Federal judge: Nonpartisan elections are unfair to minorities
...A U.S. District Court judge has rejected a challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—filled [sic] when the Department of Justice barred the city of Kinston, N.C. from holding nonpartisan elections—reasoning that lack of access to party affiliation would discriminate against minority voters who otherwise wouldn’t know how to find Democratic candidates on a ballot....
Saturday, December 31, 2011
"Black Swan" Fund Creator Explains Why Central Planning Has Doomed Us All
...Suppressing fire, creating the illusion of fire protection, leads to the wrong kind of growth, which then invites greater destruction. About 100 years ago, the U.S. Forest Service took a zero-tolerance approach to forest fires, stamping them out at the first blaze. Fast forward to 1988 when a massive wildfire at Yellowstone National Park wiped out more than 30 times the acreage of any previously recorded fire....
...Herein are pearls of great wisdom for central bankers today. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments, fertilizing them with everything from artificially low interest rates to preferential liquidity to outright securities purchases. As these institutions and instruments overrun the financial landscape, they hamper the economic ecosystem and perpetuate the environment of low growth and high unemployment in which we currently find ourselves....
Why the Left Is Losing the Argument over the Financial Crisis
...Our argument is and has been that the financial crisis would not have occurred but for government housing policy implemented principally through Fannie and Freddie and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Although there were a number of such policies, the most important were the affordable housing requirements first imposed on Fannie and Freddie in 1992 and expanded and tightened by HUD through 2007.
Summarized below are the original numbers we relied on, taken from Fannie and Freddie’s own data and from the views of bank regulators—and now supplemented with additional data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent complaints against certain officers of Fannie and Freddie. Of particular interest are Fannie and Freddie’s non-prosecution agreements with the SEC, in which they agree with facts that confirm—and in many cases go beyond—our original research concerning the scope of the GSEs’ subprime and Alt-A exposure. These are facts, and Nocera and others who might wish it otherwise should become familiar with them.
For example, in its non-prosecution agreement Freddie agreed that as of June 30, 2008, it had $244 billion in subprime loans, comprising 14 percent of its credit guaranty portfolio, rather than the $6 billion it had previously disclosed. Freddie also agreed that it had $541 billion in reduced documentation loans alone, vastly more than the $190 billion in previously disclosed Alt-A loans which Freddie had said included loans with reduced documentation.
While the SEC documents about $1.03 trillion in previously undisclosed subprime and Alt-A loans in Fannie and Freddie’s credit guaranty portfolios, an estimated $812.8 billion, or about 80 percent, were already accounted for in the totals of Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A exposures included in Pinto’s Forensic Study and Wallison’s Dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The SEC findings add $219 billion and 1.43 million loans to our original Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A totals, bringing the combined subprime and Alt-A total to $2.041 trillion and 13.37 million loans....
...All told, after adding the SEC’s new data to our original estimates, there were approximately 28 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding on June 30, 2008, before the financial crisis, with a value of approximately $4.8 trillion. This was half of all mortgages in the United States. Of these loans, over 74 percent were on the books of U.S. government agencies and firms subject to government housing finance policies. This shows where the demand for these low quality loans came from. Fannie and Freddie were themselves exposed to more than 13 million subprime or Alt-A loans, or 65 percent of the government total....
...Our argument is and has been that the financial crisis would not have occurred but for government housing policy implemented principally through Fannie and Freddie and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Although there were a number of such policies, the most important were the affordable housing requirements first imposed on Fannie and Freddie in 1992 and expanded and tightened by HUD through 2007.
Summarized below are the original numbers we relied on, taken from Fannie and Freddie’s own data and from the views of bank regulators—and now supplemented with additional data from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent complaints against certain officers of Fannie and Freddie. Of particular interest are Fannie and Freddie’s non-prosecution agreements with the SEC, in which they agree with facts that confirm—and in many cases go beyond—our original research concerning the scope of the GSEs’ subprime and Alt-A exposure. These are facts, and Nocera and others who might wish it otherwise should become familiar with them.
For example, in its non-prosecution agreement Freddie agreed that as of June 30, 2008, it had $244 billion in subprime loans, comprising 14 percent of its credit guaranty portfolio, rather than the $6 billion it had previously disclosed. Freddie also agreed that it had $541 billion in reduced documentation loans alone, vastly more than the $190 billion in previously disclosed Alt-A loans which Freddie had said included loans with reduced documentation.
While the SEC documents about $1.03 trillion in previously undisclosed subprime and Alt-A loans in Fannie and Freddie’s credit guaranty portfolios, an estimated $812.8 billion, or about 80 percent, were already accounted for in the totals of Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A exposures included in Pinto’s Forensic Study and Wallison’s Dissent from the majority report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The SEC findings add $219 billion and 1.43 million loans to our original Fannie and Freddie subprime and Alt-A totals, bringing the combined subprime and Alt-A total to $2.041 trillion and 13.37 million loans....
...All told, after adding the SEC’s new data to our original estimates, there were approximately 28 million subprime and Alt-A loans outstanding on June 30, 2008, before the financial crisis, with a value of approximately $4.8 trillion. This was half of all mortgages in the United States. Of these loans, over 74 percent were on the books of U.S. government agencies and firms subject to government housing finance policies. This shows where the demand for these low quality loans came from. Fannie and Freddie were themselves exposed to more than 13 million subprime or Alt-A loans, or 65 percent of the government total....
Ron Paul: Drug War In U.S. Has Racist Origins
...The reaction of the American government, and its people, to drug use was -- and still is -- a complex mix of factors, involving lobbying by the medical community, pharmaceutical companies, the alcohol industry, temperance advocates, and religious movements. Historically, the argument has played out -- and continues to play out -- amid a backdrop of racism and class antagonism. Racism and bigotry were generally not the drivers of prohibition movements, but instead were the weapons used by temperance advocates to achieve their ends. The movement to ban alcohol, for instance, gained its strongest adherents without resorting to bigotry, but when World War I broke out, the movement was quick to tie beer and booze to instantly despised German immigrants, pushing the effort over the Constitutional hump....
Saturday, December 24, 2011
"Too Big To Fail" just turned the large banks into GSEs (PDF):
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The [large complex financial institutions (LCFIs)] had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
Left wing hero Paulie Krugnuts even advocated creating a housing bubble for good left-wing economic reasons:
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The [large complex financial institutions (LCFIs)] had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
Left wing hero Paulie Krugnuts even advocated creating a housing bubble for good left-wing economic reasons:
To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
Apologists For Communist Totalitarianism: I Hate Those Guys
...No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first....
...The State’s founder, Kim Il Sung, claimed that all he wanted for North Korea was to be socialist, and to be left alone. In that regard, the national philosophy of self-reliance known in North Korea as “Juche” is little different from India’s Gandhian version known as “swadeshi”. Just let us get on with it, they said, and without interference, please.
India’s attempt to go it alone failed. So, it seems, has Burma’s. Perhaps inevitably, North Korea’s attempt appears to be tottering. But seeing how South Korea has turned out — its Koreanness utterly submerged in neon, hip-hop and every imaginable American influence, a romantic can allow himself a small measure of melancholy: North Korea, for all its faults, is undeniably still Korea, a place uniquely representative of an ancient and rather remarkable Asian culture. And that, in a world otherwise rendered so bland, is perhaps no bad thing....
Friday, December 23, 2011
...It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:
The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.
Significant Financial Management and Fiscal Challenges Reflected in the U.S. Government's 2011 Financial Report
WASHINGTON (December 23, 2011) - The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2011 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.
As was the case in 2010, the main obstacles to a GAO opinion on the accrual- based consolidated financial statements were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.
While the vast majority of the 24 CFO Act Agencies received unqualified opinions, DOD and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have consistently been unable to receive such audit opinions....
"Black Swan" Fund Creator Explains Why Central Planning Has Doomed Us All
...Suppressing fire, creating the illusion of fire protection, leads to the wrong kind of growth, which then invites greater destruction. About 100 years ago, the U.S. Forest Service took a zero-tolerance approach to forest fires, stamping them out at the first blaze. Fast forward to 1988 when a massive wildfire at Yellowstone National Park wiped out more than 30 times the acreage of any previously recorded fire....
...Herein are pearls of great wisdom for central bankers today. Central banks are creating a tinderbox by keeping alive many very bad investments, fertilizing them with everything from artificially low interest rates to preferential liquidity to outright securities purchases. As these institutions and instruments overrun the financial landscape, they hamper the economic ecosystem and perpetuate the environment of low growth and high unemployment in which we currently find ourselves....
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Scientists mark 1/3 of a century of satellite climate data
..."While [this] warming is noticeable in climate terms, it isn't obvious that it represents an impending disaster," says Christy. "The climate models produce some aspects of the weather reasonably well, but they have yet to demonstrate an ability to confidently predict climate change in upper air temperatures."...
...How much of the remaining warming is due to natural climate cycles (not including volcanoes) versus humanity's carbon dioxide emissions enhancing Earth's natural greenhouse effect?
"That is the Holy Grail of climatology," says Spencer. "How much of that underlying trend is due to greenhouse gases? While many scientists believe it is almost entirely due to humans, that view cannot be proved scientifically."...
Documents: ATF used "Fast and Furious" to make the case for gun regulations
...In Fast and Furious, ATF secretly encouraged gun dealers to sell to suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels to go after the "big fish." But ATF whistleblowers told CBS News and Congress it was a dangerous practice called "gunwalking," and it put thousands of weapons on the street. Many were used in violent crimes in Mexico. Two were found at the murder scene of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
ATF officials didn't intend to publicly disclose their own role in letting Mexican cartels obtain the weapons, but emails show they discussed using the sales, including sales encouraged by ATF, to justify a new gun regulation called "Demand Letter 3". That would require some U.S. gun shops to report the sale of multiple rifles or "long guns." Demand Letter 3 was so named because it would be the third ATF program demanding gun dealers report tracing information.
On July 14, 2010 after ATF headquarters in Washington D.C. received an update on Fast and Furious, ATF Field Ops Assistant Director Mark Chait emailed Bill Newell, ATF's Phoenix Special Agent in Charge of Fast and Furious:
"Bill - can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same (licensed gun dealer) and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks." ...
FDR’s Noble Lie
...Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a “noble lie,” a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good....
...Most historians when pressed on the matter now grudgingly concede that Roosevelt lied when he told the American people that he would never send their boys to fight into foreign wars, but they excuse his treachery as a “noble lie,” a deception perpetrated against the public by the political elite to achieve a supposed greater good....
UK police seize computers of skeptic blogger in England
...UPDATE: I’ve been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him....
...UPDATE: I’ve been in contact with Roger (Tallbloke) and he tells me that he is not a suspect, and that they’ll clone his hard drives and return the computers to him....
Wall Street Did It?
...But based on the number of toxic loans in the system in 2008, the government was responsible for not just a simple majority, but more than two-thirds. It's quantifiable — 71% to be exact.... And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its "fair-lending" edicts....
Fannie Freddie Lawsuit and Risk Arbitrage
...To understand how casual Fannie and Freddie were about credit risk, consider the two types of activity they engage in. One, they buy and pool mortgages, issuing securities backed by these pools, a process called securitization. They’ve been doing this longer and on greater scale than anyone else—by comparison Wall Street was a newcomer to the business.
Two, they buy such securities, whether issued by themselves or others. The lawsuits just filed concern this second type of activity, the purchase of readymade mortgage securities. The main accusation is that materials pertaining to certain securities the defendants sold from 2005 to 2007 contained wrong or deficient information, “unbeknownst” to Fannie and Freddie.
At the time they bought these securities, Fannie and Freddie were competing furiously with the same banks for mortgages to securitize—-and earn fees on. They were buying mortgages as they had for decades, but now they faced growing pressure from banks seeking lucrative securitization business. This led to all-around lowering of underwriting standards and the rise of higher-risk mortgages, the race to the bottom described in Guaranteed to Fail.
Being both suppliers and buyers in the mortgage security market on a gigantic scale, Fannie and Freddie were uniquely positioned. Because they bought mortgages to securitize, they too were lowering standards and taking higher risks. For the reality underlying the securities to be “unbeknownst” to them, they had to willfully avoid knowing it. Even if they did not do the analysis themselves, they could have easily asked for third-party reports—-which existed at the time and are presented as evidence in the cases. That the GSEs were complicit does not exonerate the banks’ shoddy work, but it does show how we got to the current mess.
Fannie and Freddie appeared to mint money because government backing gave them easy and cheap capital, plus they had special tax breaks and low capital requirements. The government guarantee was initially explicit—they were was created as federal bureaucracies, as the “F” in their names indicates. Then it became implicit until the 2008 crisis made it explicit again. It was always assumed. Their extraordinarily low capital requirement meant GSEs leveraged more than adventurous hedge funds.
Lobbying and public relations made sure they retained the full panoply of special privileges. This was managing the political risk, which they appear to have done superbly and still do—-note their victim status in the lawsuits and mainstream media coverage thereof. Ensuring political protection meant that managing credit risk was less crucial....
Should Americans Support the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?
...The subprime crisis was designed in Washington, not New York. The FHA discouraged down payments (those old fashioned “savings”), pushing them from their traditional level of 20% down to 3% - and at the start of 2008 to 0%. Everyone, regardless of whether they can afford it, should own a home! Don’t save; speculate in the hope that prices will rise!
Government sponsored enterprises Fannie and Freddie “securitized” home loans under congressional mandates to direct more funds to lower incomes. In 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development directed Fannie and Freddie to target 42% of financing to borrowers with incomes below the median in their areas, going to 50% in 2000 and 52% in 2005. Such funding was directed to financing even mobile homes, a move lauded by Rep. Barney Frank as “one of the most important things to happen to make home ownership affordable to people who might otherwise be shut out of the market.” Also, “special affordable” loans were created, with HUD directing Fannie and Freddie to target 12% of financing to borrowers earning less than 60% of the median income, a percentage that rose to 20% in 2000, then 22% in 2005. That percentage was scheduled to go to 28% in 2008....
To promote the global warming scare, Jane Lubchenco's NOAA continuously changes past temperature records to create fake warming - on a monthly basis
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov't Help Hide Climate Data?
...Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.
“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.
Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: "They are happy with me not passing on the station data," he wrote....
Climategate Bombshell: Did U.S. Gov't Help Hide Climate Data?
...Making that case in 2009, the then-head of the Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones, told colleagues repeatedly that the U.S. Department of Energy was funding his data collection -- and that officials there agreed that he should not have to release the data.
“Work on the land station data has been funded by the U.S. Dept of Energy, and I have their agreement that the data needn’t be passed on. I got this [agreement] in 2007,” Jones wrote in a May 13, 2009, email to British officials, before listing reasons he did not want them to release data.
Two months later, Jones reiterated that sentiment to colleagues, saying that the data "has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.”
A third email from Jones written in 2007 echoes the idea: "They are happy with me not passing on the station data," he wrote....
Occupy Group Faults Church, a Onetime Ally
...“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”...
...“We need more; you have more,” one protester, Amin Husain, 36, told a Trinity official on Thursday, during an impromptu sidewalk exchange between clergy members and demonstrators. “We are coming to you for sanctuary.”...
‘Morning Joe’: ‘The press was in the tank for Obama’ [VIDEO]
...Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown agreed with Scarborough’s statement, explaining it partly as the establishment media’s fatigue with the whole Clinton “narrative.”
“I think a lot of it was about the press wanted a new narrative,” Brown said. “And in the end, Obama’s story of the first black president … trumped the exceptionalism of her being the first woman president. It was bad luck for her that happened. But it was also a much more fun idea to have this new narrative to write about. Everyone was bored with the Clintons. They didn’t want to have another Clinton story.”...
...Newsweek/Daily Beast editor Tina Brown agreed with Scarborough’s statement, explaining it partly as the establishment media’s fatigue with the whole Clinton “narrative.”
“I think a lot of it was about the press wanted a new narrative,” Brown said. “And in the end, Obama’s story of the first black president … trumped the exceptionalism of her being the first woman president. It was bad luck for her that happened. But it was also a much more fun idea to have this new narrative to write about. Everyone was bored with the Clintons. They didn’t want to have another Clinton story.”...
Justice Dept. blames critics for noticing Holder’s race-card play
Under fire for leveling a racially charged attack at his critics, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has neither backed down nor revised his remarks, appearing instead to restate them.
In a front page New York Times story on Sunday, Holder alleged that some of his critics — a group he referred to as the “more extreme segment” — are motivated by racism. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said of criticism he has received for the Fast and Furious scandal, among other things. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”...
Under fire for leveling a racially charged attack at his critics, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has neither backed down nor revised his remarks, appearing instead to restate them.
In a front page New York Times story on Sunday, Holder alleged that some of his critics — a group he referred to as the “more extreme segment” — are motivated by racism. “This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him,” Holder said of criticism he has received for the Fast and Furious scandal, among other things. “Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”...
MythBuster Adam Savage: SOPA Could Destroy the Internet as We Know It
...Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the "good faith" assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn't even have to be aware that the complaint has been made. ...
DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA
During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.
The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the “Fair Use Doctrine,” the videos were pulled down.
Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees — not just the original content provider — to pull down websites harboring “infringing content.”...
...Make no mistake: These bills aren't simply unconstitutional, they are anticonstitutional. They would allow for the wholesale elimination of entire websites, domain names, and chunks of the DNS (the underlying structure of the whole Internet), based on nothing more than the "good faith" assertion by a single party that the website is infringing on a copyright of the complainant. The accused doesn't even have to be aware that the complaint has been made. ...
DeMaura and Segal: All Candidates Should Be Concerned About SOPA
During the waning days of the 2008 presidential race, there was an important but overlooked occurrence on the John McCain campaign. In mid-October, the McCain campaign awoke to find that its Web videos and online advertisements were disappearing from its YouTube page.
The culprit turned out to be a major television network claiming they owned portions of the videos and that posting the clips was a violation of copyright law. Even though the campaign, and many others in the online community, believed the content to be privileged under the “Fair Use Doctrine,” the videos were pulled down.
Fast-forward more than three years, and a new piece of legislation is making its way through Congress that would make it easier for online campaign content and websites to be taken down. Even more concerning, if passed, this bill would allow opposing campaigns or campaign committees — not just the original content provider — to pull down websites harboring “infringing content.”...
What Fannie and Freddie Knew
...The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress's affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC's lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, "Desktop Underwriter." Fannie did so as part of its "Say Yes" strategy to "provide more 'approve' messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted."
The SEC also shows how Fannie led private lenders into the subprime market. In July 1999, Fannie and Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Home Loans entered "an alliance agreement" that included "a reduced documentation loan program called the 'internet loan,'" later called the "Fast and Easy" loan. As the SEC notes, "by the mid-2000s, other mortgage lenders developed similar reduced documentation loan programs, such as Mortgage Express and PaperSaver—many of which Fannie Mae acquired in ever-increasing volumes."
Mr. Mozilo and Fannie essentially were business partners in the subprime business. Countrywide found the customers, while Fannie provided the taxpayer-backed capital. And the rest of the industry followed....
...The SEC says Fannie executives also failed to disclose the company's total exposure to risky "Alt-A" loans, sometimes called "liar loans," which required less documentation than traditional subprime loans. Fannie created a special category called "Lender Selected" loans and it gave lenders "coding designations" to separate these Alt-A loans from those Fannie had publicly disclosed. By June 30, 2008, Fannie said its Alt-A exposure was 11% of its portfolio, when it was closer to 23%—a $341 billion difference....
Fannie, Freddie At Heart Of Financial Crisis, Fraud Charges Show
...As recently as 2008, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stated: "Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income."
Now, the government's own market watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, says that's false. They're going after former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron to prove it.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," was how Robert Khuzami, director of SEC enforcement, described it Friday.
But that's an understatement.
From 2007 to 2008, according to SEC documents, executives at Freddie and Fannie together estimated their total exposure to subprime loans at about $10 billion.
The real amount? Nearly $300 billion total.
In short, Fannie and Freddie are frauds. They systematically hid their exposure to potential losses from investors, taxpayers and regulators....
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Were Into Subprime Lending, and Lied About It
...As Cato Institute economist Mark Calabria notes, “Back in 2008, Paul Krugman went so far as to say, ‘they didn’t do any subprime, because they can’t.’ Just taking 10 minutes to read the actual statute and regulations would have revealed to him that they actually could. Krugman went on to say, ‘Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.’ Of course, just reading Fannie’s 10-K would have revealed that claim to be false. But why let facts get in the way?”...
...After James A. Johnson, a Democratic political operative and former aide to Walter Mondale, became chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991 . . . it became a political powerhouse, intimidating and suborning Congress and tying itself closely to the Clinton administration’s support for the low-income lending program called “affordable housing.” This program required subprime and other risky lending, but it solidified Fannie’s support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and enabled the agency to resist privatization or significant regulation until 2008. “Under Johnson,” write Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner, “Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among banks whose loans the company bought. . . . Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”. . .Far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system. It led rather than followed Wall Street into risky lending. . .Edward Pinto (a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae) . . . presented . . . evidence . . . showing that by 2008 half of all mortgages in the U.S. (27 million loans) were subprime or otherwise risky, and that 12 million of these loans were on the books of the GSEs....
...The Beltway story of the crisis claims that Congress's affordable housing mandates had nothing to do with it. But the SEC's lawsuit shows that Fannie degraded its underwriting standards to increase its market share in subprime loans. According to the SEC suit, for instance, in 2006 Fannie Mae adjusted its widely used automated underwriting system, "Desktop Underwriter." Fannie did so as part of its "Say Yes" strategy to "provide more 'approve' messages . . . for larger volumes of loans with lower FICO [credit] scores and higher LTVs [loan-to-value] than previously permitted."
The SEC also shows how Fannie led private lenders into the subprime market. In July 1999, Fannie and Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide Home Loans entered "an alliance agreement" that included "a reduced documentation loan program called the 'internet loan,'" later called the "Fast and Easy" loan. As the SEC notes, "by the mid-2000s, other mortgage lenders developed similar reduced documentation loan programs, such as Mortgage Express and PaperSaver—many of which Fannie Mae acquired in ever-increasing volumes."
Mr. Mozilo and Fannie essentially were business partners in the subprime business. Countrywide found the customers, while Fannie provided the taxpayer-backed capital. And the rest of the industry followed....
...The SEC says Fannie executives also failed to disclose the company's total exposure to risky "Alt-A" loans, sometimes called "liar loans," which required less documentation than traditional subprime loans. Fannie created a special category called "Lender Selected" loans and it gave lenders "coding designations" to separate these Alt-A loans from those Fannie had publicly disclosed. By June 30, 2008, Fannie said its Alt-A exposure was 11% of its portfolio, when it was closer to 23%—a $341 billion difference....
Fannie, Freddie At Heart Of Financial Crisis, Fraud Charges Show
...As recently as 2008, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman stated: "Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income."
Now, the government's own market watchdog, the Securities and Exchange Commission, says that's false. They're going after former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd and former Freddie CEO Richard Syron to prove it.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives told the world that their subprime exposure was substantially smaller than it really was," was how Robert Khuzami, director of SEC enforcement, described it Friday.
But that's an understatement.
From 2007 to 2008, according to SEC documents, executives at Freddie and Fannie together estimated their total exposure to subprime loans at about $10 billion.
The real amount? Nearly $300 billion total.
In short, Fannie and Freddie are frauds. They systematically hid their exposure to potential losses from investors, taxpayers and regulators....
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Were Into Subprime Lending, and Lied About It
...As Cato Institute economist Mark Calabria notes, “Back in 2008, Paul Krugman went so far as to say, ‘they didn’t do any subprime, because they can’t.’ Just taking 10 minutes to read the actual statute and regulations would have revealed to him that they actually could. Krugman went on to say, ‘Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.’ Of course, just reading Fannie’s 10-K would have revealed that claim to be false. But why let facts get in the way?”...
...After James A. Johnson, a Democratic political operative and former aide to Walter Mondale, became chairman of Fannie Mae in 1991 . . . it became a political powerhouse, intimidating and suborning Congress and tying itself closely to the Clinton administration’s support for the low-income lending program called “affordable housing.” This program required subprime and other risky lending, but it solidified Fannie’s support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, and enabled the agency to resist privatization or significant regulation until 2008. “Under Johnson,” write Ms. Morgenson and Mr. Rosner, “Fannie Mae led the way in encouraging loose lending practices among banks whose loans the company bought. . . . Johnson led both the private and public sectors down a path that led directly to the financial crisis of 2008.”. . .Far from being a marginal player, Fannie Mae was the source of the decline in mortgage underwriting standards that eventually brought down the financial system. It led rather than followed Wall Street into risky lending. . .Edward Pinto (a former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae) . . . presented . . . evidence . . . showing that by 2008 half of all mortgages in the U.S. (27 million loans) were subprime or otherwise risky, and that 12 million of these loans were on the books of the GSEs....
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie, Freddie, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance (long PDF)
...Was the growth in private label MBS the culmination of the dream of the deregulation advocates of the 1980s coming to fruition, albeit two decades later? Or was it the emergence of new government-sponsored enterprises in the form of too-big-to-fail financial institutions? We argue the latter, and, with this emergence, came a battle between the GSEs and the too-big-to fail large complex financial institutions (LCFIs), and a race to the bottom in mortgage finance....
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The LCFIs had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
...Was the growth in private label MBS the culmination of the dream of the deregulation advocates of the 1980s coming to fruition, albeit two decades later? Or was it the emergence of new government-sponsored enterprises in the form of too-big-to-fail financial institutions? We argue the latter, and, with this emergence, came a battle between the GSEs and the too-big-to fail large complex financial institutions (LCFIs), and a race to the bottom in mortgage finance....
...Of course, the GSE firms and these LCFIs were not identical in form. The LCFIs had a more diversified product line, were afforded greater flexibility, and increasingly were perceived to have a too-big-to-fail government guarantee -- while the GSEs had a public mission, received a more explicit government guarantee, and were subject to lighter capital requirements. But when one digs beneath the surface, the failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage market by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees....
U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
WASHINGTON — Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.
The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.
They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.
The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests....
New e-mails: ATF officials discussed using Fast & Furious to … push gun control
...Follow the link and read the e-mails from a participating gun dealer to the ATF asking for a letter affirming that he was only selling these weapons at the agency’s behest. He was worried that the sales were shady and wanted legal cover in case the bureau later turned around and decided that the dealers were “irresponsible” or whatever in making the sales — which was awfully prescient given the ATF’s subsequent political opportunism. But then, none of this is surprising: Congressional Democrats and even Eric Holder himself have already used F&F as a pretext to call for more gun control. I thought the sleaziest bit of White House scandal spin we’d see this year was the Energy Department asking Solyndra to hold off on layoffs until after election day in 2010. Nope: Per the new F&F e-mails, they’re actually using their own scandals now as a pretext for greater regulation. Says Dan McLaughlin, “Obama Administration once again lives down to every paranoid caricature of itself.”...
GM Chevrolet Volt: Buyers spooked by electric car fires
...It now appears the fire hazard was first discovered back in June, when GM first heard about a fire in a Volt that occurred some three weeks after the vehicle had been crash tested.
Yet, almost five months went by before either GM or the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) told dealers and customers about the potential risks and urged them to drain the battery pack as soon as possible after an accident.
Part of the reason for delaying the disclosure was the "fragility of Volt sales" up until that point, according to Joan Claybrook, a former administrator at NHTSA.
"NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert," he said, according to industry website Autoguide.com.
"Not to tell [customers] for six months makes no sense to me. They have a duty to inform people when they've rated a vehicle as 'top rated' and make it clear there's a problem."...
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Making the Klan Boring
... I’ve long argued that there’s an infuriating tendency among mainstream liberal historians to take two approaches to evils in American history. Sins are always either the result of conservatives doing conservative things or they’re the product of America’s fundamentally bigoted nature. It’s just never, ever, the case that liberalism or progressivism has something to apologize for. Liberalism is never wrong, because essential to the concept of liberalism is the idea that it must always be right. The fact that racism and other evils were commonplace, even central, to much of the progressive project is simply too jarring to contemplate and so we get either a whitewash or blame-shifting. And with Boyle, we get both.
... I’ve long argued that there’s an infuriating tendency among mainstream liberal historians to take two approaches to evils in American history. Sins are always either the result of conservatives doing conservative things or they’re the product of America’s fundamentally bigoted nature. It’s just never, ever, the case that liberalism or progressivism has something to apologize for. Liberalism is never wrong, because essential to the concept of liberalism is the idea that it must always be right. The fact that racism and other evils were commonplace, even central, to much of the progressive project is simply too jarring to contemplate and so we get either a whitewash or blame-shifting. And with Boyle, we get both.
‘Sometimes a police state is a good thing’
...That wasn’t enough for the Twittermob, however, who wanted a piece of the action. They instantly expressed their moral fury, passing judgement without pausing for thought. Almost immediately upon seeing the video, people were tweeting it to the cops and naming the potential culprit and the place where she apparently works. Even Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined in, asking followers to help ‘identify the woman shouting racist abuse on a tram in London’. Following the arrest of a suspect, tweeters showered the transport police with praise. ‘Sometimes a police state can be used for the powers of good. Well done, @btp_uk!’, said one tweet. ‘That’s social media at work for you, an arrest in the afternoon of the video hitting the TT in Twitter!’, said another....
...That wasn’t enough for the Twittermob, however, who wanted a piece of the action. They instantly expressed their moral fury, passing judgement without pausing for thought. Almost immediately upon seeing the video, people were tweeting it to the cops and naming the potential culprit and the place where she apparently works. Even Labour Party leader Ed Miliband joined in, asking followers to help ‘identify the woman shouting racist abuse on a tram in London’. Following the arrest of a suspect, tweeters showered the transport police with praise. ‘Sometimes a police state can be used for the powers of good. Well done, @btp_uk!’, said one tweet. ‘That’s social media at work for you, an arrest in the afternoon of the video hitting the TT in Twitter!’, said another....
Declassified Memo Hinted of 1941 Hawaii Attack
...In fact, he compares the missed signals leading up to Japan's attack to 9/11, which government investigations also show that the Clinton and Bush administrations missed clear signals that an attack was coming.
"So many mistakes through so many levels of Washington," said Shirley. "Some things never change."...
...In fact, he compares the missed signals leading up to Japan's attack to 9/11, which government investigations also show that the Clinton and Bush administrations missed clear signals that an attack was coming.
"So many mistakes through so many levels of Washington," said Shirley. "Some things never change."...
Wikileaks docs reveal that governments use malware for surveillance
The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.
A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents.
The details revealed by Wikileaks echo a recent report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that discussed the surveillance industry. The publication analyzed approximately 200 documents from 36 separate companies as part of a special investigative project called The Surveillance Catalog. The material released by Wikileaks corroborates much of what the WSJ reported, but includes a broader range of material.
The documents published by Wikileaks include 287 files that describe products from 160 companies. The group says that these files are only the first set of a larger collection and that more will be published in the future. The project is being carried out in collaboration with activist groups such as Privacy International and press organizations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Washington Post....
The latest round of documents published by Wikileaks offers a rare glimpse into the world of surveillance products. The collection—which Wikileaks calls the Spy Files—includes confidential brochures and slide presentations that companies use to market intrusive surveillance tools to governments and law enforcement agencies.
A report that Wikileaks published alongside the documents raises concern about the growing use use of mass surveillance tools that indiscriminately monitor and analyze entire populations. The group also points out that some of products described in the documents are sold to authoritarian regimes, which use them to hunt and track political dissidents.
The details revealed by Wikileaks echo a recent report by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that discussed the surveillance industry. The publication analyzed approximately 200 documents from 36 separate companies as part of a special investigative project called The Surveillance Catalog. The material released by Wikileaks corroborates much of what the WSJ reported, but includes a broader range of material.
The documents published by Wikileaks include 287 files that describe products from 160 companies. The group says that these files are only the first set of a larger collection and that more will be published in the future. The project is being carried out in collaboration with activist groups such as Privacy International and press organizations such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Washington Post....
Climategate 2.0: A Sequel As Ugly As The Original.
...Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.
More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise—a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively....
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Climategate II: An Open Letter to the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
...Everyone agrees that the tone and content of many of them is a bit shrill and occasionally intolerant (kind of like University faculty meetings), but there is one repeating thread, by one of your most prestigious employees, Dr. Tom Wigley, that is far beyond the pale of most academic backbiting.
The revoking of my doctorate, the clear objective of Tom’s email, is the professional equivalent of the death penalty. I think it needs to be brought to your attention, because the basic premise underlying his machinations is patently and completely false. Dr Wigley is known as a careful scientist, but he certainly was careless here....
...Climategate I, the release of a few thousand emails and documents from the CRU in November 2009, revealed that the united-front clubbiness of the leading climate scientists was just a display for public consumption. The science of climate change was not “settled.” There was no consensus about the extent and causes of global warming; in their private emails, the scientists expressed serious doubts and disagreements on some major issues. In particular, the email exchanges showed that they were far from agreement about a key part of the global warming narrative—the famous “hockey stick” graph that purported to demonstrate that the last 30 years were the warmest of the last millennium and which made the “medieval warm period,” an especially problematic phenomenon for the climate campaign, simply go away. (See my “Scientists Behaving Badly,” The Weekly Standard, December 14, 2009.) Leading scientists in the inner circle expressed significant doubts and uncertainty about the hockey stick and several other global warming claims about which we are repeatedly told there exists an ironclad consensus among scientists. (Many of the new emails make this point even more powerfully.) On the merits, the 2009 emails showed that the case for certainty about climate change was grossly overstated.
More damning than the substantive disagreement was the attitude the CRU circle displayed toward dissenters, skeptics, and science journals that did not strictly adhere to the party line. Dissenting articles were blocked from publication or review by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), requests for raw data were rebuffed, and Freedom of Information Act requests were stonewalled. National science panels were stacked, and qualified dissenters such as NASA prize-winner John Christy were tolerated as “token skeptics.” The CRU circle was in high dudgeon over the small handful of skeptics who insisted on looking over their shoulder, revealing the climate science community to be thin-skinned and in-secure about its enterprise—a sign that something is likely amiss. Even if there was no unequivocal “smoking gun” of fraud or wrongdoing, the glimpse deep inside the climate science community was devastating. As I wrote at the time (“In Denial,” March 15, 2010), Climategate did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively....
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
Climategate II: An Open Letter to the Director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research
...Everyone agrees that the tone and content of many of them is a bit shrill and occasionally intolerant (kind of like University faculty meetings), but there is one repeating thread, by one of your most prestigious employees, Dr. Tom Wigley, that is far beyond the pale of most academic backbiting.
The revoking of my doctorate, the clear objective of Tom’s email, is the professional equivalent of the death penalty. I think it needs to be brought to your attention, because the basic premise underlying his machinations is patently and completely false. Dr Wigley is known as a careful scientist, but he certainly was careless here....
Saturday, December 03, 2011
Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: "must get rid of von Storch too"
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
PS Re CR, I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. Hans von Storch is partly to blame -- he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate'. One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter -- 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.
The Great Global Warming Fizzle
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen....
“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Climategate a ‘catastrophe’ for science?
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
Newsbytes: BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists, prime minister “green guru” publicly doubts climate change
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
How do religions die? Generally they don't, which probably explains why there's so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can't kill what wasn't there to begin with.
Still, Zeus and Apollo are no longer with us, and neither are Odin and Thor. Among the secular gods, Marx is mostly dead and Freud is totally so. Something did away with them, and it's worth asking what.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen....
“Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
Question: If warming really threatens to destroy human civilization, why was Jones hoping for warming?
And if the world was still warming in 2009, why did Jones refer to “lack of warming”?
Climategate a ‘catastrophe’ for science?
...Scepticism about global warming has spiked dramatically in the past two years. Pew also found that, after appearing on the public’s radar screen in 2007, the climate has become less important to voters with each annual survey. There are a number of possible reasons why. High unemployment makes voters hostile to the regulation of business. Scandals at Solyndra and other beneficiaries of Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus plan have shown an unseemly overlap between those who manage the government’s environmental initiatives and those who stand to make fortunes from them. “Green energy” has become the main avenue of US-style crony capitalism. Still, the emails leaked before the Copenhagen summit were more devastating than any of these things.
...Voters in a democracy do not argue about science. They argue about the authority of scientists. And scientists’ claim to authority comes from the perception that, in fact, they do not let their vanities and rivalries influence their work. Where others pursue their grubby little self-interest, scientists pursue only the truth. The emails of 2009, however, showed that some prominent members of the climate-change establishment were not operating in a spirit of openness. Defending a scientist’s furtiveness on the grounds that “his science is good” is like defending a politician’s blunder on the grounds that he “did nothing illegal”. The emails were damaging because they undermined the scientists’ claim to be speaking as scientists rather than as interested parties.
If scientists are shown to be colluding to arrive at a given result, then the halo around science dissipates. Any voter who does not want to be duped must suspend his scepticism. He must listen to scientists with no more deference than he does any other interest group. ...
Climate hoax promoter Michael Mann: "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests."
...I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy....
Yet Another Climate-Change Scandal
...Keenan is Doug Keenan, a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. McIntyre is, of course, Steve McIntyre—the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose the flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures. One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report and brought him near-legendary status in the climate science community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place....
Newsbytes: BBC In Cahoots With Climategate Scientists, prime minister “green guru” publicly doubts climate change
...Britain’s leading green activist research centre spent £15,000 on seminars for top BBC executives in an apparent bid to block climate change sceptics from the airwaves, a vast new cache of leaked ‘Climategate’ emails has revealed. The emails – part of a trove of more than 5,200 messages that appear to have been stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia – shed light for the first time on an incestuous web of interlocking relationships between BBC journalists and the university’s scientists, which goes back more than a decade. They show that University staff vetted BBC scripts, used their contacts at the Corporation to stop sceptics being interviewed and were consulted about how the broadcaster should alter its programme output. BBC insiders say the close links between the Corporation and the UEA’s two climate science departments, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research, have had a significant impact on its coverage. — David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 27 November 2011...
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