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The sancity of contracts, revisited

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Remember how we were told that AIG just had to pay those bonuses, because contracts are sacred? Some of us had some questions, since union contracts didn’t seem to be so sacred, but then, these days, we are all supposed to join in the general disdain for unions. Why are those people always demanding pay and healthcare, anyway?

But now, there is shocking news that the very same folks that considered their executive compensation contracts to be sacred, don’t feel their own contracts with the government should be sacred:

President Obama emerged from a meeting with his senior economic advisers on Friday to say “what you’re starting to see is glimmers of hope across the economy.” But there were also signs of growing tensions between the White House and the nation’s banks over the next phase of the financial rescue.

Some of the healthier banks want to pay back their bailout loans to avoid executive pay and other restrictions that come with the money. But the banks are balking at the hefty premium they agreed to pay when they took the money.

…

Both large and small banks have pressed the Obama administration to make it less costly for them to exit the bailout program by waiving the right to exercise stock warrants the banks had to grant the government in exchange for the loans. At a meeting last month, the chiefs of three of the largest banks separately asked Mr. Obama to direct the Treasury not to exercise the warrants, Mr. Fine said.

Try suggesting to your bank or credit card company that it should waive any part of its contract with you, should you decide to prepay your loan early. See how much consideration you get. Yet here’s a bank executive feeling the shoes when he has to wear them:

Douglas Leech, the founder and chief executive of Centra Bank, a small West Virginia bank that participated in the capital assistance program but returned the money after the government imposed new conditions, said he complained strongly about the Treasury Department’s decision to demand repayment of the warrants. That effectively raised the interest rate he paid on a $15 million loan to an annual rate of about 60 percent, he said.

“What they did is wrong and fundamentally un-American,” he said. “Even though the government told us to take this money to increase our lending, the extra charge meant we had less money to lend. It was the equivalent of a penalty for early withdrawal.”

Don’t be fooled. These folks are saying they were pushed into taking this money, but they wouldn’t have taken it if they didn’t need it, or think they could turn it to their advantage. Now they want the government to give up its contractual rights, because they would rather risk going under than abide by the modest restrictions the government has imposed.

We might be able to muster up a bit of sympathy for these folks, if they were getting out of the program because they truly were in great financial shape. But this is, in the main, about preserving their own rights to rape their stockholders, whether or not they sink the listing ships that they command. This is all about trying to restore the status quo ante, a consummation we should all want to avoid.

Then again, we may have to thank the bankers for doing what folks like Paul Krugman could not do: convince the Treasury that it has to crack down on the banks. It may finally dawn on them that restoring they have to make a choice between placating these greedheads and saving the economy.

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History Lesson

Friday, April 10, 2009

Apparently the Fox folks and other right wingers are attacking Obama for saying that America is not a Christian nation. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. Here is Article 11 of the 1796 Treaty of Peace and Friendship with Tripoli, negotiated by Connecticut’s own, and too much neglected Joel Barlow:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The treaty passed with not a murmur about Article 11.

How far we have fallen.

Filed in Religion | | Comments (0)

Friday Night Music-Devil in a Blue Dress

Friday, April 10, 2009

Just returned from NYC, where we celebrated Good Friday by visiting our son. This is by way of explaining the fact that this is being posted fairly late.

This is one of my wife’s favorite songs, if not her favorite. There are no old videos of Mitch Ryder that I could find, but in this very recent one he seems to be still able to belt it out. It must be a strange life for him. He only had one or two hits, and if he’s still performing he must have to perform this song every time he performs. He’d be lynched if he didn’t. It must be hard to get excited about singing the same song every day for more than 40 years.

Anyway, here he is:

And, by way of compare and contrast, here’s the Boss singing the same song, back in 1975.

Filed in Music | | Comments (0)

A reasonable request

Thursday, April 9, 2009

My intellectual batteries, or at least the cells that are capable of writing, are pretty tapped out today. I spent six hours doing a rush job writing a brief, and to be frank, I’m just not that into it tonight.

But I thought I would pass this on (via Huffington Post)to anyone who might have missed it. As someone who has to spell his name countless times a day, I feel a certain sympathy with the Asians who are at the receiving end of this foolishness. It makes you wonder if having a negative IQ is a prerequisite for holding elective office in Texas, or just for being nominated as a candidate by the Republicans.

A North Texas legislator during House testimony on voter identification legislation said Asian-descent voters should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.”

…

The exchange occurred late Tuesday as the House Elections Committee heard testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Ko told the committee that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have problems voting and other forms of identification because they may have a legal transliterated name and then a common English name that is used on their driver’s license on school registrations.

Brown suggested that Asian-Americans should find a way to make their names more accessible.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Filed in Republicans | | Comments (1)

Two sides to every story

Thursday, April 9, 2009

The big news this morning was the fact that the crew of a U.S. flagged ship fought off a group of pirates off the coast of Somalia. It still seems jarring that there should be such a thing as pirates in this day and age. As with so many things, this is not what it seems, or not what is being reported.

What we aren’t told is why this problem has suddenly developed. Who are these people, and why did they take up the pirate trade? Mediachannel.org reports that on the backstory:

Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole “pirate” story. Consider what one pirate told The New York Times after he and his men seized a Ukrainian freighter “loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition” last year. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” said Sugule Ali:. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.” Now, that “coast guard” analogy is a stretch, but his point is an important and widely omitted part of this story. Indeed the Times article was titled, “Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money.” Yet, The New York Times acknowledged, “the piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago… as a response to illegal fishing.”

Take this fact: Over $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are “being stolen every year by illegal trawlers” off Somalia’s coast, forcing the fishing industry there into a state of virtual non-existence.

But it isn’t just the theft of seafood. Nuclear dumping has polluted the environment. “In 1991, the government of Somalia collapsed,” wrote Johann Hari in The Independent. “Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since — and the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.”

From Hari’s report:

As soon as the [Somali] government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

The pirates started as a grassroots response, so to speak, to the offshore depredations. Since then, they’ve discovered that they, unlike those Pirates from Penzance, can make piracy pay.

Apparently, the pirates are not at all unpopular in Somalia, and you can see why. George Orwell observed that all [people] are equal, but some are more equal than others. The victims of Somalia piracy, which include arms dealers and oil companies, are apparently more equal than the Somalian victims of another form of international piracy. That’s the way of the world. It might very well be cheaper and easier to deal with this situation by patrolling those waters to keep the interlopers out, but that will likely never be a seriously considered option.

An interesting, but irrelevant sidenote, in the linked article Media Channel reports that the Somalian pirates apparently snookered the Americans into handing over their captain as a hostage.

Filed in Environment, Foreign Affairs | | Comments (0)

Contrasts

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

My wife has been urging me to post this video, which she saw on My Left Nutmeg. Here’s SE Connecticut’s own (can we disown him somehow?) Rob Simmons, gladly joining Sean Hannity in the muck, in contrast to Sam Caliguri, who refuses to wallow. This type of behavior is no surprise to those of us who have seen a lot of Simmons close up. Note that he had the Courant right at the ready to use as a prop, so he knew the question was coming, and he was ready to give Hannity the red meat he was seeking.

Simmons is a supremely dishonest person, both intellectually and otherwise. He will pose as a populist while lining his pockets with cash from lobbyists and bankers.

Filed in Dodd, Simmons | | Comments (1)

Obama out-Bushes Bush

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Yet another demonstration of how important it is for those of us on the rational side of the spectrum to avoid the cult of personality that we endured for eight years during the Bush era. The Obama administration has taken an even more extreme position regarding government wiretaps than that taken by the Bushies.

Not only are they using the states secret doctrine ( a governmental license to commit any crime, and then excuse itself) to try to defeat the lawsuit, but it is claiming immunity unless a victim can prove that the government willfully disclosed information it illegally obtained.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the nuances here. One of his concluding paragraphs sums it up:

What’s being asserted here by the Obama DOJ is the virtually absolute power of presidential secrecy, the right to break the law with no consequences, and immunity from surveillance lawsuits so sweeping that one can hardly believe that it’s being claimed with a straight face. It is simply inexcusable for those who spent the last several years screaming when the Bush administration did exactly this to remain silent now or, worse, to search for excuses to justify this behavior.

The lesson here, if we really needed it, is that no president can be trusted to safeguard our civil liberties. Unfortunately, we have arrived at a moment in history when no branch of government is up to the job. The courts, despite the presence of some good judges in the district courts, are under the thumb of a politicized Supreme Court that was, until now perhaps, an enabler of presidential lawlessness. The Congress has rendered itself impotent. Pat Leahy is even backing off of his Truth Commssion because it lacks a single Republican supporter, thus making it impossible for it to be comfortably bi-partisan. Why he wants a bi-partisan commission, which is another name for a truth burying commission (see, e.g., 9/11 Commission) is mystifying. The Republicans were quite happy to investigate Clinton for eight years on a partisan basis. That proves it can be done, and in this case is should be done, but it won’t be done.

