Susan Lee, a divorced mother of three in New York City, is taking a drastic step this year. “No Christmas for me,” she says. “No gifts, no turkey, no tree, no kidding.”

Lee, 41, a marketing consultant, says she needs a break from the stress and spending that are integral parts of the holiday. Her kids will celebrate a traditional Christmas with their dad, but she’s ignoring all the rituals.
“I start dreading Christmas from the time the decorations go up in the stores,” she says. “It stopped being fun for me, so I’ll find out this year if I can do without it altogether. I think it will be a relief. It already is.”

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In a time of austerity it is salutary once more to ask: what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? This is not to argue for a “Bible-says-it-all politics”, which has been out of fashion since our disastrous flirtation with it in the English Civil War of the 17th century. It is simply to recognise that all politics rest on assumptions; myths properly understood, not as fairytales but as archetypal stories about the human condition.

Both our economic activity and our political life must have ground beneath them. Human beings are not just blind globs of idling protoplasm but creatures with a name who live in a world of symbols and of dreams, not merely of matter.

If we are not only to survive this period of austerity, but even to learn to flourish in it, then we shall have to relearn a more adequate story of what is precious about human life. The story of the birth of the infant king in a poor family is a good starting place.

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If Rome could survive Caligula and Nero, says American geographer Joel Kotkin, the United States can probably survive George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Indeed, he says, the U.S. and its “anglosphere” allies ”“ Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ”“ will continue to be the primary economic, scientific and cultural force in global commerce well into the 21st century. The economic and political crises of the moment will pass. For the English-speaking world, the best is yet to be.

Author of the 2010 best-selling The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, Mr. Kotkin is singularly optimistic in his latest assessment of a world in which the anglosphere appears to be in truculent decline. The U.S. and Britain, after all, are experiencing serious crises of confidence. Now, in The New World Order, a study published in November by the London-based Legatum Institute, Mr. Kotkin and nine academic associates conclude that the anglosphere will remain the ascendant player on the world stage for a long time to come….

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…unlike the debt-ceiling drama and the destructive impasse over a grand bargain to rein in the spiraling national debt, a stalemate on the payroll tax could be good for Social Security, good for the deficit, and good for disproving the conviction that “temporary” tax cuts must never be allowed to expire.

Let us explain.

As we’ve pointed out previously, the 2-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax (from 6.2% to 4.2%) might give a short-term boost to the economy, but it contributes to Social Security’s long-term insolvency at a time when the retirement program is already paying out more in benefits than it is collecting in taxes. A one-year extension would drive up next year’s federal deficit by more than $100 billion.
The payroll tax issue also raises the question of whether there’s any such thing as a temporary tax cut. At the end of next year, the unaffordable Bush tax cuts are set to expire. Extending the payroll tax cut would set a precedent and give ammunition to those who want another extension of the Bush cuts, adding as much as $5 trillion to deficits over the coming decade.

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Anonymous “layaway angels” are rescuing Christmas for needy families across the nation.

Mystery donors are visiting stores and paying the balance on accounts that allow customers to pay for purchases over several months. Some donors ask the store to apply the money to children’s toys or clothing; they aren’t told recipients’ names. Nor do recipients learn the identities of the donors.

More than 15 layaway accounts totaling almost $4,000 have been paid by strangers at a Kmart in Lafayette, Ind., says store manager Vic Sutherland. “It’s pretty awesome,” he says. “With the economy the way it is, you wouldn’t expect it.”

Fantastic stuff–read it all.

While reading this thing, I kept waiting for the moment when the “C” word would or would not be used, in place of the safe, secular “holidays” incantation.

The premise for this story is that it’s hard to get American men to do their duties this time of year, which means heading to the nearest shopping mall and doing their part to keep their marriages and/or families united and the nation’s economy intact. Something must be done.

The answer is to combine alcohol, cigars, grilled fat, credit cards and jewelry….

