Still Not Gone, Still NOT Clean

Posted: January 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Environment, Environmental Protection, Gulf Oil Spill, New Orleans, toxic waste | Tags: , , , , | 25 Comments

THEN.

Well, it’s time for my bimonthly rant about the total lack of concern by any one above the I-10 on the fact we’re still swimming in oil down here.  The Cost Guard is still doing the Dosey-Do.  Obama doesn’t swim here so he doesn’t care.  There was some MSM press coverage.

Hello?  Is any body there?


Here’s the latest via MSNBC:

PORT SULPHUR, Louisiana — Federal and Louisiana officials got into a heated argument Friday over the cleanup of oiled marshes during a tour of an area that remains fouled 8½ months after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico.

State and Plaquemines Parish officials took reporters on a boat tour of Barataria Bay, pointing out an area where oil continues to eat away at marshes and protective boom is either absent or has been gobbled up by the oil. The heavily saturated area that reporters saw was 30 feet to 100 feet wide in sections. No cleanup workers were there when reporters toured the area.

The marshes are critical to the Louisiana coast because they protect the shore from hurricanes and serve as a nursery for Gulf sea life.

“This is the biggest cover-up in the history of America,” Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told reporters, gesturing with his gloved right hand, which was covered in oil.

Nungesser was accompanied by Robert Barham, the secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.

As the two were answering questions from reporters, representatives from the U.S. Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration interrupted to point out that a plan is being developed to clean up the marshes. They also insisted that the government has not abandoned the Gulf, nor has it lost sight of the fact that BP is a responsible party.

“Clearly there is oil here in the marsh but we are working as a team to find a best way to clean it up,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer. “It’s a high priority.”

RIGHT NOW.

You could tell it’s a high priority.

There were no clean up crews.

There was oil everywhere.

People down here are getting pretty tired of the excuses.

We’ve heard enough of them since Katrina and Rita.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Year’s Eve Reads

Posted: December 31, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, Gulf Oil Spill, health hazard, morning reads, the blogosphere, The Little Blog that could, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Wikileaks, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 28 Comments
Good morning!

Today we begin to say good bye to 2010 and the first decade of the millennium and century!    What a decade and what a year it has been!  I don’t know about you, but just the last five years alone have turned my life upside down. (Think Hurricane Katrina, BP Oil Tsunami, and the financial crisis that has empowered thugs like Governexorcist Jindal to enforce absolute budget austerity on Louisiana and higher education.)   Despite all that, we’re going to have an Airing of the Gratitude thread as part of the-Little-Blog-That-Could’s New Year’s Celebration.  I’ve bought my black eyed peas and cabbage.  Now, I’m making my list of things that I resolve to appreciate for the thread.  I’d like to invite you to think about yours too and join in.   A lot of my gratitude comes under the heading of my daughters, dad and sister, and my friends.  That includes you !  We’re a blogging community that was forged from some really tough political times.

Meanwhile, here are some headlines to gear you up for the coming year and decade.  May things improve for the better!!  May peace and sanity prevail!!  May every one’s health and circumstances improve tremendously!  Many, many  blessings to each and every one of you!

Are you pessimistic or optimistic about the coming year?  A CNN poll  shows a lot of people are optimistic about the the world outlook, but less so about their personal situation. Men are much more optimistic than women.  Where do you fit in?

The Senate appears to have reached its limit on perpetually trying to find 60 votes for cloture and taking every ‘threat’ of a filibuster seriously.  Brian Beutler at TPM is following the reform movement and the possible hurdles it faces.

The consensus package will aim to put an end to “secret holds” (anonymous filibuster threats) and disallow the minority from blocking debate on an issue altogether. Those two reforms are fairly straightforward. The third is a bit more complex. Udall, along with Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), say there’s broad agreement on the idea to force old-school filibusters. If members want to keep debating a bill, they’ll have to actually talk. No more lazy filibusters.

But how would that actually work? In an interview Wednesday, Udall explained the ins and outs of that particular proposal.

“What we seem to have the most consensus on, is what I would call… a talking filibuster,” Udall told me. “Rather than a filibuster which is about obstruction.”

As things currently stand, the onus is on the majority to put together 60 votes to break a filibuster. Until that happens, it’s a “filibuster,” but it’s little more than a series of quorum calls, votes on procedural motions, and floor speeches. The people who oppose the underlying issue don’t have to do much of anything if they don’t want to.

Here’s how they propose to change that. Under this plan, if 41 or more senators voted against the cloture motion to end debate, “then you would go into a period of extended debate, and dilatory motions would not be allowed,” Udall explained.

As long as a member is on hand to keep talking, that period of debate continues. But if they lapse, it’s over — cloture is invoked and, eventually, the issue gets an up-or-down majority vote.

DDay at FDL has a thread up that offers a more detailed explanation.  This includes a bit on what is being called ‘continuous debate’ which sounds a lot like that Jimmy Stewart movie “Mr. Smith goes to Washington” or what every one was hoping for when Bernie Sanders started talking a few weeks ago.

After 41 Senators or more successfully maintain a filibuster by voting against cloture, they would have to hold the floor and go into a period of extended debate. Without someone filibustering holding the floor, cloture is automatically invoked, and the legislation moves to an eventual up-or-down vote, under this rule change.

This would institute the actual filibuster. The Majority Leader would have the capacity, which Harry Reid says he doesn’t have now, to force the minority to keep talking to block legislation. It becomes a test of wills at this point – whether the minority wants to hold out for days, or whether the majority wants to move to other legislation.

Here’s hoping we can fix our broken government that is driven by corporate cash and interests and railroaded by imperious Senators.  I’m not very hopeful that congress can actually fix itself, but I guess we’ll see.  I will say that I do think Tom Udall is a good man. He’s one of the people that is fighting for an improved process.

I still have Louisiana and New Orleans on my mind right now. We have a new headline in our ongoing BP Oil Gusher Saga. This is from Raw Story. It appears the company that owns the rig–Transocean–is refusing to co-operate with the federal oil spill probe. I just want to find out what went wrong so we don’t ever repeat it.  I’m sure all they are thinking about is the upcoming lawsuits.

