"See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
--George W. Bush, Greece, New York. May 24, 2005
"People don't want to go to war. ... After all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country."
fatcat UAW workers up in their fancy pants palaces with their golden lunch pails and stuffed truffles asking the innocent, pure as driven snow taxpayers for handouts:
All of these people are absolute fucking idiots. There's no way a UAW line worker making the average $28 an hour is receiving another $45/hour in benefits. $6.50 for healthcare, maybe a little more if their HR department is as exceptionally incompetent as GM's management, a few bucks more in deferred pension income.
Look at the numbers. It wouldn't be difficult to argue (and you'd have to argue, because GM won't break down the benefits numbers, because they'd rather push a four year old $73/hour number in their perpetual PR campaign against the union) that their actual labor costs are less than Toyota's $48/hour (how else has Toyota kept the unions out?).
For example, you could present the data honestly by including the retirees in the denominator like the $73/hour number includes their healthcare and pension benefits in the numerator. Take Ford as the example, they have twice as many retirees as they do workers. Including them in the denominator would give us $24/hour, half that of Toyota's American subsidiary.
More honestly, we could point out that labor costs are about the same for GM as their competition - union or non-union - but that they have huge obligations to over half a million retirees because the management has routinely opposed socializing those costs like their competitors in Japan and foreign subsidiaries in Europe and Canada, and bought off the 1950s UAW's support for national health insurance with a generous private benefits package instead.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-18 15:02:41 CST |
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Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit intends to reduce headcount by about 14 percent to 300,000 in the ``near term,'' according to a presentation on the firm's Web site today. Pandit has already cut 23,000 jobs, leaving the New York-based bank with 352,000 employees as of Sept. 30.
Pesky humans, weighing down the fleet and increasingly unfettered firms of imaginary capital.
And how about that safety net for the people who will nevertheless be fired! Let's hope you can grasp that slender thread as you're falling, former Citigroup employees. We can afford to swing conditionless 25 billion dollar chunks of corporate welfare around but it would cost too much, and introduce too much moral hazard, to help you anymore than barely at all.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-17 11:10:23 CST |
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the run defense in EA's madden 09 - is it the shoes?:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-16 12:03:11 CST |
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post-mortems:
If you haven't already read Dean Starkman's piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, "Boiler Room", you should, before reading Michael Lewis' "The End", which paints the same picture from the perspective of some investors who saw the housing bubble and tried to find ways to short it:
That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats.
[...big snip to obligatory observation of the obvious...]
Greed on Wall Street was a given—almost an obligation. The problem was the system of incentives that channeled the greed.
Other fitting titles for the bit would have been "Meet a Few of Your New Overlords", or "Why Paul Volcker May Not Be The Super Awesomeist Best Choice for Sec. of Treasury of Your Dreams".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-14 21:59:10 CST |
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accounting and competence, down the mines:
Chris Carey:
If the estimated savings from the new tax breaks are included, the [total amount of federal] assistance [to the financial sector] would climb to $2.46 trillion. That total does not include other measures not focused directly on banks, such as Treasury Department's $200 billion in support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration's $300 billion HOPE for Homeowners program.
"It's a mess," said Eric M. Thorson, the Treasury Department's inspector general, who has been working to oversee the bailout program until the newly created position of special inspector general is filled. "I don't think anyone understands right now how we're going to do proper oversight of this thing."
...
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, said his concerns about oversight diminished after the Treasury program's focus shifted from purchases of financial firms' troubled assets to capital injections into companies. "The concern was they'd be buying assets and we wouldn't know the price," Frank said. The revised bailout program "doesn't have the conflicts of interest and the other things people were concerned about."
The oversight is very rigorous, it is overseen with such rigor that there is no oversight to spare for what it is that needs to be overseen so rigorously. Instead I became a miner, because down the mines it's all dark and there's no need for any oversight at all, because there's nothing down there to see.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-13 19:14:36 CST |
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these newly released videos of the world trade tower attacks clearly demonstrate my conspiracy theory about 9/11:
I have absolutely no idea why it's taken the FBI/DOJ three years to release these:
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-13 12:23:16 CST |
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a fitting successor to the education president:
If the schools are doing their job, we should expect educators to point to the significant and indisputable
achievement in raising the intellectual level of the nation - measured perhaps by larger
per capita circulation of books and serious magazines, by definitely improved taste in movies
and radio programs, by the higher standards of political debate, by increased respect for freedom of speech
and of thought, by marked decline in such evidence of mental retardation as the incessant reading of comic
books by adults.
