NEW YORK (Reuters) - The global economy may be deteriorating even faster than it did during the Great Depression, Paul Volcker, a top adviser to President Barack Obama, said on Friday.
Based on current trends, net job losses for February could exceed 700,000, a number that would surpass the 598,000 jobs lost in January, which had been the biggest total since 1974. That's after the U.S. economy lost 524,000 jobs in December, the 12th straight month of decline. Nearly 2.6 million jobs were lost in 2008, with 1.9 million destroyed in the last four months of 2008, the biggest job losses in any calendar year since 1945.
The worst U.S. housing slump since the Great Depression is draining home value as a record 19 million U.S. homes were foreclosed and stood empty at the end of 2008 and banks continue to seize homes faster than they can sell them. The share of empty U.S. homes that are for sale rose to 2.9 percent, the most since the year 1956.  |
| Chart 1: Texas Leading Index signals recession |
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| Chart 2: Texas job growth beginning to sink |
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| Chart 3: Texas exports drop sharply |
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| Chart 4: Public sector contract values increasing,but private sector shows declines |
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| Chart 5: Drilling activity declines following rapid fall in energy prices |
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| Chart 6: Most major Texas metros weakening |
Congress’ approval is only 31%-59%, but additional questions show a much more complicated picture. The number for Congressional Democrats is at 49%-45%, while Republicans are at 33%-59%.Meanwhile, people are increasingly confident that Obama is leading the country in the right direction. Since Obama’s election, there’s been a 23 percent rise in those saying the country is headed in the right direction. In October, only 17 percent of Americans felt that way, while 78 percent thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
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Only 30% say Obama hasn’t done enough to cooperate with Republicans in Congress — the GOP base vote, basically — while 62% say he’s doing the right amount and 6% say it’s been too much. Flipping it around, only 27% say Republicans have done enough to cooperate with Obama, with 64% saying not enough and 5% saying too much.
Congressman Joseph "Anh"Cao, a Republican, who defeated William "Bill" Jefferson is facing a recall petition because of his vote against President Obama's stimulus package. The recall has been initiated by a group of ministers.The two Congressmen in the U.S. House that represent Collin County residents, Sam Johnson (R) and Ralph Hall (R) and both Texas’ Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) and John Cornyn (R) voted against the stimulus bill.
Cao had originally announced his intention to vote for the stimulus package, but House Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor whipped him and other moderates into a solid 'No' vote. Without Cao's 'No' vote, Cantor could not have boasted about the GOP being "back in the saddle" by touting the GOP's big ZERO votes for the stimulus. The GOP's branding strategy is literally dependent on being the party of NO and, thanks to Cantor whipping Republicans into a unanimous NO vote, Cao may not even make it to 2010.
Papers have been filed with the Office of the Louisiana Secretary of State which started the process requiring sufficient signatures to force a recall election for the office held by Representative Cao.
A recent Gallup report on its survey of political party affiliation by voters at the state level shows only five states now have a statistically significant majority of voters who identify themselves as Republicans.
Gov. Rick Perry today accepted stimulus dollars after a weeks long aggressive campaign opposing the needed funds. Gov. Rick Perry, who co-wrote an op-ed piece with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford about all the things that were wrong with the bill, informed the White House that he'll accept the money. As you know, President Barack Obama will today sign into law H.R.1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the federal economic stimulus bill. The stimulus bill contains nearly $790 billion in tax cuts and key federal investments, including billions of dollars for infrastructure funding and incentives for job creation in Texas.Rep. Dunnam copied Speaker of the Texas House Joe Straus and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to the letter as well. It is time to act and create and preserve Texas jobs and insulate our economy from further deterioration.
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I respectfully request that you immediately take the appropriate action under the Act to certify both that Texas will request and use the funds provided for by the Act and that the funds will be used to create jobs and promote economic growth. Because of ongoing deadlines, we do not need to delay acceptance, as there is a great deal of work necessary. If you would prefer to have the Legislature make the acceptance of the funds by concurrent resolution, which is also provided for in the Act, I stand ready to assist in that option. And if this is the case, I would request you designate the Legislature's consideration of the Act an emergency item for this legislative session so we can move the resolution more rapidly through the process.
