| |
EXCLUSIVE The Obama administration is trying to assure Israel privately that it would strike Iran militarily if Tehran’s nuclear program crosses certain “red lines”—while attempting to dissuade the Israelis from acting unilaterally. The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake reports exclusively on the diplomatic balancing act.A chaotic Syria, a warlord Afghanistan--and two countries, Egypt and Libya struggling towards democracy... |
A collection of facts and information supporting my opinion that grassroots power is the only way to deconstruct the stranglehold of big money, media, and Congress that is ruining our country's basic values.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Bomb Iran? Where is the UN?
We network various transportation systems in order to move people and goods efficiently. In doing so, we combine expertise in operation management systems for rail and road traffic with solutions for airport logistics, postal automation and traction power supply as well as rail vehicles for mass transit, regional and long-distance service.Cooperative Venture Results in Huge Solar Panel
Solar Power Puts A Little Green In Kleenex
by Angeli Duffin, December 26th, 2011
If you look closely, that box of Kleenex just got a slight touch of green. Prologis and Southern California Edison recently partnered with Kimberly-Clark, owner of global brands including Kleenex, Scott and Huggies, to install one of the country’s largest single rooftop solar arrays on Kimberly-Clark’s distribution center in Redlands, Calif.The 350,000-square-foot installation expanded a 100-kilowatt rooftop array to a 4.9-megawatt array that will produce up to 6.6 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy per year – enough to power 925 Southern California homes for one year. This solar energy produced will offset the equivalent of 4,500 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Earth Techling
Monday, December 26, 2011
The Awe of the Cosmos
www.youtube.comInternational Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy as seen from about 240 miles above the Earth's horizon. It features an orbital view of lightning storms, stars, airglow and the dramatic appearance of “sungrazer” Comet
From Alice: Our chance to have consciousness of being aware that we live on the only life-sustaining planet known so far is truly a wondrous thing. Please listen to the wonders seen by Dan Burbank as a New Year speeds towards us. (And we think we're in CONTROL!)
Sing to Your Kids- Sing Folk Songs, Nursery Rhymes, Made-up Songs
Singing Therapy Helps Stroke Patients Speak Again
December 26, 2011
But now Meyerson is learning to talk again through an approach that trains the undamaged right side of her brain to "speak." Specifically, it's a region that controls singing.
For more than 100 years, it's been known that people who can't speak after injury to the speech centers on the left side of the brain can sing.
In the 1970s, Boston researchers started to use a sort of "singing therapy" to help stroke survivors speak again.
However, it never caught on much – perhaps because a lot of therapists, not to mention patients, weren't comfortable singing what they wanted to say. And back then, the science wasn't advanced enough to show the actual changes in the brain that result from the therapy.
That's changing fast.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who has had a version of "singing therapy," astounded everyone by her ability to speak again – albeit so far in single words and short phrases. Nearly a year ago, a would-be assassin's bullet tore through the speech center in Giffords' left brain.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Friends of the Earth Helps Defeat Corn Ethanol Subsidies!
| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 23, 2011 12:27 PM | CONTACT: Friends of The Earth Michal Rosenoer, 415-359-7309 Nick Berning, 703-587-4454, nberning@foe.org |
Six Billion Dollar Subsidy for Dirty Corn Ethanol Defeated
Corn ethanol no longer a sacred cow; After long campaign, diverse coalition prevents renewal of blenders' tax credit
WASHINGTON - December 23 - Congress finished its tax legislation today without including a provision to extend a massive subsidy for corn ethanol that is set to expire at the end of the year.
The subsidy — the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit — has provided the oil and agribusiness industries with $0.45 per gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline, amounting to a total of approximately $6 billion each year.
The elimination of the subsidy, cherished by the once-mighty ethanol lobby, comes after a multi-year campaign to end it waged by Friends of the Earth and an ideologically diverse coalition of allies.
Friends of the Earth biofuels policy campaigner Michal Rosenoer had the following response:
“The end of this giant subsidy for dirty corn ethanol is a win for taxpayers, the environment and people struggling to put food on their tables.
“Corn ethanol is extremely dirty. It leads to more climate pollution than conventional gasoline, and it causes deforestation as well as agricultural runoff that pollutes our water.
“The growing demand for fuel crops also means less land is available for growing food, so food prices are going up. This is something many families simply cannot afford.
“Given corn ethanol's downsides, it's outrageous that taxpayers have been subsidizing the industry to the tune of $6 billion a year. The industry's inability to get this tax credit extended signals that it no longer has carte blanche in Washington — corn ethanol is no longer a sacred cow.
“Even though the corn ethanol industry has been weakened we must remain vigilant. Pork like this has a way of ending up back in the barrel without sustained opposition.
“We will now also turn our attention to ending other federal policies that support dirty corn ethanol, including the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires a radical increase in biofuel consumption by 2022."
The subsidy — the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit — has provided the oil and agribusiness industries with $0.45 per gallon of ethanol blended into gasoline, amounting to a total of approximately $6 billion each year.
The elimination of the subsidy, cherished by the once-mighty ethanol lobby, comes after a multi-year campaign to end it waged by Friends of the Earth and an ideologically diverse coalition of allies.
Friends of the Earth biofuels policy campaigner Michal Rosenoer had the following response:
“The end of this giant subsidy for dirty corn ethanol is a win for taxpayers, the environment and people struggling to put food on their tables.
“Corn ethanol is extremely dirty. It leads to more climate pollution than conventional gasoline, and it causes deforestation as well as agricultural runoff that pollutes our water.
“The growing demand for fuel crops also means less land is available for growing food, so food prices are going up. This is something many families simply cannot afford.
“Given corn ethanol's downsides, it's outrageous that taxpayers have been subsidizing the industry to the tune of $6 billion a year. The industry's inability to get this tax credit extended signals that it no longer has carte blanche in Washington — corn ethanol is no longer a sacred cow.
“Even though the corn ethanol industry has been weakened we must remain vigilant. Pork like this has a way of ending up back in the barrel without sustained opposition.
“We will now also turn our attention to ending other federal policies that support dirty corn ethanol, including the Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires a radical increase in biofuel consumption by 2022."
###
Stiglitz--Why American Have No Jobs
Published on Friday, December 23, 2011 by Vanity Fair
The Book of Jobs: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around”
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.
It has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.
Domino Theory: The financial meltdown is the Depression parallel everyone notices. The more frightening parallel is everything else. (Vanity Fair) We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.
The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.
Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.
The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.
The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. Even if we correctly respond to the trauma—the failures of the financial sector—it will take a decade or more to achieve full recovery. Under the best of conditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as we have been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with the Depression will take on a tragic new dimension.
Until now, the Depression was the last time in American history that unemployment exceeded 8 percent four years after the onset of recession. And never in the last 60 years has economic output been barely greater, four years after a recession, than it was before the recession started. The percentage of the civilian population at work has fallen by twice as much as in any post-World War II downturn. Not surprisingly, economists have begun to reflect on the similarities and differences between our Long Slump and the Great Depression. Extracting the right lessons is not easy.
Many have argued that the Depression was caused primarily by excessive tightening of the money supply on the part of the Federal Reserve Board. Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Depression, has stated publicly that this was the lesson he took away, and the reason he opened the monetary spigots. He opened them very wide. Beginning in 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed doubled and then rose to three times its earlier level. Today it is $2.8 trillion. While the Fed, by doing this, may have succeeded in saving the banks, it didn’t succeed in saving the economy.
Reality has not only discredited the Fed but also raised questions about one of the conventional interpretations of the origins of the Depression. The argument has been made that the Fed caused the Depression by tightening money, and if only the Fed back then had increased the money supply—in other words, had done what the Fed has done today—a full-blown Depression would likely have been averted. In economics, it’s difficult to test hypotheses with controlled experiments of the kind the hard sciences can conduct. But the inability of the monetary expansion to counteract this current recession should forever lay to rest the idea that monetary policy was the prime culprit in the 1930s. The problem today, as it was then, is something else. The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced. A crisis of the real economy lies behind the Long Slump, just as it lay behind the Great Depression.
