Bill

The Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

2012-02-16T09:26:00.007-05:00

slightly modified and updated.......

The division of the human family into its two distinct branches, liberals and conservatives, occurred some 20,000 years ago. Until then all humans coexisted as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/ gatherers. A thousand generations ago, in the pivotal event of societal evolution, beer was invented. This epochal innovation was both the foundation of modern civilization and the occasion of the great bifurcation of humanity into its two distinct subgroups. Once beer was discovered, our prehistoric forebears decided it was time to settle down. Making beer required grain, and securing a steady supply of it ordained the invention of agriculture.

After that was accomplished, ancient man quickly, and unfairly, consigned actual cultivation to women. Men couldn't just run off, willy-nilly, however. Neither the glass bottle nor the aluminum can had yet been invented, so it was necessary to stick pretty close to home, and the brewery. This left our male ancestors with a lot of time on their hands, and led to the division of the species, which persists to this day. Some men tried to conserve remnants of the old way of life (hence the term "conservative") by spending their days in the open field in the dangerous pursuit of big game animals. At night they would roast their prey at a big barbecue, and afterwards sat around the fire drinking beer, passing wind and telling off color jokes.

Other, more timid, souls stayed closer to home. They are responsible for the domestication of cats and the invention of group therapy. Mostly, they sat around worrying about how life wasn't fair and concocting elaborate schemes to "liberate" themselves from inequity (thus their designation as "liberals"). In the evening they gathered around their fire, nibbling on fruit and nuts, sharing their innermost feelings.

Today some liberals try to pretend they're really sort of conservative, and sometimes succeed in confusing people. The following are a few tips to use in distinguishing the two types.
By definition liberals believe in big government and high taxes. Life is unfair and the government is there to do something about it. Most people are too stupid to spend untaxed income wisely, they say, and high taxes allow liberals in government to do a better job of it.

Conservatives don't like government, and, aside from the military, wish it would just go away. They hate taxes, regulations, speed limits, and small cars. Typical conservatives are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh and, up there with the Big Man in the Sky, the incomparable John Wayne.

Typical liberals are Dustin Hoffman, Shirley McLaine, Pee Wee Herman, Martin Sheen, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Ted Turner and his former wife, the traitor Jane Fonda.
All conservatives drink beer. Mostly American beer.

Some liberals like imported beer, but most prefer white wine or foreign water from a bottle.

Liberals like to drive Volvos and Saabs because they're made in socialist Sweden. They like to eat weird food because it's un-American.

Your basic conservative vehicle, especially in Alaska, is the Chevy Suburban. It's big, it's American, it's four wheel drive, and it sucks up the gas. Conservatives eat beef, which they (surprise!) like to barbecue.

Big game hunters are conservative. Interior decorators are liberal.

Conservatives, inspired by a remark of the legendary Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker Jack Lambert, believe quarterbacks should be required to wear skirts, so they can more easily be distinguished from real football players.

James Brown and Ray Charles are conservatives. Michael Jackson and Milli Vanilli are liberals.

Most social workers, personal injury lawyers, journalists, and group therapists are liberals. Most ranchers, loggers, professional soldiers, and steeplejacks are conservatives.

Liberal jurors distrust the prosecutors and police. Conservatives figure the defendant must be guilty or he wouldn't be on trial.

Most conservatives not only believe in the death penalty, they would cheerfully implement it, personally, if called upon to do so.

Liberals think capital punishment is a barbaric relic, and unfair to boot.

Liberals believe Europeans are, generally speaking, far more enlightened than Americans. Conservatives think they're basically foolish, as evidenced by how well the Euro is working out.

Typical conservative movies are "Braveheart", "Patton", and "Gladiator".

Typical liberal movies are "Sleepless in Seattle", "The Devil Wears Prada", and "Sex and the City".

The quintessential liberal is the handicapper, the person who decides how much extra weight to saddle the faster horses with in order to make the race "fair".

The American cowboy, of course, is your basic, full bore conservative. A hundred years ago an Englishman in South Dakota was trying to find the owner of a huge cattle ranch. He rode up to one of the ranch hands and asked, "Excuse me, but could you tell me where to find your Master?" To which the cowboy replied, "That sumbitch hasn't been born."

Get free of middle east oil

2011-11-29T13:51:00.001-05:00

OWS Report

2011-11-15T17:15:00.000-05:00

NFL

2011-07-06T15:05:00.002-04:00

NJ Schools high in cost but high in quality as well

2011-06-24T07:19:00.001-04:00

Seems we spend more than most but at least we have good quality education. Total Elementary-Secondary Spending: $23.4 Billion (5th most)

% Revenue From State Sources: 41% (10th least)

Amount Spent Per Pupil: $16,271 (2nd most)

Graduation Rate: 85.3% (6th highest)

Only 4% of New Jersey’s education budget comes from the federal government, with revenues evenly split between the state and local governments. The state spends the second most per pupil in education, more than $16,000.

Recently, the state’s supreme court ruled $500 million in education cuts made last year were illegal because they deprived poor districts of the ability to provide a decent education to their students.

Read more: http://247wallst.com/2011/05/31/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-least-on-each-student/#ixzz1QBw5ofIU

Anything for a Job

2011-04-19T17:08:00.001-04:00

funny

Reagan Greatness

2011-02-07T12:29:00.005-05:00

Ronald Reagan, the greatest president

Fed Pays US Treasury 79 Billion

2011-01-11T14:16:00.002-05:00

The "wall street bail out" or "bank bail out" was the worst handled piece of misinformation of 2009 and 2010. If this entire TARP program was initially described as a bridge-loan program the whole thing would have been better understood. Now the general public still incorrectly believes "taxpayer money" was simply pissed away to pay bank employee bonus'. The entire thing is a tragic failure of communication. Here the actions of the Fed continue to pay back the loaned money but that fact is lost on the average Joe.

market pulse
Jan. 10, 2011, 12:03 p.m. EST

Fed pays record $78.4 bln to Treasury in 2010Related stories
Fed sent $78.4 billion to Treasury last year (Jan. 10)

(MarketWatch) -- The Federal Reserve Board said Monday that it paid a record $78.4 billion to the U.S. Treasury last year as its net income rose due to its unconventional monetary policy and bailout of major Wall Street firms. The Fed's payment represents a $31 billion increase over last year's payment. The increase was due primarily to increased interest income earned on securities holdings, the Fed said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/business/economy/11treasury.html?_r=1&

Replace the Income Tax

2010-12-29T15:14:00.005-05:00

Great Idea An Open Letter to the President, the Congress, and the American people Concerning Reform of the Federal Tax Code Dear Mr. President, Members of Congress, and Fellow Americans, We, the undersigned business and university economists, welcome and applaud the ongoing initiative to reform the federal tax code. We urge the President and the Congress to work together in good faith to pass and sign into federal law H.R. 25 and S. 296, which together call for: Eliminating all federal income taxes for individuals and corporations, Eliminating all federal payroll withholding taxes, Abolishing estate and capital gains taxes, and Repealing the 16th Amendment We are not calling for elimination of federal taxation, which would be irresponsible and undesirable. Nor does our endorsement call for reduced federal spending. The tax reform plan we endorse is revenue neutral, collecting as much federal tax revenue as the current income tax code, including payroll withholding taxes. We are calling for elimination of federal income taxes and federal payroll withholding taxes. We endorse replacing these costly, oppressively complex, and economically inefficient taxes with a progressive national retail sales tax, such as the tax plan offered by H.R. 25 and S. 296 which is also known as the FairTax Plan. The FairTax Plan has been introduced in the 110th Congress and had 61 co-sponsors in the 109th Congress. If passed and signed into law, the FairTax Plan would: Enable workers and retirees to receive 100% of their paychecks and pension benefits, Replace all federal income and payroll taxes with a simple, progressive, visible, efficiently collected national retail sales tax, which would be levied on the final sale of newly produced goods and services, Rebate to all households each month the federal sales tax they pay on basic necessities, up to an independently determined level of spending (a.k.a., the poverty level, as determined by the Department of Health and Human Services), which removes the burden of federal taxation on the poor and makes the FairTax Plan as progressive as the current tax code, Collect the national sales tax at the retail cash register, just as 45 states already do, Set a federal sales tax rate that is revenue neutral, thereby raising the same amount of tax revenue as now raised by federal income taxes plus payroll withholding taxes, Continue Social Security and Medicare benefits as provided by law; only the means of tax collection changes, Eliminate all filing of individual federal tax returns, Eliminate the IRS and all audits of individual taxpayers; only audits of retailers would be needed, greatly reducing the cost of enforcing the federal tax code, Allow states the option of collecting the national retail sales tax, in return for a fee, along with their state and local sales taxes, Collect federal sales tax from every retail consumer in the country, whether citizen or undocumented alien, which will enlarge the federal tax base, Collect federal sales tax on all consumption spending on new final goods and services, whether the dollars used to finance the spending are generated legally, illegally, or in the huge “underground economy,” Dramatically reduce federal tax compliance costs paid by businesses, which are now embedded and hidden in retail prices, placing U.S. businesses at a disadvantage in world markets, Bring greater accountability and visibility to federal tax collection, Attract foreign equity investment to the United States, as well as encourage U.S. firms to locate new capital projects in the United States that might otherwise go abroad, and Not tax spending for education, since H.R. 25 and S. 296 define expenditure on education to be investment, not consumption, which will make education about half as expensive for American families as it is now. The current U.S. income tax code is widely regarded by just about everyone as unfair, complex, wasteful, confusing, and costly. Businesses and other organizations spend more than six billion hours each year complying with the federal tax code. Estimated compliance costs conservatively top $225 billion annually costs that are ultimately embedded in retail prices paid by consumers. The Internal Revenue Code cannot simply be “fixed,” which is amply demonstrated by more than 35 years of attempted tax code reform, each round resulting in yet more complexity and unrelenting, page-after-page, mind-numbing verbiage (now exceeding 54,000 pages containing more than 2.8 million words). Our nation’s current income tax alters business decisions in ways that limit growth in productivity. The federal income tax also alters saving and investment decisions of households, which dramatically reduces the economy’s potential for growth and job creation. Payroll withholding taxes are regressive, hitting hardest those least able to pay. Simply stated, the complexity and frequently changing rules of the federal income tax code make our country less competitive in the global economy and rob the nation of its full potential for growth and job creation. In summary, the economic benefits of the FairTax Plan are compelling. The FairTax Plan eliminates the tax bias against work, saving, and investment, which would lead to higher rates of economic growth, faster growth in productivity, more jobs, lower interest rates, and a higher standard of living for the American people. The America proposed by the FairTax Plan would feature: no federal income taxes, no payroll taxes, no self-employment taxes, no capital gains taxes, no gift or estate taxes, no alternative minimum taxes, no corporate taxes, no payroll withholding, no taxes on Social Security benefits or pension benefits, no personal tax forms, no personal or business income tax record keeping, and no personal income tax filing whatsoever. No Internal Revenue Service; no April 15th; all gone, forever. We believe that many Americans will favor the FairTax Plan proposed by H.R. 25 and S. 296, although some may say, “it simply can’t be done.” Many said the same thing to the grassroots progressives who won women the right to vote, to those who made collective bargaining a reality for union members, and to the Freedom Riders who made civil rights a reality in America. We urge Congress not to abandon the FairTax Plan simply because it will be difficult to face the objections of entrenched special interest groups who now benefit from the complexity and tax preferences of the status quo. The comparative advantage and benefits offered by the FairTax Plan to the vast majority of Americans is simply too high a cost to pay. Therefore, we the undersigned professional and university economists, endorse a progressive national retail sales tax plan, as provided by the FairTax Plan. We urge Congress to make H.R. 25 and S. 296 federal law, and then to work swiftly to repeal the 16th Amendment.

Wall Street Bailout Returns 8.2% Profit $25 Billion

2010-10-20T07:53:00.002-04:00

Lost in the news. Most people think "taxpayers" "bailed out" Wall street, meaning that TARP simply cost us all money by paying government money to the banks and corporations. It is all a sad misunderstanding and the fact is that so far the program succeeded in preserving the integrity of our banking system (which is the life blood of capitalism) and returned $25 billion to "taxpayers" (really the US Government). This program succeeded in stopping the run on the banks that can put our capitalist system at risk. Unfortunately people don't understand this and the press does not want them to. We are all far better off with the banking system we have where capital gets loaned to people and businesses that create profit than we would be if we had a banking system that was run by the government with no risk of a run on the bank but the driving force for deployment of capital would not be profit incentive but political power and corruption.

On Bloomberg.....
The U.S. government’s bailout of financial firms through the Troubled Asset Relief Program provided taxpayers with higher returns than they could have made buying 30-year Treasury bonds -- enough money to fund the Securities and Exchange Commission for the next two decades.

The government has earned $25.2 billion on its investment of $309 billion in banks and insurance companies, an 8.2 percent return over two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That beat U.S. Treasuries, high-yield savings accounts, money- market funds and certificates of deposit. Investing in the stock market or gold would have paid off better.

When the government first announced its intention to plow funds into the nation’s banks in October 2008 to resuscitate the financial system, many expected it to lose hundreds of billions of dollars. Two years later TARP’s bank and insurance investments have made money, and about two-thirds of the funds have been paid back. Yet Democrats are struggling to turn those gains into political capital, and the indirect costs of propping up banks could have longer-term consequences for the economy.

“From the perspective of the taxpayers getting their money back, TARP has been a great success,” said Todd Petzel, chief investment officer at New York-based Offit Capital Advisors LLC, which has more than $5 billion of assets under management. “But there are other costs as the government made it possible for the banks to pay back TARP. Those costs can turn out to be larger, and their legacy could last longer.”

Low Interest Rates

Banks benefited from dozens of other programs instituted by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury Department during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from the purchase of mortgage-backed securities to the bailout of home- lending giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The suppression of interest rates at close to zero for most of the last two years has also boosted banks’ income, enabling them to borrow money at almost no cost and lend at higher rates.

Those low rates drove down returns on instruments used by American savers. U.S. Treasury 30-year bonds yielded an average of 4.1 percent from Oct. 20, 2008, through yesterday, according to Bloomberg data.

Average rates for high-yield savings accounts, which generally have at least $10,000 in deposits and are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., have ranged from 0.36 percent to 0.92 percent over the past two years, based on data from research firm Market Rates Insight in San Anselmo, California. A two-year CD purchased in October 2008 returned 2.8 percent annually, according to Bankrate.com, the North Palm Beach, Florida-based website that tracks bank products.

S&P 500, Gold

Taxable money-market funds, sold by brokerage firms and not FDIC-insured, offered cumulative returns of 0.5 percent for the two years beginning September 2008, based on data from iMoneyNet, a research firm in Westborough, Massachusetts.

Better performers include the stock market, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index gaining 24 percent in the two years since Oct. 20, 2008. SPDR Gold Trust, a gold exchange-traded fund, offered a total return of 66 percent, according to Bloomberg data.

The $25 billion TARP return could fund the SEC for more than 20 years, based on the agency’s proposed 2011 fiscal year budget. It could pay for all farm subsidies in the U.S. for more than two years. Bloomberg compiled the TARP data from reports by the Treasury, FDIC and the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

$11 Billion Gain

“I am surprised at the numbers because the consensus seemed to be we threw good money after bad and wouldn’t get repaid,” said Jane King, president of Fairfield Financial Advisors Ltd., a Wellesley, Massachusetts-based fee-only firm whose clients have $5 million to $10 million in net worth.

The Treasury said in an Oct. 5 report that it expects to lose about $17 billion on the separate $80 billion TARP payout to Detroit automakers General Motors Co. and Chrysler LLC. The bank and insurance portion of the bailout, which includes $47.5 billion to New York-based American International Group Inc., will probably earn $11 billion in the end, taking expected losses into account, according to Treasury estimates.

One of the biggest investments produced one of the best returns. While New York-based Citigroup Inc. still hasn’t paid back $12 billion of the $45 billion it received, Treasury has already made $8.2 billion, or an 18 percent return, mostly as a result of selling its stake in the lender at a higher price, according to data analyzed by Bloomberg.

After collecting repayments, dividends and proceeds from warrant sales, the government earned a 14 percent return on the $10 billion it gave Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a 13 percent return on the $10 billion that went to Morgan Stanley. Both firms are based in New York.

Career-Killer

Even with the turnaround on bank and insurance investments, TARP remains a political career-killer. Some candidates lost primaries this year in part because they voted for the program, which was proposed by President George W. Bush. The Republican president urged lawmakers to approve it or risk a global financial calamity. Candidates from both parties who are running for election in November have been attacked for backing TARP.

That’s because of voters’ dissatisfaction with banks. A July poll by Angus-Reid Public Opinion found that 90 percent of Americans blame financial institutions for the crisis. The public also feels the pain of indirect subsidies to the banks, Offit’s Petzel said.

‘Wealth Transfer’

One of those subsidies is the $350 billion that savers forgo each year because the Fed keeps interest rates near zero, according to Petzel’s calculations. While banks can borrow at close to zero from the Fed, they lend to consumers and corporations at almost 5 percent, or to the Treasury at 2.5 percent, and they get to keep the difference.

“The huge wealth transfer from fixed-income pensioners to the banks has helped the banks repay TARP,” Petzel said.

The government and the Fed took on more risk than just TARP during the crisis, which isn’t reflected in the program’s cost, said Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs managing director and author of the 2009 book, “It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.”

According to Prins’s tally, the money plowed into the financial system to prop it up peaked at $19.4 trillion. Banks have benefited from that cash, which helped keep prices of mortgage securities, house prices and other assets overvalued, Prins said in an interview. Even though some of the support has been withdrawn, part of it will likely be lost, such as the hundreds of billions of dollars put into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, she said.

“These are all indirect subsidies the banks got,” Prins said. “So the TARP gains touted by the Treasury are only true if you ignore all the other costs.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Yalman Onaran in Washington at yonaran@bloomberg.net; Alexis Leondis in New York aleondis@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Scheer in New York at

Women Drivers in Middle East....

2010-10-01T10:41:00.001-04:00

Tepper in Sept 2010

2010-09-30T15:02:00.002-04:00

O'Reilly on Obama progressive

2010-09-30T11:19:00.002-04:00

Why No Press About TARP?

2010-09-07T09:36:00.004-04:00

The fact that TARP was not a "bailout" or giving money to "Wall Street" and that it will most likely end as a profitable result for the U.S. taxpayers is widely unreported. Currently we have seen a 10% return on money loaned to banks. Where would we be today if we did nothing to stop the modern day run on our banks?
Below is a good summary posted on Seeking Alpha
.....

The Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP) was started by the U.S. government in 2008 to purchase assets and equity from troubled financial institutions and strengthen the sector at the height of the credit crisis. Billions of tax payer funds were loaned to banks and other lenders through this program.