"Senate Republicans on Tuesday narrowly defeated an effort to impose budget rules that would make it harder to increase spending or cut taxes, a move that critics said that showed Republicans were posturing in their calls for greater fiscal restraint. ... Republicans said the push to add the rules to the budget was a back-door effort to make it harder to extend President Bush's tax cuts. 'The practical effect of this is to raise taxes,' said Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire and chairman of the Budget Committee."And, as tax cuts along side hundreds of billions of dollars of war spending in Iraq pushed the nation ever deeper into long term deficits, our Republican representatives never spoke a word of concern about deficit spending.
When Pres. George Bush "tax cut" the nation from an annual budget surplus of $300 billion, as Pres. Clinton left office, to an annual budget deficit of $1 trillion, as Pres. Bush left office, our Republican representatives in Washington fully supported and voted for Pres. Bush's deficit spending policies and legislation without complaint. Now our Republican representatives in Washington fuss about deficit spending? This smacks more of political expediency and posturing than principled government philosophy that we can believe in.Of particular concern to Gov. Perry is the federal funding for the state's unemployment insurance because it is contingent on the state relaxing its narrow unemployment benefit limits so that more jobless people can qualify.A memo to the Texas House Democratic Caucus highlights that Governor Perry is intent on sticking to the same failed tax cutting and deficit spending economic strategies of President Bush and our Republican representatives in Washington:
The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas State Rep. Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, who heads the state House’s Select Committee on Federal Economic Stabilization Funding, said it’s hard to understand why Governor Perry is reluctant to use stimulus money.
Rick Perry and the Unemployment Fund
Upon hearing the news that the Comptroller was predicting a $9.1 billion drop in [state] revenue, Governor Perry's reaction was to increase the shortfall by calling for more tax cuts. This is right in line with what he has done with the State's Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.
A year ago, the Unemployment Fund had a surplus of $90 million. In a shortsighted and politically expedient move, Governor Perry halted collection of the replenishment tax. Nearly 12 months later, Governor Perry reinstated the replenishment tax. Now the Unemployment Fund faces a $447 million deficit.
“The governor every year comes in and wants half a billion dollars for the (state) enterprise fund to create jobs and stimulate economic growth and he’s going to say we don’t want $20 billion?” Dunnam said. “I find it difficult to understand.”Governor Perry must certify that Texas will use the money to create jobs and promote economic growth in order for Texas to share of the economic stimulus money. If Perry declines to do so, however, the Legislature can accept the money on the state’s behalf by passing a concurrent resolution.
Dear fellow Democrat,
I wanted to share with you this latest press release from your Texas Democratic Party.
In these tough economic times, Texans are trying to hold onto their jobs while coping with the skyrocketing cost of insurance, health care and college tuition.Now that President Obama has signed the economic recovery plan into law, Texas stands to receive much-needed assistance - unless Governor Rick Perry rejects these funds for the sake of his own partisan agenda.
Call Governor Rick Perry's office and demand that he fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to him by Texans and get to work on solving our state's problems rather than rejecting funds that will improve our infrastructure, create jobs and allow more parents the opportunity to send their kids to college.
Governor Perry's Austin Office: (800) 843-5789
PERRY'S OBSTRUCTIONIST ANTICS
COULD COST TEXAS BILLIONS
Threats to Reject Stimulus Funds Ring Partisan
(Austin, TX) - Texans have already seen Republican U.S. Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican Congressman Pete Sessions play politics instead of working to develop a bipartisan plan to rescue our economy. Now that the economic recovery plan has been signed into law by the President, Governor Rick Perry continues to put Texans in the crossfire of his partisanship by threatening to reject all or part of the benefits Texans would see from our federal tax dollars that would be used here under the plan.