For the past several years, Bruce Greenwald and I have been engaged in research on an alternative theory of the Depression—and an alternative analysis of what is ailing the economy today. This explanation sees the financial crisis of the 1930s as a consequence not so much of a financial implosion but of the economy’s underlying weakness. The breakdown of the banking system didn’t culminate until 1933, long after the Depression began and long after unemployment had started to soar. By 1931 unemployment was already around 16 percent, and it reached 23 percent in 1932. Shantytown “Hoovervilles” were springing up everywhere. The underlying cause was a structural change in the real economy: the widespread decline in agricultural prices and incomes, caused by what is ordinarily a “good thing”—greater productivity.
At the beginning of the Depression, more than a fifth of all Americans worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932, these people saw their incomes cut by somewhere between one-third and two-thirds, compounding problems that farmers had faced for years. Agriculture had been a victim of its own success. In 1900, it took a large portion of the U.S. population to produce enough food for the country as a whole. Then came a revolution in agriculture that would gain pace throughout the century—better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, along with widespread mechanization. Today, 2 percent of Americans produce more food than we can consume.
Domino Theory: The financial meltdown is the Depression parallel everyone notices. The more frightening parallel is everything else. (Vanity Fair) We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.The banks got their bailout. Some of the money went to bonuses. Little of it went to lending. And the economy didn’t really recover—output is barely greater than it was before the crisis, and the job situation is bleak. The diagnosis of our condition and the prescription that followed from it were incorrect. First, it was wrong to think that the bankers would mend their ways—that they would start to lend, if only they were treated nicely enough. We were told, in effect: “Don’t put conditions on the banks to require them to restructure the mortgages or to behave more honestly in their foreclosures. Don’t force them to use the money to lend. Such conditions will upset our delicate markets.” In the end, bank managers looked out for themselves and did what they are accustomed to doing.
Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise. Yes, America had many things about which it could be proud. Companies in the information-technology field were at the leading edge of a revolution. But incomes for most working Americans still hadn’t returned to their levels prior to the previous recession. The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero. And “zero” doesn’t really tell the story. Because the rich have always been able to save a significant percentage of their income, putting them in the positive column, an average rate of close to zero means that everyone else must be in negative numbers. (Here’s the reality: in the years leading up to the recession, according to research done by my Columbia University colleague Bruce Greenwald, the bottom 80 percent of the American population had been spending around 110 percent of its income.) What made this level of indebtedness possible was the housing bubble, which Alan Greenspan and then Ben Bernanke, chairmen of the Federal Reserve Board, helped to engineer through low interest rates and nonregulation—not even using the regulatory tools they had. As we now know, this enabled banks to lend and households to borrow on the basis of assets whose value was determined in part by mass delusion.
The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave rise, acting as life support. Without these, unemployment would have been high. It was absurd to think that fixing the banking system could by itself restore the economy to health. Bringing the economy back to “where it was” does nothing to address the underlying problems.
The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has been brought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faced a breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown of the banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. Even if we correctly respond to the trauma—the failures of the financial sector—it will take a decade or more to achieve full recovery. Under the best of conditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as we have been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with the Depression will take on a tragic new dimension.
Until now, the Depression was the last time in American history that unemployment exceeded 8 percent four years after the onset of recession. And never in the last 60 years has economic output been barely greater, four years after a recession, than it was before the recession started. The percentage of the civilian population at work has fallen by twice as much as in any post-World War II downturn. Not surprisingly, economists have begun to reflect on the similarities and differences between our Long Slump and the Great Depression. Extracting the right lessons is not easy.
Many have argued that the Depression was caused primarily by excessive tightening of the money supply on the part of the Federal Reserve Board. Ben Bernanke, a scholar of the Depression, has stated publicly that this was the lesson he took away, and the reason he opened the monetary spigots. He opened them very wide. Beginning in 2008, the balance sheet of the Fed doubled and then rose to three times its earlier level. Today it is $2.8 trillion. While the Fed, by doing this, may have succeeded in saving the banks, it didn’t succeed in saving the economy.
Reality has not only discredited the Fed but also raised questions about one of the conventional interpretations of the origins of the Depression. The argument has been made that the Fed caused the Depression by tightening money, and if only the Fed back then had increased the money supply—in other words, had done what the Fed has done today—a full-blown Depression would likely have been averted. In economics, it’s difficult to test hypotheses with controlled experiments of the kind the hard sciences can conduct. But the inability of the monetary expansion to counteract this current recession should forever lay to rest the idea that monetary policy was the prime culprit in the 1930s. The problem today, as it was then, is something else. The problem today is the so-called real economy. It’s a problem rooted in the kinds of jobs we have, the kind we need, and the kind we’re losing, and rooted as well in the kind of workers we want and the kind we don’t know what to do with. The real economy has been in a state of wrenching transition for decades, and its dislocations have never been squarely faced. A crisis of the real economy lies behind the Long Slump, just as it lay behind the Great Depression.
For the past several years, Bruce Greenwald and I have been engaged in research on an alternative theory of the Depression—and an alternative analysis of what is ailing the economy today. This explanation sees the financial crisis of the 1930s as a consequence not so much of a financial implosion but of the economy’s underlying weakness. The breakdown of the banking system didn’t culminate until 1933, long after the Depression began and long after unemployment had started to soar. By 1931 unemployment was already around 16 percent, and it reached 23 percent in 1932. Shantytown “Hoovervilles” were springing up everywhere. The underlying cause was a structural change in the real economy: the widespread decline in agricultural prices and incomes, caused by what is ordinarily a “good thing”—greater productivity.
At the beginning of the Depression, more than a fifth of all Americans worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932, these people saw their incomes cut by somewhere between one-third and two-thirds, compounding problems that farmers had faced for years. Agriculture had been a victim of its own success. In 1900, it took a large portion of the U.S. population to produce enough food for the country as a whole. Then came a revolution in agriculture that would gain pace throughout the century—better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, along with widespread mechanization. Today, 2 percent of Americans produce more food than we can consume.
What this transition meant, however, is that jobs and livelihoods on the farm were being destroyed. Because of accelerating productivity, output was increasing faster than demand, and prices fell sharply. It was this, more than anything else, that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued. Farmers simply couldn’t pay back what they owed. The financial sector was swept into the vortex of declining farm incomes.
The cities weren’t spared—far from it. As rural incomes fell, farmers had less and less money to buy goods produced in factories. Manufacturers had to lay off workers, which further diminished demand for agricultural produce, driving down prices even more. Before long, this vicious circle affected the entire national economy.
The value of assets (such as homes) often declines when incomes do. Farmers got trapped in their declining sector and in their depressed locales. Diminished income and wealth made migration to the cities more difficult; high urban unemployment made migration less attractive. Throughout the 1930s, in spite of the massive drop in farm income, there was little overall out-migration. Meanwhile, the farmers continued to produce, sometimes working even harder to make up for lower prices. Individually, that made sense; collectively, it didn’t, as any increased output kept forcing prices down.
Given the magnitude of the decline in farm income, it’s no wonder that the New Deal itself could not bring the country out of crisis. The programs were too small, and many were soon abandoned. By 1937, F.D.R., giving way to the deficit hawks, had cut back on stimulus efforts—a disastrous error. Meanwhile, hard-pressed states and localities were being forced to let employees go, just as they are now. The banking crisis undoubtedly compounded all these problems, and extended and deepened the downturn. But any analysis of financial disruption has to begin with what started off the chain reaction.
The Agriculture Adjustment Act, F.D.R.’s farm program, which was designed to raise prices by cutting back on production, may have eased the situation somewhat, at the margins. But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery. The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.
Government spending unintentionally solved the economy’s underlying problem: it completed a necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing. Americans tend to be allergic to terms like “industrial policy,” but that’s what war spending was—a policy that permanently changed the nature of the economy. Massive job creation in the urban sector—in manufacturing—succeeded in moving people out of farming. The supply of food and the demand for it came into balance again: farm prices started to rise. The new migrants to the cities got training in urban life and factory skills, and after the war the G.I. Bill ensured that returning veterans would be equipped to thrive in a modern industrial society. Meanwhile, the vast pool of labor trapped on farms had all but disappeared. The process had been long and very painful, but the source of economic distress was gone.
