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Our Refrigerator Door
How to End the Great Recession
By ROBERT B. REICH Published: September 2, 2010
THIS promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, while at least 125,000 are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.
The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.
That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.
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How the Stimulus Is Changing America
By Michael Grunwald Thursday, Aug. 26, 2010
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — President Obama's $787 billion stimulus — has been marketed as a jobs bill, and that's how it's been judged. The White House says it has saved or created about 3 million jobs, helping avoid a depression and end a recession. Republicans mock it as a Big Government boondoggle that has failed to prevent rampant unemployment despite a massive expansion of the deficit. Liberals complain that it wasn't massive enough.
It's an interesting debate. Politically, it's awkward to argue that things would have been even worse without the stimulus, even though that's what most nonpartisan economists believe. But the battle over the Recovery Act's short-term rescue has obscured its more enduring mission: a long-term push to change the country. It was about jobs, sure, but also about fighting oil addiction and global warming, transforming health care and education, and building a competitive 21st century economy. Some Republicans have called it an under-the-radar scramble to advance Obama's agenda — and they've got a point. (See TIME's special report "The Green Design 100.")
Yes, the stimulus has cut taxes for 95% of working Americans, bailed out every state, hustled record amounts of unemployment benefits and other aid to struggling families and funded more than 100,000 projects to upgrade roads, subways, schools, airports, military bases and much more. But in the words of Vice President Joe Biden, Obama's effusive Recovery Act point man, "Now the fun stuff starts!" The "fun stuff," about one-sixth of the total cost, is an all-out effort to exploit the crisis to make green energy, green building and green transportation real; launch green manufacturing industries; computerize a pen-and-paper health system; promote data-driven school reforms; and ramp up the research of the future. "This is a chance to do something big, man!" Biden said during a 90-minute interview with TIME.
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Rev. James Martin, S.J.Catholic priest and author of 'The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything' Posted: August 29, 2010 03:17 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index Glenn Beck vs. Christ the Liberator
After his colossal "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, D.C., Glenn Beck took aim at one of his favorite targets, Barack Obama, but in a novel way. Beck regrets saying a few months ago that President Obama was a "racist." What he should have said, he now realizes, was that he didn't agree with Obama's "theology." And what is Obama's theology, according to Beck? Liberation theology.
Here's Beck's definition of the arcane area of study known as liberation theology:
I think that it is much more of a theological question that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor and victim....That is a direct opposite of what the gospel is talking about...It's Marxism disguised as religion
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Why Some Republicans Want to ‘Restore’ the 13th Amendment No, it’s not about slavery; like so much of our politics these days, it’s about Barack Obama.

Joseph Sohm / Visions of America-Corbis If there is an aspect of the human condition that is unaddressed by the platform of the Republican Party of Iowa, adopted last month at the state convention in Des Moines, you’d have to look awfully hard to find it. Its 387 enumerated planks and principles range widely over politics, culture, and economics, from sweeping statements of belief (“America is good”) to the fine nuances of agricultural policy (“We support the definition of manure as natural fertilizer”) and touching on the mythical “North American Union” (against) and the gold standard (for). Even so, it’s a little startling to come upon section 7.19, which calls for “the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution.” Since the existing 13th Amendment bans slavery, while the “original” one was about something else entirely, the wording might give the impression that Iowa Republicans wish to reverse emancipation, which is not at all the case, according to state GOP Communications Director Danielle Plogmann. Like many aspects of Republican politics this year, it’s actually about embarrassing President Obama. But you have to wonder whether the delegates knew what they were getting into. In making common cause with “Thirteenthers,” as those who seek to restore the long-lost amendment are known, the party has ventured beyond the far fringes of conspiracy theory, into a mysterious lost land without lawyers or taxes. Maybe they knew what they were doing after all.
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Idaho ranks among the worst states for job markets in Gallup index
- Idaho Statesman Published: 07/21/10
Idaho was No. 6 among the worst markets in the Gallup Job Creation Index from January to June of this year.
