Saturday, August 28, 2010

EconomyUSA: 'Stalling'? : As in coming to a halt, and then imploding?


Economy edges closer to stalling, government says


Dabura Karriem, 60, of Bloomfield, N.J., reacts upon hearing there is a job available for exactly what she's looking for as a file clerk at a bank, while attending a career fair in Newark, N.J., Tuesday, Aug. 24, 2010. Karriem's unemployment benefits have expired after being laid off two years ago, the first time she's been unemployed in 38 years.

The government on Friday Aug. 27, 2010 is about to confirm what many people have felt for some time: The economy barely has a pulse. Many analysts say the uncertainty surrounding the economy is holding back consumers from spending and companies from investing and hiring. (AP Photo/David Goldman) (David Goldman - AP)
Network NewsXPROFILE

By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER
The Associated Press
Friday, August 27, 2010; 6:57 PM

-- WASHINGTON - The economy turns out to be weaker than we thought, and the outlook for the rest of the year is now looking dimmer."


That's how Associated Press's Christopher Rugaber begins his bleak report on the state of the American economy. Do click-up the article via Washington Post (WaPo).

-- EconoMix

Thursday, August 26, 2010

EconomyUSA: Small Biz: Why not hiring?

An active participant in Volokh Conspiracy of intellectual conservative and libertarian lawyers in a brilliant blogging alliance, attractive to persons in law related professions, mostly, and offers spritely debate partners on other days.

Why Small Business Isn’t Hiring

Posted: 25 Aug 2010 11:06 AM PDT

(Jonathan H. Adler)

My Case Western colleague, Scott Shane, has a brief item linking the lack of hiring by small businesses to the collapse in home prices. Specifically, he identifies five reasons the “residential real-estate mess” is holding back small business job creation:

1.) Declining house prices have softened demand for small businesses’ products and services.

2.) Small businesses are overrepresented in the real estate-related industries that have been decimated by the residential housing market collapse.

3.) Small business owners use their homes to obtain business credit.

4.) Banks have tightened lending standards in response to a rising share of non-performing real estate loans.

Small business owners were major customers of residential real estate loans during the boom, making them among the consumers hardest hit from the collapse in home prices.

He concludes:

Waiting for small business owners to begin hiring in this economic recovery has become like waiting for Godot. Rather than continuing to wait (while chanting the mantra that “small businesses are the major job creators in economic recoveries”), we should acknowledge why small businesses aren’t leading job creation this time around and come up with solutions to the residential real estate problems that are holding them back.

Doing this is imperative. Slightly more than half (50.2 percent) the private sector works in small companies. If the residential real estate mess keeps the small business sector from hiring, it will be awfully difficult to reduce our unemployment rate to a reasonable level.
If the signs we've tea-leaved regarding downward trends in the economy (energy sector as in oil and gas industries, housing sector, and jobs sector for starters) can be reversed, perhaps unclogging the bottlenecks the entrepreneur experiences in coping with residential real estate problems and ease of access to bank credit.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

EconomicsUSA: Stimulus: Had great positive impact, benefit crested and now is waning

The AGC email newsletter, SmartBrief for Aug25,2k10, is of course published by the Associated General Contractors of America; today it alerted us in this compact item, a tabbed segment "Market Update" (notice tab to the left as you scroll down):

Stimulus package pricier than previously thought


The federal economic-stimulus package is turning out to be costlier than originally estimated. The cost of the package, pegged at $787 billion in January 2009, has risen to $814 billion, according to a new congressional analysis. The analysis said that the stimulus has saved or created between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs and increased gross domestic product by as much as 4.5%. NYT (free registration)/The Associated Press (8/25)



NYT, you'll notice, attributes authorship only to the Associated Press, so it woud seem that a certain anonymity obtains in this instance. But the article is fascinating:

Stimulus to Cost $27B More Than Original Pricetag (Aug24,2K10). Filed at 6:06 p.m. ET.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama's massive stimulus measure has created or saved as many as 3.3 million jobs and continues to boost economic growth in the second half of 2010, but it's come at a higher pricetag than originally billed.

Congressional analysts released new figures Tuesday estimating that the law enacted in January of 2009 -- then projected to cost $787 billion over a decade -- would cost $814 billion. That's still lower than the Congressional Budget Office estimated in January, when it said the measure would cost $862 billion.

