I found out, which is a bummer because I couldn't use FRED graphing system as a result, that U-6 is calculated using the above, even for the reported percentage. Originally I didn't think so since marginally attached is not seasonally adjusted plus, the marginally attached amount is about 300k additional people in comparison to 24.3 million, so it's almost in the margin of error. Usually it's sacrosanct to not mix seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted plus I figured it was close, due to the marginally attached being so small of a number in relation to the CLF.
Regardless, the U6 levels calculation matches the BLS U-6 method, (although they do not seem to publish U-6 levels directly, one must add up the variables only, which are published). The BLS just publishes the U6 percentage directly.
Then, of those in part-time jobs, those are only the people who report they are in them because they cannot get full-time jobs. So these are your people working, potentially, 2 or 3 jobs trying to survive or plain can only get 1 part time job. This implies they are really out there looking for a better, full time job, so they do assuredly count in the ratios of jobs to people looking.
It's people, not jobs in this tally. These numbers are from the CPS.
Regardless of how one looks at it, it's clear the job market is God awful for U.S. labor.
I just wanted to make sure I was matching all my p's and q's. JOLTS, obviously, does not consider U6 and that's no surprise, it's not designed for that.
I just add the U6 figure since so many are interested in it and rightly so. Due to such weak labor demand U6 is becoming more important as is trying to squeeze out how many workers have dropped out of the labor force, or been downgraded into crappy part time jobs, to determine those who really want a job.
On that score the BLS does give a number people not part of the labor force who actually want a job, which is probably just as important as U6 and that number is shockingly high.
These are very good points. Ailes is simply awful and probably close to the cynicism quotient of Murdoch. His fate, however, is tied to and controlled by Murdoch's. There are three outcomes: 1) Ailes works for a discredited boss who subject to unfolding horrors from the UK for the next two years - nothing happens here other than the bad press; 2) Ailes works for an executive and organization that hacked the voicemails of 9/11 families in the United states - Sayanora Roger; 3) Ailes works fr an executive and organization that is found to have committed other atrocities - depending on what those are and Ailes role it's either Sayanora or good luck finding a job at Heritage.
Imagine Murdoch's horror at hearing that Senator Rockefeller was after him. The question tarnishes Murdoch in perpetuity. It won't go away. The 9/11 families are stalwart and will pursue this to the extent they believe the story, no matter what the FBI says.
Senator Rockefeller certainly doesn't read this site and is not a sympathizer with our broad critique of The Money Party (he's in the equivalent of the Mayflower Society for that exclusive club). But he's a rational person who knows that we can't have a Murdoch running around egging on the realty challenged, very noisy Tea Party. That ties into Hatch and McCain. The three Senators are operatives at varying levels for the vestiges of an establishment that sees everything collapsing. Rid the nation of Murdoch and there's a chance to restore some order.
My idle speculation is that this is another round of Obama's attacks on Fox in 2009 when he referred to them as a political machine not a news organizations. That had very specific meaning to Murdoch, namely that he was systematically violating election law by using corporate funds to advance specific candidates from one party. The Citizens United decision was the answer. But the forces that unleashed are out of control, hence adios Rupert.
Things don't always go as planned. If there is a 9/11 link, the reaction from the public will consume Murdoch and expand far beyond that one source to the broader elements of control who seem to turn everything they touch to ash.
The Whistleblower of the entire phone hacking was just found dead. Report is death "not suspicious".
Oh my tin foil hat is on. Visions of that lovely hot shot between the toes ala Michael Clayton. (One of the most horrifying murder scene from a film of all time!)
Unless Ailes is found to be engaged in criminal activity, Murdoch's control over the US news agenda and right wing politics will continue. There are indications Ailes is vulnerable, however.
1) News Corporation achieves "synergies" by using a single news platform for all of the publication and television media in the company. This saves the company money by avoiding duplication of research efforts, but it also ties everyone together through a dependency on a few concentrated sources. To the extent NOTW was sharing information through the system, and their research efforts involved bribery, illegal wire tapping, and other crimes, then FOX News was participating indirectly.
2) What Rockefeller needs to find out is whether FOX News ran its own phone hacking operation. Without any doubt, the culture of News Corporation was based on these illegal activities, and this culture came straight from Rupert Murdoch. Anybody who has worked in a corporate environment knows how the entire corporation takes on the personality of the chairman. Murdoch ran a corporation that was more than most based on a cult of the chairman; his direct deputies have been described as "sycophantic and obsequious" - people who will take orders from Murdoch or be booted out. Murdoch will have all sort of plausible deniability regarding his knowledge of illegal activities, but it is impossible to have a company run with his degree of control over the news content without him knowing how the "scoops" and information were sourced. He could have imposed this culture on FOX News, though there are some indications he was intimidated by Ailes and let him run his own ship.
