Tag: ek Politics

Promises fall short, Keystone XL pipeline’s foes say

Keystone projections don’t match revenue reality for counties

Cody Winchester, Sioux Falls Argus Leader

11:51 PM, Nov. 19, 2011

When TransCanada was pushing to build an oil pipeline in eastern South Dakota back in 2007, the company’s marketing strategy included newspaper ads that promised counties along the route more than $9 million in tax revenue.

But four years later, in the pipeline’s first year of operation, tax records show that the 10 counties crossed by the Keystone oil pipeline received just one-third of this amount.

…

(F)or fiscal 2010 taxes collected this year, the company paid only $2.95 million to counties and school districts, according to figures provided by county auditors and treasurers. This does not count tax revenue TransCanada paid directly to the state, some of which was refunded under an incentive program for large projects.

A look at what TransCanada promised selected counties in estimated annual tax payments and the actual tax payment in fiscal 2010:

• Marshall County: $937,804.50 promised; $286,280.98 actually paid;
• Clark County: $1,369,565,98 promised; $359,646.04 paid;
• Miner County: $1,140,855.42 promised; $391,047.39 paid;
• Hutchinson County: $1,140, 264.64 promised; $424,504.72 paid.
• Yankton County: $837,988.68 promised; $247,965.58 paid.

“That was the big sell on this, the amount that would come to our local governments,” said state Senate Minority Leader Jason Frerichs, a Democrat from Wilmot. He called the discrepancy “further evidence that there are many unanswered questions about the pipeline.”

…

Frerichs, meanwhile, has broader concerns: “If we couldn’t take their word for the property taxes … how do we know for sure they’re going to be there for the cleanup?”

So we lied.  Tough Shit.

Blaise Emerson, executive director of Black Hills Community Economic Development, has tesified in favor of Keystone XL at state and federal hearings. He said the relatively lower tax receipts from Keystone in the east does not trouble him, because taxes are only one reason to support Keystone XL.

“How I look at it, and hopefully the way most people look at it: Don’t cry over the fact that you didn’t get quite as much as you wanted,” he said. “Maybe the estimate was a little bit high, but you wouldn’t have that revenue at all if it wasn’t coming through.”

You can’t spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You fucked up… you trusted us!

If you are an economist you should be more, not less, outraged by the corruption and fraud of our financial elites.  As Matt Stoller points out, they represent market inefficiencies and introduce far greater uncertainty than mere regulation.

Matt Stoller: Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto Cracks Open the Financial Crisis

Matt Stoller, Naked Capitalism

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Our essential economic problem is that our economy allocates resources through a mediating system of banks that are broken and/or corrupt. If you look at a chart of the recession, and then the recovery, you’ll notice that business investment perked up, but residential investment did not. The Fed lowered rates, bought Treasury bonds, and bought mortgage backed securities to lower rates for homeowners. But it’s not really working, because the monetary channel is corrupt. This indictment gets to that problem, it alleges tens of thousands of forged documents (or as a friend told me sarcastically, an afternoon’s worth of work for LPS). These documents represent foreclosures, economic loss, and clouded title. The indictments handed down, and the ones to come, show that corrupting our property laws and the basis of our economy is a crime.

…

First President Bush, and then President Obama, tried to reconstruct an economic system based on a corrupted transmission mechanism from the Fed to the real economy. This was the financial crisis, it’s why abstract derivatives based on subprime mortgages knocked trillions of productive output off of the economy. Corruption is really inefficient.

…

I think it’s important to begin considering criminal justice as a core element of economic policy. I’d like to hear from Suskind, Klein, Krugman, and others just where they think allowing massive systemic fraud fits into the analysis of what went wrong. After all, Eric Holder had ample prosecutorial discretion, so none of the usual arguments about political constraints apply. Allowing the corrupt monetary channel to continue was simply a policy choice. If the under-resourced Nevada Attorney General could make such a different policy choice, then a powerful by comparison White House and Justice Department could make it as well. And this sort of show of power does not operate in a vacuum. Taking on, and taking down, corrupt members of the elite would also have exposed all sorts of fracture lines, and would likely have change the Congressional dynamics that people argue is immutable. Bank executives would have had a strong personal incentive to fix housing problems and excessive debt loads, and politicians react differently when an act is officially deemed a crime.

The demand for justice, for a society to place certain activities outside of the bounds of socially acceptable, is not just about satisfaction of the public for wrongs committed. I get the sense that fraud for most economists is considered something of a side issue, a kind of aesthetic political problem to be ignored in favor of more significant questions of stimulus and regulatory policies. This is a baffling attitude. One of my favorite financial legal bloggers, Carolyn Sissiko, has pointed out that fraud actually can have significant macro-economic impacts by distorting bank balance sheets.

…

The felony indictments from the Nevada AG’s office are the first sign that the law enforcement community can take financial crimes seriously, that blowing up the economy through financial mismanagement can carry costs. There’s a lot of research to be done on the costs of fraud, and the costs of foreclosures. We don’t know that much about these costs, because there haven’t been investigations and there isn’t a lot of good public data. After all, we mostly just take our property rights system for granted, the notion that clouded titles or a broken $10 trillion mortgage market could inhibit growth simply was not imaginable a few years ago. What is clear is that there is a deep public hunger for justice. And I suspect, that if that hunger had been satiated a few years ago and if Holder had begun handing down indictments, mortgage servicer executives would have begun a serious loan workout program.

And our economy would probably be in much better shape. When you throw your capital into the hands of people who have no incentive to use it wisely, the economy suffers. When you enforce the rule of law, sound business models prevail and ordinary citizens have more confidence in the system and spend and invest accordingly. As an economic policy, justice works.

Unfortunately many economists are not scholars or scientists or even technicians, but merely enthusiastic members of the choir of Mammon, faith based believers who ignore evidence and logic.

You see, it’s all about easing dependence on “foreign” (brown people) oil-

Canada pipeline firms sprint to end U.S. oil glut

By Anna Driver and Scott Haggett, Reuters

22 hrs ago

The companies are racing to unlock a glut of crude in the U.S. Midwest, which has built up over the year due to rising supplies from Canada and North Dakota. They aim to ship it to the Gulf Coast where it will fetch a hefty premium.

It may end a period of dramatic upheaval in the U.S. oil market that handed Midwest refiners an unexpected windfall of cheap feedstock, robbed northern producers of richer profits, revived an era of rail-oil freight, roiled airline efforts to hedge fuel costs and threatened to erode the U.S. futures contract’s preeminence as the world’s most-traded benchmark.

Lies.  It’s all about extracting more money from the pockets of the middle class.

A lot of people are conflating The Minneapolis Examiner with The National Examiner and claiming that it’s single sourced and a questionable one at that.

Bullshit.

More from Keith-

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

I am the anger, the just anger of the people, and that is why they listen to me and believe in me.

Why Tents Have Little to Do with Reason Behind Occupy Wall Street Eviction

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Tuesday November 15, 2011 11:01 am

Bloomberg’s statement on the major police operation that resulted in hundreds of arrests, including the arrest of a reporter and city councilman, who was injured, shows once again the contempt and scorn the power elite have for democracy. He claimed, “The law that created [Liberty Square] required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day. Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with, as the park has been taken over by protestors, making it unavailable to anyone else.”

Essentially, Bloomberg is saying it had become nearly impossible for someone to go down to the park and be apathetic and ignore the critique of corporate greed and impunity for Wall Street criminals, which the occupation has been making since its first days. He is suggesting that if one cannot go down to the park for their lunch break and eat in peace, without having to hear about issues of unemployment, poverty or debt, then the city has to intervene on behalf of New Yorkers that want to be able to tune out.

This is similar to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s argument against Occupy Oakland camping. “Camping is a tactic,” she stated after the second raid of Occupy Oakland on November 14. “It is one that has divided Oakland, a city of the 99 percent. It’s time to work together on the issues of unemployment, foreclosures and education cuts. While the camping must end, the movement continues.”

