Consumers are using their credit cards again

People who are worried about their jobs and their future probably aren't going to be shopping with their credit card. Well, either that or they have nothing else left to spend so are burning credit. Consumer confidence has been increasing but we've also seen a lot of ongoing credit defaults and bankruptcies. Before either is assigned to this substantial increase we need to see more data. Reuters:

U.S. outstanding consumer installment credit shot upward in December as shoppers boosted their credit-card debt for the first time in more than two years, the Federal Reserve said Monday.

Total credit outstanding climbed $6.1 billion, nearly triple the $2.3 billion that Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast, after an upwardly revised $2 billion increase in November.

December marked the third successive month in which consumer credit outstanding grew. It had risen by a steep $7.7 billion in October before the November and December gains.

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French Prime Minister flew with family to Egypt for vacation at Mubarak's expense

And by saying "Mubarak's expense" this of course means Egypt. How can anyone believe such a boondoggle is correct in any way? This also says a lot about the links between Mubarak and world leaders. Would it really come as a surprise if any other world leaders had similar experiences? The PM now claims this information is being released in the name of transparency but it's asking a lot for anyone to believe such a statement. AFP:

The statement said the prime minister "at the invitation of the Egyptian authorities" had "used a plane from the Egyptian government fleet to travel from Aswan to Abu Simbel."

The statement said Fillon met Mubarak in the southern city of Aswan on December 30.

"He (Fillon) also embarked on a boat trip on the Nile in the same conditions," meaning also at the expense of the Egyptian authorities, it said.

Fillon and his family were "lodged by the Egyptian authorities" during their trip to Egypt, which lasted from December 26 until January 2, it said.

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Why is Wall Street using billions of taxpayer dollars to finance projects for the ultra-rich?

This is beyond silly, but this is our Wall Street government. It would be nice to see a politician from either party either scrap this program immediately or at least return it to what it was supposed to be in the beginning. For all of the right wing talk about wealth distribution, the reality of programs like this and much of Washington's policies (both parties, of course) is about wealth distribution from the middle class and poor to the rich. Wall Street in particular has benefited from enough government handouts, so why are they still pilfering the system? Absolutely sickening.

The biggest beneficiary of taxpayer help for the Blackstone revamp was Prudential Financial Inc., the second-largest U.S. life insurer. The company got $15.6 million in tax credits from the U.S. Department of the Treasury for helping to fund the project, according to Chicago city records, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second-largest U.S. bank by assets, also took in money by serving as a lender and the monitor of Blackstone construction financing, city records show.

Since 2003, some of the world’s biggest financial companies, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase and Prudential, have taken advantage of a federal subsidy that will cost taxpayers $10.1 billion -- and most of the public has never heard of it.

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City refuses to name govt center after former mayor, Harry Baals

Apparently the name won an online poll of residents, but the city is saying "no way," even though that is the guy's name.

Despite garnering far more support in an online poll than the thicket of other suggestions, residents shouldn’t expect Fort Wayne’s new government center to be named after the city’s longest tenured mayor.

Deputy Mayor Beth Malloy said naming 200 E. Berry St. the Harry Baals Government Center was “probably not” going to happen.

While Baals was a popular mayor, Malloy noted he had an unfortunate name and some elected officials have said such a name would be an embarrassment to the city.

Btw, what kind of a parent would name their kid that, seriously? (More here.)

Which brings to mind this SNL classic that isn't entirely safe for work:

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Video: Elderly woman fights off jewelery store robbers with handbag, and wins

There were multiple robbers and she took them all on. This is definitely something you won't see every day. Others eventually joined in at the very end but this woman was fearless. Maybe she could help take on Wall Street. Read the rest of this post...

Google exec kidnapped, blindfolded, 12 days by Egyptian regime

They were afraid of bad press, and that's why they arrested and basically tortured this guy. News flash: Torture is a bad method for turning around the news cycle.

Mr. Ghonim, an Egyptian who lives in Dubai with his wife and two children, was not well known outside of technology and business circles in Egypt. But his disappearance, followed by his interview Monday night on the same program where the Nobel laureate and diplomat Mohamed ElBaradei plunged into Egyptian politics a year ago, appeared to have quickly turned him into a national celebrity.

Mr. Ghonim, who came across as both humble and fearless, said he was grabbed by security police officers while getting into a taxi and then taken to a location where he was detained for 12 days, blindfolded the entire time. He said that he was deeply worried that his family did not know where he was. He said he was not physically harmed.

