from youtube comments, of all places:
In the next video, please consider covering recission:
She's on fire, and the fireman arrives.
Everything is fine, she's covered, but the fireman decides to go online and check her records.
He finds out she once had sunburn as a 4-year-old, but didn't report it on her initial Fire Care application.
The fireman calls in to the station and the private Fire Chief cancels her coverage.
The fireman departs as she disappears in a cloud of smoke.
Michael Steele, bringing some bipartisan ideas on health care reform to the table:
So if it’s a cost problem, it’s easy: Get the people in a room who have the most and the most direct impact on cost, and do the deal. Do the deal. It’s not that complicated.
If it’s an access question, people don’t have access to health care, then figure out who they are, and give them access! Hello?! Am I missing something here? If my friend Trevor has access to health care, and I don’t, why do I need to overhaul the entire system so I can get access he already has? why don’t you just focus on me and get me access?
The finance panel aims to produce a bill with a total price tag of under $1 trillion over 10 years...
And some Republicans welcomed the delay as a signal that Baucus would continue to seek broad consensus -- at least on his panel. And the chairman himself remained remarkably bullish. "There's no doubt in my mind we're going to get a bipartisan bill," Baucus told reporters this afternoon.
“Senator Baucus and I are working in a bipartisan way, which means that Senator Baucus, even though he's in the majority, did not kind of put down a take-it-or-leave-it thing of change-it-if-you've-got-the-votes- to-change-it attitude,” Grassley told Iowa reporters in an interview Thursday.
Why are Democrats committing to spending less on health care than on the Iraq war?
Why do Democrats give a fuck about a bipartisan bill?
How many lives is Chuck Grassley's vote worth?
Get 60 Senate Democrats to vote for cloture and 50+1 to vote for the bill. It ... can ... not ... be ... that ... hard
Or basically, this:
Democratic politicians have dropped [the ball] on this issue. I hear that Obama supports the public option. That would mean more if it felt even a little more urgent than his idea that we should have a college football playoff series. Ted Roosevelt didn’t call it the bully pulpit because it lets you chat on the radio for five minutes a week.
Congressional Democrats who wet their trousers at the thought of legislating without permission from Republicans are an order of magnitude worse. The liberal media is AWOL. When was the last time you saw a third party ad on TV that made you feel anything at all?
Anyone who can find evidence of message coordination on this issue wins a prize. Hell, I’ll give partial credit for proof that Democrats went into this with a coherent sense of what they want. Belaboring the obvious, people who care about what they’re doing normally enter negotiations with some firm goal in mind. Most would agree that it is moronic to make negotiating itself the point. Yet how is that any different from kicking off a ‘health care reform’ initiative without any firm idea of what the reform will entail? Reform is a process. Pick a goal and fight for it.
In my opinion, if Democrats cannot treat even a half-victory like the public plan as more important than Mitch McConell’s anguished, fake tears then they don’t deserve to win.
If Democrats can fuck up this bill while in control of the White House and Congress, with the opposition party in shambles, and an overwhelming majority of people supporting a public plan, they are complete fucking clowns
Because when I think of a neo-nazi white supremacist shooting a black guy in the Holocaust museum while wearing a confederate flag cap and a duster, the first thing that pops into my head is “liberal."
