Tag: ek Politics

Dallas, we have a problem.

How to Cut Megabanks Down to Size

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: January 19, 2013

On Wednesday, in a speech in Washington, Mr. (Richard W.) Fisher (the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas) laid out a compelling proposal for shrinking financial giants in order to protect taxpayers. He suggested that megabanks be chopped into pieces, so that no one of them could endanger the financial system if it ran into trouble.

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Why? Mr. Fisher argued that megabanks not only threaten taxpayers with bailouts, but that their continuing failure to lend is also thwarting the Fed’s efforts to jump-start the economy by keeping interest rates low. “I submit that these institutions, as a result of their privileged status, exact an unfair tax upon the American people,” he told his audience. “Moreover, they interfere with the transmission of monetary policy and inhibit the advancement of our nation’s economic prosperity.”

Smaller institutions, by contrast, have continued to lend in the post-crisis years, especially to the kinds of modest-size businesses that create so many jobs across the country. According to figures compiled by Mr. Fisher’s colleagues at the Dallas Fed, community banks – defined as those with no more than $10 billion in assets – hold less than one-fifth of the nation’s banking assets. Nevertheless, they hold more than half of the industry’s small-business loans.

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There are roughly 5,600 commercial banking institutions in the country, Mr. Fisher noted. Some 5,500 of them are community banks. While these organizations account for 98.6 percent of all banks, they hold only 12 percent of total industry assets. They are routinely allowed to fail if they get into trouble. Few of them did during the crisis.

Contrast these figures with those of the nation’s 12 largest banks, whose assets range from $250 billion to $2.3 trillion. They account for 0.2 percent of all banks but hold 69 percent of industry assets. These are the banks that enjoy all the perquisites of the federal safety net: significantly lower borrowing costs and a taxpayer backstop, for example.

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Understanding that it will be a tough battle to break up the megabanks, Mr. Fisher suggests that in the meantime, only commercial banking operations receive protection from the federal safety net in the form of federal deposit insurance. An institution’s other activities – securities trading, insurance operations and real estate, for example – should fall outside any backstop. Furthermore, he recommends that these banks require customers and trading partners to sign an agreement stating that they understand the business they are conducting is not covered by any federal protection or guarantees. That would begin to reduce the perception that all of these institutions’ counterparties would be protected in a disaster.

Part 213-

Why Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was a nightmare waiting to happen

Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

Friday 18 January 2013 11.51 EST

The 787 was pitched as the airline of the future – a revolutionary plane that that would use new technology to bring aircraft design into the 21st century. The Dreamliner is made of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic composite. More radically still, pneumatic and hydraulic systems have been ditched for electric systems.

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Outsourcing parts led to three years of delays. Parts didn’t fit together properly. Shims used to bridge small parts weren’t attached correctly. Many aircraft had to have their tails extensively reworked. The company ended up buying some suppliers, to take their business back in house. All new projects, especially ones as ambitious as the Dreamliner, face teething issues but the 787’s woes continued to mount. Unions blame the company’s reliance on outsourcing.

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Arguably, it is not just Boeing’s fault that the Dreamliner wasn’t ready. Boeing is a powerful force in Washington.

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(T)he Dreamliner was passed under a very compressed schedule, said Mann. “And there was an electrical failure and an emergency landing during the test-flight programme,” he said. “That was blamed on a ‘foreign object’.”

Mann said the FAA’s mandate changed under administrator Marion Blakey, appointed by president George W Bush in 2008 as Boeing was working on the Dreamliner. “Blakey saw the FAA as a ‘customer services organisation,'” said Mann. The FAA was working with the airlines to cut regulation, not to impose it, he said.

Fed official alleges Geithner may have alerted banks to rate cut

By Alister Bull, Reuters

Sat Jan 19, 2013 1:28am EST

In the summer of 2007, as storm clouds gathered over the world’s financial system, then-New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner allegedly informed the Bank of America and other banks about the possibility the U.S. central bank would lower one of its critical interest rates, according to a senior Fed official.

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According to transcripts of the call released by the Fed on Friday, Geithner at the time denied that banks knew the Fed was considering cutting the discount rate.

