Now they are outsourcing lawyers.
Today lawyers, tomorrow, economics faculty and journalists.
Year: 2008
Posted Without Comment
Link:
Last month’s federal backstop of Citi attracted some catcalls for letting the struggling bank’s management and shareholders off easy. But to former AIG chief Hank Greenberg — a persistent critic of the tougher terms the government has enforced in its rescue of the teetering insurer — the Citi deal is a paragon.
(emphasis mine)
SPEEA Approves Contract
So Boeing will not be hit by an engineers strike this year.
How the frack they got engineers to strike the last time, I’ll never know.
There are so many Randroid engineers out there.
Obama’s Cabinet Update
Bill Richardson, Commerce Secretary.
Election Update
Nothing on Georgia, polls haven’t closed, and I don’t have access to exit polls, this is all him, Al Franken,* in Minnesota.
The lede has to be that they found 171 uncounted ballots in Ramsey County, a Franken stronghold, and heads are exploding in the Coleman campaign.
Based on the percentages there, that should net around 30 votes for Franken.
Even so, there are indications that the two campaigns are trying to make nice, or at least appear to, as they are suggesting withdrawing some of their more stupid ballot challenges.
My suggestion: never trust a smiling Republican, and Norm Coleman is always smiling.
Meanwhile the good folks at TPM Election Central have a rundown on recent developments, in addition to the found ballots, we have a further narrowing in the vote, and the
Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, has instructed local election officials to separate rejected absentee based on the reasons for rejection, which indicates that he is taking Franken’s challenge to the rejection of about 1K ballots seriously.
My take is that it will all come down to the challenges, and that the Coleman campaign has been much more aggressive with these, so I would give a very slight advantage to Al Franken.
*It’s a roughly 30 year old reference to a running sketch on Saturday Night Live.
A Book Plug
I enjoy reading his posts at Wetmachine, and I will be checking out excerpts online (links below):
From: John R. Sundman
To: me
Subject: A “Very Special” post-Thanksgiving message from John of WetmachineHey Matthew,
Although I don’t comment much on 40 years, I do read it quasi-regularly. And I have had you on my blogroll for some while. On that basis, I take the liberty of sending you this “very special” message.
If you have any inclination at all to buy any of my books (especially a pre-order of The Pains), or to pimp them on your site, now would be a good time to do it.
I hate doing the hard sell, but the fact is that I’m unemployed and nearly broke, and selling these books is my only source of income. Of course, I could go back to driving a moving van, and will probably do so in January unless the economy is in a total shambles by then. I ran into my old boss, the crazy man called “Trip”, and he said I can drive for him whenever I want. But in these “shopping days” it seems to me that bookpimping might be a better use of my time.
The thing that’s scaring me, frankly, (besides missing the mortgage, and so forth) is that I haven’t yet pre-sold enough copies of The Pains to pay for an initial print run, and if I don’t see a few hundred more copies in the next week or so, I’m going to have to refund the money to everybody who has put in a pre-order.
So, I’m putting on the hard sell, & trust our relationship is strong enough to weather a little targeted spam. Which I will be custom-crafting to hundreds of my friends over this Thanksgiving break — thereby either re-igniting my novelistic career, or pissing off every friend I have, or both.
Perhaps you can pass this info along on my behalf?
Here’s the intro to The Pains, with an illustration I’m sure you’ll love,
http://www.wetmachine.com/
item/1389 Here’s how to buy my books online:
http://www.wetmachine.com/
shop/wetmachineshop.html and here’s how by check:
http://www.wetmachine.com/
order/orderprint.html Happy post-Thanksgiving,
jrs
Google Ads: There Are Still a Few Bugs in the System
OK, so a few days ago, I serve up an excerpt from a parody of Atlas Shrugged, so what does Google ads serve up?
Gifts for Proud Producers and Capitalists Everywhere!*
Ummmm….OK…I have nothing but contempt for Ayn Rand and routinely mock her and her followers, calling them “Randroids”, and in this case, I am spreading mockery of what she and her “Randroids” consider to be her magnum opus, and I get an ad serving a company dedicated to lionizing a horrible person and a lousy writer.†
Then again, perhaps the proprietor is mocking her too. There is a notice at the bottom of the page:
JohnGaltGifts.com is not in any way affiliated with or sponsored by the estate of Ayn Rand ®, the Ayn Rand ® Institute (ARI), Dr. Leonard Peikoff, or any other organization or company.
