What’s up with economic reform? Not enough.

At Alternet, you can read Art Levine's detailed account of legal corruption of the economic "reform." It's not pretty, and the good guys are losing many of the important battles. Here's a passage, but go read the whole thing--it's well written and critically important:

So, the sleek, blond J.P Morgan lobbyist in a smart gray suit set off by a brightly colored scarf was able to saunter in shortly before the doors opened for the hearing to see just how many more loopholes could be added. (She declined to identify herself.) Like the evicted family in Michael Moore's new film being hired by the bank to clean out their own home, the banking-industry lobbyists in Washington have at long last created the ultimate trickle-down effect from the bailouts: hiring the jobless ( for $11 to $35 an hour) to hold their places in line to make sure there's no effective federal crackdown preventing more job-destroying speculation in credit default swaps and other derivatives.

Continue ReadingWhat’s up with economic reform? Not enough.

The unspoken reality of “Peak Oil”

THE world will have to find four Saudi Arabias by 2030 if it wants to maintain its oil dependency, the International Energy Agency says. The reality of peak oil is fast approaching, and more must be done to develop and encourage the use of alternatives including solar and nuclear, the agency's chief economist has warned. "My main motto never changes, the era of low oil prices is over," Dr Fatih Birol said.
That's the verdict reported today in The Australian. I thought I'd check to see what other sources had to say about Birol's assertion, but I cannot find a single U.S.- based source reporting it, other than blogs that are dedicated to peak-oil issues. This is rapidly becoming a crisis, and almost nobody is discussing it in America. Not just here, of course-- study groups in Britain have been trying to get their government to begin planning for the reality of peak oil for years, and now they are saying it's simply too late. (see this also).

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Elizabeth Warren: Nothing much has changed

Elizabeth Warren has lots of bad news, the "stabilized" economy and the huge Wall Street bonuses notwithstanding. Warren is the Chair of the Congressional TARP Oversight Panel. Good for her, hammering on Henry Paulson's enormous bait and switch. Most of that TARP money was supposed to be used for loans for small businesses, not more gambling and bonuses, which is where it appears to have gone. Yet, according to Warren, there will "never" be a meaningful accounting of that money.

Continue ReadingElizabeth Warren: Nothing much has changed

California court declines to publish anti-camera decision

Many of us have been caught by those increasingly ubiquitous red-light cameras. Police departments and local governments argue that these sorts of cameras improve safety and increase revenue. Studies are increasingly putting the lie to the safety claim, but nobody's disputing that these traffic enforcement mechanisms bring in revenue. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that

... a study in last month's Journal of Law and Economics concluded that, as many motorists have long suspected, "governments use traffic tickets as a means of generating revenue." The authors, Thomas Garrett of the St. Louis Fed and Gary Wagner of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, studied 14 years of traffic-ticket data from 96 counties in North Carolina. They found that when local-government revenue declines, police issue more tickets in the following year. Officials at the North Carolina Association of Chiefs of Police didn't respond to requests for comment.
California state law prohibits compensation to operators of these red-light cameras based on the number of tickets issued. Localities have been side-stepping this law through "cost-neutrality" provisions, which allow the cities to pay the operators up to a certain monthly amount. After that cap is reached, the city keeps all the revenue beyond that point. The intent of the law is to remove an incentive to ticket as a means of increasing revenue to the private operators. There is now a second appellate court ruling that has struck down the red-light programs as illegal under the state law.

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Time to shine more light on the Federal Reserve

Ben Bernanke wants the Senate Banking Committee to reconfirm him as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. U.S. Representative Alan Grayson wants to see more information about the inner workings of the Fed before Bernanke is reconfirmed, "given how little is known about what he has actually done." In a mass-emailing, Grayson points out that "Ben Bernanke didn't see the crisis coming and has added $1.2 trillion to the Fed's balance sheet through covert bailouts." He points out that there can't be a full debate over Bernanke's "record if nothing is public." That's why Grayson is asking for the release of the following information:

  • Information that Bloomberg reporter Mark Pittman has requested via a Freedom of Information Act Request on the Bear Stearns rescue and that the Federal Reserve is contesting in the courts.
  • Information I requested in February on which institutions received the additional $1.2 trillion, how much each institution received, and what was promised in return.
  • All Federal Reserve documents that went to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office relating to the Bank of America/Merrill Lynch merger in which potentially illegal and coercive activity might have occurred, as well as all Federal Reserve documents relating to the lawsuit pursued by Merrill Lynch shareholders in the U.S. District court for the Southern District of New York.
  • Transcripts of all Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes up to and including that of September 2009.
  • Full disclosure of all terms and conditions of all off-balance sheet Fed transactions in the past three years.
If this controversy were about ACORN, or any other person or organization without great power, Congress would have turned the organization inside out with subpoenas, and we would have had a real discussion. I agree with Grayson that it's time to shine much more light on the Fed, especially in light of these statistics recently reported by Think Progress.

Continue ReadingTime to shine more light on the Federal Reserve