Category: Corruption

The DoJ Weighs in About the Arizona Freak Show

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The Department of Justice wants to have a word with Cyber Ninjas’ and their audit of Maricopa County Presidential ballots.

Given the lax security, and the fact that this audit included what appeared to an attempt to intimidate voters, it comes as no surprise that the Feds were profoundly unamused:

The Arizona Senate will hold off on a plan to contact voters as part of a Republican-commissioned election recount that raised concerns from the Justice Department about voter intimidation, state Senate President Karen Fann said Friday.

The head of the department’s civil rights division, Pamela S. Karlan, wrote to Fann (R) on Wednesday suggesting that the recount of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the state’s largest county by a private contractor may not comply with federal law, leaving ballots at “risk of damage or loss.” She also raised questions about the contractor’s stated plans to “identify voter registrations that did not make sense” and interview voters via phone and “physical canvassing.”

The ongoing audit run by Florida-based Cyber Ninjas has been widely criticized as fueling wild theories that fraud and other electoral problems led President Donald Trump to lose the presidential race. Officials in Maricopa County, which went for Joe Biden in November, say the results have been validated repeatedly.

But Republicans have pressed ahead with a new, highly unusual inquiry that has ranged from scrutinizing ballots under UV lights to seeking traces of bamboo. With Cyber Ninjas, they hired a company whose chief has echoed Trump’s unfounded claims of problems with the 2020 election.

Looking for traces of what? 

Are they worried that some snacking Panda was messing with the ballots?

The senator laid out conditions for anyone contacting voters: Canvassers would convey that participation is voluntary; would not select people for characteristics such as race or party affiliation; would not carry a weapon; and would not wear or say something implying an affiliation with police, immigration, tax enforcement or the military, among other requirements.

Karlan, in her letter, raised particular worries about targeting by race. “Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Karlan said.

Voter intimidation is the goal here.

Responding to the Justice Department’s security concerns, Fann said that “not a single ballot or other official election document has been destroyed, defaced, lost, or adulterated.” Ballots must be securely maintained for 22 months following a federal election.

Shining bright UV lights on ballots in an attempt to find signs of Panda infiltration cause the ballots to fade.

Their Panda hunt will deface the ballots.  It’s basic physics.

………

Former Arizona secretary of state Ken Bennett, the audit’s spokesman, previously told The Washington Post that Cyber Ninjas had not begun interviewing voters and said the company has pledged to do nothing that would constitute intimidation.

The owner of Cyber Ninjas, an enterprise with no prior experience with vote tabulation or canvassing, has already prejudged the outcome.  Expecting them to follow the law is a fiction.

This is a clearly an attempt to intimidate voters and to manufacture uncertainty on an already twice audited vote tabulation process.

Why do Republicans hate America?

That’s What I Thought You’d Say, You Dumb F%$#ing Horse Trainer

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When an athlete is caught doping, generally I blame the athlete first and foremost.

I make an exception in the case of Kentucky Derby winner Medina Spirit, because sane people to do not assign the same level of agency that they would to a human athlete.

On the other hand, I do ascribe a level of agency to Bob Baffert, Medina Spirit’s trainer, and when he claims that Churchill Downs’ decision to revoke his horses win, and to suspend him is, “Cancel Culture.” 

So says a guy who for Medina Spirit is the, “fifth horse in 13 months to test positive,” and before that his, “Horses have failed 29 drug tests.”

And he’s blaming, “Cancel culture,” for his juicing horses.

He’s a complete tool, but I am grateful to have the opportunity to adopt one of John Mulaney’s best known lines.

Frau Merkel (Horses Whinny) Is at It Again

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The day after the Biden Administration said that it supported suspending IP rights on the Covid Vaccine, Angela Merkel comes out against this.

I think that her motivation is pretty simple:  Covid response is going pear-shaped in Germany, with Covid cases spiking, and by ginning up a controversy, she can avoid scrutiny of her handling of the pandemic.

This is not the first time that she has done this, it’s behind the whole policy of “othering” southern Europeans and spreading misery throughout the EU during and after the financial crisis.

She knows that if she’s seen as doing something, anything, with the argument that she is protecting Germans from the undeserving “other” she, and her CDU Party, can benefit, even if it provides no benefit to Germans, and may kill hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

Merkel is despicable:

The US and Germany are at odds on the issue of waivers for patents on Covid-19 vaccines, as Berlin argued that a waiver would not increase production and would inhibit future private sector research.

