Breaking news: Friendships are key to longevity!

Image courtesy of Values.com.

That "friends halve our grief and double our joy" is one of my favorite truisms, and recent research suggests that our social ties also have a significant effect on our longevity. David R. Hamilton, Ph.D. reports:

Most of us accept that the secret to living to a very old age is either down to genetics or lifestyle. In reality, it's a bit of both, with genetics actually only contributing 20-30 percent of the likelihood of living to 100.

Ultimately, lifestyle is the bit that we can control, so most longevity research (research into lifespan) has focused upon this. Most of us know that eating a diet rich in fruit and vegetables, not smoking, drinking in moderation, and reducing stress in our lives is the way to go.

But one additional vital ingredient is missing from this menu. That ingredient is friends!

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The Occupiers “R” us!

photo courtesy of dnforum.com

The Nation’s John Nichols skewers the attempts of Wall Street’s defenders to dismiss the spokespersons for the 99% of the population struggling with unemployment, underwater mortgages, low wages, and the rising cost of living. 

Open your eyes, folks: the Occupiers “R” us.

In his thoughtful analysis of the Occupy movement, Nichols writes:

How did Occupy Wall Street suddenly become Occupy Los Angeles? Occupy Cleveland? Occupy Janesville? Occupy Pocatello? How did a sleep-in beneath the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan inspire kayakers clad as Robin Hood to paddle up the Chicago River under a banner reading, Wall St. Takes From the 99%. Gives to the Rich? And how did those giant cutouts of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon end up dancing with all those San Franciscans chanting, “Make banks pay”? Despite what Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain suggests, it was not some “orchestrated” attempt to deflect blame from the flawed policies of the Obama administration. It was not the media looking for a “left-wing Tea Party.” And it certainly was not a poll-tested, focus-grouped PR campaign that billionaire-funded front groups employ to gin up movements.

Occupy Wall Street started small, took a beating from the cops and struggled for weeks to get the attention of the political class, the media and even its own natural allies. The only thing going for this unlikely intervention has been the pitch-perfect resonance of its founding premises. The American people understood Occupy Wall Street, and began to embrace its promise, long before the mandarins who presume to chart our national discourse noticed that everything was changing. That’s because the generators of this movement—and it is a movement—have gotten three things right from the start:

The target is right. This has been a year of agitation, from Wisconsin to Ohio to Washington. It has seen some of the largest demonstrations in recent American history in defense of labor rights, public education, public services. But all those uprisings attacked symptoms of the disease. Occupy Wall Street named it. By aiming activism not at the government but at the warren of bankers, CEOs and hedge-fund managers to whom the government is beholden, Occupy Wall Street went to the heart of the matter. And that captured the imagination of Americans who knew Michael Moore was right when he finished his 2009 documentary Capitalism: A Love Story with an attempted citizen’s arrest of the bankers who not only avoided accountability after crashing the economy but profited from a taxpayer-funded bailout. Like the populists, the socialists and the best of the progressive reformers of a century ago, Occupy Wall Street has not gotten distracted by electoral politics; it has gone after the manipulator of both major parties—what the radicals of old referred to as “the money power.”

The numbers are right. If Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? taught us anything, it was that the great accomplishment of the money power in contemporary politics has been to divide the overwhelming mass of Americans over social and cultural issues, thus deflecting attention from fundamental economic debates. The brilliance of Occupy Wall Street’s message, “We are the 99 percent,” is that it invites just about everyone who isn’t a billionaire to recognize themselves as members of the class that has suffered what Thomas Jefferson once described as “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” For all the efforts of Wall Street’s media and political defenders to dismiss the persistent protesters as somehow un-American, the vast majority of Americans recognize that kids in sleeping bags did not shutter this country’s factories, mangle our mortgage markets or create a pay-to-play system. The 99 percent did not ask for or approve a system that always has money for wars and bank bailouts but won’t, as former Congressman Alan Grayson notes, help the 24 million Americans who can’t find full-time work, the 50 million Americans who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick, the 47 million Americans who need government aid to feed themselves, the 15 million American families who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

