Tony Blair converts to Catholicism.
This comes as no surprise to me. One wonders when he will join Opus Dei, the right wing Catholic Organization founded by fascist (literally) and alleged pedophile Josemaría Escrivá.
Category: Corruption
State Department Knew Blackwater Was Cooking Books in 2005
The State Department’s IG report in early 2005 noted that, “that Blackwater cited its profit from the contract as a cost it incurred, and billed the government for it — resulting in what the report called “a pyramiding of profit.”
This is the second most blatant bit of account theft that I have ever heard of, the first being a guy who noted change as an expense for a non-profit group called the MSR.
He did time, and so should the execs at Blackwater.
EPA Director Ignored Staff in Shooting Down California Emissions Regulations
Gee, the Los Angeles Times is saying that a Bush admin political appointee ignored the science and the law when making a decision??? I’m shocked at these allegationsEPA chief is said to have ignored staff – Los Angeles Times
“California met every criteria . . . on the merits. The same criteria we have used for the last 40 years on all the other waivers,” said an EPA staffer. “We told him that. All the briefings we have given him laid out the facts.”
The Weakest of Denials
Dan Froomkin just made a very interesting point about Bush’s press conference:
At a year-end press conference this morning, President Bush staved off questions about White House complicity in the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, refusing even to flatly deny that he was personally involved.
Hmmmm…
A Must Read Book: How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative
Well, the continuing unfolding scandal of the 2002 New Hampshire phone jamming scandal has provided quite a lot of insight into how Republicans work, and How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, by Allen Raymond, is one of the products of the scandal.
As a result of his being fingered as the fall guy for the phone jamming, he was guilty as hell (served 3 months), but he was a foot soldier sacrificed in an attempt to protect the higher ups.
First, we have a McClatchy review of an advance copy of the book, which notes that James Tobin, he former regional director for both the RNC and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (convicted and now on appeal), made 22 calls to the White House *cough* Rove *cough* in the 24 hours surrounding the phone jamming.
As soon as the investigation started, Tobin and Charles McGee, the executive director of the New Hampshire GOP, denied all knowledge, and basically pretended not to know Raymond. In the days following the election, when Raymond “when he phoned Tobin after Sununu’s 19,000-vote election victory to tell him that a Manchester, N.H., police officer was looking into the scheme, Tobin responded, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.'”
Also of interest is his story of the related at TPMmuckraker:
To set the scene: Raymond got a call in 2000* from two former colleagues in New Jersey who ran a consulting shop called Jamestown Associates. They were working for Dick Zimmer, who was running against Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), the incumbent, and they were pulling out all the stops. (Ed. Note: This post originally stated that this happened in 2002 — that was my mistake, not Raymond’s.)
They’d already succeeded in getting a Green Party candidate on the ballot to drain liberal votes from Holt (a favorite GOP trick). And they had already put Raymond’s firm to work calling Green-oriented households and urging them to support the Green candidate.
But what came next was “even better”:
[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, “How do you guys find voice talent?”
“Well, I’ve got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I’ve got ‘single Northeastern female,’ I’ve got ‘Southern belle’ — what are you looking for?”
“We’re targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter.”
“Oh,” I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. “How about ‘angry black man’?”
“Yeah, that sounds good. What’s his voice sound like?”
So I cued up one particular actor’s CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.
After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, “That’s the guy!”
So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, “I’m calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt.”
I’m not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was “I’m ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don’t vote for the Democrat I’m going to come to your house and take care of some business.”
The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be “I’m not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house.”
We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone’s character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.
Remember — they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.
Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.
Seriously, if it weren’t for bigotry the Republicans would barely outpoll the Monster Raving Loony Party.
BTW, you have to love this comment by Raymond, “As for his three months in a Pennsylvania prison, he wrote: ‘After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn’t really any great ordeal.'”
Monoliners Heading for a Crash?
This post is kind of an extension of my previous post about ACA and MBIA.
First, a definition, care of The Daily Telegraph:
Monoliners are specialist insurers who earn fees by lending their AAA ratings to US states, counties, and cities for bond issues – the safest corner of the credit industry.
The nasty twist is that most have ventured into mortgage debt to spice returns. They now face enough losses to threaten their AAA standing.
