User profile: belinda

Another example of how law enforcement creates a culture of petty criminality among its own members. Just on principle, I respect anyone who wears a badge. But I would never trust them. I think our laws are important, but no one should blindly worship people who wear badges and carry guns; far too often, they've demonstrated an unwillingness to police themselves or hold themselves accountable for the responsibility they have to the community. You accept a badge, carry more weaponry than an insurgent militia, then whine about how you had to shoot that little lady holding a dinner knife because she was an "imminent threat" to your life? You drive like a moron, rolling your car at high-speed because someone makes a left-hand turn in front of you, then try to roust the poor bastard for drunk driving, only to be proven a liar when - by the grace of God - the truth finally comes out? You take hours off from your job - with pay - to parade out to the funerals and weep at embarassments to the uniform, touting them as "heroes" and "fallen soldiers" - when they represent really nothing more than wasted, stupid lives that've cost taxpayers time and money in training them, only to cost even more in pensions and benefits once they die by their own stupidity or recklessness? After doing things like this, you expect people to trust you? You're lucky anyone even respects you. And there's nothing in a training program to fix it, because it's basically a disconnect in a police officer's own values - the ones he or she says they profess (and expects others to profess, or else risk going to jail) and the ones they actually demonstrate on a daily basis (and generally end up justifying on the basis of all the "scum" and "risk" they have to deal with). Here's a tip to all police officers on that path or tempted to it: we get it. Life's hard; people are cruel, stupid and prone to wickedness; the work day of a cop is fraught with risk, uncertainty and the possibility of death. But we didn't ask you to become a cop, and we've never given permission to police officers to view us or our community as their personal playground, to lord it over whenever their work or personal life gets tough and unsavory. We certainly didn't give the police permission to discount their responsibility to all of us, simply because the people they deal with on a daily basis may be the worst of us. You're a police officer. Act like it. And stop making excuses for yourself or your colleagues. It diminishes the honor and dignity that should be inherent in the badge.

So no one here thinks the cost per manhole is "ridiculous"? What are these people doing during an inspection, replating them? X-raying them like they're key components of a nuclear power plant? Documenting the lousy placement that creates a nice distance between the cover and the roadway, so our car suspensions get a free makeover every couple hundred miles of driving? Folks, they're talking about spending over $200 to look at a single, circular piece of metal. How long does that take, a couple days? Because by my math, you're either paying your people a hell of a lot to look at a cover, or you're taking forever to do it. A cover costs only about $40. You could replace the whole thing for maybe $150. Why isn't anyone talking about that? And Mendes should be canned...any public manager who wastes the time of private business in order to get "free" cost estimates is a moron and should be fired.

One last point. This is not about fraud, but defalcation, and the federal bankruptcy courts have upheld that one can be guilty of defalcation without any intention or knowledge of doing so. Intent or awareness of the debtor is irrelevant to proving that valuable assets were moved to the ultimate benefit of the debtor and the injury of a creditor(s).

This is important because an unsecured creditor never truly lends money without expectation of repayment of principal, nor does a debtor accept money without expectation of a claim on assets for the amount of that principal. Security notwithstanding, a $2.3B creditor whose lending is substantially prior in time to that of a subsequent $2.985B creditor has a reasonable claim to injury when the later debt arrangement is shown to have directly benefited the debtor and effectively removed or reduced the assets available to the original creditor. At the time of the 2004 lending, any reasonable creditor would have viewed the construction of casino assets such as RR as part of Station's "general corporate purposes" and therefore open to claim in case of default (along with all other wholly owned properties of the company).

Stations may have viewed it this way as well, as evidenced in presentations and comments made by company executives before and during the construction of RR, expansion of Palace Station, design of Durango Station, etc. prior to the going-private transaction. If true, one could argue that defalcation was knowingly committed in that the facts show (1) the company leveraged away the prime casino properties for the subsequent going-private transaction and (2) failed to formally appraise the raw land that formed (a) the balance of the company's creditworthiness argument in its materials for the new "privatized" financial structure and (b) a substantial part of the assets the company would ultimately leave for the original creditors. (The land holdings were never formally appraised; Stations only solicited a "professional opinion" on their value from CB Richard Ellis, a fact acknowledged in materials from the time.)

But it doesn't matter whether Stations did this knowingly or not. You don't need proof of intent to prove defalcation occurred and defalcation is critical because it trumps all other creditor claims. Victims of defalcation are entitled to have their claims paid first. Given there is about $2.3B of those, it would force Stations and Deutsche Bank to do what they should have done in the first place -- make a reasonable offer to repay the unsecured creditors what they are owed instead of trying to walk away without paying anything.

I generally agree with CynicalObserver, except in this case serious questions surround how Stations handled the "old debt" of $2.3 billion referenced above. As the article notes, "the deal left Station with $5.285 billion in debt, including old debt of $2.3 billion...[t]he new debt included $510 million from a senior secured credit facility and the $2.475 billion mortgage encumbering the four hotel-casinos." Stations borrowed the "old debt" in 2004, when it was financing Red Rock Station, Aliante and pipe dreams like Durango Station...well before any talk of going private. RR & Aliante alone cost $1.6 billion. At the time, a reasonable debt investor would have relied on those assets being available in the event of default, since there were no other assets or costs to justify the need for $2.3B. Station effectively said as much during the "old debt" issuance. By (1) encumbering the prime casinos to a senior loan in going private and (2) transferring raw land to the "old debt" with inflated values and no formal appraisals (only a weak "professional opinion" rendered by CB Richard Ellis) -- all without a supermajority vote of all "old debt" holders -- Station effectively engaged in defalcation of the "old debt" holders. Now that may or may not be a violation of the UFTA, but it is certainly long-standing case law in bankruptcy court at the federal level.

Most people opposed to Yucca Mountain have no regard for nuclear energy, viewing it as nothing more than the civilian version of "nuclear bomb." Their conditioning is driven by pacifist politics dating back a half century or more, the environmental movement of the 60's and 70's, and the anti-institutional bias of the "identity politics" crowd. They're selective Luddites who can't stand the thought of using atoms for American energy independence, but have no problem gorging themselves on myriad consumer products based in petroleum (think an Iphone doesn't depend on oil?) while spewing tone-deaf political doggerel as if it were reason or common sense.

Yucca Mountain was one of seven sites under consideration at the time. It was uniquely suitable from an ownership point-of-view, being in a federally controlled area dedicated to nuclear activities in the first place. From a containment perspective, it was uniquely suitable in that it was dry, arid, substantially elevated from sources of groundwater and nowhere near surface-water sources. The notion that Nevada was a political football at the time of selection is fair, but the subsequent "screw Nevada" meme was more the product of enterprising politicians and an anti-nuclear hometown newspaper than anything else. Absent the weapons testing of the time, Congress might have pushed the location further into the Test Site, but I think the basic decision of storing our nation's spent fuel rods and other nuclear "waste" in a mountain in the middle of the Nevada desert on a known site where nuclear activities and specialists abounded would not have changed.

Yucca Mountain was principally about science as engineering. The question really was, "do we have confidence in our nation's ability to engineer and manage a safe storage location for these types of materials, irrespective of the exact time element involved." If you believed in American enterprise and the strength of our people to accomplish great deeds, the answer was yes. If you're one of those perdurable cynics who came to hate the America you grew up with, your answer was no (more often, hell no). The "no" tends to imply that nothing should be done that has any element of risk in it, because engineering can fail, space shuttles do fall from the sky, and radiation exposure within an underground storage facility, with loss of life, is always a possibility. Someone who mistrusts existing systems and institutions almost always expects the worst. But for the same reason one should not confuse the reality of Chernobyl with the reality of Three Mile Island, such a view simply reveals a bias of another stripe. It fails to provide any meaningful determination of whether to operate Yucca Mountain or not, for it willfully ignores an inconvenient truth about America; namely, that we're very good at what we do, more often than we are not. Yucca Mountain would have been a case in point, had the harridans not had their day.