Oh the Oppression! Oh the Tyranny! Oh the doG-awful Whining With No Reason!

I was looking through various "news" web sites this morning when I came across this article from Tiger Beat On the Potomac (h/t Mr Pierce). The headline alone made me shake my head, "Wall Street gets misty as Bloomberg departs" then it just got worse as I read the "article":

Michael Bloomberg isn’t leaving office until January but Wall Street is already beginning to miss the New York City mayor — and bracing for a possible backlash from his replacement.

In his 12 years leading the city, Bloomberg has been a vocal champion of New York’s business and banking communities. When the knives have come out, he has time and again come to the defense of the financial services industry without batting an eye at the political reality that advocating for Wall Street is a highly unpopular move for public officials.

Awwww. Da poor widdle babies have their fee-fees hurt by those big bad people, led by a politician who thinks they might do a bit more to pay for services:

Many in New York’s business and financial elite, stung by the abrupt ascent of Bill de Blasio, an unapologetic tax-the-rich liberal, are fixated on a single question: What are we going to do?

The idea that someone like DiBlasio might replace Bloomberg as NYC Mayor seems to set alarums blaring among the power elite and rich in New York.

Give. Me. A. Fucking. Break.

A couple of years or so ago, I wrote a diary after reading some whines from JP Morgan/Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. Now we have more of the rich 1% from Wall St whining about how their taxes might go up and how dare he! From Raw Story:

New York City, like much of the nation, is living with a vast divide between rich and poor. In appearances leading up to Tuesday’s primary election, Brooklyn-based Democrat di Blasio decried these inequalities, saying, “We are not, by our nature, an elitist city. We are not a city for the chosen few,” statements that have set off alarm bells among the city’s top tier of business leaders and the well-to-do.

Oh those oppressed Titans of Wall St and Masters of the Universe! They are so oppressed, just like the Fundamentalist Christians and straight white men, they never get things their way. Why, they just might have to go on Food Stamps after they pay their taxes in a DiBlasio administration:

When it comes to average per capita wealth, New York City has been eclipsed by a handful of other locales, but the city that never sleeps still holds sway in the public imagination as the capital of capital, the center of the financial industry, and a place where a $235,000 salary still only counts as middle class. But, as a couple of recent articles show, New York isn't just a center of American wealth: it's also a center of American wealth inequality, a place where the divide between the very rich and the very poor is sometimes only a matter of a few hundred feet ... as the crow flies.

I'm sure you'll pardon me if I shed no tears for these members of the Clueless Class.

And because I can:

"I have a Dream..."

Fifty years ago today, August 28, 1963, I was an eleven year old boy. I do not recall if we had started back to school on this date but may well have. As it was, I was no more than a week or so maximum away from being a sixth grader.

I do not have any memories of Dr King's speech (pdf) or the March on Washington. I was vaguely aware of the actions of Bull Connor in Birmingham, AL but the church bombing in Birmingham that killed the four little girls was still a couple of weeks away and we were still a year away from Freedom Summer. Little of this would have penetrated or did penetrate my consciousness in small town Kentucky.

And then.

And then.

Fast forward to the fall of 1970 and my freshman year at Western Kentucky University. At the time, Western had a required, one credit hour course, "Freshman Orientation," that met for one hour a week for the entire first semester of the freshman year. I do not remember the name of the professor who taught my class of about forty freshmen. I could probably find his name on my transcripts if I knew where they were but it is not important. What is important is that one day, a month or so into the semester, he walked into the classroom, turned on the tape recorder sitting on the desk in the front and walked out. It was a tape of Dr. King's speech and played entirely. Afterwards, the professor returned to the room and we spent the rest of the hour discussing the speech from the distance of seven tumultuous years.

Has Dr. King's dream been fulfilled, fifty years later? Not hardly. And it is not just his desire for racial justice that is still lacking (as Mr Pierce points out, this has not been achieved no matter the ravings of people such as those at The National Review.) And contrary to the desires of one Jonah Goldberg, Dr King's message was very much about economic justice as well as racial justice and equality. Dr. King was assassinated as he was in Memphis to support the striking Memphis Sanitation workers. Dr. King, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was the organizer of the Poor People's Campaign. From the Poor People's Campaign history:

The Poor People's Campaign did not focus on just poor black people but addressed all poor people. Martin Luther King jr. labeled the Poor People's Campaign the "second phase," of the civil rights struggle - setting goals such as gathering activists to lobby Congress for an "Economic Bill of Rights," Dr. King also saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor " - appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."


Under the "economic bill of rights" the Poor People's Campaign asked for the federal government to prioritize helping the poor with an antipoverty package that included housing and a guaranteed annual income for all Americans.

My bold

Yesterday's New York Times had an opinion piece from Joseph Stiglitz where Stiglitz describes how Dr King's speech has impacted his life in economics:

But Dr. King realized that the struggle for social justice had to be conceived broadly: it was a battle not just against racial segregation and discrimination, but for greater economic equality and justice for all Americans. It was not for nothing that the march’s organizers, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, had called it the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

In so many respects, progress in race relations has been eroded, and even reversed, by the growing economic divides afflicting the entire country.

This is a time where the long term un and underemployed can't find jobs because they are among the long term un and underemployed. It is also a time where nearly 40% of the highest paid CEOs from the last 20 years have been Bailed Out, Booted, and Busted.

No, Dr. King's "Dream" is still just that - a dream. Racial equality, while improved, still has miles to go to be fully achieved. Economic justice is only a myth these days where the bulk of new jobs being created are low wage and companies rely on employees receiving food stamps and Medicaid rather than pay decent wages with benefits.

No, Dr King's dream is still but a dream of what can be, not even close to what is.

And because I can:

This is the "new normal"

The ADP Report on private sector jobs came out today and showed an increase of 158K jobs. David Dayen at the FDL News Desk discusses this report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that will be issued tomorrow morning (Friday, November 2):

Plug this all in and what have you got? The consensus forecast calls for an increase in 125,000 jobs. That would be an increase from last month’s increase of 114,000, but below the increases in July and August (August and September will get revised in the report). This generally matches what we’re seeing in the ancillary reports, and shouldn’t be a number that would arouse joy or sadness in either Presidential campaign. However, with the volatility of last month’s topline unemployment rate, derived from the household survey, I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw it increase from the current level of 7.8%.

Either way, it’s a preliminary report, and we probably shouldn’t put as much weight on it as we will, especially with the political implications headed into the election.

While the Weekly report of initial unemployment claims was lower than expected (economists surprised!), even this moderately good news is not all that great.

The reality for many millions of us among the long term un and underemployed is the good jobs just are not there. At the end of August, Catherine Rampell of the NY Times had an article headlined "Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds." As I noted in this post, it was very similar to an earlier post from April '11 I had written that was based on a Washington Post article. Both the Times article and the Post article were based on reports from the National Employment Law Project.

Sunday in the NY Times, Steven Greenhouse had this article on how employers in retail and hospitality industries use (and abuse) part time workers:

But in two leading industries — retailing and hospitality — the number of part-timers who would prefer to work full-time has jumped to 3.1 million, or two-and-a-half times the 2006 level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In retailing alone, nearly 30 percent of part-timers want full-time jobs, up from 10.6 percent in 2006. The agency found that in the retail and wholesale sector, which includes hundreds of thousands of small stores that rely heavily on full-time workers, about 3 in 10 employees work part-time.

...snip...

A 2011 survey of 436 employees at retailers in New York City, as diverse as luxury establishments on Fifth Avenue and dollar stores in the Bronx, found that half of the city’s retail workers were part-time and only one in 10 part-time workers had a set schedule week to week. One-fifth said they always or often had to be available for call-in shifts, according to the survey, which was overseen by researchers at City University of New York.

...snip...

Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours."

What? Could someone have actually spoken a truth here? The modern day wage slave, complete with sharecropping as the ideal.

While CNN has an article this morning attempting to paint the rosy glasses scenario on how the jobs are not all part time minimum wage, even they have to acknowledge the reality of the lower wage since 24% of the "new" jobs are in hospitality and retail:

It's true that the economy has added a lot of low-paying jobs over the last two years. Restaurants and bars, which pay a median wage of just $9 an hour, have accounted for 15% of all the jobs created in the recovery. Retailers, which pay a median $11 an hour, make up another 9%.

The Cincinnati Enquirer on Monday reported on the long term un and underemployed for Ohio:

According to the government, 780,000 Ohioans are underemployed or unemployed, a number that does not include persons working more than 35 hours. The report does not compile local underemployment numbers.

...snip...

More people are working multiple part-time jobs, a practice Pautke cites as the only means of increasing the person’s take-home pay.

And this point goes back to the job scheduling practices noted in the NY Times article above - it is rather difficult for a part time wage slave to work those two or more part time jobs if/when the employers want the "flexibility" to schedule the work shifts the day before.

This is the "new normal" for far too many workers. So somebody please explain to me where all those jobs are from the "job creators?" Businesses in multiple industries are posting record profits (here, here, here, here, here, here) yet there are still millions of people in long term un and underemployment, people wanting to work, people with skills asking only for an opportunity to earn a decent wage with fair benefits.

And because I can:

Oh Noes! Wall Street Might Not Get Their Bonuses!

So I was doing my standard web surfing this AM after I had checked the (non-existent) jobs listings when I saw this from Bloomberg with the title, "Half of Wall Street Employees Expect Bigger Bonuses":

Almost half of Wall Street employees expect their year-end bonuses to be higher this year than they were a year ago, according to an eFinancialCareers.com survey.

Of the 911 U.S. financial professionals who responded to the e-mailed survey, 48 percent anticipate a higher payout, up from 41 percent in a similar survey last year, the job-search website said today in a statement. Employees of hedge funds and other asset managers were more optimistic than those at banks and broker-dealers, according the statement. Of the respondents, 82 percent work for U.S.-based companies.

Well imagine my surprise this afternoon when I see this one from Bloomberg titled "Wall Street Bonus Pool Seen Shrinking for Second Straight Year":

Wall Street’s cash bonus pool is likely to fall for a second straight year as the financial industry grapples with market turmoil, economic weakness and new rules, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said.

Revenue and compensation trends have “edged downward” since February, when DiNapoli estimated that the 2011 pool for Wall Street declined by 13.5 percent to $19.7 billion, the comptroller said today in a report.

The New York Times presented it this way this afternoon:

It still pays to be on Wall Street.

Even as the financial industry in New York has slashed jobs by the thousands, the average worker who remains is collecting a near-record paycheck.

In a report released on Tuesday, the New York State Comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said that the average pay package of securities industry employees grew slightly last year and was up 16.6 percent over the past two years, to $362,950. Wall Street’s total compensation rose 4 percent last year to more than $60 billion.

CNBC appears to be trying to split the differences with this report titled "Wall Street Expects Bigger Bonuses But May Not Get Them" as they report on the same survey that Bloomberg covered in the first link:

Revenue is down on Wall Street but expectations for bonuses are up — at least for some workers who have seen their pay shrink since the financial crisis explosion.

A survey from eFinancial Careers shows 48 percent of workers on the Street are looking for higher bonuses than 2011. Expectations are high even as investment banking revenue is down 11 percent for the same period last year while the securities industry overall saw revenue fall 7 percent in the first half.

At the same time, some of the larger firms have been doing better as the headwinds from the European debt crisis subside and hopes grow that the industry will close the year out strongly.

Meanwhile as Wall Street whines its way along, our (not-so-favorite) Masters of the Universe, Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon are once again daring to spout their nonsense. Jon Walker at FDL Action presents this:

What I find most ironic about these CEO deficit hawks complaining about the “uncertainty” that is hurting the economy is that they are the ones responsible for helping to create said uncertainty to begin with. The deficit obsession created the uncertainty about raising the debt ceiling. Similarly, they constantly pushed for a big deficit deal resulting in the creation of the sequesters, which are seen as a big source of the fiscal uncertainty at the moment. The main “uncertainty” about government policy right now is how the government will clean up the mess created by past efforts to force a deficit deal.

But hey, MotU never have to be accountable for destroying the economy. After all, they deserve those millions dollars of bonuses right? Destroying the global economy is hard ass work so they must be compensated for it.

Meanwhile, CNN actually touches base with the real world with this article on part time jobs being the new normal in employment. Notice how much attention is paid to the ravings of Blankfein and Dimon and the Wall St WATB versus the attention paid to the rest of us in the real world?

And because I can:
Happy Birthday John. RIP

Labor Day Weekend, 2012 Economic Report

Well, here we are once again. Labor Day weekend has rolled around; the time when all the politicians extol the virtues of the working man and woman. But as I pointed out last year, once a year praise by Beltway Village Idiots Politicians and Pundits or the local equivalent of same, does not actually make someone a friend of workers.

