Monthly Archives: July 2011

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  • The Fed Audit – Newsroom: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (Vermont)

    "To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. "No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed's board of directors or be employed by the Fed," he said.

    The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

    The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.  The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates. Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts. Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

    A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. "The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street.""

    corporatism financial-crisis bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now

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  • Cisco, the Whistleblower, and the Angry Judge | The Mark

    "British Columbia’s highest court has accused tech giant Cisco and U.S. officials of a massive abuse of process in order to have a Cisco whistleblower thrown in jail. B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald McKinnon said Cisco had the “unmitigated gall” to attempt to use Canada’s justice system, via U.S. officials, to pressure former Cisco exec Peter Alfred-Adekeye into dropping a civil suit against the company. Alfred-Adekeye had alleged that Cisco was illegally forcing customers into maintenance contracts. Cisco eventually settled the suit and abandoned the maintenance-contract practice, but not before Alfred-Adekeye spent 28 days in a Canadian jail. The Alfred-Adekeye case has caused outrage among many commenters, some of whom have suggested it’s a sign that the U.S. is becoming a “corporate police state.” The Mark interviewed Marilyn Sandford, who represented Alfred-Adekeye during his extradition proceedings."

    corporatism whistleblower dirty-tricks felonies-committed-by-nonhumans

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  • Will Rogers Today

    "Now it's Prohibition, we hear a lot about that. Well, that's nothing to compare to your neighbor's children that are hungry. It's food, it ain't drink that we are worried about today. Here a few years ago we were so afraid that the poor people was liable to take a drink that now we've fixed so that they can't even get something to eat.

    So here we are, in a country with more wheat, and more corn, and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world; there's not a product that you can name that we haven't got more of than any other country ever had on the face of the earth, and yet we've got people starving. We'll hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile. The potter's fields are lined with granaries full of grain. Now if there ain't something cockeyed in an arrangement like that then this microphone here in front of me is, well, it's a cuspidor, that's all.

    Now I think that perhaps they will arrange it, I think some of our big men will perhaps get some way of fixing a different distribution of things. If they don't they are certainly not big men and won't be with us long. Now I say, and have always claimed, that things would pick up in '32. Thirty-two, why '32? Well, because '32 is an election year, see, and the Republicans always see that everything looks good on election year, see? They give us three good years and one bad one. No, no, three bad ones and one good one. I like to got it wrong. That's the Democrats does the other. They give us three bad years and one good one, but the good one always comes on the year that the voting is, see? Now if they was running this year why they would be all right. But they are one year late. Everything will pick up next year and be fine.

    These people that you are asked to aid, why they are not asking for charity, they are naturally asking for a job, but if you can't give them a job why the next best thing you can do is see that they have food and the necessities of life. You know, there's not a one of us has anything that these people that are without it now haven't contributed to what we've got. I don't suppose there is the most unemployed or the hungriest man in America that hasn't contributed in some way to the wealth of every millionaire in America. It was the big boys themselves who thought that this financial drunk we were going through was going to last forever. They over-merged, and over-capitalized, and over-everything else. That's the fix that we're in now."

    Will-Rogers politics Depression financial-crisis speech

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  • The Ann Arbor Chronicle | Column: Grover and Me

    "We should check back in a few years to see how the “inevitably” thing is working out. I liked Republicans better back when, like Richard Nixon, they were all Keynesians. So I have a hard time figuring out how any jobs will be created when millions of families lose disposable income through higher taxes, just to provide tax breaks to a much smaller number of businesses. (If we were investing the added revenue in public infrastructure to enable private profits, like roads, schools and bridges, it would be a different story.) To whom are Michigan businesses going to sell their goods and services, when me and everybody else in the state has to fork over all our extra cash to Rick Snyder?"

    corporatism Michigan politics Republicanism-is-not-conservatism Rick-Snyder local

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  • INTERVIEW – Suber: Leader of a Leaderless Revolution

    "  Q: As your answer indicates, there is more to OA than green and gold alone; there is also gratis and libre OA. In 2008, you produced a grid demonstrating the four-way relationship among the different types of OA. Can you expand on this, and outline the relative merits of gratis and libre OA? 

    A: Gratis OA is simply free of charge. But it’s not more free than that. Gratis literature may stand under all-rights-reserved copyrights and give users no more rights than they already had under fair use (or fair dealing).

    Libre OA is free of charge and free of at least some copyright and licensing restrictions. Libre literature stands under some-rights-reserved copyrights, at most, and permits uses that exceed fair use. The advantage of libre OA is that researchers needn’t slow down to ask permission for legitimate scholarly uses that exceed fair use, needn’t take the risk of proceeding without permission, and needn’t err on the side of non-use. By the way, the grid you mentioned was merely a preview of a longer article, which explained the gratis/libre distinction in much more detail."

    open-access publishing academic-culture openness heroes