Outrage of the Week: blocking relief for homeowners
A recent study revealed that more homes are underwater than originally believed; "underwater" of course meaning you owe more on your mortgage than the property is worth. Roughly 16 million borrowers owe the banks $1.2 trillion for real estate value value that no longer exists.
The United Steel Workers Union did some projections from that study and found that more than 40 million people - about 13% of the population of the US - live in those homes, with total mortgages outstanding of roughly $4.8 trillion.
One of the ideas of dealing with that has been straightforward principal reduction - put a different way, the bank or whatever financial institution holds the mortgage simply forgives some of the debt, says you don't have to pay that part back. That reduces the burden on the homeowner, allows for lower monthly payments so that the home doesn't wind up in foreclosure, and can free up money for purchases in the broader economy, with the stimulating effect that brings. A broad principal relief plan, in fact, would be the equivalent of a massive economic stimulus program.
Most economists who don't work for or depend on the big banks think it's a good idea and studies back them up. Now the O gang - which so far has been somewhere between indifferent and hostile on actually helping homeowners - says it wants to do more on principal reduction.
But oh my oh dear what a shame, it just can't. Why? Because of Ed DeMarco.
DeMarco is the Acting Director of the FHFA, the agency which took control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac after their bipartisan-backed “privatization” led to an swamp of greed and incompetence. And DeMarco has just said flat-out "no" to the idea of any principal reduction for any Fannie or Freddie-backed mortgage. He just won't allow there to be any such help for struggling homeowners.
Well, you can just imagine the outraged response from the White House! Why, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote to DeMarco saying “I urge you to reconsider this decision,” while at the same time insisting "you have the legal authority to make this decision." Boy, I bet that sent DeMarco reeling.
DeMarco's argument - if you can call it that - comes down to an assertion that relief via principal reduction would ultimately cost taxpayers money, even though his own agency would come out ahead. Admittedly, that loss to taxpayers is possible, although it's hotly disputed. But as Paul Krugman has pointed out, deciding if debt relief is a good policy for the nation as a whole is not DeMarco’s job.
His job is to run his agency. And his agency comes out ahead on the deal. If the executive branch decides that it's in the national interest to spend some taxpayer funds on debt relief, if the decision is made that spending taxpayer money to provide relief and some sense of security in their homes to 40 million Americans is a good thing, DeMarco has no damn business deciding on his own to refuse.
So what can be done? Fire him!
Oh, but we caaan't, comes the whine. He's the head of an independent agency. We caaan't fire him. Well, first, he's the acting director. Obama could replace him at any time by appointing a permanent director. Oh, he couldn't get his nominee through the "Filibusters'r'Us" Senate? Then do a recess appointment! Or don't fire him, transfer him! Move him to the bureaucratic equivalent of Outer Slobovia! But do not try to tell me this guy can single-handedly stand athwart national policy just because he feels like stamping his foot and saying "no" like some petulant child and be untouchable.
But nothing will happen. Nothing will happen on the policy and nothing will happen to DeMarco. Why? Because when the TARP program was first getting started, Tim Geithner was making exactly the sort of arguments DeMarco is making now. DeMarco is not challenging what has been Obama administration policy, he's expressing it. And it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://blog.usw.org/2012/08/06/f-the-bureaucracy-the-white-house-can-help-homeowners-right-now/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/why-firing-ed-demarco-is-no-solution-to-fhfa-refusal-to-engage-in-principal-modifications.html#xyIvFz4WfX0tyG7Z.99
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/01/why-ed-demarco-wont-be-fired/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/fire-ed-demarco/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/more-demarco/
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/08/06/tim-geithner%E2%80%99s-principal-hypocrisy/
Friday, August 10, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #68 - Part 2
67th anniversary of bombing of Hiroshima
Monday was August 6. Not too many people, at least not too many in the US, make note of the day anymore. We used to back in the '60s but not much now. But in Japan, they still do. Monday was the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Early on the morning of August 6th, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber nicknamed "Enola Gay" took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific, headed for Hiroshima, a city of about 250,000 people. It carried a single bomb, codenamed "Little Boy." At 8:15 am local time, Little Boy was dropped.
I want to pause for a moment to give you a sense of the kind of power we are talking about here. The bomb contained 64 kilograms - about 141 pounds - of highly-enriched, fissionable uranium. Of that amount, only about .7 kilogram, or about 1.5 pounds, actually fissioned - that is, split - and only about 600 milligrams was converted into energy. That 600 milligrams equals six-tenths of a gram, or a little more than 1/50 ounce.
The energy released was enough to do this. It had the explosive force of 14,000 tons of dynamite. Around 70,000 people died instantly; some of them were literally vaporized. Another 70,000 died by 1950 due to injuries, radiation poisoning, and cancer.
Just three days later, another nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more dead and another city destroyed.
I'm not going to get into the history of the decision to drop the bomb, I don't have time here. If you want to debate it with me, fine. But I will say that the bombing of Hiroshima was quite likely the second biggest war crime the US has ever committed. It was a crime because the bombing was unnecessary. Before - before - the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan was so thoroughly defeated that it had already offered to surrender. But there was one condition: Japan wanted to be allowed to keep its emperor. The Truman administration rejected the offer because it wasn't "unconditional" - only to, after the bombing of Nagasaki, accept a surrender on essentially the same terms it had rejected before, including retention of the emperor. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gained nothing in terms of surrender terms.
But you may think that's the past, nuclear weapons are no longer an issue - except, of course, when it involves fear mongering about Iran. You'd be wrong.
There are today eight known nuclear powers: Russia, United States, France, China, the UK, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. In addition, Israel is universally believed to possess at least a few score nuclear weapons but refuses to admit it. Estimates are that there are today about 4,400 nuclear weapons deployed and ready; most of those, but not all, are held by the US and Russia. Add up the reserves and the stockpiles, and we are talking about around 11,500 nuclear weapons in the world today, weapons that make the Hiroshima bomb look like a popgun next to a howitzer.
This is not an issue whose time has passed.
Footnote: I called Hiroshima the second greatest war crime the US had committed. What was the first? Nagasaki, which was even less necessary than the unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and occurred only because the military, unwilling to wait to see Japan's reaction to the first bomb, was rushing to get in another strike before a predicted run of bad weather and the sky over the main target was too cloudy. That's why Nagasaki was bombed.
Sources:
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/08/06/hiroshima-marks-67th-anniversary-of-a-bomb-attack
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/hiroshima_64_years_ago.html
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
http://www.doug-long.com/summary.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/08/60.html
Monday was August 6. Not too many people, at least not too many in the US, make note of the day anymore. We used to back in the '60s but not much now. But in Japan, they still do. Monday was the 67th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Early on the morning of August 6th, 1945, the B-29 Superfortress bomber nicknamed "Enola Gay" took off from Tinian Island in the Pacific, headed for Hiroshima, a city of about 250,000 people. It carried a single bomb, codenamed "Little Boy." At 8:15 am local time, Little Boy was dropped.
I want to pause for a moment to give you a sense of the kind of power we are talking about here. The bomb contained 64 kilograms - about 141 pounds - of highly-enriched, fissionable uranium. Of that amount, only about .7 kilogram, or about 1.5 pounds, actually fissioned - that is, split - and only about 600 milligrams was converted into energy. That 600 milligrams equals six-tenths of a gram, or a little more than 1/50 ounce.
The energy released was enough to do this. It had the explosive force of 14,000 tons of dynamite. Around 70,000 people died instantly; some of them were literally vaporized. Another 70,000 died by 1950 due to injuries, radiation poisoning, and cancer.Just three days later, another nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, with tens of thousands more dead and another city destroyed.
I'm not going to get into the history of the decision to drop the bomb, I don't have time here. If you want to debate it with me, fine. But I will say that the bombing of Hiroshima was quite likely the second biggest war crime the US has ever committed. It was a crime because the bombing was unnecessary. Before - before - the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan was so thoroughly defeated that it had already offered to surrender. But there was one condition: Japan wanted to be allowed to keep its emperor. The Truman administration rejected the offer because it wasn't "unconditional" - only to, after the bombing of Nagasaki, accept a surrender on essentially the same terms it had rejected before, including retention of the emperor. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gained nothing in terms of surrender terms.
But you may think that's the past, nuclear weapons are no longer an issue - except, of course, when it involves fear mongering about Iran. You'd be wrong.
There are today eight known nuclear powers: Russia, United States, France, China, the UK, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. In addition, Israel is universally believed to possess at least a few score nuclear weapons but refuses to admit it. Estimates are that there are today about 4,400 nuclear weapons deployed and ready; most of those, but not all, are held by the US and Russia. Add up the reserves and the stockpiles, and we are talking about around 11,500 nuclear weapons in the world today, weapons that make the Hiroshima bomb look like a popgun next to a howitzer.
This is not an issue whose time has passed.Footnote: I called Hiroshima the second greatest war crime the US had committed. What was the first? Nagasaki, which was even less necessary than the unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and occurred only because the military, unwilling to wait to see Japan's reaction to the first bomb, was rushing to get in another strike before a predicted run of bad weather and the sky over the main target was too cloudy. That's why Nagasaki was bombed.
Sources:
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/08/06/hiroshima-marks-67th-anniversary-of-a-bomb-attack
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/hiroshima_64_years_ago.html
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
http://www.doug-long.com/summary.htm
http://whoviating.blogspot.com/2005/08/60.html
Left Side of the Aisle #68 - Part 1
The Sikh temple massacre and the "lone wacko" nonsense
On Sunday, a 40-year-old Army veteran named Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI, a suburb of Milwaukee, and started shooting. When he was done, six people were dead. Page himself died in a shootout out with police, during which one cop was hit several times.
And so once again we have to clean up the blood of yet another massacre, once again we have to console yet another set of grieving families and friends - and once again we have to listen to yet another round of NRA-driven, corporate-sponsored, and assorted right-wing flake crap trying every way possible to blame everything and everyone except the gun.
For example, we have Pat Robertson raving about how the source of attacks on religious sites comes from
More important is that once again we have to listen to "the lone wacko" bull as if guns and resolving conflicts with murderous violence were not woven into our culture, into our very national DNA. Page may have been a lone shooter, but he was no lone wacko. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Page was a "frustrated neo-Nazi." Page himself told a white supremacist website in 2010 that he had been part of the white-power music scene since 2000 and had started a racist white supremacist band called End Apathy in 2005.
That is, for several years he lived in the sewer of hate that takes up a good portion of the right half of the American political spectrum today - and that was equally true of most of the mass killers of recent times. And no, I am not saying that most right-wingers are Nazis or neo-Nazis but I am saying that hatred and fear, based on race, religion, culture, or anything else that makes you "different" in their eyes, that hatred, fear, and all the other evil spawn of xenophobia fill every available gap in their worldview.
Meanwhile, once again we have to listen to political cowards and wimps like Barack Obama go on about how such "terrible, tragic events" call for "soul-searching" but not for doing a damn thing about how easy it is for pretty much anyone to turn themselves into a one-person strike force. This was the fifth such mass killing in Wisconsin - which has among the nation's weakest gun laws - since 2004. According to a survey by Mother Jones magazine, there have been, including Oak Creek, nearly 60 mass gun killings in the past 30 years. "Mass killing" was defined as at least four people killed, not counting the shooter, in a single event at a single place.
Page himself used a semiautomatic handgun, regarded now as the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are small, easily concealed, can be fitted with high-capacity magazines - and, of course, are easy to come by. Page, no surprise, got his gun legally. Just like the roughly 300 million other guns out there were.
And once again, again, again, we get bombarded with the lies that people don't support doing anything about gun control. Now, it's true that if you just ask people about "more gun laws" versus "the same gun laws" and "fewer gun laws," the middle choice gets the clear plurality - as "about the same" does in a lot of polls on a lot of topics. If you add that together with the third choice, you have a majority.
(I will note that the “fewer laws” people are essentially a fringe, at 12%: According to a Gallup poll, more than twice as many people, 26%, favor banning handguns outright.)
But even now, when it's supposedly a hopeless cause and a certain loser, a disaster for any political campaign, 44% support tougher gun laws. Not a majority, no, but much further from the fringe position it's usually described as by politicians and the media.
What's more, when you shift the question to "which is more important, gun control or protecting gun owner rights," according to surveys by the Pew Center, the nation is, and has been for several years, split roughly 50-50. Remember, this is at a time when no one on the national stage is making the case for gun controls, when all we get is "gun rights," "self-defense," "Second Amendment Second Amendment Second Amendment," and "they're coming to take our guns." No leader is making the case for gun control - and we are still split 50-50.
Even beyond that: When you get the vague generalities and ask about actual proposals, the numbers sometimes flip dramatically. A poll done in May by Republican pollster Frank Luntz showed that 74% of NRA members support background checks. Sixty-eight percent of NRA members believe that individuals who have been arrested for domestic violence should not be eligible for gun permits. And 75% of NRA members believe that concealed weapon permits should not be available to people who have committed violent misdemeanors. Other polls have shown majority support for bans on assault weapons - not a big majority, but a majority - and very strong support for closing the "gun show loophole," where sales at gun shows are regarded as "private transactions" that don't require any background check.
We can do something about the ocean of guns out there. All we really need is some politicians not cowering before the NRA who would find, if they actually took a stand, that they would have more support than they expected.
Sources:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0806/Sikh-temple-shooter-identified-as-Wade-Michael-Page-white-supremacist-video
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-temple-shooting-gun-violence-obama-20120807,0,2176449.story
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sikh-temple-shooting-wisconsin-mass-killing-7-years-article-1.1129793
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/killings-mark-4th-mass-murder-in-state-since-2004-4k6cgse-165072026.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-07/business/sns-rt-us-usa-wisconsin-shooting-weaponbre876068-20120806_1_sikh-temple-attack-gun-laws-handgun
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/05/wisconsin-shooting-sikh-temple_n_1744256.html
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/27/157469718/new-republic-nra-members-support-gun-control
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/30/pew-poll-little-support-for-new-gun-control-regulations-after-aurora-shooting/
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-truth-about-gun-politics-many-americans-support-restrictions-20120720
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/pat-robertson-suggests-atheists-blame-sikh-t
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/pat-robertson-says-those-_n_1749532.html
On Sunday, a 40-year-old Army veteran named Wade Michael Page walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI, a suburb of Milwaukee, and started shooting. When he was done, six people were dead. Page himself died in a shootout out with police, during which one cop was hit several times.
