesting, with actions scheduled all over the country tomorrow calling to Tax the Rich and No Cuts to SS/MA/MC! (We won't see much about this in the news, I'd expect, since they will be small local actions targeting Congressional offices - but there will be a lot of them.) The Serfs are getting restless, it seems. One hopes it's a portent.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Shucks! You make me blush 
; you know I just make this stuff up as I go along...
Tansy_Gold
(17,857 posts)Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time is a fun read, and some of it has been debunked, but it's enough to arouse one's curiosity. After I read it the first time in the early 1980s, I hunted up a few of the other works on the subject. I still have most, if not all, of them.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)ONE WOULDN'T THINK THE BOOZE SELLERS NEEDED ANY HELP. THE POLITICS AND THE ECONOMY IN THE US WOULD DRIVE ANYONE TO DRINK...
http://www.alternet.org/alcohol-industrys-plan-give-america-giant-drinking-problem?akid=9718.227380.ZDUv6a&rd=1&src=newsletter749613&t=3&paging=off
Industry giants are threatening to swallow up America's carefully regulated alcohol industry, and remake America in the image of booze-soaked Britain...England has a drinking problem. Since 1990, teenage alcohol consumption has doubled. Since World War II, alcohol intake for the population as a whole has doubled, with a third of that increase occurring since just 1995. The United Kingdom has very high rates of binge and heavy drinking, with the average Brit consuming the equivalent of nearly ten liters of pure ethanol per year...It’s apparent in their hospitals, where since the 1970s rates of cirrhosis and other liver diseases among the middle-aged have increased by eightfold for men and sevenfold for women. And it’s apparent in their streets, where the carousing, violent “lager lout” is as much a symbol of modern Britain as Adele, Andy Murray, and the London Eye. Busting a bottle across someone’s face in a bar is a bona fide cultural phenomenon—so notorious that it has its own slang term, “glassing,” and so common that at one point the Manchester police called for bottles and beer mugs to be replaced with more shatter-resistant material. In every detail but the style of dress, the alleys of London on a typical Saturday night look like the scenes in William Hogarth’s famous pro-temperance print Gin Lane. It was released in 1751.
The United States, although no stranger to alcohol abuse problems, is in comparatively better shape. A third of the country does not drink, and teenage drinking is at a historic low. The rate of alcohol use among seniors in high school has fallen 25 percentage points since 1980. Glassing is something that happens in movies, not at the corner bar....Why has the United States, so similar to Great Britain in everything from language to pop culture trends, managed to avoid the huge spike of alcohol abuse that has gripped the UK? The reasons are many, but one stands out above all: the market in Great Britain is rigged to foster excessive alcohol consumption in ways it is not in the United States—at least not yet...Monopolistic enterprises control the flow of drink in England at every step—starting with the breweries and distilleries where it’s produced and down the channels through which it reaches consumers in pubs and supermarkets. These vertically integrated monopolies are very “efficient” in the economist’s sense, in that they do a very good job of minimizing the price and thereby maximizing the consumption of alcohol.
The United States, too, has seen vast consolidation of its alcohol industry, but as of yet, not the kind of complete vertical integration seen in the UK. One big reason is a little-known legacy of our experience with Prohibition. From civics class, you may remember that the 21st Amendment to the Constitution formally ended Prohibition in 1933. But while the amendment made it once again legal to sell and produce alcohol, it also contained a measure designed to ensure that America would never again have the horrible drinking problem it had before, which led to the passage of Prohibition in the first place. Specifically, the 21st Amendment grants state and local governments express power to regulate liquor sales within their own borders. Thus, the existence of dry counties and blue laws; of states where liquor is only retailed in government-run stores, as in New Hampshire; and of states like Arkansas where you can buy booze in drive-through liquor marts. More significantly, state and local regulation also extends to the wholesale distribution of liquor, creating a further barrier to the kind of vertical monopolies that dominated the United States before Prohibition and are now wreaking havoc in Britain...Since the repeal of Prohibition, such constraints on vertical integration in the liquor business have also been backed by federal law, which, as it’s interpreted by most states, requires that the alcohol industry be organized according to the so-called three-tier system. The idea is that brewers and distillers, the first tier, have to distribute their product through independent wholesalers, the second tier. And wholesalers, in turn, have to sell only to retailers, the third tier, and not directly to the public. By deliberately hindering economies of scale and protecting middlemen in the booze business, America’s system of regulation was designed to be willfully inefficient, thereby making the cost of producing, distributing, and retailing alcohol higher than it would otherwise be and checking the political power of the industry.
MORE
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Never knew glassing was/is busting a bottle across someone’s face in a bar. Seen it in the movies somewhere though.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Truly amazing consolidation of the alcohol industry, for greed and profit.
Unfortunately, there could be more alcoholism and its harmful effects on loved ones.
snot
(10,524 posts)However, while I'm all in favor of anti-monopoly laws and enforcement, I'm not otherwise keen on regulating consumption by maintaining unnecessary inefficiencies. I'd prefer to see prices kept up by taxation proportionate to the damage caused by the product.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)At this point almost everyone has heard of Nate Silver, the New York Times polling analyst who had all the pundits looking stupid on election night. Silver managed to call every state exactly right. He ignored the gibberish about momentum or voters’ moods and simply focused on the data given by the various polls taken in the final weeks of the campaign....While Silver’s work has likely permanently transformed election coverage, it is interesting to think about a similar analysis being applied elsewhere, for example the debate over the budget. Suppose that we had someone focused on actual data involved in the budget debate instead of the silly rhetoric coming from the Republicans and Democrats. The first thing that a Nate Silver would likely point out in discussing the budget is that the large deficits of the last few years cannot be attributed either to either extravagant social spending or the Bush tax cuts. The reality that neither Republicans nor Democrats like to acknowledge is that deficits were relatively modest until the economy collapsed in 2008. The data here is straightforward and not debatable. The Congressional Budget Office reports (Table 1-1) that the deficit in fiscal year 2007, the last full year before the downturn was 1.2 percent of GDP. We can run deficits of 1.2 percent of GDP forever. At this level, the debt-to-GDP ratio was falling. Furthermore, the deficit was projected to remain in this neighborhood until 2012 when the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was expected to bring the government to a small surplus.
The reason that we got deficits of close to 10 percent of GDP in 2009 and 2010 and continuing large deficits through the present is that the economy collapsed. This led to a plunge in tax collections and increased spending on programs such as unemployment insurance and food stamps. There were no large unfunded increases in social spending since 2007 nor where there big permanent tax cuts. While we did have both spending and tax cuts as part of stimulus packages, these were explicitly temporary efforts to boost the economy. Had the economy not collapsed, there would have been no reason for this policy. In short, a Nate Silver of the budget debates might force people on both sides to acknowledge that the large short-term budget deficits are simply the result of the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble.
There are still those scary stories of exploding debt and deficits that the Peter Peterson types like to flaunt. Someone focused on evidence and data would point out that the projections of exploding budget deficits are driven almost entirely by projections of exploding health care costs. If age-adjusted health care costs did not radically outstrip the growth in GDP, then the projections for debt and deficits 10, 20, or 30 years out would not look nearly so scary. Furthermore, a Nate Silver type might point out that the CBO projections for exploding health care costs are somewhat dubious. As a recent Federal Reserve Board study points out, the CBO projections imply that non-health care consumption will be declining if private sector health care costs rise at the same pace as public sector costs. Alternatively, the CBO projections would imply sharp divergence between per person costs in the public sector and costs in the private sector, something that we have not previously seen. The CBO projections also imply an ever-growing disparity between the per-person cost of health care in the United States and the cost in other countries, a gap that might prove difficult to sustain given the ability of people to travel across national borders.
In addition to the implausibility of these projections going forward, a Nate Silver type would likely point to the past high-side bias in CBO health care cost projections. In 1995, CBO projected that Medicare spending would be equal to 4.0 percent of GDP, while Medicaid spending would be 2.0 percent of GDP (Table 2-14). The actual numbers for 2005 were 2.7 percent and 1.5 percent. This means that CBO’s projections overstated actual health care spending on these programs in 2005 by more than 25 percent. Given this track record, a Nate Silver in the budget analysis business would treat the CBO projections for health care cost growth the same way that Nate Silver treated the polling results showing a Romney lead from Gallup. While the sequence of Gallup polls through time may provide information about trends among voters, to use the polls to make a projection about the election it was necessary to adjust for the underlying bias. A comparable adjustment to the CBO numbers would largely destroy the basis for the long-term deficit horror story that occupies center stage in Washington today. Unfortunately there is no one like Nate Silver in the budget debates who can force the participants to look at logic and evidence. For the foreseeable future the budget debate will be dominated by the Karl Roves of both political parties. This is too bad, because the Karl Roves in the budget debate don’t just want to mislead us about Governor Romney’s election prospects; they want to take away our Social Security and Medicare.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Following his re-election, US President Barack Obama almost immediately turned his attention to reining in America’s rising national debt. In fact, almost all Western countries are implementing policies aimed at reducing – or at least arresting the growth of – the volume of public debt.
In their widely cited paper “Growth in a Time of Debt,” Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart argue that, when government debt exceeds 90% of GDP, countries suffer slower economic growth. Many Western countries’ national debt is now dangerously near, and in some cases above, this critical threshold. Indeed, according to the OECD, by the end of this year, America’s national debt/GDP ratio will climb to 108.6%. Public debt in the eurozone stands at 99.1% of GDP, led by France, where the ratio is expected to reach 105.5%, and the United Kingdom, where it will reach 104.2%. Even well disciplined Germany is expected to close in on the 90% threshold, at 88.5%.
