Tag: ek Politics

Tuesday the Presidential Oil Spill Commission released it’s final report.  Some reactions from Google News.

Oil spill panel calls for tighter federal rules, new fees for drilling

By Juliet Eilperin and David S. Hilzenrath, Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, January 11, 2011; 9:16 PM

The presidential oil spill commission said Tuesday that the federal government should require tougher regulation, stiffer fines and a new industry-run safety organization, recommendations that face an uncertain future in the new Congress.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), one of the commission’s co-chairmen, said that the Deepwater Horizon accident was “both foreseeable and preventable,” and that Congress and the administration needed to enact reforms in order to prevent a repeat of the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year.

“I am sad to say that part of the answer is the fact that our government helped let it happen,” Graham said. “Our regulators were consistently outmatched.”

Oil spill panel calls for reforms, fees

By Juliet Eilperin and David S. Hilzenrath, Washington Post Staff Writers

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Environmental groups immediately protested that the recommendations do not go far enough, and industry groups argued that the government should stop standing in the way of offshore drilling and production.

While calling for tougher government regulation, the commission also called for the oil and gas industry to establish a “self-policing” organization that would set and enforce safety standards. In addition, it endorsed a system used in the North Sea that calls on drilling companies to assess the risks involved in a particular well and tailor their operations accordingly.

University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform, said such deference to the companies would be “tragedy compounded,” adding, “If there ever was an industry that didn’t deserve to write its own plans, it’s this one.”

The Next Oil Spill: Five Needed Mandates to Head it Off

Marianne Lavelle, National Geographic News

Published January 11, 2011

As the oil industry forges deeper into riskier waters and other frontiers, both companies and government overseers need to radically overhaul their approach to safety, concluded the U.S. commission appointed by President Obama to examine the causes of BP’s disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The seven-member commission agreed unanimously that the spill was not caused by the actions of one rogue player, but by a systemic failure born of years of complacency.

“In the past 20 years, exploration moved into deeper and deeper and riskier and riskier areas of the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in abundant revenues for private companies and the federal Treasury,” said former Florida Senator Bob Graham, co-chairman of the panel.

Oil spill’s health effects raise concern, but are unproven, commissioner says

By David Hammer, The Times-Picayune

Wednesday, January 12, 2011, 8:20 PM

But in the end, the commissioners had to admit that their recommendation that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency establish stricter monitoring of the health effects of major spills is unlikely to help those who say their work in oiled waters and marshes has raised the level of carcinogenic benzene in their bodies and caused the onset of respiratory and intestinal illnesses.

A really deep and worthwhile article.

Berms and boom were largely ineffective responses to oil spill, panel reports

Jonathan Tilove, NOLA.com

Thursday, January 13, 2011, 7:35 AM

About of a third of the way through the National Oil Spill Commission’s 400-page report, there is a 43-page chapter on the oil spill response and containment efforts that suggests that berms and boom were pretty much a bust, collecting more headlines than oil.

About what you would expect, but confirmed in more detail.

Halliburton’s Legal Fate in Gulf Spill Still Uncertain

By LAWRENCE HURLEY of Greenwire, The New York Times

Published: January 13, 2011

The release Tuesday of the federal oil spill commission’s report into the Deepwater Horizon disaster raises further questions about when Halliburton Co. will be added to the list of defendants in the federal government’s civil complaint filed last month.

The Justice Department named nine defendants, including BP PLC and Transocean Ltd., when it filed its lawsuit in the Eastern District of Louisiana, but Halliburton, which played a major role in the Deepwater Horizon drilling operation, was conspicuous by its absence (Greenwire, Dec. 15, 2010).

The government is expected to announce criminal charges relating to the spill at some point, but so far, the focus has been on civil enforcement under such statutes as the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act. All the parties involved are also named as defendants in hundreds of private lawsuits filed by individuals and businesses affected by the spill.

It’s not entirely impossible we’ll see some perp walks, these guys did murder 11 people.

