Links of the Day - Economics

If you read no other link, scroll down and read the last one.

Are Jobs obsolete?

"Our problem is not that we don't have enough stuff -- it's that we don't have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff." Unconventional story will give you a new way of looking at things.

Death Star Procurement

This symptom probably applies to the majority of Air Force procurement projects. More Air Force officers can fly Powerpoint than fly an aircraft (sad but true).

Labor Union protest in South Korean shipyard

US Shipbuilding has biggest multiplyer effect amongst all government spending

...Due to having the largest portion of their supply chain within the US.

NYT: Unemployment now higher in South than Rust Belt

Gov't regulation saves Alaskan crabfishing

So says one of the stars of "Deadliest Catch"

News from The Associated Press

German executive arrested under Alabama's Immigration laws. That'll attract foreign investment...

Outsize Severance Continues for Executives, Even After Failed Tenures - NYTimes.com

A free market, until it's their neck in the noose.

Nabors Drilling Exec gets fat payday

Isenberg's payment would exceed Nabors' third-quarter profit of $74.3 million. A horrible executive gets a gigantic payday, against the wishes of the stockholders.

Big Banks Plead with Customers Not to Move Their Money

Banks are unpopular with #OWS'ers and conservatives.

The Consumer is Dead

With Christmas shopping around the corner, long live the Consumer?

The China Money Report » Chinese Fund Managers Sentenced to Death after Cheating Investors out of 1 Billion USD

And people accuse the #OWS crowd of hating bankers...

Who needs unionized firefighters when there's slave labor!

Can you imagine letting prisoners save your house? Coming to a budget-strapped city near you!

World Power Again Swings back to America

Talks about 80's US/Japan fall/rise trend that ended up with a lot of journalists with egg on the face. One key factor: a weaker dollar helps out US manufacturers. There were also some interesting discussions on Twitter about how NOLA-area merchants LOVED it when the dollar was weaker because they had European tourists spending like mad. Now, with the Euro in the gutter, those tourists are gone.

3 Ways Of Looking At Manufacturing In America : Planet Money : NPR

Fascinating article

It's the Economy, Dummkopf! | Business | Vanity Fair

Michael Lewis is the best writer out there when it comes to the economy. He covers the German/Greek debt crisis from an unusual perspective.

The Decline of Manufacturing in America: A Case Study « naked capitalism

H/T @muffuletta: "Read this then tell me who has done more damage to the country, Al-Qaeda or business schools"

It's the Inequality, Stupid | Mother Jones

Statistics-rich article.

Only Advanced-Degree Holders See Wage Gains - Real Time Economics - WSJ

Over the past decade, on average, wages have risen only for Americans with graduate degrees

Report: Rich-poor gap growing - Mackenzie Weinger - POLITICO.com

50% of US workers made less than $26,364 last year

The faces of poverty

A sobering read.

Obama Signs Patent ‘Reform’ Bill — ‘Crustless Sandwich’ Still Patented | Threat Level | Wired.com

Information Dissemination: US Launches a WTO Nuke Towards China's Great Firewall

Now THIS is an interesting monkey wrench.

The Economist on Student Loans

Linked to by LGM.

Losing the HP Way

"American firms have been laying-off their engineering staffs for years. In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money." Horrifying.

News and Notes - 3 Dec 2009

Odds and ends to ponder while listening to Christmas music.

* Bernanke wants to axe Social Security? Now there's now way he'll get reconfirmed.

Brezenzinski claims US too corrupt to go around asking others, including Afghanistan, to clean up corruption. Ouch.

* 21 Darts [PDF]. All about the new reserves accounting rules in the oil industry. Very snarky. Call the new rules "the equivalent of the repeal of the hydrocarbon Glass-Steagall Act."

* Arming Goldman with Pistols against the public. A must read. So many things that'll drop your jaw. A sample:

...talk of Goldman and guns plays right into the way Wall- Streeters like to think of themselves. Even those who were bailed out believe they are tough, macho Clint Eastwoods of the financial frontier, protecting the fistful of dollars in one hand with the Glock in the other.

It's almost impossible for a "peasant" to get a gun permit or a CCW in New York, but if you're a rich Wall Street banker, go ahead! God forbid someone that might actually need one get a permit (like a cabbie), but some spoiled little Goldmanite who barely knows which end the bullets come out can have a permit to carry his Glock in Central Park to fend off the rabble. Also, a great moniker for Goldman: "Arrogant and Prescient."

* Boston Globe: Harvard ignored warnings about investments. Larry Summers lost billions of dollars at Harvard. Now, he's Obama's chief economic advisor. Lovely.

* Remember, Google, don't be evil.

* Food stamp use soars, stigma fades. Bush did one thing right: he worked very hard to eliminate the stigma of Food Stamps. It was renamed "nutritional aid," application was streamlined, and benefits were expanded. Good job, Mr. Bush.

* Terrorist bomb lab found in Ohio.

* From the editorial board of Scientific American: Climate Change Cover Up? You Better Believe It.

* Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, bitter over his ouster. There's a gem at the end: he wants to become a high school teacher now. He's used to dealing with gun-toting, steroid-addled, juvenile minds. He'll be perfect.

DO YOUR HOMEWORK, MOTHERFUCKER, OR I'M GOING TO BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT!

* Speaking of homework, here's Obama's speech on science education. My favorite quote: "We're going to show young people how cool science can be."

* Science witnesses the birth of a new species. A new species of Galapagos Finch emerges after decades of observation. Related: The Beak of the Finch. Great book.

* Drilling for Scotch. I wonder what that gusher would be like?

* WSJ: The Return of Tinkering. Honestly, this is one article that has made me very hopeful about the future. Well worth a read. Also: mechanical engineering graduates may soon top 20,000 per year.

$Bill, Meet Debt Slavery

The founding fathers were very concerned about debt and it's role in society. They did start the national debt, which stimulated the economy, but they also included authorized Congress to set up Bankruptcy Courts in the very first article of the Constitution. On the flipside, Thomas Paine rallied in favor of the Estate Tax as a way of preventing a permanent oligarchy/underclass in this country. Bankruptcy also made the banks much more cautious about who they made loans to.

There was a lot of give an take on issues relating to that over the centuries, but the balance started to change in the late 90's. Congress passed a bill to make bankruptcies much tougher. Bill Clinton vetoed that bill after Hillary implored him to because of the devastating effects on single parents.

Later on, under the guise of preventing fraud, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act and George W. Bush signed it into law. Left-leaning Democrats complained it was a step on the road to Debt Slavery. One of the crooked Democrats that voted for it was none other than William "Dollar Bill" Jefferson. How many of his constituents got screwed over by that Bankruptcy Bill, especially after Katrina with (truly) underwater mortgages?

William Jefferson loved debt slavery right from the start:

About the same time, Jefferson launched one of his earliest ventures, in the rent-to-own appliance business. that was, like others that would follow, a joint project with several siblings, in this case brothers Mose and Bennie and sister Betty, a former School Board member who is now a city assessor. Through Jefferson Interests, a company they founded, the group acquired four REMCO stores starting in the early 1980s, after Jefferson had joined the Legislature.

Some called the business predatory. In 1986, Rudy Lombard, one of Jefferson's opponents in his second bid for mayor, noted in debates that some public-housing tenants in Algiers late on payments had complained of being "harassed and intimidated" by REMCO officials.

Lombard also ripped Jefferson for sponsoring a bill that would have allowed theft charges to be filed against renters who did not return appliances on time. Jefferson denied sponsoring such a bill at first, but the next day he conceded he had when reporters confronted him with the evidence.

You'd be hard pressed to find a Democrat who worked harder against the interests of his constituency than $Bill.

Open today's paper. On page A-2, William Jefferson is now getting a dose of his own medicine. He's being nailed under the Bankruptcy Bill he voted for. I'm sure he got lots of campaign contributions for doing it at the time, but now he's fucked. Good for him. Poetic justice.

Crime, Poverty

"Did New Orleans Kill Helen?" All about Helen Hill. Depressing as hell. If you want some self-flagellation, read this article. Makes some very good points, though. It ends with a call to make Helen Hill's life a reason for staying in New Orleans instead of leaving. Oh yeah, still no leads on her killer.