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Merchandisers already track our cyber choices (efficiently, following the clicks on our keyboards) and our in-store decisions (inefficiently, with glum market researchers in every aisle). Now high-tech acuity is going offline. Soon, in-store sensors and motion trackers will watch your footsteps, see what your hands do, know when you hesitate””and when you don’t.

The obvious initial response to this is outrage. The right one is delight. This technology, alert to body as well as brain, wants to respond to our behavior, not change it. And it could have amazing applications.

You’ve heard of Kinect, the Microsoft motion-sensing device that enhanced the Xbox. And you’ve heard of Google Analytics, the dashboard for website usage statistics. Shopper Tracker””launched recently by the scrappy Argentine start-up Agile Route””is a combination of both. Its spatial recognition software, plus heat sensors and proprietary algorithms, analyze customer movements. It can show which store shelves are most popular, which items are most touched, which taken and then put back.

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Watching the MF Global saga unfold, I had to wonder: “How was it possible for a broker dealer to tap segregated client monies to speculate in risky assets and lose billions?”

MF Global’s story, as you will soon understand it, raises serious concerns for any investor. That the activities that led to MF Global’s collapse were possibly legal (!) is stunning. The details are complex, but follow them through to the end and you will see all of the problems of our system ”” political corruption, excess leverage, focus on short-term profit at the expense of survival ”” in one sordid affair.

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As the political leaders of Europe come together to save the euro and European Union itself, I believe the time has come for religious leaders to do likewise.

The task ahead of us is not between Jews and Catholics, or even Jews and Christians, but between Jews and Christians on the one hand and the increasingly, even aggressively secularising forces at work in Europe today on the other, challenging and even ridiculing our faith.

When a civilisation loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children, and their children not yet born, we ”” Jews and Christians, side by side ”” must renew our faith and its prophetic voice. We must help Europe to recover its soul.

The idea of religious leaders saving the euro and the EU sounds absurd. What has religion to do with economics, or spirituality with financial institutions? The answer is that the market economy has religious roots. It emerged in a Europe saturated with Judeo-Christian values. In the Hebrew Bible, for instance, material prosperity is a divine blessing. Poverty crushes the human spirit as well as the body, and its alleviation is a sacred task.

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Underemployment, a measure that combines the percentage of workers who are unemployed with the percentage working part time but wanting full-time work, is 18.4% in mid-December, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment. This is up slightly from 18.1% at the end of November and similar to the 18.5% of a year ago.

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What this means is that there are Christians who already occupy Wall Street every day in their occupations as businessmen and women, bankers and investors, traders and executives, secretaries and receptionists, janitors and security guards. The church’s responsibility to these “occupiers” is to provide them with the moral and spiritual formation necessary to be faithful followers of Christ every day in their productive service to others.

A group of business and ministry leaders in the UK articulated this in a recent letter to The Times of London, in which they observed, “Many Christians today work within mainstream business, attempting to be ‘salt and light’. Others run organizations . . . that are committed to using business and finance to bring social benefits, raise living standards and create jobs.” Through these kinds of efforts such business leaders “are part of the broader effort of the Church to reform capitalism by going to the root of the problem: the human heart.”

Christians therefore must occupy the world in their occupations, doing all their work as Christians, whatever it is, “whether in word or deed,” as the Apostle Paul instructs, “in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col. 3:17 NIV). In this way the church finds its most significant and transformative cultural engagement through its affirmation of the daily work of Christians who already occupy Wall Street (and all streets).

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Church foreclosures are at an all-time high. Since 2008 more than 200 churches and other religious organizations have faced foreclosure, according to real estate services firm CoStar Group. In the decade before 2008, church foreclosures were rare, averaging less than 10 per year.

Tim Trainor, a spokesman for CoStar, said 2011 is so far the worst yet, including the “highest dollar volume” ever in the second quarter of 2011, when 20 properties totaling more than $27 million went into foreclosure.