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Private disclosure of confidential, market-sensitive information by the central bank would be highly unusual, but it was not immediately clear if it would be illegal. It also was not clear if strict Fed internal rules governing confidential information would have been breached, or whether any internal or external investigation was mounted.

Not that I expect an orange jumpsuit, but clearly there should be (h/t Atrios).

When Real Interest Rates Are Negative, Taxing Is More Costly Than Borrowing

By Matthew Yglesias, Slate

Posted Friday, Jan. 18, 2013, at 1:15 PM ET

A good article about public policy ought to be making some kind of non-obvious point about the world in order to get people to think about things differently. Simply responding by saying that the suggestion sounds funny is absurd.

You don’t say.

Let’s break this down. You’re the mayor of a city. A storm strikes and ruins a whole bunch of your police cars. Now you need to buy new ones. You have two options for paying for the cars-you can borrow the money and pay the bill ten years from now, or you can raise taxes and pay right now. The case for paying later is pretty clear. In ten years’ time your city’s overall economic output will be higher so the burden of paying off the loan then will be lessened. On the other hand, the case for paying now is also pretty clear-lenders generally expect interest payments in exchange for their loans so the total cost of the debt option is higher. But wait! The city’s accountants show up and point out that it’s currently possible for the city to borrow at a negative real rate. Suddenly the interest costs are off the table as a reason to prefer paying sooner.

So what’s left? Nothing. The city will be richer in ten years, so pay then. The logic becomes especially compelling when you recognize that the city’s income will grow more rapidly under the lower-tax regime that encourages more investment in residential and commercial property and more business activity.

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Perhaps Linker and I disagree about what kind of reductions in Medicare and Medicaid spending would be optimal, but I have no disagreement that they should be reduced to below their currently projected levels. That said, under any scenario the government is going to be spending money in 2013. The question on the table was should we finance that spending with taxes or should be finance it with borrowing. My view is that with real interest rates below zero, it makes sense to tax less and borrow more. This has literally no relationship to my view about the appropriate level of future government spending.

Moron.

Hat tip Dr. Duncan Black formerly of the London School of Economics, the Université catholique de Louvain, the University of California, Irvine, and, most recently, Bryn Mawr College.

Grown-Ups

It’s funny how the issues changes but the language stays the same. Liberals, in being perfectly right about many things, are silly and irresponsible children.

Well I’m still kind of unhappy that dday has left the building just as I was with Valtin, but his replacement DSWright has highlighted an interesting dichotomy.

Democratic Party Divided As Obama Inauguration Approaches

By: DSWright, Firedog Lake

Friday January 18, 2013 6:47 am

The Democratic Party has always prided itself on having a “big tent.” But representing a diversity of interests is different than representing conflicting interests. As President Obama’s Second Inauguration approaches the divisions within the Democratic Party over wealth inequality and social justice are boiling to the surface.

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Calling the DLC “center-left” is a bit of a misnomer. The correct division is between Corporate Liberals and progressives. Those that genuinely believe (or are paid to genuinely believe) that the growth of Corporate Power in American society is not only a positive development but necessary for progress. On the other side are the progressives who believe the power of capital – particularly finance capital – has grown to the point of suffocating democracy and the possibility for progress. No easy divide to bridge.

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In no debate is this divide more clear than on entitlements where Corporate Liberals have decided to swallow right-wing talking points whole despite all evidence to the contrary. They also have, to an embarrassing degree, embraced Wall Street’s worldview on debt. After bailing out the banks – making private debts public debts – the Corporate Liberals have sided with the Republicans to now extract debt payments from the lower classes to pay off that odious debt.

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And of course the Corporate Liberals’ biggest blind spot, (is) the environment. Despite lofty goals and rhetoric climate change remains unaddressed in any meaningful way. By his own metric Obama has failed on one of the biggest issues of his time.

It will be interesting to see how this divide plays out for the remainder of Obama’s presidency. Neither side of the divide has a compelling reason to lay down.

Justice is not Law, Law is Not Justice

by Ian Welsh

2013 January 16

A law is deserving of respect to the extent, and only to the extent, it is just.  A law which is not just deserves only the level of obedience one gives to any group or individual who says “do this, or I’ll hurt you.”  That is, to the extent that you believe their threat is credible, you may choose to obey to avoid the adverse effects of being caught disobeying.

The recent imbroglio over Aaron Swartz has seen a lot of people using the word “proportionality”. It does not matter if someone is guilty of a crime if the punishment is disproportionate.  In England the penalty for stealing a chicken, at one point, was death or being sent to a penal colony (Australia).  Juries started refusing to convict people even in the face of incontrovertible evidence of the accused’s guilt.  The sentencing had to be changed: stealing was no(t) made legal, rather the penalty was reduced.

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Full trials, and the full protection of the law, such as it remains, now belongs only to those who are very wealthy, and sometimes not even to them.  Defending a trial can take hundreds of thousand or millions of dollars.  An ordinary person cannot afford it.  Public defenders are overworked, underfunded, and generally plead out.  This is on top of the fact that most rich criminals, such as the bankers who committed widespread fraud, are never charged with crimes, and if they are charged are allowed to settle with a token payment which immunizes them from further charges for their criminal acts, acts which demonstrably cost hundreds of thousands of people their houses, lost people their jobs, and even their lives.  Law which is enforced only against some classes of people, and not against others, is unjust.

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A social system only works if there are people willing to carry it out. The USSR collapsed when the people running it were unwilling to call out the army.  That same class of people, in the Prague Spring, did call the army out.  It collapsed because the factory workers weren’t working, the farmers weren’t farming, and so on.

The US legal system (it does not deserve to be called a justice system) works because people carry out its dictates.  The people who run the prisons put up with, or even encourage the rapes.  Private companies make money from prisoners, so need more prisons. The police make huge amounts of money by seizing the assets of “criminals” before they are even convicted.  The judges put up with the 3 strikes laws and mandated sentencing.  They allow trials to be put back and back rather than throwing them out due to lack of a speedy trial.  Everyone get onside with plea bargaining.  The rich are good with this because they either get a real trial, or they don’t get charged at all.  The middle class think that if they’re “good” they’ll be ok, till they find out otherwise, and the poor put up with it because of a boot in the face and much more.

The principles of fixing the system (never use the word reform, it means making things better for the rich and worse for everyone else) are simple enough.  No secret evidence.  No secret laws.  No secret interpretations of law. No tolerance of rape in prison.  Nobody gets plead out if the plead involves doing jail time or becoming a felon.  No criminal record checks for jobs which don’t really really need them, so that prisoners can  reintegrate into society.  End civil forfeiture.  Allow no private defense attorneys, everyone uses a public defender including the rich, and the defenders are drawn by lot (they will be very well funded very quickly, and they will be the best lawyers in the country.)   All this will make enforcing current laws impossible with the current budgets Fine. Give judges back discretion, remove three strike laws and overly harsh sentencing, repeal virtually all prohibition laws for most classes of drugs.  Stop sending people to jail for IP offenses, and create an economy which gives poor people real jobs.

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There is no justice without proportionality, no justice in a land with secret laws, no justice in a country where the rich skate and the poor plead out.  There is only law, the same law the Stasi proclaimed: do what we say or else.

Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse

Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian

Wednesday 16 January 2013 06.40 EST

Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it’s common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That’s a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz – Massachusetts’ US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann – the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that – two days before the 26-year-old activist killed himself on Friday – federal prosecutors again rejected a plea bargain offer from Swartz’s lawyers that would have kept him out of prison. They instead demanded that he “would need to plead guilty to every count” and made clear that “the government would insist on prison time”. That made a trial on all 15 felony counts – with the threat of a lengthy prison sentence if convicted – a virtual inevitability.

Just three months ago, Ortiz’s office, as TechDirt reported, severely escalated the already-excessive four-felony-count indictment by adding nine new felony counts, each of which “carrie(d) the possibility of a fine and imprisonment of up to 10-20 years per felony”, meaning “the sentence could conceivably total 50+ years and (a) fine in the area of $4 million.” That meant, as Think Progress documented, that Swartz faced “a more severe prison term than killers, slave dealers and bank robbers”.

