Posted 4:38 pm

We spent 20 years shipping the honest work of middle class people out of the country, simply to enrich our economic elite, the favored few. In exchange we were given cheap credit and a housing bubble, which has now burst, leaving us with nothing. And look how we now respond to the possibility of useful and honorable labor:

The KITT of Connersville: How Carbon Motors Decided to Build Police Cars in Indiana
It may take a village to raise a child, but it took the rallying cry of an entire town--and a no-cost, 1.8-million-square-foot building--to convince Carbon Motors to locate its manufacturing facility to Connersville, Indiana. Carbon Motors makes the E7 law enforcement vehicle, a futuristic cop-cruiser that includes radiation and biological threat detectors, an automatic license plate recognition system, and a diesel engine that gets up to 30 miles per gallon and has a top speed of 155 miles an hour. The company already has 10,000 orders.

Back in May, Connersville--home to just over 14,000 people--threw a huge celebration to show their support of Carbon Motors, which was shopping around for industrial sites. They started with a proclamation by Mayor Leonard E. Urban declaring May 5 "Carbon Motors Day." That was followed with a parade along flag-lined streets, lawns bedecked with yard signs, and multiple billboards. A boys choir provided accompaniment. Over 7,300 people, many sporting special-edition Carbon Motors T-shirts, turned out to eat, drink and make merry with their potential investor, which is promising to invest $350 million in the plant.

William Santana Li, Carbon Motors chairman and chief executive officer, publicly expressed his gratitude for the show of support, and everyone went back to their respective boardrooms to hammer out the details of site selection. Indiana had some competition, namely upstate South Carolina and Georgia, both in close proximity to the Atlanta-based homeland security company. Stacy Stephens, Carbon Motors co-founder and sales development manager explained, "We had a huge matrix with 400 items that needed to be checked off," before making the final decision.

On Wednesday, in anticipation of Carbon Motors stopping in Indiana, Connersville whipped itself into an enthusiastic frenzy again. This time, said Blair West, director of Media Relations for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (IEDC), there were "cheerleaders leading cheers just for Carbon Motors, a high school marching band, other bands, the chief of police leading prayers, and the mayor." She also noted that several thousand people had donned the custom T-shirts, as well as buttons emblazoned with the Carbon Motors logo.

The event was originally billed as the American Jobs Rally...

Source: FastCompany

...I would support a truly confiscatory tax on any US corporation that relocated manufacturing jobs outside the country. And we need to cancel any trade agreements that remove our ability to put tariffs on imports from countries with serf-economies...

Posted 1:48 pm

This is fully in line with my expectations. We still have done nothing about the trillion dollars of worthless collateralized mortgage obligation bonds that the banks are holding. Those corporations that are deemed profitable this year are so because they cut costs, none of them are showing any sales worth talking about. And this generation of consumers will have to die off before the population starts buying again. We've not gotten anywhere near the worst of this yet:

Is This What's Coming Next?

In yesterday's CHART OF THE DAY we noted the similarities between this current rally and the famous rally between 1929 and 1930. Today, David Rosenberg picks up on the same thing, and fills it out a little more.

Source: ClusterStock

...I expect official unemployment to exceed 20% before we start the real recovery. And that recovery will leave the country looking nothing like the Golden Age of America (1950-2000). The middle class will have essentially disappeared...

Posted 11:29 am

I plan on using this with a project I'm working on:

Lookout Paypal! Google Checkout's New Gadget is Incredibly Simple
This morning on the Google Checkout Blog, the company announced the introduction of a new, embeddable gadget which you can place on any web site where you sell your products and/or services. An embeddable gadget like this is nothing new to the online shopping space - Checkout's major competitor PayPal has offered their own copy-and-paste code for years on end. But what's interesting about this new gadget is how it's tied to the Google Docs service for inventory management on the back-end. The gadget is also incredibly simple to set up and use.

According to the blog post, there are only a few steps necessary to get up-and-running with Google Checkout on your site, a process they claim will only take "a matter of minutes." (That may depend on how much inventory you sell, however.)

After signing up for your Google Checkout Seller Account the next step is to list the products you want to sell in a Google Docs spreadsheet. The process couldn't be easier. Google provides you with a copy of their template spreadsheet. When you click the link, you're prompted to click on another link reading: "Yes, make a copy." Doing so copies the template file over to your own Google Docs account where you'll see a basic spreadsheet that features columns for title, content, price, quantity, shipping, image_link, option, and option_name. So you'll know what those fields are used for, the spreadsheet also includes some example inventory entries. When you're finished listing your inventory, you simply publish the spreadsheet as a web page.

The final step is to pick the embed location, a list which allows you to choose between a normal HTML web site or one of the following Google-owned properties: Google Sites, Blogger, or iGoogle. Then you choose the size of your gadget and make a couple of changes to the code, one of which is pasting in the URL to your own Google Docs spreadsheet...

Source: ReadWriteWeb

...fabulous...

Posted 9:10 am

I'm not sure we're smart enough to resolve our problems. We instead bounce from crisis to crisis:

Healthcare Realities
At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program - but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, "wasn't having any of it."

It's a funny story - but it illustrates the extent to which health reform must climb a wall of misinformation. It's not just that many Americans don't understand what President Obama is proposing; many people don't understand the way American healthcare works right now. They don't understand, in particular, that getting the government involved in healthcare wouldn't be a radical step: the government is already deeply involved, even in private insurance.

And that government involvement is the only reason our system works at all.

The key thing you need to know about healthcare is that it depends crucially on insurance. You don't know when or whether you'll need treatment - but if you do, treatment can be extremely expensive, well beyond what most people can pay out of pocket. Triple coronary bypasses, not routine doctor's visits, are where the real money is, so insurance is essential.

Yet private markets for health insurance, left to their own devices, work very badly: insurers deny as many claims as possible, and they also try to avoid covering people who are likely to need care. Horror stories are legion: the insurance company that refused to pay for urgently needed cancer surgery because of questions about the patient's acne treatment; the healthy young woman denied coverage because she briefly saw a psychologist after breaking up with her boyfriend...

...Still, most Americans under 65 do have some form of private insurance. The vast majority, however, don't buy it directly: they get it through their employers. There's a big tax advantage to doing it that way, since employer contributions to healthcare aren't considered taxable income. But to get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can't discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.

And it's thanks to these rules that employment-based insurance more or less works, at least in the sense that horror stories are a lot less common than they are in the individual insurance market.

So here's the bottom line: if you currently have decent health insurance, thank the government...

Source: Paul Krugman in the NY Times

...I've about given up hope in a two-party system, it brings out the worst in our politicians and citizens. We've entered a stage of active disinformation campaigns by legitimate national players...