Category: employment

It’s Jobless Thursday

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Last week, initial unemployment claims fell to 444,000, down 34,000 from last week.

Once again, it’s an improvement, but with the rush of the stupid states to roll back unemployment benefits, I expect the pace of improvement slow down in those states: 

The number of workers seeking and receiving unemployment benefits through state and federal programs has reached pandemic lows ahead of this summer, when 22 states plan to end a $300 federal benefit early.

Initial unemployment claims through regular state programs dropped to 444,000 last week, marking a new low level since the pandemic hit in mid-March 2020.

The number of people claiming benefits through state and pandemic-related programs also declined in the week ended May 1 to a pandemic low of 16 million people from 16.9 million a week earlier, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That includes benefits through one of several programs, including regular state aid and federal emergency programs put in place in response to the pandemic.

………

Though jobless claims are on a downward trend, April’s job gain of 266,000 fell far short of the one million economists had forecast, fueling concerns about the recovery. Republicans also are concerned that enhanced federal unemployment payments are discouraging people from seeking work.

The low job creation numbers are a fly in the ointment.

States have announced dates ranging from mid-June to mid-July for when they will stop processing pandemic-related benefits. That means nearly 3.7 million individuals could lose the $300 weekly benefits—which were set to expire in early September—beginning in mid-June, according to estimates by forecasting firm Oxford Economics.

Of those, about 1.45 million will also lose pandemic benefits for gig work, and about 1.31 million will no longer have access to extended benefits that kick in after claimants exhaust their regular state benefits.

This is the whole Brood X Cicada emergence in the ointment.

This recovery is driven by government spending, and because they fetishize being cruel, they are knocking the pins out from underneath the recovery.

Sadism as policy is never a good thing.

That’s How You Do It

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In Pennsylvania, the procedure for approving charter schools is that they first apply to the local school district, and if they are denied, they can appeal to the Charter School Appeals Board, which has been staffed by right-wing anti-public education goons for years.

The Republican led legislature has refused to consider replacements on the boards nominated by Democratic Governor Tom Wolf.

After 7 years of delay, Wolf has fired the entire board, which means that it can no longer overrule school board decisions on charters, because there is no one to hold a meeting.

Wolf has nominated replacements, all of whom come from a background in public schools, so not the legislature can appoint his nominees, who might not vote to overrule local school boards, or not appoint anyone, which means that all appeals are effectively denied:

………

It took Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, seven years to fire his predecessor’s appointments and nominate replacements to the CAB.

Yet the GOP legislature is crying crocodile tears that he’s exceeding his authority by doing so.

The board is supposed to be a place where charter schools can challenge decisions made by their local school boards.

Charters are schools that are funded by taxpayer dollars but can be privately operated.

They have to ask the local school board for permission to open a new school in their district. Since the new charter would double services already present at the existent public school and require both schools to split existing funding, there is little incentive for school boards to grant these requests.

But charters can bypass local government by going to the CAB. Or at least they could when the board still had sitting members on it.

The CAB consists of the Secretary of Education and six members who are appointed by the Governor and approved by the state senate.

However, closed door negotiations with the Republican controlled senate over who they would even consider approving over the years continually stopped Wolf from putting people forward as official nominees.

After all, why would Republicans work with Wolf? What incentive did they have to do so?

Refusing to work with the Democratic Governor kept the previous Republican Governor’s appointees in place long after their tenure should have expired.

This kept the CAB ideologically right wing so the members could rubber stamp charter schools left and right bypassing the will of duly elected school boards all over the Commonwealth.

………

The far right love crying “Wolf” and blaming everything on the Governor, but make no mistake – gridlock is exactly what they want.

That’s why Wolf’s action on CAB is so clever.

By firing the remaining members of the board, Wolf has functionally erased it from existence.

If the senate wants there to be a charter school appeals board, lawmakers need to vote on his nominees.

Wolf has nominated the following people to the board:

-Jodi Schwartz, a school board member from the Central Bucks School District

-Shanna Danielson, a teacher in the East Pennsboro School District in Cumberland County and former state senate candidate

-Stacey Marten, a teacher in the Hempfield School District in Lancaster County

-Ghadah Makoshi, a business owner and former candidate for Pittsburgh’s school board

-Nathan Barrett, superintendent of the Hanover Area School District in Luzerne County

………. 

