Tag: ek Politics

Tip o’ the Hat to Art Pronin @ Taylor Marsh who introduces it thusly-

PPP polls have been dead on accurate for several years now. And boy does their latest show trouble for Obama 2012. Their latest has 54 percent disapproving of the president. I sure wish the folks in the WH would read real polls sometime.

Obama keeps hitting record lows

Tom Jensen, Public Policy Polling

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

In our national polling for Daily Kos Barack Obama has hit a record low approval rating 3 weeks in a row now. He’s gone from 43/53 to 42/53 to now 42/54 in our poll this week.

What might be most noteworthy is this week’s poll is how bad Obama’s numbers are with a few key and usually dependable Democratic constituencies. He’s under water in union households at 44/47. He’s also under water with voters under 30 at 45/48. The Northeast tends to a pretty dependable region for Democrats but Obama’s under water there at 47/49. Obama’s usually been able to hold his ground with female voters but he’s under water with them too at 45/49. And even with African Americans his approval rating’s down to 76%, about as low as we’ve ever found it.

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(L)ast week … Democratic enthusiasm was at a year long low. Now it’s at a lower year long low with only 47% of the party’s voters ‘very excited’ about voting this year compared to 58% of Republicans.

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Obama trails a generic opponent 48-44 on our national poll this week, including 51-37 with independents.

Public Policy Polling August 25 – 28

For readers who are allergic to orange I’ve done the best I could.  There are no comments at either link.

I’m sure those Independents and base voters are just champing at the bit to flock back to him after the spectacular cave on the timing of his clueless “Jobs” agenda speech, putting licking John Boehner’s boots before every Red Blooded ‘murkan’s love of the NFL.

You guys are so much smarter than all us serfs and peons.

“When people feel uncertain, they’d rather have somebody that’s strong and wrong than somebody who’s weak and right.” – Bill Clinton

Weak AND Wrong ain’t even in the game.  I’m afraid Archangel M is correct- Obama Concedes Election More Than a Year Before It Happens.

Electoral victory my ass.

David Axelrod as quoted by Time Magazine- May 21, 2009

WikiLeaks: Iraqi children in U.S. raid shot in head, U.N. says

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Newspapers

Posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

(h/t Think Progress)

Barry Ritholtz is a contributor to Seeking Alpha and is notable for his insights on the housing market and his book Bailout Nation.

Now this video is quite long, 24 minutes, but it has a lot of insight and if (like me) your cable is still out and you’re desperate for anything slightly resembling TV you might find it interesting.

lambert at Corrente (the blog that everybody hates and nobody reads) was taken by the fashion statement.  I only hope orange becomes the ‘in color’.

I must admit on my system it’s pretty cranky and I had to goose it past the second break.  Try moving the slider forward if you get lost in buffer land, don’t forget to restart the video.

Title quote @ aboot 4:09.  lambert’s fave @ 4:46ish.  Folsom Prison Blues below.

It’s a topic I’ve addressed before-

How to feel poor on $500,000 a year

Mon Sep 20, 2010 at 06:46:14 AM EDT

In Which Mr. Deling Responds to Someone Who Might Be Professor Todd Henderson

J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley

September 18, 2010

Professor Henderson’s problem is that he thinks that he ought to be able to pay off student loans, contribute to retirement savings vehicles, build equity, drive new cars, live in a big expensive house, send his children to private school, and still have plenty of cash at the end of the month for the $200 restaurant meals, the $1000 a night resort hotel rooms, and the $75,000 automobiles. And even half a million dollars a year cannot (get) you all of that. … (W)hy does he think that that is the way things should be? … (H)ere is the dirty secret: Professor Henderson thinks that that is the way things should be because he knows people for whom that is the way it is. … Of the 100 people richer than he is, fully ten have more than four times his income. And he knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world. And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.

I’ll note that Mr. Deling has respectfully redacted the name of the offending asshole, but I’m free to shout it from the roof tops.

So what has changed?  Things have gotten worse of course!