3) Ailes has a "Black Ops" department located in the basement of his FOX News fortress in midtown Manhattan. It's a little like Bernie Madoff's back office - off limits to everyone at the company but a handful of people. There are some sketchy reports from people who have been in there that phone hacking was either done, or was very easy to do.
Now let's look at the other side of all this.
First, Ailes is not running a tabloid operation. FOX News is not interested in celebrity gossip. He is running a political operation, usually described as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, but increasingly described as the tail which is wagging the dog. If Ailes is doing any black ops work, it is not to hack into phones of nobodies like Milly Dowler. It is to get dirty information on Democratic politicians and candidates, to find out what is going on within the Obama administration and campaign headquarters, and to pass this along to the likes of Karl Rove, who says he will have $120 million of secret money to spend on the 2012 campaign.
This is not information that would benefit FOX News. The news anchors and commentators there distort and lie their way so often that they don't need real dirt unless some major scandal can be created. This is information that is mostly for campaign purposes, though it possibly might be used to extort something from Democratic politicians caught with their pants down (Eliot Spitzer?). There would also likely be a nexus between Ailes and certain trusted corporate lobbyists and major donors (Charles and David Koch, e.g.). All part of what Hillary Clinton called the "vast right wing conspiracy".
Is the FBI willing to probe into this? Based on Obama's track record of accommodation and appeasement to the right wing in the interest of bipartisanship, the answer is no. Also, the Democratic Party may have a similar effort going on somewhere. You don't raise $750 million dollars in a presidential campaign just to run television ads. Obama and Congressional leaders in the party may not want the status quo upended. In this respect, Obama is Roger Ailes' best shield.
On the other hand - there may be some old-line Republican party politicians, like Orrin Hatch or John McCain, who have had enough of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party. They may want to reassert their control over the party and restore some semblance of sanity to its deliberations. Another group that might want to join in this effort is the Bush family. This is Roger Ailes' biggest weakness. He may have become too powerful, and too destructive for the likes of the old-line party leadership, and attacking Rupert Murdoch might be the first step to attacking him.
If these people join in on the plan to investigate Murdoch, then there might be hope that Ailes will be overthrown. If not, he may be untouchable. Remember, first you needed an appalling abuse of the little guy for the British public to take notice of what Murdoch has been doing all these years, and then you needed the public establishment primed to extract revenue on him. Both of those are currently lacking in the US.
It's like living in the days of Standard Oil. One may cut off the head of the dragon but this is Medusa and another will simply grow.
Even when the press does report accurately and frankly the WSJ does do some good reporting and they don't paint a pretty picture on the jobs front for example, owned by Murdoch, it doesn't matter.
We have politicians try to say, straight faced, corporate lobbyist wish lists are great policy and literally will try to pass corporate lobbyist written bills in Congress.
I mean Obama has turned into the latest prime example and we know all of his GOP counterparts will do the same thing.
The spin machine here is still very much in place Murdoch is in free fall in the UK. There is nothing quite like it, in my opinion, in the history of modern media - the rapid dissolution of the largest media empire over a matter of days. But here, it has just started and the outcome is not certain. It needs to be. He needs to go as an example and the rest of them should get the message that they're viability depends on the audience, which happens to be capable of bringing down habitual liars. GE's NBC brand, plus CBS and ABC, are fundamentally as distorted as Murdoch. They just lack the flare for the grotesque. We need to make the case that they too are culpable for the nonstop lies and fantasies that have taken us so low. How can people make a rational decision when they lack the facts - negative job growth for a decade, out sourcing the nations wealth and talent, the free ride on taxes for the ultra rich and powerful, the concentration of wealth in the extreme. These are all events that are described here and elsewhere but rarely touched for any length of time by "the majors." They'd better start playing catch up or this neglect wlll catch up with them.
The problem I have with this is other media is highly corrupt. I cannot count the number of corporate lobbyist plant "stories" I've seen and they pretty much run the gamut of every media outlet. I find that odious, putting corporate lobbyist plant spin out there as "news".
They won't even bring up policies that are in dire need. Case in point, instead of confronting China on currency manipulation they are pushing more trade deals analyzed to lose more U.S. jobs. Instead of curtailing offshore outsourcing, we get more and more outsourcers straight in the White House.
Instead of putting together an infrastructure jobs program, direct, we get cutting domestic spending....all the while pouring money overseas to build other countries.
Instead of forcing companies operating here to hire and use U.S. citizens, they are enabling those very companies to avoid paying any taxes, tax havens go unabated and the Panama trade deal will proliferate even more tax havens.
