Tag: ek Politics

RIP: 1904 – 2012

Count me among those who do not mourn the passing of the childish fantasy of Confidence Fairies and Invisible Bond Vigilanties.

British Economy Slips Back Into Recession

By JULIA WERDIGIER, The New York Times

Published: April 25, 2012

Britain slid back into recession in the first quarter of the year, according to official figures released Wednesday, undercutting the government’s argument that its austerity program was working.

The British economy shrank 0.2 percent in the first quarter after contracting 0.3 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday.

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The weak economic data in Britain comes as the outlook for the euro zone economies is deteriorating. The economy of the 17-nation euro zone, Britain’s largest export market, shrank 0.3 percent in the last quarter of 2011 and the European Central Bank said the regional economy might contract 0.1 percent this year.

Double-dip recession a terrible blow for George Osborne

Larry Elliott, Economics Editor, The Guardian

Wednesday 25 April 2012 05.44 EDT

Double-dip recessions are extremely rare in the UK. It is quite common for the economy to falter during a recovery with one quarter of negative activity but you have to go back to the mid-1970s, when the first oil shock of 1973-74 was followed by stagflation in 1975, to find a genuine double-dip downturn.

In the past, even during the 1930s, recoveries have been well under way by now. This time, despite the massive stimulus that has been chucked at it, four years into the deepest depression of the post-war era Britain is going backwards.

Output is more than 4% below its peak in early 2008, living standards are falling and there is no sign whatsoever of the much-heralded rebalancing of the economy.

IT’S OFFICIAL: Keynes Was Right

By Henry Blodget, Daily Ticker, Yahoo Finance

Tue, Apr 24, 2012 7:22 AM EDT

The “austerity” idea, you’ll remember, was that the continent’s huge debt and deficit problem had ushered in a “crisis of confidence” and that, once business-people saw that governments were serious about debt reduction, they’d get confident and start spending again.

That hasn’t worked.

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In other words, based on the experience of the last five years, it seems that Keynes was right and the austerians are wrong.

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In the aftermath of a massive debt binge like the one we went on from 1980-2007, when the private sector collapses and then retreats to lick its wounds and deleverage, the best way to help the economy work its way out of its hole is for the government to spend like crazy.

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(L)et’s face it: Austerity doesn’t work.

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The reason austerity doesn’t work … is that, when the economy is already struggling, and you cut government spending, you also further damage the economy. And when you further damage the economy, you further reduce tax revenue, which has already been clobbered by the stumbling economy. And when you further reduce tax revenue, you increase the deficit and create the need for more austerity. And that even further clobbers the economy and tax revenue. And so on.

Basically, austerity puts you into a death spiral in which you keep trying to cut your way to prosperity, but all you end up doing is digging a bigger hole. And in the meantime, tens of millions of people are out of work, the economy is retrenching, and everything is generally miserable.

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Most of the debt mountain we’ve piled up is the result of what we did before the crisis, not after it. In the years leading up to 2007, our absurdly undisciplined leaders took a nice big budget surplus and then squandered it. And they created absurdly loose lending standards and encouraged the whole country to lever up and buy stuff we couldn’t afford. And they never said “no” to anything except tax increases, no matter what, and denied all the structural problems that were building up for decades.

And by 2007, they had put us in one hell of a hole.

And, given that, it seems reasonable to think that, as Krugman has long argued, one of the problems with the economy now is that the original stimulus just wasn’t big enough.

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Austerians love to point at the 1930s as “proof” that Keynes was wrong. Look at the huge “New Deal,” they say. Look at all those expensive public works projects. Look at all the spending the government did to try to get us out of the Great Depression, and it never really worked. What got us out of the Depression, the Austerians smugly observe, was World War 2.

But what was World War 2 if not an absolutely gigantic Keynesian stimulus?

The Federal deficit in World War 2 was massive–much bigger than any time during the Great Depression. And we built up a huge Federal debt load. And… we set the stage for two decades of amazing prosperity, in which we worked off those debts.

Europe’s elites feel the backlash

Ian Traynor, Europe Editor, The Guardian

Monday 23 April 2012 14.02 EDT

For over two years, the mainstream political elites of Europe have been battling to save the single currency, seeking its salvation in a German-scripted programme of austerity and legally enshrined fiscal rigour that curbs the budgetary sovereignty of elected governments.

In elections in France on Sunday, in the Royal Palace in The Hague on Monday, and on Wenceslas Square in Prague on Saturday, a democratic backlash appeared to be gathering critical mass as the economic prescriptions of the governing class collided with the street and the ballot box. The collision looks likely to bring down three European governments.

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The fall of Sarkozy, if confirmed, and the demise of the Rutte government after only 18 months in office add to the political wreckage littering the chancelleries of Europe.

In the past two years, as a direct result of the debt and deficit crisis, the governments of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Finland, Slovakia, and Italy have fallen.

“A majority of voters are kicking out incumbents,” said Thomas Klau of the European Council on Foreign Relations, in Paris, and the author of a book on the euro.