The report comes 10 weeks before midterm congressional elections in which Republicans are hammering Democrats and Obama on the economy, charging they've pushed runaway spending without creating promised jobs.

The analysis credits the stimulus measure with increasing the number of people employed somewhere between 1.4 million and 3.3 million jobs between April and June -- and boosting the gross domestic product by as much as 4.5 percent. The figures are slightly less rosy than the picture Obama's economic advisers painted last month, when they said the stimulus law had ''raised employment by 2.5-to-3.6 million relative to what it otherwise would have been'' during that period.
So we've now got an upward trend up in many economic sectors, and in diverse industries, the vaunted "Recovery," and the whole picture immersed in the color of joblessness. And the grinding ongoing creation of "discouraged workers" who stop even looking for jobs.

Not good enuff!, President Obama.

--EconoMix

See recent post on key indicator/s of economic health.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

EconomicsUSA: Key indicator: Oil slopes to 3-mnth low points, gas 8-mnths gas, housing dwnwrd, jobs down

MarketWatch's latest report on a key indicator for the overall health of the USA economy (Claudia Assis; posted 3:04, Aug 24, 2k10, MW), gave the most recent info on gas and oil in the commodites futures market. Again, for the purpose of mapping, all within the energy sector.

Crude oil (unrefined) dropped its price at the pump by 2% -- "with prices sent deeper into the red after a gauge of housing activity showed its biggest drop ever. Crude oil for October delivery was off $1.47 to settle at $71.63, an eleven-week low for oil."

Then MW's reporter adds:

Gasoline for September delivery settled at $1.85 a gallon, gasoline's lowest price since December 2009.


Energy Sector

* Oil futures -- down in Aug24,2k10 snapshot of this market specialty in energy sector.

* Gas futures -- down in Aug24,2k10 snapshot of this market speciality in energy sector.

Housing Sector -- down in Aug24,2k10 snapshot of this second major sector.

Jobs Sector -- down again in Aug24,2k10 snapshot of this third major market sector, individual jobs upon hire for agreed-upon pay, of course benefits amounts to be deducted from the pay (many unions insert such clauses, especially in closed shops).

Three sectors and four diverse markets afford us also with a zoom-in to conveniently cross compare the energy sector > petroleum industry > oil subindustry, preprocessing functions like drilling, extracting, pumping, transport (pipeline, vehicular or other). And its cousin subindustry within the petroleum products industry/ies of the energy sector -- gas or, as Canadians say, petrol, and which commodity in Canada is measured in metrics, not the USA's customary English naming practice over the centuries such as our American folks have adopted as their own.

It's scary to try to monitor possible indicators of a downward trend in the economy, but unsavory indications must be pursued as events unfold (I hate to say what I think, especially written writtled down) down.

-- EconoMix

Publisher's announcement: Owlb out, Politicarp in

Our usual frontpage editor, whose brandname is Owlb, is on furlow for rest and relaxation. Politicarp, our politics editor / columnist, will take up Owlb's duties as well as maintaining his own column. Politicarp will have responsiblity for the actual final posting. Until further notice, Albert Gedraitis, publisher

Monday, August 23, 2010

PoliticsUSA: NYC mosk: Religious discrimination vs Insensitivity to the bereaved of 9/11

Islamic mosk planned for near Ground Zero, provokes protests, provokes counter protests. Obama provokes reaction to his laying down the law, changing or supplementing his position the very next day.

Just as he did in labeling the police in the Harvard neiborhoods as "stupid" and corrected himself the next day.

One of my friends regards my use of the word "glib" to describe a public position he the Prez took. He again had to revise himself the next day.

Not so good.

Protests against Mosk near Ground Zero, protests for it

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Israel: Iran: Israel must juggle negotiations with Palestinians, threat of nukes from Iran, massing Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Gaza under Hamas

New York Times (July 6, 2010), report by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Landler:
President Obama said Tuesday that he expected direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to begin “well before” a moratorium on settlement construction expired at the end of September, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pledged to take “concrete steps” in the coming weeks to get the talks moving.
Don't miss the following detail:

--><. Saudi Arabia: We will not give Israel air corridor for Iran strike - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News> (Monday, August 23, 2010)

Thursday, August 19, 2010

EconomicsCanada: Housing: Slow growth

Canada, the world's tenth largest national economy, has slid into the "no-growth" category. In the thinking of most economists, entrepeneurs, and business leaders regards growth as the criterion of success in economic relations. Retired prof Dr Bob Goudzwaard, the outstanding reformational economist over recent decades, has long argued to disestablish "growth" as the preceived norm for any business (?) and certainly any national economy. A market situation where the goal of growth has been abandoned comes in conflict the orthodox economic mainstream, of course; but market, growth, and the economists geared to such considerations call the Goudzwaard approach into question, as we see from the inevitable joblessness that arises from no-growth.


