1/ Paul Krugman thinks Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, has been intimidated into paying too much attention to inflation and not caring about the epidemic of long term unemployment.......
Great article, but I think he's being charitable to Bernanke who is entirely a creature of the big banks and does their bidding......and the oligarchs like high unemployment as it drives down wages.
At this level of power it's all about the elites and the corporations - they could care less about you......
Last month more than 14 million Americans were unemployed by the official definition — that is, seeking work but unable to find it. Millions more were stuck in part-time work because they couldn’t find full-time jobs. And we’re not talking about temporary hardship. Long-term unemployment, once rare in this country, has become all too normal: More than four million Americans have been out of work for a year or more.
Given this dismal picture, you might have expected unemployment, and what to do about it, to have been a major focus of Wednesday’s press conference with Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. And it should have been. But it wasn’t.
After the conference, Reuters put together a “word cloud” of Mr. Bernanke’s remarks, a visual representation of the frequency with which he used various words. The cloud is dominated by the word “inflation.” “Unemployment,” in much smaller type, is tucked in the background.
This misplaced emphasis wasn’t entirely Mr. Bernanke’s fault, since he was responding to questions — and those questions focused much more on inflation than on unemployment. But that focus was, in itself, a symptom of the extent to which Washington has lost interest in the plight of the unemployed. And the Bernanke Fed, which should be taking a firm stand against these skewed priorities, is instead letting itself be bullied into following the herd.
Some background: The Fed normally takes primary responsibility for short-term economic management, using its influence over interest rates to cool the economy when it’s running too hot, which raises the threat of inflation, and to heat it up when it’s running too cold, leading to high unemployment. And the Fed has more or less explicitly indicated what it considers a Goldilocks outcome, neither too hot nor too cold: inflation at 2 percent or a bit lower, unemployment at 5 percent or a bit higher.
But Goldilocks has left the building, and shows no sign of returning soon. The Fed’s latest forecasts, unveiled at that press conference, show low inflation and high unemployment for the foreseeable future.
True, the Fed expects inflation this year to run a bit above target, but Mr. Bernanke declared (and I agree) that we’re looking at a temporary bulge from higher raw material prices; measures of underlying inflation remain well below target, and the forecast sees inflation falling sharply next year and remaining low at least through 2013.
Meanwhile, as I’ve already pointed out, unemployment — although down from its 2009 peak — remains devastatingly high. And the Fed expects only slow improvement, with unemployment at the end of 2013 expected to still be around 7 percent.
It all adds up to a clear case for more action. Yet Mr. Bernanke indicated that he has done all he’s likely to do. Why?
He could have argued that he lacks the ability to do more, that he and his colleagues no longer have much traction over the economy. But he didn’t. On the contrary, he argued that the Fed’s recent policy of buying long-term bonds, generally referred to as “quantitative easing,” has been effective. So why not do more?
Mr. Bernanke’s answer was deeply disheartening. He declared that further expansion might lead to higher inflation.
What you need to bear in mind here is that the Fed’s own forecasts say that inflation will be below target over the next few years, so that some rise in inflation would actually be a good thing, not a reason to avoid tackling unemployment. Those forecasts could, of course, be wrong, but they could be too high as well as too low.
The only way to make sense of Mr. Bernanke’s aversion to further action is to say that he’s deathly afraid of overshooting the inflation target, while being far less worried about undershooting — even though doing too little means condemning millions of Americans to the nightmare of long-term unemployment.
What’s going on here? My interpretation is that Mr. Bernanke is allowing himself to be bullied by the inflationistas: the people who keep seeing runaway inflation just around the corner and are undeterred by the fact that they keep on being wrong.
Lately the inflationistas have seized on rising oil prices as evidence in their favor, even though — as Mr. Bernanke himself pointed out — these prices have nothing to do with Fed policy. The way oil prices are coloring the discussion led the economist Tim Duy to suggest, sarcastically, that basic Fed policy is now to do nothing about unemployment “because some people in the Middle East are seeking democracy.”
But I’d put it differently. I’d say that the Fed’s policy is to do nothing about unemployment because Ron Paul is now the chairman of the House subcommittee on monetary policy.
So much for the Fed’s independence. And so much for the future of America’s increasingly desperate jobless.
2/ Very professionally done video of dance moves from the movies.......from Fred Astaire to Uma Thurman to "Footloose".....4 minutes of fabulous dancing....
3/ Divide and conquer - this is what the oligarchs are doing to us in America. Most interesting essay on how the red/blue divide is being engineered by the top 1% so we, the middle class, are distracted hating each other while the rich use our inattention to plunder more and more.....
omeone very smart once said, "Your labels are your handles."And we've got handles. Left and Right. Liberal and Conservative. Democrat and Republican. In these war-weary years of our financial discontent, we are clinging harder than ever to those labels. Or, perhaps, the labels are clinging harder than ever to us. Either way, this increasingly embattled form of identity politics only makes our handles easier to grab.
And the country easier to steer.
Like the shiny handlebar of a child's bike, our political culture is adorned with two tassels ... red on one side and blue on the other. For the moneyed elites who run this country, getting what they want is as easy as riding a bike. They make sharp turns to the right and veer a little to the left. But, all the while, they keep peddling exactly where they want to go - directly to the bank.
It is no coincidence that the gaping gap between the super-rich and everyone else has widened at the same time the rift between Red States and Blue States has grown. Instead of the ever-more relevant distinction between "rich" and "poor," the political-media complex profits from emphasizing the woefully binary, two-party paradigm that serves them so well. Political salespeople feed us a steady diet of re-heated arguments, each advocating that you buy their brand. And you are what you buy. You are either Red or Blue. A one or a zero. With us or against us.
The more we identify with this binary system of ones and zeroes, the more the financial class is able to play their zero-sum game. They get the sums, and we get the zeroes.
The greedy hands of the top 1% grab us by those Red and Blue handles and turn us against each other in order to keep us from turning against them. It's all just public relations to the power people who shuttle to the nation's capital on private jets, eager to grease the palms that pull our strings ... and tug on our tassels.
Forget Red and Blue ... their true allegiance is to green.
4/ Had to sneak this in - Jon Stewart on the birth certificate, the Donald, the insane media and Trump's hair....wonderful....5 minutes.....
5/ Whatever happened to Keith Olbermann? He's around, and has a website called FokNewsChannel where he ruminates on various subjects.......
Here is an article from FOK on how the President releasing his birth certificate isn't the point - the extreme righties will never be satisfied, and will never give up until he's out of office, when they'll invent another demon.....
This one is why the White House released the Certificate now rather than earlier. The others will – simultaneously or in succession – be about whether the new document is real or a fake, or why he has two birth certificates, or — whatever, the detail is doesn’t matter.
This is because the debate has never been about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. The debate has been about whether the Republicans could or can do by rumor, innuendo, and Fox Propaganda, what they cannot do by the ballot: find the overarching “scandal” with which to beat a Democratic President. With Bill Clinton it was misconduct, sexual and legal, that made him look like a saint by contrast to the average Republican criticizing him (I’m looking at you, Newt – and all the mini-Newts). With Barack Obama it is anything, anything, anything at all, that will reinforce the idea that he is the dangerous other/terrorist/alien/menace/
And the investigation is there not to prove or disprove anything, but to merely provide its supporters with an excuse, a rationalization, to hate a President and tell themselves they are not doing so because he is a Democrat, or a black man, but because he is somehow legally unqualified for the job. Anything at all will do, providing it holds together long enough for genuinely stupid people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Donald (‘People Love My Hair’) Trump to jump on the bandwagon and lead the chorus in several versions of “We Hate Him, But Not Because He’s Black.”
6/ Incredibly dirty South Park video, where Cartman has a meltdown with his mother trying to get a new IPad.....offensive language, but very funny 2 minute clip from the show....
7/ Excellent piece of investigative journalism from Lauren Ritchie in the Orlando Sentinel on how one of the Lake County Commissioners is trying to dismantle one of the best environmental initiatives Lake County has ever done....
It's a two part article and if you live in Lake please read it. If you live elsewhere it's another example of how our Republican political class are trying to undo any good things government has done, just because they hate government.
In this case however, the County Commissioner is an attorney for land developers, and would I am sure be happy to supervise the sale of these conservation lands......
Lake County residents voted in 2004 to tax themselves to buy $36 million worth of property for conservation. Seven years later, the money is spent, but not a single acre of that property has been opened to the public.
And now, County Commissioner Leslie Campione is claiming that Lake can't afford to keep it all. She is suggesting that some of the lands be "re-evaluated" and maybe sold to relieve taxpayers of the "burden" of maintenance and to make "improvements" on the remaining ones. Other properties should earn their keep — maybe they could be leased to ranchers.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Sound bites always do, and they're an excellent tactic for obscuring the facts. But reality is different, and the commissioner's proposal puts at risk one of the most visionary steps ever taken by voters in this county.
And now, County Commissioner Leslie Campione is claiming that Lake can't afford to keep it all. She is suggesting that some of the lands be "re-evaluated" and maybe sold to relieve taxpayers of the "burden" of maintenance and to make "improvements" on the remaining ones. Other properties should earn their keep — maybe they could be leased to ranchers.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Sound bites always do, and they're an excellent tactic for obscuring the facts. But reality is different, and the commissioner's proposal puts at risk one of the most visionary steps ever taken by voters in this county.
8/ Exclusive video of the Damaged Women's Coalition's march on Washington at 2am last week - Onion News has the story....2 minutes of angry, weeping and drunk women.....
9/ One of the sneaky things Paul Ryan's Republican budget does is convert both Medicaid and Food Stamps to "block grant" programs.
"So what"?, you may say, but the way this is evil is that right now food stamps are an entitlement - when a lot of people are unemployed all of them get the same benefit.
With a block grant each state gets a chunk of money, so if unemployment goes up and more people need food stamps, everyone in the program gets less - the money pie is divided by the number of people getting the benefit.
Block grants are also much much easier to manipulate and cut......
This is truly an evil proposal.......
Discussion of the House Republican budget has focused mostly on the transformation of three big health care programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. And that’s appropriate, given the magnitude of the changes and widespread impact they would have. But those proposals are obscuring some other proposed shifts that, in any other context, would be plenty troubling for their own sake. This week I'll highlight five of them. Here's the first.
The food stamp program isn't called food stamps anymore. It's called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. And the stamps no longer come in the form of colored paper coupons. Now they are virtual stamps, loaded onto electronic debit cards. But the program serves the same essential purpose it always did: Helping poor people to pay for food.
The Republican budget would make two changes to the program. First, it would transform SNAP from an entitlement to a block-grant. Instead of an open-ended federal commitment to the program, guaranteeing benefits for any Americans that meets the eligibility guidelines, the federal government would simply give the states an allotment of money, set by a pre-determined formula. It's the same change Republicans propose for Medicaid and, as with that program, the shift is no minor thing.
Today, spending on SNAP automatically rises during economic downturns, as more people lose jobs or see incomes fall.
10/ Christina Perri with "Jar of Hearts"......this lady has some pipes, and an atmospheric video as well....3 minues....
11/ Commentary on the disruption of some Republican town hall meetings by people angry at the Ryan budget, and how the Republicans don't like it....it was OK last year when the Tea partiers were shouting and screaming at Democratic Congressmen's meetings, but people worried about Medicare? Screw 'em.....
In Broward County at an Allen West meeting a journalist was arrested, maced, put in a squad car for three hours and held in jail overnight....just for asking a question.
Video of Congressman Dan Webster's meeting, and the lady who was arrested....
Todays video - amazing magic trick
Todays jokes - some rude British quickies....
My neighbour knocked on my door at 2:30am this morning....
Can you believe that - 2:30am?!
Luckily for him I was still up playing my Bagpipes.
I sat on the train this morning opposite a stunning Thai girl.
I kept thinking to myself, please don't get an erection, please don't
get an erection... but she did.
The Grim Reaper came for me last night, and I beat him off with a vacuum
cleaner.
Talk about Dyson with death.
Did you hear about the fat alcoholic transvestite?
All he wanted to do was eat, drink and be Mary.
Paddy says "Mick, I'm thinking of buying a labrador."
"F*ck that" says Mick. "Have you seen how many of their owners go blind"
Man calls 999 and says "I think my wife is dead"
The operator says how do you know?
He says "The sex is the same but the ironing is building up!
I was in bed with a blind girl last night and she said that I had the
biggest p*nis she had ever laid her hands on.
I said "You're pulling my leg"
A man walks into a Welsh pub and orders a white wine spritzer.
The bar goes silent as everyone stares at him...
"Where are you from? You sound English", said the barman.
"I'm from across the Severn," replies the man nervously.
"What do you do, just across the Severn?",
"I'm a taxidermist."
"What on earth is one of those?",
"I mount animals."
"Its alright boys," shouts the barman "he's one of us".
Spent £40 on ebay last week for a p*nis enlarger.
Just opened it and some bastard's sent me a magnifying glass!
I saw a poor old lady fall over today on the ice!!
At least I presume she was poor - she only had £1.20 in her purse.
Went for my routine check up today and everything seemed to be going fine
until he stuck his index finger up my arse!
Do you think I should change dentists?
