but that was some sell-off on Thursday, wasn't it?

https://www.google.com/search?q=DJIA+for+the+week&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US

(click on 5 day tab to get the full effect of the week's market)

HAVE THE FARMERS STOPPED GROWING RICE, YET?

http://www.alternet.org/water/californias-devastating-drought-takes-significant-turn-worse?akid=12082.227380.UTUHi4&rd=1&src=newsletter1013815&t=22



The U.S. Drought Monitor, a government-funded weekly map of drought conditions, issued a shocking report today indicating that 58% of California is suffering from the harshest of drought conditions. All of the state has been suffering from drought conditions since May, the first time in 15 years.

This is also the first year that any part of California has experienced “exceptional drought” conditions since regular drought measurements began in the late 1990s. Now, nearly three-fifths of the state is under those conditions, with another 22% of California added into this level in the past week.

Heavy-population centers all suffer from extreme drought or exceptional drought.

DISNEYLAND IS OFF, HOWEVER...

http://www.alternet.org/activism/new-pro-holiday-advocacy-campaign-its-time-end-our-no-vacation-nation-policy-watch?akid=12082.227380.UTUHi4&rd=1&src=newsletter1013815&t=20




Despite our super power status around the globe, the United States is the only advanced economy in the world without legally mandated vacation for our citizens - with one in four American workers, or 28 million people, in the private sector not entitled to any time off. Contrast that with France and Germany where citizens are guaranteed 30 and 20 paid vacation days respectively a year.

In response, vacation equality supporters are rallying to change America's no-vacation policy once and for all with the launch of the new campaign, The Vacation Equality Project, advocating for a minimum amount of paid vacation time and building awareness of the many health and economic benefits of having quality R&R.

Studies show that those who take vacations are not only more likely to stay with their company, but perform considerably better at work than those who do not take any time off. What's more, productivity and performance reviews rise by eight percent for each additional 10 hours an employee takes of vacation, AlterNet reported.

Accompanying the short film is a Petition, which has been submitted to the White House, We The People. Project organizers hope to obtain 100,000 signatures by August 15 to secure a White House response on the issue.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/address-fact-america-only-advanced-economy-world-does-not-guarantee-any-paid-vacation-days/RW29BPwc

In 1921, while at the US Embassy in Istanbul, Dulles may have helped to expose the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery to Philip Graves, a journalist working for The Times of London. The article was reprinted in The New York Times.

Early career

Initially assigned to Vienna, he was transferred to Bern, Switzerland along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. Later in life Dulles claimed to have been telephoned by the then obscure Vladimir Lenin, seeking a meeting with the American embassy on April 8, 1917. After recovering from the 1918 flu pandemic he was assigned to the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, along with his older brother Foster. From 1922-6, he served five years as chief of the Near East division of the Department of State.

In 1926, he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan and Cromwell, the New York firm where his brother, John Foster Dulles, was a partner. He became a director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's founding in 1921. He was the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, he served as legal adviser to the delegations on arms limitation at the League of Nations. There he had the opportunity to meet with Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Maxim Litvinov, and the leaders of Britain and France. In 1935 Dulles returned from a business trip to Germany appalled by the Nazi treatment of German Jews and, despite his brother's objections, led a movement within the law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell to close their Berlin office. As a result of Dulles' efforts, the Berlin office was closed and the firm ceased to conduct business in Nazi Germany.

As the Republican Party began to divide into isolationist and interventionist factions, Dulles became an outspoken interventionist, running unsuccessfully in 1938 for the Republican nomination in New York's Sixteenth Congressional District on a platform calling for the strengthening of U.S. defenses. Dulles collaborated with Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, on two books, Can We Be Neutral? (1936), and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939). They concluded that diplomatic, military, and economic isolation, in a traditional sense, were no longer possible in an increasingly interdependent international system. Dulles helped a number of German Jews, such as the banker Paul Kemper, escape to the United States from Nazi Germany.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Dulles was recruited to work at the Office of Strategic Services and moved to Bern, Switzerland, where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of World War II. As Swiss Director of the OSS, Dulles worked on intelligence regarding German plans and activities, and established wide contacts with German émigrés, resistance figures, and anti-Nazi intelligence officers. He was assisted in intelligence-gathering activities by Gero von Schulze-Gaevernitz a German emigrant. Dulles also received valuable information from Fritz Kolbe, a German diplomat. Kolbe supplied secret documents regarding active German spies and plans regarding the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter.

