39% of financial advisers support OWS

It's important to note that financial advisers were not the prime recipients of the Wall Street bailout, so there has to be some bad blood already between the traders and the people selling the products to the public. Financial advisers have certainly heard an earful from their customers who were first walloped by the crash in 2008 and then tossed around by the unpredictable market ever since. We have been in a market that has benefited mostly the traders and not as much by the general investing public.

Business Insider:

According to the results of an exclusive InvestmentNews online survey of 350 advisers, 58.2% said they disagree with the views expressed by the Occupy Wall Street protesters. Meanwhile, 38.8% of advisers said they agree with the views of the protesters and 3% said they were unfamiliar with Occupy Wall Street.

And take one guess what the financial advisers think about tax increases for the wealthy? Read the rest of this post...

Farmers struggling to find workers

So there are actual consequences to the excessive immigration policies. Go figure.

Depending upon which government unemployment figure you follow, nearly one in five Americans is unemployed. Yet at harvest time farmers are finding that the only willing labor has to come from a nearby penitentiary.

In Idaho, farm labor is so scarce, convicts from the minimum-security St. Anthony Work Camp are picking, sorting and packing spuds for $7.50 an hour and happy to have work outside the prison walls. “The best part is you have the influence of the real world, which eventually we’re all going back to,” said Thomas Alworth, a 36-year-old convicted of grand theft by possession.

Convict labor in Arizona is up 30 percent this year, with Arizona’s tough immigration law a primary reason. “The crackdown on immigrants just makes it so hard” to find workers, said Richard Selapack, vice president for labor contracts at the Arizona Department of Corrections.

Read the rest of this post...

Jobless rate fell in half the states

AP:

The Labor Department says unemployment rates dropped in 25 states, rose in 14 and stayed the same in 11. That's a modest improvement from August, when unemployment rose in 26 states.

Nationwide, employers added 103,000 net jobs in September, nearly double the number created in August.

The problem is that it's not enough jobs to lower the unemployment rate. This is pretty much what folks were predicting, that the economy would limp along wounded for a long time coming.  And with a divided Congress, and the Republicans consistently filibustering anything substantive that could help the economy, expect it to remain this way for a long time.  The GOP sees no benefit in helping the economy before the 2012 election.  And it's time Democrats publicly called them on this. Read the rest of this post...

Alec Baldwin talks about capitalism at OWS

Despite the annoying Ron Paul supporter, it's an interesting conversation. The issues that he discusses such as the need for capital markets and the failure of the SEC is probably how many Americans feel. This is why OWS has enjoyed such enormous popular support. Read the rest of this post...

Wal-Mart reverses health insurance program; drops spouses from many policies

Nobody can deny that health insurance costs have a high cost for business, but this is a major step in the wrong direction. Whether you like Wal-Mart or not, their decisions have a large impact in the US so this should be a big red flag for the health insurance problem and the US economy. After receiving a lot of bad press in the past for its health insurance policies, Wal-Mart went on the offensive to improve its image. They have to know that rolling back these changes will come with a price, yet they still went ahead it. This gives you some indication as to how bad the problem is in terms of cost.

If anything, this move reinforces the urgency of needing a public option. The so-called "free market" for health insurance is anything but free and it's crushing the US. If the public option was so bad and so anti-American, obviously no one would buy it. Rolling back Obamacare or doing nothing is not an option. NY Times:

Citing rising costs, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, told its employees this week that all future part-time employees who work less than 24 hours a week on average will no longer qualify for any of the company’s health insurance plans.

In addition, any new employees who average 24 hours to 33 hours a week will no longer be able to include a spouse as part of their health care plan, although children can still be covered.

This is a big shift from just a few years ago when Wal-Mart expanded coverage for employees and their families after facing criticism because so many of its 1.4 million workers could not afford or did not qualify for coverage — rendering many of them eligible for Medicaid.

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Obama, Romney & reporting Wall St money

Over at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right's Field, I take a look at the dueling New York Times and Washington Post reports about whether President Obama or Mitt Romney have received more money from Wall Street. The Times says Romney has received more than Obama, but the Post says Obama has received more than all Republican candidates combined. Who's right? Find out at The Right's Field! Read the rest of this post...

I’m just not sure I care whether Gaddafi was summarily executed

Slate:

A U.N. panel set up earlier this year to investigate abuses in Libya said it wanted to take a closer look at how Qaddafi was killed, but that it was too early to tell if the panel would push for a formal investigation at the national or international level.

The spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters in Geneva that there remain questions about whether Qaddafi was killed during a skirmish between his security detail and the revolutionaries, as Libya’s prime minister suggested Thursday, or whether he was executed.

“The two cell phone videos that have emerged, one of him alive, and one of him dead, taken together are very disturbing," he said, according to the AP.

I know I'm supposed to care whether Gaddafi was executed (i.e., was captured and then summarily shot even though it wasn't necessary), but I really don't.

He was a bad man who killed a lot of people.  And he was more than just a "bad" man - lots of people are bad men, and we don't sanction them being summarily shot - Gaddafi was different, he was a dictator.  And I don't shed a tear for him.  Just like I don't shed a tear for Soviet puppet Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife being given a show trial and then shot on Christmas day of 1989.  That was a great day for the world.

I get it.  I'm a lawyer.  We can't sanction lawlessness simply because we think a particular situation is an exception, lest someone else make their own poorly chosen exceptions to the law (and one could argue that Ceausecu's execution was handled just the way he handled many an execution during his own reign of terror - though I'm not entirely sure that that's an argument against summarily shooting the man).  I just feel that things are different during war time, and they're especially different when you're dealing with a despot.

Now, how do you distinguish this from war crimes?  I'm not entirely sure.  Though, in my view, war crimes apply less to how a leader is treated than his followers (i.e., the military and the citizens).  And the distinction becomes even greater when the leader is a despot.  And yes, we all have different definitions of despot.  And some would call the US president (possibly even the current one, certainly the former one) a despot.  So would I sanction similarly harsh treatment of our leaders?  No I wouldn't. And I get that it's contradictory, I'm just putting it out there.

I'm not saying that I have a bullet-proof argument, pun intended.  I'm simply admitting that while I know legally we shouldn't condone summary executions, I think I have a pretty good moral compass and I just don't get that worked up about it when the target of an execution is a bin Laden or a Ceausecu.  And I'm at pains to understand how their summary deaths make the world, or the rule of law, any worse off. Read the rest of this post...

Breaking: Obama says All US troops are leaving Iraq by the end of the year

Okay, that was a surprise. From CNN (via email):

The United States will withdraw almost all its troops from Iraq by the end of the year, as a current agreement with Iraq dictates, a U.S. official told CNN on Friday. Only about 150 troops, a negligible force, will remain to assist in arms sales. The United States had expected that some of the roughly 40,000 Americans in Iraq would remain there to aid in training and security. But the two nations were unable to reach a deal on a key issue regarding legal immunity for U.S. troops, a senior U.S. military official with direct knowledge of the discussions told CNN this month.

More from the Washington Post.

Have to admit, I never thought it would happen. As lousy as the economy is going, I have to say that Obama has wrapped up some darn good foreign successes over the past year.

ABC's Jake Tapper tweets, "WH says 4-5,000 security contractors will remain in Iraq." Sounds like Blackwater. I'd like to see the cost of that. Read the rest of this post...

Obama nominates big bank critic to FDIC board

Does this mean someone is starting to listen? It's been obvious that we went from "too big to fail" to even bigger, but few in the political class showed any interest in changing the dynamics of a troubled industry. Unless we want a 2008 repeat, or worse, the it's not possible for the banks to stay as they are today.  This nomination is a good step in the right direction (now let's see if he survives the GOP Senate's permanent filibuster on everything).

The White House said Obama tapped former Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Thomas Hoenig to be vice chairman of the board of directors of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, a regulator that insures individual bank accounts up to $250,000.

Hoenig has been a critic of large banks, arguing they still pose a threat to the financial system and that the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial oversight law did not do enough to address the issue.

"We must make sure that large financial organizations are not in position to hold the U.S. economy hostage," Hoenig told a meeting of the Women in Housing and Finance in February. "We must break up the largest banks."

Read the rest of this post...

Goldman exec: US economy better than people realize

Talk about living in a bubble. Of course things look rosy for Goldman Sachs Asset Management Chairman Jim O'Neill. With the bonus pool deep into the billions yet again, these people haven't had a sniff of the real world in ages. Things could definitely be worse but it's really a stretch to even attempt to suggest the US economy is not in bad shape.

"There is such an ingrained negative mood internally in the U.S. about itself," he told CNBC Thursday. "People now seem to be convinced that Europe is going to drag the U.S. down. That might happen, but there is a strong likelihood that it won’t."

The U.S. "has coped pretty well with Japan going 20 years without any growth. So why does Europe having problems definitely mean the U.S. goes back into serious trouble?"

