brainiac conspiracy

There Was a Young Man of the Negro Persuasion

Who decided one day to become a Caucasian.

---Vitelius

Millionaire Polluters We Can Believe In

Fuck whatever nonsense Mitch McConnell says. I'm willing to filibuster this guy's nomination for this reason alone:

In May 2007, Forbes listed Edison International CEO John E. Bryson as receiving $12.36 million in total compensation for the latest fiscal year, with a five-year total compensation of $52.11 million. He ranked 4th on the list of CEOs in the Utilities industry, and 148th among all CEOs in the United States.

Is this really the most fitting nominee the President can come up with to act as the go-to guy for formulating and implementing US trade policy? A multimillionaire CEO? Of a company that belches millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year? That ought to go over real well with the people who toil for Commerce at this sub-agency.

God forbid we should consider appointing a non-corporate guy with extensive background in commerce and energy policy. Can't think of one? How about this guy? He's only been the ranking member of the House Commerce & Energy Committee for, like, 150 years. How about someone with extensive experience in labor policy, or farm policy? What, these people are all too liberal to possibly survive a Senate filibuster? Okay, how about a political moderate with some foreign policy chops instead?

The problem is this: The Republican extortionists in the US Senate are going to filibuster or hold any nomination the President makes to a Cabinet-level office until he agrees to sign free trade agreements with Turkmenistan and Belarus and promises to abolish the Energy Department to boot. If our President really thought he'd get a pass from Senate Republicans for offering up a Fortune 500 guy to run Commerce instead of Van Jones, well, I guess he got a rude reminder (yet again) of the futility of dealing with Teahadi hostage-takers in good faith. At this point, it's better to nominate someone based on principle over pragmatism when pragmatism has already proved to be a failed governing strategy. You may lose the confirmation battle either way, but at least you'll stop hemorrhaging support among your liberal base.

Either way, this Bryson suit doesn't deserve a promotion---he, and the other members of his class, deserve to have their fucking taxes raised, and greenhouse emissions caps imposed on their wasteful companies. Come to think of it, this could have been done two years, but sadly, it wasn't. Our country is not better off for this collective lack of action, or for this market-friendly appointment.

(As a postscript, anyone who lists employment as a senior adviser to Kohlberg Kravis Roberts on his resume, as John Bryson does, deserves to be shown the door immediately. Those people, metaphorically speaking, are the sexual predators of global finance:

Thanks to cheap credit and ever more sophisticated financial instruments, that phenomenon has lately taken on a worrying scope. The principle is simple: a club of wealthy investors decides to buy up companies that they then manage privately, far from the stock market and its restrictive rules, and without having to account to fussy, fuddy-duddy shareholders. The idea is to circumvent the very principles of the capitalist ethic by betting on the laws of the jungle only.

Concretely, two specialists explain to us, this is how things go: "To acquire a company worth 100, the fund takes 30 out of its pocket (on average) and borrows 70 from banks, taking advantage of the very low interest rates of the moment. During three or four years, it reorganizes the company with the management in place, rationalizes production, develops activities and captures all or part of the profits to pay the interest . . . on its own debt. After which, it will resell the company for 200, often to another fund that will do the same thing. Once the borrowed 70 is repaid, the firm has 130 left in its pocket for an initial bet of 30, or a return of over 300 percent on a four-year investment. What could be better?"

And while they personally are earning insane fortunes, the directors of these funds practice, without any squeamishness, the four great principles of corporate "rationalization:" reducing employment, squeezing salaries, increasing the work pace and outsourcing.)

---Vitelius

If It's Tuesday, It Must Be Bellicose

For while we have too many entitlements, we can never have enough war:

The Pentagon has concluded that computer sabotage coming from another country can constitute an act of war, a finding that for the first time opens the door for the U.S. to respond using traditional military force.

The Pentagon's first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which are expected to become public next month, represents an early attempt to grapple with a changing world in which a hacker could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, subways or pipelines as a hostile country's military.

In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S. in this way. "If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks," said a military official.

Cuz I'm the type of nigga who's built to last . . . Jesus.

