1/ When it comes down to pronouncements on economics from our politicians how much can you believe? How much of what they are saying is real, and how much is ideology? It really comes down to good faith....so this is why I keep sending out Paul Krugman's column in the Times - I believe he is logical, and I think he's right.
Here he comments on the European Union, and how they are going in exactly the wrong economic direction.....
This is of course directly applicable to the US because of the Republican drive for fiscal rectitude, which seems to have morphed into - abortion? Stopping you voting?
Anyway, we report, you decide.....
OP-ED COLUMNIST
When Austerity Fails
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: May 22, 2011
I often complain, with reason, about the state of economic discussion in the United States. And the irresponsibility of certain politicians — like those Republicans claiming that defaulting on U.S. debt would be no big deal — is scary.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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Times Topics: European Sovereign Debt Crisis (2009- )| Economy
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But at least in America members of the pain caucus, those who claim that raising interest rates and slashing government spending in the face of mass unemployment will somehow make things better instead of worse, get some pushback from the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration.
In Europe, by contrast, the pain caucus has been in control for more than a year, insisting that sound money and balanced budgets are the answer to all problems. Underlying this insistence have been economic fantasies, in particular belief in the confidence fairy — that is, belief that slashing spending will actually create jobs, because fiscal austerity will improve private-sector confidence.
Unfortunately, the confidence fairy keeps refusing to make an appearance. And a dispute over how to handle inconvenient reality threatens to make Europe the flashpoint of a new financial crisis.
After the creation of the euro in 1999, European nations that had previously been considered risky, and that therefore faced limits on the amount they could borrow, began experiencing huge inflows of capital. After all, investors apparently thought, Greece/Portugal/Ireland/Spain were members of a European monetary union, so what could go wrong?
The answer to that question is now, of course, painfully apparent. Greece’s government, finding itself able to borrow at rates only slightly higher than those facing Germany, took on far too much debt. The governments of Ireland and Spain didn’t (Portugal is somewhere in between) — but their banks did, and when the bubble burst, taxpayers found themselves on the hook for bank debts. The problem was made worse by the fact that the 1999-2007 boom left prices and costs in the debtor nations far out of line with those of their neighbors.
What to do? European leaders offered emergency loans to nations in crisis, but only in exchange for promises to impose savage austerity programs, mainly consisting of huge spending cuts. Objections that these programs would be self-defeating — not only would they impose large direct pain, but they also would, by worsening the economic slump, reduce revenues — were waved away. Austerity would actually be expansionary, it was claimed, because it would improve confidence.
Nobody bought into the doctrine of expansionary austerity more thoroughly than Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, or E.C.B. Under his leadership the bank began preaching austerity as a universal economic elixir that should be imposed immediately everywhere, including in countries like Britain and the United States that still have high unemployment and aren’t facing any pressure from the financial markets.
But as I said, the confidence fairy hasn’t shown up. Europe’s troubled debtor nations are, as we should have expected, suffering further economic decline thanks to those austerity programs, and confidence is plunging instead of rising. It’s now clear that Greece, Ireland and Portugal can’t and won’t repay their debts in full, although Spain might manage to tough it out.
Realistically, then, Europe needs to prepare for some kind of debt reduction, involving a combination of aid from stronger economies and “haircuts” imposed on private creditors, who will have to accept less than full repayment. Realism, however, appears to be in short supply.
On one side, Germany is taking a hard line against anything resembling aid to its troubled neighbors, even though one important motivation for the current rescue program was an attempt to shield German banks from losses.
On the other side, the E.C.B. is acting as if it is determined to provoke a financial crisis. It has started to raise interest rates despite the terrible state of many European economies. And E.C.B. officials have been warning against any form of debt relief — in fact, last week one member of the governing council suggested that even a mild restructuring of Greek bonds would cause the E.C.B. to stop accepting those bonds as collateral for loans to Greek banks. This amounted to a declaration that if Greece seeks debt relief, the E.C.B. will pull the plug on the Greek banking system, which is crucially dependent on those loans.
If Greek banks collapse, that might well force Greece out of the euro area — and it’s all too easy to see how it could start financial dominoes falling across much of Europe. So what is the E.C.B. thinking?
My guess is that it’s just not willing to face up to the failure of its fantasies. And if this sounds incredibly foolish, well, who ever said that wisdom rules the world?
2/ Hmmmm.....I'm smelling a great big nuclear rat.
Here is a story from the Washington Post about how the large Asian nations are coming together to restore confidence in the Fukushima disaster and doing standard PR stuff....it's the latest story I could find in a mainstream media outlet.
Japan was hoping the summit would present a unified front after Beijing and Seoul criticized its response to the nuclear crisis touched off by a massive March 11 earthquake and tsunami.