According to a report in The Banker magazine, it seems that the TARP was successful to the US in terms of return on investment and the stated goal of the program. The following are some of the key points quoted by the magazine based on the July report from SIGTARP, the body monitoring the various programs under the umbrella of the TARP:

87 TARP recipients had repaid all or a portion of their principal or repurchased shares, for a total of $201.5B.
A total of just $182.5B of disbursed TARP funds is outstanding.
By July, the US government had received $22.7B in interest, dividends, sale of warrants, stocks and other income.
Click to Enlarge

Source: The Banker

Of the 707 banks that received almost $205B in TARP funds through the Capital Purchase Program (CPP), 76 have fully repaid their funds to a total of $138.4B. Hence the US has recovered 67.5% of the funds invested in banks.
Of the remaining banks that owe money to the US, 580 of them owe less than $100M.
The US government reaped a high rate of return on the TARP funds that have been fully repaid already. The top 15 by total proceeds yielded an average non-annualized return of 10.2%.
Some examples of individual returns include Discover Financial Services (DFS), Comerica (CMA) and Goldman Sachs (GS) with 19.6%, 14.9% and 14.2% on a non-annualized return basis respectively.
In addition to TARP funds, Bank of America (BAC) and Citigroup (C) each received an additional $20B thru the Targeted Investment Program (TIP). Including this loan, the interim, non-annualized return on investment based on the amount repaid by Citigroup so far is 15.91%.
When the TARP program was implemented there was much outcry from the general public. However the data above shows that the program not only achieved its stated objective but also yielded an excellent return to the US government.

the wrong way to buy gold

2010-09-02T17:07:00.003-04:00

Goldline is a ripoff and the wrong way to buy gold.

Peter Schiff explains it correctly. I love Glen Beck but Goldline is for idiots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GJNRdIoStk

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should lower the interest rate on all mortgages in good standing, according to Pimco founder Bill Gross.

2010-08-18T08:40:00.002-04:00

Bill Gross idea to stimulate economy by lowering rates on all mortgages in good standing.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232/?video=1568381031&play=1

By: Michelle Lodge
Special to CNBC.com

CNBC.com

Bill Gross

Bill Gross, a managing director at bond giant PIMCO, told CNBC Tuesday that if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lowered interest rates for mortgage holders in good standing, it would stimulate the economy, encourage consumer spending, promote job growth and give the beleaguered housing market a much-needed lift.

The federal government, through Fannie [FNMA 0.3611 --- UNCH (0) ] and Freddie [FMCC 0.395 --- UNCH (0) ] , guarantees about 95 percent of the mortgages in the US.

Europe Caps pay - NYTimes Giddy

2010-07-07T09:32:00.001-04:00

The New York Times just loves the idea that the goverment can cap pay. What a bunch of jerks.

July 7, 2010
Cap on Bank Bonuses Clears Hurdle in Europe
By LIZ ALDERMAN
As Wall Street drags its feet on reining in bonuses, the European Union is forcing its banks — by law — to show some self-restraint.

The European Parliament on Wednesday approved one of the world’s strictest crackdowns on exorbitant bank pay, going beyond some of the limits that many banks were pressed to adopt in the wake of the financial crisis.

The action comes as the Federal Reserve accuses U.S. banks of not moving fast enough to change compensation practices that stoke excessive risk-taking. While American and British regulators have adopted the principles of Europe’s new measure, officials here are going a step further by legislating minimum caps for cash bonuses and other changes to compensation.

Bankers in the 27-nation bloc will be barred from taking home more than 30 percent of their bonus in cash starting next year, and risk losing some of the remainder if the bank’s performance erodes over the next three years. Banks that don’t curb the salaries of their biggest earners will have to set aside more capital to make up for the risk.

“The exercise here is to make sure that bonuses are not a one way bet, so that if you take risks and lose in a big way that will affect what you get,” said Nick Dent, an employment law partner at Barlow Lyde & Gilbert LLP who monitors financial compensation.

Large cash bonuses have been blamed for encouraging the type of excessive risk taking that stoked the global financial crisis. Under political pressure, banks in Britain, Germany and France had already moved to limit bonuses last year.

The legislation, passed by a vote of 625-28, codifies a compromise clinched last week between European governments and lawmakers. National finance ministers are expected to endorse it on Tuesday, and it then will take effect Jan. 1.

The measure reflects agreements among Group of 20 leaders about how to limit bank pay, and is intended to affect high-bonus cultures at banks with operations in Europe like Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Goldman Sachs, and at some hedge funds. About 70 percent of a bonus would have to be deferred for up to three years and paid in a new class of security, called contingent capital, that would decline in value if the bank’s financial performance deteriorates -- and potentially even be forfeited.

For particularly large bonuses, cash could constitute only 20 percent of the payout.

“If within that three years something happens with the performance of the bank or a staff member, he won’t get the payments that were deferred,” said Guido Ravoet, secretary-general of the European Banking Federation. “And the clawback means that even if he had been paid the full bonus, he must reimburse the bonus.”

If regulators determine that a bank’s pay structure encourages risk, they can force the bank to place hundreds of millions of euros more in its capital cushion as insurance, placing a kind of back-door financial penalty on the bank.

Banks that received government bailouts would also have to justify the pay of their directors to regulators, and report the number of employees earning more than 1 million euros, or $1.26 million.

European Parliament members said the move would radically transform the bonus culture at banks.

But it is still unclear is just how far the rules reach into the ranks of any given bank: Lawmakers are leaving it up to European governments, which will have to enforce the new rules, to decide whether the pay curbs apply only to a bank’s top executives in their country, or also to traders who take big risks to reap big money.

Last month, the Fed outlined a series of compensation principles to try to rein in risk taking at around two dozen of the largest banks in the United States. U.S. officials, unlike the Europeans, are mainly focused on the form and structure of banker compensation, not gauging excessive amounts.

At a Congressional hearing last month, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said that “many banks have not modified their practices from what they were before the crisis.”

He promised to push them “to move as quickly as possible to restructure their compensation packages so that they will not be engendering excessive risk-taking.”

The Obama Administration’s federal pay czar, meanwhile, is preparing to release the findings of a comprehensive pay review of high-earners at 180 financial companies. Other regulators are making compensation a crucial element of their bank exams, and may use it to help determine the fees a bank pays into the U.S. government-administered deposit insurance fund.

Britain’s financial watchdog must also revise its remuneration guidelines to reflect the more stringent E.U. law, including the use of contingent capital for bonus payments. The Financial Services Authority has favored paying portions of bonus in bank stock, which theoretically would give individuals an incentive to make sure the bank’s performance remained strong.

Mr. Ravoet said bankers are concerned that compensation restrictions will drive the best people offshore to places like Singapore, Switzerland or Dubai, which don’t have similar rules because they are not part of the G20. “There is competition for talent, and it should not be that financial institutions have a competitive disadvantage vis a vis other companies recruiting highly skilled individuals,” he said.

Europe’s decision to codify bonus caps could also tilt the playing field with the United States, which has so far steered clear of legislation. In Washington, “they don’t think it can be a cookie cutter approach, the same approach for every firm, but it needs to be thoughtful and reflect the risk taking appetite for each firm,” Vicki Eliot, head of financial services consulting at Mercer Consulting, said.

“The European Parliament statement seems to be very rules-based in terms of what they are suggesting with specific numbers,” she said. “It’s a little bit concerning.”

It also is unclear whether banks will increase compensation in other ways to stay competitive.

“When bonuses are so constrained, I can’t see that companies will be able to do anything other than increase fixed pay,” said Simon Garrett, a director and compensation expert at the Hay Group.

However, a number of banks raised salaries last year to avoid a one-time 50 percent tax in Britain on bonuses, and might not want to go further down that path this year, analysts said.

Eric Dash contributed reporting from New York

government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

2010-07-06T11:55:00.000-04:00

Ronald Reagan
Independence Day Message
July 4, 1981

For one who was born and grew up in the small towns of the Midwest, there is a special kind of nostalgia about the Fourth of July.

I remember it as a day almost as long-anticipated as Christmas. This was helped along by the appearance in store windows of all kinds of fireworks and colorful posters advertising them with vivid pictures.

No later than the third of July -- sometimes earlier -- Dad would bring home what he felt he could afford to see go up in smoke and flame. We'd count and recount the number of firecrackers, display pieces and other things and go to bed determined to be up with the sun so as to offer the first, thunderous notice of the Fourth of July.

I'm afraid we didn't give too much thought to the meaning of the day. And, yes, there were tragic accidents to mar it, resulting from careless handling of the fireworks. I'm sure we're better off today with fireworks largely handled by professionals. Yet there was a thrill never to be forgotten in seeing a tin can blown 30 feet in the air by a giant "cracker" -- giant meaning it was about 4 inches long. But enough of nostalgia.

Somewhere in our growing up we began to be aware of the meaning of days and with that awareness came the birth of patriotism. July Fourth is the birthday of our nation. I believed as a boy, and believe even more today, that it is the birthday of the greatest nation on earth.

There is a legend about the day of our nation's birth in the little hall in Philadelphia, a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a king who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words "treason, the gallows, the headsman's axe," and the issue remained in doubt.

The legend says that at that point a man rose and spoke. He is described as not a young man, but one who had to summon all his energy for an impassioned plea. He cited the grievances that had brought them to this moment and finally, his voice falling, he said, "They may turn every tree into a gallows, every hole into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die. To the mechanic in the workshop, they will speak hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom. Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the Bible of the rights of man forever."

He fell back exhausted. The 56 delegates, swept up by his eloquence, rushed forward and signed that document destined to be as immortal as a work of man can be. When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.

Well, that is the legend. But we do know for certain that 56 men, a little band so unique we have never seen their like since, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Some gave their lives in the war that followed, most gave their fortunes, and all preserved their sacred honor.

What manner of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, eleven were merchants and tradesmen, and nine were farmers. They were soft-spoken men of means and education; they were not an unwashed rabble. They had achieved security but valued freedom more. Their stories have not been told nearly enough.

John Hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. For more than a year he lived in the forest and in caves before he returned to find his wife dead, his children vanished, his property destroyed. He died of exhaustion and a broken heart.

Carter Braxton of Virginia lost all his ships, sold his home to pay his debts, and died in rags. And so it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston and Middleton. Nelson personally urged Washington to fire on his home and destroy it when it became the headquarters for General Cornwallis. Nelson died bankrupt.

But they sired a nation that grew from sea to shining sea. Five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep, three million square miles of forest, field, mountain and desert, 227 million people with a pedigree that includes the bloodlines of all the world. In recent years, however, I've come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.

Happy Fourth of July.

Ronald Reagan, President of the United States

Christie Says New Jersey ‘Careening Toward Becoming Greece’

2010-05-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

I love the new Gov!......

By Terrence Dopp

May 25 (Bloomberg) -- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the state is “careening our way toward becoming Greece.”

Christie, in a speech today at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, said the state can’t afford the cost of medical insurance and benefits for current workers.

“Things that used to be considered sacred cows, the third rails of politics, no longer are,” said Christie, a Republican who took office Jan. 19. “They’ve been replaced by the issue of affordability.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Terrence Dopp in Trenton at tdopp@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacie Servetah at sbabula@bloomberg.net

Golf Reporter OOOPS on Tiger Woods Injury

2010-05-11T12:54:00.001-04:00

GM did not really pay back loan

2010-05-03T14:34:00.001-04:00

While I still believe GM will pay back the government and even further that the Government will not loose money on the "TARP" overall, we have to call out GM for this lie....

Congressman thinks an Island (Guam) can tip over

2010-04-26T08:12:00.001-04:00

This is one of our great congressmen.....

The Next Crisis

2010-04-13T09:14:00.005-04:00

A great post on "Naked Capitalism" predicting the next crisis.....

It points out that there is likely going to be a day of reckoning for all sovereign debt.

"And unfortunately, a collective debt reduction across a wide swathe of countries cannot occur indefinitely under smooth glide-path scenarios. This is an outcome which lowers incomes, which lowers GDP, which lowers the ability to repay. We will have a sovereign debt crisis. The weakest debtors will default and haircuts will be taken. The question still up for debate is in regards to systemic risk, contagion, and economic nationalism because when the first large sovereign default occurs, that’s when systemic risk will re-emerge globally."

read it all here:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/the-origins-of-the-next-crisis.html

Green Police- Enviro Nazis

2010-04-09T08:55:00.002-04:00

Enviro Nazis.....(hat tip to Jonah Goldberg at National Review)

US in Decline - David Murrin Calls it Like it is

2010-03-24T12:19:00.007-04:00

The passage of the health care law shows that the US empire is declining because it illustrates the fact that people expect the state to take care of them, David Murrin, the co-founder of Emergent Asset Management hedge fund manager, told CNBC.

Cost of healthcare
Lilli Day | Photodisc | Getty Images

On Tuesday, US President Barack Obama signed into law health care legislation that expands health coverage for the poor, imposes new taxes on the rich and forbids insurance practices such as refusing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions.

In their expansionary phase, empires force people to go out, seek risks and fend for themselves, Murrin said, reminding of the dismantling of the British empire after the war, when the National Health Service, which ensures universal health coverage in Britain, was created.

"This (empire decline) is actually a dead-set course that societies get into and it will happen very quickly I'm afraid," he told "Squawk Box Europe."

"As you start to build a system it becomes cohesive because of its success… the fractures in the American system I think are more apparent than ever," Murrin added.

China's rise will be much faster than most people anticipate as the country's military prowess increases, he said.

"We all know there's going to be a change, the surprise will be the pace of that change," Murrin said, noting that "all empires when they decline they underestimate their challengers."

The peak for commodities will be reached somewhere between 2020 and 2025 and it's the period before that that must be watched, as China seems much more willing to take risks than Western countries, he predicted.

- Watch the full interview with David Murrin above.

"You have a lot more males in China then you do in the west," he said, noting that 56 percent of the Chinese society was male, because of the country's policies to control population and because of traditions which value males more than females.

"What that means is that they're far more risk-oriented than a society in the West…if you look at conflict and your ability to risk your males in conflict," Murrin explained.

UBS tax evaders get no jail time

2010-03-24T07:23:00.000-04:00

Punishment For UBS Tax Evaders Actually Not That Bad A Deal
By Bess Levin

Are you one of the UBS clients who maybe used the firm to get around paying your some or all of your taxes? Have you been considering whether or not to come forward and admit it, not because of the shame (there’s no shame in this! Except that you’re lumped in the same category as Tim Geithner, which is a little hard to swallow), but because of the possible jail time? It turns out these sentences aren’t so bad! They probably won’t send you downtown and, if you get lucky like this guy, you’ll get to play the slots at your leisure.

John McCarthy, a businessman from the wealthy seaside enclave of Malibu, also was placed on three years supervised probation on Monday and fined $25,000 for his guilty plea to a single felony count of failing to report a foreign bank account from 2003 through 2008.In addition to the fine, McCarthy was ordered to make restitution of more than $485,000 he owed to the government, which he already has paid, and to perform 300 hours of community service, which he can do while under home detention.

He had faced a maximum penalty of five years in federal prison and $250,000 in fines.But Judge Valerie Baker Fairbank said she weighed in McCarthy’s favor his cooperation with authorities, the fact that he had no prior criminal record and had otherwise “led a responsible, law-abiding life.”

McCarthy must wear an electronic ankle bracelet to monitor his movements while under home confinement but may venture outside his home to pursue employment, go grocery shopping, and attend religious functions and any medical appointments for himself and his immediate family. The judge also said he may travel to Las Vegas to visit his father, subject to advance approval of his probation officer.

Americans Believe Their Kids' Textbooks Place Political Correctness Above Accuracy

2010-03-12T08:55:00.001-05:00

Poll: Majority of Americans Believe Their Kids' Textbooks Place Political Correctness Above Accuracy
Thursday, March 11, 2010
By Joe Schoffstall

(CNSNews.com) - A new Rasmussen Poll shows that 60 percent of Americans with children in elementary schools say most school textbooks are more concerned with presenting information in a politically correct manner than in accuracy.

In a national survey conducted March 6-7, 1,000 adults were asked: “Are most school textbooks more concerned about accurately providing information or about presenting information in a politically correct manner?”

Only 28 percent thought textbooks were more concerned with presenting information accurately.

Among all Americans polled, even those without children, the same percentage -- 28 percent – said they believe that accuracy is paramount, while 55 percent disagreed and said most textbooks are more concerned about political correctness. Eighteen percent of those polled were undecided.

Only 31 percent of the adults polled said most school history textbooks portray American history accurately, while 43 percent said they believe that most of their children’s history books are inaccurate. Twenty-six (26) percent are not sure.

Those with children in elementary schools were even more hesitant in their support -- only 28 percent said they believe that school textbooks portray U.S. history accurately, while almost half (49 percent) say textbooks do not accurately portray history. Twenty-eight percent (28 percent) were not sure.

When asked who should have the final say on the material presented within textbooks given to children -- the federal government, state government, local government, teachers or parents -- 34 percent said that teachers should, while 24 percent said that parents should have the final say. Fifteen percent (15 percent) were in favor of leaving the decision on textbooks to local government, while 9 percent believe that either the federal or state governments should decide.

Among those with children in school, 28 percent believe teachers should say what goes into the textbooks. Only 21 percent believe that decision should be made by the parents.

When asked if parents should be able to transfer their children to another school if they disagreed with the material presented at their current schools, 61 percent said that should be allowed, while 27 percent disagreed, and 12 percent said they were not sure.

Shark Aquarium in Dubai Springs a Leak

2010-02-25T12:16:00.000-05:00

Alito tells Obama; "Not True"

2010-01-28T07:05:00.002-05:00

The shot of the black-robed Supreme Court justices, stone-faced, was priceless.

Cliff Asness from AQR Tells It Like It IS

2010-01-26T17:12:00.003-05:00

Cliff is the guy that had the well known letter last year ending with the funny line; "I am ready for my personalized tax rate".

This is an excellent opinion and recap of facts about our current recession and its causes.

.............

Appalled In Greenwich Connecticut

Clifford S. Asness, Ph.D.

AQR Capital Management, LLC

Preliminary version last updated: January 24th, 2009

Comments welcome: comments@StumblingOnTruth.com

Related essays available at: www.StumblingOnTruth.com

The President, in these last few days following the second revolution against big

government started in Massachusetts, has come out swinging savagely against

“banks” in numerous ways in numerous speeches. Let’s be clear. There are

legitimate issues and reforms to be discussed. But my first question is why this

exact moment? The answer is simple. When a failing government with

totalitarian impulses needs help, it’s pretty standard strategy to call down a

pogrom against an unpopular class of citizens. The bankers are nothing if not

unpopular. Unfortunately for this President, he will, I hope, find the financial

community not cowering from his Cossacks on a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement

(Greenwich, CT), but meeting his accusations with logic and patriotism.

First let’s discuss the President’s recent rhetoric. Paraphrasing him, “we will get

back all the people’s money.” And the applause line, “every dime!” OK, fine.

But most of the banks, and in particular the ones in the headlines for paying large

bonuses, have paid back all their TARP loans.1 This logic causes him no pause.

Apparently, and we must read between the lines as this is the most transparent

administration ever, he means all the money lent out to everyone through TARP

not just to banks. So, loans to the car companies, and AIG, and FNMA/FHLMC,

all must be paid back, but by the banks, who already paid back their own loans.2

Makes sense. Has this administration seen a human activity they don’t

instinctively wish to socialize?

Apparently, unlike GM, Chrysler, and the GSEs, the banks didn’t get the memo

that said when you get a bailout the polite thing to do is to continue to fail.

