Chart of the day: Early retirement fades away

From Gallup, the evidence:

Headlines of the day: Of corporations and cash

From The Atlantic Wire:

How the Maker of TurboTax Fought to Keep Your Taxes Complicated

From Common Dreams:

Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures

A troubling pattern emerges as private funds seek to profit from beleaguered cities

From ANSAmed:

Greece: youth unemployment reaches a grim record of 64.2%

From World Socialist Web Site:

IMF demands further austerity in Greece

From Raw Story:

Mao Zedong’s grand-daughter worth more than $815 million according to China’s ‘New Fortune’ magazine

Headlines of the day: It’s a simple matter of class

First, from Bloomberg, a story by a fellow doing quite well, thank you very much:

Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat

And from Business Insider, news about others not doing as well:

The Worst Unemployment Crisis In Modern History Is Unfolding Right Now

And from the London Telegraph, a story about a change of heart:

 

German euro founder calls for ‘catastrophic’ currency to be broken up

Oskar Lafontaine, the German finance minister who launched the euro, has called for a break-up of the single currency to let southern Europe recover, warning that the current course is “leading to disaster”.

And back home to California, where the fruits of a clever neoliberal property tax scheme are continuing to bear fruit for the one percenters, reported by the Los Angeles Times:

Prop. 13 loophole gives edge to big players

Change of ownership, key to reassessment, is cut-and-dried for homeowners but not businesses. It means a loss of tens of millions of dollars a year in tax revenue.

Chart of the day: What economic recovery?

The latest jobless numbers from Eurostat for both the full 27-member European Union [black line] and the 17-member common currency [euro] zone [blue]:

Quote of the day: Gee, ya think so?

From UC Berkeley’s Robert Reich:

Four years into a so-called recovery and we’re still below recession levels in every important respect except the stock market. A measly 88,000 jobs were created in March, and total employment remains some 3 million below its pre-recession level. Labor-force participation is its lowest since 1979.

Businesses won’t hire and expand unless they have more customers, but most Americans can’t spend more. Last Friday’s retail sales report showed sales down .4 percent in March. Consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest level in nine months.

The underlying problem is the vast middle class is running out of money. They can’t borrow more — and shouldn’t, given what happened after the last borrowing binge.

Real annual median household income keeps falling. It’s down to $45,018, from $51,144 in 2010. All the gains from the recovery continue to go to the top.

Headlines of the day: Economics and illnesses

We open with Europe with this from the Irish Times:

IMF trims global growth forecast and warns of bumpy recovery

Warns Europe not to relax efforts to tackle debt crisis

From Spiegel:

Capital Study: Chinese Investment in Europe Hits Record High

From El País:

IMF sees Spain’s jobless rate climbing to 27 percent this year

Closer to home, there’s this From ProPublica:

FDA Let Drugs Approved on Fraudulent Research Stay on the Market

And finally this from the Sacramento Bee:

Nevada buses hundreds of mentally ill patients to cities around country

Headlines of the day: More patterns that connect

First, atop a tale of an ex-bureaucrat’s lament in the London Telegraph:

Financial crisis caused by too many bankers taking cocaine, says former drugs tsar

David Nutt, the former Government drugs tsar sacked after claiming that horse riding was as safe as taking ecstasy, has said that the banking crisis was caused by too many workers taking cocaine

From World Socialist Web Site:

Sharp decline in employer-sponsored health coverage in US

From Ekathemerini:

Study finds spike in heart attacks since start of Greek debt crisis

From The Guardian:

Portugal’s fed-up youth pack and go as their nation slides into reverse

Job prospects are grim, health and education are in crisis and, with more austerity to come, emigration is increasingly the only solution

From MercoPress:

Madrid’s city council to vote naming a street after Margaret Thatcher

Chart of the day: Bad and getting lots worse

From John Williams’ Shadow Government Statistics, a look at the real unemployment number, which includes both those who’ve given up looking for work and those forced to work for reduced hours and pay:

Headlines of the day: Another day, more patterns

From Forbes:

Unemployment Is Really 14.3%–Not 7.6%

From the Los Angeles Times:

Budget cuts force California courts to delay trials, ax services

The courts have lost about 65% of their state general fund support in the last five years, a new study says, and the effect of the cuts is growing

From Deutsche Welle:

Risk of social unrest rises in EU

From the London Telegraph:

Helmut Kohl: I acted like a dictator to bring in the euro

Helmut Kohl, Germany’s former chancellor, has admitted that he acted like a “dictator” to bring in the single currency to the country, otherwise he “would have lost” had he held a referendum

Chart of the day: What European recovery?

From Eurostat, the latest grim unemployment numbers for both the 27-member European Union and the smaller 17-nation common currency [euro] zone, where official unemployment has hit a new high of 12 percent. Click on the image to enlarge:

Chart of the day: Economy or environment?

From Gallup, the latest annual poll results focusing on a question premised on a false dichotomy:

Headlines of the day: Looking for patterns?

From the London Telegraph:

Europe’s leaders paralysed as EMU jobless rate hits record high

Eurozone unemployment reached a record 12pc in February and looks certain to ratchet higher as fiscal cuts deepen and manufacturing continues to struggle, raising the spectre of social explosion across southern Europe

From the London Daily Mail:

U.S. sees highest poverty spike since the 1960s, leaving 50 million Americans poor as government cuts billions in spending… so does that mean there’s no way out?

