This also happened

Lost in all the hysteria about Barack Obama traveling back in time to help Benedict Arnold surrender West Point to the limeys and alternately murder all four of Thomas Jefferson's grandparents while they were children (that's why Texas had to erase him from history), was the fact that something else happened. Student Loans were reformed. And, in a break from tradition, was done so in a non-corrupt manner that didn't result in tons of shady giveaways to corporate interests, and could actually be classified as *whispers* liberal. Shh, don't tell anyone.

Now on any other week this would be hailed as some sort of massive progressive achievement. But this week also included the systematic dismantling of Abe Lincoln's log cabin or something, so it got lost in the shuffle. What happened?

Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.
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The Congressional Budget Office said the direct-lending approach would save taxpayers about $61 billion over 10 years. Roughly $40 billion of the savings will be redirected to higher education. Education programs will get an additional $10 billion from the health care package.

The bill includes some landmark changes, like automatic increases, tied to inflation, in the maximum Pell grant award.
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The legislation will make it easier to pay back student loans, by reducing the share of income that a graduate must devote to loan payments and by accelerating loan forgiveness

Wait, they ended the bank racket that allowed them to make risk free government backed loans, expanded access to college for lower income students, made serious investments in higher education, and making it easier to pay off those loans? I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this unless I'm assured there's some sort of crooked deal with banks and financial giants that we haven't heard about. This just isn't how the American government is supposed to do business! This is an outrage! Now Sean is going to have to stop stripping to pay off his loans!

Listen, I'd like to be able to explain to you just what all of this means. But unless I have Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or the Congressional GOP telling me specifically how this is going to rough up my mother in a dark alley, cause tiny Joesph Stalins to burst out of my ribcage, pour sugar in my father's gas tank, and date rape Betsy Ross I'm not sure how to grasp what I'm sure was an unprecedented assault on freedom.

Let's just assume they dug up the corpse of liberty that they had previously killed and buried during health reform and had sex with it while MSNBC filmed it. Deal? Deal. Now let's go cut the breaks on the car of some Congressmen who voted for it.

Hobo life

We here at These Bastards are great chroniclers of hobo life. And why not? This is our inevitable future. The country and economy are failing, little is being done to stop it, and it's at least 2 or 3 weeks until society buckles under the weight of problems of our own making. So that's why we educate the masses on what their lives will soon be: bindles, beans, train-yards, sleeping in cardboard boxes 'neath the underpass, daily fights for survival, and the upcoming Hobo Wars as our great hobo underclass fights for territory and leadership supremacy on the Grand Hobo Council of Elders.

But some of our elected betters are wary of this future and are doing what they can to not only warn people about government hobo indoctrination, but actively trying to stop the hobo-ification of this country. How? By stopping the extension of unemployment benefits, naturally. Let Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) explain.

Heller said the current economic downturn and policies may bring back the hobos of the Great Depression, people who wandered the country taking odd jobs.
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“I believe there should be a federal safety net,” Heller said, but he questioned the wisdom of extending unemployment benefits yet again to a total of 24 months, which Congress is doing. “Is the government now creating hobos?” he asked.

He's for a social safety net, he just opposes any means to create or extend one.

But he does raise an interesting point: government created hobos. How will these professional, government trained hobos interact with the naturally formed hobos, bums, grifters, drifters, and tramps. Will they subjugate them with their superior hobo training, ruling them as kings, and ignoring the Democracy of the Council of Elders? Or will they teach us their ways, bettering hobo society as a whole and helping us through the unpleasant times shortly after the world falls into the dystopian nightmare, post-apocalypse period?

I guess we'll soon find out. I, for one, hope that these government hobos help us better our Hobotopia.

Heresy

Sure the stimulus was too small. It wasn't focused enough on jobs. It wasted to much of it's girth on tax cuts that don't stimulate and economy. Tons of truly useful ideas were hacked out in the name of Ben Nelson and the Maine Senators looking like they were doing something. The bill still hasn't given us the free candy and blowjob we were explicitly promised.

Still, when it comes down to it, the bill that should have been better and our elected betters should have taken more seriously, largely did the job it was designed to do. Or should I say, did it's job as well as possible given the moronic confines the Senate placed on it. So sayeth economic experts.

Just look at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody’s Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.
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For that, the stimulus package, flaws and all, deserves a big heaping of credit. “It prevented things from getting much worse than they otherwise would have been,” Nariman Behravesh, Global Insight’s chief economist, says. “I think everyone would have to acknowledge that’s a good thing.”