Okay, does this only apply to our military? What happens if a standing member of Congress gets their government-issue computer hacked? He or she will typically hold a raft of security clearances too, and will probably have been privy to some classified information during their time in office hat could be accessed by an outside hacker. Does that mean we get to drop Freedom Bombs on Internet trolls like this? If so, I may have to rethink my position on this policy. Otherwise, I fault to see how this awesome new initiative can be construed as anything other than the Pentagon giving itself free license to launch offensive strikes against any country it deems a threat, at any freakin' time it chooses. I guess it's not such a ridiculous extension of the Bushbama Doctrine, but you'd think they could be a bit more discriminating about the terms of deployment. Then again, maybe I'm just forgetting that we really have become a Rogue Nation, which means if we do it, it's not illegal, and if you fuck with us we'll put a foot in ya ass.

---Vitelius

As an Alternative, We Could Do Nothing and Pretend We Don't Have a Serious Problem

But another one-time homebuyer tax credit should do the trick for these people.

---Vitelius

Parties of Moral Relativism

Genocide against Jews: Horrible, very bad, epitome of evil, we will never forget.

Genocide against Muslims: Oh, well, whatever.

---Vitelius

Very Serious People Agree!

That senior citizens are a fungible asset, i.e., human collateral for restructuring sovereign debt. What's more, to say so in our current political climate is bold and brave and courageous.

We also need more wars. Now hurry up and die quickly, moochers.

---Vitelius

Stupid Question, I Know

But as we honor today the brave men and women who have died defending our country in uniform, maybe we should ask our government to stop sending them to places where they're likely to get killed for no discernible reason? Or better yet, start bringing them home instead?

Also too, there are a lot of Very Serious People in this country today with thousands of pints of blood on their hands, and who'd like you to forget all about it:

One cannot properly honor the fallen and wounded soldiers in an unnecessary war if one cannot first come to grips with the reality that the war was unnecessary and not all that significant for the rest of the world. Iraq war supporters have consistently exaggerated the importance of the war for U.S. security and the rest of the region (and indeed for the rest of the world), and some of them continue to imagine that this major strategic blunder has been redeemed from failure to success. Exaggerating the significance of the war for the rest of the world does not respect the sacrifices that Americans, Iraqis, and other nations have made there, but disgracefully tries to distort reality. This is done not to acknowledge the achievements of American forces, nor is it done for the sake of honoring the fallen and wounded, but to gratify those who supported this disaster every step of the way and whose hubris and poor judgment plunged American and allied soldiers into a war that they should never have been called on to fight.

---Vitelius

Regression to The Mean

Breaking news: The recovery hasn't arrived yet for millions of Americans, and doesn't figure to for at least another year:

On the flip side, if you are looking to buy, and you can afford to borrow at the kinds of historically low interest rates we are seeing these days, you'd be pretty foolish not to at least think about it. The same holds true for our government as well, which could take advantage of those same low rates to borrow money to purchase things like high-speed rail systems and intercity transit projects and watershed reclamation and infrastructure rehab that would put many, many thousands of people back to work, which would get them off the welfare rolls and paying taxes again, and stimulating consumer spending on stuff like housing, and helping to reduce the federal deficit to boot. So why aren't we even talking about doing this?

Also too, this:

There will be no WPA-type programs in our near future. There was no appetite for them in the Obama admin in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression and there’s a lot less now. The reasons for that are interesting and I’ll speak to them another day. But it ain’t happening.

And please don’t accuse me of “negotiating with myself” here. I stressed above the importance of making those arguments, and I frequently made them myself as a member of the President’s economics team.

It’s also congenitally hard for politicians to get behind “a serious program of mortgage modification.” Those who advocate for this (the NYT editorial page, e.g.) are right, but they’re also downplaying a very binding constraint. The politics of this idea are deeply wound up in moral hazard. People forget, but it was precisely this action---giving mortgage relief to someone at risk of default and not to someone who was struggling to keep up their payments---that birthed the Tea Party.

