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Class Warfare
Warrantless surveillance "Stellar Wind" data took down Eliot Spitzer. And very nicely timed that was, too...
Class Warfare Corporatism Department of Now It All Makes Sense Stellar Wind
Mon, 12/15/2008 - 10:51am — lambert
[Nobody seems to have noticed this, so I'll sticky it. I think the "Stellar Wind" story is interesting for many reasons, one of which is that it merges two stories we've followed for some time: warrantless surveillance and The Big Shit Storm. -- lambert]

A throwaway paragraph in Spiky's scoop:

[Under the secret and illegal "Stellar Wind" program of domestic warrantless surveillance,] NSA was also able to access, for the first time, massive volumes of personal financial records—such as credit-card transactions, wire transfers and bank withdrawals—that were being reported to the Treasury Department by financial institutions. These included millions of "suspicious-activity reports," or SARS, according to two former Treasury officials who declined to be identified talking about sensitive programs. (It was one such report that tipped FBI agents to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's use of prostitutes.) These records were fed into NSA supercomputers for the purpose of "data mining"—looking for links or patterns that might (or might not) suggest terrorist activity.

Now, that's very, very interesting, isn't it? Read more…

» lambert's blog 7 comments
Enough already with the references to dictatorships.
Class Warfare Department of Appointments From Hell
Thu, 12/11/2008 - 12:02pm — elixir
At the risk of deflating my capital (even further) here at the Mighty Corrente Building, I'm voicing a concern/pet peve. Much like the abuse of the term "gate", the word czar is now tacked on to every government appointment that doesn't currently have an official label. Besides having a major problem with these appointments, in and of themselves, I'd rather not give the appointees the idea that they can exercise power without concern. Didn't we have 8 years of that w/ our own little dictator, George Bush, who intoned that running our country would "be a lot easier if this were a dictatorship."

I think my gag reflex kicked in when the cutesy "car czar" was coined. Read more…

» elixir's blog 4 comments
Is It Safe?
Bush Torture Policies Class Warfare Disinformation Double-Ply Journalism Homeland Insecurity Department of Now It All Makes Sense class war fascism SCLM security Villagers
Sat, 12/06/2008 - 7:57pm — chicago dyke
Hoss makes a good point about this utterly devastating critique from Digby on yet another shitstain excuse for a piece of journalism, but I'd like to make a gooder point, if I may. I actually suffered to read Nooner's entire article, and what struck me was the completely self-absorbed tone and perspective she employed. Which isn't really surprising unless like me you tend to avoid that sort of writing, but still, what does Pegster really mean when she says "Bush kept us safe?"

Surprisingly, even the comment boards at the WSJ took her to task for such a ridiculous and willfully blind assertion of facts screamingly in evidence to the contrary. But she wasn't really talking about "safety" and "national security" in the way that you and I do. She was talking about how Bush has kept Villagers and the very wealthy safe...from us.

If you can stomach it, follow the link at Digby's (I won't give the WSJ linklove here) and read the piece and see if you agree with me. It's all there. Sneering condescension for the new "oh my god he's black!!1!" president who can't possibly be smart enough to govern without the advice and consent of the Village on account of his race, the usual hatred for HRC and her lack of membership in the Kewl Kidz club, the casual dropping of elites status and invitation to the 'right' parties, and most importantly for me, a soulful review of the material culture of her world, in the form of people's (read: people like her) homes. Ah, how I miss being so close to McClean and all those monstrous, sprawling megahomes that would've made Scarlett O'Hara blush, after she married Rhett for his money.

But Noonan's pride and defense of Bush are telling to me, for they reveal what it is she really fears: masses of angry, didn't-go-to-the-right-Ivy, showering after work DFHs and Flyover rubes, beating down her doors in angry mobs, demanding a return for all the money her class has stolen from us, and acting in full command of the rights they've taken away from us. Noonan knows that Terraists will never darken any doorstep that only she and her kind may enter freely. But now that Bush is finally leaving, her nervousness is increasing. Like so many wingers, I have no doubt she sits around in frenzied masturbation, mentally and perhaps otherwise, daydreaming of "Red Dawn" scenarios and "24" episodes, safe in the knowledge that her Hero Bush and the rest of the Terror Warriors will keep her Village cocktail parties Free, just like the Constitution says they should be. But that time is coming to an end, and when she relates the question of Republicans at her party "are still we important?" she really means "do we still have the clout to keep them from coming after us for all our crimes? I'd like to say, "No, It is not safe." We'll see if I get that chance Read more…

» chicago dyke's blog 4 comments
Where'd the two trillion go, Hank?
Class Warfare Department of Analytical Tools bailout Hank Paulson TARP
Fri, 12/05/2008 - 1:38pm — lambert
Is it "gone where the woodbine twineth"?

Bloomberg's filed a FOIA request to find out what we don't know, which is good news, since our extremely courageous, highly functional, and secretly progressive Democratic Party hasn't so much as sent out a sternly worded letter, let alone held hearings. I wonder why? Read more…

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Yes, fear and the lash do work
Class Warfare
Wed, 12/03/2008 - 12:05pm — lambert
Bloomberg:

U.S. worker efficiency rose more than forecast in the third quarter and labor costs increased less than anticipated, signaling company efforts to rebuild profits are paying off [except for the workers, of course].

Productivity, a measure of employee output per hour, rose at a 1.3 percent annual rate, compared with a 1.1 percent gain estimated last month, revised figures from the Labor Department today in Washington showed. Labor costs climbed at a 2.8 percent rate, less than the 3.6 percent pace forecast. ... Read more…

» lambert's blog 1 comment
"They work every day" -- in Mumbai bombing
Class Warfare
Sat, 11/29/2008 - 10:27am — lambert
Reuters:

Staff emerge as heroes in Mumbai hotel sieges
MUMBAI (Reuters) - Prashant Mangeshikar could be dead, one of more than a hundred victims of militant attacks across Mumbai landmarks, if it had not been for an employee at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Mangeshikar, his wife and daughter were in the foyer of the 105-year-old hotel on Wednesday night when Islamist gunmen opened indiscriminate fire in one of a series of coordinated attacks in India's financial capital. Read more…

» lambert's blog 5 comments
CEOs thankful for wealth redistribution
Class Warfare
Thu, 11/27/2008 - 10:05pm — lambert
Upward.*

Wonkroom (via Ygles):

The ILO found that between 1995 and 2007, real wage growth in the United States was essentially 0 percent, and in 2009 wages will “decline by 0.5 percent in industrial countries and grow by no more than 1.1 per cent globally.” The Center for American Progress Action Fund has found that weekly wages were actually 0.3 percent lower in June 2008 than they were in March 2001.

This stagnation — which occurred at the same time that CEO pay steadily increased — has led to severe income inequality. The ILO found that the U.S. is one of the countries in which “the gap between top and bottom wages has increased most rapidly.” Indeed, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported recently that “in the United States, the richest 10 percent earn an average of US$93,000 — the highest level in the OECD. The poorest 10 percent earn an average of US$5,800 — about 20 percent lower than the OECD average.”

And, of course, there are social consequences, outside Versailles, at least: Read more…

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"The Western Financial System We Knew Has Collapsed"
Class Warfare Corporatism Department of Now It All Makes Sense banking industry corporatism economic collapse
Wed, 11/26/2008 - 12:34pm — BDBlue
That's a quote from William Buiter, courtesy of naked capitalism. You should read the entire naked capitalism post, but a couple of things in it got me thinking about this interesting discussion between ohio and badger on the idea of bubbles in essential goods and services (like housing, energy) as opposed to bubbles in non-essentials (like tech stocks). And about how we decide in times of crisis - or collapse - what we save and what we don't. Read more…

» BDBlue's blog 11 comments
(Tranche Town Rock) You reap what you sow
Class Warfare
Tue, 11/25/2008 - 8:59pm — lambert
Via Susie. Just go read; it's all about how infestment banking really worked, by the author of Liars Poker. It's long, but it's real reporting that will help you frame what you read in Bloomberg every day. These paragraphs caught my eye:

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust, carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.

But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says. ... This was Moody’s, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett.

And this: Read more…

» lambert's blog 2 comments
Wanted: a collection of basic skill sets
Class Warfare Department of Why Can't We Do That?
Thu, 11/20/2008 - 12:35am — Sarah
Lambert's been really good to us at Corrente, collecting the fiction and the recipes into Books.
I think he also did this for the winemaking.

I'd like to know what others would like to see books on (that is, all the posts on that topic saved in one place, and available without a special password). For starters, I'd like to see one on needlecrafts (knitting, crochet, tatting, spinning have all been discussed here).

