Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Eric Falkenstein’s Rule Suggests that Janet Napolitano is Corrupt

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I have discovered that Janet Napolitano has eschewed email as a matter of policy:

The woman in charge of U.S efforts to make email secure doesn’t use it herself.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Friday copped to keeping her own communications off the grid.

“I don’t have any of my own accounts,” she told a cybersecurity conference hosted by National Journal. “I’m very secure.”

Asked if her reasons for sticking to other forms of communication had to do with concerns about email security, she hedged and said she avoids email for “a whole host of reasons.”

I have, on a number of occasions used the rule of thumb that people who do not are note to be funded:

As Eric Falkenstein observes:

People who meticulously avoid email should not be trusted, because it is simply too calculating, as if they know they are regularly committing crimes. A phone conversation can always be disavowed, you just say you were talking about last weekend’s bar mitzvah.

I applied this to Hank Paulson, and it seems to me that it’s only fair to apply it to Ms. Napolitano as well.

Fred Hiatt Goes Rogue

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The Washington Post editorial board called out Paul Ryan’s budget proprosal as 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:

Finally, if you heard a glimmer of responsibility from Mr. Romney lately, think again: Mr. Ryan pulled back on it. Mr. Romney has been saying that middle-class families shouldn’t expect their tax bills to go down very much, if at all, because their lower rates would be offset by, yes, curtailing deductions. Fox News’s Neil Cavuto pressed Mr. Ryan on that score. “Was he trying to brace us for some bitter news?” Mr. Cavuto asked. Mr. Ryan: “No, not at all. . . . Middle income taxpayers get higher take-home pay.”

Mr. Wallace asked what Mr. Romney’s priority would be if his numbers didn’t add up and the reduction in tax rates couldn’t be done without losing revenue. Mr. Ryan didn’t flinch. “Keeping tax rates down,” he replied.

In other words, revenue-neutral would be nice. Lowering tax rates is the Republican priority, deficits be damned.

I am stunned. The Washington Post editorial board is ground zero of “very serious people” inside the Beltway wankertude, and they love people who want to sh%$ on the poor and elderly.

I’m wondering whose cheerios that Ryan pissed in.

H/t Paul Krugman.

If Those People Made Me This Offer, I Would Be Worried That They Would Whack Me

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Joe Conason is reporting that Republican political operative Roger Stone is alleging that Mitt Romney selected Paul Ryan because the Koch brothers promised to spend $100 million on his campaign in exchange:

Veteran Republican political consultant, unrepentant dirty trickster, and recently reborn libertarian Roger Stone yesterday published a startling accusation against Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on his personal website, The Stone Zone. According to Stone, the billionaire Koch brothers purchased the Republican vice presidential nomination for Ryan from Romney in late July by promising to fork over an additional $100 million toward “independent expenditure” campaigning for the GOP ticket.

 Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.

If this is true and Roger Stone’s biography is not something that convinces me of his reliability, thenMitt Romney is a fool.

When someone offers you a lot of money to take on a potential successor, it is because they are thinking about getting rid of you.

I’m not sure though that this is true though. The source, Roger Stone, was one of the leading rat-f%$#ers (that’s what they called themselves) in the Nixon administration, and if reports are true, he has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.

He could be telling the truth, but his background does not convince me that places a high value on the truth in the context of politics, and he is supporting Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, so YMMV.

About Bloody Time

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Wal-Mart workers on strike – Salon.com:

Today, for the first time in Walmart’s fifty-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours, they’ll join supporters for a mass rally outside a Pico Rivera, CA store. This is the latest – and most dramatic – of the recent escalations in the decades-long struggle between organized labor and the largest private employer in the world.

“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Walmart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tried of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.”

Walmart is entirely union-free in North America, and has worked aggressively to stay that way. Today’s strike is an outgrowth of a year of organizing by OUR Walmart, an organization of Walmart workers. OUR Walmart is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, but hasn’t sought union recognition from Walmart; its members have campaigned for improvements in their local stores and converged at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting.

They say their efforts have won some modest improvements, but also inspired a wave of illegal retaliation by the retail giant, which they charge is more concerned suppressing activism than complying with the law. I reported in July on three workers’ allegations that Walmart retaliated against them for their activism. Since then, OUR Walmart has filed many more Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging further punishment of activists.

Interviewed yesterday about OUR Walmart, Walmart spokesperson Dan Fogleman emphasized the group’s funding from unions, which he charged “are focused on their own agenda…getting more members to join their unions. That gives them more revenue to help fund the political agendas that they have.” He suggested that today’s rally might have been organized as a stunt to impress visiting leaders from the UNI global union federation, who are currently visiting Los Angeles to launch a global Walmart labor alliance. Fogleman denied the allegations of retaliation: “Unfair Labor Practice charges are similar to lawsuits. Anyone can file them, regardless of whether it’s a valid claim or not. We disagree with those assertions.”

