October 18, 2015

The one percent’s ultimate hypocrisy: They won’t move into high-rent apartments because ..........

The one percent’s ultimate hypocrisy: They won’t move into high-rent apartments because of the homeless displaced by high rents


Over the summer, Fox News and the New York Post joined forces in the noble journalistic endeavor of shaming homeless people in New York City. The New York Post sent more than a dozen reporters to follow around just one homeless man and plastered a picture of him on their cover. Twice. The O’Reilly Factor’s Jesse Watters braved treacherous spots like Penn Station to ask homeless people about their drug habits while looking vaguely disgusted. Joe Scarborough ranted self-righteously (and inaccurately). All of this was most likely a not-very-subtle attempt to tie visible homelessness to the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Although conservative media outlets conveniently discovered the city’s homelessness crisis when the progressive Mayor entered office, homelessness in the city has steadily increased since the mid-2000s. Today there are close to 60,000 people sleeping in city shelters, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, and an unknown number of people sleeping on the city’s streets.

And it’s not a huge mystery why. Advocates for the homeless attribute the spike to two factors: Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s homelessness policy, which, through an impressive feat of magic oligarch thinking, involved taking rental subsidies away from poor people. And the massively high cost of housing in the city. Rents have increased by 32 percent since 2002 citywide –– 90 percent in some parts of town. The average rent in Brooklyn is well over $3,000. Meanwhile, New York City’s minimum wage is $8.75. Unsurprisingly, evictions are up. ..................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/18/rich_people_are_scared_to_move_into_high_rent_apartments_because_of_the_homeless_displaced_by_high_rents_partner/

October 18, 2015

"Hillary's a solid debater. That doesn't make her right or honest on the substance."

from Salon:


This is still Bernie Sanders’ moment: He’s right on the big issues, now he must communicate it
Hillary's a solid debater. That doesn't make her right or honest on the substance. That's Sanders' opening

BILL CURRY


You don’t need me to tell you who won the Democratic debate. You can make up your own mind and probably have by now.

If you missed it, the press will gladly pick a winner for you. Don’t let them.

In 2000 Al Gore outshone George Bush in every debate but the press thought otherwise. To our emotionally arrested, intellectually undernourished reporters, politics is high school. We didn’t want to have a beer with Bush, they did. Gore struck them as a teacher’s pet and for that they were merciless to him. When he sighed audibly during one of Bush’s myriad lies, it got replayed a million times on TV. If you saw just that video, you thought Bush won. It helped him — not enough to win the election, but enough to steal it.

.....(snip).....

1. Bernie’s campaign model is spot-on; his debate strategy isn’t. His reluctance to go on the attack speaks well of him but drawing out real differences isn’t negative politics; it’s why we have debates. Clinton sure isn’t shy about it. On guns, the one issue where she’s to his left, she fileted him. But when she said things that are patently untrue, he never once corrected her. It goes partly to preparation. Hillary would pull an all-nighter to prepare for a debate. Bernie would rather chill. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the two best debaters I’ve ever seen, submit to grueling debate prep. Bernie should too, not just to expose her record but to defend his own.

2. Due partly to modern advertising and partly to our polarized politics, no one running for office ever explains anything anymore. In primaries, candidates do nothing but name-check issues they’re sure the base already agrees on. The few who want to explain issues find it hard to do. In a 30-second ad you can manipulate people’s hopes or manipulate their fears, but all the same it’s manipulation. Since reformers sell new ideas and new ideas take longer to explain, this tilts the field in favor of the status quo,

Sanders is really into policy, but less into explaining it. The heart of his campaign is a very big, very good idea. Maybe he thinks an idea so good is self-explanatory. It isn’t. He must explain it because it’s what separates him from Clinton and from every other candidate in the race. Sanders and Clinton agree on nearly every social program and cultural issue. Their major disagreement is whether such initiatives in themselves are enough to redress income inequality, wage stagnation and the slow, agonizing death of the American middle class. ..................(more)

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/18/this_is_still_bernie_sanders_moment_hes_right_on_the_big_issues_now_he_must_communicate_it/

October 18, 2015

Florida sheriff: People will die if I don't have my military tank

Published on Oct 16, 2015

The federal government has had a program that allows local police departments to acquire military equipment and vehicles at a discounted rate. Since there has been issues with police using excessive force on civilians and peaceful protests, the government is trying to roll that program back. One sheriff in Florida is not happy about that decision. Ana Kasparian (The Point), Margaret Howell (The Lip TV), comedian Kerry Coddett (Comedy Central, MTV2) and hosts of The Young Turks discuss.