Just last night, if you were so inclined, you may have listened to Mitt Rmoney talk about workers:

You deserved it because during these years, you worked harder than ever before. You deserved it because when it cost more to fill up your car, you cut out movie nights and put in longer hours. Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits. You did it because your family depended on you. You did it because you're an American and you don't quit. You did it because it was what you had to do.

Emptywheel does a wonderful job of parsing and eviscerating that paragraph of Rmoney's speech here:

The passage is fundamentally important to the logic of the speech–and indeed, Mitt’s entire campaign–both because it pretends Mitt understands the struggles of average people and because it suggests Obama failed to deliver on Hope and Change.

...snip...

The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples EasyTech Associate is $8.89. The average self-reported hourly wage of a Staples Sales Associate is $8.54.

Those jobs Mitt talked about as a symbol of America’s failed promise, the ones that don’t pay a living wage? That’s what Mitt’s campaign boasted about last night as his idea of an “engine of prosperity.”

And it was an engine of prosperity, for Mitt, for Stemberg. Mitt’s worth at least $250 million. Stemberg is reportedly worth $202 million. And they got that money by running an engine of prosperity that relies on workers who are Mitt’s own example of the failure of the American dream. “This just wasn’t right,” Mitt said himself. (Not to mention that some of the steel jobs Mitt destroyed probably were $22.50 an hour jobs, with benefits.)

A bit over a year and a half ago, I wrote this post, Let's Play With Some Numbers, where I put together what a single person with a full time job making minimum wage would have to deal with. And of course, few jobs paying minimum wage are actually remotely close to being 'full-time.'

Today's (Friday, August 31, 2012) NY Times had this article headlined with opening paragraph:

Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds

While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

This particular theme seemed familiar to me, then I realized I had written a post back in April 2011 on the same basic topic, only with a Washington Post article as the starting point. It turns out, the WaPo0 piece was based on a report (pdf) from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and the NYT article is based on an updated report (pdf) from NELP. David Dayen discusses today's NELP report here. Dayen also has this on Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke's speech in Jackson Hole, WY earlier today. Dayen offers this analogy:

Water works well at fighting fires.
Everything is on fire.
We may hook up the hose at some point.
Not promising anything.

As I have written before (here and here though I have touched on it in many more posts), we keep hearing how the Fed is "poised" to act; they just never seem to be willing to take the step of actually doing something. I guess pretending is acting in a way though. Dean Baker talks about the NYT piece here while also touching on Benbernank's speech and the fed.

But hey! Did you see where Honey Boo Boo got higher ratings the other night than the Republican National Convention? We. Are. So. Fecked.

And Because I can:

And the Occasional Truth Gets Spoken

Every now and then, I seem to run across news articles and/or headlines that seems to be just a bit of an understatement even as they are quite factual. Usually it seems, we get things like this one from NBC News yesterday:

New jobless claims take surprise jump

New claims for unemployment benefits took an unexpected jump in the latest week, raising more concerns about the struggling job market and providing further incentive for the Federal Reserve to jump in and help the economy.

As I have written before, it surely does seem as if the economist are ALWAYS surprised. Which still makes me wonder how they manage to keep their jobs as in most career fields, if you are always surprised by what happens, pretty soon you're looking for a new career.

A couple of days ago, I saw this piece from Alison Linn at the Today show with the headline:

Many in middle class say they are doing worse financially

The Great Recession and weak recovery have left slightly fewer Americans feeling like they are part of the middle class, and many who do still identify themselves as such say they are now worse off.

A new and comprehensive survey on how the middle class feels, released Wednesday by Pew Research Center, finds 42 percent of people who identify themselves as middle class say they are in worse shape financially than before the recession began. About 32 percent are in better shape, and the rest either don’t know or see no difference.

I am part of that 42% though in fact, I have been forced to accept that by income, I am no longer remotely close to "middle class." I am poor.

NBC News had this piece last night that is very much a companion to the Linn piece:

Stronger economy delivers smaller paystubs for most of us

With recoveries like this one, who needs recessions?

The average household income has fallen steadily for nearly everyone since the start of the economic expansion in June 2009, with average income dropping 4.8 percent in the three years since the upturn began, according to a report released Thursday.

High unemployment, outsourcing of jobs and generally slow economic growth have restrained income for households during one of the weakest and most prolonged recoveries on record, according to the report from Sentier Research.

Last summer, I wrote this post about the interconnectedness of the global economy. Today, the NY Times has this article on how China is now having to deal with surplus inventory:

GUANGZHOU, China — After three decades of torrid growth, China is encountering an unfamiliar problem with its newly struggling economy: a huge buildup of unsold goods that is cluttering shop floors, clogging car dealerships and filling factory warehouses.

The glut of everything from steel and household appliances to cars and apartments is hampering China’s efforts to emerge from a sharp economic slowdown. It has also produced a series of price wars and has led manufacturers to redouble efforts to export what they cannot sell at home.

This actually does make me wonder how long this headline from CNN will be true:

Romney: ‘Big businesses are doing fine’

It is a global economy and eventually what happens to one piece of that global economy WILL trickle down to the rest of the globe. Meanwhile we get to see pics of Prince Harry acting like a single, 27 year-old man visiting Las Vegas.

And because I can:

Economists try to explain why they were wrong on March jobs forecasts

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Once again, the economic community is scrambling to find the reasons why they were suprised by the March 2012 jobs report. The monthly report from ADP had private sector jobs at 209K increase for March 2012 which apparently led many economists to predict a similar number for the official report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that was released on Friday.

Oops. Wrong again.

We have been seeing stories such as this from today's NY Times about the "strong" jobs growth from earlier this year:

Although signs pointed to a strengthening economy earlier this year, the jobs report on Friday came with a message: don’t get ahead of yourself.

The country’s employers added a disappointing 120,000 jobs in March, about half the net gains posted in each of the preceding three months. The unemployment rate, which comes from a separate survey of households rather than employers, slipped to 8.2 percent, from 8.3 percent, as a smaller portion of the population looked for work.

120K jobs is not much more than is necessary to maintain the status quo of population growth (90K is the figure Dean Baker uses) and even 200K, while growing, does not appreciably put a dent in the long term un and underemployment rates. When there are 13M to 14M unemployed and 25M to 30M un and underemployed, 200K jobs is just not going to help all that much.

