Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Payback’s A Bitch

No Comments

Everyone is freaking out because Argentina is renationalizing its formerly state owned oil company, YPF:

Argentina says it will seize a controlling interest in oil company YPF that is owned by Spanish firm Repsol.

President Cristina Fernandez said a bill would be presented to the Senate allowing the government to expropriate 51% of YPF shares.

The move, announced on national television, was welcomed by her cabinet and Argentina’s regional governors.

Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo said the action had “broken the climate of friendship”.

Speaking after a government crisis meeting, Mr Margello told journalists his government would take “clear and forceful measures”, although he did not specify what these would be.

In a statement Repsol said it “considers the announced measure to be manifestly unlawful and gravely discriminatory”.

The sale of the former state owned energy company was in the middle of the Argentine financial crisis, when creditor nations held a figurative gun to the Argentine government’s head, so it was sold at fire sale prices.

As to concerns about Argentina no longer being “friendly” to foreign investment, it’s not a big deal.

Argentina has been growing more rapidly than all of its neighbors, including the vaunted Brazil.

Additionally, foreign investment won’t go away, though it might demand an additional 50 basis points return.

Also, reduced foreign investment also less risk of the speculative inrushes that cause crashes which result in the loss of economic sovereignty and a shredding of middle class.

The recent lesson of Argentina, and of Iceland, as well as that of Malaysia during the Asian financial crisis, is that the so called Washington consensus, that currency speculation and completely unimpeded capital flows, that this will produce unparalleled economic growth, is completely wrong.

This is not an expropriation, this is justice. The assets were stolen by the looters in the first place.

Good Patent News Everyone

No Comments

For once, the generic drug manufacturers win one:

The US Supreme Court ruled that generic drug makers can challenge big-name pharmaceutical firms in court to stop them from broadening the scope of their patent descriptions.

The measure overturns a 2010 appeals court ruling and confirms an earlier decision by a federal judge that ordered the US subsidiary of Danish laboratory Novo Nordisk to narrow the description of its patent on repaglinide, an anti-diabetes drug sold under the name Prandin.

Caraco Pharmaceutical Laboratories, the US subsidiary of the Indian firm Sun Pharmaceutical Industries, is seeking to produce a generic version of Prandin.

However Novo Nordisk amended the wording of his patent to extend it, and block the Caraco’s request to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to produce a generic version of the drug.

The FDA cannot approve the sale of a drug that breaks patent protection laws.

In a unanimous decision by the nine Supreme Court justices on Tuesday, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “a generic company can employ the counterclaim to challenge a brand’s overbrand use code.”

Courts have gotten much more skeptical of what I call overbroad patent bullsh%$ over the years, so this is more of  a good trend.

Israeli’s Get to Qualify Their Own Missiles on the F-35

No Comments

I think that the folks at Lockheed and the F-35 program office were pretty desperate to get the Israelis in as a customer for the JSF, as evidenced by the facility with which the IDF/AF has been able to incorporate indigenous systems into the aircraft:

The Israeli air force’s Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters will be armed with a mix of US- and Israeli-made weapon systems, sources have confirmed.

“At least one main weapon system” for the nation’s conventional take-off and landing F-35As will be of Israeli origin, sources related to the issue said on 17 April. The Israeli air force has previously expressed its wish to equip the type with a nationally-developed new-generation air-to-air missile.

………

While the first batch of aircraft will carry the integral electronic warfare system being supplied under the Lockheed-led Joint Strike Fighter programme, it is expected that this will later be “enhanced” by additional units developed in Israel.

You’ll notice that none of the other customers, or for that matter the partners in the development program, have had this sort of ability to integrate their own systems into this.

Basically, the market dynamics are such that the if the Israelis are not willing to buy a US aircraft, it would seriously hinder other foreign sales, so they got some special considerations with regards to integrating their own systems.

The Silly Season is Upon Us

1 Comment

The Cookie Monster? Seriously?

The general election campaign is on, and really, really stupid

The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania has decided to make an issue of Mitt’s characterizing cookies from a beloved Pittsburgh bakery as 7-11 cookies.

Seriously?

Seriously?

Mitt is a guy who has signed onto of the right wing’s war on women, and you break out the f%$#ing  cookie monster?

Gawd, their heads are so far up their asses that they resemble a Klein Bottle.

It Appears that There is Such a Thing as a Thinking Conservative

No Comments

Let me say that, since he was kicked out of his think thank job at AEI, David Frum has been a source of remarkably honest and thoughtful analysis.

A case in point is his comparison of Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama in reviewing Robert Caro’s bio of Johnson:

It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.

