Brains…Brains…Brains…Brains…

Paul Krugman laments the fact that failed economic ideas are now the conventional wisdom:

When historians look back at 2008-10, what will puzzle them most, I believe, is the strange triumph of failed ideas. Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever.

How did that happen? How, after runaway banks brought the economy to its knees, did we end up with Ron Paul, who says “I don’t think we need regulators,” about to take over a key House panel overseeing the Fed? How, after the experiences of the Clinton and Bush administrations — the first raised taxes and presided over spectacular job growth; the second cut taxes and presided over anemic growth even before the crisis — did we end up with bipartisan agreement on even more tax cuts?

……

Yes, politics is the art of the possible. We all understand the need to deal with one’s political enemies. But it’s one thing to make deals to advance your goals; it’s another to open the door to zombie ideas. When you do that, the zombies end up eating your brain — and quite possibly your economy too.

Go read.

It is a good analysis, but I think rather incomplete.

He seems to think that Barack Obama, in his attempts to appease Republicans, has given them cover to promulgate these failed ideas.

I think that this is too Byzantine an explanation. The simpler explanation is that Barack Obama gives lip service to these failed ideas because he actually believes in these ideas.

It explains his unwillingness to prosecute the banksters, their fraud against consumers in the HAMP, their attempts to water down financial reform, etc.

This is not cowardice.  This is corporatist thinking to a degree that makes Bill Clinton looks like Karl Marx.

This is Not a Gaffe, This is a Campaign Strategy

There is a lot of hand wringing and out rage over Haley Barbour's comments supporting the activities of the white supremacist White Citizens’ Councils in the 1960s.

I think that this misses the point.

Not only does Barbour have a long tradition of appealing to bigots, but it is clear that he wants to run for president, and a not so veiled appeal to the tradition of white bigotry in the South goes a long way towards appealing to that demographic in the primaries.

Phantom Ray Photo Pr0n

And some Video Pr0n Too

Boeing's Phantom Ray was flownb toi Edwards AFB on the back of  the 747 that was used to carry the Space Shuttle.


They did this, as opposed to breaking it down and shipping it via truck or inside an aircraft, because it was not designed with a wing break at the attachment, which makes disassembly and reassambly a rather non-trivial operation.

Do Not Piss Him Off

Ouch!  That will leave a mark!

Jon Stewart goes medieval on the Republicans who filibustered the 911 first responder healthcare bill.

Whoa.

Another Day, Another BMD Fail

Another test of the US ground based interceptor has failed.

According to the press release, "all the elements functioned well," but fail it did.

Still a few bugs in the system, I guess.

Senate Passes DADT Repeal

This is very good news, but understand that this bill does not set the speed or manner by which the military will end this policy, which means that I expect to see them slow walking this, with separations continuing for some tome, and with the Obama administration doing nothing to ensure that discrimination does not remain the policy of the Pentagon.

It's Bank Failure Friday!!!! (on Saturday)

And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

152. The Bank of Miami,N.A., Coral Gables, FL
153. Chestatee State Bank, Dawsonville, GA
     
154. Appalachian Community Bank, FSB, McCaysville, GA
     
155. United Americas Bank, N.A.,Atlanta, GA
156. First Southern Bank, Batesville, AR
157. Community National Bank, Lino Lakes, MN

Full FDIC list And here are the credit union closings:

17. Beehive Credit Union, Salt Lake City, UT

Full NCUA list

So, 6 banks this Friday, and one credit union on the 14^th.

That's a pretty busy week, though part of this might be that the regulators are closing banks this week because they do not want do do closings over the Christmas or New Years holidays.

So, here is the graph pr0n with trendline (FDIC only):


I would note that are now at the point where the utility of the least squares trendline is diminishing, but I'm keeping it here for historical purposes.

William Shatner is a Great Actor

At least he is in the right roles:

Your Moment of Sacrilege

Sacreligious, but wicked funny:

EuroFail

The Euro Zone monetary authorities are crowing about the success of Latvia, because they held the hard peg to their currency.

It appears that their GDP may grow this quarter, after as Matthew Yglesias observes, their GDP feel by 4.2% in 2008, 18% in 2009, and will fall slightly this year.

This is not success. As Paul Krugman writes, "They have made a desert, and called it successful adjustment."

Compare their progress to those of the Icelanders, Dr. Krugman supplied the graph pr0n) who devalued, and eschewed austerity.

Note also that Iceland's meltdown was the most severe this far seen, but, because they eschewed the nattering nabobs of negativism that are the pain caucus, they had what amounts to the mildest and shortest downturn.

