I don’t normally watch, but you’ll want to see this before it gets taken down.

I’ll have some motherfucking iced tea now.

Ships to sail directly over the north pole by 2050, scientists say

John Vidal, The Guardian

Monday 4 March 2013 15.00 EST

(B)y 2050, say Laurence C. Smith and Scott R. Stephenson at the University of California in the journal PNAS on Monday, ordinary vessels should be able to travel easily along the northern sea route, and moderately ice-strengthened ships should be able to take the shortest possible route between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, passing over the pole itself. The easiest time would be in September, when annual sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean is at its lowest extent.

…

“The prospect of common open water ships, which comprise the vast majority of the global fleet, entering the Arctic Ocean in late summer, and even its remote central basin by moderately ice-strengthened vessels heightens the urgency for a mandatory International Maritime Organisation regulatory framework to ensure adequate environmental protections, vessel safety standards, and search-and-rescue capability,” it adds.

A Stealth Tax Subsidy for Business Faces New Scrutiny

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH and LOUISE STORY, The New York Times

Published: March 4, 2013

(T)he ability to finance a variety of business projects cheaply with bonds that are exempt from federal taxes – has not only endured, it has grown, in what amounts to a stealth subsidy for private enterprise.

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In all, more than $65 billion of these bonds have been issued by state and local governments on behalf of corporations since 2003, according to an analysis of Bloomberg bond data by The New York Times. During that period, the single biggest beneficiary of such securities was the Chevron Corporation, which issued bonds with a total face value of $2.6 billion, the analysis showed. Last year it reported a profit of $26 billion.

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In 2005, Congress created a similar program to spur rebuilding in areas of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi that were ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The Times’s data shows that much of the bond proceeds went to the oil and gas industry, or to showcase projects like hotels or the Superdome. In 2008, Congress passed the Heartland Disaster Tax Relief Act, a bond program to help 10 Midwestern states hit by flooding and tornadoes. The goal was to help businesses rebuild their destroyed property. But by the time the program was set to expire at the end of last year, the criteria had been expanded to include new businesses.

One of those businesses was Orascom Construction Industries of Egypt, which raised $1.2 billion of tax-exempt bonds to build a fertilizer plant in Iowa. Another was the Fatima Group of Pakistan. In December, a Fatima subsidiary raised $1.3 billion, tax-exempt, to build a fertilizer plant in Mount Vernon, Ind.

But weeks later, Indiana received alarming news: Pentagon officials said that fertilizer from Fatima’s operations in Pakistan had been turning up in Afghanistan, in homemade bombs used against American troops.

Not here obviously.

Afghan Court Convicts 21 in Kabul Bank Scandal

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG and AZAM AHMED, The New York Times

Published: March 5, 2013

In total, 21 defendants were found guilty on Tuesday of crimes for their roles in the failure of the bank, which investigators have described as little more than a Ponzi scheme.

Its main function was to funnel depositors’ money to its own shareholders and their cronies, and its owners masked their theft for years by creating fictitious companies, phony books and even smuggling cash out of the country in the food trays of a commercial airliner they owned.

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According to Afghan and Western investigators, the regulators were actively deceived by the bank’s owners, who kept double books and engaged in other ploys to cover up their deceit. The owners even created fictitious companies, including fake letterheads and rubber stamps to leave a paper trail that would appear legitimate. The Karzai administration also stymied the regulators’ work, the investigators said before Tuesday’s verdicts. They had characterized the prosecutions as an effort to seek retribution.

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Once celebrated by American and Afghan officials as a cornerstone of the Western project to rebuild Afghanistan, Kabul Bank was taken over by regulators in August 2010 after becoming perilously insolvent. At the time, 92 percent of its loan portfolio – $861 million, or about 5 percent of Afghanistan’s annual economic output at the time – had gone to 19 people or companies, according to a forensic audit by Kroll Associates, an international investigative firm.

All were part of a clique that was tied to Mr. Karzai’s government. Bailing out the bank cost the financially struggling Afghan government roughly $825 million, a sum that at that time represented most of the government’s annual revenues. Estimates of how much has been recovered from those who received loans vary from $200 million to $400 million, Afghan and Western officials have said.

Critics say Afghan court was lenient in bank corruption case

By Shashank Bengali, Los Angeles Times

March 5, 2013, 7:19 a.m.

The case was a major test for Afghanistan’s justice system, which had never before tried such a massive fraud case, or one that implicated powerful men with ties to President Hamid Karzai and other top officials – and critics judged the results to be disappointing. They noted that the three-judge panel convicted Farnood and Ferozi on a lesser charge of breach of trust, which carries a lighter sentence and didn’t include an order to confiscate millions from the disgraced executives’ offshore bank accounts.

Prosecutors had sought convictions for money laundering, embezzlement and other more serious crimes, which would have faciliated recovery of the stolen funds and together could have carried a maximum jail sentence of 20 years.

