I’m pretty bummed that some sort of server upgrade ate most of the 2005 – 2007 posts of this blog. There were a couple of nice posts about how weird I find it that although you can get from Clinton to The Loop in two and-a-half hours, most people in Clinton would never think of making the journey on their own.

Which is a pity. Because that’s an easy day trip and we’re talking one of the great cities of the planet that is closer than Cedar Falls, Ames or Des Moines.

All of this is apropos of nothing save that I love the tumblr blog, Fuck Yeah! Chicago.

Looking North On Wabash & Lake

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Gelinas makes a good point. But this is hardly a comprehensive solution either to pricing externalities or to controlling oil demand. Note first this free-market pricing of risk will only work if the U.S. government holds oil companies’ (in this case BP) feet to the fire for the full cost of damage and cleanup. Which will require that a reasonable number of pro-business politicians ignore the special pleading of BP and do the right thing. Because, in the case of the Deepwater Horizon spill, those costs are likely to run well into the tens of billions of dollars; enough to wipe out the better part of a couple of years’ worth of BP profits.

But U.S.-based production accounts only for a smidgen of world oil production. Oil is a fungible asset. BP sells its oil from the wellhead to refiners who get crude from all over the world, refine it, then sell it back to BP’s chains of gas stations. The oil from a BP pump doesn’t necessarily come from a BP well somewhere. I might come from a Petrobras or a Yukos well.

Those who think that free-market approaches to pricing in externalities and risk would be well-advised to do a little research on the success of the residents of the Niger Delta region in getting adequate settlement for the environmental degradation of their region by various oil companies. Hint: not much. Or of the efforts of environmental activists in Russia. Hint: they end up dead.

The problem for Tourre—and for Wall Street more broadly—is that they’re so intent on proving that what they did was legal that they can’t see that what they did was wrong. These are men (and they usually are men) of the market, and they played by the market’s rules. And the market’s rules are these: you make as much money as you can without actually going to jail. This is a world in which people are applauded for “blowing up the customer”—that is to say, offloading a crap product on a dim investor.

Once upon a time, the financial services industry existed to perform an essential social good: they provided capitol that businesses large and small required to run their operations, expand and to build stuff. They charged interest on that capitol to hedge against non-payment and to provide income to the banks. And to the extent that those businesses paid back that capitol (almost always), the owners and investors of the financial services businesses thrived. Long before the invention of deriviatives and hedge funds, working for a large investment bank was a ticket to if not filthy lucre, at least to a very well-off life.

At some point this all changed. And the point of the exercise became to make money for the sake of making money. How much money wasn’t even the point. As many wealthy individuals have said over the years, after the first few million the money doesn’t matter any more, its just a way of keeping score.

If anything has been rather well proved by the last few years it is the lie that the financial services industry should not be excessively regulated because it is the essential engine of economic growth.

The financial services industry worked just fine at “being the engine of economic growth,” for the nation in the sixty-six years between the enactment of the Glass-Stegall Act in 1933 and its repeal in 1999. Any argument that returning to such a strict regulatory regime would somehow strangle the American ecnomy is, quire frankly, bullshit.

President and CEO Thomas J. Donohue issued a statement Sunday night saying the bill “ignores the will of the American people” and isn’t real health care reform.

It’s good to see that even the really reactionary top leadership of the CoC realizes that this is a done deal and continuing obstruction and hysterical gibbering is getting to be pretty self-destructive.

Via David Brooks, a tale of scandinavian toughness and community courage:

In 1943, [Jan] Baalsrud was a young instrument maker who was asked to sneak back into Norway to help the anti-Nazi resistance.
He was hunted by about 50 Germans and left a trail in the deep snow. He’d lost one boot and sock, and he was bleeding from where his big toe had been shot off. He scrambled across the island and swam successively across the icy sound to two other islands. On the second, he lay dying of cold and exhaustion on the beach.

Two girls found and led him to their home. And this is the core of the story. During the next months, dozens of Norwegians helped Baalsrud get across to Sweden. Flouting any sense of rational cost-benefit analysis, families and whole villages risked their lives to help one gravely ill man, who happened to drop into their midst.

Baalsrud was clothed and fed and rowed to another island. He showed up at other houses and was taken in. He began walking across the mountain ranges on that island in the general direction of the mainland, hikes of 24, 13 and 28 hours without break.

And it gets worse from there.

And from the London Times, The Man Who Broke Into Auschwitz

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the pan-ache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in.

Avey was a troublesome prisoner. In the summer of 1943 he was deported to Auschwitz, in Poland, and interned in a small PoW camp on the periphery of the IG Farben factory. The main Jewish camps were several miles to the west. “I’d lost my liberty, but none of my spirit,” he says. “I was still determined to give as good as I got.”

But he knew immediately that this was a different order of prison. “The Stripeys — that’s what we called the Jewish prisoners — were in a terrible state. Within months they were reduced to waifs and then they disappeared. The stench from the crematoria was appalling, civilians from as far away as Katowice were complaining. Everybody knew what was going on. Everybody knew.”

Avey shaved his head and blackened his face. At the allocated time, he and the Dutch Jew sneaked into a disused shed. There they swapped uniforms and exchanged places. Avey affected a slouch and a cough, so that his English accent would be disguised should he be required to speak.

“I joined the Stripeys and marched into Monowitz, a predominantly Jewish camp. As we passed beneath the Arbeit Macht Frei [work makes you free] sign, everyone stood up straight and tried to look as healthy as they could. There was an SS officer there, weeding out the weaklings for the gas. Overhead was a gallows, which had a corpse hanging from it, as a deterrent. An orchestra was playing Wagner to accompany our march. It was chilling.”

They were herded through the camp, carrying the bodies of those who had died that day. “I saw the Frauenhaus — the Germans’ brothel of Jewish girls — and the infirmary, which sent its patients to the gas after two weeks. I committed everything to memory. We were lined up in the Appellplatz for a roll call, which lasted almost two hours. Then we were given some rotten cabbage soup and went to sleep in lice-infested bunks, three to a bed.”

The night was even worse than the daytime. “As it grew dark, the place was filled with howls and shrieks. Many people had lost their minds. It was a living hell. Everyone was clutching their wooden bowls under their heads, to stop them getting stolen.” Lobethall had bribed Avey’s bedfellows with cigarettes. “They gave me all the details,” he says, “the names of the SS, the gas chambers, the crematoria, everything. After that, they fell asleep. But I lay awake all night.”

A lot of people of a certain political straind have a tendency to those throw around labels like “evil” and “heroes” with abandon in relation to our current situation here in the United States and abroad. Stories like Baalsrud’s and Avey’s remind us of the true meaning of both of those words.

Also, next week I will be in Des Moines on business on Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll be staying overnight Wednesday night and instead of staying in my hotel watching porn, I figure I could take the same $20 or so and have some stimulating conversation.

Drop me a line if you want to suggest a meeting place somewhere a) a short cab-ride from the west end of downtown b) that has good food and good beer. I’ll post the location early next week.

I hate you, you little rodent bastard.

India-based Reliance is continuing to try to purchase the bankrupt chemical giant. The offer, initally tendered in November, stands at $13.5b.

The Dutch-based Lyondell is continuing to work through its Chapter 11 reorganization, and recently filed a motion for settling claims of creditors and setting up a litigation trust fund.

Bridgepoint Education-Ashford University

Of course the big news for Bridgepoint and Ashford recently was the purchase of the property of the Clinton Country Club for an undisclosed price $2.5 million.

Ashford University is adding to its educational offerings, most recently adding specializations to its MBA program. Ashford graduated a record number of students at it winter ceremony and attracted a prominent commencement speaker in National Public Radio’s senior correspondent, Susan Stamberg.

RockTenn

RockTenn posted very good earnings growth in its Q1 2010 filing.

The Norcross, Ga.-based packaging and folding cartons maker (NYSE: RKT) had net income of $56.3 million and earnings of $1.43 a share, compared with net income of $30.6 million and earnings of 79 cents a share in the first quarter of 2009.

The company has also recently announced price increases in its corrugated box and sheet as well as its uncoated recycled paper products.

ADM

ADM is beginning initial startup of the bioplastics plant in Clinton.
The cogeneration facility is up and running.

The company also donated 700 tons of rice to Haiti relief.