Friday Reads
Posted: June 3, 2011 Filed under: abortion rights, fetus fetishists, financial institutions, morning reads, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: CFBP, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, debt ceiling crisis, personhood, Real Income, War on Women 28 Comments
Good Morning!
So, you should be able to tell that I’m knee deep in research and preparing to teach an MBA course because I’ve been writing so many finance and econ posts recently. This morning is going to continue that trend. Plus, the War on Women is still on! Some mornings it just doesn’t pay to read the news, I swear!
Feeling poorer? There’s good reason! According to statistics analyzed by Investor’s Business Daily “10-Year Real Wage Gains Worse Than During Depression”. That’s why no one has any money to spend. This is especially true when you couple that with sagging wealth from your incredible shrinking home equity.
The past decade of wage growth has been one for the record books — but not one to celebrate.
The increase in total private-sector wages, adjusted for inflation, from the start of 2001 has fallen far short of any 10-year period since World War II, according to Commerce Department data. In fact, if the data are to be believed, economywide wage gains have even lagged those in the decade of the Great Depression (adjusted for deflation).
Two years into the recovery, and 10 years after the nation fell into a post-dot-com bubble recession, this legacy of near-stagnant wages has helped ground the economy despite unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus — and even an impressive bull market.
Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.
Oh, and Moody’s is preparing for a US Government purposeful default on its sovereign debt. Feel like you’re in Hooverville yet? Just wait until Republicans looking to tank Obama’s reelection chances wind up tanking the US economy.
Moody’s Investors Service said today that if there is no progress on increasing the statutory debt limit in coming weeks, it expects to place the US government’s rating under review for possible downgrade, due to the very small but rising risk of a short-lived default. If the debt limit is raised and default avoided, the Aaa rating will be maintained. However, the rating outlook will depend on the outcome of negotiations on deficit reduction. A credible agreement on substantial deficit reduction would support a continued stable outlook; lack of such an agreement could prompt Moody’s to change its outlook to negative on the Aaa rating.
Although Moody’s fully expected political wrangling prior to an increase in the statutory debt limit, the degree of entrenchment into conflicting positions has exceeded expectations. The heightened polarization over the debt limit has increased the odds of a short-lived default. If this situation remains unchanged in coming weeks, Moody’s will place the rating under review.
Moody’s had previously indicated that its stable outlook on the Aaa rating was based on the assumption that meaningful progress would be made within the next eighteen months in adopting measures to reverse the country’s upward debt trajectory. The debt limit negotiations represent a real near-term opportunity for agreement on a plan for fiscal consolidation. If this current opportunity passes, Moody’s believes that the likelihood of anything significant being accomplished before the next presidential election is reduced, in part because the two parties each hopes to capture both a congressional majority and the presidency in the 2012 election, after which the winning party could achieve its own agenda. Therefore, failure to reach an agreement as part of the current negotiations would increase the likelihood of a negative outlook in the near term, because the upward debt trajectory would still be in place. At present, this appears the most likely outcome, in Moody’s opinion.
The Nation reports that the Banking Lobby joins the Republican party in attacking Elizabeth Warren. The fight continues to stop implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) and to stop Warren from head it up. The bureau’s main mission is to stop bad lending practices that were rampant and damaging during the subprime mortgage crisis.
During last year’s financial reform debate, Congressional Republicans, along with some bank-friendly Democrats, launched a furious campaign to defeat the bureau. The US Chamber of Commerce led a $2 million industrywide ad campaign opposing the CFPB, using a butcher as its unlikely public face. “Virtually every business that extends credit to American consumers would be affected—even the local butcher,” one ad claimed. “I don’t know how many of your butchers are offering financial services,” quipped President Obama after meeting victims of lending abuses. The financial services firms that will fall under CFPB purview—big and small banks, payday lenders, mortgage brokers—did all they could to weaken it and create special exemptions for their industries, yet the consumer bureau improbably became “one of the central aspects of financial reform,” according to Obama, and the most tangible victory for consumers. Under pressure from consumer advocates, the administration named Warren a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, her onetime foe, and the bureau’s interim director. Now Congressional Republicans and their industry backers are mounting a last-ditch effort to constrain the CFPB before its launch. Warren, according to associates, views this as an attempt to “pull the arms and legs off of the agency.”
