September 20, 2015

Economic recovery. Ok, economic recovery for some. Ok, economic recovery for very few.

(Bloomberg) U.S. Census Bureau data out Wednesday underscore just how lousy the recovery has been if you aren't rich.

Looking at eight groups of household income selected by Census, only those whose incomes are already high to begin with have seen improvement since 2006, the last full year of expansion before the recession. Households at the 95th and 90th percentiles had larger earnings through 2014, the latest year for which data are available.

Income for all others was below 2006 levels, indicating they're still clawing their way out of the hole caused by the deepest recession in the post-World War II era.



"Each decade, it's taken longer for the poor to recover from recession, for the poverty rate to start turning around after the official end of the recession," said Arloc Sherman, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. "There's quite a bit of work left to do."

Median household income is 6.5 percent lower than in 2007, the year the recession started. ...............(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-16/the-richest-americans-are-winning-the-economy-recovery

September 20, 2015

Jim Hightower: Chicago’s Taxpayer-Funded Ode to Robber Barons

by Jim Hightower


History, as the old adage goes, is written by the winners. Even though many "winners" are losers as human beings.

For a clear example of this irony, check out the new national monument to corporate greed created by our Park Service in Chicago. It’s on the site of what had been Pullman, a company town created by the feudalistic 19th-century profiteer George Pullman. He amassed a fortune as a rail car manufacturer, infamously suppressing the wages of his 5,000 factory workers.

Yet Pullman considered himself a beneficent employer, having built a 600-acre town for the workforce and vaingloriously named the place for himself. It included houses he rented to workers, churches, schools, a bank, a library, and parks - all owned by his company.

Indeed, when officials announced this year that Pullman’s town was becoming an honored part of America’s park system, officials attested to his generosity by hailing it as a place he created "to provide his employees a good life." ...............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32877-chicago-s-taxpayer-funded-ode-to-robber-barons

September 20, 2015

Spanish Banks Warn of Financial Meltdown if Catalonia Votes for Independence

By Don Quijones, Spain & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET.


In Spain’s north eastern region of Catalonia, the fear-mongering and doom-saying is reaching a deafening crescendo. If voters return a majority of pro-independence politicians in next Sunday’s regional elections, all manner of economic disaster will befall the region — according to the defenders of Spain’s established political and economic order.

The doomsayers include the Spanish government, the main opposition party, PSOE, Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Barack Obama, John Kerry, the spokesperson of the president of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, and just about every business lobby representative in Spain. Some Catalan business leaders have even urged their employees to vote against independence, warning that a yes-vote on Sunday could lead to them losing their jobs — a major threat in a nation with over 20% official unemployment!

Warning of a Crisis

The latest chorus of doom and gloom came from Spain’s two biggest banking associations AEB and CECA, whose members include Banco Santander, BBVA, Banco Popular, and Bankia. They warn that the exclusion of Catalonia from the Eurozone will trigger “serious problems of legal insecurity” for banks based in the region. Those banks include Caixabank and Banc de Sabadell, Spain’s third and fifth largest banks respectively, both of whom are also members of AEB and CECA. ..................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/09/20/spanish-banks-warn-of-financial-meltdown-if-catalonia-votes-for-independence/

September 20, 2015

About the so-called "economic recovery" .............

(Bloomberg) U.S. Census Bureau data out Wednesday underscore just how lousy the recovery has been if you aren't rich.

Looking at eight groups of household income selected by Census, only those whose incomes are already high to begin with have seen improvement since 2006, the last full year of expansion before the recession. Households at the 95th and 90th percentiles had larger earnings through 2014, the latest year for which data are available.

Income for all others was below 2006 levels, indicating they're still clawing their way out of the hole caused by the deepest recession in the post-World War II era.



"Each decade, it's taken longer for the poor to recover from recession, for the poverty rate to start turning around after the official end of the recession," said Arloc Sherman, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. "There's quite a bit of work left to do."

Median household income is 6.5 percent lower than in 2007, the year the recession started. ...............(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-16/the-richest-americans-are-winning-the-economy-recovery

September 19, 2015

Florida Man is back with a vengeance

A Florida man suspected of breaking into a bar to steal alcohol and defecating on the floor has been allegedly caught with his pants down.

Collier County deputies responded to a 911 call Tuesday evening about a possible burglary at Joey D's, an East Naples restaurant.

Deputies investigating the scene noted thousands of dollars in damage to computers, monitors and the cash register.

There was also human feces on the bar floor, WINK TV reports.

A large bottle of Sambuca was next to the poop, according to the Naples Herald. ..................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pooping-burglary-suspect-caught-with-his-pants-down_55faff99e4b08820d917bf72

September 19, 2015

Sarah Palin says don't let a clock become a mushroom cloud

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) said on Saturday that arresting and suspending Ahmed Mohamed, the ninth grader who brought a homemade clock to school, was totally reasonable.

Palin called initial media reports of Mohamed's arrest "fishy" and said that school officials were totally justified in thinking that his clock, made out of a pencil box, was a bomb.

"Yep, believing that's a clock in a school pencil box is like believing Barack Obama is ruling over the most transparent administration in history," she wrote in a Facebook post in which she shared pictures of her kids' pencil boxes. "Right. That's a clock, and I'm the Queen of England."

Palin also compared the incident to others in which students were suspended and said that Mohamed was obviously an "obstinate-answering student."

