March, 2010 archive
Politics and Reality 1
Bloomberg:
One year after U.S stocks hit their post-financial-crisis low on March 9, 2009, the benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 68 percent, and it’s up more than 41 percent since Obama took office. Credit spreads have narrowed. Commodity prices have surged. Housing prices have stabilized.
Sadly, it still doesn’t seem to be reaching those who need it most. Maybe it’s the lagging indicator thingee.
The End 1
On the block for scrap:
But for the last 14 years, the pride of a nation has gone nowhere, rusting away at a pier in South Philadelphia, a fading landmark seemingly destined for one last journey: to the scrapyard.
Its owner, Norwegian Cruise Line, which spends about $700,000 a year to moor and maintain the ship, appears ready to pull the plug
When any falling down junker of a building can attract hordes of “historic preservationists” to protect its existence, even though it has no claim to being “historical” other than being old, unpainted, and unmaintained, to allow this ship, holds stuffed with history, to be sold and dismembered, is a damned shame.
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“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
That’s why police lock down the schools when someone is spotted carrying in the neighborhood.
The Entitlement Society, Reprise 0
Paul Myners in the Guardian:
The risk is now that their confidence has not been sufficiently dented; that they have not truly learned their lesson. And the danger with this moral hazard is that they could put us all at risk again.
This is why a central part of restoring true market discipline to the world financial system must be major reform globally to the way banks and financial firms are governed and regulated.
Meanwhile . . .
The “financial industry” has demonstrated that it is incapable of learning from experience and that, in a conflict between greed and responsibility, greed wins.
Check the history of the US in the 1800s. There was a recession depression panic almost exactly every 20 years.
The only period in US history without regular recessions depressions panics was the period during which Glass-Steagel was in effect. Sure there were ups and downs, but those were hills and dales, not mountains and canyons.
Banksters gotta be watched. Carefully. Even in their little bankster hideouts.
The Entitlement Society 0
Too much is not enough.
In Germany, a bank goes under and gets taken over by another bank. The new bank decides not the reward employees of the failed bank for their failure with bonuses.
Now bankers from the failed bank are suing for their bonuses.
Dresdner “was entitled to take the actions it did in relation to Dresdner Kleinwort employees’ discretionary bonuses in light of the market deterioration in the investment bank’s performance,” according to a spokesman at Commerzbank, who declined to be identified citing company policy. “The bank will be defending any claims vigorously in the courts.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
We Need Single Payer 0
Country club memberships (emphasis added):
“You see, these insurance companies have made a calculation,” Obama said in prepared remarks released by the White House. “They’re OK with people being priced out of health insurance because they’ll still make more by raising premiums on the customers they have. And they will keep doing this for as long as they can get away with it.”
UPS and Downs 0
A veteran UPS driver, with a 25-year safety record, reflects:
“Distractions are the big culprit,” McAllister says, “and it’s definitely gotten worse.”
He is constantly amazed by “the blatant violations of traffic laws as well as the laws of physics and common sense.”
It’s the electronic age. They used to prop books and memos on the steering wheel. Now it’s laptops.
Furrfu.
Swampwater 0
Commence Operation Scapegoat (emphasis added):
After two workers, including a Virginia Beach man, shot and killed two Afghan civilians last year, the Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater was thrown off its $25 million subcontract, but not without a fight, the documents reveal.
The supervisor of the two men was specifically identified in e-mails and letters as fostering such an environment. And even after the killings last May, Blackwater – which now calls itself Xe Services – tried to keep him on the job and distance itself from the shootings.
The functions in question should have been performed by United States employees beholden and subject to the United States, not by mercenaries.
The outsourcing of military functions is bogus. It makes the official military budget look a little smaller (or more accurately not as big), while funneling money into private hands not beholden to the United States except on payday to perform the same functions with less efficiency, less effectiveness, undoubtedly less discipline, but at much greater expense.
It’s the hand-in-the-pocket thingee again.
Meta: Why the Category Is “Political Economy” 3
Because all politics is economics. Anything else is a red herring.
The magician prattles on about magic powers and beautiful assistants so you don’t watch his hands in his pockets.
The Republicans prattle on about family values for the same reason. The difference is that their hands are in the country’s pockets.
It’s a Fetish 0
That is, an unwholesome fixation on one thing, like ladies’ shoes.
Joseph Stiglitz on “deficit cut fetishism”:
Read the whole thing, particularly the paragraph towards the end in which he points out
America’s financial industry polluted the world with toxic mortgages, and, in line with the well established “polluter pays” principle, taxes should be imposed on it.
America’s financial industry has shown that it subtracts, rather than adding value and that incompetence is not its own reward; rather, incompetence deserves ginormous bonuses. And country club memberships.
Its advice should be discounted.
The Galt and the Lame 0
One of the myths treasured by the rightwing is that private industry always does a better job than government “bureaucrats.”*
It just ain’t so, but it does funnel a lot of government money in private hands:
Consider the bomb-sniffing dogs: The Navy contracted out their training. The dogs failed the tests after training (they couldn’t sniff bombs); after thinking about it a while, the Navy decided to buy the dogs and train them itself:
But what they found when they arrived was shocking, according to internal Navy e-mails: dirty, weak animals so thin that their ribs and hip bones jutted out.
(snip)
In fact, the Navy said later, at least two of the dogs did not survive. Several others were deemed too sick to ever be of use. Nearly a year after they were supposed to have begun working, the remaining K-9s still are not patrolling Navy installations as intended.
The contractor says the Navy owes it $6,000,000.00.
I hope the guv’mint protected itself by including in the contract a performance bond.
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*As if large private companies somehow do not qualify as “bureaucracies”; case in point: try calling Verizon for a telephone repair and see how long it takes to reach a real live human being.
It took me an hour and six phone calls–Verizon dropped two of them and three others ended up in Menu Hell. Once I got to them, the real live human beings were polite, knowledgeable, and efficient (afterthought: probably because they were hungry for human interaction), but Verizon’s 800-number horror show is one of the reasons I would not contract with Verizon for anything other than basic land line service.