Author: Brian

Washington – For hundreds of thousands of workers losing their jobs during the recession, there’s a new twist to their financial pain: Even as they’re collecting unemployment benefits, they’re paying bank fees just to get access to their money.

Thirty states have struck such deals with banks that include Citigroup Inc. Bank of America Corp. JP Morgan Chase and US Bancorp an Associated Press review of the agreements found. All the programs carry fees.

Citigroup’s bill to the state: zero. The bank collects fees paid by merchants and the unemployed.

“It’s a racket. It’s a scam,” said Rachel Davis, a 38-year-old dental technician from St. Louis who was laid off in October. Davis was given a MasterCard issued through Central Bank of Jefferson City and recently paid $6 to make two $40 withdrawals.

link link link link

The market of bank-issued unemployment cards is booming, and the millions of recently unemployed are footing the bill.

In 2003, states paid only $4 million of unemployment insurance through debit cards. By 2007, it had ballooned to $2.8 billion, and by 2010 it will likely rise to $10.5 billion.

Complaining costs 50 cents!

Elizabeth Warren is the head of the Congressional oversight panel on TARP.

Elizabeth Warren: But the mortgage crisis presents a somewhat different problem.

The problem there is much more a one of who’s going to bear these losses?

We’ve got houses that are now worth $100,000, let’s say. But they have mortgages against them for $140,000. And the mortgage on that house has been sold and sliced and diced and moving out–

Dan Rather: Bundled–

Elizabeth Warren: Bundled and all the fancy things that have happened. And now you’ve got a family living there.

And because of the crazy terms in this mortgage, they– they can’t pay the $140,000 mortgage. There’s no possible way.

If this house gets foreclosed, they’re gonna be out of a house. And ultimately, here’s the ironic part, the investors way on down the line, $100,000 house, they’re likely to get somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 by the time you work through the process.

Lose, lose for both groups.

What we have to do is we have to find the mechanism to get ‘em together and say, look, let’s be realistic. Can you pay $100,000 for the house? Can you get yourself in a level mortgage? If you can, let’s do it.

…
This-you know-in a funny sort of sense, this isn’t about bankruptcy, this is about reality.

You can beat on this family all you want. But they’re not gonna produce $140,000 for this house. They just can’t do it anymore.

And the day we finally get realistic, we recognize the losses, we write down what we have to write down, we let some businesses go away and we begin to count on the fact that those that are left really do have their feet on the ground, you know, that the– it– it’s solid all the way down, then we start to rebuild an economy.

By Alexander Brome [ link ] who died in 1666.

Let 'um plague us until they be weary.


We must flatter and fear
Those that over us are,
And make 'um believe that we love 'um,
When their tyranny's past,
We will serve them at last,
As they serv'd those that have been above 'um.

Our economy didn’t melt down, it was taken down by unbridled greed of economic elites enabled by their political courtesans in Washington. – Jim Hightower 11/08

The British government will turn you away at the border if you have engaged in unacceptable behavior by inciting hatred.

“The Government has made it clear it opposes extremism in all its forms.

“We will continue to stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country.

“The exclusions policy is targeted at all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs.”

That’s why anti-gay preachers are banned from Britain. This group, for example, was refused entry.

They’re the sect that pickets US soldiers’ funerals, holding up banners with phrases such as “God Hates Fags”.

Any similar church members who try to enter Britain are also likely to be stopped.

One silly commenter at The Times article posted: “I’d like to see a consistent God. He used to make it clear what He hated – nuking Sodom, flooding, pestilence, mixing up people’s languages. He could sort this whole thing out in a jiffy by doing a bit of honest smiting like in the Old Days – and it would settle any arguments over his existence.”

Geesh.

Scott Dikkers, Editor at The Onion, says about beliefs:

To me, as a writer, what’s worse is that most people don’t even make up a fantasy for themselves. They actually take something someone else made up and believe that as absolute truth. I really don’t understand that. If you’re going to make up a reality out of whole cloth, at least be original.

You can’t just take someone else’s idea and accept it wholesale as your cherished personal belief. That’s like stealing someone else’s Halloween costume idea and showing up at the same party.

Habituated to coddling power, our media has brought us tiny crumbs from CEO and managers that brought down our house. But Germany’s Spiegel interviewed the leader of the largest reinsurer in the world, a firm large enough to insure insurance companies, and he’s not happy with bankers.

These days many managers are acting as if the economic crisis were a force of nature that has struck the world.

Bomhard: The staggering dimensions of this crisis were in fact surprising for everyone, but it was — in contrast to an earthquake — created by people.

Spiegel: Greedy people.

Bomhard: People, in any case, whose actions are far more difficult to calculate than something like the probability of a tsunami in a certain region.

Spiegel: Calculating probabilities of all kinds is what you do for a living.

Bomhard: We reach our limits with such complex situations. But it was clear that something was brewing. It was merely a question of when the storm would hit.

