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Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank: David Reilly

Commentary by David Reilly

Dec. 30 (Bloomberg) — To close out 2009, I decided to do something I bet no member of Congress has done — actually read from cover to cover one of the pieces of sweeping legislation bouncing around Capitol Hill.

Hunkering down by the fire, I snuggled up with H.R. 4173, the financial-reform legislation passed earlier this month by the House of Representatives. The Senate has yet to pass its own reform plan. The baby of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the House bill is meant to address everything from too-big-to-fail banks to asleep-at-the-switch credit-ratings companies to the protection of consumers from greedy lenders.

I quickly discovered why members of Congress rarely read legislation like this. At 1,279 pages, the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act” is a real slog. And yes, I plowed through all those pages. (Memo to Chairman Frank: “ystem” at line 14, page 258 is missing the first “s”.)

The reading was especially painful since this reform sausage is stuffed with more gristle than meat. At least, that is, if you are a taxpayer hoping the bailout train is coming to a halt.

If you’re a banker, the bill is tastier. While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises.

Nuggets Gleaned

Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank’s handiwork:

– For all its heft, the bill doesn’t once mention the words “too-big-to-fail,” the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery.

– Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule.

– Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can’t authorize these funds unless “there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back.” Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well.

via Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift From Barney Frank: David Reilly – Bloomberg.com.

In the dead of night on December 17, 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama placed the United States of America under the authority of the international police organization known as INTERPOL, granting the organization full immunity to operate within the United States.

U.S. placed under international police-state.

The FDA approved the spraying of some foods with viruses in an effort to stop certain bacteria.

The spray isn’t intended to battle E.coli but to destroy the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes.

Listeria is a reasonably nasty bacteria found in soil, water and the intestines of food-producing animals. Animals who carry listeria can spread it to meat, dairy products or to other products that roll around a processing plant en route to your plate.

Roughly 2,500 people in the United States become seriously ill with listeriosis each year, and of those, about 500 die.

via Viral Meat Spray: Advancing Food Safety? – ABC News.

By Jonathan Petre, Mail on Sunday Reporter and Tom Harper, Mail on Sunday Reporter

Last updated at 6:41 PM on 27th December 2009

Phone companies have criticised Britain’s growing ’surveillance culture’

Telecoms firms have accused the Government of acting like the East German Stasi over plans to force them to store the details of every phone call for at least a year.

Under the proposals, the details of every email sent and website visited will also be recorded to help the police and security services fight crime and terrorism.

But mobile phone companies have attacked the plans as a massive assault on privacy and warned it could be the first step towards a centralised ‘Big Brother’ database.

They have also told the Home Office that the scheme is deeply flawed.

The criticism of Britain’s growing ‘surveillance culture’ was made in a series of responses to an official consultation on the plans, which have been obtained by The Mail on Sunday.

T-Mobile said in its submission that it was a ‘particularly sensitive’ time as many people were commemorating the 20th anniversary of the protests that led to the collapse of ‘surveillance states in Eastern Europe’.

via Telecom firms criticise plan for ‘Stasi’-like checks on every phone call and email | Mail Online.

Why do negotiations for a new anti-counterfeiting treaty need to be hidden from the public?

By Miles Raymer

Since late 2007 representatives of governments from the United States, the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, and Canada, among others, have been negotiating a treaty known as ACTA. The negotiations—the seventh round is scheduled for Mexico in January—are held in strict secrecy, and ACTA memos are physically watermarked to prevent leaks. Some Freedom of Information Act requests regarding ACTA—including one in January by the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)—have been flat-out denied, and similar requests have produced papers so heavily redacted that blacked-out text runs almost edge to edge. The U.S. government has routinely invoked national security to explain its lack of transparency on the matter, but ACTA doesn’t have anything to do with nuclear stockpiles or espionage or the war on terror—it’s just a trade agreement. Of course, to judge by EU documents leaked last month,

it’s a trade agreement with the potential to transform global intellectual property law, effectively remove due process from the prosecution of online copyright infringement, and turn Internet service providers into spies for the entertainment industry

—but still.

ACTA stands for Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement, and its advocates emphasize the treaty’s broad application across multiple industries—no doubt because it’s hard to find anybody who’ll protest a crackdown on knockoff car parts, pharmaceuticals, or Louis Vuitton bags. But people who don’t like the sketchy picture of ACTA that’s emerged as documents have leaked see that as a smoke screen to distract the public from the serious ugliness of the treaty’s Internet chapter. That’s where it becomes clearest that ACTA is in part a way for the entertainment industry to shape international law to suit its desires, often at the expense of individual rights.

If rights holders get their way, ACTA would force Internet service providers to filter traffic and monitor their users’ activities, compromising privacy. Some of the only praiseworthy provisions in the 1998 U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which are supposed to allow the circumvention of digital rights management in cases covered by fair use, would be modified, stripping those exemptions, and made international in their reach. The full text of the treaty hasn’t leaked and probably doesn’t even exist yet, but what’s already under consideration is apparently bad enough that Ambassador Ron Kirk—head of the Office of the United States Trade Representative, the U.S. negotiator for ACTA—told KEI director James Love early this month that some countries would be “walking away from the table” if details of the agreement were made public before it’s finalized.

via Evil Hates the Light | Music Column | Chicago Reader.