The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade. There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.) Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.
The consequences for consumer spending, and for the fundamental health of the economy—not to mention the appalling human cost—are obvious, though we were able to ignore them for a while. For a time, the bubbles in the housing and lending markets concealed the problem by creating artificial demand, which in turn created jobs in the financial sector and in construction and elsewhere. The bubble even made workers forget that their incomes were declining. They savored the possibility of wealth beyond their dreams, as the value of their houses soared and the value of their pensions, invested in the stock market, seemed to be doing likewise. But the jobs were temporary, fueled on vapor.
Mainstream macro-economists argue that the true bogeyman in a downturn is not falling wages but rigid wages—if only wages were more flexible (that is, lower), downturns would correct themselves! But this wasn’t true during the Depression, and it isn’t true now. On the contrary, lower wages and incomes would simply reduce demand, weakening the economy further.
Of four major service sectors—finance, real estate, health, and education—the first two were bloated before the current crisis set in. The other two, health and education, have traditionally received heavy government support. But government austerity at every level—that is, the slashing of budgets in the face of recession—has hit education especially hard, just as it has decimated the government sector as a whole. Nearly 700,000 state- and local-government jobs have disappeared during the past four years, mirroring what happened in the Depression. As in 1937, deficit hawks today call for balanced budgets and more and more cutbacks. Instead of pushing forward a structural transition that is inevitable—instead of investing in the right kinds of human capital, technology, and infrastructure, which will eventually pull us where we need to be—the government is holding back. Current strategies can have only one outcome: they will ensure that the Long Slump will be longer and deeper than it ever needed to be.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this brief history. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people. Yes, all those foreclosed homes will eventually find someone to live in them, or be torn down. Prices will at some point stabilize and even start to rise. Americans will also adjust to a lower standard of living—not just living within their means but living beneath their means as they struggle to pay off a mountain of debt. But the damage will be enormous. America’s conception of itself as a land of opportunity is already badly eroded. Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today. Drive through the industrial river valleys of the Midwest or the small towns of the Plains or the factory hubs of the South, and you will see a picture of irreversible decay.
Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess. Ben Bernanke has, belatedly, admitted as much. The Fed played an important role in creating the current conditions—by encouraging the bubble that led to unsustainable consumption—but there is now little it can do to mitigate the consequences. I can understand that its members may feel some degree of guilt. But anyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one.
What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment. Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction.
Can we actually bring ourselves to do this, in the absence of mobilization for global war? Maybe not. The good news (in a sense) is that the United States has under-invested in infrastructure, technology, and education for decades, so the return on additional investment is high, while the cost of capital is at an unprecedented low. If we borrow today to finance high-return investments, our debt-to-G.D.P. ratio—the usual measure of debt sustainability—will be markedly improved. If we simultaneously increased taxes—for instance, on the top 1 percent of all households, measured by income—our debt sustainability would be improved even more.
The private sector by itself won’t, and can’t, undertake structural transformation of the magnitude needed—even if the Fed were to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. The only way it will happen is through a government stimulus designed not to preserve the old economy but to focus instead on creating a new one. We have to transition out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality. To that end, there are many high-return investments we can make. Education is a crucial one—a highly educated population is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Support is needed for basic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth. Without investment in basic research, what will fuel the next spurt of innovation? Meanwhile, the states could certainly use federal help in closing budget shortfalls. Long-term economic growth at our current rates of resource consumption is impossible, so funding research, skilled technicians, and initiatives for cleaner and more efficient energy production will not only help us out of the recession but also build a robust economy for decades. Finally, our decaying infrastructure, from roads and railroads to levees and power plants, is a prime target for profitable investment.
The second conclusion is this: If we expect to maintain any semblance of “normality,” we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery. Small and medium-size companies, especially new ones, are disproportionately the source of job creation in any economy, and they have been especially hard-hit. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending. But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks, without restrictions, without conditions, and without a vision of the kind of banking system we want and need. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around.
That we should tolerate such a confusion of ends and means says something deeply disturbing about where our economy and our society have been heading. Americans in general are coming to understand what has happened. Protesters around the country, galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, already know.
The cities weren’t spared—far from it. As rural incomes fell, farmers had less and less money to buy goods produced in factories. Manufacturers had to lay off workers, which further diminished demand for agricultural produce, driving down prices even more. Before long, this vicious circle affected the entire national economy.
The value of assets (such as homes) often declines when incomes do. Farmers got trapped in their declining sector and in their depressed locales. Diminished income and wealth made migration to the cities more difficult; high urban unemployment made migration less attractive. Throughout the 1930s, in spite of the massive drop in farm income, there was little overall out-migration. Meanwhile, the farmers continued to produce, sometimes working even harder to make up for lower prices. Individually, that made sense; collectively, it didn’t, as any increased output kept forcing prices down.
Given the magnitude of the decline in farm income, it’s no wonder that the New Deal itself could not bring the country out of crisis. The programs were too small, and many were soon abandoned. By 1937, F.D.R., giving way to the deficit hawks, had cut back on stimulus efforts—a disastrous error. Meanwhile, hard-pressed states and localities were being forced to let employees go, just as they are now. The banking crisis undoubtedly compounded all these problems, and extended and deepened the downturn. But any analysis of financial disruption has to begin with what started off the chain reaction.
The Agriculture Adjustment Act, F.D.R.’s farm program, which was designed to raise prices by cutting back on production, may have eased the situation somewhat, at the margins. But it was not until government spending soared in preparation for global war that America started to emerge from the Depression. It is important to grasp this simple truth: it was government spending—a Keynesian stimulus, not any correction of monetary policy or any revival of the banking system—that brought about recovery. The long-run prospects for the economy would, of course, have been even better if more of the money had been spent on investments in education, technology, and infrastructure rather than munitions, but even so, the strong public spending more than offset the weaknesses in private spending.
Government spending unintentionally solved the economy’s underlying problem: it completed a necessary structural transformation, moving America, and especially the South, decisively from agriculture to manufacturing. Americans tend to be allergic to terms like “industrial policy,” but that’s what war spending was—a policy that permanently changed the nature of the economy. Massive job creation in the urban sector—in manufacturing—succeeded in moving people out of farming. The supply of food and the demand for it came into balance again: farm prices started to rise. The new migrants to the cities got training in urban life and factory skills, and after the war the G.I. Bill ensured that returning veterans would be equipped to thrive in a modern industrial society. Meanwhile, the vast pool of labor trapped on farms had all but disappeared. The process had been long and very painful, but the source of economic distress was gone.
The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years ago to less than a tenth of it today. The pace has quickened markedly during the past decade. There are two reasons for the decline. One is greater productivity—the same dynamic that revolutionized agriculture and forced a majority of American farmers to look for work elsewhere. The other is globalization, which has sent millions of jobs overseas, to low-wage countries or those that have been investing more in infrastructure or technology. (As Greenwald has pointed out, most of the job loss in the 1990s was related to productivity increases, not to globalization.) Whatever the specific cause, the inevitable result is precisely the same as it was 80 years ago: a decline in income and jobs. The millions of jobless former factory workers once employed in cities such as Youngstown and Birmingham and Gary and Detroit are the modern-day equivalent of the Depression’s doomed farmers.
The consequences for consumer spending, and for the fundamental health of the economy—not to mention the appalling human cost—are obvious, though we were able to ignore them for a while. For a time, the bubbles in the housing and lending markets concealed the problem by creating artificial demand, which in turn created jobs in the financial sector and in construction and elsewhere. The bubble even made workers forget that their incomes were declining. They savored the possibility of wealth beyond their dreams, as the value of their houses soared and the value of their pensions, invested in the stock market, seemed to be doing likewise. But the jobs were temporary, fueled on vapor.