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/florida-sheriff-furious-obama-took-his-military-tank-away-people-will-die-because-of-this-decision/

October 18, 2015

Reclaiming Labor History: How Domestic Workers Resisted Racism in the '60s and '70s

Reclaiming Labor History: How Domestic Workers Resisted Racism in the '60s and '70s

Sunday, 18 October 2015 00:00
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview


The following is a Truthout interview with Premilla Nadasen about her new book, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement.

Mark Karlin: You state that your book "offers an incredibly powerful, little-known story about working-class African-American women told through their own words." Why are their voices so important?

Premilla Nadasen: The story of household labor is often one of victimization. We frequently hear about the exploitation and abuse of household workers. It's not uncommon to pick up a newspaper and read about another domestic worker who has been mistreated or kept as a virtual slave. In these recountings of the occupation, the voices of domestic workers are muted and they are the object of our pity. We rarely get a chance to hear what they think, what they feel about their labor, their hopes and dreams. This story offers a different lens.

The African-American women at the center of my book organized a nationwide movement to challenge the basic contours of the occupation. They testified, they lobbied, they shared their stories, they wrote codes of conduct and they worked to educate employers. This is an example of an especially marginalized group of people who were deeply engaged in social reform and were able to shape their lives. They sought to bring dignity and respect to this occupation and aided in the passage of legislation that brought domestic labor under federal minimum wage protection after nearly 40 years of exclusion. How they achieved so much with so little is quite phenomenal.

Why does history remember so little about the activism and impact of African-American domestic workers who organized for better treatment, pay and respect in the '50s and '60s of the last century?

Historical narratives are shaped to a large degree by the available archival information. So, those people who kept papers, who wrote memoirs or who had access to media outlets dominate the historical record. People with little political clout and limited writing skills are often left out of the narrative. Marginalization in the archive, however, is not reflective of one's significance, as this movement so clearly demonstrates.

In addition, conceptual categories can be exclusionary or circumscribe our frame of reference. Feminism, for example, is often equated with the struggle of white middle-class women to enter the labor force, and this, of course, establishes boundaries about who is included in that framework. Although domestic workers were struggling for dignity and protections for women workers, they have not been considered a part of the larger women's movement. ..............(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/33268-reclaiming-labor-history-how-domestic-workers-resisted-racism-in-the-60s-and-70s

October 18, 2015

How Markets Make Fools of Us

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/how_markets_make_fools_of_us_20151017


via truthdig:



In their new book “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception,” George Akerloff and Robert Shiller merge psychology with economics to give “a broader account of how and why markets produce economic harm,” writes Harvard Law professor and former Obama administration regulator Cass Sunstein in The New York Review of Books.

Dealing in concepts that have seemed clear to many observers for a long time and which are being articulated for current generations in the field of behavioral economics, Sunstein writes that “Akerloff and Shiller believe that once we understand human psychology, we will be a lot less enthusiastic about free markets and a lot more worried about the harmful effects of competition”:

In their view, companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it. Those who fail to exploit people will lose out to those who do. In making that argument, Akerlof and Shiller object that the existing work of behavioral economists and psychologists offers a mere list of human errors, when what is required is a broader account of how and why markets produce systemic harm.