Is anybody else interested? Donut recipes, for example, are not exactly a basic life skill; but like popcorn strung on Christmas trees, donuts make life more fun. :*) Read more…

» Sarah's blog 6 comments
Wonder how long it'll take
Class Warfare Department of When Foil is not Foily
Wed, 11/19/2008 - 2:24pm — Sarah
before realization sets in, and even the Kool-Aid addicts will recognize that a Democratic president -- any Democratic President, but particularly a historic one -- will be hostage to the same Village Clinton was, and Carter before him, and LBJ before them?
Government is like a freight train. It takes a long time to get the thing in motion, even longer to stop it, and changing its direction without tracks on the ground leading the way you want to go is simply not going to happen. It's economics, it's politics -- and it's simple physics.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Read more…

» Sarah's blog 1 comment
Good news from the Dems on bailout oversight: Elizabeth Warren named to panel
Class Warfare Haves, Have Nots, and Have Mores Elizabeth Warren
Sat, 11/15/2008 - 5:34pm — lambert
Here's the announcement:

Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard University, where her research areas include bankruptcy and commercial law and financially distressed companies. She serves on the FDIC’s Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion and previously served as Vice President of the American Law Institute and as an advisor to the National Bankruptcy Review Commission.
(The other guys are Richard Neiman, New York State’s Superintendent of Banks, and Damon Silvers, of the AFL-CIO.) Looks like Leader Nance did something right, for once. Here's an earlier post where we drew attention to Elizabeth Warren, quoting her as follows: Read more…

» lambert's blog 13 comments
What if ...
Class Warfare Department of The Happy Dance
Thu, 11/13/2008 - 5:41pm — Sarah
People who have skills set out to share them, teach them, pass them down?
People who know ways of doing things simply and cheaply chose to hand along that knowledge?
People decided it was better to repair what they already had than buy new?
People figured out that reduce, reuse, recycle is a strategy for getting ahead financially?

» Sarah's blog 7 comments
Like a Library
Class Warfare Department of Why Can't We Do That?
Thu, 11/13/2008 - 3:48pm — Sarah
With very few exceptions, even right-wing nutjobs don't mind libraries (I know a few who think it's too big a tax burden).

Librarians rock, though. They stand up to the FBI and the Patriot Act. They understand confidentiality and the importance of the constitution.

Why don't we have similar agents for universal health care as we have for universal access to information?

Read more…

» Sarah's blog 4 comments
Trifecta?
Class Warfare Department of No! They Would Never to Do That!
Thu, 11/13/2008 - 1:53pm — Sarah
How much money has Sun Myung Moon poured into the right-wing media's rise? Avedon, writing at Atrios' place, seems to think it's a lot, and that it's been pretty effective.

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Lies Repeated on the View
Class Warfare Religious people are the best people
Tue, 11/11/2008 - 1:00pm — Sarah
Misinformation, misinterpretation, and downright lying on the ABC "talk show" aimed at "informing" women (h/t Atrios):I don't have a dog in this fight, except an interest in not seeing more people made needlessly miserable. As late as 1967 thirty states in the US forbid interracial marriage. In case that seems like a long time, Nixon was running for his first term -- six Presidents ago. Read more…
» Sarah's blog 7 comments
Cooties
Class Warfare Department of Now It All Makes Sense
Fri, 11/07/2008 - 4:43pm — Sarah
Cooties -- now that's a venal, petty form of prejudice we all recognize from childhood, ickiness personified. Read more…

» Sarah's blog 5 comments
Texas: One Woman's Vote for Obama ...
Class Warfare Department of The Happy Dance
Wed, 10/29/2008 - 3:35pm — Sarah
as reported by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, "fills her with joy."

photo by Larry Kolvoord, Austin American Statesman

Please give Ms. Jones a moment's respect.

This lady's vote says something important about voting, about Texas, and about freedom. That she can vote, this year, for a black man for President -- and have a chance to win! -- is a world-shattering thought, isn't it? In the USA, it's possible that a black man could be elected President this year. The wall behind her says something important too -- something we often forget, or deny -- look at the photos. There's a story there -- there's history there, in a very personal setting. Read more…

» Sarah's blog 15 comments
Jim Hightower Gets It Right: Subprime BORROWERS Not to Blame
Class Warfare Department of How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
Wed, 10/29/2008 - 9:42am — Sarah
Despite the feverish bleating of the highly-lathered right wing voices desperately trying to save Wall Street's ponzi-scheme freedoms. Bush was right, too. I hate how he and his cronies take, take, take, take -- and that they remain free to do so. Those of us who work for what we have -- a home, a vehicle, a little savings against a rainy day, tuition for our kids' college even -- shouldn't have to be robbed every 20 years or so to finance the lifestyles of the "rich" and "famous".

» Sarah's blog 2 comments
It Ain't Over Yet -- But 5-and-3 So Beats 4-and-4!!!
Class Warfare Department of Changing the Subject Cowboys
Sun, 10/26/2008 - 3:33pm — Sarah
Fewer mistakes and a defense that, for a change, didn't cave.
Wade Phillips' input seems to have made a difference for the Cowboys' D.
Roy Williams seems to be making the hook-up with Brad Johnson that Terrell Owens can't manage. The bad news: Jason Witten got hurt today.


