Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

No Vote Yet?

Yesterday was the first Tuesday in November, the traditional major fall election day. With the furious campaigning for President of These United States in the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday 3 November 2015... Oh. Wait.

It's just the off-year election after the mid-term election. We've still got a WHOLE YEAR of Presidential campaigning left.

Sigh.

No Vote?

So with election day rolling in, I couldn't remember hardly seeing ANY campaign signs anywhere, especially in Allendale, nor could I remember any Ottawa County or Michigan ballot proposals. So Monday night I checked, Googling "allendale mi ballot". The first hit was an Ottawa County site with several townships and other jurisdictions in the county -- but no mention for Allendale Twp. The Allendale Township site had a page for announcements -- and it was blank. Another website showed nothing for Allendale.

Would it kill the county or the township to put up a notice that there was NO Allendale Township election this round?

I did go down 84th Avenue in the morning and braved turning onto the M-45 traffic without benefit of a traffic light, so I could drive by the big church complex where elections are held -- no sign at the road saying VOTE TODAY.

Okay. Well, that's easy.

No! Vote

I don't normally delve into politics on this blog... but this hit the national news.

Back in September, I wrote about Cindy Gamrat (R) and Todd Courser (R) (DW) (LJ) and their shabby attempt to get back into the Michigan legislature:

In case you need context, Cindy Gamrat (R) and Todd Courser (R), managed to merge their offices in Lansing "to save money". Actually, though both married to other people, they used their shiny new combined office to cover their affair. It was eventually exposed, in part because the staff members refused to be part of the coverup. Courser thought he could put the dogs off the scent by producing a fake email smear campaign, outing him as gay -- apparently a fate worth than death or adultery.

In case you think this is only about the sex, remember they spent government money in order to conduct their affair. It was, apparently, a "mistake".

Rather than resign and let the State Legislature work on stuff like a third Real Try at funding desperately needed road repairs, they insisted on staying put until weeks of investigations and hand wringing and a vote late into the night resulted in... Gamrat being expelled from the State House and her brave suiter, Courser, bravely deciding to resign just before he was voted out as well.

Then this past week, Gamrat decided that since the voters hadn't weighed in on this, she was going to run for her seat in the special election. It is apparently legal to do so. But previously the Allegan County Republican Party had expelled her as well. Then Courser announced he was going to do the same -- run in the special election -- after getting approval (this time) from his wife.

Well, the results are in and neither Courser nor his girlfriend-not-his-wife will be going back to the legislature:

Gamrat came in third of eight candidates for the Republican special election primary, netting 9% of the vote. And in an 11 horse Kentucky Derby, Courser came in sixth with 4% of the vote. Thank goodness.

I was very peeved at both of these idiots, first for trying to use a "joint legislative office" to cover for their affair, second for Courser's idiotic plan to try to accuse himself of being gay, which he figured could be disproved, so when the rumors of the affair spread, no one would believe him. Third for not resigning when this all first blew up, because as God fearing good people and hardcore Tea Party Republicans, they couldn't imagine they did anything wrong. Thus forcing weeks of investigations, hearings and finally a long into the night vote, where the legislature expelled Gamrat and then Courser bravely let his girlfriend swing in the wind alone and resigned before he could be expelled, too. Which finally resulted in the two deciding that they should let their voters decide whether they should go back to their elected jobs as if nothing happened.

At her concession announcement at her home, Gamrat had her family on video call... from Florida. Right...

The special election itself will take place early in 2016.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

I don't spend a lot of time following the stock market.

Though I suspect that between NPR news and Marketplace, plus some newspaper columns by the Motley Fool and our NPR station's Saturday line up of news humor shows, I do better than most.

So I was amused to discover that Wall Street just pooped a nice Christmas present on itself, with the Dow closing above 18,000 for the first time.

18,024.17 to be exact.

Googling "dow jones" provided the following screenshot:

Wikipedia has updated its entry on the DJIA:

On May 3, 2013, the Dow surpassed the 15,000 mark for the first time, while later on November 18, it closed above the 16,000 level.[28] Following a strong jobs report on July 3, 2014, the Dow traded above the 17,000 mark for the first time.[29] On 23 December 2014 the Dow Jones industrial average traded above 18,000 for the first time after data showed the U.S. economy posted its strongest growth in more than a decade.