In the meantime, there are at least nine cases scheduled to be decided by CAB from Souderton, Southeast Delco, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg and Philadelphia. And that’s not even counting a recent pair of charter schools in Philadelphia where backers said they would appeal the local school board’s decision to deny their request to open.

Republicans may find themselves forced to choose between waiting out protracted legal challenges while their pet charters languish in appeals limbo or swallowing their pride, doing their damn jobs and voting on Wolf’s nominees!

My only complaint about this is that Governor Wolf took 7 years to do this. 

If Republicans are not even willing to put your nominees to a vote, it is time to play hardball, don’t wait 7 f%$#ing years.

This Will Not End Well

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Between sucking up to the Petty Persian Gulf Potentiates, outing a sexual harassment victim in her own organization, assaulting an employee, running a generally abusive workplace, having no experience with budgeting, and writing mean tweets about Republicans, Neera Tanden was deemed unacceptable by the Senate to head the White House Office of Management and Budget.  (Rather depressingly, it was the tweets that were the primary concern of the Senate)

But you know how it is with Washington, D.C. insiders: No matter how badly you f%$# up, and no matter how profoundly unsuited you are to a position of influence, you get another bite at the apple, so Neera Tanden gets a gig as Senior Advisor at the White House, a position that does not require Senate confirmation:

A contentious nomination process kept Neera Tanden out of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, but she still landed in the White House.

The White House confirmed on Friday that Biden had appointed Tanden to be a senior adviser. She will start on Monday. 

………

Tanden will hold various duties in the White House but her focus will be handling any potential fallout from Republican lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court. Tanden will also be tasked with reviewing the United States Digital Service, a program that aims to make government accessible online.

This from someone who has never worked as a lawyer (she does have a J.D. from Yale), was a model of opacity at CAP, and has no background in IT.

Lovely choice.

Except for her tweets excoriating Republicans, which I wholeheartedly approve, her entire career has been as a crass political hack and an awful human being.

More importantly, the people around her hate her enough that anywhere she works leaks like a sieve, which is rather a contrast to her mentor, Hillary Clinton.  (Say what you will about Hillary, but anyone reasonably close to her could have written a tell-all book for a 7 figure advance, and no one has.)

Much like Rahm Emanuel, we will now have another member of the Biden administration inside the tent pissing in.

I Slept Through This

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For about the 5th or 6th time since I started blogging in 2007, I did not blog.I was completely wiped than evening.

So I missed commenting on Thursday’s initial unemployment claims report, which hit another pandemic low.

Jobless claims continued a several-week slide to new pandemic lows, in a sign hiring is primed to strengthen as workers return to the labor market.

Worker applications for unemployment benefits fell to 473,000 last week from a revised 507,000 a week earlier, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims remain above pre-pandemic levels but are now at the lowest point since mid-March 2020, when the pandemic shut down the economy and triggered widespread joblessness.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in the weekly numbers, also reached a new pandemic low of 534,000.

………

Higher vaccination rates, fiscal stimulus and easing business restrictions are converging to support stronger spending across the U.S. But job growth isn’t keeping pace. U.S. employers added a modest 266,000 jobs in April, far short of the one million that economists had forecast and the weakest monthly gain since January.

Many employers say they can’t find enough workers to meet surging demand, in turn limiting production. Economists cite several factors keeping workers on the sidelines, including individuals’ fear of contracting Covid-19, child-care burdens from school closures, and expanded unemployment benefits.

Though benefits applications are on a downward trend, the number of people claiming benefits each week through regular state programs remains elevated. So-called continuing claims have stagnated between 3.6 million and 4 million since March.

I think that a recovery is underway, the questions are whether it will involve the rest of us, as the 2009 recovery did not, whether we are opening up too soon, and whether new variants of Covid-19 will take us back to lock-down.

Good Point

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It is in fact true that Republican arguments against expanded unemployment insurance are straight out of Karl Marx.

Republicans are arguing that they need the fear of starvation and destitution to get jobs filled, just as Marx argued that capitalists needed the fear of starvation to exploit the proletariat. 

There is symmetry:

Many Republican-controlled states are freaking out about the working class. Business owners, particularly of restaurants, are complaining they can’t find anyone to fill job openings, and conservative legislatures are leaping into action. At time of writing, Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wyoming, and Utah have announced they will begin refusing the federal $300 supplement to unemployment benefits in the next few weeks, and more may follow. Utah has to “roll those back, to get more people into the workforce to get those jobs, to get back to employment,” said Governor Spencer Cox.

