The expenses racked up by U.S. lawmakers traveling here for a conference last month included one for the “control room.”
Besides rooms for sleeping, the 12 members of the House of Representatives rented their hotel’s fireplace-equipped presidential suite and two adjacent rooms. The hotel cleared out the beds and in their place set up a bar, a snack room and office space. The three extra rooms — stocked with liquor, Coors beer, chips and salsa, sandwiches, Mrs. Fields cookies and York Peppermint Patties — cost a total of about $1,500 a night. They were rented for five nights.
While in Scotland, the House members toured historic buildings. Some shopped for Scotch whisky and visited the hotel spa. They capped the trip with a dinner at one of the region’s finest restaurants, paid for by the legislators, who got $118 daily stipends for meals and incidentals.
Eleven of the 12 legislators then left the five-day conference two days early.
The tour provides a glimpse of the mixture of business and pleasure involved in legislators’ overseas trips, which are growing in number and mostly financed by the taxpayer. Lawmakers travel with military liaisons who carry luggage, help them through customs, escort them on sightseeing trips and stock their hotel rooms with food and liquor. Typically, spouses come along, flying free on jets operated by the Air Force. Legislative aides come too. On the ground, all travel in chauffeured vehicles.
Goldman’s Collateral Damage
Cast your mind back to that SigTarp report, published last month.
Readers will recall there’s been a persistent stink over whether the efforts of the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury to prop up AIG had the effect of bailing out Goldman Sachs — its largest trading partner. Goldman Sachs always denied that idea, saying its exposure to AIG was collateralised and hedged against the mega-insurers’ fall. Others, were not so sure.
Last week the Wall Street Journal continued that particular line of thought with an article titled “Goldman fueled AIG gambles“, which examined GS’s role in acting as a middleman between the insurer and other banks. In short, Goldman offered banks protection on some of their investments (for instance on CDOs of home loans), which it in turn hedged with AIG in the form of CDS.
Berlin’s Class War
Twenty years after it was toppled, the area around the Berlin Wall is becoming a battleground again. In the streets neighbouring Berlin’s Todesstreifen – the once heavily guarded “death strip” on the east side – a new conflict is brewing. This time, it is between wealthy newcomers to the German capital’s regenerated core, and less monied residents, who fear being displaced.
Silvia Kollitz, an anti-development activist, is a resident of Prenzlauer Berg, a once dilapidated but now chic district of east Berlin. She feels her local area, with its pretty, tree-lined streets and sleek cafés, is being turned into a refuge for the rich. “The new buildings being put up are just for people with lots of money – who don’t use state schools and look at the rest of us as ‘local colour’ from behind their locked gates and high walls,” she says.
While Kollitz and fellow activists are seeking to halt these changes, they are fighting a strong tide. For the first time since the second world war, Berlin is attracting the international wealthy. Shaking off its gloomy cold war past, the city’s rebuilt centre is now packed with designer emporia, five-star hotels – Berlin has more than New York – and restaurants, sandwiched between Prussian palaces and new ministry buildings.
Snowstorm Panorama: Madison, WI
Quite a bit of work moving snow today, but, the early morning scenery was quite beautiful.
Will Big Business Save the Earth?
THERE is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know — because I used to share that view.
But today I have more nuanced feelings. Over the years I’ve joined the boards of two environmental groups, the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International, serving alongside many business executives.
As part of my board work, I have been asked to assess the environments in oil fields, and have had frank discussions with oil company employees at all levels. I’ve also worked with executives of mining, retail, logging and financial services companies. I’ve discovered that while some businesses are indeed as destructive as many suspect, others are among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
Much more on Jared Diamond here.
Musée de l’Orangerie Panorama
Click to the image above to view this August, 2007 (hand held) panoramic image of Monet’s water lillies. Musée de l’Orangerie website. This journey and image made possible by the generosity of my parents!
Throwing Computers At Healthcare
Computerworld reports on an extensive new Harvard Medical School study, appearing in the American Journal of Medicine, that paints a stark and troubling picture of the essential worthlessness of many of the computer systems that hospitals have invested in over the last few years. The researchers, led by Harvard’s David Himmelstein, begin their report by sketching out the hype that now surrounds health care automation:
Enthusiasm for health information technology spans the political spectrum, from Barack Obama to Newt Gingrich. Congress is pouring $19 billion into it. Health reformers of many stripes see computerization as a painless solution to the most vexing health policy problems, allowing simultaneous quality improvement and cost reduction …
In 2005, one team of analysts projected annual savings of $77.8 billion, whereas another foresaw more than $81 billion in savings plus substantial health gains from the nationwide adoption of optimal computerization. Today, the federal government’s health information technology website states (without reference) that “Broad use of health IT will: improve health care quality; prevent medical errors; reduce health care costs; increase administrative efficiencies; decrease paperwork; and expand access to affordable care.
St. Stephen’s Cathedral Panorama – Budapest
Wikipedia entry on St. Stephen’s, or Szent István Bazilika in Hungarian.
Our trip was made possible through the incredible generosity of my parents. We are truly blessed!
Dubai’s Debt Default
Asking to delay repayment on your debt – or defaulting, as the world’s press is carefully not calling it – has turned out not to be a good way for Dubai’s Sheikh Makhtoum to win friends and influence lenders to Nakheel, the property arm of the state-owned conglomerate Dubai World. Markets have tumbled worldwide; investors, reminded that governments can be subprime too, have dumped the debt of other dodgy-looking economies (including Greece); and in Dubai… everyone is on holiday.
What is surprising here is not that Dubai is on the verge of default. It is that anyone was willing to lend them ludicrous sums of money in the first place. Calculated Risk points out that Sir Win Bischoff, then at the (US) state-controlled Citi and now, appropriately enough, at the (British) state-controlled Lloyds Banking Group, was raving about raising $8bn of loans for Dubai last year and as recently as December chose to go public with a “positive outlook on Dubai”. Another non-surprise: state-controlled Royal Bank of Scotland was Dubai World’s biggest loan arranger. In the UK, Dubai World has been buying up a long list of property, according to Anita Likus at The Source; the assumption is it will shortly be selling.
More here.
The Berlin Wall: 20 Years Gone
Twenty years ago, on the night of November 9, 1989, following weeks of pro-democracy protests, East German authorities suddenly opened their border to West Germany. After 28 years as prisoners of their own country, euphoric East Germans streamed to checkpoints and rushed past bewildered guards, many falling tearfully into the arms of West Germans welcoming them on the other side. Thousands of Germans and world leaders gathered in Berlin yesterday to celebrate the “Mauerfall” – the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and German reunification – and to remember the approximately 100-200 who died attempting to cross the border over the years. Collected here are photographs both historic and recent, from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Be sure to pause on photos 12 – 15, and click them to see a fade effect from before to after. (38 photos total)