December 2011 archive

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

December 6 is the 340th day of the year (341st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 25 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1884, the Washington Monument is completed.

In Washington, D.C., workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city’s namesake and the nation’s first president, George Washington.  As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a statue of George Washington, the great Revolutionary War general, should be placed near the site of the new Congressional building, wherever it might be. After then-President Washington asked him to lay out a new federal capital on the Potomac River in 1791, architect Pierre L’Enfant left a place for the statue at the western end of the sweeping National Mall (near the monument’s present location).

The Washington Monument is an obelisk near the west end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., built to commemorate the first U.S. president, General George Washington. The monument, made of marble, granite, and sandstone, is both the world’s tallest stone structure and the world’s tallest obelisk, standing 555 feet 5 1/8 inches (169.294 m). There are taller monumental columns, but they are neither all stone nor true obelisks. It is also the tallest structure in Washington D.C.. It was designed by Robert Mills, an architect of the 1840s. The actual construction of the monument began in 1848 but was not completed until 1884, almost 30 years after the architect’s death. This hiatus in construction happened because of co-option by the Know Nothing party, a lack of funds, and the intervention of the American Civil War. A difference in shading of the marble, visible approximately 150 feet (46 m or 27%) up, shows where construction was halted for a number of years. The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1848; the capstone was set on December 6, 1884, and the completed monument was dedicated on February 21, 1885. It officially opened October 9, 1888. Upon completion, it became the world’s tallest structure, a title previously held by the Cologne Cathedral. The monument held this designation until 1889, when the Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris, France. The monument stands due east of the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial.

If anyone thought for a second that Barack Obama’s threatened veto of the Senate’s passage of legislation that would allow for indefinite detention of Americans, think again. From Washington Blog via naked capitalism:

And at first, I – like many others – assumed that Obama’s threat to veto the bill might be a good thing. But the truth is much more disturbing.

As former Wall Street Street editor and columnist Paul Craig Roberts correctly notes:

   The Obama regime’s objection to military detention is not rooted in concern for the constitutional rights of American citizens. The regime objects to military detention because the implication of military detention is that detainees are prisoners of war. As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin put it: Should somebody determined “to be a member of an enemy force who has come to this nation or is in this nation to attack us as a member of a foreign enemy, should that person be treated according to the laws of war? The answer is yes.”

   Detainees treated according to the laws of war have the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They cannot be tortured. The Obama regime opposes military detention, because detainees would have some rights. These rights would interfere with the regime’s ability to send detainees to CIA torture prisons overseas. (Yes, Obama is still apparently allowing “extraordinary renditions” to torture people abroad.) This is what the Obama regime means when it says that the requirement of military detention denies the regime “flexibility.”

   The Bush/Obama regimes have evaded the Geneva Conventions by declaring that detainees are not POWs, but “enemy combatants,” “terrorists,” or some other designation that removes all accountability from the US government for their treatment.

   By requiring military detention of the captured, Congress is undoing all the maneuvering that two regimes have accomplished in removing POW status from detainees.

   A careful reading of the Obama regime’s objections to military detention supports this conclusion. (See http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/112/saps1867s_20111117.pdf)

   The November 17 letter to the Senate from the Executive Office of the President says that the Obama regime does not want the authority it has under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), Public Law 107-40, to be codified. Codification is risky, the regime says. “After a decade of settled jurisprudence on detention authority, Congress must be careful not to open a whole new series of legal questions that will distract from our efforts to protect the country.”

   In other words, the regime is saying that under AUMF the executive branch has total discretion as to who it detains and how it treats detainees. Moreover, as the executive branch has total discretion, no one can find out what the executive branch is doing, who detainees are, or what is being done to them. Codification brings accountability, and the executive branch does not want accountability.

  Those who see hope in Obama’s threatened veto have jumped to conclusions if they think the veto is based on constitutional scruples.

Even if Obama’s threatened veto was for more noble purposes, the fact is that it would not change anything, because the U.S. government claimed the power to indefinitely detain and assassinate American citizens years ago. [..]

The Obama administration has also said for more than a year and a half it could target American citizens for assassination without any trial or due process. [..]