--A. E. Bestor, Education Wastelands, 1953
Via, if memory serves, C Wright Mills.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-13 11:34:53 CST |
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The major "flaw" with the Roberts, Health Ministry, and UNDP ILCS studies is that none of them go past June of 2006. This lops off the most violent period in Iraq's civil war, between July 2006 and August 2007, at least as measured by the proxy of news agency reports. Reported violence has only declined below the already atrocious levels of 2005 in the past couple of months, suggesting that since August 2007 excess mortality continued at rates comparable to the initial "controversial" Lancet study.
The Opinion Research Business survey included that period, running to August 2007, and the numbers are outright genocidal: 946,000 to 1,120,000.
As for taking credit for security gains since late 2007, only a little less than half of Americans credit the surge, surprising considering the conventional wisdom in the press. But that number is nevertheless off the charts compared to how many Iraqis feel that way [pdf, 3/17/2008]:
few [Iraqis] give the United States direct credit for security gains. When those
who see security as having improved are asked who deserves the most credit, Iraqi
institutions lead the way – 26 percent cite the national government, 18 percent the police, 13 percent the army. Just 4 percent mention the United States or U.S. forces.
That probably had a lot to do with the fact that half of respondents still considered the security situation worse.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-13 11:05:28 CST |
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shark hazard:
Barry Ritholtz rants by way of explanation why including punitive measures in the bailout bill would have been a good idea.
I am waiting to hear one good reason to keep them out of chapter 11.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-12 23:25:47 CST |
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if there's anything worth rescuing somebody else will:
Scanning through the list of GM-funded think tanks today, I haven't seen one yet that supports bailing out GM. Ironic and consistent.
A $25 billion bailout for $4.3 billion Ford, $1.78 billion GM, and a similarly worthless Chrysler? No, we already gave them $25 billion, now they're asking for more, a lot more:
Top executives of GM, Ford and Chrysler and the UAW president met with Congressional leaders Thursday to discuss getting a reported $50 billion in loans to help the companies withstand the weak economy and pay for future needs. The money would be in addition to $25 billion in loans that Congress passed in September to help retool auto plants to build more fuel-efficient vehicles.
We could nationalize the industry for less than the cost of bailing it out.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-11 15:33:43 CST |
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like a hummer with teeth:
By my count, there are 56 open GM factories in the United States and 54 scattered across the rest of the planet.
General Motors' Director of Economic Policy, Thomas Walton, joined the global warming denial think tank the Heartland Institute in 2001.
Bob Lutz, the Vice Chairman of Global Product Development,
is of the opinion that global warming "is a crock of shit" and doesn't "believe in the CO2 theory".
It puts its money where its heart is: it's been a long time contributor to almost every crackpot anti-environmental hack shop or think tank one could probably think of - from Tech Central Station, the Reason Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, to the finally defunct Global Climate Coalition - that has been in the business of opposing every effort to force GM to adopt a sustainable business plan. Then they follow up decades of opposition to sound environmental policies that would have made them more competitive by lying about their own record.
General Motors has been fucking America in the goatass for over half a century. How are we going to repay them when they're on the ropes, better off left for dead? Ready to be broken up, bought up, and chewed up by other capitalists who couldn't possibly be less scientifically illiterate than the present management, paving the way for some actual American innovation in the auto industry?
Barack Obama would ask us to help them survive in order to save all those factory jobs in Mexico and Canada, rather than let one American auto worker find employment in the same factories under new, undoubtably better, management. That way GM can survive to throw its massive political clout against his health care plan, his environmental agenda, his tax policies, and lobby to ensure he doesn't get any funny ideas about expanding social security to replace the private pension plans the big automakers bitch and moan about every day in the business pages.
Now repeat this post word for word with a few names changed, substituting "General Motors" with "Ford" and "Chrysler", and you've got a trifecta.
