Category: Corruption

And the Banksters Scuttle Back into the Shadows as Their Latest Bubble Begins to Deflate

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This sounds a lot like the collapse of a pump and dump:

Rents collected on the collateral for the first U.S. rental-home securities declined by 7.6 percent from October to January, according to Morningstar Inc.

Payments declined as expiring leases and early tenant departures left residences backing the bonds of Blackstone (BX) Group LP’s Invitation Homes vacant, Becky Cao and Brian Alan, analysts at Morningstar’s credit-ratings unit, said in a report. While 8.3 percent of the properties were vacant or occupied by delinquent renters in January, renewals on 78.5 percent of leases that expired the prior month exceeded the analysts’ expected rate of 66.7 percent.

The deal’s performance is being watched as Wall Street bankers and institutional property investors seek to follow Blackstone’s $479.1 million transaction in November with additional offerings. Initial lease expirations for the 3,207 homes are scheduled to peak from January through March, Morningstar said. To woo investors and rating firms in the new market, the transaction started with all of the units leased, unlike bonds backed by apartment-building loans.

They are claiming that this is going to improve, but these protestations of improving prospects sound awfully hollow.

Understand that this is in some way even scarier than what they did with the alphabet soups like MBS and CDS, because these psychopaths are now responsible for fixing things like broken heaters, plugged drains, etc.

There are already anecdotal reports that the banksters are horrible landlords (big surprise), and one wonders what is going to happen when tenants start suing them or organizing rent strikes.

As the Punchline Says, “A Good Start”*

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In the last 8 months, there have been 12 suspicious deaths, including one suicide by nail-gun to the head & chest with 7 or 8 shots.

There is also a missing financial reporter with the WSJ.

To quote Richard Dreyfuss, “This was no boat accident.”

Some of the deaths were clearly suicides, and the intern who died of exhaustion induced seizures is merely deplorable, not suspicious, but some of them, particularly Richard Talley, the nail-gun guy, make you wonder if some of the banksters, or perhaps some of their sketchy clients *cough* Russian Mafia *cough* might be tying up some loose ends.

* This is a reference to the old joke that goes:
               Q: What do you call 5000 dead lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?
               A: A good start!”

Reconstruction Was Ended Way Too Soon

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And now the s%$4 has hit the fan coal ash has hit the drinking water ………

Maddow is all over how NC Governor Pat McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources Department of Environment and Natural Resources is aggressively protecting lawbreaking polluters like Duke Energy, by aggressively preventing private actions against the firm, as opposed to actually enforcing the law:

North Carolina regulators’ penchant for seemingly protecting Gov. Pat McCrory’s (R) former employers from repeated lawsuits over their environmental practices was only stopped following a devastatingly toxic spill, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow reported on Monday.

 On two prior occasions, Maddow said, officials at the state Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) invoked a provision in the federal Clean Water Act allowing them to step in as plaintiffs against Duke Energy when Duke was being sued by environmental activists over the toxic coal ash ponds at its facilities. The state reached settlements worth a collective $99,000 for those incidents.

 But Monday night, she explained, a third such settlement was delayed in the wake of a pond spill that produced up to 82,000 tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons of contaminated water — the third-biggest spill of its’ kind in U.S. history.

 And despite not making any statement about the Feb. 3 disaster until four days after it happened, McCrory — who worked with the company for 28 years — used the first two DENR settlements to boast that his administration took “legal action” against Duke Energy.

 “Right,” Maddow said skeptically. “By stepping in and blocking other peoples’ lawsuits against the company, and then settling with the company for nearly no money, and, importantly, [requiring] no promise from Duke Energy that they would fix what they were doing wrong.”

Talk about a cheap date.  Even the Department of Justice requests a lie from the offenders to refrain from future wrongdoing.

Obamacare Is a Subterfuge

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When one looks at Obama, and the neoliberal free market mousketeers who surround him, one has to to wonder just how much Obama, who actually taught at the University of Chicago, is in thrall to Chicago School economic theory.

While I do think part of the motivation for putting forward what became the PPACA was an attempt to “fix” the thoroughly dysfunctional healthcare delivery system in the United States, I also think that there has been an unspoken agenda, which is to sever the relationship between employers and their employees insurance.

If you talk to most economists, and all of the conservative “freshwater” economists, they will vehemently maintain that employer provided healthcare is economically unjustified, and so should be abolished.

