http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2010/05/economic-recovery-prasad
http://www.nationalmemo.com/global-index-praises-us-as-sole-bright-spot-in-s luggish-world-economy/ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/8aa7df4e-b6c9-11e1-8c96-00144feabdc0.html#axz z28oSAZddB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) http://blog.euromonitor.com/2010/07/special-report-top-10-largest-economies- in-2020.html So the US economy is doing better than all of those economies following the neo-classical economic formulas. Is the Financial Times a Liberal paper? Brookings can be considered to the left of center and Joe Conason is a liberal. Still figures are figures. See the URLs. What is funny is that the business world continues to deny that China is Communist. Soon, according to euromonitor, the world's largest economy will be Communist with a mixed private sector regulated and run by Communists. They will get by us by being quiet and doing business with us and providing our largest market and funding our loans. But they ARE communist just as the Soviet Union was. They are just more subtle than the heavy handed Russians were and they have an older culture that accommodates many cultures for millennia within their union. But it seems to be true that we are doing better than the countries of Europe unless they get together and become a United States of Europe (like us and China in Asia) in which case they will be the world's largest economy and potential power. America under the hegemony of business people and the private market could be drained by the private sector in the military alone. Since Bush privatized all but the fighting, and some of that as well, we spend more on the military than all of the other militaries in the world combined including China. Now we have private prisons where it is profitable to have recidivism and private hospitals where the only way they can make a profit is to have outrageous fees or to make you sick and have to come back. For profit schools need tracking based on economic circumstances in order to prosper. We got a whiff of the future of untrammeled Evangelical market based religion when the Comptroller General of Texas removed the Unitarian Universalists, one of the oldest American Religions and the Founder of Harvard Divinity School from the Not for Profit groups covered under the first amendment to the Constitution. He called them a cult who did not believe in God and removed their religious exemption. http://www.religionnewsblog.com/7303/texas-official-says-unitarian-church-no t-a-tax-exempt-religion That was during the Bush GOP administration I'm not sure whether he succeeded but American Indians have been here before. The same group of Evangelical and Ecclesiasticals declared our religions crimes under the American Indian Religious Crimes Codes in 1883 and that stood until Congress revoked it in the American Indian Freedom of Religion Act of 1978. Now they have become an epigene on the stone of the Private Market declaring that the market follows their God's will and that it is the only holy economic system. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-20818933.html Every Sunday you can hear their Priests and Preachers preaching the religion of neo-classical economics from the pulpits across the country. The GOP even put up GOP voter registration booths in Baptist Churches across Oklahoma during the Reagan Administration. My father was appalled and told me about it. Now it's not unusual. Note the recent voter registration scandal by GOP registrars representing themselves as government employees just a couple of weeks ago. Private sectors have their purposes but when they are allowed to be as Laissez Faire as they are at present, they are like African Termites or Amazon Soldier Ants. They will devour everything in their way. Without a government referee they are too undisciplined and predatory to be of use to any society. Note the slipperiness of the GOP in the case of even how they define mega and mini systems in business. Donald Trump is a small business? Small systems and large systems require different management but if you don't know the difference how can you develop a generic model that settles down, is predictable and can foster a balanced growth. You end up needing heroes or very good connections just to survive, forget thriving. Some will say that Progressives are just as bad. Some of this is just politics but what's new is companies saying that if they are loyal to any government except company management they are bad businessmen. That's new. Take what you can from your neighbor and loyalty be damned. The head of Exxon even called that "being patriotic." I would have never joined the Army had I considered his opinion patriotic. Hell, I would have moved to some other country if that was American Patriotism. There are a lot easier places to make a living in the Arts and to survive as an Elder than the U.S. I wouldn't have given, and continue to give, all of those art scholarships to America for American Culture if he was "American Culture." I wouldn't have gone into $100,000 or credit card debt, only now paid for from my teaching, to give the American Masters Arts Festival for Ned Rorem. In fact I would encouraged Ned to become French, if I had known that the current business "Patriotism" was "American." As was tweeted on this list. I love the Obama the Republican hate. The problem is that there isn't enough of him in this President. But the alternative is grotesque. However, the figures above seem to point to Obama being on the right path and that it takes as least as many years to