Real estate agent Steve Thoele is “curious” about the continuing decline in housing prices:

“You do kind of wonder where the bottom is,” said Mr. Thoele. “Sellers know in the back of their mind that their home is worth less than at the peak, but they’re still a little surprised when you tell them their $400,000 house is now worth $300,000.”

I kind of wonder, too.  Uh-huh.  If only there were data on home prices spanning back, say, a hundred years or so, that might indicate a somewhat stable historical mean house price.  Oh, wait a minizzle…what’s this?

This graph of the Case-Shiller index over the past hunnert-twenty years, or so, (last updated to 2010) shows that homes began outrageously over-shooting their historical value starting in about 1996-97.  The plot thickens.  It was a dark and stormy night.  A shot rang out!  Where could that housing bottom (and those weapons of mass destruction) possibly be?

The self-propelling logic of war, a “news analysis” courtesy of the New York Times:

Syria … could pose a thorny dilemma for the administration…. Having intervened in Libya to prevent a wholesale slaughter in Benghazi, some analysts asked, how could the administration not do the same in Syria?

Hmmm?

Elsewhere in the NYT, Greg Mankiw demands “austerity now.”

I love it when a completely unexpected and unwarranted assumption jumps out of the closet at the end of a story to vandalize a perfectly good economic horror show with a smiley face.  

Consensus on U.S. growth this year is around 3.5%…But where will this expected growth come from?

First, the deleveraging process is far from over. In fact, It didn’t even begin…

Second, Congress isn’t debating whether fiscal policy has to be tightened — but by how much… Fiscal tightening is a huge swing from the fiscal stimulus position the U.S. economy currently enjoys.

Third, the Fed is moving slowly to prepare the markets for less monetary stimulus for the economy.

[Fourth:] The consumer sector (which accounts for a bit more than 70% of U.S. GDP)…With credit conditions relatively tight and the need to delever still in place, credit-financed consumption growth is some years off.

[Fifth:] Employment growth is barely enough to provide jobs for new entrants…As a consequence, income- and credit-based consumption growth are unlikely to provide the economic motor with the much-needed fuel that replaces the dwindling monetary and fiscal stimulus fuel.

[Sixth:]This leaves us with the investment and net export sectors of the economy to justify a 3.5% growth expectation…but keep in mind that sluggish consumption growth will likely put a dent in investment spending plans…net exports — the component that feeds directly into the GDP figures — are declining again after three years of improvement. The export sector won’t save the day.

To conclude: The U.S. economy will grow over time, if only for the natural tendency of a free market economy to seek an increase of the well being of its citizens.

In concise, mathematical terms,

– 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 – 1 (+ free market love!) = growth.

Sure, the economy is going down the crapper, but thank ye, lord, for the impending beneficence of free markets.

Feel better?

Greenwald suggests that the equation “Obama = Bush” is a “banal expression of indisputable fact.”  Why not attack Yemeni tyrants? Bahrain?  Indeed, the Saudis?  He rhetorically asks.

(Heh.  My cognitive indeedyeum is exhausted from absolute impregnation.  My imaginary shrink long ago recommended an Indeedy-otomy (to the Ottomanth power!).)

IOZ, on the other leg, clutches the problem in his barely-civilized dewclaws, pretty much ignoring the whole “war for oil” banalities of indisputable, polydactyl heft, and jack-knifes into the relatively virgin snow-drift of the current ice-cold season to pluck a perhaps more deeply, ever-burrowing, nutritive-and-crunchy-if-intestinally-waste-filled rodent of truth: that “the roots of our narcissism drink from a deep well of insecurity that requires we constantly blow shit up lest we admit to human limitations.”

In either case, we are blotted and defamed by the distances between what can be and what is.

We can’t decide whether the Hubble telescope is preferable to depleted uranium cyclops babies, because we fear not being able to afford the Hubble without tortured cyclops babies from Omelas.

In our dwindling, guttering humanity, there remain big hearts and minds amenable to reason and empathy, dignity approaching our capacities for reason and empathy.

Cheers to you.

