Very good, but it’s about an hour long, so have the time to be really depressed.
In listening to the changes, I can only conclude that this is a direct result of avarice, stupidity, and malice by the leaders in the US in the political and business spheres.
The unspoken meme of the Reagan revolution was that if you were not rich, it was because you are evil, and thus the not rich must be punished.
Do your job competently and zealously.
Mary Gade, regional administrator of U.S. EPA Region 5, was fired for trying to keep dioxin out of the environment in the Midwest.
Dow is more important to Bush and His Evil Minions™ than children dying of cancer, I guess.
That’s the hed on the article in the The Washington Independent, and it’s a good three word synopsis of the superstition and hysteria that is the anti-vaccination movement.
See my earlier posts on the subject here, here, here, and here.
All I will note is that Palfrey said in at least one interview that if she was found a suicide, it was murder.
Nothing to see here, move along.
That is really the crux of this trial, and his lawyers have been refused adequate security.
He is on trial for the execution of food merchants for price gouging in 1992, when he was foreign minister.
He turned himself into the American military in 2003, and has since been held without trial, so they want him tried before he dies in custody.
One of the lessons of all this is just how much the US government is willingly subverting the principals of Nuremberg in order to achieve politically expedient results.
Dov S. Zakheim and Ronald T. Kadish, senior executives at Booz Allen Hamilton, the government and defense consulting firm, have written a blistering editorial criticizing the defense consolidation of the 1990s, and the role of the government, in particular the Clinton administration, in encouraging this.
While I agree with their assessment of the facts, that there was an extraordinary level of consolidation in the 1990s, and that no savings have yet materialized, and that defense procurement is an over budget and behind schedule mess, I disagree with their basic thesis, that somehow deconsolidating the defense industry will help.
These moves highlight an unfortunate reality: The United States is approaching an “arsenal system” for developing and producing its weapons — that is, one in which the government manufactures its own weaponry. It’s an antiquated model with modest benefits, but the way things are going even those will probably be lost.
I have worked off and on in defense since 1992, and I have not seen any significant change.
With the US government spending more than the rest of the world on defense, it means that we are merely seeing the consequences of an effective monopsony (single buyer market, the reverse of a monopoly).
We already have a market without meaningful competition, and when you have for profit institutions without competition, you do not save money.
What’s more the self-dealing, how many retired generals work for defense contractors after, and other corruption and pork barrel aspects to not bode well for the future.
I’m not sure how to fix this, but the use of private defense contractors is not working, so perhaps an arsenal model will work.
I will note that the one part of the Soviet economy that produced reasonable quality products efficiently was their defense industry, which was precisely the arsenal model that they disparage.
Dean Baker notices the following bit of self-admitted corruption in a New York Times article on former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin:
Mr. Rubin encouraged Goldman to move into more treacherous markets like proprietary trading and commodities trading. Even so, he now says he was always concerned about the dangers posed by risky futures and derivatives trades, having seen how the pell-mell use of futures contracts exacerbated the 1987 stock market crash.
Shortly before leaving Goldman to head up President Clinton’s National Economic Council, Mr. Rubin says, he met with Richard B. Fisher, the chairman of Morgan Stanley, to discuss the idea of imposing stricter margin requirements on futures trading. Mr. Rubin says the idea died after the Chicago Board of Trade told him “we will make sure Goldman Sachs never trades another future on the C.B.O.T. if this went ahead.”
Bob Rubin just said that he changed his recommendations policy for the benefit of his company in has capacity as head of the National Economic Council. This is completely corrupt, and he is freely admitting it.
Where is one of Bush’s DoJ political vendettas when you need them?
This time, it’s about the aggressive policy to outsource civil service positions to private contractors, where they say that the zeal of Bush and His Evil Minions™ is because they ,”entered office with a deep skepticism of government. He saw competitive sourcing as a way to improve agencies’ performance.”
Any objective evaluation of Republicans, and government, including Bush, shows that they have no interest at all in improving agencies performance. One need only read their own declarations. They find government programs, with the exception of the state security apparatus, to be evil, and to the degree that it is less efficient, they see this lack of effectiveness as an independent good.
Contracting out government work is not about efficiency, it’s about patronage and rewarding contributors. It frees up money to shovel to one’s supporters.
Let’s be clear about this a crime was committed when police pumped 50 bullets into Shawn Bell’s car.
At the very least, a refusal to test police for blood alcohol level, some of whom were on duty, and drinking, as part of their undercover work was obstruction of justice.
One of the pertinent quotes is, “Detective Michael Oliver, who fired 31 bullets the night of the shooting.” That means that he emptied a clip into the car, reloaded, rechambered a round, and emptied another magazine, assuming he started with one in the chamber, and a 15 round clip.
So, you have drunk vice cops on a sting looking for a few strippers who might go a little bit too far, and its open season on black folks, and an acquittal by a judge who knows that if he wants to go higher, he will need the support of the police department when considered for a promotion.
