Tag: ek Politics

This Presidential Race Should Never Have Been This Close

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 25, 2:10 PM ET

Unless someone snags an iPhone video of Obama taking a leak on Ohio State mascot Brutus Buckeye, or stealing pain meds from a Tampa retiree and sharing them with a bunch of Japanese carmakers, the game looks pretty much up – Obama’s widening leads in three battleground states, Virginia, Ohio and Florida, seem to have sealed the deal.

That’s left the media to speculate, with a palpable air of sadness, over where the system went wrong. Whatever you believe, many of these articles say, wherever you rest on the ideological spectrum, you should be disappointed that Obama ultimately had to run against such an incompetent challenger. Weirdly, there seems to be an expectation that presidential races should be closer, and that if one doesn’t come down to the wire in an exciting photo finish, we’ve all missed out somehow.

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The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and just tried a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned the entire population to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.

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These people represent everything that ordinarily repels the American voter. They mostly come from privileged backgrounds. Few of them have ever worked with their hands, or done anything like hard work. They not only don’t oppose the offshoring of American manufacturing jobs, they enthusiastically support it, helping finance the construction of new factories in places like China and India.

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The people in this group inevitably support every war that America has even the slimmest chance of involving itself in, but neither they nor their children ever fight in these conflicts. They are largely irreligious, rarely if ever go to church, and incidentally they do massive amounts of drugs, from cocaine on down, but almost never suffer any kind of criminal penalty for their behavior.

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For all this, when it came time to nominate a candidate for the presidency four years after the crash, the Republicans chose a man who in almost every respect perfectly represents this class of people. Mitt Romney is a rich-from-birth Ivy League product who not only has never done a hard day of work in his life – he never even saw a bad neighborhood in America until 1996, when he was 49 years old, when he went into some seedy sections of New York in search of a colleague’s missing daughter (“It was a shocker,” Mitt said. “The number of lost souls was astounding”).

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If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people “wants to have a beer with,” how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife’s name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing “entitlements” like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq, and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it’s paying its bills to him on time?

Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he’s Gregg Marmalaard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane’s sneering, tux-wearing “Cal’ character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdink to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he’s literally Gordon Gekko). He’s everything we’ve been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn’t fight his own battles and insists there’s only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest.

The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney’s part to pull safely ahead in this race is what speaks to the extraordinary brokenness of the system.

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(W)hen one of the candidates is Mitt Romney, the race shouldn’t be close. You’ll hear differently in the coming weeks from the news media, which will spend a lot of time scratching its figurative beard while it argues that a 54-46 split, or however this thing ends up (and they’ll call anything above 53% for Obama a rout, I would guess), is evidence that the system is broken. But what we probably should be wondering is why it was ever close at all.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Spain Recoils as Its Hungry Forage Trash Bins for a Next Meal

By SUZANNE DALEY, The New York Times

Published: September 24, 2012

“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.”

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“It’s against the dignity of these people to have to look for food in this manner,” said Eduardo Berloso, an official in Girona, the city that padlocked its supermarket trash bins.

Mr. Berloso proposed the measure last month after hearing from social workers and seeing for himself one evening “the humiliating gesture of a mother with children looking around before digging into the bins.”

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But Mr. Berloso’s locks created something of an uproar across Spain, where the economic crisis is fueling more and more protests highlighting hunger. A group of mayors and unionists in southern Spain, where unemployment rates are far above the average, recently staged Robin Hood raids on two supermarkets, loading carts with basic foods and pressing them to donate more food to the needy.

More than a dozen people are facing prosecution for theft over the stunt. But they are unrepentant and appear to have huge local support. “Taking some food and giving it to families who are having a really hard time, if this is stealing, I am guilty,” one of the men, Francisco Molero of the farmworkers’ SAT union, told the local news media afterward.

I.M.F.’s Call for More Cuts Irks Greece

By LIZ ALDERMAN and LANDON THOMAS Jr., The New York Times

Published: September 24, 2012

The impasse has elevated tensions here as Greece braces for a nationwide general strike planned on Wednesday that threatens to bring public services to a halt. The Greek people are increasingly angry over the prospect that public salaries and pensions will be cut again in a last-ditch bid to secure a new loan installment of 31.5 billion euros, or $40.7 billion, from Greece’s creditors.

The Greek prime minister, Antonis Samaras, plans to address the nation this week to bolster support for the austerity package. He has already publicly warned his center-right party, New Democracy, that he will oust lawmakers of the party failing to back the package once it comes up for a vote, probably in early October.

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In this political calculus, Ms. Merkel and others see Mr. Samaras as the last best hope for Greece. They worry that if the government teeters, new elections might be called in which his party could lose power to the increasingly popular leftist party Syriza, led by the political maverick Alexis Tsipras. Mr. Tsipras advocates tearing up the loan agreement with Greece’s international creditors. That would raise the risk of default and an eventual exit from the euro.

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At the meeting, Poul Thomsen, the I.M.F.’s lead negotiator for Greece, was pushing hard for additional tax increases and wage and pension cuts, these people say. Mr. Stournaras angrily gestured to a bullet hole in one of the windows of the Finance Ministry.

“You see this – this came from a bullet,” Mr. Stournaras said. “Do you want to overthrow the government?”

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The impasse reveals the extent of the government’s alarm at the worsening mood on the streets. More protests are likely in October, when Parliament is expected to vote on the measure. Many Greeks are now talking about the potential for civil unrest when the weather turns colder and many people may not be able to afford to heat their homes. Fuel prices, including gasoline, have been climbing, and whatever cushion Greeks on the margins had in their savings is gone.

Moreover, questions are swirling about the extent to which Greece’s police force will be willing and able to maintain public order, because it is also facing salary cuts. A number of officers were held off with pepper spray by riot police officers last week outside of Mr. Samaras’s residence, where they held a demonstration.

Draghi Rally Lets Skeptics Dump Spain for Bunds

By David Goodman and Emma Charlton, Bloomberg News

Sep 25, 2012 8:47 AM ET

Demand for German debt, perceived to be among the safest securities, is being sustained as Spain weighs a sovereign bailout to supplement a 100-billion euro ($129 billion) bank rescue package and as Europe’s economy slides toward recession.

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Even as policy makers strive to end the three-year debt crisis, the region’s economic outlook is weakening. Euro-area surveys on Sept. 20 showed services and manufacturing output fell to a 39-month low in September adding to evidence the economy is heading for a recession. Figures yesterday showed German business confidence unexpectedly fell to the lowest in more than two and a half years in September.

