Koch's quiet coup

What do Ryan and Cantor have to hide? It's not like they're the first bright lights of the GOP to speak at one of the Koch Brothers' periodic ultra-exclusive confabs. So why are Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor so secretive about their star turn at the podium of this prestigious event?

Neither Ryan nor Cantor were willing to talk about the appearance, before or after attending, and when a reporter from the NBC affiliate in Albuquerque tried to cover the event where the New Mexico governor was speaking, he was turned away at a checkpoint -- a mile from the resort.

Good to remember while everyone is obsessing about government surveillance that these uber-rich egomaniacs and their bought insider lackeys are hatching plots to take over the world. They may be crackpots but they're not idiots. They answer to nobody. It's no secret their master plan is to fuck the rest of us over so they can have all the things for themselves.

Halliburton charged with criminal acts

But of course it's Halliburton, which is apparently above the law so, no real penalties will incur.

Under the plea agreement, which requires court approval, Houston-based Halliburton will also face three years' probation, pay the maximum fine of $200,000 and continue to cooperate in the Justice Department's criminal investigation of the April 2010 explosion and fire on the drilling platform, which killed 11 rig workers off Louisiana.

The Justice Department said it would not pursue further criminal charges against Halliburton or its subsidiaries. [...]

Halliburton's energy-services subsidiary designed and built the well for BP. In early May, the company began an internal investigation to determine whether the number of "centralizers" — metal collars that help keep the well pipe centered — played a role in the blowout. Halliburton recommends installing 21, but BP chose to use just six.

Their computer models said it was okay. But no one can find them. They've disappeared. Nor do we know who created said models. The creators remain unidentified. But Justice says Halliburton offered "significant and valuable cooperation during the course of its investigation" so all is forgiven. They pay the maximum fine of $200,000 and get three years probation, whatever that means, and we'll call it even. Because you know, a 200K fine is really going to sting a corporation that saw total revenue of $28.5 billion in 2012[pdf].

What a country. Too big to fail means too big to jail.

All your government surveillance is privatized

As I said in the previous post, we're having the wrong arguments about domestic surveillance. All the chatter is about Snowden and Obama and Bush. What's being lost in the noise is talking about the policy. The bigger scandal than the surveillance is that the surveillance is being contracted out to private corporations. Take for instance Snowden's last employer from whence he apparently hacked his documents, Booz Allen Hamilton.

The company employs about 25,000 people, almost half of whom hold top secret security clearances, providing “access to information that would cause ‘exceptionally grave damage’ to national security if disclosed to the public,” according to a company securities filing.

In January, Booz Allen announced that it was starting work on a new contract worth perhaps as much as $5.6 billion over five years to provide intelligence analysis services to the Defense Department. Under the deal, Booz Allen employees are being assigned to help military and national security policy makers, the company said…

Think Progress points out Booz Allen Hamilton is just one of many contractors.

According to a 2013 report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a total of 483,263 contractors held Top Secret clearances in 2012, the highest level one can obtain, with another 582,524 holding them at the Confidential and Secret levels.

Think about that for a moment. How many more young and possibly delusional computer geeks might there be lurking in corporate cubicles with no accountability to the taxpayer at all? Some of those guys might be accessing your personal internet communications, not because they have to, but because they can.

Beyond that, it's not even cost effective. It's a myth that the private sector can deliver public services at a lesser cost. Private industry is profit driven, above all else. Atrios is right when he says "the security/surveillance state industry is just a giant grift, a big scam there to enrich certain communities in Northern Virginia."

Of course surveillance is just one area of government being run by and enriching private industry. Military contractors like whatever Blackwater is being called right now for foreign security forces and Halliburton for military support services are also sucking billions out of our national treasury for services the government could provide at a much lesser cost. It's not just the grift, it's the graft. These corporations are cheating us and even if they get caught cooking the books, or outright stealing, nothing happens to them. They still get paid and they get their contracts renewed forever. That's at the heart of the "small government" scam.

Corporate welfare is not social welfare

It seems some diligent (and one assumes large) shareholder of the cigarette megacorporation Reynolds American, forced them to disclose their contributions to various 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofits. They threw slush money into Grover's Americans for Tax Reform, the Koch boys' Americans for Prosperity and a couple of smaller fake "social welfare" groups. Considering these groups were part of a 501(c)(4) scam that spent about "$250 million to promote or attack federal political candidates" we can guess that Reynolds wasn't the only megacorp doing so. In fact, research suggests these 501(c)(4)s have become the preferred method for political donations over PACs precisely because they afford anonymity.

A lot of people are asking how they qualify as social welfare groups when they spend most of their money on political activity but I'm wondering how they can be defined as non-profits. Surely the corporations don't directly profit from them, but all the conservative ones are pushing policies and candidates that directly benefit the corporate bottom line. Nothing they do promotes the general welfare of the majority of the public.

Granted they technically qualify for the designation, but considering the effect of their work benefits only corporate interests, it seems to me they would be more properly defined as vehicles for legalized political bribery.

Break up the Too Big To Fail banks

Don't want to get too excited about this just yet, but it's the best shot at killing the Too Big To Fail beast I've seen so far.

Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act," or the "Brown-Vitter TBTF Act" for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.

Who knows if they'll get anywhere with it. Big Finance will be throwing around a lot of big money to stop them. But there are quite a few surprise supporters including some Republicans and The Independent Community Bankers of America. The latter have been reluctant to take sides until now. And it surely sounds like a real fix in this telling.

Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.

If it worked it would be a big step in restoring some balance to the national, and international, economy.

For whom the economy recovers

This isn't new, but it shows income inequality keeps getting progressively worse every day.

In short, our current obsessed-with-profits philosophy is creating a country of a few million overlords (shareholders) and 300+ million serfs (employees).

It is also resulting in employees sharing less of the corporate wealth that they spend their lives creating than they ever have before.

That's not what has made America a great country. It's also not what most people think America or other lands of opportunity are supposed to be about.

This is an old chart I've had saved for a few months. Read the link for the wonkery and more charts that show how quickly the gap has grown. Yet they call the workers, "the takers." Clearly they have it backwards.

Just one of those crazy accidents

Story got such wide play, I wasn't going to talk about the five year old kid who killed his two year sister with his very own gun. Then I saw the marketing stats for "My First Rifle."

They are available with different barrel and stock designs, including some made in hot pink to appeal to young girls.

Business has boomed since the company's inception in 1996, according to its website. In its first year, it had four employees and produced 4,000 rifles for kids; by 2008 it had greatly expanded its operations, with 70 employees and an output of 60,000 rifles a year.

Seriously. Sixty thousand of these rifles that shoot live ammunition are in the hands of kids? And please do click that link to see a photo gallery of the kids who are playing with them. It's a "crazy accident" begging to happen.

Why our health care costs so much

Ezra posts a fascinating long read today about an experimental health care program that saves money. It's based on a simple concept that doesn't require costly medical equipment. It basically consists of regular home visits to housebound elderly patients by registered nurses. It kept these patients who suffered from chronic but easily treatable conditions from ending up in hospitals. Apparently it worked too well.

But Health Quality Partners, with its emphasis on continuous nurse-to-patient contact, did work. Of the 15 programs, four improved patient outcomes without increasing costs. Only HQP improved patient outcomes while cutting costs. So Medicare extended it again and again — now it’s the only program still running under the demo. But Medicare has notified Coburn that it intends to end HQP’s funding in June.

Medicare mumbled something about the program not being scalable, which isn't really true. The real reason comes down to corporate control over our health care system.

But not all hospitals are run by the local Village Improvement Association. Many seek to turn a profit. That makes models like Health Quality Partners something of a threat. “If we scaled what Ken is doing,” Brenner says, “you would probably shut down a third of the hospitals in the country. It’s a disruptive innovation. It just guts the current business model.”

See also this:



And this:



The HQP program was only allowed to succeed because it was being sponsored by a group who weren't interested in profits. Meanwhile the industry trend is to ever greater consolidation under larger corporate umbrellas. They spend millions on lobbyists to ensure their business model endures in order to protect their bottom line. This is how we ended up with the Rube Goldberg reform bill we now call Obamacare even though an expansion of Medicare would have been much more cost efficient.

The clear lesson here is, for profit, corporate health care is neither about health or care. Not sure how it's possible considering the breadth and strength of the lobby that protects it but the only way to truly fix it is to take out the profiteering altogether.

Bigger pipelines breed bigger disasters

The tar sands oil spill cleanup in Arkansas is ongoing, not that you're going to see it happen. There's apparently a media blackout in place so the only video is being surreptitiously captured by locals. But here's something new. It's quite possible taxpayers would end up paying for a major tar sands oil spill, say if the KXL pipeline was built and subsequently ruptured. And this is why:

Companies that transport oil are required to pay into the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, giving the government a pot of money for immediate spill responses. The Enbridge pipeline in Michigan and the Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, however, are exempt because these pipelines are not considered to be carrying “conventional oil,” despite the fact bitumen spills are more expensive and more dangerous.

In a January 2011 memorandum, the IRS determined that to generate revenues for the oil spill trust fund, Congress only intended to tax conventional crude, and not tar sands or other unconventional oils. This exemption remains to this day, even though the U.S. moves billions of gallons of tar sands crude through its pipeline system every year. The trust fund is liable for tar sands oil spill cleanups without collecting any revenue from tar sands transport. If the fund goes broke,the American taxpayer foots the cleanup bill.

And how could this happen you ask? As the saying goes, follow the money:

Connolly’s story highlights the clear effects of the revolving door of money from politicians and fossil fuel companies keeping the safety standards and oversight low. In 2009 and 2010 fossil fuel companies like Enbridge spent $25.8 million lobbying Congress and in return they received subsidies and tax loopholes worth $20.5 billion. That’s a 5,800 percent return on political investment; about $59 in return for each dollar they spend lobbying.

Just how cheaply our politicians can be bought never fails to astound. Least they could do is whore themselves out at high class call girl rates instead of a $5 hooker on lower 10th Avenue.

The frightening thing is we already have thousands of miles of pipelines carrying who knows what kind of toxic fuel all over the country.



[original larger graphic]

Tar sands oil shouldn't be exempt from the fund. They should be paying double considering tar sands crude is much more dangerous than conventional oil. As Charlie Pierce informs us:

One question central to the debate is whether this type of fuel is more corrosive than conventional crude. Fuel from Alberta's oil sands can pose a greater risk if it is transported at a higher temperature or under greater pressure, Richard Kuprewicz, president of Accufacts Inc., a Redmond, Washington-based pipeline safety consultant, said yesterday in a telephone interview. Operators using modern pipeline-safety techniques can manage the risks by cleaning out the line more frequently or carefully monitoring how the bitumen is diluted, he said. "You just don't write off the corrosion threat," he said. "You've got to be sure you're managing it."

[Insert sardonic laughter] As Charlie so perfectly put it:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't all this bitumen-diluting and frequent line-cleaning, to say nothing of "modern pipeline-safety techniques" as a whole, cost, you know, actual money to the oil companies and their ancillary business partners, who are on the whole greedy bastards who'd soak your white-haired granny in crude like she was a Louisiana pelican rather than spend an extra dime not to? Thought so.

Every major disaster I can recall was traced to cutting corners on safety and maintenence. And none of these "greedy bastards" are going to do more than minimally necessary to clean up their mess either. It seems one added hazard of the filthy tar sands crude is it's so heavy it doesn't float. It sinks to the bottom of waterways. Three years after the major spill in Michigan the oil corporation had to be ordered to do more dredging in the river they fouled. Which they'll probably fight in court while it continues to lie there and quietly poison the water.

Does anybody really want to trust these people with bigger pipelines able to do infinitely more damage? I don't.

Consumption Junction

Finally got around to watching this video from MoJo that everyone is talking about. I can see why it's going viral. Best illustration of the sadistic inequity in wealth distribution I've seen yet. Worth six minutes of your time.



[Full size version]

If the one-percenters were actually doing honest work for the money, it would be justifiable. But they're not. They make their money by cheating the system. Thing is, they own everything, so no one with the power to stop them is willing to call them out. The appointed and elected watchers look the other way, for a pittance of the spoils and a bare modicum of social status.

But at the top it's not about money, it's about power. The Overlords of the World Economy are acquisition addicts. They want all the things -- literally. They won't stop until they've plucked the last "business opportunity" from among the wreckage of civil society, which by then will be stranded on a ruined planet.

Corporate boom spells workers' doom

Yet another article on how mega-corporations are eating our economy right out from under us. Corporate share of the national income gains are at a decade's long high, while the workers' share is at a decades' long low. The split hasn't been this pronounced in 50 years. And nothing is going to change until our overlords decide to do something about persistent under and un-employment. Unfortunately for the working class, they have no incentive to do so.

The sequester is going to make it even worse but Wall Street isn't worried.

But although experts estimate that sequestration could cost the country about 700,000 jobs, Wall Street does not expect the cuts to substantially reduce corporate profits — or seriously threaten the recent rally in the stock markets.

“It’s minimal,” said Savita Subramanian, head of United States equity and quantitative strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Over all, the sequester could reduce earnings at the biggest companies by just over 1 percent, she said, adding, “the market wants more austerity.”

Of course it does. An insecure workforce doesn't agitate for higher wages and better benefits. Good for the profit margin. That's not likely to change anytime soon because Big Corporate is firing people, not hiring them.

“Right now, C.E.O.’s are saying, ‘I don’t really need to hire because of the productivity gains of the last few years,’ ” said Robert E. Moritz, chairman of the accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Productivity gains being the code word for increasing the workload while slashing personnel. Workers are left with little choice in a high unemployment environment. They'll work harder for less because they're living paycheck to paycheck and need the job. Also, somewhat more affordable health care plans.

Derek Thompson has the charts to illustrate this sadistically skewed distribution of wealth. It's even more infuriating when you view it historically over the decades.

Addendum: It's even uglier when Dave Johnson recaps the trajectory in headlines only.

Why the price of gas is so high

I don't drive that much lately. The last time I filled up my car was about a month ago. Still I noticed this mysterious spike in gas prices:

The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline has jumped 45 cents in the past 31 days, according to AAA, the fastest run-up since 2005. [...]

Analysts differed widely on the causes of the increase.

They blame lower output from OPEC, investor concern about potential oil supply disruption and US refinery shutdowns for routine maintenance but none of it makes sense under the usual "supply-and-demand fundamentals."

Indeed, the price rise makes no sense at all. As West Wing Report noted on the twitter, "U.S. demand (EIA data) at 2000 levels for November." However, international demand is high. WWR gones on to tell me the price spread between U.S. oil (West Texas Intermediate) $95.64 and Brent Sea $117.51 is driving up U.S. exports of refined products. Obviously, "U.S. refiners are exporting as much as they can because foreigners are willing to pay more."

Which brings to mind the idiocy of the drill here, drill now conservatives. Republicans promise them if only we drilled more of our own oil, the prices would magically go down a couple of bucks a gallon. If only that were true. In fact, at this very moment we have so much oil backed up in the supply chain, America has run out of oil storage. The refineries can't process it fast enough to move it out.

But the real reason the prices aren't going down is pretty much market manipulation. Big Oil is shutting down refineries. And why, when prices are so inflated, would they do that you ask?

“Atlantic Basin capacity closures have improved refining fundamentals,” the nation’s biggest refiner, Valero, said in a slide presentation at a Credit Suisse conference this month. It estimated that nearly 1 million barrels a day of refinery capacity has been closed on the East Coast or in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the past two years, which Valero said allowed it to increase profit margins.

Profit margins. It's always about the profit. Cheaper gas would help our economy recover for everyone, but artifically manipulating the supply chain boosts the corporate bottom line quicker. Corporate welfare above country. Meanwhile, Republicans are fighting tooth and nail to protect Big Oil's tax breaks while insisting we need to shred the social safety net to save the Republic. And the GOP's useful fools embrace this sociopathic corporate con because, pisses off liberals. Crazy.

The price of corporate welfare

More proof that the Republican conservative whine about over-taxed corporations is a lie:

It hasn’t drawn much attention, but Facebook’s first annual earnings report contains an accounting gem: a multibillion-dollar tax deduction for the cost of executive stock options and share awards.

Even though Facebook (FB) reported $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits from U.S. operations in 2012, it will probably pay zero federal and state taxes—and even receive a federal tax refund of about $429 million—according to a Feb. 14 statement from Citizens for Tax Justice.

It doesn't matter what the official tax rate is, the biggest, most profitable mega-corporations don't pay that rate. In fact, most mega-corps pay no taxes at all.

How do they do it? Hire an army of accountants to game the tax code. Immoral sure, yet all very legal. But we can't possibly close those loopholes because, job creators! Thus we must starve granny because keeping the government's promise to the olds and taking care of the poors is bad. Give those deadbeats a crust of bread and next thing you know they expect free cheese too. They're eating up the profits. Can't have that. [photo via Mother Jones]

Elizabeth Warren goes back to Washington

The talk of the toobz today was about Elizabeth Warren kicking the SEC's ass at her first Senate Banking Committee hearing. She politely asked why no banksters had been brought to trial. This apparently unexpected inquiry left the SEC flailing, and failing, to come up with an adequate answer.

Our intrepid Senator Warren then proceeded to explain in great detail why the failure to meaningfully prosecute the banksters was not a particulary effective deterrent to criminal manipulation of the financial markets. And her sidebar on the double standards of the justice system was a thing of beauty. Here we have an unapologetic liberal with the power to change the national conversation and the courage to do it. Cheering.

Of course, not everyone found this exchange as satisfying. The banksters were not amused.

That set off angry responses to Politico's Morning Money. "While Senator Warren had every right to ask pointed questions at today's Senate Banking Committee hearing, her claim that 'nobody believes' that bank books are honest is just plain wrong," emailed a "top executive" to the financial newsletter. " Perhaps someone ought to remind the Senator that the campaign is over and she should act accordingly if she wants to be taken seriously."

Unserious. The ulimate all-purpose code for STFU with your liberal facts.

Elizabeth Warren is "unserious." She's one of us. I don't think she's going to STFU. We are blessed. [image via]

The roots of the poison tree

I've long been convinced lobbyists are at the root of corruption in government. Can't quite figure out how to cure the disease. I mean, hard to say we should just uproot it because, right to petition the government. But this mutation of lobbying rules should surely be pruned out.

The Post analysis shows that the interests of lawmakers and their relatives have overlapped to varying degrees on bills before Congress. In the past six years, for example, 36 congressional relatives — including spouses, children, siblings, parents and in-laws — have been paid to influence 250 bills passing through their family members’ congressional committees or sponsored by the members.

All of this is legal under the rules Congress has written for itself.

So maybe the problem is, they're writing their own damn rules.

[Dark Guardian Graphic]

Stupid spending priorities

I was surprised to learn we could eliminate homelessness for less than the cost of what we spend on Christmas decorations. Which is not suggest people shouldn't decorate for Christmas. I assume much of that money goes to small U.S. businesses like tree growers and florists.

But I'm posting this infographic because it shows where our government's spending priorities are focused. If the deficit alarmists were serious they would be looking at big money corporate welfare instead of nickel and diming social programs for working class Americans.

The corporate write offs for meals and entertainment looks ripe for elimination. Why shouldn't they be absorbing that themselves as the price of doing business. Particularly at time when corporate profits have risen to obscence levels while the working man's wages have lost ground. And, of course, there's no sensible reason to continue to subsidize the oil industry. Those should have been eliminated years ago.