The Real News About Jobs and Wages — An Ode to Labor Day Robert Reich
Reading, Writing and Reaganism TPM (hat tip reader Scott)
State and Local Employment and Spending Trends Menzie Chinn
An Insider look at Ginnie Mae MBS Bruce Krasting
Bill Would Declare Your Blog a Weapon Slashdot (hat tip reader Scott)
Max Hastings on Churchill’s fighting spirit Financial Times
Antidote du jour. From the BBC:
The saola, an ox-like animal only discovered in 1992, is on the brink of extinction according to biologists. There are only a few dozen left, along the Vietnam-Laos border. Scientists from the International Union for Conservation of Nature say a big reduction in hunting is needed to save them.
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I dunno. An ox is a castrated bull.
An ox is a castrated bull. Steer, unless you were making a clever joke I’m missing. But I’m from flyover country, where we’re expected to be familiar with such things. Just not overly familiar. :D
I generally disagree with Reich, but this latest article is spot-on. He gets back to the point that this economic crisis was not just borne out of excessive bank leverage or deregulation(though that certainly helped and was most contagious). Leverage and deregulation only become real problems when there are a lot of debts that can’t be repaid, and middle America’s ability to pay back those debts is deteriorating rapidly.
The candyland created by Congressional pressure on FASB and a concerted effort at optimism have concealed the ongoing degradation. I sometimes wonder whether it can indefinitely: after all, it’s not all that different from cash-out HELOCs, which lasted far longer than I could’ve imagined. But it did come to an end, and so too will this, at some point. Without wages or revenues, there’s just no way to keep swimming upstream forever.
I recently to visit your blog, reading, I very much enjoy, and above the content is great.
An alternative take on the Churchill legacy presented by Pat Buchanan: http://bit.ly/10gwos
Title: “Churchill Spurred the Decline of the West”
Yves, I thought this issue might in the links today:
http://gawker.com/5352827/——gq—
Basically, this is the closest I have seen to open acknowledgement of a ‘controlled’ press. Condé Nast worked to hide a story criticizing Putin!
Max Hastings in ‘On Churchill’s fighting spirit’ said: “After Dunkirk, more than a few members of the ruling class thought the only rational course was to make peace.”
And yet rationality was not to prevail in Great Britain. Nor was it to prevail in Russia, where the level of privation, suffering and death was to totally eclipse that of England. C.L. Sulzberger in “History of World War II” says it is believed that, during the seige of Leningrad alone, some one million of the city’s three million residents perished.
“We are proud to have the honour of fighting alone for the things that matter much more than life and death,” Eleanor Silsby, an elderly psychology lecturer living in south London, is quoted as saying.
Leo Tolstoy in “War and Peace” called it “some unknown x.” “This x is the spirit of an army, that is, the greater or lesser readiness to fight and face danger on the part of all the men composing the army, quite apart from whether they are or are not fighting under the command of a genius, or in a two- or three-line formation, with cudgels or with firearms that repeat thirty times a minute.” Tolstoy theorizes this spirit is key to winning battles and wars, but is seldom acknowled by military experts. In guerilla warfare, he notes, its imortance is even more pronounced.
What makes this willingness to fight on in the face of overwhelming odds–this “irrational” behavior, this “spirit”–even more compelling in the case of England and Russia is that it stands at complete odds with the regnant ideologies of both countries. For at the foundation of both capitalism and communism lies a common claim, and that is that interest should rule supreme in political matters.
All of us are familiar with how materialism is deemed to be the be all and end all of a capitalist country like Great Britain, but the same holds true for a country like communist Russia as well. In fact, perhaps even more so. As Hannah Arendt points out in “On Revolution,” Marx
“saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind every violence, transgression, and violation. And since he…equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very centre of human endeavour.”
It is unfathomable to me how easily this noxious belief has become so popular in America, especially in the last 30 years. It has done so in spite of the fact that all great men like Winston Churchill stand in such stark contradiction to it. How quick we forget the revolutionary spirit exuded by Patrick Henry’s when he proclaimed “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” or by Martin Luther King when he stated: “I would rather die in abject poverty with my convictions than live in inordinate riches with the lack of self-respect.”
“Things of fundamental importance to people are not secured by reason alone,” said Gandhi, “but have to be purchased with their suffering.” “Suffering is infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle…”
Nope, ndk. Steers are castrated young and raised for beef, to be slaughtered usually at 3. Oxen are trained and raised to maturity as beasts-of-burden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ox
But then maybe oxen are no longer common is tractor country.
My only point was that ox is not a name of a breed or species, so to compare another species to an ox is a category mistake.
But then maybe oxen are no longer common is tractor country.
My only point was that ox is not a name of a breed or species, so to compare another species to an ox is a category mistake.
Well, I’ll be danged. I was always certain there was a specific “Ox” beast of burden related to the bovine. This sure would explain why the county fair never has any on display.
I’m a little smarter this morning. Thanks for pitching in. :D
From Menzi Chinn’s article:
“For these reasons, an effective stimulus law would have allocated state and local government something from 4 percent (its share of layoffs) to 14 percent (its share of employment) of its funds.”
It is of more then passing interest that the option of cutting local salaries/ benefits is nowhere in sight.