The disagreement is the first major rift between the two economic powers since Joe Biden took office, and threatens to deadlock discussions at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and sour relations within the G7 group of major industrialised democracies.

Any WTO decision on a waiver would have to be by consensus, so Germany opposition is a major obstacle to intellectual property rights on vaccines being suspended.

The Biden government’s announcement on Wednesday that it would back a waiver on vaccine patents was welcomed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a step towards greater global equity at a time when poor countries have little access to vaccines and south Asia has been hit by a devastating outbreak. India accounted for 46% of the new Covid-19 cases recorded around the world over the past week, and there are signs the wave is spreading to Nepal, Sri Lanka and other neighbouring states.

But Angela Merkel’s government came out against a waiver on Thursday.

“The US suggestion for the lifting of patent protection for Covid-19 vaccines has significant implications for vaccine production as a whole,” a government spokeswoman said.

“The limiting factors in the production of vaccines are the production capacities and the high-quality standards and not patents,” she added, arguing that the companies were already working with partners to boost manufacturing capacity.

This argument about the difficulty of vaccines is patently false, as I noted yesterday. 

You can mass produce mRNA viruses in a space smaller than the file room necessary to store the quality control documents, and Angela Merkel knows this; she got her PhD in Quantum Chemistry.

Unfortunately, there is no one in politics in Germany who is willing to call her out on her lies.

And Yet He Remains a Respected Part of the DC Establishment

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A federal judge just called former Attorney General William Barr a liar.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson just accused him of deliberately misleading her, Congress and the public about his characterization of the results of the Mueller investigation.

Furthermore, she notes that his description of the memos that avoid public disclosure through the FOIA process.

Why this man has a law license is beyond me:

A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.

………

Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”

………

The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

At issue is how Mr. Barr handled the end of the Mueller investigation and the release of its findings to the public. In March 2019, the office of the special counsel overseeing the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, delivered its report to the Justice Department. In a highly unusual decision, Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump had illegally obstructed justice.

………

But instead, Judge Jackson wrote, Mr. Barr and his aides had already decided not to bring charges against Mr. Trump. She reprimanded the department for portraying the memo as part of deliberations over whether to prosecute the president. She noted that she had been allowed to read the full memo before making her decision, over the objections of the Justice Department, and that it revealed that “excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the attorney general to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.”

………

The Justice Department argued that the emails were exempt from disclosure and filed sworn affidavits about their contents by lawyers for the Office of Management and Budget during the Trump administration. But Judge Jackson insisted on reading the emails for herself and wrote that “the court discovered that there were obvious differences between the affiants’ description of the nature and subject matter of the documents, and the documents themselves.”

More so than Donald Trump, Roger Stone, or Rudolph Giuliani, William Barr needs to be in the dock.

First, he was US Attorney General, and should be subject to a higher standard of behavior than your standard political hack, and second, he is a fixture of the Washington, DC establishment, and someone needs to poke a hole in their own innate sense of impunity for the whole corrupt edifice.

That he can still practice law is an abomination.

Pass the Popcorn

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The  Executive Office for United States Trustees, a division of the Department of Justice tasked with overseeing bankruptcy proceedings in the United States, just unleashed a huge can of whup-ass on Wayne LaPierre and the NRA.

It isn’t often that you hear terms like, “Failed to provide the proper oversight,” “Personal expenses were made to look like business expenses,” and that their regulatory issues with the New York AG are, “Not a legitimate reason for filing bankruptcy.”

It’s extremely rare for the trustee to say things like this, or to call for a bankruptcy to be halted, or to call for appointing a trustee.

The NRA is in a world of hurt, and if there is any justice in this world, Wayne LaPierre will end up sharing a cell with Matt Gaetz and Roger Stone.

The National Rifle Association’s hopes of end-running a legal challenge in New York were dealt a serious blow on Monday when a Justice Department official rebuked its leadership and called for the dismissal of its bankruptcy filing or the appointment of an outside monitor to oversee its finances.

