By MATT RICHTEL - The New York Times
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.
For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.
And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.
“This is one way to look at the economy,” Art Wong, a spokesman for the port, said of the cars. “And it scares you to death.”
The backlog at the port is just part of a broader rise in the nation’s inventories, which were up 5.5 percent in September from a year earlier, according to the Commerce Department. The car industry has been hurt particularly, with sales down nearly 15 percent this year. General Motors has said it would run out of operating cash by the end of the year if it does not receive a government bailout.
But the inventory glut in Long Beach is not limited to imported cars. There has also been a sharp drop in demand for the port’s single largest export: recycled cardboard and paper products.
This material typically goes to China, where it is used to make boxes for new electronics and other products that are sent back to the United States. But Chinese factories reacting to sharply falling demand are slowing production, so they need less cardboard. Tons of paper are piling up recycling businesses around the port, the detritus of economies on hold.
Long Beach is an important port, particularly for the West. It is where imported products arrive and filter through the tributary of trucks, trains and retailers into the hands of consumers. But now, products are just sitting.
“We’re supposed to move things, not store them,” Mr. Wong said.
Roughly 20 percent of the nation’s container imports last year came through Long Beach, putting it close behind the largest container port, Los Angeles. This year, shipping volume at Long Beach is down 10 percent from 2007, and nearly all major ports around the country have seen similar declines. Veteran port workers say the slowdown since mid-October is like nothing they have ever seen. And it is having a cascading impact on other businesses and workers.
In the 150-acre terminal where Toyotas are unloaded, there is a sea of Corollas, Camrys and RAV4s. The mere presence of so many cars is not unusual, given that Toyota brings in 250,000 cars a year in biweekly shipments. But in a sign that something is amiss, dozens of tractor-trailers that transport new cars to dealers sat empty last week amid the rows of Toyotas.
Kurt Golledge, 48, was one of just two truckers loading his green, 75-foot-long hauler with cars last week. Mr. Golledge said eight of his colleagues were laid off this month because Toyota dealers did not want more deliveries.
“I was dropping cars in Henderson, Nev., about a month ago and the dealer told me: ‘Take ’em somewhere else and dump ’em,’ ” said Mr. Golledge, who works for a company called Allied Systems. “All the dealers are telling us the same thing.”
(continue reading)
WASHINGTON (AP) - Jarred by new jobless alarms, Congress raced to approve legislation Thursday to keep unemployment checks flowing through the December holidays and into the new year for a million or more laid-off Americans whose benefits are running out.
The economic picture was only getting worse, if Wall Street was any indication. The Dow Jones industrials dropped more than 400 points for a second straight day, reaching the lowest level in more than five years, and the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell below lows established six years ago.
The Senate's vote followed Thursday's government report that laid-off workers' new claims for jobless aid had reached a 16-year high and the number of Americans searching for work had surged past 10 million.
The White House, which had opposed broader legislation containing the benefits extension, urged passage of the new version and said President George W. Bush would quickly sign it.
As Congress prepared to leave town - perhaps for the year - there was no such resolution on helping the auto industry, a disaster in the making that could lead to hundreds of thousands if not millions of additional lost jobs. Democratic leaders said they could return to Washington in mid-December to vote on rescue loans if the carmakers first present a plan on transforming and modernizing their operations.
Discouraged by the stalemate over auto aid, investors sent the Dow Jones industrials down to another big loss, 445 points.
As for the jobless benefits, about 1.2 million people would exhaust their unemployment insurance by the end of the year without the extension, sponsors said. The measure is estimated to cost about $5.7 billion, although economists put the positive impact at $1.64 for every dollar spent on jobless benefits because the money helps sustain other jobs and restores consumer confidence.
"Putting money in the hands of unemployed families means they will be able to pay their rent and utility bills, buy groceries and clothe their children," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said after the voice vote in the Senate. "It is money that will create economic growth in America." (continue reading)
by Charley Blaine - MSN.com
I was fairly sure a couple of weeks ago that the market was putting in a bottom. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index told me so.
I was so confident that a bottom was forming that I even commissioned a graphic showing why. Now, I'm worried about how far much farther the market could fall. The S&P 500 tells me so.
Here's why.
My confidence was built on how the S&P 500 behaved after dropping for no more than a minute on Oct. 10 to 839.80. That was the start of a wild day of trading.
The S&P approached 839.80 one more time on Oct. 10, and, between then and Nov. 12, the market tested that low four times, bouncing up each time.