Okay, so I’ll change the topic to how religionists are attempting to outlaw birth control and in vitro fertilization. They’re doing it by attempting to redefine personhood again.
“The definition of personhood ranges if you’re talking about property law, or inheritance, or how the census is taken,” says Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project.
All those differences are exactly what Keith Mason wants to change. He’s president of Personhood USA, a group that’s trying to rewrite the laws and constitutions of every state — and some countries — to recognize someone as a person “exactly at creation,” he says. “It’s fertilization; it’s when the sperm meets the egg.”
Mason says the basic problem is that science has advanced faster than policymaking.
“We know, without a shadow of a doubt, when human life begins,” he says. “But our laws have not caught up to what we know.”
And according to his organization, those laws should recognize every fertilized egg as an individual and complete human being.
This movement is basically trying to push a definition that contradicts medical definitions. A redefinition law is currently being considered in Colorado, Mississippi. and Alabama.
Medical experts say pregnancy begins when the egg implants in the uterus, not at fertilization. It is at this point that a woman’s hormone levels change and pregnancy can be detected through a urine test. Dan Grossman, an ob-gyn at the University of California-San Francisco who works with Ibis Reproductive Health, noted that about half of fertilized eggs implant and result in pregnancy.
Considering a fertilized egg a person with full rights also could outlaw popular forms of contraception, Grossman said. “This redefinition really could end up reclassifying all of these effective and safe birth control methods as abortifacients, or agents that induce abortions,” because some contraceptives can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus, he explained. Grossman added that the idea that birth control methods that can block implantation are the equivalent of abortion is “certainly not a view that’s held by the medical profession or that’s based on medical evidence, and it’s certainly not consistent with what American women and couples want and use to plan their families.”
Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, an attorney with ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, said personhood proponents’ intent is to ban abortion and birth control. She said that giving rights to a fertilized egg could have far-reaching and dangerous consequences by legally separating a woman from her pregnancy. For example, in cases of potentially lethal ectopic pregnancies, personhood would give “all fertilized eggs legal rights under the law [and] calls into question what kind of methods a doctor can actually use to save a woman’s life,” she said.
Amanda Marcotte–writing for Slate–describes the laws as even “weirder than imaged”. Basically, you can sum it up this way: women are receptacles and fertilized eggs are people. This seems unbelievable but it’s unfortunately real and represents just the latest threat to our autonomy.
Even some anti-abortion groups oppose personhood bills, not because they disagree with the aims of the proponents—who want to ban all abortion, IVF treatment, stem cell research, and many forms of contraception—but because it’s bad and confusing law. And part of the reason for this is that it creates a lot of confusion over the gap between belief and fact. For instance, it’s clear that many supporters of personhood laws hope the laws can be used to ban hormonal birth control and IUDs, which they argue work by killing fertilized eggs. However, attempts to use the law in this way are complicated by the fact that this is not how these contraception methods work; hormonal methods work by suppressing ovulation and IUDs work by making the uterus a hostile environment for sperm (which isn’t going to do much to quell the emasculation concerns of anti-choicers). Realistically speaking, if you believe fertilized eggs are “people” and losing one is equivalent to losing a child, then women who use the pill to prevent ovulation are actually the least murderous amongst us, since they are losing the fewest number of fertilized eggs. Using these laws to stop the distribution of these kinds of contraception would likely depend on a number of factors, including judges’ willingness to treat made-up beliefs as equal to scientific information.