Salon.com article about the criminal justice system. It mainly focuses on Central Lockup, which has been a shithole for as decades. I'm reliably informed by friends who were unfortunate enough to spend time there that it's the same shithole as before, but now you can add a moldy smell in with everything else. When I was a freshman at Tulane, I warned all my friends about how bad OPP was. I told them it was what jail is like in a third world country. I told them about how, in the early/mid 90's, they used to hand condoms to new inmates. The new inmates were supposed to beg their rapists to use the condom so they wouldn't get AIDS. After all these warnings, a few of them still ended up there. One said it was even worse than my worst description. He described how an inmate came up to him and said, "Give me a cigarette or I'm going to kill you." Fortunately, my friend was a smoker and he gave him his whole pack. He's sure that if he wasn't a smoker, he would have died right then and there.

The business of poverty. Sickening. It should be a crime. Makes you look at those Blue Hippo, et. al. commercials very differently.

I've saved the most egregious outrage for last:
[RAPE]Victim Says Police Never Came.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!

Here are some of the choice quotes:

"The would-be rapist left the neighborhood, without haste or fear of arrest.

...

"He was walking," said local artist Terrence Sanders, who followed the stranger for six blocks while waiting for a 911 operator to dispatch officers. "That's what got me so crazy. It was fast walking, but walking. He kept saying to me, 'Ain't nothing going to happen. They ain't coming.' "

...

"I just thank God I was there. I had a bottle and thought about hitting him with it, but then I realized I might catch a charge. The cops told me, 'Yeah, you could have been charged with assault.' The cops told me to go to the press. The cops were like, 'We need this out there.' They don't have the capacity."

...

When the stranger overheard Sanders describe the victim as a white woman, he [THE RAPIST] turned around and jeered, "Oh, now they'll come."

...

"He looked like he just got out of jail."

So many outrages in one article...

Rape is on the rise in New Orleans. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's rising as quickly as murder. Also, rapists have about the same chance of being brought to justice as murders under Eddie Jordan.

The rapist was running around with NO fear of being brought to justice. He didn't fear NOPD or Eddie Jordan. He didn't even fear the citizens. New Orleans can ill afford to lose its Dinerral Shavers and Helen Hills! If it takes a little vigilantism, then the citizens of New Orleans need to make criminals like this afraid. I know of a lot of women getting Concealed Carry Permits. GOOD! Shoot the rapist in the balls! Take his weapons away from him! I normally don't like blogging about guns, but If any woman is interested in learning more about concealed carry, I'd be happy to do what I can to help out.

A rapist runs free, while a cop tells a citizen that if he'd taken action, he'd have been charged with assault! Who is the system protecting!?!? If I were Terrence Sanders, I'd have been seriously tempted to slug the officer that said that...

Lastly, kudos to Terrence Sanders. He's a real hero. He saved a New Orleanian in need. He did the right thing, regardless of the outcome.

UPDATE- Has the French Quarter rapist been caught? The description is very similar. Could be the same guy. We'll see. I checked his record over at Docket Master and it's his first arrest (at least in Orleans Parish's system). Could this be a case of a guy flipping out over Katrina stress? Who knows...

Articles to check out

Church's list keeps names of murder victims alive. Great work.

Condotels coming to New Orleans. This is about the last thing we need. I've got some family members who live in Ocean Springs and everyone on the coast HATES condotels. They are basically sanctioned absentee landlords. People buy a room in the hotel, get the revenues, the management takes a small cut, and all sorts of people come through. The owners are under pressure to keep the rooms full, so they'll let anyone in and if they make themselves a nuisance, there's nobody you can really talk to. There's not one landlord. Also, you can't really pressure the company, because it's not their units. Besides, New Orleans already has a glut of both condos and hotels.

Are we reliving 1929? Interesting article. Tough to follow, though. That's why NOBODY in the mainstream media covers complex financial issues.

Re-Engineer the Corps. And it's not a Louisianian calling for the reform...

Homeless camp near city hall. I suggest it be named either "Bushville" or "Nagin Town."

It's Not Our Fault. Excellent (albeit long) blog post.

Recall Jordan website up and running. Oh yeah, and he continues his run of perfection.

Poverty

Let's face it. The source of so many of this city's problems is poverty. Not "we don't make enough to afford the latest tech toys," but Bangladesh-level "we can barely make enough to pay our bills and pay for our next meal" poverty.

I've got no big ideas right now, but here are a couple of things that might get you thinking:

Don't miss The Fever on HBO tomorrow night.

Also, here are two articles about an innovative program in New York to pay the poor for behaviors most likely to lift themselves out of poverty. Very interesting. I like to see unconventional approaches to problems. It'll be interesting to see how this experiment works out.