Technical analysts call repeated bounces off a low level the establishment of a support level, which means that the mere act of approaching that level generates new buying. (There are, of course, millions of ways to identify a market bottom -- which is to say, a market bottom shows up when it shows up. Check this set of criteria.)
I, for one, was hoping that support seemed to be forming between 840 and 850 on the S&P. If it kept holding at roughly those levels, then confidence would start to build among investors and, in time, confidence would beget buying. I wasn't alone in watching the market trend after Oct. 10. Check this post on Seeking Alpha. USA Today noted the chatter as well.
I was under no illusions that the formation of a bottom meant stocks would take off again. If all went well, I thought the market would muddle along for, say, six to nine months. And, once the economy started to show real signs of recovery, then stocks might move slowly higher. That's what happened after bear markets in 1973-74, 1981-82 and 1987. After the dot-com bust and the after-effect of the Sept. 2001 terror attacks, the bottom came in October 2002, followed by a major test in March 2003.
Alas, my hopes were shattered quickly. (continue reading)
Political Positions Shifted To Career Civil Service Jobs
Just weeks before leaving office, the Interior Department's top lawyer has shifted half a dozen key deputies -- including two former political appointees who have been involved in controversial environmental decisions -- into senior civil service posts.
The transfer of political appointees into permanent federal positions, called "burrowing" by career officials, creates security for those employees, and at least initially will deprive the incoming Obama administration of the chance to install its preferred appointees in some key jobs.
Similar efforts are taking place at other agencies. Two political hires at the Labor Department have already secured career posts there, and one at the Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to make the switch.
Between March 1 and Nov. 3, according to the federal Office of Personnel Management, the Bush administration allowed 20 political appointees to become career civil servants. Six political appointees to the Senior Executive Service, the government's most prestigious and highly paid employees, have received approval to take career jobs at the same level. Fourteen other political, or "Schedule C," appointees have also been approved to take career jobs. One candidate was turned down by OPM and two were withdrawn by the submitting agency.
The personnel moves come as Bush administration officials are scrambling to cement in place policy and regulatory initiatives that touch on issues such as federal drinking-water standards, air quality at national parks, mountaintop mining and fisheries limits. (continue reading)
By Robert Parry
Having spent more than three decades in Washington, I’ve seen enough mistakes made – and opportunities missed – for a lifetime. So, at this turning point in American history, I’m venturing beyond my normal role as reporter to offer a few ideas about what must be done now.
For one, the progressive side of American politics must invest much more in media and do so immediately.
Looking back over the past three decades, the cost of the Left’s complacency on media – i.e. its failure to create a reliable way to get important facts to the public and to counter the Right’s propaganda machine – has been almost beyond calculation.
America’s right-leaning media imbalance was a big reason why George W. Bush was able to misgovern the United States for eight years, leaving the nation in two bloody wars and wallowing in the worst financial crisis since World War II. Hundreds of thousands are dead and millions may soon be out of work.
Despite Barack Obama’s election victory, this media asymmetry will not go away. Indeed, it is almost certain to limit his ability to bring about significant change and could tilt the country back in the direction of the Republicans in the not-too-distant future.
It is a pattern I have seen often since 1977 when I arrived in Washington as a reporter for the Associated Press.
During that time, while the American Left has been largely absent from the national media landscape, wealthy right-wingers (from foundations like Olin and Scaife to media moguls like Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch) have poured tens of billions of dollars into media.
Over those years, the Right built a towering – and vertically integrated – media structure reaching from newspapers, magazines and books to talk radio, cable TV and the Internet, an apparatus concentrated in the power centers of New York and Washington.
The Right also invested money in attack groups to go after mainstream journalists who dared dig up information that put right-wing policies or politicians in a negative light. Offending journalists were accused of “liberal bias” and often found themselves hounded from the national press corps.
Over time, this imbalance had a spillover effect. Many right-wing and neoconservative pundits landed prime spots on mainstream TV news shows and the Op-Ed pages of leading newspapers, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Even the most dangerous of right-wing ideas – such as free-market absolutism at home and neoconservative imperialism abroad – got respectful if not reverential treatment across the mainstream-to-right-wing media spectrum, the news outlets that most Americans read, heard and watched.
Left’s Miscalculation
The Right’s bullying was made more effective by the fact that the progressive side of American politics chose – also starting in the mid-to-late 1970s – to withdraw from any serious commitment to national media.
