US Politics: Corporations are made out of people

[Commodore]

Pretty good jobs report numbers from BLS today. They estimate the economy added 288,000 jobs in June, and the April and May numbers were revised upwards a total of 29,000.

The unemployment rate is down to 6.1%.

Seems unlikely that the economy shrank during Q2, although we won't know for a while yet, so despite the decrease during Q1, we probably haven't entered a new recession.

half a million full time jobs lost in June

[TrackerNeil]

Policy has been a factor in Appelate Court decisions for quite some time.

As it should be...unless you listen to conservatives, who are all hung up on that "balls and strikes" nonsense. The rest of us know that judges do indeed set policy.

[Inigima]

Um. Once you're out of the domain of matters of fact and into matters of law, courts are supposed to be ruling on legality (Constitutional issues, etc.), but aren't supposed to be directing policy. Otherwise you no longer have a separation of legislative and judicial powers, and the whole thing goes to hell, as unelected justices become wholly unchecked.

[Fez]

half a million full time jobs lost in June

Likely just background noise.

One interesting nugget in the June jobs report was the rise in the number of people who worked part-time.

While it’s a number that flops around from month to month — the standard deviation is 287,000 — it jumped by 799,000, which was the largest one-month gain since January 1994. At the same time, there was a 523,000-person drop in full-time workers, the first decline since October.

“It is unusual,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group. But he said it could be noise. And he notes that most of the part-time rise in June was not in those who want to find full-time work but couldn’t, and instead in those who voluntarily opted to do so.

One concern with the Affordable Care Act was that some small employers might opt to get around the 50-person work requirement by replacing full-time workers with part-timers.

That said, over the past 12 months, 10,000 new part-time jobs have been created — versus 2.12 million full-time jobs.

And looking at the survey of establishments, it was high-paying sectors that were creating jobs in June. “These are not McDonald’s, Mickey Mouse kind of jobs,” Hoffman said. “This is a better-quality jobs story.”

Hoffman said he wouldn’t be surprised if the number of part-time workers comes back to more normal readings in July and August.

[TrackerNeil]

Um. Once you're out of the domain of matters of fact and into matters of law, courts are supposed to be ruling on legality (Constitutional issues, etc.), but aren't supposed to be directing policy. Otherwise you no longer have a separation of legislative and judicial powers, and the whole thing goes to hell, as unelected justices become wholly unchecked.

Maybe so, but the world is such that judges help set policy.

[lokisnow]

What do Senators think of the new style of topless swimsuits?

[TrackerNeil]

half a million full time jobs lost in June

Commodore, if Barack Obama single-handedly invented a cure for cancer, you'd no doubt produce a link to a blog that claimed the cure came from the souls of tormented Christian children.

[BloodRider]

half a million full time jobs lost in June

Commodeadore be like *economies? How do they work*

EDIT: Christ on a crutch, Commodeadore, if the commentors from that site are your intellectual peers, you are a racist conspiracy theorist. What sick assholes tout the virtues of the chimpout website as a valid criticism of Obama anything?

[DanteGabriel]

Commodeadore be like *economies? How do they work*

I don't think it even goes that far. The mailing list delivers its pearls of wisdom, and he passes them along. At least this didn't have quite the ghoulish glee he's evinced in the past when posting bad jobs reports.

[lokisnow]

if Romney were president and had not yet instituted a single policy regarding the economy, Commodore would be hailing those jobs numbers of proof of how great Republican policies are (and some of us liberals would be sniping at the edges in bitterness).

***

This is the greatest article ever:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-02/austrian-economists-9-11-truthers-and-brain-worms

The Austrian catechisms range from almost plausible (taking toxic mortgage assets off of bank balance sheets must have been part of the reason the Fed did quantitative easing), to somewhere in the neighborhood of the 9/11 truthers and moon-landing hoaxers. Most of the elements of Austrianism are so directly contradicted by data that the belief system practically screens itself for people who are out of touch with reality.

