Weekend Economists' Christmas 2012

[Demeter]

Wishing you all bright stars, warmth, comfort and joy....

It started snowing around 3 PM, the first serious snow of the winter, here in Ann Arbor. And in that peaceful falling snow, Christmas seemed finally possible.



It's been a hard, horrible year for many of us, but in the comfort and support of our patient friends, always willing to listen and affirm every whining whimper, we find the strength to persevere, to try and try and try again. Until we prevail.

Susan B. Anthony gave us the ultimate gift: "Failure is impossible."

And in that, she gave the REASON for democracy, for all time. Susan B. never got to vote. But she was right.

Fight on, people! And if you can, fight dirty. Martyrdom is too chancy.

[Demeter]

1. NYSE sale to ICE and the death of stocks: Derivatives rise to control the marketplace

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nyse-sale-to-ice-and-the-death-of-stocks-2012-12-20

To long-time market professionals, Thursday’s announced sale of NYSE Euronext, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, to an upstart derivatives exchange based in Atlanta isn’t the shocker it is for the general public. Since decimalization and new market regulations effectively squeezed the margins — and the potential for graft — out of the system during the last decade, the business of running a stock-trading marketplace became a sideline to the only profit center left: listings.

With the initial-public-offering market moribund, that left exchanges such as the NYSE and the Nasdaq searching the globe for a merger partner. It was a buy-your-way-to-growth strategy that seemed certain to run afoul of antitrust regulators and did with the scuttled Deutsche Bourse merger...Meanwhile, the real growth business in the markets was happening at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange CME and Chicago Board Options Exchange CBOE. While there was speculation those futures and options exchanges would be natural buyers of the stock exchanges, the executives always offered a blunt, but true, reply when asked about potential tie ups: Why would we need them?

There was an exception. The newcomer to the derivatives party, the IntercontinentalExchange ICE needed something to vault it into the conversation — even though it not only had profits, but market share and a valuation to rival any exchange in the world.

For all of its lackluster financial cosmetics, the NYSE is still the Big Board. It is the venue where the great corporations of the world are listed. The announced deal will have some opportunities for technology sharing and other efficiencies, but mostly its an $8.2 billion deal for a brand.

[Demeter]

2. 11 shocking, true facts about Simpson-Bowles by Ezra Klein

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/04/11-shocking-true-facts-about-simpson-bowles/

An important fact to keep in mind in the coming days: “The Bowles plan” that Speaker John Boehner endorsed is not the same as “the Simpson-Bowles plan.” Indeed, it’s not even the plan supported by its apparent namesake, Erskine Bowles, who insists that he was simply sketching out the evident middle ground between the members of the supercommittee...The Simpson-Bowles plan — which Erskine Bowles does actually support — occupies strange territory in Washington: Almost every politician professes to admire it, almost none of them are willing to vote for it, and almost none of its supporters know what’s in it. So here, with an assist from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, are a few facts to keep in mind about the Simpson-Bowles plan. And while you’re reading this list, remember: Simpson-Bowles is a centrist proposal.

1) Simpson-Bowles ends the the Bush tax cuts for income over $250,000. And note that they do that before they reform the tax code. The expiration of the tax cuts is built into their baseline. That way, their reform of the tax code starts from a revenue level that includes the revenue from those upper-income Bush tax cuts.

2) There are a lot of tax increases in Simpson-Bowles. $2.6 trillion over 10 years, to be exact. That’s more than President Obama ever proposed. It’s way more than the Republicans have ever proposed. It’s $1.8 trillion more than in the “Bowles plan” that Boehner is proposing. Think about that: To follow the Simpson-Bowles recommendation on taxes, you’d have to take the $800 billion Boehner is proposing and then raise taxes by more than the $1.6 trillion Obama is asking for.

3) There are so many tax increases that the plan is nearly 1:1. According to CBPP’s calculations, Simpson-Bowles includes $2.9 trillion in spending cuts and $2.6 trillion in tax increases. That’s 1.1:1. If you add the $800 billion in projected interest savings to the spending side, then it’s 1.4:1.

4) Simpson-Bowles taxes capital gains and dividends as normal income. The key difference between Simpson-Bowles-style tax reform and the tax reform plans we heard about through the election is that S-B eliminates the preferential rate on capital gains and dividend income. That amounts to a huge tax increase on the rich, and it’s how S-B manages to lower rates while raising revenue and retaining progressivity.

5) Charities, homes, health care and states. Simpson-Bowles turns the deductions for charitable contribution and mortgage interest into 12 percent, non-refundable tax credits. It caps the tax exclusion for employer-provided health care and then phases it out entirely by 2038. It eliminates the exemption for state and local bonds.