They won't even put conditions requiring these companies to hire and retain U.S. citizen workers for tax breaks and that's at every level, local, state federal.
So there were people "who thought this report was fine and improving"? I suppose that would be the same gang who think that every slight uptick in anything means things will be back to normal soon so there's no need to do anything but wait and hope.
I've had enough of both waiting and hoping, thank you very much for nothing, so-called "leaders" of America. How about some effective planning for job drought lasting until 2016 or later and acting accordingly?
There's scales of intensity for tornadoes and hurricanes.
I wish there were a similar scale for unemployment. It would be good too if there were some proscribed rules for various actions that needed to be taken by the government depending on the severity of unemployment, subject to Congressional modification.
I am dreaming I know but I refuse to accept that the we should continue to do nothing and allow the unemployed to go over the cliff and stay there.
Yes, it is ridiculous to think that places could be sold to "everyday Americans" without either huge shift in current economic-poliitcal-financial realities, or, further substantial adjustments downward in values of SFRs.
No idea about B of A specifics, but here is what I see or hear lately for SFRs:
1. Varies enormously geographically. In some areas, the market continues dead or comatose.
2. In general, pricey homes are not as obviously neglected as lower-priced properties, but nearly all need some work. Midnight parting-out operations are much less now than they were a couple of years ago.
3. There's some talk that multiple-unit residential is looking up, even some new construction, although overall rents are down. Occupancy rate of SRF rentals is probably up slightly. Rents have dropped generally -- substantially in some areas -- but may have bottomed out.
4. Everywhere and at all levels, movement is slow and difficult.
5. Vacancy rate for SFRs is probably slightly reduced over recent highs, but there is talk of huge number of repos coming soon.
6. Some investors have been buying with renting in mind -- usually small investors, picking off good deals or even working insider angles.
7. Investors don't see any better investments around, retain confidence in real property and are looking at the long term (beyond 2012). (Liquid value of raw and agricultural land is much more stable than residential, but almost all residential has some lot value.) These folks have bought at maybe 30% to 80% off theoretical highs of the boom period, but that doesn't mean that book values of comps have necessarily been adjusted accordingly. (Each closing would need to be studied, like what is the seller obliged to do, what has been warranted but actually needed to be done.)
8. There are some real people (families) who have moved into places they are buying during the last year or two, but they are the lucky few who have secure jobs or pensions so as to qualify for, or who have angels to provide, financing. These folks have bought at maybe 25% to 50% off theoretical highs of the boom period. Of course, there was also the federal tax credit, now long gone.
9. The upside is that, although some are buying to sit on a property rather than improve it for habitation, most of these buyers have been making improvements -- whether to rent or to live in.
10. Lumber and other construction materials going up, probably related to energy costs, and SFRs improvement trend cannot be reliably projected out into the future (winter of 2011-2012 or beyond).
The White House snatched back one of the few bones it's thrown to the people outraged at the looting of the United States Treasury by failed financial concerns - the big banks and Wall Street. The promised appointment Elizabeth Warren as head of the new agency to protect consumers from the financial services industry has been seriously downgraded. Instead of running the Consumer Finance Protection Agency, Warren's role has been diminished to that of special assistant to the president and adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
"President Obama, sidestepping a possibly heated confirmation battle, will appoint Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren as a special advisor to the Treasury Department to launch the government's powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to two Democratic officials familiar with the decision." LA Times, Sept 15
In mitigation, my intent was to consider issues of interest at EP through an exploratory case study of Adobe -- including issues relating to work visas and outsourcing. My impression is that you can't get reliable numbers revealing extent of these practices, but I thought I could extrapolate out from my first-hand experiences to form a picture of what is happening in one case.
Thank you for information on the open standard for PDFs and on your policy to avoid links that start downloads. There could be, for PDFs, something like the poster that is used to start playing a video ... but there isn't or it isn't used ... there's just the same kind of link that is used to go to any webpage, so your readers can't know what they are getting into. Thank you for pointing that out.
My thought is that there could be a cover page of a PDF with a pointer in the middle to start the download, just like the way videos are linked. So, yes, EP isn't the place to discuss that, but the fact that one is used widely and the other not at all says something about trends, with some implications for economics.
I think there has always been, and will be, tension between open-source doves and proprietary hawks. (And then there are the hackers who recently embarrassed Sony.)
While the PDF specification was available for free since at least 2001, PDF was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe, and was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008 ... ISO 32000-1:2008. The ISO 32000-1 allows use of some specifications, which are not standardized (e.g. Adobe XML Forms Architecture). ISO 32000-1 does not specify methods for validating the conformance of PDF files or readers. In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting a royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.
The BLS released this report 5 days ago and I just couldn't get to it until now. Despite it's not out of the news cycle, I do not care for there were groups, other analysts who thought this report was fine and improving and frankly it is not. Plus if there is one topic this site focuses on above the other economics sites, it's labor, jobs. So, gotta have an overview on the JOLTS report.
Thanks for understanding and really check out this Beveridge curve. That's really a nice thing the BLS puts out for us for it really shows we have a jobs crisis in this country.
Supposedly the claim was the GOP wouldn't confirm Warren, but they are out to destroy the CFPA, so they only person they would approve is a multinational or banking former lobbyist or executive.
Bottom line, this is a much better choice than expected. No doubt Obama is reading the 2012 election tea leaves. Seems the entire Democratic base is abandoning him, no surprise if anyone reads this site on what's going on.
I know why they came up with 90k, they used the current labor participation rate instead of the 2007 one plus did a labor force slope rate. I don't find that valid since so many have dropped out of the count.
I know Dean Baker can calculate how many jobs for himself, so why he choose to say that is beyond me. He's usually dead on.
You'll see a lot of variation on "what are the number of jobs per month to keep up with population growth" and most of them are valid. It depends on what labor participation rate one uses, the labor force growth rate or the civilian non-institutional population growth rate, the time window (as well) over what period.
I went through some of these calculations here, and show partial calculations and assumptions.
Seems I should go into way more detail and show a few methods next time.
That's the key, EPI uses slightly different numbers in their calculations. Then something no one talks about is the non-institutionalized civilian population means all of those people in jail and in the military are not in the base count.
Well, we have some of the highest prison populations to overall population ratios in the world.
We also have a lot of Vets coming out of the military who cannot find a job and it's so bad many are going homeless.
I guess I can do through this again with all of the ways to calculate out this number, but bottom line it does vary depending on what one uses.
I think Baker was more pointing to the NY Times not doing their own calculations, which is very, very common in the press.
That's another reason I go over these economic reports. I do calculate numbers straight from the data and the reports, so when it differs, either I made a math boo-boo or I have different assumptions.
First, come on people, let's not turn the site into a pdf discussion. Second, there are open source tools to read pdfs. PDF is a file format not Adobe. You don't have to use Adobe. Google has many tools, including gmail, Open Office, Foxit Reader, Apple, Linux....go to download.com and find 101 tools to read and edit pdfs.
It's true Adobe offshore outsources.
But this is just a format and while I do use links as references, i.e. click on the link to find the reference, this is just one time I linked to a group's blog post overviewing their actual report, because the actual report is linked clearly at the bottom of their blog post overviewing it.
I do this often so one doesn't start a large download to check a reference link.
It may be that Adobe outsources some customer services for North America to India. At least, that's my impression. As a penny-ante English-speaking Adobe customer, I find that if I want to talk to a real person within a relatively short time-frame, I'm talking to somebody with excellent English in that Indian accent (not that I have frequent need for customer service) ... but if you fill out a request and wait a few days, you will likely get a call from someone somewhere in the U.S.. CEO Shantanu Narayen, of course, is from Hyderabad ... but, according to the Wiki article "Adobe_Systems", 40% of their 9,000+ employees work in San Jose (how many on H-1Bs?).
Here's an interesting connection: earlier this year, Obama appointed Narayen to the President's Management Advisory Board. Hmmmm ...
Governments in the U.S. seem to like PDFs, including interactive PDFs. For example, court forms in many or most states are available as PDFs, often interactive.
Of course, Adobe's software generally is ridiculously pricey, but I suppose it's labor-intensive to get that near-universality that is what you want for the largest audience. Lately though, I find that the people who have gone mostly mobile just about never open any PDF attachments to their email. Not sure that many of them can open PDFs on whatever their mobile-device operating system may be. On your tiny screen, you can view the video, it seems, more easily than you can read the PDF.
Problem with PDFs is that the format or file extension is proprietary. Another problem is that tables and other components are tricky to break out of PDFs, I think. Not exactly a smooth object-oriented system for the end user, and that's probably how it's meant to be. Also, there's this trend toward e-books and lately I see .pub (MS proprietary, I gather).
OPEN source, not outsource ... that's the way to go global. I mean, if we're going to be gushy about one world and all, let's be consistent about it. Let's globalize altruism! Then we can all be paid equally ... zero! Even Adobe's CEO could be paid equally ... zero! I guess that's been tried, Soviet Union or wherever, but open source is an awesome world.
BTW: I like PDFs, probably because I'm in the old-fashioned reader category in my cognitive style. I think they launch with plugins only when you don't already have Adobe Acrobat (Adobe Reader), which is a free download.
