Retail Sales Still Falling, but More Moderately
Employment still falling, but more moderately.
World population still increasing, but more moderately.
Giant asteroid still hurtling directly towards the earth, but more moderately.
Have a moderately good Labor Day weekend, everyone.
A new documentary is opening in New York City tonight. American Casino moves from deregulation in Washington DC, to credit default swaps on Wall Street, and to the resulting foreclosures in Baltimore.
Trailer on Vimeo
AMY GOODMAN: What made you start American Casino?
LESLIE COCKBURN: Well, there were a lot of things going on at that time. One, there had been a mini crash in 2007 in August of financials, and that tipped us off that there was something very serious going on. Also, two hedge funds of Bear Stearns collapsed in 2007. Leverage--if you looked at the market leverage, which means borrowing, was completely out of control by the banks, the investment banks.
At the other end of the scale, already there were foreclosures on every courthouse steps in America. You could go and find that houses were on the block. We went over from--we live in Washington. We went to Baltimore and found that houses were being sold every three minutes on the courthouse steps. So it was time to do something.
And we knew also that lawmakers in Washington were terrified, that--you know, that there were serious problems underlying this crisis, and it wasn't going to go away.
AMY GOODMAN: Your scenes of the auctions on the courthouse steps in Baltimore are amazing. I mean, it almost looks like there's no one there buying. It's just the auctioneer.
LESLIE COCKBURN: Exactly. All those properties were going back to the banks.
ANDREW COCKBURN: Yeah, the one guy you see in the auction scene, the one apparent bidder, he's actually on behalf of a vulture, a foreclosure vulture, who buys up houses, you know, at rock-bottom prices.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you see the auctioneer and his sidekick.
ANDREW COCKBURN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And you see one guy in jeans and sneakers. I think it was sneakers, I'm not sure.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That's right.
AMY GOODMAN: Holding a phone.
ANDREW COCKBURN: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: And he was making decisions, and he would respond to the auctioneer on the steps.
ANDREW COCKBURN: That's right. That's the market.
AMY GOODMAN: Buying up the houses.
ANDREW COCKBURN: But most of them go back to the banks.
BTW, Cockburn pronounces his name, koh-burn. I had heard of Andrew's brother, Alexander, through his political newsletter CounterPunch, but always said cock-burn in my head.
AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that most people who get subprime loans actually qualify for prime loans?
ANDREW COCKBURN: In 2006--it was 61 percent, according to the Federal Reserve, at one point. So it's--yes, I mean, the whole--you know, any loan officer will tell you, if they're being honest, that the whole point was to get people into subprime loans, because people up the chain made more money that way, whether or not the person had the income and other qualifications to be a prime borrower.
AMY GOODMAN: We had Elizabeth Jacobson on from Wells Fargo, who was really motivated when she saw her CEO on television saying, "We don't do subprime loans."
ANDREW COCKBURN: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: And she was the head of the division. And she said, for one thing, the loan officers got something like five or six thousand dollars for each subprime loan and maybe a thousand dollars for the prime loan.
ANDREW COCKBURN: Precisely, and so on up the line. I mean, for way up in Wall Street for the bonds, I mean, for the instruments they were floating and selling, subprime was better, more yield. So the whole system was tilted to pushing people into these subprime loans.
... en France.
Christine Lagarde, ministre de l'économie, a annoncé que, au lieu de finir cette année, prime à la casse sera prolongé jusqu'à 2011. Les analystes croient que le marché d'auto a besoin du stimulus continuant. Les nombres des ventes américains ont trempé post-C4C, donc ils peuvent avoir raison, mais combien de temps peuvent-ils soutenir la culture automobile ?
À la différence de l'Argent pour Clunkers, qui utilise des miles par gallon comme la mesure, les clients français doivent acheter une voiture qui émet moins de 160 grammes/kms de CO2 pour recevoir une subvention de €1,000 . Aussi à la différence de C4C, prime à la casse les clients auront mieux préféré aux fabricants automobiles natals aux importations japonaises.
Vers un maintien de la prime à la casse ?
D'après les déclarations de Christine Lagarde, minitre de l'économie, la France envisage de prolonger la prime à la casse jusque dans le courant de l'année 2011. Elle doit théoriquement disparaitre fin 2009 mais le gouvernement a affirmé qu'il privilégiait l'idée d'une baisse progressive de ce système.
Priée de dire sur quelle période la prime sera supprimée, Christine Lagarde a répondu : "Nous envisageons deux années fiscales pour le moment : 2010, 2011, en plus de 2009. Cela a été un grand succès et ça a été imité, copié par nombre de nos partenaires qui avaient dans un premier temps critiqué ce projet", a-t-elle ajouté. "Mais aussi grand qu'ait été le succès au départ, nous devons réussir le retrait progressif dans les deux prochaines années", a-t-elle ajouté. "Nous considérons deux années fiscales pour que ce soit vraiment progressif."
Des analystes se sont penchés sur la question et ont estimé que cette prime de 1 000€ pour l'achat d'un véhicule émettant moins de 160g de CO2 a soutenu le marché français et qu'un arrêt brutal toucherait durement les constructeurs. Le ministre de la Relance a d'ailleurs rajouté que cette prime avait contribué à l'achat de 330 000 véhicules en France.
