Saturday Morning Open Thread
Posted: July 13, 2013 Filed under: abortion rights, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs, morning reads, NSA, National Security Agency, open thread, poverty, Psychopaths in charge, Real Life Horror, Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights, social justice, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, War on Women, Women's Rights | Tags: Andrea Grimes, anti-abortion laws, CNBC, Edward Snowden, Elizabeth Warren, FDic, food stamps, Glass Steagall, hunger in America, Malala Yousafzai, Rick Perry, Sergei Lavrov, Texas legislature, Vladimir Putin, Yatzel Sabat 36 Comments
Abortion rights advocates fill the rotunda of the State Capitol as the Senate neared its vote Friday night (Tamir Kalifa/AP)
Good Morning Sky Dancers!!
There sure is a lot of news out there for a summer Saturday. Beginning in Texas, the state senate passed a restrictive anti-abortion bill that will threaten women’s lives. The New York Times reports:
AUSTIN, Tex. — The Texas Senate gave final passage on Friday to one of the strictest anti-abortion measures in the country, legislation championed by Gov. Rick Perry, who rallied the Republican-controlled Legislature late last month after a Democratic filibuster blocked the bill and intensified already passionate resistance by abortion-rights supporters.
The bill would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and hold abortion clinics to the same standards as hospital-style surgical centers, among other requirements. Its supporters say that the strengthened requirements for the structures and doctors will protect women’s health; opponents argue that the restrictions are actually intended to put financial pressure on the clinics that perform abortions and will force most of them to shut their doors.
Mr. Perry applauded lawmakers for passing the bill, saying “Today the Texas Legislature took its final step in our historic effort to protect life.” Legislators and anti-abortion activists, he said “tirelessly defended our smallest and most vulnerable Texans and future Texans.”
Mr. Perry does not appear to include any “right to life” for adult women in his “effort to protect life,” however. I wonder if anyone has ever asked him one simple question: are women human beings? Forced childbirth is tantamount to slavery in my opinion. Furthermore, childbirth is far more dangerous than abortion, and the restrictions will likely mean that women with problematic late term pregnancies will die or suffer grievous harm. According to the NYT story,
The bill was opposed by many doctors, including leaders of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Texas Medical Association; the gynecologists’ group has run advertisements locally that question the scientific underpinnings of the legislation and tell legislators to “Get out of our exam rooms.”
Andrea Grimes writes at RH Reality Check: As Out-Of-State Gawkers Look On, Texas Lawmakers Prepare to Pass ‘Death Sentence’ Anti-Abortion Bill. She describes a young man from Minnesota who traveled down to Texas to watch the show.
This young guy, probably a senior in high school or a freshman in college—I didn’t catch his name—said he was real tired of wearing blue, the chosen color of anti-choice supporters of HB 2. I wore orange that day, the same color as thousands of Texans who have turned up at the capitol to stand up for reproductive rights. I also wore pink earbuds, trying to follow the house debate while waiting in line. Maybe this young guy thought I couldn’t hear him. Maybe he didn’t care.
“I’m looking forward to all this being over so I can wear my orange shirts again!” he joked.
She contrasts his blase attitude with that of Yatzel Sabat, a gay woman of color
who was dragged out of that same gallery Wednesday morning by law enforcement. Sabat was not wearing orange. She was wearing black.
Her limbs bound by state troopers, she screamed in a clear, strong voice, “This bill will kill women!” as the Texas House of Representatives gave its approval to HB 2, passing the devastating legislation along to the state senate for final passage….
This bill will kill. Period.
It will kill Texans who already travel to Mexico to buy abortion pills from flea markets because they are too poor to go to a legal abortion clinic, or unable to take time off work to find a doctor’s office and wait 24 hours between a state-mandated sonogram and an abortion procedure. It will kill Texans who, if HB 2 passes, cannot travel a thousand miles round trip to a San Antonio or Dallas ambulatory surgical center for a safe, legal abortion.
Please read the whole thing if you can.
Next up, the U.S. Congress debates more cuts in food stamps as American children go hungry. From Martha White at NBC News:
For one in seven Americans, the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps, is all that stands between them and too little food.
But the complicated calculus of financial survival for the working poor also means any cuts to the roughly $80 billion SNAP, as it’s known, being considered by Congress would be felt well beyond the grocery checkout line. Buying new school clothes, family outings, even getting a toehold in the financial mainstream could be thrown into limbo.
