brainiac conspiracy

The Face of Recovery

This is what it looks like:

In all but two quarters since the beginning of 2011, “hair,” “eggs,” or “kidney” have been among the top four autofill results for the Google search query, “I want to sell my...,” according to Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at New York-based ConvergEx Group, which provides brokerage and trading-related services for institutional investors [...]

“The fact that people even explore it indicates that there are still a lot of people worried about their financial outlook,” said Colas, who tracks off-the-grid economic indicators. “This is very much unlike every other recovery that we’ve had. It’s going to be a slow-grinding, very frustrating recovery.”

This "slow-grinding recovery" has, of course, been entirely by design. It hasn't happened by accident but as a matter of public policy, and our lawmakers could end it any time they wished with some simple legislation that should have been enacted long ago. More troubling still is the very real probability that this problem is going to get much worse in the not-too-distant future, and that the next generation will add millions more impoverished Americans to the 50 million we already have. Really not good!

---Baron V

Housing is Expensive

Even after the decline in home prices, in most parts of the country, a house is beyond the means of many millions of people. And lots of communities, particularly in rural areas, have very few rental properties, so as an alternative, people end up living in mobile homes instead. They're a byproduct of the Great Depression, and the fact that so many Americans still live in them is an indicator that many Americans are living in poverty, or very close to it. (As an aside, I inherited one of these things a few years ago, and could be living in it today. I chose to sell it instead because the "home" was located in a senior-citizen park inhabited mostly by white people, and I much prefer to live in a neighborhood that has lots of younger people of varying ethnic backgrounds because they are generally less crazy and less racist than the elder whites; and because the neighborhood I live in now has museums and art galleries and all sorts of worthwhile attractions; my mobile home, by contrast, was situated in a particularly blighted outer-ring suburb where the weather is miserable for much of the year, and with no cultural attractions of note beyond the local strip club. It would be nice to own a home one day---I never have---but not just for the sake of owning one. Like the realtors say, it's all about location.)

---Baron V

One Way for Dealing With The Unemployment Crisis

Well, our own history teaches us that creating an acute shortage of labor, which drives up demand for labor and hence wages, is a time-honored method. Complications arise, however, on the way we proceed to create that shortage of labor. But it does work!

---Baron V

Leadership ≠ Crisis Management

Because smart leaders know how to avert a crisis before it happens:

Obama and others in the White House who support Summers were deeply impressed by his ability to navigate the financial crisis. Administration officials who endured the tumultuous crisis period---and many people who didn't---assume the next crisis is a matter of when, not if.

Which is shorthand for, they failed at their jobs. Because they saved a cancerous business sector that deserved to die, at the expense of impoverishing 250 million of their constituents for the better part of a decade. But there is no inevitability to financial crashes---they happen as a result of policy options that our elected leaders choose. Or, in this case, as a result of options they simply chose to ignore.

---Baron V

Give War Another Chance

Because freedom bombs are, as stated earlier, awesome. If only we could eat them:

Despite the explosion in food stamp enrollment, the percentage of American households experiencing food shortages remains stubbornly high, with so-called “insecure” families having 26 percent less for food than a typical “secure” household of the same size.

The survey data---covering 2012---was released Wednesday morning as part of the Agriculture Department’s annual report on household food security in the U.S. An estimated 14.5 percent of households were listed as food insecure---a number that’s consistent with findings since the economic downturn in 2008 but substantially higher than the decade beforehand.

---Baron V

The Rich Are Different

You wonder if having lots of money makes people lose all appreciation of its relative value:

Bribing toddlers can be counter-productive, according to Vanessa. Instead, the 28-year-old coaches her young charges how to play together---for $450 an hour. After all, play dates are no trivial matter. They can decide a child’s future.

Vanessa, who declines to give her last name, is one of a new breed of play date experts that help children prepare for admission to New York’s elite kindergartens. As part of the admission process to these schools that charge up to $40,000 a year, four-year-olds must attend a playgroup where they are tested by teachers for academic ability and their social and emotional IQ [...]