6) Simpson-Bowles raises the gas tax by 15 cents. Just saying.

7) Congress has already passed 70 percent of the discretionary cuts. Under the Budget Control Act, discretionary spending will be $1.5 trillion lower from 2013 to 2022 than was projected in the Congressional Budget Office’s 2010 baseliner. That means that 70 percent of S-B’s cuts to discretionary spending are done.

8) Simpson-Bowles cuts security spending by $1.4 trillion, not including drawing down the wars. That’s far deeper than what’s in the law now, far deeper than anything the White House or the Republicans have proposed, and deeper, I believe, than the sequester cuts that so many think would devastate the military.

9) The Social Security changes. Simpson-Bowles makes three main changes to Social Security. It increases the taxable maximum on income to 90 percent of all income, which raises $238 billion over the next decade. It uses a different measure of inflation to slow cost-of-living adjustments. It raises the retirement age to 68 in 2050 and 69 in 2075.

10) Paul Ryan voted against Simpson-Bowles. And so, for the record, did Dave Camp and Jeb Hensarling, the other two House Republicans on the commission. Of the House Democrats, John Spratt voted for the proposal, and Xavier Becerra and Jan Schakowsky voted against. Among the senators, it was just the reverse: All three Republicans (Tom Coburn, Judd Gregg, and Mike Crapo) voted for it, as did two of the three Democrats (Dick Durbin and Kent Conrd). Max Baucus voted against it.

11) Simpson-Bowles went down in the House, 382-38. In March, Reps. Jim Cooper and Steve LaTourette brought a modified version of Simpson-Bowles to the floor. This incarnation of the proposal was actually quite a bit to the right of the original, including smaller tax increases and defense cuts. It failed, and failed big.

These 11 facts should shed light on a couple of Washington’s enduring mysteries.

First, it should be fairly clear why the White House figured Simpson-Bowles was a nonstarter. They thought that if they endorsed it, Republicans would oppose it en masse, and hang every unpopular tax increase and spending cut around the White House’s neck. In retrospect, I think the White House miscalculated here, but it’s easy to see why they made the decision they did. The proposal the White House ultimately released included far fewer tax increases and security spending cuts than Simpson-Bowles.

Second, as popular as Simpson-Bowles is among the CEO community, and on Wall Street, most of those folks don’t know what’s in it. Wall Street doesn’t tend to be hugely supportive of taxing capital gains as normal income, for instance.

Third, Republicans may want to associate themselves with Erskine Bowles, and they may want to attack Obama for not doing enough to support Simpson-Bowles, but they want nothing to do with Simpson-Bowles itself. After all, Boehner could have endorsed the Simpson-Bowles plan rather than the “Bowles plan,” and that would have won him huge plaudits in the media, and many more friends in the CEO and Wall Street communities, at least at first. But he didn’t, and, from his perspective, for good reason.

[Demeter]

3. The coming drone attack on America Naomi Wolf

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/21/coming-drone-attack-america

Drones on domestic surveillance duties are already deployed by police and corporations. In time, they will likely be weaponised. By 2020, it is estimated that as many as 30,000 drones will be in use in US domestic airspace...People often ask me, in terms of my argument about "ten steps" that mark the descent to a police state or closed society, at what stage we are. I am sorry to say that with the importation of what will be tens of thousands of drones, by both US military and by commercial interests, into US airspace, with a specific mandate to engage in surveillance and with the capacity for weaponization – which is due to begin in earnest at the start of the new year – it means that the police state is now officially here.

In February of this year, Congress passed the FAA Reauthorization Act, with its provision to deploy fleets of drones domestically. Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, notes that this followed a major lobbying effort, "a huge push by […] the defense sector" to promote the use of drones in American skies: 30,000 of them are expected to be in use by 2020, some as small as hummingbirds – meaning that you won't necessarily see them, tracking your meeting with your fellow-activists, with your accountant or your congressman, or filming your cruising the bars or your assignation with your lover, as its video-gathering whirs. Others will be as big as passenger planes. Business-friendly media stress their planned abundant use by corporations: police in Seattle have already deployed them. An unclassified US air force document reported by CBS news expands on this unprecedented and unconstitutional step – one that formally brings the military into the role of controlling domestic populations on US soil, which is the bright line that separates a democracy from a military oligarchy. (The US constitution allows for the deployment of National Guard units by governors, who are answerable to the people; but this system is intended, as is posse comitatus, to prevent the military from taking action aimed at US citizens domestically.)

The air force document explains that the air force will be overseeing the deployment of its own military surveillance drones within the borders of the US; that it may keep video and other data it collects with these drones for 90 days without a warrant – and will then, retroactively, determine if the material can be retained – which does away for good with the fourth amendment in these cases. While the drones are not supposed to specifically "conduct non-consensual surveillance on on specifically identified US persons", according to the document, the wording allows for domestic military surveillance of non-"specifically identified" people (that is, a group of activists or protesters) and it comes with the important caveat, also seemingly wholly unconstitutional, that it may not target individuals "unless expressly approved by the secretary of Defense". In other words, the Pentagon can now send a domestic drone to hover outside your apartment window, collecting footage of you and your family, if the secretary of Defense approves it. Or it may track you and your friends and pick up audio of your conversations, on your way, say, to protest or vote or talk to your representative, if you are not "specifically identified", a determination that is so vague as to be meaningless.

What happens to those images, that audio? "Distribution of domestic imagery" can go to various other government agencies without your consent, and that imagery can, in that case, be distributed to various government agencies; it may also include your most private moments and most personal activities. The authorized "collected information may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent". Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told CBS:

"In some records that were released by the air force recently … under their rules, they are allowed to fly drones in public areas and record information on domestic situations."

This document accompanies a major federal push for drone deployment this year in the United States, accompanied by federal policies to encourage law enforcement agencies to obtain and use them locally, as well as by federal support for their commercial deployment. That is to say: now HSBC, Chase, Halliburton etc can have their very own fleets of domestic surveillance drones. The FAA recently established a more efficient process for local police departments to get permits for their own squadrons of drones. Given the Department of Homeland Security militarization of police departments, once the circle is completed with San Francisco or New York or Chicago local cops having their own drone fleet – and with Chase, HSBC and other banks having hired local police, as I reported here last week – the meshing of military, domestic law enforcement, and commercial interests is absolute. You don't need a messy, distressing declaration of martial law.

And drone fleets owned by private corporations means that a first amendment right of assembly is now over: if Occupy is massing outside of a bank, send the drone fleet to surveil, track and harass them. If citizens rally outside the local Capitol? Same thing. As one of my readers put it, the scary thing about this new arrangement is deniability: bad things done to citizens by drones can be denied by private interests – "Oh, that must have been an LAPD drone" – and LAPD can insist that it must have been a private industry drone. For where, of course, will be the accountability from citizens buzzed or worse by these things?...We don't need a military takeover: with these capabilities on US soil and this air force white paper authorization for data collection, the military will be effectively in control of the private lives of American citizens. And these drones are not yet weaponized.

"I don't think it's crazy to worry about weaponized drones. There is a real consensus that has emerged against allowing weaponized drones domestically. The International Association of Chiefs of Police has recommended against it," warns Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the ACLU, noting that there is already political pressure in favor of weaponization:

"At the same time, it is inevitable that we will see [increased] pressure to allow weaponized drones. The way that it will unfold is probably this: somebody will want to put a relatively 'soft' nonlethal weapon on a drone for crowd control. And then things will ratchet up from there."

And the risk of that? The New America Foundation's report on drone use in Pakistan noted that the Guardian had confirmed 193 children's deaths from drone attacks in seven years. It noted that for the deaths of ten militants, 1,400 civilians with no involvement in terrorism also died. Not surprisingly, everyone in that region is traumatized: children scream when they hear drones. An NYU and Stanford Law School report notes that drones "terrorize citizens 24 hours a day".

If US drones may first be weaponized with crowd-control features, not lethal force features, but with no risk to military or to police departments or DHS, the playing field for freedom of assembly is changed forever. So is our private life, as the ACLU's Stanley explains:

"Our biggest concerns about the deployment of drones domestically is that they will be used to create pervasive surveillance networks. The danger would be that an ordinary individual once they step out of their house will be monitored by a drone everywhere they walk or drive. They may not be aware of it. They might monitored or tracked by some silent invisible drone everywhere they walk or drive."

"So what? Why should they worry?" I asked.

"Your comings and goings can be very revealing of who you are and what you are doing and reveal very intrusive things about you – what houses of worship you are going to, political meetings, particular doctors, your friends' and lovers' houses."

I mentioned the air force white paper. "Isn't the military not supposed to be spying on Americans?" I asked.

"Yes, the posse comitatus act passed in the 19th century forbids a military role in law enforcement among Americans."

What can we do if we want to oppose this? I wondered. According to Stanley, many states are passing legislation banning domestic drone use. Once again, in the fight to keep America a republic, grassroots activism is pitched in an unequal contest against a militarized federal government.