It appears that there are are no thinking conservatives in America, so we have to export them to Canada.
last ‘graph

Best OP/ED of the Year So Far

No Comments

I really cannot ad much to this:

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

In memoriam: After years of health problems, Facts has finally died.

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world’s most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.

But for many, Facts’ most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child’s certainty of its mother’s love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m.

Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people’s lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: “Facts are to the mind what food is to the body.”

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

…………

Go read all the rest.

It’s Jobless Thursday!

No Comments

Another disappointing week, last week was revised up, and initial claims this week were worse than forecast, 386K, down 2K from last week, only last week was revised up by 8K, with the 4-week moving average and continuing claim rising, though extended/emergency claims fell.

What I think we are seeing, and I think the fact that home sales fell in March reinforces this, is that the generally good economic news in the 1st quarter was (at least partially) an artifact of the unseasonably warm winter, which moved a lot of economic activity a few months earlier.

Basically, we saw time shifting, and thought that it was a recovery.

What a Surprise

No Comments

Obama announces a DoJ investigative task force to investigate foreclosure fraud, in order to bring the state Attorney Generals, most notably NY’s Eric Schneidermann, and they are not staffing it:

Three months ago, in his State of the Union speech, President Obama announced a new task force to investigate mortgage fraud and bring some measure of relief to the 12 million American families who are either losing their homes or in danger of losing them.

The new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group would be co-chaired by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, U.S. Attorney John Walsh of Colorado and three Washington insiders from the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Obama said, “This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Whether or not the President, attorney general and others intend to get around to this task someday, “speed” was a terrible word to choose. Because 85 days after that speech, there is no sign of any activity.

………

Yes, for a few days, there seemed to be a renewed sense of purpose and focus from the administration. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder held his own news conference and announced that at least 55 Justice Department lawyers, agents, analysts and investigators would be assigned to the effort. A news release promised 30 staffers would be joining efforts “in the coming weeks.”

………

On March 9 — 45 days after the speech and 30 days after the announcement — we met with Schneiderman in New York City and asked him for an update. He had just returned from Washington, where he had been personally looking for office space. As of that date, he had no office, no phones, no staff and no executive director. None of the 55 staff members promised by Holder had materialized. On April 2, we bumped into Schneiderman on a train leaving Washington for New York and learned that the situation was the same.

Tuesday, calls to the Justice Department’s switchboard requesting to be connected with the working group produced the answer, “I really don’t know where to send you.” After being transferred to the attorney general’s office and asking for a phone number for the working group, the answer was, “I’m not aware of one.”

The promises of the President have led to little or no concrete action.

In fact, the new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group was the sixth such entity formed since the start of the financial crisis in 2009. The grand total of staff working for all of the previous five groups was one, according to a surprised Schneiderman. In Washington, where staffs grow like cherry blossoms, this is a remarkable occurrence.

Schneidermann got punked.

There were over 1000 FBI agents assigned to the Savings and Loan crisis, so 55 is a joke, but they aren’t even staffing that.

If there was any question as to whether the banksters owned Obama, it’s been answered.

And on the other side is Mitt, who is a bankster.

What a choice.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Bloomberg Edition

No Comments

The editors at Bloomberg are calling for an increase in the minimum wage:

Here’s an unhappy observation about the minimum wage: Congress last increased the rate in stages in 2006, topping it out at $7.25 an hour in 2009, or $15,080 a year.

That amount, when adjusted for inflation, is actually lower than what a minimum-wage worker earned in 1968 and is too meager to offer anyone the chance to climb out of poverty, let alone afford basic goods and services.

About 10 states are now considering raising the rate, and Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, is proposing to increase the federal rate in three increments to $9.80 an hour in 2014. Many of the initiatives under consideration would smartly tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, meaning that those workers’ wages would finally keep up with inflation.

………

It’s also becoming clear that many Americans are being forced to take lower-paying jobs and that a low-wage bias is creeping into the economy, as Bloomberg economist Joseph Brusuelas recently put it. In many cases, minimum-wage work is all that’s available, which may explain why such workers are older and better-educated than they were three decades ago. In 2010, nearly 44 percent of minimum-wage workers had either attended or graduated from college, up from 25.2 percent in 1979, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal think tank.

Raising the minimum wage won’t entirely solve the problem of anemic incomes, but it would help. Economists have long found that boosting the minimum wage can raise income levels for those earning just above the minimum. Employers, seeking to protect “wage ladders,” often bump up salaries for slightly higher-paid employees, too.

………

The editorial page of Bloomberg is not like the moon-bat insane Wall Street Journal‘s page, they don’t contract facts on the front page in the OP/Ed Section, but this is not a populist publication by any means, and they just called out the neoliberal consensus that calls for more suffering from the least of us.

I’m beginning to think that economic populism may be a winner this year.

