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Temporary birther

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Seems that Ted Cruz has a bit of a problem. He wants to be president, but according to many of the people to whom he’s catered for the last several years, he’s not eligible. He was born in the People’s Republic of Canada, and if the birthers are consistent, they will have no choice but to conclude that he is ineligible to be president-as ineligible as Obama would have been had he in fact been born in a foreign land, as the birthers claim.

For Cruz really was born in Canada, meaning his fact pattern is identical to the phony fact pattern upon which the birthers based their arguments. How delicious it would be if his candidacy was torpedoed by consistency on the part of his base. But that appears too much too ask, although- who knows, Orly Taitz and Ann Coulter have both weighed in against him, and there’s no reason to think that his primary opponents won’t go full on if it helps to whip up the crazies.

For myself, I’m beginning to see the logic in their position. I’m a proud American, and it pains me to think that a person as hypocritical and mendacious as Cruz could possibly be a red-blooded American. Unfortunately, I find it even harder to believe that someone like him could be a product of Canada, but out of national pride I’m ready to swallow that improbability. So, my position is as follows: for the year 2016, and only for the year 2016, a person born in a foreign country to an American mother is not a natural born American, and is ineligible for the presidency. After 2016 we can go back to a rational interpretation of the Constitution, though the way things are going, by that time it might be that the “natural born citizen” clause will be the only provision of the Constitution getting that sort of treatment.

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You reap what you sow

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that the CIA did indeed depose democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq back in 1953. The proximate cause of this action was Mossaddeq’s nationalization of the country’s oil assets, which infuriated the U.S. and Britain. For a few years it worked. Our puppet Shah served our interests well, until he was taken out be the Ayatollah and Iran lurched back into the 13th century. Is it too long a stretch to believe that things might have worked out a tad different, and in our own long term best interests, had we left the Iranians to decide their own fate at that time? It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when Middle Eastern Countries had a pretty favorable impression of this country. It is no coincidence that that time coincided with a period in which we made no attempt to impose our will on them.

You would think that after a while, we might learn a little lesson from our multiple failed attempts to intervene in other country’s affairs. We really don’t do imperialism very well. The Romans and the British were each so much better in their own peculiar ways.

Credit where it’s due, Obama is earning a solid B, perhaps even a B+, on issues like this. It’s not good that he’s still feeding the Egyptian generals, but that’s merely a preservation of the status quo. It is good that he appears to be reluctant to intervene overtly or covertly in Egypt or in Syria. Syria, especially, is a place we should avoid. When the rebels win, we will likely see the present secular tyranny be replaced by one of the religious variety. There can be no dispute about which is worse, and there’s no reason in the world we should facilitate the transition.

I suppose there is a counterexample somewhere, a place where American Imperialism actually planted the seeds of blissful democracy, but none occur to me offhand. In fact, we appear to have done best where we have lost outright. Vietnam isn’t perfect, but it’s no threat to us

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Institutional Investors Declaring Independence

Monday, August 19, 2013

So, it is with tear stained eyes that I note that I am back in Connecticut, and back at work. One advantage, if advantage you can call it, is that I will be blogging more frequently. It may sound surprising, but I found better things to do while I was in Vermont.

So, I start the new week by noting yet another piece of good news, relatively speaking.

Investors responsible for more than $2 trillion recently gathered at a resort in the Canadian Rockies, far from the news media and, more important, far from Wall Street.

Those in attendance, including leaders of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund and France’s pension system, were there to consider ways to put their money to work together without paying fees to private equity firms and hedge funds. Over that weekend, three of the attendees completed the details of a $300 million investment in a clean-energy company.

The group holding the gathering, the Institutional Investors Roundtable, has kept a low public profile since it began in 2011, but it attracted 27 funds managing public money to its latest meeting and is spinning off concrete investments. The group is part of a much broader push by the world’s biggest pension and sovereign wealth funds to reduce their reliance on the Wall Street firms that used to manage almost all their money.

