Economics: Labour: Vision needed for the spread of Christian unions in North America and China

If you are a member of a labor union, most likely you are a member of the overall global labor federation called the"World Trade Union Confederation."  Some of the WTUC members are unions of Christian inspiration and principle, like the national Christian Labor federation in the Netherlands (CNV) and the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC) -- but not (yet) the Christian Labor Association in the USA (CLA-USA).

The present WTUC has evolved from previously separate global labor centers of different principles: the secularist and hence atheist labor central embracing the main capitalist and socialist unions and the more Christian-hospitable union then called the World Confederation of Labour.  Both bodies worked assiduously with the UN-affiliated International Labour Organization.  The WCL of which the CNV (Netherlands) and CLAC (Canada) have long been members was the bastion of Catholic-inspired global unionism, with a few Protestant-inspired unions also principially in this day of ecumenism actively affiliated.  One of the causes, the Catholic and formerly Catholic unions championed, a cause which the CLAC atypically concerned itself with, was the independent trade unions of Cuba where the unions were severely restricted and their leaders, including leaders of Christian labor there, were jailed -- with the keys to their cells virtually tossed into the ocean.  Instead, in old Soviet-style the Cuban govt established its affiliated Communist-inspired unions with a monopoly of representation / repression of workers.

Catholic unionism, now within the WTUC, still exists, but because of changes in the interpretations of the Catholic social encyclicals since Vatican II, the nature/grace conceptualization underlying these unions has become seriously attentuated, not least in regard to passing of the old concepts thru Vatican II's new dogma of the "preferential option for the poor" and the broader rubric "solidarity" (made famous by Lech Walesa's leadership of the Solidarity organization in Poland).  The transition from the grace side of the schematic to the nature side is a global phenomenon among formerly forthr+tly Catholic unions, once outfitted with priestly chaplains who kept the affiliates and the locals at large industrial facilities on the strait and narrow. But solidarity-thinking and an option preferential to the poor helped move Catholic industrial organization of workers to a more secular way of existence and functioning.  I think of Hendrik Hart's rubric, "biblical secularity" in my own attempt to fathom the necessity of Christ-principled labour unions distinct from institutional churches (denominations), genuinely free organizations for representing workers in the h+ly differentiated-zone of industrial labor that marks our Western societies, and which is exploding enormously in China in its quick-paced capitalist transformation under a Communist govt (with again soviet-style govt labour organizations to control workers).
Read more ...

Famine: North Korea: In sudden reversal, Kim Jong Il's regime restores marketplaces for food, outside Communist system

Washington Post's reporter Chico Harlan reports from Seoul, South Korea (Jun18,2k10), about an important development in North Korea's internal problem of mass proportion: starvation, outlawed cash markets for food buying and supplying, loss of personal savings in bank accounts due to recent govt actions.

North Korea lifts restrictions on private markets to prevent famine

Bowing to reality, the North Korean government has lifted all restrictions on private markets -- a last-resort option for a leadership desperate to prevent its people from starving.

In recent weeks, according to North Korea observers and defector groups with sources in the country, Kim Jong Il's government admitted its inability to solve the current food shortage and encouraged its people to rely on private markets for the purchase of goods. Though the policy reversal will not alter daily patterns -- North Koreans have depended on such markets for more than 15 years -- the latest order from Pyongyang abandons a key pillar of a central, planned economy.

With November's currency revaluation, Kim wiped out his citizens' personal savings and struck a blow against the private food distribution system sustaining his country. The latest policy switch, though, stands as an acknowledgment that the currency move was a failure and that only capitalist-style trading can prevent widespread famine.

"The North Korean government has tried all possible ways [for a planned economy] and failed, and it now has to resort to the last option," said Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "There's been lots of back and forth in what the government has been willing to tolerate, and I cannot rule out the possibility of them trying to bring back restrictions on the markets. But it is hard for the government to reverse it now."

No comment needs to be added.

