One of the big dark clouds hanging over our economy is our very close ties to Europe. If the European economy tanks, we will be pulled down with it. This is a fact. S&P has downgraded France and just about everyone else in Europe except for Germany.
France and eight other euro-zone countries suffered ratings downgrades on their sovereign debt Friday, sparking renewed global worries over Europe’s ability to bail itself out of financial crisis.
Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services stripped triple-A ratings from France and Austria and downgraded seven others, including Spain, Italy and Portugal. It retained the triple-A rating on Europe’s No. 1 economy, Germany.
The downgrade to France, the zone’s second-largest economy, will make it harder—and potentially more expensive—for the euro zone’s bailout fund to help troubled states, because the fund’s own triple-A rating depends on those of its constituents. The downgrades also speak to how deeply the concerns over countries on the euro zone’s periphery have penetrated its core.
A new report has just come out from the FCC on AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile. The FCC basically stated that AT&T and T-Mobile are active in almost every major market in the United States. Therefore, a merger would limit competition and increase consumer prices. There should be no surprise to anyone. Considering all the mergers that have occurred over the last decade or so, I haven’t seen one that has been helpful to us, the consumers. Finally, we have a government agency which is standing up for us. Let’s take our time, sit back and bask in the glow because it’s not happen again for another decade or so.
The Occupy Oakland movement decided to stage a general strike today. Many businesses were shut down. We need to support the Occupy movement. This is all about giving American workers a fair shake.
Sometimes it’s hard to recognize some of the things that are happening around us. Sometimes it is easy. Big business has been shipping jobs overseas for the last 30 years. For some reason, there are a number of Americans who believe that giving big business more money will somehow make them keep jobs here in the US. Whirlpool is the latest example of a company that has been slowly but steadily dismantling plants and reassembling them in Mexico.
The problem in this country is that making money isn’t enough. In the Wall Street environment that we have now, you always have to make more money than you did last quarter and more than you did last year. This is an impossible task to do forever, obviously, but Wall Street punishes those who don’t crank up the money machine. So, the fact that Bank of America is making money ain’t enough. They need to make more money. So instead of doing something like earning it, they thought that abusing their own customers was a good idea. They decided that they needed to charge their customers (who are nothing more than little piles of money) a monthly fee to use their stupid ATM cards.
“I, like you, get a little incensed when you think about how much good all of you do, whether it’s volunteer hours, charitable giving we do, serving clients and customers well,” Moynihan said during the Oct. 18 gathering. To the bank’s critics, he said, “You ought to think a little about that before you start yelling at us.”
Really? That’s what he is bringing to the table. We spend a couple of million on charity so we should be able to rip you off for a couple billion in stupid fees? That’s his argument.
As I mentioned before, Americans are tired of being ripped off by American corporations. Maybe BOA didn’t read my blog. Maybe they don’t care about the fact that the American people are in a terrible bind. They don’t have any extra money.
Fact #1: Bank of America continues to smother job creation by refusing to lend to small-businesses:
Bank of America went from being one of the top SBA lenders in 2006, making $415 million in loans to small businesses, to extending just $46 million in loans in 2010, an 89 percent drop. No wonder that Bloomberg reported that Bank of America ranked lowest in a 24-bank survey of small business customer satisfaction.
Fact #2: Bank of America continues to prefer to kick homeowners out of their homes than do permanent, sustainable loan modifications:
After participating in the HAMP program for two-and-a-half years, Bank of America has made permanent loan modifications to just 136,195 families. Meanwhile, they’ve denied or canceled modification for 683,000 families. This means homeowners have a one out of six chance of getting a permanent HAMP modification with Bank of America. In August 2011, the bank granted HAMP trial modifications to just 1% of eligible borrowers, according to a monthly report from the U.S. Treasury.
Fact #3: Bank of America — and to be fair, the other big banks too — is actually increasing homeowner indebtedness, not reducing it:
A report by the Congressional Oversight Panel last December found that nearly 95 percent of active, permanent loan modifications resulted in homeowners actually having a higher unpaid principal balance than before the modification. Translation: even those lucky few who manage to get a mortgage modification from Bank of America still end up deeper in debt than when they started. Keep this in mind every time you hear Bank of America or any other big bank tout big numbers of homeowners they have helped — 95 percent of them are deeper in debt than when they started.
