Jeffery

OK. Late Fall road trip itinerary (will go to AAA tomorrow to book it and get the trip tik). Johnstown PA (tip of the hat to Robert Pence for his pix thread on the place which convinced me to visit) Allentown/Bethlehem (staying in downtown Bethlehem) Hartford ("base camp")(visiting w. old Dayton freind now in Hartford) --side trip to NYC --side trip to Boston or Providence. Leaning toward Providence --various Connecticut things Lowell MA (touring the mills) Portland ME (overnight) Lewiston ME (visiting niece at Bates College) North Adams MA and Troy NY (overnight at one of these two, but will stop at both) Syracuse Rochester Buffalo (overnight) Home

Always get a kick out of those baby skyscrapers. They give Steubenville a bit more "presence" than it looks like it would have by just looking at a map. So...I guess the steel mill is now owned by "Severstal"? (noticed the billboard in one of the pix).

From UK's "The New Statesman" The Boom Was An Illusion ....The resulting damage over the past four years has been huge. The world economy contracted by 6 per cent between 2007 and 2009, and recovered 4 per cent. It is 10 per cent poorer than it would have been, had growth continued at the rate of 2007, and the pain is not yet over. Today, we are in the first stages of a second banking crisis. It may already be too late to avoid a "double dip", but it may still be possible to avoid a triple dip....

On a related topic: White-Collar Recession, Blue-Collar Depression But one group has paid the biggest price: Blue-collar US manufacturing workers have suffered disproportionate job losses, and their plight has big implications for all of us. In October, the overall US unemployment rate was 9.6%, while total unemployment and “underemployment” (including people who would prefer to work full time but currently aren’t) hovered around 17%. ...which is a big deal for a state like Ohio that had a lot of manufacutring going on. Manufacturing employment in Ohio was dropping all through the 2000s until crashing through the floor during the recession.

...as I suspected and probably posted about somewhere earlier in this thread: Army of unemployed is now entrenched in U.S. Commentary: Structural woes in economy creating ‘permanent underclass’ But economists need hard data before changing their minds. And over the past few months, more and more of them have concluded that indeed the depth of this particular recession and its roots in the financial crisis have combined with structural changes in the economy to push the so-called “natural” unemployment rate in the U.S. permanently higher

Here is something from Andrew Sullivan : Sullivans blog post refers to this recent history of wealth distribution "....The decade from 1970–80 was the turning point in the Great American Inversion. ... By 1990, real incomes for the top 1 percent exceeded the 1920 level threefold and continued to rise thereafter, while those of the majority did not budge. Reversing the pattern of previous decades, the richer you were, the faster gains accrued. It did not matter if Democrats or Republicans were in charge of the White House or Congress. By 2007, the top 1 percent of households had almost five times the real income they had in 1920; the top 0.1 percent had around six times, and the top 0.01 percent were awash in nearly ten times the real income they had enjoyed nine decades earlier...."

Translation: "I've go mine, Jack!" Yeah, this is a good post. I thought you are a conservative? This is more thoughtful than the usual righty POV. BTW, what you describe started before globalization, with manufacturing moving from the Midwest and Northeast to the Southeast, in search of low wages. A supposedly good history of this, using one firm as an example, is Capital Moves, RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor But yeah, what we are seeing is what was predicted that would come of globalization, the convergence in wages, salaries, and standards of living. Convergence in our (USA) case meaning a reduction or lowering.

At the moment? Railroad Earth This is one of those jam bands. Saw them live at the 20th Century theatre in Cincy (Oakley neighborhood) back last Sunday night. Wow! That show was Worth. Every. Penny. I pretty much was up dancing with everyone else very shortly after the music started, and didnt sit down until intermission, and did it all over again. These guys are an outstanding live act. Thought I say jam band..which implies folky/bluegrassy roots (and yeah thats a big influence) they did have one tune that almost sounded like they were channeling the Jefferson Airplane of the 'Surrealistc Pillow' era, maybe because the leads voice is siimilar to the male vocalist (Marty Balin?) from the old Airplane. Also they did some old gospel tunes (?). Just really good energy there in that room that night. Really good mostly postiive vibe (with one exception...a guy got too carried away and had to be hustled out), with an audience, interestingly enough, having a lot of older graybeards like yers truley as well as that younger jam band set. The vibe was upbeat, positive, almost ecstacic at moments...I guess this is that contact high people talk about (one could smell the acrid fumes of the noxious weed wafting over us the dancers) I thing this band has people who follow them around...nicknamed "hobos"? Talked to one guy who was part of this scene. Tthough not a follower (around the country) of this particular band, he knew of them, heard them before out west, and told me if I havnt seen a live show I was in for a real treat. Boy was I ever!

^ This was a good story with a positive outcome all around. But I cant help but see this glass as half empty, of situations where guys like Robert Pences boss are the "winners", and the gay or lesbian person is forced out. But, I guess, better to be forced out while you ARE out vs the mind-f_ck of being forced out while still in the closet.

But I think this is the biggest propblem facing Americans today. While unemployment is bad, and the time to find a new job just horrible, it's the drop in household income, particularly one of this magnatude and duration, that will keep this country stuck in a quagmire for a decade or more. A great many of the pillars of our economic system are built of the model of ever-growing numbers of workers with an ever-growing income. Social Security, home ownership, government expenditures, retirement savings, education debts, any borrowing for big-ticket items (cars, etc), etc, etc. For the past 200 years the system has worked because those 2 inputs - ever-growing population and ever-growing incomes, has persisted most of the time. ...dont know about the past 200 years, but this was the Post WWII model. Also, things like unemployment compensation, and other income support or supplement things also assumed lower rates of unemployment and living wages, so the hit on govt expenditures wouldnt be that high....now, we are running these big deficits because the more people qualify for aid...or, more importantly...are not paying that much back into the system. Sort of a vicious cycle.

No no...this is a 5 x 7 inch frame with pic in it, one of those desktop easel frames. I also have three snapshots (two of him by himself and one of him holding me) scanned and put on legal sized paper tacked to the cube wall near my computer. ..hah..yes I think so! I did come out to some people after my partner passed, and to my boss and his boss. Off work i am 100% out. I am just beyond this "editing" thing now. Im too old for that sh_t. BTW, our local PFLAG had LtCol Feherenbach speak. Saw him yesterday. He gave a great talk and a good Q & A session followed up. Good thing to have on Coming Out Day. Here's his story: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ Repeal Spares Decorated Air Force Aviator

I have an 8 X 5 easel portrait of I and my partner on my desk, near my computer. For about a week now. No questions, amazingly enough.

I see old Aaron Renn got some quotes in there! Good to see him breaking out like this. Recall he was an occasional poster here at UO. Now, I wonder if there is an urban expat network for ex-Louisvillians. Id definetly join that.

Beyond the anectdotes, this is what the numbers say: Recession Officially Over, Incomes Keep Falling In a grim sign of the enduring nature of the economic slump, household income declined more in the two years after the recession ended than it did during the recession itself, new research has found. Between June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and June 2011, inflation-adjusted median household income fell 6.7 percent, to $49,909, according to a study by two former Census Bureau officials. During the recession — from December 2007 to June 2009 — household income fell 3.2 percent. The finding helps explain why Americans’ attitudes toward the economy, the country’s direction and its political leaders have continued to sour ...

From the Dayton Daily News, an AP article to precede some Fed stats release on jobs numbers today: A job is becoming a dim memory for many unemployed WASHINGTON — For more Americans, being out of work has become a semi-permanent condition. Nearly one-third of the unemployed — nearly 4.5 million people — have had no job for a year or more. That's a record high. Many are older workers who have found it especially hard to find jobs. And economists say their prospects won't brighten much even after the economy starts to strengthen and hiring picks up. Even if they can find a job, it will likely pay far less than their old ones did. For me this remains the real story behind this recession. The collapse in employment and the decline in standard of living due to low wages as people get (slowly)(crosses fingers) re-employed.

No and no. My post was more about that economists take on why we are stuck where we are, not about that Occupy Wall Street nonsense

^ hey, lets debate the book cover. Mayday is some sort of graphic designer or art director, so he can offer his expert opinion.

I didnt pay much attention to the cover. It looked like some generic "city" stuff behind a green field.

