March 1 is the end of the comment period where signing the petition will do the most good. If there are multiple people in your house hold, have each one sign the petition individually.

I think that the strongest line of defense for the moratorium may be that incinerators will never be a good solution no matter how much research is done. However, if research does eventually find a solution, that would be the time to spend money to build such a system outside the lab, not now.

If right now, 4 tons of waste go in, and 1 ton of ash comes out. This gives the impression that we have just gotten rid of three tons of waste. True, we have gotten it out of the landfill site, but then three tons of pollution went into the air.

If we can barely contain the solid waste pollution runoff in the landfill, why would releasing three tons into the air be better? Other than it gets it out of our sight, and gives it to some place else where the three tons that went into the air settles.

To make an incinerator viable we will have to make the ash and captured residue be a very high percentage by weight of the solid waste that went in. This may save space in the landfill, but the full amount of pollutants will still be in the landfill. The particles will just be much smaller, more solvent, and more easily washed away with rainfall runoff.

Until someone can show that all of these incinerator life cycle problems can be solved in the lab, then there is every reason to keep the moratorium in place and no reason to even go to a model sized system, let alone a full sized system.

Whatever money would be wasted in building a life sized system would be better spent in research in a laboratory. If this research never pans out, think of how much wasteful and useless spending this will have saved us.

The American Prospect has the article Wonder Warren. The article describes actions that Elizabeth Warren is taking on some reviews that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) ordered “to help settle a probe into illegal mortgage practices that shortchanged homeowners and, in some cases, improperly kicked people out of their homes.”  The OCC decided to give up on these reviews and spend their efforts elsewhere.  Here is some of what The American Prospect article had to say:

Enter Senator Warren. She and Representative Cummings have asked OCC and the Federal Reserve for all performance reviews the two agencies conducted during the program before nixing it; the amount of money the banks paid their third-party reviewers; and the total number of reviews, along with the percentages of those in which errors were found. “Public confidence in the banking system has been badly undermined by a widespread concern that large financial institutions are not held fully to account when they break the rules—and that consumers are not sufficiently compensated,” Warren and Cummings wrote in their letter to the OCC and the Fed last week. “It is critical that the OCC and the Federal Reserve disclose additional information about the scope of the harms found to establish confidence in the sufficiency and integrity of the settlement.” Warren’s belief in the power of transparency—which in this case means releasing public data whose collection the government mandated—to improve public policy has been a driving force even before she reached the Senate. For example, the CFPB Consumer Response Center—an initiative Warren championed when standing up the agency—makes available data from the organization’s complaint hotline about consumer-credit abuses and is an integral part of the supervision process.

While the information in the Independent Foreclosure Reviews may be flawed, it’s critical to know what was gathered. Too often in post-financial-crisis settlements with Wall Street banks, regulators settle on a remedy without determining or taking into account the level of harm. What’s more, without an accounting of the mortgage-servicer industry’s previous practices, it will be nearly impossible to fix the broken mortgage-servicer industry.

Yay, Elizabeth Warren.

Motley Fool has the article The Father of Value Investing in Action.

Last Friday at the Columbia Student Investment Management Association conference, Columbia business school released a 15-minute video called “The Legacy of Ben Graham,” which shows rare footage of Graham teaching, as well as interviews with some of his former students who went on to become great investors. It’s well worth watching.

The most insightful comment comes at 14 minutes and 46 second at the end of the video. Benjamin Graham is answering a student’s question as to why Wall Street experts are not more reliable in their predictions.

Your question as to why they are not more dependable is a very good one and an interesting one. My own explanation for that is this, that everybody in Wall Street is so smart, see, that their brilliance offsets each other, and that whatever they know is already reflected in the level of stock prices pretty much, and consequently what happens in the future represents what they don’t know.

The Daily Kos has started a petition which you can sign by following the link  here. Here is the gist of their explanation:

Just weeks after Democrats and Republicans reached agreement on a watered down version of filibuster reform, Senate Republicans are up to their old obstructionist tricks. More than 40 Republican senators have stated they will filibuster any nominee to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unless Democrats agree to gut the CFPB’s power to actually protect consumers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stated that if Republicans continued to abuse the filibuster, he might re-open the process to change Senate rules. Given this latest Republican move, Reid may need to re-open that process sooner rather than later.

Please sign our petition urging Harry Reid to re-open the process of filibuster reform in the Senate. We must remain vigilant and build the case for filibuster reform every time Republican obstructionism prevents the Senate from functioning as it should.

Perhaps The Daily Kos read my blog post of four days ago, Senate Republicans will oppose Cordray again for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.