News Cut: May 12, 2009 Archive

Five at 8 - May 12, 2009

Posted at 7:57 AM on May 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (4 Comments)

The last gasps of Bear Stearns

Posted at 10:42 AM on May 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Economy

The Los Angeles Times today has an interesting review of 'Street Fighters: The Last 72 Hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street' by Wall St. Journal reporter Kate Kelly, which purports to show the extent to which federal officials -- mostly then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson -- orchestrated the first domino in the country's financial collapse.

No paragraph is more compelling than this one:

"Regulators may never know what really happened. But one thing is clear: Once confidence in a company falls away on such a grand scale, it can never recover. Bear started that week with more than $18 billion in capital, its largest cash position ever. Three days later, negative headlines, a stock drop, lender reticence and big withdrawals from client accounts had cut those capital levels in half. Eight hours later, it was nearly dead."

Another YouTube video says Kelly's book reads nothing like the newspaper stories that were coming out at the time of the collapse. You decide. Here's Kelly's lengthy blow-by-blow account in the Journal a year ago.

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A question of safety

Posted at 11:52 AM on May 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: Disasters

In February, I wrote about the similarities between the Colgan Air (flying as Continental Express) crash near Buffalo and an Express II (flying as Northwest Airlink) crash in Hibbing in the '90s, noting that the big airlines -- in the name of "branding" -- don't exactly go out of their way to make it clear to paying passengers that when they leave a big airliner and get on a smaller plane, they're changing airlines and entering a different world.

Why that fact matters is tragically apparent today as the National Transportation Safety Board holds a hearing into the crash and releases cockpit transcripts. Fact: Sometimes the pilots aren't very qualified to transport you safely from one place to another.

The Washington Post reports:

First Officer Rebecca Shaw, in conversation with Captain Marvin Renslow, expressed wariness about the possibility of being promoted to captain without proper training.

"I've never seen icing conditions," Shaw tells Renslow. "I've never de-iced. I've never seen any-- I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to have to experience that and make those kinds of call[s.] You know I'd have freaked out. I'd have, like, seen this much ice and thought, 'Oh, my gosh, we're going to crash."

It gets worse. The captain in the crash had never received any training in the "stick shaker," the device that warns pilots when the plane is dangerously slow and near "stalling" -- falling out of the sky.

As I reported in February, the captain had over 3,000 of flight time. But nobody ever got around to teaching him about a critical safety device?

Matthew Wald, writing over the weekend in the New York Times, described a "safety net" that gets tighter with every crash. The problem is: It doesn't. The way pilot Marvin Renslow slipped through the cracks -- poorly trained and flunking flight tests -- reads almost the same as the way Marvin Falitz, the pilot of the ill-fated Northwest Airlink flight in Hibbing, slipped through. The only difference seems to be the passage of 16 years.

It would be unfair, of course, to say that regional airlines as a rule are unsafe. But there are troubling -- more than troubling -- signs that systemically, they've got a problem.

Local regional pilot "Sam," who writes the excellent Blogging at FL250, pointed to the crash of a regional jet on its way to Minneapolis (without passengers but with joyriding pilots) in 2004 as the "canary in a coal mine."

When I wrote that post about regional airline safety, I regarded Pinnacle 3701 as a "Canary in the Coal Mine." That accident was a quintessential regional airline accident. I don't think it could have happened at the today's major airlines. Once upon a time the majors suffered a string of similarly senseless accidents, but they ended up taking the lessons to heart, changed the way they did a lot of things, and ended up with a safety culture where reckless and careless behavior simply isn't tolerated. There were a lot of lessons the regional airlines could've taken from Pinnacle 3701. Nobody really changed anything of importance, though. Maybe two lives and a destroyed airplane and house weren't enough to grab their attention. Maybe it was too easy to write the pilots off as two loose cannons and miss the broader implications of their behavior.

Then there's the 2003 Air Midwest accident that crashed in Charlotte, apparently because a mechanic had never worked on that kind of plane before. The NTSB said the FAA was aware of the training deficiencies, but had not addressed them.

A long-standing problem in airline safety in the United States is the NTSB doesn't have the authority to force the FAA to do anything.

In the meantime, there are more efforts to help you find out that chocolate mulch can kill your dog, than to require airlines to tell you you've stepped onto an airline with questionable safety.

(Note: The NTSB Web site is down, but when it returns, you can find the Colgan Air documents here.)

