Category: Corruption

Well, Here is a Story that I Missed

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Enterprising young environmental protester Tim DeChristopher was at a demonstration against hurried auctions of government land next to some of the crown jewels of the National Park system by Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, when an idea hit him: go into the auction, and bid against the people getting the sweetheart deals, and drive the prices up.

He had no money, but he did drive the prices up, and DeChristopher, the now infamous “Bidder 70”, actually won a fair portion of the bids before authorities realized what was up, and they threw him out.

Well, he has been collecting donations online, and he now has the requisite $45,000.00 to make the first payment on the 13 leases that he won, which accounted for roughly 15% of the total acreage that was sold at auction.

He still needs to pay a total of $1.7 million, but it’s a start.

You can donate to him here.

Big Surprise Here

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

It appears that the congressional panel tasked with investigating the Treasury Department’s TARP program has discovered that absolutely nothing has been done by way of oversight on the recipients of this money.

Maybe I’m a cynic, but I think that this is a feature, not a bug.

Bush and His Evil Minions™ in general, and Henry Paulson in particular, have done their level best to ensure that not the smallest vestige of accountability accrue to those people who are most responsible for this mess, because they believe the rules of accounting and honesty should not apply to rich people.

Elizabeth Warren, who heads a congressionally appointed oversight panel, told ABC news there was no evidence the Treasury had used money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program to support the housing market by avoiding preventable foreclosures.

“There’s just no money that’s gone in that direction. This one’s not even arguable,” she said. “The TARP funds themselves have not been used in this way despite congressional statutes requiring them to do so.”

In a draft of a report to be released on Friday, the panel said the Treasury has failed to reveal its strategy for stabilizing the financial system and had done little to track how the money was used.

More on Blagojevich/Burris

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The Illinois house just impeached Blagojevich, sending him to the State Senate for trial.

Roland Burris had the State Supreme Court refuse to force the Secretary of State to sign his certificate of appointment to the Senate, which is actually a victory, because they said his certificate is valid anyway:

…Petitioners are not entitled to an order from this court requiring the Secretary to perform those Acts. Under the Secretary of State Act, the Secretary’s sole responsibility was to register the appointment (15 ILCS 305/5(2) (West 2006)), which he did. No further action is required by the Secretary of State or any other official to make the Governor’s appointment of Roland Burris to the United States Senate valid under Illinois law.

One final thought: Please, God, make it stop!!!!

Hopefully to Be Followed by Jail Time

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It has been reported that former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has retired from Citi.

Seriously, if there is one thing that has to be done with the financial collapse, it is to find those players who broke the law and send every one of them to jail.

You start with Rubin because he is a close friend and sometime mentor to Summers, Geithner, etc., which means that we snuff out all the allegations of partisan bias at the start of the process.

As to whether Rubin might be innocent of legal wrongdoing, much of the business as usual at Wall Street is clearly dishonest and deceptive, and so you’ll find something.

Not Enough Bullets: Weekend at Bernie’s

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Madoff, that is.

The prosecution wants his bail revoked. It appears that he has been transferring a significant amount of valuables to 3rd parties.

It appears that he has mailed in excess of $1million in items to friends and relatives:

The decision by Bernard Madoff and his wife to ship jewelry and others valuables to family and friends may land him behind bars sooner rather than later.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Litt of the Southern District of New York told a magistrate judge Monday that Madoff and his wife Ruth mailed in excess of $1 million in valuables late last month despite a court order in a related civil case requiring the accused mastermind of a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme not to dissipate assets.

Most of the material has since been returned and handed over to federal authorities, but Litt said the transfer amounted to changed conditions that warrant Madoff detention as he awaits trial or a guilty plea on one of the largest frauds in history.

Defense attorney Ira Sorkin of Dickstein Shapiro said the mailing of the valuables, which included watches, a pair of cuff links and even a $200 pair of mittens, had nothing to do with allowing Madoff to remain free on bail.

$200 mittens?

JEEBUS

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The only governor to give Sarah Palin a run for her money in the “just plain nuts” department Rod Blagojevich has named former Illinois AG Roland Burris to replace Barack Obama.