Lisa L. Lambert, a lawyer in the United States Trustee’s office, which is part of the Justice Department, said the “evidentiary record clearly and convincingly establishes” that Wayne LaPierre, the longtime N.R.A. chief executive, “has failed to provide the proper oversight.” For a number of years, she added, “the record is unrefuted that Wayne LaPierre’s personal expenses were made to look like business expenses.”

Mr. LaPierre and the N.R.A. had filed for bankruptcy not because of any financial distress, but as a strategy to avoid litigation in New York, where the attorney general, Letitia James, is seeking to shut down the organization and claw back millions of dollars in allegedly misspent funds from Mr. LaPierre and three other current or former executives.

………

“The N.R.A. is in real trouble,” said Adam J. Levitin, a professor specializing in bankruptcy at Georgetown University. “The U.S. Trustee rarely gets involved in this sort of motion, much less urges dismissal, a trustee or an examiner. I cannot see an outcome where the N.R.A. comes out unscathed. I think the real issue is what remedy the judge grants.” 

John Pottow, who teaches bankruptcy at the University of Michigan Law School, called the trustee’s intervention “a glaring signal of profound dysfunction” at the N.R.A., adding that such an intervention by the trustee “doesn’t happen very often.”

“The N.R.A. has stated that it is seeking refuge from the New York attorney general’s actions and wishes to change its state of incorporation,” she added. “That can be done outside of bankruptcy. It is not a legitimate reason for filing bankruptcy.”

Shut them down, take their domain names, and take their mailing and donor lists.

Don’t allow LaPierre to resurrect his scam under a different name.

The ammosexuals community will doubtless find another outlet for their political priorities, after all, they have won the war against common sense gun laws for a generation, but at least that new organization won’t rob them blind.

Headline of the Day

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Will “Goldman Penis Envy” Crash the Economy Again?

—Matt Taibbi

The point of his article is that there are a lot of actors in Wall Street like Lehman, who are small enough that they feel that they have to massively over-leverage to compete with the Vampire Squid, but large enough to crash the system.

“We called it ‘Goldman Penis Envy,’” says Lawrence McDonald, former Lehman trader and author of A Colossal Failure of Common Sense. In telling the Gelband story, he explains that Fuld and Gregory were so desperate to beat out Goldman and become the richest men on Wall Street, they chased every bad deal at the peak of the speculative bubble.

“These tertiary financial institutions, in order to win business away from the big players, they have to continually juice their offerings, offer more leverage, more goodies,” says McDonald. “Dick and Joe, they wanted to do these banking deals, to steal Goldman’s business by offering more.”

He’s suggesting that the collapse of Archegos Capital Management is a taste of things to come.

He’s probably right.

I See the Problem

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 Look at this graph:

It might not look like much, but it shows how our economy has been taken over  by rent seekers.

IP, which only makes money to the degree that it is subsidized through government action, has increased by a factor of 5.

Even considering the rise in software as a product, it’s clear that an increasing portion of our economy has been diverted to unproductive rent seeking.

It’s a drag on our economy, and contributes to inequality.

Lock Him UP!! Lock Him UP!! Lock Him UP!!

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The FBI just raided Rudolph Giuliani’s apartment in connection with his unregistered lobbying for the Ukraine.

Federal investigators on Wednesday seized cellphones and computers from Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who became President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, stepping up a criminal investigation into Mr. Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine, three people with knowledge of the investigation said.

F.B.I. agents executed search warrants around 6 a.m. at Mr. Giuliani’s apartment on Madison Avenue and his Park Avenue office in Manhattan, carting away the electronic devices, Mr. Giuliani confirmed in a statement.

The execution of search warrants is an extraordinary action for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president. The move marked a major development in the long-running investigation into Mr. Giuliani, which examines some of the same people and conduct that were at the center of Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial.

………

The investigative actions on Wednesday were expansive, with agents also serving a grand jury subpoena on Mr. Giuliani’s executive assistant, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

One of the warrants for Mr. Giuliani’s devices indicated that the federal investigators were searching for communications between him and several Ukrainian officials, including the former president, Petro Poroshenko, and two former prosecutors who had helped Mr. Giuliani collect information about the Bidens in Ukraine, one of the people said.

F.B.I. agents also executed a search warrant on Wednesday morning at the Washington-area home of Victoria Toensing, a lawyer close to Mr. Giuliani who had dealings with several Ukrainians involved in the hunt for information on the Bidens, according to people with knowledge of that warrant. The warrant was for her cellphone.