---Vitelius

Couldn't Have Predicted That Social Trend

A lot of bandwidth of the Interwebs has been devoted to deciphering the meaning of this survey lately:

White respondents also saw anti-black bias decline through the decades, but even more dramatically than blacks did, from 9.1 in the 1950s to 3.6 in the 2000s. More significantly, whites also saw anti-white bias shoot up from 1.8 to 4.7 in the same period. As the researchers concluded, over the decades there was a "complete reversal" in whites' perception of racism. By the 2000s, whites considered anti-white bias to be a greater social problem than anti-black bias.

Norton and Sommers don't waste time pondering the veracity of that conclusion. By any metric, they write, "from employment to police treatment, loan rates to education---statistics continue to indicate drastically poorer outcomes for black than white Americans." Instead, they figure this historic flip-flop is not about objective conditions but about how whites conceptualize bias. Norton and Sommers conclude that whites, unlike blacks, view racism as a zero-sum game, a situation in which one side's gain automatically results only from the other's loss [...]

Norton and Sommers don't know exactly why whites view racism as a zero-sum game, but they suggest that affirmative-action policies, designed to increase minority representation in education and hiring, may focus whites' attention on the "impact of quota-like procedures on their own access" to jobs and colleges.

Well, there's likely some truth to that, but since we are dealing with a "perception-equals-reality" situation here, as the report's authors concede, perhaps we should ask how it is, or where it is, that whites are getting the perception that black folks in particular, and colored folks in general, are increasingly trying to screw the Anglos for the advancement of their fellow minorities. More to the point: What are the most ubiquitous and accessible cultural drivers that are shaping this perception in the collective mind of White America? I'll admit, that's a mighty tough question to answer, but I'll hazard a wild guess:

Had enough yet?

Considering that we now have a multi-billion-dollar media cottage industry that's dedicated to promulgating the twin myths of reverse racism and white victimization as a staple of its daily programming, I'd be surprised if we didn't see a pronounced change in white folks' perceptions of race relations, wouldn't you agree? I haven't actually seen the demographic breakdowns in this study (available here; ya gotta pay for the abstract), but I'll bet dollars to teabags that the particular subgroup of whites who are the biggest influencers of the survey's overall findings are overwhelmingly males, over the age of 40, who live in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas: The Fox/Limbaugh listener demographic, in other words. Given my own day-to-day experiences in dealing with people who fit this description---the majority of whom have clearly lost their minds over the last couple of years (and I say this as white guy over the age of 40)---I'd again be surprised if my conclusion didn't prove out. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

---Vitelius

Tea Party Tautology

If you run for public office preaching hostility to government, you shouldn't be terribly surprised when voters treat you with hostility once you actually join the government.

---Vitelius

Your Liberal Media

Republican partisan: Obama is forming his own secret army to confiscate our guns and confine us in FEMA forced-labor camps, after which he will destroy the state of Israel and declare America's allegiance to the new Islamic Caliphate, which he will import to America with the assistance of ACORN and voter fraud.

Democratic partisan: There is no factual basis for any of this.

NY Times reporter: Opinions differ!

Republican legislators say the new rules, which have advanced in 13 states in the past two months, offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box. Democrats say the changes have little to do with fraud prevention and more to do with placing obstacles in the way of possible Democratic voters, including young people and minorities.

--Vitelius

Very Serious People Agree

That only deluded left-wing conspiracy theorists would dare believe that the Bush administration took advantage of 9/11 to spy on leftist political dissidents:

It is not hard to understand why Mr. Crow attracted the bureau’s attention. He has deliberately confronted skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members at their gatherings, relishing the resulting scuffles. He claims to have forced corporate executives to move with noisy nighttime protests.

He says he took particular pleasure in a 2003 demonstration for Greenpeace in which activists stormed the headquarters of ExxonMobil in Irving, Tex., to protest its environmental record. Dressed in tiger outfits, protesters carried banners to the roof of the company’s offices, while others wearing business suits arrived in chauffeured Jaguars, forcing frustrated police officers to sort real executives from faux ones.

“It was super fun,” said Mr. Crow, one of the suits, who escaped while 36 other protesters were arrested. “They had ignored us and ignored us. But that one got their attention.”

