Political Economy category archive

The short-term weekly figures getting a little better. (Link fixed.)

Applications for unemployment benefits decreased by 20,000 to 368,000 in the week ended Feb. 26, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast claims would climb to 395,000, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance fell to the lowest level since October 2008.

Among the reasons for increased optimism about the labor market in coming months has been a recent drop in initial claims, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told lawmakers this week. Companies added 200,000 jobs in February, while unemployment rose to 9.1 percent, economists project a Labor Department report to show tomorrow.

(snip)

The four-week moving average, a less volatile measure, dropped to 388,500, the lowest since the week ended July 12, 2008, from 401,250 last week. It was also the first time the monthly average has been below 400,000 since July 2008.

The number of people continuing to collect jobless benefits unexpectedly decreased by 59,000 in the week ended Feb. 19 to 3.77 million.

Writing at the Guardian, Anya Schiffrin considers why business news fails to inform. One possible reason: focusing on the small picture:

Business and economics journalism is not that different from other forms of journalism. Reporters and editors mostly cover events that have already happened, not write about what could happen. They also have a tendency to rely on official and business sources, rather than on person-on-the-street interviews. This is partly because most of the people who read business news are from the worlds of money and business. Historically (the first business news sheets date to the 16th century), they relied on the business press for information that will help their investments. Sadly, this means that press reports about business and economics are often not much help to the ordinary reader trying to understand these subjects.

Remember all those happy-looking retirees in those bathtubs on the telly vision?

They are working actors, probably getting paid minimum scale:

America’s retirement system is said to be a three-legged stool made up of private savings, pension plans, and Social Security. But each leg of the stool is wobbly, while a fourth unacknowledged leg — asset accumulation from home equity — has also taken a huge hit. Absent drastic changes in retirement policy, more elderly Americans will be poor, and many more will be working, often in low-wage jobs, because they can’t afford to retire.

Read the whole thing, especially the part about why the move to 401k’s turned out to be a scam and a fraud has failed the holders of 401k-based retirement plans.

From John Cole:

A unionized public employee, a teabagger, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, then looks at the teabagger and says “Watch out for that union guy—he wants a piece of your cookie!”

This is the type of entitlemennt spending that needs re-examined.

Two years after the San Antonio’s first deployment, which included a weeks-long stop in Bahrain for emergency engine repairs, the ship has yet to return to sea. And in recent months new details that paint an even grimmer picture of the ship’s early years have emerged, including the near- collision in the Suez Canal, which The Virginian-Pilot has not previously reported.

In October, after spending more than $40 million on repairs, the Navy announced that the San Antonio wouldn’t be ready to deploy in the spring with the rest of its amphibious group, and another ship was named to take its place.

While the service has insisted with each setback that the San Antonio eventually will live up to its promises, there has been little to report in the way of progress, because each time crews have come close to fixing one major defect, more have cropped up. Many defects have extended to later ships in the class, though to lesser degrees.

The price tag for taxpayers has been enormous. Delivered several hundred million dollars over budget, the San Antonio has cost nearly $2 billion.

Lots of details at the link,

Keeping home prices within reach (of the moneyed minority):

A total of 831,574 homes that sold in 2010 had received notices of default, auction or repossession, the Irvine, California-based data seller said today in a statement. Properties in distress accounted for almost 26 percent of all home sales last year, down from 29 percent in 2009.

A “bloated supply of foreclosures and weak demand from homebuyers” are depressing the market, James J. Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s chief executive officer, said in the statement. Residential real-estate prices dropped 4.1 percent in the fourth quarter from a year a earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of home values in 20 cities.

Back under 400k. Probably just a blip until the government shuts down:

Applications for jobless benefits decreased by 22,000 to 391,000 in the week ended Feb. 19, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast claims would drop to 405,000, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. Claims have fallen in three of the past four weeks, pushing down the monthly average to the lowest level since July 2008.

You can look at this chart to see what is trickling down:

More charts at Mother Jones.