These New York children take a test at the age of four. The ERB---named after the Educational Records Bureau which administers it---determines if a child can get into the best private schools, such as Trinity which includes Lachlan Murdoch and Ivanka Trump among its alumni.

Say it again: $40,000 a year. For kindergarten. And if your name happens to be Murdoch or Trump, you can get your kid admitted, too. Welcome to the New American Meritocracy.

---Baron V

Nothing Has Changed

Except more people's unemployment benefits are running out, and they're dropping off the radar:

Peter Morici, an economist and professor at the Smith School of Business of the University of Maryland, sent out a research note titled "another disappointing jobs report" and said: "Overall, the jobs count may be up but for most working families and recent college graduates the situation is grim. Adding in discouraged adults and part-timers who want full-time employment, the unemployment rate becomes 14%."

Joseph Brusuelas of Bloomberg LP gave a similarly dire evaluation, saying that 5 million more men over the age of 20 were unemployed now than before the recession started in November 2007. He called this "the real crisis that is brewing deep inside the US labor market for men entering the peak earning years that will carry long-term implications for the overall social and economic well-being of the country".

Now, a hardened cynic---which your humble blogger certainly is not!---might suggest that this is a feature, not a bug, of our new economic order.But either way, it tends to suggest that the zero-sum, revenue-neutral, tax-cuts-for-corporations-in-exchange-for-infrastructure-banks legislative gambits so favored by Team Democrat are not going to bring our long-term unemployment crisis to an end. What will? A massive federal jobs program that blows a trillion-dollar hole in the budget deficit. Of course, this option can't even be considered because government needs to manage its money responsibly, just like American families do every month, etc., so millions of people will continue to suffer while the grown-ups in our political leadership class continue to deceive themselves by thinking that everything is fine and dandy in post-recession America. But for most people in this country, the recession hasn't ended.

---Baron V

Feedlots We Can Believe In

Sure glad I ate that grilled pork chop for my 4th of July dinner last night.

Less snarkily, you'd think that a government that can obtain a subpoena to trawl my phone and e-mail records would be able to obtain a subpoena to require industrial livestock producers to open up their facilities for scientific research. Since the nominal oversight agencies (USDA, FDA) have repeatedly proven their uselessness, perhaps someone at Health and Human Services would care to look at this? I mean, just think of the billions of dollars in health-care savings we'd reap every year if we simply cleaned up the food supply. It might even make health care more affordable without forcing people to jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops just to get coverage. But this makes entirely way too much sense, and that's why it'll never be done. But it should!

---Baron V

Light Friday Blogging

Because living in the Marxist dystopia is a lot of fun, but it takes money! So, back to work.

---Baron V

Like a Broken Record

It never ceases to amaze how the plucky members of our entrepreneur class manage to devise new and exciting wealth-creation strategies:

Companies that previously specialized in rent-to-own wheels are now shifting their business to provide low-income drivers with rent-to-own tires. Customers can pay as little as $14 per month for new rubber, but may wind up paying as much as four times the retail price by the time all's said and done [...]

[T]ire prices have increased dramatically in recent years---according to the story, trade publication Modern Tire Dealer says that the average price of a passenger car tire increased some 57 percent between 2006 and 2012. The boom in business is also being attributed to statistics that say that average household income has fallen by more than five percent since 2009, and the number of individuals with severely damaged credit has jumped to 35 percent since then [...]

Meanwhile, customers who miss payments can face aggressive lenders. Since the rent-to-own businesses technically own the property until the last payment is made, some states place failure to pay on the same level as theft, which can lead to police involvement.

But again, only an angry leftist blogger who's stuck in a radical '60s mindset would dare to insinuate that our God-given system of free enterprise relies on a surplus of poor people whose hardships can be leveraged to extract further profits. But, you know, it actually does.

---Baron V

Got an Easy Answer For That

Because they'd rather die while they still have something that they can leave to their families than be consigned to a retirement of sickness and destitution, that's why.

As mentioned earlier, we live in a social order that bestows huge rewards upon people who engage in destructive and exploitive behavior. We should not be surprised, then, to discover that many of our fellow countrymen feel that their lives and estates have been utterly destroyed because, in many cases, they have been, and that a quick and early exit from a world run by sadists and sociopaths is preferable to enduring another 20 to 30 years of hardship and austerity. From where your humble blogger sits, it's a tragic but otherwise unremarkable policy outcome, and frankly, simply expanding mental health services, while desirable, is not the ultimate antidote to it: providing a dignified retirement to people, with affordable housing and health care, is. You wanna prevent people from killing themselves, give them fewer reasons to do it. This really isn't difficult!

---Baron V

People Still Need Money

Because there aren't going to be enough jobs for them for a long, long time. Yet another reason why our central bank should stop swelling its balance sheet with junk and start mailing out checks to people instead. Just because we need to endure several more years of high unemployment does not---repeat, not---mean that the process has to inflict needless pain and suffering on people---and in fact, our economy would be healthier if it didn't.

---Baron V

Today's Worst Persons

Both of these persons.

Look, we are talking about $28,800 a year here, which in a city such as ours (average rent: $1,500/month) is not much money at all, though if your roommate/spouse makes an equivalent amount and you pool your resources, you can live more-or-less comfortably if not lavishly in most neighborhoods. But either way, $15 an hour is not the least bit unreasonable. If anything, it should be considered a baseline, and these so-called liberal Democrats should be embracing it, not running away from it.

---Baron V

Organ Failure We Can Believe In

The Great Society is, for all practical purposes, dead, along with the New Deal and the Progressive Era. Those of us on the Professional Left simply don't want to acknowledge it:

In interviews, more than two dozen USDA inspectors and poultry industry employees described a range of ailments they attributed to chemical exposure, including asthma and other severe respiratory problems, burns, rashes, irritated eyes and sinus ulcers and other sinus problems [...]

While federal officials say the enhanced use of chemicals can promote public health by fighting such contaminants as salmonella, government agencies have not conducted independent research into the possible side effects on consumers of using the chemicals. Instead, they review data provided by chemical manufacturers.

Nor has the USDA studied the effects of the chemicals on its inspectors or private employees. USDA officials said that research into worker safety is a job for other agencies. But no industry-wide study has been done by the government, and it does not keep a comprehensive record of illnesses possibly caused by the use of chemicals in the poultry industry.

Inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at poultry plants show that at least five facilities had problems with chemicals during the past three years, according to agency documents. The most common citations were for failing to properly label hazardous chemicals, failing to train employees on how to handle the chemicals and a failure to have monitoring equipment in place that would detect when chemicals, such as ammonia, reach toxic levels in a plant.

At the poultry plant where Navarro worked, company officials rejected the notion that chemicals killed him.

During the investigation at the plant, inspectors and plant workers offered a raft of complaints. They said they suffered from irritation to their respiratory system, two reported “coughing up blood,” and still others had “various skin diseases,” an OSHA report said.

The OSHA report cited chemicals as the suspected cause of the workers’ ailments.

If the White House signs off on the USDA’s proposed regulations as expected, poultry plants could speed up their slaughter lines later this year. The maximum speed for chickens would increase from 140 birds per minute to 175 birds per minute, for turkeys 45 to 55 per minute. Workers, who already often complain of carpal tunnel and other musculoskeletal disorders, will have to pluck, chop and sort birds even faster.

At the same time, the new regulations would reduce the number of federal health inspectors in the plants by as much as 40 percent.

The proposed rules grow out of a USDA pilot program, begun more than a decade ago, aimed at boosting the efficiency of poultry plants, reducing pathogens and transferring inspection responsibilities to private companies. There are financial incentives for both the USDA and the industry: The agency expects to save $90 million during the next three years from the staff reductions, and poultry plants could save more than $200 million annually.

The combination of faster processing and fewer government eyeballs means that companies will increasingly rely on chemicals to keep the poultry free of contaminants, according to interviews with six current and former USDA inspectors who have worked in a range of plants around the country where slaughter line speeds have accelerated.

“They don’t talk about it publicly, but the line speeds are so fast, they are not spotting contamination, like fecal matter, as the birds pass by,” said Phyllis McKelvey, who worked as a USDA poultry inspector for 14 years until she retired in 2010. “Their attitude is, let the chemicals do the work.” (Emphases added.)

