Tag: TMC Politics

Jan 16 2013

Treasury’s #2 Worse Than Lew

After Pres. Barack Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary confessed to a lack of financial expertise, you would have thought that the president’s choice for the number two spot would have been someone to fill that gap. Silly you. President Obama’s choice for Deputy Treasury Secretary is rumored to be Ruth Porat, who lobbied for Wall St. against regulation. This is her profile from Business Week:

Ms. Ruth Porat has been Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Morgan Stanley since January 2010. Ms. Porat served as the Global Head of the Financial Institutions Group at Morgan Stanley from September 2006 to December 2009 and also served as its Vice Chairman of Investment Banking from September 2003 to December 2009 and Chairman of the Financial Sponsors Group from July 2004 to September 2006. Throughout the recent financial crisis, she has been responsible for the Financial Sponsors Group ‘s coverage of financial institutions and governments globally, and she led the team advising the U.S. Treasury with respect to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Ms. Porat began her career with Morgan Stanley in 1987 in the Mergers and Acquisition Department.

According to Forbes, Ms Porat is the most influential woman on Wall St.

The Sunlight Foundation reports that Ms Porat lobbied on behalf of Wall St., meeting with regulators about Dodd-Frank rules nine times:

* 2012-03-27: Met with the Federal Reserve to express concerns on bank capital rules

* 2012-04-30: Met with the Federal Reserve to claim surcharges for Too Big To Fail banks were not necessary. Later also said regulating derivatives would hurt liquidity.

* 2011-12-14: Met with the Federal Reserve to ask for more lenient disclosure requirements for Morgan Stanley

* 2010-10-28: Met with the Federal Reserve to push back on Volker Rule and for more flexibility on Proprietary Trading

* 2010-11-02: Met with Treasury on the CFPB (no disclosures on meeting’s purpose)

*  2011-02-01: Met with Treasury on Capital and Liquidity (no disclosures on meeting’s purpose)

* 2011-05-03: Met with Treasury on the Volker Rule (no disclosures on meeting’s purpose)

* 2011-07-07: Met with Treasury on Derivatives (no disclosures on meeting’s purpose)

* 2011-01-05: Met with FDIC on Volker Rule (no disclosures on meeting’s purpose)

h/t DSWright at FDL News Desk

Ms Porat is not what Obama’s critics meant when they complained about a lack of woman in influential positions in the cabinet. Really, Mr. President, a Wall St. lobbyist? Jamie Dimon must be so pleased.

Jan 15 2013

Punting the Pundits

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Josh Barrow: Will Obama Ruin the Economy to Ruin the Republicans?

With both the 14th Amendment and platinum coin options to defuse a debt-limit crisis (apparently) off the table, only two possible outcomes are left: a debt- ceiling increase or the government’s missing required payments and economic chaos ensuing (pdf). This is exactly the choice President Barack Obama laid out in his news conference this morning.

Politico reported today that top Republican staff members believe “more than half” their conference is prepared to push the government into default on some payments rather than cave on their demands for further spending cuts. [..]

By creating an object lesson of how unfit the Republican Party has become to govern, Obama can ensure himself a political “win.” But with a new recession sparked by a government payments crisis, the country would lose — and Obama, whose second-term plans would be hampered by the need to manage yet another recovery, would lose, too.

New York Times Editorial: Don’t Skimp on Sandy Aid

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey made an impassioned pitch on Monday to his fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote on Tuesday for almost $50 billion in Hurricane Sandy disaster relief. “New Jersey does not expect anything more than what was done for Louisiana and Alabama and Mississippi in Katrina, and what was done in Joplin, Mo., what was done in the floods in Iowa. We don’t expect anything more than that, but we will not accept anything less,” Mr. Christie said. [..]

Northeast Republicans were told on Monday that there might be as many as 15 amendments to reach the House floor, which would mean at least 15 chances to cut the financing or make the package unacceptable to the Senate. For Republicans refusing to help Sandy victims, it is worth remembering that disasters are not confined to one region of the country. Those who vote against aid now may well find their constituents desperate for assistance sometime soon.

Robert Kuttner: The Mortgage Mess and Jack Lew

As Treasury Secretary, would Lew take a harder line with banking abuses?

