San Francisco for visitors from the First World

There's a pile of gems in this piece, but if I had to pick a favorite, as a godless pinko commie I guess I'd have to go with:

The inequality will shock you and continue to shock you. Even if you're used to London. People who have lived in SF for a while become numb to it, often taking the poverty as a point of pride for the city. "At least they won't die out on the streets. Unlike other cities, we're much less heavy handed about using police to clear them out of the city". The californian liberalism is more of a passive agressive "fuck you, got mine".

H/T @sorenrags

Incredible number of homeless kids in NYC

New York City is housing its homeless in sub-code "cluster units," decrepit apartments managed by real estate ventures taking hundreds of millions of dollars in payments from the city to shelter people with collapsing ceilings and exposed rat poison:

By mid-December, the homeless census reached a record 59,068 — nearly the population of Utica, city records show. The Coalition for the Homeless says it peaked even higher at 60,352.

The homeless count, according to the city and the coalition, includes 25,000 children. And it represents a 10% jump from the 53,615 in shelters on de Blasio’s Inauguration Day.

So. Buildings that are sub-code and wouldn't pass inspection, so let's put homeless kids in there so they can ingest lead paint dust while they're shivering because there's no heat.

Also? Fuck the Daily News for using a woman of color with 11 kids as the example for this article; a quick glance at the comments section will show what actual message the article got across. But she's not homeless because she has 11 kids at home. She's homeless because the rent is too damn high (PDF). And her kids are just a few of the 25,000 that are homeless now, up from 22,712 in January 2014. Note that the Daily News doesn't pretend to say that her family is typical of the families in these deathtrap apartments. Nope, she's just a good poster child, like this Clinton welfare reform-era golden oldie:

England vs. U.S. in homelessness stats

Followed some bouncing links today and landed on this one. I was wondering how the numbers of homeless differ between the U.K. and the U.S. Some definitions to sort through, first. The U.K. counts a number of conditions as "homelessness," which includes couch-surfing and a status called "statutorily homeless," which is a category for people who have applied for government-provided housing. The term in the U.K. for the dire condition of sleeping on the street is "sleeping rough." On our part, in the U.S. we don't count applications for subsidized housing as a category of the homeless. And our term for sleeping rough is "living in unsheltered locations."

So on to the numbers. In Autumn, 2013, the U.K. government counted/estimated 2,414 individuals "sleeping rough" throughout England (PDF). (The URL says ".uk" but the document says "England.") This is out of a population (England-only) of 53.9 million.

In January, 2013, the U.S. government estimated 215,344 "living in unsheltered locations" throughout the country (PDF). And our population is 316.1 million.

So the population of the U.S. is about 5.8 times that of England -- but the number of sleeping rough doesn't scale up at the same rate. Food for thought: why doesn't England have 14,157 people sleeping on streets, in parks, under bridges?

Anyway, Code Blue in Philadelphia tonight. I think everyone knows to call 911 if you see someone needing assistance, particularly since Hub of Hope has been kicked out of Suburban Station.

Talking with new law students in the new no-law-jobs economy

I spent a few hours the other day talking to some students who are about to embark on their first year of law school. This wasn't the first "welcome the students" event I've ever attended, but it was the first one where I was very upfront about my employment situation. The question comes up all the time from these enthusiastic, bright-eyed young people, who see the next 3 years as just the merest obstacle between them and a personally fulfilling career pursuing justice for the oppressed or making big bucks in a prominent firm: "So, Glomarization, what kind of law do you practice?"

This time my answer was, plainly, "I'm underemployed in my solo practice doing [practice area] for [type of client], and I'm actively looking for a law firm job or employment in a different sector altogether. I get an interview about every other month, but mostly I'm not working as a lawyer, though I have a few volunteer gigs doing [REDACTED] that keep me busy."

