David Cay Johnston looks at the latest income-distribution data from Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, and notes that in this recovery, unlike one that FDR oversaw, almost all the income gains have gone to the ultra-rich.
Roosevelt brought in trustbusters, reformers and even an expert at Wall Street manipulations to implement policies benefiting the vast majority.
By contrast, while Obama called Wall Street executives “fat cats,” he surrounded himself with financial insiders with the exception of Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard bankruptcy expert now seeking election to the U.S. Senate. His administration has failed to prosecute the central figures in the frauds that created our economic distress.
Meantime, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of households was $29,840 in 2010, up just 1 percent 1966. In the same time, average income in the top 0.01 percent of households is up some 367 percent, to $23.8 million.
— Abrahm Lustgarten, who covers the fracking issue (among other things) for ProPublica, tweets criticism of a front-page Wall Street Journal article that reported that some experts say faulty well construction, not fracking, is to blame for water pollution.
faulty logic: not pressure on well that caused contam, was inability of well 2 sustain pressure
Tom Wilber, who’s also covered the fracking issue extensively, is critical too:
Fracking does not cause water pollution, according to a front-page article in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. On this point there is consensus among regulators, academics and environmentalists.
This got my attention. Over the course of four years, I have interviewed many regulators, academics, and environmentalists while gathering information on my book, Under the Surface. I continue to interview them for this blog. Yet, I am yet to see much of anything that I would characterize as consensus on the risks and merits of fracking. How could I have missed this?
The answer is in the Journal’s definition of fracking.
— American Banker’s Jeff Horwitz has part two of his series on the alleged wrongdoing in JPMorgan Chase’s debt-collection department. He looks at how Chase employee Linda Almonte blew the whistle, got fired, continued fighting to expose the practices, and finally got results—big time:
Many of Almonte’s accusations are backed by internal bank documents and current and former employees. What’s more, they’ve forced Chase to cease operations in a collections unit that had previously generated billions of dollars in annual revenues.
But while the fight dragged on, Almonte and her family were broke and living in a motel.
Almonte proved persistent, however. She contacted a number of regulators, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission, expanding on allegations from her wrongful termination suit. She also discussed her complaints with officials from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees nationally chartered banks, including Chase. The OCC dispatched enforcement staffers to the bank’s San Antonio facility for two months late last year as part of a still ongoing investigation, as American Banker previously reported.
Lots of people presumably knew about what was happening, but it was one person who stood up and got it shut down—at great expense and without knowing the ultimate outcome.
This part from here:
http://tomwilber.blogspot.com/2012/03/fracking-analysis-typically-discounts.html
"The answer is in the Journal’s definition of fracking. It limits the discussion to certain boundaries the industry is comfortable with. When talking of fracking, the industry, and in this case Journal reporter Russell Gold, focuses on what happens in bedrock a mile or more underground... The process is too far underground, the argument goes, to impact the water table in a much shallower zone and separated by layers of rock.
But there is something critical missing from this view of fracking. It fails to take into account how all that chemical solution got that deep into the ground to begin with, and what happens to it after it is regurgitated with brine and other waste. This all involves legion logistical and mechanical functions that take place above the ground. Chemicals must be trucked to the well pad, where they are staged, mixed and prepared for the injection. Then they are transported through a network of hoses and couplings, at pressures of 10,000 pounds per square inch, into the well bore and through the water table. Several million gallons of chemical solution, handled and mixed above the site, is used for each well bore, and the process is repeated six or more times at each well pad. Afterward, the fracking waste, called flowback, has to be collected, contained and disposed of...
This is but one example of things that can go wrong when fracking, and when they do, they are generally attributed to mechanical failure or human error, rather then the process itself."
Reminded me a lot of previous right winger attempts to discredit Lustgarten - this one using David Nesslin's definition fracking to hide the actual realities of fracking.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Fri 16 Mar 2012 at 03:36 PM