So The Weekend will be delayed....and since Charles Dickens was 200 years old Thursday, we will be giving him the dickens.....

What the Dickens?

so bad the 99% live in a Bleak House. Wall Street lives the high life. The American Dream is now a Tale of Two Cities....


pass the knitting needles.

I just made dinner reservations.

Delay Monday instead.

Something will turn up.

THIS ARTICLE, POSTED IN A UK PAPER BEFORE THE NATIONALIZATION AND SHUTDOWN OF THE ANGLO-IRISH BANK, NOW REEKS OF IRONY...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/9819701/Central-bankers-should-be-brought-to-heel-by-elected-parliaments.html

Intellectual fashion is changing. Central bankers around the world no longer command the charisma of a high priesthood. Nor should they after stoking a global bubble and then tightening just as the money supply was collapsing in mid-2008.
The onus is falling on them to justify why monetary independence is self-evidently a good thing, and why central bankers should operate beyond democratic control.

The humbling of the Bank of Japan (BoJ) this week is just the start, as Bundesbank chief Jens Weidmann warned. “It is already possible to observe alarming infringements, for example in Hungary or in Japan, where the new government is massively involving itself in the affairs of the central bank, is emphatically demanding an even more aggressive monetary policy and is threatening an end to central bank autonomy,” he said...One could say that “alarming infringements” are in the eye of the beholder. The European Central Bank that he serves is itself a political operator of unbounded power.

Professor Richard Werner, a monetary expert at Southampton University, says the men of Maastricht misread German history very badly when they created a central bank that answers to nobody. “They thought they were modelling the ECB on the Bundesbank, but they weren’t. They have instead replicated the Reichsbank, which was not accountable to any democratic institution, and led to disaster,” he said. No political force in Germany was able to halt Reichsbank deflation in the early 1930s until Hitler took power, tore up the rule book, and appointed Hjalmar Schacht with instructions to reflate, which he did with gusto and success. Prof Werner said the Bundesbank was deliberately brought under the control of the German parliament when created after the Second World War to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Weimar era. “Europe has unlearned all the lessons of the Bundesbank,” he added.

The ECB’s actions have certainly been remarkable. It sent secret letters to the leaders of Italy and Spain in mid-2011 with a list of sweeping demands, covering pensions, labour reform, and sensitive political issues over which it has no constitutional authority. When Italy failed to comply with the terms, it switched off bond purchases, let yields spiral upwards, and forced Silvio Berlusconi out of office. That may be a good or bad outcome – depending on your point of view – but it is not the action of a central bank. It is the action of a political authority that has entirely slipped the leash of democratic control. The only real constraint on the ECB is the greater political power of the German Chancellory. Each stage of escalation in ECB’s emergency policies – culminating in Mario Draghi’s August pledge to buy “unlimited” amounts of Italian and Spanish bonds, once the political trigger is pulled – first required a green light from Angela Merkel...


IN OTHER WORDS, THE IDIOTS ARE IN CHARGE OF THE DYNAMITE FACTORY

A MUST READ!

Max Keiser is on it.....

Legacy of Chattel Slavery: Private Prisons Blur the Line Between Real People and Real Estate With New IRS Property Gambit

http://truth-out.org/news/item/14255-the-legacy-of-chattel-slavery-private-prisons-blur-the-line-between-real-people-and-real-estate-with-new-irs-property-gambit



Although many criminal justice activists are quick to denounce the most egregious race-based expressions of prison privatization, ranging from involuntary prison labor to racially disparate sentencing policies, few, if any, have attended to the deeply racialized, yet somewhat arcane, relationship developing between the private prison industry and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Curiously, one of the best ways to understand exactly how the private prison industry views itself and its fundamental mission is to analyze changes in the IRS corporate filing status of private prison companies.

In July 2012, the GEO Group - the nation's second-largest private prison operator behind Corrections Corporation of America - sent a letter to the IRS requesting a conversion from a typical "class-c" corporation to a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). At the time, the Florida-based company specializing in "correctional detention and residential treatment services" billed its potential REIT conversion as a way to increase long-term shareholder value, lower the cost of capital and attract a larger base of potential shareholders.

According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), an REIT is an entity that annually distributes at least 90 percent of its taxable income to shareholders in the form of dividends in exchange for a zero federal and state corporate tax liability. GEO estimates a $50 million annual tax savings, invests at least 75 percent of its total assets in real estate, and - here's the key - derives at least 95 percent of its gross income from real estate-related sources.

