Category Archives: Corporate Greed

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Welcome Home, Soldier

Here’s a little justice for the men and women who serve and then got served.

Members of the U.S. military whose homes were unlawfully foreclosed upon between 2006 and 2010 will receive about $39 million from subsidiaries of Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Thursday.

Each of 316 service members will receive at least $116,785, plus compensation and with interest, for any home equity lost.

It should be noted that the banks did not do this out of the goodness of their hearts.  They did it under threat of suit from the Justice Department.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Here Come the Clampetts

Matt Taibbi sums up the bailout of Wall Street.

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

And now AIG, one of the companies we helped get through rehab — and is now running a PR campaign to say “Thank you” — is thinking about suing the U.S. government because their stockholders didn’t get a pony.

Digby says that’s chutzpah.  Wrong; it’s typical.

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A Place To Start

Charlie Pierce has a suggestion on how to institute gun control: go after the companies that make and sell them.

This could be the start of something real — a disinvestment campaign, modeled on the one aimed at companies doing business in South Africa and, later, at the tobacco industry, on the part of police, and fire, and school teachers’ unions to remove their money from the marketing end of mass killing. A campaign that would redefine gun violence as a public-health crisis, as David Satcher tried to do years ago, and to redefine it on the balance sheet, where that would really count. This could be the start of holding the people who really make the money accountable for how they make it. You could close the NRA tomorrow, and they’d be another lobbying arm started up by armaments money within the hour. You could shoot Wayne LaPierre to the moon, and they’d be 100 other lobbyists lining up to take his place. Both LaPierre and the NRA serve not their members, but  weapons manufacturers. (That’s why all those polls about “rank and file” NRA members who support, say, background checks, are worthless. At its top, the organization no more answers to them than it does to the Brady Campaign.) The paranoia stoked by NRA fundraising — which, alas, seems to have worked its dark magic on Adam Lanza’s mother — is not directed merely against sensible gun legislation. It’s to sell more guns to the people who marinate themselves in that paranoia, so the people who make the guns can make even more money. That’s the place you want to paint the bullseye.

This is America, after all: the place where everyone wants to make a buck… and then go out and shoot one.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Take The Money and Run

Hostess Brands and Twinkies may be gone, the company shut down, and workers laid off, but the people who ran the place made out pretty well.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, Hostess’ CEO, Gregory Rayburn, essentially admitted that his company stole employee pension money and put it toward CEO and senior executive pay (aka “operations”). While this isn’t technically illegal, it’s another sleazy theft by Hostess executives – who’ve paid themselves handsomely while running their company into the ground. Just last month, a judge agreed to let Hostess executives suck another $1.8 million out of the bankrupt company to pay bonuses to CEOs.

This would be just another business day in Mitt Romney’s America.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Business vs. Government

CLW has a few thoughts on why people who were really successful in running a business don’t necessarily make successful government leaders.

This article from Slate by Matthew Yglesias got me thinking.  I can answer the article fairly simply: there is a belief perpetuated by the right that everyone in government is an abject failure, and of course those incompetent boobs couldn’t run a business.  But this ignores the more important point that business and government are not the same.  At all.

What I started wondering is why is there a belief that what we need in government is more business people?  Why do people so readily believe that running a business is equivalent to running a country?  What is it about the myth of the citizen legislator that is so compelling for people?

More recently, what of Mitt Romney’s skills were applicable to the job?  He never even actually ran companies where he was responsible for balancing a budget, or trimming costs, or laying out a vision that would motivate people, or any of the possible areas where skills might be seen as transferable.  Bain had people for that.  Mitt was a financier, an investor, a gambler of the highest order.  Bain doesn’t so much run companies as merely push them around on Excel spreadsheets.  And Mitt didn’t even do the spreadsheets, he just pushed for the numbers to be the biggest they could be.

But I digress into recent politics.  It is obvious to anyone, and they even have drug ads on TV playing against the stereotype, that you don’t want your plumber in the operating room, or vice-versa.  You want and need skilled people in a variety of areas to do anything complex.  So why would we think that Joe-the-Plumber has any of the requisite skills for politics?

But this skips right past the overarching problem of comparing business and government.  There are so many ways in which they are fundamentally different.

Businesses are dedicated to a single focus: maximize the profits for the stakeholders. If doing that means listening to your customers, fine.  But the top line goal never waivers, whether it’s a donut shop or a Fortune 500.  Make money, maybe enjoy the ride while you’re at it, but make money.  Happy employees?  Only if it helps the bottom line.  ”Job create” if you must, but that’s not why they’re in business (in fact, the fewer jobs, the better).  Crush the competition?  Sure, why not, if it means more for me.  Be socially responsible?  OK, if that makes people like us.  There just are no overarching objectives other than: make money.  The rest is collateral.

Government is tugged at by many masters, and the first line of the constitution makes that clear: “…  in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…”  That says is all.  Try to make a “perfect union”, establish justice, make domestic peace (emphasis mine), defend the country, promote general welfare, keep freedom alive, etc., etc.  That’s a huge laundry list, and some of them compete with each other.  Liberty and union are just two that are not natural bedfellows.

The kinds of people who can balance dozens of competing priorities, who can adroitly be welcomed by many competing factions, who can negotiate win-win results (as opposed to win at all costs), who can be strong as the commander in chief, yet warm and welcoming as the promoter of the general welfare, are a wholly different animal from those who succeed in business.  Witness the success of Steve Jobs, or Steve Sinofsky, or any of the parade of business rock stars.  They are single minded and intensely focused, are often jerks, and are frequently ruthless with few considerations other than their business and themselves.  They often have numerous enemies who drive their success just by being the enemy — it’s us against them.  They abhor dependency on others, and what alliances they do form are narrow, intense, fragile, and volatile.  In short, the very opposite of what we want government leaders to be.

It’s not clear why anyone would want these guys to run the country, or state, or city.  And that’s fine with them, because outside of a few egomaniacs, it seems they don’t want the job.

I think that perhaps one reason business people think they can run government is because they look at the surface and see so many similarities: a chain of command, office processes, employees (Miami-Dade County Public Schools is the largest employer in Miami-Dade County); the trappings of what they see in their world.  There’s even the cash-flow system; budgeting, accounting, etc.  But the difference is the product and the bottom line.  Yes, government has to work within a budget (at least the entity that I work for does), but the product we create isn’t something you see on a store shelf.  Neither are most of the government services you see: police, fire, utilities, schools, road maintenance, and so on.  And providing them isn’t something that is driven by a profit motive or a competitive urge to beat the other guy to the best sales record and the biggest bonus.  Our results aren’t something you see on a balance sheet (unless you count the NCLB state-required tests).  That’s what comes with being both the source of all of the things CLW mentions: defense, welfare, and all the things people rely from so many different things; and also being a monopoly.

It requires a different mindset.  It doesn’t mean that people can’t be turned from business to government – a lot of them have joined up and done a good job – but they knew what they were getting into, and they knew there was a big difference.  I also know that I can tell instantly among my colleagues who has been in the classroom and knows why they went into teaching, and those who thought they landed a job that would be really hard to be fired from.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Dark As a Dungeon

NPR and the Center for Public Integrity did a two-part repot on the resurgence of black lung disease in the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky.

It wasn’t supposed to happen to coal miners in Mark McCowan’s generation. It wasn’t supposed to strike so early and so hard. At age 47 and just seven years after his first diagnosis, McCowan shouldn’t have a chest X-ray that looks this bad.

“I’m seeing more definition in the mass,” McCowan says, pausing for deep breaths as he holds the X-ray film up to the light of his living room window in Pounding Mill, Va.

“The mass is larger and more defined in the right upper lobe,” he continues, clinically describing the solid streak that shows up white on the X-ray of his lungs. “If you know white is bad and black is good, I’m in a lot of trouble.”

McCowan went from a clean X-ray at age 35 to progressive massive fibrosis — an advanced stage of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung — in just five years.

“You go from being normal to where … one day you try to do something you used to do, and you can’t do it and you’re just heaving to catch your breath,” McCowan says. “And you say this is crazy. It can’t be this bad. And then you realize a couple months down the road that it can be. And you realize a year down the road after that that you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Regulations were put in place over 40 years ago to regulate coal mines and eliminate the disease. And for a while it did; cases dropped off to almost nothing. But as the report shows, they’ve been on the rise since 1995.

Round up the usual suspects: lax enforcement, longer hours, and the occasional fraudulent reporting by both the mining companies and the regulators.

From the very beginning, miners reported “irregularities” in controlling coal mine dust, says Donald Rasmussen, 84, a pulmonologist in Beckley, W.Va. Rasmussen says he’s tested 40,000 coal miners for black lung in the last 50 years.

“So many miners will say, ‘If you think the dust is controlled you’re crazy,’ ” he says.

Measuring coal mine dust is key to preventing overexposure. Excess dust can trigger citations, fines and even slowdowns in coal production. Mining companies enforce their own compliance by taking and reporting mine dust samples. Federal mine inspectors also test for excessive dust.

But NPR and CPI have found widespread and persistent gaming of the system designed to measure and control exposure.

Now comes the hard part: getting the mining companies to come clean, so to speak, and save the lives of their workers.

In a companion story to the NPR/CPI investigation, veteran coal industry reporter Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette reviews 40 years of attempts to strengthen protection for miners.

Ward quotes former MSHA official Celeste Monforton, a worker safety advocate now at George Washington University: “We can’t get a regulation out to save our souls.” And, as Ward reports, “miners are left with the same system that experts have agreed hasn’t worked for decades.”

Since 1970, when mine dust controls began, black lung contributed to the deaths of more than 70,000 miners. The federal government and the industry spent $45 billion compensating the victims, including McCowan, and their families.

“Now it feels like I’ve got a heavy wet sack on each lung,” McCowan says, between long, deep breaths. “Breathing has become a conscious effort. … It seems like I give up a little bit of my world each day, that it gets smaller and smaller.”

Dark As a Dungeon

NPR and the Center for Public Integrity did a two-part repot on the resurgence of black lung disease in the coal mines of West Virginia and Kentucky.

It wasn’t supposed to happen to coal miners in Mark McCowan’s generation. It wasn’t supposed to strike so early and so hard. At age 47 and just seven years after his first diagnosis, McCowan shouldn’t have a chest X-ray that looks this bad.

“I’m seeing more definition in the mass,” McCowan says, pausing for deep breaths as he holds the X-ray film up to the light of his living room window in Pounding Mill, Va.

“The mass is larger and more defined in the right upper lobe,” he continues, clinically describing the solid streak that shows up white on the X-ray of his lungs. “If you know white is bad and black is good, I’m in a lot of trouble.”

McCowan went from a clean X-ray at age 35 to progressive massive fibrosis — an advanced stage of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung — in just five years.

“You go from being normal to where … one day you try to do something you used to do, and you can’t do it and you’re just heaving to catch your breath,” McCowan says. “And you say this is crazy. It can’t be this bad. And then you realize a couple months down the road that it can be. And you realize a year down the road after that that you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Regulations were put in place over 40 years ago to regulate coal mines and eliminate the disease. And for a while it did; cases dropped off to almost nothing. But as the report shows, they’ve been on the rise since 1995.

Round up the usual suspects: lax enforcement, longer hours, and the occasional fraudulent reporting by both the mining companies and the regulators.

From the very beginning, miners reported “irregularities” in controlling coal mine dust, says Donald Rasmussen, 84, a pulmonologist in Beckley, W.Va. Rasmussen says he’s tested 40,000 coal miners for black lung in the last 50 years.