For many of the working poor, wages just don’t go far enough. The National Employment Law project says nearly 60 percent of jobs created in the post-recession recovery pay $13.83 or less an hour, and hourly wages for some low-wage occupations fell by more than 5 percent in just three years.
Food service and temporary employment make up 43 percent of the post-recession job growth, according to NELP policy analyst Jack Temple. “They overwhelmingly pay low wages,” Temple said. “For that lower segment, you’re going to see increased use of safety net programs to make up the difference.”
Read it and weep, folks; and while you do keep in mind that the Federal deficit has been dropping steadily. The only possible reasons for the austerity agenda are to make the rich richer and punish the working poor.
The Snowden saga continues. Reuters reports that Russia has not yet received an application for asylum from the American hacker/leaker/whistleblower/dissident–or whatever he’s being called at the moment.
Russia kept former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden at arm’s length on Saturday, saying it had not been in touch with the fugitive American and had not yet received a formal request for political asylum.
Remarks by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov signaled Russia is weighing its options after Snowden, who is stranded at a Moscow airport, broke three weeks of silence and asked for refuge in Russia until he can secure safe passage to Latin America.
Washington urged Moscow to return Snowden to the United States, where he is wanted on espionage charges after revealing details of secret surveillance programs, and President Barack Obama spoke by phone with Russian President Vladimir Putin….
“We are not in contact with Snowden,” Russian news agencies quoted Lavrov as saying in Kyrgyzstan, where he attended a foreign ministers’ meeting.
He said he had learned of Snowden’s meeting with Russian human rights activists and public figures at the airport on Friday from the media, “just like everyone else.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren is working on bringing back Glass-Steagall-like regulations on banks. From the LA Times:
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has launched a campaign to make banks boring again as she pushes legislation to enact stricter regulations forcing deposit-taking financial institutions out of the investment business.
The Massachusetts Democrat wants to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law, which separated what she called boring checking and savings accounts that are backed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. from risky investment banking.
And after joining three other senators Thursday in introducing a bipartisan bill to do that, Warren went toTwitter to rally support.
She urged her Twitter followers to retweet the message, “Banks should be boring.” She emailed her political backers, asking them to support her 21st century Glass-Steagall Act, which she introduced along with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Angus King (I-Maine).
Yesterday Warren went on CNBC to argue her case with some blonde talking head. Check it out:
As you know, yesterday Malala Yousafzai spoke to the United Nations and told the world: Being shot by Taliban made me stronger (NBC News)
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls’ education, was given a standing ovation at the United Nations Friday as she declared the attempt on her life had only given her strength and banished any fear she once felt.
“Dear friends, on the 9th of October, 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends too,” she said in her first major public appearance. “They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed.”
Speaking on her 16th birthday, she said the “terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but nothing changed in my life except this — weakness, fear and hopelessness died, strength, power and courage was born.”
“I am the same Malala, my ambitions are the same, my hopes are the same and my dreams are the same,” she said to thunderous applause.
What an courageous, intelligent, and inspiring and young woman she is!
On that note, I’ll turn the floor over to you. What stories are you following today. Please post your links on any topic in the comment thread. Have a stupendous Saturday
Senator Warren wants to know why our Jails aren’t filled with Banksters
Posted: February 15, 2013 Filed under: Elizabeth Warren Campaign, financial institutions | Tags: CFTC, FDic, FED, Financial instituions, FPB, OCC, Senator Elizabeth Warren 5 Comments
Well, Senator Elizabeth Warren is not disappointing any one.
Bank regulators got a sense Thursday of how their lives will be slightly different now that Elizabeth Warren sits on a Senate committee overseeing their agencies.
At her first Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing, Warren questioned top regulators from the alphabet soup that is the nation’s financial regulatory structure: the FDIC, SEC, OCC, CFPB, CFTC, Fed and Treasury.
The Democratic senator from Massachusetts had a straightforward question for them: When was the last time you took a Wall Street bank to trial? It was a harder question than it seemed.
“We do not have to bring people to trial,” Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, assured Warren, declaring that his agency had secured a large number of “consent orders,” or settlements.
“I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial. My question is, when did you bring them to trial?” she responded.
“We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals,” Curry offered.
Warren turned to Elisse Walter, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who said that the agency weighs how much it can extract from a bank without taking it to court against the cost of going to trial.
