Good news, lads! Good news! Some Wall Street prognosticators have identified the symptoms of an American economic collapse!
From earlier this week, a crew of power suit Wall Streeters issue this hilarity:
Macro economic data suggest the great recession is over. But the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing, thanks, in large part, to a jobless recovery. Wall Street Cheat Sheet’s Damien Hoffman says the growing underclass now accounts for about 10% of the U.S. population.
Ya don’t say, boys!
You really have to see the clip of them here. Or you can take my word they deserve an astoundingly painful beating for being obvious and enthusiastically unselfconscious.
“In this clip, [Damien and Derek], who jointly run the Wall Street Cheat Sheet website, point to several signs America is turning into a two-class society,” Yahoo ‘news’ informed readers.
These findings include:
– Unemployment. The official rate is 9.9% but the wider measure of under employed and those who have given up on their job search is more like 17%. That’s more than 24 million Americans out of work.
– Record numbers using food stamps. The Agriculture Department said a record 40 million Americans, or 1 in 8 Americans, may not be able to eat without government assistance. “This is the ultimate sign of an under class,??? the Hoffman Brothers say.
– Take a look at Dollar Tree Stores. The discounter’s stock is near an all-time high while revenues are up 12.5% this year. In other words, more Americans are chasing cheaper goods.
In college football, the NCAA ended Southern Methodist’s football program in 1987, killing its reputation as an honorable and respected school in what became known as the ‘death penalty.’
And that was only for really bad conduct in a college football program.
It will be the Obama administration’s challenge to see to it that the public perceives justice in the case of the BP oil spill.
A government-administered ‘death penalty’ to the energy giant’s operations in the United States is one idea that comes to mind.
Extraordinary screw-ups and perfidies call for extraordinary counter-measures.
Using the power of the government to quickly dismantle BP, seize its holdings and dismiss its employees, to be branded with some sort of official mark of Cain would certainly be seen as a just response.
There would certainly be no public outcry. And there would be considerable political risk in being any part of government or a political party that would take BP’s side.
Using Feds to remove BP officials from their US offices would be good, visually speaking.
At a time when the US government and military are allowed to pick off civilians and suspected terrorists around the globe with impunity, there certainly is nothing irrational about an argument calling for the picking off of an entity that’s caused an environmental disaster of Biblical proportion.
Agency Orders BP to Use a Less Toxic Chemical in Cleanup
After submitting a list of one or more alternatives to the agency, the company would then have 72 hours to start using one of them.
In seeking to break up the oil bubbling to the surface from the Deepwater Horizon well, BP has sprayed nearly 700,000 gallons of Corexit chemical dispersants on the surface of the gulf and directly onto the leaking well head, a mile underwater. It is by far the largest use of chemicals to break up an oil spill in United States waters to date.
But scientists and politicians have increasingly questioned why the E.P.A. is allowing use of the Corexit products when less toxic alternatives are available.
Because oil spills are relatively rare, only small amounts of a few dispersants are kept stockpiled, so at the outset of the disaster in the gulf, the amount of Corexit used was only in the tens of thousands of gallons. BP then ordered much more from its manufacturer, Nalco North America of Naperville, Ill., and applied the product repeatedly.
On Monday, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of New Jersey, sent a letter to Lisa P. Jackson, the E.P.A.’s administrator, demanding details of the formula for Corexit products and information about any testing that had been carried out on the chemicals.
In most countries, the active ingredients of dispersants are trade secrets carefully guarded by the companies that make them, but the recipes must be conveyed to national testing agencies.
It was not clear what chemical alternatives BP would select in response to the agency’s order, or whether the company would choose instead to rely less heavily on chemical treatment of the oil spill. But U.S. Polychemical of Spring Valley, N.Y., which makes a dispersant called Dispersit SPC 1000, said Thursday morning that it had received a large order from BP and would increase its production to 20,000 gallons a day in the next few days, and eventually as much as 60,000 gallons a day.
Currently, just switching to another compound of similar nature would seem to just mean substituting one poison for another.
More meaningful national leadership might call a halt to the process of turning the disaster into an even more gigantic ocean chemistry experiment and business opportunity for firms which have no real idea what their products will do when used in this manner.
What’s the old medical admonition to first do no harm?
Political risk taker or just more stupid than people realize?
