Image by The U.S. National Archives via Flickrhttp://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/12/the_sham_recovery/index.php
Business cheerleaders naturally want to emphasize the positive. They assume the economy runs on optimism and that if average consumers think the economy is getting better, they'll empty their wallets more readily and - presto! - the economy will get better. The cheerleaders fail to understand that regardless of how people feel, they won't spend if they don't have the money.
America's biggest companies are also showing fat profits and productivity gains because they continue to slash payrolls and cut expenditures.
Big U.S. corporations have issued $195.2 billion of debt, excluding government-guaranteed bonds. Does this spell a recovery? It all depends on what the big companies are doing with all this cash. In fact, they're doing two things that don't help at all.
First, they're buying other companies. This buying doesn't create new jobs. One of the first things companies do when they buy other companies is fire lots of people who are considered "redundant." That's where the so-called merger efficiencies and synergies come from, after all.
The second thing big companies are doing with all their cash is buying back their own stock, in order to boost their share prices. We're witnessing the biggest share buyback spree since Sept 2008. The major beneficiaries are current shareholders, including top executives, whose pay is linked to share prices. The buy-backs do absolutely nothing for most Americans.
The picture on Main Street is quite the opposite. Small businesses aren't selling much because they have to rely on American - rather than foreign - consumers, and Americans still aren't buying much.
Small businesses are also finding it difficult to get credit. In the credit survey conducted in February by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, only 34 percent of small businesses reported normal and adequate access to credit. Not incidentally, the NFIB's "Small Business Optimism Index" fell 1.3 points last month, just about where it's been since April.
That's a problem for most Americans. Small businesses are where the jobs are. In fact, small businesses are responsible for almost all job growth in a typical recovery. So if small businesses are hurting, we're not going to see much job growth any time soon.
Corporate Debt Coming Due May Squeeze Credit
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/business/16debt.html?src=me&ref=business
2012 is the beginning of a three-year period in which more than $700 billion in risky, high-yield corporate debt begins to come due, an extraordinary surge that some analysts fear could overload the debt markets.
With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.
Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis.
China Drawing High-Tech Research From U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/18/business/global/18research.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt
Concerned about aggressive marketing practices, the Obama administration is toughening rules that restrict institutions that receive federal student aid from paying their admissions recruiters on the basis of enrollment numbers.
The New Poor
Articles in this series are examining the struggle to recover from the widespread strains of the Great Recession.
Related
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Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs (February 21, 2010)
Worse Than Peak Oil? We're Quickly Running Out of a Chemical Essential to Growing Food
http://www.alternet.org/food/146048/worse_than_peak_oil_we%27re_quickly_running_out_of_a_chemical_
essential_to_growing_food
Unremarked and unregulated by the United Nations and other high-level assemblies, the world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.
If it does matter where CO2 is released, cities are in trouble
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-17-if-it-does-matter-where-co2-is-released-cities-are-in-trouble/N10/#comments
There’s some fascinating new research about “CO2 domes,” invisible clouds of carbon pollution that hover above urban areas. Bradford Plumer at The New Republic does a great job setting the context:
Does it matter where carbon dioxide is emitted? From a climate perspective, at least, the standard answer has always been, "Not really." Carbon dioxide mixes pretty evenly and uniformly throughout the atmosphere, so that the heat-trapping gases coming out of a factory in China have the same effect on global temperatures, pound for pound, as the greenhouse gases emitted by, say, cars in Delaware. (This is in contrast to a number of other air pollutants, whose effects are often localized—sulfur dioxide only causes acid rain in discrete areas.)
The new finding:
But a new study just published in Environmental Science and Technology by Stanford's Mark Jacobson adds a slight twist to this standard view. Older research has found that local "domes" of high CO2 levels can often form over cities. What Jacobson found was that these domes can have a serious local impact: Among other things, they worsen the effects of localized air pollutants like ozone and particulates, which cause respiratory diseases and the like. As a result, Jacobson estimates that local CO2 emissions cause anywhere from 300 to 1,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. And presumably the problem's much worse in developing countries.
( Thermal Inversions and 'domes' are common over Canadian cities in deep cold )
Are Greedy Water Bottlers Siphoning Your City's Drinking Water?
http://www.alternet.org/story/146116/are_greedy_water_bottlers_siphoning_your_city%27s_drinking_water
Celebrate World Water Day: Watch “The Story of Bottled Water”
Polluted Water More Deadly Than Warhttp://www.alternet.org/water/146101/polluted_water_more_deadly_than_war/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet_water
3.6 million people - including 1.5 million children - are estimated to die each year from water-related diseases, including diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera and dysentery
( Water* - Wealth and Power )
High Arctic species plummeting across the board, others Arctic residents on the rise
http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/41129
Are Younger Britons Suffering "Nature Starvation?"
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=9500411
Why Thousands Are Turning to a Psychedelic Plant from Africa for Release from Severe Addictions
http://www.alternet.org/drugs/146046/why_thousands_are_turning_to_a_psychedelic_plant_from_africa_for_
release_from_severe_addictions - ibogaine
Sean Hannity’s Freedom CONcert Scam: Almost None of Charity’s $ Went to Injured Troops, Kids of Fallen Troops; G5s for Vannity?
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/6938/sean-hannitys-freedom-concert-scam-only-7-of-charitys-money-went-to-injured-troops-kids-of-fallen-troops-g5s-g6s-for-vannity
UK/US Asylum Seekers Find Death, Abuse, and Criminal Indifference
http://pubrecord.org/torture/7202/ukus-asylum-seekers-death-abuse
Since 2001, many asylum applicants have been sent to prison, with murderers and rapists, despite the fact they have never broken any law, making Britain the only European Union country to have such a practice.
UK Guardian report from last week, when three Kosovo nationals leaped to their deaths from a Glascow apartment building. The Kosovoan nationals* — two men and one woman — were asylum applicants who had their claims of asylum rejected from the UK government.The level of desperation, as well as abuse, suffered by UK asylum seekers was documented in an Institute of Race Relations (IRR) report in September 2006,Driven to Desperate Measures (PDF)....*later amended and unspecified:a comment said Russian
Like Great Britain, the United States imprisons some of their asylum applicants, many of them torture victims, in public and private prisons throughout the country. Approximately 50,000 asylum seekers were placed in penal detention in the United States from 2003 to 2009. Detention retraumatizes the tortured, and prevents the asylum applicant from making a proper case for their claims. Over 90 immigration detainees have died since ICE took over administration of the system in 2003, at least a dozen of them suicides.
A Sri Lankan fisherman, who was a victim of kidnapping by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was detained for 30 months in the United States while ICE opposed his request for asylum on the ground that his payment of his ransom consisted “material support” to the armed group. When he was finally released from detention pending a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, he was placed into a restrictive supervision program. He was fitted with an ankle bracelet and initially required to report on a monthly basis. Eventually, this was reduced to in-person reporting every six months. After nearly two years of compliance with all reporting requirements, following his 30 months of detention, the fisherman is still required to wear a large ankle bracelet and is subject to home visits.
Enlisting Krav Maga in the War for Israel
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2010/03/22/enlisting-krav-maga-in-the-war-for-israel
Kimberly Mor and Sue Garstki, the owners of Krav Maga Illinois, in Highland Park, are giving new meaning to the phrase “get home safe.”
Their school is the first of its kind on the North Shore licensed to teach Krav Maga—the official self-defense system of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)—through the official Krav Maga Worldwide training center and the Ministry of Education in Israel.
We Stand on the Cusp of one of Humanity's Most Dangerous Moments
http://www.alternet.org/media/146005/we_stand_on_the_cusp_of_one_of_humanity%27s_most_dangerous_moments
The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala, Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not naïve enough to think I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.
Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d’état in slow motion. And the coup is over.
Hightower: Two Right-Wing Billionaire Brothers Are Remaking America for Their Own Benefit
http://www.alternet.org/investigations/146094/hightower%3A_two_right-wing_billionaire_brothers_are_remaking_america_for_their_own_benefit
In the elections of 2006 and 2008, people voted for a fundamental break from Washington's 30-year push to enthrone a corporate kleptocracy.
Yet the economic and political thievery continues, as the White House, Congress, both parties, the courts, the media, much of academia, and other national institutions that shape our public policies reflexively shy away from any structural change. Instead, the first instinct of these entities is to soothe the fevered brow of corporate power by insisting that corporate primacy be the starting point of any "reform." Thus, when Washington began its widely ballyhooed effort last year to reform our health-care system, step number one was to announce publicly that the monopolistic, bureaucratic insurance behemoths that cost us so much and deliver so little would retain their controlling position in the structure. Likewise, Wall Street barons who crashed America's financial system were allowed to oversee the system's remake--and (Big Surprise!) the same top-heavy structure and shaky practices that caused the crash are being kept in place.
In other words, the foxes who ate the chickens keep being put in charge of designing the new hen house--so nothing really changes.
Arizona Public Lands in Mining Company Hands
http://www.taxpayer.net/resources.php?category=&type=Project&proj_id=3367&action=Headlines%20By%20TCS
Despite the high value of minerals produced from Arizona and other western states’ public lands, nearly 100,000 mines are currently left abandoned by mining companies, leaving the government to pay for cleanup after minerals have been extracted. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that some of these mines will cost taxpayers more than $50 million each to cleanup, and the total cost of remediating abandoned mines nationwide could cost upwards of 70 billion. Other extractive industries such as oil and gas pay royalties for the resources they extract from federal lands and waters, and the hardrock mining industry should not receive special treatment. Mining companies must compensate taxpayers for extracting these resources and provide a revenue stream to cleanup our public lands.
Retro play satirizes modern celebrity
http://chicagotheaterblog.com/2010/03/21/hey-dancin-factory-theatre-review
Hey! Dancin’! isn’t just a hair-brained ‘80s-inspired comedy. It’s also an effective satire on people’s perceptions of celebrity today. K.K. and his girlfriend Tanya see themselves as the center of the universe because they are on TV.—cable access—but TV nonetheless. Halle and Trisha give this notion weight since they are star-obsessed with these no-name nudniks. Yet as Halle gets to know the real K.K., who admittedly dreams of being famous without actually ever wanting to hone any real talent, the image of these backwoods celebrities begins to crumble.
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