How Big Is It?

The Gulf oil slick is this big, as of today.

The notion to superimpose the outline of the oil slick to scale with Google (Hey, we're not evil; we just play that way!) Earth maps is the brainchild of one Paul Rademacher, and was presented in Atlantic Monthly.

Victory

Victory In Europe (V-E) Day; May 8th


May 8th, 1945; Kaiser-Wilhelms Church
Kurfurstendamm, Berlin


San Francisco, May 8, 1945


May 8th, 1945; Times Square, New York City


Canadian Troops, German Refugees Outside Hamburg, May 8, 1945


May 8th, 1945; Ebensee Concentration Camp, Bavaria


May 8th, 1945; Russian Soliders At The Reichstag, Berlin


May, 1945; Russian Soldiers Near Führerbunker Show Location
In Chancellery Garden Where Hitler's Corpse Was Burned


May 8th, 1945; Berlin


May 7, 1945; Survivors Of Mauthausen Concentration Camp


May 8th, 1945; Winston Churchill At Whitehall, London


May, 1945; Bomb Damage Still Being Cleared, Central London


May, 1945; Berlin


May 8th, 1945; Paris


May 8th, 1945; German Refugees, Juchen (N.Rhein-Westphalia)


Memorial, Mamayev Kurgan, Volgograd


Memorial, The Cenotaph, London


Memorial, Near The Mall, Washington, D.C.


Memorial, The Neue Wache With Kollwitz Pieta, Berlin


Memorial, Deportees And Prisoners; Lyon, France


Memorial, Yad Veshem, Jerusalem


Kaiser-Wilhelms Church; Kurfurstendamm, Berlin


European Union Headquarters Building; Brussels, Belgium

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Ruh-Roh

(Photo: Dimitri Dilkoff - Getty Images; NYT Online)

From today's New York Times Online:

“Greece may just be an early warning signal,” said Byron Wien, a prominent Wall Street strategist who is vice chairman of Blackstone Advisory Partners. “The U.S. is a long way from being where Greece is, but the developed world has been living beyond its means and is now being called to account.”

In the struggle to pass legislation in Congress to strengthen regulation of our barely-controlled financial sector, one amendment has been offered that would call for an audit of the Federal Reserve Bank. This has been resisted, strongly, by both Treasury Secretary Geithner (Timmeh!), and (Surprise!) the White House.

The current Greek/European debt crisis has a direct bearing on why Timmeh and the White House are fighting tooth and nail to prevent such an audit, and why we should be more worried, and pay more attention to what's happening with Europe's financials, than we are.

As an ex-DOJ and Financial Analyst Dog, resisting any move for more transparency generally means there's something to hide -- and while that's only my opinion and not fact, I think it may be a common one: There's a great deal that's rotten in our financial system, and it's all being hidden from view so that we don't run screaming off a cliff.

John Talbot noted in an article in Salon that the American financial crisis was hidden, but not cured, by our government's response to the crisis. If you haven't read it, you should.

Talbot noted that Troubled Asset Protection Plan (or, TARP) funds made available by the Bush administration to shore up banks and investment houses weren't used that way. Then-Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman-Sachs' CEO) Hank Paulson convinced Congress over a weekend that he needed $700 billion of TARP funds to purchase toxic assets held by America's commercial banks.

Within weeks of being given the funds by Congress, Paulson decided not to do this -- instead, he gave hundreds of billions of dollars directly to the commercial and investment banks to do what they wanted with it, and to fund a series of bailouts: Money to Chrysler and General Motors, and the Insurer AIG -- much of which immediately found its way back to the commercial and investment banks who were already getting huge amounts of government money.

To cut to the chase as Talbot reports it (increasing the number of paragraphs for emphasis is mine),

At the time [2008], nobody explained what happened to the toxic assets on the banks' books whose purchase was the original stated purpose of TARP.

We now know that the financial crisis was not caused solely by a liquidity crunch or an irrational loss of confidence, but rather by the fact that the marketplace realized that the commercial banks held more than a trillion dollars of very poor-quality ... mortgage securities such as collateralized debt obligations, or CDO’s, and that these bad assets were sizable enough to bankrupt even our biggest banks.

How bad? Even the AAA [valued] CDO is facing a mortgage default rate of approximately 93 percent today.

Talbot goes on to say that the reason Paulson didn’t pursue the original plan for the government to purchase these toxic assets is because such a purchase would have created a market price for them.