Europe Begins to Wonder About Austerity: Are We Doing This Wrong?

By: Scarecrow, Firedog Lake

Tuesday April 24, 2012 12:17 pm

Could it be that Europe’s financial and political elites are finally coming to a “d’oh!” moment, when an unbroken string of policy failures and the simple logic of  “depression plus austerity = worse depression” finally begin to get through?

Half a dozen Euro nations are now officially in recessions, others nearly so, having accepted a common view that sustained austerity would breed confidence fairies that lead to growth and jobs.  Instead, they’ve seen minimal or negative growth over the last two quarters, while their populations are facing depression level unemployment and impoverishment that show few signs of improving. Few theories have ever been so thoroughly tested and so thoroughly failed.

The destructive consequences of imposing austerity – depressing government and/or private spending in the middle of a serious recession – were predictable from standard economics text books and repeatedly predicted by Paul Krugman and many others, all still ignored prophets in their own lands.

In America, despite clear world-wide evidence their theories are a disaster, deficit hysterics still permeate both parties, religiously in one party, foolishly in the other, and unforgivably among the White House political advisers.   (Why hasn’t a failing President with his reelection on the line fired this entire team?) Together, this ship of fools has effectively blocked all efforts to even examine the devastation wrought by state austerity measures and insufficient federal spending, worsened by flirtations with grand bargains, government shut downs and pending automatic spending cuts.   Unfortunately, in America there is no one on the ballot arguing for any meaningful remedies.

In Europe, however, political leaders are paying a price for their indifference to suffering and logic. The political/financial elites  insisted the confidence fairy would return as soon as they’d squeezed enough wealth out of the their own populations.  When the anemic patient got even weaker, they applied even more leeches.

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The public generally doesn’t know what the technical economic solutions are, and the media keeps telling them, falsely, there are no good alternatives, because the deficit hysterics still control a conversation disconnected from the reality staring them in the face.  But voters now know their elites don’t have a clue and don’t seem to care that the elite solutions fashioned mostly for banks and bond holders are worsening the human suffering without solving any underlying economic problems.

Herr Doktor Professor- I told you so!

The Big Wrong

April 25, 2012, 7:59 am

Recent election results in Europe seem to have raised consciousness in a way literally years of economic data couldn’t: the austerity doctrine that has ruled European policy is a big fat failure.

I could have told you that would happen, and sure enough, I did. Did I mention that after three years of dire warnings that the bond vigilantes are attacking, the interest rate on US 10-years remains below 2 percent?

It’s important to understand that what we’re seeing isn’t a failure of orthodox economics. Standard economics in this case – that is, economics based on what the profession has learned these past three generations, and for that matter on most textbooks – was the Keynesian position. The austerity thing was just invented out of thin air and a few dubious historical examples to serve the prejudices of the elite.

And now the results are in: Keynesians have been completely right, Austerians utterly wrong – at vast human cost.

I wish I could believe that this would really be enough for us to move on and consider what can be done, now that we know that the ideas behind recent policy were all wrong. But that’s wishful thinking, I suppose. Nobody ever admits that they were wrong, and Austerian ideas clearly have an emotional and political appeal that is resilient to any and all evidence.

The Unbearable Slowness of Internal Devaluation

April 25, 2012, 8:11 am

The euro area’s economic strategy, such as it is, rests on two pillars: confidence through austerity, and “internal devaluation”. You know how the first is going; what about the second?

For the uninitiated, internal devaluation means getting your wages and other costs to a competitive position, not by devaluing your currency, because you don’t have one, but by reducing wages relative to those of your trading partners. This is essential in the crisis countries, which all saw much more rapid inflation than the rest of Europe during the good years, and now need to reverse the process. When the euro was being created, the claim was that reforms would produce “flexible” labor markets, aka markets in which wages could easily fall as well as rise.

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What we see is that even in Ireland, which has made the most progress, wages have fallen only slightly. Since wages have risen in the rest of the euro area (that’s the bar labeled EA17), the actual internal devaluation is bigger – about 5 1/2 percent in Ireland’s case – but still only a fraction of what’s needed.

Oh, and Germany – which should be experiencing substantial internal revaluation, a rise in its relative costs – hasn’t.

Leveraging, Deleveraging, and Fiscal Policy

April 25, 2012, 8:26 am

It’s an awkward fact – for the fiscal responsibility types, anyway – that Spain and Ireland were running budget surpluses, not deficits, before the crisis. It was private borrowing, not public borrowing, that created the mess.

But, say some commenters, this was nonetheless malfeasance on the part of the authorities; they should have been running even bigger surpluses to offset the private credit bubble.

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But here’s my thought: do all the people who believe that it’s appropriate for governments to run big surpluses to offset rising private-sector leverage also believe that it’s appropriate to run big deficits to offset large-scale private deleveraging – which is what’s happening now? If not, why not? Why the asymmetry?

Cameron’s Remarkable Achievement

April 25, 2012, 10:07 am

When David Cameron became PM, and announced his austerity plans – buying completely into both the confidence fairy and the invisible bond vigilantes – many were the hosannas, from both sides of the Atlantic. Pundits here urged Obama to “do a Cameron”; Cameron and Osborne were the toast of Very Serious People everywhere.

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession, and has achieved the remarkable feat of doing worse this time around than it did in the 1930s.

Britain is also unique in having chosen the Big Wrong freely, facing neither pressure from bond markets nor conditions imposed by Berlin and Frankfurt.

Now, the defense I hear from Cameron apologists is that the austerity mostly hasn’t even hit yet. But that’s really not much of a defense. Remember, the austerity was supposed to work by inspiring confidence; where’s the confidence? Basically, the expansionary aspect should already have kicked in; it’s all contraction from here.

Needless to say, Cameron and Osborne insist that they will not change course, which means that Britain will continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity.

“as opposed to looking backwards.”

Jon Corzine Is the Original George Zimmerman

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

POSTED: April 24, 8:37 AM ET

Nobody disputes the fact that MF Global officials dipped into customer accounts and took over $1.6 billion of customer money. We not only know that company officials reached into customer accounts, we know they brazenly lied to bondholders, ratings agencies and investors about the firm’s financial condition (“MF Global’s capital and liquidity has never been stronger,” wrote the CFO of MF Global’s holding company, on the same day Moody’s downgraded it to junk status).

We even know that eighteen days before the firm went bust, company officers discussed how quickly to return money to customers, and even contemplated, in writing, the possibility of not returning the money right away.

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MF Global is different. This is not complicated at all. This is just stealing. You owe money, you don’t have the cash to cover it, and so you take money belonging to someone else to cover your debts. There’s no room at all here for an argument that this money was just lost due to a bad investment, an erroneous calculation based on someone’s poor understanding of a complex transaction, etc. It’s straight-up embezzlement.

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It’s incredible that people are offering as a defense the idea that a financial company could be so overwhelmed by transactions that it could just lose track of $1.6 billion. If you’re so terrible at managing money that you can honestly lose a billion dollars – especially after swearing up and down to the whole world that you were the right choice to manage the cherished millions and billions of scads of farmers, ranchers, and other investors – you should go to jail just for that, just on general principle.

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(T)hese people stole over a billion dollars, right out in the open, and nobody is doing anything about it. Instead, we get a lot of chin-scratching legislative hearings, and an almost academic-style public discussion about whether or not a crime even took place. If there aren’t arrests in this case soon, ordinary people will correctly deduce that it simply isn’t a crime to steal in America, if the thefts are executed with a computer by white people in suits.

Not a lot of cable companies carry Al Jazeera TV, mine sure doesn’t.  This broadcast from yesterday takes a look at the fall out from this year’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

Can Formula One unite Bahrain?

We ask if the race the country’s rulers called a “force for good” has been a human rights and public relations disaster.

Al Jazeera TV

23 Apr 2012

Joining Inside Story with presenter Shakuntala Santhiran to discuss this are guests: Ali al-Aswad, a former Bahraini opposition MP and member of the al-Wefaq Party; Mahjoob Zweiri, an assistant professor in Contemporary History and Politics of the Middle East at Qatar University; and Fahad al-Binali, a media official for Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority.

I’ve recently seen a commenter on one of my ‘usual suspect’ blogs describe Al Jazeera as just as much a slave to corporate interests as CNN, only they’re different corporations.  I think you know that my answer to the subtitle question is that it was BOTH a Human Rights AND Public Relations disaster.

Yesterday was Earth Day and green is symbolic of both environmentalism and Islam.

So I’m going to recycle some material here.

As one of the pieces I collected for the Bahrain Grand Prix put it, the only image problem Formula One used to have to worry about was its environmental impact.  Now they openly support Mercenaries, Murderers, and Torturers.

If you are interested in the sporting aspect of this weekend’s events I urge you to examine the originals-

• Formula One 2012: Shanghai
• Formula One 2012: Bahrain Qualifying
• Formula One 2012: Bahrain

If on the other hand you’re more interested in the human rights abuses of the country where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based, there was a great deal of attention paid to that question as an unintended consequence of Hamad ibn Isa Al Khalifa, Salman bin Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, Jean Todt, and Bernie Ecclestone’s greed, isolation, and arrogance in staging this event.

While others may not share my sentiments I’d rate it a complete and utter flop as a Public Relations move and as a sporting event.  Even giving away tickets they were unable to fill 50% of the seats and the high profile corporations and celebrities they wanted to attract stayed away in droves.

When I put together stories from secondary sources I attempt to select passages and arrange them so that they create a narrative.  I’ve kept these in their original form and labeled each section.

This one is new-

Post-F1 Bahrain Arrests Journalists and Tortures Activists

By: Siun, Firedog Lake

Sunday April 22, 2012 6:00 pm

During the race, when ten women attempted to hold up pictures of human rights defender, Al Khawaja, they were immediately arrested and there is a confirmed report that one was severely beaten.

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Right after the race, when foreign journalists attempted to cover reactions in the Bahraini villages, the journalists too were arrested – along with their local “fixers” and drivers.

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Ala’a Shehabi, a British born Bahraini academic who has returned to Bahrain to help in the fight for civil rights and who maintains Bahrain Watch which tracks the monarchy’s performance – or lack of – on it’s promises of reform, was arrested as well. She was traveling with journalists at the time.

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Mohammed Hassan, who was arrested after assisting the Dan Rather Report to cover Bahrain and then released, was arrested today while working with another team of foreign journalists. He was beaten quite severely the first time but today released without another beating.

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As Channel 4’s Jonathan Miller says in his interview, outside journalists will most likely simply be deported from Bahrain but repercussions for Bahrain citizens who assisted those journalists as well as activists is quite dire. After all, even the monarch’s own “independent” commission last fall reported severe use of torture – for example, see the account of the torture of AlKhawaja from that report here.

Those activists who are not arrested are often seriously injured by the birdshot being used extensively by Bahraini “police” who are mainly mercenary forces from Pakistan. The use of such “birdshot” violates the US “Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.”

And of course the Obama administration has refused to stand up for civil rights in Bahrain.

Not what you think.

Sequoia Fund Manager Campaigns Against Goldman Board Member, Former Fannie CEO Jim Johnson

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Thursday, April 19, 2012

I had a colleague tell me today that I shouldn’t use the “c” word, meaning corruption, since it would alienate potential allies. The logic is similar to arguments against being shrill. He claimed that even if a lot of people in positions of authority engage in corrupt looking behavior, that doesn’t mean they understand it to be corrupt, so calling the corrupt will merely get them worked up to no useful end. They could well think they are doing the right thing and just be victims of cognitive capture.

I deeply oppose this line of argument. First, it assumes that decision-makers don’t recognize when they are taking ethically problematic actions. The people I know who have yielded to institutional pressures to do the wrong thing say they knew they were doing so and found a way to rationalize it. And I suspect even sociopaths know where the lines are. They have to do a better job of covering their tracks when their conduct is dubious.

Second, it assumes that it isn’t worth taking a firm position on ethics because it will turn off powerful people who have engaged in questionable behavior. Better to be less accusatory in order to have a dialogue with them. I don’t buy that because being indulging their justifications of their conduct helps preserve a bad status quo.

One aspect of American exceptionalism is many still believe the US is cleaner and more above board than most other advanced economies. But if you go overseas, you will find that a lot of businessmen see the US as not particularly ethical. One British colleague who has worked with major US firms described the US as becoming more and more a scam-based economy (in fairness, he was really talking about the financial services industry). An American who works a great deal with foreign investors said his clients saw the US at best as on a par with other big countries, at worst, with Russia.

One of the big reasons for the erosion in US behavior is the notion that elite crimes shouldn’t be prosecuted because it would harm the system. Glenn Greenwald describes the pardon of Richard Nixon as a critical embodiment of this principle.

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So it is important to define norms and not shy away from words like “fraud” and “corruption” when they fit. While it would be nice if more people in power were capable of feeling guilt, shame will do. Thus naming and shaming are legitimate strategies for letting the elites know that the broader public is not fooled.

(h/t Lambert Strether @ Corrente)

Yum.

(Note: this is kind of a compliment to Magnifico’s Next Big Oil Spill Disaster Set for the Arctic.- ek)

This is kind of a tough story to assemble because the images are graphic and disturbing.  Just warning you before you click through on the links.

A lot of people are talking about Al-Jazzera’s story on the horrible consequences of the BP Oil Disaster on the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem-

Gulf seafood deformities alarm scientists

Dahr Jamail, Al-Jazzera

Last Modified: 18 Apr 2012 03:16

“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.

The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.

Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.

Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.

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(Dr. Andrew) Whitehead’s (associate professor of biology at Louisiana State University) work is of critical importance, as it shows a direct link between BP’s oil and the negative impacts on the Gulf’s food web evidenced by studies on killifish before, during and after the oil disaster.

“What we found is a very clear, genome-wide signal, a very clear signal of exposure to the toxic components of oil that coincided with the timing and the locations of the oil,” Whitehead told Al Jazeera during an interview in his lab.

According to Whitehead, the killifish is an important indicator species because they are the most abundant fish in the marshes, and are known to be the most important forage animal in their communities.

“That means that most of the large fish that we like to eat and that these are important fisheries for, actually feed on the killifish,” he explained. “So if there were to be a big impact on those animals, then there would probably be a cascading effect throughout the food web. I can’t think of a worse animal to knock out of the food chain than the killifish.”

But we may well be witnessing the beginnings of this worst-case scenario.

Whitehead is predicting that there could be reproductive impacts on the fish, and since the killifish is a “keystone” species in the food web of the marsh, “Impacts on those species are more than likely going to propagate out and effect other species. What this shows is a very direct link from exposure to DWH oil and a clear biological effect. And a clear biological effect that could translate to population level long-term consequences.”

