New executive orders from President Barack Obama, directing that the Guantánamo Bay dentition facility and the CIA’s Gulag Archipelago of secret prisons be closed within a year.
He also ordered, “ll federal agencies and departments on Tuesday to stop any pending regulations until they can be reviewed by incoming staff.”
It’s nice to have people in the White House who aren’t, you know, irredeemably evil.
But I still want war crimes prosecutions.
Inevitable, I guess, but the end of a 77 year run.
Executives at Merrill-Lynch rushed their bonuses so as to beat the official takeover by Bank of America, December 29 instead of January or February.
The BoA deal closed January 1, and Merrill hurridly allocated, “about $3bn to $4bn,” for bonuses, despite a $21.5 billion loss in 2008.
I guess that this is because their base salaries, probably more than $¼ million/year on the low end, were just not enough to incentivize them, because there are just so many investment banks aggressively hiring, and they would poach their valued employees.
Delightful.
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Well, with the election in about 19 days now, the effect of the Gaza war is being felt, and the numbers are not good.
They are generally as I expected, with Kadima falling further behind Likud, down 4 seats, and with Labor picking up some ground because Barak’s position as defense minister, and I see that Yisrael Beiteinu is up to 16 seats.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? That group of bigots might be the 3rd largest party in the 130 seat Knesset?
I think that Natanyahu would be a disaster, but this is just gone into the Twilight Zone.
About the only bright side are reports of a possible prisoner swap for Gilad Shalid, which might move the election out of the, “Just fracking crazy,” category, and possibly even lead to a unity government.
I am not talking here about the delusional ramblings of people like wingnut welfare recipient* Amity Shlaes, who suggests that capitalists put their money in their mattresses in Atlas Shrugged style in 1937 because of the “uncertainties” that FDR produced.
After all, that one has been debunked by a legion of economist including right wing darling Milton Friedman, with the only dispute being to what degree the cause was fiscal tightening in 1937 by FDR (Keynesian) or monetary tightening by the Fed (Chicago School).
Instead, I am talking about the suggestions by the Chicago School boys that the New Deal did little or nothing to fix unemployment.
As economist James Galbraith so ably notes, the people who want to show this do so by not counting employed people.
Actually, it’s more than that, it’s by counting the employed as unemployed.
He starts out with the figures must usually used by neoliberal economists, in which Stanley Lebergott seems to show that the 1937 recession returned unemployment to nearly its prior level.
It seems to be a damning indictment of the new deal, except, as Michael R. Darby noted in 1976, 3½ million employed individuals are not being counted in this graph.
As Lebergott notes in his own footnotes, the people on “Emergency Employment,” things like the WPA and NRA (not the gun lobby) projects are simply not counted, because that is how the BLS counted employment in the 1930s.
What’s more, not only are they not counted, they are counted as unemployed, which paints a very different picture, with the dashed line showing the unemployment numbers.
The critics of FDR are figuring unemployment numbers by using employment data ex-employment data.
While there may be a case, though I would disagree, that these people should be dropped from the employment rolls for counting purpose, as active duty military were until 1982, when they were added to artificially keep the unemployment rate below 10% by Ronald Reagan’s BLS.
It turns out that if you take their argument, which is that government employment isn’t real, and that private sector is what matters, you get a picture which an even more drastic drop in unemployment during the New Deal, in part because private sector unemployment did not peak at 25%, but because it peaked at 30%. (!)
So, now that we have dealt with that shibboleth, I actually found another interesting bit of information, from a handy chart of GDP and federal spending from 1930 to 1984, which allows me to do this GDP chart in both absolute and real (inflation adjusted) terms using CPI data available online.
It shows a fairly blistering decent growth rate in 1934, with blistering double digit growth in 1935 and 1936, and in 1937, the economy, in real terms, finally passes the 1930 economy, as opposed to 1941 in absolute terms.
This gives us an insight as to why Roosevelt listened to his Treasury Secretary, and cut spending: he thought, or at least his gut was telling him, that the economy had grown beyond the level of 1930.
*She graduated with a degree in English from Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College†, never, as near as I can determine, has published anything on economics in a peer reviewed setting, and yet she is a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations.‡
†Ivy League Welfare too, I guess.
