Steve Forbes Loves Governor Cuomo

Want to know why Rob Astorino can't win in November?

Because business people like Steve Forbes love them some Andrew Cuomo:

BOLTON LANDING—Publishing titan and two-time Republican presidential aspirant Steve Forbes praised Andrew Cuomo before a speech Wednesday, but said it'll be a while before the governor can boast of a welcoming business climate in New York.

“He's made some changes on the tax side, and that's good, but it has to be just the beginning,” Forbes told Capital. “People see that it's beginning to improve, but a lot of work's got to be done.”

The billionaire spoke at the opening dinner of the Business Council of New York State's annual retreat at the Sagamore, a gilded island resort about halfway up the west side of Lake George.

...

The crux of Forbes' speech was a defense of capitalism and free markets, which Forbes presented as a solution to current problems from health care to inflation.

“Capitalism in free markets promotes cooperation. … You may not love your neighbor, but you sure want to sell your neighbor,” Forbes said. “It's not only creating resources. Capitalism, when allowed to operate, turns scarcity into abundance.”

Really?

What we're seeing these days is an abundance of wealth for the top 5% and a scarcity for everybody else:

Manhattan is becoming an island of extremes.

The mean income of the top 5 percent of households in Manhattan soared 9 percent in 2013 over 2012, giving Manhattan the biggest dollar income gap of any county in the country, according to data from the Census Bureau.

The top 5 percent of households earned $864,394, or 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which is being released Thursday and covers the final year of the Bloomberg administration.

“The recovery seems to be going to those at the top, much more than those in the middle, while those at the bottom may even be losing ground,” said Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College of the City University of New York. He attributed the disparity to the surging costs of housing and the lack of housing subsidies and other forms of public assistance available to many needy families.

The wealthiest New Yorkers are benefiting in part from the rise of the financial industry, including hedge funds and investment banks, which has helped lift the income of the most affluent households to levels reached before the recession. The recession lasted roughly from 2007 to mid-2009.

...

In Manhattan, the ratio between the top 20 percent and the lowest 20 percent fluctuated around 36 since 2006, but has soared more than 7 points since 2012.

The citywide poverty rate remained stalled at about 21 percent. About 1.7 million New Yorkers were living below the official federal threshold for poverty, with the biggest numerical increase among New Yorkers who are 18 to 64 years old.

In the metropolitan area, more people were living below the poverty threshold in 2013 than the year before. In 2012, the federal poverty threshold was $11,170 for an individual and $23,050 for a family of four.

“It means that despite the fact that the recession is over we’re still seeing no basic improvement in poverty levels, and for African-Americans it seems to be getting gradually worse,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group. “The escalation in rents is driving people to the wall.” About 45 percent of New York City households said they spent 35 percent or more of their income on housing.

Unfortunately whether Cuomo or Astorino wins the election, the state policies that promote this environment will continue unabated.

That's why Forbes isn't going full-out for the GOP candidate.

He knows Cuomo's going to give him what he wants too.

Occupy Activists Buy $15 Million In Debt For $400,000 As Part Of Rolling Jubilee Movement

This is doing God's work:

A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans' personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project to help people pay off their outstanding credit.

Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy's Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before "abolishing" it, freeing individuals from their bills.

By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.

"We thought that the ratio would be about 20 to 1," said Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. He said the team initially envisaged raising $50,000, which would have enabled it to buy $1m in debt.

"In fact we've been able to buy debt a lot more cheaply than that."

The group is able to buy debt so cheaply due to the nature of the "secondary debt market". If individuals consistently fail to pay bills from credit cards, loans, or medical insurance the bank or lender that issued the funds will eventually cut its losses by selling that debt to a third party. These sales occur for a fraction of the debt’s true values – typically for five cents on the dollar – and debt-buying companies then attempt to recoup the debt from the individual debtor and thus make a profit.

The Rolling Jubilee project was mostly conceived as a "public education project", Ross said.
"We're under no illusions that $15m is just a tiny drop in the secondary debt market. It doesn't make a dent in the amount of debt.

"Our purpose in doing this, aside from helping some people along the way – there's certainly many, many people who are very thankful that their debts are abolished – our primary purpose was to spread information about the workings of this secondary debt market."

I don't often see stories that make me happy.

This was one.

Weiner Backs Bloomberg On Occupy Camp Attack

Carlos Danger, AKA Anthony Weiner, backed Mayor Bloomberg on his nighttime removal of the Occupy encampment at Zuccotti Park.

Weiner, seen above running in the Ecuadorean pride parade and shouting “Que viva Ecuador!” through a bullhorn as parade-goers chanted Carlos! Carlos!", responded to a Wall Street Journal inquiry about how each prospective mayor would have handled the Occupy encampment and other so-called permit-less protests like this:

Breaking with the other Democrats, former Rep. Anthony Weiner said he largely agreed with how Mr. Bloomberg handled Occupy Wall Street. He said the mayor gave protesters enough time to "blow off some steam," and then "ultimately the police and the mayor were right to move the encampment."

Mr. Weiner said the next mayor would have to decide whether to continue what appears to be the NYPD's current policy on spontaneous Occupy-style marches—allowing permit-less protests and making arrests when safety is jeopardized.

"I think the ideal is to allow people to blow off steam in a way that doesn't endanger their neighbors," he said Sunday.

If anything, Weiner is moving to the right of Bloomberg on permit-less protests, suggesting that the current policy is endangering citizens.

Odd that Carlos Danger, the menace of the Internet, is worried about endangering citizens, and yet there it is, in black and white.

The truth is, Weiner has always been a right-winger/neo-con on foreign policy issues, on so-called law-and-order issues, on Surveillance State issues.

It's not a surprise that he would be to the right of Bloomberg on protests.

Even his choice of words - he wants to allow protesters the right "to blow off steam" - suggests that he doesn't particularly care what protesters have to say or want to engage in dialogue over the issues they're raising.

He simply wants to let them steam blow off and continue on with the status quo.

If there's anybody out there still convinced Weiner is a "liberal" and a "progressive," his stance on issues like Occupy and permit-less protests ought to be disabuse them of that notion.

Weiner, despite his cable TV image and his powder blue pants and the clown circus that follows him, is squarely in the reactionary neo-con/Surveillance State political camp.

Just take a look at his voting record in Congress for proof of that.

Top 1% Control Control 39% Of The World's Wealth

From CNBC:

The wealthiest 1 percent now control 39 percent of the world's wealth, and their share is likely to grow in the coming years, according to a new report.

The world's total private wealth grew 7.8 percent last year to $135 trillion, according to the Boston Consulting Group's Global Wealth report. The top 1 percent control $52.8 trillion, and those worth $5 million or more control nearly a quarter of the world's wealth.

That concentration is likely to increase in the coming years as the wealth of the wealthy grows faster than overall global wealth. The number of millionaires in the world surged by 10 percent year, reaching 13.8 million. The study predicts that global wealth will grow around 4.8 percent a year over the next five years—though millionaires will see their wealth grow nearly twice as fast.

Those worth $5 million or more will see their wealth grow 8 percent, while those worth more than $100 million will see their wealth grow 9.2 percent. The $100-million-plus group will see their share of global wealth grow to 6.8 percent in 2017 from the current 5.5 percent. 

Here in the United States, it's paper wealth, inflated by Federal Reserve printing and stock market gains propped up by Fed policy.

Robert Reich wrote the following yesterday:

Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good. But the recent jubilance is enough to make even weather forecasters blush. “Just look at the bull market! Look at home prices! Look at consumer confidence!”

Please.

I can understand the jubilation in the narrow sense that we’ve been down so long everything looks up. Plus, professional economists tend to cheerlead because they believe that if consumers and businesses think the future will be great, they’ll buy and invest more – leading to a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But prophesies can’t be self-fulfilling if they’re based on wishful thinking.

The reality is we’re still in the doldrums, and the most recent data gives cause for serious worry.

Almost all the forward movement in the economy is now coming from consumers —  whose spending is 70 percent of economic activity. But wages are still going nowhere, which means consumer spending will slow because consumers just don’t have the money to spend.

On Thursday the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending rose 3.4 percent in the first quarter of this year. But the personal savings rate dropped to 2.3 percent — from 5.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012. That’s the lowest level of savings since before the Great Recession. You don’t have to be an economic forecaster, or an astrologer, to see this can’t go on.

Yes, home prices are rising. The problem is, they’re beginning to rise above their long-run historical average. (Before the housing crash they were were way, way above the long-run average.) So watch your wallets. We’ve been here before: The Fed is keeping interest rates artificially low, allowing consumers to get low home-equity loans and to borrow against the rising values of their homes.

Needless to say, this trend, too, is unsustainable.

What about the stock market? It’s time we stopped assuming that a rising stock market leads to widespread prosperity. Over 90 percent of the value of the stock market — including 401(k)s and IRAs — is held by the wealthiest 10 percent of the population.

Moreover, the main reason stock prices have risen is corporate profits have soared. But that’s largely because corporations have slashed their payrolls and keep them low. Which brings us full circle, back to the fundamental fact that wages that are going nowhere for most people.

Not even fat corporate profits are sustainable if American consumers don’t have enough money in their pockets. Exports can’t make up for the shortfall, given the rotten shape Europe is in and the slowdown in Asia.

So don’t expect those profits to continue. In fact, the new Commerce Department report shows that corporate profits shrank in the first quarter, reversing some of the gains in the second half of 2012.