One of the Left’s favorite slogans became “think globally, act locally.” In practice, that meant favoring local activism (such as direct philanthropic spending on projects like feeding the poor or buying up endangered wetlands) over national media (i.e. building the kind of informational infrastructure that the Right had).
So, it was not so much that the Left lost the “war of ideas” to the Right over the past three decades; it was more that the Left abandoned the battlefield.
The Left’s neglect of media proved disastrous. The Right, with its three-decade project of building media and controlling the federal government, showed it could create far more poor people than well-meaning progressives could feed – and put more wetlands at risk than could ever be bought up.
Another result of the Left’s media miscalculation has been that even when moderately progressive politicians have managed to claw their way to power – as Bill Clinton did in 1993 and the congressional Democrats did in 2007 – they must operate within a hostile environment, fighting relentless media assaults and often scaling back plans.
It has been no accident that the last three decades have been dominated by three Republican presidents who have held the White House for a combined 20 years. At each step, the media played a pivotal role, most notably in promoting the incompetent George W. Bush over the well-qualified Al Gore.
Only in the last few years has there been a modest pushback from the Left. Adding to a few earlier media standbys – such as Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” radio/TV program and some liberal magazines – there were these new developments:
--Often operating on a shoestring, Internet sites rose up to challenge both Bush and the fawning coverage he was getting from the major news media.
--In 2004, a poorly funded Air America took flight with the goal of putting at least a few liberal voices on AM talk radio.
--Progressives got an unexpected boost with Comedy Central’s surprise hit, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and a spin-off, “The Colbert Report” with Stephen Colbert.
--MSNBC, after trying for years to out-fox Fox News with flag-waving jingoism, took a different tack when it elevated former sportscaster Keith Olbermann to a prime-time broadcast called “Countdown,” which made a point of mocking Bill O’Reilly and other right-wing blowhards on Fox.
--When profit-obsessed MSNBC executives realized that Olbermann was boosting their ratings, they hired Air America host Rachel Maddow to put on a show that follows “Countdown,” creating a four-hour block of relatively progressive news content. (continue reading)
NEW YORK—In what has become a Thanksgiving tradition, more than 10,000 locals and tourists alike braved the cold Monday to watch the annual stuffing of the Rockefeller Center Turkey.
The nationally televised event, which has rung in the holiday season for nearly 80 years, began at 5 p.m., when workers propped open the skin flaps of the 55-foot-tall bird, and pushed an 11-ton mixture of bread crumbs, onions, and other fixings into its massive trunk.
"This year's stuffing is shaping up to be the best one yet," said Mayor Mike Bloomberg, addressing the crowd from a podium next to the giant avian carcass. "Look at that beautiful glistening turkey!"
"Let Thanksgiving begin," Bloomberg added as he ceremoniously picked up a handful of salted butter and coagulated grease from the pile and threw it into the cheering crowd.
Moments after a 150-foot-tall crane stuffed the raw turkey to overflowing, ground crews fastened the bird's gargantuan legs together with nearly 200 yards of kitchen string. According to organizers, the Rockefeller Center Turkey will be basted hourly with 30,000 gallons of natural juices, pumped from industrial hoses, to prevent it from drying out.
The largest Thanksgiving centerpiece to date, the 70-foot-long turkey was personally selected by the mayor from a Maine farm and transported to Rockefeller Center on the back of a flatbed truck. Throughout its journey to the Big Apple, a record number of onlookers greeted the enormous, vacuum-sealed animal, with many a passerby scrambling to get their picture taken alongside it.
"The guidelines we use to find the perfect turkey are based not only on height, but also plumpness and just the right amount of dark meat," said David Murbach, who has helped procure Rockefeller Center's giant turkey for the past 25 years. "While this year we did opt for a commercially grown bird, in 2007 a family living in Vermont donated a 45-foot-tall turkey they had in their backyard."
Crowds reportedly started arriving before noon to watch the festive turkey-stuffing spectacle, which included live musical performances by Josh Groban and American Idol–winner David Cook. In addition, the entire cast of NBC's Chuck received the honor this year of walking inside the turkey's abdominal cavity to retrieve the 1,000-pound giblets packet.
"I knew the crowds were going to be huge, but I wanted my son to be here on the day all the stuffing went in," said Cleveland resident Dean Carlson, who was visiting New York with his family. "You should have seen the look on his face when they peeled back the skin with that giant skidder. This is something he'll remember for the rest of his life."
