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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Roman Berry
Published Letters: 198 Editor's Choice: 10
It wasn't the Republicans or the Democrats. It was the Republicans and the Democrats. Both pushed deregulation for years.
Both manipulated the tax code to favor "investment" income (long term cap gains and dividends get preferential tax treatment over grandma's passbook savings account interest), pushed home ownership as some sort of panacea for American families, gave in to corporate lobbying to repeal long established regulatory frameworks and just generally bought into the whole infallibility of markets line of BS. So in that regard, Posner is right. It was bipartisan. (And it still is.)
9.4% unemployment is really high. I don't really get the sense that media coverage reflects this reality, and most reports on economic news always seem to find the silver lining. The "good news" that job losses were not as high as expected doesn't change the fact that job losses at that level mean continued rising unemployment. A lot of people are out of work and that isn't going to improve any time soon.
(Link: http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/06/unemployment.html)
I'd say that sounds right. The media coverage doesn't reflect reality. It mostly seems obsessed with the stock market which strikes me as out of touch with the reality of a 16.4 percent U6 number. 16.4 percent is roughly one out of six workers who are either out of work, forced to work part time when they want to work full time or who are so discouraged that they have essentially stopped looking at some point in the past year. With the ripple effects that we are about to see from the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, I expect that number may yet climb.
Anyway, glad that the number wasn't any worse. But no matter how you slice it, a net decline (wait for the upward revision) of ~350k isn't really good news.
Bloomberg has an article up (http://bit.ly/jWmOs) that's pretty interesting. The Eschaton take on it is "If we pretend everything's ok then it is."
Anyway, the headline at Bloomberg is "Bank Profits From Accounting Rules Masking Looming Loan Losses"
Analysts who have examined the quarterly profits and government tests say that accounting rule changes and rosy assumptions are making the institutions look healthier than they are.-snip-
Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. in Jupiter, Florida. “The big banks’ profits were totally bogus,” says Weiss, whose 38-year-old firm rates financial companies. “The new accounting rules, the stress tests: They’re all part of a major effort to put lipstick on a pig.”
Further deterioration of loans will eventually force banks to recognize losses that their bookkeeping lets them ignore for now, says David Sherman, an accounting professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Zombie banks are putting the screws to even well-qualified borrowers. Credit is contracting. We have our Minsky moment at hand. In an economy that is so dependent on consumption for growth, what does this mean for labor? I don't think this ride is over quite yet.
People acting as apologists and/or attack dogs for Obama in many of these letters are not addressing the specifics in Sirota's article at all. They're attacking the messenger, setting up straw men and ignoring all substance. It's one fallacy after another.
Is political discourse in this nation really just fundamentally broken? It seems like the Freeper mentality of the later Clinton years is now almost de rigueur. We live in a cult of fanatic personality worship and personal hate. It seems that for many, principle is not even an afterthought. How does this all end? I think not well.
The post itself makes clear that the Secretary of State is making these demands on behalf of the administration she represents. Indeed, the Secretary of State serves at the pleasure of the President and no doubt doesn't say or do much of anything in terms of official policy and/or statements without the tacit approval of the boss.
Anyway, if the title had been "Secretary of State Clinton demands China investigate and disclose past abuses", or something to that effect, even this minor quibble wouldn't be there. I just don't like the "Hillary" thing. It makes it seem as if what is to follow is aimed at HRC personally (which would be wrong) when in fact it's not.
...with sleeping with a guy that already has a girlfriend? From the linked article:
Fast forward a few years, and a few sexually unfulfilling relationships, to Charles, the first guy who made me feel like there wasn’t anything wrong or un-feminist about wanting to be spanked. I’d known Charles for years, so he knew about my feminist activism and the writing I do about women’s issues. Once Charles learned about my dom/sub fetish, he knew—and respected—how conflicted I felt. Charles wanted to spank a woman as badly as I wanted to be spanked, and that was what mattered to him. Plus, he’d struggled with apathetic partners, as I had, and he owned a paddle! Alas, Charles also had a girlfriend.
Not that that stopped us. No, we were selfish: Charles cheated on his girlfriend with me.
That's feminist?
Who was talking about a purity pledge? Not me. I was talking about a woman proclaiming herself to be a feminist fucking over another woman by sleeping with her boyfriend.
I'm not a purity fanatic. Sex between consenting people is fine with me. No, what I'm bothered with is hypocrisy. And I'm also bothered by people who are in relationships cheating on their partner, and by the people that knowingly cheat with them. At any rate, women fucking over other women may not be unfeminist, but it strikes me as wrong none the less.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
