Category: The New Depression

Stranger than Strangelove

~ odd man out ~ 2 Comments

I was back at the shack, beside myself with angst, reading to the swamp rabbit about a catastrophe that almost happened a half-century ago:

A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima.

The document, obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina on 23 January 1961. The bombs fell to earth after a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air, and one of the devices behaved precisely as a nuclear weapon was designed to behave in warfare: its parachute opened, its trigger mechanisms engaged, and only one low-voltage switch prevented untold carnage.

I reminded the swamp rabbit that we live a hop and a skip from Philadelphia. The bomb might have wiped out Philly and the rest of the mid-Atlantic region faster than you could say “Duck and cover.”

“‘Almost’ don’t count,” the swamp rabbit said. He was drinking Wild Turkey and Coke, a rustic concoction that brings out the philosopher in him. “The Germans almost took Stalingrad. Dylan almost died in a motorcycle accident. What’s your point, Odd Man?”

I threw an empty bottle of Guinness at him and said, “The point is that real life is stranger than fiction. Even Stanley Kubrick, in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, couldn’t have made up a story this strange. If not for one measly switch, that bomb would have gone off.”

The swamp rabbit gulped his drink, spilling some on his greasy coat, and said, “So what? If the bomb had gone off, then you wouldn’t be sitting here worrying out loud like some old lady with rheumatism. That was Kubrick’s point, don’t you know? In an absurd world, why worry?”

I watched the Guinness bottle bobbing in the swamp and said, “You stupid rodent. Dr. Strangelove was a cautionary tale. Kubrick was trying to wise people up to the danger of nuclear war.”

“Dr. Strangelove was a comedy,” he said. “Ain’t no way nobody like you could have done nothin’ about no nuclear war, not when the Cold War was on. You might just as well laugh. If you want to worry, then worry about where you’re gonna sell them stories you write. Worry about where you gonna git money for food now that there ain’t no jobs.”

I almost tossed him in the swamp by his ears but resisted the urge. What good is angst if you don’t have an audience for it?

Time magazine is puzzled

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Why is everyone still so poor with the economic recovery?

The poverty rate and the number of people living in poverty haven’t budged since 2011 despite the slowly improving economy, according to a report released early Tuesday.

46.5 million people were living in poverty in 2012, according to new data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 Income Poverty and Health Insurance report. That translates into a national rate of 15% of Americans below the poverty line. Before the last recession began in 2007, the rate was 2.5 points lower and has been hovering around 15% since 2010.

Tuesday’s report represents the second consecutive year that neither the poverty rate nor the number of people living in poverty has shifted in statistically significant terms. In 2011, there were 46.2 million people living in poverty.

Hmm. Maybe a large news org (maybe a weekly magazine?) could put some of their reporters on the trail to look at the larger issues behind stubborn unemployment and perhaps figure out this baffling situation!

Read more:

17 states rejecting up to 80% of new welfare applicants

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Link:

The state of Pennsylvania has denied as many as eight of every 10 applications for cash welfare in 2013, a major increase over previous years, an Inquirer review of Department of Public Welfare figures shows. It’s a pattern being repeated in 17 other states.

The increased rate of denials coincides with a change in state law. Before Pennsylvanians apply for welfare, they now must seek at least three jobs and document their efforts. Critics contend that the ultimate goal of the new rule, known as pre-approval work search, is to stymie applicants from getting welfare by making the process harder. “It’s about punishing the poor for needing assistance by adding another hurdle for welfare,” said Rochelle Jackson, public policy advocate for Just Harvest, an anti-poverty group in Pittsburgh. State officials disagree, saying the new rules are meant to encourage people to find work and to avoid getting on welfare in the first place.

You can lead a horse to water

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

eviction-pic1

You remember my neighbor, the one who was being evicted? The one to whom you all so generously donated enough money to keep her from being kicked out?

She got kicked out this morning.

I told her not to give the money to her landlord. I told her to use it to find a room for rent — that as long as she didn’t have a job, she was only pissing it away by giving it to the landlord. But she did. (It was very frustrating for me. But then, people who weren’t born that way don’t really know how to be poor.) She thought if she gave them something, they would appreciate that she was trying and let her stay. Obviously, it didn’t work.

“I just wanted to know if I could put a few bags in your hallway while I wait for my sister to pick me up,” she said, standing there in the rain with her little dog. Of course, I said.

So she loaded several huge bags into my hall, and sat there with her dog. After two hours, her sister still hadn’t shown up, and she’d stopped answering the phone. “Get your stuff in the car, I’m taking you,” I said.

We loaded up all her stuff and drove across the bridge to Jersey. As soon as we pulled up in front of the house, her sister closed the front door and was peeking out from behind her kitchen curtains. “She’s there,” I said loudly. “I see her looking out from behind the curtain. Maybe she forgot that you took care of your dying mother for five years while she lived her life.”

