Al Gore Tells Techpreneurs Some Truths They May Not Want to Hear About Inequality

By David Sirota

June 13, 2014  |  Inequality and democracy are the kind of topics you may expect to hear about at a political convention, but not necessarily at a tech industry conference. And so former Vice President Al Gore's discussion at Nashville's tech-focused Southland Conference this week could be viewed in context as a jeremiad spotlighting taboo truths about tech culture and philanthropic traditions.

Discussing the economy, Gore lamented that "we have rising levels of inequality and chronic underinvestment" in public programs. He reminded the crowd that when "95 percent of all the additional national income in the U.S., since the recovery began in '09, goes to the top one percent, that's not an Occupy Wall Street slogan, that's a fact."

The 5 Craziest Planks In Draft Texas GOP Platform: Ban Morning After Pill, Ending Direct Election Of Senators, Defunding ACORN

Submitted by Brian Tashman on Thursday, 6/5/2014 11:50 am

According to a draft party platform obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the Texas Republican Party is ready to support a sweeping right-wing agenda with planks related to the “Benghazi cover up,” the elimination of the minimum wage and “the myth of separation of church and state.”

Voting

Not only does the draft platform advocate for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration and the Departments of Education and Energy, but it also calls for an end to the direct election of U.S. Senators:

Full Repeal of the 17th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: Return the appointment of U.S. Senators by the State Legislatures.

While the state GOP wants Texas voters to lose their right to elect their U.S. senators, the party does on the other hand “support our right to select our judges by direct vote.”

Paul Krugman: A Failed Critique of Piketty

The economist Thomas Piketty has replied at length to the attempted takedown of his work in Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Chris Giles, the economics editor at The Financial Times, and he has done it very effectively. Essentially, Mr. Giles tried to compare apples and oranges, and the result was a lemon.

The central point here is one that's familiar to anyone who works at length on inequality issues. We have two kinds of data on distribution of both income and wealth: surveys, in which people are asked what they make or own, and tax data.

What Was the Evidence in the Vergara Case? Who Wins? Who Loses?

By diane ravitch

June 11, 2014

Judge Rolf M. Treu, who decided the Vergara case , declared that he was shocked, shocked to learn from Professor Raj Chetty and Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard about the enormous harm that one “grossly ineffective” teacher can do to a child’s lifetime earnings or to their academic gains.

How did he define “grossly ineffective” teacher? He didn’t. How did these dreadful teachers get tenure? Clearly, some grossly incompetent principal must have granted it to them. What was the basis–factual or theoretical–that the students would have had high scores if their teachers did not have the right to due process? He didn’t say.

Paul Krugman: The Fix Isn't In

Eric Cantor and the Death of a Movement

How big a deal is the surprise primary defeat of Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader? Very. Movement conservatism, which dominated American politics from the election of Ronald Reagan to the election of Barack Obama — and which many pundits thought could make a comeback this year — is unraveling before our eyes.

I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.

Gaius Publius: Carbon tax should replace cap-and-trade — better emissions benefit, better economic benefit

In talking about how to eliminate carbon emissions, I’ve written about three general methods:

Ask for change.
Encourage change.
Force change.

We’re well beyond asking, so encouragement seems the next step. (Psst: I’m a fan of force, given the urgency.)

Encouraging this kind of change — eliminating carbon emissions — comes in a couple of forms. Some work more like mild requests, and others shade more toward serious pressure. We looked at one common “free-market” method — “cap and trade” — here, with help from an excellent League of Women Voters webpage.

Juan Cole: The Fall of Mosul and the False Promises of Modern History

The fall of Mosul to the radical, extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a set of historical indictments. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, population roughly 2 million (think Houston) until today, when much of the population was fleeing. While this would-be al-Qaeda affiliate took part of Falluja and Ramadi last winter, those are smaller, less consequential places and in Falluja tribal elders persuaded the prime minister not to commit the national army to reducing the city.

It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time.

Elizabeth Warren faces right-wing stooge: Here’s who’s quietly funding her top critic

Matthew Chingos of Brookings hates the senator's student loan plan. He's getting paid big time to do it 

(UPDATED) David Dayen

Today, the Senate votes on Elizabeth Warren’s bill to refinance previously issued student loans to current rates, which would save borrowers $55 billion over 10 years. The bill is designed to play up a contrast between the two parties on student aid; it’s not going to pass. And ultimately we need to give young people a free or near-free public option for higher education, rather than modestly subsidize the indebtedness that causes delays in major purchases and harm to the economy. But you could certainly do worse than reducing the massive amount of money the government makes off student borrowers (and I don’t think you have to pay for it; an investment in higher ed pays off itself in the long run).

