No, I’m talking about Robert McNamara, one of my particular historical nemeses, considering the number of important things that he messed up, destroyed or ruined. Not to mention the uncountable dead.

I have my own suspicions, but the Californians who have opinions who regularly read my journal can read this posting in the Mahablog (which I regularly read) and see if they agree about the breakdown of the political process in the Golden State.

Here also is a quick breakdown of who is paid in IOUs and who is paid in cash.

More about Daley’s efforts to sell off city parking meters and other property, and how his idea of ‘quick money now so I can keep services going now and the heck with the future’ isn’t working so well.

Also, there’s the damage that the Olympic bid will do to the parks system, and Daley’s pledge to the Olympic committee to cover cost overages that totally counters what he told the citizens of Chicago.

While retrieving THE FIXER from one of my off-air VHS tapes, I ran across the real-life story that the movie/novel was based on - see the story of the Beilis Trial in late Tsarist Russia in Wikipedia.  Wow.

NYT story about an FAA inspector who blew the whistle on a new airplane’s safety problems, and was silenced by the FAA and the airline by removing him from his job. Remember that airplane that crashed near Buffalo this winter? Yep, that airline and that airplane was the one in question.

Mr. Monteleon said his supervisors were too “cozy” with Colgan, and eager to help it keep its schedule; the airline had a contract with Continental Airlines to begin flights in theDash 8 plane — flying as Continental Express — in a little over a month after it acquired its first plane of that type.

In one memo retained by Mr. Monteleon, his manager indicates that he was reassigned because of his “conduct during a work-related duty” and because “the matter also required management to immediately respond to the operator’s scheduling needs.” The operator was Colgan.

Chicago Reader:

As for defending the deal, it’s pretty clear that the mayor’s central argument is that $1 billion in the bank today is worth more than anything 75 years down the road.

and also here:

In a damning 45-page report issued this afternoon, city inspector general David Hoffman said the Daley administration’s “hasty” consummation of the parking meter privatization deal–as well as the absence of deliberation in the City Council–cost taxpayers at least $1 billion.

“Because the deal was presented to the City Council with very limited information and because the Council scheduled its vote a very short time later, there was no meaningful public review of the decision to lease the parking-meter system,” the report says. “What is standard in the PPP [public-private partnership] ‘best practices’ model–informed deliberation, transparency, and full analysis of the public interest considerations–was not present here.

“In addition, the driving force behind the decision to lease the parking meters was the City’s short-term budgetary need. While we do not question the seriousness of the City’s budget problem that was presented in Fall 2008 because of the recession, the hasty, ‘crisis’ nature of the decision-making process meant that the short-term budget problems and the large upfront payment the City was receiving overshadowed all other legitimate, long-term, public-interest issues.”

Iraqi PM to Obama: If you release those unreleased photos from Abu Ghraib, my electorate will go up in blue flame and demand that the US get out yesterday.

” I know you tell us what to do, but you’re supposed to warn us when you tell us to do something that is going to get us into trouble with our constituents and the law!”

…from Think Progress.   Give it a look for a summary of why it’s major bad news, if you didn’t know that already…unless you think you’re Jack Bauer or something.

As Jesse Ventura said on The View:

“If waterboarding is OK, why don’t we let our police do it to suspects so they can learn what they know?” he asked. “If waterboarding is OK, why didn’t we waterboard [Timothy] McVeigh and Nichols, the Oklahoma City bombers, to find out if there were more people involved? … We only seem to waterboard Muslims… Have we waterboarded anyone else? Name me someone else who has been waterboarded.”

And no, I don’t care if half the Democratic leadership knew something about the bad stuff pulled off by Bush; they should have had the guts to stand up at the time and say - NO - but they apparently didn’t.  Them being gutless wonders is not a reason to excuse anyone else from prosecution.  The more in the dock or politically dealt with and squished on this, no problem.

My focus is on justice, the law, and good government.  Torture and other arbitrary government crap has caused an awful pile of hurt to most all of us in some form from the past; just ask a Japanese-American whose family was in internment camps during WW2, or blacks who had to deal with government-backed racism in the South (or North, and I’m talking the Bull Connor sort of thing), or those of us out there who have family who were destroyed in the Holocaust or disappeared in the Gulags behind the Iron Curtain.

From the Chicago Reader:  Part 1 and Part 2, along with the Easy Version,more concerns, and legal action from aldermen trying to kill the deal.

Over a year later, on December 2, 2008, Mayor Daley held a press conference to announce that after a rigorously monitored bidding process (as opposed to handing the deal to a company that employs his nephew) he was going to lease the meters to Morgan Stanley for–surprise!–about $1 billion.

It turns out to be a winning move for Mayor Daley. He gets the money–nearly 1.16 billion–up front. He’s pretty much free to spend it any way he wants. For all we know he may just want to put it in a big pile and burn it. Or spend it on the Olympics, which amounts to the same thing.

And it’s a great deal for Morgan Stanley, which quadrupled parking rates and can look forward to hauling in buckets and buckets of cash for the next 75 years.

As for the suckers who call Chicago home: sorry chumps, you lose–again. That parking rate hike Sneed alluded to was supposed to bring in about $55 million to the “cash-strapped city.” Instead, we’re only getting at most $20 million a year in interest from the portion of the $1.15 billion Mayor Daley has socked away. So that means we’re facing a $35 million a year hole in the budget where parking meter revenue used to be, which our mayor can either make up by raising fees or taxes or by cutting services, like, oh, fixing potholes.

Meanwhile, the city has informed alderman Scott Waguespack that the meters are worth considerably more than $1 billion–probably closer to $5 billion.

So Mayor Daley sells the meters for less than they’re worth and will have to raise fees or taxes to compensate for the revenue that’s going to Morgan Stanley instead of into public coffers. You pay more in parking meter fees and you get less in service. Is this a great deal or what?

Daniel Larison, the thinking man’s conservative pundit:

So, ironically, some of the defenders of the torture regime are making the best argument for the prosecution of past administration officials by their own invocations of past government illegalities. They are unwittingly reminding us that crimes unpunished today can easily become tomorrow’s conventionally accepted “correct” decisions. Every usurpation or instance of lawbreaking that is not challenged and reversed creates a precedent for the next round of usurpation and lawbreaking, and the fact that there is a non-trivial number of people in America who think that the illegal acts of Lincoln, FDR, Truman or others should have some mitigating effect on how we treat illegal acts under a more recent administration is one of the best reasons why crimes committed during the last administration must be investigated and lawbreakers must be prosecuted. Had many past administrations been scrutinized and their crimes investigated and punished, it is less likely that we would have to cope with an executive branch that acts as if it is above the law and which seems to be able to to break the law with impunity. If we fail to hold past administration officials accountable, we not only make a joke out of the rule of law, but we ensure that no legal or institutional constraints will prevent a future administration from committing similar wrongdoing in a time of crisis.

Another note on torture issues.   This post seems to put it all together that the prime people who got good, reliable information in World War 2 were people who followed the same gold standard we followed before George W Bush changed things around; that torture is only good for causing people to suffer and say whatever you tell them to say.   To get them to lie, to get them to scream (and doesn’t it sound lovely?) while you get off thinking you’re Jack freaking Bauer.

There’s been a tag on this journal for a while - sep_reality - and almost all of the tag instances are for situations where people were living in fantasyland, where they could make their own rules and create their own world where you are little people and they are the Big Bad Boss.    Where they could  trick themselves and others into believing that they knew their butt from a hole in the ground, and were running the show with endless ease.   The best trick, of course, was getting you to not understand what they were doing, and think it was awesomely awesome.

Somehow, through mindless showings of 24, or Kyriakou’s ‘torture made them sing’ stuff, now proven to be false, people got the very wrong idea that brave torturers got the goods on the bad guys and made ‘em fess up, saving us all.    And then the secret memos from the insiders started coming out of the Department of Justice and other areas, basically saying that people using the gold standard of persuasion got everything out of the Al Qaeda dudes, and then People With Orders came in and tortured the terrorists many dozens of times in a month’s time, demanding more information.  Information they didn’t have.

My guess is that as more things come out, the specific questions they wanted answered will come out.  And my strong bet is that the entire point of that torture was to get a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, something they could then present as a ‘Saddam did this, let’s get him’ excuse to invade Iraq.

I don’t know this, and I certainly have no love lost for Al Qaeda or Saddam.  But I don’t like it when people lie to me to get me to support them in something they wanna do because I’d never support it otherwise.  As an American, I would hope that we’re better than that.

And frankly, the people who gainsay ooh-go-torture forget the long history of this country towards the protection of the rights of the individual.  Watch this clip from A MAN FROM ALL SEASONS, about the need for the law, and you see, perhaps, that once you allow the law to fall, you may be the next one up when you end up on the wrong side of people who have more power than you do.   Manzanar can be rebuilt for new tenants anytime, and with less reason.

…which is the Organization of American States’ irregular meeting of the leadership of the OAS states (34) countries).  Interesting news coming out of it, of course.  Discussions between Obama and the US delegation on the one side, and some people Bush would never deal with on the other…discussions with the Cubans and Venezuelans and so on are very non-Bush.

Do I think that the Cuban embargo has worked?  Not really.  It hasn’t worked in 50 years of trying to bring-down-Castro, obviously.  It’s certainly helped out the Big Sugar producers in the US, some of whom are repulsive jerks, and about the only things you can say for it is that it has made Cuba the expensive problem child for either the Soviets or other lefty dictators with money who want to back him up.

I have no stars in my eyes about brutal dictatorships, and can’t stand the Cuban government and / or Chavez’s efforts to become El Jefe Por Vida in Venezuela, but I will note that what got them there was a great deal of idiocy and looking-the-other-way-while-the-rich-got-richer-and-more-brutal in both countries.    It occurs to me that stupid rich bastards who don’t give a damn about anyone else have caused a mighty amount of pain in the world and created revolutionary conditions again and again, and never realized that pushing people repeatedly to the edge will end up in disaster, eventually.

The key word there is *stupid*, allied with *cheap and greedy*.  As I’ve also noted before, most of the consumer protection things that I’ve sen in my time have rotated around that sort of root, where people cut corners and exposed the public to risks because they wanted to make a cheap, fast buck, and didn’t care about the problems they created for the public at large.  Goes for food safety, pollution, you name it.

You’d think some folks would learn…

I also found it interesting that the only ‘anglo’ in the bunch is now the PM of Canada; and if the Governor-General of Canada was there to represent the nation, there would be a shutout (she’s a Haitian refugee who came to Canada as an 11 year-old.

One of the ways that Chicago has been keeping its head above water is to sell off / privatize public money-making stuff, like parking meters and the Skyway tollway.  I frankly don’t see this ending well - partly because I don’t think that private operators will do that great of a job, and partly because there’s going to be a point in the near future where they’ll have nothing else to sell, and the poor operation of these ventures will bite them in the butt with the voters / taxpayers.   Thoughts?

I’m confused, folks.  Which side is the Republican leadership on; the side that wants to work over Wall Street, or the side that wants to Let Greedheads Free?

If you’re wanting to discuss the whole AIG matter rationally, I have some reading assignments for you:  Numerian at the Agonist, Ezra Klein at the American Prospect, Eliot Spitzer (yes, him) in Slate, Glenn Greenwald in Salon on finger-pointing, and Ezra Klein again on different finger-pointing.  And the details on the bonuses.

An amazing mess.  I think this calls for fraud indictments up and down the corporate ladder, and into Congress.   And at this point, I’m very much unsure that there’s any good way to get that bonus money out of the hands of the present and past staff of the London office of AIG.  As much as it feels good, I have to look at the law on this and figure out what legally could be done, especially since the bonuses have already been  paid to people working in another country who probably aren’t subject to  US tax laws.

See also Jim Warren on other misuses of bailout money, and other voices on accountability issues.  I also strongly recommend reading Felix Salmon’s finance blog regularly, along with the comments.

Anyone who proclaims that they have the one true simple answer short of ‘prosecute ‘em all’ isn’t as well informed as they think they are…and lack of being properly informed is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The FDIC didn’t take insurance premiums from banks from 1996 to 2006 - because, well, everything was doing so well, and Congress didn’t want them to bother the banks.

But Congress believed that the fund was so well-capitalized - and that bank failures were so infrequent - that there was no need to collect the premiums for a decade, according to banking officials and analysts.

Now with 25 banks having failed last year, 17 so far this year, and many more expected in the coming months, the FDIC has proposed large new premiums for banks at the very time when many can least afford to pay. The agency collected $3 billion in the fees last year and has proposed collecting up to $27 billion this year, prompting an outcry from some banks that say it will force them to raise consumer fees and curtail lending.

To possibly reduce the fee increase, the FDIC has asked Congress for the temporary authority to borrow as much as $500 billion from the US Treasury - up from the current $30 billion limit - in case the number of bank failures increases even more dramatically.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

The problem is that if Obama’s people are looking at a vast mess, what about the Republicans who allowed it to get out of hand in a big way?  Well, frankly, they don’t have a clue as to what to do, because they really didn’t have a clue about the whole affair in the first place.   Or they knowingly let their buds in for a slice of the pie without a care in the world for the long-term results.  And if Obama manages to pull this one off, they’re politically screwed; a grateful public won’t listen to them any quicker than they listened to Herbert Hoover after he left office, and for the same reasons.   So their only strategy is to take out their “money” wrenches (the monkey wrenches they used to get money out of lobbyists and contributors) and wooden shoes (sabots in French) and throw them into the works of what Obama’s doing, in the hope that they can gum things up enough to blame him for everything.

At the same time as they go on about how horrible earmarks are and the stimulus is, the same characters fight like hell for the earmarks for their voters.    Why?  Well:

Of course a certain number of Republicans are so solidly safe that they can get along one way or the other. But the bulk of members of congress need to be able to say to constituents and donors alike that they’ve done something. And absent earmarks, that would require members of the minority to forge some kind of compromises with members of the majority on the big issues of the day. Which is precisely what almost no Republicans seem inclined to do at the moment.

Of course, all the crash is also hitting the lobbyists and the buddies, who are being beaten to death.  The collapse of the Dow has beaten the crap out of many companies, especially those who where most dependent on a share of the financial services pie (like GE and GM and AIG, sucked dry and down by the debt-handling end of the business).  Also, the more you were dependent on wild consumer shoppies for bigger ticket items, and on lots of cheap and easy credit to keep your business going, the more you are well and totally screwed.    Once the spigot dies on those two taps, your business is irredeemable hash.

I’m not worried about a bunch of wanna-be John Galts out there who proclaim that you can’t regulate or tax me, and if you do I’ll pick up my toys and go home.   Go right ahead and try, since you idiots were the ones who got us in this mess with your bonuses-all-around, your bigger-size-of-the-company-means-my-manhood-is-supreme, your I-have-no-idea-what-it’s-doing-but-isn’t-it-purty management of your businesses.  Obama didn’t make you get stupid with wild debt stuff and wild ideas about jacking the quarterly reports and buying up competitors so you could hear the lamentations of their vimmen and the rending of their garments as you rode supreme through Wall Street.  You did that all on your own.   If that’s the sort of talent we’d lose, my heart will be broken.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to know that you can’t have CEOs whose companies have received billions in bailout funds going to court and threatening to sue employees to keep the public from knowing which executives pocketed millions in bonuses — and you can’t have them pretending that no bailout money was used to pay said bonuses.

You can’t have insolvent banks pretending that the problem is one of liquidity, and then using taxpayer money to protect their balance sheets instead of lending money to credit-worthy businesses and consumers.

And, ultimately, you can’t allow the same people who were part of the problem to be part of the solution. There is absolutely no way on earth that the same flawed thinking that got us into this mess will ever get us out of it. We need to clean house, taking the steering wheel away from the executives and the compliant boards that steered us over the economic cliff. They didn’t get it then; they still don’t get it now (see handing out bonuses, hosting spa retreats, redecorating, and throwing lavish parties while America teeters on the verge of economic collapse).

Blago appointed Burris’s son Roland II to a state job handling housing funds.  But it turns out that the dude (who was working in his Dad’s law firm until he got the new state job in September) has some serious financial problems - a huge unpaid tax lien to the state of Illinois and his house is about to be foreclosed on.  Some GOP sorts think that someone that bad with his own house money shouldn’t be allowed near government housing money….I just think that hackdom is part of the familial ethos.

• “The way to a woman’s BLANK is through her BLANK“,
• the Obama’s dog will be a BLANK,
• Nixon and LBJ had worried opinions about the BLANKs all around them, as did the FBI
• Jefferson Davis had a BLANK spy in his home and
  
• Teaching BLANK language in Summer School can get dangerous.  (h/t Deb Geisler)

• Camembert fanciers have pushed back on laws that require it to be made with pasteurized milk only.
• Bristol Palin, teenaged mom, now says that abstinence-only sex-ed courses are not realistic at all…no kidding!
• The US Postmaster General, who says the US Post Office needs to cut services one day a week and raise prices for the second time in a year, is doing the ridiculous-bonus-for-running-things-into-the-ground chacha, with a 40 % raise in the last two years, and a $135,000 bonus last year.   The Post Office had a operating loss of $2.8 billion last year.  Total with all perks and bonuses is over $800,000 a year.
• The guy who started a Muslim TV station in New York and pushed against US acceptance of cultural stereotypes of Muslims (see his TV station’s logo above) beheaded his wife for deciding to divorce him.  As usual, please remember: 99% of this sort of crap is not the fault of the religion as such, but the fault of idiots and madmen who use their own insecurities and tribal nonsense and twist things around to use their idea of religion and the law to justify their acts.    I could go on and on about John Yoo, but…