“We are in a period where the ECB has laid down its framework to save the euro but the fundamentals will ultimately creep back in and you will see new problems flare,” said Harvinder Sian, a fixed income strategist at RBS in London. “Bunds will remain supported. I think 1.55 percent to 1.70 percent is a good entry location.”

Spain is in its second recession in three years, endangering plans to trim its budget deficit and avoid a bailout. The euro-region economy will probably shrink 0.4 percent this year, the ECB said this month.

We Are Now Entering The Terrifying End Game

Nigel Farage, King World News

September 24, 2012

What is really happening here is the eurozone crisis is so serious, and so dire, public opinion across Europe is turning so quickly in every country against the project, that what they are trying to do is seal and complete the project before everybody really wakes up to what’s being done in their name.

That’s what they are about.  We are now entering the end game in what has been a 50 year political project.  This is all going to come to a very dramatic head over the course of the next two years.

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The end game for them is to effectively abolish the nation states of Europe, to completely abolish any concept of national democracy, and to vest all power, all the attributes we associate with normal countries, that is all to be vested in this new European political class.

That imperial ambition has been there from the start, but up until now it has been hidden.  I have to say that as far as most of Europe is concerned,  I am quite pessimistic.

You’re Dreaming If You Think The Euro Crisis Is Resolved

Raul Ilargi Meijer, Automatic Earth

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2012 12:54 AM

It makes no difference whether you call it shock doctrine or 21st century imperialism or hostile takeovers, you can’t take away from the people of Greece, Italy and Spain all the monuments of their past, as well as all powers they have over their own economies, production facilities and agriculture, and expect them to take that lying down. Not going to happen.

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The politico-banking class are all sitting there smugly and comfy in their bought-on-someone-else’s-credit plush offices, picking through the still rich and splendid spoils of once proud nations and fiercely independent peoples. And even if they do win some of the preliminary battles at the negotiating table, the real ones can be won only through the use of violence.

There isn’t much time left until that becomes a realistic threat, which means that now is the time for the people of Europe to decide whether they want to go down that road or not. And if they don’t, they need to draw conclusions and accept the potential consequences of that decision: Get up, Stand up. And no, I don’t have a lot of faith that they will. But I do hope that more people will now start to clue in on what that means: yes, violence.

Patience snaps in Portugal

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

September 24th, 2012

The Portuguese people have put up with one draconian package after another – with longer working hours, 7pc pay cuts, tax rises, an erosion of pensions, etc – all amounting to a net fiscal squeeze of 10.4 of GDP so far in cyclically-adjusted terms. (It will ultimately be 15pc).

They have protested peacefully, in marked contrast to the Greeks, even though the latest poll by the Catholic University shows that 87pc are losing faith in Portugal’s democracy.

Yet Mr Passos Coelho’s rash decision to raise the Social Security tax on workers’ pay from 11pc to 18pc has at last brought the heavens down upon his head.

He was hauled in front of the Council of State – a sort of Privy Council of elders and wise men – for a showdown over the weekend. Eight hours later he emerged battered and bruised to admit defeat. The measure will not go ahead.

Francisco Louca from left-wing Bloco suggested that the prime minister cannot survive such a defeat. “The government is dead”, he said.

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If Citigroup is right – and views differ on this – Portugal is going into the same sort of self-feeding downward spiral as Greece. Debt-deflation is choking the country.

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The defenders of Portugal’s current policies have nothing to do with Friedman or orthodox monetarism.

They are disciples of an extremist subcult that believes in expansionary fiscal contractions, even though ample evidence from the IMF shows that such policies are mostly doomed to failure without offsetting monetary stimulus and/or devaluation.

Sadly, there seems to be almost nobody in public life in Portugal willing to tell the people that membership of the euro is the elemental cause of their current suffering.

Valencia: A Spanish city without medicine

Paul Mason, BBC

22 September 2012

Journalists sacked when a local paper closed have taken to doing “citizen journalism” – which today means organising a coach trip around all the various projects Valencia built in the good times.

There is the Formula One racetrack, which runs right through the city so the roads had to be redesigned. But the city has lost its Formula One race.

There is the America’s Cup dock, with huge sheds for ocean-going yachts and a massive white control tower. But there is no more America’s Cup racing in Valencia.

There is the Opera House, a cross between the one in Sydney and something you would imagine only in your more disturbed dreams – 400 million euros to build, 40 million a year to run – 15 performances a year.

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Whether by corruption – and there has been a great deal of that – maladministration, or pure bad luck, Valencia is littered with vanity projects that tell their own story.

The airport that has never seen a single plane land. The theme park built in a place where the summer heat rises above 40C (104F). The land bought at premium prices that is now worthless.

Spaniards rage against austerity near Parliament

By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press

36 minutes ago

More than 1,000 riot police blocked off access to the Parliament building in the heart of Madrid, forcing most protesters to crowd nearby avenues and shutting down traffic at the height of the evening rush hour.

Police used batons to push back some protesters at the front of the march attended by an estimated 6,000 people as tempers flared, and some demonstrators broke down barricades and threw rocks and bottles toward authorities.

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Angry Madrid marchers who got as close as they could to Parliament, 250 meters (yards) away, yelled “Get out!, Get out! They don’t represent us! Fire them!”

“The only solution is that we should put everyone in Parliament out on the street so they know what it’s like,” said Maria Pilar Lopez, a 60-year-old government secretary.

Lopez and others called for fresh elections, claiming the government’s hard-hitting austerity measures are proof that the ruling Popular Party misled voters when it won power last November in a landslide.

Spain prepares more austerity, protesters clash with police

By Tracy Rucinski and Paul Day, Reuters

Tue Sep 25, 2012 3:40pm EDT

“Let us in, we want to evict you,” protesters chanted outside parliament. Evictions have soared in Spain as thousands of people have defaulted on bank loans.

Demonstrators said they were angry that the state has poured funds into crumbled banks while it is cutting social benefits.

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Half-year deficit data indicate national accounts are already on a slope that will drive Spain into a bailout. The deficit to end-June stands at over 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, including transfers to bailed out banks, making meeting the 6.3 percent target by the end of the year almost impossible.

it can only be failed.

Among some Paul Ryan backers, disappointment at Romney campaign trajectory

By Felicia Sonmez and David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

Updated: Monday, September 24, 1:50 AM

Dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the campaign seems highest among Ryan’s most ardent backers. They view Romney’s campaign as having doubled back to a cautious strategy, avoiding Ryan’s trademark big ideas, and hoping President Obama will beat himself.

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Still, there have been unforced errors, such as the one Ryan made last month when he misstated his marathon time in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt – a misstep that has so become part of Ryan’s national profile that it was lampooned in the season premiere of “Saturday Night Live.”

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And it’s not that Ryan is neglecting to cite the need to focus on the big problems facing the country. Aside from his first week on the trail, during which he barely mentioned his signature plan to overhaul Medicare, he has raised the issue at the majority of his roughly three-dozen campaign stops as GOP vice presidential nominee, including in his appearance on Friday at the AARP’s annual summit, at which he received a mixed reception.

Rather, the concern of some of the seven-term Wisconsin congressman’s supporters is that nowadays Ryan’s discussion of the big issues facing the country offers more specifics on what Obama has done wrong than what Romney and Ryan would do right.

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A Ryan spokesman disputed the notion that the campaign has not delivered on its promise of honing in on the big ideas, noting that Ryan frequently focuses in interviews as well as in his campaign-trail remarks on Medicare, tax reform and balancing the budget.

“Only one ticket has had the courage to talk about solutions to the big challenges facing America,” spokesman Brendan Buck said. “Not only has Paul Ryan championed the Romney plan to save and strengthen Medicare – he’s done it in front of Florida seniors and at the AARP. We are running on bold solutions – made even bolder compared to the pettiness of President Obama’s campaign.”

When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no – and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.- Mitt Romney

Likewise Neo-Liberalism-

Obama and the Center-Right Nation He Hasn’t Changed

By: masaccio, Firedog Lake

Sunday September 23, 2012 10:30 am

But he isn’t the only one who dismisses the concerns of his supporters. Barack Obama was elected in large part by people who wanted real changes from the Bush government. They wanted an end to wars, restoration of civil liberties, equality for LGBT people, strenuous regulation and law enforcement directed at the criminals on Wall Street, and economic fairness through support for homeowners and workers. With the notable exception of grudging support for marriage equality and equality in the ranks of the armed forces, Obama and the Democratic Party turned their backs on their supporters. It is impossible to find a single policy suggested by anyone from Paul Krugman to whatever is left of the left that made its way into any piece of actual legislation. No one from the Wall Street criminal class has been investigated, let alone prosecuted.

It was apparent by Fall 2009 that the Democrats believed what the Republicans were saying: America is a Center-Right nation. Time after time, Obama and the Democrats proposed legislation that only a Republican could love, then bargained further to the right to pick up votes from the most conservative Democrats and the least conservative Republicans. Time after time the resulting legislation was nearly useless when action was taken at all. Unions and the hard-working people they represent were probably the single greatest contributor to the Obama victory. They got slapped in the face. The stimulus was too small. Dodd-Frank relied on captured agencies to create rules. Obamacare threw millions of Americans into the maws of the private insurance companies. Every time I hear a Democrat brag on some piece of legislation, I think of the lost possibilities.

The nation was hungry for leadership, starving for action to make things better, desperate for change, and we got a President who was unwilling to push for anything that would actually change the status quo.

Ultimately, both Romney and Obama disrespect their constituents. Romney openly loathes the people he needs, and they know it. They may vote for him, but they know that they will suffer for it.

Obama is more circumspect in public, but look at the people he hires: Rahm Emmanuel who openly loathes the left, and Tim Geithner, who lives to serve Wall Street at any cost, like foaming the runway for bank foreclosures with the lives of millions of homeowners. Obama refuses even to talk to anyone who questions conventional wisdom, which is the nature of the intellectual activity of the left. It’s as if we professional leftists don’t exist for him, in exactly the same way the 47% don’t really exist for Romney.

This is no way to run a country. Ideas matter, policies matter, evidence matters. In a room full of smart people, the smartest person is the room. Romney despises his supporters, and will fill the room with silly people like those at his secret fund-raiser. So far, Obama has refused to listen to the room. He thinks he knows we are a center-right nation and that he can do nothing to change that, that he cannot exercise leadership. I hope that changes if he wins a second term.

Leadership means that the President listens to the room, clarifies thinking and helps everyone see the problems and the possible solutions. When that doesn’t happen, we are governed by a tiny group of jerks, responsible only to their moneymen and reliant on public relations tricks to pacify the masses. That will work until it doesn’t.

Five Big Opportunities on the Economy Obama Missed

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Monday September 24, 2012 9:32 am

One of the most frustrating things about having a two party political system, especially during the heat of an election, is that many important points get ignored if the don’t fit the partisan dynamic. One of the best examples I feel is the debate about Obama’s record on the economy.

The only arguments most people hear against Obama’s record comes from Republicans, but their criticisms are normally incoherent attacks based on fantasies about confidence and government crowding out the private sector. Most prominent figures who believe in Keynesian economics are at this moment defending Obama poor record mainly because it is at least noticeably less terrible than any proposal from Mitt Romney.

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People trying to defend Obama record from the left will often claim Obama didn’t try to get more stimulus only because Obama knew he wouldn’t be able to get the votes in the Senate. Yet here are things Obama could have done for the economy without Congress but he choose not to do them. Given that Obama didn’t even try to spend all the potential money for stimulus he had at his disposal, it is safe to assume the real reason Obama didn’t seek more stimulus money for Congress was simply because he mistakenly believed the economy didn’t need it.

The behavior and statements of the administration clearly show that they kept underestimating the size of the economy problem for years.

While Bill Clinton is defending Obama by claiming no president could have magically turned the economy to full employment, a honest look at the record would indicate another president could have done a better job even with the constraints Obama faced. Sadly though this critic of Obama’s record from the left is almost completely absent. Careful examinations of Obama’s failing are being completely overshadowed by how misguided Mitt Romney policy ideas are.

Bullshit Mountain

Atrios, Eschaton

Thursday, September 20, 2012

I like the inclusion of Craig T. Nelson saying, “I’ve been on food stamps and welfare, did anybody help me out? No.” Because I think that quote really gets to the true core of bullshit mountain. One can never be quite sure how much conservatives believe their own bullshit, but my longstanding theory is that they believe there’s some secret super generous welfare system that only black people have access to. When they had hard times, got their government handouts, their government handouts sucked. But the blahs are out there buying their t-bones and driving their cadillacs, so they must be getting the really good welfare. Nobody helped poor Craig out, because the food stamps and and welfare sucked. They don’t understand that this is because food stamps and welfare do suck.

(Matt Taibbi on Sam Seder, h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Wall Street Rolling Back Another Key Piece of Financial Reform

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 20, 9:33 AM ET

Jefferson County, Alabama was the most famous case – the city of Birmingham went bankrupt after being bribed and goaded into taking on billions of dollars of toxic swap deals – but in fact it was just one of hundreds of similar examples of localities being duped into suicidal financial deals by rapacious banks and financial companies. The Denver school system, for instance, got clobbered when it opted for an exotic swap deal pushed by J.P. Morgan Chase (the same villain in Jefferson County, incidentally) and then-school superintendent/future U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, that ended up costing the school system tens of millions of dollars. As was the case in Jefferson County, the only way out of the deal involved a massive termination fee that might have been even more destructive than the deal itself.

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Sounds simple, right? But Wall Street couldn’t have that. After all, if companies are required to have a fiduciary responsibility to cities and towns, how in the world can they screw cities and towns? The idea was a veritable axe-blow to the banks’ municipal advisory businesses.

So what did Wall Street lobbyists and trade groups like SIFMA (the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) do? Well, they did what they’ve been doing to Dodd-Frank generally: they Swiss-cheesed the law with a string of exemptions. The industry proposal that ended up being HR 2827 created several new loopholes for purveyors of swaps and other such financial products to cities and towns.

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So basically, if you’re underwriting a municipal bond for a city or a town, and you happen also to give the city or town advice about some deadly swap deal that will put the city into bankruptcy for the next thousand years, you don’t have a fiduciary responsibility to that city or town. The banks’ view is that being asked to perform the merely-technical function of underwriting a bond is very different from advising someone to take on an exotic swap deal – so if a bank is mainly an underwriter and happens to offhandedly recommend this or that swap deal, it just isn’t fair to drop this onerous financial responsibility, this weighty designation of municipal financial advisor, on its shoulders.

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God forbid! Thankfully, this new law provides an exemption from that “highest standard of conduct” providing the bank or financial company is not just giving advice, but also performing a merely technical function like underwriting.

The details of this law are pretty hairy, but the basic idea is simple: provided a bank isn’t dumb enough to only provide advice, or to ask for separate compensation for advice, it doesn’t owe anyone any goddamned fiduciary responsibility. So they can keep screwing cities and towns as much as they’d like.

A Rare Look at Why The Government Won’t Fight Wall Street

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

September 18, 10:28 AM ET

The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who’ve come at the issue from the inside.

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There are some damning revelations in this book, and overall it’s not a flattering portrait of key Obama administration officials like SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, Department of Justice honchos Eric Holder (who once worked at the same law firm, Covington and Burling, as Connaughton) and Lanny Breuer, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

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Connaughton writes about something he calls “The Blob,” a kind of catchall term describing an oozy pile of Hill insiders who are all incestuously interconnected, sometimes by financial or political ties, sometimes by marriage, sometimes by all three. And what Connaughton and Kaufman found is that taking on Wall Street even with the aim of imposing simple, logical fixes often inspired immediate hostile responses from The Blob; you’d never know where it was coming from.

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when Kaufman tried to advocate for rules that would have prevented naked short-selling, Connaughton was warned by a lobbyist that it would be “bad for my career” if he went after the issue and that “Ted and I looked like deranged conspiracy theorists” for asking if naked short-selling had played a role in the final collapse of Lehman Brothers. Naked short-selling is another controversial practice. Essentially, when you short a stock, you’re supposed to locate shares of that stock before you go out and sell it short. But what hedge funds and banks have discovered is that the rules provide “leeway” – you can go out and sell shares in a stock without actually having it, provided you have a “reasonable belief” that you can locate the shares.

This leads to the obvious possibility of companies creating false supply in a stock by selling shares they don’t have. Without getting too much into the weeds here, there is an obvious solution to the problem, which essentially would be forcing companies to actually locate shares before selling them. In their attempt to change the system, Kaufman and Connaughton discovered that the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation, the massive quasi-private organization that clears most all stock trades in America, had come up with just such a fix on their own.

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A roundtable to discuss the idea was scheduled by the SEC on September 24, 2009. Of the nine invited participants, “all but one” were for the status quo. Connaughton expected the DTCC representatives to unveil their reform idea, but they didn’t.

The Banker Who’d Cut Social Security and Medicare – and May Become Treasury Secretary

Richard (RJ) Eskow, Huffington Post

09/17/2012 11:08 pm

Before entering public life Bowles was a banker with Morgan Stanley. He now serves on Morgan Stanley’s board, and has done so through a series of that bank’s legal issues. As Dean Baker notes, Bowles was also on the General Motors Board “from June of 2005 until it went into bankruptcy in the spring of 2009,” and “joined the board of Morgan Stanley, the Wall Street investment bank, near the peak of the housing bubble in December of 2005.”

Bowles is also on the Board of Facebook, whose IPO has been the subject of controversy and scandal. (Baker offers a fun, interactive graph of the economic performance of the companies on whose boards Bowles has served. It isn’t pretty.)

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The Simpson/Bowles proposal is often marketed — falsely — as the product of their deadlocked and failed Presidential Deficit Commission. It claims to be “centrist” because it offers unspecified tax increases as well as cuts — probably by decimating the middle class by eliminating tax deductions for employer health care, dependent children, and home mortgage interest. It also claims “bipartisanship” because Bowles the banker is also Democratic Party insider.

The “Simpson Bowles” austerity cuts to U.S. government spending closely resemble the cuts that have devastated the economies of Europe and Great Britain. Their plan would also cut Medicare and Social Security benefits — while providing drastically lower tax rates for billionaires and millionaires.

When you look at it carefully, Simpson/Bowles only differs from the radical right-wing Republican budget in a few areas, the most important of which is this: While the Republican plan calls for no tax increases at all, the Simpson/Bowles plan says it would offset its billionaire tax cuts. But since they also lower tax rates for billionaires, millionaires and corporations, they’re left to rely like Romney on unspecified loopholes, or “tax expenditures,” which could eviscerate the tax deductions that help the middle class get health insurance and pay their mortgages.

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Washington insiders scoff at anybody who dares question the sanctity of the “Simpson Bowles” concept. But once you leave Washington, that includes pretty much everybody. About 96 percent of the country’s voters reject their emphasis on deficits as our top priority, according to recent polling. The same poll showed that 37 percent of those polled considered “the economy and jobs” their top priority. That’s nearly ten times as many people.