So we hapless citizens are in this one alone. Obama will not surrender the power Bush illegally grabbed, and no one else in our governmental system is going to grab it back from him.

Filed in Creeping Totalitarianism, Obama | | Comments (0)

Tim Kaine, DNC Chair, carries water for the right

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, who is an alleged Democrat, former long shot candidate for President, and current head of the DNC, just signed a law allowing Virginians to buy “Choose Life” license plates. The proceeds go to fund anti-abortion front groups posing as pregnancy clinics.

Kaine, who is allegedly in favor of a woman’s right to choose, explained that he would be perfectly willing to sign a bill allowing for similar plates for Planned Parenthood, a pledge he will no doubt never have to back up with deeds.

We can assume he was telling the truth about that pledge, but it doesn’t justify the decision. The state has no business raising money for advocacy groups, and it particularly has no business raising money for groups that conduct their business by deception. The whole point of the organizations funded by these groups is to maintain a facade of professionalism while pursuing a religious agenda.

This incident shines yet another light on a certain asymmetry between the way in which Republicans and Democrats operate. Republicans go out of their way to placate their bases (see S.C. Governor Sanford) even when it hurts them with the general public; Democrats go out of their way to outrage their base, even when the general public is with their base, or doesn’t much care. In the end, each approach is self destructive. Though the Republicans may at the moment be inflicting more damage on themselves, the Democratic way is more mystifying. The country is moving left, and the Democrats insist on burnishing their credentials with an ever more irrelevant right.

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Republicans threaten to go nuclear, again

Monday, April 6, 2009

I must admit to being mystified at the workings of the United States Senate, the ways of which passeth all understanding.

Bernie Sanders has put a hold on another terrible Obama financial policy nominee, a fellow named Gary Gensler, who Obama has nominated to a seat on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Gensler is best known for opposing regulations of all of the financial instruments, the unregulated use of which has led to economic disaster. Obama has consistently appointed such foxes to look after all kinds of financial chicken coops, and Sanders isn’t pleased. But check this out:

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) seemed to be pushing the nomination toward a conclusion. A reporter mentioned the hold that Sanders had placed on the nomination and asked if Reid would be moving forward.

“Yes, we will move forward on it,” he responded.

Now, Sanders caucuses with the Democrats, but Reid appears to consider his hold no more than a minor annoyance. Reid, the guy who loudly proclaims his own impotence when it comes to stopping Republican holds and filibusters, apparently gets a Viagra rush when the threat comes from his own side of the aisle.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are trying to blackmail Obama into covering up Bush’s crimes. They are threatening to “go nuclear” if he doesn’t agree to keep the remaining torture legal memos secret. That’s right, the ones that were made public are the milder ones. Maybe the secret ones get into more detail, like specifying precisely how many volts may be applied to which particular part of the genitals.

But, you may say, doesn’t the phrase “go nuclear” refer to a threat by the majority to abolish the filibuster? How would abolishing the filibuster help the Republicans? Well, the phrase once meant just that. Now it means the opposite: a threat to filibuster all Obama Justice Department nominees, particularly those with a record of opposing torture, unless Obama agrees to protect Bush and the rest of the criminal conspiracy.

If the Republicans truly are recycling that phrase, shouldn’t the Democrats be reminding them of its original meaning, and suggesting, and not so gently, that the Democrats may just take a page from the Republican book unless they sit down and shut up. It is, by now, painfully obvious that the Republicans intend to pervert the process until someone stops them. To date, the Republicans have paid no price, and been threatened with no retribution, if they keep this up. At least on this issue, the Obama administration seems to be quaking at the prospect of this threat, and is backing off on releasing the memos. Can they be so thick as to not understand that caving like this merely encourages more bad behavior. It’s time for the Democrats to “go nuclear”, in the 2005 sense of the phrase.

The threat that the Republicans might then use alternative means of slowing down the Senate is a hollow one: they have already reduced the Senate to a legislative laughing stock that can achieve nothing.

Filed in Democrats | | Comments (0)

Spring Progress Report

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I can’t really bring myself to think about politics today, so I’m posting a few pictures. One of the nice things about blogging is that ultimately you can put up anything you want.

This year I’m thinking about regularly posting pictures of my wife’s garden. Right now, the only thing growing is the garlic, which is planted in the fall.

The Star Magnolia in our yard is just beginning to bloom. These pictures show the various phases of the budding process.