The notion that camping should not be allowed because it presumably “divides” the 99 percent or that it should not be allowed because it does not allow for “passive recreation” all stems from the ideology of politicians like Bloomberg or Quan. They see themselves as democracy managers. As Sheldon Wolin writes in Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, they find that one of their main functions is “to foresee the unexpected, eliminate or cope effectively with the unforeseen (“risk management,” “crisis management”); to exploit or contain change insofar as it affects his or her enterprise; and to seize opportunities and aggressively use them to advance the power advantage of the firm – and of him- or herself.”

…

(I)t is all too clear why the encampment had to go today, Tuesday, November 15. It has less to do with the presence of tents and more to do with the growing power of Occupy Wall Street.

On November 17, occupiers had planned a massive day of action to mark their two-month anniversary. They planned to hold a massive demonstration at 7 am in front of the New York Stock Exchange. They were preparing a “block party the 1 percent” would “never forget.” They said they would “shut down Wall Street.” After that, they would get on subway trains to tell the “stories of disenfranchised Americans.” The occupiers planned to march across the Brooklyn Bridge and even hold a demonstration in Foley Square at 5 pm.

The massive day of action scared Bloomberg, the NYPD and city officials. It frightened the 1%, comrades of Bloomberg. They did not want to see what would happen on November 17 because they have already suffered from this movement. They have already seen it stop banks from slapping fees on debit cards and push hundreds of thousands of people to move their money from Big Banks into credit unions. They have been paying attention to how the people are building up organization to prevent banks from foreclosing on homes. And, those on Wall Street, more than anything, tremble at the movement’s momentum because it could produce investigations that would strip them of the immunity from prosecutions that they have enjoyed since contributing to the collapse of the economy in 2008.

Police have stormed Liberty Park tonight, as part of a co-ordinated series of round-ups across the country designed to crush the Occupy Wall Street Movement.

Well, it’s not going to work.

Time to hoist the colors.

In order to affect a timely halt to deterioriating conditions, and to ensure the common good, a state of emergency is declared for these territories by decree of Lord Cutler Beckett, duly appointed representative of His Majesty, the King. By decree, according to martial law, the following statutes are temporarily amended:

• Right to assembly, suspended.
• Right to habeas corpus, suspended.
• Right to legal counsel, suspended.
• Right to verdict by a jury of peers, suspended.

By decree, all persons found guilty of piracy, or aiding a person convicted of piracy, or associating with a person convicted of piracy, shall be sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.

You will listen to me! LISTEN! The other ships will still be looking to us, to the Black Pearl, to lead, and what will they see? Frightened bilgerats aboard a derelict ship? No, no they will see free men and freedom!

So what can we do?

Well, I’ve always been an advocate of revolution in the small things.  We can make this country ungovernable and by that I mean we can simply refuse to do the things that are expected.

Why not stop spending?  My big gift this holiday season is a week’s supply of Chinese underwear, but I could skip it.  My relatives and friends (who am I kidding, my relatives) might receive a poem or picture since while my domestic skills are servicable they are hardly artistic.  Maybe a pie.

You can hardly stop going to work if you expect to get paid, but the performance standards of your bosses are a poor example that you need not exceed out of some misguided sense of loyalty or ‘team spirit’.

Deny your eyeballs.  Persistent propaganda rots your teeth as well as your brain.

You might deride my prescriptions as insufficiently dramatic, but what we have consistently seen from the overweening egos of the elite is the desire to be worshiped.

Fuck that shit.

You are Hapsburg lipped inbred morons and that I refrain from calling for pitchforks and torches or spitting in your faces as you walk the streets is a mark of the moral superiority of the “common man” over you evil rapacious twits.

You’ll run out of bullets and destroy all your wealth before you’ll break the will of people to be treated freely and fairly.

There are a lot of reasons to hate on Nancy Pelosi, but corrupt profiteering isn’t one of them.

Being an un-democratic sell out to the Corporatist Third Way is.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

If you can’t tell the difference between left and right criticisms of the Democratic Party and our elected “Representatives”…

Why, you might just be a ‘bot.

lambert has posted an interesting email from Warren Mosler, one of the advocates of Modern Monetary Theory.

It must be impossibile for the Fed to create inflation

lambert, Corrente

Sun, 11/13/2011 – 3:33pm

Hardly an hour goes by without some pundit pushing the possibility of some kind of run away inflation, with Zimbabwe and Wiemar rolling off the tongues of ordinary Americans everywhere. And Congressman and candidates of all persuasions continuously lambaste the Fed for debasing the currency.

…

For all practical purposes the Fed has done it all. And yet unemployment remains at depression levels of over 9% (and over 16% the way it used to be calculated not long ago) and the only thing keeping what’s called ‘inflation’ over 1% is a foreign monopolist supporting the price of crude oil.

So if inflation is this ominously lurking around every corner that requires eternal vigilance to keep from suddenly rearing it’s ugly head, why have all the Fed’s horses and all the Fed’s men not be able to inflate again? And why would anyone still think they can? I mean, we’re talking about college graduates with advance degrees and resources and power up the gazoo doing everything they can to reflate, and still failing after 3 long years? Not to mention the same in Japan for going on 20 years, where they have college grads with advanced degrees as well (though pretty much from the same schools).

Maybe this inflation thing is harder to get going than it looks? And what did go on in the German Wiemar republic, where if you parked a wheelbarrow full of money thieves would take the wheelbarrow and leave the money? Turns out it was those pesky war reparations that caused govt. deficit spending to soar to something like 50% of GDP annually, with most of that whopping deficit spending used to sell the German currency and buy foreign currency to pay their war reparations. As expected, that drove their currency down the rat hole in short order, and kept driving it down, causing that famous bout of hyper inflation that didn’t end until that policy ended. And when all that ended and policy changed the inflation stopped dead in its tracks. In one day. So how about Zimbabwe? Turns out they had a tad of civil unrest that dropped their productive capacity by about 80%, but govt. spending stayed high and too much spending power with too few goods and services for sale drove prices through the roof. Not to mention rumors of insiders using the local currency to buy foreign currencies for personal gain (sound familiar).

Applying this to the US to replicate the Wiemar inflation Congress would have to increase the deficit to about $8 trillion a year and then sell those dollars continuously in the market place, using them to buy the likes of yen, euro, and pounds. And replicating Zimbabwe would mean some kind of disaster that wiped out 80% of our real productive capacity and then continuing to spend federal dollars as if that never happened.

…

What all this tells me is that run away inflation, whatever that might mean, isn’t something hiding around every corner waiting to pounce. In fact, it takes a lot of work to get there, and not from the Fed, but from Congress. And not just what we’d call high levels of deficit spending, but ultra high levels of deficit spending.

I have no fear whatsoever of the Fed causing inflation. In fact, theory and evidence tells me their tools more likely work in reverse, due to the interest income channels. That’s because when they lower rates, they are working to remove net interest income from the private sector, and when they buy US Treasury securities (aka QE/ quantitative easing) they remove even more interest income from the economy. Remember that $79 billion in QE portfolio profits the Fed turned over to the Treasury last year? Those dollars would have otherwise remained in the economy.

So what’s the fundamental difference between what the Fed and can do and what Congress can do? The Fed can’t create net financial assets because they only buy, loan, and otherwise traffic in financial assets. Buying a bond or any other security only exchanges one financial asset for another and therefore doesn’t change the nominal (dollar) wealth of the economy. When the Fed buys a security, that security is no longer held by the economy. The Fed gets the security and the economy gets an equal dollar balance in a Fed account. The exchange is done at market prices so for all practical purposes it’s a equal exchange.

When Congress spends, however, it usually buys real goods and services, and not securities and other financial assets. So when the exchange takes place, Congress gets the real goods and services, which are not financial assets, and the economy gets dollar balances at the Fed, which are financial assets. So spending by Congress adds financial assets to the economy, to the penny, making it very different from what the Fed does.

And note that when the economy buys Treasury securities, all that happens is that the dollar balances the economy has at the Fed in what are called ‘reserve accounts’ get move to dollar balances in what are called ‘securities accounts’ at the Fed. Dollars in securities accounts and reserve accounts are all dollar financial assets. So shifting back and forth doesn’t change the dollar nominal wealth of the economy.