Okay, reality check. Yes, I know that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is NOT the stock market, it isn't very industrial any more, it's an indexed average of a changing basket of stocks and it isn't the only index on Wall Street.

But it's famous. People quote it. It's important in that sense.

Okay, this is where it gets weird. Because just last Thursday we were talking to our financial guy, and I asked, was the Dow still over 16,000? And back on the Fourth of July I wrote:

Huh.

Just yesterday morning we were talking to our financial guy, and he made a comment about the Dow. And I pointed out I haven't been following it in a while -- was it still over 16,000?

Well, NPR just reported that yesterday's pre-holiday session had the Dow Jones Industrial Average exceed 17,000 for the first time.

I told you I didn't follow the stock market closely.

Following that pre-holiday theme, we had the week before Thanksgiving 2013:

So on Thursday I posted the following observation on Facebook:

4pm news lead stories: CNBC -- DJIA closes above 16,000 for first time. MSNBC -- the nuclear option in the Senate. FOX News -- McDonald's drops McRib from nation menu, many protest, is Michelle Obama to blame?
Well, you can't say all the news is the same... Dr. Phil

A little over four years ago I noted when "the stock market", i.e. the Dow Jones Industrial Average, broke 10,000+ (DW) for the first time in the recession. At the time I wrote:

Wednesday (14 October 2009) the NYSE surged above 10,000 again and stayed there. Happy days are here again. The Recession's back has been broken. We are on the path to recovery. Well, aren't we?

To some extent, I think the same sarcasm is due.

I missed the May 2013 breaking the 15,000 barrier, probably because I was in the hospital, having just got out of the ICU.

Yay. We're above 18,000. The Dow has jumped 3000 points just since I've been dealing with my heel.

But, as the Dow grows, a 1000 point gain ain't what it used to be. I was in junior high in White Plains NY, just north of New York City when it first topped 1000 points total. It's a matter of diminishing percentages, those thousand point records.

One of the reasons that I am not greatly excited about this, even as I note the historical value, is that it's a game. Sure, business needs investment money. And the value of a stock gives a gauge as to the health and wealth of a company. But past that... Most of the money made on Wall Street is a masturbatory fantasy game that Wall Street does to make Wall Street money. And an avenue for outsiders to come in and "invest" in a company by buying it up and changing that which had given it value in the first place. Chasing the tail of stock prices has fueled most of this raging drive towards short term gain at the expense of long term legacy and long term employment.

It has changed America in so many ways, and not all of them positive. For good or ill, many of our pensions are still tied into this game. And in the long term, it's a money maker. Mostly. But we don't retire in the long term, we're each on different countdown clocks. A lot of people were hurt when Wall Street screwed up the last time. And they're in the process of trying to get some of the controls enacted after that meltdown removed. Because these practices worked so well the last time.

So whoopee, here I am twirling a finger in the air.

It's just another big deal in a string of big deals.

And yet... I'm sure happier having a surging Wall Street than another market crash. If only some of this optimism and profits would actually trickle down far enough to do some good.

Dr. Phil

(Sigh)

Insert your own joke here: Must be nice to teach college classes, you only work nine hours a week.

This is so ignorant, I hardly know where to begin. But confusing credit hours and work hours is only the beginning. In an effort to slash spending, there are people looking for bogeymen to ridicule the university spending here in Michigan and make it look like the most egregious of money wasting.

Yesterday there was a Detroit Free Press article on soaring payrolls. I read this thing and found myself sputtering "but... but... but...!"

No, the real problem is that both journalists and politicians are conflating "administrators" with "huge salary top administrators". This despite the fact that they were given the correct information. Compare the headline with the article about Grand Valley's spending in this Grand Rapids Press article. Are we even talking about the same thing here?

Irony, Thy Name Is Effective Privatization

If the state legislators want to coat themselves in thick layers of fiscal responsibility by deciding to cut university spending and link state moneys to various control issues*, they may find themselves out of luck. In Grand Valley's case, the state part of their budget has dropped from 68% in 1987 to a proposed 17%. Perennially, GVSU has noted that they have never received the state's promised minimum payment per student**, at the same time the university has seen explosive growth -- 53.9% enrollment increase to nearly 25,000 students in the last decade -- and has consistently moved up the rankings into an excellent regional university. And one which operates on a heckuva lot less budget than some other comparable schools. Of course I teach at WMU, which has its own set of quibbles, I imagine, from the Free Press article and the castigations which are coming out of the legislature.