Deepwater Horizon Report Raises Further Obstacles to New Alaska Oil Drilling

January 12, 2011, 2:09 PM GMT

The report, which blamed specific mistakes by BP, Halliburton and Transocean as well as wider industry failings for the oil spill, said drilling can continue in the Gulf of Mexico with improved oversight, but questioned whether anyone would be capable of dealing with a similar accident if it occurred off the coast of Alaska.

There are, “serious concerns about the Arctic oil spill response, containment, and search and rescue,” in the chief areas of offshore drilling interest-Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas-the commission said.

“Current federal emergency response capabilities in the region are very limited: the Coast Guard operations base nearest to the Chukchi region is on Kodiak Island, approximately 1,000 miles from the leasing sites. The Coast Guard does not have sufficient ice-class vessels capable of responding to a spill under Arctic conditions,” the report said.

Gulf oil disaster has changed pace for drilling permits, official says

Jonathan Tilove, NOLA.com

Thursday, January 13, 2011, 12:02 PM

Michael Bromwich said that he is asked, “when will the pace of permitting return to the pre-April 20 level, and the honest answer is, probably never.”

So maybe some good news for the environment.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Joyful south Sudanese vote en masse in referendum

by Peter Martell, AFP

1 hr 1 min ago

Bumble Bees In U.S. Suffer Sharp Decline, Joining Countless Other Species Disappearing Worldwide

Travis Walter Donovan, The Huffington Post

1/4/11, 01:26 PM

Honey bees have long been known to be in decline, suffering from the enigmatic colony collapse disorder, and the latest research on U.S. bumble bees only exacerbates concerns over future food production, as bees are responsible for pollinating 90 percent of the world’s commercial plants, from fruits and vegetables to coffee and cotton.

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Unfortunately, insects aren’t the only creatures suffering drastic losses to their populations. Tigers could be extinct in 12 years if efforts to protect their habitats and prevent poaching aren’t increased. A recent study across three continents showed snakes to be in rapid decline due to climate change. Overfishing and changing weather patterns have left 12 of the world’s 17 species of penguins experiencing steep losses in numbers. A recent World Wildlife Fund report found that all animals in the tropics have declined by 60 percent since 1970, with everything from gorillas to fish thinning out.

Honey laundering: The sour side of nature’s golden sweetener

JESSICA LEEDER – Global Food Reporter, Globe and Mail

Jan. 06, 2011 2:07PM EST

What consumers don’t know is that honey doesn’t usually come straight – or pure – from the hive. Giant steel drums of honey bound for grocery store shelves and the food processors that crank out your cereal are in constant flow through the global market. Most honey comes from China, where beekeepers are notorious for keeping their bees healthy with antibiotics banned in North America because they seep into honey and contaminate it; packers there learn to mask the acrid notes of poor quality product by mixing in sugar or corn-based syrups to fake good taste.

None of this is on the label. Rarely will a jar of honey say “Made in China.” Instead, Chinese honey sold in North America is more likely to be stamped as Indonesian, Malaysian or Taiwanese, due to a growing multimillion dollar laundering system designed to keep the endless supply of cheap and often contaminated Chinese honey moving into the U.S., where tariffs have been implemented to staunch the flow and protect its own struggling industry.

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While many of the executives are still at large, U.S. investigators arrested four honey brokers in the U.S. who are Chinese or Taiwanese nationals with connections to ALW. All have plead guilty; three have been sentenced to a range of jail terms and deportation proceedings are continuing. The fourth is scheduled for sentencing in Seattle this week.

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Mr. Adee, the beekeeper, said he’s been attending talks in Washington to convey who the targets of honey laundering probes should really be.

“It’s kind of like they’re running a car-stealing ring,” he said. “You catch the guy stealing the car and put him out of business. But the guy that’s laundering, the chop shop or the packer, he just finds another supplier,” he said, adding: “I think it’s going to keep getting worse until we catch a couple of big ones, give them a little jail time.”

You know, what’s really discouraging about political blogging for me is how often you have to repeat yourself about obvious, undeniable facts (as a fer instance pasted over there on the right is Stephen’s take on BillO and whether the tides are explicable by a little something Sir Isaac Newton liked to call THE LAW of Gravity, because it’s not just a suggestion you see).

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Banks and Securities Holders can no longer claim title to property unless they can produce a mortgage and a statutory chain of transfer for the note.

This not a new concept, Stare Decisis is CARPENTER V. LONGAN, 83 U. S. 271 (1872), which means that it’s not easily appealable.

This exposes the Banks to severe financial losses in the Trillions of dollars.

First of all, there is no reason for someone who owes a mortgage to continue to make payments if clear title can’t be shown.  The value of all that paper those photons and electrons and derivatives is exactly zero.

Secondly, the Banks are going to be forced to honor their contracts with the big Mortgage Backed Securities holders who won’t be rolled as easy as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and Barack Obama, and buy back their fraudulent paper for more Trillions.

And finally (for the purposes of this piece at least), there’s the Hundreds of Billions they owe in title transfer fees (tax fraud) and fines.  Smart States are going to start tapping that you betcha, though it really falls in the rounds.

Felix Salmon writes about this and seems disappointed that another financial crisis is inevitable, but it is.

The legal craziness that this decision sets in motion is going to be huge, I’m sure. Anybody who was foreclosed on in Massachusetts should now be phoning up their lawyer and trying to find out if the foreclosure was illegal. If it was – if there was a break in the chain of title somewhere which meant that the bank didn’t own the mortgage in question – then the borrower should be able to get their deed, and their home, back from the bank. This decision is retroactive, and no one has a clue how many thousands of foreclosures it might cover.

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Going forwards, every homeowner being foreclosed upon will as a matter of course challenge the banks to prove that they own the mortgage in question. If the bank can’t do that, then the foreclosure proceeding will be tossed out of court. This is likely to slow down foreclosures enormously, as banks ensure that all their legal ducks are in a row before they try to foreclose.

This decision won’t be appealed: the state law seems pretty cut-and-dried, every judge who’s looked at it has come to the same decision, and there’s no conceivable grounds for the US Supreme Court to take on the case.

What’s more, courts in the other 49 states are likely to lean heavily on this decision when similar cases come before them. The precedent applies only in Massachusetts for now, but it’s likely to spread, like some kind of bank-eating cancer.

If a similar decision comes down in California, which is a non-recourse state, the resulting chaos could be massive. People who are current on their mortgage and perfectly capable of paying it could simply make the strategic decision to default, if and when they find out or suspect that the chain of title is broken somewhere. They would take a ding to their credit rating, but millions of people will happily accept a lower credit rating if they get a free house as part of the bargain.

It’s not so much that the law and the facts are against them as that there are so many tables to pound on that they’re starting to look like tobacco lawyers.  If there are similar rulings (and it’s hard to see why not) in Connecticut, New York, and California then we could be looking at an entirely different political and economic landscape.

And one in which Republicans will pay the price, because the Vampire Squid doesn’t care which stone it squeezes to get its blood just as long as it’s red.

Madam Zelda!  Madam Zelda!  Is it true this house is haunted?

What Lies Ahead in 2011?

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Project Syndicate

2010-12-13

The gravest threat (and “downside risk facing the global economy”) comes from the wave of austerity sweeping the world, as governments, particularly in Europe, confront the large deficits brought on by the Great Recession, and as anxieties about some countries’ ability to meet their debt payments contributes to financial-market instability.

The outcome of premature fiscal consolidation is all but foretold: growth will slow, tax revenues will diminish, and the reduction in deficits will be disappointing. And, in our globally integrated world, the slowdown in Europe will exacerbate the slowdown in the US, and vice versa.

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I am not so bullish on Europe and America. In both cases, the underlying problem is insufficient aggregate demand. The ultimate irony is that there are simultaneously excess capacity and vast unmet needs – and policies that could restore growth by using the former to address the latter.

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In both Europe and America, the free-market ideology that allowed asset bubbles to grow unfettered – markets always know best, so government must not intervene – now ties policymakers’ hands in designing effective responses to the crisis. One might have thought that the crisis itself would undermine confidence in that ideology. Instead, it has resurfaced to drag governments and economies down the sinkhole of austerity.

Wall Street’s Fatal Defect

Mark Sunshine, The Huffington Post

President and CEO, M.A. Sunshine Capital

Posted: December 29, 2010 03:06 PM

According to many industry experts, including the Congressional Oversight Panel, many private label mortgage backed bonds have a fatal defect. Of course, Wall Street disagrees and claims that the problem is a mere technicality and not very important. The “insignificant” defect that Wall Street is downplaying is that many mortgage backed bonds may not be backed by mortgages.

The last sentence was not a typo or a mistake of fact.

There is a serious chance that the issuers of many mortgage backed bonds lack ownership of the mortgages that are supposed to back their bonds. This dirty little defect has paralyzed the private mortgage finance markets and is a primary reason that new issuance of even private mortgage securities made up of loans to “A” quality borrowers and low loan to values has ceased. And, the problem seems to be ignored by the administration and regulators.

Remember, our Masters of the Universe went to the best schools and are ever so much brighter than us mere serfs.

Why Mortgage-Backed Securities Aren’t (Backed by Securities): How MERS Toasted the Banks

L. Randall Wray, The Huffington Post

Professor of Economics and Research Director of the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Posted: December 30, 2010 08:35 AM

In a series of pieces I have argued that MERS, a creation of the mortgage banking industry, has effectively destroyed the institution of private property in America. Ironically, MERS was created to facilitate quick and easy and cheap securitization of mortgages — what are called mortgage-backed securities. In fact, what it did was to eliminate any backing of the securities by mortgages. Of the total securitized asset universe, something like $7 trillion are (supposedly) backed by residential mortgages. However, MERS helped to delink the securities from the mortgages. At best, they are unsecured debt — there is no property backing the securities. What this means is that foreclosure is not permitted. As I have said before, it is likely that most or even all foreclosures occurring in the US are illegal seizures of property — home thefts. We are talking about 100,000 completed home thefts per month, with another 250,000 new foreclosures started to steal homes every month. Projections are that 13 million homes will have been “foreclosed” (read: stolen) by 2012.

Worse, from the perspective of the banks, they’ve got to take back all the fraudulent MBSs, most of which are toxic.

In what follows I want to present the most favorable case for the mortgage industry. That is to say, I will ignore fraud and criminal conspiracies. Let us look at the current predicament as if it resulted from a series of monumental errors. With that in mind, what is the best-case scenario? First a caveat: I am not a lawyer nor am I an investigative reporter. I have relied on my perusal of reported evidence, plus a discussion with James McGuire who has put together an entirely convincing argument that the securitizations of mortgages resulted in securities that are not backed by mortgages. I urge interested readers to go to his website.

A few bloggers have highlighted yesterday’s piece by Delaney and Grim at the Huffington Post, many of them concentrating on the Dickensian conditions that prevailed before Social Security and the New Deal-

The talk of taking Green’s children was no vacant threat. In most states, children were not allowed to live in poorhouses. Families forced into them would be split up, with children either bound for orphanages, foster homes or apprenticeships. Pennsylvania, which banned poorhouses from hosting children between the ages of two and 16, was typical. Hundreds of children in just one home, the Chester County Poorhouse, were “bounded out” — given to other families — in the middle of the 19th Century, according to an archive of their names that survives.

In 1936 a woman’s aunt and uncle hoped to extract their niece and her new baby from a poorhouse in New Hampshire. They sent a letter to a county commissioner saying they would take care of the hapless pair at their home, but the commissioner wouldn’t allow it, according to Wagner. The commissioner didn’t doubt their ability to provide, but he figured the woman would have another burdensome baby. “If I am presented with definite proof from the Merrimack County Farm, that [she] has had a sterile operation, I have no objection to her going to live in your home.”

The unemployed who were denied outdoor relief by the city had another option: To be auctioned off to the lowest bidder and live as a boarder. The city would reimburse the homeowner for the specified amount in exchange for putting the pauper up. The jobless person was expected to work without pay in exchange.

And there are lots of stories like that in it, but I’d like to draw your attention to some of the more modern events they are reporting-

The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, And The Politics Of The New Deal

Arthur Delaney and  Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post

12-29-10 10:08 PM

Though Republican hostility to the New Deal isn’t new, the Democratic embrace of language that has long been used to undermine belief in government is. Announcing a pay freeze for federal workers, Obama reasoned that “small businesses and families are tightening their belts. Their government should, too.” With nearly one in ten people unable to find work, Democrats compete with Republicans over who can sound more concerned about the debt and deficit, despite a longstanding economic consensus that a deficit is a good thing to have in times of slow growth and high unemployment.

What is dangerous about Social Security is that it works. It is evidence that people can do a better job insuring against life’s cruel downturns by working together and pooling resources than by going it alone in the market. If the financial market and its representatives in Washington succeed in undermining Social Security, they will not only have access to trillions of dollars, but will have dealt a blow to a leading symbol of the potential collective action. It’s no coincidence that cutting Social Security is often described as a “signal” to financial markets. Even Obama, after his election, echoed such language. “We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s,” Obama said before his inauguration.

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During a meeting with progressive bloggers, Obama was asked to defend his administration’s failure to stem the foreclosure tide. The president’s worry, he said, was that his anti-foreclosure program might accidentally help people who didn’t deserve it. “The biggest challenge is how do you make sure that you are helping those who really deserve help, and, if they get some temporary help, can get back on their feet,” Obama said, specifically adding that he didn’t want the effort to assist “people who through no fault of their own just can’t afford their house anymore because of the change in housing values or their incomes don’t support it.”

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Obama’s confusion about Social Security’s origins would seem mundane if it weren’t for the payroll tax holiday he pushed, the deficit commission targeting Social Security he created, and the reports that he’ll call for cuts to the program in his State of the Union address.

Social Security reform is necessary, the program’s opponents say, because its future solvency is in question: As a result of the Baby Boom and advances in medicine, more people are living longer. But the actuaries who set up Social Security in the 1930s forecast with an eerie exactitude how much life expectancies would increase — a detail that is always ignored. And the system was reformed by the Greenspan Commission in 1983, when the first Boomers were nearly forty years old. Nancy Altman, a boomer herself, served as a top aide to that commission, and said that it very specifically took into account the coming wave of retirements, which explains why it can pay full benefits through 2037, a quarter century after the first Boomer hits early retirement.

Social Security’s actuaries reported this fall that after 2037, payroll taxes would be sufficient to pay nearly four-fifths of benefits through 2084. The payroll tax stops, however, at a little over $106,000. The shortfall could be made up entirely by applying the payroll tax to more income above that threshold.

CNN Poll: Plurality say Obama’s policies will likely fail

Sixty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say they hope the president’s policies will succeed.

“That’s a fairly robust number but it’s down 10 points since last December,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Twelve months ago a majority of the public said that they thought Obama’s policies would succeed; now that number has dropped to 44 percent, with a plurality predicting that his policies will likely fail.”

Obama to blink first on Social Security

By ROBERT KUTTNER, Politico

12/16/10 9:24 AM EST

(N)ow being teed up by the White House and key Senate Democrats, is a scheme for the president to embrace much of the Bowles-Simpson plan – including cuts in Social Security. This is to be unveiled, according to well-placed sources, in the president’s State of the Union address.

The idea is to pre-empt an even more draconian set of budget cuts likely to be proposed by the incoming House Budget Committee chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), as a condition of extending the debt ceiling. This is expected to hit in April.

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How to put this politely? For a Democratic president, this approach is bad economics and worse politics.

For starters, cutting Social Security as part of a deficit reduction deal is needless – since Social Security is in surplus for the next 27 years. The move also gives away the single most potent distinction between Democrats and Republicans – Democrats defend your Social Security, and Republicans keep trying to undermine it.

If you think the Democratic base feels betrayed by Obama’s tax-cut deal, just imagine the mayhem when Obama proposes to cut the Democrats’ signature program.

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Beltway Washington – the editorial writers, columnists, centrist policy organizations, Blue Dogs and, of course, the Obama administration and its Wall Street advisers – has become an echo chamber of bad advice.

As paradox at The Left Coaster puts it-

It has been stated here before, and is equally true today, that should any cut of any Social Security element proposed by the Democratic Obama Administration the United States is unequivocally, screamingly in the utter throes of a shock doctrine evolution. Social Security is abundantly, vastly in surplus by generations of over-taxation, there’s a $120 billion annual war on with incredible tax cuts just passed, it is beyond lunacy for Social Security to be cut, it’s outright theft, an act of amazing arrogance and contempt that could only happen by the enormous distraction and manipulation of unemployment. Times are tough, we all have to sacrifice, that’s what the thieves will seriously say.

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Leaks are extremely useful in a variety of ways: they coddle and ensnare the reporter to a clubby insider status, they manipulate various political actors, they offer reaction gauges to proposed ideas, and steer the political conversation of the Village (DC) in a desired direction. Given this, just why would the Obama Administration leak that cutting Social Security story to Politico?

Where Do We Go from Here?

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, The New York Review of Books

January 13, 2011

Despite what optimists within the White House may believe, the odds are not good for a repeat of 1996, when Bill Clinton made a startling political comeback after suffering a drubbing in the previous midterm elections. Clinton, after all, presided over a booming economy: in the two years prior to the 1996 election, the US economy added more than 5 million jobs, and by November 1996 the unemployment rate was only 5.4 percent. In contrast, Obama presides over an economy that has suffered a severe financial crisis-and recovery from a severe financial crisis is almost always slow and painful, with very high unemployment persisting for years. Professional forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve now predict an average unemployment rate of 8.7 percent in 2012, awful news for a president seeking reelection.

A tough, skillful political team might be able to win even in the face of such economic weakness. But the Obama team has demonstrated neither toughness nor skill. The trouble was apparent right from the beginning. After the 2008 election, Obama had the political winds at his back. Yet rather than bargaining from a position of strength and demanding an economic program adequate to the scale of the economy’s problems, Obama made his goal the working out of a cooperative political process-accommodation and the fantasy of bipartisanship.

And despite warnings from many economists (ourselves included) that the stimulus package that resulted was much too small, Obama engaged in premature triumphalism. In February 2009, he said of the plan:

It is the right size, it is the right scope. Broadly speaking it has the right priorities to create jobs that will jump-start our economy and transform it for the twenty-first century.

The only thing missing was a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

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(Democrats can not count) on Obama himself to lead a comeback. In a dispiriting 60 Minutes interview given after the midterms, he actually seemed to accept Republican smears-blaming himself, not the GOP, for the failure to “maintain the kind of tone that says we can disagree without being disagreeable.” And it’s truly astonishing that as corporate profits hit new records despite mass unemployment, Obama apparently takes seriously accusations that his administration is antibusiness.

Even if Obama were suddenly to find an inner FDR, would anyone notice? His aloofness has become so indelibly registered in voters’ minds that if he tried to change style-even if he wanted to, a big “if”-this would immediately come across as opportunistic. Having trusted and been disappointed by Obama once before, they are very unlikely to give him another chance.

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And this brings us to our last point. Democrats need to make it clear that if Obama isn’t going to be the leader of the Democratic agenda-and all indications are that he can’t or won’t-they will advance that agenda anyway, with or without his help. They have to be ready to delink their political fate from Obama, and make it clear that they won’t tolerate further undermining of their goals by deluded calls for bipartisanship.

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How far should delinking from Obama go? There is no obvious contender to mount a primary challenge, which is in itself a testimony to Democratic weakness. But the possibility is clearly there, and both will and should become a reality if Obama follows a path of capitulation.