Some of the most frustrated folks in America right now are the leaders of America's labor movement. They have good reason to be, as an all-out war has been waged basically by both parties upon them in the last several decades. After the last election, when they used so much energy and support working Americans won the White House and a huge majority in both chambers of Congress they had really hoped that the plight of working Americans would be addressed through healthcare, wages, an end to outsourcing and the Employee Free Choice Act.
Working America According to Reuters,
attempts by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to move an
emergency unemployment aid extension in the Senate are being thwarted: Reid
had hoped to quickly pass a short-term extension of unemployment
benefits for more than a million people to ensure they are not
terminated at the end of February, but Republican Senator Jim Bunning
blocked it.
Policy advocates on Capitol Hill this morning confirmed that Sen. Bunning (R-KY)
is currently holding up an emergency measure to extend the expanded
federal support for unemployment insurance and COBRA subsidies set to
expire in three days.
A spokesman for Senator Bunning said this
morning that Bunning had objected to Senator Reid's unanimous consent
request to proceed on the measure, citing a dispute over how it should
be funded.
Kentucky's jobless rate, which exceeds the national average, increased to 10.7%
in December, the last month of available state statistics. Numerous
counties in Kentucky report unemployment rates of 13% or more, as can
be seen on this Washington Postinteractive map of unemployment rates by state and county. (click on the map to zoom in) Several counties in rural eastern Kentucky have jobless rates of 15% or higher, including Magoffin County at 21.4%. Read More
While the healthcare debate has devolved and sputtered, we still see the need for real reform almost daily. Whatever one might believe is the solution it is almost impossible for anyone to admit we have serious problem. While the real solution, single-payer has been off the table, healthcare costs continue to spriral through the kitchen ceiling. Reports today show just how bad the recession has made things.
Would a physician remove a patient's heart, throw the heart in the garbage, place a IOU for his/her charges where the patients heart use to be and then complain that the patient's vital signs indicate the patient is dead? Of course not, but I suggest this is what the politicians, Democrats and Republicans have done to middle America. The heart of middle America has been removed and a big IOU has been put where the heart use to be. Middle America's heart wasn't put in the garbage, the heart was divvied up and given to Corporate interest, China, India, Mexico, Wall Street, Military contractors, off shore banking accounts, etc.
I live about 3 miles outside of Elizabethtown, Kentucky and yesterday I had to go to town to run a few errands. Yes we still call that going to town here. It was about 3:00 pm when I got to town. There were plenty of folks out and traffic was thick. All of the restaurants were doing a brisk business. Walmart, Target and Best Buy parking lots were full or nearly full with folks buying imported products and I'm thinking the economy must be picking up.
After a decade-long slide into semi-irrelevance, it’s now being announced that the major television broadcast networks are considering leaving behind the “free TV/advertiser supported” business model in order to turn themselves into something more closely resembling a cable operation; the idea being that they could create a second revenue stream from the same “subscriber fees” that are paid by cable and satellite operators to all the other channels those operators carry.
This has become necessary, according to the networks, partly because the market has become so fragmented...which, naturally, is cable’s fault—and presumably the fault of the disloyal viewer, as well.
Another reason driving the change is related to the desire of the networks to have a source of revenue that’s more reliable in times of economic downturn, when advertisers often try to husband scarce resources by cutting back on all their expenses, particularly advertising dollars.
Will this new change in the business model reverse the fortunes of the networks? Is it possible that the networks are simply poor business managers?
And what about...Krystal Carey?
Tune in for the rest of the story—and we’ll find out.
On New Year's Eve we will be ushering in not only a new year, but another new decade. The twenty-teens will be upon us and looking both backwards and forwards one can only wonder if it would be possible for the next decade to be nearly as bad as the last. From the promise of the 1990s, we took so many steps backwards in so many regards one would hope that the new decade can only bring improvements.
Bernie Sanders has used a bit of Senate finesse to block the renomination of Ben Bernanke to head the Federal Reserve. Chris Bowers over at Closed Left explains what's happening, but what it all boils down to is that Sanders has managed to hold up the renomination of one of Bush's creatures to a hugely important office. Obama and Wall Street want Bernanke to stay and keep fucking up the economy. Sanders is looking like one of the only senators willing to go on record and try to stop this from happening.
So please click the link above and thank Bernie for looking out for us. And while you're at it, use the Senate phone directory to call your own senator and demand a filibuster of Bernanke's renomination. We need someone in there who will actually represent the public interest.
We’re diving deep into “geek world” today with a story that combines economic hardball, the periodic table of the elements, and a barely noticed provision of the Defense Authorization Act that seeks to break a monopoly which today gives China near-absolute control over the materials that make cell phones, electric cars, wind turbines, and pretty much every other tool of modern life possible.
If we successfully break the monopoly, we’ll be able to create millions of new manufacturing jobs in this country—and if we don’t, somebody else owns the 21st Century.
Ironically, the global warming we’re trying to fight with new green technologies might be an ally in our efforts to make those very same green technologies happen.
There’s a revolution in industrial processing going on, rare earths are at the center of it all...and in today’s story, the revolution will be televised.
Nothing Glenn Beck says surprises me anymore. It does not even surprising to me know that many hate-filled, ignorant souls believe his every word like gospel. What is really surprising is that while calling us the "Hate America" crowd he actually let it slip what country he really admires.
Democrats and particularly President Obama have been taking a lot of heat over the stimulus bill. Now, a lot of people that complain about the stimulus so loudly try to attribute the TARP bailout somehow to Obama too. Despite the fact that Obama was not President when the economy crashed and the banks were bailed out suddenly it is all his doing.
Newt Gingrich seems to be suffering from a mass ailment among Repubicans, Tea-baggers, and Conservatives. It is called Mass Selective Amnesia, or MSA. Yes, with all their bluster and BS they have concurred a very bad case of MSA. It is usually caused by talking about the problems that have beset our country, including the economy and the huge unemployment numbers, but also occurs when talking about debt and deficits.
One thing that has been lost in the shuffle through decades of free trade zealously is the simple fact that it matters where things are made. With the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs and the closures of hundreds of thousands of factories the ability of our country to innovate and to make the products we consume has been greatly diminished. This in turn has shrunken our middle-class to disasterous levels.
Opinion America the land of the free and the home of the brave. Really? Brave, I don't think so. How can we consider ourselves brave when we let the Wall Street elite steal our money and then blackmail us to bail them out and we sit back and twiddle our thumbs like a bunch of wimps?
Reason.Com Just how much has household net worth dropped since the peak? Calculated Risk calls it $14 trillion, as does CNN, which refers to an "all-time high of $64.4 trillion in the second quarter of 2007."
Well, the Senate Finance Committee has voted to pass the junk reforms of Max Baucus. In a way this may be good, because now that Baucus has his Corporate Welfare bill through his committee, maybe the reconciliation process can bring about something that more resembles real reform. While I still honestly believe that single-payer is the only thing that will deliver the reform to our system we need, I am hoping the Senate Finance version gets a serious facelift in reconciliation. Anything that mandates coverage for Americans without a strong, viable, robust, or whatever you want to call it public option is political suicide for the Democratic Party. Of course if they are that stupid, they deserve the defeat they will get for acting like watered-down Republicans.
New York Times Job seekers now outnumber openings six to one, the worst ratio since the government began tracking open positions in 2000. According to the Labor Department’s latest numbers, from July, only 2.4 million full-time permanent jobs were open, with 14.5 million people officially unemployed. Read more.
