An answer to a Bank of America apologist

October 10, 2011 Category :Bank Of America| banking| media| newspapers| Occupy Wall Street 0

Tommy Tomlinson  wrote a commentary for the Charlotte Observer praising the $5 monthly fee BofA will impose for debit card use and furthering the lie that the Occupy Wall Street protestors are rebels without a cause. I’m sure it went over real big in Charlotte, the company town that is the home to Bank of America. McClatchy distributed it nationally. Here’s my response:

You deserve to get zinged for this one. It praises the uncomplicated nature of the $5 fee with not one word of background about why the fee is necessary. It certainly isn’t necessary to pay for the transactions themselves. They’re automated and cost the banks a fraction of what they’re charging merchants today. Their former charges were so inflated and usurious that the government cut them. The $5 fee is an end run to make up for a whole slate of charges that weren’t as confusing as they were unfair or rigged to soak the poor and small business.

Admitting that the press can’t cover [Occupy Wall Street] “because the protesters don’t have a specific agenda” says more about the press than the protest. Covering these demonstrations requires old fashioned journalism, not the new kind where the camera crew and reporter shows up at the site expecting a one-sheet press release and a “press information officer” that knows how to button up an interview after a series of soundbyte-styled answers.

A few hours of web research will reveal lots of sites where potential demands are being discussed and voted on. This protest, with its high number of college graduates whose issues revolve around unemployment and loan debt, is a rich vein of knowledge. Sure, we’ve got our doofuses with their “deadhead vibe” whose contribution ends at good pot. But we’ve got some very smart folks as well.

Let’s just start with one demand: that somebody in the executive offices of the banks of marble actually face criminal prosecution with the possibility of going to jail. You’ll find this demand in nearly every proposed list. All the homework has been done and is in the civil lawsuits that the FHFA (Fannie and Freddie’s overseers) have brought against the banks. The names of the vice-presidents who likely perjured themselves are in the defendants’ lists.

So all we need is an indictment. Maybe we’ll get one if we have a press that starts writing about these things, instead of bemoaning that it cannot figure out what the protestors actually want without taking the time or trouble to find out the old fashioned way.

The Wobblies Songbook from the Loan Department

October 9, 2011 Category :banking| IWW| Occupy Wall Street| union 0

There are subtle signs everywhere that many of the people who might be least likely to endorse the Occupy Wall Street movement are closet supporters. It’s not just the police whose rank-and-file seem to act differently than their white-shirted managers.

A few days ago a package showed up in my mailbox that I found most fascinating.

In 1905 the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World, was founded in Chicago. IWW members were the most radical of the union organizers and their union remains the most violently suppressed through modern American history

The Wobblies were big on using media to spread their message, and in 1905 that meant singing protest songs. I’ve always wanted one of their little red songbooks, which they re-printed at their 100 years anniversary. I finally bought one on ebay.

But when it arrived and I carefully unwrapped it, I found it enclosed in a large manila envelope, folded such that you couldn’t see what the envelope really was.

It was an inter-office document carrier obviously from a large bank with a huge mortgage company and title plant, lifted by a worker for the job of bringing the protest book to me.

It was just one more example that you never can tell how well your message is resonating with people who are not in a position to publicly agree with you.

I’m sure some of these songs are being sung again on Wall Street today.

But the banks are made of marble
with a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
that the farmer sweated for.

–Banks of Marble ( page 9)
Words & Music by Les Rice,

 

Why a run on Bank of America is a bad idea

October 6, 2011 Category :Bank Of America| banking| Occupy Wall Street 0

The movement to encourage everyone to pull their money out of Bank of America has a compelling populist ring. Among the gang of thieves that wrecked our economy, BofA holds a special place. You see it in the defendant lists in the suits against bankers who lied to sell iffy mortgages as triple-A. If you count their subsidiaries, BofA is number one.

The angry people who #OccupyWallStreet are learning from each other. We all helped the collapse along by our lack of attention to detail and far more than the torches and pitchforks, the banks fear a population that cannot be placated by the half-truths and corporate doublespeak that they’ve become so good at spewing.

Photo courtesy Scott Lynch

Our financial predicament is complicated, and for #ows to really make a difference we need a movement quite unlike what we’ve seen before. We need a crowd that understands a nuanced answer well enough that each person in it can make a nuanced argument.

That’s why a successful movement that pulls all the money out of BofA is a bad idea. This financial crisis is more insurance fraud than knocking over a bank vault. When you steal money that others have pledged to replace, your crime affects far fewer people, and your ability to avoid prosecution for it grows large. That’s why no banksters are in jail today.

Because we don’t want bank failures, we told depositors that no matter what, we’ll cover most of their deposits regardless of what the bank does. So if BofA drives itself into the ditch, the taxpayer has to run in and pay off the debt, and the bankers have proven they don’t mind playing chicken with other people’s assets.

We need to remove money from BofA slowly. It may, in fact, be what they want: now that the government won’t let them soak the poor, they only want the rich as clients. So $5 fees and closing branches in poorer areas only helps them shed the folks that are no longer of any use to them.

That is why we need a nuanced approach: slowly reducing the size of the institution so that they don’t show up with a tin cup at the Fed’s door. It’s also why an audit of the Fed is a dangerous proposition. While we probably ought to know how bad things are, we always need to be mindful that there isn’t enough money to satisfy all the depositors should they show up at the same time.

When you’ve lied for so long, suddenly telling the truth can have some sudden and disastrous results. An understanding of nuance can help us embrace the truth without creating the panic that has driven the bailouts and the lies for so long.

BP suddenly worried about its creditcardholders

August 1, 2010 Category :energy| hospitality industry| oil spill 0

[An open letter response to Kevin Phelan, Sr. Vice President, Sales & Marketing, BP Products North America]

Thank you for writing to me about how your company is doing everything possible to stop the leak and protect the shoreline. I had a feeling you’d be writing me; I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to get around to it.

I pass several BP stations regularly here in South Florida. I’ve noticed there’s rarely a car or truck in them, and the tone of your letter tells me that you’ve noticed that too. Maybe the number crunchers in your department believed that things would blow over. Maybe you figured we were so pissed off it was prudent to wait. Or maybe you just don’t give a damn.

My money’s on “don’t give a damn,” because your letter is just another attempt to hide behind yet another group of people whom your negligence and reckless disregard is slowly destroying. I’m talking about the “vast majority of [BP] stations [that are] locally owned and operated and employ more than 50,000 people across the United States.”

I do feel sorry for these folks, but I also wonder why they believed in you when your history as an oil company is one disaster after another, and the investigations into those disasters reveal that you knew better but preferred to try and save a buck. A close look at the refinery fire in Texas City or the tundra along the Trans-Alaska pipeline should have predicted what happened on the Deepwater Horizon.

If your independent gas station owners had been taking care of business themselves, they could have already done what thousands of Citgo independent resellers did when their brand became tarnished by its association with Venezuela. They rebranded their stations with a logo that helped sales rather than hurt them.

Yes, Mr. Phelan, I have a BP credit card, but don’t count on my support. I haven’t bought more than a tankful of gas from your stations in several years, and that probably won’t be changing at least as long as you keep hiding behind hollow words on form letters trying to drum up sympathy for people you’ve hurt. They didn’t hurt your brand: you did.

You know how to solve this, because you’ve promised to mend your ways each time you’ve been caught. You can start gushing money in the gulf like your hapless well; you can start selling gas to your resellers at tremendous discounts; you can really put safety first, even though that delays production in ways you once thought unacceptable.

All these things will be a magnificent departure from what everyone expects from you; the story will tell itself, and you won’t need to send weasel-worded letters to your customers.

Are you interested to receive this money one thousand five hundred dollars?

June 15, 2010 Category :Internet| media 0

I’m a pretty avid reader of Bob Sullivan, who writes the Red Tape Chronicles blog over at MSNBC, so when I got an unsolicited phone call last week offering me $1,500 if I’d just answer a few online questions, I thought about his online diary of Internet scams, frauds and free lunch offers. I was able to record most of the scam call in a way it could be shared, I shared it with Sullivan, and he shared it with his readers.

On the surface, the recording is just two people lying to each other. I literally made up a CV as I went along, taking the middle and last names of the turn-of-the-century booze-bashing evangelist Billy Sunday as my own. On the other end of the line, a parade of South Asian accents trying to convince me that $1,500 in free money was “not for everybody” but was certainly within my grasp. I suspect it was lost on them that when one of them chose “Jack Daniels,” as a supervisor’s name, it meant that Jack Daniels was still tempting Billy Sunday.

Beneath the surface is the complicated multiple threads of communication that make this scam possible. From the strength of the scammer’s accents, I suspect the boiler-room is in South Asia, the call transported as voice-over-IP and dumped on the US switched network through a portal in Seattle, WA. The victim is urged to upload the sensitive financial data to a website on a Denver-based Internet provider, which the scammers have access to.

To the Internet-challenged, the scammers spin a tale that the website and boiler-room aren’t connected; I bet some of their victims never fully understand the exact method of their victimization, and even if they do, the modern ability to connect nearly everything with nearly everything else on a worldwide scale makes it almost impossible to track down and prosecute the people responsible.

The Last Temptation of Helen Thomas

June 7, 2010 Category :media| newspapers 0

Helen Thomas was writing for UPI when newspapers still used linotypes and when teletypes delivered her stories nationwide at speeds we would no longer accept for devices we carry in our pockets. It was this explosion of connectivity that ultimately ended her career: an intemperate remark made into a pocket video camera, amplified by the international reach of the worldwide web.

Helen Thomas

She was a veteran of the gatekeeper days of media; when JFK could philander in the White House and the press corps would give him a free pass. People could say intemperate things as asides and expect to do so with impunity; the gatekeepers would keep the snarky one-liners on background. As media became more prolific, and connectivity became ubiquitous, everyone suddenly became a press photographer merely by owning a phone with a camera; everyone with a camcorder and a website is their own TV news operation.

I had a vested interest in seeing Helen Thomas in the emeritus seat at press conferences. I think all of us who are refugees from dying or dead media took comfort in her longevity and perseverance; she provided at least a tenuous link with our shared journalistic past.

Just as she has outlived most of the ink-stained wretches from newspaper’s late golden age, she outlived the old media she once wrote for. She resigned from UPI when it became the mouthpiece of Sun Myung Moon; finally ending her career as a columnist for Hearst, which today sees its newspapers as only a small part of a diversified media company buying its way into the digital age.

It is symbolic that Helen Thomas ended her career in a way being mirrored by the institutions she spent her life working for; she didn’t see the subtle changes in the way information permeates society until it was too late to change. Public figures are always tempted to say intemperate things and in another day, the gatekeepers would laugh then suppress the direct quote. Now that we’re all journalists, that’s a courtesy that died with the linotype and the slow news ticker.

We never figured EVERYBODY would use it

June 2, 2010 Category :AT&T| Internet 0

AT&T no longer offers an “unlimited” data plan for mobile users. It’s not a surprise; AT&T hasn’t had the capacity it needed for its early-adopter-heavy mobile uses for several years. You saw it in the fractured and nearly unusable connectivity where geeks gather, like during the South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, or during any of the tech-hip conventions like the NAB in Vegas.

3G coverage falls apart, downloading anything more than a few KB can fail for hours. As AT&T piles more early adopters onto its network adding new Windows 7 Mobile devices later this year, plus the faster multitasking iPhones almost certain to come out this month, it faces a burgeoning crisis.

So I can’t blame them for making the change, but I can chastise them for offering unlimited connectivity in the first place. Since these plans are in fact limited by the ability of the network to handle the traffic, they have never really been unlimited at all.

What is changing is consumers are expecting quality of service. The new devices are much better at eating bandwidth than the old ones, and much more likely to appear to misbehave when the underlying connection is the thing that is failing. We can only hope that if the new charges don’t curtail usage, the new revenue will be plowed back into capacity increases.

From the beginning, we talked a good game but never really planned that everybody would be using the Internet to the extent they are. When it was just the geeks passing the HD video files back and forth we could be bandwidth pigs and the folks reading plain-text email barely noticed the lag we caused. Those days are over, and with it, the AT&T “unlimited” data plan.

What the politicians really know about the oil spill

May 27, 2010 Category :Barack Obama| energy| oil spill 0

Nearly forty years ago, I participated in an energy summit. I was young, inexperienced, hadn’t found my voice, and my job was merely to be a journalist at the most base level; to record and catalog what was said. I could have done more, but what I heard intimidated me. It was the first time I realized there are some problems that can’t be solved, so I organized my tapes, turned them in with a comprehensive index, and said nothing.

The summit was held at the beautiful Ventana Inn at Big Sur. Its participants included executives of oil companies, the Sierra Club, public policy institutes and regulators. The concept was we all sit down and have a freewheeling discussion about the problems. What we discovered was we all pretty much agreed on what the problems were; and that there was no politically viable solution. So we all did what I did: nothing.

We could solve this problem tomorrow with something as simple as a $2/gallon tax on gasoline. The primary function of this tax would be to reduce consumption, so revenue would be far from a straight line computed from current consumption. We would still, however, raise a shitpot full of money.

This money could be plowed back into paying the people whose livelihoods were taken away by the spill to clean it up, and to promote new methods of energy production. We’d still hound BP into bankruptcy, but any revenue we’d get from them in fines or damages could be plowed into green energy technology too, or go back into the economy in the form of debt reduction.

But the public outrage over millions of gallons of oil in the gulf would quickly turn to public anger at the imposers of the tax. There would be rumors of corruption; that the money was lining the pockets of the energy companies. The energy companies themselves would scream bloody murder and sue everybody in sight to stop it. Cheap energy long-term alternatives are unwanted competition, artificially inflated short-term prices simply cut into their bottom line.

Most socially responsible liberals would be outraged over the terrible effects on the poor. This solution is a progressive tax run wild because it makes energy inefficient systems worthless and within the reach of the poor, which amplifies the inequity.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama had a vision of energy independence that has been worn away by the refusal by the right to pass a truly robust recovery package; one that not only bails us out, but helps us build a future. Until we do that, until we do something truly dramatic, we will simply repeat past mistakes.

Withdrawing from an addiction is painful, and until we are willing to walk through the pain, we will keep electing politicians who either promise cheap energy or promise alternatives but who know or learn the American people simply aren’t interested in solving the base problem.

That problem isn’t the oil in the gulf, that’s the symptom. It’s our denial of our cheap-energy addiction that put that damn hole in the sea floor in the first place without any Plan B to plug it.

Why Rand Paul got a fair hearing on MSNBC

May 23, 2010 Category :2010 election| First Amendment| politics| Sarah Palin 1

Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul (R-TX-14) developed a tremendous following on the Internet, and swayed a pretty significant number of young net-hip professionals to profess a belief in Libertarianism. It’s not surprising; political neophytes could guess the whole marketplace of ideas concept of the early Internet might just work for politics as well.

So I’m not surprised Rand Paul thought he could use the Rachael Maddow show on MSNBC to mine the liberal base for new voters. What he didn’t count on, is that libertarianism itself got a fair hearing. Paul had 18 minutes to answer Maddow’s question about the public accommodations clause of the civil rights act, and he couldn’t, because he knows Americans don’t like “letting the marketplace decide” people’s rights.

So now Paul and his lukewarm supporter Sarah Palin are trying to float the theory that Paul somehow got ambushed, even though that question had become a major problem for Paul in previous newspaper and radio interviews where he tried to make his case.

Blaming MSNBC is not an avenue available to a libertarian. As the conservative media group AIM pointed out, he chose to go on Maddow’s show, it’s a privately owned channel on a non-scarce distribution system, which its viewers watch as an act of free-market capitalism.

The free market doesn’t always work, but it worked this time. It pointed out what’s wrong with libertarianism as a 21st Century political philosophy. If Rand Paul were truly committed to his belief system, he’d be happy that it worked so well in practice.

Kendrick Meek needs to up his game

May 15, 2010 Category :DADT| gay| media| politics 0

Kendrick Meek delivered a stump speech and answered questions in Delray Beach, FL, Friday to a standing-room-only crowd. He’s the only legitimate Democratic candidate for the Senate seat vacated by Mel Martinez, so he has my support. His heart is in the right place, but his rhetoric isn’t. He’ll have to improve that dramatically to have a shot at winning the general election.

He should ace the primary;  two of  his opponents are wildly underfunded and the third is self-funded candidate Jeff Greene, a billionaire who cleaned up betting against the housing market through credit default swaps. If that’s not enough, he’s a former Republican who ran for a San Fernando Valley, California congressional seat in the 1980s.

Kendrick Meek in Delray

Meek’s chances were never good; though Florida went for Obama in 2008, it was an uphill battle helped by a tanking economy that beat this red state blue. But things got a whole lot better when Republican hopeful and current Governor Charlie Crist turned independent, unable to out-teaparty his Republican challenger Marco Rubio. So its a three-way race.

Kendrick had good logic for his campaign plans. He’ll tar Crist with all the nutjob stuff he said when trying to out-conservative Rubio and then finish him off by calling him out as a affiliation-changing opportunist. His lack of name-recognition will be solved by non-stop campaigning and some aggressive advertising. With all the self-funded candidates, the tea-party independents, and the three way race, it should be a good year for Florida TV stations.

But Meek is not fast on his feet on the stump, especially in the Q and A. Obama raised the bar. The first three sentences after a question should be a direct answer, and that’s what Meek should be emulating. Asked a question about Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Meek meandered and never directly answered the question, when he easily could have. His mother (who represented his district before he did) voted against DOMA. He could have said, “We tried to stop this before it started, and the next best thing to do is repeal it.”

Instead, Meek emulated Joe Biden. He just talked, until his words led him into the canned “I’m a supporter of gay people” predigested spiel. That isn’t going to fly against a seasoned campaigner like newly-independent Crist, who helped Meek greatly when he went independent, but helped himself far more.

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