Suddenly, the banks would have had to "mark-to-market" -- to acknowledge that the CDO's they had invested in, sold to them by other fellow-players like Lehman and Goldman-Sachs, were worth a fraction of what was paid for them. Nearly all of our major commercial and investment banks would have had to declare bankruptcy.

You can see why this couldn't be allowed to happen.

What I believe the Fed did next [Talbot continues] was fraudulent and deceitful, its full impact still hidden from the American public, who want bank reform.

The Fed, I am convinced, went to these commercial banks and offered to take many of their toxic mortgage assets off their books, often accepting them as collateral for loans to the banks...

So the Federal Reserve, with no approval by the president, the Congress, the people or their elected representatives, ended up purchasing $1.5 trillion of new assets of unknown quality... What concerns many knowledgeable investors is that the Fed doesn't have the money needed to purchase these assets and instead prints new money.

As of March 2010, there was approximately $1 trillion of currency outstanding in the country, not including the more than $1 trillion of bank reserves at the Fed. So if the Fed doesn't shrink its balance sheet, we can expect inflation to come roaring back as banks increase lending in the future.

This $1.5-Trillion-dollar debt is being kept "off the books" -- an allowable but in these circumstances near-criminal accounting activity, and hidden only by the amount of physical cash the Fed directs the U.S. Mint to print and put in circulation.

As if I had to say anything, Paulson's decisions (supported by Fed Chairman Bernanke and America's major banks) only forestalled the potential reckoning of $1.5T in bad debt. It also hides the fact of that debt from the American population.


(Chart: Calculated Risk)

The direct exposure of American banks to Greece is small [notes the New York Times article],but below the surface, there are signs of other fissures. Even the strongest banks in Germany and France have heavy exposure to more troubled economies on the periphery of the Continent, and these big banks in turn are closely intertwined with their American counterparts.

Over all, United States banks have $3.6 trillion in exposure to European banks, according to the Bank for International Settlements. That includes more than a trillion dollars in loans to France and Germany, and nearly $200 billion to Spain.

What’s more, American money-market investors are already feeling nervous about hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term loans to big European banks and other financial institutions... With so much uncertainty about Europe and its common currency, the euro, managers of these ultra-safe investment vehicles are demanding that European borrowers pay higher rates.

These funds provide the lifeblood of the international banking system. If worries about the safety of European banks intensify, it could push up their borrowing costs and push down the value of more than $500 billion in short-term debt held by American money-market funds...

Now, as Europe teeters, the dangers to the American economy — and the broader financial system — are becoming increasingly evident.

Gosh. A trillion here; a trillion there; pretty soon, it adds up to real money. I live paycheck to paycheck, and a thousand dollars is a serious amount to me. But, then, I'm just one of the Peasants our Masters Of The Universe are so proud to live above.

This weekend is critical -- one attempt to create a loan package for the Greeks last week did nothing to calm fears of a larger collapse; the plummeting of world financial markets (pushed further in the case of the Dow by automatic trading software) on Thursday was the result. Whatever fix can be created will have to both offer a hopeful solution and be accepted by the Greeks, and neither is certain.

No matter how smart I may be, I don't pretend to understand every nuance of a system that's been made intentionally opaque, in order to allow the kind of behavior that created this crisis. But it doesn't take a PhD in Economics to perceive that a serious ripple in the world financial system -- one that starts in Greece, say, or Portugal and Spain's economies -- might set in motion an interlocked series of banking / investment / stock market collapses that could make the Great Depression look like a one-day-drop in the Dow.

Ruh-Roh.

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Bellwether

The Wheels Coming Off The Wagon: Athens, May 2010

[A quote from The Great Curmudgeon, unexpurgated:]

The Madness Of Central Bankers
While they never put it in this way, it of course makes sense for elites to be concerned about tiny upticks in the inflation rate rather then the human suffering of millions of people out of work. A bit of unexpected inflation might erode their fortunes a bit, and if the rest of us have to live in vans down by the river so be it.

The basis for this post was (via the link) discussion by Matthew Yglesias that "the European Central Bank could take decisive action to avert disaster in Europe but almost certainly won’t for no real reason".

Analysts had hoped the ECB might use its almost limitless ability to create money to stanch the crisis (something our own central bank, The Fed, has done here), though doing so could hurt the long-term credibility of the European Central Bank as an inflation fighter that does not yield to politics.