Way to seize the moment, Barry.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-11 00:07:22 CST |
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windfall tax subsidies for the biggest financial corporations:
Dean Baker finds an answer to how big a tax break this scam might amount to. The WaPo describes it thusly:
Section 382 of the tax code was created by Congress in 1986 to end what it considered an abuse of the tax system: companies sheltering their profits from taxation by acquiring shell companies whose only real value was the losses on their books. The firms would then use the acquired company's losses to offset their gains and avoid paying taxes.
Baker:
The Post article cites various experts who put the cost of this change in the tax code as between $105 and $140 billion. It would have been useful if the Post had placed this figure in some context. Presumably it refers to the tax savings in the near future on takeovers, based on losses already incurred by banks. If the revenue loses are realized over the next three years, then it will be equal to between 2.6 percent and 3.5 percent of projected revenue over this period.
That's pretty significant. Personally, I was thinking that the upside of the current financial mess would be new financial institutions with sounder business practices. This kind of massive subsidy for the largest firms pretty much rules out market entry - if the cost wasn't already too high in a field dominated by TBTF institutions. So much for the creative side of destruction.
Maybe it's time to google "convoy banking system".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-10 18:22:33 CST |
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maybe merlin pulled it out of his hat:
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has obtained evidence suggesting that documents which have been described as technical studies for a secret Iranian nuclear weapons-related research program may have been fabricated.
The "International Human Rights Group" where he served as Vice Chair. I think it's a funny name for a missionary Christain organization. Helping international missionaries convert world cup fans... Your mileage, I suppose, may vary.
The previous secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, was very involved in the Speicher case and changed Speicher's status from "killed in action, body not recovered" to "missing in action"
Which is who Bush was talking about when he said this:
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners ... One American pilot is among them.
Nice little piece of ancillary propaganda for whipping up hysterics about Iraq, that one. Originally:
On January 18, 1991 ... Initial reports by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney stated that Speicher had been killed. One military source said reports indicated the aircraft had "exploded to bits" in the sky, apparently having suffered a direct SAM hit.
But I guess a big reason he's one of Obama's top advisors on national security is that he's got this policy on Iraq, and how, like, we should be more like Winnie the Pooh and stop doing stupid things that, like, damage our capacity for weighing clearly the pros and cons about who we should kill next. Also, he's interviewed some terrorists, and they want to be Luke Skywalker and shit. Richard Danzig wants to be National Security Advisor.
Susan Rice wants to wipe Sudan off the map with some humanitarian cruise missiles or something - once again raising the question in my mind of what exactly is going on at the Brookings Institution that their liberals never want to start firebombing the Congo. She also wants more preventative war: "If the U.S. fails to gain UN support, we should act without it as it did in 1999 in Kosovo". Her grammar sucks also.
Dennis Ross is incapable of not lying. Anytime he opens his mouth the lingual equivalent of a Salvador Dalí painting jumps out of his throat.
From the swill of the rumor mongering that leaves Danzig and Greg Craig. I really don't understand what Danzig actually brings to the table. I guess the argument is that he's a competent manager and best buddies with Obama, but it's not like, looking at the Navy after Clinton, that you could say that it was a leaner meaner more efficient sinkhole for tax payer dollars and foreign debt, could you? Greg Craig, for my money. He's at least had a relatively fascinating legal career to ponder, and having at least one foreign policy wonk at the table endorsed by COHA would help me sleep at night.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-10 11:23:05 CST |
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update: His father the Israeli terrorist is a real class act:
In an interview with Ma'ariv, Emanuel's father, Dr. Benjamin Emanuel, said he was convinced that his son's appointment would be good for Israel. "Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel," he was quoted as saying. "Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."
Apparently Mr. Emanuel didn't get the anonymous email about the secret identity of his son's new boss. Har har.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-06 10:36:32 CST |
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Is "lowering expectations" really a "task"? That's probably more a question for the author than the aides.
But see? I'm lending a helping hand to their project of greatness already. At least the headline isn't "Obama Aides Say Task Now Is to Temper High Demands".
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-05 21:05:05 CST |
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the reactions of change:
and another clintonista, this time for head of the EPA. RFK Jr. might be a lot of good things, but he's also a crackpot. He opposes wind power off Nantucket Sound because it would ruin the Kennedy Family compound's precious view, he suspects that childhood vaccines cause autism, he's convinced the 2004 election was maliciously stolen, etc..
You might as well just confirm up front all the worst stereotypes of environmentalists as DFH anti-intellectual flower hypocrites whose hatred of business is as irrational as it is blind, and destroy the effectiveness - whatever there is left to salvage, anyway - of the agency in the process.
Mere rumors of rumors of appointments, you say, but let's entertain that these are serious propositions. If the idea is to make some sacrificial appointments to the altar of Clinton and shore up the party, couldn't he find some better baggage? Maybe Andrew Young would be interested in that Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships thingamabob? Toss Ed Rendell the DoJ or something? Why not Leon Panetta for EPA? Seriously, I can't really think of too many people that would have something to offer that Panetta wouldn't.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-05 17:57:52 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-05 15:34:22 CST |
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results that matter:
John Joseph Polacheck wins a smashing 1223 votes! Conservatively assuming that 99% of those votes were mistakes or accidents, it means I have approximately 11 fellow travelers.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-05 15:23:10 CST |
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data:
Between the 2008 exit polls and 2004 exit polls, I'd basically hand it to the youth vote. Though the loss of 5% in self-identified Republicans for a 2% gain in Democratic self-identifiers and 3% gain in "Independents" (no change at all in ideological self-id, though more of every persuasion voted for the donk) probably didn't hurt.
The rally was fun and my legs are still sore. Something about standing in place for six hours straight. I felt kinda bad for not being as rallied up as all these young people, who apparently have rally to spare, but they put on a good show.
update: It looks like lower income voters were grossly under-represented:
income
share of voters
share of households
<50K
37%
51%
50-75
21%
18%
75-100K
15%
11%
>100K
26%
17%
That's a pretty significant shift from last election to higher income voter turnout. 45% of 2004 voters made less than 50K, while only 18% made over 100K. I guess that whole plot to boost low income participation through ACORN voter registration drives and being a beacon of hope to the poor and downtrodden didn't really work so hot.
For all the higher upper income voter participation this year, they split evenly between the candidates, while the bottom half went 60-38 for the donk. Quite the bifurcation.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-11-05 02:57:28 CST |
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The elephant that is not in the room is a financial system. By a financial system, I don’t mean the tottering cartel of banks and insurers loudly sucking newly printed cash into “collateral postings” and “deleveragings” and other meaningless nonactivities. That is no financial system at all. It is an ecology of intestines and tapeworms, tubes through which dollars flow and are skimmed en route to destinations about which the tripe-creatures have little interest or concern.
No, a financial system would be forward-looking. A financial system would be interested in the world, rather than fascinated by the patterns that formed behind its own mathematical eyelids. A financial system would hunger for information. It would leave no human preference overlooked and no technological possibility unconsidered. A financial system would embrace us all, would want to learn from us all. It would not be something external, something outsourced to specialists in London or Manhattan. It would want “savers” to express what they plan to do, how they hope to live, rather than offering generic claims on money along a disembodied spectrum of “risk”. It would thirst for proposals, ideas, business plans designed to meet the preferences thus expressed, or to achieve possibilities not widely considered. A financial system would be creative. No stock exchange could contain the vast and multifarious tapestry of investable ideas a financial system would educe. A financial system would offer us opportunities to invest not in distant opportunities where we are disadvantaged, but in projects that are informationally, if not physically, near to us. A financial system would be ruthless. It would allow us to have a voice in the most important decision we collectively make, but would force us each to bear the costs of our errors.
We simply do not have such a system. We don’t have anything remotely like such a system.
The U.S. corporate tax burden is smaller than average for developed countries.[1] Corporations in 19 of the member states of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development paid 16.1 percent of their profits in taxes between 2000 and 2005, on average, while corporations in the United States paid 13.4 percent.
The ostensible corporate tax rate is 35%.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-10-31 16:46:31 CST |
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Far as demand stimulus ideas go a national sales tax holiday is an interesting one I hadn't heard before. It might make the most sense now in light of the fact that any plan would have to pass the Stupid Republican Keynsianism test. How are they going to insist on tax cuts in a stimulus bill that is a tax cut? I'm sure they'd find a way, but I'd like to see what they came up with.
The cut should only be 4%, though, too many states have a sales tax under 5%, and the sales subsidy disbursements would be a headache. There's no obvious reason why consumers wouldn't direct the savings from purchases into more consumption, rather than more savings, either.
:: posted by buermann @ 2008-10-31 16:33:02 CST |
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