"Who rules America? Breaking down the top 1%"

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

on 8/29/2011 10:55:00 AM

(T)his article breaks down the top 1% of American wealth into strata, and talks about the differences. It’s a really instructive piece, and an easy read.

The Lower Half of the Top 1% The 99th to 99.5th percentiles largely include physicians, attorneys, upper middle management, and small business people who have done well. Everyone’s tax situation is, of course, a little different. On earned income in this group, we can figure somewhere around 25% to 30% of total pre-tax income will go to Federal, State, and Social Security taxes, leaving them with around $250k to $300k post tax. This group makes extensive use of 401-k’s, SEP-IRA’s, Defined Benefit Plans, and other retirement vehicles, which defer taxes until distribution during retirement. Typical would be yearly contributions in the $50k to $100k range, leaving our elite working group with yearly cash flows of $175k to $250k after taxes, or about $15k to $20k per month. Until recently, most studies just broke out the top 1% as a group. Data on net worth distributions within the top 1% indicate that one enters the top 0.5% with about $1.8M, the top 0.25% with $3.1M, the top 0.10% with $5.5M and the top 0.01% with $24.4M. Wealth distribution is highly skewed towards the top 0.01%, increasing the overall average for this group. The net worth for those in the lower half of the top 1% is usually achieved after decades of education, hard work, saving and investing as a professional or small business person. While an after-tax income of $175k to $250k and net worth in the $1.2M to $1.8M range may seem like a lot of money to most Americans, it doesn’t really buy freedom from financial worry or access to the true corridors of power and money. That doesn’t become frequent until we reach the top 0.1%.

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(T)he people above, the “lower half of the top 1%”, still work for a living. I would put them at the top level of the “retainer class” – wealthy, but still servants.

In Roman times, these would be the very-well-off top-level administrators and professionals, many of them ex-Greek slaves, who service the real Masters (the emperor and wealthier senatorial families) and oversee the constant flow of peasant wealth upwards, from which they get a hand-me-down share.

For the author, the key American economic super-strata are:

• 99.0%-99.5%  –  The lower half of the top 1%
• 99.5%-99.9%  –  Most of the upper half of the top 1%
• The top 0.1%  –  The Big Boyz (and Girlz, but very few of those)
• The top 0.01%  –  Where most of the real wealth is concentrated

The first sub-group has a lot of retirement anxiety, as the article makes clear; and the second has some guilt. Guess where the power lies.

I like Gaius.  I like what he writes and I understand from TheMomCat who has met him that he’s a very nice guy.  He has another piece earlier that touches on the same subject-

$2 of every $3 in income growth from 2002-2007 went to the upper 1%

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

on 8/25/2011 08:21:00 PM

Not the upper 10%; the upper 1%. (2002 is the bottom of the tech crash; 2007 is just pre-the bank crash.)

Another bad stat – In 1967, 97% of prime age men with only HS diplomas were working. Today, the number is 76%. Stunning; the middle class (the real one, not the faux-middle class we see on TV) is collapsing hard from within.

All of this comes via Don Peck and his new Atlantic article, “Can the Middle Class Be Saved?“.

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Peck makes several points that regular readers will be familiar with – in particular, the notion that the super-rich (Our Betters) have not only delinked their expenses from the U.S. economy – they’re started to delink their incomes from it as well.

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The run-up in wealth inequality is the big story of this generation; in my view, a world-historical event that will have a world-historical outcome if we’re not careful. This wealth will be redistributed, one way or another, in this generation or a later one.

Fascinating stuff.  I encourage you to click the links.

I imagine that today one can hardly get away from reports about the aftermath of Irene.  I say I magine it because the most serious effects here in Stars Hollow were losing a chunk of shingles (pretty expensive but not devastating) and cable TV (an annoyance) so I cannot report from first hand knowledge.

It’s easy to forget what happened a mere 6 years ago.

Hurricane Katrina makes landfall

The New York Times

Published: Monday, August 29, 2005

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana – Hurricane Katrina slammed ashore early Monday and charged toward low-lying New Orleans with 150-mph (240-kph) winds and the threat of an extremely dangerous storm surge.

Katrina turned slightly to the east before slamming ashore early Monday with 145-mph (233-kph) winds, providing some hope that the worst of the storm’s wrath might not be directed at this vulnerable, below-sea-level city.

But National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield warned that New Orleans would be pounded throughout the day Monday and that Katrina’s potential 20-foot ( 6-meter) storm surge was still more than capable of swamping the city.

Has New Orleans recovered?  Not as much as you might hope.  As noted in last night’s Evening Edition–

42 6 years later, Lower 9th Ward still bleak

By CAIN BURDEAU, Associated Press

5 hrs ago

And let’s not forget this-

Officers Guilty of Shooting Six in New Orleans

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON, The New York Times

Published: August 5, 2011

NEW ORLEANS – In a verdict that brought a decisive close to a case that has haunted this city since most of it lay underwater nearly six years ago, five current and former New Orleans police officers were found guilty on all counts by a federal jury on Friday for shooting six citizens, two of whom died, and orchestrating a wide-ranging cover-up in the hours, weeks and years that followed. ing a wide-ranging cover-up in the hours, weeks and years that followed.

The defendants were convicted on 25 counts, including federal civil rights violations in connection with the two deaths, for the violence and deception that began on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans on Sept. 4, 2005, just days after Hurricane Katrina hit and the levees failed.

“The officers convicted today abused their power and violated the public’s trust during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, exacerbating one of the most devastating times for the people of New Orleans,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said.  “I am hopeful today’s verdict brings justice for the victims and their family members, helps to heal the community and contributes to the restoration of public trust in the New Orleans Police Department.”

“Barack Obama’s a friend,” he said, “and when you place him in the context of those who are running against him right now, he is a giant.”

(h/t Art Pronin @ Taylor Marsh)

In context, the lesser of two evils is still evil.  Without making politicians and other elites pay for their failures there is no incentive for them to change behavior.

Economics calls this Moral Hazard.

Yup, this is the Bloomberg piece everyone is talking about.

Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Fed’s Secret Loans

By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz, Bloomberg News

Aug 22, 2011 8:19 AM ET

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”

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The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 — the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg — was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The balance was more than 25 times the Fed’s pre-crisis lending peak of $46 billion on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Denominated in $1 bills, the $1.2 trillion would fill 539 Olympic-size swimming pools.

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Two weeks after Lehman’s bankruptcy in September 2008, Morgan Stanley countered concerns that it might be next to go by announcing it had “strong capital and liquidity positions.” The statement, in a Sept. 29, 2008, press release about a $9 billion investment from Tokyo-based Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., said nothing about Morgan Stanley’s Fed loans.

That was the same day as the firm’s $107.3 billion peak in borrowing from the central bank, which was the source of almost all of Morgan Stanley’s available cash, according to the lending data and documents released more than two years later by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The amount was almost three times the company’s total profits over the past decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the New York-based lender that touted its “fortress balance sheet” at least 16 times in press releases and conference calls from October 2007 through February 2010, took as much as $48 billion in February 2009 from TAF. The facility, set up in December 2007, was a temporary alternative to the discount window, the central bank’s 97-year-old primary lending program to help banks in a cash squeeze.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which in 2007 was the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, borrowed $69 billion from the Fed on Dec. 31, 2008. Among the programs New York-based Goldman Sachs tapped after the Lehman bankruptcy was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, designed to lend money to brokerage firms ineligible for the Fed’s bank-lending programs.

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The size of bank borrowings “certainly shows the Fed bailout was in many ways much larger than TARP,” Rogoff said.

TARP is the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, a $700 billion bank-bailout fund that provided capital injections of $45 billion each to Citigroup and Bank of America, and $10 billion to Morgan Stanley.

(h/t John Aravosis @ Americablog)

Stop Coddling the Super-Rich

By WARREN E. BUFFETT, The New York Times

Published: August 14, 201

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion – a staggering $227.4 million on average – but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

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(F)or those making more than $1 million – there were 236,883 such households in 2009 – I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more – there were 8,274 in 2009 – I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

The Poor’s Free Ride Is Over

They can spare it.  After all they control 2.5% of our nation’s wealth.

