Category Archives: Politics

ObamaCare Launch: First Hints of Real Back-End Problems on the Federal Exchange Begin to Appear

By Lambert Strether. Originally published at Corrente.

Via O’Reilly — the highly literate and excellent tech publishing company — we read the following. Note that the grey-haired[1] tech guy has pronounced judgment in the headline:

What Developers Can Learn from healthcare.gov
… Remember, even a failure can serve as an example of what not to do
2) Pretty doesn’t trump functional. The site is very well designed from a graphical perspective, and is clearly using lots of Javascript and AJAX to do snazzy transitions and requests in the background. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be interacting with the intermittent failures on the backend very well. If you’re going to make requests behind the scenes, you need to be very tolerant of failures. The healthcare.gov site seems to fail silently and leave a broken user experience in its wake, with no way to continue. Nothing drives a user crazy more than having to go through the same form over and over because of failures that leave them high and dry.

Former Representative Brad Miller: Naked Capitalism – My Hot Sheet on Finance

Matt Taibbi described in “How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform” the many ways “the banks strangled the Dodd-Frank law,” including the effort by House Republicans after the 2010 election to “pass a gazillion loopholes.”

“You might wonder,” Taibbi wrote, “how a bunch of lunkhead Republican Congressmen would even know how to write a coordinated series of ‘technical fixes’ to derivatives legislation, a universe so complicated that it has become hard to find anyone on the Hill who truly understands the subject. (One Congressman who sits on the Financial Services Committee laughingly admitted that when the crash of 2008 happened, he had to look up ‘credit default swaps’ on Wikipedia.)”

Yeah, that was me.

How the Pentagon Is Using Your Tax Dollars to Turn Italy into a Launching Pad for the Wars of Today and Tomorrow

Yves here. This report by David Vine describes how the US has been shifting its operations in Europe since 9/11 away from Germany and to the south, most of all to Italy. While geographic proximity to the Middle East is a superficial explanation for this shift, the bigger driver is that less wealthy countries are more compliant that Germany, which is becoming even more influential in Europe. Another factor could be that Germany imports most of its gas, and Russia is its biggest supplier. Russia is not only no longer a Cold War enemy, but some factions in Germany even favor cultivate closer ties to Russia.

But aside from the political calculus, this article also gives Americans a better sense of the sheer weight of our military spending abroad.

Trade Deals Must Allow for Regulating Finance

Yves here. In serious policy discussions, the rules of engagement are to to take rationales offered by each side at face value. So as useful as this article is in setting forth some high level but well supported reasons why the provisions of the Trans Pacific Partnership that would weaken financial regulations are a bad idea, it also has the unfortunate side effective of reinforcing a false narrative about the TPP and its European cousin. These pacts are not about trade. Trade is already substantially liberalized. Weakening national regulation is their main objective.

Joe Firestone: Stop “the Great Betrayal” – Kabuki Update

It now looks like the big media and leaders in both parties are no longer focusing on the Government Shutdown crisis, but are now moving on to the notion that the shutdown is melding with the upcoming probable breaching of the debt limit to create a combined mother of all fiscal crises. Don’t be fooled.

Glenn Greenwald on the NSA, GCHQ, and Spying

Yves here. This BBC NewsInsight interview is a remarkable little piece. Greenwald confronts a clearly hostile set of questions from the BBC interviewer. He is not amused and comes pretty close to giving her a dressing down. Go Glenn!

The Forgotten War: 12 Years in Afghanistan Down the Memory Hole

Ann Jones, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2002, is the author of Kabul in Winter (Metropolitan 2006) and War Is Not Over When It’s Over (Metropolitan 2010), among other books. She wraps up a trilogy on war with publication next month of a Dispatch Books project in cooperation with Haymarket Books: They Were Soldiers: […]

Why the US Mortgage Market Will Remain Heavily Dependent on Government Support (Updated)

In Senate Banking Committee testimony today, Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin explains why the private label (non-government guaranteed) mortgage market is a textbook case of what Nobel prize winning economist George Akerloff called a “market for lemons”.

David Dayen: The U.S. Government Has Shut Down. Unfortunately, How the U.S. Governs Hasn’t.

Being ensconced here on the West Coast, I didn’t have to wait up all night wondering whether or not the government would shut down. You know things were over around dinnertime in California and points west, when House Republicans decided to pass a resolution to move to a conference committee on the continuing resolution to fund the government. The Senate has tried 18 times over the past six months, ever since they passed a budget, to move to conference, and were denied each time. So the clear obviousness of this stunt meant I could stop taking bets on the outcome.

And yet, it must be said that there is a very clear, however cruel, logic to this shutdown, logic employed by members of both parties for decades.

Yanis Varoufakis: What Merkel’s Third Term Means for Europe

Yves here. Varoufakis gives a high-level overview of the political and economic constraints on Merkel in dealing with the festering Eurocrisis. While many of the political issues have received decent coverage in the English language press, the nature and severity of Germany’s economic challenges have gotten scant notice.

So Why is Dimon Getting to Plead His Case for JP Morgan (and Maybe Himself) Directly with Holder?

I got this e-mail from a law school professor this evening:

wtf is with Eric Holder personally meeting with Jaimie Dimon? Since when do other targets of investigations get such access and solicitude?

Taibbi on How Wall Street is Looting Public Pension Funds

You must go, pronto, and read Matt Taibbi’s latest expose, on how hedge funds are plundering public pension funds, meaning pension funds managed on behalf of government employees like policemen, sanitation workers, and teachers. Taibbi describes how a concerted PR campaign has made workers the scapegoats for large pension shortfalls when in fact public officials and unscrupulous financiers (both through their machinations with these funds and via damage done by the global financial crisis) are the real perps.

The Fat Lady Has Yet to Sing for Dimon and JP Morgan

I thought I was late to write about JP Morgan’s $920 million multi-regulator settlement last week on the London Whale, but breathless news of a possible $11 billion settlement of mortgage-related liabilities has pushed the bank and its chief back under the hot lights.