"But I’ve witnessed" (Yglesias goes on), "a prominent European central banker state, live and in person albeit off the record, that the purpose of central bank independence is to allow him to 'fight inflation, regardless of the human cost.' "

"You or I [Matt says]... or someone who’s not a sociopath might say the point of central bank independence is to allow to him pursue technocratically sound monetary policy that advances the long-term interests of the people of Europe. But that’s not necessarily how they see things in Frankfurt. The madness of the European Central Bank is, in my view, the most underexplored and underappreciated aspect of the crisis thus far. The Eurozone, not the United States, is the world’s largest economy and the Eurozone, not China, is America’s largest trade partner."

He's got that right.

UPDATE: I haven't said anything about why the Greek financial crisis is important. And, in brief (very hard, for a dog), here it is (Click on image to enlarge -- Nett und Spass für dich !)

Comparison Of Greek And Eurozone Financial Key Data

>> Greece is part of the Eurozone, the common financial and trading system supporting the European Union. The Euro is its common currency, and the current Greek debt crisis threatens its stability;

>> There is a European Central Bank (ECB), acting much as the Fed does here in the U.S. by arranging loans or financing for member states. This is what's been happening over the past few weeks as the ECB arranged a loan package which includes funds from the International Monetary Fund (another super-bank), and member EU states, like Germany;

>> The IMF-ECB loan package will cover payments the Greek government must make on loans it already holds -- but the loan comes with conditions: Accepting the loan will force Greece to balance its budget and reduce its National Debt, which is equal to 125% of Greece's GDP;

>> There will have to be job cuts and service cutbacks in a country where over 30% of the workforce are in civil service and many public services are taken for granted. The Greek standard of living, expectations for income, vacations, buying foreign goods, will have to be lowered;


Greece's Largest Union Marches In Athens Earlier This Week

>> The Greek on the street is not happy with any of this -- not with their government, not with the EU. There have been strikes and riots over the past few weeks; just a few days ago, crowds set fire to several banks around the country, killing two bank employees in the process. The Greek Communist Party has agitated heavily for support in the past few months;

>> If the Greeks cannot balance their national budget, and default on any outstanding loans (or later default on payments for this IMF-ECB loan package), they may have to drop out of the Eurozone;

>> This means they will no longer use the Euro as their principal currency, and return to the Drachma -- which will not be valued very highly. This can destabilize the entire Eurozone... and much like the interconnected Wall Street investment bank community which were all doing deals with each other, the problems of one Eurozone country can affect all of Europe;

I agree that Europe and the EU is America's largest trading partner. If they suffer, if their economies falter and stock exchanges have selloffs that force EU businesses to fire workers and reduce production, the U.S. will get hit with that as well -- just as we were trying to crawl out of our own terrible Great Recession.

Another fact about Greece's circumstances we should be paying attention to, here in the United States, is what happens when a nation's public debt becomes larger than the value of its domestic goods and services (Gross Domestic Product, or GDP). It generally ends in catastrophic financial collapse, hyperinflation, and a devaluation of its currency -- along with potential political upheavals (revolution, or a coup d'etat).

Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and general good guy, had this observation to make in the New York Times this morning. He doesn't paint a rosy picture:

So how does this end? Logically, I see three ways Greece could stay on the euro.

First, Greek workers could redeem themselves through suffering, accepting large wage cuts that make Greece competitive enough to add jobs again. Second, the European Central Bank could engage in much more expansionary policy, among other things buying lots of government debt, and accepting — indeed welcoming — the resulting inflation... third, ...fiscally stronger European governments could offer their weaker neighbors enough aid to make the crisis bearable.

The trouble, of course, is that none of these alternatives seem politically plausible. What remains seems unthinkable: Greece leaving the euro. But when you’ve ruled out everything else, that’s what’s left.

If it happens, it will play something like Argentina in 2001, which had a supposedly permanent, unbreakable peg to the dollar. Ending that peg was considered unthinkable for the same reasons leaving the euro seems impossible: even suggesting the possibility would risk crippling bank runs. But the bank runs happened anyway, and the Argentine government imposed emergency restrictions on withdrawals. This left the door open for devaluation, and Argentina eventually walked through that door.

If something like that happens in Greece, it will send shock waves through Europe, possibly triggering crises in other countries. But unless European leaders are able and willing to act far more boldly than anything we’ve seen so far, that’s where this is heading.

As the Curmudegon and Matt Yglesias pointed out, the European Central Bankers don't want to risk any inflation. And that decision, while it protects a small group of Owners and Masters Of The Universe, may put the structure supporting the Euro at risk -- and, ultimately, the EU itself. And because Europe is our largest trading partner, all that will wash up on our own shores, as surely as millions of gallons of BP crude in the Gulf.

