May 7, 2010 archive

Charles Ives

Yippee !  Wall Street is saved !

Senator Sherrod Brown’s (D OH)  amendment 3733 on the Financial Stability Act bill, to break up the Big 6 Banks into smaller ones that couldn’t take down the entire nation’s economy if they failed, itself did not pass the vote in the Senate this evening, failing by a spectacular 61 noes to 33 yeas, with 6 senators too timid to approach the subject.

http://www.senate.gov/legislat…

Not all bought and paid for yet:

YEAs — 33 votes

Begich (D-AK)

Bingaman (D-NM)

Boxer (D-CA)

Brown (D-OH)

Burris (D-IL)

Cantwell (D-WA)

Cardin (D-MD)

Casey (D-PA)

Coburn (R-OK)***** Republican

Dorgan (D-ND)

Durbin (D-IL)

Ensign (R-NV)

Feingold (D-WI)

Franken (D-MN)

Harkin (D-IA)

Kaufman (D-DE)

Leahy (D-VT)

Levin (D-MI)

Lincoln (D-AR)

Merkley (D-OR)

Mikulski (D-MD)

Murray (D-WA)

Pryor (D-AR)

Reid (D-NV)

Rockefeller (D-WV)

Sanders (I-VT)

Shelby (R-AL)*****   Republican

Specter (D-PA)*****  ex Republican

Stabenow (D-MI)

Udall (D-NM)

Webb (D-VA)

Whitehouse (D-RI)

Wyden (D-OR)

_______________________ end of people who don’t like Great Depressions and financial chaos

___________   Begin list of Senators who liked that Citizens United Ruling by the Supreme Court:

NAYs — 61

Akaka (D-HI)

Alexander (R-TN)

Barrasso (R-WY)

Baucus (D-MT)  a small, cold, scenic state of tiny population,  which votes with Utah.  wtf.

Bayh (D-IN)  does you wife get more insura/pharma stock options for this ?

Bennet (D-CO)

Bond (R-MO)

Brown (R-MA)

Brownback (R-KS)

Burr (R-NC)

Carper (D-DE)   meh. typical.

Chambliss (R-GA)

Cochran (R-MS)

Collins (R-ME)

Conrad (D-ND)

Corker (R-TN)

Cornyn (R-TX)

Crapo (R-ID)

Dodd (D-CT)  looking for that Golden Parachute……

Enzi (R-WY)

Feinstein (D-CA)  meh.

Gillibrand (D-NY)  really, Kirsten, how could you

Graham (R-SC)

Grassley (R-IA)

Gregg (R-NH)

Hagan (D-NC)

Hatch (R-UT)

Hutchison (R-TX)

Inhofe (R-OK)

Inouye (D-HI)

Isakson (R-GA)

Johanns (R-NE)

Johnson (D-SD)

Kerry (D-MA) meh. first no public option, an excise tax, and now this.   you still suck.

Klobuchar (D-MN)

Kohl (D-WI)

Kyl (R-AZ)

Landrieu (D-LA)  say, how’s the Gulf doing, Ms. Mary of Louisiana?

Lautenberg (D-NJ)

LeMieux (R-FL)

Lieberman (ID-CT)  suing Atty General Holder over the tragic Ft Hood shooting information release, too

McCain (R-AZ)

McCaskill (D-MO) midwestern Blew Dawg who thinks she’s a hot shot financial whiz.  ya huh. not.

McConnell (R-KY)

Menendez (D-NJ)

Murkowski (R-AK)

Nelson (D-FL)

Nelson (D-NE)  at least he’s consistently not on our side

Reed (D-RI)

Risch (R-ID)

Roberts (R-KS)

Schumer (D-NY)  wants to be next Majority Leader after making us all get biometric cards. Swell.

Sessions (R-AL)

Shaheen (D-NH)

Snowe (R-ME)

Tester (D-MT)  meh. These netroots Dems.

Thune (R-SD)

Udall (D-CO)

Voinovich (R-OH)

Warner (D-VA)

Wicker (R-MS)

__________________   chickenhearts

Not Voting – 6  

Bennett (R-UT)

Bunning (R-KY)

Byrd (D-WV)  okay, you’re old and frail.  pass. barely.

DeMint (R-SC)

Lugar (R-IN)

Vitter (R-LA)  you don’t have enough diapers to clean anything up

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 1000 points in ten minutes today, wiping out $1 trillion in equity values as algorithmic trading by high-speed computers spun out of control.

What passes for sanity on Wall Street was eventually restored, and after falling 998.5 points or 9.2% in only a few minutes, stocks ended the day with a relatively benign loss of 3.2%, 347 points off the Dow, in what was still its biggest one-day tumble since February, 2009.

The more or less rational fraction of this mini-panic was apparently fear that the Spanish economy would collapse along with Greece, and then…

Robot-traders ran wild!

And it wasn’t the first time.

The 1987 crash, when the Dow lost 20% in a matter of hours, was blamed squarely on program trading, in which computers are set to sell (or buy) when stocks hit a certain threshold.

But at the end of the day, nobody knows exactly what happened, or why, and our economy continues to be ruled by a tunnel-vision coalition of half-bright wonks and predatory hustlers.

Slick Operator: The BP I’ve Known Too Well

Greg Palast

I’ve seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon’s name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was … British Petroleum (BP).

That’s important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What’s so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That’s because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

Whoo!  That was a bit of the old galvanic skin response, wasn’t it?  Wall Street’s high frequency trading programs exhibited a bout of uninhibited sympathetic discharge, and lots of hearts initially stopped dead before drum-rolling seconds later, amid abrupt increases in blood pressure, pounding headaches of sudden onset, profuse sweating, piloerection, blurred vision, and micturition and voiding reflexes.  The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P took a huge, 1,000-point swan dive, while the Volatility Index shot up Ben Bernanke’s butthole like a bolt of lightning.  Exciting stuff!

I’m just glad everything is back to normal.