Mainstream macro-economists argue that the true bogeyman in a downturn is not falling wages but rigid wages—if only wages were more flexible (that is, lower), downturns would correct themselves! But this wasn’t true during the Depression, and it isn’t true now. On the contrary, lower wages and incomes would simply reduce demand, weakening the economy further.
Of four major service sectors—finance, real estate, health, and education—the first two were bloated before the current crisis set in. The other two, health and education, have traditionally received heavy government support. But government austerity at every level—that is, the slashing of budgets in the face of recession—has hit education especially hard, just as it has decimated the government sector as a whole. Nearly 700,000 state- and local-government jobs have disappeared during the past four years, mirroring what happened in the Depression. As in 1937, deficit hawks today call for balanced budgets and more and more cutbacks. Instead of pushing forward a structural transition that is inevitable—instead of investing in the right kinds of human capital, technology, and infrastructure, which will eventually pull us where we need to be—the government is holding back. Current strategies can have only one outcome: they will ensure that the Long Slump will be longer and deeper than it ever needed to be.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this brief history. The first is that the economy will not bounce back on its own, at least not in a time frame that matters to ordinary people. Yes, all those foreclosed homes will eventually find someone to live in them, or be torn down. Prices will at some point stabilize and even start to rise. Americans will also adjust to a lower standard of living—not just living within their means but living beneath their means as they struggle to pay off a mountain of debt. But the damage will be enormous. America’s conception of itself as a land of opportunity is already badly eroded. Unemployed young people are alienated. It will be harder and harder to get some large proportion of them onto a productive track. They will be scarred for life by what is happening today. Drive through the industrial river valleys of the Midwest or the small towns of the Plains or the factory hubs of the South, and you will see a picture of irreversible decay.
Monetary policy is not going to help us out of this mess. Ben Bernanke has, belatedly, admitted as much. The Fed played an important role in creating the current conditions—by encouraging the bubble that led to unsustainable consumption—but there is now little it can do to mitigate the consequences. I can understand that its members may feel some degree of guilt. But anyone who believes that monetary policy is going to resuscitate the economy will be sorely disappointed. That idea is a distraction, and a dangerous one.
What we need to do instead is embark on a massive investment program—as we did, virtually by accident, 80 years ago—that will increase our productivity for years to come, and will also increase employment now. This public investment, and the resultant restoration in G.D.P., increases the returns to private investment. Public investments could be directed at improving the quality of life and real productivity—unlike the private-sector investments in financial innovations, which turned out to be more akin to financial weapons of mass destruction.
Can we actually bring ourselves to do this, in the absence of mobilization for global war? Maybe not. The good news (in a sense) is that the United States has under-invested in infrastructure, technology, and education for decades, so the return on additional investment is high, while the cost of capital is at an unprecedented low. If we borrow today to finance high-return investments, our debt-to-G.D.P. ratio—the usual measure of debt sustainability—will be markedly improved. If we simultaneously increased taxes—for instance, on the top 1 percent of all households, measured by income—our debt sustainability would be improved even more.
The private sector by itself won’t, and can’t, undertake structural transformation of the magnitude needed—even if the Fed were to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. The only way it will happen is through a government stimulus designed not to preserve the old economy but to focus instead on creating a new one. We have to transition out of manufacturing and into services that people want—into productive activities that increase living standards, not those that increase risk and inequality. To that end, there are many high-return investments we can make. Education is a crucial one—a highly educated population is a fundamental driver of economic growth. Support is needed for basic research. Government investment in earlier decades—for instance, to develop the Internet and biotechnology—helped fuel economic growth. Without investment in basic research, what will fuel the next spurt of innovation? Meanwhile, the states could certainly use federal help in closing budget shortfalls. Long-term economic growth at our current rates of resource consumption is impossible, so funding research, skilled technicians, and initiatives for cleaner and more efficient energy production will not only help us out of the recession but also build a robust economy for decades. Finally, our decaying infrastructure, from roads and railroads to levees and power plants, is a prime target for profitable investment.
The second conclusion is this: If we expect to maintain any semblance of “normality,” we must fix the financial system. As noted, the implosion of the financial sector may not have been the underlying cause of our current crisis—but it has made it worse, and it’s an obstacle to long-term recovery. Small and medium-size companies, especially new ones, are disproportionately the source of job creation in any economy, and they have been especially hard-hit. What’s needed is to get banks out of the dangerous business of speculating and back into the boring business of lending. But we have not fixed the financial system. Rather, we have poured money into the banks, without restrictions, without conditions, and without a vision of the kind of banking system we want and need. We have, in a phrase, confused ends with means. A banking system is supposed to serve society, not the other way around.
That we should tolerate such a confusion of ends and means says something deeply disturbing about where our economy and our society have been heading. Americans in general are coming to understand what has happened. Protesters around the country, galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, already know.
© 2011 Vanity Fair
HO HO HO. This present is too late for me. My doc already dropped me.
House G.O.P. Leaders Agree to Extension of Payroll Tax Cut- NY Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Published: December 22, 2011
WASHINGTON — Bowing under intense pressure from members of their own party, House Republican leaders agreed Thursday to accept a temporary extension of the payroll tax cut, beating a hasty retreat from a showdown that Republicans increasingly saw as a threat to their election opportunities next year.
Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times
John A. Boehner, the speaker of the House, announced on Thursday that Republicans had reached an agreement on the payroll tax cut.
House Republicans — who rejected an almost identical deal on Tuesday — collapsed under the political rubble that has accumulated over the week, much of it from their own party, worried that the blockade would do serious damage to their appeal to voters.
The House speaker, John A. Boehner, determined to put the issue behind his party, announced the decision over the phone to members on Thursday, and did not permit the usual back and forth that is common on such calls, enraging many of them.
After his conversation with lawmakers, the speaker conceded to reporters that it might not have been “politically the smartest thing in the world” for House Republicans to put themselves between a tax cut and the 160 million American workers who would benefit from it, and to allow President Obama and Congressional Democrats to seize the momentum on the issue.
The agreement ended a partisan fight that threatened to keep Congress and Mr. Obama in town through Christmas and was just the latest of the bitter struggles over fiscal policy involving House conservatives, the president and the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Under the deal, the employee’s share of the Social Security payroll tax will stay at the current level, 4.2 percent of wages, through Feb. 29. In the absence of Congressional action, it would revert to the usual 6.2 percent next month. The government will also continue paying unemployment insurance benefits under current policy through February. Without Congressional action, many of the long-term unemployed would begin losing benefits next month.
In addition, under the agreement, Medicare will continue paying doctors at current rates for two months, averting a 27 percent cut that would otherwise occur on Jan. 1.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Will House Republicans Cave?
The Daily Beast--ULTIMATUM
Looks like John Boehner is getting an ultimatum for the holidays. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a statement Thursday urging the House Republicans to pass the Senate’s compromise that will extend the payroll-tax cut—and President Obama has backed McConnell's ultimatum. While McConnell acknowledged Republicans’ complaints about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s refusal to send negotiators to the House GOP to create a new bill, McConnell clearly calls for the House to pass some form of the Senate's bill. In a speech Thursday, Obama told the House Republicans that “we should go ahead and get this done” and urged them to follow McConnell's deal. The comment comes only hours after GOP strategist Karl Rove told Boehner to cave and pass the Senate’s compromise.from Alice: Thanks, anyway. My PCP cut me today anyway with the threatened 1/3 reduction in dr reembursements for those on Medicare. Now I have no doctor.
Merry Christmas!
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Public Pressure CAN Work. Keep it up, everyone--More than ever.
www.grist.org
The EPA finally unveiled its new rule covering mercury and other toxic emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants. Here's why it's worth lifting our heads out of the news cycle and taking a moment to appreciate that history is being made.
Strengthen the Clean Air Act Now!
act.credoaction.com
The EPA has finalized one of the most important updates to the Clean Air Act in 40 years. This is a huge victory for our health, and a defeat of big polluters. Thank Pres. Obama and the EPA and urge them to continue protecting us from mercury and other toxic pollution from power plants.
Chinese People Try to Stop The Enormous Use of Coal Power!
