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Midsummer getaway

Saturday, June 22, 2013

This post will have nothing to do with politics, unless in the course of it I make some snarky comments about rich people, with whom I am currently surrounded.

As I mentioned yesterday, my wife and I find ourselves staying at the Hopkins Inn in LItchfield County. This came about sort of through happenstance. Our son asked if we might be taking a weekend somewhere, in which case he would like to use our house to entertain some friends, our house being half way between Boston and New York. Arms ever so slightly twisted, we agreed to vacate; chose this weekend, and here we are, in what is, if not a foreign country, a place far different culturally from our end of Connecticut. Today we went to the Hollister House, that boasts what it bills as an English style garden. I am not qualified to judge, but it is a very lovely place. We were told by the owner that there will be an article in this month’s Martha Stewart Magazine about the place, so I figured I’d beat her to the punch and do a little photo spread in CtBlue.

I guess you would call this a formal garden.

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Another view

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A bench, but quite a beautiful bench.

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Athena, or at least it looks like Athena, presiding over the whole thing.

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I have no idea what kind of flower this is, but I loved the deep purple color.

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Now, for something completely different. On Friday we visited the Hopkins Winery, which is right next door to the Inn, and afterwards I wandered about in the vineyard, and came upon this, which sat among what looked like the remains of some sort of demolished structure. A weird thing to come upon in the middle of nowhere.

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We’ve visited two Connecticut vineyards on this trip. The Hopkins vineyard, here by the Inn, and Sunset Meadow Vineyards, in Goshen, a place name that should make all true Firesign Theater fans take notice. Connecticut wines aren’t bad, but you have to be among the 1% to make a habit out of them, and in truth and in fact, they are rarely good enough to justify the prices. We bought a couple of bottles at each vineyard, but only because, as tourists, we are licensed to spend money we don’t have and I do like to spend my money locally, within limits of course.

Unfortunately, tomorrow we return to the poor side of the state, but it’s been fun.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, June 21, 2013

This is the Midsummer's Night isn't it, and summer begins, some went searching for a summer song. While I myself don't actually have the Summertime Blues this seemed like a decent choice, especially because I really don't have a whole lot of time to go looking around for music. We are on a bit of a mini-vacation, staying at the Hopkins Inn in Warren. I haven't blogged for awhile, for multiple reasons, but I'm hoping to start again in a few days, if not earlier.

Anyway, here's The Who:

 

 

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There’s pressure, and then there’s pressure

Monday, June 17, 2013

Looks like Obama is about to cave once again, this time marching us, against his own better judgment, waist deep or more into the Big Muddy of Syria. Well, you can’t blame the man. He knows he’s only setting us up for trouble down the road, but the man is under a lot of pressure:

For two years, President Obama has resisted being drawn deeper into the civil war in Syria. It was a miserable problem, he told aides, and not one he thought he could solve. At most, it could be managed. And besides, he wanted to be remembered for getting out of Middle East wars, not embarking on new ones.

So when Mr. Obama agreed this week for the first time to send small arms and ammunition to Syrian rebel forces, he had to be almost dragged into the decision at a time when critics, some advisers and even Bill Clinton were pressing for more action. Coming so late into the conflict, Mr. Obama expressed no confidence it would change the outcome, but privately expressed hope it might buy time to bring about a negotiated settlement.

(via Heavy Pressure Led to Decision by Obama on Syrian Arms – NYTimes.com)

Obama has, for reasons that are unclear, never been terribly good about resisting pressure from those with whom he disagrees, also known as those he can never please. But, give the man credit, he’s great at resisting pressure from those with whom he purports to agree. In fact, it’s almost a badge of pride, for after all, how better to establish your beltway bona fides than to disagree with the dirty hippies, that annoying group of people who most always turn out to be right.

