Economic Uprising

I have no special knowledge about the Ukraine, but since a major war could be brewing there think we all should brush up fast!  For sure the U.S. and Russian 1% are each trying to see how much they can steal.  The U.S. has spent billions to convince the Ukrainians that the European Union is paradise (Ask the Greeks or the Spaniards about the EU heaven).  The Ukrainian fascists are very powerful and were a big part of the shock troops who overthrew the elected president (who along with his family was busy enriching himself).   On the other hand the Putin regime and his billionaire buddies are no friend of the Ukrainians.  Stories about threats to the Russian base and the Crimea or threats to Russian speaking Ukrainian are just excuses for old fashioned Russian great power grasping.   Let’s not pretend that all that has happened is just a conspiracy.   Huge crowds of people who have been living in he Maidan for months demanding change.  A message for the U.S. 1%: Why are you looking down your noses at Russia?  This is what you wanted, not a reformed democratic Soviet Union, but an empire torn to pieces, replaced by aggressive no holds barred robber baron capitalism.  Putin and his friends are what you drooled for.

Important or Interesting articles about the Ukraine with My Comments

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Panorama View of EuroMaidan Dec. 2013

Feb. 21, 2014.   On the Ground in the Ukraine.  How the fascists beat and barred the Left from the Maidan

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Dear Dr. Hansen:

You’ve asked for comment on your draft paper “Renewable Energy, Nuclear Power and Galileo: Do Scientists Have a Duty to Expose Popular Misconceptions?“

I think your explanation of the gravity of the problem is fine, but I think the paper is unconvincing when it calls for expansion of nuclear power through fast reactors.  I also disagree on what to do with the money raised by a carbon tax.

1. Consider the Monju fast breeder reactor near Kyoto, Japan.  It was built 20 years ago, cost around $10 billion and has produced about 1 hour of electricity in all those years.  There was an accident in 1995 when there was a massive leak of the sodium coolant and then a major fire.  This is a real problem with the fast breeders because they can’t use water for coolant and must use very dangerous materials like liquid sodium.  As of a few days ago the Japanese government announced that it most likely won’t ever use the plant  to generate power at all, but would use it for “research”

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Feb. 25. Just noticed this Jan. 10 article, but it hit 50 degrees in Pilbara  region of Australia on that day. This may not seem to be a big deal to those of us in the northeast U.S. who would kill for a day at 50 degrees Farenheit, but the Australian temperature was in Centigrade. So in our terms it was really 122! That’s very nearly the highest temperature ever recorded in that continent.

Several thousand miles to the east in Queensland bats were dying because of the heat. An estimate is that 100,000 have fell out of the sky to their deaths. “Residents near Athol Terrace lookout in Boonah said they have been agonizing over the smell of dead bats for four days.”

Feb. 19.   The government numbers and press releases sound good.  The “Unemployment Rate” slowly but steadily has been going down, now to just 6.6%.  So everything should be hunky-dory, right?  Funny thing though the public thinks unemployment is the most important problem facing the country today.  That’s the finding of the Gallop poll taken earlier in February.

The lack of jobs was thought to be the #1 worry by 23% with another 20% saying problems with the economy was #2.  Lack of confidence in government leaders was #3.

Gee, does the average person know something the politicians don’t?

Feb. 17.  In his State of the Union, the president said the U.S. had cut carbon emissions “over the last eight years” more than any other country in the world.  Carbon emissions for 2004-2012 fell from 5.853 billion metric tons to 5.490 billion metric tons.  We were on the right track! Or were we?

In 2013 U.S. carbon pollution went up, by 2%.  The Washington Post got this from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The reason the Washington Post said was because the “shale fracking boom had pushed natural gas prices to unsustainably low levels.”  Prices of natural gas went up a lot and many companies switched back to coal.

How could they go back to coal?  Well, electric power companies can just throw their most dangerous garbage (carbon dioxide) into the air when they burn it  and never have to pay to clean it up.  There is no nation carbon tax so why not go back to coal?  All that matters is profit, right?  Climate worries are for sissies.

Now here’s an interesting tidbid from the same Washington Post article.  “The EIA is only counting carbon-dioxide emissions from energy sources like coal, natural gas, and oil. This makes up about 84 percent of all of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions. But it leaves out other potent, heat-trapping gases like methane, which can leak out of natural gas operations, landfills, and farms.”

So we don’t even know if they Obama claim about 2004-2012 was true.

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Feb. 17. Tomas Edsall wrote a piece in the NYT about what is now an old idea on how to reduce inequality and get workers more enthusiastic in the companies they work for, ESOP, an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. It’s been a law for 50 years giving companies tax breaks if they formally give their workers stock in the company. Some 12,000 companies do so.

Ronald Reagan loved the idea. It’s supposed to make workers love the company and become more “productive”. Supposedly it makes every man(/woman) a capitalist, and is a “win/win” situation.

Sorry, just because you own some stock you’re not a capitalist. You’d have to make most of your living taking advantage of workers to be in that class. You wouldn’t say that Bob Cratchit was a capitalist just because Scrooge used some of the company profits to give Cratchit a goose on Christmas.