A downgrade means that every bond bearing their guarantee must be downgraded pari passu. Pension funds and institutions will be forced to liquidate sub-AAA holdings. A fresh cascade of distress sales will ravage the $2,400bn ‘muni’ market.
The unthinkable now looms. Moody’s said it was “somewhat likely” that top insurer MBIA would fall below the AAA capital requirement: Fitch warns of a “high probability” that CIFG Guaranty and Financial Guaranty will be placed on negative watch.
Does this sound familiar? It does to me.
Remember the people who were renting their credit to people with poor credit so that they could qualify for loans? It got shut down 6-12 months ago by all the major credit report agencies.
This is pretty much the same, only multiplied by about 100 million.
The forest issues is simple: a business – the monoliners’ insurance of securities and holding of risky ABS securities – that is fundamentally based on having a AAA rating is a business that does not deserve a AAA rating in the first place: it is clear to all that if a monoliner were to lose its AAA rating the essence of its business model would fail and such monoliner would have to close shop. But in any industry you have firms that can do business and thrive with an AA or A or even lower rating, even among major financial institutions. Here we have instead an industry that would go bankrupt as soon as its AAA rating is lost: by definition this is not an industry that can deserve a AAA rating. So the issue is not one of how sound these monoliners are managed or whether they have enough capital or whether they can raise new capital to maintain their AAA status. There is a fundamental and conceptual flaw in a business model that is conditional on a AAA rating and that is in a business that insures assets and firms that do not have a AAA rating. This is analogue to the voodoo finance of taking subprime and BBB mortgage backed securities and turning them into AAA by the black magic of CDO tranching.
This is not as the good Doctor Roubini admits, a painless process. This would involve losses in excess of $200 billion, but it is clear that this is a fraudulent practice, and the fact that the ratings agencies are giving these folks time to raise capital before a downgrade is merely supporting a “rotten business model”.
Mukasey Limits White House Access to Investigations
This was the policy before the tenure of Abu Gonzalez, when political operatives had unlimited access to the DoJ, and now we are back to a situation where WH operatives will not have the access exert undue political influence on ongoing investigations:
The original policy authorized more than 40 Justice Department officials and 400 White House officials to know about ongoing investigations, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a leading Democratic proponent of changing the policy.
During the Clinton administration, seven White House and Justice officials were permitted to receive such information.
Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr said Mukasey’s new policy mirrors the Clinton administration’s, but allows more officials to receive details about national security matters.
This is my first pleasant surprise from Bush and His Evil Minions&trade in a long time.
Barclays Sues Bear Stearns
So, now the lawsuits start:
Barclays sues over sub-prime losses
British bank says hedge fund losses were hidden
Andrew Clark
Barclays’ exposure to America’s sub-prime mortgage fiasco took a dramatic turn last night as the bank sued the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns for fraud and deception over the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in an ill-fated hedge fund.
In a lawsuit filed in New York, Barclays accused Bear Stearns of systematically hiding losses in a fund which swallowed $400m (£200m) of the British bank’s money. The fund had to be bailed out in June after reaching the brink of collapse following a disastrous series of investments in mortgage-backed securities.
Barclays described the fund’s demise as “one of the most high profile and shocking hedge fund failures in the last decade”. The suit alleges that up to the last days before the bail-out, Bear Stearns executives engaged in a cover-up to hide the slump in its value.
…
This is going to get worse. We are going to see more lawsuits, and some very big jury verdicts.
With proper regulations, you stop this sort of stuff before it gets out of hand. Without it, you just have lawsuits after the fact.
2002 New Hampshire Phone Jamming, DoJ Dragged Its Feet
In addition to reports that the Bush Department of Justice dragged its feet in investigating the 2002 New Hampshire election day phone jamming, which crippled the Democratic party GOTV efforts, we now have one of the perps dropping a dime on his former partners in crime at the Republican party.
A former GOP political operative who ran an illegal election-day scheme to jam the phone lines of New Hampshire Democrats during the state’s tight 2002 U.S. Senate election said in a new book and an interview that he believes the scandal reaches higher into the Republican Party.
Allen Raymond of Bethesda, Md., whose book Simon & Schuster will publish next month, also accused the Republican Party of trying to hang all the blame for a scandal on him as part of an “old-school cover-up.”
Raymond’s book, “How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative,” offers a raw, inside glimpse of the phone scandal as it unraveled and of a ruthless world in which political operatives seek to win at all costs.
McClatchy obtained an advance copy of the book.
I believe that we will be seeing a lot more of this.
With Democratic control of the congress, the opportunities for rewards for keeping one’s mouth closed have diminished, and if the Dems take the White House, the possibility for a pardon vanishes.
We will see a lot more people ratting out former friends, and writing books.
BTW, I love his last line, “As for his three months in a Pennsylvania prison, he wrote: “After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn’t really any great ordeal.“
Kerik, the Gift That Keeps on Giving
Well, it appears that there are still more depths to plumb in l’affaire Kerik.
Laurence Ray, one of Kerik’s closest associates, he was best man at Kerik’s 1998 wedding and he was convicted of mob-related securities fraud, appears to be singing like a bird:
This spring, Ray’s friend Sidney Baumgarten, a New York lawyer, told former deputy mayor and longtime Giuliani ally Ninfa Segarra that Ray was embroiled in a bitter divorce and an even worse custody dispute over his two daughters. Baumgarten said he told Segarra that Ray possessed “damaging” information about Giuliani but that he would not go public with his allegations if he could receive help with the mounting legal troubles.
“That was the implied quid pro quo,” Baumgarten recalled in an interview with The Post, saying the conversation stemmed solely from his desire to help Ray’s children in the custody case.
The following day, Baumgarten received an e-mail from Segarra advising Ray to call an acquaintance of hers, a “political heavyweight” lawyer who could assist Ray in the custody dispute in New Jersey. “For now I would ask not to identify me as the referral,” Segarra wrote in the March 5 e-mail obtained by The Post.
I am so hoping that the Republicans nominate Giuliani.
Who Says That Irony Is Dead?
Yes, it’s true, Blackwater has decided to expand its operations into peacekeeping.
Well, I guess that the dead do not conduct war.
(to the tune of Ghostbusters)
Blackwater
If there’s men with guns
in your neighborhood
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If there’s random death
and it don’t look good
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
If there’s a fear of death
running through your head
Who can ya call?
Blackwater
An populist man
turning your country red
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If ya all alone
pick up the phone
and call
Blackwater
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I here it likes the mercst
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
If you’ve had enough of those
Looters and scum
Ya better call
Blackwater
Lemme tell ya something
Bustin’ makes me feel good!
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
I ain’t afraid of no mercs
Don’t get caught alone no no
Blackwater
When it comes through your door
Unless you just want some more
I think you better call
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I think you better call
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
I can’t hear you
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Louder
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Who can ya call?
Blackwater
Who ya gonna call?
Blackwater
Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Back Down on Attempt to Seize Control of JAG Corps
Yesterday, I mentioned how Bush was attempting to put political hacks in charge of the military’s legal corps, one would assume that they were doing this because they have so completely f$%#ed up real trials, so they wanted false ones.
Today, they have backed down. Reviews and promotions will be handled through the military chain of command, not through political hacks.
My guess is that a few dozen of the people involved with the Gitmo trials made it clear that they would resign their commissions if this went through.
Prosecutors Investigating Bear Stearns
Fortune has an article, somewhat amusingly titled titled Prosecutors loaded for Bear, looking into allegations of insider trading.
Specifically, it is alleged that senior fund manager Ralph Cioffi pulled his money out of Bear’s mortgage backed funds about 2 weeks before they imploded.
Drip, drip, drip…I stand by my prediction on Bear Stearns: They will cease to exist as an independent entity before August 2, 2008.
Judge Tells DoJ Not To Tell Him What to Do, Holds CIA Tapes Hearing
U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy rejected calls from the Justice Department to stay out of the matter, and told lawyers to appear before him this Friday.
Kennedy as you recall was the judge who ordered the government to preserve, “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”
The tapes were destroyed a couple of months later.
Even if the destruction technically complied with the letter of his order, they could still be on the hook for obstruction or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in “pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation.”
Members of Congress Push for Special Prosecutor in Tapes Case
I was 11 in 1973, and that hed sounds like Deja vu, but Conyers and Kennedy are calling for a special prosecutor to investigate the CIA tape destruction.
