Category: Corruption

Of Course this is a Part of Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

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The Pentagon is looking at stripping the security clearance for the lead whistle-blower advocate for spies in the US government:

The Pentagon’s inspector general is trying to suspend and possibly revoke the top secret access of the Defense Department’s former director of whistleblowing, triggering concerns in Congress that he’s being retaliated against for doing his job.

If the recommendation is acted on, Daniel Meyer would no longer be able to work in his current job as the executive director for intelligence community whistleblowing at a time when President Barack Obama’s reforms of the system are supposed to be underway .

The controversy over Meyer’s fate comes at an awkward moment for the Obama administration. Meyer, the Pentagon inspector general’s whistleblower advocate until last summer, was well-known for aggressively investigating whistleblower allegations. In his current job, he was supposed to have a key role in the president’s initiative to improve the intelligence whistleblowing system.

The administration pointed to those reforms after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked details on the agency’s then-classified mass collection of Americans’ email and phone records. Snowden has said he was prompted to disclose the details because he believed the whistleblowing system was broken.

“Dan Meyer has been a relentless advocate for whistleblowers in making sure they don’t fall through the cracks,” said one congressional staffer, who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity of the matter. “If action is taken against him, it could have a chilling effect on whistleblowers coming forward.”

This is, of course, a feature, not a bug.

While I do not think that the political appointees in the Obama administration directly authorized this, I think that it is clear that this is a part and parcel on President Obama’s war on whistle-blowers. (He has criminally prosecuted more of them than all of his predecessors combined)

This is happening because this is a part of the culture within institutions like the DoD, the NSA, and the CIA, and because it is a part of the culture of the Obama White House.

Intimidating potential whistle blowers is an implicit goal of all of these policies.

Shades of “Nurse Nayirah”

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Remember her?

She was the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter (and member of the royal family) who testified to Congress that she saw Iraqi troops throwing babies out of incubators.

She falsely claimed to be a nurse’s aid when she had not even been in the country at the time of the invasion.

Well,”Nurse Nayirah,” meet Liz Wahl, the former RT News anchor who resigned on the air:

Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine.

“I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.”

………

Wahl’s Howard-Beale-like moment came just one day after her colleague Abby Martin, host of RT America’s “Breaking the Set,” committed her own on-air indiscretion. Martin denounced Russia’s military occupation of the Crimean peninsula, which had been part of neighboring Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991

Unlike Wahl, however, Martin didn’t quit the network; she is still hosting her daily 30-minute show. Martin’s decision to stay at RT drew criticism from the same reporter who landed the first interview with Wahl after her resignation, The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick.

“Indeed, far from damaging the propaganda efforts of the Russian government, Martin’s momentary act of nonconformity plays right into the Kremlin’s hands,” Kirchick wrote in a March 4 article in Tablet Magazine. “RT will now be able to hold up her 60-second departure from the official script as evidence of its editorial independence.

………

Case in point: The Beasts’ Kirchick—who got the first interview with Wahl and was critical of Martin after she remained at RT—gets his paychecks from the neoconservative Foreign Policy Institute, where he is a Fellow. FPI has been described as a renascent version of the Project for the New American Century, which is in turn often described as one of the well-connected brain trusts behind the launch of the Iraq War.

Note that the Foreign Policy Institute (FPI) was founded by William Kristol, who founded PNAC, and

A source from inside RT, who spoke to WhoWhatWhy anonymously for fear of retribution, had at one point “observed [Wahl] taking pictures of the office over the summer, asking all sorts of odd questions about my experience, and looking at Jamie Kirchick’s website while in the office.”

This led the RT America employee to believe that Kirchick—with the help of Wahl—was planning to write a hit piece on the organization.

A recently published piece by TruthDig goes further, contending that Kirchick and neoconservative allies orchestrated—in TruthDig’s words “stage managed“—Wahl’s resignation right from the start.

………

A large part of TruthDig‘s contention that Kirchick and the Foreign Policy Institute “stage managed” the whole thing relies on FPI’s Twitter feed activity in the minutes leading up to Wahl’s on-air resignation.

FPI’s feed that day telegraphed “something big might happen on RT” and teased “you’re really going to want to tune in to RT” within 19 minutes of Wahl’s stepping down. Then, as soon as Wahl made her announcement, FPI tweeted, “RT Anchor RESIGNS ON AIR. She ‘cannot be part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin.’”

Asked about the feed and timing of the tweets by WhoWhatWhy, Kirchick responded, “I am an employee of FPI. Liz called me [while I was] at work. I told everyone in the office to watch. We did.”

Wahl corroborated Kirchick’s account of how events unfolded.

The prevalence of this kind of sh%$ in the political and media landscape is why I try to get as much of my news as possible from overseas sources.

H/t Crooks and Liars.

F%$# Andrew Cuomo

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Remember when I wrote that Bloomberg approved charter school plans would have disabled kids getting therapy in the hallway?

You should, it was only 5 days ago.

I noted that New York mayor Bill DiBlasio rejected a few charter co-location applications because of these issues.

Well, Governor Andrew Cuomo hates disabled kids:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has mapped out an ambitious agenda for education in New York City. He wants to reinvigorate schools on the verge of shuttering, open 100 schools with health clinics and therapists at their core, and train more students for careers in science and technology.

But the budget deal announced by state leaders on Saturday, which would require the city to find space for charter schools, may cut into Mr. de Blasio’s priorities.

………

With classroom seats in short supply across the city, Mr. de Blasio may find it difficult to accommodate charter schools and find space for some of his own programs.

Mr. de Blasio has said he is willing to work with charter schools, so long as they do not disrupt programs run by traditional public schools. He named a committee of district officials and charter school leaders last week to help mediate disputes over space and overcrowding.

………

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Republicans in the State Senate seized on the momentum, and on Saturday they announced an agreement that would provide charter schools in New York City some of the most generous protections in the country.

Under the deal, the city would be required to find space in public buildings for charter schools, which operate independently of the school district but receive public funds. If the city could not, it would have to cover the cost of renting private space, up to $40 million. Charter schools could challenge the city’s selection of space through an arbitration process.

You know that warehouse that they used to hold all those protesters in the 2004 Republican National Convention?

I would suggest locating them there

As Diane Ravitch notes, “The bottom line is that when billionaires talk, the New York legislature and Governor Cuomo listen. Actually, they sit up, bark, and roll over.”

The political reality in New York state is that a primary challenge to Cuomo is practically impossible, so it’s time to see if he is banging a hooker.

I really hope he is.

If there is anyone out there willing to take one for the team, it would be appreciated.

We are All Koch Suckers Today

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The court ruled in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance reform:

Back in October, when the Court heard oral argument in a challenge to the overall caps – known as “aggregate limits” – on how much an individual can contribute to candidates for federal office, political parties, and political action committees, there wasn’t a whole lot of suspense.  Given the Court’s recent campaign finance rulings, it seemed clear that a majority of the Justices would vote to strike down at least some of the caps; the only real question was whether they would strike down them all.

Today we got our answer from the Court, and it was a decisive “yes”:  all of the aggregate limits must go.  Let’s talk about today’s decision in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission in Plain English.

As I explained in my preview of the case in October, there are (at least until today) two kinds of limits on campaign contributions.  The first is what is known as the “base limits” – the maximum that you can contribute to a candidate, political party, or political action committee in an election.  The aggregate limits are the second kind:  in a two-year period known as an “election cycle,” you can donate no more than $48,600 to all candidates combined and no more than $74,600 to political parties and political action committees.

An Alabama businessman named Shaun McCutcheon went to court to challenge the aggregate limits.  He didn’t ask for the right to give more money than the base limits to any particular candidate; instead, he wanted to give money to many more candidates, but the aggregate limits prohibit him from doing so.  That, he argued, violates his free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Although a lower court disagreed with McCutcheon, he found a more receptive audience in the Roberts Court, which has consistently voted to overturn campaign finance regulations.  Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the Court, which was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Samuel A. Alito.  (Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his own opinion saying the Court should go even further, but the Chief Justice’s opinion is the controlling one.)

………

Breyer’s dissent lamented that the Court’s decision “eviscerates our Nation’s campaign finance laws, leaving a remnant incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy that those laws were intended to resolve.” In his view, “corruption” is not limited to scenarios involving a quid pro quo, which he described as “an act akin to bribery.” Instead, it includes exactly the kind of efforts to use money to obtain influence and access to elected officials that the Chief Justice’s opinion characterized as “a central feature of democracy.” This is so, Breyer explained, because if people believe that elected officials only pay attention to big-money donors, they may lose faith in the political process altogether.

Breyer next contended that the Court is just wrong when it asserts that, even if the aggregate limits are removed, there is still no way to get around the base limits. Here the dissent painted a very different picture from the rest of the Court, predicting that “donors can and likely will find ways to channel millions of dollars to parties and to individual candidates.”

Whose vision of the future of campaign finance will prevail – the dissent’s apocalyptic one or the Chief Justice’s more optimistic one? You can be sure that journalists and election law experts will be paying close attention over the next few years. We can also be confident that the decision today will spawn new campaign finance challenges – including, in all likelihood, to the “base limits” themselves. Stay tuned . . . .

And if this is not bad enough, it looks like SCOTUS will overturn bans on corporate donations to candidates:

The Supreme Court, fresh from its new ruling expanding the political donation options of private individuals, faces a choice this week about its current view on campaign contributions to candidates by corporations.  For weeks, the Court has been sitting on a case that would test a state’s flat ban on corporate donations, and is now set to look at that case in the wake of Wednesday’s ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

The Court, according to its electronic docket, is scheduled to consider at its private Conference on Friday the case of Iowa Right to Life Committee v. Tooker.  That case has been ready for the Court, technically, since November, but so far no action has been taken.

If the Court’s usual practice is followed, it will have at least three options: agree to hear the case to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s ban on corporate donations, deny review and thus leave intact a federal appeals court ruling upholding that ban, or tell the lower courts to reconsider based on the McCutcheon ruling.

In 2003, in the case of FEC v. Beaumont, the Court upheld the long-standing federal ban on corporations, at least so far as that provision applied to non-profit corporations.  In the new case, the Iowa Right to Life Committee urged the Court to overrule the Beaumont decision, arguing that it cannot be squared with the Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

Needless to say, we can expect another 5-4 decision allowing rich people to double down on their influence.

We ……… are ……… f%$#ed.

So Not Surprised: Hedge Funds as Slumlords

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Hedge funds have gone big time into small and single family rentals, and in turn, they have illegally ignored their responsibilities as landlords:

The yawning gap between private equity landlord sales talk and what they are delivering is finally being exposed.

One of the reasons many investors have been skeptical of the way private equity firms have gone full bore into buying distressed single family homes is that property management is a hands-on business even when it’s done it the most favorable possible setting, an apartment building. Individuals who have invested in single family home rentals almost without exception report that even when they found it to be an economically attractive proposition, it was still oversight-intensive. Admittedly, there are some private equity firms who have bought rental properties who actually do seem to be targeting markets and renters in such a way that they might be able to do a decent job of property management, for instance, by buying homes where they can rehab the kitchen and bath plumbing using the same fixtures, screening tenants in person, and then inspecting the properties monthly and giving the tenants points for passing that they can convert into credits against a purchase or take in cash.

But the biggest fish in this ocean, Blackstone, is clearly taking the opposite approach, of doing as little as they can to maintain the houses and trying to fob off the responsibility onto the tenant, even when local regulations clearly prohibit it. So managing dispersed homes is no problem if you never planned to do the job in the first place.

Blackstone tries to evade this duty formally, through lease terms, and informally, by making themselves inaccessible. And because Blackstone is the largest and highest profile player in this space, they may be hoping that if enough PE landlords follow their lead, communities will accept the new finance-dictate bad standards, just as they have with foreclosure abuses.

But the difference here is while stressed borrowers were the ones that were hurt in foreclosures, and foreclosures and bankruptcies are seen as shameful event, there’s no reason for a victim of a bad landlord to be seen as unsympathetic. Moreover, deliberately negligent PE landlords like Blackstone traditionally have hurt the value of neighboring properties. If this trend continues, abused tenants and their neighbors face a common threat.

Notice that contracts that violate local law are almost certain to fail a legal challenge. In New York, which has more extensive tenant protections than other cities, landlords sometimes try to include provisions that are impermissible, like prohibiting a tenant from having a roommate. Housing court judges exhibit a bit of zeal in smacking down landlords when challenges to those leases come before them.

………

Now to the update on Blackstone’s latest escapades, via some original reporting at In These Times. The article, Game of Homes, makes for good one-stop shopping if you want to get friends and colleagues up to speed on this topic. For NC readers, the first two-thirds of the article covers familiar terrain. Here are the sections that discuss how Blackstone, which is using “Invitation Homes” as its brand for its single-family rentals, is trying to evade its duties as landlord:  ………

If you thought Wall Street was bad as a lender, just imagine how badly they can f%$# you up as a landlord.

As an FYI, I was in a dispute with a landlord and property management company in Texas, one of the less tenant friendly jurisdictions, we lawyered up and won, because even the professional property management firm did not grasp the actual rights of tenants.

Here’s hoping that we will see some major court losses for the hedge fund pukes.

Why the Catholic Church Should Be Out of the Hospital Business

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A Catholic hospital in (where else) Oklahoma has forbade its doctors from prescribing birth control:

Doctors affiliated with a small Catholic hospital in Bartlesville, Okla., are no longer allowed to prescribe contraception for the purposes of birth control, according to a report from the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.

Administrators at Jane Phillips Medical Center are reported to have held a meeting last week to inform doctors of the new directive barring them from prescribing contraceptives as birth control; according to the Examiner-Enterprise, doctors are allowed to prescribe contraceptives for non-birth control purposes, such as cramps, menstrual pain or endometriosis.

“I have spoken to my doctor about my birth control options,” one patient impacted by the directive told the Examiner-Enterprise. “I was told that my physician has been instructed that they can no longer write prescriptions for birth control as birth control. This effects me because I take birth control as birth control. There are other ways to receive birth control, for example headaches, cramps, excessive bleeding — but I have none of those symptoms.

Note that this is not just employees, or on the hospital premises, this is a directive given to any doctor with admitting privileges.

The Catholic Church has been engaging in a massive hospital buying binge, and they are using it to make not just abortion, but birth control, unavailable across the nation.

Maybe Because They do not Want to be Revealed as Sociopathic Sadists?

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This would explain why the CIA has consistently lied about both the effectiveness and the extent of its torture program:

A report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concludes that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.

The report, built around detailed chronologies of dozens of CIA detainees, documents a long-standing pattern of unsubstantiated claims as agency officials sought permission to use — and later tried to defend — excruciating interrogation methods that yielded little, if any, significant intelligence, according to U.S. officials who have reviewed the document.

“The CIA described [its program] repeatedly both to the Department of Justice and eventually to Congress as getting unique, otherwise unobtainable intelligence that helped disrupt terrorist plots and save thousands of lives,” said one U.S. official briefed on the report. “Was that actually true? The answer is no.”

Current and former U.S. officials who described the report spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue and because the document remains classified. The 6,300-page report includes what officials described as damning new disclosures about a sprawling network of secret detention facilities, or “black sites,” that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009.

Classified files reviewed by committee investigators reveal internal divisions over the interrogation program, officials said, including one case in which CIA employees left the agency’s secret prison in Thailand after becoming disturbed by the brutal measures being employed there. The report also cites cases in which officials at CIA headquarters demanded the continued use of harsh interrogation techniques even after analysts were convinced that prisoners had no more information to give.

(emphasis mine)

Also, the techniques used were far worse than previously revealed.

We now understand why the CIA has bee pushing back against the Senate Intelligence Committee. 

It’s one thing to argue that it was a necessary evil that yielded results, it’s another that the policies were prosecuted out of nothing more than a sadistic need to prove how macho they are.

Truth be told, I am not surprised.  This sort of narcissistic cruelty is something that I would expect to have originated from the mind of one Richard Bruce Cheney.

The problem is that for the entire Bush-Cheney years, being a sadistic torturer, or at least pretending to be one, was the only way for advancement in the CIA, and Obama has done nothing to clean house since then.

This means that the upper echelons of the CIA need to cover up this at all cost, or they will be sidelined.

Torture comes home, nu?

Now We Know Why Bill DiBlasio Turned Down a few Charter Applications

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You may have read about the battle between Bill DiBlasio and political hack/Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz over the allocation of public spaces for some of her schools, with New York Governor and complete tool, Mario Cuomo rather unsurprisingly taking her side.

What you may not be aware of is that the DiBlasio administration approved 36 of 45 applications, and 5 of 8 for Success Academy.

What you may also not know is that the requests by Moscowitz would have taken space from a puclic school literally doing therapy for disabled students in the halls:

From now on, she will apply four criteria in reviewing proposed co-locations. She won’t put elementary and high schools in the same building. She won’t keep approving small schools that only require more high-paid supervisors to run them. She won’t approve co-locations that require expensive renovations of school properties.

And, most importantly, she won’t allow reduced services or seats for special education students.

“These are the most vulnerable and highest needs kids in our system,” Fariña said, but “they were the first kids to lose space or be moved” under the prior administration.

No one is happier about her policy change than the parents and staff at the Mickey Mantle school, a program for autistic and emotionally disturbed children that was slated to lose space and seats to the proposed expansion of Success Academy.

“Our school already lost a music, a theater arts and an art room the past few years,” said Barry Daub, principal at Mickey Mantle. Those losses happened to make room for Harlem Success 1, launched in the same building in 2006.

Mickey Mantle would have lost enrollment and even more space if Fariña had approved the Success Academy expansion.

“We would be doing physical and occupational therapy in the halls,” Daub said..

(emphasis mine)

Charter advocates don’t care.

More often than not, they do not serve the disabled community.  They lack the resources to do so, and they have absolutely no interests in developing those capabilities.

They just want to make sure that the senior executives, and their Wall Street backers stay on the gravy train. (Moscowitz, who has fewer than 7000 students in her schools, is paid more than the New York City Schools Chancellor, who manages more than a million students)

Drip, Drip, Drip

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Christie appointed Chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, David Samson, has resigned as a result of scandals that came to light following the “Bridgegate” scandal:

Gov. Chris Christie on Friday announced the resignation of the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the highest-ranking public official to step down during the scandal over lane closings at the George Washington Bridge — as he embarked on an aggressive campaign to re-establish himself on the national stage.

The chairman, David Samson, an éminence grise in New Jersey politics and a cherished adviser to Mr. Christie, had been under fire for his role in the lane closings since January, when emails suggested that he was more concerned about the political ramifications for Mr. Christie than drivers stuck in traffic. That was followed by a steady beat of accusations about conflicts of interest between his role at the Port Authority and his law practice.

With those conflicts under investigation by federal authorities, he had declined to cooperate with an internal investigation Mr. Christie had commissioned.

First, let me criticize the editor at the New York Times: When a reporter uses the term, “éminence grise,” (which means behind the scene power) even at the Gray Lady, it is the job of the editor to take out his red pen, and scrawl “BS” all over this.

“Éminence grise“, seriously?

On a slightly more serious note, while I do not know if Chris Christie will be frog marched out of the New Jersey’s Governor’s Mansion in handcuffs, his putative presidential campaign is done.

The fallout from “Bridgegate” and the subsequent developments are peeling his allies away from him like one would peel an onion.

Note also that the press’s man crush on Jabba the Governor has ended, which can be shown by the latest NY Times editorial, from the board, which leads with, “The only thing wrong with the resignation announcement on Friday of David Samson, Gov. Chris Christie’s top appointee to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was that it took so long.”

Recep Tayyip Erdogan is Toast

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There has been a lot going in Turkey.

There is a recording that allegedly has the Turkey’s PM taking about a corruption coverup with his son.

About a week ago, when this went viral, Turkey blocked Twitter, and today, they blocked YouTube.

There is a point in every scandal when its target goes a little bit nuts, and Erdogan has hit this point.

This stage is characteristic of the end-game.

I don’t know whether it will be his party, or the opposition, or the Turkish military who will take him down, but down he will be taken.

Here is Hoping That This Holds Up on Appeal

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The regional director of the NLRB has just ruled that Northwestern football players are employees, and so are allowed to unionize:

In a stunning ruling that has the potential to revolutionize college athletics, a federal agency said Wednesday that football players at Northwestern University can create the nation’s first college athletes union.

The decision by a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board means the board agrees that football players at the Big Ten school qualify as employees under federal law and therefore can legally unionize.

The Evanston, Ill-based university argued that college athletes, as students, do not fit in the same category as factory workers, truck drivers and other unionized workers. The school plans to appeal to labor authorities in Washington.

Outgoing Wildcats quarterback Kain Colter took a leading role in establishing the College Athletes Players Association (CAPA), which would take the lead in organizing the players. The United Steelworkers union has been footing the legal bills.

Colter, whose eligibility has been exhausted and who has entered the NFL draft, said that nearly all of the 85 scholarship players on the Wildcats roster backed the union bid, though only he expressed his support publicly.

CAPA attorneys argued that college football is, for all practical purposes, a commercial enterprise that relies on players’ labor to generate billions of dollars in profits. That, they contend, makes the relationship of schools to players one of employers to employees.

The top level of college sport is thoroughly corrupt and exploitative of “Student Athletes”, and it time for the cartel that keeps those students in peonage to pay the piper.

At the very least, one hopes that the students get insurance coverage of their chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

Not Enough Bullets………

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The hedge fund vultures have outdone themselves, the first example are the pukes who are buying shares in the in the 1983 Marine Corpse bombing in Beirut:

Iran is still a pariah in the international community, but one hedge fund thinks it will eventually pay $1.8 billion as ordered by a U.S. court.

RD Legal Capital hopes to raise up to $100 million to buy the rights to payments from families of the 241 U.S. Marines killed in a terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. A federal court in 2007 found Iran liable for the truck-bomb attack, which led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops from war-torn Lebanon.

Iran, of course, is not on the best of terms with the U.S., and the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. Still, Iran’s central bank is appealing the $1.8 billion verdict against it.

Victims’ families agreed to allow RD to buy stakes in the judgment. The firm will not buy out any of the beneficiaries, instead investing only in pieces of each of the 151 claims. The Iran fund is RD’s first ever focused on a single case, The Wall Street Journal reports.

And then there are the vulture funds who are buying into the abject misery and death that the banksters (and the Germans) have caused in Greece and Portugal:

Yield-hungry investors are flocking back to Greek and Portuguese markets, shunned by international buyers for four years, as the outlook for the bailed-out countries improves and alternatives look more expensive or increasingly risky.

Portuguese and Greek shares and bonds have been the best performers in Europe in 2014, and funds invested in them are making a killing, Thomson Reuters data shows.

Investors say they are driven by economic improvement, which provides fresh impetus to an initial bounce triggered by the European Central Bank’s pledge in 2012 to save the euro.

Potential investment alternatives are also less tempting. Tensions between the West and Russia and global growth concerns cloud the outlook for similar-yielding emerging markets, while a 1-1/2 year rally has shrunk returns elsewhere in euro zone debt.

“It’s not so much an interest-rate-driven rally but much more a structural shift and a perception that the euro crisis is behind us,” said Franz Wenzel, chief strategist at AXA Investment Managers, which manages assets worth about 550 billion euros ($760 billion).

After nearly crashing out of the euro zone in 2012, Greece’s recession is easing, while the Portuguese economy is already rebounding. Lisbon is due to exit its international bailout in about two months.

As much as Timothy Geithner might disagree, there has to be well defined limits to what is a legal financial speculative instrument.

These people are F%$#ing ghouls.

I Really Hope That This Happens

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The Supreme Court has declined to hear a case from Delaware which effectively makes arbitration hearings there open to the public:

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the public and the press to sit in on arbitration of business disputes in Delaware, when a state judge acts as the arbitrator. That was the result of the Court’s denial of an appeal by a group of Delaware judges, seeking to keep those proceedings closed to the public. If business firms do not like having a public audience, that could limit or even kill a four-year-old Delaware experiment.

That was one of several denials of review in significant cases. In addition, the Court agreed to add to its decision docket for next Term a new case on the appeal rights of state prisoners in federal habeas courts. It also sought the U.S. government’s views on the deadline for filing a lawsuit claiming that the manager of a retirement plan made faulty investment decisions, and on the right of an investor to sue over the filing of a defective stock registration statement, when the investor acquired an interest in the stock before such a statement existed.

The Court offered no explanation, as usual, when it decided against reviewing the Delaware arbitration case, Strine v. Delaware Coalition for Open Government.

Ordinarily, arbitration proceedings are not public events, because they are a way to resolve private legal disputes without the formality of a court trial and without much of the expense of hiring trial lawyers and of paying for pre-trial and trial maneuvering. Delaware’s legislature wanted to keep arbitration a closed matter when it decided, in 2009, to allow state judges to take on the task of arbitrator in a closed system.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled, however, that this would turn arbitration into something like a civil courtroom trial, so they had to be open to the public and the press under a string of Supreme Court precedents on the right of First Amendment access to court proceedings.

Considering Delaware’s history of whoring for shady corporate entities, I expect to see a rewrite of the law to once again favor corporations, but it’s nice to see some more push-back against the corrupt and blatantly unfair arbitration which we are saddled with in the United States.

If I Were Glenn Greenwald, I’d Watch My Back Around Pierre Omidyar

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A while back Mark Ames wrote of the ties between the founder of First Media, who now employs Glenn Greenwald, and the CIA and State Department’s clandestine activities to destabilize the Ukraine.

Now, Paul Carr follows up with an analysis of Pierre and Pamela Omidyar’s pattern of regular  visits to the Obama White House:

Speaking to the Daily Beast, documentary maker Jeremy Scahill mentioned his boss explicitly when comparing the cozy relationship between other news organizations and the White House. First Look, he insisted, would be different…

I think that the White House, whether it is under Republican or Democrat, they pretty much now [sic] who they are dealing with. There are outlets like The Daily Beast, or The Huffington Post that have risen up in the past decade, but they are very quickly just becoming part of the broader mainstream media, and with people that have spent their careers working for magazines or newspapers or what have you, and the White House believes they all speak the language on these things. With us, because we want to be adversarial, they won’t know what bat phone to call. They know who to call at The Times, they know who to call at The Post. With us, who are they going to call? Pierre? Glenn?”

Scahill’s question is a good one — and it’s also very easy to answer: If the White House has a problem with First Look, it’s a pretty safe bet they’ll pick up the phone and call Pierre Omidyar.

After all, according to records made available under Obama’s 2009 transparency commitment, Omidyar has visited the Obama White House at least half a dozen times since 2009. During the same period, his wife, Pamela Omidyar, who heads Omidyar Network, has visited 1600 Pennsylvania Ave at least four times, while Omidyar Network’s managing partner, Matthew Bannick, has visited a further three. In all, senior Omidyar Network officials made at least 13 visits to the White House between 2009-2013. (In fact the logs indicate that, on several occasions, Omidyar visited the White House more than once in the same day. To avoid unfairly inflating the numbers, I’ve removed same-day duplicates from all the totals cited in this article.)

To put the numbers in perspective, Omidyar’s six visits compare to four visits during the same period by NBCUniversal chief Stephen Burke, two by Fox News boss Roger Ailes, two by MSNBC’s Phil Griffin, one by New York Times owner Arthur O Sulzberger, and one each by Dow Jones’ Robert Thompson, Gannett/USA Today’s Gracia Martore and Omidyar’s fellow tech billionaire turned media owner, Jeff Bezos.

In fact Pando could only find three media titans who had earned more White House visitor loyalty points than Omidyar: CNN’s Jeffrey Zucker (7), former Post owner Donald Graham (9) and queen of all media, Arianna Huffington (11). According to records, neither The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown or Barry Diller were invited at all — nor, by the way, was Rupert Murdoch.

Even compared to other major tech leaders, Omidyar is a special case. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman visited the White House twice during the same period, as did Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Omidyar also beat out Marissa Mayer (5), Eric Schmidt (5), John Doerr (4), Dick Costolo (3), Evan Williams (3), Jack Dorsey (2), Larry Ellison (1) and poor old Reed Hastings who wasn’t invited at all, until this week. According to records, other people not important enough to make it through the door include Pando investors Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel.

………

Serbia, Georgia and Burma are, of course, all places where USAID-backed pro-US color revolutions were successful. And now we have Omidyar Network investing in USAID’s newest overseas programs, “advancing U.S. national security interests” in USAID’s words.

Carr reveals Omidyar’s extensive and ongoing ties to the US state security apparatus’ involvement in the intelligence operations, Scahill says that Omidyar is aggressively involved with the day to day operations of First Media‘s magazine, The Intercept, “Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else.”

This is not proof that Omidyar is somehow in cahoots with the CIA or the Obama administration, but it does mean that neither Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, nor Matt Taibbi should trust him any further than they could throw him.

As James Reisen of the New York Times observed, the Obama administration, is “The Greatest Enemy Of Press Freedom That We Have Encountered In At Least a Generation.”

What Does Chris Christie and the FBI Have in Common?

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They just both ran investigations of themselves which cleared them completely at taxpayer expense:

With his office suddenly engulfed in scandal over lane closings at the George Washington Bridge, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey two months ago summoned a pair of top defense lawyers from an elite law firm to the State House and asked them to undertake an extensive review of what had gone wrong.

Now, after 70 interviews and at least $1 million in legal fees to be paid by state taxpayers, that review is set to be released, and according to people with firsthand knowledge of the inquiry, it has uncovered no evidence that the governor was involved in the plotting or directing of the lane closings.

The review is the first of multiple inquiries into a scandal that has jeopardized Mr. Christie’s political future. It will be viewed with intense skepticism, not only because it was commissioned by the governor but also because the firm conducting it, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, has close ties to the Christie administration and the firm’s lawyers were unable to interview three principal players in the shutdowns, including Bridget Anne Kelly, the governor’s former deputy chief of staff.

But lawyers from the team who led the inquiry are prepared to vigorously defend their work, which they described as an unfettered look into the inner workings of an administration known to prize loyalty and privacy.

This is perhaps the only internal investigation with less credibility than the FBI, today, at least.

What Do the FBI, and Joe DiMaggio Have in Common?

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An unprecedented streak.

The FBI has now found that all the shootings since 1993, all 150 151, investigated by the FBI, have found the FBI blameless.

Hoocoodanode:

Ending an interrogation in its investigation of the Boston Marathon bombing with a dead body and a host of new questions was not the sort of thing the FBI wanted.

But on May 22, an FBI agent shot Ibragim Todashev – a 27-year old former mixed-martial arts fighter and associate of one of the suspected bombers – seven times, killing him. The agent had just completed a lengthy interrogation of Todashev in his Orlando apartment, part of an inquiry into the already-dead bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. One of the bullets appears to have entered through the top of Todashev’s head.

The FBI’s story, doled out through anonymous leaks, changed several times in the weeks that followed. First, Todashev, who had voluntarily endured hours of questioning, lunged at the FBI agent with a knife, or even a sword. Then it was a length of pipe. Other accounts had him knocking over a table. At least one account held that Todashev was unarmed. The version that currently stands is that Todashev wielded a metal pole – or, perhaps, a broomstick.

Little is known about that mysterious pole-slash-broomstick: its heft, its dimensions, its use. Yet it is likely to be a major difference between vindication and damnation of the FBI’s handling of the case. A Florida prosecutor examining the case is expected to publish the results of an long-awaited investigation into Todashev’s death on Tuesday morning.

Unknowns accumulate in the Todashev shooting. Two Florida detectives reportedly aided the FBI interrogation, and their role during the shooting remains unclear. Florida’s autopsy report, available since July, was barred from release by the FBI. The bureau’s months of silence over the case have compounded the questions it faces.

But the FBI has already reached its conclusion. An internal FBI inquiry vindicated the agent, whose name is not public, months ago. That’s typical for the FBI – between 1993 and 2011, its agents fatally shot 70 people and wounded another 80, and the bureau found no major improprieties in any of those cases, according to records obtained by the New York Times last year.

………

The Florida prosecutor conducting that independent investigation, Jeffrey Ashton, batted away reports on Friday that he has already exonerated the special agent who shot Todashev. He still may, and the bureau has to be hoping he will. The worst outcome for the bureau in the Todashev shooting would be for Ashton to contradict its findings and effectively indict its integrity.

So, the FBI says that everything in hunky dory, and the subtext of this article is that they are leaning on the local prosecutor who is investigating locally.

Just lovely.

So Not a Surprise. The CIA F%$#ed Up, and then Covered it Up

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In Newsweek, of all places, we have Jeff Stein explaining part of why the CIA is trying to suppress and discredit the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture.

Rather unsurprising, torturer and tape destroyer Jose Rodriguez figures prominently in all of this:

The hotel bar TVs were all flashing clips of Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein denouncing the CIA for spying on her staff, when I met an agency operative for drinks last week. He flashed a wan smile, gestured at the TV and volunteered that he’d narrowly escaped being assigned to interrogate Al-Qaida suspects at a secret site years ago.

 “I guess I would’ve done it,” he said, implying you either took orders or quit. But everybody in the counterterrorism program knew what was going on in those places, he said, and he was glad the agency found something else for him to do at the last minute. “Look what’s happened.”

 Four years after Feinstein launched her probe of that interrogation program, her committee and the CIA are locked in a death-struggle over what can be released from the panel’s 6,300-page, still-classified report. The impasse is bringing renewed attention to statements by former CIA and FBI agents that buttress the committee’s all-but-official conclusion that the agency exaggerated the interrogation program’s successes and minimized its abuses.

 In early 2008, for example, the committee heard from Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s top former counterterrorism agents, who has since gone public with his criticism of the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, that CIA contractors had used on top Al-Qaida captive Abu Zubaydah. “The staffers present were shocked,” he wrote in his memoir, The Black Banners. “What I told them contradicted everything they had been told by Bush administration and CIA officials. When the discussion turned to whether I could prove everything I was saying, I told them, ‘Remember, an FBI agent always keep his notes.’ “

 A Lebanese-American who was decorated by both the FBI and Defense Department for his counterterrorism work, Soufan laid out a case for the committee that CIA officials, chiefly Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA counterterrorism boss who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, lied about the value of torturing detainees-to the point of altering the dates on documents to show a cause-and-effect that didn’t exist.

 “In this area, it’s not a question of memory but of factual record,” he later told the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson. “There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the EITs claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claim.

This is why the CIA is terrified.

They are not afraid that their immorality will be revealed, they are afraid that their incompetence and mendacity will be revealed.

They are afraid that meaningful oversight will reveal that there are no adults in the room, which will lead to ……… meaningful oversight.

And I Would have Gotten Away With it Too, if it Weren’t for You Meddling Voters

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The very rich seem to think that democracy is a drag, because it gets in the way of their making even more money by privatizing essential public functions:

The newest bit of “wisdom” for public education comes to us from Netflix Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings, who is a big charter school supporter and an investor in the Rocketship Education charter school network. At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association on March 4, he said in a keynote speech that the problem with public schools is that they are governed by elected local school boards. Charter schools have boards that are not elected and, according to his logic, have “a stable governance” and that’s why “they constantly get better every year.”

 Here’s a transcript of part of the Hastings speech, published on stoprocketship.com (and you can watch the video below):

And so the fundamental problem with school districts is not their fault, the fundamental problem is that they don’t get to control their boards and the importance of the charter school movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing and you can’t do long term planning to a system of large non-profits…The most important thing is that they constantly get better every year they’re getting better because they have stable governance — they don’t have an elected school board. And that’s a real tough issue. Now if we go to the general public and we say, “Here’s an argument why you should get rid of school boards” of course no one’s going to go for that. School boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years. So what we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily, and the work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8% of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90%, so we have a lot of catchup to do…So what we have to do is continue to grow and grow… It’s going to take 20-30 years to get to 90% of charter kids….And if we succeed over the next 20 or 30 years, that will be one of the fastest rates of change ever seen around the world for a large system, it’s hard. [applause]

Actually, all charter schools don’t have stable governance and all of them aren’t getting better every year (plenty close because of their lousy governance) and even charter advocates have called for changes to improve governance structures. What Hastings is suggesting is that democratic elections themselves create unacceptable instability in governance of public education.

Note that Hastings has invested millions in Rocketship charger schools, and while they claim to to be a not for profit, stoprocketship.com does provide numerous links that seem to indicate that much of their activities are structured so as to provide profits for its principals and those who make contributions.

No wonder Reed Hastings thinks that voters are annoying.  It makes the grifting too hard.

Note that this is not limited to education, where charter schools do not (when comparing apples to apples) outperform the public school system, and where in the extreme case (New Orleans 90% charters) we are seeing increasing cases of malfeasance and misfeasance requiring greater oversight.

It also applies to things like trade deals, or the Simpson-Bowles commission.

Even if this actually resulted in good policy, it would be wrong, but when you look at things like NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, TTIP, etc., it is clear that all it does is that it creates an orgy of corruption and rent seeking.

When you decide to take democracy out of the mix, and run this stuff “like a business”, someone gets the profit, and ain’t the taxpayer.

Barack Obama, What’s Your F%$#ing Problem?

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OK, we now know that the CIA is accused of spying on and breaking into Congressional computers. We also know, thanks to Dan Froomkin, that John Brennan wrote a letter admitting that they hacked into the Senate staffers’ computers:

Brennan, in his own remarks after Feinstein’s speech on Tuesday, vaguely ridiculed allegations of CIA “hacking” and said that “when the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.” But nothing he said actually disputed Feinstein’s version of events.

 And as Michael Masnick reported for Techdirt, a January 27 letter to Feinstein that Brennan  sent out to CIA staff on Tuesday actually confirmed the search, though Brennan described it — and the need for it — in the context of concern about a security breach:

Because we were concerned that there may be a breach or vulnerability in the system for housing highly classified documents, CIA conducted a limited review to determine whether these files were located on the SSCI [Senate Select Committee on Intelligence] side of the CIA network and reviewed audit data to determine whether anyone had accessed the files, which would have been unauthorized.

And he said he wasn’t done. “Only completion of the security review will answer how SSCI staff came into possession of the documents,” he wrote, saying that he had only “temporarily” suspended further action until getting Feinstein’s consent.

 The “breach” in question concerned the committee staff’s possession of an internal CIA review of the materials the agency had previously turned over to Feinstein’s committee during the course of the four-year congressional investigation into the Bush-era torture practices.

What is Barack Obama’s response?  Abuses by the CIA are someone else’s problem:

Barack Obama sought to distance the White House from the fierce dispute between top senators and the Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday, claiming it would be inappropriate for his administration to become involved the clash over an investigation into the use of torture in post-9/11 interrogations.

 In the president’s first remarks about the dispute since Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence accused the CIA of a cover-up and intimidation directed at her staff, Obama said it was not a matter for the White House to “wade into at this point”.

This is something that you don’t “wade into at this point”?  Seriously?  How can this not be a matter that you need to “wade into at this point”?

You are the HMFIC.*  Do your F%$#ing job, and take charge!

The chief counsel of the CIA’s review of the Senate report is a subject of the investigation whose name is mentioned 1600 times.

This person also attempted to intimidate Senate staffers by filing a bogus criminal complaint.

And the head of the CIA, John Brennan is saying that everything is hunky-dory.

You are F%$#ing President of the F%$#ing United States of F%$#ing America.  How the F%$ is this not your F%$#ing job?

I don’t care how F%$#ing awsome you F%$#ing think you F%$#ing are, your mere existence does not constitute the “Hope” or the “Change” that have figured so prominently in your messaging.

Why the f%$# did you run to be President if you somehow don’t think that this this is not your f%$#ing job?

*Head Mother F%$#er In Charge.

I Got One Explanation for this, and It Ain’t Good for Port Authority Chairman David Samson

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The US Attorney in New Jersey is investigating the collection of scandals involving the George Washing Bridge and misappropriation of Hurricane Sandy aid.

On Friday, something odd happened. The US Attorney for New York City issued a subpoena for Port Authority Chairman David Samson.

Technically, it might be in the New York US Attorney’s jurisdiction, since there are issues about votes that Samson took where he refused to recuse himself from issues that benefited the legal clients  at his firm.

The votes took place in New York City, so there are issue of whose case this might be.

Well today, the subpoena was rescinded:

A subpoena issued by the federal prosecutor from Manhattan to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey seeking documents related to Chairman David Samson was rescinded this afternoon, a source with knowledge of the subpoena said.

Samson has been under intense scrutiny by investigators and the media for several votes he has taken on Port Authority actions that may have benefited clients of his law firm, Wolff & Samson.

The subpoena was initially sent to Samson on Friday by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

However, the subpoena was withdrawn, according to the source, because of an overlapping investigation by Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey.

I understand why the subpoena was issued, but it is not clear why it was pulled back in 1 business day.

I can only think of one reason why a jurisdictional dispute would be resolved so quickly, and that is that the NJ USA called the NY USA, and explained that Samson is a primary target of their investigation.

I really cannot see any other scenario which would engender such a quick reversal.