Akerlof and Shiller use the word “phish” to mean a form of angling, by which phishermen (such as banks, drug companies, real estate agents, and cigarette companies) get phools (such as investors, sick people, homeowners, and smokers) to do something that is in the phisherman’s interest, but not in the phools’. There are two kinds of phools: informational and psychological. Informational phools are victimized by factual claims that are intentionally designed to deceive them (“it’s an old house, sure, but it just needs a few easy repairs”). More interesting are psychological phools, led astray either by their emotions (“this investment could make me rich within three months!”) or by cognitive biases (“real estate prices have gone up for the last twenty years, so they’re bound to go up for the next twenty as well”). …

From all of these examples, Akerlof and Shiller offer a general account, which is that phishing occurs because of the “manipulation of focus.” Like magicians and pickpockets, phishermen are able to take advantage of “an errant focus by the phool.” Indeed, the idea that free markets work, and that government is the problem, “is itself a phish for phools,” a kind of story, one that does not capture reality. With respect to Social Security reform, securities regulation, and campaign finance reform, the United States has suffered from false and skewed claims that fail to account for the fact that free markets make people free not only to choose but also “free to phish, and free to be phished. Ignorance of those truths is a recipe for disaster.”

Akerlof and Shiller contend that behavioral economists have failed to explore, or perhaps even to see, the ubiquity of phishing, and the extent to which free markets promote it. Instead of a catalog of human errors and behavioral biases, they seek a more general account, one that gives “a picture to the mental frames that inform people’s decisions.” That picture involves “the stories we are telling ourselves.” Akerlof and Shiller believe that the idea of storytelling is “a new variable” for economics, one that explains why “people make decisions that can be quite far from maximizing their own welfare.” Thus “phishing for phools is not some occasional nuisance. It is all over the place.” Whenever “we have a weakness—if we have a way in which we are phishable—the phishermen will be there in waiting.”

Continue reading here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

October 18, 2015

The Chilling Thing Wal-Mart Said about Financial Engineering

The Chilling Thing Wal-Mart Said about Financial Engineering
by Wolf Richter • October 14, 2015


[font size="3"][font color="green"]Once financial engineering fails, all bets are off[/font][/font]

Wal-Mart had a bad-hair day. Its shares plunged $6.71, the largest single-day cliff-dive in its illustrious history. They ended the day down 10%, at $60.02, a number first kissed in 2001. Shares are 34% off their peak in January. So it wasn’t just today.

But Wal-Mart didn’t do anything that special at its annual investor meeting today. It announced big “capital investments,” (we’ll get to the quotation marks in a moment), a crummy outlook, and a huge share buyback program. All of which it has done many times before. Only this time, the outlook is even worse, but the promised share buybacks are even larger.

Wal-Mart proffered its strategies on how it would try to boost revenue growth in an environment where its primary customers – the 80% that got trampled by the Fed’s policies – are struggling to make ends meet. A problem Wal-Mart has had for years.

The news release hints at these new initiatives, spells out costs, and forecasts the resulting earnings debacle.

Wal-Mart will goose “capital investments” by $11 billion in Fiscal 2017, on top of the $12.4 billion it’s spending on “capital investments” in fiscal 2016. This will maul earnings per share. In 2017, they’re expected to drop 6% to 12%, when the analyst community had forecast an increase of 4%. But 2019 is back in the rosy scenario of earnings growth. ...................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/14/have-share-buybacks-suddenly-lost-their-magic-wal-mart-financial-engineering/

October 18, 2015

Wrath of Financial Engineering: It’s Now Eating into Earnings

Wrath of Financial Engineering: It’s Now Eating into Earnings
by Wolf Richter • October 15, 2015


Companies with investment-grade credit ratings – the cream-of-the-crop “high-grade” corporate borrowers – have gorged on borrowed money at super-low interest rates over the past few years, as monetary policies put investors into trance. And interest on that mountain of debt, which grew another 4% in the second quarter, is now eating their earnings like never before.

These companies – according to JPMorgan analysts cited by Bloomberg – have incurred $119 billion in interest expense over the 12 months through the second quarter. The most ever.

With impeccable timing: for S&P 500 companies, revenues have been in a recession all year, and the last thing companies need now is higher expenses.

Risks are piling up too: according to Bloomberg, companies’ ability pay these interest expenses, as measured by the interest coverage ratio, dropped to the lowest level since 2009.

