Soda_Jerk Re- Copyright

Soda_Jerk's site is here.

Update Re- Genetically-Modified Foods

As explained in a 2009 post and by others before me, "insect-resistent" GM plants have in fact been engineered to produce food that's literally full of poison.

Lately I'm hearing stories on public radio (the only traditional-media news product I regularly consume) about "good" GM – how spider genes have enabled silkworms to create stronger silk, and how sunflower seeds have been engineered to produce more cooking oil.

I hope this surfacing of the GM discussion results from an independent, journalistic initiative on the part of public radio – that seems possible, since I believe I also heard mention that the use of environmentally-hazardous pesticides or other chemicals has actually increased with the use of GM crops. Alternatively, the coverage may arise from a p.r. initiative on the part of the GM industry.

Regardless, I welcome the discussion, since I think genetic engineering is here to stay and does in fact offer the potential to help us build a better world quicker than natural selection might otherwise do.

But for purposes of the discussion, it would seem useful to distinguish between GMOs that deploy different kinds of strategies – e.g., for starters, to distinguish between poisonous and non-poisonous GMOs (since creating organisms that produce intrinsically poisonous food would seem more obviously likely to give rise to undesirable consequences).

To do that, we need new, clear terms – and we should expect that any terms the industry might propose will not be clear.

So let's propose some ourselves. Here's an initial attempt:

"Poisonous GMO": a GMO engineered to cause death or illness in any living organism, or to impair or inhibit the reproductivity or functioning of otherwise healthy, normal or typical living organisms.

"Non-Poisonous GMO": a GMO which is not a Poisonous GMO, as defined above.

Alternative or additional suggestions welcome.

What the Fed HA$ Delivered On:

. . . its intent – clear, for those who would see, in Oct., 2008 – that TARP funds would be used to bail out not only Goldman, but foreign investors et al.

Results of the recent Fed audit showing that trillions went to foreign investors discussed here. Oct., 2008 c-Blog post warning that the TARP bill was designed to permit this here.

Undead for Dinner

"[P]hotographer Sally Davies decided to buy a ["Happy Meal"] from McDonald's, set it out on a table, and take a picture of it every day until it disintegrated. That was 137 days ago and the . . . fries look as fresh as the day they came out of the fryer, and the burger — minus a little patty shrinkage — is virtually unchanged." More at Grub Street; see also Leo Foley's museum of barely-decayed hamburgers collected during the last 19 years.

Unfortunately, the meals are not so impervious that human digestion can't extract the calories.

Why Liz Warren Should Run the New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Some "Shakedown"

According to Information Clearing House,

"The 'escrow account' in 2010 is not $20 billion dollars. BP will put in $3 billion dollars in the third quarter of 2010 (ending September 30) and another $2 billion in the fourth quarter (ending December 31). Thereafter, it will have to make installments of $1.25 billion each quarter for the next three years. . . . [A] measure of perspective can be had by comparison . . . to the accumulated potential fines and penalties under the Clean Water Act. BP can be fined $4,300 per barrel of oil spilled as a consequence of gross negligence. With the recent acknowledgment that the spill volume is 60,000 barrels per day, . . . every 60 days accumulates a potential $15 billion fine under the Act. The voluntary arrangement to set aside $5 billion per year is meager in comparison."

Interactive Map of BP Spill

here, thanks to NOAA; apparently updated at least daily. The map below is a snapshot as of this posting; click on the image for a larger, updated version (give it a few moments to load):

Viacom Suing YouTube for Allowing Viacom to Infringe Itself

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Posted by Zahavah Levine, YouTube Chief Counsel, at Broadcasting Ourselves; more worthwhile info at the link.

Motion to Amend

Corporations have gone after our tax dollars, our jobs, our schools, our military, our voting machines, our infrastructure, our food, and our future. And

"[o]n January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government."

"Don’t just sit there and fume. . . . "

The Supreme Court's ruling was simply stunning on many levels. Regardless of whether it was correct, however, it is urgent that we get our brains around the issues involved and act quickly to prevent the final destruction of our democracy otherwise heralded by this decision.

Sign a petition, for starters, and learn what else you can do here. Wikipedia has a rough summary of some of the issues here.

Obama: a Corporate Marketing Creation

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. He has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. You can see the rest of the speech here; remember to rate it up.