Fact #4: Bank of America continues to be a major threat to American taxpayers:
And the threat just grew by trillions of dollars. Last week, federal bank regulators allowed Bank of America to transfer the riskiest of its crumbling assets from an uninsured Merrill Lynch division to the deposit-insured and discount-window-eligible Bancorp division. As Simon Johnson from MIT wrote, “The move puts the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on the hook for any losses…because the agency can tap a U.S. Treasury line of credit if the fund runs dry, taxpayers could be at risk, too.” This is an unacceptable shift of Wall Street risk onto the American taxpayers, and some are saying the beginning of another backdoor bailout for Bank of America.
Americans can take abuse. You can push us around and you can talk badly about us… for a while. Wall Street darling Netflix was raking in money hand over fist. Who would’ve thought that sending DVDs through the mail could be really, really profitable? Well, the guys at Netflix figured this out. They were on Easy Street. They’d figured out a model for delivering movie content to Americans through multiple different ways – DVDs through the mail, direct download to your TV or direct download to your computer. They had an extremely sweet set-up. Then, during the middle of a recession, they decided to raise prices significantly. They forgot their own business model. They forgot that they were delivering movies to Americans cheaply and easily. Without regard to the cheapness, Americans can go and rent a movie at any number of locations or even buy the movie, at a pretty cheap price. Americans were not happy. We spoke loudly and clearly by canceling subscriptions to Netflix – left and right. The reaction was so swift and sudden that we saw something in the United States that we haven’t seen for decades – a CEO actually apologizing to the American people. It may be too little, too late. (I bet you the board will fire him.)
There are very few geniuses who actually touch all of our lives the way Steve Jobs has. Off the top my head, I can think of Thomas Edison, Alexander Bell and Einstein. But the neat thing about Steve Jobs was that he did not hide from the public. As a matter of fact, he embraced the public like no CEO did before him. When a new product was introduced, it wasn’t some gorgeous Madison Avenue model, or even that paid spokesman with the impossibly deep voice and perfect enunciation, it was Steve Jobs who took mic in hand and introduced the product. He understood his audience. He knew the best way to connect with his audience was to get up and do it himself. It worked like a charm.
G4
Briefly, I would like to touch on some of the great things that Steve Jobs helped bring to the public. First of all, let me clear the air and say that I’m not really an Apple guy. I’ve never owned an Apple computer. I’ve looked at them really, really closely but have never bought one. There are those among us, and you know the type, who have an Apple computer and will never own another computer. They love it. They don’t just sort of like it. They don’t sort of tolerate it. They love it. They love the way it functions, its reliability, the Apple community. So, in my mind, the first thing that separated Apple from the rest of field was a Macintosh computer. It was light years ahead of its competitors. It was fast. It was easy to use. It was actually practical in a time when computers were clunky and difficult to use and crashed all the time. The Macintosh was a stroke of genius.
Steve Jobs was fired from Apple Computers in 1985. The absolute stupidity and craziness of that decision became more and more evident with Apple’s decline over the next decade. Apple rehired Steve Jobs in 1996. The result of Steve Jobs being back in the driver seat was the iMac. This was followed by the G4, which was classified as a “supercomputer”. Seriously. This computer was such a game changer that it was illegal to take a G4 out of the country for several years. Finally, in 2001, the iPod came out. The iPod, too, was a game changer. Apple had broken out of the mold of catering only to geeks and nerds. Now, anybody can download music and have high quality audio anywhere they went. You just had this little wheel you needed to use. And this is the genius of Steve Jobs. I don’t think that he actually invented any new technology. I could be wrong. Instead, he took existing technology wo that his engineers could repackage it in an attractive user interface and he sold it to the public. It was the interface that was his genius. Think about the iPod for just a second. Sony really had a leg up in personal audio. They’d introduced the Walkman more than a decade earlier. Although the Walkman was a breakthrough for it’s time, it never evolved into something better. Sony completely dropped the ball. There are several other Walkman-like products and devices that were difficult to use and couldn’t really interface with your computer well. They were a pain. The iPod erased all that. A couple years later, Steve Jobs came out with the iPhone. Again, he did not invent the cellular phone. He did make a phone that was more compact. He made a phone that had more features than we could ever imagine. Most importantly, you had the easy user interface. Your grandmother can use an iPhone. That was the genius of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was one of those geniuses who touch our lives in a personal way. If you don’t have an iPod or an iPhone then you know somebody who does. He will be sorely missed by all of us.
