William Black has written the piece Bhide: Pick a “Boring” Fed Chair because Supervision is the Key and it requires “Dullness”.  There is a lot in the article that is obviously based on his own experiences as a regulator.

Bhide has just witnessed the greatest spree of elite looting in history, but somehow missed it entirely.  Had Greenspan and Bernanke understood that deregulation was “bound to produce looting” and given the “regulators in the field” their full support there would have been no financial crisis.  Greenspan did not muster even “lukewarm support” for the Fed’s supervisors – he attacked them savagely for daring to criticize the banks that were large control frauds.  Bernanke appointed two economists as his top (anti) supervisor to ensure he would not suffer their practice of speaking truth to power.  A Fed Chair who made it her mission to restore effective supervision would not choose “boring”, “dull,” or “bureaucratic” people.  She would be putting a giant bull’s-eye on her back and would ensure that she never have another boring day.

I wonder how  hard the American people need to be hit upside the head with the evidence of this obvious plundering by the elite bankers of this country before they insist on reform.  There is no reason why Elizabeth Warren should be so alone in her insistence on fixing the problem.

I have also often mentioned this point brought out by Black’s article:

Control fraud begat additional control fraud and created the perverse incentives that spread “echo” epidemics of control fraud through other professions (loan brokers, appraisers, and auditors) by creating a “Gresham’s” dynamic in which bad ethics tends to drive good ethics out of the markets and professions.

I observed this at the time of the dot com bubble.  Year after year people were making money hand over fist with ridiculous investments in these enterprises which were almost certain to fail.  The mutual fund managers who only made their customers 12% per year gains by making prudent investments were drummed out of the business because they weren’t making 90% returns like their colleagues who were willing to throw caution to the winds.  I wanted to invest with the cautious mutual funds, but they were disappearing right before my eyes.  Fortunately for me there were enough cautions mutual funds left to keep me protected from the dot com  bubble.

New Economic Perspectives (NEP) has the video NEP’s William Black appears on HuffPost Live.

The legal culture of big-time settlements can short-circuit the law, protecting wrongdoers from punishment, trial or even an admission of guilt. That’s just what the government has done for the major banks implicated in sweeping mortgage fraud. Is it too late to rectify the big banks role in the housing and financial crisis? Bill and other panelists speak with Alyona Minkovski on this subject.

I post this especially for reader DavidF who thinks that money spent on welfare is as serious a problem to solve as is the problem of the country’s elites robbing us blind. So here are my numbers as hinted at in the above video. I am waiting to see David’s numbers for his case of the money wasted on welfare payments to the poor being as serious an issue.

The Real News Network highlighted the video below titled This Is The Instruction Manual To Pillaging The World.

If my posts about The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and all the posts referring to that post are too poorly done or too verbose, the above video captures it all in a nutshell. (A little blue wording in this video, but if you’re an adult, you can take it.)

New Economic Perspectives has the post “Makers and Takers:” They’re Projecting Again!

The post uses this video below as its launch point.

Woman: “It kills me every time i hear senators, especially republicans, talk about those takers. they’re just taken. the takers. i paid taxes for over 30 years and i have a rare illness and now i’m disabled. the state of arizona raised the eligibility for a program that was paying $100 a month for my medicaid to 3.4%. consequently, i was cut off. $100 a month, which meant (breaks down) i could no longer go to physical therapy. do it intentionally to cut as many people as they can for as long as they can from benefits that are desperately needed and it’s just not right. we’re the takers.”

This is a powerful video in itself, but you don’t get the full import of the headline until you read the post on New Economic Perspectives. I think the following snippet makes the point.

That’s the point the DC/New York “villagers” don’t want to talk about very much. They’ll credit people with not being likely to vote for people who label them “moochers,” but they won’t credit people with understanding that the real “takers” are not themselves, but the very people who are projecting that insult onto them.

Maybe that’s because the villagers don’t intend to talk about who the real takers are. But I think that people are smart enough to come to understand that anyway. And when they do, there will be hell to pay for those who guilt-tripped them in order to distract them from the reality of the real takers and their outrageous takings.

The point about who the real takers are is one that is the subject of many posts on my blog.

Alternet has the article How Billionaire ‘Philanthropy’ Is Fueling Inequality and Helping To Destroy the Country. It gives another side to my feeling that philanthropy from billionaires might seem laudable, but if they had not used predatory practices to gain near monopolies so that they could have billions of dollars to give, the world might actually be a better place.

I’ll show an extensive quote from one section of the article to demonstrate why I am so upset with MIT for accepting a large donation from the Koch brothers to build a cancer research center and name the building after the Koch brothers.

David and Charles Koch, together worth $35 billion, have perfected this philanthropic misanthropy perhaps better than anyone else. Their Kansas-based Koch Industries is the second largest private company in the country after Cargill, with annual revenues estimated to surpass $100 billion. Together they control thousands of miles of oil pipelines from Alaska to Texas; fertilizers, minerals and biofuels; Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups and Lycra.

A research team at American University found that from 2007 to 2011, Koch foundations gave $41.2 million to 89 nonprofits and sponsored an annual libertarian conference. The report details how Koch Industries’ $53.9 million federal and state lobbying budget routinely goes hand-in-glove with Koch-affiliated nonprofits’ “public advocacy” for reasons having little to do with the public and everything to do with the brothers’ sprawling business interests. Koch lobbyists advocate for bills like the Energy Tax Prevention Act — which sought to roll back the Supreme Court ruling allowing EPA regulation of greenhouse gases — that are then supported in congressional testimony by “experts” from Koch-funded nonprofits.

Though private foundations cannot legally “be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests,” the study’s authors note that IRS enforcement is largely “sporadic and somewhat mysterious,” and even in the case of an investigation communications between the foundation and the government are generally kept from the public. The Koch nonprofit machine has exploited this loophole for all it’s worth, testifying before congressional committees at least 49 times since 2007.

For decades, Koch philanthropy has also waged ideological warfare within U.S. universities, contributing over $30 million to 221 universities since just 2011. Here, the payoff couldn’t be plainer. A 2012 report in Academe documented the Koch-funded coup in Florida State University’s economics department, showing how “in exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave FSU $1.5 million to sponsor two assistant professors, fund fellowships and shape curricula promoting free-enterprise doctrine. It then created an advisory board to distribute money to faculty and ensure their work aligned with the foundation’s ideology.

The Kochs have tapped many useful allies, academic and non, in their collegiate ploys. A year before the FSU story, Inside Higher Ed exposed how administrators at Clemson University cultivated the Koch Foundation to build its “Institute for the Study of Capitalism,” receiving $1 million for the effort. BB&T, the financial institution whose former chairman and CEO John Allison heads the Koch-backed Cato Institute, regularly pays universities to chair favorable professors, typically in economics. Cooperative institutions are rewarded with Koch dollars as a bonus. American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop found 10 such universities, where BB&T-chaired professors coincided with Koch cashflow.

Perhaps what they have done to economics departments in other schools will give pause to a certain reader of this blog who told me that we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth with regard to the MIT donation.  This reader has many personal connections into and pride for the Sloan School at MIT and the economics department at MIT.  Would he be so proud if those schools started teaching and preaching Kochian economics?

Any MIT alumni or alumnae out there want to join my protest movement of stopping all gifts to MIT and making sure they know why you are stopping?

The New York Times business section has the story Trash Into Gas, Efficiently? An Army Test May Tell.

In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several years testing a waste-to-energy system called the FastOx Pathfinder. The centerpiece, a waste gasifier that’s about the size of a shower stall, is essentially a modified blast furnace. A chemical reaction inside the gasifier heats any kind of trash — whether banana peels, used syringes, old iPods, even raw sewage — to extreme temperatures without combustion. The output includes hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which together are known as syngas, for synthetic gas, and  can be burned to generate electricity or made into ethanol or diesel fuel.

The naivete of this report would be astounding if I hadn’t mentioned this is on the business page. Do the reporters have the technical expertise to know why this story is highly doubtful from the get go?  Actually, a college course in physics or perhaps even a high school course might give you the knowledge you need in order to raise some fundamental questions.

A chemical reaction that occurs in a blast furnace at temperatures above the combustion point of the material put into the furnace will do a fast oxidation (FastOx) that is usually called combustion.  So there may be some materials whose combustion point is higher than the temperature of the blast furnace, but most will simply combust (also known as burn, also known as incinerate).

There are something like 118 elements (maybe 102 found in nature) in the chemical periodic table.  Unless we are talking about nuclear or radioactive reactions, one element does not turn into another element.  So the output from this process may contain “hydrogen and carbon monoxide”, but it also includes 99 other elements in the same proportions by weight as were put into the blast furnace.  What do we do with those elements after the hydrogen and carbon monoxide are extracted as syngas?

To generate the heat of a blast furnace requires some kind of fuel.  There is no mention in the article of this fuel as one of the inputs.  How much will the fuel cost compared to how much economic benefit will be derived from the useful products (minus the cost of disposing of the non-useful products)?

One of the useful outputs according to the article is carbon monoxide which is usually considered a product of incomplete combustion.  In minute quantities, carbon monoxide is lethal if inhaled.  I sure hope they have some great technology to make sure none of it escapes.  (Of course, they could have meant carbon dioxide which is not directly lethal except for it being a greenhouse gas that we already are producing in excess.)

As for solving the military’s supply line problems with supplying fuel in combat situations, how is supplying the blast furnace with fuel any easier than supplying diesel or gasoline to the field?  To get the byproducts out of the blast furnace and turn it into anything that can power a tank would require some kind of technology not mentioned in this article.

Tangelia Sinclair-Moore posted the article, A Scandal That’s Exposing Ugly Truths About the School Privatization Agenda  by David Sirota, on her Facebook page.

…Before all of these controversies, of course, there were plenty of ways to see that something other than concern for kids has been driving “reformers’” push to privatize public schools.

You could, for example, contrast privatizers’ pro-charter-school propaganda with Stanford University’s study showing that most charter schools perform no better — and often worse — than traditional public schools.

You could juxtapose the Reuters story screaming “Private Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. Public Schools” next to the New York Times headline blaring “Hedge Funds’ Leaders Rally for Charter Schools.”

You could consider that the most prolific fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was defined by a massive cheating scandal.

I naively thought that this was an ideological battle.  Thanks to Tangelia for posting this so that I could see that it really was all about money.  I should have known.  We all should have known.

I also had thought that Michelle Rhee was a true reformer, but I started having some doubts when I started reading her diatribes against some of the public school teachers.

Eugene Robinson of Washington Post Writers Group has written the op-ed A Lack of Spine on Egypt.

“America cannot determine the future of Egypt,” the president said. Which means the least we can do is stand for what we believe.

In the beginning, I almost bought the twisted logic that the Egyptian military was restoring democracy rather than staging a coup. How could I think that ousting a democratically elected president could be restoring democracy?  Maybe we didn’t like Morsi’s brand of democracy, but, as Barack Obama now admits, “America cannot determine the future of Egypt”.  We cannot tell them what to do, but we can decide what crimes we will refuse to abet.  By continuing our military aid, we are abetting the crimes the Egyptian military is now perpetrating. Using snipers to kill unarmed civilians is just beyond the pale no matter what orders you give to the civilians that they refuse to obey.

I wonder if it will take us 50 years to admit our role in this situation like it seems to have in the case of the 1953 coup in Iran. (See CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran’s Coup)

Two videos from The Real News Network. Don’t blame me if you are silly enough to follow the links below.

Why are Egyptian Liberals Celebrating a Massacre?

US Foreign Policy: The Moral Hazard of “Relative Evil” Necessary to Fight “Absolute Evil”

August 20, 2013

To any of my relatives who should stumble onto this post, I plead with you not to click on the following link.

Max Blumenthal: Something Snapped when Israel Attacked Gaza

August 21, 2013

Israel, Anti-Semitism, and Negotiations Without End

This is the final segment in this series.

If we use the history of native Americans as an example, perhaps in a future generation there will be memorials to the Palestinians who were pushed off their lands, the Jewish residents of Israel will feel bad about what was done, but they will get the “benefits” of living in a state without having to give any further thought to an uprising by the few remaining Palestinians.  After all, after the cleansing is complete enough, what can the people of that future generation do?

Perhaps the Israelis of the current generation should consider one difference between the native Americans and the Palestinians.  After the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, there will still be a huge population of Palestinians outside of Israel that will harbor resentment and a desire to return to their native lands.  Isn’t that the way the Jewish Israelis managed to get the state of Israel recognized by The United Nations?

The New Economic Perspectives blog has published William K Black’s article The FBI’s 2010 Mortgage Fraud Report Reveals Why the Banksters Love Holder.

The cutest quote from the article is:

One of the difficulties we have is that because the last two administrations have fanatical devotees of the cult of the Virgin Crisis – the myth that the ongoing crisis was the first in modern times conceived without sin (control fraud) – that it is exceptionally difficult to know what their creed is.

However, the short quite that is most indicative of the shortcomings of l;aw enforcement is the following quote”:

The U.S. Attorney for Sacramento, one of the epicenters of accounting control fraud, was foolish enough to attempt to explain why he did not investigate or prosecute the banksters:

Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. “It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,” Wagner said.

Wagner’s inability to keep his pronouns straight even when they were in the same sentence – “they” refers to the CEO, “themselves” refers to the bank the CEO is looting – was so embarrassing that he did not even try to respond to his critics. 

Black compares the prosecutions after the S & L crisis to the ones after the current crisis to emphasize how much the current law enforcement entities have fallen down on the job. The current executives in our law enforcement agencies seem to have forgotten all the resources at their disposal that have been useful in past frauds. Instead they turn to the perpetrators to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do to investigate the crimes. I am not talking about reformed perpetrators, either. These are the perpetrators who continue with their crimes. We know how well that worked out with the Whitey Bulger case. If even murder isn’t enough to get the FBI’s attention, then how can we expect them to be bothered by a few trillion dollars of fraud?