Consider the following. Bill Clinton, whose wife helped get us into Iraq and who himself apparently favored that ill-fated endeavor, apparently has credibility with the current president sufficient to help force him to get us mired in Syria. But how much influence do you think Al Gore, who has considerable credibility on climate issues, will have on the ultimate decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline:

Al Gore has called on Barack Obama to veto the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, describing it as “an atrocity”.

The former vice-president said in an interview on Friday that he hoped Obama would follow the example of British Columbia, which last week rejected a similar pipeline project, and shut down the Keystone XL.

“I certainly hope that he will veto that now that the Canadians have publicly concluded that it is not safe to take a pipeline across British Columbia to ports on the Pacific,” he told the Guardian. “I really can’t imagine that our country would say: ‘Oh well. Take it right over parts of the Ogallala aquifer’, our largest and most important source of ground water in the US. It’s really a losing proposition.”

(via Reader Supported News)

Fact is, no amount of pressure from his supporters can move this president, no matter how much he may agree with them in the abstract, or purport to agree with them. He is, in fact, impervious to pressure from the left. There’s always some impediment to doing the right thing, so long as one Republican or conservative Democrat has a problem with such an outrageous course of action.

President Obama on Wednesday night laid bare the political dilemma he faced in deciding the fate of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada as he told a group of high-dollar donors that the politics of the environment “are tough.”

Mr. Obama appears to be leaning toward approval of the pipeline, although he did not specifically mention it to the donors. But he acknowledged that it is difficult to sell aggressive environmental action to Americans who are still struggling in a difficult economy to pay bills, buy gas and save for retirement.

“You may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your number-one concern,” Mr. Obama said. “And if people think, well, that’s shortsighted, that’s what happens when you’re struggling to get by.”

…

The challenge for Mr. Obama is to find a way to balance the political demands of supporters like Mr. Steyer, who has criticized the pipeline, with the insistence of Republicans, Canadian officials and some unions that the pipeline will create jobs and lower the cost of fuel in the United States. The president also faces pressure from some members of his party who argue that the economic benefits of the pipeline are too important to ignore. Last month, 17 Democratic senators signed on to an amendment backing construction of the pipeline. Included in the group were seven senators from conservative or swing states who are up for re-election in 2014.

(via New York Times)

It’s not really a challenge, as there’s no contest. Obama will cave. He believes more in the fake urgency of the need to balance the budget than in the real urgency of the dying planet. And since when has a Democrat caved in to union pressure except when the unions are aligned with corporate interests?

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My fashion sense appreciated

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

We all get emails and all of us get spam, which may be a good thing, as it might make it harder for the NSA to get at the interesting stuff. And then there’s the stuff that’s betwixt and between. I mean I really hoped, as I began reading a recent email, that I had been discovered and appreciated, but as I read on I began to doubt it:

Hi

My name is Sam Bell and I am the Media Director of Cityblis.

My team and I have looked at your blog ctblueblog.com/ and we would like to give you exclusive access to our new media content database on the Cityblis platform called the Cityblis Media Center.

The Cityblis Media Center is front row access for media professionals such as yourself in the fashion and design industry. We curate thousands of independent designers from over 50 countries, giving you exclusives on their collections, trends, images, videos, press releases, event invitations, launch parties, media content and samples.

There are two possibilities here. Well, actually three. Starting with the most probable: 1) Sam and his team haven’t really been reading my blog; 2) Sam and his team have a serious problem with reading comprehension; or 3) I have been unwittingly writing in some secret code known only to the members of the “fashion and design industry”.

But still, this may be my big chance to break into the big time. Some of my readers know me, and can vouch for the fact that when it comes to sartorial elegance, I am at a level all my own. Scarcely a decade goes by that I don’t buy a new suit. So, what think any of you that read this blog? Should I start insightfully reviewing the latest fashion trends, now that I have the chance to get exclusives on collections, trends, images, videos, press releases, event invitations, launch parties, media content and samples? Maybe I can give out prizes, like tickets to launch parties.

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Yet one more modest proposal

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

David Atkins asserts that someday it will be a crime for Wal-mart to pay its employees so little that most of them end up getting food stamps or some other form of government aid. I’m not sure about that, but it occurs to me that a sufficiently creative state legislature could do something about this.

