Fact-esque

Honest Numbers At Last: 16% of Americans in Poverty, 17% Unemployed

After nearly a decade of the Bush Admin playing with statistics to ensure no one would know how bad it was, I give full credit to Obama for allowing his National Academy of Sciences to correct their poverty formula (or at least begin correcting it) so it reflects the real world instead of deliberately violating it.

Having said that, I then have to add that the price for the Bush Economy is turning out to be a lot higher than anyone but pessimists like me thought it was. That's the reason Bush hid it in the first place.

Entities Not Too Big to Fail...Wait...The FDIC?!

I started out this afternoon by running into tech ticker's Top Ten List of BIG Companies Facing Bankruptcy, which included a few surprises, like Hertz, Goodyear tire, and - oops! - CBS. O yes.

7. CBS

Weak advertising and falling license fees have sent CBS's earnings off a cliff in 2009.

If they remain depressed for too long, the company could have trouble refinancing $3.2 billion of debt coming due over the next five years.

It will really come down to whether or not CBS’s earnings collapse is merely cyclical, or the result of structural trend whereby traditional TV is dying.

I wouldn't worry too much. $3.2BIL is just about what the CIS franchise alone will make over the next five years. Still, the thought that traditional tv might be dead is delicious even if it is 50 years too late.

Too Late, Joe: Where Was Your Empathy When We Needed It?

When Bill Clinton set about on his "Third Way" oddyssey, one of his first priorities was to "end welfare as we know it". And he succeeded since he was essentially giving the anti-poor Pubs what they'd wanted since LBJ started his War on Poverty. Many of us warned over and over that there was going to be a price to pay. Barbara Ehrenreich in today's NYT shows us what it is and it ain't pretty. But you knew that already.

"We Didn't Do It, It Just...Happened"

This kind of shit always makes my blood pressure spike.

As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

Mr Hulse, I watched this happen and it isn't "American style", it's "American conservative style". Conservatives of both parties took what was intended to be a complementary and synthesized series of programs and over time, particularly in the 80's, deliberately turned them into a mishmosh of competing, unco-ordinated agencies vying for the same shrinking pool of govt funding. They added acres of delimiting eligibility requirements, demanded more layers of bureaucracy designed to make sure nobody was "cheating" any of their requirements, and then set up contradictory instructions that no one, not even govt lawyers, could understand.

Pigs in Space 12: Homeowners Fight Back - Squatter's Rights

In the Great Depression (no, not this one, the one Republicans and bankers created in the 1930's) the concept of "squatter's rights", a leftover of pioneer days and the settling of the west, was a controversial populist issue. Not surprisingly, here we are again and, sure enough, here it is again.

Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said about a dozen advocacy groups around the country were actively moving homeless people into vacant homes — some working in secret, others, like Take Back the Land, operating openly.

In addition to squatting, some advocacy groups have organized civil disobedience actions in which borrowers or renters refuse to leave homes after foreclosure.

The groups say that they have sometimes received support from neighbors and that beleaguered police departments have not aggressively gone after squatters.

“We’re seeing sheriffs’ departments who are reluctant to move fast on foreclosures or evictions,” said Bill Faith, director of the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio, which is not engaged in squatting. “They’re up to their eyeballs in this stuff. Everyone’s overwhelmed.”

Yes, well, welcome to the club. When the phony-baloney Corporate America/Bush Economy finally got so obese it couldn't be covered up any more and collapsed of its own fraudulent weight, it left a lot of collateral damage behind. Some of that CD isn't prepared to just sit around being damaged. It's finally fighting back.

Hunger in America

This is Joel Berg. His new book is called All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?.  I'm reading it now and am learning a lot about what it took to get where we were in the late 70's just before Reagan came to tear it down.  I recommend it.

Middle Class Moving Onto Welfare

After the Great Welfare Reform bill was passed, Bill Clinton's signature success, some of us were constrained by reality to point out that when the Good Times Turned Bad, as they inevitably would, people's need for help was going to explode and the whole system would be aimed at making sure they didn't get it. Well, as predicted the economy has imploded due to the scams and illegal maneuverings of our financial institutions and here they come. Only it ain't the poor what's filling out the forms. It's the middle class.

For the first time since welfare was redefined a dozen years ago, weaning millions of poor Americans from monthly government checks, the deteriorating economy is causing a surge in welfare rolls in a growing number of states.

The swelling caseloads pose the first hard test of the premise behind transforming the old system of welfare, once considered an open-ended right, into a finite program built to provide short-term cash assistance and steer people quickly into jobs.

Though still a fraction of the size they were at their height in the mid-1990s, welfare rolls recently have begun to climb again in at least a dozen states, according to interviews with state officials. In other states, applications are rising, foreshadowing more people on welfare soon. The trend has spread across the District, Maryland and Virginia.

More striking is who is coming onto welfare and why. Here in Florida, as elsewhere, the new face of welfare includes people who have tumbled from the middle class -- and higher -- after losing jobs, savings and self-reliance. And some are returning to welfare years after they thought they had found permanent work and independence. In the county that includes Fort Myers, nearly 40 percent of the 812 people who applied for welfare in October had never before asked for help.