Saeedeh Pouraghaei: the face of a new victim
In Foreignews, my short advice to those considering political revolt was, "You'd better win." Now that the election has been settled, Iran is arresting and brutally punishing the protesters, even one who merely chanted for freedom:
New information is emerging about another victim of the Basij's post-election violence. Saeedeh Pouraghaei was arrested because of her chants of Allahu-Akbar on the roof of her house in Dowlat Ave, in north of Tehran. Saeedeh was the only child of Abbas Pouraghaei who died two years ago of injuries sustained during the Iran-Iraq war. Saeedeh was arrested by the plain-clothed agents, and about 20 days after her arrest her mother was summoned to identify her body. Saeedeh's mother says that the body was partially burned, and she recognized her daughter with difficulty. She was asked to announce "kidney failure" as the cause of death. According the Saeedeh's family it seems that the body was intentionally burned to hide the evidence of rape and torture. Her body was not even handed over to her family, and they were just notified that she was secretly buried in Behesht Zahra cemetery in one of the unknown graves in section 309. Mir Hossein Mousavi attended Saeedeh's funeral ceremony on Saturday in a mosque in Dowlat Ave.
The lady pictured above, and four other people, are profiled on CNN Money. They have been unemployed so long that they have used up unemployment benefits and extensions. They may no longer figure into the official unemployment statistics.
My unemployment benefits ran out:
I was laid off from my administrative assistant job in 2006, and since then I've had only two terrible temp jobs at call centers. At the first, I had to call late-payers to tell them their electricity was being shut off. I left in December 2007. I took another call-center job reconciling health claims, but I was laid off in April 2008.
Last summer, I was diagnosed with cancer; I'm in collections on most of those bills, because I have zero money to pay them. They say I'm in remission now, but I can't afford to go to the doctor, although I'm supposed to every three months.
Luckily, I worked long enough at that second job to qualify for unemployment -- only about $180 a week. I received extensions, but they're all gone now. I've used up all my savings and retirement money. All that's keeping me afloat is a monthly disability check. I earn a very small amount selling jewelry online and at farmers' markets, but those end in this area in September.
I'm getting kind of fatalistic at this point. I went from a divorce to cancer to unemployment. I've been paying into "the system" for over 45 years, and now that I try to use it just once, it fails me.
I'm writing a fiction novel set in the future. Maybe it'll be a book someday, and maybe it's pure escapism. But I need something, anything, to take me away.
The next bubble in the recession is about to burst.
More than 650,000 Americans will have used up all of their unemployment benefits by September, in what experts say could be the start of a looming crisis.
In the next few weeks, the victims of the mass layoffs that happened six months ago -- when the pace of layoffs was at its zenith -- will start running out of their basic benefits. A total of 4.4 million people are expected to face this fate -- or 65% of the entire filing population.
And while they may have up to another year of unemployment insurance benefits -- thanks to the confusing patchwork of extensions that were enacted last summer -- they will be soon be unaccounted for in government unemployment reports.
...
The Labor Department doesn't track anyone who has moved beyond 26 weeks of unemployment in its weekly data on continuing claims (the number of people who request benefits after their first week). And, said Stella Cromartie, spokeswoman for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said the agency does not currently have plans to begin tracking this population.
That is why many people look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics U6 measure or Shadowstats to get the full scope of the unemployment characterizing this depression.
Construction activity is cyclical, and being laid off seems to be the normal method of termination in my profession. When I was younger, I was too proud to even look into filing for benefits. But in the 21st century, with a wife and kids to support, I have filed twice, both times expecting the benefits to tide me over until finding a new job, which is what happened. I have no such expectation today.
Or, in a separate window: Part One Part Two Part Three
Hat Tip to TYWKIWDBI blog, mentioning Glenn Greenwald's Salon blog on Bill Maher's interview of Bill Moyers on his HBO show:
On what's really happening in the health care fight:
MOYERS: I don't think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party. This is a party that has told its progressives -- who are the most outspoken champions of health care reform -- to sit down and shut up. That's what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: "no public insurance option, no health care reform."
And I think the reason for that is -- in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money. I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama's re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street. And so he's a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won't be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .
Money in politics -- you've had in the last 30 years, money has flooded politics . .. the Supreme Court saying "money is free speech." It goes back to the efforts in the 19th Century to give corporations the right of personhood -- so if you as a citizen have the right to donate to campaigns, then so do corporations. Money has flowed in such a flood into both parties that the Democratic Party gets a lot of its support from the very interests that -- when the Republicans are in power -- financially support the Republicans.
You really have essentially -- except for the progressives on the left of the Democratic Party - you really have two corporate parties who in their own way and their own time are serving the interests of basically a narrow set of economic interests in the country -- who, as Glenn Greenwald, who is a great analyst and journalist, wrote just this week: these narrow interests seem to win, determine the outcomes, no matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter who has their hands on the levers of powers, these narrow interests determine the outcomes in Washington, even when they have to run roughshod over the interests of ordinary Americans. I'm sad to say that has happened to the Democratic Party.
I'd rather see Barack Obama go down fighting for vigorous strong principled public insurance, than to lose with a [corporate-dominated] bill . . . . the insurers are winning. Everyone already knows the White House has made a deal with the drug industry -- promising not to import cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe - promising not to use the government to negotiate for better prices -- that deal has been cut . . .
There's this fear that Barack Obama will become the Grover Cleveland of this era - Grover Cleveland was a good man, but he became a conservative Democratic President because he didn't fight the powerful interests - people say Obama should be FDR - I'd much rather see him be Theodore Roosevelt --- Teddy Roosevelt loved to fight - ... I think if Obama fought instead of really finessed it so much . . . I think it would change the atmosphere.
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