Wal-Mart’s Achilles Heel is the fact that it has to have a physical presence in order to make money. It can’t pull an Apple and shift its operations to a tax haven or put all its stores in Alabama. You’d have to put some thought into how you do it, but what’s to stop the Connecticut legislature, for example, from imposing a tax on any business that employs more than 500 (or more, pick your number) people nationally, that has a given percentage of employees that collect government benefits. Wal-mart can’t fire people getting the benefits, for they’d have no one left to exploit, and you could make that illegal too if you felt it was a threat. (In fact, in Connecticut, it’s already illegal to discriminate in housing against a person based on their source of income. A four or five word change to the employment discrimination statute is all you would need to prevent Wal-Mart from further impoverishing its employees by threatening to fire anyone getting food stamps.) A bill like that might provide some incentive to Wal-Mart to pay a living wage or give employees full time work, in place of the part time marginal existence so many of them have to endure. Alternatively, it would provide some much needed funds to the state while making a teeny, but nonetheless satisfying, dent in Wal-Mart’s obscene profits. Worst case, Wal-Mart leaves Connecticut, but that’s really a best case scenario.

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Different rules for different folks

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

A few stories picked up at random on the net, the common thread of which is that it’s good to be a banker or the functional equivalent. Among other things, you get to make your own laws.

Consider first, this article from this morning’s Times. When a broker defrauds you, you can’t sue them. Every brokerage contract in the country requires a victim of broker fraud to seek relief through arbitration. It’s a system already set up to favor the brokers, but even that’s not good enough for them. When they are found to be in the wrong they can seek absolution, so that if you, as a consumer, try to do your due diligence, you won’t be able to find out that that friendly broker has been found guilty of some nefarious deed or other.

An industry group called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority maintains a database of sanctioned brokers, but if you say pretty please, they’ll scrub your misdeeds:

As Main Street investors rely increasingly on Finra’s online database, BrokerCheck, to vet professionals on Wall Street, brokers and executives like Ms. Kief and Mr. Daifotis are pursuing every means possible to remove negative information from their records. Ms. Kief, in fact, even went so far as to ask her arbitrators to expunge two unrelated arbitrations, which the panel declined to do.

“People are starting to use BrokerCheck the way they use TripAdvisor,” said Seth E. Lipner, a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College who represents investors in cases against brokers. “No broker wants these red flags on their record.”

The effort to expunge records would be less critical if brokers were subject to the same legal exposure as other professionals who are defendants in lawsuits brought by customers, like doctors or lawyers, investor advocates say.

But as a result of a 1987 Supreme Court decision, brokerage firms have been able to insist that customers give up their right to sue in court before they can even open an account. The resulting transfer of investor lawsuits to private arbitration has meant that Wall Street firms and their employees have avoided the burden of a court record of claims against them for a quarter-century. Arbitration hearings are closed and documents are not available to the public. The information on BrokerCheck is thus the only repository of allegations an investor can mine.

Why, you might ask, don’t the victims object to the scrubbing. Because the Masters of the Universe bribe them not to do so. How silly of you to ask.

Meanwhile, over at the SEC, Obama’s latest industry friendly appointment (you can always tell the really bad ones. They’re the ones that breeze through their Senate confirmations) has installed yet another fox in the henhouse:

The Financial Times has caught a significant revolving door that its business press peers have largely overlooked.

In a front page story, the pink paper points out that the incoming chief counsel for the SEC has an outstanding suit against him from his last incarnation, as head of compliance for the Americas for Deutsche Bank.

Read the whole story for all the details. Suffice it to say that it’s a wonderful thing if the prosecutor is a former employee, and is possibly looking ahead to another, more lucrative position, down the road.

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Yet another Modest Proposal

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

It seems clear that the chink in the armor of the National Security State is the fact that a lot of normal human beings-the kind that have consciences and know right from wrong- are given access to state secrets. It can’t be avoided. We need drones to handle this stuff.

