The Economic Impact Of America's Failing Infrastructure

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Jobs Market Continues To Suck - Tape At 11

The Employment and Training Administration is a government agency that tracks the number of jobs added and lost in the economy. Let us take a quick look at what they have to say:

In the week ending September 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 428,000, an increase of 11,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 417,000 [revised up]. The 4-week moving average was 419,500, an increase of 4,000 from the previous week's revised average of 415,500 [revised up as well].

What this basically means is that despite what a politician might have you believe, there ain't shit for jobs out there and the number of people becoming jobless and officially counted as unemployed continues to rise. With the trend the way it looks, we likely will see negative job growth for the month of September. Negative job growth basically means that more jobs were destroyed than were created in a given time frame.

On top of this rosy information the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that:

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.4 percent in August on a seasonally adjusted basis. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 3.8 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.2 percent in August, the same increase as the previous month. Shelter and apparel were the biggest contributors, though the indexes for most of its major components posted increases, including used cars and trucks, medical care, household furnishings and operations, recreation, tobacco, and personal care. The new vehicles index, unchanged for the second month in a row, was an exception... The energy index has risen 18.4 percent over the last year, while the food index has increased 4.6 percent.

What all that mumbo jumbo translates to says that everything that you can't live without got more expensive very fast. Remember, 0.4% inflation in one month may not seem like much but you multiply that by 12 and you have 4.8% increase in cost of living over the course of one year. A year in which more people than ever have no job, no savings, and many continue to still lose assets like their houses. Then you take that 4.8% and you multiply by the roughly three plus shitty years we've had and you get almost 15% increase in every needed good to survive. That adds up quickly.

Republicans and Obama have said that tax cuts will spur job growth. They've said this since Obama took office. Obama so far has cut taxes more than George Bush has and yet the job growth continues to suck ass in a big way. Obama’s new jobs bill contains many many more tax cuts. If we didn't break through the barrier to the greener pastures for our economy by ramming our heads into the wall, why in the hell does Washington think that we just need to try one more time? We've already tried this since basically Reagan and every time since then we've had a downturn economy we double down on the tax cuts and it never works.

Businesses and consumers are not spending money in the economy enough to get the economy moving which leaves only the government left that has the power to spend money in the economy enough to jump start it. This is called stimulus spending. We sort of tried it once when Obama took office only half of his stimulus bill wasn't government spending, it was tax cuts that weren't used to generate a significant amount of economic activity.

We will have a shit economy until someone starts spending a lot of money. Consumers don't have any money left, businesses are sitting on never before seen record profits but refuse to spend it and thus the onus is on the government to spend. Yet the rhetoric would have you believe that for every one dollar the government spends a job loses its funding.

What bullshit.

--Kirs

This Day In History: US Appeases The Commies

Every first Monday of September we as a nation come together and celebrate Labor Day. These days however, my anecdotal experience tells me that not many people really remember how Labor Day got its start so we’ll take a quick trip down memory lane!

Back in the Gilded Age of our history (that is post Reconstruction or 1877-1893) we saw massive industrial growth and expansion. T’was the fastest era of economic expansion ever in American history. This growth happened on the backs of masses, who suffered abusive working conditions, unsafe work environments, zero worker protections, substandard wages, and no institutional system in place to try and find redress for their grievances. This was the era that anarchists, communists, and labor unions first began agitating in the country for things like non 14-hour work days, pensions, fair and living wages, work environments that didn’t kill laborers as a routine cost of doing business and the such.

When these groups would strike or protest it almost universally turned violent with the police or the military cracking down hard on the dissenters. One such incident was the Haymarket affair which occurred on Tuesday May 4, 1886 at Haymarket Square in Chicago. During the rally to support striking workers person since unknown threw a dynamite bomb at the police. The police retaliated by firing into the crowd at random, though managed to kill several other officers in friendly fire. An unknown number protestors were also killed in the fire and ensuing chaos. The event was the genesis for the internationally observed May Day which in every other country is our Labor Day.

So why is our May Day called Labor Day and in September? Well in another bloody strike called the Pullman Strike, the US military and US Marshalls violently cracked down on railway workers who were striking. The entire affair was a black eye for then president Cleveland and fearing further agitations rammed legislation through Congress that created Labor Day as a federal holiday a mere six days after the strike was broken up. Cleveland, fearing that tying Labor Day to the internationally recognized May Day, or the International Worker’s Day, would embolden the Communist, Syndicalist, and Anarchist movements who normally didn’t work together had started to do so to commemorate the Haymarket Affair. So Cleveland instead made the first Monday of every September Labor Day in the US.

The great irony of all of this though? These days Labor Day has turned into a capitalist extravaganza and an important event for retailers who host large Labor Day sales. Since these retailers throw big sales on Labor Day they need to keep their staffs on shift for the day. As such, the one day of the year we’ve decided to give to the working class, the shift workers in retail and food service and the factory workers and such can’t even be enjoyed by the working class since they have to work to man the storefronts for the sales. Meanwhile the capitalist class gets another federal holiday to enjoy.