* We are a decentralized non-violent resistance movement, which seeks to restore the rule of law and fight back against the organized criminal class.

* One-tenth of one percent of the population has consolidated wealth in unprecedented fashion and launched an all-out economic war against 99.9% of the population.

* We are not affiliated with either wing of the two-party oligarchy. We seek an end to the corrupted two-party system by ending the campaign finance and lobbying racket.

* Above all, we aim to break up the global banking cartel centered at the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, Bank of International Settlement and World Bank.

* We demand that the primary dealers within the Federal Reserve banking system be broken up and held accountable for rigging markets and destroying the global economy, effective immediately.

* As a first sign of good faith we demand Ben Bernanke step down as Federal Reserve chairman.

* Until our demands are met and a rule of law is restored, we will engage in a relentless campaign of non-violent, peaceful, civil disobedience.

* In our next communication we will announce Operation Empire State Rebellion.

“heh, to the indeedy.”

It rocks my house.

Speaking at West Point, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates casually suggested that the US of A is “sick in the head,” and needs to see a shrink.  After ten years into the Afghanistan war, eight years into the second Iraq war, with multiple ongoing “low-intensity” conflicts in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and constant drumbeats for war against Iran,  all while American warships are currently bearing down on Libya, Gates stepped aside the lectern, nonchalantly “opened his kimono” and said, “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General [Douglas] MacArthur so delicately put it.”

Gates briefly leant his pudgy frame upon the lectern with expert familiarity and self-possession before closing his kimono and returning to his otherwise disinterested cardboard platitudes about the future of American Exceptionalism abroad.

Standing in the wings quietly pounding a baseball bat in his palm, ever ready to burst an Arab bubble, blow three trillion bucks, kill a million innocent people, and crash the global economy “because we could,” was Tom “Tony Soprano” Friedman, wondering to his own goddamned self:

When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask: What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are almost identical to the governments we’re applauding the Arab people for overthrowing?

Wow, America, you’re not nearly as fucked in the head as we thought.  

Illustration of the pain pathway in René Descartes’ David Petraeus’ Traite de l’homme (Treatise of Man) 1664 2011. The long fiber running from the foot to the cavity in Petraeus’ head is pulled by the heat and releases a fluid that makes the muscles contract, retracting the foot from the fire and into the salving buccal mucosa.

via Jason Ditz at antiwar.com

Reports that Gen. David Petraeus, the top US Commander in Afghanistan, accused parents in rural Kunar Province of burning their children simply to make the US “look bad” sparked considerable consternation, and what passes these days for an “explanation” from the military.

Petraeus’s insultingly awkward and racist evasion was made “awkwarder” when his spokesman clarified his meaning:

“Petraeus never said that children’s hands and feet were purposely burned by their families in order to create a civilian casualty event,” insisted spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, and here’s where the explanation falls off the rails again.

“Rather, he said that the injuries to the children appeared inconsistent with the types of munitions used and that the burns to their hands and feet may have been the result of discipline sometimes handed out to Afghan children. Regrettably this is customary among some Afghan fathers as a way of dealing with children who misbehave,” Smith continued.

That’s right, the Afghan government wasn’t mad that Petraeus said parents burned their kids to make him look bad, the Afghan government was mad because Petraeus said Afghan parents burn their kids all the time.

Boffo.  Simply boffo.

Charles Blow of the New York Times has noticed that great sucking sound of our decadent empire in decline, and says, “It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country,” because among industrialized countries “we are among the worst of the worst.”  

Zoinks, Scoob!  It used to be that Americans didn’t want to know the truth, and the media had the courtesy not to tell us.

As for the cause of this decline to this “worst of the worst” status, Blow references “an increasingly cut-throat global economy” and shows an IMF chart indicating that the US has one of the highest Gini indices (i.e., measures of inequality) amongst industrial nations, just behind Hong Kong and Singapore.

I give Blow credit for his candor, as far as it goes, but let’s go ahead an nail that thesis to the door of the Church: Everything is going to shit because capitalism is an inherently psychopathic and monomaniacal drive for profits, all else be damned, and the plutocrats are taking increasingly large everything! for themselves.