"Governor Perry's obstructionist antics demonstrate he is more concerned with political recovery for the Republican Party than economic recovery for Texas," said Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie. "If the Governor's political agenda allows our tax dollars to be shipped off to other states, 'Ripoff Rick' will cost Texans an important investment in job creation, schools, health care and transportation."
"Years of failed Republican economic policy got us into this mess, and now Rick Perry is threatening to reject real solutions to cleaning up the mess he himself helped create. That's not leadership - that's reckless partisanship," continued Richie.
Gov. Perry's partisan antics are at odds with the new direction our country is taking - the recovery plan is being welcomed by an overwhelming majority of our nation's governors - both Democrats and Republicans. If Gov. Perry rejects Texas' share of the federal aid, our state could lose as much as $27 billion to invest in infrastructure - funds that could create or save an estimated 269,000 jobs.
"Apparently, Rick Perry would rather Texans sit in traffic on his toll roads than have the funding to build new roads," added Richie. "He should be ashamed of his threats to ship hard-working Texans' tax dollars off to other states - but perhaps he's hoping the 39% of voters who supported his reelection won't mind becoming casualties of his obstructionism."
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Your friend and fellow Democrat,
Boyd L. Richie
| Updated Tuesday February 17, 2009 at 3:20 PM This afternoon, the White House released a statement by President Obama announcing the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan. Noting that the “situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan demands urgent attention and swift action,” Obama said that he “approved a request from Secretary Gates to deploy a Marine Expeditionary Brigade later this spring and an Army Stryker Brigade and the enabling forces necessary to support them later this summer.” |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus said on Wednesday that negotiations with some members of the Taliban could provide a way to reduce violence in sections of Afghanistan gripped by an intensifying insurgency.
Pres. Obama's economic stimulus bill gained final approval from Congress Friday after a final round of tough debate. White House Chair, Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer discusses the bill's potential impact on the economy on the PBS News Hour, "We know that the private sector is the engine of growth, and that's where we expect to see the vast majority of the jobs."
The White House has released a photo essay about the economic stimulus package showing Obama reaching out to Republicans during stimulus negotiations. In this photo taken on Jan. 27, 2009 House Republicans surround the President after his meeting with the G.O.P caucus. Many of them were seeking his autograph. Zero House Republican voted for the bill.This op-ed by Karl Frisch originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.
It's probably a good thing that cable news generally doesn't draw much of an audience from the 18- to 24-year-old demographic. Otherwise, history professors across the nation could very well be witnessing the undoing of their work to educate students about the dire economic climate the United States faced for much of the 1930s.
Those who have been watching cable news lately have undoubtedly noticed the litany of conservative media figures attempting to rewrite history by denigrating the tremendous successes of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal policies in what amounts to an orchestrated effort to derail the economic recovery plans of President Obama.
Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume recently called Roosevelt's policies "a jihad against private enterprise," just after claiming that "everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now, that the New Deal failed." That may be accurate if by "both sides of the spectrum" Hume is referring to the right and far-right over at Fox News.
Hume's own jihad against the facts, however, represents only a small portion of the historical misrepresentations passed off as reasoned debate about the New Deal.
Witness the day-break machinations of the crew over at MSNBC's Morning Joe. During a recent broadcast, Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski kicked off a string of attacks against the president's recovery plan, using the New Deal as their dubious weapon du jour. Mika said of Obama's plan, "I think we're going to have the same unemployment in three or four years, just like the New Deal." That just isn't true -- unemployment fell every year from 1933 through 1937.
Her buddy Joe didn't fare much better, cherry-picking data in telling viewers that unemployment was at "20 percent" in 1938, ignoring the downward trend in unemployment that occurred under the New Deal.
Joe isn't alone -- conservative columnists George Will and Mona Charen have played the same numbers game to falsely claim the New Deal failed to reduce unemployment, a contention disputed by historians and economists.
