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in title, tags, annotations or urlThe "New Centrism" and Its Discontents - 0 views
Gary Gensler's Conversion to Financial Reformer - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Today, he is emerging as one of the nation’s archreformers, pushing to impose some of the most stringent new financial regulations in history. And as the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the leading contender to oversee the complex derivatives contracts that played a central role in the financial crisis and, in turn, the Great Recession, he is in a position to influence the outcome. It may seem an unlikely conversion, but it is one that has won the approval of Brooksley E. Born, of all people, a former outspoken head of the commission. She sounded alarms more than a decade ago about the dangers hiding in the poorly understood derivatives market and was silenced by the same Washington power brokers that counted Mr. Gensler as a member. Mr. Gensler opposed Ms. Born, according to people who worked at the commission in the 1990s, and in 2000 played a significant role in shepherding through Congress deregulation measures that led to explosive growth of the over-the-counter derivatives market. That was then. These days, Ms. Born is convinced of Mr. Gensler’s reformist zeal, as he takes on Wall Street in what is becoming one of the fiercest battles over regulation in the postcrisis era. “I think he is doing very well,” she said in an interview. “He certainly seems to be committed to robust oversight of derivatives and limiting excessive speculation and leverage.” The proposals championed by Mr. Gensler, if adopted by Congress, would substantially alter what is now a largely unregulated market in over-the-counter derivatives, financial instruments used by companies and investors to protect themselves and bet on moves in variables, like interest rates or currencies, and to speculate. The proposals include forcing the big banks that sell derivatives to conduct their trades in the open on public exchanges and clear them through central clearinghouses, so that any investor can see the prices that dealers charge their customers. Today, those transactions are bilateral and private.
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For 18 years, Gary G. Gensler worked on Wall Street, striking merger deals at the venerable Goldman Sachs. Then in the late 1990s, he moved to the Treasury Department, joining a Washington establishment that celebrated the power of markets and fought off regulation at almost every turn.
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Maybe he has "SEEN THE LIGHT" (had an almost "religious" conversion to the benefits of regulation). Then again, maybe his old employer (Goldman Sachs) - having become the "biggest and baddest" in the regulation-less free-for-all (including getting bailout funds through AIG for credit-default-swap "insurance" on derivatives) - wants to "cement" their position with regulation preventing any other party from doing what they did (and he is willing to help them in that regard)!?
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Maybe he has "SEEN THE LIGHT" (had an almost "religious" conversion to the benefits of regulation). Then again, maybe his old employer (Goldman Sachs) - having become the "biggest and baddest" in the regulation-less free-for-all (including getting bailout funds through AIG for credit-default-swap "insurance" on derivatives) - wants to "cement" their position with regulation preventing any other party from doing what they did (and he is willing to help them in that regard)!?
Is Kerry Positioning Himself For 2012? - 0 views
Gun Appreciation Day Sponsored By American Third Position, White Supremacist Group - 0 views
Pakistan urges US to end drone strikes - 0 views
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inarticle: Pakistan is holding talks with the United States to end drone strikes against suspected Taliban fighters, which sometimes also kill civilians, a senior Pakistani official has said. "Drone attacks are against sovereignty of Pakistan, against international law and against the UN charter," Jalil Abbas Jilani, the administrative head of Pakistan's Foreign Ministry told members of Parliament in Islamabad, the capital. "Innocent people have been killed in these attacks," Jilani said on Friday, adding; "We are having talks with the US to stop the drone attacks and we hope for a positive outcome of the dialogue and hope that drone attacks will stop." The attacks, which are operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), have strained Pakistan's relations with the US. Pakistan says the attacks violate its sovereignty.
Tunisian government begins to unravel - 0 views
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Chokri Belaïd, a secular, anti-Islamist member of the National Constituent Assembly, was assassinated last week. The backlash of the assassination is causing strife in Tunisian politics. His widow has accused Ennahda of playing a role in the assassination, "which sparked mass demonstrations, attacks on Ennahda headquarters and clashes with security forces throughout the country." The Prime Minister, a high-ranking official in Ennahda, has declared his wish to form a non-partisan government of technocrats to manage the socio-political crisis. He has also declared that he will resign from his position if he's not allowed to do so. So things really are deteriorating. qt: Four opposition groupings-Belaïd's own Popular Front bloc, the Call for Tunisia party (Nidaa Tounes), the Al Massar party, and the Republican Party-announced that they were pulling out of the National Constituent Assembly and called for a one-day general strike last Friday, the day of Belaïd's funeral. The principal Tunisian trade union federation, the UGTT (Tunisian General Union of Labour) backed the call, resulting in the first general strike in Tunisia in 35 years. Reportedly, over one million people took part in Belaïd's funeral procession in Tunis on Friday, many calling for the fall of the Ennahda government and a second revolution. ... Much of the bourgeoisie, both secular and Islamist, has swung behind Jebali's proposal. The business journal l' Economiste asserts that "the prime minister's initiative and his proposal to form a non-political government of technocrats is a minimum response, but salutary. The rejection of this reasonable solution by his own party is evidence of the internal divisions that are eating away at Ennahda..." ... The revolutionary uprising of 2011 was channeled into parliamentary manoeuvring and constitutional wrangling by the Tunisian bourgeoisie, with the aid of the petty-bourgeois "left" parties and the UGTT. Underlying the present
West 86th - The Administration of Things: A Genealogy - 0 views
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“If men never disagreed about the ends of life, if our ancestors had remained undisturbed in the Garden of Eden, the studies to which the Chichele Chair of Social and Political Theory is dedicated could scarcely have been conceived,” Isaiah Berlin told his audience at Oxford when he assumed that position in 1958. Philosophy was at its best when it was being contentious, especially when it was being contentious about the meaning and purpose of our common existence. Too much agreement was an abdication of its ethical responsibility
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The task of philosophy was not to settle disputes, but to unsettle them, to encourage them, to keep them going. For it was only through disputation that we could resist the rule of experts and machines, the bureaucratic-technocratic society foretold by Saint-Simon and championed by Marx and Engels, a society in which we replace the “government of persons by the administration of things.”
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Louis de Bonald pointed to the hard choices that the state would have to make. “In the modern state, we have perfected the administration of things at the expense of the administration of men, and we are far more preoccupied with the material than the moral,” he wrote. “Few governments nurture religion or morality with the same attention that they promote commerce, open communications, keep track of accounts, provide the people with pleasures, etc.” 12
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Maddow: Ron Paul calls out uncomfortable truth in GOP politics | Dark Politricks - 0 views
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"What is most interesting about Ron Paul is the extent to which his domestic stuff, his social-issue libertarianism, his position on things not just like the war in Iraq but the war on drugs, calls out a really uncomfortable truth in Republican politics," she explained. "Which is that Republicans want their brand to be small, hands off government, but the policies they support are more like big intrusive government. Things like forced, mandatory drug testing by the government and federal regulation of every marriage in the country."
Some of the most considered Middle East crisis - 0 views
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Zionism is one of the Middle East Crisis which has been increasingly vital for imperialist powers for strategic positions. In 1918, the majority of area that was a part of Turkish Empire was sided along Germany in 1st World War. This area was defeated from Arab armies and by British. During 1920, French and British imperialism further divided Middle East to hand over the pieces of land to the rulers. Lebanon was called as another state which was dominated by the Christian bourgeoisie through a compromise that was taken by the leaders of Moslem peasantry and Druze.
Good Government vs. Less Government « The Baseline Scenario - 0 views
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Recently, a controversy raged in the blogosphere about whether neo-liberalism has been a bane or a boon for the world economy. The argument is rather coarse, in that it fails to distinguish between the various elements of neo-liberalism, or moderate deregulation vs. extreme deregulation. But if we take the argument at face value, one of the major claims of neoliberals is that countries in the world which are more neoliberal are more successful (because they are more neoliberal). I disagree. My disagreement is not with the raw correlation between the Heritage Index and Per Capita GDP. A number is a number. My disagreement is with the composition of the index itself, and interpreting this correlation as causation between neo-liberalism and 'good things.' My primary contention below is that many of these measures used in the composite Heritage Index have nothing to do with less government, and a lot more to do with good government. It is these measures of good government that correlate to economic growth and drive the overall correlation between the "Freedom Index" and positive outcomes. Secondarily, I will argue that many of the other items in the index (like investment freedom) are not causes of growth, but rather outcomes of growth.
How Corporations Buy Congress | BuzzFlash.org - 0 views
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With the November elections quickly approaching, the majority of Americans will be thinking one thing: "Who cares?" This apathy isn't due to ignorance, as some accuse. Rather, working people's disinterest in the two party system implies intelligence: millions of people understand that both the Democrats and Republicans will not represent their interests in Congress. This begs the question: Whom does the two party system work for? The answer was recently given by the mainstream The New York Times, who gave the nation an insiders peek on how corporations "lobby" (buy) congressmen. The article explains how giant corporations - from Wall-mart to weapons manufacturers - are planning on shifting their hiring practices for lobbyists, from Democratic to Republican ex-congressmen in preparation for the Republicans gaining seats in the upcoming November elections: "Lobbyists, political consultants and recruiters all say that the going rate for Republicans - particularly current and former House staff members - has risen significantly in just the last few weeks, with salaries beginning at $300,000 and going as high as $1million for private sector [corporate lobbyist] positions." (September 9, 2010) Congressmen who have recently retired make the perfect lobbyists: they still have good friends in Congress, with many of these friends owing them political favors; they have connections to foreign Presidents and Kings; and they also have celebrity status that gives good PR to the corporations. Often, these congressmen have done favors for the corporation that is now hiring them, meaning, that the corporations are rewarding the congressmen for services rendered while in office, offering them million dollar lobbyist jobs (or seats on the corporate board of directors) that requires little to no work. The same New York Times article revealed that the pay for 13,000 lobbyists currently bribing Congress is a combined $3.5 bil
Signing Out-By Ken Silverstein (Harper's Magazine) - 0 views
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This is my last post here at Washington Babylon and I'll be leaving my positions as Harper's Washington Editor (I will remain as a contributing editor to the magazine). I've received a fellowship at the Open Society Institute and will also be leading special investigations at Global Witness, which has offices in London and in Washington. My work for both will focus on long-term international investigations.
Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview : NPR - 0 views
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"People tend to conform their factual beliefs to ones that are consistent with their cultural outlook, their world view," Braman says. The Cultural Cognition Project has conducted several experiments to back that up. Participants in these experiments are asked to describe their cultural beliefs. Some embrace new technology, authority and free enterprise. They are labeled the "individualistic" group. Others are suspicious of authority or of commerce and industry. Braman calls them "communitarians." In one experiment, Braman queried these subjects about something unfamiliar to them: nanotechnology — new research into tiny, molecule-sized objects that could lead to novel products. "These two groups start to polarize as soon as you start to describe some of the potential benefits and harms," Braman says. The individualists tended to like nanotechnology. The communitarians generally viewed it as dangerous. Both groups made their decisions based on the same information. "It doesn't matter whether you show them negative or positive information, they reject the information that is contrary to what they would like to believe, and they glom onto the positive information," Braman says.
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"Basically the reason that people react in a close-minded way to information is that the implications of it threaten their values," says Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale University and a member of The Cultural Cognition Project. Kahan says people test new information against their preexisting view of how the world should work. "If the implication, the outcome, can affirm your values, you think about it in a much more open-minded way," he says. And if the information doesn't, you tend to reject it. In another experiment, people read a United Nations study about the dangers of global warming. Then the researchers told the participants that the solution to global warming is to regulate industrial pollution. Many in the individualistic group then rejected the climate science. But when more nuclear power was offered as the solution, says Braman, "they said, you know, it turns out global warming is a serious problem."And for the communitarians, climate danger seemed less serious if the only solution was more nuclear power.
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"It's a hoax," said coal company CEO Don Blankenship, "because clearly anyone that says that they know what the temperature of the Earth is going to be in 2020 or 2030 needs to be put in an asylum because they don't." On the other side of the debate was environmentalist Robert Kennedy, Jr. "Ninety-eight percent of the research climatologists in the world say that global warming is real, that its impacts are going to be catastrophic," he argued. "There are 2 percent who disagree with that. I have a choice of believing the 98 percent or the 2 percent." To social scientist and lawyer Don Braman, it's not surprising that two people can disagree so strongly over science. Braman is on the faculty at George Washington University and part of The Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who study how cultural values shape public perceptions and policy
Marshall Auerback: Memo to Greece: Make War Not Love with Goldman Sachs - 0 views
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We know that the Obama administration will not go after the banksters that created this global financial calamity. It has been thoroughly co-opted by Wall Street's fifth column, who hold most of the important posts in the administration. Europe has even more at stake and has shown somewhat more willingness to take action. Perhaps our only hope for retribution lies there.
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Some might believe the term "banksters" is too mean. Surely Wall Street was just doing its job -- providing the financial services wanted by the world. Yes, it all turned out a tad unfortunate but no one could have foreseen that so many of the financial innovations would turn into black swans. And hasn't Wall Street learned its lesson and changed its practices? Fat chance. We know from internal emails that everyone on Wall Street saw this coming -- indeed, they sold trash assets and placed bets that they would crater. The crisis was not a mistake -- it was the foregone conclusion. The FBI warned of an epidemic of fraud back in 2004 -- with 80% of the fraud on the part of lenders. As Bill Black has been warning since the days of the Saving and Loan crisis, the most devastating kind of fraud is the "control fraud," perpetrated by the financial institution's management. Wall Street is, and was, run by control frauds. Not only were they busy defrauding the borrowers, like Greece, but they were simultaneously defrauding the owners of the firms they ran. Now add to that list the taxpayers that bailed out the firms. And Goldman is front and center when it comes to bad apples. Lest anyone believe that Goldman's executives were somehow unaware of bad deals done by rogue traders, William Cohan reports that top management unloaded their Goldman stocks in March 2008 when Bear crashed, and again when Lehman collapsed in September 2008. Why? Quite simple: they knew the firm was full of toxic waste that it would not be able to continue to unload on suckers -- and the only protection it had came from AIG, which it knew to be a bad counterparty. Hence on March 19, Jack Levy (co-chair of M&As) sold over $5 million of Goldman's stock and bet against 60,000 more shares; Gerald Corrigan (former head of the NY Fed who was rewarded for that tenure with a position as managing director of Goldman) sold 15,000 shares in March; Jon Winkelried (Goldman's co-president) sold 20,000 shares. After the Lehman fiasco, Levy sold over $6 million of Goldman shares and Masanori Mochida (head of Goldman in Japan) sold $56 million worth. The bloodletting by top management only stopped when Goldman got Geithner's NYFed to produce a bail-out for AIG, which of course turned around and funneled government money to Goldman. With the government rescue, the control frauds decided it was safe to stop betting against their firm. So much for the "savvy businessmen" that President Obama believes to be in charge of Wall Street firms like Goldman.
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From 2001 through November 2009 (note the date -- a full year after Lehman) Goldman created financial instruments to hide European government debt, for example through currency trades or by pushing debt into the future. But not only did Goldman and other financial firms help and encourage Greece to take on more debt, they also brokered credit default swaps on Greece's debt-making income on bets that Greece would default. No doubt they also took positions as the financial conditions deteriorated-betting on default and driving up CDS spreads. But it gets even worse: An article by the German newspaper, Handelsblatt, ("Die Fieberkurve der griechischen Schuldenkrise", Feb. 20, 2010) strongly indicates that AIG, everybody's favorite poster boy for financial deviancy, may have been the party which sold the credit default swaps on Greece (English translation here). Generally, speaking, these CDSs lead to credit downgrades by ratings agencies, which drive spreads higher. In other words, Wall Street, led here by Goldman and AIG, helped to create the debt, then helped to create the hysteria about possible defaults. As CDS prices rise and Greece's credit rating collapses, the interest rate it must pay on bonds rises-fueling a death spiral because it cannot cut spending or raise taxes sufficiently to reduce its deficit. Having been bailed out by the Obama Administration, Wall Street firms are already eyeing other victims (and for allowing these kinds of activities to continue, the US Treasury remains indirectly complicit, another good reason why one shouldn't expect any action coming out of Washington). Since the economic collapse is causing all Euronations to run larger budget deficits and at the same time is raising CDS prices and interest rates, it is easy to pick off nation after nation. This will not stop with Greece, so it is in the interest of Euroland to stop the vampires now. With Washington unlikely to do anything to constrain Goldman, it looks like the European Union, which is launching a major audit, just might banish the bank from dealing in government debt. The problem is that CDS markets are essentially unregulated so such a ban will not prevent Wall Street from bringing down more countries-because they do not have to hold debt in order to bet against it using CDSs. These kinds of derivatives have already brought down an entire continent -- Asia -- in the late 1990s , and yet authorities are still standing by and basically doing nothing when CDSs are being used again to speculatively attack Euroland. The absence of sanctions last year, when we had a chance to deal with this problem once and for all, has simply induced even more outrageous and fundamentally anti-social behavior. It has pitted neighbor against neighbor -- with, for example, Germany and Greece lobbing insults at one another (Greece has requested reparations for WWII damages; Germany has complained about subsidizing what it perceives to be excessive social spending in Greece). Of course, as far as Greece goes, the claim now is that these types of off balance sheet transactions in which Goldman and others engaged were not strictly "illegal" under EU law. But these are precisely the kinds of "shadow banking transactions" that almost brought down the global financial system 18 months ago. Literally a year after the Lehman bankruptcy -- MONTHS after Goldman itself was saved from total ruin, it was again engaging in these kinds of deals. And it wasn't exactly a low-level functionary or "rogue trader" who was carrying out these transactions on behalf of Goldman. Gary Cohn is Lloyd "We're doing God's work" Blankfein's number 2 man. So it's hard to believe that St. Lloyd did not sanction the activities as well in advance of collecting his "modest" $9m bonus for last year's work.
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Ok, if a literal armed attack on Goldman is too far-fetched, then go after the firm using the full force of the regulatory and legal systems. Close the offices and go through the files with a fine-tooth comb. Issue subpoenas to all non-clerical staff for court appearances. Make the internal emails public. Post the names of all managers and traders on Interpol. Arrest anyone who tries to board a plane, train, or boat; confiscate their passports; revoke their visas and work permits; and put a hold on their bank accounts until culpability can be assessed. Make life at least as miserable for them as it now is for Europe's tens of millions of unemployed workers.
Op-Ed Columnist - Senator Bunning's Universe - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax. Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe. More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
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So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Pliocene Hurricaines - 0 views
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By combining a hurricane model and coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model to investigate the early Pliocene, Emanuel, Brierley and co-author Alexey Fedorov observed how vertical ocean mixing by hurricanes near the equator caused shallow parcels of water to heat up and later resurface in the eastern equatorial Pacific as part of the ocean wind-driven circulation. The researchers conclude from this pattern that frequent hurricanes in the central Pacific likely strengthened the warm pool in the eastern equatorial Pacific, which in turn increased hurricane frequency — an interaction described by Emanuel as a “two-way feedback process.”�The researchers believe that in addition to creating more hurricanes, the intense hurricane activity likely created a permanent El Nino like state in which very warm water in the eastern Pacific near the equator extended to higher latitudes. The El Nino weather pattern, which is caused when warm water replaces cold water in the Pacific, can impact the global climate by intermittently altering atmospheric circulation, temperature and precipitation patterns.The research suggests that Earth’s climate system may have at least two states — the one we currently live in that has relatively few tropical cyclones and relatively cold water, including in the eastern part of the Pacific, and the one during the Pliocene that featured warm sea surface temperatures, permanent El Nino conditions and high tropical cyclone activity.Although the paper does not suggest a direct link with current climate models, Fedorov said it is possible that future global warming could cause Earth to transition into a different equilibrium state that has more hurricanes and permanent El Nino conditions. “So far, there is no evidence in our simulations that this transition is going to occur at least in the next century. However, it’s still possible that the condition can occur in the future.”�Whether our future world is characterized by a mean state that is more El Nino-like remains one of the most important unanswered questions in climate dynamics, according to Matt Huber, a professor in Purdue University’s Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The Pliocene was a warmer time than now with high carbon dioxide levels. The present study found that hurricanes influenced by weakened atmospheric circulation — possibly related to high levels of carbon dioxide — contributed to very warm temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, which in turn led to more frequent and intense hurricanes. The research indicates that Earth’s climate may have multiple states based on this feedback cycle, meaning that the climate could change qualitatively in response to the effects of global warming.
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The Pliocene epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5 million to 3 million years before present. Although scientists know that the early Pliocene had carbon dioxide concentrations similar to those of today, it has remained a mystery what caused the high levels of greenhouse gas and how the Pliocene's warm conditions, including an extensive warm pool in the Pacific Ocean and temperatures that were roughly 4 degrees C higher than today's, were maintained. In a paper published February 25 in Nature, Kerry Emanuel and two colleagues from Yale University's Department of Geology and Geophysics suggest that a positive feedback between tropical cyclones - commonly called hurricanes and typhoons - and the circulation in the Pacific could have been the mechanism that enabled the Pliocene's warm climate.
Timmy Has Fallen Down the Well - 1 views
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Through long and ignominious tradition, the US has selected people for cabinet positions based on a combination of nepotism and party loyalty. Products of this system include luminaries like former FEMA director, Michael Brown. But sometimes there are qualified cabinet nominees installed for all the wrong reasons. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is a useful example.