She disappeared into the house with two bags, and came out to get more.

“She’s really mad at me for being here,” she said. “She said she had people working to find a solution, why didn’t I just wait?”

Yeah, in the rain. With her dog.

She told me about someone she knows who threw herself in front of a train. (She lived. She’s in rehab.) “What if my sister kicks me out?”

“Don’t let her,” I said. “You’re family. You Italians love to talk about family, well, this is what it’s all about. And don’t let her make you feel bad. No one at our age would willingly put themselves in the position of living with a sibling.” (I know I wouldn’t.)

And I drove away.

She’s a college grad with a background in the food business, including a certification in wine and cheese pairings. She had two interviews at Whole Foods, but they hired someone with a masters in nutrition. For $9 an hour.

And people wonder why I’m so pissed at Obama? Because he hasn’t done anything for people like this. Worse than that, he never even raised his voice on their behalf.

‘The only sustainable prosperity is a shared prosperity’

~ susie

http://youtu.be/n8C20ph0fAI

Joseph Stiglitz speaking at the AFL-CIO convention:

“It’s been clear to me that our economy has been sick for a long time,” he began, introducing a theme he would hammer home throughout the speech. “For too long, the hardworking and rule-abiding had seen their paychecks shrink or stay the same, while the rule-breakers raked in huge profits and wealth,” he said. “It made our economy sick, and our politics sick, too.”

He attacked those who oppose living wages in the name of the abstraction of “cutting spending,” saying that “[w]e won’t achieve [true and sustainable prosperity] through mindless cutbacks in public spending, whether in schools, hospitals, police, or firemen. These are ways to keep our economy sick. And an economy in which 95% of the growth goes to the top 1% can only be called that: sick.”

Stiglitz then called on the members of the AFL-CIO to encourage others to unionize, citing Pres. Lincoln on the consequences of dividing houses: “We have become a house divided against itself – divided between the 99% and the 1%, between the workers, and those who would exploit them. We have to reunite the house, but it won’t happen on its own.”

“It will only happen if workers come together. If they organize. If they unite to fight for what they know is right, in each and every workplace, in each and every community, and in each and every state capital and in Washington. We have to restore not only democracy to Washington, but to the workplace.”

– See more at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/09/13/nobel-laureate-stiglitz-the-only-true-and-sustainable-prosperity-is-shared-prosperity/#sthash.TWjnbo1x.dpuf

Atlantic City’s ultimate crap-out, a.k.a. Revel

~ odd man out
Revel is a bust, but A.C. is still a great place for enterprising job seekers.

They echoed in my head this morning, the words of the swamp rabbit as he confronted me at my shotgun shack in the Tinicum swamp: “What’s your plan, Odd Man?”

The pesky little rodent mocks me because I tend to bitch about being broke. He tries to provoke me into jumping off the porch into the swamp to try to wring his scrawny neck. His other favorite question is, “If you’re so smart, Odd Man, how come you ain’t rich?”

He still jokes about my recent trip to Atlantic City, where I tried to get work with the beach patrol, making sure the women’s bathing skirt hems were no more than four inches higher than their knees. (Atlantic City is trying to become more of a family resort, or so I have read.)

The women kicked sand in my face when I tried to get hold of their legs, so I took a walk to see if Revel was hiring. Revel, you might recall, is the $2.4 billion, 47-floor casino-hotel that was going to transform A.C. from a blue-collar gambling town into a chic destination for vacationers who enjoy lunch prepared by Michelin chefs, a dip in the rooftop pool overlooking the ocean, and a few hands of baccarat before the full-body massage. And God help any troglodyte who tried to smoke a cigarette in this upscale consumers’ paradise.

But Revel wasn’t hiring. In fact, it was trying to bounce back from bankruptcy by pulling a one-eighty regarding ambiance. Its fate will hinge on whether it can re-invent itself as a hangout for hardcore low-level gamblers (slots players, ugh) rather than a haven for would-be sophisticates. As for the smoking ban — would you like a fresh ash tray with your cigarette, ma’am?

The swamp rabbit got a few laughs out of Revel’s new incarnation, especially when I told him it had secured $350 million in “exit financing” when it emerged from bankruptcy. He said, “If the guys who run this place are so dumb, how come they ain’t busted?”

Which happens to be the question of the decade, one that reporters never get around to asking about the thieves who still run the economy-killing Wall Street banks that survived only because of government bailouts.

Footnote: Revel’s main financial backer used to be Morgan Stanley, which received a $107.3 bailout from the Fed after the economy tanked in 2008.

One more: A recent newspaper story headlined “Revel sued by gamblers who felt cheated by casino’s ‘You Can’t Lose’ campaign,” provides more evidence that the people who run Revel are dumber than swamp rabbits.

‘Structural unemployment’?

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

unemployment

Why NOT throw money at the problem?