Welcome home, Roy Williams!

Video

UPDATE: DMN hater Tim McMahon agrees with me: Read more…

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Attack Hoax -- how should Drudge, Politico, etc. respond?
Class Warfare Department of No! They Would Never to Do That!
Sat, 10/25/2008 - 4:41am — Sarah
Fox News and Politico carried the now-discredited story of a politically-motivated attack on a white 20-year-old woman who was in Pittsburgh to volunteer for the GOP. She has since come forward and admitted her story was false.She has a history of mental illness; may she find the help she needs.But what of the media -- some of it "mainstream," much of it Web-based -- where the story broke, grew, and spawned outrage?

Shades of Jessica Lynch ... only worse.

» Sarah's blog 13 comments
Harvest MetaWaxing: CD on The Franchise
Class Warfare Corporatism Republican Playbook Department of Now It All Makes Sense meta blogging is the cure for harvest time fatigue
Thu, 10/23/2008 - 1:40pm — chicago dyke
[Ed: This post will make much more sense to you if you've ever worked for a large, inflexible corporation or hierarchal entity in which a bunch of incompetent, juvenile, clannish doods get to ruin everything, blame you for it, make you do all the work, and take all the credit when things do go right. But it's honestly not meant to be bitter retaliation about anything specifically personal or recent; I'm truly glad not to be part of that world anymore and I'm just waxing meta.]

Back during the dark days of the ex, he and I had a conversation about a frustrating moment he'd had at work that day. Blabbity blabbity, "...and why does he have to be such an asshole about it?" he bitched. He was speaking about his 'regional manager,' from the perspective of being the store manager most directly under Mr. Asshole. I said, "Because they always are. They have to be. The franchise requires it."

At the time, I was specifically speaking of the large corporation they both worked for, and the business model their company employed. Over the years, I've come to think of a lot of politicians and members of the media, and others, in similar ways. Waxing meta, blogger that I am, I think of the people we find ourselves talking about, the people who are making decisions for us "in our best interest" but so often against our will, as members of The Franchise. A sort of super-octopus of power and control that mimics/constructs a set of behaviors and relationships common to a smaller corporate specific.

Getting back to the asshole regional guy, it's not a coincidence that he was a rock ribbed Republican. White guy, exurban dweller, libertarian silliness clouding his occasional and normally laughable attempt a political philosophizing, cut right from the Contract on America cloth. Mammon was his god, if his wife did go to the family church now and again. Life was on the road, but only until he proved himself enough- normally by beating down local managers and exhorting them to follow the corporate manual of how best to beat the slaves into squeezing more blood from stones. Read more…

» chicago dyke's blog 13 comments
Pro-America America and "Real" Virginia
Class Warfare gentrification Patriotism
Wed, 10/22/2008 - 5:25am — Paul_Lukasiak
The Villagers are all aflutter because the McCain campaign and its surrogates are are talking about stuff like "the pro-America" parts of the country, and "real" parts of the state.

But you know what? Some areas of this country are a lot more patriotic than others. In some parts of the country, its tough to find a flag displayed on the Fourth of July and Memorial Day. In other places, flag display on "patriotic" holidays is the norm -- the places where you didn't wait until 9-11 to wear a flag pin. Read more…

» Paul_Lukasiak's blog 29 comments
Drill, Baby, Drill and Mine, Baby, Mine
Class Warfare Department Of Stop it! You're killing Everything!
Sun, 10/19/2008 - 7:23pm — Sarah
Those are the key phrases in Sarah Palin's answers to the nation's energy needs. In Scranton on the 14th, and in Roswell today, McCain running-mate Sarah Palin repeats the drumbeat.

In discussing Mr. McCain's plans to get American back on the road to energy independence, Mrs. Palin called it a national security issue. The governor said there is more coal in the United States than there is oil in Saudi Arabia and promised Pennsylvania, with its coal reserves, will have a key role to play.
"Drill, baby, drill, and mine, baby, mine," Mrs. Palin said as the crowd roared its approval. Read more…

» Sarah's blog 6 comments
McClatchy: Don't Buy the Hype on Home-Buyers' Fault
Class Warfare Department of All The Damn Gall
Sat, 10/11/2008 - 5:57pm — Sarah
Rightwing radio is pushing a meme: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac failed, precipitating the finance crisis, because of the federal law mandating loans to minority home buyers. It's a crock, people, and McClatchy has the proof!

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

But the truth has never played well over the likes of Limbaugh's radio shows, has it? Read more…

» Sarah's blog 12 comments
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