Surprisingly to me, the Benbernank may have been more realistic than many others (via Bloomberg.) Of course, the article goes on to quote Fed regional presidents as saying that the numbers, no matter how soft, probably won't cause the Fed to actually, you know, do something to ease the un and underemployment problem. No matter that a primary part of the stated Federal Reserve Mission statement is to pursue "maximum" employment.

It does appear that the consensus being reported is to blame the warm weather from January and February for the lighter number for March. Here's Dean Baker's take:

The slower job growth shown in the establishment survey in March likely reflected the fact that good weather pulled forward a lot of hiring so that workers who might typically have been hired in March instead found jobs in January and February. This is most obviously the case in construction, which showed a loss of 7,000 jobs after showing an average gain of 13,000 in the prior three months. Weather may also explain the decline of 14,200 jobs in employment services (the broader temp category) after the sector added an average of 45,600 jobs the prior three months.

The Washington Post presented this perspective this way:

Economists say the mild winter has artificially inflated job growth. February alone stole as many as 72,000 positions from March and future months, according to Macroeconomic Advisers.

Translation: The surge in hiring early in the year may not be as strong as it appeared.

The Post then goes on to "explain" things in an attempt to cushion the problem:

Typically, these bumps in demand are evened out through a process called seasonal adjustment. That allows researchers to compare one month’s economic activity with the next for a more accurate picture of the nation’s health. But this year’s weather was so abnormal that those models fell short, and economists are now scrambling to figure out how much of the growth over the past three months was simply due to a glitch in their systems.

Ah, just a "glitch in the system!" The Post ends their reporting with the rose-colored glasses firmly in place:

Typically, these bumps in demand are evened out through a process called seasonal adjustment. That allows researchers to compare one month’s economic activity with the next for a more accurate picture of the nation’s health. But this year’s weather was so abnormal that those models fell short, and economists are now scrambling to figure out how much of the growth over the past three months was simply due to a glitch in their systems.

...snip...

And despite the hand-wringing over the weather, economists seem to agree that the fundamentals of the recovery are solid. Bob Baur, global chief economist for Principal Global Investors, said he believes that the second half of the year will pick up steam as state and local governments enjoy rebounds in tax revenue and layoffs slow down.

MSNBC is showing the pretty face of the jobs picture in a similar fashion as the Post with it all just being "quirks" in the data.

The NY Times did have a report on what they termed "permabears," i.e., those economists who are skeptical of the strength of the US and global economies.

I'm on an email list from Monster.com and received one a couple of days ago on "Industry News." It included a link to an article on "Five High-Paying, Low-Stress Jobs":

1. Optometrist
2. Materials Scientist
3. Economist
4. Aeronautical Engineer
5. User Experience Designer

Since Economists seem to personify the old cliche, "Often wrong but never in doubt" it is no surprise at all that they are both highly paid and low stress. They suffer no repercussions for being wrong. Unlike the 25M to 30M long term un and underemployed who have to listen to their tap dances.

And because I can:

How does an interconnected global economy avoid a global recession?

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As I was surfing through various news sites this morning (April 2), I noticed a number of articles discussing problems with the European and US economies which lead directly to the question I have posed in the title of this post:

How does an interconnected global economy avoid a global recession?

Unfortunately, I do not know the answer but if I had to guess, it would be to say "It can't."

The first article I noticed was from tha AP via Yahoo titled, "Euro unemployment spikes to record 10.8 percent." Reuters reported it as "Euro zone unemployment reaches near 15 year high":

Unemployment in the euro zone reached its highest level in almost 15 years in February, with more than 17 million people out of work, and economists said they expected job office queues to grow even longer later this year.

Joblessness in the 17-nation currency zone rose to 10.8 percent - in line with a Reuters poll of economists - and 0.1 points worse than in January, Eurostat said on Monday.

Economists are divided over the wisdom of European governments' drive to bring down fiscal deficits so aggressively as economic troubles hit tax revenues, consumers' spending power and business confidence which collapsed late last year.

As a companion to these was this blog post from Reuters on youth unemployment across Europe:

In Spain the number of under 24-year-olds out of work is 50 percent, in Italy nearly a third of young people are without a job and in France the figure is a quarter.

However, in Germany youth unemployment is expected to sink to record lows over the coming months and is currently well below 8 percent.

...snip...

So what is Germany doing right and can Spain learn a few lessons? In an article written for the Centre for European Reform, John Springford lays the problem out clearly. In EU countries where rates of unemployment are high levels of participation in higher education and vocational studies is approximately 40 percent. In Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark and Finland, where youth unemployment is fairly low, rates are closer to 60 percent in some cases.

But it is not just high unemployment in general and among the young in particular that is problematic. Today's NY Times had this article on the swelling ranks of the working poor in Europe:

Europe’s long-running euro crisis may be cooling. But the economic distress it has left in its wake is pushing a rising tide of workers into precarious straits in France and across the European Union. Today, hundreds of thousands of people are living in campgrounds, vehicles and cheap hotel rooms. Millions more are sharing space with relatives, unable to afford the basic costs of living.

These people are the extreme edge of Europe’s working poor: a growing slice of the population that is slipping through Europe’s long-vaunted social safety net. Many, particularly the young, are trapped in low-paying or temporary jobs that are replacing permanent ones destroyed in Europe’s economic downturn.

Now, economists, European officials and social watchdog groups are warning that the situation is set to worsen. As European governments respond to the crisis by pushing for deep spending cuts to close budget gaps and greater flexibility in their work forces, “the population of working poor will explode,” said Jean-Paul Fitoussi, an economics professor at L’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris.

Meanwhile in the US, there was this post from Yahoo:

In addition, while the economy has been expanding for nearly three years and hiring is picking up, Reich notes, "we also see some major declines in terms of median wage. And that's particularly true for the bottom 90 percent."

In the past, economists argued that wage growth lagged in part because employers were spending more on benefits like health care and pensions. But that hasn't been the case in the past few years. A recently released study from the National Institute for Health Care Reform shows that in 2010, the percentage of Americans with insurance who got insurance from employers fell to 53.5 percent, down sharply from 63.6 percent in 2007. "At the top of the talent chain, employers are providing very generous health insurance, deferred compensation, and everything you can imagine," notes Reich. "But as you go down the job ladder, particularly to people who are doing routine jobs, they're getting less and less. There has been a substantial erosion of health care benefits for the bottom 90 percent.

