Month: May 2008

Wanktacular Financial Press Coverage

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They are just discovering that commercial real estate may be dropping too.

Commercial real estate typically lags residential in a downturn, and it’s been heading down by all standard measures for 6 months, and now, they are finally getting around to saying that there might be a risk of downturn?

Seriously, the ads realtors run do f&^% up coverage, because the papers and cable networks are so dependent on it.

Signs of Progress in Iraq and Afghanistan, They Are Entering the Modern Financial System

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Specifically insurance fraud, but it’s only the contractors, who have conspired with insurance companies to stick it to the tax payers.

It’s basically kickbacks. The contractors negotiate their own insurance deals, which are over priced, and they get commissions from the insurers:

KBR Inc., one of the largest defense contractors in Iraq, paid the insurance giant AIG $284 million for medical and disability coverage under the Defense Base Act, a reference to the federal law mandating the insurance. Due to the way KBR’s contract is structured, this premium, along with an $8 million markup for KBR, gets billed to the taxpayer.

“Out of this amount, just $73 million actually goes to injured contractors, and AIG and KBR pocket over $100 million as profit,” Waxman said.

Lovely.

Don’t Cry for Me Italy, You May Have Silvio Berlusconi, but We Have George W. Bush

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Silvio Belusconi has appointed Mara Carfagna, a “32-year-old former Miss Italy contestant and television showgirl”, to the post of equal opportunities minister in his cabinet, with the expected results, she is rejecting a gay pride march in Bologna in June, “gay prides are pointless.”

It appears that she thinks that there is no anti-gay bigotry in Italy.

A real candidate for Olbermann’s “Worst Person’s” segment.

I Get Letters

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So I get this in my in box. It is not, as Bullwinkle says, “fan mail from some flounder”, though I think that some intellectual floundering definitely present.

Note that I have permission to reprint, and the only changes have been to email addresses.

#####@aol.com <#####@aol.com> Sun, May 18, 2008 at 8:28 AM
To: me

From an AOL address…How utterly appropriate

Since taking over Congress two years ago, everything has GOTTEN WORSE.

First, of course, it’s not been two years, it’s been 11/3 years. Congress came in on January 2007. It’s only 1½ years from the election, so now we know that you can’t count.

Gas is skyrocketing, and they campaigned and told us they would stabalize prices.

Actually, gas prices were not an issue in the 2006 elections, it was war and corruption. In fact the only people who are claiming that they can control gas prices are the Republicans, both through John McCain’s (and to her shame Hillary Clinton’s) gas tax holiday, and through the two months (most likely case the 6 months quoted is best case) that are under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The economy is failing and all they want to do is take more in in TAXES.

The economy is failing because our deficits are catching up to us. We need to balance the budget.

Furthermore, the economy is failing because the velocity of money is slowing….Rich people spend more slowly than poor ones, and so you want to get money going further down the scale.

The spending cuts instead proposal means throwing retirees out into the street and downsizing our military to the size of that of Norway. You arguing for that?

Republican profligacy, as evidenced by Ted Stevens’ bridge to no where, and Dennis Hastert’s road project to inflate the value of his land are Republithug innovations, thank you very much.

It’s why we are seeing a breakout in inflation, which is higher than reported.

The common theme is that President Bush is the problem.

He is a large part of the problem. His solution to the credit crisis is to eliminate oversight and regulations over financial institutions, as the abandonment of basic regulations was not what screwed this up in the first place.

While many of these problems go a long way back, starting with baby steps under Jimmy Carter, and proceeding to spring under Reagan, it’s clear that Bush has been long opposed to doing anything about this, and he is still largely trying to wish the problem away.

With the veto pen, and Mich McConnell being willing to filibuster a burp, there are limits to what can be done under our system.

Is president Bush a god or something.

Only to you guys, though I’m sure that when he leaves power, your worship will end. At that point, to paraphrase Richard Widmark you will be blaming the Eskimos.

Seems like the Dems have no clue what or how to do anything.

Truth be told, I’m not too happy at their relative lack of success in getting through their agenda, but the bulk of the Democratic members of Congress have limited experience with being in the majority, and they seem to be doing better month by month, albeit very slowly.

