Not necessarily thematically connected, but this is my blog and I can write anything the government will permit me to write.
Obama is visiting serial labor exploiter Nike to push for his trade agreement. Nike is making promises about what will happen if the agreement is approved:
BEAVERTON, Ore. — President Obama plans to campaign for a Pacific free-trade zone on Friday by visiting the headquarters of Nike, where executives will announce that they will create 10,000 jobs in the United States if the accord is approved.
via New York Times
Would anyone care to bet that Nike will follow through on that promise?
Obama’s embrace of this gift to the corporate world is, perhaps, his greatest betrayal of the “hope and change” theme he pushed to get elected. But it truly boggles the mind that he would be so tone deaf as to think Nike headquarters is a good place to make his case.
Speaking of criminality, once more the crime syndicates known as banks are going to cop a plea, this time to charges that they have failed to take steps to make sure that bankruptcy discharges are reflected in credit reports.
The lawsuits accuse the banks of engineering what amounts to a subtle but ruthless debt collection tactic, effectively holding borrowers’ credit reports hostage, refusing to fix the mistakes unless people pay money for debts that they do not actually owe.
It is not the only pressure. Lawyers with the United States Trustee Program, an arm of the Justice Department, are investigating the banks, said several people briefed on the inquiry, about whether the banks are deliberately flouting federal bankruptcy law.
One of the banks is JPMorgan Chase, where crime boss Jamie Dimon, the highly paid hands on kingpin of the organization, will once again plead ignorance of what his minions were doing.
Elsewhere, Facebook tells us that it’s pages do not promote insular thinking. Here’s the problems as concerned “scholars” perceive it:
Because so much information now comes through digital engines shaped by our preferences — Facebook, Google and others suggest content based on what consumers previously enjoyed — scholars have theorized that people are building an online echo chamber of their own views.
This is as opposed to the echo chambers of corporate approved views that people get from the corporate media. I get most of my news from blogs, and I’ll freely admit most of them are left leaning. I suppose I’ve created an echo chamber, but at least it’s one I’ve created based on my own assessment of the reliability of the sources. That has to be better than what we get from the corporate media. Consider Paul Krugman’s ruminations on the recent election in England, where the corporate media has successfully persuaded the majority of the population that the conservative government, which tanked the economy, actually saved it:
What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.
Now, every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.
Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis.
Now, to a mystery. I’ve often wondered how the con artists at places like Bain Capital get away with their corporate raids, considering that the other-people’s-money they are playing with usually comes from institutional players that should know better. Here’s an even bigger mystery. Why would anyone buy credit default swaps on government debt, particularly the debt of the United States? Dean Baker puts the problem succinctly:
As the more calm among us tried to explain, it’s not clear that the price of a CDS on U.S. Treasury bonds measured anything. A person holding the CDS can only get paid off, if the U.S. government defaults on its debt and the bank that issued the CDS is around to make the payment. If there is a real default (I don’t mean a delay of a few hours or days over debt ceiling fights), it is hard to imagine what banks would still be standing to make good on the CDS they had issued.
In other words the probability that the U.S. government would default and there would be bank in a situation to meet its CDS obligations is very close to zero. This is why the price of a CDS issued on U.S. Treasury bonds is virtually meaningless as a measure of default risk.
via Beat the Press
That really is quite clear. It’s like getting insurance against a comet hitting the earth and utterly destroying it. There doesn’t seem to be an upside. So who are the people buying these swaps? I’ve got a few bridges they might be interested in buying.
Finally, in the you can’t make this up department, Jeb Bush is telling his supporters that he’ll be getting his advice on Middle East policy from none other than brother George:
The Washington Post reported that Jeb cited his brother as an adviser on Israel, however, four sources confirmed to CNN that the comments were focused on foreign policy more broadly. Three of them said Jeb noted his brother was an adviser on the Middle East.
One of the people in the room jotted down Jeb’s comment as such: “What you need to know is that who I listen to when I need advice on the Middle East is George W. Bush.”
via CNN
Jeb’s spokesperson is walking these comments back as I write.
As Yoda might say, “Shame it is Hillary for the Iraq War voted”. Yes, unfortunately Hillary is in no position to make hay out of this in the unlikely event Jeb is the candidate. Now, Bernie on the other hand…
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