Over the last six months, the GEO Group has assiduously lobbied the IRS claiming that it meets REIT eligibility criteria. "Fundamentally, GEO is in a real estate intensive industry ... and GEO has attractive real estate characteristics," reads an excerpt from its most recent investor presentation - one that leaves out all mention of rehabilitation....On January 18, the GEO Group announced it had received a favorable private-letter ruling from the IRS in connection with its previously announced intention to convert to a REIT. Hours later, the company's shares hit an all-time high. (Corrections Corporation of America, by the way, is still awaiting its own REIT conversion ruling from the IRS.) Based on the receipt of the private-letter ruling, GEO's board of directors authorized the company to elect REIT status retroactive to January 1, 2013...According to the AP, George Zoley, GEO's chairman, CEO and founder, said:


Lobbying for and achieving a REIT corporate filing status with the IRS demonstrates that the GEO Group primarily sees itself as a real estate firm that incidentally dabbles in corrections, not an agency whose primary objective is rehabilitation, safety, or community restoration.

Mark Twain once said that although history doesn't repeat itself, it sure does rhyme.

MORE ON THE HORRORS OF MODERN DLAVERY AT LINK

http://www.nationofchange.org/private-medicare-plans-drive-health-care-costs-offering-insufficient-coverage-1359995003

Two separate reports by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Health Affairs builds upon earlier research to conclude that private insurance plans under the Medicare Advantage program drive up Medicare spending. Ultimately, those private plans raise health care costs by encouraging seniors to cherry pick their health plans respective to their health, Kaiser Health News reports.
Private insurance plans under Medicare Advantage are often able to attract healthier Medicare beneficiaries by offering cheap — but bare-bones — health plans. When those healthier seniors encounter a medical problem that’s too extensive for their private coverage, they switch over to the more generous traditional Medicare program in order to take advantage of its more expansive benefits. That in turn, raises spending in the traditional Medicare pool:



While the Health Affairs study notes that there have been some protective measures instituted to prevent this cherry-picking, it still occurs in considerable volume. The findings underscore the reality that adverse selection remains a costly problem in private insurance markets. While some critics might claim that reductions to Medicare Advantage payments under Obamacare could encourage seniors to continue disenrolling from private Medicare Advantage plans, that hasn’t borne out in reality. In fact, since Obamacare’s cuts to overpayments in Medicare Advantage began to be phased in, enrollment in the program is up while premiums are down.

Furthermore, increased enrollment into traditional Medicare might actually be a desirable outcome — the traditional Medicare program costs less per capita than the private Advantage program. And as these recent studies show, Advantage plans tend to fall short — and cost more — once beneficiaries get sick. As Center for Medicare Advocacy executive director Judith Stein put it, “Private Medicare Advantage plans work for people when they are relatively well, but fall short of traditional Medicare when they are sick or disabled.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/05/171160747/when-companies-agree-to-huge-penalties-but-dont-admit-wrongdoing

It happens all the time: The government announces some giant settlement with a company that's been accused of doing something wrong. The company agrees to pay some massive fine. Then, in the fine print, there's something along the lines of: "The company neither admits nor denies any wrongdoing."

Recently, though, some powerful people have been pushing back, rejecting deals that include this kind of fine print. Jed Rakoff, a federal judge, refused to approve a big settlement between the SEC and Citigroup precisely because it included that boilerplate about neither admitting nor denying guilt. In his decision (PDF AT LINK), Judge Rakoff wrote that he couldn't approve a settlement when no one had proved or admitted that Citi did anything wrong. What's more, Rakoff argued, the whole neither-admit-nor-deny thing is contrary to the public interest:


Rakoff's decision may be overturned, but last month the SEC restricted companies' ability to refuse to admit wrongdoing, at least in certain cases.

And this week's government lawsuit against Standard & Poor's was filed in part because S&P refused to admit wrongdoing, according to the NYT. The government says S&P knowingly inflated the ratings of mortgage-backed bonds; the company says the accusations are false...No surprise there: If S&P were to admit that it knowingly inflated bond ratings, it could face a huge wave of lawsuits.

"If you say, 'Oh, we're guilty,' then everybody in the world who ever bought a bond that was rated could come after you," Lawrence Kaplan, a lawyer who's an expert in banking regulation, told me this morning.

Going to trial and being found guilty would actually create fewer legal problems for S&P. Unlike admitting wrongdoing, losing a trial is only binding in that particular case, Kaplan said. Other would-be plaintiffs would have to try the case all over again, before a new jury, which might find in favor of the company...So if federal prosecutors really are getting serious about forcing companies to choose between admitting wrongdoing and going to trial, we're likely to see more cases go to court — and fewer big settlements where companies agree to pay lots of money but don't admit they did anything wrong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/05/the-case-for-the-too-big-to-fail-banks/?wprss=rss_ezra-klein

America is still spitting mad over the financial crisis that hit the country half a decade ago and that continues to hang over the U.S. economy. And in the last few months, there’s been a new wave of calls to break up the “too big to fail” banks that were at the center of the crisis — and the beneficiaries of a massive wave of bailouts. So, is splitting those banks up the answer? That debate is just getting going. Does the U.S. economy need these guys to be so darn big? More and more lawmakers and regulators don’t like the financial system that they see: banks with trillions of dollars in assets, sprawling global operations that may be too complex to manage, and an implicit guarantee that governments will not let these giants go under.

The move to change that has a growing list of powerful allies. This week, the British government proposed a law that would break up giant banks that fail to separate their riskier trading activities from basic banking services. As Ezra Klein catalogued Monday, the list of those opposed to designating banks as too big to fail includes veteran bank regulators, such as former FDIC president Sheila Bair, FDIC vice chairman Tom Hoenig and Dallas Federal Reserve president Richard Fisher. Two of the nation’s most powerful regulators, Federal Reserve governor Dan Tarullo and New York Fed president Bill Dudley, haven’t gone as far as calling for break-ups, but they’ve have inched in that direction.

But what is the counterargument? As the push to split up the banks gains steam, it is worth wrestling with what value the megabanks offer the world economy, and what costs might be attached to breaking them apart...A new paper from Patrick Sims of Hamilton Place Strategies, a policy and communications firm led by Bush administration White House and Treasury official Tony Fratto, amounts to a case for the big banks. (Hamilton Place counts major banks and their trade associations among its clients). The entire paper is worth reading, but here are some of the arguments that I believe have the most merit.

The first argument is also the simplest. This is a huge and complex global economy. With trillions of dollars in global trade and companies with hundreds of billions in assets, it takes giant banks with a global reach to supply them with the financial products they need to do business...The paper dismisses research that suggests there are no real economies of scale in banking above $100 billion in assets. Sims argues that this does not take into account that the megabanks are doing many types of business that smaller banks don’t do, which makes the comparisons moot. Big banks provide trade finance for companies doing business overseas, underwrite stock and bond offerings, sell products to let companies hedge against fluctuations in currencies, commodities and interest rates — all activities that enable the giant global companies to do their work. It is a lot easier for Caterpillar or Boeing to sell American-made construction equipment and airplanes overseas when they have banks with massive resources to draw from when they need it...The counterargument from the too-big-to-fail opposition is that smaller, regional banks can work together to syndicate loans, each funding a portion of the loan. Sims presents data showing that in practice, loan syndication is still done heavily by the giant banks; the top 10 banks in the U.S. loan syndication market were all either U.S.-based or international megabanks. For example, the largest syndication of 2012, an $11 billion loan to energy company Kinder Morgan, included funding from 10 major global banks, including the four biggest U.S. banks and others from overseas that would also fit in the too-big-to-fail category. If the U.S. government capped bank assets at $300 billion (JPMorgan is $2.3 trillion), the four largest banks would become 25 mid-sized banks; that would suggest a company looking for a loan like the one Kinder Morgan took out last year would either have to turn to foreign banks or deal with the hassle of coordinating with dozens of smaller American banks...

MORE

THIS RAISES IN MY MIND THE QUESTION OF TOO-BIG CORPORATIONS, A HITHERTO UN-ADDRESSED ISSUE. CAN CORPORATIONS GET TOO BIG, AS IN, TOO BIG TO LIVE, TOO BIG TO REGULATE, A SORT OF SUPER-QUASI-NATION THAT HAS NO FIXED BOUNDARIES AND NO OVERSIGHT BY ANY DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTION...I SUBMIT THAT TOO MANY OF THEM ALREADY ARE.

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/how-inequality-holding-back-recovery


Is inequality holding back our weak recovery? Joe Stiglitz argues it is, while Paul Krugman argues it is not. John Judis summarizes the debate at The New Republic. I want to rephrase the question and focus specifically on the two most relevant policy points.



Right now our federal government's tax structure is progressive, while state and local taxes are regressive. Meanwhile, the federal government can borrow at cheap rates and run a large deficit without a problem, while state budgets are constrained and need to be balanced. As a result, large cuts and layoffs at the state and local level have counteracted much of the federal government's stimulus that comes from running a larger deficit. Indeed, Stiglitz's point that inequality makes it harder to fund education is a real life battle: we are currently seeing education funding by state and local governments collapsing in real-time. Here's a chart on how regressive state and local taxes are from the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy:




When it comes to state and local taxes, the top 1 percent pays 6.4 percent, the middle 20 percent pays 9.7, while the poorest 20 percent of families pay 10.9 percent. This isn't counting user fees, though a CEO with 300 times the income of a worker probably doesn't get 300 times as many drivers' licenses. So, all things being equal, less inequality would mean less revenue for the federal government and more for state and local governments. Since a good plan for boosting demand would entail the federal government collecting less revenue (an extension of the payroll tax cut would have boosted demand) and state and local governments collecting more revenue and thus facing less austerity, less inequality would net provide more stimulus. I doubt it would matter that much, though it's an empirical matter on just how much it would provide.