It’s hard to believe that any genuine democracy would accept a claim by its leader that he could have anyone killed simply by labeling them an “enemy.” It’s hard to believe that any adult with even the slightest knowledge of history or human nature could countenance such unlimited, arbitrary power, knowing the evil it is bound to produce. Yet this is what the great and good in America have done. Like the boyars of old, they not only countenance but celebrate their enslavement to the ruler.

(emphasis mine)

I had not read Dahlia Lithwick’s article at Slate on military detentions when I wrote about Obama’s veto threat of the NDAA because he objected to military making the decision:

Now, perhaps you suspect these thorny questions about the handling of terrorists are best left to the experts, and that the Senate was simply listening to them. Such suspicions would be unfounded. The secretary of defense, the director of national intelligence, the director of the FBI (pdf), the CIA director, and the head of the Justice Department’s national security division have all said that the indefinite detention provisions in the bill are a bad idea. And the White House continues to say that the president will veto the bill if the detainee provisions are not removed. It sees the proposed language as limiting its flexibility.

There may be no good outcome here. It could be an unholy victory for both the prospect of unbridled executive power and for the collapse of any meaningful separation between domestic law enforcement and military authority. The law manages to expand the role of the military in domestic terror prosecutions and also limit the authority of the civilian justice system to thwart terrorism. These were legal principles to which even the Bush administration said they adhered.

No good will come of this no matter what Obama and Congress do or don’t do. This “war on terror” has now become the “war on liberty” by our own government.

Former US Congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) pushed for an audit of the Federal Reserve, the first in its 99 year existence, that produced a massive 251-page GAO report entitled “Opportunities Exist to Strengthen Policies and Processes for Managing Emergency Assistance” (pdf). Rep. Grayson summarized some his favorite parts and explains what it all means in an article in the Huffington Post:

(1) In the case of TARP, at least The People’s representatives got a vote. In the case of the Fed’s bailouts, which were roughly 20 times as substantial, there was never any vote. Unelected functionaries, with all sorts of ties to Wall Street, handed out trillions of dollars to Wall Street. That’s now how a democracy should function, or even can function.

(2) The notion that this was all without risk, just because the Fed can keep printing money, is both laughable and cryable (if that were a word). Leaving aside the example of Germany’s hyperinflation in 1923, we have the more recent examples of Iceland (75% of GNP gone when the central bank took over three failed banks) and Ireland (100% of GNP gone when the central bank tried to rescue property firms).

(3) In the same way that American troops cannot act as police officers for the world, our central bank cannot act as piggy bank for the world. If the European Central Bank wants to bail out UBS, fine. But there is no reason why our money should be involved in that.

(4) For the Fed to pick and choose among aid recipients, and then pick and choose who takes a “haircut” and who doesn’t, is both corporate welfare and socialism. The Fed is a central bank, not a barber shop.

(5) The main, if not the sole, qualification for getting help from the Fed was to have lost huge amounts of money. The Fed bailouts rewarded failure, and penalized success. (If you don’t believe me, ask Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan.) The Fed helped the losers to squander and destroy even more capital.

(6) During all the time that the Fed was stuffing money into the pockets of failed banks, many Americans couldn’t borrow a dime for a home, a car, or anything else. If the Fed had extended $26 trillion in credit to the American people instead of Wall Street, would there be 24 million Americans today who can’t find a full-time job?

There is nothing to stop the Federal Reserve from doing this again. More money please but only if you’re a bank.

In 2007, Eileen Foster, a former executive vice president in charge of fraud investigations for Countrywide Financial Corp., and her team began looking through documents in the company’s mortgage division. What she uncovered was massive fraud that was being committed on a daily basis. When Countrywide was acquired by Bank of America in 2008, Ms. Foster was fired for “inappropriate and unprofessional conduct.”

Ms. Foster filed a wrongful termination lawsuit with the Department of Labor. During her three year fight to clear her name, the extensive fraud committed by Countrywide employees and executives came to light. Bank of America, as typical, says that this in nothing new and the claims against Countrywide were settled. In the first part of a two part article by Michael Hudson published at i-Watch News, recounts the extent of the fraud committed by Countrywide employees, condoned by executives and covered up by BoA:

In government records and in interviews with iWatch News, Foster describes other top-down misconduct:

   

She claims Countrywide’s management protected big loan producers who used fraud to put up big sales numbers. If they were caught, she says, they frequently avoided termination.

