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Civil War In Corporate America: Banks Battling The Chamber On Accounting Rules

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:41:34 -0800

The banking industry is hoping to pull off a quiet power grab that has eluded its grasp since the Great Depression, by stripping the independence of the board that sets financial accounting standards.

The move could effectively let banks set their own accounting standards in rough economic times.

Astonishingly, at a time when the public is crying out for greater regulation to limit excessive risk-taking by financial institutions, the banks are trying to get Congress to agree that the next time there's a big downturn, they should have the ability to alter their accounting standards -- essentially, fudge the numbers -- so that the public and investors won't be able to tell how insolvent they really are. By ignoring their declining asset values, they can avoid the standard requirement of raising more capital.

The mechanism is contained in an amendment set to be introduced in mid-November by Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.) that would move final authority over the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) from the Securities and Exchange Commission to a new body, a so-called "oversight" board, that would include the officials charged with managing systemic risks to the financial markets.

These regulators would have the authority to override FASB's accounting guidelines by taking into account economic conditions.

The move is so radical that it has split corporate America. The bankers and members of Congress who support it have earned themselves an unlikely enemy: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

A typical business or investor, after all, prefers honest, independent accounting, because they buy and sell real things based on real value.

African Nations Make a Stand at UN Climate Talks | CommonDreams.org

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:05:54 -0800

"The poorest countries say they are dying now and the rich are just sitting back doing nothing. Hopefully they will take action now," said Asad Rehman, head of international climate with Friends of the Earth.

"The world's largest historical emitter, the US, is missing in action during the climate negotiations, on its targets, on its finance - and the developing world is rightfully calling them out on it," said Greenpeace USA climate campaign director Damon Moglen.

"It is clear that for many countries, enough is enough. The fact that this has come today from countries including Kenya, President Obama's ancestral home, should be his wake-up call. Obama can no longer hide behind failed congressional legislation. He must provide ambitious, science-based emissions reductions targets and come to table in Copenhagen."

The Existentialist Cowboy: How the GOP is Killing America

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:58:32 -0800

The US is much, much worse off these days than Mexico which often takes the blame for the drug trade and 'income disparities'. Fact is --income and wealth inequalities are much, much worse in the US than in Mexico. At the end of the Bush Sr era, the upper quintile alone had benefited from the Reagan tax cuts. Even fewer benefited from Shrub's largesse! So --where do the GOP 'yankees' get off aiming their demagoguery at Mexico?

The piddly amounts of drugs sold across the border are a strawman --peanuts compared to the heist of US wealth pulled off by just one percent of the US population!

The GOP is either nuts or crooked or both! I often wonder what the US might have been if right wing psychopaths had not demagogued every war or every so-called 'crisis' and in ways that enriched only their 'base'! The end result is that just one percent of the entire population owns more than some 95 percent of the rest of us combined! Anyone not of that ruling elite still supporting the elitist GOP and complicit DINOs is nuts! And I have no sympathy for you!

Eric E. Burns: Fox News Is the Story

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 11:32:29 -0700

The issue is not whether it was a good idea politically for the White House to say that the emperor has no clothes. The issue is that the emperor actually has no clothes. In other words, the administration's comments about Fox News aren't the story. Fox News is the story.

And yet, during a recent press conference, ABC's Jake Tapper asked Robert Gibbs how Fox News -- "one of our sister organizations," as he put it -- is different from any other network. His question indicates the pervasive unwillingness among members of the media to officially kick Fox News to the curb of the press club. By legitimizing Fox News as a news organization, reporters and commentators are enabling the network to continue conducting a massive conservative political campaign under the guise of journalism. In the process, they are permitting Fox News to dominate the national discussion by spreading smears and lies -- smears and lies that become conventional wisdom. They are also defending an organization that has nothing but contempt for journalistic standards -- hence undermining their own profession and the public interest at the same time.

Criticizing Fox News has nothing to do with criticizing the press. Fox News is not a news organization. It is the de facto leader of the GOP, and it is long past time that it was treated as such by our nation's media.

The evidence supporting such a reality is overwhelming. To begin with, Fox News CEO (and former GOP campaign consultant to Ronald Reagan) Roger Ailes has described his station's confrontation with the Obama administration as "the Alamo." Fox News senior vice president Bill Shine said Fox was "the voice of opposition." In other words, the entire operation has an explicit political agenda, not just a few hosts. There is no separation between Fox News' "opinion" programming and its "news" programs. "
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btw-- Friends and associates are encouraging Fox News chief Roger Ailes to jump into the political arena for real by running for president in 2012

"Ailes knows how to frame an issue better than anybody, and that's what we need now," says one Ailes friend who is encouraging the Fox founder, chairman and CEO to seek the Republican nomination....
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So... the CEO of an outfit that clearly opposes a sitting president is upset that his group is called "partisan" even though he himself may run against that president!

We should remember that media magnate Silvio Berlusconi did parlay his right wing media empire into his current political status. (Bloomberg may eventually try to do the same thing.)

Update: Ailes has turned down a presidential run: "This country needs fair and balanced news more now than ever before, so I'm going to decline a run for the presidency. Besides, I can't take the pay cut."

Bomb hits outside suspected Pakistani nuclear-weapons site | McClatchy

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:35:07 -0700

Bomb hits outside suspected Pakistani nuclear-weapons site

A suicide bomber attacked a suspected nuclear-weapons site Friday in Pakistan, raising fears about the security of the nuclear arsenal, while two other terrorist blasts made it another bloody day in the country's struggle against extremism.

Increasingly daring and sophisticated attacks by terrorists allied with al Qaida on some of Pakistan's most sensitive and best-protected installations have led to warnings that extremists could damage a nuclear facility or seize nuclear material.

Pakistan's nuclear sites are mostly in the northwest of the country, close to the capital, Islamabad, to keep them away from the border with archenemy India, but that places them close to Pakistani Taliban extremists, who are massed in the northwest. Al Qaida has made clear its ambitions to get hold of a nuclear bomb or knowledge of nuclear technology. Several other sites associated with Pakistan's nuclear weapons have been hit previously."
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COMMENT: This ain't good.

Remember Pakistan has had more than one military coup and it does not take a Nostradamus to predict another one in the near future if this sort of thing continues. Indeed, support for such a move could be part of the reason these bombings are being perpetrated.

Bizzaro Sarah Palin Book to Be Released on Same Day as Regular Old Stupid Sarah Palin Book | Indecision Forever | Comedy Central

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 12:45:46 -0700

SHARKAT is far more likely to read the one one the left!

Former Panel Chair Says Perrys Office Pressured Him On Death Penalty Probe | TPMMuckraker

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:23:29 -0700

It's starting to look more and more like Texas governor Rick Perry orchestrated an effort to thwart a state probe into an arson investigation that may have led to the execution of an innocent man.

Sam Bassett -- the former chair of the Texas Forensic Science Commission, who Perry declined to reappoint last month -- is now saying that Perry's aides tried to pressure him over the direction of the inquiry his panel was conducting into the steps that led to the 2004 execution of Cameron Todd Willingham for arson. Perry, as governor, signed off on the execution, despite clear evidence that the investigation was flawed.

Bassett told the Chicago Tribune over the weekend that he twice was summoned to meetings with Perry's top attorneys, who said explicitly that they were unhappy with the how the panel's probe was being conducted. At one meeting, Perry's lawyers questioned how much it was costing, and asked why the panel had hired a nationally known arson expert -- rather than a Texas fire scientist -- to look into the case. Bassett added that after that meeting, a staffer from the Texas general counsel's office started attending commission meetings.

Said Bassett to the Tribune:

I was surprised that they were involving themselves in the commission's decision-making. I did feel some pressure from them, yes. There's no question about that.

Nor is Perry's office being transparent about the issue. Over the weekend, it refused a request from the Houston Chronicle to release documents that would shed light on how -- or whether - it reviewed a report from Willigham's lawyer, sent hours before Willingham alerting the governor to serious flaws in the arson investigation. Perry's office argued to the paper that staff comments and analyses of the report aren't public records.

Since the controversy over Bassett's ouster erupted last month, Perry has pointed out that Bassett's tenure was expired, and that the governor merely declined to reappoint him. But an advisory lawyers group, as well as several members of the panel itself, had urged Perry to keep Bassett on. And the decision not to reappoint Bassett came just days before the panel was to hear testimony from Craig Beyler, a nationally known arson expert who argued in a report that methods used in the investigation could not support the finding of arson.

The new chair appointed by Perry to replace Bassett, conservative prosecutor John Bradley, called off Beyler's testimony, saying he and other new panel members needed more time to get up to speed on the case. Bradley has not said whether Beyler's appearance will be rescheduled. "

Whos in Big Brothers Database? - The New York Review of Books

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 07:30:37 -0700

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes by 2015. "Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be or may one day become a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story."
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the biggest problem facing the agency is not the fact that it's drowning in untranslated, indecipherable, and mostly unusable data, problems that the troubled new modernization plan, Turbulence, is supposed to eventually fix. "These problems may, in fact, be the tip of the iceberg," he writes. Instead, what the agency needs most, Aid says, is more power. But the type of power to which he is referring is the kind that comes from electrical substations, not statutes. "As strange as it may sound," he writes, "one of the most urgent problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power." With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.

The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political power for the agency.

Rather than give the NSA more money for more power--electrical and political--some have instead suggested just pulling the plug. "NSA can point to things they have obtained that have been useful," Aid quotes former senior State Department official Herbert Levin, a longtime customer of the agency, "but whether they're worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind."

Crooks and Liars

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:54:59 -0700

Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger (the pilot who safely landed the jet in the Hudson River) had testified in Congress that no pilot he knows wants any of their children to become a pilot. Pilots, he said, are completely demoralized. He spoke of how his pay has been cut 40% and his own pension eliminated. Most of the TV news didn't cover his remarks and the congressmen quickly forgot them. They just wanted him to play the role of "HERO," but he was on a more important mission.

"I hadn't heard anywhere that this stuff about the airlines is in this new movie," the pilot said.

"No, you wouldn't," I replied. "The press likes to talk about me, not the movie."

And it's true. I've been surprised (and slightly annoyed) that, with all that's been written and talked about "Capitalism: A Love Story," very little attention has been paid the mind-blowing stuff in the film: pilots on food stamps, companies secretly taking out life insurance policies on employees and hoping they die young so the company can collect, judges getting kickbacks from the private prison industry for sending innocent people (kids) to be locked up. The profit motive -- it's a killer.

Especially when your pilot started his day at 6am working at the local Starbucks. "
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The actual substance of Moore's film is precisely what the corporate media DOES NOT want to talk about. The film is a critique of the very system of which they are an integral, a crucial part. Their job is to distract, to draw attention away from any such criticism.

mental_floss Blog & The Rand Corporation: The Think Tank That Controls America

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:03:27 -0700

Through the years, RAND's sphere of influence became more visible. In the 1960s, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara hired scores of its young researchers--dubbed the "Whiz Kids"--to reorganize the Pentagon. But perhaps the thing that most solidified RAND's reputation in the public's imagination was the release of the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb in 1964. The movie's title character, a deranged Nazi scientist, was modeled after RAND's eccentric Herman Kahn. A military strategist, Kahn famously argued that America could easily survive an all-out conflict with the Soviet Union if people took refuge in shelters and rationed food. Although the radiation would cause hundreds of thousands of genetic defects, Kahn insisted the American people would endure. Kahn's apocalyptic scenarios didn't end there. He also dreamed up the Doomsday Machine, a device that could destroy all life on Earth, which Kubrick used in Dr. Strangelove. In fact, Kubrick borrowed so many of Kahn's sayings and ideas that the scientist began demanding royalties. Kahn was so persistent that Kubrick finally had to tell him, "That's not how things are done, Herman."

Spinning a World Wide Web

While RAND has played a major role in keeping America safe from military attacks and nuclear catastrophes, the think tank has also left its mark on the communications industry. RAND is directly responsible for packet switching, the technology that made the Internet possible. It all started in the 1960s, when the military asked RAND researchers to solve a hypothetical question: If the Soviet Union destroyed all of our communication systems with a nuclear bomb, how could we fight back?

A young engineer named Paul Baran provided an elegant solution by likening the nation's telephone wires to the brain's central nervous system. Baran proposed sending messages via phone lines and changing words into numbers to avoid noise and distortion. Baran also decided that any content relayed should be divided into "packets," or discrete bundles of data. As a result, messages were separated during transmission, and would then automatically reconfigure themselves once they reached their destination. More importantly, if direct communications were destroyed, the packets could reroute themselves through phone lines anywhere in the world.

Baran tried to convince AT&T to install the system, but the phone giant refused to create something that could become its worst competitor.