It sounds like an old story, but the Wrongologist and Ms. Oh So Right are again headed to a wedding in Vermont, so there will be no new posts until Monday. Therefore, cartoons!
We canât ignore the visit of Pope Francis. Yesterday, he spoke to the Congress, and the usual spin ensued. Like the Liberty U folks when Bernie spoke there, the defining political issue for 90+% of Republicans is abortion. As long as the Pope remains with them on that issue, there’s no contradiction between their faith and political affiliation.
They will no more listen to this Pope on other issues than they did to John Paul II’s anti-war messages.
Liberals, including liberal Catholics, appreciate Francis because he says some things that they’ve believed for a long time. Itâs always nice when an authority figure affirms one’s beliefs. But the three Catholic POTUS candidates, Christie, Jeb, and Santorum, have already rejected anything Francis has to say on climate change and income inequality. As have all the GOP members of Congress regardless of their religious affiliation.
The Popeâs big job:
Brian Williams returned from banishment to anchor coverage of the Pope:
We may see a government shutdown this fall. One thing to keep in mind about the Republican debate over whether or not to risk a government shutdown for the âdefund Planned Parenthoodâ movement is that this isnât a fight over goals or principles. There isnât a single Republican presidential candidate who does not favor âdefunding Planned Parenthood:
The GOP is moving on to Carly:
Volkswagenâs CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday over the emissions cheating scandal, saying âIâm not aware of any wrongdoing on my part.â Strange choice of words, probably written by his PR team. This is a rogue company that undertook anti-social activities for profit. Anyone can see that this is the outcome we should expect if Mr. Market is allowed to run free:
You may vaguely remember that President Obama went to the Tomb of the Unknowns’ on Memorial Day. You probably donât remember that he said:
Today is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.
Yet, just two weeks later, he sent more âadvisersâ to Iraq. This will bring the number of US locations in Iraq to five. Mr. Obama and his own advisers continue to believe that the US should defeat or degrade ISIS in Iraq without significant help of Iran and the Shiâite militias.
Most of Washingtonâs foreign policy establishment is pushing Obama to âwinâ in Iraq. To do that, he must exercise at least as much influence with Baghdad as Iran. He must keep a US-friendly leadership in power, and keep the Iraqi military engaging ISIS outside of Baghdad.
Obamaâs decision to locate a new base in Anbar province between Ramadi and Fallujah conforms to the FP establishmentâs program. The new location only makes sense if American troops are there for some kind of combat role. If they were only going to Iraq to train Sunnis, (the stated role), it could be located anywhere in the country. But, as the Wrongologist has reported, the new advisers will be stationed at Taqqadum, an Iraqi base near the city of Habbaniya, where they will act as a trip-wire for ISIS advances.
Add to this what General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week about creating a string of âlily padsâ, American military bases around Iraq:
You could see [them] in the corridor from Baghdad to Tikrit to Kirkuk to Mosul.
General Dempsey acknowledged that such sites would require many more troops than those already authorized by Mr. Obama. Unfortunately, it didnât work against the Taliban in Afghanistan, so a good question is why it will work in Iraq. The âlily padâ idea will increase the already high likelihood that the American forces will soon be shooting, and being shot at. This means Gen. Dempsey is suggesting an open-ended American presence in Iraq engaging an open-ended insurgency by ISIS. Any decision to plant additional lily pads will certainly require more US troops in Iraq.
Wake up America, these DC Hawks will never end the war in the Middle East. To bring you gently into consciousness, here is another spring visitor to the fields of Wrong, the Magnolia Warbler:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_dm5InFg1g
If you read the Wrongologist in email, you can view the video here.
Disney World upped their prices to get in to $125. But itâs the cross-selling that takes the Disney experience to a new price level. Their Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutiques sell a $195 pampering for little girls that includes a makeover, hair-styling, a costume and a princess sash. Sounds like some Wall Street Dadâs idea. Not judging, people can spend their $$ however they want.
We need to accept the fact that the US doesnât have longâsimply helping it pass that time in comfort is the humane thing to do…letting it meet its end naturally is the merciful decision here.
Yesterday we talked about how America is losing middle class jobs to technical outsourcing on our way to becoming a land of spreadsheets and flags. Today, letâs discuss another aspect of that; how technology continues to cost more and more mid-skilled jobs. We usually think of technology as a great panacea, making most of our processes more efficient. In fact, many of us can look back on the âsneakernetâ of the 1980s and feel good about how far weâve come with technology.
But technology has also reduced the number of middle class workers required, at a time when American wages are stagnant and benefits are falling for the remaining available jobs.
