When Cuomo Gets Challenged

Governor Cuomo was in Rochester yesterday to continue to tout his agenda and declare upstate and western NY an economic success due to his economic development programs.

A Rochester reporter, Rachel Barnhart of WROC-TV was having none of it and challenged him:

Barnhart: “We still have more than 40,000 fewer people employed than we did in the 90s here in the Rochester area, 40,000 fewer people in the workforce, 40,000 fewer people that have jobs. So how can you sound so bright about what’s happening?”

Cuomo's response was classic:

Cuomo: “So you’re a cynic. And by the way we’re gonna die some day, so let’s be depressed, right? And we’re getting older, so let’s be depressed. And it’s cold, so let’s be depressed, you know. You can look at the glass and it can be half full or half empty.

The video's even better.

Sullio and I added some more to the governor's statement:

@perdidostschool @NickReisman Cuomo: "And I'm under federal investigation, so let's be depressed."

— Sullio (@sullio) January 5, 2016

@sullio @NickReisman My donors may have non-prosecution agreements to cooperate against me, so let's be depressed.

— rbe (@perdidostschool) January 6, 2016

@perdidostschool @NickReisman Cuomo: "We dissolved the Committee to Save New York because New York has been saved."

— Sullio (@sullio) January 6, 2016

@NickReisman Make for great campaign commercial - things are better, if only we believe!

— rbe (@perdidostschool) January 5, 2016

Cuomo clearly doesn't like to be challenged when he's touting his economic fantasy of an upstate utopia and he clearly wasn't expecting anybody in the Rochester press to challenge him.

How wrong he was and the end result was one of those wonderful Cuomoesque moments that expose him for the twisted individual he is.

The headline at Politico NY summed it all up:

Cuomo: Rochester's coming back, but we're all going to die https://t.co/CbdGf4onZG

— rbe (@perdidostschool) January 6, 2016

Fabulous.

There Is Money For Municipal Worker Raises In NYC

Every time the subject of all those expired municipal union contracts comes up at the NY Post and other right wing media outlets, we hear how the city is broke, the city cannot afford raises for workers, employee benefit packages are turning NYC into Detroit blah blah blah.

But the reality is this:

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio may be inheriting a city in better financial shape than he had expected.

New York will end the current fiscal year with a surplus of $2.4 billion — “$581 million more than projected by the Bloomberg administration,” according to a new fiscal forecast from the city Independent Budget Office released Thursday.

The budget office also projects a surplus of $1.9 billion for fiscal year 2015.

The extra money should ease the financial pressures faced by de Blasio, including a demand by the city’s unions — which have been working without contracts for as long as four years — for $7 billion in retroactive pay.

In addition, we learned the following about the national economy this week:

Boosting optimism for the new year ahead, the government announced Friday that the economy in the third quarter grew at its fastest rate in nearly two years and much better than previously estimated.

Higher consumer spending was largely responsible for the economy's annual growth rate of 4.1% from July through September, the Commerce Department said. Last month, it estimated a 3.6% rate.

In the second quarter the economy grew at a 2.5% annual pace.

The latest estimate of last quarter's gross domestic product — that's the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S. -- marked the first time since late 2011 that quarterly GDP growth exceeded 4%.

Last quarter's better-than-expected performance was spurred by consumers spending more over the summer on health care, recreation and other services.

The government says consumer spending grew at an annual rate of 2.0%, up from 1.6% in its previous estimate last month.

"The consumer is back in the game," exulted Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist of Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, in a client note Friday. "Is this economic growth fast enough to put America back to work? The answer is, yes. The wheels of the economy are turning fast enough to bring down the unemployment rate further. "

Business investment also increased, growing at a 4.8% annual rate, 1.3 percentage points better than the government's earlier estimate.

The report sparked a rally on Wall Street, driving the Dow Jones industrial average up 0.3% and the Standard & Poor's 500 index 0.5% to new records.

Many economists predict fourth-quarter growth will not match last quarter's because the third quarter's large increase in business stockpiles won't be repeated in this period. But they're also optimistic about next year.

Friday's GDP report suggests that the U.S. economy entered the fourth quarter "with more momentum than had previously been thought to be the case," said Richard Moody, chief economist of Regions Financial Corp. "And we expect that momentum to build further in 2014."

A larger than expected budget surplus for NYC in 2014, a budget surplus for 2015 as well and the economy looking like it finally has started to turn around, with consumers and businesses both spending (which may mean even higher revenues than forecast)  - these are good signs for NYC, for the de Blasio administration and for municipal workers.

The Posties and other benefits scolds may say NYC is heading the way of Detroit because of municipal worker contracts and benefits, but it's just not true.

And if the economy continues at a 3%-4% growth pace for the next few quarters, as some analysts say it might, there will be money for workers' raises, no matter how sad that will make Bloomberg or Murdoch or the pension trolls at Gotham Schools.

Scary Labor Day Thought

From Dean Baker:

Ezra Klein gives us some terrifying news in a Bloomberg column today. President Obama’s economic team think they are doing a great job, hence the desire to bring back former teammate Larry Summers as Fed chair. This is terrifying because the economy this Labor Day is described by a set of statistics that can only be described as horrible.

We are almost 9 million jobs below the trend level of employment. The number of people involuntarily working part-time is still up by almost 4 million from its pre-recession level. Wages have been stagnant for a decade and show no signs of increasing any time soon. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the economy is still operating more than $1 trillion (6 percent) below its potential. Oh, and by the way, the financial sector is more concentrated than ever, with top honchos drawing the same sort of paychecks they did before the crisis.

I could go on but what’s the point? This is an economy that under other circumstances we would all say is awful. The Obama team can pat themselves on the back for saying its better than a second Great Depression, but that’s a bit like saying that the 1962 Mets didn’t lose all their games. Horrible is horrible.

Your progressive president in action.

The Walmarting of America - "Hey, we're doing a swell job!"

How about some more of those part time, minimum wage service jobs you guys are so good at creating?

Well, I guess bombing Syria for no good reason will create, let's see, uh, a couple of p.r. jobs...

So Much For That Turnaround

We kept hearing how sequestration and austerity wasn't hurting the economy. 