Via Michael Tomasky.

Shaun Mullen finds some interesting statistics. Follow the link to see what conclusions they lead him to.

Consider that only five states do not have collective bargaining for teachers. Those states’ rankings on ACT/SAT scores are:

South Carolina — 50th
North Carolina — 49th
Georgia — 48th
Texas 47th
Virginia — 44th

Got that? Meanwhile, the states with the highest ACT/SAT rankings all allow collective bargaining:

Iowa — 1st
Minnesota and Wisconsin — 2nd
Kansas — 4th
Nebraska — 5th

Statistics can lie, but these are unambiguous. States that allow teachers to bargain produce better students, and by inference better teachers.

. . . are nil.

Dean Baker, writing at the Guardian, points out that many of those who today crusade against the growing deficit are the same folks who championed the policies of that led to the housing crash, which in turn led to . . . the growing deficit.

A nugget:

When the country actually did face a real economic disaster, these people were nowhere in sight. They were diverting attention to other issues and dismissing those of us who tried to warn of the real danger.

Now that we are experiencing an economic disaster – 25 million people unemployed or underemployed, millions of people facing the loss of their homes, more than 10 million underwater with their mortgages – as a direct result of their incompetence, these same people are telling us again about the urgent need to cut social security and Medicare. The deficit hawks somehow think that their case is more compelling because of the damage done by their incompetence.

It should not work this way. In most lines of work, incompetence is not a credential; it should not be one in designing economic policy either.

In Wisconsin, Republicans reveal their long-tern goals: Rolling the clock back to reinvigorate the meaning of “slave” in the phrase “wage slave.”

Dick Polman explains the rightwing’s union-busting tactics. A nugget (emphasis added):

The new Republican governor’s bold bid to strip public employee unions of their collective-bargaining rights is not just a parochial skirmish about finding money to close the budget deficit. It’s about exploiting that state deficit for political gain, using it as an excuse to declare war, and perhaps eviscerate, the last healthy sector of the labor movement – a strategy nurtured these past four decades by national conservative strategists and their well-heeled backstage business donors.

(snip)

But conservatives smell a greater golden opportunity in all that red ink. They’ve previously ridiculed Rahm Emanuel’s ’08 quip about how “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” but now they’ve adopted it – by launching a radical attack on the core principle of collective bargaining. If successful, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, they might achieve their aim of turning back the clock to the era, circa 1929, when all workers were at the mercy of their employers.

I am not a big fan of individual unions, but for a long time I was in a union job, a member of TCU local 1506, and I held my union card (and paid my dues) for two decades–as long as I was with the railroad–after leaving the union job for management.

By and large, unions have done far more good than bad. They have certainly done far more good for average Americans than has Goldman-Sachs.

Anyone who thinks otherwise needs to read up on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; Harlan County, Kentucky; and the Pullman Strike.

It wasn’t the workers who were packing lead; it was the bosses.

My first father-in-law, one of the finest and fairest men I have ever known, could tell stories of being shot at for his activities on behalf his fellow railroad union members not so long ago.

Dennis G. lines up a fascinating collection of maps through time at Balloon Juice to illustrate trends in labor-management relations–efforts by the plutocracy to keep wages low–as moderated by the states through time. He starts with slavery, moves though convict-labor, and reaches the contempororary era.

I commend it to your attention as context for the Republican attack on workers.

Here’s his bit on the double-talk (emphasis added):

This system of boldly stealing the labor of convicts lasted into the 1930s (and versions of it still can be found in almost every State of the Union). It was FDR and the new Democrats of the New Deal who passed a series of laws that made the theft of labor more difficult and help workers to organize and collectively bargain for a fair and living wage. It work. A great middle class in America was created and for almost fifty years prosperity was shared.

