Now that he is back in the country, he has written a New York Times OP/ED.
It is very thoughtful and conciliatory, and I recommend reading it.
Were I were in such a position, what I would write would involve the term “bigot”, and likely the phrase, “inbred c%$#suckers,” which is why I am not a member of the clergy.
He riffs on Rahm Emanuel’s “F%$# the UAW” comment, which was reported by former Car Czar, and corporate criminal Steve Rattner.
Damn good, if somewhat profane, writing.
I will be so f^%$ing glad when that f^%$ingchicken sh$# pissant coward Rahm is gone from public service.
Mayor Richard M. “Richie” Daley has decided not to run for reelection as Mayor of Chicago.
Basically, given his history, my guess is that he knows that a corruption indictment is coming, and he wants to clear the deck in preparation.
There are whispers that Rahm Emanuel might take a shot at running for mayor, but I don’t think so.
Rahm has failed upward his entire political career, NAFTA, trying to kill the 50 state strategy, running pro-war candidates who lost, etc.
You can make money in Washington, and on Wall Street (Rahm worked at Wasserstein Perella and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac)) based on connections, but if you are the Mayor of Chicago, you have to make things work.
Just ask former Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic.
Rahm might have the chops for the party politics, it is what he excels at, but at making worthwhile things happen, he is simply incompetent, and if he were to be mayor, he would be a one term mayor, and he would be unelectable thereafter, at least in Illinois.
But I’ve gotten off topic. My thesis is that Daley is resigning because US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is getting to close for comfort.
Barry Ritholtz asks his readers what was the biggest mistake made by regulators during the financial crisis, he thinks that it was the Bear bailout, because it led banks to think that they were invincible, but he asks, “Was Lehman the biggest error? Fannie/Freddie Nationalization? Something else in entirely?”
I’ll go with something else entirely.
We should have let the festering pile of arrogance, ignorance, greed, and evil that was circling the bowl go under, and replace it with a taxpayer run lending facility for the rest of the economy.
We would have spend a lot less money than we have, there would have been more lending to the real economy, and the corrupt elites that got us into this mess would have been unseated, which, as Simon Johnson, former IMF chief economist, is what is really necessary in these cases, that these politically connected elites be broken.
He is accused of stealing Goldman Sachs’ proprietary high frequency trading software, but one of the three counts against him, for unauthorized computer access, has been dismissed.
I’ve always maintained that HFT is actually illegal front-running, or at least it was illegal before Treasury Secretary Robert “Why am I not in jail?” Rubin got his hands on the regulatory regime, and as such, I have always wondered if there was a cover-up of some kind, seeing as how the prosecutors have admitted that this code could be used to manipulate the markets.
A twist in the case that I was unaware of was that Sergey is not the only one the Feds are going after on this, as, “Two months after Aleynikov’s indictment, prosecutors charged former Societe Generale trader Samarth Agrawal with stealing computer code used in high-frequency proprietary trading in the French bank’s New York office.”
I am beginning to think that there is an official policy of allowing “systemically important” banks to skim profits from the markets in order to bolster balance sheets that are far shakier than has been revealed, but they want to keep this technology out of the hands of the small fry, because it would make the flash crash look like a weenie roast if too many people got their hands on this technology.
Background here
Frequently people who I consider to be bad actors say things that I want to note.
In a blog, of course, you are supposed to link to them, that is what the World Wide Web is supposed to be about.
On the other hand, I do not want to drive traffic to their site.
One way of handling it, as I do with Associated Press stories, is to find alternate links. (here Google News is your friend)
Well, our good friends at Tech Crunch have provided an alternate, and somewhat less severe way to handle this, the nofollow tag, which tells Google not to follow the tag, so you won’t boost their google page ranking.
Here is an example from the Wiki:
<a href=”http://www.example.com/” rel=”nofollow”>discount drugs</a>
The tag was created by Google, but Yahoo, Ask.com, and Bing also follow this convention.
I’m not sure under which circumstances I would employ this tag, as opposed to finding an alternate link, except, perhaps, when there is no alternate link.