Spending: The other debate has to do with the marginal propensity to consume. Evidence does find the rich are less likely to spend money on consumption than everyone else, and in a liquidity trap this matters. Steve Waldman at Interfluidity has a larger theory on why it has mattered over the past decades, but I want to focus on the complicating, narrow issue of wealth inequality. A graph by Amir Sufi, using Federal Reserve data, shows a collapse in the median net worth of households, and his research and others finds that this is a driver of the collapse in demand:




Meanwhile, precautionary savings are still a problem.

So, all things being equal, what happens if we decrease inequality in a balance-sheet recession? I see two changes running in opposite directions. You could see an increase in spending by the median household, as they have a higher propensity to spend, plus more income could relieve their balance-sheet constraints. However, if more middle-class households have more of the country's income, they may save it even more aggressively; this would amplify the Paradox of Thrift and make the recession worse in the short term. It's not clear which of these effects would dominate over the other.

One way to deal with this is to boost net wealth while keeping incomes consistent, via debt forgiveness or reform our legal mechanisms like bankruptcy so they can handle allocating these losses, though that doesn't seem to be in the cards.

http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/4-secretive-ways-wall-street-extorts-you?akid=10017.227380.hgwQim&rd=1&src=newsletter789871&t=14&paging=off

Wall Street execs continue getting richer off the backs of regular Americans. In January, Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said that Wall Street banks, "... as a result of their privileged status, exact an unfair tax upon the American people." If a president of a regional Federal Reserve bank (hardly a socialist), is telling us that Wall Street is not only privileged, but using its privileges to "tax" the hell out of us, it might be wise to take a closer look. While he's not literally talking about a tax, he's talking about a kind of extortion -- a virtual tax that ends up in the pockets of our Wall Street barons. While our political elites warn us about becoming the next Greece (do we get the tasty retsina, good weather and nice beaches too?), the real "tax and spend" game is taking place on Wall Street, hidden from view. In fact, Wall Street is essentially exerting a hidden tax on us day in and day out -- but we don't even notice or get anything back in return.

Before describing how Wall Street does it, let's try to wrap our minds around how big our biggest banks really are. In 1970, the top five U.S. banks owned 17 percent of all U.S. banking assets. By 2010, well after the crash, the top five banks owned 52 percent of all our banking assets. Who are these giant banks today? The usual suspects -- JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. These five alone have assets that account for more than one quarter of the entire U.S. economy. They form an oligopoly, defined by Investepedia.com as "a situation in which a particular market is controlled by a small group of firms. An oligopoly is much like a monopoly, in which only one company exerts control over most of a market. In an oligopoly, there are at least two firms controlling the market." As a result, a very small group of banks can exert power over markets to boost profits and gouge consumers -- that would be us. The extra we pay to them is precisely like a tax, except we don't know we're paying it. This puts an entirely new spin on "no taxation without representation."

Here are four Wall Street ploys that create a hidden and unfair tax on all Americans.

1. Too-big-to-fail banks jack up every mortgage rate in the country.

The largest U.S. banks use their oligopoly power to siphon money from the mortgage markets. This means they can charge consumers higher interest rates for loans and credit card debt, and they can keep interest rates on home mortgages higher than they should be. For example, the five largest banks are the primary buyers of loans originated by community banks and mortgage companies. It's still enormously prosperous for giant banks, but the smaller community banks are squeezed. As Jeff Horowitz writes in the American Banker, "The country's biggest banks are again making handsome profits from buying and servicing home mortgages. The smaller institutions that produce the loans have not been so fortunate." ...Neither has the consumer. Although mortgage rates are low because of the financial crash, they would be even lower if the big banks did not extract extra oligopolistic profits. It's just a fact of economics that when competition among banks declines, the cost of mortgages to consumers goes up. How much? This amounts to a hidden tax of $1,000 per year for anyone taking out a 30-year mortgage. But this hidden tax is so subtle that the average consumer has no idea that she is being fleeced. As the New York Times, reports, "Banks are making unusually large gains on mortgages because they are taking profits far higher than the historical norm, analysts say. That 3.55 percent rate for a 30-year mortgage could be closer to 3.05 percent if banks were satisfied with the profit margins of just a few years ago. The lower rate would save a borrower about $30,000 in interest payments over the life of a $300,000 mortgage."

2. The biggest banks and their hedge fund partners engage in high-speed trading that rips off everyone who has money in pension and mutual funds.

