So busy. And so bitchy! That’s me. I’m an evil bitch; trust me it’s true. And thus you shouldn’t ever listen to me. Still, something woke me up this morning faster than the coffee.

I’m not going to make the claim that I know this graphic to be absolutely true. But it rings true, to my mind. Via the comments in this post. Which you need to read, all the way thru. SN is spot on in this point:

Powerful forces want to keep society in its current shape. For good reason, there is not only physical capital, but the doctrine of incorporation to contend with: we become physically the shapes and habits that they live. Moses never reached the promised land, and there is a desert to cross to take this generation out of the desert and into the land of milk and honey. Either we will face a reactionary century, or a new, progressive century, there is no third choice.

I guess that’s really been my problem with HRC and BHO supporters all along. And I’ll even admit that my guy would’ve hardly been better, perhaps a little, perhaps not.  Read more 

As your seedlings sprout in your flats, the first greens to appear are the “seed leaves” or cotyledons. They produce food for the plant as it begins to grow true leaves and are usually distinctly different in appearance from the plant’s leaves. If you are starting your seeds in flats, once the second set of true leaves start to appear it’s time to begin potting up – transplanting your seedlings from the flats into individual containers or cells of multi-packs.

 Read more 

GE: Dismal Earnings, Blasted Credibility

Deane Dray, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, said in a note to investors Friday that the earnings miss and lowered guidance “raises credibility concerns for GE over the near-term, given that CEO Jeff Immelt had expressed confidence and reaffirmed guidance and operating targets on his March 13 retail Web-cast. This implies that the back half of March deteriorated significantly, which is especially unnerving.”

They should sell off NBC. They could pay off their bond holders, boost their cash reserves, and invest in the company.

Well, a blog is really good for people who like to play economist, like me. So I’m reading this post and two things occur to me.

1. Costco up 7%, Penny’s down 12%, Wal-mart down .7%. That’s good news. Costco pays a living wage and tries to sell stuff made in the US. Proving they are profitable in a recession is one way to help frame the argument to get rid of the idiots who got us into this mess, the ones who hate unions and working people.

2.  Read more 

Those of you who have read my previous posts know that in addition to an avid winemaker, I am a lifelong gardener. In Wisconsin, like many parts of the country, the only way to grow many types of vegetables and flowers is by setting out plants started earlier in the season from cuttings or seeds. I start most of my own plants in a seed starting rack I’ve built in my basement. This series will step you through the basics of starting plants from seed and setting them out into your garden.

 Read more 

We make a lot of jokes here, and around the blogosphere, about what “hard work” it is to blog. In truth, it is. No, really! I won’t bore you with the emotions and thoughts I have about the burdens of blogging, or not, but let me say that I can totally understand why it is these “for pay” type bloggers are dropping like flies. And frankly, I think it’s a future many will unhappily come to appreciate. This is what life is like, when the entire “economy” revoloves around poor, desperate people selling junk from somewhere else to other poor, desperate people who also need to convince someone to buy something. All so a few rich people can be richer.

We all disapprove of prostitution for a reason. Not because it’s “dirty,” but because it’s dehumanizing. When will we apply the same logic to our ’legit’ work environment?

I have already blogged extensively on the current food price crisis affecting mostly poor countries. Now, via Le Monde, we learn, unsurprisingly, that riots have exploded in parts of Africa in response to the cost of food.

L’Afrique piégée par la flambée des prix des aliments
LE MONDE | 04.04.08

©  Read more 

Hey y’all. Sorry to be dark so much recently, but it’s that time of year and I’ve been ramping up for Major Labor under the sun and stars. I want to build something like this, but prettier. That’s my rub with growing houses- it’s so spendy to make them look nice. I’m house-vain like that, I guess. Still, I don’t want an ugly plastic shack on my lawn. At the same time, using recycled and reclaimed materials really appeals to me/my wallet.

Political, botanical, environmental, beautiful. What more can you ask for in a site?

Feeling snooty? I’m realizing just how snooty the gardening classes can be. But in this country at least, that’s going to change. Can you eat that 40$ cultivar, honey?

They may or may not be snooty, but they are pretty hardcore about their plants: I was over at Monticello the other day and gosh! You can see how a grrl could love Jefferson, what a whiz with plants he was! And speaking of things to look at, anyone know any good sites for garden design? With lots of pics? Most places I’ve come across are only trying to sell me a book or magazine and that’s not what I want/can afford. Oh, yes- I am very, very disappointed with all of you. Medium is the best we can do? Fuck. That’s pathetic.