-- Politicarp

PoliticsUSA: Oil firm bows to govt: Obama's victory in tactical takeover of oil industry, to futher Prez's radical green agenda

Brilliant cartoon deserves own semiotic-illustrative analysis. See:  refWrite Backpage: Semiotics

Carl-Henric Svanger,
BP's board of directors, chair

Dick Morris is the dean of intellectual conservative strategic analysts, those analysts who engage in professional consultancy in the two-party American political system -- including its third party challenges (think Perot, think Nader, think Republican Ron Paul's candidacy for Prez under the Libertarian Party, etc.) -- mostly on the USA Federal level. But it's the more mainstream challenges that drive the Dean, who operates out of respect for indepth analysis of America's Federal legislative chambers, the two chambers of Congress (which implies the Joint Committees and Conferences and other inter-relationships of the two houses, constitutional bicameralism) -- Morris and co-author McGann mine the info deep enuff to gather the particulars regarding candidates and incumbent members of the House of Representatives and of the Senate, persons running in an oncoming election -- like the every-2-years election of the entire 435 woud-be officeholders of the House of Representatives, and only a third or so of the 100 Senators. Morris has chosen a unique authorial niche of specialized expertise thru which to offer the Morris team's unique service in line with his conservative principles, a political-journalism-and-advocacy niche that had earlier preoccupied another keen observer of the legislative branch and its election, especially midterm elections so important for the sitting president, a niche favoured also in his day by the late Robert Novak. The contrast between the two conservative Republicans is fascinating.

Comparing between countries, I imagine this political-analytic process may be much like the special analyses of candidates and incumbents running for the House of Commons and a few members of the Senate in Canada (most of the Senate had been appointed, but the present Prime Minister had eschewed appointing newbies to the Canadsian Senate, wanting them to be elected by the provinces instead) -- thus, USA and Canada in further comparison to their parent political system, the United Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Northern Ireland (Ulster with its capital, Belfast, and its unicameral parliament at Stormont) -- UK being the Anglo-Saxon mother country of our once-colonial polities in both the USA and Canada.  In the USA, Morris concentrates on understanding the memberships, constituencies, and funding of both of these major parties' candidates and incumbents at election time. Not just the executive funtion of the Presidency, but the legislative function of the Congress in voting in new law, that latter consideration is crucial to the work of the authors.

Morris and his wife, Eileen McGann, have a new article out entitled Dems turn on Obama. I recommend it to you, for immediate reading and for your personal strategic thinking in regard to the upcoming November elections 2010 USA.

Rookmaker Club files
<br /> Reformational political philosophy has rarely taken up the questions of military strategic concerns, or party-political strategics either. <br /> <br /> The Rookmaker Club files edited by Politicarp allow the community of the Protestant philosophy initiated by Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Mekkes, Rookmaker, and Stafleu (all of whom underwent the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, two of whom were Dutch military -- Mekkes and Rookmaker -- they ending up in prison camps for the War's duration), allows the present-day Protestant Christian philosophical community in the USA to address one another as Americans not in denial about terrorism, the present wars, and future mass conflict. -- Politicarp<br />

I'll look in the leftwing media for a thawtful companion citation I can recommend along with the Morris/McGann "Dems turn on Obama."  Read more ...

War: Mexico: Mexico is in a virtual state of war internally, with spills into USA

President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, had an editorial published yesterday in newspapers thru-out that nation, an editorial that asserted, "If we remain with our arms crossed, we will remain in the grip of organized crime, we will always live in fear, our children will have no future, there will be more violence, and we will lose our freedom." The quotation appears in an article by William Booth, "Deadly drug violence in Mexico on rise; gang fights, federal clashes blamed (Washington Post, Jun15,2k10).

