Month: March 2010
Federal pay ahead of private industry
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
Trashing Alabatross Chicks
These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.
To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.
via current work.
There’s a new Red Scare. But is China really so scary?
This new Red Scare says a lot about America’s collective psyche at this moment. A nation with a per capita income of $6,546 — ensconced above Ukraine and below Namibia, according to the International Monetary Fund — is putting the fear of God, or Mao, into our hearts.
Recent reports about how China is threatening to take the lead in scientific research seem to ignore the serious problems it is facing with plagiarism and faked results. Projections of China’s economic growth seem to shortchange the country’s looming demographic crisis: It is going to be the first nation in the world to grow old before it gets rich. By the middle of this century the percentage of its population above age 60 will be higher than in the United States, and more than 100 million Chinese will be older than 80. China also faces serious water shortages that could hurt enterprises from wheat farms to power plants to microchip manufacturers.
And about all those engineers? In 2006, the New York Times reported that China graduates 600,000 a year compared with 70,000 in the United States. The Times report was quoted on the House floor. Just one problem: China’s statisticians count car mechanics and refrigerator repairmen as “engineers.”
via There’s a new Red Scare. But is China really so scary? – washingtonpost.com.
The Rising Sovereign Debt Crisis
Bond giant PIMCO spoke of a “sovereign debt explosion” that has taken the world into uncharted waters and poses a major threat to economic stability. “Our sense is that the importance of the shock to public finances in advanced economies is not yet sufficiently appreciated and understood,” said Mohamed El-Erian, the group’s chief executive.
Mr El-Erian said most analysts are still using “backward-looking models” that fail to grasp the full magnitude of what has taken place in world affairs since the crisis. Some 40pc of the global economy is in countries where governments are running deficits above 10pc of GDP, with no easy way out.
Italy has to refinance 20pc of its entire debt – the world’s third largest after Japan and the US – tapping the bond markets for a total €259bn this year. Belgium has to roll over 22pc of its substantial debt.
via Eurozone could risk ‘sovereign debt explosion’ – Telegraph.
Globilization’s Religious Revival
Here’s the indisputable reality: All of the world’s major religions were formed during the Malthusian era of human economics, before the Industrial Revolution shifted Western societies from a subsistence paradigm to questions of how to deal with abundance.
Survival economies demand a strict code, but abundance offers a choice: Do I adapt the ancient rules to this economic liberation or do I reject it as a socially driven moral evil?
Once the “go forth and multiply” logic is disrupted, then long-held strictures regarding marriage, family, sex, homosexuality, and other social institutions are suddenly put in jeopardy. This is where globalization’s economic connectivity generates revolutionary social change, unleashing personal freedom that by historical standards is stunning — even perverse.
The upside, of course, is the commensurate unleashing of personal creativity and innovation, something we’ll need in superabundance for the many resource-utilization challenges that lie ahead.
Globalization divides societies into short-term economic winners and losers, for the simple fact that some people adapt faster than others. The temptation for those who come out on the losing end is an end-times ideology that promises deliverance from these unacceptable circumstances. Such fundamentalism pursued peacefully presents no problem. The faithful simply live apart from the “evil world.”
This is how religion’s fundamentalist variants came to replace communism as the worldwide organizing principle for violent resistance to capitalism’s continued evolution and expansion around the planet.
via WPR Article | The New Rules: West Must Bridge Globalization’s ‘God Gap’.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner
At first, some people on Wall Street feared that the Obama Administration was simply seeking a pretext for taking over embattled firms like Citigroup and Bank of America, as liberal Democrats had urged. But Geithner was resolutely opposed to such an option, at least at that stage. He and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, intended to use the stress tests to bolster banks’ finances rather than nationalizing them. “That would have been a deeply transforming policy mistake,” he said to me. “The country would have suffered for decades. We’d have spent hundreds of billions of dollars more that we didn’t need to spend, and would have been stuck in those institutions for years.”
In fact, some commentators agreed that the Treasury and the Fed were being too tough on banks. One of these skeptics was Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities, who has been following the financial industry since 1965. He has since changed his mind. “Geithner recognized that the system needed overkill on security and soundness to rebuild the confidence that was lacking,” he said. According to Bove’s calculations, U.S. banks now have more capital as a percentage of assets than in any year since 1935. “He built in that safety and soundness throughout the industry. As time goes on, I’m getting more and more respect for him.”
Between March 9th and May 7th, when the results of the stress tests were announced, the Dow rose by almost two thousand points, and the spread between AAA and BAA bonds—a reliable indicator of financial distress—fell sharply
Read more: via Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner : The New Yorker.
Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!
About a quarter of the world's economic output is produced by the United States, whose population is less than a fourth of China's 1.3 billion. So there's a very long way to catch up for a country beset by a variety of Third World problems, from lack of paved roads in many rural areas to water pollution so severe that 700 million people have to drink contaminated water every day, according to the World Bank.
via Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!- International Business-News-The Economic Times.
For many in Haiti, there’s nowhere to call home
With the looming rainy season and housing proposals coming to disaster-prone Haiti, both government officials and relief workers are in a race against nature to relocate hundreds of thousands of quake victims living in squalid camps prone to flooding. But in their fervent pursuit of rain-resistant shelter, they are finding an old problem quickly becoming a new one: lack of suitable land.
Even before Haiti’s biggest disaster leveled more than 200,000 homes and buildings, land was already a problem in this densely populated nation where the Champs de Mars camp now boasts one person per 53 square feet, instead of the international norm of one person per 484 square feet.
Illegal squatters living on private and government land, often in substandard conditions with nothing more than dirt for a floor, are as much a norm as people spending their life savings in corruption-ridden legal battles over land title.
via For many in Haiti, there’s nowhere to call home – Haiti – MiamiHerald.com.
What The Tea Party And Hippies Have In Common
About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.
About 40 years ago, a social movement arose to destroy the establishment. The people we loosely call the New Left wanted to take on The Man, return power to the people, upend the elites and lead a revolution.
via Op-Ed Columnist – The Wal-Mart Hippies – NYTimes.com. Continue reading “What The Tea Party And Hippies Have In Common”