Transocean said the U.S. Chemical Safety Board does not have jurisdiction in the probe, so it doesn’t have a right to the documents and other items it seeks. The board told The Associated Press late Wednesday that it does have jurisdiction and it has asked the Justice Department to intervene to enforce the subpoenas.

Last week, the board demanded that the testing of the failed blowout preventer stop until Transocean and Cameron International are removed from any hands-on role in the examination. It said it’s a conflict of interest. The request is pending.

Our economy is in sad shape down here and a good part of it is due to Transocean’s role in destroying livelihoods and life around the Gulf of Mexico.  Human lives aren’t the only thing still struggling from the gulf gusher.  Here’s some local news on that.

Scientists at the institute of Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport are studying why two endangered manatees died near the Gulf Coast in the past two weeks.

According to the Institute’s Executive Director Dr. Moby Solangi, cold water killed the manatees, but they should have migrated to warmer water.

Scientists are finding an unusually large number of Gulf of Mexico animals out of place since the BP oil spill began.

“It is no different than having a forest fire,” Dr. Solangi said Thursday. “The oil spill expanded, it went thousands of square miles and as their habitat shrunk, these animals moved to areas that were not affected.”

The problem, according to Dr. Solangi, is those unaffected areas were also unfamiliar to the animals.

Too many turtles, for instance, wound up in waters off the Mississippi coast, where they didn’t understand the food supply.

300 turtles died in Mississippi.

Many more were caught by fishermen.

“In the past years, we would get one or two or maybe three animals, this year we had 57,” Dr. Solangi said.

He and his staff at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies are now caring for dozens of sea turtles.

Of course, turtles in distress have to be  swimming through some pretty nasty stuff in their environment. The shores along the Gulf are still oiled. Here’s a story about 168 miles of coast in Louisiana alone.  This is from New Orleans own Times Picayune. Yes, folks, every single story I’m linking to on this is no more than a day old.  We’re still living this nightmare down here.

Louisiana’s coastline continues to be smeared with significant amounts of oil and oiled material from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, with cleanup teams struggling to remove as much as possible of the toxic material by the time migratory birds arrive at the end of February, said the program manager of the Shoreline Cleanup and Assessment Teams, which are working for BP and the federal government.

There are 113 miles of Louisiana coastline under active cleanup, with another 55 miles awaiting approval to start the cleanup process, according to SCAT statistics. Teams have finished cleaning almost 72 miles to levels where oil is no longer observable or where no further treatment is necessary.

But that’s not the whole story for the state’s coastline. According to SCAT statistics, there’s another 2,846 miles of beach and wetland areas where oil was once found but is no longer observable or is not treatable.

Gary Hayward, the Newfields Environmental Planning and Compliance contractor who oversees the SCAT program, said that large area will be placed into a new “monitor and maintenance” category, once Louisiana state and local officials agree to the procedures to be used for that category.

“With rare exceptions, most of the marshes still have a bathtub ring that we have all collectively decided we aren’t going to clean any more than we already have because we’d be doing more harm to the marshes than the oil is going to be doing to them,” Hayward said.

Raise your hand  if you heard any thing about any of this on your local newspaper or the national TV stations.  We’re so out of sight and out of mind down here that some times I wonder if we’re even considered part of the country.  You do realize that a majority of water-related commerce and a majority of oil comes through our state, don’t you?

The South American country of Brazil is looking forward to incoming-President Dilma Rousseff.  The Nation has an article that spotlights the country’s first female elected head of state.  I only hope to see a day like that for our country.  I’d also like to end the Reagan legacy and get a real Democrat back in the White House.  Yes, I’m clapping for Tinkerbelle.

When the confetti was still falling after her victory at the polls on October 31, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president-elect, said, “I want to state my first commitment after the elections: to honor Brazil’s women so that today’s unprecedented result becomes a normal event and may be repeated and enlarged in companies, civil institutions and representative entities of our entire society.”

In a country where women have typically played a limited role in politics, the election of a woman to Brazil’s highest office signals a major break from the past. But Rousseff’s term will likely be marked by continuity with her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, a member of the Workers’ Party (PT), is leaving office with 87 percent support in the polls. An economist, PT bureaucrat, chief of staff under Lula and former guerrilla in the anti-dictatorship movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Rousseff was handpicked by Lula to follow his lead as president. When she is sworn in on January 1, she will inherit Lula’s popular legacy and will be further empowered by the fact that her party and allied parties won a majority of seats in the Senate and Congress. Not even Lula counted on this much support.

Well, at least somewhere, women are getting their due.  I’m getting tired of living through stories where women in the U.S. watch jobs they should have go to less qualified people.  Then, they get to do all the work without the title.  What’s worse is when the boyz club in power make you participate in the charade of celebration and finding the royal heir. Like that legitimizes their malfeasance!  Here’s yet another example in a  WSJ story about Elizabeth Warren searching for a person for the job she would hold if the world weren’t so upside down.  It seems less and less about qualifications and knowledge these days and more and more about appearances and appeasing the old boyz.  Money screams!

White House adviser Elizabeth Warren and a top lieutenant are quietly asking business and consumer groups for names of people who might run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, people familiar with the matter said.

The hunt suggests that Ms. Warren, a lightning rod for some bankers, might not be selected to lead the bureau, a centerpiece of the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill that passed this summer. Still, many liberal groups will push to get her in the post.

President Barack Obama’s choice could signal how he intends to deal with resurgent Republicans in Congress. The feelers to business groups serve as a reminder that any nominee would likely need support from at least seven Republicans in the Senate to win confirmation.

Among the names being discussed are Iowa’s attorney general, Tom Miller; New York state bank regulator Richard Neiman; and former Office of Thrift Supervision director Ellen Seidman.