The meme used to be that if technology replaced workers, new jobs came along and net-net, more people were employed. Although things werenât that simple, by 1900 if you were displaced, you could get another job because 99% of all jobs were still done only by humans.
Today corporations tell us that the knowledge economy can take as many workers as we can create, and since we canât create them fast enough, technology firms need more of the H-1B visas we discussed yesterday. This is false. Facebook is touted as a prime player in the knowledge economy, but it only employs 5,800 to service 1 billion customers! Twitter has 400 million total users. It has 2,300 employees.
What is the value of Facebook and Twitter to the jobs economy? These are two of our very âbestâ success stories, and they only employ 8,100 workers. They have had a huge impact on society, but the total jobs they have created are only a rounding error in our economy.
Much of what we want to buy is produced in factories increasingly run with robots, and maintained and operated by small cadres of engineers. Increased sales of iPhones only add a few sales jobs at $12/hour in the US and not many new factory jobs in China. Also, keep in mind that globally, some 3 billion people are looking for work and the vast majority are willing to work for less than the average American.
We all know that technology is costing jobs, and by some estimates it could cost half of all current jobs in the next 20 years. So, we can expect an ever-greater number of unemployed chasing an ever-shrinking number of jobs that canât be eliminated or simplified by technology. Thus, the prognosis for many medium and some higher-skilled workers appears grim. With this being said, technology is benefiting a lot of businesses and the way they operate. You’ll get a better understanding of it just by reading these Quotes about AI. Seeing as technology doesn’t look like it is going anywhere anytime soon, we might as well use it to our advantage in a business.
The oligarchs have seen these forecasts. That may explain their unwillingness to do anything serious to create effective jobs programs here at home. They donât need to do anything, because there is a (virtually) infinite supply of skilled and unskilled workers in the overpopulated third world.
The issue is not technology, or robots, or restoring our manufacturing base. Nor is the issue better skills, or technology or outsourcing. We have too many people chasing too few good jobs.
Incomes will continue to stagnate, because automation does not threaten unskilled jobs. This is sometimes called âMoravecâs Paradoxâ, which says that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires relatively little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources. The âRoombaâ robotic vacuum cleaner is, despite years of development, just an expensive toy. It has had zero impact on the market for janitors and maids, yet, wages for American janitors and maids have fallen because of competition from the currently unemployed and newly arrived immigrants. While the Roomba aims to be a forward-looking cleaning solution, it still cannot compete with the manual vacuum cleaners, like Bissell’s, that still prove to be the preferred choice despite innovative attempts to move towards automation. See this link for Bissell vacuum cleaners – https://www.bissell.com/vacuums/upright-vacuum-cleaners/
If we forecast continuing technology breakthroughs (and we should), and combine that with the 3 billion people currently looking for work globally, we have to conclude that the planet is overpopulated if the goal is a growing global middle class.
This is why the quest for better technology has become the enemy of sustaining middle class growth in the developed world.
Full service restaurants employ over 4 million people and that is expected to grow by nearly 10% by 2022, which means that these companies are in a profitable market segment. The top 5 full service chains made $705 million in profits last year, while paying out another $751 million in dividends and stock buybacks.
A new report by the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), shows that five of the ten lowest paid jobs as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) are in full-service restaurants. Since many full-service restaurant workers receive wages below what is needed to meet their basic necessities, these workers rely on taxpayer-funded programs in order to meet their basic needs. We pay the full-service restaurant industry a double subsidy:
⢠High numbers of full-service restaurant workers are on public assistance
⢠By paying a less-than-minimum wage, customers are paying restaurant workersâ wages directly through tips
The ROCâs analysis looked at utilization of public assistance programs to estimate annual benefit expenditures for families of full-service restaurant workers for the years 2009-2013. Here is a summary of their findings:
⢠Nearly half of the families of full-service restaurant workers are enrolled in one or more public-assistance programs
⢠The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the full-service restaurant industry is $9,434,067,497 per year (thatâs $9 billion for the math-impaired)
⢠Tipped restaurant workers live in poverty at 2.5 times the rate of our overall workforce
⢠The taxpayer underwriting of social programs for low-wage workers in a single Olive Garden is $196,970 annually.
ROC estimated that low wages and lack of benefits at the five largest full-service restaurant companies in the US cost taxpayers an estimated $1.4 billion per year. They focused on the major means-tested public programs that provide income supplements for working families. These included Medicaid and Childrenâs Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, the federal earned income tax credit (EITC), food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), basic household income assistance (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF).