There are a couple of reasons why I’m not just posting Dora The Explorer singing ‘We Did It’ and only one of them is that there are no good YouTubes.

Politico: Obama to delay Koch Bros-Keystone pipeline until after 2012 election

By Gaius Publius, Americablog

11/10/2011 01:55:00 PM

A cynic could read that phrase “avoid ecologically sensitive areas” as “avoid politically resistant areas” – but that’s not us. We live in Hope (and politely ask for Change).

Two notes: (1) Obama thinks this delay is an argument for voting for him in 2012. (2) That assumes he won’t hand you your hat the minute he never has to face another voter – for the whole of the rest of his life.

So a question for you: Is Obama’s decision to delay a Tar-Sands decision a reason to support him in 2012, or just the opposite?

Obama Punts Keystone Pipeline Decision Until After 2012 Election

By: Jon Walker, Firedog Lake

Thursday November 10, 2011 12:47 pm

The fact that the Obama administration is at least delaying the decision is a partial victory for environmentalists and grassroots activism. The delay proves massive protests and civil disobedience can have an impact on those in power. Getting a President to even delay plans to approve a huge project proposed by big oil is a monumental feat.

Given the concerns about potential health and safety risks to the Agallala aquifer over which the current route would pass, there are compelling, legitimate reasons to consider alternative routes.  Unfortunately, this move may only punt a decision to approve the pipeline until after the election.  It strongly feels like an act of pure political cynicism from President Obama, instead of a sincere response to the concerns of regular Americans.

Once Obama gets young environmentalists to vote for him in 2012, and he no longer needs to worry about facing the voters again, I suspect he plans to quickly approve the pipeline with a slightly different route, ignoring all other environmental concerns.

U.S. Delays Decision on Pipeline Until After Election

By JOHN M. BRODER and DAN FROSCH, The New York Times

Published: November 10, 2011

While environmental groups welcomed their temporary victory on the pipeline project, some expressed skepticism about the president’s motives. Glenn Hurowitz, an environmental activist and senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, said the delay could leave the final decision in the hands of Mr. Obama’s Republican successor.

“This decision just puts off a green light for the tar sands by a year,” Mr. Hurowitz said in an e-mailed statement. “That’s why I’m a little dismayed at suggestions that this kick-the-can decision means environmentalists will enthusiastically back President Obama in 2012. Is the price of an environmentalist’s vote a year’s delay on environmental catastrophe? Excuse me, no.”

I personally put more faith in the fundamental economic unfeasibility of the project.

Keystone XL: Pipe Dreams

By Paul Tullis, BusinessWeek

November 10, 2011, 5:15 PM EST

As Phoenix Woman puts it-

Late Night FDL: Keystone XL – Because Everything Is Connected

By: Phoenix Woman, Firedog Lake

Thursday November 10, 2011 8:00 pm

TransCanada wants the Keystone XL pipeline so it can a) more readily reach ports capable of hosting supertankers and b) drive up (that’s right, drive up) the price of fuel in the Midwest. Here’s how it works:

The real reasons a pipeline is “needed” are not because TransCanada wants to put that oil in our cars or give us jobs, but because they want to get to a port to ship it overseas, and the British Columbia ports are too shoaled up to accommodate oil supertankers; the biggest boats they can handle are less than a thousand feet in length, and supertankers are typically well over 1,100 feet. (By the way, the unsuitability of the BC ports renders the “we’ll just sell it to China if you don’t buy it” argument ridiculous; without the BC ports, there’s no cost-effective way to get it to China, or any other country not named the U.S. of A.) As for the effect on US gas prices, check this out (courtesy of Bernie Sanders and The Guardian, which published what no major US paper likely ever would).

…

The pipeline is the only way the frozen tar sands muck – which must be specially and expensively treated for it to even be able to flow in a pipe in the first place – can be made profitable for TransCanada.

Emphasis mine.  Well, except the ‘up’ which is in the original.

If you don’t like Phoenix Woman’s references you can check out this yellow bordered News Corp publication called The National Geographic for Harper and TransCanada’s plan B.