From the wire:
Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul criticized President Barack Obama’s handling of the Gulf oil spill Friday as anti-business and sounding “really un-American.”
Paul’s defense of oil company BP PLC came during an interview as he tried to explain his controversial take on civil rights law, an issue that seemed to suddenly swamp his campaign after his victory in Tuesday’s GOP primary.
“What I don’t like from the president’s administration is this sort of, ‘I’ll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'” Paul said in an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business.”
Other Republicans have criticized the administration’s handling of the oil spill, but few have been so vocal in defending BP …
The rest of the GOP apparently still lacks the nerve to assert its un-American not to like big corporations which create Biblical disasters.
Good news, lads! Good news! My retirement is now guaranteed and proceeding nicely.
Plain as the nose on your face, life for many in the formerly great US of A is relentlessly bleak.
Chalk the next piece up to that, along with innovative use of punishments for carrying out powder hoaxes after 9/11. While an interesting read, it impeaches our ‘way of life’ on many levels.
So far, Timothy Cloud’s retirement plan seems to be working out for him.
In a statement written by Cloud last month for two federal agents, he admitted mailing menacing messages scrawled on 3-by-5 cards, along with talcum powder, from Roseville to President Barack Obama at the White House and to Social Security Administration offices in New York City, Kansas City, Mo., and Baltimore.
“I mailed the envelopes … to those addresses because I hoped people would think it was anthrax,” he wrote. “I mailed the letters because I was mad. I knew I would be caught.
“I do not regret sending the envelopes because that was my retirement plan. Either I was going to get Social Security or I was going to jail.”
He went to jail in Sacramento, where he remains held without bail as a flight risk.
“All he wanted was three hots and a cot,” said his attorney, Assistant Federal Defender Matthew Bockmon. “He was frustrated with Social Security over denial of benefits to which he feels entitled.
“This is a pathetic case of a homeless person making a desperate cry for help. He’s been on the streets a long time; long enough that he was sick of it.”
You think Ted Nugent might offer him some stale balogna sandwiches, too?
It’s interesting watching the press stumble over itself trying to explain the ‘pros’ of using ‘disperstants’ — allegedly magic mixtures — to combat the Gulf oil spill. Unable to come to grips with the real world limits of American technology — for so long regarded as capable of anything.
All you really need to know about Corexit is here in this .pdf.
It’s bad. There’s no dressing it up. The safety sheet reads as if it’s almost as nasty as an oil spill itself — only slightly different.
Consider the masses of such a mixture necessary to even make the slightest dent in the volume of released petroleum. The US chemical industry can’t make enough. And there’s no way to ship enough.
This is probably a good thing, all matters considered. Think of using it as a giant chemistry experiment performed by people who have no real idea about what they’re doing.
What could be the outcomes? Choose one from three: Worse, worser, or worst.
One of the dilemmas faced by the Obama administration – and the US government, in general — in these days of Biblical fail is the inability to see to swift and very public punishment for those who visit catastrophe upon the nation.
It’s a hallmark of Paul Fussell’s BAD, so to speak. Always much bragging and talk about technology and America’s limitless can-do talent during staged events and commercials. But a more deeply rooted and expansive talent for folding like cardboard when the chips are down, then making a lot of excuses and dressing up fail as a great new paradigm of success.
The US is great at bombing and assassinating trivial pests and civilians around the globe — and making big boogeymen out of the same.
It’s virtually powerless to administer quick justice to wrecking balls like the Tony Haywards and Lloyd Blankfeins on its own property.
BP will have to pay for the clean-up, insists the President.
This is very weak, semantically. It will read even worse when the millions of barrels of oil in the Gulf have smashed livelihoods and wildlife, very visibly, across many states.
Sometimes the bad people just have to be tarred, feathered and put away permanently. Being called before Congress to be badgered by a few puffed-up white guys with pointing fingers for television cameras doesn’t really do it for anyone.
Speed is also a virtue. Allowing weasels to squirm around on the loose for years because they’re wealthy, it’s capitalism and they have an army of corporate lawyers, isn’t justice — it’s the process of fail set in cement.
This is political dynamite for the Obama administration. It can either have its arms blown off or choose to blow someone else’s life up who deserves it up for a change.
Putting such men specifically on notice — on network TV, f’r instance — that they’re now officially on a Public Enemies list, could be a start.
