California State Unemployment Rate Highest Since 1941
California, UnemploymentSaturday, April 18, 2009
BY TOM ABATE Chronicle Staff Writer
The state unemployment rate soared to 11.2 percent in March, the highest since before World War II, leaving a record 2.1 million Californians out of work, according to a report issued Friday.
Employment Development Department spokeswoman Patti Roberts said the March figure surpasses the 11 percent rate that occurred during the 1980s recession and brings California close to the jobless level of January 1941, when unemployment stood at about 11.7 percent.
Roberts said unemployment is estimated to have been as high as 25 percent during the Great Depression. The highest reliable figure in state archives is the 14.7 percent rate in October 1940.
The U.S. unemployment rate for March stood at 8.5 percent.
“California’s higher rate of job loss is primarily the result of greater exposure to the housing downturn,” said Stephen Levy, with the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy in Palo Alto.
The Bay Area job market remained slightly better than the state average in March. But local rates continued to rise even in the San Francisco metropolitan area, which has been among the state’s most resilient job markets.
Unemployment in the three-county metropolitan zone made up of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties rose to 8.5 percent in March.
In the Oakland metropolitan area, composed of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, the March rate was 10.2 percent.
The unemployment rate in metropolitan San Jose was 11 percent, as Santa Clara County and San Benito County suffered accelerating losses.
State figures show that employers cut 62,100 jobs last month. Since March 2008 the state has lost 637,400 jobs.
Over the past 12 months, another 913,000 have joined the ranks of the unemployed. That includes workers who were laid off, young people looking for their first jobs, and older adults who rejoined the labor force, perhaps because a family member got laid off.
“These are stark numbers and this is certainly not an easy time, but on the other hand things are not really as bad as you might think,” said Chris Thornberg with Beacon Economics, a firm that forecasts California conditions.
Thornberg said these job losses reflect the slump in consumer spending that occurred at the end of 2008 and in the beginning of 2009. He said spending is starting to stabilize rather than fall.
“If the stability in consumer spending continues over the next few months, as I expect, the job market will stabilize,” Thornberg said.
But even if the national and state economies start to bottom out later this year, that would only slow the rate of job losses, said Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist with the UCLA Anderson Forecast.
“Unemployment will likely creep up through the end of the year because employers will want to see that the increase in demand is strong before they hire,” he said.
Nickelsburg predicts that the state jobless rate will hit 12 percent before it starts to decline in 2010.
Meanwhile, record numbers of Californians struggle to find work in the toughest job market of their lives.
“This is the first time I’ve been out of work for seven months,” said Phillip House, a 46-year-old San Francisco native who can’t find openings or land interviews in his chosen field of accounting.
“I’m at the point where I’ll do any job that’s legal, moral and ethical,” he said.
State unemployment in March
Labor force*
18,604,000
Total employment
16,524,000
Total unemployment
2,080,000
State unemployment rate
11.2 percent
*People with jobs or looking to work
Source: Employment Development Department
E-mail Tom Abate at tabate@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/18/MNPQ174BVL.DTL
This article appeared on page A – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
US Looks to Hackers to Protect Cyber Networks
Computer Hackers, Cyber Warfare, Internet Security, Pentagon, U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team(AP) WASHINGTON D.C.
By LOLITA C. BALDOR
Apr 18
Wanted: Computer Hackers
Buffeted by millions of digital scans and attacks each day, federal authorities are looking for hackers – not to prosecute them, but to pay them to secure the nation’s networks.
General Dynamics Information Technology put out an ad last month on behalf of the Homeland Security Department seeking someone who could “think like the bad guy.” Applicants, it said, must understand hackers’ tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems.
And in the Pentagon’s budget request submitted last week, Defense Secretary Robert Gates hung out his own help-wanted sign, saying the Pentagon will increase the number of cyber experts it can train each year from 80 to 250 by 2011.
Amid dire warnings that the U.S. is ill-prepared for a cyber attack, the White House conducted a 60-day study of how the government can better manage and use technology to protect everything from the nation’s electrical grid and stock markets to tax data, airline flight systems, and nuclear launch codes.
President Barack Obama appointed former Bush administration aide Melissa Hathaway to head the effort, and her report was delivered Friday, the White House said.
While the country had detailed plans for floods, fires or errant planes drifting into protected airspace, there is no similar response etched out for a major computer attack.