I found out, which is a bummer because I couldn't use FRED graphing system as a result, that U-6 is calculated using the above, even for the reported percentage. Originally I didn't think so since marginally attached is not seasonally adjusted plus, the marginally attached amount is about 300k additional people in comparison to 24.3 million, so it's almost in the margin of error. Usually it's sacrosanct to not mix seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted plus I figured it was close, due to the marginally attached being so small of a number in relation to the CLF.
Regardless, the U6 levels calculation matches the BLS U-6 method, (although they do not seem to publish U-6 levels directly, one must add up the variables only, which are published). The BLS just publishes the U6 percentage directly.
Then, of those in part-time jobs, those are only the people who report they are in them because they cannot get full-time jobs. So these are your people working, potentially, 2 or 3 jobs trying to survive or plain can only get 1 part time job. This implies they are really out there looking for a better, full time job, so they do assuredly count in the ratios of jobs to people looking.
It's people, not jobs in this tally. These numbers are from the CPS.
Regardless of how one looks at it, it's clear the job market is God awful for U.S. labor.
I just wanted to make sure I was matching all my p's and q's. JOLTS, obviously, does not consider U6 and that's no surprise, it's not designed for that.
I just add the U6 figure since so many are interested in it and rightly so. Due to such weak labor demand U6 is becoming more important as is trying to squeeze out how many workers have dropped out of the labor force, or been downgraded into crappy part time jobs, to determine those who really want a job.
On that score the BLS does give a number people not part of the labor force who actually want a job, which is probably just as important as U6 and that number is shockingly high.
Murdoch Whistle Blower Found Dead - Not being treated as suspicious by police - America Blog
By Gaius Publius
These are very good points. Ailes is simply awful and probably close to the cynicism quotient of Murdoch. His fate, however, is tied to and controlled by Murdoch's. There are three outcomes: 1) Ailes works for a discredited boss who subject to unfolding horrors from the UK for the next two years - nothing happens here other than the bad press; 2) Ailes works for an executive and organization that hacked the voicemails of 9/11 families in the United states - Sayanora Roger; 3) Ailes works fr an executive and organization that is found to have committed other atrocities - depending on what those are and Ailes role it's either Sayanora or good luck finding a job at Heritage.
Imagine Murdoch's horror at hearing that Senator Rockefeller was after him. The question tarnishes Murdoch in perpetuity. It won't go away. The 9/11 families are stalwart and will pursue this to the extent they believe the story, no matter what the FBI says.
Senator Rockefeller certainly doesn't read this site and is not a sympathizer with our broad critique of The Money Party (he's in the equivalent of the Mayflower Society for that exclusive club). But he's a rational person who knows that we can't have a Murdoch running around egging on the realty challenged, very noisy Tea Party. That ties into Hatch and McCain. The three Senators are operatives at varying levels for the vestiges of an establishment that sees everything collapsing. Rid the nation of Murdoch and there's a chance to restore some order.
My idle speculation is that this is another round of Obama's attacks on Fox in 2009 when he referred to them as a political machine not a news organizations. That had very specific meaning to Murdoch, namely that he was systematically violating election law by using corporate funds to advance specific candidates from one party. The Citizens United decision was the answer. But the forces that unleashed are out of control, hence adios Rupert.
Things don't always go as planned. If there is a 9/11 link, the reaction from the public will consume Murdoch and expand far beyond that one source to the broader elements of control who seem to turn everything they touch to ash.
(How did you like the image?)
The Whistleblower of the entire phone hacking was just found dead. Report is death "not suspicious".
Oh my tin foil hat is on. Visions of that lovely hot shot between the toes ala Michael Clayton. (One of the most horrifying murder scene from a film of all time!)
Unless Ailes is found to be engaged in criminal activity, Murdoch's control over the US news agenda and right wing politics will continue. There are indications Ailes is vulnerable, however.
1) News Corporation achieves "synergies" by using a single news platform for all of the publication and television media in the company. This saves the company money by avoiding duplication of research efforts, but it also ties everyone together through a dependency on a few concentrated sources. To the extent NOTW was sharing information through the system, and their research efforts involved bribery, illegal wire tapping, and other crimes, then FOX News was participating indirectly.
2) What Rockefeller needs to find out is whether FOX News ran its own phone hacking operation. Without any doubt, the culture of News Corporation was based on these illegal activities, and this culture came straight from Rupert Murdoch. Anybody who has worked in a corporate environment knows how the entire corporation takes on the personality of the chairman. Murdoch ran a corporation that was more than most based on a cult of the chairman; his direct deputies have been described as "sycophantic and obsequious" - people who will take orders from Murdoch or be booted out. Murdoch will have all sort of plausible deniability regarding his knowledge of illegal activities, but it is impossible to have a company run with his degree of control over the news content without him knowing how the "scoops" and information were sourced. He could have imposed this culture on FOX News, though there are some indications he was intimidated by Ailes and let him run his own ship.