The more information we learn about the mortgage settlement that was announced Monday-official documents are yet to be made public-the more of a smarmy backroom deal it turns out to be.

The deal lets ten major banks and other “loan servicers” off the hook for a corrupted and illegal process of millions of foreclosures, with a paltry one-time settlement of $8.5 billion. The economic damage inflicted on homeowners, and by extension on the economy, was many times that.

The deal was hatched by the weakest of the federal bank regulatory agencies, the Comptroller of the Currency, and signed off on by the Federal Reserve. [..]

The relevance to Jack Lew? The comptroller of the currency is part of the Treasury and reports to him, assuming that Lew is confirmed.

Dean Baker: The 3 Percent Cut to Social Security: aka the Chained CPI

According to inside Washington gossip, Congress and the president are going to do exactly what voters elected them to do; they are going to cut Social Security by 3 percent. You don’t remember anyone running on that platform? Yeah, well, they probably forgot to mention it.

Of course some people may have heard Vice President Joe Biden when he told an audience in Virginia that there would be no cuts to Social Security if President Obama got reelected. Biden said: “I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.”

But that’s the way things work in Washington. You can’t expect the politicians who run for office to share their policy agenda with voters. After all, we might not like it. That’s why they say things like they will fight for the middle class and make the rich pay their fair share. These ideas have lots of appeal among voters. Cutting Social Security doesn’t.

Robert Reich: Obama’s Debt Ceiling Gamble Depends on the GOP Being Sane

A week before his inaugural, President Obama says he won’t negotiate with Republicans over raising the debt limit.

At an unexpected news conference on Monday he said he won’t trade cuts in government spending in exchange for raising the borrowing limit.

“If the goal is to make sure that we are being responsible about our debt and our deficit – if that’s the conversation we’re having, I’m happy to have that conversation,” Obama said. “What I will not do is to have that negotiation with a gun at the head of the American people.”

Well and good. But what, exactly, is the President’s strategy when the debt ceiling has to be raised, if the GOP hasn’t relented?

He’s ruled out an end-run around the GOP. [..]

But Obama’s strategy depends on there being enough sane voices left in the GOP to influence others. That’s far from clear.

Mike Lux: Complicated Politics: Democrats and the Grand Bargain

It is a well-known fact that President Obama wants a “grand bargain” with the Republicans, a deal that would reduce future deficits both by raising tax revenues and cutting spending, including on the so-called “entitlement programs.” He has offered this idea up repeatedly to Speaker Boehner and other Republican leaders in the 2011 debt ceiling talks and in the 2012 fiscal cliff debate, and media reports suggest that he is discussing the idea again with Republicans in the lead-up to the next perils of a budget crisis that is only a few weeks off.

Democrats in the progressive wing of the party (of which, full disclosure, I am a card carrying member) think the idea of cutting Social Security, Medicare and/or Medicaid benefits is terrible public policy because senior citizens who can least afford it will be badly hurt, and we have been working hard to convince the president to back away from this offer. This may be difficult to do, though, as the president has some strong (wrong, in my judgment, but compelling to the president’s political and legislative team) political reasons for wanting to do this grand bargain. But the politics of this deal are very different for the rest of the party, and it may well be that progressives can win over a lot more of those Democrats than conventional wisdom currently expects.

Wendell Potter: Insurers Telling Only Part of the Story in Attempt to Gut Important Consumer Protections

As Ronald Reagan once famously said, “There you go again.”

The culprits in this case are health insurance companies that want to change ObamaCare so they can keep selling highly profitable junk insurance to young people and keep charging older folks so much in premiums they have little money left over for anything else.

What’s happening now is a repeat of the tactics insurers employed during the final weeks of the health care reform debate. Back then, they papered Washington with a flawed “study” warning that premiums would soar if lawmakers ignored their recommendations. And now insurers are once again disseminating a new study with similar predictions. This time they’re trying to convince us that coverage for all young adults will become unaffordable next year if Congress doesn’t gut an important consumer protection in the reform law.

Jan 15 2013

Jack Lew: An Epic Failure

Sen. Bernie Sanders has already decided that he will not vote to approve President Barack Obama’s replacement for Timothy Geithner, Jack  Lew, AS Treasury Secretary, with good reason. It seems that Mr. Lew, who currently is the president Chief of Staff, does think that deregulation had a role in the housing crash. This is Sen. Sanders’ statement:

Jack Lew is clearly an extremely intelligent person and I applaud his many years of public service to our country. I believe that he will be confirmed by the Senate. Unfortunately, he will be confirmed without my vote. At a time when the middle class is collapsing and millions of workers are unemployed, I do not believe he is the right person at the right time to serve in this important position.

As a supporter of the president, I remain extremely concerned that virtually all of his key economic advisers have come from Wall Street. In my view, we need a treasury secretary who is prepared to stand up to corporate America and their powerful lobbyists and fight for policies that protect the working families in our country. I do not believe Mr. Lew is that person.

We don’t need a treasury secretary who thinks that Wall Street deregulation was not responsible for the financial crisis. We need a treasury secretary who will work hard to break up too-big-to-fail financial institutions so that Wall Street cannot cause another massive financial crisis.

We don’t need another treasury secretary who believes in ‘deficit neutral’ corporate tax reform. We need a treasury secretary willing to fight to make sure that large, profitable corporations pay their fair share in taxes to reduce the deficit and create jobs.

We don’t need a treasury secretary who will advise the president that he should negotiate with the Republicans to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits. We need someone who is going to strengthen these programs.

We don’t need another treasury secretary who believes that NAFTA and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China have been good for the American economy. We need someone in the White House who works to fundamentally re-write our trade policy to make sure that we are exporting American goods, not American jobs.

Matt Taibbi, contributing editor for Rolling Stone magazine, and William Black, associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a white-collar criminologist and former senior financial regulator, joined Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez at Democracy Now! to discuss why Jack Lew is a “failure of epic proportions”



Transcript can be read here

At Huffington Post, Prof. Black also described Mr. Lew’s role as OMB Chief during the Clinton administration, that set the stage for our current economic and financial problems, his path to Wall St. and back through the “revolving door” to the Obama administration. He calls Mr. Lew “another brick in the Wall Street on the Potomac,”

From CBS News:

   Obama is clearly comfortable bringing another ex-Wall Streeter into an administration that, beyond a recent ratcheting up of populist rhetoric, has done relatively little to rein in the financial industry.

   That, in turn, reflects the ease with which Washington hands like Lew shuttle between the Street and the Hill. Case in point: Lew’s predecessor as budget chief, Peter Orszag, left the agency and joined Citi as vice chairman of global banking. A job in politics is no longer a back-door to a lucrative job in banking — it’s a red carpet. The revolving door keeps spinning.

   The Citi alternative investments] division ultimately lost billions. As for Lew, he naturally made big bucks during his three-year stint at Citi, including a [roughly $950,000 bonus in 2009 — after the company’s federal bailout.

Lew helped establish finance policy under President Clinton. [..]

Lew’s predecessor as chief of staff was William Daley. Daley is a lawyer. Daley was on the executive board of J.P. Morgan-Chase during the crisis and before that he was on Fannie Mae’s board of directors. Daley is a member of “Third Way’s” controlling board. Third Way is a Pete Peterson ally that lobbies in favor of austerity and cuts to the safety net. It pushes Wall Street’s, and Pete Peterson’s, greatest dream — privatizing Social Security. Privatization would allow Wall Street to increase its profits by hundreds of billions of dollars in fees for managing our retirement savings. [..]

The obvious aspects of this pattern include: (1) Obama prefers to have Wall Street guys run finance (despite coming to power because Wall Street blew up the world), (2) the revolving door under Obama that connects Wall Street and the White House has been super-charged, and (3) even very short stints in Wall Street have made Obama’s finance advisers wealthy. The obvious is vitally important, and it is largely ignored by the most prominent media. The obvious aspects help explain why Obama’s economic policies have been incoherent, ineptly explained, inequitable, and often slavishly pro-Wall Street at the expense of our integrity and citizens. [..]

Prof. Black gives examples of the less obvious aspects of the pattern that compound problem of Pres. Obama appointing people who have failed, not just professionally, but ethically and morally. It is an eye opening, scathing critique of an administration that is trying to force a destructive policy of austerity and why Jack Lew is a terrible choice for Treasury Secretary.  

Jan 14 2013

Punting the Pundits

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The New York Times Editorial: An Incomplete Fix

Thanks to the fiscal cliff deal, the alternative minimum tax will not ensnare tens of millions of middle-class Americans for whom it was never intended. The deal raised the income thresholds before the A.M.T. kicks in and indexes them for inflation going forward. As a practical matter, this means that 28 million filers who would have had to pay the tax on their 2012 returns have been spared and are much less likely to have to pay the tax in the future.

Yet the fixes are incomplete. The purpose of the A.M.T. is to ensure that wealthy taxpayers cannot make excessive use of deductions, shelters and other tax breaks. It was thus supposed to hit multimillionaires and billionaires whose tax shelters reduce their tax bills to a pittance relative to their incomes. In the absence of comprehensive reform, the A.M.T. will continue, for the most part, to allow the highest-end taxpayers to escape, while still afflicting many taxpayers below those lofty levels.

Paul Krugman: Japan Steps Out

For three years economic policy throughout the advanced world has been paralyzed, despite high unemployment, by a dismal orthodoxy. Every suggestion of action to create jobs has been shot down with warnings of dire consequences. If we spend more, the Very Serious People say, the bond markets will punish us. If we print more money, inflation will soar. Nothing should be done because nothing can be done, except ever harsher austerity, which will someday, somehow, be rewarded.

But now it seems that one major nation is breaking ranks – and that nation is, of all places, Japan.

This isn’t the maverick we were looking for. In Japan governments come and governments go, but nothing ever seems to change – indeed, Shinzo Abe, the new prime minister, has had the job before, and his party’s victory was widely seen as the return of the “dinosaurs” who misruled the country for decades. Furthermore, Japan, with its huge government debt and aging population, was supposed to have even less room for maneuver than other advanced countries.

Glenn Greenwald: The US, Saudi Arabia, Propaganda and Tyranny in the Middle East

The most significant problem in political discourse is not that people embrace destructive beliefs after issues are rationally debated. It’s that the potency of propaganda, by design, often precludes such debates from taking place. Consider how often one hears the claim that the US is committed to spreading democracy and opposing tyranny in the Middle East in light of this fact from a New York Review of Books article by Hugh Eakin reviewing three new books on Saudi Arabia (via As’ad AbuKhalil):

   “The US does more trade – overwhelmingly in oil and weapons – with Saudi Arabia than any other country in the Middle East, including Israel, and depends on close Saudi cooperation in its counterterrorism efforts in Yemen.”

[..]

In other words, the single most repressive regime in that region is also America’s closest ally. Eakin also notes that while Saudi leaders have exploited the rhetoric of the Arab Spring to undermine leaders its dislikes (primarily in Syria and Iran), its only direct action was to send its troops into Bahrain “to stave off a popular revolt and prop up the Bahraini monarchy” and use “its influence in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the alliance of autocratic Persian Gulf states, to pull together support for the beleaguered royal houses of Morocco and Jordan.” About all of this Saudi bolstering of tyranny, Eakin says: “The White House has remained silent.”

Bill Moyers and Michael Winship: Corporate Gold on the Fiscal Cliff

In economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s book, End This Depression Now!, there’s a chapter titled “The Second Gilded Age” in which he describes the extraordinary rise in wealth and power of the very rich during this era of unregulated greed. Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the top one percent of Americans have seen their incomes increase by 275 percent. After accounting for inflation, the typical hourly wage for a worker has increased just $1.23.

Big Money, as Krugman writes in his book, buys Big Influence. And that’s why the financiers of Wall Street never truly experience regime change – their cash brings both political parties to heel. So it is that the policies that got us where we are today – in this big ditch of chronic financial depression – have done little for most, but have been very good to a few at the top.

John Nichols: Why Bernie Sanders Objects to Obama’s Treasury Nominee

Bernie Sanders campaigned, hard, for Barack Obama’s re-election.

But the independent senator from Vermont is not going to rubberstamp the president’s selection of Jack Lew, a supporter of banking deregulation who has passed back and forth through the revolving door from Wall Street to Washington, as the nation’s seventy-sixth secretary of the Treasury. [..]

One of the Senate’s most vital duties is that of providing “advice and consent” on presidential nominations. A president has broad leeway when it comes to naming members of the cabinet-arguably broader leeway than in the naming of lifetime appointees to the federal judiciary. But that leeway is not such that senators can or should simply approve every nominee. Advice should be given, and at times consent should be denied-not just by partisan foes of the sitting president but, sometimes, by allies of that president.

Dana Milbank: Obama’s Cabinet of yes men

President Obama hasn’t even begun his second term, yet already he has been ensnared by scandal.

Republicans have uncovered a shocking level of wrongdoing in the Oval Office, and I’m afraid what they say is true: The president is brazenly trying to fill his Cabinet with . . . people he likes.

Alas, the perfidy doesn’t end there. Not only is Obama naming agreeable people to his Cabinet, he is also – audaciously, flagrantly – nominating people who . . . agree with his policies. [..]

But that’s Obama’s prerogative. He won the election. The only scandal is denying him the right to choose his own advisers.  

Jan 14 2013

Krugman: The Keys to Economic Recovery

Paul Krugman Explains the Keys to Our Recovery



Transcript can be read here

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argues that saving money is not the path to economic recovery. Instead, he tells Bill, we should put aside our excessive focus on the deficit, try to overcome political recalcitrance, and spend money to put America back to work. Krugman offers specific solutions to not only end what he calls a “vast, unnecessary catastrophe,” but to do it more quickly than some imagine possible. His latest book, End This Depression Now!, is both a warning of the fiscal perils ahead and a prescription to safely avoid them.

On Pres. Obama’s choice of Jack Lew for Treasury Secretary

(W)hat the president needs right now is he needs a hardnosed negotiator. And rumor has it that’s what he’s got, so.

The president can’t pass major new legislation. He can’t formulate major new programs right now. What he has to do now is bargain down or ride over these crazy people in the Republican Party. And we what we need now is not deep thinking from the treasury secretary. If the president wants deep thinkers, he can call Joe Stiglitz, he can call other people. What he needs from the Treasury secretary is somebody who’s going to be very effective at dealing with these wild men and making sure that nothing terrible happens.

Damning praise, indeed.

Jan 13 2013

Punting the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

Up with Chris Hayes: Joining Chris will be:

Joy Reid, MSNBC Contributor and managing editor of TheGrio.com; John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia University, contributing editor at the New Republic and New York Daily News columnist; Eli Lake, senior national security reporter for Newsweek and The Daily Beast; Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of “Democracy Now!” and co-author of “The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance & Hope;” Dave Zirin, columnist for The Nation and author of “The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World;” Tara McGuinness, executive director, Center for America Progress Action Fund; and Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union.

This Week with George Stephanopolis: Guests on “This Week” are  Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI); Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN);  Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass and ABC News Global Affairs Correspondent Martha Raddatz discuss the nominations, plus the debate over Afghanistan and the latest threats from Iran.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, honorary chairs of No Labels, tackle whether both parties can ever come together in Washington.

The roundtable breaks down the domestic battles ahead, from the looming budget cliffs to the gun control debate to the fight over President Obama’s Cabinet picks, with Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman; Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan; Bloomberg News executive editor Al Hunt; “PBS NewsHour” co-anchor and senior correspondent Judy Woodruff; and David Walker, former U.S. comptroller general and founder and CEO of the Comeback America Initiative.

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer: Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Gen. (ret) Stanley McCystal; Se. John McCain (R-AZ);  Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV); Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

A panel of reporters with The Washington Post‘s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Cook Political Report‘s Amy Walter and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson.

The Chris Matthews Show: Information about this week’s guests was unavailable.

Meet the Press with David Gregory: On this Sunday’s MTP anexclusive interview with General Colin Powell (Ret.).

The roundtable weighs in: Newark’s Democratic Mayor Cory Booker; Fmr. Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS); GOP strategist Mike Murphy; and NBC’s Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: Ms. Crowley’s guests this Sunday are NRA President David Keene; Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT); Former Utah Governor and Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV).

Joining her for a panel discussion are  Congressman Elijah Cummings, Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, Jeff Zeleny from the New York Times, and Michael Scherer of Time magazine.

