Fess up - you grinned when you heard that Goldman Sachs was charged with fraud, didn't you?

"WALL STREET POWERHOUSE ACCUSED OF FRAUD: The government says Goldman Sachs & Co. sold mortgage investments without telling the buyers that the securities were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them to fail. Goldman denies the civil fraud allegations."
{Google News}

The Commission brings this securities fraud action against Goldman, Sachs & Co. ("GS&Co") and a GS&Co employee, Fabrice Tourre ("Tourre"), for making materially misleading statements and omissions in connection with a synthetic collateralized debt obligation ("CDO") GS&Co structured and marketed to investors. This synthetic CDO, ABACUS 2007AC1, was tied to the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities ("RMBS") and was structured and marketed by GS&Co in early 2007 when the United States housing market and related securities were beginning to show signs of distress. {SEC versus Goldman Sachs & Co. and Another}

I know I had a grin from ear to ear when I heard that the financial anaconda had finally been caught out and I think I'm not alone in that. I'm not sure who demanded trial by jury but I'm willing to bet that there will be few in any American juror pool who will be unaffected by the sub-prime debacle and it aftermath.

"Ever since the financial catastrophe of 2007-08, Goldman Sachs has been hyper-vigilant when it comes to the media. Many like myself have been complained about and rudely denied access. The blogosphere has been patrolled 24/7 so that critics can be promptly pounced on.
Now we know why.
Yesterday's bombshell announcement that Goldman was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is hardly surprising. This is Wall Street's last survivor, and it is about to be ordered off the island too, so to speak." {My confidence in the SEC is restored}

Tweets on the subject:
timbray: Any morning where Goldman Sachs is getting prosecuted by the Feds is a good morning. Pity it's civil not criminal.

theexpert: Please ... PLEASE, prove to me that Twitter has some relevance. Make Goldman Sachs a trending topic.

bobhayward: RT @Lucas_Wyrsch: In Goldman Sachs We Do Not Trust http://dlvr.it/XFbl http://myloc.me/65XdS

KeithSwiderski How can the government sue Goldman Sachs? I thought Goldman Sachs ran the government?

In which era do Australian judges dwell?

Every so often a news report comes along which just confirms my suspicion that Australian judges live in another time and place from the rest of us mere mortals.
The Northern Territory News came up with this last Thursday:
"CHIEF Minister Paul Henderson said yesterday he did not believe a 13-year-old girl could consent to having sex with her teacher.
He made the comments after a Supreme Court judge said a teacher was not a rapist "as that word is ordinarily understood" because there was no evidence the sex he had with his student was not consensual.....
Justice Mildren said the teacher was not a "sexual predator" - but had suffered from a "life of loneliness".
WTF? Sexual abuse of a child is A O.K. if the person with all the power has a lousy life?
Justice Dean Mildren, gawd help us all, lectures to aspiring lawyers at the Northern Territory University besides supplying ready-made justifications to human predators.
Mildren is a serial offender when it comes to offering excuses for those caught abusing children.
This is de judge in 2008:
"Justice Dean seems to think that because teacher Paul Incani was "in love" with his sixteen year-old student {fifteen at time of the offence}, and the student was a "willing" partner in the relationship, that Mr Incani has been poorly treated and deserves to be freed from jail forthwith."

NSW: The prison state

If further evidence is needed to show that the NSW government has adopted a "lock 'em up and throw away the keys" approach to sentencing offenders, look no further than a sentence imposed by a magistrate in a NSW local court this week.

An offender appeared in a local court on a charge of driving with a mid-range prescribed concentration of alcohol. Admittedly the offender wasn't a clean-skin, but when a suggestion was made that the offender be sentenced to periodic detention the magistrate was told by a court officer there were no places available in periodic detention so that was ruled out as an option. Result: the offender was sentenced to six months’ jail. Read a report on the matter here.

Also, NSW magistrates have stated that their hands are often tied in relation to mentally ill persons when they appear in court. Those persons often end up in jail due to the lack of proper facilities that would better cater for their situations.

A magistrate said, “You shouldn’t have mentally ill people in jail – (it's) just not the place for them. There are clearly people who I’ve had before me – if you look at the facts and their background – and clearly there is a mental health issue – and yet a lot of the times they are held in custody when they should really be in hospital."

The magistrate's comment concurred with a media statement from the Mental Health Council of Australia which stated that jail exacerbated mental illness for sufferers, making the system counter productive." Read about this here.

But things don't end there.

Now, the NSW Attorney General, John Hatzistergos, is pushing for violent offenders to be kept in prison beyond their sentences if they show signs of being insufficiently rehabilitated by the NSW prisons system. Hatzistergos reckons special categories of offenders should go to prison for indeterminate periods, until the government decides their time is up. Read more about this here.

Does Target know something about about the Rudd Government's income management scheme that the rest of us don't?

"In its submission to the Senate inquiry into the new policy, the Society of St Vincent de Paul said: "Income management is returning social policy in Australia to the Depression-era Sustenance Allowance, commonly referred to as the 'susso'. The present legislation seeks to turn back the clock to provide the modern equivalent to a food ticket."
Of the 80 welfare organisations that made submissions to the inquiry, only two were in favour. Government reports have noted bad outcomes from income management over the last two years, including the 2008 Yu report and the 2009 productivity report.
The reports said that since income management began domestic violence reports in the targeted communities have increased 61%, substance abuse by 77%, school enrolments have remained unchanged, child malnutrition is higher and the total number of confirmed cases of child abuse rose from 66 in 2006-07 to 227 in 2008-09." {The Green Left in April 2010}

Nearly fell over backwards this week when I discovered that Target stores in New South Wales are advertising the Rudders-Macklin Centrelink BasicsCard beside their cash registers.
Maud up the Street swears that one store on the North Coast insisted that this income management scheme went operational this month across the state.
Now I know Big Brother government has spread like wildfire in Australia, but surely even Mother Macklin wouldn't impose national welfare payment quarantining for the unemployed, families and students before the NT state-wide trial of this scheme had even commenced.
So has this big multinational chain store got it wrong or is welfare payment rationing being advanced by stealth?
Either way it's not a good look and Maud reckons she's going to think twice about shopping at a store which obviously relishes its role in beating up on the less well-off.

The little town that doesn't....

Doesn't want McDonald's plastic hambugers and wall-to-wall litter that is.

Pic found on Facebook

Mercurius on Hockey-ed Wingnuts

Can't do better today than to read Mercurius across at Larvatus Prodeo as he hold forth on Wingnut as she is spoke: “Personal responsibility”.
Here's the journalist's take on Aussie Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey's free market credentials Joe Hockey blames government intervention for global financial crisis; and here is Uncle Joe's speech IN DEFENCE OF ENTERPRISE' ADDRESS TO THE EIDOS INSTITUTE 12:30PM WEDNESDAY 14 APRIL 2010.
Particularly enjoy the fact that the boy thinks that:
"Enterprise separates the human species from the rest of the Earth’s living creatures. Without it, human beings would have achieved nothing beyond our most basic animal needs".
Yup. Forget empathy, altruism, collective effort and opposable thumbs - 'twas the individual and free markets which set us firmly on the path out of pre-historic Africa.

My old mum was right - Teh Tube makes us dumb

One from the locker that I forgot to post!

I don't know how many times as a teenager I was told that the television in the living room was an 'idiot box'.
All those visions of Frankie Ifield yodelling, rope petticoats swirling and (by today's standards) sedate rocking around the clock apparently set the old grey matter permanently on snooze mode.
Only grandads glued to the cricket on the radio were immune to its insidious effects.
And it looks like my old mum was right - lotsa Aussies have finally forgotten how to turn the thing on!


mUmBRELLA says: "Total prime time TV audiences have fallen below 5m in Australia, according to a new analysis of viewing data so far this year. This is despite the arrival of the new Freeview and subscription TV channels to tempt viewers. According to the analysis of figures across the prime 6pm to 10.30pm slot, the average audience has fallen from 5,027,868 in 2008 to 4,969,810 in 2009. This marks a decline of around 60,000 prime time viewers per evening – or a fall of just over 1%. This is despite the Australian population growing by more than 2% during the same period."

Pic from GraniteGrok

Who was it that told McDonald's that it didn't have to bother with decent supporting documentation for its proposed fast food development in Yamba?

In a previous post I pointed out that the Australian arm of that large foreign multinational McDonald's had included a misleading Traffic Impact Assessment with its Development Application (DA) for a 24 hour eat-in and drive-through fast food outlet in Yamba at the mouth of the Clarence River on the NSW North Coast.

A brief look at the Statement of Environmental Effects (SEE) it also lodged with Clarence Valley Council in support of this new development shows that its spin above fact attitude continues.

On Page 13 McDonald's describes a prefabricated building of "compressed fibre cement with applied finishes. The applied finishes are in a combination of colours, including grey, black, brown and red that provides a distinctive 'MacDonald's' look" as being "designed to reflect a coastal character".

This hardly sounds like a building with coastal character or one which would be markedly sympathetic to either Yamba's existing post-2000 commercial and original architecture mix in Treelands Drive and environs or to the town's tourism branding objectives.

Based on the basic layout diagrams supplied, the McDonald's store intended for Yamba may look very like the facade of this one at Sydney's domestic airport although positioned differently on the proposed block:
That McDonald's has done better than these aesthetically barren generic pre-fabs is evidenced by what the company has done in other countries which have obviously demanded a more culturally sensitive approach and more appropriately sized signage, as exampled by Singapore:
McDonald's Australia has not confined itself to spin about its architectural plans. At times its description of matters both it and Clarence Valley shire councillors must properly consider in relation to the Treelands Drive DA is downright misleading.

In the text on Page 8 of the SEE, McDonald's states; "Bounding the subject land is a a vacant lot zoned 2(a) Residential under Maclean Local Environmental Plan (LEP) 2001...."

However, there are actually two adjoining vacant residential lots at the rear of the site with building entitlements.

Clarence Valley Council's own mapping supplied to McDonald's clearly shows that although both are zoned low density residential and are on the same deposited plan, these are two separate lots. As does Council's online interactive mapping which clearly indicates two different street numbers, lot numbers and land area dimensions:
Google Maps and Google Earth also show these two lots - but just to be on the safe side I telephoned the Yamba real estate agency which is currently selling one of these vacant lots and this agency is under the same impression.

If all this mapping is correct then this is a serious omission on McDonald's part because both of these residential lots in Kookaburra Court need to have any impacts on amenity considered before development consent is either given or refused, as does the house which abuts a rear corner of the development site. Consideration which McDonald's appears intent on downplaying by 'disappearing' one lot entirely from much of its documentation text.

As for its general understanding of the commercial precinct in which it seeks to place this hamburger joint - this would border on the hilarious if the issue was not so serious.

McDonald's asserts that two businesses (which are very visibly extinct in Treelands Drive) are actually alive and well and, doesn't appear to understand that there is a permanent cinema in Yamba which is not only alive and well but in the process of expanding its seating.

Now McDonald's Australia is no stranger to NSW planning legislation and local government requirements, so its very lackadaisical and unprofessional approach to the Yamba development application is quite frankly puzzling.

To recap; this multinational states that it doesn't know details of bus routes in the immediate vicinity of the proposed development site, has not done a meaningful study of the two Treelands Drive intersections subject to significant increases in traffic if the development were to go ahead, appears ignorant of the number of properties adjoining the site, obviously has not adequately looked at the character of either the street or town and probably intends to build the restaurant to a set design with no distinctive 'coastal' character.

On 9 February 2010 McDonald's and Clarence Valley Council staff had a pre-lodgement meeting and the company asserts in the SEE Introduction that the DA "meets pre-lodgement conditions".

Which leaves me pondering a question: Who was it that apparently gave McDonald's Australia the impression that it would be acceptable for the company to just throw together a token Statement of Environmental Effects and Traffic Assessment attached to the building design and site layout?

I can think of no other reason for such inaccurate information being so insouciantly presented for consideration by Council in the Chamber in the near future, except that McDonald's has formed an opinion that the Yamba community can be discounted and shire councillors herded like so may sheep.

How Teh Mighty Marohasy has fallen

Had to smile at this from Jen herself:
Jennifer Marohasy is sceptical of the consensus position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and gives entertaining and informative talks on 'Climategate'. Dr Marohasy is quoted in the leaked emails from the UK's Climate Research Unit.
Gee whiz - quoted in a few emails. What fame!

On climate change scepticism...

Excerpts from the transcript of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium. If you find those interesting go to the transcript and audio at the Science Show

Riley Dunlap on climate change sceptics as authors:

Back in the '80s there were only a couple of years, in the '90s we miss a few years, sort of a reasonably consistent flow and we get in the 2000s, and there's just been an explosion in these books quite recently. If we do it by decade it jumps out at you more. We've jumped up to 64 books espousing some version of climate change denial since 2000. Several of these books are bestsellers. On Amazon, you find them in Borders, Barnes & Noble, Hastings, they're carried by the Conservative Book Club, they reach a large audience. Now, the key issue; how many of these books are linked to conservative think-tanks? It turns out to be 78%. What you see here originally almost all were. I'm going to give you some insight into where these come from.....

Okay, now we get some insight here. We now distinguish between natural science PhDs, a PhD in another discipline, and no PhD. What of course you can see is the lowest connection to think-tanks are down here among people without PhDs. In addition, a main source of books these days are self-published books, Author Press et cetera, Author House, I think it's called, anyone can publish a book. And another thing that's going on is a lot of these books are self-published and these are the folks who aren't affiliated with the think-tank. I found one, a retired real estate agent in British Columbia, he started writing books after he retired and he decided to do one on climate change because it's a hoax et cetera.

William Freudenburg on those anti-science websites and vested interest think tanks:

Usually at a AAAS meeting when there's any talk about the connections between science and society it's in the old framework of public understanding of science. How well is the information getting to society? There's less attention to what some sociology and philosophy of science people have written about, about how scientists are affected by society. When you get outside of the halls of the AAAS, there's plenty of attention, especially in the United States, and it's almost all bad: JunkScience.com, which was set up by someone who used to fight the so-called junk science on cigarette smoking; American Thinker...they lie; ClimateSceptic.com, ClimateSceptics.org, which looks a lot like Wikipedia, doesn't it.

Then blizzards happen and of course we conclude from this...Inhofe is out there building an igloo...that if it snows in Washington DC that proves that the global climate is getting colder. You've got some very conservative outlets that pick up the trope and repeat it that scientists are hiding evidence, and eventually it quite often gets into relatively mainstream media such as CNN. 'Is this a trick or is this the truth?' And you find a few important scientists saying that every error exaggerated the impact of change. That's a testable hypothesis.......

And you heard from Dr Dunlap that that campaign is going on today.

Some of his other research that you didn't hear about, an earlier study he did with Jacques and Freeman, found 141 books expressing scepticism about anything environmental. And in that earlier study, 92% of the books were from conservative think-tanks. And this is not by any subtle way of doing the math, either the author worked for it, they published it, or both. In essence, there would not be a so-called scepticism literature if it were not for the work of some well funded, hard working, skilled in PR, conservative think-tanks.

Stephen Schneider on the scientist as sceptic:

So we're going to talk about the issue of scepticism. I'm going to start right out now; what's the difference between scepticism and denial? There's no such thing as a good scientist who isn't a sceptic. I changed my opinion in 1970 from cooling to warming, published it first, it's one of my proudest moments in science because we found, as the evidence accumulated, that there were a number of reasons, it's all explained in chapter one of Science as a Contact Sport, and I still have to hear things from those famous climate professors, the ones that publish all the papers in the referee journals, professors Limbaugh and Will, you know, about how... 'Oh Schneider, he's just an environmentalist for all temperatures', it's a great line!....

The purpose in the advocacy world is to win for the client or the ideology. In science that is a quick ticket to not getting funded, not getting promoted and not getting your papers accepted. So you don't start with a level playing field because the two epistemologies of advocacy and science are so diametrical that it therefore is actually career counterproductive for scientists to try to act in the same behavioural way that the opponents do.