At the same time as the de facto war internal to Mexico escalates almost daily, the leading law enforcer of an Arizona county the size of the state of Connecticut, announced that his jurisdiction is in large part lawless and beyond his enforcement. The bad guys, Mexican drug and human traffickers, Giving part of US to Mexico? about which FoxNews.com says "Stretch of Arizona off limits to Americans because of heavily armed drug smugglers and human traffickers." I saw the telecast segment on Fox, but I coudn't call it up on the online Fox video page, where it is listed. Maybe you can do better. In any case, the report was astounding, including the footage that records the sherrif's statement. He, of course, appealed to the US Federal govt to send the American military to his county and to the Mexican-American border two counties to his south.

-- Politicarp

Semiotics: Romantic Archetypic: Moved to refWr+t Backpage

Update (June 17,2k109): This blog-entry has been moved and will shortly be expanded on rW Backpage.

 

EconomicsUSA: Labour: Does increased compensation cause increased productivity? It depends, says expert

Does increase of compensation lead to a strait-line increase of productivity by workers? As a general question, the answer is No. But it can work in certain situations for the employer, with preexisting goodwill, to spur productivity with a small incrase in wages. That suggests in a particular work culture situation, productivity was already lapsed. Let's leave at this level of abstraction, rather than putting forth various hypothetical scenarios.

Clickup the Portfolio of Ideas playerpage link. Portfolio of Ideas presents Ben Ariely of Duke University on the question whether increased compensation to workers, causes increased production by them.

-- EconoMix

PolitcsEurope: Netherlands: Anti-immigrant party 3rd, Christian Dems slip from 1st to 4th or worse

Click the blog-entry title above and read the full report in Blomberg Businessweek, Jun10,2k10): "Dutch Face Months of Coalition Talks as Wilders Comes in Third" by Jurjen van de Pol.

PoliticsUSA: Primary Votes: Women candidates win in key races, besides trending up they are also trending conserve

The enti-incumbent trend continues in the latest round of primary votes to select party-candidates in various states. The outstanding win among Democrats, to my mind, was nevertheless an incumbent in the USA Senate, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. She has for months stood out from her colleagues because of her accounting background, her role on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and hence her vigourous campaign to curb the wilder rampages of financial interests in the derivatives markets. They were --along with housing-mortage snake-oil lending by Fannie May, Freedie Mac and assorted sordid banks -- a chief cause of the Great Recession we hope to have begun shaking off (Greece!, Hungary?).

Sen. Lincoln has her own natural interest: to protect the agricultural derivatives markets from the worst abuses that undermine the smaller farms, often family farms, that are plentiful in her state. This has given her, as well, a national concern for the overall agricultural policy of the USA, and ins+t into the difference between farmers and large farming corporations. From this centerpoint, she has worked hard to achieve as much as is presently possible to her and like-minded Senators, a fair and effective Financial Regulation law -- especially its section on Derivatives and its subsection on Agricultural Derivatives. You may recognize these financial zones as related to the futures markets in agricultural commodities -- corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. Futures markets focussed not on the usual food commodities but instead on financial instruments, however, have distorted the already-existing dangers of destabilization by excesses in selling and buying the outcomes anticipated in farming and coporate agriculture. It always has had and will have a speculative edge, due to the need to know what size and quantity can be expected from future harvests of foodstuffs. But with experienced commodity-futures speculators eyeing and shifting in part to participate in the wider deployment of derivatives investment, there's a stituation where food futures are impacted by the feedback loop from lucrative financial futures, based on paper and digital obfuscations. That's the impact dynamics of financial sector spill-over into the once-ordinary ho-hum trading in food commodities. The newer kind of speculation sets the tone too much for the time-worn speculation on what food will be on hand for American tables several months from now.

read more ...

Juridics: Canada: Law journalism for the law-focussed professions is slowly rising in Canada

One feature of the emerging magazines both in print and online, targetting the need of persons in the law professions for magazines that cater to the kind of discourse and reportage they need. In Ontario, perhaps the flagship of this niche among online journals is Law Times. R+t smartly, the editors of the online versions of these mags have concentrated on to a considerable extent on news videos, often produced and distributed by the digital dynamoes themselves.

