The 1% Simply “Shed” Their Obligations
Posted on November 29th, 2011 at 2:18 pm by Steve

Corporations are legal “persons,” and, like you and me, enter into binding legal contracts. One difference is, when they go bankrupt, they just “shed” their obligations and move on. You and I aren’t usually so lucky.

A case in point is extreme financial distress. For a person, this might be caused by a loss of employment, or sudden illness; for a corporation, it could be a drop in business, excessive operational costs, or bad planning. In either case: revenue is down, costs are up, and the balance sheet is negative.

If you’re a person, this kind of crisis means that you’ll suffer direct hardships: the things you own get taken away, and if you actually still earn money, your future earnings are pledged to your creditors. If you have a mortgage, you’re typically foreclosed and lose your home. Your car gets repossessed. Your belongings are sold off to pay your debts.

Ah, but if you’re a corporation, things are different! You can simply “shed” those expensive obligations and soldier on! Well, you can’t shed all your contracts – just the ones you made with your employees:

AMR [American Airlines’ parent company] was determined to avoid Chapter 11 as air travel fell and losses mounted after the 2001 terrorist attacks, even as peers used bankruptcy to shed costly pension and retiree benefit plans and restructure debt.

(Source: Bloomberg Business Week, November 29, 2011)

Of course, the obligations you made to your peers (i.e., other corporations) must still be honored. These debts will be “restructured.” But your contractual promises to pay for the doctor visits and medicine for the thousands of people who gave you 30 of the best years of their lives? Those you can “shed” like a tired skin you’ve outgrown.

“You would expect a leaner, stronger company to emerge from bankruptcy,” Chris Logan, an analyst at Echelon Research & Advisory LLP in London, said today by telephone. “As they are in Chapter 11, it will be more easy to demand concessions from the labor force.”

Ah yes, “concessions from the labor force!” In other words, the executives hold a gun to the heads of the employee unions and offer them a choice: either some of you lose your jobs and the rest lose your benefits and even more of your salary, or all of you lose your jobs and your benefits and all of your salary. Some choice.

It’s not like we haven’t been down this road before, with this very company. American’s pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, gate agents, baggage handlers – you know, the people who actually make the planes fly and keep the passengers safe – these very employees took a 30% pay cut back in 2003 in hopes of avoiding a bankruptcy proceeding. Those poor saps! Now, instead of regaining the $1,600,000,000 that they gave up eight years ago, they’re being told that they’re still earning too much, and that if they don’t make further sacrifices, they’ll all lose their jobs.

While the workers have already taken huge pay cuts, given up their pensions, and paid more in health insurance premiums, American’s executives have somehow managed to escape harm. In 2008, the same year his airline lost more than $2 BILLION the boss’s compensation package topped $5 million. But, pity poor Gerald Arpey: that $5 mil was a 22% drop over his 2007 compensation.

A quick glance at the headlines will tell you that, even through huge losses and now bankruptcy, The 1% at AMR are doing just fine: “Despite losses, American Airlines CEO’s compensation climbs” – Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Apr. 21, 2011; “Executive compensation at American Airlines raises eyebrows” – Tulsa World, April 19, 2010; “AP says Arpey earned $6.6 million in 2007” – Dallas Morning News, April 19, 2008.

Thus do the executives of the corporate entity continue to prosper and thrive, continuing to do their “jobs” of running the business, while thousands of employees are laid off, and tens of thousands more lose the only hope they had of actually being able to, you know, survive their retirement years on something other than handouts and cat food.

Although all of that can change.

Like, Unlike
Posted on September 15th, 2011 at 10:13 pm by Steve

Unlike -1

The Drum Major Instinct
Posted on September 15th, 2011 at 9:55 pm by Steve

God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. (Preach it, preach it) God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in _________________. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.

— The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

February 4, 1968

In 1996, MBTA Promised Green Line to Somerville by 2011
Posted on August 2nd, 2011 at 7:21 pm by Steve


In 1996, the MBTA planned to have the Green Line extended to Somerville by 2011.

Today, in 2011, the Patrick administration announced that they will be delaying – until at least 2018 – construction and operation of the Green Line into Somerville and Medford.

Long-time watchers of Somerville’s transit woes (such as this author) are unsurprised by this latest development.

Courtesy of those pesky “archives” that libraries seem to love, here’s a Boston Globe article from January 28, 1996 (more than FIFTEEN years ago!):

Slater, the T’s planning director, contends, “Somerville probably has more bus service than any comparable area. It’s got a lot of service going into both Lechmere and Sullivan, where people can make connections. Part of the long range plan is to extend the Green Line into Somerville. The deadline on that is the year 2011, and we’re trying to meet earlier deadlines now on other projects.”

I guess the good news is that the planning horizon today is half what it was in 1996. Maybe in 2018, they’ll announce service in 2022. And, in 2022, they’ll announce service in 2024. And, in 2024, they’ll announce service in 2025, and maybe by then it will actually be built.

I’m not holding my breath.

Nuke New England!
Posted on April 18th, 2011 at 3:03 pm by Steve


Imagine a “station blackout” occurs at the Pilgrim Nuclear Generation Station in Plymouth, MA. Within days, a hydrogen explosion shatters the secondary containment building, possibly breaching primary containment as well. The government orders a mandatory evacuation for areas within 20 km of the plant, but the BBC World Service is saying that the British government has advised their citizens not to travel within 50 miles of Plymouth.

This catastrophe at Plymouth (or Seabrook, or Vermont Yankee, or Millstone in Connecticut) hasn’t happened…yet. But the notion that “it can’t happen here” has taken quite a beating over the last month. If and when a disaster like this strikes, we’ll have hours to evacuate. Think for a moment what it would take to evacuate just the inner “exclusion zone” around one of these reactors. Where are we going to put all the people from Brockton, Plymouth, Taunton, Fall River, Buzzards Bay, Sandwich…? And what about the more than a million people that live within 50 miles? Remember that, even now, the US government is advising Americans not to travel within 50 miles of Fukushima, a month after the crisis began. How can we avoid travel to the entire Boston metro area?

Of course, Pilgrim only has one reactor, where Fukushima Daiichi has six. On the other hand, Pilgrim has more than TWO MILLION POUNDS of radioactive spent fuel assemblies stored on site. A loss of coolant water in the tightly-packed spent fuel pool at Plymouth – which has far less containment, and far more fuel, than the reactor core – could quickly lead to a fire and a massive excursion of radioactive isotopes of cesium, strontium, iodine, and others. An explosion could spread deadly plutonium and uranium particles for miles (as happened at Fukushima). In other words, even with fewer reactors, a station blackout at Plymouth could have worse radiological consequences than the ongoing disaster in Japan.


The spent fuel pool at Vermont Yankee

The reactor at Plymouth is a General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, the same design and vintage of the “troubled” reactors in Japan. Of course, America’s Nuclear Industry and Regulators (is there a difference?) are quick to point out that American reactors have strict safety standards and have been upgraded and so on. Ask them about the spent fuel pools. Ask them how long they can run the pumps to maintain sufficient cooling in the event of a station blackout (whatever the cause). Ask them the consequences of allowing the operator to store 2,918 spent fuel assemblies in a pool that was designed and originally licensed to hold just 880 assemblies.

Of course, the spokesman for Vermont Yankee is quick to assure us, “We believe pools are perfectly safe. It was designed to be safe and there are redundant systems so there is never a loss of coolant.” Indeed. For some reason, those fools in Japan neglected to design their pools to be safe, and that’s why they suffered a complete loss of coolant and melting of the fuel rods in the spent fuel pool. Silly Japanese!

“Deficits Don’t Matter”
Posted on April 8th, 2011 at 5:37 pm by Steve


Today, the U.S. government is on the verge of “shutting down” over a budget impasse in the Congress. Republicans are insisting that massive spending cuts are required to avert disaster. Just today, Illinois Republican Representative Judy Biggert said, “We’re facing an economic disaster. We have to cut the spending.”

But during the Bush era, Republicans were singing a very different tune. After the 2004 elections, Dick Cheney famously said, “Reagan proved: deficits don’t matter” (according to then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill). Whether or not Cheney actually said those exact words, that’s certainly how the Cheney-Bush administration behaved:

During his eight years in office, President Bush oversaw a large increase in government spending. In fact, President Bush increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ. In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent.

During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent.

[source: Spending Under President George W. Bush, Veronique de Rugy, George Mason University.]

Conservative commentators must have been outraged, right? After all, deficit spending is mortgaging our children’s future!

Turns out, not so much. Here’s the tune that the Weekly Standard was singing back in 2005:

WHEN DICK CHENEY SAID, “Deficits don’t matter,” economists took that as proof of the economic illiteracy of the Bush administration. But it turns out there is a case to be made that Cheney was onto something.

On the deepest level, the vice president was echoing, in slightly exaggerated form, an idea put forward a few years ago by Irving Kristol, the Godfather of the neoconservatives who have had such a wide-ranging effect on Bush administration policy. Kristol wrote then, and still believes, that “We should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse.”

[…]

The deficits that Bush ran up in the years in which the country was teetering on the verge of a serious recession had the beneficial effect of righting the economy. In that sense, deficits not only didn’t matter, but were a force for economic good.

[source: Do Deficits Matter?, Irwin M. Stelzer, Hudson Institute]

Something has changed in the last five years, however. For some reason… can’t quite put my finger on it… but for some reason, Republicans now fear the DOOM of deficit spending:

“There’s no daylight between the Tea Party and me. What they want is they want us to cut spending. They want us to deal with this crushing debt that’s going to crush the future for our kids and grandkids. There’s no daylight there.”

[Source: John Boehner talking to ABC’s George Stephanopolous on April 7]

I wonder if having a Democrat in the White House could possibly have anything to do with their objections?

And besides… if they’re so worried about improving the government’s balance sheet, maybe they could do something about this:

General Electric, the nation’s largest corporation, had a very good year in 2010. The company reported worldwide profits of $14.2 billion, and said $5.1 billion of the total came from its operations in the United States.

Its American tax bill? None. In fact, G.E. claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

[Source: tG.E.’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether, New York Times, March 24, 2011]

Nah. The Republicans would much rather shut down essential government services, fire public employees, and ensure that poor people become even more desperate for any crumbs the rich may throw their way.

In fact… isn’t that the GOP’s 2012 campaign platform?

Change We Can Believe In
Posted on February 8th, 2011 at 12:57 pm by Steve

[S]ince 1993 [Omar] Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.

Jane Mayer, “Who Is Omar Suleiman?”, in the New Yorker

Compared To What?
Posted on October 23rd, 2010 at 1:30 pm by Steve

John Legend and The Roots have a new album out, and one of my favorite songs is “Compared To What.” I played it for some musician friends of mine, and one of them said, “Wow, this is a lot slower than the original!”

There ensued some discussion of “the original.” One person said Common (the hip hop artist); someone else said, “I thought it was from The Seventies.” After a visit to The Google, I found a wealth of information about this interesting, important song of protest, and its circuitous pop history.

Mark Anthony Neal, a music writer and professor at Duke University, gives the best breakdown of the song’s history in a March, 2003 article for Pop Matters. He notes that, indeed, Common did record a version of “Compared to What,” with the singer Mya. But the only lyrics from the original song that remain are, “Tryin’ to make it real, compared to what?” Everything else is a rap by Common that includes lines like “the real can’t be bought or sold.”

The irony (which you knew was coming)? The rapper was remaking Eugene McDaniels’s 1960’s-era anti-war song as part of a Coca-Cola marketing campaign called “Coca-Cola…Real:”

The original version of the song is a powerful example of black pop that wasn’t afraid, echoing Audre Lorde, to speak truth to power, an element sorely missing in contemporary black pop music.

Many of the so-called hip-hop generation’s artists have been remarkably silent, while Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Powell march lockstep to war with Iraq. Thus it is terribly ironic that in the midst of major antiwar protests around the world, one of the most “conscious” of hip-hop artists [Common] referenced one of the great protest recordings in the pantheon of soul music to sell brown caffeinated fizz.

[flvplayer http://www.noiselabs.com/blog/audio/mya_common_comparedToWhat.flv 400 320]

That remake of the song is particularly distasteful when you compare it to the most famous of the 60’s-era versions. You Tube user Dr. Greez had uploaded the classic recording of pianist Les McCann and saxophonist Eddie Harris doing “Compared to What” live at the 1969 Montreux Jazz Festival:

That version really cooks.

It’s interesting to hear John Legend and The Roots, who share enough of an affinity with Common that he appears elsewhere on the same album (Wake Up!), offer their take on this anti-war song. Unlike Common in the Coca-Cola ads, John Legend sings the original lyrics more or less as written. The Roots provides a much more stripped-down, slower base for the song. Overall, it’s a stirring version.

As we’re in the midst of two “overseas contingency operations” that continue to kill and maim on a daily basis, the potent protest lyrics of “Compared To What?” remain sadly relevant. John Legend, ?uestlove, and the Roots have taken a small step toward restoring the honor, and the power, of Eugene McDaniels’s original.

Have a listen below.

[audio:http://www.noiselabs.com/blog/audio/roots_what.mp3|titles=Compared to What|artists=John Legend and The Roots]
“I Watched the Sun Set, Listening to the Colors Change…”
Posted on September 20th, 2010 at 4:08 pm by Steve

Austin Seraphin (who is nearly blind) describes the revelation of using an iPhone with Voice Over functionality:

I spent ten minutes looking at my pumpkin plants, with their leaves of green and lemon-ginger. I then roamed my yard, and saw a blue flower. I then found the brown shed, and returned to the gray house. My mind felt blown. I watched the sun set, listening to the colors change as the sky darkened.

It’s inspiring that the Apple engineers and developers are working hard to make their devices and software accessible to the widest possible number of people.

Beautiful Info-Graphics From 1870
Posted on June 4th, 2010 at 7:37 pm by Steve

You wouldn’t expect to find such beauty in the Statistical Atlas of the United States, Based on the Ninth Census (1870) from the Library of Congress, would you? Sophisticated data visualizations, hand-calculated and hand-engraved, in beautiful colors, prepared by a staff headed by Francis A. Walker, M. A., superintedent of the ninth census.

The display above shows you, for each U. S. state and territory, the proportion of the church-going population (the colored boxes) relative to the total population (the shaded box in which the colored boxes are set), as well as the breakdown by the top 11 denominations!

I highly recommend that you check out all the charts and maps!

« Previous Entries