We heard how the 2% payroll tax hike in January wouldn't hurt consumer spending. 

We heard that the housing market is BACK and the markets are steaming at all-time highs and everything is ready to ZOOM, ZOOM, ZOOM.

And then we got this:

(Reuters) - American employers hired at the slowest pace in nine months in March, a sign that Washington's austerity drive could be stealing momentum from the economy.

The economy added just 88,000 nonfarm jobs last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, well below market expectations for a 200,000 increase. The jobless rate ticked a tenth of a point lower to 7.6 percent largely due to people dropping out of the work force.

Analysts suspected some of the weakness was due to tax hikes enacted in January. While retail sales data had not shown a big impact earlier in the year, retailers cut staff in March by 24,100.

"The U.S. economy just hit a major speed bump," said Marcus Bullus, trading director at MB Capital in London.

Let's add in long-term unemployment for a whole generation of older Americans laid off from their jobs and probably never going to work again, the looming Medicare and Social Security cuts President Obama is dying to inflict upon working and middle class Americans, the continued problems in the Eurozone where unemployment is at 12%, almost every country is in recession and one or two are near depressions, the stealth inflation the Fed has created by printing money faster than the speed of sound, the budget crisis which never seems to get resolved, and we have a whole host of reasons why this summer could very well cool down after a very "hot" winter - just the way the last two summers saw cool downs after the economy looked to be turning around in January/February.

I Thought Everything Was Turning Around

The message recently was that the economy had turned a corner, that not even the sequestration mess could put a dent into it.

But here's what the Cyprus news is doing:

NEW YORK, March 19 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasuries prices
climbed on Tuesday as a plan in Cyprus to tax bank accounts to
help pay for a bailout unraveled, creating uncertainty about the
island country's financial future and reviving fears about the
stability of the euro zone.

    Benchmark yields hit a two-week low. The Cypriot parliament
overwhelmingly rejected a proposed levy on bank deposits, a
proposal that had sent investors dumping stocks and scurrying
for safe havens this week.
    The rejection by Cyprus's parliament of the levy brings the
country, one of the euro zone's smaller members, to the brink of
financial collapse. 
    Treasuries are being dogged by contagion fears, said Jason
Rogan, managing director in Treasuries trading at Guggenheim
Partners in New York.
    "There are some people saying it could occur in Italy and
Spain, that is really where the fear is building and why
Treasuries are reacting the way they are," he said.  
    Robert Tipp, chief investment strategist for Prudential
Fixed Income, said, "It's pretty much wide open on the rumor
mill for Cyprus right now.
    "People are at a loss. There are a lot of factors in play,"
he said, calling the situation a "jump ball" that could go in
many possible directions.

It really doesn't take much for the so-called recovery to get put on hold.

We heard how things had turned around in the first quarter in both 2011 and 2012.

Until the economy slowed back down to a crawl both years.

Now we have sequestration and this Eurozone flare-up.

Be interesting to see how things go from here.

Wouldn't wanna bet my Spring Break on new highs for the Dow now.

Obama Not Adding Value To Jobs Market Or Economy (UPDATED)

President Obama is a "No Excuses!" kind of guy when it comes to education reform.

The only thing that matters to President Obama about teacher performance is test scores.

Are teachers "adding value" to their students' scores?

If not, they need to be fired, like in Central Falls, Rhode Island, where the president cheered the firing of teachers at a school in one of the poorest cities in the state.

High poverty, high unemployment, municipal bankruptcy, serious social and economic problems facing the students and community?

"No excuses!" says Obama. "Raise scores or be fired!"

Given his refusal to accept mitigating outside circumstances for why students might struggle in school, one wonders why he refuses to hold himself to the same standards when it comes to his performance as the nation's economic steward.

But he's not - he's still blaming Bush for the problems:

US unemployment stayed stubbornly stuck at 8.2% with only 80,000 new jobs added in June, dealing a potentially damaging blow to Barack Obama in the run-up to November's White House election.

The US bureau of labor statistics, in a jobs report published Friday, said the unemployment situation was "essentially unchanged" from the previous month, with unemployment at 12.7 million.

The Republicans seized on the figures to say Obama's attempts to stimulate the economy over the last three and a half years had failed.

Obama, campaigning in Ohio on Thursday, argued that he had inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression, and that it takes time to turn an economy around.

Here are some numbers we can look at to see how much value Obama has detracted from the economy:

Delving deeper into the figures, the unemployment rate for whites and Latinos is unchanged, but unemployment among black Americans has risen, to 14.4%.

About one-third of the jobs gained in June were in temporary services. Manufacturing added 11,000, its ninth straight month of gains. The healthcare sector added 13,000 jobs and financial services gained 5,000. Retailers, transportation firms and the government all cut jobs.

...

Analysts had anticipated an increase of at least 95,000 new jobs, a fairly modest target. But the figures were even lower than that.

And U.S. manufacturing is actually in recession again:

US factories saw their biggest one-month drop in orders last month since the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the effects from Europe's sovereign debt crisis rippled across the Atlantic.

Amid growing evidence that the battle to save the euro is now having a global impact, a key monthly snapshot of business in America showed manufacturing sliding into recession territory for the first time in three years.

Shares fell on Wall Street after traders were taken aback by a gloomy report from the Institute for Supply Management in the US, which followed downbeat news earlier in the day from China and the UK as well as the 17-nation eurozone.

Oil prices also fell back sharply, losing almost $2 a barrel amid concerns that weaker growth across the world economy would hit demand for energy.

Analysts were particularly concerned by the sharp drop in orders for US factories last month, the main factor behind a drop in the ISM's purchasing managers' index below the 50 level that separates expansion from contraction. The ISM said the fall - which puts pressure on the Federal Reserve to take fresh steps to boost growth - from 53.5 to 49.7 was the first since the US was last in recession in 2009.

...

"The fall in June's ISM manufacturing index to below 50 is the surest sign yet that the US is catching the slowdown already underway in Europe and China", said Paul Dales, US economist at Capital Economics.

Sure there are mitigating outside circumstances for why the jobs market has stalled and U.S. manufacturing is back in recession.

But "No Excuses!", Mr. President.