[Demeter]

4. WHY DO WE HAVE TO READ THIS BY WAY OF BRITAIN?

[Demeter]

7. Push to step up domestic use of drones Gary Martin and Viveca Novak

http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/Push-to-step-up-domestic-use-of-drones-4064482.php



SEE VIDEO ANIMATION OF DRONE IN ACTION AT LINK

[Demeter]

5. Menace to Solvency

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/menace-to-solvency/



If you thought there was one lesson from the financial crisis of the last 5 years, it would likely be that governments need to have the ability to cut themselves loose from large financial institutions, meaning that they have the power to liquidate or restructure them without incurring massive fiscal obligations. And when people look around for a model of how this process might actually work, they cite the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

It may be worth noting therefore that in the spending cuts bill (H.R. 6684) hastily assembled by US Congressional Republicans on Thursday to drum up votes for their fiscal cliff solution, the FDIC would have lost its expanded 2010 Orderly Liquidation Authority to liquidate or restructure bank holding companies, bank affiliates, or non-bank financial intermediaries (like AIG) — its power prior to then only included banks that it directly insured. It’s not like the bill proposed a better alternative — had it passed, it would have been simply a reversion to the 2008 situation, which worked out so well with Lehmans and AIG. And this was being presented as a solution to the country’s long-term economic problems.

Lesson: the fiscal cliff isn’t just about fiscal policy. There are other very damaging agendas being pursued under its cover.

[Demeter]

6. The Insourcing Boom By Charles Fishman

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-insourcing-boom/309166/?single_page=true

After years of offshore production, General Electric is moving much of its far-flung appliance-manufacturing operations back home. It is not alone. An exploration of the startling, sustainable, just-getting-started return of industry to the United States. For much of the past decade, General Electric’s storied Appliance Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, appeared less like a monument to American manufacturing prowess than a memorial to it...The very scale of the place seemed to underscore its irrelevance. Six factory buildings, each one the size of a large suburban shopping mall, line up neatly in a row. The parking lot in front of them measures a mile long and has its own traffic lights, built to control the chaos that once accompanied shift change. But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday. The vast majority of the lot’s spaces were empty; the traffic lights looked forlorn.

In 1951, when General Electric designed the industrial park, the company’s ambition was as big as the place itself; GE didn’t build an appliance factory so much as an appliance city. Five of the six factory buildings were part of the original plan, and early on Appliance Park had a dedicated power plant, its own fire department, and the first computer ever used in a factory. The facility was so large that it got its own ZIP code (40225). It was the headquarters for GE’s appliance division, as well as the place where just about all of the appliances were made...By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week, and the complex was powering the explosion of the U.S. consumer economy...The arc that followed is familiar. Employment kept rising through the ’60s, but it peaked at 23,000 in 1973, 20 years after the facility first opened. By 1984, Appliance Park had fewer employees than it did in 1955. In the midst of labor battles in the early ’90s, GE’s iconic CEO, Jack Welch, suggested that it would be shuttered by 2003. GE’s current CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, tried to sell the entire appliance business, including Appliance Park, in 2008, but as the economy nosed over, no one would take it. In 2011, the number of time-card employees—the people who make the appliances—bottomed out at 1,863. By then, Appliance Park had been in decline for twice as long as it had been rising.

Yet this year, something curious and hopeful has begun to happen, something that cannot be explained merely by the ebbing of the Great Recession, and with it the cyclical return of recently laid-off workers. On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory... On March 20, just 39 days later, Appliance Park opened a second new assembly line, this one in Building 5, to make new high-tech French-door refrigerators. The top-end model can sense the size of the container you place beneath its purified-water spigot, and shuts the spigot off automatically when the container is full. These refrigerators are the latest versions of a style that for years has been made in Mexico...Another assembly line is under construction in Building 3, to make a new stainless-steel dishwasher starting in early 2013. Building 1 is getting an assembly line to make the trendy front-loading washers and matching dryers Americans are enamored of; GE has never before made those in the United States. And Appliance Park already has new plastics-manufacturing facilities to make parts for these appliances, including simple items like the plastic-coated wire racks that go in the dishwashers.

In the midst of this revival, Immelt made a startling assertion. Writing in Harvard Business Review in March, he declared that outsourcing is “quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances.” Just four years after he tried to sell Appliance Park, believing it to be a relic of an era GE had transcended, he’s spending some $800 million to bring the place back to life. “I don’t do that because I run a charity,” he said at a public event in September. “I do that because I think we can do it here and make more money.”