More than half of the 10 best job markets in 2010 are energy- and commodity-producing states, Gallup reported.
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Tremble, Banks, Tremble The key to financial recovery: restoring the rule of law on Wall Street.
Published July 9, 2010 by The New Republic by James K. Galbraith
The financial crisis in America isn't over. It's ongoing, it remains unresolved, and it stands in the way of full economic recovery. The cause, at the deepest level, was a breakdown in the rule of law. And it follows that the first step toward prosperity is to restore the rule of law in the financial sector.
First, there was a stand-down of the financial police. The legal framework for this was laid with the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Meanwhile the Basel II process relaxed international bank supervision, especially permitting the use of proprietary models to value complex assets-an open invitation to biased valuations and accounting frauds.
Key acts of de-supervision came under Bush. After 9/11 500 FBI agents assigned to financial fraud were reassigned to counter-terrorism and (what is not understandable) they were never replaced. The Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision appeared at a press conference with a stack of copies of the Code of Federal Regulations and a chainsaw-the message was not subtle. The SEC relaxed limits on leverage for investment banks and abolished the uptick rule limiting short sales to moments following a rise in price. The new order was clear: anything goes.
Second, the response to desupervision was a criminal takeover of the home mortgage industry. Millions of subprime mortgages were made to borrowers with undocumented incomes and bad or non-existent credit records. Appraisers were selected who were willing to inflate the value of the home being sold. This last element was not incidental: surveys showed that practically all appraisers came under pressure to inflate valuations in order to make deals happen. There is no honest reason why a lender would deliberately seek to make an inflated loan.
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Robert Creamer Political organizer, strategist and author Posted: July 13, 2010 11:52 PM
Dirty Little Secrets the Republicans Don't Want You to Know
The Republicans have a set of dirty little (actually not so little) secrets they don't what you to know -- and certainly don't want you to think about when you go to the polls in November.
And the fact is that some of those secrets could provide Democrats with silver bullets this fall. But first let's recall the context.
Over the course of eight short years -- between 2000 and 2008 -- the Republicans methodically executed their plan to transform American society. They systematically transferred wealth from the middle class to the wealthiest two percent of Americans -- slashing taxes for the wealthy. They eviscerated the rules that held Wall Street, Big Oil and private insurance companies accountable to the public. They allowed and encouraged the recklessness of the big Wall Street banks that ultimately collapsed the economy and cost eight million Americans their jobs. They ignored exploding health care costs, tried to privatize Social Security, gave the drug companies open season to gouge American consumers and presided over a decline in real incomes averaging $2,000 per family. They entangled America in an enormously costly, unnecessary war in Iraq, pursued a directionless policy that left Afghanistan to fester, and sullied America's good name throughout the world.
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The Creativity Crisis For the first time, research shows that American creativity is declining. What went wrong—and how we can fix it.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
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Companies pile up cash but remain hesitant to add jobs
By Jia Lynn Yang Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 15, 2010
Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn't want to spend it hiring anyone.
Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. And as several major firms report impressive earnings this week, the money continues to flow into firms' coffers.
Yet all the good news from big business hasn't translated into much promise for jobless Americans, leading many to wonder: If corporations are sitting on so much money, why aren't they hiring more workers?
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Obesity in America 2010 Where does your state rank when it comes to obesity?
By Maia Szalavitz for MSN Health & Fitness Although childhood obesity appears to be stabilizing, adult obesity is continuing its relentless rise, according to a new analysis of government statistics. Influenced, perhaps, by the example of our svelte president and his wife who head a campaign against childhood obesity, Washington, D.C. was the only area in the country to show a decline in the proportion of obese adults.
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Everyone has someplace special, like their refrigerator door, a bulletin board, or such, where they post those 'unique' items they encounter on the web or in the media from time to time. This is our 'refrigerator door' and these are our findings. |
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