Category: Corruption

Live in Obedient Fear Citizen

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Remember that you are the bankster’s property, and the Bill of Rights never applies:

Jeff Olson, 40, is facing a potential 13-year jail sentence for perhaps the world’s most costly sidewalk art. A former aide to the U.S. Senator from Washington, Olson used water-soluble statements like “Stop big banks,” and “Stop Bank Blight.com” outside Bank of America branches last year to protest the company’s practices. He eventually gave up his protest but prosecutors later brought 13 charges against him. Now a judge has reportedly banned his attorney from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial.” It appears someone associated with Bank of American could finally go to jail, but it will not by the bank officials in the financial scandal. It is the guy writing slogans in chalk in the sidewalk.

 I have long been critical of the degree to which American judges are now barring parties from making defenses and arguments before juries. These rulings often have an outcome determinative impact on trials. In this case, free speech was the motivation of Olson, but he will reportedly have to defend himself as just a guy who walked up and started drawing in front of this bank.

 Olson and his partner had been campaigning to get people to take their money out of the bank. This campaign led to a confrontation with Darell Freeman, vice president of Bank of America’s Global Corporate Security, who reportedly demanded action from local prosecutors. Olson stopped when contacted by the San Diego Gang Unit in 2012.

 Yet, the bank insisted the chalk caused $6,000 to clean up, a rather suspicious claim. These were slogans written on the sidewalk. Prosecutors hit him with 13 counts of misdemeanor vandalism charges and $13,000 in restitution to the City and to Bank of America.

(emphasis mine)

This has gone viral, and the response of the judge was swift, to put a gag order on all the participants for a f%$#ing misdemeanor:

As reported in a Thursday evening, June 27, BuzzFlash at Truthout update to the chilling San Diego (SD) city attorney prosecution of Jeff Olson, an SD Judge placed an unprecedented gag order on a misdemeanor trial — in particular muzzling Olson. But it also apparently included witnesses, the jury and others.

 Judge Howard Shore also chastised the Mayor of San Diego, Bob Filner. Filner apparently in the judge’s eyes had the temerity to call the trial of Olson a waste of time and taxpayer money. According to the San Diego Reader, Filner sent out a memorandum on June 20 that read in part:

This young man is being persecuted for thirteen counts of vandalism stemming from an expression of political protest that involved washable children’s chalk on a City sidewalk. It is alleged that he has no previous criminal record. If these assertions are correct, I believe this is a misuse and waste of taxpayer money. It could also be characterized as an abuse of power that infringes on First Amendment particularly when it is arbitrarily applied to some, but not all, similar speech.

Judge Shore, in essence, warned the mayor of San Diego, who happens to be a Democrat in a traditionally conservative city, to keep his comments to himself, and would likely have issued a gag order on the mayor if Judge Shore were able.

(Again emphasis mine)

Silly rabbit, free speech is for Banksters.

Bush Obama Nominee for Commerce Secretary Approved

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Sorry about the headline, but Penny Pritzker who was just approved by the Senate as Secretary of Commerce, with only Bernie Sanders voting no:

Senators pick their battles, and by Tuesday, members in both parties had decided not to have one with President Obama over his nomination of Penny Pritzker, the billionaire hotel heiress, to be commerce secretary. In a 97-to-1 vote, they confirmed her to join the cabinet.

The lone dissenter was Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the socialist independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats.

When Mr. Obama announced in May his choice of Ms. Pritzker, 54, to join his second-term economic team as head of the eclectic Commerce Department — its responsibilities vary widely and include federal business programs and weather forecasting — rumblings from the right and left suggested trouble.

Yes, virulently anti union, a bought/looted a bank, dove into subprime mortgages, and left the taxpayers holding the bag, and keeps her fortune in overseas tax havens. (Background here.)

But the is a friend of Obama, and was his his first big buck donor, so she gets to be commerce secretary.

I guess that it’s the new motto of the Obama administration cabinet, “Not quite as lame as Alberto Gonzalez.”