But I'm only a Dog, and no one listens to me.

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Funds Of Navarone

Greek Left Party Hangs Banners At The Acropolis, Near Athens
(Photo: Louisa Gouliamaki / Getty Images, New York Times)

More fun and games in the land that gave us the Olympics, the films Zorba The Greek and Never On Sunday; has terrific food and Retsina (a wine you have to want to drink), and was at one time filled with cartoon Germans and that bad guy who killed John Malkovich's mother in Elena, and later was the setting for a not very good 2001 film starring Nicholas Cage.



Unfortunately, the particular Greek Thing that prompted this display of political brouhaha could cause some very bad things here in the US of A if it is exported to the European Union.

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Panic In The Year One Zero

Dow Jones Drops 900+; Net Loss For Day = 357 Points



Some have argued that the United States should have to commit funds to a European economic assistance fund, because the circumstances that created this debt crisis was Made In The USA !!™

The Rightists who feel the United States is already insane for having spent taxpayer money to bail out pay for Little Lloyd Blankfein's masseur and car valet are righteously angry that anyone should even suggest helping the IMF to provide financial security for European countries burdened with debt.

Today, in reaction to the Greek debt crisis, European stock markets fell, the euro plunged to a value of $1.28 U.S; Gold rose to over $1,207 an ounce; and the DJIA dropped almost nearly ten per cent before recovering a bit towards the end of the trading day.

Does anyone at Rightwingnut central understand the term "financial interconnectedness" yet?

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Police Identify Incompetent Retard Terrorist Person Of Interest In Attempted Times Square Bombing

The 12th Incarnation Of The God Ra Takes Snapshot Of
Jerkwad Who Couldn't Blow Up Inflatable Love Doll, And
Nissan Pathfinder (Shortly To Become Evidence Jackpot)

ABC News indicates that "Federal authorities" are racing to apprehend the Person Of Interest (©) in the attempted Times Square bombing reported by almost every news outlet in those parts of the world that matter.

(At this juncture, I'm hoping these "Federal authorities" aren't, like, the Undersecretary of Inland Waterways and five janitors from the Rayburn Congressional Office Building.)

This person was described as a completely clueless murderous fuckwad "naturalized American citizen... from Pakistan" who had recently returned to the United States after spending five months there. Purchasing the now-infamous Nissan Pathfinder for several hundred dollars in cash, the deluded circus geek perpetrator loaded it with some fairly crude homemade explosives, and drove it to New York City.

Enraged with America and Freedom and having to drive for hours in Midtown without finding a parking space, the bomber apparently armed his home-made devices. Unfortunately (for him), they were such sorry excuses for bombs that he only succeeded in starting a small fire in the back of the Pathfinder.


Security Camera Captures Secret Terrorist Vehicle In
Times Square, And Enhanced View At Upper Right (BBC)

Finally, he stopped his vehicle directly in front of the All-Seeing Eye Of The 12th Incarnation Of The Sun God, Ra (Bow before his power -- yeah; that means you. You know who you are). Smoke was coming out of an open window in the Pathfinder, and the painful excuse for intelligent life bomber got out, scarpering off walking away into the crowd, unobtrusively leaving the Pathfinder's door open and its hazard lights flashing.

A few moments later, some passing tourists caught this video and sold it to CNN.

As most sentient humans now know, fortunately, the Pathfinder did not blow up -- a fact which has provided investigators with a treasure-trove of evidence. A retired NYPD detective told the New York Times, "He was trying to cover his tracks, but he left more clues than a guy walking into a bank to rob it without a mask... [He] left everything here but his wallet."


Special Timing Device (Photo: New York Times)

ABC added that there is apparent evidence that "the bomber did not act alone and had ties to radical elements overseas", with a "senior official" telling ABC News that in addition to the Person Of Interest (©), there are "several individuals believed to be connected with the bombing and that at least one of them is a Pakistani-American".

Meanwhile,

WEST HOLLYWOOD -- A woman believed to be suffering from mental issues is under arrest after sheriff's deputies say she stabbed four shoppers at a West Hollywood Target store.

Is this the time of Chtulu's return, or is this all just a run-up to 2012?

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Culture Of More: Screwing The Peasants

Department Of Justice Drops The Dime On Goldman-Sachs


"Moi, Un Criminelle? I Fart At You, Américains stupides!"
Fabrice Tourre, Prime Suspect BSD, Testifying Before The
Congressional Inquiry Into Causes Of The New Depression
Financial Crisis (Photo: Forbes online, 4/27/10)

Goldman-Sachs, home of the best money that money can buy, is reported to be the target of a Department Of Justice criminal investigation, prompted by information forwarded from the SEC.