It appears to me that this means that the T-shirt and sticker maker is using the fruit of Ayn Rand’s intellectual output to enrich himself, which is specifically what Rand condemned.
If that’s the case, it’s a very subtle and sophisticated parody.
*I’m linking because I’m complaining, it’s only fair.
†While I have never read Atlas Shrugged, nor do I intend to, I have read The Virtue of Selfishness in 1980 as part of a philosophy of literature class in high school, and it was awful. Emanuel Kant was more readable.
Will the Last one in Detroit Please Turn Out the Light?
Well, we are now hearing that Ford is putting Volvo on the auction block, and that GM is looking to do the same with SAAB.
In truth Ford-Volvo is a bigger deal than GM-SAAB, as Volvo automobile has a much larger reach (the commercial vehicles/trucks are still owned by Volvo Group).
Because They Could Not Find Any Child Rapers to Bail Out
Hank Paulson and His Evil Minions™ are looking at bailing out private student loan issuers with TARP money:
Student advocacy groups are urging the Treasury Department to prevent a new $200 billion consumer-lending program from benefiting private student lenders, which they say are largely unregulated and prey on students with risky, high-interest loans.
The program, announced this week and developed by the Treasury and Federal Reserve, is not aimed specifically at the student loan market. Its much broader goal is to encourage lending to consumers — including car loans, credit card debt and student loans — as well as help the financial system by increasing liquidity in the credit markets.
But groups including Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports magazine, and the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers say the money will also help prop up private student-loan providers, which often offer high and variable interest rates but not the consumer protections guaranteed under the federal government’s loan programs.
These people are sleaze merchants, and they victimize the students in question and the taxpayers, in addition to having been caught bribing school financial aid officials.
Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest lending company, has offered private loans with an average interest rate of 11 to 13 percent, nearly twice as much as federal loans, according to Student Lending Analytics, a California-based firm that advises financial aid offices. It said Sallie Mae, which is based in Reston and controlled 42.5 percent of the private student loan market last year, has offered some private loan variable rates that are more than 17 percent.
Tom Joyce, a spokesman for Sallie Mae, said the average rate now is between 10 and 11 percent, around what most banks are charging for private student loans, which are not subsidized and government-guaranteed like federal loans. “The comparison to federal student loan rates is unfair and artificial,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The comparison should be to borrowing on a credit card or other unsecured loans.”
Only, of course, these loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, and they are guaranteed by taxpayers, so they are completely different from credit card loans.
Can you imagine an industry so f$#%ed up that it compares itself to the credit card industry in regards to how ethically it treats its customers?
Well, you don’t have to, because reality has met you, and smacked you in the face with a rancid halibut.
I Wish Your Intelligence Had Been Adequate
Bush was interviewed by Charlie Gibson:
BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
Let’s see, we have documents from the British saying that your intel was complete ballocks, the French thought that it was complete ballocks, the Germans thought that it was complete ballocks, the Israelis thought that it was complete ballocks.
You systematically excluded anything that did not support your wish to invade Iraq, and you, and the rest of your Evil Minions&trade should all be on your way to the Hague.
Torture Kills Our Guys
That is what an anonymous author of an editorial in the Washington Post wrote today.
He notes the breakthroughs that he made by using psychological measures designed to build rapport with the detainees, up to and including getting the information used to successfully hunt down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But that was never the norm in Iraq.
He describes a situation where sadism for its own sake is actively encouraged. It is reports of torture that bring in the foreign fighters to Iraq:
Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
(emphasis mine)
The answer, of course, is that Republicans don’t count American soldiers as Americans, because, after all, “they all volunteered,” so they demand torture because it makes them feel smug and superior.
Bush Administration Ignored Warnings…Again
This time on the effect that zero down, negative equity and other risky mortgages might have if allowed to continue:
The Bush administration backed off proposed crackdowns on no-money-down, interest-only mortgages years before the economy collapsed, buckling to pressure from some of the same banks that have now failed. It ignored remarkably prescient warnings that foretold the financial meltdown, according to an Associated Press review of regulatory documents.
“Expect fallout, expect foreclosures, expect horror stories,” California mortgage lender Paris Welch wrote to U.S. regulators in January 2006, about one year before the housing implosion cost her a job.
Bowing to aggressive lobbying — along with assurances from banks that the troubled mortgages were OK — regulators delayed action for nearly one year. By the time new rules were released late in 2006, the toughest of the proposed provisions were gone and the meltdown was under way.
