September 2013 – Page 5

Sep 25 2013

Muse in the Morning

By Robyn in Art, Community, Poetry

Muse in the Morning

Floret

Muse in the Morning

Sep 25 2013

US Spying Lambasted by an Ally

By TMC in Politics

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The president of an close US ally, Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, told the audience of dignitaries at the annual United Nations General Assembly session that the US is in violation of international law by using the NSA to indiscriminately collect “the personal information of Brazilian citizens and economic espionage targeted on the country’s strategic industries.”

Rousseff’s angry speech was a direct challenge to President Barack Obama, who was waiting in the wings to deliver his own address to the UN general assembly, and represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Rousseff had already put off a planned visit to Washington in protest at US spying, after NSA documents leaked by Snowden revealed that the US electronic eavesdropping agency had monitored the Brazilian president’s phone calls, as well as Brazilian embassies and spied on the state oil corporation, Petrobras. [..]

Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the UN and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted,” Rousseff said, in a global rallying cry against what she portrayed as the overweening power of the US security apparatus. [..]

She warned, using very strong words that the the NSA surveillance was a direct threat to freedom of speech and democracy.

“Meddling in such a manner in the lives and affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and as such it is an affront to the principles that should otherwise govern relations among countries, especially among friendly nations,” [..]

“Without the right to privacy, there is no real freedom of speech or freedom of opinion, and therefore, there is no actual democracy,” [..]

“A country’s sovereignty can never affirm itself to the detriment of another country’s sovereignty,”

She called for the “establishment of multilateral mechanisms” to protect the internet and the privacy of individuals, businesses and diplomats.

Many countries have denounced the US at the UN, coming mostly from nations that disagree with US international policies. This rebuke, coming from a large influential and close ally was diplomatically painful.

The full transcript of Pres. Rouseff’s speech can be read here and here (pdf).

Sep 25 2013

The Increasing Inequality of the 99%

By TMC in Politics

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The income gap between the 99% is has grown to the point that it now as great as it was a the start of the Great Depression. In New York City, Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio built his campaign for mayor around the increased poverty of New Yorkers that he says is creating two cities. According to the US Census Bureau the poverty rate continues to climb in NYC threatening the viability of the city:

The poverty rate rose to 21.2 percent in 2012, from 20.9 percent the year before, meaning that 1.7 million New Yorkers fell below the official federal poverty threshold. That increase was not statistically significant, but the rise from the 2010 rate of 20.1 percent was.

Former Labor Secretary for President Bill Clinton, Robert Reich has released a documentary, Inequality for All, on the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Bothers and the second anniversary of Occupy Wall Street which brought attention to the income gap and change the nation’s conversation about the “American Dream.” Sec. Reich joined Bill Moyers on his show Moyers & Company to discuss his film and the increasing income inequality for all of us.

TRanscript can be read here

“The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there’s upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.”

By the Numbers: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class

by Karen Kamp, Moyers & Company

A typical American household made about $51,017 in 2012, according to new figures out from the Census Bureau this week. That number may sound familiar to anyone who remembers George H. W. Bush’s first year as president or Michael Jackson in his prime. That’s because household income in 2012 is similar to what it was in 1989 (but back then it was actually higher: you had an extra $600 or so to spend compared to today).

That sobering statistic gives an indication of where the American middle class appears to be headed. Take a look below at a snapshot of where the middle class is now, the problems they face and what our Facebook audience has to say about squeaking out a living these days.

Sep 24 2013

Today on The Stars Hollow Gazette

By TMC

Our regular featured content-

On This Day In History September 24 by TheMomCat
Punting the Pundits by TheMomCat

These featured articles-

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities” by ek hornbeck
The Increasing Inequality of the 99% by TheMomCat
US Spying Lambasted by an Ally by TheMomCat

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Write more and often. This is an Open Thread.