Countries can reduce their national debt by narrowing the budget deficit or achieving a primary surplus (the fiscal balance minus interest payments on outstanding debt). This can be accomplished through tax increases, government-spending cuts, faster economic growth, or some combination of these components. When the economy is growing, automatic stabilizers work their magic. As more people work and earn more money, tax liabilities rise and eligibility for government benefits like unemployment insurance falls. With higher revenues and lower payouts, the budget deficit diminishes. But in times of slow economic growth, policymakers’ options are grim. Increasing taxes is not only unpopular; it can be counter-productive, given already-high taxation in many countries. Public support for spending cuts is also difficult to win. As a result, many Western policymakers are seeking alternative solutions – many of which can be classified as financial repression.
Financial repression occurs when governments take measures to channel to themselves funds that, in a deregulated market, would go elsewhere. For example, many governments have implemented regulations for banks and insurance companies that increase the amount of government debt that they own.
MORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I’m trying to remain optimistic that the President and congressional Democrats will hold their ground over the next month as we approach the so-called “fiscal cliff." But leading those negotiations for the White House is outgoing Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner, whom Monday’s Wall Street Journal described as a “pragmatic deal maker” because of “his long relationship with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, for whom balancing the budget was a priority over other Democratic touchstones.” Geithner is indeed a protege of Bob Rubin, for whom he worked when Rubin was Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration. Rubin then helped arranged for Geithner to become president of the New York Fed, and then pushed for him to become Obama’s Treasury Secretary. Both Rubin and Geithner are hardworking and decent. But both see the world through the eyes of Wall Street rather than Main Street.
I battled Rubin for years in the Clinton administration because of his hawkishness on the budget deficit and his narrow Wall Street view of the world. During his tenure as Treasury Secretary, Geithner has followed in Rubin’s path — engineering a no-strings Wall Street bailout that didn’t require the Street to help stranded homeowners, didn’t demand the Street agree to a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act, and didn’t seek to cap the size of the biggest bank, which in the wake of the bailout have become much bigger...In an interview with the Journal, Geithner repeats the President’s stated principle that tax rates must rise on the wealthy, but doesn’t rule out changes to Social Security or Medicare. And he notes that in the president’s budget (drawn up before the election), spending on non-defense discretionary items — mostly programs for the poor, and investments in education and infrastructure — are “very low as a share of the economy relative to Clinton.”
If “pragmatic deal maker,” as the Journal describes Geithner, means someone who believes any deal with Republicans is better than no deal, and deficit reduction is more important than job creation, we could be in for a difficult December.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)What’s the best way to pressure Republicans into agreeing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the middle class while ending them for the wealthy? The President evidently believes it’s to scare average Americans about how much additional taxes they’ll pay if the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule at the end of the year. He plans to barnstorm around the country, sounding the alarm. The White House has even set up a new Twitter hashtag: “My2K,” referring to the extra $2,200 in taxes the average family will pay if all the Bush cuts expire. Earlier this week the Council of Economic Advisers published a report detailing the awful consequences of going over the so-called “fiscal cliff.”
But isn’t this fear-mongering likely to buttress Republican arguments that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for everyone — including the rich? Republicans will say (as they have a thousand times before) that the rich are the “job creators,” so we should tackle the budget deficit by cutting spending rather than raising anyone’s taxes. Obama’s only real bargaining leverage comes from the fact that when the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of December, America’s wealthiest will take the biggest hit. The highest marginal income tax rate will rise from 35 to 39.6 percent (for joint filers), and the capital gains rate from 15 to 20 percent. This will happen automatically if nothing is done between now and then to change course. It’s the default if Republicans won’t agree to anything else. It’s Obama’s trump card.
So rather than stoking middle-class fears about the cliff, the White House ought to be doing the opposite – reassuring most Americans they can survive the fall. To utilize his trump card effectively, Obama needs to convince Republicans that the middle class is willing to jump. And the middle class can jump fearlessly if the White House and Democrats enact legislation that reinstates the Bush tax cuts for the middle class as of January 1. The legislation would operate like a bungee cord — snapping the middle class back from the abyss of paying an extra $2,200 in taxes next year, even as the wealthy go over the cliff. This bungee-cord legislation could be introduced early next year, but there’s no reason not to introduce it sooner — even now. And challenge Republicans to vote on it as we get nearer and nearer the precipice.
This would give the President’s “My2K” campaign the focus it needs — directly pressuring Republicans to support tax cuts for the middle class and not for the wealthy. If Republicans won’t agree, they still face the cliff’s automatic tax increases on the rich. But they’re also revealed as shills for the rich — ready and willing to push the middle class over the edge in pursuit of even more wealth for their patrons.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)So the bidding has begun.
According to the Wall Street Journal (which got the information from GOP leaders), the President’s opening bid to Republicans is:
— $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenues over the next decade, from limiting tax deductions on the wealthy and raising tax rates on incomes over $250,000 (although those rates don’t have to rise as high as the top marginal rates under Bill Clinton)
— $50 billion in added economic stimulus next year
— A one-year postponement of pending spending cuts in defense and domestic programs
— $400 billion in savings over the decade from Medicare and other entitlement programs (the same number contained in the President’s 2013 budget proposal, submitted before the election).
— Authority to raise the debt limit without congressional approval.
The $50 billion in added stimulus is welcome. We need more spending in the short term in order to keep the recovery going, particularly in light of economic contractions in Europe and Japan, and slowdowns in China and India. But by signaling its willingness not to raise top rates as high as they were under Clinton and to cut some $400 billion from projected increases in Medicare and other entitlement spending, the White House has ceded important ground.
Republicans obviously want much, much more.
The administration has taken a “step backward, moving away from consensus and significantly closer to the cliff, delaying again the real, balanced solution that this crisis requires,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in a written statement. “No substantive progress has been made” added House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio). No surprise. The GOP doesn’t want to show any flexibility. Boehner and McConnell will hang tough until the end. Boehner will blame his right flank for not giving him any leeway, as he’s done before. It’s also clear Republicans will seek whatever bargaining leverage they can get from threatening to block an increase in the debt limit – which will have to rise early next year if the nation’s full faith and credit is to remain intact.
Meanwhile, the White House has started the bidding with substantial concessions on tax increases and spending cuts.
Haven’t we been here before? It’s as if the election never occurred – as if the Republicans hadn’t lost six or seven seats in the House and three in the Senate, as if Obama hadn’t won reelection by a greater number of votes than George W. Bush in 2004.
And as if the fiscal cliff that automatically terminates the Bush tax cuts weren’t just weeks away. Déjà vu all over again. But if it’s really going to be a repeat of the last round, we might still be in luck. Remember, the last round resulted in no agreement. And no agreement now may be better than a bad agreement that doesn’t raise taxes on the wealthy nearly enough while cutting far too much from safety nets most Americans depend on. If Republicans won’t budge and we head over the fiscal cliff, the Clinton tax rates become effective January 1 – thereby empowering the White House and Democrats in the next congress to get a far better deal.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)If the president continues to stand his ground against Republicans, he'll win the battle over the "fiscal cliff." THAT'S A MIGHTY BIG IF.
In response to pushback from Congress and progressive activists following a report in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that Obama had offered to be “flexible” on tax-rate hikes for the very richest, the White House formally unveiled a tough bargaining stance: $1.6 billion in tax increases over a decade, all on the top two brackets, and no tax hikes for the bottom 98 percent.
The White House proposal included only $400 billion in spending cuts over a decade, none of which cut into Social Security or Medicare—details to be filled in later. Obama also proposed a change in the law to eliminate the obstructionist ritual of requiring a congressional vote to periodically increase the debt ceiling. (The debt increase has already been obligated by previous congressional actions, so the debt-ceiling vote is entirely redundant and nothing but an opportunity for mischief.)
The Republicans, not surprisingly, dismissed the White House position out of hand.
Two things are encouraging about Obama’s stance. First, there was no backsliding on the promise to insist on restoring the pre-Bush tax cut rates on the top two brackets. Obama proposed to get about a trillion dollars from the rate hikes, and another $600 million from changes in capital gains treatment and other reforms that affect only the top brackets.
Equally significant is the refusal to whack Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid....MORE...If Obama holds the line on tax reform, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, he will have public opinion on his side and the only fiscal cliff will be the one that the Republicans jump off.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo seems to have been the first to use the phrase "austerity bomb" to describe what's scheduled to happen in the United States at the end of the year. It's a much better term than "fiscal cliff." The cliff stuff makes people imagine that it's a problem of excessive deficits when it's actually about the risk that the deficit will be too small; also and relatedly, the fiscal cliff stuff enables a bait-and-switch in which people say "So, this means that we need to enact Bowles-Simpson and raise the retirement age!" — both of which have nothing at all to do with it. And it can't be emphasized enough that everyone who shrieks about the dangers of the austerity bomb is in effect acknowledging that Keynesian economists were right all along — that slashing spending and raising taxes on ordinary workers is destructive in a depressed economy, and that we should actually be doing the opposite. Meanwhile, Europe, which has had much more austerity in aggregate than we have, is seeing grim new industrial production numbers and a worsening unemployment crisis.
By the way, some readers have asked me what is happening to Ireland, which has seen an especially sharp fall in industrial production. The answer appears, in part, to be Lipitor. That is, expiring patents on some important drugs have created a cliff for Ireland's pharmaceutical exports. I don't want to overstate the real impact on Irish citizens: The pharmaceuticals industry looms large in Irish gross domestic product but not so much in employment because it's highly capital-intensive and much of the value-added accrues to foreign multinationals...Still, not what Ireland needed.
Pursuing the theme that the United States is doing the least worst among the major economies, here's a chart that I find illuminating. In the early stages of the crisis, unemployment rose more rapidly in the United States than in Europe. This mainly reflected differences in institutions: it's much easier to fire people in the United States. From some point in 2010 onward, however, the situation in the United States gradually improved; initially some of the drop in unemployment was basically people leaving the labor force, but more recently there have been solid though modest gains in the ratio of employment to the relevant population (you have to adjust for aging).
