1/ Coming soon - the fight in the Senate to confirm Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Protection Agency. All Republicans and some Democrats who are owned by Wall Street hate her, because she is one of the very few people in the government speaking up for us. Yes, you, you middle class person.
My prediction is that she will not get the approval of the Senate, which is a pity as she is the last hope we have for any resistance to the power of the banking oligarchy......
All attempts so far to construct some form of Pecora Hearings have failed – partly because the issues are complex and partly because of partisan fighting. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission made some progress but could reach no consensus (or bring anyone to justice). Senator Levin’s hearings into Goldman Sachs grabbed attention and were most helpful in the Dodd-Frank reform debate but again no one is going to jail – and few people even grasp what were the real issues at stake. And the Department of Justice has preferred to pursue insider trading cases, perhaps taking the view that these are easier to explain to juries.
But Elizabeth Warren cuts through the complexity and offers a message that – outside of Washington – plays well across the political spectrum.
Her message is simple: the consumer “market” for financial products does not operate like a proper market because leading firms (bigger banks and also nonbanks, like some payday lenders) have figured out how to make a great deal of money by confusing their customers.
Of course, there are many honest players – mostly in credit unions and smaller banks. But when the playing field has been unfairly tilted towards cheating, honest bank executives struggle to stay in business (or to keep their jobs).
If someone attempted to sell boxed cereal in the same fashion that many financial products are now sold, that person would be drummed out of the cereal business. The norms of that sector (and many other nonfinancial sectors in the United States) would not stand for this degree of deception and malpractice.
Some parts of financial services have moved too far towards become unscrupulous and abusing customers. This is bad for the people who are mistreated, it’s bad for the economy, and it’s bad for all honest people in the financial sector.
Elizabeth Warren is offering to allow proper markets to work again within at least part of finance. She has convinced many community bankers that her intentions are sincere and that her principles-based approach can work.
It’s time for the president to stand up to abusive financial practices facilitated by cynical and nontransparent subsidies.
If nominated, Elizabeth Warren’s confirmation hearing would become a defining moment for thinking about finance in America.
And reform would win. All the missed opportunities, botched bailouts, and kowtowing to megabanks would fade into the background. Every attempt at change must face many setbacks – and financial reform has really struggled to have any impact.
But at the end of the day, if Elizabeth Warren wins, we all win.
2/ The oil industry drumbeats are starting again about more wells in the Gulf, Alaska, off the Atlantic coast etc. that we need to help gas prices. All BS.
Here is a Times editorial that spells out the real issues that you can use if you are talking about this with a Fox News viewer.....
The Return of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
Published: May 6, 2011
With the country again facing $4-a-gallon gasoline, the time would seem ripe for a grown-up conversation on energy. What we are getting instead is a mindless rerun of the drill-baby-drill operatics of the 2008 campaign, when gas was also at $4 a gallon. Then, as now, opportunistic politicians insisted that vastly expanded oil drilling would bring relief at the pump and reduced dependence on foreign oil. Then, as now, these arguments were bogus.
As President Obama observed in a March 30 address on energy issues, drilling alone cannot possibly ensure energy independence in a country that uses one-quarter of the world’s oil while owning only 2 percent of its reserves. Nor can it lower prices, except at the margins. Only coordinated measures — greater auto efficiency, alternative fuels, improved mass transit — can address these issues.
Still the oil industry and its political allies persist in their fantasies. On Thursday, the House passed the first of three bills that will require the Interior Department to accelerate drilling permits without proper environmental or engineering reviews, reinstate lease sales off the Virginia coast that were canceled after the BP blowout, and open up protected coastal waters — East, West and in Alaska — to drilling.
The bills would make regulation of offshore drilling even weaker than it was before the spill. They would also do almost nothing to solve the problems of $4-a-gallon gas.
Here’s the hard truth: Prices are set on the world market by the major producers, OPEC in particular. Even countries that produce more oil than they need, like Canada, have little leverage. Canada’s prices track ours.
The Energy Information Agency recently projected what would happen if the nation tripled production on the outer continental shelf. There would be no price impact at all until 2020 and only 3 cents to 5 cents a gallon in 2030.
By contrast, the agency found, raising the fuel efficiency of America’s cars would do real good. Increasing the fleetwide average from roughly 30 m.p.g. today to 60 m.p.g. in the next 15 years, an ambitious but not implausible goal, could bring prices down by 20 percent.
Some politicians get it. Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, is drafting a bill that seeks to repeal $4 billion in annual taxpayer subsidies to the oil industry and use the proceeds to develop more efficient cars and alternative fuel sources. Mr. Obama has tried twice, without success, to get rid of those subsidies, and the House voted in March to preserve them in the current budget.
The tax breaks — fast write-offs for drilling expenses, generous depletion allowances, and the like — may have been useful years ago but are wholly unnecessary when oil prices and industry profits are reaching new highs.
Even John Boehner, the Republican leader, conceded in a recent ABC News interview that oil companies “ought to be paying their fair share.” When horrified aides reminded him that ending the subsidies would amount to a tax increase — anathema among Republicans — he backed off.
Repealing these breaks would reduce the deficit and yield revenues to be invested in cleaner fuels, while having no real impact on prices. Mr. Obama may not be able to persuade the House of these simple truths. But he can and must seize whatever opportunities are offered in the Senate, involving himself, not just rhetorically, in the hard but necessary struggle for a sane energy policy.
3/ Well the Supreme Court did it again - by an 8-1 majority they have ruled sports fans are entitled to behave like total assholes.....Onion Sportsdome has the story......
In an 8-1 decision, the Court found that buying a ticket is license to boo, swear and throw beer at whomever fans please at a sporting event, on the grounds that anyone who doesn't like it can stay home, and those tickets pay for the players' salaries, so who are they to complain?
4/ A follow-up on the Business Week story of last week about the mini-casinos springing up everywhere in Florida including at least five in our tri-city area around Mount Dora.......
From the NYTimes....
APOPKA, Fla. — A drab strip mall in this city north of Orlando includes the usual fixtures: a pharmacy and a payday loans store, as well as an Internet cafe with a sign on the door that reads “Copy-Fax-Print, Surf the Web.”
That these cafes are cash machines — and take in as much as $100,000 a week — is no secret to robbers.
And so, at 1 a.m. on April 19, three armed men tried to rob the place at a time when more than three dozen people were playing slot machine-type games on the cafe’s computer terminals. A security guard shot and killed one of the men; the other two fled and were being sought. A woman hiding in the cafe bathroom told a 911 operator that the robbery was happening in “the casino, in Apopka.”
The shooting death in a place that some customers call a casino has brought fresh scrutiny to Florida’s quickly multiplying “Internet sweepstakes cafes,” which now total nearly 1,000 statewide and are estimated to gross more than $1 billion this year, according to industry analysts, state legislators and their aides, and lawyers in the gambling industry.
5/ A short 3 minute Jon Stewart segment where he comments on Trump and Palin's presidential ambitions.....funny.....
Thursday night's "Daily Show" made a brief departure from all the talk of Osama Bin Laden to catch up on the GOP's search for a 2012 presidential candidate. Jon Stewart couldn't help but notice that frontrunners Donald Trump and Sarah Palin ("The Tom Arnold and Roseanne Barr" of the GOP) were absent from the first debate. He then went over their latest gaffes.
6/ A very interesting tech product that could improve your computer set-up wonderfully, and let you get a smaller laptop as well......not often you get an innovation as useful as this one......
Mmmmmm. Wireless.
Think of all the wires we’ve eliminated so far, thanks to inventions like the remote control, Wi-Fi, cellphones and tiny Bluetooth earpieces. Each time, it’s magical. Each time, it’s more convenient. And each time, the world becomes a better place.
In a couple of weeks, the Cable-Extinction Hall of Fame will gain a new member: the Samsung Central Station.
On your desk, it looks exactly like a sleek, high-definition computer monitor, clad in shiny black. The picture is bright and vivid. The screen comes in two sizes: 23 inches ($450) and 27 ($600).
That’s about $200 more than regular desktop monitors of the same size — even Samsung monitors. But that’s forgivable, considering the Central Station’s secret: It doubles as a wireless docking station
7/ The most accurate pundit in America? - Paul Krugman of the NYT, according to an analysis by a University team.
Fascinating article which confirms what we know instinctively - most of these blowhards on TV are assholes.....
As anyone who routinely tunes in to watch Sunday Morning prognosticators sound forth on their big predictions about politics will tell you: it hurts to watch. So much. So very much. But they'll also tell you that being a political tout seems to be a pretty great gig: you show up, you say a bunch of stuff, and you never worry that you'll ever be held accountable for whatever you get wrong. That's why if you choose that path in life, you may as well be bold and make a bunch of insane predictions, because you're just as liable to accrue renown for being crazy as you are for being correct.
Nevertheless, from time to time, some intrepid souls take it upon themselves to study the augury and attempt to make a determination about who is right and who is wrong. And now, students at Hamilton College under the direction of public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff have subjected 26 of your favorite pundits to rigorous analysis.
8/ Unusual music video of Apocalyptica, a cellist trio playing a haunting melody "Far Away" in the first half of the video, then what can only be described as classical cello rock for the second.
Also the video, set in the Sahara, the ocean and a wasteland has a message.....if you watch this and get their point, please let me know....like who is the old man in the rowboat? What is the relevance of the underwater scene? And why does the guy drop dead at the end?
Nice tune, challenging video.....
9/ The pond scum in the Florida legislature and the crook in the Governors office have finally agreed on a "budget", which will screw the middle class and the working poor of Florida and enrich the corporate titans and their lobbyists......thanks Rick.....
If you voted for these bastards, did you expect anything different?
FOR ALL THE TALK about doing things differently in Tallahassee, state leaders finalized next year's state budget the way it almost always has been done: in secret, with leaders getting what they want, regardless of what's in Florida's best interest. Gov. Rick Scott, who claimed during his campaign that he would be different and not succumb to the Tallahassee machine, now looks like a poser. To strike a face-saving deal on corporate income tax breaks, Scott tacitly approved decisions by House Speaker Dean Cannon and Senate President Mike Haridopolos to steer millions to hometown projects that could have been spent on education, health care and other priorities. This isn't reform; it's business as usual.
10/ Jimmy Fallon has a late night show, so they can get away with more edgy stuff than usual. Here he does a 9 minute skit of "Jersey Shore", helped by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler among others.
Although I've never watched the Shore, this skit is still funny because all of us know enough about the low life characters in this popular reality show about brain dead morons to relate....like Snooki, the Situation etc etc..........
Funny......
11/ The environment is one of the casualties in this years assault by the Florida Legislature......so are integrity, ethics and logic....
Very good Scott Maxwell column from the Orlando Sentinel......
In the Orlando Sentinel, Scott Maxwell has it exactly right: legislators in Tallahassee are caught in a tidal wave of ignorance. While he suggests "taking names", he won't name, names. Carpet baggers like Barney Bishop of Associated Industries and the hoi polloi of Florida's business community who won't stand up for reason, even though their predecessors and, yes, even Republican leaders in the past had the good sense not to throw Florida's environmental protections under the bus.
12/ "Foreclosuregate" is a new way to describe the illegal actions of the banks taking millions of homes away from their owners......
Not the most coherent article or the best written, but he makes several valid points......also an interesting discussion of the effects of changing the Bankruptcy law in 2005.....
The ForeclosureGate scandal poses a threat to Wall Street, the big banks, and the political establishment. If the public ever gets a complete picture of the personal, financial, and legal assault on citizens at their most vulnerable, the outrage will be endless. (Image)
Foreclosure practices lift the veil on a broader set of interlocking efforts to exploit those hardest hit by the endless economic hard times, citizens who become financially desperate due medical conditions. A 2007 study found that medical expenses or income losses related to medical crises among bankruptcy filers or family members triggered 62% of bankruptcies. There is no underground conspiracy. The facts are in plain sight.
ForeclosureGate represents the sum total illegal and unethical lending and collections activities during the real estate bubble. It continues today.
..............................
Beyond ForeclosureGate
The surface scandal is about fraudulent business practices and a systematic assault on homeowners by lenders, servicers, and the legal system. A much broader picture must be viewed in order to understand the utter contempt that the ruling elite has toward citizens and the depraved tactics used to express that contempt, all to serve endless desire to accumulate more money and power.
13/ South Florida is in the grips of a severe drought, so much so they are hoping for a tropical depression to get some rain to the aquifer and the Everglades....hmmmm....be careful what you wish for.....
MIAMI — This year's dry season tortured South Florida, so much so that officials today said that we need the rainy season to bring a tropical disturbance just to help us get back to normal.
But what the rainy season will bring is unknown.
"We don't know precisely what this wet season will produce," said Susan Sylvester, spokeswoman for the South Florida Water Management District. "But we need this wet season to produce at least normal rainfall."
National Weather Service and water management officials met here this morning to present their predictions of the rainy season and to say where South Florida stands in its dry season. While officials are hopeful for an extremely rainy wet season, they say it just might not be enough.
Todays video - Careful Pulling Out......
Todays pet owners joke....
To All Pet Owners...or Not.
FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE PETS, THIS IS A TRUE STORY. FOR THOSE THAT DON'T, IT IS STILL A TRUE STORY.
The following was found posted very low on a refrigerator door.
Dear Dogs and Cats: The dishes with the paw prints are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Placing a paw print in the middle of my plate of food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.
The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Racing me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn't help because I fall faster than you can run.
I cannot buy anything bigger than a king sized bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort, however. Dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep. It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other, stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out on the other end to maximize space is nothing but sarcasm.
For the last time, there is no secret exit from the bathroom! If, by some miracle, I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, meow, try to turn the knob or get your paw under the edge in an attempt to open the door. I must exit through the same door I entered. Also, I have been using the bathroom for years - canine/feline attendance is not required.
The proper order for kissing is: Kiss me first, then go smell the other dog or cat's butt. I cannot stress this enough.
Finally, in fairness, dear pets, I have posted the following message on the front door:
TO ALL NON-PET OWNERS WHO VISIT AND LIKE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT OUR PETS:
(1) They live here. You don't.
(2) If you don't want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. That's why they call it 'fur'-niture.
(3) I like my pets a lot better than I like most people.
(4) To you, they are animals. To me, they are adopted sons/daughters who are short, hairy, walk on all fours and don't speak clearly.
Remember, dogs and cats are better than kids because they:
(1) eat less,
(2) don't ask for money all the time,
(3) are easier to train,
(4) normally come when called,
(5) never ask to drive the car,
(6) don't smoke or drink,
(7) don't want to wear your clothes,
(8) don't have to buy the latest fashions,
(9) don't need a gazillion dollars for college and
(10) if they get pregnant, you can sell their children .....
Short bonus Osama joke
I can’t wait to order a Bin Laden at the bar tonight.
Two shots and a splash of water.
No comments:
Post a Comment