Although Washington barred Dulles from making firm commitments to the plotters of the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, the conspirators nonetheless gave him reports on developments in Germany, including sketchy but accurate warnings of plans for Hitler's V-1 and V-2 missiles.

Dulles was involved in Operation Sunrise, secret negotiations in March 1945 to arrange a local surrender of German forces in northern Italy. After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the Office of Strategic Services Berlin station chief and later as station chief in Bern. The Office of Strategic Services was dissolved in October 1945 and its functions transferred to the State and War Departments.

In the 1948 Presidential election, Dulles was, together with his brother, an advisor to Republican nominee Thomas E. Dewey. The Dulles brothers and James Forrestal helped form the Office of Policy Coordination. During 1949 he co-authored the Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report, which was sharply critical of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been established by the National Security Act of 1947. Partly as a result of the report, Truman named a new Director of Central Intelligence, Lieutenant General Bedell Smith.

CIA career

In 1950, Smith recruited Dulles to oversee the agency's covert operations as Deputy Director for Plans. The same year Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, second in the intelligence hierarchy. After the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Bedell Smith shifted to the Department of State and Dulles became the first civilian Director of Central Intelligence.

The Agency's covert operations were an important part of the Eisenhower administration's new Cold War national security policy known as the "New Look". Under Dulles' direction, the CIA created MK-Ultra, a top secret mind control research project managed by Sidney Gottlieb. Dulles also personally oversaw Operation Mockingbird, a program that influenced foreign and domestic media companies.

At Dulles' request, President Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. In March 1950, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential communist subversion of the Agency. Although none of the investigations revealed any wrongdoing, the hearings were potentially damaging, not only to the CIA's reputation but also to the security of sensitive information. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA, under Dulles' orders, had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed disinformation to him in order to discredit him, in order to stop his investigation of communist infiltration of the CIA.

In the early 1950s, the United States Air Force conducted a competition for a new photo reconnaissance aircraft. Lockheed Aircraft Corporation's Skunk Works submitted a design number called the CL-282, which married sailplane-like wings to the body of a supersonic interceptor. This aircraft was rejected by the Air Force, but several of the civilians on the review board took notice, and Edwin Land presented a proposal for the aircraft to Dulles. The aircraft became what is known as the U-2 'spy plane', and it was initially operated by CIA pilots. Its introduction into operational service in 1957 greatly enhanced the CIA's ability to monitor Soviet activity through overhead photo surveillance. The aircraft eventually entered service with the Air Force. The Soviet Union captured a U-2 in 1960 during Dulles' term as CIA chief.

Dulles is considered one of the essential creators of the modern United States intelligence system and was an indispensable guide to clandestine operations during the Cold War. He established intelligence networks worldwide to check and counter Soviet and eastern European communist advances as well as international communist movements.

Coup in Iran

In 1953, Dulles was involved, along with Frank Wisner, in Operation Ajax, the covert operation that led to the removal of Mohammad Mossadeq, prime minister of Iran, and his replacement with Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran. Rumors of a Soviet takeover of the country had surfaced due to the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. British diplomat Christopher Woodhouse had proposed the idea of a coup d'état to President Eisenhower to try to regain British control of the oil company.

Coup in Guatemala

President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala was removed in 1954 in a CIA-led coup carried out under the code name Operation PBSUCCESS.

Sabotage against Cuba: Operation 40

At the direction of President Eisenhower, Dulles established Operation 40, comprising 40 officials and agents whose primary area of operations was the Caribbean region, including Cuba. On March 4, 1960, La Coubre, a ship flying a Belgian flag, exploded in Havana Bay. It was loaded with arms and ammunition destined for the armed forces of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The explosion killed 75 people and over 200 were injured. Fabian Escalante, an officer of the Department of State Security (G-2), later claimed that this was the first successful act carried out by Operation 40.