When you look at the implementation of healthcare reform, it seems that one constant is that the employer mandate has been repeatedly delayed and weakened.

And today, they did it again:

For the second time in a year, the Obama administration is giving certain employers extra time before they must offer health insurance to almost all their full-time workers.

Under new rules announced Monday by Treasury Department officials, employers with 50 to 99 workers will be given until 2016 — two years longer than originally envisioned under the Affordable Care Act — before they risk a federal penalty for not complying.

Companies with 100 workers or more are getting a different kind of one-year grace period. Instead of being required in 2015 to offer coverage to 95 percent of full-time workers, these bigger employers can avoid a fine by offering insurance to 70 percent of them next year.

How the administration would define employer requirements has been one of the biggest remaining questions about the way the 2010 health-care law will work in practice — and has sparked considerable lobbying. By providing the dual phase-ins for employers of different sizes, administration officials have sought to lighten the burden on the small share of affected employers that have not offered insurance in the past.

As word of the delays spread Monday, many across the ideological spectrum viewed them as an effort by the White House to defuse another health-care controversy before the fall midterm elections. The new postponements won over part, but not all, of the business community. And they caught consumer advocates, usually reliable White House allies, by surprise, particularly because administration officials had already announced in July that the employer requirements would be postponed from this year until 2015.

Congressional Republicans seized on the announcement as the latest justification for scrapping the health-care law. In particular, they renewed their opposition to the law’s requirement that most Americans have insurance, saying it is unfair to delay rules for businesses and not for individuals.

Of course it’s unfair.

That’s a feature not a bug.

It is my belief that the goal of these actions is to create a space which will allow the minimization, and eventual elimination, of employer provided healthcare, because ……… freedumb and free markets.

This also explains why Obama has been so eager to cut a “grand bargan” with the ‘phants, and why he is so enthusiastic about trade deals like the TPP where freedumb and free markets trump democracy, labor rights, and environmental protections.

I did Not Expect this From the New York Times

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The Times when writing about the debate about raising the minimum wage, calls out a so called “think tank” as being a subsidiary of the hospitality industry:

Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment.

 But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The nonprofit group is run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry, as part of a tightly coordinated effort to defeat the minimum wage increase that the White House and Democrats in Congress have pushed for.

 “The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.

 The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.

Those are the first 4 paragraphs.

Seriously, the New York Times led with the fact that that a lot of the think tanks are little more than whores for their donors.

And then they name the lead pimp:

………

 The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America. He has repeatedly created official-sounding nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that have challenged limits like the ban on indoor smoking and the push to restrict calorie counts in fast foods.

 ………

 The sign at the entrance is for Berman and Company, as the Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Mr. Berman’s for-profit advertising firm, instead, “bills” the nonprofit institute for the services his employees provide to the institute. This arrangement effectively means that the nonprofit is a moneymaking venture for Mr. Berman, whose advertising firm was paid $1.1 million by the institute in 2012, according to its tax returns, or 44 percent of its total budget, with most of the rest of the money used to buy advertisements.

 Disclosure reports filed by individual foundations show that its donors in recent years have included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a longtime supporter of conservative causes. Mr. Berman and Mr. Saltsman would not identify other donors, but did say they included the restaurant industry. But its tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.

I am not sure why the New York Times has decided to stop channeling Claude Rains, but it is a refreshing change for the “paper of record”.

Normally this sort of “business as usual” is studiously ignored by the Washington press corps(e).

Not Enough Bullets………

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To no one’s surprise, this involves real estate developers, a scurvy lot who depend on the kindness of taxpayers while extolling the virtue of “free market heroes” like themselves.

Case in point, Seattle developers are suing because they think that the city is charging too much for them to break zoning laws:

A coalition of several developers filed a lawsuit in King County Superior Court on January 15 that would make Seattle, already booming with construction cranes, more friendly for developers. Their issue? One of the city’s affordable-housing programs.

Since 2006, the city has struck a deal with developers in the downtown core: In exchange for setting aside a few modestly affordable units or paying fees toward a city housing fund, developers get to build taller buildings. For example, developers could build a 400-foot tower where they’d otherwise have to keep it under 300 feet. The Seattle City Council raised those fees by about one-third in December 2013. In their lawsuit, which cites three Supreme Court decisions, the developers claim that fee hike is “an out-and-out extortion.”

