Communism outperforms Capitalism

U.S. Sets Tariffs On Chinese Solar Panels:

 

The U.S. Commerce Department has imposed new import fees on solar panels made in China, finding that the Chinese government is improperly giving subsidies to manufacturers of the panels there.  The department said Tuesday it has found on a preliminary basis that Chinese solar panel makers have received government subsidies of 2.9 percent to 4.73 percent. Therefore the department said tariffs in the same proportions will be charged on Chinese panels imported into the U.S., depending on which company makes them.  The tariff amounts are considered small, but the decision could ratchet up trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Several U.S. solar panel makers had asked the government to impose steep tariffs on Chinese imports. They are struggling against stiff competition from China as well as weakening demand in Europe and other key markets, just as President Barack Obama is working to promote renewable energy.  "Today's announcement affirms what U.S. manufacturers have long known: Chinese manufacturers have received unfair ... subsidies," Steve Ostrenga, CEO of Helios Solar Works in Milwaukee, Wis., said in a statement. The company is a member of a group called the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing.  On the other side, some U.S. companies argue that low-priced Chinese imports have helped consumers and promote rapid growth of the industry.  The new tariffs are low, making the Commerce Department decision "a relatively positive outcome for the U.S. solar industry and its 100,000 employees," said Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy. "However, tariffs large or small will hurt American jobs and prolong our world's reliance on fossil fuels. Fortunately, this decision will not significantly raise solar prices in the United States."  Members of CASE include California-based SunEdison, Recurrent Energy, SolarCity and Westinghouse Solar, as well as China-based Suntech Power Holdings Co.  Commerce said it was putting off until May 17 a decision on whether Chinese companies are dumping the solar panels on world markets, selling them below cost.  Trade tensions with China are especially sensitive at a time when the U.S. and other Western economies want to boost technology exports to revive economic growth and reduce high unemployment.  The U.S. and China are two of the world's biggest markets for solar, wind and other renewable energy technology. Both governments are promoting their own suppliers in hopes of generating higher-paid technology jobs.  The U.S. manufacturers' complaints have been amplified by the controversy surrounding Solyndra Inc. a California-based solar panel maker that filed for bankruptcy protection after winning a $500 million federal loan from the Obama administration.  Solyndra's failure embarrassed the administration and prompted a lengthy review by congressional Republicans who are critical of Obama's green energy policies. Solyndra has cited Chinese competition as a key reason for its failure.  U.S. energy officials say China spent more than $30 billion last year to subsidize its solar industry. Obama said in November that China has "questionable competitive practices" in clean energy and that his administration has fought "these kinds of dumping activities." The administration will act to enforce trade laws where appropriate, Obama said.  SolarWorld Industries America Inc., the largest U.S. maker of silicon solar cells and panels and a subsidiary of Germany-based SolarWorld, has led the U.S. manufacturers' complaints.  China announced its own probe in November, saying it will investigate whether U.S. support for renewable energy companies improperly hurts foreign suppliers.

Goldman Sachs ripping off Clients

Goldman Employee Criticizes Firm for Ripping Off Clients:

A departing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) employee mounted an unprecedented public attack on its “toxic and destructive” culture in a New York Times opinion piece, becoming the first serving insider to openly criticize the firm.  Greg Smith, identified by the newspaper as an executive director and head of the bank’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe, will leave the firm after 12 years, blaming Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein and President Gary D. Cohn for losing hold over the firm’s culture. Executive directors are junior to managing directors and partners, the most senior rank.  A departing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Employee mounted an unprecedented public attack on its "toxic and destructive" culture in a New York Times opinion piece, becoming the first serving insider to openly criticize the firm. Goldman Sachs said it disagreed with comments made by Greg Smith, identified by the newspaper as an executive director and head of the firm’s U.S. equity derivatives business in Europe. Gigi Stone and Christine Harper report on Bloomberg Television's "In the Loop."  Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities LLC, talks about the results of Federal Reserve bank stress tests and a New York Times opinion piece by a departing Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Employee. Bove speaks on Bloomberg Television's “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.”  Bloomberg's Erik Schatzker, Stephanie Ruhle, Sara Eisen and Scarlet Fu report on an opinion piece in today's New York Times written by Greg Smith, a departing employee from Goldman Sachs, attacking the firm's culture. They speak on Bloomberg Television's "Inside Track."

“I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients,” Smith, a Stanford University graduate, wrote in the New York Times. “It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them.”  The attack adds to criticism from politicians and protesters who blame the company for triggering the financial crisis and profiting at clients’ expense. Goldman Sachs has faced congressional hearings probing its role in the financial crisis and paid $550 million in 2010 to settle a lawsuit accusing it of misleading investors in a collateralized debt obligation. “This will certainly be damaging for the firm,” said John Purcell, founder of London-based executive search firm Purcell & Co. “It’s obviously a very heartfelt piece. Maybe he’s made a sufficient amount of money in his life that he isn’t particularly bothered if he isn’t employed in financial services again and works in a completely different world like teaching.”  Goldman Sachs fell $4.17, or 3.4 percent, to $120.37 in New York trading at 1:34 p.m.  A call to Smith’s mobile phone in London wasn’t answered. Goldman Sachs said it disagreed with his criticism.  “In our view, we will only be successful if our clients are successful,” the firm said in a statement. “This fundamental truth lies at the heart of how we conduct ourselves.” “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off,” Smith wrote. “‘Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘‘Muppets,’’ sometimes over internal e-mail.’’Blankfein and Cohn addressed the criticism in a memo to employees today. ‘‘In a company of our size, it is not shocking that some people could feel disgruntled,’’ they said in the memo. ‘‘A recent survey of employees found that 89 percent believe the firm provides ‘exceptional service’ to clients and that a similar percentage of the firm’s 12,000 vice presidents, the rank held by Smith, felt that way, they said.  Employees are allowed to express concerns anonymously, according to the memo. ‘‘We are not aware that the writer of the opinion piece expressed misgivings through this avenue, however, if an individual expresses issues, we examine them carefully and we will be doing so in this case,’’ they said.  Smith blamed the company’s management for promoting employees who made money for the firm, often by getting customers to buy products that Goldman Sachs was trying to get rid of. If clients can’t trust the firm, they will stop doing business with it, however smart its employees, Smith wrote in the Times.‘‘Culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success,” he wrote in the New York Times. “It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients,” he said. “It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm.”  Goldman Sachs’s score was among the lowest in a recent study of corporate reputations, according to a Feb. 13 statements from Harris Interactive Inc. (HPOL), a market research firm.

Chinese kids rescued from Human Traffickers

14 Chinese kids rescued from human traffickers:

At least 14 children were rescued and 38 suspects arrested when police busted two human trafficking rings in China, police said Saturday.  The rings were busted in southwest China’s Guizhou province, Xinhua reported.  A joint operation was carried out by police of Guizhou, Henan, Chongqing, and Zhejiang, police said.  The rings were identified after police seized two suspects, surnamed Wang and Xiao, on a train along with two babies in December last year.  Wang and Xiao purchased children in Guizhou and transferred them by train to Henan province for sale, police said.  DNA tests would be carried on the rescued children to find their families. Over 3,000 gangs involved in human trafficking were busted across China last year, and more than 15,000 women and 8,000 children rescued by police.

F.B.I. manufactors Terrorists to Hunt

U.S. Government Now Creating Terrorists So It Can Arrest Them:

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, was arrested this weekend for plotting to detonate a bombat a downtown Portland, Oregon tree-lighting celebration. So that’s good, right? Americans appreciate not getting blown up. But the thing is, Mohamud was never a member of a terrorist group. The FBI provided him a fake bomb and worked with him in the planning of the attack. But that’s not unusual these days, because the government no longer just tries to find and arrest actual terrorists; it also tries to create terrorists it can then arrest. In fact, informants now like to stand in the parking lots of American mosques, offering hundreds of thousands of dollars and fancy cars to anyone who will sign up for jihad. It’s a brave new world for thoughtcrime.  Mohamud was a student at Oregon State, and as far as we can tell from this AP story, was not promised to get rich quickly by becoming a terrorist. He, at least, did have an actual interest in becoming one, because the FBI saw his e-mails to a friend in Pakistan, asking if he knew Osama bin Laden’s AIM handle or whatever. When Mohamud had no luck getting this contact info (WHAT? HIS FRIEND WAS IN PAKISTAN! HE MUST HAVE KNOWN TERRORISTS!), the government swooped in and told him they were hip terrorist guys with a bomb and a terrorist letterman’s-jacket with his name stitched on it.  Oh, why was the FBI reading this Mohamud guy’s e-mails in the first place? It’s never explained in this AP story. But c’mon, the kid’s name is Mohamud. He shouldn’t have let his parents name him that if he didn’t want to be a terrorist. So obviously the answer to this problem was not continued surveillance but rather to entice this kid into dropping out of college to become the ULTIMATE TERRORIST.  It was also very difficult to decipher that this kid is an American citizen, because the AP story was so busy telling us he is a “Somali-born teenager” and PRECIOUS SMALL WHITE CHILDREN were at this Portland Christmas event (at which they were never in danger of exploding).  But here’s an even more fun account in Slate about “four African-American ex-cons from Newburgh, N.Y.” who were enticed into saying they would blow up two synagogues:

Hussain bought meals for the group of four men he assembled because none of them had jobs or money. The owner of a Newburgh restaurant where they occasionally ate considered him “the boss,” because he would pick up the tab. Among his other inducements were the offer of $250,000 and a BMW to the most volubly anti-Semitic plotter, the man the government says was the ringleader, James Cromitie. To drive that car, Cromitie would have needed a driver’s license—which he didn’t have. Another supposed plotter, a Haitian, was a paranoid schizophrenic (according to his imam), which was the reason his deportation had been deferred (according to The Nation’s TomDispatch.com), and who kept bottles of urine in his squalid apartment (according to the New York Times). The last two, both surnamed Williams, have histories of drug busts and minimum-wage jobs in Newburgh. At trial the government asserted that the plot was driven by anti-American hatred. But in papers filed in court by defense lawyers before the trial began, Cromitie is quoted in government transcripts explaining to Hussain that the men “will do it for the money. … They’re not even thinking about the cause.”

One of these guys tried to back out, “saying he didn’t want to hurt any women or children,” but the informant pressured him into staying with the group.  This is just perverse. Perhaps the government will one day figure out how to wind down bureaucracies and bureaucratic divisions once they’re proved no longer necessary. But until then, the FBI will create terrorists for itself to bust because it doesn’t have enough actual, group-aligned terrorists to hunt. And, perhaps, a fake bomb for you to assemble will suddenly arrive on your doorstep one day after you criticize the government or American society. But anti-terrorism efforts have to adjust to the actual threat eventually, right? It’s not like archaic bureaucracies like the Tennessee Valley Authority are still around.

Mohamud was known at the Salman Al-Farisi Center in Corvallis, said Yosof Wanly, imam at the mosque. He said Mohamud was “an average university boy,” drinking the occasional beer with friends in fraternities.

“He had some fraternity friends,” Wanly said. “He would attend athletic (events), basketball games, whatever they are.”

By the way, you know who coaches that basketball team? Known terrorist Barack Obama’s brother-in-law. DUN DUN DUN

H5N1 Biosecurity Threat

Deadly bird flu studies to stay secret for now.  The Virus could escape or fall into the wrong hands and be used to spark a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak:

 Two studies showing how scientists mutated the H5N1 bird flu virus into a form that could cause a deadly human pandemic will be published only after experts fully assess the risks, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.  Speaking after a high-level meeting of flu experts and U.S. security officials in Geneva, a WHO spokesman said an agreement had been reached in principle to keep details of the controversial work secret until deeper risk analyses have been carried out.  The WHO called the meeting to break a deadlock between scientists who have studied the mutations needed to make H5N1 bird flu transmit between mammals, and the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), which wanted the work censored before it was published in scientific journals.  Biosecurity experts fear mutated forms of the virus that research teams in The Netherlands and the United States independently created could escape or fall into the wrong hands and be used to spark a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed up to 40 million people.  "There must be a much fuller discussion of risk and benefits of research in this area and risks of virus itself," the WHO's Gregory Hartl told reporters. HIGH FATALITY RATE.  The H5N1 virus, first detected in Hong Kong in 1997, is entrenched among poultry in many countries, mainly in Asia, but so far remains in a form that is hard for humans to catch.  It is known to have infected nearly 700 people worldwide since 2003, killing half of them, a far higher death rate than the H1N1 swine flu which caused a flu pandemic in 2009/2010.  Last year two teams of scientists - one led by Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Center and another led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin - said they had found that just a handful of mutations would allow H5N1 to spread like ordinary flu between mammals, and remain as deadly as it is now.  In December, the NSABB asked two leading scientific journals, Nature and Science, to withhold details of the research for fear it could be used by bioterrorists.  They said a potentially deadlier form of bird flu poses one of the gravest known threats to humans and justified the unprecedented call to censor the research.  The WHO voiced concern, and flu researchers from around the world declared a 60-day moratorium on January 20 on "any research involving highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses" that produce easily contagious forms. Fouchier, who took part in the two-day meeting at the WHO which ended on Friday, said the consensus of experts and officials there was "that in the interest of public health, the full paper should be published" at some future date.  "This was based on the high public health impact of this work and the need to share the details of the studies with a very big community in the interest of science, surveillance and public health on the whole," he told reporters.  In its current form, people can contract H5N1 only through close contact with ducks, chickens, or other birds that carry it, and not from infected individuals.  But when H5N1 acquires mutations that allow it to live in the upper respiratory tract rather than the lower, the Dutch and U.S. researchers found a way to make it can travel via airborne droplets between infected ferrets, which are considered good models of how flu viruses behave in people.  Asked about the potential bioterrorism risks of his and the U.S. team's work, Fouchier said "it was the view of the entire group" at the meeting that the risks that this particular virus or flu viruses in general could be used as bioterrorism agents "would be very, very slim."

[caption id="attachment_1927" align="aligncenter" width="1024" caption="Global_H5N1inHuman"]