The demands are right. The most comic complaint about Occupy Wall Street—not just from critics but even from some elite sympathizers—is that it lacks well-defined demands. In fact, the objection of the occupiers to a system of corporate domination and growing inequality, and their desire to change that system, makes a lot more sense to a lot more Americans than anything being said by politicians. Polling confirms this point: Barack Obama’s approval ratings are dismal, but the approval ratings for the Republicans in Congress are dramatically worse. The American people desperately wanted this movement. That is proven not only by the polls but by the practical embrace of the Occupy Wall Street ethos in more than a thousand communities across the nation. Some are already occupying public spaces, others are marching and rallying. Beyond Wall Street, there will be more specific complaints, more adventurous alliances, more practical politics, but there’s no reason why a diversity of issues and tactics cannot build the movement that was invited when the call to Occupy Wall Street was issued.

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Krugman’s Crash Course in Economics: How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

If you’ve been reading Katalusis since its inception in August 2007, you’re well aware that economics is not one of my areas of expertise. My usual response to the topic has been to marvel at a system that functions best when the middle class is heading daily to the mall to spend its hard-earned cash on stuff it doesn’t need instead of saving a few dollars for a rainy day.

In recent years, many of us have been suckered in by credit card swindlers to spend more than we have at usurious interest rates. At the same time, a significant number of low income seniors have racked up credit card debt to pay for emergencies like car repairs, dental bills, new eye glasses, and doubled or tripled electric bills from running the air conditioner during summer heat waves.

Then came word in the fall of 2008 that the economy was tanking fast. One of the scariest scenes for me since the announcement of the global financial meltdown was Alan Greenspan’s public admission that the model he had believed in over the years had proved to be wrong. What model would that be, I wondered.

Nearly a year later, I surprised myself by printing Paul Krugman’s 11-page dissertation in the NY Times Magazine titled How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? More surprising, I gathered it up and took it out to my kitchen table and with yellow highlighter in hand sat there and read the whole thing. No kidding. Written in lay people’s terms, the article was readable even for a novice like me, and I now have a much better handle on economic theory and practice; heck, I even know the difference between “fresh water” and “salt water” economists. Hint: lots of fresh water economists are from Chicago.

Krugman writes:

It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.

Last year, everything came apart.

Read more of Krugman’s compelling narrative here:

The Verdict on Obama’s Response to the Financial Crisis: “No We Can’t”

Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman gently turns the Obama Administration’s response to the nation’s economic crisis inside out and concludes there’s not much there.

Krugman writes:

(emphasis mine)

By any normal political standards, this week’s Congressional agreement on an economic stimulus package was a great victory for President Obama. He got more or less what he asked for: almost $800 billion to rescue the economy, with most of the money allocated to spending rather than tax cuts. Break out the Champagne!

Or maybe not. These aren’t normal times, so normal political standards don’t apply: Mr. Obama’s victory feels more than a bit like defeat. The stimulus bill looks helpful but inadequate, especially when combined with a disappointing plan for rescuing the banks. And the politics of the stimulus fight have made nonsense of Mr. Obama’s postpartisan dream.

Krugman continues:

For while Mr. Obama got more or less what he asked for, he almost certainly didn’t ask for enough. We’re probably facing the worst slump since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office, not usually given to hyperbole, predicts that over the next three years there will be a $2.9 trillion gap between what the economy could produce and what it will actually produce. And $800 billion, while it sounds like a lot of money, isn’t nearly enough to bridge that chasm.

Officially, the administration insists that the plan is adequate to the economy’s need. But few economists agree. And it’s widely believed that political considerations led to a plan that was weaker and contains more tax cuts than it should have — that Mr. Obama compromised in advance in the hope of gaining broad bipartisan support. We’ve just seen how well that worked.

Now, the chances that the fiscal stimulus will prove adequate would be higher if it were accompanied by an effective financial rescue, one that would unfreeze the credit markets and get money moving again. But the long-awaited announcement of the Obama administration’s plans on that front, which also came this week, landed with a dull thud.

And here’s the conclusion of Krugman’s disturbing reflections on the state of the economy this morning:

Over all, the effect was to kick the can down the road. And that’s not good enough. So far the Obama administration’s response to the economic crisis is all too reminiscent of Japan in the 1990s: a fiscal expansion large enough to avert the worst, but not enough to kick-start recovery; support for the banking system, but a reluctance to force banks to face up to their losses. It’s early days yet, but we’re falling behind the curve.

