A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds that 54% of Americans believe high gas prices are here to stay …
Nationally, regular gasoline averages $3.91 a gallon, 7 cents less than last week’s 2011 high of $3.98. But … fewer than one in 10 Americans believe that prices have peaked for the year…
While nearly seven in 10 Americans say the high cost of fuel is causing financial hardship, for 21%, the impact is so dramatic they say their standard of living is jeopardized.
Aja Turner, an unemployed mother of three from Greenville, S.C., says high fuel costs are forcing her to move in with family in Virginia
Colorado computer repairman Jon Fye, whose monthly gas bill on his Isuzu pickup has jumped 60% to $400 a month …
Fye, 31, has leaned on his church and a food bank in Fort Collins to help bridge the gap between his paychecks and expenses.
This item was to laugh yesterday — a Wal-mart CEO bemoaning the fact that the customers of the sundry goods megastore chain weren’t spending.
Having led the charge to Chinese-made goods and subsequent forfeiture of American jobs and wage compression, there’s a lethal irony in a US multinational company unselfconsciously expressing regret over diminished profits because its US middle class customer has been beggared.
Wal-Mart reported better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue Tuesday, although its U.S. store sales continued to decline as higher gas, energy and food prices ate away at its customers’ paychecks.
“Our core U.S. customers are stretched. They are concerned about rising gas, food prices and employment issues,” Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke said …
Last month, Duke told an industry gathering that Wal-Mart’s core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and that the retailer is worried.
Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in.
Lately, they’re “running out of money” at a faster clip, he said.
As their budgets get more stretched, Wal-Mart shoppers are also changing their buying habits, picking up more groceries and household goods — such as detergent and paper towels — while cutting back on non-essential items such as clothing and home furnishings.
Which are all made in China although they may be US company branded.
Like its competitor Target, Wal-mart has greatly expanded its role as a supermarket, both companies realizing people must eat. And that the government foodstamp subsidy is a revenue stream to be mined more thoroughly.
If you had a button to push that would silently annihilate these people you’d use it.
President Barack Obama’s “International Strategy for Cyberspace,” released late Monday (May 16), is a forward-thinking document in many ways …
But in one part, it’s eerily like “Dr. Strangelove.” It states that America reserves the right to counter a cyberattack by any means necessary, including unrestrained military force …
That’s the legacy of the last 10 years,” [I told the publication]. “And to the world at large, it’s viewed as a nation that sees every potential problem as a nail to be hit with the hammer of the military and/or security contractors.”
A few months ago I came up with the Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein rule.
It’s simple:
Even if there’s an appetite for a lynching in the public, if nobody knows the names of the to-be-lynched, the lynchees, then the latter are probably safe.
When I used to announce the band was going to play the song, “Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein,” the audience — all adults, many of whom have had very bad luck since the economic collapse of 2008 — never knows who the guy is.
So I have to explain it.
In so doing, it illustrates how the mainstream media in collusion with US financial interests which captured the financial regulatory structures of the US government, betrayed everyone.
For a graphic example, the current issue of Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi’s piece on the Levin report, the big book on the economic collapse and Wall Street skullduggery. His story is here.
It explains the Levin report in Taibbi-style, focusing on Goldman Sachs.
Taibbi relates how the Levin report documents Goldman’s systemic global fraud, a process in which the company realized it was over-leveraged into billions of dollars of toxic mortgages and crap assets.
However, it then decided to unload the toxic financial waste — which Lloyd Blankfein called “cats and dogs” — to suckers, further betting against the newly diced-up and repackaged assets. And it told no one it was doing this.
In this manner Goldman came out a big winner when the economy cratered in 2008.
Taibbi digests material from the Levin report that show Goldman lied continually to its clients about the worth of the products it was selling to them.
Goldman’s biggest client, Morgan Stanley, begged it to liquidate the investment and get out while they could still salvage some value. But Goldman refused, stalling for months as its clients roasted to death in a raging conflagration of losses. At one point, John Pearce, the Morgan Stanley rep dealing with Goldman, lost his temper at the bank’s refusal to sell, breaking his phone in frustration …
Goldman insists it was only required to liquidate the assets “in an orderly fashion.” But the bank had an incentive to drag its feet: Goldman’s huge bet against the deal meant that the worse Hudson performed, the more money Goldman made. After all, the entire point of the transaction was to screw its own clients so Goldman could “clean its books” …
The crime was far from victimless: Morgan Stanley alone lost nearly $960 million on the Hudson deal, which admittedly doesn’t do much to tug the heartstrings. Except that quickly after Goldman dumped this near-billion-dollar loss on Morgan Stanley, Morgan Stanley turned around and dumped it on taxpayers, who within a year were spending $10 billion bailing out the sucker bank through the TARP program.