Dean Baker: Paul Solman takes me and my grumpy friend Paul Krugman to task for insisting that there is a growing consensus within the economics profession that we are not suffering from structural unemployment. Krugman and I used our blogs to complain about Aug. 2’s segment in which Brooks suggested structural unemployment was the economy’s main problem and that there was little that could be done about it.

The United States currently has about 9 million fewer people working than if it had continued on its trend of growth from 2002 to 2007.

The question is whether the unemployment problem is a lack of demand due to a loss of $8 trillion in housing bubble wealth, or whether there are structural problems that would prevent most of these 9 million people from being re-employed even if the demand were there. Krugman and I support the former idea; those who see unemployment as structural are in the latter camp. Here’s another way to think about the problem. Imagine someone found a $1 trillion bill in the street and decided that, as a public service, she would spend the money over the next 12 months to boost the economy. For simplicity, let’s assume that she decides to divide her $1 trillion so that it is spent in exactly the same way that the economy’s current $16 trillion in annual spending is spent.

In my view, this $1 trillion of new spending would cause output to increase by roughly 6 percent. (I’m ignoring multiplier effects to keep things simple.) Employment would also rise by roughly the same amount, filling the bulk of the 9-million-jobs hole. In other words, this would be great news for the country.
Continue reading “‘Structural unemployment’?” →

Recovery or not?

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

unemployment vs share

Ezra Klein:

Today is jobs day. And today’s jobs report, like most jobs report, will lead directly to the most uncomfortable question of the recovery: Has there even been an economic recovery?

Spend much time looking at the drop in the percentage of Americans participating in the labor force and you’re likely to think not. Unemployment has fallen 2.5 percent from its post-recession peak, but the share of working-age adults with jobs has barely budged. This leads to scary graphs, like this one, or scary stats, like this one: If labor-force participation had held at its pre-recession peak, unemployment would be around 9.7 percent today.

The implication of these numbers is that the recovery is a mirage. The official unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work. It’s dropped less because people have found work than because they’ve stopped looking. Ergo, there’s been no recovery — just a hardening of the post-recession labor market.

This is a story I gestured at on Thursday. But Marc Goldwein of the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget pointed me towards an Urban Institute paper that complicates the situation considerably.

The popular (well, popular among depressed econ wonks) image of discouraged workers sighing and deleting their Monster.com account once and for all is wrong. The rate of labor force exit is actually lower than it was in the aftermath of the 2001 recession. It’s labor force entry that’s suffered.

In particular, it’s suffered among women — and it’s really suffered among young women – who are a lot less likely to enter the labor force than they were in 2002 and 2003.

That is, in certain ways, a more encouraging trend: Discouraged workers who leave the labor force typically see their skills erode. Young people who delay entry are often staying in school longer, gathering skills that will ultimately prove valuable to them (and student loan debt that will prove burdensome).
Continue reading “Recovery or not?” →

80 percent of U.S. adults face near-poverty, unemployment

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

neighbor

I’m not surprised. Are you?

WASHINGTON — Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused – on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn’t generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

“If you do try to go apply for a job, they’re not hiring people, and they’re not paying that much to even go to work,” she said. Children, she said, have “nothing better to do than to get on drugs.”

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government’s poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

Hey, maybe this would be a good time to cut Social Security payments!

NJ residents wait months for food stamps

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

http://youtu.be/ioq6WRjyLU8

Why doesn’t Chris Christie fix this? Oh, I forgot: He’s too busy sucking up to the Kochs!

High demand for food stamps has made New Jersey one of the slowest states in the nation to process food stamp applications.

States are required to process applications for the food stamp program, or SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), within 30 days. But according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, New Jersey only meets this requirement 73.75 percent of the time.
The cause of the delay is a struggle to keep up with growing demand for the program, a direct consequence of the recession and ongoing economic recovery. Since 2008, the county boards of social services, which are charged with administering SNAP in New Jersey, have seen a 107 percent increase in the number of applicants, according to Lisa Pitz, coordinator of advocacy and outreach for the New Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition. The USDA calculated that as of March, 873,657 people were receiving SNAP benefits, or nearly one in 10 New Jersey residents. These high numbers put a strain on the state agencies that provide SNAP benefits, slowing down the application process for potential beneficiaries.

Some SNAP applicants have had to wait as long as six months for their application to go through. Others have given up their benefits because they could not afford to keep waiting. One mother described how difficult it is when benefits are delayed:

“Oh, man, it’s been so bad,” said Katira Quiles, 22, a Camden mother of two who has a part-time job for $8 an hour at a food-processing plant near Glassboro. “They take a long time getting you your food stamps.”
Recently, Quiles’ benefit was a week late, causing her to panic because she didn’t have enough food for her children.

The USDA mandates that any state that processes 90 percent or less of its SNAP applications within 30 days must create a strategy to reach a 95 percent rate. New Jersey is hiring new caseworkers, improving computer systems, and expediting the often lengthy process of filing the proper paperwork.