We had 420,000 initial claims last week, a small drop, but the less volatile 4-week moving average rose for the first time in 6 weeks, from 423,500 to 426,000, though both continuing and extended claims fell.
Initial claims, and unemployment, is too damn high, but it continues to trend a bit better.
Well, I have managed to find a contract closer to home, so starting in January I will be working about 18 miles from home in Westminster, MD, where I will be working on autonomous robotic vehicles.
What it means at this moment is that over lunch, I am sitting in a waiting room in Reston, VA waiting to be called back for a drug screen.
Yes, fill this cup, we need to evaluate the worthiness of your bodily fluids. Now THERE is an experce that positively reeks of our society’s tremendous respect for human dignity.
In any case, it means that I can be home with my family every night, so it is worth it.
It likely means less bloggy goodness from me, but my reader(s) will learn to deal.
Posted via mobile.
Cancer survival rates in Sweden and Canada are better than those of the United States, because people do not get early screening here.
All of the returning Democratic Senators, and all of the retiring ones except for Christopher Dodd, have signed a letter asking for filibuster reform:
All Democratic senators returning next year have signed a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., urging him to consider action to change long-sacrosanct filibuster rules.
The letter, delivered this week, expresses general frustration with what Democrats consider unprecedented obstruction and asks Reid to take steps to end those abuses. While it does not urge a specific solution, Democrats said it demonstrates increased backing in the majority for a proposal, championed by Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and others, weaken the minority’s ability to tie the Senate calendar into parliamentary knots.
This change can only come about if a fairly obscure change is made to the Senate rules first: The Senate currently describes itself as a continuing body, meaning that any changes in the rules at the start of a new Congress require a ⅔ majority.
If the President of the Senate, Vice President Biden, were to rule that the Senate Wasn’t a continuing body, then that could be approved by a simple majority vote, as could the filibuster rule changes.
I would not something else interesting about the various proposals, it looks like Reid will accept a proposal to have committee chairs elected by secret ballot, as opposed to the current regime, where there is only a vote if another Senator publicly objects.
Hopefully, the old guard in the Senate won’t block these changes.
The final numbers for US GDP in the 3rd quarter came in, and they were slightly lower than estimates, with a 2.6%, as opposed to the 2.7% forecast, growth rate, while core inflation was at a 50 year low.
So I don’t think that either inflation or a robust recovery are around the corner, particularly with oil rising above $90/bbl, a 2 year high, which has in turn driven gasoline prices near to $3.00/gallon.
Unfortunately, the dollar has continued to fatten up versus the Euro, because people see more pain and woe from Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Italy.
Adventures in bad corporate damage control.
Specifically, because Wikileaks has said that they have a document dump from a Bank of Bank of America, Bank of America has started to buy up hundreds of nasty domain names in the hope of preventing the airing of criticism:
Bank of America has snapped up hundreds of abusive domain names for its senior executives and board members in what is being perceived as a defensive strategy against the future publication of damaging insider info from whistleblowing Website WikiLeaks.
According to Domain Name Wire, the US bank has been aggressively registering domain names including its board of Directors’ and senior executives’ names followed by “sucks” and “blows”.
For example, the company registered a number of domains for CEO Brian Moynihan: BrianMoynihanBlows.com, BrianMoynihanSucks.com, BrianTMoynihanBlows.com, and BrianTMoynihanSucks.com.
You know, I REALLY don’t think that this is going to help when people realize that you were smoking cigars lit from the original notes of mortgages that you have foreclosed on, and that you used homeless orphans as ash trays.
More seriously, if Wikileaks has your documents, then people will go there, or to one of its legion of mirrors, to get that information.
The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was signed into law, the Senate passed the START arms control treaty, and a new food safety bill that gives the FDA the power to order recalls passed the house and is heading to the President’s desk.
I still don’t see any gazillion dimensional chess here, but it’s a good day.
BTW, since the bill gives the military fairly broad discretion in how the ban is phased in, I would take even money that separations from the military will be continuing into 2012, because Obama won’t push the military on this.
Now we have reports of them sending in crews to break into houses and change locks when they have not foreclosed on the property, in one case stealing electronics, wine, and beer, and in another, throwing out the ashes of the homeowner’s husband. (surprise, there is now a lawsuit)
It’s clear that something needs to be done about the criminal (breaking and entering and theft) activities of the mortgage services, but it appears that if you are the Federal Reserve, what needs to be done is to fight the rest of the government to protect the people who are breaking the law:
Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry out improper foreclosures. The FDIC supports such rules, according to an FDIC official involved in the dispute.The new regulations would rein in debt collection, loan modification and foreclosure proceedings at bank divisions called “mortgage servicers.” Servicers have committed widespread fraud in the foreclosure process. While the recent robo-signing of fraudulent documents has received the most attention, consumer advocates have complained about improper fees and servicer mistakes that lead to foreclosure for years.
This is what happens when you put an organization that is chartered to protect and support banks in charge of regulating them.
Instead of reigning in excesses, they validate those excesses, so the Fed is attempting to throw away something like 300 years of established property law so that the banksters can take you house for no reason at all.