It is worth pointing out here that Goldman’s behavior in the Hudson scam makes a mockery of standards in the underwriting business. Courts have held that “the relationship between the underwriter and its customer implicitly involves a favorable recommendation of the issued security.” The SEC, meanwhile, requires that broker-dealers like Goldman disclose “material adverse facts,” which among other things includes “adverse interests.”
And the firm continued to lie to Congress in investigations the body launched after 2008.
Taibbi goes through details culled from the Levin report and he makes the case that there is now more than enough evidence to bring criminal cases against the firm. However, Goldman has made the bet that it has so captured the US government that no serious cases will be brought against it.
And, so far, that looks like the smart money.
Was Taibbi’s piece big news. Is anyone even talking about the Levin report on Goldman being in jeopardy?
Nope. The big news is Osama bin Laden’s porn stash.
For an example of journalistic malfeasance in action, here’s Taibbi on CNN — backburnered to Ali Velshi’s territory for assorted pantywaists.
Velshi and CNN set it up as the usual journalistic polarity, with Taibbi on one side — the one for lynching Lloyd Blankfein and Goldman Sachs, and Megan McCardle on the other.
Somewhere in between the two, the mores of modern journalism dictate, must be the truth.
Ummm, no.
Taibbi despises McCardle as a witless high-button shill for Wall Street at the Atlantic. He visibly sneers at her near the end, quipping sarcastically: “Morality is so trite.”
McCardle doesn’t care for Taibbi, naturally, but that’s more a consequence of his damaging her reputation through regular refutations published at Rolling Stone.
Well, what’s the moral here? It’s the Lynch Lloyd Blankfein rule in action.
What did you hear more about this weekend, Osama bin Laden’s porn stash, Mike Huckabee not running for president, or the case for criminal prosecutions against Goldman Sachs?
Relief officials inundated with donations after the flurry of twisters that killed more than 300 people across the South are sorting through the broken toys and used underwear they don’t need while hunting for places to store mountains of vital supplies like canned food …
ith storage space scarce, most say they can’t handle any more used toys or cast-off clothing.
“That becomes the disaster within the disaster,” said Salvation Army spokesman Mark Jones. “When people make those mass donations … it causes the community to be overrun with them …
As for the Salvation Army, Jones said the agency only recently found warehouse space in hard-hit Tuscaloosa and still desperately needs new underwear, nonperishable foods, pet food and sports drinks.
Canned food and cleaning products are urgently needed ..
I know the first thing that always occurs to me when I see these kinds of things is to bag up some of my used underwear, socks and broken shit.
Grad school has become a socially acceptable way to drink beer, read, and go into massive debt in your 20s.
This in a piece on how “education” is the next bubble.
Now, let me get this right. Everyone’s flocking to graduate school because the loans are sub prime and universities are the new Wall Street, cross-collaterizing and over-leveraging everything.
Sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh at the comically mean people on Fox News.
On Saturday around lunch time I caught a few minutes of Stossel.
Run out of ABC a couple years ago, Stossel’s new show has one theme: Afflicting the afflicted. There’s no person or class too poor or bottom-out-of-sight to be spared the lash and some mocking laughter.
And while there’s always a lot of merriment at the expense of others on Stossel, the real humor is in catching the kinds of guests rubbing their hands together in glee and yukking it up over how they’ve exposed the manifold evils of the poor.
On Saturday, it was the rising menace of beggars, attested by two “experts” from — paradoxically — the poor man’s Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute.
First up, Stossel put on a fake beard and pan-handled for the camera. He told viewers he could have earned a decent living doing it, extrapolating a salary from a modest sum he allegedly earned after a few hours.
Think of the argument this way: You find a twenty dollar bill on your way to the market tomorrow. If you continue with that as proof of your earnings power per hour, starting as a baseline, you’ll think you can make $160 a day, tax free.
Uh-huh.
But the guests took the cake, with everyone at one point — near the end — pointing out that poor people are the fattest in America. Because they, like, get a lot of free food and then use all their begging money in the purchase of liquor and drugs.
The only rational response is to laugh at the cartoons masquerading as rational people, for instance, one named Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
McDonald’s routine is getting an audience to believe begging is out of control and that, by extension, beggars have the highest sense of self-entitlement in America.
Indeed, she’d have no career if it wasn’t actually rather easy to persuade a certain percentage of stupid but sometimes influential white people in cities that the real reason things are in decay around them is all the damn beggars and vagrants lousing up the joint, refusing to straighten up and fly right.