Bay of Pigs

Several failed assassination plots utilizing CIA-recruited operatives from the Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans directly against Castro undermined the CIA's credibility. The reputation of the agency and its director declined drastically after the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco. President Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds."

Dismissal

During the Kennedy Administration, Dulles faced increasing criticism. The pro-American but unpopular regimes in Iran and Guatemala that Dulles had helped put in place were widely regarded as brutal and corrupt. In autumn 1961, following the Bay of Pigs incident, Dulles and his entourage, including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and Deputy Director Charles Cabell, were forced to resign. On November 28, 1961, Kennedy presented Dulles with the National Security Medal at the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The next day, November 29, the White House released a resignation letter signed by Dulles.

NYT BOOK REVIEW

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/books/review/the-brothers-by-stephen-kinzer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Anyone wanting to know why the United States is hated across much of the world need look no farther than this book. “The Brothers” is a riveting chronicle of government-sanctioned murder, casual elimination of “inconvenient” regimes, relentless prioritization of American corporate interests and cynical arrogance on the part of two men who were once among the most powerful in the world.


THE BROTHERS

John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War

By Stephen Kinzer

Illustrated. 402 pp. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $30.

John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, were scions of the American establishment. Their grandfather John Watson Foster served as secretary of state, as had their uncle Robert Lansing. Both brothers were lawyers, partners in the immensely powerful firm of Sullivan & Cromwell, whose New York offices were for decades an important link between big business and American policy making.

John Foster Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 to 1959; his brother ran the C.I.A. from 1953 to 1961. But their influence was felt long before these official appointments. In his detailed, well-­constructed and highly readable book, Stephen Kinzer, formerly a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a columnist for The Guardian, shows how the brothers drove America’s interventionist foreign policy.

Kinzer highlights John Foster Dulles’s central role in channeling funds from the United States to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Indeed, his friendship with Hjalmar Schacht, the Reichsbank president and Hitler’s minister of economics, was crucial to the rebuilding of the German economy. Sullivan & Cromwell floated bonds for Krupp A. G., the arms manufacturer, and also worked for I. G. Farben, the chemicals conglomerate that later manufactured Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of Jews. Of course, the Dulles brothers’ law firm was hardly alone in its eagerness to do business with the Nazis — many on Wall Street and numerous American corporations, including Standard Oil and General Electric, had “interests” in Berlin. And Allen Dulles at least had qualms about operating in Nazi Germany, pushing through the closure of the Sullivan & Cromwell office there in 1935, a move his brother opposed.

Allen Dulles spent much of World War II working for the Office of Strategic Services, running the American intelligence operation out of the United States Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. His shadowy networks extended across Europe, and his assets included his old friend Thomas McKittrick, the American president of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, a key point in the transnational money network that helped keep Germany in business during the war. The O.S.S. was dissolved in 1945 by President Truman, but was soon reborn as the C.I.A. Kinzer notes that Truman did not support plots against foreign leaders but his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, had no such scruples. By 1953, with Allen Dulles running the C.I.A. and his brother in charge of the State Department, the interventionists’ dreams could come to fruition. Kinzer lists what he calls the “six monsters” that the Dulles brothers believed had to be brought down: Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, Sukarno in Indonesia, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Fidel Castro in Cuba. Only two of these, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, were hard-core Communists. The rest were nationalist leaders seeking independence for their countries and a measure of control over their natural resources. Ironically, Ho Chi Minh and Castro, strengthened perhaps by their Marxist faith, proved the most resilient. But the world still lives with the consequences of bringing down Mossadegh, who might have guided Iran, and thus world history, along a very different path. The 1953 C.I.A.-sponsored coup that brought Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power was seared into Iran’s national consciousness, fueling a reservoir of fury that was released with the Islamic revolution of 1979.