Add value to the jobs market and economy or go do something else for a living.

That's your message to public schools and public schools teachers.

Fair's fair - you need to live by your own rules too.

UPDATE: The NY Times picks up on the "It's Not My Fault!" angle Obama is trying to sell on the campaign trail.

Obama is not wrong to say these are long term problems that defy quick solutions.

I just wish he would acknowledge the same in public education.

But he doesn't.

Instead he sells a reductionist program of education reform - fire our way to the top.

Why The U.S. Cannot Educate Its Way To Economic Equality

Really good piece from John Marsh, author of Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach Or Learn Our Way Out Of Inequality, in Sunday's Daily News about why education reform is not going to solve the economic inequality problem in America because even if millions of children from impoverished families grow up to go to college, there aren't enough high-paying jobs for them to work when they graduate.

Here is the piece in full:

It is not every day that the U.S. secretary of education charges a professor with "insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country." But in the cutthroat world of education reform, the daggers have come out.

The professor, Diane Ravitch of NYU - who once shared educational reformers' love for school choice, charter schools and accountability - has in recent years come to oppose them. A few weeks ago, she published a much-debated op-ed in The New York Times that reiterated her belief that few schools, reformed or not, can overcome the differences in family income that determine educational outcomes. "Families," she wrote, "are children's most important educators."

The critics pounced. The columnist Jonathan Alter called her views "the mother of all cop outs." The aforementioned Arne Duncan - President Obama's education chief - said she was "in denial."

To the new breed of educational reformers, whose motto is "no excuses," schools cannot only prevail over the effects of an impoverished upbringing; they can set students from poor families on the path to college and, ultimately, a middle-class life.

This argument is a neat but dangerous dodge. The inconvenient truth: If you care about poverty and economic inequality, you would be better off forgetting about education. Because, even if schools could overcome the effects of growing up in poverty, they cannot reshape the structure of an economy that produces poverty and economic inequality in the first place.

In terms of income, it is no secret that the United States has grown top-heavy in the past few decades. In broad terms, the rich have gotten richer, most people have treaded water and more people live in poverty. From 1993 to 2008, slightly more than half of all economic growth in the U.S. flowed to the top 1% of earners. The United States now has the most unequal distribution of incomes among developed countries.

Almost no one disputes whether this profound inequality exists. Rather, the debate seems to be about whether it matters - and if so, what to do about it. According to recent polls, most Americans seem to have made up their minds about both questions. More than 70% of us think differences in income are too large. Regarding what to do about it, Americans are equally decisive. Roughly two out of three people disagree with the proposition that it is the government's responsibility to reduce income differences.

By contrast, there is unfailing and overwhelming support for education and, lately, education reform.

It is not hard to imagine why Americans almost unanimously support education as a solution to poverty and inequality. It offers an elegant solution to an otherwise intractable problem: Good schools, the thinking goes, can provide everyone, including and perhaps especially the poor, a chance to get ahead, graduate from college and join the middle class. In this way, economic inequality would be reduced. Moreover, by combating income inequality with genuine educational equality, Americans can avoid the spectre of divisive economic policies - of "spreading the wealth around," as Barack Obama famously put it in his 2008 presidential campaign.

The only problem is that it does not, and will not, work. As a growing body of scholarship has shown, educational achievement depends mostly on family background - on how much money your parents make. In that respect at least, Ravitch is right.

For the sake of argument, though, suppose critics like Ravitch were wrong and reformers like Duncan and Alter were right. Assume the United States could induce many more poor and low-income students to graduate from college. It is not clear what all those new college graduates would do.

The economy requires more workers with college degrees than ever before. Yet it remains - and will remain - an economy that requires more workers without degrees than workers with degrees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that seven out of the 10 occupations that will produce the most new jobs by 2018 will require only on-the-job training. (Think jobs like home health aides, customer service representatives, food preparers and servers.)

A good education will not help workers trapped in low-wage, nonunion jobs. Nor will it do much to divert the flow of economic growth to the top 1% of earners. These are the reasons behind rising economic inequality, and these reasons have little to do with education.

In short, we cannot teach or learn our way out of inequality. And so, Americans must decide what they dislike more: differences in income that are too large, or the government taking more responsibility to reduce income differences. Their favorite solution, education, is no solution at all.

Marsh is author of the book, "Class Dismissed: Why We Cannot Teach or Learn Our Way Out of Inequality."

There is a reason so many of the education reformers these days are made up of hedge fund managers and other economic elites.

They want you to take your eye off how much they are stealing on a daily basis from the economy and blame schools and "bad teachers" for the economic problems in the country instead.

Failed President

Heckuva job, Barack!

The public opinion boost President Obama received after the killing of Osama bin Laden has dissipated, and Americans’ disapproval of how he is handling the nation’s economy and the deficit has reached new highs, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey portrays a broadly pessimistic mood in the country this spring as higher gasoline prices, sliding home values and a disappointing employment picture have raised fresh concerns about the pace of the economic recovery.

By 2 to 1, Americans say the country is pretty seriously on the wrong track, and nine in 10 continue to rate the economy in negative terms. Nearly six in 10 say the economy has not started to recover, regardless of what official statistics may say, and most of those who say it has improved rate the recovery as weak.

New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.

Overall, about six in 10 of those surveyed give Obama negative marks on the economy and the deficit. Significantly, nearly half strongly disapprove of his performance in these two crucial areas. Nearly two-thirds of political independents disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, including — for the first time — a slim majority who do so strongly.

In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue.

The president has sought to point to progress on the economy, particularly in the automobile industry, and to argue that the policies he put in place at the beginning of his term are working. But the combined effects of weak economic indicators and dissatisfaction among the public are adding to the political pressures on the White House as the president’s advisers look toward what could be a difficult 2012 reelection campaign.

Let's run down the failures of this president to put things right with the economy:

1. Stimulus too small
2. Stimulus gave us garbage like Race to the Top instead of a jobs bill that would have put people to work rebuilding the infrastructure of this country
3. Renominated Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve, doubling down on the print and mint monetary policy
4. Bought into deficit reduction frame of economic story long before recovery took hold, legitimizing all the downsizing that is now leading to mass layoffs and budget cuts which are further damaging a weak economy
5. Held NOT one Wall Street criminal accountable for financial collapse of '08, instead handed out trillions in bailout money and rubberstamped Wall Street criminal activity in the process as A-OK
6. HAMP mortgage mess which made things worse in the housing market for many homeowners

And those are just the ones I can of off the top of my head.