Quote from website: Good news, lads! Good news! … Thanks to you today I work for Halliburton, a company which is perfectly inline with my values.
Pssst, I added the “Good news, lads!” bit. The rest is real, though.
This blog deals with a sizeable number of montebanks in the national security business who regularly predict attacks by American enemies which result in catastrophes of Biblical proportion.
And then there are real world Biblical catastrophes which have no relationship with the fictions the former like to peddle.
It’s a symbol of systemic US dysfunction at almost every level, from simple comprehension and critical thinking about subjects to the national leadership which has made all the wrong decisions, seeing fit to cede all authority and regulation to corporate power.
When the best one can come up with are containment booms and silly talk about chemical dispersant, as if the latter is some magic wand which can be applied to an oil slick, we know the holster’s empty and the gun jammed.
Quotes:
At a town hall meeting in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, Mayor Stan Wright warned fishermen in the audience that outbursts would be met with arrest. The fishermen were told that they were not allowed to ask questions.
Stifle your questions and anger. Don’t demand BP bosses be lynched. What fine leadership qualities this shows.
Crews worked through Friday night to dispense 3,000 gallons of sub-surface dispersant, officials said.
About 1.6 million gallons of oil have spilled since the explosion, the Coast Guard said.
Since journalists have no idea about simple chemistry and mass action, they have only an inkling of how pathetic this reads.
And the President — who probably thought he was doing something clever by latching onto the Republican position on drilling — is now inconveniently seen as being on the wrong side with the rest of the rascals.
Today’s first item is bizarre, an example of how a box of well-meaning rocks, to which physical fitness means everything, think only narrowly and in a peculiar manner.
That the American diet in 2010 stinks is beyond question. Decades on it has resulted in obesity as a growth industry. And its consequences with regards to the general health of the population have been staggering.
A report today from the Associated Press concerns a group of retired military men who view “school lunches” as a national security threat because they make kids too fat to fight.
It’s what happens when you have no outside advisors, no person to read what you’ve come up with and give you a good slap upside the head, saying: “And just when did you discover obesity is a bad thing?”
“So you’ve decided to label school lunches a natsec threat. What about all the other ways in which people get their foods and the nature of such nourishment choices, huh?”
Paid any attention to Michelle Obama recently, fellows? She’s not just concerned about national security.
School lunches have been called many things, but a group of retired military officers is giving them a new label: national security threat.
That’s not a reference to the mystery meat served up in the cafeteria line either. The retired officers are saying that school lunches have helped make the nation’s young people so fat that fewer of them can meet the military’s physical fitness standards, and recruitment is in jeopardy.
A new report being released Tuesday says more than 9 million young adults, or 27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24, are too overweight to join the military. Now, the officers are advocating for passage of a wide-ranging nutrition bill that aims to make the nation’s school lunches healthier.
The officers’ group, Mission: Readiness, was appearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday with Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
—
“When over a quarter of young adults are too fat to fight, we need to take notice,” [one military man] said. He noted that national security in the year 2030 is “absolutely dependent” on reversing child obesity rates.
Today, the group is urging Congress to eliminate junk food and high-calorie beverages from schools, put more money into the school lunch program and develop new strategies that help children develop healthier habits.
Good luck with stopping kids and everyone else from drinking corn syrup sweetened soda pop, armed forces dudes.
There are many problems facing the United States. Obesity, not just in children, but in the entire population, is certainly one that looms … large.
A lesser problem, but one that is still vexing in a way very unique to Americans, is to view too many problems in terms of their impact as a threat to national security.
That is, to think of them in such a narrow-focus way that proposed solutions only serve your profession’s goals. That’s just damn selfish.
It’s not just ALL ABOUT YOU.
What was that famous picture of the future from the cute sci-fi movie?
Oh yeah, this … Well, there’s always robots. Isn’t the US military big on them?
Unsurprisingly, Democratic Congressman Tim Holden — who represents the old hometown of DD, Pine Grove in Schuylkill County, voted ‘no’ on healthcare reform.
To be elected as a “Democrat” in Schuylkill County, two things must always occur. You have to be a Republican under the thin layer of cover and the actual GOP man or woman running against you must either be ineffective or have the image of a criminal.