Happy Labor Day!

Taxpayer Money Spent To Christianize The Military

The military, and in particular the Army, have in the recent years started up a rather controversial and rather blatantly discriminatory policy called the, “Spiritual Fitness,” test. The test acts as one of the five components to the Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program. Each component tests a different category: emotional, physical, family, social, and spiritual. If a solider fails any component they are directed to training modules both online and off to increase their competency in that component. Only the spiritual component however carries a non-mandatory requirement for those earning a failing mark to seek remedial training.

However, going by the reports of many soldiers who have complained about the program, they are not being told that remedial training is non-mandatory and the test is being used to ferret out non-believers and non-Christians or just Christians who are not “spiritual” enough to meet the test’s standards and force them to undergo “spiritual” training. I use quotations around spiritual because the phrase acts as a code word for promoting religion in the military, something that is expressly forbidden, illegal, and unconstitutional. To get around the promotion of religion they abstract the language to spiritual and then go about trying to evangelizing the military.

This runs afoul of the constitution in several ways. It violates the first amendment on free speech, establishment of religion, and prohibition of the free exercise of religion. Further this testing violates Clause 3 Article 6 of the constitution which prohibits any kind of religious test for government service. Also, any private company or organization accepting more than $10,000 a year in contracts from the Federal government cannot discriminate based on religion as part of their hiring practices.

Yet this testing is only one component of the evangelizing of troops. We are also spending money to host Evangelical Christian concerts on bases as well as Evangelical Christian resorts and camps for adults, married couples, kids, and families. All of these resorts and camps explicitly hire based on an applicant’s religious beliefs with the applications have religious litmus tests included.

This is an egregious and illegal expenditure of tax payer money that needs to stop now. We never should have allowed these programs to start up in the first place and the faster we dismantle them the better we’ll be. Already Islamic based terrorists groups have been using propaganda that we, the west, view the war on terror as another crusade against Muslims and when we evangelize our army and talk about fighting against the false god Muslims we are playing right in to their rhetoric. Beyond that though, we should never be spending a single dollar to enforce religious beliefs on anyone or to bar someone from serving their country because of their beliefs.

A soldier wrote a letter about his experience with this program and I want to reproduce it in full, though his name, rank, unit, etc.. are withheld to protect his privacy. I first saw the letter in a huffingtonpost article found here.

Subject: I Am A "Spiritual Fitness Failure"  

......Before I tell you, Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF of my total outrage at the U.S. Army for grading me as a "Spiritual Fitness failure", I will tell you a few things about myself. My name is (name withheld) and I am an enlisted soldier with the rank of (rank withheld) in the United States Army stationed at Ft. (military installation withheld). I am in my early-to-mid twenties. I have been deployed downrange into Iraq and Afghanistan 6 times. I will deploy again for my 7th time very soon; to Afghanistan and more combat. All of my deployments have been very heavy combat assignments. I have been wounded 4 times including traumatic brain injury. I have earned the Combat Action Badge, the Bronze Star and multiple Purple Hearts. I have fought in hand-to hand- combat and killed and wounded more than a few "enemy combatants." M religion? I was born a Methodist and guess I still am one. I'm not very religious but consider myself to be a Christian. I don't go to chapel services that often although I go every now and then. I can't stand the chaplains as most of them are trying to always get me and my friends to "commit to Christ" and be far more religious as well as they try to get more and more soldiers to get more and more soldiers to be the same type of "committed Christian". I cannot count the number of times that these chaplains and my own chain of command has described this war we fight as a religious one against the Muslims and their "false, evil and violent" religion. I am a Christian and therefore neither an agnostic nor an atheist though many of my fellow soldiers are such. Now to the point. I, and everyone else who is enlisted in my company, was ORDERED by my Battalion Commander to take the GAT's Spiritual Fitness Test not very long ago. Let me make this CLEAR, we were all ORDERD to take it. After we did, our unit's First Sgt. individually asked us all how we did on the test. There was NO "anonymity" at all. None of us were ever told that we did NOT have to take this Spiritual Fitness Test nor that we did NOT have to tell our FIrst Sgt. what our results were. A bunch of us "failed" the SFT and when we told that to our First Sgt., per his disclosure order, he further ordered us to make immediate appointments with the chaplains so that we would not "kill ourselves on his watch". None of us wanted to do it but we were scared. None of us wanted to get in the shits with our First Sgt. who can and will make life miserable for anyone who might have said no to him. They keep saying that this is all to stop us soldiers from killing ourselves but THIS degrading SFT "failure" only makes it worse. Two of my battle buddies who I KNOW are thinking of ending it all were a million times worse off after failing this SFT and being called a "spiritual failure" and then ordered to go see the chaplains. I felt like a total coward for not standing up to my First Sgt. but I did what he told me to do. I was scared to tell him no. So I went to see the chaplain. When this chaplain told me that I failed the SFT because it was "Jesus' way of personally knocking on my door as an invitation for me to come to Him as a born again 'REAL' Christian" so that I could be saved and not burn forever in Hell for rejecting him, I thought of 3 things. First, I thought of the fact that I was already born a Christian and did not need to be born again. Second, I thought of my battle buddy (name and rank withheld) who took a bullet for me in his face during the Battle of (name of Iraqi battle withheld) and that he was the same kind of Christian as me and this chaplain is telling me that my battle buddy (name and rank withheld) is burning in hell for all time. Third, I thought how I wanted to blow that fucking chaplain's head right off. Thank you, Mr. Weinstein and MRFF for listening and standing up. A bunch of us saw you on MSNBC. We also read about the enlisted guy at Ft. Bragg. Please tell Sgt. Griffith at Fort Bragg that he speaks for many of us who can't handle the consequences if we spoke out. We have all read the letter you sent to tell the Army to stop this Spiritual Fitness Test. It cheered us up alot because that making us take that test is WRONG and using it to send us to the chaplains against our will is also WRONG. Please tell your lawyers at that big law firm company not to forget about those of us who want to speak up and thank them all but cannot. (Name, rank, combat MOS, military unit, military installation withheld)