So they’re asking a judge to invalidate that higher fee, making it cheaper and easier to build the tallest buildings allowed downtown—while throwing even fewer scraps to the city’s growing affordable-housing needs.

“This just shows developers are not willing to do their fair share,” says Rebecca Saldaña of Puget Sound Sage, an affordable-housing advocacy group. She says Seattle’s taxpayers fund a housing levy, and politicians have eased other development requirements. This latest uptick in fees, Saldaña says, is “really just asking developers to come up to speed.”

………

For example, Smith’s Second and Pike project is a proposed 400-foot tower, with 290 residential units above retail and restaurant space. Normally, the height limit there is 290 feet. Under the new fee regulations, in exchange for that extra height, Smith would have to pay a one-time fee of around $2.5 million into the city’s housing fund. The lawsuit says the city should revert to the former requirements, which require paying only $1.8 million. (In an odd twist, Smith will pay the $1.8 million either way, because he applied for a permit under the old rules.)

“My hope is that most people won’t actually pay the fees,” says O’Brien. “They’ll just provide the housing” inside the new construction. In Smith’s building, that would mean setting aside 20 or so moderately affordable units—around $1,300 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

Clearly, even that isn’t particularly affordable, and 20 apartments don’t amount to much housing. And the city knows its program isn’t good enough. Which is why housing advocates, developers, and lawmakers have been meeting since last summer to overhaul the program.

$1300/month.

If you figure that 25% of pre-tax income should go to housing, that translated to about $62K a year.

For a one bedroom apartment.

And this is too much for the developers to tolerate.

You know, when Mao came to power in China, he executed the landlords, basically the real estate developers of China of the time.

I’ve always found it hard to condemn this act.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Goes to Work

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CFPB Alleges Mortgage Insurer Operated 15-Year-Long Kickback Scheme – Consumerist

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun proceedings against PHH Corporation for its involvement in a 15-year-long mortgage insurance kickback scheme that collected hundreds of millions of dollars from homeowners.

 The CFPB announced Wednesday that it is seeking a civil fine, an injunction to prevent future violations and victim restitution from PHH Corporation and its residential mortgage origination subsidiaries, PHH Mortgage Corporation and PHH Home Loans LLC, as well as it’s wholly-owned subsidiaries, Atrium Insurance Corporation and Atrium Reinsurance Corporation, for violating the Real Estate Settlements Procedures Act and harming consumers through a kickback scheme beginning as early as 1995 and continuing until at least 2009.

 ………

 An investigation by the CFPB showed that when PHH originated mortgages, it referred consumers to its mortgage insuring partners. In exchange for the referral, the insurers purchased reinsurance – a product that transfers risk to help mortgage insurers cover their own risk of unexpected losses – from PHH’s subsidiaries. As a result, consumers ended up paying more in mortgage insurance premiums.

Good, but this will not send anyone to jail.

Until we start people, not just corporations, start experiencing the direct consequences of the misdeeds, nothing will change.

A 23 Year Long Multi-Billion Dollar Long Contract Dispute Settled

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And, surprise, surprise, it is a sweetheart deal for the defense contractors: (paid subscription required)

After more than two decades and numerous attempts at a settlement, the U.S. government finally agreed to accept $400 million from General Dynamics and Boeing in the dispute over the Navy’s cancellation of the $4.8 billion A-12 Avenger II program.

 The settlement is a fraction of what the government sought when the lawsuit began, demanding $1.3 billion in restitution ($2.2 billion in 2014 dollars) for money spent on the stealthy carrier-based aircraft program that had yet to deliver an aircraft. And it is even smaller when compared with an agreement for $2.9 billion that was nearly negotiated in 2003.

 ………

 The Navy will receive three EA-18G Growlers that will be delivered on top of the 21 Boeing aircraft that were funded by Congress for fiscal 2014 and are expected to be delivered in 2016, according to the Navy.

 General Dynamics will provide $198 million in credits to the Navy toward the design, construction and delivery portions of the Zumwalt-class DDG-1000 destroyer.

 ………

 The dispute began in 1991, when then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the $4.8 billion stealth attack aircraft, run by General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, which has since been acquired by Boeing. It was terminated in part due to the government’s conclusion that contractors were not meeting cost and schedule targets. The Navy demanded that contractors repay $1.3 billion to the government.

 The prime contractors sued the government, arguing the government should make penalty payments because the contract was canceled for “convenience,” not a failure to perform. The case festered in the court system, eventually reaching the Supreme Court.

 ………

 In 2011, 20 years after the start of the dispute, the Supreme Court considered the case. The Navy argued that the contractors had not completed the work they had promised. The contractors argued that the government held back classified information about stealth technology that hampered their effectiveness. Ultimately, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, where it remained until now.

They met none of their technical requirements, they missed their schedule, and they were hideously over budget, and the punishment for the (now effectively admitted with the settlement) misfeasance and malfeasance is that the contractors get to secure the status of existing programs.

5 Words that Strike Terror into My Heart

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“Wall Street’s New Housing Bonanza“

Wall Street’s latest trillion-dollar idea involves slicing and dicing debt tied to single-family homes and selling the bonds to investors around the world.

 That might sound a lot like the activities that at one point set off a global financial crisis. But there is a twist this time. Investment bankers and lawyers are now lining up to finance investors, from big private equity firms to plumbers and dentists moonlighting as landlords, who are buying up foreclosed houses and renting them out.

 The latest company to test this emerging frontier in securitization is American Homes 4 Rent. The company talked to prospective investors at a conference in Las Vegas last week about selling securities tied to $500 million of debt, according to people briefed on the matter.

 American Homes 4 Rent, which went public in August, has tapped JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo as its bankers for a debt deal that is expected to be sold by the end of the first quarter, these people said.

This will not end well.

Another complex deal that will leave banksters richer, and rest of us stuck with the f%$#ing tab.

Would You Let the Vampire Squid Get a Hold of Your Dong?

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It appears that the coalition in Denmark has collapsed over this issue:

After a recent spate of controversies and ministerial resignations, the Danish centre-left government suffered another blow on Thursday when the Socialist People’s party (SF) left the ruling coalition amid anger over Goldman Sachs‘s investment in Denmark’s state-owned energy company.

 Goldman’s 8bn kroner (£900m) purchase of a 19% share in Dong Energy has been championed by the government but caused a revolt among SF’s parliamentary group. After a night of tension and discussions, SF’s leader, Annette Vilhelmsen, announced her resignation and said her party was leaving the coalition.

 “It has been a dramatic 24 hours,” Vilhelmsen said. “Yesterday it became clear to me that it wasn’t possible to unite the party. For the sake of SF, I take the consequence of this.”

 The Goldman Sachs deal was approved by the parliament’s finance committee on Thursday, but it has come under widespread scrutiny and criticism in recent weeks. A poll showed 68% of Danes were against the sale, and close to 200,000 people signed an online petition opposing the deal.

(emphasis mine)

Even worse, like most privatization deals, it is a hand out from taxpayers to overpaid CEOs:

My friend Niels-Jakob Harbo Hansen and I calculated some of the financial aspects of the deal, and they don’t look that good. The bidders are offering about 107.25 kroner per share, supposedly valuing the company at 31.5 billion kroner before the investment. In addition to a healthy package of minority rights, they also get a put option for 60% of the shares: if DONG doesn’t go public within 4 years or so (and Goldman can veto that), the investors can sell 60% of their shares at a strike price equal to the purchase price of 107.25 kr per share, plus a healthy return of about 3% per year.

 That’s like an insurance policy that covers not only your loss, but also the insurance premium you originally paid, plus interest.

 Once you account for the put option, the deal values the shares at 24.5 billion kr., around 47% of book value. Maybe that’s fair because DONG just had a big loss and will be constrained by its business plan to invest in windmills and such, but it still seems awfully low. On the other hand, the investment bankers have deemed it Fair™, so who am I to question that.

 The main thing we did was to compare the deal to the most obvious alternative: the Danish government (AAA rating, 26% debt/GDP, 45% including local government) could borrow at an interest rate of about 1%, and make the investment itself. The expected loss from the deal compared to a government investment is about 2.5 billion kroner.

So, it costs the taxpayer 3x as much as a public investment, and you can be certain that rates will go up faster than they would if the company were to remain completely publicly owned.

Pushback on Drug Pricing

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The AIDS Healthcare Foundation is lobbying to keep the $1000.00 a pill Sovaldi out of Medicaid formularies.

I wholeheartedly agree enough is enough:

In a series of letters to be sent to state Medicaid directors starting today, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) President Michael Weinstein will ask the state directors to block Gilead Sciences’ new $1,000-per-pill Hepatitis C drug Sovaldi (sofosbuvir) from inclusion on their respective state Medicaid and other drug formularies. The drug was approved by the F.D.A. on December 6, 2013 and Gilead immediately announced that it would price the drug at $84,000 for a twelve-week course of treatment—or $1,000 per tablet—making it one of the most expensive drugs ever marketed. Suggested treatment guidelines also require that Sovaldi be used with another drug, ribavirin (a nucleoside inhibitor), further adding to the cost of the prohibitively expensive course of treatment.

 “When is enough, enough? At $1,000-per-pill, Sovaldi is priced 1,100% more than Gilead’s most expensive AIDS drug, Stribild, its four-in-one AIDS drug combination, which was priced at $80 per pill a year ago when it came to market,” said Michael Weinstein , President of AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “At that time, Stribild’s price was 35% more than Atripla, the company’s best selling combination HIV/AIDS treatment, and made Stribild the highest priced first-line combination AIDS therapy. Now, Gilead has set a new benchmark for unbridled greed with its outrageous price for Sovaldi—a price that some pharmacy industry sources suggest represents a retail markup of 279,000% over the cost of actually producing the drug.”

 In his letter to state Medicaid directors, Weinstein wrote, “Gilead is charging a higher price for this drug even though the cost to produce it is small. According to industry reports, Gilead produces Sovaldi for approximately $1.00 per gram (with only 10 to 30 grams needed to successfully treat patients with Hepatitis C).1 This represents a retail markup of over 279,000%.

Enough is f%$#ing enough.

This sh%$ needs to stop.

Barack Obama, Fire James Clapper Now

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If you want to give a guy the keys to our security apparatus, they cannot hold the Constitution of the United States of America in contempt:

James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, appeared today before the Senate Intelligence Committee, his first appearance since outright lying to that Committee last March about NSA bulk collection. In his prepared opening remarks, Clapper said this:

Snowden claims that he’s won and that his mission is accomplished. If that is so, I call on him and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.

Who, in the view of the Obama administration, are Snowden’s “accomplices”? The FBI and other official investigators have been very clear with the media that there is no evidence whatsoever that Snowden had any help in copying and removing documents from the NSA.

If there were any credible evidence of foreign agency involvement, it would have been leaked by Obama and His Evil Minions™, if not publicly trumpeted in a press conference.

Clapper, the man whom Edward Snowden proved to have lied to Congress, should not be allowed to have access classified of any kind.

Here’s hoping that Mr. Snowden wins the Nobel Peace Prize he was recently nominated for.

He is far more deserving that President “I Have a Drone”:

One of the biggest debates over the last year was whether Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who ignited a storm of controversy when he revealed a huge number of covert measures by the NSA, was a traitor or a hero. Today, the latter camp got a big boost after it was announced that Snowden had officially been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

While Nobel Peace Prize nominations are typically kept secret for 50 years, those who submit nominations can make them public themselves sometimes. Thousands of different people, including academics, elected officials, and former recipients can make nominations for whomever “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses” over the preceding year.

Snowden was nominated by Norway’s Socialist Left Party politicians Baard Vegar Solhjell, a former environment minister, and Snorre Valen, a member of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where Valen announced the whistleblower’s nomination earlier today.

The FCC Gets Lemons, and Makes An Antifreeze Cocktail

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I have a plan so cunning that you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel………Not!!!!

Because the FCC is unwilling (not unable, just unwillint) to properly classify broadband providers as common carriers, because they are a bunch of wimps have been cowed by, and have bought into, the bankrupt philosophy of the free market Mousketeers, so they have come up with a plan that makes Baldrick from Blackadder look like a genius:

The nation’s top telecom regulator is tipping his hand a bit more on network neutrality.

While FCC chairman Tom Wheeler wouldn’t say outright how he intends to respond to a recent court decision overturning his agency’s rule barring Internet providers from blocking Web traffic, he appears to be leaning increasingly toward using the FCC’s existing legal authority to regulate broadband providers.

Industry watchers say this approach would likely turn on a part of the Communications Act known as Section 706, which gives the FCC authority to promote broadband deployment. Moving in that direction would put more distance between Wheeler and another alternative that’s been floated, which is to reclassify Internet service provders (ISPs) as a kind of utility (making them much more like the phone companies the FCC already regulates strongly).

You see the problem here, don’t you?

What happens when the next Michael Powell, a corporate tool nonpareille ends up running the FCC, and they decide, much as Powell did, that eliminating regulation will magically promote broadband.

This is what has given the United States the slowest and most expensive Internet access in the developed world.

And the New York Times Just Went Medieval of Christie’s Lt. Governor………

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It appears that  New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno has drawn the attention of the Times, and when the hed is, “A Lieutenant Governor, an Artist and a Portrait of a Smear, it’s pretty clear that your political career is in trouble:

In her first year in office, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno opened a frontal attack on an unlikely target, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Its contracting was “inexcusably” flawed, she said. Its practices were “unethical” and too cozy. Its director had to go.

Ms. Guadagno went on like this for months in 2010, and no one knew what to make of it. She wanted more control over the Arts Council, which distributed $16 million a year all over the state and was broadly respected.

In spring 2011, she began a new offensive. She went before legislative committees and pilloried a man doing work on an Arts Council contract, building a 9/11 timeline at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. His contract was no-bid, she said, the money unclear.

This gentleman is Daniel Aubrey, a 62-year-old man with a gray-flecked goatee. He and his wife, an artist, live in a modest home on a modest block just outside Trenton. A friend called him that day and exclaimed: The lieutenant governor just spelled out your name and said there was contract fraud!

A day later, an assistant attorney general called Mr. Aubrey. You are involved in an illegal contract, the prosecutor said. Do you have a criminal attorney?

He did not.

Just like that, Mr. Aubrey fell into reputation’s ditch, and the Christie administration piled dirt atop him. Except — and this is not incidental to our story — Mr. Aubrey did nothing wrong.

This behavior is unconscionable, and if it is not illegal, it should be.

No surprise, but Kim Guadagno used to be a professional bully prosecutor.

Sucks to be her right now.

Another Strike Against the No Fly List

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Obama must love Kafka and Orwell’s nightmares, because he is emulating them

And this ruling is not being classified as secret:

A Virginia man who claims that as a teenager he was detained, interrogated, and abused in Kuwait at the behest of the Obama administration (a story I wrote about here) has won a key victory in his lawsuit against the government. A George W. Bush-appointed judge allowed Gulet Mohamed’s case to move forward on Wednesday, ruling that by putting him on the no-fly list (and thus infringing on his right to return home to the US), the government made him “a second class citizen.”

 Judge Anthony Trenga of the US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that the no-fly list’s “impact on a citizen who cannot use a commercial aircraft is profound,” restricting the right to travel and visit family, the “ability to associate,” and even the ability to hold down a job. Inclusion on the list also “also labels an American citizen a disloyal American who is capable of, and disposed toward committing, war crimes, and one can easily imagine the broad range of consequences that might be visited upon such a person if that stigmatizing designation were known by the general public,” Trenga added. Here’s another key excerpt:

In effect, placement on the No Fly List is life defining and life restricting across a broad range of constitutionally protected activities and aspirations; and a No Fly List designation transforms a person into a second class citizen, or worse. The issue, then, is whether and under what circumstances the government should have the ability to impose such a disability on an American citizen, who should make any such decision, according to what process, and by what standard of proof.

This little bit of Kafkaesque horror is something that came from the Obama administration.

This is not the product of one of Dick Cheney’s security wet dreams, this is Obama embracing and extending those policies.

Federal Civil Rights Board Condemns NSA Snooping Program

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The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board just issued a report on the NSA’s metadata driftnet.
They have concluded that it is both ineffective and illegal:

An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.
The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.
………
The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” the report said. “As a result, the board recommends that the government end the program.”
………
But the privacy board’s report criticized that, saying that the legal theory was a “subversion” of the law’s intent, and that the program also violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
“It may have been a laudable goal for the executive branch to bring this program under the supervision” of the court, the report says. “Ultimately, however, that effort represents an unsustainable attempt to shoehorn a pre-existing surveillance program into the text of a statute with which it is not compatible.”

The ruling was not unanimous, the two members, both alumni of the ferociously corrupt and incompetent Bush DoJ, Rachel L. Brand and Elisebeth Collins Cook, both thought that everything was all hunky dory, with Ms Cook letting loose this bit of completely moronic insanity:

Still, in her dissent, Ms. Cook criticized judging the program’s worth based only on whether it had stopped an attack to date. It also has value as a tool that can allow investigators to “triage” threats and provide “peace of mind” if it uncovers no domestic links to a newly discovered terrorism suspect, she wrote.

Translation: Just because spying on the whole country hasn’t yet worked, doesn’t mean that at some point there might be a chance of it doing something good.
To paraphrase Jimi, excuse me while my head explodes.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica goes a bit further down into the weeds, and covers some important minutae:

The Thursday PCLOB report only addresses critiques of the Section 215 program, but it notes that a future report will address problems found in Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act (FISA AA). Meanwhile, the report describes the rules for targeting non-Americans outside the United States. The government argues that PRISM and related spying programs targeting non-Americans outside the United States are authorized under Section 702.
………
The report goes into great detail explaining both the mechanics of the bulk metadata collection program and how it began. It also emphasizes that under the Section 215 program, the NSA does not collect cell-site location information (CSLI), which can be used to provide geographic information about a call.
However, the report ominously notes:

In the past, the NSA has collected a limited amount of cell site location information to test the feasibility of incorporating such information into its Section 215 program, but that information has not been used for intelligence analysis, and the government has stated that the agency does not now collect it under this program.


 The PCLOB concluded, as Ars has previously, that by allowing analysis of up to “three hops,” this could potentially encompass around half the population of the United States:

If the NSA queries around 300 seed numbers a year, as it did in 2012, then based on the estimates provided earlier about the number of records produced in response to a single query, the corporate store would contain records involving over 120 million telephone numbers.

The PCLOB also notes that there is a significant difference between using phone calling data to follow up on a reasonable suspicion, and collecting information on every phone call made in the country.

Still, I don’t expect anything but minor cosmetic changes.

Full report after the break:

Obama Punts on Equal Healthcoverage Coverage for CEO’s, Lets the 1% Loot Again

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One of the provisions of the PPACA was that senior executives had to get the same sort of insurance as the rest of their workers.

Well, it seems that the Department of Health and Human Services has decided that it’s just too hard to come up with rules to implement this portion of the statute:

The Obama administration is delaying enforcement of another provision of the new health care law, one that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees.

Tax officials said they would not enforce the provision this year because they had yet to issue regulations for employers to follow.

The Affordable Care Act, adopted nearly four years ago, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate “in favor of highly compensated individuals” with respect to either eligibility or benefits. The government provides a substantial tax break for employer-sponsored insurance, and, as a matter of equity and fairness, lawmakers said employers should not provide more generous coverage to a select group of high-paid employees.

But translating that goal into reality has proved difficult.

Officials at the Internal Revenue Service said they were wrestling with complicated questions like how to measure the value of employee health benefits, how to define “highly compensated” and what exactly constitutes discrimination.

Bruce I. Friedland, a spokesman for the I.R.S., said employers would not have to comply until the agency issued regulations or other guidance.

This sh%$ ain’t rocket science.

Either they are dragging their feet, or they are writing Byzantinely complex rules.

The only reason for complexity is to create loopholes that millionaire campaign contributors executives can drive their Beemers through.

In Which I Use the Words “Insurance” and “Fascinating” in the Same Sentence………

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Susie Madrak’s has a post at C&L about Christie’s allies in the New Jersey Democratic Party.

While I am not an expert on New Jersey Politics, that way madness lies, I was aware that South Jersey Dems tended to be more in line with both Christie’s policies and his manner.

Normally, I would not write about Suzie’s take on this, but she reveals a deep systemic problem with governance at the state and local level throughout the United States.

Specifically, she notes how insurance is routinely used as a way to generate undeserved profits for businessmen, and undeserved political contributions for politicians:

We talked about the legislative fight over funding Philadelphia’s then-new convention center. He called it “a boondoggle.”

 “Then why did the Republicans end up supporting it?” I said.

 He looked at me like I was a moron. “The bonds. The insurance. Follow the money,” he said. “The Republicans are making money off all that stuff. It’s always about insurance and bonds.”

 So I took his advice, and started delving into the esoteric world of municipal insurance. I discovered that the same insurance broker had almost every single insurance contract in the county, and that he was a heavy Republican contributor – which is why he got all those contracts in the first place.

 New Jersey has a broker like that. His name is George Norcross, and he’s a Democrat — at least nominally.

 To understand why he who controls the insurance controls the politics, you need to understand just how profitable insurance is. And if you own the political apparatus that runs along with it, you have a perpetual money machine that really doesn’t require much upkeep.

 It was the experience in the county I covered that the politically-connected insurance contracts cost an average of 30% more than a municipality or other entity would pay on the open market. Much of the excess profits get kicked back through political contributions. (These contracts are almost always an exception to the open bidding process, which makes it easy. Not so much for the homeowners paying the additional millage.)

 But there are other benefits. For instance, a cooperative insurance broker who wields that much power with the carriers makes sure there are quick and speedy confidential settlements regarding messy little matters like police brutality cases or public officials who are stealing money. They control which attorneys are retained by the carriers, and they’re always politically connected.

 It may be tidy, but it’s probably not democracy.

 Here’s an example of how Norcross works — and it’s all perfectly legal, even if the taxpayers get screwed:

In another DRPA-related transaction, Norcross’s insurance firm received $410,000—not for actually doing the authority’s insurance work, but for referring that business to another insurance firm, Willis of New Jersey. While a report last year from the New Jersey comptroller was critical of that arrangement, it also noted that there was technically nothing unlawful about it, a point Norcross reiterates when I bring it up. “Look,” he says, “the report itself says nothing happened that was illegal.”

Looking at this, and how the regulatory and legal environment not only enables, but encourages this behavior.

After all, when was the last time that your heard of an indictment, much less a conviction of an insurance broker doing a shady deal with a local government?

It’s the Iron Triangle writ local.

Not Enough Bullets………

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After JP Morgan had to pay billions of dollars in fines and restitution, the board of directors took decisive action, and doubled JP Morgan CEO’ Jamie Dimon’s salary.

I guess in finance, everyone gets a gold star, kind of like kindergarten, only with less accountability:

JP Morgan Chase has almost doubled chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon’s pay for 2013, rewarding the executive for settling probes against the bank.

Dimon will receive total compensation of $20m in 2013, consisting of $18.5m in stock options and a base salary of $1.5m, the bank said in a statement Friday.

That compares with total compensation of $11.5m a year earlier, down from $23m in each of the previous two years.

The bank says it took several factors into account when deciding on Dimon’s pay, including the “sustained long-term performance” of the bank, gains in market share and customer satisfaction as well as his handling of the legal issues facing the lender.

Seriously, we need to start jailing these people post haste.

People Who Should be Banned from Teaching for Life

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If there was a way to throw these pitiful excuses for a human being in gaol, I’d go for that too.

A teacher harassed one of her students for being a Buddhist, and when the parents complain the administration suggest that the family give up Buddhism:

A public school in Louisiana allegedly advised a Buddhist family to change their beliefs if they didn’t want their child to face harassment from zealous teachers.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Louisiana on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against Negreet High School in Sabine Parish on behalf of two parents, Scott and Sharon Lane, and their son, “C.C.” The lawsuit claims the school has “a longstanding custom, policy, and practice of promoting and inculcating Christian beliefs,” including the teaching of creationism.

Sixth-grade teacher Rita Roark has told her students that the universe was created by God about 6,000 years ago, and taught that both the Big Bang theory and evolution are false, according to the lawsuit. She told her students that “if evolution was real, it would still be happening: Apes would be turning into humans today.”

One test she gave to students asked: “ISN’T IT AMAZING WHAT THE _____________ HAS MADE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” The correct answer was “Lord,” but C.C. wrote in something else. Roark responded by scolding the boy in front of the entire class.

When informed that C.C. was a Buddhist and therefore didn’t believe in God, Roark allegedly responded, “you’re stupid if you don’t believe in God.”

On another accusation, she allegedly described both Buddhism and Hinduism as “stupid.”

When the outraged parents confronted Sabine Parish Superintendent Sara Ebarb about the incidents, she allegedly told them “this is the Bible belt” and that they “shouldn’t be offended” to “see God here.” Ebarb advised that C.C. should either change his faith or be transferred to another District school where “there are more Asians.”

Those “educators” had better hope that there is no God, because if he does, then they are all surely going to hell.