3) Ailes has a "Black Ops" department located in the basement of his FOX News fortress in midtown Manhattan. It's a little like Bernie Madoff's back office - off limits to everyone at the company but a handful of people. There are some sketchy reports from people who have been in there that phone hacking was either done, or was very easy to do.
Now let's look at the other side of all this.
First, Ailes is not running a tabloid operation. FOX News is not interested in celebrity gossip. He is running a political operation, usually described as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, but increasingly described as the tail which is wagging the dog. If Ailes is doing any black ops work, it is not to hack into phones of nobodies like Milly Dowler. It is to get dirty information on Democratic politicians and candidates, to find out what is going on within the Obama administration and campaign headquarters, and to pass this along to the likes of Karl Rove, who says he will have $120 million of secret money to spend on the 2012 campaign.
This is not information that would benefit FOX News. The news anchors and commentators there distort and lie their way so often that they don't need real dirt unless some major scandal can be created. This is information that is mostly for campaign purposes, though it possibly might be used to extort something from Democratic politicians caught with their pants down (Eliot Spitzer?). There would also likely be a nexus between Ailes and certain trusted corporate lobbyists and major donors (Charles and David Koch, e.g.). All part of what Hillary Clinton called the "vast right wing conspiracy".
Is the FBI willing to probe into this? Based on Obama's track record of accommodation and appeasement to the right wing in the interest of bipartisanship, the answer is no. Also, the Democratic Party may have a similar effort going on somewhere. You don't raise $750 million dollars in a presidential campaign just to run television ads. Obama and Congressional leaders in the party may not want the status quo upended. In this respect, Obama is Roger Ailes' best shield.
On the other hand - there may be some old-line Republican party politicians, like Orrin Hatch or John McCain, who have had enough of Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and the Tea Party. They may want to reassert their control over the party and restore some semblance of sanity to its deliberations. Another group that might want to join in this effort is the Bush family. This is Roger Ailes' biggest weakness. He may have become too powerful, and too destructive for the likes of the old-line party leadership, and attacking Rupert Murdoch might be the first step to attacking him.
If these people join in on the plan to investigate Murdoch, then there might be hope that Ailes will be overthrown. If not, he may be untouchable. Remember, first you needed an appalling abuse of the little guy for the British public to take notice of what Murdoch has been doing all these years, and then you needed the public establishment primed to extract revenue on him. Both of those are currently lacking in the US.
It's like living in the days of Standard Oil. One may cut off the head of the dragon but this is Medusa and another will simply grow.
Even when the press does report accurately and frankly the WSJ does do some good reporting and they don't paint a pretty picture on the jobs front for example, owned by Murdoch, it doesn't matter.
We have politicians try to say, straight faced, corporate lobbyist wish lists are great policy and literally will try to pass corporate lobbyist written bills in Congress.
I mean Obama has turned into the latest prime example and we know all of his GOP counterparts will do the same thing.
The spin machine here is still very much in place Murdoch is in free fall in the UK. There is nothing quite like it, in my opinion, in the history of modern media - the rapid dissolution of the largest media empire over a matter of days. But here, it has just started and the outcome is not certain. It needs to be. He needs to go as an example and the rest of them should get the message that they're viability depends on the audience, which happens to be capable of bringing down habitual liars. GE's NBC brand, plus CBS and ABC, are fundamentally as distorted as Murdoch. They just lack the flare for the grotesque. We need to make the case that they too are culpable for the nonstop lies and fantasies that have taken us so low. How can people make a rational decision when they lack the facts - negative job growth for a decade, out sourcing the nations wealth and talent, the free ride on taxes for the ultra rich and powerful, the concentration of wealth in the extreme. These are all events that are described here and elsewhere but rarely touched for any length of time by "the majors." They'd better start playing catch up or this neglect wlll catch up with them.
The problem I have with this is other media is highly corrupt. I cannot count the number of corporate lobbyist plant "stories" I've seen and they pretty much run the gamut of every media outlet. I find that odious, putting corporate lobbyist plant spin out there as "news".
It misleads people to the extremes.
They won't even bring up policies that are in dire need. Case in point, instead of confronting China on currency manipulation they are pushing more trade deals analyzed to lose more U.S. jobs. Instead of curtailing offshore outsourcing, we get more and more outsourcers straight in the White House.
Instead of putting together an infrastructure jobs program, direct, we get cutting domestic spending....all the while pouring money overseas to build other countries.
