Yes, Something's Changed

This will be the lead article through Monday. New content, if any, will be below.

Image credit: Emilian Robert Vicor/Flickr

I'm trying out a new template for the blog. The old one wasn't doing any number of things properly, and I was tired of trying to figure out why things weren't working.

It's quite likely this won't be the end of the changes, but it's a step in a better direction.

Let me know in comments or via e-mail if something isn't working for you.

UPDATE (Oct. 15): I've changed the CSS so that blockquotes and tables are set off with slightly different background colors.

Now that the "share this" widget appears at the bottom of articles like it's supposed to, I've removed the "Twitterize Me" widget along the side. Thanks for using it, and now you have even more ways to let the world know about all the fabulous stuff you've found here. ;)

Hopefully, that's all the changes...

Quote Of The Day

From theflamingmaiden, writing about her experience occupying Louisville today:

As a small business owner, I need affordable healthcare, food, gas, and housing so I can keep my job and do cool things like feed my kid.

Occupy Wall Street Running Smoothly in Louisville

It's the caption that does it for me.

Personally, I like being able to heat my place and eat. But one of the prices of freedom is having to figure out what we do with our disposable income.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Mark M./Occupy Together

Economist Nouriel Roubini is sounding an awful lot like David Frum today in an essay published at Al Jazeera:

[T]he rise of the social-welfare state was a response (often of market-oriented liberal democracies) to the threat of popular revolutions, socialism, and communism as the frequency and severity of economic and financial crises increased. Three decades of relative social and economic stability then ensued, from the late 1940’s until the mid-1970’s, a period when inequality fell sharply and median incomes grew rapidly.

Some of the lessons about the need for prudential regulation of the financial system were lost in the Reagan-Thatcher era, when the appetite for massive deregulation was created in part by the flaws in Europe’s social-welfare model. Those flaws were reflected in yawning fiscal deficits, regulatory overkill, and a lack of economic dynamism that led to sclerotic growth then and the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis now.

But the laissez-faire Anglo-Saxon model has also now failed miserably. To stabilise market-oriented economies requires a return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods. That means moving away from both the Anglo-Saxon model of unregulated markets and the continental European model of deficit-driven welfare states. Even an alternative “Asian” growth model - if there really is one - has not prevented a rise in inequality in China, India, and elsewhere.

The Instability Of Inequality

Or, he's sounding a lot like me when I talk about the free market fairy. Take your pick.

Anyone who thinks that markets are going to work to the betterment of people in them all the time is not only mistaken, but clearly has chosen to ignore much of modern history. As Roubini suggests when he discusses the "flaws in Europe's social-welfare model", government involvement isn't always a good thing, either, but a truly enlightened society will use its government to keep its markets working the way they should, and make up for the situations when they clearly can't.

Quote Of The Day

Guess where this quote comes from:

[I]n politics and public policy there are better and worse answers. There are things that work and things that don't work. Right now we're watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We've seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector -- especially at the state and local level. But we're seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse. And even though we're in a technical recovery, incomes and employment -- all of that remains lagging for people -- I think that we've rediscovered in this crisis something that I think we all knew. Which is, there's a reason why the people of the 1930s built some kind of minimum guarantee -- unemployment insurance, health care coverage and things like that. And it's not because they wanted to be nice. It's because in a crisis when people lose their jobs, if there is no social safety net they loose 100 percent of their purchasing power.

NPR Marketplace Interview

Who was that raving liberal? Paul Krugman? Dean Baker? Oh, wait it's NPR's Marketplace, that means it must be Robert Reich, right?

Wrong. This is David Frum, Robert Reich's right-wing opponent on Marketplace, or I should say is erstwhile opponent. That interview is his announcement that he can no longer represent the Republican Party in these broadcasts.

At first, I was mystified as to why he can't continue, even though he clearly doesn't agree with the GOP's current prescription for the economy. I can't blame him there, because it's batshit insane. It's also President Obama's strategy, though, which ought to give him some room to argue. His erstwhile counterpoint doesn't understand, either:

I don’t feel any obligation to represent liberal Democrats. Over the years I’ve argued, for example, in favor of getting rid of the corporate income tax, creating school vouchers inversely related to family incomes, and extending free-trade agreements — positions not exactly favored by liberal Democrats.

The American public doesn’t want or need to hear “representatives” from the so-called right or left. It wants insight into what’s best for America.