And so once again we have to clean up the blood of yet another massacre, once again we have to console yet another set of grieving families and friends - and once again we have to listen to yet another round of NRA-driven, corporate-sponsored, and assorted right-wing flake crap trying every way possible to blame everything and everyone except the gun.
For example, we have Pat Robertson raving about how the source of attacks on religious sites comes from
people who are atheists, they hate God, they hate the expression of God, and they are angry at the world, angry with themselves, angry with society and they take it out on innocent people who are worshipping God.Beyond the fact that no one has reported on Page's religious affiliation or lack of it, although given what we do know about him, I would bet - I don't know but I would bet - he calls himself some form of Christian, there is the simple fact that it's hard to see how atheists "hate god" since atheists believe god does not exist and how can you hate something that doesn't exist. Then again, even some on the right have consigned Pat Robertson to "family embarrassment" territory like the weird uncle who drives everybody nuts every family gathering with tales of how his neighbor down the street is organizing the neighborhood cats into a gang of robbers.
More important is that once again we have to listen to "the lone wacko" bull as if guns and resolving conflicts with murderous violence were not woven into our culture, into our very national DNA. Page may have been a lone shooter, but he was no lone wacko. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Page was a "frustrated neo-Nazi." Page himself told a white supremacist website in 2010 that he had been part of the white-power music scene since 2000 and had started a racist white supremacist band called End Apathy in 2005.
That is, for several years he lived in the sewer of hate that takes up a good portion of the right half of the American political spectrum today - and that was equally true of most of the mass killers of recent times. And no, I am not saying that most right-wingers are Nazis or neo-Nazis but I am saying that hatred and fear, based on race, religion, culture, or anything else that makes you "different" in their eyes, that hatred, fear, and all the other evil spawn of xenophobia fill every available gap in their worldview.
Meanwhile, once again we have to listen to political cowards and wimps like Barack Obama go on about how such "terrible, tragic events" call for "soul-searching" but not for doing a damn thing about how easy it is for pretty much anyone to turn themselves into a one-person strike force. This was the fifth such mass killing in Wisconsin - which has among the nation's weakest gun laws - since 2004. According to a survey by Mother Jones magazine, there have been, including Oak Creek, nearly 60 mass gun killings in the past 30 years. "Mass killing" was defined as at least four people killed, not counting the shooter, in a single event at a single place.
Page himself used a semiautomatic handgun, regarded now as the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are small, easily concealed, can be fitted with high-capacity magazines - and, of course, are easy to come by. Page, no surprise, got his gun legally. Just like the roughly 300 million other guns out there were.
And once again, again, again, we get bombarded with the lies that people don't support doing anything about gun control. Now, it's true that if you just ask people about "more gun laws" versus "the same gun laws" and "fewer gun laws," the middle choice gets the clear plurality - as "about the same" does in a lot of polls on a lot of topics. If you add that together with the third choice, you have a majority.
(I will note that the “fewer laws” people are essentially a fringe, at 12%: According to a Gallup poll, more than twice as many people, 26%, favor banning handguns outright.)
But even now, when it's supposedly a hopeless cause and a certain loser, a disaster for any political campaign, 44% support tougher gun laws. Not a majority, no, but much further from the fringe position it's usually described as by politicians and the media.
What's more, when you shift the question to "which is more important, gun control or protecting gun owner rights," according to surveys by the Pew Center, the nation is, and has been for several years, split roughly 50-50. Remember, this is at a time when no one on the national stage is making the case for gun controls, when all we get is "gun rights," "self-defense," "Second Amendment Second Amendment Second Amendment," and "they're coming to take our guns." No leader is making the case for gun control - and we are still split 50-50.
Even beyond that: When you get the vague generalities and ask about actual proposals, the numbers sometimes flip dramatically. A poll done in May by Republican pollster Frank Luntz showed that 74% of NRA members support background checks. Sixty-eight percent of NRA members believe that individuals who have been arrested for domestic violence should not be eligible for gun permits. And 75% of NRA members believe that concealed weapon permits should not be available to people who have committed violent misdemeanors. Other polls have shown majority support for bans on assault weapons - not a big majority, but a majority - and very strong support for closing the "gun show loophole," where sales at gun shows are regarded as "private transactions" that don't require any background check.
We can do something about the ocean of guns out there. All we really need is some politicians not cowering before the NRA who would find, if they actually took a stand, that they would have more support than they expected.
Sources:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0806/Sikh-temple-shooter-identified-as-Wade-Michael-Page-white-supremacist-video
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-temple-shooting-gun-violence-obama-20120807,0,2176449.story
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sikh-temple-shooting-wisconsin-mass-killing-7-years-article-1.1129793
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/killings-mark-4th-mass-murder-in-state-since-2004-4k6cgse-165072026.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-07/business/sns-rt-us-usa-wisconsin-shooting-weaponbre876068-20120806_1_sikh-temple-attack-gun-laws-handgun
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/05/wisconsin-shooting-sikh-temple_n_1744256.html
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/27/157469718/new-republic-nra-members-support-gun-control
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/30/pew-poll-little-support-for-new-gun-control-regulations-after-aurora-shooting/
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-truth-about-gun-politics-many-americans-support-restrictions-20120720
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/pat-robertson-suggests-atheists-blame-sikh-t
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/pat-robertson-says-those-_n_1749532.html
Left Side of the Aisle #68
Left Side of the Aisle
for August 9 - 15, 2010
This week:
Sikh temple massacre and the "lone wacko" nonsense
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0806/Sikh-temple-shooter-identified-as-Wade-Michael-Page-white-supremacist-video
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-temple-shooting-gun-violence-obama-20120807,0,2176449.story
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/sikh-temple-shooting-wisconsin-mass-killing-7-years-article-1.1129793
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/killings-mark-4th-mass-murder-in-state-since-2004-4k6cgse-165072026.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-08-07/business/sns-rt-us-usa-wisconsin-shooting-weaponbre876068-20120806_1_sikh-temple-attack-gun-laws-handgun
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/05/wisconsin-shooting-sikh-temple_n_1744256.html
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/27/157469718/new-republic-nra-members-support-gun-control
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/30/pew-poll-little-support-for-new-gun-control-regulations-after-aurora-shooting/
http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/the-truth-about-gun-politics-many-americans-support-restrictions-20120720
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/pat-robertson-suggests-atheists-blame-sikh-t
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/06/pat-robertson-says-those-_n_1749532.html
67th anniversary of bombing of Hiroshima
http://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2012/08/06/hiroshima-marks-67th-anniversary-of-a-bomb-attack
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/08/hiroshima_64_years_ago.html
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/nukestatus.html
http://www.doug-long.com/summary.htm
Outrage of the Week: blocking relief for homeowners
http://blog.usw.org/2012/08/06/f-the-bureaucracy-the-white-house-can-help-homeowners-right-now/
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/07/why-firing-ed-demarco-is-no-solution-to-fhfa-refusal-to-engage-in-principal-modifications.html#xyIvFz4WfX0tyG7Z.99
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/08/01/why-ed-demarco-wont-be-fired/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/fire-ed-demarco/
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/more-demarco/
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/08/06/tim-geithner%E2%80%99s-principal-hypocrisy/
Clarabell Award: commenters on story about racial slur
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/31/motel-6-racial-slur_n_1720762.html
And Another Thing: Curiosity lands on Mars
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0806-mars-curiosity-rover-landing-20120806,0,2608752.story
Death of Mary Tamm, Romana #1
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Romana
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18995370
Monday, August 06, 2012
I am curious - Mars
The Mars rover Curiosity has safely landed on Mars.
The 2000-pound (910kg) vehicle, the size of a small car, now begins what is planned as a two-year mission focused on the question of if there ever was or could at some time be life on Mars.
It joins Opportunity, now in the ninth year of a mission that was planned to last for 90 days.
And the geek smiles.
Footnote: What with all this, it's probably appropriate that there have been a spate of new reports about Roswell 1947.
The 2000-pound (910kg) vehicle, the size of a small car, now begins what is planned as a two-year mission focused on the question of if there ever was or could at some time be life on Mars.
It joins Opportunity, now in the ninth year of a mission that was planned to last for 90 days.
And the geek smiles.
Footnote: What with all this, it's probably appropriate that there have been a spate of new reports about Roswell 1947.
Friday, August 03, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #67 - Part 4
Pennsylvania admits claims of "voter fraud" used to support voter ID laws are bogus
There is much more to say about this issue and about the particular case, but I've no time this week. But I did want to tell you this:
I've talked before about attacks on The Commons, on the idea of a community of shared interests and responsibilities, and that one of the forms of those attacks are these voter ID laws and how they are an attack on the right to vote and how they have disproportionate impact on the poor, minorities, students, and the elderly, four groups that when they do vote tend to lean to the liberal side of things.
Supporters defend the laws by going on about alleged "voter fraud." "Don't you care about the integrity of the vote?"
Pennsylvania is one of the states with these insane laws. That law is now under court challenge and a hearing on the suit has been going on. In a stipulation agreement before the hearing, the state of Pennsylvania acknowledged there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”
Additionally, Pennsylvania “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” or even argue “that in person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of the Photo ID law.”
In other words, before the hearing even started, Pennsylvania admitted the claimed basis, the whole claimed purpose, of the law, is totally bogus. And don't you forget it.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/pennsylvania-voter-id-trial_n_1697980.html
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/pennsylvania_voter_id_no_in_person_voter_fraud.php
There is much more to say about this issue and about the particular case, but I've no time this week. But I did want to tell you this:
I've talked before about attacks on The Commons, on the idea of a community of shared interests and responsibilities, and that one of the forms of those attacks are these voter ID laws and how they are an attack on the right to vote and how they have disproportionate impact on the poor, minorities, students, and the elderly, four groups that when they do vote tend to lean to the liberal side of things.
Supporters defend the laws by going on about alleged "voter fraud." "Don't you care about the integrity of the vote?"
Pennsylvania is one of the states with these insane laws. That law is now under court challenge and a hearing on the suit has been going on. In a stipulation agreement before the hearing, the state of Pennsylvania acknowledged there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”
Additionally, Pennsylvania “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” or even argue “that in person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absence of the Photo ID law.”
In other words, before the hearing even started, Pennsylvania admitted the claimed basis, the whole claimed purpose, of the law, is totally bogus. And don't you forget it.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/pennsylvania-voter-id-trial_n_1697980.html
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/pennsylvania_voter_id_no_in_person_voter_fraud.php
Left Side of the Aisle #67 - Part 3
Clarabell award: Federal judge ignores Supreme Court to impose abortion restrictions
The Clarabell Award is given on a regular basis for acts of meritorious stupidity. This time the dishonoree is US District Court judge for the District of Arizona, one Judge James A. Teilborg.
Back in April, Arizona Governor Jan Brewery signed a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks except in narrow cases where the life of the mother is seriously at risk. It was to go into effect on this past Thursday, August 2. The ACLU went to court on behalf of three Arizona physicians who sought a temporary injunction against the law going into effect pending the outcome of their legal challenge to it.
Their argument was simple: The controlling legal authority is the 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Court ruled in that case that states can't ban abortions prior to viability, that is, prior to the time when the fetus could survive outsite the womb. That now is regarded as around 22 to 24 weeks. Which would appear to make for a slam-dunk case.
Unfortunately, it was heard before Judge Teilborg, who in effect told those doctors and the ACLU that resistance is futile. In fact, in the course of the hearing, he actually lectured the lead counsel for the plaintiffs - that is, the ACLU lawyer - on her supposed lack of compassion for “the unborn child” and suggested that supposed lack “underscores the legitimacy” of the state’s action.
Given that patent bias in favor of fantasy - as I’ve said a number of times, there is no such thing as an “unborn child” unless you also start calling a caterpillar an unborn butterfly, a tadpole an unborn frog, and an acorn an unborn oak tree - given that bias, it should come as no surprise that Teilborg denied the temporary injunction, allowing the law to go into effect.
What could be a surprise but perhaps shouldn’t be given that transparent bias, he also declared that the hearing was not on the injuction but actually on the merits of the law and threw the suit out entirely.
His reasoning? Because of the provision regarding saving the life of the mother, the law doesn't actually ban abortions after 20 weeks, it merely "restricts" them. Quoting him: "[the law] is not a ban on previability abortions, but is rather a limit on some previability abortions between 20 weeks gestational age and viability."
You know, there is a law against shooting people in the street. But the truth is, if you shot someone who was in the process of, say, trying to kill you with a knife, I doubt you would be charged. So by Teilborg's logic, that law doesn't actually ban shooting people in the street, it merely restricts some cases of it. And there's a law that says you can't run a red light. But I expect that if you went thought a red light while rushing someone to the Emergency Room because you thought they were having a heart attack - as I did once with my father - you would be unlikely to be given a ticket. So according to Teilborg, that law doesn't ban going through red lights, it's just a limitation on some cases of it.
The ACLU is making an emergency appeal of the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, calling Teilborg's ruling "just wrong on its face."
Which is not surprising, since Judge James Teilborg's own face has a great big red nose. James Teilborg, clown.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/arizona-20-week-abortion-ban_n_1720803.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/fetal_pain_nonsense_prevails_in_arizona/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/anti-abortionists-on-trial.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood_v._Casey
The Clarabell Award is given on a regular basis for acts of meritorious stupidity. This time the dishonoree is US District Court judge for the District of Arizona, one Judge James A. Teilborg.Back in April, Arizona Governor Jan Brewery signed a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks except in narrow cases where the life of the mother is seriously at risk. It was to go into effect on this past Thursday, August 2. The ACLU went to court on behalf of three Arizona physicians who sought a temporary injunction against the law going into effect pending the outcome of their legal challenge to it.
Their argument was simple: The controlling legal authority is the 1992 Supreme Court decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Court ruled in that case that states can't ban abortions prior to viability, that is, prior to the time when the fetus could survive outsite the womb. That now is regarded as around 22 to 24 weeks. Which would appear to make for a slam-dunk case.
Unfortunately, it was heard before Judge Teilborg, who in effect told those doctors and the ACLU that resistance is futile. In fact, in the course of the hearing, he actually lectured the lead counsel for the plaintiffs - that is, the ACLU lawyer - on her supposed lack of compassion for “the unborn child” and suggested that supposed lack “underscores the legitimacy” of the state’s action.