The reality is Obama fights for nothing but Obama. I know there are other Obama appointments coming up shortly and I’m trying to get a grasp on what I want to discuss with you on the proposed replacements for Larry Summers.  Well, I know what I want to discuss but it’s more like trying to figure out how to describe what I see as the problem. As some one who rides both sides of the finance and economics line, I have some insight that many don’t have.  Finance is where you make the money and it’s really based on chimera.  I know the details and the proofs behind asset pricing models and it’s simply smoke and mirrors.  Economics is where the brains and the real insight exists. There is going to most likely be a bland, uninspired replacement for Larry Summers.  A finance person will undoubtedly win that appointment.  Hence, we will get smoke and mirrors and meaningless numbers.

Once again, it’s the vision thing.  All these appointments seem to reek of employing micromanaging corporate bureaucrats that are part of the problem.  They can crank through the data but they can’t put it into perspective.  As old President Bush used to say, no one seems to be good at the “vision thing”.  No one is crafting a  blue print that incorporates a better big picture based on what we already know.  The Great Depression and the inflationary 70s–and definitely the failures of Reagan’s voodoo economics–are full of lessons that every one seems to be ignoring.   We’re seeing the appointment of types that just muck around in the already mucked up bureaucracy decimated by Dubya Bush whose only inspiration appeared to be blowing things up like a psychopathic third grade with a bunch of firecrackers and a pond full of frogs.

Finance people have tons of numbers in search of a theory.  They crunch that data until they come up with a hypothesis that fits their storyline.   Macroeconomists have a broader sense of what the system needs to look like in order to really change things.  Economics has theory proved endlessly by empiricists.  Finance people have run amok since the 1980s and really, it’s time to end overt data mining and look to bigger principles.

This White House seems really short on values, vision, and a blueprint to carry our country forward into this new decade. We need an economic strategy that includes real job creation; not imaginary ‘saved’ jobs.  We need to unwind any thing that’s too big too fail and empower small, facile, and agile companies.  Our money needs to be concentrated on developing strategies and resources that we can nurture and renew.  (No, corn ethanol is not the answer. Making higher education more expensive and less accessible to all is not the answer either.)  We need to find a way to fulfill our promises to the weakest among us.  Current income inequality is not only immoral but it’s at levels approaching the powder keg of revolutions.  (Have you listened to a Teabot recently?)   We can no longer be railroaded by the interests of the few just because they can afford to fund political campaigns.  No government law should incent a business to leave its community in need to search out obscene profits elsewhere because government policy encourages it.  We should not accommodate any country that buggers growth from us by proffering trinkets on credit.   Vision is not a difficult thing.  Fighting for what’s right should not be a difficult thing either unless you’re in the fight with the wrong motivation.

Compromise seems to come so easy these days because there’s nothing proffered but compromise.  The original positions are badly compromised from the get-go.  Law making is based on political victory and not victory for the country.  No one is shifting real strategies due to midterm elections because there’s never been an overarching plan to begin with.  Moving pieces around a chess board is not playing chess.  Government at the highest levels has just gotten to be a muddled process with no guiding principles.   The White House is intently putting mid-level bureaucrats from corporations and the Clinton administration in charge of making tasteless sausage.  It’s just making things even more muddled and more muddled is not the type of change people want.  No bold vision could ever include the likes  Timothy Geithner, Joe Biden, or  Bill Richardson in positions that require vision.  Instead, we have people of vision–like Elizabeth Warren–hunting for acceptable seat warmers.

Meh.

I would just like to say that the last two months of being more than a file cabinet has brought a lot of intriguing things to Sky Dancing.  We have a growing number of readers and front pagers and I find that all very exciting.  So, must other parts of the blogosphere.   WonktheVote’ s excellent piece ‘What if this is as good as the Obama administration gets? ‘ made Mike’s Blog Round up at Crooks and Liars. Another surprise showed up last night from Pew Research Center and the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. This time a reference and quote come  from BostonBoomer on Julian Assange and the Wikileaks.  Here’s their story and how we fit in.

Espousing a unique mix of politics, technology, free speech and transparency, WikiLeaks has captured the attention from bloggers in a way few stories ever do. It has been a focus of social media conversation for three weeks this month alone, with a discussion that moved from one dimension to the next. After centering on political blame, the value of exposing government secrets, and the importance of a free press, the debate took on yet a new angle last week.For the week of December 20-24, more than a third (35%) of the news links on blogs were about the controversy, making it the No. 1 subject, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

…

“It should go without saying that I do not approve of Assange’s behavior if the allegations against him are true. Nevertheless, I still believe the allegations are very convenient for the powers that be,” declared Sky Dancing.

The Center produces something that’s called the New Media Report.  Here’s the description.

The New Media Index is a weekly report that captures the leading commentary of blogs and social media sites focused on news and compares those subjects to that of the mainstream press.

PEJ’s New Media Index is a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today’s news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news-consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ aims to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press.

In similar news,  Technorati just gave us a new badge early this morning. It’s a nice little green rectangle that says TOP 100 US POLITICS. We’re currently 95.  Not so bad for a blog that was just a file cabinet 2 months ago.

Our goals here include becoming part of the bigger conversation as well as providing more links and information to news items than we get via traditional main stream media outlets dominated by the concerns of advertisers and sources.  We complement that with our commentary and explanations and yours.    Yes.  They hear us now.

So what’s on your reading, blogging and celebration lists today?

Tuesday Reads

Posted: December 28, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Global Financial Crisis, Gulf Oil Spill, investment banking, jobs, New Orleans, the blogosphere, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, We are so F'd, Wikileaks | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 29 Comments
Good Morning!

I had a productive day yesterday for a change and I hope you did too!  Dare I go shop for plumbing stuff today?  I was bemoaning a shortage of headlines on Sunday.   I should be a bit  more careful about wishing for things because today’s list of reads will be long.

The other good news for me is that we’re going from hard freeze warnings to weather in the 70s this weekend.  It sounds like it’s going to be a fun New Year’s Eve here in New Orleans!  That should explain the picture!  I also wanted to give you a bit of  New Orleans News before I moved on to other things.