Sorry again for the short and infrequent posting, but this is what happens in an economy where some of us are realizing it makes a lot of sense to have a plot that will provide…oh, let’s avoid polemic and hysteria this morning and just say 30% of my diet.  Read more 

H/t MS. Just for shits and giggles, check this out. Heh, it seems Corrente isn’t the only place to go for naughty, spicy language about today’s economy:

GMAC Bank is suing mortgage company HTFC for selling improperly secured loans, which lead to the hilariously blue and aggressive deposition from HTFC CEO Aron Wider. Wider dropped the f-bomb 73 times, frustrating the opposing counsel’s attempts to get him to answer difficult questions like “Where are you currently employed?” Some of the more colorful and creative expletives from the testimony of Mr. Wider, who, according to his company website, serves as company Coprorate Information [sic], CEO / Senior Underwriter, and Radio Engineer, inside…

Q: My question is where are you currently employed.
A: I’ m not. I just told [you] I work for free.
Q: OK. You’re not employed by the HTFC Corporation?
A: Hit That Fuckin’ Clown. That’s what it means.  Read more 

So I’ll spare you the photos. But: I went to the local “asian grocery,” and I bought this pan. A wok, actually. It looked nice and wasn’t completely the ’cheap choice.’ The food and service in this place were good, all the times I’d been there. I live in a university town; lots of Asian seeming folks were shopping there, and all the stuff sold there was labeled in a different language than English. So my thought was: this could be a good place to shop for “asian” cooking supplies.

I wanted to make a beef and water chestnut dish tonight. I used the new wok. It had been oiled, gently washed clean from store-born ick, and heated for the first time to a reasonable temp. I even used a plastic spatula.

Just as the meat cooking was getting done, I noticed something. A long, shiny, two-inch scrape on the floor of the wok. One that left edges of paint, turned back and ready to work into the meat or food cooking in the wok. I was horrified. All I could think of was “poisoned lead paint” and dying children. I also hated myself for the racist reaction I had to pans and kitchen stuff made abroad; I confess that I had one.

What should I do? I’m taking the wok back to the grocer from whom I bought it tomorrow. Should I report it? Them? To whom? How? Again, I keep thinking, “how many of these were sold to the unsuspecting?” What creeped me out was that I realized, had I not been closely paying attention, I could’ve cooked the scraped paint right into the meat and veggies and never noticed (you know how sometimes you only put half the pan of food onto the serving bowl for the table; the rest covers the cooking pan bottom) that the paint had mixed and flaked into the food, and was almost invisible in the dark sauce.

This, by the way, is life in the post-strong dollar economy. A friend of mine who is fluent in the languages of modern China, and who does regular biz in Sh and Bg, told me thusly: “they are keeping the good stuff for sale at home now; America gets the crap.” That seems more or less true to me. You?  Read more 

Via Prom6, here’s a data point that is troublesome. Take those worthless greenbacks elsewhere, Yanks.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The U.S. dollar’s value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands.

“Our dollar is worth maybe zero over here,” said Mary Kelly, an American tourist from Indianapolis, Indiana, in front of the Anne Frank house. “It’s hard to find a place to exchange. We have to go downtown, to the central station or post office.”

That’s because the smaller currency exchanges — despite buy/sell spreads that make it easier for them to make money by exchanging small amounts of currency — don’t want to be caught holding dollars that could be worth less by the time they can sell them.

The dollar hovered near record lows on Monday, with one euro worth around $1.58 versus $1.47 a month ago.

What are the candidates going to do about the dollar’s decline, specifically? That’s my question.

Speech-acts don’t impress me so much anymore. Nor do websites. Or rallies. Cucking Stool reminds us of the real cost of the continuation of the clusterfuck that is Iraq, and it’s hefty:

Nobel Economics Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author, Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, have estimated the total cost of the war, just to the United States, to be three to four trillion dollars. The rest of the world will pay similar amount. They wrote a book called The Three Trillion Dollar War, but that estimate is apparently out of date, although the book just came out:

All of the war-price tallies include operations in the war zone, support for troops, repair or replacement of equipment, reservists’ salaries, special combat pay for regular forces and some care for wounded veterans — expenses that typically fall outside the regular Defense Department or Veterans Affairs budgets.