These foreclosures are likely just the tip of the iceberg. No one really knows how many churches not officially in foreclosure are on the brink. Take, for example, The Church at South Las Vegas. The church started in 2001 by Pastor Benny Perez now has more than 4,000 in regular Sunday morning attendance. But the church also has a $53,000 per month mortgage payment, and it can’t sell any of its real estate because that real estate is now worth at least $5 million less than what the church paid for it.

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…the principle I have just tried to set out for you, of giving ourselves to and for others, is not just about religion. There’s been a lot of talk about building the Big Society this year, and unfortunately the very phrase has become something of a political football, and been prejudiced too by the need to make such cuts. The fact remains, though, that 2012 has to be the year when we start to work together for the common good, or stay stuck in the gloom. Anything that is going to happen for good is likely to be bottom-up not top-down.

If we are going to do that we are going to need to engage together, and in three ways. To make them easy to remember, all three things begin with P. We are going to need to get our hands dirty and share in growing new provision for our communities. Christ came into the same regular world that you and I live in, and got stuck in. Whether it is care for the isolated and vulnerable, places for young people to hang out safely, transport for rural places, lunch clubs or language classes, there are a whole raft of practical bits of provision that we need to hang onto and if necessary recreate together. We have a great tradition of community action together ”“ and the churches have by and large played their part well ”“ but did you know that nationally 60% of men born in 1946 were members of local organisations when they were in their 30s, but by 1970 that figure had dropped to just 8%? 2012 is surely the year to reverse that trend….Together we can get things done.

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In Afghanistan, Cpl. Clayton Rhoden earned about $2,500 a month jumping into helicopters to chase down improvised explosive devices or check out suspected bomb factories.

Now he lives with his parents, sells his blood plasma for $80 a week and works what extra duty he can get for his Marine Corps Reserve unit.

Cpl. Rhoden, who is 25, gawky and polite with a passion for soldiering, is one of the legions of veterans who served in combat yet have a harder time finding work than other people their age, a situation that officials say will grow worse as the United States completes its pullout of Iraq and as, by a White House estimate, a million new veterans join the workforce over the next five years.

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But as hard and, frankly, as weird as it’s been at times, I didn’t trade in my mantra, nor did I give up on what I learned from the research: Vulnerability is not weakness, nor is it optional. We can’t opt out of the uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks that are woven through our daily experiences. Like it or not, vulnerability is coming, and we have to decide if we’re going to open up to it or push it away.

The only choice we really have is how we’re going to respond to feeling vulnerable. And contrary to popular belief, our shields don’t protect us. They simply keep us from being seen, heard, and known.

If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past decade and experienced firsthand over the last year, it’s this: Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose.

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I maintain that no matter how much cash you have on your balance sheet, or how compliant your banker might be, or how cheap the cost of money, you will not commit substantial capital to expanding your payroll or investing significant amounts to expand plant and equipment until you know what it will cost you to run your business; until you know how much you will be taxed; until you know how federal spending will impact your customer base; until you know the cost of employee health insurance; until you are reassured that regulations that affect your business will be structured so as to incentivize rather than discourage expansion; until you have concrete assurance that the fiscal “fix” the nation so desperately needs will be crafted to stimulate the economy rather than depress it and incentivize job creation rather than discourage it; or until you are reassured that the sinkhole of unfunded liabilities like Medicare and Social Security that Republican- and Democrat-led congresses and presidents alike have dug will be repaired so that our successor generations of Americans will prosper rather than drown in dark, deep waters of debt.