Above, we have embedded the latest short video in the weekly "Ontario Legal News Update," usually carrying a quick survey of legal developments in our procvince, featuring stories selected by the editor, covering the week's developments. In this case, the week beginning June 7, 2k10. In the near future, refWr+t will be taking up some the developments featured in Law Times and other law mags hailing from Ontario, wider Canadian locales, and perhaps even occasionally a French-language story, regarding which our readers may benefit from it's being aired here.

-- Lswt

EconomicsUSA: Stock Market: General Motors Corporation and its spin-off liquidation corp

I decided to do a little sleuthing regarding the stocks traded on various stockmarket, the ones bawt and sold on the New York Stock Exchange, and indexed not on the Dow Industrial Average as it turns out, rather on the NASDAQ index. NASDAQ is the

U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on the trading of domestic securities not listed on the regular stock exchanges. It publishes two composite price indexes daily as well as bank, insurance, transportation, utilities, and industrial indexes. By the 1990s it had surpassed the American Stock Exchange (AMEX) to become the second largest U.S. securities market, in terms of market capitalization, after the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Members register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and meet requirements for assets, capital, public shares, and shareholders. In 1999 it merged with AMEX to form the Nasdaq-Amex Market Group, and in 2000 NASD sold nearly half its interest in NASDAQ to private investors.

My motive was in rummaging about for relevamt factoids has been simply that I ran across a lovely little app, a freebie called StockMeter that puts a stock quotation or two in your main Menu Bar on your personal computer screen, and Stockmeter then follows the change in the quotation, as the stock is exchanged over the course of the day. What a hoot! An update every half-hour or so, of a specific stock I choose to follow for a while.  Read more ...

EconomicsUSA: Financial Regulation: New draft law passes Senate

Bank of America, an institution on which I may become dependent and which I want to love, was cawt short in financial shenanigans for a deal it made in July 2008 has settled with Countrywide housing mortage firm, makes a $108 million settlement for having "ripped off borrowers hit during the subprime crisis by inflating fees and overcharging" (MarketWatch, click blog-entry title; MW frontpage here).


May the responsibles at Bank of America rectify their ways, and as in the case of this settlement with Countrywide (itself a most dubious character -- if a firm is legally a "person," then legally it can be said to have character flaws, correct?); may the two enterprises restitute the people who lost their homes due to corporate greed and instiutional malfeasance.  Where appropriate, may heads roll!


Come on, Federal law-makers and enforcers, let financial regulation to reform the structural flaws and officials' trickery or incompetence flow forth like rivers of water that refresh an industry too lacking hitherto in justice to its ordinary consumers and clients.


Update:  In the 'slow slide' of New York Stock Exchange trading yesterday,  the "Bank of America (BAC 14.83, -0.52, -3.39%) fell the hardest among blue chips, losing 3.4% " (MW).


-- EconoMix

Semiotics: Cartoon: Yaakov Kirschen the celebrated cartoonist May25,2k19 semaphores the Israeli situation today

Semiotics:  The artist is Yaakov Kirschen of Israel who is widely celebrated for his award-winning wit, simplicity of concept (given the complexity of issues with which he often deals), and persistence of effort over the years.  DryBonesBlog.com is the name of his major web presence, and his cartoons usually have an accompanying wr-t-up on the blog. 

-- Semaphore

Politics: Israel / Gaza: Columnist analyzes the naval blockade and war going on in the Med, with parallels to to past USA blockades

The brilliant syndicated columnist of Washington Post (WaPo) writes analytically and succinctly of the precedents of the blockade maintained by Israel against the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza, the tiny enclave of a million souls that snuggles into the shore line of the East Mediterranean sea between Israel's 6 million and Egypt's 80.5 million. I quote a brief snippet from WaPo's edition today (Jun3,2k3):

Oh, but weren't the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel's offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza -- as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.


Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel's inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

Krauthammer makes an informative geostrategic analysis of the h+ly relevant concepts pertinent to the specifics of Israel's defense against Hama terrorism from Gaza. The concepts to which he attends are Forward defense and Active defense, and there's a third, Passive defense which must be added given the present situation in the "international community."

Rookmaker Club files

Reformational political philosophy has rarely taken up the questions of military and strategic concerns. The Rookmaker Club files edited by Politicarp allow the community of the Protestant philosophy initiated by Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Mekkes, Rookmaker, and Stafleu (all of whom underwent the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, two of whom were  Dutch military -- Mekkes and Rookmaker -- they ending up in prison camps for the War's duration), allows the present-day Protestant Christian philosophical community in the USA to address one another as Americans not in denial about terrorism, the present wars, and future mass conflict.

Under the first rubric, he wr+ts:

Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land -- evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.

Since the Active Defense strategy did not work (2000, 2005, Krauthammer notes that Israel "then had to switch to active defense -- military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama's description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew" (2006, 2008-09).

The punch of the article is heady, and it comes under the heading Passive Defense. I urge refWr+t readers to clickup the article to read it in its entirety.
-- Politicarp

EducationUSA: School Choice: New Jersey Governor becomes outstanding voice for school kids and parents

Christie speaks in Washington DC, calling Newark schools 'absolutely disgraceful'

 -- thanks to Newark-Star Ledger via Heritage Foundation for video !  See also Catrholic Online editorial regarding Gov Christie's speech.

It took 80 years in the Netherlands -- in what is called "the School Wars" -- for the establishment of a genuinely pluralist school-policy. I know of no jurisdiction in North America that has embraced a principled pluralist approach.

The School Struggle or Schoolstrijd [was] a historical conflict in the Netherlands between 1848 and 1917 over the equalization of public financing for religious schools. The Protestant and Catholic parties, the ARP and CHU and the Algemeene Bond respectively, wanted their religious schools to receive financing equal to that received by [atheist] public schools; while maintaining their freedom in for example curriculum policy, teacher appointments etc. that came with their religious tradition. Liberals tried to protect the privileged financial position of public schools. The conflict lasted from 1888 to 1917, when it was resolved in the pacificatie. (Wapedia article "School struggle.")

And:
  The Pacification of 1917 is an event in Dutch politics. In 1917 the constitution was changed by the extra-parliamentary cabinet led by Pieter Cort van der Linden in order to resolve the antithesis between religious and secular parties. It implemented both universal suffrage, proportional representation and equal payment for religious schools.

With this historical background to school pluralization, freedom of association, and equal payment in mind, we can look at the historically regressive situation in the USA and Canada.  Read more ...

Semiotics: PoliticalAdsUSA: A conserative Repub runs vs left Dem, Barbara Boxer, for USA Senate -- the ad!

A consideration of the semiotics of a political ad moves the ad from something analyzable only politically, to something analysable also for its comprehensive sign-value: style, humour and wit -- among other wide-angled horizons experienced simultaneously ("simultaneity of norm-realization," Bernard Zylstra) that may move some of us to enjoy the ad while deploring the public-policy stances of the advertizer, in this case the candidate for the US Senate from California, going up against the incumbent Sen, Barbara Boxer. Some others of us may enjoy the ad, and approve the politics too. Even get out and vote in the November election!

-- Politicarp

Natural Disaster: Guatamala: Hurricane rains saturate Guatamala city, open huge sinkhole, swallowing building

EconomyUSA: Investors: Market Watch portrays May's volatility in this apt pix

Do you carry a left-goudzwaardian hate for capitalists, particularly investors?

Then, I give you occasion to rejoice and be exceeding glad as you feast your eyes on this one. But maybe you can glimpse the real pain in the face on this excellent bit of webcomic satire.  You see, the volatility of the markets last month created an enormous amount of anxiety and worse, as investors last month -- the good, the bad and the ugly among them -- tempted to cope with their shortfalls.  Of course, some clever lads made a killing, by luck or purposeful exploitation knowing when and where to reap stunning profits off the misery of others -- and the others not being only investors, small investors particularly, but also the noninvestors in the workforce and out of it, impacted severely by an unstable world and domestic market.