There is only one solution. Increase the salaries of the people handling national security stuff by a factor of about 1000. That will raise the compensation to levels high enough to attract the intelligent sociopaths that would otherwise become hedge fund managers. They would have no compunctions about the work they would be doing, and the secrets would remain safe.

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Attention Deficit Disorder at Work

Monday, June 10, 2013

Speaking of Iran-Contra, to which I alluded in my previous post, it looks like Obama is now the beneficiary of a phenomenon that I, at least, first noticed at the time of that affair.

The geezers among us remember that at first, the scandal consisted of the fact that Reagan secretly sold weapons to Iran. There was no question that Reagan absolutely knew what was going on. That fact alone would have gotten Obama in the impeachment dock, and should have done for Reagan, but the Reagan people performed brilliantly.

What did they do? They came forward and acknowledged that the money they made on the secret arms deal was used to buy arms for the Contras in Nicaragua, and announced that Reagan was totally unaware of that fact. They knew that the media and beltway folks can only think about one thing at a time, and sure enough, everyone ignored the crime to which Reagan had already pleaded guilty in favor of trying to find out if he had committed the crime to which he’d pleaded not guilty by reason of incompetence. Congress duly wasted its time looking into the one issue, while ignoring the other.

The same phenomenon is on display these days, though not through any obvious White House machinations. Benghazi, IRS, and AP are fading into irrelevance because the one big thing is the NSA spying “scandal”. I’m the first person to agree that the NSA should not be spying on us all, but folks, there is nothing new here. This program, or stuff like it, has been known about for years. It wasn’t that long ago that we on the left were loudly arguing that the telecoms should not be granted retroactive immunity for doing precisely what they are continuing to do, and a guy named Obama said he agreed with us, until the time came to vote on the bill.

The Obama folks must be secretly delighted and would probably like to give Glenn Greenwald and Mr. Snowden a medal. The Republicans could unite around the fake Benghazi and IRS scandals, and the AP thing, which they never cared about, never got any traction, but they’re at a loss on this thing, since they heartily approve of wholesale spying on the American people. They approve of it so much that they can’t take the standard Obama era approach and attack him for doing what they have previously proposed (see, e.g., Obamacare). So while everyone concentrates on this Bush era, Obama continued assault on our liberties, the Republicans’ favored “scandals” are withering on the vine, and the Republican bigwigs find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend Obama. One reason the Republicans are able to dominate beltway discourse is that they speak with one voice, but on this issue, they are unable to do that. It helps, of course, that this really is a serious thing, though it is not the shocking revelation that it’s played out to be. But that doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that it’s the latest thing, and all previous things are quickly forgotten, because the collective Washington mind can only contain two things at once: the permanent obsession with deficits (this applies only during Democratic administrations), and the latest thing to come along.

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One conspiracy theory we always knew was true

Monday, June 10, 2013

We are all familiar with the term “October Surprise”. It refers to an action taken shortly before an election, usually by the party in power, designed to affect the election’s outcome. The term was first used, I think history would show, in 1980, when Republicans loudly proclaimed their certainty that Jimmy Carter would somehow, likely in some sort of unholy deal with Iran, get the hostages out of Iran at a time designed to guarantee himself re-election. All the while, many of us have always believed, the Republicans were conspiring with the Iranians to make sure that such a thing would definitely not happen until Reagan was safely elected. There was evidence in support of the theory, though never a smoking enough gun to make a dent on public opinion. Most people never bothered to wonder why Carter was able to finally succeed in freeing the hostages on the date most favorable for Reagan: Inauguration Day, which guaranteed that Reagan would not have the issue to dog him, and would not have ownership of whatever agreement was made to free them. Who knows, Jimmy might have known he was being played, but what could he do?

