Category: The New Depression

Not a good sign

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

UPDATE: Looks like all they did was displace crowds to the middle of the night.

So I slept right through my alarm this morning and did not get over to the Black Friday protest at my local Walmart. I rode over when I woke up, but there were no signs of a protest (although I understand they’re planning in-store actions, too). The parking lot wasn’t anywhere near as full as you’d expect, and I thought, “Good, people are observing the strike.”

But as I rode around, I noticed business was light everywhere: the parking lots at Lowe’s, the Home Deport, Kmart, even (gasp!) Target weren’t anywhere near as crowded as usual.

Now, I have nothing to compare. This is the first time I have even left the house on Black Friday, so I don’t know what’s “normal.” But it sure looks to me that people aren’t very interested in shopping this year — and that doesn’t bode well for the economy.

How about you guys? Anyone venture out this morning?

Train to nowhere

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

The lead paragraph from a smart piece in The New York Times Magazine that explains why the old jobs are never coming back, and why any politician who says they are is a liar:

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

More here.

The rewards of austerity

~ odd man out ~ 1 Comment

From The Guardian:

Unemployment in the eurozone has risen to a new record, with more than one in four out of work in Spain and Greece.

There are now 18.49 million people without jobs in the 17 countries sharing the euro, said the European statistics office Eurostat on Wednesday with an extra 146,000 joining the ranks of the unemployed last month.

Youth unemployment – joblessness among under-25s – rose to 23.3%, up from 21% during the same month a year ago…

Fascism grows

~ susie

In an empty belly. Keep an eye on Greece, because this is some scary shit:

The Golden Dawn office in downtown Athens is open three evenings a week. Most of the visitors are middle-aged women with dull eyes and sunken cheeks, faces too old for their bodies, hardened, tired expressions. More than 50 come in an hour. Quietly, they ask the bouncers, “Are they giving out food inside?” “Third floor,” the bouncers say; but most of the women come out empty-handed save for a mauve piece of paper with the Golden Dawn logo on it. There’s only enough today for voters from this ward; they’ll announce the next distribution on a poster, in the papers, if you phone.


Away from the door, Maria Kirimi tells me she’s been locked out of her flat with all her things inside since 29 July; the family are crowded at her mother’s now, seven people surviving on €400 a month. “We’re the living dead,” she says. Isn’t she troubled by Golden Dawn’s violence? “The boys in the black shirts are the only ones I’m not scared of. I feel they’ll protect me.” I ask her mother, old enough to remember the junta, what she thinks of their far-right views. “I heard Michaloliakos say on TV that their sign isn’t Hitler’s sign but a patriotic one,” she says, and then looks down at her feet. “It does upset me a bit. But I haven’t heard of anyone else giving out food.”

FactCheck.org is bogus. Check it out.

~ odd man out

Obama is no FDR, but what’s up with FactCheck.org bolstering Willard’s deceptive talking points?

From a piece in Seeing the Forest that corrects FactCheck’s “facts”:

Yes, even after the stimulus turned things around we were still losing jobs, but losing fewer each month, and then breaking into positive territory and staying there.

As for public/private -sector jobs, yes Obama did try to save public-sector jobs and did a good job of that with the stimulus, but Republicans blocked further efforts, and in the state were able to lay off many, many teachers, police, etc.

And according to FactCheck.org, that’s Obama’s fault, too…

But why no criminal charges?

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

From AP:

The latest federal lawsuit over alleged mortgage fraud paints an unflattering picture of a doomed lender: Executives at Countrywide Financial urged workers to churn out loans, accepted fudged applications and tried to hide ballooning defaults.

The suit, filed Wednesday by the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, also underscored how Bank of America’s purchase of Countrywide in July 2008, just before the financial crisis, backfired severely.

The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, said he was seeking more than $1 billion, but the suit could ultimately recover much more in damages.

“This lawsuit should send another clear message that reckless lending practices will not be tolerated,” Bharara said in a statement. He described Countrywide’s practices as “spectacularly brazen in scope…”