The month of June 2k10 will find rW attempting to monitor the general pattern of the markets (via MarketWatch and other financial newshorses), monitoring as well as the proposed American legislation to reform and better regulate the American domestic financial industry.  We're not laissez-faire, neither are we anticapitalist as some goudzwaardian reformational folk seem to be.  We're rather centre-goudzwaardian ourselves, but know that the stock markets are integral to the advanced differentiated society we live in, and that sphere sovereignty is conceptually and practically (as a life-practice) prior to the capitalist vs socialist debate so prominent in some corners today.  Let's get out of the corners!

A reformational investors club, anyone?

A Christian labor/labour union, anyone?

A round of beers at the local pub, anyone?, to discuss these pressing concerns that plague us and have us looking over our shoulders to see if the sky is falling.  Don't jump at the start of the next crisis or when your bank fails.  Remember the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is there as a safety net (thank God for regulation in that respect at least?).  Yes, we need strong reform and wise regulation of our financial institutions, because everyone, not just investors, are hurt in the purse and wallet when malfeasance spreads in societal spheres mentioned, hurt as well as our bank accounts, when the volatility heats up.  Somebody is making a killing, and somebody is getting killed.

Oh by the way, aside from the semiotics of the cartoon pix, the webcomic satire, the analytics of the situation also appear on MarketWatch today in a synthesis regarding developments by Steve Goldstein, "US stock futures jump on China, Europe, BP jitters" (June1,2k10).

-- EconoMix

Full disclosure:  I own no stocks in any company, my pension is small, and I am to be (ac)counted among the poorer of the sisters and brothers reformational in the h+ly industrialized West.  Not poor from the standpoint of reformationals in Africa and Latin America, for instance.

Israel: Enemy flotilla: Evidence emerges re violent Hamas supporters in waters approaching Gaza

Thanks to law blog Volokh Conspiracy for these YouTube video stunners:


And:



Click on my blog-entry headline above, which will take you to David Bernstein's blog entry yesterday, "Pro-Palestinian "Peace Activists" in VC. Please read his text. Thanks and Hat Tip to Bernstein, VC, YouTube, and whoever video-documented the evidence.

<br /> Reformational political philosophy has rarely taken up the questions of military and strategic concerns. <br /> <br /> The Rookmaker Club files edited by Politicarp allow the community of the Protestant philosophy initiated by Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven, Mekkes, Rookmaker, and Stafleu (all of whom underwent the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, two of whom were Dutch military -- Mekkes and Rookmaker -- they ending up in prison camps for the War's duration), allows the present-day Protestant Christian philosophical community in the USA to address one another as Americans not in denial about terrorism, the present wars, and future mass conflict. -- Politicarp<br />

I greatly regret the political impact of this "incident." Turkey has severed ties with Israel, where previously they had been allies, altho recently a cooling-off of relations between the two countries had already begun. Turkey was Isreal's only ally in the region, but the Turks have re-elected an Islamist party which greatly strengthened itself internally against the secularist Army there. The flotilla, a Trojan horse of 10,000 tons of aid carried on 6 ships sailing from Turkey, had among its 1,000 or so passengers embedded a cadre of pro-Hamas paramilitaries among its "peace activists." Bernstein's text, together with the vids, makes the point clear regarding the provocateurs in midst of the "mere" activists.

Further info on this breaking-news story:

•Israel processes Gaza activists, eyes new aid ship (Reuters via Yahoo! News, found it on the blue breaking-news ticker on my sidebar)

•Analysis: High-seas raid deepens Israeli isolation (Associated Press via Yahoo! News, May31,2k10). An excellent overview of this breaking news-story.