US and Euro Zone Unemployment
Meanwhile, Europe, now formally in recession, has gotten much worse, but the truth is that it has been going downhill all along. Why the divergence? The obvious answer is that the austerity stuff broke out in 2010, and the austerians took over policy much more completely in Europe than in the United States.
Po_d Mainiac
(4,183 posts)Paying out 1:1 on AIG garbage to the banksters ain't dealing. More like a yes-man for the squid.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)(before the past catches up with us)
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)pro-forma, he-said, she-said stories on "the cliff." This economist said this. But another economist said that. Not only was the story a big snore, but it was like white noise - in the end, nothing there. Made worse by being immediately followed by a rather long featurette on some forgettable topic. They could have used the combined time to do a REAL story.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)and see what is known about Richard III historically.
My sister said, when I told her the tale, that she thought Richard III was imaginary. My reply was, "then why did they call him the Third?"
Then she asked me if there was a fourth one...
I'd like to say we came from different gene pools...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)DR. KRUGMAN, OUR ECONOMY ISN'T JUST "INSECURE". IT'S BEEN HOLLOWED OUT, AND IN THE EVENT THE BORDERS CLOSED, WE'D BE HARD-PRESSED TO MAINTAIN OURSELVES IN MANUFACTURING, RAW MATERIALS, EVEN SOME FOODS. NOT TO MENTION THAT INCOME FLOWS WOULD BE TOTALLY DISRUPTED. UNDER THOSE CIRCUMSTANCES, A SAFETY NET WOULD BE OF LITTLE USE.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13073-in-the-us-an-insecure-economy-needs-a-stronger-safety-net
...I wanted to share some thoughts provoked by a recent New York Times column by Ross Douthat, in which he makes a very good point — namely, that President Obama's winning coalition did not, for the most part, consist of forward-looking, National Public Radio-listening, culturally adventurous liberals. Instead, the big numbers came from groups "unified by economic fear," as Mr. Douthat put it.
Indeed: single women, Hispanics and African-Americans are for a stronger welfare state because such groups can require the security such a welfare state can provide. Where I would part ways with Mr. Douthat is in his suggestions that (a) rising insecurity reflects "social disintegration" and that (b) turning to the welfare state is a dead end. The truth is that while single women and members of minority groups are more insecure at any given point in time than married whites, insecurity is on the rise for everyone, driven by changes in the economy. The United States' industrial structure is probably less stable than it used to be — you can't count on today's big corporations to survive, let alone retain their dominance, over the course of a working lifetime. And the traditional accoutrements of a good job — a defined-benefit pension plan, a good health-care plan — have been going away across the board.
Every time you read an article by someone extolling the dynamism of the modern economy, the virtues of risk-taking and declaring that everyone has to expect to have multiple jobs in his or her life and that you can never stop learning, etc., bear in mind that this is a portrait of an economy with no stability, no guarantees that hard work will provide a consistent living and the constant possibility of being thrown aside simply because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And nothing people can do in their personal lives or behavior can change this. Your church and your traditional marriage won't guarantee the value of your 401(k) or make insurance affordable on the individual market. So here's the question: isn't this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn't it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for a corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?
IMO, IT'S MORE THAN PERSONAL INSECURITY. IT'S A CASE OF NATIONAL INSECURITY.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The critically acclaimed public intellectual Henry A. Giroux discusses the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, especially in the United States. For Giroux, what is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis. Only a fundamental rethinking of our political priorities can rescue us from this tragic foreclosure of hope. A close friend of the late Paolo Friere, Henry has made groundbreaking contributions to numerous fields, including education, critical theory, youth studies, media studies and public pedagogy. He currently occupies the Global TV network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
VIDEO AT LINK
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz notes:
Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes:
Krugman also says:
Krugman is right. Letting the banks go bust – instead of perpetually bailing them out – is the right way to go.
We’ve previously noted:
Bloomberg reports:
Iceland’s commitment to its program, a decision to push losses on to bondholders instead of taxpayers and the safeguarding of a welfare system that shielded the unemployed from penury helped propel the nation from collapse toward recovery, according to the Washington-based fund.
***
Iceland refused to protect creditors in its banks, which failed in 2008 after their debts bloated to 10 times the size of the economy.
The IMF’s point about bondholders is an important one: the failure to force a haircut on the bondholders is dooming the U.S. and Europe to economic doldrums.
The IMF notes:
[The] decision not to make taxpayers liable for bank losses was right, economists say.
In other words, as IMF put it:
Icenews points out:
Unlike the US and several countries in the eurozone, Iceland allowed its banking system to fail in the global economic downturn and put the burden on the industry’s creditors rather than taxpayers.
***
The rebound continues to wow officials, including International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde, who recently referred to the Icelandic recovery as “impressive”. And experts continue to reiterate that European officials should look to Iceland for lessons regarding austerity measures and similar issues.
Barry Ritholtz noted last year:
They are now much much better for it than the countries like the US and Ireland who did not.
Bloomberg pointed out February 2011:
***
“Iceland did the right thing … creditors, not the taxpayers, shouldered the losses of banks,” says Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, an economics professor at Columbia University in New York. “Ireland’s done all the wrong things, on the other hand. That’s probably the worst model.”
Ireland guaranteed all the liabilities of its banks when they ran into trouble and has been injecting capital — 46 billion euros ($64 billion) so far — to prop them up. That brought the country to the brink of ruin, forcing it to accept a rescue package from the European Union in December.
***
Countries with larger banking systems can follow Iceland’s example, says Adriaan van der Knaap, a managing director at UBS AG.
“It wouldn’t upset the financial system,” says Van der Knaap, who has advised Iceland’s bank resolution committees.
***
Arni Pall Arnason, 44, Iceland’s minister of economic affairs, says the decision to make debt holders share the pain saved the country’s future.
“If we’d guaranteed all the banks’ liabilities, we’d be in the same situation as Ireland,” says Arnason, whose Social Democratic Alliance was a junior coalition partner in the Haarde government.
***
“In the beginning, banks and other financial institutions in Europe were telling us, ‘Never again will we lend to you,’” Einarsdottir says. “Then it was 10 years, then 5. Now they say they might soon be ready to lend again.”
And Iceland’s prosecution of white collar fraud played a big part in its recovery:
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Born in 1930 in Schiller Park, Ill., the deceased was 82 years old at the time of passing, which ironically was the day before Thanksgiving...Having long enjoyed the sweet life, the end was a bit bitter, for the dearly departed's estate had been mercilessly plundered in recent years by unscrupulous money managers. This left 18,500 surviving family members in dire straits. Indeed, the family contends that the octogenarian's death was not due to natural causes, but to foul play — a case of corporate murder.
This is the drama behind the sudden death of Twinkies. Fondly remembered as "the cream puff of the proletariat" (and less fondly as a sugar-and-fat bomb that delivered a toothache in one bite and a heart attack in the next), this industrial concoction of 37 ingredients became, for better or worse, an icon of American food processing. The father of the Twinkie was James Dewar, a baker at the old Continental Baking Co. who saw the goo-filled tube cake as a way to keep the factory's confection machinery busy after strawberry shortcake season ended. Yes, the Twinkie was actually conceived as "food" for idle machines. How fitting is that? But we humans happily swallowed this extruded marvel of comestible engineering. As a teenager, I probably downed my weight in Twinkies each year — and my long years on this Earth might well be due to the heavy dose of preservatives, artificial flavors and other chemicals baked into every one of those cellophane-wrapped two-packs that I consumed...The Twinkie was the best-seller of Hostess Brands, a conglomerate purveyor of some 30 nutritionally challenged (but moneymaking) brand-name food products, ranging from Wonder Bread to Ho Hos. In the past year, Hostess racked up $2.5 billion in sales — yet it suffered a staggering $1.1 billion in losses. Thus, on Nov. 21, Ripplewood Holdings, the private equity outfit that had taken over the conglomerate in 2009, pulled the plug, solemnly announcing that Hostess simply couldn't survive.
Why? Because it was burdened with overly generous labor contracts, the firm's executives declared, adding that greedy union officials refused to save the company by taking cuts...Wait a minute. They claim that the bereaved loved ones of the Hostess family killed the Twinkie? Holy Agatha Christie, that can't be right...Remember the horrible murders in 1978 of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk? At the killer's trial, his lawyer argued for leniency on the grounds that his client subsisted on a steady diet of junk food, which had addled his brain. This claim entered the annals of American jurisprudence as the "Twinkie Defense."...Even less defensible is the campaign by Ripplewood financial manipulators to lay the death of Hostess at the feet of loyal, longtime employees who, after all, need the jobs. In fact, far from greedy, Hostess workers and their unions have been both modest and faithful. Their wages are decent but not at all excessive — only middle class. And the charge that unions would not make sacrifices to help the company is a flat-out lie, for they had previously given back $100 million in annual wages and benefits to help it survive.
The true perfidy in this drama is not in the union, but inside Ripplewood's towering castle of high finance in New York City. After buying Hostess in a bankruptcy sale, these equity hucksters proceeded to feather their own nests, rather than modernize Hostess's equipment and upgrade its products, as the unions had urged. For starters, these profiteers piled an unbearable debt load of $860 million on Hostess, thus diverting its revenues into nonproductive interest payments made to rich, absentee speculators. Also, they siphoned millions of dollars out of Hostess directly into their corporate pockets by charging "consulting and management fees" that did nothing to improve the snack-makers financial health. But it was not until this year that their rank managerial incompetence and raw ethical depravity fully surfaced. While the Ripplewood honchos in charge of Hostess were demanding a new round of deep cuts in worker's pay, health care, and pensions, they quietly jacked up their own pay. By a lot! The CEO's paycheck, for example, rocketed from $750,000 a year to $2.5 million.
Like a character in a bad Agatha Christie whodunit, Ripplewood — the one so insistently pointing the finger of blame at others — turns out to be the one who killed the Twinkie. Along with the livelihoods of 18,500 workers.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The Princes in the Tower were Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. The two brothers were the only sons of Edward IV of England and Elizabeth Woodville alive at the time of their father's death. Then 12 and 9 years old, they were lodged in the Tower of London by the man appointed to look after them, the Lord Protector, Richard, Duke of Gloucester. This was supposed to be in preparation for Edward's coronation as king.
After Richard took the throne for himself, it is assumed that they were murdered. This may have occurred sometime around 1483, but apart from their disappearance, the only evidence is circumstantial....
In May 1483 Edward arrived in London for his coronation and was accommodated in the Tower of London, then a royal residence. Richard at that point was with his mother in sanctuary, but joined his brother in the Tower in June. Both princes were declared illegitimate by an Act of Parliament of 1483 known as Titulus Regius, and their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, was crowned as King Richard III of England. There are reports of the two princes being seen playing in the Tower grounds shortly after Richard joined his brother, but there are no recorded sightings of either of them after the summer of 1483. Their fate remains an enduring mystery, but historians and contemporary popular opinion agree that the princes may have been murdered in the Tower. There is no record of a funeral.
In 1674, the skeletons of two children were discovered under the staircase leading to the chapel, during the course of renovations to the White Tower. At that time, these were believed to have been the remains of the two princes, and on the orders of Charles II the remains were reburied in Westminster Abbey. In 1933, the grave was opened to see if modern science could cast any light on the issues, and the skeletons were determined to be those of two young children, one aged around seven to eleven and the other around eleven to thirteen.
If the boys were indeed murdered, there are several major suspects for the crime. The evidence is ambiguous, and has led people to various conflicting conclusions.
Richard III had eliminated the princes from the succession. However, his hold on the monarchy was not secure, and the existence of the princes would remain a threat as long as they were alive. The boys could have been used by Richard's enemies as figureheads for rebellion. Rumours of their death were in circulation by late 1483, but Richard never attempted to prove that they were alive by having them seen in public, which strongly suggests that they were dead by then. However he did not remain silent on the matter. Raphael Holinshed, in his Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1577) reports that Richard, "what with purging and declaring his innocence concerning the murder of his nephews towards the world, and what with cost to obtain the love and favour of the communaltie (which outwardlie glosed, and openly dissembled with him) ... gave prodigally so many and so great rewards, that now both he lacked, and scarce with honesty how to borrow."[2] Richard also failed to open any investigation into the matter, which would have been in his interest if he was not responsible for the deaths of his nephews. Many modern historians, including David Starkey,[3] and Michael Hicks,[4] or writers such as Alison Weir,[5] do regard Richard himself as the most likely culprit. There never was a formal accusation against Richard III on the matter; the Bill of Attainder brought by Henry VII made no definitive mention of the Princes in the Tower, but it did include the accusation of "shedding of Infants blood", which may be an accusation of the Princes' murder (especially since no other specific accusation of harming infants has ever been made against Richard).
James Tyrrell was an English knight who fought for the House of York on many occasions. Some, notably William Shakespeare, regard him as the most likely culprit. Tyrrell was arrested by Henry VII's forces in 1501 for supporting another Yorkist claimant to the throne. Shortly before his execution, it is said that Tyrrell admitted, under torture, to having murdered the princes at the behest of Richard III; however, no written record of such an important confession has ever been found or referred to.
Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was Richard's right-hand man and sought personal advantage through the new king. Some, notably Paul Murray Kendall, regard Buckingham as the likeliest suspect: his execution, after he had rebelled against Richard in October 1483, might signify that he and the king had fallen out because Buckingham had taken it on himself for whatever reason to dispose of Richard's rival claimants; alternatively, he could have been acting on behalf of Henry Tudor (later to become King Henry VII). On the other hand, if Buckingham were guilty he could equally well have been acting on Richard's orders, with his rebellion coming after he became dissatisfied with Richard's treatment of him. As a descendant of Edward III, through John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster and Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester, Buckingham may have hoped to accede to the throne himself in due course. Buckingham's guilt depends on the princes having already been dead by October 1483, since he was executed the following month. In the 1980s, within the archives of the College of Arms in London, further documentation was discovered which states that the murder was conducted "be (by) the vise of the Duke of Buckingham".[6] Another reference, surfacing this time in the Portuguese archives, states that "...and after the passing away of king Edward in the year of 83, another one of his brothers, the Duke of Gloucester, had in his power the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, the young sons of the said king his brother, and turned them to the Duke of Buckingham, under whose custody the said Princes were starved to death." [7] However neither document states whether Buckingham acted for himself, on Richard's orders, or in collusion with the Tudor party.
Henry VII (Henry Tudor) following his accession, proceeded to find a legal excuse to execute some of the rival claimants to the throne.[8] He married the princes' eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, to reinforce his hold on the throne, but her right to inherit depended on both her brothers being already dead. Realistically, Henry's only opportunity to murder the princes would have been after his accession in 1485. This theory leaves open the question of why the princes were not seen after 1483 and why Richard did not produce them when he was suspected of their murder. Besides, Holinshed states quite unequivocally that Richard commented on the "murder of his nephews" during his (Richard's) reign (see above).
There were subsequently a number of apparent pretenders claiming to be Prince Richard, Duke of York,[9] although there seem to have been none claiming to be Edward V. It has been suggested that this is because Edward V was well known and would have been difficult to impersonate; this would be less true of his younger brother. The best-known Pretender was Perkin Warbeck. The fact that Henry VII did not provide an official public version of the fate of the Princes, despite Warbeck's activities, until the Tyrell confession, has been interpreted as meaning either that he was unaware of the true story or that publishing it would have not been in his interests.
The Croyland Chronicle, Dominic Mancini, and Philippe de Commines all state that the rumour of the princes' deaths was current in England by the end of 1483. In his summary of the events of 1483, Commines says quite categorically that Richard was responsible for the murder of the princes; Commines was present at the meeting of the Estates-General of France in January 1484. The other two sources do not suggest who was responsible. Only Mancini's account, written in 1483, is truly contemporary, the other two having been written three and seven years later, respectively. The Great Chronicle, compiled 30 years later from the contemporary London municipal records, says the rumour of the princes' death did not start circulating in London until after Easter of 1484. However, if the princes were not already dead by the end of 1483, this of course removes any possibility that Buckingham, who was executed on 2 November 1483, could have murdered them.
The possibility of Henry Tudor (later Henry VII) being the culprit has been suggested; however, Henry became king in 1485, whereas the Princes went missing in 1483.
Thomas More, a Tudor loyalist (and later Chancellor under Henry VIII), composed his History of King Richard III around the year 1513. He identified Sir James Tyrrell as the murderer, acting on Richard's orders, and told the story of Tyrrell's confession, which took place after he had been arrested for treason against Henry VII. Tyrrell was the loyal servant of Richard III who is said to have confessed to the murder of the princes in 1502. The Great Chronicle of London, written around the year 1512, also identified Tyrrell.[10] Polydore Vergil, in his Anglica Historia (circa 1513), specifies that Tyrrell was the murderer, stating that he "rode sorrowfully to London" and committed the deed with reluctance, upon Richard III's orders, and that Richard himself spread the rumours of the princes' death in the belief that it would discourage rebellion.[11]
In his history of King Richard, More said that the princes were smothered to death in their beds by two agents of Tyrell—Miles Forrest and John Dighton—and were then buried "at the stayre foote, metely depe in the grounde vnder a great heape of stones", but were later disinterred and buried in a secret place.[12] Curiously, under Henry VIII, a documented Miles Forrest was granted King's favours as found in English historical documents: After the Dissolution, the manor of Morborne, with the house and grange of Ogerston in the same parish, lately the property of the Abbey of Crowland, was granted in 1540, with all appurtenances, to Miles Forrest, bailiff of the Abbot of Peterborough at Warmington in 1535.[13] However this was 50 years after the Battle of Bosworth Field, and 52 years after the deed was allegedly done, leading to suspicion that this Miles Forrest was not the one referred to by More, as he would by then have been into his seventies or even eighties and well past retirement. In 1513, Thomas More named Miles Forrest as a murderer. In 1534, More fell out of favour with Henry VIII when More denied that the king was the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Henry had More beheaded in 1535. In the same year or in 1540 (the above history references both dates), Henry awarded the manor to Miles Forrest, the documented bailiff of the Abbot of Peterborough.
In 1674, some workmen remodelling the Tower of London dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. The bones were found in the ground close to the White Tower, consistent with More's description of the original burial place of the princes, but not consistent with More's later claim that the bodies had been subsequently removed and buried elsewhere (under the tower stairs). One anonymous report was that they were found with "pieces of rag and velvet about them", the velvet indicated that the bodies were those of aristocrats.[14] Eventually the bones were gathered up and placed in an urn, which Charles II of England ordered interred in Westminster Abbey in the wall of the Henry VII Lady Chapel. The rags and velvet were not mentioned again and, presumably were not included in the reinterrment. In 1933 the bones were taken out and examined, and then replaced in the urn. They were found to have been interred carelessly along with chicken and other animal bones. There were also 3 very rusty nails. One skeleton was larger than the other, but many of the bones were missing, including part of the smaller jawbone and all of the teeth from the larger one. Many of the bones had been broken by the original workmen. Examination of photographs from this exhumation indicated that the elder child was 11–13 years old and the younger was 7–11 years old.[15] It was not possible at that time to determine the sex of children's skeletons. No further scientific examination has since been conducted on the bones, which remain in Westminster Abbey, and DNA analysis (if DNA could be obtained), which would now determine the sex, has not been attempted.