…
Spiegel: The high bonuses are now being questioned in many countries — in the United States as well as in Great Britain and Switzerland.

Bomhard: And with very good reason. I very often hear from bankers the argument that they only pay bonuses because the competition does so as well. I think that with another business philosophy and corporate culture you can also pay people differently. If I offer exorbitant sums as a reward …

Spiegel: … I want mercenaries …

Bomhard: … and that’s usually what I get. And of course large, short-term bonuses basically accelerated the crisis.

While FOX News blathers mud in the eye and major networks fluff, the Euro and Asia press more often press:

Spiegel: Many bankers lack understanding, sensibility — or let’s call it a sense of decency.

Bomhard: It is regrettable, but also part of human nature, that assuming high-ranking positions involves a certain amount of distancing from normal life.

Who knows what they’ll learn?

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has ordered community gardens at each USDA facility worldwide.

Michelle Obama said this is “a very good thing” and brought a seedling from President Jackson’s magnolia tree to honor ‘breaking pavement’.

WASHINGTON, (UPI) — Innocent people are sent to prison because forensics used in police stations and courtrooms rely on faulty science.

‘Badly Fragmented’ Forensic Science System Needs Overhaul
The U.S. National Academy of Sciences finds serious deficiencies in the nation’s forensic science system and calls for major reforms.

Most forensics don’t meet even minimal scientific standards but forensic scientists confidently assert the reliability of their findings when they testify in court.

Over the years, ten states (in dark red) have pressured their utilities to increase efficiency and conservation.

Most state governments and utilities have achieved very little.

Amory Lovin’s Rocky Mountain Institute found that the USA would use 30% less electricity if laggard states would catch up.

Wasted electricity is a premier resource.

Energy efficiency is surely the lowest hanging fruit in the quest to satisfy our national energy hunger (and to cure our addiction to oil)—household energy use totals about 22 percent of our nation’s total energy consumption, much of which is senselessly wasted through poor design and construction.

And of the easy to reach fruits of efficiency, the very easiest to pluck might well be the weatherization of homes, which Amory Lovins, efficiency guru and founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, once called the “oil field in our attics”.

The study has alarmed politicians and engineers as each state makes various claims and excuses. Yes but my state has more factories. Yes but my state has older power plants. Yes but my state has poorly insulated older homes. Exactly.

What bugs me much more than dealing with smoke in the sky from old technologies such as coal is the smoke in our eyes from arrogant politicians and execs that assume we are naive.

“Clean Coal” was bundled into a package of bumper stickers during the McCain-Palin campaign, paraded as a moral and strategic initiative that required loose government and loose controls to protect us from desert empires. Winking for votes.

Dusty business plans were re-circulated as if Sarah Palin would or could create Bulwark America, as if Alaska drains its one year of crude to be followed by so-called clean coal from the Prairies to Virginia. How many bought this capricious junk? Too many.

Now without McCain’s slipshod back-room incentives, execs and investors are retreating from new plants.

For one example of hundreds, NV Energy, Inc. will not move forward “until the technologies that will capture and store greenhouse gas are commercially feasible, which is not likely before the end of the next decade.”

There will not be 100, 200, 300 new coal-fired power plants. American Electric Power projects have been placed on hold. AES Corporation with almost $14 billion in revenues will withdraw applications to build coal-fired power plants as Obama’s EPA has effectively put a moratorium on all coal-fired plant projects in order to confront CO2.

China has erected several hundred new coal plants. Many Americans should worry. The particulates are carried eastward over North America. Made darker by pollutants, dirty ice melts faster, exposing tundra and putting us at risk of atmospheric methane. The ash by-product from burning coal for power contains up to 100 times more radiation than nuclear waste. And we haven’t truly understood the damage that fine particulates can cause in our bodies.

Whether or not flue scrubbing or hi-tech burn become effective, the coal industry has much to answer for. The Clean Air Act has been gutted, especially under Bush, but recently set new targets to reduce particulates.

We no longer spill solvents into rivers. Diesel soot is finally under regulation. It’s time we notice that tiny particles are potentially dangerous and too common.

Incidentally, did you know that almost one third of laser printers emit large numbers of ultrafine particles that can penetrate deep into our lungs.

Did you know the world’s longest word describes black lung disease common in the coal industry? [ wiki ]

Is there such a thing as merely a little bit of fascism?

Finished with his camera, Mr. Taylor, 30, was about to board the train when a police officer called to him. He stepped back from the train.

“The cop wanted my ID, and I showed it to him,” Mr. Taylor said. “He told me I couldn’t take the pictures. I told him that’s not true, that the rules permitted it. He said I was wrong. I said, ‘I’m willing to bet your paycheck.’ ”

…
“I said, ‘According to the rules of conduct, we are allowed to take pictures,’ ” Mr. Taylor said. “I showed him the rules — they’re bookmarked on my BlackBerry.”