Since 1991, the federal tipped sub-minimum wage has been set at $2.13 per hour, but states may establish a minimum wage that is higher than the federal governmentâs. So restaurant workers in 22 states receive the federal sub-minimum wage of $2.13 per hour, while restaurant workers in 20 states receive higher state sub-minimum wages of up to $5.00 per hour. Restaurant workers in eight states receive the full minimum wage.
Women make up 66% of all tipped workers, and people of color make up 40% of the total. Unsurprisingly, their poverty levels are higher in states that pay a $2.13 sub-minimum wage than in states that pay one minimum wage for both tipped and non-tipped workers.
You will pay more for a meal at most of these restaurants than at the fast food places. And that cost will go up if you believe in a fair wage for a fair dayâs work. Naturally, the industry, represented by the National Restaurant Association is fighting any increase in the minimum wage for restaurants. This is something ALEC has been working with the National Restaurant Association and state governments to fight.
How about if the 535 well-coiffed rubber stamps in Washington start by raising the wages on any companies where public assistance subsidizes payroll wages? Why should taxpayer money be going to fund stock buybacks and bonuses to restaurant chain CEOs?
We could dream big, of tying the minimum wage to the cost of local resources like housing. Given the problem we reviewed yesterday, the minimum wage could be linked to how many hours is necessary to pay a monthâs rent and utilities.
Every low wage worker needs a place to sleep when they arenât working. It shouldnât be on the street so that their employers can repurchase more stock.
The lands surrounding the Mansion of Wrong remain deeply snow-covered, and we picked up another 6â of snow last night. Where is Spring? In other weather-related news, February 2015 was officially the coldest February on record here in the Nutmeg State. So, letâs turn to Pete Seeger for a lovely Wake Up song about snow, with a gentle political message buried inside. Here is âSnow, Snowâ:
Sample Lyrics: Snow, snow, falling down; Covering up my dirty old town.
Covers the garbage dump, covers the holes, Covers the rich homes, and the poor souls, Covers the station, covers the tracks, Covers the footsteps of those who’ll not be back.
In news of the stupid, a branch of the Republican Party in Idaho voted to take up a measure to declare the state is Christian. The Idea was to bolster what supporters called the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of the US. The proposal was that Idaho be “formally and specifically declared a Christian state,” guided by a Judeo-Christian faith as reflected in the US Declaration of Independence. Jeff Tyler, a member of the committee and backer of the draft resolution, said:
We’re a Christian community in a Christian state and the Republican Party is a Christian Party.
Well, when the news got out of Kootenai County, the countyâs Republican Central Committee decided to shelve the measure, Now, Republicans will tell you it was just a small splinter group, and the resolution was going nowhere, so the US Constitution was never in danger from Republican religious extremists. Perhaps the more realistic way to look at it is that the Constitution is safe for the moment, until another, larger Republican extremist group comes along.
Here are your Monday hot links:
A study of frozen ice cores from the Tibetan Himalayas shows that international agreements on phasing out the use of toxic organic pollutants are working. Itâs cheaper to take an ice core sample than it is to place air quality sensors everywhere and monitor them.
In the US, just three out of ten workers produce and deliver all of the goods we consume. Everything we extract, grow, design, build, make, engineer, and transport â down to brewing a cup of coffee in a restaurant kitchen â is done by roughly 30% of the country’s workforce. Another 30% of us spend our time planning what to make, deciding where to install the things we have made, performing personal services, talking to each other, and keeping track of what is being done, so that we can figure out what needs to be done next. The rest are kids, elderly and out of work. Which 30% are you in?
You Tube makes no money. The Wall Street Journal reports that while YouTube accounted for about 6% of Googleâs overall sales last year ($4 billion), it didnât contribute to earnings. After paying for content, and the equipment to deliver speedy videos, YouTubeâs bottom line is âroughly break-evenâ. You Tube has 1 billion users per month. By comparison, Facebook generated more than $12 billion in revenue, and nearly $3 billion in profit, from its 1.3 billion users per year.
Letâs start the first Monday of the New Year with this photo of a hermaphrodite Northern Cardinal:
The half-red, half-white plumage of this northern cardinal is caused by its sex chromosomes not segregating properly after fertilization, so the bird is half-male, half-female. You can read more in New Scientist magazine here.
Last night, Wrongo watched Martin Scorseseâs film, The Last Waltz, which documents the last concert by the roots-rock group, The Band. Late in the movie, Robbie Robertson recounts jamming with the great harmonica player, Sonny Boy Williamson in the early 1960s, and making (never-realized) plans to work together. Obviously, Robertson, Helm, et al. went on to be the band that backed Bob Dylan in the 1970s.
