Making Sausage

…with our livelihoods.

This is where the trickery comes in. To explain it, let’s go back to the sausage analogy.

Say I’m a sausage grinder. My sausage is selling great.  Until one day, my customers say they don’t want the ends, the ones with those nasty knots. Pretty soon, I’ve got all these end bits piling up on my counter. I’m worried it’s going to turn off customers. So I shove the end bits back in the grinder and make new sausages.  Brilliant. Of course, customers don’t want those end bits either.  So, I throw them back in the grinder. This works for a while.  But eventually, I’m making sausages that are made up entirely of nasty end bits.

“So, this is exactly what happens with subprime CDOs (collateralized  debt obligations) ,” Bernstein says. “The investment banks take the worst parts of the CDO and they put it into new CDOs, recycling it again and again, until pretty soon, the CDOs that you’re left with are made up of the worst parts of the stuff.”

With Wall Street, when they recycle a CDO and shove a nasty bit back in the blender, they mark it as a sale. As if they found a real customer.

“In fact, a lot of the business is an illusion,” Eisinger says. “The CDO guys are orchestrating the demand.”

From a fine collaboration with NPR and ProPublica, with AutoTune the news thrown in for good measure.

40 Days

When Greg Abbott actually sues a company in Texas, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.

In Texas City, an estimated 538,000 pounds of pollutants like benzene, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide leaked into the air during that period, though Carman believes the release may be “more than 10 times higher” than the number that BP reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That’s because, he says, BP assumes that its flare met the 2 percent standard but has no record proving that it does. “BP has no real monitoring technology up on the flare,” he says. “They have no way to measure the actual emissions that did not get burned over the 40 days.”  (more…)

While we ponder more stringent immigration controls in the state, hows about we deport BP?

Tea Party & Vergoogle

Following the release of Google and Verizon’s controversial proposal on managing Internet traffic, which comes less than a week after the FCC abandoned efforts at a hammering out a compromise, Tea Party groups have taken a strong stance on the issue of net neutrality.

Specifically, they’re against it. (more…)

I just…I can’t…words….rage….what the hell? Instead of the Government mandating an open web that is free of tiered-content restrictions based on provider, you’re going to let the ‘free’ market decide what content you should be allowed to access, based on a payment level? Or worse yet be served specific content at a different priority level, thus severely diminishing the open access to multiple sources/viewpoints? So, freedom of speach is cool, but if I’m poor and can’t afford access I only get served a specific…. oh wait, you guys hate poor people anyhow, so this actually works in your favor. I see what you did there.

This was my favorite bit.

The Internet has never been a regulated utility and we urge you to keep it that way by rejecting so-called “Net Neutrality” regulations on the Internet and the proposed Title II reclassification.

Right, cause all those root DNS servers, backbone connections, URL naming conventions -they all magically run themselves with no government intervention or regulation.

Birthright Citizenship

“The debate is always about the theoretical. … Whenever you talk about the practical aspects of it, there’s silence,” says Margaret Stock, an Anchorage, Alaska-based immigration attorney who’s written extensively and testified before Congress on the subject. “Because anybody who understands how citizenship is determined in the absence of the 14th Amendment quickly realizes that we have a huge mess on our hands. And it will cost billions of dollars if we change the amendment’s current interpretation.”  (more…)

Anti-immigrant sentiment and the absurdity of the anchor babies argument aside, get rid of your birth certificate as proof of citizenship and your talking about a huge inflation of bureaucracy to keep track of citizens, somewhere on the scale of a national ID plan meets the Census Bureau with some elements of  the IRS thrown in for fun  (all this being the supposed anathema to your conservative base (except of course with defense)) . Someone needs to help the Republicans and the Teapers eat their young on this bullshit.

1937

In case you missed the recent round of  politi-theater, Congress recently neglected to extend unemployment benefits to nearly 1 million fellow Americans because they’re concerned (as they should be) about deficit spending (although we’ll ignore the fact that bush-era wars/war-on-terror/war-on-drugs spending by the GOP accounts for a large chunk of this). Turns out we’ve been down this road before. In 1937, after unprecedented Federal spending helped cut unemployment in half, Republicans pressured FDR to balance the budget. Unemployment doubled.