The efforts to change the way public money is managed are motivated, in no small part, by the big fees and lackluster performance that many hedge funds and private equity firms have delivered to their biggest clients in recent years. Investment managers like Leo de Bever, at the Canadian province of Alberta’s $70 billion fund, have found they can often manage their own money at a lower cost without losing out on returns.

(via NYTimes.com)

There are some impediments. In order to get experienced fund managers, you have to pay through the nose, and in many states you are not allowed to pay through the nose. But the expense of one or two out-sized salaries, as offensive as that is, pales in comparison to the cost of the bankers and hedge fund managers, and at least such a person would have undivided loyalty, and would be less likely to let their clients buy into the type of derivative time bombs that hurt Detroit so much.

The article reminded me of Louis Brandeis’s book, Other People’s Money and the Bankers Who Use It, that I mentioned in a previous post. He was mainly concerned with the tax that the bankers levied to float bonds for perfectly solvent municipalities (such as Detroit back then). He pointed out that those municipalities could easily float the bonds themselves, and spare themselves the outsize fees so common then and now.

So, this is good news. And speaking of good news, I have my own personal bit of good news to impart. About a year and a half ago, I was approached by a group called Newstex that wanted to distribute my ravings across the internet-for money. After deciding they weren’t certifiably crazy, and after perusing the contract to make sure there wasn’t a hitch, I agreed.

Well, yesterday, I got my reward. $26.08 which is maybe ten to twenty cents for every post I’ve written since I signed up. What more can you ask?

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Book Review

Thursday, August 15, 2013

A few weeks ago I read a blog post (can’t remember where anymore) in which the author mentioned Louis Brandeis’s book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It. The book was written in about 1913 and was originally serialized in Harper’s Weekly, and the blogger, whoever he or she might have been, said that the book might just as well have been written today. I downloaded a copy (it’s quite cheap) and just finished reading it, and I’m writing this to recommend it. It’s like reading today’s papers, except the large numbers he throws around, (figures in the millions or single billions) seem ludicrously small today. The games the same, and if you knew nothing about Franklin Roosevelt, you’d think nothing had changed since 1913.

Brandeis points out that the “dominant element in our financial oligarchy is the investment banker”; that the investment banker’s stock in trade was financial manipulation that often left the companies they controlled bankrupt; and that they benefitted from assisting those companies as they engaged in illegal activity by getting commissions for the sale of securities designed to violate anti-trust laws and then got commissions for the sale of securities that the same companies were forced to issue when they got caught and had to pay the piper. The bankers of course, like today, were never punished. He even points out that like today, the bankers warned that putting the brakes on the oligarchs would “affect every wage earner from the Atlantic to the Pacific” and goes on to demonstrate that there wasn’t (and isn’t) an ounce of truth in the claim.

I am not an economist by trade, and I haven’t read a lot of economic history, so it may very well be that some of the ills Brandeis diagnosed are not being repeated today. We don’t have blatant trust building anymore, but on the other hand, we still have problems with interlocking directorates and bankers who operate with inherent conflict of interests as a matter of course. In fact, even Brandeis would probably be surprised at a state of affairs in which it is not per se illegal to design an investment vehicle to fail, whether or not it can be proven that the bank doing the designing actively misled investors. Brandeis would surely conclude that nothing has changed were he to read this oh-too-true summary by Pam Martens at Wall Street on Parade.

The Wall Street cartel now controls everything from interest rates set by a rigged Libor benchmark to the price of aluminum going into the price of a can of Coca-Cola, to the cost of crude oil and the fleecing of your wallet at the gas pump, to the shrinking budgets of cities and towns paying out to Wall Street on rigged interest-rate swaps. Why wouldn’t Wall Street expect to continuously control the White House and the Fed?

Brandeis points out as well that the bankers were in many instances little more than taxing authorities that returned nothing in services for the fees that they charged. Like today, they commanded outsize fees for performing services that added little or nothing to the financial products they were peddling.

What’s deeply depressing is the fact that we did, in fact, take steps to halt or curb most of the excesses Brandeis identified. Starting in the 80s, and accelerating in the 90s, the political parties entered into a contest to see who could dismantle the laws that had kept bankers in their place, and the economy fairly stable, for almost half a century. We are now reaping the fruits of that insanity, and the most depressing aspect of it is that the people who brought us this depression have suffered no consequences. The criminal bankers go free and Larry Summers, an architect of deregulation, may soon be heading the fed.

