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Doesn’t Coca-Cola own any Senators?

Monday, July 22, 2013

Much has been written about the fact, as reported by the Times, that the banks, not being satisfied with using our money to gamble, are now using it to corner the market in metals, enabled as always by a compliant Fed and Congress. Read the Times article for the details, if you haven’t already. It’s almost comical if it wasn’t so tragic; they have to shift the metal from warehouse to warehouse in order to keep the market cornered. (So, for once, they’re creating jobs, for the guys that shift the metal from place to place) There’s comment here and here, and others scattered around the web, but I want to simply ask a question that I don’t think has been asked elsewhere. Consider this, particularly the stuff in bold face:

Before Goldman bought Metro International three years ago, warehouse customers used to wait an average of six weeks for their purchases to be located, retrieved by forklift and delivered to factories. But now that Goldman owns the company, the wait has grown more than 20-fold — to more than 16 months, according to industry records.

Longer waits might be written off as an aggravation, but they also make aluminum more expensive nearly everywhere in the country because of the arcane formula used to determine the cost of the metal on the spot market. The delays are so acute that Coca-Cola and many other manufacturers avoid buying aluminum stored here. Nonetheless, they still pay the higher price.

(via A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold – NYTimes.com)

So my question is, as the title suggests: Don’t Coca-Cola, Pepsi, the Auto Companies, or the various corporations that still make real things out of aluminum own any Senators? Is class solidarity so strong among the captains of industry that they prefer to get hosed by the banks to turning on the bankers? Can they really pass on the increased costs to their customers without losing sales, given the ever increasing poverty of the masses? Or, do the prefer to absorb the loss rather than put pressure on Congress to give them some relief. Where are the armies of lobbyists seeking to stop this highway robbery?

This weird disconnect between what would appear to be the enlightened self interests of corporations and what they actually do is not confined to their response to rent seeking bankers. It seems that corporations are peculiarly reluctant to advocate for their own self interest when that interest happens to coincide with the interests of the other kind of people; the ones that get born instead of formed at the Secretary of State’s office. Most of our corporations, (think GM, for example) would benefit from a single payer health care system that would relieve them of the cost and obligation of providing health care to their employees. Those costs almost bankrupted GM. But do they ever advocate for a sane health care system that would save them gobs of money? Answer: No. On the other hand, as soon as someone proposes any regulation that might make the air a bit cleaner, or the climate a bit healthier, they’re out in force to stop it, though the financial impact on them is as nothing compared to health care costs.

Personally, I think it gets back to what I’ve often said is the guiding principal of the corporate mind: It is not enough that they succeed, everyone else must fail.

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Friday Night Music

Friday, July 19, 2013

As promised in the previous post, I’ve gone looking for happy songs. I’ve found a bunch. Take your pick, or watch them all. First up, Sir Paul (the Beatles version not being available on video) singing Good Day, Sunshine.

Willie Nelson, singing’ about Blue Skies:

Dick van Dyke, lip syncing in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie.

Bing. If I’m not mistaken this song has the same message as Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

The guy sure had a great voice.

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No downer news, first edition

Friday, July 19, 2013

So, as promised, today’s blogging will all be about good things. My picks might be quirky, and you might argue that they don’t qualify as news in some cases, but this is my blog and I get to set the rules.

Anyway, first up is good news of the heartwarming variety, which you will have missed unless you subscribe to the Boston Globe. It seems a Korean War vet is going to North Korea to search for the remains of a friend who he tried without success the save. He got the Medal of Honor; his friend was a black man who had to fight for the chance to die for his country.

WASHINGTON — In the decades since returning home to Massachusetts from the Korean War, Thomas J. Hudner Jr. has been haunted by what he left behind.

The former fighter pilot risked his life, and earned the nation’s highest medal for valor, by crash-landing his own plane and attempting to save his downed wing man, Jesse L. Brown. But he was unable to pull Brown from the burning wreckage before Chinese troops closed in.

Now, 60 years after the war, Hudner, frail at 88 but determined as ever, is making one final attempt to give his friend a long overdue homecoming, setting out to find Brown’s remains and bring them home.

It is the final chapter in a saga that is about not only loyalty, but about race. Hudner is white, and Brown was African-American.

Their story is credited with advancing equality in the military, which had been integrated just two years earlier. Hudner’s efforts to save Brown helped put to rest lingering doubts that whites would risk it all for their black comrades in the heat of battle.

Hudner is set to arrive Friday in North Korea to examine the purported wreckage of the F-4U Corsair in the rugged mountains where Brown, the Navy’s first African-American aviator, is believed to have died.