-- Politicarp

EconomyUSA: Jobless increase: Impacts and impasse on job creation in the new healthcare-driven American economy

To contrast with UK's unemployment crisis (mentioned in yesterday's blog-entry), here's a recent stat from USA's labour crisis (May 13, 2k10). Jeffry Bartash wr+ts in MarketWatch, "Weeklu jobless claims little changed at 444,000" --

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The number of people applying for unemployment benefits essentially held steady at 444,000 in the latest week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Claims actually fell by 4,000 for the week ended May 8, but the data was revised up by 4,000 for the prior week. The net effect: no change from last week's headline number. The four-week average of initial claims - a better gauge of employment trends than the volatile weekly number - dropped by 9,000 to 450,500. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch predicted initial claims would dip to a seasonally adjusted 440,000.

Uncannily, the number echoes with biblical sobriety -- "And I heard the number of them which were sealed: [and there were sealed one hundred forty four thousand -- 444,000!--of all the tribes of the chldren of Israel" (Revelation 7:4 KJV; see also Rev. 4:1). Am I the only person who noticed that parallelism?

In any case, the Bible verses are a distraction here. We have to retain our sobriety in order to guage the significance of a half-million unemployed workers applying for jobless benefits, pogey, the Dole over the course of a week, as averaged from a four week's total figure -- must give any considerate observer some considerable pause.

These jobless figures of a week's average nearly rises to a half-million, yet the portion of the economy signified by small businesses, which are the primo job-creators, are being taxed into immobility and somnolescence. Obamanomics is staggering under the new healthcare entitlement (praise God for that were there elsewhere in the Fed budget an adequate compensatory move toward spending cuts and paying down the national debt) -- instead, out of nowhere we have an unstoppable oil disaster we can't afford, and ... and ... we're in trouble in the USA economy. We need a public policy of encouraging and incentivizing the job creators, not big business so much as small.

Britain and America must both prioritize now the creation of jobs for the unemployed, and thus the creation of incomes spendable by wage-earners returned to work -- and taxable by Federal, state and local govts in significant part to pay for the budget-prioritization of healthcare (including the 32 million many of whom will be out of work and jobless). Economically speaking, everything else is secondary. Except of course, intelligent regulation of the financial and the energy sectors. We are not finished with our oil addiction, as President George W. Bush, termed it; rather our continuing and returned workers in many places need to drive their cars to get to work, public transit being unavailable in many places across the continent.

-- EconoMix

EconomyUK: Leeds Arena: To boost its economy Metropolitan Leeds, England, will build 55 million pounds worth of arena

ContractJournal.com reports a then-anticipated building venture in the city of Leeds, England in Four contest £55m Leeds arena deal - 18/11/2009 - Contract Journal by Brian Warner, who had said then that the project's launch woud take place November 2010, and it woud be completed in 2012,

I encountered the Warner article May30,2k10. The same webvisit brawt me also to an article that informs us the Contract Journal and its webling ContractJournal.com woud have closed down in Nov2k09. The Contract Journal had been publishing for 130 years.  England has been hit hard by the financial crisis which restricts enterprises of all kinds, and certainly has spilled over to workers (especially in the key industry of large-scale construction), workers who often have nowhere else to go, but onto the Dole.

Sad day for workers, for construction contractors, and the entire large-scale construction industry! Has the UK economic picture unclouded sufficiently to start hiring again? Have many of the newly-unemployed tried to set themselves to working again by way of independent contracting or by finding jobs at smaller construction firms? For those who have had to scale-down their/family income due to these moves to gain work in lower-wage jobs, has competion among the independents and smaller firms in the industry led to an increasingly severe competition at low wages? That's the pattern economically-informed job-hunters and onlookers woud expect, but perhaps not so much in Leeds which hopefully will have at least that monster project going for a new arena, starting this November and on into 2012, if all has gone well / is going well. If not, in the meantime, have construction workers in Leeds had to move out?, I wonder.

Update: Here are some labour stats for Leeds (Yorkshire and the Humber River area): official labour stats for Leeds.

-- EconoMix