There's also the nagging little question of what effect these chemicals could have on people who might actually eat the chicken since

Peracetic acid can damage most internal organs, including the heart, lungs and liver, the data sheets show.

At least we can rest assured knowing that

The USDA has not conducted research into possible health risks that chemical treatments could pose for consumers of the poultry products but instead says it relies on the chemical review and approval process of the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA, for its part, does not conduct its own research but examines data provided by the chemical manufacturers.

Absent regime change, I think I just ran out of reasons to keep supporting Team Democrat. If anyone's drawn up on online impeachment petition, I'll be more than happy to sign it. This shit has simply got to stop, and if the current Corporatist-in-Chief won't do it, maybe President Biden will. It's worth a try at this point!

---Baron V

Home Cooking II

As mentioned the other day, home cooking is a worthwhile endeavor, and besides providing nutrition and sustenance, it can be therapeutic and relaxing. Cooking should never be stressful either way---it should be something that you genuinely love to do with friends and family. But you'll never convince people to take up the routine if cooking becomes a game of Russian roulette:

• The federal tests published in February determined that 9 percent of raw chicken samples and 10 percent of raw ground turkey sampled from retail supermarkets in 2011 were tainted with a superbug version of salmonella bacteria. Antibiotic resistance in salmonella is growing fast: of all salmonella microbes found on raw chicken sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, compared to less than 50 percent in 2002. These microbes, frequently found on chicken and turkey and occasionally on beef and pork, commonly cause diarrhea and in extreme cases can lead to arthritis.

• In the same federal tests, a superbug version of the Campylobacter jejuni microbe was detected on 26 percent of raw chicken pieces. Raw turkey samples contained numerically fewer of these microbes, but 100 percent of those examined were antibiotic-resistant. The Campylobacter jejuni pathogen is a common cause of diarrhea and in severe cases can trigger an autoimmune disease that results in paralysis and requires intensive care treatment.

• In 2006 FDA scientists found superbug versions of a particularly troublesome strain of E. coli, responsible for more than 6 million infections a year in the U.S., on 16 percent of ground turkey and 13 percent of chicken. Fully 84 percent of the E. coli bacteria identified in these tests were resistant to antibiotics.

• In its own tests of raw pork, published last January, Consumer Reports magazine found that 63 percent contained a superbug version of Yersinia enterocolitica, a microbe that can cause long-lasting bouts of diarrhea.

• In 2011 tests, researchers at Northern Arizona University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute found that 74 percent of store-bought raw turkey samples were tainted with Staphylococcus aureus bacteria resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of these staph bacteria, 79 percent were resistant to three or more types of antibiotics. Staph can cause skin infections in exposed cuts or produce toxins that cause foodborne illness.

Considering how much concern our political leaders have expressed over the threat posed by rising health-care costs, you'd think they would have done something about this by now since food-borne illnesses really drive up health-care costs. How much? This much.

---Baron V

Wild Guess

In the future, this kind of arrangement will be much more commonplace:

With the cost of living on the rise and showing no sign of slowing down, total strangers desperate to save money are moving in together [...]

Two million Americans over the age of 30 now live with a housemate or roommate, and shared households make up 18 percent of U.S. households---a 17 percent increase since 2007.

And now that they've had to pool their resources in their late middle age (go watch the video; couldn't embed it here) to avoid lives of utter destitution, let's make sure they have less money to pay their utility bills for the last 20 years of their lives. And dock 'em extra for their health care, too, the greedy farts.

Okay, okay, it's just maddening to see abundant signs every day that our economy is extremely fragile and that millions of our fellow citizens are only a paycheck or two away from lives of poverty and desperation, and yet our political leadership class persists in doing everything it can to make the problem worse while insisting that their policies will yield inverse outcomes. What terrible things did we ever do to deserve them?

---Baron V

Spreading The Love Around

Sure was a smart move cutting that budget deal to get the debt ceiling off the table:

A new CNN poll finds that the effects of the sequester are increasingly being felt around the country, with four in 10 Americans saying the cuts had greatly or somewhat affected them personally.

