Author: Matthew G. Saroff

He Keeps Coming Back, Like a Bad Penny

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Yes, it’s Ken Starr, and it looks like he got yet another trumped up investigation, this time of a Jewish Studies professor who isn’t right wing enough for the Clinton era persecutor prosecutor:

It’s unclear what exactly Ellis is on trial for, as neither Baylor nor Ellis would comment on the record about the nature of the charges. (One clue: no criminal charges have been filed against Ellis.) Roger Sanders, Ellis’ lawyer, says Baylor’s lawyers told him the internal process mandates nondisclosure, though Baylor spokesperson Lori Fogleman disputes this, telling RD that the charges can only be released with Ellis’ written permission.

Sanders says the investigation hinges on “bogus allegations.” One can only hope the result will not be another 336-page Starr Report—the $40 million product of the independent counsel’s four-year investigation, for which the beleaguered Monica Lewinsky was interrogated over 20 times. “‘You’re a pervert, Ken Starr,’” Lewinsky’s father once said he’d like to tell the former independent counsel.

In late November Cornel West, feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and other luminaries launched a change.org petition addressed to Starr, which has thus far gathered over 5,000 signatures. The petition asserts that the controversy “looks more and more like a persecution to silence a Jewish voice of dissent.”

“The charges,” reads a petition update, “are about ‘abuse of authority.’…Many of us were contacted several times by institutional lawyers who tried to persuade us to tell them examples of ‘abuse of authority’ he has exercised.”

According to Sanders, the investigation consisted of “sort of announc[ing] to people, ‘Here’s what Marc’s guilty of. Now tell us what you know about him.’” Fogleman claims no knowledge of the investigation’s procedures and declined to recommend officials who could answer questions about it.

The fact that, but for his misconduct in l’affaire Lewinski, he’d probably be on the Supreme Court now, should scare the hell out of us.

Guess What, the Bank Deal is Even Worse Than You Thought

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We still have no written agreement, but we the North Carolina AG has released an executive summary, and it strongly implies that the immunity grant is a lot broader than has been implied:

This is the critical part:

The proposed Release contains a broad release of the banks’ conduct related to mortgage loan servicing, foreclosure preparation, and mortgage loan origination services. Claims based on these areas of past conduct by the banks cannot be brought by state attorneys general or banking regulators.

The Release applies only to the named bank parties. It does not extend to third parties who may have provided default or foreclosure services for the banks. Notably, claims against MERSCORP, Inc. or Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) are not released

.

This is sufficiently general so that it is hard to be certain, but It certainly reads as if it waives chain of title issues and liability related to the use of MERS. That seems to be confirmed by the fact that made by local recorders for fees are explicitly preserved (one would not think they would need to be preserved unless they might otherwise be assumed to be waived). This is exactly the sort of release we feared would be given in a worst case scenario. The banks have gotten a huge “get out of jail free” card of bupkis.

It’s gonna get worse.

Every time we get more information it’s gonna get worse.

We are going to discover that this precludes all sorts of remedies for bad acts, and there will be no enforcement mechanisms to prevent future bad faith actions.

It’s gonna be more extend and pretend, so the banksters can get their bonuses, and we get the shaft.

Cyberwar Is the New Profit Center

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Seriously, we are seeing yet another hyped up bit of pants-wetting terror in order to create another way for defense contractors to rip the taxpayers off:

In last month’s State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to pass “legislation that will secure our country from the growing dangers of cyber threats.” The Hill was way ahead of him, with over 50 cybersecurity bills introduced this Congress. This week, both the House and Senate are moving on their versions of consolidated, comprehensive legislation.

The reason cybersecurity legislation is so pressing, proponents say, is that we face an immediate risk of national disaster.

wired guest column“Today’s cyber criminals have the ability to interrupt life-sustaining services, cause catastrophic economic damage, or severely degrade the networks our defense and intelligence agencies rely on,” Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said at a hearing last week. “Congress needs to act on comprehensive cybersecurity legislation immediately.”

