The editors of The Nation have called for Rahm Emanuel to resign as mayor of Chicago:
In the coming months, a jury will consider the fate of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, who has been charged with first-degree murder for shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times at close range. Police originally claimed that McDonald had lunged at officers with a knife, but the dash-cam footage released last month showed no such dangerous move. Instead, the tape showed Van Dyke pumping bullets into the teenager as he lay on the ground.
As the case advances through the legal system, Chicagoans are left to consider the political future of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who appears to have done everything in his power to prevent this case from reaching a courtroom. That verdict may already be in: A recent poll showed that a majority of Chicagoans want Emanuel to resign, while less than 30 percent support his remaining in office. We agree with Chicago: Rahm Emanuel must go.
While not good for the mayor, I don’t see The Nation’s reaction as particularly bad for him, either. They’re no friends of the DLC, of which Mayor Emanuel was a member. More than anything else the call is another indication of the fight for control of the Democratic Party between its progressive and centrist wings.
This is off topic to the current post, but germane to Daves recent “inflation” post, and worthy of reading. Even if you don’t like the associated commentary – and I can think of a couple commenters who wouldn’t – the data is informative. Of course if you look at the data, the question becomes what is it about the commentary you disagree with?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-18/david-stockman-warns-dread-fed-sell-bonds-sell-stocks-sell-house
I don’t think Chicago has a recall mechanism, so gritting his teeth and waiting this out may work for Rahm.
Not just Chicago. Illinois doesn’t have a recall mechanism. This has got to be the least populist state in the Union.
No, Rahm will need to be pushed. He won’t jump.
That ZH post is pretty breathless, Guarneri. Yes, it will be heresy to some.
The only comment I have is that the only thing you can tell from cratering commodity prices is that China was stockpiling and it isn’t any more.
Kind of related to the ZH link:
Why does the BLS rely primarily on surveys for its data? Elsewhere in the government, the IRS and the SSA have vast quantities of real, live data for most of the individuals in the country. Admittedly there are problems, as not everyone earns a regular paycheck or pays their taxes with each paycheck (among others), but the quantity and quality of the data from those organizations would beat the pure survey methods used by the BLS. The surveys should be a supplement to their data streams, not the primary data.
Concerns for privacy would be minimal, at best. There are ways to scrub that kind of data so as to hide what data belongs to who without losing anything essential. (We did something similar at Disney so as to analyze HC expenses without violating HIPAA & other privacy regulations – there are companies dedicated to this kind of work.) Work to add in state and local tax data and the government could be looking at a much more precise version of what’s happening with the economy. And given that pretty much no one trusts the estimation methods of the witch doctors, er, economists, it could even have a slightly better chance of being credible.
Of course, the down-side of this is that all the technocrats would want to use the data to “manage” the economy that much more closely, so maybe I should shut up now.