We're supposed to be worried about the economy and the budget. I get it. We're supposed to be worried about jobs, especially in a state which has seen its major industry undergo a withering reduction. We're supposed to be reinventing ourselves and coming up with a high tech future. And so demonizing the universities which are doing something about this helps us how?

I'm not so naive to imagine that there aren't ways to save moneys. But acting like a GVSU hasn't done a damn thing about their budgets over the last ten years of cuts isn't very productive. And going on about those "administrators" and those professors with those cushy jobs where they only work nine hours a week -- puh-lease.

Dr. Phil

* One proposal is to tie state appropriations to those universities who don't offer same-sex partner benefits.

** In the past ten years there have been numerous attempts to "reward" universities which limit their tuition increases below some set levels in the midst of state budget cutting. Nearly all these deals got reneged on, which makes one wonder why any of our state universities would even bother with trying to play by yet another set of "new reward rules". Seems to me that one cannot simultaneously complain that the state schools are gouging the students with tuition increases while cutting the state supports and then not delivering even what was promised. Oh wait, politics isn't like science -- it doesn't have to make sense. (sorry)

A Disaster With No End In SIght

The BP oil platform Deepwater Horizon disaster off the coast of Louisiana, which began with its explosion on 20 April 2010, is rapidly becoming one totally incompetent fuck up. Actually, calling it an "oil spill" is a little disingenuous -- a spill is a one-off and suggests remediation and cleanup will fix it. This is ongoing and gushing.

210,000 gallons of oil a day -- counting it in barrels makes the problem sound more manageable. But by Sunday it's some 1,600,000 gallons of oil and growing.

Don't Make Me Laugh

Some are already calling this President Obama's Katrina. Yeah, right. Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster which was mishandled badly by the U.S., state and local governments. This was a manmade disaster mismanaged badly by BP. One where they assured the government they were on top of things, they had it under control and there was no threat of a wider spill. If the Obama administration is guilty of anything right now, it's allowing the beloved principle of self-policing to run its course until it was obvious that it wasn't working. Hell, BP didn't even know the magnitude of the problem.

As for the "delay" in Obama traveling to the area, what the hell was he going to see? Why people would just call it grandstanding. Now that oil is or is about to spoil the shoreline, NOW there's something to see.

Some of this isn't news to people who follow off-shore drilling. This article lists several issues including the lack of a switch which could allow BP to remotely shut off the well head some 5000 feet on the bottom of the ocean.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the well lacked a remote-control shut-off switch that is required by Brazil and Norway, two other major oil-producing nations. The switch, a back-up measure to shut off oil flow, would allow a crew to remotely shut off the well even if a rig was damaged or sunken. BP said it couldn't explain why its primary shut-off measures did not work.

U.S. regulators considered requiring the mechanism several years ago. They decided against the measure when drilling companies protested, saying the cost was too high, the device was only questionably effective, and that primary shut-off measures were enough to control an oil spill.

Self-policing and self-regulating industries. Yeah, works real good. Congress and Wall Street -- are you listening yet?

Expect gas prices to spike this summer. Shrimp prices, assuming you can get shrimp, will jump, too. Guess Wall Streeters will have to pull out extra hundred dollar bills to pay for those jumbo shrimp cocktails at dinner...

I Have Two Words For All This

THIS SUCKS.

Dr. Phil

And Away We Go

Wednesday the NYSE surged above 10,000 again and stayed there. Happy days are here again. The Recession's back has been broken. We are on the path to recovery.

Well, aren't we?

Banking -- Ur Not Doing It Rite

Meanwhile on Wednesday I was listening to NPR's Talk of the Nation and they were talking about the problems with the programs and efforts to get mortgages redone to prevent foreclosures. In many cases, the few mortgages that are being rewritten end up with $50/month savings -- rather than the $500-$1000/month needed for relief. Then in some cases the penalties built up from before the rewriting get folded back into the mortgage, resulting in a monthly payment more than it was before. Some re-fi, eh?

