Yes, it appears that the new de-Baathification law that the Iraqi parliament passed, the one that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have been crowing about, isn’t a de-Baathification law, it’s actually an even more aggressive purge of Baath party members, and Sunnis, than the previous law.
And it gets even better, because everyone’s favorite double crossing thief, Achmed Chalabi, is heading the de-Baathification commission.
AT&T sells you bandwidth, and now they want to charge the people from whom you download a second time for the privilidge of using the wires that you have already paid for.
They are claiming that they want to help crack down on copyright infringement, but let’s be clear, this is a lie.
They want the RIAA and MPAA to support their efforts, so that later, they can charge the RIAA’s and MPAA’s clients for selling AT&T customers online music and movies.
We don’t care. We don’t have to. (snort) We’re the Phone Company!”
Just go read Harold Feld’s take.
He’s an expert in this area, and I don’t have any insights to add.
Hopefully, this will bring network neutrality to at least a bit of the spectrum.
The Boston Globe has noted that the military is telling soldiers not to forward the dispicable “Obama is a Crypto-Muslim” email.
It’s against military and civil service regulations.
My guess is that someone in the military realized that this guy might be C-in-C in under a year, and it was ass covering time.
Anyone know what proportion of this spam is coming from military servers.
As the good doctor Roubini says, there is a difference between an illiquidity crisis, and an insolvency crisis.
A corollary is that dealing with insolvency as illiquidity simply throws good money after bad*, and the extensions that are being granted to ACA Bond Holdings to “unwind” its credit swaps, is an attempt to deal with insolvency as illiquidity.
ACA has lost 97% of its market cap over the past year, it’s been downgraded to CCC last month (12 steps all at once), and it’s currently being run by its regulator, the Maryland Insurance Administration, which, “extended an agreement that waives collateral requirements, policy claims and termination rights until Feb. 19, the New York-based company said in a statement on Business Wire late yesterday.”
It’s hit an ice berg, and it’s going down. Delaying this in the hope of finding stupid investors is going to help no one in the long term.
*To quote Roubini on the difference, “But the current market turmoil is much worse than the liquidity crisis experienced by the US and the global economy in the 1998 LTCM episode. Let me explain why. Economists distinguish between liquidity crises and insolvency/debt crises. An agent (household, firm, financial corporation, country) can experience distress either because it is illiquid or because it is insolvent; of course insolvent agents are – in most cases – also illiquid, i.e. they cannot roll over their debts. Illiquidity occurs when the agent is solvent – i.e. it could pay its debts over time as long as such debts can be refinanced or rolled over – but he/she experiences a sudden liquidity crisis, i.e. its creditors are unwilling to roll over or refinance its claims. An insolvent debtor does not only face a liquidity problem (large amounts of debts coming to maturity, little stock of liquid reserves and no ability to refinance). It is also insolvent as it could not pay its claim over time even if there was no liquidity problem; thus, debt crises are more severe than illiquidity crises as they imply that the debtor is insolvent, i.e. bankrupt, and its debt claims will be defaulted and reduced. In emerging market crises of the last decade, we had liquidity crises (i.e. a solvent but illiquid sovereign) in Mexico, Korea, Brazil, Turkey; we had debt/insolvency crises (a sovereign that was both illiquid and insolvent) in Russia, Ecuador, Argentina.”†
†You have to just love this, footnotes almost twice as long as my post.
I am no not surprised at the veto threat.
Disgraceful.
Harold Feld asks, “Someone tell me why Canadians seem to be so much smarter than we are, at least on the public policy fronts that I cover?”
The public policy fronts that he covers involve things like IP and network neutrality, and he is, in this case referring to the the Candian Radio-Television Commission‘s (CRTC) announcement that it is imposing new national ownership limits and cross ownership limits on its broadcast media, and the political backlash that has delayed a Canadian version of the DMCA.
The answer is actually far more depressing than the my friend Harold Feld, esq. would like to think: The Canadians believe in public policy, and the United States does not.
This is why someone like Michael Powell could make a statement that basically said that corporate profit was a public good, and not get tarred and feathered.
In Canada, his phone calls would not be returned.
The Nation has a very interesting article, Citigroup: Too Big to Fail?, which goes a long way towards seeing how the deregulatory attitudes of the past 31 years (yes, it started with Carter) have led to our current mess.
Citibank is the poster child for this problem, though the bank has a very long history of being on the wrong side of collapses (they were deep in Mexico and Asia when both needed bailouts).
First, let’s look at the Glass-Steagall act of 1933. It was a New Deal law, which was enacted in response to abuses preceding the Great Depression, where bankers were pushing depositors to invest in dubious stocks that they were also being paid by the company to sell.
Basically, it made it illegal for a commercial bank to operate as an investment bank, and vise verse, because there are too many conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds“.