First, if you haven’t had a chance to read Sandy Rosenthal’s piece at HuffPo on the failure of the Levees during Hurricane Katrina, please do so.  There are still folks out there that think our devastation was from Hurricane Katrina and that just isn’t so.  I was on the edge of the bowl.  I know.  My house experienced very little actual damage because my house was on high ground and above the waters.  A failure of engineering devastated my city. It was not an act of nature.  I signed the petition.  Will you?

Last week, I wrote to the New York Times asking them to please resist using fast and easy “Katrina shorthand.” Forty-eight hours passed and we heard no response, so we decided to let our supporters step in. We urged our followers to sign our petition to the NY Times urging the paper to be more specific when referencing the flood disaster.

Over 1,000 people all across the nation signed our petition in under 48 hours. This immediate huge response – during the holiday no less – will hopefully show the New York Times that informed citizens understand that “Katrina” did not flood New Orleans. Civil engineering mistakes did.

Saying Katrina flooded the city protects the human beings responsible for the levee/floodwall failures. It is also dangerous since 55% of the American people lives in counties protected by levees.

If you haven’t yet, please sign our petition. We will keep it live until Jan 4, 2011.

In a similar vein, I would like to shout out HAPPY BIRTHDAY HARRY!!! to fellow New Orleans Blogger, neighbor, actor, musician, and polymath Harry Shearer (12/23/49) who made his film debut in the great epic  ‘Abbott and Costello Go To Mars’ in 1953.   There’s another New Orleans connection in that movie.  The Abbot and Costello characters–Lester and Orville–accidentally launch a rocket that should’ve been Mars bound.  They land in New Orleans for Mardi Gras instead.   Harry plays an uncredited “Boy”.

I also want to offer up a plug for Shearer’s wonderful documentary on the Levee Failure called ‘The Big Uneasy’ that was released last August on our 5th Katrina Anniversary.  It’s going to be re-released in 2011.    I’m including an interview with him by local radio show host Kat (not me).  You’ll learn that the Golden Globes are a simple piece of business and that Harry’s songstress wife is spoonable.   Who knew?  Also there seems that there’s a chance his documentary will be shown on PBS so you may get to see it there. I wonder if we can help encourage that situation.

I’d like to take another chance to remind you that we’re still living with the results of the BP Oil Gusher here on the Gulf Coast. There also appears to be covered-up as well as forgotten stories down here.  You may want to take a look at this from Open Channel on MSNBC.com: ‘ Is dispersant still being used in the Gulf?” This story reports on pictures and samples take in early August that are being investigated now. I’d written about some of these reports earlier.

Kaltofen is among the scientists retained by New Orleans attorney Stuart Smith to conduct independent environmental testing data from the Gulf on behalf of clients who are seeking damages from BP. (Click here to read about their effort.)

An independent marine chemist who reviewed the data said that their conclusion stands up.

“The analytical techniques are correct and well accepted,” said Ted Van Vleet, a professor at the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. “Based on their data, it does appear that dispersant is present.”

Why responders would continue to use chemical dispersants after the government announced a halt is a mystery. If the oil was gone or already dispersed, as the federal government and BP have said, what would be the point? And, because dispersants don’t work very well on oil that has been “weathered” by the elements over long periods of times, there would be little point in spraying it that situation.

I wanted to share a New Orleans and indeed a Southern New Year’s eve tradition. We serve a concoction of black eyed peas, cabbage and sausage/ham called ‘Hoppin’ John’ to bring us luck and wealth in the New Year.  I evidently didn’t make enough of it last year, so I’m planning to cook more this year.  The pea’s black eyes represent coins, the cabbage represents cash, and the sausage or ham is meat that always symbolizes luxury to hungry, poor people.

Here’s  Emeril’s ‘Hoppin’ John’ recipe provided courtesy the Food Network:

Hoppin’ John

Prep Time: 15 min    Cook Time:50 min     Serves: 10

Ingredients

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large ham hock
1 cup onion, chopped
1/2 cup celery, chopped
1/2 cup green pepper, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped garlic
1 pound black-eyed peas, soaked overnight and rinsed
1 quart chicken stock
Bay leaf
1 teaspoon dry thyme leaves
Salt, black pepper, and cayenne
3 tablespoons finely chopped green onion
3 cups steamed white rice

Directions

Heat oil in a large soup pot, add the ham hock and sear on all sides for 4 minutes. Add the onion, celery, green pepper, and garlic, cook for 4 minutes. Add the black-eyed peas, stock, bay leaves, thyme, and seasonings. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat and simmer for 40 minutes, or until the peas are creamy and tender, stir occasionally. If the liquid evaporates, add more water or stock. Adjust seasonings, and garnish with green onions. Serve over rice.

Okay, so enough about my home town.

The AFL-CIO wants to talk unions this holiday season because there is so much misinformation about these days. It’s a nice list of myths and facts that you may want to arm yourself with when talking to those right wing nattering nabobs of negativism.

MYTH: Unions only care about their members.

FACT: Unions are fighting to improve the lives of all workers.

  • It’s easy to forget that we have unions to thank for a lot of things we take for granted today in today’s workplaces: the minimum wage, the eight-hour work day, child labor laws, health and safety standards, and even the weekend.
  • Today, unions across the country are on the frontlines advocating for basic workplace reforms like increases in the minimum wage, and pushing lawmakers to require paid sick leave.
  • Studies show that a large union presence in an industry or region can raise wages even for non-union workers. That means more consumer spending, and a stronger economy for us all.
  • So it’s no wonder that most Americans (61 percent) believe that “labor unions are necessary to protect the working person,” according to Pew’s most recent values survey.

Here’s a gift that keeps on giving er… taking from FT: “AIG secures $4.3bn in credit lines“.