Daniel De Groot at Open Left pulls a comment by sTivo and it may be the clearest explanation of both Barack and 3rd way politicians yet given:
When Barack Obama made his famous remarks about Ronald Reagan being transformational, it was misinterpreted as being political, an attempt to reach out to the other side. It actually was, as some feared, philosophical. It really did mean, sincerely, that except around the edges, he thought that Reaganism-Thatcherism was irreversible. Just as Bill Clinton does, just as Tony Blair does.
The Third-Wayers are serious about this. Seriously deluded, perhaps, but dead serious. There was never an attempt to triangulate the “independent center”, those who still believed in Reaganism but were distressed by the partisan cultural meanness. That was sincere. Those who were played were the Democratic base. They would have to be satisfied with corporate-style knockoffs of social-democratic ideas (health care being the most obvious example). Labor reformers would have to be mollified with “we don’t have 60 votes”. And symbolic gestures devoid of content like inviting Pete Seeger to the White House.
(emphasis mine)
Occam’s razor seems to mitigate toward this explanation.
Go read the rest.
H/t Atrios.
Yes, this is Ronald Reagan criticizing excessive profits, and the Republican Jihad against the organized labor, and he blames those profits on the inflation of 1946-48.
The largest bank in Afghanistan, Da Kabul Bank, is in the process of imploding due in a miasma of corruption and self dealing, as ordinary depositors rush to pull out their money from the institution following a number of stories revealing their corruption:
The Karzai government is corrupt and rotten to the core. Not a single US soldier should die to prop it up. The lie that we are fighting “al–Qaeda” in Afghanistan needs to be exposed. The US and NATO are fighting four or five groups of Pashtun insurgents, some of them until fairly recently US allies. The goal of the fighting is to keep the Karzai government from falling to the guerrillas and to train up an army and police force that could go on defending Kabul. The Afghanistan National Army from all accounts has poor morale. No wonder. What Afghan soldier or policeman would die for a ponzi scheme?
But Juan Cole’s outrage at this was premature, because it is actually worse than he first reported, because after the government seized control of the bank, as the Washington Post hed states, “Officials freeze assets of Kabul Bank shareholders, excepting Karzai’s brother.”
Why we supported his continued corruption, and his election theft, I’ll never know, but enough is enough.
Get out now, because the alternative, replacing him (see Diệm, Jean Baptiste Ngô Đình) just won’t work.
So now, instead of trying for something that works to reduce unemployment, Obama is calling for a modest public works program, $50 Billion over 6 years, significantly less than what we are flushing down the toilet on the unnecessary F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.*
What’s more, once again, he throws a bargaining chip to the Republicans, who have shown their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith, by also proposing that the R&D tax credit be extended and made permanent.
Once again, when trying to put forward even the most modest proposal, he kneecaps himself by taking what could have been used as a lever to derive support, and handing it to his enemies so that they can use it as a cudgel against him.
Week tea, constructed to make it even weaker, once again.
*This is not meant to be a commentary on the capabilities of the F-35, simply a statement that these capabilities are simply not necessary in current of foreseeable future conflicts, and the same goes for the F-22, so please don’t make this a Raptor/Lightning II pissing contest.
It appears that a French company has patented Plumpy’nut, a fortified peanut butter as a treatment for severe malnutrition:
Should a revolutionary humanitarian food product be protected by commercial patent, when lifting restrictions might save millions of starving children?
That is the moral conundrum at the heart of a bitter transatlantic legal dispute.
On one side are the French inventors of Plumpy’nut, a peanut paste which in the last five years has transformed treatment of acute malnutrition in Africa.
Nutriset, the Normandy-based company, says the patent is needed to safeguard production of Plumpy’nut in the developing world, and to stop the market being swamped by cheap US surpluses.
And on the other side are two American not-for-profit organisations that have filed a suit at a Washington DC federal court to have the patent overturned.
They say they are being stopped by Nutriset from manufacturing similar – and cheaper – peanut-based food products, despite the proven demand from aid agencies.
“By their actions, Nutriset are preventing malnourished children from getting what they need to survive. It is as simple as that,” said Mike Mellace, of the San Diego-based Mama Cares Foundation.
I will spare you the picture of the severely malnourished child in the article, but it appears to me that this patent is not only morally indefensible, but also a very real expansion of IP law to an area where it had not previously applied, recipes, which are rather famously not covered by copyright (see here), and the patent appears to be rather broad, covering pretty much every nut based food with milk in it, which would include the Nutella from which Plumpy’nut was originally derived.