It will be an unprecedented expedition, stage-managed by the notoriously propagandist Communist regime. Hudner, who deliberately crash-landed in the snow after seeing Brown waving through billowing smoke, “has regretted the fact that Jesse Brown was never recovered,” according to an overview of the mission shared with the Globe: “He dreams about traveling to the Democratic Republic of Korea and visiting the wreckage of Brown’s Corsair, to pay his respects to his fallen comrade and search for any trace of his remains.”

For Brown’s widow and childhood sweetheart, Daisy Brown Thorne, 86, the news of the expedition came as a shock before the stirring implications, after these many years, sunk in.

“At first I don’t know what my reaction was,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Hattiesburg, Miss. “Then I was really happy that he wanted to go and happy that he is going to get a chance to go back. Whatever the success is, it will bring some closure.”

(via The Boston Globe)

Who cares if the Koreans make propaganda hay out of it. In the days of Trayvon Martin and Fox News racism, a story like this can’t help make you feel good.

Now, for something completely different. I’ve often noted that there’s a bit of a double standard in this country. The right and the South, their politicians included, are allowed to mock us Northerners and liberals endlessly, but its taboo for us to respond in kind, and point out, for instance, that they are a bunch of slack jawed uneducated racist cretins that live off the dole while lecturing us on self sufficiency. It is, of course, asking too much of our own politicians to stick up for us. Well, enter Lewis Black. Odds are, you’ve seen this, but if not, definitely watch it. It’s funny and feel good at the same time. I mean I hate the Yankees and all; it’s my duty as a Red Sox fan, but I love New York and I love the fact that the people in our biggest city have by and large developed a culture of tolerance that’s an example for the world.

So, that’s it. Edition One of what I hope will be a weekly series of no-downer CTBlue posts. I hope you enjoyed that. I’m trying to figure out something to go along with it for music tonight. Back to doom and gloom tomorrow.

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A promise

Thursday, July 18, 2013

I’m informed by a regular reader (yes, I have some) that this blog is too depressing lately, a charge to which I plead guilty. There are many reasons for this, chief among them being the fact that it looks like this time we really are on the Eve of Destruction (you aging hippies know what I’m talking about). Anyway, that’s no excuse for non-stop doom and gloom, so, as my Good Friday videos always advise, I am going to look on the bright side of life. Well, not always, as the song suggests, but at least once a week, hopefully starting tomorrow. I will look on this as a challenge, much like the ever more difficult challenge of finding a fresh Friday night video by an artist or group that I have not yet featured, yet also know something about. If there’s anyone out there, please feel free to let me know if you stumble upon any good news for this new feature. Surely something good happens at least once a week, and I will henceforth do my best to root it out and do it justice.

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High tech wage slaves needed because we Americans are all studying art history

Thursday, July 18, 2013

I was only mildly surprised that this article appeared on the Washington monthly website. It’s a generally good site, but there is an establishment bent that can’t be denied. The article is by Robert D. Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. One suspects an industry front group, but lets put that aside. Mr. Atkinson pleads for half loaf immigration reform if we can’t get the real thing, given the absolutely desperate need in this country for “high skill” immigrants:

Some, particularly Democrats, want to tie any movement on high-skill immigration reform to comprehensive immigration reform, recognizing that if a high-skill bill were to pass, the pressure to pass comprehensive reform would lessen. Unfortunately, we cannot afford to let more years pass without reforms that address the need for more high-skill immigrants, particularly in science and engineering. If comprehensive reform goes belly up, which hopefully it will not, Congress should at least pass a stand-alone bill that liberalizes and reforms high-skill immigration or we risk falling further behind our global competitors.

High-skilled immigration has played a vital role in U.S. innovation by making up for the deficits in our current education system in turning out more scientists and engineers. While STEM jobs play a key role in supporting U.S. economic vitality, the U.S. underperforms in STEM education. In 2006, the U.S. had 26 percent of the OECD’s K-12 students but just 14 percent of high-performing math students. Between 1997 and 2009, enrollment in the music theory Advanced Placement test grew by 362 percent, while enrollment in the Computer Science AB test grew just 12 percent. It’s so bad that three times as many students take the Art History AP test as the Computer Science test.

In fact, we appear to be well down the path John Quincy Adams predicted when he said, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” The only problem is while art history might be personally satisfying it does nothing to make our economy innovative or competitive.

(via The Washington Monthly)

Actually, I believe it was John Adams himself that authored that quote, but put that aside. Oh, what the heck, in fact, I’m sure it was Adams, Sr., , but that’s my useless liberal arts background showing.

This is all a smokescreen to allow our high tech companies to pay low tech salaries to workers that come here under the H-1B program. The workers are exploited, and they replace American workers that, our overlords assure us, don’t want to, and can’t, do the jobs they must train their replacements to perform. I don’t know if his figures on our educational system are accurate, but the reasoning sure is specious. The mass of parents out there have not earned their bread through “mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture”. They have earned it, and lately been unable to earn it, by the sweat of their brows, and if their kids don’t study those subjects its because people like Atkinson would much rather deplore the state of the American educational system than do something about improving it, other than breaking unions and pushing the odd meme that we can improve our educational system by creating for-profit schools, paying rent seekers a bundle, and paying teachers even less. Of course, he has a solution for that, I’m sure, exploited H-1B teachers to replace the home grown variety.

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One teeny step

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Harry Reid scored a minor victory yesterday. Republicans caved and allowed a vote on some executive branch nominations, getting nothing in return, but the Senate remains incapacitated and Obama’s judicial nominations remain frozen. What else is new, right?

Well, what’s new, apparently, is that this entire unprecedented situation is the fault of both parties, as everything is in our media’s fantasy world:

The agreement came after a meeting on Monday night where 98 Senators vented for over three hours. Members of both parties admitted some culpability in the political fighting, with Democrats conceding that their headlong drive to alter the rules may have been overly aggressive.

(via NYTimes.com)

Well, that paragraph sent me to the dictionary in much confusion, for I had never seen the words “headlong” and “aggressive” applied to a group of people that endured 6 years of provocation and then boldly insisted on a half measure response. We all have our blind spots, and maybe I missed school the day these words were defined. So, I clicked on the American Heritage Unabridged, 4th, and here’s the definition of “headlong”:

In an impetuous manner; rashly.

Well, that couldn’t be right. So it occurred to me that maybe the meaning recently changed, so I went to the 5th edition, where much to my surprise I found the same definition. This left me in such confusion that I couldn’t bring myself to look up “aggressive”. Let it lie, I thought. The Times must have added its very own dictionary to its stylebook. Or perhaps, by virtue of the media’s iron law of partisan equivalency, these words were necessary to “balance” the story. After all, if everyone’s to blame, then no one’s to blame, and that is the all purpose meme that the media has no desire to abandon.

By the way, lest you think what happened yesterday signals a brighter tomorrow, check this out. In all likelihood Obama’s judicial nominees will all spend their remaining days as lowly lawyers rather than exalted jurists. Harry Reid has won his skirmish, but like McClellan, he’ll likely avoid battle in future days. Pity the man who can be outfoxed by Mitch McConnell.

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Privatizing lawmaking

Monday, July 15, 2013

Life is good for bankers, in good times and bad. When you commit massive fraud you get a slap on the wrist that barely eats into the profits realized from that fraud, and you get to decide who you’ve ripped off too. But, the icing on the cake is that you’ll never get caught for committing that kind of fraud again. Not that you won’t do the same thing. It’s just that you’ll get it made legal.

The top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee has tucked a provision into his mortgage finance reform bill that would create a privately held “National Mortgage Data Repository.” The repository would basically look like MERS, the bank-owned electronic database tracking mortgage transfers. The difference is that, while MERS’ activities have drawn legal challenges across the country, the National Mortgage Data Repository would have the force of statute to carry out the exact same behavior. According to the bill text, any document arising from this repository would be seen as presumptively legal, pre-empting state and federal laws on demonstrating the right to foreclose.

(via Naked Capitalism)

Read the linked post for the whole story. Boiled down, it comes to this. The bill would legalize MERS, and hand over to the banks the right to determine what is and what is not good evidence of their right to foreclose. They would only have to prove as much as they would require themselves to prove, and if that means that your house gets foreclosed by someone who has no documentary proof that you owe them a dime, well tough luck. Well, that’s not fair. They’ll always have documentary proof, because this bill gives them the right to manufacture it out of thin air.

By the way, many people did get their homes foreclosed when they were not in default. I had a case myself, which happened to have a happy ending for the homeowner. She successfully defended a foreclosure by proving that she had made payments to the lender and its successors, who succeeded each other in rapid sequence. The bank’s lawyer then wrote her a letter telling her that the bank realized it had lost the first time, but it still felt she was in default (she was not) and it intended to start all over again. In the end, we got money from the law firm for unfair debt collection practices and, sort of bizarrely, got the mortgage itself voided, so she ended up with the house and no debt. That happy ending is an outlier, however. This proposal would make sure such unusual events never took place, while enhancing the odds that people would lose their homes without cause.