That’s not how Matthew Chingos of the Brookings Institution sees it. Since Sen. Warren entered public office last year, Chingos has been one of her most persistent critics on higher education issues, calling her proposals “embarrassingly bad” and “not as progressive as it seems.” Chingos, with his affiliation with a centrist think tank, often gets cited in the media as an objective source in the student loan debate.

If You Want to Know the Truth About Charter Schools, Follow the Money to the Hedge Funds

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

The Washington Post is not known for exposing the greed, gluttony and financial exploitation of the masters of the universe who run our economy. However, last week, it did focus on an important engine for the growth in the white elite's supercharged drive to privatize public education through charter schools: hedge funds.

Yes, BuzzFlash and Truthout have extensively detailed the flaws behind the concept of charter schools somehow magically changing the urban educational landscape - without resolving the decades-old economic abandonment of large expanses of cities, as well as the incarceration-industrial complex that feeds on minority imprisonment. We've detailed studies that show a lot of money is being made off of shortchanging students in charter schools and pocketing profit (or paying high administration salaries in nonprofit charter schools, as well as their politically connected subcontracting to for-profit consultants and vendors.) We've shown that many analyses find that charter schools perform well in their first year, but then actually trail behind public schools in the Washington DC ultimate measure of education: test results.

A Disappeared Book on Wall Street History Provides a Dead Serious Warning

By Pam Martens: June 11, 2014

Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for some time now that much of Wall Street’s past and current history has up and disappeared – either at the hands of high speed shredders on orders from the SEC, or through Courts sealing documents, or Wall Street’s private justice system preventing access to hearings, non-disparagement contracts when you change your job on Wall Street, or critical pieces of Wall Street history just go missing and no one can find out exactly why. Now we learn that a vital book on Wall Street’s history had vanished until an NYU Professor made it his mission to return it to the public’s hands.

Paul Krugman: An Ambitious Plan for Climate Change

I recently had a discussion with someone who felt disappointed in President Obama; he had not, this person complained, lived up to the high hopes of his supporters. My response apparently came as a surprise: I'm liking Mr. Obama more and more as he slogs through his second term.

Of course you're disappointed if you believed that soaring rhetoric could transform our political life, or if you believed that Mr. Obama could, by sheer force of will, turn crazy right-wingers into centrists. But I never bought into all of that. In fact, I was always exasperated by the inspiring speeches, which suggested to me that Mr. Obama didn't understand what he was facing.

'Citizen Koch' and the Oligarchic Slide

Jacob Silverman
June 2, 2014

It takes about $99,000 to buy a Democratic congressman. That’s one of the grim factoids we learn in Citizen Koch, the new documentary from directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. That particular insight comes from James Bopp, who would know pay from payola; the conservative boffin has acted as a lawyer and advisor for a range of influential organizations, from the Republican Governors Association to Citizens United.

In the film’s impassioned telling, we owe the existence of this institutionalized corruption to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the 2010 Supreme Court case during which, in a five-to-four decision, the Court struck down any bans on corporate and union spending on behalf of candidates.

Google’s New All-Seeing Satellites Have Huge Potential—For Good and Evil

By Marcus Wohlsen | 06.11.14 | 6:30 am

The reach of Google’s online empire is hard to overstate. In a sense, the Google search engine is the loom through which the entirety of the public internet is woven. With tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs, the company also handles many of our private online tasks. Using the data generated by these services to target online ads, Google has built a business that generates tens of billions of dollars a year.

Now, with the $500 million purchase of Skybox, a startup that shoots high-res photos and video with low-cost satellites, Google can extend its reach far across the offline world. Thanks to its knack for transforming mass quantities of unstructured data into revenue-generating insights, the unprecedented stream of aerial imagery to which the company is gaining access could spark a whole new category of high-altitude insights into the workings of economies, nations, and nature itself.

The Dark Money Machine That Beat Eric Cantor

Wednesday, 11 June 2014 15:23
By The Daily Take Team, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past twenty-four hours, you know by now that Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, lost his primary election last night to a little-known college professor named David Brat.

This was a shocking upset, one that no one saw coming. So ever since news broke about Cantor's defeat at roughly around 8 P.M. last night, the Beltway media has been trying to get to the bottom of just why exactly someone like him, someone so well-connected and established, lost to someone like David Brat, who spent less on his campaign than Cantor spent on steaks.

Polarizing Plutocracy: Our Broken Higher Education System

Kathleen Geier
June 5, 2014

The American political system is broken, and one unmistakable sign of it is our inability to bring down soaring levels of student debt or to regulate predatory for-profit colleges. The best solution the Obama administration has been able to propose in this area is a college ratings system that would evaluate colleges on the basis of factors like graduation rates and graduates’ earnings and debt loads.

Frankly, the idea that a ratings system will fix what ails American higher education is a little nuts. It views education as if it were a market like any other, and treats colleges like consumer products. “It’s like rating a blender,” burbled Education Department official Jamienne Studley last week to the New York Times. But while blenders can be tested in a lab, employment statistics can be all too easy to game, as anyone who’s followed recent reporting about bogus law school employment rates can attest.

Trafficked Teachers: Neoliberalism’s Latest Labor Source

BY George Joseph

Between 2007 and 2009, 350 Filipino teachers arrived in Louisiana, excited for the opportunity to teach math and science in public schools throughout the state. They’d been recruited through a company called Universal Placement International Inc., which professes on its website to “successfully place teachers in different schools thru out [sic] the United States.” As a lawsuit later revealed, however, their journey through the American public school system was fraught with abuse.

According to court documents, Lourdes Navarro, chief recruiter and head of Universal Placement, made applicants pay a whopping $12,550 in interview and “processing fees” before they’d even left the Philippines. But the exploitation didn’t stop there. After the teachers landed in LAX, they were required to sign contracts paying back 10 percent of their first and second years’’ salaries; those who refused were threatened with instant deportation.

The Fox Effect: Viewers Are More Uninformed About Immigration

Sahil Kapur – June 10, 2014, 12:07 PM EDT

Americans who most trust Fox News are more likely to be uninformed about the immigration system and less likely to support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants than those who trust other news sources, according to a sweeping new study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution and Public Religion Research Institute.

Of the Americans who trust Fox News to give them the most accurate information about politics and current events, just 12 percent correctly believe that deportations have increased under the Obama administration, said the study, which measured cultural attitudes toward immigration in 2014. Overall, 25 percent of Americans correctly said deportations have risen.

Good Enough for Government Work

Conservatism in the tank

Jim Newell

When Sen. Jim DeMint, the upper chamber’s godfather of Tea Party nihilism, abruptly announced his retirement from his lawmaking career and his plans to take over as president of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, the consensus in Washington was that this was a step down for a guy who had never done all that much in the first place. For goodness’ sake, the pundits wailed, what legacy does this man think he’s leaving behind? What authorship can he claim for any significant—or, for that matter, trivial or failed—piece of legislation? He must be going from do-nothing legislator, the thinking went, to a sinecure outside the official branches of power purely for the money. The money! What a useless person that Jim DeMint is, and ever shall be.

So far as it goes, this appraisal of DeMint’s legacy is accurate enough—he’s the sort of lawmaking mediocrity who makes, say, Montana’s onetime senator-cum-Abramoff-bagman Conrad Burns look like Daniel Webster. But measuring DeMint’s career move on the usual Washington grid of legislative achievement also completely misses the point.

Magnetic cooling enables efficient, 'green' refrigeration

A team of Canadian-Bulgarian researchers has developed a promising novel approach for magnetic cooling that's far more efficient and 'greener' than today's standard fluid-compression form of refrigeration

WASHINGTON D.C., June 10, 2014 – Magnetic cooling is a promising new refrigeration technology boasting several advantages – ranging from lower energy consumption to eliminating the use of hazardous fluids – that combine to make it a much more environmentally friendly option than today's standard fluid-compression form of refrigeration.

One novel magnetic cooling approach, developed by a team of Canadian-Bulgarian researchers, relies on solid magnetic substances called magnetocaloric materials to act as the refrigerant in miniaturized magnetic refrigerators. As the team describes in the journal Applied Physics Letters,from AIP Publishing, these materials are the key to the development of a "green" cooling technology whose efficiency is able to scale directly with the generated magnetocaloric effect.

The French are right: tear up public debt – most of it is illegitimate anyway

Debt audits show that austerity is politically motivated to favour social elites. Is a new working-class internationalism in the air?

Razmig Keucheyan
theguardian.com, Monday 9 June 2014 12.17 EDT

As history has shown, France is capable of the best and the worst, and often in short periods of time.

On the day following Marine Le Pen's Front National victory in the European elections, however, France made a decisive contribution to the reinvention of a radical politics for the 21st century. On that day, the committee for a citizen's audit on the public debt issued a 30-page report on French public debt, its origins and evolution in the past decades. The report was written by a group of experts in public finances under the coordination of Michel Husson, one of France's finest critical economists. Its conclusion is straightforward: 60% of French public debt is illegitimate.

