The morning news is dominated with reaction to the job report released yesterday, showing that the U.S. shed half a million jobs in November. As well as news that loans to the auto industry may move forward.
Also, Bill Ayers attempts to set the story straight in an op-ed for the New York Times.
And, a little piece of Obamamania in South Korea.
The Wall Street Journal surveys economists' reactions to the news that we lost half a million jobs last month:
This is almost indescribably terrible. In the past six months the U.S. has lost 1.55 million jobs, almost as many as were lost in the whole 2001 recession, which included 9/11 and the two months after. Ian Shepherdson, High Frequency Economics
This was much worse than was expected and represents wholesale capitulation. The threat of a widespread depression is now real and present. Peter Morici, University of Maryland
The bottom drops out of the labor market... History tells that once the labor market weakens as much as it has in the past several months, job-shedding takes on a life of its own and tends to persist for a long while. Joshua Shapiro, MFR Inc.
These are god-awful numbers. The economy is headed downhill and the brakes are not working. Sung Won Sohn, Smith School of Business and Economics
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The Washington Post reports that normally sober reports from economists were anything but sober in reacting to this news:
Indeed, the economy is unraveling so fast as to defy analysis through the usual statistical models. Among the phrases found in normally sober reports from the nation's top economic forecasters yesterday: "god-awful," "wholesale capitulation," "shockingly weak" and "indescribably terrible."
"The numbers here are truly horrific," said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a consultancy. "It is clear this economy is now deteriorating with frightening speed and ferocity."
The Mortgage Bankers Association also reports that 1 in ten homeowners are either in foreclosure already or falling behind on their mortgage payments, with the association predicting 2.2 foreclosures this year.
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The morning news is also dominated by reports that the numbers will likely get worse - possibly a lot worse - before they get better:
Economists predicted that the unemployment rate, which rose to a 15-year high of 6.7 percent in November, could soar as high as 10 percent before employers begin hiring again. The rate was at 4.7 percent one year ago. Unemployment peaked at 10.8 percent during the recession in 1982, terrible but still a far cry from the Depression, when roughly one in four Americans was out of work.
"The economy is in a free fall," said Richard Yamarone of Argus Research. "It is as if someone flicked off the switch on hiring."
"It's a mess," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. "Businesses, battening down the hatches, are concerned about their survival and are cutting workers."
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Adam Cohen wonders if it would be better for the economy as a whole if employers cut back on hours and reduced salaries instead of instituting mass layoffs:
In 1933, the Senate passed a "30 Hour Bill" that would have barred from interstate commerce goods made by workers employed more than 30 hours a week. Its sponsor, Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, said the bill would create six million new jobs. It made no sense, he insisted, for some employees to work 70 hours a week "while others are driven into poverty and misery from unemployment."
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It looks like maybe something may get done in Congress, after Nancy Pelosi removed her opposition to providing loans to the automakers from the $25 billion set aside for developed fuel-efficient cars, the Boston Globe reports:
Details of the rescue package for the automakers were not immediately available, but senior congressional aides said it would include billions of dollars in short-term loans to keep the automakers afloat at least until President-elect Barack Obama takes office. Senior aides said the money would probably come from $25 billion in federally subsidized loans intended for developing advanced fuel-efficient cars. Reuters reported the amount of the bailout as between $15 billion and $17 billion.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had resisted using $25 billion set aside for loans, which was approved as part of an energy bill last year, and Democrats had called repeatedly on the Bush administration or the Federal Reserve to act unilaterally, using existing authority, to aid the auto companies.
It sure would be nice one day if the Republicans were the ones to make concessions, instead of the Democrats. The frontpage of Huffington Postreads "Bush Wins Showdown: Green Car Funds Tapped to Bailout Detroit."
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William Ayers writes an op-ed for the New York Times this morning:
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
and:
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.
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Salon's Alex Koppelman predicts that the stories about Obama's birth certificate will never die:
The faux controversy isn't going to go away soon. Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii, and yes, he is eligible to be president. But according to several experts in conspiracy theories, and in the psychology of people who believe in conspiracy theories, there's little chance those people who think Obama is barred from the presidency will ever be convinced otherwise. "There's no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody's mind," says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American, and who holds an undergraduate and a master's degree in psychology.
Oh, goodness. I don't look forward to hearing about this nonsense for the next eight years.
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Speaking of things I'm not looking forward to, did you hear that Joe Scarborough is now getting his own radio show?! When will the maddness end? Well, at least O'Reilly won't be on radio anymore, but still.
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The North Jersey Herald reports on the latest developments regarding the selection of the EPA adminstrator:
Lisa Jackson, Governor Corzine's chief of staff and the state's former top environmental official, appears closer to nomination as administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, environmentalists and congressional aides said Friday.
Jackson, who serves on President-elect Barack Obama's energy and natural resources transition team, is apparently edging out the competition — a California environmental official — and could be named within two weeks, aides said.
The director of Sierra Club's New Jersey chapter "praised her work on addressing global warming, coastal concerns and other key environmental issues."
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Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of IAEA, says U.S. efforts to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions over the last five years have been a failure:
"We haven't really moved one inch toward addressing the issues," said Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. "I think so far the policy has been a failure."
But, he's optimistic about Obama's policies:
He said U.S. President-elect Barack Obama gave him "lots of hope" after he inserted a proposal to abolish all nuclear weapons in the Democratic Party platform and advocated opening diplomatic dialogue with rivals.
"He is ready to talk to his adversaries, enemies, if you like, including Iran, also [North] Korea," he said, adding that the Bush administration was reluctant to do so. "To continue to pound the table and say, 'I am not going to talk to you,' and act in a sort of a very condescending way -- that exaggerates problems."
Can someone add this to the running list of failures of the Bush administration? That would be a great diary, come to think of it, but it would probably take days and days to write.
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NEWSWEEK declares that support for gay marriage is growing, according to their recent poll results:
Fifty-five percent of respondents favored legally sanctioned unions or partnerships, while only 39 percent supported marriage rights. Both figures are notably higher than in 2004, when 40 percent backed the former and 33 percent approved of the latter.
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I thought I would leave you with something from South Korea that made me laugh. On my morning run last week, I came across a new realty office that has just opened:
Sorry that the picture quality kind of sucks, but you get the idea.
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So what's on your mind this morning?