David Dayen at FDL News points out that "Austerity doesn't work." Austerity in Europe squeezes the 90%, throws more people into unemployment and creates more working poor. The same thing in the US. In an interconnected global economy, how can we not have a global recession when seemingly the entire industrial world is being squeezed.

And because I can:

Is the Greece Crisis a Preview of Coming Attractions?

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Let me start this by stating right up front that I do not pay near enough attention to happenings around the world and the Greek debt crisis is just one of those issues that I am aware of without really knowing all the ins and outs of the situation.

Nevertheless, I saw a headline this weekend that has me in full on WTF mode. Saturday morning a NY Times headline said "Greek Premier Faces Impasse Over Demand to Cut Private Wages.":

ATHENS — Lucas Papademos faced his most difficult test as Greece’s interim prime minister on Friday when his three-month-old government reached an impasse over proposed demands by the country’s foreign lenders to reduce private-sector wages drastically in exchange for the aid the country needs to prevent default.

Now, I can understand why lenders would demand wage cuts for Public Sector employees. I can think it is incredibly stupid, short-sighted, and penalizing the wrong group of people but I can understand the logic behind it. But Euro zone leaders and banks requiring private sector wage cuts before restructuring debt for Greece just makes no sense at all.

A bit further down in the article though I do get a small hint here:

It was unclear exactly what sort of wage cuts the troika was demanding. Some news reports said the lenders were seeking changes that would reduce most private-sector salaries by as much as 25 percent; others said the group was insisting on a cut in the minimum wage that, at least directly, would affect fewer than 300,000 people.

The goal of any pay cuts would be to help make Greek workers, who are generally less productive than workers elsewhere in Europe, able to compete more effectively inside the euro zone, where countries share a common currency that does not allow devaluations to help even out differences in labor costs.

My bold. And I think that is the goal right there. Cut minimum wage. Even though (assuming this wiki is correct), the Greek minimum wage works out to roughly $11,454 per annum (compared to the US minimum wage which works to $15,080 per annum - $7.25 per hour x 40 hour week x 52 weeks).

Today, I saw this article from the Wall Street Journal (if the article does not come through completely, check Der Google for the headline "UPDATE:Greece Close To Announcing 20% Cut In Minimum Wages-Sources" to get the full article):

Pressure on Greece has been piling up from its euro-zone partners to accept a new round of painful austerity if the country is to get a EUR130 billion bailout loan that will keep the country from defaulting next month when EUR14.4 billion in bonds have to be redeemed.

Germany and France urged Greek leaders on Monday to "live up to their responsibilities" by agreeing to the new cutbacks.

...snip...

Demands for cuts to the country's public-sector payroll were also on the table. The international creditors have asked for job cuts in the police and the armed forces, and there are even proposals to lay off teachers who work on temporary contracts, as part of the targeted 150,000 civil servants whose jobs will have to be eliminated by 2015.

Reuters reported the issue this way:

In Brussels, the European Commission defended the troika's demand for a cut in the minimum wage.

Commission spokesman Amadeu Altafaj said the Greek minimum wage averaged 871 euros a month, compared with 748 euros in Spain, which is not under an EU/IMF rescue program, and 566 euros in Portugal, which has received a bailout.

So apparently, the whole point is to drive wages of Greeks to as low as the lowest other nations in the Euro. David Dayen at FDL News put it this way earlier today with the headline "Greece Asked to Destroy Itself In Exchange for Bailout":

Greek bailout talks have deadlocked again, but at the moment the culprit is not the hedge funds seeking a higher payout on the distressed debt they bought, but the “troika” of the EU, ECB and the IMF. They gave Greece a Monday deadline to accept bailout terms. And those terms, frankly, are totally insane.

The deal calls for Greece to run a primary budget surplus (not counting interest payments on debt) in 2013 of over 2% of GDP, rising to over 4% by 2014. That implies massive cuts to public spending in the middle of a 5-year recession, if not a depression. As Antonis Samaras, leader of the New Democracy Party, told the Financial Times, “They’re asking for more recession than the country can take.” Samaras also has highlighted that the troika seeks cuts in private sector wages as part of the deal, of up to 25%. There would also be a 35% cut in supplementary pensions.

If Greece fails to agree to this today, the troika will likely suspend debt payments, forcing the country into default. European leaders said explicitly that they would not fund a continuing bailout unless Greece agreed to the troika’s demands.

This is where the tin foil comes into play for me. The "Preview of Coming Attractions" is telling me that if/when the Greek minimum wage gets pushed down, it will intensify the push here in the US to lower the minimum wage. Even if it is almost impossible to make it on a minimum wage as it is, it won't stop those who push this level of gibberish.

But hey, doG forbid, any banksters get a smaller than expected bonus. Why that truly is a sign of the coming apocalypse.

And because I can:

Improvement, yes, but not that much improvement

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OK, so you might have noticed a few headlines the last few days talking about how the economy is getting better, unemployment is dropping, and we're all going to win Powerball tonight and retire tomorrow with our sparkly ponies.

Yeah, I ain't holding my breath on any of those things either.

Yes, the economy is getting a little better. Slightly. But not to a level to make an appreciable difference to the millions of long term un and underemployed. As David Dayen noted at FDL News on Friday:

The reason that the unemployment rate was able to tick down, however, is that the labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 64.0%. This low participation rate means that, even with the economy growing and the job market improving, a fair number of able-bodied workers have not rejoined the labor force. When they do, and when the labor force participation rate increases, that will put upward pressure on that topline unemployment rate. And unless everyone came into found money, that’s fated to happen. The employment-population ratio also remained unchanged in December (58.5%), despite the job additions. The average workweek and average pay went up very slightly over the month.

Even if those folks who have given up and left the workforce were to stay away and not return, it will still take years for the current problems to right themselves.

Let's pretend that we stay on the current level of seeing the official unemployment rate drop .2% each month. At the end of 2012, the unemployment rate would be at 6.1%, a number that sounds much better than it has been. But that number would still not be addressing the millions of folks working part time (probably minimum wage) jobs who want full time employment. Nor does it account for all the folks forced into being "independent contractors" or all the college grads from 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 still trying to get their first position in their fields.

Just today (Wednesday, January 11), MSNBC had this post with the headline, "Four job seekers for every opening, report shows":

Though hiring picked up in November, job openings shrank by 63,000, to 3.2 million. October’s job openings were revised down by 43,000.

With 13.3 million people unemployed in November, there were about 4.2 job seekers for every job opening, down a notch from the revised October ratio of 4.3-to-1. That is roughly triple the ratio seen before the recession hit in December 2007 but down from a peak of 6.9-to-1 in the summer of 2009.