My colleague Sarah Bloom Raskin””one of the newest Fed governors, and a woman possessed with a disarming ability to speak in non-quadratic-equation English””recently used the example of the common kitchen sink to illustrate a point. I am going to purloin her metaphor for my description of our present predicament. You give a dinner party. The guests leave and you are washing the dishes. When you are done, you notice the remnants of the party are clogging the sink: bits of food, coffee grinds, a hair or two and the like. You have two choices. You can reach down and scoop up the gunk, a distinctly unpleasant task. Or you can turn the water on full blast, washing the gunk down the drain, providing immediate relief from both the eyesore and the distasteful job of handling the mess. You look over your shoulder to make sure your kids aren’t looking, and, voilà, you turn the faucet on full blast, washing your immediate troubles away.

From my standpoint, resorting to further monetary accommodation to clean out the sink, clogged by the flotsam and jetsam of a jolly, drunken fiscal and financial party that has gone on far too long, is the wrong path to follow. It may provide immediate relief but risks destroying the plumbing of the entire house. It is a pyrrhic solution that ultimately comes at a devastating cost. Better that the Congress and the president””the makers of fiscal policy and regulation””roll up their sleeves and get on with the yucky task of cleaning out the clogged drain.

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Read them both.

I was interested to see the AP describe the Presiding Bishop’s remarks as “a rare comment on a local issue.”

For months, they were the best of neighbors: the slapdash champions of economic equality, putting down stakes in an outdoor plaza, and the venerable Episcopal parish next door, whose munificence helped sustain the growing protest.

But in the weeks since Occupy Wall Street was evicted from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, relations between the demonstrators and Trinity Wall Street, a church barely one block from the New York Stock Exchange, have reached a crossroads.

The displaced occupiers had asked the church, one of the city’s largest landholders, to hand over a gravel lot, near Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, for use as an alternate campsite and organizing hub. The church declined, calling the proposed encampment “wrong, unsafe, unhealthy and potentially injurious.”

And now the Occupy movement, after weeks of targeting big banks and large corporations, has chosen Trinity, one of the nation’s most prominent Episcopal parishes, as its latest antagonist.

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The Obama administration will give states broad latitude to define the minimum benefits that many health insurance policies will be required to offer under the 2010 health-care law, officials announced Friday.

The plan sparked criticism from interest groups on all sides of the issue. Consumer advocates worried that millions of Americans could end up with insurance substantially less comprehensive than the law’s drafters intended. Representatives of employers and insurers warned of an opposite scenario: A state could make the benefits package so comprehensive that the resulting plans would be prohibitively expensive.

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Continuing the region’s recent streak of national recognition, greater Charleston has been tagged as one of the economically healthiest metropolitan statistical areas in the country.

The Charleston-North Charleston MSA ranked 11th in the nonpartisan Milken Institute’s “Best-Performing Cities 2011,” up from 19th last year and from 30th in 2009….

Charleston climbed to just outside the top 10 on the strength of its “vibrant aerospace sector,” “stable military presence” and other high-tech, high-skill employers, according to the report.

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Dioceses will be better placed to meet financial challenges in 2012 after the Archbishops’ Council cut its request for funding next year by £0.5 million. The Council has decided to request the same overall level of funding for its work in 2012 as in 2011, rather than the 1.8 per cent increase approved by the General Synod in July.

Although dioceses have already set their 2012 budgets, the resulting saving of £0.5 million will help dioceses meet other financial challenges whilst enabling the Council to meet all the commitments made when its budget was approved by General Synod in July….

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One wishes that financial investors were made of the same stuff as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. With virtually the entire world convinced that the euro zone has not done enough to save the common currency, Merkel remains stoic in the face of demands to erect a gigantic firewall. On Thursday, she ruled out increasing the size of the permanent euro backstop fund, the European Stability Mechanism, beyond the currently planned €500 billion ($648.5 billion).

“The German government has always made it clear that the European debt crisis is not to be solved with a single blow,” she told German parliamentarians one day earlier. She said that overcoming the debt crisis would take years and made a plea for patience and endurance.

It would appear, however, that not many are listening. This week has seen several indications that financial markets are by no means impressed with the results of last week’s European Union summit….

