Mark Weisbrot
Truthout, September 21, 2015

September 4, 2015 (Jobs Byte)

September 4, 2015

Jake Johnston
VICE News, September 6, 2015

Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Stromberg told Post readers that President Obama is not a climate hypocrite for talking about climate change even as he opens areas in the Arctic for drilling. Stromberg was responding to environmental groups who argued that if we are to prevent dangeorous levels of global warming, we will have to leave large amounts of the world's oil in the ground. They argue opening the Arctic for drilling is a serious step in the wrong direction.

Stromberg's response is that the environmentalists are engaged in confused thinking. He cites a column by Michael Levi at the Council of Foreign Relations:

"'[M]ore oil production in one place generally means less oil production elsewhere — that’s how markets and prices work — which substantially blunts the effect' that Arctic drilling would have on global greenhouse emissions."

In other words, Stromberg is arguing that if we drill more oil out of the Arctic, it will be offset by less oil coming from other places. This assertion is largely true, but it leaves out an important part of the picture.

Mark WeisbrotAl Jazeera America, September 1, 2015

The sequester put in place as part of the 2011 budget agreement is continuing to bite, as most areas of discretionary spending are seeing their budget cut in real terms. One of the areas slated for the biggest proportional cuts in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Ready to head for the barricades?

Okay, I know that the data produced by the BLS doesn’t sound especially sexy. After all, we aren’t talking about children going hungry or pregnant women being denied medical care. But on a per dollar basis, I would argue that BLS funding is among the best investments out there.

The purpose of the data collected by the BLS is to let us know how the economy is doing. Based on the data it produces we can know who is getting ahead and who is falling behind. We can know whether college degrees are really paying off, or paying off equally for everyone. We can know how long people spend being unemployed after losing a job or how much less they are likely to make when they find a new job.

Yes, we all have common sense understandings of these issues. We have friends, neighbors, and co-workers all of whom have experiences in the labor market, dealing with health care insurance, planning for retirement. These impressions are valuable, but sometimes our impressions are wrong. Our immediate circles of contacts may not be typical. The data from BLS lets us get beyond these impressions to get a fuller picture of the economy.

This matters hugely for important policy decisions. Right now there are many people who are anxious to have the Federal Reserve Board raise interest rates to slow the economy and the pace of job creation. The key factors in whether this makes sense are the pace of inflation, the pace of wage growth, and the extent of unemployment or various forms of under-employment.

We should want the best possible data on all of these items. It would be an enormous tragedy if the Fed raised rates and prevented hundreds of thousands of workers from getting jobs, and millions from getting pay increases, because it thought the inflation rate was higher than it actually is.

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, August 31, 2015

Dean Baker
Truthout, August 31, 2015

A local Haitian observation group has released a detailed report from election day, calling into question the legitimacy of the vote in many areas throughout Haiti. The group, made up of RNDDH, CNO and CONHANE, had observers present in 48 percent of voting centers throughout the country. The observers state that in more than 60 percent of polling centers where they were present there was massive fraud or attempted fraud, serious irregularities, intimidation and violent or aggressive acts.

The report continues:

The executive authorities, officials of the electoral body as well as many political parties and candidates each share a part of the blame for what can be considered an electoral fiasco. 

In effect, after having spent four (4) years in power without holding elections that the people were calling for, after having spent four (4) years procrastinating and trying to place the blame on other actors involved in the elections, the executive authorities produced these electoral contests where the political parties of the ruling power, namely PHTK and Réseau National Bouclier Haîtien, have been identified as being, on the day of the election, the most aggressive in the perpetration of fraud and the use of electoral violence as a means to success.

The Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) has announced that elections will be re-run in 25 areas where the number of tally sheets counted was below 70 percent. The Senate election in the Artibonite will also be re-run in October. The local observers, however have questioned the transparency of this decision:

The CEP has not provided any information about the handling, at the level of the Tabulation Center, of the numerous irregularities related to ballot-box stuffing and vote fraud reported during the election of August 9 2015. 

Moreover, the decision of the CEP to validate results from a Voting Center based on the relatively low threshold of 70% of tally sheets risks causing serious prejudice to candidates who were the target of violence by their opponents.

Although the CEP never produced a full list of voting centers that were closed or where significant problems ensued, the local observer report lists 104 voting centers where “massive fraud” and violence took place and where the voting was stopped, at least temporarily. Although Haiti’s electoral law specifically states that the suspension of the vote is not, in and of itself, grounds to annul an election, the closures, coupled with reports of fraud and violence certainly raises the question of whether results from these voting centers should be counted at all.

An analysis of the 104 voting centers where massive fraud and violence took place showed that in many cases the CEP never received any tally sheets from the centers. However, many voting centers that are listed by RNDDH produced tally sheets which were eventually accepted and counted by the CEP.  If those additional tally sheets were excluded from the final results, many different races, at both the deputy and senate level would fall below the CEP’s 70 percent threshold.

To demonstrate how sensitive the CEP’s threshold is to small changes in the number of tally sheets accepted and counted, the breakdown below shows the impact of excluding tally sheets from voting centers listed in the local observer report.

Note: PVs are tally sheets produced from each Bureau du Vote (BV). Totals PVs is the total number of PVs if each BV in a given area had produced a tally sheet.

As can be seen, by removing tally sheets from voting centers listed by the RNDDH-led local observer group, four additional departments would need to re-run Senate elections: the Nord, Centre, Grand Anse and Ouest.

Half of PHTK’s eight Senate candidates advancing to the second round come from these departments and all four of Bouclier’s do as well. Verite would lose three of its seven Senate candidates. Both Bouclier and PHTK were warned by the CEP for their involvement in electoral violence in three of the four departments where Senate elections would no longer stand. Verite was singled out for its role in electoral violence in the Nord and Ouest departments, both areas where the party advanced Senate candidates.

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, August 31, 2015