In doing research for my latest book, How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America's Wealth I came across the incredible phenomena of high-speed computer trading. Wall Street makes somewhere between $5 billion and $20 billion a year using ultra-fast and expensive computers that can execute millions of trades per second. Why make so many trades so quickly? You may find this almost impossible to believe, but by being able to trade in nanoseconds, the high-speed computers can "see" when you're about to buy a stock, get there before you and then resell it back to you for a few pennies more. Between the time you press the "buy" button to the time your trade goes through, the price is bumped up a few pennies by these automated high-speed trading systems. The same goes for your mutual and pension funds. When they buy or sell stocks in your behalf, the high-speed computers are waiting to pounce in order to extract a few pennies from each and every trade, just like a sales tax -- except that it goes into Wall Street's ever deepening pockets.

3. Insider trading is yet another hidden tax.

The U.S Attorney's office in Manhattan has nailed over 70 hedge fund employees on charges of insider trading. Since these cases are extremely difficult to prosecute, it's reasonable to assume that we're seeing a very small tip of the corruption iceberg. No doubt there are hundreds of other culprits, if not thousands, throughout Wall Street who are illegally profiting from insider trading. But who's the victim? You are. Again, it's likely to come out of your pension and mutual funds. When a Wall Street money manager makes a lucrative trade based on illegal insider information, those on the other side of the trade are worse off. Either you don't get the upside or you are stuck with the downside. When the definitive history of this period is finally written, it may show that most, if not all, of the super-profits enjoyed by hedge funds and the proprietary trading desks of too-big-to-fail banks over the past decade came from illegal financial machinations.

4. The biggest tax of all? As Wall Street grows larger, economic growth is harmed, thereby killing jobs, decreasing tax revenues and provoking debt crises.

Andrew Haldane, a key regulator for the Bank of England, reports on an amazing study which shows that as banks grow larger and more concentrated, economic development is harmed. "There is a threshold at which private credit-to-GDP may begin to have a negative impact on GDP growth," writes Haldane. "That threshold is found to lie at a private credit-to-GDP ratio of around 80-100%." Unfortunately, our private credit-to-GDP ratio is about 200 percent, meaning the private debt created by banks is twice the size of our economy and doing more harm than good. Let me put this crudely. When the financial sector grows too large, it sucks the economic life out of the economy. Its hidden taxes siphon away investment money from other sectors that could use it much better. It milks consumers and lowers effective demand. And it uses its too-big-to-fail status to take excessive risks to boost profits, knowing full well that any major downside --- the inevitable failures -- will be covered by the taxpayer.

SEE THE RECOMMENDED CURES AT LINK

****************************************************************

Les Leopold is the executive director of the Labor Institute in New York, and author of How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America's Wealth (J. Wiley and Sons, 2013).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/06/federal-reserve-anonymous

US central bank confirms intrusion after hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen 4,000 bankers' details...The US Federal Reserve bank has confirmed one of its internal websites was broken into by hackers after the hacktivist group Anonymous was claimed to have stolen details of more than 4,000 bank executives.

"The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product," a spokeswoman for the US central bank said.

"Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system," the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals affected by the breach had been contacted.

The admission follows a claim that hackers linked to Anonymous struck the bank on Sunday. The technology news site ZDNet separately reported that Anonymous appeared to have published information said to containing the login information, credentials, internet protocol addresses and contact information of more than 4,000 US bankers. The claim was made via Twitter using an account registered to OpLastResort, which is linked to Anonymous, which has claimed responsibility for attacks on other government and corporate sites. OpLastResort is a campaign some hackers linked to Anonymous have started to protest against government prosecution of the computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, who killed himself on 11 January.

The bank declined to identify which website had been hacked. But information it provided to bankers indicated that the site, which was not public, was a contact database for banks to use during a natural disaster. A copy of the message sent by the bank to members of its Emergency Communication System (ECS) and obtained by Reuters warned that mailing address, business phone, mobile phone, business email and fax numbers had been published. "Some registrants also included optional information consisting of home phone and personal email. Despite claims to the contrary, passwords were not compromised," the bank said.

The website's purpose is to allow bank executives to update the Fed if their operations have been flooded or otherwise damaged in a storm or other disaster. That helps the bank assess the overall impact of the event on the banking system.