Might be this:
I've been following the Oil Drum guys since 2005, and so far they seem to have been largely correct in their description of the situation and predictions. This is a messy science and made harder by the fudged numbers put out by many countries. But what was a very fringe view a few years ago is now being taken much more seriously
If they're close to correct regarding what a sharp decline we're likely to see, it seems hard to believe there will be any long-term economic recovery. The world still has no real replacement for oil. Conservation will help, but we still need a replacement for the two functions served by oil:
Right now we have no technology that can serve both these functions, so we need some combination of:
Right now its not at all clear that we have any combination of those technologies that is both:
Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here -- this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We're going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who've received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture -- like other prisoners of war -- must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That's why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don't make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
Bullshit
Well, the WHO just raised the pandemic alert level to 5
They describe this level as:
Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short
Seems like the only thing left to figure out is what the overall mortality rate will be. If it's anywhere near the 2+% of the 1918 flu, we're in for a bad year
Looks like it might be just about time to start freaking out re: "swine flu". The write-in reports to the BBC from Mexico all seem to indicate their government is greatly downplaying the seriousness of the outbreak, which starting yesterday and today seems to have spread to various places around the US and is starting to hit Europe
We'll probably know within a week or so whether this is another fizzle like SARS or something much worse. So far, my money's on worse
I have no idea how MSNBC got away with this, but it's an absolute masterpiece:
It's fun that the OMB now has a blog, and Peter Orzag has an interesting post up explaining different types of government debt, in which he argues that the $10 trillion figure often quoted is wrong, mainly because of this:
Intragovernmental debt is, essentially, debt that the government owes to itself—as of the end of last year, it totaled $4.2 trillion. The majority of this debt is issued to the Social Security Trust Fund, and most of the remainder is issued to other trust funds, such as the Civil Service Retirement and Medicare Trust Funds. These trust funds are required to invest their surpluses in government bonds. While the federal government will certainly make good on the IOUs issued to these trust funds, they should not be counted when assessing the financial state of the federal government as a whole.
One branch of the government issuing debt to another branch may make one branch poorer relative to the other branch—but it does not affect the overall financial state of the government. For example, when I tell my daughter and son that I owe them each $10 for their allowances, I am poorer, and they are richer—as a family, though, there is no change in our overall finances.
Now granted, this is Peter Orzag and I'm just some schmuck, but this sounds like a load of bullshit to me. His analogy sounds like a sensible one, but let's break it down:
taxpayers : government :: employer : dad
SS fund : government :: kids : dad
But wait, this makes no sense. In the allowance analogy, Dad is promising money out of his own paycheck to the kids, subtracting money out of his own income. But in the real world, the government is collecting money through a variety of means, one of them being payroll taxes which fund social security. Currently there's more money coming in from these taxes than is being paid out, so the money is "lent" to other parts of government which then spend it, since the government as a whole is still running a deficit even after the social security surplus is accounted for
But in the near future this surplus will dwindle and then reverse into a deficit. Not to worry though, because social security has $4.2 trillion in assets saved up, so the fund can run a deficit for quite a long time. We just have to take the money out of... oh right, we lent it to the rest of the government
A more accurate analogy would be a kid helping to save for his own college fund working a summer job, and dad takes the money and writes an "IOU" for it. And then spends it all, and more. That is, he's spending not only his own income but also junior's summer job money on family expenses. And then even more on top of that. So not only does dad - the government - have $58,000 in credit card bills, but he's got another $42,000 in college IOUs. And in a few years junior won't be working the summer job any more, and will be asking for those IOUs to be paid back in hard cash. Sure, in one sense it's "owed to the family", but another way of looking at it is it's owed to the college
And another way of looking at social security is it's owed to the citizens who will be retiring and demanding their benefits. And not only is the money for those benefits not sitting in a bank somewhere, but the government had got accustomed to spending the surplus those and other citizens had been paying into the fund on other programs, because the US government refuses to actually collect taxes that come anywhere near meeting its expenses
Yglesias makes some interesting comments about literacy and democracy, but more shocking to me was the literacy stats alone:
The way these levels are defined is described here, and is a subjective assessment, but basically:
(the numbers above are for prose, click here for the full breakdown, but it's pretty much the same)
Also see this:
Hehe, I can't resist. Taibbi writing about the AIG douchebag who sent his self-pitying resignation letter into the NYT op-ed page:
First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down -- well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.
Out in the real world, when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client. It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble -- only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off after the hostile takeover, no matter how ill-considered the mortgages lent out by your division were.
You expect that money because you think it's owed to you. But what money? The money is gone. Your boss, if not you, set it all afire. You want the money, but where exactly do you think it's coming from?