AIG, took a step closer to independence from government as it said it had secured $4.3bn in credit facilities.
The US insurer bailed out by Washington during the financial crisis is is in the process of repaying the $95bn the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York lent following its disastrous decision to insure billions of dollars worth of securities backed by mortgages.

Under the facilities arranged by 36 banks and administered by JPMorgan Chase, AIG can borrow $1.5bn over three years and an additional $1.5bn over 364 days, according to a regulatory filing. Separately, Chartis, an AIG division, obtained a $1.3bn credit line.

Let’s just hope they clean up their act this time.  I’m not holding my breath or any stock offers that may come up. Notice one of the usual suspects is ‘facilitating’ the arrangements. Cue ‘The Godfather’ music, please.

There’s an item from Slate that you may want to check out.  It’s “A selection of gaffes from the 2010 campaign we should forgive”.  Here’s one from Pelosi that gave me a chuckle.

Nancy Pelosi: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

On March 9, the Speaker of the House spoke to the National Association of Counties about the health care bill that was days away from final passage. This was the phrase that launched a thousand campaign ads. Nine months later, this is remembered as Pelosi admitting what Tea Partiers had feared: that Democrats were ramming through bad bills without reading them.

BostonBoomer sent me to Glenn Greenwald’s latest which really is a must read: ‘ The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired’.  Greenwald’s work on behalf of massacre leaker Bradley Manning is Nobel Peace Prize worthy. I don’t mean aspirational prizes either.

For more than six months, Wired‘s Senior Editor Kevin Poulsen has possessed — but refuses to publish — the key evidence in one of the year’s most significant political stories:  the arrest of U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning for allegedly acting as WikiLeaks’ source. In late May, Adrian Lamo — at the same time he was working with the FBI as a government informant against Manning — gave Poulsen what he purported to be the full chat logs between Manning and Lamo in which the Army Private allegedly confessed to having been the source for the various cables, documents and video that WikiLeaks released throughout this year. In interviews with me in June, both Poulsen and Lamo confirmed that Lamo placed no substantive restrictions on Poulsen with regard to the chat logs:  Wired was and remains free to publish the logs in their entirety.

We’re waiting for a response from Wired since vacation seem to preempt media responsibility these days. Will we find out that there’s been some active media suppression of the truth regard Manning’s accusations today?   This morning, Greenwald continued his admonition to fellow journalists in the excellent article “The merger of journalists and government officials”.

From the start of the WikiLeaks controversy, the most striking aspect for me has been that the ones who are leading the crusade against the transparency brought about by WikiLeaks — the ones most enraged about the leaks and the subversion of government secrecy — have been . . . America’s intrepid Watchdog journalists.  What illustrates how warped our political and media culture is as potently as that?  It just never seems to dawn on them — even when you explain it — that the transparency and undermining of the secrecy regime against which they are angrily railing is supposed to be . . . what they do.

There’s another economics story covered on The New Yorker‘s The Financial Page headlined:  ‘The Jobs Crisis’ by James Surowiecki.  It’s a good explanation of a debate between economists and politicians right now.  Guess which one knows best on this?

Why have new jobs been so hard to come by? One view blames cyclical economic factors: at times when everyone is cautious about spending, companies are slow to expand capacity and take on more workers. But another, more skeptical account has emerged, which argues that a big part of the problem is a mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skills that people have. According to this view, many of the jobs that existed before the recession (in home building, for example) are gone for good, and the people who held those jobs don’t have the skills needed to work in other fields. A big chunk of current unemployment, the argument goes, is therefore structural, not cyclical: resurgent demand won’t make it go away.

Though this may sound like an academic argument, its consequences are all too real. If the problem is a lack of demand, policies that boost demand—fiscal stimulus, aggressive monetary policy—will help. But if unemployment is mainly structural there’s little we can do about it: we just need to wait for the market to sort things out, which is going to take a while.

The structural argument sounds plausible: it fits our sense that there’s a price to be paid for the excesses of the past decade; that the U.S. economy was profoundly out of whack before the recession hit; and that we need major changes in the kind of work people do. But there’s surprisingly little evidence for it. If the problems with the job market really were structural, you’d expect job losses to be heavily concentrated in a few industries, the ones that are disappearing as a result of the bursting of the bubble. And if there were industries that were having trouble finding enough qualified workers, you’d expect them to have lots of job vacancies, and to be paying their existing workers more and working them longer hours.

Here’s a fun read at New York Magazine about living large in a libertarian world.

No one exemplifies that streak more than Ron Paul—unless you count his son Rand. When Rand Paul strolled onstage in May 2010, the newly declared Republican nominee for Kentucky’s U.S. Senate seat, he entered to the strains of Rush, the boomer rock band famous for its allegiance to libertarianism and Ayn Rand. It was a dog whistle—a wink to free-marketers and classic-rock fans savvy enough to get the reference, but likely to sail over the heads of most Republicans. Paul’s campaign was full of such goodies. He name-dropped Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s seminal The Road to Serfdom. He cut a YouTube video denying that he was named after Ayn Rand but professing to have read all of her novels. He spoke in the stark black-and-white terms of libertarian purism. “Do we believe in the individual, or do we believe in the state?” he asked the crowd in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on Election Night.

It’s clear why he played coy. For all the talk about casting off government shackles, libertarianism is still considered the crazy uncle of American politics: loud and cocky and occasionally profound but always a bit unhinged. And Rand Paul’s dad is the craziest uncle of all. Ron Paul wants to “end the Fed,” as the title of his book proclaims, and return the country to the gold standard—stances that have made him a tea-party icon. Now, as incoming chairman of the subcommittee that oversees the Fed, he’ll have an even bigger platform. Paul Sr. says there’s not much daylight between him and his son. “I can’t think of anything we grossly disagree on,” he says.

Well, they must have both been impacted by the same disease or environmental catastrophe to share so many views so out of the mainstream and be so far removed from experience, data, and science.  I can’t help but believe the more the media shines a bright light on them, the more the warts and the brain damage will become noticeable.