Given that patent bias in favor of fantasy - as I’ve said a number of times, there is no such thing as an “unborn child” unless you also start calling a caterpillar an unborn butterfly, a tadpole an unborn frog, and an acorn an unborn oak tree - given that bias, it should come as no surprise that Teilborg denied the temporary injunction, allowing the law to go into effect.
What could be a surprise but perhaps shouldn’t be given that transparent bias, he also declared that the hearing was not on the injuction but actually on the merits of the law and threw the suit out entirely.
His reasoning? Because of the provision regarding saving the life of the mother, the law doesn't actually ban abortions after 20 weeks, it merely "restricts" them. Quoting him: "[the law] is not a ban on previability abortions, but is rather a limit on some previability abortions between 20 weeks gestational age and viability."
You know, there is a law against shooting people in the street. But the truth is, if you shot someone who was in the process of, say, trying to kill you with a knife, I doubt you would be charged. So by Teilborg's logic, that law doesn't actually ban shooting people in the street, it merely restricts some cases of it. And there's a law that says you can't run a red light. But I expect that if you went thought a red light while rushing someone to the Emergency Room because you thought they were having a heart attack - as I did once with my father - you would be unlikely to be given a ticket. So according to Teilborg, that law doesn't ban going through red lights, it's just a limitation on some cases of it.
The ACLU is making an emergency appeal of the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, calling Teilborg's ruling "just wrong on its face."
Which is not surprising, since Judge James Teilborg's own face has a great big red nose. James Teilborg, clown.
Sources:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/arizona-20-week-abortion-ban_n_1720803.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/fetal_pain_nonsense_prevails_in_arizona/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/anti-abortionists-on-trial.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg_%28Star_Trek%29
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_Parenthood_v._Casey
Left Side of the Aisle #67 - Part 2
Good news on same-sex marriage
After that, I need some good news. So here's some.
The government of Scotland has announced plans to legalize same-sex marriages. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said last week that legislation permitting the marriages would soon be introduced and is sure to pass because it has the backing of all the major Scottish political parties. Scotland thus could become the first part of the UK to allow same-sex marriages.
The UK government has conducted what they call a public consultation, inviting public comment and so forth, on legalizing same-sex marriages but officials are waiting for the results before taking further steps - that is, they're waiting to make sure it's politically safe. But since legalization is endorsed by Prime Minister David Cameron, it can't be too far out there as a position.
But in a real surprise, Vietnam is considering recognition of same-sex marriages. Vietnam is hardly a bastion of human rights and until just a few years ago, homosexuality was labeled as a "social evil" alongside drug addiction and prostitution, so this is a real shift.
It's unclear just what form such recognition would take or even if the idea will survive the coming intra-governmental debates. But the very fact that it's being considered is a major step forward. Justice Minister Ha Hung Cuong described it as facing reality. If it does come to pass, Vietnam will be the first nation in Asia to take that step.
Here at home there is some interesting news on this front, particularly as it reflects changing attitudes. Among those who follow the issue, the Chick-fil-A fast food chain had long been known for its anti-same-sex-marriage stance, contributing millions of dollars to groups opposing recognition. But something happened recently that brought attention to the company: A couple of weeks ago, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy was asked about those reports of its anti-gay stance and answered "Well, guilty as charged." That flip response, along with his insistence that "We are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family" and "We ... operate on biblical principles" struck a nerve and there were calls to boycott the chain. Those calls were countered by folks like Mike Huckleberry, Rick IshouldbeinaSanitarium, and Sarah Failin', among others, who urged people to eat more Chick-fil-A.
So what's happened? YouGov is a polling organization that tracks, among other things, approval scores for members of the Top National Quick Service Restaurant Sector - that is, the leading fast food chains. Just before the interview was published, Chick-fil-A's index score was 65, well above the average score for the sector of 46. Just four days later, Chick-fil-A's score had fallen to 47 and last week, it was down to 39, below the sector average score of 43.
If you celebrate your opposition to equal rights for same-sex couples - yes, your customers do care. And that is good news.
Footnote: I didn't refer to "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" because it was happening on August 1, the same day the show was taped, so I had no info on how well or badly it had gone. Apparently, it was a success for the anti-rights crowd, with large turnouts and long lines. Disappointing, but not surprising: We all know the haters are still out there in considerable numbers. Still, one day is not the issue; the longer-term is the issue. And on that score, I would say the YouGov results mean a lot more than a single day's fast food choice.
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/29/157561604/vietnam-considers-legalizing-same-sex-marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/scottish-government-to-ba_0_n_1701443.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/chick-fil-a-brand-approval-rating-anti-gay-controversy_n_1719359.html
After that, I need some good news. So here's some.
The government of Scotland has announced plans to legalize same-sex marriages. Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said last week that legislation permitting the marriages would soon be introduced and is sure to pass because it has the backing of all the major Scottish political parties. Scotland thus could become the first part of the UK to allow same-sex marriages.
The UK government has conducted what they call a public consultation, inviting public comment and so forth, on legalizing same-sex marriages but officials are waiting for the results before taking further steps - that is, they're waiting to make sure it's politically safe. But since legalization is endorsed by Prime Minister David Cameron, it can't be too far out there as a position.
But in a real surprise, Vietnam is considering recognition of same-sex marriages. Vietnam is hardly a bastion of human rights and until just a few years ago, homosexuality was labeled as a "social evil" alongside drug addiction and prostitution, so this is a real shift.
It's unclear just what form such recognition would take or even if the idea will survive the coming intra-governmental debates. But the very fact that it's being considered is a major step forward. Justice Minister Ha Hung Cuong described it as facing reality. If it does come to pass, Vietnam will be the first nation in Asia to take that step.
Here at home there is some interesting news on this front, particularly as it reflects changing attitudes. Among those who follow the issue, the Chick-fil-A fast food chain had long been known for its anti-same-sex-marriage stance, contributing millions of dollars to groups opposing recognition. But something happened recently that brought attention to the company: A couple of weeks ago, Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy was asked about those reports of its anti-gay stance and answered "Well, guilty as charged." That flip response, along with his insistence that "We are very much supportive of the family - the biblical definition of the family" and "We ... operate on biblical principles" struck a nerve and there were calls to boycott the chain. Those calls were countered by folks like Mike Huckleberry, Rick IshouldbeinaSanitarium, and Sarah Failin', among others, who urged people to eat more Chick-fil-A.
So what's happened? YouGov is a polling organization that tracks, among other things, approval scores for members of the Top National Quick Service Restaurant Sector - that is, the leading fast food chains. Just before the interview was published, Chick-fil-A's index score was 65, well above the average score for the sector of 46. Just four days later, Chick-fil-A's score had fallen to 47 and last week, it was down to 39, below the sector average score of 43.If you celebrate your opposition to equal rights for same-sex couples - yes, your customers do care. And that is good news.
Footnote: I didn't refer to "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" because it was happening on August 1, the same day the show was taped, so I had no info on how well or badly it had gone. Apparently, it was a success for the anti-rights crowd, with large turnouts and long lines. Disappointing, but not surprising: We all know the haters are still out there in considerable numbers. Still, one day is not the issue; the longer-term is the issue. And on that score, I would say the YouGov results mean a lot more than a single day's fast food choice.
Sources:
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/29/157561604/vietnam-considers-legalizing-same-sex-marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/scottish-government-to-ba_0_n_1701443.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/chick-fil-a-brand-approval-rating-anti-gay-controversy_n_1719359.html
Left Side of the Aisle #67 - Part 1
Outrage of the Week: US and guns
The Outrage of the Week this week involves multiple outrages, so many that I couldn't pick just one. I'm going to start with something you already know about.
On Friday, July 20, 24-year-old James Holmes went into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and started shooting. When it was over, 12 people were dead and 58 more were injured, a few in the general chaos but most by being shot. So the first outrage, the first moral outrage, is the incident itself.
When he went on his rampage, Holmes was wearing a ballistic helmet, a gas mask, a throat-protector, plus tactical vest and pants. It was such complete protective gear that responding officers almost thought he was a member of their SWAT team. He threw tear gas into the crowd before he started shooting. He was armed with two handguns and an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle modified with a high-powered 100-round drum magazine. Holmes also had a shotgun which he left in his car. He had amassed over 6000 rounds of ammunition, including 300 for the shotgun.
And everything - every bit of that of that armory, the ammunition, the guns, the clothing, the tear gas, all of it - he obtained entirely legally. Not only legally, but without even raising any red flags anywhere. As one writer put it, "an unregulated online marketplace allows consumers to acquire some of the tools of modern warfare as if they were pieces of a new wardrobe."
Which raises the second outrage: What are we going to do about this? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We're not going to do one single damn thing.
In fact, both the AR-15 and the 100-round drum had been illegal under the federal assault weapons ban passed in 1994. But that expired in 2004 with no effort then or anytime since to renew it. And nothing will be done now.
Oh, President Hopey-Changey went on about how "saddened" he was and Witless Romney joined right in and the House of Representatives even adopted a resolution honoring the victims of the massacre - isn't that precious - but not one of them proposes to actually do anything to reduce the chance of this happening again.
In 2007 we had the Virginia Tech massacre: 32 dead, 12 injured. Nothing was done. In 2011 we had the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson: six dead, 13 injured. Nothing was done. Now we have Aurora. And again, nothing will be done.
In his first official response to Aurora, Obama emphasized how he intends to safeguard the Second Amendment - like it was actually under some kind of threat - and praised "the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation" as part of "a cherished national heritage." The White House later added that Obama will work "within existing law." That is, he won't do a damn thing.
As for House Speaker John Boner, he said "I agree" with Obama: We must have no new laws.
What makes this even worse is that it's not just Aurora. That's the kind of thing that gets our attention - but the fact is, the US sees two Auroras every single day. On average, about 25 Americans are killed by guns every single day. That's upwards of 9000 a year - and that doesn't include accidents or suicides. Include those and you're talking about over 25,000 guns deaths a year.
That means the United States accounts for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest nations of the world combined. But actually do something to stop the carnage? Do something to limit the amount of sheer firepower that is out there that wipes out the equivalent of the entire population of Carver every six months? We can't do that. Because, apparently, 9000 murders and 16,000 more gun deaths every year is part of our "cherished national heritage."
Now, we all know that the real reason for this "can't do" attitude is spelled N-R-A and actually has far more to do with political cowardice than with any "heritage" - except a heritage of political cowardice.
That cowardice, by the way, is not limited to the federal level by any means. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper - who is a Democrat, by the way - dodged a question about gun control, saying of Holmes "Even if he didn’t have access to guns, this guy was diabolical. He would have found explosives. He would have found something.” Yeah, maybe he might have gone into that theater and, I dunno, thrown lawn furniture at people. Or maybe it would have been "Omigosh, look out! He's got a backpack full of frisbees and he's not afraid to use them!"
Meanwhile, Colorado State Rep. Mark Waller cautioned against trying to limit purchases of ammunition -the purchase of which, except for armor-piercing and hollow-headed rounds, is essentially totally unregulated in the United States - saying the 300 shotgun rounds Holmes had was just everyday stuff.
And the mayor of Aurora, Steve Hogan, who you would think would be particularly concerned, appearing with Hickenlooper, contented himself with saying of Holmes "there was something wrong with this individual" while ignoring the weapons involved completely.
In fairness, I have to note that not every voice was one of cowardice: Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed "I'm not really a progressive but I play one on MSNBC" Rendell said "Everyone is scared of the NRA," but added
I will in the future be talking more about this, about the politics of guns, about the role of money and the power of the NRA. I'll also be talking about our "gun culture," so aptly summarized by Dudley Brown, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, who said in the wake of the shootings that Holmes' collection of guns was "the average male in Colorado" and that "If I only had 6,000 rounds for my AR-15s, I'd literally feel naked," a statement I think rather more revealing than he intended.
I'll be looking, that is, at why we are so much more violent than other nations, the reasons for which clearly include the hundreds of millions of guns out there but actually are not limited to that.
But right now I want to address something else: The despicable, inhuman, subhuman responses from the wackos and wingnuts that populate the right side of the American political spectrum. That they respond the same way to every such bloodbath makes it no less contemptible.
There was, for example, Sarah Failin', who inanely blathered on about how “The bad guys don’t follow laws and restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer." Because, again "Bad guys don’t follow laws.” Which may well be true. On the other hand, maybe the owners of the gun shops and the gun show dealers and the rest of those who supply the guns to "the bad guys" would follow the law.
Then there are always those ready to blame the victims, those such as former Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of the state's infamous "papers please" anti-immigrant law. The day after the tragedy, he wondered online why none were “brave” enough to stop it.
“Where were the men of flight 93?" he bloviated. "All that was needed is one Courages [sic] man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done.”
After the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix New Times reported his remarks, Pearce got all huffy and insisted he was being "mischaracterized.” He wasn't blaming the victims, oh no, perish the thought even though that's exactly what he had just done. No, he insisted, he was actually blaming gun control, because it left so many people disarmed and vulnerable "when the only real effect is to disarm everyone who could have saved lives.”
That was echoed by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who said the slaughter proved "one of the rationales behind conceal and carry, where criminals actually have to be concerned that somebody could stop them. That somebody, a responsible individual had been carrying a weapon, maybe they could have prevented the death and injuries."
What's the argument here? It's that there aren't enough guns out there. That there aren't enough people walking around carrying concealed loaded weapons. Because by god if there only had been a bunch of people in that theater packing heat, then amid the darkness of the theater and the tear gas and smoke so thick that one survivor described seeing Holmes only as a silhouette, amid the noise and the people running and screaming, amid the tumult and chaos, that if only other people had been shooting off guns so that no one could even tell who was the original shooter, all trying to hit a target they couldn't really see - and who was wearing body armor - oh yeah, you farina-for-brains jackasses, that would have made it all better.
And of course we have the conspiracy nuts like talk radio guy Alex Jones. If you don't know who he is, count your blessings. It's estimated that listening to one half-hour of Alex Jones can cost you more brain cells than the entire decade of the '60s.
He claims that the Aurora theater Shooting was a “staged event” designed to generate support for (gasp) taking away our guns, leaving us defenseless against the New World Order, black helicopters optional. According to Jones, the person who did the shooting was some “black-op” masked operator and Holmes was a “patsy” who was drugged with “amnesiacs” and duped into taking the fall. Who it was that received the dozens of shipments of ammunition, body armor, and explosive materials delivered to Holmes' apartment and to his place at school goes unexplained.
And finally we come to the religious fanatics of the right. They know who is to blame for this! There is no question! It's liberalism and secularism!
Fred Jackson, head of the American Family Association blamed Hollywood movies, "what we see on the Internets" (Just how many Internets do these people think there are?), liberal bias in the media, "politicians changing public policy," and - get this now - "churches leaving the authority of Scripture."
Jerry Newcombe, a spokesperson for Truth In Action Ministries, blamed the shooting on the separation of church and state - which he apparently thinks is a brand-new thing. That separation, he said, has "chased away any fear of God in the hearts of millions." And in case you didn't get his point about the "fear of god," he declared that any among the dead who were really really Christian, well, for them to die wasn't so tragic because "they are going to a wonderful place" - but those who weren't Christian enough for him, they went straight to hell.
If I believed in hell, I'd have to believe there would be a special place in it for despicable scum like Jerry Newcombe and Fred Jackson - right along with the right-wing wackos and the whole mass of political cowards who mouth platitudes that turn to dust in the air because they are more interested in kissing the butt of the NRA than in protecting the lives and safety of their constituents.
Again, I will have more to say about this at some point. but for right now, all I can say is - it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/evangelical-leaders-blame-the-obvious-culprits-in-aurora-shooting-liberals.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/russell-pearce-blames-shooting-victims-facebook.php
http://underthemountainbunker.com/2012/07/22/alex-jones-and-the-aurora-theater-shooting-was-a-staged-event-conspiracy/
http://www.care2.com/causes/gunman-kills-12-in-colorado-movie-theater.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/james-holmes-weapons-internet_n_1694451.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/aurora-shooting-victims-house-resolution_n_1706044.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Giffords
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/21/gun-control_n_1691781.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/sarah-palin-on-aurora-shootings-gun-control_n_1702936.html
http://www.cagle.com/2012/07/its-the-guns-but-we-all-know-its-not-really-the-guns/
http://www.city-data.com/city/Carver-Massachusetts.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/john-hickenlooper-colorado-shooting_n_1692875.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/michael-bloomberg-nyc-mayor-reacts-colorado-shooting_n_1689211.html
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy-2.jpg
The Outrage of the Week this week involves multiple outrages, so many that I couldn't pick just one. I'm going to start with something you already know about.
On Friday, July 20, 24-year-old James Holmes went into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and started shooting. When it was over, 12 people were dead and 58 more were injured, a few in the general chaos but most by being shot. So the first outrage, the first moral outrage, is the incident itself.
When he went on his rampage, Holmes was wearing a ballistic helmet, a gas mask, a throat-protector, plus tactical vest and pants. It was such complete protective gear that responding officers almost thought he was a member of their SWAT team. He threw tear gas into the crowd before he started shooting. He was armed with two handguns and an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle modified with a high-powered 100-round drum magazine. Holmes also had a shotgun which he left in his car. He had amassed over 6000 rounds of ammunition, including 300 for the shotgun.
And everything - every bit of that of that armory, the ammunition, the guns, the clothing, the tear gas, all of it - he obtained entirely legally. Not only legally, but without even raising any red flags anywhere. As one writer put it, "an unregulated online marketplace allows consumers to acquire some of the tools of modern warfare as if they were pieces of a new wardrobe."
Which raises the second outrage: What are we going to do about this? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We're not going to do one single damn thing.
In fact, both the AR-15 and the 100-round drum had been illegal under the federal assault weapons ban passed in 1994. But that expired in 2004 with no effort then or anytime since to renew it. And nothing will be done now.
Oh, President Hopey-Changey went on about how "saddened" he was and Witless Romney joined right in and the House of Representatives even adopted a resolution honoring the victims of the massacre - isn't that precious - but not one of them proposes to actually do anything to reduce the chance of this happening again.In 2007 we had the Virginia Tech massacre: 32 dead, 12 injured. Nothing was done. In 2011 we had the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson: six dead, 13 injured. Nothing was done. Now we have Aurora. And again, nothing will be done.
In his first official response to Aurora, Obama emphasized how he intends to safeguard the Second Amendment - like it was actually under some kind of threat - and praised "the traditions of gun ownership that passed on from generation to generation" as part of "a cherished national heritage." The White House later added that Obama will work "within existing law." That is, he won't do a damn thing.
As for House Speaker John Boner, he said "I agree" with Obama: We must have no new laws.
What makes this even worse is that it's not just Aurora. That's the kind of thing that gets our attention - but the fact is, the US sees two Auroras every single day. On average, about 25 Americans are killed by guns every single day. That's upwards of 9000 a year - and that doesn't include accidents or suicides. Include those and you're talking about over 25,000 guns deaths a year.
That means the United States accounts for over 80% of all the gun deaths in the 23 richest nations of the world combined. But actually do something to stop the carnage? Do something to limit the amount of sheer firepower that is out there that wipes out the equivalent of the entire population of Carver every six months? We can't do that. Because, apparently, 9000 murders and 16,000 more gun deaths every year is part of our "cherished national heritage."
Now, we all know that the real reason for this "can't do" attitude is spelled N-R-A and actually has far more to do with political cowardice than with any "heritage" - except a heritage of political cowardice.
That cowardice, by the way, is not limited to the federal level by any means. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper - who is a Democrat, by the way - dodged a question about gun control, saying of Holmes "Even if he didn’t have access to guns, this guy was diabolical. He would have found explosives. He would have found something.” Yeah, maybe he might have gone into that theater and, I dunno, thrown lawn furniture at people. Or maybe it would have been "Omigosh, look out! He's got a backpack full of frisbees and he's not afraid to use them!"
Meanwhile, Colorado State Rep. Mark Waller cautioned against trying to limit purchases of ammunition -the purchase of which, except for armor-piercing and hollow-headed rounds, is essentially totally unregulated in the United States - saying the 300 shotgun rounds Holmes had was just everyday stuff.
And the mayor of Aurora, Steve Hogan, who you would think would be particularly concerned, appearing with Hickenlooper, contented himself with saying of Holmes "there was something wrong with this individual" while ignoring the weapons involved completely.
In fairness, I have to note that not every voice was one of cowardice: Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed "I'm not really a progressive but I play one on MSNBC" Rendell said "Everyone is scared of the NRA," but added
There are some things worth losing for in politics and to be able to prevent carnage like this is worth losing for.And New York City Mayor Micheal "I'm just an average, everyday billionaire tool of Wall Street" Bloomberg said
Soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be President of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it.Unfortunately, Mr. Mayor, we already know the answer. They are going to do precisely nothing.
I will in the future be talking more about this, about the politics of guns, about the role of money and the power of the NRA. I'll also be talking about our "gun culture," so aptly summarized by Dudley Brown, the executive director of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, who said in the wake of the shootings that Holmes' collection of guns was "the average male in Colorado" and that "If I only had 6,000 rounds for my AR-15s, I'd literally feel naked," a statement I think rather more revealing than he intended.I'll be looking, that is, at why we are so much more violent than other nations, the reasons for which clearly include the hundreds of millions of guns out there but actually are not limited to that.
But right now I want to address something else: The despicable, inhuman, subhuman responses from the wackos and wingnuts that populate the right side of the American political spectrum. That they respond the same way to every such bloodbath makes it no less contemptible.
There was, for example, Sarah Failin', who inanely blathered on about how “The bad guys don’t follow laws and restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer." Because, again "Bad guys don’t follow laws.” Which may well be true. On the other hand, maybe the owners of the gun shops and the gun show dealers and the rest of those who supply the guns to "the bad guys" would follow the law.
Then there are always those ready to blame the victims, those such as former Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of the state's infamous "papers please" anti-immigrant law. The day after the tragedy, he wondered online why none were “brave” enough to stop it.
“Where were the men of flight 93?" he bloviated. "All that was needed is one Courages [sic] man prepared mentally or otherwise to stop this it could have been done.”
After the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix New Times reported his remarks, Pearce got all huffy and insisted he was being "mischaracterized.” He wasn't blaming the victims, oh no, perish the thought even though that's exactly what he had just done. No, he insisted, he was actually blaming gun control, because it left so many people disarmed and vulnerable "when the only real effect is to disarm everyone who could have saved lives.”
That was echoed by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, who said the slaughter proved "one of the rationales behind conceal and carry, where criminals actually have to be concerned that somebody could stop them. That somebody, a responsible individual had been carrying a weapon, maybe they could have prevented the death and injuries."
What's the argument here? It's that there aren't enough guns out there. That there aren't enough people walking around carrying concealed loaded weapons. Because by god if there only had been a bunch of people in that theater packing heat, then amid the darkness of the theater and the tear gas and smoke so thick that one survivor described seeing Holmes only as a silhouette, amid the noise and the people running and screaming, amid the tumult and chaos, that if only other people had been shooting off guns so that no one could even tell who was the original shooter, all trying to hit a target they couldn't really see - and who was wearing body armor - oh yeah, you farina-for-brains jackasses, that would have made it all better.
And of course we have the conspiracy nuts like talk radio guy Alex Jones. If you don't know who he is, count your blessings. It's estimated that listening to one half-hour of Alex Jones can cost you more brain cells than the entire decade of the '60s.
He claims that the Aurora theater Shooting was a “staged event” designed to generate support for (gasp) taking away our guns, leaving us defenseless against the New World Order, black helicopters optional. According to Jones, the person who did the shooting was some “black-op” masked operator and Holmes was a “patsy” who was drugged with “amnesiacs” and duped into taking the fall. Who it was that received the dozens of shipments of ammunition, body armor, and explosive materials delivered to Holmes' apartment and to his place at school goes unexplained.
And finally we come to the religious fanatics of the right. They know who is to blame for this! There is no question! It's liberalism and secularism!
Fred Jackson, head of the American Family Association blamed Hollywood movies, "what we see on the Internets" (Just how many Internets do these people think there are?), liberal bias in the media, "politicians changing public policy," and - get this now - "churches leaving the authority of Scripture."
Jerry Newcombe, a spokesperson for Truth In Action Ministries, blamed the shooting on the separation of church and state - which he apparently thinks is a brand-new thing. That separation, he said, has "chased away any fear of God in the hearts of millions." And in case you didn't get his point about the "fear of god," he declared that any among the dead who were really really Christian, well, for them to die wasn't so tragic because "they are going to a wonderful place" - but those who weren't Christian enough for him, they went straight to hell.
If I believed in hell, I'd have to believe there would be a special place in it for despicable scum like Jerry Newcombe and Fred Jackson - right along with the right-wing wackos and the whole mass of political cowards who mouth platitudes that turn to dust in the air because they are more interested in kissing the butt of the NRA than in protecting the lives and safety of their constituents.
Again, I will have more to say about this at some point. but for right now, all I can say is - it is an outrage.
Sources:
http://www.care2.com/causes/evangelical-leaders-blame-the-obvious-culprits-in-aurora-shooting-liberals.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/russell-pearce-blames-shooting-victims-facebook.php
http://underthemountainbunker.com/2012/07/22/alex-jones-and-the-aurora-theater-shooting-was-a-staged-event-conspiracy/
http://www.care2.com/causes/gunman-kills-12-in-colorado-movie-theater.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/james-holmes-weapons-internet_n_1694451.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/aurora-shooting-victims-house-resolution_n_1706044.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Giffords
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/21/gun-control_n_1691781.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/sarah-palin-on-aurora-shootings-gun-control_n_1702936.html
http://www.cagle.com/2012/07/its-the-guns-but-we-all-know-its-not-really-the-guns/
http://www.city-data.com/city/Carver-Massachusetts.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/john-hickenlooper-colorado-shooting_n_1692875.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/michael-bloomberg-nyc-mayor-reacts-colorado-shooting_n_1689211.html
http://thismodernworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TMW2011-01-12acolorlowres-copy-2.jpg
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #67
Left Side of the Aisle
for August 2 - 8, 2012
This week:
Outrage of the Week: US and guns
http://www.care2.com/causes/evangelical-leaders-blame-the-obvious-culprits-in-aurora-shooting-liberals.html
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/russell-pearce-blames-shooting-victims-facebook.php
http://underthemountainbunker.com/2012/07/22/alex-jones-and-the-aurora-theater-shooting-was-a-staged-event-conspiracy/
http://www.care2.com/causes/gunman-kills-12-in-colorado-movie-theater.html
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/james-holmes-weapons-internet_n_1694451.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/aurora-shooting-victims-house-resolution_n_1706044.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabrielle_Giffords
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/21/gun-control_n_1691781.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/obama-gun-control_n_1704246.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/sarah-palin-on-aurora-shootings-gun-control_n_1702936.html
http://www.cagle.com/2012/07/its-the-guns-but-we-all-know-its-not-really-the-guns/
http://www.city-data.com/city/Carver-Massachusetts.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/john-hickenlooper-colorado-shooting_n_1692875.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/20/michael-bloomberg-nyc-mayor-reacts-colorado-shooting_n_1689211.html
Good news on same-sex marriage
http://www.npr.org/2012/07/29/157561604/vietnam-considers-legalizing-same-sex-marriage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/25/scottish-government-to-ba_0_n_1701443.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/chick-fil-a-brand-approval-rating-anti-gay-controversy_n_1719359.html
Clarabell award: Federal judge ignores Supreme Court to impose abortion restrictions
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/arizona-20-week-abortion-ban_n_1720803.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/fetal_pain_nonsense_prevails_in_arizona/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/26/opinion/anti-abortionists-on-trial.html
Pennsylvania admits claims of "voter fraud" used to support voter ID laws are bogus
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/24/pennsylvania-voter-id-trial_n_1697980.html
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/pennsylvania_voter_id_no_in_person_voter_fraud.php
Friday, July 20, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #66 - Part 4
Global warming: Drought, storms, and ever-increasing data
Global warming is back in the news. The US is seeing wildfires, freak storms, thousands of temperature records being broken. The last 12 months in the US made up the hottest 12-month stretch on record; the first 6 months of 2012 were the hottest consecutive 6 months on record.