Back on shore, troubled by what he had been seeing, Keath Ladner met with officials from the US Food and Drug Administration and asked them to promise that the government would protect him from litigation if someone was made sick from eating his seafood.

“They wouldn’t do it,” he said.

What is Al-Jazeera’s special expertise in this story?  The Persian Gulf has been experiencing the toxic effects of oil spills for nearly a century.

ThinkProgress is covering it as is dday  who opinies-

There’s no way that every one of these mutated fish was caught before it ended up on a dinner plate. I don’t know what that means for humans who consume them; the process of cooking may have removed some of the toxics. But I am no longer hankering for Gulf sushi. And the Gulf of Mexico provides 40% of all seafood consumed in the US, so it’s not really “Gulf” sushi at all.

Scientists know enough about dispersants to say fairly confidently that they’re causing the mutations in the Gulf. I’m sure the American Petroleum Institute can find some who think otherwise. And the office of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, contacted for the story, claimed that “Gulf seafood has consistently tested lower than the safety thresholds established by the FDA for the levels of oil and dispersant contamination that would pose a risk to human health.”

At Naked Capitalism George Washington has an excellent post with many, many links to the terrible damage that has already been documented-

George Washington: 2 Years After the BP Oil Spill, Is the Gulf Ecosystem Collapsing?

By Washington’s Blog, Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Mother Jones points out that the White House pressured scientists to underestimate BP spill size. And see this Forbes write up, and our previous reporting on the topic.

This is exactly like Fukushima and the financial mess, because  government’s approach to crises is consistent, no matter what area we are talking about: let the giant companies which fund political campaigns do whatever they want … and then help them cover up the extent of the crisis once it inevitably hits.

And what is BP doing about it?  Extend and Pretend, because that’s working oh so well.

The Big Spill, Two Years Later

The New York Times

Published: April 17, 2012

BP has paid $14 billion in cleanup costs and $6.3 billion in damages to individuals and businesses, with another $7.8 billion pledged. The company is also likely to owe several billion dollars for damages to natural resources under the Oil Pollution Act, and somewhere between $5 billion and $20 billion in penalties under the Clean Water Act, depending on the level of negligence.

BP may well prefer a negotiated settlement of these damages to a long and potentially damaging trial. If so, the Justice Department should press for the best possible deal from what is still a deep-pocketed company. Congress must make sure that the bulk of this money is used not only to address particular damage from the spill but to carry out a broad program of ecosystem restoration – the wetlands and barrier islands that had been weakened well before the spill by industrialization and mismanagement of the Mississippi River and by Hurricane Katrina.

Duh.

BP proposes Gulf spill accord terms, trial delay

By Jonathan Stempel, Reuters

Wed Apr 18, 2012 4:16pm EDT

If BP wins a trial delay, the schedule suggests that any trial on federal and state government pollution claims, claims against BP’s drilling partners, and claims among BP and those partners would not start until well into 2013, if not later.

“States represent millions of citizens, and they deserve their day in court,” Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, who coordinates state interests with his Louisiana colleague James “Buddy” Caldwell, said in a telephone interview.

“I think quite frankly that BP is not going to focus on a comprehensive settlement until it is up against a trial deadline,” Strange added.

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The medical settlement addresses claims by people made ill from exposure to oil or chemical dispersants. It covers clean-up workers and residents of beachfront or wetland areas, and allows people who develop symptoms later to sue BP at that time. About 16,000 plaintiffs have submitted claims, court papers show.

Victims who are unhappy with the settlements may opt out and pursue their claims separately.

Those ineligible to recover include financial institutions, casinos, people claiming hardship from an Obama administration moratorium on deepwater drilling, and some private plaintiffs in Florida and Texas.

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“Neither side will receive everything it wants,” but the settlements are “more than fair, reasonable and adequate” and could avert a decade of litigation, BP and plaintiffs’ lawyers said in papers filed in New Orleans federal court.

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“BP made a commitment to help economic and environmental restoration efforts in the Gulf Coast,” Chief Executive Bob Dudley said in a statement. “This settlement provides the framework for us to continue delivering on that promise, offering those affected full and fair compensation, without waiting for the outcome of a lengthy trial process.”

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Prior to the settlement, the lawyer Kenneth Feinberg had paid out $6.1 billion to spill victims who submitted claims under BP’s $20 billion Gulf Coast Claims Facility.

BP expects the $7.8 billion payment to come from that trust. Claimants with final offers from Feinberg can receive 60 percent of their money now, and if eligible under the new program may receive the remaining 40 percent or seek higher awards.

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BP still faces tens of billions of dollars of potential claims from the U.S. government; Gulf states; and drilling partners Transocean Ltd, which owned the rig, and Halliburton Co, which provided cementing services.

The oil company’s potential liability for violating the federal Clean Water Act alone could reach as high as $17.6 billion upon a finding of gross negligence. BP has already taken a $37.2 billion charge for the spill.

Your tax dollars at work-

Congress falls short on oil spill safety, panel says

By Neela Banerjee, Washington Bureau, L.A. Times

April 17, 2012, 6:24 p.m.