Obviously this is a high risk strategy, but one hopes that it pays dividends.

Yet Another Example of How Financializing Policy Screws Things Up

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Case in point, the collapse of the UN’s global cap and trade system:

The world’s only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has “essentially collapsed”, jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.

Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations’ system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.

A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon.

Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: “The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It’s extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously.”

The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves.

Yep, we need to bail out the banksters in order make this policy work.  Our government has to manipulate the market for their benefit.

The real reason that the “very serious people” support cap and trade over a carbon tax is because they went to the same elite schools as the people at the big banks, so they have to structure this policy so to allow their friends to stand athwart the goal of reducing emissions and extract rents.

If you applied a carbon tax, and applied it to imports in the same way that the VAT is applied to imports, you would get the same result, only you would not have the parasites in Wall Street and the City taking a slice from the rest of us.

From the Department of Well, Duh

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It’s the truth, and it is something that our political elites refuse to say, which means that it is a good thing to say, but Glenn Greenwald’s observation that the real problem with Iran having the bomb is that it would prevent us attacking them on our whim:

Every now and then, they reveal the real reason: Iranian nuclear weapons would prevent the US from attacking Iran at will, and that is what is intolerable. The latest person to unwittingly reveal the real reason for viewing an Iranian nuclear capacity as unacceptable was GOP Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the US’s most reliable and bloodthirsty warmongers.

 On Monday, Graham spoke in North Augusta, South Carolina, and was asked about the way in which sanctions were harming ordinary Iranians. Ayman Hossam Fadel was present and recorded the exchange. Answering that question, Graham praised President Obama for threatening Iran with war over nuclear weapons, decreed that “the Iranian people should be willing to suffer now for a better future,” and then – invoking the trite neocon script that is hauled out whenever new wars are being justified – analogized Iranian nukes to Hitler in the 1930s. But in the middle of his answer, he explained the real reason Iranian nuclear weapons should be feared:

“They have two goals: one, regime survival. The best way for the regime surviving, in their mind, is having a nuclear weapon, because when you have a nuclear weapon, nobody attacks you.”

Graham added that the second regime goal is “influence”, that “people listen to you” when you have a nuclear weapon. In other words, we cannot let Iran acquire nuclear weapons because if they get them, we can no longer attack them when we want to and can no longer bully them in their own region.

Let me be clear here:  I do not want Iran to have nuclear weapons.  I also don’t want Israel to have nuclear weapons, or India, or Pakistan, or China, or the UK, or France, or Russia, or the United States of America.

The desire for a credible deterrent is a rational response to US hegemony:

Whatever one thinks of Iran, the signal the US has sent to the world is unmistakable: any rational government should acquire nuclear weapons. The Iranians undoubtedly watched the US treatment of two dictators who gave up their quest for nuclear weapons – Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi – and drew the only reasoned lesson: the only way a country can protect itself from US attack, other than full-scale obeisance, is to acquire nuclear weapons.

I Won’t Be Liveblogging the Debate

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I have an appointment at 9:15, so I won’t be watching the debate.

I truth be told, the real meaning of the debates will be how it gets called by the press anyway.

As to my advice to the candidates, it is as follows:

  • Obama, don’t hippie punch. It will be tempting, because you hate the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, but it won’t convince the undecideds, and it would serve to demoralize your base.
  • Mitt, you have to go off the reservation. You need to attack Obama for not going after the banksters. Note that, despite clear evidence of fraud, there has been zero prosecutions of big bankers and no meaningful prosecutions of big banks.

FWIW, I predict that neither of them will do this.

Obama will go after liberal strawmen, and Rmoney won’t go after the banksters.

Scott Brown Lets the Mask Slip

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Scott Brown was asked by Dick Gregory who his favorite Supreme Court Justice, and he answers “Scalia.”

As boos rise from the crowd, he realizes that he just said a bad thing, and he proceeds to over half the other justices on the court, saying that he could not chose from all those wonderful jurists.

As you can plainly see, Warren is trying hard not to burst out laughing.

I’m having a problem not bursting out laughing.

The vid is here.

H/t Americablog both for the story and the GIF.

My Little Boy is Growing Up!

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We were watching The Science Channel, and Kari Byron, of Mythbusters, was on an ad for LDRS, Large Dangerous Rocket Ships, (basically extreme hobby model rocketry) which she will be hosting.

I turned to Charlie, and said, “She is hawt.”

Then I explained myself. I said, “I have a weakness for read heads.”

Charlie replied, “It must run in the family.”

My little boy is growing up.

I Have a New Favorite Abraham Lincoln Quote

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And it is from the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Stephen Douglas was arguing for “Popular Sovereignty”, where he argued that the new territories could ignore the Dredd Scott case, because they would be acting as independently of the Federal Government.

To say that Lincoln thought that this was weak tea is an understatement, because of the sweeping nature of the Supreme Court decision:

Has it not got down as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death?