One student gamely continued the conversation, talking about their interest in non-patent intellectual property (where there are absolutely no jobs outside of the non-hiring large law firms). I pointed out the jaw-droppingly low hiring rate for 2011 grads: only about 50% have full-time, permanent jobs where a J.D. is required, and some 15% have no job at all. That leaves about 35% who are working part-time, in temporary jobs (not necessarily clerkships, either), or in jobs where they don't need a piece of paper that cost $150,000 plus 3 years of unemployment. I said that I'm self-employed, but after a decade as a small business owner, I don't like being an entrepreneur. I went to law school so that I'd have a job at the other end of it. And not in an entitlement kind of way, but in an "I did this to better my life and I jumped through all your hoops, and now I find that there are no lawyering jobs, and my degree makes me less employable as a non-lawyer once people see the J.D. on my resume, what the fuck gives?" kind of way.

The student's response to this was something along the lines of, well, finding a job, it's all a matter of personality, really.

I can't talk to these people. They're operating from some different worldview, a completely different paradigm than I'm operating from. It's like when talking with a friend of mine from my undergraduate days who is an actual, real-life young-Earth creationist. Different paradigm. We cannot have a conversation when one of us sincerely, absolutely believes that the planet and the universe are literally younger than 10,000 years old. Our basic understandings of reality are irreconcilable, and it's the same between me and this shiny new law student I was speaking with. See, there's a 90% chance that the student will end up in the bottom 90% of their class -- but they will not allow that concept into their reality. Or if they will, they're assured that they'll beat that 50% employment figure anyway and that it's just a matter of personality as to whether they land a real lawyering job out of law school.

There's absolutely nothing I can say to this student. But I do promise that I won't say, "I told you so" to them 3 years from now, even though their comment was, at bottom, not very nice at all.

Obamacarization

I would go into some in-depth analysis of the Obamacare decision, but really my questions all just boil down to: How will the decision affect the level of heartburn I have almost daily as I try to figure out how to pay my household and office bills this month?

Cutting childcare subsidies costs money in the short- and long-term, California edition

[Former employee of a non-profit organization Clarissa] Doutherd, who lives in Oakland, Calif., with her 4-year old son Xavier, had been able to cover the nearly $1,000 monthly child care bill thanks to a state subsidy that helps lower-income working parents. The support disappeared after budget cutbacks last year.

"In June, I had to quit my full-time job," after her salary was insufficient to cover her child care costs, she said. "I was on the brink of being able to pay the full cost, just another raise away from being completely self-sufficient" (MSNBC).

I love a good cliché, and the one that works best here is "penny-wise, pound-foolish." How much money is the state of California saving by cutting childcare subsidies? Better to ask, how much income is the state losing? Now that California forced Ms. Doutherd to quit a full-time job where she was expecting a raise, the state treasury is no longer receiving from her . . .

• Income tax, which would likely have gone up with her raise
• Sales tax, to the tune of 8.75% minus Oakland's cut, on purchases other than groceries, medicines, etc.
• Tolls, which finance road construction and seismic retrofitting of bridges

I don't know exactly how much her subsidy was, but it was something less than $1,000 per month. Clearly, she probably wasn't paying $1,000 per month in taxes. But let's say that she was, or that the state was actually spending that full amount, while keeping in mind that a 4-year-old kid won't require full-time daycare for much longer. For $1,000 per month, the state of California was helping her earn, save, and spend money, keeping it moving around and working for her and for the businesses and services she used. It was allowing her to maintain and even build her skills, and spend time with her colleagues and professional peers. It was helping her "bank" time at her job so that she'd get seniority and earn a raise. The other side of that coin: the non-profit organization employer was guarding some institutional memory, and thus was better able to use its state tax-exempt status to the benefit of its constituents in the state, by avoiding turnover in her accounting job. And the state was moving money to the federal government in the form of income and social security taxes -- the federal government loses some taxes now, and Ms. Doutherd will have a number of months or years where she won't be putting money into her own social security for later. And more, the state was helping Xavier get pre-school enrichment and socialization outside of the home that will help him when he enters kindergarten or first grade, particularly if the program he was in was something like Head Start (PDF), (PDF).

