Well, here is the evidence:
Month: November 2011
It’s a Good Election Night
But not a great one, with Ohio overturning Governor John Kasich’s union busting bill, while in Mississippi, they defeated the “fetal personhood” referendum, and Maine defeated the elimination of same day voter registration by the ‘Phants.
On the other side, it’s likely that Virginia’s state Senate will flip to the ‘Phants, (actually a 20-20 tie, but the Lt. Gov, who breaks ties is a Republican) with the pivotal seat having the Republican leading by 86 votes, and Mississippi approved a poll tax strict photo ID requirements.
I will say that the recall of über wingnut, and state senate leader, Steve Pearce in Arizona, made famous as the sponsor of Arizona’s “Papers Please” law, does make me chuckle.
Bill Daley Being Shuffled Out the Door
Well, it looks like Obama’s more prominent efforts to completely capitulate to the Washington, DC insider consensus, his appointment of William Daley, political insider and bankster, as his chief of staff, is now inoperative:
President Obama’s chief of staff, William M. Daley, has turned over some of his day-to-day management responsibilities to another senior aide, Pete Rouse, according to several officials with knowledge of the change. The shift comes after a turbulent period in which the White House has struggled with a weak economy and a hostile Congress.
Mr. Daley made the announcement in a staff meeting on Monday, these officials said, though it was unclear exactly what his new role would look like. He told a Chicago television station recently that he planned to return to his home there after the 2012 election.
The news of the management changes was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
A banker with deep connections on Wall Street and in Democratic politics, Mr. Daley was recruited by Mr. Obama last fall to smooth relations with the business world. But after the administration’s failure to strike a deficit-reduction deal with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Mr. Daley found that his deal-making skills were of less use.
Yeah, that whole “Kissing Republican and bankster ass,” post partisan unity schtick strategy worked so well, didn’t it.
Don’t worry though, you can be sure that a year from now, we’ll see it back, just as soon as the polls close.
Stewart Unleashes Hell on John Corzine
Comedy central does not have his monologue up yet, but I’m watching Jon Stewart talk about Jon Corzine’s clusterf%$# at MF Capital.
It’s not up on the web yet, but this is unbelievably brutal.
As I’ve said before, don’t piss this man off.
I’ll post it tomorrow.
Worse Than Wal-Mart
The big banks, who are so dedicated to nickel and diming their customers that Wal-Marthas experienced explosive growth in its check cashing services as people desperately try to find a bank that does not cheat them:
Americans say they are fed up with banks. They are protesting on Wall Street and raising a ruckus over outsize fees. Now there is a surprising beneficiary: Wal-Mart.
Geoffrey Cardone, a 26-year-old factory worker, said he dumped his bank account because he felt that he was being nickeled and dimed by fees. His new payday ritual includes a trip to the Wal-Mart here in northeastern Pennsylvania.
“It’s cheaper,” said Mr. Cardone, who was charged a flat fee of $3 to cash his paycheck. Many check-cashing stores keep a percentage of the check, which tends to be higher.
The Wal-Mart here has a clerk in a brightly painted Money Center near the entrance, like more than 1,000 other Wal-Marts across the country. Customers can cash work and government checks, pay bills, wire money overseas or load money on to a prepaid debit card. At most Wal-Marts without dedicated Money Centers, the financial services are available at the customer service desks or kiosks.
Four years ago, Wal-Mart abandoned its plans to obtain a long-sought federal bank charter amid opposition from the banking industry and lawmakers, who feared the huge retailer would drive small bankers out of business and potentially conflate its banking and retail operations. Ever since, Wal-Mart has been quietly building up à la carte financial services, becoming a force among the unbanked and “unhappily banked,” as one Wal-Mart executive put it.
Even before the recent outcry against banks, the services had become popular with cash-poor customers, many of whom never had a bank account and found the services more affordable than traditional check-cashing operations. Now newcomers to the ranks of the banking disaffected are helping to swell the numbers, Wal-Mart officials said.
Here is the kicker:
In research conducted a year and a half ago, Wal-Mart found that more than 60 percent of the customers using its financial services had bank accounts. When Wal-Mart asked those people how much their banking activities cost them over the last six months, the answer was between $200 and $400, Mr. Eckert said, with overdraft fees, minimum-balance charges and so forth.
(emphasis mine)
So for the privilege of giving customers ¼% on their own money, money that they then lend to them at 23% as revolving credit, they are also charging them around $500 a year.
Let’s see, 500 a year, ¼% … So the break even point is about $200,000.00.
