December 2008 archive

Auto Executives Drive To Washington For Money

Get Handed Their Hats Instead    

Jobless Rate Rises to 6.7% as 533,000 Jobs Are Lost

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Published: December 5, 2008

With the economy deteriorating rapidly, the nation’s employers shed 533,000 jobs in November, the 11th consecutive monthly decline, the government reported Friday morning, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.7 percent.

The decline, the largest since December 1974, was fresh evidence that the economic contraction accelerated in November, promising to make the current recession, already 12 months old, the longest since the Great Depression. The previous record was 16 months, in the severe recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s.

“We have recorded the largest decline in consumer confidence in our history,” said Richard T. Curtin, director of the Reuters/University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, which started its polling in the 1950s.

Auto Executives Face a Hard Sell on Capitol Hill



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and BILL VLASIC

Published: December 4, 2008

WASHINGTON – The chief executives of America’s foundering automobile manufacturers returned to Capitol Hill on Thursday and found themselves confronting years of pent-up anger, the harsh politics of a recession and the realization that even their strongest supporters might not be able to muster the votes to save them.

Fiscal hawks are worried that taxpayers will lose billions. Pro-labor lawmakers are furious that union workers are being blamed for causing the automakers’ problems, even as tens of thousands face layoffs. Environmentalists like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are fed up after years of battles over fuel-efficiency rules. And Congress, as a whole, is suffering from acute bailout fatigue.

Many Children Lack Stability Long After Storm



By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: December 4, 2008

BATON ROUGE, La. – Last January, at the age of 15, Jermaine Howard stopped going to school. Attendance seemed pointless: Jermaine, living with his father and brother in the evacuee trailer park known as Renaissance Village since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, had not managed to earn a single credit in more than two years.

Not that anyone took much notice. After Jermaine flunked out of seventh grade, the East Baton Rouge School District allowed him to skip eighth grade altogether and begin high school. After three semesters of erratic attendance, he left Baton Rouge in early spring of this year and moved in with another family in a suburb of New Orleans, where he found a job at a Dairy Queen.

USA

Retailers Report a Crisis in All Aisles

November Sales Slump as Shoppers Stow Credit Cards

By Ylan Q. Mui

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, December 5, 2008; Page A01

Retailers posted the worst November sales in more than 30 years yesterday, as holiday shopping not only failed to lift the economy but showed that the financial crisis is further distressing everyday consumers.

About 30 major companies — including Macy’s, Abercrombie & Fitch and Target — posted sales declines at established stores. Overall, retail sales in November fell 2.7 percent compared with the same month last year, marking the second consecutive negative month, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group.

And American consumers, whose spending accounts for the bulk of the economy and who have powered the nation out of previous recessions, are turning away from their most potent tool: credit cards.

also in tillamook county….

Napper said the tide had receded around Proposal Rock on Saturday when the couple began to walk to it. He planned to propose and give her the ring he carried in his pocket.

one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.c…

So, in 1995, just out of college, when I was still an actor, I was cast in a production of a play called Spiele ’36 about the two Jewish runners kicked off the 1936 United States Olympic team by American Bund members at the behest of Adolph Hitler (he, Hitler, didn’t want Aryan athletes to be seen bested by those damn Hebrews).

The Jewish runners were replaced at the last minute by African American runners, specifically Jessie Owens, which is how he, Owens, won his fourth gold medal.

But that’s all background to this tale.

The play was a co-production between George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, and in the George Mason production one of the Caucasian members of the team was played by an actor who got the unfortunate but utterly appropriate nickname “Poor Dumb Joey”.

Joey was a tad pathetic, not overly bright, but was hopelessly looking, so I’m sure he’s done fine in life.

But Joey, too, is basically irrelevant to this saga.

The guy who gets the title of this diary was the actor who took Joey’s role in the Chicago production. His name was Tom and he got automatically saddled with “Poor Dumb Tommy”… well… because that’s sort of thing just happens in the theater. Wrong place, wrong time.