Rule 1050.9 (c) of the state code says, “Photography, filming or video recording in any facility or conveyance is permitted except that ancillary equipment such as lights, reflectors or tripods may not be used.”

Then a police sergeant arrived.

Mr. Taylor said. “I tell him, ‘If you feel I’m wrong, give me a summons and I’ll see everyone in court.’ The sergeant told them to arrest me.”

In handcuffs, Mr. Taylor was delivered to the Transit District 12 police station, and a warrant check was run. “They were citing 9/11,” said Mr. Taylor, whose encounter was described on a blog by the photographer Carlos Miller, Photography Is Not A Crime.

The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs.

“Of course, 9/11 is serious. I said: ‘Let’s be real. We’re in the Bronx on the 2 train. Let’s be for real here. Come on.’ ” [story at NYTimes]

Dog owners were asked how they dealt with aggressive behavior:

– 43% hit or kick dog for undesirable behavior

– 41% growl at dog

– 39% force an item from a dog’s mouth

– 31% roll the dog onto its back and hold

– 30% stare at or stare down

– 29% force the dog down onto its side

– 26% grab dog by jowls and shake

A year-long University of Pennsylvania survey found that confrontational or aversive methods will likely increase aggression.

Meghan E. Herron, lead author of the study, said. “Our study demonstrated that many confrontational training methods, whether staring down dogs, striking them or intimidating them with physical manipulation does little to correct improper behavior and can elicit aggressive responses.”

Bullies are also fools.

HousingCrisis blog:

Now, you might say we’re convulsing through the beginning of the end of the era of the fossil fuel economy. It’s not an easy passage, and weaning $40-or-so-trillion of global gross domestic product from the planet’s oil supply doesn’t bode well for a very comfortable next 50 years or so.

So Americans’ cars and Americans’ houses are not ever going to mean what they have meant.

If who we are is not what we drive and where we live, then what happens?

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. – Thomas Jefferson

Bristol Palin was on Fox News saying her mother’s views on abstinence are ‘not realistic at all because it’s not the 19th Century any more, not even in Alaska’.

James Hansen is director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He was the first scientist to warn the US Congress of the dangers of climate change:

Coal-fired power plants are death factories. Close them

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

Simon Caulkin: Inside every chief exec, there’s a Soviet planner

“Managers miscalculated risk, misallocated resources & created incentives of such outstanding perversity that they brought the entire global financial system crashing down around them.

How could this happen?

…
The truth is that much conventional management is central planning in western disguise. This is why most companies are zombie-like in their structural and strategic similarity. This is why, too, they are unable to learn.

With their faces toward the CEO and their arses towards the customer… the Zimbabwe school of change management – altering course only after ruin, by coup d’état.

Paul Krugman:

The bottom line is that there has been basically no wealth creation … since the turn of the millennium: the net worth of the average American household, adjusted for inflation, is lower now than it was in 2001.

At one level this should come as no surprise. For most of the last decade America was a nation of borrowers and spenders, not savers. …

Why should we have expected our net worth to go up?

Yet until very recently Americans believed they were getting richer, because they received statements saying that their houses and stock portfolios were appreciating in value faster than their debts were increasing. … Then reality struck… The surge in asset values had been an illusion — but the surge in debt had been all too real.

So now we’re in trouble — deeper trouble, I think, than most people realize… For this is a broad-based mess. Everyone talks about the problems of the banks… But the banks aren’t the only players with too much debt and too few assets; the same description applies to the private sector as a whole.

…
If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression.

Since nothing like that is on the table…

Joe Bagent:

Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess.

But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows.

However, I’m not ruling out the possibility that they just might help do that — keep the lid on — because they are state authorized and accredited to do so. The infrastructure of industrial strength administration of psychology is there. And has been ever since sheepskins were issued to “industrial psychologists.”

Nobody in the Western World seems to see the irony and conflict in that term. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have “snapped” alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as “individuals.” Of course, if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help ‘em because they would then be a national security problem, the last thing you want to be in a security state.

…
We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?) which have always been among us, though never in such strength.

…
Still, it is only a system. Systems can be changed.

Robert Patterson:

I am not talking about communism, I am talking about nature’s law. The worst thing in nature is a system with too little diversity. We have allowed the most important parts of our lives to be captured by a tiny self serving elite.

Google Trends on lipstick and unemployment from Mahalanobis.

Take A Seat on an 18,449 mile bike ride.

Who am I?

Dominic Gill, 28 years old, Climber, Videographer, Adventurer, Jack of all trades (hopefully master of one, one day…)

Where did I go?

From Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, approximately 29,519 kilometres / 18,449 miles down the west coast to Ushuaia, the most southerly city in South America.

What was my mode of transport?

A tandem bicycle. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with one of the approximately 270 people I picked up for company on the back!

How long did it take?

I arrived at the Southern tip of Patagonia 2 years and 2 months after rolling away from Prudhoe Bay.