get out of a mess as it did for George Bush/Carl Rove and his rightwing machine to deconstruct the Democratic Economy. It is said that Clinton used Republican ideas and programs and that's true in some cases but he used them supplemented with programs that gave people a way to train and protect themselves from the brute and bully consequences of the predatory private sector he was stimulating. If you're going to have Buffalo you had better be able to get out of their way. Clinton devised programs that trained the poor and helped them get to work. He did that with Republican cooperation but they were not the same as the GOP Neanderthals today. Those programs included programs for people being dropped from welfare. The GOP is slowly dismantling those programs such as Americorps. He also put in more police while the GOP's alternative is everyone carry a gun. Unfortunately the GOP likes the Reagan solution for the old Soviet Union. Do little about that Nuclear Arsenal. Just beat them and then walk away. "Tag you're IT. NEXT!" What if we had done that to Europe after WWII? The private answer was the totally wrong answer and now we have a hostile Russia once again raising its head and Germany, which created the death of 100 million people in two wars is now our friend. Is the Cold War going to be only the prelude to the war that murders the planet? Are we outdoing the Germans with world wars I and II because we are just lousy at Reconciliation? Reconciliation is the Domain of Religion. If our countries are warmongering our religions are profane. Thus far, it isn't perfect by any means, but the Democratic answers as practiced by Barak Obama , not neo-classic Republican utilitarian answers, are the only hope for Reconciliation. When they had him a handfull of feces like a little child, he says: "Maybe we can fertilize the crops" and they say "NO! and we are going to GET YOU!" If what the GOP says about Affirmative Action and Obama's culture is true that I would add that it seems all the white folks have moved on or regressed back to an earlier time. A time that only existed in Westerns from Hollywood peopled by actors who got out of going to war. Like the current Supreme Court. We'll see what happens with this little cellist who claims that she didn't get into the University of Texas and had to go to school with the Cajuns of Louisiana because she is white. Remember "White" is a very slippery term according to race. What she really means is that she is a particular regional European culture that doesn't consider it to be "of color." I have no idea which one. She looks Irish but looks are deceiving. Elizabeth Warren's a Cherokee woman. You can tell that by her intelligence, her discipline and her actions. Those are the traits of all of the Cherokee women I've known and that is recorded in history. People learned not to fool around with them. The Europeans who have a similar reputation are the Serbs and the Slovenians. No Axis soldier wanted to fall into the hands Yugoslav women. Frankly as culturally confused as society and the left wing is at the moment, I would be tempted to agree the right on this one. Just as, if I accepted the premises of any group around the infallibility of their English Bible I wouldn't believe them to be nuts. The issue here is context and context always sets up how you view content and the process you will follow. The premise is that we are diverse and Universities want to follow diversity. Race is a slippery diversity because for so long one drop of African, American Indian or Asian was an excuse NOT to admit. Better they should understand the problem of Sopranos. There are literally many times the number of sopranos as any other voice part. It's unfair that those tenors have it so easy. And yet the definition of Art is that you don't downsize for economic or reasons of fairness. It is all about context: What instrument or voice part you sing, content: What the composer wrote for and process: Do you have the money to do the Art? In this case, do we have the honor, duty and discipline to have a society that follows the dictates of the Constitution and the demands of quality. The biggest group is going to have the biggest default base just as if more people played the flute. She plays the cello which is more rare and more likely got her more available scholarships if she's any good. One Institution turned her down. In the Arts that happens all the time. If she cries all the way the Supreme Court she's going to have one hell of problem with the people who hire her in the Arts. In fact they probably have already stereotyped her and won't even give her an audition. Artists have to be tougher than that. REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ray Harrell Sent: Monday, October 08, 2012 8:49 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Slugger Krugman hits it out of the Park again. I find it strange that conservatives trash Professor Krugman but struggle to get their kids into his school. I knew these current conservatives. They are as young as my schooling at Manhattan School of Music when I used to study with some of them and sing at their parties until they learned that my background thought their parochialism was dumb. Then I was persona non grata. But I was there enough to understand them and how dangerous they were. William Buckley, Sam Lipman, Hilton Kramer and the boys at their parties who would become conservative columnists for the NYTimes and editors at the National Review. What a young bunch of Pusherke's they were. Hot for attention and on the make for bucks. Anyway, I'm sick of the Drudges, the Darkbarts and Drones personified