Please go rate this up on YouTube (click on the picture above). We cannot begin to hold them accountable, until we understand what they need to be held accountable for.

"Free Trade" Helped Cause the Economic Crisis

Great discussion on HuffPo of "free trade." The problem isn't free trade of goods, it's that our jobs have been shipped to countries that don't have protections against worker and environmental exploitation. As Dave Johnson explains,

"Imagine a company in South Carolina that makes 20,000 pairs of shoes a week and distributes them to stores. Now, imagine that the company closes its South Carolina plant, opens a plant in a low-wage country, ships all the machines and raw materials there, ships back 20,000 pairs of shoes each week and distributes them to the same stores. Is that 'trade?' Are the raw materials sent out of the country an 'export?' Are the shoes brought back into the country an 'import?'

"The only thing that has been 'traded' in this scenario is American jobs traded for huge executive bonuses."

Meanwhile, foreign workers still can't afford the goods they're manufacturing, and we can't either because we've lost most of our decently-paid jobs. Without disposable income or equity, we masses can't continue to consume, and the economy grinds to a halt.

Obama Rewards AT&T's Ed Whitacre with GM Chairmanship

Add this to the list of Obama's list of disappointing appointments (see a lengthy but not-necessarily-complete list in this previous post). Whitacre was Chair and CEO of AT&T for 17 years (see The WSJ on his appointment to the GM chairmanship and his prior career), including while it was enabling the Bush admin's warrantless spying on innocent Americans (see Wikipedia, Corrente).

Since Obama et al. previously voted to immunize the telcos from their gross violations of our rights, Mr. Whitaker is now not in jail and is available for the GM Chairmanship – how lucky is that?

Genetically Modified Foods

This is not my usual issue, but I feel compelled to share this article by Jeffrey M. Smith at Seeds of Deception. I hadn't realized that, when they say GM'd foods are "resistant" to insects, what they really mean is that the plants have been engineered to produce food that's literally chock full o' poison. Salient points (out of order per the original article):

"GM corn and cotton are engineered to produce their own built-in pesticide in every cell. When bugs bite the plant, the poison splits open their stomach and kills them. Biotech companies claim that the pesticide, called Bt—produced from soil bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis—has a history of safe use, since organic farmers and others use Bt bacteria spray for natural insect control. Genetic engineers insert Bt genes into corn and cotton, so the plants do the killing.

"The Bt-toxin produced in GM plants, however, is thousands of times more concentrated than natural Bt spray, is designed to be more toxic,[10] has properties of an allergen, and unlike the spray, cannot be washed off the plant.

* * * * *
["Not a single human clinical trial on GMOs has been published", but] "[w]hen GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died within three weeks—compared to a 10% death rate among the control group fed natural soy.[3] The GM-fed babies were also smaller, and later had problems getting pregnant.[4] When male rats were fed GM soy, their testicles actually changed color—from the normal pink to dark blue.[5] Mice fed GM soy had altered young sperm.[6] Even the embryos of GM fed parent mice had significant changes in their DNA.[7]"

* * * * *
"Scientists at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had warned about all these problems even in the early 1990s. . . . [T]he scientific consensus at the agency was that GM foods were inherently dangerous, and might create hard-to-detect allergies, poisons, gene transfer to gut bacteria, new diseases, and nutritional problems. They urged their superiors to require rigorous long-term tests.[27] But the White House had ordered the agency to promote biotechnology and the FDA responded by recruiting Michael Taylor, Monsanto’s former attorney, to head up the formation of GMO policy. . . . Mr. Taylor later became Monsanto’s vice president.

* * * * *
"There is a pocket Non-GMO Shopping Guide, . . . which is available as a download . . . ."

(Please see the original article at the link above for the footnotes and much more.)

Free Markets vs. Regulation

Pretty fully 'splained 8 years ago, here.

World Bank Under CyberSIEGE Since April

World Bank Under Cyber Siege in ‘Unprecedented Crisis'
By Richard Behar.

"The World Bank Group’s computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year, FOX News has learned.

"It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution’s highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank’s network for nearly a month in June and July.

"In total, at least six major intrusions — two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China — have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

"In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank’s senior technology manager referred to the situation as an 'unprecedented crisis.' In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution. And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public."

More at the Media Channel -- and by the way, the Media Channel is fighting to stay alive right now; pls consider donating!

What is crashing is . . .

"the paper edifice set up as 'insurance' against default, meant to insulate the issuer against risk, and which then was turned into a profit center for larger institutions. Somebody owes somebody for every default; and that somebody is then owed by somebody, and so forth and so on down the line. The market in these things is opaque: no one knows who has what potential liabilities; in a number of cases, even the chiefs of firms involved probably do know the real exposure of their own companies. No one knows what someone might be called upon to settle up immediately; no one knows what financial firm can be relied on to make a payment tomorrow, or next Monday. The sum total of these various paper obligations is several times the total amount of real money on earth: the truth is that they cannot really be liquidated, certainly not all at once, which means that their purported value is merely an elegantly engraved fiction. When the market in them functions they are not usually liquidated, they are simply matched against one other and cancel one another out. But doing so requires their being taken at face value, or a regularized rate of discount, and maintaining them in this state requires ready access to credit for those holding them."

(Thanks, Magistrate!)

In Case You Didn't Notice, Congress Also Passed a $619 Billion Defense Bill

While Lehman Pled for Federal Rescue,

. . . its execs were simultaneously securing their golden parachutes.

Lehman's CEO Richard Fuld, who testified before Congress today, has already taken home close to $480 million since 2000. Said Fuld, "I feel horrible about what's happened" -- but he didn't offer to return any of the money.

Another great post from HuffPo; thanks to Kadie for the pic!

UPDATE: Per Bloomberg, Lehman's "'key' money managers will get retention bonuses valued at $400 million when their investment-management business is bought by Bain Capital LLC and Hellman & Friedman LLC.

"Bain and Hellman on Sept. 29 agreed to buy most of the asset-management unit from bankrupt Lehman in a deal that values business at $2.15 billion, about half the buyout firms' initial bids. The purchasers will deduct the employee awards from the amount they pay the investment bank for the assets, Lehman's lawyers said today in a court filing.

"Under the proposed arrangement, which a U.S. bankruptcy judge must approve, Lehman employees and portfolio managers will get 16.8 percent of the equity in the purchased assets. The awards are valued using the 'gross purchase price' of $2.15 billion, which includes assumption of liabilities, according to the filing."

A Few Key Concerns Re- the Bailout Bill

This is a very rough draft, but I thought impt. to get it out.

We may well be at a make-or-break moment like few our country has faced before. So pls try to digest this sufficiently to pick out a few points you can relate to and call your congresscritters NOW.

Under the Bailout Bill, Paulson's Authority to Buy Bad Debt on Behalf of Taxpayers Is NOT Limited to U.S. Firms, or Even to Debt Secured by U.S. Properties

As stated by Rep. Brad Sherman (CA) on CNBC (video here):

"The Bank of Shanghai can transfer all of its toxic assets to the Bank of Shanghai of Los Angeles which can then sell them the next day to the Treasury. I had a provision to say if it wasn't owned by an American entity even a subsidiary, but at least an entity in the US, the Treasury can't buy it. It was rejected.

"The bill is very clear. Assets now held in China and London can be sold to US entities on Monday and then sold to the Treasury on Tuesday. Paulson has made it clear he will recommend a veto of any bill that contained a clear provision that said if Americans did not own the asset on September 20th that it can't be sold to the Treasury.

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are going to bail out foreign investors. They know it, they demanded it, and the bill has been carefully written to make sure that can happen."

See also this.

"It's the Derivatives, Stupid"

Much discussion I've heard talks about this bill as if it enables Paulson merely to buy mortgages, or interests in mortgage pools, and suggests that even if the loans are bad, they're only partially under-secured, so there's no way we'll lose more than a portion of our money and we might even come out ahead if we buy these assets at bargain prices.

This is a red herring.

Paulson is NOT limited to buying mortgages and interests in mortgage pools. Bad mortgages are only a small part of what he can buy, and they are only a small part of the problem -- only 5%, according to the gov't's own, recent report; derivatives are 95%.

These derivatives are basically shallowly secured bets. So, the much larger problem is the layers of leveraging on top of mortgage pools. See here:

“I think the $700 billion will be like a drop in the bucket because the total credit market in the U.S. is something close to $60 trillion. Then you have the CDS market – credit default swaps – of around $62 trillion. Then you have the whole derivatives worldwide worth about a notional $1,300 trillion. So the $700 billion is really nothing and the Treasury is just giving out this figure when actually the end figure may be $5 trillion. . . the problem is not that home prices have gone down; the problem is excessive leverage.”

I guess this is why the serious analysts I've read worry that this bill will do no more than delay our day of reckoning.

Why No Serious Discussion of Alternatives?

Such as:

1. The "Trickle Up" plan.

2. The progressive Dem plan described here.

3. Bill Clinton mentioned during his most recent appearance on The Daily Show that when faced with a similar situation, instead of buying bad assets outright, which sticks taxpayers with 100% of the risk, in a similar sitch under the Clinton Admin. we made LOANS which bore INTEREST. Note that under general legal principals, the first people to get paid off are lenders. Next, investors. Last, owners. So this approach would incentivize the people we're giving the money to get their houses in order and give significantly better assurance to taxpayers that both their original investment and possibly even some kind of profit will be recovered.

4. George Soros thinks we should buy equity, not bad assets. As suggested above, this approach would afford taxpayers more upside for less risk.

5. See also here.

6. And here ("In a Sept. 24 letter to congressional leaders, 166 academic economists [including three Nobel Prize winners] said they oppose Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's plan because it's a "subsidy'' for business, it's ambiguous and it may have adverse market consequences in the long term. They also expressed alarm at the haste of lawmakers and the Bush administration to pass legislation.")

The Secret Pink Elephant

The Fed has been massively inflating the dollar as our only way out of this mess. Citizen wealth won't be eviscerated JUST by busted home values, or by hits to our savings though portfolio losses, or even by the bailout. We'll suffer as much or more through losses to our buying power.

(I saw this coming when we invaded Iraq while cutting taxes. There simply was no other realistic way to pay for it all.)

Elimination of the Mark-to-Market Rule

See here. Elimination of this rule means that the values claimed by companies for their assets need no longer have any basis in reality. Even assuming the new rule requires companies to estimate values reasonably and in good faith, proving that management understated values unreasonably or in bad faith will be all but impossible, since everyone agrees it's impossible to determine the values for assets for which there's no market (assuming you dismiss the notion that no market means the value is zero), and no one knows just how bad these debts are.

There will no longer be any meaningful basis for investors to evaluate companies' assets. Investors who understand the change won't want to invest in U.S. firms, and investors who don't understand it will basically be defrauded.

Elimination of the Up-Tick Rule

See this and sources cited therein.

Obviously, we need MORE, not less oversight, regulation, and meaningful DISincentives for bad behavior

. . . but this bill does NOTHING to bring those about; in fact if anything, it continues the trend initiated during the Reagan administration toward dismantling such protections. The Glass-Steagall Act should be restored, as well as the up-tick rule and other protections.

The Secret Hot Pink Elephant

All financial institutions would prefer a free-for-all; but perhaps now we have the chance not only to re-regulate our own markets but to persuade other countries to regulate theirs, too. This would not only ensure a level playing field for our own markets and institutions, but promote fairness to investors, large and small, world-wide.

Who Will Administer the Assets We Buy?

We'll be buying the worst of what "professionals" have stuck themselves with, but we won't have the stronger assets to help us carry any losses and we don't now have the professional expertise to deal with what we'll be buying.

People talk about this as a "liquidity crisis"; but there would be no liquidity crisis if those who created it weren't seriously worried that what underlies it is a bunch of big losses. These "assets" will require active management.

And does anyone really imagine the government as run by the current administration is going to deal with these assets more efficiently than incentivized professionals? Not really. As The New York Times reported ten days ago,

"Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it.

"Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

"At the same time, investment firms were jockeying to oversee all the assets that Treasury plans to take off the books of financial institutions, a role that could earn them hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees."

But aren't those the same people who drove the system off a cliff and couldn't fix it on their own dime?

Did You Know . . .

That Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was Chairman of Goldman Sachs during the period for which it was investigated for fraudulent activity by Elliott Spitzer? (See Wikipedia on Paulson and Spitzer.)

UPDATE: Hm, looks like as of 10-15-08, the Wikipedia info on Paulson has been edited . . . no longer any mention of investigation of Spitzer's investigation of wrongdoing under Paulson's management of Goldman Sachs; instead, it says, "Paulson led government efforts to avoid a severe economic slowdown."

"Lipstick"

It all makes sense if in place of "lipstick," you read, the corporate-owned media. (Speaking of pigs.)