If we decry the influence of Big Business on Congress, we have overlook the equally potent influence of Civil Service Unions on local government.
The older idea of Civil Service was to pay a lower current wage in return for job stability and a pension. The CS unions were able to raise the wages to and above prevailing rates, but still kept the protection and the (now bloated) pensions. The effects is an increase in taxation needed by local communities to pay
From Menzi Chinn’s article:
“For these reasons, an effective stimulus law would have allocated state and local government something from 4 percent (its share of layoffs) to 14 percent (its share of employment) of its funds.”
It is of more then passing interest that the option of cutting local salaries/ benefits is nowhere in sight.
If we decry the influence of Big Business on Congress, we have overlook the equally potent influence of Civil Service Unions on local government.
The older idea of Civil Service was to pay a lower current wage in return for job stability and a pension. The CS unions were able to raise the wages to and above prevailing rates, but still kept the protection and the (now bloated) pensions. The effects is an increase in taxation needed by local communities to pay these wages and benefits.
The effects of the taxes are usually regressive and certainly has its effect on housing foreclosure.
@Ray Duray
Re: The Patrick Buchanan link
I usually don’t bother to respond to the nonsese of fools, but in this case I am going to make an exception.
Those like Buchanan who dismiss the threat that Hitler posed are certainly nothing new. As George Orwell put it: “Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard.”
But Buchanan goes much further than this. He actually defends Hitler. He rattles off a long list of crimes which Churchill and England supposedly committed, then implies a moral equivalency between those and the crimes committed by Hitler. This, of course, is nothing but blathering nonsense. But how does one explain such perverse logic? Again, perhaps Orwell provides the needed insight:
“With all its injustices, England is still the land of habeas corpus, and the overwhelming majority of English people have no experience of violence or illegality. If you have growen up in that sort of atmosphere it is not at all easy to imagine what a despotic regime is like… To people of that kind such things as purges, secret police, summary executions, imprisonment without trial, etc., etc., are too remote to be terrifying. They can swallow totalitrianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism.”
Buchanan is a member of the loony right. He is a fixture on the bread and circuses of cable news, not despite, but precisely because of the outrageousness of his views. Even so, it seems that the right’s teabaggers and death panels, accusations concerning Obama’s citizenship, protests over his addressing school children, and now Buchanan’s defense of Hitler are trying their best to destroy the already abysmally lame and dysfunctional nature of our public discourse. Maybe next week Michael Steele will come up with a defense of slavery. What makes the situation all the more absurd is that it is not like the Democrats are making sense on anything in particular either. So why are the Republicans so intent on out stupiding them?
As Hannah Arendt points out in “On Revolution,” Marx
“saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind every violence, transgression, and violation. And since he…equated necessity with the compelling urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than anybody else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life process of society is the very centre of human endeavour.”
can be made more correct by saying that he, and others, grasped that a society cannot Reproduce itself without producing the means by which to do so,,,that there are various sets of social relations through which this takes place but none have been/are free of contradiction leading, ultimately, to societal transformation.
‘The life process of society’, as Arendt puts it, was/is the process of social production and Reproduction which, given her interest in Council Communism, she must have understood, and in so doing agreed with Marx’s appreciation of the potential within a form such as the Paris Commune.
Juan:
Arendt was pretty notorious for insisting that Engels was the sole authoritative interpreter of Marx, and that thus a mechanistic-deterministic understanding of Marx was the only option. This conveniently removed all that dialectical “nonsense”. Which then allows that Heideggerian interpretation of Marx’ “materialism” as another version of German vitalism. That’s all a bit perverse, especially as she implicitly invokes Hegel’s master/slave and the dynamics of recognition to assert a standard of existence higher than “mere” life, in German Mandarin fashion. Still, “The Human Condition”, which is in part an implicit critique of Marx, is not entirely wrong-headed, in that she does excavate the tendency of Marx to subsume the relative autonomy of the public-political into the “private”-economic, and thus the fatal absence of a fully political account in Marx. But then Marx was precisely protesting the rooted exclusion of the working-class from the public-political domain.
Im sorry – why do we have to protect a species that is a relative newcomer in the evolutionary process and that is naturally incapable of expanding its adaptation to more than a dozen survivors? Is the point of conservationism to usurp natural selection by picking and choosing which cute and fuzzy creatures will have an edge in survival – at the expense of others that better adapt to the current state of ever-changing conditions?
We’d have named Robert Reich the Gnat had he been a member of Animal House – Mouse and the Flea were already taken. My concerns about RR and others who compare this ‘worst job and wage situation since the Great Depression’ is IT COULD GET WORSE. The ‘Great Depression’ is all we conveniently remember – balls of twine and aluminum foil and stacks of old newsprint in the attic when I was a kid. I assert this period is more similar to, and related to 1907 and the credit/money crisis that led to the gestation by Congress of the Creature from Jekyll Island – the Federal Reserve – your friendly local banker owned by Rothschild, GS, et. al.. Real unemployment is more accurately about 17% now anyway.
Here’s Jesse Livermore on possible other scenarios we might again confront – “The stock market had been closed from the 31st July to the middle of December of 1914.”
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefevre, Wiley Press
http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/09/real-news-about-jobs-and-wages-ode-to.html