Companies also have to refinance that debt when it comes due. If they can’t, they’ll end up going through what their beaten-down brethren in the energy and mining sectors are undergoing right now: reshuffling assets and debts, some of it in bankruptcy court. ................(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/15/wrath-of-financial-engineering-eating-earnings-record-corporate-debt/

October 17, 2015

Chicago: Now Arriving: Underground 4G Wireless Service on CTA Blue Line

McClatchy, via MassTransitMag:


Do you hate going into underground tunnels on the train and finding that your phone has no service? Well, those days are nearly over, because Mayor Emanuel announced Thursday that 4G wireless service will be offered to the first section of the CTA subway system.

Starting this week, CTA Blue Line O'Hare branch riders will have full 4G coverage in the Kimball Subway. That 1.2-mile segment of the Blue Line serves the Logan Square and Belmont stations.

If you don't take that specific Blue Line route, you may be wondering, "But when will the entire subway system get coverage?" Have no fear. Activation of 4G coverage on the remaining Blue and Red line subway sections will occur in phases and should be completed by the end of this year.

"We've finished phase one of the project and by the end of 2015, the new network will be ready to provide an incredible 4G wireless experience to T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint customers that ride the Chicago subway enabling them to talk, chat, tweet, surf or send and receive video calls while using the nation's second largest public transportation system," T-Moble Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray said in a news release. .....................(more)

http://www.masstransitmag.com/news/12127315/now-arriving-underground-4g-wireless-service-on-cta-blue-line

October 17, 2015

"Pharma Bro" reaffirms that he is a big pile of dung

The man-child known as “Pharma Bro” — also known as Martin Shkreli — is an absolute wonder when it comes to public relations. As in “We wonder if he would would recognize good PR is if he was neck-deep in it.” Because, quite frankly, he can’t seem to stop from publicly punching himself in the face — and we can’t stop watching.

The former hedge funder turned pharma CEO turned Internationally Known Social Pariah and Greedhead has a knack for blithely making terrible decisions and then compounding them by doubling down and going on TV and trying to grin and bluff his way out of it.

Never successfully.

Ever.

Shkreli was finally beat down enough t0 agree to lower the price of Daraprim — down from from the $750 per pill he had jacked it up to after buying the rights to it when it was selling for $13.50 a pop — but that has yet to happen.

.....(snip).....




Then this week he tried to buy himself a little face-time with Sen. Bernie Sanders and that most definitely didn’t — and won’t — happen after the Sanders campaign donated Shkreli’s $2,700 (about three and a half Daraprims if you’re keeping score at home) to charity.

At which point you, as a smart person, might have thrown in the towel and said, “Screw it, I’m just glad the money went to a good cause,” and made a public show of it. ..................(more)

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/10/pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-whines-about-bernie-giving-his-money-to-charity-and-twitter-tears-him-a-new-one/

October 17, 2015

Moody’s Jumps on Recession Bandwagon

Moody’s Jumps on Recession Bandwagon
by Wolf Richter • October 16, 2015


These crazy days of ours, if you want to have confirmation the economy is sliding into trouble, look at stocks: for stock-market jockeys, crummy economic data indicates that the Fed won’t raise interest rates. And stocks jump.

Maybe not jump, exactly. But the S&P 500 rose 0.9% for the week, its third weekly gain in a row, following another decline in industrial production, weak retail sales propped up by autos and restaurants, falling wholesales and business sales, rising inventories, a lackluster employment report…. The word “recession” is floating around, and when it hits, stocks might make a big new high. That’s the twisted hope.

And now Moody’s has jumped on the recession-warning bandwagon too, with a logic of its own.

[font size="3"][font color="blue"]First, there’s credit: the spigot is getting turned off.[/font][/font]

For the last three weeks, only one junk-rated company was able to issue bonds in the US. And just in the US: “This is shaping up to be the worst October for the worldwide issuance of high-yield bonds” since October 2011, wrote John Lonski, Chief Economist at Moody’s Capital Markets Research. He warns of “reduced access to financial capital.”

But unlike October 2011, when the euro debt crisis caused wild gyrations in the bond markets, which then recovered quickly, this time around, there might not be an easy recovery: average yields and spreads are still low in comparison to 2011, but the average expected default frequency (EDF) for US/Canadian junk-bond issuers, which was 3.85% in October 2011, is now a “much riskier” 5.20%. ...............(more)

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/10/16/moodys-recession-warning-jarring-drop-in-payrolls/