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Actually this is a pretty easy calculation.  We can do this.  The bottom 50% it’s just simple math.  In dollar figures the bottom 50% of this country have $1.45 Trillion in everything they own on this earth.  So let’s see, they have $1.45 Trillion, so what do you say we take, I don’t know, half of that.  That’d be, oh look at this- $700 Billion.  Why does that figure sound so familiar?

If you pay attention to economics it’s hard not to predict a Democratic defeat in 2012 of epic proportions starting at the top with Barack Obama.

Fact:  The US economy has just entered or is about to enter the second leg of at least a Double Dip Recession.

Second-quarter growth cut on inventories, trade

By Lucia Mutikani, Reuters

WASHINGTON | Fri Aug 26, 2011 12:43pm EDT

(Reuters) – U.S. economic growth in the second quarter was slower than previously thought and consumer confidence sank in August, further reducing prospects of a strong pick-up in output in the second half of the year.

Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1 percent, the Commerce Department said on Friday, as business inventories and exports were less robust. That was a downward revision of the government’s prior 1.3 percent growth estimate.

Separately, the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index fell to 55.7 this month from 63.7 in July.

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The economy advanced just 0.4 percent in the first quarter. Economists had expected second-quarter GDP to be marked down to a 1.0 percent rate.

The second GDP estimate for the quarter confirmed growth almost stalled in the first six months of this year.

Chance of Recession Is as High as 80%: Study

By: John Melloy, Executive Producer, Fast Money & Strategy Session, CNBC

Published: Thursday, 25 Aug 2011 | 6:55 PM ET

The Philly Fed puts a recession probability at 85.7 percent, while the consumer survey puts contraction chances at 80 percent, according to Bank of America’s probability model, which uses a so-called Bayesian technique that “tests if the economy is in a recession based on the interaction of variables that are associated with turns in the business cycle.”

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According to their data, the Philly Fed has accurately forecast four of the last seven recessions. The older Michigan survey has accurately signaled three of the last eight recessions.

“It’s a 100 percent chance,” said Peter Schiff, CEO & Chief Global Strategist of Euro Pacific Capital. “In fact the recession might have already started.”

World Facing 50% Danger of Another Recession, Nobel Laureate Spence Says

By Robyn Meredith, Bloomberg News

Aug 25, 2011 7:00 PM ET

“I’m quite worried,” Spence said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong yesterday. “A combined downward dip in Europe and America, which is a good chunk of the industrialized economies, I’m quite sure will take down growth in China particularly, and that will then immediately spread to the rest of the emerging economies.” He put the likelihood of such a scenario “at about 50 percent.”

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China “cannot make up for the kind of loss of demand that would go with a downturn in the advanced economies,” Spence said. Because Chinese inflation is running at an official rate of 6.5 percent, a figure many economists say is understated, Beijing would be “pretty close to nuts” to fuel further credit growth, he said.

QE3 Is Coming by Year End: Roubini

By: Margo D. Beller, CNBC

Published: Thursday, 25 Aug 2011 | 5:49 PM ET

Roubini, also known as “Dr. Doom,” puts the chance of a double-dip recession at 50 percent.

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While bad economic data on housing, jobs and home sales suggests a double-dip in the U.S., Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Spain “are already back in recession or never got out of the first one.” Data also suggest France and Germany are in “borderline contraction” while the U.K. “has not had any economic growth for three quarters.”

With Economic Pessimism Rising, Americans Move Towards Keynesianism

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Friday August 26, 2011 9:30 am

(T)here is now a slim plurality of the country ready to embrace real spending on jobs programs. A five point increase over two months is a rather impressive amount of movement on what could be considered a fairly fundamental question of government ideology.

More government spending to create jobs is exactly what Keynesian economics prescribes. The fact that, without realizing it, more Americans are open to the idea of Keynesian spending to help the economy is remarkable given how the top leadership in both political parties have trumpeted the importance of deficit reduction over all else for so long. And Republicans have been openly disparaging Keynes, just as they did in the Great Depression.