On Tuesday, gravy boats came up the Hudson River, while dump trucks heaped with mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and boiled corn lined Sixth Avenue for nearly a mile. Several dozen workers have also been added to the payroll to shovel congealed fat and gristle off the sidewalks until the end of December.
"You know the holidays are right around the corner when you can smell raw turkey from 50 blocks away," SoHo resident Stephen Finney said. "Thanksgiving in New York just wouldn't be the same without it."
According to historian Steve Medina, the custom of stuffing a Rockefeller Center turkey first started in 1931, when exhausted workers laying the plaza's foundation kept their spirits up by preparing a 10-foot-tall bird right on the construction site. The tradition quickly caught on, and has only grown in pomp and popularity since.
"The Rockefeller Center Turkey has given us so many wonderful memories over the years," Medina said. "From the first honey-glazed bird in 1957, to that image of Mayor LaGuardia raising those giant gizzards above his head to signal the start of another Thanksgiving season."
"Through depression, war, and even food shortages, this incredible tradition has always endured," Medina continued. "Except of course for 1951, when the enormous bird rolled off a cargo train and crushed 64 people before plunging into the East River."
The Rockefeller Center Turkey will be slow-roasted from 5:30 p.m. to midnight each day until Thanksgiving, when the red button pops out, indicating that the bird is fully cooked and ready to be served.
Officials claimed that the turkey would not be wasted this year, as its leftovers will be used to make enough sandwiches to last for the next 10 months.
USA Today
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican emigration has dropped 42% over the last two years, a government study released Thursday showed, confirming that America has become less appealing amid an economic downturn and stepped up raids against illegal migrants.
About eight of every 1,000 Mexicans emigrated between February and May of this year, according to the survey conducted by the National Statistics and Geography Institute. That's a 42% drop from the same period in 2006.
In all of 2007, an estimated 814,000 Mexicans emigrated, compared to 1.2 million in 2006. The figure — which was reached through household surveys — includes all Mexicans who left the country, and did not break down legal and illegal migration.
A summary of the investigation did not delve into the reasons for the drop. But experts say America's economic troubles and tighter border security have deterred many Mexicans from risking the journey to the United States, a trip that often means long desert treks, dodging bandits and bribing corrupt police.
The vast majority of Mexican migrants go to the United States.
The study did not offer statistics past May 2008. But experts expect the trend to continue amid the financial crisis that rattled markets worldwide in September.
"There is no longer an American dream, at least for the moment with the economic situation," said Victor Clark, the director of the Tijuana-based Binational Center for Human Rights, which works with illegal migrants. "News of mass raids snowball through towns that send a lot of migrants. In small northern towns, the news is that there is no work for Mexicans in the United States."
There have long been indications that Mexican emigration has been falling dramatically. The U.S. Border Patrol has reported a 39% drop since 2005 in the capture of migrants trying to cross the frontier illegally.
And Mexicans are sending less money home, hurting Mexico's second-largest source of foreign income behind oil exports. Remittances fell 12% to $1.9 billion in August, the biggest drop since record-keeping began 12 years ago, according to Mexico's central bank.
The statistics are part of the broader 2006-2008 National Survey of Occupation and Employment, which studied 120,000 households.
The study found no significant change in the number of Mexicans coming home. But the drop in emigration was so large that by the end of 2007, more Mexicans were returning home than leaving the country, the study said.
Some authorities believe Mexican will see a surge of returning migrants as the economy worsens in the United States. Mexico City's municipal government has predicted that up to 30,000 more immigrants than usual will return from the U.S. over the next few months. Other towns across Mexico are also preparing for an influx of returning migrants.
Clark said it was too early to know whether Mexicans would start leaving the United States en masse, or whether emigration rates to the U.S. would recover after the crisis.
"It's a phenomenon that is barely starting to develop," he said. "Some immigrants say they will travel farther north in the United States to find work. But others say they will come back."
By Nicholas von Hoffman, The Nation / Alternet
We have no idea who got this money or the conditions or collateral put up in return for the loans.
With his latest policy switch to buying stock in banks and other companies, Henry Paulson has more zigs and zags to his credit than a fox trying to escape a pack of hounds.
The fox and the hounds, of course, have a clear idea of what they want to do and how they want to do it, which is more than you can say of Paulson. Sums of incalculable size are being spent or pledged by Paulson and his playmate, Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and nobody outside their organizations, or maybe inside them either, knows who got what, how much they got, and under what conditions they got it.
In the past couple of months Bernanke has loaned out $2 trillion to unnamed companies under eleven different programs and all but three of them were slapped together in the past fifteen months of financial crisis.