The disasters left more than 24,000 people dead or missing and sparked a continuing crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
On Saturday, the three leaders met in Fukushima to demonstrate their joint desire for Japan’s recovery.
“We are deeply grateful for the great help and assistance provided by China and South Korea,” Kan said.
Japan has been particularly concerned that excessive fears over contamination of Japanese produce led to unnecessary trade restrictions. China and South Korea had both expressed fears over Japanese products and criticized Japan for allowing the release of water with high radiation levels into the ocean.
In a statement after Sunday’s meeting, the leaders agreed that safety measures should be based on informed policy and overreaction should be avoided.
But here is an article that says the Fukushima situation is spiralling out of control, with the potential to irradiate the planet to some degree, and that there is a tacit conspiracy to keep this quiet to maintain confidence.....
ukushima may be in an apocalyptic downward spiral.Forget the corporate-induced media coma that says otherwise ... or nothing at all.
Lethal radiation is spewing unabated. Emission levels could seriously escalate. There is no end in sight. The potential is many times worse than Chernobyl.
Containing this disaster may be beyond the abilities of Tokyo Electric or the Japanese government.
There is no reason to incur further unnecessary risk. With all needed resources, it's time for the world's best scientists and engineers to take charge.
Even then the outcome is unclear.
For a brief but terrifying overview, consult Dr. Chris Busby as interviewed by RT/TV.
Fukushima Units One, Two and Three are all in various stages of melting down.
Molten fuel at Unit One may have burned through its reactor pressure vessel, with water poured in to cool it merely pouring out the bottom.
A growing pond of highly radioactive liquid is softening the ground and draining into the ocean.
There is no way to predict where these molten masses of fuel will yet go.
Especially in the event of an aftershock, steam and hydrogen explosions could blow out what's left of the containments.
The extra plutonium in the MOX fuel at Unit Three is an added liability.
At least one spent fuel pool has been on fire.
The site has already suffered at least two hydrogen explosions. Some believe a fission explosionmay also have occurred.
All have weakened the structures and support systems on site.
These shocks and the soft ground may be why Unit Four has partially sunk and is tipping, possibly on the brink of collapse. Even a relatively minor aftershock could mean catastrophe.
More explosions are possible. More leaks are virtually certain.
Escalated radiation levels from any one of the reactors could force all workers to evacuate, leaving the entire site to chance.
The New York Times has now reported that critical valve failures that contributed to the Fukushima disaster are likely at numerous US reactors.
Significant radioactive debris has been found thousands of yards from the plant. Radiation levels in Tokyo, nearly 200 miles away, have risen. Fallout has been detected in North America and throughout Europe.
Radiation pouring into the sea has begun to spread worldwide.
There is much more, none of it good.
Japan and Germany have had the good survival sense to abandon future reactor construction,and to shut some existing sites.
But here, the corporate media blackout is virtually complete. Out of sight, out of mind seems the strategy for an industry desperate for federal loan guarantees and continued operation of a rickety fleet of decaying old reactors.
The Obama Administration has ended radiation monitoring of seafood in the Pacific. It does not provide reliable, systematic radiological or medical data on fallout coming to the United States.
But we may all be in unprecedented danger.
A national movement is underway to end atomic give-aways and turn to a green-powered Earth.
Now we must also move ALL the world's governments beyond denial to focus on somehow bringing Fukushima under control.
After two months of all-out effort, four reactors and at least that many spent fuel pools remain at risk.
Our survival depends on stopping Fukushima from further irradiating us all.
The world community has come together to put a new sarcophagus around Chernobyl.
A parallel, more urgent effort now needs to focus on Fukushima.
Whatever technical, scientific and material resources are available to our species, that's what needs to go there.
So take your pick, dear reader. Do you believe the official line, which is actually to ignore Fukushima? Remember when the tsunami wrecked the nuclear plant there was 24/7 coverage, endless analysis of the various reactors etc. etc. Now there's nothing.
Do you smell cover-up? Or fear?
3/ Lady Gaga has a new video this month - "Judas", and this one is guaranteed to throw the religious right into a frenzy. The 12 apostles are a motorcycle gang, Gaga is in love with Judas who is wearing a crown of thorns, Gaga gets baptised and flogged as a prostitute, and there's the normal lingerie section.....
Any new Lady Gaga video is an event, because noone does [or has ever done] mini-stories like these OTT extravaganzas......song is OK, video amazing.....5 minutes.....
Just wonderful stuff....and it's also in1080!!!
4/ Thursday last week I sent out a 9 minute video and urged you to watch it......it was about how algorithms are shaping your opinions without your knowledge or input.....hopefully you saw the video....but if you didn't, here is essentially the same information from Eli Pariser from the Times opinion page today.....
