Monday Morning Humor for 08/05/2013
Forbes: Bernanke Tells Congress: I Don’t Really Understand Gold
While Ron Paul is no longer part of the Congressional committees that grill Ben Bernanke twice a year, the Fed Chairman was forced to answer questions about gold on Thursday again. Asked about the falling price of gold, which is down nearly 25% this year, Bernanke admitted he doesn’t understand the yellow metal.
“No one really understands gold prices,” Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee, adding he doesn’t get it either.
Gold prices, which have been under intense pressure since at least last September, were actually up on the day, gaining 0.5% to $1,284.20 an ounce by 12:47 PM in New York.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/07/18/bernanke-tells-congress-i-dont-understand-gold/
Washington Post: Libertarian Democrats: A movement in search of a leader
Lost amid all the hubbub about Rand Paul and Chris Christie’s war of words over NSA security programs and the rising strain of Republican libertarianism is this:
A similar divide is alive and well in the Democratic Party — arguably just as much in the GOP (if not more).
Several Democrats from this movement will meet at the White House this afternoon to discuss their concerns with President Obama and Republicans.
For evidence of the widespread uneasiness on the left, one need look no further than the vote in the House last week to defund the NSA’s phone record collection program. While much was made of the fact that nearly half of Republicans voted for the measure, it’s just as notable that 111 of 194 Democrats did the same.
In other words, well more than half the House Democratic conference voted to defund a surveillance program overseen by a president of their own party. That’s a pretty stunning fact that has gotten lost in the current debate.
So why hasn’t this issue played out on the Democratic side like it has on the Republican side (i.e. in full view)?
Put plainly: It’s a movement in search of a leader. There isn’t one big nationally known player on the left that is pushing this issue in a way that Paul is on the right.
For now, the de facto leaders of the left’s effort to rein in the Obama Administration’s surveillance programs are Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and, arguably, the journalist who has been working with Edward Snowden to reveal the programs, Glenn Greenwald. While these two have been pushing the issue hard, they aren’t exactly political figures with huge built-in constituencies.
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BBC News: US economic growth at 1.7% in second quarter
The US economy grew at an annualised pace of 1.7% in the second quarter of the year, the Commerce Department has said.
That was a faster pace than expected by economists.
It was also up from the growth rate for the first three months of 2013, which was revised lower to 1.1% from 1.8%.
A slowdown was widely expected due to the impact of federal spending cuts, but also from the continuing weakness in the global economy.
In March, $85bn (£56bn) of public spending was cut as a result of a deal between Democrat and Republican politicians.
But the Commerce Department said that the federal government cut spending by only 1.5% in the April-to-June period, compared with a sharp drop of 8.4% in the first quarter.
The US economy grew by 0.4% in the second quarter compared with the previous three months. That compares to 0.6% growth in the UK in the same period.
The eurozone’s GDP figures are released on 14 August. The 18-member region shrank 0.2% in the first quarter – the sixth quarter of decline in a row.
‘Recovery’
“We have an upside surprise in the GDP, which speaks volumes for the job recovery that we’re putting together,” said Andre Bakhos, a market analyst at Lek Securities in New York.
“The recovery in the economy is starting to take root. This will be an interesting development given the fact that we’ll have a Fed announcement today.”
The Federal Reserve meets on Wednesday to make its latest statement on its massive bond-buying programme to stimulate the economy.
Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of US GDP. Official figures showed that consumers spent less in the second quarter than in the first, with personal consumption expenditure up 1.8%, compared with 2.3% previously.
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NBC News: ‘Stop with the napping’: TSA workers caught sleeping on the job
The chairman of a congressional subcommittee on oversight and management efficiency Wednesday called on the Transportation Security Administration to crack down on “the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect” a day after a watchdog’s report revealed a spike in TSA misconduct.
The TSA investigated and closed 9,622 cases of employee misconduct between the years 2010 and 2012, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office.
The figure marked a 26 percent increase in misconduct cases in a three-year period.
Thirty-two percent of the cases involved problems with workers showing up for their jobs, according to the report, and 20 percent had to do with security and screening.
The report was released ahead of a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday morning that included representatives from the TSA and GAO.
In one case mentioned in the GAO report, an employee left an assigned checkpoint to help a family member get a bag — later found to contain “numerous prohibited items” — past screening. The employee was suspended for seven days, according to the report.
In another case from January 2012, two former employees of the TSA were sentenced to six months in jail after they admitted to have stolen $40,000 from a bag at John F. Kennedy Airport, NBC New York reported.
Of the more than 9,000 misconduct cases closed by the TSA over the three-year period, nearly half resulted in a letter of reprimand, while employees were suspended in 31 percent of cases, according to the report. Only 17 percent of the employees found to have engaged in misconduct were removed from their jobs.
Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., the chairman of the subcommittee on oversight and management efficiency, said on Wednesday that a few bad employees contributed to a poor public perception for the agency.
At a House hearing on TSA integrity and misconduct by airport security personnel, Chairman Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., called upon them to “stop with the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect. Earn Americans’ trust and confidence.”
“While I know that there are many thousands of hardworking, dedicated employees working at airports throughout the country, and it’s unfair to generalize to the whole workforce, unfortunately a few bad apples can ruin the bunch,” Duncan said. “These findings are especially hard to stomach since so many Americans todays are sick of being groped, interrogated, and treated like criminals when passing through checkpoints.”
“If integrity is truly a core value, then, TSA, it’s time to prove it. Stop with the napping, the stealing, the tardiness, and the disrespect, and earn America’s trust and confidence,” Duncan said.
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OpenMarket.org: Detroit Bankruptcy Focuses Attention on Public Pensions
For people watching it from afar, the bankruptcy of Detroit — the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history — may have brought a sense of relief in the fact that they live somewhere else. But it’s also brought needed public attention to the state of city finances around the nation. While Detroit is an egregious case of municipal incompetence, corruption, and mismanagement, its problems are not unique.
In fact, one of the drivers of debt that brought the Motor City to its knees is common among states and cities: defined benefit pension plans, which guarantee payments independently of the level of the plan’s funding. This week’s cover story in The Economist brings some needed attention to the problem:
Most public-sector workers can expect a pension linked to their final salary. Only 20% of private-sector workers benefit from such a promise. Companies have almost entirely stopped offering such benefits, because they have proved too expensive. In the public sector, however, the full cost of final-salary pensions has been disguised by iffy accounting.
Pension accounting is complicated. What is the cost today of a promise to pay a benefit in 2020 or 2030? The states have been allowed to discount that future liability at an annual rate of 7.5%-8% on the assumption that they can earn such returns on their investment portfolios. The higher the discount rate, the lower the liability appears to be and the less the states have to contribute upfront.
Even when this dubious approach is used, the Centre for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College reckons that states’ pensions are 27% underfunded. That adds up to a shortfall of $1 trillion. What is more, they are paying only about four-fifths of their required annual contribution.
On a more realistic discount rate of 5%, the CRR reckons the shortfall may be $2.7 trillion. A similar calculation by Moody’s, a ratings agency, reckons that schemes are 52% underfunded.
This is a huge problem. But to effectively address it requires knowing how big it actually is. That is easier said than done, given that much of the underfunding is the result of fuzzy math that has resulted in discount rates based on overly optimistic investment return projections.
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Reason.com: California Student Who Had to Drink His Own Urine While in DEA Custody Settles With U.S. Gov for $4 Million
Daniel Chong, the California college student who nearly died after DEA agents put him in a holding cell in 2012 and then forgot about him for four days, will receive a $4.1 million settlement from the U.S. Government, according to the Associated Press. The AP also reports that “no one has yet been disciplined for the April 2012 incident and no criminal charges will be filed.”
Chong was arrested in April 2012 at a 4/20 party, and put in a DEA holding cell. In May 2012 NBC interviewed Chong about his experience:
In his desperation, he said he was forced to drink his own urine.
“I had to do what I had to do to survive….I hallucinated by the third day,” Chong said. “I was completely insane.”
Chong said he lost roughly 15 pounds during the time he was alone. His lawyer confirmed that Chong ingested a powdery substance found inside the cell. Later testing revealed the substance was methamphetamine.
After days of being ignored, Chong said he tried to take his own life by breaking the glass from his spectacles with his teeth and then carving “Sorry mom,” on his wrists. He said nurses also found pieces of glass in his throat, which led him to believe he ingested the pieces purposefully.
Chong said he could hear DEA employees and people in neighboring cells. He screamed to let them know he was there, but no one replied. He kicked the door, but no one came to get him.
By the time DEA officers found Chong in his cell Wednesday morning Chong was completely incoherent, said Iredale.
“I didn’t think I would come out,” Chong said.
The AP also reports that DOJ Inspector General is investigating Chong’s case.
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Click below for more over at Reason.com
http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/30/california-student-who-had-to-drink-his
The Daily Beast: Paul Krugman’s Nasty and Inane Attack on ‘Libertarian Populism’
It’s got to be a pretty good gig to be Paul Krugman. He’s rich enough to bitch to The New Yorker about not being able to afford a home in St. John so, sigh, St. Croix has to do. He’s got tenure at the second-best college in New Jersey, an equally secure gig at the second-best newspaper in New York, and he’s even copped a Nobel Prize (economics, but still). He’s asked for his opinion on pop bands in a way that I’m pretty sure Milton Friedman or John Kenneth Galbraith never experienced (thank god for small favors). “The New Pornographers are probably technically better than Arcade Fire,” he’s solemnly sworn to Playboy. “But what the hell? It’s all good.”
The man also known as Krugtron the Invincible is able to utter such fallacious conventional deep thoughts as “the Great Depression ended largely thanks to a guy named Adolf Hitler” and that the 9/11 attacks were just the ticket to goose the soft early-’00s economy in lower Manhattan (“All of a sudden, we need some new office buildings,” he actually wrote in the Times on September 14, 2001) and still be taken seriously. He’s repeatedly called for a a bogus alien invasion that occasions even more super-stimulative spending than we’ve seen already in this awful 21st century—an idea presumably lifted, unacknowledged, from the Watchmen comic books.
Best of all, Krugman has attained that rare level of eminence where he doesn’t even have to engage the very opponents he dismisses as beneath contempt. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, he just needs to wave his hand, mumble vague abjurations, and rest assured his devoted minions will finish his work for him.
Krugman’s latest target is “libertarian populism,” which he summarizes thus: “The idea here is that there exists a pool of disaffected working-class white voters who failed to turn out last year but can be mobilized again with the right kind of conservative economic program—and that this remobilization can restore the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes.”
This ain’t gonna happen, chuffs Krugman, because … because … because … Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)! Despite the fact that the former Republican vice-presidential nominee and marathon-time amnesiac is nobody’s idea of a libertarian or a populist, Krugman insists that libertarian populism is doomed precisely because to “the extent that there was any substance to the Ryan [budget] plan, it mainly involved savage cuts in aid to the poor. And while many nonwhite Americans depend on these safety-net programs, so do many less-well-off whites—the very voters libertarian populism is supposed to reach.”
Had Colonel Krugman ventured outside his ideological compound, he might have happened upon the writings of Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner. To the extent that libertarian populism has a policy agenda, it’s mostly thanks to Carney, who likes to write books attacking right- and left-wing crony capitalists. He’s libertarian in that he consistently believes that freer markets function more fairly and more efficiently, and he generally thinks people should be left alone when it comes to economic and personal freedom (he’s not an absolutist on most things). He’s populist in that he is basically obsessed with what he sees as concentrations of power and wealth among elites who rig markets, status, and more against the little guy.
Unsurprisingly, Carney’s libertarian-populist policy agenda has precious little to do with starving poor people to death or stoking white working-class resentment against dusky hordes (Carney is pro-immigration). Unless by dusky hordes, you mean Wall Street banksters and well-tanned pols such as Speaker John Boehner.
For better or for worse, it’s filled with prescriptions such as “cut or eliminate the payroll tax” (that’s the one that hurts low-wage earners the most); “break up the big banks and/or place stricter safety and soundness rules on them” (hmm, how does that help the Rothschilds again?); and “end corporate welfare” (Carney specifically name-checks the awful Export-Import Bank and subsidies to Big Sugar, which both receive bipartisan congressional support).
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Monday Morning Blues Buster: 07/29/2013
Monday Morning Humor for July 29, 2013
Market Watch: Attempt to curb NSA surveillance defeated in House
House lawmakers on Wednesday defeated an attempt to drastically curb a national-security program that collects the phone records of millions of Americans, after a tense debate on the balance between privacy rights and
government efforts to find terrorists.
The measure was narrowly defeated, 205-217, after last-minute lobbying by the Obama administration and House members on the intelligence panel, who said the program was crucial to national security.
House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio), who doesn’t often cast a ballot, voted against the amendment, reflecting nervousness among opponents about whether they would be able to defeat the bill.
The measure, from Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.), would have blocked funding for the National Security Agency to collect phone records unless they pertained to a particular person under investigation. The program came to public attention due to disclosures by Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who recently released details of two classified programs.
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