The years 2011 and 2012 were to Austrians like sunrise is to a vampire. It was simply amazing to sit there and watch Austrians writhe and contort under the pure, burning light of extant reality. Massive torrents of Fed money-printing failed to budge prices; this fact directly cracked the central foundations of Austrian thought. The history-book moment came when David Henderson of the Naval Postgraduate School defeated Austrian champion Robert Murphy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in a bet about inflation.

How did Austrians deal with this assault by the forces of extant reality? First they attempted to deny it. Have you seen the price of X? they would ask, implying that inflation was occurring much faster than the government statistics let on. They pointed to shadowstats.com, a website that claimed that a change in the way the government calculated inflation was covering up big spikes.

But reality was relentless. The nongovernment Billion Price Project put a dagger through the heart of inflation-conspiracy theorists. The government statistics were true -- prices really werent going up very much. And writer John Aziz found that shadowstats.com was actually a laughably simple hoax (no surprise there, unless youre an Austrian).

The Austrians next defense was to redefine reality. Inflation doesnt mean a rise in prices, they said -- it means an increase in the monetary base. QE wasnt causing inflation, it was inflation itself. Duh! Now the Austrians were safe -- after all, you can define inflation as anything you want. Its a free country, aint it? You can define inflation to be a rare poisonous South American tree frog if you want, and the only consequence will be that people think youre off your rocker. And so when Austrians tried to redefine the word inflation to mean something other than a rise in prices, people duly recognized that Austrians were off their rockers.

The next blow against the brain worms came with the plunge in the price of gold, which by the end of last year had fallen more than 35 percent from its 2012 peak. Gold is central to the Austrian worldview. To them, the yellow metal represents freedom from government control -- which, since Austrianism mixes politics with economics as shamelessly as unscrupulous Chinese companies mix melamine with milk, meant that rises in gold prices represented the triumph of good over evil. The rise of gold from 2000 through 2011 told Austrians that the power of the vile government-bank alliance was finally breaking, and a new era of freedom was on the way. Unfortunately, gold returns actually had more to do with foreign central-bank purchases, falling real interest rates, speculative demand, and the bursting bubble that wreaked havoc on the wealth of anyone who had bought into the worldview of gold-flogging sites like Zero Hedge.

But brain worms have a way of just burrowing deeper to escape the light, and my Twitter feed is still occasionally hijacked by true believers screeching that inflation really is off the charts, that Im a corrupt spokesman for big banks and government overlords.

The continued life of the Austrian brain worm is due to the appealing nature of the nonsense it injects into the surrounding neurons. Austrianism wraps itself in the rhetoric of personal freedom and conservative politics, laying the free-market rhetoric on thick. If you didnt know that monetarists such as Milton Friedman -- who strongly supported printing money to fight depressions, and had harsh things to say about the Austrians -- were also strongly pro-free-market, you might buy into the Austrian line that gold is freedom and QE is slavery.

Austrianism also appeals to workers in the finance industry, especially young men with a strong sense of self-reliance. When asset returns are controlled by a bunch of academics at the Fed, and business has to be conducted under the auspices of the big bank oligopoly, a young trader tends to feel that he cant make money for himself -- that hes at the mercy of The Man. To top it off, taxes are taking a cut of his trading profits and a cut of his salary. That makes him psychologically vulnerable to the idea that a bank-Fed conspiracy is behind all the woes of the global economy.

[Fez]

Bizarrely, SCOTUS issued an injunction today against HHS from compelling Wheaton college, an evangelical school in Illinois, to fill out the exemption-to-the-contraception-mandate paperwork that has always existed for religious nonprofits. However, the injunction only applies if Wheaton sends a written letter to the HHS Secretary saying that they are a religious nonprofit that has objections to the mandate, which is what the entire point of the enjoined paperwork was in the first place.

