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Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns
Jesse McKinley, New York Times
FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.
“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”
Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”
(25 March 2009)
Decrying AIG, top officials ask strong new control
Tom Raum and Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press via GoogleNews
Pointing with dismay to the AIG debacle, the nation’s top economic officials argued Tuesday for unprecedented powers to regulate and even take over financial goliaths whose collapse could imperil the entire economy. President Barack Obama agreed and said he hoped “it doesn’t take too long to convince Congress.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, in a rare joint appearance before a House committee, said the messy federal intervention into American International Group, an insurance giant, demonstrated a need to regulate complex nonbank financial institutions just as banks are now regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
(24 March 2009)
California’s jobless rate forecast to pass 12%
Dean Calbreath, San Diego Union-Tribune
California’s unemployment rate will soar to between 12 percent and 15 percent by next spring and remain in the double digits until at least the beginning of 2012, according to forecasts released by two teams of University of California economists.
The state’s unemployment rate has not reached those heights since the Great Depression.
The projections – one released today by UCLA’s Anderson Forecast, the other last week by UC Santa Barbara’s Economic Forecast – paint a grim picture of declining economic growth, lower retail sales, a troubled housing market and falling office prices lasting through much of 2010.
… The UCSB economists have an even darker view of the state’s economy, with unemployment peaking at 14.7 percent in early 2010 and remaining above 13 percent for the rest of the year. If that forecast comes true, it would mean that by the end of 2010, California would have lost all of the jobs created in the state over the past decade.
… Nickelsburg also has doubts about the stimulus package, partly because he fears that it will only fill in for spending that has been cut from the state’s budget.
“The simple story is that on a Tuesday in February we got a federal stimulus package that cut taxes and increased government spending, and then just three days later, we got a budget package out of Sacramento that raised taxes and cut government spending,” Nickelsburg said.
“The federal government and the state are going in opposite directions,” he said. “When you combine the two, what comes out of it is a very limited stimulus that could keep us from losing so many schoolteachers and could help keep some state programs going.”
… Economists say there is a reason for the wide divergence of opinion over how bad the economy might get. The economic situation is so fluid and the circumstances so unprecedented that it is hard to make solid predictions, they say.
“There are so many structural changes happening that it makes forecasting extremely difficult,” Adibi said. “The way that consumers have suddenly put the brakes on spending has never happened before in such a rapid period of time. And we’ve never experienced the steps that federal agencies are taking in the economy. It’s all very unconventional. There’s no model to capture that.”
(25 March 2009)
NYT repeats coal talking points, try to sabotage Obama’s green energy plans
Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos
Articles like this one are terrible because they give “objective” credence to arguments made exclusively by lobbyists. I imagine the coal industry did not imagine that their lies would be repeated so uncritically:
Curbing carbon dioxide emissions — a central part of tackling climate change — will almost certainly raise electricity prices, experts say. And increasing the nation’s reliance on renewable energy will in itself raise costs.
These are, quite simply, lies, and the sole purpose of publishing such articles is to undermine the Obama administration drive to develop renewable energy.
(29 March 2009)
The article in question is Cost Works Against Alternative and Renewable Energy Sources in Time of Recession by Matt Wald in the New York Times.
At Gristmill, Joseph Romm says: NYT story quotes only one-sided industry sources, ignores efficiency and cost of inaction.