Wisconsin Voter Suppression Law Won’t Be In Effect in November

No Comments

The State Supreme Court has decided not to review the court decisions at this time, so the injunction remains in place:

The state Supreme Court refused Monday to immediately take up a pair of cases that struck down the state’s new voter ID law, a decision that will likely mean citizens won’t have to show identification when they cast ballots in recall elections in May and June.

The court’s terse orders send the cases back to two different appeals panels, though the cases could eventually return to the Supreme Court.

The justices issued their orders just three weeks before the May 8 primary for Democrats to pick a candidate to run against Republican Gov. Scott Walker in the June 5 recall election.

Dane County Circuit Judge David Flanagan in March blocked the voter ID law for the April presidential primary, saying it likely disenfranchised voters, based on testimony that there are more than 220,000 Wisconsin residents who do not have photo IDs but who are otherwise qualified to vote.

A trial in that case began Monday, and Flanagan is expected to decide whether to lift his injunction or block the law permanently after it concludes this week. The case was brought by the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.

My guess is that one of the 4 reactionary hacks (7 members on the WI state Supreme Court) on the court looked at the political landscape, and realized that there was no benefit to jumping in line, because it would put a pall over the recall election.

Another Reason Banksters Walk

No Comments

Because there are a lot of people who make a lot of money by finding the scammers and betting on the damage that they do, like this short seller:

But then he came to the nub of the issue. The easiest scammer to find is a repeat offender. We actively seek out people who promote dodgy stocks and who who are repeatedly involved in dodgy companies. The slogan is “once a scumbag, always a scumbag”. That slogan is probably not strictly accurate – but we only need to be right 90 percent of the time to be fantastic at this business – and the recidivism amongst scammers is surprisingly high.

………

So, says my son asks you like nasty people to steal from poor investors, mutual funds (and he did not say pension funds for school teachers) so that you can join them in taking the loot by being a short-seller – and you don’t want the regulators to do anything about it because there are more opportunities for you?

Sheepishly I confess yes.

And he says with a mixture of admiration and horror: “daddy you are more evil than I thought”.

As shocking as the outright law breaking on Wall Street it, what is legal is even scarier.

I’m surely not the first one to observe this, but the incentives in our financial system are seriously whack.

Betraying Women for Fun and Profit

No Comments

It looks like the Democratic establishment in Michigan is going all in for a Congressional candidate who has voted to defund Planned Parenthood:

That’s a serious question: Who does the DCCC back in the Michigan 3rd CD race?

Context — Obama’s White House is in the process of trying (and failing) to damp down the firestorm from the gay community about Obama’s pointed refusal to grant the same protection against same-sex–preference bias as it routinely grants to other biases.

Marcie Wheeler, who lives in the district pointed it out this way:

Meanwhile, the Democrats are still going to use GOP attacks on women as a political stunt. DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz tweeted or re-tweeted 7 comments about women’s issues yesterday, in addition to the seemingly mandatory condemnation of Rosen.

I was particularly amused by this DWS tweet:

Bottom line: Choice, affordable contraception, and Planned Parenthood are at stake in this election. http://j.mp/I6A8c0

As it happened, a few hours after DWS sent that tweet, I went to a Debbie Stabenow event hosted by a local women’s group. As we were waiting for the Senator to speak, a top county Democrat was sitting several rows behind me trying to convince some of the women not to support Trevor Thomas. “There is absolutely no way he can win,” the guy said (the polling says he’s wrong, and I suspect he knows that). In addition to saying a gay man can’t win, he also said a pro-choice person can’t win in the district (his listeners pointed out that Stabenow herself had won the district; so have at least two other pro-choice candidates). Then he described Steven Pestka, using the line Michigan Democrats used to defend Bart Stupak as he was rolling back access to choice for women across the country.

He’s with us on everything else.

But the really appalling comment, uttered by a man at a women’s event, was this:

I need to win this year.

If the guy were reasonably intelligent, he might have said, “we need to win the gavel back for Nancy Pelosi.” But he couldn’t even muster a “we need to win” this year. Nope. It was “I need to win this year,” and that’s why women have to suck it up and vote for someone who has attacked their autonomy in the past.

Steve Pestka’s with us on everything else, this guy said at a women’s event. But he’s not just anti-choice. When he was in the State House (the experience locals point to to claim he’s a better candidate than Trevor) he scored a whopping 0% on votes to support choice. That included a vote for HB 4655, which singled out Planned Parenthood to be defunded, precisely the outrage–at the national level–that Democrats use as the cornerstone of their metaphorical attack on the GOP for its “War on Women.”

It really is remarkable just how craven, and willing to abandon core principles the professional Democrats are, and how f%$#ing stupid this sort of behavior is.