Bill Clinton delivered his “New Democrat” party, accompanied by lots of happy talk about magic words like “synergy” and how “modernization” would create a more stable (and profitable) financial system. It did the latter, for sure, but not the former.
Actually, the combination of insurance, investment banking and old-line commercial banks multiplied the conflicts of interest within banks, despite so-called “firewalls” supposed to keep these activities separate. Much like Enron, placing some deals in off-balance sheet entities did not insulate Citigroup from the losses in its swollen subprime housing lending. The bank has so far written off something like $15 billion and more to come.
The problem is, of course, that Citi is so large that the consequences of its failure would be disastrous to the markets. It would make the collapse of LTCM, which reaqired a Fed orchestrated (Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan) bailout look like the failure of the corner 7-11.
Over the past few years it has appeared that the every single rollback of Depression Era regulations has been a mistake.
Gee, I wonder if those offers of immunity, which make complication prosecution because they, “might make it difficult to prove that evidence gathered by federal prosecutors did not stem from statements made by the guards after they were promised limited immunity,” have anything to do with the fact that this guy is a loyal Republican donor from a family of loyal Republican donors.
It certainly seems that Blackwater has been using State to run interference on drunken murder, fraudulent billing practices, and human sacrifice.
OK, the last one is pulled out of my ass, but I’m going BillO here.
I have been warning for some time that the US dollar, and the US economy is in a bad position because we are increasingly in a position where rate cuts can cause the US dollar to plummet, and while this may be good in the long term, it would move toward restoring the balance of trade, in the short term it leaves US policy makers with the choice between inflation and recession, and that the net result would probably involve both.*
Well, we now have a central banker at the European Central Bank, Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, saying the same thing, when he, “warned that the tumbling dollar may now start to foreclose the option of US rate cuts and force the Fed to keep monetary policy tighter than it would like.”
The ECB is acknowledging that the Emperor has no clothes. While it seems mild, it’s actually a very strong statement, and it’s not the individual statement of one person. They don’t freelance that way.
*See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, with the last link being just as I started the blog, but I’ve been posting about this on a private BBS for about 6 years.
For what it’s worth, if Comcast finds it necessary to throttle some applications, they should be open about it to customers and prospective customers.
What happened here was that they were forging TCP reset packets to throttle the traffic, and then lying about it.
The problem is threefold, first, it interferes with non-Bit Torrent applications, I’ve read about it interfering with Lotus Notes, second, it makes troubleshooting problems with other applications very difficult, and third, the customer is being defrauded.
FWIW, traffic management, if necessary, should be based on bandwidth, which is what the ISPs sell, not application. It, or so I’ve been told, a trivial operation.
To quote Wetmachine: Harold Feld’s Tales of the Sausage Factory:
1) The FCC issued a public notice asking for comment on our Petition for Declaratory Ruling that Comcast’s “network management practice” of messing with BitTorrent uploads violated the FCC’s “Broadband Policy Statement,” which includes a principle that network operators may not block or degrade content or applications. In a separate public notice (but as part of the same proceeding), the FCC also seeks comment on the Vuze Petition for Rulemaking on how broadband access providers handle and shape IP traffic generally. (Copy of Vuze Petition here, copy of our Petition here).
2) Separately, the FCC issued a separate public notice seeking comment on a Petition filed by Public Knowledge and the usual suspects asking the FCC to declare that wireless carriers cannot deny short codes or block text messaging. This goes after Verizon’s high profile “oopsie” of denying a request by NARAL for a short code. Although, as we pointed out in the Petition, the more likely and pernicious problem is with plain old anticompetitive blocking, such as denying a short code to VOIP provider Rebtel.com and denying applications to major banks offering competing services.
3) Comcast confirmed that the FCC has lanched a formal inquiry into whether it violated the FCC’s broadband policy statement. Comcast reiterated that it will fully cooperate with the FCC, and expects any investigation to show that Comcast did not block content and has engaged in legitimate network management practices.
I think that the problem here is largely cultural. To paraphrase Lilly Tomlin from Laugh-In, who originally said this about the phone company, “We’re the cable company, we don’t have to care.”
That said, for the complex minutiae of how this is proceeding, and what it all means, go to the link. The process is confusing.
In particular, look at his, “How Do I File Comments?” section. If you want your voice heard.
This is true, he is calling for regulation in the mortgage markets. Of course, his prescriptions are disastrously wrong, but he’s new at this regulation thing.
The short form for any solution: Do what FDR did. This problem has grown as we have rolled back depression era regulations.
His points, and my rebuttals:
For what it’s worth, a good first step would be to allow bankruptcy judges to redefine the terms (not the principal) of the loans, as they can for vacation homes and rental properties.
If someone has that option, then a lender is likely to be more willing to deal with them responsibly about loan restructuring.
