‘Ghost Net’
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Hack into the matrix:
The malware is remarkable both for its sweep — in computer jargon, it has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets — and for its Big Brother-style capacities.
It can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room.
The investigators say they do not know if this facet has been employed.
The New York Times has a story this morning on a huge, Orwellian computer spy network, working out of China and “that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.”
Read the whole Times story here.
Straight-Shooter Business
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Bow-tied and all business, long-time TV news journalist, Irving R. Levine, died Thursday at the age of 86.
Levine was an original, who like Murrow, Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, to name a few, were themselves a trademark for excellence in news gathering — trench journalists.
Despite looking urbane and all-sophisticated up with a bow tie, Levine knew his shit.
(Illustration found here).
As if living a journalism story, Levine came up through the ranks, starting as an ‘obit’ writer with a Rhode Island newspaper in 1940, and although he’s far-more well known nowadays for business-related issues, he was a global correspondent for NBC News in the 1950s — the network made him its chief economic reporter in 1971 — producing all kinds of stories from Korea, the old USSR, Vietnam.
Levine was a straight-shooter business guy.
Paul Kangas with Nightly Business Report on PBS this evening:
Irving R. Levine didn’t just cover financial news, he pioneered it.
The bow-tie clad reporter had his own incisive style and dry delivery.
He shared it with viewers as an economics correspondent for NBC News for 45 years, reporting from more than two dozen countries.
He brought that insight to NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT for more than a decade.
Looking back, much of what he told our viewers was right on the money.
He might have been dry, but he had a certain style.
I’d always snicker when Levine came on, but I’d watch and pay attention to his reports, though so-enjoying his sign-off, “This is Irving R. Levine,” heavy with dry-like authority with a certain tempo — serious with a side of hilarious:
During one economic slowdown, Johnny Carson quipped on NBC’s “The Tonight Show” that things were so bad that “I saw Irving R. Levine standing by the side of the freeway with a sign reading, ‘Will work for bow ties.’ ”
On another occasion, Carson noted that “NBC is cutting back so much, Irving R. Levine has to buy his bow ties at the Pee Wee Herman garage sale.”
When Levine starting covering the economics beat near four decades ago, business news was way down on the scale of importance — currently it’s ALL the news and ALL tied in one hell of a gnarly bow.
Despair Economics
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This so-called “financial meltdown” is indeed a down, but a descent from the base-bottom up — Close to 70 percent of the current unemployed in the US are blue-collar workers despite all the Wall Street blubbering and Rick-Santelli rants about the financial industry.
“This is a blue-collar recession, just like we saw in ’81,” said Andrew Sum, professor of labor economics at Northeastern University. “In fact, we’ve seen no net loss among college graduates. At least not yet.”
And this ain’t heavy.
(Illustration found here).
Jobs are important in more than just the obvious, financial sense, but in the physical-social movement as well — an example, the growing tent city explosion across the country of unemployed, homeless folks, maybe a big chunk from the construction industry, at 17 percent unemployed, one of the hardest-hit trades in this economic nightmare.
Here in California, the unemployment rate hit 10.5 percent in February, which lead the nation in mass layoffs — 116,000 jobs gone, the “biggest portion, about a third, were in manufacturing, followed by retail trade and transportation and warehousing” — all blue-collar peoples, and mostly male peoples.
Maybe the big news is former banking executives now delivering pizza or some such bullshit, but the real feelers of the “news” are those in actual contact with the physical end-result reality of all those fancy default swaps.
National employment stats released this morning from the Labor Department continues the look of an old Shell-station public toilet — brown-shit nasty:
And for the week ended March 21, first-time (unemployment) claims for benefits rose 8,000 to 652,000, a level that’s fully 78% higher than the same period in the prior year.
The four-week average of these initial claims fell 1,000 to 649,000.
The claims report shows that businesses are laying off workers at a rapid pace and that finding replacement employment for those people out of work is ever harder.
Initial claims represent job destruction, while the level of continuing claims indicates how hard or easy it is for displaced workers to find new jobs.
Claims rose 123,750 to stand at 5.33 million — in itself an all-time record-keeping high.
Also from MarketWatch:
The U.S. economy experienced its most violent contraction in a generation during the fourth quarter, with real gross domestic product plunging at a 6.3% annualized seasonally adjusted rate, the Commerce Department reported Thursday in its third estimate of quarterly growth.
GDP hadn’t fallen so much since the first quarter of 1982.
It was the third largest decline in GDP in 50 years.
Economists believe the current quarter, which ends March 31, was nearly as bad.
Current projections look for GDP to fall at a 5.1% annual pace.
Since 1947, GDP has never fallen by more than 4% for two quarters in a row.
But the real horror:
The recession that began in December 2007 intensified in the fourth quarter following the government’s rescue of several large financial institutions and the collapse of Lehman Bros.
The ensuing credit squeeze has driven consumer and business confidence to generational lows, and cost 3 million Americans their jobs.
Just since last September — WTF!
Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner, ah, we remember.
The now-famous $700 billion TARP program we couldn’t survive without in September, but never really used and redefined by Paulson a month later, which actually meant the man didn’t know what the shit he was doing.
Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time and had a hand in putting the original nonsense together.
This entire financial system bailout/save-the-bankers scheme is akin to having the fox guard the hen-house.
Blue-collar vs white-collar nowadays, even within its own self, like reports CitiGroup engaging in “Recessionary Discrimination” in laying off people, or even with new jobs lagging, medical people are in high demand — a circle of employment spiraling down.
According to the above-mentioned Andrew Sum, professor of labor economics at Northeastern University, education is still the key: “It is well-documented that the more education you have the easier it is to find a new job…This is why we’ve seen virtually no net losses among white-collar workers,” he said.
Although there’s been some net job gains for black women, not so for black men, and in the Hispanic community, men have absorbed about 80 percent of the layoffs, while with whites it’s 75 percent.
Where are we going with this?
In the meantime, economists high and low are still searching for the bottom of the blue-collar, mostly male recession barrel, only to come up with bigger and bigger unemployment numbers.
“The magnitude of this is alarming,” Mr. Sum said. “People say, ‘Why does it seem so much worse?’ and the answer is because it is.”
Horse walks into a bar, bartender asks, ‘Why the long face?’
When Smart-Ass Reporters Ask Dumb-Ass Questions
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News people working the White House are way-too-cool for school — Last night, they acted the arrogant clowns displaying delusional as opposed to actual smarts during President Obama’s press conference.
(Illustration found here).
Obama is a slick guy and the slick comes from within — Josh Marshall at TPM hit the eye-tooth right on the head, noting US peoples are right now “looking for competence and command, a sense that someone is sailing the ship, at helm with a clear sense of where they’re going.”
No one knows right now what’s going to happen with this horrific-mangled financial system, despite all the bluster — No one knows for sure, but a real leader also has to comfort.
Hence, Obama’s mug, voice and body has been all over the place his first 64 days in office, even hitting late-night TV, utilizing his administration’s biggest asset — himself.
In public appearances, from a joint session of Congress to town-hall meetings to shooting hoops last summer in Kuwait, Obama has always displayed an acute public sense, a kind of fore-knowledge if you will, of what people want to hear.
He also seems to understand the vital point of it all: The ability to communicate that ‘what people want to hear’ with seemingly sincere confidence.
And ostensibly with good grace — Even if the news is not so good.
Last night, he returned to the early campaign trail with a classroom-like exposition:
Instead, in his second prime-time news conference from the White House, it was Barack Obama the lecturer, a familiar character from early in the campaign.
Placid and unsmiling, he was the professor in chief, offering familiar arguments in long paragraphs — often introduced with the phrase, “as I said before” — sounding like the teacher speaking in the stillness of a classroom where students are restlessly waiting for the ring of the bell.
…
At a time of anger and anxiety in the country, Mr. Obama showed little emotion.
He rarely cracked a joke or raised his voice. Even when he declared himself upset over the $165 million in bonuses paid this month by the American International Group despite its taxpayer bailout, his voice sounded calm and unbothered.
“I’m as angry as anybody about those bonuses,” he said, adding that executives needed to learn that “enriching themselves on the taxpayers’ dime is inexcusable.”
To a certain extent, Mr. Obama’s demeanor could have been calculated — an effort, aides said, to lower the temperature after a supercharged week and nudge the country toward what Mr. Obama considers the more pressing issues of fixing the banking system and reviving the economy.
Even after excoriating the A.I.G. executives, he cautioned that “the rest of us can’t afford to demonize every investor or entrepreneur who seeks to make a profit.”
Recent polls, however, suggest US peoples are still confident in his performance, even with the AIG bonus fiasco.
Despite talking through the pratfalls of a tanking economy, Obama last night also had to put up with the dumb-ass White House press corp, who apparently couldn’t muster up any decent, pertinent questions, a shameful performance made worse by some non-professional, high-salaried, always-obnoxious asshole reporter people — Representatives of the MSM.
First nearly out of the chute was Chuck Todd of NBC, a most-pure example of the Peter Principle and a shallow political commentator to boot (Seen making a question pitch in the above photo at Obama’s press conference last month), with a bone-headed question about the obvious.
Some have compared this financial crisis to a war. And in times of war, past presidents have called for some form of sacrifice.
Some of your programs, whether for Main Street or Wall Street, have actually cushioned the blow for those that were irresponsible during this economic period of prosperity or supposed prosperity that you were talking about.
Why, given this new era of responsible that you’re asking for, sacrificing to participate in this economic recovery?
On TV anyway, Obama looked liked he winced, not from the question, but from the absurdity of it, and then laid it all out once again:
Well, as — as I said, the American people are making a host of sacrifices in their individual lives.
We are going through an extraordinary crisis, but we believe that, taken — if you take the steps that we’ve already taken, with respect to housing, with respect to small businesses, if you look at what we’re doing in terms of increasing liquidity in the financial system, that the steps that we’re taking can actually stabilize the economy and get it moving again.
After a couple of weak, but decent questions on middle-class tax cuts and cap-and-trade measures in Obama’s proposed budget, up steps Chip Reid of CBS with a real-smart-ass beef on the looming $1 trillion deficit (Reid, one remembers, got his panties in a bind earlier this month when during a questioning of Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, made a catty aside about the “ugly heads” of Democrats), but neglected to mention in his question Obama’s heady inheritance.
First of all, I suspect that some of those Republican critics have a short memory, because, as I recall, I’m inheriting a $1.3 trillion deficit, annual deficit, from them.
That would be point number one.
Point number two.
Both under our estimates and under the CBO estimates, both — the most conservative estimates out there, we drive down the deficit over the first five years of our budget.
The deficit is cut in half.
And folks aren’t disputing that.
Reid is an idiot.
Maybe the top dumb-ass question last night, however, came from chub-cheeks nit-wit Ed Henry of CNN, who tried to pop a “gotcha” question, but instead ended looking mean-spirited and sore:
You spoke again at the top about your anger about AIG.
You’ve been saying that for days now.
But why is it that it seems Andrew Cuomo seems to be in New York getting more actual action on it?
Pricking at the AIG bonus flap last week amid the talk vs action routine, Henry continued, saying that although Obama has “been very critical of President Bush doubling the national debt,” then predicted failure for the current budget when spending skyrockets: “You keep saying that you’ve inherited a big fiscal mess. Do you worry, though, that your daughters, not to mention the next president, will be inheriting an even bigger fiscal mess if the spending goes out of control?”
Obama is slick indeed and with a knife-like, serious edge, replied as if talking to an ignorant smarty-pants:
Of course I do, Ed, which is why we’re doing everything we can to reduce that deficit.
Look, if this were easy, then, you know, we would have already had it done, and the budget would have been voted on, and everybody could go home.
This is hard.
He went to explain about “a structural deficit that’s going to take a long time” to put behind us and how health-care will benefit in the long run, but Henry wouldn’t leave it alone, following up: “But on AIG, why did you wait — why did you wait days to come out and express that outrage?”
The president smiled and retorted:
It took us a couple of days because I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.
The answer created laughter in the press room.
Another good look at Henry’s time at bat can be found here.
And then there’s the incompetent Ann Compton of ABC.
She let loose a question that was so dated, it was near embarrassing: “Could I ask you about race?”
(An inquiry most likely way-way-down on the list of questions for the new president).
And after listening quietly, looking like he was a bit uneasy, too, Obama answered:
I think that the last 64 days has been dominated by me trying to figure out how we’re going to fix the economy, and that affects black, brown and white.
And, you know, obviously, at the inauguration, I think that there was justifiable pride on the part of the country that we had taken a step to move us beyond some of the searing legacies of racial discrimination in this country, but that lasted about a day.
And — and, you know, right now, the American people are judging me exactly the way I should be judged.
And that is: Are we taking the steps to improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to re-open, keep America safe?
And that’s what I’ve been spending my time thinking about.
A transcript of the press conference can be found via RealClearPolitics.
Odd, but not a question about Tim Geithner’s famous bank plan unrolled just on Monday — one would think there would be a shitload of questions about crook-faced Geithner’s three-forked scheme to massage $420 billion in toxic loans and assets off US bank balance sheets.
No, the press is too hard-pressed to catch Obama off guard.
And for a look at the media looking not at itself, but Obama, see here.
Sugar-Coat the Stress
Filed Under Finance, Media, Musings | Leave a Comment
A side effect of continuous bad news on the doorstep.
This morning in the New York Times:
The recession seems to have a sweet tooth. As unemployment has risen and 401(k)’s have shrunk, Americans, particularly adults, have been consuming growing volumes of candy, from Mary Janes and Tootsie Rolls to Gummy Bears and cheap chocolates, say candy makers, store owners and industry experts.
Theories vary on exactly why. For many, sugar lifts spirits dragged low by the languishing economy. For others, candy also provides a nostalgic reminder of better times. And not insignificantly, it is relatively cheap.
(Illustration found here).
When every other damn thing is in the tank, candy is riding high.
Many big candy makers are reporting rising sales and surprising profits even as manufacturers of other products are struggling to stay afloat.
Cadbury reported a 30 percent rise in profits for 2008 while Nestle’s profits grew by 10.9 percent, according to public filings.
Hershey, which struggled for much of 2008, saw profits jump by 8.5 percent in the fourth quarter.
Lindt & Sprüngli, which specializes in more expensive products like Lindt and Ghirardelli chocolate, announced that even though it expects to close some of its luxury retail stores this year, it also expects chocolate sales to remain strong through mainstream retailers like Wal-Mart and Target.
“All is well in candy land,” said Jamie Hallman, owner of the Sweetdish candy store in the Marina district of San Francisco.
And this is sweet, too:
Congressional Republicans are telling Dick Cheney to go back to his undisclosed location and leave them alone to rebuild the Republican Party without his input.
…
The veep, who showed a penchant for secrecy during eight years in the White House,has popped up in media interviews to defend the Bush-Cheney record while suggesting that the country is not as safe under President Obama.
Rep. John Duncan Jr. (R-Tenn.) said, “He became so unpopular while he was in the White House that it would probably be better for us politically if he wouldn’t be so public…But he has the right to speak out since he’s a private citizen.”
And this, too, with a near-illegal twist:
WBAL in Baltimore reported today that Jenna Bush’s Secret Service detail vehicle was towed due to six unpaid parking tickets. A second Secret Service vehicle was also ticketed.
Bush and her hubby, Henry Hager, moved to Baltimore after their wedding, where she is a school teacher, and he is employed by Constellation Energy.
Big deal, right?
Well, according to the Secret Service’s web site, Jenna Bush is not entitled to Secret Service detail as she is over age 16.
So…why are our tax dollars paying for at least two Secret Service vehicles to be dispatched to Jenna?
Yeah, and hand over those damn Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!