There’s way more at stake than even abortion and contraception, in fact. The haziness of these bills could create all sorts of nightmarish scenarios. For one thing, they would absolutely make IVF illegal, but it would also call into question how you handle all the embryos that have already been created in labs. With IVF being banned, it’s pointless to keep them around anymore, but disposing of them is killing “people.” Are we prepared to throw people in jail for this? There’s also a concern about how miscarriages are handled once you’ve determined that a “child” has been lost every time a woman miscarries, no matter how early in her pregnancy. These laws open the possibility of every woman miscarrying being detained for a legal investigation to determine if she has criminal liability for miscarriage. If you think I’m being ridiculous about this, consider that women are already being thrown in jail for giving birth to babies that don’t survive. Personhood laws could roll back the clock on your criminal liability to before you were even pregnant. Unfortunately, there are zealots in law enforcement that are willing to throw a woman who miscarries at eight weeks in jail because someone saw her drinking in a bar six weeks ago, before she probably even knew she was pregnant.
So, want some even more disheartening news? Melissa at Shakesville finds yet another article tailored for young women that basically says you can avoid most rapes if you just don’t drink alcohol. No kidding!
The Frisky‘s “Girl Talk: Why Being Drunk Is a Feminist Issue,” by Kate Torgovnick, who totes isn’t a victim-blamer, she swears! It’s just that we don’t live in an ideal world, so because women “do not have control over what men, drunk or sober, will do when presented with our drunkeness,” women should take control over “our side of the equation—how much we drink.”
There is a lot wrong with that article (not least of which is the author’s confusion about what actually constitutes rape), but I’m not going to waste my time fisking garbage. I’ll merely note that the entire premise is fundamentally flawed in the same ways that every other piece in this despicable genre is, in addition to the evident issue that victim-blaming, even if cynically rebranded as “taking control,” inexorably shifts responsibility from rapist to victim
Where have all the consciousness raising groups gone?
So, I really don’t want to talk about Wienergate or who is in New Hampshire or why Chris Christie thinks it’s okay to take state helicopters on personal jaunts. So, maybe you’ve got something else to offer up? What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Elizabeth Warren: Fighter or Pinata?
Posted: March 19, 2011 Filed under: commercial banking, financial institutions, Global Financial Crisis | Tags: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Elizabeth Warren 9 Comments
I’m never quite happy when a major media outlet like the New York Times refers to a woman as an inanimate object. Even if the article is flattering, the metaphor still stings. The caption below her picture reads “President Obama’s adviser on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” too. Obama may own her appointment but he doesn’t own the woman who has been on the side of consumers of banking services for a very long time. If Elizabeth Warren is an object of loathing for both bankers and Republicans, it’s because she’s a fighter. She’s not a passive thing and she certainly wasn’t passive during recent hearings. A person doesn’t become a tenured professor at a competitive place like Harvard’s law school by being passive.
And thus the real purpose of the hearing: to allow the Republicans who now run the House to box Ms. Warren about the ears. The big banks loathe Ms. Warren, who has made a career out of pointing out all the ways they gouge financial consumers — and whose primary goal is to make such gouging more difficult. So, naturally, the Republicans loathe her too. That she might someday run this bureau terrifies the banks. So, naturally, it terrifies the Republicans.
The banks and their Congressional allies have another, more recent gripe. Rather than waiting until July to start helping financial consumers, Ms. Warren has been trying to help them now. Can you believe the nerve of that woman?
At the request of the states’ attorneys general, all 50 of whom have banded together to investigate the mortgage servicing industry in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, she has fed them ideas that have become part of a settlement proposal they are putting together. Recently, a 27-page outline of the settlement terms was given to banks — terms that included basic rules about how mortgage servicers must treat defaulting homeowners, as well as a requirement that banks look to modify mortgages before they begin foreclosure proceedings. The modifications would be paid for with $20 billion or so in penalties that would be levied on the big banks.