That tracks closely with other poll results which showed that seventy percent of Americans were either “very uncomfortable” or “somewhat uncomfortable” with the Simpso(n)/ Bowles plan when it was released.

Meanwhile polls show that Medicare is a key issue in three battleground states, with Paul Ryan’s unpopular plan giving Democrats a decided edge on that issue. The selection of Bowles would damage that advantage if it was announced before the election, and would create a sense of betrayal if announced afterwards.

That particular form of right-wing wealth redistribution is what allows Simpson, Bowles, their funders and supporters to keep bragging that their plan is “brave.” If they were really brave they’d admit that they’re offering a right-wing austerity plan, not a “nonpartisan” solution to a long-term issue that’s receiving attention that should be focused on today’s jobs crisis.

Since Romney Raised the Issue of Freeloaders, What Is Erskine Bowles?

Dean Baker, cepr

Tuesday, 18 September 2012 04:42

Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.

If people think that this is a private matter, with Mr. Bowles just ripping off shareholders while Governor Romney’s freeloaders are ripping off taxpayers, think again. One of the companies on whose board Mr. Bowles sat, General Motors, went bankrupt with substantial costs to the government. Another, Morgan Stanley, would have gone bankrupt without extraordinary assistance from the Fed and Treasury, which continues to this day in the form of implicit too big to fail insurance.

So, if we want to have a debate about people who freeload on the rest of the country, we should have folks like Erskine Bowles at center stage. Of course he is in a much higher income bracket than the folks who get Social Security or unemployment insurance from the government, but that fact should not be allowed to color the debate.

I’m actually a great admirer and have been for years.  I freely admit that I’ve adjusted my writing style based on his which I think works much better for Front Page pieces than my 2500 word Jim Blaine homages.

He has a new temporary gig-

Writing Stuff Elsewhere

Atrios, Eschaton

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Doing a weekly online column for USA Today until the election. I’ll use it to promote some crazy ideas.

Viva Social Security

By Duncan Black, USA Today

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Instead of considering some exciting new program to try to encourage workers into saving more, another Rube Goldberg incentive contraption designed to nudge individual behavior in the right direction, we should increase the level of retirement benefits in the existing Social Security program.

That sounds like blasphemy because we’ve all been fed the myth that Social Security is bankrupt. It is almost universally accepted in policy circles and in the pundit class that strengthening Social Security involves cutting future benefits relative to what current law promises because according to current projections, Social Security only has the ability to pay promised benefits in full until 2033, and then 75% of them thereafter. The basic thinking is that we must promise to cut benefits now so that we won’t necessarily have to cut them 22 years from now. What?

Imagine if that is how we treated defense spending. Since it appears budgets will be tight in the 2030s, best to mothball all those aircraft carriers today. Who would buy that argument?

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Social security is only bankrupt to the extent that our political leaders lose the will to invest in a decent retirement for American workers.

Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled.

Breuer Admits That Economists Have Convinced Him Not to Indict Corporations

by emptywheel

Posted on September 14, 2012

I’ve become increasingly convinced that DOJ’s head of Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer is the rotting cancer at the heart of a thoroughly discredited DOJ. Which is why I’m not surprised to see this speech he gave at the NYC Bar Association selling the “benefits” of Deferred Prosecution Agreements.  (h/t Main Justice) He spends a lot of his speech claiming DPAs result in accountability.

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But the real tell is when he confesses that he “sometimes-though … not always” let corporations off because a CEO or an economist scared him with threats of global markets failing if he held a corporation accountable by indicting it.

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None of this is surprising, of course. It has long been clear that Breuer’s Criminal Division often bows to the scare tactics of Breuer’s once and future client base. (In his speech, he boasts about how well DPAs and NPAs have worked with Morgan Stanley and Barclays, respectively.)

It’s just so embarrassing that he went out in public and made this pathetic attempt to claim it all amounts to accountability.

Crony Capitalism, American Style

L. Randall Wray, EconoMonitor

September 16th, 2012

Our nation’s top cops freely admit that they have no interest in prosecuting criminal behavior perpetrated by our elite 1% at the top of our crony capitalism pyramid. As reported at Naked Capitalism, Lanny Breuer, head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division, practically brags about the absence of criminal convictions for all the fraud perpetrated over the past decade. He freely admits that when his department suspects a big bank of fraud, he calls in the bank’s team to provide a flashy presentation showing why it should not be investigated. The banksters make the argument that actually prosecuting fraudsters would be bad for crony capitalism, which of course scares the bejeebers out of Washington. So Breuer’s office then makes nice with the banksters, and they all go back to doing what they’ve been doing-moving all wealth to the cronies in the top 1%.

The Wall Street bank’s business model is fraud.

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You all already understand that mortgage brokers and property appraisers were in cahoots-overvaluing property to justify out-sized mortgages. You know that brokers pushed “don’t ask, don’t tell” “Liar’s loans” to put borrowers into loans they could not afford, and that they doctored loan documents after borrowers had signed them to cover up the lender’s fraud. And you know that the Wall Street banks created MERS to evade proper recording of property records, effectively wiping out half a millennium of record keeping so that no one any longer knows who owns what.

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(I)n fact, in many cases mortgages were never bundled into the securities. So it is not just a problem with the quality of the mortgages backing the securities. And it is not just a problem with the fact that the trustees lied about what was behind the securities. And it is not just a problem of splitting off the notes from the deeds. There is accumulating evidence that the only thing backing securities is an empty “paper bag“: mortgages were never actually securitized. The securities your pension fund might be holding were never worth a dime because they securitized air.

And many of these securitizations were supposed to be REMICs, which offer tax advantages but only if done properly. Guess what. One of the rules is that the mortgages must be put in the REMIC almost immediately. That rule was probably rarely followed; and of course if the mortgages were never put there at all, REMIC rules were certainly violated so the investors owe huge backtaxes. Wall Street’s response is to make a new “Wall Street Rule”: hey we all did it, and if the IRS pursues taxes and if we are pursued for fraud, then the whole system blows up. This is precisely the kind of line Breuer finds irresistibly logical, so you can bet his office won’t be going after the securitizers.

What I think is shocking is that a President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that they are ‘victims’, entitled to handouts, and don’t have to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their thefts and fraud.

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Cokie’s Law

At this point, it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.

As you know I only report the most scurrilous rumors and I ran across one today that even Yves Smith hesitated to talk about-

Condom used as evidence in Assange sex case ‘does not contain his DNA’ Daily Mail. Remember, this IS the Daily Mail!