So if the president's re-election chances are going from slam Arne Duncan to ruh-roh Shaggy!, it's really his own fault.

The theme for the administration should have been jobs, jobs, jobs.

It should have been protecting the middle and working classes from the economic ravages of globalism.

It should have been rebuilding this country's infrastructure and putting people to work with good paying jobs while doing it.

Instead we got TALF, HAMP and RttT.

Maybe Obama will get a trip back to RahmEmanueland for his arrogance and short-sightedness.

How's That Austerity Theory Working Now?

Our coprorate overlords and the coprorate politicians they own in both parties have been selling the country on austerity as the fix for the economic ills we suffer.

Here is how that "fix" is working so far:

After several months of strong job growth, hiring slowed sharply in May, raising concerns once again about the underlying strength of the economic recovery.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the United States added 54,000 nonfarm payroll jobs last month, following an increase of 232,000 jobs in April. May’s job gain was about a third of what economists had been forecasting.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 9.1 percent from 9.0 percent in April.

“The economy clearly just hit a brick wall,” said Paul Ashworth, chief United States economist at Capital Economics. “It’s almost as if it came to a complete standstill.”

The dismal numbers may change the economic debate in Washington and potentially revive calls for the Federal Reserve to engage in another round of asset purchases, Mr. Ashworth said. Democrats and labor-oriented groups have also amplified their pleas for Congress to delay deficit-reduction measures.

“Living here in Washington, in the past few weeks there has been all this talk about deficits and the debt ceiling as though that were the biggest problem right now,” said Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization. “My fervent hope is that this shocks policy makers into realizing the most urgent problem in front of us right now is jobs.”

More layoffs to come at the state and municipal levels, more cost-cutting in municipal, state and federal government, and a middle and working class that is being squeezed by stagnant wages, job uncertainty and higher food and energy costs.

Oh, and the housing market is tanking again.

Should be a fabulous recipe for an improved economy.

Heckuva job, Barack! Buying into the Randian deficit meme has really brought about a recovery.

And just wait until all those teachers get laid off at the end of year in states all across the nation.

Should really make for a "recovery summer"!

Krugman: Education Cannot Rebuild Middle Class

The Shrill One, saying what I have been saying for a long, long time - just saying it better. Here it is, in full:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers.

And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

And then there’s globalization. Once, only manufacturing workers needed to worry about competition from overseas, but the combination of computers and telecommunications has made it possible to provide many services at long range. And research by my Princeton colleagues Alan Blinder and Alan Krueger suggests that high-wage jobs performed by highly educated workers are, if anything, more “offshorable” than jobs done by low-paid, less-educated workers. If they’re right, growing international trade in services will further hollow out the U.S. job market.

So what does all this say about policy?

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Note that so many of the teacher trashers - Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, et al. - are part of that 400 wealthiest Americans group Michael Moore talked about yesterday who own more than the bottom 150 million in the country.

Until we TAKE BACK some of that cash and wealth from those guys, middle and working class wages and wealth will continue to get squeezed.

Until those guys FEAR that they'd better give something up willingly or it will ALL be taken from them FORCIBLY, nothing is going to change.

That's the harsh truth that so many don't want to face these days.

Oligarchs don't give up power or money willingly.

They have to be pressured to do it.

The Hollowing Out Of The American Economy

The education reformers both in and out of the Obama administration like to say that there is no unemployment problem in this country, there is an education problem.

Under this dubious theory, Americans are not educating themselves enough to be able to do the high tech jobs the economy is creating.

Once the American public education system is blown up and replaced by a charter school system that actually educates the youth of America better, especially in the areas of math, science, and technology, the unemployment problem will largely disappear.

The NY Times lays waste to this theory today:

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

...

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

There is an Asimov short story, one of the Robot stories I think, that starts out with a line about how some people were supportive of the robots in society but others worried what humans would do for jobs once the robots took over much of the employment. What would the robots do to the economy?

Well, we're now there.

I have been thinking about this topic a lot, not least of which because I believe ultimately the powers that be will replace teachers like me with computers, virtual instruction software and one or two remote teachers somewhere in Sri Lanka to teach students in NYC.

I have also thinking about this topic in terms of how to help my seniors navigate the college admissions world. Majors that once seem sure bets for employment - like law, like education, like computer programming - now seem more uncertain as automation replaces much of what humans used to do.

I'm no Luddite, but I am uncomfortable with so much of the uncritical "Gee Whiz!" reaction we get to so much of this human-replacing automation we are seeing in the past few years.

And as Autor, the economics professor from MIT, pointed out in the Times article, these high-paying jobs that are disappearing are NOT going to be replaced with anything nearly as lucrative.

Indeed, Robert Reich noted this in his commentary about yesterday's jobs report.

There are jobs returning to America, yes - 190,000+ last month.

But they don't pay anywhere near what the jobs that disappeared back in 2008-2010 paid.

This ought to be the thing that Obama and his merry men are worried about for the future.

But they're not - they're too busy scapegoating teachers and schools for a systemic problem that will not be addressed by education levels, but that will instead be addressed by coming to a different understanding of the value and economics of work.

Value-Added Analysis Of The Obama Record On Employment

Via, Atrios, here is the unemployment rate for the last three years:

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2008	5.0	4.8	5.1	5.0	5.4	5.5	5.8	6.1	6.2	6.6	6.9	7.4
2009	7.7	8.2	8.6	8.9	9.4	9.5	9.4	9.7	9.8	10.1	10.0	10.0
2010	9.7	9.7	9.7	9.9	9.7	9.5	9.5	9.6	9.6

While Obama and the Dems were fighting Republicans (or sometimes other Dems) over health care reform, unemployment was wavering between 9.6% and 10%.

Had Obama and the Dems addressed the unemployment problem and gotten the rate back down to the level it was at when Bush left office, they wouldn't have gotten hammered like they did last night.