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Paul Klingler likes his job as a mold-maker for a Rochester plastics manufacturer.

But the 54-year-old Parma resident also liked his last mold-making job, which he held for four years before being laid off early this year. And when he didn’t get a call back regarding an open position at another company, Klingler chalked it up to his lack of a college degree. “I know I have all the other skills they’re looking for,” he says.

That’s why Klingler is working with Monroe Community College here to figure out what coursework he needs to earn an associate’s degree in its machine trades apprentice training program. He plans to start this spring.

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Google’s annual run-down of Britain’s most popular and fastest rising searches always makes for a revealing list ”“ the internet search engine calls the study “Zeitgeist” because it aims to capture the spirit of our age.

This year the royal wedding was fastest-rising but, tellingly, it doesn’t even make the top 10 most popular UK searches. That’s dominated by functional queries for Facebook, eBay, YouTube, Hotmail and, oddly, Google itself. When it comes to individuals, the same is true: Kim Kardashian, Victoria Beckham and Emma Watson are most popular, untouched by the fastest-rising people such as the late American TV star Ryan Dunn or singers Adele and Ed Sheeran.

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The world’s financial system showed new signs of strain on Wednesday as banks and investors clamored for U.S. dollars and two European banks took emergency measures to address the deepening crisis.

Stresses rippled through debt and stock markets despite measures taken by European leaders last week to help restore investor confidence. Reflecting the tension, rates that banks charge each other for short-term borrowing in dollars continued to climb, hitting their highest level since July 2009. Long-term Italian government bond yields jumped back above 7%, a level that would crimp Italy’s ability to borrow in the future. Amid the rush for dollars, the euro dropped below $1.30 for the first time since January….

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A majority of chief executives of U.S. firms expect their hiring to slow in the next six months as anxiety remains high over the European debt crisis and continued slow economic growth here.

Business Roundtable’s fourth quarter CEO survey released Wednesday shows that expectations for sales, capital spending and hiring were steady in comparison to the third-quarter report, with growth expected at around 2 percent for 2012, which doesn’t translate into job growth.

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One of the German Social Democrat opposition leaders, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, also told the Bundestag that the summit had been a failure. “The fiscal pact is only an illusory giant ”” from far away it looks very big but if you come close, the breakthrough is really very small,” he said. “We used to have a debt crisis but after the summit we added a veritable constitutional crisis. What we have now is more instability and a further complicated structure in Europe.”Adding to signs of the economic damage, the respected Ifo Institute cut its forecast for German growth in 2012 by half to 0.4 per cent and warned Europe’s biggest economy could slide into recession if the debt turmoil is not quelled.

In theory the incipient rescue plan is supported by 26 European nations, with Britain the only exception. But other countries outside the eurozone have also cast doubts, saying they do not yet know if they can fully sign up. Earlier this week Petr Necas, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, said that the deal was “not much more than a blank sheet of paper”.

Michael Noonan, Ireland’s Finance Minister, said on a visit to London yesterday that Ireland may need to hold a referendum on the EU treaty, pointing to barriers within the euro area itself.

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Allowing a counterculture to develop is vital to creating companies that will revolutionise an industry, according to Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.
Speaking to Evan Davis for a BBC 2 programme about his former business partner Steve Jobs, he said that allowing creativity in the early days of Apple was far more important than how you dressed or the length of your hair.

Listen to it all (just under 5 minutes).

The Bishop of Ripon and Leeds and a Conservative MP have exchanged sharp words over a letter criticizing the government’s welfare reforms.

The member for Skipton and Ripon, Julian Smith, told the Ripon Gazette that Bishop John Packer was ignorant of economic reality and out of touch with ordinary people. Bishops should stay out of politics, Mr Smith said, and focus on topics with which they were familiar.

On 20 November 2011 the Observer printed a letter signed by Bishop Packer and 17 other bishops calling for amendments to the welfare reform bill before Parliament that would cut aid to families with children….

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