And the VSPs wonder why people hate the banksters.
Italy’s Cancer of the Body Politic Offers to Step Down
Silvio Berlusconi has offered to resign:
The European debt crisis appeared to claim its most prominent victim on Tuesday when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, cornered by world markets and humiliated by a parliamentary setback, pledged to resign after Italy’s Parliament passes austerity measures demanded by the European Union.
Although Mr. Berlusconi’s exit was not immediate — weeks of political wrangling over the austerity measures probably lie ahead — political commentators said they could see no escape this time for the prime minister, whose Houdini-like ability to wriggle free from scandals is legendary.
“A season is over,” said Mario Calabresi, the editor in chief of the Turin daily newspaper La Stampa, who said Mr. Berlusconi told him that he was not only stepping down, but also would not run for office again.
In the end, it was not the sex scandals, the corruption trials against him or even a loss of popular consensus that appeared to end Mr. Berlusconi’s 17 years as a dominant figure in Italian political life. It was, instead, the pressure of the markets — which drove Italy’s borrowing costs to record highs this week — and the European Union, which could not risk his dragging down the euro and with it the world economy.
It’s good that he’s going, but the bigger picture is that Berlusconi’s continued political success has been almost entirely due to his near complete dominance of Italian television.
Self-serving clowns like Silvio are the inevitable result of media consolidation, whether it’s the Italian monopoly on commercial TV (and effective control of state TV), or the media oligopoly in the United States.
The problem is that while one can have free and fair elections, but without an independent and heterogeneous media, you stand a real risk of not having a free and fair campaign.
Why I Haven’t Written About L’Affaire Cain
Because it is the Republican presidential primary, and it’s so whacky that all I can do is make fun of them.
Unfortunately, the reality that is Herman Cain simply beyond my meager literary gifts to ridicule. I can’t beat the straight news.
A quick search of The Onion reveals that they haven’t covered it either, to their (far better) writers appear to be flummoxed by this as well.
Will Rogers I ain’t.
Quote of the Day
Stealing from our customers is a business decision, not a legal decision.
——An unnamed Citibank Executive
You see, Citi was simply taking money from customers when they overpaid their accounts.
It was called the “sweep” program, and it gets even better:
The same executive later said that the sweep program could not be stopped because it would reduce the executive bonus pool.
Why are we not not sending these assholes to jail?
I know that I’m a bit behind on this story, it broke in 2008, but it still raises the question, why aren’t these people going to jail? Why hasn’t anyone gone to jail?
You can see the California AG’s PR on this here.
Reuters Gets It
In describing a new, “informal leadership directorate” in Europe, the “leaders of Germany and France, the presidents of the executive European Commission and of the European Council of EU leaders, the heads of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the chairman of euro zone finance ministers, and the European Commissioner for economic and financial affairs,” is described as a “New Politburo“.
Heh.
Deep Thought
My son was talking to me as I was perusing the blog Wall Street Jackass, and he asked if everyone on Wall Street was a jackass.
I told him, “No, they have janitors there too.”
It’s the Best Monday of the Year
Because it starts an hour later.
I hate daylight savings time, and I am glad that it is over.
So, the October Job Numbers are Out
And they suck wet farts from dead pigeons.
80,000 new jobs on the NFP when natural growth in the labor market requires something like 175K, and while the jobless rate fell to 9.0%, that’s because people are stopping looking for jobs.
It’s not a time for half-measures.
It Would Be Ironic If…………
Pass the Popcorn
The first big name bankster to get put in the dock is Barack Obama’s biggest backer, Jon Corzine for his role in the collapse of MF Global.
You see it appears that first he successfully lobbied regulators to allow the trades that did his firm in, and then the firm commingled customer funds with their own private risk capital,* so now he is hiring a lawyer:
Jon S. Corzine has hired Andrew J. Levander, a leading white-collar criminal defense lawyer, according to three people briefed on the matter, as the former New Jersey governor deals with fallout from the collapse of MF Global, the brokerage firm he has run since last year.
Mr. Corzine resigned from MF Global on Friday morning and will not seek $12 million severance payments.
Federal authorities, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the $630 million in missing customer money at MF Global.
Mr. Levander could not be reached as he is out of the country, according to his assistant. He did not return an e-mail seeking comment. Daniel O’Donnell, the chief executive of Mr. Levander’s law firm, Dechert, declined to comment.
