Job Hunt
Then, in the dream, I’d take a nap.
The real news, as well as this week’s guests below.
September 2014 archive
Sep 03 2014
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Michelle Chen: How Humanitarian Aid Weakened Post-Earthquake Haiti
More than four years after Port-au-Prince crumbled to the ground, last month’s meeting with a delegation from the American Chamber of Commerce seemed to mark Haiti’s steady new pathway to recovery. Business elites posed for photo-ops and affirmed President Michel Martelly’s goal to “make Haiti an emerging country by 2030.”
Elsewhere on the island, tens of thousands had yet to emerge from the ruins of the 2010 earthquake and were clustered in makeshift encampments, still frozen in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
It was on behalf of these Haitians that human rights activist Antonal Mortime paid a visit to Washington, DC, the same week that the AmCham shmoozed in the Haitian capital. In collaboration with the American Jewish World Service, he came to tell US activists that Western aid efforts had harmed far more than they had helped. More than four years since Haiti was flooded by aid money, the chaotic rebuilding effort has widened the country’s social rifts, bringing the first emancipated black republic under the yoke of a new kind of imperialism.
Amy B. Dean: Free-riding on the labor movement
American communities depend on collective action. Fire and police departments are great examples: They can function successfully because all of us pay in – not only those whose houses have burned down or been burglarized.
These institutions work on the principle that the most effective way to protect individual interests is for all to contribute a little for the common benefit. When someone doesn’t contribute, everyone suffers. If someone didn’t want to chip in for firefighters or police officers but still expected the benefits of these collective protections, they would be considered freeloaders, and their behavior would be rightly vilified.
Yet when it comes to the labor movement, free-riding is exactly the response that conservatives are encouraging.
Zarin Banu: Erosion of Hong Kong’s core values
Hong Kong is a sideshow in Beijing’s main act: securing its status as a rising superpower.
Hong Kongers are used to being a pawn in the game of superpowers. In 1997, Britain handed the city over to China under the “one country two systems” principle leaving it “Special Administrative Region” status. The principle was enshrined in the Basic Law, the legal framework for how Hong Kong would be governed from that point on.
The recent ruling by the National People’s Congress (NPC) on the fate of Hong Kong is just a staging post in China’s advance to consolidate its status as rising superpower. The decision is best viewed through this lens. Hong Kong is a sideshow in the main act: President Xi Jinping’s ambition to cement China’s economic and geopolitical stature as a superpower.
Dean Baker: Public should speak up before Fed clamps down on jobs
With the bank’s policy taking cues from the financial industry, a vocal citizenry must push back to sustain growth
The media often cover debates over Federal Reserve Board policy as though it is arcane and technical subject matter beyond the understanding of ordinary people. In this context we are supposed to take the statements of Fed officials as though they are pronouncements from Dr. Science, who “knows more than you do.”
In reality, the basics of Fed policymaking are fairly straightforward. The main question the Fed is considering right now is whether it should have its foot on the accelerator to try to promote growth and jobs, or alternatively whether it should have its foot on the brake to try to stop inflation. In the latter case, the economy will grow less rapidly and we will have fewer jobs and higher unemployment.
Richard Brodsky: Cuomo Wins!/Loses!
Conventional political wisdom has New York Governor Andrew Cuomo winning the Democratic primary and the November general election handily. The same wisdom has him badly damaged in New York and nationally. What gives?
The objective measures of political success show Cuomo on a roll. He’s raised over $35 million. His opponents are starving. His poll numbers are good. Most voters don’t know the opposition. He’s dominated the political news as a candidate in the same manner that he dominated the government.
That may be the rub. His political operation was never satisfied with winning. Opposition was to be crushed and the methodologies were simple and punishing. It worked. Republicans voted for gay marriage and gun control. Democrats folded to an austerity economic agenda that cut taxes for the rich, cut spending, and gave billions to corporations as “economic development.”
Paul Waldman: The Stupidity of Hating Your Senator for Living Where You’ve Sent Her to Work
Should we really get mad if our representatives spend too much time in Washington, where they’re supposed to be doing their jobs?
This year, not one, but two, incumbent senators up for re-election have been dogged by the “issue” of the precise location where they rest their heads at the end of a weary day of lawmaking. First it was Republican Pat Roberts, who, we learned in February, lists the home of some friends as his official residence in Kansas; apparently he crashes there when he’s in the state. And now it’s Democrat Mary Landrieu, whose heretofore unimpeachable Louisiana roots (her father Moon was the mayor of New Orleans in the 1970s, and her brother Mitch holds that office today) are now being questioned. It seems that although Landrieu owns a home in Washington, she’s registered to vote in the New Orleans house she grew up in, where her parents still reside (even though it’s technically owned by Mary and her eight siblings, all of whose names begin with “M”-make of that what you will).
