Author: Matthew G. Saroff

Big Labor Getting a Clue

No Comments

After getting nothing but feeble lip service from national Democrats on labor issues, and even less on the Republican state-level jihad against unions from the national Dems, labor unions are pulling back on donations to national democrats:

Some of the nation’s largest labor unions are cutting back dramatically on their financial support to the Democratic Party, saying they are highly frustrated with the failure of Democrats to put up stronger resistance to Republican proposals opposed by labor.

The unions have cited what they see as Democrats’ tepid response to Republican efforts to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, cut Medicare funding and require voters to show identification at the polls.

“It doesn’t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, in a speech Friday. “The outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them.”

…………

Labor’s threats to Democrats follow a major push in last year’s midterm election, when unions spent $8 million backing a liberal challenger to former senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.). The challenger, then-lieutenant governor Bill Halter, lost to Lincoln in a runoff, and a weakened Lincoln went on to lose the general election to Republican John Boozman.

Trumka trumpeted the outcome of that race in a question-and-answer period after his speech Friday. A moderator asked what was different about his latest rhetoric given that unions have threatened to withdraw support for Democrats in the past.

“Ask Blanche Lincoln,” he replied.

This is really the point that should be made, that there are a lot of Democrats who have little or no interest in protecting the average American worker, or of supporting organized labor, the distinguished gentlewoman from WalMart being one of the more prominent examples, and making an example of them is a good thing.™

I would also note that Lincoln was down by double digits to any Republican before the primary challenge.

Remember, It’s Only Censorship if It’s a Government

No Comments

So Murdoch owned Sky Italia dropping Current TV because it hired Keith Olbermann:

Former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV cable network has claimed Rupert Murdoch’s Italian satellite TV company dropped the network in Italy because it hired liberal politics news anchor Keith Olbermann.

Imagine that.

If there is a lesson to the travails of Silvio Berlusconi, it is that private unregulated mass media outlets are a cancer on democracy, and Rupert Murdoch is just another example of this.

Keith is Back

No Comments

Keith Olbermann has a special comment about the reactions to Michael Moore’s comments about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

While he disagrees with Moore, in that he [Olbermann] is OK with the idea that the US sent out a kill team with no real plans to capture of al-Qaeda’s founder, he finds the unrelenting attacks of Michael Moore’s character and patriotism by the Obama fanboi to be completely contemptible, and he notes the parallels to the attacks against people who questioned George W. Bush’s campaign of lies to get us to invade Iraq:

Some of us – not enough — questioned the official story in 2002 and 2003. But few of us who did so, had as much to lose as did Michael Moore. We were accused of “intellectual liberal hand-wringing” – even by supposedly liberal commentators on supposedly liberal television networks. We were dismissed, and demonized.

And to this day, even though Michael Moore was right, and George Bush was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and Newt Gingrich was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and John Boehner was wrong – to this day it is Moore who is demonized by the Republican Cult in ways that Bush and Gingrich and Boehner are not demonized by the American Left.

Instead, Moore, himself, now gets demonized in part, by the American left.

I want Michael Moore to question everything. I want him even to repeat the ten tweets he had in the aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden, in which he picked up on his theme from three years ago, when he told Larry King that the story that Bin Laden was living in caves, moving from one to the other, was palpable nonsense, that the only millionaire who willingly lived in a cave was Batman, and he only went there to change costumes.

I want Michael Moore, and every other Michael Moore, to remind us that, indeed, “Pakistan just couldn’t be seen as participating with us” and that, indeed, “the story has changed four times now in four days” and that, indeed, “As long as he wasn’t conducting terror, Osama Bin Laden alive served a purpose. Someone should just fess up: the war industry needs fear to make (money).”

Towards the end of his tenure at MSNBC, I thought that he had kind of lost his edge, but it appears that he’s back, and he’s right.

FYI, he is specifically calling out MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz, who has been an Obama fanboi for as long as I’ve followed who said, “The fact of the matter is, the intellectual liberal hand-wringing needs to stop in this country. People who voted for President Obama had to know he was willing to go anywhere at anytime to take out the world’s number one terrorist,” which is a truly contemptible attempt to squelch debate.

Between Schultz’s Obama man crush, and the unbearable inside-the-beltway conventional thinking wankfest of Lawrence O’Donnell, all I watch these days on MSNBC is Rachael Maddow.

