Year: 2010

Supreme Court Eviscerates Campaign Finance Reform

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Basically, the Supreme Court just said that corporations can run any sort of ad that they want:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court struck down decades-old restrictions on corporate campaign spending, reversing two of its precedents and freeing companies to conduct advertising campaigns that explicitly try to sway voters.

The 5-4 majority, invoking the Constitution’s free-speech clause, said the government lacks a legitimate basis to restrict independent campaign expenditures by companies. The ruling went well beyond the circumstances in the case before the justices, a dispute over a documentary film attacking then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority. “This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

They have just deliberately created a “Wild West” for campaign finance, and they did it because they bought into the myth of Obama small donors (he out-raised from Wall Street fat cats against both Clinton and McCain).

About the only bright spot on this is that Sotomayor has given indications that she opposes she is dubious of the according of “person” status to corporations, which was done by a court clerk in the footnotes (no, I am not joking) in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. (see Sotomayor’s comments here)

There is a decent chance that Obama will get another opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice before 2012, and it’s very important to counterbalance the nut-jobs that Bush put in.

Deep Thought

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Reminds Me of a Certain Super Bowl Ad

Hillary Clinton has just announced that it’s now official US policy for countries to allow their internet access to be free and uncensored:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled on Thursday a new U.S. policy that encourages the world’s governments to ensure their citizens have open access to the Internet.

The speech comes a little more than a week after Google’s blunt declaration about Chinese censorship and illegal electronic intrusions, and the company’s assertion that it will pull out of China if it can’t reach a reasonable understanding with the Beijing government.

9:54 a.m. EST Clinton took the stage here at the Newseum, a museum dedicated to the news industry, and appealed to the audience to think of the communications networks that have been destroyed in last week’s massive earthquake in Haiti. She also noted how a mother and daughter in Haiti enabled their rescue by sending a text message. Clinton called communication networks a “new nervous system” for the world.

“In many respects, information has never been so free,” Clinton said. She referred to the way that virtually anyone can broadcast information to the Internet at any time. But governments can also use Internet and communications technologies to repress their people, she said, “just as steel can be used to build hospitals or machine guns.”

My first thought was, “Good for her,” and by extension, Barack Obama.

My one, and the the one that falls into the “Deep Thought” category, is that picture really looks like that “1984” ad that an Obamanite put out during the primaries.

Obama Proposes a Return to Glass Steagall

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First Photo of Volker and Obama Together in Months

Or something very much like that.

The changes proposed are very significant, or at least they appear to be significant.

Among snap shot of the provisions are:

  • Commercial banks would be prohibited from trading on their own behalf, so called proprietary trading.
  • Commercial banks would, “would no longer be allowed to engage in trading unrelated to their customers’ interests.”
  • Commercial banks would be prohibited from investing in or advising hedge funds or private-equity firms.
  • Extending the current cap of 10% of US federally insured deposits to non-insured assets.

I think that the first thing to note here is that Barack Obama has had this in his back pocket for some time, not because he wanted to do this, but because there might come a time where he needed to, and following the Coakley debacle in Massachusetts, he felt that he had to do this

A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that, “Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street.” A full 95 percent said the economy was important or very important when it came to deciding their vote.

I don’t think that until Tuesday, Obama understood how tremendously pissed off the voters are about the bank bailout, and the bonuses, so chalk one up for my hope that if Coakley lost, Obama would get a clue.

Of course, it still has to go through the banking committees, where the Republicans will be unified against it, and where many of the Blue Dog and New Dem corporatist pukes sit, because it’s a good place to raise money from.

His proposals will only work if Obama kicks ass and takes name in Congress, otherwise, they will remain in committee for a long time, or be watered down to the point on meaninglessness.

*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.
†Or perhaps leaving a loophole for the Calamari bankers is considered to be a feature, rather than a bug. Summers and Geithner still work for him after all.

Full text of statement after break:

The Obama-Volcker remarks in full:

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

SUBJECT: ADDITIONAL REFORMS TO THE FINANCIAL SYSTEM

THE DIPLOMATIC RECEPTION ROOM, THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
11:39 A.M. EST, THURSDAY, JANUARY 21, 2010

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Good morning, everybody. I just had a very productive meeting with two members of my Economic Recovery Advisory Board: Paul Volcker, who is the former chair of the Federal Reserve Board, and Bill Donaldson, previously the head of the SEC. And I deeply appreciate the counsel of these two leaders and the board, that they’ve offered as we have dealt with a broad array of very difficult economic challenges.