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

The brothers’ Manichaean worldview proved to be a poor tool for dealing with the complexities of the postcolonial era. Leaders like Lumumba and Mossadegh might well have been open to cooperation with the United States, seeing it as a natural ally for enemies of colonialism. However, for the Dulles brothers, and for much of the American government, threats to corporate interests were categorized as support for communism.

“For us,” John Foster Dulles once explained, “there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who are Christians and support free enterprise, and there are the others.”

when people can't buy, they don't

The International Monetary Fund has admitted that some of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was "bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived happily ever after.

Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in "the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF, put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.

The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.

Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment", as the philosopher John Gray has said all along.

The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course, its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless, to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves – and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules, and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task, supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/08/neoliberalism-financial-elite-governments-ransom

Hi Matt! Things keeping together for you?

I've had a second (unexpected) week of hell, but it should be really over by Weds. if nothing else happens. Of course, my definition of hell is nothing like yours...

but it's primary on Tuesday, and I'm working the polls. The smart poll inspectors took off for this election. the paperwork should keep the precinct workers employed from 6 AM until at least 10 PM...the cost of democracy.

As natural gas supplies are tightly squeezed, from Friday, manufacturing and municipalities in Ukraine are officially getting 30 percent less gas. This reduction is expected to help the country live through the winter without imported Russian gas.

The savings plan was announced by the deputy head of Naftogaz Alexander Todiichuk on Ukrainian TV in mid–July.

“The saving regime is being forced in Ukraine and it’ll officially come into operation as of August 1,” he said.

The 'regime of gas saving' includes cutting the use of gas by 30 percent in manufacturing and municipalities, while consumers that rely on government funding, such as schools and hospitals, would have to cut gas consumption by 10 percent.

The measure are expected to save about 150 million cubic meters of gas per month, which will be pumped into underground storage, said Todiichuk, adding that the volume should increase starting from August.

Coming into the winter, Ukraine has 16-17 billion cubic meters of natural gas saved up in underground storage.

The government in Kiev estimates Ukraine needs to import 7.23 billion cubic meters of gas in the next eight months through to March in order to keep economic activity stable, especially during the high-demand winter season.

http://rt.com/business/177316-ukraine-gas-russia-saving

My comment... So, let's see. Cut gas use by 30% in manufacturing, create less output, less people working, less people getting paid, less people paying taxes including the new 1.5% "War Tax." Pass new taxes, send more legit businesses to the underground economy (which is already big here, and which (going underground) is already happening). That so totally sounds like a plan!

but the next year, unless everyone insulates like beavers, it's gonna be cold inside. There won't be the money to buy even 70%.

Last edited Sat Aug 2, 2014, 10:49 AM - Edit history (1)

MOSCOW, July 30, /ITAR-TASS/. Russia plans to suspend the 1994 agreement on free trade with Georgia which signed an association agreement with the European Union.

Association agreements were signed at the end of July with Georgia and Moldova, and the economic part of the association agreement with Ukraine. Documents point to harmonisation of the three countries’ laws to align with European legislation and establishment of a free trade zone with the European Union.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said with this in view that Russia could take measures to protect its economy as Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova are also in a zone of free trade with Russia.

Earlier reports on Wednesday said the Ministry of Economic Development had drafted a government instruction to impose import duties on goods from Ukraine.

Import duties are to be paid, on 130 items, in particular on beef, pork, cheeses, farmer cheese and chocolate, as well as pipes, clothes, cosmetics, construction materials, cars and other goods.

http://en.itar-tass.com/economy/742973

What difference does it make if these tiny countries have agreements with TWO power blocks?

Can they be used to pass through goods untaxed from one side to the other?

OK, let's see if I can explain this in a brief, yet somewhat coherent manner.

First, it's not about Russia being a dick. There are good reasons for these steps. Let's look at these. After the breakup of the USSR, the new Russia kept generally good trading terms with its former states. In the beginning, it was overall beneficial to both Russia and the new states to do so. This is very similar to what is called in the USA "most favored nation" status.