   

Foster claims Countrywide’s subprime lending division concealed from her the level of “suspicious activity reports.” This in turn reduced the number of fraud reports Countrywide gave to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

   

Foster claims Countrywide failed to notify investors when it discovered fraud or other problems with loans that it had sold as the underlying assets in “mortgage-backed” securities. When she created a report designed to document these loans on a regular basis going forward, she says, she was “shut down” by company officials and told to stop doing the report.

Eileen Foster appeared on 60 Minutes in an interview with Steve Kroft:

60 Minutes also interviewed the head of the criminal division at the Department of Justice, Larry Brewer asking him about the lack of prosecutions that could be done under the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Brewer’s response was “he thinks nobody ‘lacks confidence’ in the department’s ability to prosecute financial crime”:

   60 MINUTES: We spoke to a woman at Countrywide who was a senior vice president for investigating fraud and she said that the fraud inside countrywide was systemic. That it was basically a way of doing business.

   BREWER: Well, it’s hard for me to talk about a particular case. Of course in the Countrywide case, terrific office, US Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, investigated that. Interviewed many, many people. Hundreds of people, perhaps. Reviewed millions of documents.

   60 MINUTES: Do you lack confidence in bringing cases under Sarbanes-Oxley?

   BREWER: Steve, no one is really has accused this Department of Justice, or this division, or me of lacking confidence. If you look at the prosecutors all over the country, they are bringing record cases with respect to all kinds of criminal laws. Sarbanes-Oxley is a tool, but it’s only one tool. We’re confident. We follow the facts and the law wherever they take us. And we’re bringing every case that we believe can be made.

Some state attorney generals are filing suits and conducting investigations. Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley filed papers in state court suing five major mortgage lenders, including Bank of America, and MERS. Meanwhile, there have been no federal prosecutions of any top level executives and federal prosecutions of financial fraud have fallen to a 20 year low but thousands of Occupy Wall Street protesters have been arrested.

As Zaid Jilani concludes at Think Progress:

After all, allowing criminals to help cause a global recession that plunged 60 million people into extreme poverty and then proliferate in an industry will only sully its reputation.

Mr. Obama?

Part 1

Part 2

Transcript

Overtime

(h/t Diane Sweet @ Crooks & Liars)

You see, the fundamental problem is that their banks are insolvent.

European banks’ asset sales face disastrous failure

By Gareth Gore, International Finance Review

26 November 2011

European banks are being forced to abandon their efforts to sell off trillions of euros worth of loans, mortgages and real estate after a series of talks with potential investors broke down, leaving many already struggling firms with piles of assets they can barely support.

…

Deadlocked talks with potential buyers – a mix of private equity firms, hedge funds, foreign banks and insurers – show little sign of making breakthroughs, say bankers taking part in those negotiations, with the stalemate threatening to block the industry’s ability to save itself from collapse through a mass deleveraging.

…

People involved in asset sale talks say price is the major sticking point. Lenders want only to sell higher-quality assets near to par value so as to avoid huge write-downs, which would erode capital further. By contrast, potential buyers want high-yielding investments and are offering only knock-down prices.

“There is a huge amount of liquidity among investors right now, but they only want to buy at distressed prices,” said Stefano Marsaglia, a chairman within the financial institutions group at Barclays Capital. “Lots of discussions are taking place but there is a gulf in terms of pricing.”

The homogeneity of assets on offer is also complicating the negotiations – a number of Dutch lenders, for example, all want to sell very similar mortgage-backed securities. Several bankers advising such clients were unanimous in saying that the deals will struggle to happen.

And Now Europe’s Banks Are Starting To Panic As The Oxygen Gets Sucked Out Of The Room

Henry Blodget, Business Insider

Nov. 16, 2011, 9:27 PM

Specifically, traditional sources of bank funding in Europe, such as institutional investors and other banks, are getting cautious as fears grow about the need for sovereign debt restructurings. As liquidity dries up, the only reliable source of funding is often the ECB.

But the ECB only accepts certain types of assets as collateral for loans, and some banks are running out of those assets.

So they’re turning to investment banks and other “counter-parties” that have them. And they’re entering into “swap” agreements in which they exchange their assets for the counter-parties’ assets and then stock-pile the latter assets for use as collateral.

And that’s a fine plan… until the music stops and one big “counter-party” fails.

How does this relate to the sovereign debt crisis?  As Citi’s Willem Buiter puts it-

I think France definitely has its work cut out for itself. It has a government budgeting problem which is structural to a large extent. And then they have a large banking sector. Do not forget that the U.S. banking sector balance sheet is less than 100% of GDP. In Europe and France, it is 300%. Their banks are under fire and so their sovereigns are under fire. I do not think the sovereign will keel over, but they have their work cut out for them.

All the liquidity in the world is not going to solve the problem that European banks are holding over $7 Trillion of valuation on their books that can’t be sold for anything near that AND the sovereign governments have made an implicit promise to bail them and their investors out.

As Roubini put it–

At this point most investors would dump their entire holdings of Italian debt to any sucker – the ECB, European Financial Stability Facility, IMF or whoever – willing to buy it at current yields.

…

So using precious official resources to prevent the unavoidable would simply finance the exit of others.

…

If, as appears likely, Italy remains stuck in an uncompetitive recession and is unable to regain market access in the next twelve months, then even if such large official resources were mobilised, they would be wasted on financing investors’ exit and thus postponing an inevitable debt restructuring that would then be more disorderly.

As your humble servant put it shortly thereafter-

This is a liquidity fix, not an insolvency fix.  The problem it’s intended to address is that banks will no longer lend to other banks because they suspect (and rightly so) that the other banks’ assets are pieces of crap.

It does nothing at all to address the fact that those assets are pieces of crap.

For their part the governments are making the additional bad choice to pursue a program of austerity that has already stifled growth to the point of Recession and the beginnings of a Deflationary Spiral.

What Can Save the Euro?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

2011-12-05

It is increasingly evident that Europe’s political leaders, for all their commitment to the euro’s survival, do not have a good grasp of what is required to make the single currency work. The prevailing view when the euro was established was that all that was required was fiscal discipline – no country’s fiscal deficit or public debt, relative to GDP, should be too large. But Ireland and Spain had budget surpluses and low debt before the crisis, which quickly turned into large deficits and high debt. So now European leaders say that it is the current-account deficits of the eurozone’s member countries that must be kept in check.

In that case, it seems curious that, as the crisis continues, the safe haven for global investors is the United States, which has had an enormous current-account deficit for years. So, how will the European Union distinguish between “good” current-account deficits – a government creates a favorable business climate, generating inflows of foreign direct investment – and “bad” current-account deficits? Preventing bad current-account deficits would require far greater intervention in the private sector than the neoliberal and single-market doctrines that were fashionable at the euro’s founding would imply.

…

There is, interestingly, a common thread running through all of these cases, as well as the 2008 crisis: financial sectors behaved badly and failed to assess creditworthiness and manage risk as they were supposed to do.

These problems will occur with or without the euro. But the euro has made it more difficult for governments to respond. And the problem is not just that the euro took away two key tools for adjustment – the interest rate and the exchange rate – and put nothing in their place, or that the European Central Bank’s mandate is to focus on inflation, whereas today’s challenges are unemployment, growth, and financial stability. Without a common fiscal authority, the single market opened the way to tax competition – a race to the bottom to attract investment and boost output that could be freely sold throughout the EU.

…

Even if those from Europe’s northern countries are right in claiming that the euro would work if effective discipline could be imposed on others (I think they are wrong), they are deluding themselves with a morality play. It is fine to blame their southern compatriots for fiscal profligacy, or, in the case of Spain and Ireland, for letting free markets have free reign, without seeing where that would lead. But that doesn’t address today’s problem: huge debts, whether a result of private or public miscalculations, must be managed within the euro framework.