Take the Scientific American/Global Shell Energy Poll!- Got Science Anyone?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/sponsored/energyforthefuture/?id=poll
From Alice: Does Scientific American really think Shell Oil is interested in our opinion about
alternative energy? A concerning new trend has emerged recently--the insertion of big money and big oil
into education (Harvard, MIT, science organizations, NIH) creating state of the art facilities at these prestigious organizations. Our nation used to have a national science board, non-partisan, to advise
strictly from a scientific basis, what trends were going on, what research was needed and so on. This board was gutted under George Bush and the director became a 24 year old creationist with no scientic credentials.
From Alice: Does Scientific American really think Shell Oil is interested in our opinion about
alternative energy? A concerning new trend has emerged recently--the insertion of big money and big oil
into education (Harvard, MIT, science organizations, NIH) creating state of the art facilities at these prestigious organizations. Our nation used to have a national science board, non-partisan, to advise
strictly from a scientific basis, what trends were going on, what research was needed and so on. This board was gutted under George Bush and the director became a 24 year old creationist with no scientic credentials.
Congress Leaves for Xmas- Leaving Unemployment Payments Running Out
From Alice--In another act of extraordinary cowardice, Congress rushes home for Christmas (presumably they have homes to rush home to!) while 50% of Americans are now low-income and counting on small boosts like unemployment checks to buy food and heat. The Republicans even suggested that the unemployed should be drug-tested to see if they are drug-users!! Only Kucinich seems in touch with reality- they can't find jobs because there aren't any!
3 Million Could Lose Jobless Pay in Impasse
Jobless benefits have been overshadowed by debate on a payroll tax cut, but have become a huge sticking point in negotiations on a bill that deals with both issues.
Republicans would continue aid for some of the unemployed, but would sharply reduce the maximum duration of benefits and impose strict new requirements on people seeking or receiving aid.
Democrats said these changes made no sense at a time when 45 percent of jobless workers had been unemployed for more than half a year and the average duration of unemployment — 41 weeks — was higher than at any time in 60 years.
Jon D. Grandstaff, 50, who lives in a suburb of Tulsa, Okla., said Tuesday that he had been watching the debate in Congress with trepidation, worried that his jobless benefits would be exhausted on Jan. 9.
“This mess in Congress is so upsetting,” Mr. Grandstaff said in an interview. “I don’t know who to blame — House, Senate, Republicans, Democrats. They are toying with people’s lives. I’m getting really scared and nervous.”
Mr. Grandstaff said he was making $43,000 a year when he was laid off in March from the collections department of a major cellphone company. Now he is working at a part-time job for $8 an hour and hoping the position will lead to full-time work.
Brenda G. Crosier, 52, of Northglenn, Colo., outside Denver, is also at risk of losing extended unemployment benefits. She said she applied for five to eight jobs a week but rarely received responses, and in a telephone interview Tuesday she had this question for Congress:
“Why are you leaving for Christmas vacation? If you worked for a company and you did not have your work done, you would not be walking out the door. You have no business leaving until your work is finished.”
Major provisions of the federal unemployment insurance program begin expiring in the first week of January, and people would begin to feel the effects over the next several months. By mid-February, the Labor Department estimates, 2.2 million workers would have lost jobless benefits, and by the end of March, 3.6 million will be affected.
People in states with the highest unemployment rates would be among the hardest hit.
The cornerstone of the program, regular unemployment insurance benefits, provides up to 26 weeks of assistance financed by the states. In states with high unemployment, jobless workers may be able to get up to 73 weeks of additional benefits, financed by the federal government, for a total of 99 weeks of aid. House Republicans would reduce the maximum to 59 weeks.
“This reflects a more normal level of benefits typically available after recessions,” said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said: “I don’t see why you have to go more than 59 weeks. In fact, we need some incentives for people to get back to work. A lot of these people don’t want to work unless they get really high-paying jobs, and they’re not going to get them ever. So they just stay home and watch television. I don’t mean to malign people, but far too many are doing that.”
The Senate version of the payroll tax bill, passed with bipartisan support on Saturday, would continue paying jobless benefits under current law for two months, while lawmakers tried to figure out a longer-term solution.
House Republicans said they wanted a full-year extension, with additional requirements to prevent abuse of the program. They would require most recipients of jobless benefits to search for work and to pursue G.E.D. certificates if they had not completed high school.
Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, said the Republican proposals amounted to “the most drastic attack on the unemployment system” in 75 years.
House Republicans would also allow states to require drug testing as a condition of getting benefits. Democrats said such tests were an insult to the unemployed, because they implied that many were lazy drug abusers.
“I don’t see anyone in the Republican majority demanding drug testing for folks who receive oil and gas subsidies,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina.
But Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said, “People who are unemployed should be looking for a job and should not become voluntarily ineligible by taking illegal drugs.”
Democrats say the program has reduced poverty and helped stabilize the economy, reducing the depth of the last recession. Republicans say the benefits have led some people to reduce their efforts to find new jobs.
Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, said: “The problem is not a lack of effort for those seeking a job. The problem is a lack of jobs.”
House Republicans said they had borrowed ideas from the jobs bill that President Obama sent Congress in September. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said the president’s proposal would probably reduce the maximum length of unemployment benefits to 79 weeks, from the current 99, in many states.
Republicans would allow states to get waivers from many federal standards and requirements, including one stipulating that money from state unemployment taxes must be spent on jobless benefits.
Democrats see the waivers as a threat to the fabric of the unemployment insurance system. But Republicans said that, instead of just writing benefit checks, federal and state officials must do more to help people get back to work.
“In this uncertain economy, using unemployment dollars to subsidize the training of a new employee to re-enter the work force is just good public policy,” said Representative James B. Renacci, Republican of Ohio.
3 Million Could Lose Jobless Pay in Impasse
By ROBERT PEAR
Published: December 20, 2011
WASHINGTON — More than three million people stand to lose unemployment insurance benefits in the near future because of an impasse in Congress over how to extend the aid and how to offset the cost.
Republicans would continue aid for some of the unemployed, but would sharply reduce the maximum duration of benefits and impose strict new requirements on people seeking or receiving aid.
Democrats said these changes made no sense at a time when 45 percent of jobless workers had been unemployed for more than half a year and the average duration of unemployment — 41 weeks — was higher than at any time in 60 years.
Jon D. Grandstaff, 50, who lives in a suburb of Tulsa, Okla., said Tuesday that he had been watching the debate in Congress with trepidation, worried that his jobless benefits would be exhausted on Jan. 9.
“This mess in Congress is so upsetting,” Mr. Grandstaff said in an interview. “I don’t know who to blame — House, Senate, Republicans, Democrats. They are toying with people’s lives. I’m getting really scared and nervous.”
Mr. Grandstaff said he was making $43,000 a year when he was laid off in March from the collections department of a major cellphone company. Now he is working at a part-time job for $8 an hour and hoping the position will lead to full-time work.
Brenda G. Crosier, 52, of Northglenn, Colo., outside Denver, is also at risk of losing extended unemployment benefits. She said she applied for five to eight jobs a week but rarely received responses, and in a telephone interview Tuesday she had this question for Congress:
“Why are you leaving for Christmas vacation? If you worked for a company and you did not have your work done, you would not be walking out the door. You have no business leaving until your work is finished.”
Major provisions of the federal unemployment insurance program begin expiring in the first week of January, and people would begin to feel the effects over the next several months. By mid-February, the Labor Department estimates, 2.2 million workers would have lost jobless benefits, and by the end of March, 3.6 million will be affected.
People in states with the highest unemployment rates would be among the hardest hit.
The cornerstone of the program, regular unemployment insurance benefits, provides up to 26 weeks of assistance financed by the states. In states with high unemployment, jobless workers may be able to get up to 73 weeks of additional benefits, financed by the federal government, for a total of 99 weeks of aid. House Republicans would reduce the maximum to 59 weeks.