………

The federal authorities have largely focused on whether Mr. Giuliani illegally lobbied the Trump administration in 2019 on behalf of Ukrainian officials and oligarchs, who were helping Mr. Giuliani’s dirt-digging campaign. At the time, Mr. Biden was a leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The United States attorney’s office in Manhattan and the F.B.I. had sought for months to secure Justice Department approval to request search warrants for Mr. Giuliani’s phones and electronic devices.

And William Barr almost certainly corruptly intervened to quash those subpoenas while he was still Attorney General. 

Even more than Giuliani, Barr needs to face consequences for his actions, because the Attorney General of the United States of America needs to meet a higher standard.

The culture of impunity in Washington, DC needs to end.

 

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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Given the education policies of Obama Administration, and its support for the most rapacious of the chrter school looters, it should be no surprise that  Seth Andrew, former, “Senior advisor and superintendent-in-residence at the U.S. Department of Education, ” and , “enior advisor in the Office of Educational Technology,” was charged with stealing from the charter school that he founded.

It is a perfect metaphor for the increasingly corrupt and increasingly segregated world of  charter schools:

A former senior adviser in the Obama administration was arrested Tuesday on charges that he stole more than $200,000 from a network of charter schools that he founded and used the money to get a lower interest rate on a mortgage for a Manhattan apartment, federal prosecutors said.

The founder, Seth Andrew, 42, is accused of taking money from bank accounts controlled by Democracy Prep Public Schools, which teaches mostly low-income students of color in New York and other states, and using it for the purchase of a $2 million apartment, prosecutors said.

Mr. Andrew is charged with one count each of wire fraud, money laundering and making a false statement to a bank. The first two charges both carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, and the third carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, according to a statement on Tuesday from Audrey Strauss, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the assistant director-in-charge of the New York field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“Today Andrew himself is learning one of life’s most basic lessons — what doesn’t belong to you is not yours for the taking,” Mr. Sweeney said in the statement.

Don’t you know the first rule of charter schools, “The only crime is to get caught.”

This guy got caught.

It’s the Fraud, Stupid

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woah exhibit 16. more Facebook docs quietly unsealed yesterday – it gets worse. A full, damning senior execs’ email thread (CFO, COO) unsealed. Facebook slowed unsealings in this fraud case and spun it as “cherrypicking.”
Top marketing exec, Carolyn Everson, weighs in here. /1 pic.twitter.com/Zn51XNcKxn

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 25, 2021

It’s Called Fraud

As I have noted a few times, any in depth examination of Facebook would reveal systematic fraud. 

Recently revealed emails uncovered in the fraud lawsuit against the social media network show Facebook was deeply aware that it was providing false information to advertisers, which seems to be a slam-dunk case of fraud.

Both Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandburg are famously “Hands On”, and this is at the core of their business.

They knew that they were defrauding advertisers, and they took their money anyway:

Carolyn Everson, one of Facebook’s most senior advertising executives, said the company had to “prepare for the worst” over claims that it overstated the potential reach of its advertisements, according to newly released court filings.

The world’s largest social network has been fighting a class-action lawsuit in California since 2018 over claims that its figure for its “potential reach”, which told advertisers how many people saw their ads, included duplicate and fake accounts.

Facebook has argued that the numbers were only estimates and that advertisers are charged for actual clicks and impressions, rather than for the potential reach of an ad.

But according to filings in the lawsuit that were unredacted over the weekend, Everson, the vice-president of Facebook’s global business group, wrote an email in 2017 that said the metric “clearly impacted [advertisers’] planning”.

“We are going to get really criticized for that (and justifiably so),” she said. “If we overstated how many actual real people we have in certain demos, there is no question that impacted budget allocations. We have to prepare for the worst here.”

………

The lawsuit, which was filed in northern California in 2018 by a small-business owner, alleges that Facebook executives knew the potential reach figure was “misleading” and took no action to correct it in order to “preserve its own bottom line”.

It points to research showing Facebook had suggested potential reach in certain US states and demographics that was greater than the actual populations in those geographies.
A Financial Times investigation in 2019 found similar discrepancies in Facebook’s ads manager, an online tool to help advertisers build campaigns, even though the company made some changes to its potential reach definition earlier that year.

They knew that the metrics were complete crap, and they tried to bury the information and continued to use the bad data to get paid.

Break out the cuffs, Ponch.

I Think that His Consultant Gigs are at an End

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Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh has announced that there will be a review of all the reports on in custody depths by former Chief Medical Examiner for the State of Maryland David Fowler following his clearly dishonest testimony at the Derek Chauvin.

Given that Fowler is currently being sued for covering up the eerily similar death of Angus Black under police restraint, it seems to me that Fowler’s days as a hired gun for bad cops are over.

As an aside, I am not at all surprised that he was born in what was then Rhodesia, (now Zimbabwe) and was did his medical school in Cape Town, South Africa, graduating from medical school in 1983,  working in South Africa until moving to the US in 1991.

It does appear that he has a rather long history of excusing law enforcement misconduct against people of color:

The Maryland’s Attorney General’s Office said Friday it believes there should be a review of “in custody” death reports produced by the state’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner during the tenure of Dr. David Fowler, nine days after Fowler testified that an ex-Minneapolis police officer was not responsible for the death of George Floyd in police custody.

The announcement came less than 24 hours after the attorney general’s office received a letter from the former medical examiner of Washington, D.C., Roger A. Mitchell, signed by 431 doctors from around the country, saying Fowler’s testimony and conclusions were so far outside the bounds of accepted forensic practice that all his previous work could come into question.

“Dr. Fowler’s stated opinion that George Floyd’s death during active police restraint should be certified with an ‘undetermined’ manner is outside the standard practice and conventions for investigating and certification of in-custody deaths. This stated opinion raises significant concerns for his previous practice and management,” the letter said.

Attorney General Brian Frosh’s office said Friday afternoon that it agreed for the need to review Fowler’s work, and said it had been in contact with Gov. Larry Hogan’s staff.

“We agree that it is appropriate for independent experts to review reports issued by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) regarding deaths in custody,” Raquel Coombs, a spokeswoman for Frosh, said in an statement to The Baltimore Sun. “We are already in conversations with the Governor’s Office about the need for such a review, and have offered to coordinate it.”

Fowler testified that Floyd died of a sudden heart rhythm problem due to his heart disease while being restrained by police, contradicting several experts who said Floyd died due to a lack of oxygen. Former officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter for kneeling on Floyd’s neck.

………

Black’s 2018 death was captured on video, with Greensboro police holding the unarmed teenager down for more than six minutes. Fowler ruled that Black died because of a sudden cardiac event while struggling with police, and not because they pinned him in a prone position.

Testifying in the Floyd case, Fowler said that police, who held Floyd down in a prone position for more than nine minutes, did not cause Floyd’s death. His testimony was rebutted by a string of prosecution medical experts.

………

The office will review all cases from 2003-2020, which falls under Fowler’s tenure. He retired in 2019 after 17 years as chief medical examiner to go into private consulting practice. He was considered one of the foremost medical examiners in the country and served on national boards.

Included in that time period is the death of Tyrone West, who died after struggling with Baltimore Police following a traffic stop in 2013. Witnesses and the officers themselves said there was a violent struggle between the officers and West, but the state medical examiner’s office ruled that he died from natural causes exacerbated by the struggle and the summer heat. That ruling played a significant factor in the officers being cleared by the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office.

That the findings of the study are likely to support the lawsuit against him over the death of Angus Black is just the cherry on top of all of this.

Here is hoping that this guy’s professional reputation is destroyed.  It should have happened years ago.

Interesting Thesis

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In a (sort of) obituary for Bernie Madoff, we learn that in interviews following his conviction for runing a Ponzi scheme, Madoff believed that everyone on Wall Street knew what he was doing.

Certainly, the pattern of financial players of cashing out early before the game of musical chairs stopped is suspicions:

Bernie Madoff died today, and he leaves behind a legacy of financial wreckage that stretched around the globe. His Ponzi scheme was the largest in history, wiping out some $65 billion in gains, albeit paper gains. The longevity of his scheme — decades — was breathtaking. He was without a doubt one of the most accomplished liars in history. Yet perhaps it takes a con man to know how the system cons us all. And Madoff understood the financial system as only a financial crook can. One thing he was certain of: They all knew.

………

I spent hours talking to Madoff during his years behind bars, and more hours listening to tape of his depositions from prison, exclusive material which offered insight into his crimes for my podcast. To the extent one can get into the mind of the greatest con artist of the age, I felt I knew him, or at least certain things about him. And I came to believe that Bernie Madoff was, in his way, a truth-teller. Madoff understood the workings of the financial system as few others did. Clearly he used that knowledge to sustain his con. The financial system’s attitude toward him was “willful blindness,” he said in one deposition.

When he was caught in 2008, as the financial crisis gripped America ever tighter, Madoff became a poster child for the misdeeds of that entire universe. The banks had pushed us to the brink of national ruin. But theirs was a complicated fraud, including such arcana as securitized bonds and overleverage. Their crimes weren’t easy to understand. Madoff, on the other hand, looked you in the eye, shook your hand, and then cut the shirt off your back. That was straightforward.

And so a narrative evolved. The systems, financial and to some extent judicial, cast Madoff as a rogue operator, a lone bad apple in an otherwise forthright arrangement. We were all hoodwinked, was the going line. He was that good.

Nonsense. The financial system enabled, weaponized, and profited handsomely from Madoff. Some hedge funds he did business with were nothing more than sales operations. They lured in clients with promises of due diligence and exclusive access. “I made them hundreds of millions,” Madoff said. It was true. And for doing what? Some simply took money from investors and handed it to him. For their trouble, they took a percentage off the top. They promised that they examined the details, but that simply wasn’t true.

………

Did the small investors know? Most of them didn’t. They trusted their financial advisors, those connected with institutions such as Banco Santander, who promised to keep an eye on Madoff’s operations.

………

Of course, he bears a large share of the responsibility for defrauding investors, although he liked to shrug that off. No doubt the notion of Madoff as another victim of the system is repulsive. But without the cold-blooded support of large financial players, Madoff would have been a local phenomenon, a tragedy limited in time and scope.

We need to make it easier to prosecute Wall Street malefactors, and we need to make it easier to claw back their ill gotten gains from them when it all goes pear shaped.

I Fat Fingered Myself into a New Word

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In a discussion on the Stellar Parthenon BBS, there is a discussion thread about Chauvin’s conviction, I shared an article titled, “Nancy Pelosi Can Go F%$# Herself For Real.” 

I introduced the link with the following, “Speaking of paychopaths, I love this take-down of Pelosi’s thank you to Floyd.”

Clearly, my finger slipped and hit an “A” instead of a “S” in “Psychoath.”

It seems completely apropos to describe the dysfunctional and corrupt, “Anything for a campaign donation,” ruling elites to be described as a “Paychopath.”

Headline of the Day

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The Operating Costs of the F-35 Are High Because They Are Designed to Be

—Hush-Kit

Money quote from the interview:

The operating costs are high because they are designed to be so. From the very beginning of the program, the F-35 was set up to operate as a “total system performance responsibility” enterprise which meant that the services were intentionally surrendering a great deal of control over the maintenance and operations of the weapon they were buying to the contractors. This incentivised the contractors to design the aircraft in such a way that only their personnel could perform many of the maintenance actions on the aircraft. It is nearly always more expensive to use contractor personnel to perform work for the government, which certainly drives up the cost-per-flight-hour. It also means that the government has only one source bidding for these contracts, so there is little incentive to lower costs.

This, “Total system performance responsibility,” was not an accident.

The Pentagon procurement is deeply corrupt, with senior military officers choosing the most expensive, and hence most profitable ways to address their stated needs, because at the end of their career, after they retire, they secure comfortable sinecures at defense contractors and the like.

Our defense procurement system is corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaffordable.

Also, NYPD Officers Will Have to Start Asking Their Wives for Blow Jobs Again

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On the Stellar Parthenon BBS, user DC noted, upon hearing that the Manhattan DA will stop pursuing prostitution prosecutions, cynically observed that, “The income for NYPD officers just dropped by 20%, now that they can’t shake down the women.“

I noted (See title) that it will likely effect their home and family life as well. 

Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr. announced on Wednesday that his office would no longer prosecute prostitution and unlicensed massage.

The new policy, according to a press release from the office, will prevent unnecessary future contacts with the criminal justice system, eliminate the collateral consequences associated with having a prostitution case or conviction and “empower New Yorkers to interact with law enforcement without fear of arrest or deportation.”

“Over the last decade we’ve learned from those with lived experience, and from our own experience on the ground: criminally prosecuting prostitution does not make us safer, and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers,” Vance said in a statement.

“By vacating warrants, dismissing cases, and erasing convictions for these charges, we are completing a paradigm shift in our approach,” he added.

Failure is VERY Profitable

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Following her 9 point drubbing by Susan Collins, Democrat Sara Gideon still has $11,000,000.00 left in her campaign accounts.

By way of context, the population of Maine is 1.35 million.

Collins raised about $30 million, and Gideon raised about $75 million.  (And the loser spent only about 85% of that, because there is only so much media in Maine)

This is addition to at least $70,000,000.00 in “independent” PAC spending.

This from a campaign that was literally sending out frantic funding requests emails the day before the election.

The reason that they spent so much money was that for every media buy, the consultants associates with the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) got a percentage.

The same thing happened in Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell destroyed the hapless Amy McGrath by almost 20 points.

In both cases, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) chose to run a largely content free campaign and a largely content free candidate, and the only winners on the Den side were the consultants.

The same could be said from North Carolina, where 3rd party expenditures, and hence commissions, dwarfed spending be l by both campaigns.

All of these races were seen as winnable, and all of these races were not even close, despite the best efforts of the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment).

By comparison, Democrats won both (still hugely expensive) races in Georgia, largely on the get out the vote efforts of Stacy Abrams, which were a TINY fraction of total spending.  (I still don’t trust her though, because of her choices in literature)

For to many in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), the strategies never change, because they make money from these failed strategies.  Lots and lots of money, something like 20% on media buys, and 10% on fundraising.

My advice is the same as always tell the DCCC, DSCC, and the DNC to pound sand, never respond to online or phone solicitations for funds, and chose your candidates yourself.

Act Blue is good, but going through a candidate’s web site is better, and you can get links to their web sites through Act Blue.

Until the plague of consultants, who I liken to a plague of locusts, are ejected from the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment), it’s all you can do.

H/t Atrios

—
Posted via mobile. 

Karma’s a Bitch, Neh?

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Liberty University has just sued Jerry Falwell Jr. for ten million dollars, claiming that his behavior ran counter to his obligations as an officer of the school.

I only hope that there is a way for both of them to lose:

Liberty University filed a lawsuit this week against its former president Jerry Falwell Jr., alleging that he breached his contract and fiduciary duties to the school as he sought to cover up a personal scandal.

The evangelical Christian university in Lynchburg, Va., is seeking more than $10 million in damages from the man who led it for 13 years. The suit filed Thursday in Lynchburg Circuit Court marked another twist in the saga of Falwell’s messy departure last year from Liberty.

………

Later that month he agreed to resign after news reports emerged about a young man Falwell and his wife, Rebecca Falwell, had befriended who allegedly was sexually connected to the couple. Falwell has said that his wife, who also goes by Becki, had a brief affair with the man.

Falwell, 58, filed a defamation suit against Liberty in October, alleging the school accepted without verifying what he called false statements made by the young man. He later dropped the lawsuit.

In its lawsuit, Liberty contends that Falwell failed to return university-owned computers, devices and confidential information to Liberty and that he failed to disclose to the university alleged threats of extortion he had received in connection with potential personal scandals.

………

The 38-page complaint alleges that Falwell deliberately sought to hide the affair. “Despite his clear duties as an executive and officer at Liberty, Falwell Jr. chose personal protection,” the suit alleged.

Further, the suit alleged: “Falwell Jr.’s actions in breaching the fiduciary duty he owed to Liberty were willful and wanton and disregarded the rights of Liberty.”

………

When Falwell resigned in August, he said he was entitled to $10.5 million in severance. Liberty, in its lawsuit, disputes that claim.

His severance package is a major issue in the suit. Liberty alleges that Falwell concealed information about extortion threats from the governing board when he negotiated a new contract in 2019 that included a higher salary and a provision for two years of severance pay, under certain conditions, worth a total of $2.5 million. The suit indicates that Liberty agreed to that level of payout on Aug. 28, 2020.

It appears that everyone involves worships Benjamin Franklin. Isn’t there something in the bible about worshiping false gods?

………

Falwell’s father, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr., was a prominent leader of the religious right who founded Liberty University and a nearby church.

Under Jerry Falwell Jr., who became Liberty’s president and chancellor after his father died in 2007, the school grew enormously and became a frequent stop for Republican politicians and others who wanted to connect with conservative evangelical Christian audiences.

………

Liberty recently announced that Jonathan Falwell, senior pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and Falwell Jr.’s brother, will become the school’s campus pastor at the end of the semester.

That last bit has gotta hurt.

I hope that this case burns through decades and consumes millions of dollars from both institutions.

Always Read the Footnotes

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holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR

— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021

The Tweet that led me to the footnote

A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.

I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.

They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly.  (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.

After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:

*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.

They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).

I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.

It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.

Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:

  • Publishing articles suggesting from racist eugenicist (and one time cross-burner) Charles Murray  that Black people were genetically inferior.
  • Published articles on public health paid for by the tobacco industry.
  • Brought in serial fabulist Stephen Glass to TNR, and published serial plagiarist and fabulist Ruth Shalit.

And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR. 

H/T Atrios.

Back Loaded Bribery

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We really need to do something to stop people from scoring highly remunerative jobs with the companies that they regulated as soon as they leave their position. 

The revolving door is not just unseemly, it is a form of bribery:

Citadel Securities, the US market maker owned by billionaire Ken Griffin, has snapped up Heath Tarbert, the former head of the main US derivatives regulator, to be its new chief legal officer.

Tarbert left the Commodity Futures Trading Commission just 27 days ago, having resigned as its chair after an 18-month tenure.

Citadel Securities’ announcement on Thursday marked the latest in a long list of hires from US regulators by Griffin. Tarbert replaces Steve Luparello, Citadel Securities’ general counsel, who is a former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of trading and markets.

Griffin also hired Gregg Berman, the SEC’s former head of research who examined the role of high-frequency trading on the world’s largest equity market, as well as Ryan VanGrack, who was an adviser to former SEC chair Mary Jo White, among others.

The move has reawakened accusations of a so-called revolving door from public service to private work.

I’m not sure how to make this illegal, but it needs to be made illegal.

Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel

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(As Atrios would say)

It turns out that a reporter at Bloomberg news was feeding insider information to a speculator. Hoocoodanode?

Basically, there was a pattern of suspicious trades in the hours before a story from Bloomberg hit the web, and one reporter had a byline on all of the stories:

For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market—and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arranged to make significant purchases of the companies’ shares.

Last month, a federal grand jury indicted Jason Peltz on multiple counts of securities fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and lying to the FBI. Peltz, 38, is accused of working with over a half-dozen unnamed and unindicted co-conspirators to learn about impending takeovers and other market-moving news, and to move money between accounts as a way to hide his role and profits.

The indictment notes that Peltz’s moves were timed closely to stories that ran at “a financial news organization.” While the newsroom isn’t named, federal officials cite five stories and their timestamps— all of which match precisely to pieces that ran on Bloomberg News’ website. Each of those stories had shared bylines, but only one reporter is identified as an author for all of the articles: Ed Hammond, who worked at the Financial Times before coming to Bloomberg more than six years ago to cover mergers and acquisitions. In 2017, Hammond was named Bloomberg’s senior deals reporter in New York — a highly prestigious post in that newsroom.

Hmm, I wonder just who could be the source of the insider information?

The feds allege that Peltz used disposable “burner” phones and encrypted apps to communicate with a journalist, and that the reporter provided “material nonpublic information about forthcoming articles” which Peltz used to trade in the market “just prior to publication of an article about each company written by the reporter.” The indictment describes “numerous contacts” between Peltz and a reporter, including at least one in-person meeting.

I might be inclined to dismiss this as an a unfortunate social interaction, except for the fact that Mr. Peltz was using a burner phone.

Assuming that the Bloomberg source was not actively profiting from the transactions, it means that either Peltz was using him to manipulate the timing of the public release M&A information, or using the Bloomberg source to get information regarding future M&A information, or both.

In either case, the reporter still got something of value, a scoop, and while this should not be actionable from a criminal perspective, one would hope that his editor is crawling so far up his ass about this that he can see his tonsils.