Click the pic for a larger image. It makes it easier to read. Don't feel bad, I just learned I need tri-focals. I must be a geezer.

Via Crooks & Liars. From here.

Bailout For The Rich

Again. Like the reader in the comments from from the post, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that Bu$hco would favor the rich over the rest of us. I'll admit, I haven't been paying as much attention to the economy as I should have been paying. Now I will pay, along with a whole lot of other people. Bu$hCo & Dick "Dick" Cheney won't suffer, however, & they will keep their great health insurance. Too bad.

...over 70% of the Bush tax rebate goes to the top 40% (average income: $134,000) and less than 10% reaches the bottom 40% (average income: $14,300).

The Dow is now off 8.34 ....

Recession, it's the new surge.

Ya Think?

Headline in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Jobless rate reaches 5% - a 2-year high
18,000 new jobs suggest economy's troubles run deep

Story here. Go read it, it will help when you argue with the 30 percenters.

Yikes

Looks like the predatory market forces will do more than make a lot of people homeless.

The deepening housing crisis will cut economic growth by more than 25 percent in 143 U.S. metropolitan areas next year and by more than a third in 65 metro communities, according to a new forecast for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The new report prepared for the mayors by financial forecaster Global Insight warns of cascading problems caused by falling home prices, an expected 1.4 million foreclosures and the pending reset of millions of adjustable-rate mortgages. The mayors are to release the report Tuesday.

Yeah, greed is good. My emphasis.

UPDATE: It's going to cost the San Francisco Bay area $5.4 billion.

Feeling Safer?

Even the loony is trading at about $1.10. Looks like my trip around Lake Superior on the Harly next summer may not happen, well, the high loony & the ripoff involved in getting an American passport.

The investigators' findings? The government's $30 fee was roughly double the actual cost when imposed in 2002. The Postal Service, which operates 5,382 locations where people can apply for passports, estimated its costs at $13.31 in 2002. The State Department, which operates 14 passport offices, said its costs were $16.20 at that time.

"This is not supposed to be a profit-making venture," Dorgan said. "They charge 30 bucks just for passing something across the counter."

Oh, BTW, here are how two other currencies are doing relative to the dollar. These numbers have been rounded up.

Euro - $1.50
Pound - 2.10

UPDATE: More here.

Bad Economics

Via RLK. Tell me again Hank Martinsen, how great the Bu$hCo economy is.

Bill Moyers Speaks

Hat tip to RLK. Moyers has some good things to say in this piece in the new Jan. 22, 2007 issue of The Nation.

Here is the real political story, the one most politicians won't even acknowledge: the reality of the anonymous, disquieting daily struggle of ordinary people, including the most marginalized and vulnerable Americans but also young workers and elders and parents, families and communities, searching for dignity and fairness against long odds in a cruel market world.

Everywhere you turn you'll find people who believe they have been written out of the story. Everywhere you turn there's a sense of insecurity grounded in a gnawing fear that freedom in America has come to mean the freedom of the rich to get richer even as millions of Americans are dumped from the Dream. So let me say what I think up front: The leaders and thinkers and activists who honestly tell that story and speak passionately of the moral and religious values it puts in play will be the first political generation since the New Deal to win power back for the people.
....
he problem with this--and still a major problem today--is that the purported ideological cease-fire ended only a few years later. But the Democrats never re-armed, and they kept pinning all their hopes on economic growth, which by its very nature is valueless and cannot alone provide answers to social and moral questions that arise in the face of resurgent crisis. While "practical management of a modern economy" had a kind of surrogate legitimacy as long as it worked, when it no longer worked, the nation faced a paralyzing moral void in deciding how the burdens should be borne. Well-organized conservative forces, firing on all ideological pistons, rushed to fill this void with a story corporate America wanted us to hear. Inspired by bumper-sticker abstractions of Milton Friedman's ideas, propelled by cascades of cash from corporate chieftans like Coors and Koch and "Neutron" Jack Welch, fortified by the pious prescriptions of fundamentalist political preachers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the conservative armies marched on Washington. And they succeeded brilliantly.