"Women delivering newspapers in Torrance shot in manhunt for ex-cop"

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2013/02/ex-cop-manhunt-newspaper-delivery-women-shot.html

Especially LA. The pigs are feral there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/opinion/americas-genius-glut.html

WHILE genuine immigration reform has the potential to fix a seriously broken system, four senators have introduced a bill to solve a problem we don’t have: the supply of high-tech workers. The bill’s authors, led by Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, argue that America would benefit from letting more immigrants trained in science, technology, engineering and math work in the country, with the sponsorship of high-tech companies like Microsoft and I.B.M. But the opposite is the case: the bill would flood the job market with indentured foreign workers, people who could not switch employers to improve their wages or working conditions; damage the employment prospects of hundreds of thousands of skilled Americans; and narrow the educational pipeline that produces these skilled workers domestically. The impetus for the bill, which would give six-year visas to as many as 300,000 foreign high-tech workers a year, is the longstanding lament by business leaders that they cannot find the talent they need in the American labor market. In their version, there is a shortage of scientists and engineers, and the United States is failing to keep substantial numbers of foreign students in the country. As a result, our position as the world’s leading high-tech economy is in danger. Fortunately, they argue, H-1B visas — our guest-worker program for high-tech workers — brings us “the best and the brightest” in the world. We just don’t give out enough of them.

But America’s technology leadership is not, in fact, endangered. According to the economist Richard B. Freeman, the United States, with just 5 percent of the world’s population, employs a third of its high-tech researchers, accounts for 40 percent of its research and development, and publishes over a third of its science and engineering articles. And a marked new crop of billion-dollar high-tech companies has sprung up in Silicon Valley recently, without the help of an expanded guest-worker program. Nor are we turning away foreign students, or forcing them to leave once they’ve graduated. According to the Congressional Research Service, the number of full-time foreign graduate students in science, engineering and health fields has grown by more than 50 percent, from 91,150 in 1990 to 148,900 in 2009. And over the 2000s, the United States granted permanent residence to almost 300,000 high-tech workers, in addition to granting temporary work permits (for up to six years) to hundreds of thousands more. The bill’s proponents argue that for the sake of our global competitiveness, we shouldn’t train and then return the tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian students who come here every year. But almost 90 percent of the Chinese students who earn science and technology doctorates in America stay here; the number is only slightly lower for Indians. If they’re talented enough to get a job here, they’re already almost guaranteed a visa.

If anything, we have too many high-tech workers: more than nine million people have degrees in a science, technology, engineering or math field, but only about three million have a job in one. That’s largely because pay levels don’t reward their skills. Salaries in computer- and math-related fields for workers with a college degree rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. If these skills are so valuable and in such short supply, salaries should at least keep pace with the tech companies’ profits, which have exploded. And while unemployment for high-tech workers may seem low — currently 3.7 percent — that’s more than twice as high as it was before the recession.

If there is no shortage of high-tech workers, why would companies be pushing for more? Simple: workers under the H-1B program aren’t like domestic workers — because they have to be sponsored by an employer, they are more or less indentured, tied to their job and whatever wage the employer decides to give them. Moreover, too many are paid at wages below the average for their occupation and location: over half of all H-1B guest workers are certified for wages in the bottom quarter of the wage scale. Bringing over more — there are already 500,000 workers on H-1B visas — would obviously darken job prospects for America’s struggling young scientists and engineers. But it would also hurt our efforts to produce more: if the message to American students is, “Don’t bother working hard for a high-tech degree, because we can import someone to do the job for less,” we could do significant long-term damage to the high-tech educational system we value so dearly.

There is no question that the immigration system needs major reform. But let’s not break anything else in the process.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Ross Eisenbrey is the vice president of the Economic Policy Institute.

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IT'S QUITE OBVIOUS THAT SOME OF THAT "GENIUS" NEEDS TO GO INTO POLITICS, AND I WOULD SO RECOMMEND THE YOUTH OF THIS NATION

the accompanying news article.

The NYT really should follow the WP and let readers have their say with respect to all articles.

That includes the OP pieces by Thomas Friedman.

His more provocative pieces rarely allow comment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/opinion/mary-jo-white-at-the-sec.html

President Obama has nominated one of the nation’s best lawyers, Mary Jo White, to be the next chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Ms. White has a formidable record as a prosecutor from 1993 to 2002, when she was the United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. She also has a stellar reputation as a white-collar defense attorney at Debevoise & Plimpton, where she has been chief of litigation since 2002, representing several of the firms and executives that she would regulate at the S.E.C. Her résumé in the past decade has understandably alarmed advocates of financial reform, who fear that her work as a defender of Wall Street means that she is dangerously biased in favor of the banks and their deregulatory agenda. Her lack of a deep regulatory background is also a worry at a time when the agency’s top priority is to finish overdue rules to carry out the Dodd-Frank financial reform and other securities laws. Complicating matters further, her husband, John White, is also a corporate lawyer, at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, with his own long list of Wall Street clients. We understand these concerns but do not believe they are disqualifying. Ms. White is a worthy nominee, though clearly, the White House and Ms. White will have to address the conflicts of interest in her background frankly and persuasively. Equally important, she must be able to demonstrate in her confirmation hearing that she is not captive to the financial industry’s view of the world, which has dominated her recent professional life.