A Concise Summary Of Grade Inflation

Created by: Masters Degree

Budget Hero

While listening to NPR the other day I heard them promoting a game that Marketplace had created called Budget Hero. The game is flash based and presents you the budget as it currently exists which includes the automatic repeal of the Bush Tax Cuts in 2012. It then gives you several categories to pick from and there are options in each category that will either add to or take away from the budget.

The options available to choose from seem pretty comprehensive in some areas, specially those areas that are supportive of deeply conservative ideas and neo-liberal economic ideas. At the same time there are other areas that seem deeply lacking, such as ideas that promote progressive ideas. Further some of the explanations are pretty disingenuous such as one option in the health care field. Every option gives you a pro and a con. In the con for adding the Public Option for health care they state that it will kill American innovation with out giving any evidence to support this rather dubious claim pushed by neo-liberals. I haven't finished going through all the options but I'm sure there are plenty more of these discrepancies throughout.

Take some time to play around with the budget and see what you come up with. The budget I came up with reduced our budget deficit to -$70B by 2021 (meaning we will still owe another $70B.). I reduced the debt from 75.5% of GDP in 2012 to 59.2% of GDP in 2021 and I pushed the year in which the current budget would need changes from 2031 to 2034. I also managed to greatly expand the role of the federal government in providing a safety net for most Americans and expanding infra-structure and science and education investment all the while reducing the size of the federal government from 25.9% to 23.6% of GDP.

When you are done they give you a great way to compare your budget to other demographics based on location, income, sex, age, and political affiliation. For reference, my three badges are Safety Net, Competitive Advantage, and Green. You'll understand when you play a round.

-Kris

Obama Administration Acting Directly Against The Interests Of The People

The thing that started our slow slide into economic recession over these last few years was the housing bubble. The bubble was fueled by easy access to credit for banks to use to make home mortgage loans. Without going too detailed into the process the banks ended up not caring how bad the loans were because no matter how bad, or toxic, they were they could make a profit off of them, and in fact the more toxic the loan, the more money banks could end up making on it.

Since the economy went boom there has been very little movement on the federal level to file lawsuits against those responsible at these banks. However at the state level several attorney generals have pushed to file suit against bank executives.

Currently the Obama Administration and the banks are working out a wide-ranging settlement over the resulting foreclosures that occurred because of shit loans being made to people with no ability to actually service the loan. There have been many reports of banks trying to foreclose on properties that they have no proof or fraudulent proof of owning the title on and this settlement would in some ways provide banks immunities from suits because of this.

Such a settlement would interfere with those states I mentioned earlier from suing banks and individual bankers over this. Eric Shneiderman, the New York attorney general, is particularly concerned about the details in the settlement because the settlement will interfere with his ability to gather evidence and file suits against the banks. 

Looking at the rhetoric coming from the Obama administration you'd think that they would side with Eric Shneiderman and rework the terms of the settlement to allow the attorney generals at both the state and federal level continue prosecution efforts. However the administration's plan of attack veers sharply away from anything resembling that. Not only has the administration begun pressuring Shneirderman to drop his opposition to the settlement but they've gone after Shneirderman’s supporters as well in an attempt to silence Shneirderman.

If the administration were to succeed and the settlement passes as is then this would be a significant step backwards for the average American and a large boon for Wall Street bankers. If you live in New York you can send Shneiderman an email of support. He continues to try and fight the good fight for not just the citizens of New York who were directly impacted by the illegal actions of banks, but all Americans who were because these banks sit within his jurisdiction. 

-Kirs