THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

President Obama’s strongest supporters during the presidential campaign were the young, the black and the poor — and they are among those who are being hammered unmercifully in this long and cruel economic downturn that the financial elites are telling us is over.

If the elites are correct, if the Great Recession really is over, then these core supporters of the president are being left far, far behind — as are blue-collar workers of every ethnic and political persuasion. Nobody wants to talk seriously about class in America, but the elites are smiling and perusing their stock portfolios while the checklist of Americans locked in depressionlike circumstances just grows and grows: construction and manufacturing workers, young men without college degrees (especially young black and Hispanic men), teenagers, and those who were already poor when the recession began.

The economic environment for all of these groups is an absolute and utter disaster.

# posted by montag : 1:14 PM  0 comments

Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier per year, appears almost constant.

So even if President Obama opts for a lower troop commitment, Afghanistan’s new costs could wash out the projected $26 billion expected to be saved in 2010 from withdrawing troops from Iraq. And the overall military budget could rise to as much as $734 billion, or 10 percent more than the peak of $667 billion under the Bush administration.

# posted by montag : 1:07 PM  0 comments

Bank of America Corp's search for a new chief executive has been hurt by federal pay limits that played a major role in the senior vice chairman of PNC Financial Services Group Inc spurning feelers from the company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday...

...Bank of America has argued the added regulation, like the pay czar's compensation limits, hurts its ability to compete with other financial firms.

Those limits are expected to be in place for any successor to Kenneth Lewis, who is scheduled to retire at year end and gave up his 2009 salary and bonus at Feinberg's request...

...Bank of America's next chief faces a bevy of operational, regulatory and political challenges.

# posted by montag : 12:26 PM  0 comments

The Obama Administration's irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people," Boehner said in a statement. "This decision is further evidence that the White House is reverting to a dangerous pre-9/11 mentality - treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue and hoping for the best

# posted by montag : 4:46 PM  0 comments

What began as a TV project to build a new house is turning into the transformation of a whole neighborhood.

“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” famously helps one family and one house. But since work for ABC-TV's popular show began Sunday at 228 Massachusetts Ave., thousands of volunteers, skilled and unskilled, have descended on the Lower West Side. By the end of today, organizers say, they will have worked on 50 homes, installing siding, roofs and porches, planting shrubs and applying coats of paint.

Together with volunteers who have poured concrete sidewalks, painted murals, cleaned up vacant lots and built community gardens they are changing the face of an area of several blocks long considered one of Buffalo's most hard-pressed and crime-ridden.

The reason why the Buffalo version of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” goes beyond a modern-day fairy tale for a lucky resident begins with David Stapleton, owner of David Homes.

“I felt it would be unconscionable for us to come here and build this one house without trying to do something to help others in the neighborhood while we're here,” said Stapleton, who quietly accepted the invitation to be the home builder Oct. 19 after producers sought him out.

Stapleton said he initially encountered “some reservations from the show” because producers first needed to be reassured the main focus wouldn't be diverted.

Stapleton praised all those involved in what he said was “the possibility of people getting together and starting to take back this neighborhood.”

“Every time I asked for volunteers, more showed up than what we asked for. Every time we asked for donations in materials to help in the community, people said yes and gave more,” he said.

# posted by montag : 1:12 PM  0 comments

A man blamed a low-flying pelican and a dropped cell phone for his veering his million-dollar sports car off a road and into a salt marsh near Galveston. The accident happened about 3 p.m. Wednesday on the frontage road of Interstate 45 northbound in La Marque, about 35 miles southeast of Houston.

The Lufkin, Texas, man told of driving his luxury, French-built Bugatti Veyron when the bird distracted him, said La Marque police Lt. Greg Gilchrist. The motorist dropped his cell phone, reached to pick it up and veered off the road and into the salt marsh. The car was half-submerged in the brine about 20 feet from the road when police arrived.

Gilchrist said he doesn't know if the car was salvageable, but in his words, "Salt water isn't good for anything." He says the man, whose identity hasn't been released, was not injured.

A 2006 Bugatti Veyron was recently offered for sale in Jonesboro, Ark., for $1.25 million.

# posted by montag : 1:10 PM  0 comments

Alternatively, or in addition, we could have policies that support private-sector employment. Such policies could range from labor rules that discourage firing to financial incentives for companies that either add workers or reduce hours to avoid layoffs.

And that’s what the Germans have done. Germany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job losses.