The first word of his release came when he posted this sentence in English on his Twitter account at 7:05 p.m.:

“Freedom is a bless that deserves fighting for it.”

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Boeing-owned US tech company helped Egypt shut down internet

Why does Boeing hate freedom and democracy? Read the rest of this post...

'Texas Miracle' looks worse by the day

Maybe, just maybe, the exodus from California to Texas didn't really happen the way Governor Perry said. Was it cheap labor and cheap land plus high oil prices that created the illusion of prosperity? Whatever it was, Texas is not and was not the "miracle" that the Republicans bragged about. People like Perry loved taking shots at California during their troubles, so now he will have the opportunity to have the favor returned. The real tragedy here is that the already suffering poor in Texas are going to be walloped by the Republicans. That's what they always do. LA Times:

Even Perry's claims of companies that have decamped from California to lay down roots in Texas appear to be overblown. When the Austin American-Statesman looked into the Texas governor's boast that there were 153 such companies in 2010, reporters found the claim included California firms that stayed put but maybe opened a Texas branch. The newspaper concluded that Perry's figure was grossly inflated.

Perry's staff said the governor was too busy to be interviewed in Austin last week. Media reports later revealed that he was on a five-day trip through California, which involved trying to coax companies east. His spokesman refused to name the companies.

The state's dogged determination to not tinker with its tax system or lean on business in other ways is certain to win points with some executives. But some Texans question whether business leaders will tolerate the resulting deterioration of public infrastructure, particularly in the education system.

So when are we going to see a 60 Minutes episode on the Texas Miracle? They slobbered all over Chris Christie yet somehow keep ignoring Texas. Read the rest of this post...

Facebook founder has Facebook stalker

Creepy. Read the rest of this post...

GOP rep. makes veiled threat against federal judges

And he knew perfectly well what he was doing. The GOP regularly traffics in veiled violence. Its uneducated base loves it. At times you have to wonder if the far right running the GOP likes anything about our current system of government, checks and balances, Constitution (other than the 2nd Amendment). They talk a good talk about loving Amurika, but when it comes to the details, a lot of Republicans seem to disdain everything our country actually stands for. Read the rest of this post...

A portrait of the Egyptian police

This is another background piece. Earlier I offered a portrait of the Egyptian military, seen through the eyes of Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer. Here I offer a complementary portrait of the numerous Egyptian police forces (there are more than one). The view is through the eyes of Paul Amar, whose Jadaliyya piece we discussed earlier.

About Egypt's various police groups, Amar notes the following (I've added paragraphing, a few notes, and emphasis for clarity):

Western commentators, whether liberal, left or conservative, tend to see all forces of coercion in non-democratic states as the hammers of “dictatorship” or as expressions of the will of an authoritarian leader. But each police, military and security institution has its own history, culture, class-allegiances, and, often its own autonomous sources of revenue and support as well. It would take many books to lay this all out in detail; but let me make a brief attempt here.

In Egypt the police forces (al-shurta) are run by the Interior Ministry which was very close to Mubarak and the Presidency and had become politically co-dependent on him.

But police stations gained relative autonomy during the past decades. In certain police stations this autonomy took the form of the adoption of a militant ideology or moral mission; or some Vice Police stations have taken up drug running; or some ran protection rackets that squeezed local small businesses. The political dependability of the police, from a bottom-up perspective, is not high. Police grew to be quite self-interested and entrepreneurial on a station-by-station level.

In the 1980s, the police faced the growth of “gangs,” referred to in Egyptian Arabic as baltagiya. These street organizations had asserted self-rule over Cairo’s many informal settlements and slums. Foreigners and the Egyptian bourgeoisie assumed the baltagiya to be Islamists but they were mostly utterly unideological. In the early 1990s the Interior Ministry decided “if you can’t beat them, hire them.” So the Interior Ministry and the Central Security Services [Markazi, see below] started outsourcing coercion to these baltagiya, paying them well and training them to use sexualized brutality (from groping to rape) in order to punish and deter female protesters and male detainees, alike.

During this period the Interior Ministry also turned the State Security Investigations (SSI) (mabahith amn al-dawla) into a monstrous threat, detaining and torturing masses of domestic political dissidents.

Autonomous from the Interior Ministry we have the Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi). These are the black uniformed, helmeted men that the media [erroneously] refer to as “the police.” Central Security was supposed to act as the private army of Mubarak.