“As the job-seekers ratio shows, what’s happening is not that millions of workers have become lazy, unskilled, or unproductive; it is that there are not enough jobs available,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute.

The Wall Street Journal had this article on Monday on how "Unemployment Scars Likely to Last for Years" (you can use der Google on that title to get the full article but here's a snippet):

The U.S. job market is showing signs of a sustained recovery. But the country's prolonged struggle with unemployment will leave scars that are likely to remain for years, if not generations.

The latest labor-market snapshot, out Friday, gave cause for continued, if tepid, optimism. U.S. employers added 200,000 jobs in December, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 8.5%, its lowest level since early 2009.

But economists gathered here for the American Economic Association's annual convention took a longer and generally dimmer view. Even if recent progress continues, the recession already has had a lasting effect on a generation of workers. Worse, the crisis has laid bare problems in the U.S. labor market that won't quickly recover when the economy eventually rebounds. And the longer that unemployment remains high, the greater the risk that it will create structural problems that will endure.

But hey! Let's make sure we don't hurt the fee-fees of the Private Equity Vulture Capitalists (NY Times via MSNBC):

The titans of private equity have long feared this moment. As Mitt Romney has established himself as the front-runner for the Republican nomination, not only has his record at Bain Capital come under intense scrutiny and withering attacks — but so has the private equity industry.

Mr. Romney’s opponents are the loudest, accusing such firms of carving up companies and cutting jobs. Newt Gingrich said over the weekend that Bain looted companies and fired employees, and Rick Perry on Tuesday called private equity firms “vultures.” An anti-Romney documentary calls him a “predatory corporate raider.”

The attacks have unnerved many buyout executives — especially those who have long used their fortunes to support the Republican Party. As Mr. Romney’s rivals have sought to turn the primaries into a referendum on his business career, the private equity industry finds itself under fire from those it thought were friends.

Amazing how much whining these people do. Whether they want to emulate Blackbeard or just Gordon Gecko, they've made their choices and should be willing to live with them.

And because I can:

Re-arranging the Deck Chairs Is Not a Net Positive

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So here we are. It is the middle of December 2011. The US (and global) economies still suck. The Federal Reserve continues to wring its hands and do pretty much nothing about maximizing employment (which means they are not doing their jobs).

These past few weeks, I've seen a number of articles in various news sites about various states offering "tax incentives" to businesses trying to get them to stay where they are or to move to another state. One of the first was when I saw reports in early October that the governor of the state in which I reside claimed that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange could be moving to Florida. Then at the end of November, I noticed that Cincinnati and Ohio had "lost" Chiquita Brands to North Carolina:

Chiquita Brands International Inc. decided to leave Cincinnati for many reasons, but the biggest one is undeniable: Money.

Lured by the promise of big savings, better air service to Europe and Latin America and a more diverse workforce, Chiquita announced Tuesday that it plans to leave Cincinnati, site of its home office of 24 years, for Charlotte, N.C.

North Carolina offered a package of grants and tax incentives potentially worth $22.7 million over 11 years, enticing the relocation of the world's largest banana seller.

The counter offer from the state of Ohio and Cincinnati to keep the company downtown amounted to $6 million to $6.5 million, Chiquita chairman and CEO Fernando Aguirre told The Enquirer late Tuesday.

A couple of days later, I see where Ohio, having offered a fraction of what North Carolina had offered for Chiquita had turned around and offered Sears hundreds of millions to move from Chicago to Columbus. At the end of the article on the Sears offer, I found this telling little nugget of information:

The largest incentive package in Cincinnati - a 2003 deal worth up to $52 million to keep Convergys Corp. downtown - was hotly debated for months before being approved. The deal kept Convergys downtown, but the company hasn't grown here, and instead has cut its city workforce from 1,500 to 1,000.

Tax incentives are a quick, short-term strategy to boost job numbers, but they don't always work in the long-term, said Wendy Patton, a former Ohio Department of Development official.

Just last week (December 7), the NY Times had an article on Fortune 500 companies being able to avoid paying any state taxes for years at a time, no matter how profitable they might be:

As states have struggled to balance their budgets by cutting services, laying off workers and raising taxes, a study to be released on Wednesday suggests that many profitable Fortune 500 companies have not been paying as much in state corporate income taxes as the average levied on American companies, with some big firms paying none at all in recent years.

A few companies, including DuPont, reported paying no state corporate income taxes from 2008 to 2010 even as they reported profits, according to the study, which was conducted by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, nonprofit research organizations in Washington that advocate a more progressive tax code. (A spokeswoman for DuPont said that she had not seen the study, but that “DuPont complies with all tax laws and regulations” wherever it operates.)

...snip...

To gauge how much Fortune 500 companies are paying in corporate income taxes, the study looked at the 265 of them that are both profitable and disclose their state tax payments. It found that 68 reported paying no state corporate taxes in at least one year between 2008 and 2010. All together, the study found that the companies reported $1.33 trillion in domestic profits from 2008 to 2010, but paid states only about half of what they would have if they had paid at the average corporate income tax rate of all states — reducing their state taxes by some $42.7 billion.

Today, the NY Times had a related article on the battle between states for corporate business:

As the unemployment crisis grinds on, states are trying to both lure and retain businesses by offering tax breaks, grants, cheap loans — just about anything (short of candy and foot massages) they can think of. But how many jobs do these expensive incentives actually create?

And are the jobs any good?

Economic development programs cost states and cities billions of dollars a year, but many programs require little if any job creation, fewer than half call for wage standards, and fewer than a quarter require the companies to provide health care for their workers, according to a study of program requirements scheduled to be released Wednesday by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit research organization that tracks corporate subsidies. Some merely require companies to invest in plants or new equipment, which could actually enable them to reduce their head counts.

In doing some quick checks of der Google for this post, I noticed that Indiana had also made a play for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Fortunately for the good folks of Indiana, Ohio, and Florida, the Illinois legislature has bowed to the corporate blackmail:

While a tax-break package aimed at keeping Sears Holdings Corp. and Chicago's financial exchanges from exiting the state cleared the General Assembly on Tuesday, Illinois' business tax policies will continue to be a hot-button issue in the coming year.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle said they expect the parade of companies seeking special relief to continue, creating pressure to further examine how the state taxes business.