It is amusing to consider this development in light of the ongoing conservative panic attack over President Biden’s supposed “American Marxism” agenda, in the words of prominent right-wing radio host Mark Levin. Ironically, what Republicans are doing to the unemployed actually is explained by classic Marxism.

Let me explain. In his magnum opus Capital, Marx argued that a capitalist system will more-or-less automatically produce a population of surplus workers. Businesses become more productive through greater capital investment, which will require more workers in some areas but far fewer in others, and hence this process will always tend to to create an “industrial reserve army” of surplus labor — that is, the unemployed.

This reserve army is very important for classical capitalism. It “becomes … the lever of capitalistic accumulation, nay, a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production.” The reason is that businesses are constantly changing the way they operate, and so always need a large supply of idle workers to fling into new projects on a moment’s notice:

The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches, such as railways, &c., the need for which grows out of the development of the old ones. In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. [Capital]

This really does not surprise me.  The entire Neoliberal movement grew from Trotskyites.

That Republican thinking mirrors that of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin does not surprise me not one whit.

Well, This is Horrifying

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Jeff Bezos is a psychopath who revels in hurting people.

His ethos permeates Amazon, and it’s why you hear so many stories about the inhumanity of its workplace, not just in its warehouses, but in its corporate offices.

It turns out that Amazon gives its a mangers a quote of people to fire each year, which has led to a practice called, “Hire to Fire,” where they hire people for the express purpose of firing them in a few months so that they can hit their numbers.

Why does this world embrace sadists?

Amazon has a goal to get rid of a certain percentage of employees every year, and three managers told Insider they felt so much pressure to meet the goal that they hired people to fire them.

“We might hire people that we know we’re going to fire, just to protect the rest of the team,” one manager told Insider.

The practice is informally called “hire to fire,” in which managers hire people, internally or externally, they intend to fire within a year, just to help meet their annual turnover target, called unregretted attrition (URA). A manager’s URA target is the percentage of employees the company wouldn’t regret seeing leave, one way or the other.

………

The most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track their URA goals, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, is expected to replace 6% of his division through “unregretted” departures on what appears to be an annual basis.

Something is deeply broken in our society.

I don’t know how to fix this.  My only advice is that if you go postal at work, go after senior executives first.

And, It’s Under Estimates

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The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever

They were expecting a million new jobs in April. They got just 266,000, and the unemployment rate ticked up by 1%.

After some good news yesterday, we got some bad news today:

Hiring in the U.S. unexpectedly slowed in April, a sign the nation’s recovery from the pandemic still faces challenges as many businesses struggle to find workers or remain cautious about the economic outlook.

U.S. employers added a modest 266,000 jobs in April, a report Friday by the Labor Department showed, far short of the one million that economists had forecast and the weakest monthly gain since January. The deceleration came after payrolls rose a downwardly revised 770,000 in March and left total employment down by 8.2 million from its pre-pandemic level.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 6.1% in April from 6% a month earlier, partially reflecting an increase in people entering the workforce.

………

Signs of labor-market tightness also emerged in Friday’s report, aligning with many companies’ complaints that they can’t find workers to meet demand. Wages for workers rose in April as some employers appeared to lift pay to attract or retain employees. Average hourly earnings for private-sector employees rose by 21 cents to $30.17 in April. The gain is notable because strong hiring in the lower-wage hospitality sector—which occurred in April—would typically put downward pressure on average earnings.

Given that the hospitality sector is one of the most dangerous sectors from a Covid perspective, people are simply no longer willing to die for minimum wage, and this is a good thing. ™

The average workweek increased to 35 hours in April, an indication some employers added worker hours to compensate for the lack of labor.

………

Friday’s report adds to the likelihood that the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policies will remain in place in coming months, something financial markets reflected in price movements on Friday.

………

The leisure and hospitality sector, including restaurants, accounted for the bulk of employment creation in April, adding 331,000 jobs. The Labor Department said that reflected an easing of pandemic-related restrictions in many parts of the country.

Meaning that other sectors of the economy lost 60,000 jobs.   

When you undershoot your prediction by 74%, and the previous month’s jobs report was revised down by 146,000, you are not having a good jobs report.

Sadism as Official Policy

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Context on the Dental Floss

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte is ending his state’s participation in the federal program increasing unemployment payments, because he thinks that it makes people too lazy.