And if, in your opinion, begging hasn’t yet been sufficiently criminalized it’s only because MacDonald and the Manhattan Institute don’t have the lobbying might of agencies like the National Rifle Association or the Chamber of Commerce. It’s certainly been criminalized but enough is really never enough in 2011 USA.
I’d send you to Fox but the show was too long to endure just for the sake of seeing MacDonald.
Instead, I’ll just cite some of her over-the-top claims (you can read the rest) on the menace of beggar youth in San Francisco, here:
Four filthy targets of Homelessness, Inc.’s current relabeling effort sprawl across the sidewalk on Haight Street, accosting pedestrians. “Can you spare some change and shit? Will you take me home with you???? Cory, a slender, dark-haired young man from Ventura, California, cockily asks passersby. “Dude, do you have any food???? His two female companions, Zombie and Eeyore, swig from a bottle of pricey Tejava tea and pass a smoke while lying on a blanket surrounded by a fortress of backpacks, bedrolls, and scrawled signs asking for money. Vincent, a fourth “traveler,??? as the Haight Street punks call themselves, stares dully into space … The girls wear necklaces and bracelets of plastic disks and other hip found objects; their baggy tank tops and stockings are stylishly torn.
Of all the destinations on the “traveler??? circuit, the Haight carries a particular attraction to the young panhandlers, thanks to the Summer of Love. Starting in late 1965, waves of teens from across the country began pouring into what was then a ramshackle, blue-collar neighborhood of pastel Victorian houses and low-rent businesses, drawn to the emergent drug culture and its promised liberation from the bourgeois values of self-discipline and hard work. “The time has come to be free,??? a local flyer proclaimed. “Be FREE. Do your thing. Be what you are. Do it. Now.??? This insipid philosophy was eventually co-opted by consumer capitalism, while the hippie ethos gave way to punk, daisy chains to piercing, acid to meth, and mindless utopianism to mindless nihilism.
Over the last several years, the Haight’s vagrant population has grown more territorial and violent, residents and merchants say. Pit bulls are a frequent fashion accessory …
Merchants trying to clean up feces and urine left by the alcohol-besotted youth are sometimes harassed and attacked …
An unintentionally hilarious letter to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2010 revealed just why the homelessness-industrial complex is so desperate to claim the Haight infestation for itself: government contracts. “The majority of the youth on the streets and in the park are in the Haight seeking support to address the issues that have led them there,??? wrote the executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services in criticizing the sit-lie proposal. “Funding to help these youths through outreach, case management, education and employment has been severely cut over the past two years. . . . Rather than rallying in anger, a better use of our time is to focus on helping youths exit the streets so they can find work and housing and become contributing members of the community.??? Translation: Homelessness, Inc. wants more money.
As for becoming “contributing members of the community,??? that’s definitely not on the agenda, either. Asked what he saw for himself in the future, a “traveler??? in the Stanford documentary rolls his eyes, smiles nervously, and shakes his head for nearly a minute before replying: “A hot dog, there’s definitely a hot dog in my future.???
For Stossel, beggars were momentarily expanded to a national problem, one perhaps contributing to the economic state of malaise.
Vagrants and freeloaders have such nerve!
And you know beggars are always the fattest people you see on the streets. Unfortunately, there’s no hunger in America. It’s because of all the free food and booze money, damn right. These people even have enough left over to feed pit bulls.
One of Businessweek’s columnists notices that the Republican budget plan calls for killing education.
The thesis seems to be that even a business publication is getting alarmed when the eating of the seed corn and tearing of everything down becomes so noticeable.
Where the man gets it all wrong is near the finish. He seems to think that certain types of schooling, like trivial vocational training, made this country great.
It doesn’t. The biotech revolution, which he mentioned, happened because lots of people like me got Ph.D’s in the hard sciences. Period.
The education pipeline is worsening, too. The U.S. was once the world’s leader in mass education, with succeeding generations of children better educated then their parents. The trend toward ever-greater educational achievement has slowed since the 1970s, according to Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. They note that the U.S. has slipped from the top of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s ranking for high school graduates to near the bottom. The U.S. college graduation rate has remained steady over the last decade, but the country has the highest college dropout rate among OECD nations.
Help Wanted: Well-Educated Workers
Yet demand for well-educated workers is rising. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of the 30 fastest-growing occupations in the U.S.—jobs such as biomedical engineers and financial examiners—require at least a bachelor’s degree. Entry into an additional seven growth occupations, including dental hygienists and occupational therapy assistants, requires either an associate’s degree or a postsecondary vocational certificate.