Now over the past two years more than 7 million Americans have lost their jobs in the deepest recession our country has known in generations. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t hear from folks who are hurting. And every day we are working to put our economy back on track and put America back to work.

But even as we dig our way out of this deep hole, it’s important that we not lose sight of what led us into this mess in the first place. This economic crisis began as a financial crisis when banks and financial institutions took huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses. When the dust settled and this binge of irresponsibility was over, several of the world’s oldest and largest financial institutions had collapsed or were on the verge of doing so. Markets plummeted, credit dried up, and jobs were vanishing by hundreds of thousands each month. We were on the precipice — precipice of a second Great Depression.

And to avoid this calamity, the American people, who were already struggling in their own right, were forced to rescue financial firms facing crisis largely of their own creation. And that rescue, undertaken by the previous administration, was deeply offensive, but it was a necessary thing to do, and it succeeded in stabilizing financial systems and helping to avert that depression.

Since that time, over the past year, my administration has recovered most of what the federal government provided the banks. And last week I proposed a fee to be paid by the largest financial firms in order to recover every last dime.

But that’s not all we have to do. We have to enact common-sense reforms that will protect American taxpayers and the American economy from future crises as well.

For while the financial system is far stronger today than it was one year ago, it’s still operating under the same rules that led to its near collapse.

These are rules that allowed firms to act contrary to the interests of customers, to conceal their exposure to debt through complex financial dealings, to benefit from taxpayer-insured deposits while making speculative investments, and to take on risks so vast that they posed threats to the entire system. That’s why we are seeking reforms to protect consumers.

We intend to close loopholes that allowed big financial firms to trade risky financial products, like credit-default swaps and other derivatives, without oversight; to identify system-wide risks that could cause a meltdown; to strengthen capital and liquidity requirements, to make the system more stable, and to ensure that the failure of any large firm does not take the entire economy down with it.

Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.

Now, limits on the risks major financial firms can take are central to the reforms that I have proposed. They are central to the legislation that has passed the House, under the leadership of Chairman Barney Frank, and that we’re working to pass in the Senate, under the leadership of Chairman Chris Dodd.

As part of these efforts, today, I’m proposing two additional reforms that I believe will strengthen the financial system while preventing future crises.

First, we should no longer allow banks to stray too far from their central mission of serving their customers. In recent years, too many financial firms have put taxpayer money at risk by operating hedge funds and private equity funds and making riskier investments, to reap a quick reward.

And these firms have taken these risks while benefitting from special financial privileges that are reserved only for banks. Our government provides deposit insurance and other safeguards and guarantees to firms that operate banks.

We do so because a stable and reliable banking system promotes sustained growth and because we learned how dangerous the failure of that system can be during the Great Depression. But these privileges were not created to bestow banks operating hedge funds or private equity funds with an unfair advantage.

When banks benefit from the safety net that taxpayers provide, which includes lower-cost capital, it is not appropriate for them to turn around and use that cheap money to trade for profit. And that is especially true when this kind of trading often puts banks in direct conflict with their customers’ interests.

The fact is, these kinds of trading operations can create enormous and costly risks, endangering the entire bank if things go wrong.

We simply cannot accept a system in which hedge funds or private- equity firms inside banks can place huge, risky bets that are subsidized by taxpayers and that could pose a conflict of interest. And we cannot accept a system in which shareholders make money on these operations if a bank wins, but taxpayers foot the bill if a bank loses.

It’s for these reasons that I’m proposing a simple and common- sense reform, which we’re calling the Volcker rule, after this tall guy behind me. Banks will no longer be allowed to own, invest or sponsor hedge funds, private-equity funds or proprietary trading operations for their own profit, unrelated to serving their customers. If financial firms want to trade for profit, that’s something they’re free to do. Indeed, doing so responsibly is a good thing for the markets and the economy. But these firms should not be allowed to run these hedge funds and private equities — funds while running a bank backed by the American people.