Anyway, download the book. It’s a quick and educational read.

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Cynicism 101

Friday, August 9, 2013

It’s raining here in Vermont, else I’d be doing something other than ranting, but when life deals you lemons…

Okay, so I’ve done my feel good post for the week, meaning I can go back to cynicism and decrying the death of the American Republic.

But speaking of cynicism:

President Barack Obama met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and a number of other technology executives yesterday to discuss government surveillance, according to Politico. Thursday’s meeting was one of “a number of discussions” the Obama administration is holding on surveillance, which an aide said is part of the president’s “national dialogue about how to best protect privacy in a digital era, including how to respect privacy while defending our national security.” Cook had no comment on the report. The issue of government surveillance has been in the spotlight since a June report on PRISM, the code name of the extensive government data mining program. Apple denied knowledge of the program, and denied its servers were being accessed by government agencies.

(via iLounge News)

You really can’t top this. With whom better to start a dialog about interference with privacy than with your partners in surveillance, the ones who readily and without protest co-operated with what was perhaps the most massive invasion of privacy in the history of the world? But what can you expect from a guy who is making Russia look good in the Snowden affair and who has consistently shown that he is in thrall to the “national security” interests that insist that we common folk have no rights to privacy that the security state is bound to respect.

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Amazing but true: a Church does a good thing (of course not here in America)

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

This should prove, or nothing can, that I will indeed be highlighting, at least once a week, some good news, no matter what the source. For this week, not only am I pointing out something good, but the good thing I am highlighting is actually being done by, of all things, a religious organization. Well, I guess the Anglican Church counts as a religious organization. It’s sort of the Catholic Church, without the guilt. Anyway, here’s the good news, and it really is a good thing:

Payday lenders like Wonga, Speedy Cash and Quick Quid are increasingly lending small sums of money for a few days or weeks at interest rates that, when extrapolated onto a full year, can exceed 5,000 percent. Welby calls the practice “sinful” and “immoral.”

But unlike German reformer Martin Luther, who wanted to see all usurers sent to the gallows, Welby preaches solutions from within the system. In a meeting in late July with the head of one of the money-lending companies, Errol Damelin of Wonga, Welby reportedly said: “We’re trying to compete you out of existence.”

It’s the kind of language that is understood in the financial world of London. Some 2,000 years after Jesus drove moneychangers and lenders out of the temple, Bishop Welby is inviting them back in. The Church of England, says Welby, has “16,000 branches in 9,000 communities,” which he wants to open up to credit unions so that they can issue short-term loans to the needy at far more moderate interest rates.

(via SPIEGEL ONLINE)

Welby is the Archbishop of Canterbury, and as the article points out, his strategy might not work, since if the loans are made through credit unions they might not be made as quickly as the loan sharks are able to make them. But nonetheless, it’s actually a concrete way of helping people. This reminds me of an idea that got re-floated, so to speak, a while back that’s gone nowhere, even though it has worked well in North Dakota for about a century: state owned banks. The idea here is not to compete private banks out of existence, but to provide a check on their excesses. If people have a place to park their money where they get a reasonable return and reasonable fees they will use that service, and the banks will either have to do the same, or retreat from providing insured banking services and stick to organized crime.

So, anyway, good for the Church of England. This is the first time in a long time that I’ve heard about a Christian Church actually doing something of which Christ might actually have approved. It may not work, but at least they’re trying.

Filed in Economics, Religion | | Comments (0)

Musings from the Green Mountain State

Sunday, August 4, 2013

First off, an apology to any miserable creature out there who needs a daily fix of CTBlue, should any such creature there be. Friday we made our annual pilgrimage to the beautiful state of Vermont, and blogging will be sparse, sporadic and, perhaps, non-political for the duration of our vacation.