Public-sector cutbacks today do not solve the problem of yesterday’s profligacy; they simply push economies into deeper recessions. Europe’s leaders know this. They know that growth is needed. But, rather than deal with today’s problems and find a formula for growth, they prefer to deliver homilies about what some previous government should have done. This may be satisfying for the sermonizer, but it won’t solve Europe’s problems – and it won’t save the euro.

Is there some hope?  How about some new leadership?

Wolf Richter: French Presidential Election – Coup De Grâce For The Euro?

Naked Capitalism

Friday, December 2, 2011

France isn’t doing well. Unemployment, which has been rising since May, breached 9%. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation, and purchasing power has dropped. Industrial orders plummeted. Layoffs have been announced. Yields are rising. Banks are teetering. Sarkozy had tried to reform the French welfare and tax system. Result: rising income disparity, tax loopholes for the rich, diminished pension benefits for the middle class, reduced subsidies for the poor, etc., and now ugly unemployment trends.

Voters are angry. And the poll numbers that came out today show to what extent (L’Exress, article in French). During the first round on April 22, François Hollande of the Socialist Party would obtain 29.5%, Sarkozy 26%, and right-wing populist Marine Le Pen 19.5%. And this after Sarkozy got a 6-point bump from an anti-nuclear imbroglio on the left that Hollande had trouble squelching. In a face-off during the second round on May 6, Hollande would win by a landslide 56% against Sarkozy’s 44%.

If the economy deteriorates further, Marine Le Pen, president of the National Front, might beat Sarkozy in the first round. Media savvy and endowed with a captivating presence, she’d stunned the French political establishment by beating Sarkozy in the polls earlier this year.

…

François Hollande is more temperate. … His camp has come up with a five-point plan:

1. Expand to the greatest extend possible the European bailout fund (EFSF)
2. Issue Eurobonds and spread national liabilities across all Eurozone countries
3. Get the ECB to play an “active role,” i.e. buy Eurozone sovereign debt.
4. Institute a financial transaction tax
5. Launch growth initiatives instead of austerity measures.

But the core of their solution-monetizing sovereign debt without central control over national budgets-is totally unacceptable to Germany. So, if the euro and the Eurozone as we know them are still alive by early May, then the French presidential election may well deliver the coup de grâce.

That is, if Germany remains intransigent.

On the other hand it’s highly likely Mr. Market isn’t going to wait that long.  German bonds (I refuse to confuse you by calling them bunds just to pretend to be hip and cosmopolitan) were already under considerable pressure before the latest optimism bubble and projected growth of the German economy has been sharply revised downward even from the anemic 1.5 to 2% of a month ago.

The vast majority of German exports are to EU partners who can no longer afford them under the austerity regimes dictated by the German banks who in fact hold more of that unsellable crap sovereign and commercial debt than most of their peers.  If they continue this policy they’ll be committing economic suicide.

There is no confidence fairy.  You can’t cut your way to prosperity.

I say good riddance to bad rubbish in my very best imitation of Hayek and refer you again to David Apgar-

As far as costs go, massive European bank restructuring comes to mind, especially following a cool €300 billion or so of losses on government bond holdings. It’s hard to say anything nice about bank restructuring, but at least we know how to do it. We know, for example, how to split good banks from bad banks. (Hint: rank balance sheet assets by quality and liabilities by seniority and draw a line across the balance sheet after the last asset of reasonably determinate value.) That’s handy when you need banks with systems in place ready to restart lending. And we know these transactions work when free from political interference as they were in Sweden in 1992.

…

(M)assive European bank restructuring may be unavoidable even if Europe somehow enlisted enough ECB printing presses, enough future earnings of all those carefree northern European taxpayers, and enough future benefits of all those docile southerners to plaster a smile on the face of every bond portfolio manager at BNP Paribas and Commerzbank. The scale of the bailout needed to avoid further investor losses as of today – much less tomorrow or next week – would entail cross-border consolidation or de facto nationalization of a significant portion of the euro banking sector.

…

The most popular alternative has the ECB stepping in to buy bonds every time investors try to cut their exposure. At first blush, it looks clean – no forced austerity, no messy investor losses and bank restructurings, no burden on taxpayers in creditor countries like Germany.