So, one more suggested read comes via Lambert and Corrente.  It’s really interesting piece from The Atlantic on ‘The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks’. It talks about Hackers, Assange, and the Hacker code of conduct. Any one who as read Assange’s manifest can see the connect and disconnect that simultaneously occur in the ideas.  BB and had discussed that Assange might have a form of Aspergers disease about a month ago and I was also interested to see that Lambert, Valhalla, and some others had similar thoughts. It frequently runs in brilliant people who can decode a lot of things with the exception of other people. Anyway, here’s a taste of Jaron Lanier.

The strategy of Wikileaks, as explained in an essay by Julian Assange, is to make the world transparent, so that closed organizations are disabled, and open ones aren’t hurt. But he’s wrong. Actually, a free flow of digital information enables two diametrically opposed patterns:  low-commitment anarchy on the one hand and absolute secrecy married to total ambition on the other.

While many individuals in Wikileaks would probably protest that they don’t personally advocate radical ideas about transparency for everybody but hackers, architecture can force all our hands. This is exactly what happens in current online culture. Either everything is utterly out in the open, like a music file copied a thousand times or a light weight hagiography on Facebook, or it is perfectly protected, like the commercially valuable dossiers on each of us held by Facebook or the files saved for blackmail by Wikileaks.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation — or any human undertaking — that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn’t have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

I’m still fascinated by the sideshow that is driving ad hominem attacks on Assange and the women involved with the charges.  Still, that does not cloud my appreciation of what’s being released by Wikileaks.  We’ll definitely have more coming.  I’m personally waiting for the BOA stuff as that’s the stuff that I can personally decode.  I’m glad we’re extending the Front Page Team to include more and more people that can tackle some of the other technical stuff from their vantage points.  Stay tuned for more on all of this.

Just ONE MORE NAWLINS THANG: New Orleans Saints 17 – Atlanta Falcons 14.  My home town continues to be the Great American Comeback Story.

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

Well, It’s About Time! Justice Department Sues BP

Posted: December 15, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Gulf Oil Spill, New Orleans | Tags: , , | 27 Comments

Finally! The Justice Department (PDF) is suing BP and eight other companies over the Gulf oil spill. From the Financial Times

BP faces penalties of $21bn-plus if found fully liable for damages in a lawsuit over the oil accident in the Gulf of Mexico launched by the US government on Wednesday.

Any damages would be on top of the $20bn (£17bn) BP has agreed to pay into a fund to compensate people on the Gulf coast who have suffered financially because of the spill. The final damages figures depend on the US government’s ability to prove gross negligence.

[….]

The US Department of Justice announced that it was suing BP, along with Anadarko of the US and Mitsui of Japan, its partners in the disastrous Macondo well; Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig; and the QBE syndicate 1036 at Lloyd’s of London, which insured the rig.

Eric Holder, the US attorney-general, said: “We intend to prove that these defendants are responsible for government removal costs, economic losses and environmental damages without limitation.”

According to Raw Story:

The lawsuit alleges that safety and operating regulations were violated in the period leading up to April 20.

It says that the defendants failed to keep the Macondo well under control during that period and failed to use the best available and safest drilling technology to monitor the well’s conditions. They also failed to maintain continuous surveillance and failed to maintain equipment and material that were available and necessary to ensure the safety and protection of personnel, equipment, natural resources and the environment, the suit charges.

Before Wednesday, potential class-action lawsuits had been filed in the Gulf oil spill by fishing and seafood interests, the tourism industry, restaurants and clubs, property owners losing vacation renters — even vacationers who claim the spill forced them to cancel and lose a deposit. So far, more than 300 suits have been spawned by the spill and consolidated in federal court in New Orleans.

Specifically, according to the Christian Science Monitor,

The complaint seeks to enforce provisions of the Oil Pollution Act, which government lawyers say provides for open-ended liability for pollution removal costs and other damages.

The lawsuit alleges that the companies failed to take necessary precautions to keep the oil well under control in the period leading up to the explosion. The companies also failed to rely on the best available and safest drilling technology, the suit says.

In addition, the companies are accused of failing to maintain continuous surveillance of the drilling operation and failing to ensure the safety and protection of workers, equipment, natural resources, and the environment.

The suit also seeks civil fines under the Clean Water Act for the oil that poured into the Gulf after the explosion.

The civil suits will be going on at the same time as the Justice Department’s criminal investigation.

The Justice Department is “at a different stage” with its criminal investigation compared with the civil case, Holder said. “We are moving as quickly as we can” on the criminal investigation, said Holder, who didn’t give any timetable for when it might conclude.

The Blog of the Legal Times notes the difficulty posed by running parallel criminal and civil legal actions:

The suit filed today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana comes amid an ongoing criminal investigation of the oil spill, which followed an explosion and fire in April that killed 11 workers.

The suit thrusts the government into the sometimes challenging world of parallel criminal and civil proceedings. The Justice Department also said in the complaint it reserves the right to conduct administrative proceedings against the defendants.

“It is difficult to have parallel proceedings going on at the same time,” said Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., addressing reporters this afternoon at Main Justice. “We need to be careful to make sure that we don’t do anything that violates any of the rules that we have to follow on the criminal side while at the same time proceeding on the civil side. It’s been a little tricky.”

Today was the final day to sue for damages caused by the BP oil spill.

The lawsuit makes it possible for the federal government to seek billions of dollars in penalties for polluting the Gulf of Mexico, beaches and wetlands, and reimbursement for its cleanup costs. More than 300 lawsuits filed previously by individuals and businesses, and now consolidated in the New Orleans federal court, include claims for financial losses and compensation for the families of 11 workers killed in the blast.

The judge overseeing those lawsuits had set Wednesday as the deadline to file certain types of complaints, though it was unclear whether the government was bound by that time frame.

“The Justice Department has left its options open to argue that there was gross negligence and therefore should be higher penalties,” said David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who headed up the Justice Department’s environmental crimes section for seven years. “The government has not limited itself in any way with the filing of its civil lawsuit.”