Yet evidence to sustain such dire warnings is conspicuously absent. In many respects, rhetoric about cyber catastrophe resembles threat inflation we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War. And while Congress’ passing of comprehensive cybersecurity legislation wouldn’t lead to war, it could saddle us with an expensive and overreaching cyber-industrial complex.

Every so called case of a major attack on meat-space infrastructure has turned out to be false, but we’re gonna spend billions on it.

While Joe Nocera is Generally a Waste of Time

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I agree with him that the N.C.A.A. is little better than a cartel engaging in human trafficking:

The N.C.A.A. despises sports agents — hates them so much so that it once helped promulgate an anti-agent law. As of January 2010, according to the N.C.A.A.’s Web site, that law had been passed by 40 states. A player who takes an “improper benefit” from a sports agent loses his eligibility. A player who gets drafted out of high school — this happens in baseball as well as hockey — and engages an agent to talk to the pro team that drafted him loses his eligibility. Indeed, the mere act of signing with an agent is enough for a player to lose his eligibility. N.C.A.A. “scandals” involving agents and athletes are almost as common as recruiting scandals.

The N.C.A.A. claims — as it always does — that it is acting to protect its athletes “from exploitation by professional and commercial enterprises.” But this is classic N.C.A.A. Orwellian spin. Its true purpose in preventing athletes from engaging with agents while in college is to exacerbate their exploitation. The professional and commercial enterprise doing the exploiting, of course, is college sports itself.

“It’s all about control,” says Don Jackson, a lawyer who specializes in representing athletes who have run afoul of the N.C.A.A. Teenage athletes with agents are far more likely to make informed decisions about their lives than athletes acting on their own. Instead, athletes have to rely on coaches and athletic administrators, whose primary interest is the school, not the player.

And it’s not just hockey players who have to make important life decisions at a young age. When a baseball player gets drafted out of high school, he has a hard decision to make. Basketball players are usually eligible for the draft after one year of college; football players after three years. Yet N.C.A.A. rules force these athletes to make these major decisions without an agent at their side.

At some point, enterprising lawyer is going to find is going to use RICO, or the tax code, or anti-human trafficking statutes, or some combination of all these and other laws, and these folks will get taken down ……… hard.

Huh, I Don’t Know How I Missed This………

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But the Dassault Rafale has won the Indian MMRCA competition, and will be delivering 126 fighters.

It appears that the Rafale largely beat the Typhoon largely on the basis of cost, though the fact that the Rafale is currently more capable in the strike role probably helped, as did what appeared to be a pretty good offset deal.

It’s interesting that the final decision came down to the cheapest of the two most expensive competitors (other competitors, were the MiG-35, Gripen, F-16, and F/A-18).

I still wonder how much of this was driven by a concern that the French were seen as more independent of US foreign policy.

Epic Snark

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Barry Ritholtz puts in his application to be head of corporate communications for the Vampire Squid:

To: Hiring Committee, Goldman Sachs
From: Barry Ritholtz
Re:  Position, Head of Public Relations, Goldman Sachs
Date: February 13, 2012

Gentlemen:

Now that your public relations chief, Lucas van Praag is (finally!) retiring, it is time for the executive committee to seriously rethink the position of PR head. To be blunt, your efforts have not been up to the level of excellence that one would expect from Goldman Sachs. It would be impolite to speak ill of the job done by LVP has done under challenging circumstances, but you gentlemen need to face the facts, and fast. On his watch, the firm’s reputation has suffered, its ability to recruit top talent has been compromised, and its market cap has gotten shellacked.

In short, your PR efforts have performed about as well as the ABACUS 2007-AC1 –  the John Paulson created mortgage bundle that cratered. Or, about as well as John Paulson’s fund in 2011, which also cratered (I am seeing a pattern here).
All of which says, you guys have really stunk the joint up.

Thus, it is with great pleasure that I toss my hat into the ring for the position of Director of Communications for Goldman Sachs. Not only do I have the requisite skill set to help rehabilitate the image of the 100+ year old firm — media savvy, legal smarts, netizen, with just a dollop of snark — but I believe I can help you move gracefully into the new century.

Just read the rest. It’s da bomb!

So, Now They are Turning Over Rocks at Komen

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It turns out that Komen CEO Nancy Brinker has managed to generate 6 figures in reimbursable expenses from the charity while she was working full time for the Bush administration:

She billed her charity for $133,507 in expenses at a time when she had a full-time job elsewhere. Her staff is in turmoil. While her cancer-fighting work is undisputed, her managerial style is not.

Nancy Brinker, a socialite, powerbroker, and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, has turned Susan G. Komen for the Cure into a cancer-fighting giant over the past three decades. Now, critics say, it may be time for her to go—if she wants to preserve the very charity she built.

The recent crisis over Komen’s decision to de-fund—and then re-fund—Planned Parenthood has put Brinker under intense scrutiny, with observers questioning everything from her management style to her earnings to her spending. “It has all become a diversion. It has itself become cancerous,” says Eve Ellis, a former board member of Komen in New York City. “Nancy has accomplished so much and provides so many millions in research dollars, but the foundation needs to get back to being strong. For that to happen, she needs to step down.”

In interviews with The Daily Beast, a half-dozen former Komen employees who held a range of jobs at the charity in the past five years expressed similar sentiments, saying the foundation has become dominated by its larger-than-life leader. These people strongly acknowledge Brinker’s accomplishments, praising her immense skill at raising funds for lifesaving cancer research. At the same time, they describe her as an imposing figure who flies first class, prefers five-star hotels, and generally exhibits an entitled air, which, they say, is at odds with the organization’s important mission. Employees don’t call her “Nancy,” these people say. They are expected to call her “Ambassador Brinker.”

In the 30 years since she launched the foundation, Brinker has raised some $1.9 billion for cancer research. More than 100,000 volunteers work in a nationwide network of affiliates. It was all Brinker’s vision—she started the charity after her sister, Susan G. Komen, died of breast cancer in her mid-30s.

………

The Daily Beast found that Brinker billed the foundation for $133,507 in expenses from June 2007 to January 2009, according to her filings with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. At the time, she was a full-time federal employee, serving as chief of protocol for the State Department. President Bush nominated her for the position in June 2007 and she held the job until January 2009.

But it gets better:

After Brinker’s term in the State Department ended in 2009, she returned full time to Komen. Her return coincided with a cultural shift within the foundation, former employees say. She was more distant and aloof, these people say. “It was like suddenly she expected someone to carry her purse,” says one person.

…………

At the Komen foundation, management turned over fairly rapidly from 2009 to 2011, at considerable expense to the foundation.

It appears that her stint in the Bush administration may have knocked a screw loose, a not unsurprising development.

It is interesting to see the knives come out. Just as few weeks ago, Komen was synonymous with the fight against breast cancer, and now the dam has burst.

Komen may survive, but Nancy Brinker won’t be at the helm.  She’s done, even if she does not realize this yet.

As an aside, at the core of much of movement conservatism is a sense of entitlement, and a sense of entitlement is generally incompatible with a properly functioning charity.

This doesn’t mean that Republicans can’t do good charity work, it just means that their world view renders them more vulnerable to losing sight of their mission.

Cry Me a River

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That is not the real Pope

Ok, because Natalie, my daughter, insisted on watching the Grammys, so I saw Niki Minaj’s The Exorcist inspired bit.

My reactions was, “WTF?”

But professional victim, pedophilia apologist, and talented amateur bigot, Catholic League president Bill Donohue predictably blew a gasket:

In what should come as zero surprise to anyone who watched Nicki Minaj attempt to reenact “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” during her performance at Sunday’s Grammy Awards, the Catholic League has issued a statement condemning the actions of the “Superbass” star.

As predicted by our own Maura Judkis, the faith-based organization whipped up an angry news release written by Catholic League president Bill Donohue as a response to Minaj’s rendition of her song “Roman Holiday.” Donohue mocked Minaj but primarily blamed the Recording Academy for allowing the number to air, a notable fact given that the executive producer of the Grammys and Minaj have told conflicting stories about how the performance got approved. More on that in a moment. First, the angry press release.

Well, this improves my opinion of Minaj.

There is probably a more contemptible (technically self appointed) spokesman for the Catholic Church, but none immediately come to mind.

They Are A Bunch of F%$#ing Ghouls!

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Sony Music, one of the slimiest record distributors out there, has just topped itself.

It raised prices on Whitney Houston’s music less than 12 hours after her death:

It’s easy to get so emotional about a singer after they’ve passed prematurely, as Whitney Houston did Saturday at the age of 48. But fans seeking to buy her digital albums in remembrance weren’t too happy at sudden price hikes so soon after her death.

The Brits picked up on it quickly, with London-based Next Web writer Matt Brian and The Guardian’s Josh Halliday both finding the price increases, which raised Houston’s “The Ultimate Collection” 2007 album from £5 (about $7.89) to £8 (about $12.63). In the United States, the cost is even steeper: $15 for the “Greatest Hits” collection at both Amazon (mp3 store) and iTunes.

Halliday found out that Sony Music increased the price of “The Ultimate Collection” at about 4 a.m. Sunday, not even 12 hours after news broke of Houston’s death. Fans were quick to point fingers at Apple for the anti-sale, but it turned out that when Sony bumped up the wholesale price of “The Ultimate Collection,” iTunes and other retailers automatically upped their pricing.

Not a fan, but sort of crap is cold.

H/t Chris in Paris.

Greeks Vote to Approve Their Own Suicide While the Rest of the EU Applaudes

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Their parliament has approved the new austerity plan, which will allow them to borrow money and give it to German, French, and British banks.

If I were running Greece, I would start a program of aggressive instruction in German for the populace.

If the Germans want to make Greece uninhabitable, perhaps they should accommodate the refugees.

In the meantime, Athens burns:

After violent protests left dozens of buildings aflame in Athens, the Greek Parliament voted early on Monday to approve a package of harsh austerity measures demanded by the country’s foreign lenders in exchange for new loans to keep Greece from defaulting on its debt.

Though it came after days of intense debate and the resignation of several ministers in protest, in the end the vote on the austerity measures was not close: 199 in favor and 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions or blank ballots. The Parliament also gave the government the authority to sign a new loan agreement with the foreign lenders and approve a broader arrangement to reduce the amount Greece must repay to its bondholders.

The new austerity measures include, among others, a 22 percent cut in the benchmark minimum wage and 150,000 government layoffs by 2015 — a bitter prospect in a country ravaged by five years of recession and with unemployment at 21 percent and rising.

But the chaos on the streets of Athens, where more than 80,000 people turned out to protest on Sunday, and in other cities across Greece reflected a growing dread — certainly among Greeks, but also among economists and perhaps even European officials — that the sharp belt-tightening and the bailout money it brings will still not be enough to keep the country from going over a precipice.

It’s actually going to make things worse, because it will cause the economy to contract, and the last thing you want to do in order to get out of debt is to cut your salary.

The Bank Deal is Likely Worse Than it Sounds

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Because the details of the deal have not been released, and they may in fact not have actually been settled, which means that when they are finalized, they could be worse than what we have already heard.

In fact they almost certainly will be worse, because the state AGs and the Obama administration simply cannot afford pull defeat from the jaws of what they claim to be victory:

You know it’s bad when banks are the most truthful guys in the room.

Remember that historical mortgage settlement deal that was the lead news story on Thursday? It has been widely depicted as a done deal. The various AGs who had been holdouts said their concerns had been satisfied.

But in fact, Bank of America’s press release said that the deal was “agreements in principle” as opposed to a final agreement. The Charlotte bank had to be more precise than politicians because it is subject to SEC regulations about the accuracy of its disclosures. And if you read the template for the AG press release carefully, you can see how it finesses where the pact stands. And today, American Banker confirmed that the settlement pact is far from done, and the details will be kept from the public as long as possible, until it is filed in Federal court (because it includes injunctive relief, a judge must bless the agreement).

This may not sound all that important to laypeople, but most negotiators and attorneys will react viscerally to how negligent the behavior of the AGs has been. The most common reaction among lawyers I know who been with white shoe firms (including former partners) is “shocking”. Let me explain why.

Negotiating of large, complex deals (or even little deals) does not happen in one fell swoop. Even when the two sides have outlined the major terms, and in sone cases hammered out the really important ones in some detail, there is still a great deal of negotiating that takes place in finalizing the text of the contract. The negotiation over the definitive agreement makes a great deal of difference on how fair the pact turns out to be. For instance, one of the sayings of transaction lawyers is “He who controls the document controls the deal.” The party that writes up the initial version of the contract has undue influence because that becomes the default and the other side has to negotiate back from that language.

Politics is trumping both the law and mathematics, and this will not end well.

This is Why These F%$#s Need to Go to Jail

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Because the financial class is really a bunch of monsters:

Fannie Mae (FNMA) pulled the plug on a 2010 plan to forgive borrowers’ mortgage debt because company executives were “philosophically opposed” to the idea, a former company employee told House investigators.

…………

According to the letter, a former Fannie Mae employee told the committee that the mortgage finance company had developed a pilot program for reducing mortgage debt for borrowers who owe more on their house than the property is worth.

The purpose of the plan was to develop “a responsible way to reduce principal balances for underwater mortgage borrowers without creating undue incremental moral hazard,” the employee told the committee.

The pilot had preliminary approvals from officials at Fannie Mae, FHFA, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bank regulator, according to the former employee.

In mid-2010, two weeks before its launch, senior Fannie Mae executives cancelled the program because they were “philosophically opposed to writing down principal balances,” according to the former worker, who was quoted in the letter without being identified.

“I believe that we could be saving tens of billions of dollars while also helping stabilize housing prices and stimulating economic growth,” the former employee said, according to the letter.

They f%$#ed the economy, but they are so convinced of their ultimate virtue that they are acting against the interests of the companies that they manage, and the taxpayers, because they have bought into a, “heads I win, tails you lose,” vision of crony capitalism in which they are the arbiters of virtue.

These people are dangerous sociopaths.

What Ken Livingstone Said

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In the time I was mayor, I used to do meetings with City bankers and I’d often open by saying, ‘This isn’t the world I would have created . . .’ [Bankers’ bonuses are] like penis extensions, among a small league of men – mine is bigger than yours.

. . . The world is run by monsters and you have to deal with them. Some of them run countries, some of them run banks, some of them run news corporations.

— The former (and hopefully future) Mayor of London Ken Livingston on the banksters and other captains of industry

(emphasis mine)

I think that this is an important thing to say.  One of the primary defenses of the banksters and the rest of the parasites on our economy is that their success is somehow the product of their virtue and ability.

This is a lie.  It has always been a law, and so long as we allow the myth that these folks are anything other than amoral winners of the genetic lottery, we grant them a legitimacy that they they do not deserve, and we do so at our own peril.

The Drug War Sucks

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We’ve kind of been rolling the trifecta with colds.

Sharon* has been on antibiotics for a cough and sinus for a few days, and after being blown off by our kid’s pediatrician’s replacement doc, so we went to an urgi-care clinic, and we got diagnoses for them, and me as well, since I had a nagging cough, and it had gotten bad enough that I wasn’t waiting until I saw my doctor at my regularly scheduled appointment with my doctor.

