You know Saroff’s Rule:
If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive.
Well, now I have to come up with a corollary for puppet shows, because the always entertaining Dylan Ratigan has added this to the mix.
[on edit]If anyone can give me suggestions, it would be appreciated.
It’s kind of like School House Rock, on a bad acid trip.
We See the problem here
The good folks at Bloomberg, no group of raving socialists have some graph pr0n.
What they are showing is something very basic: That when profits (and not stated, remuneration) in the financial industry skyrocket, this is not a sign of health in the economy, this is a sign of sickness.
It means that enormous amounts of resources are being redistributed to non-productive activities, essentially bankers shafting their customers and pocketing the difference:
In July 2008, [Deutsche Bank AG strategist Jim] Reid said that U.S. banks had made “excess profits” of about $1.2 trillion in the previous decade, compared with how much they should have made based on economic growth, and that those excesses would be wiped out. Since then, U.S. financial firms have written down the value of their assets by about $1.15 trillion, according to Bloomberg data.
“We are now all well aware that rather than overhaul a financial system that arguably contributed to the problems of the last two to three years, the authorities have created the conditions for the industry to thrive,” Reid wrote this week. “Only time will tell how the regulators and politicians will decide to address these imbalances.”
In any case, I spotted it on Kevin Drum’s blog, and he found it at Paul Kedrosky’s blog, but he begs to differ with Mr. Kedrosky’s analysis.
You see, Mr. Kedrosky’s thesis is that with rates at 0%, and the finance industry still not supplying the lubricant that keeps the economy moving particularly well, that even bad bankers can make a profit.
Mr. Drum, and I agree, sees the role of the bankers somewhat differently :
Wall Street is only full of bad bankers if you think the role of bankers is to provide efficient financial services to the rest of the economy. If you adopt the more correct attitude that the role of bankers is to make lots of money for bankers, then America has the best bankers in the world. And they’re proving it yet again.
(emphasis mine)
This is, of course the problem: What is good for the banks is increasingly bad for the country, which is why the finance industry, and all of the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) needs to be shrunk back to historic levels of society.
Until one of the goals of regulation is a recognition that the FIRE sector is basically parasitic once it expands much beyond the bare minimum required, then part of the solution is to shrink it, and this needs to be an explicit goal of any new regulatory regime.
*It’s a reference to Damon Knight’s (very) short story eripmaV. Read the story, or buy the T-shirt with the story printed in full on it.
Saroff’s rule: If a financial transaction is complex enough to require that a news organization use a cartoon to explain it, its purpose is to deceive
The New York Times has a description of how Lehman Brothers used a front company to obtain credit and conceal debt:
It was like a hidden passage on Wall Street, a secret channel that enabled billions of dollars to flow through Lehman Brothers.
In the years before its collapse, Lehman used a small company — its “alter ego,” in the words of a former Lehman trader — to shift investments off its books.
The firm, called Hudson Castle, played a crucial, behind-the-scenes role at Lehman, according to an internal Lehman document and interviews with former employees. The relationship raises new questions about the extent to which Lehman obscured its financial condition before it plunged into bankruptcy.
While Hudson Castle appeared to be an independent business, it was deeply entwined with Lehman. For years, its board was controlled by Lehman, which owned a quarter of the firm. It was also stocked with former Lehman employees.
None of this was disclosed by Lehman, however.
Not surprised about their doing this, though I am surprised that this is, at least nominally, legal.
Crusiing the innerwebz, a member of the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS discovered the following video of Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s.
It’s short, but you will note that he thinks that agencies attempting to make coal mines safer are as “silly as global warming.”
Well, one of the users, Jolly Reaper, on said the following:
If he doesn’t get whacked by a miner, this nation really is full of pussies.
It’s true.
One of the great tragedies of US culture is that when disgruntled employees go on shooting sprees, they target their coworkers, as opposed to upper management, which should then be followed by a few acquittals.
While any loss of life is tragic, if there was a real fear of death among upper management as to their safety, we would see better management.
It seems that even workers going postal give too much deference to the MBA/Banker types.
A soldier whose unit was involved in the incident captured on video is saying that these actions were business as usual and were fully in accord with the rules of engagement.
The full statement is after the break, but his basic point is that this is an inevitable part of war.
Certainly this is true to some degree, but the incident is also a reflection of some real issues with US doctrine, particularly with the aggressive use of air power, and rules of engagement.