Snowden Has Flown to Russia, Is Expected to Ask for Asylum in Ecuador

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I am not surprised.  Hong Kong is not a safe haven in the long term, and if he returns to the United States, he will be tortured through extended solitary confinement in an attempt to break him, as was done with Wen Ho Lee.

So he is in Moscow negotiating asylum with Ecuador:

Fugitive former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is due to fly out of Russia in the next few hours in a bid to seek asylum in Ecuador.

Reports suggest he will be on an early afternoon flight out of Moscow, heading first to the Cuban capital Havana.

Washington says it is urging countries in the “Western Hemisphere” not to let Mr Snowden enter their territory.

The US has charged him with espionage over leaked secret documents revealing US internet and phone surveillance.

In a series of rapidly moving developments on Sunday, Mr Snowden flew to Moscow from Hong Kong where he had been holed up since fleeing the US.

Once at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport it is thought he was met by Ecuador’s ambassador to Moscow whose car was seen arriving by reporters.

On Sunday night it was unclear exactly where Mr Snowden was, but he was believed to be still at the airport.

BBC Moscow correspondent Daniel Sandford says it is being reported that he will fly first to Cuba and then to Venezuela before heading to Ecuador. The first plane scheduled to fly to Havana was due to leave Sheremetyevo at 14:05 Moscow time (10:05 GMT).

He will be trying to avoid any country that might arrest him on behalf of the US, our correspondent adds.

At this point, I expect that Obama is looking into ways of having Snowden whacked, and Glenn Greenwald might be on his latest kill list as well.

Like Rendering for Torture, Only With Data

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In another scoop, the Guardian has revealed that GCHQ, the British Equivalent of the NSA, engaged in the same sort of massive data drift net as the NSA:

Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

 The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

 One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

 ………

 By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

 The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the US“.

 When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was “your call”.

 The Guardian understands that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.

(Emphasis mine)

What we are seeing here is the moral equivalent of the rendition for torture that the CIA engaged in with despotic governments.

In this case, the NSA is not allowed to spy on Americans, so they have the British do it for them and then they review the data under the British “Light oversight regime.”

Note that this in addition to the exceptions and shadings on the NSA’s own surveillance discussed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Taken together, it’s a blue print for a lawless surveillance state.

(updated title)

Once Again, Obama Invokes the 96 Year Old Espionage Act Yet Again

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Yes, this time Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever™ is using the act, originally drafted to prohibit expressing anti-war sentiments, to pursue a leaker, in this case, go after Edward Snowden:

Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.

 Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Rolling Glenn Greenwald:

Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined. How can anyone justify that?

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect “noble” and “patriotic” whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer said recently that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency has brought investigative journalism to a “standstill”, while James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper that “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom.” Read what Mayer and Goodale wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration’s threat to the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?

………

They haven’t learned anything from these disclosures that they didn’t already well know. The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.

And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability. If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.

(Emphasis Original)

He is correct.  The only potential “injury to the United States” (from the text of this law) is to subject the actions of the NSA, and the rest of the US state security apparatus to public discussions.

The terrorists already knew this, as it is clear from the approved leaks from the Obama administration made this clear to anyone with 2 working brain cells.

I wish that we had a less paranoid president with a greater devotion to openness and transparency.

Of course, Richard Nixon qualifies as less paranoid President with a greater devotion to openness and transparency, which just goes to show how far we have fallen as a society.

Obama Is Lying About the Prevented Terror Attacks, and Other NSA Scandal Stuff

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A review of the claims shows that either ordinary law enforcement actions uncovered the planned attacks, or that there never was a planned attack, there never was an attack:

This suspect, in turn, was in contact with an individual in the United States named Khalid Ouazzani. Thus warned, the FBI investigated Mr. Ouazzani through traditional law enforcement methods, and discovered a burgeoning plot to bomb the NYSE.

 “Ouazzani had been providing information and support to this plot,” FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce told lawmakers.
However, Mr. Ouazzani pleaded guilty to providing material support – in his case, money – to Al Qaeda, not to terror planning. His May 2010 plea agreement makes no mention of anything related to the New York Stock Exchange, or any bomb plot, notes David Kravets in Wired magazine.

 Plus, Ouazzani’s defense attorney said Tuesday the stock market allegation was news to him.

 “Khalid Ouazzani was not involved in any plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange,” attorney Robin Fowler told Wired.

 As to the New York subway plot, it was discovered not by analysis of vast amounts of Internet data of foreign users, but rather by old-fashioned police work, according to The Guardian, the British newspaper that first published a secret NSA document showing the agency collected phone metadata from Verizon Business Services.
A British intelligence investigation into a suspected terrorist cell in England’s northwest first turned up a crucial e-mail address of a Pakistani extremist, write The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington and Nicholas Watt. They passed this address to the US.

 Surveillance of this one address led the US to Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-American living in Colorado who had asked the Pakistani extremist for explosives recipes. FBI agents followed Mr. Zazi as he traveled to New York. Search warrants turned up bomb components, and in 2010 Zazi confessed to a plot to bomb the city’s subway system with backpacks.

The NSA’s sweeping data interception capability “played a relatively minor role” in breaking this case, write Mr. Pilkington and Mr. Watt.

And the Guardian now hsa published the secret standards used by the NSA, and it appears we have another lie, because the standards do allow for emails to be read and phone calls to be listened to:(see here and here for the docs)

The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target “non-US persons” under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance.

The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used.

………
The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection.

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

  • Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;
  • Retain and make use of “inadvertently acquired” domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;
  • Preserve “foreign intelligence information” contained within attorney-client communications;
  • Access the content of communications gathered from “U.S. based machine[s]” or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

………

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA’s foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.

………

Those procedures state that the “NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person”.

It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination – including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases, which can include public information and data collected by other agencies.

Where the NSA has no specific information on a person’s location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues.

“In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person,” it states “a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person.”

If it later appears that a target is in fact located in the US, analysts are permitted to look at the content of messages, or listen to phone calls, to establish if this is indeed the case.

Referring to steps taken to prevent intentional collection of telephone content of those inside the US, the document states: “NSA analysts may analyze content for indications that a foreign target has entered or intends to enter the United States. Such content analysis will be conducted according to analytic and intelligence requirements and priorities.“

(emphasis mine)

Translated from the bureaucratese, this is unlimited ability to record phone calls and emails, until it is proven that they are not in the United States, and even then, the data is retained.

All that the analyst has to do is to claim that you are “not sure” if the target is a “US Person”, and it’s no harm no foul for intercepting the contents of their communications.

As Glenn Greenwald notes, this is yet more evidence that FISA court oversight is a complete joke.

H/t to Washington’s blog for the links on the NSA false claims.

Here is No Surprise

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In a lawsuit, Bank of America* has been accused of giving bonuses to staff for foreclosing on people:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the second-biggest U.S. lender, rewarded staff with cash bonuses and gift cards for meeting quotas tied to sending distressed homeowners into foreclosure, former employees said in court documents.

 Mortgage workers falsified records and were told to delay U.S. loan-assistance applications by requesting paperwork that the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank had already received, according to statements from ex-employees filed last week in federal court in Boston. The lender improperly disqualified applicants to the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, according to a May 23 statement from Simone Gordon, a loss-mitigation specialist who left the company in 2012.

 “We were regularly drilled that it was our job to maximize fees for the bank by fostering and extending delay of the HAMP modification process by any means we could,” Gordon said. Managers instructed staff to “delay modifications by telling homeowners who called in that their documents were ‘under review,’ when in fact, there had been no review,” she said.

Bank of America, which has spent more than $45 billion to settle claims tied to its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp., is being sued by homeowners who didn’t receive permanent loan modifications after making payments under trial programs, according to court papers. Statements from seven former loan employees were included in a filing last week as part of plaintiffs’ attempt to gain class-action status. The lender has denied the allegations.

(Emphasis mine)

Seriously, why we haven’t put banksters in jail, particularly, the former CEO of Countrywide, Angelo Mozilo, who created the mess that BoA is trying to sweep under the carpet?

Also, why did the Obama administration set up HAMP as a Petri dish for mortgage servicer abuses?†

*Full disclosure, it is my bank.
†Actually, we know why. Geithner‡ wanted to let the banksters to cheat homeowners so as to protect the bank.
‡Laying it all at Geithner’s feet is not completely fair, because as I often say, the Cossacks work for the Czar.

When the Spys Have Lost John le Carré………

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He actually makes a point that has been missed in the whole NSA revelations controversy,

Carré gets to the heart of the matter when he notes that much of the problem is that our government is increasingly serving the state security apparatus when it should be the other way around:

In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.

This is the core of the problem.

Our intelligence agencies are driving national policy on the basis of their own self interests, and the interests of the rest of society suffer as a result.

Quote of the Day

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From the always informative Charlie Savage:

You think any of these guys looked at what happened in 2008 and thought, “Boy, those guys really were crooks and bought the country a helluva catastrophe. We should learn from them and not do that ourselves.” Nope, I guarantee you the first thoughts among the people who thought up this scam for the insurance companies was, “Holy crap, look at the dough those guys made!” And I guarantee you those same people all got raises. The upper levels of American capitalism is so rotten with amorality, so utterly devoid of any conventional sense of ethics, let alone social responsibility, that it hardly seems worth pointing it out any more. Congratulations to America’s graduate schools of business. You have bred three generations of vampires to feed on the rest of us. It’s as though every medical school in the country adopted the basic approach to thoracic surgery of Sweeney Todd and married it to the economic philosophy of Bialystock And Bloom.

He is talking about the insurance industry, which has recently been discovered to have been using complex accounting tricks to boost their apparent assets and revenue.

If the Banksters had been sent to a “federal pound me in the ass prison,” these insurance executives would have thought twice before engaging in accounting fraud.

Would You Cut Someone’s Throat for Money

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The hed is instructive, “Chicago Hospital Accused of Cutting Throats for $160,000.”

When people talk about how the private sector solves everything, just remember this story:

A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital cut a hole in Earl Nattee’s throat on Jan. 3, the day before he died. It’s not clear why.

The medical file contained no explanation of the need for the procedure, called a tracheotomy, according to a state and federal inspection report that quotes Sacred Heart’s chief nursing officer as saying it happened “out of the blue.” Tracheotomies are typically used to open an air passage directly to the windpipe for patients who can’t breathe otherwise.

Now, amid a federal investigation into allegations of unneeded tracheotomies at the hospital, Nattee’s daughter, Antoinette Hayes, wonders whether her father was a pawn in what an FBI agent called a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medicaid.

“My daddy said, ‘They’re killing me,’” Hayes recalled, in reference to the care he received at the hospital.

Based in part on surreptitious tape recordings, an FBI affidavit lays out allegations that a Sacred Heart pulmonologist kept patients too sedated to breathe on their own, then ordered unneeded tracheotomies for them — enabling the for-profit hospital to reap revenue of as much as $160,000 per case.

They have witnesses who wore wires, and a number of doctors, as well as the CEO of the for profit (notwithstanding the Catholic hospital sounding name) hospital.

There is a reason why governments need to aggressively regulate, or operate, critical services, because incentives to produce good behavior are either ineffective, or more expensive than explicit regulation.

H/t JR at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

And While We Are On the Subject of Obama and Subverting Regulation………

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Gary Gensler surprised everyone when, as head of the CFTC, he actually enforced sensible rules.

So it it comes no surprise that Obama is firing him and replacing him with a corporate drone from the Vampire Squid:

Obama is no longer bothering to pretend that he is anything other than a stooge for banks and other big money interests.

 The president is effectively dismissing Gary Gensler, the ex-Goldman partner who headed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. Gensler used his post at a secondary financial regulator to push for reforms. It was his office that blew the Libor scandal wide open by taking referrals from British regulators seriously (by contrast, Geithner, who heard about widespread, deliberate mismarking in 2008, passed the buck to the Bank of England). Gensler has also been making himself unpopular by taking the view that swap dealers, which includes foreign branches of US banks and parties that conduct business with US parties, must comply with Dodd Frank. ………

 Shahien Nasiripour at the Huffington Post describes how Gensler is being ousted for his position on swaps regulation, which was coming to a head in international meetings starting June 20, with a July 12 deadline looming. The industry was pushing for the usual “race to the bottom” approach, since the Dodd Frank provisions are more stringent than overseas requirments (the spin, of course, was that Gensler was acting unilaterally, as opposed to implementing what Congress mandated). Gensler faces varying degrees of resistance from three of his four fellow commissioners. International regulators were apparently also unhappy with Gensler’s tough stand, to the point where they were complaining to Treasury Secretary Jack Lew.

 Even if Obama fails in fast-tracking his chosen replacement, Amanda Renteria, Gensler’s lame-duck status will considerably weaken his ability to arm-twist the fence-sitters among his colleagues.

 And Renteria is a simply pathetic choice. Oh, she’s got a very appealing personal story, having worked her way up from a very disadvantaged background, a child of migrant workers who made her way to Stanford and later Harvard Business School. But there’s nothing in her background that qualifies her to act either as a senior regulator or as the head of a large operation (the CFTC has over 400 employees). This leap in responsibilities is tantamount to taking a promising law firm associate and making them the head of a large law practice. You’d never do that if you cared about the health of the firm. A move like this looks an awful lot like an effort not just to sideline Gensler’s push on swaps regulation, but to render the CFTC incompetent over time.

 Renteria’s knowledge of finance appears to consist of having worked right after college for a few years at Goldman. ………

And to this we add the bonus story that Barack Obama has nominated Walmart’s biggest fan to head his council of economic advisors:

On June 10, 2013, President Obama announced his intention to nominate Jason Furman to become the next chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. This is a big-time, highly influential post. So what kind of economist is Furman?

One who thinks Walmart is the best thing since sliced bread.

For Furman, Walmart is nothing short of a miracle for America’s poor and working-class folks. For him, progressives should be cheering the firm: he even wrote a 16-page paper titled, “Wal-Mart: A Progressive Success Story,” which was posted on the Center for American Progress website. ………

In Furman’s view, “the US productivity miracle and the emergence of Wal-Mart-style retailing are virtually synonymous.”

For the man who will have President Obama’s ear on vital matters like jobs, the evidence of whether Walmart’s wages and benefits are substandard is “murky.” And he doesn’t much care for those who question Walmart’s approach: In the 2006 dialogue with Ehrenreich on Slate, he upbraided activists who had pushed the firm to increase wages and offer better benefits:………

To complete the finger in the eye, the American Enterprise Institute has issued effusive praise on the choice.

I’m not surprised.  I’m disappointed, but not surprised.

Obama loves hippie punching.

Yes, James Clapper Perjured Himself Before Congress, and Should Be Both Fired and Prosecuted

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Fred Kaplan, who tends to be a font of conventional wisdom, is calling for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to be fired:

If President Obama really does welcome a debate about the scope of the U.S. surveillance program, a good first step would be to fire Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

 Back at an open congressional hearing on March 12, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied, “No sir … not wittingly.” As we all now know, he was lying.

 We also now know that Clapper knew he was lying. In an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell that aired this past Sunday, Clapper was asked why he answered Wyden the way he did. He replied:

“I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘when are you going to … stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is … not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no. So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying, ‘No.’ ”

Let’s parse this passage. As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden had been briefed on the top-secret-plus programs that we now all know about. That is, he knew that he was putting Clapper in a box; He knew that the true answer to his question was “Yes,” but he also knew that Clapper would have a hard time saying so without making headlines.

There were actually some non-answer answers he could have given that didn’t rise to the level of lying to Congress, saying something like, “No one is perfect, but we do our best not to infringe on the privacy of the American public,” but he just perjured himself, and he did so because he simply did not did not care about telling the truth under oath.

FWIW, is obliquely saying the Clapper lied through his teeth as well:

Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, revealed that he had given Clapper, the director of national intelligence, a day’s advance notice of a question about the extent of government surveillance at a congressional hearing in March.

 Clapper said earlier this week that he had misunderstood the question. When asked directly by Wyden in March whether the NSA was collecting any kind of data on “millions” of Americans, Clapper replied “no” and “not wittingly” – a claim undermined by the Guardian’s disclosures about NSA collection of millions of Americans’ phone records. Wyden also disclosed that he had given Clapper an opportunity in private to revise his answer, after the session.

 “One of the most important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a Tuesday statement.

(emphasis mine)

Note that this makes this even worse, because Clapper did not just lie off the cuff. He was given 24 hours to come up with an appropriate answer, and then he was given the opportunity to revise his answer, and he just lied, because he knew that there would be absolutely no consequences for this.

With Barack Obama in the White House, and Eric Holder as Attorney General, he is probably right, but the statute of limitations is 5 years, so a new AG could file charges between January 2017 and May of 2018.

It won’t happen, but I can dream.

Paul Ryan Calls the NSA Surveillance “Creepy”, and He is Right

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Look at those dead eyes, he knows creepy

Seriously, makeing Paul f%$3ing Ryan right on ANYTHING is the epitome of fail:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) expressed misgivings with the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance programs, suggesting on Monday that the activities “go way beyond the scope” of what the federal government has been authorized to do by laws like the Patriot Act.

 “It comes across as creepy,” the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee said in an interview with the Wisconsin radio station WJRN. “I understand FISA court orders to go after some known person, and their phone records and whoever they’re communicating with. But to do a blanket dragnet nationwide, that seems to go way beyond the scope of the law that I’m familiar with called the Patriot Act.”

The fail is strong with the Obama administration.

More than any sitting president I have ever seen, Obama seems to obsess over his legacy.

Well, this is your legacy.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Why NSA Spying Matters

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John Judis was a relatively low level political activist, primarily concerned with the Vietnam war, in the 1960s

Well, he relates the systematic program of surveillance and harassment against him:

President Barack Obama has assured us that we need not be worried about the National Security Agency listening to our phone calls or monitoring our Internet use. The NSA’s programs, he said, represent “modest encroachments on privacy” that are “worth us doing” to protect the country from terrorists. Count me among those who are not reassured by Obama’s statement. I know better—from my schoolboy knowledge of the Constitution and from my own experience during the ’60s with unwarranted government surveillance.

I don’t usually like to base moral judgments on what the Constitution does or does not allow, but in this case, it makes sense to do so. The Constitution had two very different purposes: One was to create a functioning government; the other, forged in the wake of the American revolution, was to establish constraints that would prevent the abuse of state power. The First Amendment was designed to do the latter; and so was the Fourth, which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The administration’s obsessive pursuit of press leaks threatens the First Amendment’s freedom of the press; and the NSA’s surveillance violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on general warrants—on indiscriminate searches without probable cause.

………

 I had my own vague vision of what a socialist America would look like, but almost everything that I did was directed at immediate issues like ending the Vietnam War or later impeaching Richard Nixon. I was not a bomb thrower. I advocated running candidates in elections. I taught classes on Marx’s Capital and American history at a school we organized in Oakland. But during this period, I was under almost constant surveillance by the FBI and by other intelligence or police agencies. I received regular visits from the FBI (I told them I wouldn’t talk to them), and they also visited my parents and friends.

As my FBI file, which I later obtained, attested, my movements were being monitored even when I didn’t know it. (Most of it is, unfortunately, blacked out.) In organizing demonstrations, I encountered people who turned out to be government agents. I was pulled over by the police with guns drawn for no apparent reason. And I also received inquiries about my tax returns from the IRS even though I was living on about $3000 a year during much of this period. These inquiries, which to this day may or may not have had something to do with my politics, certainly make me sympathetic to the rightwing groups who were barraged by inquiries from the IRS—whether or not these inquiries were directed by higher-ups in the administration.

 ………

 Obama says that the debate over the NSA’s activities is “healthy for our democracy” and a “sign of maturity.” But I think it’s a sign of forgetfulness—of Constitutional amnesia—on the part of Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the administration’s vaunted intelligence chiefs who want to divert attention from the subject of the leaks, which is their own behavior, onto the leaker. I am hoping Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress remind the administration what the Constitution was designed to do and what the original FISA legislation was meant to do, but judging from the performance of most congressional leaders so far, I am not holding my breath.

