When I had a client, my first job was to understand his viewpoint and to feed it back to him with a more sophisticated slant. Usually, this justified my fee. Since I have some scruples, my report would include a modicum of straight thinking sugar-coated so as not to offend him.

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The intellectuals define economics as the Dismal Science. They are half right. Economics is not nearly a science. It is guesswork obscured by jargon and a few impenetrable graphs quickly glossed over.

Good economists develop a gut feel for the economy. People make the whole thing work and they bring their emotions with them. More than greed on the upside and fear on the downside, there is trust. Most of our government and business leaders have lost our trust.

It is akin to finding the spouse participating in an orgy without you.

As an economist, my first rule was to discover who paid the salary of the brother economist who had written the article. His reasoning usually dovetailed with that of his bosses.

When I had a client, my first job was to understand his viewpoint and to feed it back to him with a more sophisticated slant. Usually, this justified my fee. Since I have some scruples, my report would include a modicum of straight thinking sugar-coated so as not to offend him.

Generally, people prefer lies to the truth. This is why Cramer is on television while I am not.

It Aint Easy Being Anybody

Incredibly, until Lehman Brothers collapsed, John McCain had a lead over Obama. If the Republicans had managed just two more months at disguising the recession, they would have been in the catbird seat still. Somehow, the US public failed for 40 years to realize that the GOP was doing a tap dance on their heads. This was fabulous for the upper one percent of us who did the dancing. The others of us 99% in the have not group simply got big headaches.

Yeah, I guess many are right about the lower 99% class. Even now they let the 1% avoid prosecution.

Two days ago I posted an article on Eric Holder's prosecution of bankers and brokers. Nobody responded.

Understanding and Compassion

To me, the sick world embodies mortgage payments, the rat race, expense accounts, avarice and greed. This 'civilization' vanished one night in 1976 in Manhattan when the electricity grid failed. This culture is not sustainable.

The Great Depression called many people back to the basics understanding and compassion.

Job Training

The stimulus spending bill signed last month includes $4.5 billion for job training. That only begins to address an area long neglected, said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project in New York. In current dollars, the nation devoted the equivalent of $20 billion a year to job training in 1979, compared with only $6 billion last year, Mr. Stettner said.

"We have to seriously look at fundamentally rebuilding the economy," he said. "You've got to use this moment to retrain for jobs."

Friday's report reinforced how much the economy is being assailed at once by falling household spending power and the financial crisis, with companies resorting to wholesale layoffs after months of merely declining to hire.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/business/economy/07jobs.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th

Management Hates Workers [Consumers]

I hate writing as a Marxist class warrior, but sometimes it is necessary for understanding. Advertising is the corporate titan's way to convince that he cares for us [the 99%].

My employer was a Fortune 500 sweat shop. He owned the town and all the people in it. When the employees tried to unionize, he moved the production facility to a red state. We executives remained in the original factory cleverly disguised as an office building.

My office overlooked a bubbling brook. Every day it changed from its pristine color to that of the experimental dye being used and flushed that day. Since my boss was cool, I asked him why the firm polluted the best part of the city. He warned me to keep that question to myself.

Another manager was organizing to petition the mayor for a bicycle path. His fellow managers advised him to tear it up. The petition smacked of unionization to them.

The corporations will take any measure to defeat unionization. Certainly, a part of this is to quash outside interference in business. The deeper motive is class hatred the 1% versus the 99%. When they punish workers, they are degrading the consumer class for nobody's benefit.

My factory owner polluted the brook to prove he had the power to do it.

The Republicans dilute [pollute] Obama's recovery program for the same reason: spite.

Authors Bio:
Born a month before Pearl Harbor, I attended world events from an early age. My first words included Mussolini, Patton, Sahara and Patton. At age three I was a regular listener to Lowell Thomas.
My mom was an industrial nurse a member of the AFL/CIO. My dad was a painting contractor. We shopped at the Working Man's Store.
Dad's reading matter was the Old Mole the house organ of the Socialist Workers Party. I played the saxophone and became a young fan of Charlie Parker, Lester Young and Duke Ellington. Naturally, I gravitated to the Civil Rights movement.
After college to avoid the draft, I joined the US Army Reserve. Alas, this came to crowd control, which was a euphemism for busting radical potheads. When I ducked out of this duty, my commander bundled me off to a unit doomed to go to Vietnam. Ironically, my old unit went to Vietnam and the new one stayed home.
I studied economics in graduate school where I watched America go mad with war. Afterwards, I joined the rat race for a decade.
When Ronnie Reagan became President, I took up residence in Israel.
The 11 books listed below describe my adventures in Israel.
The articles reflect additional thoughts that expand on the author's ten volumes Genesis Begins the Millennia. The work begins in 1995 with a fictional account of ordinary Israelis absorbed with everyday events. There are extraordinary happenings the characters gradually recognize as portents of the Messianic Age. Volumes four and five show why the Messiah decided to delay His arrival.
Volumes six through ten [Tradebombers] begin six weeks before the 9/11 World Trade Center tragedy. Again, the characters portray ordinary citizen reaction to extraordinary events.