Lower income and rural Americans are more likely to report sequester-related pain.

“More than half of Americans who make less than $50,000 a year say that the forced spending cuts have affected their personal finances, compared to only about a third of those with higher incomes,” said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Of course, they cut that deal with the crazy people on the assumption that the crazy people wouldn't really be so crazy as to let the economy slide back into recession even though it was obvious that the crazy people didn't care. Kinda like how they're trying to cut a deal with the crazy people now on the assumption that the crazy people wouldn't really be so crazy as to voucherize Medicare and turn Social Security into a hedge fund, even though the crazy people have repeatedly said that's exactly what they want. Good luck in 2014!

---Baron V

Bipartisan Consensus

Give the President credit. He's proven it's possible to achieve:

The AARP reveals that 70 percent of voters age 50-plus oppose the use of the chained CPI to cut benefits, and two-thirds of them---including 60 percent of Republicans---say they would be “considerably less likely” to support a congressional candidate if he or she backed a new way of calculating consumer prices. And 84 percent of voters over 50 say Social Security has no place in budget-deficit discussions, since it is self-financed.

On every single question, Republicans lag only a point or two behind Democrats in their opposition to Social Security cuts.

I'll never understand how the White House policy shop operates, deliberately floating bad ideas that people loathe while simultaneously disowning them. The serious persons may have their own ideas, but people in this country, by and large, only care about deficits in the abstract, and their love of deficit reduction stops the minute their jobs are affected and their social-insurance payments cut. Besides, we had an election only four months ago, when voters were offered two distinct visions of the nation's future---which, typically, is a trademark of our two-party political system---and a Grand Bargain wasn't one of them.

So here's a practical bit of advice: stop forcing Team Democrat to defend policy proposals that voters despise, and start championing proposals that voters agree with, like raising taxes on rich people to pay for infrastructure improvements. It's not only smart politics, but it's also smart policy since more people going back to work = more tax revenue for the government = the deficit shrinks on its own. What a novel idea!

---Baron V

Market-Based Solutions

Perhaps our rulers would consider printing some money and using it to start up a drug-manufacturing business that hired lots of people because our job creators in the private sector, well, aren't:

The manufacture of many of the generic, everyday drugs used in hospitals is dominated by two companies with major production issues, said Erin Fox, manager of the Drug Information Service at University of Utah Hospital & Clinics.

The number of individual drugs in an active shortage is at 323 nationally, an all-time high since Utah began compiling a U.S. database in 2001, Fox said.

"It's mind-boggling there's not another source for these products," said Fox, a doctor of pharmacy. "Do we have drug companies that are too big to fail? But they are failing."

Aren't you glad we made sure these stakeholders had a place at the table?

In the end, it doesn't really matter if they can't keep up with increased demand because they're understaffed or they're simply manipulating the supply to artificially jack up prices. They're not making these drugs in sufficient quantity because it is more profitable for them to, uh, "ration" these drugs instead of flooding the market with them. And this is why relying on current market-based delivery methods to "reform" the health-care sector or the banking sector or any other sector of the economy is doomed to failure: because the dominant business model of the modern-day corporation---returning dividends for shareholders, even if millions of people get sick and die because of it---is fundamentally broken. How to fix? Try taxing dividends at 95 percent, and I am guessing we'll see changes in the way they do business.

---Baron V

Better Than Funemployment

You remember funemployment, no? It was a thing a few years ago when young people discovered that being jobless and desitute wasn't so bad after all because freedom. Now they've stumbled upon something even more awesome---the responsibilities of a job and the liberating effects of destitution:

Journalist Hannah Seligson interviewed several young college graduates in Washington, D.C. and discovered that more and more grads have become “permaterns”---serial interns who are usually in their twenties. Kate, a 25-year-old Ivy League school grad, told Seligson that she’s had three unpaid internships since moving to DC and pays her bills by working as a restaurant hostess three or four nights a week. Kate’s story has become the new norm, Seligson says in an interview with The Daily Ticker.

“Interns have replaced the entry level employee,” she says. The millennial generation "was hardest hit by the recession. Young people are taking internships because they can't find a full-time job.”

---Baron V