Dinosaur demise allowed mammals to ‘go nuts’ BBC
Take a sensible approach to air security CNN. Debunks popular perceptions of how much damage the shoe and underwear bombers could have done.
Why is homeland security enforcing the nation against music downloads? Michael Perelman, EconoSpeak
China Warns U.S. as Korea Tensions Rise Wall Street Journal
Bid to knock Rahm Emanuel off ballot for Chicago mayor: Can it succeed? Christian Science Monitor. We can only hope….
CBS Joins the Attack On Social Security Dean Baker
Starve the Beast: Just Bull, not Good Economics Bruce Bartlett, The Fiscal Times (hat tip Mark Thoma)
Holiday hunger Economic Policy Institute. Remember, food stamps are modern era soup kitchens.
Winning the Class War Bob Herbert, New York Times
Core at Zero Menzie Chinn, Econbrowser
The Give and Take of Liar Loans Joe Nocera, New York Times. Good info on Countrywide’s two-faced stance, but Nocera gets the rep and warranties legal issues wrong. Misrepresentation alone is not sufficient. In crude terms, the misrepresentation has to be material and it also has to have led to a loss. And since the plaintiff has the burden of proof, he must demonstrate that the misrepresentation, as opposed the economy hitting the wall, is the reason a particular loan went sour.
The continuing fight against overdraft fees Felix Salmon
Second-Mortgage Standoffs Stand in Way of Short Sales Wall Street Journal. When the biggest holders of seconds are TARP banks, how did the Journal manage to make as its centerpiece a servicer owned by Shinsei, a Japanese bank? The story manages to be narrowly accurate yet refuses to talk about the normal elephant in the room.
Strongest argument against a State default has disappeared Irish Times (hat tip reader Don B)
Irish protesters to march against cutbacks BBC
In Rare Agreement with Krugman; Onerous “Bailout” Rates of 6.7% Denied; Don’t do Stupid Things; “Tell the EU and IMF to Shove It!” MIchael Shedlock
Antidote du jour:
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Re Why is the DHS acting as a copyright thug?:
Does it have anything better to do? The DHS was never intended to be anything but a corporatist boondoggle. It certainly doesn’t have any real work to do. It acts only as a pork machine, corporate thug, and police state expander.
The looming Food Tyranny bill, which may be voted on next week, would expand DHS power to a vast extent over the food supply.
http://foodfreedom.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/food-safety-the-worst-of-both-bills-hr-2749-and-s-510/
The broader answer is that IP is intended to be one of the key weapons of corporate tyranny. As we see here, it’ll be used as the pretext for generalized Internet censorship. Directly say, “I want to censor political content”, and not only will you have constitutional problems, but the people might even object.
Say, “we’re going to rigorously enforce property rights!”, with political censorship just collateral damage, and far more sheep will fall into line.
That’s just one example. The propertarian ideology is slated to be the engine of total domination over all aspects of life. Everything has already been commodified. The next step is to drive out all non-proprietary commodities.
This evil plan is especially well advanced where it comes to seeds, the very basis of our physical existence:
http://attempter.wordpress.com/2010/11/26/the-seed-war-1-of-2/
Re food stamps:
It’s needful that we work to expand the range of markets where food stamps can be accepted. As it is the system wants people to use food stamps to buy processed junk from corporate retailers. (That’s why corporations support the food stamp program.)
But we need to expand it to farmers’ markets, CSAs, and other healthful alternatives. By health I mean our physical health from eating nutritious food as well as the road to economic health, the encouragement of economic relocalization in general and food relocalization in particular.
As things are only a minority of farmers’ markets can accept food stamps. The hurdle is the expensive machine which swipes the card. Most markets can’t afford it, although some have come up with various ways to share the cost. It’s something which would have a greatly positive multiplier effect, a great return on investment.
Attempter,
Thank you for sounding the alarm on this one.
After seeing what the Department of Homeland Security looks like at the airports, we have reason to be alarmed that such an agency is in charge of anything.
That they are operating above the law. People at airports did not even have the right to leave the airport at will unescorted, unquestioned, nor the right to continue with their travel plans unmolested.
The image of people lined up voluntarily for transportation being treated like a herd of cattle stripped of human rights by a thug organization is all too familiar.
Now that we know how its done and what is in store for us if the revolution doesn’t begin now.
We need to start purging the airplane from our lives. Mass passenger flight is nearly at an end anyway. Who’s going to be able to afford it as the economic Depression bites at the same time fuel prices soar? And how much longer can the government keep up the airline bailout? How many decades of corporate welfare has it been now?
Wouldn’t it be better to renounce it first, as a gesture of rejection of such a tyrannical system? It’s nearly ten years now airports have been nothing so much as repression indoctrination centers. And isn’t air travel an absolutely hideous experience by now, in every way? Can’t we do most things with modern communication equipment?
We should be looking more and more to what’s closer to home, in every way.
that was meant for Kravit below at 3:10pm
Attempter,
You are right, and I travel as little as possible because the process is so obnoxious.
But families and friends live at great distances from each other; at opposite ends of the country and in other countries all over the planet. They are also required to travel for their jobs and businesses.
For a lot of people air travel is a necessity.
“The United States Trustee Program is engaged in an enhanced review of mortgage servicer filings in bankruptcy cases …”
That word ENHANCED again -gives me the creeps.
I guess the bureaucrats fall in love with certain tell tale words the same way the rest of us do.