“This reflects a more normal level of benefits typically available after recessions,” said Representative Dave Camp, Republican of Michigan and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said: “I don’t see why you have to go more than 59 weeks. In fact, we need some incentives for people to get back to work. A lot of these people don’t want to work unless they get really high-paying jobs, and they’re not going to get them ever. So they just stay home and watch television. I don’t mean to malign people, but far too many are doing that.”
The Senate version of the payroll tax bill, passed with bipartisan support on Saturday, would continue paying jobless benefits under current law for two months, while lawmakers tried to figure out a longer-term solution.
House Republicans said they wanted a full-year extension, with additional requirements to prevent abuse of the program. They would require most recipients of jobless benefits to search for work and to pursue G.E.D. certificates if they had not completed high school.
Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, said the Republican proposals amounted to “the most drastic attack on the unemployment system” in 75 years.
House Republicans would also allow states to require drug testing as a condition of getting benefits. Democrats said such tests were an insult to the unemployed, because they implied that many were lazy drug abusers.
“I don’t see anyone in the Republican majority demanding drug testing for folks who receive oil and gas subsidies,” said Representative James E. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina.
But Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said, “People who are unemployed should be looking for a job and should not become voluntarily ineligible by taking illegal drugs.”
Democrats say the program has reduced poverty and helped stabilize the economy, reducing the depth of the last recession. Republicans say the benefits have led some people to reduce their efforts to find new jobs.
Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, said: “The problem is not a lack of effort for those seeking a job. The problem is a lack of jobs.”
House Republicans said they had borrowed ideas from the jobs bill that President Obama sent Congress in September. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said the president’s proposal would probably reduce the maximum length of unemployment benefits to 79 weeks, from the current 99, in many states.
Republicans would allow states to get waivers from many federal standards and requirements, including one stipulating that money from state unemployment taxes must be spent on jobless benefits.
Democrats see the waivers as a threat to the fabric of the unemployment insurance system. But Republicans said that, instead of just writing benefit checks, federal and state officials must do more to help people get back to work.
“In this uncertain economy, using unemployment dollars to subsidize the training of a new employee to re-enter the work force is just good public policy,” said Representative James B. Renacci, Republican of Ohio.
EGYPTIAN WOMEN FEARLESS AGAINST CAIRO'S MILITARY FORCES
Mass March by Cairo Women in Protest Over Abuse by Soldiers
Nasser Nasser/Associated Press
A poster showing a woman attacked by officers was carried by one of several thousand marchers Tuesday in downtown Cairo.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
Published: December 20, 2011
CAIRO — Several thousand women demanding the end of military rule marched through downtown Cairo on Tuesday evening in an extraordinary expression of anger over images of soldiers beating, stripping and kicking female demonstrators in Tahrir Square.
Related
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The Lede Blog: Video of Egyptian Women's March in Cairo (December 20, 2011)
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The Lede Blog: Protesters 'Deserve to Be Thrown Into Hitler's Ovens,' Egyptian Military Adviser Says (December 19, 2011)
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The Lede Blog: Video Shows Egyptian Soldiers Beating and Shooting at Protesters (December 17, 2011)
Related in Opinion
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Editorial: Egypt’s Military Masters (December 21, 2011)Follow @nytimesworld for international breaking news and headlines.
Filippo Monteforte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A woman shouted slogans during the protest Tuesday in Cairo. Chants, some joined by men, included, “Freedom, freedom.”
Historians called the event the biggest women’s demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism inaugurated women’s activism here, and a rarity in the Arab world. It also added a new and unexpected wave of protesters opposing the ruling military council’s efforts to retain power and its tactics for suppressing public discontent.
The protest’s scale stunned even feminists here. In Egypt’s stiffly patriarchal culture, previous attempts to organize women’s events in Tahrir Square during this year’s protests almost always fizzled or, in one case in March, ended in the physical harassment of a small group of women by a larger crowd of men.
“It was amazing the number of women that came out from all over the place,” said Zeinab Abul-Magd, a historian who has studied women’s activism here. “I expected fewer than 300.”
The march abruptly pushed women to the center of Egyptian political life after they had been left out almost completely. Although women stood at the forefront of the initial revolt that ousted President Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago, few had prominent roles in the various revolutionary coalitions formed in the uprising’s aftermath. Almost no women have won seats in the early rounds of parliamentary elections. And the continuing demonstrations against military rule have often degenerated into battles in which young men and the security police hurl rocks at each other.
On the fifth day of clashes that have killed at least 14 people, many women in the march said they hoped their demonstration would undercut the military council’s efforts to portray demonstrators as little more than hooligans, vandals and arsonists. “This will show those who stay home that we are not thugs,” said Fadwa Khaled, 25, a computer engineer.
The women’s demand for a voice in political life appeared to run counter to the recent election victories of conservative Islamists. But the march was hardly dominated by secular liberals. It contained a broad spectrum of Egyptian women, including homemakers demonstrating for the first time and young mothers carrying babies, with a majority in traditional Muslim head scarves and a few in face-covering veils. And their chants mixed calls for women’s empowerment with others demanding more “gallantry” from Egyptian men.
Egypt’s military rulers came under fire from international human rights groups soon after they took power in February for performing invasive, pseudo-medical “virginity tests” on several women detained after a protest in March. But in Egypt’s conservative culture, few of the women subjected to that humiliation have come forward to criticize the generals publicly.
The spark for the march on Tuesday came over the weekend, when hundreds of military police officers in riot gear repeatedly stormed Tahrir Square, indiscriminately beating anyone they could catch. Videos showed more than one instance in which officers grabbed and stripped female demonstrators, tearing off their Muslim head scarves. And in the most infamous case caught on video, a half-dozen soldiers beat a supine woman with batons and ripped off her abaya to reveal a blue bra. Then one of them kicked her in the chest.
Recalling that event at a news conference Tuesday, the woman’s friend Hassan Shahin said he had told the soldiers: “I’m a journalist, and this is a girl. Wait, I’ll take her away from here.” But, he said, “nobody listened, and one of them jumped on me, and they started beating me with batons.”
No doubt fearful of the stigma that would come with her public humiliation, the victim has declined to step forward publicly, so some activists now refer to her only as “blue bra girl.” The photos of her beating and disrobing, however, have quickly circulated on the Internet and have been broadcast by television stations around the world.
In Washington on Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the recent events in Egypt “shocking.”
“Women are being beaten and humiliated in the same streets where they risked their lives for the revolution only a few short months ago,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Obama Passes On Healthcare--States Have to Decide
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ANYONE'S GAME Get ready for a train wreck out of Iowa. The Daily Beast's Mark McKinnon and George Caudill say Newt Gingrich is starting to lose steam, Ron Paul is surging, and it's showtime for Jon Huntsman. Iowa won't be the crystal ball that predicts the clear winner of the GOP presidential nominee—rather, the verdict is likely to be muddled coming out of the nation's first caucuses, and could even result in a five-way tie. DISASTER Landslides and flash floods in the Philippines caused by a typhoon have killed more than 250 people and left almost 400 people missing. Typhoon Washi hit the island of Mindanao on Friday night, forcing tens of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. Most of the missing are from a coastal village where houses were swept into the sea while people slept. The Philippine social-welfare department estimates that about 100,000 people have been displaced. CHANGING COURSE In an attempt to deflect one of the main Republican lines of attack on the health-care-reform program, President Obama announced that the new law will not set standard health benefits that insurers must provide. Instead, states can specify their own benefits by picking an existing health-care plan as a benchmark, and requiring all other insurers provide benefits of the same or greater value. Under this plan, the program will resemble the regional differences in state Medicaid programs. |
Friday, December 16, 2011
From: Soon There Will Be No Long Island-American Center for Progress
The North American Amendment Proposal to Phase-Down HFCs under the Montreal Protocol, introduced originally in 2009 and resubmitted again this year, would limit the total production of HFCs beginning in 2014 and reduce emissions 15 percent below baseline every three years over a 30-year period. The measure would result in the reduction of approximately 4 gigatons of the carbon dioxide equivalent through 2020 and 98 gigatons of the carbon dioxide equivalent through 2050.