Amy Goldstein, the WaPo reporter, seems surprised. The tone of the article is one of "Look at this! Who could have predicted it?" which marks a conservative these days. Confirming that diagnosis is the absurd assumption that welfare was at any time anywhere "considered an open-ended right". Welfare rolls have been down not because more people found jobs - they didn't - but because they were thrown off whether they had or not - the old conservative trick of denying eligibility and then claiming no one was eligible so there was therefore no need for the program. No one ever considered welfare a "right". They considered not going hungry or frozen in the richest nation in the world a "right", perhaps, but that's hardly the same thing.

If it Ain't Broke (or Even if it Is)

We don't need to regulate the financial sector because, as Alan Greenspan says, they're all professionals who know what they're doing.  But if you thought that the current financial collapse was helping those predatory lenders out there learn some lessons, you thought wrong. 

“They get people who they know are in trouble, they know are desperate, and they aggressively market a product to them which is not in their best interest,” said Jim Campen, executive director of the Americans for Fairness in Lending, an advocacy group that fights abusive credit and lending practices. “It’s the wrong product at the wrong time.”

But read the story to find out how those companies find you in the first place.  Hint: remember data mining?

In the midst of the high-flying housing market, mortgage triggers became more than a nuisance or potential invasion of privacy. They allowed aggressive brokers to aim at needy, overwhelmed consumers with offers that often turned out to be too good to be true. When Mercurion Suladdin, a county librarian in Sandy, Utah, filled out an application with Ameriquest to refinance her home, she quickly got a call from a salesman at Beneficial, a division of HSBC bank where she had taken out a previous loan.  

The salesman said he desperately wanted to keep her business. To get the deal, he drove to her house from nearby Salt Lake City and offered her a free Ford Taurus at signing.

What she thought was a fixed-interest rate mortgage soon adjusted upward, and Ms. Suladdin fell behind on her payments and came close to foreclosure before Utah’s attorney general and the activist group Acorn interceded on behalf of her and other homeowners in the state.

Well, hey.  It looks like when ACORN wasn't busy undermining the fabric of American Democracy (TM) and causing the mother of all financial crises, they were out there trying to avert it.

Poorest 1% See Opportunity in Failure of Economy

Turns out that even in the midst of disaster there is economic opportunity for those willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. (Just parenthetically, how is PYUBYB physiologically or gravitationally possible?) Anyway, turns out that the homeless are a lot richer than they think. Using exactly the same criteria and talking points that conservatives have been arguing for 30 years, this report makes plain that you can get stats to say anything and that Bush and the WSJ editorial board were right all along.

Us poor are just Lucky Duckies.

A report on growing disparities in the concentration of U.S. aluminum-can wealth, released Tuesday by the Department of Commerce, revealed that 66 percent of the nation's recyclable assets are now held by the poorest 1 percent of the population.

According to the sobering report, the disproportionate distribution of soda-can wealth is greater than ever before, and has become one of the worst instances of economic inequality in the nation's history. Data showed that over-salvaging of cans by a small and elite group of can-horders has created a steadily growing and possibly unbridgeable gap between the rich and the mega-poor.

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"Although our nation's upper middle class actually consumes the most beverages, a staggering percentage of these cans wind up in the hands of a very few," said economist Cynthia Pierce, who worked as a consultant on the three-year, $14 million government study. "It's a troubling trend. And as a tiny fraction of the population continues to maintain its stranglehold on redeemable can wealth, it's a trend that shows no sign of slowing."

According to Pierce, the study points to a distinct economic advantage for the most can-affluent—those who possess the resources necessary to collect, transport, separate, and accumulate more and more cans than the rest of the population.

"Members of this exclusive group come from exceedingly poor backgrounds and have access to outrageously low levels of education, which makes them much better prepared to reap the benefits of digging around in garbage," Pierce added.

Take that, you liberal whiners.

Take Action Against the Bailout!

I am so desperate to see this latest battle in the class war go to the good guys that this video of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (via Avedon) actually had me tearing up.  If we get what she suggests, the bad guys won't just have lost this battle, they'll have lost a lot of the ground they made in the last thirty years.   

Everyone knows that the Dems are best at capitulation, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory and serving their corporate masters so I remain only very cautiously optimistic but at least I feel like there's a shred of hope. Please show this video to your friends.  Tell them to be patient when it comes to handing over a trillion dollars of their money to the super rich in a mystery bailout.  Tell them to be impatient when it comes to investing in new jobs, a freeze on foreclosures and putting rules in place that kept Wall Street productive for everyone instead of only the top one percent for sixty years. 

They can call their members of Congress by calling the Capitol Hill switchboard: 202.224/2131.    They can sign up to organize a public action against the bailout at a site set up by True Majority, USAction and United for Peace and Justice.

UPDATE:  The Lower Bucks County Block the Bailout demonstration will happen on Thursday, 9/25 at 5:00pm at the intersection of Bristol-Oxford Valley Road and Oxford Valley Road - on the site of the abandoned Fuddruckers.  If you know anyone in Bucks County, send them our way.  You can RSVP for the event here.