It got the attention of the F.B.I. as well, evidently, leading to the three-year investigation that focused specifically on Mr. Crow. The surveillance documents show that he also turned up in several other investigations of activism in Texas and beyond, from 2001 to at least 2008.

When the true history of the last decade is written, I am willing to bet that stories like this will be small change, the iceberg's tip of a massive COINTELPRO-style domestic intelligence-gathering operation that ruled over our national-security apparatus from September 2001 until at least 2008---and which, for all we know, may still be in business today. It's really a tragedy that the current administration seems so incurious to investigate the likely probability of this---given the provenance of the people who were driving anti-terror policy in Bush's first term---or to prescribe legislative remedies to ensure that it can't possibly happen again.

Then again, maybe they simply don't give a shit since Loony Lefty Conspiracy Theorists™ can serve as handy foils when you're trying to defend elements of your own national-security policy that are flat-out lawless on their own, or which are intended to shield past criminality.

Either way, you really have to pity poor Dick Nixon: he was a prophet without honor in his own time.

---Vitelius

Fire Tim Geithner. Fire Him Now

Or maybe we need to fire Tim Geithner's boss:

I asked a Very Reliable Source to provide the inside skinny and this is what he told me: “All this is really about is the boys don’t want to have an independent woman in their clubhouse.” When I recounted this remark to my wife, she said, “What else is new?”

Tim Geithner, said my Very Reliable Source, really, really doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren in the position where she is sure to be a tough-minded and independent voice on major financial-policy issues. As CFPB director, Warren would also sit on the new “systemic risk” council of regulators who decide very large questions like “too big to fail.” The other regulators can outvote her easily enough, but Warren has an alarming history of personal candor. She says what she thinks, out loud and in public. That naturally disturbs the club members, all of whom have a rank history of making life easier for the big boys of banking.

Warren made her integrity clear when she served as chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel digging into the financial crisis and bailouts. Her investigations turned up alarming facts the bankers and bank regulators wished to avoid. Furthermore, Warren was often dissenting on legislative issues Geithner and team were pushing in the congressional debates on financial reform. Geithner doesn’t tolerate contrary thinkers in his midst; witness the galaxy of Wall Streeters he recruited to run the Treasury department. Geithner is a favorite of the president’s, perhaps because he is absolutely faithful to the financial establishment’s best interests.

I am guessing that Elizabeth Warren, sooner rather than later, gets something resembling the treatment afforded Van Jones, another mercurial and brilliant liberal reformer who was gently shown the door when his presence became an inconvenience to the administration. The fact that the President could already have recess-appointed her, i.e., over the Easter recess last month, tells me that he's waiting for a good excuse not to have to roll the dice on her. And sure enough, the President's good friends on the Republican side of the aisle are providing one as if on cue. Oh well, there's always a US Senate seat as a consolation prize.

---Vitelius

Fire Tim Geithner. Fire Him Now

For turning the New York Fed into a zero-interest ATM for his ailing friends:

The New York Fed conducted 44 ST OMO auctions, from March through December 2008, according to its website. Banks bid the interest rate they were willing to pay for the loans, which had terms of 28 days. That was an expansion of longstanding open-market operations, which offered cash for up to two weeks.

Outstanding ST OMO loans from April 2008 to January 2009 stayed at $US80 billion. The average loan amount during that time was $US19.4 billion, more than three times the average for the 7 1/2 years prior, according to New York Fed data. By comparison, borrowing from the Fed's discount window, its main lending program for banks since 1914, peaked at $US113.7 billion in October 2008, Fed data show.

Goldman Sachs, led by Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, tapped the program most in December 2008, when data on the New York Fed website show the loans were least expensive. The lowest winning bid at an ST OMO auction declined to 0.01 per cent on Dec. 30, 2008, New York Fed data show. At the time, the rate charged at the discount window was 0.5 per cent.

Stephen Cohen, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.

As its ST OMO loans peaked in December 2008, Goldman Sachs's borrowing from other Fed facilities topped out at $US 43.5 billion, the 15th highest peak of all banks assisted by the Fed, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That month, the bank's Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities trading unit lost $US 320 million, according to a May 6, 2009, regulatory filing.

Under ST OMO, cash changed hands through repos, or repurchase agreements, which the central bank has used to move money in and out of the banking system for at least 60 years. In a repo, the dealer sells securities to the Fed and agrees to buy them back for a higher price after a set period of time.

Open-market operations traditionally use repos to influence the federal funds rate, which is banks' cost of short-term borrowing, said Sherrill Shaffer, the officer in charge of the discount window at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia from 1994 to 1997. He's now a banking professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.

When the central bank increases the money supply---by paying cash for securities in repos---interest rates tend to fall. When it drains cash from the system by selling securities in reverse repos, rates can climb.

Using repos to provide emergency cash, a step the Fed announced on March 7, 2008, was a departure from that process, said John H. Cochrane, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“The Fed was slamming the pedal to the metal in the lender-of-last-resort category,” Cochrane said. “What they did was so far from what we conventionally think of as monetary policy.”

Because monetary policy had nothing to do with it. This was simply a matter of the New York Fed taking advantage of a program which was intended to adjust the money supply and using it to simply throw piles of government cash at failing investment banks to help cover their losses on subprime mortgage securities. And that's why they tried to keep the transactions a secret:

The Fed opposed disclosing details of its open market operations because doing so would probably cause borrowers “substantial competitive harm,” according to a March 2009 declaration by Christopher R. Burke, vice president of the New York Fed's markets group. The declaration is filed in federal court.

Revealing the borrowing “could lead market participants to inaccurately speculate that the primary dealer was having difficulty finding term funding against its collateral in the open market and that the dealer itself must therefore be in financial trouble,” Burke said in opposing a media request for records about the borrowing.

Riiiiiight. Then why did the banks need the money so badly? And why was the Fed so willing to provide it for as little as one-hundredth of one percent interest? No one gets those kinds of financing terms, not even the US government. Wouldn't it be nice if you could bid for your own interest rate on a 30-year mortgage loan?

So much for disincentivizing moral hazard:

Another issue which keeps Rosner up at night is the Fed's uber-easy monetary policy.

"The Fed is still under the assumption all they have to do to revive an economy is blow a new bubble," he says, suggesting commodities and emerging market bubbles have replaced housing, which in turn filled in after the Internet bubble collapsed.

At the same time, the Fed is creating "a lot of interest rate risk" by keeping rates at zero for so long. "As interest rates rise we'll see which banks are in trouble," he warns.

Geithner, it should be recalled, was chairman of the New York Fed when all this crap was going down. None of this could have happened without his sign-off.

And to think that Barack Obama thought this guy was the most qualified individual to head up the Treasury Department for his administration. Seriously.

---Vitelius

Best Served Cold

Res ipsa loquitor:

The American soldier at the centre of the WikiLeaks revelations was so mentally fragile before his deployment to Iraq that he wet himself, threw chairs around, shouted at his commanding officers and was regularly brought in for psychiatric evaluations, according to an investigative film produced by the Guardian.

Bradley Manning, who was detained a year ago on Sunday in connection with the biggest security leak in US military history, was a "mess of a child" who should never have been put through a tour of duty in Iraq, according to an officer from the Fort Leonard Wood military base in Missouri, where Manning trained in 2007.

The officer's words reinforce a leaked confidential military report that reveals that other senior officers thought he was unfit to go to Iraq. "He was harassed so much that he once pissed in his sweatpants," the officer said.

"I escorted Manning a couple of times to his 'psych' evaluations after his outbursts. They never should have trapped him in and recycled him in [to Iraq]. Never. Not that mess of a child I saw with my own two eyes. No one has mentioned the army's failure here---and the discharge unit who agreed to send him out there," said the officer, who asked not to be identified because of the hostility towards Manning in the military.

"I live in an area where I would be persecuted if I said anything against the army or helped Manning," the officer said.

Despite several violent outbursts and a diagnosis of adjustment disorder, a condition that meant he was showing difficulty adjusting to military life, Manning was eventually sent to Iraq, where it is alleged he illegally downloaded thousands of sensitive military and diplomatic documents and passed them on to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

In Iraq, Manning retained his security clearance to work as an intelligence specialist.

Two months after his arrival, the bolt was removed from his rifle because he was thought to be a danger, his lawyer, David Coombs, has confirmed.

A Guardian investigation focusing on soldiers who worked with Manning in Iraq has also discovered there was virtually no computer and intelligence security at Manning's station in Iraq, Forward Operating Base Hammer. According to eyewitnesses, the security was so lax that many of the 300 soldiers on the base had access to the computer room where Manning worked, and passwords to access the intelligence computers were stuck on "sticky notes" on the laptop screens.

Rank and file soldiers would watch grisly "kill mission" footage as a kind of entertainment on computers with access to the sensitive network of US diplomatic and military communications known as SIPRNet.

Now, I suppose you could infer from these revelations that this is all a part of some stealth campaign by our government to further discredit Private Manning, but I am guessing it is the exact opposite: The enough people, in and our of the military, have found out that the cruel, and inhumane nature of his solitary detention has rendered him psychologically and emotionally incapable of presenting admissible testimony on his own behalf in any upcoming trial. So the people who knew him, and worked with him in the Army, are stepping up now, albeit anonymously, and telling his story for him. It all certainly explains why our government has wanted to keep this kid on ice for so long: For if true, the circumstances leading up to Private Manning's deployment and subsequent leaking of documents stands as one more condemnation of the Iraq War and of the previous administration's callous, capricious and criminal prosecution of it. Since the legal team in our current administration has apparently decided to grant total immunity to the previous one for any and all crimes it may have committed, it all becomes more obvious now why Private Manning has been incarcerated for so long without facing trial: Because he will never be allowed to talk until he has been rendered catatonic---the circumstances surrounding his deployment are an obvious indictment of the previous administration's utter lack of concern for national security or for the well-being of our military---so it has fallen upon his former colleagues to testify for him.

A more jaundiced pundit than I might conclude from this that our federal government has now become one bipartisan-approved surveillance state, which reserves unto itself the preemptive right to eavesdrop upon, detain, harass, and incarcerate any citizen at any time for any reason it chooses under the guise of National Security. This was certainly not the kind of change I voted for three years ago, and in fact, it's not a change at all but the mainstreaming of extremist Bush-era authoritarian national-security policy. And absent some upswell of public protest against it, it's hard to see how this security status quo is ever going to change at all.

---Vitelius

Whistling Past the Graveyard

I suppose for folks in some of the most impoverished areas of the country, news like this could sound like manna from heaven, but you really have to question the wisdom of dedicating a dwindling resource that we need to survive (water) to extracting a mineral that's largely responsible for gradually rendering the planet uninhabitable. There's also the nagging little question of the question of what to do with all the waste water after the sale fields have been tapped out. But I guess as long as people continue to view the earth as some sort of fungible asset, rather than as something irreplaceable, you're going to see short-sighted energy policies like this being promoted by all the usual profiteers.

---Vitelius

Invisible Fins

I think it's obvious how we solve this problem: have the government cut a bunch of billion-dollar checks to the five or six biggest commercial operators, then set up a product-labeling program for consumers. Let's call it Fraudulently Identified Seafood Help (FISH). The companies that label their products honestly will get even more money from the government, and those that don't get sternly worded warnings---and additional government funding should they incur any losses from implementing the program. Aggrieved consumers seeking recompense for purchasing harmful or fraudulently labeled products might get some relief, but they probably won't since the program's voluntary and it involves a lot of paperwork that gets frequently misplaced. Otherwise, there's nothing to be done but give the self-correcting wisdom of free markets the power to articulate its own solutions. From the comments:

We don't need to enforce these regulations. The marketplace should take care of this. Customers should do their own investigations of every piece of fish they buy, as Milton Friedman intended.

---Vitelius

At Least We'll Have Kebabs at the Holiday BBQ

And chicken shawarma and baklava too . . . sounds awesome to me.

---Vitelius

His &hearts Was Going LK Mad & K I Said K I Will K LOL

---Vitelius

Lies, Damn Lies, and True Lies

Far be it from me to engage in baseless rumor-mongering and salacious whisper campaigns against highly respected public figures. So I won't.

---Vitelius