There are separate baselines for Article 5 (developing) and Non-Article 5 (developed) parties, each based on historical data from 2005-2008. The baseline for Article 5 countries only accounts for historical HCFC consumption, whereas Non-Article 5 countries estimates historical HFC consumption in addition to HCFC consumption.
The proposal also limits HFC-23, a byproduct emission resulting from the production of HCFCs and HFCs that is primarily used as a refrigerant. HFC-23 is 14,800 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. The phasedown of HFC production and consumption and the reduction of HFC-23s would be funded by the Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund.
Arctic Council black carbon agreement
The Arctic Council is a multilateral, intergovernmental forum of the eight arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Russian Federation, and the United States) for addressing environmental concerns and climate change impacts (which includes expanded maritime traffic and resource extraction) in the Arctic region.In May 2011 the Arctic Council called on its member states to strengthen mitigation measures for black carbon via the Nuuk Declaration. Black carbon is the particulate matter (soot) emitted from inefficient fossil-fuel combustion via diesel or machine engines, cook stoves, and biomass (forest) burning. The council offered tighter regulations and mitigation measures for diesel transport, domestic heating, biomass burning, marine shipping, and gas flaring.
Black carbon is a short-lived climate forcer. Like HFCs, it does not stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2, but it can have a more intense impact on climate change, particularly in the Arctic, where it darkens snow and ice and makes those Arctic surfaces absorb heat instead of reflecting it. The Arctic Council estimates that short-lived climate forcers such as black carbon currently account for up to 40 percent of Arctic warming.
Reducing black carbon emissions is not a stand-in for reducing CO2, but it can slow warming in the medium term while the global community works to reduce CO2 emissions.
Thus far, the Arctic Council has not pursued a treaty or other binding commitment on black carbon—the council is currently focusing on elevating the discussion to a multilateral level to improve cooperation and to encourage individual states to take stronger mitigation action. It is possible that the council may consider more formal action in the future.
Regardless, if these efforts result in stronger member state regulations to reduce black carbon emissions, it could significantly slow Arctic warming.
Major Economies Forum
The Major Economies Forum, or MEF, was established in advance of the Copenhagen meeting to explore possible initiatives that can increase clean energy while reducing greenhouse gases emissions. Representing the 17 largest economies in the world, the MEF provides a unique platform for action that lies outside the traditional U.N. process.On December 14, 2009, the MEF took its first steps toward accomplishing its goals through the creation of the Global Partnership for low carbon technologies to drive “transformational low-carbon, climate-friendly technologies.” The Global Partnership created 12 “technology action plans” that together chart a course that addresses more than 80 percent of the major economies’ energy sectors’ CO2 emissions reduction potential. They are not mandatory.
The technology action plans provided a springboard for countries to launch national initiatives while collaborating on best practices and sharing information. Spanning everything from energy efficiency to advanced vehicles, the action plans helped translate hypothetical emissions reduction scenarios into 11 concrete initiatives sponsored by the Clean Energy Ministerial. These initiatives bring together major economies representing more than 80 percent of emissions, and various nations have subsequently pledged to carry them out.
In our report, we will analyze the various emissions reductions scenarios contained in these action plans, and the different timelines and probabilities of success.
The MEF’s potential, however, has not yet been exhausted. In CAP’s forthcoming report we will examine other avenues for cooperation among the MEF partners that could potentially bring about additional emission reductions among the largest emitters on the planet as well as potentially create sources of climate finance to assist in low-carbon development in other countries.
Conclusion
The UNFCCC should not be seen as the only venue for addressing global warming. In a perfect world, a new global, legally binding instrument would be agreed upon and would exceed current pledges for emissions reductions.It is highly unlikely, however, that all parties will agree to binding emissions reductions before the end of this decade, and even if they did, that still might not be enough to close the gigaton gap solely through UNFCCC action.
It is therefore critical that we start and strengthen other dialogues for developing solutions to global warming outside of the formal negotiations process.
There is much to be gained from harmonizing opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in existing multilateral forums beyond and in concert with the UNFCCC. We do not need a new international process to do this. The infrastructure already exists in other multilateral frameworks.
Some of these agreements—like the MEF—are already underway and can be expanded to take on new roles and new ambitions. Others can be broadened in scope to address climate change but have thus far been hindered by political constraints. The view that forums such as the Montreal Protocol are not appropriate for addressing greenhouse gas emissions must be answered and overcome.
Broadening the scope of existing multilateral frameworks and buttressing existing agreements can generate emissions reductions that will help fill the gap left open by the UNFCCC.
Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst, Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow, Melanie Hart is a Policy Analyst on China Energy and Climate Policy, and Adam James is a Special Assistant at American Progress.
Iraq-A 3 Section Confederacy With Volatile Neighbors and no Infrastructure
U.S. Marks End to 9-Year War, Leaving an Uncertain Iraq
Andrea Bruce for The New York Times
American forces, arriving in Kuwait in one of the last convoys out of Iraq, took the same highway they came in on in 2003.
By TIM ARANGO
Published: December 15, 2011
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
A soldier at a Baghdad market, the scene of bloody attacks in the past. Merchants now sell items left behind by departing soldiers.
“This will be an easy target for car bombs,” said Muhammad Ali, a merchant who lost two brothers during the cruelest times of the conflict. “People will die here.”
After nearly nine years, about 4,500 American fatalities and $1 trillion, America’s war in Iraq is about to end. Officials marked the finish on Thursday with a modest ceremony at the airport days before the last troops take the southern highway to Kuwait, going out as they came in, to conclude the United States’ most ambitious and bloodiest military campaign since Vietnam.
For the United States, the war leaves an uncertain legacy as Americans weigh what may have been accomplished against the price paid, with so many dead and wounded. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was vanquished, but the failure to find illicit weapons undermined the original rationale, leaving a bitter taste as casualties mounted. The lengthy conflict and repeated deployments strained the country and its resources, raising questions about America’s willingness to undertake future wars on such a grand scale.
Iraqis will be left with a country that is not exactly at war, and not exactly at peace. It has improved in many ways since the 2007 troop “surge,” but it is still a shattered country marred by violence and political dysfunction, a land defined on sectarian lines whose future, for better or worse, is now in the hands of its people.
“It is the end for the Americans only,” Emad Risn, an Iraqi columnist, recently wrote in Assabah al-Jadeed, a government-financed newspaper. “Nobody knows if the war will end for Iraqis, too.”
Iraq will now be on its own both to find its place in a region upended by revolutions and to manage its rivalry with Iran, which will look to expand its influence culturally and economically in the power vacuum left by the United States military. While American officials worry about the close political ties between Iraq’s Shiite leadership and Iran, the picture at the grass-roots level is more nuanced. Iraqis complain about shoddy Iranian consumer goods — they frequently mention low-quality yogurts and cheeses — and the menacing role of Iranian-backed militias, which this year killed many American soldiers.
Failed Reconciliation
The Iranian rivalry frequently plays out in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Iraq’s religious authorities are based. Iran, which like Iraq is majority Shiite, recently installed one of its leading clerics in Najaf, raising worries that Iran is trying to spread its brand of clerical rule to Iraq. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, an anti-American cleric with very close ties to Iran, has recently said that with the military withdrawal, American diplomats are now fair game for his militiamen.
Iraq faces a multitude of vexing problems the Americans tried and failed to resolve, from how to divide the country’s oil wealth to sectarian reconciliation to the establishment of an impartial justice system. A longstanding dispute festers in the north over how to share power in Kirkuk between Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen, an ominous harbinger for power struggles that may ensue in a post-America Iraq. A recent deal between Exxon Mobil and the Kurdistan government in the north has been deemed illegal by Baghdad in the absence of procedures for sharing the country’s oil resources.
Gingrich on Health: Partners with Insulin Company and Healthcare for Kids?
Gingrich Push on Health Care Appears at Odds With G.O.P.
Stephen Chernin/Associated Press
Newt Gingrich at a Tea Party event in April 2009, amid rising conservative anger over health care issues.