Well, like most journalisticy ‘institutions’ The Daily Mail is a fine training ground for stenography OR fiction and in this case they have the benefit of being backed up by Wiki Leaks Central as reported by TheMomCat (The Tangled Web That Nations Weave: Part 2 Tue Aug 21, 2012).

Crossposted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Not only is the Arctic a poor place to drill for local environmental reasons, the truth of the matter is that if we merely burn all our “proven” reserves as of RIGHT NOW, we condemn the entire planet to mass extinction.

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

By Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone

July 19, 2012 9:35 AM ET

Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees.

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How good are these numbers? No one is insisting that they’re exact, but few dispute that they’re generally right. The 565-gigaton figure was derived from one of the most sophisticated computer-simulation models that have been built by climate scientists around the world over the past few decades. And the number is being further confirmed by the latest climate-simulation models currently being finalized in advance of the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Looking at them as they come in, they hardly differ at all,” says Tom Wigley, an Australian climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There’s maybe 40 models in the data set now, compared with 20 before. But so far the numbers are pretty much the same. We’re just fine-tuning things. I don’t think much has changed over the last decade.” William Collins, a senior climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, agrees. “I think the results of this round of simulations will be quite similar,” he says. “We’re not getting any free lunch from additional understanding of the climate system.”

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The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons

This number is the scariest of all – one that, for the first time, meshes the political and scientific dimensions of our dilemma. It was highlighted last summer by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a team of London financial analysts and environmentalists who published a report in an effort to educate investors about the possible risks that climate change poses to their stock portfolios. The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it’s the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

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Think of two degrees Celsius as the legal drinking limit – equivalent to the 0.08 blood-alcohol level below which you might get away with driving home. The 565 gigatons is how many drinks you could have and still stay below that limit – the six beers, say, you might consume in an evening. And the 2,795 gigatons? That’s the three 12-packs the fossil-fuel industry has on the table, already opened and ready to pour.

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

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If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today’s market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion. Which is to say, if you paid attention to the scientists and kept 80 percent of it underground, you’d be writing off $20 trillion in assets. The numbers aren’t exact, of course, but that carbon bubble makes the housing bubble look small by comparison. It won’t necessarily burst – we might well burn all that carbon, in which case investors will do fine. But if we do, the planet will crater. You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both. Do the math: 2,795 is five times 565. That’s how the story ends.

Shell abandons Alaska offshore drilling efforts until next year

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

September 17, 2012, 12:53 a.m.

Shell Alaska said Monday it has abandoned its efforts to drill into hydrocarbon deposits in the offshore Arctic after the latest in a series of glitches on the company’s troubled oil containment barge resulted in damage to the high-tech dome designed to contain oil in the event of an underwater spill.

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The latest setback involves the oil containment barge, the Arctic Challenger, which has been delayed in Bellingham, Wash., undergoing a trouble-plagued retrofit overseen by Superior Marine Technical Services, a Shell contractor.

The vessel has been unable for weeks to win U.S. Coast Guard certification, following problems with some onboard safety systems, along with trouble fixing good stowage for the ship’s anchor chocks and the boom designed to flare gas in the event of a spill. Coast Guard officials documented four minor illegal fluid discharges from the vessel while it was moored in Bellingham.

Federal authorities have not allowed Shell to plumb into hydrocarbon deposits until the barge is on site in the Arctic, but the multimillion-dollar upgrade has been delayed with one problem after another while attempting to win certification from the Coast Guard.

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“However, during a final test, the containment dome aboard the Arctic Challenger barge was damaged,” she said.

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“We will begin as many wells … as time remaining in this season allows,” Op de Weegh said. “The top portion of the wells drilled in the days and weeks ahead will be safely capped this year, in accordance with regulatory requirements.”

Shell had commenced drilling an initial well in the Chukchi Sea earlier this month, but was forced to shut down the operation and move away when a large ice floe began approaching.

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In the Beaufort Sea, Shell is awaiting the conclusion of the fall Inupiat Eskimo whaling season, which could end as early as this week, before launching drilling operations there.

Shell boss defends Alaska project as ice halts drilling

Terry Macalister, energy editor, The Guardian

Sunday 16 September 2012 12.51 EDT

Speaking after a huge ice floe forced drilling 70 miles off the north-west coast of Alaska to be temporarily halted, Peter Slaiby, vice-president of Shell Alaska, insisted that the company had learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

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Environmentalists say a spill similar to Deepwater Horizon would be catastrophic in a pristine environment badly affected by climate change and home to threatened mammals such as polar bears, bowhead whales and walrus.

Asked if another major spill would destroy the company’s reputation, Slaiby said: “I feel there is a helluva responsibility on my head, but we have clear accountability models. I have the ability to do things in the right way and I have the backing of the most senior leaders in Shell to do things the right way.”

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Slaiby, said the company fully understands the impact of carbon on climate change but said oil and gas are still needed to meet growing global energy demand in the near term. “The US Geological Survey says that about 25% of the world’s remaining hydrocarbon reserves are here [the Arctic]. And 25% of those are here in Alaska. Oil and gas are part of the mix, a big part of the energy puzzle, and we have to ensure local communities benefit economically.”

BP shares slide on fears over Deepwater negligence claim

Terry Macalister, energy editor, The Guardian

Wednesday 5 September 2012 13.36 EDT

“The behaviour, words and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall. Yet they were condoned in a corporation engaged in an activity (deep water drilling) that no less a witness than Tony Hayward (former BP chief executive) himself described as comparable to exploring outer space,” said the DoJ.

There had been earlier speculation that BP was in out-of-court talks with the DoJ about a wider settlement of criminal and civil charges but the latest department filing suggest no such deal is likely before new court proceedings start early next year.

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Privately the company is believed to be shaken by some of the aggressive language used by the department which comes in the middle of a volatile presidential election campaign.

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“BP died when it failed to cap the Macondo spill in the first few days. The CEO did a good job of saving BP from forced liquidation, but we do not believe he can revert to its pre-Macondo strategy,” he (Stuart Joyner, energy analyst at Investec Securities in London) added.

The increased anxiety over its position in the US, where it still has an enormous business, comes at a time when it is also struggling to find agreement with its Russian partners inside TNK-BP to dispose of its 50% shareholding there. That money might be needed to help pay any final bill for the Deepwater Horizon “blowout” in which 11 oil workers lost their lives and miles of beach front were damaged by the accompanying oil spill.