The problem here is that the other potential players in this market (EVIL term, that) are all small not for profits who would be driven to extinction with a loss in a patent court.
One solution here is to make patents like civil rights law, and allow people to file suit before infringing, for the same reason that they do with civil rights suits: because the chilling effect occurs even if no one breaks the law.
Our troops are still conducting combat operations in Iraq:
US troops have been called in to help Iraqi forces battle insurgents who attacked an army base in Baghdad, killing 12 people, officials say.
It marks the first such use of US troops since the end of US combat operations five days ago.
US forces remaining in Iraq can now only participate in operations at the request of Iraqi authorities.
A US military spokesman said US forces had provided fired as Iraqis located two of the assailants inside the base.
When I said that the phony withdrawal from Iraq was a lie, I was right.
So says a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey.
This is unsurprising, and it may explain why efforts like Clinton’s, Blair/Brown’s, and Obama’s to dismantle the New Deal/Social Democrat structure, because they believe, even more than Republicans, that “Reagan changed everything,” are driving people back into the arms of an increasingly delusional Republican Party, because a bad something always wins over a better nothing.
This is a foreseeable consequence of the “3rd Way.”
I company called ECA Program is in talks to purchase 15 Su-27 Flankers from Belarus in order to set up a private air-to-air combat academy at Keflavik airport in Iceland.
The primary customer is dissimilar air combat training for NATO forces, but I would really like to get a ride on one of these aircraft, and my guess is that they will make this available to private individuals as well.
Of course, now I just need a few million dollars.
I would also note that there are some differences of opinion amongst the various players in the Icelandic government about the merit of this proposal.
Israel’s Ministry of Defense has approved a purchase of 20 F-35 fighters, though the report of a price of “only” $96 million a copy, is clearly a blivit,* as evidenced by this report of that 20 JSFs will cost about $2.75 billion, which gives a price of $137.5 million each, which is closer, but probably still less than, the cost of the aircraft.
In any case, while the MoD has approved, there is significant resistance from the full cabinet, with Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz expressing significant concerns about Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s decision.
It’s clear that both Lockheed Martin and the DoD were desperate to get this sale, which explains why Israel Aerospace Industries got a contract to build 800 wingsets for the stealthy fighter, which comes close to Israel being paid to take the plane.
They want a stamp of approval from a country that is not already a partner in the F-35 consortium, and Israel gives them more market credibility than almost any other non NATO nation.
*10 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.
You have to credit the Russian aircraft designers, this eleptical fuselage transport aircraft, dubbed ‘EkoJet’, appears to be an interesting way of looking at how to get a large number of people on and off an aircraft.
But man, it is one fugly bird.
The designers claim that the aircraft can carry as many passengers as the Il-86 (around 350 in an all coach configuration), but that it would weigh 80 tons less, or about 40% less than the IL-86’s 217t MTOW, which I simply don’t find credible.
The problems with the Il-86 were always its propulsion, not its structure, and a 40% weight savings seems to violate the laws of physics.
This is so wrong:
I’m so going to do this one day:
No bank failures this week, for the 3rd time this year, and the 2nd time in 2 weeks.
Something is going on, but I am not sure exactly what.
In any case here are the Full FDIC list and the Full NCUA list
Here is the graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only):
One of the big questions out there is who Barack Obama will appoint to appoint to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The leading candidate has always been Elizabeth Warren, who literally wrote the book on predatory finance in the age of the mega-banks, but the mega-banks, along with Tim Geithner, just don’t like her, because, she might actually, you know, protect consumers.
That being said, the democratic wing of the Democratic Party has rallied behind her to an astonishing degree, and so it has increasingly appeared that Obama will nominate her, if only to allow the nomination to be filibustered, as they did in the case of his nominee to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.
Given just how demoralized the party base is, politics demands it.
Nothing has been announced yet though, so the press is engaging in a process similar to Kremlinology, and we have another data point: Ms. Warren has pulled out of the contract law class that she was teaching at Harvard.
I still expect that if Obama nominates Warren, he won’t fight for her, but it is beginning to look like he will nominate her.