I keep going back and forth between thinking I should do economic triage and vote for any Democrat that runs in 2016 — and wondering if I should vote at all. Every time I listen to Russell Brand, I find myself leaning more and more in his direction:
Category: Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
John Oliver takes on payday lenders
His show is really hard-hitting, I’m surprised he’s still on the air!
A win for Warren — and us
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) got her way on Tuesday when the Federal Reserve rejected the living will plans for most Wall Street banks.
Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase all had their plans rejected.*
The concept of living wills was born of the financial crisis, when regulators and politicians realized that they had no orderly way of unwinding systemically important banks that had failed. They didn’t want to see another Lehman bankruptcy that would take three years to resolve.
The wills then became a part of Dodd-Frank, so banks were legally required to write their own strategies for the “rapid and orderly resolution in the event of material financial distress or failure of the company.”
The Fed on Tuesday made it clear that it did not feel the wills that banks submitted last month (now in their second iteration) were capable of doing that — something Warren had been shouting about.
When Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen testified before the Senate last month, Warren completely grilled her on JP Morgan’s living will, which she said was not enough to cover the bank’s $2.5 trillion in assets.
“I almost couldn’t believe this when I read it,” Warren told Yellen.
Yellen said the Fed was continuing to review the wills and that it was a complicated process.
Warren wasn’t satisfied:
I think the language in the [Dodd-Frank] statute is pretty clear. That you are required, that the Fed is required to call it every year on whether these institutions have a credible plan. And I remind you, there are very effective tools that you can use if those plans are not credible. Including, forcing these financial institutions to simplify their structure, or forcing them to liquidate some of their assets. In other words, break them up.
The Fed said the wills the banks presented were “unrealistic” and that firms lacked significant structural changes necessary to carry them out.
Via Terry Eaton.
Imagine that
That Rahm would steal money from the schools to give to his pals. Who’d a thunk it?
Months after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said budget constraints forced him to push for pension cuts and mass school closures, an analysis of government documents reveals the city has $1.71 billion in special accounts often used to finance corporate subsidies. While the Emanuel administration has rejected open records requests for details of the subsidies, evidence suggests at least some of them have flowed to companies connected to Emanuel’s campaign donors.
The analysis conducted by the TIF Illumination Project evaluated the city’s 151 tax increment financing, or TIF, districts, which divert a share of property taxes out of accounts obligated to schools and into special accounts under the mayor’s control.
The report shows $412 million was diverted last year alone into the TIF accounts and out of traditional property tax funding streams, many of which are dedicated to the city’s schools. In 21 of those districts, the report says 90 percent or more of all property taxes were diverted into the TIF accounts.
Citing Chicago subsidies offered to S&C Electric Co., LaSalle Street Capital, United Airlines and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, an earlier study from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First found in the last 25 years, $5.5 billion of taxpayer money has gone into TIF accounts, and “much of the city’s TIF revenue was spent on subsidizing corporations, nonprofits and developers.” The amount of money diverted into TIFs has exploded in the last decade, and transparency advocates say under Emanuel, TIF projects have been shrouded in more secrecy than ever.
Another crash?
I can’t imagine it’s not going to happen. I think anyone who thinks their finances are stable now is living in a fool’s paradise. We never fixed any of the problems with the banks, it will all collapse again.
And once people realize what happened, it’s not going to be pretty. Invest in pitchfork futures!
R.I.P. Terry Greenwood
With the death of Terry Greenwood, farmer and anti-fracking activist, from a rare form of cancer, calls for mandated health research are rising:
Last month, Terry Greenwood, a Pennsylvania farmer whose water had been contaminated by fracking waste, died of cancer. He was 66 and the cause of death was a rare form of brain cancer.
His death drew attention from around the globe in part because Mr. Greenwood was among the first farmers from his state to speak out against the gas industry during the early years of the state’s shale gas rush.
Mr. Greenwood went up against a company called Dominion Energy, which had drilled and fracked a shallow well on his small cattle ranch property under a lease signed by a prior owner in 1921.
In January, 2008, Mr. Greenwood had reported to state officials that his water supplies had turned brown and the water tasted salty. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection subsequently found that the company, whose gas well was drilled 400 feet from the Greenwoods’ water well in 2007, had impacted the Greenwoods’ water. State officials ordered Dominion to temporarily supply the family with drinking water.
Mr. Greenwood’s death was mourned by environmentalists around the world. In London, for example, attendees at a fracking education event recorded video messages for the Greenwood family and raised over $500 for Terry’s survivors.
“Terry Greenwood was one of the most compelling people you could ever listen to,” wrote filmmaker Josh Fox. “There was just something about the way he spoke, there was a decency and a positivity that shone through every word no matter how distressing or disturbing the subject matter was.”
But the story of Mr. Greenwood’s fight against the drilling industry and lax oversight by state regulators does not stop there.
Continue reading “R.I.P. Terry Greenwood”
That cat’s been hanging off the roof for two years now
Remember my joke about “the cat’s on the roof”? TEPCO and the Japanese government was so obviously lying, I couldn’t believe how I was attacked by readers over at the other site for “fearmongering”:
The meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s third reactor building was even worse than initially believed, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has announced.
In fact, the power company’s new appraisal of the Fukushima No. 3 reactor building shows that all – or nearly all – of the fuel rods contained inside were melted, dropping onto the floor of the containment vessel. If true, the news means the power plant could be even tougher to decommission.
According to the Japan Times, TEPCO first estimated back in November of 2011 that roughly 63 percent of the reactor’s fuel rods had melted.
But TEPCO now believes that after studying conditions surrounding the fuel core, the reactor’s cooling system stopped functioning more than five hours earlier than previously estimated. As a result, the meltdown would have started around that same time period.
As reported by the Yomiuri Shimbun, it is possible that with more nuclear fuel resting in the containment vessel than originally estimated, removing it will require even more careful planning.
“As the core meltdown is now believed to have started earlier than was previously thought, the amount of melted nuclear fuel that passed into the containment vessel through the pressure vessel is considered to have been greater, making it technically more difficult to extract the melted fuel and dispose of it,” the newspaper stated.
Despite the new findings, however, TEPCO spokesman Shinichi Kawamura said the company is still hoping to find some fuel that had not melted down.
“We think some fuel still remains at the core part based on the actual plant data,” he said, as quoted by the Japan Times.
Targeted
Lee Fang, one of the better journalists out there, is being targeted by Comcast for his reporting on their attempts to undermine net neutrality.
Now he has paid trolls following him. Ah, the online life is so glamorous!
Walgreens is staying put
Look what we helped make happen:
Yesterday afternoon the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch reported the news: “Walgreen Stock Tumbles on Report It Won’t Invert.” Citing unnamed sources (and Sky News), the bulletin reported that Walgreens has decided not to “invert” the company’s nationality to become a Swiss company, and thus lower its U.S. tax bill as it completes its takeover of the pharmacy chain Alliance Boots.
This news represents a victory for a powerful alliance of citizen action groups, united under the banner of Americans for Tax Fairness, who have been sending a strong message to Walgreens that, if the company did not renounce plans to abandon the U.S., Americans would abandon Walgreens stores. And it represents a victory for President Obama, who had recently called on companies like Walgreens to reject using the inversion loophole to change nationality while continuing to operate in the U.S. He declared in July that “I don’t care if it’s legal, it’s wrong.” And it is a victory for members of Congress, like senators Sander Levin, Richard Durbin and Elizabeth Warren, who are still pursuing legislation that would make it illegal for large corporations to use the inversion option.
Over the last few weeks, the Campaign for America’s Future has joined other coalition groups of Americans for Tax Fairness to criticize the stampede of U.S. corporations using inversion to escape taxes – and we have focused pressure on Walgreens as that company publicly considered taking the inversion route, which would have saved them $4 billion over five years by becoming – on paper – a Swiss company, according to a report by ATF and Change to Win.
Many groups used different language to encourage supporters to sign the same message. We led our online campaign with a blunt warning: Tell Walgreens: If you leave the U.S., we will leave your stores.
Good
He won’t be “curing” anyone else anytime soon:
An Indian teenager took a knife to a so-called tantric who allegedly tried to rape her for a second time and cut off his penis.
The man, who is also the girl’s uncle, is currently being hunted by detectives who praised what they described as the young woman’s “courage”.
Police in the Madhepura district of Bihar said the young woman, believed to be aged either 17 or 18, had been raped last month by her uncle, who is known in the local area as a tantric and who performs rituals. When he allegedly tried to assault her a second time, she was prepared and had armed herself with a knife.
The girl then reported what had happened to a village council. When the council failed to tackle the matter to her satisfaction, the young woman contacted women police officers, located at the local station.
One report in the Indian media said the girl had been taken to see the tantric by her parents after she fell ill and that he was tasked with “curing” her.