MORE GOOD NEWS AT LINK

[Demeter]

9. Why one of China's richest men is squaring off against Obama in court (ANOTHER INSOURCE INCENTIVE?)

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2012/1128/Why-one-of-China-s-richest-men-is-squaring-off-against-Obama-in-court

YEAH, WHEN THE CHINESE GET UPPITY, THE AMERICAN CEO BUGS OUT...

Wu Jialiang, CEO of Ralls Corp. is challenging Obama's refusal on national security grounds to let him build a wind farm in America, marking the first such high level case in the US from a Chinese firm....One of China’s richest men squared off against President Obama in a Washington federal court Nov. 28, challenging the US leader’s refusal, on national security grounds, to let him build a wind farm in the US.

“We are suing the president because we do not accept his finding that we are a national security threat. It is not true,” says Wu Jialiang, CEO of Ralls Corp., whose deal to buy land for a wind farm in Oregon near a US Navy weapons training facility ran into a presidential veto in September.

US and Chinese lawyers say it is unlikely Ralls will win its case, but that the high profile challenge is a landmark in Chinese companies’ increasingly bold strategy of investing abroad. It could also serve as a test of Chinese allegations that US investment rules are biased against Chinese companies....Lawyers do not expect the case to go far.

“The government has a pretty good case that once the president issues an executive order, that is the end of the story,” says David Fagan, an expert on cross-border investment with Covington & Burling, a Washington law firm. “The statute is pretty clear that the president has the authority to prohibit a transaction to safeguard national security.”

AMUSING READ

[Demeter]

8. Why rich guys want to raise the retirement age by Ezra Klein

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/21/why-rich-guys-want-to-raise-the-retirement-age/

If you’re the CEO of Goldman Sachs – if you have a job that you love, a job that makes you so much money you can literally build a Scrooge McDuck room where you can swim through a pile of gold coins wearing only a topcoat – then you should perhaps think twice before saying this:

You can look at the history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. … So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed. Maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

That’s Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, talking to CBS. And he’s not saying anything that people, particularly wealthier people with desk jobs, don’t say all the time in Washington and New York. So I don’t want to just pick on him. But the cavalier endorsement of raising the retirement age by people who really love their jobs, who make so much money they barely pay Social Security taxes, and who are, actuarially speaking, are ensured a long and healthy life, drives me nuts...If you want talk about cutting Social Security, talk about cutting it. It’s a reasonable point of view. You’re allowed to hold it. But “cutting” Social Security is unpopular and people don’t like to talk about it. So folks who want to cut the program have instead settled on an elliptical argument about life expectancy. Social Security, they say, was designed at a time when Americans didn’t live quite so long. And so raising the retirement age isn’t a “cut.” It’s a restoration of the program’s original purpose. It doesn’t hurt anything or anyone.

The first point worth making here is that the country’s economy has grown 15-fold since Social Security was passed into law. One of the things the richest society the world has ever known can buy is a decent retirement for people who don’t have jobs they love and who don’t want to work forever. The second point worth making is that Social Security was overhauled in the ’80s. So the promises the program is carrying out today were made then. And, since the ’80s, the idea that we’ve all gained so many years of life simply isn’t true...Some of us have gained in life expectancy, of course. As you can see on this graph, since 1977, the life expectancy of male workers retiring at age 65 has risen six years in the top half of the income distribution. But if you’re in the bottom half of the income distribution? Then you’ve only gained 1.3 years.


Graph: The Incidental Economist

If you’re wealthy, you do have many more years to enjoy Social Security. But if you’re not, you don’t. And so making it so people who aren’t wealthy have to wait longer to use Social Security is a particularly cruel and regressive way to cut the program. It’s also a cut that’s particularly tough on people who spend their lives in jobs they don’t enjoy...You know what age most people actually begin taking Social Security? Sixty-five is what most people think. That’s the law’s standard retirement age. But that’s wrong. Most people begin taking Social Security benefits at 62, which is as early as the law allows you to take them. When they do that, it means they get smaller benefits over their lifetime. We penalize for taking it early. But they do it anyway. They do it because they don’t want to spend their whole lives at that job. Unlike many folks in finance or in the U.S. Senate or writing for the nation’s op-ed pages, they don’t want to work till they drop....


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

That’s what’s galling about this easy argument. The people who make it, the pundits and the senators and the CEOs, they’ll never feel it. They don’t want to retire at age 65, and they don’t have short life expectancies, and they’re not mainly relying on Social Security for their retirement income. They’re bravely advocating a cut they’ll never feel. But you know what they would feel? Social Security taxes don’t apply to income over $110,000. In 2011, Lloyd Blankfein’s total compensation was $16.1 million. That means he paid Social Security taxes on less than 1 percent of his compensation. If we lifted that cap, if we made all income subject to payroll taxes, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would do three times as much to solve Social Security’s shortfall as raising the retirement age to 70. In fact, it would, in one fell swoop, close Social Security’s solvency gap for the next 75 years. That may or may not be the right way to close Social Security’s shortfall, but somehow, it rarely gets mentioned by the folks who think they’re being courageous when they talk about raising a retirement age they’ll never notice....