David Powner, director of technology issues for the Government Accountability Office, told Congress last month that the U.S. has no recovery plan for a digital disaster.
“We’re clearly not as prepared as we should be,” he said.
The U.S., administration officials say, has not kept pace with technological innovations needed to protect its computer networks against emerging threats from hackers, criminals or other nations looking for national security secrets.
U.S. computer networks, including those at the Pentagon and other federal agencies, are under persistent attack, ranging from nuisance hacking to more nefarious assaults, possibly from other nations, such as China. Industry leaders told Congress during a recent hearing that law enforcement and other protections are too outdated to fend off threats from criminals, terrorists and unfriendly foreign nations.
Just last week, a former government official revealed that spies had hacked into the U.S. electric grid and left behind computer programs that would let them disrupt service. The intrusions were discovered after electric companies gave the government permission to audit their systems, said the ex-official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Cyber threats are also included as a key potential national security risk outlined in a classified report put together by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Pentagon officials say they spent more than $100 million in the last six months responding to and repairing damage from cyber attacks and other computer network problems.
Nadia Short, vice president at General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, said the job posting for ethical hackers fills a critical need for the federal government.
The analysts keep constant watch on the government networks as part of a surveillance programs called Einstein that was initiated by the Bush administration under the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. US-CERT is a partnership of the Homeland Security Department, other public agencies and private companies. The Einstein program is an automated process for collecting and sharing security information.
Short said the $60 million, four-year contract with US-CERT uses the so-called ethical hackers to analyze threats to the government’s computer systems and develop ways to reduce vulnerabilities.
Faced with such cyber challenges, Obama ordered the 60-day review to examine how federal agencies manage and protect their massive amounts of data and what the government’s role should be in guarding the vast networks that control the country’s vital utilities and infrastructure.
Over the past two months, Hathaway met with hundreds of industry leaders, Capitol Hill staff and other experts, seeking guidance on what the federal government’s role should be in protecting information networks against an attack. And she sought recommendations on how officials should define and report cyber incidents and attacks; how the government should structure its cyber oversight and how the nation can increase security without stifling innovation.
A task force of technology giants, including representatives from General Dynamics, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Hewlett-Packard Co. urged the administration to establish a White House-level official to lead cyber efforts and to develop ways to share information on problems more quickly with the private sector.
The administration has struggled with the basics, such as who should control the nation’s cyberspace programs. There appears to be some agreement now that the White House should coordinate the overall effort, rejecting suggestions that the National Security Agency take it on – a plan that triggered protests on Capitol Hill and from civil liberties groups worried about giving such control to U.S. spy agencies.
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On the Net:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov
Actors Union Reaches Deal With Producers of Television and Film
Alan Rosenberg.ABC.com, AMPTP, CBS.com, Film, Hulu.com, NBC.com, S.A.G., TV
CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — The Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said Friday that they’ve reached a tentative agreement on a new deal covering TV programs and movies.Details of the deal will not be disclosed, the two sides said in a joint statement, before the Screen Actors Guild’s board of directors formally reviews the agreement on Sunday during a videoconference in New York and Los Angeles.A spokeswoman for SAG declined further comment about the agreement.
Should the deal be acceptable to SAG’s board, it probably won’t be ratified until around June 1, says Jonathan Handel, an entertainment attorney at TroyGould.
“Any opposing statements within the Guild have to be drafted, and Membership First has said they’ll oppose any deal,” Handel said, referring to a more militant wing of the guild led by President Alan Rosenberg.
According to SAG’s rules, the tentative agreement would then have to be mailed to SAG members, who would respond by mail.
By the time the voting process is completed, it will be late May, Handel commented.
To be ratified, the deal must receive 50% membership approval. “They won’t get the 90% range of approval that the Writers Guild got when it ratified its deal [last year],” Handel said, because there is opposition. But I think this deal gets done.”
SAG represents more than 122,000 actors. Its previous contract with the AMPTP expired June 30, 2008, a month after the producers walked out on negotiations.
The AMPTP represents the major studios, including those owned by Time Warner Inc. which also owns MarketWatch, the publisher of this report.
Among other demands, the actors have asked for residual payments from productions made specifically for the Web, cell phones and other nontraditional platforms, regardless of budget.
The union argued that the producers offer no residual compensation to actors for original programming that runs on ABC.com, NBC.com, CBS.com, Hulu.com or other network-owned new media platforms.