Later, when Ronnie was caught sending money to Iran, inquiring minds wanted to know: were those persistent rumours about a campaign season deal true? Congress duly investigated, but as was their wont, Democrats preferred a believe-no-evil approach was called for. A critical question was whether Bill Casey, the by then deceased former head of the CIA, had or had not gone to Madrid to make the deal to guarantee the hostages would remain hostages for the duration. The Congressional committee decided he did not, and absolved the Reaganauts of any wrongdoing.

But…, as Robert Parry of Consortium News reports:

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who oversaw two congressional investigations into Ronald Reagan’s secret dealings with Iran, says a key piece of evidence was withheld that could have altered his conclusion clearing Reagan’s 1980 campaign of allegations that it sabotaged President Jimmy Carter’s hostage negotiations with Iran.

In a phone interview on Thursday, the Indiana Democrat responded to a document that I had e-mailed him revealing that in 1991 a deputy White House counsel working for then-President George H.W. Bush was notified by the State Department that Reagan’s campaign director William Casey had taken a trip to Madrid in relation to the so-called October Surprise issue.

Casey’s alleged trip to Madrid in 1980 was at the center of Hamilton’s investigation in 1991-92 into whether Reagan’s campaign went behind Carter’s back to frustrate his attempts to free 52 American hostages before the 1980 election, popularly known as the “October Surprise.” Hamilton’s task force dismissed the allegations after concluding that Casey had not traveled to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “We couldn’t show that. … The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation. “If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said, adding that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

The document revealing White House knowledge of Casey’s Madrid trip was among records released to me by the archivists at the George H.W. Bush library in College Station, Texas. The U.S. Embassy’s confirmation of Casey’s trip was passed along by State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson to Associate White House Counsel Chester Paul Beach Jr. in early November 1991, just as the October Surprise inquiry was taking shape.

(via Consortiumnews)

I’m not generally a conspiracy theorist, but this one fit together all too neatly, and it was precisely the sort of thing one would expect from a party that has always, since the days of Nixon, believed in winning at any cost. I’ve always believed that it happened, and I think it paved the way for the later secret deal in which the U.S. secretly sold arms to a state that was, officially, an implacable enemy of ours.

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Mea culpa

Sunday, June 9, 2013

A day or two ago I penned a short post about a study that showed that inequality in the United States was a result of deliberate governmental policy. The point I tried to make, in a more or less humous vein, is that it doesn’t take a study to make that finding; the facts are staring us right in the face.

To my shock and surprise the post post garnered a comment from the study’s author, David Cay Johnston, which I reproduce here:

JCW, the cynical commentary you offer is not useful.

But for a lot of hard work by a relative handful of people digging through and analyzing the official data you would not be so well informed.

This study is not redundant, it is groundbreaking because it establishes facts that show the prevailing argument about what drives inequality is wrong.

After many years of digging out facts that were not known and getting them into the public record I am happy that you grasp the issues so well.

But a very large number of our fellow Americans, including many of the most politically and economically powerful citizens.

Also see my new piece on these issues, which just went up at National Memo and my earlier column for Tax Analysts on relative income growth of the vast majority and the oligarchs – an inch to 5 miles.

He’s mostly right, of course. (Looks like he forgot to finish the fourth sentence, but it’s easy to see where he was going). We do need these things rigourously proven, though sometimes you have to wonder if that does any good, since the ruling elites and media movers and shakers have an amazing facility for ignoring the facts. Still, I stand by the gist of my observation. It was pretty easy to see, for anyone who understood math, that each and every Republican tax cut was a transparent attempt to shift money from the masses to the elite. That was a matter of simple arithmetic. That left two possibilities. First, that the shift was the whole point. Second, that the politicians involved had no idea what they were doing. The latter seems unlikely to the nth degree, so that leaves us with the former. The same pattern repeats itself over and over, including many bills passed with substantial Democratic support. Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act is a case in point, though the motivations there could be more successfully obscured than in the “tax cut” bills.

In any event, I want to apologize for seeming to dismiss the hard work that went into the study. Sometimes it is necessary to prove the obvious.

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