Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

by Paul Jay

Last night, Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish aid ship on its way to Gaza. It is reported that they killed ten to fifteen activists and injured thirty more.

The flotilla was attacked in international waters, 65km off the Gaza coast.  Organizers said the flotilla was carrying 10,000 tones of humanitarian aid headed to Gaza challenging the Israeli blockade.

The Israeli Army Radio said soldiers opened fire “after confronting those on board carrying sharp objects”.  Israel says they offered to deliver the aid if the ships turned back.

The Free Gaza Movement, the organizers of the flotilla, however, said the troops opened fire as soon as they stormed the ships. They also said they were fully within international law delivering the aid directly to Gaza.

Turkey in a written statement condemned Israel over the deadly attacks: “This deplorable incident, which took place in open seas and constitutes a fragrant breach of international law, may lead to irreparable consequences in our bilateral relations,” it said.

Turkey is a member of NATO and one of the few majority Muslim countries that has diplomatic relations with Israel.  Although Israel has been a major supplier of arms to Turkey, diplomatic relations have been tense following the 2008-2009 Israel attack on Gaza.

Prior to the attack on the aid ship, Israel ’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said, “The aid convoy is violent propaganda against Israel, and Israel will not allow its sovereignty to be threatened in any way, in any place – land, air, or sea. There is no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza strip.”  The UN and numerous NGO’s have described the conditions in Gaza as a humanitarian disaster.

Lieberman has openly talked about ethnically cleansing Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin. In late May 2004, Lieberman proposed a plan in which the populations and territories of Israeli Jews and Arabs, including some Israeli Arabs, would be “separated.” According to the plan, also known as the “Populated-Area Exchange Plan,” Israeli Arab towns adjacent to Palestinian Authority areas would be transferred to Palestinian Authority, and only those Arab Israelis who migrated from the area to within Israel’s new borders and pledged loyalty to the Jewish State of Israel would be allowed to remain Israeli citizens.

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Fake news by Andy Borowitz

WASHINGTON—At a conference of oil leak experts in Washington today, attendees proposed plugging the massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico with executives of BP, the company responsible for the catastrophic spill.

“We’ve tried containment domes, rubber tires and even golf balls,” said William Cathermeyer of the National Oil Leakage Institute, a leading consultancy in the field of oil leaks. “Now it’s time to shove some BP executives down there and hope for the best.”

Submerging the oil company executives thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface could be a “win-win” situation, Cathermeyer said. “Best-case scenario, they plug the leak,” he said. “And at the very least, they’ll shut the fuck up.”

But even as the oil leak experts proposed their unorthodox solution, environmental expert Marilyn Sufranski warned of the possible negative consequences of plugging the oil leak with BP executives. “The Gulf of Mexico is slimy enough already,” she said.

Poll: Rand Paul Surges Ahead of Sarah Palin Among Voters Who Describe Themselves as Morons; Key Constituency for Two Hopefuls

MINNEAPOLIS—In a sign of his increasing prominence in the so-called tea party movement, a new poll shows Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul topping former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin among voters who describe themselves as morons.

In the poll, conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, 42 percent preferred Paul, 36 percent preferred Palin, and the remaining 22 percent were unsure what the word prefer meant.

According to Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota, Paul’s surging popularity among morons is bad news for Palin, who previously had a lock on that important constituency. “I never thought I’d say this, but if Palin is going to stay competitive with Paul, she’s going to have to start dumbing down her message.”

Award-winning humorist, television personality and film actor Andy Borowitz is author of the book “The Republican Playbook.”

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By Mr. Fish

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By Chris Hedges

The witch hunts against communists in the United States were used to silence socialists, anarchists, pacifists and all those who defied the abuses of capitalism. Those “anti-Red” actions were devastating blows to the political health of the country. The communists spoke the language of class war. They understood that Wall Street, along with corporations such as British Petroleum, is the enemy. They offered a broad social vision which allowed even the non-communist left to employ a vocabulary that made sense of the destructive impulses of capitalism. But once the Communist Party, along with other radical movements, was eradicated as a social and political force, once the liberal class took government-imposed loyalty oaths and collaborated in the witch hunts for phantom communist agents, we were robbed of the ability to make sense of our struggle. We became fearful, timid and ineffectual. We lost our voice and became part of the corporate structure we should have been dismantling.

Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak in the vocabulary Marx employed. We have to grasp, as Marx did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money. They throw poor families out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, loot the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship only money and power. And, as Marx knew, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself. The nightmare in the Gulf of Mexico is the perfect metaphor for the corporate state. It is the same nightmare seen in postindustrial pockets from the old mill towns in New England to the abandoned steel mills in Ohio. It is a nightmare that Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghans, mourning their dead, live each day.

Capitalism was once viewed in America as a system that had to be fought. But capitalism is no longer challenged. And so, even as Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars and the Gulf of Mexico is turned into a toxic swamp, we do not know what to do or say. We decry the excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate state. The liberal class has a misguided loyalty, illustrated by environmental groups that have refused to excoriate the Obama White House over the ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Liberals bow before a Democratic Party that ignores them and does the bidding of corporations. The reflexive deference to the Democrats by the liberal class is the result of cowardice and fear. It is also the result of an infantile understanding of the mechanisms of power. The divide is not between Republican and Democrat. It is a divide between the corporate state and the citizen. It is a divide between capitalists and workers. And, for all the failings of the communists, they got it.

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Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

The most important remaining battle to rein in Wall Street is over Senator Blanche Lincoln’s measure to stop the big banks from being subsidized by taxpayers for their risky derivative trades. Miraculously, it’s still in the bill but it’s on life support. The bill has now gone to the conference committee where differences between the House and Senate bills are to be ironed out.

But official Washington (read: dependent on Wall Street for money) is dead set against it. Even Barney Frank — who Massachusetts voters used to consider a reliable progressive until he became chair of the House Financial Services Committee — has vowed to kill Lincoln’s provision. And the White House says the measure is “not core,” which in Washington-lingo means “you’re free to dump it.”

Big, big money is at stake.  Wall Street’s five largest banks have a corner on the trade, raking in about in about $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. It’s the single largest reason they’re too big to fail. So they’re spending like mad on Washington lobbyists and campaign donations in order to keep the subsidy in place. (Lincoln’s provision doesn’t force them to give up derivative trading, by the way; it only forces them to do it in a separate entity that doesn’t get subsidized by deposit insurance or the Fed’s discount window).

All the guns are aimed at this measure. But it’s still possible that the people can prevail, if we’re organized and active. Here’s a list of all the Dems on the Senate Banking and House Finance Committee, as well as Republican conferees. All conferees are indicated by ->.

Organize and mobilize your friends and acquaintances, especially those who live in these states or districts, to call their members and make their voices heard. Tell them you want Lincoln’s measure (Section 716 of the Senate bill) to remain in the final bill. Say you’ll hold them responsible if it goes.

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Robert Reich
Former Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

It’s time for the federal government to put BP under temporary receivership, which gives the government authority to take over BP’s operations in the Gulf of Mexico until the gusher is stopped. This is the only way the public know what’s going on, be confident enough resources are being put to stopping the gusher, ensure BP’s strategy is correct, know the government has enough clout to force BP to use a different one if necessary, and be sure the President is ultimately in charge.

If the government can take over giant global insurer AIG and the auto giant General Motors and replace their CEOs, in order to keep them financially solvent, it should be able to put BP’s north American operations into temporary receivership in order to stop one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

The Obama administration keeps saying BP is in charge because BP has the equipment and expertise necessary to do what’s necessary. But under temporary receivership, BP would continue to have the equipment and expertise. The only difference: the firm would unambiguously be working in the public’s interest. As it is now, BP continues to be responsible primarily to its shareholders, not to the American public. As a result, the public continues to worry that a private for-profit corporation is responsible for stopping a public tragedy.

Five reasons for taking such action:

1. We are not getting the truth from BP. BP has continuously and dramatically understated size of gusher. In the last few days, BP chief Tony Hayward has tried to refute reports from scientists that vast amounts of oil from the spill are spreading underwater. Hayward says BP’s sampling shows “no evidence” oil is massing and spreading underwater across the Gulf. Yet scientists from the University of South Florida, University of Georgia, University of Southern Mississippi and other institutions say they’ve detected vast amounts of underwater oil, including an area roughly 50 miles from the spill site and as deep as 400 feet. Government must be clearly in charge of getting all the facts, not waiting for what BP decides to disclose and when.

2. We have no way to be sure BP is devoting enough resources to stopping the gusher. BP is now saying it has no immediate way to stop up the well until August, when a new “relief” well will reach the gushing well bore, enabling its engineers to install cement plugs. August? If government were in direct control of BP’s north American assets, it would be able to devote whatever of those assets are necessary to stopping up the well right away.

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JERUSALEM (AP) – Israeli naval commandos stormed a flotilla of ships carrying aid and hundreds of pro-Palestinian activists to the blockaded Gaza Strip on Monday, killing nine passengers in a botched raid that provoked international outrage and a diplomatic crisis.

Dozens of activists and six Israeli soldiers were wounded in the bloody predawn confrontation in international waters. The violent takeover dealt yet another blow to Israel’s international image, already tarnished by war crimes accusations in Gaza and its 3-year-old blockade of the impoverished Palestinian territory.

Click here to watch video from aboard the ship.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu canceled a much-anticipated meeting with President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday in a sign of just how gravely Israel viewed the international uproar. In Canada, Netanyahu announced he was rushing home.

Israel said it opened fire after its commandos were attacked by knives, clubs and live fire from two pistols wrested from soldiers after they rappelled from a helicopter to board one of the vessels. Late Monday, it released a grainy black-and-white video that it said supported its version of events.

Reaction was swift and harsh, with a massive protest in Turkey, Israel’s longtime Muslim ally, which unofficially supported the mission. Ankara announced it would recall its ambassador and call off military exercises with the Jewish state.

The U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting later Monday to hear a briefing on the incident, said Lebanon’s Deputy Ambassador Caroline Ziade, whose country holds the council presidency. The Arab League called for a meeting to discuss the issue Tuesday in Cairo.

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By Daniel Tencer

The Los Angeles Police Department has launched an internal investigation after one of its officers was caught on camera apparently kicking a cyclist during a protest against oil giant BP on Friday.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the incident took place on Hollywood Boulevard during a “Critical Mass” cycling event. Critical Masses — which involve cyclists riding through the streets to call for cyclists’ rights — typically take place on the last Friday of every month. This particular event targeted BP for its role in the Gulf oil spill.

Video of the incident, which was posted to YouTube, shows what appears to be a police officer stepping out and kicking at a passing bicycle.

“Whoa, what the f*** was that for?” the unidentified cameraman can be heard saying. Moments later, the video shows two officers converge on the cameraman and take him down to the ground.

“Get up,” one officer can be heard saying, as another says “Stay down.”

“What did I do?” the cameraman can be heard saying.According to the LAist, between 200 and 1,000 cyclists took part in the protest, which made its way from Los Angeles into Hollywood. The Weho Daily blog reports that “interaction with the LAPD took a turn for the worse in Hollywood … where a few riders were taken down by officers.”

“The vast majority of the police along the way were helpful and accommodating,” a witness told Weho Daily. “But for whatever reason the police in Hollywood were extremely aggressive and were harassing riders for no reason other than to get their kicks (I presume).”

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Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

Dear Messrs, Tepper, Soros, Simons, Paulson, Cohen, Icahn, Lampert, Griffin, Arnold and Falcone,

It’s now estimated that about 150,000 teachers will lose their jobs next year because of the financial crisis touched off by your industry.

On behalf of the 3 million young people who would have been their students, I have a proposition for you: Donate 50 percent of your 2009 earnings to keep those 150,000 teachers in their classrooms. Each of you, on average, still would net over $935 million dollars for the year (you should be able to scrape by on that) — and the money you’d forgo would ensure that 3 million kids would get an education.

That the ten of you personally received $18.7 billion (not million) from your hedge fund proceeds in 2009 is quite a feat, given that it was the worst economic year since the Great Depression. You each got roughly $36 million a week — over $900,000 an hour! Meanwhile, as result of the Wall Street shenanigans you helped engineer, 29 million Americans are now without work or forced into part-time jobs.

While you may not feel personally responsible for the crash, you do bear some responsibility since you are major players in the financial industry. (Funny how no one is accepting responsibility for the financial crisis.) As Leo Hindery Jr. put it, your industry is a

“profit-driven, greedy, selfish institution that, with its unbridled compensation practices and current light-touch regulatory regime is, I truly believe, behind almost every major societal and economic ill that has befallen the United States since 1980.”

As you know, you probably would have earned little or nothing in 2009 if the American taxpayer hadn’t bailed out the entire financial system. That $18.7 billion you collected didn’t fall from the sky. Fearing another great depression, we poured nearly $10 trillion into the financial sector in the form of loans, liquidity programs, asset guarantees and the like. Those taxpayer subsidies should have gone to enhancing the public good, not pumping up obscene levels of private gain. Instead the net result of our mammoth rescue effort is that 150,000 teachers are laid off while you collect more than $36 million a week.

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Matt Taibbi

It’s early May in Washington, and something very weird is in the air. As Chris Dodd, Harry Reid and the rest of the compulsive dealmakers in the Senate barrel toward the finish line of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act – the massive, year-in-the-making effort to clean up the Wall Street crime swamp – word starts to spread on Capitol Hill that somebody forgot to kill the important reforms in the bill. As of the first week in May, the legislation still contains aggressive measures that could cost once-
indomitable behemoths like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase tens of billions of dollars. Somehow, the bill has escaped the usual Senate-whorehouse orgy of mutual back-scratching, fine-print compromises and freeway-wide loopholes that screw any chance of meaningful change.

The real shocker is a thing known among Senate insiders as “716.” This section of an amendment would force America’s banking giants to either forgo their access to the public teat they receive through the Federal Reserve’s discount window, or give up the insanely risky, casino-style bets they’ve been making on derivatives. That means no more pawning off predatory interest-rate swaps on suckers in Greece, no more gathering balls of subprime shit into incomprehensible debt deals, no more getting idiot bookies like AIG to wrap the crappy mortgages in phony insurance. In short, 716 would take a chain saw to one of Wall Street’s most lucrative profit centers: Five of America’s biggest banks (Goldman, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup) raked in some $30 billion in over-the-counter derivatives last year. By some estimates, more than half of JP Morgan’s trading revenue between 2006 and 2008 came from such derivatives. If 716 goes through, it would be a veritable Hiroshima to the era of greed.

“When I first heard about 716, I thought, ‘This is never gonna fly,’” says Adam White, a derivatives expert who has been among the most vocal advocates for reform. When I speak to him early in May, he sounds slightly befuddled, like he can’t believe his good fortune. “It’s funny,” he says. “We keep waiting for the watering-down to take place – but we keep getting to the next hurdle, and it’s still staying strong.”

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Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — A litany of half-truths, withholding crucial video, blocking media access to the site and a failure to share timely and complete information about efforts to contain the largest oil spill in U.S. history have created the widespread impression that BP is withholding information about the April 20 oilrig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, if not misleading the public and the government.

The government has been little better, for weeks blindly accepting BP’s estimates of the size of the spill, all but powerless to force the company to curb its use of toxic chemical dispersants and ignoring warnings from its own officials about possible worker safety violations.

Most damning, say members of Congress, was BP’s failure to release video that would help measure how much oil is being released from the broken well — a number that will be key evidence when federal investigators and perhaps juries consider what damages BP should pay.

A government task force last week found that twice BP’s original estimate — and possibly much more — has been spewing out of the well each day.

“What’s clear is that BP has had an interest in low-balling the size of their accident, since every barrel spilled increases how much they could be fined by the government,” said Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who led the push to force the company to make its video feed publicly available.

His administration should have pushed harder and sooner for the video information, President Barack Obama acknowledged in a press conference Thursday. It’s “a legitimate concern to question whether BP’s interests in being fully forthcoming about the extent of the damage is aligned with the public interest,” he said, adding: “We have to verify whatever it is they say about the damage.”

The company’s reports on the progress of its so-called top kill operation, which pumped heavy drilling mud into the well in a futile effort to stop the flow of oil and gas that the company abandoned late Saturday, have raised more questions about its candor.

Early Thursday morning, after the operation began, BP issued a press release saying that operations “continued over the night and are ongoing. There are no significant events to report at this time.”

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By Marisa Taylor and Erika Bolstad, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Federal regulators complained in a scathing internal memo about “significant deficiencies” in BP’s handling of the safety of oil spill workers and asked the Coast Guard to help pressure the company to address a litany of concerns.

The memo, written by a Labor Department official earlier this week and obtained by McClatchy , reveals the Obama administration’s growing concerns about potential health and safety problems posed by the oil spill and its inability to force BP to respond to them.

BP said it’s deployed 22,000 workers to combat the spill, which experts now estimate has spewed 37 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico . At this point, much of the oil remains offshore.

David Michaels , the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health who wrote the memo, raised the concerns on Tuesday, the day before seven oil spill workers on boats off the coast of Louisiana were hospitalized after they experienced nausea, dizziness and headaches.

Late Friday, the disaster response team sent four more workers to the hospital by helicopter, including two with chest pains.

In his memo to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen , Michaels said his agency has witnessed numerous problems at several work sites and staging areas through the Gulf Coast region.

“The organizational systems that BP currently has in place, particularly those related to worker safety and health training, protective equipment, and site monitoring, are not adequate for the current situation or the projected increase in clean-up operations,” Michaels said in the memo.

“I want to stress that these are not isolated problems,” he continued. “They appear to be indicative of a general systemic failure on BP’s part, to ensure the safety and health of those responding to this disaster.”

Michaels added that BP “has also not been forthcoming with basic, but critical, safety and health information on injuries and exposures.”

Michaels raised the alarm about BP as his own agency was coming under fire for not being aggressive enough in monitoring the company or the contractors who are providing oil spill cleanup training.

Graham MacEwen , a spokesman for BP, maintained that his company is being responsive to any problems as they develop.

“We consider safety a number one priority,” he said. “We will continue to try to improve our safety record.”

He said that BP also was ensuring that cleanup workers are getting “very rigorous training,” adding that he wasn’t aware of any systemic problems being raised by the Obama administration.

“Whenever we see any problems, we’re moving very quickly to resolve them,” he said.

Michaels, however, raised several significant concerns in his memo that he said weren’t being addressed, including:

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By Stephen C. Webster

Legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone is by no means done exploring the administration of George W. Bush.

While producing new material for his upcoming documentary “South of the Border,” which explores the history of political and social movements in Latin America, Stone sat down to interview former Argentina president Néstor Kirchner.

The subject inevitably turned to George W. Bush, the subject of Stone’s creative nonfiction feature “W”. In front of a film crew, Kirchner confided to Stone that the former U.S. president once directly told him, “The best way to revitalize the economy is war.”

“We had a discussion in Monterrey. I said that a solution for the problems right now, I told Bush, is a Marshall Plan,” he claimed to have suggested. “And he got angry. He said the Marshall Plan is a crazy idea of the Democrats. He said the best way to revitalize the economy is war, and that the United States has grown stronger with war.”

Asked to clarify, Kirchner added: “He said that. Those were his exact words.”

Stone looked aghast, one finger gouging his left eye as if it pained him to hear the confession.

“Was he suggesting that South America go to war?” the director asked.

“Well, he was talking about the United States,” Kirchner replied. “The Democrats had been wrong. All of the economic growth of the United States had been encouraged by the various wars.”

“It is worth noting that despite the prosecution of two major wars, there was very minimal net job growth during Bush’s tenure as president,” Think Progress added. “And of course, he bequeathed an economy that suffered massive job losses in his wake.”

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Marcus Baram
Marcus@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

The federal prosecutors investigating Goldman Sachs are focusing on Timberwolf, the infamous “shitty deal” repeatedly cited in a tense Senate hearing last month, according to people who have been contacted by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office.

The probe raises the possibility of criminal charges against the storied Wall Street firm, which was charged in April by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with civil fraud for allegedly misleading investors about another subprime mortgage-related security called Abacus.

Investigators from the U.S. Attorney’s office have reached out to individuals involved in the deal, including David Mapley, the former independent director of an Australian hedge fund who claims that the firm collapsed shortly after Goldman sold it $100 million of securities in Timberwolf, a $1 billion collateralized debt obligation.

In an interview with the Huffington Post from his office in Geneva, Mapley said that he has been contacted by the U.S. Attorney’s office and that he expects to be interviewed by them soon. Mapley brought his complaints about Goldman’s role in the deal to the SEC in December 2007, met with SEC lawyers several times in 2008 and he says that he continues to talk to them.

“Overall, the whole thing was a fraudulent concoction,” says Mapley, who says that it was one of the most egregious cases he had seen in his decades working in finance. “We examined the whole trade, what led up to the trade, the way it was marketed and everything about it was inaccurate. You think you’re buying one thing and what you see is totally different.”

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Shannyn Moore
Just a girl from Homer

It’s been a few days since the Palins learned Joe McGinniss moved in next door. Love thy neighbor as thyself, then build a fence.

“Fences make good neighbors,” promised her Facebook blog. Not sure at which of the five colleges Palin studied Robert Frost’s Mending Wall , but I think she missed the point. Perhaps it was the, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” part.

Within a few hours Sarah had launched a “Joe The Stalker/Pervert” campaign. Glenn Beck called for a boycott of Random House publishing, and Random House held their ground. The Paliban swarmed with comments of “stalker”, “reload”, “let’s burn it to the ground”, and “get ‘em, Todd”. The following morning the Palins super-sized their fence. The “waterin’ hole” must be defended.