Instead, he’s offering a one time limited offer of an “Employment Bonus.”

This is unbelievably and deeply stupid policy, as well as being stupid politically, particularly in a state so lily white (88.54%) that there are virtually no Black people (0.50%) to blame everything on.

I think that his brain has been poisoned by agricultural chemicals used on those famous Montana dental floss farms:

The coronavirus pandemic – heard of it? It’s famously still going on! Though national case numbers are finally starting to drop and recent regional outbreaks in the midwest have begun to subside, there were still about 50,000 new Covid-19 infections recorded in the US on Tuesday and just over 700 new virus-related deaths.

But Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, has other priorities: he’s been talking about a “labor shortage” in a cynical attempt to cut public assistance. The Republican governor released a statement on Tuesday announcing his state will stop participating in the federal program that has given unemployed workers additional unemployment payments since the start of the pandemic – in an apparent attempt to get Montanans back to work, and he plans to give those who choose to do so something he calls a “return-to-work bonus”.

………

Although Montana’s unemployment rate fell to 3.8% in April, which is about at pre-pandemic levels, the state’s labor commissioner, Laurie Esau, says its labor force is approximately 10,000 workers smaller than it was pre-lockdown, a drop that Gianforte assumes is to do with lazy people who, given their new found pandemic benefits, don’t want to work any more. And according to Montana department of labor estimates, nearly 25,000 people are currently filing unemployment claims, a good chunk of whom the governor is eager to push into the state’s 14,000 or so job openings.

But this means there aren’t enough job openings for the number of people unemployed; even if the governor’s plan succeeds in filling those vacant positions as intended, there will still be over 10,000 people without jobs to apply for, forced to subsist on less. It is also wildly reductive to assume that because there are fewer people working, it must be the result of a lack of will. People had jobs, and those jobs were taken away, either through mass layoffs or government shutdowns of businesses. That kind of disruption takes time to recover from. People could now be working out childcare arrangements again; finding out where they fit in a new jobs market; or worried about returning to work until the coast is clear.

The headline of this story should be, “Montana Governor has tragically small penis, inflicts pain on whole state to compensate.”

Also, boycott Montana grown dental floss until this policy is reversed.

Under 500,000!

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Initial jobless claims fell below 500,000 last week, the first time that this has happened since the pandemic:

Worker filings for unemployment benefits in the U.S. reached a new low since the Covid-19 pandemic began more than a year ago—the latest sign that the labor-market rebound is gathering force.

Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell 92,000 last week to 498,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. That brings the four-week average of initial claims, which smooths out volatility in weekly data, to the lowest point since the pandemic took hold, though still well above pre-pandemic levels.

………

While the number of new applications has been declining, the level of Americans receiving unemployment benefits remains elevated and businesses can’t find enough people to hire. 

I will note again, “Unable to find enough people to hire,” means, “Unwilling to pay enough for the job.”

………

This improvement will likely be captured in the Labor Department’s April employment report, which the department will release Friday. Economists forecast that the U.S. economy added one million jobs last month, compared with a gain of 916,000 in March, and project that the jobless rate ticked down to 5.8% from 6% a month earlier.

However, the pandemic’s impact was so severe that economists expect employment to close out this year 1.6% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019, despite the swift pace of hiring they anticipate in coming months. The number of new jobless claims peaked at more than six million in the spring of 2020. After falling sharply, it then plateaued between 700,000 and 900,000 throughout the fall and winter.

I’ll go with the under, because I always go with the under.

Still, this is undeniably good news.

About that “Labor Shortage”

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Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Just Don’t Want to Risk Dying for Minimum Wage

—Jacobin

As I have noted before, “If only there were some sort of proxy for value that we could offer workers. 

We have seen more than a few examples of this: 

As March drew to a close, Klavon’s Ice Cream Parlor in the Strip District found itself without enough workers for the upcoming spring and summer rush, and it certainly did not have enough workers to open the shop to its desired seven days a week schedule.

Then, on March 30, the parlor announced it would more than double the starting wage for the roles, going from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, a scoop that seemed to captivate workers throughout the region and one that earned a significant amount of local media coverage.

“It was instant, overnight. We got thousands of applications that poured in,” Maya Johnson, general manager of Klavon’s, said. “It was very overwhelming, very. People were coming in by the next day that it broke on the news, they were coming in, filling out paper applications. I was doing on-the-spot interviews.”