Speaking of blogging, I have felt that my performance has not been up to snuff recently, and I think Paul Krugman may have put his finger on the problem today. As he note, there is one overriding issue in this country at the moment, at once the source of all our problems and the impediment to solving any of them, but there’s only so much you can say about the GOP.

In the short run the point is that Republican leaders are about to reap the whirlwind, because they haven’t had the courage to tell the base that Obamacare is here to stay, that the sequester is in fact intolerable, and that in general they have at least for now lost the war over the shape of American society. As a result, we’re looking at many drama-filled months, with a high probability of government shutdowns and even debt defaults.

Over the longer run the point is that one of America’s two major political parties has basically gone off the deep end; policy content aside, a sane party doesn’t hold dozens of votes declaring its intention to repeal a law that everyone knows will stay on the books regardless. And since that party continues to hold substantial blocking power, we are looking at a country that’s increasingly ungovernable.

The trouble is that it’s hard to give this issue anything like the amount of coverage it deserves on substantive grounds without repeating oneself. So I do try to mix it up. But neither you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.

(via Chaos Looms – NYTimes.com)

So true. How many different ways are there to express outrage at the Republican Party and its media enablers, who treat its dysfunctions as if they were all normal behavior?

But as I started out saying, this isn’t my problem for a while. Right now I’m enjoying absolutely wonderful (if bizarre-sunshine one minute, rain the next, but nice and cool throughout) weather here in the Green Mountains.

So, here’s a few pictures. This is in Plymouth, a stone’s throw from the former home of one of the worst presidents ever (don’t worry George, he wasn’t anywhere near as bad as you), Calvin Coolidge. We weren’t there to honor Cal, we were there for a free breakfast, courtesy of the inn we stayed at Friday night.

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Today we paid a visit to the Vermont Museum of Mining and Minerals in Grafton, VT., a one room affair maintained by a dedicated rock fanatic. (Not talking about music here, we’re talking rocks). I don’t know the story behind this sculpture, but I thought it was sort of neat.

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Yesterday, also, we stopped at an incredible roadside eatery called Chef Brad’s Crazy Side Diner, great food at great prices.

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While we waited for four food to be cooked we stepped around the food truck and made this fellow’s acquaintance:

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Filed in Ramblings | | Comments (0)

Good News

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

As promised, another edition of good news, leaving me free to let negativity pull me through for the rest of the week. This week we really do have good news:

This should go a long way toward dissuading White House advisers that President Obama should nominate Larry Summers to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

“Given the level of opposition to Larry Summers within our caucus, confirming him would be a huge challenge and probably a pretty ugly process,” a Senate Democratic leadership aide tells TPM.

For the past week or so, news reports have caused Fed watchers and progressives to conclude that Summers had become the leading contender to replace Ben Bernanke, surpassing Fed vice chair Janet Yellen, who had been the odds-on favorite for months.

This concern was bolstered by a public relations push by Summers allies, though the White House’s official position is that Obama has made no decision, a decision was never imminent, and won’t be coming until the fall.

(via TPMDC)

Not only is it good news that Summers may never be nominated, it is great news that for once Senate Democrats are doing the right thing.

If you have any questions about this being good news, do a bit of poking around on progressive economics blogs. You can start here.

Filed in Economics | | Comments (1)

You’re the Pope, that’s who you are!

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, I earned an advanced degree in theology (one true Church variety) from the good nuns and who-knows-whether-they-were good-or-bad priests at Our Lady of Sorrows (yes, you read that right) grammar school in Hartford, Connecticut. I have on several occasions, opined on Church doctrine, and have on at least two occasions explicated the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. I last alluded to the doctrine, and my take on it here, when I took umbrage at Pope Benedict’s attempt to abolish Limbo, a post, by the way, that I enjoyed re-reading (warning: only other theologians with a Catholic grammar school theology agree will likely share my enthusiasm):

Now, some may say that I have no standing to dispute theology with the Pope. He is, after all, infallible. But as I said in yet another post (which for reasons good and true I pulled down) the Pope is only infallible while he is Pope. When Benedict is gone, some other Pope can bring Limbo back. Who knows, maybe God will inspire the Cardinals to pick me, and if He does, my first exercise in infallibility will be to arrange for Limbo’s return.