The average US temperature for each of the last 13 months has ranked in the top third of its historical distribution. In other words, June 2011 was in the top third of hottest Junes on record, as was July 2011, and August 2011, and September, and so on. This is the first time that has happened in the recorded history of weather data. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the odds of this occurring randomly are 1 in 1.6 million.
In fact, it's been so hot that we even had events like the one in the picture, with a jet getting trapped at Reagan airport outside DC because it had been so hot that that the tarmac softened and the plane sank four inches down. It had to be towed out of the depression before it could take off.
We're also had the worst droughts in over 50 years, as the map below shows. Some 56% of the land surface of the continental US was designated to be in some form of drought at the end of June. Now, to be fair, I have to note that this is not as bad as dust bowl of '30s but again, it is the worst in over 50 years - and it ain't over yet.
According to a Washington Post-Stanford University Poll in June, over three-fourths of Americans now accept that human activity is at least partly responsible for the rising temperatures and yes, something needs to be done about it, a finding echoed by an editorial in the Sat Lake City Tribune, headlined "A hotter West: Climate change effects undeniable."
Now, as I've said many times before, one hot spell no more proves global warming than one cold snap disproves it. Assigning a particular weather event to global warming is problematic at best. But what we're seeing here is not a single event but an increasingly long string of a variety of events. Each on them on its own proves nothing - but taken together, they make up a massive amount of data persistently, consistently, insistently, pointing in the same direction: We are screwing with the climate to our own pain and harm.
What's more, the latest State of the Climate report out of NOAA notes that scientists are increasingly able to assign probabilities to weather events, that is, not to say "yes this weather event would have happened even without global warming" or "no it wouldn't have happened except for global warming," but to express how likely that event would be. For example, a La Niña year can produce a heat wave in Texas. Now, due to climate change, such a La Niña-driven heat wave is 20 times more likely than it was 50 years ago. Unusually warm Novembers in Great Britain are now 60 times more likely than they would have been 50 years ago, while cold Decembers are half as likely.
Take another look at that drought map. Again, this is not the worst drought on record - but droughts like this, of this severity, are now much more likely than they were 50 years ago. We simply are more likely to experience more droughts, more freak storms, and more record high temperatures than we have been in the recorded history of weather data.
As Deputy NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said when releasing the new State of the Climate report, “Every weather event that happens now takes place in the context of a changing global environment."
That report, by the way, used 43 separate climate indicators to track and identify changes and trends in global climate. Each indicator includes thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets and was compiled by 378 scientists from 48 countries around the world. Think about the weight of that data and that range of expertise the next time some nanny-nanny naysayer wants to go on about something they read somewhere on the Internet.
And that report, that State of the Climate report, does cover the world. And in fact, worldwide, 2011 was the coolest year since 2008, with temperatures held in check by back-to-back La Niñas, which produce cooler-than-average water temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific and so bring cooler temperatures to various regions. Despite that double dip cool-it-down effect, temperatures worldwide remained above the the 1981–2010 average and 2011 was among the 15 warmest years on record.
One last thing to give you some bad dreams. Even with La Niña conditions occurring during most of the year, the 2011 global sea surface temperature was among the 12 highest years on record. Ocean heat content, measured from the surface to 2,300 feet deep, continued to rise since records began in 1993 and was at a record high.
Why are the air and surface temps not even higher than they are? Because, as the graph to the right shows, most of the warming has gone into the world's largest heat sink: the oceans. At some point - and some fear it is fast approaching - the oceans will have absorbed all they can. Future warming will then go into the land surface and the air, having nowhere else to go. And then you will see the temps really climb.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/plane-gets-stuck-at-reagan-national/2012/07/08/gJQAZgG9UW_story.html
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/08/george-will-climate-scientist-explains-the-weather-its-just-summer/
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-climate-will-20120710,0,7227437.story
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2012/07/americans-finally-admitting-to.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/2012/6
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120710_stateoftheclimatereport.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0710/Does-climate-change-increase-the-odds-of-extreme-weather-events-video
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54437645-82/warming-climate-emissions-scientists.html.csp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/drought-in-us-reaching-levels-not-seen-in-50-years-pushing-up-corn-prices/2012/07/16/gJQA01SopW_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/worst-drought-since-1950s-in-continental-us/2012/07/16/gJQAbeKApW_blog.html#pagebreak
Global warming is back in the news. The US is seeing wildfires, freak storms, thousands of temperature records being broken. The last 12 months in the US made up the hottest 12-month stretch on record; the first 6 months of 2012 were the hottest consecutive 6 months on record.The average US temperature for each of the last 13 months has ranked in the top third of its historical distribution. In other words, June 2011 was in the top third of hottest Junes on record, as was July 2011, and August 2011, and September, and so on. This is the first time that has happened in the recorded history of weather data. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, the odds of this occurring randomly are 1 in 1.6 million.
In fact, it's been so hot that we even had events like the one in the picture, with a jet getting trapped at Reagan airport outside DC because it had been so hot that that the tarmac softened and the plane sank four inches down. It had to be towed out of the depression before it could take off.We're also had the worst droughts in over 50 years, as the map below shows. Some 56% of the land surface of the continental US was designated to be in some form of drought at the end of June. Now, to be fair, I have to note that this is not as bad as dust bowl of '30s but again, it is the worst in over 50 years - and it ain't over yet.
According to a Washington Post-Stanford University Poll in June, over three-fourths of Americans now accept that human activity is at least partly responsible for the rising temperatures and yes, something needs to be done about it, a finding echoed by an editorial in the Sat Lake City Tribune, headlined "A hotter West: Climate change effects undeniable."Now, as I've said many times before, one hot spell no more proves global warming than one cold snap disproves it. Assigning a particular weather event to global warming is problematic at best. But what we're seeing here is not a single event but an increasingly long string of a variety of events. Each on them on its own proves nothing - but taken together, they make up a massive amount of data persistently, consistently, insistently, pointing in the same direction: We are screwing with the climate to our own pain and harm.
What's more, the latest State of the Climate report out of NOAA notes that scientists are increasingly able to assign probabilities to weather events, that is, not to say "yes this weather event would have happened even without global warming" or "no it wouldn't have happened except for global warming," but to express how likely that event would be. For example, a La Niña year can produce a heat wave in Texas. Now, due to climate change, such a La Niña-driven heat wave is 20 times more likely than it was 50 years ago. Unusually warm Novembers in Great Britain are now 60 times more likely than they would have been 50 years ago, while cold Decembers are half as likely.
Take another look at that drought map. Again, this is not the worst drought on record - but droughts like this, of this severity, are now much more likely than they were 50 years ago. We simply are more likely to experience more droughts, more freak storms, and more record high temperatures than we have been in the recorded history of weather data.
As Deputy NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan said when releasing the new State of the Climate report, “Every weather event that happens now takes place in the context of a changing global environment."
That report, by the way, used 43 separate climate indicators to track and identify changes and trends in global climate. Each indicator includes thousands of measurements from multiple independent datasets and was compiled by 378 scientists from 48 countries around the world. Think about the weight of that data and that range of expertise the next time some nanny-nanny naysayer wants to go on about something they read somewhere on the Internet.
And that report, that State of the Climate report, does cover the world. And in fact, worldwide, 2011 was the coolest year since 2008, with temperatures held in check by back-to-back La Niñas, which produce cooler-than-average water temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific and so bring cooler temperatures to various regions. Despite that double dip cool-it-down effect, temperatures worldwide remained above the the 1981–2010 average and 2011 was among the 15 warmest years on record.
One last thing to give you some bad dreams. Even with La Niña conditions occurring during most of the year, the 2011 global sea surface temperature was among the 12 highest years on record. Ocean heat content, measured from the surface to 2,300 feet deep, continued to rise since records began in 1993 and was at a record high.Why are the air and surface temps not even higher than they are? Because, as the graph to the right shows, most of the warming has gone into the world's largest heat sink: the oceans. At some point - and some fear it is fast approaching - the oceans will have absorbed all they can. Future warming will then go into the land surface and the air, having nowhere else to go. And then you will see the temps really climb.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/plane-gets-stuck-at-reagan-national/2012/07/08/gJQAZgG9UW_story.html
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/08/george-will-climate-scientist-explains-the-weather-its-just-summer/
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-climate-will-20120710,0,7227437.story
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2012/07/americans-finally-admitting-to.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/2012/6
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120710_stateoftheclimatereport.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0710/Does-climate-change-increase-the-odds-of-extreme-weather-events-video
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54437645-82/warming-climate-emissions-scientists.html.csp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/drought-in-us-reaching-levels-not-seen-in-50-years-pushing-up-corn-prices/2012/07/16/gJQA01SopW_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/worst-drought-since-1950s-in-continental-us/2012/07/16/gJQAbeKApW_blog.html#pagebreak
Left Side of the Aisle #66 - Part 3
Outrage of the Week: NYPD falsely links Occupy to unsolved murder
The week's Outrage of the Week brings together two things, both of which I have talked about before but neither of them recently: the New York City Police Department and Occupy.
The NYPD and the city government are really full of themselves with regard to terrorism. As evidence of their supposed brilliance, the NYPD, its allies, and the media have repeatedly said the department has stopped or helped stop 14 terrorist plots against New York since September 11. The figure has been cited repeatedly in the media, by New York congressmen, and by the police commissar - er, commissioner - himself.
It's crap. Of the 14 supposed plots - as published by the NYPD - only three involve actual terrorist plots involving New York. And one of them, the 2010 Times Square bombing, the cops didn't even prevent: It just failed. The bomb didn't go off. Of the other two, one was uncovered by US intelligence and the other by British agents - in fact, in that one the plot involved blowing up airliners over the Atlantic (so no, not aimed at New York) and the only connection to New York was that one of those arrested carried flight information about flights into and out of the city, among other places.
Of the other 11 cases, there are three in which government informants played the major role, even to the point of creating the plot in order to ensnare people. Four more are cases whose credibility or seriousness has been questioned by law enforcement, including ones in which federal prosecutors wouldn't even bring charges. And the last four cases each involved an idea for a plot which never got beyond talk, including one - a proposal to bring down the Brooklyn bridge by cutting the supporting cables - which was abandoned before the cops even knew about it.
That's the record the NYPD thumping its chest about. Which definitely would be Clarabell territory but in this case it just forms the backdrop. I've gone after the NYPD before, for example, for its racist stop and frisk policy, its intrusions into privacy, and its illegal harassment and arrests of Occupy protesters.
But now, the New York cops have gone completely over the top and around the bend in their attempts to smear and discredit dissenters from the Wall Street barons who are the actual rulers of their city.
On March 28, Occupy staged a protest against New York City fare hikes and service cuts in its public transit system by chaining open gates at 20 subway stations across the city, so anyone could walk in for free. Well, just over a week ago, on July 10, the NYPD announced that a DNA sample taken from a chain at one of those sites matched a sample found at the scene of the unsolved brutal murder of a Juilliard student named Sarah Fox in 2004. And that, you have to understand, is how the police presented it: The unsolved murder of Sarah Fox has been linked to Occupy via DNA.
And that, of course, is how the media presented it: the New York Observer, The Gothamist, the Daily Mail (UK), Associated Press, the Village Voice, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, CBS New York, NBC New York, Gawker, every single one of them carried exactly the sort of headline the cops wanted: Every one of them had a headline along the lines of "DNA evidence links murder to Occupy Wall Street." Every one of them.
None of them even mentioned until at least several paragraphs into the story that the cops have no idea who the DNA on the chain came from and that in fact it could have come from anyone who touched that chain - which means it could have just as well been a rider with no connection to the protest at all. And not one of them mentioned the possibility of error except to deny it or mentioned the possibility of a contaminated sample at all. All that despite the fact that a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union a year before pointed to independent research showing, quoting,
Nearly 24 hours after these screaming headlines, the story had a different take; investigators were reporting that “contamination at a city laboratory could have led to the match between DNA found at the murder scene of a Julliard student eight years ago and a chain used at a recent Occupy Wall Street protest.” In fact, a source who had been briefed on the investigation told the New York Times that both samples - the one from 2004 and the one from the chain - came from a Police Department employee who works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
So there was no reason to connect any Occupy protester to the murder and even less than no reason to connect the movement as a whole to it. Yet, bluntly, that is exactly what the cops did. Consciously. Deliberately. And that is what the media went along with and amplified. Either consciously and deliberately or as the worst of incompetent, lazy, butt-kissing buffoons.
Now, some people will see the updates. And some of those will go "Oh, I see." But how many thousands will not? How many thousands will recall only the lurid headlines and - thanks to the lies of the cops and the complicity of the media - come away with the notion in the back of their minds that Occupy is harboring murderers?
It is an absolute outrage. The Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/07/11/media-publish-weak-but-titillating-reports-tying-occupy-wall-street-to-unsolved-murder/
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Sarah-Fox-Occupy-Wall-Street-DNA-Link-Lab-Contamination--162120545.html
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/nyregion/suspected-dna-link-to-2004-killing-was-the-result-of-a-lab-error.xml
http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/nypd-exaggerated-counterterrorism-exploits-elliott.html
http://strikeeverywhere.net/fare-strike-hits-mta-in-new-york/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79266911/Civil-Liberties-DNA
The week's Outrage of the Week brings together two things, both of which I have talked about before but neither of them recently: the New York City Police Department and Occupy.
The NYPD and the city government are really full of themselves with regard to terrorism. As evidence of their supposed brilliance, the NYPD, its allies, and the media have repeatedly said the department has stopped or helped stop 14 terrorist plots against New York since September 11. The figure has been cited repeatedly in the media, by New York congressmen, and by the police commissar - er, commissioner - himself.
It's crap. Of the 14 supposed plots - as published by the NYPD - only three involve actual terrorist plots involving New York. And one of them, the 2010 Times Square bombing, the cops didn't even prevent: It just failed. The bomb didn't go off. Of the other two, one was uncovered by US intelligence and the other by British agents - in fact, in that one the plot involved blowing up airliners over the Atlantic (so no, not aimed at New York) and the only connection to New York was that one of those arrested carried flight information about flights into and out of the city, among other places.
Of the other 11 cases, there are three in which government informants played the major role, even to the point of creating the plot in order to ensnare people. Four more are cases whose credibility or seriousness has been questioned by law enforcement, including ones in which federal prosecutors wouldn't even bring charges. And the last four cases each involved an idea for a plot which never got beyond talk, including one - a proposal to bring down the Brooklyn bridge by cutting the supporting cables - which was abandoned before the cops even knew about it.