I actually prefer the video [link below]....he's very clear......but whatever floats your boat.......
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
When the Internet Thinks It Knows You
By ELI PARISER
Published: May 22, 2011
ONCE upon a time, the story goes, we lived in a broadcast society. In that dusty pre-Internet age, the tools for sharing information weren’t widely available. If you wanted to share your thoughts with the masses, you had to own a printing press or a chunk of the airwaves, or have access to someone who did. Controlling the flow of information was an elite class of editors, producers and media moguls who decided what people would see and hear about the world. They were the Gatekeepers.
Then came the Internet, which made it possible to communicate with millions of people at little or no cost. Suddenly anyone with an Internet connection could share ideas with the whole world. A new era of democratized news media dawned.
You may have heard that story before — maybe from the conservative blogger Glenn Reynolds (blogging is “technology undermining the gatekeepers”) or the progressive blogger Markos Moulitsas (his book is called “Crashing the Gate”). It’s a beautiful story about the revolutionary power of the medium, and as an early practitioner of online politics, I told it to describe what we did atMoveOn.org. But I’m increasingly convinced that we’ve got the ending wrong — perhaps dangerously wrong. There is a new group of gatekeepers in town, and this time, they’re not people, they’re code.
Today’s Internet giants — Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft — see the remarkable rise of available information as an opportunity. If they can provide services that sift though the data and supply us with the most personally relevant and appealing results, they’ll get the most users and the most ad views. As a result, they’re racing to offer personalized filters that show us the Internet that they think we want to see. These filters, in effect, control and limit the information that reaches our screens.
By now, we’re familiar with ads that follow us around online based on our recent clicks on commercial Web sites. But increasingly, and nearly invisibly, our searches for information are being personalized too. Two people who each search on Google for “Egypt” may get significantly different results, based on their past clicks. Both Yahoo News and Google News make adjustments to their home pages for each individual visitor. And just last month, this technology began making inroads on the Web sites of newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.
All of this is fairly harmless when information about consumer products is filtered into and out of your personal universe. But when personalization affects not just what you buy but how you think, different issues arise. Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.
Like the old gatekeepers, the engineers who write the new gatekeeping code have enormous power to determine what we know about the world. But unlike the best of the old gatekeepers, they don’t see themselves as keepers of the public trust. There is no algorithmic equivalent to journalistic ethics.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, once told colleagues that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” At Facebook, “relevance” is virtually the sole criterion that determines what users see. Focusing on the most personally relevant news — the squirrel — is a great business strategy. But it leaves us staring at our front yard instead of reading about suffering, genocide and revolution.
There’s no going back to the old system of gatekeepers, nor should there be. But if algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see, we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow “relevance.” They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye.
Companies that make use of these algorithms must take this curative responsibility far more seriously than they have to date. They need to give us control over what we see — making it clear when they are personalizing, and allowing us to shape and adjust our own filters. We citizens need to uphold our end, too — developing the “filter literacy” needed to use these tools well and demanding content that broadens our horizons even when it’s uncomfortable.
It is in our collective interest to ensure that the Internet lives up to its potential as a revolutionary connective medium. This won’t happen if we’re all sealed off in our own personalized online worlds.
Eli Pariser, the president of the board of MoveOn.org, is the author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.”
5/ Words fail me on this one. No wonder they rule the world, or will very soon......
A Chinese video that is astonishing in it's complexity....and beauty.....amazing....4 minutes....
6/ Health care in Massachusetts.
Interesting editorial from the Times saying that the Mass. health care program is working, covering almost all of the state's citizens at a reasonable cost. This enrages Republicans so much that Mitt Romney, who brought the program into being, is forced to disavow it if he has any chance to get the [R] nomination for President.
What a fxxked up political life we have....
[Just an aside - the xx-es are in the word above because a few of our alert readers have spam filters that reject anything with "naughty" words in it......not because we're shy or anything here at DDD]
EDITORIAL
Health Reform in Massachusetts
Published: May 20, 2011
Mitt Romney’s defense of the Massachusetts health care reforms was politically self-serving. It was also true.
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Times Topic: Health Care
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Despite all of the bashing by conservative commentators and politicians — and the predictions of doom for national health care reform — the program he signed into law as governor has been a success. The real lesson from Massachusetts is that health care reform can work, and the national law should work as well or even better.
Like the federal reform law, Massachusetts’s plan required people to buy insurance and employers to offer it or pay a fee. It expanded Medicaid for the poor and set up insurance exchanges where people could buy individual policies, with subsidies for those with modest incomes.