It’s good to be a bank. Almost as good as being the king.

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Honor among thieves, American style

Friday, July 12, 2013

This morning as I perused the Times, I read this article about Hillary Clinton, who is currently following her husband’s career path and raking in big bucks on the lecture circuit. My immediate reaction was to condemn such fees as a transparent investment, a payment to assure favorable treatment if Hillary should in fact succeed Obama, both temporally and philosophically. But, sort of coincidentally, shorty after I read a post on Americablog, and realized that I was in fact wrong:

Ex–Obama Treasury Secretary and former official with the New York Fed, Tim Geithner, has arrived on Thank-You Street.

Geithner’s share of the legal DC bribery — $400,000 for just three speeches, with more to certainly come.

(via Legal bribery: Tim Geithner earns $400,000 for 3 speeches)

The post provides all the facts any reasonable person would need to conclude that Geithner is being paid for services rendered. I beg leave to add another proof: anyone can make the case that some people might actually want to pay to hear Bill Clinton; some might, if we stretch a point, want to pay to hear Hillary Clinton, but no one on earth would want to listen to little Timmy, unless they themselves were paid. And the likelihood is that both Bill and Hillary are now being rewarded for past services; for in the one case his time is past, and in another her future may not be anywhere near what some suppose.

But I come not to condemn those whose heels rest securely on our heads. I come to praise them. For in what other pack of criminals is such honorable behavior so widespread? Most bribe takers demand money up front, some few will accept it as due upon services rendered, but only in the USA can a bribe taker consider his payment to be, shall we say, as safe as money in a government guaranteed bank, be its promised payment date ever so far in the future. Truly, these folks are the most honorable of thieves and the most admirable of men (and women), for one man’s wink and another’s nod forms a mutual bond that neither would think of breaking. So Geithner could rest assured that though his time for true riches must needs be deferred, it most surely would come, and indeed it has, with only the skimpiest of fig leaves to hide the obscene goings on.

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Not sure about this

Thursday, July 11, 2013

I’m a big Elizabeth Warren fan, and I’m also firmly convinced that the Glass-Steagall Act should never have been repealed, and should be reenacted. That being the case, why am I a bit reluctant to cheer on Elizabeth after receiving her email asking me to support her recently introduced 21st Century Glass Steagall Act. Well, it was this paragraph:

Now it’s time to launch the next push. I joined forces with Senators John McCain, Maria Cantwell, and Angus King to introduce the 21st Century Glass Steagall Act of 2013 to reinstate and modernize core banking protections.

Why, oh why, do Democrats continue to believe that getting John McCain on board of a bill will bring anything but grief, not to mention the real possibility that he will vote against his own bill. And, I am sorry to say, Angus King’s name on the list doesn’t fill me with warm and fuzzy feelings, after he gave aid and comfort to the Republican efforts to kill student loan relief.

Who knows, it may work this time. But please Elizabeth, beware of the company you keep.

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Reid threatens, Republicans yawn

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Harry Reid is once again threatening to end the filibuster, and it looks like this supreme political strategist has chosen his approach: threaten to hit ‘em where it will hurt the least (and then not follow through):

Democratic sources confirmed a New York Times report that leaders are weighing a change that would end filibusters on presidential picks for administrative posts, but not for judgeships. It’s a plan that appears to have been in the works for some time. HuffPost reported in May that Democrats were gearing up for a fight around Cordray’s job this month.

(via Huffington Post)

Well, I’m not being fair. It would hurt the Republicans even less, at least at the moment, if the Democrats confined their filibuster reform to filibusters of legislation, seeing as nothing useful will ever pass the cretin filled House. But this is harmless enough, since the Republicans will have succeeded in preventing a two term Democratic president from appointing anywhere near the number of judges that he should have appointed. That’s a shame really, because by and large, Obama’s judicial appointments have been pretty good, unlike most of his administrative appointments (e.g., Jack Lew and James Comey). It’s the judges that make the decisions, and anything decent Cordray does will certainly be set aside by the DC judges, to whose number Obama has been forbidden by filibuster to add. Recall that the Republicans threatened to change the rules on judges, and the Democrats didn’t merely cave, they really quite sincerely caved. Don’t look for the Republicans to cave to similar pressure, if it’s ever threatened. They’ve taken Reid’s measure, as they’ve taken Obama’s. Reid will cave in the end, when McConnell once again promises to be good. Reid’s heart isn’t in it. Collegiality (strange word to apply in these circumstances, but they all use it) is more important than good government.

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