Housing ownership falling back to '80s levels?

The New York Times says that yes, just such a thing could happen before the housing bubble finally, fully deflates.

This isn't just more and more subprime loans going belly-up. On the side of "fundamentals," it appears more and more would-be buyers are willing to continue the wait-and-see as to how much further the market might go.

And, this isn't just a decision in high-priced urban areas.

The Associated Estates Realty Corporation, which owns 13,000 apartments in Georgia, Indiana, Michigan and other Midwest and Southeast states, also is seeing more people deciding to rent.

“We have more of what we call ‘renters by choice’ than I’ve seen in the 40 years I’ve been in the apartment business,” said Jeffrey I. Friedman, chief executive of Associated Estates.

Beyond that, it appears that other Americans have finally stopped buying into the myths told by the National Association of Realtors and believed by people like my parents about the "investment" of owning a home.

Especially given the craptacularly cheap value with which many of today's Sunbelt suburban homes are built by the likes of D.R. Horton, et al, this is an investment that, frankly, sucks.

Besides, as long as there's such a glut of homes on the market, even if housing quality were better, there's no chance of serious appreciation.

That said, the continued slump affects more than just housing. Realtors were a major newspaper advertiser. And, they made money off legal notice classifieds for zoning changes, development hearings, etc. that city and county governments had to hold.

In the housing biz itself, this also affects subcontractors, many of whom, like carpenters, would be the contractor on farmed-out remodeling, etc.

The AP has a great follow-up story on the broader effects of the housing bubble. It also mentions the foreclosure fraud committed by mortgage signing services, a fraud the banksters don't want to accept any responsibility.

Branding Barack Obama — and his abused "lovers"

Naomi Klein, a while back, reflected on the 10th anniversary of her book "No Logo," The Guardian excerpts here her reflections.

In this, she gets much more into "branding" in politics, noting W. was decent at it, but that Barack Obama makes every predecessor of his look like a piker in terms of modern branding, both in techniques, and degree of use.

This, from the excerpt, sounds all too true and all too depressing. Although I didn't have a label for what I was "seeing through" by the end of 2007, it's clear in hindsight, and with a bit of help from Klein, that I was seeing through his branding, and finding the hollowed-out non-core of neoliberalism inside.

But, she also sounds like an abused woman returning to the man who just slapped, or even punched, her in the face:

Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren't as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

To me, without the actual violence, of course, that sounds exactly like the psychology of an abused lover, claiming they're not betrayed, that you have to look on the bright side, that it's not really that bad, etc.

It's amazing how someone like Klein can be so insightful and then ... so willfully self-blinded.

CO2 takes record jump - 4C rise coming?

The Guardian has the details on how 2010's global increase in carbon dioxide emissions from 2009 set a new record. And, discusses what that means.

A 2-degree Celsius rise in temperatures by 2100? We had better start worrying about 4C.

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. "These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a 'business as usual' path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100," he said.

A 4C rise by 2100 would likely mean 1.5C by 2050, when many people now on this globe will still be alive, is a realistic worry.

And, there's other issues:

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. "This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world's last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don't put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them."

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These "locked-in" emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

So, you American red staters, before you die, the average temperature wherever you live has about a 50-50 chance of rising by 3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Hope you like it. And, yes, that's schadenfreude, even as I still live in Texas

Bring back the WPA

Paul Krugman argues well for programs like the Depression-era Works Progress Administration to be revived today to combat "structural unemployment."

Memorial Day, Civil War, modern GOP South

A good reminder here of why Memorial Day started: to honor black Americans who died for the Union.

This is a fascinating story and one I had never heard before. As we star four years of Civil War sesquicentennial observation, anytime anybody in the GOP halfway close to Haley Barbour pops up, or whenever we get any more Lost Cause bilge spilled by Southerners, even academic (allegedly) historians, and lapped up by dumb media, we need to look at events like this to get the focus back to what the Civil War ultimately became all about.

Fix USPS — just not the Big Biz way

I agree with Business Week — the United States Postal Service is in serious financial trouble and needs help.

But, not what it proposes.

First, there's a big geographic and population spread difference between the U.S. and Europe, by and large.

Most privatization schemes ignore how much more rural "flyover" country is in the US is compared to anything in Europe this side of Russia. And, those older Red State rural voters who still mail lot of stuff will squawk if it's a buck a letter.

Scanning mail and converting it to digital formats? Would be great if broadband Internet, especially in rural areas, is as fast and reliable as in Europe. But it ain't, in part because union-busting Big Biz types that Business Week loves, and their GOP allies in Congress, vehemently oppose the government here getting involved with improving that.

But, given the way the GOP eats its young, like a threat to refuse disaster aid to VERY "reddish" Joplin, Mo., don't doubt it would do that, i.e., privatize the mail without requiring the retention of rural free delivery, that is, rural rates the same as urban ones. Ditto on Red State GOPer switching USPS to digitally-scanned mail without improving infrastructure. When you see how much the GOP refuses to pay for road and bridge upgrades, you know this ain't happening.

"Digital mail" in its other aspects? Utilities and other folks already have online bill-pay; that part of digital mail would go nowhere in the U.S.

NOT mentioned in this biz-friendly story — increasing the price of junk mail. On the revenue side, that would vastly help USPs, as well as unclogging mailboxes. Also not mentioned, and related — a comparison of U.S. and European junk mail rates.

Otherwise, this article seems to be an exercise in singing the praises of privatization, and of union-bashing. No shock, coming from an oftimes kinder, gentler, subtler version of Faux News that is Bloomberg.