Instead of forcing companies operating here to hire and use U.S. citizens, they are enabling those very companies to avoid paying any taxes, tax havens go unabated and the Panama trade deal will proliferate even more tax havens.
They won't even put conditions requiring these companies to hire and retain U.S. citizen workers for tax breaks and that's at every level, local, state federal.
So there were people "who thought this report was fine and improving"? I suppose that would be the same gang who think that every slight uptick in anything means things will be back to normal soon so there's no need to do anything but wait and hope.
I've had enough of both waiting and hoping, thank you very much for nothing, so-called "leaders" of America. How about some effective planning for job drought lasting until 2016 or later and acting accordingly?
There's scales of intensity for tornadoes and hurricanes.
I wish there were a similar scale for unemployment. It would be good too if there were some proscribed rules for various actions that needed to be taken by the government depending on the severity of unemployment, subject to Congressional modification.
I am dreaming I know but I refuse to accept that the we should continue to do nothing and allow the unemployed to go over the cliff and stay there.
Yes, it is ridiculous to think that places could be sold to "everyday Americans" without either huge shift in current economic-poliitcal-financial realities, or, further substantial adjustments downward in values of SFRs.
No idea about B of A specifics, but here is what I see or hear lately for SFRs:
1. Varies enormously geographically. In some areas, the market continues dead or comatose.
2. In general, pricey homes are not as obviously neglected as lower-priced properties, but nearly all need some work. Midnight parting-out operations are much less now than they were a couple of years ago.
3. There's some talk that multiple-unit residential is looking up, even some new construction, although overall rents are down. Occupancy rate of SRF rentals is probably up slightly. Rents have dropped generally -- substantially in some areas -- but may have bottomed out.
4. Everywhere and at all levels, movement is slow and difficult.
5. Vacancy rate for SFRs is probably slightly reduced over recent highs, but there is talk of huge number of repos coming soon.
6. Some investors have been buying with renting in mind -- usually small investors, picking off good deals or even working insider angles.
7. Investors don't see any better investments around, retain confidence in real property and are looking at the long term (beyond 2012). (Liquid value of raw and agricultural land is much more stable than residential, but almost all residential has some lot value.) These folks have bought at maybe 30% to 80% off theoretical highs of the boom period, but that doesn't mean that book values of comps have necessarily been adjusted accordingly. (Each closing would need to be studied, like what is the seller obliged to do, what has been warranted but actually needed to be done.)
8. There are some real people (families) who have moved into places they are buying during the last year or two, but they are the lucky few who have secure jobs or pensions so as to qualify for, or who have angels to provide, financing. These folks have bought at maybe 25% to 50% off theoretical highs of the boom period. Of course, there was also the federal tax credit, now long gone.
9. The upside is that, although some are buying to sit on a property rather than improve it for habitation, most of these buyers have been making improvements -- whether to rent or to live in.
10. Lumber and other construction materials going up, probably related to energy costs, and SFRs improvement trend cannot be reliably projected out into the future (winter of 2011-2012 or beyond).
Triumph of the Money Party!!! Warren's role downgraded, reports to Geithner
Michael Collins
September 15, 2010
The White House snatched back one of the few bones it's thrown to the people outraged at the looting of the United States Treasury by failed financial concerns - the big banks and Wall Street. The promised appointment Elizabeth Warren as head of the new agency to protect consumers from the financial services industry has been seriously downgraded. Instead of running the Consumer Finance Protection Agency, Warren's role has been diminished to that of special assistant to the president and adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
In mitigation, my intent was to consider issues of interest at EP through an exploratory case study of Adobe -- including issues relating to work visas and outsourcing. My impression is that you can't get reliable numbers revealing extent of these practices, but I thought I could extrapolate out from my first-hand experiences to form a picture of what is happening in one case.
Thank you for information on the open standard for PDFs and on your policy to avoid links that start downloads. There could be, for PDFs, something like the poster that is used to start playing a video ... but there isn't or it isn't used ... there's just the same kind of link that is used to go to any webpage, so your readers can't know what they are getting into. Thank you for pointing that out.
My thought is that there could be a cover page of a PDF with a pointer in the middle to start the download, just like the way videos are linked. So, yes, EP isn't the place to discuss that, but the fact that one is used widely and the other not at all says something about trends, with some implications for economics.
I think there has always been, and will be, tension between open-source doves and proprietary hawks. (And then there are the hackers who recently embarrassed Sony.)
According to Wiki Portable_Document_Format --
The BLS released this report 5 days ago and I just couldn't get to it until now. Despite it's not out of the news cycle, I do not care for there were groups, other analysts who thought this report was fine and improving and frankly it is not. Plus if there is one topic this site focuses on above the other economics sites, it's labor, jobs. So, gotta have an overview on the JOLTS report.