Given that the Senate Dems have already said they won’t seat him, it guts ugly, particularly since the precedent of Adam Clayton Powell indicates that they may have to.

Furthermore, we have reports on him, and we know that he is 71, that he is the first Black man to be elected to state wide office in Illinois, that it appears that he is not interested in running for reelection in 2010, and he has excoriated Blago:

Burris has also condemned Blagojevich and supported his removal,and that he’s said he would not seek another term.”

The Illinois secretary of state is trying to reject the paperwork, though the legality of that is unclear.

The initial reports on Burris is that he’s squeaky clean, and he ran against, and lost to, Blagojevich in the primary. See here:

My home state’s culture of political corruption is well documented. Roland Burris managed to build a career in politics in this state without falling into that muck. He is, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, squeaky clean, and he’s highly respected. He’s 71 years old, so I wonder if he intends to serve as a caretaker. But he’s an honorable guy, well liked by people across the state in both parties. It’s a stroke of brilliance by Blagojevich in my opinion.”

A Photograph of Him in a Mariachi Outfit?

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Peter S. Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson have what might be the single most entertaining account of bank mismanagement of the year.

They recount the story of WaMu, and start by quoting former CEO Kerry K. Killinger”

We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.

Well, he’s right, it’s 5 years later, and nobody is calling Washington Mutual a bank anymore.

But it gets even better when they interview a former supervisor at a WaMu mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons, who is now in prison on drug charges:

…..

Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.

Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved.

(emphasis mine)

Yog-Sothoth’s Yam Yogurt, this is eerily reminiscent of the Tulip Mania of 1637.

H/T Wallstreetjackass for noticing this bit of absurdity.

Pardongate is Coming Early This Year

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George W. Bush released 19 pardons, including one for Mr. Isaac Robert Toussie, a crooked real estate developer who victimized minority first time home buyers.

When the details came out, and it was revealed that his father, Robert Toussie, had contributed heavily to the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bush decided to reverse the pardon.

No bit surprise there. It’s embarrassed having been caught selling a pardon, and it makes it very difficult for the ‘Phants to challenge Obama’s AG nominee, Eric Holder, on the Mark Rich pardon.

The interesting thing is that Bush may not have the power to reverse the pardon, maintaining that it had not been “delivered” because the, “Pardon Attorney had yet to “execute and deliver grants of clemency to the named individuals.”

According to the Pardon Power Blog, this may not be true, as “The Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA) called each grantee (or his counsel) via telephone and told him that he’d been pardoned by the President,” so the pardons may have already been legally delivered and accepted, and that “receiving the president’s warrant and sending notifications to the petitioners is purely ‘a ministerial act of notification.’“

So, once again, we are hip deep in a complete f$#@-up courtesy of Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Un-Dirtyword-Believable

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You have to love this:

If you go back about 20 years, you come across a bank regulator known as Darrel W. Dochow who overrode the recommendation of bank examiners in the matter of Lincoln Savings and Loan, of Keating 5 fame, that the institution be seized because it was insolvent.

Of course, a little while after that, it collapsed, at far greater cost to the taxpayers than had they acted earlier.

So, where is Mr. Dochow now? He’s the western regional director for the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), and he figures prominently in the failure of IndyMax.

It seems that he signed off on a back-dated transfer of money to the now failed thrift:

The Office of Thrift Supervision’s western regional director, Darrel W. Dochow, allowed IndyMac Bank to receive $18 million from its parent company on May 9 but to book the money as having arrived on March 31, according to the Treasury Department’s inspector general, Eric M. Thorson. The backdated capital infusion allowed IndyMac to plug a hole that its auditors had belatedly found in the bank’s financial results for the first quarter. If IndyMac had not been able to plug that hole retroactively, its reserves would have slipped below the minimum level that regulators require for classifying banks as well capitalized.

Though the $18 million transaction was minuscule in comparison to IndyMac’s $32 billion in assets, it had tremendous significance. If IndyMac had lost its well-capitalized status it would not have been allowed to accept “brokered deposits” from other financial institutions. Brokered deposits are typically high-yielding certificates of deposit arranged by brokers and sold to savings and loans. IndyMac relied heavily on brokered deposits, which amounted to $6.8 billion or 37 percent of its total deposits last spring.

