brainiac conspiracy

America's Job Creators

They're hiring again! Only not here:

Bank of America, which last fall announced plans to lay off 30,000 workers, is about to go on a hiring spree---overseas.

America's second-largest bank is relocating its business-support operations to the Philippines, according to a high-ranking Filipino government official recently quoted in the Filipino press. The move, which includes a portion of the bank's customer service unit, comes less than three years after Bank of America received a $45 billion federal bailout.

Roman Romulo, deputy majority leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, bragged to the Manila Standard Today earlier this month that the Philippines "has secured its place as the world's fastest-growing outsourcing hub." Romulo pointed out that BofA is the last of the "big four" US banks to move their business-support network to his island nation, where the average family makes $4,700 a year.

None of this needed to have happened. This criminal outfit is functionally insolvent, should have been broken up years ago, and would have been broken up years ago if we had leaders who genuinely cared about reconstituting a financial system that looted trillions of equity out of people's homes, pensions and 401(k)s. Alas, we don't have those kinds of leaders. I really hope the Occupy kids give them hell in Charlotte this summer---in oh-so many ways, they richly deserve it.

---Vitelius

You Don't Raise Taxes in The Middle of a Recession

Because it would harm small businesses and kill jobs: it's a bipartisan article of faith among our leaders in Washington, and our industrious Job Creators are most grateful to them for it.

---Vitelius

It's High-Fives All Around

Whenever serial human-rights violators get together to swap war stories. Good times!

Personally, I think this rendition of Dubya is much more lifelike than the painting.

---Vitelius

Friends Don't Let Friends Read Politico

Or, I read this shit so you don't have to:

Republicans cry “bias” so often it feels like a campaign theme. It is, largely because it fires up conservatives and diminishes the punch of legitimate investigative or narrative journalism. But it also is because it often rings true, even to people who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh---or Haley Barbour.

Reply outsourced to . . . yeah, a men's fashion magazine:

Let's get macro for a moment. This Politico story was written by Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, two people at the very top of the organization's masthead. It's effectively an unsigned house editorial. And it levied a charge of journalistic malpractice at two of Politico's biggest rivals. The house position of Politico, as evidenced by this piece, is that they are fair and their chief competition is not. It's a thinly disguised, fundamentally craven argument for Politico's superiority in the world of political coverage. Let's call this article for what it was. It wasn't journalism. It was business.

Also too, Politico's timing could not have been better, coming only a day after the frequent victims of liberal media bias gave a stellar display of journalistic objectivity. You really can't teach genius like this.

---Vitelius

Self-Correcting Wisdom

As today's must-read reminds us, it's a singular virtue of free markets everywhere:

At the mortgage-processing factory in O’Fallon, Hunt was working on an assembly line that helped inflate a housing bubble whose implosion would shake the world. The O’Fallon mortgage machinery was moving too fast to check every loan, Hunt says.

By 2006, the bank was buying mortgages from outside lenders with doctored tax forms, phony appraisals and missing signatures, she says. It was Hunt’s job to identify these defects, and she did, in regular reports to her bosses.

Executives buried her findings, Hunt says, before, during and after the financial crisis, and even into 2012.

In March 2011, more than two years after Citigroup took $45 billion in bailouts from the U.S. government and billions more from the Federal Reserve---more in total than any other U.S. bank---Jeffery Polkinghorne, an O’Fallon executive in charge of loan quality, asked Hunt and a colleague to stay in a conference room after a meeting. The encounter with Polkinghorne was brief and tense, Hunt says. The number of loans classified as defective would have to fall, he told them, or it would be “your asses on the line.”

Good to see that Dodd-Frank has exerted such a strong influence on our corrupt financial system.

I think it's reasonable to assume at this point that our Job Creators have simply worked out a formula that budgets in a certain amount of fines to be paid out of accounts receivable to the Federal government each year while still allowing them to post solid margins and pay out dividends. Call it the cost of doing business, I guess, but if you or I tried to do it, we'd be hauled in front of a judge for mortgage fraud.

Meanwhile, recovery.

---Vitelius

Clueless Democrats II

I'm not the only soul
accused of hit and run.
Tire tracks all across your back,
I can see you've had your your fun:

In an MSNBC interview on Wednesday morning, President Barack Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, said the recall outcome will have no bearing on the presidential election.