The Stars Hollow Gazette

Sep 24 2013

Rania Masri on Syria and the Middle East

By ek hornbeck

Transcript

Sep 24 2013

Doing God’s Work

By ek hornbeck

Forbes Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

POSTED: September 20, 2:55 PM ET

It reads like an Onion piece, just hilarious stuff. I mean, Jesus, even Lloyd Blankfein himself didn’t go so far as to take the “God’s work” thing 100% seriously, and here’s this jackass saying, without irony, that the Goldman CEO literally out-God-slaps Mother Teresa.

The thing is, for all its excesses, Mr. Catyanker’s piece does reflect an attitude you see pretty often among Rand devotees and Road To Serfdom acolytes. Five whole years have passed since the crash, and there are still huge pockets of these Fountainhead junkies who genuinely believe that the Blankfeins of the world are reviled because they’re bankers and they’re rich, and not because they’re the heads of unprosecutable organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud, manipulation and the shameless burgling of public treasure. In this case you have a guy who writes for Forbes, a business publication,and apparently he isn’t acquainted even casually with any of the roughly 10,000 corruption cases involving Blankfein’s bank.

…

Just for yuks, let’s fill Binswanger in on some of the ways Goldman has made its money over the years. This is just the stuff they’ve been caught for, by the way.

Way back in 1999, several eras of corruption ago, Goldman serially engaged in manipulation of the IPO markets, including illegal tactics like “spinning” and “laddering,” where insiders and top bank clients would be allowed to buy shares in new companies at severely discounted prices, sometimes in return for investment banking business or for promises that those insiders would jump back into the bidding later to jack up the price artificially. In a famous case involving eToys, Goldman paid a $7.5 million settlement for allowing insiders to buy shares at $20, far below the $75 shares the company traded on opening day. The secret discounts might have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. The firm went bankrupt in short order, by the way.

In the infamous “Abacus” case, Goldman teamed up with a hedge-fund billionaire named John Paulson to create a born-to-lose portfolio of mortgage derviatives, which were then marketed by Goldman to a pair of sucker European banks, IKB and ABN-Amro. When the instruments crashed, Paulson made bank on bets he made against his own loser portfolio. Goldman’s peculiar role was in “renting the platform,” i.e. allowing IKB and ABN-Amro to think that neutral Goldman, not a hedge funder like Paulson massively betting against the product, had created the portfolio. Goldman only made $15 million in the deal that ended up causing over a billion in losses, meaning this wasn’t even just about money – they were just trying to curry favor with a hedge fund client out to screw a bunch of Euros. They were fined $550 million.

In the even more absurd Hudson deal, Goldman unloaded a billion-plus sized chunk of toxic mortgage-backed crap on Morgan Stanley during a time when Lloyd “Mother Teresa” Blankfein was telling his minions to unload as much of the firm’s ‘cats and dogs’ as possible, ie. its soon-to-explode subprime holdings. In its marketing materials, Goldman represented to Morgan Stanley that its interests were aligned with Morgan, because Goldman owned a $6 million slice of the Hudson deal. It didn’t disclose that it had a $2 billion bet against it. Morgan Stanley, which was subsequently bailed out by taxpayers like Harry Binswanger, lost $960 million.

Goldman bought a series of aluminum warehouses and has apparently been serially delaying the delivery of aluminum in order to artificially inflate the price. Even Binswanger might have heard of this one. The CFTC sent a wave of subpoenas on this score just last month.

Goldman paid a fine to the SEC in 2010 after it was caught breaking rules governing short-selling on at least 385 occasions – it is currently embroiled in numerous lawsuits that similarly allege that Goldman has engaged in widespread “naked” short selling, a kind of stock counterfeiting that artificially depresses the prices of companies by flooding the market with phantom shares.

Earlier this year, Goldman and Chase agreed to pay a combined $557 million to settle government claims that the banks and/or their mortgage servicing arms engaged in wholesale abuses in the real estate markets, including (but not limited to) robosigning, the practice of mass-producing fictitious, perjured affidavits for the courts for the purposes of foreclosing on homeowners.

A VP in Goldman’s Boston office was nabbed making improper contributions to the former state Treasurer in Massachusetts, during a time when Goldman was underwriting $9 billion in state bonds. Goldman paid a $14.4 million fine in the pay-for-play scandal.

In what one former SEC official described to me as “an open-and-shut case of anticompetitive behavior,” Goldman took a $3 million payment from J.P. Morgan Chase to bow out of the bidding for a toxic interest rate swap deal Chase wanted to stick to the citizens of Jefferson County, Alabama. Goldman got the payment, a Chase banker joked, “for taking no risk.” Chase ended up funneling money to the County Commissioner, who signed off on a deadly deal that put the citizens of the Birmingham, Alabama area into billions of debt (and ultimately bankruptcy), in what is still considered the largest regional financial disaster in American history.

In 2009, a Goldman programmer named Sergey Aleynikov left his office in possession of a code that contained Goldman’s high-frequency trading algorithms. Goldman promptly called the FBI – which up until that point had done exactly zero to prevent crime on Wall Street – to help Mother Teresa’s bank recapture its valuable trading code. In court, a federal prosecutor admitted that the code Aleynikov had in his possession could, “in the wrong hands,” be used to manipulate markets. Aleynikov just pulled an eight-year sentence. Goldman, incidentally, has gone entire quarters without posting a single day of trading loss – in Q1 2010, the bank made at least $25 million every single day, somehow never once betting wrong in 63 trading days. Imagine that! What foresight! What skill! One can see how Mr. Binswanger could believe that the bank’s CEO should be exempt from income taxes.

I could go on – Goldman has been wrapped up in virtually every kind of scandal known to investment banking (and even more that they invented) and was recently at the center of a mysterious and near-catastrophic computer-trading disaster that could have caused massive social damage (more on that in a column coming soon).

The bank is also a truly courageous pioneer in the area of securing completely underserved public bailouts, including the collection of nearly $17 billion in public money for speculative trades with bailed-out AIG and the outrageous receipt of a Commercial Bank Holding Company charter in late September of 2008, allowing it to borrow billions in lifesaving money from the Federal Reserve discount window at a time when Goldman execs were already selling their beach houses for cash in anticipation of the firm’s collapse. Surely even Mr. Binswanger is able to see that Goldman is not, in fact, a commercial bank, and that giving it a commercial bank hat to wear while standing on line to the Fed’s discount window is pure welfare, as inappropriate as LeBron James collecting a federal disability check.

…

So even forgetting the fact that this company on a good day makes its money rigging metals prices, stage-managing IPOs to help insiders, falsifying documents, selling phony mortgages to institutional investors while betting against their own product and engaging in highly dubious high-speed proprietary trading programs that mysteriously allow the firm to pick winners every single time (Harry, they’re using cheat-algorithms to trade split-seconds ahead of the market, not “digging” legitimately as “knowledge-seekers” for inside information, which I know you think should be legal) – even all that wasn’t enough, and Goldman still would have gone out of business, had all of us parasites not been pressed into service to rescue the company with our tax dollars.

It’s hilarious that these Rand-worshipping cultist types are still blind to this basic fact a half a decade later. And my God, Mother Teresa? Would she have been a more “valuable” person if she’d managed an Applebee’s? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Sep 24 2013

Cartnoon

By ek hornbeck

Sep 24 2013

On This Day In History September 24

By TMC in News

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

September 1 is the 244th day of the year (245th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 121 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day on 1789, The Judiciary Act of 1789 is passed by Congress and signed by President George Washington, establishing the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal made up of six justices who were to serve on the court until death or retirement. That day, President Washington nominated John Jay to preside as chief justice, and John Rutledge, William Cushing, John Blair, Robert Harrison, and James Wilson to be associate justices. On September 26, all six appointments were confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Supreme Court was established by Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution granted the Supreme Court ultimate jurisdiction over all laws, especially those in which their constitutionality was at issue. The high court was also designated to oversee cases concerning treaties of the United States, foreign diplomats, admiralty practice, and maritime jurisdiction. On February 1, 1790, the first session of the U.S. Supreme Court was held in New York City’s Royal Exchange Building.