Jon Stewart hyperventalates wondering why Democrats can't get anything done despite having a larger majority than Republicans have had since 1923, despite losing Sen. Ted Kennedy's seat tonight.
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I would like to know how many countries have had presidents or other top leaders elected on a mandate of "change" post-Obama.
El Mercurio (en español): Piñera beats Frei and the center-right wins its first election in 52 years
L.A. Times (in English): Billionaire Pinera wins Chile runoff
I'm still traveling, but for most Americans this is the first week back from work following the Christmas-to-New Year's holiday. Accordingly, Slate reports on a new Conference Board survey showing that only 45% of Americans are satisfied with their jobs (h/t Micky).
From the survey, published in TIME:
When the Conference Board's first survey was conducted in 1987, most workers — 61% — said they were happy in their jobs. The survey of 5,000 households was conducted for the Conference Board by TNS, a global market research company.
One clue that may explain workers' growing dissatisfaction: Only 51% now find their jobs interesting — another low in the survey's 22 years. In 1987, nearly 70% said they were interested in their work.
Workers who find their jobs interesting are more likely to be innovative and to take the calculated risks and the initiative that drive productivity and contribute to economic growth, Barrington says.
"What's really disturbing about growing job dissatisfaction is the way it can play into the competitive nature of the U.S. work force down the road and on the growth of the U.S. economy — all in a negative way," says Lynn Franco, another author of the report and director of the Conference Board's Consumer Research Center.
Conference Board officials and outside economists suggested that weak wage growth helps explain why workers' unhappiness has been rising for more than 20 years. After growing in the 1980s and 1990s, average household incomes adjusted for inflation have been shrinking since 2000.
Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman is calling this last decade "The Big Zero." I tend to agree with him (and thus excerpt at length):
[F]rom an economic point of view, I’d suggest that we call the decade past the Big Zero. It was a decade in which nothing good happened, and none of the optimistic things we were supposed to believe turned out to be true.
It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged “Bush boom,” in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade’s middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.
Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like “Dow 36,000” predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.
So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.
[...]
What was truly impressive about the decade past, however, was our unwillingness, as a nation, to learn from our mistakes.
Even as the dot-com bubble deflated, credulous bankers and investors began inflating a new bubble in housing. Even after famous, admired companies like Enron and WorldCom were revealed to have been Potemkin corporations with facades built out of creative accounting, analysts and investors believed banks’ claims about their own financial strength and bought into the hype about investments they didn’t understand. Even after triggering a global economic collapse, and having to be rescued at taxpayers’ expense, bankers wasted no time going right back to the culture of giant bonuses and excessive leverage.
Then there are the politicians. Even now, it’s hard to get Democrats, President Obama included, to deliver a full-throated critique of the practices that got us into the mess we’re in. And as for the Republicans: now that their policies of tax cuts and deregulation have led us into an economic quagmire, their prescription for recovery is — tax cuts and deregulation.
The Sacramento Bee reports on California state agencies that inflated the number of jobs they created or preserved through use of American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (a.k.a., stimulus) funds. But I think the more illuminating part may be how the money was distributed in the first place. Consider these numbers:
In October, Caltrans told the federal government that it created or preserved 1,590 jobs with $26.7 million the department received earlier this year under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
[...]
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation claimed that it saved 18,229 jobs with $1.08 billion in stimulus money, even though the department had issued layoff notices for just 6,962 corrections employees.
The California State University system said it saved 26,156 jobs – half its entire work force – with $268.5 million in federal stimulus money.
via OpenLeft, the NYT reports on a Congressional Research Service Report that shows that the much-maligned ACORN, a stalwart of community organizing and voter registration, has broken no laws in the last five years, despite facing the scrutiny of "46 inquiries by federal, state, and local agencies, including the FBI and the Treasury Department, and five by Congress as of October 2009."
This witch hunt is purely political.
From yesterday's LAT, a piece on the efforts of California's food banks to make fresh fruits and vegetables a key component of food assistance:
"Ten years ago, food banks were much more passive," said Michael Flood, who runs the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, one of the largest food banks in the country. They took what they could get -- packaged food that might have been supermarket rejects or new products that failed.
Today, 20% of the L.A. bank's food is produce -- by far the largest single category, Flood said.
Farmers have long donated food to their local food banks or have allowed people to glean leftovers from their fields. But in 2005, the California Assn. of Food Banks got involved, hiring one solicitor who procured 10 million pounds of food. In 2008, three solicitors got 64 million pounds of produce. A fourth solicitor begins work in January.
[Solicitor Steve] Sharp, whose family has long farmed in the Imperial Valley, is a deal maker in a Dodge pickup and a straw cowboy hat, seeking farmers in the Imperial and Coachella valleys who are willing to harvest or pack crops they can't otherwise sell. They get paid just enough to get the cabbage or garlic or melons into bins.
"Two weeks ago I had a grower call me and say he had a truckload of cantaloupes and one of honeydew. So I have to go look at it and make sure the quality is there," Sharp said. "They were just real small, and nobody wanted it. There was no market for that size of melon."
He hopes to get [grower Rudy] Schaffner's off-size corn come spring. Schaffner has agreed to work on adapting his conveyor belt system to handle what Sharp needs. They think of it as finding a solution "farmer style."
"The cool thing is, we've got a problem and we're taking care of it directly," Schaffner said one sunny December afternoon in his kitchen, a large poinsettia on the table.
Farmers often have crops that don't meet customers' size or appearance requirements. Or they may have a bumper crop they can't afford to store. A storm in the Northeast can back up produce orders across the country, leaving a farmer with a truckload of unsold food.
"You cut their losses. You are fixing a problem they may have," Sharp said.
