Month: July 2009

Obama Looking to Restrict Antibiotic Use in Livestock

This is good news.

Basically, feeding tightly penned industrially raised animals antibiotics make they gain weight faster, probably because it suppresses minor illnesses.

It also creates things like antibiotic resistant E. coli, leaves residues in the food, etc.

The Dutch banned antibiotics in animal feed over a decade ago, and we know that the net cost of this change would be less than 5¢ a pound.

Additionally, it would make some of the more inhumane animal husbandry techniques less viable, because stressed animals packed in close quarters become more vulnerable to disease.

Economics Update

Well, in the real economy, we have the Federal Reserve releasing yet more down numbers on industrial production and capacity utilization.

The most of the rest of today’s (and yesterday’s, I was not blogging yesterday) news today basically has to do with inflation, with increasing energy prices being responsible for increased retail and wholesale sales, producer prices rising 1.8% in June, and Consumer price rising 0.7% in June, though for the CPI, it was only 0.2% when the more volatile food and energy segments were taken out, and the CPI was down 1.4% year over year, the biggest drop since 1950.

We also have the yield curve slope hitting highs.

The yield curve slope is the difference in interest rates between 2-year and 10 year treasury bills, and is an indicator of market concerns about inflation, so it means that the bond market is seeing inflation out there in the medium term.

I’m not sure where this inflation would come from though, because this year’s back to school sales season is looking as anemic as the 2008 Christmas shopping season.

In any case, good corporate returns for Intel, and obscene returns for Goldman Sachs have left people optimistic, and so the US dollar fell, and, with the help of an anemic inventories report, oil rose above $61/bbl.

The Ezra Klein Dead Pool


Bummer of a birth mark, Ezra

WaPo blogger Ezra Klein tore Sarah Palin, and the Washington Post editorial page, a new one with regards to her editorial.

It’s well deserved, but he works for the Washington Post, and the only people who get to criticize the paper are conservatives and people like Howard Kurtz, whose right-wing consultant wife has, over the years, literally received a paycheck from the Republican party, and then only because the paper does not give conservatives a fair shake.

I figure that he will be out by the beginning of November.

The model here is Dan Froomkin, who was, IMNSHO, fired because he called out the most egregious of the Washington Post editorial page hacks, his exchange with the dishonest and insane Charles Krauthammer comes to mind, on their dishonesty and hacktacular behavior.

The Washington Post is a Sick Joke

They published an OP/ED by the Quittah from Wasillah, Sarah Palin, on global warming.

That’s bad enough, but when the article does not contain the phrases, “global warming,” and “climate change,” are missing from the article.

The problem is not that it is disingenuous, global warming deniers make their case through lying, after all.

The problem is that the article is complete and total crap that should not have passed the editorial pen of the Shopping News, much less the Washington Post.

It’s not even attempting to argue a point, it’s a bunch of red meat for the base strung together.

Michelle Malkin shows more dedication to reasoned argument.

We Now Know Why Rattner Left the Auto Task Force

It appears that he is more closely tied into the state pension plan pay for play scandal than had been previously indicated.

Big surprise. You hire a merger and acquisition scum bag specialist who maked his money on buying up companies, juicing the stocks by making draconian cuts, and then flipping them, and then you have to get rid of him because he turns out to be….well….a scum bag.

So shocked.

BTW, I realize why he got the job in the first place (from the Wiki), “Rattner is married to Maureen White, the former National Finance Chair for the Democratic Party,” which means that she specialized in raising lots of money from her rich friends, so there was an element of pay-for-play in his getting this assignment in the first place.

Well, Today Sucked

It pretty much started out as a normal unemployment day, I was calling recruiters, and just before I was about to make myself lunch, I get a frantic call from my daughter, Natalie.

Camp had ended early, noon instead of 2:00 pm, because they are having an afternoon/evening outing, so I had to rush out to pick her up, which I did.

Unfortunately, in the rush, I did not look at the gas gauge, and on I-795, I ran out of gas, and I called Sharon* to pick up the Jerry can from the shed that I use to fuel the lawn mower.

So I spent an hour on the shoulder, in the sun, having had nothing to eat or drink since I woke up.

I still don’t think that my blood sugar or electrolytes have recovered, so I’m not posting any more today.

I’d be even more incoherent than usual, which is saying something.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

More Footsteps Toward the Exits

Specifically, this regards the US dollar, and the leader of the Japanese opposition party, which is currently leading in the polls, is saying that, “the nation should consider shifting its $1 trillion of foreign reserves away from the dollar and buying International Monetary Fund bonds,” and we have increasing evidence that China is taking baby steps away from the US dollar too, increasingly moving toward bilateral trade deals in which the currencies in question are increasingly directly exchanged, as opposed to dollar denominated.

I think that there has always been a synergy between the US financial industry and the US dollars status as the world’s preeminent reserve currency, and what has shaken it lately is not the US deficits, but the spectacle of a dysfunctional and corrupt finance industry which has our government so in its thrall that it tarnishes both the industry and the currency.

Dick Cheney’s Death Squad Emporium

We now know, because DCIA Panetta has told Congress, that the CIA had a secret program running for almost 8 years, and that they did not inform Congress of this, as required by law, on the orders of Dick Cheney.

It’s even gotten Dianne Feinstein,* who is generally remarkably hospitable to secrecy and executive authority saying that this was a clear violation of the law.

At this point all indications are that Cheney was setting up a death squad that would answer only to him.

Theoretically, it would only be used against al Qaeda, but remember that Bush and His Evil Minions defined “returning to terrorism” as publishing an OP/ED in the New York Times.