The Triumph Of Dogma

Beside the idea that cutting corporate income taxes is a good idea, there's another idea in this quote that I take exception to: While I want to hear insights about what's best for America (or whoever the subject is), I can't remember having heard that on the news analysis programs I've watched lately. At least, if you look at something like This Week, Meet The Press, Face The Nation, or even The News Hour, what you are treated to almost entirely are the talking points of one party or the other. It's a rare day when there's actual analysis about what's best for our society in those discussions.

So, I'm glad that David Frum is smart enough to realize that more bleeding isn't going cure this gushing head wound of an economy, but I can sort of understand his lack of interest in discussing it on the radio.

I'd rather he gave it a try, though.

Dennis Ritchie: RIP

Caption: C language source code - Dennis Ritchie's gift to the world. This particular bit is part of the Linux operating system.

Image credit: Screenshot by Cujo359


The other day, I left a comment at another site regarding Steve Jobs' death, pointing out that, while Jobs certainly helped popularize the computer, he didn't "democratize" it. What he did, in fact, was the opposite - closing the technology of Apple products, so that only a small oligarchy could determine its direction.

In rebutting this idea, I mentioned some of the people who have worked to make computer technology more open and available, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee, Richard Stallman, and Eric Raymond being the ones I can remember. Sadly, there was at least one giant omission from that list:

Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died aged 70.

While the introduction of Intel's 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability.

Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and C, dies

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Joel Gehman/Occupy Together

Ian Welsh is often good for a quote of the day, a thought that sums up some subject remarkably well in few words. A comment of his yesterday at his own blog is a case in point. Discussing how the Wall Street elite have been handling the Occupy Wall Street protests so far, he wrote:

I find the way the elites are acting incredibly stupid. If I were them and didn’t want fundamental changes, I’d pat the protestors on the head, tell the cops to be nice to them, and even go say sympathetic things to them. Smile, nod, be supportive of the encampments themselves, but don’t make any changes to how business is actually done. Let winter and disillusionment deal with them. Give them nothing to rally against.

They are incompetent even at this.

I see the police are providing an education (comment)

Arrogance makes you stupid, and I suspect this is the case here. Not too long ago, their peer among Presidential candidates, Herman Cain, had this to say about the 99 percent of us who aren't rich:

The Tea Party favorite then argued that the plight of the unemployed was their own fault.

"Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed," the ex-Godfather's Pizza CEO declared.

Herman Cain to Occupy Wall Street protesters: If you're not rich 'blame yourself'

How much of an arrogant jackass do you have to be to not recognize how much good fortune has to do with whether you're rich or not? If nothing else, all those signs about "the other 99%" should be a clue. Being rich is a rare thing, and there are many reasons. You have to win the genetic lottery, for starters - be given enough brainpower and good health to be able to achieve your ambitions. You have to live in a stable society, at least assuming you're not a sociopath. And you have to be able to get enough support from those around you to at least get started.

Caption: A rich kid who gets it. If there were more like her, we wouldn't need protests.

Image credit: Buzz Feed


Yet Herman Cain, and the arrogant clowns like him who are running Wall Street these days, seem to think that there's no such thing as not being smart enough, not being able to stay healthy, or not being able to catch a break when you need it.

So, yes, while I agree with Ian's assessment of what they should do, they're so arrogant that I'd be very surprised if they ever did. They just don't seem to be able to get over themselves.


(h/t Joyce Arnold for that Buzz Feed photo)

How Ignorant Do You Have To Be?

Caption: The American Revolution, as envisioned by Rick Perry.

Image credit: Walter Lantz

Wow. I thought after the last Republican primary things couldn't get any worse for that party's presidential candidates. I was wrong:

[Texas Governor Rick] Perry, a favorite of tea party Republicans, replied, “Our Founding Fathers never meant for Washington, D.C., to be the fount of all wisdom. As a matter of fact, they were very much afraid of that because they’d just had this experience with this far-away government that had centralized thought process and planning and what have you, and then it was actually the reason that we fought the Revolution in the 16th century, was to get away from that kind of onerous crown if you will.”

Tea Party Favorite Perry Gets Revolution Date Wrong

This isn't just nitpicking. He didn't say it was 1776, when Concord, Bunker Hill, and all the early battles in Massachusetts happened in 1775. Nor is this a case of saying "17th Century" because the Revolution happened in the 1700s. By any reasonable criterion, he's off by more than a century. Columbus didn't reach the Western Hemisphere until the end of the 15th Century (1492). The 16th Century was when the Spaniards set about stealing all the gold they could from the locals.

It wasn't until the 17th Century, the 1600s, that the first English and Dutch settlements were founded, which were the first efforts by Europeans to settle what became the original thirteen colonies. The American Revolution was still more than a century and a half away.