Jan 13 2013

What We Now Know

Up host Chris Hayes discusses what we now know since last week began, including how NFL linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest preserving his brain for scientific study. His panel guests are George Saunders, author of “Tenth of December;” Michael Chabon, author of “Telegraph Avenue” and Pulitzer Prize-winner; Victor LaValle, author of “The Devil in Silver” and Assistant Professor and Acting Fiction Director at Columbia University School of the Arts; and Ayana Mathis, author of “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.”

Seau Suffered From Brain Disease

by Mary Pilon, New York Times

The former N.F.L. linebacker Junior Seau had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma when he committed suicide in the spring, the National Institutes of Health said Thursday.

The findings were consistent with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease widely connected to athletes who have absorbed frequent blows to the head, the N.I.H. said in a statement. Seau is the latest and most prominent player to be associated with the disease, which has bedeviled football in recent years as a proliferation of studies has exposed the possible long-term cognitive impact of head injuries sustained on the field. [..]

Since C.T.E. was diagnosed in the brain of the former Eagles defensive back Andre Waters after his suicide in 2006, the disease has been found in nearly every former player whose brain was examined posthumously. (C.T.E. can be diagnosed only posthumously.)

NFL concussions lawsuit: 2,000 former players to file class action suit

PHILADELPHIA (AP) – A concussion-related lawsuit bringing together scores of cases has been filed in federal court, accusing the NFL of hiding information that linked football-related head trauma to permanent brain injuries.

Lawyers for former players say more than 80 pending lawsuits are consolidated in the “master complaint” filed Thursday in Philadelphia.

Plaintiffs hope to hold the NFL responsible for the care of players suffering from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions. Other former players remain asymptomatic, but worry about the future and want medical monitoring.

Australia Adds New Weather Map Colors for Extreme Heat

by Brooke Jarvis, Rolling Stone

Climate change is causing ‘catastrophic’ danger in much of the country

Australia is facing record-breaking temperatures in next week’s forecast – a heat wave so intense that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been forced to make new charts.

For the first time, the century-old agency’s forecast map now includes a gauge for temperatures up to 54° Celsius (129.2° Fahrenheit), complete with new colors – deep purple and hot pink – to indicate areas experiencing heat above 50°C (122°F).

Though Australia’s existing heat record, set in 1960, still stands for the moment, officials believe it may soon be surpassed. The nation’s Bureau of Meteorology has been open about the impact that rising greenhouse gases are already having there: The agency’s website declares that Australia is “experiencing rapid climate change,” including more frequent heat waves and changing rainfall patterns.

The current heat wave has produced above-average temperatures for 80 percent of the country – the nationwide average on Monday was 104 degrees Fahrenheit – and scores of wildfires. The state of New South Wales, home to Australia’s most populous city, Sydney, is facing its greatest fire danger ever, officials say. In some areas of the state, the official fire danger rating is “catastrophic.”

2012 Hottest Year On Record For Lower 48 States, NOAA Confirms

It’s official: 2012 was the warmest year on record in the lower 48 states, as the country experienced blistering spring and summer heat, tinderbox fire weather conditions amid a widespread drought, and one of the worst storms to ever strike the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), 2012 had an average temperature of 55.3°F, which eclipsed 1998, the previous record holder, by 1°F. That was just off Climate Central’s calculation in mid-December, which projected an expected value of 55.34°F, based on historical data.

The 1°F difference from 1998 is an unusually large margin, considering that annual temperature records are typically broken by just tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. In fact, the entire range between the coldest year on record, which occurred in 1917, and the previous record warm year of 1998 was just 4.2°F.

Jan 12 2013

Punting the Pundits

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Jonathan Alter: The Platinum Coin Wouldn’t Have Been Goofy to FDR

I love the trillion-dollar platinum coin solution to the debt-ceiling blackmail threat, though lots of people find it too gimmicky. They say that a serious government can’t pull stunts like that to bolster the financial system.

Oh, really? Ask Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression. The nation was in the fetal position. Almost three-quarters of the states had already closed their banks. As president-elect, Roosevelt wanted his predecessor, Herbert Hoover, to close the rest. Hoover refused, and Roosevelt signed an executive order to do so on his first day in office.

Rev. Richard L. Kilmer: President Obama, Do Not Let Your First Promise Be Your Last Deed

As President Barack Obama prepares to be inaugurated for his second term, he re-enters the Oval Office with several challenging tasks in front of him. One of the most challenging, and most important, is his unfulfilled commitment to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the first detainees being taken to Guantanamo Bay. [..]