An ESOP may give you back a little bit of the money the boss has gouged out of you, but that’s it. You’re not the partial boss of an ESOP. They have rules that keep you out of the running of the company. That’s for “professionals”. As Robert Shaffer of Appalachia said in his comment posted to Edsall’s article, “ESOP participants do not have any say when the company decides to move its operations out of this country. They may not even tell you until the day it happens. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt.”
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Feb. 15 VIDEO – While the world heats Obama brags about how much fossil fuel he is digging up

Bill McKibben ripped into Obama about this on Democracy Now! this week

Feb. 17   Update.  Here’s what Trumka said about climate change and jobs at a “Good Jobs, Green Jobs”conference on February 11.  He said that merely saying that things should be shut down “poisons the well politically”.  He didn’t utter the words “Keystone XL”, but what else?  He was complaining that climate activists wanted Keystone XL shut down.

What was the reaction from the crowd? There’s wasn’t one “boo”.  Not one person shouted out “what about the pipeline?”.   Pathetic.  In addition Trumka didn’t say anything about phasing out coal burning plants and finding new work for coal miners.  The ex-coal miner president just digs in his heels and defends the status quo.  Mostly he talked about trade agreements.  Bizarrely at 38:36 he called for a “working and middle class climate”.  A WHAT?  Final point, looking at the list of sponsors there were a lot more corporations than climate activists.

Feb. 8.  Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, may not be in the 1%, but he’s close behind. He made a salary of $272,000 last year along with nearly $16,000 of “other disbursements”. If he retired tomorrow he’d get 60% of that as a pension for his 14 years of “service” as a top AFL-CIO officer.

I have the gall to connect his exalted position to his recent decisions to help destroy the climate.

In These Times reports, “On a recent conference call with reporters, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka endorsed two initiatives reviled by green groups: the Keystone XL pipeline and new natural gas export terminals.” ITT says he said, “There’s no environmental reason that [the pipeline] can’t be done safely while at the same time creating jobs.”

He’s talking the same way as the State Department report, talking only about the safety of the pipeline itself and ignoring the catastrophic danger of pouring umpteen gigatons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
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Feb. 7. The jobs picture is confusing. The number of new jobs created in January was a lot less than predicted, but somehow there seem to be a lot more people working. The economists had expected 180,000 jobs to be created, but the labor department said there was a gain of only 113,000. Federal jobs even fell by 12,000.

When the federal jobs report came out the stock market then went up a bunch.

The reason was there were other parts of the job report that were quite good. E-pop, the most accurate employment rate (employed was a percent of the population) went up from 58.6 to 58.8. Another rate called the “participation rate” went up by a similar amount. The number of workers who said they were working part-time because of lack of full time work dropped 500,000. The result was a whopping increase of 600,000 people who were employed. How? Who knows.

Back to the negatives. Paul Krugman writing in the New York Times mentions that the level of long-term unemployment is far above average. He writes, “long-term unemployed — those out of work for 27 weeks or more — have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. “ Half the long-term unemployed (the LTU) are non-Hispanic whites. The LTU have a special problem, employer prejudice, the belief that these people must have something wrong with them because they’re out of work so long.
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Click here: for a very fine satire on You Tube.

Here’s the Forbes article that is based on Davos statistics. Take a look at it and see the breathtaking increase in the wealth of the U.S. 1% during the reign of “socialist” Obama.

Biting satire in of all places the New York Times.

Here’s the whole speech.

You won’t find these words or phrases there:

racism….. mass incarceration ….. civil rights ….. Trayvon Martin …..

New Jim Crow ….. affirmative action…..

labor unions ….. card count ….. collective bargaining ….. strikes…..

mountain top coal removal ….. increase social security payments …..

billionaire ….. the 1%…..

soup kitchen ….. deportations ….. Cristian Avila ….. TPP ….. fast track…..

human rights ….. hunger strike ….. forced feeding ….. Edward Snowden …..

Egypt ….. coup …..

Gaza siege ….. Bahrain ….. our Al-Majalah massacre in Yemen …..

Saudi Arabian nuclear program …..

nuclear energy ….. nuclear waste ….. military-industrial complex ….. PTSD …..

Keystone XL ….. global warming ….. fracking ….. 400 ppm …

Indian ….. native American ….. Pine Ridge ….. Leonard Peltier…..

Nelson Mandela ….. Abdulrahman al-Awlaki ….. Pete Seeger

words and phrases that were there and emphasized:

middle class ….. energy independence ….. natural gas ….. American dream ….. reform…..

Jewish state …..

terrorism ….. terrorist

The number enrolling in the exchanges for Obamacare medical insurance is up to 3.3 million and some officials think they may hit their March goal of 7 million.

In addition 6.3 million have been deemed eligible for Medicaid. Some of that is because the new health care law makes it easier to qualify, but most is because more people are now aware that they could have qualified all along.

On the other hand at the end of 2012 there were 48 million without insurance, so by mid-year there should still be 35 million without coverage.

The jobless rate went down three tenths of a percent last month. That’s quite a lot if the official “unemployment rate” meant anything. What really happened last month is that lots of people left the labor force. The U.S. population went up 90,000, but the number not in the labor force went up by near 300,000! Even the New York Times Editorial Board realized this saying that “the share of workers employed or looking for work fell to the lowest level since 1978”.

