Posts from — October 2009

Bank of America, Wells Fargo/Wachovia, Citibank, and JP Morgan/Chase are all on the dole. They are the true “welfare queens” of the US. They have been bailed out to the tune of billions, and want to continue on their merry way, as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Well, they don’t, because the US government has proved to them that they will be bailed out regardless of what they do.

All individuals can do is to avoid any contact with them. Move your accounts to a credit union or local bank, and avoid them like the pestilence they are.

I have before me a missive from Citibank, which, for whatever reason, now owns the Citgo gas card business. After receiving billions of dollars in free government money to spur lending to help the economy, they have reacted with the following rates and fees on the Citgo card:

• Rate for Purchases: Prime Rate plus 19.99%, but not less than 24.99%.
• Rate for Cash Advances: Prime Rate plus 23.96%, but not less than 29.95%.
• Fee for Cash Advances: 5% of the amount, but not less than $10.

This is on an account that has been open for more than a decade, and has never carried a balance, i.e. it is paid in full every time there is a charge on it.

The current Prime Rate is 3.25%, and it has been unchanged for months. A good rate on a CD is 2%.

If you look around, you can probably find a better rate at a pawn shop or from a loan shark.

The politics blog at the Orlando Sentinel covers the latest source of Republican outrage over Rep. Grayson: apparently he gave out the URI of a web site he had created on the floor of the House, and horror of horrors – it has a link to Grayson’s campaign web site!!!!

The FEC has already passed on the site because Grayson paid for it out of his own checking account, not with campaign cash, but as soon as they figure out what ethics rules have been violated, the Republicans are going to file a complaint, and the Democrats have to immediately condemn Grayson for something.

The web site, Names of the Dead, was set up to record the names of people who have died as a result of a lack of access to health care. It has links to Grayson’s campaign web site, his House web site, his YouTube speeches, the text of HR 3200, and the study that provided the number who die every year because of a lack of access to health care.

I hate to break it to the Republicans, but mentioning the name of a web site on the floor of the House is not exactly an effective path to getting a lot of hits. The link at the Orlando Sentinel will probably generate more traffic. If the Republicans hadn’t had a hissy fit, no one would know it existed.

Update: Congresscritter Grayson has had them remove the link to the campaign web site from the page.

The St. Petersburg Times has an op-ed on Florida’s temp Senator: Newest senator takes low road

In Tallahassee, LeMieux, Gov. Charlie Crist’s former chief of staff, was credited with helping the governor’s populist appeal. But Wednesday, he sacrificed candor in a predictable play to a partisan constituency. He reasonably equated Congress to a family who recklessly relies on credit cards to pay the bills. But he implied the runaway spending stems from Democratic control, ignoring that it began under President George W. Bush.

LeMieux really lost the high ground when he bragged that Crist and the Florida Legislature have cut spending by nearly 10 percent, or $7 billion, to balance the budget. LeMieux’s omission: This year’s state budget was balanced only because of $5 billion in federal stimulus dollars and $2.2 billion in new taxes and fees. Florida didn’t live within its means. In fact, it was more like the spoiled offspring of a wealthy family who called Mom or Dad for a bailout.

“High ground”? “Candor”? What part of “Republican” don’t they understand? Charlie needs the Republican base in the primary. LeMieux has to sound all of the right notes on the “dog whistle”, or Charlie won’t even get to run. He has his orders, and LeMieux intends to do exactly what Charlie needs to win.

The CRTC [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission], the Canadian version of the US FCC, has issued a net neutrality ruling.

Their version is a “truth in advertising” path. The big telcos have to tell individuals 30 days in advance of any price changes, and the wholesalers [ISPs & hosting companies] 60 days in advance, with the changes displayed prominently on their web sites. They may use throttling and other network management tools only if they can show that that they can’t manage their network any other way, and they are open about what they are doing.

Well, that’s a FAIL. Needless to say, Rogers and Bell, the big telcos in Canada, are the only ones happy about this. This approach can only work if there is competition, and with only two companies who generally do not have overlapping areas of infrastructure, there is no competition. In addition, it shifts the onus of proving that the telcos are violating the ruling to the users, who lack the resources to effectively bring action against the telcos.

In case you were wondering, the Conservative Party is currently in charge of the government of Canada,

The BBC notes that Big names support net neutrality

A group of the world’s largest internet companies has written a letter of support to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The letter is the latest in an ongoing debate about “network neutrality” – or how data is distributed on the web.
…

The letter, signed by the chief executives of Google, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Amazon and Sony Electronics among others, says that maintaining data neutrality helps businesses to compete on the basis of content alone.
…

Other signatories included community websites Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn and Craigslist.

The telcos want to set up tiers so they can charge some people more than others, i.e. introduce a class system to the ‘Net, because some people don’t like to have their important content treated the same way as Friday Cat Blogging.

The real problem is that telcos have been pulling in subscribers with promises of unlimited bandwidth, and discovered they are going to need to spend money on improvements to the infrastructure to provide it, rather than just milking the existing system for profits, which is what they had in mind.

If they don’t make the improvements, they are going to be forced to start limiting the access of their subscribers, and the subscribers may leave. It’s called competition, and there isn’t a lot of it around, but they hate what there is.

Over at Corrente Hipparchia has a must read on the Dartmouth Atlas Project. If you have any interest in the current debate on health care and insurance it is important to understand what this document really is, because everyone and their Aunt Martha is citing it as a basis for controlling costs in what is coming out of Congress.

This is a study of the amount of money spent on people during the last six-months of their lives. Everyone studied is dead. All off their health care resulted in death. This is being used to judge the efficiency of various health care systems, when all of the systems failed the subjects of the study.

All you can factually derive from this study is the cost of failure in various locations. It doesn’t tell you how many people receiving the same level of treatment didn’t die, because it is limited to those who did. What they are doing is basing reforms and reimbursements on the relative cost of failure.

McClatchy has a thoughtful opinion piece, Wal-Mart and the high cost of ‘cheap’, about the efforts by WalMart to build a store near the Wilderness Civil War battlefield.

As always, Wal-Mart stresses new jobs and the economic benefits to the area of the store, but that isn’t the way it works, and I know from local experience.

First off, WalMart has a corporate contractor building their stores, and the actual construction doesn’t generate local jobs. The only local boost from construction is from the purchases of the crew that are brought in to build it.

A newly opened WalMart does indeed feature very low prices, but those go away after all of the local competition withers and fails. When you allow a WalMart you are transferring jobs, not creating them. Almost everything in a WalMart is trucked in, including the meat and baked goods. Most local supermarkets have butchers and bakeries these days. Despite that you can find things that are cheaper at a Publix, than a WalMart, and you can get really fresh baked goods, instead of defrosted goods.

There is a difference between inexpensive and cheap – WalMart sells cheap.

If you are a US resident, as you recover from whatever you got up to on Halloween, don’t forget that the clocks are “falling back” at 2AM on November 1^st. You get an extra hour of sleep.

[Offer not applicable in Hawaii or Arizona, because they refuse to play, and don’t bring up Indiana, because they are on their own and need to decide what they are going to do. YMMV]

Also, it is time to put a new battery in your smoke detector.

If you can’t figure out how to reset the clock in your car, disconnect and reconnect the battery ground at noon, if am and pm make a difference to you, you’ll have to do it at midnight.

Hurricane Rick has been under attack by wind shear and has dropped down to a Category 2 storm, with wind shear and cooler water acting to probably reduce it to tropical storm strength when it grazes Baja Sur.

Typhoon Lupit has gone down to a Category 3 storm, but the conditions are favorable for it to be at least a Category 2 storm when it hits the northern end of Luzon island in the Philippines.

Baja Sur and Luzon are the wrong places to be this year as both are braced for their third storm of the season.

While the Atlantic basin benefits from the El Niño condition, the warm waters in the Pacific make times “interesting” in the Pacific.

The US has seen Tropical Storm Claudette, which popped up in the Gulf off the Southwest Coast of Florida and came ashore at the Coast Guard station on the eastern end of Okaloosa Island. There is the possibility of something building in the Western Caribbean off Costa Rica, but that’s about it, and the cool spell that hit is reducing the heat potential of the northern Gulf.

The BBC reports that Iranian commanders assassinated

Several top commanders in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have been killed in a suicide bombing in the volatile south-east of the country.

Iranian state television said 31 people died in the attack, in the Pishin region of Sistan-Baluchistan, and more than 25 were injured.

Shia and Sunni tribal leaders were also killed. A Sunni resistance group, Jundullah, said they carried it out.

The Baluchis have been at it for a while. The US and UK know better than to have direct involvement with the Jundullah or the MEK, but, after Cheney and company outed our best source for reliable information, Valerie Plame’s network, I feel certain that information is purchased from both groups. The information has a low reliability factor, because both will spin to produce what the buyer wants to hear, and to advance their own agenda.

It sounds like the Revolutionary Guard were sponsoring some type of peace council with leaders from the area. The Jundullah certainly couldn’t let anything like that happen.

Two days, and two posts on the WAR ON CHRISTMAS !!!

Digby was first with a piece about the rebirth of a supposed threat that references a petition for a ruling sent to the FCC. The matter was resolved by the FCC circa 1975, but it keeps getting resurrected. [Resurrection is very important to Christians, but I don’t think it should be used for bogus e-mail campaigns.]

This particular meme almost beats out the “post office is going to bill you for e-mail” as the most repeated bogus threat.

Then John McKay found the White House Christmas tree ornament scandal, that isn’t.

Of course the White House is going to continue to misrepresent the decorated fir tree in the Winter as a Christian symbol. You don’t really expect them to admit it was stolen from Teutonic Solstice celebrations, do you?

I think they should continue to send those cards and letters. It increases the Postal Service’s income.

Position: 17.0 N 110.3 W [10 PM CDT 0300 UTC].
Movement: Northwest [305°] near 13 mph [20 kph].
Maximum sustained winds: 145 mph [230 kph].
Wind Gusts: 170 mph [275 kph].
Tropical Storm Wind Radius: 175 miles [280 km].
Hurricane Wind Radius: 60 miles [95 km].
Minimum central pressure: 936 mb ↑.

It is 410 miles [660 km] South of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

The storm is continuing slow weakening. It is expected to pass over cooler water and encounter wind shear before hitting Baja.

Rick is second only to 1997 Hurricane Linda on the list of stongest eastern Pacific storms.

Here’s the link for NOAA’s latest satellite images.

[For the latest information click on the storm symbol, or go to the CATEGORIES drop-down box below the CALENDAR and select “Hurricanes” for all of the posts related to storms on this site.]

In addition to taking care of all the standard chores associated with cold snaps down here [lows in the 40s aren’t normal this time of year, and tonight and tomorrow will probably be records], watching Rick go nuts in the Pacific near Baja, and the fires down under in XXXX/Oz/Australia, I have been watching the fantasy world that constitutes media reporting on financial issues.

The big news this past week was the Dow going above 10K – big damn deal. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is an artifice supposedly based on the stock price of 30 widely held stocks. Only one of those 30 companies has been part of the Average since it was started, General Electric. The other 29 have been rotated at the whim of Dow Jones Inc., now part of Rupert Murdock Inc., and is now being shopped around so Rupert can get some cash flow.

When Alcoa and Intel, both current members of the “club”, reported seemingly good news, the number went up, and when BofA, also part of the clique, reported bad news, it went down. This says nothing about the actual health of the economy, only the stock prices of thirty companies. Most people who supposedly own stock, are actually invested through mutual funds. If stock prices move up too quickly, a lot of people who held on, rather than cashing out their 401(k)s, will drop stocks like a hot rock.

As Badtux explained at his place, the current “wunderkind” CEOs don’t know anything about the products they make, they only know how to sell stuff. The MBA CEO is interested in the stock market, not the market for their company’s products, so they do things that boost stock prices in the short term, but make their company less viable for the long term.

The Dow is a relic from an earlier era when we actually had “industrials” in the US that made things. If we don’t start investing in making things in this country again, and in the research and development necessary to make things people want to buy, it doesn’t matter how low prices are, no one will be able to pay them.