By JIM RUTENBERG and MIKE McINTIRE
Published: December 16, 2011
Shortly before the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, Newt Gingrich’s political committee put out a video of Mr. Gingrich denouncing it as a “big politician, big bureaucracy, pork-laden bill.”
Josh Haner/The New York Times
As a candidate, Newt Gingrich, second from front, is criticizing some of the same programs that he supported as a consultant.
But at the same time, Mr. Gingrich was cheering a $19 billion part of the package that promoted the use of electronic health records, something that benefited clients of his consulting business. “I am delighted that President Obama has picked this as a key part of the stimulus package,” he told health care executives in a January 2009 conference call.
After the bill was passed a month later, Mr. Gingrich’s consultancy, the Center for Health Transformation, joined two of its clients, Allscripts and Microsoft, in an “Electronic Health Records Stimulus Tour” that traveled the country, encouraging doctors and hospitals to buy their products with the billions in new federal subsidies. “Get Engaged, Get Incentives,” one promotion read.
As Mr. Gingrich runs for president, he is working to appeal to Republican primary voters suspicious of big-government activism, especially in the realm of health care. But interviews and a review of records show how active Mr. Gingrich has been in promoting a series of recent programs that have given the government a bigger hand in the delivery of health care, and at the same time benefited his clients.
During the Bush administration, he was a leading Republican advocate for the costly expansion of Medicare, which many in his party now regret. And he and his center pushed some policies that are reflected in Mr. Obama’s health care record — a record Mr. Gingrich regularly criticizes on the campaign trail. All the while, his center functioned as a sort of high-priced club where companies joined him in working the corridors of power in Washington and in state capitals.
Mr. Gingrich did not respond to questions for this article. But a spokeswoman for the center said in an e-mail that Mr. Gingrich was a health care “visionary” who, for instance, supported electronic health records “BEFORE it ever came up for discussion by the president or anyone else.”
Mr. Gingrich’s chief Republican rival, Mitt Romney, has found himself on the defensive among conservatives for signing a universal health care law when he was governor of Massachusetts. But Mr. Gingrich has his own history with health care policy, part of which puts him at odds with many Republican voters.
Mr. Gingrich’s ideas and the interests of his clients are often intertwined. When President George W. Bush and some Congressional Republicans were seeking to block renewal of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program in 2007, Mr. Gingrich met with his former conservative House colleagues, arguing that inaction could unfairly harm children. At the time his center was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by major drug makers and insurers, groups that would have been harmed by a lapse in the program.
When he urged Republicans to support the Bush administration’s expansion of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit, he worked to ensure that it would cover new diabetes treatments sold by Novo Nordisk, a Danish drug company and a founding member of Mr. Gingrich’s center.
More broadly, he has indicated his agreement with the most controversial aspect of President Obama’s heath care plan, the requirement that every American buy health insurance. Although he now says he is opposed to the so-called individual mandate, in a May 2009 conference call — previously unreported — he told health care executives, “We believe there should be must-carry; that is, everybody should have health insurance, or if you’re an absolute libertarian, we would allow you to post a bond.”
Mr. Gingrich also worked with former Senator Tom Daschle, an early health policy adviser to Mr. Obama, to write a forward to the center’s book on the expansion of electronic health records. “It’s fair to say he was supportive of the goals of health care reform,” Mr. Daschle wrote in a brief e-mail exchange. “And I felt that we were in agreement on some of the principles.”
Mr. Gingrich has defended his support for the prescription drug benefit, and other health care spending, by saying that present costs will be more than offset by future savings. And a spokeswoman for his company, the Center for Health Transformation, Susan Meyers, reiterated Mr. Gingrich’s assertion that he does not lobby. But his dealings with Novo Nordisk show how his center’s policy advocacy could blend with the narrower objectives of its paying members.
Separate from its $200,000-a-year charter membership in the center, Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest producer of insulin, hired Mr. Gingrich to help “position itself as a thought leader” in an initiative to raise awareness of diabetes. A research document prepared in 2003 by the Gingrich Group, a consulting firm related to the health care center, noted that in improving treatment, the company wished to also emphasize insulin-delivery devices that “offer better financial return for Novo.”
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Low-Income America--Are We a 2nd World Country?
One in Two Americans Are Poor
Is this what decline looks like? According to new supplemental data from the Census Bureau, nearly half of Americans—a shocking record number—have fallen under the poverty line or are classified as “low income” and barely scraping by. Many in the middle class have dropped to the low-income threshold, meaning they make less than $45,000 for a family of four, because of pay cuts or spouses losing jobs. They number 97.3 million, and together with the 49.1 million in poverty, they represent about 48 percent of the U.S. population, or 146.4 million. That’s up by 4 million from 2009 numbers.
Is this what decline looks like? According to new supplemental data from the Census Bureau, nearly half of Americans—a shocking record number—have fallen under the poverty line or are classified as “low income” and barely scraping by. Many in the middle class have dropped to the low-income threshold, meaning they make less than $45,000 for a family of four, because of pay cuts or spouses losing jobs. They number 97.3 million, and together with the 49.1 million in poverty, they represent about 48 percent of the U.S. population, or 146.4 million. That’s up by 4 million from 2009 numbers.
From Alice: Furthermore, the "foreclosure tsunami" which has left millions homeless is only about halfway completed. In a few more years, as banks continue to refuse to renogtiate home mortgages, millions more homes will stand vacant.
Progressives Fight for a Free Internet!
Alice,
The Internet is under attack in Congress because some big corporations would rather stifle innovation online than compete against it.
That's why the founders of Google, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia wrote that a bill being considered tomorrow by a powerful House committee "would have a chilling effect on innovation" and "give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China."
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Click here to sign our emergency joint petition with social-news site reddit -- telling Congress to protect the Internet. Then pass it on!
Overnight, thousands have signed.
Some background: YouTube started in a garage. If a big company like Viacom thought a video violated copyright law, Viacom couldn't break YouTube's links or force the kids who invented YouTube to spend millions in court.
Instead, under the law, Viacom would have to contact YouTube and allow YouTube to decide if the complaint had merit. YouTube had a "safe harbor" of time to voluntarily take down an infringing video without penalty.
Because of this due process, early investors in YouTube knew that big corporations couldn't shut down YouTube or litigate YouTube to death. This allowed innovation to thrive.
But if the "Stop Online Piracy Act" passes Congress, all of this would change. Innovative sites could be taken down by others (including the government at the behest of big corporations) without due process -- like in China.
Please sign our emergency petition telling Congress to protect Internet innovation and free speech. Then pass it on!
We'll deliver this petition to Congress and inform you when your representative is about to take a key vote.
Thanks for helping to save the Internet.
-- Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Jason Rosenbaum, Karen Oelschlaeger, Ethan Jucovy, and the PCCC team
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The Internet is under attack in Congress because some big corporations would rather stifle innovation online than compete against it.
That's why the founders of Google, YouTube, Craigslist, and Wikipedia wrote that a bill being considered tomorrow by a powerful House committee "would have a chilling effect on innovation" and "give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China."
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. Click here to sign our emergency joint petition with social-news site reddit -- telling Congress to protect the Internet. Then pass it on!
Overnight, thousands have signed.
Some background: YouTube started in a garage. If a big company like Viacom thought a video violated copyright law, Viacom couldn't break YouTube's links or force the kids who invented YouTube to spend millions in court.
Instead, under the law, Viacom would have to contact YouTube and allow YouTube to decide if the complaint had merit. YouTube had a "safe harbor" of time to voluntarily take down an infringing video without penalty.
Because of this due process, early investors in YouTube knew that big corporations couldn't shut down YouTube or litigate YouTube to death. This allowed innovation to thrive.
But if the "Stop Online Piracy Act" passes Congress, all of this would change. Innovative sites could be taken down by others (including the government at the behest of big corporations) without due process -- like in China.
Please sign our emergency petition telling Congress to protect Internet innovation and free speech. Then pass it on!
We'll deliver this petition to Congress and inform you when your representative is about to take a key vote.
Thanks for helping to save the Internet.
-- Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Jason Rosenbaum, Karen Oelschlaeger, Ethan Jucovy, and the PCCC team
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