The report by members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling complained that Congress had failed to pass legislation requiring the offshore oil and gas industry to bear the costs of federal oversight through fees on leasing and permitting reviews. The presidential panel had also recommended that the $75-million liability cap for offshore oil spills be increased substantially.

The Democratic-controlled Senate has passed a bill to funnel penalties from the spill to restoring the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem, but House Republicans have yet to approve it.

Several recent developments signal the need for more serious steps to bolster offshore drilling safeguards, the report said. In the last 10 months, “at least three offshore oil and gas rigs around the world have experienced significant leaks, demonstrating again and again how risky this activity is,” the report said. “Risks will only increase as drilling moves into deeper waters with harsher, less familiar environmental conditions.”

Some senior administration and congressional staffers complained that the report used simple letter grades to sum up complicated efforts.

And as usual, Magnifico scooped me on that story too-

U.S. oil production is increasing and offshore drilling is expanding, but yet the problems that contributed to the BP Gulf oil disaster remain. “It is unfortunate that two years after the worst oil spill in U.S. history, Congress has yet to take action to bolster the government’s program for managing offshore activities,” the commission wrote in their report card.

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With increased drilling and intentionally negligent oversight, it isn’t a matter of if there will be another oil drilling disaster off the American waters, but when it will happen. The environment and people who depend on it for their existence, which is everyone, will be negatively impacted.  With the inevitable oil spills, the commission reports that “Congress has provided little support” for spill response and containment too. So, the country remains unready to respond to the next disaster.

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So, while the Obama administration has been opening up more areas for drilling, the Republican-controlled House and the ineffective Senate have been at best doing nothing to responsibly oversee offshore oil drilling and at worst been proactively trying block oversight.

The commission is being generous when it gave Congress a “D” grade. “Congress has provided neither leadership nor support for these efforts,” the commission wrote summarizing nearly two years of inaction.

We need to do better electing people to represent us and our nation’s interests. More oil at the expense of our country’s environment is not the solution.

There Is No Super Secret Obama Waiting for 2013

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Tuesday April 17, 2012 12:26 pm

I want to give the same piece of advice to some apparently delusional people who both oppose and support President Obama: there is no super secret Obama 3.0 just waiting until after the election to strike.

Apparently this delusional belief that some secret Obama, way better or way worse than today, will magically emerge in 2013 isn’t just limited to conservatives who think Obama will take away their guns or socialize the whole economy. It apparently also exists among his supporters who are trying to make up totally absurd reasons for voting for him. For example, last night Lawrence O’Donnell basically claimed you should vote for Obama because he has a super secret plan to decriminalize drugs and end the drug war once he wins re-election.

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The reality is that Obama has been in office for over three years. We know how he has governed, and it is a great predictor of how he will govern in another term. The priorities he set for the first four years should be about the same as for the next four years. While Obama will have some more flexibility after the election, if he really cared about something he would have actively tried to achieve it by now or at least worked to prepare the groundwork for it.

The Obama we now have is the Obama we will get if he wins re-election. People should judge him on what his record has been so far, not some decade old statements or fevered fantasy.

If Obama significantly changes course on this or any other issue after re-election, it won’t be because it was all part of Obama’s super secret plan for his second term. It would be a result of changing facts, popular opinion, and political pressure making his old course untenable.

When I was 6, I began putting together a massive collection of comic books. Batman implanted a concept in my mind, introduced me to a paradigm as to how the world is set up: that there are oppressors, there are the oppressed, and there are those who step up to defend the oppressed. This resonated with me so much that throughout the rest of my childhood I gravitated towards any book that reflected that paradigm-‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ and I even saw an ethical dimension to ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

By the time I began high school and took a real history class, I was learning just how real that paradigm is in the world, I learned about the Native Americans and what befell them at the hands of European settlers. I learned about how the descendants of those European settlers were in turn oppressed under the tyranny of King George III. I read about Paul Revere, Tom Paine, and how Americans began an armed insurgency against British forces-an insurgency we now celebrate as the American Revolutionary War. As a kid I even went on school field trips just blocks away from where we sit now. I learned about Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, John Brown, and the fight against slavery in this country. I learned about Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs and the struggles of the labor unions, working class and poor. I learned about Anne Frank, the Nazis, and how they persecuted minorities and imprisoned dissidents. I learned about Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggle. I learned about Ho Chi Minh, and how the Vietnamese fought for decades to liberate themselves from one invader after another. I learned about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Everything I learned in those years confirmed what I was beginning to learn when I was 6: that throughout history, there has been a constant struggle between the oppressed and their oppressors. With each struggle I learned about, I found myself consistently siding with the oppressed, and consistently respecting those who stepped up to defend them-regardless of nationality, regardless of religion. And I never threw my class notes away. As I stand here speaking, they are in a neat pile in my bedroom closet at home.