Don't take my word for it -- data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the unemployment rate in 1933 clocking in at 24.9 percent and falling each year thereafter (to 14.3 percent in 1937) until 1938 when it rose to 19 percent. Why the increase from 1937 to 1938? As Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has noted, it was a reversal of these very same New Deal policies, which had reduced unemployment, that actually led to recession and drove the numbers back up. It's worth noting, by the way, that these numbers do not include those in federal work-relief programs (at the time, BLS counted those employed by the New Deal's emergency work programs as unemployed). So, the unemployment numbers were actually lower than reported in these years.
The strengthening of the social safety net during the 1930s stimulated the economy while also providing assistance to those waiting to feel the economic recovery for themselves. That's perhaps why Fox News' Bill O'Reilly saw fit to lambast portions of the president's plan aimed at assisting those most in need during these difficult times, claiming last week on his television show that increased funding for programs like food stamps has "nothing to do with stimulating the economy." Though his ego will never let him admit it, O'Reilly is dead wrong.
Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf and former McCain campaign economic adviser Mark Zandi have both said that extending food stamps does, in fact, stimulate the economy. Zandi stated last year that "extending food stamps [is] the most effective [way] to prime the economy's pump," while Elmendorf noted in congressional testimony just last week that "[t]ransfers to persons (for example, unemployment insurance and nutrition assistance) would also have a significant impact on GDP."
Faced with the prospect that history will again demonstrate that government spending and investment are important tools in confronting an economic crisis, it is now clear that conservatives are engaged in a misinformation campaign to mislead the public.
So, when radio host Rush Limbaugh, whom former President Ronald Reagan reportedly called the "Number one voice for conservatism" and House Republicans named an honorary member of Congress in 1994, recently said of Obama, "I hope he fails," it makes one wonder if he might not be speaking for all of his pals on the right.
If Limbaugh and conservatives truly want the president to "fail," rewriting the history of the New Deal may very well be the first salvo in a long war to defeat Obama's agenda for America.
Karl Frisch is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog, research, and information center based in Washington, D.C.Obama Makes VAN's Database 10 Times Larger
Credit: Technology Review / Thursday, December 18, 2008.
One side effect of Barack Obama's Webcentric presidential campaign is that it helped turn the Democratic National Committee's voter database--information on the political leanings and interests of millions of U.S. citizens--into a far more potent political weapon. In the final two months before Election Day, 223 million new pieces of data on voters accrued to the database, and the DNC now holds 10 times as much data on U.S. voters as at the end of the 2004 campaign, according to Voter Activation Network (VAN), a company based in Somerville, MA, that builds front-end software for the database.
Such information could prove vital for future elections in that it shows where to allocate resources most effectively--particularly when it comes to voters who are wavering between parties--and what kinds of messages will appeal to specific voters. While some of 223 million pieces of data added in the final stretch of the campaign are not particularly useful (it includes canvassers' or callers' notations that a voter "refused to talk" or "wasn't home"), overall, it's a gold mine, says Mark Sullivan, co-founder of VAN.
"The data collection in 2008 was a quantum leap from where we were in 2004," Sullivan says. "It also means that we start the 2010 cycle with vastly more knowledge about who voters are, and how we can best communicate with them, rather than feeling like we have to start all over again." This information could perhaps even help Obama govern if the DNC decides to ask average Americans to contact members of Congress about specific policy efforts related to, say, energy, health care, or the Iraq War.
The VAN database--Sullivan would not describe its exact size, but there are about 170 million registered voters in the United States--can be used by all Democratic candidates in national or state elections. In the case of primary campaigns, new data collected by a Democratic combatant is kept by the candidate and added to the national database after a winner emerges.
While most campaigns add something to the database, the biggest contributor this year was, of course, the Obama campaign. For example, tens of thousands of times, volunteers logged in to Obama's social-networking site, my.barackobama.com (MyBO), and downloaded small batches of voter names and phone numbers, dialed them up, and followed various scripts. The aim was to learn their political and issue leanings, encourage people to vote for Obama and to ask supporters to make sure they go to the polls. These responses were recorded by the volunteers using a Web interface, adding to the database instantly.