Heh.

Imagine that. People were making fun of homeopathy 170 years ago.

Paid Trolls

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My “sh%$ty little blog” doesn’t rate them, but Barry Ritholtz problems, particularly in his posts detailing Megan McCardle being a stooge of the Koch brothers, is something I’ve seen before.

I do believe that there are people being paid to troll his comment section.

I believe this because I am an alumni of Netslaves, where the sysop Patrick “Splat” Neeman was getting web design business thrown his way by Lauren “Uncle Meat” Bandler, and so was allowed to troll with impunity.

It destroyed the board and the community.

It’s their goal.


H/t for the xkcd  for the cartoon, which does not obscure the naughty word.

Tommy “Toast” Thompson

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Bummer of a Birthmark, Hal

You know, when you talk to constituents you get taped.

So if you want to pander to teabaggers your statements saying that you are the best person to get rid of medicare and medicaid will end up online:

Already down almost 10 points in the PollTracker Average, Tommy Thompson has now shown up in a video from a Tea Party meeting in June bragging that who better than him to “do away with the Medicare and Medicaid”.

BTW, I’m watching his debate with Tammy Baldwin right now, and I’m wondering if he if he was always this dense, or if he’s doddering a bit in his old age.

He really sounds out of it.

Yes, Making a Tort a Criminal Matter is Stupid

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I can think of no better example how how our relentless criminalization of our IP laws creating an environment where prosecutors and IP holders run roughshod over our rights and the presumption of innocence than the current clusterf%$# that is the Kim Dotcom persecution:

Officials in New Zealand’s government apparently believed the law gave them the right to spy on MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom because he was a foreign national.

They were wrong.

In New Zealand today, Prime Minister John Key apologized to DotCom for the spying conducted against him by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

The United States has accused DotCom of criminal copyright violations. In January, New Zealand police raided his home and arrested him. Just ahead of the raid, the GCSB began collecting intelligence against DotCom to see if he posed any danger to the police who would later swoop in by helicopter to arrest him.

[It] Turns out that the GCSB isn’t allowed to conduct such surveillance on New Zealand citizens, and the agency was under the false impression that DotCom, who was born in Germany, was not yet a citizen.

This meant that the spying was unlawful.

If you don’t think that they were breaking the law knowingly at the explicit request of the FBI, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

What a Whiny Bitch, Todd Akin Edition

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He’s whining about how Claire McCaskill was mean to him in the debates:

Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin compared the recent debate performance of Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill to that of a “wildcat,” saying she is worried about her reelection chances.

 McCaskill came on strong during their first debate last week, criticizing Akin’s earlier suggestion that pregnancy “rarely” results from “legitimate rape” because women’s bodies have a way of shutting down conception. McCaskill said his views were extreme and out of the mainstream.

 “The first two minutes, wow, it’s like somebody let a wildcat out of the cage,” Akin told a small group of supporters and activists as his statewide bus tour stopped Wednesday evening in Rolla, a rural college town between St. Louis and Springfield. “She was just furious and attacking in every different direction, which was a little bit of a surprise to us.”

You know, you’ve been spouting this crap for years, and now you are whining about someone telling people what you say? PuhLease!!!

BTW, he also came out in favor of paying women less for the same work.

It’s simple: If you don’t like people calling you out for saying stupid sh%$, then stop saying stupid sh%$.

But It’s Not Happening Here

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It looks like the rest of the industrial world is seriously address the risks and effects of high frequency trading:

After years of emulating the flashy United States stock markets, countries around the globe are now using America as a model for what they don’t want to look like.

Industry leaders and regulators in several countries including Canada, Australia and Germany have adopted or proposed limits on high-speed trading and other technological developments that have come to define United States markets.

The flurry of international activity is particularly striking because regulators have been slow to act in the United States, where trading firms and investors have been hardest hit by a series of market disruptions, including the flash crash of 2010 and the runaway trading in August by Knight Capital that cost it $440 million in just hours. While the Securities and Exchange Commission is hosting a round table on the topic on Tuesday, the agency has not proposed any major new rules this year.

Here is the kicker, unlike the claims of the HFT mafia, it turns out that markets run better when they have limits placed on them:

The broadest and fastest changes have come out of Canada, where this spring regulators began increasing the fees charged to firms that flood the market with orders. The research and trading firm ITG found that the change had already made trading more efficient by reducing the crush of data burdening the market’s computer systems.

Now Canadian trading desks are preparing for rules that will come into effect on Oct. 15 and curtail the growth of the sophisticated trading venues known as dark pools that have proliferated in the United States. While the regulation has been hotly debated, many Canadian bankers and investors have said they don’t want to go any further down the road that has taken the United States from having one major exchange a decade ago to having 13 official exchanges and dozens of dark pools today.

It’s time to realize that most financial innovation is not an advance in the art, but rather an exercise in fraud and rent seeking, and we need to stop it.