Political Economy category archive

Still trending slightly down:

Productivity grew at an annual rate of 3.6 percent in the first quarter, better than economists had expected. But it still declined sharply from growth that exceeded 6 percent for each of the previous three quarters.

The job market is improving, according to a second Labor report. Applications for unemployment benefits dropped for a third straight week, decreasing by 7,000 to 444,000.

Double talk decoded by the Philadelphia Inquirer. A nugget:

• Wall Street: A very wealthy, sparsely populated, gated community surrounded by angry hordes of people living in much-diminished circumstances.
• Analyst expectations: Guesses that are heralded when exceeded, but ignored at other times.
• Bonuses: Contractual obligations that reward the undeserving, often disguised as increased salaries, stock options, or temporary fellowships at the U.S. Treasury.

More here.

Concord, Mass., draws a line on the right to dry:

First, the Town of Concord. Next, the world. Environmentalists in Concord scored an important victory last week when residents at Town Meeting passed the state’s first “right to dry’’ measure. Homeowners’ associations and real estate contracts in Concord can no longer prohibit the use of clotheslines.

It does not apply to existing restrictions and compacts.

The story goes on to point out that “a nightlight uses 5 watts of energy, a vacuum cleaner 1,000 watts, a clothes dryer 5,000 watts.”

A reporter at the local rag, in a spirit of experimentation, tries to go 24 hours without using anything made in China. Along the way, she highlights the intertwined networking of a globalized economy.

A nugget:

I check my bath towel as I head for the shower. It was made in India, so no problem. I dry off, then grab my fuzzy bathrobe off the back of the door. Darn! Made in China. But my husband’s terry robe was made in Turkey, so I wear it instead.

The hair dryer is suspect, as is my hairbrush, since the United States imported $8 billion worth of Chinese plastics in 2009, but I cannot go to work with wet hair. My toothbrush says “Assembled in America from U.S. and international components.” How many countries does it take to make a toothbrush?

Transcript.

Lillian Vernon is closing down its operation here, though the brand name will live on:

The owner of Lillian Vernon, the catalog and Internet retailer that has called the city home for 22 years, plans to shutter its headquarters off International Parkway, citing a drop in sales.

Current USA Inc., a stationery and gifts company based in Colorado Springs, Colo., bought Lillian Vernon two years ago and employs about 200 warehouse and call center employees in Hampton Roads. It plans to wind down the Beach operation and terminate all positions there by August 2011.

My parents were on their mailing list, though I can’t recall their ever actually ordering something from them. I used to read the catalog from time to time, usually after finishing reading all the cereal boxes in the house.

I feel sorry for the employees. They didn’t have any say about what went into the catalog.

Still stalled in the high 400,000s. The long-term trends, though, are looking up:

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 456,000, the Labor Department said, resuming a downward trend that had been interrupted by the Easter holiday. Markets had expected 455,000.

Stockholders and management are never responsible. It’s called fiduciary responsibility. Or something.

Delmarva Power is asking state regulators to alter the way its rates are calculated so that ratepayers — rather than stockholders — make up for pension fund investment losses during the financial market collapse in 2009.

Paul Krugman in the Guardian makes the case for financial consumer protection. Short version: “You can’t trust the banksters”:

Last October, I saw a cartoon by Mike Peters in which a teacher asks a student to create a sentence that uses the verb “sacks,” as in looting and pillaging. The student replies: “Goldman Sachs”,

(snip)

The main moral you should draw from the financial crisis, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong – and not just because no such promise would be credible.

The fact is that, however the Goldman Sachs case is resolved, much of the financial industry has become a racket – a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on

The Booman, in a separate post on the same general topic, dissects yet another Republican misdirection play:

(Republicans) don’t oppose reform because they are in the pocket of financial industry lobbyists! Heaven forbid! They are the principled ones here. It’s the Dems who want to screw the country and the little guy by helping the Big Bad Banks.

How soon these Republicans and their conservative disinformation machine want you to forget The Resolution Trust Company created up by Bush Sr. in 1989 to resolve the S & L crisis.

More recently, how quickly they want you to forget Hank Paulson and George Bush and the complete lack of oversight over TARP program that those GOP stalwarts created to bail out the banks that were “too big to fail.”

How quickly they want you to forget Paulson’s behind closed doors threats to Congress that if they didn’t pass the TARP legislation in precisely the manner the Bush administration demanded “that within 24 hours, the entire political structure of the United States would collapse.”