BP selling oil fields in Gulf of Mexico ahead of Deepwater Horizon fines

Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

Monday 10 September 2012 11.37 EDT

BP has agreed to sell some of its Gulf of Mexico oil fields for $5.6bn as it builds up cash reserves ahead of potentially huge fines for 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The British oil giant is selling its interests in older smaller fields in the gulf to Plains Exploration & Production of Houston. BP will remain a major operator in the area.

“While these assets no longer fit our business strategy, the Gulf of Mexico remains a key part of BP’s global exploration and production portfolio, and we intend to continue investing at least $4bn there annually over the next decade,” chief executive Bob Dudley said in a statement.

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Analysts calculate that BP faces a fine of up to $20bn under the clean water act for the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The blowout killed 11 workers and pumped about 4.9m barrels of oil into the Gulf.

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Last week the US department of justice launched a withering attack on BP over its handling of the disaster. In court papers government lawyers said BP had made “plainly misleading representations” in its settlement proposals.

“The behaviour, words and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall,” wrote government lawyers.

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The sale brings the value of BP’s disposals since the 2010 spill to more than $32bn. BP is also looking to sell its Texas City refinery – the site of fatal explosion in 2005 that left 15 dead and 170 injured.

The staggering decline of sea ice at the frontline of climate change

John Vidal, The Guardian

Friday 14 September 2012 11.30 EDT

Cambridge University Sea ice researcher Nick Toberg, who has analysed underwater ice thickness data collected by British nuclear submarine HMS Tireless in 2004 and 2007, said: “This is staggering. It’s disturbing, scary that we have physically changed the face of the planet. We have about 4m sq km of sea ice. If that goes in the summer months that’s about the same as adding 20 years of CO2 at current [human-caused] rates into the atmosphere. That’s how vital the arctic sea ice is.

“In the 1970s we had 8m sq km of sea ice. That has been halved. We need it in the summer. It has never decreased like this before”.

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All over the Arctic the effects of accelerating ice loss and a warming atmosphere are being seen. The ecology is changing rapidly as trees and plants move north, new beetles devastate whole forests in Canada, Siberia and Alaska, and snowfall increases. Inuit and other communities report more avalanches, the erosion of sea cliffs and melting of the permafrost affecting roads and buildings. Whole coastal communities may have to be moved to avoid sea erosion.

With the ice loss has come a rush by industry for Arctic resources. Oil, gas, mining and shipping companies are all expanding operations into areas that until only 20 years ago would have been physically impossible.

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Other new research suggests that the loss of ice could be could be affecting the path and speed of the jet streams, possibly explaining why extreme weather in the northern hemisphere is lasting longer.

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“The ice is weak so it opens up water and allows more sunlight in which warms the water more which makes the ice break up more – so it accelerates the melt. There is hardly any old, multi-year ice left, so first year ice is now dominant. We are seeing less and less old thick ice,” says Toberg.

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What is suspected is that the formation of the sea ice produces dense salt water which sinks, helping drive the deep ocean currents. Without the summer sea ice, many scientists fear this balance could be upset, potentially causing major climatic changes.

“The Arctic ice cover is a lid on the planet that regulates the temperature. By taking it off you are warming it. Temperatures [everywhere] depend on it,” says Toberg.

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“This is a defining moment in human history,” said Kumi Naidoo, director of Greenpeace International in Amsterdam. “In just over 30 years we have altered the way our planet looks from space and soon the north pole may be completely ice-free in summer.

“Fossil fuel companies are still making profits despite the fact that climate change is so clearly upon us. Our politicians are putting corporate interests above scientific warnings and failing in their duties to the public”.

Climate change: all that is solid melts into water

The Guardian

Sunday 16 September 2012

It is the ice cap that keeps the Arctic cold. Sunlight that hits white ice bounces back into space. Dark ocean absorbs light, and therefore warmth, making the next winter’s ice pack thinner, and less enduring. The difference between the torrid tropics and the icy Arctic governs weather patterns in the northern hemisphere. The frozen ocean and permafrost at the perimeter prevents ground methane from escaping into the atmosphere and thereby accelerating global warming. The polar seas drive the marine ecosystem and fuel the north Atlantic fish stocks. So the consequences of ice loss could be considerable, although nobody with political authority seems so far to have sufficiently considered them.

Bad news from the far north has just been matched by a bleak warning from the tropics. German, US and Australian scientists report in Nature Climate Change on Monday that the double menace of increasing greenhouse gas emissions and rising ocean acidity could spell the end for most of the world’s coral reefs. These extraordinary and beautiful structures flourish at the limits of their tolerance. They like it hot, but not too hot. They tend to “bleach” and even die as temperatures rise: during 1998, 16% of all living corals perished in one exceptional tropic summer. Coral reefs deliver coastal protection, tourism and fishing for millions: the reefs are home, habitat and hunting territory for about a quarter of all marine species. The researchers used 19 different climate models to predict the effects of a 2C increase in global average temperatures, and found that by 2030 around 70% of the reefs would suffer what they politely call “long-term degradation”.

Thoughts on climate crisis speed – Polar ice "retreated faster than anyone expected, record smashed to smithereens"

By Gaius Publius, Americablog

9/16/2012 09:55:00 AM

If you’re hearing a theme, it’s that things are happening faster than anyone anticipated. That’s my main point. All of our models are wrong in the same direction – the bad one.

Climate predictions are consistently wrong to the slow side

Nearly all recent predictions of global warming speed have been wrong to the slow side. The crisis is proceeding faster than expectations, and that should scare the whole of humanity.

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If I’m right (and everyone playing this game has been wrong to the slow side), mark your calendars. Sometime in the next 10 years or so, we’ll know if we’ve pulled back from the brink or leaped over it.

By that I mean: If I’m right and we reach 1½°C by 2025 – the U.S. has just 35 years to pack its bags and move to Canada, a country that will still be able to grow things and maintain a national electrical grid.

Ready for the near-term geopolitical question of the century? What are the odds the Canadian government will let us all in? (Me, I place that at zero, but that’s just a guess. Some people think we’re universally loved.)

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

It’s about the naked aristocratic power to force people to wipe your bottom and lick your boots.

Bettman’s lockout will give you the Deja Blues

BY JEFF GORDON, St. Louis Today

September 13, 2012 12:25 pm

The gulf between the owners and players appears too great to bridge quickly. Barring a miracle, the NHL will shut down Saturday. It will be the third stoppage in Bettman’s checkered tenure.

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This labor dispute is not all Bettman’s fault, of course, but he will ultimately flip the switch.  He is the lead negotiator for the owners. He is their mouthpiece.