And, by the way, the full effect of the cuts in government spending hasn’t even been felt yet. The sequester is going to be a large fiscal drag starting next month.

Look, I don’t want to rain on the parade. But any self-respecting weather forecaster would warn you to zipper up and take an umbrella. Don’t be swayed by all the sunny talk. There are too many storm clouds ahead.

I would add that in some areas, the real estate is bubbling again because the hedge fundies and Wall Street free marketeers are buying real estate with cheap Fed money and causing prices to soar again.

I'm sure that will end well.

In fact, I'm sure this will all end well.

Just like it did the last time - for the 1%, who now have 39% of the world's wealth.

Occupy Debt

People in media and power may think Occupy Wall Street is irrelevant ever since the Mayor of Money released her personal army on them at Zuccotti Park and many other Occupy camps were dispersed by the coordinated efforts of the Obama administration and municipal police departments around the country.

But this effort by Occupy Debt seems quite relevant to me:

If Occupy Wall Street has its way, your next bill from debt collectors might have a zero balance. Occupy is trying to quietly buy up "distressed debts" from lenders at rock-bottom prices, and then forgive them. Yes it’s legal (they’re coordinating with the IRS) and works: "As a trial run, we spent $466 and successfully bought and abolished $14,000 of medical debt," Occupy said in a statement. A "Rolling Jubilee" telethon will be held next week to raise $50,000, which could erase $1 million in personal debt. "This is a simple, powerful way to help folks in need — to free them from heavy debt loads so they can focus on being productive, happy and healthy," organizer David Rees said.

As someone who once ran up a lot of credit card and student loan debt when I was in graduate school, I know the importance of learning the lessons of solvency and prudence.

So I'm not in the camp that thinks every person in debt should have those debts bought up and forgiven.

That kind of thing undercuts the lesson that needs to be learned.

That said, I do think that Occupy Debt buying up medical or loan debt of people hopelessly drowning it can go a long way toward helping people regain their lives.

As one commenter at the story put it:

I'm a retired senior citizen living on a very limited income. If I could find a job or if someone came along offering to pay off my $10,000 debt (which will probably take me 15 years and thousands of dollars of interest) I would be thrilled to death. Perhaps then living wouldn't be so difficult!

That's exactly the kind of person I can see Occupy Debt helping with this effort.

Income Gap Worse In NYC Than Third World, Bloomberg Blames It On Schools

DNAinfo reports that the Mayor of Money, Michael Bloomberg is proud that the income gap between rich and poor in NYC is worse than in some Third World countries:

NEW YORK CITY — Manhattan’s income gap now rivals many third-world nations — but Mayor Michael Bloomberg doesn’t mind.

“That’s not a measure of something we should be ashamed of,” Bloomberg told reporters at a press conference on Staten Island Thursday, when asked about new census data out last week.

The latest numbers show the gap between the city’s rich and poor is on the rise, with the median income for the bottom fifth of New Yorkers down to less than $9,000 in 2011, while the top fifth of households made a median $200,000.

The disparity was even starker in Manhattan, where the top-fifth earners took in nearly $400,000, versus less than $10,000 for those in the bottom fifth — meaning the wealthiest residents now make more than 40 times as much as those on the bottom rung. That's on par with many Sub-Saharan African nations, the New York Times noted.

Bloomberg, however, dismissed the criticism and said there's nothing wrong with the city's uber-rich.

“Those comparisons are about as meaningless a set of numbers as you can come up with,” he said, noting that the city had “tried very hard” to lure wealthy people from around the nation to boost tax revenue.

“The last time a government tried to have everybody have the same level of income, it didn’t work out very well," he said.

Instead, Bloomberg said what's needed is better education and more jobs at every level.
“What we really have here is... a gap in education,” he said.

First, notice how he accuses anybody who complains about the income gap of being closet Communists with his "The last time a government tried to have the same level of income, it didn't work out very well" straw man argument.

That is of course not what people are trying to do by pointing out that the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us is growing bigger by the year, but the gap between the bottom of the 99% and the top of the 1% has grown so large that NYC now has the same level of income gap as many Sub-Saharan African nations.

It's scary that New York City is owned, er, run by an oligarch mayor so out of touch with ordinary folks that he can't see how unsustainable this is - that we cannot continue to have the top 1% squeezing everybody else the way they have over the last 30 years.

Second, notice how Bloomberg dismisses the issue of poor people anyway, saying we want more rich people in the city because they're the ones that pay taxes.  I think we can dispute just how much rich people, or rich corporations, or rich non-profits like Bloomberg's own, actually pay taxes here and how many plant their money in offshore havens (like Bloomberg's philanthropy foundation), but the point is not really about needing more rich people to pay taxes.  The point of the problem is that there are so many poor people in this city, more by the year, and the mayor just doesn't care about that.