That's the record the NYPD thumping its chest about. Which definitely would be Clarabell territory but in this case it just forms the backdrop. I've gone after the NYPD before, for example, for its racist stop and frisk policy, its intrusions into privacy, and its illegal harassment and arrests of Occupy protesters.
But now, the New York cops have gone completely over the top and around the bend in their attempts to smear and discredit dissenters from the Wall Street barons who are the actual rulers of their city.
On March 28, Occupy staged a protest against New York City fare hikes and service cuts in its public transit system by chaining open gates at 20 subway stations across the city, so anyone could walk in for free. Well, just over a week ago, on July 10, the NYPD announced that a DNA sample taken from a chain at one of those sites matched a sample found at the scene of the unsolved brutal murder of a Juilliard student named Sarah Fox in 2004. And that, you have to understand, is how the police presented it: The unsolved murder of Sarah Fox has been linked to Occupy via DNA.
And that, of course, is how the media presented it: the New York Observer, The Gothamist, the Daily Mail (UK), Associated Press, the Village Voice, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, CBS New York, NBC New York, Gawker, every single one of them carried exactly the sort of headline the cops wanted: Every one of them had a headline along the lines of "DNA evidence links murder to Occupy Wall Street." Every one of them.
None of them even mentioned until at least several paragraphs into the story that the cops have no idea who the DNA on the chain came from and that in fact it could have come from anyone who touched that chain - which means it could have just as well been a rider with no connection to the protest at all. And not one of them mentioned the possibility of error except to deny it or mentioned the possibility of a contaminated sample at all. All that despite the fact that a report from the New York Civil Liberties Union a year before pointed to independent research showing, quoting,
an unexpectedly high incidence of error and fraud in the collection, handling and analysis of DNA evidence: mislabeling of samples, cross contamination of samples, misinterpretation of results, misrepresentation.The research showed these problems in labs across the country, including those in New York City.
Nearly 24 hours after these screaming headlines, the story had a different take; investigators were reporting that “contamination at a city laboratory could have led to the match between DNA found at the murder scene of a Julliard student eight years ago and a chain used at a recent Occupy Wall Street protest.” In fact, a source who had been briefed on the investigation told the New York Times that both samples - the one from 2004 and the one from the chain - came from a Police Department employee who works with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
So there was no reason to connect any Occupy protester to the murder and even less than no reason to connect the movement as a whole to it. Yet, bluntly, that is exactly what the cops did. Consciously. Deliberately. And that is what the media went along with and amplified. Either consciously and deliberately or as the worst of incompetent, lazy, butt-kissing buffoons.
Now, some people will see the updates. And some of those will go "Oh, I see." But how many thousands will not? How many thousands will recall only the lurid headlines and - thanks to the lies of the cops and the complicity of the media - come away with the notion in the back of their minds that Occupy is harboring murderers?
It is an absolute outrage. The Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/07/11/media-publish-weak-but-titillating-reports-tying-occupy-wall-street-to-unsolved-murder/
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Sarah-Fox-Occupy-Wall-Street-DNA-Link-Lab-Contamination--162120545.html
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/nyregion/suspected-dna-link-to-2004-killing-was-the-result-of-a-lab-error.xml
http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/nypd-exaggerated-counterterrorism-exploits-elliott.html
http://strikeeverywhere.net/fare-strike-hits-mta-in-new-york/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79266911/Civil-Liberties-DNA
Left Side of the Aisle #66 - Part 2
Clarabell Award: CNN hypes Iranian missiles
The Clarabell Award, which has become a regular feature of Left Side of the Aisle, is given for that week's act of Truly Meritorious Stupidity. This week, however, there was just too much stupidity; maybe it's the heat or something. In any event, I couldn't pick one. So I have a winner plus two runners-up.
The second runner-up comes about as the result of an article in Esquire magazine by Tom Junod entitled “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama.” It's about the Obama administration reserving to itself the right to create kill lists without oversight, outside input, any minimal transparency, or even acknowledgment about these policies even when they target and kill innocent people. I've talked about this issue several times.
Junod said in response to the article, he received a telephone call from someone he describes as “a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration.” State secrecy, the man on the phone said, exists to protect two essential things: the sources and methods of the intelligence community (an assertion which is not under challenge and is irrelevant to the issue), and something he called "the requirement of non-acknowledgement." State secrecy, that is, is vital because it enables the government to lie through its teeth to everyone, including the US public. The state must be able to keep things secret so that the state can keep things secret.
That's like someone proving the sky is green by saying it must be green because it's the sky and the sky is green, therefore, the sky is green. How more clownish can you get?
Well, maybe this much more, our first runner-up. Witless Romney has been struggling to explain how it is that, according to him, he had no connection to Bain Capital after 1999 even though documents over the following three years list him as CEO, Chairman, President, and sole stockholder of the company and show that he took a six-figure salary, signed corporate documents related to major and minor deals, and attended board meetings for at least two Bain-affiliated companies.
On July 15, senior campaign adviser Ed Gillespie went on CNN’s “State of the Union” and took another shot at climbing out of this deepening hole but instead produced this gem of clownishness: "He [that is, Romney] took a leave of absence [in 1999] and in fact he ended up not going back at all, and retired retroactively to 1999 as a result."
Got that? He "retroactively retired." What a great concept. "Gee officer, sorry but you can't give me a speeding ticket. I retroactively turned off this road a mile back so I'm not actually here." "Retired retroactively." A phrase that will outlive its clown originator.
Okay, now here's this week's winner of the Clarabell Award for Truly Meritorious Stupidity. I gave this the award because of the importance of the issue.
To start, you need to know that the Pentagon is sending the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Persian Gulf region four months ahead of schedule and intends for it to be there twice as long as originally planned. There is ongoing, even increasing, tension in the region as Israel threatens pre-emptive airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran responds by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and US officials continue to make dark references to "Iran’s nuclear weapons program" even though our own intelligence agencies say there isn't one.
Late last week, on CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer reported on what he described as “an ominous new warning coming in from the Pentagon" about Iran's missile program. It turned out that the "ominous new warning" was actually an unsubstantiated Pentagon claim - the Pentagon being the people I call The Fear Merchants - from three years ago.
But this is the award winner. Blitzer then turned to CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, a guy named Chris Lawrence, who dutifully parroted the Pentagon claims about how Iranian missiles are getting more accurate and more deadly and then said this:
CNN: not only clowns, clowns in service to those pushing us to another insane war.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/12/excuses_for_assassination_secrecy/
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/237943-gillespie-says-romney-retired-retroactively-from-bain-capita
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/15/mitt-romney-bain-capital_n_1674209.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12769568-aircraft-carrier-uss-stennis-going-to-persian-gulf-early-staying-longer
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/cnn_on_the_iran_threat/
The Clarabell Award, which has become a regular feature of Left Side of the Aisle, is given for that week's act of Truly Meritorious Stupidity. This week, however, there was just too much stupidity; maybe it's the heat or something. In any event, I couldn't pick one. So I have a winner plus two runners-up.The second runner-up comes about as the result of an article in Esquire magazine by Tom Junod entitled “The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama.” It's about the Obama administration reserving to itself the right to create kill lists without oversight, outside input, any minimal transparency, or even acknowledgment about these policies even when they target and kill innocent people. I've talked about this issue several times.
Junod said in response to the article, he received a telephone call from someone he describes as “a person with intimate knowledge of the executive counter-terrorism policies of the Obama administration.” State secrecy, the man on the phone said, exists to protect two essential things: the sources and methods of the intelligence community (an assertion which is not under challenge and is irrelevant to the issue), and something he called "the requirement of non-acknowledgement." State secrecy, that is, is vital because it enables the government to lie through its teeth to everyone, including the US public. The state must be able to keep things secret so that the state can keep things secret.
That's like someone proving the sky is green by saying it must be green because it's the sky and the sky is green, therefore, the sky is green. How more clownish can you get?
Well, maybe this much more, our first runner-up. Witless Romney has been struggling to explain how it is that, according to him, he had no connection to Bain Capital after 1999 even though documents over the following three years list him as CEO, Chairman, President, and sole stockholder of the company and show that he took a six-figure salary, signed corporate documents related to major and minor deals, and attended board meetings for at least two Bain-affiliated companies.
On July 15, senior campaign adviser Ed Gillespie went on CNN’s “State of the Union” and took another shot at climbing out of this deepening hole but instead produced this gem of clownishness: "He [that is, Romney] took a leave of absence [in 1999] and in fact he ended up not going back at all, and retired retroactively to 1999 as a result."
Got that? He "retroactively retired." What a great concept. "Gee officer, sorry but you can't give me a speeding ticket. I retroactively turned off this road a mile back so I'm not actually here." "Retired retroactively." A phrase that will outlive its clown originator.
Okay, now here's this week's winner of the Clarabell Award for Truly Meritorious Stupidity. I gave this the award because of the importance of the issue.
To start, you need to know that the Pentagon is sending the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis to the Persian Gulf region four months ahead of schedule and intends for it to be there twice as long as originally planned. There is ongoing, even increasing, tension in the region as Israel threatens pre-emptive airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, Iran responds by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, and US officials continue to make dark references to "Iran’s nuclear weapons program" even though our own intelligence agencies say there isn't one.
Late last week, on CNN’s The Situation Room, host Wolf Blitzer reported on what he described as “an ominous new warning coming in from the Pentagon" about Iran's missile program. It turned out that the "ominous new warning" was actually an unsubstantiated Pentagon claim - the Pentagon being the people I call The Fear Merchants - from three years ago.
But this is the award winner. Blitzer then turned to CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, a guy named Chris Lawrence, who dutifully parroted the Pentagon claims about how Iranian missiles are getting more accurate and more deadly and then said this:
Iran already has a missile that could reach the US if it could put it on a ship and move it to within 600 miles of the American coastline.What the hell kind of argument is that? I have a rock I could throw all the way to Iran if I could get to within 100 feet of its border. How incredibly clownish is that argument? Especially considering that back in November, when Iranian leaders were boasting about their navy, the Pentagon mocked idea that the Iranian navy could get anywhere near the us - and CNN obediently quoted its "experts" ridiculing the very notion that now the network finds so threatening.
CNN: not only clowns, clowns in service to those pushing us to another insane war.
Sources:
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/12/excuses_for_assassination_secrecy/
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/237943-gillespie-says-romney-retired-retroactively-from-bain-capita
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/15/mitt-romney-bain-capital_n_1674209.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12769568-aircraft-carrier-uss-stennis-going-to-persian-gulf-early-staying-longer
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/cnn_on_the_iran_threat/
Left Side of the Aisle #66 - Part 1
Tim Geithner and LIBOR
The LIBOR scandal, which so far has been largely confined to the UK, could jump across the pond and right into the lap of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
As I explained last week LIBOR is in effect the interest rate at which the biggest banks can get short-term loans from each other. It's importance is that many other interest rates are pegged to it. It directly affects some $10 trillion in economic activity and indirectly affects as much as $800 trillion, right down to things like home mortgages and student loans. And there is clear evidence that those banks have been manipulating the rate to their own advantage. One - Barclays - has already reached a settlement of over $500 million and several other major banks both here and abroad are being investigated in several countries.
Between 2003 and when he joined the Obama administration in 2009, Tim Geithner was director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, usually just called the New York Fed. It is regarded as the most powerful of the regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve system. There have been increasing questions about what the Fed knew or didn't know, did or didn't do, in relation to LIBOR during the time Geithner was in charge of the New York Fed.
Under pressure, the New York Fed released a bunch of documents related to those questions. They show that more than four years ago, in December 2007, a time - again - when Geithner was in charge there, Barclays bank told the New York Fed that, in general, LIBOR submissions appeared unrealistically low. A few months later, in April 2008, a New York Fed analyst asked a Barclays employee in detail about the extent of problems with LIBOR. “We just fit in with the rest of the crowd if you like,” the bank’s staffer said. “We know that we’re not posting an honest LIBOR. And yet we are doing it, because if we didn’t do it, It draws unwanted attention on ourselves."
The response of the New York Fed representative to this confession of lying and assertion of lying on the part of all the others? Sympathy and understanding:
"You have to accept it," the representative of the New York Fed says. "I understand. Despite it’s against what you would like to do. I understand completely."
It's hey, y'know, ya gotta do what ya gotta do for your own short-term interests and the rest of world will just have to suck it up and deal with it.
According to the Fed's documents, in the first part of 2008 a summary of this admission circulated through the US government, including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. As a result, on June 1 of that year, Geithner sent a memo to the governor of the Bank of England, one Mervyn King, suggesting six reforms of LIBOR. King responded that Geithner’s recommendations “seem sensible” and passed them on to the British Bankers’ Association, which actually gathers the data on which LIBOR is based and does the daily calculation.
But here's the thing: While the Fed claims it continued to follow developments in LIBOR after that time, it offers little documentation of that interest, beyond a handful of phone calls. There is no evidence that Geithner's recommendations were acted on - in fact, they never were - or that the Fed pushed for their adoption. Which is why, in late October 2008, months after Geithner's memo to King, a Barclays employee could tell a New York Fed representative that LIBOR rates were still "absolute rubbish."
And here's the big thing: Mervyn King, addressing Parliament on July 17, said he had not been sent any of the evidence of misreporting that the Fed had gathered. “The New York Fed did not raise any evidence of wrongdoing with regards to LIBOR,” he said. Which could be discounted as self-serving - he is, after all, a banker - except for the fact that there is no evidence either in Geithner's memo or anywhere else that the Fed or anyone else in the US government told British regulators that they had evidence of deliberate manipulation of LIBOR. They wrote up their little memo - and then they dropped it.
And what is their defense? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that the central bank did all it was required to do. To put that more clearly, in the face of a confession that a major international interest rate benchmark was being manipulated, they did the minimum required by law - more precisely, they did as little as possible.
So what's going to come of all this? I think here, in the US, almost nothing. Maybe some fines, maybe a resignation or two, but no real change. Here's why: The O gang is not going to go after this because to do so would mean going after their own guy, Geithner, And while you think the GOPpers would pounce on this, what with Geithner being Obama's Treasury Secretary and all, but I expect they won't - because you have to remember that Geithner's wrongdoing was in ignoring the wrongdoing of others. So to really go after Geithner, they would have to go after the banks. And that I just don't see them doing.