I have no clue as to why it did not go forward, but we can be thankful about that, because they would have gotten it horribly wrong, because that is what the Bush administration did time and time again.

The thing is though, this is precisely the sort of thing that Cheney wanted to do, because it made him feel powerful, whether it worked or not.

They tortured because it gave Cheney and Rumsfeld a stiffy.§

It’s torture all over again: Now that the reports are coming out, it turns out that sugarless cookies worked better than torture, and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tennant knew this, but they were objectively pro-torture.

They wanted to do this, because it made them feel powerful, and ordering murders would have done the same thing.

The real question here is what stopped them, and the only answer that I have is that someone told them they could be in the cross hairs if they tried this, and that they, and theirs, were softer targets Osama.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Except, of course, the “Tipton 3” were never terrorists in the first place.

Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.

Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.

§Sorry for that mental image.

Democrats Push Back on Needle Exchange

Well, it looks like Barack Obama is going to be getting some well deserved push-back on his proposal to keep the ban on needle exchange programs.

Obama put it in his budget, and the House Appropriations Committee pulled it from their budget, and it’s what comes out of the Congress at the end of the day that makes law here.

Here is the background on Barack Obama going out of his way to reverse a campaign promise, and I still think that this is a deliberate attempt to enrage the gay community in order to score points with right wingers.

That being said, Obama also opposing sane harm reduction policies with regard to drugs in the context of international diplomacy, so maybe he actually buys into this whole “War on Drugs” charade, so maybe he is just worried of being demagogued on the issue.

I’m not sure which state of mind is worse.

Economics Update

Interesting day. Not a whole bunch of news, but what I saw looks like it might mean more than it seems.

First, we have 10-year treasuries spiking, because bond investors believe that the economy will not be recovering this year.

We may also have S&P warning of a lending bubble in China, with the possibility of a “sharp deterioration in banks’ assets,” over the next few months as a result.

I think that if the bond market is right, and that is a big if, then the expansion of lending in China does have a real possibility of a significant hang-over in the next few months.

It does seem that pessimism is ruling energy and currency too, with retail gasoline having its biggest 2 week drop since the end of last year, and crude oil closing at a 2 month low.

Additionally, demand for a safe haven has driven the dollar higher.

Wanker of the Day

Megan McArdle (Note that this is a link to Barry Ritholtz, not the McArdle article, because friends don’t give friends links to Randroids).

You see, she’s one of those people who read “Atlas Shrugged” in high school (I read the “Virtue of Selfishness, and hated every poorly crafted juvenile word), and never got over it. (She used to blog under the pseudonym “Jane Gault”)

She says that Matt Taibbi is wrong when he fingers Goldman Sachs as a politically connected octopus (OK, “that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,”* Goldman Sachs.) that was front and center in gaming and profiting from the regulatory arbitrage and fraud that enriched their principals, and beggared the rest of us, “for the simple reason that no one person or even one group is powerful enough to take down a whole system.”

What’s at the core of this is Randroid objectivist bullsh$#. The markets, you see, are brilliant, and so no one person, nor one organization, can game them.

It’s the same thing that led Alan Greenspan to tell Brooksley Born that, “Wasn’t a need for a law against fraud because if a floor broker was committing fraud, the customer would figure it out and stop doing business with him.”

You see markets, and all there participants are the epitome of capitalist savvy, and as such, they would never be unaware of others engaging in unsafe activities for their own benefits, and so the only explanation of failure must be collective, so it’s everyone‘s fault, particularly that lay-about mom working 60 hours a week at minimum wage, which makes it no one‘s fault.

I hope she has someone to cut her meat for her, because I think that the safe operation of a steak knife is beyond her.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
This is despite the fact that the currently unraveling software theft case shows that Goldman Sachs has been front-running the entire stock market.

Eric Holder and False Accountability

Glenn Greenwald has the scoop, and it’s even lamer than what was clearly a set of deliberate leaks by Eric Holder and His Evil* Minions that were covered in the Newsweek article.

According to the Washington Post, which notes that, “The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation,” and the New York Times, which observes that, “The Justice Department official who confirmed the likelihood of an inquiry said it was not likely to focus on those legal opinions, the lawyers who wrote them or anyone who acted within the boundaries they set, even though the ground rules for interrogations have shifted,” it’s clear that real accountability for real crimes is not on the table.

For the small fry, “Just following [illegal] orders,” will be considered an absolute defense, and and the people who actually gave those illegal orders, and who did so without regard to the law or legal precedents, will not be subject to scrutiny.

I understand the possible political complications, though I think that they are stupid, because the Republicans will oppose Obama tooth and nail every step of the way regardless of his peace overtures, but even if non-prosecution were to produce a more bipartisan atmosphere, it would be wrong, because covering up a crime against humanity, and make no bones about it, torture is a crime against humanity, is a crime in and of itself.

*Evil is the only way to describe this concerted effort to ensure that the people who authorized, and enabled torture never face justice. By deliberately ignoring the law in this matter, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama have become co-conspirators for torture after the fact.

Gripen and Super-Bug Go With Local Manufacturers to Win Brazil Competition

Boeing is taking the more conventional route, with the company
looking for manufacturers of components for the F/A-18 E/F, while Saab is offering to move as much as ½ of its production for the Gripen, along with a significant partnership in marketing and development.

I think that the Gripen is at a disadvantage here. First, the aircraft will have to operate over large inhospitable stretches of the Amazon rain forest, which would favor a two engined design, and second, the G/A-18, along with the Rafale, can be operated from Brazil’s aircraft carrier, but it’s clear that Saab is considers this order crucial to the continued existence of the program, and so it is moving very aggressively to win this competition.