JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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1
Why do Japanese change their attitude when they communicate with foreigners?
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2
U.S. Navy investigating how parts fell off aircraft near Atsugi
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3
Confrontation
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4
California court to decide if SeaWorld whales are illegal 'slaves'
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5
Kuroki reported pregnant 2 weeks after denying relationship with Akanishi
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- Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) in Kanto region
- RCS (RCSコーポレーション), Kanto
- Salary: ¥180,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month includes performance bonus
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- Assistant Language Teacher - TOKYO - late-March start
- Interac, Tokyo
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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- Assistant Language Teacher - Kanagawa Prefecture - late-March start
- Interac, Kanagawa
- Salary: ¥230,000 ~ ¥255,000 / Month
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Betzee
Most of us could retire in comfort on what these chumps are getting in one bonus.
Speak for yourself there, bud, I intend to live high on the hog.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
I don't believe AIG has released any information about how these bonuses have been calculated. Where I work, there's an elaborate system of points awarded for each performance standard met or exceeded.
Without that information, the taxpayers, who are picking up the tab for these bonuses, must accept on faith that employees are deserving. My faith has been severely tested over the past six months as revelation after revelation emerged about the reckless manner in Wall Street managed invested funds.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
Madverts,
Patriotism as defined by the Right revealed: put partisan interests ahead of the nation's. I can remember in 2004, after GWB's reelections, being admonished "we don't want our party's success to be built on national failure." That's kinda what happened, on it's own though.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
Rather than follow Grassley's advice, what the AIG execs should do is return the bonuses voluntarily to demonstrate they, along with much of the rest of America, can make do with less in these hard times.
In California, where I live, state government offices are on rolling furlough status. That means if it's Friday, the DMV must be closed. State employees have accepted a reduced paycheck, whatever the contractual obligations of their employer, because the state's coffers have run dry.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
Grassley may want to rethink his admiration for Asian displays of public contrition because the custom also extends to elected officials. I don't recall anyone in Congress apologizing for playing a part in creating the mess.
The AIG execs have become a popular scapegoat which enables people to avoid looking within. Too many Americans lived beyond their means and ended up deeply in hock as evidenced by underwater mortgages and hefty credit card balances which also contributed to the credit crunch.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
Normally I don't find Jonah Goldberg's LA Times column particularly compelling, but he had some good points today:
What signal does it send when the president and Congress make it very clear that they will revisit legal contracts that run afoul of populist outrage? Already, many banks that have received bailout money are returning it -- or trying to -- because the political strings attached hinder them against competitors. Worse, the highly politicized climate requires financial firms to become dependent on the whims of Washington, which can't help thaw out frozen credit markets, particularly when Geithner has yet to explain what his actual policy will be.
The problem is there's nobody with cleans hands in Washington which has become a company town in which too many people profit off government rather than "serving the people." This feeds public dissatisfaction with Congress where both parties are trying to channel populist outrage while cognizant of where it can lead (outlined well by Goldberg).
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
The whole thing was put together at the 11th hour. It was Hank Paulson who did all the talking for the GWB administration. As Treasury Secy, he set up an Office of Financial Stability filled by his own appointees to handle the book-keeping aspects of the bailout. There was no public accountability and that made many leery in addition to the fact Uncle Sam had no experience taking over the financial sector.
Fast forward to the present: It sure doesn't look like it was anything more than direct deposit into the checking account and wait five days for the check to clear as far as conditions were concerned.
Posted in: White House, Congress knew AIG was planning to pay bonuses
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Betzee
The NYT's thinks the "bonus issue" is a distraction from more troubling revelations:
Which brings us to the second disclosure of recent days. It was common knowledge that most of the A.I.G. bailout money had been funneled to the company’s trading partners — banks and other financial firms that would have lost big if A.I.G. were allowed to fail. On Sunday, after much prodding by Congress and the public, A.I.G. finally released the partners’ identities, along with amounts paid thus far to make them whole.
The largest single recipient was Goldman Sachs ($12.9 billion). The amount — hardly chump change even by Wall Street standards — appears to contradict earlier assertions by Goldman that its exposure to risk from A.I.G. was “not material” and that its positions were offset by collateral or hedges. If so, why didn’t the hedges pay up instead of the American taxpayers?
Posted in: Obama berates AIG and vows to try to block bonuses
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Betzee
If Charles Grassley represents the Republican alternative, well 'nuff said.
Posted in: Obama berates AIG and vows to try to block bonuses
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Betzee
This is too much:
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.
Posted in: Obama berates AIG and vows to try to block bonuses
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Betzee
Breath-taking ignorance of how manufacturing supply chains operate.
Chinese factories fill orders from retailers like Wal-Mart which set the price. Buying agents "scour the globe to give shoppers an $8.63 Polo shirt" as an LA Times series put it a few years ago.
When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. demands a lower price for the shirts and shorts it sells by the millions, the consequences are felt in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and here in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory.
The competition to get the contract pits vendor against vendor, country against country. "If you can't fill it at this price, well there's a factory somewhere else that can." To bring it in at that price, corners have to be cut. Among those corners, are environmental safeguards.
There's such a thing as "responsible consumption" and people need to educate themselves about it. While Chinese pollution is not wholly the result of export industries, to argue the point you have to know something about the process.
Posted in: China: Importers need to share blame for emissions
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Betzee
I was in Taiwan, China's renegade province, in the 1980s when the environmental movement was formed while the island was still under martial law. It started when a community resisted hosting a sixth naphtha cracker (六輕) plant. (I haven't the faintest idea what a naphtha cracker plant does, I only know I don't want to live around one.)
As the environmental movement got going in Taiwan, the effect was to send polluting industries scurrying across the strait to China where regulations are quite a bit laxer. This manufacturing migration underscored the reality that environmentalism is driven, to some extent, by the NIMBY (not in my backyard) mentality. Now we've discovered, someone else's background doesn't free us for the impact.
Posted in: China: Importers need to share blame for emissions
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Betzee
"In the UK and Germany there are many coal fired power stations but with currently available technology it is possible to reduce emissions enormously."
The Chinese have followed the "grow first, clean up later" model of economic development. The impetus to upgrade to green technology won't come from being berated by governments whose citizens purchase the goods made under these conditions but the Chinese people themselves, who are beginning to demand a cleaner living environment.
Posted in: China: Importers need to share blame for emissions
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Betzee
“For them to simply sit there and blame it on the previous administration or claim contract—we all know that contracts are valid in this country, but they need to be looked at,” McConnell said. “Did they enter into these contracts knowing full well that, as a practical matter, the taxpayers of the United States were going to be reimbursing their employees? Particularly employees who got them into this mess in the first place? I think it’s an outrage.”
The time to do that was when the bail out was pushed through Congress last fall. It should have been extended with conditions. If the assumption was that these guys would follow the example of Lee Iaccoca, who ran Chrysler when it was bailed out back in the 1980s and accepted a salary of USD 1 while the company's restructuring was being underwritten by the taxpayers, well that was a misjudgment.
Posted in: Outrage grows over millions in AIG bonuses
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Betzee
The terms of the bail-out "contract" were drawn up last fall. If you want Uncle Sam (or AIG) to change them retroactively, well that would undermine our capitalist system. Hence forth no one would have the confidence to conclude a business deal since the laws affecting the contract could change tomorrow.
One of the issues which was raised last fall is the government has no expertise in running private sector enterprises. True, but our financial infrastructure would have collapsed under the banks not be bailed out. Things has reached such a dire stage before corrective action was undertaken in a hasty manner.
Posted in: Insurance giant AIG to pay $165 mil in bonuses despite $170 bil taxpayer bailout
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Betzee
On a nice spring day, such as the one in the photo, my cat much prefers to be in "the killing fields," an overgrown embankment filled with gopher holes.
Posted in: Feline fashion
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Betzee
This cat may like attention which it no doubt gets in this outfit. I play a game called "no claws boxing" with my cat. As soon as the telephone rings and it becomes a multi-tasking moment, well her claws come out.
Posted in: Feline fashion
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Betzee
I really haven't followed this closely so I wasn't aware that "the Prop 8 Legal Defense Fund filed legal briefs defending the constitutionality of Prop 8 and attempting to forcibly divorce 18,000 same-sex couples that were married in California last year. The California Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case on March 5, 2009, with a decision expected within the next 90 days."
Posted in: California's gay marriage battle back in court
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Betzee
One of the reasons it was clear Prop 8 proponents didn't understand the legal terrain they were on was their effort to make passage more palatable by allowing existing same sex marriages to remain vaild.
Correction: Laws cannot be applied retroactively. So passage of Prop 8 could not touch existing same-sex unions. Yet the law is not supposed to apply in a "window of opporunity" fashion to issues which pertain to equal rights under the law.
Posted in: California's gay marriage battle back in court
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Betzee
Molenir,
I've lived in California since 1988 so I've seen a good many ballot initiatives. Most focus on purely regulatory matters such as what information insurance companies can use to set a policy holder's rate. Mundane but important to the pocketbook issues.
It was a surprise to one poster above that blacks and Hispanics voted for Prop 8, which is to say against the legalization of same-sex marriage. Why the surprise? Macho cultures tend not to be tolerate of homosexuality.
But tolerance is not the issue for the judicial system to address. Rather it's equal rights under the law. In a previous ruling, the court could not find any compelling justification to deny same sex couples the right to apply for a marriage license at City Hall. Churches, by contrast, are not obligated to marry any particular couple. Any reason can be used to deny such a request, which usually elicits at least one meeting with the minister who ascertains the maturity of the two parties and their fitness for a lifetime commitment. If s/he decides "No," there's no legal redress since a church wedding is not an entitlement.
One of the reasons it was clear Prop 8 proponents didn't understand the legal terrain they were on was their effort to make passage more palatable by allowing existing same sex marriages to remain vaild. Yet that opens the door to two groups of same-sex couples being treated differently under the law, those who married prior to November 4 and those denied the right to do after Nov 4.
The state now does have a real incentive to say, "OK, we're going to get out of the marriage business altogether, henceforth the state will only confer civil unions which are open to all." Some libertarians have in fact long pushed for this; claiming the state's only interest in marriage is taxing it.
It will be interesting to watch...
Posted in: California's gay marriage battle back in court