bidness
mikethemadbiologist | February 22, 2009Over at Beat the Press, economist Dean Baker describes his plan to deal with the wave of foreclosures:
1. Gives homeowners facing foreclosure the option of renting their home for as long as they want at the fair market rate. This rate is determined by an independent appraiser in the same way that an appraiser determines the market value of a home when a bank issues a mortgage.
2. The proposal requires no taxpayer dollars or new bureaucracies. It would be administered by a judge in the same way that foreclosures are already overseen by judges. It simply changes the rules under which…
mikethemadbiologist | February 18, 2009
This is not the Mad Biologist
Or how the Boston Phoenix proves they missed the point of Shepard Fairey's work (Fairey made the iconic Obama poster). I'll get to that in a moment, but Sunday, I went to the ICA in Boston to see the Shepard Fairey exhibit. For me, it was a blast from the past: I was in Providence when the whole Andre the Giant thing started (I still have a sticker from that time). It was also funny to watch (discretely) a middle-aged--to be generous--docent explain to similarly aged visitors about Andre having a posse. Ironic proto-skaterpunk anarchism wasn't really…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2009...does it make a sound? On Sept. 18, 2008, the banking system almost collapsed--no, really. A while back, I noted that there are at least two classes of media bias: one involves the interpretation of a set of agreed upon facts, while the other involves decisions as to what those facts are, or, even if something happened (an aside: while this was not controversial to the science-oriented commenters, this distinction is apparently beyond the ken of at least one journalism professor).
Anyway, this story, unearthed by C-SPAN, falls into the latter category (in the video, go to the 2:05 mark…
mikethemadbiologist | February 2, 2009By now, you might have heard about the growing outrage that bankers at banks receiving bailout money are drawing bonuses. It's reached the point where Sen. Claire McCaskill has proposed capping bankers' income at a salary equivalent to that of the president of the U.S. I didn't really have much to add about how ridiculous the arguments for paying the bankers bonuses when their firms have been nationalized (if, nothing else, most employees, who through no fault of their own, working in dying businesses are getting laid off--that is, no salary at all). But a quotes from a NY Times article…
mikethemadbiologist | January 28, 2009It looks like nationalization of failing banks is off the table. What bothers me are two of the reasons given by Treasury Secretary Geithner. Reason #1:
Explicit nationalization of financial companies has little support among key Obama officials, sources said. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and top White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers think governments make poor bank managers and cannot efficiently manage a vast number of institutions, according to some of their associates.
Given that the goal is to wipe out the shareholders and sell off Big Shitpile for whatever you might…
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2009And I've got the picture to prove it!
Or maybe it's an invasive organism?
Either way, it's pretty creepy.
mikethemadbiologist | December 26, 2008So, if you go on the teevee machine and tell people that investment banks should be allowed to pay out dividends, and you're simply an economics professor, we should probably take the claim at face value. But what if you have tens of thousands of shares as compensation for being a board member? Oops:
I did some more checking, and Tyson has received over a million dollars in cash and stock options combined from Morgan Stanley. As I've noted before, you can't be a stateman and a salesman.
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2008By way of Atrios, we discover that Google has moved away from its pro-net neutrality position:
Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.
At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic the same -- nobody is supposed to jump the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 15, 2008...never mind believe in. Obama can do much better than former Clinton official and current corporate lobbyist David Hayes for Secretary of Interior. As a lobbyist for Ford, Hayes chose to side with Ford over a poor Native American community:
Trying to stick the cost of the clean-up of a toxic waste dump on a rural, economically disadvantaged American Indian community is not the kind of behavior one would want to see from a potential Secretary of the Interior. The Ringwood superfund site is a little-known American tragedy and David J. Hayes, as recently as 2007, was trying to get the…
mikethemadbiologist | December 11, 2008This couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of assholes:
The collapse of the sale of publisher Reed Elsevier's business information unit was inevitable. It's what happens next that's crucial.
Reed was planning to use the sale proceeds to pay down debt from its $4.1 billion acquisition of U.S. personal data firm Choicepoint earlier this year. If it doesn't find another solution, it risks losing its A- credit rating.
So now it faces a choice. Most likely, it will launch a $2 billion bond issue in January ahead of the first tranche of Choicepoint debt falling due in March - a move likely to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 11, 2008David Leonhardt does a good job of explaining the lies surrounding the bogus $73 per hour compensation that the Big Three autoworkers supposedly receive--even if he does so rather elliptically. Here's how that $73 figure is reached:
You'll notice that past compensation is a big part of the problem. As Leonhardt puts it:
The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn't mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It's a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd…
mikethemadbiologist | December 3, 2008In case you missed it, there's a fascinating, albeit horrifying, article about the intersection of the business interests of retired military officers with their depiction in the mainstream media as unbiased commentators who are putting country first. Here's a sample:
The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.
Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially…
mikethemadbiologist | November 24, 2008From Bloomberg News:
Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.
When I read this, a line from a movie* kept running through my head:
With a lie this big, we can get away with anything.
Seriously, we have no conceptual means to grasp something of this magnitude. And tell me why we can't lend Detroit $25 billion? That is one three-thousandthhundredth of the package to…
mikethemadbiologist | November 19, 2008I haven't a clue as to how to proceed about the potential auto industry bailout, and anyone who can say with confidence about how the largest industrial bailout in U.S. history will play out is kidding themselves. My instinct is not to lose U.S. controlled industrial capacity on national security grounds. But to follow on something driftglass discussed, there seems to be one group of people who aren't getting blamed.
-link to driftglass
-list as questions the three fuckups
Are salaries and benefits relatively 'high' for auto workers?
Sure (although nobody cares to comment on the 'high'…
mikethemadbiologist | November 3, 2008I finally figured out what the underlying philosophy for the banking bailout is (other than TEH STOOPID): it's supply-side/trickle down economics. First, the latest insult by way of Chris in Paris (italics mine):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/29/AR20081…
U.S. banks getting more than $163 billion from the Treasury Department for new lending are on pace to pay more than half of that sum to their shareholders, with government permission, over the next three years.
The government said it was giving banks more money so they could make more loans. Dollars paid to…
mikethemadbiologist | November 2, 2008I think this quote by Nell Minow sums up what most people feel about bonuses for employees at bailout-receiving investment banks:
"I'm just flabbergasted that the financial community has failed to show any sense of leadership on this issue and doesn't seem to understand how angry people are at them,'' said Nell Minow, editor of Corporate Library, a Portland, Maine-based corporate-governance research firm. "They are just a bonus away from having the villagers come after them with torches.''
Actually, I think some people would like to skip the 'bonus away' and go straight to the torches…
mikethemadbiologist | October 28, 2008...I would be feeling like an idiot right about now. A while ago, I endorsed Sonia Chang-Diaz over Dianne Wilkerson for MA State Senate because I thought Wilkerson had some ethics problems. I didn't know the half of it (italics mine):
State Senator Dianne Wilkerson was arrested this morning after an 18-month undercover investigation by Boston Police and the FBI in which she allegedly accepted eight bribes worth $23,500.
The 15-year Democratic lawmaker allegedly accepted cash payoffs that ranged from $500 to $10,000 to help a nightclub secure a liquor license and to assist a private…
mikethemadbiologist | August 27, 2008If there was a crucial tile in the Jenga Pile o'Shit (also known as the recent financial meltdown), it was the cratering of Bear Stearns stock. I can't have been the only one who thought, "Damn if I had only shorted Bear Stearns...." Turns out some anonymous investors did just that under some...unusual circumstances:
As the story lacked prurient interest, it was left to Bloomberg.com to
unearth persuasive information that the Wall Street firm was seemingly brought down by a conspiracy that netted its participants a profit of upwards of $250 million on an investment of $1.7 million in a week…
mikethemadbiologist | July 3, 2008By way of Pandagon, we learn that the stimulus check isn't, well, stimulating 'values':
An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.
According to Kirk Mishkin, Head…
mikethemadbiologist | June 12, 2008Wolfrum at Shakesville alerts us to The New Right's attempt to lay our failed energy policies every but at the feet of Republicans:
Take the post "How did the GOP get stuck "Defending Big Oil" again?"
Now, this post could have been just five words long: "Because that's what they do." But the post is more about how to change the oil debate to make the GOP look better rather than on how to do anything about oil prices:
First, I don't see any reason at all we need to keep getting stuck with the "defending tax breaks for big oil" charge over and over again. Subsidies are not a free market…