I can't really make heads or tails of this, or the fact that Ginsburg and Sotomayer wrote incredibly long dissents to the injunction, which were joined by Kagan but not by Breyer.

As near as I can tell, Wheaton's problem was that the filling out of that paperwork triggered the HHS-governed program that pays for contraceptive coverage for employees of objecting nonprofits, and Wheaton didn't want to do that. However, since they still have to write that letter, HHS can just use that to trigger the program; so it just doesn't make sense.

[Queen Ayras Lord Commander]

Hilarious thread to read. Some of you are way too optimistic about this court's integrity, but I can't discredit you for hoping.

This most recent decision highlights a never ending truth in American politics: Democrats/Liberals usually have the better idea, but Republicans/Conservatives can explain their BS reasoning a thousand times better.

Anyways, ACA has not lived up to minimal expectations. It's kind of funny in a terribly sad way, but most people I speak with who don't reside at one of the political extremes want a single payer type system now. I personally feel like having a dual track system where you have a single payer system as a net that covers everyone and those who have greater means could purchase additional services that might provide higher quality of care and faster delivery for non-vital concerns was always the way to go.

Also, if you really want to improve the general quality of care, while reducing the cost and uplifting communities, then craft legislation that would provide a pathway for talented children from impoverished families who want to be doctors to get a free education and in return commit to work for 7 years in government run hospitals, at a reduced pay rate.

And lastly, immigration reform that has any meaning is long since dead. The Cantor defeat, though shocking (and awesome!), is the proverbial nail in the coffin. Furthermore, as long as the GOP is the majority in the House (and they likely will be for some time, fucking gerrymandering bastards!), then comprehensive immigration from is also dead. Because face it, they care more about their reelections than doing something that will help the public. A fact only made worse by the understanding that the White House, unless the political landscape changes drastically, will almost always be won by a Democrat, the Senate will always fluctuate back and forth and thus be a place where hopes and dreams go to die, and the House will likely be under GOP control for the next 6 years and do absolutely nothing. So in other terms, pick the state you live in wisely!

[TrackerNeil]

Anyways, ACA has not lived up to minimal expectations. It's kind of funny in a terribly sad way, but most people I speak with who don't reside at one of the political extremes want a single payer type system now. I personally feel like having a dual track system where you have a single payer system as a net that covers everyone and those who have greater means could purchase additional services that might provide higher quality of care and faster delivery for non-vital concerns was always the way to go.

Those expectations being...?

As to single-payer, I'd love such a system, but it wasn't going to happen in 2010, full stop.

[OccupyHarrenhal]

Anyways, ACA has not lived up to minimal expectations. It's kind of funny in a terribly sad way, but most people I speak with who don't reside at one of the political extremes want a single payer type system now. I personally feel like having a dual track system where you have a single payer system as a net that covers everyone and those who have greater means could purchase additional services that might provide higher quality of care and faster delivery for non-vital concerns was always the way to go.

The reason it hasn't performed is because of the states that refused to expand Medicaid. The poor don't get covered under Medicaid expansion, so their employer has to do it. And if they aren't working full time, or their employer cuts them to part-time to avoid paying, then they still are expected to buy insurance. It is unequivocally the fault of the states throwing away money that has already been spent, and yet conservative groups in the South constantly run ads talking about the pressure the Affordable Care Act has put on business owners and the poor.

Single payer was impossible after the midterms, but when it was possible is between January 2009 and January 2011. And I do fault the president for working so hard to be bipartisan that he left the American people with nothing except an insurance requirement (which the HMOs LOVE by the way), some very basic regulations, and so much political backlash after years of battling over the law that we're seeing states ignore a federal mandate on a level not seen since the fucking Jackson presidency.

[HairBearHero]

I personally feel like having a dual track system where you have a single payer system as a net that covers everyone and those who have greater means could purchase additional services that might provide higher quality of care and faster delivery for non-vital concerns was always the way to go.

