Bloodthirsty Liberal

Is it already Thursday morning? Time to play our game.

So, the nuance to the new game is that when you compare numbers of new applications for unemployment benefits to the upwardly revised numbers of the week before, they are down slightly. But if you compare to reality, that is to the knowledge that these numbers will be upwardly revised next week, just as we all know that our late cat, Trevor, had a butt, then you realize that unemployment is moving upward.

More Americans than forecast filed applications for unemployment benefits last week, a sign that the labor market is taking time to improve.

Jobless claims fell by 1,000 to 388,000 in the week ended April 21 from a revised 389,000 the prior period that was the highest since early January, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 48 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a drop to 375,000.

Isn’t that cute? It means that the shills in the media can claim that unemployment is dropping.

- Aggie

But notice how calmly the NY Times writes about it

The Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions on how counterterrorism analysts may retrieve, store and search information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes other than national security threats.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Thursday signed new guidelines for the National Counterterrorism Center, which was created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and serve as a terrorism threat clearinghouse.

The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and “data mining them” using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat.

Intelligence officials on Thursday said the new rules have been under development for about 18 months, and grew out of reviews launched after the failure to connect the dots about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber,” before his Dec. 25, 2009, attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner.

After the failed attack, government agencies discovered they had intercepted communications by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and received a report from a United States Consulate in Nigeria that could have identified the attacker, if the information had been compiled ahead of time.

The changes are intended to allow analysts to more quickly identify terrorism suspects. But they also set off civil-liberties concerns among privacy advocates who invoked the “Total Information Awareness” program. That program, proposed early in the George W. Bush administration and partially shut down by Congress after an outcry, proposed fusing vast archives of electronic records — like travel records, credit card transactions, phone calls and more — and searching for patterns of a hidden terrorist cell.

But national security officials stressed that analysts could already get the same information under the old rules, just in a more cumbersome way. They cited safeguards to protect against abuse, including audits of searches. The same rules apply to access by other federal agencies involved in counterterrorism.

“There is a genuine operational need to try to get us into a position where we can make the maximum use of the information the government already has to protect people,” said Robert S. Litt, the general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the National Counterterrorism Center. “We have to manage to do that in a way that provides protection to people’s civil liberties and privacy. And I really think this has been a good-faith and reasonably successful effort to do that.”

If I wasn’t so tired, I would re-write this as it would have been written when Bush was president. Headline: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!

- Aggie

He rejected the Keystone pipeline

The Obama administration rejected a bid to expand the controversial Keystone oil sands pipeline Wednesday, saying the deadline imposed by congress did not leave sufficient time to conduct the necessary review.

“The rushed and arbitrary deadline insisted on by Congressional Republicans prevented a full assessment of the pipeline’s impact, especially the health and safety of the American people, as well as our environment,” Obama said in a statement.

The pipeline may not be dead though. The State Department, which was tasked with issuing the permit, said “the Department’s denial of the permit application does not preclude any subsequent permit application or applications for similar projects.”

I would point out to all of the people in the states that would have benefited from the pipeline that many of you voted for Hope ‘n Change.

Boehner says it will cost 100,000 jobs. And the Canadians will just give the work to the Chinese. The Chinese thing is hilarious because surely the environment of the planet would be better served if the pipeline goes directly to Texas? But I have to say, there is a huge part of me that is rooting for the Chinese. We elected an idiot and we deserve the consequences.

- Aggie

Don’t look now, but lay-offs are still happening. And they are happening a lot.

Of the 1,600 job cuts announced earlier this month by Morgan Stanley, 580 will be at its home base in New York.

The relentless tug of the dismal economy is hitting employees in the banking sector hard, and it’s no surprise that many of the job cuts are hitting the epicenter of the financial industry. Citigroup, with its headquarters a seven-minute drive up Park Ave. from Morgan Stanley in Manhattan, said recently that it would eliminate 4,500 jobs, or about 1.5 percent of its global work force of 267,000, over the next few quarters.

But jobs are being slashed by banks almost everywhere.

In September, Bank of America Corp., based in Charlotte, N.C., said it would cut 30,000 jobs over the next few years. Swiss lender UBS is downsizing its investment bank to 16,000 people from the current 18,000 as it reduces its exposure to risk.

Morgan Stanley disclosed in a filing with the Labor Department on Wednesday that the cuts will be made at four New York locations: 1221 Ave. of the Americas, 1 New York Plaza, 1585 Broadway and 750 Seventh Ave.

The investment bank said that the layoffs — which began two weeks ago and will represent 2.6 percent of its work force — will hit all levels of the company and would go on through the first three months of next year.