How long will Ms. Doutherd's household make it before she needs to apply for food stamps, utilities aid, subsidized housing, or some other assistance? Luckily for her, the article appears to state, she has just the one kid, and at age 4 he'll be in full-time school sometime soon. Until then, the household will be treading water and doing absolutely nothing to rebuild the state or national economy, all to save the state under $1,000 a month, on the back of a single mother. Great job, California!

Twelve versus seventy

Today in job search news, my anecdotal, unscientifically tested impression lately is that open job positions either pay $12.00 per hour, or require 70 hours per week and a resumé with about 15 fewer years on it than mine has. There is no in between, there is no happy medium, there is no reasonable option for a mid-career professional.

I don't want to go so far as to say that I never should have gone to law school; but right now that diploma looks less like a career-boosting, life-changing credential, and more like $150,000 worth of mental masturbation. And not that I'm totally against mental masturbation -- my long-term, post-childrearing plans include pursuing a Ph.D. -- but right now I'd prefer to be getting some regular cash.

Speaking of which, couple of paying tasks today, so I'm off to get to work.

No, really: a huge number of women will be disenfranchised in November

Another 8 weeks, another job interview scheduled.

Add to my previous dataset the new statistic that this will be for a "J.D. preferred" job, not an actual attorney position. With an accordingly dismal salary expectation.

But back to photo ID requirements for voters. Current lawsuits challenging voter ID laws are attacking them via the 14th and 24th Amendments or as a Voting Rights Act problem. But you know what would be neat? Since one third of American women do not possess a piece of ID that meets the requirements of these photo ID laws (PDF), it would be really neat to see a disenfranchised woman or class of women bring a § 1983 action against one or more of the states enacting the voter ID laws, on the grounds that it deprives them of their 19th Amendment right to vote regardless of sex.

Barring a massive "get your female voting friends and family to the DMV" awareness-raising effort, in some states one third of the female electorate will be disenfranchised in November. That is an outrageously huge fraction, and it will be a huge number standing alone. I'm actually really surprised that no one is pursuing this issue as an unconstitutional sex discrimination problem. But what do I know? I'm just an unemployed lawyer.

Women will be disenfranchised this November

Have been keeping myself busy with non-paying work, a couple of trips up and down the Northeast Corridor, and academic politics. My most recent stabs at employment in a venue where someone else would cut my paychecks have gotten nowhere. I've been advised by a very interested party to simply take the J.D. off my resumé. However, as the advice did not include any correlating advice as to what to do with the 3 school years and 2+ underemployed years that would then go "missing" off the resumé, I've so far declined to follow it.

In the meantime, we appear to have a definite GOP nominee for president. Bizarrely, some polls are putting him at a dead heat against President Obama. Did the poll-takers not speak to any women at all?

Speaking of which, women voters in photo-ID states need to beware, and they need to beware fast. Fully one third of American women over 18 do not possess a valid photo ID, one that the pollworkers will accept, reflecting their legal name (3-page PDF), mostly for marriage or divorce reasons. Pennsylvania just enacted a voter ID law that will permit ID-less voters at the primary election next week, but will disenfranchise people without photo ID in November. The process can take weeks because of documentation requirements, and the rule in November will be strict.

This is going to be huge. You think the ACORN debacle was stupid? Do you want to take a stab at what the 2-digit percentage will be of women across the country who won't be allowed to vote for president in November?

Crazy-making

I think it bears repeating that being un- or under-employed is incredibly stressful. I have a great undocumented, unofficial safety net of friends, family, and a partner who buys my groceries; but that's all it is, a safety net. I'm not building reserves. And I've had to accumulate debt on my credit card again because last month I had an only somewhat expected, but totally uninsured loss at my home.