Update: I found this on GeekBeat.TV. It is funny and touching and true.
American born terrorist was killed in Yemen. Details of how he died and who killed him are unclear at this time. Anwar al-Awlaki was the Qaeda leader who inspired Major Nidal Malik Hasan to shoot up an Army base in Foot Hood, Tx.
Regulatory uncertainty leads to hiring stalemate. Not so much.
Our GDP is slightly better than we thought it was.
I talked about this case earlier, but I think there’s a real question as to whether Rick Perry, who stated that he sleeps well, allowed an innocent man to be executed.
It’s important to remember that it is still extremely early in the political season. Eight years ago Wesley Clark was leading the Democratic field with 22% of the support, followed by Howard Dean at 13%, John Kerry with 11%, and Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieverman with 11% and 10 %, respectively.
The Senate has filibustered a huge number of Obama’s appointments to the federal bench. It appears that Harry Reid has figured out how to get some of these nominees through the Senate.
In the category of the world gone crazy, “actress” and model Holly Madisonhas insured her breasts for $1 million.
We asked experts, and most told us that while there is relatively little scholarship on the issue, the evidence so far is that the overall effect on jobs is minimal. Regulations do destroy some jobs, but they also create others. Mostly, they just shift jobs within the economy.
“The effects on jobs are negligible. They’re not job-creating or job-destroying on average,” said Richard Morgenstern, who served in the EPA from the Reagan to Clinton years and is now at Resources for the Future, a nonpartisan think tank.
Almost a decade ago, Morgenstern and some colleagues published research on the effects of regulation [PDF] using ten years’ worth of Census data on four different polluting industries. They found that when new environmental regulation was applied, higher production costs pushed up prices, resulting in lost sales for businesses and some lost jobs, but the job losses were also offset by new jobs created in pollution abatement.
“There are many instances of regulation causing a specific industry to lose jobs,” said Roger Noll, co-director of the Program on Regulatory Policy at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Noll cited outright bans of products—such as choloroflorocarbons or leaded gasoline—as the clearest examples.
Solyndra executives were summoned to Capitol Hill yesterday. They took the fifth. This is curious.
There’s more going on in Wisconsin with regards to Governor Scott Walker and some secret investigation. Scott Walker’s spokesman has received immunity. This can’t be good.
Sometimes, government is hard. Other times, it’s just politics. It appears that a government shutdown is on the horizon, again. The Republicans have not given up on insisting on funding cuts before funding FEMA disaster relief.
I find it kind of amusing that we are instructing Europe to be more aggressive on their debt crisis. This is in spite of the fact that we really haven’t solve our own debt crisis.
Scientists at Penn State College of Medicine announced that they have found a virus capable of killing breast cancer within seven days. If this is true and if there are no untoward side effects, like getting some other type of cancer, this would be a huge breakthrough.
Michele Bachmann during last week’s debates basically proposed no taxes. I’m not talking about a system with fewer taxes. I’m talking about a system without any taxes. I guess that government would run on a voluntary basis. There would be no military. There would be no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. There would be nothing. No disaster relief. The crazy, irrational philosopher, Ayn Rand, would be proud.
For quite some time now, some money gurus have been touting the safe haven of gold. After yesterday’s losses, I’m guessing that gold and silver aren’t that safe anymore.
One of the darlings of Wall Street has been this company called GroupOn. Just like every other phrase on Wall Street, Groupon was initially overvalued at $20 billion. Its revenues were nowhere near this lofty number. There seems to be some accounting irregularities which reduce the revenue from over $700 million to $312.9 million. That’s a huge accounting discrepancy.
I’ve been extremely critical of Hewlett-Packard. I think that they’ve lost their way. They have fired their old CEO and have hired eBay’s old CEO Meg Whitman. She’s got a lot of work to do.
The NRA is confused and delusional. They seem to be upset that Obama has done what he said he was going to do. Nothing. He wasn’t going to touch gun control. That simple task of Obama’s sticking to his promise has gotten the NRA in a twist. Read this craziness.