The post I removed, and I don’t remember why, explained my theory at greater length. It boiled down to this: Popes are only infallible while they are popes, once they’re gone, the next pope to come along, being every bit as infallible as the last one, can change whatever the last pope did, without in any way affecting the prior pope’s infallibility. Each pope is infallible in his own time; infallibility is a constant, while doctrine is, in the end, completely malleable. Go to hell for eating meat on Friday one day; eat beef on Friday to your heart’s content on another (Friday, that is).

The one thing even an advanced theologian like me would never have predicted was that a living pope would acknowledge this principle, even obliquely, but how wrong I was, and how disappointed I am in the present Pope, for having this to say about gay priests:

“If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?” Francis told reporters, speaking in Italian but using the English word “gay.”

I’ll tell him who he is to judge. He’s the f***in’ Pope, that’s who he is. He’s god’s appointed, who speaks on behalf of god on matters of faith and morals. It’s his job to judge, and just because he and his predecessors usually get it wrong is no excuse for him to shirk his responsibilities.

But note, that implicit in this brazen act of popely cowardice is an acknowledgment of the temporal nature of papal infallibility. For, after all, his predecessors have all judged, viciously and without hesitation or mercy (Inquisition anyone?) and were their pronouncements eternal, they would be binding on Francis. But apparently he doesn’t see it that way. By refusing to judge he has turned his back on centuries of hypocritical judgments made by his hypocritical predecessors, thus vindicating my theory.

As Stephen Colbert would say, “I accept your apology”.

Oh, and by the way, if anyone out there thinks what Francis said signals anything other than a desire to put a lid on some inside the Vatican sex scandals, think again. On matters such as this, I am infallible, and I hereby pronounce that it ain’t happening, though it would be just like the Church to lighten up on gay men while continuing the total subjugation of women.

Addendum: Since drafting the above, I’ve remembered why I took down my first infallibility post, but I’m not telling.

Filed in Religion | | Comments (1)

Who’s the most evil of them all?

Monday, July 29, 2013

Here’s an interesting question. Which is the most evil, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, or Apple?

“Apple, Walmart and McDonald’s are among the largest corporate employers and profit-makers in the U.S., with a total of 2.6 million employees worldwide (1.6 million in the U.S.) and combined 2012 pre-tax profits of more than $88 billion.

All three companies pay the majority of their employees low wages, poverty-level wages. This is borne out by SEC data and the press releases of the companies themselves. The only question is who gets away with the most profits while their employees are forced to tap into public money – our tax money – for food stamps and health care and other assistance.

Walmart: Underpaying the Most People

Walmart employs about 2.1 million workers, two-thirds of them in the United States. Its 2012 revenue is three times that of Apple, and about fifteen times that of McDonald’s. The company claims that its average full-time wage is $12.78 per hour. That’s just under $26,000 per year. (IBISWorld says Walmart pays associates $8.81 per hour).

…

McDonald’s: Paying the Lowest Wages

McDonald’s employs 440,000 workers worldwide, most of them food servers making the median hourly wage of $9.10 an hour or less, for a maximum of about $18,200 per year. The company’s $8 billion profit, after wages are paid, works out to the same amount: $18,200 per employee.

…

Apple: Making a Half-Million per Employee

Now for Apple. Like Walmart and McDonald’s, the company pays extraordinarily low wages to its store workers, an average of about $12 per hour, or $24,000 per year for a full-time employee. In-store salespeople make up about half of the total workforce.

With 80,000 worldwide employees (50,000 in the U.S.) and a 2012 profit of $55 billion ($19 billion declared in the U.S.), Apple made an astonishing $697,000 per employee in 2012 (almost $400,000 in the U.S.).

Apple, of course, more than the other two companies discussed here, has numerous high-paying positions in engineering, design, programming, marketing, etc. Reports by two independent salary trackers indicate that the overall average salary at Apple is about $50,000. Even with this much higher figure, Apple pays its U.S. employees only $1 for every $8 in profits.

(via Buzzflash)

Much as I hate to admit it, my money’s on Apple.

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