President Obama, I urge you: Do not let your first promise be your last deed. Use your executive power to close Guantanamo Bay and once and for all, lead us out of the dark shadow of September 11th and restore our moral standing as a nation that can be a light unto others.

Charles M. Blow: [Revolutionary Language Listen closely.

That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.

And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be – a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.

These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.

Richard (RJ) Eskow: Is the US Budget ‘Wanton’ and ‘Wild?’ The IMF Says Yes, These Charts Say No

Well, there they go again. Less than a week after its chief economist apologized for wrongly imposing austerity on European nations — hey, sorry about that, unemployed millions! — the International Monetary Fund is misleading another country into the miasma of austerity economics: ours.[..]

The IMF report calls us “profligate” because we’re imbalanced between the amount of money our government collects and the amount it spends. But, as Howard Schneider notes in the Washington Post, Denmark offers much better social benefits than the U.S. and isn’t called “profligate” because it collects the revenues to pay for it.

At this rate, only concerted action can stop the trend toward more of the same austerity madness that has wounded Europe — and us — thanks to the misguided guidance we keep receiving from institutions like the IMF — which will no doubt ‘apologize’ for this absurd report someday too — long after the damage has been done.

New York Times Editorial: Senator Reid Takes Fresh Aim

During a tight re-election campaign in 2010, when the vote of gun owners was crucial, Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader of the Senate, not only showed his prowess with a 12-gauge shotgun – hitting two clay pigeons from the air – but also invited Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, as his guest for the opening of a new shooting range in Searchlight, Nev. Mr. Reid, a former policeman, eagerly displayed his sportsman’s enthusiasm to the voters. [..]

Mr. Reid must be held to nothing less as his friends in the N.R.A. mount their ferocious campaign against effective reform. A significant part of the gun lobby’s supporters on Capitol Hill are Democrats. As their leader, Harry Reid will be crucial in making genuine change happen, and he will share the blame if it does not.

Gail Collins: The Flu. Who Knew?

Everybody is talking about the flu. Never have I seen so many people trying to open doorknobs with their elbows. “Epidemic spurs rush to hospitals,” announced The New York Post under a “Flu York” front-page headline. A financial Web site offered a list of undervalued stocks in the funeral service industry. The mayor of Boston declared a public health emergency. Google Flu Trends painted a map of the country in deep red and inspired a raft of terrifying predictions. (“Outbreak could be the worst on record.”)

It’s hard to tell the extent of a flu outbreak because most of the victims just snivel away unhappily in the privacy of their own homes. The Google site solves this problem by tracking the number of times people search for flu-related terms online. Does this make sense to you, people? If we could determine what was going on in the world by the most popular searches, wouldn’t the universe be run by mischievous kittens and Kate Middleton?

Jan 11 2013

Punting the Pundits

“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”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman; Coins Against Crazies

It’s crucial to understand three things about this situation. First, raising the debt ceiling wouldn’t grant the president any new powers; every dollar he spent would still have to be approved by Congress. Second, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the president will be forced to break the law, one way or another; either he borrows funds in defiance of Congress, or he fails to spend money Congress has told him to spend.

Finally, just consider the vileness of that G.O.P. threat. If we were to hit the debt ceiling, the U.S. government would end up defaulting on many of its obligations. This would have disastrous effects on financial markets, the economy, and our standing in the world. Yet Republicans are threatening to trigger this disaster unless they get spending cuts that they weren’t able to enact through normal, Constitutional means. [..]

Or, best of all, there might be enough sane Republicans that the party will blink and stop making destructive threats.

Unless this last possibility materializes, however, it’s the president’s duty to do whatever it takes, no matter how offbeat or silly it may sound, to defuse this hostage situation. Mint that coin!

New York Times Editorial: America’s Health Disadvantage

It is no secret that the United States spends a lot more on health care than any other country yet ranks far behind other advanced nations in keeping its citizens healthy. This has been well documented in studies of older people and of newborn infants. It is now shockingly clear that poor health is a much broader and deeper problem than past studies have suggested.

An authoritative report issued by the Institute of Medicine this week found that, on average, Americans experience higher rates of disease and injury and die sooner than people in other high-income countries. That is true at all ages between birth and 75 and for even well-off Americans who mistakenly think that top-tier medical care ensures that they will remain in good health. The study found that even upper-income Americans with health insurance and college educations appear to be sicker than their peers in other rich nations.

Rep. Keith Ellison: Cut Oil Subsidies, Not Jobs

Last week, I said that if Congress has to make cuts, we should embrace the idea of ridding ourselves of wasteful giveaways to the fossil fuel industry. Here’s an idea. Let’s cut the Master Limited Partnership loophole and fossil fuel subsidies.

The Master Limited Partnership is an obscure but harmful multibillion dollar loophole that allows fossil fuel companies to avoid all income taxes on transportation or processing of fossil fuels — things like oil pipelines. [..]

The Master Limited Partnership is just one example of the billions of dollars in handouts that polluters get from Congress. [..]

It’s time for Republicans in Congress to put their money where their mouth is. Middle class families should not be forced to scrape by with less while oil companies get away with more. Any cuts we make should reflect our priorities and needs as a country. Rather than cutting important lifelines like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, let’s cut corporate tax loopholes. The five largest oil companies made more than $1 trillion in profits in the last decade. They don’t need our help.

Ray McGovern: Excusing Torture, Again

Would-be tough guys like former CIA torturer-in-chief José A. Rodriguez Jr. brag that “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists – or doing what the rest of us would call “torturing” – has made Americans safer by eliciting tidbits of information that advanced the search for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Rodriguez makes this case again in the Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section in the context of the new “hunt-for-bin-Laden” movie, “Zero Dark Thirty,” though Rodriguez still disdains the word “torture.” He’s back playing the George W. Bush-era word game that waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other calculated pain inflicted on detainees in the CIA’s custody weren’t really “torture.” [..]

Yet, while quibbling with some details of the movie and its gory depiction of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rodriguez largely agrees with the film’s suggestion that the harsh tactics played a key role in getting the CIA on the trail of bin Laden’s courier who eventually led Seal Team 6 to bin Laden’s hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan. [..]

But others familiar with the chronology of events dispute that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were responsible for any significant breaks in the case. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Carl Levin, chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Service Committee respectively, have asserted that “The original lead information had no connection to CIA detainees” and a detainee in CIA custody who did provide information on bin Laden’s courier “did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

Eugene Robinson: Is It Hot Enough for You?

All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?

Apparently not. The climate change denialists-especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course-have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.

Robert Reich: Debt Ceiling and Guns: Using Presidential Authority to the Fullest

Anyone who thinks congressional Republicans will roll over on the debt ceiling or gun control or other pending hot-button issues hasn’t been paying attention.

But the president can use certain tools that come with his office — responsibilities enshrined in the Constitution and in his capacity as the nation’s chief law-enforcer — to achieve some of his objectives. [..]

But it’s a fair argument that when the nation is jeopardized — whether in danger of defaulting on its debts or succumbing to mass violence — a president is justified in using his authority to the fullest.

The mere threat of taking such actions — using the president’s executive authority to pay the nation’s bills or broadly interpret gun laws already on the books — could be useful in pending negotiations with congressional Republicans.

Jan 11 2013

You’re On Your Own, Dick

President Barack Obama signed the 2012 Presidential Protection Act which restored lifetime Secret Service Protection to former presidents and their spouses.

The measure Obama signed Thursday applies to presidents elected after Jan. 1, 1997, specifically Obama and former President George W. Bush. It reverses a 1994 law that ended Secret Service protection 10 years after a president leaves office. Under that law, the Homeland Security secretary could extend such protection on a temporary basis.

However, Secret Service protection for the vice president, his/her spouse and dependent children under age 16 remains unchanged.

(8) Former Vice Presidents, their spouses, and their children who are under 16 years of age, for a period of not more than six months after the date the former Vice President leaves office. The Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to direct the Secret Service to provide temporary protection for any of these individuals at any time thereafter if the Secretary of Homeland Security or designee determines that information or conditions warrant such protection.

I’m fairly certain that former Vice Pres. Dick Cheney is secure in his man sized safe under the sculpture near the entrance to the CIA in Langley, VA.

CIA Hq Kryptos Sculpture

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