Month: February 2012

Cry Me a River

No Comments

That is not the real Pope

Ok, because Natalie, my daughter, insisted on watching the Grammys, so I saw Niki Minaj’s The Exorcist inspired bit.

My reactions was, “WTF?”

But professional victim, pedophilia apologist, and talented amateur bigot, Catholic League president Bill Donohue predictably blew a gasket:

In what should come as zero surprise to anyone who watched Nicki Minaj attempt to reenact “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” during her performance at Sunday’s Grammy Awards, the Catholic League has issued a statement condemning the actions of the “Superbass” star.

As predicted by our own Maura Judkis, the faith-based organization whipped up an angry news release written by Catholic League president Bill Donohue as a response to Minaj’s rendition of her song “Roman Holiday.” Donohue mocked Minaj but primarily blamed the Recording Academy for allowing the number to air, a notable fact given that the executive producer of the Grammys and Minaj have told conflicting stories about how the performance got approved. More on that in a moment. First, the angry press release.

Well, this improves my opinion of Minaj.

There is probably a more contemptible (technically self appointed) spokesman for the Catholic Church, but none immediately come to mind.

They Are A Bunch of F%$#ing Ghouls!

No Comments

Sony Music, one of the slimiest record distributors out there, has just topped itself.

It raised prices on Whitney Houston’s music less than 12 hours after her death:

It’s easy to get so emotional about a singer after they’ve passed prematurely, as Whitney Houston did Saturday at the age of 48. But fans seeking to buy her digital albums in remembrance weren’t too happy at sudden price hikes so soon after her death.

The Brits picked up on it quickly, with London-based Next Web writer Matt Brian and The Guardian’s Josh Halliday both finding the price increases, which raised Houston’s “The Ultimate Collection” 2007 album from £5 (about $7.89) to £8 (about $12.63). In the United States, the cost is even steeper: $15 for the “Greatest Hits” collection at both Amazon (mp3 store) and iTunes.

Halliday found out that Sony Music increased the price of “The Ultimate Collection” at about 4 a.m. Sunday, not even 12 hours after news broke of Houston’s death. Fans were quick to point fingers at Apple for the anti-sale, but it turned out that when Sony bumped up the wholesale price of “The Ultimate Collection,” iTunes and other retailers automatically upped their pricing.

Not a fan, but sort of crap is cold.

H/t Chris in Paris.

Greeks Vote to Approve Their Own Suicide While the Rest of the EU Applaudes

No Comments

Their parliament has approved the new austerity plan, which will allow them to borrow money and give it to German, French, and British banks.

If I were running Greece, I would start a program of aggressive instruction in German for the populace.

If the Germans want to make Greece uninhabitable, perhaps they should accommodate the refugees.

In the meantime, Athens burns:

After violent protests left dozens of buildings aflame in Athens, the Greek Parliament voted early on Monday to approve a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by the country’s foreign lenders in exchange for new loans to keep Greece from defaulting on its debt.

Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.

The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.

But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.

It’s actually going to make things worse, because it will cause the economy to contract, and the last thing you want to do in order to get out of debt is to cut your salary.

The Bank Deal is Likely Worse Than it Sounds

No Comments

Because the details of the deal have not been released, and they may in fact not have actually been settled, which means that when they are finalized, they could be worse than what we have already heard.

In fact they almost certainly will be worse, because the state AGs and the Obama administration simply cannot afford pull defeat from the jaws of what they claim to be victory:

You know it’s bad when banks are the most truthful guys in the room.

Remember that historical mortgage settlement deal that was the lead news story on Thursday? It has been widely depicted as a done deal. The various AGs who had been holdouts said their concerns had been satisfied.

But in fact, Bank of America’s press release said that the deal was “agreements in principle” as opposed to a final agreement. The Charlotte bank had to be more precise than politicians because it is subject to SEC regulations about the accuracy of its disclosures. And if you read the template for the AG press release carefully, you can see how it finesses where the pact stands. And today, American Banker confirmed that the settlement pact is far from done, and the details will be kept from the public as long as possible, until it is filed in Federal court (because it includes injunctive relief, a judge must bless the agreement).

This may not sound all that important to laypeople, but most negotiators and attorneys will react viscerally to how negligent the behavior of the AGs has been. The most common reaction among lawyers I know who been with white shoe firms (including former partners) is “shocking”. Let me explain why.

