Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

328 pledged delegates are up for grabs and a total of 153 unpledged delegates (66 in Ohio alone) will be selected.  

The overall situation has shifted slightly to Romney with Gallup giving national support at:

Romney 38
Santorum 22
Gingrich 15
Paul 12

Romney has clawed back to match his previous high.  Such as it is.

But Romeny still has the largest plurality of support and the Not-Romney vote is split between Santorum and Gingrich.  

The world is in a classic Positive Feedback Loop in the Negative Direction causing cascade failure across the global economy.   Increasing a causal factor comprising the Feedback Loop will only drive the economy further in the Negative Direction.

So says Theory.

Black Thursday.

Teaser Quote:

As I write, it is four in the morning and I am watching the Asian stock markets falling. Yesterday both the FTSE100 and the Dow Jones crashed, and further falls are expected today. No-one seems to have any real idea why stock markets are collapsing around the world. But on one thing everyone is agreed - we have a worldwide financial crisis.

Another sign a devastating systematic critique of Neo-Classical Economics, and policies based thereon, is forming.

Spent some time looking at the probable course of events over the next ten years.  Keep coming back to the same barrier: cannot predict how the politicians are going to respond.  So far they've been doing all the wrong things, for all the wrong reasons; throwing their lot in with the banksters¹ against their citizens or subjects.  If that continues, and there's no evidence they won't, things are going to get grim.  How grim depends on how long and strong the politicians support the banksters.  

Isn't that a nice little feedback loop?

front-paged by afew

A place to talk.

Basis is a comment I wrote in today's Salon.

5 Lessons Brands Can Learn from Hosni Mubarak:

1. Social media is fueled by real people with real concerns.  

2. You cannot turn off the conversation.

3. Social media isn't a technology.  

4. Your target market doesn't live in a vacuum.  

5. The pace of change has changed.

At the link there are brief expositions of these five points.

This is going to take two hours.

E.J. Dionne sums up:

Voters under 30 dropped from 18 percent of the electorate to 11 percent; African Americans from 13 percent to 10 percent, and Hispanics from 9 percent to 8 percent. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16 percent of the electorate to 23 percent.

If the numbers for the 2010 Mid Term had held in '08 we'd be talking about President McCain.

Professor George McDonald at George Mason University has his 2010 Turnout Rate and Early Voting Rate Forecasts.  Ed Gilgore perused the numbers and observed

69% of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57% of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well--a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.

This election is predicted to have a ~43% turn-out with ~90 million Americans voting.  A horrible percentage but that is the way it goes.

What does it mean?

The Local: Swedish women equate jogging with sex: survey

... according to the survey of 1,774 women between the ages of 15-60, jogging is equal only to sex and time spent with the family. A third of the women replied that pounding the streets was in fact preferable to exercise between the sheets.

Further in my Bookmarks I discovered a background analysis by Moonlight on the Swedish Dating Ritual posted on the Lost In Stockholm blog which starts:

With one of the highest birth rates in Europe, the Swedes seem to be pretty prolific when it comes to making babies, but even after six plus years of living in Stockholm, I'm still not sure how Swedish relationships actually happen.

and goes in an exhaustive analysis of the subject.

I thought would be of interest to the ET community.

The new Best Party is contesting the election and, if the polls are accurate, will capture seven of the fifteen seats being contested.

OK, what's the Best Party?

frontpaged - Nomad

Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

In a quite fascinating book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone - the well-off as well as the poor.

...

The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem - ill-health, lack of community life, violence, drugs, obesity, mental illness, long working hours, big prison populations - is more likely to occur in a less equal society.

The dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years has created a fundamental new change in the atmospheric circulation in the Northern Hemisphere that has sped up sea ice loss and is affecting fall and winter weather across most of the Northern Hemisphere, according to several recent studies. Arctic sea ice loss peaks in September and October, exposing a large area of open water that heats the air above it. This extra heat has helped drive September - November air temperatures in the Arctic to 1°C (1.8°F) or more above average over about half of the depth of the lower atmosphere (Figure 1). This deep layer of warm air has grown less dense and expanded, pushing the top of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) higher. The result has been a decrease in the pressure gradient (the difference in pressure) between the North Pole and mid-latitudes. With not as much difference in pressure to try and equalize, the jet stream has slowed down in the Arctic, creating a major change in the atmospheric circulation for the Northern Hemisphere.