It's that simple.

Yes, they would have lost seats in both houses.

But not control.

But Obama didn't want to hear any of this.

He had in his head that HE - THE GREAT OBAMA - would reform the health care system and do something that even FDR and LBJ couldn't do.

Leaving aside just how shitty HCR actually is (and I do hope Repubs repeal it - mandating 31 million Americans buy garbage health insurance from private companies and providing subsidies to those companies by placing a 40% excise tax on people with employer-provided plans is NOT good policy), getting stuck for months trying to get four or five Repubs to play along with the proposals, then pushing the thing through anyway pissed off a whole bunch of Americans (including me) who were worried about their jobs.

Now here we are, a year after the HCR fight, unemployment remains above 9.5%, people are STILL worried about their jobs in the private sector, the public sector (especially teachers) will see MASS LAYOFFS this year, and many long-term unemployed cannot find jobs.

So, using a value-added analysis like Kleinberg want to use on NYC teachers, let's recap:

Obama came in with 6.9& unemployment.

Unemployment has NOT fallen below 8% since he took office.

It currently looks like it is heading back to 10%.

Obama said it would be down to 7.9% if his stimulus was passed, would tap out at 9% if it wasn't.

He has been wrong on jobs since the beginning, underestimating the severity of the employment problem, doing little to mitigate it (anybody think RttT added jobs?) and STILL doesn't know what to do about the problem now.

Not only has Barack Obama NOT added value to this economy, he has consistently taken value out by focusing on the wrong issues, hiring the wrong people to fix the problems (Geithner? Bernanke? Summers?) and haphazardly trying to stimulate the economy with garbage programs like Race to the Top.

I have said it before, I will say it again - if the Obama administration were a school in NYC or Chicago, the Obama DOE would have it on the closure list.

Dems got their school closure notice for the House yesterday.

The closure notice for the Senate and the White House will come in two years if they do not change course and figure out how to a) fix the mortgage mess b) fix the long-term unemployment problem c) hold the financial industry accountable for their sins, both crisis-related and fraudclosure-related.

I suspect it is too little too late to do any of those things now, what with Boehner and Company ready to gridlock everything in sight.

That is Obama's fault.

He had the chance to address these problems.

We TOLD him to address them.

His people laughed at us and called us the "professional left" and said we were on drugs.

Well, Obama will bear the brunt of these mistakes and pay for his arrogance.

He will go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever.

Seriously.

Just look at how much value he has taken out of this country already.

It is in the numbers.

And with unemployment forecast to fall to 8.1% by the end of 2012 (still much higher than when Obama first took office), you can be sure the next big set of national elections will look like the ones we saw last night.

Value Added Assessment Of The Obama Administration's Economic Record

First, input the stats

• Wages & Salaries are still down 3.7% from the prior peak
• Corporate profits are still down 20% from the peak
• Real GDP is still down 1.3% from the peak
• Industrial production is still down 7.2% from the peak
• Employment is still down 5.5% from the peak
• Retail sales are still down 4.5% from the peak
• Manufacturing orders are still down 22.1% from the peak
• Manufacturing shipments are still down 12.5% from the peak
• Exports are still down 9.2% from the peak
• Housing starts are still down 63.5% from the peak
• New home sales are still down 68.9% from the peak
• Existing home sales are still down 41.2% from the peak
• Non-residential construction is still down 35.7% from the peak

Those are the current stats.

Now take a look at the trend for the future:

This is not what the market wanted to hear: "Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts suggested continued growth in national economic activity during the reporting period of mid-July through the end of August, but with widespread signs of a deceleration compared with preceding periods. Economic growth at a modest pace was the most common characterization of overall conditions, as provided by the five western Districts of St. Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Dallas, and San Francisco. The reports from Boston and Cleveland also pointed to positive developments or net improvements compared with the previous reporting period. However, the remaining Districts of New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Atlanta, and Chicago all highlighted mixed conditions or deceleration in overall economic activity."

Widespread deceleration of economic activity?

Gee, that sounds bad.

Given the the negative quality of the current economic stats, down anywhere from 3.7% to 68.9% from the peak of economic activity, and given the future trend of widespread deceleration of economic activity, Mr. Obama we're afraid we are just going have to fire your incompetent corporate-whore ass.

The good news is, you can play golf with Mayor for Life Richard Daley now that his corrupt, corporate ass is heading out of office too.

Jobless Claims Jump, Philly Fed Index Shows Contraction

Just in case you're inclined to be as clueless about the seriousness of economic conditions as President Hopey/Changey, take a look at this mornings' business headlines:

Jobless claims jump to nine-month high
Initial filings up 12,000 in latest week to hit 500,000 mark, data show

Philly Fed Index shows contraction in August, first time since July 2009

U.S. stocks dig deeper hole after Philadelphia Fed drop

AIA: Architecture Billings Index shows contraction in July

Jobless claims need to be at or below 300,000 for there to be real job growth.

That claims are going the OTHER WAY and have hit 500,000 is very bad news indeed for the economy and the already unemployed.

If you're already an unemployed person, just try getting a job when more people are being laid off every week.

With economic activity as measured by the Philly Fed DECLINING (the index went from 5.1 reading in July to -7.7 in August), you can bet there will be more layoffs to come.

The August jobs report is going to be pretty bad.

The September and October reports may be even worse.

And President Obama and his yes boys and girls around him seem clueless - not only about what to do to spur job growth and economic activity, but clueless too about why the president's approval ratings have plummeted:

Democrats in Washington are divided and somewhat puzzled over President Obama’s fading popularity. They reject, of course, the Republican view that the president is basically a closet socialist whose disdain for free enterprise has alienated voters. But that’s about as far as the consensus goes.

In conversations over the past few weeks, some of the party’s leading strategists told me that it all comes down to messaging, or — here’s that ubiquitous word again — “framing.” The president who ran such a brilliant campaign, they argue, has utterly failed to communicate his successes. They cited factors like the president’s cool demeanor and suggested that he hadn’t used the right words or shown the proper empathy.

Uh, boys and girls at the White House, "framing the issues" and "showing empathy" are both important skills and/or qualities to have in politics and I would definitely say President Hopey/Changey is REALLY, REALLY bad at the empathy thing (he really does come across like he doesn't give a shit about anything except his next post-game cigarette with Arne Duncan), but the biggest, most important reason Obama's ratings have plummeted is THE FREAKING ECONOMY.

Jesus Christ, why can't these morons at the White House get their heads around the fact that no one outside the Village Hierarchy of Evan Thomas, David Broder and Jonathan Alter gives a shit that Obama got a bunch of legislation through.

What people care about are RESULTS.

How is the economy doing?

What's happening with employment?

Is my job safe?

Can I pay my mortgage and still buy food?

What are my health care costs like?

On ALL of these counts, Hopey/Changey has been a MISERABLE failure.

The economy got WORSE after he took office, steadied for a bit, and is getting WORSE again.

Unemployment, which the administration said would never get above 8% if Obama's stimulus package was passed, has held steady between 9.5% and 10% and is now RISING again as the economy worsens in the second half of the year.

And let's not forget that the unemployment rate is a BULLSHIT measure.

Underemployment - the number of people who are unemployed and looking for work, the number of people who are unemployed but have stopped looking for work BECAUSE THERE IS NONE, and the number of people who are working part-time but want full-time work - is at 19%.

Yeah - 19%.

Underemployment may hit 25% before long as layoffs ratchet up again and the economy continues to slow.

And let's not forget that states and municipalities haven't finished cutting hours and laying people off too.

Calculated Risk posts that California furloughs are back on again and Oregon is seeing a widening budget deficit and is considering cutting jobs and school and state services.

Conditions are growing worse.

People are scared.

Yet the man in charge in Washington - a fellow who has bragged about holding teachers accountable like no one has ever held them accountable before for stagnant test scores and poor graduation rates - can't seem to get his head around the fact that THE ECONOMIC DATA SUCKS and therefore people think HE SUCKS.

The Democratic Party will take it on the chin this November. They should. They have done little to mitigate the mortgage disaster, the unemployment problem, the way hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson use Wall Street like a Big Rigged Casino.

But the man who really deserves the accountability - President Obama - will not receive any this November. He and his political advisers have decided that losing the House to the GOP is EXACTLY what they want to happen.

That way they can run against the crazy Repubs running Congress who want to repeal the 14th Amendment and deport every Mexican busboy in every restaurant in the country just because they're, you know, Mexican.

But had President Obama actually used the economic crisis of 2008-2009 to reforge the bond between government and the people that FDR once built, to show Americans how government services can be used to help put people back to work, to increase economic activity, to make people's live better, we could have been in a better place economically and he could have been in a better place politically.

Instead we got that corporate-friendly THIRD WAY jive that Clinton was so fond of - if you add a government program, it must be in the form of some competitive grant that shifts the work to some private corporation because private enterprise is so much better than Big Government.

That's what Race to the Top was all about.

That's what so much of the stimulus stuff was.

You know, had they trained people to fix the infrastructure, the electrical grid, to repave roads that states can longer afford to keep paved, to make sure bridges in Minnesota (or anywhere else) do not collapse because they haven't been fixed, to build transit systems or fix existing ones, to build high speed rail along the Eastern Corridor so that people can travel rapidly and cheaply without going near an airport, Obama could have gone down into history as a great president who not only pulled the country out of the Great Recession but also made this country look great (and be safe) again.

Instead we got Race to the Top and the other jive. And Obama has 44% approval ratings and 500,000 new jobless claims this month and unemployment soon to reach 10% or higher again and GDP to hit 0%.

If the measures of accountability that the LA Times and the other ed deformers are using on teachers like a sledgehammer were applied to this president and the yes boys and girls around him, he would be vilified as the incompetent arrogant fool he is and out on his ass.

But I think we will have to wait until 2012 for that.

And unfortunately, as NYC Educator points out here, what comes AFTER Obama will be even worse.

It's a shame.

It didn't have to be this way.

Recession Almost A "Certainty"

Must be the fault of teachers and schools:

The US economy is almost certainly headed back into a double dip recession, and economists aren't seeing it because they're using "the old rules of thumb" that don't apply this time, well-known economist David Rosenberg told CNBC.

Consumers' focus on shedding debt rather than spending will prevent the economy from growing and bring a halt to the recovery, said Rosenberg, a former Merrill Lynch economist who now works at Gluskin Sheff, an advisory firm based in Toronto.

"The risks of a double-dip recession—if we ever got out of the first one—are actually a lot higher than people are talking about right now," he said. "I think that it's almost a foregone conclusion, a virtual certainty."

Rosenberg has long been pessimistic on the economy, believing that persistently high unemployment, weak economic indicators and massive debt-cutting—deleveraging—by consumers and businesses will send the economy into a double dip.

Though many economists disagree with Rosenberg about the chance of another recession, his views are widely followed on Wall Street and have often been accurate.

Unemployment remains stubbornly high at 9.6 percent, while Friday's economic reports showed modest gains in retail spending and the consumer price index.

In addition, a slew of leading economists, from firms including Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs have been scaling back their outlook for the gross domestic product.

On Friday, Goldman raised the chance of a double-dip happening to 25-30 percent. BMO Capital Markets, in its second-half outlook released last week, said consumer weakness has been a hallmark of weak recent recoveries, but this cycle is the worst.

Robert Shiller said something similar last week about the U.S. economy sliding back into recession.

Meanwhile the Obamas spend August on vacation on the public dime.

Michelle Obama seems to think she's fucking Oprah, taking her kid and her entourage on a tour of Spain.

Then it's off to Martha's Vineyard for a week.

Lotta fucking nerve, given how bad things already are for many Americans and how much worse they are about to get.

But soon enough, Michelle, Sasha and Malia will get a permanent vacation away from the White House.

By that point, President Obama will be down in history as the 21st century Herbert Hoover.

And all four can slink back to Chicago and take all the vacations they want.

Douple Dip

Not ice cream - recession:

(Reuters) - The state of the economy is worrisome and there is a high possibility of a double-dip recession, one of the property market's most well-known economists said on Tuesday.

Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and co-developer of Standard and Poor's S&P/Case-Shiller home price indexes, told Reuters Insider he does not know where home prices may be headed, but believes the economy may be on a precarious path.

