January 25, 2013 archive

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Free Flipper

(h/t WNBC)

Dolphin Swimming in Gowanus Canal

By MARC SANTORA, The New York Times

Published: January 25, 2013

The dolphin was first spotted about 9:30 a.m. at the mouth of the canal, Ms. Wocial said. Experts are monitoring the dolphin’s swimming patterns and breathing patterns, hoping to understand what, if anything, might be ailing it.



The Gowanus has long been considered the most inhospitable of waterways. For years, it was the dumping ground for industrial waste, a receptacle for sewage spill-off and generally a symbol for urban decay.



It is not uncommon for large marine animals like dolphins and whales to swim right up to the openings of New York’s waterways, including the Gowanus Canal, swept in during high tide and out again with the next high tide. Most of the time, the animals come and go without incident.



Still, he said, the hope was that the animal would swim out during high tide. Any rescue that involves human intervention, he said, has inherent risks. Removing the animal from the water would be further complicated by the cold weather, he said.

High Tide is around 7 pm ET.  Unfortunately this is likely to end sadly, the dolphin is in considerable distress.

Meanwhile in Davos



Transcript available here

At Davos, Is the Party Over?

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, The New York Times

January 22, 2013, 9:52 pm

In previous years, the Friday night of the World Economic Forum was always filled with big dinners and blowout parties.

Certain bashes were among the most coveted. Google held a standing-room only party at Steigenberger Belvedere Hotel, complete with bands flown in from New York and beyond. Across the street, Accel Partners, the venture capital firm behind Facebook, held a wine tasting at the Kirchner Museum, often flying in cases of vintage wine from California. And Nike held a huge dinner with the slogan, “No Speeches. No Powerpoint. And no ties.”

This Friday, however, the operative slogan could be “No dinner. No parties.”



Have those companies given up on Davos for good? Is there something bigger here at play than just parties? Those are some of the questions being asked, however, answers have been forthcoming – at least not yet.

Oxfam says world’s rich could end poverty

Al Jazeera

20 Jan 2013 07:49

The world’s 100 richest people earned enough money last year to end world extreme poverty four times over, according to a new report released by international rights group and charity Oxfam.

The $240 billion net income of the world’s 100 richest billionaires would have ended poverty four times over, according to the London-based group’s report released on Saturday.



(Jeremy) Hobbs (executive director at Oxfam) said that “a global new deal” is required, encompassing a wide array of issues, from tax havens to employment laws, in order to address income inequality.

Closing tax havens, the group said, could yield an additional $189bn in additional tax revenues. According to Oxfam’s figures, as much as $32 trillion is currently stored in tax havens.

In a statement, Oxfam warned that “extreme wealth and income is not only unethical it is also economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive.”

Can we fight poverty by ending extreme wealth?

by Olga Khazan, Washington Post

January 20, 2013 at 8:00 am

In a sign that the “Occupy” and “99 percent” movements that swept the United States in recent years have taken on increased global relevance, Oxfam International this week called (.pdf) for “a new global goal to end extreme wealth by 2025,” as a way to stem income inequality and continue the fight against poverty.



Oxfam does have a point. The movement against income inequality has been gaining momentum as the world’s rich have continued to amass larger shares of their countries’ fortunes. In the United States, according to the group, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent of the population has increased to 20 percent, from 10 percent in 1980.



The World Economic Forum (Davos) also recently rated “severe income disparity” as one of its top global risks for 2013.

Oxfam’s idea is basically the opposite of the trickle-down theory: Rather than creating jobs and lifting others out of poverty, the group says, super-rich minorities cause social unrest and depress demand for goods and services, limiting growth and innovation as a result. It’s an argument that’s also been echoed recently by several vocal billionaires.



The group also suggested some measures that have been at the center of some of the fiercest policy battles in the United States and elsewhere:

“Limits to bonuses, or to how much people can earn as a multiple of the earnings of the lowest paid, limits to interest rates, limits to capital accumulation are all only recently-abandoned policy instruments that can be revived. Progressive taxation that redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor is essential,” Oxfam continued.

Those tactics sound good, but they’d require something else that unfortunately the most unequal countries also lack: governments willing to risk angering their wealthiest citizens in order to improve life for the poorest.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Cartnoon

On This Day In History January 25

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

January 25 is the 25th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 340 days remaining until the end of the year (341 in leap years).

On this day in 1905, the world’s largest diamond is found. At the Premier Mine in Pretoria, South Africa, a 3,106-carat diamond is discovered during a routine inspection by the mine’s superintendent. Weighing 1.33 pounds, and christened the “Cullinan,” it was [the largest diamond ever found.

The Cullinan diamond is the largest rough gem-quality diamond ever found, at 3,106.75 carats (621.35 g).

The largest polished gem from the stone is named Cullinan I or the Great Star of Africa, and at 530.4 carats (106.1 g) was the largest polished diamond in the world until the 1985 discovery of the Golden Jubilee Diamond, 545.67 carats (109.13 g), also from the Premier Mine. Cullinan I is now mounted in the head of the Sceptre with the Cross. The second largest gem from the Cullinan stone, Cullinan II or the Lesser Star of Africa, at 317.4 carats (63.5 g), is the fourth largest polished diamond in the world. Both gems are in the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom.