Swartz’s girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, told the WSJ that the case had drained all of his money and he could not afford to pay for a trial. At Swartz’s funeral in Chicago on Tuesday, his father flatly stated that his son “was killed by the government”.

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(A)s CNET’s Declan McCullagh detailed in a comprehensive article this morning, it is Ortiz who “has now found herself in an unusual – and uncomfortable – position: as the target of an investigation instead of the initiator of one.” And that’s exactly as it should be given that, as he documents, there is little question that her office sought to make an example out of Swartz for improper and careerist benefits. Swartz “was enhancing the careers of a group of career prosecutors and a very ambitious – politically-ambitious – U.S. attorney who loves to have her name in lights,” the Cambridge criminal lawyer Harvey Silverglate told McCullagh. Swartz’s lawyer said that Heymann “was going to receive press and he was going to be a tough guy and read his name in the newspaper.”

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Ortiz and Heymann continue to refuse to speak publicly about what they did in this case – at least officially. Yesterday, Ortiz’s husband, IBM Corp executive Thomas J. Dolan, took to Twitter and – without identifying himself as the US Attorney’s husband – defended the prosecutors’ actions in response to prominent critics, and even harshly criticized the Swartz family for assigning blame to prosecutors: “Truly incredible in their own son’s obit they blame others for his death”, Ortiz’s husband wrote. Once Dolan’s identity was discovered, he received assertive criticism and then sheepishly deleted his Twitter account.

Clearly, the politically ambitious Ortiz – who was touted just last month by the Boston Globe as a possible Democratic candidate for governor – is feeling serious heat as a result of rising fury over her office’s wildly overzealous pursuit of Swartz. The same is true of Heymann, whose father was Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration and who has tried to forge his own reputation as a tough-guy prosecutor who takes particular aim at hackers.

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The US has become a society in which political and financial elites systematically evade accountability for their bad acts, no matter how destructive. Those who torture, illegally eavesdrop, commit systemic financial fraud, even launder money for designated terrorists and drug dealers are all protected from criminal liability, while those who are powerless – or especially, as in Swartz’s case, those who challenge power – are mercilessly punished for trivial transgressions. All one has to do to see that this is true is to contrast the incredible leniency given by Ortiz’s office to large companies and executives accused of serious crimes with the indescribably excessive pursuit of Swartz.

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In most of what I’ve written and spoken about over the past several years, this is probably the overarching point: the abuse of state power, the systematic violation of civil liberties, is about creating a Climate of Fear, one that is geared toward entrenching the power and position of elites by intimidating the rest of society from meaningful challenges and dissent. There is a particular overzealousness when it comes to internet activism because the internet is one of the few weapons – perhaps the only one – that can be effectively harnessed to galvanize movements and challenge the prevailing order. That’s why so much effort is devoted to destroying the ability to use it anonymously – the Surveillance State – and why there is so much effort to punishing as virtual Terrorists anyone like Swartz who uses it for political activism or dissent.

The law and prosecutorial power should not be abused to crush and destroy those who commit the “crime” of engaging in activism and dissent against the acts of elites.

With noted Villager Idiots Peggy Noonan, Al Hunt, Judy Woodruff, David Walker, and George Stephanopoulos.

What did you think would happen when you voted for the lesser evil?

Web exclusive content-

Transcript.

Jon Stewart doubling down on his personal ignorance-

Ok, I’ll stop blaming your writers and just blame you.  You’re a moron.  The one ruining their brand is you.

Not that I don’t have some nits to pick with Herr Doktor Professor who so intimidates you that you won’t even have him on your show.

Coward.

Normally Jon Stewart and his writers are reasonably good at lampooning current events and especially the media that covers them, but occassionally they fail.

Now normally it’s something stupid and petty like his inside comic interviews that make no sense at all, or more seriously his letting big ‘gets’ weasel away from the tough questions, especially his pet beltway ‘friends of the show’.

His blessedly rare independent editorializing is dreadful because he’s always going for the false equivalence of liberals and conservatives, a meme he constantly lambastes in others.

Thursday he displayed his and his writers’ mind boggling ignorance of Economics 101-

Herr Doktor Professor–

Stewart seems weirdly unaware that there’s more to fiscal policy than balancing the budget. But in this case he also seems unaware that the president can’t just decide unilaterally to spend 40 percent less; he’s constitutionally obliged to spend what the law tells him to spend. True, he’s also constitutionally prohibited from borrowing more if Congress says he can’t – which is a contradiction. But that’s the whole point of the discussion.

And it makes no sense at all to talk about any of this without the context of extortion and confrontation.

Above all, however, what went wrong here is a lack of professionalism on the part of Stewart and his staff. Yes, it’s a comedy show – but the jokes are supposed to be (and usually are) knowing jokes, which are funny and powerful precisely because the Daily Show people have done their homework and understand the real issues better than the alleged leaders spouting nonsense. In this case, however, it’s obvious that nobody at TDS spent even a few minutes researching the topic. It was just yuk-yuk-yuk they’re talking about a trillion-dollar con hahaha.

Hey, if we want this kind of intellectual laziness, we can just tune in to Fox.

Just because I like you most of the time doesn’t mean you get a pass.  Which goes for Krugman too.

    You’re immature, Fielding.

    How am I immature?

    Well, emotionally, sexually, and intellectually.

    Yeah, but what other ways?

How dumb do you have to be to write for Forbes?

Experts Agree: U.S. May Become A ‘Simpsons’ Episode And Need Platinum Coins Or IOUs

Abram Brown, Forbes Staff

1/10/2013 @ 11:32AM

If the Treasury did mint that $1 trillion platinum coin, depositing it at the Federal Reserve would allow it to keep paying the bills, says Donald Marron, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. The Fed would book $1 trillion, just as it would book 25 cents if the Treasury sent a quarter instead.

Marron quickly concedes the mind-boggling nature of a $1 trillion coin, which would weigh more than 43 million pounds and occupy roughly 32,000 cubic foot (assuming about $1,600 a troy ounce of platinum): “Minting a trillion-dollar coin sounds like the plot of a Simpsons episode or an Austin Powers sequel. It lacks dignity.” For perspective, the coin would weigh as much as 100 Statues of Liberty; America’s copper-cast leading lady weighs in at 450,000 pounds.

Too dumb, it seems, to have passed even a High School “Introduction to Economics” class.

Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given socio-economic context or country.

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(N)early all contemporary money systems are based on fiat money. Fiat money, like any check or note of debt, is without intrinsic use value as a physical commodity. It derives its value by being declared by a government to be legal tender; that is, it must be accepted as a form of payment within the boundaries of the country, for “all debts, public and private”. Such laws in practice cause fiat money to acquire the value of any of the goods and services that it may be traded for within the nation that issues it.

The money supply of a country consists of currency (banknotes and coins) and bank money (the balance held in checking accounts and savings accounts). Bank money, which consists only of records (mostly computerized in modern banking), forms by far the largest part of the money supply in developed nations.

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Fiat money or fiat currency is money whose value is not derived from any intrinsic value or guarantee that it can be converted into a valuable commodity (such as gold). Instead, it has value only by government order (fiat). Usually, the government declares the fiat currency (typically notes and coins from a central bank, such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.) to be legal tender, making it unlawful to not accept the fiat currency as a means of repayment for all debts, public and private.

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One of the last countries to break away from the gold standard was the United States in 1971.

No country anywhere in the world today has an enforceable gold standard or silver standard currency system.

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Commercial bank money is created through fractional-reserve banking, the banking practice where banks keep only a fraction of their deposits in reserve (as cash and other highly liquid assets) and lend out the remainder, while maintaining the simultaneous obligation to redeem all these deposits upon demand. Commercial bank money differs from commodity and fiat money in two ways, firstly it is non-physical, as its existence is only reflected in the account ledgers of banks and other financial institutions, and secondly, there is some element of risk that the claim will not be fulfilled if the financial institution becomes insolvent. The process of fractional-reserve banking has a cumulative effect of money creation by commercial banks, as it expands money supply (cash and demand deposits) beyond what it would otherwise be. Because of the prevalence of fractional reserve banking, the broad money supply of most countries is a multiple larger than the amount of base money created by the country’s central bank. That multiple (called the money multiplier) is determined by the reserve requirement or other financial ratio requirements imposed by financial regulators.

Or, indeed, to have learned how to use Wikipedia.  This level of dumb applies to “economists” who are directors of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center too.

Investopedia–

Metals also have a market value; silver and gold, for example are traded daily. Other metals also have value and a new breed of investors is emerging: the coin hoarder.

All American coins are made from a variety of base metals. Prior to 1965, dimes and quarters were made primarily of silver, until the soaring cost of silver forced the United States Mint to change the composition of the coins to a cheaper alloy. Prior to 1982, pennies were composed of 95% copper, until lower-cost zinc replaced a substantial amount of it. Nickels are still composed of 25% nickel and 75% copper. As the underlying values of the metals rise, the coins become theoretically more valuable. At today’s prices for copper and nickel, a five-cent piece is worth almost seven cents. There’s a catch, however. Since 2006, it has been illegal to melt down pennies and nickels.

NO circulating United States coin, save for those with minimal face value intended for trade as bullion, EXCEPT for pre-1982 pennies and all nickles has a commodity value as metal greater than its face value as currency.  This difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it is called Seigniorage.

So, unless you want to be laughed at as some ignorant wacko destined to die under a pile of used coffee grounds and old newspapers, please don’t let this fallacy enter your conversation even though you are an “economist” who is a director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center or a columnist for a major “financial” publication.

It makes people wonder if you got your job through nepotism and inbreeding.

Now the thing that’s always bothered me about this film is how does Dr. Taylor deal with the fact that removing her from her own time line with no warning or explanation whatever, the kind of granny-killing paradox that we’re told so often will totally destroy the universe as we know it by making a mockery of causality or some such HAS ABSOLUTELY NO EFFECT AT ALL!

I mean, she doesn’t have a cat or something?

But I like to deliver good news on occasion and we seem to have some from the Great White North.

Stranded killer whales break free from Hudson Bay ice

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, The Guardian

Thursday 10 January 2013 12.17 EST

A dozen killer whales, trapped and facing near-certain death in the frozen expanse of Canada’s Hudson Bay, broke free on Thursday morning, to the vast relief of locals and many thousands monitoring their plight online.

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“They are free, they are gone,” Johnny Williams, the town manager, said in a telephone interview. “Last night, the winds shifted from the north. The ice cracked and with the new moon, the ice went. We have open waters on the coastline of Hudson Bay.”

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Had the weather not intervened, it is likely the whales would have suffocated beneath the sea ice, or endured slow starvation until the break-up of the ice next May.

So, good news right?

Stranding of killer whales in Arctic ice is relatively unheard of. Williams, who is 69, said in his lifetime he had only ever seen two or three carcasses of orcas before this week.

But marine biologists say killer whales are moving into the Arctic in greater numbers over the last decade as the sea ice retreats due to climate change.

Orcas face no natural predators in the Arctic, putting them at the top of the food chain.

The whales spend the summers in the Arctic, feasting on seals and narwhal and beluga whales. By the time the ice freezes, in November or December, they are miles away. A killer whale once tagged near Baffin Island had made it as far as the Azores by winter.

This year, however, the freeze came later, after the new year, and the whales were trapped.

Hmm…  And then there’s this-

Ice breakers, as demanded by the mayor of Inukjuak, were too far away from the remote region.

What could be more pristine and clean than some good old Arctic crude?

In the event, however, nature took its course, freeing the whales before the list of bad options had to be explored.

“I am just very glad,” said Megan Epoo, whose elderly uncle was the hunter who originally spotted the stranded whales. “The men here had announced they were going to try and make the breathing hole bigger, and remove the ice from the side of the hole, and that would have been very dangerous. So we were all very worried that something bad would happen,” she said.

“But now nobody has to do anything because the whales are free.”

Yay us, I guess.

Here’s the video the authorities in Inukjuak posted Wednesday to attract some government attention to the whale’s plight.