The U.S. is "doing a lot better than the mood appears to be. There seems to be this mood around an inevitability about the next course or we’re back in recession or close to it. I don’t really buy that," O'Neill said, adding he sees "no momentum for a recession."

Uh huh. Let's remember how well Wall Street predicted the last recession. Read the rest of this post...

Wash Post: Will Romney’s Mormonism hurt him in the GOP primaries

Interesting analysis from the Washington Post:

[O]ver six in 10 said Mormonism is “very different” from their religion; that is almost as many as said Islam is very different.

More than a third of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said Mormonism is not a Christian religion in the Pew survey. And while only 14 percent of Republicans who believe Mormonism is a Christian religion say they are “less likely” to support a Mormon, that jumps to 40 percent of those who say the religion does not match up to Christianity. For the record, both Romney and Mormons see themselves as Christians.

The criticism that Mormons are not Christians appears to have legs as an attack on Romney, according to John C. Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron. In a survey experiment, Green and his colleagues gave some voters a short biographical description of Romney, while others read his biography along with the fact that he was a local leader in the Mormon Church. They found that voters who read about his involvement in the Mormon Church said they were less likely to vote for him than those who hadn’t read that information. This effect was largest among those who said that Mormons are not Christians.

Keep in mind that a lot of evangelicals - aka the religious right - don't think Catholics are Christians. Imagine how they really feel about Mormons, but might not be willing to tell a pollster. Read the rest of this post...

Are Osama and Gaddafi Obama’s national security trump cards for the campaign?

HuffPost Hill:

OBAMA CAMPAIGN DEVISING WAYS TO ARTFULLY POINT AT DEAD GUYS AND SAY, 'HEY, LOOK AT THOSE DEAD GUYS!' - Muammar Gaddafi is dead: The world no longer has a leader who can show us what Michael Jackson might have looked like at 90. Now the White House must find a way to not take credit for Col. Mashedpotatoface's demise while, you know, taking credit for it. Sam Stein: "Obama advisers and those who serve as consultants to his re-election team have considered how to effectively highlight the president's foreign policy successes in the context of a campaign. The general consensus seems to be that his track record can be leveraged in two ways. First and most basically, it can be used to nullify attacks from Republicans. When, for example, Mitt Romney ripped into Obama's stewardship of foreign affairs during a high-profile speech several weeks ago, campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt responded in not-so-subtle-fashion...'It is a character issue,' explained Anita Dunn, former Communications Director for the Obama White House and an adviser to the re-election campaign, 'it is a presidential attribute issue, and it is a leadership issue.' As Dunn argues, the killing of bin Laden and the death of Gaddafi provide effective, thematic counterpoints both to Democrats who question Obama's resolve and Republicans who question his results."

More from Sam Stein at HuffPo:

"If it weren't for the economy, this would all be a powerful boost to the president's reelection," said Bob Shrum, the longtime Democratic adviser who wrote Kerry's memorable 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, in which the Senator said he was "reporting for duty."

"[Obama] put to rest the idea that Democrats are weak on national security," he added. "But to quote Al Gore, elections are not a reward for past performance ... I don't think in any event [Obama] would be able to say, 'Vote for me because I've done this.' But people would get a sense of his strength of character and all the rest of it which I think will help a lot."

Indeed, it's a bad bit of political fortune that the president has made such strides in his foreign policy agenda at a time when few voters seem to actually be paying attention. But during a time of deep unemployment and concerns about the country's fiscal trajectory, there is little room to focus on much else.

"It is impressive what he has done on national security -- even bin Laden alone -- but also deft in the way he has handled the Arab Spring, Libya, getting out of Iraq was a big deal," said Jim Gerstein, a Democratic pollster and strategist who has done extensive work on national security and foreign policy polling. "Politically, [the timing] is unfortunate. You just can't understate how hard it is economically for people right now."

I think both are right. This helps to inoculate Obama against GOP attacks on national security, but at the same time the number one concern Americans have is the economy. And if the Republicans keep voting against economic proposals the people like, like they did last night, Obama and the Dems in Congress can turn this around. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Midnight sun in Iceland

A neat video filmed in Iceland over a period of a few weeks during the summer when the sun never sets.  I was in Sweden in the summer when the sun did set, but it was still a bright twilight for a few hours until it rose again.  It was very strange.  I kept getting out of my hotel bed to look out the window again and again to see if it would ever get completely dark.  It didn't.

Click image to see video.

Read the rest of this post...