Anyone who has read a newspaper in recent years knows how important debt is to contemporary politics. As David Graeber among others has shown, we live in debtocracies, not democracies. Debt, rather than popular will, is the governing principle of our societies, through the devastating austerity policies implemented in the name of debt reduction. Debt was also a triggering cause of the most innovative social movements in recent years, the Occupy movement.

Larry Summers’ Contradictory and Dishonest Defense of Administration’s Bank-Focused Crisis Response

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Yves Smith

If you are going to succeed in rewriting history, a necessary condition is that the public doesn’t remember it very well. Unfortunately, that requirement is not in place for the architects of the Administration’s blatantly bank-friendly crisis responses.

Timothy Geithner’s book Stress Test, in which he tries selling the idea that rescuing the banks was unsavory but necessary, and wanting to hold individuals accountable was a mere desire vengeance, is not only doing poorly in terms of sales, but is producing pushback on multiple fronts. Not only have quite a few reviewers taken issue with Geithner’s sense of priorities and his factual claims, but he’s gotten raspberries from the public. If you look at the one-star Amazon reviews, for instance, a large portion come from people who state that they haven’t read the book but have such antipathy to Geithner that they want to discourage everyone from buying it. Similarly, a sympathetic interview of Geithner by Andrew Ross Sorkin elicited overwhelmingly negative (and often extremely articulate and detailed) comments from New York Times readers.

The slow process of turning the US into a low wage McJobs nation

US breaks even with jobs lost since 2007, those not in the labor force jumps nearly 13 million, and 1 out of 4 is working for $10 an hour or less

The US is slowly becoming a McJob nation. While the press jumps up and down that the US is now finally at a breakeven point from the jobs lost since the recession started in 2007, they fail to mention that those not in the labor force is up by nearly 13 million. Even looking into the recent employment report, we continue to find a heavy trend of hiring in low wage employment sectors. For example, 32,000 jobs were added in “leisure and hospitality” bringing the annual total of jobs added to 311,000. Another 21,000 jobs were added in social assistance which pay very little but will grow as demand for health support grows by an aging population. The system at least in the eyes of Wall Street and the government is working perfectly fine. We have a plentiful supply of low wage labor while laws and bailout mechanisms are in place for the financially and politically connected. The middle class continues to fall off the bandwagon one by one and enters a labor force of permanent low wage labor with very little prospect of a decent retirement. In fact, most will be working until all the wheels come flying off. We also find that 1 out of 4 Americans are working in jobs that pay $10 or less per hour. How about trying to earn the Americans Dream on that McJob salary?

Thomas Frank: Colleges are full of it--Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media

Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping

The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.

On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”

Larry Summers Should Keep His Mouth Shut

Posted on June 9, 2014 by James Kwak

Larry Summers is well on his way to rehabilitating his public image as a brilliant intellectual, moving on from his checkered record as president of Harvard University and as President Obama’s chief economic adviser during the first years of the administration. Unfortunately, he can’t resist taking on his critics—and he can’t do it without letting his debating instincts take over.

I was reading his review of House of Debt by Mian and Sufi. Everything seemed reasonable until I got to this passage justifying the steps taken to bail out the financial system:

“The government got back substantially more money than it invested. All of the senior executives who created these big messes were out of their jobs within a year. And stockholders lost 90 per cent or more of their investments in all the institutions that required special treatment by the government.”

I have no doubt that every word in this passage is true in some meaninglessly narrow sense or other. But on the whole it is simply false.

Paul Krugman: Interests, Ideology And Climate

There are three things we know about man-made global warming. First, the consequences will be terrible if we don’t take quick action to limit carbon emissions. Second, in pure economic terms the required action shouldn’t be hard to take: emission controls, done right, would probably slow economic growth, but not by much. Third, the politics of action are nonetheless very difficult.

But why is it so hard to act? Is it the power of vested interests?

How the Private Equity Industry Is Looting the Middle Class 

By David Sirota

June 9, 2014  |  A few weeks ago, a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission reported on what he called a "remarkable" amount of potentially illegal behavior in the private equity industry -- aka the industry that buys up, changes and sells off smaller companies.

In its evaluation of private equity firms, the SEC official declared that half of all the reviews discovered "violations of law or material weaknesses in controls." The announcement followed an earlier Bloomberg News report on how the agency now believes "a majority of private equity firms inflate fees and expenses charged to companies in which they hold stakes."

At first glance, many probably dismiss this news as just an example of plutocrats bilking plutocrats. But that interpretation ignores how such malfeasance affects the wider economy.

The Biggest Policy Mistake of the Great Recession

By David Dayen, The Fiscal Times
June 6, 2014

The popular conception of the Great Recession explains that it stemmed from a financial shock. Housing prices stopped going up, and then Lehman Brothers fell, triggering paralysis in the credit markets. This spilled onto Main Street, and the effects still linger in terms of elevated unemployment and sluggish economic growth.