Cowardly political calculation, particularly with the active public support of the party establishment, turns off voters.

Though I’m Sure that New Yorkers are Glad to be Rid of Rush…

No Comments

It appears that the numbers don’t lie, but right wing economists do:

Proponents of the migration myth are at it again, trying to sell the idea that if states with lower taxes gain more population than states with higher taxes, taxes must be the reason.

To prove that people migrate from state to state in search of lower taxes, the latest edition of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) “Rich States, Poor States” report notes that, over the past two decades, Hawaii (which has an income tax with a relatively high top rate) has lost twice as many residents to other states as Alaska (which has no income tax).

Wait, you might ask. What about differences in the job market? Oil prices? Housing costs? Shouldn’t we take these and other potential factors into account?

………

For example, ALEC attributes Florida’s 46 percent population gain between 1990 and 2010 to its lack of an income tax, ignoring the fact that neighboring Georgia — which has an income tax — grew by 50 percent over that period.

As for Alaska and Hawaii – the states that ALEC uses to illustrate the tax-flight myth — IRS data show that, in fact, slightly more households are moving from no-income-tax Alaska to high-income-tax Hawaii than the other way around. In 2010, the last year for which data are available, 300 households moved from Alaska to Hawaii; 287 moved the other way.

As our report stated:

It would not be credible to argue that no one ever moves to a new state because of the desire to live someplace where taxes are lower. But neither is it credible to say that taxes are a primary motivation, nor that migration has a large impact on the revenue impact of tax measures.

As for Rush, he probably decided to move to Florida because it’s easier to get a direct flight to the Dominican Republic from the sunshine state.

After all Rush has to be able to indulge his “tourist proclivities.”

H/t Mark Thoma.

Vikram Pandit, F%$# You

No Comments

What Cee Lo Green Said (NSFW)

At the Bank of America’s annual meeting,; shareholders voted down Vikram Pandit’s pay package:

In a stinging rebuke, Citigroup shareholders rebuffed on Tuesday the bank’s $15 million pay package for its chief executive, Vikram S. Pandit, marking the first time that stock owners have united in opposition to outsized compensation at a financial giant.

The shareholder vote, which comes amid a rising national debate over income inequality, suggests that anger over pay for chief executives has spread from Occupy Wall Street to wealthy institutional investors like pension fund and mutual fund managers. About 55 percent of the shareholders voting were against the plan, which laid out compensation for the bank’s five top executives, including Mr. Pandit.

“C.E.O.’s deserve good pay but there’s good pay and there’s obscene pay,” said Brian Wenzinger, a principal at Aronson Johnson Ortiz, a Philadelphia money management company that voted against the pay package. Mr. Wenzinger’s firm owns more than 5 million shares of Citigroup.

Capitalism is a bitch, ain’t it, Mr. Pandit?

We need a lot more of this.

 In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the feeling of amusement.

Stating the Obvious

No Comments

Eliot Spitzer notes that Barack Obama was on Wall Street’s side from Day One:

That being said, I think that Spitzer is wrong on the finer points here. He thinks that the tepid (largely phony) moves toward regulation have turned Wall Street against Obama, not his occasional speeches about “fat cat bankers.”

I think that it is these words. These are very rich men, who spend their lives surrounded by toadies and sycophants who validate their self worth, because of they have a pathetic need for affirmation.

People simply don’t tell them that they might not be the most valuable people in the world in their world, so when Obama offers the most tepid of critiques, while doing their bidding, they freak out.

I just wonder how small these guy’s penises are.

A Nice Recapitulation of Rather and Bush

No Comments

I’m not sure if it really reveals much, but I think that it’s pretty clear that Rather and his producers got punk’d by Karl Rove.

It’s basically a recapitulation of what we know, but the circumstantial evidence is:

  • George W. Bush got into the National Guard because his dad, or someone close to him, pulled stings.
  • Ben Barnes was in the thick of things, and some (remarkably corrupt) doings involving the Texas Lottery were involved, which might have been the real reason that Harriet Miers was dropped as a Supreme Court nominee.
  • Texas is generally a festering pit of corruption and self dealing.
  • That what Dan Rather reported was probably true, but that someone *cough* Karl Rove *cough* used false documents to simultaneously get the facts out and discredit them.  (He appears to have done the same with the late J. H. Hatfield with his book Fortunate Son)
  • Bush almost certainly stopped flying when he became afraid to fly.

So there are no new blockbusters, and quote honestly, much like the Reagan/Bush deal to keep the Iranian hostages locked up in 1980, the ‘Phants are well past the denial stage, and into dismissing the whole affair as irrelevant common knowledge.

H/t Jesse Singal at Washington Monthly.