[However t]hese are not revolutionary guards or morality brigades like the basiji who repressed the Green Movement protesters in Iran. By contrast, the Amn al-Markazi are low paid and non-ideological. Moreover, at crucial times, these Central Security brigades have risen up en masse against Mubarak, himself, to demand better wages and working conditions. Perhaps if it weren’t for the sinister assistance of the brutal baltagiya, they would not be a very intimidating force.

The look of unenthusiastic resignation in the eyes of Amn al-Markazi soldiers as they were kissed and lovingly disarmed by protesters has become one of the most iconic images, so far, of this revolution. The dispelling of Mubarak’s authority could be marked to precisely that moment when protesters kissed the cheeks of Markazi officers who promptly vanished into puffs of tear gas, never to return.

On the relationship between the police and military, Amar adds:

The Armed Forces of the Arab Republic of Egypt are quite unrelated to the Markazi or police and see themselves as a distinct kind of state altogether. One could say that Egypt is still a “military dictatorship” (if one must use that term) since this is still the same regime that the Free Officers’ Revolution installed in the 1950s. But the military has been marginalized since Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David Accords with Israel and the United States. Since 1977, the military has not been allowed to fight anyone. Instead, the generals have been given huge aid payoffs by the US. They have been granted concessions to run shopping malls in Egypt, develop gated cities in the desert and beach resorts on the coasts. And they are encouraged to sit around in cheap social clubs.

These buy-offs have shaped them into an incredibly organized interest group of nationalist businessmen.

We referred to these extraordinary "military" activities here.

So for those keeping score at home, the following police groups are part of the game:

• The actual police forces (al-shurta) run by the Interior Ministry and used as an arm of the Mubarak regime
• Individual al-shurta police stations with relative autonomy — some with militant or moral ideology, some doing drug running, some running protection rackets
• Street gangs (baltagiya), completely unideological, who have been co-opted by the police into anti-populist repression
• State Security Investigations, or SSI (mabahith amn al-dawla), also run by the Interior Ministry and involved in torturing domestic political dissidents
• And finally, Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi), independent of the Interior Ministry, low-paid and non-ideological

So when you read an article like this (h/t hector) and you see phrases like "State Security" and "drug-addled gangs", you'll know he means mabahith amn al-dawla and baltagiya — and not the black-uniformed al-Markazi.

Hope this helps; we're all playing catch-up here.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Keith Olbermann to get show on Current TV

NYT (hat tip C&L;):

Keith Olbermann, the former MSNBC anchor, will host a prime time program for Current TV, the low-rated cable channel co-founded by Al Gore. The one-hour program will begin sometime in the spring.

Mr. Olbermann will also become the chief news officer for Current, the company said in a news release Tuesday.

“We are delighted to provide Keith with the independent platform and freedom that Current can, and does uniquely offer,” Mr. Gore said in a statement.

Ironically, Comcast has a 10% stake in Current TV.

I for one have no idea if we get Current TV on Comcast cable, do we? Having said that, this seems like an ingenious way for Olbermann to maneuver around NBC's bs proviso they put in his settlement package, banning him from working on competing networks for a year - surprise, Current TV isn't a competing network to NBC! Snap! Read the rest of this post...

'Moderate' Senate Dems may join Rs in voting to repeal individual mandate

Manchin of WV (figures, he's a homophobe too), McCaskill of MO, and Jon Tester of MT. They're all up in 2012.

Here's a thought. Rather than running from their biggest accomplishment, and buying into the GOP talking points on health care, how about actually defending what they did? Read the rest of this post...

ElBaradei: Egypt should be ruled by a transitional presidential council

According to Al Jazeera, Mohamed ElBaradei is "one of the leaders of the protesters' negotiating team" and has made a counter-proposal to the U.S. "let Suleiman run it" position (my emphasis throughout):

Mohamed ElBaradei ... said on Friday that Mubarak should step down and let a presidential council made up of several figures - including the military - rule for a year to rewrite the constitution ahead of elections set for September.

Later, the article says:

In response to the country's political vacuum, an impromptu group of prominent Egyptians who call themselves the "council of wise men" have stepped in to facilitate a transition government.

It includes Amr Moussa, the Arab League secretary-general, and Naguib Sawiris, a business tycoon, who recommended that Suleiman preside over a transitional government.