Should America be trying anything along these lines? In a recent interview, Lawrence Summers, the Obama administration’s highest-ranking economist, was dismissive: “It may be desirable to have a given amount of work shared among more people. But that’s not as desirable as expanding the total amount of work.” True. But we are not, in fact, expanding the total amount of work — and Congress doesn’t seem willing to spend enough on stimulus to change that unfortunate fact. So shouldn’t we be considering other measures, if only as a stopgap?

Now, the usual objection to European-style employment policies is that they’re bad for long-run growth — that protecting jobs and encouraging work-sharing makes companies in expanding sectors less likely to hire and reduces the incentives for workers to move to more productive occupations. And in normal times there’s something to be said for American-style “free to lose” labor markets, in which employers can fire workers at will but also face few barriers to new hiring.

But these aren’t normal times.

# posted by montag : 12:56 PM  0 comments

I propose that we immediately enact the following:

* Give every single man and woman that is fighting for us a housing credit of $50,000, with the caveat that the credit must be used by someone within two years.
* Make it so that the credits are completely fungible, meaning that if the veteran doesn't wish to buy a house, he or she can sell the credit to someone who does -- and keep the money. If the reselling of gift cards on Ebay is any indication, I am sure there will be a thriving market where soldiers could probably get pretty close to 90 cents on the dollar for their credit.

Considering the roughly 2 million veterans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan so far, this would give a much needed $100 billion boost to the housing market. Just as a template for comparison, Goldman Sachs (albeit it doing "God's work") and the other complicit banks like JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley will pay $29.4 billion in personal bonuses this year.

In reporting on this financial crisis, I have been most surprised by the blatant disregard that our politicians and even some journalists have shown for the most fundamental American notion of fairness. I don't think handing taxpayer trillions to some of the least worthy individuals is something that our country will stand for, regardless of what the current incumbents think.

If we must resort to handouts to save our country, let's at least put them in the hands of the most deserving.

# posted by montag : 10:37 PM  0 comments

In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, "What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat." He's an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he's not happy about what's being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.

"Most escorting is done by the Taliban," an Afghan private security official told me. He's a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. "Now the government is so weak," he added, "everyone is paying the Taliban."

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. "Two Taliban is enough," she told me. "One in the front and one in the back." She shrugged. "You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible."

# posted by montag : 2:12 PM  0 comments

They bill themselves as being truly pro-business — not like those leftists at CNBC. But they aren’t really pro-business; they’re pro-Republican. They’d like you to believe that it’s the same thing; but there’s this awkward fact that markets have, you know, gone up under Obama.

And this isn’t just a phenomenon of the last few months. Look back at stock returns under recent presidents, which is easy using a clever gadget at Political Calculations. Taking real, dividend-inclusive annual returns on the S&P 500, I get:

Reagan: 10.08%
Bush I: 10.16%
Clinton: 14.35%
Bush II: minus 5.81%

Tax-hiking Democrats are supposed to be terrible for business; I mean, Norman Podhoretz whines that Jews should be conservatives because Republican policies are better for the economy. But the data just refuse to say that — and that’s even if we restrict ourselves to the stock market, never mind job creation, wages, poverty and all that.

# posted by montag : 1:45 PM  0 comments

John King will anchor an ambitious new 7 p.m. hour of political news for CNN beginning early next year, the network said Thursday.

The announcement came a day after Lou Dobbs abruptly announced that he was quitting his CNN anchor job immediately.

# posted by montag : 1:25 PM  0 comments

President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday...

...The main sticking points appear to be timelines and mounting questions about the credibility of the Afghan government.

Administration officials said Wednesday that Obama wants to make clear that the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan is not open-ended.

# posted by montag : 10:14 PM  0 comments

Well, first of all, it has more than a robust public option, it's got a totally government-run plan, the costs are extraordinary associated with it, it increases taxes in a way that will not pass in the Senate

# posted by montag : 5:06 PM  0 comments

The following day Rose attacked a Heinkel 111 and closed to within a few yards to shoot the bomber's port engine. Oil from the engine covered the windscreen of his Hurricane so he climbed away, slowed the aircraft down to almost stalling speed, loosened his harness, stood on his seat and leant out of the cockpit in an attempt to clean the windscreen. As he did, tracer from an enemy fighter hit his aircraft.

Seeing Rose standing in the cockpit, the German pilot claimed he had shot down the Hurricane, but Rose managed to break away. His aircraft was badly damaged but he managed a forced landing at a forward airfield where the aircraft was destroyed.