[Demeter]

10. Obama Administration Deported Record 1.5 Million People

http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2012/12/24/167970002/obama-administration-deported-record-1-5-million-people?ft=1&f=1001

Although President Obama supports setting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, his administration deported a record 1.5 million of them in his first term. In addition, the latest data released by the government in recent days show that an unprecedented 409,849 people were deported for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The increase from the previous year occurred despite policy changes ordered by Obama to reduce the deportations of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants.

Roughly 55 percent, or more than 225,000 people, deported in the past year were convicted of crimes such as drug offenses and driving under the influence. Immigration officials note that they deported nearly twice as many convicted criminals as in the year before Obama took office. That year, in 2008, criminals made up about a third of all deportations. The administration says the figures demonstrate that the shift in enforcement to focus on criminals is working. Priority cases include convicted felons, repeat violators of immigration laws, people who have recently crossed U.S. borders illegally and those who pose a national security threat, the White House says.

Burt immigrant advocates, including Latino politicians and civil rights groups, criticized the figures as evidence that Obama's policy changes don't sufficiently protect unintended targets.

"This is nothing to be proud of," Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., said in a statement. "In the 409,849 deportations are hardened criminals for whom I have no sympathy, but we must also realize that among these ... are parents and bread-winners ... that are assets to American communities and have committed no crimes."

Some 90,000 people in this category are deported every year, Gutierrez estimates...

[Demeter]

11. Jack Klugman Of 'The Odd Couple' Dies At 90

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/24/167993556/jack-klugman-of-the-odd-couple-dies-at-90?ft=1&f=1001

Jack Klugman, the prolific, craggy-faced character actor and regular guy who was loved by millions as the messy one in TV's "The Odd Couple" and the crime-fighting coroner in "Quincy, M.E.," died Monday, a son said. He was 90.

Klugman, who lost his voice to throat cancer in the 1980s and trained himself to speak again, died with his wife at his side.

"He had a great life and he enjoyed every moment of it and he would encourage others to do the same," son Adam Klugman said.

Adam Klugman said he was spending Christmas with his brother, David, and their families. Their father had been convalescing for some time but had apparently died suddenly and they were not sure of the exact cause...

[snot]

12. Dear Demeter,

I just want to thank you for all your work here. I'm continually amazed at all you bring here, and at how much you understand about it. I've rec'd this thread to a number of people on DU and elsewhere as THE best source I know of, aggregating economic and political info –– for which you and others here deserve great credit.

I wish more availed themselves of what you provide, but I for one share what I find here with others; and I'll share with you a quote in which I take comfort:

"I used to be concerned about this mass audience thing . . . not anymore. There are overlapping circles of activity and . . . . It doesn't matter what the volume is . . . These circles are not sealed off from each other, they affect each other."

– Yvonne Rainer, in an interview by Lyn Blumenthal for "Women with a Past," Program Six from the series, What Does She Want

I want to thank everyone else here as well –– you all contribute –– but Demeter's done a lion's share for a while now, so special thanks to her.

[Demeter]

13. The 12 Days of a Capitalist Christmas By Paul Buchheit

http://www.nationofchange.org/12-days-capitalist-christmas-1356359265

On the first day of Christmas my employer gave to me a penny for every $3 the richest 130,000 Americans make. It's been a national tradition since 1980.



On the second day my doctor showed me TWO Americans needing mental health care, but only one of the two could afford treatment. The doctor informed me that the fifty states have cut $1.8 billion from their mental health budgets during the recession, and that the 2013 Republican budget proposes further cuts. "It's crazy," I protested. "Some states are allowing guns in schools and daycare centers and churches and bars and hospitals, but they're cutting mental health care?" The doctor just nodded in frustration.



On the third day The Economist told me that it costs just THREE cents in administrative expenses for every $100 raised through a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) in the United Kingdom, versus $1.42 for the personal income tax and $1.25 for the corporate income tax. With up to THREE quadrillion dollars in total U.S. financial transactions, we could replace federal income taxes with a tiny FTT.



On the fourth day a food pantry gave me FOUR dollars worth of food. That's about what food stamp recipients get each day through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To pay for rent and utilities, a family of three gets $400 per month from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which comes to about FOUR dollars a day per person.