Do you just not understand that that money now would have to come out of someone else's pocket? That it would have to come from middle-class taxpayers, real plumbers, people who didn't make millions over the years in equity and commodity trading?
Here's the real problem with people like Jake DeSantis. Throughout this whole period, they never were able to connect the dots -- to grasp the fact that when they skimmed a million here or a million there off the great rivers of capital that flowed through their offices, that that money came from somewhere, from someone. To them, it wasn't someone else's money, it was just money, and why shouldn't they have it?
It's remarkable that when DeSantis, in his letter, touts the reason he deserves his high compensation, all he can talk about is how much money he made: "The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation."
For a guy like this, his worth as a human being is wrapped up in buying a bag of beans for $10 and selling it for $11. He states this like it's a law of nature: he was a good equities-and-commodities trader, therefore he should make a lot of money.
Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers, when in reality no one "deserves" that much money. It may be that some people do get paid that much, but most people who make that much money have enough sense to realize their cushy lifestyles are an accident of fate, of birth, of class, not something that is "supported" by some unwritten natural law of compensation.
Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism -- values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents' bedpans, comparatively penniless -- you made a lot of money.
Good for you. Consider yourself lucky. But your company went belly-up and broke, almost certainly thanks in part to you, and now you don't get your bonus.
So be a man and deal with it. The rest of us do, when we get bad breaks, and we've had a lot more of them than you. And stop whining. Jesus Christ.
Simon Johnson in The Atlantic:
In my view, the U.S. faces two plausible scenarios. The first involves complicated bank-by-bank deals and a continual drumbeat of (repeated) bailouts, like the ones we saw in February with Citigroup and AIG. The administration will try to muddle through, and confusion will reign.
...
Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.
The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.
The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.
Obama's response to this economic crisis has gone from bad to worse to holy fuck they must be joking in short order. It's worth starting, yet again, with Matt Taibbi:
It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).
So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."
Liddy made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick from being left out in someone else's financial weather. He conveniently forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the causes of its "pneumonia" was making colossal, world-sinking $500 billion bets with money it didn't have, in a toxic and completely unregulated derivatives market.
Nor did anyone mention that when AIG finally got up from its seat at the Wall Street casino, broke and busted in the afterdawn light, it owed money all over town — and that a huge chunk of your taxpayer dollars in this particular bailout scam will be going to pay off the other high rollers at its table. Or that this was a casino unique among all casinos, one where middle-class taxpayers cover the bets of billionaires.
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.
The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class. But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.
Read the rest, and then go back and read that first section again. It sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. The way CDOs were being used to hide the risk in loans was a lie, and it led to vastly inflated values for houses, and possibly also other sorts of bad loans that banks could make without worrying whether they'd be repaid
The credit default swaps were worse - they were being used both as a second-order instrument to hide risk in the CDOs, but also for flat out gambling. Think your neighbor's house will burn down? You can take out a CDS to get a home insurance payout if it does
And so with all that in mind, here's how the Obama team thinks we should "fix" the crisis
The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.
That's really all you need to know about how fucking stupid this is. The "value" of these assets on the banks' balance sheets are all inflated beyond belief, because the Wall Street whiz kids priced risk out of the system. People were going around buying homes they simply can't afford because
a) everyone else had done it and saw their net worth skyrocket, so you'd have to be stupid not to and
b) because the fucking bank was more than willing to give you a loan you couldn't repay
These mortgages, bundles of these mortgages, other investments based on bundles of these mortgages, insurance on these bundles and investments, and a borderline criminal gambling market where rich people and corporations bet that all the other parts would fail - those are the assets. A huge part of the financial sector is rotten to the core
The entire housing market essentially became the bottom of the pyramid of an enormous multi-dimensional Ponzi scheme, and much of the rest of financial industry built itself on that "safe", high-return foundation. There is no fix to this crisis that doesn't recognize this paper maché pyramid and burn the fucking thing to the ground
Not only are we apparently not going to do that, but the plan that's been leaked would be a rape of ordinary citizens even if these assets were worth anything:
So presumably, the point of a competitive process (assuming enough parties show up to produce that result at any particular auction) is to elicit a high enough price that it might reach the bank's reserve, which would be the value on the bank's books now.
And notice the utter dishonesty: a competitive bidding process will protect taxpayers. Huh? A competitive bidding process will elicit a higher price which is BAD for taxpayers!
Dear God, the Administration really thinks the public is full of idiots. But there are so many components to the program, and a lot of moving parts in each, they no doubt expect everyone's eyes to glaze over.
And so, yes Krugman and Frank Rich are probably right that this is Obama's one shot to do the right thing:
Inquiring Americans have the right to know why it took six months for us to learn (some of) what A.I.G. did with our money. We need to understand why some of that money was used to bail out foreign banks. And why Goldman, which declared that its potential losses with A.I.G. were “immaterial,” nonetheless got the largest-known A.I.G. handout of taxpayers’ cash ($12.9 billion) while also receiving a TARP bailout. We need to be told why retention bonuses went to some 50 bankers who not only were in the toxic A.I.G. unit but who left despite the “retention” jackpots. We must be told why taxpayers have so little control of the bailed-out financial institutions that we now own some or most of. And where are the M.R.I.’s from those “stress tests” the Treasury Department is giving those banks?
Another compelling question connects all of the above: why has there been so little transparency and so much evasiveness so far? The answer, I fear, is that too many of the administration’s officials are too marinated in the insiders’ culture to police it, reform it or own up to their own past complicity with it.
But more than that, it's Taibbi who seems to be using the right language and appropriate level of outrage. This isn't just a bad plan or a stupid plan, it's a corrupt plan. It's the biggest giveaway in a long series of giveaways to the financial power players whose fraudulent activity created this mess in the first place. And it's being engineered by the very people responsible. For christ's sake, this isn't even "6 degrees of wall street" - half these people have direct ties to Goldman Sachs
Over the past six months everyone has been forced to learn the terminology and details of the financial world to try to grasp what happened here, and that terminology and the people who explain it have acted to frame the discussion as one about a serious economic recession with financial mismanagement and unwise investments as the cause. Moving forward though, I'm not sure that framing is helpful anymore. At the very least, it seems to obscure the reality and causes behind what's now happening
As Taibbi says, this isn't about money, it's about power. And this rescue proposal may be best seen not as a plan to fix the economy, but as the final giveaway to the powerful people who created this crisis before the whole thing collapses. Some people do get rich from Ponzi schemes:
Emerging market crises are marked by an increase in tunneling - i.e., borderline legal/illegal smuggling of value out of businesses. As time horizons become shorter, employees have less incentive to protect shareholder value and are more inclined to help out friends or prepare a soft exit for themselves.
Boris Fyodorov, the late Russian Minister of Finance who struggled for many years against corruption and the abuse of authority, could be blunt. Confusion helps the powerful, he argued. When there are complicated government bailout schemes, multiple exchange rates, or high inflation, it is very hard to keep track of market prices and to protect the value of firms. The result, if taken to an extreme, is looting: the collapse of banks, industrial firms, and other entities because the insiders take the money (or other valuables) and run.
This is the prospect now faced by the United States.
...
The course of policy is set. For at least the next 18 months, we know what to expect on the banking front. Now Treasury is committed, the leadership in this area will not deviate from a pro-insider policy for large banks; they are not interested in alternative approaches (I’ve asked). The result will be further destruction of the private credit system and more recourse to relatively nontransparent actions by the Federal Reserve, with all the risks that entails.
The crackpot writing that is Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the IMF
Note: I went to Portland, but it was rainy the entire time and so I took no photos:
cliff at the end of a hike:
cool hole in the clouds:
sequoia's are squishy:
hike up high:
doing some climbing:
quite depressing to see in real life:
visited the rogue brewery:
