GM repaid taxpayers? Not even close :(

Shikha Dalmia dissects the news story, and General Government Motors' claim, that GM has paid the government back.  (Dalmia is also from India.  And, no, I don't know her; India is a land of a billion-plus people!!!)
First, what was the news item?  In his weekly address, the President talked about this:

Fresh off the news that General Motors had paid back its taxpayer-backed loans five years ahead of schedule, Obama said the decision to help the companies as proven to be less costly than the alternative.

The CEO of GM wrote an op-ed in the WSJ, and the title of that was: The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full

So, what does Dalmia say about this?

when Mr. Whitacre says GM has paid back the bailout money in full, he means not the entire $49.5 billion--the loan and the equity. In fact, he avoids all mention of that figure in his column. He means only the $6.7 billion loan amount.

The rest is not cash but taxpayer our equity in the corporation--yes, lest we forget, we are the majority owners over at GM.
But, Dalmia says that is not all; it gets worse:

the company has applied to the Department of Energy for $10 billion in low (5%) interest loan to retool its plants to meet the government's tougher new CAFÉ (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. However, giving GM more taxpayer money on top of the existing bailout would have been a political disaster for the Obama administration and a PR debacle for the company. Paying back the small bailout loan makes the new--and bigger--DOE loan much more feasible.
In short, GM is using government money to pay back government money to get more government money. And at a 2% lower interest rate at that. This is a nifty scheme to refinance GM's government debt--not pay it back!
GM boasts that, because it is doing so well, it is paying the $6.7 billion five years ahead of schedule since it was not due until 2015. So will there be an accelerated payback of the rest of the $49.6 billion investment? No. That goal has been pushed back, as it turns out.

Hmmm .... hire a couple of accountants and executives who can juggle numbers .... wait a minute; wasn't that Enron's approach as well? Ahem ....

The geography of slavery

Henry Louis Gates has a neat op-ed in the NY Times on the complexities of identifying the parties responsible for the horrible trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Gates refers to this database, where you find a treasure of maps on this subject, including the following map:

The topic of slavery is always like the topic of the Holocaust: every time I read something about these topics, I simply cannot understand how humans allowed these to happen. History is full of such atrocities, I suppose ... and, yet, even the President is so cautious about using the "genocide" word when he referred to the manner in which the Ottoman Turks practically wiped out a good chunk of the Armenians ...

Graham Slam :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Straight to Video
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

What a country!

After watching the Daily Show's take on the death threats against the creators of South Park, and Comedy Central's censoring of the show, I was reminded of Yakov Smirnoff's line: "America, what a country!"
What's the background, you ask?  South Park showed a character in a bear suit said to be the Prophet Muhammad.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
South Park Death Threats
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

More on Obama and NASA

More on Diane Wood for the Supreme Court

As I have remarked often in this blog, I am a huge fan of Glenn Greenwald's analysis and opinions, particularly on constitutional issues.  So, yes, I have been reading his recent notes on the replacement for Justice Stevens.  From an ill-informed perspective, I had already decided--if I had my vote, it would be for Judge Diane Wood.
Apparently my vote is consistent with Greenwald's bottom-line:

She has not refrained, due to careerism and personal ambition, from issuing principled rulings (even in dissent) that she knew could be used against her (such as the series of abortion rulings which are now being used to depict her -- falsely -- as some sort of pro-abortion extremist).  That she graduated college and law school from the University of Texas (before clerking for Justice Harry Blackmun) will bring some much needed diversity to the Court; by all accounts, this background (along with her raising three children while piling up these accomplishments) causes her to bring a different perspective to the circumstances of individual litigants as compared to the typical Yale/Harvard federal judge or academician.  As a result, her judicial record evinces a steadfast commitment to ensuring (rather than closing off) justice system access for ordinary Americans when the law permits it.  I document these attributes below.
* * * * *
But the starting point for seeing why Wood is such a superior alternative -- what first convinced me -- is the University of Chicago Law Review article she wrote in early 2003, entitled The Rule of Law in Times of Stress.  This courageous analysis was designed to warn the nation about the profound threats posed to the rule of law and the Constitution by excesses in the War on Terrorism, but also more broadly to set forth her general view of the proper role of the Supreme Court when rights are being assaulted and individuals from marginalized groups are being mistreated.  By itself, this article says more than I ever could about why she is really the ideal replacement for Justice Stevens, using every standard which progressives have always claimed to embrace regarding their views of the Court.