Acknowledging basic reality? Nariman my man, have you met this country or it's political leaders?

But there's a nice bit of news that while good, still doesn't make anyone feel better about the economy or it's prospects for the future. Somehow "When faced with the greatest economic crisis in our lifetimes, government struggled to enact a party line vote on a watered down measure that eventually ended up stemming the tide" doesn't engender Carnivale type celebrations. There's that.

And although our elected betters have seen the successes and learned from a rash of experts how the failure to make the bill big enough hindered making real headway into job and economic numbers, they're still going with small bore economic measures, cheap gamesmanship, obstruction, zero sum politics, lying, and minuscule bills in an attempt to address the jobs issue. Given a spot of good weather and large sections of the government growing a conscience, some of those bills might make it far enough to fall just short of getting the required votes to end a filibuster in the Senate. There's also that.

But hey, an additional 2 million of you would be unemployed and the economic numbers would still be flailing if not for the stimulus. I guess that's something.

Things I like

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo... suing Bank of America for fraud.

Details:

Cuomo also sued the bank’s former chief financial officer Joe Price and the bank itself for not disclosing about $16 billion in losses Merrill had incurred before it was bought by Bank of America in an effort to get the merger approved. Afterwards, Lewis demanded government bailout funds, Cuomo said.

“We believe the bank management understated the Merrill Lynch losses to shareholders, then they overstated their ability to terminate their agreement to secure $20 billion of TARP money, and that is just a fraud,” Cuomo said today at a press conference. “Bank of America and its officials defrauded the government and the taxpayers at a very difficult time.”

Hey, at least there's one guy out there who is willing to use his power and legal jurisdiction to fight for some accountability for the financial giants and banks that molested our economy. Good luck with that.

And he's a political legacy kid, imagine that. I think the odds are that one out of every twenty isn't some kind of simpering idiot. I think NY is finding that out with Harold Ford Jr.

What is happening?

Uh-oh, might there be evidence that glass half full, parade rainers like ourselves will soon have to contend with actual optimism about the economy? Might we have to deal with purely good news with no hints of an economic shitstorm? Will we have to shelve all our hobo and bindle related material? Goddamnit, are things actually starting to improve?

Government efforts to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into the U.S. economy appear to be helping the U.S. climb out of the worst recession in decades.
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The U.S. economy is beginning to show signs of improvement, with many economists asserting the worst is past and data pointing to stronger-than-expected growth. On Tuesday, data showed manufacturing grew in August for the first time in more than a year. "There's a method to the madness. We're getting out of this," said Brian Bethune, chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight.

Blaaarg, the good news...it burns us! What next? Oh Jesus Christ, the manufacturing index grew for the first time in 18 months! Horrid sunshine, oppress some other being with your vile illumination. Surely there must me some terrible lining. Most of the stimulus hasn't even been spent yet...adding percentage points to growth...increased consumer consumption, investment, and spending...0% growth without stimulus...magic blowjob fairies return...11 industry groups showing growth...
FUCK!!!!!!!!
It seems the only thing they're wondering about is how much of the growth will continue if the stimulus stops and which action the government took is most responsible for improving things. Someone, anyone, relentlessly fearmonger to me without any regard to the facts.

Eric Cantor: Since we know now that the Stimulus has not met the criteria by which it was passed and the White House promoted it, which was to stave off job losses and to stop unemployment from reaching above 8.5%, since we know it’s been a failure, why not do the responsible thing, which is to take the $400 billion that has not been committed yet - or not been spent, but been committed to the stimulus - and just pay off the debt and deficit so we can get our fiscal house back in order?

Whew! God bless Eric Cantor. I mean sure, what he says runs contrary to what even the Wall Street Journal is forced to recognize and that when he does appearances back in his district he takes credit for the stimulus and the jobs it created in Virginia, but I'll be damned if he doesn't stew a good pot full of economic gloom. Thanks buddy, I needed that.

Thanks California

You know the great thing about having the car industry over a barrel? They pretty much are forced to agree to do all the things that it would have been smart for them to do a decade ago. Plus, if you jerk their arm up behind their back hard enough, they'll agree to extra stuff, like a "one free backrub" card that the President can turn in at any time, a solemn promise to run 300% less "This is ouuuuuuuuur counnnnnntry" ads during the football season, and new fuel standards. What are these new fuel standards? The ones California wanted to pass four years ago.