In your eyes, I’m a terrorist, and it’s perfectly reasonable that I be standing here in an orange jumpsuit, but one day, America will change and people will recognize this day for what it is. They will look at how hundreds of thousands of Muslims were killed and maimed by the U.S. military in foreign countries, yet somehow I’m the one going to prison for ‘conspiring to kill and maim’ in those countries- because I support the mujahedeen defending those people. They will look back on how the government spent millions of dollars to imprison me as a ‘terrorist,’ yet if we were to somehow bring Abeer al-Janabi back to life in the moment she was being gang-raped by your soldiers, to put her on that witness stand and ask her who the ‘terrorists’ are, she sure wouldn’t be pointing at me.

First They Come For the Muslims

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig

Posted on Apr 16, 2012

Stephen F. Downs, a lawyer in Albany, N.Y., a founder of Project Salam and the author of “Victims of America’s Dirty War,” a booklet posted on the website, has defended Muslim activists since 2006. He has methodically documented the mendacious charges used to incarcerate many Muslim activists as terrorists. Because of “terrorism enhancement” provisions, any sentence can be quadrupled-even minor charges can leave prisoners incarcerated for years.

…

“I was unprepared for the fact that the government would put together a case that was just one lie piled up on top of another lie,” Downs said. “And when you pointed it out to them they didn’t care. They didn’t refute it. They knew that it was a lie. The facts of most of these pre-emptive cases don’t support the charges. But the facts are irrelevant. The government has decided to target these people. It wants to take them down for ideological reasons.”

“In the past, when the government wanted to do something illegal it simply went ahead and broke the law,” he said. “They rounded up the Japanese during World War II and stuck them in concentration camps. They knew they were breaking the law when they decided to go after the activists with COINTELPRO in the 1960s but they rationalized that they were doing it for a higher purpose. This is different. The government is destroying the legal framework of our country. They are twisting it out of recognition to make it appear as though what they’re doing is legal. I don’t remember that kind of a situation in the past. The opinions of the court are now only lame excuses as to why the courts can’t do justice.”

“The government lawyers must know these pre-emptive cases are fake,” he said. “They must know they’re prosecuting people before a crime has been committed based on what they think the defendant might do in the future. They defend what they are doing by saying that they are protecting the nation from people who might want to do it harm. I’m sure they’ve been co-opted at least to believe that. But I think they also know that they are twisting the legal concepts, they are stretching them beyond what the framework of the law can tolerate. They have convinced themselves that it is OK to convict many innocent people as long as they prevent a few people from committing crimes in the future. They are creating an internal culture within the Justice Department where there is contempt for the law and for the foundational principle that it is better for one guilty person to go free than that one innocent person is convicted. They must know they do not do justice, and that they serve only ideological ends.”

Downs pointed out that if the government was actually concerned about the rule of law it would prosecute politicians and other prominent Americans who have publicly spoken out in support of Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis), an armed group on the State Department terrorism list that carries out terrorist attacks inside Iran. They include former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, former FBI Director Louis Freeh, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton and Gen. James Jones, who was President Obama’s first national security adviser. Some of them voiced their backing in speeches for which they were paid lavishly.

…

Already dissidents such as peace activists, environmentalists and outspoken intellectuals have been treated as terrorists. Downs expects soon to see labor organizers and those in Occupy encampments treated as terrorists, especially if domestic dissent spreads. Yet despite his pessimism he has no intention of surrendering.

“I take comfort from organizations like the White Rose in Germany,” he said, referring to the anti-Nazi group that defied Hitler and saw most of its members arrested and executed. “They were doomed almost from the beginning. How long could you defy Hitler before you were rounded up and shot? It appeared to be a futile effort. And yet, after the war, when people went back and began to rebuild the German nation, they could look to the White Rose as an example of what German culture was really about. There were Germans who cared about peace, freedom and tolerance. I’m working now as much for the historical record as for those still in jail.”

‘Better 100 guilty go free than one innocent punished.’  (Benjamin Franklin on Blackstone’s Formulation)

The White Rose.

Does the 2012 Presidential Election Matter?

Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Friday, April 13, 2012

The 2012 election … is at this point a completely empty enterprise, bereft of substance, or integrity.  This is new to our era, reminiscent of the late 19th century electoral landscape which was dominated by policy consensus around corruption and plutocracy while electoral contests were organized around “bloody shirt” smear campaigns.  Populism intruded briefly, but there’s a reason that time period was known as the time of the robber barons.  It’s increasingly analogous to our time.

In 2003-2004, a large Democratic field and George Bush bitterly debated questions of war and peace.  In 2007-2008, both parties saw significant debate between multiple candidates in which they argued about a whole set of questions, from war to civil liberties to the financial crisis.  The financial crisis was probably determinative in 2008, with the lead seesawing between the two candidates until John McCain “suspended” his campaign.  There was a substantive amount of deceit, of course, in previous contests, and it’s true that many of the promises were not real.  But at least the candidates had to debate in a way in which their words had to bear some resemblance to the world in which voters resided.  But this time, there is literally no relationship between the reality of the policy questions and the political debate.