Maybe this will be of some help in getting the long term unemployed their benefits back. 1.3 million lost them last month in the big budget Democratic-Republican compromise. The Times doesn’t seem optimistic. Its editorial ends with despair, a prediction that the as bad as it is the release of the report “will not lead to action anytime soon”.

What could be keeping the people’s government from coming to the aid of the people? Hmm. This item of news is of interest. For the first time in history the majority of members of Congress are millionaires. Which party has the most dough? Hint: It’s not who you think. The Open Secrets site says, “Congressional Democrats had a median net worth of $1.04 million, while congressional Republicans had a median net worth of almost exactly $1 million.”
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Jan. 1, 2014.  I was watching a BBC feature report on home insulation measures yesterday and the reporter matter-of-factly  mentioned that 30,000 people died of the cold in the UK last year.   I thought that number startling so started doing some research.

The number of “excess deaths” during the winter 2012-2013 was indeed over 30,000.  It was 31,000 in fact, a number a staggering 29% more than the year before.  True, it was an unusually cold winter, but Scandinavian countries who have even colder winters don’t have the problem.  (In 2002 the BBC reported that there more winter deaths in the UK than in any European country or in Russia’s Siberia!)

We’re not talking about people being found dead in snow drifts.  The problem is more invisible.  Homes are not insulated well and people can’t afford to pay for the energy to keep them warm.

A group called Age UK estimates that “1.7 million older people in the UK can’t afford to heat their homes, and over a third (36%) of older people in the UK say they live mainly in one room to save money.”  People who are cold suffer more deaths from heart attacks and when they get the flu it often turns deadly.

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Newsweek just printed an article saying  that 30 million Americans in the 50-64 age bracket have no retirement savings at all. That’s half of all Americans nearing retirement. All they have is Social Security and as of July that averaged only $1,269 a month or $15,228 a year.

A reason for the lack of savings is the Great Recession.  Workers who lost jobs not only lost whatever the companies were giving them for retirement, but they dipped into their savings to get along.

So people who expect to retire at 65 will just have to stay in the job market longer.

Oops, just remembered that your odds of getting a job after 60 are about the same as the snowball in a pit of lava.

One the ideas the coal lords came up with to continue using their deadly fuel (deadly because of accidents, particles in air, climate effects of carbon) is to capture the carbon dioxide produced from the burning of the fuel and seal it deep underground.

We’ve talked about the problems with this notion in the past, the massive extra energy needed to capture the CO2, the uncertainty about whether CO2 gas under high pressure would be permanently sealed in the earth and whether the CO2 would create earthquakes. (for a recent article about that click here.)

But the Obama “All of the Above” Administration has plowed ahead with the carbon capture. A new coal plant is opening in DeKalb Mississippi that will capture all of its CO2. What could be more green? However the Associated Press has discovered that the “green vision proved too expensive and complicated”

So the government is letting the power companies sell the carbon dioxide to oil companies which pump it into old oil fields to force more crude to the surface.
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Dec. 9.  The latest reports are that the Republicans and Democrats are likely to make their first budget deal as early as this weekend.  The “Grand Bargain” that has been talked about for years is out and the sequester (automatic budget cuts) will go too.  The “Grand Bargain” was to be some tax increases on corporations and the rich in exchange for major cuts to Social Security and other social spending.  That’s off the table.

The Republicans realize their idea of shutting down the government to get their way got them only public anger and record low polling numbers.  More important they’re worried about another cut in their favorite welfare program, military spending, that would happen with round two of the sequester.  So the parties are putting together a budget with only very small cuts in a few programs.

However, the one thing that appears to be on the chopping block is extended unemployment benefits.  1,300,000 people will lose their benefits just after Christmas, immediately cut off.  The AFL-CIO figures the number will swell to 3 million by June.  The White House wants the benefits to continue, but it won’t make it a “must have” issue.

As we noted a few days ago with the somewhat good news on jobs in last Friday’s job report the clearly bad news was that the fix of people without jobs for a long time has not improved one bit.

Where are the unions and the civil rights groups?  Why aren’t there marches in the streets?

Dec. 6.  The government released its jobs numbers today.  E-pop, the number of those with jobs as a percent of the population, went back to 58.6% the same as it was two months ago (before the partial government shut-down).  It’s still far below the 63 and 64 per cent numbers before the Great Recession.  The “participation rate” went up a couple of clicks, also though it did not catch up to where it was in September.   The cartoonist Ted Rall did a fine cartoon about the decline in recent years of the participation rate.

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was essentially unchanged at 4.1 million in November.

E-pop for whites is 59.3.  E-pop for Blacks is 53.0.   For both blacks and whites the number is almost a half percent less than last year.

For what it’s worth the official unemployment rate for whites is 6.2%.  For blacks it’s 12.5%.  As I’ve said many times before I don’t think the “official” rate shows how bad unemployment is, but the fact that the black rate remains double the white rate is scandalous.  (and listen to a comment about that at blackagendareport.com)