Joe the Neighbor should have told Todd he was writing a book about Russia and heard he could research from his porch. He didn’t.

But why the outrage now?

The home Joe McGinniss is renting used to be an Oxford House from 2005 until 2008. The tenants were men recently released from prison who were recovering addicts. What? No fence to protect sexy Sarah in her tank top? Dear God! Who was lurking in that house watching her children play?

The Palins themselves rented the home McGinnis is staying in for six months in 2009, but weren’t interested in purchasing it. They didn’t want to spend the money. Last October they were “done with the house”. During the election, the Secret Service guarded the Palin home from the backyard now occupied by Mr. McGinnis. Here’s a hint, Sarah – if you want to dictate who lives in the house, you should have probably bought it first.

It’s predictable Palin.

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Matthew Goldstein

NEWARK, Delaware (Reuters) – Collateralized debt obligations are as hard to love as they are to fathom. The scourge of the financial world, these complex subprime mortgage-linked securities caused hundreds of billions of dollars in losses for banks, hedge funds and insurers.

Housing Market

But CDOs have been very good to Donald Puglisi, a retired University of Delaware finance professor who remains fond of them. In fact, he and others are still making decent money from the bundled securities, even though Wall Street long ago stopped churning out new ones and most of the existing 2,000 odd deals have lost half their value.

Some financial experts chalk it up as just one more only-on-Wall Street absurdity of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Puglisi, a 64-year-old grandfather who left teaching a decade ago, serves as the sole independent director on the Delaware-based corporations behind more than 200 mostly subprime-backed CDOs. And for every deal, Puglisi still collects a modest annual fee of several thousand dollars for reviewing and signing the initial transaction documents and continuing to handle mostly routine clerical matters.

He pockets those annual fees — which structured finance experts say can range from as little as $2,000 to as much as $10,000 — as long as a CDO hasn’t been dissolved and is still generating cash flows from the underlying mortgage-related assets. And fortunately for Puglisi, most of the deals he’s been involved in are still ticking, although some are on life support.

Puglisi won’t discuss his CDO earning power. But using the most conservative back of envelope calculation he is taking in at least $400,000 in director’s fees. And that doesn’t include any fees he’s collecting on the more than 100 CLOs — collateralized loan obligations — he services in a similar capacity.

In the United States, Puglisi just may be the dean of CDOs — he figures he has served as an independent director on more of these mortgage-linked securities than any other person and most in the industry don’t dispute the claim.

But as jobs go it is not nearly as taxing or time-consuming as the title might imply. That’s because in the world of structured finance, independent directors are like the Wall Street equivalent of a notary public, with no real power or authority over deals they get involved in.

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Dean Baker
Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research

The world is suffering from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The crisis has left tens of millions unemployed in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. The huge baby boomer generation in the United States, now on the edge of retirement, has seen much of its wealth destroyed with the collapse of the housing bubble.

It would be difficult to imagine a worse economic disaster. Prior periods of bad performance, like the inflation ridden seventies, look like mild flurries compared to the blizzard of bad economic news in which we are now enmeshed.

None of this is new. People don’t need economists to tell them that times are bad. However, what the public may not recognize is that the same people who caused this disaster are still calling the shots. Specifically, there has been little change in personnel and no acknowledgment of error at the central banks whose incompetence was responsible for the crisis.

Remarkably, this crew of incompetents is still claiming papal infallibility, warning governments and the general public that bad things will happen if they are subjected to more oversight. Instead, the central bankers and their accomplices at the IMF are dictating policies to democratically elected governments. Their agenda seems to be the same everywhere, cut back retirement benefits, reduce public support for health care, weaken unions and make ordinary workers take pay cuts.

Given how much they have messed up, it is amazing that these central bankers have the gall to even show their face in public. They are lucky that they still have jobs — and very good paying ones at that. (Many of the boys and girls at the IMF can retire with six figure pensions at the age of 50.) Ordinary workers, like teachers, autoworkers, or custodians, would be fired in a second if they performed as badly as the world’s central bankers.

What was going through their heads when they saw house prices in the United States, the UK, Spain and elsewhere spiral upward with no basis in any of the fundamentals of the housing market? How did they think this bubble would end; did they think that trillions of dollars of housing bubble wealth could just disappear without any impact on the economy. Or, did they think the bubble would never end and that house prices would just continue to go skyward forever?

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By Washington Post Editors

The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday that one in six cell phone users have been shocked to find increases in their monthly bills that aren’t part of their service plan, according to a survey by the agency.

Half of cell phone users and two-thirds of broadband Internet subscribers said they are unaware of early contract cancellation fees attached to their plans, the FCC said.

The findings, from a survey of 3,005 adults by Abt/SRBI and Princeton Survey Research Associates, indicate consumer confusion in the mobile marketplace – an exploding industry of 180 million users who are increasingly using text messaging and Internet services that can trigger extra charges.

“There is still more that can be done to help customers navigate what is sometimes a confusing marketplace,” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. “A simple and easy to understand mobile purchase and billing process will empower consumers to avoid bill shock and other unexpected fees.”

The results could set the stage for new guidelines or rules to better protect consumers, analysts have said. The FCC earlier this month said it would explore ways to prevent bill shock for cell phone users. The agency pointed to mandatory text message alerts in the E.U. that warn customers when charges are exceeding monthly contract plans.

In a conference call with reporters, Joel Gurin, chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs bureau said they are in discussions with cell phone carriers and Internet service providers about bill shock and confusion over early cancellation feees.

Industry representatives, however, said the survey results and a recent report by the FCC that showed there isn’t enough competition in the wireless industry could set the stage for unnecessary rules.

““I am very troubled with the current direction the FCC is taking with respect to the wireless industry . . . it seems the Commission is going to attempt to micromanage what is an incredible array of choices for consumers,” said Steve Largent, CEO of CTIA, a wireless industry trade group. “Contrary to the statements in the press release, the industry does provide ’simple and easy to understand’ plans for every type of American consumer.”

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Laura Bassett
lbassett@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Bad news for Memorial Day weekend road-trippers: a 54 cents per gallon gasoline discount planned at two Capitol Hill Exxon stations for today has been canceled due to unspecified “political reasons.”

In an effort to draw attention to a tariff on imported ethanol, the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA) scheduled a one-day gasoline discount at two stations on Capitol Hill to provide local residents a preview of how Americans across the country could save money at the pump if Congress ends this import tax later this year. The tariff, UNICA believes, strongly incentivizes American ethanol, which eliminates market competition and allows American ethanol providers to jack up their prices.

A UNICA spokesperson said the event was also intended to educate drivers about the benefits of sugarcane ethanol, a clean, renewable fuel that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and could help the United States cut its dependence on oil from the Middle East. But a week after approving the event and less than 24 hours after allowing promotional banners to be hung on its property, the Capitol Petroleum Group abruptly canceled the promotion, citing “political reasons.”

Joel Velasco, UNICA’s chief representative in North America, said it was unclear why CPG canceled the event after initially approving it.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “We think consumers win when there’s competition in the marketplace, and we wanted to remind drivers that there are things that can be done to incentivize more competition. But apparently we’re not gonna be allowed to give away gas.”

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By Joe Conason

The more we learn about the BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, the more we ought to question the basic assumptions that led us here. Like the explosion of the housing bubble that ruptured the world economy, this human and environmental tragedy resulted from a system that encourages reckless profiteering without effective regulation.

It is impossible to understand why an accident like the Deepwater Horizon disaster was inevitable without looking back on an era when the energy industry dominated government. The oil bidness, as it is known affectionately in Texas, could do no wrong under the Bush-Cheney administration, which was run by former oil executives and their lobbyists. Remember that among the top priorities of the secretive energy task force run by Vice President Dick Cheney was relief for Big Oil from “burdensome” environmental regulations.

As The New York Times reported recently, the Washington zeal for deregulation let offshore oil drilling proceed virtually without interference from government, even though scientists and engineers repeatedly raised safety and environmental concerns over the past decade. Warned specifically that the blowout-prevention technology that drillers were relying on to avoid an explosive spill was faulty as long ago as 2000, the oil industry did nothing except to drill deeper.

As for the Minerals Management Service, the Interior Department agency responsible for overseeing the drilling operations, it too did nothing—except to reduce its inspections of safety equipment. Presumably, the MMS failed to act because it was infested with crooked officials who took illegal drugs and engaged in sexual relationships with oil industry personnel—and accepted bribes from them, too. The oil industry was allowed to drill, baby, drill wherever it wanted, often without even paying royalties to the federal government.

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