Perfect Reading for Christmas Eve

"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street..." --------Dylan Thomas, "A Child's Christmas in Wales."

For the entire text, click here.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Luck and Who You Know (3 and 4 of 20)

Many of the comments over the years on here have always made me chuckle. One stock line I hear quite a bit is "if you work really hard, you can make it!" or "successful people work really hard." The former is largely false and the latter is true in some cases but not all.

I was reminded recently in comments of my life in corporate America in the 1990s doing sales and marketing. Hard work never got us anywhere. It sort of reminds me of the teachers who tell students to "just try harder!" This has never made any sense to me. You can push harder or pull harder but try harder? No. Trying involves patience and dedication but not effort as we have conventionally thought about it. Not "harder."

Both of the companies I worked for won clients as a result of two things. The first was just luck. I would happen across some bit of information (mostly on accident) and we'd have a new client. The second was who I knew...which was a lot of people. We built a lot of business from networking which brings us to numbers 3 and 4 of the Secret Weapons of the Super Rich: Executive Perks and Networking.

Senior executives at large companies typically receive not just a salary but bonuses, grants of stock, and stock options. They may have the ability to defer some of their compensation until future years, which can help with tax planning.Corporate leaders may also get help with tax preparation, along with free medical care and valuable insurance benefits.

We've talked about this one before. One very clear advantage the wealthy have over everyone else is they are able to structure how they are paid so they pay less in tax. This is why you never hear any talk of flat taxes any longer--something I would be in favor of today. The wealthy would end up paying more than they do now if there was a flat tax. The wealthy also enjoy the advantages of being able to hire accountants and lawyers--something your average Joe can't do. I had many clients who would regale me with stories of how they were going to save money while passing it on to their customer.

The topic for discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January is "shared norms for the new reality." Sound sleepy? For most of the rich and powerful in attendance, the real payoff is an opportunity to network with other rich and powerful individuals.

Sounds great, right? But honestly this new reality is simply adjusting the market to sell more to each other as opposed to the vanishing middle class. I can only imagine the tittering and guffawing that goes on Bill Clinton shows up at this event (as he has in the past) and talks about the engine of the middle class.

I guess I'm laughing as well because this is how we got our business back in the 1990s: networking. There was no hard work at all involved...just my very social personality. We got new business because of the people that I knew who trusted me. We lost business because we weren't in the "club." This was more true of the first company I worked at as opposed to the second. The first was run by two guys who were just terrible with clients. We pitched to every major company in town and we only were chosen from 2 of them. And that was to do smaller, less paying work.

Later, when I and two others split off from the first company we did better but we still weren't in the right networks and it was very clear we never would be. This is why I also laugh at people who think that small business is being fucked over by the government. Small business is being fucked over by the in crowd. They don't want small businesses to succeed, on the whole, because it leaves less money for them. Greed really kicked into high gear in the 1990s culminating in the nuclear level we have today.

They are able to do this because they are very strict about who they let into the club. It ain't Joe the Plumber, that's for sure. And yet he (and countless others) blame the government and President Obama who actually gave them tax breaks. Why is this?

Because their love of the dream (working harder and then making it) is too powerful to ignore. Like many other myths, they simply believe.

Semper Fi!

The other day someone used the term "warmists" in comments. I had never heard this term before but apparently it refers to people who have succumbed to "climate change hysteria." They refuse to accept the "truth." You know the "truth" I am talking about, right? The one Thomas Friedman astutely defines as "a fraudulent, anti-science campaign funded largely by Big Oil and Big Coal." Those silly warmists....how can they not see the facts? Well, guess who else doesn't see the truth and the facts.

The United States Marine Corps.

Ray Mabus, Secretary of the Navy, has directed both the Marines and the Navy in strategies that will "out green" Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and petrol dictators like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Apparently, going green is going to save the lives of our troops.

Fewer fuel convoys in theater can mean saving the lives of soldiers, said Katherine Hammack, the new assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment. Last week -- at the start of October's energy awareness observance -- the word "energy" was added to the name of that office. It's a reflection of the Army's new focus on energy.

There was one casualty for every 24 fuel convoys in Afghanistan in fiscal year 2007, according to a 2009 Department of the Army study.

Maybe there are other reasons to go green. Huh. I guess the hysteria over the "warmists" must have overlooked this fact. The article also details how the military is going to figure out ways to use less energy. One way is going to be solar power and more energy efficient buildings. All of this translates into better security for the troops.

The Navy is also up to some pretty cool shit as well. They've recently tested a biofueled Green Hornet (50 percent conventional fuel and 50 percent camelina, a hard plant that can grow in difficult soil) that flew above Mach 1, a critical threshold to clear the jet for operations. The Navy has also launched the USS Malkin Island, an amphibious assault ship powered by a hybrid engine. They also have the RCB-X combat boat which runs on 50 percent algae.

"Going green is about combat capability and assuring Navy's mobility," said Rear Adm. Philip Cullom, director of the Chief of Naval Operations Energy and Environmental Readiness Division, which leads the Navy's Task Force Energy. "It is not just about natural security; it also strengthens national security. By having reliable and abundant alternate sources of energy, we will no longer be held hostage by any one source of energy, such as petroleum."

No shit. Thankfully, there are people out there that are actually THINKING about the myriad of positive outcomes from green technology as opposed to being obsessed with winning arguments and not being wrong. It's important to also note that camelina and algae are biofuels that don't compete with ethanol (a food related biofuel).

All of this is part of Secretary Mabus' overall plan to increase security, reduce costs, and make our military more efficient by having a "Great Green Fleet."

We are moving towards alternative fuels in the Navy and the Marine Corps for one main

reason, and that is to make us better fighters. Strategically we have got to break the

dependence on foreign sources of fossil fuels. We would not let countries that deliver our

energy today build our warships, we would not let them build our weapon systems, we would not let them be responsible for our defense and yet we’re willing to let them power those same warships, those same airplanes, those same weapon systems.

So strategically there’s a compelling case to be made for changing the way we get and the way we use energy. Tactically you can make the same case, every time you cut a ship away from an oiler, every time you produce the energy where you are you’ve made us better war fighters.

Semper Fi!

Well...are you?

Are you smarter than a Fox News viewer? How about a CNN viewer? Take our quiz to find out.

Please publish your results in comments below. I was wrong on one of them.

Oh, and there are plenty of facts to back up each question. Have fun with those:)

Shh (2 of 20)

Continuing on with examples of how the wealthy in this country have more advantages to grow their worth and attain more power, we have the hedge fund.

Hedge funds, which are also restricted to accredited investors, use a variety of often complex strategies, such as high-tech, proprietary trading platforms that buy and sell stocks in milliseconds. There were more than 8,000 hedge funds at the end of 2009, according to Hedge Fund Research.

John Merrill, chief investment officer of Tanglewood Wealth Management in Houston, says less than 25 hedge fund managers have stellar long-term records that make them worth often hefty fees, which can be 2 percent of the portfolio every year plus 20 percent of any profits. For regular investors it can be a challenge to even identify the most successful funds, which can be secretive about their track records, he adds.

Something else to note as well. Hedge funds are not obligated to disclose their activities to third parties. In addition to being very under regulated, hedge fund disclosure is not available to the non investor. Even to investors, they have very limited transparency and this is how someone like Madoff was able to run (an actual as opposed to make believe) Ponzi Scheme.

So, hedge funds are another example of something that is offered only to the very wealthy which further cements their ability to maintain power over the rest of us.

Get Ready

I recently completed the magnificent Dark Tower series by Stephen King. I highly recommend this wonderful series of books if you have not read them. In the last book, King through out a line that I will be using in great frequency starting today so get ready.

One of the characters in the book is describing in detail to the series' heroes how a town's residents (the morks) function and how their minders (the Algul staff) rule them. These residents are doing great harm to the universe and Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah and Oy (the heroes) are learning about them so they can attack the town and stop them.

Most morks are selfish introverts masquerading as rugged individualists-they want the world to see them as Daniel Boone types-and the Algul staff loves it, believe me. No community is easier to govern than one that rejects the very concept of community.

Now I finally get it and some of you. Fucking mega!

Christmas For Me! (1 of 20)

I guess I must've been nice as opposed to naughty because Santa has given me a very large present in the form of this year in the form of Ben Steverman's article/power point presentation over at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Each section details exactly how the wealthy of this country have far more advantages than the rest of us and have set up a system to not only keep it that way but to net them more money and, with it, more power. Since this has been the overall and ongoing argument in comments for the last year or more, I thought it would be cool to showcase his 20 points and see if I can make any sort of headway through the 1,000 feet of rock granite minds that make up some of my regular readers. Let's dive in and take a look at his first point.

Under U.S. law, certain investment products are only available to accredited investors, who must have a household net worth of $1 million or more. A key advantage of many of these so-called "alternative investments" is that, at least in theory, they help diversify a portfolio because they don't move in lockstep with traditional stock and bond investments, and so help balance out returns. Alternative investments include venture capital funds, private equity funds, direct investments in commodities such as timber, and stakes in private companies.

Available only to accredited investors...hmmm...but I thought that the market was free and we all had the same choices as everyone else? Apparently, we don't.

Of course, I'm certain that many of you will look at the first three words and leap into the usual GUBMINT BAD rhetoric but I'm hoping that you are smart enough to operate on the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy and figure out why and how this law exists the way that it does.

Here's to hoping!

Voices in his Head?

I get a a lot of grief in comments for arguing with the voices (conservatives) in my head. I have a post coming soon that addresses these comments. For now, though, and because it's Sunday, check out this video.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jesus Is a Liberal Democrat
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

I wonder if Stephen Colbert has voices in his head as well.

More importantly, a goal of mine has finally been achieved: "Jesus would've probably been a liberal Democrat." I've toyed with the idea of saying this but after some thought realized He wouldn't be either a Democrat or a Republican.

But the simple fact that Bernie Goldberg said it on Fox News pretty much makes my day. Recognizing the contradiction in the way Christ lived his life and the obsession the right has with the free market is the first step in realizing that being a Christian, as defined by Christ's words, and being a conservative (libertarian, evangelical or otherwise) today are mutually exclusive.

Victory

The Senate just voted to repeal DADT, 65-31. I don't see many victories these days but this is certainly one of them. A couple of weeks ago I didn't think it would happen. But here we are.

I'd like to issue a special note of honor to Sens. Scott Brown, R-Mass.; Mark Kirk, R-Ill.; George Voinovich, R-Ohio; Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both R-Maine for putting the vote over 60. I don't care if you have a "D" or "R" next to your name. When you do the right thing, you get credit from me. Well done, Senators.

This would be one of those days when I am super fucking proud to be an American!

Seriously?

As I was scrolling through my news feed on FaceBook the other day, I saw that one of my very conservative friends (also an evangelical minister) had "liked" The American Principles Project.

I went and checked out the site expecting the usual. I certainly got that but right up front I saw something that was such a fine example of monumental hypocrisy that I, of course, had to share with all of you.

On the first page, we get their mission statement, which reads as follows.

The American Principles Project is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to preserving and propagating the fundamental principles on which our country was founded - universal principles, embracing the notion that we are all, "created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

At first glance, I think we would all agree with this. But take a look at the first article in their news feed.

A response to a response - The Argument Against Gay Marriage: And Why it Doesn’t Fail

Are you fucking kidding me? We are all created equal...have unalienable rights...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness....UNLESS YOU ARE GAY IN WHICH CASE FUCK OFF!!!

What a load of hypocritical bullshit on a myriad of levels. If they actually believed their mission statement (the Declaration of Independence), they would embrace gay marriage. More troubling, and this is glaringly true of many conservatives these days, is their insistence that the Constitution limits government....except when it comes to things like gay marriage. Then its OK for the federal government to dictate what people do in their private lives.

The ONLY reason why homosexuality is considered a sin is because at the time the Bible was written, Romans were buggering little boys. That is a sin. In fact, it's a criminal act that has somehow translated over the centuries to mean that being gay is a criminal act. But back in those days, there were no Neils and Steves adopting little children from Haiti and operating their little B and B. Our culture has changed...our society has moved...homosexuality isn't a crime, folks.

I don't get it. Why are people so concerned about gay marriage? What do they think is going to happen when it becomes legal?. It's been illegal in most states for the history of our country and the heterosexuals certainly haven't improved it. In fact, it's worse now then it's ever been with the divorce rate being so high.

I don't care if they don't like gay people. That's their right. But to be such a hypocrite about the Constitution. Is it all about fear...AGAIN...with these people?

What I feel like every day in discussions on this blog. Bloody brilliant!

Sweet Site

Just found Michael Laser's site, news-basics.com and I love it. We see a lot more of these popping up in this day and age of biased media. Want to know the basics with some nice detail about Iran? Click on the link on the left hand side of his page. And if you absolutely have to have opinions, he offers links on all sides.

He also has a pretty cool link called Liberal vs. Conservative Values. Like Michael, I found myself laughing at the fact that I agree with some of the simplified polar opposites. For example,

On the social safety net

The liberal view

• There are people in this world who need help. They struggle to put food on the table, or can’t afford medical care—and many of them live in the United States. A civilized society would try to help them, instead of leaving them to fend for themselves. (Someday, the one who needs a helping hand may be you, or someone you love. All it takes is a serious illness, an injury, a lay-off, or a death in the family.)

The conservative view

• People are responsible for themselves—and, given the chance, they’re capable of supporting themselves and their families. If the government makes a practice of providing for people (with welfare, for example), they become weak and dependent, and lose their will to work. Nothing could be more destructive to the health of our society.

I agree with both and do not think they are mutually exclusive. Why do many of you think they are?

The Other Nixon Legacy

The Nixon Library released another 265 hours of conversations Richard Nixon recorded during his presidency. What's interesting about these conversations is how they show the kind of progress we can make in 50 years, and how far we still have to go.

In those conversations, according to the New York Times article, Colson told Nixon he had always had "a little prejudice." Nixon responded that he himself wasn't prejudiced but that "I've just recognized that, you know, all people have certain traits."

In other words, Nixon prejudged people based on their ethnicity because "all people" have certain traits. One of the dictionary definitions of prejudice is "preconceived notion or opinion." So there's no question that anyone who makes broad assumptions about someone based on race or ethnicity is prejudiced in at least one sense of the word.

Another dictionary definition of prejudice is "an irrational attitude or hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race or their supposed characteristics." This is the one that Nixon thinks he is innocent of.

But in practice, one sort of prejudice makes the other sort possible. By buying into the idea that certain groups all share some trait, you automatically exclude a person from consideration for certain jobs solely based on their ethnicity. And the crazy thing is, especially in the US, almost no one can claim any one ethnicity -- my ancestors came from at least five different countries and pretty much everyone here can say that.

Most of the headlines echo the New York Times: "In Tapes, Nixon Rails about Jews and Blacks." But Nixon was bigoted all around. From the Times:

“The Jews have certain traits,” he said. “The Irish have certain — for example, the Irish can’t drink. What you always have to remember with the Irish is they get mean. Virtually every Irish I’ve known gets mean when he drinks. Particularly the real Irish.”

Nixon continued: “The Italians, of course, those people course don’t have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but,” and his voice trailed off.

Paradoxically, this is a ray of light.

Nixon was obviously prejudiced in all senses of the word against pretty much everyone. At the time of these conversations people were becoming what the right loves to call "politically correct" about racism. But 10 years earlier Nixon's ethnic slurs would not have raised any eyebrows.

The headlines on this story trumpet Nixon's prejudice against Jews and blacks, but relegate his racism against the Italians and the Irish to minor talking points that burnish Nixon's racist credentials. These days Nixon's anti-Irish and anti-Italian prejudices seem silly, nonsensical and almost quaint.

The most damning thing in the Nixon story was this (from the Times):

At another point, in a long and wandering conversation with Rose Mary Woods, his personal secretary, that veered from whom to invite to a state dinner to whether Ms. Woods should get her hair done, Nixon offered sharp skepticism at the views of William P. Rogers, his secretary of state, about the future of black Africans.

“Bill Rogers has got — to his credit it’s a decent feeling — but somewhat sort of a blind spot on the black thing because he’s been in New York,” Nixon said. “He says well, ‘They are coming along, and that after all they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart.’ So forth and so on.

“My own view is I think he’s right if you’re talking in terms of 500 years,” he said. “I think it’s wrong if you’re talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that’s the only thing that’s going to do it, Rose.”

It's taken less than 40 years for a black man to attain the highest office in the land, not 500. But, some will argue, Nixon was right after all: Obama is the son of a Kenyan and a white American. He had been "inbred."

No, Nixon was just racist and wrong. Colin Powell would have been able to run for president and win. I don't think Powell has the stomach for the crap you have to put up with to get elected (I don't see how anyone can stand it). But he has the ability to lead and he had the trust of the American people until he was caught up in the Bush administration's lies on Iraq. And he was serving in Nixon's military at the time Nixon made his pernicious remarks!

And, yeah, Powell too had been "inbred." But that's the point. Everyone in this country has been thrown into the melting pot. It doesn't take 500 years for this to happen: it only takes the time for racist bigots to die out and the artificial barriers that separate us to fall away and allow us to treat each other as equals.

In the next 50 years we'll likely see the last vestiges of racism against American blacks die out, and the anti-gay hysteria disappear completely. As groups assimilate prejudice eventually evaporates (new prejudices may form as new out-groups arrive, but that's life).

This question of assimilation seems to be the bone of contention for a lot of people on the right today. They aren't prejudiced, they insist, but it's not right that Mexican Americans "refuse" to learn English or that American Muslim women wear veils or that Somali Americans eat weird food. These people demand assimilation instantly, but they miss the lessons of history.

Assimilation doesn't happen in a day. Japanese, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Norwegian and German immigrants spoke their native languages.

But their kids assimilated and now all their descendants speak English and wear jeans and eat hamburgers and French fries. And we eat Kung Pao chicken and sushi and beef burritos.

The wrong way to force assimilation was what happened to many American Indians -- kids were taken from their parents, stripped of their clothing and their names and forced to learn English.

If you want to hire someone you don't criticize their clothes, what they eat and how they talk. It's the same thing with assimilating recent immigrants into our society. To encourage assimilation and remove racial tension we need to accept people for what they are. We can't insist they change instantly -- it's not possible. The adults will never change, because adults can't. But their kids -- their kids will be 100% American if we don't alienate them.

Like the generations of Swedes, Frenchmen, Russians, Poles, Czechs who came to this country, these new kids will forget their parents' native tongues, throw away their veils, and stop eating weird food. Their parents will bemoan the loss, but hey -- that's life in America. If we make the American way of life attractive and inviting the kids will be helpless to resist The Borg of American popular society.

At the same time we may get something new in the process. Like pizza: the staple of American life.

Son of Trying Again

Getting back to how the organizations that run the derivatives market fuck people over...

The clearinghouses that run the inner circle of the derivatives market are very exclusive. As the article details, banks try get into to the club only to be rebuffed for "having too little capital." But that's not the real reason.

“We are not a nobody,” said Sanjay Kannambadi, chief executive of BNY Mellon Clearing, a subsidiary created to get into the business. “But we don’t qualify. We certainly think that’s kind of crazy.”

The real reason the bank is being shut out, he said, is that rivals want to preserve their profit margins, and they are the ones who helped write the membership rules.

Mr. Kannambadi said Bank of New York’s clients asked it to enter the derivatives business because they believe they are being charged too much by big banks. Its entry could lower fees. Others that have yet to gain full entry to the derivatives trading club are the State Street Corporation, and small brokerage firms like MF Global and Newedge.

Preserve their profit margins...exactly what I have been saying all along. And these committees, not the government, write the rules. Great. Please let's continue to have more shit and paranoia blamed on the government so these assholes can continue to rip people off.

So is there a way to quantify all of this? No. Why?

The precise amount that banks make trading derivatives isn’t known, but there is anecdotal evidence of their profitability. Former bank traders who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements with their former employers said their banks typically earned $25,000 for providing $25 million of insurance against the risk that a corporation might default on its debt via the swaps market. These traders turn over millions of dollars in these trades every day, and credit default swaps are just one of many kinds of derivatives.

The secrecy surrounding derivatives trading is a key factor enabling banks to make such large profits.

Super! So nothing at all has changed since 2008. Ah well, let's just say it's all the fault of the government and move on. These guys running these clearinghouses are all rugged individualists simply reaping the benefits of a free market. We need to leave them alone because it's clear that their market is perfectly competitive. The government just needs to get out of the way and watch the economy take off. Except, how can it when these people ARE TAKING ALL OF THE MONEY!

Since I know some of you aren't getting this yet, here's another way to look at it.

And the profits on most derivatives are masked. In most cases, buyers are told only what they have to pay for the derivative contract, say $25 million. That amount is more than the seller gets, but how much more — $5,000, $25,000 or $50,000 more — is unknown. That’s because the seller also is told only the amount he will receive. The difference between the two is the bank’s fee and profit. So, the bigger the difference, the better for the bank — and the worse for the customers.

It would be like a real estate agent selling a house, but the buyer knowing only what he paid and the seller knowing only what he received. The agent would pocket the difference as his fee, rather than disclose it. Moreover, only the real estate agent — and neither buyer nor seller — would have easy access to the prices paid recently for other homes on the same block.

Wow, that's fantastic. And this is perfectly OK with 30 to 40 million of you?

But listen, I can feel many of you still digging in your heels as you always do and refusing to accept these facts. Let's keep going because I know your knee is jerking to that ol' classic, "Let Loose the Market (And Watch It Take Off)."

Mr. Griffin said last week that customers have so far paid the price for not yet having electronic trading. He puts the toll, by a rough estimate, in the tens of billions of dollars, saying that electronic trading would remove much of this “economic rent the dealers enjoy from a market that is so opaque.”

Tens of billions. Staggering. So where is the government again? Oh, that's right...neutered in the corner by Tea Party hysteria.

Under the Dodd-Frank bill, the clearinghouses were given broad authority. The risk committees there will help decide what prices will be charged for clearing trades, on top of fees banks collect for matching buyers and sellers, and how much money customers must put up as collateral to cover potential losses.

There is so much anti-government fervor out there that conservative Democrats, feeble minded wankers that they are, are succumbing to zillions of falsehood riddled with paranoia. People like Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown are painted as Nazis...choking the "poor and helpless" derivatives market out of their money and giving it to a lazy, lower class useful idiot with a flat screen. The more we fail to recognize that men like Sanders and Feingold are our last line of defense, the more our country decays.

Basically, what we are doing is blowing up our air force on the eve of a major aerial conflict because a little over a third of our country is afraid of flying.

Trying Again

I've put up a fair amount of information regarding the shift of wealth in this country and how, unless you are very wealthy, you are being screwed over by the top two percent in this country. This will continue to happen as long as we have somewhere between 30 and 40 million people in our country who have a pathological hatred of government.

It's pretty clear to me that it's going to take a long time to convince some of you. More than likely I never will. Because even after all the information I have put up here, I still get questions like this.

Do you have some way of quantifying the gouging that you are talking about?

When I answer a question like this with figures and commentary (by myself and others), they dismiss it all as illogical and the sources as biased...ironically falling into the genetic fallacy trap of which I am so often accused. An example of this was a challenge that was recently issued to demonstrate a counterpoint to a recent study which showed the stimulus and TARP programs to be successful. I have to see such a model.

Still, the questions persist.

Ripped off HOW? How does someone else getting richer rip me, or you, off?

Trying again...

A Secretive Banking Elite Rules Derivatives Trading
Clubby Clearinghouses Limit Competition and Consumers Face Higher Prices.

The banks in this group, which is affiliated with a new derivatives clearinghouse, have fought to block other banks from entering the market, and they are also trying to thwart efforts to make full information on prices and fees freely available.

Banks’ influence over this market, and over clearinghouses like the one this select group advises, has costly implications for businesses large and small, like Dan Singer’s home heating-oil company in Westchester County, north of New York City.

This fall, many of Mr. Singer’s customers purchased fixed-rate plans to lock in winter heating oil at around $3 a gallon. While that price was above the prevailing $2.80 a gallon then, the contracts will protect homeowners if bitterly cold weather pushes the price higher.

But Mr. Singer wonders if his company, Robison Oil, should be getting a better deal. He uses derivatives like swaps and options to create his fixed plans. But he has no idea how much lower his prices — and his customers’ prices — could be, he says, because banks don’t disclose fees associated with the derivatives.

“At the end of the day, I don’t know if I got a fair price, or what they’re charging me,” Mr. Singer said.

Seems pretty straight forward to me. Any of you getting it now? Or we going to fall back into the "winning the argument-want him to fail-never be wrong" pathology again?

See, this is what happens when you don't have enough regulation. People are gouged out of money and purposefully left in the dark. Do they have any other choice? If you think they do, call Mr. Singer and tell him. Let me know how the conversation goes.

The marketplace as it functions now “adds up to higher costs to all Americans,” said Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates most derivatives. More oversight of the banks in this market is needed, he said.

Sorry, Gary, but that's not going to happen any time soon. People think that government is the problem. Until they ditch their pathology, banks are going to continue these practices.

But, hey, what about the financial overhaul bill?

Under the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul, many derivatives will be traded via such clearinghouses. Mr. Gensler wants to lessen banks’ control over these new institutions. But Republican lawmakers, many of whom received large campaign contributions from bankers who want to influence how the derivatives rules are written, say they plan to push back against much of the coming reform. On Thursday, the commission canceled a vote over a proposal to make prices more transparent, raising speculation that Mr. Gensler did not have enough support from his fellow commissioners.

Excuse me, but doesn't the GOP want to support guys like Dan Singer? I guess they would rather support the banks.

“When you limit participation in the governance of an entity to a few like-minded institutions or individuals who have an interest in keeping competitors out, you have the potential for bad things to happen. It’s antitrust 101,” said Robert E. Litan, who helped oversee the Justice Department’s Nasdaq investigation as deputy assistant attorney general and is now a fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “The history of derivatives trading is it has grown up as a very concentrated industry, and old habits are hard to break.”

And I'm the one that gets ripped for not having any depth, economically speaking.

But how exactly do these clearinghouses keep people out? And why is that relevant? More on that tomorrow.

Collapse

Take a look at these two photos. On the top is what the Metrodome, home of the Minnesota Vikings, is supposed to look like. On the bottom is what it looks like this morning after 16 inches of snow have been dumped on it.

I can't help but think of the Dome as a metaphor this morning for the Democrats...super inflated and pumped up after the 2008 election...completely collapsed and deflated after a mountain of bullshit has been heaped upon them.

To me, the snow represents how the "minority" party can be effective if that party has a relentless, well financed engine of propaganda behind it. 30 percent approval rating or less? No problem. Let's get Rush, Glenn and Sarah on it. Problem solved. Democrats have nothing like this. Perhaps it's simply not in their nature. More likely is the fact that they don't have irrational fear combined with paranoia about the government on their side. Whatever the reason, the Democrats have caved to so many things in the last week that this image of the snow heaped Dome is honestly perfect.

For the next two years, they need to heed the advice of the unnamed Holocaust survivor. "When someone says they want to kill you, believe them." I know I'm going to heed it. Quite literally, lives are at stake as is the future of this country.

And I'm not going to sit around and watch aimlessly as pathological ideologues destroy it.

WTF Has Obama Done?

Signed the Christopher and Dana Reeve Paralysis Act, the first piece of comprehensive legislation aimed at improving the lives of Americans living with paralysis.

One of the main reasons why I am a Democrat is because they seem to understand (in giant leaps and bounds) that helping people is a good thing. And that it's OK when the government does it. Apparently, the only "help" that the government is allowed to do in GOP Land is related to guns and blowing things up. Certainly, I have no problem with this if the situation presents itself where that is necessary but their mindset seems awfully narrow.

Surprise, surprise...

So Obvious

Fox News has been the talk of town of late. Check out this video of Hannity.



What I love about this one is how he doesn't actually say that Scott is wrong. Just another fine example of shamelessly playing to the bigots in the base. Check out this photo (left) of Scott. Could he BE any more obvious?

A leaked document from Fox News managing editor Bill Sammon also has the Internet buzzing. I have no idea why. Are there people out there that are still surprised by the fact that Fox News manipulates language in order to sway people to think a certain way?

Here is the memo.

1) Please use the term "government-run health insurance" or, when brevity is a concern, "government option," whenever possible.

2) When it is necessary to use the term "public option" (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation's lexicon), use the qualifier "so-called," as in "the so-called public option."

3) Here's another way to phrase it: "The public option, which is the government-run plan."

4) When newsmakers and sources use the term "public option" in our stories, there's not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.

Yeah, and? Why is this a shocking revelation? I suppose it is very interesting to see how Fox uses the word "government" and how insistent they are that is mentioned a great deal. Since we have been discussing this recently, I thought at least worthy of a note. This is yet another fine example of how marketing manipulates people into acting against their self interest. The word "government" is a code word specifically used to control thought.

In many ways, it's a trigger word (see: The Manchurian Candidate) used to activate somewhere between 30-40 million Americans. Clearly, it's very successful.

Hell, they don't need to kill anyone anymore. When you have that many people so nicely controlled, who needs assassins?

Fuck You

I'm not usually this blunt with titles in my posts but that is my message for the GOP today and its supporters. Fuck you. Fuck you and your single minded pathology that desires all Democrats to fail regardless of the human consequence.

Senate Republicans today blocked a procedural vote to take a straight up and down vote on health care compensation for 9/11 workers. I guess the people that dug body parts out of the rubble and got really sick as a result of all the environmental hazards need to pull themselves up by their boot straps and get their own fucking health care, right? How are these people any different than our troops? The (phony) gripe by the GOP is that it the price tag is too much (7.4 billion dollars) and they are worried how to pay for it.

How about the tax breaks you just gave to Thurston Howell? Assholes.

I'm trying really hard to see their side of it, being the reflective guy I am, but they have about as much of a "side" as the Selma police had in the 50s and 60s. NONE.

Click here for a list of the douchebags who hypocritically beat people with the flag but then do nothing about it.

Deal With It

A couple of months back, as part of continuing education, I participated in a two day seminar titled "Beyond Diversity." For the most part, I consider myself to be a racially sensitive person but I quickly found out how many things I take for granted every day. For example, see any Band Aids at Target or elsewhere that are NOT white flesh colored (other than the cute kiddie ones)? How about hair care products that are made for the type of hair that black people have? These might seem like minor things but this is our culture. For the time being, anyway, it is a white dominated culture and that's a problem. The evidence is in the numbers but I'll get to that in a moment.

If these examples don't convince you, ask someone you know that is black if, when they teach their children how to drive, if they also teach them how not to get shot by a police officer (regardless of said officer's skin color). Every parent in the seminar, who had children of driving age, taught their kids where to put their hands, how to talk to the officer, and how, because they were black, they had to be more careful than white drivers. Since I knew that the people at the seminar were probably very tuned in to race issues, I decided to ask every black person I see regularly if they had children of driving age or older and if they taught them in the same manner.

Every single one said the same thing as the folks at the seminar.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we still have racial issues in this country. More importantly we have four basic areas of denial or avoidance that are illustrated beautifully in comments on this blog nearly every day. Before I detail what they are, however, I want to make one thing very clear. There is one reason and one reason alone why I am talking about this: The Achievement Gap.

The achievement gap has long been documented between whites and blacks and is numerical evidence that our culture is still white dominated. Even today, we see the same problems we have seen for decades.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.”

Conversations people are unwilling to have....so true...especially here.

But how does this unwillingness that Ferguson mentions manifest itself? Through the following four areas

1. Ignorance. We see two different types here: unconsciousness (I don' t know what I don't know) and Dys-Consciousness (I don't know but I think I do). The former describes myself when I learned about the band aid colors. The latter describes someone who would say "I'm not racist. I have a Black friend." Something else to avoid here is, when discussing issues of race, don't make your black friend a spokesperson. "Well, he's black-let's ask him?" essentially says that all black people think alike because of their race.

2. Denial. This describes some of my readers. Many of you bitch that "it's all over now-why can't the blacks just get past it?" Or "we've already had this discussion." To answer the first question, because of the achievement gap and to answer the second, it's not good enough because of the achievement gap. Face the numbers. Deal with it.

Another element of denial is something else we see all the time: Blaming the Victim. There are great examples of it in comments all the time. I'm certain we will see several after this post. If Bill accuses Hank of being prejudiced or participating in discrimination, somehow (as if by magic, see: out of someone's ass) Bill is the problem, not Hank. "He brings it on himself" is the phrase we hear most commonly.

3. Redefinition. Another area in which several of my readers reside. "It's only a few people" or "It's in human nature. There's nothing I can do about it." I've said the latter myself and I was most assuredly wrong to do so. We also here people say that it's not race but behavior...which is actually prejudiced if you think about it. So, if they are black, they behave a certain way?

4. Counteratttack/Competing Victimizations. This is the area in which most of the right wing pundits reside. The obsession with the wise Latina remark by Sonia Sotomayor is a great example of this. The New Black Panther voting "story" is another. Simply mention that someone is prejudiced on any right wing blog and watch this area unfold in all its glory as well as both of these comments. You'll see them faster than flies screaming to shit.

In looking at these four stages of avoidance, it is quite clear that they all exacerbate the problem. Folks, we need to start having these conversations and not fall into any of these stages because the numbers don't lie. As long as we, as a culture, continue to fail black people, the issue of race is going to continue to come up and the wheel of perpetuity keeps on spinning like wheels in a good, old fashioned Minnesota snow storm. The word "racist" will be heard over and over again. I know many of you don't like it when it does.

So, you don't like it when the issue of race comes up and it makes your head hurt? Fine. Work on fixing the achievement gap which starts with a conversation. Face the problem and deal with it rather than being a dick about it.

After all, it's honestly in your self interest if you think about it.