Morgan Stanley had more than 62,000 employees at September’s end.

This is the perfect time to Occupy Wall Street! Hate on bankers! Right, guys?

- Aggie

Hilarious.

- Aggie

Retail sales rose less than expected in November.

I am surprised, because the Black Friday was a zoo. Unfortunately, for the first time in my life, I experienced the full effect, and it was overwhelming. So I assumed that we were in recovery mode.

Not so much.

Retail sales rose less than expected in November as a drop in receipts for food and beverages weighed against stronger sales of motor vehicles, tempering some of the expectations of a strong holiday shopping season.

Total retail sales increased 0.2 percent after rising by an upwardly revised 0.6 percent in October, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast retail sales climbing 0.6 percent last month.

“It’s fairly disappointing given that all the evidence was pointing to fairly strong gains during the month,” said Millan Mulraine a macro strategist at TD Securities in New York.

Consumer spending – which accounts for more than two-thirds of U.S. economic activity – rose sharply in the third quarter but November’s retail sales growth was the weakest in any month since June.

However, shoppers flocked to stores over the Thanksgiving weekend, traditionally retail’s biggest sales period.

Strong sales reports over that weekend led some analysts to predict a strong overall season, although economists have warned the shopping frenzy may not carry through the holidays due to the nation’s still high unemployment rate of 8.6 percent.

Also, the heavy discounts that brought buyers in also cut into margins. On Tuesday, Best Buy Co’s (NYSE:BBY), the world’s largest electronics chain, reported a fall in third-quarter profits. Its shares dropped 8 percent in heavy pre-market trading.

Isn’t Best Buy the chain that was selling giant flat screen TVs for two hundred bucks, a five hundred dollar savings or something? And they didn’t make a profit? We they expecting several hundred dollars in impulse purchases?

I have to say, they shopping vibe is not reaching me. I just don’t have the jolly holiday spirit. I am downright grumpy. I know too many unemployed people, and too many people that have jobs but are doing the work for more than one person. What I mean by that is that half the staff has been laid off, exhausting the other half. I know of several people who are going to the office at 8am and leaving at 10 or 11pm, routinely. Not occasionally, but three or four days a week. And I still think that most of them will vote for Obama, partly because the media has tarnished the Republican field, and partly because the Republican field has done it to itself.

- Aggie

A lot has been written recently about how the Obama administration is giving up on white working class voters in favor of a coalition of the elite plus very low income Americans.

Jobs: The president says that extending unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut will create more jobs than an oil pipeline from Canada. There are at least 20,000 members of the 99% who would disagree.

You can see why the economy is in trouble. Vice President Joe Biden, the stimulus sheriff, says he turned first to MF Global’s Jon Corzine for economic advice and President Obama thinks 20,000 people getting extended unemployment benefits does more for the economy than 20,000 people getting paychecks to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada.

In the president’s view, extending the payroll tax cuts is more important than adding more people to the payrolls, unless they are making electric cars that catch fire or work for solar-panel makers that go bankrupt.

Any attempt to link the pipeline to a payroll tax cut extension will be vetoed, Obama said Wednesday as he stood next to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

President Obama has dropped any pretense that delaying the pipeline that would bring Canadian tar-sands oil to American refineries is really related to environmental safety concerns.

He knows it would create jobs, at least 20,000 directly and many more indirectly thanks to the multiplier effect he dismisses now but touted when he still believed in “shovel-ready” jobs that needed federal funding.

“However many jobs might be generated by a Keystone pipeline,” he said, “they’re going to be a lot fewer than the jobs that are created by extending the payroll tax cut and extending unemployment insurance.”

He forget the stimulus effect of food stamps, something touted by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

When it comes to payroll tax cuts, unemployment benefits and food stamps, Democrats and liberals believe in the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

You get back much more than you spend. In their skewed view, joblessness can create jobs.

While adding $250 billion to the deficit, according to Alex Brill of the American Enterprise Institute, extending the payroll tax holiday would provide up to $1,500 per family.

But, Brill notes, researchers Matt Shapiro and Joel Slemrod found that among recipients of tax rebates in 2001, only 22% spent the rebate, while the rest saved it or used it to pay off debt. A similar study of 2008 tax rebate recipients found only 20% spent it.

Contrast this with the 20,000 paychecks that would be added if the $7 billion Keystone XL project is completed. These workers would pay federal taxes. States along the route are projected to receive an additional $5.2 billion in property tax revenue.

Doesn’t matter. The environmentalists don’t want it and Obama wants their votes. And he has written off the votes of the sorts that would be working those projects.

The really terrifying part of all of this silliness is that people who don’t want to live in a Liberal Fascist State have nowhere to go. Even Canada has more sense than the US under this clown.