History

The Cullinan diamond was found by Frederick Wells, surface manager of the Premier Diamond Mining Company in Cullinan, on January 26, 1905. The stone was named after Sir Thomas Cullinan, the owner of the diamond mine.

Sir William Crookes performed an analysis of the Cullinan diamond before it was cut and mentioned its remarkable clarity, but also a black spot in the middle. The colours around the black spot were very vivid and changed as the analyzer was turned. According to Crookes, this pointed to internal strain. Such strain is not uncommon in diamonds.

The stone was bought by the Transvaal government and presented to King Edward VII on his birthday. It was cut into three large parts by Asscher Brothers of Amsterdam, and eventually into 9 large gem-quality stones and a number of smaller fragments. At the time, technology had not yet evolved to guarantee quality of the modern standard, and cutting the diamond was considered difficult and risky. In order to enable Asscher to cut the diamond in one blow, an incision was made, half an inch deep. Then, a specifically designed knife was placed in the incision and the diamond was split in one heavy blow. The diamond split through a defective spot, which was shared in both halves of the diamond.

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Fireworks 1

Congressional Game of Chicken: The Last Word on Filibuster Reform

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Tom Harkin: Filibuster Reform Failure Hamstrings Obama Agenda

by Michael McAuliff

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) warned President Barack Obama that he “might as well take a four-year vacation” if the Senate fails to pass real filibuster reform — and the plan being unveiled Thursday by Senate leaders doesn’t qualify, the veteran lawmaker said. [..]

“Does it help a little bit? Anything helps around here,” Harkin said of the leaders’ filibuster plan. “It still will provide a system where people can filibuster and they don’t even have to come here.” [..]

“I said to President Obama back in August … and I said to him the night before the election, I said to him, ‘Look, if you get reelected, if we don’t do something significant about filibuster reform, you might as well take a four-year vacation,'” Harkin said. “This is not significant.”

The president is left with few options, Harkin added.

“He can go out and give wonderful speeches and things like that, but with the House in the hands it’s in and the fact that in the Senate now you have to have 60 votes to pass anything, well, I dare say that Obama’s package — his very aggressive proposals — will not get very far,” said Harkin.

I will give the last word on filibuster reform to MSNBC “The Ed Show” host Ed Schultz:

Is Harry Reid really a Democrat?

The “Untouchable ” Banks (Up Date)

Cross posted by The Stars Hollow Gazette

“Too big to fail” now according to the Justice Department, “too big to jail.” The PBS news series, Frontline “investigates why Wall Street’s leaders have escaped prosecution for any fraud related to the sale of bad mortgages” in its presentation of “The Untouchables.”

Transcript can be read here

Phil Angelides: Enforcement of Wall St. is “Woefully Broken”

Phil Angelides was chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was created by Congress in 2009 to investigate the causes of the crisis. In its report, submitted in January 2011, the commission concluded that the crisis was avoidable, a result of excessive risk taking, failures of regulation and poorly prepared government leaders. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Oct. 11, 2012.

Lanny Breuer: Financial Fraud Has Not Gone Unpunished

Lanny Breuer serves as assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division. He told FRONTLINE that when fraud from the financial crisis has been detected, the Department of Justice has pursued charges. “But when we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there was criminal intent, then we have a constitutional duty not to bring those cases,” Breuer said. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Nov. 30, 2012.

Too Big To Jail? The Top 10 Civil Cases Against the Banks

by Jason M. Breslow

The Justice Department’s initial response to the financial crisis did not take long to materialize. In June 2008, three months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, the department brought its first criminal case, charging two former Bear Stearns executives with securities fraud for their alleged roles inflating the housing bubble.

A little more than a year later, a jury found the executives not guilty, dealing the DOJ an early setback. Since then, government investigations into the crisis have almost exclusively centered on civil charges, which requires prosecutors establish guilt beyond a preponderance of the evidence. The bar is higher in criminal cases, requiring they prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Here are 10 of the most prominent of those cases to date. In nearly all, the government won multi-million dollar settlements, but the companies and officials involved were not required to admit wrongdoing.

Secrets and Lies of the Bailout

by Matt Taibbi

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

Up Date: After his appearance on “Frontline”, Yves Smith at naked capitalism delightedly announced the news that Lanny Breuer, former Covington & Burling partner and more recently head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice, had his resignation leaked today.

Never mind resign, why hasn’t Obama fired him?

Late Night Karaoke

Koch Industries secretly fund attacks on climate science

As anyone but a but Fox viewing Republican knows climate change is real and happening now and not 100 years from now.  While not widely reported by the American media in the last 4 years the Koch brothers and the associated groups they fund have been forced into the light of day by those willing to investigate the agenda these funds support.

 

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

Remember “Climategate”? Think Charles and David Koch

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a “donor advised fund”, meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

Anonymous private funding of global warming sceptics, who have criticised climate scientists for their lack of transparency, is becoming increasingly common. The Kochs, for instance, have overtaken the corporate funding of climate denialism by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. One such organisation, Americans for Prosperity, which was established by David Koch, claimed that the “Climategate” emails illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia in 2009 proved that global warming was the “biggest hoax the world has ever seen”.

Global warming is the biggest hoax of all that’s why its taking place in our lifetime and not in 10,000 years as these fools would have you believe.

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

Our regular featured content-

And these featured articles-

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Write more and often.  This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette