Raw Story » Helen Thomas hits White House for lack of transparency

Sometimes I think Helen Thomas is the ONLY real Reporter in the room…  and then someone like Reid shows up and reaffirms a bit of my faith. -dcm

more about “Raw Story » Helen Thomas hits White H…“, posted with vodpod

Clues to What’s Next for the Economy – List of Troubled US Banks

All US Banks and their Texas Ratio

Chris Brunner at the Lew Rockwell Blog posted this interesting article about how to get a clue as to what banks might be the shakiest at the moment, and more likely to fail.

Brunner:

A few days ago, a friend of mine called me to ask if I had any idea how to figure out which banks would be the next to fail. Some extensive googling revealed that while lists of troubled banks obviously exist, none of them seem to be readily available to the public. Why? Because the bankers do not want you to have this. Just watch the president of the American Bankers Association in this interview talk about how important it is to keep this private.

This is a list of all of the banks in the United States and the corresponding Texas Ratio for each one. Developed by Gerard Cassidy, the Texas ratio is a measure of a bank’s credit troubles. Basically, the higher the ratio, the worse the situation is for that particular bank. Banks with a ratio of 100 and higher are in very serious danger of collapse, and banks with a ratio of 50 or higher are vulnerable.

This is the formula I used:

100 * ((Non-performing Assets – U.S guaranteed loans) + Other REO) / (Equity + Loss Reserves)

… I recommend Chris’s post – read it!

I have put the list together as a word .doc file and as an excel spreadsheet sorted (ascending) by state and city and then (descending – worst to best) by Texas Ratio.

View:            doc spreadsheet

-dcm

Presidential Records “Custodian” Dead in Plane Crash

Republican IT Consultant Mike Connell Masterminded external GWB43 email accounts

(update 1) (update 2) (update 3) (update 4)

So let me get this straight.  Rawstory is reporting that Mike Connell, Karl Rove’s IT Contractor, has been killed in a plane crash.

“A top level Republican IT consultant who was set to testify in a case alleging GOP election tampering in Ohio died in a plane crash late Friday night.

Michael Connell — founder of Ohio-based New Media Communications, which created campaign Web sites for George W. Bush and John McCain — died instantly after his single-prop, private aircraft smashed into a vacant home in suburban Lake Township, Ohio.”

This is the guy who ran the company whose mail servers handled the President’s mail for the two year period which the administration variously claims is “lost”, “archives destroyed”, “archives never created”, i.e., unavailable.  (And now, ) No matter what course of legal action, unavailable.

dead men tell no tales?

Connell’s mail servers handled at least 88 White House email accounts, according to Think Progress.  This included the VP’s and Carl Rove’s and other inner circle officials and operatives email, too.

Larisa Alexandrovna, who has reported on Connell for some time, posted this about it on her blog at-Largely yesterday (emphasis added):

Michael Connell died in a plane crash last night. He was a key witness in the Ohio election fraud case that I have been reporting on. More importantly, however, he had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.

It is interesting how Alexandrovna was led to Mike Connell, while investigating the US Attorney firing scandal.

So all this mail has been lost.

And now the IT guy who ran the thing is dead.  And he was getting ready to talk. And he was frightened.

And he just happened to have had a fatal accident.

Uh Huh.

-dcm

Update 1 – Pissed Off Democrat is reporting that Ohio’s Election Attorney had requested Witness Protection for Connell due to threats from Karl Rove and his associates.  Also that Velvet Revolution has called for a full federal investigation after their contacts with those close to Connell revealed the threats and concern for Connell’s safety.

Update 2 - Here is VR’s press release in yesterday’s NY Times.

Update 3 – The Brad Blog has been covering this for a while.   Also, Lisa Derrick published this piece about it on Huffington Post.  A search of YouTube video’s about Connell’s various alleged crimes is here.  Below is a video explaining a bit of the context of Mike Connell’s suspicious and untimely death.

Update 4 - 1 Boring Old Man offers a couple of informative posts, Red Flags, and Re: Mike Connell.  There’s a discussion over at E. Pluribus Media.  Locally, CantonRep.com has an accident report that brings some perspective here, which includes the below video at the scene.

Post Script

Here are the background links Larisa compiled for her post’s second update.  They are valuable for understanding the context for Mike Connell’s death.

Here are the reading materials in case you have not followed any of this closely. These are articles I have done over spanning over a year of investigative work:Part 1 – Political Prisoner http://rawstory.com/news/2007/The_Permanent_Republican_Majority_1125.htmlPart 2 – Siegelman’s Daughter Speaks Out http://rawstory.com/news/2007/The_permanent_Republican_majority_Daughter_of_1127.html Part 3 – Karl Rove Running Elections from the White House http://rawstory.com/news/2007/The_Permanent_Republican_Majority_Part_III_1216.html Part 4 – Mississippi Prosecution, Justice Oliver Diaz http://rawstory.com/news/2008/How_Bush_US_attorney_riddled_with_0401.html Part 5 – Justice Diaz Speaks http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Diaz_placeholder_0408.html Part 6 – Break-ins plague targets of political prosecutions http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Breakins_plague_Justice_Department_whistleblowers_0430.html Part 7 – Justice for Sale http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Justice_for_Sale_How_Big_Tobacco_0828.html Related articles: Judge who denied Paul Minor release was protégé of Karl Rove http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Judge_in_Paul_Minor_case_was_0821.html DOJ Investigating 2 US Attorneys http://rawstory.com/news/2008/DOJ_Investigating_two_US_Attorneys_involved_0604.html 60 Minutes Segment on Siegelman “dropped” in Alabama http://rawstory.com/news/2008/60_Minutes_broadcast_on_prosecution_of_0225.html Republican IT Consultant Subpoenaed in Ohio election fraud case http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Republican_IT_consultant_subpoenaed_in_case_0929.html Abramoff said he had agreement with White House aide just a month after Bush took office http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Abramoff_said_he_had_agreement_with_1117.html Treasury Department investigating US Attorney for leaking state Supreme Court Justice’s tax returns http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Treasury_Department_investigating_US_Attorney_for_1201.htm

President-Elect Obama Speaks

Reaffirms America’s Penchant for Change

Ladies and Gentlemen, The President-Elect of the United States …

Well, who could possibly follow that?

The Real Great Depression – 1929 Wrong Model for Current Crisis

Today’s global collapse more closely resembles Panic of 1873 than 1929

By Scott Reynolds Nelson

[Occasionally I will invite a Guest to publish at Scribal Thrum - and I'm proud to welcome Scott Nelson, Professor of History at William and Mary College.  Thanks for Contributing, Scott.)

As a historian who works on the 19th century, I have been reading my newspaper with a considerable sense of dread. While many commentators on the recent mortgage and banking crisis have drawn parallels to the Great Depression of 1929, that comparison is not particularly apt. Two years ago, I began research on the Panic of 1873, an event of some interest to my colleagues in American business and labor history but probably unknown to everyone else. But as I turn the crank on the microfilm reader, I have been hearing weird echoes of recent events.

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them.

In fact, the current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." She pinched pennies in the 1930s, but she says that times were not nearly so bad as the depression her grandparents went through. That crash came in 1873 and lasted more than four years. It looks much more like our current crisis.

The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates. This banking crisis hit the United States in the fall of 1873.

Run on the Fourth National Bank, No. 20 Nassau Street New York City, 1873 : WikiMedia Commons

Railroad companies tumbled first. They had crafted complex financial instruments that promised a fixed return, though few understood the underlying object that was guaranteed to investors in case of default. (Answer: nothing). The bonds had sold well at first, but they had tumbled after 1871 as investors began to doubt their value, prices weakened, and many railroads took on short-term bank loans to continue laying track. Then, as short-term lending rates skyrocketed across the Atlantic in 1873, the railroads were in trouble. When the railroad financier Jay Cooke proved unable to pay off his debts, the stock market crashed in September, closing hundreds of banks over the next three years. The panic continued for more than four years in the United States and for nearly six years in Europe.

The long-term effects of the Panic of 1873 were perverse. For the largest manufacturing companies in the United States — those with guaranteed contracts and the ability to make rebate deals with the railroads — the Panic years were golden. Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, and John D. Rockefeller had enough capital reserves to finance their own continuing growth. For smaller industrial firms that relied on seasonal demand and outside capital, the situation was dire. As capital reserves dried up, so did their industries. Carnegie and Rockefeller bought out their competitors at fire-sale prices. The Gilded Age in the United States, as far as industrial concentration was concerned, had begun.

As the panic deepened, ordinary Americans suffered terribly. A cigar maker named Samuel Gompers who was young in 1873 later recalled that with the panic, “economic organization crumbled with some primeval upheaval.” Between 1873 and 1877, as many smaller factories and workshops shuttered their doors, tens of thousands of workers — many former Civil War soldiers — became transients. The terms “tramp” and “bum,” both indirect references to former soldiers, became commonplace American terms. Relief rolls exploded in major cities, with 25-percent unemployment (100,000 workers) in New York City alone. Unemployed workers demonstrated in Boston, Chicago, and New York in the winter of 1873-74 demanding public work. In New York’s Tompkins Square in 1874, police entered the crowd with clubs and beat up thousands of men and women. The most violent strikes in American history followed the panic, including by the secret labor group known as the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania’s coal fields in 1875, when masked workmen exchanged gunfire with the “Coal and Iron Police,” a private force commissioned by the state. A nationwide railroad strike followed in 1877, in which mobs destroyed railway hubs in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Cumberland, Md.

In Central and Eastern Europe, times were even harder. Many political analysts blamed the crisis on a combination of foreign banks and Jews. Nationalistic political leaders (or agents of the Russian czar) embraced a new, sophisticated brand of anti-Semitism that proved appealing to thousands who had lost their livelihoods in the panic. Anti-Jewish pogroms followed in the 1880s, particularly in Russia and Ukraine. Heartland communities large and small had found a scapegoat: aliens in their own midst.

The echoes of the past in the current problems with residential mortgages trouble me. Loans after about 2001 were issued to first-time homebuyers who signed up for adjustablerate mortgages they could likely never pay off, even in the best of times. Real-estate speculators, hoping to flip properties, overextended themselves, assuming that home prices would keep climbing.

Those debts were wrapped in complex securities that mortgage companies and other entrepreneurial banks then sold to other banks; concerned about the stability of those securities, banks then bought a kind of insurance policy called a credit-default swap, which risk managers imagined would protect their investments. More than two million foreclosure filings — default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions — were reported in 2007.

By then trillions of dollars were already invested in this credit default swap derivative market. Were those new financial instruments resilient enough to cover all the risk? (Answer: no.)

As in 1873, a complex financial pyramid rested on a pinhead. Banks are hoarding cash. Banks that hoard cash do not make short-term loans. Businesses large and small now face a potential dearth of short-term credit to buy raw materials, ship their products, and keep goods on shelves.

If there are lessons from 1873, they are different from those of 1929. Most important, when banks fall on Wall Street, they stop all the traffic on Main Street — for a very long time. The protracted reconstruction of banks in the United States and Europe created widespread unemployment.

Unions (previously illegal in much of the world) flourished but were then destroyed by corporate institutions that learned to operate on the edge of the law. In Europe, politicians found their scapegoats in Jews, on the fringes of the economy. (Americans, on the other hand, mostly blamed themselves; many began to embrace what would later be called fundamentalist religion.)

The post-panic winners, even after the bailout, might be those firms — financial and otherwise — that have substantial cash reserves. A widespread consolidation of industries may be on the horizon, along with a nationalistic response of high tariff barriers, a decline in international trade, and scapegoating of immigrant competitors for scarce jobs. The failure in July of the World Trade Organization talks begun in Doha seven years ago suggests a new wave of protectionism may be on the way.

In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world’s credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India. Beyond that I would not hazard a guess. I still have microfilm to read.

Scott Reynolds Nelson is a professor of history at the College of William and Mary. Among his books is Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American legend (Oxford University Press, 2006).

Reprinted by Special Arrangement with the Author.  A slightly different version of this article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 17, 2008 issue, Volume 55, Issue 8, Page B98, and in the Online Edition, here.

Sh*T-for-Brains Yellow Journalism: WFTV, Barbara West, Bob Jordan

(Update I)

<rant>

To the General Manager of WFTV

Your interview Thursday with Joe Biden was not a tough interview, as many have held.  It was an ambush interview. Perhaps Barbara West and Bob Jordan learned how to be Journalists from Bill O’Reilly’s sprititual forefather,  Joe Pyne.

Not simply an ambush, this interviewer’s questions were not simply woefully uninformed as the Obama camp would have it, but they were outright insulting to the intelligence of any reasonably educated and informed Viewer.

Ironically part of the title of the above video feed on YouTube says “Real Reporter Asks Real Questions.”  Neither characterisation is true, judging from the content.

First, the questions about ACORN.  Both candidates have a history with ACORN.  So?  Would not a balanced interview follow up with a question about GOP efforts to remove voters from the rolls in multiple states?

You seem to want to make something of the so called “redistribution” of wealth.

Excuse me, WFTV, what do You think the US Tax Code is?  Both Democrats and Republicans have had a hand in it’s design.

Little wonder Biden thought it might be a joke.  To a real Journalist it would have been.

Pre-2008 Collapse - Effect of Bush 2001 Tax Cuts on National Debt

What do You think the immense 1.8 Trillion dollar tax cut was, when Bush was forced to sue to get into the White House in the 2000 attempted election?  Does this Biden interviewer know who got most of that money?

Does this interviewer know anything about the corporate loophole filled US Tax Code?  Does this interviewer have any familiarity at all with Republican legislation for the past eight years in this regard?

Ask them who benefitted the most from Bush’s tax giveaway of our surplus.  If they don’t know, fire them for nonfeasance.  If they DO know, fire them for ignoring the facts and preparing a set of interview questions intentionally false to fact.  Karl Marx indeed.

According to Hal Boedeker’s blog on the Orlando Sentinel,  the Obama campaign cancelled a second interview with Biden’s wife.

WFTV news director Bob Jordan said, … “Mr. Biden didn’t like the questions,” Jordan said. “We choose not to ask softball questions.”