In addition, as part of our efforts to protect against future crises, I’m also proposing that we prevent the further consolidation of our financial system. There has long been a deposit cap in place to guard against too much risk being concentrated in a single bank. The same principle should apply to wider forms of funding employed by large financial institutions in today’s economy. The American people will not be served by a financial system that comprises just a few massive firms. That’s not good for consumers; it’s not good for the economy. And through this policy, that is an outcome we will avoid.

And my message to members of Congress of both parties is that we have to get this done. And my message to leaders of the financial industry is to work with us, and not against us, on needed reforms. I welcome constructive input from folks in the financial sector. But what we’ve seen so far in recent weeks is an army of industry lobbyists from Wall Street descending on Capitol Hill to try and block basic and common-sense rules of the road that would protect our economy and the American people.

So if these folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have. And my resolve is only strengthened when I see a return to old practices in some of the very firms fighting reform; when I see soaring profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms claiming that they can’t lend more to small businesses, they can’t keep credit- card rates low, they can’t pay a fee to refund taxpayers for the bailout without passing on the cost to shareholders or customers. That’s the claims they’re making.

It’s exactly this kind of irresponsibility that makes clear reform is necessary.

Now, we’ve come through a terrible crisis. The American people have paid a very high price. We simply cannot return to business as usual. That’s why we’re going to ensure that Wall Street pays back the American people for the bailout. That’s why we’re going to rein in the excess and abuse that nearly brought down our financial system. That’s why we’re going to pass these reforms into law.

This Should Scare the Crap Out of You

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Josh Marshall got a letter from an anonymous staffer, and while the whole letter is profoundly disturbing, the excerpt that Mr. Marshall put before the break is f%$#ing terrifying:

The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.

This is a recipe for disaster for the Democratic party, and by extension, for the country, because people want politicians to stand for something, even if it’s wrong, and the Republicans waiting in the wings are far less moderate than Bush/Cheney/Rove.

Think about that: Republicans in power who would make us fondly remember the moderation of George W. Bush.

You may change your underwear now.

Best, Satan

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A letter to the editor from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Dear Pat Robertson,

I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so I’m all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating. I may be evil incarnate, but I’m no welcher.

The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle.

Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Haven’t you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”?

If I had a thing going with Haiti, there’d be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style.

Nothing against it — I’m just saying: Not how I roll.

You’re doing great work, Pat, and I don’t want to clip your wings — just, come on, you’re making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad.

Keep blaming God. That’s working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.

Best, Satan

(line breaks are mine, the LTE had none)

Josh Marshall is Right, and Was Right in 2004

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In the aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, a lot of people are wondering what the hell happened.

The talking heads inside the Beltway are sure that it’s because Obama is too Librul™, of course, but I think that Josh Marshall talked about the core problem in August of 2004.

He was talking about the Bush-Kerry campaign, and he characterized it as follows:

Let’s call it the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.

It goes something like this.

………

Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really — a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they’re tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.

………

One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.

………

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.

………

Only now, it isn’t the Republicans bitch slapping anyone. It’s the Democrats who bitch slap themselves.

Or as Zaid Jilani’s southern ConservaDem friend says:

And can I say this? F*ck the Democrats. They couldn’t get s%$# done with 60 seats, why the hell would I care if they have 59? F%$# them seriously we deserve to lose Congress this year. And don’t bitch and whine about it either how much has changed since we took over in 2006? Ain’t s%$# as far as I can tell. We capitulated to Bush, then capitulated to Republicans and now are just capitulating to ourselves.

F%$# it dude, I mean Republicans get whatever the f%$# they want with 50 seats and we can’t do f%$# all we deserve to lose

(“%$#” mine, “*” original)

Fundamentally, when we look at what is going on in DC, it looks like no one in the Senate or the White House is even trying to make substantive change. (Pelosi, at least, creates the appearance that she is trying to do something)

What’s more, among the DC Dems, there has been near constant bitch slapping of the Party Base, whether it’s the capitulation on the public option, the labor union insurance surtax, or the constant drum beat of how “the left” hates the Democratic Party because they want to primary DINOs (Democrat In Name Only) who have safe seats.

The central campaign platform of the Republican Party is that government can’t do anything. The Democratic Party seems to try very hard to prove them right.

Because It’s Not a War on Islam

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Well, they have just discovered that sniper scopes purchased for the Marine Corps contain verses from the Christian bible:

Following an ABC News report that thousands of gun sights used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan are inscribed with secret Bible references, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said the Corps is ‘concerned’ and will discuss the matter with the weapons manufacturer.