# posted by montag : 2:00 PM  0 comments

Out of work and willing to relocate? McDonald's is advertising for an assistant manager for its sole franchise in Cuba — serving up burgers and fries that sometimes feed detainees at the prison camps at Guantanamo Bay.

The help wanted ad popped up recently at the McVirginia.com careers Web site featuring the Golden Arches, a headline "Find a Career @ McDonald's" and this enticement: "Enjoy the perks."

It didn't specify salary but said, "Candidates must have restaurant management experience, possess a valid United States passport and be willing to relocate to Cuba."

Other incentives include half your rent paid and, potentially, tax-free status for year-round residents.

# posted by montag : 1:28 PM  0 comments

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton are coalescing around a proposal to send 30,000 or more additional American troops to Afghanistan, but President Obama remains unsatisfied with answers he has gotten about how vigorously the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan would help execute a new strategy, administration officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama is to consider four final options in a meeting with his national security team on Wednesday, his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters. The options outline different troop levels, other officials said, but they also assume different goals — including how much of Afghanistan the troops would seek to control — and different time frames and expectations for the training of Afghan security forces.

Three of the options call for specific levels of additional troops. The low-end option would add 20,000 to 25,000 troops, a middle option calls for about 30,000, and another embraces Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly 40,000 more troops. Administration officials said that a fourth option was added only in the past few days. They declined to identify any troop level attached to it.

# posted by montag : 12:43 PM  0 comments

Republican leaders in a South Carolina county have censured their own U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for working with Democrats on a climate bill and other legislation.

The Republican has often worked with Democrats in Congress, but Charleston County Chairwoman Lin Bennett says his work on climate legislation is the last straw.

The party resolution passed Monday says Graham has weakened the Republican brand. Bennett expects a similar resolution to be introduced at the state GOP convention next year.

# posted by montag : 12:19 PM  0 comments

It says much about the transformation of the Republican Party that even Newt Gingrich is now carrying the cross.

When Gingrich came to power 15 years ago, his Contract With America was a document of fiscal conservatism that mentioned God only in passing. When he led the impeachment of Bill Clinton a decade ago over the Monica Lewinsky affair, Gingrich was involved in his own longtime extramarital relationship with a former aide, who is now his third wife.

"Newt," Christopher DeMuth put it gently as he introduced the former House speaker Monday to a forum at the American Enterprise Institute, is "a politician who in his private life is a seriously religious man but who does not make religious belief an upfront part of his political platform."

His first two wives might have quibbled with the description of Gingrich as a seriously religious man in private. But after Monday's performance, nobody will ever again say that he "does not make religious belief an upfront part of his political platform." His talk was titled "The Victory of the Cross: How Spiritual Renewal Helped Topple the Berlin Wall."

# posted by montag : 10:43 PM  0 comments

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then Blackwater’s president, had approved the bribes and that the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where the company maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.

# posted by montag : 10:13 PM  0 comments

There is a lot of us who consider ourselves Republicans, of the Party of Lincoln. If they don't want us with them, we're going to work against them.

# posted by montag : 4:26 PM  0 comments

If I were a close adviser of President Obama’s, I would say to him, “Mr. President, you have two urgent and overwhelming tasks in front of you: to put Americans trapped in this terrible employment crisis back to work and to put the brakes on your potentially disastrous plan to escalate the war in Afghanistan.”

Reforming the chaotic and unfair health care system in the U.S. is an important issue. But in terms of pressing national priorities, the most important are the need to find solutions to a catastrophic employment environment that is devastating American families and to end the folly of an 8-year-old war that is both extremely debilitating and ultimately unwinnable.

I would also tell him that rebuilding the economy in a way that allows working Americans to flourish will require a sustained monumental effort, not just bits and pieces of legislation here and there. But such an effort will never get off the ground, will never have any chance of reaching critical mass and actually succeeding, as long as we insist on feeding young, healthy American men and women and endless American dollars into the relentless meat grinders of Afghanistan and Iraq.

We learned in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was trumped by Vietnam, that nation-building here at home is incompatible with the demands of war.

# posted by montag : 1:03 PM  0 comments

Fifty-nine Americans died in October fighting to protect the corrupt Afghan electoral process that resulted in a second five-year term for Hamid Karzai. Since July and the run-up to the August election, 195 Americans were killed and more than 1,000 were wounded, a higher casualty rate than during the 2007 military "surge" in Iraq. A principal purpose cited by President Obama for sending 17,000 more combat troops to Afghanistan earlier this year was to protect the election, which, according to most observers, Karzai stole.