If you cannot find workers, just pay them more, and you will find them.

This is How You Weed Out the Militia Types

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Once again making a joke of, “Protect and Serve,” police are some of the public servants least likely to get a vaccine.

This is a good thing:  It is a canary in a coal mine.

When you tell a police officer, get a vaccine, or you are suspended, and they take the suspension, 9 times out of 10, they are right wing militia types who have infiltrated the police.

These are the cops who generate your problems with brutality, racism, and million dollar judgement.

Let them go:

Police officers were among the first front-line workers to gain priority access to coronavirus vaccines. But their vaccination rates are lower than or about the same as those of the general public, according to data made available by some of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies.

The reluctance of police to get the shots threatens not just their own health, but also the safety of people they’re responsible for guarding, monitoring and patrolling, experts say.

At the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, just 39 percent of employees have gotten at least one dose, officials said, compared to more than 50 percent of eligible adults nationwide. In Atlanta, 36 percent of sworn officers have been vaccinated. And a mere 28 percent of those employed by the Columbus Division of Police — Ohio’s largest police department — report having received a shot.

“I think it’s unacceptable,” Joe Lombardo, the head of Las Vegas police and sheriff of Clark County, said of the meager demand for the shots within his force.

………

Police hesitancy also means officers may be vectors of spread to vulnerable people with whom they interact during traffic stops, calls for service and other high-contact encounters. That could thwart efforts to restore community trust in a moment of heightened scrutiny after last month’s conviction of ex-officer Derek Chauvin in the killing of George Floyd.

“Police touch people,” said Sharona Hoffman, a professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. “Imagine having a child in the car who’s not vaccinated. People would want to know if a police officer coming to their window is protected.”

Make it mandatory and fire the cops who refuse.  They are refusing to support public health.

You will end up with a better police force.

Good Unemployment News

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In our latest edition of, “Jobless Thursday,” initial unemployment claims fell to 547,000, a pandemic low, and the first unemployment report since the shutdown that can be described as normal recession levels, as opposed to, “Disaster of biblical proportions ……… Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God ……… Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling ……… Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes ……… The dead rising from the grave ……… Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria,” levels.

So the employment outlook is now beginning to look like a recession:

Worker filings for jobless benefits declined to 547,000 last week, a new pandemic low that adds to evidence of a strengthening labor market and overall economic recovery.

Initial unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell 39,000 last week from an upwardly revised 586,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said on Thursday. That put new claims on a seasonally adjusted basis below 600,000 for two consecutive weeks in mid-April, their lowest levels since early 2020. The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in the weekly figures, was 651,000, also a pandemic low.

The median sales price for previously owned homes climbed to a record high in March as a shortage of homes during the pandemic limited transactions, the National Association of Realtors said separately. Existing-home sales dropped 3.7% in March from February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.01 million, marking the second straight month of sales declines.

Jobless claims remain higher than their pre-pandemic levels—the weekly average in 2019 was about 218,000—but last week’s drop extended a downward trend since the start of this year and raised expectations for further declines in coming weeks.

I hope that the powers that be won’t take their foot off the accelerator pedal. 

The claims rate is still too damn high.

Back to Normal

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In yet another indication that we are returning to a post-pandemic new normal, a mass shooting at an Indianapolis FedEx warehouse has killed at least 8 people. 

The situation was made even worse because FedEx has a policy of requiring employees to turn over their cell phones at the beginning of a shift, which means that loved ones could not contact them, and they could not call the police.

Officials with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department identified the eight victims of the mass shooting at a FedEx warehouse in Indianapolis on Friday night, more than 20 hours after the gunman opened fire on Thursday.

Families of people who worked at the warehouse were gathered at a hotel in the hours after the shooting, waiting for news. FedEx employees are not allowed to use their phones on the floor of the warehouse, complicating the reuniting of employees and their loved ones.

The victims were identified by the police as Matthew R. Alexander, 32; Samaria Blackwell, 19; Amarjeet Johal, 66; Jaswinder Kaur, 64; Jaswinder Singh, 68; Amarjit Sekhon, 48; Karli Smith, 19; and John Weisert, 74. Some family members of victims who were Sikh provided different spellings and ages: Jasvinder Kaur, 50; Amarjit Sekhon, 49; and Jaswinder Singh, 70.