State of Working America has some interactive graphs showing average incomes of the top 10% (in red hues) and bottom 90% (in blue) of wage earners between 1917 and 2008.  Moving the vertical bars in their graphs allows the user to select and summarize intervals of interest.  Data were compiled by economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley.

From 1917 to 1970 the bottom 90% of wage earners took home 72% of income growth, whereas the top 10% earners took home 28%.  The top 1% (light pink) took the smallest proportion of growth, whereas the next two largest income earners (rose and maroon)took the largest shares of the 28% cut.

Over the past forty years or so, income inequality has ballooned.  Specifically, from 1970 to 2008, the top 10% wage earners took home all the growth in incomes.  The top 1% took the majority of that growth.  The bottom 90% got nothing.  For the past 40 years, the vast majority and poorest Americans have gotten nothing.  Bupkis.  Goose eggs. Zilch.  All the money has gone to the very top, the worst of the worst, for forty fucking years.

Charles Blow of the New York Times has noticed that our decadent empire is in decline, and “It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country,” because among industrialized countries “we are among the worst of the worst.”  

How dare you notice, sir?  And since when is the NYT making such embarrassing revelations publicly?  To paraphrase Colbert, Americans don’t want to know how vile and corrupt our plutocratic overlords are, and the media used to have the courtesy not to tell us.

It’s all about inequality

State of Working America has some interactive graphs showing average incomes of the top 10% (in red hues) and bottom 90% (in blue) of wage earners between 1917 and 2008.  Moving the vertical bars in their graphs allows the user to select and summarize intervals of interest.  Data were compiled by economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley.

From 1917 to 1970 the bottom 90% of wage earners took home 72% of income growth, whereas the top 10% earners took home 28%.  The top 1% (light pink) took the smallest proportion of growth, whereas the next two largest income earners (rose and maroon)took the largest shares of the 28% cut.

Over the past forty years or so, income inequality has ballooned.  Specifically, from 1970 to 2008, the top 10% wage earners took home all the growth in incomes.  The top 1% took the majority of that growth.  The bottom 90% got nothing.  For the past 40 years, the vast majority and poorest Americans have gotten nothing.  Bupkis.  Goose eggs. Zilch.  All the money has gone to the very top, the worst of the worst, for forty fucking years.

This trend of the uber-wealthy getting uber-wealthier while the rest of us “suck on it” is only accelerating.  From 2000 to 2007 the top 1% took 75% of all income growth.

Charles Blow of the New York Times has noticed that our decadent empire is in decline, and “It’s time for us to stop lying to ourselves about this country,” because among industrialized countries “we are among the worst of the worst.”  

How dare you notice, sir?  And since when is the NYT making such embarrassing revelations publicly?  To paraphrase Colbert, Americans don’t want to know how vile and corrupt our plutocratic overlords are, and the media used to have the courtesy not to tell us.

Share of the wealth: Income growth

State of Working America has some interactive graphs showing average incomes of the top 10% (in red hues) and bottom 90% (in blue) of wage earners between 1917 and 2008.  Moving the vertical bars in their graphs allows the user to select and summarize intervals of interest.  Data were compiled by economist Emmanuel Saez at UC Berkeley.

From 1917 to 1970 the bottom 90% of wage earners took home 72% of income growth, whereas the top 10% earners took home 28%.  The top 1% (light pink) took the smallest proportion of growth, whereas the next two largest income earners (rose and maroon)took the largest shares of the 28% cut.

Over the past forty years or so, income inequality has ballooned.  Specifically, from 1970 to 2008, the top 10% wage earners took home all the growth in incomes.  The top 1% took the majority of that growth.  The bottom 90% got nothing.  For the past 40 years, the vast majority and poorest Americans have gotten nothing.  Bupkis.  Goose eggs. Zilch.  All the money has gone to the very top, the worst of the worst, for forty fucking years.

Exploding Health Care Costs:

The Housing Bubble Collapse:

The Bail-outs: Privatizing profits and socializing losses:

alphabet soups, GSEs

Our exploding national debt: