The Dodd-Frank act: Too big not to fail | The Economist

17 Feb

When Dodd-Frank was passed, its supporters suggested that tying up its loose ends would take 12-18 months. Eighteen months on, those predictions look hopelessly naive. Politicians and officials responsible for Dodd-Frank are upbeat about their progress and the system’s prospects, at least when speaking publicly. But one banker immersed in the issue speaks for many when he predicts a decade of grind, with constant disputes in courts and legislatures, finally producing a regime riddled with exceptions and nuances that may, because of its complexity, exacerbate systemic risks rather than mitigate them.

For the same reasons that bankers are worried, lawyers are rubbing their hands. For many of America’s most prominent law firms helping companies to cope with Dodd-Frank is a vital service to clients, a lubricant for the American economy and a great new business.

Hmmm . . . Sorta makes you think that no one really knows what’s going on.

via The Dodd-Frank act: Too big not to fail | The Economist.

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Is China our future? – U.S. Economy – Salon.com

17 Feb

And GE Consumer & Industrial CEO James Campbell reiterated it when he recently told the New York Times that “making things in America is as viable as making things any place” because domestic labor costs are now “significantly less with the competitive wages” — read: far lower wages — now accepted by American workers.

Now that this consensus is finally out in the open, the real question for America is simple: Do we accept an economic competition that asks us to emulate China?

If our answer is yes, then we should support current state legislative proposals to reduce child labor protections; back federal legislation to eliminate all environmental, wage and workplace safety laws; and applaud corporations that crush unions and further reduce wages in America. We should also probably encourage our fellow countrymen to follow Apple Inc.’s Chinese workforce by simply accepting $17-a-day paychecks, 12-hour workdays and six-day workweeks.

via Is China our future? – U.S. Economy – Salon.com.

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Noam Chomsky: America’s Decline Is Real — and Increasingly Self-Inflicted | World | AlterNet

17 Feb

From the 1970s, there has been a significant change in the U.S. economy, as planners, private and state, shifted it toward financialization and the offshoring of production, driven in part by the declining rate of profit in domestic manufacturing. These decisions initiated a vicious cycle in which wealth became highly concentrated (dramatically so in the top 0.1% of the population), yielding concentration of political power, hence legislation to carry the cycle further: taxation and other fiscal policies, deregulation, changes in the rules of corporate governance allowing huge gains for executives, and so on.

Meanwhile, for the majority, real wages largely stagnated, and people were able to get by only by sharply increased workloads (far beyond Europe), unsustainable debt, and repeated bubbles since the Reagan years, creating paper wealth that inevitably disappeared when they burst (and the perpetrators were bailed out by the taxpayer). In parallel, the political system has been increasingly shredded as both parties are driven deeper into corporate pockets with the escalating cost of elections, the Republicans to the level of farce, the Democrats (now largely the former “moderate Republicans”) not far behind.

via Noam Chomsky: America’s Decline Is Real — and Increasingly Self-Inflicted | World | AlterNet.

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Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health | | AlterNet

17 Feb

A few years ago bees starting dieing in large numbers, large enough that there are serious doubts about agriculture, as many food plants (and others) are pollinated by bees. We don’t know what’s going on, but we keep messing with the environment anyway.

Hackenberg isn’t doing as poorly as he was several years ago, but he attributes that to feeding the bees protein and supplements like brewers yeast and eggs and “kicking them in the pants with all kinds of nutrition because what they are gathering out there in nature is not what it’s supposed to be.” Hackenberg says, “We — America or the world — has messed up the bees’ diet. Not only the bees’ diet but everyone else’s diet. We just don’t have the nutrition that’s out there in the food and bees are telling us this because what they are bringing home — they can’t make it anymore. We’re supplementing them… and the bees are eating it… But go back 10-15 years ago, we didn’t need this stuff.”

A key question is whether the problem is simply a laundry list of unrelated factors (i.e. pesticides, disease, parasites, etc.) or whether those factors interact synergistically to kill bees.

Are we as vulnerable as our bees?

Beekeepers see their bees as the canaries in the coal mine. All living beings are exposed to the cocktail of pesticides and other chemicals in our midst, each in sub-lethal doses but all mixing together and interacting in our bodies. Many Americans, like bees used to pollinate monocultures, do not eat very healthy or nutritious diets, and our stressful and sedentary lifestyles put us at even more risk of succumbing to illness. Are the bees giving us a message we should be heeding?

via Have Bees Become Canaries In the Coal Mine? Why Massive Bee Dieoffs May Be a Warning About Our Own Health | | AlterNet.

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The Uriah Principle & Environmental Destruction

16 Feb

The Chestnut Burr is using the story of David and Bathsheba as a way of thinking about how our leaders have put their own interests ahead of environmental stewardship. David, as you’ll recall, saw Bathsheba and decided he wanted her for himself. But, she was married to Uriah. So David abused his power to ensure that Uriah became isolated in battle and thus dies. Now David could have Bathsheba. However:

This is really the beginning of David’s kingship and family becoming unraveled. Bathsheba’s child dies and David’s son Absalom turns against him. It became a very sad time for Israel, all because of a ruler who put personal desires ahead of his subjects and God’s laws.

The rulers today who have decreed it’s okay to dump megatons of aluminum and barium into our skies, land, and lungs are guilty of the same. They have put themselves on false thrones and decreed their desire outweigh ours. They are stealing our good earth and turning it into a wasteland that only Genetically modified organisms from Monsanto can grow in. Those GMO’s make populations sterile, sick, and will eventually kill us all through weakened immune systems!

via The Uriah Principle « The Chestnut Burr.

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Manhattan District Attorney Subpoenas Occupy Protester’s Twitter Account | The Nation

16 Feb

The Manhattan District Attorney subpoenaed the Twitter account of Malcolm Harris, who’d been arrested on a disorderly conduct charge in an Occupy event on 1 October (crossing the  bridge with 700 others). They were seeking “any and all user information including e-mail address, as well as any and all tweets for the period 9/15/11-12/31/11” for his account, which has almost no bearing on the offense:

Why the prosecutor would bother to conduct an investigation into the most minor of offenses, one that even upon conviction does not result in a criminal record is unclear. But whatever it is that is under investigation—perhaps the entire Occupy movement—it is not Harris’s alleged disorderly conduct. New York criminal defense attorney, Earl Ward, who is familiar with the case, but not involved in it, calls it a “fishing expedition meant to have a chilling effect on protest” and says it is “prosecutorial abuse, an effort by the DA’s office to get into personal communications of these protesters, for the purpose of chilling their First Amendment rights.”

via Manhattan District Attorney Subpoenas Occupy Protester’s Twitter Account | The Nation.

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How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com

16 Feb

That little piece of plastic you have that gets you discounts at the supermarket? Well, it also lets the retailer learn your habits; that’s why the give it to you. The more the know about your habits, the more accurately they can sell to you.

Andrew Pole was hired by Target to use the same kinds of insights into consumers’ habits to expand Target’s sales. His assignment was to analyze all the cue-routine-reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department’s work was straightforward: find the customers who have children and send them catalogs that feature toys before Christmas. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. But Pole’s most important assignment was to identify those unique moments in consumers’ lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon would cause them to begin spending in new ways.

In the 1980s, a team of researchers led by a U.C.L.A. professor named Alan Andreasen undertook a study of peoples’ most mundane purchases, like soap, toothpaste, trash bags and toilet paper. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision-making. Which meant it was hard for marketers, despite their displays and coupons and product promotions, to persuade shoppers to change.

But when some customers were going through a major life event, like graduating from college or getting a new job or moving to a new town, their shopping habits became flexible in ways that were both predictable and potential gold mines for retailers.

via How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

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The BRAD BLOG : Maine GOP Commits Massive Election Fraud in State Caucuses; Paul Supporters Justifiably Outraged

16 Feb

An honest man just  an’t get a break these days. . . .

The state GOP itself has stolen the state for Mitt Romney in Maine’s 2012 Caucuses. Period.

Might Romney be the actual winner once all votes are actually cast and counted? Perhaps. But the fact is, the Maine Republican Party has purposely blocked that from happening and the apparent loser in all of this — beside the voters of Maine — is Congressman Ron Paul who, according to the official results reported by the state GOP last Saturday night, “lost” to Romney by just 194 votes.

Adding to the outrage, the election fraud was perpetrated by the Chairman of the state’s Republican Party, Charlie Webster.

Readers of The BRAD BLOG may well remember Webster as the man who spent months attempting to wholesale disenfranchise thousands of legal student voters in the state of Maine, on the entirely fraudulent basis that they were committing “voter fraud” because they were out-of-state students who, living in Maine and going to school there most of the year, should be, nonetheless, barred from voting there.

via The BRAD BLOG : Maine GOP Commits Massive Election Fraud in State Caucuses; Paul Supporters Justifiably Outraged.

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The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks – Salon.com

16 Feb

Mass unemployment isn’t new at all,  of course. Which raises the question, generally asked about software, is it a ‘bug’ or a ‘feature’?

Another similarity between the “unemployed armies” of yesteryear and the Occupy movement is the brutal response by law enforcement. Witnesses expressed shock when the Oakland police sprayed tear gas at protesters and complained about the liberal use of billy clubs by cops in New York, but imagine Gen. Douglas MacArthur unleashing a deadly offensive of tanks, bayonets and torches on military veterans camping out in Washington, D.C. It’s all captured in the chilling video below.

via The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks – Salon.com.

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We Need a Politics of Jubilee

15 Feb

What I’m thinking is that the Occupy movement is the beginnings of a politics of Jubilee. But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Jubilee?

Writing in Leviticus as Literature, the late Mary Douglas observes (p. 243): “Release of slaves and cancellation of debts incurred under the preceding regime were common practice for victorious conquerors, a magnanimity that cost them nothing while their rule was new and their power to enforce it recently demonstrated.” Continue reading →

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