“We are aware of the issue and are concerned with how this may be perceived,” Capt. Geraldine Carey, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps, said in a statement to ABC News. “We will meet with the vendor to discuss future sight procurements.” Carey said that when the initial deal was made in 2005 it was the only product that met the Corps needs.

However, a spokesperson for CentCom, the U.S. military’s overall command in Iraq and Aghanistan, said he did not understand why the issue was any different from U.S. money with religious inscriptions on it.

(emphasis mine)

Ummm………Because inscribing Christian verses on weapons that you kill Muslims with will make it that much more difficult for US troops to train with Muslim troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and because it’s likely to inspire more violence against American troops, because it is another piece of evidence that Islamic radicals will use to show that this is a war against Islam?

That kind of fits the definition of, “Contrary to good order and discipline,” doesn’t it.

The Marines get it, the US Army doesn’t.

Interestingly enough, it’s the the Army, along with the US Air Force in which the bulk of complaints about discrimination by aggressive Evangelicals have been reported.

It appears that this has been common knowledge among gun enthusiasts for about 4 years, but the military never noticed what the Trijicon corporation was doing.

41

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The Boston Globe calls it for Scott Brown, so he will be the 41st Republican in the Senate.

I was right with my prediction, and that sucks. Normally I’m wrong.

For the optimists, refer to my earlier take on potential positives of Coakley losing, (the bullet points toward the end of the post) but for me, this just sucks.

Two words: Budget Reconciliation.

Jon Stewart captures the essence of what is wrong with both candidate Coakley (first 5½ minutes), and the Democratic Party (after).

Not Enough Bullets

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It looks like the fat cat Wall Street Bankers are looking at a legal challenge to Obama’s proposed bank tax:

Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on the matter.

Ummm ……… Despite the fact that these guys destroy £7 of wealth for each dollar that they are paid, and the fact that this is intended to collect money to replace those spent under the TARP law, which required such a levy, they still believe themselves to be the masters of the universe, and they are outraged at that Obama has unveiled a modest tax on their liabilities and spoken about them with less than glowing terms.

It’s really kind of whiny, since the tax is modest, and largely geared toward forestalling more punitive measures floating around Congress.

The tax is nominally 15 basis points (0.15%) on liabilities over $50 billion, and it appears to weigh more heavily on investment banks than depositor banks, though the legal distinction was erased when the brokers all became bank holding companies. (See the FAQ from the Treasury Department)

What’s more the tax is profoundly weak tea, as the effective tax is halved, yielding a tax of 7½ basis points, which is well under the 78 basis point advantage in cost of funds that the “too big to fail banks” have over their smaller brethren.

Note also that this only covers the $117 billion or so of the TARP, but when other bailouts are considered, we are approaching $30 trillion in money handed to banks, without a thought of clawing that back.

So they are getting a sweetheart deal, and they are screaming like stuck pigs.

They do not realize how angry people are, and they won’t until people literally start burning down their houses with torches.

There is a Point Where Obama Moves Beyond “Looking Ahead,” and Becomes a Co-Conspirator

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Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine looks at the deaths of three detainees in detention at Guantánamo, and concludes that it is likely that they were tortured to death, and almost certain that there is a pervasive and ongoing coverup of the details of their deaths:

……… Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the George W. Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

The law, both US and international, is clear here: covering up a war crime is a war crime.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners.

As news of the deaths emerged the following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown. The authorities ordered nearly all the reporters at Guantánamo to leave and those en route to turn back. The commander at Guantánamo, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, then declared the deaths “suicides.” In an unusual move, he also used the announcement to attack the dead men. “I believe this was not an act of desperation,” he said, “but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.” Reporters accepted the official account, and even lawyers for the prisoners appeared to believe that they had killed themselves. Only the prisoners’ families in Saudi Arabia and Yemen rejected the notion.