At this point in our national economic crisis the image that keeps coming to mind with all of these tax incentives for companies to stay or go is so much re-arranging of the deck chairs. These jobs are not net new jobs for the nation and wind up costing jobs IMNSVHO because of the lost jobs and services in both the losing state and gaining state. The losing state winds up offering larger incentives to try to save jobs and for the folks in the losing state who have lost their jobs, here's the struggle to make ends meet with unemployment so more bankruptcies and foreclosures. For the gaining states, there are all the costs associated in providing the sweetheart deals to the corporations to get them to move means non-reimbursed expenditures for infra-structure and more wear and tear on existing systems. If the state manages to "save" the jobs by bowing to the blackmail, it is that much less revenue coming in that cannot be recovered. Lose-lose-lose for all but a few folks in corporate management (Bonuses!)

And because I can:

Corruption or Incompetence; the Economic Effects Seem the Same

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One of the on-going arguments across the blogosphere and even the entire world is whether the economic problems of the last ten years are more related to incompetence or basic corruption. I must say, just the last week has offered plenty of evidence for both views. For example, we had this article from Bloomberg yesterday (Tuesday, November 29) about how then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson met with his hedge fund buddies and gave them the first class insider information on his plans to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into "conservatorship."

Paulson explained that under this scenario, the common stock of the two government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs, would be effectively wiped out. So too would the various classes of preferred stock, he said.

The fund manager says he was shocked that Paulson would furnish such specific information -- to his mind, leaving little doubt that the Treasury Department would carry out the plan. The managers attending the meeting were thus given a choice opportunity to trade on that information.

...snip...

And law professors say that Paulson himself broke no law by disclosing what amounted to inside information.

...snip...

At the time Paulson privately addressed the fund managers at Eton Park, he had given the market some positive signals -- and the GSEs’ shares were rallying, with Fannie Mae’s nearly doubling in four days.

William Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, can’t understand why Paulson felt impelled to share the Treasury Department’s plan with the fund managers.

“You just never ever do that as a government regulator -- transmit nonpublic market information to market participants,” says Black, who’s a former general counsel at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. “There were no legitimate reasons for those disclosures.”

So, apparently what Paulson did was not illegal, yet there were and are no controls on Paulson or anyone else receiving this information. But it does smell of corruption. Or maybe Paulson was so incompetent as to believe that he was just sharing gossip with his friends that would harm no one.

Only MOTUs and Banksters get TARPs.

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So there I was this morning, having completed my daily check for jobs in my chosen field of Software Quality Assurance and Testing (I do wish it would take longer than five minutes as that would mean there are actually some improvements in the economy but such is life), when I reached the NY Times and saw this article with the headline from Mayor Bloomberg that "‘Tent City’ Goes Beyond Free Speech":

“The Constitution doesn’t protect tents,” he said at a news conference in Queens. “It protects speech and assembly.”

The mayor expressed concern that those exercising a “right to be silent” might be getting drowned out amid the din of the protests.

“We can’t have a place where only one point of view is allowed,” he said. “There are places where I think it’s appropriate to express yourself, and there are other places that are appropriate to set up Tent City. They don’t necessarily have to be one and the same.”

A quick check of der Google shows that a lot of elected officials in places such as Durham, NC, Hennepin Co, MN, Seattle, WA, San Francisco and even Sydney, Australia are apparently in full agreement with Mayor Bloomberg. In fact, in this quick check, it was only Hartford, CT that did not seem to think tents and Tarps are the cause of the decline of Western Civilization. (I'm sure there are other cities fighting the use of tents and tarps and there may even be a couple of others allowing them besides Hartford).

David Dayen at FDL News notes that in fact there is only one tent in Zuccotti Park, a medicine tent. It seems folks owe a bit of thanks to Jesse Jackson for helping to block the NYPD from taking this tent down:

Bloomberg’s foray into originalism notwithstanding, the focus on tents also apparently extends to medicine. Because hours after the mayor made this statement, the NYPD tried to take down the medical tent at Zuccotti Park. Jesse Jackson, who was randomly on the scene in the middle of the night when this went down, helped save the tent, which is apparently not Constitutionally protected. Incidentally, the medical tent is the only tent at Zucotti Park. So he must really have it out for that tent. Such an eyesore!

So tell me Mr Mayor, where in the Constitution does it say that taxpayers have to bail out TBTF banks and give them a "TARP?" It seems that if Banksters and MOTUs get a TARP that protects their bonuses, surely folks who are protesting that largesse can have a tarp to protect themselves from the weather.

It seems to this ol' country boy that so many of the politicians around the globe are paid to be bullish and protect the MOTU and Banksters. Along with the Bloomberg article, today's NY Times had another article about how Gov Cuomo refuses to extend New York's "millionaire's tax":

Even as Occupy Wall Street stokes debate over income inequality, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo dug in his heels on Monday against extending a so-called millionaires’ tax on high-earning New Yorkers, saying the income tax surcharge would place New York at a competitive disadvantage with neighboring states.

The problem when politicians are so bullish about the MOTU and banksters? When there are a lot of bulls around, there's bound to be a lot of bull shit around.

H/T Peterr for the post title

And because I can:

Limited Good Economic News Won't Last

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You might have seen some headlines from yesterday on the weekly report of Initial Unemployment claims about those claims "falling sharply" (Reuters headline phrase):

Applications for unemployment benefits fell by 37,000 to a seasonally adjusted 391,000 in the week ending September 24 from an upwardly revised 428,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said on Thursday.

My first prediction today is that the 391K figure first announced will be revised upwards when next week's report comes out. My second prediction is whatever good news that can be wrung from this report will have a limited overall effect.

CNN's report was a bit more circumspect with this:

The recent drop to 391,000 maked the lowest level since the week of April 2, when 385,000 new claims came in.

Still, economists cautioned against getting too excited about the better number. It's just one week of data, and according to a government spokesman, seasonal adjustments could have impacted the calculation.

...snip...

For the country overall, the unemployment rate is still at 9.1%...

Continuing claims -- which include people filing for the second week or more of benefits -- decreased by 20,000 to 3,729,000 in the week ended Sept. 17, the most recent data available.

That figure only includes people who are receiving benefits though, which typically run out after 99 weeks.

Including people who aren't currently receiving those benefits, about 14 million people remain unemployed in the United States.

Nice of CNN to point out that the unemployment figure does include those folks who persist in looking for jobs without finding them, even after they have exhausted all benefits.

Wait! I thought the South was where all the jobs are!