On the fifth day a financial advisor introduced me to his FIVE richest investors, who were the only ones out of 100 Americans to increase their wealth over the past 25 years, by the impressive rate of almost 20 percent. It's like that throughout the entire country, the advisor said: only 5 percent took almost all the gains.



Five golden rings, indeed.



On the sixth day, as the traditional 12-day song started to get annoying, Santa appeared to take me by the hand to the U.S. corporate offices, where the tax lawyers gave to me SIX cents for the national treasury. "Hey," I said, "this used to be twenty-five cents. You've doubled your profits in the last ten years, but individual and payroll taxes have to pay 94 cents out of every dollar!" The lawyers just smiled. Santa shook his head in frustration.



On the seventh day a guidance counselor informed me that one out of SEVEN Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 is neither working nor in school.



On the eighth day an IRS agent gave me these matching facts: Over EIGHT percent of the GDP (8.4 percent) goes for tax expenditures (subsidies provided through the tax code, mostly to the very rich). That's almost exactly the same amount (8.4 percent of the GDP) that goes to Social Security and Medicare.



On the ninth day an unemployed dietitian told me that the average male has increased his weight by NINE percent over the past 20 years (180 to 196), and the average female by TWELVE percent (142 to 160). As a NINE dollar per hour food-service worker gave me and Santa our burgers and fries and shakes, my jolly old partner chortled, "Ho Ho Ho, soon you'll all look like me!"



On the 10th day a Forbes article confirmed that the TEN richest Americans made more than our entire national housing budget in just one year. That's over $50 billion. The twenty richest Americans made more than our entire education budget. Santa assured me that the transfer of wealth from society's needs to a few individuals was not the norm around the world.



On the eleventh day a creditor gave me a bill for ELEVEN trillion dollars of debt incurred by the American consumer, including mortgages, student loans and credit card liabilities.



And on the twelfth day Santa gave me an IOU for TWELVE trillion dollars, the U.S. share of up to $32 trillion held overseas, untaxed. "One problem," cautioned Santa, "my reindeer haven't been able to find any of it yet."



After all this I stood perplexed. "What does it all mean?" I asked Santa.



"Well, that's capitalism," I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight. "It's all about the individual getting all he can, because that will benefit everyone. And let me tell you," he added with a twinkle, "those benefits are just as real as I am!"



And with that he was gone.

[Demeter]

14. It's the thought that counts

[Demeter]

15. Dig Finds Evidence Of Pre-Jesus Bethlehem by Sheera Frenkel

Thousands of Christian pilgrims streamed into Bethlehem Monday night to celebrate the birth of Jesus. It's the major event of the year in that West Bank town. But Israeli archeologists now say there is strong evidence that Christ was born in a different Bethlehem, a small village in the Galilee.

About 100 miles north of where the pilgrims gathered, shepherds still guide their flocks through green unspoiled hills, and few give notice to the tucked-away village with the odd sounding name: Bethlehem of the Galilee. Archeologists who have excavated there say there is ample evidence that this Bethlehem is the Bethlehem of Christ's birth. "I think the genuine site of the nativity is here rather then in the other Bethlehem near Jerusalem," says Aviram Oshri, an archeologist with the Israel Antiquities Authority which has excavated here extensively. He stands on the side of a road that now cuts through the entrance to the village. It was the construction of this road that led to the discovery of the first evidence that Bethlehem of the Galilee may have had a special place in history. "It was inhabited by Jews. I know it was Jews because we found here remnants of an industry of stone vessels, and it was used only by Jews and only in the period of Jesus," he says. Oshri also found artifacts which showed that a few centuries later the community had become Christians and had built a large and ornate church. He says there is significant evidence that in early Christianity this Bethlehem was celebrated as the birthplace of Christ. The emperor Justinian boasted of building a fortification wall around the village to protect it. The ruins of that wall, says Oshri, still circle parts of the Galilee village today. He thinks many early scholars would have concluded that this Bethlehem was the birthplace of Christ.

"It makes much more sense that Mary road on a donkey while she was at the end of the pregnancy from Nazareth to Bethlehem of Galilee which is only 7km rather then the other Bethlehem which is 150km," Oshri says. YA THINK?

He adds there is evidence the other Bethlehem in the West Bank or what Israelis call Judea, was not even inhabited in the first century...MORE

AND OF COURSE, ANOTHER SCHISM RESULTS....

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/25/168010065/dig-finds-evidence-of-pre-jesus-bethlehem?ft=1&f=1001

[kickysnana]

17. Smithsonian Mag: The Little-Known Legend of Jesus in Japan

A mountain hamlet in northern Japan claims Jesus Christ was buried there

On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai. The rest of the world knows him as Jesus Christ.