"This is a gubernatorial race with a guy who was recalled and a challenger trying to get him out of office," Cutter said. "It has nothing to do with President Obama at the top of the ticket, and it certainly doesn't have anything to do with Mitt Romney at the top of the Republican ticket. So, no, I don't think -- you know, there may be some that will predict that it means doom for us in Wisconsin in the fall elections, but I think they'll be proven wrong."

Jesus, where to begin.

Playing devil's advocate for a minute, I'll assume they have some horrendous internal polling numbers for this election, which is why they're distancing themselves from the likely outcome, i.e., they don't want to be associated with what they've identified as a Lost Cause. Still, would it have been so difficult to issue some basic boilerplate like:

We're following this race with a great deal of interest as it's a test case to determine whether untold millions of dollars in special-interest money from big banks and oil companies will be allowed to drown out the hopes and aspirations of working Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, and who are only asking for the opportunity to pursue the dream of a better life for themselves and for their families.

See how easy that was?

Yes, it would be sort-of partisan. And yes, it would be sort-of populist. And yes, we know the Serious Persons in Washington take a dim view of both partisan populism and populist partisanship, at least when they're exercised by Democrats. But honestly, if you wanted to depress voter turnout in Wisconsin next week---not to mention union-member turnout next November---you couldn't do much better than what the White House political brain trust is doing, which is greeting a bellwether election in a battleground state with a collective shrug. As with so much else they have done in the past, it's not smart policy, and it's awful politics.

---Vitelius

Our Clueless Democratic Leadership

At least they're consistent:

[T]he House Democrats are entering tough negotiations with the Republicans by going 83% of the way toward the GOP position. Whether you're buying a car or trying to balance the budget, that's no way to bargain.

Still can't figure out why they behave this way when none of their previous good-faith capitulations have been rewarded in kind. Then again, there's a perfectly good reason for starving the government of revenue in the middle of a recession, but it's kind of a losing issue with voters when you explain it to them, which is likely why it isn't mentioned in this op-ed. Either way, if this tax-cuts-for-almost-everyone kabuki is just a prelude to enacting Sensible & Sustainable Entitlement Reforms™ post-election, I hope Pelosi's colleagues realize they'll be relegating themselves to minority-party status for the next quarter century, or at least until all the Boomers die off. They'll also have one less vote in their column going forward.

---Vitelius

Not Rocket Science

I'm no economist, but when you impose a fiscal regime that mandates massive job losses, obligatory wage and pension devaluations, and cutbacks in government services to fulfill, aggregate demand drops precipitously because, well, people no longer have any money to buy things. How this qualifies as success, I have no idea, but I guess that's why I'm not a central banker.

---Vitelius

Mission Accomplished

Didn't realize it was Morning in America™ again, but our leaders' work is apparently done:

Job creation has since slowed. Employers took on 115,000 new workers in April, the fewest in six months. Economists project a Labor Department report tomorrow will show payrolls grew by 150,000 last month, still weaker than any month from November through March.

Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William C. Dudley said the U.S. expansion will probably continue at a “moderate” pace and that additional stimulus likely won’t be needed unless the economy falters.

“As long as the U.S. economy continues to grow sufficiently fast to cut into the nation’s unused economic resources at a meaningful pace, I think the benefits from further action are unlikely to exceed the costs,” Dudley said yesterday.

You really have to wonder what it's going take for these people to realize that happy talk notwithstanding, we still have a serious crisis on our hands.

---Vitelius

General Electric

Gets nearly a billion dollars a year in military contracts. So of course they were going to make Chris walk the plank for daring to infer that, you know, that maybe the military is not the most awesome career path a young person can take since your service is only going to be manipulated by self-interested political figures and praised by people in our media who don't really give a rat's ass about you. For telling the truth, in other words. Welcome to the bigs.

---Vitelius

They Might Have Considered Doing Something

To solve this little problem before we got this deep into a re-election campaign:

Lot of electoral votes there. Sure would hate to see anything happen to them.

And it's not like they haven't had opportunities, even from before the beginning:

The mortgage crisis was worsened this past time because critical decisions were made during the transition between Bush and Obama. We voted the TARP out. The TARP was basically being administered by Hank Paulson as the last man home in a lame duck, and I was disappointed. I tried to get them to use the TARP to put some leverage on the banks to do more about mortgages, and Paulson at first resisted that, he just wanted to get the money out. And after he got the first chunk of money out, he would have had to ask for a second chunk, he said, all right, I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask for that second chunk and I’ll use some of that as leverage on mortgages, but I’m not going to do that unless Obama asks for it. This is now December, so we tried to get the Obama people to ask him and they wouldn’t do it.