That is what Haley Barbour is doing now.
First, he lauds the white supremacist Citizens Councils, and now he’s saying that he was just commenting on the lack of violence in his home town.
He is dog whistling to racists in his putative white house run.
It might not pick up votes in New Hampshire, but it will in South Carolina.
Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ are drawing up plans for the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay:
The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.
The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.
But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.
The law here is clear.
If we are at war, and I understand the argument that the authorization for the use of force might constitute this, then you can detain people without access to the legal process, as prisoners of war, with all the rights pertaining to that status.
This is not about prisoners of war. This is about the king throwing people in jail on nothing but his word, and it is antithetical to American founding principles, which should be obvious to everyone, except perhaps for the worst constitutional law professor ever.
I don’t mean that there is physical damage to his penis. I mean that the Brit Milah, the first mitzvah that a Jewish boy experiences, is supposed to, you know, make you Jewish, and Brooks’ biography states that he is a Jew did not work. This guy is about as Jewish as Ann Murray.
Somehow or other he manages to express dumbfounded amazement at his experience at having a discussion with a Jewish theologian where she makes points that are so mainstream in Judaism that you can’t hear a Rabbi’s sermon without hearing at least one of them twice:
In her classes and groups, she tries to create arduous countercultural communities. “We live in a relativistic culture,” she told me. Many people have no firm categories to organize their thinking. They find it hard to give a straight yes or no answer to tough moral questions. When they go in search of answers, they generally find people who offer them comfort and ways to ease their anxiety.
[Dr. Erica] Brown tries to do the opposite. Jewish learning, she says, isn’t about achieving tranquility. It’s about the struggle. “I try to make people uncomfortable.”
Shocking, here is a Jew who asks a question in response to a question. What do you think of that?
Brown seems to poke people with concepts that sit uncomfortably with the modern mind-set — submission and sin. She writes about disorienting situations: vengeance, scandal, group shame. During our coffee, she criticized the way some observers bury moral teaching under legal casuistry and the way some moderns try to explain away the unfashionable things the Torah clearly says.
Sorry, but I’ve heard this from Reform Rabbis through black hat Orthodox.
I don’t mean to imply that she is not a rigorous thinker, or that she might not be an engaging teacher. What I am saying is that this is completely mainstream Jewish thought, and that any Jew who expresses surprise and wonderment at what is standard boiler plate for a B’nei Mitzvah speech given by a 13 year old.
I have seen such expressions of surprise from Christians that I’ve dealt with, I recall a Pentecostal woman in college who was stunned when I noted that the afterlife was simply not particularly important in Judaism, for example (It’s orthogonal to Tikkun Olam), which blew her mind.
It’s one of the reasons that I object to the term “Judeo Christian,” because there are real and deep differences in ethics and philosophy. I would argue that existentialism, with its focus on personal responsibility, is actually closer to Judaism than many of the strands of Christian theology.
As Ioz observes, “This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.”
I am not sure if he’s really stupid, or if his hanging out with right wingers, who either are evangelicals, or who find evangelicals “useful idiots,” but he really needs to spend some time listing to the rabbi’s sermons, as opposed to playing on his Blackberry.
H/t Brad Delong.
And once again Congressional seats are moving south and west.
There are now 308 million people in the United States.
At a glance, and there is a nice interactive graphic here, it looks like about 8-10 Dem seats will be lost in the process.
So, after some arm twisting, the FCC has passed something it’s calling network neutrality regulations.
Surprise, surprise, it’s another cave to corporate interests, allowing for tiered access in wired service, and what amounts to no protection at all for wireless.
The two most prominent consumer protection organizations, Public Knowledge and Free Press have both condemned the deal.
I would also note that the FCC decided not to define broadband back to a telecommunications service (Title II), and instead have elected to have it remain a data service (Title I) which the courts have already slapped down the FCC about, so not only are these rules toothless, they are almost certainly going to be overturned in court.
Once again, the Obama administration has decided to treat the miscreants, in this case the incumbents who have taken billions in subsidies to make the US last in the developed world on connectivity and cost, as partners to be parleyed with, and given them pretty much what they want.
The chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court has set up a hearing on January 19 demanding that the mortgage servicers show cause as to why foreclosures should not be suspended state wide.
It appears that slack mortgage procedures and documentation have reached the notice of judicial authorities in the Garden State.
This is, as the Vice President is wont to say, a big f%$#ing deal.
Not only is there the prospect of an indeterminate foreclosure moratorium in a populous state with expensive real estate, but the judge has explicitly placed the burden of proof on the banksters.
As Harold Feld says, “Stay Tuned”.
Seriously. We have his fingerprints all over the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame, over the firing of US Attorneys who refused to engage in political witch hunts, and on the political prosecution of Don Siegelman.
Well, now it appears that Karl Rove is involved in the sexual assault charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange:
These days, Sweden and the United States are apparently undertaking a political prosecution as audacious and important as those by the notorious “loyal Bushies” earlier this decade against U.S. Democrats.