…

With such ECB generosity on offer – and with euro zone inflation looming – why would any bond trader with a pulse stop after dumping her Greek, Portuguese, Irish, Italian, and Spanish exposure? Why not get rid of the French and German paper in the vaults, as well? Get rid of it all.

…

This, then, is the impasse euro zone bond investors have reached. To avoid losses, they clamor for alternatives that could disrupt the currency itself – one of the few things that might actually make them worse off in real terms than they are right now.

8% of Japan Contaminated

Post-Fukushima Radiation Mapped

Cesium in soil a problem for agriculture

By Prachi Patel, IEEE Spectrum

December 2011

Three recently published academic studies show that while direct radiation exposure of Fukushima residents isn’t as high as was initially feared, soils across northeastern Japan are contaminated and could affect public health for decades through the produce farmed there. The research, combined with a map of soil radiation-which was based on measurements made during helicopter flights and released by Japan’s science ministry-shows substantial soil contamination in the prefectures of Fukushima and its neighbors: Miyagi and Iwate to the north, Ibaraki and Chiba to the south, and Tochigi and Gunma to the southwest.

…

The government’s radiation map shows high levels of radioactive cesium in Fukushima and surrounding prefectures. Some spots have levels between 100 000 and 600 000 becquerels per square meter (148 000 was the standard used for mandatory resettlement after the Chernobyl disaster). That the cesium is mostly in chloride form makes matters worse, Moulder says: “It’s water soluble, easily taken up by the body, and very well distributed in the body-all the things you don’t want.” The contamination could also irradiate anyone who walks on the ground, he adds.

According to the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, the science ministry says that about 8 percent of the country’s land has been contaminated with levels higher than 10 000 Bq/m2, a threshold that Japan’s science ministry defines as affected by a nuclear accident. The newspaper also reports that the government has confirmed radioactive materials from the meltdown in all prefectures, including Okinawa, which is 1700 kilometers from the power plant.

…

“There’s really no good way to clean up cesium-137 from a large area,” Moulder says. “To decontaminate a playground, you can scoop up the soil and lay down new asphalt, but you can’t scoop up a whole rice field. You’ll then have to dispose all that radioactive waste. These areas could become inhabitable but still couldn’t be used for agriculture.”

Cesium-137 is responsible for radiation in the Chernobyl dead zone.  It has a half life of 30 years.

Ocean contamination

Fukushima nuclear fallout spread through oceans, researchers say

MOST of the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant dropped into the ocean and began circling the planet, Japanese researchers say.

AFP

November 17, 2011 8:02PM

Up to 80 per cent of the caesium released by the Fukushima Daiichi power plant after the March 11 disaster landed in the Pacific and made its way into other oceans around the world, scientists at the Meteorological Research Institute said.

…

Researchers said the radioactive materials, including caesium-137, an isotope with a half-life of more than 30 years, were widely dispersed when they entered the oceans and each particle would measure less than one micrometre – one seventh the size of a human red blood cell.

…

Using computer simulations, they calculated the material was first blown northeast over eastern Russia and Alaska, before falling into the Pacific and reaching the western coast of mainland US around March 17, Takahashi said.

The materials were believed to have completed their first around-the-globe trip by March 24, he said, adding that the results would be presented to an academic meeting in Nagoya, central Japan.

Fukushima disaster’s marine fallout

Nuclear contamination poses long-term threat to ocean ecosystem and to Japan’s fishing industry.

Steve Chao, Al Jazeera

30 Nov 2011 12:11

During the peak of Ukraine’s Chernobyl cataclysm of 1986, the Black Sea was registering 1,000 becquerels per cubic metre of water; this appears miniscule in comparison to nuclear levels at Fukushima’s peak recorded at 100,000 becquerels.

And it hasn’t stopped yet.

More Radioactive Water Leaks at Japanese Plant

By HIROKO TABUCHI and MARTIN FACKLER, The New York Times

Published: December 4, 201

(U)tility workers found that radioactive water was pooling in a catchment next to a purification device; the system was switched off, and the leak appeared to stop. But the company said it later discovered that leaked water was escaping, possibly through cracks in the catchment’s concrete wall, and was reaching an external gutter.

In all, as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the facility, according to a report in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun that cited Tepco officials.