Over time, the most-favored-nation status evolved for a number of the new states. Most because they joined the EU and NATO, though a couple might have lost most favored status for other reasons. So what did most-favored-nation status look like for Ukraine?

First, it's been generally recognized that Russia had been subsidizing the Ukrainian economy to the tune of $5-$10 billion a year almost every year since independence. The largest of these subsidies were discounts on the price of natural gas. A good part of this had to do with most-favored-nation status. Another part of this had to do Ukraine allowing Russia to maintain its fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. Russia paid rent, but at times they also gave Ukraine additional discounts on the price of natural gas. All of this of course helped keep the price of gas down, which is generally considered to be a good thing. But it also helps to make Ukrainian industries that use a lot of energy, especially steelmaking, to become less competitive. Why less competitive? This led to underinvestment in new technologies so that now steel, if all of the energy subsidies would be removed, would be approximately 3 times more expensive than steel made in the EU. Of course, the subsidies in place, it wasn't nearly that expensive, so Russia was more than happy to be a market for Ukrainian made steel.

Remember too that Russia and Ukraine are highly complementary economies. This is because they were both part of the same economy for a couple of centuries. East Europe want one way; West Europe went another. This leads to some fairly interesting anomalies such as the fact that trains built for West Europe cannot run on tracks in Eastern Europe because the spacing between the rails are different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Europe

So, back to the main question. When Ukraine gets duty-free status of the EU, here's what happens.

Benefits for Ukraine.
Goods made in Europe become cheaper because they can be imported duty-free.

Negatives for Ukraine.
Except for certain low value added items, mostly agricultural and raw materials, Ukrainian made products will be undesirable or unsellable in Europe.
Most high-value added items, things like automobiles, electronics, etc., do not meet European safety standards, pollution standards, and energy standards, and therefore cannot be imported to Europe.
Because of better efficiency in Europe, even some low value Ukrainian products may be impacted, like cheese, chocolates, and alcoholic products. If French and Italian wines become more affordable because no duties need to be paid, Ukrainian products will be impacted.

So, does this mean for Ukraine? It will be lower demand for many Ukrainian products across the board. Many cannot be sold in Europe, many that can be sold in Europe would be undesirable to many European consumers. Demand for many Ukrainian made goods in Ukraine would go down because EU made products, often of a higher quality, suddenly become a lot more affordable to buy. This will lead to higher unemployment.

The other change in the duty-free status between Russia and Ukraine, Ukraine can then attempt to keep their factories running just like before, and shipping more of these goods to Russia. As mentioned before, the Russian and Ukrainian economies are highly compatible. A number of goods coming out of both Russian and Ukrainian factories are of similar quality. However, they can be made more cheaply in Ukraine because living standards and salaries in Russia are generally higher. Ukrainian goods flooding into Russia can then undermine Russian industries leading to higher unemployment and Russia. In other words, Ukraine can export expected unemployment to Russia. Needless to say, Russia does not want that or need that. So putting duties on Ukrainian made products help ensure that Russian-made products remain competitive in Russia against more affordable Ukrainian made products.

I hope this explanation makes sense. Not so brief, but hopefully coherent!

and the Ukrainian Elite are fooling themselves if they think they are doing the people any good.

You ought to sell the above explanation to a news reporting source...get some facts and intelligent analysis into the mix of terra, terra, terra and war, war, war.

You could be a stringer for NPR, for example...

Can they be used to pass through goods untaxed from one side to the other?

Yes, that can happen too!

there's only so much bad news I can sort through at a time.

Privatisation isn't working. We were promised a shareholding democracy, competition, falling costs and better services. A generation on, most people's experience has been the opposite. From energy to water, rail to public services, the reality has been private monopolies, perverse subsidies, exorbitant prices, woeful under-investment, profiteering and corporate capture.

Private cartels run rings round the regulators. Consumers and politicians are bamboozled by commercial secrecy and contractual complexity. Workforces have their pay and conditions slashed. Control of essential services has not only passed to corporate giants based overseas, but those companies are themselves often state-owned – they're just owned by another state.