My main question is where will the money go if the suits are successful? Will the people in the Gulf states receive any compensation from damages paid to the government? I certainly hope so.

Sunday Reads

Posted: November 28, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Breaking News, Democratic Politics, Diplomacy Nightmares, Elections, Global Financial Crisis, Gulf Oil Spill, morning reads, The Great Recession, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Economy | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 59 Comments
good morning!!!

Here’s an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor about an attempt to knock Rahm Emanuel off the ballot for the Chicago Mayoral election.  Emanuel’s eligibility is in question because of his residency in the District as Obama’s Chief of Staff.  Does that duty deserve similar treatment to active duty soldiers?

Chicago area election lawyer Burt Odelson filed his challenge to the Chicago Board of Elections, saying that Emanuel does not meet a state law that requires all candidates to be residents of the municipality in which they seek office for at least one year. He filed on behalf of two Chicago residents; on Wednesday, five other challenges were filed separately. Tuesday is the last day objections can be filed to the election board.

Central to Mr. Odelson’s argument is that Emanuel was removed from voter rolls twice during his two-year tenure in Washington, when he served as White House chief of staff to President Obama. During that time, Emanuel rented out his home. His campaign says he maintained ties to the city by paying property taxes, maintaining a driver’s license, and voting in the February primary.

Economists Olivier Jeanne and Anton Korinek  at VOX are suggesting Pigou taxes  (i.e. sin taxes) on financial corporations that would vary with credit booms and busts.    Rules would change depending on the state of the economy.  Suggestions include requiring higher capital levels or placing some kind of penalty on an organization when they take on large amounts of credit during an asset price boom.  The purpose is to impose the social cost of bailing the organization out on them to prevent from doing so and causing havoc in the financial markets. The idea is that they’d be less able to profit from the leverage so they’d be less likely to  go for the risk.  Suggestions specifically target mortgages with balloons or “teaser rates” since they are more risky and more likely to blow up in the face of market troubles.  The tax would then be used to fund any required bailout.

The optimal tax should also be adapted to the maturity of debt. Long-term debt makes the economy less vulnerable to busts than short-term debt, because lenders cannot immediately recall their loans when the value of collateral assets declines. For example, 30-year mortgages make the economy less prone to busts than mortgages with teaser rates that are meant to be refinanced after a short period of time.

An important benefit of ex-ante prudential taxation during booms is that it avoids the moral hazard problems associated with bailouts. When borrowers expect to receive bailouts in the event of systemic crises, they have additional incentives to take on debt. If the financial regulators accumulate a bailout fund, borrowers may increase their indebtedness in equal measure, leading to a form of “bailout neutrality”

Real Time Economics over at the WSJ has some interesting numbers up on Mortgage defaults.  The ever increasing backlog of defaults is worrisome.

492: The number of days since the average borrower in foreclosure last made a mortgage payment.

Banks can’t foreclose fast enough to keep up with all the people defaulting on their mortgage loans. That’s a problem, because it could make stiffing the bank even more attractive to struggling borrowers.

In recent months, the number of borrowers entering severe delinquency — meaning they missed their third monthly mortgage payment — has been on the decline, falling to about 700,000 in October, according to mortgage-data provider LPS Applied Analytics. But it’s still more than double the number of foreclosure processes started.

I personally enjoyed reading this Michelle Goldberg take-down on the Daily Beast of certain right wing women politicians who are trying to campaign as the ‘real’ feminists while throwing out their rewrites of herstory.  The Right Wing always rewrites history with the worst revisions.  I’m calling what they adhere to feminotexactlyism.  Here’s a few tidbits.

The historical revisionism here recalls that of Christian conservatives who try to paint our deistic Founding Fathers as devout evangelicals. At one point, Palin refers to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” which came out of the historic 1848 women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton deliberately echoed the language of the Declaration of Independence, referring to the rights that women are entitled to “by the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” To Palin, this mention of God proves that Stanton shared her faith: “Can you imagine a contemporary feminist invoking ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God?’ These courageous women spoke of our God-given rights because they believed they were given equally, by God, to men and women.”

Not really. Stanton was a famous freethinker, eventually shunned by more conservative elements of the women’s movement for her attacks on religion. In one 1885 speech, she declared, “You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women.” Ten years later, she published the first volume of The Woman’s Bible, her mammoth dissection of biblical misogyny. Stanton was particularly scathing on the notion of the virgin birth: “Out of this doctrine, and that which is akin to it, have sprung all the monasteries and nunneries of the world, which have disgraced and distorted and demoralized manhood and womanhood for a thousand years.”

For more debunking, including that silly one about Susan B Anthony being some how against abortion, go read the article.  Facts are  such tractable things to Republicans that I wonder why any sane person would quote one without fact checking them first.  I just can’t take any more presidential candidates needing basic re-education; let alone presidents that require it.

Speaking of another one in that category, the national spotlight isn’t doing much good for my governor either.  I’ve got two sources I’ll quote here.  The first one is The American Thinker which you may recall is conservative.  They’ve even got his number.  It seems that just writing books about yourself is not going to be the path to Presidency any more.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is busy promoting his new tome Leadership and Crisis with book tour stops all over the country. This latest tour comes on top of his previous speaking tours to raise campaign cash for himself and various Republican candidates around the country. The only place Governor Jindal has trouble visiting is his home state of Louisiana. The joke in Louisiana is that Bobby is known as a governor in 49 states.


Louisiana blogger Lamar White, Jr. takes it even farther.  Yup, Jindal’s our ROAD Scholar. We can’t keep professors on university payrolls but we can sure pay for him to promote his self-serving book.

The oil spill was a huge scare, but instead of being honest about it, Jindal used it as an opportunity to advance his own political celebrity and perpetuate ridiculously disconcerting and almost masochistic myths about the effects of a deepwater drilling moratorium, none of which turned out to be true. He spent more time posing for the cameras and tagging along with CNN than practically anyone else, yet, in his “memoir,” it’s the Obama Administration who cared about media perception, not him. As an example, he cites a letter he delivered requesting an increase for federally-subsidized food stamps, suggesting that the Obama Administration delayed on their response. According to White House officials, Jindal’s formal request was delivered on the same day that Jindal called a press conference decrying the delays. Pure political theater.