"For me a double-dip is another recession before we've healed from this recession ... The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50 percent," Shiller said.

"I actually expect it."

Shiller thinks the administration needs to push another stimulus bill through that puts people back to work.

That would be nice, but it's not going to happen.

First off, the first stimulus bill was loaded with bullshit that actually FIRED people, not put them to work.

That's what the Race to the Top program is about.

Second, too many deficit trolls are looking to cut spending and put the U.S. through an austerity plan similar to what Greece is going through.

Never mind that the austerity plan in Greece has made things worse there.

We need austerity for the middle and working classes here in the U.S.

So we're cutting food stamps, raising the retirement age, cutting Social Security benefits, closing schools, firing teachers and otherwise making a making a mess of thing while making sure the banksters have lots of 0% interest dough available to them.

Heckuva job, Barack!

I think Sheer is right - I am expecting a double dip as well.

I am not an economist, but common sense tells me, when you don't put people back to work, when you put an end to government stimulus while corporations are sitting on their cash (i.e., not hiring or reinvesting it), when the housing market continues to be a problem, when the banks STILL have crap mortgages on their books, and when Europe is STILL a mess, problems are coming.

Really big problems.

I am sure President Accountability will try and blame it on Bush and the public school system.

But this is HIS mess now.

Obama's School Turnaround Strategy Means Everybody Gets Fired - Including The School Lunch Lady

President Accountability has vowed to hold EVERYBODY in the school system accountability for "failing" schools - including the janitors and lunch people:

In Chicago, the strategy is called "turnaround," and it involves removing everyone who works in a failing school. Proponents—including U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan—say failing schools need to start over with a clean slate.

Dan Abraham disagrees. He’s is with the union that represents most Chicago lunchroom workers.

ABRAHAM: Schools that are not achieving educationally are not going to be fixed by changing the lunch ladies.

Numbers obtained by WBEZ show that over three years, 285 support staff lost their positions in Chicago turnarounds. The district says just 14 employees won jobs back in those schools. About one in five found positions elsewhere in the system.

The turnaround strategy is going national. The federal government yesterday announced it’s giving Illinois $147 million to fix its lowest performing schools. Turnaround is one option districts can use.

Unfuckingbelievable.

Even the lunch ladies and the janitors get canned by the Obama/Duncan education "reforms."

You know who needs to lose their jobs?

Not the lunch ladies and the janitors at "failing" schools.

Nor the overwhelming majority of teachers either.

It's Duncan and Obama for putting policies in place that encourage mass chaos and financial impropriety

It's Duncan and Obama for putting policies in place that are making conditions in the public school system WORSE, not better.

Yes, Duncan and Obama need to lose their jobs and lose them soon.

And they will.

Oh, yes - they will.

Accountability is coming, Obama.

You have a couple more years of deform and destruction.

But you WILL be slinking out of Washington a one-term president with a reputation worse than that of George W. Bush.

The economy will make that a certainty.

Yes, it will.

Oh, yes, - it will.

Where Is The Accountability For Obama On The Economy?

The economy is a mess.

Unemployment still stands at 9.5%. Add in the people who stopped looking for jobs because the job market is so bad or the people working only part time but wanting full time work and you get a figure closer to 19% of the entire country either underemployed or unemployed.

That's just incredible.

Back in January 2009, the Obama administration said unemployment would rise to 9% WITHOUT the '09 stimulus package and projected unemployment to be closer to 8% with it.

Wow - were they REALLY wrong!

Unemployment hit double digits, has hovered between 9.5%-10% since and is expected to RISE again before the end of the year as GDP growth slows.

In fact 9% unemployment and 18% underemployment may be the new normal for the 21st century.

So what happened?

What happened is the stimulus package SUCKED.

It wasn't large enough, it didn't actually employ people, it was used for bullshit ideological items like giving Arne Duncan $4.3 billion in walking around money for Race to the Top.

Add to the unemployment problem the GDP problem. We're headed back into negative territory:

The government’s preliminary estimate for economic growth in the second quarter is likely to be revised substantially lower.

This preliminary estimate of gross domestic product growth, which was released on July 30, reported that the nation’s output grew at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the spring. This tepid growth was nothing to write home about, since it was a big step downward from growth rates in the previous two quarters. (The economy grew at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter of the year, and 5 percent in the last quarter of 2009.)

But even that 2.4 percent annual rate is now looking too rosy.

Many of the inputs that government economists use to estimate G.D.P. each quarter are rough estimates based on incomplete data. Slowly, more complete data are rolling in.

As we noted last week, more complete data on the inventory component of G.D.P. shows that the overall growth rate was worse than expected.

And today, the Commerce Department reported that the trade deficit in June was wider than expected. Trade is also incorporated into the calculation of G.D.P., and a wider trade deficit means an even smaller gain gross domestic product.

Right now it’s looking like second quarter G.D.P. growth was only half as big as initially estimated.

“Combining the bigger-than-expected trade deficit with other weak data suggests that Q2 growth was only 1.2 percent rather than the 2.4 percent originally estimated, placing the economy on even shakier ground than it seemed,” wrote Nigel Gault, chief United States economist at IHS Global Insight, “and underlining why the Fed has shifted towards an easing bias.”

It was in the second half of the year - Q3 and Q4 - when the stimulus money has completely faded away that GDP was expected to see a large drop.

If the drop is ALREADY happening in Q2, well, Q3 and Q4 may be REALLY ugly.

Wall Street finally woke up to that fact today. As of 1:00 PM, the Dow is down 248 points.

Now who knows, the Big Casino On Wall Street may end up for the day, but the long term picture remains the same.

Economic activity is decreasing.

Unemployment is as big a problem now as it was when Barack Obama first took office.

And it is going to get WORSE before it gets better.

It may be this bad FOR YEARS.

And yet, the only accountability we hear from the administration is for teachers.

There is NO accountability for Larry Summers, Timmeh Geithner or Barack Obama - the three men MOST responsible for the CURRENT economic mess.

And Ben Bernanke got renominated to the Federal Reserve, so there was no accountability there either.

Yes,the economic mess started under Bush. But the Obama people have done LITTLE to NOTHING to make things better.