For its part, the AMPTP has said its offer to SAG would provide actors with $250 million more in compensation than did its previous contract, with terms related to online streaming that are similar to those accepted by other unions, including the Writers Guild of America, AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America. 
David B. Wilkerson is a reporter for MarketWatch in Chicago.
Canadian Banks Avoided Mortgage Meltdown
Banks, Canada, Federal Reserve, Mortgage Backed Securities, Subprime Lending, TD BankBankers Eschewed Subprime Loans, Mortgage Securities; The Result — No Bank Failures
Two more U.S. banks were taken over by the government overnight. And while a number of this country’s biggest banks reported improving conditions this week, some of their accounting methods have been questioned.
One place where none of this banking drama is taking place is Canada, as CBS Evening News weekend anchor Jeff Glor reports.
Ed Clark is a plainspoken, polite and prudent Canadian bank CEO with a few simple rules: “We should never do things for our customers and clients that we don’t actually understand. If you wouldn’t put your mother-in-law in this, don’t put our clients in it.”
You may never have heard of Clark or Toronto Dominion bank (aka TD Bank), but it’s the sixth-largest bank in North America – and, in the middle of a global banking crisis, a profitable one at that.
“We will make more money in this quarter than any bank in North America,” Clark said. “So for a little Canadian bank sitting up here, yeah that feels pretty good.”
How did that come to pass?
“Basically, because we didn’t do the things that blew other banks up,” Clark said.
And neither did TD Banks’s Canadian brethren. In the last quarter of 2008, all of Canada’s major banks were profitable, collectively making $2.5 billion during a period when U.S. banks lost more than $26 billion.
In fact, since the financial crisis began, American taxpayers have provided more than $300 billion dollars to more than 450 companies. During that same period, from their government, Canadian banks have not received one penny.
One reason: Take those infamous subprime mortgages given to risky homebuyers. They crippled banks in the U.S., where at peak, 25 percent of loans were subprime. In Canada? Three percent.
“Our U.S. subsidiaries did not do any subprime lending. Nothing. Zero,” Clark said. “We just said, ‘Stay away from this stuff. We know where this is going.'”
Another villain in the financial crisis were toxic mortgage-backed securities – risky loans that were chopped up and resold in countless different ways. Many banks gobbled up the now virtually worthless investments. Ed Clark got out 4 years ago saying they were just too complex.
Clark: “As soon as you see that complexity, you say, ‘How can I possibly think I actually can guess whether this will work or not?’ And as soon as I hear that, I say, ‘Get out of it.'”
Sherry Cooper spent years at the Fed overseeing Wall Street, before moving to Bay Street, the Canadian equivalent.
“It didn’t take long for me to discover that this is an entirely different culture,” said Cooper, chief economist at the Bank of Montreal. “Canadian banks were up to their ankles in the toxic muck whereas American banks were over there heads.”
“A lot of this is about saying, ‘Here are old banking rules, and we’re prepared to give up short term profit in order to make sure we have a balance sheet that doesn’t blow up on us,'” Clark said.
One reason why Canada is the only industrialized nation in the world without a single bank failure in the current economic downturn.
Bill Maher Goes Into Audience to Kick Out 911 Truther
9/11 Truth, Politics, TullycastBill Black With Bill Moyers
Banking Crisis, Bill Black, FDIC, Goldman Sachs, SEC, Tim Geithner, Wall StreetPart Two
Part Three
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ38T-VgmSY]
Torture : For the Beltway Media, It's All About Not Offending Charles Krauthammer
StoriesObtained: Federal Agency’s Memo Warning Of “Left Wing Extremists” | The Plum Line
DHS, Rightwing Extremism, The Washington Times
Hmm. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is keeping an eye on the threat from “left wing extremists,” in addition to “right wing” ones, according to an internal DHS threat assessment I’ve just obtained.
Yesterday the Washington Times caused a massive outrcry by reporting that the DHS had prepared a threat assessment warning law enforcement officials around the country of increased activity by “right wing extremists.”
The story was grabbed on to by conservatives and Republican elected officials who alleged it proved anti-conservative bias by the Obama administration, with some claiming that the sweeping term “left wing extremists” would never be used by Obama administration officials about the left.