In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth Woodville, discovering in the process what appeared to be a small adjoining vault. This vault was found to contain the coffins of two unidentified children. However, no inspection or examination was carried out and the tomb was resealed. The tomb was inscribed with the names of two of Edward IV's children: George, 1st Duke of Bedford who had died at the age of 2, and Mary of York who had died at the age of 14; both had predeceased the King.[16] During the excavation for the royal tomb house for King George III under the Wolsey tomb-house in 1810-1813 two lead coffins clearly labelled as George Plantagenet and Mary Plantagenet were discovered and moved into the adjoining vault of Edward IV's but at the time no effort was made to identify the two lead coffins already in the vault.[17]
In the late 1990s, work was being carried out near and around Edward IV's tomb in St George's Chapel, the floor area was excavated to replace an old boiler and also to add a new repository for the remains of future Deans and Canons of Windsor. A request was forwarded to the Dean and Canons of Windsor to consider a possible examination of the two vaults either by fibre-optic camera or, if possible, a reexamination of the two unidentified lead coffins in the tomb also housing the lead coffins of two of Edward IV's children that were discovered during the building of the Royal Tomb for King George III (1810–1813) and placed in the adjoining vault at that time. Royal consent would be necessary to open any royal tomb, so it was felt best to leave the medieval mystery unsolved for at least the next few generations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower
Rumours about the disappearance of the princes and their uncle’s part in it soon began to circulate on the continent, where those who were disaffected by the current regime had taken refuge. However, it was only after Richard’s own death that the accusations became more substantive and they are still popularly believed.
The few facts that are known do not, however, support the traditional story, which was that they had been smothered by James Tyrell, Master of the Horse to Richard III, with the help of two men, Miles Forest and John Dighton. The bodies were then buried at the foot of a flight of stairs in the Tower. This story is well known from Shakespeare's play 'The Tragedy of King Richard the Third' and from his major source for this story, Thomas More's 'The History of King Richard III'.
The Bones from the Tower
This story is often said to have been confirmed by the discovery of the bones of two children within the foundations of a staircase in the Tower of London in 1674. In 1678 some bones, said to be the same ones, were interred in an urn in Westminster Abbey as the bones of the princes by order of Charles II. In 1933 they were exhumed and, after examination, were declared to be the bones of two children of the right age and thus assumed to be the bones of the princes. Neither sex nor century of death could be determined, however.
With the advance of knowledge and with new techniques available, the conclusions of the 1933 examination are now disputed. The categorical statements made in the report which followed the examination would not now be made by modern forensic scientists, who would stress the uncertainties in the determination of age, sex, family relationship, date of death and so on. To take just one example, modern forensic techniques show that the ages arrived at for the two skeletons are highly disputable and they may both be younger than they would be if they were the princes. Furthermore, the age gap between the two children appears to be less than the three years that separate the births of Edward and Richard, the two princes. Assigning a date to the bones could not be done at all in 1933. Using radiocarbon dating, it would now be possible to at least assign a century to them, and indeed probably come as close as a date with a margin of error of plus or minus about 15 years. This would at least enable us to know whether we were talking about late medieval bones or Roman bones, for example. It is likely that in the future even more accurate dates will be possible.
Another major deficiency in 1933 was the lack of a reliable method for establishing a family relationship between the two bodies. In the report a relationship was largely assumed, and unreliable techniques then applied to prove it. No attempt was made to determine their sex. With such young children this is difficult, but new techniques being developed will soon make it possible. More reliable methods have been developed since 1933, particularly DNA testing. With this powerful new technique it is possible to determine whether the children were male or female, to show if a relationship existed between them and whether they were both descended from the same person. The drawback in this particular case is that for this test to work a comparison between the mitochondrial DNA in the bones and that in a person descended in an unbroken female line from Elizabeth Woodville, the mother of the princes, must be made. This is because only mitochondrial DNA descends unchanged, through the female line, through the generations. No such descent from Queen Elizabeth Woodville is currently known. An alternative would be to disinter her body and, to check their paternity, that of Edward IV their father.
It is therefore apparent that a further examination of these bones could tell us much more than could be determined in 1933. However, in a few years it may be possible to find out even more and it is not desirable to disinter bodies just to satisfy our curiosity now. The Society will, however, welcome a re-examination as and when the authorities are prepared to give permission. We have to be content to wait for that and when scientific advances will have made the results much more meaningful.
http://www.richardiii.net/r3_controv_princes.htm
THE PLOT THICKENS! READ THESE SPECULATIVE ARTICLES:
http://www.r3.org/bookcase/misc/wigram01.html
http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/the-princes-in-the-tower/
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Just in time for Christmas, a retiring Minnesota grocery store owner is giving his roughly 400 employees quite a gift — ownership of his three stores.
Instead of accepting any of the multiple offers he received from large national chains to purchase his stores, Joe Lueken, 70, will transfer ownership of his two Lueken’s Village Foods in Bemidji, Minn., and another one in Wahpeton, N.D., to his employees as part of an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). The transfer of ownership from the Lueken family to the employees will begin on Jan. 1, and will not cost the employees any money.
The amount of shares each employee receives will be based on length of service and salary. The program is expected to pay the Lueken family off for the sale in three to five years, according to a report by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
“My employees are largely responsible for any success I've had, and they deserve to get some of the benefits of that," Lueken told the Star Tribune. "You can't always take. You also have to give back." MORE
THEY DON'T MAKE 'EM LIKE THAT ANYMORE
Demeter
(85,373 posts)When the people of Greece saw their democratically elected Prime Minister George Papandreou forced out of office in November of 2011 and replaced by an unelected Conservative technocrat, Lucas Papademos, most were unaware of the bigger picture of what was happening all around them.
Similarly, most of us in the United States were equally as ignorant when, in 2008, despite the switchboards at the US Capitol collapsing under the volume of phone calls from constituents urging a “no” vote, our elected representatives voted “yes” at the behest of Bush's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen and jammed through the biggest bailout of Wall Street in our nation’s history.
But now, as the Bank of England, a key player in the ongoing Eurozone crisis, announces that former investment banker Mark Carney will be its new chief, we can’t afford to ignore what’s happening around the world.
Steadily – and stealthily – Goldman Sachs is carrying out a global coup d’etat.
MORE AT LINK
THIS IS AN ELOQUENT CALL TO ARMS!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The first-of-its-kind assessment of the domestic workforce finds that the people who substantially help drive the US economy are themselves overworked, underpaid, sometimes abused and often in dire economic straits...Anna has not had a single day off from work in 15 months. She works for a family of four in Midtown Manhattan, waking up at 6 a.m. with the children she cares for every day. She teaches the children to read, prepares family meals and does the laundry and the house cleaning. Anna takes her rest on a small mattress at 10 p.m. after cleaning the kitchen and putting the children to bed. Anna's employer originally offered her $1500 a month to work as a live-in nanny and housekeeper, but she now only receives $620, making her average hourly wage a meager $1.38.
...By freeing the time for employers to pursue their more lucrative careers, domestic workers provide a crucial building block of the American economy, but because work agreements are often informal and few regulations and personnel standards exist for those who work in their employers' homes, many domestic workers struggle with low wages, tough working conditions and even abuse...Low pay is common in the field, and 23 percent of the workers surveyed are paid below the minimum wage in their state. Nearly half of those surveyed are not paid enough to adequately support a family, the survey found. Ten percent reported being paid less than they originally agreed on or not at all in the past year, and 23 percent reported being paid late, an obvious source of stress for working families who need to pay the bills.
"Domestic workers do not enjoy full coverage under US employment law, nor do they receive the workplace protections that most Americans take for granted," said Professor Nik Theodore of the University of Illinois at Chicago and a co-author of the report. "As a result, they endure profound economic hardships."
... organizing domestic workers to fight for even the most basic rights presents unique challenges. Many of the people she works with are immigrants; some are undocumented, and the isolated nature of their work makes it difficult to build solidarity. But once workers start talking about their experiences and working conditions, Jakubek said, the abuse they face becomes obvious to them and they want to do something about it. Coalitions of groups like the NDWA and Domestic Workers United (DWU) are organizing workers across the country to push for legislative reforms that will recognize domestic workers like the rest of the workforce. In 2010, they won a victory when New York City adopted a bill of rights for domestic workers, but Jakubek said the local policy only covers basic concerns.
HA! IT'S NO BETTER WORKING FOR THE STATE...$8/HR, NO BENEFITS, AND A FIGHT OVER UNIONIZATION...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
...This shows the decline in ‘real money’ volumes. Again, we presume real money means the investments of real people (individuals or managed funds) into productive businesses with the hope of generating a decent return.
It also shows the rise of HFT trading, which means ‘high frequency trading’. This is computer-driven, ‘algorithm’ trading. It didn’t even exist in 2005. But now it completely dominates the market and is a major part of the reason why the confidence of the ‘average investor’ continues to deteriorate...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)
The number of American households receiving food stamps jumped nearly 10% in 2011. Nearly 15 million households were on food stamps at some point last year, up from 13.6 million in 2010, newly released Census data shows. That's an increase to 13%, up from 11.9% in 2010.
Some 47 states and the nation's capital experienced an increase in their residents receiving nutrition assistance, with the District of Columbia, Alabama and Hawaii seeing the largest jump. No state experienced a statistically significant decrease.
Oregon had the highest share of households receiving food stamps at 18.9%. Wyoming had the lowest at 5.9%.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)DOES THIS MEAN THE BANKS ARE FORCING GREECE OUT?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/citigroup-sees-90-chance-that-greece-leaves-euro.html
Citigroup Inc. (C) said there’s now a 90 percent chance that Greece will leave the euro in the next 12 to 18 months, with prolonged economic weakness and spillover for the currency bloc.
In an analyst note, Citigroup updated its forecast for a Greek exit from the 17-nation currency union from a previous estimate of 50 percent to 75 percent, and said it would most likely happen in the next two to three quarters. Specifically, the bank assumes a Greece exit would occur on Jan. 1, 2013, while saying that is not a forecast of a precise date...
Ghost Dog
(16,881 posts)(.pdf) https://ir.citi.com/qO2AlUKNPa7MR81FIXSTHPCU5gbeAqPbmEFTGdKPDm3rSrpWUMzoiQ%3D%3D
It says in summary:
financial and fiscal imbalances in the EA. For now, political leaders in the EA
maintain that Greece is special and that sovereign debt restructuring is neither
necessary nor desirable in other EA periphery countries. We expect that a desire to
limit official exposure to EA periphery sovereigns and/or demands for debt relief
from those same periphery countries will change this assessment over time and
expect some form of debt restructuring for at least five EA sovereigns (Greece,
Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain; and in Cyprus and Slovenia unless substantial
bank debt restructuring takes place) by 2017. In 2013, we expect that the
unsustainability of Portugal’s sovereign debt will become increasingly clear (even
though action on it may be delayed). We expect Italy and Spain to enter sovereign
bail-out programmes in 2013, and that debt restructuring will only be considered
and implemented there and in Ireland in later years. In Greece, debt restructuring is
unavoidable whether Greece exits the euro area (our base case, with a 60%
probability in the next 12-18 months) or not.9 Banking sector deleveraging
throughout the EA — both core and periphery — will occur through consolidation
and recapitalisation, but also through resolution, debt restructuring and liquidation.
Incremental fiscal tightening, structural reforms, tight financial conditions and a
continued ‘uncertainty overhang’ will continue to weigh strongly on domestic
demand and keep the EA in recession until 2014e, although with improving
competitiveness, external demand may provide some relief. Sovereign yield
spreads vs Bunds and bank funding stress indicators are likely to remain high in
many EA countries in coming years and are only expected to come down gradually.
We do not, however, expect the euro area to break up in 2013 or the following years
(other than Grexit), nor do we expect the disorderly default of an EA sovereign
(except possibly in the case of Greece). The risk that either or both of these adverse
scenarios materialise remains, however, non-negligible...
This is referred to by the Telegrapsh's Evans-Pritchard thus:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100021573/citigroup-sentences-to-europe-to-faster-ecomic-death/
... "We expect very different recovery paths, reflecting differing policy choices in managing the deleveraging process, plus underlying differences in terms of the supply-side and energy availability. US real GDP per head probably will rise about 9-10% above the 2007 level by 2017 – clearly outperforming Japan’s "lost decade" (real GDP per head rose by 5% from 1992-02).
"By contrast, in the euro area, we expect continued recession in 2013 and 2014 and prolonged weakness thereafter — with ongoing financial strains and, over the next few years, Grexit (Greek exit) plus a series of sovereign debt restructurings. In the euro area and UK, real GDP per head will probably remain 3-4% below the 2007 level even in 2017 — markedly underperforming versus Japan’s "lost decade".
"The European economies still have underlying potential to grow: but we expect that private sector deleveraging, weak banking system, early fiscal austerity and financial strains resulting from flawed EMU structures will continue to cap demand for an extended period."
Italy will slide slowly into the abyss, with further contraction in 2013 (-1.2) and again in 2014 (-1.5), and near zero growth from then on. Spain is not much better. Portugal will contract 4.6pc next year. They will all need debt restructuring. France is dead until 2016.
So there you have it, the "flawed EMU structures" have doomed Europe to a generation of depression. The euro itself has become a force of economic destruction...
Self-fulfilling, I guess they hope. The war on the Eurozone continues apace...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)who set up the Eurozone to fail.
The Eurozone just wasn't an "organic" organization, growing out of natural developments.
It was a politico/social experiment, designed by idiots who never considered the downside of a business cycle, let alone a credit cycle and who refuse to see the need for "tweaking" the experiment, let alone redesigning it to take in new data, and who imposed it from above on a populace who were misled by the propaganda, which was designed for the 1% anyway...
The propaganda said the 1%ers could all go on merrily bribing, conniving amongst themselves, and tax cheating, without having to change currencies all the time and show passports. That the sheeple wouldn't mind, really, as their lives shrank into poverty. That this would prevent WAR--as if Germany were on the march at a moment's notice.
Well, this time the war is economic, Germany's been on the march for a decade, and the fighting is going to be civil war, ala French Revolution, across the Continent.
Because what cannot continue, will not continue.
And then, there's Goldman Sachs, the Fifth Column, fomenting further chaos, theft and disruption.
Another fine mess, as Ollie would say....
Demeter
(85,373 posts)HOW COMFORTING!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/human-robot-kill/
The Pentagon wants to make perfectly clear that every time one of its flying robots releases its lethal payload, it’s the result of a decision made by an accountable human being in a lawful chain of command. Human rights groups and nervous citizens fear that technological advances in autonomy will slowly lead to the day when robots make that critical decision for themselves. But according to a new policy directive issued by a top Pentagon official, there shall be no SkyNet, thank you very much.
Here’s what happened while you were preparing for Thanksgiving: Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter signed, on November 21, a series of instructions to “minimize the probability and consequences of failures” in autonomous or semi-autonomous armed robots “that could lead to unintended engagements,” starting at the design stage (.pdf, thanks to Cryptome.org). Translated from the bureaucrat, the Pentagon wants to make sure that there isn’t a circumstance when one of the military’s many Predators, Reapers, drone-like missiles or other deadly robots effectively automatizes the decision to harm a human being.
The hardware and software controlling a deadly robot needs to come equipped with “safeties, anti-tamper mechanisms, and information assurance.” The design has got to have proper “human-machine interfaces and controls.” And, above all, it has to operate “consistent with commander and operator intentions and, if unable to do so, terminate engagements or seek additional human operator input before continuing the engagement.” If not, the Pentagon isn’t going to buy it or use it.
It’s reasonable to worry that advancements in robot autonomy are going to slowly push flesh-and-blood troops out of the role of deciding who to kill. To be sure, military autonomous systems aren’t nearly there yet. No Predator, for instance, can fire its Hellfire missile without a human directing it. But the military is wading its toe into murkier ethical and operational waters: The Navy’s experimental X-47B prototype will soon be able to land on an aircraft carrier with the barest of human directions. (The video below is of the X-47B being loaded on a ship.) That’s still a long way from deciding on its own to release its weapons. But this is how a very deadly slope can slip...
NOW, ABOUT THAT BRIDGE FOR SALE...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The US Navy has executed the first launch of a stealth drone set to be the first robot aircraft piloted by artificial intelligence. The “killer robot” might be the next step in the development of machines with the power to decide who lives or dies.
Landing on a flight deck just might be the most difficult thing a naval pilot can do. But if the United States Navy has its way, it might be an operation no pilot ever has to complete again. After five-years in the making, the X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) demonstrator completed its first land-based catapult launch, “marking the start for a new era of naval aviation,” the navy announced on Thursday. With a wingspan of 62-feet (18.9m), the subsonic drone will be the first tailless aircraft ever to land on a carrier.
"The X-47B shore-based catapult launch we witnessed here today will leave a mark in history," the navy quotes Vice Adm. David Dunaway, NAVAIR commander, as saying.
"We are working toward the future integration of unmanned aircraft on the carrier deck, something we didn't envision 60 years ago when the steam catapult was first built here," he continued.
Engineers had originally planned 50 test flights from the X-47B, but after performing beyond expectations, they stopped after 16 trials. Following the dozen-plus successful trials, the next step came on Monday, when the drone was hoisted on to the flight deck of aircraft carrier USS Harry S Truman. After a series of upcoming sea trials planned for 2013, the X-47B is set to become the world’s first unmanned aircraft piloted by artificial intelligence rather than a remote human operator. The subsonic stealth drone, first dreamed up by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and later taken over by the navy, has been given a robot brain, putting it miles above the thousands of other unmanned drones currently circling the skies. While automation has long been a feature of robots, the X-47B will truly be autonomous.
People will still have a say in the X-47B’s overall mission, though the drone will be able to make split-second decisions in a real-time environment all on its own. So while a living and breathing operator might select its flight path, a medley of GPS equipment, accelerometers, altimeters, gyroscopes, collision avoidance sensors and its highly-evolved Control Display Unit will leave the X-47B’s moment-to-moment decisions out of human hands. For those reminded of SkyNet’s self-aware Hunter Killer aerials from the Terminator films, the Pentagon announced earlier this month announced that the decision to hurt or kill a human being would never be made by a machine.
PHOTOS, VIDEO AT LINK
bread_and_roses
(6,335 posts)Slightly OT, since it's MacBeth, not R_III ... oh, well 
The Bard is an endless source, applicable across an entire tapestry of threads...and I say this as one too immature to much enjoy reading the plays, though I love the well-known quotes ...
http://www.alternet.org/world/petraeus-was-disaster-enough-glorifying-failed-military-generals?page=0%2C0
Tom Dispatch [1] / By William Astore [2]
comments_image
Petraeus Was a Disaster: Enough with Glorifying Failed Military Generals
November 30, 2012
In our particular drama, generals may well be the actors who strut and fret their hour upon the stage, but their directors are the national security complex and associated politicians, their producers the military-industrial complex’s corporate handlers, and their agents a war-junky media [10]. And we, the audience in the cheap seats, must take some responsibility as well. ..
America’s military is astonishingly top heavy, with 945 generals and admirals on active duty as of March 2012 ...
Of Proconsuls, Imperators, and the End of Democracy
In Roman times, a proconsul was a military ruler of imperial territories, a man with privileges as sweeping as his powers. Today’s four-star generals and admirals -- there are 38 of them -- often have equivalent powers, and the perks [29]to go with them. Executive jets on call. Large retinues. Personal servants. Private chefs...