Growth is a necessity for the country's economic well-being. The following data leaves us wondering which choice to make in these unsettled days.
The Canadian leading index of 10 economic components has averaged 0.9% growth per month over the past 12 months. Growth rarely exceeds 1%.

The slowdown was caused largely by a 4.1% drop in the housing index, which is composed of new housing starts and house sales.
The mid-summer slowdown in house building and house sales is said to be at least a warning sign in regard to the presumed health of the Canadian economy's maintenance and development.

I'm trying to assimilate the green-movtivated research by Goudzwaard (his disseration written for his doctorate was an early exploration of "unpriced scarcity" -- clean water, breathable air, etc).

-- EconoMix

Technics: Google: Blogger / Blogspot blindspot blocks access to owner of blog

Whew! I just broke thru a veil of inaccessibility to my Google connection. Too much!, and I hope I can hold onto the irregular connection I've been able to contrive from scraps of orphaned databits.


-- Technowlb, columnist rW4


Tuesday, August 10, 2010

A little innovation tried on our refWr+t / refWrite backpage

Yup, yep, yawnp:  trying to revive a short-lived blog created or last blog-entried on Jun4,2K07, and from that date back to the first blog-entry in the same year Marfirst to last blog constitutes Series 1 in :

sportsdiverseblog by Sportikos

sportsdiverse
a blog by Sportikos

Christian journaletics, sports wr+ting with nu orthographics, digital display of sports journaletics (which latter word is in one regard  like athletics) -- also dialectix and dialects, dialogue, and diamonds.
--------------------------------------
she loves me, she loves me not,
and so do I
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while we warm up, click-up sportsdiverse by Sportikos
refWr+t columnist and a blogger in my own r+t !

Monday, August 09, 2010

Politics: Rwanda: Great leader succumbs to tyrannical self-advancement

August 9, 2k10,  New York Times reporters Jeffrey Gettleman and Josh Kron, surveyed the situation in Rwanda which had undergone the horrors of genocide of the formerly leading tribe's population by the underdog majority Hutus.  Under the title, "Doubts rise in Rwanda as election is held," the reporters did so on the eve of a most predicatable re-election of the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame,  a great leader who had led the country toward justice for the prominent perpetrators and their victimes, and towards a larger social reconciliation between the two main people-groups -- Tutsis and Hutus.  But something has gone terribly amiss, the reporters say.

There is no question that Mr. Kagame, 52, will be re-elected as Rwandans vote on Monday. The real question is how broad — and genuine — the support is for Mr. Kagame, one of Africa’s more incongruous strongmen.

He has packed recent rallies with 100,000 people screaming, “It’s you! It’s you!” And Rwandans have a lot to shout about: new roads and health clinics; millions of dollars of foreign investment; broadband Internet; even national health insurance, a small miracle in this poor, tiny, overcrowded country where the top natural resource may be the few hundred gorillas left in its misty mountains. Mr. Kagame’s spectacled face dominates Kigali, the capital, through countless posters and billboards. “Choose Peace” is his slogan.

This journaletic item deserves to be read, before you turn to the results from yesterday's results from that genocide-devestated country.   The results are expected tomorrow, Wednesday, but "reports from several regions indicated that President Kagame had won between 98 and 100 per cent of the vote" (Irish Times).


-- Politicarp

EconomicsUSA: Labour: Construction industry loses jobs nationwide


















News today from construction industry email, AGC Smart Brief:
U.S. market loses 11,000 construction jobs in July The U.S. construction job market hit a 14-year low in July, as contractors eliminated 11,000 jobs nationwide. The Labor Department reported that the private sector grew its employment base by 71,000 jobs -- but that growth didn't extend to the construction industry. Some 1.5 million construction workers are out of work, pushing the unemployment rate in construction to 17.3%, well above the 9.5% rate overall. 
Construction industry jobs are a key indicator for the overall economy.
It shoud be noted that the Christian Labor Assocation (USA), tho it be a quite small union (proportionate to USA total statistics for USA unions), is active in the construction industry of several states.