‡The fact that her rise to prominence followed her 1988 marriage to right wing luminary “journalist” Seth Lipsky, former editor-in-chief and president of the faux “newspaper” the New York Sun seems to indicate that nepotism is involved, but compared to Bill Kristol, who would be flipping burgers but for who his father was, it’s a minor example.§
§Why doesn’t the left support its ideological foot soldiers in the same way?
They are now cutting checks on emergency loans from the federal government.
We will see more of this.
Note that New York state has among the most meager unemployment benefits in the region.
Additionally, the insurance rates charged, and the salary based used, are among the lowest in the region too, which means that the finances are precarious in the best of times.
With Democrats holding both houses now, this needs to change, and income taxes on higher earners should go up too.
And while we are at it, a Texas Style redistricting, since the NY state ‘Phants gerrymandered themselves into a State Senate majority for the past 30 or so years. (Seeing as how Dems hold a 26-3 lead in the House of Representatives, that can slide until the next census)
Heard on Countdown, reports confirmed in the NY Times.
An NSA whistleblower was on Olbermann about this, and said that journalists were under constant surveillance.
As I said in May 2008, they likely wiretapped Christiane Amanpour in 2004, and her husband, James Rubin, was senior adviser for national security affairs for the John Kerry campaign.
This is not just spying on the press. This is spying on the political opposition by proxy.
94-2, but no vote on Holder yet.
Part of the delay on Eric Holder is because the ‘Phants want to bash Bill Clinton over pardons again, but it’s also because they want him to promise not to prosecute torture.
Dumb move. With mortgages sliced and diced amongst dozens, if not hundreds, of investors, you cannot renegotiate terms in many cases, which means more defaults and foreclosures.
He’s not opposed to allowing bankruptcy judges to rewrite mortgages, he just does not want it in the bailout package.
That’s because he’s still pursuing the asinine goal of getting 80 votes in the senate.
He won’t get 80 votes for a bill that works, because Republicans cannot afford fiscal stimulus to succeed.
No surprise. It’s happened before, and now Supreme Court has again revoked a ban of Arab parties by a Knesset committee.
Everyone who voted to the ban the party knew that this would happen, but they also saw political benefit in doing so, because some of the more prominent Israeli Arab politicians are viewed as assholes.
My previous post on this was called, “Stupid and Damaging Electioneering,” and I stand by that.
This is kind of the polar opposite of Dukkakis and the pledge of allegiance in the 1988 campaign. He vetoed the bill, even though he knew it would be unpopular, because he knew that it was unconstitutional.
Israeli politics sucks.
From an interview with Barney Frank:
FRANK: I have friends who said ‘well, Bank of America’s too big, shouldn’t we stop them from buying Countrywide?’ … [M]y answer was, I would have been happy if Syria bought Countrywide, because it was one of the most irresponsible institutions out there. Bank of America has done a very good job … I did not know until you just told me that Fannie and Freddie were doing that and I can pretty much guarantee you that we will have put an end to that within a few days.
ROTFLMAO
Barney Frank is a funny, funny guy.
Courtesy of the ever reliable Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)
In an interview on Tuesday evening with the German television program “Frontal 21,” on channel ZDF Professor Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush’s head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush’s torture practices.
“The evidence is sitting on the table,” he stated. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.” He pointed to the U.S. undertakings under the Convention Against Torture in which the country committed that it would criminally prosecute anyone who tortured, or extradite the person to a state that would prosecute him. “The government of the United States is required to take all necessary steps to bring George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld before a court,” Nowak said.
I wanna see them in the Hague, because I think that you will have too many people willing to be a mole in the jury in the US.
Figure 20%+ dead-enders, that’s two per jury, and, because it’s going to be a long and complex trial, people who aren’t die hard Bush supporters won’t want to sit on the jury.
One letter, and six months.
Another nail in climate change denier’s coffin, it turns out that Antarctica is warming, not cooling.
David Crowe, or the National Association of Home Builders, the folks who generally try to paint a bright picture of housing predicts that house prices will further collapse in 2009.
In addition to a 25.3% in the Case/Shiller Home Price Index drop since the peak in March, 2006, he is saying that house prices will fall a further 29% in 2009, for a total drop from peak of 47%.
Ouch.
Though I would also note that this likely a lead in to a pitch for some sort of Federal aid.
H/T Calculated Risk