Disturbing as their personal behavior may be, the real problem is that America’s four-star proconsuls are far more powerful than our civilian ambassadors and foreign service members. Whether in Afghanistan, Africa, or Washington, the military controls the lion’s share of the money and resources. That, in turn, means its proconsuls [33] end up dictating foreign policy based on a timeless golden rule: “he who has the gold makes the rules.”
... Put simply, Americans need to stop genuflecting to our paper Caesars before we actually produce a real one, a man ruthless enough to cross the Rubicon (or the Potomac) and parlay total military adulation into the five stars of absolute political authority.
Inequality, Oligarchy everywhere ...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)You don't get the nickname Betrayus as a compliment from your loyal troops...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It's a busy weekend...with the holidays adding to the workload. I'll be back later this evening, to see what you all post.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Dallas and Pittsburgh are two of only three U.S. cities that have staged a full economic recovery from the 2007-09 recession and experiencing growth, according to a report.
Citing a study by The Brookings Institution, Reuters said the Washington-based research group’s finding is the result of an analysis of employment levels and gross domestic product per capita in 300 largest metropolitan economies across the world. Knoxville, Tenn., was the third U.S. city.
"It was still better than last year when the U.S. had no metro recoveries," Brookings Associate Fellow Emilia Istrate was quoted as saying....
STOP THE IRONY! YOU'RE KILLING ME!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)In my line of work, it doesn't pay to dress up.
That's why the party last night was so surreal. I wore a skirt and sweater, pearls, dressy boots, and makeup...and I got to drink wine, since I didn't have to drive!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)personally -- i Live for a moment like that.
i'm so glad you got to have some fun, miss demeter.
i know you don't always get to have 'fun' on your calendar.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)I had them in a double loop, and they started choking me...
xchrom
(108,903 posts)China's official November manufacturing PMI just came out.
The good news is that the measure climbed to 50.6 from 50.2 a month ago
However, it was a tad below economists' expectation of 50.8.
Any reading above 50 signals growth.
November 2012 October 2012
Output 52.0 51.4
New Orders 50.5 49.6
New Export Orders 49.4 48.2
Backlogs of Work 45.2 45.1
Inventories of Finished Goods 48.3 48.1
Purchases Quantity 50.8 49.9
Imports 48.2 47.7
Input Prices 51.8 50.5
Inventories of Raw Materials 47.4 46.5
Employment 48.9 49.1
Supplier Delivery Times 49.8 49.9
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/november-official-china-manufacturing-pmi-2012-11#ixzz2Dnzo1xTR
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Economic growth slowed in India in the third quarter, while in Canada and Brazil it dropped surprisingly sharply.
Meanwhile in the eurozone, unemployment hit a new high of 11.7% in October, as German retail sales fell unexpectedly and French consumer spending dropped.
And in the US, citizens saw their incomes stagnate in October, while spending fell slightly, in large part due to disruption from Storm Sandy.
US personal incomes rose less than 0.1% from a month earlier, according to the Commerce Department, while spending fell 0.2%.
DemReadingDU
(16,000 posts)Note that Durham is already listed above...
6/22/12 Timothy S. Durham, 49, former CEO of Fair Financial Company, convicted of one count conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud, 10 counts of wire fraud, and one count of securities fraud.
11/30/12 Judge sentences Tim Durham to 50 years in prison for defrauding investors
Deceit. Greed. Arrogance.
Those were the three words a federal judge said best describe Indianapolis businessman Tim Durham and his scheme to defraud about 5,000 investors in Ohio-based Fair Finance out of more than $200 million.
Then she sentenced him to 50 years in prison, which essentially is a life sentence for Durham, 50.
“Mr. Durham, you were raised better than that,” U.S. District Court Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson said during Durham’s sentencing hearing Friday. “You’re educated. You’re specially trained in the law. All of that was jettisoned because you wanted a lifestyle that, quite frankly, I don’t know how you kept track of.”
A federal jury convicted Durham of 12 felony fraud counts in June. His associates, James F. Cochran, 57, and Rick D. Snow, 49, also were convicted of some of those charges.
more...
http://www.indystar.com/viewart/20121130/NEWS02/121130008/Judge-sentences-Tim-Durham-50-years-prison-defrauding-investors
When is the government going after the banksters and send them to jail too!
Hotler
(11,421 posts)The president said on Sixty Minutes that Wall St. did nothing illegal. Nothing to see here folks. Please move along.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)if all goes well.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Moody's has cut the triple-A rating of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) euro rescue fund by one notch and given it a negative outlook.
It follows a downgrade earlier this month of key ESM-backer France.
Moody's also cut rating of the mechanism's predecessor, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF)
Managing director of the ESM and EFSF chief executive, Klaus Regling, described the ratings agency's decision "difficult to comprehend".
Demeter
(85,373 posts)xchrom
(108,903 posts)MADRID (AP) -- Spain's famed chef Ferran Adria says the contents of the wine cellar of his former restaurant, elBulli, is to be auctioned off to raise funds for his new project.
ElBulli served its last supper and closed in July last year with Adria and business partner Juli Soler planning to establish "an experimental center looking at the process of innovation and creativity."
Adria told The Associated Press on Saturday that the sale is to raise funds for the foundation. Sotheby's auction house says more than 8,800 bottles from elBulli's cellar would be auctioned next year with a view to raising an estimated $1.6 million.
El Bulli maintained an almost unattainable Michelin three-star status for over a decade and was rated the world's best restaurant five times by British magazine The Restaurant.
xchrom
(108,903 posts)BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's chancellor says she understands the frustration felt by many Germans over the repeated bailout programs for Greece.
But Angela Merkel also insists that helping debt-ridden Greece is in her country's self-interest because it helps stabilize the 17-nation eurozone on which Germany's prosperity depends.
In an interview released Saturday, Merkel told Sunday tabloid Bild am Sonntag: "I obviously feel many citizens' skepticism, and partly understand it, because Greece has often disappointed its partners in the past."
The chancellor stressed in the interview that the new Greek government shows the necessary resolve "to change the country, to create modern structures."
xchrom
(108,903 posts)A little-discussed but crucial factor in the debate over wealth transfers from Europe's more economically sound north to its troubled south is the relationship between public debt, GDP and private wealth (households' financial and non-financial assets, minus their financial liabilities) – in particular, the ratio of private wealth to GDP in the eurozone countries.
While the European Central Bank's bond-purchasing scheme has calmed financial markets to a considerable extent, some European economies – including Italy, Spain, Greece, and Portugal – are still at risk, because they are not growing fast enough to narrow their deficits and stem the growth of their national debts. The grim irony here is that the ratio of private wealth to GDP in some of the countries in need of support from the ECB and northern eurozone members is equal to or higher than that in more solvent countries.
Consider Italy, which has the highest ratio of private wealth to public debt of any G7 country, and is 30% to 40% higher than in Germany. Likewise, Italy and France share a private wealth/GDP ratio of five to one, while Spain's – at least before the crisis hit the country in full – was six-to-one. By contrast, the ratio in Germany, Europe's largest creditor, is only 3.5 to one.
This discrepancy is at the heart of the question with which European policymakers are now grappling: should taxpayers in debtor countries expect "solidarity" – or, more bluntly, money – from taxpayers in creditor countries? Why should taxpayers in creditor countries have to take responsibility for financing the euro crisis, especially given that high private wealth/GDP ratios may result from low tax revenues over time, while lower ratios may reflect higher tax revenues?
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)I'm waiting for that 58F they promised us....probably in vain. It will rain, first.
Haven't had fogs like this in decades, and that was in Massachusetts in the 70's, while I was learning to drive. Talk about a crash course!
Demeter
(85,373 posts)It's not beginning to look a lot like Christmas, at all, at all.
Egalitarian Thug
(12,448 posts)Or So Bad, So Sad, Sucks to be You USD.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/2012112895215981884.html
We all know the new names of the new generation - from Xi Jinping, now General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) before he's anointed President next year, to Vice-Premier Li Keqiang. Yet what's in a name? Not much, because now China is all about structural attack; how to tweak the model of breakneck economic growth coupled with political stagnation - while at the same time battling corruption.
Xi has already warned the Politburo, "If corruption becomes increasingly serious, it will inevitably doom the party and the state". Well, it is already so serious that Xi himself is losing his sleep with the very real possibility of an Arab Spring in Mandarin, even though fast developing China is not exactly an economic underdeveloped Egypt. Yet autocracy and corruption remain very much in the picture.
Chinese culture is all about numbers. The Top 3 sources of sleepless nights for the majority of Chinese are inflation, corruption and inequality. So, essentially, it's the economy, stupid. But as the economy hits a rockier path, the masses inevitably start asking questions about all things dysfunctional inbuilt in single party rule. Thus, in the end, this surge of corruption as an "existential threat" to the system...
Let's take a geopolitical diversion. Last week, a re-elected President Obama parachuted into a summit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to sell a US-concocted Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal, a NAFTA-style free trade mechanism excluding China.
Well, what really happened is that on November 20, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand - that's no less than half the world's population - announced they would start a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, excluding - you guessed it - the US itself. Game, set, match Beijing.
It's not hard to see why. One number is enough: 2008.
Up to 2008, turbo-capitalist globalisation - centred on the US - was the name of the game. In The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (Verso, London and New York, 2012), Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin amply demonstrate the strategic importance of US capital in areas such as information technology...
After the greatest economic crisis since (and including) the Great Depression, the US number one competitive advantage - its unbounded innovation drive - went downhill, as venture capital for high-tech manufacturing simply disappeared. Asia wants and needs from the US high-tech, high-value-added manufactured products. What it does not need is a superpower borrowing like there's no tomorrow to finance a multi-trillionaire government debt.
Meanwhile, in parallel, we had trade between China and the rest of Asia overtaking trade between Asia and the US. Another way of framing it is that, in economic terms, Obama's "pivoting to Asia" is already DOA...