From The Independent:

Pregnant women ‘more likely to miscarry as result of cuts to Government spending’

From The Guardian:

Extreme poverty could be wiped out by 2030, World Bank estimates show

World Bank head speaks of ‘auspicious moment in history’ amid criticism rhetoric is not being matched with detailed policies

From the Irish Independent:

IMF wants faster home repossessions

From Ekathemerini:

Golden Dawn wants death penalty for violent migrants

From Keep Talking Greece:

German policemen at Greek airports to check travellers bound to Germany

Ethos: A documentary on money and power

Hosted by actor Woody Harrelson and written and directed by Pete Gain, Ethos is a 2011 documentary that explores the relationship between banking, power, politics, personal freedom, and environmental destruction. Among those featured are Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Chalmers Johnson.

It’s well worth 68 minutes of your time.

Frankie the First: The austerian pope

Pay close attention to this Oscar Leon report from The Real News Network on Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Argentinian Cardinal transformed into Pope Francis I — signifying his homage to St. Francis of Assisi, that most austere-living of saints.

Indeed, watch the headlines displayed in the video, and their invocation of papal austerity as sign of the new pope’s conspicuous frugality.

Watching the video, we had a perverse thought.

Frankie’s no liberation theologian, out to redistribute wealth. No, he’s here to preach the religious benefits accruing from the embrace of austerity. The poor accrue virtue by acceptance of their status, nay, by embracing their status.

Looking back at the recent history of the Catholic church, we see an easy acceptance of fascism in preference to communism, the provision of escape lines for Nazi war criminals in the wake of Nazi defeat, and the ongoing cooperation and funding of radical right underground groups during the Soviet era.

Who better to sell the austerian message to the peoples of, say, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, that a Latin American pope who names himself after a hippie saint?

And he’s proven himself quite accommodating to oligarchical imposers of austerian measures, and now runs a city state with its own bank-with-a-troubled history, laundering both mafia and spook money.

Anyway, just a thought.

Pope Francis accused by family and friends of tortured priests

A full transcript of the segment is posted here.

UPDATE: Donning our Madison Avenue thinking caps, we came up with a slogan for the Vatican to use to sell folks on latter-day indentured servitude:

Poverty: Not just a necessity,
It’s a divine virtue!

Headlines of the day: The two Europes

First, the good news from Deutsche Welle:

Carmaker Porsche looks back on record year

And then the bad news, from Deutsche Presse-Agentur:

Greece to sack 5,000 state workers to appease lenders – reports

Finally, from Keep Talking Greece:

Juncker warns of “Social Rebellion in Europe” if Growth, Jobs not Addressed

Headlines of the day: Signs of the times

From UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian:

Berkeley Student Cooperative pushes for cuts to employee benefits

From Bloomberg:

Rising Student-Loan Delinquencies Hurt Young Homebuyers

And to close on a positive note, from Science 2.o:

Pessimists Live Longer And Healthier

Quote of the day: Seeing the future in urban form

From a stunning and very perceptive 1999 report by Robert Fishman for Fannie Mae Housing Facts & Findings on the trends shaping of American cities, past and future.

The number one trend he saw for the first half of the 21st Century is proving right on the money:

The past 30 years have seen increasing concentrations of income and wealth at the top of the income scale, relative stagnation in the middle, and worsening poverty at the bottom. Our respondents expect this trend to continue in the next 50 years, with possible dire consequences for American cities and regions. For growing disparities in income and wealth lead inevitably to an increasingly divided metropolis. If, as our respondents believe, these growing disparities of wealth will become the most important single influence on the American metropolis in the next 50 years, some of the negative consequences are detailed in the rest of the top 10 list: a perpetual “underclass” in central cities and inner-ring suburbs and the deterioration of the “first-ring” post-1945 suburb, as the struggling portions of the middle and working classes find themselves trapped in deteriorating older suburbs. On the wealthier side of the great metropolitan divide, we are likely to see the winners in our “winner-take-all society” isolate themselves in gated communities or other exclusive preserves at the edge of the region.

Other likely trends include a home-building industry increasingly focused on high-end “trophy houses” or “tract mansions;” a similar concentration in retailing on upscale malls; office parks located near the enclaves where the top executives live-locations that often leave the bulk of the employees with long, difficult commutes; and increasing disparities between the quality of the school systems and other services in elite suburbs versus less-favored suburbs and inner cities. We are also likely to see new building focused not just on the outer edge of a region but in certain “quadrants” favored by the affluent: for example, in Washington, DC, the Northwest; in Minneapolis-St. Paul, the Southwest; in Atlanta and Chicago, the North. For the affluent who choose to live in gentrified neighborhoods in central cities, the rule of isolation will also obtain, as the wealthy use the techniques of privatization, ranging from private schools to special tax-and-service districts, to insulate themselves from the urban crisis around them.

80 years ago today: The launch of the New Deal

A report from The Real News Network featuring John Weeks, professor emeritus at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, and Jennifer Taub, associate professor of law at Vermont Law School.

A full transcript is posted here.

Headlines of the day: Austerity in action

Both at home [from the New York Times]:

Recovery in U.S. Is Lifting Profits, but Not Adding Jobs

And abroad [also from the New York Times]:

Greece, Creditors to Discuss Public Sector Layoffs

A must-see video: Wealth Inequality in America

From vlogger politizane, a stunning visualization of wealth inequality based on research by researchers Michael I. Norton [Harvard] and Dan Ariely [Duke]  reported in “Building a Better America—One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” published in Perspectives on Psychological Science [PDF].

For more on wealth inequality, see here.