They soft pedaled Saudi involvement in terrorism both before and after 911 because the House of Saud is an FOB (Friend of Bush), and they soft pedaled sleazy mortgage agents because they gave money to Republithugs.
That’s what it’s all about for them.
So We’ll Eat Veggies and Fish
It appears that there is a kosher meat shortage as a result of Agriprocessors’ collapse.
I guess that this hits me where I live, as we keep kosher, but considering the labor law violations, hiring illegals and child labor, in their slaughterhouse, good riddance.
Agriprocessors are a shanda before the Goyim.
Heck of a Job, Kenny Boy
Well it now appears that the merger of Bank of America and Countrywide Financial so aggressively pushed by Bank of America CEO and President Kenneth D. Lewis is finally bearing some fruit.
Unfortunately, it appears to be fruit of the toxic variety, as investors who hold mortgage backed securities of the former subprime lender are suing to demand their repurchase at full face value:
On Monday, a hedge fund sued the Countrywide Financial Corporation, the giant mortgage lender, demanding that Countrywide compensate holders of some securities backed by mortgages if the lender changes the terms of the loans.
The fund, Greenwich Financial Services, said it and other investors stood to lose money if Countrywide, now part of Bank of America, modified loans under a settlement that it reached with 11 state attorneys general in October.
Seriously, what were you thinking when you turned over the rock that was Countrywide Financial, saw the slime that lay beneath, and started to eat that, Mr. Lewis?
The problem with superstar multimillion dollar CEOs is that they don’t think that the basic rules of reality apply to them.
The War Nerd on Mumbai
Trust Gary Brecher to cut to the chase:
So what you see here is something economists would understand as well or better than traditional military analysts. I hate to sound cold-blooded, putting it this way, but what happened is that Pakistan’s Islamists had a surplus of raw labor, and thought of a way to get it to a place where it maximized its global value in terms of pure blood and destruction.
It is remarkable just how badly Carter and Brezinski’s purchase of a civil war in Afghanistan in the 1970s has screwed up that entire region.
Go read the rest.
This is Not the Onion
It appears that the The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has issued a statement commending the US and UK central banks for following its lead: See also here):
As Monetary Authorities, we have been humbled and have taken heart in the realization that some leading Central Banks, including those in the USA and the UK, are now not just talking of, but also actually implementing flexible and pragmatic central bank support programmes where these are deemed necessary in their National interests.
That is precisely the path that we began over 4 years ago in pursuit of our own national interest and we have not wavered on that critical path despite the untold misunderstanding, vilification and demonization we have endured from across the political divide.
Yet there are telling examples of the path we have…For instance, when the USA economy was recently confronted by the devastating effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as the Iraq war, their Central Bank stepped in and injected life-boat schemes in the form of billions of dollars that were printed and pumped into the American economy.
(emphasis in original central bank statement)
I don’t know about you, but I’m very relieved that a bank that has engineered a 231 million percent inflation rate (and that’s just the official number) has endorsed our monetary policy.
Obama National Security Team Named
President elect Obama rolled out his new national security team: (cut and paste from the Washington Independent)
- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, as secretary of state.
- Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to remain in his current position.
- Eric Holder, a former federal prosecutor and deputy attorney general, as attorney general.
- Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, as secretary of homeland security.
- Gen. James L. Jones (Ret.), as national security adviser.
- Susan Rice, national security adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign, as ambassador to the United Nations.
An interesting side story on all this is that
Hillary Clinton will not resign until she is confirmed.
My guess is that notwithstanding the famous collegiality of the Senate, she figures that there is at least one Republican willing do pull the secret hold crap, either to screw with her or Bill, and she just sent a message to them that if they do, she will be in the room with them for a long time.
Damn
The one of the main bloggers on Calculated Risk has died of ovarian cancer at age 47.
The New York Times Obit.
Economics Update
Where the hell did manufacturing go?
Seriously, with the ISM’s factory index falling faster than it has in 20 years in the US, and similar gauges dropping like epileptic ducks in the UK, Euro Zone, and Chine, I’m expecting global manufacturing’s face to show up on a milk carton.
If there is any solace, it is that oil prices fell on reports that OPEC is holding off on further cuts for now, as did retail gasoling (75th straight day!).
Meanwhile, another indicator of the credit crunch Treasury yields, are still plumbing record lows, indicating that money is still too frightened to do anything.
It Took Them 11 Damn Months to Figure This Out?
Yes, Virginia, we are officially in recession, and we have been since December, 2007.
What took the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) so long?