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Chattel and cattle

Posted at 3:40 PM on May 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (3 Comments)
Filed under: War

The government in Kabul handed out piles of cash today to families of 140 people killed in a U.S. airstrike.

Grieving relatives got the equivalent of $2,000 for each person killed and $1,000 for each one injured.

In Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's story on All Things Considered this afternoon, though, one paragraph -- intentionally or not -- hits like a cold bucket of water:

Many of those interviewed say they will use the money to rebuild their homes and buy new brides and livestock.

No other mention was made in the story of the life of the women of Afghanistan.

For that, we have the Peoria Journal Star which this week carried a blistering editorial that suggested one of the original -- if secondary -- goals of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was no longer a concern.

Much has been written in the last few weeks about a law passed by the Afghan parliament governing how members of the Shiite minority may treat women. It explicitly spells out the limited circumstances under which a woman can leave her home, backsliding toward the draconian restrictions imposed by the Taliban. But that rule alone is mild compared with another element of the measure, which effectively legalizes marital rape by mandating that Afghan women must submit to their husbands' demands for sex. The law offers only a few exceptions for women, but no exception would make the odious measure more acceptable.

When Karzai gave it his approval it sparked an outcry, particularly given the reputation he's cultivated as a leader interested in improving human rights for women. There were street protests in Kabul and Western leaders widely condemned the change, with President Obama calling it "abhorrent." In the face of such pressure, Karzai froze its enforcement and put it through a judicial review, which is slated to wrap up next week.

Meanwhile, reports out of Afghanistan today said five young girls slipped into comas, and 100 have been taken to a hospital, after a gas attack on their school. It's the third such attack of late and an official said he doesn't think the Taliban are responsible.

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Biking with Bob

Posted at 7:33 PM on May 12, 2009 by Bob Collins (13 Comments)
Filed under: Sports

On Thursday at 1 p.m. , I'll be hosting a live chat with some bicycling fans and the Minneapolis Non-Motorized Transportation Pilot Program Coordinator. It's National Bike Month. CNN is hosting videos with lots of bicyclists riding to work this week because it's also National Bike-to-Work week and National Bike-to-Work Day on Friday. A swell idea, I guess.

Here's the thing: I don't do Spandex. I usually don't even do shorts, and I'm not that much of a bike fan. The most undesirable people I've ever met were the bicyclists -- in Spandex and shorts -- racing down the mountains and across the Golden Gate bridge, shouting "move" to my wife and I who made the apparent mistake of not being them.

I like to think they're not really the biking community, but I have a small frame of reference. A few colleagues I like very much bike to work. They also wear Spandex. Me? I'm one of the few people who still follows the company edict against sandals in the workplace.

I got roasted last year by a biker blog. I can't remember why but I think it was for something I said on the Current about bikers who ride in the road when there's a perfectly empty bike path. The biking community does not have a great sense of humor, though I suspect the same people who got upset then think Wanda Sykes is a stitch now.

I have this mountain bike, which my wife won at a school raffle a few years ago. I inherited it when I bought her a new bike for her birthday. I suspect if it could talk, it would spill its gears about the mean things the cool bikes say about it.

I like riding a bike around the neighborhood just fine. But I'm 55. I'm out of shape, and I abhor the thought of showing up to work sweaty. I don't ride in the road to make a point. I don't think it makes much sense to buy a several-thousand-dollar bike to save a few hundred dollars worth of gasoline. Last year I rode my bike from Woodbury to the South St. Paul airport each weekend. But saving $4 in gasoline cost me $5 in Gatorade.

Where other people look cool riding a bike, I look like a guy whose car is in the shop.

I'm bored by the biker vs. motorist debate, which hasn't moved in any direction in years, and on occasion sounds like a "rights" debate, little different from the gun control debate, which also bores me these days. Bike. Don't bike. Own a gun. Don't own a gun. Choice is good.

But if I'm going to host this chat, I might as well try to figure out why so many bicyclists are so keen on other people riding bikes to work, too. So on Wednesday morning I'll ride in from Woodbury (mostly downhill) and we'll see how it goes.

The first thing I need to figure out is how I'm supposed to lug a laptop and all my other blog-related equipment from home. And what about a change of clothes? I'll have to bring some extra money because there's no way for me to carry the lunch I usually bring from home. This simplicity stuff is complicated and costly.

If you're a regular bicyclist, you probably have some tips and stories about the joy of your ride. Go ahead and share them below.

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