Charlie has a sinus infection, Natalie’s sinus infection migrated down to pharyngitis, and mine had migrated down to a full blown bronchitis.

In addition, Marilyn, my mother-in-law is at Sinai Hospital for what appears to be pneumonia.

So, what does this have to do with the drug war?

Well, in addition to antibiotics, both Charlie and I were prescribed decongestants, and both of these medications contained Pseudoephedrine, and so I could not buy both, because federal regulations say that it’s too much, and we might ………… cook meth.

The war on drugs is, to misappropriate the words of Nietzsche, like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

This Isn’t Water, It’s Shoggoth Blood!

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Russian researchers in Antarctica have drilled through more than 2 miles of ice and extracted a ten million year old water sample from “Lake Vostok” underneath.

Between the novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing as Don A. Stuart), the oeuvre of Howard Phillip Lovecraft, and John Carpenter’s take on cinematic take on Antarctic science, this is not something that I find particularly reassuring.

Two Banks Get Eated

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And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.

  1. Charter National Bank and Trust, Hoffman Estates, IL
  2. SCB Bank, Shelbyville, IN

An average week, and this Shelbyville is nowhere near Springfield (about 200 miles), so it’s not the real (Simpsons)  Springfield.

    Full FDIC list

    So, here is the graph pr0n with last years numbers for comparison (FDIC only):

    And here is the detail, since it is early in the year:

    Obama and Contraception

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    When your opposition looks this pampered and out of touch, you have a winning issue

    So, in the ginned up controversy over the requirement that religious non-profits cover contraception for their employees, Obama has split the baby:

    Mr. Obama announced that rather than requiring religiously affiliated charities and universities to pay for contraceptives for their employees, the cost would be shifted to health insurance companies. The initial rule caused a political uproar among some Catholics and others who portrayed it as an attack on religious freedom.

    Meeting with his top advisers in the Oval Office last week amid rising anger from Catholic Democrats, liberal columnists and left-leaning religious leaders — a fed-up Mr. Obama issued an order meant for Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services. Ms. Sebelius and agency lawyers had initially told the president they needed a year to work out a compromise that had seemed obvious to some in the administration from the start: make the new rule more like that offered by the State of Hawaii, where employees of religiously affiliated institutions obtained contraceptives through a side benefit offered by insurance companies.

    But in difficult internal negotiations, a group of advisers had bested Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others and sold the president on a stricter rule. Now the political furor surrounding it was threatening to consume signs of economic improvement giving a boost to the White House and put the Obama re-election campaign on the defensive.

    So the mandate for coverage is now on insurance companies, rather than the employers.

    If this is the end of this matter, then this is a good thing.

    My concern, based on past history, is that this is only the first step in a larger retreat.

    Then again, there are a number of people I respect who see it as eleventy dimensional chess, with people like Amanda Marcotte suggesting that Obama punked both the Conference of Bishops and the woman hating wing of the Republican Party, by forcing them to publicly oppose contraception, which is used by something like 99% of all sexually active women in the US at one time or another.

    Certainly the optics, for now at least, are good, and the effect on coverage of this change is zero, so it’s a win win.

    But the most powerful knock against Obama is his unwillingness to fight, and in the 2-3 days before this decision, news outlets were starting to note that there are 28 states that have had an identical mandate, and have had such a mandate for years, with nary a peep from the pedophile protection bureau US Conference of Catholic Bishops, so it was clear that the worm was turning in the media as well, so keeping this up until they blinked would, to my mind, have been the optimal approach.

    [on edit]
    I think that the real policy and political implications are best synthesized by the following from Lindsay Beyerstein:

    But if the bishops won’t accept this deal, Obama should stop trying to accomodate them. Respect for religious freedom does not include paying solemn lip service to the contraception cooties.