350 Is The Upper Limit "If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted... CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm." Jim Hansen, NASA
“In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, No Mas and artist James Blagden proudly present the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter…
Of the 263 no-hitters ever thrown in the Big Leagues, we can only guess how many were aided by steroids, but we can say without question that only one was ever thrown on acid.
Sadly, the great Dock Ellis died last December at 63. A year before, radio producers Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel, had recorded an interview with Ellis in which the former Pirate right hander gave a moment by moment account of June 12, 1970, the day he no-hit the San Diego Padres. Alexander and Ilels original four minute piece appeared March 29, 2008 on NPRs Weekend America. When we stumbled across that piece this past June, Blagden and Isenberg were inspired to create a short animated film around the original audio.”
Check out this mess over at Seeking Alpha (my emphasis):
Seen on a recent Citibank (C) statement: “Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change.”
[...]
I called Citi about it and they said the warning applies only to customers in Texas and that the notification had been mistakenly included on statements nationwide. Whatever the explanation, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Citi. I’ve got nothing against Citi as a general matter — I have friends who work there, and know some account holders who are generally satisfied customers. But it’s hard to believe a bank would be sending out a notice like that on its statements.
A Citibank rep responded in the comments:
Received by email:
I saw your post on Citibank and wanted to get you some additional information. At issue is Reg D, which requires that in order for a NOW account to be eligible to earn interest or receive promotions, a bank must reserve the right to require seven days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal.
When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future.
Robert Julavits
Citi Public Affairs
Regular checking accounts are DDA accounts, normally. That means “Demand Deposit Account“. Simply explained, a DDA means that the bank acts as a custodian of your money. Your money in a DDA is NOT there to be loaned out to others. The money is supposed to be there at the exact time you demand it.
There is a type of “checking account” that is not DDA – it’s called a NOW account (Negotiable Order of Withdrawal) – which normally may require some amount of notice to the bank prior to withdrawal. These accounts generally offer some benefit, such as the ability for your cash to earn interest, in exchange for the stricter requirements.
Citi Lied
When I first read about this new Citibank risk, I took them at their word, that it was a simple mistake. Then I found this:
You may need to click the image to read the text. Look at the highlighted text. Especially read the last highlighted item.
“We reserve the right to require seven (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking, savings and money market accounts.”
In essence, they’re saying that there are no DDA accounts available at Citi, period. At any point in time, they can simply deny your check or refuse to hand over your cash. This makes the response by Robert Julavits look like so much steaming crap in a field of green. Denninger explains it well (emphasis in original):
Now most banks will not allow you to walk in and demand $50,000 in cash at any instant, mostly because they don’t have it, or if they do have it allowing that would severely deplete their cash amount on hand and they would not be able to transact routine amounts for other people. After all, it takes time (even if only a few hours) to order up an armored truck full of $100s and $20s.
But “withdraw” is not limited to cash.
You can get a counter (bank) check for the entire balance, you can write a check on your account (and give it to someone or deposit it somewhere else) and you can wire or ACH money in or out of the account. All are “withdrawals.”
“NOW” (negotiable order of withdrawal) accounts are a different sort of animal. Those pay interest, and on those accounts the bank reserves the right (and always has) to require notice. Same with saving-linked sweeps (which, by the way, is what Alan Greenspan wildly expanded the authorization for early in his tenure as Fed Chairman, essentially destroying bank reserve requirements as this was instantaneously gamed to reduce actual held reserves almost to zero.)
What this “quiet” little change means is that Citibank has changed the character of all of its checking accounts. They no longer offer a “DDA” account, whether they did before or not.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. Without a “DDA” account the bank could at its sole discretion dishonor any check at any time, thereby hitting you with an overdraft fee as you didn’t give them the requisite seven days notice. It could also prevent you from removing your funds to a more appropriate (for you) institution for that seven days, entirely at their whim and sole discretion.
ALL time deposits (savings accounts included, which have always contained this requirement) effectively are a loan of funds from you to the bank. That is, you don’t “deposit” money there, you loan it to the bank which then charges other people to borrow it. This relationship isn’t taught in our Goebbels Government Education System (not even in college!) but it is nonetheless true.
However, essentially all banks have maintained one type of account – a Demand Deposit Account – which in fact operates differently. A DDA account is an appointment of the bank as a custodian of your funds, not as a borrower of your funds. Said account never pays interest (per Federal Reserve rules – and common sense) yet it allows immediate, unrestricted access to your funds because you are not lending them to the bank, you are appointing them as a custodian of them.
DDA accounts are essential for the ordinary flow of commerce. There must be an option available to consumers and businesses alike in which they can place custody of funds they may need, up to the entire balance of that account, at any point in time without prior notice. Without this ability you are literally at the mercy of the financial institution in question, which can cause you to incur hideous “bounced check” and other similar charges as well as potentially exposing you to criminal liability for “uttering” (writing bad checks.)
This is NOT a trivial change in terms. I would never do business with an institution for my business or personal checking accounts that did not offer a true demand account, and you should not either. This sort of change is outrageously destructive to your rights as the funds you have on deposit in a checking account are not intended to be loaned to the bank to do with as they wish, but rather to be held for your immediate (if necessary or desired) use.
Do you know what kind of checking account you have at your current bank or credit union? Here’s a quick somewhat reliable test: Ask yourself one question – does my checking account have interest applied to it? If you are accruing interest on the funds in your account, then you do not have a DDA account. DDA accounts, per federal law, cannot accrue interest.
Maybe you think that you need that interest? Wow, how much do you have in that checking account anyway? And if interest is your thing, what is your cash doing in a checking account anyway? Face it, for the few dollars per year you get in interest, you’re allowing someone else ultimate control over your cash. I’d be willing to bet that one bounced check charge would wipe all that interest away.
And with a policy like the Citibank policy, that could happen even if you have funds in the account. Check yourself, check your bank. This is, after all, your money.
This is a bit long, but I hope you’ll read through it anyway. Things like this have been going on too long, and if we don’t soon get a grip on who we are, we may not like who we become.
The Same
Apparently, we’re still basically saying that we don’t give a damn about the fact that we torture folks, even when we know that they have never done anything against us.
We are such a great nation.
There were 3 guys in Guantanamo. They all died on the same night in June 2006. The US government says they all committed suicide.
Supposedly, even though in isolation, with zero contact, they all decided to tie their hands behind their backs, then stuff wads of cloth very far down their throats, then put a mask on so they wouldn’t accidentally spit out the wads while they were choking, then climbed up on a wash basin in their cells, then put their heads through a noose made of more sheets than were issued to prisoners, then jumped off the sink, hanging themselves, simultaneously.
When I asked Talal Al-Zahrani what he thought had happened to his son, he was direct. “They snatched my seventeen-year-old son for a bounty payment,” he said. “They took him to Guantánamo and held him prisoner for five years. They tortured him. Then they killed him and returned him to me in a box, cut up.”
Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle experience came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a sandwich!”
“Yasser wasn’t guilty of anything,” Al-Zahrani said. “He knew that. He firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why would he commit suicide?” The evidence supports this argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements at the time of Yasser Al-Zahrani’s death masked the fact that his case had been reviewed and that he was, in fact, on a list of prisoners to be sent home. I had shown Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was Yasser’s suicide note and asked him whether he recognized his son’s handwriting. He had never seen the note before, he answered, and no U.S. official had ever asked him about it. After studying the note carefully, he said, “This is a forgery.”
Also returned to Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned in his youth, Mani grew up in his uncle’s home in the small town of Dawadmi. I spoke to one of the many cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi. Mani, said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan—a rural, tribal area that straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—to do humanitarian work, and someone there had sold him to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani was a peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S. authorities had decided to release Al-Utaybi and return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died, he was just a few weeks shy of his transfer.
Salah Al-Salami was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities raided a residence in Karachi believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and took into custody all who were living there at the time. A Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to Pakistan with only $400 in his pocket. The U.S. suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students, in a boarding house that terrorists might at one point have used. There was no direct evidence linking him either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22, 2008, the Washington Post quoted from a previously secret review of his case: “There is no credible information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist related training or is a member of the Al Qaeda network.” All that stood in the way of Al-Salami’s release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations between the United States and Yemen.
Law and Legacy
Two of the families opened legal proceedings against the United States. This week, Judge Ellen Huvelle dismissed the lawsuit because of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. In short, her answer to the families was “So sorry! My hands are tied. Besides it’s obvious they were guilty because the military said so. Nothing we can do here!”
Apparently, the Bush administration’s legacy is still with us. And with this decision, it becomes a part of the Obama legacy. If things like are allowed to stand, it becomes the legacy of all of us.
Read this, from Harpers again. You’ll see that the esteemed judge made at least one blatantly false statement:
[...]
In the lawsuit, the families of Yasser Al-Zahrani and Salah Ali Abdullah Ahmed Al-Salami sought damages under the Alien Tort Claims Act, arguing that the two prisoners had been wrongfully imprisoned, tortured, and subjected to cruel, unusual, and inhuman punishment. In dismissing the suit, Judge Huvelle did not parse the claims brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of the families of the deceased prisoners. Rather, she concluded that Congress had stripped the court of jurisdiction to hear and resolve such cases when it enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The judge said the two detainees were properly determined by the U.S. military to be enemy combatants. Citing an appeals court decision, Huvelle said judicial involvement in the “delicate area” of how detainees are treated could undermine military and diplomatic efforts by the U.S. government on the terrorism front.
Al-Zahrani, 22 years old when he died, was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001 and he was 17 years old when he was transferred to Guantanamo in 2002, according to the suit by the men’s families. Al-Salami was arrested by local forces in Pakistan in March 2002.
Judge Huvelle’s conclusion that the detainees were “properly determined” to be “enemy combatants” runs contrary to the evidence. Both men were turned over to U.S. forces for bounty payments, and a thorough investigation of their cases by American military intelligence concluded that there was no meaningful evidence to link either man to either Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Al-Zahrani had been placed on a list to be released back to Saudi Arabia, immediately behind Mani Al-Utaybi, who also died under still unexplained circumstances on June 9, 2006, at approximately the same time as Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami, according to pathologists.
The decision to dismiss the cases follows from a Bush Administration effort to block judicial examination of any case involving the death or mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, which was incorporated in the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as one of the last measures adopted by the G.O.P.-controlled Congress following elections that delivered control to the Democrats. Although President Obama, as an Illinois senator, voted against the act and joined in calls for its repeal, his administration has yet to take steps to overturn it. The measure, as applied by Judge Huvelle, placed the United States in breach of its obligations under the Convention Against Torture. Article 14 of the Convention provides:
Each State Party shall ensure in its legal system that the victim of an act of torture obtains redress and has an enforceable right to fair and adequate compensation including the means for as full rehabilitation as possible. In the event of the death of the victim as a result of an act of torture, his dependents shall be entitled to compensation.
Extraordinary
Both men were turned over for bounty payments? Extraordinary Rendition, indeed.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 doesn’t supersede any treaty we’ve entered into with another nation. New laws are supposed to take into account any provisions of all treaties currently enforced. Laws which do not cannot be passed without a repudiation of the treaty.
And even if the intent of the law in question was to keep the civilian justice system from invading the military justice system, which is apparently what it was trying to do, these guys had been determined non-combatants, not the enemy.
For the judge to blatantly lie about that as an excuse to get out of hearing a difficult case says much about our judicial system, and much about us.
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