Nice framing. The article lists others on this "council of wise men," and the name ElBaradei doesn't come up. It seems therefore that this group represents more mainstream (i.e., U.S.-friendly) business interests. Note the following about Mr. Naguib Sawiris:

Sawiris is one of the most influential businessmen in Egypt today, thanks to his rapidly expanding telecom empire under Orascom Telecom, the shareholder of Mobinil, and the investment company Weather.

As chairman of Orascom Telecom, he has been behind the rapid growth of the company.

The organisation now operates GSM networks in seven different countries in the Middle East, Africa, and India, in addition to a number of Internet Service Providers and satellite service providers serving approximately 500 million people around the world.

Mobinil is the big Egyptian cell phone service (the nil part of the name means "Nile"). That makes Mr. Sawiris one of the Bigs indeed, both before and after the street demonstrations erupted. (Wonder who he was allied with before?)

It will be interesting to see, therefore, if ElBaradei and his protest group can hold firm, or whether the big-money interests can simply lop the name "Mubarak" from the masthead and maintain control.

Things seem to be simplifying. Keep your eye on this self-styled "council of wise men". They're shaping up as the neo-liberal strike force that will attempt to weave a pro-U.S., pro-entrenched power, and pro-Suleiman solution. (Watch for cries of "But, Muslim Brotherhood!" to dazzle your ears while the deal is done.)

And it appears that both groups, ElBaradei-led protesters and big-money types, are courting the military as the final solution. As the article points out, the army has always held the deciding card. And the army is definitely not a monolithic group.

A good piece from Al Jazeera. As always, stay tuned.

GP Read the rest of this post...

Obama to CEOs: 'Ask yourselves what you can do to hire American workers'

Pay them $2 per hour without health care? This latest effort to appease the richest Americans who ship jobs offshore while making record profits is just sad. It shows a complete lack of understanding by Obama of what makes these people tick. Talking about removing regulation only provides them with more ways to squeeze average Americans while doing nothing for anyone else. The problem is not how to enrich the elite even more, but rather, how to rebuild a declining middle class. The problem was started during the "you're on your own" Reagan years and with each administration it gets worse.

Obama is obviously a smart person but in this case, he's a fool for playing their game. As a guy who likes to play basketball, he should know that you want to play your game and not play against the strengths of the other team. Doing so only results in a more lopsided loss. The bottom line with the CEOs is the stock prices. They could care less about jobs in the US but they care a lot about cutting costs and hiring overseas if it means a higher stock price. That's the system as it stands today, so appealing to patriotism is not going to fly with them.

He enumerated new efforts by his administration to improve the nation's business infrastructure, spend more to support entrepreneurs and foster greater innovation. He vowed to address "a burdensome corporate tax code," and go after "unnecessary and outdated regulations."

But to a polite, subdued audience of about 200 he also offered a stout defense of health care and financial regulation overhauls — two signature administration initiatives that caused some of the most rancorous disputes with the Chamber last year.

"I want to be clear: Even as we make America the best place on earth to do business, businesses also have a responsibility to America," Obama said.

When business is given everything they want (much like a spoiled child) why should they think they have any responsibilities? Are you kidding? They know they own the place and by having another temper tantrum, they can get more. Like new tax cuts. Sheesh.

Naturally the right wing business loons (Jack Welch and Larry Kudlow) aren't impressed and still think he's a socialist. Since Obama asked that business put some of the profits back into workers, he's obviously a dangerous guy. Welch was unintentionally funny (in a bad way) when he talked about Clinton bringing in people like Robert Rubin to help make everything better. It's not often that anyone has many good things to say about Rubin between his implementation of Wall Street's wish list and then his disgraceful Citi years leading up to the crisis.

Now that Obama has annoyed everyone and failed to win over business, how does this help him in 2012? Read the rest of this post...

Al Jazeera reporter discusses his detainment by Egyptian military

The discussion is about ten minutes long but it's interesting to hear the details. The journalist was fortunate to have only been detained for eight hours compared to others who were held for much longer. Other journalists allegedly were kicked, beaten and tasered by the military.

Protests are due to continue again today with new energy following the release of Google executive Wael Ghonim. Read the rest of this post...

Haiti issues passport for Aristide

As if Haiti needs even more chaos. AFP:

The Haitian government said it has issued a new passport to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, enabling him to end his exile in South Africa and return to Haiti, a government official said.

"The passport was issued on Monday. All the formalities have been completed," the official said, asking to remain anonymous.

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