Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.
“Everything’s _______ up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”
I put down my notebook. “Just that?”
“That’s right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything’s ______ up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”
Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.
Category: Taxes
Saturday Afternoon Ice Fishing Panorama: Madison
Panoramas and photos from Saturday’s Pro-union & Tea Party rallies at the Capitol can be seen here.
The “National Insecurity” of Imported Oil
Getting America off imported oil is always urged in the context of national security. No matter how often that refrain is repeated, however, it always points toward how much imported oil American motorists use.
It’s never about the amount of oil imported into the United States, refined into numerous products and shipped back out of the country. Nor are people arguing that we need to quit using imported oil for manufacturing concerns – like making fertilizers to grow corn, to make into ethanol to put into our gas, so we can quit importing oil. (That’s the most comical circular argument currently making the rounds.) But we also use oil for things like asphalt for our roads, and in the plastics industry, and even the most ardent “get America off imported oil” advocates don’t talk about constraining those industries.
In reality, the country from which we import the most oil is Canada. And I’m fairly certain that we aren’t too worried about the national security aspect of bringing that oil into America, now or in the future. Yet we’re still hearing the constant mantra that this is a national security issue, and that’s what troubles me most. And, if you own one of the nation’s 240 million vehicles, the “national insecurity of imported oil” refrain should trouble you, too.
GOP pushing for ISPs to record user data
he House Republicans’ first major technology initiative is about to be unveiled: a push to force Internet companies to keep track of what their users are doing.
A House panel chaired by Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin is scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow morning to discuss forcing Internet providers, and perhaps Web companies as well, to store records of their users’ activities for later review by police.
One focus will be on reviving a dormant proposal for data retention that would require companies to store Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for two years, CNET has learned.
Tomorrow’s data retention hearing is juxtaposed against the recent trend to protect Internet users’ privacy by storing less data. Last month, the Federal Trade Commission called for “limited retention” of user data on privacy grounds, and in the last 24 hours, both Mozilla and Google have announced do-not-track technology.
Amazing. I thought the economy was job #1 for the Republicans.
Goldman’s pieties go too far
For sheer, toe-curling embarrassment, it’s hard to choose between last year’s populist attack on Goldman Sachs by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and this week’s cringe-worthy response from the investment bank.
Last April, when the SEC filed suit against Goldman, the bank could have fought back. The suit complained it had sold fancy mortgage securities without disclosing that a hedge-fund manager, John Paulson, was betting that those same securities would blow up. To which Goldman could have answered: so what? Any time an investment bank sells any derivative, it should be obvious to the buyer that somebody somewhere must be taking the other side. The SEC’s assertion that Goldman had misled customers about the nature of Paulson’s involvement was potentially more damaging, except that the SEC produced no evidence to make this charge stick.
It was surely not beyond the wit of Goldman’s publicists to communicate these simple points. Banks cannot be held responsible for the profits or losses of their clients, since middle-men necessarily have customers who lose as others win. But after one vain attempt to explain market making at a belligerent Senate hearing, Goldman’s boss, Lloyd Blankfein, gave up. He settled with the SEC, even though most lawyers think he could have beaten the charges. Then he ordered up an elaborate cleansing ritual to relaunch the firm of Goldman Sachs.
Several months later, the fruits of Goldman’s sun salutations are out. A 67-page manifesto of self-purification proclaims that “our clients’ interests always come first,” and that “if we serve our clients, our own success will follow.” But these pieties misrepresent the true nature of an investment bank just as surely as the SEC did.
Study: We’ve Got Plenty of Land for Biofuels
One of the great arguments against biofuels is the wisdom, if not the morality, of using land to produce fuel instead of food. But research out of Illinois suggests it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition.
Researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found that biofuel crops cultivated on land unsuitable for food crops could produce as much as half the world’s current fuel consumption without adverse impact on food crops or pastureland.
The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, identifies land around the world that is unsuitable for food production but could be used to raise biofuel feedstocks like switchgrass.