by the right wing and their candidate. Obama's not perfect but does anyone believe that a Republican would have brought us back from eight years of catastrophe, war crimes and dumb programs in four years? Not even a Sam Rayburn could have done that. I have no doubt that Hubert Humphrey would have saved us from the embarrassment of the Vietnam withdrawal the Nixon budget and Watergate but what is a real Democrat like their used to be in Oklahoma. Obama should get at least as much time to get us out as the Republicans got to get us in, before we have to endure another Republican raid on the treasury. REH <http://www.nytimes.com/> The New York Times October 7, 2012 Truth About Jobs By PAUL KRUGMAN If anyone had doubts about the madness that has spread through a large part of the American political spectrum, the reaction to Friday's better-than expected report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics should have settled the issue. For the immediate <http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2012/10/unemployment-plummets-78/57 640/> response of many on the right - and we're not just talking fringe figures - was to cry conspiracy. Leading the charge of what were quickly dubbed the "B.L.S. truthers" was none other than Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who posted an assertion on Twitter that the books had been cooked to help President Obama's re-election campaign. His claim was quickly picked up by right-wing pundits and media personalities. It was nonsense, of course. Job numbers are prepared by professional civil servants, at an agency that currently has <http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/explaining-the-big-gain-in-job -getters/?hp> no political appointees. But then maybe Mr. Welch - under whose leadership G.E. reported remarkably smooth earnings growth, with <http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/10/ges-jack-welch-on-bls-book-cooking/> none of the short-term fluctuations you might have expected (fluctuations that reappeared under his successor) - doesn't know how hard it would be to cook the jobs data. Furthermore, the methods the bureau uses are public - and anyone familiar with the data understands that they are "noisy," that especially good (or bad) months will be reported now and then as a simple consequence of statistical randomness. And that in turn means that you shouldn't put much weight on any one month's report. In that case, however, what is the somewhat longer-term trend? Is the U.S. employment picture getting better? Yes, it is. Some background: the monthly employment report is based on two surveys. One asks a random sample of employers how many people are on their payroll. The other asks a random sample of households whether their members are working or looking for work. And if you look at the trend over the past year or so, both surveys suggest a labor market that is gradually on the mend, with job creation consistently exceeding growth in the working-age population. On the employer side, the current numbers say that over the past year the economy added 150,000 jobs a month, and revisions will probably push that number up significantly. That's well above the 90,000 or so added jobs per month that we need to keep up with population. (This number used to be higher, but underlying work force growth has dropped off sharply now that many baby boomers are reaching retirement age.) Meanwhile, the household survey produces estimates of both the number of Americans employed and the number unemployed, defined as people who are seeking work but don't currently have a job. The eye-popping number from Friday's report was a sudden drop in the unemployment rate to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent, but as I said, you shouldn't put too much emphasis on one month's number. The more important point is that unemployment has been on a sustained downward trend. But isn't that just because people have given up looking for work, and hence no longer count as unemployed? Actually, no. It's true that the employment-population ratio - the percentage of adults with jobs - has been more or less flat for the past year. But remember those aging baby boomers: the fraction of American adults who are in their prime working years is falling fast. Once you take the effects of an aging population into account, the numbers show a substantial improvement in the employment picture since the summer of 2011. None of this should be taken to imply that the situation is good, or to deny that we should be doing better - a shortfall largely due to the scorched-earth tactics of Republicans, who have blocked any and all efforts to accelerate the pace of recovery. (If the American Jobs Act, proposed by the Obama administration last year, had been passed, the unemployment rate would probably be below 7 percent.) The U.S. economy is still far short of where it should be, and the job market has a long way to go before it makes up the ground lost in the Great Recession. But the employment data do suggest an economy that is slowly healing, an economy in which declining consumer debt burdens and a housing revival have finally put us on the road back to full employment. And that's the truth that the right can't handle. The furor over Friday's report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation's long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality - whether that reality involves polls or economic data - not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories. It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.
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