Your daily dose of economic sunshine and smiles

Robert Reich is a Cal professor, former Harvard professor, a former Labor secretary, and all around expert on various economic and labor policies. He also comes in a handy pocket size. He brings you good news: our long national nightmare is over.... the rich are rich again and corporations are raking in money hand over fist. I'm sure that will trickle down to the rest of us any day now.

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.

So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong

He gives many reasons. Namely, they're using money to expand overseas operations not US ones, they invest money in labor saving technologies not payroll expanding ones, the money is also being used to pay out stock dividends, buy up stock, and inflate stock prices, spite, they'll totally get around to it but it slipped their mind, spite, Chinese work cheap, they totally would but American workers are untrustworthy, they got bailed out so they didn't have to hire back US workers, and spite.

He concludes that this is a long term trend and that big US corporations may never rehire large numbers of American workers. He calls it "the great decoupling of company profits from jobs." It doesn't have much of a ring to it, but it's more academic sounding than "It's hobo grade beans and cardboard boxes for life, you poor, poor bastards."

So in case you got it into your head that the increase in stability and cash flow for businesses meant that a recovery is just around the corner, don't hold your breath. It's a bounce back for them, not everyone else. They don't call it a jobless recovery for nothing. But let's just take some time out of being spiteful and not having jobs to be happy for them and the cheap Chinese workforce they've replaced everyone with. Don't be bitter, they've moved on and found someone else. We'll console each other on unrequited love in the soup lines.

Sobering list of economic facts of the day

Michael Snyder, he of the cheerily named The Economic Collapse Blog, has brought together a cheery list of economic facts for his recent article in Sunshine and Smiles monthly entitled The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove It.

Try not to slit your wrists until you finish it.

• 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
• 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.
• A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
• 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
• For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
• In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
• As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
• Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
• In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
• The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
• This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
• Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 - the highest rate in 20 years.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
• The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.

Remember: up the road, not across the street. That's right, let the red life juice flow into the warm bath.

Just something to keep in mind when our elected betters, media elites, and money overlords tell us that letting some of the Bush tax cuts expire and letting tax rates on the top 1% return to the levels they were during the late nineties will cause some sort of colossal moneygeddon. Excuse me, re-moneygeddon.

Your sunshine and smiles of the day

The Afghanistan NGO Security Office takes a look at our Afghanistan surge, how our new policies are working, what our chances for success are, and the general state of things in the graveyard of empires. They're glass half empty people.

The US military build-up in Kandahar is likely to further strengthen the hold of the Taliban over the vital southern Afghanistan city, a highly respected security organisation said today in a bleak report warning of record Taliban violence and rising civilian deaths across the country.

The report by the Afghanistan NGO Security Office, which monitors trends in violence on behalf of aid organisations, said Nato's counter-insurgency strategy was not showing any signs of succeeding amid rising violence, the unchecked establishment of local militias and a huge increase in attacks on private development workers across the country.
...
"We do not support the [counter-insurgency] perspective that this constitutes 'things getting worse before they get better', but rather see it as being consistent with the five-year trend of things just getting worse," the report said.

Come now, as long as we're able to get enough security forces and military trained up the we can have them take over the fight for us, we need to prop up the main and local governments to give them the support they need, our new strategies and counter-insurgency tactics need to be given time to work, we have to get the tribal leaders and people to understand that they have to come together to stand against the Taliban, know that we're in this for the long haul for the safety and security of Afghanistan as well as America, and other various statements, we'll get this thing won.

So buck up and don't listen to these naysayers, because this, and anything and everything that happens in Afghanistan, just shows that we're taking the fight to them and slowly turning the tide. As long as you don't note that we've been saying things like this for almost a full decade without any signs of discernible progress or an end in sight, then you can pretend that the end is just over that next insurgent infested mountainside.

So keep up with your naysaying, highly respected international observers and NGO's, this is all just part of a complex plan of success that smarty pants experts like you are completely unable to discern. Seriously, just as soon as we get those police, security, and military forces trained up, things will get better. I know that has turned into a sort of Escher painting where they're always being trained yet never finished training, but once we get that done, all these things that look like a slowly dawning failure will, in actuality, flip and become successes right at the end.

Just a couple more years, we just need a couple more years.

I like mine done medium-rare

What with loathed British shitbag Tony Hayward off to the Middle East to beg sheiks for bailout money in a way that doesn't result in him being made to wear a dress and join a harem, BP has been hurting for some really bad news that makes people hate them more. In fact, what with BP sponsoring our love of sky explosions and the baseball combined with this country's gnat-like attention span, the might even be inching their approval rating into that high teens Dick Cheney area.

So really, what's one thing they could do to really surprise and offend us in a new way so as to squander the good will they're getting as a result of spending about as much on PR as they are on the cleanup? Did I hear someone say "burn animals alive"? You know, ones bigger than the turtles? DING DING DING! Bonus points for the man in the back with the magnifying glass, ant-farm, and the sociopath's gaze.