The company said that the water had about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level set by the government, but appeared to have already been cleaned of radioactive cesium before leaking out. Both elements are readily absorbed by living tissue and can greatly increase the risk of developing cancer.

Total Meltdown

All N-fuel may have fallen to outer vessel / TEPCO: Up to 68 tons likely melted in No. 1 reactor, eroding concrete of containment unit

The Yomiuri Shimbun

Dec. 2, 2011

In the No. 1 reactor, TEPCO believes, almost all of the about 68 tons of fuel melted. This has not only seriously damaged the bottom of the steel pressure vessel enough to create holes, but the fuel has also fallen to the concrete bottom of the containment vessel, eroding it by up to 65 centimeters.

Only 37 centimeters of concrete remains between the fuel and the vessel’s outermost steel wall in the most damaged area, TEPCO said.

That’s 25.6 and 14.6 inches for the metrically impaired.

Did Black Friday save the season? Beware the retail hype.

By Barry Ritholtz, The Washington Post

Saturday, December 3, 10:20 PM

We begin with a quick review of the retail sector in 2011: Sales improved versus 2010 by 3 to 4 percent. We use year-over-year comparisons because of the highly seasonal nature of retail sales. In 2010, sales were fairly soft, in part because much of the nation experienced severe weather. In the business, we call those “easy comps” – a low comparable data point that should be easy to beat.

Based on the first 10 months of the year, holiday shopping in 2011 should see similar improvements. Consistent with the year-over-year retail numbers, expect sales gains of 3 to 4 percent. Even so, these numbers come with caveats.

Prices in some products have risen – in some cases, substantially. The three most noteworthy are gasoline (up 15 percent), food (5 percent) and cotton (a whopping 230 percent).

The price pressures on these – all consumer staples – are reflected in the total retail sales data. When we look at total sales, we get a sense of how much the nation is spending – but, because of inflation, not how many goods people bought. Based on that data, we can conclude that a decent amount of the total dollar gains in retail sales are not improvements, but rather price inflation.

…

The reports released with Black Friday and the holiday weekend are from trade groups representing retailers. (They do not hide this.) Each year, they make wildly optimistic projections, which are repeated in the media like clockwork. By the time the actual data come in, the projections have been forgotten. By then, we learn that early reports were pure hokum, put out by trade groups to create a “positive shopping environment.”

…

“Traffic and spending were up both online and in stores, reaching historic highs. According to the survey, a record 226 million shoppers visited stores and Web sites over Black Friday weekend, up from 212 million last year. Digging deep into their holiday budgets, the average holiday shopper spent $398.62 this weekend, up from $365.34 last year. Total spending reached an estimated $52.4 billion.”

That would suggest that retail sales climbed 16 percent. They did not. Surveys where people forecast their future spending are pretty much worthless. They are far too unreliable to base sales forecasts upon.

…

How far off have these surveys been in the past? Enormously. In 2005, based on a survey on Black Friday and Saturday, the NRF forecast a 22 percent increase in holiday shopping gains for the Thanksgiving weekend. The results? Up just 1 percent.

The same foolishness resurfaced again in 2006, with an 18.9 percent sales increase forecast. Of course, the reality was nowhere near that, with sales gains below 5 percent. Incidentally, it is not just Shopmas: The back-to-school-season was another opportunity to repeat the error. And in 2007, just as the recession was getting underway, they forecast a 4 percent gain in sales. What happened? Sales at U.S. retailers “unexpectedly” dropped 0.4 percent in December 2007, the weakest holiday season since 2002. In 2008, given the broad scale of the economic collapse, what’s perhaps most surprising was the expectations for a 2.2 percent sales gain (sales fell 6 percent). In 2010, Black Friday weekend sales rise were estimated at 9.2 percent, and overall sales were forecast to rise in November and December 2010 by 11 percent. (They rose 5.5 percent.)

…

So when those breathless retail sales surveys were released (this year), we had no idea as to whether, and by exactly how much, sales might climb. The most that could be accurately said was that more people appeared to be in stores on Black Friday 2011 than in 2010. Indeed, that can be explained in part by the unseasonably warm weather around the country; as well as the extended store hours (including midnight Thanksgiving Day).

