Here:
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.
“It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.
Is there anything he touches that does not collapse into a morass of failure, corruption, and self dealing?
In this case, a sweetheart deal negotiated in secret to allow a developer to set up subdivisions of McMansions, because the US Forest Service will redefine logging in the national forests roads as residential ones, and pave them.
Dan Froomkin notes that when Democrats push back, Bush’s signing statements get withdrawn:
Robert Brodsky writes for Government Executive: ‘The White House and congressional leaders have announced most of the appointees to the long-awaited Commission on Wartime Contracting. The bipartisan team is charged with investigating virtually all war-related contracts, including funds devoted to reconstruction, logistical support for coalition forces, and security and intelligence functions.
‘The commission is the brainchild of Sens. Jim Webb, D-Va., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. The freshmen senators co-wrote the provision creating the panel, which was included in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act and signed into law in January. . . .
‘The White House’s cooperation with the panel is an about-face from its earlier public stance.
‘Shortly after signing the defense authorization, Bush issued a signing statement that said he did not have to abide by four provisions in the legislation, including the one creating the commission. At the time, Bush said the provisions could inhibit his ‘ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and execute his authority as commander in chief.’
“Webb immediately pushed back, criticizing the statement as an ‘impingement on the rights’ of Congress and said the Senate would ‘march forward in an expeditious manner’ to create the panel. Webb’s office said the White House seems to have dropped its objections and plans to cooperate with the panel. . . .
“The commission is modeled after the Truman committee, which conducted hundreds of hearings and investigations into government waste during and after World War II.”
For more about that signing statement, see my Jan. 30 column, Bush Thumbs Nose at Congress.
I’m not a big fan of Webb. I think that he’s too conservative.
That being said, he has a spine.
You may recall that while he was in Congress, his daughter’s offices at Defense Solutions, an arms trading firm working for the Russians, were raided by the FBI.
Well, Curt Weldon is now a senior executive for the firm, working to smooth deals in Iraq, Libya, by banned arms exporter Rosoboronexport.
I’ve mentioned that Joseph Bruno, the Republican New York State Senate leader is stepping down, and I suggested that he was doing so because he believed that he would lose the majority in the next election.
Well, another shoe has dropped, giving him another reason to retire: The FBI raided his office just before he announced his retirement.
Hoocoodanode?
U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuit by the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation claiming that the US government has wiretapped conversations with their lawyers, because the document that confirms this is classified:
A federal judge in San Francisco has dismissed a lawsuit that claimed the government illegally wiretapped conversations between lawyers and a client, a now-defunct charity suspected of terrorism.
The lawsuit relied on a classified call log the government turned over by mistake to the client, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation. U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker barred the foundation from using the document and dismissed the suit, according to the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He gave the foundation 30 days to file a new lawsuit using publicly available information.
Catch 22.
Joe Hagin, a White House deputy chief of staff. He’s been with Bush for a very long time, and he is yet another of the folks from Chiquita who pay terrorists to murder labor organizers.
I look forward to his memoir.
It turns out that when Hunt Oil, run by a Bush political ally, cut a deal with the Kurds over oil last year, pissing off the Iraqi central government, and throwing a monkey wrench into the works of a comprehensive oil law, Bush and the state department not only knew about it, but they tacitly approved it.
Oh, well…Only 6 months and 20 days left for him and his to rape US interests for personal profits.
They are now sending prosecutors to the USA to get more information on the money paid to Olmert.
Stick a fork in him, he is done.
Not surprisingly, it was an executive at Chiquita, formerly United Fruit, which did so much to destabilize and de-democratize Latin America, who is involved, Carl H. Lindner Jr., whose firm admitted to knowingly supporting a terrorist organization:
Carl H. Lindner Jr., the billionaire Cincinnati businessman, was CEO of Chiquita Brands International from 1984 to 2001, and remained on the company’s board of directors until May 2002. Beginning under his tenure, Chiquita executives paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (known by the Spanish acronym AUC), which is described by George Washington University’s National Security Archive as an “illegal right-wing anti-guerrilla group tied to many of the country’s most notorious civilian massacres.”
Following a Justice Department indictment last year, Chiquita admitted to illegally funding the paramilitaries and agreed to pay a $25 million fine. Chiquita’s payments to the AUC began in 1997 and lasted seven years; roughly half of the funds came after the group was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. State Department in 2001.
According to the Justice Department, the payments “were reviewed and approved by senior executives” of Chiquita, who knew by no later than September 2000 “that the AUC was a violent, paramilitary organization.”
Lindner has hosted a number of fund raisers for McCain, and is on his “Ohio Victory Team”.
Chiquita also did gun running to the AUC, which I suppose is one way to keep the banana plantation workers from organizing.
And, of course, Mr. Straight Talker also did favors for the guy regarding a land deal in Arizona in the 1990s.
Oh, and I almost forgot, his chief political advisor, Charlie Black, lobbied for both Chiquita and Columbia.
What a bloody witches brew we have here….but the press won’t cover it, because McCain is a straight talker and honest.
Specifically, regulators in Massachusetts have obtained emails showing that UBS was pushing auction rate securities even as it believed that the market was in trouble.
They were aggressively selling these to individual consumers, even while their corporate clients were bailing, because they did not want to be left hold the bag.