…

For instance, at the same time as the Rosen spat occurred, this week we also saw a report from the Inspector General of TARP that Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department has simply not implemented a $7 billion program intended to help families hardest hit by foreclosures.   That could have been a scandal of sorts, with the Republicans attacking the administration for incompetence and the administration making arguments about its economic stewardship.  The major problem facing our economic structure is the collapse of the housing finance system, with 96% of mortgages at this point backed explicit by government.  Yet, no debate, nothing.  It’s millionaire kabuki.  There are now murders happening around the foreclosure crisis.  Nothing.  No pressure from the left, or the right.

Major policy initiatives, such as the JOBS Act eliminating accounting requirements for companies using public equity markets, are now bipartisan, beyond debate.  AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka is apparently “personally disgusted” by that bill, but he can’t help but argue how Barack Obama is the President for the middle class.  The Democratic campaign will center in at least some part on tax justice and economic fairness, with the Republicans decrying class warfare.  Yet, the data on inequality betrays that this narrative is completely disconnected from substance, from reality.  Without an debate over the policies that led to this endpoint, it’s hard to figure out whether the 2012 election matters.  Since Obama is still taken seriously when he promises to redress inequality immediately after signing the JOBS Act, this debate can’t happen.

…

This is not to say that politics is the only route to social change, it certainly is not.  And this is not a “your vote matters” argument.  It doesn’t always matter.  Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.  What is striking is how little pressure is coming from the populace, towards the political elites in both parties.  The Republicans have a bitter class divide within their party, but they have quickly clamped down on the populists in their midst.  Meanwhile, Barack Obama can give stump-speeches on his support for the middle class with a straight face.  Until this dynamic changes, and someone or something forces a real debate that reconnects substance and politics, our American decline will continue.  Until then, the debates in DC will happen behind closed doors among powerful interests, and the public will only witness a fierce kabuki performance over Hilary Rosen’s tweets.

BREAKING: White House To Delay Implementation Of Key Anti-Discrimination Order

By Igor Volsky, ThinkProgress

Apr 11, 2012 at 6:45 pm

After months of dodging questions about the progress of an executive order prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in federal contracting, the White House won’t issue the directive, but will instead study whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees require employment protections, ThinkProgress has learned. The news comes after White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett held a meeting with LGBT advocates to discuss the matter.

Existing studies suggest that 11 to 16 million additional employees would have gained protections as a result of the measure, since many “federal contractors do not currently have those policies, and they employ millions of workers.”

…

“Today’s news that the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors will launch a study to better understand workplace discrimination against gay and transgender Americans is confounding and disappointing,” said Winnie Stachelberg, the Executive Vice President for External Affairs at the Center for American Progress. “The President should use his executive authority to extend existing nondiscrimination requirements of federal contractors to include sexual orientation and gender identity,” she added.

Earlier this month, 72 Congressional lawmakers urged the administration to enact the order, noting that it would “extend important workplace protections to millions of Americans, while at the same time laying the groundwork for Congressional passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).” Data show that “43 percent of LGB people and 90 percent of transgender people have experienced workplace discrimination” and that the overwhelming majority of Americans – 73 percent – would have supported a measure prohibiting it.

The delay represents a departure for the president who committed to supporting a “formal written policy of non-discrimination that includes sexual orientation and gender identity or expression…for all Federal contractors” as a candidate in 2008 and pledged to fight for the community in 2009 and 2011. “I’m here with a simple message: I’m here with you in that fight,” Obama told the Human Rights Campaign in 2009, adding, “Nobody in America should be fired because they’re gay, despite doing a great job and meeting their responsibilities. It’s not fair. It’s not right. We’re going to put a stop to it.”

Oh my yes.  A departure from the President who had  Donnie McClurkin sing for him and Rick Warren deliver his inaugural invocation.

That Barack Obama.

After Media Challenge Closure of Guantanamo Hearing, Government Proposes Remedy

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday April 11, 2012 3:16 pm

A “war court judge” allowed a First Amendment attorney to represent a “consortium” of media organizations and argue against closing a hearing expected to feature testimony from an accused USS Cole bomber on how he was treated during CIA interrogations. The testimony, according to the Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, was to be given as part of an argument by the defense that he should not be shackled to the floor during interviews because it would remind him of how he was inhumanely treated or tortured by CIA interrogators.

…

The judge then asked Schulz to leave the courtroom and proposed a “non-shackling” option that made testimony from Al-Nashiri unnecessary. The defense could be locked in a room with Al-Nashiri unshackled. Since the testimony was to be given to prevent shackling that could cause “retraumatization,” this essentially solved the problem.

Faced with objections from the media, the government was put in a position where they had to comply with the defense’s effort to win the right to interview or speak to Al-Nashiri without detention center guards shackling him to the floor. Granting Al-Nashiri this privilege was better than risking the possibility of more attention being brought to how the CIA had tortured Al-Nashiri.

The agreed remedy is also politically convenient because, for now, the Obama Administration can claim they are upholding increased transparency in the Guantanamo military commissions by keeping the hearings open to the press.