Magpie

Look for me at Pacific Views.

2009-09-24T11:49:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's been a long time since my last post here. But no, I haven't been completely silent.

I've been posting from time to time at Pacific Views. Look for new stuff there.

How come this story isn't on the front pages of US newspapers?

2008-10-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

From today's UK Guardian:

Financial workers at Wall Street's top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year - despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.
Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government's cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.
Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. [...]
The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

Why oh why am I not the least bit surprised to find out that the bailout is going directly into the personal pockets of the same people who made the bailout (allegedly) necessary?

Read the whole thing here.

Thanks to The Sideshow for the tip.

Five reasons to vote against the latest version of the Wall Street bailout plan.

2008-09-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

David Sirota's got em.

Pay particular attention to #4. If I were a member of the House or Senate, I'd think at least twice before I voted for the bailout.

Will the Wall Street bailout fix the ailing US economy?

2008-09-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Nope, says an excellent piece by McClatchy's Kevin Hall:

A principal risk now for the American economy is that the spate of bad news will feed on itself, creating a downward spiral.
For example, the wave of bank failures and mergers is sure to lead to large layoffs in the financial sector, and already computer makers like Dell and Hewlett Packard have announced job cuts in the expectation of a worsening sales environment.
As the number of jobless grows, the number of delinquent home loans grows larger. And defaults on car loans rise. More consumers will fall behind on credit card payments, restaurants will shutter their doors because of fewer diners, and fewer restaurants will cut demand for farm and processed food products. It's all inter-linked and becomes a spiral.

Kinda like the spiral already caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. Which, of course, many of the architects of the current bailout plan didn't see as a problem.

You can read the full article here.

Where was Sarah, hmmm?

2008-09-27T11:54:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest sign that Republicans know what a disaster Sarah Palin is as a VP choice: While Dem VP nominee Joe Biden was all over the media after last night's debate, praising Obama's performance, Sarah Palin wasn't anywhere to be seen.

Palin's absence from the debate postmortems isn't all that surprising, given this item from progressive radio host Ed Schultz:

The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as "disastrous." One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, "What are we going to do?" The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is "clueless."

This magpie is, of course, anxiously awaiting Palin's performance in next week's VP debate—allowing, of course, that the Republicans don't find a way to keep her from fulfilling her obligation.

Make the bastards pay for their own bailout.

2008-09-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

It doesn't take an MBA or degree in economics to figure out that people in the US are pissed off at the possibility that they'll have to shell out hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the big financial institutions responsible for the current economic disaster. Given this, you'd think that the Dems could come up with a response to the Dubya administration's bailout plan that relieves the average taxpayer from paying the costs of any bailout, wouldn't you? But no. Democratic leaders in Congress are instead settling for minor tweaks to Dubya's bailout—tweaks that leave most of us holding the financial bag.

This magpie isn't a financial genius, but I've been paying attention to proposed solutions that some really smart people are making. Here are some of those ideas:

Put a 0.25% tax on the transfer of stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. According to estimates I've seen, this could raise US $160 billion each year—enough by itself to pay for a bailout on the scale of what Dubya's administration is proposing. This tax should be made permanent.
For at least five years, put a 10% income tax surcharge on any individual whose pre-tax income is US $500,000 or more.
Instead of lowering the capital gains tax (as proposed by right-wing Republicans), add a 25% surcharge to the existing tax for any individuals whose pre-tax income is US $500,000 or more. This capital gains surcharge should last at least five years.
Lastly, impose a windfall profits tax on the obscene profits being made by the oil industry. No, this isn't directly related to the bailout. It's a good idea, though, and one that would be broadly supported—especially if the proceeds from this tax were used to help taxpayers meet the high cost of heating oil and gasoline.

This 'modest proposal' to the Democrats puts the cost of the bailout on the people and institutions responsible for—and who have reaped financial benefits from—our current economic problems. Just as importantly, it prevents the Republicans from tying Barack Obama and the Democrats to Dubya's unpopular bailout plan.

What do you think?

No fooling.

2008-04-01T15:36:00.001-07:00

Fafblog is back.

Yipppeeeee!!!!!

Testing

2008-03-31T21:43:00.001-07:00

This is just to see how posting via email works.

Happy birthday!

2008-03-31T21:16:00.000-07:00

To Magpie! It's this blog's 5th blogiversary!

I was going to post a flurry of stuff today, but my 'real job' interfered. So it's a poorly celebrated blogiversary, but at least I'm still here.

Thanks to all the usual suspects, and I promise to get back up to speed soon.

Nobody seems to know much about this ...

2008-03-30T13:12:00.000-07:00

And some folks think it's 'creepily lifelike' and 'awesome'. But I think it's just plain creepy. I mean, just imagine Karl Rove working this technology.

(Oh, maybe Karl Rove has already been working this technology.)

Go look for yourself.

Not dead yet.

2008-03-24T20:14:00.000-07:00

Really.

This magpie's time away from the blogosphere will end Real Soon Now. Stay tuned.

Sorry for being so scarce lately.

2007-09-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

I spent a bunch of time trying to land a contract job. And now that I have the job, I've been too busy to blog. Plus both of my computers had catastrophic hardware failures on the same day, and it took five days to get even one of them back again.

Hopefully I'll be able to slip in a few Magpie posts soon.

Step right up folks! See the amazing disappearing benchmarks!

2007-09-07T00:12:00.000-07:00

Although our Dear Leader doesn't recall the benchmarks that he himself set up for judging the success of the surge in Iraq, Salon's Tim Grieve remembers them quite well indeed.

This magpie wants to think that the Democrats in Congress will remember Dubya's benchmarks—and how very few of them have been met—when they pass judgment on the surge later this month. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Too busy to blog.

2007-09-06T15:20:00.000-07:00

I'm doing research for a possible new job, so there won't be any new posts until this evening at the earliest. Thanks for your patience!

Riverbend resurfaces ...

2007-09-05T15:57:00.000-07:00

... as one of the 1.4 million Iraqis who've fled their country and are living as refugees in Syria. Here's her latest post.

(For more on Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, see this earlier Magpie post.)

Via Baghdad Burning.

Earth to Dubya, Earth to Dubya ...

2007-09-05T15:30:00.000-07:00

This magpie really has to wonder what planet our Dear Leader is on after reading this account of his arrival in Australia:

"We're kicking ass," he told Mark Vaile on the tarmac after the Deputy Prime Minister inquired politely of the President's stopover in Iraq en route to Sydney. [Emaphsis and incredulity added]

The word 'delusional' doesn't even begin to cover it.

Via Sydney Morning Herald.

Cast your memory back to Central America in the 1980s.

2007-09-05T00:31:00.001-07:00

Remember those death squads that operated in El Salvador and Honduras? The ones that were covertly supported—if not actually organized—by the Reagan administration with the aim of killing off leftists, political activists, labor leaders, and other 'communists'?

It appears that the El Salvador death squads are still operating, twenty years later.

[Lawyer Jaime Martínez of the Institute of Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Science] said that 622 possible cases of death squad killings were documented ... between January 2001 and August 2005.

In 2006, [El Salvador's] Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDDH) reported the case of a young man, Abimilet Ramírez, who after being picked up by the police was thrown down a well.

He survived, and there were witnesses who saw him being seized by the police. But he was killed later, after he and the PDDH reported his case to the public prosecutor's office.

Investigations by human rights organisations have found that these incidents form part of "homicidal practices" that "year after year have been seen in the post-war period, and up to the present, and that are carried out with the acquiescence of high-ranking authorities," [David] Morales said in a television interview. [Morales is a lawyer with the Catholic church’s legal aid office in San Salvador.]

This magpie has to wonder how long the death squads now causing havoc in Iraq will continue operating after the US finally withdraws its troops.

Via IPS News.

What kind of news do people want?

2007-09-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

Not celebrity scandals, despite the evidence of numerous US newscasts. Unfortunately, people aren't much interested in foreign news or science news either. And, even worse, fewer people are interested in news at all than they were 10 years ago.

Here's a quick summary of the results of a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press:

[Table and Data: Pew Research Center for People & the Press]

What I find really interesting is that very little has changed over the two decades of news coverage included in the study. Other than a big increase of public interest in stories about money, and a big loss of interest in stories about disasters, peoples' interests in the news now are remarkably similar to what they were in the mid-1980s. This is, of course, despite news media apologists who always say that they're 'just giving the public what it wants' whenever critics complain about the current state of print and broadcast news in the US.

The Columbia Journalism Review has a nice summary of the Pew Institute's findings here. You can look at the Pew study in detail over here.

No future.

2007-09-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

And I thought I was pessimistic about the state of the US. I've got nothing on Chris Floyd, who's already willing to write an obituary for the American republic:

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

he war which we were told the Democrats and ISG consensus would end or wind down has of course been escalated to its greatest level yet -- more troops, more airstrikes, more mercenaries, more Iraqi captives swelling the mammoth prison camps of the occupying power, more instability destroying the very fabric of Iraqi society. The patently illegal surveillance programs of the authoritarian regime have now been codified into law by the Democratic Congress, which has also let stand the evisceration of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, and a raft of other liberty-stripping laws, rules, regulations and executive orders. Bush's self-proclaimed arbitrary power to seize American citizens (and others) without charge and hold them indefinitely -- even kill them -- has likewise been unchallenged by the legislators. Bush has brazenly defied Congressional subpoenas -- and even arbitrarily stripped the Justice Department of the power to enforce them -- to no other reaction than a stern promise from Democratic leaders to "look further into this matter." His spokesmen -- and his "signing statements" -- now openly proclaim his utter disdain for representative government, and assert at every turn his sovereign right to "interpret" -- or ignore -- legislation as he wishes. He retains the right to "interpret" just which interrogation techniques are classified as torture and which are not, while his concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and his secret CIA prisons -- where those "strenuous" techniques are practiced -- remain open. His increasingly brazen drive to war with Iran has already been endorsed unanimously by the Senate and overwhelmingly by the House, both of which have embraced the specious casus belli concocted by the Bush Regime. And to come full circle, Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton and Carl Levin are now praising the "military success" of the Iraq escalation -- despite the evident failure of its stated goals by every single measure, including troop deaths, civilian deaths, security, infrastructure, political cohesion and regional stability. This emerging "bipartisan consensus" on the military situation in Iraq (or rather, this utter fantasy concealing a rapidly deteriorating reality) makes it certain that the September "progress report" will be greeted as a justification for continuing the "surge" in one form or another.

It is, by any measure, a remarkable achievement, one of the greatest political feats ever. Despite Bush's standing as one of the most despised presidents in American history, despite a Congress in control of the opposition party, despite a solid majority opposed to his policies and his war, despite an Administration riddled with scandal and crime, despite the glaring rot in the nation's infrastructure and the callous abandonment of one of the nation's major cities to natural disaster and crony greed -- despite all of this, and much more that would have brought down or mortally wounded any government in a democratic country, the Bush Administration is now in a far stronger position than it was a year ago.

How can this be? The answer is simple: the United States is no longer a democratic country, or even a degraded semblance of one.

I know I say this a lot, but ... it's really worth your time to go read the entire post.

My view of our current political situation in the US isn't quite as dark as Floyd's, but he makes a very persuasive argument about the degree of danger to democracy that Dubya, his minions, and his Democratic enablers represent. Dismissing his argument as paranoia only makes it more certain that the tombstone will soon be placed over the grave of the long democratic experiment in the US.

Via The Sideshow.

Pop quiz!

2007-09-04T00:19:00.000-07:00

Quick! What's missing from The Economist's list of the 15 most democratic countries in the world?

Something's missing here.

You get half credit if you couldn't find the UK, but what I'm really wanting you to notice is that the US isn't there either. To find the US, you have to look at the complete listing of the world's full democracies. There are 28 of them, and the US is #17, right between Spain and the Czech Republic. (And, if you are wondering, the UK is #23.)

Here's some of how The Economist explains that positioning:

One advantage of our index compared with others is that it provides for considerable differentiation of scores, including among developed countries. The “near-perfect” democracy is Sweden, the country with the highest score. The other Nordic countries also have high ranks. By contrast, the United States and Britain are near the bottom of the full democracy category, but for somewhat different reasons. America falls down on some aspects of governance and civil liberties. Despite low election turnouts, political participation in the United States is comparatively high. In Britain low political participation (the lowest in the developed world) is a major problem, and to a lesser extent, for now, so are eroding civil liberties. [Emphasis added]

Just how far has the US fallen down on civil liberties? Well, the US of A has the lowest civil liberties score of any of the 29 'full democracies' on the list, and scores worse than more than 20 of the 50 'flawed democracies' rated by The Economist.

Remember when the US would have been near the top of this or any similar list? Hopefully the results of next year's presidential elections will reverse the sad trend set in motion by Dubya's two terms in office.

By the way, the worst country of the 167 that The Economist rated is North Korea. Iraq came in at #112, just one position away from dropping onto the 'Authoritarian Regimes' roster. No such luck for the US' steadfast Mideast ally, Saudi Arabia, which is #156.

You can read a summary of the Economist's findings if you go here, and you can download the full Democracy Index (along with a description of the methodology used to generate the list) if you click here [PDF file].

Little or no blogging today.

2007-09-03T12:04:00.000-07:00

Faced with having to comment on Dubya's ~~visit to~~ photo-op in Iraq or—even worse—having to say anything about this, taking the day off seems to be a wise move.

See y'all tomorrow.

The upcoming attack on Iran.

2007-09-02T17:01:00.000-07:00

Over at Daily Kos, Maccabee has a much-linked and much-commented upon post in which he relays news from a friend who's a Landing Signals Officer in a US Navy carrier group stationed near Iran. According to the friend, the preparations for an attack on Iran are done and, she says, the military needs only the word from Washington for the bombs to start dropping.

In reading the post, though, I found the following part of the LSO's comments scarier than the news that an attack could be imminent:

"I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer", she said. "But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran."

"We’re not stupid. Most of the members of the fleet read well enough to know what is going on world-wise. We also realize that anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them. Keep in mind that most of the people I serve with are happy to be a part of the global war on terror. It’s just that the touch points are what we see since we are the ones out here who are supposedly implementing this grand strategy. But when you liason with administration officials who don’t know that Iranians don’t speak Arabic and have no idea what Iranians live like, then you start having second thoughts about whether these Administration officials are even competent." [Emphasis added]

I don't know what I can possibly add to that. Be very afraid.

Welcome back!

2007-09-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

South Dakota's Tim Johnson will be returning to the US Senate this Wednesday, resuming work for the first time since he almost died from a brain hemmorage last December. With Johnson back in the Senate, the Democrats' razor-thin margin of control is slightly less precarious.

Via CQ Politics.

Tancredo to New Orleans: F*ck you!

2007-09-01T00:45:00.000-07:00

GOP presidential candidate Tom Tancredo continues to show that he's the epitome of compassion.

The Hill reports that Tancredo has called for an end to federal aid to the Gulf Coast areas hit by Hurricane Katrina, and that the hurricane's survivors need to realize that ' the taxpayer gravy train [has] left the New Orleans station.'

"The amount of money that has been wasted on these so-called 'recovery' efforts has been mind-boggling," said Tancredo, who is running a long-shot presidential campaign. "Enough is enough...."

"At some point, state and local officials and individuals have got to step up to the plate and take some initiative.... The mentality that people can wait around indefinitely for the federal taxpayer to solve all their worldly problems has got to come to an end."

The lawmaker criticized in particular the amount that has been wasted through fraud and abuse, estimated at $1 billion.

"This whole fiasco has been a perfect storm of corruption and incompetence at all levels," he added.

This magpie is tempted to agree with Tancredo on that last point, except that I'm certain the gentleman from Colorado doesn't think (as I definitely do) that the 'corruption and incompetence' emanates directly from the White House.

Ooooooh, really shiny!

2007-08-31T13:35:00.000-07:00

The south pole of the Sun, taken in stereo view this past March.

Wow.
[Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/NRL/GSFC]

[This] image is one of many taken by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites, which have provided the first three-dimensional images of the sun. For the first time, scientists will be able to see structures in the sun's atmosphere in three dimensions. The new view will greatly aid scientists' ability to understand solar physics and thereby improve space weather forecasting.

You can see a full-resolution version of the image if you go here.

Via NASA Image of the Day.