It’s that time of year once again. Posting Nina Paley’s excellent sticker (h/t to lulutsg!) sent me scurrying to the far corners of the web, and I found this little Christmas tidbit courtesy of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:

in 1659, a law was passed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony requiring a five-shilling fine from anyone caught “observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way.” Christmas Day was deemed by the Puritans to be a time of seasonal excess with no Biblical authority. The law was repealed in 1681 along with several other laws, under pressure from the government in London. It was not until 1856 that Christmas Day became a state holiday in Massachusetts. For two centuries preceding that date, the observance of Christmas — or lack thereof — represented a cultural tug of war between Puritan ideals and British tradition.

The law makes for strange bedfellows. In this case… I expect I’ll be waking up next to the younger Reverend Mather. And, perhaps, I’ll finally learn why they called him “Increase!”

HMO stocks rise as public option wanes in US reform

NEW YORK, Dec 9 (Reuters) – Shares of U.S. health insurers rose on Wednesday after efforts to overhaul the health system moved away from creating a government-run insurance plan long viewed as damaging to the industry.

That Reuters dispatch tells you all you need to know about the Democrats’ scuttling of the already-watered-down “Public Option.”

My belief in the utility of national electoral politics remains nearly nonexistent. Current events have done nothing to modify that opinion.

Went for a ride through the Central Artery Tunnel at 10:30 pm on Sunday night, and – as usual – the road was down to just one lane. Several police cars, a few parked construction vehicles, and two workmen standing next to an idle machine that comrade E. assures me is a concrete cutter. I actually can’t recall driving through Boston after 10pm on any night of the week without having the Central Artery either reduced to one lane or closed completely. The maze of on-ramp closures and diversions has, on occasion, been severe enough that I’ve unintentionally ended up in East Boston.

How much does it cost to have a highway that stays open all night long?

How much does it cost to build an integrated urban transit system that actually makes sense? In 1990, the Commonwealth committed to doing things like building the Green Line out to Medford, building the Blue Line out to Lynn, adding walking paths and bicycle trails, and restoring commuter rail service to the southern burbs on the Greenbush Line. If you follow the money, you can guess which ONE of these options has actually come to pass (yes, the Greenbush Line — probably the least useful in terms of passenger-miles, but the most vociferously demanded by relatively wealthier suburbanites).

Another proposal that was prominent throughout the planning stages of the Big Dig related to passenger rail service. Currently, all the rail lines into Boston terminate either at North Station or at South Station. The two stations are about a mile apart, and there is NO direct transit link between them – Amtrak advises passengers with luggage to take a taxi, although they could also walk down to the Red Line platform, and board a Red Line train to Downtown Crossing, then walk up and over and down again to the Orange Line platform and ride the Orange Line to North Station, and then go up two levels and into North Station itself to board their continuing train.

The Big Dig entailed digging a huge tunnel in which to bury the Central Artery highway…eight lanes of traffic underneath downtown Boston, stretching from… yes, you know this by now… North Station to South Station.

People with an ounce of fucking common sense insisted that the planners include a provision for TRAIN TRACKS in the tunnels that would be built from NORTH STATION TO SOUTH STATION.

What happened? Here’s an excerpt from a Boston Globe article from 1994:

Calling a proposed rail link between North and South Stations too expensive, a panel of transportation specialists yesterday threw cold water on a Weld administration plan cherished by supporters as a way to help solve Boston’s vehicular chaos.

The final report of the three-day “Boston Conference: Shaping the Accessible Region,” held last April and May, said alternatives should be sought for the $2 billion to $4 billion link designed to unite Boston’s communter rail systems.

In the report the panel endorsed development of the 14-mile route known as the Urban Ring.

So… in 1994 the Commonwealth killed the idea of linking North and South stations via rail because it would have added $2 billion to the cost of the project.

Fast-forward fifteen years: the Globe estimates that taxpayers will have spent over $22 BILLION on the Big Dig, including debt payments… and that 73% of those costs are borne by Massachusetts alone.

For what it’s worth, the original project estimate was $2.6 billion.

Rate that banks pay the Federal Reserve to borrow money for up to 90 days, “No Questions Asked”: 0.5%.

Rate that banks pay depositors for regular savings accounts: 0.05%.

Rate that banks charge borrowers for borrowing money with many “questions asked”: 5.25%.

Nice work, if you can get it.

Writing in Vanity Fair, Nina Munk explores Harvard’s staggering endowment losses in Fiscal 2009 (the amount they lost that year is about DOUBLE the total amount of the endowment in 1993):

last December [2008], the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion…

To be clear, even if you’d tried hard, you could not have picked a worse time to sell bonds than December 2008; that was the precise moment when credit markets seized up. But Harvard, it seems, had no choice. Unwilling to sell its assets at fire-sale prices, it needed immediate cash to cover, among other things, what my sources say was approximately a $1 billion unrealized loss from interest-rate swaps…

Those swaps, put in place under Harvard’s then president, Lawrence “Larry” Summers, in the early 2000s, were intended to protect, or hedge, the university against rising interest rates on all the money it had borrowed. The idea was simple: if interest rates went up, the swaps would bring in enough money to cover Harvard’s higher debt payments.

Instead, interest rates went down. And for reasons no one can explain to me, even as interest rates were plunging in 2007 and 2008, the university simply forgot, or neglected, or chose not to cancel its swaps—with the result that Harvard wound up facing that $1 billion loss! Whose responsibility was that? Where were Harvard’s chief financial officer and treasurer while all this was going on?

When you remember that the so-called “Masters of the Universe” and “financial wizards” who run Wall Street and the world’s major corporations are educated at places like The Big H… maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that The Big H itself was the biggest financial loser in the latest round of global economic catastrophe.

Looks like not everyone is hurting in this economic downturn. Check out Matt Taibi’s recent RS article in which he uncovers how Goldman Sachs has managed to manipulate markets and their own regulators to make the major economic bubbles of the past 100 years into massive profit booms for their firm. Even now, they have used the recent bailouts as an opportunity to “to pick the American carcass clean of its loose capital”.

Guess having your former executives as your overseeers has it’s advantages.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one of them.

more..

An article in New York magazine discusses the dozens of stalled or foreclosed residential construction projects in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn… home to some dear friends of Noise Is Information.

Boys and their toys… how quickly they tire of them!

What a world, what a world! Dear Leader’s on Twitter!

My favorite linked story so far is titled “Leader’s Forced March Full of Patriotic Devotion,” and includes such inscrutable gems as this:

The visit to Rakwon was followed by the 800km-long journey of field guidance to the Kim Chaek Iron and Steel Complex, the Ranam Coal Mining Machine Complex and the Musan Ore Mining Complex on the east coast where he set a timetable for creation of innovations.

In those days he found himself on the way of field guidance without dropping in his home even a day.

His unprecedented forced march was followed by visits to Manpho, a border town in Jagang Province, the area at the foot of Mt. Paektu, Songrim, Tokchon, Jaeryong, Huichon, Anju, Kusong and other parts of the country.

He went on his march day and night by train and field jeep, covering high passes, steep mountain ridges and earth and icy roads.

His forced march full of patriotic devotion is bringing about signal successes and creation of new norms and new records in all sectors of the national economy in the DPRK.

Wow. Just… wow.

This is the opening/trailer for Food, Inc.:

The film opens June 16 at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, for those of you local to Boston…

(h/t: Boston Locavores blog)