Both of these problems contribute, and continue to contribute to, a situation where we are creating an environment where we create more insurgents, and, in the long run, more dead American soldiers.
| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 9, 2010 10:45 AM |
CONTACT: Media Advisory
Sarah Lazare: sarah.lazare@gmail.com
|
Veteran of “Collateral Murder” Company Speaks Out
WASHINGTON – April 9 – Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.
“A lot of my friends are in that video,” says Stieber. “After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are.”
Stieber deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16, whose members were involved in the incident captured in Wikileaks’ “Collateral Murder” video, which has made international headlines by depicting a July 2007 shooting incident outside of Baghdad in which over a dozen people, including two Reuters employees, were killed. Although he was not present at the scene of the video, he knows those who were involved and is familiar with the environment. Stieber, who now works to promote peace and alternatives to war, is speaking publicly about his time in Iraq and the incident captured in this video.
“If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like,” says Stieber. “If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.”
Stieber currently lives in Washington, D.C.
BACKGROUND ON JOSH STIEBER:
Branch of service: United States Army (USA)
Unit: 1st ID
Rank: Spc.
Home: Laytonsville, Maryland
Served in: Baghdad (Rustamiyah) 07-08 Fort Riley, KS 06-07, 08-09
Pro Publica, along with the radio folks at Planet Money, have investigated the activities of a hedge fund called Magnetar, which appears to have bankrolled the creation of mortgage backed securities so that they could bet against them.
Note that there are 8 chapters, so you may want to link to the This American Life broadcast, (about 40 minutes) which is less encyclopedic, but rather more streamlined.
Basically, at the end of 2005, it appeared that the housing bubble was moderating, which made people were less interested in investing in the mortgage backed security known as the CDO, because without double digit increases in home prices, the risk levels were higher, and the potential rewards were less.
What Magnetar did was to get banks to write more CDOs by agreeing to buy the worst tranches, the riskiest 3-5% of these instruments, and then everyone else, seeing as how the scum at the bottom of the barrel was taken, would snap up the “higher quality” stuff.
At one point, Magnetar was covering about ½ of the CDO market, and betting against everything that they could get their hands on with credit default swaps (CDS).
And the financial industry noticed their moves into the field, even if they did not know of the CDS bets, to the degree that Business Week predicted that they would be, “shredded”.
The folks at Pro Publica have uncovered emails where they were aggrissively pressuring the agents that they set up for the funds to make them as risky as possible, which makes sense, if you are betting against them.
For what it’s worth, it wasn’t only people like pension funds and municipalities who got burnt by this. J.P. Morgan lost billions by holding onto senior tranches of CDOs that they created for Magnetar, even though it was clear by that time the game that they were playing.
So, why did Morgan do it anyway? Because the people who bought the CDOs generated commissions at the front end, and were then given huge bonuses based on this, so by the time it all went pear shaped, the individual traders had a few tens of millions of dollars in the bank.
By the end of their run, it was so bad that even Moody’s refused to rate their CDOs.
This is deeply and perfidiously corrupt and well organized, and I cannot see why RICO isn’t being applied to anyone who touched this.
But seriously, read the whole thing. It is stunning in its scope and corruption, but this boggles the mind.
This is not taking out insurance on your neighbor’s house and burning it down. Paying for the road out to a sub development so that people will buy houses, and then using a squadron of B-52s to firebomb that development, only that development is our economy.
All of the big banks used Lehman style accounting tricks to goose their numbers before quarterly reporting deadlines:
Major banks have masked their risk levels in the past five quarters by temporarily lowering their debt just before reporting it to the public, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
A group of 18 banks—which includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc.—understated the debt levels used to fund securities trades by lowering them an average of 42% at the end of each of the past five quarterly periods, the data show. The banks, which publicly release debt data each quarter, then boosted the debt levels in the middle of successive quarters.
Excessive borrowing by banks was one of the major causes of the financial crisis, leading to catastrophic bank runs in 2008 at firms including Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers. Since then, banks have become more sensitive about showing high levels of debt and risk, worried that their stocks and credit ratings could be punished.
Seriously, “business as usual” is better described as an “ongoing criminal enterprise.”
Thomas Joseph Petters was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme, and he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, which has him released when he is 102.
There should be more of this, because it would deter these guys in the future.
The idea of 3-5 in a minimum security prison, followed by a lifetime of leisure does not cut it.
It appears that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is mad enough to say to members of parliament that if things don’t go his way, he might join the Taliban:
At one point, Mr. Karzai suggested that he himself would be compelled to join the other side —that is, the Taliban—if the parliament didn’t back his controversial attempt to take control of the country’s electoral watchdog from the United Nations, according to three people who attended the meeting, including an ally of the president.
Mr. Karzai blamed the lawmakers’ resistance to his move on a foreign conspiracy, they said. The Afghan president’s latest remarks came less than 24 hours after he assured U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that he was committed to working with the U.S. That phone call was precipitated by a similar—but less vitriolic–anti-Western diatribe Mr. Karzai delivered earlier last week.
So he’s complaining that the Electoral Complaints Commission is appointed by independent judges and the UN, and that parliament is refusing to reorganize it so that he can appoint its members, and stack future elections.
It should be noted that the commission invalidated almost a million votes during his reelection bid, and found pervasive fraud by him and his allies, so I guess that he does not want a repeat of this.
Still, his statements make him both part of the problem, and probably completely f%$#ing nuts.
When juxtaposed with his ruinously corrupt drug running brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, whose actions are so suspect that US forces have threatened to kill him the next time he is seen meeting with a Taliban representative, it’s really a heady brew.
Now that Wisconsin state law requires teaching about the use of contraceptives in sexual education classes, the Juneau County Distract Attorney is threatening prosecutions of any teacher who teaches these classes, on the theory that teaching kids about condoms, etc. is, “Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender.”
He is threatening prosecutions for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Expect a baby boom in Juneau County shortly, because those kids will be f%$#ing anyway.
As would be the regulators and judges that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has assiduously cultivated over the years.*
They would have been tried, convicted, and had a bullet in the base of their skull.
As it is, the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 25 miners have died and 4 are still missing, has a long history of repeated violations, 1,342 since 2005, and 50 just last month is a case of a wealthy business owner buying off the local Mandarins, and then having a very public disaster.
This is classically a situation where the Chinese legal machinery rolls into action and does a few executions for PR.
They’ve done it to corrupt brokers, and it appears that in this case, the model would be to execute Blankenship, the judge, and a few bureaucrats in the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
All in all it would make the world a better place, particularly in the case of Blankenship, whose company has left a trail of avoidable mining disasters behind it.
And then the meds kick in, and I remember that I oppose the death penalty.
*He quite literally bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice some years back.
The rumor is that Larry Summers is dissatisfied with his relative lack of power in the Obama administration, and will soon be leaving.
I am generally not a big follower of the Kremlinology school of politics, which looks obsessively at petty power squabbles amongst the courtiers in the White House, but it appears that Larry Summers, after being denied Treasury Secretary because he was too toxic, was expecting that he would be appointed to replace Ben Bernanke as Fed chair.
Well, Joshua Green at The Atlantic notes that Summers has started demanding perks, such as, I kid you not, “golf dates with the president,”* and that he is most unhappy with his role as head of the Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and is considering leaving.
Well, all that I can say is, hip hip hurray!
Larry Summers, whatever his academic achievements have been, has been deeply, profoundly and disastrously wrong on every venture into the real world, as evidenced by Mark Ames’ devastating portrait of his performance as a public servant which shows him to be both incompetent and corrupt.
Here’s hoping that Barack Obama does not feel the need to keep him around. Larry Summers is not just the wrong man for these times, he is the wrong time for any times.
Next up, Tim Geithner, and if the Senators place a hold on his successor, then recess appoint Sam Webb.
It is a disaster on both a policy and a politics level to allow senior economic staff to be so captured by wall street.
*Golf Dates? F%$#ing Golf Dates?!?!? How fucking egotistical and petty can you be?
It appears that there has been a flood of resumes from Republican National Committee (RNC) staffers following revelations of waste, corruption, and mismanagement under Michael Steele’s watch.
It appears that they think that continued association with Mr. Steele would be bad for their future career trajectory.
Well, duh.
The Wikileaks Video
Dan Froomkin has some very trenchant commentary on the video released by Wikileaks showing the attack on a Reuters camera crew and the people who later attempted to take the shooting victims to hospital.
Wikileaks calls it “Collateral Murder,” and I think that the characterization is a bit inflammatory.
That being said, regardless of intent or criminality, it is clear that this was a mistake. As Glenn Greenwald notes on Ratigan, the people effected by this violence will have their world view, and their view of the United States, colored by these events, as will the people in the Arab world who see videos like this, and videos like this are common features on various Arab broadcast networks.
In a word, incidents like this create a fertile ground for the radicalization of individuals, who then are far more likely to take action against Americans and American interests: In other words, they create terrorists.
That being said, I think that there are some problems here beyond the tactical, an over-reliance on relative imprecise airpower and artillery in a counter-insurgency situation, or the aesthetic, the rather creepy laughter on the video.
The first is that this sort of tragedy is an inevitable part of war, and are unavoidable, and so invasion and occupation, even when conceived to combat radicalism and terrorism, must create some level of new radicalism and terrorism, because sh$# like this will happen. War is confusing, and mistakes will be made.
Second, it does appear, at least according to as to training and rules of engagement, there were some violations, at least according to Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer (again on Ratigan), based on his observation of the video, and the fire directed at the would be rescuers of the injured people.
Third, and most importantly, it is clear that the US Military has a policy of deliberately lying about such things as standard operating procedure, whether it is this incident, the friend fire incident that killed Pat Tillman, or the rather gruesome account of special forces operatives digging bullets out of bodies in order to cover up their mistakes that has been reported recently by the New York Times.
It’s clear that this has nothing to do with protecting militarily sensitive information, simply put, shooting innocent civilians, or former NFL players, is not militarily sensitive, and the people on the ground, both the general public in the war zones, as well as the forces opposing us, already know what is going on.
The purpose of these activities is to deliberately deceive the American public, which is something that the military has been specifically forbidden to do by law, and the media, particularly the broadcast and cable media, appear to be all to willing to ignore.
Simply put, on matters where embarrassment is an issue, the Military can be reliably relied on to lie, and the press can be trusted to mindlessly parrot the stories over the news cycle.
Matt Taibbi, once again, this time on how the banks used complex products to rape Jefferson County, Alabama when they wanted to issue debt to upgrade their sewer system:
What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human sh%$ into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack. [a county employee laid off when the debt exploded]
………And once the giant sh%$ machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that’s right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the f%$# off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
(%$# mine, emphasis original)
I believe that I have described him as this generation’s Hunter S. Thompson, but I was wrong.
He is this generation’s Upton Sinclair, though there is certainly a lot of Thompson in his prose.
It’s a fairly long read, and the twists and turns of the deal, where Morgan Stanley paid a middleman to bribe people, and now will be getting off Scott free, and I really can’t do justice with a summary, so just read the whole thing, and at the end, you will agree with him when he says, “This isn’t capitalism. It’s nomadic thievery.”
I wish that I could write like him.
Michael Burry, who made millions from the collapse of housing bubble, talks about how it was all perfectly obvious that we were heading at 95 miles per hour into a brick wall:
Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, proclaimed last month that no one could have predicted the housing bubble. “Everybody missed it,” he said, “academia, the Federal Reserve, all regulators.”
But that is not how I remember it. Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, Scion Capital, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy. My prediction was based on my research into the residential mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. After studying the regulatory filings related to those securities, I waited for the lenders to offer the most risky mortgages conceivable to the least qualified buyers. I knew that would mark the beginning of the end of the housing bubble; it would mean that prices had risen — with the expansion of easy mortgage lending — as high as they could go.
I had begun to worry about the housing market back in 2003, when lenders first resurrected interest-only mortgages, loosening their credit standards to generate a greater volume of loans. Throughout 2004, I had watched as these mortgages were offered to more and more subprime borrowers — those with the weakest credit. The lenders generally then sold these risky loans to Wall Street to be packaged into mortgage-backed securities, thus passing along most of the risk. Increasingly, lenders concerned themselves more with the quantity of mortgages they sold than with their quality.
He is one of many people who began to worry about an over-inflated housing market,* though he has the distinction of being one of perhaps a dozen people who actually researched it thoroughly enough to risk his, and his clients’ money at Scion Capital.
And he made a killing, to the tune of about $¾ billion.
Of course, Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan take on all this is that he was just lucky:
Since then, I have often wondered why nobody in Washington showed any interest in hearing exactly how I arrived at my conclusions that the housing bubble would burst when it did and that it could cripple the big financial institutions. A week ago I learned the answer when Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television, who had read Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short,” which includes the story of my predictions, asked Mr. Greenspan directly. The former Fed chairman responded that my insights had been a “statistical illusion.” Perhaps, he suggested, I was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins.
Mr. Greenspan said that he sat through innumerable meetings at the Fed with crack economists, and not one of them warned of the problems that were to come. By Mr. Greenspan’s logic, anyone who might have foreseen the housing bubble would have been invited into the ivory tower, so if all those who were there did not hear it, then no one could have said it.
If Greenspan had no naysayers talking to him, it was because, as Paul Krugman so ably notes, it was, “Because Greenspan insulated himself from people who told him what he didn’t want to hear.”
Krugman notes a number of people, Dean Baker, Robert Shiller, himself, etc., and notes that Greenspan’s alibis are an artifact of his lack of menschlichkeit (integrity).