Two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base, issued a report supporting the account originally advanced by Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet. The Pentagon declined to make the NCIS report public, and only when pressed with Freedom of Information Act demands did it disclose parts of the report, some 1,700 pages of documents so heavily redacted as to be nearly incomprehensible. The NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, made clear why the Pentagon had been unwilling to make its conclusions public. The official story of the prisoners’ deaths was full of unacknowledged contradictions, and the centerpiece of the report—a reconstruction of the events—was simply unbelievable.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

(emphasis mine)

This is well into the territory of the SNL phony news report that anti-Apartheid activist Stephen Biko had died in custody as the result of his hunger strike, and please ignore the skull fracture, which was a result of a good faith effort by the authorities attempt to force feed him roast beef through his skull.

It is clear that there is a pervasive and ongoing cover-up of this affair within the military. It’s also clear that it is large enough that political appointees within the Department of Defense have to be giving their tacit approval of a continuing deception.

Whoever this individual is, they are, as I noted earlier, guilty of war crimes.

With the appearance of Horton’s story on the web, and Keith Olbermann’s show, everyone in the military and civilian chains of command at the Pentagon and the White House has to be aware of these issues.

If immediate action, by which I mean an independent investigation, is not taken to uncover the facts, and then these individuals, including Barack Obama, are war criminals.

I understand that the Obama administration finds investigating what appears to be a multiple cases of torturing people to death to be politically inconvenient, but political inconvenience does not excuse law breaking.

More Ass Covering by the Fed

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It’s clear that Bernanke does not want the rock turned over to see what slimy things live underneath, and so we have some more measures taken by the Federal Reserve to try to mute calls for an audit, and perhaps a re-evaluation of the role and powers of the institution.

They have implemented more consumer friendly credit card rules (also here and here), and now Bernanke is saying that the central bank would welcome an audit of their dealings with AIG by the GAO.

In the latter quote, the pertinent quote is this:

The invitation does not represent any procedural changes, as GAO could have reviewed the issue without such an invitation. But the does letter highlight the Fed’s sensitivity to mounting criticism to the events leading up to the bailout.

So, if the Federal Reserve has no choice, then they will write a nice letter saying, “Okily dokily, neighbor.”

I expect that if the GAO conducts an audit, it will take crowbars and explosives to actually extract any meaningful information though.

Bad Day for Lowbrow Literature

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Robert B. Parker, author of the Spencer detective novels, and Erich Segal, author of Love Story have both died.

I don’t mean to imply that they were bad authors, I rather enjoyed reading the Spencer books, and I have never read Segal, and so cannot comment on his work at all, but rather I am saying that their books were decidedly mass market, as opposed to the more erudite stuff that you see reviewed in gushing tones on NPR.

Received via Email

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Specifically, this was received by Dutchie on the Short Skool Buss BBS:

So after landing my new job as a Wal-Mart greeter, a good find for many retirees, I lasted less than a day……

About two hours into my first day on the job a very loud, unattractive, mean-acting woman walked into the store with her two kids, yelling obscenities at them all the way through the entrance. As I had been instructed, I said pleasantly, ‘Good morning and welcome to Wal-Mart. Nice children you have there. Are they twins?’

The ugly woman stopped yelling long enough to say, ‘Hell no, they ain’t twins. The oldest one’s 9, and the other one’s 7. Why the hell would you think they’re twins? Are you blind, or just stupid?’ So I replied, ‘I’m neither blind nor stupid, Ma’am, It’s just hard to believe that you got laid twice. Have a good day and thank you for shopping at Wal-Mart.’

My supervisor said I probably wasn’t cut out for this line of work.

Brilliant.

Buh Bye New York Times

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One of the dirty secret of the newspaper business is that people do not pay for the news.

People pay a portion of the cost of setting ink to paper, but the remainder of the cost of producing a physical copy, as well as the cost of producing the content is covered by advertising.

The problem is that the most lucrative part of advertising is the classified. at about $55 for 3 lines, it generates a lot of revenue.

Unfortunately, Craigslist is better and cheaper, so newspapers find their classified revenue shrinking.

Additionally, after years of playing the Wall Street game of cutting costs, meaning reporters and in depth stories, and quality in general, their product is less attractive.

In the case of the New York Times, this has been further complicated by the fact that they plunked down a huge amount of cash for their brand new narcissistic monument to the New York Times office building, so they find themselves with a cash flow problem.

It appears that they are looking at setting up a pay wall around the newspaper to generate the desired revenue.

They have forgotten the disaster that was Times Select, which shut down after 2 years, when they generated very little revenue, and their opinion pieces largely dropped of the map on the Internet.