The ethics and disclosure documents Ms. White has signed and that will be part of the nomination papers submitted to the Senate are a good start. They identify Ms. White’s recent former clients, including JPMorgan Chase, UBS, General Electric and Deloitte & Touche, among others. By law, Ms. White would have to recuse herself from S.E.C. enforcement decisions involving the clients, unless she is cleared to participate by ethics officials. The White House has indicated that the number of Ms. White’s potential recusals is not out of line with those of several other political appointees. The law does not require Ms. White to recuse herself from decisions on new rules that will affect her former clients because such rules do not apply to specific firms or individuals. Still, to earn and retain the public trust, it is crucial that she avoid the appearance of conflict in all S.E.C. matters.

It is particularly important for senators at Ms. White’s confirmation hearing to ask how she plans to identify and analyze potential conflicts, and to make sure that her answers leave no doubt about her independence. The ethics letter also details changes to Mr. White’s law practice to avoid direct or apparent conflicts, like his pledge not to communicate directly with the S.E.C. while Ms. White is the chairwoman and restructuring his compensation at his law firm so that he is not rewarded for outcomes that rest on S.E.C. decisions. It could go further, like requiring Mr. White to give up his positions on various accounting advisory boards, since such issues are a central concern of the S.E.C.

Most important, at the confirmation hearing Ms. White will have to explain her own goals, values and motives in taking the top S.E.C. job, including her regulatory priorities and her specific views on pending rules, including the Volcker rule to constrain bank speculation and rules on executive pay. Her qualities of toughness, tenacity and aggressiveness are just what the S.E.C. needs in a leader. The overarching question she must be asked — and that she must answer — is how she will use those qualities to advance the S.E.C.’s mission, which is to protect individual investors by ensuring that markets are transparent, well regulated and vigorously policed.


WE SHALL SEE IF MS. WHITE IS PURE...OR NOT. GIVEN THE KIND OF APPOINTMENTS MADE SO FAR, I'D SAY NOT, BUT I'M WILLING TO BE CONVINCED.

WHEN IS ERIC HOLDER RESIGNING, BY THE WAY?

GOES INTO THE "NSS" FILE

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/07/171420747/study-finds-vast-majority-of-americans-felt-great-recession-personally?ft=1&f=1001

The Great Recession touched a vast majority of Americans personally, a new study from Rutgers' Heldrich Center finds. The most stunning number in the study: "Some 73 percent of Americans either lost a job themselves, or had a member of their household, a close relative, or a friend lose a job at some point in the past four years."

The report is pretty depressing. A few more findings:

— 56 percent say they have less money in savings now than before the recession.

— The vast majority think college will be permanently out of reach for most young people.

— A majority of Americans think it'll take at least six years before the economy recovers fully. 30 percent said it will never recover.

Cliff Zukin, co-author of the report, summed it up for The New York Times: "This to me is why the recession was so all-consuming and is likely to influence the American psyche," he said. "Almost everyone, four out of five, were directly or one step removed from unemployment and all that goes with it financially, socially, psychologically."

'The Happiness Index'. They will cook that book too....until the peasant finally revolt against their WS overloards.


http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=171414674&m=171453887

http://www.nationofchange.org/patient-s-guide-how-stay-safe-hospital-1360075468

Propping up a patient’s hospital bed at a 30-degree angle can help prevent hospital-acquired pneumonia. Using alcohol wipes kills staph bugs, but you need bleach wipes to kill C. diff germs. High-protein snacks can help prevent bed sores.

However, most patients don’t know these things. And doctors and nurses can easily overlook these basic care practices. Karen Curtiss AND Her book, “Safe & Sound in the Hospital: Must-Have Checklists and Tools for Your Loved One’s Care,” collects scores of these simple actions and details that can make a big difference in a patient’s recovery. Checklists have become more common for surgeons in the operating room. But according to Curtiss, she’s the only one producing checklists on hospital care for patients and families...



MORE AT LINK

A trend forecast from McKinsey Global Institute. Just 8 or 10 years out, so not terribly difficult to project the likely range of directions this train is heading...

These points -

Here.

In the details that shortage of tertiary degrees is mostly outside of the U.S. Here they say we will be short about 1.5 mill, which is less than the number of college grads in a year. They say we need to increase our output of STEM grads by about 30%, as that will be where most of the gap here is, although foreign-born workers help take some of that as 17% of the total grads in STEM.

But it says there will be an oversupply of medium- and low-skill labor, about 10%, or 20 million with no job available in the U.S. They also suggest we need to work on creating opportunities. So, and as our current labor statistics tell us, we will need to work on "... finding opportunities for workers without a college education to participate in fast-growing fields—such as health care and home-based personal services—in advanced economies".

Bedpans 101.