Bush and His Evil Minions™ make miss the openness, honesty, and general humanity of the Nixon administration.
I cannot believe that I just said that.
Federal Reserve to Tighten Lending Regulations
This good, but I need to say three words: barn door cow.
The high points:
- Prohibit giving people unaffordable loans.
- Restrict use of “liar” loans.
- Prohibit or limit prepayment penalties.
- Curb or better disclose broker incentives.
- Require or encourage escrowing of taxes and insurance.
- Prohibit coercion of appraisers.
- Prohibit loan servicers from engaging in unfair practices.
- Require better disclosure overall.
Of course, half of these should be done already by anyone who wants to operate for more than a few years and then leave town ahead of the police.
Shuttle Sensor Problem Existed for 26 Years and Could Cause Explosion
It appears that the shuttle fleet is grounded until they can resolve the problem with the Hydrogen engine cutoff sensor. (Paid subscription required)
Basically, if there is a problem and the engine runs out of hydrogen before getting shut down
A cutoff is essential before hydrogen depletion to avoid cavitation in the 39,000-rpm. main engine high-pressure fuel pumps that would result in an explosion.
So this is a MAJOR problem.
But wait, there’s more:
The space shuttle fleet is grounded until technicians find and fix a vexing problem with engine cutoff (ECO) sensors—a component that NASA now realizes has likely never worked throughout the 26-year history of the shuttle program.
…..So why do we need an LH2 cutoff system? Simply put, if you need it and the LH2 tank runs dry with the engines at full power with LO2 still coming in, inevitably a catastrophe will occur. LOX-rich shutoffs are ugly in the extreme. This is a crit 1 situation. And it would occur so rapidly that human intervention is not practical.”
What’s going on here is that the shuttle is in the end of life phase, so the pressure to cover-up problems is decreasing, and so we are seeing long term potentially catastrophic loss of vehicle, crew, etc.
The Shuttle has been a pig since day one, and NASA has seen their job as covering up problems so that they can continue to play Captain Kirk.
Japanese Bank on Big Sh%$pile Bailout Fund: F$%# You White Man
It appears that the major Japanese banks are getting government pressure to help bailout subprime financial instruments, and they are profoundly disinterested in doing so.
Japan big banks reluctant to pay for subprime fund
Mon Dec 17, 2007 5:44am ESTBy Nathan Layne and Taro Fuse
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s top three banks are expected to resist a request to put up a total of $15 billion for a U.S.-led subprime rescue fund, a move that could further cloud prospects for the bailout plan.
Sources told Reuters last week that Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (8306.T: Quote, Profile, Research), Mizuho Financial Group (8411.T: Quote, Profile, Research) and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc (8316.T: Quote, Profile, Research) had each been asked to pony up $5 billion, and to give an answer this week.
…
But the issue could yet become political, the megabank executive said. Japanese banks are eager to expand their presence overseas and will not want to be seen as turning a blind eye to the health of the global financial system.
“What did America do when we had our non-performing loan problem? They just pushed us into the corner. European banks also ran away. Why should Japan now shoulder this burden?” said the megabank executive. “But this is a decision made at a high political level and could end up defying logic.
Part of this is the fact that the rest of the world pretended not to know them during the Japanese crisis, but another, larger part is the fact that the Japanese banks have largely cleaned up their act. The lack of transparency, cozy relationships, and self dealing in the subprime debacle mirror their experience 15 years ago.
What’s more, they understand that this bailout will interfere with reform, because it will largely serve to allow the worst miscreants to dump their investments on someone further down the economic knowledge chain (you know, teachers’ retirement funds, etc).
Mukasey Covering Up for Bush
Mukasey has told the CIA not to cooperate with any congressional investigation. Congress would, “just have to wait until the joint Justice Department-CIA probe was done.”
This is why, when John Mitchell resigned during Watergate, the Democrats demanded a special prosecutor as a price for approving a new AG.
Majid Khahn’s Lawyers Ask Court to Preserve Evidence
They also want a declaration that he was tortured.
Seeing as how he was in CIA custody for over 3 years, this Ballmur man (he was largely raised in Baltimore) is almost certainly telling the truth on this.