Author Archives: Laura Hertzfeld

Sky high

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Stuyvesant Town, NYC/Credit: Flickr User Marianne OLeary

Stuyvesant Town, NYC/Credit: Flickr User Marianne O'Leary

Skyscrapers are going up, but are they getting sold?

EconomyBeat.org reports on the Skyscraper Index, a calculation that finds big buildings go up during financial crises to prove a country’s strength, but often they foretell economic disaster instead.

V, Double dip (W) or L recession? Things look bad for the EURO if the skyscraper index is right. We have heard recently about problems in the Eurozone. Is the worst over or is the worst still to come? The skyscraper index indicates: Trouble ahead.

Trouble is no stranger to the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village residential complex in Lower Manhattan. The biggest real estate deal in New York City history went bust this week as two major developers backed out of a plan to buy the area.

WNYC reported that tenants are nervous about the instability the fallout will bring.

“This is a community that’s been here for 60 years,” says Al Doyle, president of the Tenants Association. “We want to protect the affordability. We want to protect the tenants and we want to make sure the property is adequately maintained.”

Dead air

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Last week, liberal talk radio network Air America announced it would go off the air. Was it just another victim of the struggling economy, or were there other factors at play?

At its core, Air America was an experiment in how the left could counter the right’s hold on talk radio, and as Marketplace’s Amy Scott reports, trial and error attempts to craft that programming may have been at the core of the network’s problems, even more than its financial woes.

Founding Air America host Al Franken has been off the air for three years. Thom Hartmann replaced him, before taking his show elsewhere. Hartmann says that was part of Air America’s problem: constantly changing line-up.

But the financial burden of the network was too much to keep big name hosts like Rachel Maddow and Al Franken afloat, as David Folkenflick noted on NPR today.

Back in March 2009, Vanity Fair’s Matt Pressman all but predicted the network’s downfall.

As Air America’s fifth birthday approached, it seems fair to ask: is the concept of a liberal talk-radio network dead? And why didn’t it take off as its supporters had hoped?

Air America was far from alone in its business struggles. Scott Rosenberg writes on MediaShift that traditional newsrooms grew based on revenue and so should new ones:

The newsrooms of today acquired their size and shape and structure thanks to the business model that supported institutions of their size. The world has changed; that model is vanishing. We shouldn’t be asking “What sort of business can support a newsroom online?” The question is, “What’s the best kind of newsroom that the online business can support?

In their new book, “The Death and Life of American Journalism” Robert McChesney and John Nichols examine how we got to a crisis point in the media, and government policy’s role in the media. The authors spoke with KQED’s Forum program this week about the Air America collapse and other recent issues in the media.

Footing the bill for unemployment

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As jobless rates continue to rise, states are struggling to keep up with unemployment insurance claims. ProPublica reported that 25 states have already run out of funds or borrowed to keep up with the demand for unemployment insurance. Are there any creative solutions? Which states are hurting the most?

Minnesota’s Dislocated Worker Program has given some people an alternative to staying on unemployment benefits, but has it provided real opportunities? Minnesota Public Radio’s Public Insight Network followed Tom Koller, who’s gone from laid off machinist to Sun Microsystems credentialed network administrator.

It’s not clear the credential will deliver a job. The market, he [Koller] says, is looking worse than when he began training last year. He says he initially saw about 12 to 14 postings a week for computer system administrators…Koller, 50, is one of the tens of thousands of Minnesotans thrown out of work in this recession and among an unknown number retraining for a new industry because their old jobs will not be coming back.

Should the federal government step in with similar job training programs? A quiz from KQED’s You Decide provides the pros and cons.

Across the country, unemployment funds are drying up. Last summer, WBEZ reporter Adriene Hill told the stories of people in Chicago learning to live with less when unemployment benefits ran out.

The social safety net, set up to help people get through rough stretches, is showing its limits. A spokesman with the Illinois Department of Employment Security says thousands of people could exhaust their unemployment benefits in the next two or three weeks. And, by the end of the year, there could be 40,000 people no longer getting unemployment checks.