The depressing thing is that when all is said and done, the New York City PD is one of the best in the nation.
God Bless America.
Here is an interesting commentary on the rather dubious nature of some of the assets on wall street.
Here’s Rule No. 1 from Wall Street’s public-relations playbook: If the company you run has big losses on hard-to-value assets, scream your head off about the accounting rules.
And what if the squishy values result in huge gains instead, as they have in the not-so-distant past? Rule No. 2: Stay mum about it for as long as the rules allow.
Basically he is noting that the various brokerages are booking a lot of profits on level 3 assets, but level three assets have no regular market to independently determine value, so we are back to smoke and mirror.
Go read, if you dare.
Yes, Georgetown has decided not to renew Douglas Feith’s contract
Speaking of Iraq, the Georgetown Hoya newspaper last week quoted a student saying she was ‘displeased that university officials have not asked’ former Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith’to return to teach next year.’
Asked about Feith’s status, Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown’s foreign service school, told us that when Feith was hired — something that caused an uproar among the faculty — it was understood he ‘was on a two-year appointment.’ Any decision not to renew should not be seen as ‘a judgment on his performance,’ Gallucci said, noting that Feith’s students’ ‘course evaluations were really good.’
Good move.
A better one would have been never to hire the son of a bitch.
Means very little, basically they just sent him a stern letter over his attempt to politically pressure US Attorney David Iglesias.
Roger Lowenstein is a very concise analysis of just how what Atrios and I call the “Big Sh%$pile”* got the high ratings from Moodys necessary for the debt to be resold.
I think that it explains the process in a clear and concise way, though I think that he is far too easy on Moodys.
The process involved is inherently corrupt, since the issuers get to choose their ratings agency.
I would argue that much of this was covered in “Best PowerPoint Ever“, which makes it rather more clear just how corrupt this game was.
*Only the distinguished gentleman from Philadelphia does not mask out the last two letters of the word “Sh%$”
Great. This is a man who has staked his personal reputation in Iraq, and now they want him to allocate resources between Iraq and Afghanistan. I wouldn’t expect much perspective here.
Even more disturbing are his lies regarding Iran, which implies that Bush and His Evil Minions™ now have someone who be willing to attack Iran without question.
Furthermore, this will create a problem for an eventual Democratic nominee, because It’s clear that Petraeus will be a voice for Iraq forever, otherwise he looks like the charlatan he is, and there will be political blowback if they try to remove him from the post.
My hope would be that the hearings for his appointment would be scheduled for sometime in late January, 2009.
This time, it’s Robert Coughlin, former deputy chief of staff of the DoJ criminal division, who has pled guilty to accepting bribes.
My guess is that it’s going to go much higher, at least if the next Prez decides to pursue it.
This time, it’s the $20 million high-tech fenceless border fence, which is now being dumped less than three months after being implemented as a technology demonstrator.
Morons.
The trial of Thomas Kontogiannis, the money man/money launderer of the Duke Cunningham scandal, appears under some sort of government blackout.
The government is saying that the details of the case, which are normally public record, are government secrets, because the government says so.
So very little of the plea has been revealed.
Given the history of the state secrets privilege, it was created in the 1950s, and the US government lied to the court in the case establishing the precedent, United States v. Reynolds, I’m inclined to think that this is more Bush DoJ shenanigans.
They are probably covering up for other corrupt Republicans, Rep. Lewis comes to mind.
There are maybe one of two of you out there who recall a couple of posts (here and here) just under a year ago about Thielert, a company that seemed to be on the verge of “great things” with its line of turbocharged diesel commercial aircraft engines.
While the tech might still be first rate, and it does sound so, the company appears to be in serious financial, and possibly legal, trouble.
It appears that the company may be very near insolvency, either through booking non existent orders to puffing up the balance sheet, or through customers who are seriously late in making payments for products that are already shipped.
My money is on the second, as two (perhaps all) of the management board have been dismissed by the board of directors.
It’s a pity. It’s nice well developed tech.
Why am I not surprised.
This time though, it wasn’t to spy on political opponents find terrorists, and it wasn’t to torture children gain important intelligence.
This time, it was to make sure that children did not get medical care, because the insurance companies contribute to Republicans.
The Bush administration’s limits on expansions of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) are unlawful, according to Congress’s investigative arm.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) unlawfully bypassed congressional review when it issued a directive to states in August alerting them that federal authorities would seek to restrict raising the income eligibility level for the program, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded in a report issued Thursday.
**Sigh**
The former CEO of Fannie Mae has has agreed to pay $24.7 million for stock manipulation. In total for the executives in question, it’s $31.4 million.
No. When you steal that money from that many people, which is what the stock/earnings manipulation did to the shareholders, you should go to jail for a very long time.