Bloomberg and the NYT reported the story under National news.

The federal review, which lawyers say is common in such a high-profile case, is being done by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Bloomsberg financial news reported. The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Goldman Sachs on April 16, alleging fraud tied to collateralized debt obligations that contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Based on public reports about the SEC matter, a criminal case may be difficult, said Douglas R. Jensen, an attorney with Park & Jensen LLP in New York ... “In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing,” said Jensen...


"Dunno Why The Fuk I Be Heah; Um juss a Businessman; Capiche?"
Goldman BSD Blankfein Swears, Kinda, To Talk 'Bout Somethin',
Maybe (Photo: Jason Reed / Reuters / ABC News Online 4/27/10)

Little Rupert's Wall Street Journal, however reported it as "Politics" and with a little not-very-subtle spin informs us that Congress is really just trying to mislead the public:

Senators vs. Goldman
The committee members fumble toward finding the real villains
[Unsigned Article]

If an investor buys shares in General Electric, and then GE's stock declines in the future, is the New York Stock Exchange to blame? What if the investor chooses to purchase the shares through TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab? Is the broker also responsible for the losses?

Senators interrogating Goldman Sachs executives yesterday appear to believe the firm has a duty to protect all of its institutional trading partners from making bad decisions... Yet much of the Beltway class, looking back at the financial crisis, now believes that gamblers who bet their money on an always-inflating housing bubble are the real victims...

...In sum, it appeared to be another bad day for the SEC's specific case against Goldman. But lawmakers seemed intent on finding the firm generally guilty of meeting institutional demand for subprime housing risk.


Messr. Tourre Leaving The Capitol: Calimari, Anyone?

It's like the age-old defense of the rapist: "Hey; She Was Askin' For It! She Wanted It!" It's really the fault of the banks and clients to whom Goldman sold those bad investments, because... they wanted it. They forced us.

We're not sure which of the politicians at yesterday's Senate hearing did the most to confuse spectators. Investigations subcommittee chairman Carl Levin of Michigan seemed unaware of the difference between a market-maker, whose role is to offer prices at which a client may buy or sell a given asset, and an investment adviser, whose role is to act in the interests of the client as a fiduciary.

Ranking member Susan Collins of Maine showed that she understood the difference, yet still decided to badger the market makers at Goldman Sachs to admit they weren't acting as fiduciaries. [Who have an obligation to advise clients about risk] Of course they weren't, as their sophisticated institutional customers would have known.

But the heart of the argument against The Masters Of The Universe is this: If you knew your investments were made up of crap, even if your role was not to act as a 'Fiduciary', didn't you still have an obligation to inform others they were selling bags of toxic waste?

Goldman's responses when questioned were to use the same logic as Little Rupert's anonymous writer in the WSJ. Come on, you idiots; We had no obligation to define risk to other players. We sold them stuff to make money. They were in it to make money.

They know how the game's played -- they lost! We won! And that's all that matters. That's how the free market operates, you fookin' Peasants. Do ya hate freedom, is that it?


Goldman's Legacy To Our Kultur.

But those kinds of answers just obscure and evade the real, basic question in everybody's mind: Didn't you have an obligation not to sell bad investments at all?

What's disgusting about the performance of people like Tourre and Blankfein this week is their inability to comprehend the legitimacy of that question. From the perspective of a player, A Big Swinging Dick In Wall Street, they haven't done anything wrong -- and if you believe we have... well, you stupid Peasants, we'll just buy our way out of it.


Who Cares About The Little People? (Cartoon: Abstruse Goose)

However, free of cant, the truth is that Goldman sold toxic crap, because they could. Because they wanted to make more money. It was the Game, Baby; the Game, and the payoff was More. The proof is that as a company, they bet against the performance of their own investments to win big if the subprime market collapsed -- or as Little Lloyd Blankfein put it in a memo, "short [on] mortgages saved the day".

Little Rupert's media suggests this is a political prosecution -- an attack on the 'Free Market' by the minions of a socialist scary Black Man who faked his way into the Presidency. It's true that the SEC is hard-pressed to remake its image as a guardian of financial regulation -- but that is because it did nothing to prevent the behavior Wall Street engaged in during those go-go, Lil' Boots Bush years (Remember him? Yeah, he was just, you know, some guy or other) which put us where we are today.

