Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
We’re losing jobs, credit is unavailable, small businesses and householders are being forced to bankruptcy, and this will continue for some time yet.
On the basis that the old economy was wrongly constructed to begin with, what’s actually to preserve here? The old jobs are never coming back. Time for new jobs.
When things are bad it’s easy to look for people to blame, but for my money there’s a lot more simple incompetence at work than there is downright conspiracy. Looking for secret schemers as an explanation for the hidden dynamics of life, we often overlook dullness and underachievement as forces in play.
Part of the reason we overlook the incompetence larded throughout our national activity is the mediocrity of reporting itself. For illustration, nothing serves better than the abysmal job of reporting on Obama’s trip to China done by the mainstream media that feeds us our news and analysis. In one big blue pencil slash, the media shows that incompetence needs no controlling hand, it runs itself quite well.
Even as the political process grinds forward on health care reform and financial regulation, the capitulations made along the way by Congress and the administration have puzzled countless supporters of these reforms. The larger story behind these frustrations is that the political process is broken.
Amy Goodman at Democracy Nowtalked this week with Robert Johnson, a global expert on finance and international monetary reform, to find out why his testimony was silenced when he spoke before Congress advocating more regulation of derivatives. His simple explanation is that business very completely owns our representatives through the campaign finance system. This structural dysfunction, says Johnson, is what prevents much of the reform from getting passed.
Click through to see the clip and more commentary by others.
Calculated Risk notes that the Obama administration is considering the elements of the next stimulus package. Unemployment is right around 10 percent and the 2010 elections are close.
The economy needs more stimulus to help us out of the recession, says Nieman Watchdog in its latest project, Reporting on The Collapse. The stimulus effort helped us stave off worse disaster, and is helping us recover, and could do even better with even more. A time that calls for aggressive fiscal policy is not the time to worry about deficits, says Nieman.
I agree. I think anyone who’s watched impartially has seen the stimulus work – in fact we’re currently seeing states lay off workers now as the stimulus funds are used up.
We don’t need to suffer job losses during recesssions – it’s only through ignorance and uncaring that we do. During contractions we should retool our economy and most importantly retrain our workforce, and gladly use budget deficits if necessary for these ends.
We’re seeing a lot of stories about big bonuses to the recipients of taxpayer bailouts. What’s odd is that the outrage we read doesn’t seem to penetrate into the financial industry. The moral voice doesn’t seem to carry through the insulations of layers of money.
As to why we coddle these giants of finance, apart from their having bought the political system with our money: our culture contains much forebearance for financiers, perhaps from the assumption – now proved obsolete – that what they do is both difficult, and incomprehensible to most of us.
If your own research persuades you that the Earth truly is warming, then watch a sadly beautiful and terrifying thing: time-lapse photography recording glaciers melting around the world.
This is a film presented at TED by photographer James Balog with the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras aimed at vast bodies of ice, all now receding at a fearsome pace.
BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, What happened to global warming?, was completely discredited yesterday by no less an expert than Joe Romm at Climate Progress.
Paul Hudson, a weather presenter writing under the byline of climate correspondent for BBC News, claimed that “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.” He cited Britain’s Met Office for this claim.
“The truth is the Internet didn’t steal the audience. We lost it. Today fewer people are systematically reading our papers and tuning into our news programs for a simple reason—many people don’t feel we serve them anymore. We are, literally, out of touch.”
Here on the eve of Obama’s speech on health care before Congress, I just caught up with a Frontline special from 2008 on how five industrialized nations around the world handle their own health care.
It’s compelling viewing. I felt somewhat ashamed of how poorly America has done when it comes to this most basic of needs for sustaining a society. The countries examined are Britain, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland. We could take lessons from any of them.
Bookmarked a great point by Krugman, that I hope gets followed by our political process during Obama’s terms:
Let me add a sort of larger point: aside from the essentially circular political arguments — centrist Democrats insisting that the public option must be dropped to get the votes of centrist Democrats — the argument against the public option boils down to the fact that it’s bad because it is, horrors, a government program. And sooner or later Democrats have to take a stand against Reaganism — against the presumption that if the government does it, it’s bad.
- Why the public option matters
Paul Krugman published a great article in the New York Times last week, summarizing the history of economics since the Great Depression, and showing how economists forgot the lessons of Keynes, and started to believe again that markets are perfect. The article is called, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
I recommend the article as a cornerstone reference for you if you’d like to know how we could be so blind to the housing bubble, how the finance industry took over the economy, why the Federal Reserve System allowed it all to happen – and where we go from here.
I have to say I found it sad to see again that the discipline of economics doesn’t really understand how the economy works.
Here in its entirety is the Frontline episode from Tuesday, June 16th, called Breaking the Bank. It’s a very clear exposition of the fundamental change that occurred in the collapse of Wall Street in late 2008. Essentially, the government is in charge.
The episode contains the usual wonderful stuff from Simon Johnson, to the effect that we really kind of went ahead and nationalized the banks back around the time of the Lehman bust, and the government-brokered acquisition of Merril by Bank of America.
Entertaining and enlightening. Below the fold is more from Simon Johnson, in the full transcript of his background interview the Frontline people did with him preparing the show. Johnson’s perspective really is valuable, and resonates quite soundly with me. I think he’s worth reading. Here’s the show:
I loved to read this about Nancy Pelosi, especially in a time of people gunning for her, thinking she makes for helpless prey. Chickenhearts themselves, they don’t understand true toughness. I didn’t realize Pelosi had been so principled all this time, one of the very few people who decried the US’s delinking of human rights from its other considerations of relations with China.
I say bless her for her courage – far beyond all of the gutless cowards in their high office and the greedheads in business who turned their backs on both the Tibetan and the Chinese people. Pelosi, love you we do … read the full post from the International Campaign for Tibet:
Pelosi, we love you!
So read one of the slogans painted by a group of Chinese on the main gate of Beijing’s propaganda office directed at the Speaker during her China trip this week. It is a sentiment shared by those of us in Washington who advocate for human rights in China and Tibet.
The New Yorker has an article on health care in America, and why it costs so much for so little extra benefit. This will be the best thing you read all year about our medical system. Written by a doctor who is also a very good writer – I envy his skill. It’s called:
The Cost Conundrum
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
by Atul Gawande
When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen – and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care – you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine.
Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming? « Climate Progress tags: Sustainability We are engaged in a multi-year messaging struggle here. The planet is going to get hotter and hotter, the weather is going to get more extreme. One of the reasons to be clear and blunt in your messaging about this [...] […]
Big Oil’s Fairy Tale « Climate Progress tags: Sustainability Coming late to the discussion, but Joe that’s a nice piece of writing. I went over to Salon just to admire it. This thread turned to BP and the plug but your piece was originally about Obama and his realpolitik. He IS a mystery though, don’t [...] […]
biofuels and their tradeoffs tags: Sustainability Well biofuels, including algae: Compete with food security, energy security, and water security; a World Bank 2008 report estimates that biofuels have increased food prices by 75%; increasing AGW-related temperatures expected to decrease crop yields (recent US national assessment) and increase irrigation requ […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
political future tags: policy, Sustainability, economics y’know, ALL the economists have embraced the notion of limits to growth at the limits of natural resources. I think that the only future left to us – if any future is left to us – is steady-state economics: sustainable enterprises working in stable cycles unto the nth generation [...] […]
Bill Black: economic meltdown caused by fraud tags: economics Bill Moyers with Bill Black, bank investigator during the Savings & Loan mop-up of the eighties, and national expert on financial crime. Black says every bank we’ve investigated involved in the meltdown has revealed deliberate fraud, and we’ve only investigated six! No one’s pushing forward ca […]
Break up the Banks tags: economics I think the undoing of Goldman will be that its execs, just like those at Morgan Stanley, or GE, or GM, have failed to understand that their own personal wealth can only last as long as the “lower classes” have at least a decent life. A chance to feed [...] […]
Facebook tags: Sustainability Ross Hunter “like a syrupy muffin, connecting socially online may be like eating empty calories. The circuitry activated when you connect online is the ‘seeking’ circuitry of dopamine. Yet when we connect with people online, we don’t tend to get the calming effect of oxytocin or seratonin that happens when we bond [...] […]
veggie, vegan or local? tags: Sustainability Ross Hunter try to remember we have a permeable administration, unlike the rock-hard one before. Count blessings briefly, get to work and understand that our example will permeate an administration that is willing to be influenced by groundswell. All Obama has ever asked for is for the forces in [...] […]
Nouriel Roubini paints a stark picture of our economic prospects and tells a tale of two economies, one rich, one poor. Personally, I’m heading for the third economy, the one being newly created right now all around us as a sustainable economy.
When things are bad it’s easy to look for people to blame, but for my money there’s a lot more simple incompetence at work than there is downright conspiracy. Looking for secret schemers as an explanation for the hidden dynamics of life, we often overlook dullness and underachievement as forces in play.
Even as the political process grinds forward on health care reform and financial regulation, the capitulations made along the way by Congress and the administration have puzzled countless supporters of these reforms. The larger story behind these frustrations is that the political process is broken.
The economy needs more stimulus to help us out of the recession, says Nieman Watchdog in its latest project, 
We’re seeing a lot of stories about big bonuses to the recipients of taxpayer bailouts. What’s odd is that the outrage we read doesn’t seem to penetrate into the financial industry. The moral voice doesn’t seem to carry through the insulations of layers of money.
BBC News upset a good many people on Friday by claiming that the oceans are cooling and that global warming has stopped happening – this during the hottest decade in recorded history. The story, 
Here’s some analysis that resonates keenly. It says that mainstream media is irrelevant. You can read the whole article here: 
I loved to read this about Nancy Pelosi, especially in a time of people gunning for her, thinking she makes for helpless prey. Chickenhearts themselves, they don’t understand true toughness. I didn’t realize Pelosi had been so principled all this time, one of the very few people who decried the US’s delinking of human rights from its other considerations of relations with China.