It turns out that Jesus of Nazareth—the Messiah, worker of miracles and spiritual figurehead for one of the world’s foremost religions—did not die on the cross at Calvary, as widely reported. According to amusing local folklore, that was his kid brother, Isukiri, whose severed ear was interred in an adjacent burial mound in Japan.

n Shingo, the Greatest Story Ever Told is retold like this: Jesus first came to Japan at the age of 21 to study theology. This was during his so-called “lost years,” a 12-year gap unaccounted for in the New Testament. He landed at the west coast port of Amanohashidate, a spit of land that juts across Miyazu Bay, and became a disciple of a great master near Mount Fuji, learning the Japanese language and Eastern culture. At 33, he returned to Judea—by way of Morocco!—to talk up what a museum brochure calls the “sacred land” he had just visited.

Having run afoul of the Roman authorities, Jesus was arrested and condemned to crucifixion for heresy. But he cheated the executioners by trading places with the unsung, if not unremembered, Isukiri. To escape persecution, Jesus fled back to the promised land of Japan with two keepsakes: one of his sibling’s ears and a lock of the Virgin Mary’s hair. He trekked across the frozen wilderness of Siberia to Alaska, a journey of four years, 6,000 miles and innumerable privations. This alternative Second Coming ended after he sailed to Hachinohe, an ox-cart ride from Shingo.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Little-Known-Legend-of-Jesus-in-Japan-183833821.html#ixzz2G5b3pnQn
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

[Demeter]

19. Why not?

Rather like the Legends of Robin Hood....

[Fuddnik]

16. Santa showed up on his sled!

I went riding around like this, this morning. All kinds of waves, and honking.





And, Dear Ole Pappy is down for the holidays. Too warm for that sweatshirt though, but it was a present from Mrs. Clause.

[Demeter]

18. Quite a family resemblance there, Fuddnik! Merry Merry!

Last edited Tue Dec 25, 2012, 10:11 PM - Edit history (1)

and a Happy Happy!

[Demeter]

20. As Great Lakes levels plummet, Michigan town tries to save its harbor

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2012/11/as_great_lakes_levels_plummet.html

For more than a century, easy access to Lake Michigan has made Onekama a popular place for summer visitors and a refuge for boaters fleeing dangerous storms. Now the community itself needs a rescue, from slumping lake levels that threaten its precious link to open water.

The Great Lakes, the world’s biggest freshwater system, are shrinking because of drought and rising temperatures, a trend that accelerated with this year’s almost snowless winter and scorching summer. Water levels have fallen to near-record lows on Lakes Michigan and Huron, while Erie, Ontario and Superior are below their historical averages. The decline is causing heavy economic losses, with cargo freighters forced to lighten their loads, marinas too shallow for pleasure boats and weeds sprouting on exposed bottomlands, chasing away swimmers and sunbathers.

Some of the greatest suffering is in small tourist towns that lack the economic diversity of bigger port cities. Yet they are last in line for federal money to deepen channels and repair infrastructure to support the boating traffic that keeps them afloat....The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that about 30 small Great Lakes harbors will need attention in the next couple of years. In bygone days, friendly members of Congress would slip money into the federal budget to dredge a harbor. But so-called earmarks have fallen out of favor, leaving business and civic leaders wondering where to turn. A desperate few are raising money locally for dredging but insist they can’t afford it on a regular basis....What makes the situation particularly frustrating for small Great Lakes communities is that a fund for dredging and other harbor maintenance already exists. It’s generated by a tax on freight shipped at U.S. ports and raises about $1.5 billion a year. But about half of the money is diverted to the treasury for other uses. Members of Congress from coastal states are pushing to change that policy.

...the falling water levels are taking a toll, illustrating how extensively the health of the Great Lakes affects the economy of a region that is home to more than 30 million people extending from Minnesota to New York...Lake Michigan’s level at the end of October was more than 2 feet below its long-term average. The Corps of Engineers says without heavy snowfall this winter, the lake may decline to its lowest point since record-keeping began in 1918...Onekama’s year-round population is less than 2,000. Much of its tax base comes from expensive waterfront homes owned by summer residents who come for the boating and fishing. Without the link to Lake Michigan, property values would plummet, hammering local government budgets, Meister said. “You’re talking about schools, 911 emergency, library, fire protection — everything,” he said.

SOUNDS LIKE AN OPPORTUNITY FOR A PERSON LIKE ME....BUY CHEAP, WAIT FOR THE RAIN, OR JUST ENJOY...