The "excesses of the free market" which brought about the destruction of the lives of so many people -- the Little People that our Masters Of The Universe don't give two farts about -- occurred because there was no oversight.

And no matter whether Little Rupert wants to spin this scrutiny of Goldman-Sachs as political; it isn't, and all of Warren Buffet's comments or Blankfein's appearances on television to blow smoke will not change that.

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Another Thing You Take For Granted

Leslie Buck [Laszlo Büch], 1922-2010


The Anthora Paper Cup, Designed By Leslie Buck (1959)

(Another post inaugurating a new Category here at Before Nine that talks about things so prevalent in our lives and culture that we simply don't see them... Things We Take For Granted.)

There are hundreds of items which mark our times, from music to favored colors and themes; technology and architecture; clothing, vehicles; hairstyles and eyeglasses; even the typefaces used in publications. And there are also humble things -- like the paper coffee cup.

Leslie Buck, the designer of what we've come to expect as the standard paper coffee cup, died at his home in Long Island yesterday.

Born Laszlo Büch in Czechoslovakia in 1922, he was deported by the nazis to Auschwitz and Buchenwald with the rest of his family; only he and his brother, Eugene, survived. They emigrated to the United States after World War II ended in Europe and opened an import-export business in New York.

In the late 1950's, they started the Premiere Cup Company, manufacturing (what; you were expecting socks?) paper cups. Premiere merged with the (not that much larger) Sherri Cup company a few years later, and Buck became its design director.

According to the New York Times, the Sherri Company "was keen to crack New York’s hot-cup market. Since many of the city’s diners were owned by Greeks, Mr. Buck hit on the idea of a Classical cup in the colors of the Greek flag. Though he had no formal training in art, he executed the design himself. It was an instant success.


All-Purpose Cups In The 1950's: For Hot Drinks, The Wax Melted

"Mr. Buck made no royalties from the cup, but he did so well in sales commissions that it hardly mattered, his son said. On his retirement from Sherri in 1992, the company presented Mr. Buck with 10,000 specially made Anthoras, printed with a testimonial inscription."


Leslie Buck In 1991 (New York Times Online)

It made Sherri Cup, Inc. a fortune. The concept was copied by other manufacturers, of course, but Sherri is apparently still going strong, having sold 500 million of Leslie Buck's design worldwide last year. Naturally, the standard white, 8-ounce card stock cup with the rolled lip and coated inner surface is now a standard item all over the planet.

Every morning, I get a tall cup of whatever Java that the Asian Breakfast Place near my office brews, but never paid much attention to the container I pour it into. I've seen cups like it from the moment I understood the concept of a paper cup, and until now had no idea who designed it.


Dairy Queen's Version With Rolled Lip And 'Safety Bulge', 1960's

The Greeks of the Classical world believed that no person ever died, so long as they remained in the memory of the living. No one knows whether that's so -- but give Leslie a thought next time you order a brew at Starbuck's, or Peets, or 7-11.

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The Delights Of The Jobless Recovery

In the words of The Great Curmudegon:

One gets the sense that elites have moved on, that the recovery is here and the foreclosure crisis is over. Neither is true.

I know how ironic this must sound, but Bloomberg reports that more and more Americans are exhausting their unemployment benefits without having found work.

What will become of them, when they have no money at all? Well, in the true spirit of the early Protestants who founded this great country, "The weak culls will have to fall by the wayside as nature intended. They are not of the Elect Of God, and therefore damned upon the Day of Judgment; and since their names are not writ in the Big Book O' Life™, who cares?"

Since the recession began, aid extensions added 53 weeks of assistance to the 46 weeks that had been in place. About 11 million Americans, roughly 70 percent of the nation’s jobless, in March received unemployment checks averaging $320 per week.

The challenge for lawmakers is that while benefits have reached record lengths, so has long-term unemployment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 44 percent of the jobless have been out of work for at least six months, the biggest share since the government began keeping track in 1948.

According to the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, a record 6.5 million workers have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. A study by the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative which the Bloomberg article noted shows 3.4 million workers have been unemployed for more than a year.

So, the Math: 11 million unemployed. More than half of them have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and roughly a third have been out of work for more than a year. That doesn't count people who have already lost their benefits.

UPDATE: Time for this dog to find a new food bowl, and in the next six months. Other wise members of the pooch pack, look after yourselves, since no other dogs will.


Willie Wheelie Says: Sometimes Ya Just Gotta Hit The Road

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