But this history of the recession can’t be right, say two economics professors who have studied the data. In their new book House of Debt, Amir Sufi of the University of Chicago and Atif Mian of Princeton point out that consumer purchases dropped sharply well before the September 2008 Lehman bankruptcy, and most deeply in places where home prices fell the most. They found that steeper declines in net worth — many homeowners were completely wiped out by falling home prices — led to far sharper reductions in consumer spending, and bigger job losses. But even those with no debt suffer when fire-sale foreclosures drop home prices, and lower overall demand spreads out across the country.

How Do Hedge Funds Get Away With It? Eight Theories

Posted by John Cassidy

The other day, I asked how hedge funds manage to bestow such great riches on their managers despite the fact that, in many cases, their performance seems pretty ordinary. That got quite a reaction. The responses ranged from claims that hedgies are remunerated perfectly appropriately to charges that they are outright crooks who prey on gullible and greedy investors. Because the industry has grown enormously in recent years—according to one industry source, hedge funds now manage about $2.1 trillion of capital, a good deal of which comes from pension funds and charitable endowments—it’s not a trivial matter which of these explanations is the most accurate.

Ralph Nader: Corporate Contractors' Heavy Burdens on Taxpayers

Next time you hear federal officials say that there is no money to repair or build necessary public facilities in your community, ask them why there always seems to be money to greatly overpay for government projects that are routinely outsourced to corporate contractors.

It is important to understand why incomplete projects such as the proposed campus-like Department of Homeland Security in Washington, D.C., the “cleanup” of the biggest repository of radioactive waste in the U.S. at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Southeastern Washington State, the ballistic missile defense program and the pie-in-the-sky fusion reactors have gone way over budget. They are either behind schedule, or without any clue for completion or cessation.

Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance

Wires allow agencies to listen to or record live conversations, in what privacy campaigners are calling a 'nightmare scenario'

Juliette Garside
The Guardian, Thursday 5 June 2014

Vodafone, one of the world's largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.

The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday. At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.

Who Is Behind the National Right to Work Committee and Its Anti-Union Crusade?

Thursday, 05 June 2014 00:00
By Jay Riestenberg and Mary Bottari, PRWatch | News Analysis

As the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 session comes to a close, one of the major cases left for a decision is Harris vs. Quinn,which could effect millions of public sector workers in the United States.

The case originates in Illinois, where home health care workers have been successfully organized by public sector unions. Now, a small group of these workers, represented by lawyers from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, have sued and their lawyers contend that the agency fees, or the fair share dues that even non-union members of a bargaining unit are required to pay to unions that bargain for higher wages on their behalf, violate the First Amendment. Agency fees are barred in so-called "right to work" states, which have much less unionization and lower wages and benefits.

Fukushima’s Children are Dying

Harvey Wasserman | June 14, 2014 10:11 am

Some 39 months after the multiple explosions at Fukushima, thyroid cancer rates among nearby children have skyrocketed to more than forty times (40x) normal.

More than 48 percent of some 375,000 young people—nearly 200,000 kids—tested by the Fukushima Medical University near the smoldering reactors now suffer from pre-cancerous thyroid abnormalities, primarily nodules and cysts. The rate is accelerating.

How Acidification, Overfishing and Plastics Threaten the World’s Oceans

Dr. David Suzuki | June 3, 2014 7:39 pm

June 8 is World Oceans Day. It’s a fitting time to contemplate humanity’s evolving relationship with the source of all life. For much of human history, we’ve affected marine ecosystems primarily by what we’ve taken out of the seas. The challenge as we encounter warming temperatures and increasing industrial activity will be to manage what we put into them.

World Ocean Day: As the late American marine biologist, author and conservationist Rachel Carson wrote, “It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist: the threat is rather to life itself.”

As a top predator, humans from the tropics to the poles have harvested all forms of marine life, from the smallest shrimp to the largest whales, from the ocean’s surface to its floor.  

Paul Krugman: The Unlucky Unemployed

Matt O'Brien, a reporter at The Washington Post, recently wrote an interesting, if depressing, article on long-term unemployment in the United States, making the point that it is basically a matter of bad luck: if someone gets laid off in a bad economy, he has a hard time finding a new job; and the longer he stays unemployed, the harder it becomes to find work.

Obviously I agree with this analysis - and I'd add that Mr. O'Brien's results more or less decisively refute the alternative story, which is that the long-term unemployed (people who have been without a job for six months or more) are workers with a problem.