OK, Credit Where Credit is Due*

The Federal Reserve is proposing to slash swipe fees for debit cards, taking them from somewhere around 1½2% to something less than 12¢.

Of course this is just a proposal, so I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The full FRB releases (PDF) are here.

^*Pun not intended.

And the Dems Roll Over to Obama

His, "Make the Democrats a generational party for a generation" tax plan passes the house 277-148.

Bummer.

Economics Update

Click for full size

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That may be a bottom, but it ain't a recovery

It's jobless Thursday, and initial claims fell by 3,000 to 420,000, and the 4-week moving average fell by 5,250 to 422,750, another 2+ year low, but continuing claims rose by 22,000 to 4.14 million, and emergency/extended claims rose by 324,537 to 4.83 million.

I would call that mixed. Fewer people losing their jobs, but people looking for work are not finding it.

In real estate news, home prices declined 1.9% in October, and by 3.93% year over year, so we are still not seeing any signs of recovery there.

EU Court Rules that Irish Abortion Law Violates Human Rights Standards

I would argue that this is a another example of how Ireland is a 3^rd world nation masquerading as a modern one by virtue of geography, but that critique would apply to the US as well:

Ireland's constitutional ban on abortion violates the rights of pregnant women to receive proper medical care in life-threatening cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday in a judgment that harshly criticized Ireland's long inaction on the issue.

The judgment from the Strasbourg, France-based court will put Ireland under pressure to draft a law extending limited abortion rights to women whose pregnancies represent a potentially fatal threat to their own health.

A right to receive proper medical care?

Well, that doesn't exist here either.

Obama is Now Blocking DADT Repeal

So much for his promise to be a "Fierce advocate" for the LGBT:

Sources on the Hill are telling me a big reason DADT repeal isn't moving faster comes right from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Despite President Obama's public support for repeal, with DADT stacked up against the START nuclear arms reduction treaty that Obama carefully brokered with the Russians earlier this year, the White House is putting its legislative push behind START.

At this point, with more than the 60 votes secured to invoke cloture on a repeal bill in the Senate, obstacles to repealing DADT legislatively are a simple combination of time and priorities. Time is short in the lame duck session, and DADT repeal is just one of many items the Senate would like to address before it adjourns. Where repeal slots into the remaining legislative calendar, and how much time is left in that calendar when it does pop up, will make the difference between repealing the ban and keeping the status quo.

I strongly disagree with the next paragraph though:

No one questions that Obama wants to see DADT end, or that he wants to see it end this year. The concern is over the priorities: Obama, it seems, wants START to come first. And with the White House pushing START (in daily phone calls from top White House officials, according to one source on the Hill), Obama could end up standing in the way of DADT getting done.

Truth be told, Barack Obama's excuses for not supporting LGBT civil rights, whether it's his slow-walking DADT, or aggressively defending it in court, or ignoring judges orders to recognize gay marriages where they are legal, etc. rivals John McCain's flip flops on gay rights for their mendacity.

Assange Granted Bail

Basically, the terms of his bail amount to house arrest:

Britain's high court today granted bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.

Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by City of Westminister magistrates court earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000, and strict conditions on his movement.

This is good news, but we are hearing more reports of the US looking for ways to indict him, this time by ginning up a conspiracy case:

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

It should be noted that these activities, cultivating and providing a source a way to get his information to you, are staples in the diet of investigative journalism.

Any prosecution under these circumstances would be an full frontal assault on freedom of the press, which is profoundly disturbing to anyone who cares at all about the Constitution.

Unfortunately, I think that this sort of assault on the press, and by extension leaking, appears to be something that Barack Obama, who must have been the worst professor of Constitutional law ever, really would like to do.

His administration is more vociferously hostile toward leaks and leakers than Bush/Cheney ever was.

Of course, this is why this administration is allowing the leaker, PFC Bradley Manning to be tortured pre-trial, because they want to coerce an accusation against Assange.

Just In Case You Wondered How Repugnant Obama's People Are

Peter Orzag, in his last column for the New York Times before accepting his bribe from starting his new job with Citigroup, calls for gutting disability insurance because the problem is that people are just lazy malingerers:

Finally, the disability insurance program itself must be reformed. Program administrators understand the need to encourage beneficiaries to return to work, and they have experimented with various incentives. Such initiatives have generally been ineffective, though, because they reach beneficiaries too late, after they have already become dependent on the program and lost their attachment to the work force.

A better approach has been suggested by David Autor of M.I.T. and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland. In a paper released last week from the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, these economists argue that employers should be required to offer their workers private disability insurance. Such coverage would provide people who have a work-limiting disability with vocational assistance, workplace accommodation and limited wage replacement. All of these benefits would kick in within 90 days of the onset of disability, to avoid the problems with delayed assistance that have plagued efforts to reform public disability insurance. Private employers would have an incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications, because their insurance premiums would rise in response to higher disability rates.

Disabled workers could remain on this privately financed insurance for two years, and then be eligible for the existing public program. The goal would be to minimize long-term dependency, and re-orient the federal disability insurance program toward assisting those who are truly unable to work.

(emphasis mine)

If you do not believe that Barack Obama and His Evil Minions^™ want to privatize Social Security, you are a fool, because one of his closest confidants is suggesting privatizing disability insurance.

Think about this, with unemployment at a generational high, and new entrants to the work force unable to find jobs, Orzag wants something akin to insurance recission teams, the people who kicked cancer patients out of health insurance programs, to hound people who are on disability.

Basically, every person who is on disability is someone who is not competing with a kid fresh out of high school or college looking for their first job.

That's what, having "incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications," means. It means allowing employers to use coercion to intimidate sick people so that they do not file claims.

This is how Peter Orzag rolls, and this is how Timmy Geithner rolls, and this is how Lawrence Summers rolls.

This is not a mistake.  These are people who the President chose to execute his agenda, and the agenda is seriously right wing by any sane standard.  (Note here that "sane standard" and "Republican Party" had a messy divorce in the 1990s.)

Remember That Justice Department Crackdown of Financial Fraud?

Round up the usual suspects

It's all theater, with a bunch of run of the mill low level grifters being rounded up being sold as real law enforcement:

The "Broken Trust" target list resembles that of the President's "Interagency Financial Task Force," which has concentrated on minor criminals while studiously avoiding the big (and still deadly) fish (see "A Banker Can't Get Arrested In This Town"). Most of the Task Force's indictments involved a category of financial criminal we call "ABB" -- "anybody but bankers." There were software entrepreneurs, family investment firms, some Florida retirement advisors ... even a fraudulent psychic who claimed he could predict stock performance! (And no, it wasn't Jim Cramer.)

Holder's list of alleged "Broken Trust" victories is a similarly Faginesque assemblage of small-time grifters. It would make an ideal cast of characters for a Damon Runyon story or a Bertolt Brecht musical: There's a Miami-based Ponzi schemer who used his loot to buy basketball tickets and make yacht payments, a retired Ohio cop who scammed fellow police officers and some firefighters, and the New Jersey hustler who scammed people so he could buy three luxury cars and two country club memberships.

This is clearly top down policy.

You see it from Treasury, you see it from the Department of Justice, you see it from Obama's entire domestic policy team.

And Now the US Military is Torturing Its Own Soldiers

Specifically PFC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months -- and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait -- under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning's detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a "Maximum Custody Detainee," the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not "like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole," but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

It should be noted that this sort of treatment produces profound long term damage to mind that is akin to traumatic brain injury.

This is deliberate punitive torture, and its purpose is two fold:

• To serve as a warning to other whistle blowers.
• To coerce false testimony that can be used to prosecute Julian Assange.

Welcome to Barack Obama's America, which is a lot like George W. Bush Dick Cheney's America, only less respect for due process and transparency.

You can donate to PFC Manning's defense fund here.

The Cossacks Work for the Czar

After spending trillions bailing out banks, and billions paying the banks to pretend not to foreclose on people under the HAMP program, it now turns out that the Treasury Department is refusing to cut loose any money for legal aid for people facing foreclosure:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has authorized big payouts to banks in an effort to encourage mortgage modifications, but is preventing borrowers in danger of losing their homes from accessing legal assistance under the Obama administration's foreclosure relief plan -- even when banks are wrongfully or fraudulently attempting evictions.

As of August, the administration's foreclosure prevention program -- which had paid a total of $231.5 million to banks -- had paid nothing specifically for borrower's legal fees, despite the urging of congressional Democrats who say legal funding is critical to easing the crisis.

Democrats from foreclosure-battered states are pushing new legislation that would overrule Geithner's edict, but the legislation is doomed this session with apathy from leadership in both parties and a packed lame duck calendar.

It's easy to blame Timothy "Eddie Haskell" Geithner for all of this, but the reality is that he is Barack Obama's man, and he is where he is because Barack Obama wants him there, coddling bankers and defrauding homeowners.