And, Greenwald also observes this, which is an important point to note:

Whatever else is true, progressives should demand a replacement for Justice Stevens whose values, approach to the Constitution, and judicial philosophy they can know, as well as someone who has embodied the function the Supreme Court is intended to serve in our political system:  namely, one which checks and limits the other branches and safeguards core Constitutional liberties, especially when the political climate makes it most likely that those rights will be assaulted.

Yes. No more stealth candidates. Never, ever.  That should be our directive to the people we elect to represent us.  For instance, as Greenwald points out, we know exactly what Wood thinks about the rule of law even during times of stress: she has written about it, and she asserts the supremacy of the rule of law.  Wood writes: In a democracy, those responsible for national security ... must do more than say "trust us, we know best"
I am all the more for Judge Wood--just for this sentence alone :)

Cellphones and toilets--the Indian story

No, it is not about how people accidentally drop their cellphones in the toilet, then take them out and use them--after cleaning it, of course ... (hey, yes, I know at least one person who reads this blog who has done that; you know who you are!!!)
But, is about

More people in India, the world’s second most crowded country, have access to a mobile telephone than to a toilet, according to a set of recommendations released today by United Nations University (UNU) on how to cut the number of people with inadequate sanitation. ...
India has some 545 million cell phones, enough to serve about 45 per cent of the population, but only about 366 million people or 31 per cent of the population had access to improved sanitation in 2008.

The issue of lack of sanitation in India is not new to this blog.  I have also written at least one op-ed about this.  I hope this situation will change for the better real soon ...
(photo: from flickr)

Photo (joke) of the day: about Iceland

Creativity, eh :)
 Click on the photo to read the text, and to laugh, if the letters are not clear at this size ...
Here is a video on how another sand sculpture was done .... and watch what happens at the very end

Are "1984" and "Animal Farm" read anymore?

Many moons ago, when I felt like I was at ideological crossroads, knowing not whether I should hang a left, it was George Orwell who guided me along through Animal Farm and 1984 ... granted, it has been years since I read them, and would flunk a test on those two books because I have lost track of the nitty gritty details.  (Editor: you are a faculty with lots of "free" time!  What prevents you from reading them now?)

Then, later on, as a faculty I have every once in a while quoted from Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language, whenever I felt the urge to really "lecture" about writing.  But, any time I bring up Orwell in a classroom environment, that name does not seem familiar to students.  And when I ask about 1984 and Animal Farm, well, no luck there either.

In fact, it is the same story with Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Crime and Punishment, ....

I am beginning to think that there is something odd going on.  I mean, if the purpose behind requiring students to read works in literature is to help them understand many aspects of society, so that they can then be responsible and productive citizens, shouldn't Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451, for instance, be books that college students ought to be familiar with?  In fact, shouldn't these be required readings at the high school level?  So, what do students then read in literature classes anymore, if books like the ones I am ranting about are no longer in the canon?  Spiderman? :P)

Or, are my expectations inconsistent with ground-level reality, whatever that might be?  But then as a university faculty, well, am I not supposedly living in that ground-level reality?  There is something seriously wrong here ....

How we spend money

In an earlier post (it was an op-ed piece) I referred to a study from the Center on Budget and Public Priorities.  Today, I came across this neat graphic (ht) that tells us the reality of the federal budget--that a whole bunch of discussions on items that take up most of the budget are actually off the table: defense, medicare, social security, ... so, at the end of it all, federal and state budget deliberations are essentially about small slices of the pie :(

Quote of the day: on "education conservative"

"I am a political liberal, but once I recognized the relative inertness and stability of the shared background knowledge students need to master reading and writing, I was forced to become an education conservative.  The tacit, intergenerational knowledge required to understand the language of newspapers, lectures, the Internet, and books in the library is inherently traditional and slow to change. Logic compelled the conclusion that achieving the democratic goal of high universal literacy would require schools to practice a large measure of educational traditionalism."

(via Mark Bauerlein) from E.D. Hirsch's The Making of Americans

Washington, DC is the problem :)

No, this is not about American politics.  Far from that.

It is about how DC has always managed to raise my hopes for professional opportunities only to later, well, ...