Negotiating of large, complex deals (or even little deals) does not happen in one fell swoop. Even when the two sides have outlined the major terms, and in sone cases hammered out the really important ones in some detail, there is still a great deal of negotiating that takes place in finalizing the text of the contract. The negotiation over the definitive agreement makes a great deal of difference on how fair the pact turns out to be. For instance, one of the sayings of transaction lawyers is “He who controls the document controls the deal.” The party that writes up the initial version of the contract has undue influence because that becomes the default and the other side has to negotiate back from that language.

Politics is trumping both the law and mathematics, and this will not end well.

This is Why These F%$#s Need to Go to Jail

No Comments

Because the financial class is really a bunch of monsters:

Fannie Mae (FNMA) pulled the plug on a 2010 plan to forgive borrowers’ mortgage debt because company executives were “philosophically opposed” to the idea, a former company employee told House investigators.

…………

According to the letter, a former Fannie Mae employee told the committee that the mortgage finance company had developed a pilot program for reducing mortgage debt for borrowers who owe more on their house than the property is worth.

The purpose of the plan was to develop “a responsible way to reduce principal balances for underwater mortgage borrowers without creating undue incremental moral hazard,” the employee told the committee.

The pilot had preliminary approvals from officials at Fannie Mae, FHFA, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bank regulator, according to the former employee.

In mid-2010, two weeks before its launch, senior Fannie Mae executives cancelled the program because they were “philosophically opposed to writing down principal balances,” according to the former worker, who was quoted in the letter without being identified.

“I believe that we could be saving tens of billions of dollars while also helping stabilize housing prices and stimulating economic growth,” the former employee said, according to the letter.

They f%$#ed the economy, but they are so convinced of their ultimate virtue that they are acting against the interests of the companies that they manage, and the taxpayers, because they have bought into a, “heads I win, tails you lose,” vision of crony capitalism in which they are the arbiters of virtue.

These people are dangerous sociopaths.

What Ken Livingstone Said

No Comments

In the time I was mayor, I used to do meetings with City bankers and I’d often open by saying, ‘This isn’t the world I would have created . . .’ [Bankers’ bonuses are] like penis extensions, among a small league of men – mine is bigger than yours.

. . . The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

— The former (and hopefully future) Mayor of London Ken Livingston on the banksters and other captains of industry

(emphasis mine)

I think that this is an important thing to say.  One of the primary defenses of the banksters and the rest of the parasites on our economy is that their success is somehow the product of their virtue and ability.

This is a lie.  It has always been a law, and so long as we allow the myth that these folks are anything other than amoral winners of the genetic lottery, we grant them a legitimacy that they they do not deserve, and we do so at our own peril.

The Drug War Sucks

No Comments

We’ve kind of been rolling the trifecta with colds.

Sharon* has been on antibiotics for a cough and sinus for a few days, and after being blown off by our kid’s pediatrician’s replacement doc, so we went to an urgi-care clinic, and we got diagnoses for them, and me as well, since I had a nagging cough, and it had gotten bad enough that I wasn’t waiting until I saw my doctor at my regularly scheduled appointment with my doctor.

Charlie has a sinus infection, Natalie’s sinus infection migrated down to pharyngitis, and mine had migrated down to a full blown bronchitis.

In addition, Marilyn, my mother-in-law is at Sinai Hospital for what appears to be pneumonia.

So, what does this have to do with the drug war?

Well, in addition to antibiotics, both Charlie and I were prescribed decongestants, and both of these medications contained Pseudoephedrine, and so I could not buy both, because federal regulations say that it’s too much, and we might ………… cook meth.

The war on drugs is, to misappropriate the words of Nietzsche, like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

This Isn’t Water, It’s Shoggoth Blood!

2 Comments

Russian researchers in Antarctica have drilled through more than 2 miles of ice and extracted a ten million year old water sample from “Lake Vostok” underneath.

Between the novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing as Don A. Stuart), the oeuvre of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, and John Carpenter’s take on cinematic take on Antarctic science, this is not something that I find particularly reassuring.

Two Banks Get Eated

No Comments

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Charter National Bank and Trust, Hoffman Estates, IL
  2. SCB Bank, Shelbyville, IN

An average week, and this Shelbyville is nowhere near Springfield (about 200 miles), so it’s not the real (Simpsons)  Springfield.