Sources:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-fed-knew-of-libor-cheating-in-2008-2012-07-13?link=MW_pulse
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/new-york-fed-libor-documents_n_1671524.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/geithner-did-not-show-evidence-of-rigged-libor-british-bank-official-says/2012/07/17/gJQA7RIFrW_story.html
The LIBOR scandal, which so far has been largely confined to the UK, could jump across the pond and right into the lap of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
As I explained last week LIBOR is in effect the interest rate at which the biggest banks can get short-term loans from each other. It's importance is that many other interest rates are pegged to it. It directly affects some $10 trillion in economic activity and indirectly affects as much as $800 trillion, right down to things like home mortgages and student loans. And there is clear evidence that those banks have been manipulating the rate to their own advantage. One - Barclays - has already reached a settlement of over $500 million and several other major banks both here and abroad are being investigated in several countries.Between 2003 and when he joined the Obama administration in 2009, Tim Geithner was director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, usually just called the New York Fed. It is regarded as the most powerful of the regional banks that make up the Federal Reserve system. There have been increasing questions about what the Fed knew or didn't know, did or didn't do, in relation to LIBOR during the time Geithner was in charge of the New York Fed.
Under pressure, the New York Fed released a bunch of documents related to those questions. They show that more than four years ago, in December 2007, a time - again - when Geithner was in charge there, Barclays bank told the New York Fed that, in general, LIBOR submissions appeared unrealistically low. A few months later, in April 2008, a New York Fed analyst asked a Barclays employee in detail about the extent of problems with LIBOR. “We just fit in with the rest of the crowd if you like,” the bank’s staffer said. “We know that we’re not posting an honest LIBOR. And yet we are doing it, because if we didn’t do it, It draws unwanted attention on ourselves."
The response of the New York Fed representative to this confession of lying and assertion of lying on the part of all the others? Sympathy and understanding:
"You have to accept it," the representative of the New York Fed says. "I understand. Despite it’s against what you would like to do. I understand completely."
It's hey, y'know, ya gotta do what ya gotta do for your own short-term interests and the rest of world will just have to suck it up and deal with it.
According to the Fed's documents, in the first part of 2008 a summary of this admission circulated through the US government, including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. As a result, on June 1 of that year, Geithner sent a memo to the governor of the Bank of England, one Mervyn King, suggesting six reforms of LIBOR. King responded that Geithner’s recommendations “seem sensible” and passed them on to the British Bankers’ Association, which actually gathers the data on which LIBOR is based and does the daily calculation.
But here's the thing: While the Fed claims it continued to follow developments in LIBOR after that time, it offers little documentation of that interest, beyond a handful of phone calls. There is no evidence that Geithner's recommendations were acted on - in fact, they never were - or that the Fed pushed for their adoption. Which is why, in late October 2008, months after Geithner's memo to King, a Barclays employee could tell a New York Fed representative that LIBOR rates were still "absolute rubbish."
And here's the big thing: Mervyn King, addressing Parliament on July 17, said he had not been sent any of the evidence of misreporting that the Fed had gathered. “The New York Fed did not raise any evidence of wrongdoing with regards to LIBOR,” he said. Which could be discounted as self-serving - he is, after all, a banker - except for the fact that there is no evidence either in Geithner's memo or anywhere else that the Fed or anyone else in the US government told British regulators that they had evidence of deliberate manipulation of LIBOR. They wrote up their little memo - and then they dropped it.
And what is their defense? Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the senate Banking Committee on Tuesday that the central bank did all it was required to do. To put that more clearly, in the face of a confession that a major international interest rate benchmark was being manipulated, they did the minimum required by law - more precisely, they did as little as possible.
So what's going to come of all this? I think here, in the US, almost nothing. Maybe some fines, maybe a resignation or two, but no real change. Here's why: The O gang is not going to go after this because to do so would mean going after their own guy, Geithner, And while you think the GOPpers would pounce on this, what with Geithner being Obama's Treasury Secretary and all, but I expect they won't - because you have to remember that Geithner's wrongdoing was in ignoring the wrongdoing of others. So to really go after Geithner, they would have to go after the banks. And that I just don't see them doing.
Sources:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-fed-knew-of-libor-cheating-in-2008-2012-07-13?link=MW_pulse
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/new-york-fed-libor-documents_n_1671524.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/geithner-did-not-show-evidence-of-rigged-libor-british-bank-official-says/2012/07/17/gJQA7RIFrW_story.html
Left Side of the Aisle #66
Left Side of the Aisle
for the week of July 19-25, 2012
This week:
Tim Geithner and LIBOR
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-fed-knew-of-libor-cheating-in-2008-2012-07-13?link=MW_pulse
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/13/new-york-fed-libor-documents_n_1671524.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/geithner-did-not-show-evidence-of-rigged-libor-british-bank-official-says/2012/07/17/gJQA7RIFrW_story.html
Clarabell Award: CNN hypes Iranian missiles
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/12/excuses_for_assassination_secrecy/
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/237943-gillespie-says-romney-retired-retroactively-from-bain-capita
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/15/mitt-romney-bain-capital_n_1674209.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/16/12769568-aircraft-carrier-uss-stennis-going-to-persian-gulf-early-staying-longer
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/16/cnn_on_the_iran_threat/
Outrage of the Week: NYPD falsely links Occupy to unsolved murder
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/07/11/media-publish-weak-but-titillating-reports-tying-occupy-wall-street-to-unsolved-murder/
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Sarah-Fox-Occupy-Wall-Street-DNA-Link-Lab-Contamination--162120545.html
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/nyregion/suspected-dna-link-to-2004-killing-was-the-result-of-a-lab-error.xml
http://www.juancole.com/2012/07/nypd-exaggerated-counterterrorism-exploits-elliott.html
http://strikeeverywhere.net/fare-strike-hits-mta-in-new-york/
http://www.scribd.com/doc/79266911/Civil-Liberties-DNA
Global warming: Drought, storms, and ever-increasing data
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/plane-gets-stuck-at-reagan-national/2012/07/08/gJQAZgG9UW_story.html
http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/07/08/george-will-climate-scientist-explains-the-weather-its-just-summer/
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-climate-will-20120710,0,7227437.story
http://jobsanger.blogspot.com/2012/07/americans-finally-admitting-to.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/drought/2012/6
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2012/20120710_stateoftheclimatereport.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0710/Does-climate-change-increase-the-odds-of-extreme-weather-events-video
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/opinion/54437645-82/warming-climate-emissions-scientists.html.csp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/drought-in-us-reaching-levels-not-seen-in-50-years-pushing-up-corn-prices/2012/07/16/gJQA01SopW_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/worst-drought-since-1950s-in-continental-us/2012/07/16/gJQAbeKApW_blog.html#pagebreak
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Left Side of the Aisle #65 - Part 4
And Another Thing: Higgs boson found; so what?
This has been all over the news, so I bet you've heard about it even if you didn't understand it - which wouldn't be surprising because the people in the media telling you about it probably didn't understand it, either.
On July 4, two teams at the European Organization for Nuclear Research - known as CERN after the acronym formed from its French name - announced that after years of smashing subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light they had found a new elementary particle which was, in the cautious words of scientists, consistent with the characteristics predicted for the Higgs boson.
Put another way, they had all but certainly found what had come to be nicknamed the "God particle" because of the way it cements the standard model of subatomic physics.
Simply put, even overly-simply put, there are two types of subatomic particles: fermions, usually associated with matter, and bosons, which are the force carriers between other particles. An electron is a fermion; a photon, which can be thought of as a particle of light, is a boson.
Here was the issue: There is a whole zoo of subatomic particles, but they could be organized into groups based on related characteristics. So scientists had this nice - rather complex, but still organized - pattern of the relationships among various families of particles and the individual particles that make up those families. Each particle has its own characteristics. But a question remained: Why did they have those particular characteristics? All fermions, for example, are essentially point particles - they essentially have zero volume. So why do they - and how can they - have different masses? Where does mass come from?
The Higgs boson was the hypothetical answer to that question. The Higgs boson - named for Peter Higgs, the British physicist who came up with the idea - would make up the Higgs field, which permeates all of space. Different particles would interact differently with the Higgs field, some more strongly than others. The more strongly a given particle interacted, the more energy it would take to move it through the field. Since the amount of energy it takes to move something, that is, to overcome its inertia, is the measure of mass, the Higgs field would be why things have mass and why different things have different masses.
That hypothesis specified the characteristics the Higgs boson would have to have in order to fit the idea. And it is a particle with those characteristics which researchers at CERN now believe they have found. The picture, by the way, is of one of the experimental results - such pictures being part of the data to be analyzed - that gave the scientists cause to think that.
Years ago, Bill Cosby, back when he was funny instead of an obnoxious old man shouting "get off my lawn," had a comedy album called "Why Is There Air?" In a way, this is like that: It's one of those fundamental "why" questions, ones sometimes so basic we don't think to ask them. Why is there mass? Now scientists think they know. And how cool is that.
Sources:
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/higgs-boson-god-particle-discovered.php
http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs
This has been all over the news, so I bet you've heard about it even if you didn't understand it - which wouldn't be surprising because the people in the media telling you about it probably didn't understand it, either.
On July 4, two teams at the European Organization for Nuclear Research - known as CERN after the acronym formed from its French name - announced that after years of smashing subatomic particles together at nearly the speed of light they had found a new elementary particle which was, in the cautious words of scientists, consistent with the characteristics predicted for the Higgs boson.
Put another way, they had all but certainly found what had come to be nicknamed the "God particle" because of the way it cements the standard model of subatomic physics.
Simply put, even overly-simply put, there are two types of subatomic particles: fermions, usually associated with matter, and bosons, which are the force carriers between other particles. An electron is a fermion; a photon, which can be thought of as a particle of light, is a boson.
Here was the issue: There is a whole zoo of subatomic particles, but they could be organized into groups based on related characteristics. So scientists had this nice - rather complex, but still organized - pattern of the relationships among various families of particles and the individual particles that make up those families. Each particle has its own characteristics. But a question remained: Why did they have those particular characteristics? All fermions, for example, are essentially point particles - they essentially have zero volume. So why do they - and how can they - have different masses? Where does mass come from?
The Higgs boson was the hypothetical answer to that question. The Higgs boson - named for Peter Higgs, the British physicist who came up with the idea - would make up the Higgs field, which permeates all of space. Different particles would interact differently with the Higgs field, some more strongly than others. The more strongly a given particle interacted, the more energy it would take to move it through the field. Since the amount of energy it takes to move something, that is, to overcome its inertia, is the measure of mass, the Higgs field would be why things have mass and why different things have different masses.That hypothesis specified the characteristics the Higgs boson would have to have in order to fit the idea. And it is a particle with those characteristics which researchers at CERN now believe they have found. The picture, by the way, is of one of the experimental results - such pictures being part of the data to be analyzed - that gave the scientists cause to think that.
Years ago, Bill Cosby, back when he was funny instead of an obnoxious old man shouting "get off my lawn," had a comedy album called "Why Is There Air?" In a way, this is like that: It's one of those fundamental "why" questions, ones sometimes so basic we don't think to ask them. Why is there mass? Now scientists think they know. And how cool is that.
Sources:
http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/higgs-boson-god-particle-discovered.php
http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs
Left Side of the Aisle #65 - Part 3
Outrage of the Week: Medals for "bravery" for drone pilots
The Pentagon is considering creating a new medal. It's to be called the Distinguished Warfare Medal. While it hasn't been approved yet, the Army Institute of Heraldry, which is responsible for designing medals, has already submitted six alternate designs.
Big deal, a new medal. So what's the outrage? It's this:
The medals are specifically intended to be awarded to those who pilot predator drones to attack targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. That is, to be given to "pilots" who sit in bases literally thousands of miles from the conflicts, thousands of miles from any possibility of injury beyond a hand cramp or a calloused thumb, thousands of miles away from the death and destruction they cause which to them appears only as a grainy video on a computer screen - and now they are to be rewarded, it appears, for what, their bravery? Apparently so:
Writing in the May-June issue of the Air & Space Power Journal, Air Force Maj. Dave Blair wondered how much difference there is in terms of risk "between 10,000 feet and 10,000 miles." According to him, an "aircraft that scrapes the top of a combat zone, well outside the range of any realistic threat" is deemed in "combat" because, well, it entered a combat zone. But a Predator drone firing a missile is considered mere "combat support." And it's just not fair, it seems, that the drone pilots, the joystick jockeys, sitting at their computer screens killing people by remote control while wondering whether to have pizza for dinner, it's just not right that they aren't regarded as in actual combat, as in the thick of things, as right on the front lines with the grunts in foxholes.
Years ago, in fact a few decades ago, the military started talking about "the electronic battlefield." The headquarters of the Army's "electronics warfare command" was at the military base just down the road from where I lived. Some people started worrying about wars of robots, others about how increasingly isolating people from the effects of their actions desensitizes them to those effects making them easier to impose. Making, that is, wars easier to start. It's taken some time, but we surely are seeing that now, as those who kill computer images at a distance are to be regarded as engaging in work that is not even merely necessary, but somehow courageous.
But as Glenn Greenwald said
Human being referred to as "bugs" to be squashed and the people who do the squashing in complete safety from thousands of miles away to be rewarded for their "bravery."
A week doesn't seem enough for that level of outrage but it's all I have. The Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/drone-pilots-to-get-medals/2012/07/09/gJQAF2PhYW_blog.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/10/bravery_and_drone_pilots/
The Pentagon is considering creating a new medal. It's to be called the Distinguished Warfare Medal. While it hasn't been approved yet, the Army Institute of Heraldry, which is responsible for designing medals, has already submitted six alternate designs.