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

Paul Krugman: Send in the Clueless

There are two crucial things you need to understand about the current state of American politics. First, given the still dire economic situation, 2012 should be a year of Republican triumph. Second, the G.O.P. may nonetheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory – because Herman Cain was not an accident.

Think about what it takes to be a viable Republican candidate today. You have to denounce Big Government and high taxes without alienating the older voters who were the key to G.O.P. victories last year – and who, even as they declare their hatred of government, will balk at any hint of cuts to Social Security and Medicare (death panels!).

And you also have to denounce President Obama, who enacted a Republican-designed health reform and killed Osama bin Laden, as a radical socialist who is undermining American security.

So what kind of politician can meet these basic G.O.P. requirements? There are only two ways to make the cut: to be totally cynical or to be totally clueless.

Ray McGovern: Are Americans in Line for Gitmo?

Though the 9/11 attacks occurred more than a decade ago, Congress continues to exploit them to pass evermore draconian laws on “terrorism,” with the Senate now empowering the military to arrest people on U.S. soil and hold them without trial, a serious threat to American liberties

Ambiguous but alarming new wording, which is tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and was just passed by the Senate, is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own Constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”

The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimond Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin, but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded and capitulated.”

“The result of this millionfold nervous breakdown,” wrote Haffner at the time, “is the unified nation, ready for anything, that is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.” Not a happy analogy.

The Senate bill, in effect, revokes an 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, which banned the Army from domestic law enforcement after the military had been used and often abused in that role during Reconstruction. Ever since then, that law has been taken very seriously – until now. Military officers have had their careers brought to an abrupt halt by involving federal military assets in purely civilian criminal matters.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

December 5 is the 339th day of the year (340th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 26 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1933, The 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and bringing an end to the era of national prohibition of alcohol in America. At 5:32 p.m. EST, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the requisite three-fourths majority of states’ approval. Pennsylvania and Ohio had ratified it earlier in the day.

The movement for the prohibition of alcohol began in the early 19th century, when Americans concerned about the adverse effects of drinking began forming temperance societies. By the late 19th century, these groups had become a powerful political force, campaigning on the state level and calling for national liquor abstinence. Several states outlawed the manufacture or sale of alcohol within their own borders. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. On January 29, 1919, the 18th Amendment achieved the necessary three-fourths majority of state ratification. Prohibition essentially began in June of that year, but the amendment did not officially take effect until January 29, 1920.

The proponents of Prohibition had believed that banning alcoholic beverages would reduce or even eliminate many social problems, particularly drunkenness, crime, mental illness, and poverty, and would eventually lead to reductions in taxes. However, during Prohibition, people continued to produce and drink alcohol, and bootlegging helped foster a massive industry completely under the control of organized crime. Prohibitionists argued that Prohibition would be more effective if enforcement were increased. However, increased efforts to enforce Prohibition simply resulted in the government spending more money, rather than less. Journalist H.L. Mencken asserted in 1925 that respect for law diminished rather than increased during Prohibition, and drunkenness, crime, insanity, and resentment towards the federal government had all increased.

During this period, support for Prohibition diminished among voters and politicians. John D. Rockefeller Jr., a lifelong nondrinker who had contributed much money to the Prohibitionist Anti-Saloon League, eventually announced his support for repeal because of the widespread problems he believed Prohibition had caused. Influential leaders, such as the du Pont brothers, led the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, whose name clearly asserted its intentions.

Women as a bloc of voters and activists became pivotal in the effort to repeal, as many concluded that the effects of Prohibition were morally corrupting families, women, and children. (By then, women had become even more politically powerful due to ratification of the Constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage.) Activist Pauline Sabin argued that repeal would protect families from the corruption, violent crime, and underground drinking that resulted from Prohibition. In 1929 Sabin founded the Women’s Organization for National Prohibition Reform (WONPR), which came to be partly composed of and supported by former Prohibitionists; its membership was estimated at 1.5 million by 1931.

The number of repeal organizations and demand for repeal both increased. In 1932, the Democratic Party’s platform included a plank for the repeal of Prohibition, and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt ran for President of the United States promising repeal of federal laws of Prohibition.