ENHANCED interrogation, anyone? Enhanced pat downs?
attempter,
I was very surprised when I read this blurb and wondered:
“Why would DHS (I.C.E. in this case) be in charge of executing a court order on an IP theft case? Isn’t this the purview of the F.B.I.?”
Then, 2 names popped up from my memory: Ali Soufan and Kalil Sheik Mohamed.
The answer was obvious: F.B.I. is rather strict about obedience to the rule of law. DHS does not care about the law.
You be the big recording industry that contributes a lot to the party in the WH? Hence, if you want law enforcement results, you want them fast, thorough, and clean, no legal mess.
Who you gonna call?
There was nothing wrong with that Goldstone report comment I made Yves. Most of my comments if you sit and look at them aren’t really that wild, certainly THAT ONE wasn’t. You’re going to kill traffic on your own site by massaging comments if you haven’t already. Your prerogative though….
That Rahm Emanuel comment was funny. I’m no Rahm Emanuel fan but that’s a little harsh for a lefty. We’ll never know what kind of guy Rahm was until his big book comes out, and we might not even know then. Maybe if Rahm had had his way AIG’s counterparties would have got 50% haircut and that meeting with the 13 bankers would have forced the FDIC resolution process for some of them. Can we really know what happened in Rahm—Obama meetings at this stage???
Is that the one where you accused her of whining about her book?
No, he used the word “zionist” in a bigoted manner. That is the only editing of any sort I do. I do NOT edit comments (except for my own or on the request of readers) otherwise. And I have only done that twice in the history of this site, ironically in the last week. I normally delete ones with offensive content.
The fact that you’d cavil over a one word edit, and of a word generally seen as a real ethinic slur, says it’s you, and not me, who has a problem.
a friend in phoenix who is way underwater & broke has been getting calls from his servicer trying to talk him into a short sale; he just found out yesterday that, unlike foreclosure in AZ, with a short sale he’d still be liable for the difference…
http://realityzone-realityzone.blogspot.com/2010/11/some-arizona-homeowners-still-owe-after.html
i meant to say
… People at airports who refused to go through the body scanner or get a pat-down did not have the right to leave the airport at will unescorted, unquestioned; nor the right to continue with their travel plans unmolested.
Mish quotes Krugman as saying “Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses,….”. This is a style of English that might almost be designed to disguise facts rather than illuminate them: it omits the moral agent in the crucial action. It should read “Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with the Irish government choosing to put taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, …”. See? The moral agent – doubtless a very immoral moral agent – was the government. Not the bankers, not the EU and not the great unwashed, just the government.
The mental and lexical gymnastics it takes to maintain a view that the world is simple, categorical and unambiguous are indeed extreme.
[Please don’t take this comment at face value. There’s something hidden underneath…]
That is what I’ve been saying all along Dearie. They don’t care What the ‘Debt’ is, where it comes from, who it is owed to, or what it is related to. The “Debt” is the glue which binds the control structure together. The debt extinguisment so often advocated here and the wealth redistribution/leveling advocated by our very own F Beard, would destroy the social fabric by negating the control structure.
Our conservationist masters do not care whether we work to pay credit card debt, work to pay off underwater mortgages, or are debt slaves in an Indian brick yard. The important thing is that we are all somehow debt encumbered and therefore cannot afford to risk disturbing the status quo. The shifting of private debt to public debt is a logical extention of this. It casts the debt net widder, so that it will catch also those who were lucky enough or prudent enough to have avoided having personal debt. In some way this public debt will impact those who have private wealth, larger property taxes, asset taxes, estate taxes…
“1984” here we come. It will be so easy. It is even obvious in such reasoned forums as Naked Capitalism. When we the commons are burdened and denied opportunity, the most convenient target for our frustrations are “Haves”. While blithley ignoring the real roots of our condition.
Rather a macabre photo. I’m afraid those puppies look deceased.Note the blood at the corner of one mouth. The stiffened legs, the blank expressions. Many of the photos of animals posed in “cute” positions are taken of dead animals. Just FYI.
Maggie, those puppies are alive, look at the flushed bellies.
I agree on the overdraft item. Financial institutions are still being sneaky. Just last week my credit union (Navy Federal) for my online account raised to the top of my account page an item that indicated I needed overdraft protection with dire warnings that items that had insufficient funds would not be paid unless I had protection. Then if I got overdraft protection they would only charge me $25 for each one that occurred.
I called them and complained that I already had a 10k line of credit on my account that would automatically pay any deficits, and that only kicked in after the automatic transfers from my savings account to my checking account drained everthing. I asked them if this changed now. They said no, it was still in force. I asked them why in the world I would want to pay $25 for each overdraft if now I paid nothing. They told me, “some people want this protection.”
My throat was swelling up as I tried to continue talking. But I could not continue as my head was coming unglued from my neck.
Legal standing?
US Trustees getting involved?
Oh, my. Gretchen…
Don’t Just Tell Us. Show Us That You Can Foreclose.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28gret.html?src=busln
“The United States Trustee Program is engaged in an enhanced review of mortgage servicer filings in bankruptcy cases to help ensure the accuracy of the claim to repayment,” she said.”
Quid?? Come again??
Pray tell who the f*&% put this protection in place to begin with? It most certainly isn’t the People, right? Where and when were we told that, like it or not, bondholders we’re such a special class of investors that my tax dollars (and yours too BTW) could be used to give them what is essentially a risk-free investment??
They can get lost as far as I am concerned. You invest, you take a risk! Don’t you love the smell of raw capitalism in the morning?
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