Nepal-- An Unhappy Model For The Republican Party? Or China?

Last month I was in Nepal and writing about how deplorable their system of aviation is... as well as their environmental controls and food safety regulatory systems. Their capital, according to the UN, is now the most polluted city on earth; it was practically pristine the first time I visited. And it is so dangerous to fly on their airlines or land at their airports that you have to take those considerations into your plans. Recently the national carrier sacrificed two goats on the tarmac in the hopes it would help get a malfunctioning plane to take off. If the Republicans keep up their Terrible-Twos kind of behavior, this country will grow more and more backward and "catch up" with Nepal... maybe soon. In fact, yesterday we hear that their latest fit goes beyond taking the debt ceiling (and economy) hostage to their petulant and unpopular demands to gut Social Security and Medicare and into the realm of air safety. Now they're threatening to defund the Federal Aviation Administration if they don't get their way on their latest attack on unions. And it could shut down... tomorrow! Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood says the government will lose about $200 million a week in airline ticket taxes and that $2.5 billion in airport construction projects will come to a halt if Republican anarchists force the Federal Aviation Administration to shut down.

The Federal Aviation Administration could shut down on Friday because House Republicans are tying its funding to an anti-democratic (note the small "d") provision to hinder union organizing. The anti-union provision is not included in the Senate bill, and President Obama has said he might veto it. If they don't reach an agreement, the FAA's operating authority expires on Friday and it shuts down.

This is the right-wing's idea of governance-- destroy everything if you can't get your way. They're a scourge on humanity and they're always on the wrong side of history.

Only tangentially related-- after all, China is right over the Himalayas from Nepal now that they've absorbed Tibet-- I can't help bringing up China as an economic model for America, as has been publicly suggested by two of the most extreme Republican reactionaries in the Senate, Pat Toomey (PA) and Ron Johnson (WI), each of whom benefited from illegal campaign contributions from China that were funneled through the Chamber of Commerce last year. Yesterday Bird Abroad suggested that we might as well forget about counterfeit handbags from China because now there's a whole counterfeit Apple store there. I wonder if Ron Johnson is an investor in what he insists proudly is the remarkable and rapid change in the world’s fastest growing economy.

[W]hen we strolled down a street a few blocks from our house a couple weeks ago, I was only sort of surprised to see this new place, one that any American of my generation can probably recognize instantaneously:

It's an Apple Store!

Or is it?

RP and I went inside and poked around. They looked like Apple products. It looked like an Apple store. It had the classic Apple store winding staircase and weird upstairs sitting area. The employees were even wearing those blue t-shirts with the chunky Apple name tags around their necks... [T]his was a total Apple store ripoff. A beautiful ripoff-- a brilliant one-- the best ripoff store we had ever seen (and we see them every day). But some things were just not right: the stairs were poorly made. The walls hadn’t been painted properly.

Apple never writes “Apple Store” on it’s signs-- it just puts up the glowing, iconic fruit.

The name tags around the necks of the friendly salespeople didn’t actually have names on them-- just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation "Staff." And of course, Apple’s own website will tell you that they only have a few stores in Beijing and Shanghai, opened only recently; Apple famously opens new stores painstakingly, presumably to assure impeccable standards and lots of customer demand.

Is this store a copy of one of those in Beijing? A copy of a copy in another Chinese city? A copy of a copy of a copy?! While you’re pondering that, bear in mind: this is a near-perfect ripoff of a store selling products that were almost unknown when we first came to China. My white MacBook was likely to draw only blank stares or furrowed brows as I sat gnashing my teeth trying in vain to get a piece of Chinese software to run on it.

Being the curious types that we are, we struck up some conversation with these salespeople who, hand to God, all genuinely think they work for Apple. I tried to imagine the training that they went to when they were hired, in which they were pitched some big speech about how they were working for this innovative, global company-- when really they’re just filling the pockets of some shyster living in a prefab mansion outside the city by standing around a fake store disinterestedly selling what may or may not be actual Apple products that fell off the back of a truck somewhere.


And the best part? A ten minute walk around the corner revealed not one, but TWO more rip-off Apple stores.

In Kunming!

And the White House responded to the Republican tactics on closing down the FAA:

The Administration strongly supports passage of a clean extension of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) programs, as the Congress has done 20 times without controversy, in order to allow bipartisan, bicameral negotiations to continue on a full reauthorization.

H.R. 2553 includes controversial provisions that, because they have not been negotiated, needlessly threaten critical FAA programs and jeopardize thousands of public and private sector jobs. Without timely passage of a clean extension, all of FAA’s capital accounts (Grants-in-Aid for Airports, Facilities and Equipment, and Research, Engineering, and Development) would be shut down, and approximately 4,000 employees would be furloughed. FAA’s ability to award new grants, including for infrastructure upgrades at airports across the country, as well as to move forward with vital testing and implementation of the Next Generation air traffic control system, would come to a stop.

After the debate yesterday, the Democrats offered an alternative measure that "prohibits air carriers from charging a fee for four or fewer items of baggage checked by a member of the Armed Forces who is traveling in scheduled air transportation on official military duty." This is a real problem, as we saw last month when Delta was caught ripping off active duty servicemembers again. Although every Democrat voted for it, so few Republicans crossed the aisle-- just 3-- that it was defeated 187-233. The Republicans then went on to ram through their crazy turn-America-into-a-third-world-hellhole bill. It passed 243-177, only 6 Republicans with the guys to oppose Boehner and Cantor. Thirteen of the worst Democrats let their freak flags fly and voted with the GOP, reactionary a-holes like John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA), Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN), and Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC).

Would It Be News If Someone Told You The Mafia Opposes Laws That Punish Criminal Behavior?

Predators DuPont & Ryan, cut from the same cloth

Something about Ryan's tempest in a Echezeaux Grand Cru bottle that most got to me was how-- like many over-privileged, self-entitled millionaires-- he and his 2 reactionary buddies were sitting around grousing about how normal people don't like millionaires and how unfair it is. Poor babies! But they have it all wrong. It's selfish predators-- not always the same thing-- that normal people don't like.

Now, there is some sense of unfairness that a good-for-nothing clod like Ryan, who's never accomplished a thing in his life and has never had a real job or done anything to merit his great wealth could be sitting around bitching and swilling French wine with 2 sleazy and avaricious hedge fund managers while [t]wo years after the Great Recession officially ended, job prospects for young Americans remain historically grim, primarily due to the policies being pushed by Ryan and his cronies. "More than 17 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds who are looking for work can’t find a job, a rate that is close to a 30-year high. The employment-to-population ratio for that demographic-- the percentage of young people who are working-- has plunged to 45 percent. That’s the lowest level since the Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948. No double pops of Echezeaux Grand Cru for them!

But that kind of natural envy isn't the real problem, of course-- for as much as Ryan and his sleazy pals want to whine about it in their wine. Wall Street's billion dollar unending campaign against regulations are why normal people hate millionaires. It's their relentless activities in rigging the system, activities that include the buying of weak and self-serving political hacks like Paul Ryan. Let's remember what "free enterprise" evangelist and notorious American fascist Lammont DuPont told the National Manufacturers Association in 1942: "We will win the war by reducing taxes on corporations, high income brackets, and increasing taxes on lower incomes, by removing unions from any power to tell industry how to produce, how to deal with their employees or anything else, by destroying any and all government agencies that stand in the way of free enterprise." Free as in free to exploit and cheat everyone else. Yesterday Josh Boak poked around into how Wall Street is continuing DuPont's work today.

Wall Street’s epic battle over financial reforms didn’t end when the Dodd-Frank law was enacted a year ago. It simply shifted from Capitol Hill to the regulatory agencies, with banks claiming the new rules will cripple a hurting economy.

In the first quarter of this year, a record number of companies were lobbying the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The financial sector shows no sign of retreat, even after suffering a blow last month when Congress refused to delay new limits on “swipe fees” that banks charge to merchants for debit card transactions. That defeat may be less about Wall Street’s weakened political muscle than about the strength of its foes on the issue-- such as Wal-Mart and the National Retail Federation.

“If you want to go after Godzilla, you need to have King Kong,” said Nick Nyhart, president of Public Campaign, a nonprofit that tracks special interest money.

But the banking industry isn’t taking chances. It’s bulking up to take on regulators tasked with enforcing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The 848-page law approved in response to the financial meltdown mandates a sweeping set of changes-- from stronger consumer protections to new rules on trading derivatives.

...“I think if you listen carefully, the large banks are complaining much louder,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner recently told the House Small Business Committee. “They’re spending a huge amount of money trying to undo, shift the burden and delay the reforms that are targeted at them and their risk taking. They’re spending a huge amount of money trying to block, delay, erode, weaken and walk back.”

Ryan, although a relative newcomer to politics has taken more money from the finance sector than any other politician in the history of Wisconsin. This year, so far, he's added $715,052 in legalistic bribes from the very people he's supposed to be protecting us from. In all, he's taken $2,349,822 in direct cash from banksters, insurance companies and the real estate industry. Is it any wonder that he slavishly serves their agenda even if it means shafting his own constituents in Kenosha, Racine, Janesville and Muskego?

E. Coli Conservatives Are Willing To Gamble With Our Children's Lives For The Sake Of Their Deranged Ideological Convictions

Long before the Republican Party adopted Ayn Rand as their newest ideological goddess, right wing sociopaths have been adamant that federal regulatory agencies were an outrageous interference with the "free market." (Remember, to a Republican "free market" goes beyond caveat emptor into the realm of the "freedom" of unscrupulous "businessmen" to rip off, even to the point of manslaughter, their customers .) They have always opposed all regulations on business. And they still do. In fact, they are busy trying to defund the agencies that regulate modern society, whether they be agencies that are supposed to protect us from predator banksters or agencies that make sure corporations aren't polluting the air and water or, ironically, the FDA, which is struggling to make sure the food we eat is safe. In Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan-world, a merchant whose products poisons a thousand people will sooner or later be driven out of business. Take that!

House Republicans are pushing back against a series of public health measures, including school lunch standards and tobacco regulation, teeing up a confrontation with Senate Democrats and the White House over the reach of government in daily life.

The Republicans have used an agriculture appropriations bill to send several messages: They don’t want the government to require school meals that are more nutritional but also more expensive, they don’t want the government to prod food companies to restrain marketing to children, and they don’t want the Food and Drug Administration to regulate any substance based on anything but “hard science.”

They took aim at measures that are part of the Obama administration’s efforts to combat obesity among children and adults as well as some initiatives enacted by the previous Congress.

On Tuesday, the GOP majority on the House Appropriations Committee approved a 2012 spending plan that directs the Agriculture Department to ditch the first new nutritional standards in 15 years proposed for school breakfasts and lunches. The lawmakers say meals containing more fruits and vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy will cost an additional $7 billion over five years-- money they say the country can ill afford in difficult economic times.

The committee also directed the USDA to scale back participation in an effort to develop voluntary guidelines for companies that market food to children. And it directed the FDA to exempt grocery and convenience stores and other businesses from regulations set to take effect next year requiring that calorie information be displayed.

So on the very day Michelle Obama was working with the Department of Agriculture to unveil a plan to replace the long outmoded and virtually useless "food pyramid" with a more up-to-date way of helping parents and care-givers make healthy choices for their children, the GOP was up to their old anti-social tricks.

The first part of the campaign will encourage people to make half their plate fruit and vegetables. Later phases of the campaign will urge consumers to avoid oversize portions, enjoy their food but eat less of it and to drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Ayn Rand characters William Edward Hickman & Paul Ryan have different approaches to murder

Meanwhile, a deadly strain of E. coli is killing consumers in Europe and seems to have jumped over to the U.S. with two tourists who returned last month from Hamburg. Yesterday the first cases were reported in Britain and the Guardian provides us with this update:

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) has said that three of the seven people in Britain who have been infected by the strain of E coli sweeping Europe have developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), a rare and severe kidney complication that destroys red blood cells and can affect the brain and spinal cord.

The HPA confirmed that all seven patients had recently visited Germany, where an 81-year-old woman became the 18th victim of the previously unknown E coli strain when she died on Wednesday at Hamburg-Eppendorf university hospital. More than 2,000 others have so far been infected in 10 countries from eating contaminated vegetables.

The HPA reminded Britons travelling to Germany to avoid eating raw tomatoes, cucumbers and leafy salad including lettuce, especially in the north of the country, until further notice. Anyone returning from Germany with symptoms including bloody diarrhoea should seek urgent medical attention and ensure they mention their recent travel history.

Dilys Morgan, head of the agency's gastrointestinal department, said: "The HPA continues to actively monitor the situation very carefully and we are working with the authorities in Germany and with our counterparts across Europe as to the cause of the outbreak. We have alerted health professionals to the situation and advised them to urgently investigate and report suspected cases with a travel history to Germany. ... Though the EU continued to insist there was not enough evidence for any foodstuffs to be banned, Germany's disease control authority, the Robert Koch Institute, has advised German consumers against eating raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.

...Genetic sequencing of the bacteria behind the outbreak suggests that it is a previously-unknown strain. Dr Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at the WHO said that "this is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before". She added that the new strain has "various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing."

Paul Wigley of the University of Liverpool's School of Veterinary Science, said that the E coli outbreak was caused by a type called O104, part of a group of bacteria that produces a chemical called verocytotoxin (Vtec).

"[These bacteria] normally infect people directly through animal faeces, or more usually through poorly cooked meat contaminated with the bacteria. Whilst most strains of E coli do not cause disease, Vtec are able to attach to the wall of the intestines very tightly and produce toxins.

"It is these toxins that cause damage to the gut, leading to bloody diarrhoea and may cause damage throughout the body including the kidneys."

He added: "Animals, and in particular cattle, may carry Vtec in their intestines without disease, which may lead to the bacterium being shed in their faeces. It is most likely that the use of manure as a fertilizer in organic salad vegetable production has lead to contamination of cucumbers and other vegetables.

"Although E coli infection is most commonly associated with meat, there have been previous reports of the disease being contracted from raw vegetables."

It's a complicated world, not quite as simpleminded as the way Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan have painted it. Without well-funded regulatory agencies to protect consumers, we'd be stuck on our own battling these kinds of things constantly-- whether or not someone was eventually run out of business.

What Can Society Do To Protect Itself From Wily Predators Like Rajaratnam & Trump?

On the bright side, if Raj serves 20 years, he could lose some of that excess bulk, get into fighting trim and live longer

In yesterday's L.A. Times reporters Geraldine Baum, Tom Hamburger and Michael Mishak made it crystal clear to anyone harboring any delusions that born-to-wealth carnival barker Donald Trump is somehow worth something-- beyond entertainment-- to society, that the man has always been, basically, a parasite on the rest of us, figuring out how to game the system for himself at the expense of taxpayers. Their point is that this darling of brainless conservatives and supposed opponent of Big Government has relied on tax breaks and federal funding to build the real estate empire he inherited from his father; "a swashbuckling entrepreneur, shrewder and tougher than any politician, who would use his billionaire's skills to restore discipline to the federal government" is a misunderstanding of who and what Donald Trump is.

From his first high-profile project in New York City in the 1970s to his recent campaigns to reduce taxes on property he owns around the country, Trump has displayed a consistent pattern. He courted public officials, sought their backing for government tax breaks under extraordinarily beneficial terms and fought any resistance to deals he negotiated.

He has boasted of manipulating government agencies, misleading officials in one case into believing he had an exclusive agreement to develop a property and then retroactively changing the development's accounting practices to shrink his tax bill. In New York, Trump was the first developer to receive a public subsidy for commercial projects under programs initially reserved for improving slum neighborhoods. Such incentives have now become the norm in the powerful New York real estate community.

Karen Burstein, a former auditor general of New York City, reviewed a major Trump project in the 1980s and concluded he had "cheated" the city out of nearly $2.9 million. Decades later, Burstein said she was still appalled at the way Trump operated.

"It's extraordinary to me that we elevated someone to this position of public importance who has openly admitted that he has used government's incompetence as a wedge to increase his private fortune," she said in a recent interview.

It's beyond the purview of these 3 reporters, however, the report that this is how, without strict regulation and without fear of punishment, greed-obsessed sociopaths operate. Not just Trump, but many "respectable" billionaires who have bought political protection by owning the Republican Party and the Blue Dog faction within the Democratic Party outright. Not to mention the mass media.

So it was with great delight-- not to mention surprise bordering on disbelief-- to read yesterday that one of these plutocratic predators was actually convicted of a serious crime yesterday. Wall Street hedge fund operator Raj Rajaratnam will appeal and may get off in the end but right now, he is looking like he could actually wind up in prison, something that rarely happens to billionaires no matter how heinous their crimes. And Rajaratnam's wasn't about stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family.

Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire investor who once ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, was found guilty of fraud and conspiracy on Wednesday by a federal jury in Manhattan. He is the most prominent figure convicted in the government’s crackdown on insider trading on Wall Street.

Mr. Rajaratnam, who was convicted on all 14 counts, could face as much as 19 and a half years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Mr. Rajaratnam is expected to appeal.

The government built its case against Mr. Rajaratnam with powerful wiretap evidence. Over a nine-month stretch in 2008, federal agents secretly recorded Mr. Rajaratnam’s telephone conversations. They listened in as Mr. Rajaratnam brazenly-- and matter-of-factly-- swapped inside stock tips with corporate insiders and fellow traders.

“I heard yesterday from somebody who’s on the board of Goldman Sachs that they are going to lose $2 per share,” Mr. Rajaratnam said to one of his employees in advance of the bank’s earnings announcement.

“One thing we know, this is very confidential, someone is going to put in a term sheet for Spansion,” he told a colleague, referring to a proposed acquisition of a technology company.

“So yesterday they agreed on, at least they’ve shaken hands,” a tipster told Mr. Rajaratnam about an upcoming deal involving another publicly traded business. “So I think, uh, you can now just buy.”

For years, Mr. Rajaratnam was lionized as one of Wall Street’s savviest investors. At its peak, his Galleon Group hedge fund managed more than $7 billion in assets. Investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley counted Galleon, which paid out roughly $300 million in trading commissions annually to brokerage firms, as one of their largest trading clients.

In the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2009, federal agents arrested Mr. Rajaratnam at his Sutton Place apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. The government placed him at the center of a vast insider trading conspiracy, accusing him of using a corrupt network of tipsters to earn tens of millions of dollars in illegal trading profits in stocks including Google and Hilton Worldwide.

The case has led to insider trading charges against 25 defendants-- 21 of whom have pleaded guilty-- including former executives at I.B.M., Intel and Bear Stearns.
Mr. Rajaratnam fought the charges against him, insisting that he had done nothing wrong. His lead lawyer, John C. Dowd, said that his client’s success as a money manager came from “shoe-leather research, diligence and hard work.”

He based his defense on the so-called mosaic theory of investing. Galleon was famous for its dogged digging for information about publicly traded companies that would form a “mosaic”-- a complete picture of a company’s prospects that gave it an investment edge over other investors.

Mr. Rajaratnam’s lawyers argued that all of his supposed illegal trading was grounded in publicly available newspaper articles, analyst reports and company news releases. For instance, the defense presented evidence showing that before Advanced Micro Devices acquired ATI Technologies-- a deal that prosecutors said Mr. Rajaratnam had received an illegal tip about-- 51 news articles and 6 analyst reports speculated on the likelihood of a merger between the two companies.

Prosecutors dismantled Mr. Rajaratnam’s defense by acknowledging that Galleon performed legitimate research. But at the same time, they argued, the firm routinely violated securities laws. In the words of a former Galleon portfolio manager who testified during the trial, the firm did its homework-- but also cheated on the test.

“The defendant knew the rules, but he did not care,” said a prosecutor, Reed Brodsky, in his summation. “Cheating became part of his business model.”

Rajaratnam and Trump aren't the only sociopaths cheating society to make capitalism work for them. It's why we need a strong regulatory system. And it's why Big Business interests are investing so heavily in the Republican Party and the Blue Dog caucus to wreck the regulatory systems. Wall Street predators reacted badly to Rajaratnam's guilty verdict; the stock market tumbled. Crooks don't like being reminded what could-- even if it rarely does-- happen when they get caught braking the laws. Although Rajaratnam funded Bill Frist's shady Volunteer PAC to the tune of thousands of dollars, he also gave thousands to Democrats, paying the protection racket game that keeps these predators in business. I wonder if Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer will return the contributions they received from Rajaratnam; I'm sure Frist won't.