-- EconoMix

Saturday, August 07, 2010

JuridicsUSA: Gay Reparations: Left TV commentator advocates



Jeff Poor writes online (NewsBusters, Aug8,2k10) in response to the YouTube video snipped from a recent telecast of Thom Hartmann, leftoid TV commentator regarding openly-gay Judge Vaughn Walker's Aug4,2k10 ruling in San Fransisco. Poor's article is entitled, "Liberal talk show host Thom Hartmann says it's time for Gay 'reparations.' "

Walker, a conservataive jurist, after listening to arguments based on gay-motivated social-science discourses,  has foddered Hartmann's enflamed imagination to suppose that some kind of "reparations" are in order for his precious "gays."   The latter term is a political-ideology term, whereas to be homo or lesbian is another thing.  Disclosure:  I'm homo, and celibate, not a participant in the skewered equality-fetish with which the gay ideology is recondite.  

Please note  that marriage is not reducible to other intimate unions, whether of 2 women or of 2 men.  Nor are 2-women intimate-unions reducible to 2-men intimate-unions -- so ,much for the neologism "same-sex," as in "same-sex marriage."   Gay ideologists want to erase differences of structuration in the 3 kinds of intimate-unions.  These 3 kinds of intimate unions are all qualified normatively by by the same ethical modal norm, by the same creational moral character under God (Bible verses and Sharia quotes to the contrary notwithstanding) thus constitutes their internal structural principle., but only in one respect, the qualifying functional aspect.  

However, the sameness of the three kinds of intimate unions that bond each kind of  couple (even thru occasions of strife in the ongoing development of each couple's mutuality, reciprocity, and responsiblity) in regard to the the qualifying function of their self-constitution as a moral entity with a vowed relationship to undergird  the couple's mutual life,  excluding all others from the depth of their intimacy, with an intention of permanence.  However, the 3 kinds are typified also by difference.  The different foundational functions (following philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd) obtain to differentiate 1woman-1man intimate unions from 2women intimate unions and from 2men intimate unions.  A three-term differentiation, without reducing any of these three kinds to one another.  Along these lines, Dooyeweerd's  juridical-scientific approach is largely confirmed by two professional philosophical ethicists, Andre Troost and James Olthuis.

That's the proffered paradigm by which to distinguish kinds of intimate unions, only one of which is marriage.m  Whether it shoud be prioritized by the state, as I think it shoud be, is yet another question.

Besides intimate unions, there are two other chief sorts of relationships that are also qualified by the creational ethical mode (again qualifying function of a multifunctional, multi-aspectual human being in his/her/inbetween integral existence).  The two further are friendship, and family (parents, their kids,. and the sibling relationship among the children of these parents).

The philosophically-shallow decision of Judge Walker seems, on the basis of newsreports, to have confused family with couples (vowed, exclusive, intention of permanence).  The issue of lesbian reproduction (kids) and adoption of kids (male homos too)  is juridically not at issue in the question of the intimate union of any of the three kinds.  Judge Walker is probably guilty of a category mistake in this regard, based on his lack of an adequate philosophy of law, inadequate to the juridical problems at hand.

I have not tried to provide answers to all questions that m+t surge into mind for various readers, where their own sexuality can powerfully function when trying to absorb the set of distinctions I have so far made.  For instance,  bisexuality can be discussed in the terms and concepts already supplied.   So also can transgender concerns.   Suffice it to say that this juridical view, ethical theorizing for moral behaviours, and all else,  is not moralistic, not legalistic, not biblistic. (Arnolod DeGraaqaff).

-- Albert Gedraitis,  refWr+t publisher

China: Persecution: Christians are being subjected to a new wave of terror




Bill Schiller chief of the Asia bureau of Toronto's Daily Star,(Aug7,2k10) presents a video report on how the government of China "is grapplying to respond" to a virulent campaign against China's huge Christian demographic where Christians constitute a larger membership than the Communist Party (tho the Christians remain very much  a minority for sure, given China's gteneral population).  So, the persecution is not the work of state, which is trying to stymie the anti-Christian persecutors?  H+ly unlikely in China.

-- Politicarp