In Massachusetts, Boston blogger JiKamins was trying to file for unemployment just this week, when he found that he couldn’t get into the state’s new unemployment insurance web site, which was swapped to an electronic system recently.

“The two DUA employees with whom I spoke today both said that the new system is having innumerable problems across the board, ” he complained in a post.

ProPublica’s unemployment tracker lets you check the current status of unemployment funds in your state. If you have a story to share about how unemployment insurance is affecting you, share it with ProPublica here.

Campaign finance, then and now

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Today’s Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance reform will allow corporations to give as much money as they want to support candidates, overturning a ruling that had been in effect for the past 20 years. But what was the scenario before 1990?

NPR takes a look at campaign finance through the years in a timeline of legislation from 1900 to the present. The timeline include events such as the 1907 ban on corporate contributions to Congressional and Presidential campaigns, the start of Political Action Committees in 1943, and the start of modern campaign finance in 1971.

Watchdog organizations like Open Secrets and the Sunlight Foundation will clearly play a larger role as this decision takes effect. The Obama campaign was defined by the numerous smaller donations from individuals – will the new rules take away the importance these types of donors play in elections? The non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute provides reports on campaign finance in the 2008 election.

Not surprisingly, President Obama was not satisfied with the court’s ruling. Two notes on the President’s Twitter feed discussed the issue this afternoon:

@BarackObama: Today’s Supreme Court ruling gives special interests more power, and undermines the influence of average Americans. http://bit.ly/7-a

The @WhiteHouse will work immediately w/ bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision http://bit.ly/-I

Public Media Texas gives an overview of NPR’s coverage of today’s proceeds and what their effects may be.
Political Junkie reported:

Today’s decision overturns a 20-year ruling — Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce — that prohibited corporations or labor unions from paying for campaign ads. The decision removes spending limits for independent expenditure groups. It threatens to remove spending limits already established in 24 states. And it struck down part of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that bars issue ads paid for by corporations or unions in the closing days of a campaign.

Questions about campaign finance and what the ruling means? Ask Congressman Steve Scalise (R-La.) on this week’s Ask Your Lawmaker podcast, or submit a question to any Congressperson on Ask Your Lawmaker.

After Mass

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Special Election in Mass./Credit: Flickr user Rob Weir

Special Election in Mass./Credit: Flickr user Rob Weir

The special election victory by Republican Scott Brown over Democrat Martha Coakley to fill late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts yesterday left a torrent of speculation and accusation in its wake.

Will the healthcare bill be put in jeopardy? What does this mean for the Democrats in 2010 and even 2012? Does the public trust the president to lead the country out of recession?

Patchwork Nation looks at what fueled Brown’s win, in economic terms:

Compared with candidate Obama, Coakley did worst in the six counties where unemployment rose by more than 3 percentage points in the last year. In each of those counties, she got 16 percentage points less than Obama did in 2008.

That suggests that Tuesday’s vote was a “change” vote motivated perhaps by disgruntlement. Voters may be punishing Coakley for what they perceive as a lack of focus on jobs and the economy on Obama and the Democrats’ part and overemphasis on healthcare reform.

Coakley lost votes in every county in the state compared with Obama in 2008. Unemployment is up in every county as well. That can’t be a comfort to the Democrats.

For 2010, some signs of recovery need to be apparent before voters retain their support for or swing towards the Democrats. Patchwork Nation’s Dante Chinni writes “Right now the state of the national economy is fragile. What we hear repeatedly from people we talk to in different Patchwork Nation communities around the country is: ‘We have not seen a recovery here, yet.’”

WBUR in Boston took an in-depth analysis of the election results from Tuesday night and took into account who was voting, compared with previous races.

Even in many communities where Obama had a narrow victory over McCain, Brown blew Coakley away. In Weymouth, for example, Obama got 53 percent of the vote in 2008. On Tuesday, Weymouth went red, giving Brown 61 percent to Coakley’s 38 percent.

EconomyBeat pulls from blogs around the web, on both the left and right, to assess response to the special election. Reader comments from beyond Massachusetts on sites including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight brought out opinions on the democratic party, health care, and spending.