This change in attitudes is a reflection of just how seriously worried regular people are right now about what they perceive as the worsening state of the economy. Since the last time Pew asked this (my link- ek) question the number of people who think the economy is getting worse has increase by over 10 points according to Gallup’s tracking poll.

AP-GfK poll: Views on economy, Obama role sour

By TOM RAUM, Associated Press

22 hrs ago

The survey found that 86 percent of adults see the economy as “poor,” up from 80 percent in June. About half – 49 percent – said it worsened just in the past month. Only 27 percent responded that way in the June survey.

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As the public’s outlook on the economy dips, so has approval for the president’s economic stewardship.

More than 6 in 10 – 63 percent – disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy. Nearly half, or 48 percent, “strongly” disapproved. Approval of his economic performance now stands at just 36 percent, his worst approval rating on the issue in AP-GfK polling.

Among Democrats, 58 percent approve of the president’s handling of the economy, down from 65 percent in June. Among Republicans, approval dipped to 9 percent from 15 percent.

Just 51 percent consider Obama a strong leader, down from 60 percent in June and 65 percent following the capture and death of Osama bin Laden in May. In June, 85 percent of Democrats in the poll called him a strong leader. Now, the number is down to 76 percent.

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Some 75 percent in the poll said the country is heading in the wrong direction, up from 63 percent in June. Among Democrats, 61 percent chose “wrong direction” – up from 46 percent in June.

In a new high, 52 percent of all adults said they disapprove of his overall performance – 52 percent, up from 47 percent in June. Among Democrats, approval fell 8 points, to 74 percent from 82 percent in June. Among Republicans, it fell to 11 percent from 22 percent.

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Unemployment increased to 9.2 percent in July, up from 9.1 percent in June. And most economists don’t expect it to decline much below 8.5 percent by the November 2012 presidential election. No president has won re-election with a jobless rate that high since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

Stock Tip: Be Worried. Workers are Consumers.

Robert Reich

Friday, August 19, 2011

We’re slouching toward a double dip, and the stock market is imploding, because consumers – whose spending is 70 percent of the economy – have reached their limit.

It’s not just the jobless who can’t spend. It’s mainly people with jobs. Median wages continue to fall. Weekly wages in July for Americans with jobs were 1.3 percent lower than eight months before.

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Many on Wall Street are scratching their heads, trying to understand why the stock market is plummeting. After all, they tell themselves, corporate earnings are still near record highs.

But it’s becoming clear those earnings can’t be sustained. Corporate earnings are the highest they’ve been relative to worker wages and benefits since just before the Great Depression. And the richest 1 percent of Americans are getting a higher percent of total income since just before the Great Depression.

Get it? It was only a matter of time before the boom on Wall Street turned into a bust. Economic booms cannot continue without American workers participating in them.

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What will happen to the Dow Jones Industrial Average when corporate earnings revert to their historic average relative to American wages? I’ve seen various estimates. They’re not pretty.

Bernanke “optimistic.” Philly Fed says another recession 85% sure; Roubini says it’s coming

by John Aravosis, Americablog

on 8/26/2011 10:40:00 AM

Anyone who votes to cut any spending this year or next, or signs such legislation, shouldn’t be re-elected.  Period.  This is criminal that Congress and the President just cut spending, and now plan on doing it again in the super committee.  It’s equally criminal that the President refused to adequately defend the stimulus (and refused to push for a big enough stimulus the first time), then embraced deficit reduction over a year ago, when the economy was still teetering on the brink.

Every single one of them, the Democrats in Congress, the Republicans in Congress, and the President own this double dip recession if it comes, as they do the already crappy economy we have.  And I don’t know how you vote for anyone who is supporting legislation that will literally depress the economy further.

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We need another massive stimulus now. Or a lot of people are going to lose their jobs and their homes, and it will be the fault of every single politician in Washington, from the White House to the Congress.  The President’s constant pandering to conservative Dems and Republicans is no longer academic.  It’s  having real world consequences.

A lot of Politicians are going to lose their jobs too, including Barack Obama.

Electoral victory my ass.