At this time, the people servicing the loans frequently do not own the loans, and as such, they are unable to renegotiate the terms. Allowing bankruptcy to do so would save a lot of homes, and save the market, and it would penalize the most egregiously abusive lenders.
Haley Barbour loses one. The judge judge rules that the special election must be held sooner, rather than later.
In his order, DeLaughter said the election should be held “within 90 days of the governor’s Dec. 20, 2007 proclamation of writ of election…on or before March 19, 2008.
Hood cited Mississippi Code 23-15-855, which applies to U.S. senator vacancies. He and Barbour have differing interpretations of that statute.
This is significant for a number of reasons:
I’m doing a happy dance now.
Well, knock me over with a sledge hammer, it appears that Attorney General Mukasey is actually doing his job, at least in what has become the minority voting suppression division of the Justice Department under Bush and His Evil Minions™.
I’m pleasantly surprised, though Abu Gonzalez actually made me nostalgic for John Freaking Ashcroft, so it is a low bar.
First, John “Minorities will be Dead Soon” Tanner has resigned as head of the voting rights section, and is moving to the Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices in December, and last friday, his replacement, Christopher Coates, who was promoted from within the section, demoted Tanner’s former deputy chiefs, Susana Lorenzo-Giguere (who drew a salary while living at her Cape Cod vacation home) and Yvette Rivera (who has been accused of discriminating against blacks on staff).
Of note is that Rivera is being replaced by Tim Mellett, who was one of the professional staff who issued a report, subsequently overruled by the political appointees , that Tom Delay’s Texas redistricting was illegal.
At least 17 are refusing to make their licenses comply with the REAL ID act.
It’s not surprising. Given the recent data breaches, the requirements for REAL ID are an invitation to identity theft.
The requirements actually make the people less secure in their identity, not more so.
When McCain and Feingold were writing their campaign finance law, they had to deal with the problem of self financing candidates. If a multimillionaire wanted to run, and spend millions of his own money, the court decisions had explicitly made it clear that this was protected by the first amendment.
Their solution was to allow candidates facing a rich self-funding to accept larger donations, which the Supreme Court will now be reviewing the case, Davis v. FEC, which affirmed the law.
I do not think that this lawsuit against 21 lenders will succeed, but we know what my prediction record is.
I think that the judges will throw it out of court in the early stages, but if they don’t, and it goes before a jury, I think that it will be far more likely that they will prevail.
That being said, the idea that major banks and Wall Street firms are being called public nuisances, “The Cleveland suit, filed Thursday in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court under the state’s public nuisance law, asserts that the financial institutions created nuisances across broad swaths of Cleveland because their loans led to widespread abandonment of homes,” does represent an interesting change in attitude.
For the past 25 years, the rule for municipalities and states was to please Wall Street, and now these institutions are being view, accurately IMNSHO, as parasites and near-criminal enterprises.
The Iraqi Parliament has finally passed a law allowing for low level Baath party members to return to government jobs.
In a one party state, the bureaucrats will be members of that party, and banning them all from public service was just one of L. Paul Bremer’s many mistakes.
Of course, this should have passed in 2 weeks, but it took about a year and a half.
Yes, after 736 million dollars, the State Department’s Baghdad Embassy is a fire hazard.
In addition, the power plant and electrical has not been tested at all.
No surprise. A ¾ Billion contract handed out to a, “Contractor had never built an embassy and did not realize that under State Department rules it needed approval for substituting certain materials.”
But I’m sure that they have a long history of contributing to the Republican party.
I found this little tidbit in a story about cutbacks and layoffs in the newspaper industry:
A few years ago, he said, some drivers talked about organizing, but the idea went nowhere. The problem, he went on, is that on the north side, 80 to 90 percent of the drivers are in the United States illegally. I have no idea if that number’s accurate, but I believed him when he said he’s one of them. “When you are illegal in this country you have to be patient,” the English-speaking driver explained. “So I think that is one of the reasons—they need the money, they have no papers to work, that’s why they keep quiet. They know if they complain they will get fired. We think the main Tribune, they don’t know nothing about this.”
Apparently they don’t. Tribune spokesman Michael Dizon e-mailed me that “it is against Chicago Tribune policy to publicly discuss how fees for delivery services are negotiated.” But he added, “Our company does not hire undocumented workers to deliver our newspapers. Tribune Company contracts with independent businesses to deliver products. In turn each independent contractor enters into his or her own contracts with sub-contractors to perform delivery results.”
This is why the US is so schizophrenic on illegal aliens. The powers that be use them to drive down wages and prevent union activities, which they like (and any guest worker program has the same effect), but the average American understands that it’s against the law.
That’s why, when I made some proposals about deterring illegal immigration, they focused on the demand from employers.