Has it occurred to anyone in the White House national security circles or the pundit class that these recent American deaths were wasteful and immoral? That sending Americans to die for an unpopular regime of warlords, landlords, drug dealers and CIA assets (Karzai's brother) is impossible to justify? And that rather than admitting the mistake, the president and his advisors are preparing to compound it?

# posted by montag : 12:16 PM  0 comments

Why did productivity stagnate for 20 years, then revive? The truth is that it probably had very little to do with anyone’s economic policies; the best guess is that businesses spent two decades figuring out what to do with information technology, then found the answer: big box stores!

# posted by montag : 7:12 PM  0 comments

Goldman Sachs' Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein's comment that bankers are doing "God's work" came under fire today from one of the longest-standing allies of the firm, Satan, the Prince of Darkness.

In a rare press conference, the usually reclusive Beelzebub blasted Mr. Blankfein for his remark, telling reporters, "Lloyd Blankfein needs to remember who he works for."

"Lloyd Blankfein seems to have forgotten who came up with the idea of credit default swaps, derivatives, and mortgage-backed securities," he said. "I don't want to sound like a diva, but how about a little respect for the guy who signs your paycheck?"

# posted by montag : 6:20 PM  0 comments

As if the Taliban, car bombs, roadside bombs, leftover Soviet land mines, political unrest and errant NATO air attacks weren't enough, Afghans are facing a new killer: the H1N1 flu pandemic...

...In the past few days, surgical face masks have bloomed like poppies on the faces of worried pedestrians along crowded streets and markets of the capital as more cases were reported.

Karzai, meanwhile, accidentally added to his flu troubles during a television address Friday night when he referred to the illness by its common name, swine flu, rather than H1N1. The strain is transmitted from person to person, not from animals to people.

The first reported cases in Afghanistan were among U.S. soldiers and other foreigners working on military bases. Muslims are forbidden to eat pork, and so some Afghans have begun saying that clearly the flu is passing from pigs to the foreigners then to Afghans. For them, there is one logical solution.

"They say that we should throw out all the foreigners," Raaid said.

# posted by montag : 1:39 PM  0 comments

"History tells us that job growth always lags behind economic growth, which is why we have to continue to pursue measures that will create new jobs," he said. "And I can promise you that I won't let up until the Americans who want to find work can find work."

It was a strong vow, but it raises a question: Why has a White House that talks so much about boosting employment steered clear of the most direct strategy that could keep Americans on the job?

Since taking office, the Obama administration has studiously avoided paying people to go to work, which could be accomplished by subsidizing workers' private-sector employment or by creating new government-paid jobs. There are programs in a handful of states that financially compensate employees who cut their hours to prevent broader layoffs at their companies -- an approach that costs relatively little, since it results in lower payouts of unemployment benefits, and that has helped Germany keep unemployment under 8 percent despite the deep slowdown there. But the Obama administration has so far opted not to expand this initiative. And aside from a small summer employment program for young people, it has not sought to create jobs on the public payroll, something the country did in the 1930s and 1970s.

Instead Obama's team has taken a more indirect approach, a prudence that critics on the left say is misplaced. If you're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on stimulus, why not do it with conviction? Engaging in more forthright job creation could invite some political pitfalls (such as those constant accusations of socialism), but is double-digit unemployment any less a political risk?

# posted by montag : 12:52 PM  0 comments

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit...

...Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone...

...The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.

# posted by montag : 12:29 PM  0 comments

That's only the three largest firms. JP Morgan Chase took $25 billion in government aid; Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, $10 billion each. All three have paid back the government bailout money they've received, but the liquidity and "cheap money" offered by the Fed have kindled record profits at their investment and trading arms.

According to analyst estimates published by Bloomberg News, the financial banking triumvirate will shell out $29.7 billion in bonuses this year -- up 60 percent from 2008, and higher than the previous record of $26.8 billion in 2007.

If divided equally among the firms' collective 119,000 employees, the sum total per worker comes to $250,400 each (which Bloomberg notes is almost five times the median US household income of $50,000).

# posted by montag : 12:05 PM  0 comments

As the American public and the global community await the completion of the Obama administration’s extensive review of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former president of the Soviet Union, said Sunday that, instead of sending more troops, Obama should begin to the lay the groundwork to withdraw from Afghanistan.

“I think that what’s needed is not additional forces,” the former Soviet leader said through a translator, “this is something that we discussed, too, years ago but we decided not to do it. And I think our experience deserves attention.”

# posted by montag : 11:51 PM  0 comments