Schuylkill County is solidy GOP, demographically old white and getting older, so the primary narrative would have been the one transmitted by the party and Fox News: The blacks, kids and other miscellaneous underserving leeches are going to get your piece of the healthcare pie.
The Pottsville Republican, the newspaper in the county seat, didn’t even run the healthcare story as top news on its website.
The health care overhaul bill approved by the U.S. House of Representatives Sunday night will impact Schuylkill County’s health care system possibly with cuts in Medicare, the Schuylkill Health System’s president and chief operating officer said after the vote.
“It’s obviously hard to tell exactly what is in the bill,” John E. Simodejka said, adding the bill will have an impact on county health care beginning in October.
“All health care is local,” Simodejka said. “However, Schuylkill County has a higher percentage of the population on Medicare and health care providers will see a greater impact than other areas. We will see Medicare cuts as a provider and will have to plan for reductions in payment” …
[Congressman Tim Holden] said President Obama called him Thursday and he gave the president his reasons why he is against the bill.
In a recent story in The Republican-Herald, Holden said the Senate bill does not address the concerns that lead to his “no” vote in November.
Holden said the Senate bill’s provisions against federal funding for abortions are weaker than those in the House bill, another deal breaker for his support.
However, Obama indicated Sunday he would issue an executive order preventing the spending of federal money for abortions.
On March 16, about 10 people, a mixture of local residents and out-of-the-area members of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, a coalition of groups that advocates for health care reform, protested at Holden’s office.
In the valley over
The Lehigh Valley Biblical Anti-Union ex-Union Man Grandpap is, naturally, Old Testament in the way only he can be.
Today, fresh from the predatory career-advice industry: Traits that will guarantee you that raise in the US corporate workplace.
1. Think for the Boss
Find out the key initiatives your company president wants to achieve.
If the president said in the annual report that he wants to increase profit by 15 percent at the health insurance company, focus on that goal. Your work needs to be connected with what the company cares about right now. So get to work writing computer software that will sift clients for penny-ante mistakes on their insurance papers, so they can be targeted for cancellation immediately when they get sick.
2. Be a highly visible lickspittle, not just a cubicle toady
If you stay cloistered in your cubicle, you’ll probably be disappointed when raises are announced — no matter how hard you work. To ensure that you and your hard work are seen, request projects that will get you in front of others — like dunning your colleagues for your boss’s favorite charity — United Way — instead of letting him do it.
This will make it easier for your boss to plead your case to any necessary approvers. “If a boss is in meeting and says, ‘I want to give a raise to Bloor, it’s going to be hard if no one knows who Bloor is. On the other hand, if Bloor has been visibly helpful in collecting monies or in the newspaper defending the company against allegations of fraud or criminal misconduct, they’ll say, ‘Oh Bloor, he’s terrific!'”
3. Be a charismatic apple-polisher
Being a suck up is terrific. But if you really want to go places, your suck-upitude must be infectious, capable of spreading its enthusiasms to your co-workers. Executive coach Lisa Blankfein-Pandit says this kind of interpersonal skill plays a huge role when compensation is discussed.
4. Be subtle
No boss will ever actually come out and say, “I love to give raises to ass-kissers.” So how do you draw attention to this quality without seeming like a finagling braggart? The president and CEO of the National Association of Professional Employer Organizations says that giving your boss a quarterly report on his or the company’s milestones — be it downsizing 100 employees without experiencing any theft or damage to office equipment or how the chief executive figured out how to put a lot less product in a box that looks lots bigger — and asking for feedback is a subtle way to get noticed.
5. Feel for the Boss
The highest-earning employees understand that their job is to make their boss’s life easier. Think about the things that your boss doesn’t like doing — well, just about everything except collecting his end of year bonus or meeting high rent hookers at the Serbian Crown Room or Ruth’s Steakhouse — and ask if you can help by taking over those tasks. It’s also important to understand that your boss can’t always give you what you want, no matter how great your efforts have been to uplift his days. “Most people get keyed up to ask for a raise and when they hear ‘no’ they respond really negatively,” says one career-adviser. “If you instead say, ‘I understand, but when wages are unfrozen, please sir, I would like to be the first in line, remember the many good happy hours you had at the Serbian Crown Room,’ you’ll have a much better chance of getting the raise when they can give it.”
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.??? This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences??? in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.