Is Putin back in as the Russian president? Nice gig if you can get it.
UBS CEO has stepped down over the $2 billion losses. Remember, I mentioned several days ago that a “rogue” trader lost $2 billion at UBS. I think that it is important to point out the wink, wink, nod, nod that is going on here. This trader wasn’t a rogue. He was just the same as those other knuckleheads. Matt Taibbi put it this way –
They’re not “rogue” for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. Hell, they don’t call these guys “rogue traders” when they make a billion dollars gambling.
The only thing that differentiates a “rogue” trader like Barings villain Nick Leeson from a Lloyd Blankfein, Dick Fuld, John Thain, or someone like AIG’s Joe Cassano, is that those other guys are more senior and their lunatic, catastrophic decisions were authorized (and yes, I know that Cassano wasn’t an investment banker, technically – but he was in financial services).
In the financial press you’re called a “rogue trader” if you’re some overperspired 28 year-old newbie who bypasses internal audits and quality control to make a disastrous trade that could sink the company. But if you’re a well-groomed 60 year-old CEO who uses his authority to ignore quality control and internal audits in order to make disastrous trades that could sink the company, you get a bailout, a bonus, and heroic treatment in an Andrew Ross Sorkin book.
Right on cue, Larry Flynt, founder of Hustler magazine, has offered $1 million for anyone who has proof of a sexual affair with Rick Perry.
Cain wins Florida straw poll. Interestingly, Michele Bachmann finished last. She finished behind – Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich (who has gotten no traction at all) and Jon Huntsman.
What’s on your mind? What stories are you following?
Troy Davis is scheduled for execution later on today. His final appeal has been denied. In my opinion, the question is whether justice be served by executing Troy Davis. Will we be safer?
If you are seen in the company of extremists, does that make you out of the mainstream? Who’s that with Rick Perry? (By the way, I do not play the game of guilty by association. I think the game is wrong and dangerous.)
American hikers who have been jailed for espionage (being stupid beyond belief) have been released from an Iranian jail. Look for them to be hitting all the media outlets by tomorrow morning or late tomorrow afternoon at the latest.
Reports are circulating that the Hewlett-Packard board may be looking to boot out the CEO.
The Fed’s instituting Operation Twist seems to have stocks falling. I’m guessing that investors are not believing in the wisdom of the Fed.
Existing home sales rose in August. This looks like speculators taking advantage of a depressed market rather than homeowners buying houses. If we immediately stop construction on all new homes, we still have an eight months’ supply of empty, unoccupied houses.
Former first Lieutenant Dan Choi who was an outspoken critic of don’t ask, don’t tell was one of the first to reenlist once this awfully destructive law was repealed. Now this is patriotism.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup have all been downgraded by Moody’s. Over the next few days, we should figure out what this means. I don’t see how this can be good for the average American.
Finally, several Republican members of Congress have written Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and have basically asked him not to help the economy. Really? How does this help Main Street? Politicians are always talking about helping Main Street. One of these guys can step up and at least propose something that’s going to help – MainStreet.
Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC news analyst, has been trying to change his soft and milquetoast image. He’s been trying to be a little bit more forceful. He had a segment the other night where he went after Rudy Giuliani. Now, I have no love for Rudy Giuliani. I think that there are very few people outside of the Bush administration who exploited 9/11 more than “America’s Mayor.” I’m not sure why Lawrence O’Donnell decided that this was a good time to go after Rudy Giuliani since he’s not running for office and we’re still approximately two weeks away from the anniversary of 9/11. Yet, it’s hard to argue with his points.
Representative Allen Westconsiders leaving the Congressional Black Caucus. Really? Who cares?
Three graphs which you should show anyone who tries to tell you that Obama is spending “too much.”
Where were the Tea Party dudes when Bush was spending and spending? One supplemental spending bill after another was passed without much fuss from Republicans.
Although I would be the first to admit that the stimulus did not go far enough and did not help as many people as intended, it is clear that the stimulus stopped our trend of hemorrhaging jobs.
I do not support the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. I cannot remember any merger over the last 10-15 years which has actually benefited the American people. Mergers like these decrease competition and increase the monopolistic tendencies of these huge companies.