---Vitelius

The Banality of Drone Strikes

Feeling a lot safer these days knowing that our leaders are only targeting real militants, militants-in-training, militant-wannabes, or people engaging in militant-related program activities:

Probably the most disturbing of which is that one of the reasons why the Obama administration runs around claiming that the casualties of civilians are so low from their drone attacks, which everyone knows is false, is because they have redefined what a militant is. A militant in the eyes of the Obama administration formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the U.S. shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people without even knowing whom they have killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by virtue of their proximity to that scene.

What the New York Times article said, was that the rationale for this is that they believe that anybody who is even near a terrorist or any terrorist activity is "Probably up to no good." Ironically, that is, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, the exact phrase that George Zimmerman used when describing Trayvon Martin to the 9-1-1 call, that he must be up to no good. The sort of suspicion, that even though we don’t know anything about somebody, the mere happenstance of where they are or what they’re doing entitles us not just to harbor a suspicion about them, but to kill them. And it is amazing that American media outlets continue to use the word "militant" to describe people [who] are killed by American drones without knowing their identity, even though we now know that the Obama administration uses that word in a incredibly deceitful and propagandistic way.

Well, it's not really all that amazing because, frankly, they just don't give a shit about who those people are on the wrong end of a Predator strike. And neither, outside of a few Unserious Persons like Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul, do very many Americans. This is one reason of many why I wonder if we can no longer be considered a functioning liberal democracy anymore.

---Vitelius

Minimal Blogging Day

Got a meeting to attend today with a bunch of guys in suits, so go Occupy something until I return.

---Vitelius

Nice Work if You Can Get It

It's hard work trying to impose a little discipline on the freeloaders:

Lagarde, predicting that the debt crisis has yet to run its course, adds: "Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax." She says she thinks "equally" about Greeks deprived of public services and Greek citizens not paying their tax.

"I think they should also help themselves collectively." Asked how, she replies: "By all paying their tax."

Asked if she is essentially saying to the Greeks and others in Europe that they have had a nice time and it is now payback time, she responds: "That's right."

Especially when one leads by example:

Christine Lagarde, the IMF boss who caused international outrage after she suggested in an interview with the Guardian on Friday that beleaguered Greeks might do well to pay their taxes, pays no taxes, it has emerged.

As an official of an international institution, her salary of $467,940 (£298,675) a year plus $83,760 additional allowance a year is not subject to any taxes.

---Vitelius

Tuesday Night Folk Blogging

I never knew until I read the obits tonight that he was blind from infancy. R.I.P.

---Vitelius

Market-Based Solutions

Sure is a good thing we're going to be requiring everyone in America to purchase health insurance, assuming the Federalist Five doesn't fuck up the program:

Unknown to most consumers, many hospitals and physicians offer steep discounts for cash-paying patients regardless of income. But there's a catch: Typically you can get the lowest price only if you don't use your health insurance.

That disparity in pricing is coming under fire from people . . . who say it's unfair for patients who pay hefty insurance premiums and deductibles to be penalized with higher rates for treatment.

The difference in price can be stunning. Los Alamitos Medical Center, for instance, lists a CT scan of the abdomen on a state website for $4,423. Blue Shield says its negotiated rate at the hospital is about $2,400.

When The Times called for a cash price, the hospital said it was $250.

What it means, of course, is basically:

This election will be fought between two men whose "solutions" to this debacle are based on a system that cannot possibly solve it [...]

Maybe we'd be better off if we encouraged people not to buy health insurance? It just might drive down the cost curve a bit if several million people opted out of their coverage all at once, don't you think? I guess this is yet another reason why I probably won't lose any sleep if the Roberts Gang throws out the Affordable Care Act next month. It may be an egregious violation of stare decisis and all that legalistic stuff, but if it forces our leaders to come up with a universal health-care plan that actually makes care affordable and doesn't reward profiteering, well, good. Because up to now, they haven't tried that approach.

---Vitelius

Variations on a Theme

Here, we call it "extend and pretend":

Spanish banks are masking their full exposure to soured property loans while they continue to prop up zombie developers, leading to credit-rating downgrades and plummeting share prices.

Spain is working to clean up its banks, requiring lenders set aside more for possible losses on loans deemed performing to developers like Metrovacesa SA (MVC), which hasn’t completed a project in more than a year and has none under way. While that represents about 30 billion euros ($38 billion) of increased provisions, it’s not enough because many loans said to be performing aren’t being repaid, according to Mikel Echavarren, chairman of Irea, a Madrid-based finance company specializing in real estate.