But most importantly, when Jindal says Congressmen should spend more time at home, he should probably listen to his own advice. During the last couple of years, Jindal’s become more known for the things he has done outside of Louisiana than for anything he has done here in Louisiana. Before the November elections, he spent weeks touring the country to support fellow Republican candidates, and only two weeks after the election, he embarked on yet another nationwide tour, this time promoting his memoir.

I have to admit that this next Republican presidential primary is going to have me chewing my finger nails off.  If this is the best they have to offer, we are SO sunk.

Both the Koreas are upping the stakes in the Yellow Sea.  North Korea is sending veiled threats to the U.S about sending its air carrier–USS George Washington–into the area for joint ‘war games’.  SOS Clinton is in talks with the Chinese.  This is from The Guardian.

The world’s diplomatic corps is working feverishly to contain the crisis and make sure there is no further conflict. China, which is widely seen as having influence over the North, has held talks with the US between its foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, and the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. “The pressing task now is to put the situation under control,” the Chinese foreign ministry quoted Yang as telling Clinton.

Meanwhile the US stressed that its military operation with the South – which includes deployment of a nuclear-armed aircraft carrier – was not intended to provoke the North. Yet the North’s news agency addressed that issue: “If the US brings its carrier to the West Sea of Korea [Yellow Sea] at last, no one can predict the ensuing consequences.”

The the joint US-South Korea exercises started late last night.  Here’s the report on them from English Al Jazeera.

South Korea’s military later said that explosions – possibly the sound of artillery fire – were heard on Yeonpyeong Island.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that what is believed to have been a round of artillery was heard on Sunday from a North Korean military base north of the sea border dividing the two Koreas. It was not immediately clear where the round landed.

Residents of the island were ordered to take shelter in underground bunkers, but that order was later withdrawn, according to Yonhap.

Dozens of reporters, along with soldiers and police and a few residents, headed for the bunkers, where they remained for 40 minutes.

I’ve been watching the euro crisis again as the problems with Ireland seem to be creating problems with Spain now.  My print copy of The Economist didn’t come this morning so I’ve been having to read the cyber ink here.  My Saturday night soak in a hot bath was just not the same without it.  So,here’s my idea of a chiller thriller.

Europe’s rescue plan is based on the idea that Ireland and the rest just need to borrow a bit of cash to tide them over while they sort out their difficulties. But investors increasingly worry that such places cannot, in fact, afford to service their debts—each in a slightly different way. In Ireland the problem is dodgy banks and the government’s hasty decision in September 2008 to guarantee all their liabilities. Some investors think this may end up costing even more than the promised EU/IMF loans of some €85 billion ($115 billion)—especially if bank deposits continue to flee the country (see Buttonwood). Ireland’s failing government adds to the doubt, because it could find it hard to push through an austerity budget before a new election (see article). In Greece the fear is that the government cannot raise enough in taxes or grow fast enough to finance its vast borrowing. Likewise in Portugal, which though less severely troubled than Greece nevertheless seems likely to follow Ireland to the bail-out window.

If the panic were confined to these three, the euro zone could cope. But Europe’s bail-out fund is not big enough to handle the country next in line: Spain, the euro’s fourth-biggest economy, with a GDP bigger than Greece, Ireland and Portugal combined.

One has to ask how much the Germans are going to pony up the cross country fiscal policy this will take.   I’m still not ready to call the eminent demise of the EURO since every study that I’ve read–and I’ve read lots over the last three years–points to how much trade and foreign direct investment has come from integration.  This will test a lot of wills; good an otherwise. Meanwhile, the Irish are rebelling over their deal. They don’t want austerity measures any more than the Greeks do or we do for that matter.

The Economist also weighed in on  the “Republican Backlash” to the QE2 calling it perplexing which I believe is equal to me being baffled by the whole thing.  It’s still either they don’t know a damn thing (e.g. Republican presidential wannabe candidate number 1 on the link up top) or they just want the power so they don’t really care (e.g Republican presidential wannabe candidate number 2 on the link up top there).  Has to be.  What is still the weirdest thing to me is how many of them seem to hate Bernanke who is–afterall–a fellow Republican and a Dubya appointee.  What a strange, strange world this has turn out to be.  I mean Ron Paul is going to be in charge of the House subcommittee on Monetary Policy next year.  That’s like putting a representative of Astronauts for a flat earth society in charge of NASA.

Yet the fight is not ultimately over numbers, but ideology. To be sure, the Fed’s reputation has suffered among Americans of all political stripes over its failure to prevent the crisis and its bail-outs of banks. But the tea-party movement holds it in particularly low regard, seeing it as the monetary bedfellow of the hated stimulus and bail-outs. Some 60% of tea-party activists want the Fed abolished or overhauled, according to a Bloomberg poll. One of the movement’s heroes is Ron Paul, a congressman from Texas who wants to scrap the Fed outright and bring back the gold standard. His son Rand, newly elected as a senator from Kentucky, has also been stridently critical. QE can be made to seem sinister: an animated video on YouTube that portrays it as a conspiracy between Goldman Sachs and the Fed to fleece the taxpayer has been viewed over 2m times.

The ideological content of the backlash should not be overestimated. In 1892 William Jennings Bryan, later the Democratic presidential candidate, declared: “The people of Nebraska are for free silver and I am for free silver. I will look up the arguments later.” Liberals accuse the Republican leadership of likewise concocting an excuse to rally their base against Barack Obama. Indeed, the letter to Mr Bernanke criticises QE2 in much the same language used to oppose fiscal stimulus: as a dampener of business confidence and stability.

Well, I’ve just about had it with the print news today.  Do you suppose the Sunday News Programs will have anything on more meaningful?

Ah, probably not.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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