The effort to push back against labor rights started almost immediately. By 1947 this movement was able to pass the Taft Hartley Act and open the door to new restrictions to the rights of workers. By the Reagan era in the 1980s, the movement to steal labor was repackaged and resold to the most gullible and cynical among us. Since then it has picked up a lot of steam. Laws to restrict the rights of workers have been given the very Orwellian name, “Right to Work” laws—as in in you have the right to work, but not the right to come together and ask for a fair deal. In a “Right to Work” State, a worker is on his or her own. The State will always fight against you. You are on your own sucker and you just have to deal with it. In a “Right to Unionize State” you have back-up, regardless of whether or not you work in a Union shop.blockquote>

February 21, 2011 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Political Economy | Bookmark this post

Back over 400K.

Applications for jobless benefits increased by 25,000 to 410,000 in the week ended Feb. 12, exceeding the 400,000 median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, Labor Department figures showed today. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance was little changed, while those collecting extended payments decreased.

A reduction in firings by U.S. firms is needed to keep unemployment going down. Bigger job gains are needed to boost consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of the world’s largest economy.

Two thoughts:

• There will be no increase in consumer spending until the number of consumers who have something to spend increases significantly. The DOW doesn’t spend.
• The unnamed experts forecasting the figures should maybe read the racing form before placing their bets.

Making homes more affordable while reducing wasteful spending on unnecessary frills such as schools, police forces, and fire departments:

FROM WEST GHENT to Bayview, the housing slump took a huge toll on the city in 2010, with banks foreclosing on nearly 1,000 homes. In some neighborhoods, foreclosures outnumbered traditional house sales.

(snip)

Bunn said what Norfolk experienced with its home values is not unlike its neighbors. Virginia Beach’s real estate tax assessments will drop by about 3 percent, Chesapeake by 3.3 percent and Suffolk from 5 to 7 percent, she said. She did not get an answer from Portsmouth leaders about their assessments, she said. Other South Hampton Roads cities are expected to release details soon about their 2010 assessments.

Noticeably under 400k for the first time in a long time:

Applications for jobless benefits decreased by 36,000, more than forecast, to 383,000 in the week ended Feb. 4, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast claims would fall to 410,000, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance fell, while those collecting extended payments increased.

Afterthought:

Next time you complain because the predicted day’s high temperature was off by a couple of degrees or because the forecasted rain started an hour early, stop and consider how ticked off you would be if these unnamed “economists” cited above were predicting the weather.

Addendum:

Elmer Smith at Philly dot com cautions that

It’s all in how the numbers get calculated.

Follow the link for his explanation of the variables.

Hadley Freeman, in the Guardian, dissects the meanness and misogyny lurking in the right wind’s anti-abortion, anti-birth control tactics (emphasis added):

An exciting update on last week’s discussion about how certain US politicians believe that, while some women are unfortunate enough to be raped, not all of them have been raped enough.

Consequently, some right wingers wanted to finish the job politically.

The “forcible rape” tactic succumbed to the derision it deserved, so now the Republicans are looking to a tax increase strategy.

Which leads to a wonder that I’ve wondered before: Why are Republicans so interested in other persons’ private parts?

Still not good:

Applications for jobless benefits decreased by 42,000 to 415,000 in the week ended Jan. 29, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast claims would fall to 420,000, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The total number of people receiving unemployment insurance and those collecting extended payments decreased.

In related news,

The productivity of U.S. workers unexpectedly increased in the fourth quarter at a faster rate as companies sought to contain costs.

The measure of employee output per hour rose at a 2.6 percent annual rate, compared with a revised 2.4 percent gain in the previous three months, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. Economists projected a 2 percent advance, according to the median forecast in a Bloomberg News survey. Labor expenses fell for fifth time in six quarters.

In a Jeremiad against Britain’s proposed cuts in public services, Philip Pullman rips into those who think that everything must be for sale:

Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life.

(snip)

Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days. The greedy ghost understands profit all right. But that’s all. What he doesn’t understand is enterprises that don’t make a profit, because they’re set up to do something different. He doesn’t understand libraries at all, for instance. That branch – how much money did it make last year? Why aren’t you charging higher fines? Why don’t you charge for everything?

Read it.