Report after report has shown privatised services to be more expensive and inefficient than their publicly owned counterparts. It's scarcely surprising that a large majority of the public, who have never supported a single privatisation, neither trust the privateers nor want them running their services.

But regardless of the evidence, the caravan goes on. David Cameron's government is now driving privatisation into the heart of education and health, outsourcing the probation service and selling off a chunk of Royal Mail at more than £1bn below its market price, with the government's own City advisers cashing in their chips in short order.

No amount of disastrous failures or fraudulent wrongdoing, it seems, debars companies such as G4S, Atos and Serco from lucrative new contracts in what is already an £80bn business – and one with an increasingly powerful grip on Westminster and Whitehall.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/09/tide-turning-against-privatisation

It's tough cookies, but them's the breaks.

Just plain old good business.

IT'S A GIGANTIC RACE TO THE BOTTOM, AND BIG BUSINESS IS THE HOST!

http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/jul/29/boomers-arent-to-blame-social-security-and-medicare-suffering-because-of-lower-wages?CMP=ema_565

Social security funds will bottom out by 2033, according to the fund’s trustees, but that’s not necessarily bad news...How are Medicare and social security doing? Every year, trustees of the programs release their estimates of financial health, and every year it raises controversy and panic. This year wasn’t any different.

Here’s what you need to know: social security will be depleted in 2033, according to the report, which was released Monday. The Medicare report showed that the program’s funds are now expected to deplete in 2030.

Bad news? Not really. The estimate on social security’s funding is unchanged from last year. Medicare added a mere four years to its lifespan. Neither is going to die a sudden death. After the social security fund runs out in 2033, the annual revenue from taxes will still be enough to cover 75% of pension costs. By 2050, the revenue from payroll taxes will be able to cover 75% of Medicare’s costs.

What people seem to forget: these are estimates, not bills coming due....

AND FURTHERMORE, IT DOESN'T EVEN TOUCH THE FUNDS THAT HAVE ACCUMULATED IN THE GENERAL FUND THAT BELONG TO THESE PROGRAMS (OF COURSE, WE'D HAVE TO RAISE TAXES ON THE RICH TO PAY BACK THAT MONEY, WHICH WENT FOR THEIR BANK BAILOUTS, ILLEGAL WARS OF ALL KINDS, AND CONSTITUTION-VIOLATING PROGRAMS OF ALL STRIPES...

...Social security is funded by payroll taxes, which means it is intertwined with the persistent problem of stagnant wages. Social security’s trustees assumed that the wage growth would be closer to 1.5% – far too optimistic. In a blog post prior to the release of this year’s estimates, Morrissey notes that over the last 30 years the real wages grew by an average of 1% per year. Back in 1983, that rate of growth was considered so low that it was the most pessimistic scenario envisioned by social security’s trustees.

The new assumption by the trustees is that wage growth will be a modest 1.1%.

There’s a disturbing implication there: the trustee’s lower wage predictions suggests that anemic incomes for Americans “is the new normal”, according to Morrissey – a sign of pessimism.

“[It] reflects pessimism about our public policy and our political will to actually implement policies that promote broad based economic growth,” she said... .

depends on what the meaning of "is" is...


http://www.theguardian.com/money/us-money-blog/2014/jul/30/us-economic-growth-better-worse-gdp-both?CMP=ema_565



Is the US economy finally improving after six years of stubborn stagnation, or is it bumping along sadly with no progress?

Yes.

Here are the numbers: the US economy grew a whopping 4% in the most recent quarter, after dipping to -2.1% in the first three months of the year.

It’s a wild swing, nearly the stuff of science fiction, and one that deserves skepticism.

While several publications touted the great new GDP growth, because 4% is miraculous, it’s important to take note that the enthusiasm was not widespread. Don’t jump to any conclusions about the economy based on today’s GDP report.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which actually crunched the GDP numbers, was far more subdued than the econowonks of Twitter. In the second line of its release it warned everyone that the 4% estimate is highly likely to change:

See you on the SMW!