“I appreciate that. That’s what everybody does,” said Warren, a former Harvard law professor. “Can you identify the last time when you took the Wall Street banks to trial?”
“I will have to get back to you with specific information,” Walter said as the audience tittered.
“There are district attorneys and United States attorneys out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on sometimes very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example, as they put it. I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial,'” Warren said.
and the Band Played On
Posted: September 12, 2009 Filed under: Bailout Blues, Equity Markets, Main Stream Media, Surreality, The Bonus Class, U.S. Economy, Voter Ignorance | Tags: bank failure, Banking, banking cartel, banking regulation, FDic Comments Off on and the Band Played On
So the so-called conservatives are having their so-called freedom event with so-called commentators and news anchors from so-called news stations. It’s all a side show to the real problems of the country. It’s easy to misplace anger in an environment where misinformants rule the airwaves.
So, let me show you where the real theft is happening, in case you may have missed it.
First, the FDIC released yet another move towards creating a financial banking cartel. Another one bites the dust.
Corus Bank, National Association, Chicago, Illinois, was closed today by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with MB Financial Bank, National Association, Chicago, Illinois, to assume all of the deposits of Corus Bank, N.A.
But you know there’s really nothing to see here at the NY Times: A Year After a Cataclysm, Little Change on Wall St. Much more important to focus on creeping socialism and taking our government back from imagined enemies.
One year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the surprise is not how much has changed in the financial industry, but how little.
Backstopped by huge federal guarantees, the biggest banks have restructured only around the edges. Employment in the industry has fallen just 8 percent since last September. Only a handful of big hedge funds have closed. Pay is already returning to precrash levels, topped by the 30,000 employees of Goldman Sachs, who are on track to earn an average of $700,000 this year. Nor are major pay cuts likely, according to a report last week from J.P. Morgan Securities. Executives at most big banks have kept their jobs. Financial stocks have soared since their winter lows.
No nothing to see here. Wait, a minute. Maybe we should listen to people with some expertise instead of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh who couldn’t even get one college degree or a freshman’s worth of credits between them . Maybe we shouldn’t focus on sycophants like Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann who just want to hear themselves talk and hump each others legs until they tingle.
In fact, though, regulators and lawmakers have spent most of the last year trying to save the financial industry, rather than transform it. In the short run, their efforts have succeeded. Citigroup and other wounded banks have avoided bankruptcy, and the economy has sidestepped a depression. But the same investors and economists who predicted, and in some cases profited from, the collapse last fall say the rescue has come at an extraordinary cost. They warn that if the industry’s systemic risks are not addressed, they could cause an even bigger crisis — in years, not decades. Next time, they say, the credit of the United States government may be at risk.
Yup, what have we been talking about here for month after month after month, while we get named called every imaginable insult from one end of the political spectrum to another. I must defy definition if one day I can be called a racist republican ratfucker then be called a greenie and a leftie the next.
Oh, meanwhile …
What’s That Lassie? Little Timmy’s in the Well AGAIN?
Posted: August 4, 2009 Filed under: Bailout Blues, Equity Markets, Global Financial Crisis, president teleprompter jesus, The Bonus Class, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy | Tags: Ben Bernanke, CNBC, FDic, FED, Larry Summers, Mary Schapiro, Naked Capitalism, SEC, Sheila Bair, Timothy Geithner, Wall Street Cheerleaders, Zero Hedge Comments Off on What’s That Lassie? Little Timmy’s in the Well AGAIN?
Wow, it looks like Turbo Tax Timmy has gone rogue! We better send the press up to Alaska to chase down another Palin rumor. First, there’s that nastiness over the weekend with the Stephanapolous show on ABC where he explicitly said that the administration wasn’t ruling out new taxes on the middle class. (Something Larry-the-la-la Summers also inkled, but hey, he’s not a cabinet officer, he’s something akin to a Czar that has to be overthrown by something other than scandal and public displays of stupidity.) I believe that gave Robert Gibbs Excedrin headaches number 349-357 during yesterday’s presser.
Now, there’s rumors of a temper tantrum in the presence of all the nation’s topic economists and financial regulators outlined here in the WSJ. It seems he’s not getting the Obama way on this one. The ladies in the room have taken exception to his granting Ben Bernanke (possibly later, this year, La-la Summers) all the fun and power. I guess being an independent regulator with an agency all to yourself just isn’t what it used to be; especially when you have scary lady parts and a huge brain.
Mr. Geithner told the regulators Friday that “enough is enough,” said one person familiar with the meeting. Mr. Geithner said regulators had been given a chance to air their concerns, but that it was time to stop, this person said.
Among those gathered in the Treasury conference room were Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair.
Friday’s roughly hourlong meeting was described as unusual, not only because of Mr. Geithner’s repeated use of obscenities, but because of the aggressive posture he took with officials from federal agencies generally considered independent of the White House. Mr. Geithner reminded attendees that the administration and Congress set policy, not the regulatory agencies.
Mr. Geithner, without singling out officials, raised concerns about regulators who questioned the wisdom of giving the Federal Reserve more power to oversee the financial system. Ms. Schapiro and Ms. Bair, among others, have argued that more authority should be shared among a council of regulators.
This current turf battle is only the latest move by a group within government possibly thwarting the Treasury’s plans to continue uploading tax dollars to the bonus class in the guise of saving the financial sector. If there’s still disagreement about this point, can you imagine what other things are going on in complete disarray behind the scenes? Who is really in charge of solving this overt act of sibling rivalry? Well, if you have figured out where the buck stops in this administration, you’re doing better than me. (Hint: these folks are ALL presidential appointments).
Mission Creep: The Incredible Expanding Power to Bailout
Posted: April 7, 2009 Filed under: Bailout Blues, Global Financial Crisis, U.S. Economy | Tags: FDic, Hedge Fund Bailout, LTCM, Mission Creep, SEC, Sheila Bair, Timothy Geithner 2 CommentsI’ve been watching the three big regulators in the Financial Crisis (the Fed, the FDIC, and the SEC) start doing things 
unheard of only a year ago. What has been baffling is no one has changed any laws or charters while these things keep happening. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t have the time to go poking around a lot of the charters and laws surrounding these institutions, but you have to start wondering if some of their more unconventional moves are technically legal.
I’ve been watching the Fed Open borrowing at the Discount Window and accepting some really strange collateral. The Discount Window used to be exclusive to member banks. I’ve been looking over what they now accept as collateral and am surprised. Take a look at the list and see if you’d like to be left holding the bag on some of these things. I’m not sure I want these off budget quasi agencies turning their balance sheets into dumping grounds for some of the most heinous looking gambles available on the market.
The NY Times Reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin has been poking around the charter and law concerning the FDIC. The FDIC was chartered to provide deposit insurance to bank deposits. You would think that is a fairly straight-forward task. However, when the charter was written, the size of the task at hand today was unfathomable and it seems the FDIC is tiptoeing around some of its charter provisions. The FDIC is barred from incurring any obligation greater than $30 billion and its about to take part in guarantees that would commit $1 trillion in the PPIP bank bailout program. Sorkin reports on what he calls “mission creep” here.
Now, because of what could politely be called mission creep, it’s elbowing its way into the middle of the financial mess as an enabler of enormous leverage.
In the fine print of Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s plan to lend as much as $1 trillion to private investors to help them buy toxic assets from our nation’s banks, you’ll find some details of how the F.D.I.C is trying to stabilize the system by adding more risk, not less, to the system.
It’s going to be insuring 85 percent of the debt, provided by the Treasury, that private investors will use to subsidize their acquisitions of toxic assets. The program, extraordinary in its size and scope, is the equivalent of TARP 2.0. Only this time, Congress didn’t get a chance to vote.
These loans, while controversial, were given a warm welcome by the market when they were first announced. And why not? The terms are hard to beat. They are, for example, “nonrecourse,” which means that if an investor loses money, he owes taxpayers nothing. It’s the closest thing to risk-free investing — with leverage! — around.
Obama Team or He Man Woman Haters Club?
Posted: December 4, 2008 Filed under: president teleprompter jesus, U.S. Economy, Women's Rights | Tags: Bair, FDic, Frank, Geithner, Obama Comments Off on Obama Team or He Man Woman Haters Club?
Just when you think the Obama team cannot disrespect women more, you find yet another misogynist in the pack. This one really surprises me. Politico reports that the incoming Treasury Secretary has a problem with the FDIC’s Sheila Bair. She is one of the FEW people in the entire bailout mess sticking up for the homeowner. You may recall that Riverdaughter profiled her earlier on The Confluence. I have nothing but nice things to say about her. She is a a moderate Republican woman and she’s not part of the Obama team. That is her supposed sin. Congressman Barney Frank is standing up for her in a no nonsense way.
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