“This is very significant in terms of whether IndyMac was over or under the O.T.S.’s thresholds for capital,” said Bert Ely, a veteran banking analysts in Alexandria, Va. “But what’s really troubling is that it seems to have been going on elsewhere.”

What is even more troubling is that this guy still had a job in bank regulations, and what’s more, he had a senior position.

Why this man was allowed to do anything that did not involve asking, “Do you want fries with that?” Is the real question here.

I don’t know if Darrel Dochow ever took a dime, or a dinner, or even something as inconsequential as a calendar or a pen, from anyone related to the industries that he regulated, but it’s clear that even if he broke no laws, he is corrupt, and he should be kept away from balance sheets and regulation for the rest of his natural life.

Cheney Admits to Engineering Outing of CIA Operative to FBI

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Ummmm…wow????

Legally, it may be a gray zone, because there is no evidence that he actually explicitly gave the order to out Valerie Plame, but Murray Waas, one of the better investigative journalist of my generation has gotten his hands on the notes from FBI interview with dick Cheney, and it’s very clear that he rewrote the talking points on the push-back on Joe Wilson’s OP/ED debunking the Niger-Iraq-Uranium claim in such a way as to make it nearly inevitable that Plame would be outed:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

(emphasis mine)

Of course, I expect Cheney to be among those pardoned between January 15 and January 20, so it will amount to nothing.

Latvia Required to Steal from Poor and Give to Rich for Emergency Loan

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They are getting emergency loans from the EU and IMF to the tune of about €7.5 billion, and they come with an austerity package.

The bullet points on the austerity package:

  • Public sector wages are to be slashed by 15%
    • BTW, this will increase corruption in the public sector, because bureaucrats gotta eat too….Decent wages is the best line of defense against a culture of corruption in the public sector.
  • The VAT (sales tax) is to be increased.
    • Which hits poor people harder.
  • The income tax is to be cut.
    • Free money for the rich.

Mostly, this is to keep their currency, the Lat, fixed relative to the Euro in preparation for joining the monetary union.

It also has the effect of benefiting rich creditors over poor debtors…See
William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech.

The country is in trouble: Save the rich, burn the poor for fuel.

So, an Obama Administration Will Employ a Liar as DHS Spokesman

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Specifically, Joe Lieberman’s campaign manager for his 2006 primary, Sean Smith, will be hired as the new spokesman at the Department of Homeland Security.

You may not recall, but the Lieberman site went down on primary day of 2006 because they exceeded the limitations on their sight, but that did not stop Sean Smith from repeatedly insisting that Lamont and his supporters were hackers.

If there is a government agency with a black eye on credibility worse than DHS, I can’t think of one, and I am including the Office of the Vice President in this equation.

Obviously people like spokesman and campaign managers tend to lie….It’s their business, but not this guy at this post.

Big Surprise

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When a reporter asked the banks about what they were doing with their bailout funds, they refused to answer, except one bank with a vague, “reducing foreclosures,” which is, you know, like a lie, since foreclosures cost lots of money up front, and hit the balance sheet immediately.

One bank said, “No comment,” and then asked the reporter not to quote them on that.

Seriously, some people need to go to jail for a very long time.

How the Heck Do They Screw This Up So Badly

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Let’s be clear about this: while it is clear that Ted Stevens is guilty of accepting bribes, he was only convicted of the easier-to-prove failure to report gifts.

In the process of prosecuting this case, the prosecution mad basic, and what appear to me (IANAL) to be very elementary errors in things like discovery and errors in the indictment, and now we have a whistle blower claiming irregularities in terms of witness contacts:

  • A member of the prosecution accepted “multiple things of value” from a “cooperating source” (most likely former Veco CEO Bill Allen, his name shows up in the redacted complaint)
  • An “inappropriate scheme” was created to relocate a witness.

I’m wondering if someone on the prosecution team was trying to throw the case. Bush, and Bush before him, and Reagan before him, have done their level best to politicize the DoJ, and this could be the fruit.

I find simple incompetence to be an inadequate discussion explanation.