Officials said the gunman, a 19-year-old, was a former employee of the company whose mother had warned law enforcement officials last year that he might try to attempt “suicide by cop.” An F.B.I. special agent confirmed that the gunman had been interviewed by federal agents in April 2020, and that he was put on an “immediate detention mental health temporary hold.”

He was not charged with a crime, and the agent said that a shotgun was not returned to him.

………

The violence in Indianapolis comes only weeks after mass shootings last month at spas in the Atlanta area and at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo., renewing pressure on lawmakers in Washington to address America’s deep-seated problem with gun violence.

Officials used a common word — “another” — to define the tragedy.

………

The atmosphere was fraught at a nearby hotel on Friday as families of workers at the facility waited for word about loved ones, many of whom were not allowed to have their cellphones at work.

(emphasis mine) 

There are many things that I missed from the before times: Restaurants, movie theaters, bars, and theater immediately come to mind.

There are also things that I really do not miss, in person meetings, commuting, and especially mass shootings.

At the very least, I had hoped that the pace of mass shootings would not return to their pre-pandemic levels so quickly.

Good News on Initial Jobless Claims

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Initial jobless claims have finally fallen below their pre-pandemic record.

Well, that only took 13 months: 

Unemployment claims declined to the lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic struck last spring, adding to signs the U.S. economic revival is picking up speed.

Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell to 576,000 last week from 769,000 a week earlier. That is the lowest weekly figure since March 2020. Claims remain higher than the pre-pandemic levels of around 220,000, but economists expect they will continue to drop as the recovery accelerates.

“We are seeing both a strong reopening and rehiring in the economy at this time,” said Kathy Bostjancic, economist at Oxford Economics. “It’s been faster than most economists expected.”

Several factors are converging to boost growth across the economy. Vaccination rates are powering consumer spending, governments are relaxing restrictions on businesses, and federal-stimulus funds are flowing through the economy.

………

The total number of people receiving unemployment assistance is declining as the labor market heals. About 16.9 million people were collecting unemployment benefits through state and federal programs in the week ended March 27, down from 18.2 million a week earlier.
More on the Economy

The labor market still has a long way to go before achieving a full recovery. As of March, U.S. payrolls remained 8.4 million below their level in February 2020.

It’s unalloyed good news though the current situation remains pretty dire.

New Nevada Democratic Party Leadership Raises Money Looted by Old Guard

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You may recall that after reformers took over the Nevada Democratic Party, the entire staff quit, transferred much of their cash to the DSCC, took most of the remainder as severance, and quit. (The consultants quit too)

I called it an, “Own Goal,” because it ended up removing ears and eyes and potential saboteurs affiliated with the old guard from the organization.  (This is a lesson that can be learned from Jeremy Corbyn and the active monkey-wrenching committed by professional staff in Labour)

Now it appears that, the Nevada Democratic Party has raised a crap-load more money than was looted by the old guard:

Just over a month after the staff of Nevada’s Democratic Party quit rather than work alongside an incoming slate of candidates backed by the local chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, taking $450,000 and severance with them, the party’s new leadership has raised that money back with some to spare.

The Nevada Democrats have raised $530,000 from more than 16,500 contributions since the March 6 elections, when a progressive slate of five candidates — one incumbent and four newcomers — took over the party, beating the preferred picks of the local machine. The figure includes $100,000 raised on their own within a few weeks of the election and a boost in contributions with help from national progressive allies like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who sent fundraising emails over the last several weeks on the party’s behalf.

………

When Judith Whitmer, founder and chair emeritus of Left Caucus, won the March 6 election for state party chair, her predecessors did not only almost empty the state party’s accounts, but they also funneled the money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and notified Whitmer that all their consultants had terminated their contracts. The DSCC will use the money to support the 2022 reelection campaign of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev. In the runup to March 6, Cortez Masto asked Whitmer to drop out of the race and approached her opponent, Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, a Sanders ally who is more established in the state party, to run.

Don’t rehire the consultants.  Instead, focus your efforts about increasing registration and turnout for likely Democratic voters.

The consultants are parasites, the old guard is useless.

Back Loaded Bribery

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We really need to do something to stop people from scoring highly remunerative jobs with the companies that they regulated as soon as they leave their position. 

The revolving door is not just unseemly, it is a form of bribery:

Citadel Securities, the US market maker owned by billionaire Ken Griffin, has snapped up Heath Tarbert, the former head of the main US derivatives regulator, to be its new chief legal officer.