Here’s the thing: The quality of retirement for the Baby Boom generation—from Social Security to private pensions—will depend on cash flow created by the current generation of young people. From the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862 to the G.I. Bill of 1948 and on to the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the lesson of history is clear: Education pays.
For example, the NDEA funded the education of a generation of young people that became the driving force behind the infotech and biotech revolutions.
You can be well-meaning and concerned and still be an utter fool. Like this man.
Financial examiner jobs require a college degree. Big deal. The present job market may desire financial examiners but the idea that an army of them will lead to future progress is deluded.
And filling the territory with platoons of dental hygeinists and occupational therapy assistants isn’t an answer for anything except maintaining clean teeth in people with health plans and, as for the second, c’mon. We’re going to innovate our way back into the lead with people trained to rehabilitate those who’ve had strokes and fractured hips?
As mentioned last week, this country doesn’t lack for human capital. It lacks vision and the desire to do something with it because it’s far simpler to run an entrenched vulture economy. We do have well-educated workers. My experience at the census proved it.
But even a good education no longer guarantees a middle class job. The GOP is not the only enemy here. The Democratic Party owns a big share of the responsibility for the way things have turned out. So does corporate America.
“Increasing exports, as the administration aims to do, is a promising strategy.”
Can someone get these people an intro econ textbook? Increasing exports is not what creates jobs, it is increasing net exports (exports minus imports) that creates jobs.
If GM shuts an assembly plant in Ohio and instead ships its car parts to Mexico to be assembled there, are these parts exports creating jobs? In Washington Post land the answer is apparently “yes.” Unfortunately in the real world the answer is no. Since we have been increasing our imports more rapidly than we have increased our exports, the United States has been running a big trade deficit, leading to a large loss of jobs. (The trade deficit also implies negative national savings — and therefore either large budget deficits or negative private savings or some combination, but we’ll leave this issue for another day.)
Finally, the Post conclues by urging patience:
“The costs, human and economic, of high unemployment are heartbreaking. But it will take a measure of patience as well as a sense of urgency to prevent it from becoming a permanent feature of the U.S. economic landscape.”
Yes, all the buffoons running economic policy who could not see the largest asset bubble in the history of the world are still there running economic policy. All the Wall Street clowns who made a fortune pushing junk mortgages and packaging them into complex financial instruments are still rich. That’s just the way it is. The rest of us just need to be patient.
It’s worth adding that “increasing exports” the administration’s way usually just means either mostly arms deals or insignificant bumps in opening foreign markets to SUVs, and plutocracy artisanal economy products from small companies that very rarely expand their workforces in southern California.
Astonishingly, HBO is devoting an hour long promotion to its upcoming Hollywood-ization of the Wall St.-led global economic collapse, Too Big to Fail.
This meant trotting out all the A-list actors chosen to portray the Masters of the Universe.
There’s William Hurt as Henry Paulson.
Paul Giamatti, an unbelievable choice despite the salt ‘n’ pepper beard, as Ben Bernanke. However, Giamatti is unbelievable as a wrestling coach, which was his most recently publicized role in Win Win. Paul Giamatti is only ever believable when playing pudgy schmucks. He is not a chameleon.
The big underlying problem is what I now call the Let’s Lynch Lloyd Blankfein Rule.
As I found, after writing a decent song about the CEO of Goldman Sachs, hardly anyone — except people who’ve read Matt Taibbi religiously — know who Blankfein is. So few had any inkling what the song was about and why lynching was recommended.
While they vaguely grasp that Wall Street did very bad things, fucking everyone over, that’s the extent of general static knowledge on the affair.
HBO has the same problem and I’m wagering it’s why it has such a long pre-explaining promotional segment devoted to pimping the dramatization.
However, if Michael Moore’s Capitalism — A Love Story and Ferguson’s Inside Job couldn’t catalyze change, this certainly has no chance.
And I’m assuming that’s not its purpose. Too Big to Fail’s purpose is as a loss leader for cable TV award nominations and blow jobs from big city newspaper television critics.
When the best you can come up with, other than actors talking about the parts they play — the equivalent of the porn industry’s solo sessions, are assholes like Fareed Zakaria and John Fund explaining why something is good, there’s no way you’re selling for people who actually, uh, like entertainment to be entertaining.
You watch Fund and regardless of whether or not you know who he is, the most likely thing to spring to mind is: “A dermatologist could do something about the wart on that guy’s eyelid.”
On a scale of one to ten rate the way you’d look forward to the following (with ten being $5,000 and a weekend in the Florida Keys and one being another weekend with only flaring hemorrhoids):
Watching a famous actor play Henry Paulson, the 74th Secretary of the Treasury of the US, in a made-for-tv movie.