Wonder if a nation of home-based personal services "associates" can afford a fleet of drones to hold back all the people we pissed off in this decade? And pay higher costs for health care with worse result than any developed nation.

Reading about life under Hoover.

Unrepentant Radical
Sidney Lens
1980

S&P 500 +0.2%
DOW +0.1%
NASDAQ +0.4%

too much snow!

I better leave the motorcycle at home.

I sure could use a drink right about now...but no time.

The Kid's appointment ran an hour late, and so has everything since. I'm already off-loading stuff unto Saturday, which I am loathe to do.

What happens next is anybody's guess. But somewhere along the way, alcohol will be found.

http://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/content/Work_Trends_February_2013.pdf

Diminished Lives and Futures: A Portrait of America in the Great-Recession Era

Background
The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rut- gers, The State University of New Jersey was founded as a research and policy organiza- tion devoted to strengthening New Jersey’s and the nation’s workforce during a time of global economic change. The Heldrich Cen- ter researches and puts to work strategies that increase workers’ skills and employability, strengthen the ability of companies to com- pete, create jobs where they are needed, and improve the quality and performance of the workforce development system. Since 1997, the Heldrich Center has experienced rapid growth, working with federal and state gov- ernment partners, Fortune 100 companies, and major foundations. The Center embodies its slogan “Solutions at Work” by teaming with partners and clients to translate cutting- edge research and analysis into practices and programs that companies, unions, schools, community-based organizations, and govern- ment officials can leverage to strengthen the nation’s workforce. The Center’s projects are grounded in a core set of research priorities:
ƒ Disability Employment ƒ Evaluation, Management, and Employ-
ment ƒ Industry, Education, and Employment ƒ Reemployment ƒ Work Trends and Economic Analysis

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/feb/08/germany-trade-surplus-exports-imports

Germany's trade surplus has risen to its second highest level in more than 60 years after an unexpected drop in imports in December.

Exports rose over 2012, pointing to the strength of Europe's largest economy. And in further signs of a global economic recovery, China's exports and imports surged in January while inflation eased.

German imports declined by 1.3% in December, defying expectations of a rise of 1.4%. But exports inched up 0.3% from November, driving the full-year trade surplus to €188bn (£160bn), the second highest since records began in 1950.

Christian Schulz, from Berenberg Bank, said: "German trade was weak at the end of 2012, with exports failing to rebound from their sharp November fall and imports falling further.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2013/0208/breaking27.html


China's exports and imports surged in January as the first hard data of the year signalled not only a solid recovery in domestic and overseas demand, but also the risk that inflationary pressures are building.

Exports grew 25 per cent from a year earlier versus a forecast of 17 per cent in a Reuters poll. Imports surged 28.8 per cent to comfortably beat a consensus call of 23.3 per cent and the resulting $29.2 billion trade surplus topped a market expectation of $22 billion.

New lending by China's banks in January beat expectations at 1.07 trillion yuan (€128.2 billion) and more than doubled from December. Total social financing - a broad measure of liquidity in the economy - leapt to 2.54 trillion yuan, well ahead of December's 1.63 trillion yuan.

Economists were cautious about reading too much into one month's data undeniably distorted by the timing of Lunar New Year holidays, which fall in February this year but were in January in 2012. Still, the consensus view suggested an economic recovery that started in late 2012 was strengthening.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2013/0208/1224329792278.html

EU efforts to boost free trade with the US and the rest of the world will bring “massive benefits” to the Republic, a senior European Commission official told a gathering of business people yesterday.

Addressing the Dublin Chamber of Commerce agm late yesterday, Irishman David O’Sullivan, who is chief operating officer of the commission’s European External Action Service, said membership of the EU was in the Republic’s best economic interest.

Mr O’Sullivan said that while the EU was committed to the World Trade Organisation, it was also continuing to open markets through bilateral agreements with both the US and economies in Asia.

“If we succeed in these negotiations the EU will become the hub of the largest free trade network ever seen, stretching from North America, through to India and the Far East,” Mr O’Sullivan told the meeting.

2/8/13 Americans Are Tapping into Home Equity Again Diana Olick
Nearly 11 million borrowers are underwater on their mortgages, owing more than their homes are worth, according to CoreLogic, and yet home equity lines of credit are suddenly on the rise again. During the housing boom of the last decade Americans withdrew over $1 trillion in home equity. They did it through cash-out refinances, home equity loans, and home equity lines of credit. The latter allowed them to use their homes like an ATM. They spent the money on cars, televisions, vacations and fancy home upgrades. It was seemingly endless equity, until suddenly that equity was gone. "Home prices are definitely a factor" in the recent rise home equity lines of credit, said Brad Blackwell, an executive with Wells Fargo (WFC) Home Mortgage. "As they increase, people have more available equity."

more...
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-tapping-home-equity-again-160850204.html