- Aggie

Green jobs? Not so much.

Sometimes I enjoy thinking about the Progressive accomplishments in the Age of Obama. Not two wars, but three. Egypt has fallen apart. Iran is more of a threat than ever before. Unemployment has doubled. The deficit has quadrupled; the debt has doubled. And green jobs = flushing money down the toilet. So it’s not Hope ‘n Change, but Oil ‘n Gas that are saving the day.

So President Obama was right all along. Domestic energy production really is a path to prosperity and new job creation. His mistake was predicting that those new jobs would be “green,” when the real employment boom is taking place in oil and gas.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported recently that the U.S. jobless rate remains a dreadful 9%. But look more closely at the data and you can see which industries are bucking the jobless trend. One is oil and gas production, which now employs some 440,000 workers, an 80% increase, or 200,000 more jobs, since 2003. Oil and gas jobs account for more than one in five of all net new private jobs in that period.

The ironies here are richer than the shale deposits in North Dakota’s Bakken formation. While Washington has tried to force-feed renewable energy with tens of billions in special subsidies, oil and gas production has boomed thanks to private investment. And while renewable technology breakthroughs never seem to arrive, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have revolutionized oil and gas extraction—with no Energy Department loan guarantees needed.

The oil and gas rush has led to a jobs boom. North Dakota has the nation’s lowest jobless rate, at 3.5%, and the state now has some 200 rigs pumping 440,000 barrels of oil a day, four times the amount in 2006. The state reports more than 16,000 current job openings, and places like Williston have become meccas for workers seeking jobs that often pay more than $100,000 a year.

Or take production in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale formation, which the state Department of Labor and Industry says created 18,000 new jobs in the first half of 2011. Some 214,000 jobs are now tied to a natural gas industry that barely existed in the Keystone State a decade ago. Energy firms are also rushing to develop the Utica shale in eastern Ohio, and they are expanding operations in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma, among other places.

Hahahahahahahaha

This is so good we’ll just keep reading.

Good news? You’d think so, but liberals can’t seem to handle this truth so they are now trying to discredit the jobs that accompany it. The American Petroleum Institute recently commissioned a study by the Wood Mackenzie consulting firm, which estimated that better federal energy policy would create an additional 1.4 million jobs by 2030.

This has caused a fury on the political left, which complains that the study included estimates of direct and indirect jobs (such as equipment suppliers) but also “induced” jobs, or jobs created when oil workers spend their salaries at, say, hotels, restaurants or bowling alleys. It seems these claims rely on—drum roll, please—”multipliers” to produce estimates of knock-on jobs.

Liberals know all about multipliers, which are the central operating conceit of modern Keynesian economics. The entire public justification for the $820 billion Obama stimulus was the claim that every $1 of spending would have a multiplier effect of 1.5 or more and thus create millions of new jobs.

That looks like a joke now. But Democrats and liberals continue to cite the black-box multiplier claims of Moody’s Mark Zandi, who says the latest Obama jobs bill will create 1.9 million jobs. Some 750,000 of those jobs are supposed to appear merely from extending the payroll tax holiday for workers, giving them more money to spend on, say, hotels or restaurants or bowling alleys. All such multipliers are suspect, but the liberals can’t have it both ways and invoke them to justify government spending but then repudiate them for private business.

In any case the beauty of the oil and gas boom is that multipliers aren’t needed to predict job growth. It’s happening right before our eyes. And it stands to reason that if the Obama Administration dropped its hostility to oil and gas energy, even more jobs would be created as the industry invested to exploit other areas with new technology and production methods.

Yet earlier this month the Interior Department released a new five-year plan that puts most of the Outer Continental Shelf off-limits for oil drilling.

And we’ll stop there. Elections have consequences.

- Aggie

Societies collapse, suddenly

Fifteen years ago, I noticed that when things change, they change suddenly. One day there was Hitler and the German population strutting their stuff, but within short order you couldn’t find a Nazi in Germany anywhere. None of them had supported the Nazi party. All those pictures of hundreds of thousands of cheering Germans were but hallucinations.

We saw the same thing happen with the internet bubble – riches to rags in a few months. September 11th took us from a comfortable, silly society in which our biggest problem was summer shark attacks to the society we have today. In short order.

It turns out that this has been studied:

Don’t call me a “declinist.” I really don’t believe the United States—or Western civilization, more generally—is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline.

But that’s not because I am one of those incorrigible optimists who agree with Winston Churchill that the United States will always do the right thing, albeit when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

The notion that civilizations don’t decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted.

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they didn’t.