Add to the list another fantastic lie:
“I’m a Republican. I care about the little guy.”

It is truly amazing how much money persons can make for ruining the economy, for putting lots of folks out of work, or for providing nothing whatsoever of value (indeed, in some cases subtracting value from life).

And how little persons earn for adding value to life.

All the Easter Bunnies have been laid off:

More Americans unexpectedly filed initial claims for jobless benefits last week, in part reflecting difficulty in seasonally adjusting the data ahead of the Easter holiday.

Initial jobless applications increased by 18,000 to 460,000 in the week ended April 3, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The week leading up to Easter and the two weeks that follow are traditionally a “volatile time” for claims, a Labor Department analyst said, making it difficult to discern the underlying trend in applications.

The details are rather irrelevant. It’s still in the high 400,000s.

At least it’s holding steady.

This video shows why:

Taken between 1984 and 2009 by NASA’s Landsat 5 satellite, the true-color pictures document the evolution of the Hobet mine in the Appalachian Mountains.

Comment from Blue Virginia:

There’s so much anti-tax rhetoric out there, and of course almost nobody enjoys paying taxes, but Shayna Englin has a great point here that is too often forgotten – without taxes, we wouldn’t have our quality of life, our military, our police and firefighters, Social Security, Medicare, safe food, safe water, Metro, roads, bridges, airports, parks, or just about any other “common good” you can think of. Oh wait, I forgot, Glenn Beck et al. say that taxes are “socialist,” right? No, Glenn, they’re called “American.”

Aside: I wish I owed more taxes this year. That would mean that I made more money.

Via Not Larry Sabato.

Via Balloon Juice.

One of Attorneys General suing to nullify the health care bill is from the State of Washington.

He didn’t tell the governor before he filed suit. She is not happy.

She is most decidedly not happy.

Via John Cole.

A revealing insight into the thinnking of the bonus babies and how they come to believe they are Masters of the Universe.

From the beginning of the essay:

A year on from its brush with Armageddon, the financial services industry has resumed its reckless, self-serving ways It isn’t hard to see why this has aroused simmering rage in normally complacent, pro-capitalist Main Street America. The budget commitments to salvaging the financial sector come to nearly $3 trillion, equivalent to more than $20,000 per federal income tax payer. To add insult to injury, the miscreants have also availed themselves of more welfare programs in the form of lending facilities and guarantees, totaling nearly $12 trillion, not all of which will prove to be money well spent.

Wall Street just looted the public on a massive scale. Having found this to be a wondrously lucrative exercise, it looks set to do it all over again.

I’ve forgotten where I found the link. When I remember, I’ll add the credit.

From the transcript:

The fact is, it’s now been well over a year since the near collapse of the entire financial system – a crisis that helped wipe out more than 8 million jobs and that continues to exact a terrible toll throughout our economy. Yet today the very same system that allowed this turmoil remains in place. No one disputes that. No one denies that reform is needed. So the question we have to answer is very simple: will we learn from this crisis, or will we condemn ourselves to repeat it? That’s what’s at stake.

Krugman:

Back when the Cato Institute first began pushing for individual Social Security accounts, it called its push, well, The Project on Social Security Privatization. As the Bush administration got ready to make its privatization push, however, it became clear that “privatization” polled badly. So the project was renamed The Project on Social Security Choice. And Republicans began bristling at any suggestions that they were proposing privatization, calling that a slander. Really.

If you put a pig in a poke and call it a poodle, it’s still a pig.

Via TPM.

The Brits, seduced by market ideology, which claims that adding marketeers into the mix is always better, have been experimenting with their health care system.

It’s not working. Service is deteriorating, costs are increasing, and the extra money is ending up in the pockets of the marketeers.

And when the private sector does deliver clinical services, it has tended to do so at a more expensive rate than the NHS. According to the health select committee, the work carried out by the first wave of independent sector treatment centres (ISTCs) was 12% more expensive than it would have been had it been undertaken by the NHS. After its first three years of operation, the Manchester ISTC was delivering just 63% of the contracted work it had been paid for.

The business lobby insists that this is all part of the necessary birthing process of the market, but this grand design will turn us into consumers of healthcare, creating ever greater demand. Couple this problem with the fact that private investor-owned firms are profit maximisers, not cost minimisers, and you have a recipe for spiralling healthcare costs. The $2.6 trillion US healthcare system is a great example of this combination.