July 2012 archive

Amidst the worst drought in 50 years, Up host Chris Hayes discusses climate change on the price of food. Joining Chris are:

Bryn Bird, second-generation farmer in Granville, Ohio at Bird’s Haven Farms.  She is also a field outreach coordinator for Rural Coalition;

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” and syndicated columnist for King Features;

Josh Barro (@jbarro), contributor to Forbes.com with “The Barrometer;”

Stacy-Marie Ishmael (@s_m_i), adjunct professor at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, former editor of “FT Tilt;”

Gary Gensler (@cftc), chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission since May 2009. Gensler previously served as the under-secretary of domestic finance at the Treasury Department.

“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”.

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Paul Krugman: Loading the Climate Dice

A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.

And this banal observation may be what dooms us to climate catastrophe, in two ways. On one side, the variability of temperatures from day to day and year to year makes it easy to miss, ignore or obscure the longer-term upward trend. On the other, even a fairly modest rise in average temperatures translates into a much higher frequency of extreme events – like the devastating drought now gripping America’s heartland – that do vast damage.

New York Times Editorial: A Spiteful New Policy at Guantánamo Bay

The Obama administration’s latest overuse of executive authority at Guantánamo Bay is a decision not to let lawyers visit clients in detention under terms that have been in place since 2004. Because these meetings pose little risk and would send a message about America’s adherence to the rule of law, the administration looks as if it is imperiously punishing detainees for their temerity in bringing legal challenges to their detention and losing.

In one case, the administration is saying that the Yemeni national Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail no longer has the right to meet with his counsel, David Remes, because his plea to be released was “terminated.” The Justice Department will only let them meet, it said in an e-mail to Mr. Remes, if he signs a new memorandum giving the government what Mr. Remes calls “absolute authority over access to counsel.”

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.

Click on images to enlarge

July 23 is the 204th day of the year (205th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 161 days remaining until the end of the year.

THE GREAT COMET OF 1997. Above, the bright head of comet Hale-Bopp, called the coma, is pointed towards the Sun. The coma is composed of dust and gas, masking the solid nucleus of the comet made up of rock, dust and ice. Photo taken by Jim Young at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories Table Mountain Observatory in March 1997.

The comet was discovered in 1995 by two independent observers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, both in the United States. Hale had spent many hundreds of hours searching for comets without success, and was tracking known comets from his driveway in New Mexico when he chanced upon Hale-Bopp just after midnight. The comet had an apparent magnitude of 10.5 and lay near the globular cluster M70 in the constellation of Sagittarius. Hale first established that there was no other deep-sky object  near M70, and then consulted a directory of known comets, finding that none were known to be in this area of the sky. Once he had established that the object was moving relative to the background stars, he emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, the clearing house for astronomical discoveries.

Bopp did not own a telescope. He was out with friends near Stanfield, Arizona observing star clusters and galaxies when he chanced across the comet while at the eyepiece of his friend’s telescope. He realized he might have spotted something new when, like Hale, he checked his star maps to determine if any other deep-sky objects were known to be near M70, and found that there were none. He alerted the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams through a Western Union telegram. Brian Marsden, who has run the bureau since 1968, laughed, “Nobody sends telegrams anymore. I mean, by the time that telegram got here, Alan Hale had already e-mailed us three times with updated coordinates.”

The following morning, it was confirmed that this was a new comet, and it was named Comet Hale-Bopp, with the designation C/1995 O1. The discovery was announced in International Astronomical Union circular 6187.

Small Business Owners, Job Creators.

Randy Wray: Why We’re Screwed

L. Randall Wray, Naked Capitalism

Monday, July 23, 2012

A century ago Veblen analyzed religion as the quintessential capitalist undertaking. It sells an inherently ephemeral product that can not be quality tested. Most of the value of that product exists only in the minds of the purchasers, and most of that value cannot be realized until death. Dissatisfied customers cannot return the purchased wares to the undertakers who sold them-there is no explicit money back guarantee and in any event, most of the dissatisfied have already been undertaken. The value of the undertaker’s institution is similarly ephemeral, mostly determined by “goodwill”. Aside from a fancy building, very little in the way of productive facilities is actually required by the religious undertaker.

But modern finance has replaced religion as the supreme capitalistic undertaking. Again, it has no need for production facilities-a fancy building, a few Bloomberg screens, greasy snake-oil salesmen, and some rapacious traders is all that is required to separate widows and orphans from their lifesavings and homes. Religious institutions only want 10%; Wall Street currently gets 20% of all the nation’s output (and 40% of profits), but won’t stop until it gets everything.

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And that is just the start. They also place tens of trillions of dollars of bets on derivatives whose value is purely “notional”. The thieves get paid when something goes wrong-the death of a homeowner, worker, firm, or country triggers payments on Death Settlements, Peasant Insurance, or Credit Default Swaps. To ensure that death comes sooner rather than later, the undertaker works with the likes of John Paulson to handpick the most sickly households, firms and governments to stand behind the derivative bets.

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The top four US Banks hold $171 Trillion worth of derivative deals like this. Derivatives are really just bets by Wall Street that we will get screwed-it is all “insurance” that pays off when we fail. Everything is insured-by them against us.

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You see, all the top financial institutions are dens of thieves, and thieves know better than to trust one another. So lending to fellow thieves has to be collateralized by safe financial assets-which is the traditional role played by Treasuries. But there were not enough of those to go around so Wall Street securitized home mortgages that were sliced and diced to get tranches that were supposedly as safe as Uncle Sam’s bonds. And there were not enough quality mortgages, so Wall Street foisted mortgages and home equity loans onto riskier borrowers to create more product.

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Suddenly there was no collateral behind the loans Wall Street’s thieves had made to one another. Each Wall Street thief looked in the mirror and realized everything he was holding was crap, because he knew all of his own debt was crap.

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And that is why we are screwed.

I see two scenarios playing out. In the first, we allow Wall Street to carry on its merry way, as the foreclosure crisis continues and Wall Street steals all homes, packaging them into bundles to be sold for pennies on the dollar to hedge funds. All wealth will be redistributed to the top 1% who will become modern day feudal lords with the other 99% living at their pleasure on huge feudal estates.

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In the second, the 99% occupy, shut down, and obliterate Wall Street.

Last time we started our series on carbon, and I now expect it to run for four installments.  Amongst many other properties, carbon is unique in having more allotropic forms than any other element.  Also known as allotropes, these are pure elements with radically different properties.  The term is reserved only for elements, the term for compounds being polymorphs.  An allotrope is a subset of a polymorph.

There is also another distinction:  for an element to have an allotrope, it must exist in the same phase.  Thus, solid lead and molten lead (and lead vapor) are not allotropes, but rather different phases of a given element.

Before we concentrate on carbon, let us consider oxygen.  In the gaseous phase, it has two allotropes, O₂, normal molecular oxygen, and O₃, also called ozone.  For an element as reactive as oxygen, normal molecular oxygen is remarkably nonreactive (wait a few weeks), but ozone is extremely reactive.  But both are just composed of oxygen atoms.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

crossposted from Voices on the Square

So, you’ve got Plan A. And in case something goes awry with Plan A, you’ve got your fallback plan, Plan B.

But what is the fit really hits the shan? What if all the assumptions that lie behind your planning turn out to be false. Things are far worse than ever contemplated in Plan A and Plan B? That’s when you turn to your Plan C, your Plan in case of Complete Catastrophe. In the event of a complete catastrophe, all of the polite fictions of the normal planning process go out the window. Which also means that Plan C is quite often the answer to, “Oh, now what do we do?, and the answer is, “Come up with something that will work ”

So, we have a crisis. A serious crisis, affecting our current transport system, which means a crisis that at the very least interferes with our supply of gasoline. But we have the Petroleum Reserve, so … assume its not a temporary emergency, but a crisis that threatens to last for years. Whether the Crisis hits next year or next decade, well, I don’t know that, do I? But suppose that its coming sometime in the next decade.

What would we face in coming up with something that will work?

The likely Republican presidential candidate and quintessential vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney, chided President Obama for not being sufficiently fearful of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez Friás last week.  In the conservative Daily Telegraph Mitt is quoted as saying:

“The idea that this nation, this president, doesn’t pose a national security threat is simply naive and an extraordinary admission on the part of this president to be completely out of touch with what is happening in Latin America,” Romney said of Chavez in an  interview Wednesday with Fox News.

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Yes, socialist Venezuela, the country which was recently ranked the 5th happiest in the world, following four social democratic countries, presents a threat to Mitt’s vulture business model and his support base, who largely come from the 92,000 wealthy individuals who sequester their wealth in “tax havens” such as Switzerland the Cayman Islands. (See rt. com  for its report on “The Price of Off Shore Revisited”.

After President Chavez was elected to office in 1998, Venezuela has had currency controls in place to prevent its national wealth from being looted and sent to extra-territorial banks, a model which defeats the efforts of would-be off shore tax evaders in Venezuela.  Other countries have allowed themselves to be systematically raped of their needed tax revenues.

Venezuela also jailed its criminal banksters for speculating with their depositors money.  Here, Mitt, you would likely be in jail for creating tax-evading investment vehicles in the Cayman Islands.  No, socialist Venezuela, under President Chavez, is definitely not a vulture-capitalist friendly country.  That is why it is now thriving.

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.

Click on images to enlarge

July 22 is the 203rd day of the year (204th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 162 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1933, Wiley Post becomes the first person to fly solo around the world traveling 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes.

Like many pilots at the time, Post disliked the fact that the speed record for flying around the world was not held by a fixed-wing aircraft, but by the Graf Zeppelin, piloted by Hugo Eckener in 1929 with a time of 21 days. On June 23, 1931, Post and his navigator, Harold Gatty, left Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York in the Winnie Mae with a flight plan that would take them around the world, stopping at Harbour Grace, Flintshire, Hanover twice, Berlin, Moscow, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Blagoveshchensk, Khabarovsk, Nome where his airscrew had to be repaired, Fairbanks where the airscrew was replaced, Edmonton, and Cleveland before returning to Roosevelt Field. They arrived back on July 1, after traveling 15,474 miles in the record time of 8 days and 15 hours and 51 minutes. The reception they received rivaled Lindbergh’s everywhere they went. They had lunch at the White House on July 6, rode in a ticker-tape parade the next day in New York City, and were honored at a banquet given by the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce of America at the Hotel Astor. After the flight, Post acquired the Winnie Mae from F.C. Hall, and he and Gatty published an account of their journey titled, Around the World in Eight Days, with an introduction by Will Rogers.

His Lockheed Vega aircraft, the Winnie Mae is on display at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, and his pressure suit is being prepared for display at the same location. On August 15, 1935, Post and American  humorist Will Rogers were killed when Post’s aircraft crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow, in Alaska.

Local Boys Geared Up for German Grand Prix, but Not at Pole Position

By BRAD SPURGEON, The New York Times

July 21, 2012

(A) bit of bad German news has been all the talk of how the other track that hosts the German Grand Prix in alternating years, the Nurburgring, is in a complete state of financial ruin and its future in doubt, as the circuit is going bankrupt. In 2009, the local government backed and paid for a renovation of the circuit into both a circuit and a theme park, and it has turned into a fiasco.

Last March, the European Commission sent out a press release that began thus: “The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation to assess whether a €524 million set of aid measures supporting the racetrack and leisure park at the Nurburgring in Germany is in line with EU state aid rules.”

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And in a final bit of bad news, German media has found the race a good moment to report that prosecutors in Munich are preparing to investigate claims by a German banker that Bernie Ecclestone had attempted to bribe him, offering $44 million in exchange for selling Formula One to CVC Capital a few years ago. The banker, Gerhard Gribkowsky, was recently sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in another matter, after admitting bribery, breach of trust and tax evasion.

F1 : No German arrest for corruption as Formula 1 supremo skips Hockenheim race

F1SA

Sunday, 22 July 2012

The Formula 1 Chief Executive’s absence, unusual for a European race but not unheard of, heightened speculation he is afraid of being arrested.

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“With Mercedes-Benz stalling on a new Concorde Agreement, and sponsors watching on anxiously, no one knows quite what will happen next,” Tom Cary wrote in the Telegraph.

If you build it, they will come? The Nürburgring folly

Mark Hallam, Deutsche Welle

7/21/12

How do you take the world’s most famous racetrack, with relatively small financial woes, and turn it into a half-billion-euro hole in less than a decade? The answer’s simple: renovate it with things it doesn’t need.

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The idea behind revamping the Nürburgring was to turn it into a publicly-traded company at least partially owned by private investors.

Two businessmen, Kai Richter and Georg Lindner, combined with then-Nürburgring CEO Walter Kafitz to convince the state government that the project was viable. The pair pledged to contribute to Nürburgring GmbH, and said others would flock to the project once the foundations were laid.

No new investors emerged. Midway through the construction process, Richter and Lindner themselves withdrew, saying they were out of money.

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“Well, firstly, Richter and Lindner obviously must go!” Hahne said. “Secondly, the racing and ‘event’ segments of the company must be divided. And thirdly – this is most important – the race tracks must remain in public possession, either at the regional or federal level.”

His suggestion, in short, is to do everything possible to turn the clock back on five disastrous years, at a great cost to the state and the German taxpayer.

Famed German Tracks Leave Their Mark on Series

By BRAD SPURGEON, The New York Times

Published: July 20, 2012

With the advent of the Schumacher era, Formula One became so popular in Germany that for many years the country hosted both the German Grand Prix at Hockenheim and another race – either the European Grand Prix or the Luxembourg Grand Prix – at the Nürburgring. Since 2008, the German Grand Prix has rotated between the Nürburgring and Hockenheim, while the European Grand Prix has moved to Valencia, Spain.

But many of the most memorable races of the German Grand Prix took place at the old Nürburgring track, the Nordschleife, or north loop, which was a track 20.81 kilometers, or 12.93 miles, long, winding through the forests of the Eiffel hills. It was a roller coaster of a track and on it only the greatest drivers could prove their mettle.

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The Hockenheimring was redesigned in 2002, with a vast portion of long straights through the forest cut off in favor of a small track with a large, tight hairpin to facilitate overtaking.

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The distinctive, winding track in the stadium area has remained, however, and is a favorite for fans to see the cars and for the drivers to see the fans.

3 drivers were penalized for gearbox changes, Rosberg, Grosjean, and Webber (at Silverstone).  Perez was penalized for impeding in Q2.  Red Bull is in violation of Engine Torque mapping rules.  No penalty imposed.

Forecast is for a dry track. Coverage is at noon on Faux

• Formula One Official Site
• Hockenheim
• German Grand Prix
• Guardian Interactive Circuit Guide
• Formula One: Hockenheim Qualifying

Pretty tables below.