& so do I. Speak that is. We must now continue the "surge" we began in November 2006 & keep telling the story of how Bu$hCo & his ReThug minions are really hurting America. As long as we continue to show the inequality that is inherit in our present economic situation, as long as we continue to show the brutality of Bu$hCo's war of choice, as long as we continue to show how decent, progressive people live & behave in a democracy, we will prevail.

The Leader Of The Free World

Well, the other day I mentioned outrage fatigue & Bu$hCo does his best, an oxymoron, I know, to outrage me one more time. What a buffoon, or something, maybe a maroon, or a cartoon. There, Les, I rhymed. & here is our President, speaking today at a press conference. Well, somebody's President.

A recent report on retail sales shows a strong beginning to the holiday shopping season across the country -- and I encourage you all to go shopping more.

As If

I'm not holding my breath. This whole business of compassionate capitalism has been gratuitously recycled my whole life. Wal-Mart anybody?

Paul Krugman

Via Susie Madrak, since I won't, on principle, pay the NYT for the pleasure of some of their columnists. The nation is all the poorer for their greed.

How serious a slump is the bond market predicting? Pretty serious. Right now, statistical models based on the historical correlation between interest rates and recessions give roughly even odds that we’re about to experience a formal recession. And since even a slowdown that doesn’t formally qualify as a recession can lead to a sharp rise in unemployment, the odds are very good — maybe 2 to 1 — that 2007 will be a very tough year.

The Economy

Molly Ivins adds up the numbers. Not so good.

Bush's version of "doing remarkably well" includes a trade gap--a record $69.9 billion in August--up 2.7 percent since July. "Short of a big correction in consumer spending, the best we can hope for is that the trade deficit stabilizes," Stephen Stanley, chief economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, told Bloomberg.com.

Meanwhile, what we see in the economy as a whole is an immense shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the very rich. It seems a little painful to have to point this out yet again after six solid years of it, but these are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Just to give you an idea of how dependable the Bush numbers are, the Department of Health and Human Services put out a news release a few weeks ago telling senior citizens they will have "new options with low costs" and that monthly premiums in '07 will be the same as in '06.

"The Medicare prescription drug benefit ... just keeps getting better," burbled HHS. They seem to have been taking too much in the way of prescription drugs. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), one of the most singularly useful members of Congress, found that average premiums will actually increase by more than 10 percent next year. And for the lowest-priced plans, average premiums will be up more than 44 percent. "It is not merely confusing arithmetic, it is deceptive advertising," said Waxman.

While lightening the tax burden for the rich, other parts of the Bush economic program continue to undermine the middle class in this country. As you may recall, in 2005 the credit industry successfully rammed a disgraceful bankruptcy reform bill through Congress. It's working out just the way we expected it to: Middle-class families are borrowing more than ever to make ends meet. Most families go under if: (a) they lose a job or (b) they have a health crisis.

One attorney sums up the legislation's impact: "It's designed to make life miserable for anybody who owes money. It's a help-the-banks, squish-the-little-guy law."

Had Enough?

Will this finally be the wake-up call Wal-Mart workers will answer? I sure hope so. Wal-Mart is a great example of the evil side of a market economy. & yet Wall Street approves & cheers them on.

But some Wal-Mart workers say the changes are further reducing their already modest incomes and putting a serious strain on their child-rearing and personal lives. Current and former Wal-Mart workers say some managers have insisted that they make themselves available around the clock, and assert that the company is making changes with an eye to forcing out longtime higher-wage workers to make way for lower-wage part-time employees.

Investment analysts and store managers say Wal-Mart executives have told them the company wants to transform its work force to 40 percent part-time from 20 percent. Wal-Mart denies it has a goal of 40 percent part-time workers, although company officials say that part-timers now make up 25 percent to 30 percent of workers, up from 20 percent last October.