I’ve now obtained, however, an internal DHS assessment for law enforcement officials that sounds equally dire warnings about “left wing extremists.” And it broadly defines these extremists as including people who embrace some components of “anticapitalist” or “antiglobalization” ideas.
You can read the whole thing right here.
While this new memo was mentioned tangentially by The Washington Times, reading the whole memo in full shows clearly that a similar approach was employed towards the left and deflates any claims of DHS “bias.”
Critics are upset with the right wing memo in part because it defines “rightwing extremism in the United States” as not just hate groups but also ones that challenge the authority of the Federal government. The outcry has been so vehement that DHS chief Janet Napolitano is expected to address it today.
But the memo I’ve obtained describes “left wing extremism” as including people who “embrace a number of radical philosophical components of anticapitalist, antiglobalization, communist, socialist, and other movements.” That seems equally sweeping.
Critics of the right wing memo also decry the description of “right wing extremists” as violence-prone. But the left wing memo — which is dated January 26th — also explicitly warns of violence from left wing extremists.
“Many leftwing extremists use the tactic of direct action to inflict economic damage on businesses and other targets to force the targeted organization to abandon what the extremists deem objectionable,” it says. “Direct actions range from animal releases, property theft, vandalism, and cyber attacks — all of which extremists regard as nonviolent — to bombings and arson.”
To be fair, it’s true that the right wing memo was clumsily done and created a political problem where there needn’t have been one. But this new memo, which is equally ham-fisted in parts, shows pretty clearly that the right wing one isn’t the result of “bias” among DHS employees or anyone else.
Developing…
Harry Kalas Collapses in Broadcast Booth and Dies; Voice of Phillies and NFL Films
Baseball, Harry Kalas, PhilliesHarry Kalas dies; voice of Phillies and NFL Films
The announcer for Phillies baseball since 1971, Harry Kalas collapses in the broadcast booth before a game. He was known nationwide as an NFL narrator.
From Staff and Wire Reports
LOS ANGELES TIMES
1:11 PM PDT, April 13, 2009Harry Kalas, the longtime voice of baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies who also had a familiar role as an announcer on NFL radio broadcasts and as the narrator of the league’s action for NFL films, died Monday. He was 73.
Kalas collapsed in the broadcast booth just hours before a game between the Phillies and the Washington Nationals in Washington.
“We lost our voice today,” team President David Montgomery said, his voice cracking. “He has loved our game and made just a tremendous contribution to our sport and certainly to our organization.”
Kalas was found by the Phillies’ director of broadcasting about 12:30 p.m. and taken to a hospital, where he died, Montgomery said.
Kalas had surgery earlier this year for an undisclosed ailment that the team characterized as minor. He looked somewhat drawn last week as the Phillies opened the season at home.
Kalas joined the Phillies in 1971. Before that, he was a member of the Houston Astros broadcast team from 1965 to 1970. In 2002, he received the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford C. Frick Award for his contributions to the game.
“Players come and go, but ‘Outta here!’ — that’s forever,” said Scott Franzke, a Phillies radio broadcaster.
Kalas lent his sonorous voice to everything from puppies to soup. He broadcast NFL games for CBS Radio and Westwood One and was the narrator of the league’s weekly highlights for NFL Films. He was the voice for Chunky Soup commercials and Animal Planet’s annual tongue-in-cheek Super Bowl competitor, the Puppy Bowl.
Kalas joined the Phillies radio and TV broadcast team in 1971, replacing fan favorite Bill Campbell.
He wasn’t immediately embraced by Phillies fans, despite being paired with Richie Ashburn, a hall of famer as a player, and longtime announcer. But Kalas evolved into a beloved sports figure in Philadelphia. He and Ashburn grew into a popular team and shared the booth until Ashburn’s death in 1997.
“Major League Baseball has lost one of the great voices of our generation,” Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement. “Baseball announcers have a special bond with their audience, and Harry represented the best of baseball not only to the fans of the Phillies, but to fans everywhere.”
The son of a Methodist minister, the Naperville, Ill., native graduated from the University of Iowa in 1959 with a degree in speech, radio and television. He was drafted into the Army soon after he graduated.
In 1961, he became sports director at Hawaii radio station KGU and also broadcast games for the Hawaii Islanders of the Pacific Coast League and for the University of Hawaii.
He did his first major league broadcast in 1965 for the Astros.
The New York Herald Sun 