“Spain has engaged in a policy of delay and pray,” Echavarren said in an interview. “The problem hasn’t been quantified by anyone because there is huge pressure not to tell the truth.”

This, of course, is why those slothful Spaniards need to relinquish their unsustainable pensions and health-care benefits: Because they have forsaken their nation's shared cultural values, which are deeply rooted in the Franco-Torquemada Equilibrium. Again, for their greediness, they will simply have to pay.

---Vitelius

Are There No Prisons?

Too bad I've hit my limit of Times articles this month, otherwise I'd quote directly from the source, a.k.a., Davey the Salad Tosser at the Georgetown Applebee's:

Lyndon Johnson was right to use government to do more to protect Americans from the vicissitudes of capitalism. But he made a series of open-ended promises, especially on health care. He tried to bind voters to the Democratic Party with a web of middle-class subsidies.

A government that was energetic and limited was turned into one that is omnidirectional and fiscally unsustainable. A government that was trusted and oriented around long-term visions is now distrusted because it tries to pander to the voters' every momentary desire. A government that devoted its resources toward future innovation and development now devotes its resources to health care for the middle-class elderly.

Health care for the middle-class elderly? Clearly, a foolish misallocation of government resources. Thankfully we don't need to look far into the future for a solution. It's staring us in the face right now:

The Catsoula family, who live in the suburbs of Athens, are at breaking point. The two sisters and their elderly grandparents need various forms of medicine. Seventy-year-old Heleni Catsoula uses oxygen to help her with respiratory problems.

But she told Sky News: "The government reimburses me for the 100 euros I pay for the oxygen, but now they have stopped. They also used to pay the chemists for my drugs but they have stopped.

"Now I owe my local chemists 400 euros and I find it difficult to get my medication. If I have an attack, I don't even have petrol in the tank to get to the hospital. And nor can I afford the five euro entry fee" [...]

The family, who live in the industrial area of Aspropirgos, has sold all their jewellery including wedding rings and christening gifts to pay for food and medication. Ms Catsoula's daughter Vicki, who is diabetic herself, now regularly makes a three-hour journey to a central Athens refuge centre to try to get hold of the drugs her family needs.

For the Catsoulas, austerity has meant the state no longer provides them with the support they need.

Their home sits in the shadow of the Aspropirgos power station and yet they cannot afford to service their electricity bills. One of the sisters lost her job at the factory three years ago.

It never fails to amaze me how Serious Persons like David Brooks get taken seriously by the other Serious Persons in Washington for waxing seriously nostalgic for the good old days of the early 20th Century, before left-liberal politicians overreached and shamelessly bought the loyalty of voters with unsustainable social-welfare programs like Medicare. Because, well, it's not like any of those voters actually needed those programs since their presence would upset the Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian Equilibrium, which I guess is some kind of Grand Unifying Theory that defines our values and has Made Us Exceptional. Perhaps if those greedy Greeks, like their American counterparts, would understand the universality of this principle and respect their own Platonic-Aristotelean Equilibrium, they'd once again be able to assume their rightful position among the league of democratic nations. Until then, however, more of them will apparently need to expire, victims of their own moral deficiency.

---Vitelius

Am I Glowing Yet?

I rarely ever eat bluefin tuna anymore. It's been horrendously overfished to the point where 90 percent of all known wild stocks have been depleted. But the fishmonger at the Larchmont Farmer's Market had such a smokin' great deal on "sashimi-grade" ahi last week, I decided to plunk down for a pound.

I guess I know now why it was such a bargain:

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away---the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years.

----Vitelius

Forward Never Back

Hard to know where to begin here:

The president “was very interested in obviously trying to understand how a guy like Awlaki developed,” said General Jones. The cleric’s fiery sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings at Fort Hood. Then he had gone “operational,” plotting with Mr. Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after the airliner was over the United States.

That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.

Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him. (Emphasis added.)

I guess we know now why nobody from the Bush Justice Department was ever charged with a war crime, and never will be: heck, they only contrived Constitutional arguments to torture foreigners. In the Obama Justice Department, they contrive Constitutional arguments to kill U.S citizens. What's even scarier to me is the fact that no one in the administration will pay any political price for this behavior; the media will simply monitor the body count, and the public will applaud approvingly. At least until the next successful terror strike, which this policy would seem to make inevitable, eventually.

Meanwhile, winning hearts and minds.

---Vitelius