They didn't even cook it right to get the diamond grill marks. Is there no corner they won't cut?

Now I know some of you are saying "How do we know this was BP's fault? How do we know that this whale didn't set itself on fire or swim into a controlled burn area on purpose in order to commit suicide, possibly over a whale romance gone bad?" Ok, valid points. To this I say what if BP set the whale on fire... because it knew too much!

But hell, maybe there is a valid scientific explanation that doesn't legally remonstrate BP for burning a giant sea creature. Science? Anyone from science want to present a plausible alternative theory? I know you're purposefully being kept away from this spill and your solutions are being ignored, so here's your chance to get in there and help.

What's that? A hypercarnivorous giant ancient whale shark that ate smaller whales, you say? I'm sure evolution could have had them develop some sort of rudimentary fire deployment system for cooking their food over the 12 million years since they last existed. Yes, that's clearly what happened here. A new giant species of super whale that's bears some sort of PR grudge against BP. I think we can close the books on this one. BP would never do this, they paid for fireworks one time.

Your daily dose of brightness and sunshine

With the 'top kill' efforts seeming to show some progress, people are starting to be optimistic about finally stopping all that oil from gushing into the Gulf. But make no mistake, the 'top kill' procedure is a measure of last resort, before they basically have to throw their hands up and say "any crackpots have some off the wall ideas out there"? And then we start talking about detonating nukes underwater. Seriously.

But if this doesn't work? Well... all the clamoring for President Obama to send in the military, take over, and so on isn't going to help. David Roberts of Grist explains.

The BP Gulf oil disaster is reaching an interesting phase. People's gut instinct, their first reaction, is to find someone to blame. They blame BP for negligence; the Obama administration for its tepid response; the Bush administration for lax regulatory enforcement. People have been casting about for some way to compartmentalize this thing, some way to cast it as an anomaly, an "accident," the kind of screwup that can be meliorated or avoided in the future.

We are, however, drifting toward a whole different kind of place. [Today] BP is attempting the "top kill" maneuver -- pumping mud into the well. If it doesn't work, well ... then what? Junk shot? Top hat? Loony stuff like nukes? Relief wells will take months to drill and no one's sure if they'll work to relieve pressure. It's entirely possible, even likely, that we're going to be stuck helplessly watching as this well spews oil into the Gulf for years. Even if the flow were stopped tomorrow, the damage to marshes, coral, and marine life is done. The Gulf of Mexico will become an ecological and economic dead zone. There's no real way to undo it, no matter who's in charge.

I'm curious to see how the public's mood shifts once it becomes clear that we are powerless in the face of this thing. What if there's just nothing we can do?

We'll know if there's nothing we can do by tomorrow. Feel better yet?

He goes on to make points about how we do this kind of irreversible damage to the Earth every day in the search and excavation of energy and wonders that if having that sort of catastrophe shoved in our face like this will make us reconsider how we go about things. Easy answer: we're Americans, it won't.

But there we are. The damage has been done already and all the yelling about Superman, big business, or the Government to come in and do something is moot. The 'top kill' move is pretty much it before we have to resign ourselves to a minimum of months of this well throwing oil into the ocean. So then what? Do we just keep bitching, like we always do, and keep trying to retroactively blame someone and take measures to close the barn door after the horses got out... and spilled oil everywhere? Or do me actually try to move forward as a society and actually, for once, try to make a commitment to transforming our energy needs into methods that don't contain a potential "colossal environmental disaster" scenario? I think you know what I think we'll do. But, I do like to be surprised.

Understatement of the day

Well, the effort to throw up a cap onto the underground oil leak has failed... is failing.... hasn't failed but will... let's just say it isn't going well. Why? Well there was an apparent buildup of of methane hydrates, a crystallized form of methane which has already been blamed for possibly causing the initial... you know what? I don't understand any of this. Magic. Magic is what caused the spill. Magic is what is preventing a fix. Magic. Also, possibly some sort of undersea rebellion/terrorism/Sea War by marine wildlife -perhaps led by Sebastien the sea crab- which I think you'll agree, also qualifies as magic.

Anyway, when confronted with this fact, a spokesman dropped this little bon mot about the capping efforts and laced it with all the optimism he possibly could.

When asked whether the dome effort had "failed," the BP official said, "I wouldn’t say it has failed, yet... but it hasn't worked."

Ooh, you can just feel the sunshine and smiles wafting off that statement. Gotta love that "yet".

So buck up, America. Sure, the one idea they had to cap the massive oil gush didn't work and the main PR guy for BP, sent out to make everyone feel better and cover BP's asses, basically dressed in an undertaker's outfit and started playing a funeral march for the Gulf/efforts to get us to a point where we'd just have to worry about cleaning up the biggest environmental disaster in human history. On the other hand... I'm sure something will be along shortly to distract our news media from having to focus on that.

Oh look, the new Supreme Court pick...