Back in 1993, I went to DC to pursue a couple of exciting possibilities to work with consultant groups that were doing a lot of international work.  Spent a couple of days there, and then ....

In 1994, I went to DC to interview with the World Bank for the Young Professionals program.  After an extensive process that filtered out the 8,000-plus applicants from all over the world, the Bank invited 80 to the final interview, out of which 40 were to be hired.  So, a fantastic one-in-two chance, right?  I went there, had a great interview, and then ....

Last week I was in DC for the AAG annual meeting, and to also interview for the Book Review Editor position for Professional Geographer.  I was one of the two finalists.  Hey, the same one-in-two chance, right?  I went there, and then ....

Hmmm .... whatever happened to the "third time is the charm" deal?

NASA and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Horror story of the day: rape of Afghan women

Anna Badhken writes in Foreign Policy:

Eight years ago, four Pashtun women told me of their assailants, three fighters from Dostum's militia, Junbish-e-Milli-e-Islami who took turn raping them all night. Technically, only one of them, Nazu, was a woman; her daughters were 10, 12, and 14. The youngest, Bibi Amina, was playing with the fringe of the giant red scarf that covered her head and smiling. It seemed to me that she had not understood what had been done to her.

One of the many incidents of rape as a weapon .... this is after the fall of the Taliban government!!!
And, apparently all those crimes will go unpunished; Badhken concludes:

Last month, the Afghan government confirmed that it had signed into force the National Stability and Reconciliation Law -- and what a tragic misnomer that is. The law effectively amnesties all warlords and fighters responsible for large-scale human rights abuses in the preceding decades. "Their view," says Farid Mutaqi, a human rights worker in Mazar-e-Sharif, "is that justice should be the victim of peace."
You know what this means, daughters of Balkh: This means your rapes will never be punished. Perhaps, in some future iteration of war that has been rolling back and forth through these green wheat fields almost incessantly for millennia, they will be avenged -- through some other rapes, of some other women.

Quote of the day

Whether here within the university, at think tanks, in the government, in the press, or even working with us in the labor movement, working people need the help of engaged policy intellectuals if we are together going to build an economy that works for all.
Think about the great promise of America and the great legacy we have inherited. Our wealth as a nation and our energy as a people can deliver, in the words of my predecessor Samuel Gompers, “more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.” ...
Working people are angry—and we are right to be angry at the betrayal of our economic future. Help us turn that anger into the energy to win a better country and a better world.

From Richard Trumka's (President of AFL-CIO) speech on “Why Working People Are Angry and Why Politicians Should Listen” delivered at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government
ht

Cartoon of the day: Obama and NASA

My comments? Here

All quiet on the Western Front--air space, that is

Notice that according to FlightRadar the only air traffic is in the southernmost parts of Europe?

During the ride from the AAG meetings/hotel to the airport, a fellow passenger in the van was a scholar from Switzerland.  His flight was, of course, canceled.  But, he was heading to the airport because he figured that going to the airport would take less time than being on the phone--apparently the system told him that the projected wait time, due to call volumes, was at least 75 minutes!

Meanwhile, even as we were only half way to the airport, he got a message from his collaborator that Friday would be the earliest he would be able to leave.  This is the second time he has been stranded like this--he was apparently vacationing in the US when the events of 9/11 unfolded :(

A day earlier, at a talk, I was sitting adjacent to a group of grad students from Scandinavia--they seemed to be happy at the thought of an extended visit in the US for which their universities cannot fault them.  I tell you, it all depends on where you are viewing the event from .... perspectives do differ ....

The best comment I overheard at the conference related to all these?  Hasn't Iceland caused enough troubles even before this volcanic eruption? Obviously, the reference was to Iceland's role in gambling banking

Recapping the week of April 12th

The week was a blur ....

• Tuesday was wiped out with the travel to Washington, DC for the AAG conference. 
• Wednesday was the interview to be the next Book Review Editor for Professional Geographer, published by the AAG. 
• Thursday was my research talk on volunteer tourism, and then attending a bunch of talks. 
• Friday was even more intense with listening to Paul Krugman, David Harvey, and Jane Goodall--in different sessions, of course :)
• Saturday was the meeting of a committee that I chair, and then the travel back.

So, as one might imagine, I did not have time to catch up with a lot of things that were happening.  Fortunately, Jon Stewart tells me what happened :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Recap - Week of 4/12/10
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party