Third, you can see that when the mayor does get around to acknowledge that there just might be an income gap in the city that is a mite too large, he blames it on schools and teachers by saying that it's not an income gap, it's an education gap.

You see, if those lazy teachers would just work harder, NYC children would be getting a better education.  Those same NYC children would then be able to get better jobs, make more money and everybody would be happy.

Except that as John Judis points out in The New Republic, that story about educating our way out of the income gap is jive - it's just not accurate:

If you listen to education reformers, you would imagine that there is a huge demand for highly educated workers at the top that the lower tier schools are not meeting, but that is not the case. In employment projections to 2020, C. Brett Lockard and Michael Wolf of the Bureau of Labor Statistics list the thirty occupations that are projected to have the large numeric growth between 2010 and 2020. Of the top ten jobs, only one--postsecondary teachers--would require a doctoral or professional degree; one--registered nurse--would require an associate’s degree; and the rest--and that includes retail salespersons, home health aides, food preparer and servers, and office clerks--would require a high school diploma or less. Of the top thiry occupations, only seven would require more than a high school degree.
 
If you look at the current flaccid recovery, the greatest increase in private sector jobs over the last year has been in food services and drinking places, where 298,000 jobs were added. According to the BLS, these jobs require “less than high school” and have a median annual wage, as of May 2010, of $17,950. In his speech at the Democratic convention, Bill Clinton suggested that there was job openings, but that American workers didn’t possess the skills to fill them. Most economists dispute this, including conservative Edward Lazear argued in a paper last month that “neither industrial nor democratic shifts, nor a mismatch of skills with job vacancies can explain movements in unemployment rates over recent years.”

Urban public schools like those in Chicago could definitely do a better job of preparing their students to enter the work force, but in doing so, they won’t, except in unusual cases, be preparing their students to become engineers, doctors or lawyers. And in preparing students to enter the lower rungs of a labor force, the schools will face a constant drag of low expectations that impedes learning. Is it really necessary, these students may ask themselves, to master algebra to be a home health aide? Or to learn American history or be able to write passable prose to be a food server? If the reformers really want to reduce the gap between good schools and bad, that will require taking aim not just at the schools, but at the emerging structure of the American economy, and the expectations it generates in America’s young.

There are people who are more qualified than I am to say what could be done about the economy. But a rudimentary list would include raising dramatically the wage and status of service workers, perhaps by restricting low-wage immigration (which puts downward pressure on wages), subsidizing certain kinds of industries and discouraging others, rehabilitating inner cities and rural areas, making sure, as the Obama administration has tried, that all Americans enjoy a safety net against unforseen illness and unscrupulous speculation, and encouraging the unionization of low tier service workers.

The Third World income gap level the city is experiencing is not primarily an education problem - it is primarily an economic problem.

Bloomberg is emblematic of the problem.

In 2001 when he came into office, he was worth $5 billion.

This year, Forbes estimated his worth at $25 billion.

Meanwhile a Fiscal Policy Institute found the following:

Since the last expansion began in 2003, New York’s per capita GDP has grown more than three times as fast as the U.S. overall. This should have translated into real gains for New York workers. However, by dragging down wages, the Great Recession and its aftermath have widened the gap between the growth in worker productivity and the growth in wages for the average worker. New York workers are not sharing in the prosperity they help create. Since 2000, GDP per worker has grown more than twice as fast as annual average wages (even counting CEO salaries.) Where do the benefits of this high productivity go? Gross operating surplus—the basis for corporate profits—has grown over six times as fast as average wages.

...

Between the end of World War II and the end of the 1970s, the income share of the wealthiest one percent in the U.S. held steady at 9 or 10 percent. It started rising rapidly around 1980, reaching 23.5 percent in 2007. In New York, the share of income going to the wealthiest one percent rose to 35 percent for the state overall in 2007 and to 44 percent in New York City. The wealthiest one percent of New York State households had an average income in 2007 that was 50 times the average for all households earning from $25,000 to $120,000.

The wealth is being sucked up by the criminals on Wall Street, the criminals in the corporations, and oligarchs like Bloomberg.

He likes to blame unionized teachers and unionized schools for the income gap.

But the real culprit is people like Bloomberg.

No wonder he's trying to divert attention to schools and "bad teachers".

Now wonder he sent his "personal army" - the NYPD - to destroy the Occupy Wall Street encampments and harass protestors wherever they go.

No wonder New York City has a police force so large and so militarized that it rivals the armies of Third World nations (and even the FBI.)

When you run a city with an income gap at Third World nation levels, you need a police force standing at the ready to take care of any opposition.

Keeping Bank of America Safe From Protesters

Three protesters in wheelchairs are arrested by NYPD police outside Zuccotti Park today on the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

No word on whether the NYPD has shot anybody yet at today's protests.

But it's still early.