And I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach — a feeling that America just isn’t rising to the greatest economic challenge in 70 years. The best may not lack all conviction, but they seem alarmingly willing to settle for half-measures. And the worst are, as ever, full of passionate intensity, oblivious to the grotesque failure of their doctrine in practice.

There’s still time to turn this around. But Mr. Obama has to be stronger looking forward. Otherwise, the verdict on this crisis might be that no, we can’t.

Again, Americans, it's time to wake up. You voted for a charming, motivational speaker in 2008 and elected the least experienced candidate in either the Democratic or Republican primaries to lead us through the most challenging period in recent American history.

Were you really so idolatrous as to expect Mr. Obama to walk on water?

Forced to Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils in the Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression

Tony Rezko and Barack Obama, photo credits: Politico

We’re in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and bogged down in two wars, but in the run up to the presidential election in November, neither of the two major candidates is qualified to steer the nation safely through good times, much less these deeply troubled waters.

To my knowledge Barack Obama has never been responsible for any budget other than that of the Obama family, which he managed to screw up with his ties to indicted Chicago businessman and political fundraiser Tony Rezko who helped him buy a house.

John McCain undermined his own credentials early on in the race by admitting that economics was not his strong suit.

In light of the above, it’s sickening to recall how the corrupt Democratic party brutally pushed Hillary Clinton out of Obama’s way during the primary, thus depriving the nation of the leadership in the next four years of the candidate easily best qualified in both economic and foreign affairs.

Can you imagine how much it would have done for the nation’s spirit in the aftermath of the recent Wall Street meltdown to realize that it might soon be guided by a second Clinton Administration, now celebrated by even the blatantly calculating and hypocritical Obama team as an era of peace and prosperity?

But back to present day reality: Politico’s David Paul Kuhn reports this morning that Republican strategists are saying that McCain must hammer on the economy in the remaining weeks of the campaign.

Kuhn writes:

‘“He’s going to have to do something bold unless he basically has a very good night Wednesday night,’ veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins said, referring to the upcoming final presidential debate. “If he doesn’t convince people to have a second look, it’s over.’

“Rollins suggested McCain should reconsider and pledge to serve only one term in office and then focus solely on revitalizing the economy and getting troops out of Iraq.”

Now there’s an idea!

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Ignore the Tabloids: This is Not a Depression!

Lately, I’ve wished I’d taken at least an introductory class in economics during my college years. After word of the House’s thumbs down on the $700 billion rescue bill yesterday, sensationalist headlines instantaneously appeared across the MSM and the blogosphere shouting, “the worst stock market plunge ever!”

Marketwatch offers a calmer voice this morning: Irwin Kellner writes: “We are nowhere near a depression, so let's stop talking ourselves into one.”

Kellner compares today’s financial situation with the depression of the 1930s:

In the crash of 1929 the Dow Jones industrials ($INDU:Dow Jones Industrial Average
$INDU 10,365.45, -777.68, -7.0%) plunged 40% in two months; this time around it has taken a year to fall 22%.

The jobless rate jumped to 25% by 1933; it is little more than 6% today.

The gross domestic product shrank by 25% during the early 1930s; it is up over 3% during the past year.

Consumer prices fell by about 30% from 1929 to 1933; and the last time I looked they were still rising.

Home prices dropped more than 30% during the Depression vs. about 16% today.

Some 40% of all mortgages were delinquent by 1934 compared with 4% today.

In the 1930s, more than 9,000 banks failed compared with fewer than 20 over the past couple of years.

Remember also it was policy errors, not the stock market crash, that caused the Great Depression:

Instead of increasing the money supply, the Federal Reserve of that era reduced it by one-third.

Instead of lowering taxes, Herbert Hoover raised them.

And to channel whatever demand was left into U.S.-made goods, the government enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act to keep out foreign products; this only provoked our trading partners to do the same.

Add to this today's automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and Social Security, the FDIC to insure bank deposits and circuit breakers to keep stocks from falling too quickly, and you can see why this is not a depression in any way shape or form.

While I am at it, I would like to take issue with the almost ubiquitous use of the word "bailout" to describe the government's rescue package.
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