“So many miners will say, ‘If you think the dust is controlled you’re crazy,’ ” he says.

Measuring coal mine dust is key to preventing overexposure. Excess dust can trigger citations, fines and even slowdowns in coal production. Mining companies enforce their own compliance by taking and reporting mine dust samples. Federal mine inspectors also test for excessive dust.

But NPR and CPI have found widespread and persistent gaming of the system designed to measure and control exposure.

Now comes the hard part: getting the mining companies to come clean, so to speak, and save the lives of their workers.

In a companion story to the NPR/CPI investigation, veteran coal industry reporter Ken Ward Jr. of The Charleston Gazette reviews 40 years of attempts to strengthen protection for miners.

Ward quotes former MSHA official Celeste Monforton, a worker safety advocate now at George Washington University: “We can’t get a regulation out to save our souls.” And, as Ward reports, “miners are left with the same system that experts have agreed hasn’t worked for decades.”

Since 1970, when mine dust controls began, black lung contributed to the deaths of more than 70,000 miners. The federal government and the industry spent $45 billion compensating the victims, including McCowan, and their families.

“Now it feels like I’ve got a heavy wet sack on each lung,” McCowan says, between long, deep breaths. “Breathing has become a conscious effort. … It seems like I give up a little bit of my world each day, that it gets smaller and smaller.”

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Monday, March 26, 2012

Write Your Own Damn Laws

Paul Krugman turns his attention to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbying organization sponsored by a number of large corporations that cranks out ready-made boilerplate laws that then get passed by Republicans in state legislatures, many without changing a word from the factory.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

What’s getting ALEC noticed is that it is the group that basically drafted Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Which makes me wonder if ALEC will be held accountable when, if not now in the Trayvon Martin case, someone decides to sue the state of Florida or one of its agencies over the law.

That is really what is at the heart of the matter: who will be held accountable. That’s basically what justice is all about: who caused the injury, who will make the amends, who will face the consequences of the action? In the Martin case, will the National Rifle Association and ALEC be the ones to answer for the injustice? Can they be hauled into court by the family for complicity in passing a law that any reasonable person could see the inevitable conclusion that at some point someone would kill an unarmed and non-threatening person and basically get away with it?

As the law stands now, of course not. Lobbyists are not held to account for pushing through laws that they want because they can claim that all they did was point out the benefits of the legislation — and the consequences (both electoral and financial) to the elected representatives who vote against them. The corporations and the interest groups are shielded, if not in the legal sense, because when it comes right down to it, they’re not the ones who printed out the templates, filled in the blanks, and passed it off as their own work like a college student buying a term paper from an on-line paper mill.

But if we did hold them accountable, I wonder if they would bite that hands that feed them.

Write Your Own Damn Laws

Paul Krugman turns his attention to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobbying organization sponsored by a number of large corporations that cranks out ready-made boilerplate laws that then get passed by Republicans in state legislatures, many without changing a word from the factory.

Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.

What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.

What’s getting ALEC noticed is that it is the group that basically drafted Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. Which makes me wonder if ALEC will be held accountable when, if not now in the Trayvon Martin case, someone decides to sue the state of Florida or one of its agencies over the law.

That is really what is at the heart of the matter: who will be held accountable. That’s basically what justice is all about: who caused the injury, who will make the amends, who will face the consequences of the action? In the Martin case, will the National Rifle Association and ALEC be the ones to answer for the injustice? Can they be hauled into court by the family for complicity in passing a law that any reasonable person could see the inevitable conclusion that at some point someone would kill an unarmed and non-threatening person and basically get away with it?

As the law stands now, of course not. Lobbyists are not held to account for pushing through laws that they want because they can claim that all they did was point out the benefits of the legislation — and the consequences (both electoral and financial) to the elected representatives who vote against them. The corporations and the interest groups are shielded, if not in the legal sense, because when it comes right down to it, they’re not the ones who printed out the templates, filled in the blanks, and passed it off as their own work like a college student buying a term paper from an on-line paper mill.

But if we did hold them accountable, I wonder if they would bite that hands that feed them.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Deepwater Deductions

The one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, fire, and subsequent oil spill is being marked by the fact that we the taxpayers are ending up on the hook for the clean-up because BP will be able to write off some of the the losses on their taxes.

Under U.S. corporate law, companies can take credits on up to 35 percent of their losses. In this case, that means U.S. taxpayers are indirectly subsidizing at least part of cost for the cleanup and the $20 billion fund BP created to compensate people, fisherman and businesses along the Gulf Coast hurt by the spill.

BP may spread that $40.9 billion loss over 2010 and the next few years until all the payments are paid to the victims. Companies can only deduct the amount of losses paid out in any given year, and the trust fund likely will be paying victims for years to come.

That could end up cutting $13 billion from BP’s overall tax bill.

That’s also why BP was so quick to step up with their $20 billion compensation fund; it’s deductible.

To quote the immortal Archie Bunker: “It’s easy to be generous when it doesn’t cost ya nothin’.”

iSpy

If you’re not wild about other people knowing where you are all the time, you might want to ditch your iPhone. Sam Biddle at TPM’s Gizmodo has the details.

It turns out that your iPhone is keeping a record of everywhere you’ve been since June. This data is stored on your phone (or iPad) and computer, easily available to anyone who gets their hands on it. Why? Apple won’t say. We’re creeped out.

The enormous privacy startle, apparently enabled by this summer’s iOS 4 release, was discovered by two security researchers, one of whom claims he was an Apple employee for five years. They’re equally puzzled and disturbed by the location collection: “By passively logging your location without your permission, Apple have made it possible for anyone from a jealous spouse to a private investigator to get a detailed picture of your movements,” they explain. All it would take to crack the information out of your iOS device is an easy jailbreak. On your computer, the information can be opened as easily as JPEG using the mapping software that the security experts have made for download.

I know my little five-year-old Samsung has a GPS tracker in it, so it’s no surprise that Apple would leap way beyond that with this real-time tracker.

Yes, it’s creepy, but the ironic thing is that it isn’t the government that is doing it. First of all, they’re not that capable of it; we’re talking about a government that is still using Windows XP, f’r Chrissake. Second, here in America it’s going to be the corporations that are doing the spying, not the Feds.

That reminds me of a moment from one of my favorite films, The President’s Analyst, starring James Coburn, from 1967:

HT to TPM for the post title.

Monday, August 30, 2010

Fair and Balanced Boycotting

Matt Taibbi suggests that we boycott Fox News and their advertisers.

There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.

[...]

I’m beginning to wonder why effective boycotts against these hate-media channels, and particularly Fox, haven’t been organized yet. Why not just pick out one Fox advertiser at random and make an example out of it? How about Subaru and their unintentionally comic “Love” slogan? I actually like their cars, but what the f**k? How about Pep Boys and that annoying logo of theirs? Just to prove that it can be done, I’d like to see at least one firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies. Isn’t that at least the first move here? It’s beginning to strike me that sitting by and doing nothing about this madness is not a terribly responsible way to behave.

I’m glad Mr. Taibbi said “effective boycotts.” I’ve never been convinced that just not buying something is a truly effective method of registering a complaint with a corporate entity. After all, it’s an attempt to prove a negative: how can they know you’re not shopping there if you’re not shopping there? Rather, I think the active approach as demonstrated against Target last month works. A shopper in Minnesota went to Target, bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff, and then turned around and returned it all showed the company her displeasure at the corporation’s financial support of a right-wing anti-gay candidate. A debit/credit spreadsheet works better than a rant on a blog to these people.