A news item the other day mentioned that women are more likely than men to experience mental illness (MSNBC). How is this report surprising? When you jump through the right hoops, you do all you're supposed to do -- I put myself through law school so that I could double or triple my administrative professional's salary and show my daughter a better life -- and you get jack for it. What kind of jack? I serve on a volunteer committee with a guy who graduated below me in my law school class, who can't figure out how to calendar meetings on the iPad his Biglaw job gave him and who can't meet a deadline to save his life, and yet I'm the one who knows that, right now, I have $68.17 in the bank. This guy takes home six figures a year from his office; in my office, I get asked for free advice on how to legally force a grant-making foundation to give money to an organization that hasn't even applied for its determination letter yet.

I applied for dozens of jobs in 2011, landed a half-dozen interviews, and made less money in the past two years than a relative of mine spent in six weeks to finish their basement.

My friend Bee Lavender on American poverty and the lack of will on the part of political leadership to address it:

[E]normous numbers of people are forced into bankruptcy because of the egregious and parasitic [health] insurance industry. Others are trapped in jobs and relationships that restrict their aspirations, usefulness, and profitability, because they need the insurance. Health care reform hasn't happened in a fashion useful to me, and I very much doubt that it will in my lifetime. Not for lack of need, or care, but because the political will does not exist.

But instead of talking about the reality of poverty, and what it means to be poor, we get to hear presidential candidates shit talk our brothers and sisters, wives, husbands, children.

They say we're poor because we're lazy. I say I've never met a lazy poor person, though I have met quite a few rich people who lie and cheat and steal.

The esteemed Republican presidential candidate does not seem to grasp some basic concepts about life, work, or economics. Repealing child labor laws would certainly not have helped me as a child (my absenteeism being the result of cancer, not a bad attitude). My parents were already forced by necessity to take any job on offer, no matter how demeaning or low paid.

My dad is a janitor; Gingrich says we should fire janitors and make kids do the job. I would like to ask him what my father is meant to do? He is sixty-two years old, and has the best job he can find. If he loses it, there is no alternative career path.

This is crazy-making. In the face of ad-hominem attacks from politicians who blame the poor for their condition, and yell "look, Elvis!" to successfully draw the media's attention away from government policies that allow incomprehensibly high corporate profits to go untaxed while social services, public education, and the nation's infrastructure crumble, it's enough to make an un- or under-employed person crazy.

Rita's Water Ice sold to private equity firm again: what it means

Quietly reported yesterday, though not announced on either company's website, a private equity company called Falconhead Capital, LLC, has bought Rita's Water Ice. Rita's had been owned by a private equity group since 2005. So though this was merely paperwork (and the exchange of an undisclosed but likely eight-figure amount of money) it's still a good opportunity to talk about what it means when a business changes from operating as an independent company to being owned by a private equity firm.

It means the business is no longer a company of its own, but is merely an asset in the equity firm's diverse portfolio of brands. And as soon as it starts underperforming, the firm's portfolio managers will treat it as any asset that produces income for members of of the firm, not as a company employing and serving people: the asset will be sold off or terminated. The business will enter into bankruptcy or will wind down; workers will be laid off, shops will be closed, and money that would have moved around the local community from customers to workers and managers, and from employees to the places where they spend their paychecks, will no longer move around.

Companies are managed for their stakeholders. In our capitalist system and under our state and federal laws, it's the legal and ethical duty of the company's directors to do what they have to for the stakeholders. When any company's income is down, the company has to respond for the benefit of its stakeholders. The stakeholders of a private equity company are the investors in the company's portfolio. The stakeholders of an independent company are employees, customers, management, and stockholders. So compare. When a company is just a company, when it underperforms the directors choose from options like shaking up management, cutting some jobs, closing a few storefronts, or choosing some strategic planning option, like enduring a few quarters of decreased income while anticipating increased future income through investment in their plant, on the assumption that in the long run it's best to keep the company itself a going concern. But when a company is a line item in a portfolio of assets, when it underperforms it gets taken out of the portfolio. That's the only legal and ethical option, once a company has been sold, as Rita's has, and is nothing but an asset of a private equity firm.

It's what happened to Harry & David, the mail-order fruit gift box people. And there's a good possibility that sooner or later it'll happen to Rita's, too.

The end result of selling a business to a private equity firm so that it's just one brand out of many is uncertainty -- among the business's employees and local suppliers who lose their income. In the local communities that see an eventual loss of the money that the business had kept moving around. And among the customers who are disadvantaged economically with a lack of competition and with quality of life issues that enter in when the only choices at the strip mall are remotely-owned mega-chain restaurants and stores.

Regulatory uncertainty versus food insecurity

The trope is that big businesses aren't creating jobs because of "uncertainty." Would someone please explain to me the nature of this uncertainty? GE paid no federal taxes in 2010 and its profits have regularly exceeded $1 billion per quarter. Private equity wizards, Tea Party financiers, and terror profiteers Charles and David Koch are (each or both, but at this level it hardly makes a difference) worth $25 billion -- which sounds like a number you'd make up to exaggerate for comedic effect, you know?

What is the uncertainty here? You hire someone and pay them $28,000 a year, or $120,000 a year? That will have an almost literally negligible effect on GE's profits. What am I missing in the math? GE makes over $1 billion extra every quarter; they'd pay the hypothetical new hire some $7,000 or $30,000 out of that. The Kochs add some new, highly capitalized business or a family of brands to their equity portfolio, and they've spent, what, a few hundred million dollars out of their $25 billion.

I guess "regulatory uncertainty" is the phrase spoken trippingly on the tongue as well. But really? The argument is that businesses won't hire now because they don't know if the rules will change in the future, making their permanent employees more expensive. But OSHA is notoriously understaffed and underfunded and has been for years and multiple administrations. It's not as if some new rules or increased enforcement will happen any time soon to wreck your factory's productivity. As for the energy sector (oil drilling, fracking, and so on), how many actual jobs are we talking here, versus, for example, Exxon's $10 billion in quarterly profits?

Why do people repeat the "uncertainty" line without making the people who claim uncertainty explain it?

I'll tell you what uncertainty is. It's not knowing whether you can pay the rent or put food on the table next month. And states are cutting TANF left and right. TANF -- thank you, President Clinton -- is difficult to get in the first place, offers no childcare to moms while requiring them to go to work, and discriminates against non-married, non-nuclear families.

I said it yesterday and I'll say it again. It's no wonder that there's a tent city at City Hall, and I don't see why anybody there would hurry up to leave. There's nothing left to lose, and the critics are free to hire them so that they move into a higher tax bracket.

Bloomberg Businessweek: Small businesses are killing America

This week's Bloomberg Businessweek, page 10-11:

[T]he notion that small business is the force behind prosperity is not true. [...] So let's revisit the home-office tax deduction, which costs the IRS $9 billion in [annual] revenue.

And on 66-67:

U.S. multinationals like Pfizer, Cisco, and Apple have parked more than $1.3 trillion in profit overseas, avoiding federal income taxes.

You can't have it both ways, Bloomberg. Either small businesses are killing America, or transnational megacorps evading taxes by offshoring all their capital are starving the Treasury. I think I know which scenario is more plausible.

The coming global economic collapse

Busy lately with a personnel shake-up at my law firm. Took a couple of days off to stay away from the office and have spent the past few weekends hanging with friends and family.

I'd complain about the coming global economic collapse, but the horse I have in that race is inconsequential, to mis-use a metaphor. What I mean to say is that my assets and my stock market holdings are so small that a crash can't really hurt me. Between now and Monday I'll run up my credit cards turning my home into a bunker stocked with 6 or 8 months' worth of food and other supplies, and I guess I'll be set.

Could be worse. I could be sitting for a bar exam right now.

"I don't want people to know that he's my dad"

CBS's 60 Minutes interviews homeless kids in Florida. A few of the homeless kids talk about washing up at Wal-Mart before going to school, having all their clothes and toys sold out of a storage unit, living with siblings and parents in a single room at a neighbor's house after they were evicted, watching their dad hold up a sign at a busy corner saying "Family of 5, please help":



The show reports that very soon 25% of all American children will be living in poverty. That's a big chunk of the next generation of voters who aren't going to grow up to be Republicans.

Why I don't really care about how Chick-fil-A hates gay people

My god, I must be seriously out of touch with the way most Americans eat. I was reading that article about how Chick-fil-A hates gay people, and it mentioned people who eat there weekly or used to eat there almost daily, and it occurs to me that I have not eaten a fast-food meal in years. Maybe even 10 years. And by "fast-food meal" I mean burger + fries + Coke, or a chicken or breakfast sandwich variation of some kind.

Part of it is the question of the money-nutrition equation. Fast food calories are inexpensive, this is true. But you don't get much nutrition for your buck, and you get so little fiber and protein that you feel hungry way too soon afterward for the number of calories you've taken in. So while I can't beat KFC's price if I make a home-made fried chicken meal box on my own, certainly I can make something more filling and more nutritious for that amount of money. And really, I can feed myself for two or even three meals for the price of one KFC box.

The other part of it is what I'll call the question of Fast Food Nation or Food, Inc. And by "question," I mean "really big, multi-faceted issue including but not limited to unsafe meat production, factory farms, globalization, multinational corporations, the FDA, the USDA, OSHA, HHS, the USPTO, and Karl Marx." I've distilled it for myself and my daughter into two things: One, I'll go out on a limb here and express my distaste for worker exploitation, agricultural animal abuse, environmental degradation, government corruption, untested and undeclared GMOs, and unhealthy food. And two, I want to put my money where my mouth is. One way to do that is to opt out. That is, opt out of Big Food. Skip convenience foods like shelf-stable boxed meals (except as emergency supplies in the pantry), baby foods, ready-to-eat cereals, frozen vegetable medleys, fruit cups, pre-sliced anything, and so on. Skip junk foods, which by definition don't provide much nutrition per dollar. Skip restaurants, from diners to upscale chains and everything in between, that serve pre-prepared, frozen foodservice dishes or components, reheated and assembled for your plate. And for the love of christ, skip corn syrup, the easiest way of doing so being to quit drinking sodapop.

I've been baking my own bread for a while now, because my local supermarket quit carrying the kind of bread I like (the family size all whole-wheat loaf, which is the same weight but has more slices -- and so more sandwiches and pieces of breakfast toast -- than the all whole-wheat loaves they continue to carry). I prepare just about all of my meals from scratch, starting with whole ingredients, a variety of fruits and vegetables and grains, and a good knife.

I have a crockpot and I'm not afraid to use it.

Households in so-called "food deserts" have a problem. A lot of socioeconomically disadvantaged people live in neighborhoods where there is no supermarket. At the risk of sounding like Scrooge -- "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" -- where do these people go to work or school? Why not pick up groceries on the way home? Why not include transit fare to a supermarket in their shopping budgets? Why not spend some part of the weekend going food shopping and then preparing or planning meals for the coming week?

Some households in food deserts are truly stuck, I understand that. They're getting minimal welfare benefits and other assistance, and the money simply runs out mid-month. It is impossible to live with a good pantry when you don't have the initial capital to stock the pantry in the first place. I don't know how to solve that problem. This is where I start to sound libertarian, because I've lived on very little money at various times in my life but have still managed to eat healthily and cheap. I think a very, very large number of people in food deserts could at least partially address the problem themselves through education and working on making their households less chaotic. And by using the following principles that I adopted when I had food security issues:

• Brown rice and beans is cheap. Start from dry beans and a $15 crockpot and it's even cheaper.
  
• An orange a day keeps you regular and wards off scurvy. Even the corner markets sell oranges.
  
• Here in Philadelphia, the Reading Terminal Market produce vendors and the farmer's market vendors take SNAP (food stamps) and WIC. You can get to the Reading Terminal Market from just about anywhere within the city limits on a single trip plus a transfer, if not a single trip without a transfer.
  