I cannot wait for his new show on Current TV on June 20.

God Bless The Onion

No Comments

I really cannot add anything to the article, but it needs to be shared:

Budget Mix-Up Provides Nation’s Schools With Enough Money To Properly Educate Students

WASHINGTON—According to bewildered and contrite legislators, a major budgetary mix-up this week inadvertently provided the nation’s public schools with enough funding and resources to properly educate students.

Sources in the Congressional Budget Office reported that as a result of a clerical error, $80 billion earmarked for national defense was accidentally sent to the Department of Education, furnishing schools with the necessary funds to buy new textbooks, offer more academic resources, hire better teachers, promote student achievement, and foster educational excellence—an oversight that apologetic officials called a “huge mistake.”

…

Read the rest.

It’s Bank Failure Friday!!!!

No Comments

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

  1. Atlantic Southern Bank, Macon, GA
  2. First Georgia Banking Company, Macon, GA
  3. Summit Bank, Burlington, WA

Full FDIC list

And here are the credit union closings:

  1. Hmong American Federal Credit Union, St. Paul, MN

Full NCUA list

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

I really can’t find a pattern here, but it seems to be better than 2010, and worse than 2009.

OK, I’m Feeling Better About Donald Trump Leaving the Race…

No Comments

Because I hadn’t realized just how entertainingly insane Newt Gingrich can be.

In response to the sh%$storm that he unleashed for telling the truth about the Paul Ryan plan  to kill Medicare, he has been engaged in a series of obfuscations that are as delusional as they are epic.

His campaign’s latest press release is a true work of art, to such a level that Stephen Colbert felt the need to bring in John Lithgow to make a dramatic reading of it on his show.

I had forgotten what a complete pratt he was.

Press release after the break.

The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding,” Tyler wrote. “Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Matt Taibbi is Wrong

4 Comments

This Ain’t a “Pass the Popcorn” moment

Matt Taibbi notes that Eric Schneiderman, the New York State Attorney General is investigating irregularities in securitization of mortgage loans, and he is doing a happy dance at what looks like slam dunk at a real investigation, and prosecution, of the malefactors at the center of the financial crisis:

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities.

The questions Schneiderman will seek to answer are these: did the banks securitize loans they knew were fraudulent, throwing the rotten mortgages into the stew before serving them to customers? Did they also commit insurance fraud by duping the bond insurers (known as “monoline” insurers) into thinking the mortgages were not as risky as they really were? And did they participate in the fraud scheme on a more basic level by lending huge amounts of money to the Countrywides of the world, knowing that they in turn would immediately use that money to create the bad loans? In other words, did the banks finance the fraud in addition to brokering it?

(emphasis original)

He’s right on the basic facts, but he’s wrong on what happens next.

There very well may be a settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing, but in terms for real consequences towards the Vampire Squid and the rest of the universe on Wall Street, nothing meaningful is going to happen.

Either the Feds get involved, and block Schneiderman, or he gets destroyed like Eliot Spitzer was, or he, or the state of New York, gets bought off, but we are not going to see the laws applied to people like this, despite pervasive criminality involved, because we live in their world, and they just rent it back to us.

You Say It Because It’s True

2 Comments

Noted African American studies professor Cornell West recently characterized Barack Obama as, “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats,” in addition to declaring that he the President has bought wholeheartedly into “the American Killing Machine.”

While there are a number of reasons why a man who was once one of Barack Obama’s staunchest supporters might have become disillusioned, and in the interview linked above, there does appear to be a sense of wronged entitlement, West complains about not getting phone calls answered and issues with the inauguration tickets.

Having relatives who have worked, or are working in academe, some at fairly rarefied levels, I can state with some level of authority that a sense of entitlement is rather endemic in this environment, particularly amongst those who ply their trade in the Ivys.

So, I do not find Dr. West’s opinion particularly surprising or worthy of note, but I do find the positively kraptastic response to this criticism amongst the intelligentsia and much of the liberal blogosphere to be interesting.

Karoli has a good survey of those responses, in addition to being a prime example of this idiocy:

I don’t understand what the goal is when it comes to Cornel West’s opinion. He says in that same interview that if the only backstop against fascism is Barack Obama, he’ll go with that. If the goings-on in Republican states and the United States Congress doesn’t convince you of that, then look to the Supreme Court’s future to understand what’s at stake. So why come out and call President Obama a tool of the oligarchs? It makes no sense, and is suppressive in nature and intent.

How about this: because it is the truth.

Whether it is Geithner and Summers and the banks, the quashing of even the most casual investigation of torture, the expansion of the surveillance state, the war on whistle blowers, etc., Cornell West’s statement is objectively true.

He is better than the current crop of Republican candidates, but so was Terri Schiavo when she was on a ventilator.

Here Is a Shocker

No Comments

The Registrar of Deeds for Guilford County, North Carolina, Greensboro and environs, after hearing horror stories about fraudulent loans, decided to go through his own deeds, and went through all the deeds transferred from 2006 to 2010.

The results? That in a cursory examination, well over half of the deeds were in some manner fraudulent:

But Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, a county of about 465,000 in the center of the state (the largest city is Greensboro), decided to survey all the mortgage documents submitted to his office by DocX, a notorious “mortgage mill” that processes documents on behalf of lenders, between August 2006 and April 2010. He was inspired by a 60 Minutes investigation revealing numerous forgeries, backdating, and other false information on mortgage documents. “When I saw that [story], I was basically on fire,” Thigpen says. “‘I know this material is in my office, I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to get it out.'”

Out of the 6,100 documents Thigpen examined, 4,500 showed signature irregularities. The name of one DocX employee, Linda Green, who was acting as a vice president for several major banks, was forged 15 different ways on the Guilford County documents, rendering them invalid. Thigpen’s investigation was one of the first systematic assessments of mortgage document fraud in the entire country, certainly more robust than anything conducted by state and federal regulators.

Thigpen, as well as his Essex County equivalent John O’Brien, have been making as much of a stink as they can about this, they have asked the Iowa Attorney General, Tom Miller, to hold off on his proposed national settlement pending a real investigation. (some older posts here)

That would be the right thing to do, of course, but considering the fact that Miller is angling for some sort of position in the Obama administration, and the Obama administration is as interested in pursuing the banks for wrong doing as they are in pursuing Dick Cheney for outing a CIA agent, I don’t expect that there will ever be a meaningful investigation of Bankster wrongdoing.

It’s Jobless Thursday

No Comments

Initial claims are out and they are better, but still not enough to constitute a recovery in the job market.

Initial claims were at 403,000, still above the roughly 375K required for a meager recovery, while the less volatile 4 week moving average climbed to a 7 month high.

In the longer time views, while continuing claims fell, extended and emergency claims rose.

These are awful numbers, and Barack Obama has to be thanking his lucky stars about what a clown show the Republican Presidential campaign has become, because there were also a whole passel of truly anemic economic metrics released today, with the Philadephia Fed survey, the Conference Board’s Index of Leading Economic Indicators, and existing home sales disappointing.

2 Years???? 2 F%$#ing Years?!?!?!?

5 Comments

Yep, it’s that misbegotten bastard child of Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and Barack Obama*, the Home Affordable Mortgage Program, HAMP, where the Treasury has finally decided to require a single point of contact for homeowners participating in the program:

Mortgage servicers must provide a single relationship manager to borrowers being evaluated for a Home Affordable Modification Program trial by Sept. 1, according to guidance released by the Treasury Department Wednesday.

The guideline is required of the 20 largest servicers participating in HAMP, and it is one of the largest adjustments to the program since its inception in March 2009. Since then, more than 670,000 borrowers received a permanent loan modification, and more than 1.8 million trials have been extended.

“Over the past two years, two of the biggest complaints we received from borrowers were servicers are losing documents and they can’t connect with anybody who can actually track them down. Every time they call they can’t get a hold of someone with access to their case,” Laurie Maggiano, director of policy at the Treasury’s homeownership preservation office, said in an interview with HousingWire Wednesday.

The relationship manager must be an employee of the bank and cannot be a contractor. This manager will be assigned when the servicer makes successful contact with the delinquent borrower. The borrower must meet the initial criteria of the program, such as owner-occupancy and a 31% debt-to-income ratio.

The program has been in place for about 2 years, and since day 1, the complaints have been about no one being a point of contact, meaning that you had repeatedly lost paperwork, changing conditions, dual tracking, where when you were talking with one bankster, another was in the process of foreclosing, etc.

People have been screaming about this.

The press has been screaming about this.