The opposition researchers have certainly been earning their keep. But should the rest of us care? The easy answer is, of course not; this is the kind of inane faux-controversy that consumes campaigns, where one side pretends to take umbrage at something with no importance, then the press pretends it means something because a candidate is “on the defensive.” But as far as phony issues go, this one is actually revealing-not because of anything it says about the senators, but because of what it says about the often absurd and contradictory expectations we have of our representatives. We berate them for being lazy and not getting enough done, but at the same time, we get mad if they spend too much time in the place where they’re supposed to be working
Sep 03 2014
TBC: Morning Musing 9.3.14
I’ve got 3 interesting article this morning for you all.
I think that we ought to do automatic DNA testing on evidence from crimes where there is anyone convicted of them on Death Row. And throw in the life without parole folks too. I abhor the death penalty in and of itself and it seems cruel and unusual to not just make sure in this day and age.
2 Convicted in 1983 North Carolina Murder Are Cleared After DNA Tests
Jump!
Sep 03 2014
On This Day In History September 3
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
September 3 is the 246th day of the year (247th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 119 days remaining until the end of the year.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
On this day in 1783, the Treaty of Paris is signed ending the American Revolution
The treaty document was signed at the Hotel d’York – which is now 56 Rue Jacob – by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay (representing the United States) and David Hartley (a member of the British Parliament representing the British Monarch, King George III). Hartley was lodging at the hotel, which was therefore chosen in preference to the nearby British Embassy – 44 Rue Jacob – as “neutral” ground for the signing.
On September 3, Britain also signed separate agreements with France and Spain, and (provisionally) with the Netherlands. In the treaty with Spain, the colonies of East and West Florida were ceded to Spain (without any clearly defined northern boundary, resulting in disputed territory resolved with the Treaty of Madrid), as was the island of Minorca, while the Bahama Islands, Grenada and Montserrat, captured by the French and Spanish, were returned to Britain. The treaty with France was mostly about exchanges of captured territory (France’s only net gains were the island of Tobago, and Senegal in Africa), but also reinforced earlier treaties, guaranteeing fishing rights off Newfoundland. Dutch possessions in the East Indies, captured in 1781, were returned by Britain to the Netherlands in exchange for trading privileges in the Dutch East Indies.
The American Congress of the Confederation, which met temporarily in Annapolis, Maryland, ratified the treaty of Paris on January 14, 1784 (Ratification Day).[1] Copies were sent back to Europe for ratification by the other parties involved, the first reaching France in March. British ratification occurred on April 9, 1784, and the ratified versions were exchanged in Paris on May 12, 1784. It was not for some time, though, that the Americans in the countryside received the news due to the lack of communication.
Sep 03 2014
TDS/TCR (Promotion Day)
The Best Beer On The Planet
Zombie Reagan
The real news, as well as this week’s guests and a friendly duck below.
Sep 02 2014
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
Heading home after a lovely vacation. Pundits will return tomorrow.
TMC
Sep 02 2014
TBC: Morning Musing 9.2.14
Well, I had to work yesterday so I’m kind of dragging and don’t have a proper rant at the moment, so I’ve decided to give you some funnies and a tune this morning. Hope you enjoy!
Sep 02 2014
On This Day In History September 2
This is your morning Open Thread. Pour a cup of your favorite morning beverage and review the past and comment on the future.
Find the past “On This Day in History” here.
September 2 is the 245th day of the year (246th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 120 days remaining until the end of the year.
On this day in 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.
Several inventors worked on early versions of a cash-dispensing machine, but Don Wetzel, an executive at Docutel, a Dallas company that developed automated baggage-handling equipment, is generally credited as coming up with the idea for the modern ATM. Wetzel reportedly conceived of the concept while waiting on line at a bank. The ATM that debuted in New York in 1969 was only able to give out cash, but in 1971, an ATM that could handle multiple functions, including providing customers’ account balances, was introduced.
ATMs eventually expanded beyond the confines of banks and today can be found everywhere from gas stations to convenience stores to cruise ships. There is even an ATM at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Non-banks lease the machines (so-called “off premise” ATMs) or own them outright.
Sep 01 2014
Solidarity Forever
When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun
For the Union makes us strong
Chorus
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
For the Union makes us strong
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong
It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid
Now we stand outcast and starving ‘mid the wonders we have made
But the union makes us strong
All the world that’s owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone
We have laid the wide foundations, built it skyward stone by stone
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own
While the union makes us strong
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn
We can break their haughty power gain our freedom when we learn
That the Union makes us strong
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold
Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the Union makes us strong
Chorus
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever
Solidarity forever
For the Union makes us strong
Sep 01 2014
Punting the Pundits
“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.
Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.
Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt
New York Times Editorial Board: Labor Today
Wages and Salaries Still Lag as Corporate Profits Surge
In the months before Labor Day last year, job growth was so slow that economists said it would take until 2021 to replace the jobs that were lost or never created in the recession and its aftermath.
The pace has picked up since then; at the current rate, missing jobs will be recovered by 2018. Still, five years into an economic recovery that has been notable for resurging corporate profits, the number and quality of jobs are still lagging badly, as are wages and salaries. [..]
Worse, the recent upturn in growth, even if sustained, will not necessarily lead to markedly improved living standards for most workers.
That’s because the economy’s lopsidedness is not mainly the result of market forces, but of the lack of policies to ensure broader prosperity. The imbalance will not change without labor and economic reforms.
Robert Kuttner: Labor Day: The Beginning of a Breakthrough
This Labor Day, working families do not have much to celebrate when it comes to wages and job security. But we can celebrate the fact that the deteriorating conditions of work are finally breaking through into broad political consciousness. [..]
This Labor Day, more people are conscious of the fact that precarious work needn’t be the norm. As citizens, we need to politicize an issue that until now has been seen mainly as people’s private problems — I was born at the wrong time; I didn’t get enough education; I should have been an entrepreneur.
Sorry, but people just like you, in an economy with different rules, were able to get a much fairer shake from the system. We need a fair economy back. It begins with consciousness and consciousness has to lead to politics.
Sarah Werblin: Blockbuster bank settlements leave consumers hanging
Details of homeowner relief stay opaque while tax deductions and accounting loopholes lower cost to banks
Last week Bank of America reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to the tune of $16.65 billion for its role in selling faulty mortgages in the financial crisis. Such big-dollar settlements with large banks – including, in the past year, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase – sound like harsh punishments but in actuality amount only to slaps on the wrist.
For one, those colossal dollar figures are rarely the actual prices the banks will pay. The real costs to these companies is muddled by tax deductions, unclear directives and accounting loopholes. The secretive negotiation process for settlements is also inconsistent with the civil and criminal process the average American faces.
It’s no wonder, then, that the nation has settlement fatigue; the feeling among consumer advocates and the public is that these agreements have negligible impact on the lives of homeowners affected by the financial crisis.
Julia Zulver: Are reproductive rights human rights?
Women’s lives continue to be endangered by anti-abortion policies.
Hashmat Moslih recently wrote an opinion piece noting that the concept of human rights faces huge challenges in a culturally diverse global setting. He states: “It is impossible to develop a harmonised human rights philosophy that is not circular. At the heart of the issue of human rights runs the issue of justice and at the heart of justice runs the issue of happiness and it is argued that happiness is attained through acquiring a good life and a good life is one that insures everyone’s well-being. But how do we define well-being?”
There are many definitions of well-being, grounded in various cultural, religious, and historical contexts. Furthermore, as Moslih notes, there are contested views about what constitute fundamental rights, and whether we can ever consider these non-ideological. For example, there is by no means an international consensus about whether sexual and reproductive rights can be considered universal.
Despite this, the words of Morena Herrera, the leader of the Agrupacion Ciudadana por la Despanalizacion del Aborto (Citizens Group for the Depenalisation of Abortion), during a personal interview, will always ring clearly in my mind: “by ruling against an abortion [in the case of Beatriz], El Salvador is ruling against the life of a woman.”
Emma Brockes: Are you a summer person? Because the autumn people are already winning
Good riddance to the sunny, lazy season. You know exactly what you’re going to get with a rainy, productive day
Summer officially ends on Monday and, with it, the wearing of white and that feeling of being on vacation all the time. So, too, the ascendence of summer people over winter people. The calendar year runs January to January, but for many, that sinking, new-school-year feeling that comes around the first of September is the real start of the new year. How depressed the new season makes you – well, that depends largely on which season you think of as “yours”.
I used to be a summer person. I used to think winter people were creepy, pale-skinned, slow-moving creatures who lived in long sleeves and probably cut up their burgers with a knife and fork. In England at least, where the sun comes out for approximately two weeks a year, there was, I thought, a deliberate perversity to those who complained about it.
And then I moved to New York, where the summer is as bald and unrelenting as an English winter. Heat of 90°F with humidity isn’t cheering, it’s sedating – and keeps you inside as effectively as snow.
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