• It is OK to eat the same damn thing several days in a row.
  
• It is OK to feel hungry, and then really hungry, for a while before you put more food in your mouth.
  
• It is OK to feel not completely satisfied at the end of a meal, or downright hungry because you had to skip a meal, unless of course you're diabetic or something.
  
• Fast food is not your friend. It is not truly inexpensive, it is not truly filling, and it is absolutely not healthy.

But my point, and I had one when I started, is that honestly I would care more about the "Chick-fil-A hates gay people" controversy if I cared at all about fast food. Gay people and their supporters should vote with their dollars, of course -- but more importantly, really nobody should be eating Chick-fil-A or any kind of fast food. It's no good for you and it's expensive and it's destroying the planet. Go bake some bread, instead.

"What Killed Aiyana Stanley-Jones?"

Charlie LeDuff of Mother Jones has written an in-depth article about current events in Detroit and how Detroit got to where it is. Read through to the end, and you'll find that he finishes with a couple of paragraphs that explain better than I can why I can't listen to WHYY 90.9 FM any more:

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can't keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist's match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children's milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn't manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation's children with a burden of debt? Can she be blamed for that?

[ ... ]

I left McNeal's porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and A Prairie Home Companion came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the windshield at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over, and switched it off.

Spend your coffee break reading it, and don't get lost following the bouncing links to the articles and websites LeDuff cites to.

Bank of America to pre-emptively pay a lot of money to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Looks as though Bank of America is scared shitless in advance of WikiLeaks's promised coredump:

Bank of America said it agreed Monday to pay $2.8 billion to taxpayer-funded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to settle claims that it sold the mortgage giants bad home loans.

The agreement is the biggest so far between Fannie and Freddie and lenders that sold them loans during the subprime lending boom and before standards were tightened.

The $2.8 billion represents loans that BofA bought from subprime lender-scammer Countrywide.

It's as if WikiLeaks is getting BofA to pay for 0.3% of the tax cuts for millionaires.

No TV is good TV

I don't really do New Year's resolutions, but I do tend to sit back and think about what I accomplished in the previous year and what goals I might consider in the new year. Not really doing that this year, except for the general, overarching goal of finding regular work in 2011, either in my private practice or with an employer.

On the 31st we took the TV out of the livingroom and stashed it in an unwatchable position on the floor of my bedroom. This isn't as big a change as it may seem. After the digital changeover in 2009, I hooked up a converter box to the TV -- a "subcompact" tube I got in the early 1990s for my college dorm room the year they first ran cable TV to that building -- but couldn't get a useable signal because I didn't have a good antenna. I never got around to getting the right kind of antenna, either, because I ended up not missing the morning TV news that much anyway. I kept the VCR and DVD player hooked up and watched a movie once. But it was There Will Be Blood, and when they show the title on-screen in that movie it's in a German gothic type of font, and do you know how small that phrase is on a 14" CRT screen when it's presented in a German gothic type of font? Way to make me feel like a geezer, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Long story short, I had an essentially defunct TV sitting in the corner of my livingroom for a year and a half, and now I don't, and now I like my livingroom better.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to have a nice, big flatscreen HDTV and cable service and Netflix and all to go with it. But right now the only way I can justify even my bare-bones Internet access is that it would be an incredible penny-wise, pound-foolish way to prevent myself from working and looking for more work. To add another $50 or $100 to that monthly cost would be staggeringly stupid, and budgetarily impossible in any event.

So until I can budget for my own cable TV, I'll keep on going on TV binges once or twice a month when I'm at a friend's and he's saved up a bunch of Dr Who episodes on his DVR or OnDemand or whatever it is. And old episodes of Barney Miller on Hulu.com.

Fattah will vote to continue the Bush tax cuts for billionaires

Chaka Fattah, R-Pa., believes in trickle-down fairies and will be voting for the tax breaks for billionaires (fattah.house.gov).