I Still Hate Neil Irwin - part the twelfth

The first of these odes to the writer-I'd-trade-to-be was July, 2014. Every one which dealt with macro-analysis (most of them) found me lamenting that Mr. Irwin wouldn't state the base cause of macro problems: collapse of aggregate demand. Yet another entry today. And he takes yet another baby step toward the goal:

Despite some promising signs of vitality during much of last year, issues that have dogged the world economy for the last decade — an aging work force in many of the biggest economies, weak growth in productivity, excessive global savings and industrial capacity, and a shortage of worldwide demand — haven't disappeared.
[my emphasis]

He nearly gets it. To paraphrase Bubba, "It's aggregate demand, stupid!" The other entries in his list are motivators of the decline (or, at least, lack of necessary growth) in aggregate demand.

Here's another motivating factoid:

The top 1 percent now owns 50.1 percent of the world's wealth, up from 45.5 percent in 2001.

Swamp People

For no particular reason, the show "Swamp People" walked through my lower brain stem, so off to the Wikipedia I went. Turns out to be mostly true, although I've never, and won't, watch the show. But this led to more searching, and I came across a thread, which contains this morsel:

Publicity fricks everything up. 30 years ago, I was a mussel diver on The Tennessee River. There were only a few of us,and it was easy to make some really great money,doing something I enjoyed. Somebody talked to the wrong people one day though,and this news crew showed up at our main boat ramp asking questions.
Well a handful of dumbasses had to talk about all the money they were making.Next thing you know,the river was covered up with divers.

The market for shells got flooded pretty quick,and the shell population got raped,because the new guys were taking small shells.
I had to get a fricking real job
-- Auggie/2017

Turns out that the show had about the same effect on gator hunting. Not surprising, at all. If you search for information on virtually any harvested animal, you'll find the same story. Knuckleheads make silly money depleting the stock, then get all bent out of shape when the Damn Gummint tells them to stop raping the stock. Or they harvest it to extinction.

Facts Follow Fiction

Being addicted to 'Law&Order' and the 'CI' variant, one occasionally finds that fiction predicts facts. The tag line, 'ripped from the headlines' becomes, 'ripped from the script'. Today, and the last few days really, we find The Manchurian President living the script.

There's the 'L&O' episode, 'Mega' which tells the tale of a couple of high end grifters who invent a religion/self-improvement scam. They've gotten really rich siphoning off the marks' assets. We get into the tale when one of the marks ends up dead. In the end, he gets convicted of the murder, but McCoy and Carmichael finally see that he's, likely, been set up by the wife.

McCoy and Carmichael close the episode by confronting her. This is what she said:

There was never enough, enough power, money, attention, women, enough control.
...
[He] would have to sit very quietly for a very, very long time, and know that now I had it all. I wanted him to know that, for him, there wasn't going to be any more.

The Manchurian President, meet Nancy.

The Oracle of the Beatles

I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
-- Lennon/McCartney/1967

Who knew that a bit past 50 years later, they would turn out to be prophets.

Three months later, after regularly causing earthquakes, the fracking has stopped, and the company has begun pulling some equipment from the site.

The company, Cuadrilla Resources, says it will continue to work in the cow pasture near Blackpool in Lancashire, seeking to extract natural gas economically and safely from the shale rocks. But so far, its results have failed to win over skeptics.

To be strictly accurate, Blackpool is 24 miles from Blackburn, but, you know, black folks do live together.

Pissing Contest

If some of the Dear Readers have been sleeping under a rock, then it behooves these endeavors to draw attention to some information from the Mueller team with regard to Cohen and Buzzfeed. Of the many punditing, only Chuck Rosenberg with Maddow has done the j'accuse.

The information provided by Cohen about the Moscow Project in these proffer sessions is consistent with and corroborated by other information obtained in the course of the SCO's investigation.

Game, set, match. If Cohen did, in fact, tell the SCO that The Manchurian President told him to lie. If you pause the video, you'll see that the filing is by SDNY, not SCO. The only issue is whether Cohen didn't tell either SCO or SDNY that The Manchurian President told him to falsely represent the Moscow Project in testimony. Why would he still cover for The Manchurian President at such a juncture? And why would SCO make plain that his cooperation about the Moscow Project was backed up by other evidence?

And, naturally, why would the SCO get it's back up and tell a vague rebuke? The mostly likely reason is simple timing. The SCO was saving the pound of dry powder for later. But, again, Rosenberg points out that the SDNY filing shows that the pound of dry powder was sitting there in plain sight.

FAIL!

OK, so here's the latest exemplar of how and why our healthcare process is screwed up. And where a lot of the money goes.

Immunomedics is a New Jersey pharma which has been around since 1982. As of market close today, its market cap was $3.44 Billion. Now, this company has never gotten a drug approved. Let that sink in for a second. Tomorrow was to be the decision day from FDA for its latest attempt to get an approval. Well... FAIL!! A day early and an approval short. Rejected. They released the news after both regular hours and after-hours trading.

I doubt it'll be worth north of $3,000,000,000 tomorrow morning.

Cannon Fodder

It wouldn't be Right Wingnut without dissying anyone who gets paid by the Damn Gummint. Never mind that at least 80% of those folks live outside the DC metroplex. Exact figures are hard to come by, but here's a few attempts.

From 2013

With so many government jobs tied to Defense Department operations, there's a clear "federal employment belt" running through the South and West. "At the end of the day," Florida writes, "it is America's red states that appear more heavily tied to the levels of federal employment than their blue state counterparts, setting up a fundamental irony about the locations of the most ardent 'starve-the-beast' supporters of smaller government."

Well, of course there is.

From 2015

The highest concentrations of public sector jobs are frequently found in states with relatively large rural populations. Eight of the 10 states with the highest concentrations of public sector jobs were less densely populated than the national population density of 87.4 people per square mile. On the other hand, eight of the 10 states with the smallest public sectors were twice as densely populated as the nation as a whole.

Those are all levels of Damn Gummint employment, but still... AKA, empty shitkicker country.

From 2018

Although the Washington area has the highest number of federal workers, government employees make up large shares of the workforce in many other areas, often near military bases. Federal civilians are 15 percent of the workforce in the small metropolitan area near Robins Air Force Base south of Macon, Ga. Similarly, federal civilian workers are 13 percent of the workforce in the Bremerton-Silverdale metropolitan area near Seattle. Federal workers are 16 percent of the workforce near the Patuxent Naval Air Station in Southern Maryland.

There's a map of where these folks live.

Another from 2018

Outside Washington D.C., several Midwestern and rural states have the highest share of their workforces employed by federal agencies affected by the shutdown.
...
60% of the federal workforce has at least a bachelor\u2019s, compared with 35% in the private sector.

Again, detailed maps.

From 2019. Anecdotal information.

Many of the affected federal workers — including 10,000 people in Utah, 6,200 in West Virginia and 5,500 in Alabama — have salaries far below the average $85,000 for government employees. But those paychecks drive local economies, and workers are starting to make tough choices about how to spend them — eating out less, limiting travel and shopping at food pantries instead of grocery stores — creating a ripple effect through the neighborhoods and towns where they live.

I wonder? Will these Trumpsters ever figure out that they've been conned?