    Full FDIC list

    So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

    And here is the detail, since it is early in the year:

    Obama and Contraception

    No Comments

    When your opposition looks this pampered and out of touch, you have a winning issue

    So, in the ginned up controversy over the requirement that religious non-profits cover contraception for their employees, Obama has split the baby:

    Mr. Obama announced that rather than requiring religiously affiliated charities and universities to pay for contraceptives for their employees, the cost would be shifted to health insurance companies. The initial rule caused a political uproar among some Catholics and others who portrayed it as an attack on religious freedom.

    Meeting with his top advisers in the Oval Office last week amid rising anger from Catholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders — a fed-up Mr. Obama issued an order meant for Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. Ms. Sebelius and agency lawyers had initially told the president they needed a year to work out a compromise that had seemed obvious to some in the administration from the start: make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies.

    But in difficult internal negotiations, a group of advisers had bested Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others and sold the president on a stricter rule. Now the political furor surrounding it was threatening to consume signs of economic improvement giving a boost to the White House and put the Obama re-election campaign on the defensive.

    So the mandate for coverage is now on insurance companies, rather than the employers.

    If this is the end of this matter, then this is a good thing.

    My concern, based on past history, is that this is only the first step in a larger retreat.

    Then again, there are a number of people I respect who see it as eleventy dimensional chess, with people like Amanda Marcotte suggesting that Obama punked both the Conference of Bishops and the woman hating wing of the Republican Party, by forcing them to publicly oppose contraception, which is used by something like 99% of all sexually active women in the US at one time or another.

    Certainly the optics, for now at least, are good, and the effect on coverage of this change is zero, so it’s a win win.

    But the most powerful knock against Obama is his unwillingness to fight, and in the 2-3 days before this decision, news outlets were starting to note that there are 28 states that have had an identical mandate, and have had such a mandate for years, with nary a peep from the pedophile protection bureau US Conference of Catholic Bishops, so it was clear that the worm was turning in the media as well, so keeping this up until they blinked would, to my mind, have been the optimal approach.

    [on edit]
    I think that the real policy and political implications are best synthesized by the following from Lindsay Beyerstein:

    But if the bishops won’t accept this deal, Obama should stop trying to accomodate them. Respect for religious freedom does not include paying solemn lip service to the contraception cooties.

    Sorry Felix, You are Wrong

    No Comments

    Yesterday, I talked about Dave Dayen and Yves Smith’s take on the settlement, and their take was “bankster bailout”, and I noted that Felix Salmon’s take was that it was a good thing.

    Well, now the journalist who is I think the best person (this side of Jon Stewart, anyway) at distilling the complexities of Wall Street to you average reader, Matt Taibbi has weighed in, and not only is he calling bailout for Wall Street crooks, but he apologizes for his earlier optimism. What’s more, he distills what it all means in one paragraph:

    But this deal not only doesn’t end robosigning, it officially makes getting caught for it inexpensive. Shame on me for ever thinking that might be a good thing.

    That is the final word.  Fraud and forgery have been given a price tag, and it’s less than 2 grand.

    OK, These Are Some Tax Collectors That I Could Love

    No Comments

    So, the Italian police have taken to staking out posh neighborhoods and pulling over drivers of expensive cars. They then take their personal information, and send that to the tax bureau to make sure that their lifestyle matches up to their declared income:

    Police fanned out across Milan in late January halting more than 350 vehicles, mostly luxury SUVs and Porsches.

    At checkpoints, including one adjacent to the fashionable Corso Como, the police got the driver’s license and registration, which they passed on to the national tax agency. The tax authorities will use the data to check if the cars’ owners had declared enough income — and of course paid the right amount of income taxes — to justify their lifestyles.

    It was at least the fifth raid targeting wealthy Italians since a Dec. 30 sweep at the posh Cortina d’Ampezzo ski resort, where 251 high-end cars were stopped, including Ferrari and Lamborghini supercars, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Feb. 13 issue. Rome, Portofino on the Italian Riviera and Florence have also been targeted.

    I’m Matthew Saroff, and I approve of this tactic.

    So, the Pedophile Protection Bureau Wants Contraception Coverage Banned

    No Comments

    So, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, or more accurately the guy they hired to represent their position, has admitted that they want to ban coverage for all forms of contraception for everyone:

    “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” [Conference general council Anthony] Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

    That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”
    “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

    They want to pull all coverage for contraception for everyone, and so we should take it seriously when they they say want to ban all contraception.