I ran across this book review in a magazine somewhere. Sounds like the author is talking about Urban Ohios second and third tier cities. Small Gritty & Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low Carbon World America’s once-vibrant small-to-midsize cities--Syracuse, Worcester, Akron, Flint, Rockford, and others--increasingly resemble urban wastelands. Gutted by deindustrialization, outsourcing, and middle-class flight, disproportionately devastated by metro freeway systems that laid waste to the urban fabric and displaced the working poor, and struggling with pockets of poverty reminiscent of postcolonial squalor, small industrial cities--as a class--have become invisible to a public distracted by the Wall Street (big city) versus Main Street (small town) matchup. These cities would seem to be part of America’s past, not its future. And yet, journalist and historian Catherine Tumber argues in this provocative book, America’s gritty Rust Belt cities could play a central role in a greener, low-carbon, relocalized future ...I havn't read it (apparently it has not been released yet?) but it sounds quite relevant to places like Dayton, Akron, Toledo, etc (the author teaches..or taught...at the University of Toledo). And, a negative review: Industrial Strength ....At times it sounds like in the future everyone is supposed to be a peasant farmer growing vegetables for local consumption in places like Flint. These cities are valiantly installing riverfront trails, remediating brownfields, restoring wetlands, and land-banking disused lots. But the die-hard localism Tumber champions is not new: it’s part of a deeply conservative tradition that isn’t expanding the economy, it’s shrinking it, year after year. Ironically the suburbs in areas she describes are often more economically and ethnically diverse than the cities.

I ran across this guy in an article about attendees at those "Occupy Wall Street" protests. Apparently this Nobel-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (won in 2001), was at one of the demos. He has an interesting article out on why the "recession" is persisting, and draws an analogy with the early 20th century economy, but also certain aspects of globalization and monetary flows as contributing causes. To Cure the Economy ...Globalization has been one, but only one, of the factors contributing to the second key problem – growing inequality. Shifting income from those who would spend it to those who won’t lowers aggregate demand. By the same token, soaring energy prices shifted purchasing power from the United States and Europe to oil exporters, who, recognizing the volatility of energy prices, rightly saved much of this income. The final problem contributing to weakness in global aggregate demand was emerging markets’ massive buildup of foreign-exchange reserves – partly motivated by the mismanagement of the 1997-98 East Asia crisis by the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury. Countries recognized that without reserves, they risked losing their economic sovereignty. Many said, “Never again.” But, while the buildup of reserves – currently around $7.6 trillion in emerging and developing economies – protected them, money going into reserves was money not spent... Why did he win that Nobel? From wikipedia: Stiglitz's most famous research was on screening, a technique used by one economic agent to extract otherwise private information from another. It was for this contribution to the theory of information asymmetry that he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics[3] in 2001 "for laying the foundations for the theory of markets with asymmetric information" with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence.

^ Re "Industrial Valley"...no, I have that book you linked to and its a good overview of the pre-rubber canal-era industrialization, a period often overlooked, methinks, since "Akron = Rubber" The book I'm thinking about is this one: Industrial Valley

^ I guess enough old/obsolete plant has been demolished or abandoned that what's left in the industrial facilities market is enough to match demand....or, considering how tight this market is, maybe not enough to match demand?

I was there on Saturday night, around 11 PM or maybe a bit later. Could be nice if they had a crowd. I went there to dance, and it seemed the only dancers were this bachelorette party or something. Hmph. Ended up at The Serpent...again. I remember The Dock from years and years ago. It had a deliciously rustbelt/gritty location amid side tracks, scrapyards and freight/warehouse operations, directly under that railroad bridge across the Ohio. So you sat in their patio with diesels pulling slow freights across the brige, a few stories directly overhead. Great Stuff! (esp if you are gay AND a railfan). Not sure if this is still in the same location....I though they did a lot of demo/construction down there for the stadiums. I might hit the Dock this Friday night as I will be back in Cincy, but overnight this time.

You're welcome. that chart....I don't know how much clearer it can be, this recent history.

Robert Reich has another op-ed in the NYT on growing inequality. Neat graphic comes along with the article ..and aslo compares the US to Germany: Some say we couldn’t have reversed the consequences of globalization and technological change. Yet the experiences of other nations, like Germany, suggest otherwise. Germany has grown faster than the United States for the last 15 years, and the gains have been more widely spread. While Americans’ average hourly pay has risen only 6 percent since 1985, adjusted for inflation, German workers’ pay has risen almost 30 percent. At the same time, the top 1 percent of German households now take home about 11 percent of all income — about the same as in 1970. And although in the last months Germany has been hit by the debt crisis of its neighbors, its unemployment is still below where it was when the financial crisis started in 2007. How has Germany done it? Mainly by focusing like a laser on education (German math scores continue to extend their lead over American), and by maintaining strong labor unions. THE real reason for America’s Great Regression was political ...which I disagree with. The US business community was chasing low costs. They did this by automation and moving work to...first...the low wage Southern states, then to Mexico and now to Asia. And by busting the unions. Since US politics is driven by $$$ the people with money...the buisness community (which includes the FIRE sector).....influenced policy to facilitate this. The Business of America is Business, and the "politics" reflects this....Riech says the reason was politics, but I think the politics was just the symptom or reflection of an economic imperative.