This isn't Perry's first time being on the wrong side of reality. Like the idiots of 2007, he doesn't "believe" in evolution. He's the one who implored his state to pray for rain when droughts brought fires to much of Texas, when he had not long before cut funding for fire fighting. Which, one would have to think, was due to the fact that he doesn't "believe" in climate change, either.

Rick Perry is the answer to the question "How ignorant do you have to be to be the Tea Party's favorite?" The answer is not very flattering to either Perry or the party.

Cartoon Of The Day

The curve isn't quite so steep in my case, but it goes in the same general direction:




Image credit: xkcd

If you're not sure what this is about, perhaps this Wikipedia article can shed some light.

Quote Of The Day

Image credit: Rayna Daine/Occupy Together

After starting out much as I did, noting that there seems to be no end of people willing to criticize the Occupy Wall Street movement for not making specific policy demands, The New York Times editorial concludes:

It is not the job of the protesters to draft legislation. That’s the job of the nation’s leaders, and if they had been doing it all along there might not be a need for these marches and rallies. Because they have not, the public airing of grievances is a legitimate and important end in itself. It is also the first line of defense against a return to the Wall Street ways that plunged the nation into an economic crisis from which it has yet to emerge.

Protesters Against Wall Street

That's the problem in a nutshell. Why in the world should these people come up with policy demands? They want jobs, a safety net, decent schools, and no doubt other things that a just and honorable society would provide already. They're protesting at the place that is the center of everything that is preventing that from happening. There's really no other message necessary, provided you're not motivated to believe otherwise.

September's Job Numbers

Image credit: Clipped from this U.K. Guardian photo by Cujo359

There's not much to say that hasn't been said already. The basic problem, as has been true for all but a couple months of the Obama Administration, is that job growth has not even kept pace with the increase in the available supply of labor. Hugh put the bottom line pretty well over at Corrente:

In conclusion, 30 million is the number this month and it doesn't appear in the jobs report. 30 million Americans is a lot of Americans. It is a lot of families, a lot of hopes and dreams. The Republicans don't care at all. Neither do Obama and the Democrats. Even by Obama's own best case scenario, his jobs plan would create 1.9 million jobs (lasting about a year). The truth is the way his package is structured he would be lucky to create one million, but most of the plan is just an election campaign gesture. It is not meant to be enacted but to provide campaign talkingpoints. But even if it were, 1.9 million temporary jobs would, after taking into account population growth, improve the U-3 unemployment rate by maybe 0.4%. Take my estimate of one million jobs and it would not cover population growth and have no positive effect on the U-3 rate at all. And this is the response of our political Establishment to a problem whose size they say is 14 million. Only it is more than twice that big, 30 million. To be blunt, we are so screwed. Not only do we have a huge jobs crisis that is getting worse but our political duopoly is committed to doing nothing about it beyond some short term exploitation of it to score a few political points.

The BLS Jobs Report Covering September 2011: 30 Million Disemployed

What Hugh calls "disemployment" is all the people who either don't have jobs and want them, or have jobs that provide less than they need financially. If I were calculating that number, it would be higher, because I don't assume that the new batch of potential workers is like all potential workers. They're generally younger, and I assume that most, if not all of them, need a job. That may not be a valid assumption, either, but if my numbers are higher than Hugh's, that's why.

Still, by Hugh's calculation there are 30 million of us who either want a job or need a better one. That's as high as that number has ever been. People who tell you the economy is improving, in my opinion, are profoundly mistaken, and it's really hard to look at these numbers and not realize that. We have been losing ground nearly every month since President Obama took office, and we lost millions of jobs in the year before he arrived.

On the subject of the "jobs bill", I don't disagree one bit. What I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

If they had been serious about getting the economy kick-started, they would have proposed at least $2 trillion - the amount of the output gap to date, minus the $800 billion of the stimulus bill. They're off by almost an order of magnitude.

Hey, I Don't Want To Brag, But...

can now be confirmed by Hugh's calculation. My approach was essentially the same as Christy Romer's and Paul Krugman's. I looked at the difference between what the economy should have produced since 2007 and what it actually did, then assumed that the government would have to make up most of the difference. Hugh's was to look at the size of our disemployment problem and compare it to the number of jobs the bill is claimed to be capable of creating. In both cases, the answer is that the bill is a tenth what it ought to be.

And, as Hugh says, there isn't a chance that even this pitiful excuse for a bill will pass. It's a talking point, and what that talking point says to me is that even if the Democrats were free to do whatever they wanted, they wouldn't do anywhere near enough.

ite magna aut ite domum - it's definitely not the Democrats' motto.