Assessing Treasury’s Strategy: Six Months of TARP

The April oversight report for COP is entitled Assessing Treasury’s Strategy: Six Months of TARP. In this report, COP offers a preliminary look at Treasury’s strategy and offers a comparative analysis of previous efforts to combat banking crises in the past.
Over the last six months, Treasury has spent or committed $590.4 billion of the TARP funds. Treasury has also relied heavily on the use of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet which has expanded by more than $1.5 trillion (not including expected TALF loans) in conjunction with the financial stabilization activities it has undertaken beyond its monetary policy operations. This has allowed Treasury to leverage TARP funds well beyond the funds appropriated by Congress.

Of, by, and for the Bondholders

When in trouble, bondholders have always looked to Washington for relief.

By Daniel GrossPosted Saturday, April 11, 2009, at 7:16 AM ET

At a conference last week on the panic of 2008, a group of distinguished academics tried to puzzle out the meaning of the tumultuous events of the past year. Sitting in the Moot Court Room at the George Washington University Law School, I listened to people who possess more degrees than me struggle mightily to shoehorn the bewildering facts into the accepted model and theories that are supposed to govern our world. Efficient markets? Rational actors? Regulatory capture?

Ancient Life Tapped for Solar Technology

By LiveScience Staff

posted: 08 April 2009 02:30 pm ET

An ancient life form has been tapped to create one of the newest technologies for solar energy. The systems that may be surprisingly simple to build compared to existing silicon-based solar cells, researchers said today.

Interestingly, the scientists aren't sure exactly how it works.

Tiny, single-celled marine life forms called diatoms have existed for at least 100 million years and are at the bottom of the food chain, supporting much of the life in the oceans, but they also have rigid shells that can be used to create order in a natural way at the extraordinarily small level of nanotechnology.

Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?

Whatever ideological logo we adopt, the shift from free market to public action needs to be bigger than politicians grasp

Eric Hobsbawm
The Guardian, Friday 10 April 2000

The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. That should not be as difficult as it seems, because the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century has patently disappeared down the plughole of history. This was the way of thinking about modern industrial economies, or for that matter any economies, in terms of two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy. The first broke down in the 1980s, and the European communist political systems with it. The second is breaking down before our eyes in the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the 1930s. In some ways it is a greater crisis than in the 1930s, because the globalisation of the economy was not then as far advanced as it is today, and the crisis did not affect the planned economy of the Soviet Union. We don't yet know how grave and lasting the consequences of the present world crisis will be, but they certainly mark the end of the sort of free-market capitalism that captured the world and its governments in the years since Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan.

Ralph Nader: CPAs MIA

Where were the giant accounting firms, the CPAs, and the rest of the accounting profession while the Wall Street towers of fraud, deception and cover-ups were fracturing our economy, looting and draining trillions of dollars of other peoples' money?

This is the licensed profession that is paid to exercise independent judgment with independent standards to give investors, pension funds, mutual funds, and the rest of the financial world accurate descriptions of corporate financial realities.

It is now obvious that the accountants collapsed their own skill, integrity and self-respect faster and earlier than the collapse of Wall Street and the corporate barons. The accountants-both external and internal-could have blown the whistle on what Teddy Roosevelt called the "malefactors of great wealth."

Glenn Greenwald: Obama and Habeas Corpus -- Then and Now

It was once the case under the Bush administration that the U.S. would abduct people from around the world, accuse them of being Terrorists, ship them to Guantanamo, and then keep them there for as long as we wanted without offering them any real due process to contest the accusations against them. That due-process-denying framework was legalized by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Many Democrats -- including Barack Obama -- claimed they were vehemently opposed to this denial of due process for detainees, and on June 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that the denial of habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees was unconstitutional and that all Guantanamo detainees have the right to a full hearing in which they can contest their accusations against them.

In the wake of the Boumediene ruling, the U.S. Government wanted to preserve the power to abduct people from around the world and bring them to American prisons without having to provide them any due process. So, instead of bringing them to our Guantanamo prison camp (where, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, they were entitled to habeas hearings), the Bush administration would instead simply send them to our prison camp in Bagram, Afghanistan, and then argue that because they were flown to Bagram rather than Guantanamo, they had no rights of any kind and Boudemiene didn't apply to them. The Bush DOJ treated the Boumediene ruling, grounded in our most basic constitutional guarantees, as though it was some sort of a silly game -- fly your abducted prisoners to Guantanamo and they have constitutional rights, but fly them instead to Bagram and you can disappear them forever with no judicial process. Put another way, you just close Guantanamo, move it to Afghanistan, and -- presto -- all constitutional obligations disappear.

Many of the jobless get no unemployment benefits

By Barbara Hagenbaugh, USA TODAY

When Clarence Athy lost his job laying concrete just before Thanksgiving, the 56-year-old single father did what most people do: He applied to collect unemployment benefits.

But like many Americans, Athy was denied.

Athy, of Kalispell, Mont., was told by state workers that he was not at his job long enough to collect benefits. He has applied for jobs all over town — where the unemployment rate is in the double digits — without any luck. Now, he's trying to do what he can to feed himself and his son, Calvin, 15, and keep a roof over their heads. He is behind on his rent, has turned off his telephone and next week may lose his electricity.

America's 10 Most Endangered Rivers

By , Environment News Service
Posted on April 10, 2009, Printed on April 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/136109/

"Our nation is at a transformational moment when it comes to rivers and clean water," said Rebecca Wodder, president of American Rivers as she released the organization's annual list of America's 10 Most Endangered Rivers on Tuesday. "Water is life, yet our nation's water infrastructure is so outdated that our clean drinking water, flood protection and river health face unprecedented threats."

This year's report highlights what Wodder calls the "sorry state" of the nation's water infrastructure - drinking water, wastewater and stormwater systems, and dams and levees – and the need for green, 21st century investments to protect clean water, public health and safety, and the fish and wildlife that depend on healthy rivers.

Big Food Is Copying Big Tobacco's Disinformation Tactics, How Many Will Die This Time?

By Fen Montaigne, Yale Environment 360
Posted on April 11, 2009, Printed on April 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/135965/

Increasingly, the question of what we eat and how it affects our health is a subject that is important not just to those concerned about nutrition but to environmentalists. Kelly D. Brownell, a psychologist who is director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, has been a leading researcher into America's obesity epidemic and its links to the practices of the food industry. Author of the 2004 book, Food Fight, Brownell has recently become interested in the connections between obesity, the environment, and hunger, believing that sustainably growing and producing more nutritious foods can help solve each of these challenges.

How the Toxic Asset Plan Will Magically Make Your Money Disappear

By Cenk Uygur, Huffington Post
Posted on April 11, 2009, Printed on April 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/136183/

Under the Treasury Department's toxic asset proposal, the government puts in 85% of the investment in these assets through a loan given by the FDIC. The Treasury puts in another 7.5% of the money and the private investor contributes the final 7.5%

This is a guaranteed way of transferring money from the American taxpayer to the private investors. Let me show you how.

The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means

By Mark Danner

ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody

by the International Committee of the Red Cross

43 pp., February 2007

Download the text of the ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody by The International Committee of the Red Cross, along with the cover letter that accompanied it when it was transmitted to the US government in February 2007. This version, reset by The New York Review, exactly reproduces the original including typographical errors and some omitted words.

When we get people who are more concerned about reading the rights to an Al Qaeda terrorist than they are with protecting the United States against people who are absolutely committed to do anything they can to kill Americans, then I worry.... These are evil people. And we're not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.

If it hadn't been for what we did—with respect to the...enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees...—then we would have been attacked again. Those policies we put in place, in my opinion, were absolutely crucial to getting us through the last seven-plus years without a major-casualty attack on the US....

—Former Vice President Dick Cheney, February 4, 2009^[1]

1.

When it comes to torture, it is not what we did but what we are doing. It is not what happened but what is happening and what will happen. In our politics, torture is not about whether or not our polity can "let the past be past"—whether or not we can "get beyond it and look forward." Torture, for Dick Cheney and for President Bush and a significant portion of the American people, is more than a repugnant series of "procedures" applied to a few hundred prisoners in American custody during the last half-dozen or so years—procedures that are described with chilling and patient particularity in this authoritative report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.^[2] Torture is more than the specific techniques—the forced nudity, sleep deprivation, long-term standing, and suffocation by water," among others—that were applied to those fourteen "high-value detainees" and likely many more at the "black site" prisons secretly maintained by the CIA on three continents.

Obama to release Reagan records kept secret by Bush

04/10/2009 @ 7:34 pm
Filed by Muriel Kane

The Obama administration is about to release 244,966 pages of documents from the Reagan White House that the Bush administration had held back for years during a review of whether to assert executive privilege.

Historians and advocates of government transparency have complained strongly about the Bush backlog, which Obama ended with an executive order signed the day after he took office that limits the review period to 30 days in most cases.

A Plea To President Obama: Don't Bankrupt America

by Sarah van Gelder

President Obama's massive giveaway to Wall Street threatens to bankrupt the federal government and undermine the agenda that got him elected. Here are some first steps needed to change course.

Dear President Obama,

I'm getting a sinking feeling. Watching your appointees' latest bank bailout makes me wonder if all your administration's good work on health care, education, and jobs will be swept away by the extraordinary giveaway of trillions in taxpayer money to a group of powerful Wall Street operatives, who appear willing to bankrupt our country to continue building their wealth and power.

Could this be happening on the watch of someone who, like yourself, came to Washington with the promise of personal integrity and a concern for the common good?

Hannity rewrites economic history to bash Obama

Summary: Calling President Obama's proposed tax plan, "the antithesis of the Reagan economic model," Sean Hannity falsely claimed that during President Reagan's term, 21 million jobs were created, revenues doubled, and the U.S. experienced the longest period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history.

During an interview with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on the April 9 edition of his Fox News program, Sean Hannity stated that President Obama's proposed "tax plan is the antithesis of the Reagan economic model, which led us to 21 million new jobs, the longest period of peacetime economic growth in history, and the doubling of revenues to the government." In fact, as Media Matters for America has noted, the number of total nonfarm payroll jobs increased by 16 million during Reagan's term, not 21 million. Additionally, when adjusted for inflation, federal revenue did not double during President Ronald Reagan's term in office; rather, it increased 15 percent ($1.077 trillion to $1.236 trillion). And the longest period of peacetime economic growth in U.S. history occurred between March 1991 and March 2001, largely during President Bill Clinton's term, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

More fuzzy math? How GOP estimates carbon tax impact

David Lightman and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: April 09, 2009 06:23:45 PM

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are trying to convince consumers that the White House and Democratic lawmakers will raise their taxes every time people flick on a light switch.

They're gaining some political traction as Washington struggles to craft legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, one of the Obama administration's top 2009 priorities.

Paul Krugman: Making Banking Boring

Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service — but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring.

In the years that followed, of course, banking became anything but boring. Wheeling and dealing flourished, and pay scales in finance shot up, drawing in many of the nation’s best and brightest young people (O.K., I’m not so sure about the “best” part). And we were assured that our supersized financial sector was the key to prosperity.

The Official End of Obama’s Honeymoon

But Summers, a leading architect of the administration’s economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.

via Summers Raked in Speaking Fees from Wall Street | 44 | washingtonpost.com.

So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn’t technically a bribe because Summers wasn’t named to Obama’s Economic Transition Team until November 24 — a full twelve days later. I’m sure Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration back on November 12.

It likewise makes perfect sense that Merrill Lynch, a company just months removed from having to be rescued from bankruptcy by an eleventh-hour, pseudo-state-subsidized buyout by Bank of America, would decide to spend $45,000 on a speaking appearance by Larry Summers because, well, they really valued his economic expertise and his proven ability to rally the troops with his stirring rhetoric. It certainly had nothing to do with the fact that a) it was eight days after a Democrat was elected to the presidency, and b) Summers had a long history of being one of the key policymakers in Democratic Party politics, and c) Merrill was absolutely not going to survive more than a few more months unless taxpayers forked over another twenty billion or so to cover the giant hole in Merrill’s balance sheet that was, at that time, still being hidden from Bank of America and its shareholders.

Terrorism charges against 'RNC Eight' dropped

Citing 'distraction,' prosecutor intends to focus on 'core illegal conduct'

Terrorism charges against the eight protesters arrested for plotting to disrupt the Republican National Convention have been dropped while lesser felony charges remain in place.

"The Ramsey County attorney's office said [Thursday morning] that it would file amended complaints in the cases of the men and women known as the 'RNC 8.' The charges of conspiracy to commit riot and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property will remain, but other charges of conspiracy to commit riot and conspiracy to commit criminal damage to property 'in furtherance of terrorism" will be dismissed,' writes Twincities.com.

Geithner Bank Plan Faces New Wave Of Criticism

Two weeks after being introduced, Timothy Geithner's bank rescue plan is facing a new round of withering criticism from economists who say the proposal is likely to produce major losses for taxpayers as banks and investors game the system.

In public writings and interviews with the Huffington Post, some of the same figures that issued early warnings about the current financial crisis now say that Geithner's designs for alleviating toxic assets from the nation's banks are inherently flawed. As evidence, they point to the massive amount of federal funding, in the form of FDIC backing, being offered to prospective buyers of toxic assets. It is the "closest thing to risk-free investing -- with leverage! -- around," wrote Andrew Ross-Sorkin of the New York Times.

Soros: Obama "Lost a Great Opportunity" to Fix the Banks

Posted Apr 09, 2009 07:17am EDT by Aaron Task

George Soros was an early and avid supporter of Barack Obama, so it's probably no surprise he gives the President high marks for his handling of international affairs, the stimulus package, the budget (the famed financier calls it "very courageous") and for "stabilizing" the financial crisis.

But President Obama "lost a great opportunity" by not taking a more radical approach in dealing with the banks, Soros says. "There's too much continuity with the bumbling and mishandling by the previous administration. Not enough discontinuity."

GM Pensions May Be ‘Garbage’ With $16 Billion at Risk

By Holly Rosenkrantz

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- Den Black, a retired General Motors Corp. engineering executive, says he’s worried and angry. The government-supported automaker is going bankrupt, he says, and he’s sure some of his retirement pay will go down with it.

“This is going to wreck us,” said Black, 62, speaking of GM retirees. “These pledges from our companies are now garbage.”

Prize for 'Sun in the box' cooker

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

A cheap solar cooker has won first prize in a contest for green ideas.

The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food.

The Kenyan-based inventor hopes it can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world, supplanting the use of wood which is driving deforestation.

Disconnect electrical grid from Internet, former terror czar Clarke warns

04/08/2009 @ 9:16 am

Filed by David Edwards and Ron Brynaert

The Wall Street Journal reported that spies from Russia and China have penetrated the United States power grid. "The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war," the report said.

Former White House cyber security adviser Richard Clarke told ABC's Diane Sawyer that the U.S. should consider disconnecting the power grid from the internet to decrease the likelihood of attack.

ThomasFrank: Eighteenth-Century Man

Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, is the conservative of the moment. For months he has been the object of national attention thanks to his refusal to accept a portion of funds set aside for his state in the $787 billion stimulus package. Conservatives love him: Here is another brave South Carolina nullifier, putting high principle before low, craven politics.

Mr. Sanford sees nothing unusual about his stand. "I've got a 15-year pattern of doing exactly this kind of thing," he said last month.

Aerosols may drive a significant portion of arctic warming

Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.

Politics is a street fight, not a seminar

Considering that 70 percent of those surveyed in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll were "very or somewhat concerned" that within the next year a family member would fatten the already swollen ranks of the unemployed, it was reassuring news that 66 percent still broadly approved of the president's job performance.

Reassuring, since someday soon Mr. Obama will indeed take ownership of the GOP's economic sewer. But that day, obviously, is not yet upon him; it looks as though the multitudes may grant him 180 days or so before they reckon he's had plentiful time to stop and reverse three decades of criminal incompetence and carefree madness.

Congressional Panel Suggests Firing Managers, Liquidating Banks

April 8 (Bloomberg) -- A congressional panel overseeing the U.S. financial rescue suggested that getting rid of top executives and liquidating problem banks may be a better way to solve the economic crisis.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, in a report released yesterday, also said the Treasury may be relying on too rosy an economic scenario to guide its $700 billion bailout, and declared that the success of the program after six months is “mixed.” Three of the group’s members disagreed with at least some of the findings.

The president makes a victory lap

By Pepe Escobar

United States President Barack Obama's up-to-the-last-minute secret Iraq drop-in was as virtual as a Nevada-based Predator drone pilot's visit to the tribal areas in Pakistan. Iraqis have every reason to say the president did not see Iraq - but the Pentagon in Iraq.

The date couldn't be more pregnant with meaning. Baghdad under Saddam Hussein fell to the US Marines Corps under George W Bush exactly six years ago this Thursday - light years of death and devastation ago. To prove his point, made rhetorically in Ankara at the Turkish parliament, that "the United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam", Obama could have hit the definitive home run by going to Firdous Square and delivering a rousing speech to real, flesh-and-blood suffering Iraqis, Sunni and Shi'ites alike. Meeting a joyous 600 among the 139,000 US troops still occupying Iraq doesn't even come close.

Glenn Beck and the rise of Fox News' militia media

by Eric Boehlert

After a night of drinking, followed by an early-morning argument with his mother, with whom he shared a Pittsburgh apartment, 22-year-old Richard Poplawski put on a bulletproof vest, grabbed his guns, including an AK-47 rifle, and waited for the police to respond to the domestic disturbance call his mother had placed. When two officers arrived at the front door, Poplawski shot them both in the head, and then killed another officer who tried to rescue his colleagues.

In the wake of the bloodbath, we learned that Poplawski was something of a conspiracy nut who embraced dark, radical rhetoric about America. He was convinced the government wanted to take away his guns, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. Specifically, Poplawski, as one friend described it, feared "the Obama gun ban that's on the way" and "didn't like our rights being infringed upon." (FYI, there is no Obama gun ban in the works.) The same friend said the shooter feared America was "going to see the end of our times."

The "Disaster Stage" of U.S. Financialization

By Kevin Phillips - April 7, 2009, 3:34PM

Thirty to forty years ago, the early fruits of financialization in this country - the first credit cards, retirement accounts , money market funds and ATM machines - struck most Americans as a convenience and boon. The savings and loan implosion and junk bonds of the 1980s switched on some yellow warning lights, and the tech bubble and market mania of the nineties flashed some red ones. But neither Wall Street nor Washington stopped or even slowed down.

In August, 2007, the housing-linked crisis of the credit markets predicted the arriving disaster-stage, the Crash of September-November 2008 confirmed the debacle, and now an angry, fearful citizenry awaits a further unfolding. There is probably no need to fear a second coming of nineteen-thirties Depression economics. This is not the same thing; the day-to-day pain shouldn't be as severe.

Time to Deliver: No Turning Back, Part I

By Sara Robinson
Created 04/07/2009 - 10:40am

Terrance's last post heroically set out and engaged the two dominant scenarios about the American future that progressives seem to be wrestling with right now. These two scenarios might be described as:

1) Permanent Decline -- Due to Americans' native hyperindividualism, political apathy, and overweening willingness to accept personal blame for their country's failures, the corporatists finally succeed in turning the US into Indonesia. This time, we will not find the will to fight back (or, if we do, it will be too late). As a result, in a few years there will be no more middle class, no upward mobility, few remaining public institutions devoted to the common good, no health care, no education, and no hope of ever restoring American ideals or getting back to some semblance of the America we knew.

2) Reinvented Greatness -- Americans get over their deeply individualistic nature, come together, challenge and restrain the global corporatist order, and finally establish the social democracy that the Powers That Be -- corporate, military, media, conservative -- have denied to us since the 1950s. This happens in synergy with a move to energy and food self-sufficiency, the growth of a sustainable economy, a revival of participatory democracy, and a general renewal of American values that pulses new life into our institutions and assures us a much more stable future.

Gates Follows Through

The Pentagon is finally cutting expensive weapons programs it doesn't need.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, April 6, 2009, at 6:27 PM ET

---

This is remarkable: In his budget address today, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates actually did what he has said he'd do for some time now—killed or slashed a bunch of weapons programs that don't fill the needs of modern warfare, vastly boosted spending for weapons that do, and took the first steps toward truly reforming the way the Pentagon does business.

Charting a New Course at the FDA

by Marcia Angell

On March 14, President Obama nominated Margaret Hamburg to become commissioner of the FDA and appointed Joshua Sharfstein, a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry, as her principal deputy. Sharfstein, who does not need Senate approval, took over the agency as acting commissioner last week, pending Hamburg's confirmation. His appointment gives real hope that the FDA will stop kowtowing to the big drug companies. For too long the agency has behaved as though its job is to speed brand-name drugs to market, not to ensure that they are safe and effective. But while new leadership is crucial, more needs to be done.

A Trillion Dollars for the Banks: How About a Second Opinion?

by Dean Baker

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner wants to have the government lend up to a trillion dollars to hedge funds, private equity, funds and the banks themselves to clear their books of toxic assets. The plan implies a substantial subsidy to the banks. It is likely to result in the disposal of these assets at far above market value, with the government picking up the losses.

As much as we all want to help out the Wall Street bankers in their hour of need, taxpayers may reasonably ask whether this is the best use of our money. After all, the $1 trillion that is being set aside for this latest TARP variation is equal to 300 million SCHIP kid years. Congress has had heated debates over sums that were a small fraction of this size. To give another useful measuring stick, the Geithner plan could fund 1 million of the Woodstock museums that were the main prop of Senator McCain's presidential campaign.

Resist or Become Serfs

By Chris Hedges

America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs.

Can Organic Cropping Systems be as Profitable as Conventional Systems?

Results show that diversified systems are more profitable than monocropping.

MADISON, WI, April 6, 2009 -- Which is a better strategy, specializing in one crop or diversified cropping? Is conventional cropping more profitable than organic farming? Is it less risky?

To answer these questions, the University of Wisconsin’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Michael Fields Agricultural Institute agronomists established the Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial (WICST) in 1990. This research is funded by USDA-ARS.

Michael Kinsley: Life After Newspapers

Few industries in this country have been as coddled as newspapers. The government doesn't actually write them checks, as it does to farmers and now to banks, insurance companies and automobile manufacturers. But politicians routinely pay court to local newspapers the way other industries pay court to politicians. Until very recently, most newspapers were monopolies, with a special antitrust exemption to help them stay that way. The attorney general has said he is open to additional antitrust exemptions to lift the industry out of today's predicament. The Constitution itself protects the newspaper industry's business from government interference, and the Supreme Court says that includes almost total immunity from lawsuits over its mistakes, like the lawsuits that plague other industries.

Signs emerge of global crime wave

By Michael T Klare

In all catastrophes, there are always winners among the host of losers and victims. Bad times, like good ones, generate profits for someone. In the case of the present global economic meltdown, with our world at the brink and up to 50 million people potentially losing their jobs by the end of this year, one winner is likely to be criminal activity and crime syndicates.

From Mexico to Africa, Russia to China, the pool of the desperate and the bribable is expanding exponentially, pointing to a sharp upturn in global crime. As illicit profits rise, so will violence in the turf wars among competing crime syndicates and in the desperate efforts by panicked governments to put a clamp on criminal activity.

Utah Student Who Prevented Bush Admin Sell-Off of Public Land Charged for Disrupting Auction

We speak to University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher, who has just been charged with two felonies for disrupting the auction of over 100,000 acres of federal land for oil and gas drilling. DeChristopher was arrested after he posed as a bidder and bought 22,000 acres of land in an attempt to save the property from drilling. He faces up to ten years in prison.

Solution to the carbon problem could be under the ground

Hope for the fight against climate change as study finds greenhouse gas can be buried without fear of leaking

By Steve Connor, Science Editor

Thursday, 2 April 2009

Carbon dioxide captured from the chimneys of power stations could be safely buried underground for thousands of years without the risk of the greenhouse gas seeping into the atmosphere, a study has found.

The findings will lend weight to the idea of carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) – when carbon dioxide is trapped and then buried – which is being seriously touted as a viable way of reducing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide while still continuing to burn fossil fuels such as oil and coal in power stations.

Frank Rich: Even Rick Wagoner’s Firing Got Lousy Mileage

EVEN among pitchfork-bearing populists, there was scant satisfaction when the White House sent the C.E.O. of General Motors to the guillotine.

Sure, Rick Wagoner deserved his fate. He did too little too late to save an iconic American institution from devolving into a government charity case. He embraced the Hummer. G.M.’s share price fell from above $70 to under $3 on his watch. Yet few disputed the judgment of the Michigan governor, Jennifer Granholm, that Wagoner was a “sacrificial lamb,” a symbolic concession to public rage ordered by a president who had to look tough after being blindsided by the A.I.G. bonuses. Detroit’s chief executive had to be beheaded so that the masters of the universe at the top of Wall Street’s bailed-out behemoths might survive.

Joseph Stiglitz: "It's going to be bad, very bad"

In an interview, the Nobel Prize-winner and former chief economist at the World Bank talks about the Great Depression, Obama's stimulus package and today's financial crisis.

By Spiegel staff

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in Der Spiegel.

---

Apr. 03, 2009 |

Many people are comparing the financial crisis to the Great Depression. Will it really be that bad?

It's going to be bad, very bad. We're experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, and we haven't reached the bottom yet. I'm very pessimistic. Governments are indeed reacting better today than during the global economic crisis. They're lowering interest rates and boosting the economy with economic stimulus plans. This is the right direction, but it's not enough.