I would actually go further: He actually had a political and electoral purpose to his policies, which was that he held, and kept rates low, and encouraged things like exotic mortgages, because he wanted the Republicans in general, and George W. Bush in particular, to implement policies that he supported, such as the dismantling of Social Security, and by propping up the economy, he put the wind at their backs.
The independent Federal Reserve is largely a myth, and treating it as such leaves us with people like Alan Greenspan running the show to the detriment of everyone else.
*Hell, I was issuing dire warnings on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS regarding what I thought was, and is, an over valued US dollar and increasing interest rates KOing the housing market in 2004, so I was right about there being a housing bubble, and the effects of low interest rates, but wrong, at least so far, as to the mechanism for the collapse of it all.
As evidenced by the recent assault on history by conservatives.
Cases in point, arguing that:
We could go on and on, but the lesson to be learned is that when talking to conservatives, you need to confirm if they say that milk is white.
And let me note that the staffer, Peter Roberson, deserves it.
Basically, this guy took lead on writing regulations on derivatives, and then he started shopping himself to hedge funds, and this Really pissed off Barney Frank:
But in late January, after learning that Roberson was interviewing for a position with ICE, Frank asked him to leave his post, removed him from the payroll, de-activated his email account and took his Blackberry, keys and identification credentials, according to both Frank and Frank’s spokesman.
And if that weren’t enough:
Frank said there is a rule which bans staffers who leave for industry positions from interacting with committee members for one year, but he doesn’t think this rule goes far enough.
Frank said Thursday he has instructed staff “to have no contact whatsoever with Mr. Roberson on any matters involving financial regulation for as long as I am in charge of that committee staff.”
(emphasis mine)
I will note that Frank did this a year ago with another former aid, where he forbade contact with Goldman Sachs lobbyist, and former committee staffer, Michael Paese, from contacting the committee while they were working on reform legislation, but that was only while the bill was being drawn up.
I am not sure if this has happened because Roberson’s behavior was particularly egregious, or if it was because the bleeding in staff was becoming excessive, but this is a much needed shot across the bow of the revolving door in the US Congress.
In either case, it’s pretty clear that Roberson is now radioactive, and that his market value as a peddler of access has been much diminished.
Frank’s official statement after break:
Statement of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney FrankWashington, DC – House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) today made the following statement about stories related to a recent staff departure from the House Financial Services Committee:“Several people have expressed criticism of the move by Peter Roberson from the staff of the Financial Services Committee to ICE, after he worked on the legislation relevant to derivatives. I completely agree with that criticism. When Mr. Roberson was hired, it never occurred to me that he would jump so quickly from the Committee staff to an industry that was being affected by the Committee’s legislation. When he called me to tell me that he was in conversations with them, I told him that I was disappointed and that I insisted that he take no further action as a member of the Committee staff. I then called the Staff Director and instructed her to remove him from the payroll and provide him only such compensation as is already owed.
“Stories about this correctly noted that there is a one year ban on his interaction with members of the Committee staff, but I do not think that is adequate. I am therefore instructing the staff of the Financial Services Committee to have no contact whatsoever with Mr. Roberson on any matters involving financial regulation for as long as I am in charge of that Committee staff. Fortunately, examples of staff members doing what Mr. Roberson has done are rare, but even one example is far too much and that is why I wanted to make clear I share the unhappiness of people at this, and my intention to prohibit any contact between him and members of the staff for as long as I have any control over the matter.”
###
It turns out that Koch Industries has funneled millions of dollars to a veritable alphabet soup of anti-global warming front groups.
I’ve been aware of this for a while, it just pops up every now and again that the Koch family is seriously right wing (see their backing of the teabaggers), but Greenpeace has connected the dots:
A Greenpeace investigation has identified a little-known, privately owned US oil company as the paymaster of global warming sceptics in the US and Europe.
The environmental campaign group accuses Kansas-based Koch Industries, which owns refineries and operates oil pipelines, of funding 35 conservative and libertarian groups, as well as more than 20 congressmen and senators. Between them, Greenpeace says, these groups and individuals have spread misinformation about climate science and led a sustained assault on climate scientists and green alternatives to fossil fuels.
Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m (£31.8m) to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. From 2005-2008, it donated $25m to groups opposed to climate change, nearly three times as much as higher-profile funders that time such as oil company ExxonMobil. Koch also spent $5.7m on political campaigns and $37m on direct lobbying to support fossil fuels.
I put this down as a “Captain Renault” moment. It’s been clear for a very long time that the global warming skeptics are a “rent a crowd.”