Month: December 2014

They said there’d be snow at Christmas

by digby

Merry Christmas everyone!

h/t to Dennis Hartley

We love a good redemption story

by Tom Sullivan

Casablanca, Groundhog Day, Meet John Doe, It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, A Christmas Carol. We love a good redemption story. Especially at this time of year.

So many of those stories, if not about personal redemption proper, are about cynics and misanthropes rediscovering a connection with the rest of humanity. With an economy out of whack, and with a justice system glaringly separate and unequal — one rigged for the rich and powerful, and another for the rest — there are probably enough Scrooges and Potters in this country to keep the Ghosts of Christmas busy 365-1/4 nights a year.

But with Ghosts of Christmas in short supply, Lynn Stuart Parramore of AlterNet’s New Economic Dialogue Project project believes bringing back a sense of shame in these Dickensian times might help hasten the revolu … um, redemption:

History shows that in cases when the law or public consensus has rendered an act reprehensible, society has contrived an impressive array of shaming devices — the dunce cap, the pillory, ducking chairs to plunge the guilty into rivers and ponds and tarring and feathering. The idea, of course, is to not only punish the culprits but also to deter other potential wrongdoers from following suit.

What would be appropriate for CEOs who pinch the wages of their employees while earning hundreds of times more than the lowest paid among them? A scarlet G for “greed” sewn to their lapels? Don’t laugh: Some judges have been known to get creative with sentencing when the ordinary route of punishment doesn’t seem to work. A Los Angeles Times op-ed noted that a judge in La Habra, California, ordered a slumlord to live in his own rundown building under house arrest for two months, and a Cleveland judge sentenced a man who had bullied a neighbor and her handicapped children to stand on the side of the highway carrying a sign describing his crimes. Perhaps a judge equipped with the latest CEO pay disclosures could sentence some corporate titan found guilty of stealing wages to live on the salary of his lowest-paid employee for a time. There is something rather satisfying about ideas like that.

Dickens himself might approve.

A little Christmas Eve treat

by digby

Here’s Patti Smith singing “O Holy Night” at the Vatican. And it’s awesome.

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“Let the children enjoy this night tonight. Tomorrow we’ll worry about the world …”

by digby

Doris Kearns-Goodwin says Winston Churchill said that at the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony three weeks after Pearl Harbor. I don’t think you’re allowed to say things like that today … it’s handwringing and hysteria 24/7. Or the terrorists will win.

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There are acts of patriotism and then there’s this

by digby

BuzzFeed newsroom at a standstill, transfixed, watching The Interview. This is our moon landing.
— Tom Gara (@tomgara) December 24, 2014

I assume he was kidding. At least I hope so …

Before we all rush to download The Interview as the greatest act of patriotism in our time, this strikes me as worth considering:

Everyone has a theory about who really hacked Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.

Despite President Barack Obama’s conclusion that North Korea was the culprit, the Internet’s newest game of whodunit continues. Top theories include disgruntled Sony insiders, hired hackers, other foreign governments or Internet hooligans. Even some experts are undecided, with questions about why the communist state would steal and leak gigabytes of data, email threats to some Sony employees and their families and then threaten moviegoers who planned to watch “The Interview” on Christmas.

“Somebody’s done it. And right now this knowledge is known to God and whoever did it,” said Martin Libicki, a cyber security expert at RAND in Arlington, Virginia, who thinks it probably was North Korea. “So we gather up a lot of evidence, and the evidence that the FBI has shown so far doesn’t allow one to distinguish between somebody who is North Korea and somebody who wants to look like North Korea.”

Perhaps the only point of agreement among those guessing is that even the most dramatic cybercrimes can be really, really hard to solve convincingly. When corporations are breached, investigators seldom focus on attributing the crime because their priority is assessing damage and preventing it from happening again.

“Attribution is a very hard game to play,” said Mike Fey, president of security company Blue Coat Systems Inc. and former chief technology officer at McAfee Inc. “Like any criminal activity, how they get away with it is a very early step in the planning process, and framing another organization or individual is a great way to get away with something.

Fey added: “If they’re smart enough and capable enough to commit a high profile attack, they’re very often smart enough and capable enough to masquerade as someone else. It can be very difficult to find that true smoking gun.”
[…]
“Attribution to any high degree of certainty will always be impossible,” said Chris Finan, a former White House cyber security adviser. “At some point these are always judgment calls. You can do things like corroborate using intelligence sources and methods. But ultimately you’re still looking at a pool of evidence and you’re drawing a conclusion.”

Even knowing North Korea was involved doesn’t mean others weren’t, too.

“It’s very difficult to understand the chain of command in something like this,” Fey said. “Is this a hacking-for-hire scenario? Is it truly delivered by an organization? Or, is it possible there’s some alternate nefarious plot under way none of us understand yet.”

He later added: “One last idea. What if all this is just a movie-goer (who) can’t stand the idea of another Seth Rogan movie.

For all I know, Dear Leader did the deed himself. We don’t know. So all this chest beating about not letting that tin-horned Axis-o-evul dictator tell us what we can and cannot watch might just be a bit overblown.

The hacking into private company emails is very disturbing because they are supposed to be … private. I certainly hope that doing this — and blackmailing companies — doesn’t become common. It’s a serious problem on any number of levels. But rallying around the flag and the bill of rights over this movie is very dicey. “Content” companies censor and withhold and just plain refuse to finance material that foreigners find offensive to their “pride” all the time. The industry simply isn’t a bastion of free speech. Controversial material almost always gets made by accident not intention.

I’m all for defending free speech. I even defend Dear Leader’s right to say what he wants. But the overwhelming outpouring of emotion around this particular event, which may very well turn out to have been a stunt — or something else entirely — strikes me as yet another opportunity for too many people to yell USA! USA! — a chant which signals something else entirely.

I’m sure Sony and the theatres will have a very profitable holiday week-end box-office now, though. So that’s nice.

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Trump-l’œil

by digby

The boyz:

It would appear that Dad’s legacy of weird hair is in good hands …

h/t to Dave Weigel

A Huckleberry Christmas Question

by digby

Just cuz:

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Rewarding failure by design?


by Tom Sullivan

For the investor class, it is a tragedy of the commons when they don’t get a cut from it. That’s why, for example, they are so hot to see a middle man in every middle school.
Since the GOP took over in North Carolina in 2011, we’ve been warning about efforts by industry and ALEC to privatize public schools and public infrastructure:

Public private partnerships are a hot, new investment vehicle. PPPs are a way for getting public infrastructure — that you, your parents, and their parents’ parents paid for and maybe even built with their own hands — out of public hands and under the control of private investors who are more than happy to sell your own property back to you at a tidy profit. A turnpike here, an airport there, or your city’s water system.
Psst. Hey, bud. C’mere. I got this bridge in Manhattan …

In fact, the Macquarie Group is “buying” a bridge in Manhattan. As the nature of public-private partnership deals (P3s) for new highway expansions became clear, both the left and the right have found a common adversary: kleptocrats stripping America for parts.
David Dayen wrote yesterday at Salon about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to investment banker, Antonio Weiss, President Obama’s nominee for Treasury Department undersecretary for domestic finance. One of Weiss’ biggest clients is Brazilian private equity fund 3G. Dayen describes deals that would make Paul Singer blush. (Okay, maybe not.) They seem almost designed to reward failure:

The deals also exhibit the modern hallmark of corporate America: financial engineering. Decisions are made to satisfy shareholder clamoring for short-term profits rather than any long-term vision about building a quality business. The manager class extracts value for their own ends, and the rotted husk of the company either sinks or swims. It doesn’t matter to those who have already completed the looting.

So now, back to those P3 deals. North Carolina’s senator-elect Thom Tillis’ 50-year I-77 “Tholl Road” deal with Spain-based Cintra Infraestructures continues to draw scrutiny this week. Time Warner Cable News in Charlotte interviewed Nicholas Rubio, the U.S. president of Cintra (sorry, no video embed, watch it at the link):

The company’s project on Highway 130 in Texas came close to bankruptcy this summer before it restructured $1 billion in debt. Another Cintra toll road in Indiana did file for bankruptcy to restructure nearly $6 billion in debt.
Time Warner Cable News asked Rubio if North Carolinians should be worried because of those financial issues.
“Rather than worry, they should be comforted,” Rubio said. “At the end of the day, part of the advantage of this business is you are passing the traffic risk to private developers.”

Uh, not exactly. As I wrote in September:

Here’s how those “innovative ideas” have worked elsewhere:

Just yesterday (9/22/14), debt-ridden Spanish-Australian Cintra-Macquarie infrastructure group filed for bankruptcy on its 75-year contract to operate the Indiana Toll Road. After just eight years.
Moody’s, the rating agency, declared Cintra’s 50-year Texas toll road concession in default in July.After just two years.
After opening in 2007, Macquarie’s 35-year concession for the South Bay Expressway (San Diego) went bankrupt in 2010. After just three years.
Nevertheless, North Carolina is signing contracts with Madrid-based Cintra for a 50-year toll lane project (HOT lanes – High Occupancy Toll) on I-77 north of Charlotte in Speaker Thom Tillis’ district, with Tillis’ enthusiastic support and backed with federal and state tax dollars. Yours.

In “A Blueprint for Bankruptcy,” here’s how Randy Salzaman of Thinking Highways described these deals for Truthout in October:

Beginning with the contracting stage, the evidence suggests toll operating public private partnerships are transportation shell companies for international financiers and contractors who blueprint future bankruptcies. Because Uncle Sam generally guarantees the bonds – by far the largest chunk of “private” money – if and when the private toll road or tunnel partner goes bankrupt, taxpayers are forced to pay off the bonds while absorbing all loans the state and federal governments gave the private shell company and any accumulated depreciation. Yet the shell company’s parent firms get to keep years of actual toll income, on top of millions in design-build cost overruns.

US and state taxpayers are left paying off billions in debt to bondholders who have received amazing returns on their money, as much as 13 per cent, as virtually all – if not all – of these private P3 toll operators go bankrupt within 15 years of what is usually a five-plus decade contract.

A “staggering” number go bankrupt, Salzman continues.

Of course, no executive comes forward and says, “We’re planning to go bankrupt,” but an analysis of the data is shocking. There do not appear to be any American private toll firms still in operation under the same management 15 years after construction closed. The original toll firms seem consistently to have gone bankrupt or “zeroed their assets” and walked away, leaving taxpayers a highway now needing repair and having to pay off the bonds and absorb the loans and the depreciation.

But wait! There’s more. These projects are frequently sold both to governments and to investors on the basis of inflated traffic/revenue projections. Creditors of failed projects such as American Roads LLC’s Detroit Windsor Tunnel are suing. This account of the legal proceedings, for example, from 2013:

In the little publicized litigation in the State Supreme Court of New York Syncora alleges that the financing and spinoff by Macquarie involved fraud and misrepresentation, in particular that Macquarie had a secret and improper relationship with Australian traffic and revenue forecaster Maunsell Australia Pty Ltd (since absorbed into Aecom) to produce unrealistically high traffic and revenue forecasts.

American Roads was originally a creation of Australian financial services giant, Macquarie Group/Macquarie Capital. It paid undisclosed “success fees” for those rosy projections. The judge was not amused and ruled against Macquarie:

Schweitzer continued: “Syncora argues, and the court agrees, that the undisclosed conflict of interest under which Maunsell operated, in addition to secret success fees that Maunsell was paid… do amount to a material misrepresentation or omission of fact.”
This, the judge said, was “plainly actionable as fraud.”

Aecom and a competitor, CDMSmith, keep turning up as sources of the inflated traffic and revenue projections in failed project after failed project. Aecom performed traffic studies in California in 2003 (South Bay Expressway – BANKRUPT); in Virginia in 2006 (US Route 460, planned); Texas in 2009 (Dallas North Tarrant Express); Texas in 2010 (SH-130 – BANKRUPT/Restructured); and Michigan in 2010 (Detroit’s Windsor Tunnel – BANKRUPT); and in Indiana in 2006 (Indiana Toll Road – BANKRUPT). CDMSmith performed traffic studies in Virginia (Dulles Toll Road), in South Carolina (Greenville Southern Connector – BANKRUPT).

There’s something oddly “designed to fail” about these P3 infrastructure deals. And awfully, awfully familiar. Remember the Brazilian private equity fund, 3G, from above? Remember securitized mortgages and credit default obligations? The phrase, “this is not a boat accident,” comes to mind.
(Barry Summers of Making Progress: News for a Change contributed to this post.)

I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.

by digby

Is this a great country or what?

One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [he mimes a disk roughly the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.

“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.

“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’

I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’

They said, ‘What’s in the box?’

I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.

So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’

I said, ‘gold.’

And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’

‘The King of Sweden.’

‘Why did he give this to you?’

‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’

At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”

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Reflexively whining at criticism doesn’t breed respect

by digby

I am a big believer in cops getting lots and lots of benefits, like full early retirement, generous disability pay and free legal representation. Nobody denies it’s a tough job and that’s the deal we’ve made with them. Many of those things are guaranteed by their unions and that’s what they’re supposed to be there for. But the over-the-top reactions of the police reps to these various examples of shooting unarmed African American men and the mentally ill is just shameful.

Here’s yet another example:

[Officer] Manney shot 31-year-old Hamilton on April 30 after responding to a call for a welfare check on a man sleeping in the park. Manney said Hamilton resisted when he tried to frisk him. The two exchanged punches before Hamilton got a hold of Manney’s baton and hit him on the neck with it, the former officer has said. Manney then opened fire, hitting Hamilton 14 times.

CBS affiliate WDJT reported earlier this month that Hamilton’s family released a copy of the Milwaukee County autopsy report, which details all the gunshot wounds found on Hamilton’s body after the incident.

Hamilton’s family said he suffered from schizophrenia and had recently stopped taking his medication.

The police chief in this case responded responsibly and correctly:

Police Chief Edward Flynn fired Manney in October, saying Manney instigated the fight with an inappropriate pat-down. The chief said Manney correctly identified Hamilton as mentally ill but ignored his training and department policy, and treated him as a criminal.

“You don’t go hands-on and start frisking somebody only because they appear to be mentally ill,” Flynn said when he announced Manney had been dismissed.

He accepted responsibility for the officer’s improper behavior and fired him. The cops should not go around rousting mentally ill people and then shooting them when the mentally ill person responds like a mentally ill person. It happens all the time and it’s an absolute travesty. Considering how so many of the police looks at African Americans as the face of the enemy in their war on the streets of America, it’s fair to wonder just how awful it must be for black people who are mentally ill. One shudders to think about it.

But once again, the the police representatives come out swinging and throwing accusations around instead of acting like professionals:

The Milwaukee Police Association condemned Manney’s firing as a political move, and members voted no confidence in Flynn soon after the firing.

Manney has appealed his firing and applied for disability, saying the shootings in Milwaukee and Ferguson have cost him sleep and made it difficult for him to think clearly. He also has said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ok, this fellow is just doing what he can to get compensation. And I’m not even going to argue with that even though his self-serving rationale is absurd. But the Police association reflexively attacking the chief for being “political” because he gives a damn about the killing of a mentally ill black man is just pathetic. Sure, they can defend their guy. That’s how they see their job. But to constantly accuse anyone who cares about this of being a liberal tool of an undeserving black community (which is what being “political” means in this context) is so irresponsible. And revealing.

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