Year: 2009

Why Mass Transit Sucks in the US

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Matthew Yglesias points to an interesting study on world subway systems.

It’s just a bunch of maps printed out at the same scale, and you notice a difference between the US and the rest of the world:

Take a look:

London


New York


Tokyo


Moscow


Paris


Chicago


Berlin


Washington, DC


Osaka


San Francisco’s BART


Boston


Philadelphia

There some outliers in the rest of the world, Seoul, for example, but the difference, except in New York, is that America does not really build subways, which serve the city and allow you to get around in the city, it builds some sort of light rail, for commuters to get into the city, in yet another subsidy of the American suburb.

Martha Coakley Must Have Pictures of Them Doing an Underage Goat

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Because that’s about the only way that I can see that the Massachusetts Attorney General managed to pry $60 million from Goldman Sachs for engaging in deceptive loan and loan securitization processes.

$50 million dollars to the home owners, and $10m in fines to the state, which will reduce principal on, “first mortgages by 25-35% and second mortgages by 50% or more.”

Yes, I know, it’s a typical “no wrongdoing admitted” deal, but she had to have found an awfully big club to use on them.

I wonder what it was.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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It’s by Lanny Davis, a Washington, DC insider, and the guy who accused people supporting Ned Lamont in 2006 against Joe Lieberman of “Liberal McCarthyism“, and he is calling for the criminal prosecution of Dick Cheney for authorizing torture:

I have agreed with President Obama on the need to look forward, not backward.

But … I have changed my mind about the need to indict former Vice President Dick Cheney for complicity in illegal torture.

…

Even more, they seem to be an in-your-face dare by Mr. Cheney to the U.S. criminal justice system: “I am Dick Cheney, I approved violations of the law in the name of the war on terror, and what are you going to do about it?”

It reminds me of Gary Hart’s reaction in the early days of his 1988 presidential campaign to the rumors of his womanizing. …..

So as to Mr. Cheney: I think it is time to take him up on his implicit dare and indict him for violating the 1994 federal law against torture.

This is as big a Beltway Blowhard™ as they come, and he called for Dick Cheney to be prosecuted, and got it published in the Moonie Times (Link is to The Hill, which republished it.

I don’t think that he is suggesting this out of any real moral imperative, it’s just that he feels that Dick Cheney is, to paraphrase Bull Durham, “Calling the umpire a called the guy a c$#@sucker,” which offends his genteel Beltway sensibilities.

It’s a Chu-Chu Race

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But not between locomotives. Judy Chu won the special election to replace Hilda Solis in California’s 32nd Congressional district, but did not get an absolute majority, and Betty Tom Chu was the highest finishing Republican, so they, along with Libertarian candidate Christopher Agrella face off in a runoff in runoff on July 14, Bastille Day.

And, yes, it appears that the two Chu’s are distantly related.

In any case, it is a solidly Democratic district, so Judy Chu should likely be the next Representative from CA-32.

Where Are the Slime Going to Flow?

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One of the arguments about the obscene compensation on Wall Street is that they have to pay in order to keep their “talent” from jumping ship.

Brendan Coffey looks at this, and notes that these folks really have no where to go:

  • Hedge funds: They are shutting down, and now that they aren’t making double digit returns people are not interested in 2% of assets and 20% of gains any more.
  • Private Equity: It’s dependent on cheap credit, there isn’t that much any more, and it likely won’t be in the near term.
  • Foreign banks: Compensation for CEOs, except for the UK’s “The Street”, which is sicker than Wall Street, their CEOs make less than a lot of junior traders get for bonuses.

If these whiners are so sick of this, and threatening to jump ship, let’s not throw them a life raft when they land in the water.

Thoughts on Netanyahu and I/P Issues

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I think that Benyamin Netanyahu is a corrupt nutjob, and his economic policies, specifically his his economic and fiscal embrace of Thatcherism, are almost as crazy as his security policy.

That being said, one of the goals of negotiation is to negotiate and the Palestinians have been consistently infantilized in this process.

In any other negotiation, whether it be the UAW and General Motors, Croatia/Slovenia border discussions, or two people dickering over a used car, people try to maximize their advantage in a negotiation.

To use the case of the used car, it means that the price on the window is higher than the dealer really needs to sell it at, and the car has been repainted, and the customer comes with a magnet to look for bondo and paint jobs, and parhaps a carfax.com report, and they start off very far apart.

This is what happens in negotiations. Both sides take positions as a starting point that are more extreme than they expect to actually get, and try to define the situation on the ground (paint jobs, bondo, etc.) to bolster their positions.

This is what happens, and once this does happen in negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, things will move forward, toward an (inevitable) Palestinian state.

People who believe that the normal give and take of a negotiation process is somehow unfair and unjust, and must be somehow avoided, it will forestall meaningful negotiations. It raises unrealistic expectations, and in the case of the Palestinians, those expectations mean that real negotiations, which will produce a less than optimal solution for everyone on both sides, create a very real risk of the death of whoever signs off on such a deal.

It probably won’t be Netanyahu who will be the one to finish the deal, but someone will.

As to the what a Palestinian state would look like, I rather imagine that it will be a typical failed Arab government, much like the corrupt and autocratic Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, UAE, etc., but it will be their failed government, and that is what they want.

One final note: A solution to this problem will not solve any other problem in the world. The idea that all of the problems in the Middle East somehow run through Jerusalem and Ramallah is as nonsensical as it is widely held.

This does not make the problem not worth solving. This is worth solving on its own merits.

Obama’s Guantánamo Show Trials

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It just gets better and better.