    At least the Taliban does not find f%$#ing little boys to be a moral imperative.

    The Obama Administration Just F%$#ed Us All to Benefit the Banks Again

    No Comments

    Well, it looks like everyone (except Oklahoma) has signed onto Obama’s bank sellout settlement :

    After months of painstaking talks, government authorities and five of the nation’s biggest banks have agreed to a $26 billion settlement that could provide relief to nearly two million current and former American homeowners harmed by the bursting of the housing bubble, state and federal officials said. It is part of a broad national settlement aimed at halting the housing market’s downward slide and holding the banks accountable for foreclosure abuses.

    Despite the billions earmarked in the accord, the aid will help a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure. The success could depend in part on how effectively the program is carried out because earlier efforts by Washington aimed at troubled borrowers helped far fewer than had been expected.

    Still, the agreement is the broadest effort yet to help borrowers owing more than their houses are worth, with roughly one million expected to have their mortgage debt reduced by lenders or able to refinance their homes at lower rates. Another 750,000 people who lost their homes to foreclosure from September 2008 to the end of 2011 will receive checks for about $2,000. The aid is to be distributed over three years.

    An announcement was scheduled in Washington for Thursday morning. The final details of the pact, including how many states would participate, were expected to be announced then. The two biggest holdouts, California and New York, now plan to sign on, according to the officials with knowledge of the matter who did not want to be identified because the negotiations were not completed.

    So, if a bankster steals your house, you get $2000, which might cover the cost of having all your furniture hauled to the dump.

    And as for the write-downs, that’s about $17 billion for about one million home owners ($5 B goes to the states), or about $17k  for homeowners, but there are 11 million homeowners under water, and on average it’s more than $50K each.

    And, BTW, the banks get to do this for mortgages that they manage, but don’t hold, meaning that the money is coming from investors, pension funds, and the taxpayer, and this serves to strengthen the second mortgages, which the banks do hold.

    I’m with Yves Smith’s take on this, “The Top Twelve Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage-Settlement.html,” not Felix Salmon’s rather more optimistic take on this.

    This is not a settlement, it’s another sellout and back door subsidy to the banksters.

    The Foreclosure Sellout Settlement Is Getting Weird

    No Comments

    I missed it, but the New York AG canceled a press conference about his position on the mortgage/foreclosure fraud settlement at the last minute:

    New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman late Tuesday postponed a much anticipated conference call with reporters that was set up to announce whether the state would participate in broad a settlement with five big banks over foreclosure practices. Schneiderman, who is co-chair of a new mortgage fraud task force, told reporters in late January that he was not ready to participate in state settlement negotiations. Observers had speculated that he might announce his participation.

    This is happening despite the full court press from the Obama administration for this deal to go through.

    The sticking point appears to be the MERS lawsuit, and the banks want this dropped before they sign off on any deal.

    I think that this delay is a good thing because:

    • The deal is basically another bailout for the banks.
    • As it gets nearer to the election without a deal, the more it becomes likely that the Obama administration will be forced to go after them for electoral benefit, as opposed to just going after some small fry.

    This should get interesting.

    More on the Catholic Church and Sh%$

    No Comments

    Amanda Marcotte has a great example of just what “public accommodation” means, and it is both illustrative of just how hypocritical the Catholic Church is being over the requirement that they follow the law in insuring their employess.

    It has the additional advantage of goring my own ethnic ox, albeit that I am not at a black hat Jew:

    There was an interesting story a few months ago here in Brooklyn about a privately owned company that serves the public that was engaging in discrimination against women.

    Women who ride the B110 bus in Brooklyn can’t sit where they want unless they’re okay with being berated by Orthodox Jewish men, even though technically the B110 is a public bus.

    The B110, which travels between Williamsburg and Borough Park is open to anyone, has a route number, and goes to city bus stops. However, the line is run by a private company under a decades-old agreement with the city, and since the bus is designed to serve the Hasidic community in the area, a board of rabbis sets the rules. They’ve decreed that women should sit in the back and men should sit in the front to avoid contact betwen members of the opposite sex.

    When it was exposed that a bunch of religious fanatics were doing this, the city came down on them and said, “God or no god, you can’t discriminate against women if you’re serving the public.”

    She’s right.  Hospitals and universities  serve the public provide public accomodation.

    The Catholic Church has no more right to make its employees sit at the back of the bus for their insurance than do those Jews running that bus line.