Unfortunately before Barack Obama becomes a one term president and is himself unemployed, he will see many more people fired and laid off.

Many of those will be purposeful (i.e., teachers as part of the RttT and NCLB Jr. programs.)

Obama calls those firings "accountability."

It comes from all the testing data he wants tracked and collated.

Looking at the economic data, it is quite clear that Larry Summers, Timmeh Geithner and Barack Obama himself ought to be fired.

But silly, RBE - accountability isn't for THEM.

It is only for teachers.

The Wall Street Con

Matt Taibbi's piece on the Biggest Con In History is essential reading:

There's still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street "earns" its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around "earns." The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street's eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its "performance" was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.

The bottom line is that banks like Goldman have learned absolutely nothing from the global economic meltdown. In fact, they're back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force — only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they're rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.

That's why this bonus business isn't merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of old-school hustles that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There's even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a mark so he doesn't call the cops is known as the "Cool Off."

Read the rest to see how they pulled it off and continue to pull it off with the help of the Fed, the Bush administration, and the Obama administration.

These people belong in jail.

Instead, the "socialist" president calls Blankfein of Goldman and Dimon of JP Morgan Chase "very savvy businessmen" and says he "doesn't begrudge" their taxpayer-provided bonuses.

Instead he puts the very people who facilitated this mess - Bernanke, Summers and Geithner - in charge of cleaning up the mess (and surprise, surprise! The only thing getting cleaned up is the taxpayer...)

Instead he offers no real meaningful reform to the financial system and continues the era of the Yummy Yummy Punchbowl for Wall Street and the banksters.

Instead he offers them even more punchbowls - "reforming" health care with a very insurance industry- and Big Pharma-friendly plan and "reforming" education by opening up all that yummy yummy public education money to for-profit education entrepreneurs.

And what we're left with just a little less than two years after the financial system collapsed is more of the same, only worse. Here's Taibbi again:

To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by "performance": Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit — who wouldn't deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?

Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the "True Believer Syndrome." That's sort of where we are, in a state of nagging disbelief about the real problem on Wall Street. It isn't so much that we have inadequate rules or incompetent regulators, although both of these things are certainly true. The real problem is that it doesn't matter what regulations are in place if the people running the economy are rip-off artists. The system assumes a certain minimum level of ethical behavior and civic instinct over and above what is spelled out by the regulations. If those ethics are absent — well, this thing isn't going to work, no matter what we do. Sure, mugging old ladies is against the law, but it's also easy. To prevent it, we depend, for the most part, not on cops but on people making the conscious decision not to do it.

That's why the biggest gift the bankers got in the bailout was not fiscal but psychological. "The most valuable part of the bailout," says Rep. Sherman, "was the implicit guarantee that they're Too Big to Fail." Instead of liquidating and prosecuting the insolvent institutions that took us all down with them in a giant Ponzi scheme, we have showered them with money and guarantees and all sorts of other enabling gestures. And what should really freak everyone out is the fact that Wall Street immediately started skimming off its own rescue money. If the bailouts validated anew the crooked psychology of the bubble, the recent profit and bonus numbers show that the same psychology is back, thriving, and looking for new disasters to create. "It's evidence," says Rep. Kanjorski, "that they still don't get it."

More to the point, the fact that we haven't done much of anything to change the rules and behavior of Wall Street shows that we still don't get it. Instituting a bailout policy that stressed recapitalizing bad banks was like the addict coming back to the con man to get his lost money back. Ask yourself how well that ever works out. And then get ready for the reload.

The hucksters on Wall Street and in Washington like to blame public education and teachers for all the ills of the American economy.

But one need look no further than the con men in Washington and on Wall Street (often interchangeable) to see who is really to blame.

If Obama Were A NYC School, He'd Be On The Closure List

President Accountability appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show to award himself a B+ for his first year in office.

Sorry, but I beg to differ.

First, let's note that Accountability's signature domestic policy, health care reform, is heading for ignominious defeat. Most people hate the reform proposals (tonight's NBC News/WSJ poll has 32% favoring Obama's reform measures and 47% opposing them) and liberals and progressives in particular think the wishy-washy president caved to moderates and conservatives to create a health care reform proposal that is simply awful. It forces those without health insurance to buy insurance, but doesn't provide any mechanism like a public option or Medicare buy-in to help keep costs down for them. So essentially health care reform garners 33 billion more customers for the health insurance industry, but does little to hold down costs. Maybe the worst thing that could happen for Dems is if this thing does pass. The only thing worse than doing nothing is passing a bad bill that people hate.

Next, let's look at the economy Obama thinks he's turned around. Unemployment remains at 10%, long term unemployment is even worse, the national debt has skyrocketed, and Obama's stimulus package has done too little to add the necessary number of jobs per month to turn things around. Foreclosures continue to rise and are not expected to peak until 2011 and again, Obama's foreclosure plan has been a dismal failure. On the financial front, it's true the punch bowl is back for the boys on Wall Street and the financial markets are doing quite well. But Wall Street is taking Main Street to the cleaners and Obama is helping them to do it. Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture describes the latest Wall Street/Obama administration outrage:

The ongoing transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top 1% continues unabated.

The Treasury Department, via the IRS, has made a terrible deal with Citigroup for TARP repayment: They repay $20 billion in TARP money, and in exchange we give them $38 billion in tax abatements.

...

The looting of the Treasury, begun in panic under George W. Bush, continues in ignorance under Barack W. Obama.

As Matt Tiabbi wrote in the latest Rolling Stone, Obama has done everything in his power to make sure the boys on Wall Street have been able to enrich themselves at the public trough while failing to get any meaningful reform passed. He didn't campaign on these Wall Street-friendly policies, but he certainly has governed this way:

What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.

How could Obama let this happen? Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we've been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?

Now maybe Obama thinks he deserves a B+ for 10% unemployment, a record debt, trillion dollar bailouts to Wall Street without any meaningful reform in exchange, and a health care reform measure that only a health care industry executive could love, but I have to tell you, if he were a school under Arne Duncan's command, he'd be slated for "turnaround" via closure, not the merit pay President Accountability seems to think he deserves.