So, am I the only one that even finds the tongue and cheek use of “the nerve of this woman” as being particularly patronizing vision of some one who has been such a consistent, articulate, fighting voice for beleaguered consumers in a tough environment built for big time lobbyists with big time money? The point of the article is that many of the old regulators who are supposed to make sure the bank runs of the 1930s don’t recur–like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency–have become their old captured selves. This is in firm contrast to the article’s objectified pinata.
It’s not just the House Republicans either. Already the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has reverted to form, becoming once again a captive of the banks it is supposed to regulate. (It has strenuously opposed the efforts of the A.G.’s to penalize the banks and reform the mortgage modification process, for instance.) The banks themselves act as if they have a God-given right to the profit they made precrisis, and owe the country nothing for the trouble they’ve put us all through. The Justice Department has essentially given up trying to make anyone accountable for the crisis.
So, yes, thank goodness for Ms. Warren and her fighting spirit. We’re on to the next big thing. There’s a fresh hell called Libya and a worry for all those invested in energy company with ownership of nuclear assets. So, bankers, you know, will be bankers.
During the subprime boom, many states tried to stop the worst lending abuses, only to be blocked by federal banking regulators. Now that the country is dealing with the aftermath of those abuses — the rising tide of defaults and foreclosures — it is the attorneys general who are, once again, put in the position of trying to stamp out abuses, this time of the foreclosure process itself.
I dare to guess that the president’s spent more time on his march madness brackets than what’s up in Warren’s office. When Warren’s time in her interim position expires, Obama will undoubtedly let his banker friends find an acceptable banker potted plant to fill her spot.
Their leverage comes from the fact that the banks and their servicing divisions have, in the words of the University of Minnesota law professor Prentiss Cox, “routinely violated basic legal process” by, for instance, not transferring the note after the sale of a home. But in addition to assessing a financial penalty on the banks, the A.G.’s are trying to use the threat of litigation to force the banks to finally deal with defaulting homeowners more fairly and humanely. That is the essence of the settlement proposal that has been floating around. That — and a big push to finally come up with a modification plan that works.
Their leverage comes from the fact that the banks and their servicing divisions have, in the words of the University of Minnesota law professor Prentiss Cox, “routinely violated basic legal process” by, for instance, not transferring the note after the sale of a home. But in addition to assessing a financial penalty on the banks, the A.G.’s are trying to use the threat of litigation to force the banks to finally deal with defaulting homeowners more fairly and humanely. That is the essence of the settlement proposal that has been floating around. That — and a big push to finally come up with a modification plan that works.
Author Joe Nocera is clearly in awe of her too. He states that she’s by far the most qualified person for the position. She understands the ins and outs of the processes very well.
As I listened to her on Wednesday, I was struck anew at how clearly she articulates the need for the new bureau. “If there had been a cop on the beat to hold mortgage servicers accountable a half dozen years ago,” she said at one point, “the problems in mortgage servicing would have been found early and fixed while they were still small, long before they became a national scandal.”
Senate Republicans have vowed to block her appointment if President Obama nominates her. Yet even if her nomination goes down in flames, Senate confirmation hearings would be clarifying. Americans would get to hear Ms. Warren explain why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has the potential to help Americans. And they would get to hear Republicans explain why the status quo — including the everyday horror of the foreclosure mess — is just fine.
It has been much noted in recent months that President Obama seems unwilling to start a fight with Republicans. Maybe that’s why he has shied away from nominating Ms. Warren to a job for which she is so clearly suited. But if protecting financial consumers — and helping the millions of Americans struggling to hold onto their homes — isn’t worth fighting for, then what is?
The woman hardly qualifies as a noun. She is a verb. Elizabeth Warren fights for us. Who will fight for her?
New Year’s Eve Reads
Posted: December 31, 2010 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: Brazil's first woman president, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Dilma Rousseff, Elizabeth Warren, Filibuster, Marine mammals struggle with oil, New Media Report, oil spill, oiled marshes, Oily beaches, Pew Research, Reform, Senate, Tom Udall, Transocean 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.
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