Thanks for understanding and really check out this Beveridge curve. That's really a nice thing the BLS puts out for us for it really shows we have a jobs crisis in this country.
Warren is still out with Richard Cordray in.
Supposedly the claim was the GOP wouldn't confirm Warren, but they are out to destroy the CFPA, so they only person they would approve is a multinational or banking former lobbyist or executive.
Bottom line, this is a much better choice than expected. No doubt Obama is reading the 2012 election tea leaves. Seems the entire Democratic base is abandoning him, no surprise if anyone reads this site on what's going on.
I know why they came up with 90k, they used the current labor participation rate instead of the 2007 one plus did a labor force slope rate. I don't find that valid since so many have dropped out of the count.
I know Dean Baker can calculate how many jobs for himself, so why he choose to say that is beyond me. He's usually dead on.
You'll see a lot of variation on "what are the number of jobs per month to keep up with population growth" and most of them are valid. It depends on what labor participation rate one uses, the labor force growth rate or the civilian non-institutional population growth rate, the time window (as well) over what period.
I went through some of these calculations here, and show partial calculations and assumptions.
Seems I should go into way more detail and show a few methods next time.
That's the key, EPI uses slightly different numbers in their calculations. Then something no one talks about is the non-institutionalized civilian population means all of those people in jail and in the military are not in the base count.
Well, we have some of the highest prison populations to overall population ratios in the world.
We also have a lot of Vets coming out of the military who cannot find a job and it's so bad many are going homeless.
I guess I can do through this again with all of the ways to calculate out this number, but bottom line it does vary depending on what one uses.
I think Baker was more pointing to the NY Times not doing their own calculations, which is very, very common in the press.
That's another reason I go over these economic reports. I do calculate numbers straight from the data and the reports, so when it differs, either I made a math boo-boo or I have different assumptions.
First, come on people, let's not turn the site into a pdf discussion. Second, there are open source tools to read pdfs. PDF is a file format not Adobe. You don't have to use Adobe. Google has many tools, including gmail, Open Office, Foxit Reader, Apple, Linux....go to download.com and find 101 tools to read and edit pdfs.
It's true Adobe offshore outsources.
But this is just a format and while I do use links as references, i.e. click on the link to find the reference, this is just one time I linked to a group's blog post overviewing their actual report, because the actual report is linked clearly at the bottom of their blog post overviewing it.
I do this often so one doesn't start a large download to check a reference link.
So, this basically is a non-issue.
It may be that Adobe outsources some customer services for North America to India. At least, that's my impression. As a penny-ante English-speaking Adobe customer, I find that if I want to talk to a real person within a relatively short time-frame, I'm talking to somebody with excellent English in that Indian accent (not that I have frequent need for customer service) ... but if you fill out a request and wait a few days, you will likely get a call from someone somewhere in the U.S.. CEO Shantanu Narayen, of course, is from Hyderabad ... but, according to the Wiki article "Adobe_Systems", 40% of their 9,000+ employees work in San Jose (how many on H-1Bs?).
Here's an interesting connection: earlier this year, Obama appointed Narayen to the President's Management Advisory Board. Hmmmm ...
Governments in the U.S. seem to like PDFs, including interactive PDFs. For example, court forms in many or most states are available as PDFs, often interactive.
Of course, Adobe's software generally is ridiculously pricey, but I suppose it's labor-intensive to get that near-universality that is what you want for the largest audience. Lately though, I find that the people who have gone mostly mobile just about never open any PDF attachments to their email. Not sure that many of them can open PDFs on whatever their mobile-device operating system may be. On your tiny screen, you can view the video, it seems, more easily than you can read the PDF.
Problem with PDFs is that the format or file extension is proprietary. Another problem is that tables and other components are tricky to break out of PDFs, I think. Not exactly a smooth object-oriented system for the end user, and that's probably how it's meant to be. Also, there's this trend toward e-books and lately I see .pub (MS proprietary, I gather).
OPEN source, not outsource ... that's the way to go global. I mean, if we're going to be gushy about one world and all, let's be consistent about it. Let's globalize altruism! Then we can all be paid equally ... zero! Even Adobe's CEO could be paid equally ... zero! I guess that's been tried, Soviet Union or wherever, but open source is an awesome world.
BTW: I like PDFs, probably because I'm in the old-fashioned reader category in my cognitive style. I think they launch with plugins only when you don't already have Adobe Acrobat (Adobe Reader), which is a free download.
First, full employment ... then and only then ... work visas.
That should be, like, fundamental. Civilized nations generally have had such a policy.
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