A suspicious package was delivered to an Army base. Three people who handled the package developed a mysterious rash. I’m not sure what this is.
Remember all of those secret flights carrying those terrorism suspects to places unknown? It looks like the court has shed some light on this subject.
Please file this under – You’ve Got to Be Kidding Me. The Florida legislature spent time, effort and brainpower passing a bill which bans saggy pants on college campuses. As a matter fact, a Florida legislator stood on one of the Florida campuses and handed out belts to those who “needed it.” Florida’s unemployment rate currently sits at 10.9%. Instead of trying to find jobs the Florida legislature is sitting around passing laws about style. This is so wrong I do not know where to begin.
Do you remember the scene from the movie, Back to the Future, where Marty is transported back to 1955 and he is walking through the town square and sees a gas station? A car pulls up and instantly three or four service attendants come out to wash the windshield and to put air in the tires and a fill up the car with gas. That scene used to happen throughout the United States. It was called service. Major corporations used to give us more than we expected. We would ask for X and they would deliver X plus Y. Those days are long gone. Now when we asked for X, we are hoping against hope that we can actually get X and not have to settle for something less.
One of the best industries for shafting the American people is the wireless companies. I wish I could tell you there was a difference between the wireless companies. There may be, but I haven’t seen it. Whether it’s Sprint, Verizon, AT&T or any of the others, they are all set up to suck money out of our pockets and to provide as little service as possible. Several days ago, I took my wife to buy a new phone. Her old cell phone was giving us a white screen. None of the buttons would activate anything. The first thing they tell you is to take out the battery and then put the battery back in. This is supposed to have some magical powers. Of course, it did not work.
Upon entering the store we were asked to put our name on a list so that we could wait. While waiting, we were “encouraged” to browse. (I won’t even get into how ridiculous it is that there isn’t somebody in the store who can help you right away or within five minutes.) So we looked at several phones and I tried to find out which phone my wife will like best. Do you like the slide-out keyboard or would you prefer to type messages on the screen? After about 20 minutes, a service associate (I know, the name is laughable) asks if she can help us. I explained that my wife’s phone has died and that we would like to buy this new phone right here. The associate states that she’s happy to help us, but that she can send us that exact phone in three days. Unfortunately, they don’t have any of those phones in stock. No store does. So, basically, they’ve put out this shiny, new, really cool phone but it is not available. Nowhere have they written that this phone is not available and won’t be out for several days. Instead, they are advertising and signage in the store has led us to believe that this phone is just like all the other phones in the store which are available for purchase right now. At the very least, this is false advertising. At the most it’s fraud.
For reasons that are unclear, buying a cell phone is different than buying a camera or a loaf of bread. When buying a camera or loaf of bread you simply go and pay for it and within a couple minutes you walk out of the store with your loaf of bread or the camera. When buying a cell phone, there is a 20-minute process where the sales associate is playing video games (clicking on the computer) and trying to sell you more stuff (trying to suck more money out of your pocket). Finally, we decide to go ahead and order the phone and have it delivered via FedEx on Monday.
This means that my wife has a cell phone that doesn’t work for several days. The sales associate did nothing to try to fix the phone. She basically referred to the “white screen of death.” It was as if the phone was unfixable. Well, I’m somewhat hardheaded. I spent an hour surfing the Internet and I download a new operating system for my wife’s Blackberry. Although it takes a while to download and reload all of the applications, I get my wife’s cell phone to work which is something the sales associate should’ve done in the store. This is simply another example of how big business is set up to suck money out of our wallets while providing just enough service to prevent you from coming across the counter and physically assaulting the personnel.
The story continues. Got a nice e-mail on Sunday with a tracking number. Cool. You could see that the cell phone was in Memphis, Tennessee. Knowing the way the overnight delivery service works, everything looks cool. On Monday morning, it was clear the cell phone was not going to be delivered as promised. The delivery date was changed from Monday to Tuesday. So, to increase my level of frustration, I decide to call my cell phone provider. After more than an hour on the phone, nobody admits that they out and out lied to me when they told me the cell phone would be delivered on Monday morning. Instead, I got the old “corporate shuffle” where the call is routed through multiple different people before I get the excuse – there is so much demand there probably weren’t any cell phones at the warehouse. Now, the new delivery date is today. Whatever. I’m still waiting for the new cell phone.I have now fixed my wife’s old cell phone and it works just fine. If the new cell phone does not arrive within the next couple of hours, they can keep it.
