UK’s credit rating downgraded from AAA to AA1 by Moody’s

Press Association, The Guardian

Friday 22 February 2013 18.05 EST

The agency warned that “subdued” growth prospects and a “high and rising debt burden” were weighing on the economy. But Osborne said the loss of the gold-plated status did not mean the government should change course.

“Tonight we have a stark reminder of the debt problems facing our country – and the clearest possible warning to anyone who thinks we can run away from dealing with those problems,” he said.

“Far from weakening our resolve to deliver our economic recovery plan, this decision redoubles it.

Osborne humiliated as UK loses AAA credit rating

By George Eaton, New Statesman

Published 22 February 2013 22:50

Back in February 2010, a few months before he entered the Treasury, George Osborne declared: “Our first benchmark is to cut the deficit more quickly to safeguard Britain’s credit rating. I know that we are taking a political gamble to set this up as a measure of success.” A gamble it was and how it has backfired on the Chancellor. Tonight, Moody’s became the first rating agency to strip the UK of its AAA credit rating (downgrading it to AA1), citing the “continuing weakness” in the UK’s growth outlook and its “high and rising debt burden”.

For Osborne, who chose to make our credit rating the ultimate metric of economic stability, it is a humiliating moment. Not my words, but his. During one of his rhetorical assaults against Labour in August 2009, he warned: “Britain faces the humiliating possibility of losing its international credit rating”. Rarely before or after becoming Chancellor, did Osborne miss an opportunity to remind us just how important he thought the retention of our AAA rating was.

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By Osborne’s own logic, then, his deficit plan is no longer credible.

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The economic consequences of the downgrade are unlikely to be significant. France and the US, for instance, have seen no rise in their borrowing costs since losing their AAA ratings (in fact, yields on US and French bonds have fallen). All the evidence we have suggests that the market is prepared to lend to countries that can borrow in their own currencies (such as the UK) and that enjoy the benefits of an independent monetary policy, regardless of their credit ratings or their debt levels. But the politics of the downgrade are toxic for Osborne.

Still, you might ask, why should we listen to Moody’s, the agency that gave AIG an AAA rating just a month before it collapsed? The answer is simple: we shouldn’t. But this doesn’t alter the fact that Osborne did. For political purposes, he used Britain’s credit rating as a stick to beat Labour with. He can hardly complain if others now use this move against him. Tonight, the Chancellor has been hoist with his own petard.

“I don’t care what the ratings agencies think about anything, but if it’s a stark reminder of anything it’s a stark reminder that you’re the stupidest fucking person on the face of the planet.”- Atrios

“Often “austerity” and the “need” for budget cuts are just excuses to kicks the poors and olds and ram through whatever horrible agenda you wanted to ram through in the first place. But I think the simpleton Gideon Osborne really believes it. He likes kicking the olds and the poors too, but he’ll nonetheless be proved fucking right.

And for some reason Labour is unwilling to just say Shit Is Fucked Up And Bullshit, austerity bites, and we gotta step on the gas.”- Atrios

The condensed Moody’s downgrade

By Alex Hern, New Statesman

Published 23 February 2013 10:43

Some will focus on the fact that Moody’s analysis starts with poor growth as the basic factor for Osborne’s failure. Others will note that Moody’s is still a firm advocate of high-speed deficit reduction.

Still others, myself included, will argue that, apart from the fact that the Chancellor has been hoist by his own petard, all the news really does is prove yet again that ratings agencies aren’t very good at their jobs. Moody’s recognises that Britain’s economic travails stem from depressed growth, but its analysis seems incapable of progressing on from there. Taken as a whole, the agency is saying, with a straight face, that “Britain’s attempts to cut its debt have harmed its attempts to cut its debt, and this could harm its attempts to cut its debt”, and it sees nothing problematic with that.

Really, nothing in Moody’s analysis matters. The only important part of it is that one missing A, and the effect that has on Osborne’s credibility.

Of course I stole it.  I believe in Capitalism!  And ‘Free Markets’!

Are you ready?  Here it is-

Watch CNBC like a hawk and whenever they mention a stock, short it.

No one man can be more corrupt than soccer can be boring.

Faithful readers already know what I think about Turn Left.

In the Roman form of chariot racing, teams represented different groups of financial backers and sometimes competed for the services of particularly skilled drivers. These teams became the focus of intense support among spectators, and occasional disturbances broke out between followers of different factions. The conflicts sometimes became politicized, as the sport began to transcend the races themselves and started to affect society overall.

Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss.  Purple makes a fine winding sheet.

It’s hard to blame the technology, the cars and tracks can hardly be safer than they are.  It’s high speed bumper cars and the rules that create an environment where you can take out 12 of them at a time; and though 33 were injured, some critically, nobody died… yet.

To me the sport’s biggest sin is that it’s boring.  BORING!