Here is your Monday musical wake-up: Sonny Boy Williamson playing and singing â99â, in which he canât come up with that last dollar to make the $100 his girlfriend wants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP668KiaY7E
Here are links that you may have missed:
Drone etiquette is one of several issues covered in the WSJâs â21 Tech Doâs and Donâts for 2015.â Really, drone etiquette is gonna be a thing in 2015?
The latest ISIS offensive in Iraqâs Anbar Province may have reversed weeks of progress by Iraqâs government forces. And it only took a few hours. No airstrikes were launched by US coalition forces in time to support the ground troops.
Today is the Wrongologistâs birthday. Thatâs right, nearly everyone in the civilized world tries to have a drink with Wrongo on New Yearâs Eve. It makes New Yearâs Eve among his favorite holidays.
Christmas, not so much. The double bind that Christmas has become is summed up by those annual Lexus commercials. They promise that if youâre nice enough to Santa, or if your spouse truly loves you, there could be a $50,000 luxury car outside, wrapped in a bow.
Really? Tell that to the average American (whose wages havenât gone up, even though much of their daily living costs have increased) that the reason they donât have a Lexus waiting for them is that their spouse or significant other just doesnât love them enough.
It is easy to hate what Christmas has become here at the end stage of the Empire.
But New Yearâs is different. Here is Johnny Swim, the Wrongologistâs favorite new musical group of 2014, singing a song written by Frank Loesser in 1947, âWhat Are You Doing New Yearâs Eve?â:
Happy New Year, and thanks to all of those who read this blog.
No need for a long list of resolutions that we would all just break in January. Letâs settle for a wish that 2015 brings each of us a better economy, better health, and fewer global crises to worry about.
Now, Christmas Eve doesnât engender thoughts of Bob Dylan. Heâs the last guy you would think about. But today, we have Dylan two ways. First, Dylan singing âIt Must Be Santaâ. If you listen carefully, Dylan uses the names of several US presidents in with the list of Santa’s reindeer. And his hair is ironed or its a wig:
We close with our go-to Christmas Eve sing along carol here at the Mansion of Wrong. That would be Tom Lehrerâs âA Christmas Carolâ. Here is Lehrerâs lead in to the song:
Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in. I refer of course, to money.
Hereâs the song:
From all of us here at the Mansion of Wrong, Merry Christmas, and please work to bring peace to your family and your community.
Today is the birthday of both of the Wrongologistâs parents, born on the same day in different years. Dad was 2 years younger than Mom, they were married for more than 50 years, and both died at 85. They were born during WWI, were teenagers during the depression, and thus missed out on the education that today, we think of as necessary to get ahead.
They lived through WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and through the greatest expansion of the middle class in our country’s history. They went from horse-drawn vehicles on the streets of Brooklyn to owning cars and consumer electronics. They were Republicans who voted for Dewey and saw Nixon resign.
Their world view was that hard work brought continuous economic improvement. They didnât feel tied to one job â there was another one out there that paid better, that held greater responsibility, which would pay off your house, send your kids to college and provide for your retirement. They were the last of the majority stay-at-home mom generation. Dad never made more than $40k per year, but they saved enough to buy a waterfront home in Florida, and to live there until just before the time when their money ran out.
Fast forward to 2014, and people have little reason to be so optimistic. On Thursday, the NYT released a poll that found that only 64% said they still believed in the American dream, the lowest result in 20 years. The American Dream for depression-era adults was not about becoming rich, it was about being able to move upwards, to reach a greater level of prosperity, something that, from the 1950s through the 1970s, everyone believed was possible.
Now, that optimistic vision is dying for Americans like my mom and dad, and Washington doesn’t care.
Onward to music. Today we feature Tom Waits, 2011 inductee into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Those who have heard Waitsâs work know that he’ll never have to cancel a concert due to laryngitis. We start with a tune that shows how Americans were fools for the advertising of the 1970s. Thatâs probably an eternal condition in America, one that reflects the continuing (and wildly successful) effort on the part of corporations to sell us shit we don’t really need. Here is âStep Right Upâ:
The key lyric is a thought for the ages:
âThe large print giveth and the small print taketh awayâ
We close with âJersey Girlâ. Most people think that this song is by Bruce Springsteen, but it was written by Waits. He wrote it with is soon-to-be wife, Kathleen Brennan. This is a long video for a short tune. You can go to 3:51 where Waits says âthis is for Kathleenâ and just hear his version of the song, or you can listen from the beginning to his extended shtick with the audience:
