Tag: ek Politics

Well, it took me a while but I finally tracked down the Wall Street Journal article on the BP Blowout Disaster that every one-

• AFP
• Reuters
• AP
• The New York Times
• The Washington Post
• Bloomberg
• Business Week
• USA Today

is referencing.

I didn’t think it was much of a much in terms of things we didn’t know already, but it sure got the print media’s attention and since it did take so long to find I thought I’d share it with you.

Gulf Spill Linked to BP’s Lack of ‘Discipline’

By STEPHEN POWER, BEN CASSELMAN And RUSSELL GOLD, The Wall Street Journal

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

Engineers’ Report Blames Oil Giant for Failing to Ensure That Safety Trumped Cost; Regulators’ Technical Acumen Is Panned

An “insufficient consideration of risk” and “a lack of operating discipline” by oil giant BP PLC contributed to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, according to a report due for public release Wednesday from a team of technical experts.

…

The report provides little new information on the specific causes of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, instead providing a long list of decisions by BP and other companies that it says may have played a role in the disaster.

…

But the panel also identifies non-technical factors that it says likely contributed to the accident. The panel cites off “a lack of management discipline” and a “lack of onboard expertise and of clearly defined responsibilities.”

The report doesn’t attempt to assign blame to individual workers or companies, and it doesn’t directly address one of the key questions raised by Congressional and other investigators: whether BP cut corners to save money. It does say that many of BP’s choices “were likely to result in less cost and less time relative to other options,” and it criticizes the lack of processes to ensure that safety didn’t take a back seat to cost.

One nice thing about it is that it does have a link to a .pdf version of the preliminary report.

Not much detail yet, but breaking after the bell on CNBC, Ireland has said it will only accept a bank bailout and not a government bailout.

Meetings expected to continue tomorrow.

Update:

Irish rebuff bailout call in euro zone crisis

By Jan Strupczewski and Julien Toyer, Reuters

1 hr 1 min ago

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Ireland said it was discussing stabilization measures with its European partners on Tuesday and ways to cut its heavily indebted banks’ funding costs in what a top EU official called a “survival crisis” for the euro zone.

A euro zone source said finance ministers of the 16-nation currency area meeting in Brussels would declare support for Dublin’s austerity measures and express readiness to help financially, if it asks for aid, but would not announce any practical measures.

In Dublin, Prime Minister Brian Cowen rebuffed calls to request a bailout, saying the government was fully funded until mid-2011, and insisted that only the banks may need help.

In other news, kiss goodbye any Stock Market gains in November.  As Atrios says is seems that only when the Market goes down do our “leaders” in Washington pay attention, so, more days like this please.

In about half an hour (2:30 pm ET) the Senate Banking Committee will be holding hearings on Title Fraud.  You can watch it here @ senate.gov (h/t dday).  It’s not on C-Span unfortunately.

Among the scheduled witnesses are- Barbara Desoer, president of Bank of America Home Loans, and David Lowman, chief executive of Chase Home Lending.  Also Tom Miller, Attorney General of Iowa, Adam J. Levitin of Georgetown University Law, and Diane E. Thompson with the National Consumer Law Center.

There may be fireworks but attentive readers will remember I’ve been outlining many of the myriad problems for a long time and once again as recently as yesterday so I’m not really expecting any surprises.

The good news is that finally at least some of our brain dead political class seems to be waking up to the facts which have been apparent for months and years now.  emptywheel highlights a newly released study from the TARP Congressional Oversight Panel that’s worth taking a look at.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Property rights, and their transfer, are governed by laws with factually thousands of years of precedent.  The earliest records are in hieroglyphics and cuneiform.

Are Obama and Congress Set To Screw American Counties, Homeowners and Give Wall Street Mortgage Banksters a Retroactive Immunity Bailout?

By: bmaz Friday November 12, 2010 7:40 pm

Why would the Obama Administration and Congress be doing this? Because the foreclosure fraud suits and other challenges to the mass production slice, dice and securitize lifestyle on the American finance sector, the very same activity that wrecked the economy and put the nation in the depression it is either still in, or barely recovering from, depending on your point of view, have left the root balance sheets and stability of the largest financial institutions on the wrong side of the credibility and, likely, the legal auditory line. And that affects not only our economy, but that of the world who is all chips in on the American real estate and financial products markets.

What does that mean to you? Everything. As quoted above, even the most conservative estimate (and that estimate is based on only a single recording fee per mortgage, when in reality there are almost certainly multiple recordings legally required for most all mortgages due to the slicing, dicing and tranching necessary to accomplish the securitization that has occurred) for the state of California alone is $60 billion dollars. That is $60,000,000,000.00. California alone is actually likely several times that. Your county is in the loss column heavy from this too.

…

This is a death knell to the real property system as we have always known it and the county structure of American society as we have known it. And millions of people will have lost the ability to benefit from the established rule and process of law that they understood and relied on. After the fact. Retroactively. So Obama and Congress can once again give a handout and bailout to the very banks and financial malefactors that put us here.

I don’t weep for the counties, they’re not much more than lines on a map in Connecticut, but I do for the rule of law.  If you don’t give a rat’s ass about the 5th Amendment, you might about ex post facto.

Too Dumb and Dishonest to be anything but a Plagiarist

Our former deciderer-

George Bush Book ‘Decision Points’ Lifted From Advisers’ Books

by Ryan Grim, The Huffington Post

11-12-10 04:17 PM

When Crown Publishing inked a deal with George W. Bush for his memoirs, the publisher knew it wasn’t getting Faulkner. But the book, at least, promises “gripping, never-before-heard detail” about the former president’s key decisions, offering to bring readers “aboard Air Force One on 9/11, in the hours after America’s most devastating attack since Pearl Harbor; at the head of the table in the Situation Room in the moments before launching the war in Iraq,” and other undisclosed and weighty locations.

Crown also got a mash-up of worn-out anecdotes from previously published memoirs written by his subordinates, from which Bush lifts quotes word for word, passing them off as his own recollections. He took equal license in lifting from nonfiction books about his presidency or newspaper or magazine articles from the time. Far from shedding light on how the president approached the crucial “decision points” of his presidency, the clip jobs illuminate something shallower and less surprising about Bush’s character: He’s too lazy to write his own memoir.

Bush, on his book tour, makes much of the fact that he largely wrote the book himself, guffawing that critics who suspected he didn’t know how to read are now getting a comeuppance. Not only does Bush know how to read, it turns out, he knows how to Google, too. Or his assistant does. Bush notes in his acknowledgments that “[m]uch of the research for this book was conducted by the brilliant and tireless Peter Rough. Peter spent the past 18 months digging through archives, searching the internet[s], and sifting through reams of paper.” Bush also collaborated on the book with his former speechwriter, Christopher Michel.

Sometimes, to persuade an ass, you need a 2 x 4.

Where’s the Democrats’ fighting spirit?

By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post

Friday, November 12, 2010

“Why don’t they fight back?”

That’s the question I’ve been hearing from the Democratic Party’s stunned and dispirited base. For the past month, I’ve been on a book tour that has taken me to Asheville, N.C., Terre Haute, Ind., Austin and elsewhere. Everywhere I go, supporters of President Obama and his agenda ask me why so many Democrats in Washington don’t stand up for what they say they believe.

…

Now, which party holds the presidency and, until January, ample majorities in both houses of Congress? That would be the Democrats. Which party can point to public opinion polls indicating that Americans support its position that the Bush tax cuts should be extended only for the middle class? That, too, would be the Democrats. And finally, which party somehow appears to be looking for a way to lose this argument and capitulate? Incredibly, the Democrats.

The conventional wisdom in Washington is that those who say the lesson from last week’s drubbing is that progressives should get a spine simply “don’t get it.” The explanation given by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and some others – that aside from stubbornly high unemployment, one contributing factor was the Democrats’ failure to explain their program and counter Republican misinformation – is seen by the conventionally wise as delusional.

So how’s that river working out for you?

This is an apocryphal story, or at least I can’t be bothered to source it, but it goes something like this-

During the height of the Space Program a famous Astronaut was eating dinner at a restaurant when a waiter came by and spit in his soup.  Said the waiter-

Not everybody loves you babe.

So after his election “shellacking” his handlers hustled Barack Obama out on the road to revisit his adoring overseas crowds.  How’d that work out for you?

Traveling in Asia, Obama’s Glow Dims

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, The New York Times

Published: November 12, 2010

Before leaving Washington for a 10-day diplomatic tour of Asia that he has characterized as an economic mission, Mr. Obama conceded that his relationship with the American people had come down from an “incredible high” and gotten “rockier and tougher” as time went on. But he said the same is not true of his relations with foreign leaders.

…

Mr. Obama seemed to stumble in Seoul. He failed to seal a deal with Mr. Lee on a long-awaited free-trade agreement, a serious setback for a president who has made doubling exports a centerpiece of his economic agenda. And his plan to even out global trade imbalances ran into resistance from Mr. Hu and Mrs. Merkel, among others. Mr. Obama chalked it up to international muscle-flexing.

It ain’t just a river babe.

We can only hope.  Or changiness, I forget which.

In my piece yesterday, Democratic Party Death Wish, TheMomCat added a chart by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones that illustrates the “deficit” problem.  It’s kind of small so I’m blowing it up (I apologize for the sacrifice in resolution).

In case you can’t see it so well there are 3 blue colored areas and one thick blue line.

• The light blue area at the bottom is labeled Other Federal Noninterest Spending
• The dark blue area in the middle is labeled Social Security
• The medium blue area at the top is labeled Medicare and Medicaid
• The thick blue line is labeled Revenues

The thick blue line cuts through the big Medicare and Medicaid area and makes it look like there are two of them, but it’s really just the one.

Is the Deficit Commission Serious?

By Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Wed Nov. 10, 2010 8:46 PM PST

Here’s what the chart means:

• Discretionary spending (the light blue bottom chunk) isn’t a long-term deficit problem. It takes up about 10% of GDP forever. What’s more, pretending that it can be capped is just game playing: anything one Congress can do, another can undo. So if you want to recommend a few discretionary cuts, that’s fine. Beyond that, though, the discretionary budget should be left to Congress since it can be cut or expanded easily via the ordinary political process. That’s why it’s called “discretionary.”
• Social Security (the dark blue middle chunk) isn’t a long-term deficit problem. It goes up very slightly between now and 2030 and then flattens out forever. If Republicans were willing to get serious and knock off their puerile anti-tax jihad, it could be fixed easily with a combination of tiny tax increases and tiny benefit cuts phased in over 20 years that the public would barely notice. It deserves about a week of deliberation.
• Medicare, and healthcare in general, is a huge problem. It is, in fact, our only real long-term spending problem.

…

Bottom line: this document isn’t really aimed at deficit reduction. It’s aimed at keeping government small. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re a conservative think tank and that’s what you’re dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

Now consider Krugman-

The Hijacked Commission

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: November 11, 2010

We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected.

Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue?

Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh.

…

(W)hat the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases – tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans – the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest – and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate.

…

It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old – tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net.

My emphasis.

The truth is that the Catfood Commission wasn’t hijacked at all.  It was set up by Barack Hussein Obama and his Administration to produce exactly the results it did-

(T)his document isn’t really aimed at deficit reduction. It’s aimed at keeping government small. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re a conservative think tank and that’s what you’re dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

To her credit here is Nancy Pelosi’s official take–

This proposal is simply unacceptable. Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren’s economic security as well as for our nation’s fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America’s middle class families-under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.

In middle school I was a member of the Fencing Club.

Bank of America Allegedly Foreclosing Fraudulently in Kentucky

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Many foreclosures show this process was not observed on a widespread basis: the notes were assigned (as in transferred) to the trust right before closing, a violation of the PSA, the New York trust statutes that govern virtually all mortgage securitization trusts, and IRS rules for these trusts (REMIC). When foreclosure defense attorneys started contesting these assignments, suddenly a new ruse started to show up: allonges, which are sheets of paper that contained the needed endorsements, would magically appear out of nowhere. The problem is that an allonge is supposed to be used only when there is no space left on the note for endorsements, including margins and the reverse side, and when it is used, it is supposed to be so firmly attached to the original as to be inseparable. But these “ta da” allonges were always somehow discovered at the custodian, quite separate from the note.

…

This means the odds are awfully high that Bank of America committed multiple frauds on the court, first on the state court in the foreclosures process, and now on the Federal bankruptcy court.

…

This sort of abuse is far more serious than robo signing. As much as the likely misconduct here and robo signing would both be considered frauds on the court, the robo signing is arguably cost cutting gone mad and riding roughshod over proper legal procedures. By contrast, this practice has all the appearances of multiple coverups of the fact that Countrywide trust did not have standing to foreclose on the house. The steps undertaken here look to be a deliberate, concerted effort for the bank to get its way, the law be damned. And this clearly took more parties and more thought than the robo signing abuses.

At a minimum, the attorneys at the law firm and the parties at the servicer had to be aware of this device. And if our reading of this document is correct, this is fraud, pure and simple. It’s high time we see some attorneys disbarred and some law firms go out of business as a result of foreclosure chicanery, as well as serious investigations of the people involved in foreclosure litigation at the servicers and the banks’ general counsel’s office.

(h/t lambert @ Corrente)

Also-

Alan Greenspan: “Fraud, fraud is a fact.” And the banksters are doubling down, with the help of the Obama administration

Thu, 11/11/2010 – 10:51am – lambert

UK Guardian Releases British Torture Tape

By: Jeff Kaye (valtin), Wednesday November 10, 2010 7:08 pm

The UK Guardian yesterday released a videotape of a 2007 interrogation of a suspected Iraqi insurgent, one of 1,253 tapes made by interrogators at a secret British military center near Basra, run by the Joint Forces Interrogation Team (JFIT). The release came only days before the U.S. Justice Department investigation into the CIA’s destruction of videotapes of the torture of three high-value detainees at secret black site prisons was closed, with no charges brought. The news about torture was not a complete surprise as revelations last month showed torture techniques were taught to British interrogators in secret training manuals.

The release of the British torture tapes was the result of a lawsuit brought before the British high court by 220 former Iraqi prisoners. The Guardian warns that the video embedded here “contains material that viewers may find disturbing.” Having watched it, I can vouch it is difficult material to watch. Amazingly, the U.S. press, and much of the British press, have totally ignored this material. The truth is going to be difficult to stomach, but this is a taste of what might have occurred had U.S. tapes found their way to public viewing.

…

Watch the video posted here, and then ponder what role we all play in this monstrous enterprise. If we do not speak out, if we do not demand that all torture stop, and that the entire secret archives be opened so we can know once and for all what has been and is going on, then we put our own futures into dire jeopardy, and will surely earn the scorn of future generations. The Wikileaks Iraqi war logs already have plenty of evidence of torture and war crimes by the United States. Where are the investigations? The prosecutions? The outcry?