It’s called, “putting lipstick on a pig”:
This e-mail was released as part of a civil suit brought against UBS by William Galvin, secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He says UBS misled investors by saying that auction-rate securities were as safe as cash in order to keep these arcane bonds off their own books. Among the other e-mails uncovered:
From Joel P. Aresco, chief risk officer for the Americas, Nov. 15: “What measures are being taken to reduce this exposure? [to auction rate securities”
From David Shulman, Dec. 11: “I am pushing every angle here to move product.”
I hope that someone is going to go to jail over this.
I believe that I’ve covered it before in passing, but this is, I believe, the first court case in which a court has canceled a loan for deceptive practices.
They plaintiffs thought that they had gotten a loan that was fixed for the first 5 years, but rates went up after the first year:
The Andrews filed the case seeking class action status; and in early 2007, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman ruled that the bank had violated the Truth in Lending Act, or TILA, and that thousands of other Chevy Chase borrowers could join them as plaintiffs.
The judge transformed the case from a run-of-the-mill class action to a potential nightmare for the U.S. banking industry by also finding that the borrowers could force the bank to cancel, or rescind, their loans. That decision was stayed pending an appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to rule any day.
The lawsuits filed by attorneys general in California, Florida, and Illinois use much the same theory.
It’s based on the 1968 Truth in Lending Act, which requires clear disclosures of terms, and allows for, “rescission, or termination, of a loan and the return of all interest and fees when a lender is found in violation.”
Needless to say, the banks are freaking, though I would ask why any ethical mortgage banker would have anything to fear.
This one’s going to the Supreme Court, where I expect them to rule in a 5-4 split, that only little people have to follow the law.
For shorting workers on the breaks and lunches, and making them work off the clock, to the tune of $6.5 million dollars.
Note that this is just compensatory damages, and that there will be a jury portion to determine punitive damages…And there are about 70 suits just like this one across the USA.
So, it appears that the financial services industry is now objecting to pricing assets on their balance sheets at market value, because it makes their balance sheets look pretty sick.
Let’s be clear on this: these companies bought a bunch of highly complex financial instruments, ones that they themselves did not understand, and now no one is willing to buy this toxic waste at anything even remotely near to face value.
Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, thinks that the accounting rule, FAS 157, which requires that you place your investments on the books at fair market value, is too high a standard, and that,”the rule is accentuating and amplifying potential losses.”
What is amplifying the rule is traders and senior executives dealing in pixie dust, because they got a commission for doing so.
Note that SOME companies have been doing mark to market for a long time:
But Goldman Sachs proved why FAS 157 works: Goldman has been marking its books to market for years, and as a result, its risk officers were able to hold back its go-go traders from making bad bets when everyone else was throwing their chips last year into the subprime game.
Will no one rid me of these turbulent brokers?
The state is filing suit against the lending giant, alleging predatory lending.
Heck of a purchase, Bank of America.
You now have California, Florida, and Illinois suing you, so that’s probably already double digits of their market share under legal attack.
You can read the story. They claim that there are issues of risks to the soldiers and diplomatic repurcussions, but I think that the real reason that they are holding off from authorizing special forces to try to find and apprehend/kill bin Laden is that they want it closer to the November elections.
In this case, it’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, who appears to have actively shut down any investigation into the legality of techniques mandated by Rumsfeld.
Another day, another war criminal who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush.
He now has cushy gigs on the boards of military contractors.
He should be in jail awaiting trial.
So it now appears that these no bid oil service contracts were drawn up by a, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team.”
This confirms what was already suspected, that the deal was done by and for the US, and not for the owners of this oil, the Iraqi people.
Seeing as some in the administration *cough* Dick Cheney *cough* they see this as a win, win, I find the idea that they are funding military and terrorist actions in Iran to be credible.
My guess would be is that if an American special ops soldier were captured by Iran, they would consider it to be a lucky break for them, because it would allow them to strike.
It reinforces their view that American military might is the only way to conduct foreign policy, and they believe that it would benefit Republicans in November.
Glenn Greenwald savaged Keith Olbermann because he is endorsing Obama’s sellout as clever politics, when earlier he had one of his vaunted “special comments” denounced telco immunity as textbook Fascism.
Olbermann promptly went on Kos, and called Glenn Greenwald names, and asserted that John Dean said that a President Obama could prosecute the telcos criminally.
There are two problems with this assertion:
I said that when I read the bill, and talked to the folks at the ACLU who had been following it, that it was not clear. I raised it when appearing on Countdown with the hope that someone might figure it out. But that is the nature of this badly drafted bill that it is not clear what it does and does not do, and the drafters are not saying.
But even if the bill is unclear there is no question the Bush Administration is not going to do anything to the telecoms, so the question is whether a future DOJ could — and here there is case law protecting the telecoms. But there may be language buried in the bill that protects them as well but it can only be found by reading the bill with a half dozen other laws which I have not yet done.
I made no declarative statements rather I only raised questions that jumped at me when reading the 114 page monster.
(emphasis mine)
For Keith Olbermann to laud Obama’s decision to sell out, and to suggest that Dean supports this action, when on his own show, Dean called telco immunity a, “grave assault on the Constitution”.
It’s not OK when Bush does it, and it’s not OK when Obama goes along with, Mr. Olbermann.