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The NYT had an article on people who actually got a job this year. The bottom line: you need to lower your standards. The path to getting a new job is hard and jobs are not what you wanted. The closing quote: [Adam Kowal whose] hourly wage has fallen from $15 an hour at the warehouse to $10.50 an hour washing dishes and . . . → Read More: Your desire for a future job? Pretty farfetched… For all 35mm camera owners: an era has passed. The New York Times reports that the last Kodachrome processor in the world has stopped processing the film. As digital wins out the era of silver based film processing is drawing to a close. An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become . . . → Read More: Coda for Kodachrome I really liked and enjoyed Mike Konczal’s piece on the losing well in politcal terms. It seems to me that we were hoodwinked into believing that Obama was a progressive, or even a liberal. When all that he has shown to be is a politician focusing on the short term, what can I achieve. Mike makes the point in relation to immigration policy, . . . → Read More: Losing badly The Nation has an article by Robert C. Lieberman on Why the Rich are Getting Richer. I particularly like this quote: Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan. While Foreclosuregate grinds on and homeowners are put out of their homes its good to know that the Execs at Fannie and Freddie have more big paychecks coming at them. Fannie (FNMA) CEO Michael Williams and Freddie (FMCC) chief Charles Haldeman each stand to make some $6 million this year, going by company filings that broadly outline 2009 pay and 2010 guidelines. Using . . . → Read More: Fannie and Freddie Execs take home millions There are many lists out there for projections for 2011. I have decided to do the anti-pattern of a projection (the anti-projection?) with a discussion of what I think will occur and what I would rather see happen in 2011. Facts finally trump lies cleverly told and sold. I published a piece on the neologism ‘Agnotology,’ a word to describe the purposeful sowing . . . → Read More: Anti-Projections for 2011 As it took Nixon, with clear anti-communist credentials to stop the Vietnam war (even with secret bombing of Cambodia, and CIA shenanigans all over Southeast Asia, Kissinger, etc.); unfortunately it looks like it will take a Republican President with tax reduction and deficit reduction credibility in 2012 or in 2016 to finally say to the American people that the honest way out of . . . → Read More: A Nixon for Tax Increases? If you thought that the financial plutocrats have been tamed, and that a new boom and bust cycle will be mitigated by future government intervention and regulation; Bloomberg lays it all out in astonishingly clear rhetoric in an article by Christine Harper Out of Lehman’s Ashes Wall Street Gets Most of What It Wants : The U.S. government, promising to make the system . . . → Read More: Wall Street Gets What It Wants… Keynes: On the one hand the laboring classes accepted from ignorance or powerlessness, or were compelled, perusade or cajoled by custom, convention, authority, and the well-established order of Society into accepting a situation in which they could call their own very little of the cake that they and Nature and the capitalists were co-operating to produce. And on the other hand the capitalist classes were allowed to call the best part of the cake theirs and were theoretically free to consume it, on the tacit underlying condition that they consumed very little of it in practice. . . . → Read More: Keynes on the Economic Consequences of the Peace Bank of America has not yet seen the bottom of the hole that it dug itself when it purchased Countrywide. A report today add Allstate insureance to the growing list of companies that have sued BofA for the fraud perpetrated on them by the RMBS’ sold to them by Countrywide. Nasdaq reports: Insurance company Allstate Corp. sued mortgage- originator Countrywide Financial Corp., now . . . → Read More: Allstate queues up at the BofA trough |
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