The highest estimates often include projections for future operations, long-term health care and disability costs for veterans, a portion of the regular, annual defense budget, and, in some cases, wider economic effects, including a percentage of higher oil prices and the impact of raising the national debt to cover increased war spending.

The debate raging on Capitol Hill, on the presidential campaign trail, in research institutes and in academia touches on such esoteric factors as the right inflation index for veterans’ health care costs; the monetary value of nearly 4,000 soldiers killed; and what role, if any, the war has had in higher oil prices.

Some economists who track the war expenses say they worry that politicians are making mistakes similar to those made in 2002, by failing to fully come to grips with the short- and long-term financial costs.

“The relevant question now is: what do we do now going forward? Because we can’t do anything about the costs that have already happened,” said Scott Wallsten, an economist and vice president of research with iGrowthGlobal, a Washington research institute. “We still don’t hear people talking about that.”

In discussions about the economy, the elephant - boy, is that an apt metaphor - in the room is the war. The national debt has soared, as has the price of oil, and the dollar has plunged. The Fed keeps throwing “liquidity” on the fire; it seems to help for a little while - at least in terms of buoying the stock market - but only for a little while. As the Fed accepts dodgey-er and dodgey-er debt as collateral, the prospect that the taxpayer is going to foot the bill becomes more and more inevitable.

Privatize the profits and socialize the losses!  Read more 

We’ve been chatting it up about barter and trade and revolutionary economics lately, so this caught my eye:

The Economics of Free Beer  Read more 

The strict definition of “recession” is:

a decline in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth, for two or more successive quarters of a year.

Bush claims that he inherited a recession and also disputes that we are now in a recession.

As both cannot be true, it seems that “recession” is not a macroeconomic term, rather, a political one.  Read more 

I’m not an economist. Some of these people are paid big money to be. So, this struck me:

The disconnect between the US economy and Latin America has never been greater than in the first months of 2008. While our US economists are focused on the continued fallout from the credit crunch, the housing recession and a weakening labor market, throughout Latin America new growth records keep being set.

Peru announced last week that real GDP grew by 9.1% in 4Q, bringing growth for 2007 to 8.9% ? the best pace in more than a decade. Meanwhile in Brazil, the signs of abundance are widespread: locals are boasting that auto production could set a new record – up to nearly 3.5 million vehicles this year – while foreign direct investment doubled in 2007 to US$35 billion compared with just a year ago. Even in Mexico ? where the link with the US is strongest ? the downturn is not immediately apparent. While Mexico’s 4Q GDP began to show a slowing pace on a quarter-over-quarter basis, the more widely reported year-over-year report showed 4Q GDP up 3.8% ? its best quarterly performance during the year.  Read more 

Via the Society of American Mosaic Artists, where you can view plenty more that are cool/suck/confusing/incredible.

Busy day today, but I wanted to confess to you all my new obsession. I won’t be able to garden for long months yet, and the need to do something with my hands (get your mind out of the gutter) has driven me to explore a new craft/art form. Also, poverty. If you like to craft but can’t afford all those expensive supplies, you can do some amazing things with some cement, paint, and broken shards of glass, clay or pebbles.

Recycling has to become a Way of Life for us. We have to learn to live the truth that everything we throw away has an “energy cost” as well as a landfill cost.  Read more 

I’m outta here, as this is what my day will look like, mostly:  Read more 

So Big Blue and lots of other number-inclined bloggers have been telling us all about the housing market crash, or I guess I should call it “multiple markets crash” because it’s affected banks, Wall Street, insurance and credit card companies, and a whole lot more. Been to Home Depot lately? So many looking so suicidal. I came across a term I didn’t know, and so I went off and did a little casual reading about “undevelopment.” Now, before I say anything, read this:

When I was a child I went to school in Kalemie. It was a great honour for one from our village to go to the big town and I was chosen because I was the son of the chief. My family walked with me through the forest to the place not far from here where the bus passed. I will never forget that first bus journey.” He fell silent for a moment, staring into the fire.
“I was still at school when independence came in 1960, and in Kalemie I remember almost all of the white families fled across the lake because they were scared. I came home and since then I think I have been to Kalemie maybe two times.

“Our village here, the one you are sitting in, used to have cars come through it every few days. Just a few kilometres away is one of those guest houses the Belgians built. They called them gites and they were always open for travellers coming through by car. But all of that went with the fighting.