"Friends, consider the kids disciplined and/or kicked out of school for bringing squirt guns to school or taking bites out of a pop tart until it resembled (to some politically correct yahoo) a gun. Or the student out deer hunting with his dad early one morning who forgot he had a box of ammo in his truck when he parked in the school's lot later that day," she wrote. "Whereas Ahmed Muhammad, an evidently obstinate-answering student bringing in a homemade 'clock' that obviously could be seen by conscientious teachers as a dangerous wired-up bomb-looking contraption (teachers who are told 'if you see something, say something!') gets invited to the White House." .....................(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sarah-palin-ahmed-clock_55fd7d59e4b0fde8b0ce7ddc?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013&section=politics

September 19, 2015

“You couldn’t pick a worse, non-imprisoned CEO to be your standard-bearer” (Fiorina)

Published on Sep 17, 2015

During the debate there was a showdown between Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina where they attacked each others’ business records. It seems neither of them have much room to talk. Especially Florina. Cenk Uygur, host of the The Young Turks, breaks it down. Tell us what you think in the comment section below.

"“How did she do?" asked Yale University management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. “Pretty badly.”...

All told, HP’s stock dropped more than 55 percent during Fiorina’s tenure as chief executive. The company laid off 30,000 employees under her leadership. Fiorina herself left with a $21 million golden parachute, having collected a total of $100 million in pay for her six rocky years in charge.”*

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/carly-fiorina-business-record_55f9e2c7e4b08820d9173ee6

September 19, 2015

Debt-Strapped Japan Planning a No-Frills Olympics

(Bloomberg) Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic Games will be the first of a leaner type of competition that will limit spending on big-ticket venues to avoid alienating the public, Chief Executive Officer Toshiro Muto said, two months after debt-ridden Japan canceled plans for a futuristic main stadium.

The International Olympic Committee last year set out a new agenda that favors existing venues over purpose-built stadiums, as concerns mount in potential host countries over the burden of holding the event. Public anger over the cost of Tokyo’s flagship stadium swelling to $2 billion damped initial euphoria over the Games, prompting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to scrap the design and seek new bids after trimming the budget by more than a third.

"It’s not going too far to say that Tokyo 2020 will be the first Games of its type," Muto, who heads the Tokyo Olympic committee and formerly served as deputy governor of the Bank of Japan, said in an interview at his office in Tokyo. "In Japan in particular, fiscal problems are very sensitive. Some people want this to be an opportunity to build stadiums as in the past, but if we keep on doing that, we will gradually lose public support. The IOC has a sense of crisis about this and we feel the same way."

Avoiding backlash

Japan is struggling to control a public debt more than twice the size of its $4.6 trillion economy, as social security costs spiral due to an aging population. With the risk of another recession as his Abenomics policies fail to boost growth in Asia’s second-biggest economy, Abe is looking to avoid a public backlash by keeping a cap on Olympic spending. ...................(more)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-18/debt-strapped-japan-will-seek-cost-conscious-olympics-ceo-says

September 19, 2015

Really Phallic Fruit

from HuffPost:





Forbidden fruit, indeed.

Angel Anderson got a surprise when she opened up her produce box on Friday.

In the box, along with the pomegranates, plums, mango and grapefruit was a bosc pear about 5-and-a-half inches long that looked amazingly like a male sex organ -- a circumcised male sex organ.

"I opened the box right up and thought, 'What the f***!'" she told The Huffington Post. "I had no idea what it was until I looked at the receipt and it said I received three bosc pears in my order. The other two looked more like what a bosc pear is supposed to look like." ...............(more)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/ob-nurse-finds-penis-shaped-in-her-produce-box_55fc7a5be4b0fde8b0ce4aff?utm_hp_ref=weird-news

September 19, 2015

Fools, Fascists and Cold Warriors: Take Your Pick

from truthdig:


Fools, Fascists and Cold Warriors: Take Your Pick

Posted on Sep 18, 2015
By Robert Scheer





Are they fools or fascists? Probably the former, but there was a disturbing cast to the second GOP debate, a vituperative jingoism reminiscent of the xenophobia that periodically scars Western capitalist societies in moments of disarray.

While the entire world is riveted by the sight of millions of refugees in terrifying exodus attempting to save drowning and starving children, we were treated to the darkly peculiar spectacle of scorn for the children of undocumented immigrants and celebration of the sanctity of the unborn fetus.

Marching to the beat of that mad drummer Donald Trump, the GOP candidates have taken to scapegoating undocumented immigrants, in particular the young, blaming them for all that ails us. Most of the GOP contenders appeared as a shrill echo of the neo-fascist European movements of late, adopting the traditional tactic of blaming the most vulnerable for economic problems the most powerful have caused.

Forget the collateralized debt obligations and other Wall Street scams that continue to cripple the world economy—as the Federal Reserve Bank noted Thursday in postponing a threatened increase in interest rates—or the massive shipment of jobs abroad by leading companies like GE. Instead, blame the folks who cook your food, raise your kids and pick the grapes from the vineyards for all that has gone wrong.

None of the candidates—not even Marco Rubio, who admitted to a Spanish-speaking grandfather who emigrated from Cuba, or Jeb Bush, who is married to one of those Mexicans now tarred as criminals—had the courage to cite the overwhelming evidence from the Congressional Research Service and other impeccable sources of these facts: Undocumented immigrants are far less likely than the general population to commit crimes, and they pay more in taxes and uncollectible benefits than they receive in public assistance. ...............(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/fools_fascists_and_cold_warriors_take_your_pick_20150918