“The Depression, as bad as it was, would have been much worse without the government spending,” says Alan Brinkley, a historian of the Depression at Columbia University. “And the 1937 effort to balance the budget — I think almost every economist would agree — was a catastrophe.”

Ok, setting aside the negative humanitarian (and economic) impact of axing benefits for 1million people, I get the tough on big-government thing, and in some ways I agree with it. But when you have economists telling you to keep dumping money into public projects, and historians saying, look this has happened before, it might do you well to listen for change, as opposed to cranking out another soundbite for your conservative base.

General Disarray

Changing commanders in the middle of a war is never easy. Lincoln fired lethargic General McClellan and appointed Grant to command the Army of the Potomac. The troops were not happy with the change. Truman fired General MacArthur, and conservatives hammered him for it….Generals frequently tend to be more popular than presidents. They appear stronger, more purposeful, more competent. But they have the luxury of only focusing on war, on killing the enemy or capturing ground. Presidents, whether they want to or not, must deal with the big picture. More…

Before I get hammered here for taking the side of the president, let’s try a little litmus test – go find a local freelance reporter with nothing to lose, use facebook, or maybe just buy a billboard if you’re well off. Proceed to speak/post with zero filter about your job, your boss, your coworkers, the public face of your company, etc. Then report back here as to the status of your employment in about a week.

BP’s Liability

Cue the lawyers….

Jeffrey Rachlinksi, a Cornell University professor specializing in environmental law, calls the current push by Senate Democrats to lift the upper liability “largely redundant theater.”

Language already in the Oil Pollution Act, established after the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, eliminates the cap if the party responsible for a spill is found to have been grossly negligent or violated federal regulations governing the construction, safety or operation of an offshore rig such as the Deepwater Horizon. The rig was destroyed seven weeks ago in an explosion that killed 11 workers.

It’s “highly unlikely that the events of April 20 did not include one or more deviations from these codes,” Rachlinski told NPR. More…

So now it falls to BP to prove they were running a rig in accordance with the letter of the law, a rig that is currently sitting on the floor of the gulf, and was actually operated by another company, all with a price-tag sufficient to  bankrupt a multinational corporation.

Oh yeah, this will be settled quickly and fairly, I’m just sure of it.

5%

Gov. Good Hair is asking agencies for a 5% cut out of his ostensibly  ‘balanced budget.’ I wonder if he could reimburse us for the rent on his Westlake mansion as a good start.

In total, Perry’s initial request for proposal produced plans for reductions $1.7 billion in approved spending from all state agencies over the current biennium. Today’s announcement via the Legislative Budget Board cuts that to $1.25 billion, which is still no small chunk of change. Such cuts probably hurt basic service provision in Texas more than they would in many other states because (as is so well and widely reported) such services have been cut to the bone as is.

House Legislative Caucus Leader Jim Dunnam, D-Waco, was quick to point out that if the state had taken steps to receive up to $700 million in Race to the Top dollars and $500 million in unemployment insurance cash, then things might not be so bleak. The caveat that he doesn’t mention is that these would be dedicated dollars for specific projects, but, still, $1.2 billion is nothing to sneeze at, even in the best of times. Dunnam said, “Accepting the Federal unemployment insurance and education dollars would only have affected Perry’s false image as a Washington outsider (never mind the $16 billion in Federal Stimulus funds Perry and the Republican legislature used to balance the current state budget).”

I really don’t understand how he’s still ahead in the polls.

The Euro

You know at least when we tired our damnedest to destroy the world economy, it was just a couple of jackass banks (and of course, the federal government which turned a blind-eye to said banks, but that’s neither here nor there). In the EU, entire member states are working hard to send us into another tailspin.

In an extraordinary session that lasted into the early morning hours, finance ministers from the European Union agreed on a deal that would provide $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion under an existing lending program. Elena Salgado, the Spanish finance minister, who announced the deal, also said the International Monetary Fund was prepared to give up to $321 billion separately.

…for a grand Total of $957 bn. Not exactly chump change and as The Times notes, bigger than our $700bn bailout.

Neutrality

Well whaddya know,  FCC has suddenly  grown a pair.

But today, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski made Internet lines subject to the same rules as telephone networks, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. These rules, which come from Title 2 of the Communications Act, state that service providers should not block or restrict speed or bandwidth for websites or applications because of their content or the nature of the traffic.

On the surface it looks like a step in the right direction for net neutrality.