Oh by the way, dont think that the 57 STATES mentioned by Obama will go away. It is clear, Obama was referencing the 57 Muslim states. HGMMMMMM……I wonder what was on his mind when he made that comment.

Well, since you haven’t read the full quote, where he says that he won’t make it to Alaska and Hawaii, but will hit all the other states, it’s a brain fart on numbers, particularly since there aren’t 57 Moslem nations. To quote the Republican president Abraham Lincoln*, “It is better to stay silent and let people think you are an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt,” as there are roughly 40, Wiki has 37, Majority Islamic nations.

The dems are certainly making this a better country, YEAH RIGHT.

They are trying, which is more than I can say for Republicans. I mean this in a very literal way.

I went to school, and served in the SGA Senate with, (convicted of corruption) Tony Rudy and Brian Darling (of Schiavo Memo Fame), classic modern movement conservatives, and I actually had fairly good social relationships with them.

They honestly believe that government is an unmitigated evil, and that government programs, even when they work, are evil, so their goal is to break stuff so that it does not work.

It’s why, after 38 years of Democratic rule in the house, you had corruption defined by a few bounced checks and one guy splitting salaries with ghost employees, where with the Republicans you had representatives preying on little boys, and an explicit pay-for-play bribery system.

It’s harder to be an honest Republican, because the only reason you are in government is money, power, and getting your way.

resp Paul P

Back at you.

BTW, you might want to use the comments instead in the future. I do read them.

*There are some disputes on the source of the quote. It has variously been attributed to Lincoln, Twain, and Franklin.

Calling for Offentlighetsprincipen

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In their never ending quest to avoid public scrutiny, Bush and His Evil Minions™ have introduced a new form of restricted information, Controlled Unclassified information.

Basically, the goal here is not to protect information from enemies, but to keep it from the public, and particularly FOIA requests.

The more I learn about government classification, the more that I think that we need to enshrine the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (Openness) in our constitution.

Basically, it says that all government documents are open, except those covered by the following, and only by the following:

  • the security of the Realm or its relations with a foreign state or an international organization;
  • the central finance policy, monetary policy, or foreign exchange policy of the Realm;
  • the inspection, control or other supervisory activities of a public authority;
  • the interest of preventing or prosecuting crime;
  • the public economic interest;
  • the protection of the personal integrity or economic conditions of private subjects;
  • the preservation of animal or plant species.”

This list are the only reason, and, “Secrecy is limited to a maximum time of 70 years (when relating to individuals that is 70 years after the person’s death).”

Given the tradition of secret government in the US over the past 60 years, I think that the list in the US should be more restrictive, as we have a long tradition of bureaucratic figleafs to keep the American people in the dark.

Texas Attorney General Does Not Think that N***ers Should Vote

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Once again, we have a wingnut trying to prove massive vote fraud, and once again, despite his best effort he cannot find anything, this time in the wingnuttiest of states, Texas.

Attorney General Greg Abbott, a ‘Phant, entered office pledging to, ” root out what he called an epidemic of voter fraud in Texas”.

Net result: 26 prosecutions, almost all against blacks and Hispanics, because in Texas, it’s a crime for darkies to vote.

In 18 of the 26 cases, people were prosecuted for neglecting to put their name on the envelope when they carried it to the mailbox for someone else.

They did encounter some real vote fraud in the remaining cases, it appears to be about a dozen votes, no doubt Bigot Abbot will use as justification to aggressively pursue voting while dark prosecutions.

McCain is Short on Cash

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So it looks like he will be relying heavily on party money to make up the difference.

Of course, that means less for Republicans at every level down the chain.

I’m so not crushed by this.

Here’s hoping that Obama does not opt into public financing in the general. He should not, McCain has already shown that he will break the campaign finance law that he wrote without a 2nd thought, so he simply can’t be trusted.

Krugman on Reducing Travel Energy

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He makes a very good point, that getting people to buy cars that get better gas mileage is the easy part of this.

The hard part is getting people to drive less too, since we have engaged in policies that have subsidized choices that require driving over the past 50 + years.

In many places, with far spread suburbs, public transport is far less efficient than it is in denser areas, and there are a lot of people living in suburbs, particularly in far suburbs, who are going to experience a very bad time as a wrenching change to lifestyle is made.