Think Occupy Movement. Do they consider The Constitution of the United States to be legitimate?

Remember that poster that used to hang in every college dorm, of a runaway steam train that has crashed through the wall of a rail station and hit the street below, nose first? The caption was: “Oh sh*t!” I believe it’s time to ask how close the United States is to the “Oh sh*t!” moment—the moment we suddenly crash downward like that train.

The West first surged ahead of the Rest after about 1500 thanks to a series of institutional innovations that I call the “killer applications”:

1. Competition. …

2. The Scientific Revolution. …

3. The Rule of Law and Representative Government….

4. Modern Medicine. …

5. The Consumer Society. …

6. The Work Ethic. …

For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world.

In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese. Westerners not only grew richer than “Resterners.” They grew taller, healthier, and longer-lived. They also grew more powerful. By the early 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.

Beginning with Japan, however, one non-Western society after another has worked out that these apps can be downloaded and installed in non-Western operating systems. That explains about half the catching up that we have witnessed in our lifetimes, especially since the onset of economic reforms in China in 1978.

Now, I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. Indeed, I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.

Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans.

…

He is going over his points in the current context. I’m skipping most of them, but this is interesting:

The rule of law? For a real eye-opener, take a look at the latest World Economic Forum (WEF) Executive Opinion Survey. On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection. On every other count, its reputation is shockingly bad. The U.S. ranks 86th in the world for the costs imposed on business by organized crime, 50th for public trust in the ethics of politicians, 42nd for various forms of bribery, and 40th for standards of auditing and financial reporting.

I mention this because I think we have a problem with corruption in our legal system, and that corruption really threatens the sturdiness of our whole society. If we can’t trust the court system to be above board, we might as well let organized crime run things.

He’s kinda glum:

If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.

Ya’ know… people are busy. Voting is an inconvenience and trying to understand these complex issues is just a waste of time. Barry will handle it.

We’ve delegated our future.

- Aggie

Time to cut off NPR

National Public Radio continues to define itself in every way as a taxpayer-funded nest of leftism. NPR couldn’t just supportively report on the Occupy Wall Street protests. A fire-breathing spokeswoman for the “Occupy D.C.” protests against capitalism was also an NPR host.

From late 2000 to early 2002, Lisa Simeone was an NPR anchor for their weekend version of the newscast “All Things Considered.” Now this radical was leading protests as she hosted a radio documentary series called “Soundprint” and an arts show, “The World of Opera.”

Liberals have focused on the opera show so as to dismiss criticism from conservatives. Time magazine TV writer James Poniewozik joked, “Have you long worried that your station was undermining capitalism through its broadcasts of the Ring Cycle? Tired of having your children brainwashed by the socialistic messages of La Traviata?”

OK, so put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine an NPR opera host working the weekends for the Tea Party. Time magazine writers would require smelling salts.

They are focusing on the opera angle in order to dodge the much larger issue. In an era of trillion-dollar deficits, how much longer are we going to pretend that it is an essential function of government to prop up the wholly unnecessary NPR to spew on the air the same warmed-over ’60s bilge the OWS rabble spews on the streets? It’s time for Congress to cut the umbilical cord and stop bankrolling this rogue political operation.

The narrower question about Lisa Simeone was whether NPR was going to live up to its own ethics rules, which forbid attending protests, let alone organizing them and serving as public relations staff for them. The “Soundprint” series, which is not produced by NPR but is a current events show, fired Simeone. That decision was a no-brainer.

But the opera show, also not produced by NPR, but by an affiliate station in North Carolina, arrived at a different solution. NPR announced it would no longer distribute the program to the 60 stations that air it. Instead, the local station would. That’s merely solving an appearance problem and nothing more.

It is inexcusable that NPR didn’t fire Simeone long ago. It did nothing to stop Simeone before the story blew up in their faces. Simeone appeared in a YouTube video uploaded three months ago, declaring with an angry face that, “The time has come to stop these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the other places we’re now bombing with our drones and other equipment, and to demand that money that’s being spent and wasted on slaughter come home here to spent in the U.S. on human needs.”

Etc.

BTL and I had an executive session today in which I explained my new, mellower, attitude to this stuff. We have the government we deserve. It’s all good with me. Still, it does seem a bit hypocritical to fire Juan Williams for appearing on Fox, but to find a way to retain her. Ultimately, I don’t mind. I figure that the fact that America’s young college grads face roughly 17 years of weak earnings as a result of Hope ‘n Change (according to the NY Times, for what it’s worth) is sufficient punishment for their stupidity. If they escalate the ignorance, the nation as a whole will lose more wealth.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

Lately my fingernails have been breaking easily. What’s that all about?

- Aggie