The article Working Together to Address the Failings of the Obama Administration is by Laura Bonham one of the founding members of Progressive Democrats of America.

This is a response to the article I mentioned in the post whose alternative title was There’s Just No Pleasing Some Left Wingnuts.

I find Laura Bonham’s approach to be one that I would more likely want to follow than one of constantly undermining the current Democratic Party.  If you punish your friends equally as you do your enemies, what is the incentive for your friends?

In There’s Just No Pleasing Some Robber Barons, Robert Scheer talks about the displeasure at some of the former corporate backers of Obama at his “unfriendliness” to corporate America.

I suppose I could have made a separate blog post titled “There’s Just No Pleasing Some Left Wingnuts” with a link to the article When Will We Take Responsibility for the Obama Presidency’s Failings? No one is proposing taking actual responsibility. That would be too much like work.

In the article U.S. Delays Test of Device That Could Seal Gulf Well there are two points of view expressed.

Kent Wells, a senior BP vice president, said scientists from the industry and government were reviewing the test procedures. “This test is so important that a decision was made to give them another 24 hours,” he said at a Wednesday morning briefing in Houston. “We don’t want to end up with a test with inconclusive results.”

That is the management point of view from the inappropriately named BP vice president, Kent Wells. Would you delay a test because it might be inconclusive?

Here is the more believable story from way down the chain of command closer to the actual work being done

A technician involved in the effort said that at the center of the debate was the issue of whether shutting in the well was worth the risk. A pressure buildup might damage the well bore, making it more difficult to eventually seal the well through the relief well.

Maybe the technician should be dubbed Mr. Wells.

In the article We’re in a Recession Because the Rich Are Raking in an Absurd Portion of the Wealth Robert Reich explains why growing income inequality is the fundamental problem driving all of our other economic ills.

… when earnings accumulate at the top, people at the top invest their wealth in whatever assets seem most likely to attract other big investors. This causes the prices of certain assets—commodities, stocks, dot-coms or real estate—to become wildly inflated. Such speculative bubbles eventually burst, leaving behind mountains of near-worthless collateral.

In other words, above a certain level of wealth, there is nothing useful left for the wealthy to invest in.

This is another version of the story  Emphasis on Growth Is Called Misguided, which I posted on September 24, 2009. In that post, I mentioned that

This story resonates with what I recently read in the book The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide: Common Sense Principles for Troubled Times by Robert H. Frank.

The Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill is a Valuable Step Forward is the subject of a blog on the Brookings Institution web site. According to the author, Douglas J. Elliott, Fellow, Economic Studies, Initiative on Business and Public Policy

“I believe that the bill, combined with regulatory changes that are in train, will move us perhaps two-thirds of the way from where we are now on financial regulation to where we should be. In the real world, this is grounds for real congratulations. It is impossible to achieve legislative perfection when transforming such a major sector of the economy. In addition to the obvious constraints created by politics and vested interests, we simply do not always know the right answers, given how complex and inter-related modern financial institutions and markets have become. Even experts legitimately disagree on important points.”

It’s only a blog, so don’t expect a lot of detail to back up the opinion of the author..

The New York Times article, Mortgage Investors Turn to State Courts for Relief, explains how big investors are using state courts to try to hold the banks accountable for the fraudulent Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) that they sold.

This item coincides with my starting to read the book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Part of the book is a retelling of the shoddy practices by the loan originators.  That information is not new to me.

On the other hand, The New York Times article explains the assurances that big investors got from the packagers of CDOs that such shoddy practices were not going on.  The banks told the investors that the banks had done due diligence to assure that mortgage standards had been maintained when, in fact, the banks had done no such due diligence (to put it charitably).

A small investor like me had depended on such assurance from firms such as RAIT Financial Trust. I thought I was being so smart because RAIT assured me that they were mostly in commercial and not residential loans.  What residential loans they had all had high credit ratings.  The CDOs they sold were all non-recourse which I thought was even more protection.  I did get some hefty dividends while the bubble was inflated, but I lost about 90% of the principle.  Fortunately my strict policy of diversification had limited the amount of money I invested in RAIT, and the dividends probably cut the loss to only 70-80%.

The article, U.S. seized opportunity in arrests of Russian spies, in the Washington Post at least passes the smell test.

With this depth of information in the article, I wonder if this had been known by the press, but was under embargo until the trade was completed. I am waiting for an article describing the press’s role in this story.

As all politicians and people in the public sphere should have learned by now, a cover up is often more serious than the misdeed being covered up.

The Patient’s Bill of Rights is one of the important steps in the recently passed health care reform legislation.

This post is my effort to help spread the word.  If we don’t spread the word, people are unlikely to find out about the benefits of the bill that will be affecting them this fall.

As I said in yesterday’s post, The Real Russian Spy Story, I had been wondering about the media’s flogging of this story.

It has been getting clearer in recent days, but today was the final clarification if we need any more.

There was hardly if any real spying going.  The FBI has been onto these people for almost 10 years.  Suddenly the government decides to close these people down.

We now know that the purpose was to generate some trading currency to get our own spies out of Russia.  There was no real threat to our own country.

If I could smell a phony story in this one, you would have suspected that the professional news reporters could also have smelled the same smell.

So we are left to conjecture how much collaboration between the news media and our government was going on to get this story hyped beyond all relation to its value as news. I guess the story was hyped about as much as it was worth for forwarding the government’s interest with respect to trading spies.

After CBS News’ report tonight about the confessions and deportations of the “spies”, I expected at least a confession on their part of how they blew this all out of proportion at the government’s request.  Of course, no such confession was forthcoming.  As I watched the rest of the news, I kept saying to Katie Couric, “And you expect us to believe what you are telling us now given how you have been deceiving us over the past week?”

If it was not collusion between the government and the media, it is surprising that the people in the media don’t admit how badly they were taken in.

To one of my friends who thought the Russian “spies” should have been shot, I ask, “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” I know that the answer is “No I am not ashamed.  I was not taken in by this story.  The crimes these people committed are much worse than our government is letting on.  Glenn Beck told me so.  And I can tell the difference between a lie and the truth.”

Unfortunately, I am at a  disadvantage with this friend because I do not believe I can always tell what is a lie and what is the truth.