Since reform was enacted, the state has achieved its goal of providing near-universal coverage: 98 percent of all residents were insured last year. That has come with minimal fiscal strain. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonpartisan fiscal monitoring group, estimated that the reforms cost the state $350 million in fiscal year 2010, a little more than 1 percent of the state budget.
Other significant accomplishments:
The percentage of employers offering insurance has increased, probably because more workers are demanding coverage and businesses are required to offer it.
The state has used managed-care plans to hold down the costs of subsidies: per capita payments for low-income enrollees rose an average of 5 percent a year over the first four years, well below recent 7 percent annual increases in per capita health care spending in Massachusetts. The payments are unlikely to rise at all in the current year, in large part because of a competitive bidding process and pressure from the officials supervising it.
The average premiums paid by individuals who purchase unsubsidized insurance have dropped substantially, 20 percent to 40 percent by some estimates, mostly because reform has brought in younger and healthier people to offset the cost of covering the older and sicker.
Residents of Massachusetts have clearly chosen to tune out the national chatter and look at their own experience. Most polls show that the state reforms are strongly supported by the public, business leaders and doctors, often by 60 percent or more.
There are still real problems that need to be solved. Small businesses are complaining that their premiums are rising faster than before, although how much of that is because of the reform law is not clear.
Insuring more people was expected to reduce the use of emergency rooms for routine care but has not done so to any significant degree. There is no evidence to support critics’ claims that the addition of 400,000 people to the insurance rolls is the cause of long waits to see a doctor.
What reform has not done is slow the rise in health care costs. Massachusetts put off addressing that until it had achieved universal coverage. No one should minimize the challenge, but serious efforts are now being weighed.
Gov. Deval Patrick has submitted a bill to the Legislature that would enhance the state’s powers to reject premium increases, allow the state to limit what hospitals and other providers can be paid by insurers, and promote alternatives to costly fee-for-service medicine. The governor’s goal is to make efficient integrated care organizations the predominant health care provider by 2015.
The national reform law has provisions designed to reduce spending in Medicare and Medicaid and, through force of example, the rest of the health care system. Those efforts will barely get started by the time Massachusetts hopes to have transformed its entire system. Washington and other states will need to keep a close watch.
7/ Occasionally we need to throw in a "nice" video, so here it is.....a Tuscaloosa miracle.......2 minutes.....
8/ The housing market.
A gloomy article about how prices have not yet hit bottom due to the huge inventory of homes held by the nations biggest landowners...the big banks........
As Lenders Hold Homes in Foreclosure, Sales Are Hurt
Joshua Lott for The New York Times
Jayson Meyerovitz, a broker in the Phoenix area, is concerned about bank-owned foreclosures: “If so many houses hit the market, what is going to happen then?”
By ERIC DASH
Published: May 22, 2011
EL MIRAGE, Ariz. — The nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders have steadily amassed real estate empires, acquiring a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump and create a further drag on the economic recovery.
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All told, they own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac, a real estate data provider. In addition, they are in the process of foreclosing on an additional one million homes and are poised to take possession of several million more in the years ahead.
Five years after the housing market started teetering, economists now worry that the rise in lender-owned homes could create another vicious circle, in which the growing inventory of distressed property further depresses home values and leads to even more distressed sales. With the spring home-selling season under way, real estate prices have been declining across the country in recent months.
“It remains a heavy weight on the banking system,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “Housing prices are falling, and they are going to fall some more.”
Over all, economists project that it would take about three years for lenders to sell their backlog of foreclosed homes. As a result, home values nationally could fall 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to Moody’s, and rise only modestly over the following year. Regions that were hardest hit by the housing collapse and recession could take even longer to recover — dealing yet another blow to a still-struggling economy.
Although sales have picked up a bit in the last few weeks, banks and other lenders remain overwhelmed by the wave of foreclosures. In Atlanta, lenders are repossessing eight homes for each distressed home they sell, according to March data from RealtyTrac. In Minneapolis, they are bringing in at least six foreclosed homes for each they sell, and in once-hot markets like Chicago and Miami, the ratio still hovers close to two to one.
Before the housing implosion, the inflow and outflow figures were typically one-to-one.
9/ Many states have programs like Oregon, which pays people their unemployment benefits with a pre-paid debit card.....the big banks lobbied to have this excluded from the recent toothless financial reform bill, so of course the banks are loading up fees and charges on to these cards to screw the people who need the money the most.
The politicians are getting handsome donations from the lobbyists for the banks, so it goes round and round. The banks get billions in fees, and the working poor are getting the shaft....
Wait till Rick Scott hears about this scam......
Instead of paper checks, Oregon officials pay weekly unemployment benefits by loading the money onto debit cards that come with several unusual fees.
After she found a job last year, 48-year-old Jennifer Schmidt of Riddle, Ore., was charged an "inactivity fee" of $2
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