…

Executives and top shareholders looted the private Kabul Bank of $935 million – including some squirreled out of the country in food trays of a now-defunct airline – sparking one of the largest bank failures ever. The theft amounted to some 6% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, financed shopping sprees and overseas villas for leading shareholders while leaving ordinary account holders broke, and dealt a huge blow to international confidence in the country’s fledgling public institutions.

Untouchability is the social-religious practice of ostracizing a minority group by segregating them from the mainstream by social custom or legal mandate. The excluded group could be one that did not accept the norms of the excluding group and historically included foreigners, house workers, nomadic tribes, law-breakers and criminals and those suffering from a contagious disease such as leprosy. This exclusion was a method of punishing law-breakers and also protected traditional societies against contagion from strangers and the infected. A member of the excluded group is known as an Untouchable.

Fallout from ‘Untouchables’ Documentary: Another Wall Street Whistleblower Gets Reamed

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

POSTED: March 4, 2:31 PM ET

A great many people around the county were rightfully shocked and horrified by the recent excellent and hard-hitting PBS documentary, The Untouchables, which looked at the problem of high-ranking Wall Street crooks going unpunished in the wake of the financial crisis. The PBS piece certainly rattled some cages, particularly in Washington, in a way that few media efforts succeed in doing.

…

There are people out there still willing to argue that the government somehow “forced the banks to lend” to unworthy applicants. In reality, it was unscrupulous companies like Countrywide that were cranking out loans en masse, knowing that these loans would be unloaded down the line, first to banks and then to sucker investors like pension funds and foreign trade unions, almost as soon as they were created.

Winston was a witness to all of this. Eventually, he would be asked by the firm to present false information to the Moody’s ratings agency, which was about to give Countrywide a negative rating because of some trouble the company was having in working a smooth succession from one set of company leaders to another.

When Winston refused, he was essentially stripped of his normal responsibilities and had his corporate budget slashed. When Bank of America took over the company, Winston’s job was terminated. He sued, and in one of the few positive outcomes for any white-collar whistleblower anywhere in the post-financial-crisis universe, won a $3.8 million wrongful termination suit against Bank of America last February.

Well, just weeks after the PBS documentary aired, the Court of Appeals in the state of California suddenly took an interest in Winston’s case. Normally, a court of appeals can only overturn a jury verdict in a case like this if there is a legal error. It’s not supposed to relitigate the factual evidence.

Yet this is exactly what happened: The court decided that the evidence that Winston was wrongfully terminated was insufficient, and then from there determined that the “legal error” in the original Winston suit against Bank of America and Countrywide was that the judge in the case failed to throw out the jury’s verdict.

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A number of people in positions of power wanted to know just what “experts” people like Breuer had consulted with before deciding not to press charges in certain cases. Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley and Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown, specifically, sent Attorney General Eric Holder a letter asking a number of questions.

Among other things, the two Senators wanted to know if certain companies had been designated “Too Big to Jail.”

…

Well, at the end of last week, on February 27th, the Department of Justice sent Brown and Grassley a letter in return. The letter is, to describe it very generously, not terribly informative.

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On those questions, the DOJ would say only that “it is entirely appropriate for prosecutors to hear from subject matter experts at relevant regulatory authorities”.

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That is one hell of a slippery piece of language. It’s great that the Department of Justice is not paying, say, HSBC to consult with them on the question of whether or not HSBC should be prosecuted. What a relief! But that doesn’t mean they’re not paying someone else for that kind of advice.

The DOJ similarly blew off naming any individual experts and they refused absolutely to turn over information about any compensation they may have paid out to whomever it is who is whispering in their prosecutorial ears.

…

The Department of Justice is now saying that it misunderstood the two Senators, that it didn’t know that they were asking for the actual names of those experts. Moreover, the Department claims it is working on answers to those queries.

In the meantime, Eric Holder is appearing before the Judiciary Committee this Wednesday, and it will be interesting to see how he handles questioning from Senator Grassley. It may get ugly before the answers actually come out, but it seems that someone is finally determined to get some real information.

Scalia: Voting Rights Act Is ‘Perpetuation Of Racial Entitlement’

By Nicole Flatow and Ian Millhiser, Think Progress

Feb 27, 2013 at 11:52 am

The problem here, however, is suggested by the comment I made earlier, that the initial enactment of this legislation in a – in a time when the need for it was so much more abundantly clear was – in the Senate, there – it was double-digits against it. And that was only a 5-year term.

Then, it is reenacted 5 years later, again for a 5-year term. Double-digits against it in the Senate. Then it was reenacted for 7 years. Single digits against it. Then enacted for 25 years, 8 Senate votes against it. And this last enactment, not a single vote in the Senate against it. And the House is pretty much the same. Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement. It’s been written about. Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes.

I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless – unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution. You have to show, when you are treating different States differently, that there’s a good reason for it.

That’s the – that’s the concern that those of us who – who have some questions about this statute have. It’s – it’s a concern that this is not the kind of a question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose – they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act.

Even the name of it is wonderful: The Voting Rights Act. Who is going to vote against that in the future?

Massachusetts official challenges Chief Justice Roberts’ claim about voting

By Akilah Johnson, Boston Globe Staff

February 28, 2013

“Do you know which state has the worst ratio of white voter turnout to African-American voter turnout?” Roberts asked Donald Verrilli Jr., solicitor general for the Department of Justice, during Wednesday’s arguments.

“I do not know that,” Verrilli answered.

“Massachusetts,” Roberts responded, adding that even Mississippi has a narrower gap.

Roberts later asked if Verrilli knew which state has the greatest disparity in registration. Again, Roberts said it was Massachusetts.

The problem is, Roberts is woefully wrong on those points, according to Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin, who on Thursday branded Roberts’s assertion a slur and made a declaration of his own. “I’m calling him out,” Galvin said.

Galvin was not alone in his view. Academics and Massachusetts politicians said that Roberts appeared to be misguided. A Supreme Court spokeswoman declined to offer supporting evidence of ­Roberts’s view, referring a ­reporter to the court transcript.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet some other writers that should impress you if you’re paying attention at all and one of them is Gaius Publius who writes this today-

Obama economic adviser: Using the sequester to cut benefits was "part of the DNA from the start"

by Gaius Publius, Americablog

3/3/2013 10:00am

We now have stunning confirmation that Obama is using the sequester “battle” as blackmail to get his Grand Bargain (Grand Betrayal) passed – and that “entitlement” benefit cuts are, and always were, part of the plan. It could not be more clear.

Barack Obama wants to cut entitlements, and he’s using the sequester to do it. This, and no other reason, is why the sequester is happening.

The person who made the statement quoted in my headline – that cutting entitlements is “in the DNA” of the sequester – is Gene Sperling, a “top economic aide” to Barack Obama, and someone who knows what he’s talking about.

Why Obama Refuses to Kill the Sequester

Bill, Black, Naked Captalism

Monday, February 25, 2013

I wrote last year about the fact that President Obama had twice blocked Republican efforts to remove the Sequester. President Obama went so far as to issue a veto threat to block the second effort. I found contemporaneous reportage on the President’s efforts to preserve the Sequester – and the articles were not critical of those efforts. I found no contemporaneous rebuttal by the administration of these reports.

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I raised the President’s efforts to save the Sequester because they revealed his real preferences. Those of us who teach economics explain to our students that what people say about their preferences is not as reliable as how they act. Their actions reveal their true preferences. President Obama has always known that the Sequester is terrible public policy. He has blasted it as a “manufactured crisis.”

…

When he acted to save the Sequester, Obama proved that he preferred the Sequester to the alternative. When the alternative threatened by the Republicans was causing a default on the U.S. debt (by refusing to increase the debt limit), one could understand Obama’s preference (though even there I would have called the Republican bluff). The Republicans, however, had extended the debt limit in both of the cases that President Obama acted to save the Sequester in 2011.

Similarly, President Obama has revealed his real preferences in the current blame game by not calling for a clean bill eliminating the Sequester. It is striking that as far as I know (1) neither Obama nor any administration official has called for the elimination of the Sequester and (2) we have a fairly silly blame game about how the Sequester was created without discussing the implications of Obama’s continuing failure to call for the elimination of the Sequester despite his knowledge that it is highly self-destructive.

The only logical inference that can be drawn is that Obama remains committed to inflicting the “Grand Bargain” (really, the Grand Betrayal) on the Nation in his quest for a “legacy” and continues to believe that the Sequester provides him the essential leverage he feels he needs to coerce Senate progressives to adopt austerity, make deep cuts in vital social programs, and to begin to unravel the safety net. Obama’s newest budget offer includes cuts to the safety net and provides that 2/3 of the austerity inflicted would consist of spending cuts instead of tax increases. When that package is one’s starting position the end result of any deal will be far worse.

Gaius again-

Obama wants the Grand Betrayal to be his legacy. Give it to him. Everyone reading this has some “reach” – some group of people you influence. Every time you talk about Obama, tell just tell the truth.

“Barack Obama wants to cut Social Security and Medicare. He’s tried it every time these phony crises come along. He just needs Republican tax hikes to hide the knife.”

In other words, rebrand him; paint him with the truth. Don’t hide it from yourself; don’t hide it from your friends. At some point, the new paint will stick. But for that to happen, we must persist.

I also recently had a chat with lambert strether of Corrente and Naked Capitalism and one of his major topics was rebranding.  Well, here’s the issue.

As much as I think other little things like War Crimes, Global Warming, and stuff are equally important indictments of current government policies; Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are supported by 90%! majorities.

The outcry against this must be as strong by true leftists (progressive is what liberals call themselves because they’re weak and ashamed and cowardly, and Democratic is merely a party of convenience rapidly compromising themselves into irrelevance) as it was against W.

Or are you just a tribalist celebrity suck up with no principles you’re not willing to sellout for an insincere smile?  History and voters will punish you.

Dewey’s Damn Decimal System.

GPS Adventures.