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Jobs.

Although the official time frame for "The Great Recession" was December 2007 through June 2009, for the millions of long term un and underemployed, the daily reality is that not only has the recession never ended, it is more applicable to The Great Depression than it is to any of the various acknowledged recessions since the end of WWII. One of the articles of faith from the always surprised Economists is that job creation lags other indicators, yet here we are, over two years since the "end" of the last recession and the official unemployment rate is still at 9.1% with the underemployed figure at 16.2% for August 2011.

Each week on Thursday, there's a report of the Initial Jobless Claims for the week before. Like many of the earlier weeks, last week's report forced the headline writers to find the lone tidbit of almost good news to concentrate on in their ledes. From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Americans filed fewer new claims for jobless benefits last week but the decline was not enough to dispel worries the economy was dangerously close to falling into a new recession.

Applications for unemployment benefits dropped 9,000 to 423,000 in the week ended September17, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That was roughly in line with expectations.l

Of course, once again, the earlier report had been revised upwards (from 428K reported on September 15). It is not going too far out on a limb to predict that the 423K reported for September 22 will be revised upwards on September 29.

I did not go too far out on a limb back in June when I first predicted a "double-dip" and it still was a short limb when I reiterated the prediction in July. Nouriel Roubini has made the same prediction last Thursday documented from his tweets (via Business Insider). A few days earlier (September 19), Roubini had written this op-ed on how to keep the coming Recession from being a Depression.

Here Is Class Warfare

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So apparently, the phrase of the week from Republicans is "Class Warfare!" as a response to President Obama's proposal for a new Millionaire's Minimum Tax. Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham both used the phrase yesterday on the Bobble head shows. The proposed tax has also become known as the "Buffett Tax" in honor of billionaire investor Warren Buffett who has long noted the irony of his paying a lower tax rate for his investments (aka Unearned Income) than the rate paid by his secretary (Earned Income). Of course, the folks at Forbes Magazine and the Murdoch NY Post think it is a bad idea to do such a thing.

The reality is, and Buffett noted years ago, we are in a class war:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Regulations Are an Opportunity for Job Creating Innovation

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It is an article of faith among Republicans (and far too many Democrats) that all those pesky "regulations" are to blame for the lack of jobs today and the ongoing economic slowdown. Just the first of this month, McClatchy had an article where they had surveyed small business owners across the country and the consensus was that in fact regulations are not the problem for small business but lack of demand is:

When it's asked what specific regulations harm small businesses _which account for about 65 percent of U.S. jobs — the Chamber of Commerce points to health care, banking and national labor. Yet all these issues weigh much more heavily on big corporations than on small business.

...snip...

None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it. Some pointed to the lack of regulation in mortgage lending as a principal cause of the financial crisis that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-09 and its grim aftermath.

...snip...

Other small firms say their problem is simply a lack of customers.

My bold and I think we see where the folks complaining about regulations are really coming from. While the small businesses are struggling to make traction and find customers, the big businesses are squeezing every penny out of their operations in order to meet the quarterly demands of Wall St. And the anti-regulations crowd show an incredible level of short-sightedness. Instead of a knee-jerk "regulations bad" approach, they should be looking on regulations as an opportunity for innovation and building new businesses.

Economically, 'Good for Business' Is Usually Bad for People

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"Business Friendly Climate" is one of the buzz phrases we see and hear a bit more frequently these days. I guess it is a phrase that may have always been around to some extent but is not just limited to the business press. But what exactly does "Business Friendly Climate" actually mean? Googling the phrase brings up millions of pages of hits with apparently every state, city, and town in the country making the claim for themselves. President Obama says the US must become Business Friendly to create jobs. But to me, the more often I see and hear the phrases "business friendly" or "good for businesses," the more I become convinced that the end result will be something that is bad for humans and bad for living, breathing entities.

In case you are curious as to what precipitated this, it was a few articles the last week or so on both sides of the "it's good for business" divide. First up is this article from CNN on Tuesday, July 12 on businesses "fleeing" California:

Economists and Ethics: Is There an Effect On the Economy?

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Code of Ethics: A code of ethics is a set of guidelines which are designed to set out acceptable behaviors for members of a particular group, association, or profession. Many organizations govern themselves with a code of ethics, especially when they handle sensitive issues like investments, health care, or interactions with other cultures. In addition to setting a professional standard, a code of ethics can also increase confidence in an organization by showing outsiders that members of the organization are committed to following basic ethical guidelines in the course of doing their work.

I am not currently a member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) but since I do consider myself a Quality Assurance professional, I have no problem adhering to the ASQ Code of Ethics. When I got my first QA position back in the early '80s, ASQ was known as the American Society for Quality control (ASQC) but the Code of Ethics was then as it is now. One of the many technical books I have read and used to help me in business is Ethics in Quality, which I found an interesting read, if only because the case studies used were not all black and white but showed the nuance of everyday life where sometimes there is no right or wrong answer nor are there always good choices available to folks.

The Very Serious People Missing the Interconnectedness of Everything

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As we see the various articles today about President Obama and the "grand bargain" being offered to get Republican votes for raising the debt ceiling, we also see further indications of the total cluelessness of so many of the folks who live inside of the beltway village.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this post explaining how good jobs would attack the so-called deficit problem. This is without addressing the $3.7T plus costs of our wars since 2001 nor that the cost of the Bush/Obama tax cuts are far larger contributors to the "problem."

The last few days, I have seen a couple of articles reinforcing for me that Pete Peterson and his acolytes are winning the battle. Just last Friday (July 1), Bloomberg had this article on the Government Accountability Office releasing a study (pdf) on how people are going to have to delay collecting Social Security and "buy an annuity" in order to pay for their retirements:

“The risk that retirees will outlive their assets is a growing challenge,” according to a study from the Government Accountability Office released today. Increased life expectancies and health-care costs coupled with declines in financial markets and home equity over the last few years have “intensified” workers’ concerns about how to manage their savings in retirement, the report said.

...snip...

“The risk that retirees will outlive their assets is a growing challenge,” according to a study from the Government Accountability Office released today. Increased life expectancies and health-care costs coupled with declines in financial markets and home equity over the last few years have “intensified” workers’ concerns about how to manage their savings in retirement, the report said.

Of course, the study does not and cannot explain how we are all supposed to be able to come up with the cash to buy an annuity nor does it explain how we're are supposed to find insurance companies that will actually be around to pay off on the annuities, even if we could afford them.