Yup, that’s right, more boring than having Vettel dive into the front and drive off into the distance with Mark Webber in tow.

And that’s because nothing matters until the last 5 laps except for the accidents.

You know, like the whole track falling apart.

So let’s talk instead about Danica Patrick’s love life.

Patrick Was Leading Way Even Before Winning Pole

By VIV BERNSTEIN, The New York Times

Published: February 18, 2013

On the first day that drivers arrived at Daytona International Speedway for Speedweeks, the Daytona 500 and the celebrated start of Nascar’s 2013 Sprint Cup season, the story making headlines was Danica Patrick’s romantic relationship with the driver Ricky Stenhouse, Jr.

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Her relationship with Stenhouse, an up-and-coming driver who will also be a rookie in the Sprint Cup this season, has only served to intensify the interest in everything she does on and off the track.

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“I don’t mind answering questions about the other stuff,” she added. “But I get that it’s not about racing. It’s nice to change the tone of the questions because of what’s going on, on the track. That is a really good sign, and I like that.”

Either way, it’s all good for Nascar. Patrick made the rounds of many of the major television talk shows Monday morning, giving the sport some much needed publicity. Nascar has had a drop in attendance and television ratings in recent years. The marketing game plan is to focus on drivers, and nobody does a better job of self-marketing than the 30-year-old Patrick.

“Driver star power is something we’re going to bang on from a marketing perspective in ’13 and in ’14, ’15, ’16,” said Steve Phelps, Nascar’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “It will all be about the drivers.

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“Listen, she is a marketing phenomenon,” Phelps said. “I think putting her on the biggest stage that we have, the Sprint Cup, and have her run a full season, will only help her.”

He asked rhetorically: “Do I believe that she needs to win in order to continue that momentum that she has seen so far? I don’t. Would it add to it? Would it kind of plus-up the whole thing? I do.”

To be continued, as Patrick moves through the week and heads to the pole Sunday, with 500 miles in front of her and the remaining skeptics in the rear.

ek, are you implying that we’re living in the decadent final days of empire with bread and circuses to placate the proletariat?

Ahem, let me clear my throat.

WE ARE LIVING IN THE DECADENT FINAL DAYS OF EMPIRE WITH BREAD AND CIRCUSES TO PLACATE THE PROLETARIAT!!!

Enjoy the race, I’ll be back for the last 5 laps to see how things turned out.

Unfortunately Chuckles refused to disappear and all I have left at the moment is good stuff.

I’m putting it below the fold in hopes of confusing the ‘bots, but if you have any interest in large constrictors and what’s in Carol Merrill’s box or pacifist themes you’ll watch this while it’s still available and put it in your Netflix account for when it won’t be.

Here is a song about boxes-

And another one-

And of course, no boxed set would be complete without a heart shaped one-

But it’s all good because we should just trust the President.

• Could the Administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States? (.pdf)

This Administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing so.

Obama officials refuse to say if assassination power extends to US soil

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Friday 22 February 2013 09.46 EST

The crux of this issue goes to the heart of almost every civil liberties assault under the War on Terror since it began. Once you accept that the US is fighting a “war” against The Terrorists, and that the “battlefield” in this “war” has no geographical limitations, then you are necessarily vesting the president with unlimited powers. You’re making him the functional equivalent of a monarch. That’s because it is almost impossible to impose meaningful limitations on a president’s war powers on a “battlefield”.

If you posit that the entire world is a “battlefield”, then you’re authorizing him to do anywhere in the world what he can do on a battlefield: kill, imprison, eavesdrop, detain – all without limits or oversight or accountability. That’s why “the-world-is-a-battlefield” theory was so radical and alarming (not to mention controversial) when David Addington, John Yoo and friends propagated it, and it’s no less menacing now that it’s become Democratic Party dogma as well.

Once you accept the premises of that DOJ white paper, there is no cogent limiting legal principle that would confine Obama’s assassination powers to foreign soil. If “the whole world is a battlefield”, then that necessarily includes US soil. The idea that assassinations will be used only where capture is “infeasible” is a political choice, not a legal principle. If the president has the power to kill anyone he claims is an “enemy combatant” in this “war”, including a US citizen, then there is no way to limit this power to situations where capture is infeasible.

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Out of the good grace of his heart, or due to political expedience, Obama may decide to exercise this power only where he claims capture is infeasible, but there is no coherent legal reason that this power would be confined that way. The “global war” paradigm that has been normalized under two successive administrations all but compels that, as a legal matter, this power extend everywhere and to everyone. The only possible limitations are international law and the “due process” clause of the Constitution – and, in my view, that clearly bars presidential executions of US citizens no matter where they are as well as foreign nationals on US soil. But otherwise, once you accept the “global-battlefield” framework, then the scope of this presidential assassination power is limitless (this is to say nothing of how vague the standards in the DOJ “white paper” are when it comes to things like “imminence” and “feasibility of capture”, as the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson pointed out this week when suggesting that the DOJ white paper may authorize a president to kill US journalists who are preparing to write about leaks of national security secrets).

A Bad Idea Gets Worse

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

Feb 21, 2013 at 12:30AM

Of all the various Washington mystery cults, the one at that end of Pennsylvania Avenue is the most impenetrable. This is why the argument many liberals are making — that the drone program is acceptable both morally and as a matter of practical politics because of the faith you have in the guy who happens to be presiding over it at the moment — is criminally naive, intellectually empty, and as false as blue money to the future. The powers we have allowed to leach away from their constitutional points of origin into that office have created in the presidency a foul strain of outlawry that (worse) is now seen as the proper order of things. If that is the case, and I believe it is, then the very nature of the presidency of the United States at its core has become the vehicle for permanently unlawful behavior. Every four years, we elect a new criminal because that’s become the precise job description.

What a Targeted Killing in the US Would Look Like

By: emptywheel

Tuesday February 19, 2013 1:03 pm

The arrest was staged at a warehouse controlled by the FBI, outfitted with 5 closed circuit video cameras that gave the FBI full visibility into anyone entering and leaving the warehouse, as well as pallets loaded with sandbags to provide cover. Altogether 66 FBI Agents participated in the arrest, with 29 Agents, including a K-9 team and snipers, inside the warehouse itself, along with helicopter cover, another K-9 team, and a control room nearby. Members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue and SWAT teams participated, with Agents flying in from Columbia, South Carolina and DC via a previous operation in Los Angeles. The team had practiced the arrest scenario up to 10 times before the actual arrest.

The arrest started when the FBI detonated 3 pre-positioned diversionary explosives in the room in which the leader, 4 accomplices, two undercover officers and an informant had been moving boxes (the FBI insiders had already left the scene). That allowed the FBI team, wearing bullet proof gear and helmets, to move into place.

On orders, “FBI, show me your hands, on the ground!” the leader’s four accomplices put their hands up and got down on the ground (for a variety of reasons, the FBI doesn’t have recordings of the audio of the event). The leader hesitated, but then got face down on the ground, though the FBI claims his hands were not visible.

At that point, 62 seconds after the diversionary explosions, the K-9 handler, who had been briefed that the leader was the main target of the investigation, released the dog and gave the “bite” command, the first time he had ever done so in the year he had been a K-9 handler; the dog lunged at the leader’s arm or face. The FBI claims the leader raised a gun and shot the dog three times. One accomplice disagrees, describing that the leader had both hands on the dog, trying to keep him away from his face. Two FBI Agents who admitted shooting their rifles also had Glocks, though of a different caliber than the one allegedly used by the leader. There was no gunpowder residue found on the leader and no fingerprints found on the Glock.

In the next 4 seconds, 4 different FBI officers shot the leader with their Colt M4 rifles (3 were from the Hostage Rescue Team that had flown in for this arrest), set on semiautomatic. He was hit a total of 21 times. He died within a minute.

This was the culmination of a 3-year counterterrorism investigation into Imam Luqman Abdullah, a black Muslim who led a mosque in Detroit.

Warning: Several minutes into this video (included at the link), graphic images of a corpse appear. Also, the government may start tracking your online viewing if you view this YouTube, as someone started following my mostly defunct YouTube account after I watched it.

I’ve cleaned the links up a little and added some emphasis.- ek

Yes, Katrina, Wall Street Won Again, and Progressives Need to Face Up to That

Dave Dayen, Naked Capitalism

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, got very upset at my characterization of the task force (Residential Mortgage Backed Securities Working Group), and scolded me for taking a “victory lap.”

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Vanden Heuvel closes by linking to reporting from The Nation that’s five months old and actually says nothing about targets of the task force, as she claims. My favorite statement of hers about the potential value of the task force is when she says it has a significant “pending congressional appropriation.” A pending appropriation! Because everyone knows that in an age of sequestration, where every federal line item is due for a 6% haircut in a couple weeks, this is the perfect time for new congressional appropriations to take root! Just ask the House Republicans!

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I’m sure the Administration trembles at the pressuring from the groups that sent out glowing press releases a year ago about the “real leadership” shown by the President in announcing a task force that, by this own admission, carried no guarantee of resources or prioritization.

Look, nobody likes having to admit they’ve been duped. But I reject the assertion that there are only two courses of action here, that “we can either fight to see that this investigation is real or we can take our ball and go home.” That fight over the investigation is doomed. What would be useful is to examine the role of these DC progressive groups, who continue to build coalitions aimed at “pressuring” the White House and who continue to fail in spectacular fashion.