In a ceremony today at the White House, Obama will establish the first national limits on car exhaust and dramatically raise fuel efficiency standards. The new exhaust target – an average 35.5mpg by 2016 – will force US manufacturers to produce cars and trucks that are nearly 40% more efficient.
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A senior administration official said the change, which will sharply ramp up today's average 25mpg performance, equates to taking 177 million cars off of America's roads, or shutting down 194 coal plants, and will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 900 million metric tonnes.

The plan is the product of months of negotiations between the White House, the Big Three struggling auto makers of Detroit – General Motors, Ford and Chrysler – and the state of California.

There are two parts to this. First is the raising the CAFE standards to the levels California wanted (cars - 39mpg and light trucks - 30mpg), makes that the national standard, and moves the timetable up to 2016. Second is new emissions standards, which again are California's emissions standards, that put an end to auto industry lawsuits against the standards.

So big thanks to California for pushing for this and big thanks to the auto industry. By holding onto a failed model for so long, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to block this kind of action, and refusing to even consider the possibility that better fuel economy was a smart idea, you brought about your own doom and are now being forced to do what smart people would have done a long time ago. We appreciate it. Now you have a couple more years to get your fleet up to the standards already reached by Japanese car companies reached a few years ago.

End of an era

It seems there are now less and less places to secretly hide away your money from the prying eyes of government. Today Swiss bank UBS is set to open it's books and let the US take a peek at all the tax cheats squirreling their acorns away overseas in the hopes that the legendary Swiss banking system that was good enough for the Nazis and African warlords was good enough for a mid management tax dodger from Merrill Lynch. What will we find? Mengele's safety deposit box, Amelia Earhart's checking account, Bigfoot's home loan info? No, probably just boring info about boring US tax cheats. No Nazis.

In the hush-hush world of Swiss banking, the unthinkable is happening: secrets are spilling into the open.

UBS, the largest bank in Switzerland, agreed on Wednesday to divulge the names of well-heeled Americans whom the authorities suspect of using offshore accounts at the bank to evade taxes. The bank admitted conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and agreed to pay $780 million to settle a sweeping federal investigation into its activities.

It is unclear how many of its clients’ names UBS will divulge. Federal prosecutors have been examining about 19,000 accounts at the bank, but UBS ultimately may disclose the identities of only a few hundred customers.

Nice as our government is, we gave UBS a $220 million break on the penalties and back taxes they had to pay, what with the recession and all. As to why they turned over all this information, it seems the executives of UBS had an aversion to indictment and prison. In prison, bankers are currency. What is of note is that this fine is only covers the last seven years, from 2000-2007, so really, they're getting off light.

Among the charges that UBS is admitting to is that they encouraged the falsification or destruction of records, hiding money, jewelry, and art in safe deposit boxes, and the use Swiss credit cards so the IRS couldn't track purchases. Of note is that Swiss law doesn't actually recognize tax evasion as a crime, but as a necessary skill our financial betters have to engage in because they have earned it. As God intended. So sorry if you had hopes of hording your cash away from the government or soon to be ex-spouse, times are tough and the Swiss had to cut a deal. I'm sure you can find another crooked countries banking system. Just throw a dart at the map of the Caribbean and join your dirty money with your corporation's dirty money and shell companies.

The Terminator controls all your emissions

The Governor on his zero emissions horse. Get to the chopper!

Obama To Allow States To Curb Auto Emissions

President Barack Obama is pushing stronger curbs on greenhouse gases, saying he wants to make it easier for states such as California to adopt tougher fuel-efficiency rules than the federal standard.

Obama told a White House gathering that "America will not be held hostage to dwindling resources." He said the government must work with the states _ not against them _ on tougher fuel standards for cars and trucks.
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Obama said Monday that he now wants the Environmental Protection Agency to take a second look at decisions denying permission for states to have the higher standards.

See because California had pollution regulations before the US government did, so as such they can set guidelines if a waiver is granted by the government, whereupon states can choose to follow the Cali or Feddy Gov guidelines. In things such as emissions standards, which affects the types of cars being manufactured, this essentially sets the regulation for the entire country. Last time around the Bush Administration didn't grant the waiver and *gasp* some even suggested that it was for political and not scientific means.

The California regulations would force automakers to cut emissions in their cars and light trucks by 30% by 2016 and 13 states (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) have already agreed to adopt the Cali regs as soon as they're legal.