In Mr. Levander, the chairman of Dechert, Mr. Corzine has retained a New York lawyer who is no stranger to defending prominent Wall Street executives. He represented John Thain, the former chief executive at Merrill Lynch, in a government inquiry related his role in Merrill’s sale to Bank of America. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager who invested with Bernard L. Madoff, hired Mr. Levander to defend him against a New York attorney general’s lawsuit connected to the Madoff case.
The only question now is who is first, Barack Obama, claiming never to have known the guy, or the Republicans, who will try to super glue Corzine to him.
Pass the popcorn.
*The technical term for this is “stealing”.
The Ghost of J. Edgar Haunts the FBI
Well what do you know. The FBI’s counterterrosism training is so screwed up that they are literally calling in the US Army to fix it:
To fix its troubled counterterrorism training, the FBI is calling in the cavalry.
The Bureau has turned to the Army’s Combating Terrorism Center at West Point to scour the FBI’s training materials, after Danger Room revealed that Bureau specialists were teaching agents that “mainstream” Muslims were likely to be “violent” and radical.” The West Point request represents a frank admission from the FBI that it requires outside help to reform.
The Combating Terrorism Center earns high praise from counterterrorism experts as a haven for rigorous, practical scholarship on terrorism and Islamic extremism. Its researchers consider themselves to be the opposite of analysts like William Gawthrop, the FBI intelligence analyst who compared Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader.” The CTC experts’ challenge, as they themselves see it, is to undo the work of Gawthrop and his allies.
“At CTC, there’s an ethos of education,” says Brian Fishman of the New America Foundation, a former research director at the Center. “When you have that, you inherently recognize that you need to illustrate that, for example, the practice of Islam around the world isn’t monolithic.”
I’m not sure that it will help much though, as bigots like William Gawthrop are still employed by, and still exert excessive influence, on the FBI.
It’s amazing just how much the FBI continues to be a product of the festering hate and bigotry that was Hoover’s fevered mind.
As a first step, how about taking his name off that damn building?
Why Protesters With Military Training Get Better Results
Admittedly they’ve been at it for a few months longer than Occupy Wall Street, but the fact that if cops just wanted to bust heads, they are deterred by the fact that almost all Israelis have served in the military, and have at least some training in hand to hand combat as a result serves as a deterrent.
Thus we have the Israeli cabinet voting to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations:
Israel’s summertime protest movement, which was occupying “Wall Street” before it was cool, can now celebrate their first major tangible success.
At a Sunday cabinet meeting the government approved the restructuring of Israel’s tax system, shifting a few degrees of the social burden onto corporations and the very rich.
On Monday, during the opening day of the winter session of parliament after a three-month summer break, legislators received the new tax plan for approval, alongside a lengthy list of demands for financial reform and social justice that were nonexistent when the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was last in session and which have been catapulted to the forefront of a pre-electoral year.
As lawmakers gathered it became clear that Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hoped the government’s imprimatur of approval on significant changes in taxation would shift credit from the young protest leaders to the party itself.
This reminds me of a story from the 1960s, when there was a protest against German Chancellor Adenour at a university, and the police went in with batons swinging, and were physically ejected from campus by the protesters.
Obviously, part of this is that Netanyahu, and Likud, are scrambling to avoid an electoral debacle in the next election.
They are widely loathed at this point, and deservedly so, because they have aggressively promoting and implementing Thatchernomics, cutting taxes on the wealthy and raising indirect taxes (particularly indirect ones like sales taxes, fees, etc.) on everyone else.
There are real economic issues driving these changes, but if a few dozen cops been able to rout the demonstrators at the beginning of their protests, the discontent would have remained buried for a while longer.
It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!! (on Sunday)
I missed last week’s closings, so it’s included here this week.
It appears that the little spike over weeks 41 and 42 is over.
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
- All American Bank, Des Plaines, IL ⇐ This was from last week
- Mid City Bank, Inc., Omaha, NE
- SunFirst Bank, St. George, UT
So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):
How the Marine Corps F%$#ed the JSF
The inestimable Bill Sweetman notes that many of the problems with the F-35 stem directly from the decision to make the Marine Corps, and their STOVL requirement, a part of the program.
The F-135 engine (43,000 lbs thrust) weights 6,500 pounds. The F-414 (22,000 lbs thrust) weighs 2,445 lbs, so this means that the F135 weighs about 1500 pounds more than the about the same amount of thrust installed for the F414.
The engine is also about $5 million dollars more than two F414s.
Of cours, you couldn’t use 2 F414s for an STOVL aircraft, because the lose of just one engine still results in an aircraft loss, so it’s actually less safe than a single engine variant.