This is basically how the UK system works - the NHS provides free care for all for most things, but if you want it faster/better/cosmetic then you get private health insurance and use that.

Doubt this idea would have have been viable due to GOP "Eurocommie!!!" objections though.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Commodore, if Barack Obama single-handedly invented a cure for cancer, you'd no doubt produce a link to a blog that claimed the cure came from the souls of tormented Christian children.

A cure for cancer means rates of heart disease would go up (you have to die of something). So Obama would be getting accused of increasing rates of heart failure.

[BloodRider]

I don't think it even goes that far. The mailing list delivers its pearls of wisdom, and he passes them along. At least this didn't have quite the ghoulish glee he's evinced in the past when posting bad jobs reports.

People go into jobs, people go out of jobs. YOU CAN'T EXPLAIN THAT!

[Inigima]

A cure for cancer means rates of heart disease would go up (you have to die of something). So Obama would be getting accused of increasing rates of heart failure.

What an embarrassing failure of Moochelle's nutrition program!

[DanteGabriel]

There's a saying that one shouldn't mud-wrestle with a pig, because you both will get dirty and the pig will enjoy it...

In Mississippi's Republican primary for the US Senate seat, the pigs are wrestling each other: pro-McDaniels Breitbartish blogger vs. pro-Cochran dirty tricks operative.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/charles-johnson-brad-dayspring-feud

[Shryke]

The story of that primary has been amazing in it's full bore horribleness, stupidity and hilarity.

My favourite recent turn:

It has occurred to the Thad Cochran campaign that the country is gazing on Mississippi's attempt to elect a senator and finding, to its amusement and its horror, that the national gob is regularly smacked as though the country has said something very nasty to its mother. So the Cochran folks put together a conference call for those members of the national media who can't make it down there to follow the campaign in person.

Hilarity ensued.

Austin Barbour, a Cochran campaign adviser, was giving examples of why the campaign felt the charges of double-voting - people who voted in the Democratic primary and then voted for Cochran in the Republican primary runoff - were wrong. "If they want to file a challenge, we've got no problem with that whatsoever," Barbour said of the McDaniel campaign. But, he went on, "the time has certainly come in our minds for the McDaniel campaign and their allies to either put up or shut up." Then someone who was evidently not a reporter interrupted Barbour.

Note to self: when organizing a conference call for a national media who already think your campaign has buried the needle on the izonkometer, it is helpful to invest in a Mute button.

That person repeatedly said that "black people harvested cotton" and accused the Cochran campaign of "harvesting black votes." Barbour asked him to stop multiple times, saying he would answer questions from anyone at the end of his statement. The conference call line did not give the Cochran campaign the ability to mute callers' lines, so there was no way to force the caller to stop speaking. "I'm happy to address any question, no matter the lunacy of it," he said. But the man on the line, who did not identify himself, could not be placated. Finally, Barbour apologized and announced he was ending the call, telling national press that they had the contact information for the campaign if they had any questions. At that point, someone who was possibly a reporter, interrupted to try to keep Barbour on the line. Barbour cut the line.

How everybody covering this thing isn't drunk 24/7 at this point is a tribute to their dedication as journalists.

With the Cochran campaign people gone, callers on the line broke into an argument - a woman berated the man who had interrupted. The man defended himself, saying he had a legitimate question. More people got into the argument and began discussing the identity of the caller asking the "cotton" question. Someone asked if it was Charles Johnson, a conservative blogger who has been loudly alleging the Cochran campaign paid for voters. A woman on the call said it was not him. Johnson has been open in his support for McDaniel. He tweeted the call-in number 15 minutes before the call started, asking people to join him in crashing it. Thirty minutes after the call ended, the call line was still open. Someone was using a soundboard of President Barack Obama's voice saying "Hey! What's up?" Someone else was playing the audio from the movie "Animal House."

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Mississippi_Sideshow_Goes_National

Hopefully this makes your day.