China is exporting 50 per cent more to the rest of Asia - no less than three times more than it exports to the US. Chinese exports to the US are not moving up. Ten years ago, China imported five times as much from Asia as it did from the US. Now it imports 10 times as much from Asia, compared to the US.
Currency follows trade (and to think that Mitt Romney wanted to launch a currency/trade war against China on Day One of his - failed - presidency). Virtually, every Asian currency is trading more closely with the yuan than with the US dollar. Everyone travelling to East Asia will notice that the yuan is already the de facto reference currency. This is an inevitable outcome of increasing regional trade integration...
China will end up growing 8 per cent in 2012 - certainly 1.3 per cent less than in 2011, but still above the previously predicted 7 per cent. That's due to a boom in domestic consumption and a lot of investment in infrastructure; at the same time, there are no signs of mass unemployment or deflation. This may be a sign that the CCP is doing the basics right - before the much-vaunted internal fight against corruption. According to the Institute of Economic Research, by 2013 China will be growing again at an astonishing 9.3 per cent.
Washington think-tanks of the exceptionalist school should start considering a stark fact; it is getting increasingly more complex and more expensive for the US to maintain its hegemony. All over Asia, the US dollar is in relative decline. And historically this decline does mirror the decline of the British pound - as well as Britain's imperial power - from 1918 to the mid-1960s.
Obviously, the decline of the US dollar happens in parallel to the rise of the yuan. The yuan will become fully convertible even before the usually brandished deadline of 2020. This means that within the next five years, most if not all of East Asia will be part of the yuan bloc. Inevitably, China will be the top trading partner of every nation in East Asia.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)
The person behind this is reported to be one who just last year got out of federal prison (three years for running a diploma mill with her husband). There are extra challenges when you are a convicted felon, so I don't judge what she has to do for a living, especially at $5 a pop.
And more especially in a world where the moral outlook is if the buyer will sign, the deal must be a good one. (Like selling crack, or perpetrating fraud with mortgage-backed securities).
(I wonder if there's a market for that?)
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Welcome to another edition of Charts that Speak for Themselves. This one shows that we live in a country in which the 97 percent of the population without education beyond a master's degree experienced declining income over the past decade. A master's degree! Enough said?
wages by education
(Matthew Slaughter/Dartmouth College)
All right, I have one thing to say. Remember this next time you hear about how union members or public employees or middle class taxpayers or pretty much any person who's not already at the top of the income and wealth ladders just needs to sacrifice to set everything straight in our economy.
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)"If you trace the links back to teh WSJ:
http://blogs.wsj.com/...
You'll see they cited the BLS as the source:
http://www.census.gov/...
Look at table A6:
1. The numbers are actually median numbers. Not average. Also the data is wages for full time workers. So people who are unemployed are not factored in there."
Here.
Good things to know. A new book is out called Plutocrats, and in just reading a little it talks about the ivy league colleges and their over-representation among the rich. Wall Street has MBA's like dust mites, lots of $20 million a year folk around there. So I wonder about the distribution of degrees, whether STEM really means as much here as it does in and to developing countries?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)The purpose of this work is to strip away the layers of damage done to the reputation of King Richard III. This monarch, unjustly maligned, initially by Tudor historians and in perpetuity by the plays of William Shakespeare, deserves a more honored place in history. To clarify the true history of King Richard III and his era, each ‘crime’ attributed to him by Shakespeare’s play was scrutinized and then held up against the verifiable facts, or in some cases, lack thereof. The crimes were examined in two ways - as Shakespeare intended them to be perceived and then, using primary, contemporary and modern revisionist sources for the historical details, how events were really played out.
It is also the intent of this work to cause the reader of Shakespeare to question the history behind the drama. What was Shakespeare’s motive in making Richard a hunch-back with a shriveled arm? What did Richard have to gain in murdering his nephews? Had he really been plotting for the throne his entire life? To accept the play as history is to ignore the true timeline of events and the reality of human nature...
Introduction
William Shakespeare’s play Richard III, written sometime between 1591 and 1593, can indisputably be called his masterpiece. In it, he has created a character of evil incarnate in the form of Richard III. Richard’s line, ‘I am determined to prove a villain’ foreshadows Shakespeare’s intent for the whole play.1 If asked of an average person to describe King Richard III, most would probably come up with a picture straight out of Shakespeare. Paul Murray Kendall wrote, ‘While the Tudor chroniclers made up the minds of subsequent historians about Richard III, Shakespeare has made up the imagination of everybody else.’2
The list of ‘crimes’ attributed to Richard III by William Shakespeare is long. In the play, he satisfies his all-consuming ambition by:
[lil] Killing William, Lord Hastings
[lil] Not content with all this, Shakespeare also has Richard poisoning his wife in order to marry his niece.
Physically, we are presented with a Richard, ‘Deform’d, unfinish’d…’, a twisted hunchback with a shriveled arm, reflecting a profoundly evil character. But what are the historical facts behind all this? Before we delve into each ‘crime’ and sift fact from fiction, it is necessary to examine the circumstances, timeframe and sources from which the play was written...First and foremost, we must remember that Shakespeare was a playwright, not a historian. To him, the drama of the piece would have been of infinitely greater importance than a meticulous attention to historical truth. The daunting task of molding one of history’s most turbulent periods, the Wars of the Roses, into a coherent series would have created its own problems and he often took liberties such as combining two or three different events into one. Often times, one scene would contain incidents that had occurred months or even years apart. There are many instances of anachronisms and errors found not only in The Tragedy of King Richard III, but also in other Shakespearean plays. To just name a few, Richard appears in Henry VI, part two, during the first Battle of St. Albans, which took place in 1455. Shakespeare has Richard killing the Duke of Somerset, when in actuality Richard was only three years old. In part three of Henry VI, Richard is seen participating in the Battles of Mortimer’s Cross and Towton. In fact, Richard was eight years old and living in Burgundy. This telescoping of events and characters has done much to warp the true chain of events and, while it may serve to make the play flow better, has left us with having to separate the truth from dramatic license.
When attempting to ferret out the truth, it is always important to keep in mind the sources William Shakespeare used for writing his play. Shakespeare would have turned to the sources available to him at that time – among them Vergil and, most importantly, Sir Thomas More.
Upon the writings of these early vilifiers of Richard, Shakespeare would build his foundation for his play...
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Tansy_Gold
(17,857 posts)That Sir Thomas More, who had oh so many political reasons for defaming Richard, would eventually take the Church's side against Henry VIII and ultimately lose his head for it. More's personal history has many connections to both the Yorks and the Tudors.
By the time More was writing his History of King Richard III, printing had made the dissemination of written works much more easy, and that in turn spurred the increased literacy of the general population. (Printers and booksellers needed a literate population to whom to sell their works.) And by the time Shakespeare was writing, producing, and publishing his plays a century and more after Bosworth, there were few who could, even if they dared, speak up to defend Richard.
More also wrote Utopia and so is called by some to be one of the first "modern" science fiction/fantasy writers. And in 1935 he was canonized by the Catholic Church as a martyr in the schism that would become the Protestant Reformation.
The ultra conservative christian Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, MI is named for More.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Thomas More Law Center of Ann Arbor, MI is one of those crosses we have to bear around here, thanks to Dominoes Pizza Monaghan, an orphan raised by nuns...who has mercifully moved out to Florida, for the most part.
They truly are an embarrassment--trying to use the Constitution to impose theocracy.
Tansy_Gold
(17,857 posts)I never trust people who either can't make up their minds about major issues or compartmentalize their conflicting beliefs to such a point that they no longer see the contradictions.
kickysnana
(3,908 posts)BOEHNER: What is this difference where the money comes from? We put $800 billion worth of revenue, what he is asking for, out of eliminating the top two tax rates. But, here’s the problem, Chris, when you go and increase tax rates, you make it more difficult for our economy to go, after that income, the small business income, it is going to get taxed at a higher rate and as a result we’ll see slower economic growth, we can’t cut or grow our way out of the problem, we have to have a balanced approach and the President wants to slow or economy at a time when he says he wants the economy to grow and create jobs.
======
Yeah, cut out the middleman. Let the Middle Class believe our BS and pay our taxes directly. We like that better.
Demeter
(85,373 posts)Please feel free to continue this thread in my absence.
See you all on SMW Monday!
xchrom
(108,903 posts)Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Demeter
(85,373 posts)Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)I'm confused. Maybe I need to leave for a while and have some beer!
AnneD
(15,774 posts)Last edited Sun Dec 2, 2012, 03:08 PM - Edit history (1)
It was truly worth the time. I especially like the part where they say he wasn't such a bad monarch. I guess we can thank Will for sucking up to Liz for some of the historical perception..
Edited to add...I posted this before I had a chance to read Demeter and Tansy's excellent summary. And yes, in England they do keep track of historical things. I and reminded of the time we visited a professor friend of our in Lewis. He knew I loved history so he went to great lengths to show me the 'old' stuff. A new wall incorporated parts of an old stone wall around the castle wall. He went to great lengths to tell me all about the battle.
But my favorite part of the tour came when he ask me if I wanted to see an 800 yo beam of English Oak that once formed the beam of a long house. I said that I would and we trugded off to what I thought would be another historical grounds. We walked up to this very typical English house and the professor knocked on the door. A man opened the door in his stocking feet. The professor asked if we could see the beam. The gentleman was not put out at all and proudly showed up the beam in his ceiling and even offered us some tea. I asked if he got that often. He said he got it occasionally, but the people that tracked it down were always most interesting. We chatted for a while and thanked his for his time. I love small English towns.
I also visited the house that Henry sent his wife of the Holbein portrait fame ( Catherine of Cleeves I think). He was kind to her and she was smart enough to take his offer. From all I have read, she seems to have been very intelligent and politically astute.
Fresh Air had an interview with an author that had finished the second of her third book on the rise of Cromwell. It dealt with the execution of Anne Bolyn. It seems like a good read. I will post the details when I get it.