Foley Square

Occupy

Great day at Foley Square today.

Tomorrow:

Occupy

Schedule for Sunday and Monday here.

Foley Square tomorrow.

Wall Street on Monday.

See you there.

Education Won't Solve This Employment/Wage Problem

You hear politicians and business people and media figures blame public schools and public school teachers for the employment/wage problems in the country all the time.

The theory goes like this: teachers in the system suck, so therefore schools suck, so therefore kids are not getting the education they need to get good paying, high-skilled jobs, therefore they're stuck doing low wage jobs and until we do something about the "bad teachers" in this country who are churning out all the poorly trained laborers, we are not going to solve our unemployment/wage problems.

The latest media figure to parrot that was Chris Matthews of MSNBC.

But the theory is bunk.

First, there are fewer and fewer good paying jobs in this country -they've all been outsourced or automated.

The NY Times is the latest to report that this morning:

While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.

“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.

The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations — those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.

The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.

Some of these new, lower-paying jobs are being taken by people just entering the labor force, like recent high school and college graduates. Many, though, are being filled by older workers who lost more lucrative jobs in the recession and were forced to take something to scrape by.

...

Over the last few decades, the number of midwage, midskill jobs has stagnated or declined as employers chose to automate routine tasks or to move them offshore.

Job growth has been concentrated in positions that tend to fall into two categories: manual work that must be done in person, like styling hair or serving food, which usually pays relatively little; and more creative, design-oriented work like engineering or surgery, which often pays quite well.

Since 2001, employment has grown 8.7 percent in lower-wage occupations and 6.6 percent in high-wage ones. Over that period, midwage occupation employment has fallen by 7.3 percent.

This “polarization” of skills and wages has been documented meticulously by David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recent study found that this polarization accelerated in the last three recessions, particularly the last one, as financial pressures forced companies to reorganize more quickly.

“This is not just a nice, smooth process,” said Henry E. Siu, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, who helped write the recent study about polarization and the business cycle. “A lot of these jobs were suddenly wiped out during recession and are not coming back.”

On top of private sector revamps, state and local governments have been shedding workers in recent years. Those jobs lost in the public sector have been primarily in mid and higher-wage positions, according to Ms. Bernhardt’s analysis.

“Whenever you look at data like these, there is this tendency to get overwhelmed, that there are these inevitable, big macro forces causing this polarization and we can’t do anything about them. In fact, we can,” Ms. Bernhardt said. She called for more funds for states to stem losses in the public sector and federal infrastructure projects to employ idled construction workers. Both proposals have faced resistance from Republicans in Congress.

Now just in case you buy into the theory that, yes, the mid-level jobs are gone for good, but if we just train those people who used to do the mid-level skill jobs for the high-skill level jobs, we'll be able to solve the problem, remember that outsourcing and automation isn't just affecting the mid-level job skill category. It's affecting the higher skill categories too.

Let's take a look at what automation is doing:

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.”

The automation trend is accelerating, and as we have seen an increasing financialization of the economy wherein the only thing that matters to companies is quarterly profits and returns, they're happy to lay off reams of employees and replace them with software - whether that it is in a legal department, an accounting department or a school - or outsource those jobs overseas where employees are paid a lot less.

These jobs aren't coming back either and for anybody to think that all of these people can be retrained for high skill level jobs - particularly science and tech jobs - and think that will solve the employment/wage problems, well, they're not paying attention to all the unemployed, underemployed or employed out of their skill science and tech people.

Let's take a look at that from a Washington Post article earlier this year:

Michelle Amaral wanted to be a brain scientist to help cure diseases. She planned a traditional academic science career: PhD, university professorship and, eventually, her own lab.

But three years after earning a doctorate in neuroscience, she gave up trying to find a permanent job in her field.

Dropping her dream, she took an administrative position at her university, experiencing firsthand an economic reality that, at first look, is counterintuitive: There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

That reality runs counter to messages sent by President Obama and the National Science Foundation and other influential groups, who in recent years have called for U.S. universities to churn out more scientists.

Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

But it’s questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists — those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.

“There have been many predictions of [science] labor shortages and . . . robust job growth,” said Jim Austin, editor of the online magazine ScienceCareers. “And yet, it seems awfully hard for people to find a job. Anyone who goes into science expecting employers to clamor for their services will be deeply disappointed.”

One big driver of that trend: Traditional academic jobs are scarcer than ever. Once a primary career path, only 14 percent of those with a PhD in biology and the life sciences now land a coveted academic position within five years, according to a 2009 NSF survey. That figure has been steadily declining since the 1970s, said Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University who studies the scientific workforce. The reason: The supply of scientists has grown far faster than the number of academic positions.

The pharmaceutical industry once was a haven for biologists and chemists who did not go into academia. Well-paying, stable research jobs were plentiful in the Northeast, the San Francisco Bay area and other hubs. But a decade of slash-and-burn mergers; stagnating profit; exporting of jobs to India, China and Europe; and declining investment in research and development have dramatically shrunk the U.S. drug industry, with research positions taking heavy hits.

Since 2000, U.S. drug firms have slashed 300,000 jobs, according to an analysis by consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In the latest closure, Roche last month announced it is shuttering its storied Nutley, N.J., campus — where Valium was invented — and shedding another 1,000 research jobs.

“It’s been a bloodbath, it’s been awful,” said Kim Haas, who spent 20 years designing pharmaceuticals for drug giants Wyeth and Sanofi-Aventis and is in her early 50s. Haas lost her six-figure job at Sanofi-Aventis in New Jersey last year. She now works one or two days a week on contract at a Philadelphia university. She dips into savings to make ends meet.

“Scads and scads and scads of people” have been cut, Haas said. “Very good chemists with PhDs from Stanford can’t find jobs.”

Largely because of drug industry cuts, the unemployment rate among chemists now stands at its highest mark in 40 years, at 4.6 percent, according to the American Chemical Society, which has 164,000 members. For young chemists, the picture is much worse. Just 38 percent of new PhD chemists were employed in 2011, according to a recent ACS survey.

Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field.

“They’ll be employed in something,” said Michael S. Teitelbaum, a senior adviser to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation who studies the scientific workforce. “But they go and do other things because they can’t find the position they spent their 20s preparing for.”

OK, so now we see that there is actually a glut of those trained in high skilled jobs who can't find steady, good-paying work in their fields either.

So what is the cause of all of this?

Easy - more and more of the resources in this country are being sucked up by fewer and fewer people.

The increased financialization of the economy has given the 1% (and really, the .0001%) the opportunity to suck up huge swaths of wealth in the country, use that wealth to hire batteries of lobbyists to get taxes cuts and benefits for their own industries (but only the people at the top of those industries) and squeeze everybody else.

The rest of us are fighting it out for fewer and fewer resources.

Until we address income inequality and redefine what kinds of jobs we value, this problem is not going to get better.

Why do the hedge fundies get to pay a lower rate of tax than the rest of us?

Why are private equity guys like Bain not the Bane of the Nation for functioning as economic predators?

Why are the Too Big To Fail banks allowed to fix and rig and steal with impunity and nobody goes to jail?

Why are the laws and regulations that are put into place primarily benefiting corporations and the financial industry over small business and individuals?

Why do corporations have more rights than individuals?

These are all problems that are leading to the vast gap in income between the very top and the rest of us - we live in the new Gilded Age - and until we solve these problems, income inequality is going to worsen.

It is so much easier to blame schools and teachers for this mess rather than the real culprits - the banksters and hedge fundies and private equity guys who are stealing so much of the world's wealth.

And of course when a guy like Chris Matthews parrots this garbage about schools and teachers, he does so on a corporate-owned entity like NBC that itself benefits from the inequity of the system.

These are big problems, and last year, the Occupy movement was beginning to shine a light on them.

We're back to the same nonsense we have heard before, however - the employment/wage problems are primarily education and skills problem.

But that's bunk - there are fewer and fewer good paying jobs at any level in the economy because our corporate masters have decided that they don't want to pay anybody anything that they absolutely don't have to pay all the while their rigging the system's laws and regulations to make it so that they can steal with abandon.

In short, the overlords have stolen the wealth and they've managed to divert our attention from the real culprits (themselves) with bread and circuses and corporate-owned, media-driven narratives that are, in the end, bullshit.

Time to Occupy.

NYPD Goons At It Again

How dare a photographer take photos of the NYPD arresting somebody - that's a beatable offense in Bloomberg's NYC:

The New York Times has complained to the city's police department after one of its photographers said he was assaulted by officers who arrested him on Saturday.

Robert Stolarik, a freelance photographer, claimed a New York Police Department (NYPD) officer "slammed" his camera into his face before he was dragged to the ground, kicked and arrested.

Stolarik was on assignment with two other reporters in the Bronx when he was stopped by police on Saturday evening.

Police ordered Stolarik to stop taking pictures of a teenage girl being arrested. When he refused, an officer reputedly grabbed Stolarik's camera and dragged him to the ground.

Stolarik claimed he was then kicked in the back and received scrapes and bruises on his face, legs and arms as a result of the arrest. He was charged with obstructing government administration and of resisting arrest.

The New York Times reported that a video of the arrest taken by another journalist showed Stolarik face down on the pavement beneath a huddle of about six police officers.

Two words here - sue them.

NYU, Fordham Report: NYPD Out Of Control, Above Law In Occupy Protests

No surprise here:

The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.

In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, routinely obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.

The study, published on Tuesday, found evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies.

The NYPD report is the first of a series to look at how police authorities in five US cities, including Oakland and Boston, have treated the Occupy movement since it began in September 2011. The research concludes that there now is a systematic effort by authorities to suppress protests, even when these are lawful and pose no threat to the public.

Sarah Knuckey, a professor of law at NYU, said: "All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking".

The report says the NYPD was by far the worst offender of all the police departments involved in suppressing Occupy protests:

The NYPD appears to be the worst offender, in large part because it has made little attempt – unlike Oakland, for example – to reassess its practices or open itself up to dialogue or review. The NYPD practices documented in the report include:

• Aggressive, unnecessary and excessive police force against peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers, and journalists. This included the use of batons, pepper spray, metal barricades, scooters, and horses.

• Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring, including arrests of at least 10 journalists, and multiple cases of preventing journalists from reporting on protests or barring and evicting them from specific sites.

• Pervasive surveillance of peaceful political activity.

• Violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments.

• Unjustified closure of public spaces, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and trapping of protesters.

• Arbitrary and selective rule enforcement and baseless arrests.

• Failures to ensure transparency about government policies.

• Failures to ensure accountability for those allegedly responsible for abuses.

The report argues that the lack of transparency and accountability is especially troubling because the public does not know whether police actions are guided by specific written policies, or whether they are random or ad hoc.

The NYPD turned down multiple requests to meet the researchers, who say they were keen include the police's point of view in the report. The other four police departments examined for the project all sent representatives to meet researchers. The NYPD did not provide a comment to the Guardian by the time of publication of this article.

As I wrote earlier - this Bloomberg's city.

You're lucky he lets you live.

Not "live in it."

"Live."

Obama Or Romney, It Matters Little

Chris Hedges' latest::

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

...

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

Occupy.

No Wonder Occupy Was So Threatening To Them

Naomi Wolf:

Last fall, I argued that the violent reaction to Occupy and other protests around the world had to do with the 1%ers' fear of the rank and file exposing massive fraud if they ever managed get their hands on the books. At that time, I had no evidence of this motivation beyond the fact that financial system reform and increased transparency were at the top of many protesters' list of demands.

But this week presents a sick-making trove of new data that abundantly fills in this hypothesis and confirms this picture. The notion that the entire global financial system is riddled with systemic fraud – and that key players in the gatekeeper roles, both in finance and in government, including regulatory bodies, know it and choose to quietly sustain this reality – is one that would have only recently seemed like the frenzied hypothesis of tinhat-wearers, but this week's headlines make such a conclusion, sadly, inevitable.

Indeed - the fixing of LIBOR and the fact that regulators including the current Secretary of the Treasury and then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York did nothing serious to stop it and never exposed it to the public is the biggest example of a system that is rigged beyond measure.

If they fixed LIBOR and the regulators knew it and did little to nothing to stop it, then frankly nothing in the financial system can be trusted, no one in the financial world can be trusted, no one in regulation or government can be trusted to put things right.

The system is rigged and rotten to the core.

Naomi Wolf is quite right when she says no wonders the criminals in power reacted so violently to the Occupy protests.

They know they're standing on dominoes that are tottering.

The crookedness and criminality are so widespread that they are too difficult to hide anymore.

And so the oligarchs respond with violence and repression and control.

Expect to see much more of this from the elite and their security apparatus as the rot at the core of the system continues to become apparent:

Hundreds of Los Angeles police in riot gear, shooting rubber bullets, clashed with Occupy L.A. protesters and street artists attending a sidewalk chalk-drawing event dubbed "Free Chalk for Free Speech" as part of the monthly L.A. ArtWalk. Several injuries and 19 arrests, mostly for "vandalism." For drawing in chalk, in the rain? Overreact much?

Ah yes - using rubber bullets on protesters armed with chalk.

That's where we're at today.

And soon, the drones.

Occupy's Sixth Month Anniversary

Seems like old times, doesn't it?

Occupy Wall Street protesters’ numbers swelled Saturday night as they prepared to spend the night in the lower Manhattan park where their movement began, but cops forced them out before Zuccotti was reoccupied.

Demonstrators regrouped in Zuccotti Park just hours after a half-dozen of their number were arrested as they marked the movement’s six-month anniversary, police and demonstrators said.

Michael Moore, the documentary filmmaker, made an appearance at the park, wandering among protesters after giving a speech at a Socialist forum nearby.

“We are unstoppable; another world is possible,” chanted some of the hundreds of demonstrators crammed into Zuccotti Park in the afternoon.

I was at the Left Forum yesterday - a lot of good energy and good people there.

More on that soon.

As for the Zuccotti news, I am glad to see that as the global-warming induced weather is heating up, so is the Occupy movement.

Hypocrites Go After Teachers Pensions While Padding Their Own

No wonder these assholes are promoting deficit reduction and tax breaks for millionaires and corporations:

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.

Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.

But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.

...

One likely cause of the rising wealth, political analysts say, is the growing cost of a political campaign. A successful Senate run cost on average nearly $10 million last year, and a successful House race was $1.4 million, significantly above past elections.

The prohibitive cost has inevitably drawn richer candidates who can help bankroll their own campaigns and attract donations from rich friends — while deterring less well-off candidates, political analysts say.

The data analyzed by The Times corroborated the idea that incoming members are in fact richer than those in the past. The freshman class of 106 members elected last year, including many Tea Party-backed Republicans, had a median net worth of $864,000 — an inflation-adjusted increase of 26 percent from the 2004 freshmen.

Once in Congress, members benefit from many financial perks unavailable to most Americans. Beyond a base salary of $174,000 — an increase of about 10 percent since 2004, somewhat less than inflation — members get extra pay for senior posts and generous medical and pension benefits, as well as accouterments of power often financed by taxpayers or their campaigns.

Congressional assholes railing against government employee pensions while padding (and eventually collecting) their own.

Hmm, where have I heard a similar story about a DOE asshole who railed against teachers' pensions, then cashed in as soon as he retired to greener passages at News Corp.?

Oh, yeah - now I remember:

Just weeks before former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein slammed teacher pensions as "hollowing out public education," Klein walked into the teacher pension office to collect his own annual windfall, sources told the Daily News.

Klein, who could rake in as much as $4.5 million this year at his new gig with News Corp., also will collect $34,000 annually for his eight years as chancellor.

Accepting the money seems to fly in the face of a harsh editorial he wrote last week, ripping into the guaranteed pensions earned by veteran teachers.

"Defined-benefit pensions helped bring the once-vibrant U.S. auto industry to its knees," Klein wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 10. "The promised benefits just proved too costly. In that industry, such pensions are mostly a thing of the past."

"Alas," he added, "the same kind of pensions are now hollowing out public education."

But Klein's eight-plus years as chancellor entitled him to a slice of the public pension pie and last month he helped himself. His $250,000-a-year salary allowed him to cash out at a much higher rate for fewer years logged.

A teacher with a master's degree can make up to about $34,000 in annual pension payments only after 20 years of service.

Klein said through a spokesman that he had no comment.

You better you bet he had no comment - even Joel "Running The Phone Hacking Cover-Up" Klein couldn't lie his way out of this hypocrisy.

It's a shame the corporate news media doesn't throw it into his face every time he rails about teachers and pensions.

Same goes for these assholes in Congress padding their own pensions even as they hawk deficit reduction on the backs of working and middle class people.

But that's the country we're in now - the system is broken, our leaders are hypocrites and crooks and the corporate news media seems to carry their water more often than not.

The times when they don't -as in when they expose a Joel Klein collecting his pension just a few days after railing about teachers collecting theirs - the stories disappear like so much mist into the ether.

The Oligarchs Clamp Down

Unless you were sleeping under a rock yesterday, you know that Mayor Bloomberg ordered his NYPD jackboots to clear Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zucotti Park.

The raid happened under the cover of darkness. Police enforced a media blackout, allowing neither journalists nor legal observers to see their dirty work. Batons, pepper spray, fists and boots were used to rouse protestors from their slumber and throw them out of the park. Subways were shut down, the Manhattan-bound side of the Brooklyn was closed, a city councilman who ran to Zucotti to support the protestors was beaten by police and arrested.

Six journalists were also arrested.

The New York raid came in the same week that Occupy camps in Portland and Oakland were raided by police.

Oakland mayor Jean Quan said city mayors and police departments were coordinating the raids together over conference calls.

Make no mistake - the clampdown is here.

The 1% know that something is happening here and they have to put a stop to it soon.

Tomorrow there is a major demonstration planned downtown.

The mayor likes to claim that the Occupy Wall Street protests are costing New York City jobs.

He claims this even as he plans thousands of layoffs this fiscal year.

He claims this even as he forces austerity down the throats of the 99% with budget cuts to education, health care, senior care, libraries.

He claims this even as both Democrats and Republicans in Washington get ready to slash Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that help middle and working class Americans.

He claims this even as the NY Times reports middle class neighborhoods have shrunk over the last forty years as Americans drop down the economic ladder into poverty.

It is time to Occupy this country.

It is time to Occupy this city.

It is time to Occupy Tweed Courthouse.

Time to Occupy One Police Plaza.

Time to Occupy City Hall.

Time to Occupy the White House, the Congress, the Senate.

Time to Occupy Wall Street.

The fascists are fighting back with what they have - police, military, guns, batons, pepper spray, rubber bullets, orange netting, media blackouts, and brutality.

But they ARE on the other side of history.

Remember Egypt, remember Tunisia.

Spring is Coming.

Occupy.