Tarbert left the Commodity Futures Trading Commission just 27 days ago, having resigned as its chair after an 18-month tenure.

Citadel Securities’ announcement on Thursday marked the latest in a long list of hires from US regulators by Griffin. Tarbert replaces Steve Luparello, Citadel Securities’ general counsel, who is a former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of trading and markets.

Griffin also hired Gregg Berman, the SEC’s former head of research who examined the role of high-frequency trading on the world’s largest equity market, as well as Ryan VanGrack, who was an adviser to former SEC chair Mary Jo White, among others.

The move has reawakened accusations of a so-called revolving door from public service to private work.

I’m not sure how to make this illegal, but it needs to be made illegal.

Missed Jobless Thursday, My Bad

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Initial claims increased to 744,000, up by 16,000, and the second straight increase.

I am thinking that initial claims will remain in the mid 700K range for a while yet: 

Workers are slowly pulling away from unemployment assistance as a U.S. economic revival picks up speed, with initial filings for benefits holding near pandemic lows and the number of people receiving help dropping.

Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by a seasonally adjusted 16,000 last week to 744,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. The four-week average, which smooths out volatility in the figures, rose slightly to 723,750 from 721,250. Claims are still well above the weekly average of around 220,000 in the year before Covid-19’s arrival.

The continued high rate of filings comes amid other signs of recent labor-market improvement. U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate slipped to 6.0%, from 6.2% in the prior month.

………

Moreover, the number of people receiving unemployment assistance is slowly declining. Continuing claims, which provide an approximation of the number of people receiving benefits, at the end of March reached their lowest level of the pandemic, declining slightly to 3.73 million. A broader reading that includes state and pandemic-related federal programs also eased slightly to 18.16 million.

As always, I am more of a pessimist, particularly with Coronavirus cases spiking and talk about the re-imposition of some restrictions becoming more common.

Must Get This Book

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I just read a review of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, and the book sounds like a real barn-burner:

Who are the members of the professional managerial class? Neither capitalists nor workers, one strains to define them in purely economic terms. If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves.

Is it due to nature or nature? Occupational hazard or innate insufferableness? No one really knows for sure. What is known is that these are the most annoying people on the planet. People who get positively aroused at the idea of telling you what to do, correcting you, and telling you that they just read an article in The New York Times about just that issue and now have something old to say in a new way. A day without them giving out a did you know factoid is like a day without sunshine. The type of people who can only have an orgasm if they see someone getting a parking ticket.

Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.

(emphasis mine)

That line made me laugh.

………

However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.

Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”

This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.

I also call them Hillary Clinton voters.

………

The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:

[The PMC] prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order. It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background decor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people.

Looks like someone just got herself uninvited to an 80s party.

What the review, and probably the book, do not address is how so much of this is driven by what the late Dave Graeber called Bullsh%$ Jobs.

I would argue that much of the dysfunction described in this review is an artifact of what Graeber described as the, “profound psychological violence,” of having a career that one knows on some level has no value.

He May Be the Must Repugnant Member of the Democratic Party Establishment (There Is No Democratic Party Establishment) Today

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No, not Joe Manchin, nor even the twisted wannabe punk Kyrsten Sinema.

I am talking, of course about Rahm Israel Emanuel, a politician so contemptible that he was run out of the Chicago Mayor’s office on a rail.

There seems to be no level of evil and stupidity he won’t support, so now he’s cast his lot against raising the minimum wage, which is arguably the most beneficial, and is certainly the most politically popular policy initiative in the United States today:

As disgraced former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel reportedly keeps floating his name for a Biden administration appointment, he is recycling an old Republican plan to let states opt out of a higher minimum wage. Now, he is slated to headline the annual conference of one of the major corporate lobbying groups fighting against congressional Democrats’ $15 minimum wage legislation.

The National Restaurant Association, the lobbying group which led the fight to block a minimum wage increase in the COVID-19 relief bill passed last month, will be hosting Emanuel as a keynote speaker for the group’s virtual conference on April 20, an event entitled: “Seeking Unity: Conversations on How We Can Come Together.”

The speaking slot follows Emanuel’s Washington Post op-ed last month arguing that omitting a minimum wage increase from the American Rescue Plan was not a big deal, and asserting that Democrats should work with Republicans on a plan that does not guarantee $15 nationwide.

He’s always wrong, he’s not particularly competent, and he’s a bully.

Why is he not flipping burgers at minimum wage for a living?