Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A “Criminal Enterprise”

16 Comments

Is that what TARP is? Looks like it to me. Of course, government can do lots of things that you and I would go to jail for (including the way they keep their books). But this looks even worse, and an actual violation of the law.

It’s easy to guess that Barofsky is looking into the possibility that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson coerced the CEOs of the nine largest banks to accept capital investments from TARP, even though several of them didn’t want the government as a stakeholder. Wells Fargo chairman Richard Kovacevich, for example, says that he was “forced to take the TARP money.” Philip Swagel, who served at the time as assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury, admits that “there is no authority in the United States to force a private institution to accept government capital. This is a hard legal constraint.”

Is that the “public corruption” Barofsky is talking about?

But then again, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the statute that authorizes TARP, doesn’t give the Treasury the power to make direct investments in banks at all. It gives the Treasury the power to buy troubled assets and to write insurance against losses in troubled assets. But there’s not one single solitary word in the act that authorizes the Treasury to buy stock in banks.

And there’s not one single solitary word in the act that authorizes the Treasury to do anything at all for auto companies like General Motors and Chrysler. The act only authorizes helping “financial institutions.” Yet billions of TARP dollars have gone to the two automakers.

I think these people have simply gone mad with power. Acton had it right.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Barney Frank

6 Comments

Liar.

Who in the press will call him on it?

[Mid-afternoon update]

Nick Gillespie has more thoughts:

Frank is nothing less than a trickster figure in American politics, especially for us libertarians who believe that economic and civil liberties are conjoined at the hip, the Chang and Eng of what makes this miserable world worth suffering through. As the comment above suggests, Frank is as good as it gets on most lifestyle issues (indeed, he even had Reason’s Radley Balko testify about repealing online gambling bans) and yet he’s a real lummox when it comes to economic freedom. His role in the banking and housing crisis is genuinely godawful. Not only did he strongarm mortgage companies to extend more and more credit to shakier and shakier customers, he did so all while denying anything was amiss at the government-sponsored behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that literally underwrote the mortgage mess.

And Frank’s at his worst again, now pushing The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2009, which critics charge would vastly increase the level of complexity in lending and make it more difficult for low-income borrowers and others to get access to credit.

As a commenter notes, being a lummox on economic freedom is a problem of the Dems in general.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Was Janeane Garafolo Right?

3 Comments

Little Miss Attila thinks so (sorta):

Janeane Garofalo is absolutely right: the tea parties are racism straight up. Because if it had been racism on the rocks, PJM would have gotten someone else to do interviews that day, instead of asking Zo to do two jobs. And if it had been racism-and-water, the organizers of the event wouldn’t have imposed upon Alfonzo by asking him to the podium. If it were racism-and-soda, they wouldn’t have recruited Zo to work for PJTV at all, but would have allowed him to continue commenting on events from his living room in the SoCal desert.

But don’t you see, this just proves Janeane’s point, because as all the bien pensant know, Zo (who I had the pleasure to briefly meet at Bill Whittle’s birthday party a couple weeks ago) is obviously a Tom.

Glad I’m not bien pensant.

Media Criticism, Space

Bad PR, In My Opinion

1 Comment

Scaled has issued a press release in response to Rob Coppinger’s speculations about Monday’s rudder-dragging incident that raises new questions. What do they mean when they say:

…you should question the motivations of a publication that reports design or flight test information that is based only on speculation.

Why should we question them? What will it gain us to do so? What “motives” are they implying here?

Also, my understanding is that Rob posted this at his blog, which presumably has less rigorous standards than a Flight Global article, and is exactly the place to do the same kind of speculating that we all were (though I didn’t blog about it).

This seems like an unjustified slam at Rob, with no basis, other than that they’re upset about his speculations. I doubt if it will change his reporting or attitude toward Scaled in the future, but this doesn’t seem like very good press relations to me, and I just don’t understand their purpose in doing this. As Clark says, it would have been a lot better had they left off that last sentence. Also, as Jeff says, that’s why they call them “test flights.”

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Solar System Day

10 Comments

Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.

Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.

So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.

Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.

But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.

I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.

I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).

Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.

But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.

Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.

[Thursday morning update]

Save the humans:

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…

…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Confidence Building

17 Comments

Appropriately frightened CEOs are hampering the recovery:

The yield curve predicts growth. Check. Consumer sentiment is ticking up. Check. But CEO confidence is lousy, and CEOs are (not) spending accordingly. Whoops. This begs the question: Why are CEOs in such a low mood?

Answer: If you are a CEO in financial services, manufacturing, energy production and health care, you are going to be more regulated. Period, end of story. Your response to forthcoming regulation of yet-to-be-determined complexity will be to hunker down. Keep your name out of the news, improve the balance sheet and hold tight.

This is why the U.S. economy, which wants to turn the corner, is still stuck in the intersection as it decides which way to go.

In her book The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes (now a Forbes columnist) wrote that the 1937-38 “depression within a depression” occurred when “capital went on strike.” President Roosevelt’s willingness to “try anything”–including retroactive taxation, laws against discount pricing and an attempted Supreme Court packing–had businesses and their backers so confused about Roosevelt’s rules that they simply withdrew.

This is the risk of Obama’s willingness to “do what it takes.” The words sound positive and action-oriented. But in practice, “do what it takes” really means “anything can happen.” Tearing up of legal contracts … that can happen. Limits to salary and travel … that can happen. Bullying by the Environmental Protection Agency … that can happen. Nationalization of General Motors and Citigroup … that can happen. Nobody knows for sure. Government is sorting it out, day by day.

I’d be happy to triple Congressional salaries, if they wouldn’t come in to “work.”

Media Criticism, Space

Confusing

4 Comments

Andy Pasztor has an article at the Journal today about NASA’s budget problems that is very misleading in its use of the word “Constellation.” For instance:

By casting doubt on Constellation’s progress, the report may provide ammunition for lawmakers and others hoping to extend the life of the shuttle past its current retirement date of 2010. Extending the life of the shuttle could reduce the gap between the last shuttle flight and the initial operation of Constellation. Lockheed Martin Corp. is the prime contractor for the project.

No, Lockheed Martin is not the prime contractor for Constellation, which consists of a number of system elements, starting with the Ares 1 launcher and Orion capsule. LM is only prime for the Orion. ATK is the lead for the Ares 1.

And then he writes:

Accelerating Constellation to 2013, as some inside NASA have advocated, would require significantly larger budget hikes, according to the report. NASA officials project the total cost for Constellation at around $30 billion

It’s not “accelerating Constellation,” which won’t be complete for many years, as it includes things like the Ares V heavy lifter, earth departure stages, the Altair lunar lander, etc., development of which haven’t even begun. It’s only accelerating Ares/Orion, which is what is required to close the dreaded “gap” (assuming that they don’t instead just do COTS D and hope that SpaceX comes through with Falcon 9 and Dragon).

And there’s no way that the total cost for “Constellation” will be only thirty billion. The GAO recently estimated that Ares 1 alone is going to cost at least seventeen billion, and Orion was going to cost at least twenty, with top estimates of twenty and twenty-nine respectively, which would mean close to fifty billion for Ares/Orion alone (and that’s just development costs — it excludes operations).

With all the numbers floating around out there, it’s easy to get things confused, but the words do mean things. Ares/Orion are not Constellation — they are a subset of it and only the first planned elements.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Lies, Damned Lies…

4 Comments

…and Mexican gun violence:

Obama is right that the U.S. is largely responsible for the carnage in Mexico, which claimed more than 6,000 lives last year. But the problem is neither the drugs Americans buy nor the guns they sell; it’s the war on drugs our government insists the rest of the world help it fight. Instead of acknowledging the failure of drug control, the Obama administration is using it as an excuse for an equally vain attempt at gun control.

And the administration continues to lie about the percentage of Mexican guns that come from the US, and much of the media ignorantly (or otherwise) repeat it.