That said, I fully endorse the idea of letting a company know that you’re displeased with their choice of advertising venues via a polite letter or e-mail. If you’re like me and you save your receipts, you can scan and attach copies of them to show how much money you’ve spent on their products but from now on will be going to their competitor. (I’ve used that approach and it works. Okay, it was a complaint about Diet Pepsi in cans being repackaged in lots of eight instead of twelve, but it worked, and I’m very sure I wasn’t the only one who complained. They now proudly display the twelve-pack under a sign that says “Because you asked for it!”) It’s also more effective to organize a campaign against a company if you don’t include political rants; the ad buyers look at ratings, not polls. Just state the facts: “You choose to advertise on Fox. That’s your choice and it’s a free country. I choose to buy a Ford instead of a Subaru, and I’m urging my friends who are looking for a new car to do the same.” It also works if you contact a company whose products you actually use. I’m not sure that Summer’s Eve would be all too worried about losing my business.

Frankly, I wouldn’t know what companies to boycott in the first place since I don’t watch Fox News; hell, I don’t even know where it is on the cable in my area. So I guess I’m already boycotting Fox News.

Via C&L.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Office Perks

I’ve been working in an office for most of my career but apparently I’ve missed out on the fun jobs.

Staff members at an agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted tickets to sports events, lunches and other gifts from oil and gas companies and used government computers to view pornography, according to an Interior Department report alleging a culture of cronyism between regulators and the industry.

In at least one case, an inspector for the Minerals Management Service admitted using crystal methamphetamine and said he might have been under the influence of the drug the next day at work, according to the report by the acting inspector general of the Interior Department.

In my office, our idea of cronyism is getting the left-over sandwiches and cookies from committee meetings. That’s living on the edge, baby!

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Short Takes

The President is not happy with the “cozy” relationship between big oil and regulators.

The next big idea in stopping the oil leak is the “junk shot.”

Debit card fees cut is in the works in the financial reform bill.

The Feds are launching a criminal probe into the West Virginia mine disaster.

Shuttle Atlantis is launched on what may — or may not — be its last flight.

Toyota was planning a PR attack on witnesses who testified against the company in front of Congress.

The Tigers lost to the Red Sox 7-2.

Friday, May 7, 2010

Short Takes

The British election goes the way of Florida 2000.

Oil begins washing ashore in Louisiana.

The head of BP sees progress in capping the oil spill. Of course he does.

The Taliban connection to Times Square.

Attorney General Holder defended Mirandizing terror suspects.

A real headline in the New York Times: Signs of Neanderthals Mating With Humans. No, they’re not talking about the frat parties.

Fans lined up at Comerica Park in Detroit to say good-bye to Ernie Harwell.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Imperial Oil

Juan Cole provides a little background on the history of the company that is responsible for the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico:

BP, by the way, is British Petroleum, a descendant of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Iranian parliament asked for a better deal from the AIOC in the late 1940s and early 1950s (they wanted a 50/50 cut of the profits, which was what ARAMCO offered Saudi Arabia). The AIOC absolutely refused. In response, the Iranian parliament nationalized the AIOC holdings in 1951. It was in order to restore Western Big Oil to its Iranian holdings that the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, putting the shah back on the throne as a megalomaniacal capitalist dictator and puppet of Washington. The enraged Iranian public overthrew the shah in 1978-79, establishing the Islamic Republic that has been a thorn in Washington’s side ever since. So, BP’s earlier arrogance helped produce our current crisis with Iran, just as it’s [sic] current incompetence has produced the massive Delaware-sized oil slick now devouring Louisiana.

HT to Balloon Juice.

Short Takes

BP had no plan — “The company said a catastrophic accident at an offshore rig that exploded was “unlikely.”

Florida declares an emergency over the oil spill.

Tornadoes hit Arkansas.

The Florida legislature ends the session with wrangling, bitterness, and petulance.

President Obama will not have to testify in the case of Illinois vs. Blagojevich.

As if the Senate race in Florida wasn’t interesting enough, Jeff Greene, a former Republican billionaire who made his fortune in the housing bubble, announces his bid for the Democratic primary.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL) announces her retirement.

The Tigers had a whopping good 4th inning to beat the Angels 10-6 in Detroit.