My point for writing this is not to point out my own personal frustrations but instead to point out that this frustration is universal. Today, I’m complaining about my cell phone provider but tomorrow it could be my home computer, my car, my television or the plumbing in my house. The fact is, as Americans, we need to demand better. We work hard for our money and we should get both products and service for our hard-earned dollars. What are your thoughts? Are you mad and frustrated, too? How can we make big business more responsive to our needs?
Update: So the much-anticipated cell phone arrives. The setup was relatively easy. The activation was easy. Unfortunately, it takes no time at all to find out there’s a huge problem. Every time you try to make a call, the cell phone asks you to reenter the number. If it happened every now and then, I would ignore it but it happened every time. See video –
So, I call my cellular phone company. I spent 42 min. on the phone without resolution. The good news, I guess it’s good news, is that we generated a technical support ticket. The bad news, is I’m not sure what this means and it doesn’t fix my cell phone. Is the problem with the phone? Is the problem with the cellular phone company? After 42 min. on the phone my technical support “expert” can’t answer that question.
With everything still in limbo, I call again this morning. My new technical support guru tells me that this is a security measure because I’ve placed parental controls on this phone. He assures me after removing the parental controls the phone should work just normally. Okay. The parental controls are removed and like magic, the phone works just fine. What is the take-home message of the last five days? Well, I guess one of the take-home messages is that my time is completely worthless. Including the time that I spent wandering around the cell phone store, calling technical support, calling customer service this whole ordeal has taken more than four hours out of my life.my cell phone company really doesn’t care about wasting my time. What are your thoughts?
I don’t understand the country’s conniption over the Casey Anthony verdict. Some people were simply apoplectic. We need to get a grab on reality. We need to be upset over Republicans’ refusal to renew the debt ceiling. We need to be upset at the fact that Republicans are refusing to stimulate job growth which would ease the symptoms of this economic slowdown for millions of Americans. We need to focus less on the sensational trials and more on the fact that jobs are being shipped overseas and wages are stagnant and have been for more than 20 years.
Huge dust storm envelops Phoenix. The airport was shut down for over an hour. Now, that’s a dust storm.
Mentally deranged man is being detained for mental health evaluation after threatening to kill the President.
When I was on the air regularly, there are times when I was talking and it seemed to me that I was not as engaged in what I was talking about as I should’ve been. I think the same thing happen to Republican presidential candidate and former Senator Rick Santorum. He stated, on-air, that “they (the Obama administration) created only 240 million jobs.” Misspeaking is not his only problem. The problem is that his error was pointed out and he doggedly stuck to it. He didn’t realize that he was off by a factor of 100. The total number of jobs in the United States is only about 130 million. Our population is only 311 million. To me, the take-home lesson is be aware of the facts and if you make a mistake correct it.
To everyone who follow sports, it was clear that Roger Clemens had taken some sort of performance enhancing drug. Yet, he sat in front of Congress and simply lied. Now, his trial for perjury begins. I think it is a separate question whether drugs should or should not be allowed in professional sports. The question is should you be able to sit in front of Congress and lie like Jim Carrey‘s character in the movie Liar Liar.
America’s education system is in a sad state of affairs. Many students are not learning the information that is necessary to make them successful in this hyper-competitive, technology-based society. So, it is extremely disheartening to find out that over 150 teachers and principals in Atlanta have been caught up in a cheating scandal. As a reflex, I would like to take the side of the hard-working teachers and principals, but there really is no excuse. I understand they’ve been put under increased scrutiny and pressure and have not been given the resources to adequately complete their tasks, but there is no excuse.
American businesses are sitting on cash. A lot of this cash could be used to expand business and hire workers but it isn’t happening.
A study by the Labor Department was supposed come out four years ago. This study was supposed (may need a subscription) to look at workers who have lost their jobs and have been “retrained” to qualify for higher paying jobs. I’m not sure we need to study. I think it is pretty clear that once a middle-aged worker loses a manufacturing job the majority of these workers end up in the service sector which cuts their pay approximately in half.