Big deal, a new medal. So what's the outrage? It's this:
The medals are specifically intended to be awarded to those who pilot predator drones to attack targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. That is, to be given to "pilots" who sit in bases literally thousands of miles from the conflicts, thousands of miles from any possibility of injury beyond a hand cramp or a calloused thumb, thousands of miles away from the death and destruction they cause which to them appears only as a grainy video on a computer screen - and now they are to be rewarded, it appears, for what, their bravery? Apparently so:
Writing in the May-June issue of the Air & Space Power Journal, Air Force Maj. Dave Blair wondered how much difference there is in terms of risk "between 10,000 feet and 10,000 miles." According to him, an "aircraft that scrapes the top of a combat zone, well outside the range of any realistic threat" is deemed in "combat" because, well, it entered a combat zone. But a Predator drone firing a missile is considered mere "combat support." And it's just not fair, it seems, that the drone pilots, the joystick jockeys, sitting at their computer screens killing people by remote control while wondering whether to have pizza for dinner, it's just not right that they aren't regarded as in actual combat, as in the thick of things, as right on the front lines with the grunts in foxholes.
Years ago, in fact a few decades ago, the military started talking about "the electronic battlefield." The headquarters of the Army's "electronics warfare command" was at the military base just down the road from where I lived. Some people started worrying about wars of robots, others about how increasingly isolating people from the effects of their actions desensitizes them to those effects making them easier to impose. Making, that is, wars easier to start. It's taken some time, but we surely are seeing that now, as those who kill computer images at a distance are to be regarded as engaging in work that is not even merely necessary, but somehow courageous.
But as Glenn Greenwald said
If the mere act of taking steps that will result in the death of others makes one "brave," consider all the killers who now merit that term: dictators who order protesters executed, tyrants who send others off to war, prison guards who activate electric chairs.Consider, too, that when one of these drones succeeds in killing someone, it 's referred to - this is the actual military term - it 's referred to as a "bug splat."
Human being referred to as "bugs" to be squashed and the people who do the squashing in complete safety from thousands of miles away to be rewarded for their "bravery."
A week doesn't seem enough for that level of outrage but it's all I have. The Outrage of the Week.
Sources:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/drone-pilots-to-get-medals/2012/07/09/gJQAF2PhYW_blog.html
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/10/bravery_and_drone_pilots/
Left Side of the Aisle #65 - Part 2
LIBOR scandal: What it is, why it matters
There's some big important news of late about which you might not have heard because it's just beginning to penetrate the US mainstream media. Some of the big newspapers - the New York Times and so on - have had some stories, but TV, from where most people get their news, doesn't seem to have paid much attention to it. It's big news around the world, but as is all too common, we don't hear about it because we're more focused on what Kate Moss is up to. So you might not have heard about this - or, if you have, you probably didn't get it explained properly because the people explaining it probably didn't really understand it themselves.
It's about something called LIBOR - the London Inter-Bank Offered (or Offer or Offering or Overnight) Rate. Each day, each of a consortium of now 18 international banks submits to the British Bankers Association, a trade group, an estimate of the interest rate at which they think their bank could borrow short-term from other banks. The association throws out the four high and the four low submissions and averages the rest to create the daily LIBOR.
It is, in other words, a measure of the interest rates that global banks charge each other for short-term borrowing, without any guarantees against default, such as those offered in the United States by the FDIC. The idea is that without such guarantees, it's a reflection of the actual market cost of such loans. It's monitored by government agencies, such as the Federal Reserve in the US and the Financial Services Authority in the UK, but it isn't regulated by anybody.
Why is LIBOR important? Because it provides the baseline for the interest rates on a variety of other loans and transactions. It directly affects around $10 trillion in loans and it's estimated by the Wall Street Journal that it indirectly affects $800 trillion in economic activity, everything from derivatives of multiple sorts down to interest received on savings accounts and paid on student loans, business loans, and adjustable-rate mortgages, all pegged to LIBOR. As a comparison, if you have a credit card with a variable rate, you've probably noticed that the rate is pegged to the US prime rate. These other transactions, and therefore their costs, are pegged to LIBOR in the same way, rising and falling with it.
So this is a big deal. It's an important number. In fact, The Economist calls it "the most important figure in finance."
And evidence is emerging that it has been manipulated by the banks for years for the benefit of - guess who - the banks.
So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclays, a big and old - 300 years old, in fact - London-based bank that just paid $453 million to US and British bank regulators. It's top executives have been forced to resign amid revelations of its traders’ emails, which give, in the words of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "a chilling picture" of how easily they got their colleagues to rig (or at the very least try to rig) interest rates in order to make big bucks. Because of the daily flow and flux of derivatives trading, even small changes in interest rates could turn into major amounts of cash. In 2007, for instance, the gain (or loss) that Barclays stood to make from normal moves in interest rates over any given day was $40 million. A day.
But here's the thing, and here's where the scandal starts to grow real claws: Because of the way it's calculated - remember, the four high and low estimates get tossed and the rest averaged - there is no way that Barclays on its own could have affected LIBOR enough to make a meaningful difference. Only the collusion of the other banks involved or at least a significant number of them could have allowed for that. And Wall Street - including the usual suspects such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America - were right in there.
And in fact, over the past week-plus damning evidence has emerged out of the documents released as part of the settlement Barclays made with regulators. Those documents show that employees at the bank and at several other unnamed banks tried to rig the number repeatedly over a period of at least five years. Rigging the entire international system of finance for their own selfish short-term ends. Gee-what-a-shock.
Quoting Robert Reich again:
There are now investigations going on in several countries, including Canada, America, Japan, the European Union, Switzerland, and Britain. The chief executive of a multinational bank said "This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” referring to the lawsuits and settlements that cost America’s tobacco industry more than $200 billion in 1998. It's the moment it all hits the fan.
Which has lead to some people defending the banks not just on the usual dismissive claims such as those made by the #2 person at the Bank of England that this is just a "minor scandal" and harrumphing about how that was all back then and everything is fine now, move along, nothing to see here - but on the jaw-dropping grounds that "the world cannot afford endless litigation against banks." It's too much of a threat to growth, to the world economy, to anything and everything we hold dear - we just can't afford to hold the banks responsible for their actions. Just like in 2008, just like multiple times before, we just have to suck it up, count our losses, and lick our wounds because the prospect of doing anything else is just too horrible to contemplate. It's "too big to fail" all over again; in fact, it's beyond that to "too big to challenge."
But as always, "too big to fail" should also mean "to big to exist." It's past time to just break the banks. It's time to take over the banks. Take them over not to resell them to some other set of supposedly more efficient masters but to turn them into public, nonprofit banks and credit unions. And if the banks and bankers don't like it? Tough. You've been stepping on our faces more than long enough. It's past time you got to see what the soles of our shoes look like up close.
A couple of quick footnotes to this:
Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays who was forced to resign, seemed shocked that he was out. An American by birth, he apparently expected to be subject to what New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson called "the American rules of engagement," where in the face of evidence of illegalities, top executives plead ignorance, kick out a few lower-level managers, maybe give up a bonus or two - and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines from the shareholders rather than criminal penalties from the real actors. UK regulators may have been asleep at the wheel, but once they woke up they seem a bit more interested in actually doing their jobs than our own regulators are here.
The other footnote also involved Diamond. In its settlement with regulators, Barclays accepted that its traders had manipulated rates on hundreds of occasions. Diamond retorted in a memo to staff that “on the majority of days, no requests were made at all” to manipulate the rate. Which, someone said, was rather like an adulterer saying it was all okay because he didn't cheat on his wife on most days.
Sources:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/libor.asp#axzz20A8p6V6E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43266422/LIBOR_CNBC_Explains
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/07/10/why-rigging-the-libor-interest-rate-is-a-big-rotten-deal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303567704577516804050467544.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
http://www.economist.com/node/21558281
http://robertreich.org/post/26708840314
http://www.propublica.org/article/beyond-barclays-laying-out-the-libor-investigations
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-nobody-freaking-out-about-the-libor-banking-scandal-20120703
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/09/rules_of_american_justice/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303343404577518322474380682.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
There's some big important news of late about which you might not have heard because it's just beginning to penetrate the US mainstream media. Some of the big newspapers - the New York Times and so on - have had some stories, but TV, from where most people get their news, doesn't seem to have paid much attention to it. It's big news around the world, but as is all too common, we don't hear about it because we're more focused on what Kate Moss is up to. So you might not have heard about this - or, if you have, you probably didn't get it explained properly because the people explaining it probably didn't really understand it themselves.
It's about something called LIBOR - the London Inter-Bank Offered (or Offer or Offering or Overnight) Rate. Each day, each of a consortium of now 18 international banks submits to the British Bankers Association, a trade group, an estimate of the interest rate at which they think their bank could borrow short-term from other banks. The association throws out the four high and the four low submissions and averages the rest to create the daily LIBOR.It is, in other words, a measure of the interest rates that global banks charge each other for short-term borrowing, without any guarantees against default, such as those offered in the United States by the FDIC. The idea is that without such guarantees, it's a reflection of the actual market cost of such loans. It's monitored by government agencies, such as the Federal Reserve in the US and the Financial Services Authority in the UK, but it isn't regulated by anybody.
Why is LIBOR important? Because it provides the baseline for the interest rates on a variety of other loans and transactions. It directly affects around $10 trillion in loans and it's estimated by the Wall Street Journal that it indirectly affects $800 trillion in economic activity, everything from derivatives of multiple sorts down to interest received on savings accounts and paid on student loans, business loans, and adjustable-rate mortgages, all pegged to LIBOR. As a comparison, if you have a credit card with a variable rate, you've probably noticed that the rate is pegged to the US prime rate. These other transactions, and therefore their costs, are pegged to LIBOR in the same way, rising and falling with it.
So this is a big deal. It's an important number. In fact, The Economist calls it "the most important figure in finance."
And evidence is emerging that it has been manipulated by the banks for years for the benefit of - guess who - the banks.
So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclays, a big and old - 300 years old, in fact - London-based bank that just paid $453 million to US and British bank regulators. It's top executives have been forced to resign amid revelations of its traders’ emails, which give, in the words of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "a chilling picture" of how easily they got their colleagues to rig (or at the very least try to rig) interest rates in order to make big bucks. Because of the daily flow and flux of derivatives trading, even small changes in interest rates could turn into major amounts of cash. In 2007, for instance, the gain (or loss) that Barclays stood to make from normal moves in interest rates over any given day was $40 million. A day.
But here's the thing, and here's where the scandal starts to grow real claws: Because of the way it's calculated - remember, the four high and low estimates get tossed and the rest averaged - there is no way that Barclays on its own could have affected LIBOR enough to make a meaningful difference. Only the collusion of the other banks involved or at least a significant number of them could have allowed for that. And Wall Street - including the usual suspects such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America - were right in there.
And in fact, over the past week-plus damning evidence has emerged out of the documents released as part of the settlement Barclays made with regulators. Those documents show that employees at the bank and at several other unnamed banks tried to rig the number repeatedly over a period of at least five years. Rigging the entire international system of finance for their own selfish short-term ends. Gee-what-a-shock.
Quoting Robert Reich again:
This is insider trading on a gigantic scale. It makes the bankers winners and the rest of us - whose money they’ve used for to make their bets - losers and chumps.As if all that wasn't enough, there's a second, related scandal: Around 2007, when the whole rotten structure of derivatives of derivatives of derivatives was beginning to teeter like a two-foot-high stack of pennies, Barclays was submitting LIBOR figures clearly below what they should have been. That is, it was submitting interest rates that other banks would have charged them to loan money which were lower than what those other banks actually would have charged. What this did was make Barclays look less risky as a loan partner, less likely to default on its debts, that is, of better financial health, than it actually was. It was actively concealing its actual increasingly precarious financial condition. In its own defense, bank officials said they had to do this because all the other banks were doing it, and Barclays couldn't afford to be an outlier. By concealing their actual positions in this way, these banks delayed the financial collapse, but they did not prevent it. However, they did accomplish two things: They protected their bottom lines in the short term and insured the collapse would be even worse when it did hit, as it did in 2008.
There are now investigations going on in several countries, including Canada, America, Japan, the European Union, Switzerland, and Britain. The chief executive of a multinational bank said "This is the banking industry’s tobacco moment,” referring to the lawsuits and settlements that cost America’s tobacco industry more than $200 billion in 1998. It's the moment it all hits the fan.
Which has lead to some people defending the banks not just on the usual dismissive claims such as those made by the #2 person at the Bank of England that this is just a "minor scandal" and harrumphing about how that was all back then and everything is fine now, move along, nothing to see here - but on the jaw-dropping grounds that "the world cannot afford endless litigation against banks." It's too much of a threat to growth, to the world economy, to anything and everything we hold dear - we just can't afford to hold the banks responsible for their actions. Just like in 2008, just like multiple times before, we just have to suck it up, count our losses, and lick our wounds because the prospect of doing anything else is just too horrible to contemplate. It's "too big to fail" all over again; in fact, it's beyond that to "too big to challenge."
But as always, "too big to fail" should also mean "to big to exist." It's past time to just break the banks. It's time to take over the banks. Take them over not to resell them to some other set of supposedly more efficient masters but to turn them into public, nonprofit banks and credit unions. And if the banks and bankers don't like it? Tough. You've been stepping on our faces more than long enough. It's past time you got to see what the soles of our shoes look like up close.
A couple of quick footnotes to this:
Bob Diamond, the CEO of Barclays who was forced to resign, seemed shocked that he was out. An American by birth, he apparently expected to be subject to what New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson called "the American rules of engagement," where in the face of evidence of illegalities, top executives plead ignorance, kick out a few lower-level managers, maybe give up a bonus or two - and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines from the shareholders rather than criminal penalties from the real actors. UK regulators may have been asleep at the wheel, but once they woke up they seem a bit more interested in actually doing their jobs than our own regulators are here.
The other footnote also involved Diamond. In its settlement with regulators, Barclays accepted that its traders had manipulated rates on hundreds of occasions. Diamond retorted in a memo to staff that “on the majority of days, no requests were made at all” to manipulate the rate. Which, someone said, was rather like an adulterer saying it was all okay because he didn't cheat on his wife on most days.
Sources:
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/libor.asp#axzz20A8p6V6E
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor
http://www.cnbc.com/id/43266422/LIBOR_CNBC_Explains
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/07/10/why-rigging-the-libor-interest-rate-is-a-big-rotten-deal
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303567704577516804050467544.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
http://www.economist.com/node/21558281
http://robertreich.org/post/26708840314
http://www.propublica.org/article/beyond-barclays-laying-out-the-libor-investigations
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-is-nobody-freaking-out-about-the-libor-banking-scandal-20120703
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/09/rules_of_american_justice/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303343404577518322474380682.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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