An argument is often made that even if the banks paid their explicit debt back,

they simply would not have survived without the loans. Thus, they owe the

government much more than mere repayment. This is riddled with flaws:

• According to bailout alarmists nobody would have survived, neither man

nor beast, without TARP, so why is this argument unique to the banks,

1 Lest you find me too partisan, please note I am not ignoring nor forgetting that TARP and the bailouts

began under the Bush administration. Also, not all bailouts were through TARP, but I’m going to use that

as short-hand here.

2 Nobody has really added in the cost of the FNMA/FHLMC bailout yet. It’s the bailout the government

likes to talk about least. I wonder why?

and again why are they paying back everyone’s debt just by virtue of their

success?

• Again, as in the Chrysler bankruptcy that drove me to a similar missive

last year, the government is seeking to write ex post facto rules. It’s

entirely possible that if during the dark days of the bailout the government

told banks, "we get half your profits for the next two years," the banks

would have signed the deal. No one asked. The deal was the deal.

There is no crying in baseball.

• What exactly do they expect the banks to do with the money they earned

in 2009? Well, there are really four choices. 1) Give it to the government

as a thank you tip. Their shareholders would sue their brains out and win

(and the government would probably just hand it to Louisiana and

Nebraska anyway). 2) Give it to their shareholders through dividends.

That is more reasonable, though the shareholders themselves should be

the ones to weigh in on this and they seem pretty happy paying large

bonuses for talent and reaping high stock prices. As a very similar

measure to dividends they could keep it as retained earnings. The banks

already have too much cash on hand and are being yelled at for not

lending it out (by they way, the lack of lending isn’t a problem of not

enough cash, it’s a problem of not enough projects they’re confident in,

and the fact that many of these “banks” never did commercial lending to

begin with). 3) Give it to charity. Goldman Sachs is already forcing their

employees to give 10% away, in a gesture of appeasement sure to

generate laughs from the Left at the insufficiency, confusion on the Right,

and only Neville Chamberlain’s ghost smiling in the middle. Goldman, you

run a great firm, but the reason it’s called C-H-A-R-I-T-Y is that it is

voluntary. Or, finally, of course, 4) Pay it to their employees.

• Another basic flaw is the words "bank" and "banker" are used in slippery

ways. "Bank" is sometimes used to mean regulated commercial bank,

bailout recipient, financial institution in general or any institution controlling

large amounts of capital. The "banks" guilty of causing the bubble need

not be the same as the "banks" that were rescued and neither group

coincides exactly with the "banks" to be taxed. This flexibility is one of the

great strengths of unfair scapegoating.

If you were running the banks you’d pay the normal proportion of revenue to your

employees, or perhaps a bit less in a gesture of appeasement as banks are

doing now. You know you would. Anyone would. Paying less means hurting

both employees and shareholders, in order to deflect criticism from people with

no interest in the matter save grandstanding.

With regards to the proposed bank tax and other banking restrictions, please

note this does not affect the bonus controversy. There’s nothing in the proposed

bank tax or restrictions that obviously reduces market-clearing wages in the

financial industry. So the government, upset about banker bonuses, is penalizing

bank shareholders who will bear the brunt of this tax (not bankers) for these

same shareholders not getting paid enough of the 2009 profits, which the

shareholders were fine with. If that sentence is confusing, do not worry, you are

following as well as the government.

I was against the bailout at the end of 2008 (while admitting that the ridiculous

cumulative policy of too-big-to-fail left me scared at the consequences). But, for

those who were for it, this is the policy you put in place, and the deal you made.

Sorry.3

Now let’s talk about the narrative that’s been sold. We hear readily, from

politicians of the President’s party, and his media choir, statements like “the

bankers who brought us this crisis” as a lead-in to any discussion (sometimes

about the weather). As one tiny example consider the New York Times editorial

of January 13, 2010, with the Leftist dream title of, “Tax Them Both.” Early on

they throw in the simple line “Let’s be clear, the crisis spawned by banks’

recklessness has cost the country…” Not the crisis aided by banks’

recklessness, but the crisis spawned by banks’ recklessness, no hint of caveat o

nuance. The rest of us were just babes in the woods doing green jobs and

singing Disney songs while birds danced on our shoulders, but the bad

bank-witch made us eat her poisoned apples. This is one example but if you

dare/bet me to come up with 10,000 more, I will win.

Say something stupid and hurtful, but simple and with a compelling villain, long

enough and I guess it becomes our society’s version of truth (again, the

“narrative”). Bankers (and by this I mean Wall Street in general) are certainly

guilty of acting irresponsibly and aiding and abetting the bubble, but assigning

them sole blame is ridiculous. This is an Agatha Christie novel where everyone

is the murderer.

Government encouraged wild lending, virtually creating the sub-prime market,

and up until the end our representitives swore the GSE’s were all ok (the fact that

the President is flanked by Barney Frank while discussing how to ‘get’ the terrible

bankers should alone make you turn the dial and watch cartoons). Government

land use restrictions added more than a little oomph to real estate prices,

particularly in areas where the bubble grew largest. In addition, government kept

money easy (rates low) to grease the bubble’s wheels. Note, mixing metaphors

is allowed when appalled in Greenwich. In New Canaan it’s frowned upon.

Individuals and non-bank companies played their major parts as well, buying and

building too many houses, with too little equity contribution. People spent too

much on everything, not just houses, and companies cheerfully fed the demand

by extending unlimited credit, with the Federal Government the ultimate backstop

3 By-the-way, I’m not a banker. I’m an asset manager. So we are not talking about my money (yet).

lender (and a very willing one at that). Every sector of the economy, every region

of the country, every demographic group except perhaps the Amish was

overleveraged (buggies have a very onerous haircut when on repo). No doubt

there are plenty of innocent individuals, but it's hard to point to any coherent

group of them.

Banks, and Wall Street in general, certainly failed to recognize the risks in time.

Or they recognized them but couldn’t see how to avoid them as bubbles that do

not burst for long periods put skeptics out of business – it is harder to do this real

time than many politicians and editorialists think. In rare cases some of the

lending may have been fraudulent, but the idea that most of the real estate

bubble was the result of predatory lending is a complete fiction. The "victims"

were happily getting rich without working, until the music stopped.

But the above, a world gone mad and all of us sharing blame, is not the

“narrative.” The narrative is Wall Street gravely injured us all, to their sole

shame, so now let’s get them! Why? Well, politicians certainly aren’t going to

blame themselves. They aren’t going to blame individuals who, what’s that thing

individuals do again, yeah, they vote. The press, certainly this press, with this

government, mainly repeats the party line, sometimes with their legs tingling. So,

who should they blame? Well, what better than casting sole blame on the evil

bankers? Who likes a banker? I’m not sure I do and many are my friends. I’m

not sure their wives or husbands like them. But that doesn’t make them guiltier

than others. Every financial crisis, for at least our country’s history and probably

way longer, has been blamed on bankers and speculators, and generally this has

been one-sided, exclusionary of the many real culprits, and often dead wrong.

The narrative once established is a powerful thing to fight, but fight it we must, as

it’s simply not true. Bankers deserve their share of castigation, but no more than

their share, and that inconvenient truth makes things a lot more complicated.

Another thing to note is that this is now called a financial or banking crisis. This

is true without being right (which is a difference with a distinction). Our current

economic pain, the high unemployment, the disappointing economic growth, has

deep and varied roots. For years, some things were unsustainably high and

growing: housing prices, the trade deficit, consumer debt and more recently

government debt; while other things were unsustainably low and falling: credit

spreads, inflation rates and savings. While people differ on which were the

causes and which were the effects, and who was to blame, few believed things

could have continued indefinitely (while again, calling the top a very dangerous

game to hold the bankers to getting precisely right). Some dramatic change was

inevitable, and it was equally inevitable that it would be painful. Perhaps wiser

and less greedy bankers would have given us an earlier and gentler wake-up

call, but the same is true of wiser and less greedy politicians, central-bankers,

non-financial companies and individuals, many of them with more latitude to step

off the gas than bankers with shareholders. The economy crashed, not just the

banks. It was caused by the entire economy, not just the banks. It's the economy

that has to be fixed, not just the banks.

Although the stated reason for punishing banks is the false accusation that they

wrecked the economy all on their lonesome, much of the populist resonance of

this libel springs from the inconsistent argument that bankers are socially useless

parasites skimming money from real transactions. This doublethink is very old.

The belief is moneylenders and speculators are powerful enough to cause all our

economic problems, but not useful enough to deserve a share of our economic

successes. Where this power without usefulness derives from is never clear. In

fact, highly skilled bankers (in the broad sense, including lenders, traders, asset

managers and deal makers) are essential to an efficient modern economy and

some of them will therefore earn very large amounts of money. What they create

is as real as a shoemaker, as a modern economy would produce a lot less shoes

if instead of banking we relied on something closer to the barter system. If you

penalize these services, or legislate away the freedom to innovate and to get rich

by doing them better than anyone else, you destroy both a fundamental

economic freedom and a key component of economic growth.

With all that said, it's still important to fix the banks. Ignoring the obvious

pogrom-like timing of his ire, the President has a point. You can’t have a too-bigto-

fail policy and not have much tighter rules on the banks and similar institutions

(none of this explains the proposed bank tax which is purely grandstanding for

the mob). Nobody, including me, likes to see banks profiting on their gains and

socializing their losses. I dearly wish the government, if they had to do a bailout,

had struck a better deal (the difference is I won’t coercively force my preferences

after the fact). So, what do we do going forward? Add a ba-jillion (remember,

I’m a quant) new rules and restrictions, and have the bureaucrats run the country

like they run Congress? Or fix too-big-to-fail itself?

Well I think the answer is obvious. If you fix too-big-to-fail you fix almost

everything. You need light regulation as fraud is still illegal and banks bear their

own downsides. Risk is run much tighter by financial institutions who know that

nobody has their backs. All is well and we can keep on rockin-in-the-free-market

(can one legally paraphrase Neil Young while supporting Capitalism?).

So, how do you fix too-big-to-fail? Well, this is complicated, give me a moment. I

got it. You let them fail. There’s a famous episode of Happy Days (ok, by

"famous" I mean I remember it) where Ritchie needs help against a bully. The

Fonz (yeah, I went there) advises him to bluff, act like a maniac and the bully will

back off. Ritchie does this and turns to the Fonz, with his back to the bully, and

asks, “is it working?” The Fonz says no and Ritchie asks why? “Well”, the Fonz

explains, “it turns out that for this to work, some time in your life you have to have

actually hit someone.” Ritchie responds with those immortal words, “that’s a very

important detail to have left out, Fonz!” Well our government repeatedly blinking

and bailing out those who should have been allowed to fail (including the whole

economy which occasionally should’ve been allowed to suffer more without a

“Greenspan Put”) was a very important detail to have left out!4

I admit perhaps by fall/winter of 2008 this was a matter of brinksmanship, and

while I would’ve opted for no bailout (I think Capitalism is very robust), it was

scary. But it never should have come to that. From Continental Illinois to

Chrysler to LTCM (not technically a bailout but still a confirmation government

would ride to the rescue) to the “Greenspan Put” for 20 years, we built up the

doctrine of too-big-to-fail until it became a monster. But it can be tamed. How?

Well, you start planning for failure, how the piping and legal structure of the

system would work for major failures (some are calling these living wills for

companies), and you start letting people fail. Capitalism is a beautiful system

and free markets work. But failure, no matter how big, is as important as

success if not more.

Just a few more things. Let’s talk about hindsight bias. That’s where everyone

thinks they knew something was going to happen after the fact, when few really

knew it back then. Bias is the geeky way of saying “hindsight is 20-20.” Right

now we all find it incredibly obvious that circa 2006 or 2007 a giant real-estate

and credit bubble was about to kill us all. Certainly that was discussed by many

at the time. Certainly it turned out to be true. But to call it obvious, particularly

the timing and magnitude, which is much harder to get right than the existence, is

insane (even I say above that it was obvious something bad was coming – but

how big was not obvious even well into the crisis). If obvious why did the Fed,

possibly soon to be granted more oversight power, not see it and scream a

warning? If obvious why didn’t we all see it and act on it? If obvious why did

Barney Frank famously decide to “roll the dice” a little more with his GSEs (see, I

don’t even blame Barney). We should have known better, I don’t dispute that,

but it wasn’t as obvious as we all think now. Why is this important? Because the

less obvious it was, the less villainously incompetent all players involved were,

including Barney and the bankers (a good band name). But that just ruins the

“narrative” doesn’t it? You can’t get a good mob attack off the ground with that

kind of even-handed reasoning.

We commonly hear that this crisis was a failure of regulation, but we rarely hear

what exact regulation would have saved us, particularly from the real estate

bubble that was most of the problem (most real-estate rules that changed in the

last few decades were towards Left-leaning rules that exacerbated this bubble).

Anyway, I don’t argue all regulation is bad, or that we couldn’t improve it, but I do

argue that doing away with too-big-to-fail is way more important than tinkering

with regulation, and in fact renders much of the tinkering moot. Also I’d note that

the fixed income markets are far more regulated than the equity markets, which

did not fail us this time or in their own meltdown in 2000. Better regulation might

4 Barney Frank got this one right, paraphrasing him, “markets will never believe us until we let a big

company die.” Yes, in my example, Barney is the Fonz.

be part of the solution, but bad regulation was not the main cause of the crisis

and good regulation cannot do much if we retain too-big-to-fail.

We hear a ton about bankers’ bonuses. In no way did the large bonuses, or

“asymmetric risk and reward” of bonuses, cause the real estate bubble, still the

major cause of our pain. And curing too-big-to-fail also cures this bonus problem

as if the banks pay out too much and don’t have enough left for safety, they are

gone along with all their equity. When failure is an option because the

government provides a safety net, discipline about bonuses as well as risk goes

out the window. Finally, the precedent of the government having any say in what

private companies, with shareholder approval, pay their people is chilling to

anyone with even the remotest understanding of limited government.5

Derivatives also didn’t cause the real estate bubble. They probably caused the

failures of some banks and insurance companies who made bad bets on the

bubble (particularly when used by companies like AIG not to shift their bets but

simply to make a much more massive leveraged bet on real estate). But these

banks and insurance companies should have known that they’d be allowed to fail

if they turned out to be wrong (if so presumably they would’ve made smaller

bets). Instead they knew the opposite. Again, a false culprit is exaggerated (the

math guys did it!), and again ending too-big-to-fail fixes the problem. Some

lessons from the crisis seem to be reasonable if not a cure-all, e.g., get more

derivatives on clearinghouses, but I doubt we need government fiat to move us in

that direction going forward.

OK, I’m done, but for a short recap. The bankers are far from without sin, and

there are things in the system that need fixing. But the bankers have largely paid

back what they borrowed and should not be penalized versus those who cannot

repay, simply because the bankers performed well post bailout (wasn’t that the

hope and intention?). Bankers didn’t cause this crisis any more than individuals

did, and probably less than government. But those last two are inconvenient

villains. In America we’re not supposed to choose our villains by convenience, or

how good a simple “narrative” is, but we’ll leave that for another day.

We should fix the system going forward but by making it more of a free market

not less. Punish failure. Don’t institutionalize too-big-to-fail by accepting it and

then try to regulate away large failures with telephone books of rules and

coercive government interference. Cheer outsized rewards when they are the

result of two-sided risk where skin was in the game, but castigate then eliminate

outsized rewards when they are the result of one-sided risk where the

government foolishly has the wrong end of the deal. Get the government out of

social engineering and dictating to private individuals how to live, work, invest,

5 As an aside, most bankers are not very highly paid. Following the confusion we documented above with

the term “banker”, we often say "banker" but we mean "trader", "asset manager", or "investment banker".

Those doing the banking, taking deposits, lending, etc., are, in general, not raking it in. They do however,

oddly, have a new target on their backs put there by the commander-in-chief.

and conduct commerce. Most of all, do not look for simple answers and

scapegoats, particularly for political gain, it’s disgusting and beneath the dignity

we should expect from our leaders.

I would end this again, as in my last similar essay, with “I’m ready for my

personalized tax rate now” but given the plethora of suggestions in the offing

(bonus taxes, capital taxes, transactions taxes), I’m pretty sure that it’s in the

works anyway.

The information set forth herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed by author

to be reliable. However, the author does not make any representation or warranty, express or

implied, as to the information’s accuracy or completeness, nor does the author recommend that

the attached information serve as the basis of any investment decision. This document has

been provided to you solely for information purposes and does not constitute an offer or

solicitation of an offer, or any advice or recommendation, to purchase any securities or other

financial instruments, and may not be construed as such. This document is intended

exclusively for the use of the person to whom it has been delivered by the author, and it is not

to be reproduced or redistributed to any other person.

Replay of US Air landing in Hudson

2010-01-13T09:41:00.000-05:00

Why We Have a Health Care Cost Problem

2009-12-29T09:50:00.000-05:00

Article in IBD.....

Why We Have a Health Care Cost Problem and Why It Will Only Get Worse: Other People's Money

The chart above shows why we have a health care cost problem. Patients have little direct connection in paying for their care, and their role has fallen significantly. Meanwhile, the government's involvement has grown, as has that of the insurance industry.

Because so many Americans rely on an insurance policy or a government program to pay their health care bills, the internal governors that temper the rest of their purchases are turned off. When a visit to the doctor's office or a diagnostic test costs them a mere $10 or $20 co-payment out of pocket — or there is no charge at all — cost has little impact on their decision to see a doctor. "By not knowing the full costs associated with health care, consumers demand more and 'overuse' it," Kenneth E. Thorpe explained a few years back in Health Affairs.

Americans would be more judicious in seeking health care — they would self-ration — if the right incentives were in place. An effective way to cut overuse and bring down costs would be to encourage through public policy the use of health savings accounts. If consumers used HSAs to pay the full amount for medical care at the point of service rather than letting employer-funded insurance or a government program pay the bills, the demand would fall.

The Democrats' health care legislation, however, puts more distance between Americans and the payment process and promotes dependence on government. That will only drive down consumers' out-of-pocket expenses even further and force overall health care spending upward. Under such a regime, the system will be worse off than it is now.

Taxes are strong incentive

2009-12-29T08:18:00.002-05:00

If Governments continue the path of raising taxes they will continue to find the result is not more tax revenue.

In London, aside from the hedge funds leaving even JP Morgan is considering packing up...

This in the Telegraph..

JP Morgan may scrap £1.5bn London HQ plan over Labour's attacks on City
JP Morgan, the giant US investment bank, has warned the Chancellor it may scrap plans to build a £1.5bn flagship European headquarters in Canary Wharf if politicians don't rein in their attacks on the City. Jamie Dimon, chief executive, made the coded warning to Alistair Darling in an angry phone call after the Government revealed its 50pc super-tax on bonuses in the pre-Budget report. Although Mr Dimon did not explicitly threaten to can the 1.9m square foot Docklands development, he pointedly used it to demonstrate the bank's commitment to London.

Hedge Funds Will MOVE

2009-12-14T13:39:00.003-05:00

Watch London and see what happens if the government attempts to exact punitive taxes on a minority that also is a strong positive economic producer.... You kill the goose that laid the golden egg.