Worse, a lot of banks seemed to have hired the paperwork gurus from the health insurance industry, since besides saying "NO" right off the bat, they seem to be unable to hold onto any paperwork. People are reporting having to resend the same information an obscene number of times -- and even the successful rewritten mortgages seem to take up to two-and-a-half years to process. One real estate person in Florida said that in his area the banks were more willing to lose $400,000 of a house's value in a short sale, than lose $200,000 in a rewritten mortgage. It's all part and parcel of the short-term gain mentality which has been steadily ruining this country since the 1980s or so. Worse, it's not all stemming from people with no income getting outrageous homes or people buying McMansions -- there's quite a pool of people who would've qualified for a perfectly ordinary and reasonable mortgage they could've afforded but were steered into or sold with some other mortgage product which came equipped with land mines and balloon payments. Caveat emptor on one hand? Or malfeasance and greed on the other?

If the Fed's interest rate to banks is essentially zero, why are there mortgages charging rates like bad credit cards? None of this financial mess would pass muster in any freshmen Economics class!

In Ohio it was mentioned that this one reporter couldn't confirm that National City (now part of PNC out of Pittsburgh) had been able to rewrite any mortgages. One caller to the program said that a judge had ruled against Wells Fargo and Deutchebank for what sounded like hiding behind a shell game of who owns and who controls the mortgage. So much for Federal programs to provide relief -- as it was six months ago, the people most likely to get help are those who contact either someone in government or a reporter, and get a response from a bank that doesn't want to look bad? Yikes.

Thursday, Goldman Sachs was flying high on massive profit reports -- and the news that they wanted to pay millions in bonuses. Other good financial news? Citi lost less than expected. O happy day.

Uh, Never Mind

Today's stock market? Well, let's say that Bank of America and GE had "disappointing" earning reports -- and the Dow-Jones dropped quickly back below 10,000. There was some sort of nonsense of Bank of America wanting to pay bonuses as they cheerfully lost $2,200,000,000.00. Um, that was decided to be a dumb idea.

We're Still Number One!

In Michigan the unemployment rate rose from 15.2% to 15.3%. We still don't have a budget, even though the state's fiscal year began October 1st -- we're operating on a one month extension. The House and Governor are Democratic, the Senate is Republican. Something like eight of the spending bills have been passed by both houses and reconciled, but the State Senate is holding on to them until the last minute to try to prevent the governor from using her constitutional line item veto.

Yeah, I'm not very happy about some of this stuff. Really.

Dr. Phil

One Month Ago

I was going to blog about the fact that the Michigan legislature had one month to come up with a budget -- for a fiscal year which has already started for many universities and school systems. Given the current splits -- Democratic House & Governor, Republican Senate -- this annual budgetary nightmare gets pretty cranky. And last minute. And sometimes the state government has to shut down. Etc.

Besides the raw politics, Michigan does have some troubles. We have the highest unemployment rate in the nation (Yay -- We're Number One! ... oh... never mind) and the lack of jobs, the increase in downsizing incomes as people shift jobs and the bankruptcy of some rather large corporations in the state (GM, cough) means that tax revenues have fallen as well.

Promises, Promises

In an economy where getting an education is crucial, to say nothing of all the benefits of retraining the older out-of-work workers, it is ironic that various forms of the budget want to cut school spending by like about $260/student and to wipe out (or greatly reduce) the Michigan Promise scholarships. Yeah, those would be the ones which allow thousands of Michigan residents go to Michigan colleges on what was expected to be a four-year journey. I heard something to the effect that this was to be the year that the scholarships were going to be fully funded.

Nope. Hope you weren't depending on actually getting any of that scholarship money.

(And didn't the Promise scholarships come from the tobacco settlement moneys? Or was that just the down payment?)

Burning Down The House With The Midnight Oil

The Dems say you can't cut enough to make up the shortfalls, something like $2.6 billion before the Federal stimulus money gets poured in. The GOP says don't you even think of increasing revenue like taxes and fees.

So it came down to the wire. They locked the doors to keep the legislators in session. Midnight came and went. Technically the state shut down, but as most citizens and most state workers were asleep, it didn't matter much because... After about two hours they passed a one-month stopgap bill which the governor signed.

Round Three!

Having not solved this budget during the rest of the year, or the month of September Do It or Lose It, we now skip ahead to 31 October 2009 -- and see whether or not thirty-one more days of posturing and wrangling gets us anywhere.

(* head desk *)

Political compromise -- it does not mean capitulation. It does not mean that one side gets to dictate to the other what the terms are. We're talking about a state, not Use It or Lose It personal finances.

Do your jobs and fix it.

'kthnxbye

Dr. Phil