As for me, I’m about 5¼ Miles from the terminus of the Baltimore Subway, so I’ll do OK, I can bicycle to it.

I End Up on Some Odd Mailing Lists

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I get email from the “Minaret Foundation” a, “A free market Muslim perspective on economics, democracy, terrorism and Middle East conflict”, because I asked some questions via email regarding an article on the Medieval sugar trade.

Now I find this in my inbox, because I guess someone did a Technorati search on me.

Needless to say, trip to Iran is not on my agenda.

Religion & Media 2008 Thu, May 15, 2008 at 7:11 PM

Reply-To: Religion & Media 2008
To: ############

The Second International Conference on Religion and Media will be held in Tehran and Qom, Iran, from November 9th to 12th, 2008. We cordially invite all media researchers and scholars, representatives from diverse religious traditions, professionals and students involved with the subjects of the conference to attend and submit a paper. Further information could be found at conference website: http://www.religion-media.ir/

A few scholarships are available to partially subsidize the costs of participants with selected papers.

Sincerely,
Mahdiye Tavakol
Conference Coordinator

IRIB University,
Niyayesh Highway, Vali-e-Asr Street,
Tehran, Iran.
Tel: +98 21 22652238
Fax: +98 21 22652238
rm2008@religion-media.ir

Economics Update

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On the good news side, Leading indicator increased 0.1% to 102, the first back to back gain in about 6 months. I’m calling a dead cat bounce.

One of the reasons is because of good news like, southern California house sales “surging” 22% from March to April, where the reporter ignores the fact that while this is a month-to-month gain, year over year, it’s still a 19% drop, and one of the weakest Aprils on record.

So Cal has a Mediterranean climate, which means that March is wet. People don’t house sit when it’s wet.

It also ignores the small fact that 34% of those sales were REOs, real-estate owned properties. So these were basically foreclosed properties.

It’s why California Luxury home prices fell for the 2nd straight quarter.

Not only are real estate prices still falling, but Commercial property prices are falling, the most since 2000. (A critique of the financial press on this in a later post)

In contrast to Bernanke and Paulson, Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank is saying that the credit crunch is ongoing. I think that this is true, and portends a major shift in the financial markets. (Again, I’ll go into more detail in a later post)

As to why, perhaps the fact that banks are doing accounting backflips to keep $35 billion in losses off of their balance sheets justifies a lack of faith in the financial markets and financial industry.

Of course, boneheaded moves like UBS blowing $24 billion by deciding to expand into asset based securities further erodes people’s confidence in financial “professionals”.

My cats could do better on the cat-turd futures market than these guys.

As a result, we are seeing another big LBO foundering, this time the the $51.8 billion Bell Canada takeover, what is (was?) to be the largest LBO ever.

Michael Medved Endorses Nazi Style Eugenics

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He basically declared that he was no longer a film critic when he outed the ending of “Million Dollar Baby” because there was a right wing jihad against it, and now is declaring that he is no longer a member of the civilized world by declaring that the US is simply genetically superior in speaking glowingly the articles put forward by Peter C. Whybrow and John D. Gartner.

This is the cultural Darwinism that had as its crowning achievement the slaughter of over a million in the Congo at the turn of the last century, and the pseudo science sold as eugenics that achieved popularity between the wars that led to the Holocaust.

America is simply genetically superior, according to Medved, which doubtless sells well to the readership of Townhall.com, though those same readers would consider Medved untermenschen, of course.

RIAA v. Thomas Sent Back for New Arguments

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It appears that courts are becoming increasingly restrictive on the scope of RIAA claims, and new arguments, and possibly a new jury trial, have been ordered as a result.

In this case, the RIAA got a judgment of $220,000.00 from Ms. Davis, but:

That was the case in the trial last fall of Jammie Thomas of Brainerd. A U.S. district court judge, Michael Davis, instructed jurors that making sound recordings available without permission violates record company copyrights “regardless of whether actual distribution has been shown.”

On Thursday, Davis said that may have been a mistake.

He wrote that he found a 1993 ruling from the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Minnesota, that said infringement requires “an actual dissemination of either copies or phonorecords.”

One wonders why he is asking for a re-ruling without either side having brought up this original ruling.

My guess is that his grand kid with the iPod told him.