You also had the costs and delays associated with the weight reduction programs, which were driven by the needs of the STOVL B model of the JSF.
I think that it was clear from the start that having commonality with between CTOL and STOVL aircraft would result in additional costs, and reduced performance for the CTOL variants, and that incorporating the capabilities of the CTOL variants would increase the cost and weight of the VTOL variant.
So from an engineering perspective, this is a lose, but for the US Marine Corps, from a political perspective, it was a win.
The Marines knew, even with a (now canceled) British order for for a STOVL aircraft, if they were the sole service procuring this, that it would be much easier to cancel.
The F-35 as a joint Navy-Air Force program was too big to fail, a Marine-only aircraft wouldn’t be, so the Marines made it their program too, which had the (political only) advantage of making the JSF program even bigger and higher to kill.
The JSF is a real microcosm of everything that is wrong with the current US procurement/development process.
How Can You Tell That the Pentagon is Desparate About the JSF
Because they are demanding that Lockheed Martin, rather than the tax payers, will have to cover at least some of the costs: (Paid sucscription required)
Prolonged delays in development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are coming home to roost for Lockheed Martin, as the Defense Department moves to force the manufacturer to bear the cost of any changes to production aircraft that could result from the thousands of hours of flight testing that still lie ahead.
Even as development has fallen behind schedule, Lockheed has continued to produce aircraft and the resulting overlap, or concurrency, has driven up the cost of the initial batches of F-35s, forcing the cutback on procurement to cover the overruns.
Crying foul 10 years after his company signed the F-35 development contract, CEO Bob Stevens revealed last month that the government has failed to reimburse Lockheed Martin for up to $1.2 billion in costs associated with low-rate initial production (LRIP) Lot 5. And those bills may not be paid until the company agrees to negotiate what Stevens says is an “unprecedented” contract provision, called a concurrency clause, for the next production lot of aircraft.
Such a clause would place the burden of financial liability on the contractor team for design changes to the LRIP 5 jets that result from discoveries made during the ongoing flight-test program. Stevens declined to outline how much liability the government is intending to place on the contractors.
…………
But while progress is being made, an October memo signed by the Pentagon’s chief tester has added to cost anxieties, indicating it could require an additional 10 months to begin F-35 pilot training, which was expected to start in the fall. It is now more likely to begin next spring, at the earliest. Further delays in pilot training could increase costs for customers who will be required to operate older fleets for a longer time until F-35s can be accepted into service. The memo adds to concerns that testing on the aircraft is too immature to proceed with pilot training and operational use.
(emphasis mine)
The problem is that the Pentagon wants the contractor to cover the costs of the post production modifications required for the early-build airframes as a result of delays in the test program.
This is an indication of desperation on the part of the Pentagon, because this jeopardizes the general’s lucrative post-retirement employment with the defense contractors.
This means that the program is in enough jeopardy that DoD feels the need to get tough with their future employers, which is kicking out a leg of the Iron Triangle.
I’m beginning to think that we won’t procure any more of these than we did the F-22.
And Now We Have Deliberate Police Brutality in Oakland
And now the Oakland cops have gone postal on a protester, lacerating his spleen, and then they denied medical treatment for 18 hours, and it’s another vet:
A former U.S. Army Ranger and Occupy Oakland protester was in intensive care on Friday after a veterans group said he was beaten by police during clashes with demonstrators this week.
The veteran, identified as Kayvan Sabeghi, was the second former American serviceman during the past two weeks to be badly hurt in confrontations between anti-Wall Street protesters and police in Oakland.
The group Iraq Veterans Against the War said Sabeghi was detained during disturbances that erupted late on Wednesday in downtown Oakland and was charged with resisting arrest and remaining present at the place of a riot.
Highland General Hospital confirmed that Sabeghi was a patient in the intensive care unit there.
Brian Kelly, who co-owns a brew pub with Sabeghi, said his business partner served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Sabeghi told him he was arrested and beaten by a group of policemen as he was leaving the protest to go home.
“He told me he was in the hospital with a lacerated spleen and that the cops had jumped him,” Kelly said. “They put him in jail, and he told them he was injured, and they denied him medical treatment for about 18 hours.”
These guys really don’t have a frelling clue.
Occupy Wall Street went viral after the video of the unprovoked macing of protesters, and ramped up after they fractured a guys’ skull, and now this.
BTW, there is at least one video of the incident.
I wonder when it will hit Youtube.
Matt Taibbi’s Take-Downs are a Thing of Beauty
Case in point is his latest on Michael Bloomberg.
Go Read.