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“It doesn’t matter what the sport is, and it doesn’t matter what the claimed economics are,” Fehr told reporters in New York. “The proposal is always the same. It is always, ‘The players will take a lot less money, and if not, we’ll lock you out.’ That’s what the proposal always is. It’s regrettable, but that’s the world we seem to live in.”

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And how would the owners fare after shelving the product?

The powerful NHL franchises can withstand a lengthy lockout, but many teams will suffer greatly as their fans move along to other interests. Another significant shutdown will force many franchises into heavy ticket discounting when play resumes.

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These men can’t help themselves. They can make almost any system fail with their resolute commitment to irresponsible management.

Some of the most vehement anti-union owners – Ed Snider (Flyers), Philip Anschutz (Kings) and Craig Leipold (Wild) – have some of the most ludicrous contracts on their books. These guys are pushing the hard line after personally fueling the league’s salary inflation.

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Bettman is demanding that the players help protect the owners from themselves. NHL history suggests this is an impossible task.

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And, as always, the NHL will lag behind the other major team sports in terms of general U.S. popularity.

Why the NFL would rather lockout referees than pay $16 million

Nicolaus Mills, The Guardian

Wednesday 12 September 2012 13.26 EDT

What is surprising is that the league wants a new labor war now. The country is in a recession, but pro football is thriving. NFL revenues are currently $9.3 billion a year and expected to climb to between $12 and $14 billion.

The refs, for their part, are seeking benefits that they put at $16.5 million over the five years of a new contract. In a 32-team league that amounts to just $500,000 per team, less than what a typical pro player earns in a single season. ($1.9 million average NFL player salary or $770,000 median NFL player salary).

Were the NFL serious about ending the current lockout, all it would have to do is offer up the $16.5 million the refs say they need. The refs have made their $16.5 million demand so public that they have left themselves no wiggle room to ask for more.

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Still, what the regular refs are asking for in their new contract is modest in light of their employer’s growing wealth. If the refs have overreached, it has been in believing their nearly 1,500 years of collective NFL experience would spare them from being treated as disposable, middle-class employees.

Like thousands of teachers and municipal workers who in recent years have been forced into accepting pay and benefit cuts, the refs are finding they are more on their own than they ever imagined.

The NFL is willing to defend its bottom line at all costs, even if that means showing its worst side. Remember, until medical evidence proved them wrong, NFL officials sought to minimize how dangerous the concussions players so often experience are. The lockout of the referees follows this same penny-wise-pound-foolish pattern.

Corporate-Led Education Reform Movement Ignores Solvable Problems to Carry Out Its Agenda

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Tuesday September 11, 2012 9:06 am

To the extent that there are problems, it appears clear that they have to do with resources. The schools in the lowest-income areas have no air conditioning. Roofs leak. The cafeteria is full of roaches. Mold sits in the ventilation systems. Kids don’t get textbooks for weeks. Administrators pack classrooms with 40 and 50 students at a time. These are pretty obvious and solvable problems.

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Worse, there’s apparently money in the system to make these repairs, in the form of TIFs or Tax Increment Financing, that have been re-routed to pet projects, including a Hyatt Hotel and the Chicago Board of Trade.

The corporate-funded “education reform” movement, however, neglects these demonstrable problems. They prefer to describe American education, and in this case Chicago education, as in a state of perpetual crisis (You would think that, regarding Chicago, they would blame the guy in charge of the city’s public schools from 2001 to 2009, current Education Secretary and reform movement leader Arne Duncan). They use this assumption of a crisis, picked up by the media and prominent politicians, as a pretext to enact wide-ranging interventions into schools that may just need a solid roof, no lead in the paint and some relief from the heat. They want to overhaul so-called “failing schools,” and hand them over to entities which don’t run them any better but which make a lot of money for investors and for-profit vendors.

This is a very good overview of the Chicago Teachers Union strike, and this serves as a marker for what Chicago teachers want out of their schools. It’s about a teachers union that finally said no to the rightward drift of education policy, led by a new mayor committed to the corporate-led reform agenda. The issues of student testing evaluations and the like are the means to the end of the ultimate privatization of the education system. When you look at assessment that doesn’t incorporate the standardized tests, you see that the schools have progressed, with student achievement on the rise. But that would be deeply harmful to the corporate-led reform agenda.

The Worst Teacher In Chicago

By: Greg Palast Report, Firedog Lake

Thursday September 13, 2012 3:41 pm

In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher-I won’t use her name-who’d been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn’t do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year. Under Chicago’s new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.

In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire. No teachers’ union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field – for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.

You’ve guessed it by now: It’s the same teacher.

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Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure: slash teachers salaries and bust their unions.

They’ve almost stopped pretending, too. Both the Right Wing-nuts and the Obama Administration laud the “progress” of New Orleans’ schools-a deeply sick joke. The poorest students, that struggle most with standardized tests, were drowned or washed away.

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Here is an actual question from the standardized test that were given third graders here in NYC by the nation’s biggest test-for-profit company:

“…Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence a private club is….” Then you have some choices in which the right answer is “Country Club – place where people meet.”

Now not many of the “people [who] meet” at country clubs are from the South Side of Chicago – unless their parents are caddies. A teacher on the South Side whose students are puzzled by the question will lose their pay or job. Students on the lakefront Gold Coast all know that mommy plays tennis at the Country Club with Raul on Wednesdays. So their teacher gets a raise and their school has high marks.

Chicago Teacher on Why He’s Striking Against Rahm Emanuel’s Pro-Business Education Agenda

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday September 10, 2012 9:08 pm

When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids.

When you lock down our schools with metal detectors and arrest brothers for play fighting in the halls, that hurts our kids.

When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids.

When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there’s no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids.

When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a “full school day” and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids.

When you support Mayor Emanuel’s TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail.

When you close and turnaround schools disrupting thousands of kids’ lives and educations and often plunging them into violence and have no data to support your practice, that hurts our kids.

When you leave thousands of kids in classrooms with no teacher for weeks and months on end due to central office bureaucracy trumping basic needs of students, that not only hurts our kids, it basically ruins the whole idea of why we have a district at all.

When you, rather than bargain on any of this stuff set up fake school centers staffed by positively motived Central Office staff, many of whom are terribly pissed to be pressed into veritable scabitude when they know you are wrong, and you equip them with a manual that tells them things like, “communicate with words”, that not only hurts our kids, but it suggests you have no idea how to run a system with their welfare in mind.