So, the details of the plan are dribbling out and it’s a distinction without a difference as was made clear when the New York Times obtained a filing made to the judges running the military commissions.

Remember the statement that, “The accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel?”

Not so much, Bush and His Evil Minions™ required that the defendants’ lawyers be appointed by the Pentagon, and, “assigned to a special office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo, which meant, among other things, that they had to be uniformed military, and in the filing to the judges, Obama and His Evil Minions™ say that a detainee would be allowed to select a lawyer of their “own choosing”, but that the, “requested lawyer must be assigned to the Pentagon’s office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo.“

“Any color you want, so long as it’s black,” quoth Henry Ford.

Furthermore, the right to confront witnesses against them will be ignored by using a very broad hearsay rule, because, according to “senior administration officials” said that although federal courts bar many kinds of hearsay evidence, “the hearsay rule is not one of those things that is rooted in American values.”

The right to confront witnesses in court is one of the most basic of legal rights in our system since the excesses of the Star Chamber in England.

Note that while coerced testimony will not be allowed, that the defendant will not be allowed to question the primary source of the testimony, only their interrogator, or possibly just someone who reads the interrogator’s report, will confirm this.

Economics Update

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Well, let’s lead with a rather unique bit of news, the volume of the derivatives market fell for the first time ever in the last 6 months of 2008.

The outstanding contracts fell by 15% to $592 trillion dollars (!!), or about forty times the GDP of the United States, and 110% of the entire planet.

My guess is that people suddenly realized that they had absolutely no idea at all what the hell they were holding, and started to unwind, because they did not know who they could trust.

It’s the sort of story I like, so I put it first even though by all rights the fact that Japan’s GDP fell at a 15.2% annualized rate in the first quarter of this year.

That’s Eastern Europe imploding numbers.

Export driven economies like Japan’s are going to take a hit, which is why
Moody’s is warning on possible downgrades of Asian banks, specifically those in Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

Still we have a couple of glimmers on real estate, with the Architecture Billings Index holding steady in April, indicating that there future building is at least taking a pause downward, and mortgage applications rose in response to low interest rates, though much of that is refi activity.

Of course, the commercial real estate market market is still heading down sharply, which is why the Federal Reserve has expanded the TALF to include commercial mortgage backed securities.

Ending with oil and the US dollar, oil finished above $60 for the first time since November, $62.04/bbl, and the dollar hit a 5-month low on more optimism about the world economy.

I don’t get that last bit. All I see is a dead cat bounce.

Pelosi/CIA Update

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It turns out that some of the people’s notes on the briefings could not have been made contemporaneously, as the term enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) was used extensively throughout, and this term was not used before 2004, and the briefing was given in 2002.

This does not mean that anyone at the CIA is lying, though my guess is that some of them are, but it means that the notes used are not those made at the time.

So, you have every Dem who was briefed on that day saying that the CIA did not say then that it was torturing, and you have numerous errors in attendance, staffers being called present, Rep. David Obey challenging the accuracy of the documents, and notes that Porter Goss was briefed along with members of Congress after he became head of the CIA.

As Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman would say, “This one’s busted.”

MoDo’s Mistake

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The entire thing is interesting. Here is the blog that outed her, here is the Op-Ed in question, along with the correction:

Correction: May 18, 2009
Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday, about torture, failed to attribute a paragraph about the timeline for prisoner abuse to Josh Marshall’s blog at Talking Points Memo.

Here is
Josh Marshall’s original post, and the pertinent excerpt:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

And her version in the original:

More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Difference are bolded.

Her claim is that she heard it from a friend, and she really liked it, so she dropped it in, but that story stinks. The charitable explanation is that she got an email, liked the line, copied it in for a draft, went to get a cup of coffee, and forgot to cite.

The obvious question, is really where does she get her ideas from in the first place, and is this a single transgression, or a part of a pattern?

Since I don’t like her stuff, I’m not going to comb through it to check….It’s too painful.

The Big Lies of 2009

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Yes, they are….Only, there’s no mention of repaying the FDIC insured loans, and they are trying to weasel out from their obligations in the stock warrants that they issued to the US Government at the time they got the money, which could cost taxpayers billions of dollars.

I expect the Treasury to act in a way that benefits the banks at the expense of the taxpayers, since that’s what Geithner has been doing his whole career.

In any case, it appears that the Fed has set a timetable of around June 8 for a response, and there are restrictions on paying back the money, including another “stress test” and getting off the FDIC gravy train, because, of course, senior executives think that their own inflated paychecks are more important than the health and well being of their banks.

More Bank Failure Fridays Not On Friday

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Well, there were no bank failures on last Friday, but we have the continuing saga of BankUnited, which regulators have called “critically undercapitalized”:

WL Ross & Co. and private-equity firms including Carlyle Group made a bid to buy BankUnited Financial Corp. assets provided they are put into receivership by the U.S. government, a person familiar with the matter said.

So it seems to me that it is time to put a fork in BankUnited, it’s done.

Wanker of the Day

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Senator Wyden who is leading the charge to strip the public option out of health care, because he has set his heart on, “Finding a legislative solution that can win at least 70 votes in the Senate.”

Dude, if you come up with a solution that works, it condemns the Republicans to at least 40 years in the wilderness, so the only thing that they will support will be something that doesn’t work.

Both ideologically and tactically, it is against their interests to pass comprehensive health care reform.

The stimulus package passed with 3 Republican votes in the entire congress, Social Security passed without a single Republican vote, and you think that somehow getting 12 Republicans to vote you way is going to happen with any proposal with real merit.

You sir, are an idiot.