Daily Archives: December 12, 2014

Shutdown averted following late-night drama

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MSNBC has the story Shutdown averted following late-night drama.

Note that 67 House Republican broke ranks and opposed the package negotiated and endorsed by their own chamber’s leaders – that’s a little more than a fourth of the caucus – which would have been enough to kill the legislation were it not for the 57 House Democrats who rebuffed their leaders and backed the bill. 



Please see my previous post Please Impeach The President Already, I Am Begging You to see Nancy Pelosi’s explanation of all that is wrong with this bill.


I am wondering how a certain friend of mine will react to this news.  He believes that the younger generation of voters is thirsting for bipartisan compromise.  Is this the kind of compromise that would satisfy him?  In return for funding the government with a bill that both sides could compromise on, at the last minute, the Republican leadership added what should have been a poison pill.  They are providing government funded protection to huge Wall Street banks to take excessive risks.  As Nancy Pelosi points out, if the risks pay off, the bank executives get to walk away with the proceeds.  If the risks lead to disaster as they did in 2008, the bank executives just walk away, and we tax payers pick up the losses.


I have been hearing about something called Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO).  See the April 2014 Fortune Magazine article Collateralized loan obligations: Our next financial nightmare.



Greed, stupidity, and slack government oversight fueled the mortgage bubble. The same thing seems to be happening today, but this time with leveraged loans and junk bonds.





Do voters think that the timing of rushing this poison pill part of the bill into law is just a bit of protection that will never be needed?  I think Jonathan Gruber’s remarks have been completely vindicated by this action of the Republican Congressional leadership.  It would be ironic if within days of the entire government (including President Obama) selling out the country to Wall Street, this whole CLO thing blew up in all our faces.


Perhaps, this time, when the government bails out the banks, they will nationalize them like they should have done the last time.  (And put a slew of bank executives in jail.)


    

    
                                    

                                
                                                            
                                                                    

                                        
    

              

          
Ali Soufan: Torture contractors shocked CIA interrogators
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MSNBC has the segment from The Rachel Maddow Show, Ali Soufan: Torture contractors shocked CIA interrogators.



Ali Soufan, former FBI special agent who took part in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the Senate torture report squares with his experience and why the CIA switched to torture interrogations they knew don’t work.




    





For a long time I have known about the claim from professional interrogators that torture is a counterproductive technique.  This is the reason why I am categorizing this blog post under Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive behavior “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the behavior was trying to produce.”


This especially applies to the ordinary citizens who still want to torture suspects.  Are they just ignorant of the facts about torture, or do they have some ulterior motive that I cannot even guess?


And now that I think about it, what about people in the Bush White House?  What were their motives?  Were they actually trying to silence the suspects lest they implicate the Bush administration or its allies?