7thriv

Solar-cell manufacturer Solyndra Inc. announced today that it would seek bankruptcy protection, suspend work at its Fremont facilities and lay off 1,100 employees, as the recent plunge in panel prices undercut the company's sales.

Solyndra, whose modules are thin tubes rather than flat panels, gained national attention in 2009 when it won a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government to build a second factory in Fremont, near the company's headquarters. State and federal officials cited the project as an example of how the green tech industry could generate jobs.

But the company had to cancel its plans for a $300 million initial public stock offering last year, and it struggled to compete against a flood of inexpensive solar cells pouring into the market from new factories in China.

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

The question in the first raid seemed to be whether Gibson had been buying illegally harvested hardwoods from protected forests, such as the Madagascar ebony that makes for such lovely fretboards. And if Gibson did knowingly import illegally harvested ebony from Madagascar, that wouldn't be a negligible offense. Peter Lowry, ebony and rosewood expert at the Missouri Botanical Garden, calls the Madagascar wood trade the "equivalent of Africa's blood diamonds." But with the new raid, the government seems to be questioning whether some wood sourced from India met every regulatory jot and tittle.

San Francisco police were seeking witnesses Sunday to the shooting of two men and the severe beating of a third in a restroom at Candlestick Park, as city and league officials condemned a rash of attacks and brawls that marred the annual preseason football game between the Raiders and 49ers.

The most severely injured victims from Saturday night - a 24-year-old wearing an anti-49ers T-shirt who was shot, and a 26-year-old who was beaten - were listed in serious condition at San Francisco General Hospital, suggesting they would survive.

Meanwhile, video footage of fights between fans at the stadium popped up on YouTube, showing a chaotic and dangerous scene at an event that drew tens of thousands of fans.

I ... just don't believe that if you take money away from people who were smart, energetic, focused and maybe even ruthless enough to make it in the first place, and give it to politicians and bureaucrats to allocate to projects they have a notion are good ideas, that will somehow create wealth. I worked in government and with government for about six years, long enough to realize it's difficult to get government workers to do anything simple on time, let alone come up with some new way to make money. Forget about morality and incentive effects -- how likely, how plausible is it that doing this will create wealth? And assuming this is a big waste of money, which it is, how can wasting money be anything but, well, a waste of money? With apologies to my literal scriptural friends, when I read Krugman or somebody else talking this way, it's like listening to the people who say, oh no, the dinosaurs were created six thousand years ago and were all vegetarians until Adam ate that apple, at which point they started killing and eating each other. That is, my jaw drops and I think HTF can they actually believe that? You take money from millionaires, give it to people not smart enough to do the same, they keep part of it and give the rest to their pals, and this makes us all richer. Right.

Moammar Gadhafi is making preparations for a departure from Libya with his family for possible exile in Tunisia, U.S. officials have told NBC News, citing intelligence reports…

The officials could provide no further details as to conditions or precise timing for Gadhafi’s departure, NBC said, and the news report emphasized that there was no guarantee that Gadhafi would follow through on any plans to flee…

Five loud explosions shook the center of Tripoli on Thursday afternoon, possibly striking near Gadhafi’s compound. NATO jets flew overhead minutes after the blasts. It wasn’t immediately clear what was hit or if there were civilian casualties. NATO has bombarded military targets all over Libya since March when a no-fly zone was instituted…

The Bush model of war -- go in heavy, attempt to win the war on the backs of American (and allied) soldiers, attempt to establish a monopoly on the use of violence, and then continue that monopoly on the use of violence by acting as the nation's law enforcement/army for five, six, ten years -- doesn't work, or at least does not work at costs the American public is willing to pay.

I see no point agitating for a Full War Model against Iran, for example -- to urge such a thing is futile. I do not believe the American public has the appetite for such an endeavor. (At least-- not unless Iran uses its soon-to-be-built nukes.)

We didn't use to take care of these countries in this fashion. We used to arm and train rebels within those countries (they've all got them), fund them, provide intelligence, spread some bribe money around, and, when necessary, bring in the sort of Word of God that our air and naval forces issue from the air or sea.

Such wars were messy and bloody and often very very dirty, with guerrilla tactics that often looked like "terrorism" being employed by both sides. This is only a problem when the forces on our side employ such tactics, because that's the only time such tactics get condemned in the press.

They are, however, effective, much of the time at least, and with a light American involvement as far as troops on the ground.

Colin Powell's ludicrous statement -- "You break it, you buy it" -- is a formula for nonstop, decades-long nation-building of exactly the same type that George W. Bush campaigned against in 2000, albeit on a much longer and much bloodier scale than we saw in, say, Haiti.

Why do we "buy" it if we break it?

Broken societies reassemble themselves. In fact, they seem to do so more quickly than people expect, even when faced with great devastation.

Mr. Perry brought the Fed directly into the campaign debate Monday night by saying it would be "almost ... treasonous" for the central bank to play politics by expanding the money supply.

"If this guy prints more money between now and the election," Mr. Perry said in Cedar Rapids Monday night, without naming Mr. Bernanke, "I don't know what y'all would do to him in Iowa, but we—we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas."

An Indian tribe creates a corporation owned by the Tribe. Its sole function is to hire employees and then "lease" those employees to other companies. Who hires the employees? Not the Tribe. Where do the employees work? Not on the reservation. Who do the employees work for? Formally, for the Tribe's company, but actually, the outside employer. It's as if Oracle said to its employees: "Okay, I want all of you to be formally employed by this outside entity. You'll still work here, and for me, but your paycheck will come from someone else."



Why do that? Because tribal corporation don't have to pay Federal Unemployment Tax on its employees, which is around six percent of the first slice of an employee's wages. So the company thus hoses the United States (and, secondarily, the states) for those taxes, which pay for unemployment benefits, and instead the employer and the Tribe keep for themselves (and then split) those taxes.



How much money can you make this way? Well, this case involves the Blue Lake Racharia, an Indian tribe in Humbolt County. How many members does it have? 53. How many "employees" did it have?



39,000.

Wisconsin Republicans narrowly maintained control of the state Senate Tuesday, according to unofficial results, winning four of six recall elections in Republican-held districts.

Tuesday's results are also a victory for Republican Gov. Scott Walker, who maintains Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature—although by the narrowest of margins in the Senate, where Republicans will have a 17-16 advantage. Democrats needed to gain three seats to flip control of the Senate but fell one short.

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent.

Put aside for a moment the fact that Obama’s willingness to compromise was entirely theoretical; never did he put such a compromise plan on the table. His FY 2012 budget proposal was anything but a compromise; it included no entitlement reform and projected massive deficits for as far as the eye could see, and therefore received not a single vote in Congress.

What is most ludicrous is the Democrats’ effort to distract attention from the fact that they controlled Congress from January 2007 until January 2011. The first Congress that had any ability to be influenced by the Tea Party movement has been in office for only six months. Do the Democrats seriously expect anyone to believe that S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt arises out of something that Republican Congressmen have done in the last six months? We expect the Democrats to appeal to ignorance at all times, but this is ridiculous.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane. What did the Democrats do with respect to federal debt during the four years they controlled both Houses of Congress? Here is a summary of the deficits the Democrats racked up during that time:

FY 2008 — $460 billion

FY 2009 — $1,410 billion ($1.4 trillion)

FY 2010 — $1,300 billion ($1.3 trillion)

FY 2011 — $1,600 (estimated) ($1.6 trillion)

Of the $14.5 trillion national debt, nearly $4.8 trillion–one-third of the total–was incurred during that four-year period when the Congress was exclusively controlled by the Democrats. Moreover, and equally important, during that time the Democrats did nothing to assure the markets that they have a long-term plan to deal with the country’s burgeoning debt. On the contrary, for more than two years the Congressional Democrats have refused to adopt or even to propose a budget! If you are looking for the reason why rating agencies have lost faith in the ability of our government to get its spending and debt under control, you need look no farther

I'm afraid I think that the lion's share of the blame goes to the GOP, which escalated to this completely unnecessary showdown, and then gave up any hope of a grand bargain because it would have required some revenue increases.

(But what about the specifics? I hear you cry. I find this singularly unconvincing as a rebuttal. The GOP was extraordinarily, um, specific about their total aversion to revenue increases, a position that they continued right up to the brink of a crisis, which makes me think that it was not merely a clever negotiating tactic. It is therefore not some sort of horrifying example of Democratic perfidy that the negotiations never went beyond fairly broad generalities. It's an example of what happens when you signal that you aren't going to compromise no matter what)

This was not terroristic, psychopathic, or whatever, and the people who used those sorts of epithets have forfeited the moral high ground they claim to occupy. I sympathize with the Tea Party's goals of smaller government. I even kind of understand what they thought they were trying to do. But it was an enormously counterproductive tactical mistake, and though of course I would say this, I believe it was made because everyone who tried to point this out was ignored . . . nay, not just ignored, but derided as a Beltway Insider Commiesymp.

In that political environment, hell, I'd downgrade us.

I'm sorry, but this was stupid. It hurt the country, and it hurt the party that staged the protest vote even more. All for very little gain

S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn't do enough to address the gloomy outlook for America's finances. It downgraded long-term U.S. debt to AA+, a score that ranks below more than a dozen governments', including Liechtenstein's, and on par with Belgium's and New Zealand's. S&P also put the new grade on "negative outlook," meaning the U.S. has little chance of regaining the top rating in the near term.

The unprecedented move came after several hours of high-stakes drama. It began in the morning, when word leaked that a downgrade was imminent and stocks tumbled. Around 1:30 p.m., S&P officials notified the Treasury Department that they planned to downgrade U.S. debt and presented the government with their findings. Treasury officials noticed a $2 trillion error in S&P's math that delayed an announcement for several hours. S&P officials decided to move ahead, and after 8 p.m. they made their downgrade official.

S&P said the downgrade "reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government's medium-term debt dynamics." It also blamed the weakened "effectiveness, stability, and predictability" of U.S. policy making and political institutions at a time when challenges are mounting.

Stocks spiraled downward Thursday as investors buckled under the strain of the global economic slowdown and the failure of policy makers to stabilize financial markets.

The selling began in Europe and continued in the U.S., where stocks plunged from the opening bell. The Dow Jones Industrial Average posted its worst point drop since the financial crisis in December 2008, falling 512.76 points, or 4.31%, to 11383.68. Oil and other commodities were also hammered. Even gold was a safe haven no more as prices fell. Asian markets slid on Friday morning, with Tokyo, Australia, South Korea and Hong Kong markets all falling more than 3% in early trading.