To repeat, we do not know who got this money or what collateral was put up in return for the loans or what conditions were attached to them.
The sums involved are almost three times as large as Paulson's $700 billion muddled bailout efforts that Congress voted for last month. Bernanke does have the legal authority to pass out these trillions without Congressional authorization and without explanation, but secrecy breeds suspicion and loss of confidence.
These officials preface every speech by talking about "transparency," their favorite word, at the same time they are handing off $2 trillion and they won't say to whom, and leading Bloomberg News to file suit under the Freedom of Information Act.
Paulson has made off with $50 billion to give to AIG for the purpose of setting up a special entity by which the company's lousiest loans are to be kept off the books and the unknown debtors protected. When asked about this by the New York Times, Lynn E. Turner, who sits on the Treasury Department's Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession, complained that "We've had way too many things here that nobody knows anything about…. That's why no one has faith in the capital markets."
Paulson appears to have given away, invested, loaned or lost about $300 billion of the first $700 billion Congress gave him. But he has lost more than money: Nobody believes him or Bernanke anymore.
Every day another company steps forward with its hand out -- American Express, Chrysler, GE Financial -- and every day it appears Paulson and Bernanke are prepared to accommodate these corporate mendicants.
Paulson left his job as CEO of Goldman Sachs to become treasury secretary, and by now it may be dawning on him that CEO-ship is no substitute for an apprenticeship in public service that might have given him the political skills he lacks. The same may be said of Bernanke, who spent much of his life as a harmless Princeton professor of economics.
Both of these men are convinced, doctrinaire free-marketeers. They hate supervising this intervention into American business. Paulson repeatedly bemoans what he is doing.
Hence, both the principals are trying to devise and carry out programs that they do not believe in. They cannot have spent any time thinking about how government might regulate and intervene successfully. It's as though one were to ask a couple of pro-life physicians to conduct a series of abortions. Should we be surprised they do not do it well?
With President Bush hors de combat and having rendered himself a nullity, we are reduced to Paulson and Bernanke to show us the way in this maelstrom. That may explain why criticism of their work has been so muted.
Two female officials, however, have conducted their offices with distinction. Sheila Bair, chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, has moved heaven and earth to get Paulson and Bernanke to embrace a massive program to stop the housing foreclosures and take the first step toward ending the chaos. To say that she has had mixed success with the men is an understatement.
Less well known is Brooksley Born, who will be a major figure when the history of this Great Debacle is written. Born was the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1996 to 1999. She foresaw the calamity that runaway use of credit default swaps and other derivatives would cause, and battled to impose regulation on them. She was stopped by Alan Greenspan, Arthur Levitt and Robert Rubin, the major economic figures in the Clinton administration.
After a distinguished career in law, Brooksley Born has retired to watch birds and play with her grandchildren. Sheila Bair battles on against the dunderheads, and we are left helpless, waiting.
Reuters
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Rampant piracy off Somalia is forcing shipping companies to avoid the Suez Canal and send cargoes of oil and other goods on a longer journey around southern Africa, industry officials said on Thursday.
Denmark's A.P. Moller-Maersk is routing some of its 50 oil tankers around the Cape of Good Hope instead and Intertanko said many other tanker firms were doing the same.
Norway's Frontline, which ferries much of the Middle East's oil to world markets, said it was considering a similar step.
They were responding to Saturday's spectacular capture by Somali pirates of a Saudi Arabian supertanker loaded with $100 million worth of oil, the biggest ship hijacking in history.
Scores of attacks in Somali waters this year have driven up insurance costs for shipping firms and the decision to divert cargo around South Africa risks pushing up prices for manufactured goods and commodities.
"We need immediate action from governments to protect these vital trade lanes -- robust action in the form of greater naval and military support with a clear mandate to engage, to arrest pirates and to bring them to trial," Intertanko said.
The head of the International Maritime Organization, Efthimios Mitropoulos, warned of "a series of negative repercussions" if ships had to reroute.
He said going around the Cape added about 12 days to a typical Gulf-to-Europe voyage, delaying oil supplies, and potentially raising freight rates by 25 to 30 percent.
Mitropoulos urged the U.N. Security Council to strengthen the mandate of anti-piracy forces with "clear rules of engagement" and to make states bring to justice pirates they captured.
A who's who guide to the people poised to shape Obama's foreign policy.
U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.
Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.
"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."
Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam. (continue reading)
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