A new study questions whether too many angioplasties are performed in United States. All I know is if I’m having chest pain and I have other signs and symptoms of a heart attack I want an angioplasty by a qualified cardiologist because that could save my life. Also, when you have a patient that comes back to the ER with recurrent chest pain and you can’t find an etiology and cardiology is finally consult it and finds a mild coronary artery lesion should they stent that as the possible problem for the chest pain? I’m just asking.
The online magazine Mother Jones has a section of a huge graphic called Capital Gain which simply asks the question of whether Congress can really represent the American people. With the median net worth of American families being approximately $120,000 and the median net worth of the members of Congress being $912,000. In our general population one and 22 Americans are millionaires. In Congress, nearly half of every congressman is a millionaire. The combined net worth of the top 10 members (richest members) is $2.8 billion. All 10 of these members voted to extend the Bush tax cuts. So, does Congress represent us?
So what articles are you following? So what’s on your mind?
After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:
“Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period,corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”
The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”
Republicans, as far as I know, have always been and always will be all business, all the time. They are huge supporters of capitalism and, more importantly, unfettered capitalism. They do not believe that capitalism should be restrained by silly government regulations (to them, all regulations are silly). The rest of us understand that unfettered capitalism leads to massive abuse of workers, of customers and of other businesses. The rest of us understand that without appropriate controls capitalism is not about competition but instead it is about crushing your opponents. Capitalism is about making money and that’s it. Yesterday we saw another example of unfettered capitalism – Massey Energy. Massey Energy appears to have wanted to do just about anything in order to make money. Cut corners? Okay, as long as we can make money. Risk miner safety? Okay, as long as we can make money. This is an example of why we need a government big enough to stand up to folks like Massey Energy.
Massey Energy Co. could have prevented the West Virginia mine explosion that killed 29 workers last year and the company failed to disclose some hazards in reports it provided to government inspectors, federal safety officials said Wednesday.
Patricia Smith, the U.S. Labor Department’s top lawyer, said not recording hazards where required was a potential criminal violation of the Mine Act and “we have notified the U.S. attorney of that.”
The Justice Department’s probe of the accident is continuing, it said recently. Its investigation has so far resulted in a criminal indictment against the former head of safety at the Upper Big Branch mine for allegedly attempting to destroy evidence. He has pleaded not guilty.
The April 2010 explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., was the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster in 40 years. It resulted in several wrongful-death lawsuits against Massey and led to the resignation of the company’s chief executive and the sale of Massey to Alpha Natural Resources Inc. of Abingdon, Va.
At a briefing Wednesday in Beaver, W.Va., Kevin Stricklin, coal administrator for mine safety and health at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, said, “We found there to be two sets of books” kept by Massey. (more…)
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this morning finds that 44 percent, a plurality, of Americans think the economy is getting worse, rather than staying the same or getting better. With unemployment hovering around 9.6 percent while economic inequality is at levels not seen since the Depression, many Americans feel as if the economy is leaving them behind.
The Wall Street Journal reports today that Corporate America certainly isn’t doing its part to help bring America out of its economic malaise. The paper surveyed employment data by some of the nation’s largest corporations — General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle — and found that they cut their workforces by 2.9 million people over the last decade while hiring 2.4 million people overseas.
The paper notes that this is actually a sharp reversal from trends in the late 1990s, when these major companies were creating more jobs in the United States than overseas. Yet by 2001, things took a turn for the worse, and these corporations have been adding more jobs abroad than at home, as is illustrated here:
Under George W. Bush, Wall Street said nothing as the Bush administration enacted three major tax cuts in four years. None of the tax cuts were paid for. There were no major spending cuts proposed to offset the tax cuts. Wall Street sat silent. The Bush administration started two major wars. Again, none of this was paid for. The Bush adminstration did nothing to try to raise capital to pay for the wars and Wall Street was silent. Now we are coming out of a recession. It is imperative that the government spends money in order to get us out of the recession. Suddenly, Wall Street has something to say about our debt ratio! This is the same rating agency that rubber stamped garbage mortgage derivatives as AAA and AA. Now, I’m sure this is not politically motivated. They’re just warning the United States about our debt ratio. Interesting.
The threat of a downgrade raises the stakes in the struggle between President Obama’s Democratic administration and his Republican opponents in the House to get control over a nearly $1.4 trillion budget deficit and $14.27 trillion debt burden.