In the final four days of the campaign alone, four million such calls were made through MyBO, says Jascha Franklin-Hodge, cofounder and CTO of Blue State Digital, which built MyBO as well as the interface to the VAN voter list. "This was just using our tools in that short window of time--never mind what the actual field organization was doing on the ground," he says. MyBO was hardly the only source: the DNC, local campaign offices, traditional phone banks, and canvassers also added data in various ways.
Beyond the data gathered on voters, the Democrats and Obama also have access to a network of willing volunteers who can be used to recontact voters. "They've got a whole volunteer structure that gathered all this information that can be put to used in the 2010 midterms, and can hopefully be available for a reelection [of Obama]," Franklin-Hodge says. "There is a tremendous amount of data mining and analysis that goes on within the party and political organization that allows a better understanding of how people vote and how they make decisions."
This approach--"micro targeting" voters based on their feelings toward specific issues--was once the domain of the Republican National Committee. But even leading Republican figures now acknowledge that the days of GOP voter-data dominance have ended. "For decades, the RNC has had a significant advantage in their voter file, and in their ability to identify and turn out voters," says Mike Connell, founder of New Media Communications, an Ohio-based Republican new-media firm. "With the Obama campaign and the efforts over the last couple of years, [the Democrats] have made significant strides and have caught up."
A key reason for the DNC's data advance was a decision by DNC chairman Howard Dean to improve data sharing among Democratic organizations at the state level. "Four years ago, Howard Dean 'got it,'" Connell says. "Not a lot of people give him credit, but he made a transformation."
Since then, the DNC and VAN have steadily improved the database interfaces. This year, the newest tool in the arsenal was a Google Maps application developed by VAN that makes it far easier to chop up lists of voters in specific precincts for canvassers to personally visit. In the new application, called "turf-cutter," voters' homes are displayed as icons on a map. A few clicks of a mouse allow organizers to draw boundaries around clusters of voters' homes and print out the resulting list for volunteers.
In the past two months, Sullivan says, activists from all Democratic campaigns have used this application 948,000 times, saving thousands of hours of man power, compared to manually figuring out how best to chop up a given district and dispatch volunteers in the most efficient manner. "Probably, on average, for each precinct, they would work with maps and highlighters," says Sullivan. "I hear all the time, 'That was a 45-minute job,' and now they go in here and it takes a minute or two. It was the biggest bottleneck."
| Obama warns lawmakers that 'catastrophe' looms By David Lightma McClatchy Newspapers President Barack Obama warned lawmakers Thursday that the economic crisis could become a "catastrophe" unless they stop bickering and act, while the Senate's Democratic leader predicted that the president's economic-stimulus package will pass. » read more |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. job losses accelerated in January as 598,000 were slashed, the most in 34 years, and the unemployment rate soared to a 16-year high [of 7.6 percent.] moreBoth Texas’ senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (R) and John Cornyn (R) have also voiced their staunch opposition to Obama's $819 billion stimulus plan. “I read the bill in vain for any real stimulus in the economy,” Cornyn told the Dallas Morning News. Senator Hutchison told the Plano Chamber of Commerce that she could not support President Barack Obama's proposed $825 billion non-stimulus package at a Jan. 23rd luncheon meeting. Both Texas’ senators are positioned to filibuster Obama's economic stimulus package.
Even as both Texas' Senators oppose Obama's stimulus spending in favor of the usual G.O.P tax cuts, Obama's legislation could help cushion Texas against expected job losses over the next two years. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, Bernard L. Weinstein, director of the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas said, "It appears the 286,000 jobs might just offset the anticipated losses over the next two years."
Also in contrast to Senators Hutchison's and Cornyn's opposition to Obama's infrastructure spending approach to stimulating the economy, the The Texas Department of Transportation is lobbying for the stimulus spending legislation and for Texas' share of the infrastructure spending provided in the bill to repair Texas' roads and aging bridges.
Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman explains stimulus spending vs. tax cuts on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Video here - The meat of the discussion starts just after time mark 4:00. mark