Legally Obama has to have the EPA review this, but it is a mere formality (because of the science~!) that they'll side with California and we'll be swimming in a sea of new standards soon. Barry is also expected to raise fuel economy standards to 35 mpg by 2020, a 40 % increase. How do we know this is a great set of ideas? Because John Boehner is pissed off about it. He declared that this attempt to make Detroit modernize it's standards to succeed in the 21st century will hurt Detroit's attempts...to modernize and create jobs in the 21st century. It has something to do with fractions and complex math. Take note America, the government might actually be a force for good again. At least in limited areas and segmented sections of influence.

Science marches on

Green light for US stem cell work

US regulators have cleared the way for the world's first study on human embryonic stem cell therapy.

The move comes three days after the inauguration of President Barack Obama who has been a strong supporter of embryonic stem cell research.

Since 2001 there have been limits on federal funding for stem cells.

Geron Corp, the biotech company behind the research, plans to initiate a clinical trial in patients paralysed due to spinal cord injury.

Science? Being supported and allowed by the US government? And it has nothing to do with the military or proving Jesus rode dinosaurs? Guh? This all happened three days after Obama people started heading up the US Food and Drug Administration? I don't even know what this feeling is. Head nodding agreement? Happiness? Fear, knowing that one day they'll eventually green light the robots that will enslave us all?

Anyway, drag those stem cells out from that box in the closet, the one behind the porn. You can do science with them again. Thank the God you don't believe in and get to work, I have several activities that are dangerous to my spine that I'd like to engage in without fear over the next few years.

The internet, minus the reason everyone wants the internet.

Hey, the FCC head wants free, wireless internet for all Americans, American looking illegal immigrants, and moochers right up on the Canadian border. So w00t, and "jog on" to Comcast and all that. Except he only wants us to utilize 2% of the internet, walling off the other 98% behind a puritanical "no porn" robo wall.

The proposal to allow a no-smut, free wireless Internet service is part of a proposal to auction off a chunk of airwaves. The winning bidder would be required to set aside a quarter of the airwaves for a free Internet service. The winner could establish a paid service that would have a fast wireless Internet connection. The free service could be slower and would be required to filter out pornography and other material not suitable for children. The FCC's proposal mirrors a plan offered by M2Z Networks Inc., a start-up backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr.

Consumer advocates have objected to the FCC's proposed pornography filter, while the wireless industry has objected to the entire free Internet plan. To address concerns about the filter, the FCC is proposing that adults could opt out and access all Internet sites.

At least the "consumer advocacy groups" (read: dirty old men) are on it, fighting for our right to free porn. Though I would like to see any legal or petitioning briefs to the FCC arguing that access to free XXX rated action over government wireless internet is some sort of constitutional right envisioned by George Washington himself. Take heart, you are this close to living your dream: watching the most degenerate pornography you can think of in a public square, courtesy of the government wireless network.

Bailout might accidently get good

U.S. May Take Ownership Stake in Banks

Having tried without success to unlock frozen credit markets, the Treasury Department is considering taking ownership stakes in many United States banks to try to restore confidence in the financial system, according to government officials.

Treasury officials say the just-passed $700 billion bailout bill gives them the authority to inject cash directly into banks that request it. Such a move would quickly strengthen banks’ balance sheets and, officials hope, persuade them to resume lending. In return, the law gives the Treasury the right to take ownership positions in banks, including healthy ones.

Well well well, look what just might have happened. The government might accidentally use taxpayer money in a smart way to bail out companies. I know, I don't know what happened either. Maybe it was Iceland taking that track. Maybe it was Gordon Brown announcing a plan to do the same in the UK yesterday. Whatever the case, Henry Paulson just might not piss away $700 billion dollars on buying worthless assets and the United States Congress might have actually crafted a competent, even good bill. I'm as baffled as you are. When did we start to be governed by adults?

Now, don't plan the party just yet. Buying equity stakes in the banks and financial institutions is only an option and Paulson has only indicated he was moving in that direction, not definitely doing it. So we could just be living out the same scenario we have for 8 years: government flirts with the right plan, switches to ineffective bullshit on a whim, chaos ensues. Though the fact that recapitalization might happen, which means we get an equity stake, which means we might actually get the money back and fix the problem, is heartening when the optional nature of it's inclusion in the bill left some thinking that it meant that it would be totally ignored.. Mark it on your calendar: Bush Administration given option to do right thing and appears to consider doing right thing with no ulterior motive. Who knew it could happen? All they had to do was drive us to the brink of economic collapse.