According to the researchers, many studies examining biofuel crop viability focus on yield — how productive the crop can be. They wanted to examine land availability to determine whether it is possible to produce sufficient biofuel to meet demand without sacrificing food production.
Lessons in Scroogenomics
Ebenezer Scrooge came into the room slowly. He was, to my surprise, much as Charles Dickens had described him. How, I wondered, could he have changed so little over 170 years? It must be the benefit of being a literary character, I decided.
“Good morning, Mr Scrooge,” I remarked politely. “I have come to interview you about your best-selling new book Scroogenomics – or How to Do Well out of Doing Good.”
Scrooge smiled. “Yes,” he responded, “I had to show that Joel Waldfogel’s Scroogenomics, cleverly reviewed by your John Kay, merely portrayed my unenlightened self. But Dickens, albeit a talented writer, was just a sentimental fool. He never understood what my change over that Christmas was about. I learnt, above all, to appear benevolent. That, with my business acumen, turned Marley & Scrooge into a global enterprise. Fortunately, that philanthropy has become less painful, since my charities are tax deductible. What can be less painful for a miser than state-subsidised charity?”
I was shocked by his candour. He must have drunk too much at the book party earlier. After the abstinence described by Dickens, one drink would have a big effect.
On Net Nuetrality
To whom it may concern:
I have always loved humor and laughter. As a young engineer I got an impulse to start a Dial-a-Joke in the San Jose/San Francisco area. I was aware of such humor services in other countries, such as Australia. This idea came from my belief in laughter. I could scarcely believe that I was the first person to create such a simple service in my region. Why was I the first? This was 1972 and it was illegal in the U.S. to use your own telephone. It was illegal in the U.S. to use your own answering machine. Hence it also virtually impossible to buy or own such devices. We had a monopoly phone system in our country then.
The major expense for a young engineer is the rent of an apartment. The only answering machine I could legally use, by leasing (not purchasing) it from our phone company, the Codaphone 700, was designed for businesses like theaters. It was out of the price range of creative individuals wanting to try something new like dial-a-joke. This machine leased for more than a typical car payment each month. Despite my great passion and success with Dial-a-Joke, I could not afford it and eventually had to stop after a couple of years. By then, a San Francisco radio station had also started such a service. I believe that my Dial-a-Joke was the most called single line (no extensions) number in the country at that time due to the shortness of my jokes and the high popularity of the service.
2011: And Still No Energy Policy
“First generation [corn] ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.”
– Al Gore, speaking at a Green Energy Conference on November 22, 2010
“Ethanol is not an ideal transportation fuel. The future of transportation fuels shouldn’t involve ethanol.”
– Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, November 29, 2010
No one knows what brought on the blast of political honesty in the last eight days of November. Having been a rabid ethanol booster for most of his political career, there was former Vice President Al Gore reversing course and apologizing for supporting ethanol. Of course Gore’s reason for taking that position was perfectly understandable — for a politician. As he told the Athens energy conference attendees, “One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers of Iowa because I was about to run for President.”
Translated from politics-speak into English, pandering to farmers gets votes. But if your claimed position is to plan some sort of energy policy for everyone else, then getting farmers’ votes shouldn’t determine what’s the right thing to do for the nation’s fuel supplies.
Wall Street owes its survival to the Fed
For a brief, surreal moment, the prevailing narrative in Washington was that the 2008-09 bail-outs were not really so bad. In September, Treasury secretary Tim Geithner called the government’s troubled asset relief programme “one of the most effective emergency programmes in financial history”, claiming that the final cost to taxpayers would be less than $50bn.
Steven Rattner, the Wall Street banker who oversaw the Obama administration’s rescue of the auto sector, wrote in the Financial Times in October that “without exaggeration, this legislation [establishing Tarp] did more to keep America’s financial system – and therefore its economy – functioning than any passed since the 1930s”.
But Wednesday’s document dump from the Federal Reserve – a congressionally ordered “WikiLeak moment” – puts this bargain-bail-out patter in a new perspective. The post-Lehman rescues were far broader than Tarp, and far riskier for taxpayers, even if the alternative of a systemic meltdown would have been worse.