Well-meaning people all over this country concerned about any number of issues hand over their hard-earned money to these groups, and they aim to speak broadly for liberal values. The accountability doesn’t stop on Wall Street. It needs to be shared by the DC progressive community. I’ve gotten enough correspondence in the wake of my Salon piece to know that the majority of them now believe they were fooled, vanden Heuvel’s bravado notwithstanding. It would be incredibly worthwhile to exercise some self-examination at this point, to question the entire value of building these ad hoc organizations at the edges of the halls of power, and then working through polite channels and gentle nudges to get as much progress as possible, as long as it doesn’t disrupt being able to sit in on meetings with senior Administration officials and the like.

We talk a lot about broken models. The DC progressive model is broken. It does nothing but facilitate the injustices readily evident in this case. A good use of time at the next board meeting would consist of a moment of self-examination, and maybe entertaining a motion for dissolution. Those of us demanding justice and accountability will always have to fight for it, and maybe next time we could use some colleagues with more than a squirt gun.

BP to fight government’s ‘excessive’ demands over Deepwater oil spill

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

19 February 2013 13.17 EST

The trial is the last major hurdle to BP’s efforts to move beyond the fatal blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 people and resulted in the biggest oil spill in US history.

BP has already accepted criminal responsibility for the disaster, pleading guilty last November to manslaughter and lying to Congress and paying $4.5bn in fines. It reached a separate $7.8bn settlement earlier last year with thousands of local individuals that suffered economic damages because of the oil disaster.

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The Justice Department has said it would set out to prove that BP was “grossly negligent” in its response to the spill – a designation that would increase the burden of fines on the oil company to $4,300 a barrel.

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Federal government scientists have estimated that 4.9m barrels of oil were released before the well was finally capped. BP, in its statement on Tuesday, repeated its argument that estimate was too high – going so far as to accuse the federal government of exaggerating its findings.

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BP has consistently argued that the government’s estimate is off by about 20% – and said that at most it should be liable for 3.1m barrels of spilled oil.

The company also demanded the federal government subtract about 810,000 barrels of oil siphoned off directly from the well, without entering Gulf waters. That would shave another $3.4bn off the maximum $21bn penalty.

Guantánamo trials plunged into deeper discord as confidence in court wanes

Chris McGreal, The Guardian

Sunday 17 February 2013 11.46 EST

In recent days, the commander of the Guantánamo prison, Colonel John Bogdan, was forced to admit on the witness stand that secret listening devices disguised as smoke detectors were installed in the cell where lawyers met their clients, and that he knew nothing about them.

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“I said, Mr Guard, is that a listening device, and he said, ‘Of course not’,” she said. “Well, guess what, judge? It’s a listening device”

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The prison’s lawyer, Captain Thomas Welsh, told the court he discovered the room was fitted with hidden microphones early last year and reported it to the then warden, Colonel Donnie Thomas, to seek assurances that meetings between the accused and their lawyers were not being spied on.

Bogdan said he was not informed when he took over. He told the court that the FBI was in control of the room until 2008 and that he has since discovered that the bugs were accidentally disconnected in October during renovations but then secretly reconnected by an unnamed intelligence service two months later, suggesting they were still in use.

Bogdan denied that the microphones were eavesdropping on lawyers. “We understood that any listening to an attorney-client meeting is prohibited,” he said.

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That followed a strange incident at a hearing last month when the audio feed from the courtroom to the public and reporters was suddenly cut when a defence lawyer made a reference to torture in an unclassified motion arguing that CIA “black sites” in Poland, Afghanistan and Romania, used to interrogate and torture abducted suspects, be preserved.

The judge, Colonel James Pohl, was caught unawares and demanded to know who had cut the feed. It transpired that an unnamed intelligence agency was monitoring proceedings from an unspecified location and decided to censor the hearing, a privilege Pohl said was reserved exclusively for him.

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Defence lawyers also accused the prison authorities of using cell searches to seize confidential legal documents. Attorneys for three of the accused – Mohammed, Bin Atash and Ramzi Binalshibh – said that the men returned to their cells on Tuesday to discover that the bins they use to store documents had been searched and confidential papers removed.

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The prison lawyer, Lieutenant Commander George Massucco, confirmed that the documents had been removed and said they would be returned shortly.

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Eviatar said the military tribunal’s track record is already damaged by the use of torture and CIA black sites in interrogations, and the original Bush plans for the conduct of the trials which were struck down by the supreme court as unconstitutional.

“I think what’s happening really seriously undermines the credibility of the process,” she said. “These are new courts to begin with. The first version of these courts was struck down by the US supreme court so you’re already starting with a lot of scepticism. And this current version hasn’t been tested in the US supreme court yet. But there’s so many problems every step of the way that it’s going to be very hard for anyone to look back and say this was a fair trial.“

Yah think?