“Now when we hear the fighting coming our way, my people and I just flee into the bush. We have learned it is the safest place for us. We know how to survive there. And when we come back, our village is almost always destroyed and we have to build it again.

“Over the years, things have got worse and worse. We have lost the things we once had. Apart from what we can carry into the bush, we have nothing. I think the last time I saw a vehicle near here was 1985, but I cannot be sure. All these children you see around you are staring because I have told them about cars and motorbikes that I saw as a child, but they have never seen one before you arrived.”  Read more 

Heh, there are days when I love the lazy, carefree completely accurate yet totally snarky way the blogosphere can reduce issues to their essentials. So what if they both prove wrong, Kang and Kodos are reading this and seriously thinking about investments in Outer Mongolia instead:

Much shorter Nouriel Roubini:

Home prices will fall between 20% and 30% from their peak, wiping out between $4 trillion and $6 trillion of household wealth.

10 million households would have negative equity in their homes

Losses for the financial system from the subprime disaster as high as $250 to $300 billion

Losses from other kinds of mortgages are $150 B or more.

Hundreds of billions of losses from off-balance sheet SIVs and conduits  Read more 

Example A and the inevitable correction. I could say a lot about this, but instead I’ll just say: I can understand John’s frustration. Technically, he’s not wrong, and we all will pay back the irresponsible “tax cuts,” with interest. And what will the rich get, while we snap and snipe at each other about who is more poor? A bunch, I bet.

John isn’t hurting, he’s got a nice place and some security. But like the poorest, he too can sense how easily the rug could get pulled out from under him. It’s less likely that will happen to him than to say, a homeless Latina veteran. But he’s right to feel anxiety. This post just seems bitchy and self-concerned, and makes him look unaware of how much worse off the plight of those who will get a “tax cut” suffer. More common than you may think, that particular shortcoming and many of our leading “progressive” voices.

The lesson for the movement: make all tax increases on the truly wealthy. There are plenty of them, they can afford it, include corporations and then no better-than-average “centrists” or “liberals” will complain again.

Dood, I don’t know anything about Teh Economies, but this doesn’t look good to me. IIRC the US GDP is ~13 trillion. Those numbers above kind of dwarf that.

A reader named Bex and the Agonist crew are having a really good discussion where I found that graph. He wonders: if all these people are losing all this money, who is making it? Where is it going? And I’d add: what expectations will those people have politically, now that the financial power is shifting so graphically and rapidly?  Read more 

My grandparents were amazing people. Despite racism and poverty, they managed to retire in wealth and comfort, because they beat the odds and worked the system and carved out a very profitable little real estate empire in the latter halves of their lives. Beginning when I was 12, I got sent to live and work with them in the summers, the better to learn about “the value of the dollar” and “where money comes from” and other wholesome lessons. It worked. I learned over those summers that “business” in America means one must at all times be on guard for lying, thieving, stealing, misreprestation and demonic evil. Sometimes, I wish I had my grandfather’s mettle; I left the business and went off to college to study things that didn’t make me feel so “icky,” which is always how I feel in a sales position. But it turns out he was right and I was wrong; if I’d skipped college and taken over the business, I’d be rich and powerful enough to buy me some politicians, instead of poor and with a head stuffed with pretty words and dates in history that no politician seems to be able to hear.

Anyway, this post from a blog that’s new to me really brought back the real estate nightmares every salesperson has had:  Read more 

I’m being glib in the title of this post, but if I’ve ever felt the need to use “slaughtered” and “destroyed” in a sentence after reading a blog post, this is it. No, silly, not physical violence, but in the intellectual sense: I think NO’s comment at the bottom sums it up best:

…why in hell should any politician deliver for unions? implied “ever again?”

One will have a very difficult time defending some decisions and leadership in the unions after reading this devastating post. Don’t read it as about Edwards. Take out his name and insert the candidate of your choice; it could’ve happened to any of them.

Unions in America have been in a decline for over 60 years. Union membership has dropped from almost 35% of all workers in 1945 to less than 15% today. In fact, union membership has declined to almost exactly the same percentage as it was in 1930 before FDR took power and encouraged the growth of unions. The first crucial battle the unions lost came after FDR died, when over Truman’s veto the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947. Truman called the Taft-Hartley Act a “slave labor bill”.

Since then unions have lost critical battle after battle  Read more 

I was out at the grocery store today. I shop for others, so I have to go down aisles that have things I would never buy for myself; candy and cookie and potato chip and meat sections. There I often see people different tha