Jordan added, “I’m crying foul on this one.”

Cry whatever You want, Bob.  If You think these were “hardball” questions, You should probably should go back to whatever You were doing before You decided to try Your hand at the news business.  Because based on this interview, You don’t know what the hell You’re doing.  You are either disingenuous, or actually do know nothing about recent events with regard to tax legislation, corporate lobbying, or what has passed for social policy under republican governance.  And You need to know about such things to be a news director, Bob.  You really should.

Here is how the interviewer, alleged “veteran Journalist” Barbara West, responded to the reactions to her encounter with Biden:

I think I asked him some pointed questions. These are questions that are rolling about right now and questions that need to be asked. I don’t think I was rude or inconsiderate to him. I think I was probing and maybe tough.

So, let me get this straight, Barbara, veteran that You are:  You choose Your questions based on what is “rolling about right now?” What does this mean?  That You mindlessly parrot whatever questions other equally uninformed talking heads are mindlessly parroting about now?  Or that You choose Your questions based on what Your uninformed “news director” hands You without any actual research into the subjects of the interview on Your part?

I am a Journalist.  And I am insulted, appalled, and aghast at the prospect that Your station, WFTV, would have the temerity to represent this “interview” as anything remotely resembling responsible, researched, informative Journalism. As a thoughtful, reasonably intelligent Citizen trying to do due diligence in informing myself about the important issues facing our country, I’m insulted.  Looking at this interview, I couldn’t blame any Journalist or Journalistic Blogger who cares about the integrity of their information for wanting WFTV’s hide for a doormat for such a breach.

It wasn’t decent Journalism.  As a thinking being, I can assure You that it was not.  It was an attempted hi-tech lynching (apologies to Clarence Thomas).  It was crap.

As much has been made of Joe Biden’s tendency to be verbose, or commit gaffes by shooting from the hip, his performance in this encounter belies that.  Biden handled himself beautifully, in the hands of an obviously non-thinking and ill infomed questioner.  I think he was much kinder than was deserved.

This bubble-headed interviewer needs to get some research practice.  Both Parties just gave away all of the tax revenue the US Government hopes to derive from the next 3 or more generations with this so called economic bailout, and these are the best questions You can come up with?

Shame on WFTV.  In the interest of honesty with Your Viewers and professional due diligence, perhaps You should either forgo doing news, outsource it to a professional staff, or hire some talent.

For what it’s worth,

David C. Manchester
http://dredeyedick.wordpress.com

</rant>

My preliminary research suggests that WFTV’s corporate parent, Cox Enterprises, is a good example of much that is wrong with the Fourth Estate today, in terms of media concentration of ownership, and a $1.5 million lobbying agenda.

Cox Enterprises 2008 Lobbist Expenses Reported at $1,500,000.00

If You would like to write to the owner of WFTV about this shameful and unprofessional episode, here is Alexa’s information about them:

Cox Holdings, Inc.

1400 Lake Hearn Dr. NE
Atlanta, GA
30319
US
Phone: 404 843 5327 404 269 1437
Fax: +1 404 572 1801
CoxTVsURL [at] cox.com

(Update I)

I am not alone in this assessment. -dcm

Welcome to Scribal Thrum

Welcome to Scribal Thrum – a chronicle of journalism, analysis, and commentary.

My name is David C. Manchester, aka dredeyedick.  My background is a combination of concurrent careers in IT, Journalism, Military Public Affairs, Constitutional Law, Economics, and  Intelligence.  I am not a Lawyer, nor do I work for any legacy media organisation, military unit, school, or intelligence organ.  My income is from IT Contracting.  My main concern here is that the evolving information, political, and economic systems we embrace be fair, humane, effective, and reasonable for individual Human Beings.

If I had to classify myself by any sort of ideology, my best guess would be to say that having started my adult life as a laissez-faire advocate of capitalism, I have passed through various stages of maturity, until today, when I favor an as-yet undeployed, emerging digital peer-to-peer system of social credit which I would call DotCommunism.

From the start of my career as a dissident military journalist at the end of the Vietnam era through my various incarnations as a Journalist and IT Contractor, I have been struck by the disconnect between the rhetoric emitting from our politicians about what sort of individual (and corporate) liberty the United States stands for, versus the reality of our political economy organised around the needs of progressively more and more consolidated corporate control over our governments, laws, financial systems, “news” organisations, and Personal degrees of Freedom.

As a journalist and military dissident, I have found over the years that the unbridled practice of free speech while in the military will follow You for all the years of Your life, if the opinions You voice don’t strictly adhere to the american military’s “party line” of the moment.   I wrote some of that story at Civiblog, an Open Net Initiative site, in December, 2005.

Since then I have been relatively quiescent, not blogging, just dropping links to previous work in related places.  But now I think it’s time to get a little more organised, a little more active.

Scribal Thrum is the result.