The U.S. prosecution of WikiLeaks, if successful, could criminalize many kinds of investigative news reporting about government affairs, not just the WikiLeaks disclosures that are embarrassing Sweden as well as the Bush and Obama administrations. Authorities in both countries are setting the stage with pre-indictment sex and spy smears against WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange, plus an Interpol manhunt.“This all has Karl’s signature,” a reliable political source told me a week and a half ago in encouraging our Justice Integrity Project to investigate Rove’s Swedish connection. “He must be very happy. He’s right back in the middle of it. He’s making himself valuable to his new friends, seeing the U.S. government doing just what he’d like ─ and screwing his opponents big-time.”
The theory here is that Rove has something to cover up that Wikileaks has.
That’s possible, but I am more concerned about the possibility that someone in the Obama may have affirmatively sought him out in order to set something up against Assange and Wikileaks.
If that is the case, then we are in a much bigger world of hurt than previously imagined.
*A plot by Catholics in 1605 to blow up parliament.
The Congress has finally passed a bill allowing for low power community radio, the Local Community Radio Act, which will allow for expended low power, sub 100 watt, radio stations.
Until the late 1970s, legally licensed low power non commercial radio was a fairly common thing, but then NPR successfully lobbied the FCC to terminate those licenses to eliminate the competition and to open up airwaves for their expansion.
Hopefully, this will allow for a far greater diversity in radio.
Matt Taibbi is all over this, and while the suit is civil and not criminal, and so a loss would not put the accounting firm in the same position as Arthur Anderson, which was shut down as a result of a criminal conviction stemming from the collapse of Enron. (Since reversed, but they are still dead)
Basically, it comes down to a way that Lehman used an arcane financial instrument called a “Repo 105″ to conceal its debt, and his example is spot on”
These Repo 105 transactions are just loans that Ernst and Young and Lehman Brothers conspired to book as revenue from sales. If I go to you and I ask you to lend me a hundred bucks to pay for Knicks tickets, that’s a loan, and you and I and the SEC and every investor on Wall Street all know I’m in debt to you, that I owe you a hundred bucks.
Here’s how Lehman Brothers paid for their Knicks tickets: a week before the game, they went to you and offered to you “sell” you their worthless puke-stained lava lamp for a hundred bucks, with the understanding that two days after the Knicks game, it would come back and “buy” the lamp back for the same $100 (plus a small commission for your trouble). And when Lehman pocketed that $100 from the initial transaction, they decided to call that not borrowing but a true sale, i.e. they booked that hundred bucks as revenue from an honest sale of a worthless piece-of-sh%$ lava lamp.
In 2007 and 2008 Lehman would do this before the end of every quarter. They would “sell” billions of dollars of assets, typically bonds, to various companies, and use that money to pay down debt before the quarter’s end, so that they didn’t look so flat-ass broke to investors. Then, a week or so after the end of the quarter, they would go out and borrow more money, and then “buy” the assets back. The reasons they did this were myriad, but in most cases the assets they were “selling” were depressed in value at the time and could not have been sold at anything like face value had they really gone out on the market and tried. So instead of really “selling” these items on their balance sheet, they worked together with other companies to jury-rig these “repurchase” agreements that looked like sales but were actually loans.
(%$ mine)
There are two possibilities here for Ernst & Young: Either they were negligent, and hence they owe damages, or they complicit, in which case they are criminally liable, and could suffer the same fate as Anderson .
My hope is that the accounting firm will turn on former Lehman executives, most notably Dick Fuld, to get out from under, and we may see our first big banker criminal case as a result.
My fear is that this will be another 8 figure fine with no criminal prosecutions.
That you will run against him in the primaries unless he drops his idea to cut social security:
The tax deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky is just the first part of a multistage drama that is likely to further divide and weaken Democrats.
The second part, now being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan — including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.
This is bad policy, it’s bad politics.
You could call it political Seppuku, but I think that is more accurately the deliberate and premeditated murder of the New Deal, and the marginalization of the Democratic Party for at least a generation.
I can no longer attribute this to incompetence or cowardice. This is deliberate malice:
Paul Krugman laments the fact that failed economic ideas are now the conventional wisdom:
When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.
How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?
……
Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.
Go read.
It is a good analysis, but I think rather incomplete.
He seems to think that Barack Obama, in his attempts to appease Republicans, has given them cover to promulgate these failed ideas.
I think that this is too Byzantine an explanation. The simpler explanation is that Barack Obama gives lip service to these failed ideas because he actually believes in these ideas.
It explains his unwillingness to prosecute the banksters, their fraud against consumers in the HAMP, their attempts to water down financial reform, etc.
This is not cowardice. This is corporatist thinking to a degree that makes Bill Clinton looks like Karl Marx.
There is a lot of hand wringing and out rage over Haley Barbour’s comments supporting the activities of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils in the 1960s.
I think that this misses the point.
Not only does Barbour have a long tradition of appealing to bigots, but it is clear that he wants to run for president, and a not so veiled appeal to the tradition of white bigotry in the South goes a long way towards appealing to that demographic in the primaries.