See this on Dealbreaker and in the FT:
Adventures In Hyberbole: European Hedge Fund Exodus Edition
Posted by Jon Shazar, Dec 14, 2009, 9:30am

It’s been made perfectly clear by everyone with something to lose from Europe’s ever-changing-but-still-draconian hedge fund regulation proposals that they’ll be a disaster. Hedge funds will leave in droves, London will be left a ghost town with tumbleweed rolling down Knightsbridge Road, subsistence farming in Hyde Park and (most terrifyingly) slightly less rich people occupying Mayfair townhouses.

So, yes, we get it: The regulations are going to hurt. But one lawyer is not content to leave the fearmongering at a reasonable level.

The regulations, watered down or not, will wash the European Union clean of hedge funds, according to Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer’s Michael Raffan.

…the impact would be “rapid and decisive… no hedge funds will operate from within the EU.”

None! Not a one! Real wrath of God-type-stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The Dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria.

It’s already here.

Hedge funds are much more mobile than banks. It’s much easier for three guys in Mayfar to pack their bags and move to Geneva.

Law firm warns of hedge fund exodus [FT]

Electric or Natural Gas?

2009-12-02T10:43:00.004-05:00

Good article in Seeking Alpha by Richard Shaw. We need to get the country behind the idea of Natural Gas powered vehicles. A great first step would be to convert all the trucking industry to nat gas and start offering it on big SUV's. This seems like a no-brainer first step to getting off imported oil. We can have a developing debate about Nukes, Wind and Solar later but we must do this.

Seeking Alpha article ......

Electric Vehicles vs. Natural Gas Vehicles

If we have more natural gas than we can currently use; if natural gas vehicles use a proven technology; and if we have developed natural gas pipelines that lose less energy than high tension electric transmission lines; why do we seek electric vehicles when the technology is not developed for distance travel, when electric power losses over long distance transmission are substantial, and when we do not have the electric production or transmission capacity to supply a major conversion from gasoline to electric vehicles?

If we face brown outs and rolling managed electricity outages in summer months due to air conditioning, how do we expect to handle millions of automobiles plugging into electric sockets as they arrive home from work each day?

If we possess all of the necessary resources domestically in the U.S. to convert to a proven technology, natural gas based vehicle system, but must rely on batteries produced in China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea to power an underdeveloped and unproven technology electric vehicle system, why not natural gas instead of electricity?

Natural gas producers, storage and transmission companies are a more sensible system to rely upon than electric power plants, electric transmission lines and foreign produced electric batteries from both an economic and national security perspective.

If that logic stands up over time, and if the flaws in the wide scale adoption of the pure electric car concept are seen more broadly, then natural gas producers, storage and pipelines companies should outperform current expectations.

Such an investment approach would require a long patient wait, but if a reasonable dividend yield is available now for some natural gas related stocks, the long-term capital gain return could surprise on the upside.

We would tend to favor pipelines over producers at this point, because the oversupply of natural gas is still growing, while there is not a correspondingly large oversupply of transmission capacity.

Here are four pipeline companies that may be interesting in terms of the natural gas versus electric vehicle argument: Spectra Energy (SEP), El Paso Pipeline (EPB), Westcorp (WES), Williams Pipeline (WMZ).

Healthcare Reform?

2009-11-19T07:55:00.002-05:00

Great opinion written in Reason Mag....
http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/18/my-body-their-choice

My Body, Their Choice
Turning health care over to the government inevitably limits individual freedom.

.......
For pro-choice, pro-reform liberals, this is exactly the problem: On the one hand, they support a massive expansion of government funding and bureaucratic control into nearly every corner of the health care system. On the other hand, they're incensed that the government would make rules about how that funding can be used.

It's grimly ironic: After spending much of the year ridiculing opponents of health care reform for insisting that reform would put government in between doctors and patients, they're now up in arms that government has gotten involved in decisions they believe should only be made by women and their doctors.

But if the history of bureaucracy teaches us anything, it's that what the government funds is what the government controls. Or, to put it another way: When the government gets involved in making everyone's health care decisions, it may be your body, but it won't be your choice.

Peter Suderman is an associate editor at Reason magazine.

Try to Tax the Rich- Watch Them Leave

2009-10-30T08:25:00.004-04:00

Hat tip to Dealbreaker for this one.... This most interesting point is the last line. Governments think they can raise taxes to unreasonable rates to steal from only the rich to pay for all the socialist programs they over promise and under-deliver on, BUT all it will achieve is making the wealthy leave.......

Proof The Recovery Is For Real
Posted by Greg Michaels, Oct 29, 2009, 2:31pm

Two critical questions about the economic recovery can now be put to rest: (1) is the consumer back and (2) are government policies having an impact. The answer to both questions can be found in 290 feet of opulence otherwise known as the world’s largest sailing yacht, the Maltese Falcon. After months of rumor and speculation, we now have confirmation that, after parting with $120 million, one lucky individual can now sail the seven seas in style. So who has a cool $100 mil to throw down on a yacht like this in the current economic climate?

Wealth Report can now confirm an unsourced report on Yachtpals, that the buyer was Elena Ambrosiadou, founder of the hedge fund Ikos Partners.

Media reports from 2008 say the Greece-born hedge funder was the highest paid woman and wealthiest female entrepreneur in Britain. The British press estimated her net worth last year at 200 million pounds ($327.5 million), though she is probably worth far more if she could afford to plunk down $120 million for a boat.

But tales of UK-based hedge fund managers buying massive yachts are exactly what British regulators have heard enough of. They plan to send the message loud and clear that funds in the UK are going do their part to clean up the current mess through higher taxes. That way, people like Ms. Ambrosiadou will learn a valuable lesson.

She recently moved her fund to Cyprus, according to press reports, to avoid Britain’s new tax increase and rules for nondomiciled residents.

No Depression

2009-10-21T10:14:00.001-04:00

nice post on Crossing Wall Street blog

http://www.crossingwallstreet.com/archives/2009/10/no_more_histori.html

No More Historical Comparisons Graphs

Starting today, I refuse to look at any more charts that contain five or more squiggly lines, one labeled 2009, another labeled 1929, another 1974, another 1379. Enough!

These charts were kind of fun to look at a few months ago, but seriously, markets don’t trace out precise patterns from decades ago. On the morning of October 19, 1987, the WSJ famously ran a similar chart comparing the Dow’s current run with the market’s run-up in 1929, but there was one major difference. They altered the x-axis to make it a better fit. Once you start toying around with the data, you can make anything fit

John Stewart Nails CNN

2009-10-13T10:55:00.004-04:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

CNN Leaves It There

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Ron Paul Interview

And the SNL sketch.

Obama Address

The President is giving away t-shirts.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/obama-address/1163263/

Liberal Looking Glass....

2009-09-21T14:29:00.004-04:00

One from Jonah Goldberg pointing out correctly that modern American liberals (and the press) see only "conservatives" as the ones supporting bad ideas, and liberals are always somehow not at fault for anything bad that happens under their watch....

JG at NRO - the Corner
Liberals Are Never to Blame
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZWNlYzYzNDU1NTcwMjAyNTEyM2JlYTNlMmFhMjg0ZGU=

This reminded me of a passage from my book:

In the liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and “America” writ large. progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged “conservative” misdeeds—say, McCarthyism—are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight “hard enough” for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

Or, as George Clooney once put it:

“Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.”

Thomas Friedman is a Liberal Fascist

2009-09-09T11:13:00.003-04:00

On "the Corner" from National Review

Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Thomas Friedman is a Liberal Fascist [Jonah Goldberg]

Mark beat me to it, but I must put in my two cents. Thomas Friedman writes:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse....

So there you have it. If only America could drop its inefficient and antiquated system, designed in the age before globalization and modernity and, most damning of all, before the lantern of Thomas Friedman's intellect illuminated the land. If only enlightened experts could do the hard and necessary things that the new age requires, if only we could rely on these planners to set the ship of state right. Now, of course, there are "drawbacks" to such a system: crushing of dissidents with tanks, state control of reproduction, government control of the press and the internet. Omlettes and broken eggs, as they say. More to the point, Friedman insists, these "drawbacks" pale in comparison to the system we have today here in America.

I cannot begin to tell you how this is exactly the argument that was made by American fans of Mussolini in the 1920s. It is exactly the argument that was made in defense of Stalin and Lenin before him (it's the argument that idiotic, dictator-envying leftists make in defense of Castro and Chavez today). It was the argument made by George Bernard Shaw who yearend for a strong progressive autocracy under a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin (he wasn't picky in this regard). This is the argument for an "economic dictatorship" pushed by Stuart Chase and the New Dealers. It's the dream of Herbert Croly and a great many of the Progressives.

I have no idea why I still have the capacity to be shocked by such things. A few years ago, during the worst part of the Iraq war, I wrote a column saying that Iraq needed a Pinochet type to bring order to Iraq and help develop democratic and liberal institutions. To this day, I get vicious hate mail from liberal and leftist readers for my "pro-dictator" stance. Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman, golden boy of the NYT op-ed page, is writing love-letters to dictatorships because they have the foresight to invest in electric batteries and waterless toilets or something. It looks like there's reason to hope I was wrong about Iraq (I certainly hope I was). But at least I favored a dictatorship of sorts — for another country! — because I thought it would lead to a liberal democracy. Here, Friedman lives in a liberal democracy but has his nose pressed up against the candy store window of a cruel, undemocratic, regime and all he can do is drool over the prospect of having the same power here. It's disgusting.

Update: A friend IM's:

great post ; you know whoe specially hates the argument Friedman makes? Indians. They hear that argument all the time — from Indian communists; but smart indians I talk to want to stab your eyes out when they hear you say this argument since they know democracy — as messy as it is — is a huge strength for them. You would think Bangalore Tom might understand this.

Top 250 Rock tunes

2009-09-08T09:18:00.000-04:00

http://www.1019rxp.com/Blog/Steve/blogentry.aspx?BlogEntryID=10049659

THE DEFINITIVE 1019 LIST!!!
Posted 9/8/2009 8:05:00 AM
101.9 RXP’s Labor Day “Definitive 1019”

1. The Clash, London Calling
2. The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again
3. The Smiths, How Soon Is Now
4. Bruce Springsteen, Thunder Road
5. Beatles, A Day In The Life
6. Led Zeppelin, Ramble On
7. Tom Petty, American Girl
8. Rolling Stones, Gimme Shelter
9. Elvis Costello, (What’s So Funny About)…
10. Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated
11. U2, Bad
12. Oasis, Live Forever
13. Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
14. Pearl Jam, Black
15. Guns N Roses, Sweet Child Of Mine
16. Foo Fighters, Everlong
17. David Bowie, Rebel Rebel
18. Nirvana, Smells Like Teen Spirit
19. Coldplay, Clocks
20. The Cure, Just Like Heaven
21. Velvet Underground, Rock N Roll
22. John Lennon, Imagine
23. Jimi Hendrix, All Along The Watchtower
24. Aerosmith, Dream On
25. Radiohead, Creep
26. Doors, LA Woman
27. Jane’s Addiction, Jane Says
28. The Who, Baba O’Riley
29. Depeche Mode, Personal Jesus
30. Stone Temple Pilots, Interstate Love Song
31. Paul McCartney & Wings, Band On The Run
32. Joy Division, Love Will Tear Us Apart
33. Bob Dylan, Like A Rolling Stone
34. Iggy Pop, Lust For Life
35. AC/DC, You Shook Me All Night Long
36. The Verve, Bittersweet Symphony
37. Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down A Dream
38. Soundgarden, Black Hole Sun
39. U2, Sunday Bloody Sunday
40. Cream, Badge
41. Bruce Springsteen, Rosalita
42. Bob Marley, Redemption Song
43. The Cult, She Sells Sanctuary
44. Van Halen, Panama
45. White Stripes, Seven Nation Army
46. Talking Heads, Once In A Lifetime
47. Rolling Stones, Sympathy For The Devil
48. Smashing Pumpkins, 1979
49. Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody
50. Sex Pistols, Anarchy In The UK
51. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under The Bridge
52. Violent Femmes, Blister In The Sun
53. Blind Faith, Can’t Find My Way Home
54. Dramarama, Anything, Anything
55. Police, So Lonely
56. Led Zeppelin, Rock & Roll
57. Neil Young, Rockin’ In The Free World
58. Pearl Jam, Alive
59. Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb
60. Beatles, Revolution
61. AC/DC, Back In Black
62. The Clash, Train In Vain
63. Dave Matthews Band, Ants Marching
64. Cheap Trick, Surrender
65. The Killers, All These Things That I’ve Done
66. The Kinks, You Really Got Me
67. Bruce Springsteen, Born To Run
68. Aerosmith, Sweet Emotion
69. Ramones, Blitzkrieg Bop
70. Airborne Toxic Event, Sometime Around Midnight
71. Derek & The Dominoes, Layla
72. Blondie, Hanging On The Telephone
73. Dire Straits, Sultans Of Swing
74. Elton John, Tiny Dancer
75. Led Zeppelin, Kashmir
76. Beastie Boys, Fight For Your Right
77. Mott The Hoople, All The Young Dudes
78. Blur, Song 2
79. Allman Brothers Band, Midnight Rider
80. Temple Of The Dog, Hunger Strike
81. Steely Dan, Reelin’ In The Years
82. The Cure, In Between Days
83. Guns N Roses, Paradise City
84. INXS / Need You Tonight
85. U2, Where The Streets Have No Name
86. Ace Frehely, New York Groove
87. Radiohead, Karma Police
88. Bruce Springsteen, Jungleland
89. MGMT, Kids
90. Oasis, Champagne Supernova
91. Pretenders, Message Of Love
92. Queen & David Bowie, Under Pressure
93. R.E.M., Losing My Religion
94. Rolling Stones, Beast Of Burden
95. Replacements, Alex Chilton
96. Elvis Costello, Pump It Up
97. Grateful Dead, Touch Of Grey
98. John Lennon, Instant Karma
99. Kings Of Leon, Sex On Fire
100. The Clash, I Fought The Law
101. Pearl Jam, Corduroy
102. David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust
103. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Scar Tissue
104. Lou Reed, Sweet Jane
105. Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze
106. Weezer, Say It Ain’t So
107. The Who, The Real Me
108. The Killers, Mr. Brightside
109. Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps
110. Stone Temple Pilots, Plush
111. The Band, The Weight
112. The Knack, My Sharona
113. Police, Roxanne
114. Green Day, Basket Case
115. Bob Dylan, Positively 4th Street
116. Echo & The Bunnymen, Lips Like Sugar
117. Depeche Mode, Enjoy The Silence
118. Bruce Springsteen, Prove It All Night
119. Blind Melon, No Rain
120. Van Halen, Why Can’t This Be Love
121. The Jam, Town Called Malice
122. Thin Lizzy, Boys Are Back In Town
123. Social Distortion, Story Of My Life
124. Doors, Roadhouse Blues
125. The Church, Under The Milky Way
126. Beatles, Help
127. Joe Jackson, Is She Really Going Out With Him?
128. Raconteurs, Steady, As She Goes
129. Neil Young, Cinnamon Girl
130. R.E.M., It’s The End Of The World As We Know It
131. Smithereens, A Girl Like You
132. Lou Reed, Walk On The Wild Side
133. The Pixies, Here Comes Your Man
134. Pink Floyd, Money
135. Buzzcocks, Ever Fallen In Love
136. Beck, Loser
137. Led Zeppelin, Trampled Under Foot
138. Jim Carroll Band, People Who Died
139. Bob Marley, No Woman No Cry
140. Aerosmith, Walk This Way
141. Prince, Let’s Go Crazy
142. Squeeze, Pulling Mussels From The Shell
143. Coldplay, Viva La Vida
144. Rolling Stones, It’s Only Rock N Roll
145. The Kinks, (Wish I Could Fly..) Superman
146. R.E.M., So Central Rain (I’m Sorry)
147. AC/DC, Highway To Hell
148. The Who, My Generation
149. Ramones, Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
150. U2, I Will Follow
151. Foo Fighters, Times Like These
152. Bruce Springsteen, Born In The USA
153. David Bowie, Young Americans
154. Death Cab For Cutie, I Will Possess Your Heart
155. George Harrison, What Is Life
156. Jet, Are You Gonna Be My Girl
157. Led Zeppelin, Fool In The Rain
158. Rush, Limelight
159. Silversun Pickups, Panic Switch
160. Talking Heads, Psycho Killer
161. Beatles, Come Together
162. The Monroes, What Do All The People Know
163. U2, Pride (In The Name Of Love)
164. The Who, Substitute
165. Split Enz, I Got You
166. Pearl Jam, Elderly Woman Behind…
167. Chuck Berry, Johnny B. Goode
168. Tom Petty, Refugee
169. The Undertones, Teenage Kicks
170. The Cars, Just What I Needed
171. Smashing Pumpkins, Tonight, Tonight
172. Nick Lowe, Cruel To Be Kind
173. Neil Young, Southern Man
174. Metallica, Enter Sandman
175. Sublime, Badfish
176. Bruce Springsteen, Badlands
177. Black Crowes, She Talks To Angels
178. Toadies, Possum Kingdom
179. The Smiths, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
180. Van Halen, Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love
181. Weezer, Buddy Holly
182. Beatles, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
183. The Clash, Lost In The Supermarket
184. Alice In Chains, Rooster
185. Pretenders, Middle Of The Road
186. Modest Mouse, Float On
187. Rolling Stones, Paint It Black
188. Simple Minds, (Don’t You) Forget About Me
189. Jimi Hendrix, Crosstown Traffic
190. New Order, Blue Monday
191. Heart, Crazy On You
192. Replacements, I’ll Be You
193. Depeche Mode, Blasphemous Rumors
194. Allman Brothers band, Whipping Post
195. Nirvana, Lithium
196. David Bowie, Suffragette City
197. Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock
198. XTC, Dear God
199. Pearl Jam, Jeremy
200. Tears For Fears, Everybody Wants To Rule The World
201. Doors, Riders On The Storm
202. Weezer, Undone (The Sweater Song)
203. Warren Zevon, Lawyers, Guns And Money
204. The Killers, Somebody Told Me
205. Live, Lightning Crashes
206. The Who, 5:15
207. Cheap Trick, I Want You To Want Me
208. Oasis, Wonderwall
209. Patti Smith, Because The Night
210. Green Day, American Idiot
211. Guns N Roses, Welcome To The Jungle
212. Modern English, I Melt With You
213. Pink Floyd, Time
214. Iggy Pop & The Stooges, Search And Destroy
215. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Give It Away
216. Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit
217. Cracker, Low
218. Echo & The Bunnymen, The Killing Moon
219. Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
220. Rolling Stones, You Can’t Always Get What You Want
221. Harvey Danger, Flagpole Sitta
222. Bruce Springsteen, Dancing In The Dark
223. The Pixies, Monkey Gone To Heaven
224. Tom Petty, Free Fallin’
225. U2, New Year’s Day
226. David Bowie, Let’s Dance
227. Led Zeppelin, Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You
228. Morrissey, Suedehead
229. Jackson Browne, Running On Empty
230. Ramones, Rockaway Beach
231. Beatles, Getting Better
232. Radiohead, High And Dry
233. Buffalo Springfield, For What It’s Worth
234. Living Colour, Cult Of Personality
235. Elvis Costello, Alison
236. Dave Matthews Band, What Would You Say
237. Husker Du, Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely
238. Cranberries, Zombie
239. Talking Heads, Burning Down The House
240. The Who, Pinball Wizard
241. Joe Jackson, I’m The Man
242. Crosby Stills And Nash, Suite: Judy Blue Eyes
243. Beastie Boys, No Sleep Til Brooklyn
244. Jimi Hendrix, Castles Made Of Sand
245. Catherine Wheel, Black Metallic
246. Rolling Stones, All Down The Line
247. The Cure, Friday I’m In Love
248. Elvis Costello, Radio Radio
249. Cake, The Distance
250. Grateful Dead, Scarlett Begonias

Heathcare Debate

2009-08-20T07:00:00.001-04:00

Why We Need Health Care Reform - Barack Obama, NYTimes.com
Obama Goes Postal, Lands in Dead-Letter Office: Caroline Baum - Bloomberg.com
Economist's View: Swiftboating Health Care Reform
Robert Reich's Blog: How Tough is Our President?
Populist Right Rising - Patrick Buchanan
The inevitable socialisation of health care financing - Willem Buiter
Economist's View: "Public Option versus Co-ops: The Market Test"
Clive Crook - Obama took wrong turn on health
The Swiss Menace - Paul Krugman
Ara Darzi and Tom Kibasi - In Defense of Britain's Health System - washingtonpost.com
Fareed Zakaria - When Only a Crisis Brings Reforms - washingtonpost.com
Obama’s teflon melting as outrage over healthcare heats up - Marshall Auerback
Economist's View: "A Public Option Isn't a Curse or a Cure"
On why I can't get in to see my doctor - James Fallows
You Do Not Have Health Insurance - James Kwak
A Canadian doctor diagnoses U.S. healthcare - Los Angeles Times
Unconscionable Math - Taunter Media
Hospital Savings - Salaries for Doctors, Not Fees - Series - NYTimes.com
Charles Krauthammer - Why Obamacare Is Sinking - washingtonpost.com
My whopping $32 emergency room visit in the land of socialized medicine
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/08/what-real-comprehensive-healthcare.html

Score One for the Good Guys

2009-08-07T11:47:00.002-04:00

Pakistani Taliban Chief Killed by U.S., Aide Says

Friday , August 07, 2009

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan —
Pakistan's Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who led a violent campaign of suicide attacks and assassinations against the Pakistani government, has been killed in a U.S. missile strike, a militant commander and aide to Mehsud said Friday.

Taliban commanders were meeting to decide on his successor, intelligence and militant sources said.

The White House said Friday that it could not confirm that Mehsud's death but added that the people of Pakistan are now safer if reports are accurate.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Friday: "We cannot confirm whether he is dead. There seems to be a growing consensus among credible observers that he is indeed dead."

Earlier, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said intelligence showed Mehsud had been killed in Wednesday's missile strike on his father-in-law's house in Pakistan's lawless tribal area, but authorities would travel to the site to verify his death.

Pakistani and U.S. intelligence officials said the CIA was behind the strike. All spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

"I confirm that Baitullah Mehsud and his wife died in the American missile attack in South Waziristan," Taliban commander Kafayat Ullah told The Associated Press by telephone. He would not give any further details.

Mehsud's demise would be a major boost to Pakistani and U.S. efforts to eradicate the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but would not necessarily deal a definitive blow to the Taliban in Pakistan. Mehsud has deputies who could step into his place.

Pakistani intelligence officials and Taliban sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Taliban commanders were meeting in the lawless tribal areas Friday to choose a replacement. It was unclear when they might reach a decision.

Three Pakistani intelligence officials said the likeliest successor was Mehsud's deputy, Hakim Ullah, a commander known for recruiting and training suicide bombers. Two other prominent possibilities, the officials said, were Azmat Ullah and Waliur Rehman, also close associates of Mehsud.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Whether a new leader could wreak as much havoc as Mehsud depends largely on how much pressure the Pakistani military continues to put on the network, especially in South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal belt. The mountainous region has a leaky border with Afghanistan and fiercely independent, heavily armed tribes hostile to interference by outsiders. The Pashtun tribes from which the Taliban draws most of its fighters straddle both sides of the border.

Although Mehsud's stronghold in South Waziristan does not directly border Afghanistan, he was known to have ties to other commanders acting on the frontier and was believed to give refuge to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan who move freely back and forth across the border.

Mehsud has Al Qaeda connections and has been suspected in the killing of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan views him as its top internal threat and has been preparing an offensive against him.

For years, the U.S. considered Mehsud a lesser threat to its interests than some of the other Pakistani Taliban, their Afghan counterparts and Al Qaeda, because most of his attacks were focused inside Pakistan, not against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

That view appeared to change in recent months as Mehsud's power grew and concerns mounted that increasing violence in Pakistan could destabilize the U.S. ally and threaten the entire region.

The Pakistani intelligence officials said Mehsud's body was buried in the village of Nardusai in South Waziristan, near the site of the missile strike.

Another senior Pakistani intelligence official said phone and other communications intercepts — he would not be more specific — had led authorities to suspect Mehsud was dead, but stressed there was no definitive evidence yet.

An American counterterrorism official said the U.S. government was also looking into the reports. The official indicated the United States did not yet have physical evidence — remains — that would prove who died but said there were other ways of determining who was killed. He declined to describe them.

Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter publicly.

A local tribesman, who also spoke on condition his name not be used, said Mehsud had been at his father-in-law's house being treated for kidney pain, and had been put on a drip by a doctor, when the missile struck. The tribesman claimed he attended the Taliban chief's funeral.

Last year, a doctor for Mehsud announced the militant leader had died of kidney failure, but the report turned out to be false.

In Afghanistan, Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Zahir Azimi said Mehsud's fighters would cross the border into eastern Afghanistan occasionally to help out one of most ruthless Afghan insurgent leaders, Siraj Haqqani.

"He was an international terrorist that affected India, Pakistan and Afghanistan," Azimi said, without confirming Mehsud was dead.

In March, the State Department authorized a reward of up to $5 million for Mehsud. Increasingly, American missiles fired by unmanned drones have focused on Mehsud-related targets.

Pakistan publicly opposes the strikes, saying they anger local tribes and make it harder for the army to operate. Still, many analysts suspect the two countries have a secret deal allowing them.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Pakistan's military was determined to finish off Pakistan's Taliban.

"It is a targeted law enforcement action against Baitullah Mehsud's group and it will continue till Baitullah Mehsud's group is eliminated forever," he said.

Pakistan's record on putting pressure on the Taliban network is spotty. It has used both military action and truces to try to contain Mehsud over the years, but neither tactic seemed to work, despite billions in U.S. aid aimed at helping the Pakistanis tame the tribal areas.

Mehsud was not that prominent a militant when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Mahmood Shah, a former security chief for the tribal regions. In fact, he has struggled against such rivals as Abdullah Mehsud, an Afghan war veteran who spent time in Guantanamo Bay.

But a February 2005 peace deal with Mehsud appeared to give him room to consolidate and boost his troop strength. Within months of that accord, dozens of pro-government tribal elders in the region were gunned down on his command.

In December 2007, Mehsud became the head of a new coalition called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistan's Taliban movement. Under his guidance, the group killed hundreds of Pakistanis in suicide and other attacks.

Analysts say the reason for Mehsud's rise in the militant ranks is his alliances with al-Qaida and other violent groups. U.S. intelligence has said Al Qaeda has set up its operational headquarters in Mehsud's South Waziristan stronghold and neighboring North Waziristan.

Mehsud has no record of attacking targets in the West, although he has threatened to attack Washington.

However, he is suspected of being behind a 10-man cell arrested in Barcelona in January 2008 for plotting suicide attacks in Spain. Pakistan's former government and the CIA have named him as the prime suspect behind the December 2007 killing of Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister. He has denied any role.

Timmy G House for Sale

2009-07-30T10:40:00.002-04:00

funny one on Tim G.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Home Crisis Investigation

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Joke of the Day

Like Really Cool Way to Like Solve California's Budget Problem

2009-07-28T16:40:00.002-04:00

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Taxing The Rich Will Not Work

2009-07-16T15:45:00.001-04:00

EVIAN Ad

2009-07-10T11:27:00.000-04:00

Funnnny

Dolphin "Superpod"

2009-07-09T14:56:00.001-04:00

Celeb foreclosures

2009-07-08T07:39:00.002-04:00

Holyfield needs money.....
According to reports out of Atlanta, former heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield has avoided foreclosure — again. His sprawling, 54,000-sq ft home, located on Evander Holyfield Way in Fairburn, GA, was to be auctioned off today, July 7.
The article states Holyfield has worked out a deal with mortgage holder JP Morgan Chase and he has until August 4 to pay the debt. Holyfield is reportedly working on several projects — including a comeback fight.
Read our continually-updated list on celebrity foreclosures

Apache Takes Out Insurgent Mortar Team With A Hellfire Missile In Iraq

2009-07-02T16:39:00.001-04:00

Apache Takes Out Insurgent Mortar Team With A Hellfire Missile In Iraq
AH-64 Gunship Takes Out Insurgent Mortar Team + Mortar Tube With 2 Hellfire Missiles In Iraq.Unclassified New Apache Footage Coming Every Week, Subscribe If You Want So You Will Not Miss Them.
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/198064.php

Bat Catching Falcon

2009-06-29T08:27:00.004-04:00

Is CO2 the cause of Global warming?

2009-06-26T14:11:00.003-04:00

Strong Argument that CO2 is not the cause.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=288952680655100870

CO2 & Temperature (also see Temperature Record)

The ice-core data is frequently cited as principal evidence to argue that CO2 is the earth’s main climate driver. It is, in a way, the jewel in the crown of the theory of man made global warming. But the ice-core data does not show that CO2 drives climate. It shows, very clearly, that variations in temperature precede rises in atmospheric CO2 – not the other way round. The two phenomena are divided by a time lag of several hundred years.

There is no evidence that CO2 has ever ‘driven’ the climate in the past, nor is there any compelling evidence that it is doing so now.

According to global warming theory, if an enhanced greenhouse effect (from increased levels of CO2 or indeed any other greenhouse gas) is responsible for warming the earth, then the rate of temperature rise should be greatest in that part of the earth’s atmosphere known as the troposphere, specifically in the tropics. And yet the observations, from weather balloons and satellites have consistently shown that not to be the case. I urge readers to look at the Christy et al papers below. The latest one was recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (2007). This may seem like a rather technical issue, but it strikes at the very heart of the theory of man made global warming.

AND Some back and forth fighting regarding this piece here..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle

Compensation Limits (is this the USA?)

2009-06-03T15:14:00.001-04:00

On Dealbreaker....

Compensation Regulation Watch '09
Posted by Greg Michaels, Jun 03, 2009, 3:09pm
The summer of compensation legislation is almost upon us and the Swiss have radioed in with some general guidelines for how they intend to deal with the issue. It should come as no surprise that the main focus is on longer-term, performance-related payment structures that look to penalize individuals whose short-term gains turn into longer term losses. However FINMA, the Swiss regulator, did stop short of establishing guidelines to flat out restrict compensation. According to FINMA, "From a legal perspective, FINMA is not authorised to restrict the remuneration paid to employees. Indeed, this would not be a sensible option." Barney Frank disagrees.

What Caused the Housing Bust

2009-05-27T10:30:00.002-04:00

If you believe the press and the politicians; Wall Street greed and lack of regulation caused the housing bust that has lead to the current banking problems. This is not true. It can all be simply explained by the fact that our Government (legislators) deliberately created a regulated infrastructure intended to provide mortgages without enough collateral or equity to absorb any kind of a pricing downturn.

Getting To The Crux Of Housing Bust

By WALTER E. WILLIAMSPosted 05/26/2009 06:03 PM ET

Hot off the press is Dr. Thomas Sowell's 43rd book, "The Housing Boom and Bust," an eye-opener for anyone interested in the truth about the collapse of the housing market that played a major role in our financial market crisis.

The root of the problem lies in Washington. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, later given teeth during the Bush and Clinton administrations, forced financial institutions to make risky mortgage loans they otherwise would not have made.

President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, threatened legal action against lenders whose racial statistics raised her suspicions. Bank loan qualification standards, in general, came under criticism as being too stringent regarding down payments, credit histories and income.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises, by lowering their standards for the mortgage paper they would purchase from banks and other mortgage lenders, gave financial institutions further incentive to make risky loans.

In 2002, the Bush administration urged Congress to enact the American Dream Down Payment Assistance Act, which subsidized down payments of homebuyers with income below a certain level. Bush also urged Congress to pass legislation requiring the Federal Housing Administration to make zero-down-payment loans at low interest rates to low-income Americans.

Between 2005 and 2007, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac acquired an estimated trillion dollars' worth of subprime loans and guaranteed more than $2 trillion worth of mortgages. That, Sowell points out, is larger than the GDPs of all but four nations.

Many warnings went unheeded. In congressional hearings, Treasury Secretary John Snow said, regarding the risks assumed by Fannie and Freddie: "The concern is, if something unravels, it could cause systemic risk to the whole financial system."

Peter Wallison, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, warned that if Congress did not rein in Fannie and Freddie, "there will be a massive default with huge losses to the taxpayers and systemic effects on the economy."

There were other warnings of pending collapse, but Congress and the White House, in their push for politically popular "affordable housing," ignored them.

Rep. Barney Frank, now chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, said critics "exaggerate a threat of safety" and "conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see." Chairman Chris Dodd, of the Senate Banking Committee, called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "one of the great success stories of all time" and urged "caution" in restricting their activities."

HG Wells and Today's Democrats

2009-05-26T17:18:00.001-04:00

Fred Siegel
The Godfather of American Liberalism
H. G. Wells: novelist, historian, authoritarian, anticapitalist, eugenicist, and advisor to presidents
The Granger Collection
A generation of American liberals, including Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, and the editors of The New Republic, regarded Wells as a visionary.
Modern American liberalism, as it emerged in the 1920s, was animated by a revolt against the masses. Liberal thinkers accused the great unwashed of smothering creative individuals in a blanket of materialist, spiritually empty cultural conformity. The liberal project was, so to speak, to refound America by replacing its business civilization—a “dictatorship of the middle class,” as Vernon Parrington put it—with a new, more highly evolved leadership. But along with the ideal of the spontaneous, creative individual, liberals also embraced government economic planning, which depended on making people more predictable. The tension between the two aspirations was resolved, rhetorically at least, by proposing to place power in the hands of scientists, academics, artists, and professionals, a new and truly worthy aristocracy that could govern based on what was good for both leaders and the led.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_HG-wells.html

Why Governments Are Lousy at Running Business, But Excellent at Scaring You About "Annihilating" Budget Cuts

2009-05-21T10:21:00.002-04:00

in the WSJ on May 20th.

Why Government Can't Run a Business

Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits.

Article

By JOHN STEELE GORDON

The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in -- if not taking over entirely -- America's health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government's track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged.

When the plant was finally finished, however -- three years after World War I had ended -- it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate only at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen.

Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company. But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud. Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees.

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. There are a number of reasons why this is inherently so. Among them are:

1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. Politicians can only make political decisions, not economic ones. They are, after all, first and foremost in the re-election business. Because of the need to be re-elected, politicians are always likely to have a short-term bias. What looks good right now is more important to politicians than long-term consequences even when those consequences can be easily foreseen. The gathering disaster of Social Security has been obvious for years, but politics has prevented needed reforms.

And politicians tend to favor parochial interests over sound economic sense. Consider a thought experiment. There is a national widget crisis and Sen. Wiley Snoot is chairman of the Senate Widget Committee. There are two technologies that are possible solutions to the problem, with Technology A widely thought to be the more promising of the two. But the company that has been developing Technology B is headquartered in Sen. Snoot's state and employs 40,000 workers there. Which technology is Sen. Snoot going to use his vast legislative influence to push?

2) Politicians need headlines. And this means they have a deep need to do something ("Sen. Snoot Moves on Widget Crisis!"), even when doing nothing would be the better option. Markets will always deal efficiently with gluts and shortages, but letting the market work doesn't produce favorable headlines and, indeed, often produces the opposite ("Sen. Snoot Fails to Move on Widget Crisis!").

3) Governments use other people's money. Corporations play with their own money. They are wealth-creating machines in which various people (investors, managers and labor) come together under a defined set of rules in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they can create separately.

So a labor negotiation in a corporation is a negotiation over how to divide the wealth that is created between stockholders and workers. Each side knows that if they drive too hard a bargain they risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs for both sides. Just ask General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

But when, say, a school board sits down to negotiate with a teachers union or decide how many administrators are needed, the goose is the taxpayer. That's why public-service employees now often have much more generous benefits than their private-sector counterparts. And that's why the New York City public school system had an administrator-to-student ratio 10 times as high as the city's Catholic school system, at least until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a more than competent businessman before he entered politics) took charge of the system.

4) Government does not tolerate competition. The Obama administration is talking about creating a "public option" that would compete in the health-insurance marketplace with profit-seeking companies. But has a government entity ever competed successfully on a level playing field with private companies? I don't know of one.

5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. But competition is exactly what makes capitalism so successful an economic system. The lack of it has always doomed socialist economies.

When the federal government nationalized the phone system in 1917, justifying it as a wartime measure that would lower costs, it turned it over to the Post Office to run. (The process was called "postalization," a word that should send shivers down the back of any believer in free markets.) But despite the promise of lower prices, practically the first thing the Post Office did when it took over was . . . raise prices.

Cost cutting is alien to the culture of all bureaucracies. Indeed, when cost cutting is inescapable, bureaucracies often make cuts that will produce maximum public inconvenience, generating political pressure to reverse the cuts.

6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. The CEO of a corporation has the power to manage effectively. He decides company policy, organizes the corporate structure, and allocates resources pretty much as he thinks best. The board of directors ordinarily does nothing more than ratify his moves (or, of course, fire him). This allows a company to act quickly when needed.

But American government was designed by the Founding Fathers to be inefficient, and inefficient it most certainly is. The president is the government's CEO, but except for trivial matters he can't do anything without the permission of two separate, very large committees (the House and Senate) whose members have their own political agendas. Government always has many cooks, which is why the government's broth is so often spoiled.

7) Government is regulated by government. When "postalization" of the nation's phone system appeared imminent in 1917, Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T, admitted that his company was, effectively, a monopoly. But he noted that "all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly."

It is government's job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself. Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely -- and rightly -- end up in jail.

But that is exactly what the federal government (which, unlike corporations, decides how to keep its own books) does with Social Security. In the late 1990s, the government was running what it -- and a largely unquestioning Washington press corps -- called budget "surpluses." But the national debt still increased in every single one of those years because the government was borrowing money to create the "surpluses."

Capitalism isn't perfect. Indeed, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, it's the worst economic system except for all the others. But the inescapable fact is that only the profit motive and competition keep enterprises lean, efficient, innovative and customer-oriented.

Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).

Libertarian View

2009-05-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

"Relentless Anti-Human Bias in Childrens Education" and More Great Insights from JG

2009-05-15T11:16:00.002-04:00

His book is a MUST Read especially now as it was written prior to the current events

Schools not as good as you think

2009-05-14T16:11:00.001-04:00

Location: The Heritage Foundation's Allison Auditorium

Our national conversation about education reform often focuses on the need to improve schools in urban communities. But the Pacific Research Institute’s new documentary film – Not As Good As You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School – exposes an overlooked reality in American education: middle class schools are not as good as parents think. This documentary highlights serious problems as well as promising solutions for improving educational opportunities for all children.

Join us for a 45-minute screening of this groundbreaking film
followed by a discussion with Lance Izumi and Nick Tucker.

View the trailer for Not As Good As You Think above, or at

funnies

2009-05-11T10:06:00.004-04:00

Hedge Funds Speak Out

2009-05-05T07:45:00.003-04:00

This is a must read posted by the hedge fund manager of AQR Capital Management.
________________________________________

Unafraid In Greenwich Connecticut
Clifford S. AsnessManaging and Founding PrincipalAQR Capital Management, LLC

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”The responses of hedge fund managers have been, appropriately, outrage, but generally have been anonymous for fear of going on the record against a powerful President (an exception, though still in the form of a “group letter”, was the superb note from “The Committee of Chrysler Non-TARP Lenders” some of the points of which I echo here, and a relatively few firms, like Oppenheimer, that have publicly defended themselves). Furthermore, one by one the managers and banks are said to be caving to the President’s wishes out of justifiable fear.I run an approximately twenty billion dollar money management firm that offers hedge funds as well as public mutual funds and unhedged traditional investments. My company is not involved in the Chrysler situation, but I am still aghast at the President's comments (of course these are my own views not those of my company). Furthermore, for some reason I was not born with the common sense to keep it to myself, though my title should more accurately be called "Not Afraid Enough" as I am indeed fearful writing this... It’s really a bad idea to speak out. Angering the President is a mistake and, my views will annoy half my clients. I hope my clients will understand that I’m entitled to my voice and to speak it loudly, just as they are in this great country. I hope they will also like that I do not think I have the right to intentionally “sacrifice” their money without their permission.Here's a shock. When hedge funds, pension funds, mutual funds, and individuals, including very sweet grandmothers, lend their money they expect to get it back. However, they know, or should know, they take the risk of not being paid back. But if such a bad event happens it usually does not result in a complete loss. A firm in bankruptcy still has assets. It’s not always a pretty process. Bankruptcy court is about figuring out how to most fairly divvy up the remaining assets based on who is owed what and whose contracts come first. The process already has built-in partial protections for employees and pensions, and can set lenders' contracts aside in order to help the company survive, all of which are the rules of the game lenders know before they lend. But, without this recovery process nobody would lend to risky borrowers. Essentially, lenders accept less than shareholders (means bonds return less than stocks) in good times only because they get more than shareholders in bad times.The above is how it works in America, or how it’s supposed to work. The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go through this process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing. Clients of hedge funds include, among others, pension funds of all kinds of workers, unionized and not. The managers have a fiduciary obligation to look after their clients’ money as best they can, not to support the President, nor to oppose him, nor otherwise advance their personal political views. That’s how the system works. If you hired an investment professional and he could preserve more of your money in a financial disaster, but instead he decided to spend it on the UAW so you could “share in the sacrifice”, you would not be happy.Let’s quickly review a few side issues.The President's attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to "sacrifice" some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.Let’s also mention only in passing the irony of this same President begging hedge funds to borrow more to purchase other troubled securities. That he expects them to do so when he has already shown what happens if they ask for their money to be repaid fairly would be amusing if not so dangerous. That hedge funds might not participate in these programs because of fear of getting sucked into some toxic demagoguery that ends in arbitrary punishment for trying to work with the Treasury is distressing. Some useful programs, like those designed to help finance consumer loans, won't work because of this irresponsible hectoring.Last but not least, the President screaming that the hedge funds are looking for an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout is the big lie writ large. Find me a hedge fund that has been bailed out. Find me a hedge fund, even a failed one, that has asked for one. In fact, it was only because hedge funds have not taken government funds that they could stand up to this bullying. The TARP recipients had no choice but to go along. The hedge funds were singled out only becausethey are unpopular, not because they behaved any differently from any other ethical manager of other people's money. The President’s comments here are backwards and libelous. Yet, somehow I don’t think the hedge funds will be following ACORN’s lead and trucking in a bunch of paid professional protestors soon. Hedge funds really need a community organizer.This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.

Alaska was hot once before SUV's

2009-05-04T15:53:00.001-04:00

Check out this from Steve McIntire

Will Andy Revkin Tee Off on Chu?

by Steve McIntyre on May 3rd, 2009

I don't like talking about political appointees, but Chu is supposed to be a "scientist".

If you don't know the answer to something, it's a good idea not to pretend that you do. Take a look at Chu's appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee url (h/t reader Gene)

Barton must think that Chu is a total idiot.

Chu was there as a scientist. Barton asked Chu how the oil and gas got to the Alaska North- wasn't it warmer when the organics were laid down?

Chu rose to the bait, foolishly denying that it was warmer up north in the Cretaceous, attributing the presence of oil and gas in Alaska to continental drift. It "drifted up there".

Nope.

The most recent source rocks in Alaska were laid down in the Cretaceous - see here.

Four key marine petroleum source rock units were identified, characterized, and mapped in the subsurface to better understand the origin and distribution of petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. These marine source rocks, from oldest to youngest, include four intervals: (1) Middle–Upper Triassic Shublik Formation, (2) basal condensed section in the Jurassic–Lower Cretaceous Kingak Shale, (3) Cretaceous pebble shale unit, and (4) Cretaceous Hue Shale.

By the Cretaceous, Alaska was more or less in its present position. Here is the relevant map fromwww.scotese.com:

Florida Pensions Just the Begining?

2009-05-04T08:32:00.002-04:00

Many pension funds could be in serious trouble?

see the "Pension Pulse" blog for more

SUNDAY, MAY 3, 2009

Dark Clouds Hanging Over Sunshine State?

Following up to my last post on systemic fraud at public pension funds, Sydney Freedburg sent me her latest article, Florida investment agency uses smoke, mirrors (added emphasis and notes are mine):

Front and center on its Web site, the agency that invests $118 billion for Floridians showcases its code of ethics: "It's all about … Trust — Performance — Integrity.''
Most people take that as an article of faith, that the state is investing money for retirees and others wisely. But when the agency has fielded inquiries, it has often been about obfuscation, omission and falsehood.
[Note: When you are hiding the truth, remember the three O's: Obfuscate, Obfuscate, Obfuscate!]
When a community college employee asked if his pension money was in risky securities sliding on Wall Street, the answer he got was misleading and false.
When a city official with $26 million invested with the state asked if the money was safe, the people who run the state fund brushed him off.
When another city official asked if a $425 million investment was safe, the agency gave an answer the city considered so misleading that it asked the FBI to investigate.
When the agency's employees privately fretted about losses and shaky investments, their bosses told retirees and state and local officials that everything was fine. They even misled the three people charged with oversight of the agency: the governor, the chief financial officer and the attorney general.

Will Bankruptcy Laws Apply to Chrysler? Or Will Politics Prevail Above Law?

2009-05-01T10:30:00.003-04:00

The WSJ editorial today (May 1,2009) points out exactly what a bunch of crap it is to portray senior secured bond holders as speculators just because they expect to be put ahead of junior unsecured debt holders. It will be interesting to see if the bankruptcy judge has the cubes to make the right call or if he caves in to politics.

Also see; U.S. Tactics Spark Worries Over Lenders' Rights [The Wall Street Journal]
and on Dealbreaker;

Dangerous Times
Posted by Equity Private, May 01, 2009, 9:33am
It being effectively impossible to make viable the starving infant presently sucking at government teat given the existing rules and law of the land, bending, nay, breaking them has become a matter of patriotic necessity. Hence:
The U.S. government's restructuring plan for Chrysler LLC is sounding alarm bells for those in the business of lending money who worry that the plan could subvert decades of standing legal precedent and investing principles.
Banks, hedge funds and other investors that hold $6.9 billion in secured loans are being asked to release their contractual claims over Chrysler's assets in exchange for a fraction of what they are owed. Many lenders see that as a raw deal, because in the bankruptcy code's priority scheme, secured creditors are supposed to get paid before unsecured creditors such as employees.
Raw deal or not, this Administration gets what it wants, unless the screaming becomes too loud to tolerate. And what screaming can the haves issue that the have-nots will hear?

Obama and Mussolini

2009-04-20T16:15:00.002-04:00

From the New York Times....
Jonah Goldberg deserves some recognition even if he thought it was going to be Hillary rather than Obama, he still called it.

April 20, 2009

The Caucus

But Can Obama Make the Trains Run on Time?

By JOHN HARWOOD

As they seek to jolt the economy out of recession, President Obama’s Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve have set aside worries about future inflation.

But one form of inflation — rhetorical — may become a short-term hazard for Republicans seeking an effective strategy to oppose Mr. Obama’s activist-government agenda. As the Democratic Congress returns this week to juggle administration initiatives on energy, health care and financial regulation, the minority party faces an internal debate over striking the right tone.

“Rhetorically, Republicans are having a very hard time finding something that raises the consciousness of the average voter,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party who recently lost a bid to became national party chairman.

Workaday labels like “big spender” and “liberal” have lost their punch, and last fall, Senator John McCain of Arizona and Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska gained little traction during the presidential campaign by linking Mr. Obama’s agenda to socialism.

So Mr. Anuzis has turned to provocation with a purpose. He calls the president’s domestic agenda “economic fascism.”

“We’ve so overused the word ‘socialism’ that it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago,” Mr. Anuzis said. “Fascism — everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.”

Whether fellow Republicans think that is factually appropriate or strategically wise is another question.

It’s Been Tried Before

In modern American politics, linking opponents to totalitarianism typically signals that the side making the link is losing. Yet sometimes it works.

In his come-from-behind 1948 victory, President Harry S. Truman, a Democrat, likened a vote for the Republican challenger, Thomas E. Dewey, to a vote for fascism. Four years later, as a vice-presidential candidate trying to break the Democrats’ 20-year grip on the White House, Richard M. Nixon ripped the Democratic nominee for president, Adlai E. Stevenson, as a graduate of the “cowardly college of Communist containment.”

Later, his onetime speechwriter Patrick J. Buchanan recalled, Nixon “consciously kept the rhetoric cool” — even after the Democratic presidential challenger in 1972, George McGovern, compared him to Hitler. Ronald Reagan, a master of the temperate communication that fit the dominance of broadcast television, preferred humor to vitriol.

But recent years have produced a boom market for harsher rhetoric, for reasons that include the polarization of the two political parties and the rising influence of cable television and the Internet. In 2004, for instance, The American Prospect magazine depicted an elephant’s trunk curling around the neck of the Statue of Liberty with the headline: “Stranglehold: The right-wing push for a one-party state.”

Addressing President George W. Bush on MSNBC last year, the host Keith Olbermann declared, “You’re a fascist.”

The epithet, commonly associated with Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, gained new currency among conservatives with the publication of Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book, “Liberal Fascism.” This spring, an article in The American Spectator titled “Il Duce, Redux?” called Mr. Obama’s goals, language and conception of government “straight out of Mussolini’s playbook.”

Mr. Anuzis noted that the Fox News commentator Glenn Beck had picked up the theme, as did some participants at the antitax “tea party” rallies last week. Mr. Anuzis spreads the word on Facebook and Twitter.

But that discomfits other conservatives who question its accuracy and political wisdom.

“I don’t think the word ‘fascism’ applies at all,” said the CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, a sharp critic of Mr. Obama’s tax and spending policies. “Barack Obama is not a dictator. He’s a liberal.”

Tony Fabrizio, a Republican pollster, said: “If what you’re trying to do is reach out to the middle, the more extreme the language, the less likely they are to pay attention. We sound like white noise in the background. It’s like a yipping Chihuahua.”

Smile When You Say It

The sharper language partly reflects pent-up frustrations over Mr. Bush, who presided over spending increases and the government’s $700 billion financial system bailout last fall. Now Republicans lament much more of the same from Mr. Obama.

“They’re trying to figure out how to oppose a relatively popular president during an economic emergency,” said Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, dismissing the fascism charge. “That’s not an easy thing to do.”

The practical question for Republicans is how best to reach political independents, 60 percent of whom now approve of Mr. Obama’s job performance. As his policies sink in, said William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, “I think ‘big-government-liberalism’ is good enough.”

Mr. Anuzis remains unconvinced. He notes that he does not call Mr. Obama himself a “fascist.” Rather, he applies the “economic fascism” label to government tax and regulatory policies that seek, in the words of one magazine’s definition he cites, “to achieve the utopian socialist ideal.”

“It’s politically very incorrect only because we’re not used to it,” concluded Mr. Anuzis, who recently joined American Solutions for Winning the Future, a group led by Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker. But he acknowledged, “You’ve got to be careful using the term ‘economic fascism’ in the right way, so it doesn’t come off as extreme.”

Is it Patriotic to Pay Taxes?

2009-04-14T15:51:00.003-04:00

Is it patriotic to pay taxes? It is fair that so few pay almost all taxes? Would the founding fathers of our country think our tax system is fair?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4OeKmWjOI

http://reason.com/blog/show/132837.html

Reason.tv: W-2 WTF?!?!—Tax facts to make your head explode!

April 10, 2009, 12:01pm

Is it patriotic to pay taxes? And if so, who the most patriotest Americans? Who are the least? How many words are in the tax code? How much do patriotic Americans pay to prepare their taxes? How long do you have to work in a year to earn enough to pay your taxes?

The answers to these and other questions add up to one big W-2 WTF.

Produced by Meredith Bragg. Written by Bragg and Nick Gillespie.

Go here for embed code.

Reason on taxes here and here.

Related: "3 Great Reasons to Pay Your Taxes (or Else!): A friendly reminder from the IRS":

Frank is a Liar and at the Genesis of the Banking Crisis

2009-04-09T07:21:00.001-04:00

Judicial Watch obtained the documents from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated December 4, 2008. Judicial Watch requested records related to members of Congress activity regarding the policy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to increase lending to individuals with poor credit risk, as well as correspondence and records about contacts between FHFA and Fannie and Freddie. Among the important documents:

FHFA letter, dated March 26, 2007, from the director of the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight (OHFEO), James B. Lockhart, to U.S. Senators Elizabeth Dole, Chuck Hagel, Mel Martinez and John Sununu: “This is a very serious issue. Freddie Mac’s inadequate systems and controls make it a significant supervisory concern. Furthermore, its lack of timely public disclosures deny market participants the essential financial information made available by all other publicly traded companies so that investors may make informed judgments.” The letter also mentions, “…Fannie Mae still has not filed financial statements for 2005 and 2006 and thus, they are not timely filers either.”

FHFA letter, dated December 3, 2004, to Congressman Barney Frank: “On November 15, 2004 Fannie Mae filed a Form 12b-25 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Fannie Mae indicated that its external auditors could not complete their reviews of its financial statements and noted the possibility of up to a $9 billion loss dating back to 2001. As a result, OHFEO has determined it will not provide a monthly capital classification at this time.”

Letter dated June 16, 2006, from OHFEO Director Lockhart to Senator Chuck Hagel: “…In January 1999, Chairman and CEO Franklin Raines approved a recommendation made by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) (Tom Howard) and the Controller (Leanne Spencer) to defer recognition of $200 million in amortization expense. This deferral, along with other accounting decisions made at that time relating to provisions for loan losses and the recognition of low-income housing tax credits, allowed management to meet the EPS threshold for maximum bonuses.”
Overall, these documents show that Congress was made aware of the massive problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the last six years. Yet liberals, led by Congressman Barney Frank, repeatedly blocked attempts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

For example, during a hearing on September 10, 2003, before the House Committee on Financial Services considering a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: “I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two government sponsored enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury.“

Obama's Ultimate Agenda

2009-04-03T14:20:00.000-04:00

Obama's Ultimate Agenda

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 3, 2009; A19

Five minutes of explanation to James Madison, and he'll have a pretty good idea what a motorcar is (basically a steamboat on wheels; the internal combustion engine might take a few minutes more). Then try to explain to Madison how the Constitution he fathered allows the president to unilaterally guarantee the repair or replacement of every component of millions of such contraptions sold in the several states, and you will leave him slack-jawed.

In fact, we are now so deep into government intervention that constitutional objections are summarily swept aside. The last Treasury secretary brought the nine largest banks into his office and informed them that henceforth he was their partner. His successor is seeking the power to seize any financial institution at his own discretion.

Despite these astonishments, I remain more amused than alarmed. First, the notion of presidential car warranties strikes me as simply too bizarre, too comical, to mark the beginning of Yankee Peronism.

Second, there is every political incentive to make these interventions in the banks and autos temporary and circumscribed. For President Obama, autos and banks are sideshows. Enormous sideshows, to be sure, but had the financial meltdown and the looming auto bankruptcies not been handed to him, he would hardly have gone seeking to be the nation's credit and car czar.

Obama has far different ambitions. His goal is to rewrite the American social compact, to recast the relationship between government and citizen. He wants government to narrow the nation's income and anxiety gaps. Soak the rich for reasons of revenue and justice. Nationalize health care and federalize education to grant all citizens of all classes the freedom from anxiety about health care and college that the rich enjoy. And fund this vast new social safety net through the cash cow of a disguised carbon tax.

Obama is a leveler. He has come to narrow the divide between rich and poor. For him the ultimate social value is fairness. Imposing it upon the American social order is his mission.

Fairness through leveling is the essence of Obamaism. (Asked by Charlie Gibson during a campaign debate about his support for raising capital gains taxes -- even if they caused a net revenue loss to the government -- Obama stuck to the tax hike "for purposes of fairness.") The elements are highly progressive taxation, federalized health care and higher education, and revenue-producing energy controls. But first he must deal with the sideshows. They could sink the economy and poison his public support before he gets to enact his real agenda.

The big sideshows, of course, are the credit crisis, which Obama has contracted out to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and the collapse of the U.S. automakers, which Obama seems to have taken on for himself.

That was a tactical mistake. Better to have let the car companies go directly to Chapter 11 and have a judge mete out the bitter medicine to the workers and bondholders.

By sacking GM's CEO, packing the new board, and giving direction as to which brands to drop and what kind of cars to make, Obama takes ownership of General Motors. He may soon come to regret it. He has now gotten himself so entangled in the car business that he is personally guaranteeing your muffler. (Upon reflection, a job best left to the congenitally unmuffled Joe Biden.)

Some find in this descent into large-scale industrial policy a whiff of 1930s-style fascist corporatism. I have my doubts. These interventions are rather targeted. They involve global financial institutions that even the Bush administration decided had to be nationalized and auto companies that themselves came begging to the government for money.

Bizarre and constitutionally suspect as these interventions may be, the transformation of the American system will come from elsewhere. The credit crisis will pass and the auto overcapacity will sort itself out one way or the other. The reordering of the American system will come not from these temporary interventions, into which Obama has reluctantly waded. It will come from Obama's real agenda: his holy trinity of health care, education and energy. Out of these will come a radical extension of the welfare state; social and economic leveling in the name of fairness; and a massive increase in the size, scope and reach of government.

If Obama has his way, the change that is coming is a new America: "fair," leveled and social democratic. Obama didn't get elected to warranty your muffler. He's here to warranty your life.

Salary control: You knew it was comin

2009-03-31T11:38:00.000-04:00

Salary control: You knew it was coming

By Michelle Malkin • March 31, 2009 10:42 AM

This is not a surprise. Grabby Hands Barney Frank has been signaling his salary control plans for weeks. In early February, you’ll recall, he told Business Week that compensation restrictions might be restricted to all US companies, not just TARP recipients.

Now, via Byron York:

[I]n a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to “prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards,” according to the bill’s language. That includes regular pay, bonuses — everything — paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top 25 or 50 executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.
In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is “unreasonable” or “excessive.”

And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate “the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates.”

The bill passed the Financial Services Committee last week, 38 to 22, on a nearly party-line vote. (All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans, with the exception of Reps. Ed Royce of California and Walter Jones of North Carolina, voted against it.)

But you can thank the 85 Republicans, led by Minority Whip Eric Cantor, who helped pave this path with their hysterical vote for the 90 percent AIG bonus tax.

Gevernment Power Expanding

2009-03-25T15:45:00.001-04:00

Barney Frank: TARP's comp curbs could be extended to all businesses

2009-03-25T13:30:00.001-04:00

Barney Frank: TARP's comp curbs could be extended to all businesses
Would be part of broader bill limiting hedge funds, credit-raters, and mortgage securitizers; 'deeply rooted anger'

By Neil Roland

February 3, 2009 3:01 PM ET

Congress will consider legislation to extend some of the curbs on executive pay that now apply only to those banks receiving federal assistance, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said.

“There’s deeply rooted anger on the part of the average American,” the Massachusetts Democrat said at a Washington news conference today.

He said the compensation restrictions would apply to all financial institutions and might be extended to include all U.S. companies.

The provision will be part of a broader package that would likely give the Federal Reserve the authority to monitor systemic risk in the economy and to shut down financial institutions that face too much exposure, Mr. Frank said.

Also included in the legislation: registration requirements for hedge funds and proposals aimed at curbing conflicts of interest at credit-rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s.

The bill, which the committee is working on in consultation with the Obama administration, also will require financial institutions that bundle mortgages into securities to share in potential losses. This would give banks and mortgage-specialists an incentive not to make bad loans, he said. Institutions that securitize loans improperly will incur tougher penalties.

“There have been too few constraints on major financial institutions incurring far more liability than they could handle,” Mr. Frank said.

The committee hopes to have a general outline of the legislation by early April, he said. It will be the panel’s first priority in its effort to restructure financial regulation in the wake of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Mr. Frank has summoned the CEOs of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and the seven other U.S. financial firms that got $125 billion from TARP to testify at a Feb. 11 committee hearing.

Mr. Frank seems to be in synch with the Obama administration in his plans for executive compensation.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said last month that he might try to extend to all U.S. companies a restriction that prohibits bailout banks from taking a tax deduction of more than $500,000 in pay for each executive.

The Troubled Assets Relief Program legislation enacted in October seeks to give companies receiving aid under the $700 billion bailout a number of incentives to curb what it calls excessive executive pay.

Mr. Geithner said he would consider “extending at least some of the TARP provisions and features of the $500,000 cap to U.S. companies generally.”

Under the legislation, banks receiving bailout money must limit golden parachute payments to senior executives to no more than three times the executives’ base pay. The companies also must subject any bonuses or incentives to clawbacks if the payouts are based on bank’s misleading financial statements.

In addition, bailout recipients can’t offer top managers incentives that “encourage unnecessary excessive risks that threaten the value of the financial institution.”

These limits apply to the chief executive officer, chief financial officer and the next three most highly compensated executives in a bank receiving rescue funds.

Mr. Frank said provisions on golden parachute payments and bonus clawbacks would probably be in the legislation, though he declined to provide more detail because “we’re early in the process.”

A congressional oversight panel headed by Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren also recommended last week that Treasury consider revoking executive bonuses at failed institutions getting federal aid.

Currently, these institutions must subject bonuses to clawbacks only if the payouts are based on banks’ misleading financial statements.

The top Republican on the committee, Spencer Bachus of Alabama, said last month he has reservations about giving the Fed new powers, such as the authority to monitor systemic risk.

Mr. Frank said today that after lawmakers address issues on systemic risk, they will consider how to bolster investor protection via changes at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The committee also will review proposals to assist struggling homeowners and expand the housing supply, and to strengthen international financial institutions such as the World Bank, he said.

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Atheists Meeting- South Park

2009-03-17T11:36:00.003-04:00

Atheists - South Park

2009-03-17T11:27:00.001-04:00

inflation inevitable

2009-03-12T12:29:00.002-04:00

Indoctrination

2009-03-06T12:17:00.001-05:00

More from Pickens

2009-03-02T16:38:00.001-05:00

Capitalism

2009-02-09T07:46:00.001-05:00

Socialism on the march

2009-02-02T18:05:00.000-05:00

pickens

2009-01-07T11:25:00.001-05:00

Sea Ice Ends Year at Same level as 1979- Downgrade of Ice Loss - Media Reports Opposite

2009-01-06T11:48:00.006-05:00

Rapid growth spurt leaves amount of ice at levels seen 29 years ago.

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close.

Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.

The data is being reported by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, and is derived from satellite observations of the Northern and Southern hemisphere polar regions.

Each year, millions of square kilometers of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly -- defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

Sea ice is floating and, unlike the massive ice sheets anchored to bedrock in Greenland and Antarctica, doesn't affect ocean levels. However, due to its transient nature, sea ice responds much faster to changes in temperature or precipitation and is therefore a useful barometer of changing conditions.

Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Bill Chapman, a researcher with the UIUC's Arctic Center, tells DailyTech this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In May, concerns over disappearing sea ice led the U.S. to officially list the polar bear a threatened species, over objections from experts who claimed the animal's numbers were increasing.

A new scientific report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program has sharply reduced earlier estimates of global ice loss. The CCSP, which coordinates the efforts of 13 different federal climate agencies, has released updated figures estimating combined ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland at 48 cubic miles per year, a figure the Washington Post dolefully reports as "accelerated" ice loss.

But is it?

In 2006, a widely-reported study estimated ice loss from Greenland alone to be over 57 cubic miles per year. Another the same year reported Antarctic ice loss of 36 cubic miles -- a combined annual total of over 93 cubic miles. The new estimate, however, is only about half as high. In most rational circles, this would be cause for celebration.

Not for the Washington Post, however. Ignoring earlier estimates, it casts the figure in a threatening light by noting it's twice the amount of ice locked in the Alps. It fails to mention, though, that those 48 cubic miles, when spread out over the planet's 139 million square miles of ocean, works out to a sea level rise of only 2.1 inches per century. For you metric types, that's about half a millimeter a year. Even factoring in an additional increase for thermal expansion, the value is far too small for concern.

Glossing over all this, the Washington Post instead reports a potential rise of four feet by the year 2100. The figure is based on the assumption of unforeseen positive feedback effects which might accelerate ice loss, despite the fact that no evidence exists that this is happening, and even the report's own authors considered such a scenario "unlikely".

When one considers sea level has been rising for the last 18,000 years, at an average of about 25 inches a century, one sees even less cause for alarm. The rate of increase has actually slowed in past 4,000 years; before this, it often rose by as much as several meters per century.

The Post article also fails to point out the report doesn't include data for 2008, a colder year in which sea ice increased sharply, and preliminary estimates indicate that land-based ice sheets may have as well.

Some positive notes in the report are that "no clear evidence" for global-warming induced hydrologic changes (drought or floods) are being seen in the US, and that catastrophic events such as a shutdown of sea ocean currents ("thermohaline circulatory shutdown" ) or dramatic releases of methane (the "clathrate gun" hypothesis) seem increasingly unlikely.

To be fair to the Washington Post, 48 cubic miles/year is indeed larger than some estimates from the 1990s. But those figures were arrived at before the launch of advanced systems such as NASA's GRACE satellite. It's unclear how much of the difference in estimates is due simply to today's more accurate monitoring.

The report also indicates that current IPCC modeling doesn't accurately capture lubrication effects that may increase ice thinning and loss. However, a model prediction is not the same thing as actual measurements and observations.

The new figures obviously don't prove whether or not CO2 is warming the planet. However, they do strongly indicate that sea level rise isn't something that we -- or even our great-grandchildren -- need to worry about.

For previous research published warning of polar ice melt see ;

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/stories/arctic/index.html

Che hated singers and actors

2008-12-11T11:26:00.003-05:00

Hollywood actors and singers look stupid in Che shirts. In fact the Che shirt is like a shirt that says "I'm with Stupid" with an arrow pointing up at them. Or better yet "I am Stupid"

http://reason.tv/embed/video.php?id=622

Killer Chic
Hollywood's Sick Love Affair with Che Guevara

Gisele Bundchen wears him on the runway, Johnny Depp wears him around his neck, and Benicio Del Toro becomes him in the new, highly acclaimed, two-part epic film from Steven Soderbergh, Che. Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the revolutionary who helped found communist Cuba, is the celebrity that celebrities adore. And be it Madonna, Rage Against the Machine, or Jay-Z, musicians really dig Che.

It’s something that baffles Cuban jazz legend Paquito D’Rivera. “Che hated artists, so how is it possible that artists still today support the image of Che Guevara?” Turns out the rebellious icon that emblazons countless T-shirts actually enforced aesthetic and political conformity. D’Rivera explains that Che and other Cuban authorities sought to ban rock and roll and jazz.

“Che was an inspiration for me,” D’Rivera tells reason.tv. “I thought I have to get out of this island as soon as I can, because I am in the wrong place at the wrong time!” D’Rivera did escape Cuba, and so far he’s won nine Grammy awards playing the kind of music Che tried to silence. But D’Rivera says Che’s crimes didn’t end with censorship. “He ordered the execution of many people with no trial.” Che served as Castro’s chief executioner, presiding over the infamous La Cabana prison. D’Rivera says Che’s policy of killing innocents earned him the nickname—the Butcher of La Cabana.

“We’re rightly horrified by fascist murderers like Adolph Hitler,” says reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie. “Why aren’t we also horrified by communist killers?” Certainly, Che’s body count isn’t anywhere near Hitler’s. But what about someone Che idolized, someone whom he might have liked to wear on his chest?

“Che, Castro, all the communist regimes idolized only one thing that Mao personifies—violence.” Kai Chen grew up in China under the reign of Mao Zedong. Although he won gold medals for China’s national basketball team, Chen’s was far from the celebrity life of an NBA star. Says Chen, “You have no right to talk, and you have no right to think.”

The punishment for questioning Mao’s authority was often death. The Black Book of Communism estimates that Mao is responsible for the deaths of 65 million people—a figure that dwarfs even Hitler’s body count. “Mao is a murderer,” says Chen. “The biggest mass murderer in human history.”

And yet, like Che, Mao’s image is becoming an increasingly popular way to move merchandise. You can buy Mao t-shirts, mugs, caps—you name it. Near Chen’s Los Angeles home there’s even a restaurant called Mao’s Kitchen. “Can you imagine a restaurant called Hitler’s Kitchen?” asks Gillespie.

Neither D’Rivera nor Chen understands why communist killers are considered Chic, but each finds his own way to have the last laugh on these anti-capitalist icons.

"Killer Chic" is written and produced by Ted Balaker. Director of Photography is Alex Manning.

Closing music, "Che Guevara T-Shirt Wearer," courtesy of The Clap. Listen to the whole song here.

Pickens Plan

2008-10-21T10:09:00.001-04:00

south park - scientologists

2008-10-17T07:53:00.000-04:00

2008-10-07T18:16:00.000-04:00

Barney Frank is a Jerk

2008-10-03T15:57:00.000-04:00

October 03, 2008
O'Reilly, Rep. Frank, Duel Over Mortgage Mess
Last night on "The O'Reilly Factor," host Bill O'Reilly and Rep. Barney Frank had a heated discussion about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE1ayDZfmIQ

Garage costs

2008-09-24T09:36:00.000-04:00

Cost to build garages soars
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
BY ANDREW TANGEL
STAFF WRITER
When Mountain Development Corp. moved into its Clifton headquarters in early 2002, the company estimated it would pay about $12,000 for each space in a new parking garage. A new garage could have added as many as 300 spots.Since then, Mountain Development has brought more tenants into its seven-story building at 100 Delawanna Ave. So when the company again considered building a garage late last year, executives were shocked at the new estimates: costs would range from $22,000 to $28,000 a space, said Michael Seeve, the firm’s president.“The cost has gotten totally out of control,” Seeve said. Mountain Development decided to stick with surface parking for now and attract tenants that require fewer spaces.The costs of steel and concrete – the main materials of parking garages – have soared in recent years, fueled by rising demand in rapidly developing countries such as China and India. Prices for products made at steel mills, meanwhile, shot up 34 percent in 2004 alone. Following further annual increases, the cost has risen more than 20 percent so far this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The gains are reflected in estimates provided by Walker Parking Associates, an industry consulting firm. A parking space in a garage in New York City, which most closely approximates the New Jersey market, cost about $14,600 to build in 2000, according to Walker’s estimates. This year, an average parking space in New York City runs about $20,100. The price includes costs for financing and engineering, but not land.The expenses are posing challenges to developers. For builders of office properties, particularly those in suburban areas such as Bergen County, the soaring costs of constructing parking garages pose a dilemma, Seeve said. Developers have treated parking garages as sunk costs, meaning they didn’t intend to pass them on to tenants, he said.“When you rent space, and tenants compare buildings, they don’t really pay you more because you’ve spent the money on structured parking,” Seeve said. “But if you don’t spend the money on structured parking and you don’t have the requisite parking to lease office space, people just aren’t going to take the space.”And, he added: “If your employees can’t park when they have to be there, then the building doesn’t work for you.”The costs also pose problems for developers in urban areas, where space is scarcer and more expensive, and where many tenants often rely on cars even if mass transportation is more available.“It’s nearly impossible to look at urban development without having a parking deck of some size,” said Russell Tepper, vice president of development at Matrix Development Group in Cranbury.With pollution remediation and features such as retail space built into the decks, parking garages can wind up costing as much as $35,000 a space in urban areas or more, said Richard Johnson, a senior vice president at Matrix.For developers to break even on a project, with traditional financing arrangements – for example, an 8.5 percent interest rate for a mix of a bank loan and equity over seven to 10 years – each space would need to generate revenue of nearly $300 a month, Johnson said. That’s generally too expensive for markets in New Jersey.Parking garage authorities, which can issue bonds that have a lower interest rate over a longer period of time, need to generate roughly $140 a space per month, said Leonard Bier, executive director of the New Jersey Parking Institute, an agency whose primary members are the cities and parking authorities that run garages.As construction costs for parking garages increase, so too do the prices drivers pay to park. Five years ago, parking authorities needed to generate about $125 a space per month, Bier said.“There’s an obvious cause and effect” between higher construction costs and more expensive parking, Bier said.Garage operators must service the debt they incurred when issuing bonds, as well as pay for operating costs and set aside some funds for future improvements, he said.As garage costs climb, developers have sought tax credits to offset the rising expenses. Johnson said Matrix has sought to reclassify the garages as infrastructure and not real estate, which underwriters expect to pay for itself in relatively few years.Also, developers have struck public-private partnerships with parking authorities, Bier said. Developers may provide the land, for example, but parking authorities may seek the financing because they typically can issue bonds at lower rates.On the construction side, engineers have sought to minimize the use of steel in parking garages. One technique involves stretching steel strands, pouring concrete over the steel and then releasing the stress, making the concrete very stiff.“Almost nobody will build a parking garage unless they have to,” said Greg Neiderer, director of operations in Walker Parking’s mid-Atlantic office in Wayne, Pa. Garages often cost 25 percent of a development, he added.“The deal might make sense or might not make sense based on the garage,” Neiderer said. “For developers, parking can kill a deal. I see it somewhat often. We have some developers who come to us over and over again to try to salvage a project.”E-mail: tangel@northjersey.com

Field Turf

2008-08-28T08:41:00.001-04:00

Kids safe from lead in turf Wednesday, July 30, 2008 Last updated: Wednesday July 30, 2008, EDT 10:53 PM BY MATTHEW VAN DUSEN STAFF WRITER var clickTitle = "Kids safe from lead in turf"; var partnerID=272336; var _hb=1; window.onerror=function(){clickURL=document.location.href;return true;} if(!self.clickURL) clickURL=parent.location.href; #printDesc{display:none;} Several North Jersey artificial turf fields that closed because of high lead levels will likely reopen in the coming weeks now that a federal agency has concluded the turf poses no health risk, officials said today. “Children should go outside and play” on the fields said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said today.But local officials said they won’t throw open the gates to their fields until the state health department responds to the federal report. “I would hope that they are going to concur with the [report],” said Jan Furman, superintendent of the Northern Valley school district, where two fields have been closed since June. “It’s going to be really frustrating if they don’t.”Just in time for football practice, too.“I just feel so much relief,” said Paul Saxton, the superintendent of the Ramapo Indian Hills school district, where two artificial turf fields were closed because of high lead levels.Both school districts are doing additional tests and Furman said she must confer with her board before reopening the fields.The lead-in-turf saga began in April, when the health department found levels that exceeded the state standard for lead in residential soil on fields in Newark, Hoboken and Ewing. In June, Northern Valley hired a private environmental consultant to test its fields in Demarest and Old Tappan and found levels above the state standard. Other towns also began testing. In all, nine fields in Bergen County were found to exceed the lead standard. Six remained closed as of Wednesday. The state recommended that children under 7 be restricted from playing on fields with high lead levels and that athletes wash their clothes and bodies after playing, but did not recommend closing the fields.Exposure to lead, particularly in children, can cause developmental problems, including low IQ.Artificial turf manufacturers, particularly FieldTurf Tarkett of Montreal, insisted their product was safe and the problem was created by the testing methods used by the state.“It’s a New Jersey story. The rest of the country did not follow suit,” said Joe Fields, the chief executive officer of FieldTurf Tarkett.Industry officials said the initial tests done by the state and replicated by private consultants looked at the lead content in the blades of the turf instead of whether or not the lead was “bioavailable,” meaning that it could be absorbed by the body. A “wipe” test, in constrast, evaluates whether children could be exposed to the lead that is present. None of the fields that exceeded the state standard for lead in residential soil showed high levels in subsequent wipe tests ordered by local officials.In its tests, the commission took the wipe test result and divided it by 5 to account for the difference between what a hand can pick up versus a wipe and again by two to account for the loss of lead residue when it is transferred to a child’s mouth.On all the fields tested, lead levels were below a level of concern for lead poisoning, the commission concluded.State officials were evaluating the results Wednesday and had not yet changed their recommendations for the fields. “At first glance the CPSC study does support the statement that we were making all along, which was that the … concern was for the older fields that had degradation, which created a dust that contained lead and that represented a potential cumulative exposure,” a health department statement read.Fields said the state’s delay in making a decision is “ludicrous” and it should lift the recommended restrictions immediately.School officials said, however, they are waiting for the state’s ruling before deciding whether to open their fields. Jeff Tittel, the executive director of New Jersey’s Sierra Club, said the commission’s report is “outrageous.” “Hopefully, the state of New Jersey will not heed this but continue down their path,” Tittel said. “I’m a believer that if cows can’t eat it we shouldn’t be letting our kids play on it.”Ridgefield Park Mayor Anthony Suarez said the commission report would not affect his decision on whether to open Willis field. The field has been closed since July 3, when tests showed lead levels were more than 30 times the state standard.Suarez said Health Officer Jad Mihalinec told him the report “makes no difference. Tests were done and in his opinion, [lead] levels are unsafe.”The borough is awaiting results of further tests, but Suarez said he is inclined to keep the field closed.But Indian Hills High School’s football coach, Mark Aramburu, said Wednesday that he hopes his team will be able to use the school’s artificial turf field when practice opens on Aug. 22.“I know everybody’s eager to get back on it,” he said.Brian Dunn, head football coach at Northern Valley Old Tappan High School, said his team has been preparing for a season without use of its home field.“When the field was put in about six or seven years ago, we spent the whole season on the road,” he said. “So we’ve done something like that before but it’s not fun, and it’s not a fair situation for the kids that play, especially for the seniors. It’s their last season.”Wayne was one of a few towns and school districts in North Jersey that moved forward with new artificial turf after high levels of lead were discovered in fields in the region. Construction of the fields at both district high schools was finished ahead of schedule, a district spokesman said. The fields installed in Wayne were made from polyethylene fibers, which federal health officials have said pose little risk.As a precaution, however, the district will require the artificial turf at the high schools be tested before the project is deemed complete, school officials said. The Wayne School board also changed the color of the stripes planned for the soccer fields to black, instead of yellow, which may have a higher lead content.The CPSC report is at:http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml08/08348.htmlStaff Writers William Lamb, Merry Firschein and Andrea Alexander contributed to this article.E-mail: vandusen@northjersey.com Page 1 2 >> Several North Jersey artificial turf fields that closed because of high lead levels will likely reopen in the coming weeks now that a federal agency has concluded the turf poses no health risk, officials said today. THOMAS E. FRANKLIN/STAFF Kids are playing again on the turf field at the Pulis Avenue recreation area in Franklin Lakes. “Children should go outside and play” on the fields said Julie Vallese, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said today. FAST FACTS Fields that remain closed:Ramapo High School, Franklin LakesIndian Hills High School, OaklandNorthern Valley Regional High School, Old TappanNorthern Valley Regional High School, DemarestHitchcock Field at Hasbrouck Heights High School, Hasbrouck HeightsWillis Park, RidgefieldTemporarily closed, then reopened:Pulis Avenue Recreation Field, Franklin LakesHigh levels of lead found, never closed:Football/Soccer field, Bergen County Regional Sports Complex, Palisades ParkRiver Dell High School, Oradell But local officials said they won’t throw open the gates to their fields until the state health department responds to the federal report. “I would hope that they are going to concur with the [report],” said Jan Furman, superintendent of the Northern Valley school district, where two fields have been closed since June. “It’s going to be really frustrating if they don’t.” Just in time for football practice, too. “I just feel so much relief,” said Paul Saxton, the superintendent of the Ramapo Indian Hills school district, where two artificial turf fields were closed because of high lead levels. Both school districts are doing additional tests and Furman said she must confer with her board before reopening the fields. The lead-in-turf saga began in April, when the health department found levels that exceeded the state standard for lead in residential soil on fields in Newark, Hoboken and Ewing. In June, Northern Valley hired a private environmental consultant to test its fields in Demarest and Old Tappan and found levels above the state standard. Other towns also began testing. In all, nine fields in Bergen County were found to exceed the lead standard. Six remained closed as of Wednesday. The state recommended that children under 7 be restricted from playing on fields with high lead levels and that athletes wash their clothes and bodies after playing, but did not recommend closing the fields. Exposure to lead, particularly in children, can cause developmental problems, including low IQ. Artificial turf manufacturers, particularly FieldTurf Tarkett of Montreal, insisted their product was safe and the problem was created by the testing methods used by the state. “It’s a New Jersey story. The rest of the country did not follow suit,” said Joe Fields, the chief executive officer of FieldTurf Tarkett. Industry officials said the initial tests done by the state and replicated by private consultants looked at the lead content in the blades of the turf instead of whether or not the lead was “bioavailable,” meaning that it could be absorbed by the body. A “wipe” test, in constrast, evaluates whether children could be exposed to the lead that is present. None of the fields that exceeded the state standard for lead in residential soil showed high levels in subsequent wipe tests ordered by local officials. In its tests, the commission took the wipe test result and divided it by 5 to account for the difference between what a hand can pick up versus a wipe and again by two to account for the loss of lead residue when it is transferred to a child’s mouth. On all the fields tested, lead levels were below a level of concern for lead poisoning, the commission concluded. State officials were evaluating the results Wednesday and had not yet changed their recommendations for the fields. “At first glance the CPSC study does support the statement that we were making all along, which was that the … concern was for the older fields that had degradation, which created a dust that contained lead and that represented a potential cumulative exposure,” a health department statement read.

Wladwick boy dies during football practice

2008-08-26T16:39:00.000-04:00

Boy dies during football practice
Tuesday, August 26, 2008Last updated: Tuesday August 26, 2008, EDT 3:40 PM
BY MICHAEL J. FEENEY, EVONNE COUTROS AND KIM MINEO
STAFF WRITERS
The parents and coaches of a 13-year-old Waldwick boy who died during football practice last night are at a loss to explain why the seemingly healthy teen collapsed while running drills on a mild summer night.“There were no signs of this whatsoever,” said his father, James Fisher. “He was strong.”“Yesterday was his birthday, yesterday he was 13,” Fisher said. “We had gotten gifts.”Sean Fisher had been practicing with other 7th- and 8-graders in the Waldwick Junior Football Association for about 20 minutes when he appeared to lose his footing and fell to the ground, said Ray Jimenez, a coach and the league’s president.“He just dropped,” Jimenez said.Two 12-year-old teammates said they thought Sean was kidding. He loved to joke around, they said."It wasn't really hot," one teammate said. "But this was our first day of practice in full pads."The next thing they knew, a father who is also an EMT rushed onto the field, removed Sean's helmet and administered CPR.Jimenez ran for a phone to call in the emergency, then raced to his car to find the health form that Fisher’s parents had submitted when the teen signed up to play with the league for the first time ever this summer.“I wanted to see if there was any medical condition listed on the form," he said, "but there wasn’t.”Sheila Fisher was preparing for the celebration she and her husband were about to have for their only child's 13th birthday last night when she got a phone call. The parents then raced to the field, where they saw paramedics using a defibrillator to try to revive him.He was pale and wasn’t moving, James Fisher said.The couple followed in a police car and a separate ambulance as he was rushed to The Valley Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.The Fishers said their son didn't suffer from seizures or any other ailment. He had had yearly physicals but wasn't required to have a special exam to clear him to play football. Such exams are generally not needed for youth recreational leagues, Jimenez said.A few weeks ago, Sean was injured during a flag rugby camp when he collided with a camp counselor. He lost consciousness for a few seconds before getting back up. He complained of a slight headache.Sheila Fisher said she spoke to the boy’s pediatrician, who told her that the earlier incident was most likely not related to his collapse. The couple, however, is still awaiting the results of an autopsy.Earlier today, the two of them sat on their living room couch, surrounded by friends and family, recalling their son’s short life.“He was coming into his own,” said James Fisher, who has another son, age 22, from a previous marriage. “He had a lot more friends. He was selective with friends. He didn’t have a bad bone in his body.”When the Fishers moved to Waldwick six years ago, Sean made it at point to get to know people.“He knew all the neighbors, riding his bicycle up and down the street,” Sheila Fisher said. “He was out introducing himself.”Like many boys his age, Sean loved videos games. His favorite place was the beach. Besides rugby and football, he wrestled and played lacrosse. He was also a second-degree black belt, friends said.Sean also played a few rounds of golf with his father each year at Darlington County Park. “I had him practicing outside yesterday in the yard,” said James Fisher, who emigrated from Scotland to Kearny in 1973. “I took him to the Barclays last week. Sean was starting to hit the ball better. He was starting to hit the driver well.”“He was starting to flourish,” said the father, unable to stifle tears as he spoke.Although he was new to football, Sean played a variety of sports.“He started getting big after three years of wresting,” James Fisher said. “He was physically getting big shoulders and he was one of the fastest ones on the team.”He didn't appear to be having trouble with any of the drills, Jimenez said. The team, not scheduled to play its first game until Sept. 20, was in its third week of practices.Jimenez said the players had just finished warm-ups and were performing “pursuit drills” where one player runs up the field shadowed by another. The team had not yet begun any “contact drills,” and already had taken two water breaks.“It was a beautiful evening, not really hot at all,” Jimenez said.There were about 125 children on the field when Sean, an offensive lineman, was stricken. They included 3rd- and 4th-graders from the peewee division and girls practicing for the cheerleading squad.The football league, a member of the Bergen County Junior Football League, is independent from the borough and the school district and has its own governing board. A scrimmage scheduled for Thursday has been cancelled and Jimenez said the league would seek advice from grief counselors about what the do with the rest of their schedule.School officials are conducting grief counseling sessions for the team’s players and other youths in town. By 1 p.m., more than two dozen parents and children had filed into the middle school to meet with counselors, said Schools Supt. Robert Penna.“This is a very painful time for all of us,” Penna said.Meanwhile, the football field at the school where the rec league had practice the night before was being used by the high school’s soccer and football teams.E-mail: diskin@northjersey.com and coutros@northjersey.com

new RHS league stinks

2008-08-20T09:19:00.000-04:00

RHS should leave the league

ridiculous realignment - the record plan was better but they all stink. Let Bosco, BC and the big time catholic schools go off on thier own.

A plan for realigning high-school sports leagues
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The Record's Panel on Realignment built a model restructuring the state's high school athletic leagues with the goal of even competition. See how our plan compares with the one that the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association announced yesterday.
Read the proposal
H.S. Sports
New high-school sports divisions announced
Tuesday, August 19, 2008 Last updated: Wednesday August 20, 2008, EDT 9:02 AM
BY GREGORY SCHUTTA
STAFF WRITER
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View the new conferencesDon Bosco could be playing in a division where just one football team finished above .500 last season. Wayne Hills and Wayne Valley could revisit their crosstown rivalry every year in every sport.
Queen of Peace will have to find a map of Essex County and Ridgewood still finds itself in a division with three non-public schools.
Copies of the realignment plan for high school sports put forth by the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association began appearing in the offices of principals and athletic directors throughout the state today, causing a firestorm of reaction among school officials in North Jersey.
“You’re telling me that 20 percent of my games will be against [non-public] schools,” said Greg McDonald, the athletic director at Ridgewood. “How is that an improvement? That’s not an improvement, at least in my eyes.”
“I knew this would be controversial when they made the decision to mail it out to all the schools,” said Jim Ring, the boys basketball coach at John F. Kennedy High School in Paterson.
The realignment plan, drawn up by a 33-member committee to address the increased controversy surrounding the competitive imbalance between public and non-public schools, makes huge changes in the league structure in North Jersey while doing little in Central and South Jersey. The plan will be voted on by the association’s executive committee in September and could go into effect as early as September 2009.
“[The north is] where it became evident that change was needed,” said Michael Hughes, principal of North Hunterdon High School and one of the co-chairmen of the committee. “It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of moving around, but it is the beginning of change, which we didn’t have before.”
Steve Timko, executive director of the NJSIAA, could not be reached for comment.
The realignment abolishes all current conferences in North Jersey and realigns 170 schools in Bergen Passaic, Hudson, Essex, Morris and Sussex counties into four super conferences of three to five divisions each.
A report accompanying the plan states, “It is certainly not a panacea but represents the best effort to assure fairness among our public, private and parochial schools alike, throughout New Jersey.”
There aren’t many school officials in North Jersey who agree with that assessment. Don Bosco, widely recognized as the best football team in the state and winner of three straight Bergen Jamboree basketball titles and three straight Bergen County baseball titles, was placed in a league with Clifton, Passaic, Passaic Tech, Paterson Eastside and Kennedy. Only Eastside finished above .500 in football last season.
Ridgewood, one of 12 public schools which threatened to leave the NNJIL in January if it still had to face non-public schools like Bosco, Bergen Catholic and Immaculate Heart, was placed in a division that includes Bergen Catholic, IHA and Paramus Catholic. It’s one of only two divisions out of 18 throughout four conferences in North Jersey that includes more than one non-public school.
“They could have put this all together in less than 48 hours,” said Ring. “It seems to me they only took into consideration enrollments. They didn’t take into account the quality of the programs or the quality of the opponents.”
He was not far off.
“We addressed the issue of travel and balancing of enrollments, which was our mandate,” said Bill Vacca, president of the state athletic directors’ association and a member of the committee. “Strength of program was probably a third consideration, if third.”
There is a question of whether the plan even addresses the public/non-public debate that spurred the realignment. From the start, the committee looked at the model of the 46-member Shore Conference and the 34-school Greater Middlesex Conference, reasoning that by spreading out non-public schools over a larger number of divisions would lighten the pain.
But many, even some non-public schools, were hoping the plan would include a division made up entirely of non-publics, at least in football, to address the public schools’ lack of competitiveness with national level programs such as Don Bosco, Bergen Catholic and St. Joseph.
That was an idea that was tossed around and quickly discarded in early discussions according to committee member Steven Jenkins.
“I’m still a believer that they should be separated,” said Jenkins, the Bloomfield athletic director and one of the architects of the January public school revolt in the NNJIL. “But this entire proposal wasn’t built on public and non-public. Both sides made huge compromises, and I believe that this plan is the next best thing.”
“I’m of the belief that change was needed,” Tony Karcich, the AD and football coach at St. Joseph, said of the plan, which will be reevaluated after two years. “Out of respect for all the hard work that went into this, we have to give it a shot for better or worse. But that’s as long as we’re open minded so we can go back in two years and decide if it didn’t work.”
E-mail: schutta@northjersey.com
Page 1 2 >>
View the new conferences

Find out which schools your team will be playing this fall.
Don Bosco could be playing in a division where just one football team finished above .500 last season. Wayne Hills and Wayne Valley could revisit their crosstown rivalry every year in every sport.
Queen of Peace will have to find a map of Essex County and Ridgewood still finds itself in a division with three non-public schools.
Copies of the realignment plan for high school sports put forth by the New Jersey Interscholastic Athletic Association began appearing in the offices of principals and athletic directors throughout the state today, causing a firestorm of reaction among school officials in North Jersey.
“You’re telling me that 20 percent of my games will be against [non-public] schools,” said Greg McDonald, the athletic director at Ridgewood. “How is that an improvement? That’s not an improvement, at least in my eyes.”
WINNERS AND LOSERS
The WinnersWayne: The township will be treated to a crosstown rivalry between Wayne Hills and Wayne Valley every year in every sport. Last season, the two played for the North 1, Group 3 football championship for just the second time in history, with Hills winning.Hudson County: Though the plan breaks up leagues in Bergen and Passaic counties, it leaves the Hudson County Interscholastic Athletic Association intact in two divisions and brings in Secaucus, Weehawken and Harrison. It raises the specter of a true Hudson County champion in most sports.The LosersRidgewood: One of 12 schools that threatened to leave the NNJIL if forced to continue playing non-public powerhouses, the Maroons are placed in a division with former league rivals Bergen Catholic, Immaculate Heart and Paramus Catholic.BCSL Olympic: Though the division remains intact, the nine members of the Olympic will be forced to play a non-public school for the first time with the inclusion of St. Mary from the BCSL National.BCSL National: By contrast, the Olympic’s sister division was broken up and merged into two divisions in two conferences with some schools that don’t have full athletic programs.Queen of Peace: The southernmost non-public school in Bergen County, the Golden Griffins ended up in a division otherwise made up of Essex County schools.
“I knew this would be controversial when they made the decision to mail it out to all the schools,” said Jim Ring, the boys basketball coach at John F. Kennedy High School in Paterson.
The realignment plan, drawn up by a 33-member committee to address the increased controversy surrounding the competitive imbalance between public and non-public schools, makes huge changes in the league structure in North Jersey while doing little in Central and South Jersey. The plan will be voted on by the association’s executive committee in September and could go into effect as early as September 2009.
“[The north is] where it became evident that change was needed,” said Michael Hughes, principal of North Hunterdon High School and one of the co-chairmen of the committee. “It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of moving around, but it is the beginning of change, which we didn’t have before.”
Steve Timko, executive director of the NJSIAA, could not be reached for comment.
The realignment abolishes all current conferences in North Jersey and realigns 170 schools in Bergen Passaic, Hudson, Essex, Morris and Sussex counties into four super conferences of three to five divisions each.
A report accompanying the plan states, “It is certainly not a panacea but represents the best effort to assure fairness among our public, private and parochial schools alike, throughout New Jersey.”
There aren’t many school officials in North Jersey who agree with that assessment. Don Bosco, widely recognized as the best football team in the state and winner of three straight Bergen Jamboree basketball titles and three straight Bergen County baseball titles, was placed in a league with Clifton, Passaic, Passaic Tech, Paterson Eastside and Kennedy. Only Eastside finished above .500 in football last season.
Ridgewood, one of 12 public schools which threatened to leave the NNJIL in January if it still had to face non-public schools like Bosco, Bergen Catholic and Immaculate Heart, was placed in a division that includes Bergen Catholic, IHA and Paramus Catholic. It’s one of only two divisions out of 18 throughout four conferences in North Jersey that includes more than one non-public school.
“They could have put this all together in less than 48 hours,” said Ring. “It seems to me they only took into consideration enrollments. They didn’t take into account the quality of the programs or the quality of the opponents.”
He was not far off.
“We addressed the issue of travel and balancing of enrollments, which was our mandate,” said Bill Vacca, president of the state athletic directors’ association and a member of the committee. “Strength of program was probably a third consideration, if third.”
There is a question of whether the plan even addresses the public/non-public debate that spurred the realignment. From the start, the committee looked at the model of the 46-member Shore Conference and the 34-school Greater Middlesex Conference, reasoning that by spreading out non-public schools over a larger number of divisions would lighten the pain.
But many, even some non-public schools, were hoping the plan would include a division made up entirely of non-publics, at least in football, to address the public schools’ lack of competitiveness with national level programs such as Don Bosco, Bergen Catholic and St. Joseph.
That was an idea that was tossed around and quickly discarded in early discussions according to committee member Steven Jenkins.
“I’m still a believer that they should be separated,” said Jenkins, the Bloomfield athletic director and one of the architects of the January public school revolt in the NNJIL. “But this entire proposal wasn’t built on public and non-public. Both sides made huge compromises, and I believe that this plan is the next best thing.

2008-07-30T07:27:00.001-04:00

no blogging here