People pay for the Wall Street Journal because it provides breaking financial news, which is something that people have traditionally been willing to pay for.

General news, probably not, and so I’ll probably find other sources to link to.

Holy Crap! I’m Not in Boston Today!

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Note: I’m post dating this to keep it on the top of the post for the weekend. Scroll down for new posts.

In February 1985, I went to my first science fiction convention. In October, I ran a fiction convention, NotJustAnother1 Con (NJAC). I did it again in 1986, and then started Arisia, Inc. and ran the first two conventions 1990 and 1991.

About 4 years ago, I realized something important: I don’t like science fiction conventions.

When I go to a con, I don’t go to program items, I either work the con, or I self medicate.*

What’s more, my involvement with running a con completely subsumes my life, and I have a family now, and, quite honestly, it’s a destructive addiction thing to me, and no one wants to work with a self-destructive addict, and I don’t want to be one.

It only took me 20 years to realize that I hated my hobby/obsession, and, honestly, I’ve always found the community rather unremarkable.†

So I cut my losses, and following a remarkably unpleasant exchange with Arisia, Incorporated and the for-profit database vendor to whom they have outsourced their attendance and mailing list management, I had my information, and that of my wife and children, expunged from the Arisia database.‡

Maybe, the next time I think about calling someone “#@&ing stupid”, perhaps this experience will make me a bit kinder.§

In any case, I was driving to pick up my Son, and his drum kit, from school today, and there was an announcement for a Martin Luther King day symposium, and I realised, “MLK’s Birthday? Is it Arisia again?”

So I called up their web page, and yes, it is this weekend …… Though it’s technically in Cambridge, across the Charles River from Boston.

The first few years after I severed ties with the con, and the 501(c)3 corporation, I worried about it sucking me back in, but I hadn’t thought about the con in months, and only made the connection because the MLK birthday announcement triggered a connection.

I find this amazing, because just a year ago, I was contacted regarding a potential dispute with an artist, whose graphic art work is the official artist, and I found that it left me pissed off for a week.

If anyone from Arisia is reading this, I will paraphrase what I said about the time:

Please note that this is NOT intended to prohibit or discourage any individual to contact me personally in a purely social context, I just don’t want to discuss, or be involved with Arisia.

I would sooner give Dick Cheney a sponge bath than get sucked back in.

*Mammoth, some would say legendary, drunken binges.
†Which anyone who has ever discussed SF Fans with me knows.
‡What part of “remove me from the list” is so hard to understand? Needless to say, this Further justified my sense of ambivalence toward science fiction fans.
§NoT!!!. I’ll still judge them harshly. Let’s be honest here. I’m going to be calling people who do stupid things while I still have two brain cells left to rub together.

OK ……………… Weird

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Pyrofarmer, one of the regulars on the Shortskoolbus BBS had the following exchange:

My nearby farmer was asking me if I watched some Obermann segment the other night about health care?

‘No, but aren’t you going to loose your GOP membership for watching him?’

‘Have you tried to watch Beck or listened to Rush lately? They’re out of their f%$#ing minds!

(%$# mine)

You don’t have to be a Democratn to realize that Fox News resides in Bizarro World.

Japan Proposing Carbon Tax

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Well, it’s nice that that the conservative Liberal Democratic Party is not in power, because now the Japanese government is proposing a carbon levy on marine fuel:

Japan, one of the world’s top shipping operators, will submit details of its proposal for an international levy on marine fuel ahead of a meeting of the U.N.’s shipping agency in March, a government official said on Friday.

Under the proposal, which was first touted last year as an alternative to an idea supported by some European countries to introduce an emissions trading system in the sector, money raised would be used to help cut carbon dioxide emissions relating to shipping in developing countries.

Funds would be spent in areas including improving conditions at ship recycling yards, many of which are located in India and Bangladesh, the official said.

Ships that improve their fuel efficiency and new ships that exceed efficiency requirements would be offered partial refunds on the levy.

(emphasis mine)

Everyone wins, except, of course, the traders on Wall Street, the City, and the Nihombashi in Tokyo, because they don’t get to charge commissions on the fees for carbon trading, charge yet more fees for creating carbon based derivatives, and then get bailed out by the taxpayers when their house of cards collapses.

I can live with that.