Congress has been screaming about this.

But nothing was done until the 2012 election loomed, because, after all, this was not a program to help people, it was a program to cheat people, and help the banks.

*Who knew that bad programs were conceived by three beings?  For the rest of nature, it’s either parthenogenesis (Amoeba, lobbyists) or some sort of sexual reproduction involving only two participants. There are echos here of the Asimov novel The Gods Themselves.

The New York Times is Called Out On What it Calls Torture

No Comments

By its own Ombudsman:

The Times should use the term “torture” more directly, using it on first reference when the discussion is about — and there’s no other word for it — torture. The debate was never whether Bin Laden was found because of brutal interrogations: it was whether he was found because of torture. More narrowly, the word is appropriate when describing techniques traditionally considered torture, waterboarding being the obvious example. Reasonable fairness can be achieved by adding caveats that acknowledge the Bush camp’s view of its narrow legal definition.

This approach avoids the appearance of mincing words and is well grounded in Americans’ understanding of torture in the historical and moral sense.

The fact that our media still consider people who think that it’s OK to crush a child’s testicles to pressure their parent (John Yoo) to be acceptable as regular editorial contributors (to be fair, in the Philly Inky, not the Gray Lady) indicates that the idea of telling the truth has left the lexicon of so-called journalism.

Is Angela Merkel the George W. Bush of the Eu?

No Comments

It appears that Ms. Merkel doesn’t realize that she’s not bailing out the Greeks, she’s bailing out the German banks who are owed the money, but she’s still being a hard-ass and virtually assuring that we will see defaults, as well as worsening social unrest:

Also at issue was the technical operation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the permanent euro zone bailout fund due to come into force in mid-2013.

As ministers prepared to tackle the increasingly precarious financial situation in Greece, Dr Merkel made clear her resistance to any debt restructuring by the country.

Addressing students in Berlin, Dr Merkel said private sovereign creditors should not bear losses until the ESM starts its work.

“It would raise incredible doubts of our credibility if we simply were to change the rules in the middle of the first programme,” Dr Merkel said.

The rise in dissatisfaction with the EU, and the rise on nationalistic, and frequently xenophobic, parties in the EU is a direct result of the fact that it is being run as a support group for the banks, who, after all, were the ones who f%$#ed up everything in the first place.

I stick with my original statement on the Euro Zone: the country that needs to leave is not any of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), but Germany, which has increasingly seen the Euro as a way to artificially deflate its currency for export purposes, both within and outside of the EU.

They are a predatory exporter, only marginally better than China.

Medical Myths Exploded In a Picture

1 Comment
Click for full size

They’ve been blaming you and laughing all the way to the bank

You know what they all say, we drink too much (not), smoke too much (not, really really not, have you seen how much Frenchmen smoke), obesity (not), malpractice (one of the great lies in history).

What does it come down too?

  • We pay more for the same services.
  • Our overhead costs dwarf those of socialized medicine.
  • Doctors get paid a lot more here.

At its core, what we are seeing is a situation where the perfect “immaculate market” that the free market mousketeers seem so enamored of simply does not work.

It doesn’t work because healthcare is not an area where you have the option of just not buying the service, and frequently, shopping is not an option.

Besides, even if it were an option to shop for the best deal, the pricing schemes are deliberately obfuscatory, because opacity suits the players in this little pseudo-market dance.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the graphic.

Links to part 1 and part 2 of the series.

John ensign

No Comments

First, his former best friend, and the husband of the woman that John Ensign f%$#ed, Doug Hampton, has been indicted for violating lobbying laws and conflict of interest laws.

The could get interesting if he decides to drop a dime on Ensign and the rest of his co-conspirators.

It does appear though that John Ensign is incredibly busted, since the normally toothless Senate Ethics committee voted to make a criminal referral to the DoJ, and the special prosecutor they appointed to investigated recommended that he be expelled from the Senate.

BTW, speaking of co-conspirators, it appears that Senator Coburn was hip deep in negotiating the specifics of the payoffs to Hampton and his wife.

Assuming that the Department of Justice has the stomach for it pulling on this string* will unravel a lot more than just a Senator boinking a staffer.

Pass the popcorn.

*I think that they don’t because of their mishandling of the Ted Stevens prosecution and because of a general Obama administration policy to let things slide when they involve Republican law breaking.