By E.S. BROWNING

Many investors realize that stocks have been among the worst investments of the past decade. But they may not realize quite how bad the decade was, because most people forget about the effects of inflation.

Despite its 2009 rebound, the Dow Jones Industrial Average today stands at just 10520.10, no higher than in 1999. And that is without counting consumer-price inflation. In 1999 dollars, the Dow is only at about 8200 and would have to rise another 28% or so to return to 1999 levels. Using today's dollars and starting at 10520.10, the Dow would have to surpass 13460 to get back to its 1999 level in real, inflation-adjusted terms.

Controlling for inflation takes extra work and makes stock gains look punier, so it is easy to see why stock analysts almost never do it. The media almost never do it either.

via Adjusted for Inflation, Dow’s Gains Are Puny – WSJ.com.

Last week the Senate voted to increase the national debt limit from a mere 12.1 trillion, up to 12.4 trillion, to accommodate at least 290 billion in new spending.

The annual deficit for 2009 was last approaching 1.8 trillion dollars.

Of course, all of this is at the request of the Obama administration. After those accomplishments, and with 30,000 newly added service members to be sacrificing their time for the fight in Afghanistan, President Obama needed a lavish vacation on what is said to be the finest beach on Oahu, at Kailua. The family will spend 10 days of their 14 day vacation there. Their beach is said to have been the favorite of Hawaiian royalty.

via 12 trillion in national debt doesn’t hamper lavish Hawaiian vacation for Obamas.

$12,400,000,000,000.00

Divided by 300,000,000 People in the U.S. (entire U.S. population)

Equals aproximatly $40,000,000.00 in debt per citizen.

Thats 40 million per person for those bad with math.

These numbers are so high that we must be dreaming. When are we going to wake up from this nightmare and put an end to this? What is it going to take? What will be the repercussions? Global government? World War? Revolution?

You tell me.

By Mark Fefer in Media, Technology

Tuesday, Dec. 22 2009 @ 2:04PM

We don’t claim to be the slickest technical whiz kids here at Seattle Weekly. Our search engine has the occasional hiccup and our rotary phone app, The Ripper, hasn’t necessarily taken off as we might have hoped. Nonetheless, even we can’t help being a little puzzled at the Web site of the man whom President Obama just named to oversee computer security for the entire United States.

We’ve already noted Howard A. Schmidt’s propensity to speak inane gibberish. And his site is essentially no different. Here it is:

No joke, that is seriously the guy’s site. Schmidt’s Issaquah company is called R&H Security. He has ostensibly been running it for several years (he incorporated in 2003) and has been quoted and interviewed as its CEO. He’s owned the url cyber-security.us since 2002. And there’s nothing on the site. (I mean, except for a photo of a 10-year-old Macintosh on the top banner, along with some 1’s and 0’s.)

It truly is the ultimate in Web security.

The Web Site of Obama’s New Cyber Security Chief Is Still “Under Construction,” Seven Years After Launch – Seattle News – The Daily Weekly.

In a drastic move to tighten regulations of the Internet, individuals can no longer register domain names in China, and those who already have personal websites could lose them.

According to a statement on The China Internet Network Information Centre, as of this week, the only people who can register new domains will be businessmen or organizations, and all those new registrants will need to have both written application materials as well as copies of their enterprise’s business license or organization code certificate.

The China Internet Network Information Centre, which supervises domain name registration, says that the measure stemmed from concern over widespread pornographic content on personal websites.

Existing individual domains could also be in trouble. Website owners in Jiangsu, Shanghai, Henan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi said their sites were no longer accessible.

Individuals can no longer register domain names in China..

Hours after the burial of a marine who died in a raid that killed drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva, gunmen burst into his home and killed family members.

Irma Cordova, right in the green dress, the mother of the Mexican marine killed in a commando raid, and his aunt, Josefa Angulo, at his funeral in Paraiso in the state of Tabasco. The two women were among family members killed by gunmen the next day. (America Rocio / Associated Press / December 21, 2009)

Reporting from Mexico City – The young marine received the highest military honors that the Mexican state could offer. Killed during a raid that ended the life of a notorious drug lord, the marine was buried a hero, ushered to his grave by an honor guard of commandos in camouflage, his mother awarded a folded flag.

Hours later, the grieving mother, the marine’s sister, his brother and an aunt were mowed down by gunmen in a revenge attack that sent a chilling message to the Mexican military combating drug traffickers.

The slaughter of Melquisedet Angulo Cordova’s family early Tuesday horrified Mexicans seemingly inured to a drug-war brutality that has claimed more than 15,000 lives in three years of spectacular violence. The killing, especially, of a mother seemed to violate the most basic code of conduct that even coldblooded hit men and traffickers obeyed.

Was it a mistake to have so publicly identified the family of the felled combatant? Military commandos carry out their dangerous missions with their faces covered by masks and with no hint of personal identity.

I’m gonna go ahead and say ya!

Mexico drug raid hero’s family slaughtered — chicagotribune.com.