The White House last week announced plans to trim $4 trillion from the deficit over the next 12 years, mostly through spending cuts and tax hikes on the rich. Congressional Republicans want deeper spending cuts and no tax increases.
The deficit problem has become crushing since the financial crisis of 2008. Now for every dollar the federal government spends, it takes in less than 60 cents in revenue.
A budget deficit running at nearly 10 percent of output and expected to grow will likely further swell a public debt load that’s already more than 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
“Because the U.S. has, relative to its AAA peers, what we consider to be very large budget deficits and rising government indebtedness, and the path to addressing these is not clear to us, we have revised our outlook on the long-term rating to negative from stable,” S&P said.
Even so, Austan Goolsbee, the top economist at the White House, downplayed S&P’s move, telling CNBC on Monday it was a “political judgment” that “we don’t agree with.
DoubleLine Chief Executive Jeffrey Gundlach said on Monday that the S&P warning “should serve as an effective cattle prod in pushing the politicians toward a program of spending cuts and tax increases.” (more…)
Work isn’t valued. Making money is valued but work isn’t. If work were valued, then workers would be paid more. No one would ever think about cutting wages or killing pensions if work were valued.
Over the last 30 years there has been very modest wage growth for the typical worker. This is not because the economy was weak and employers were strapped for cash or profits. The economy enjoyed soaring productivity between 1980 and 2009. The Figure compares median wage growth over that period to average gross domestic product growth per worker, a measure of what each individual worker, on average, contributed to the overall economy. This is equivalent to the growth of income per worker as well. While average income per worker grew 59.0%, median wages grew by just 11.2%. Over this same period the amount of wealth (household assets less liabilities) per worker grew by 63.7%.
This modest wage growth was not the result of a broken economy: rather, modest wage growth is the result of the way the economy has been designed to work. Essentially, economic policy of the last three decades has not supported good jobs. The focus instead has been on policies that claimed to make consumers better off through lower prices: deregulation of industries, privatization of public services, the weakening of labor standards such as the minimum wage, erosion of the social safety net, expanding globalization, and the move toward fewer and weaker unions. These policies have served to undercut the bargaining power of most workers, widen wage inequality, and deplete access to good jobs. In the last 10 years, even workers with a college degree have failed to see any real wage growth.
Military helicopters dropping water on crippled nuclear power plant in Japan
One of these days we’re gonna finally understand that corporations exist to make money by “any means necessary.” For many Americans this comes as a surprise. Some of us want to believe that corporations exist to live in harmony with their environment. We want to believe the hype. We want to believe that British Petroleum cares about the environment. We want to believe that cute dancing elephants are truly happy that GE is using their imagination to create jet engines that are eco-friendly. We desperately want to believe. We want to believe that corporations are good and not evil. This isn’t about good and evil. This is not about right and wrong. This is about making money and capitalism and Americans living with big business.
If we want capitalism to work we have to provide it the appropriate framework. We found out in the 1880s and 1890s that unbridled capitalism corrupts our government and subjects our population to ridiculously low wages and no hope of opportunity. It is well documented how corporations simply bought politicians. Now, the buying of politicians is more subtle. It’s called campaign contributions. It’s called cushy executive posts when you retire from Congress. Smart, enforceable regulations are required to keep business working for us. We cannot have disasters in the Gulf. We cannot have nuclear reactors melting down, for any reason. We cannot have our environment destroyed because business tried to cut corners.
The New York Times reports that G.E. marketed the Mark 1 boiling water reactors, used in TEPCO’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, as cheaper to build than other reactors because they used a comparatively smaller and less expensive containment structure.
Yet American safety officials have long thought the smaller design more vulnerable to explosion and rupture in emergencies than competing designs. (By the way, the same design is used in 23 American nuclear reactors at 16 plants.)
In the mid-1980s, Harold Denton, then an official with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said Mark 1 reactors had a 90 percent probability of bursting should the fuel rods overheat and melt in an accident. A follow-up report from a study group convened by the Commission concluded that “Mark 1 failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.”
Errington C. Thompson, MD, is a surgeon, scholar, full-time sports fan and part-time political activist. He is active in a number of community projects and initiatives. Through medicine, he strives to improve the physical health of all he treats...