When people (like the contemptible Lawrence O’Donnell* this evening) say that they “feel safer” because they are much less likely to be observed in the vast morass of data, they do no not get it.

The question is what happens with all that information when someone in power, whether it be the President of the United States, or minor data entry clerk like Edward Snowden, or a law enforcement official like J. Edgar Hoover decides to make you their business.

You do not get lost in the haystack when they decide to come for you.

That’s why we have a 4th amendment.

*Seriously, he is so in the tank for Obama that he would endorse an order from Obama for O’Donnell’s own execution.

Read This

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This is a devastating take-down of the culture of high finance. What’s more, it does so from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as opposed to a conventional economics analysis, which suits my temperament better:

The excessive pay can be interpreted as a sign of unfair or inefficient markets. It is that, but I think the deeper cause is not so much economic as sociological. Financiers have persuaded the broader society that they are modern aristocrats. Pampered lives are part of the package. They go along with an unthinking sense of entitlement and a mix of self-righteousness and self-centredness, with just a hint of condescending tolerance for limited criticism.

Of course, today’s financial aristocracy is different from traditional nobility. The contemporary titles (partner, managing director) and privileges (first-rate education, political influence) are not exactly hereditary, and long hours on the job have replaced a life of leisure. But I believe the commonalities are more significant.

………

In my view, the sociological analysis provides more insight into the industry’s condition than the more common argument about “heads I win, tails you lose” incentives. I rarely meet financiers who would admit to being reckless or wasteful. What I observe is sublime and blind self-confidence.

Living largely with other members of their caste, they rarely have doubts. To them, more finance is always better than less and higher margins always better than lower. They welcome the development of more complicated financial products; they don’t worry much about the effect of these products on the rest of the economy.

Read the whole thing.

I think that his analysis is spot on, though his last ‘graph is a bit too optimistic for my taste.

Gee, Another Case Where the Chain of Command Does the Wrong Thing When Sexual Assault is Alleged

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In this case, it’s the Naval Academy in Annapolis:

Three football players at the U.S. Naval Academy are under investigation in an alleged sex assault involving a female midshipmen almost a year ago, according to a Defense Department official.

 According to the official, the three midshipmen were first accused by her at the time of the alleged incident, but she dropped her complaint a few months after the incident. She then made a complaint again earlier this year, and the investigation is now underway by the Navy. The alleged victim’s lawyer, Susan Burke, said her client has participated in wiretapping as part of the investigation at the request of NCIS.

Normally, I would not be sure if this is a military thing, or if it is a sports thing, but reading this:

In a statement to CNN, attorney Susan Burke said the woman went to an off-campus party at a “football house” in April 2012 and became intoxicated, and woke up there the next morning “with little recall” of what occurred.

 “She learned from social media and from friends that three football players had claimed to have had sexual intercourse with her while incapacitated,” Burke said.

 She reported the incident to Navy authorities and explained that she could not provide much information because she had been intoxicated, Burke said.

 Burke said the woman was disciplined for drinking and the case was closed without further action by the academy.

Leads me to believe that the problem here is not sports culture, but military culture.

At this point that non only does sexual assault need to be moved out of the chain of command under the UCMJ, but every crime not directly related to military operations and discipline needs to be moved out of the chain of command.

Accountability in Free Trade, What a Concept

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Following a spate of horrific fatal disasters at Bangladeshi textile industry pressure is increasing end special trade status between that nation and the US:

After several deadly factory disasters in Bangladesh — including the collapse of an eight-story garment factory last month that left at least 1,127 people dead — labor advocates are stepping up pressure on the Obama administration, calling for it to convey its disapproval of working conditions in the country by revoking its special trade status.

But federal officials remain conflicted over the American government’s responsibility for safer labor conditions overseas, and in meetings in recent weeks they disagreed over what combination of carrots and sticks would work best to achieve this goal.

 Some officials, particularly in the State Department, say that if trade status is revoked, Washington will lose its leverage to pressure Bangladesh to improve building codes and labor rights. Labor advocates and officials from the Labor Department counter, however, that this leverage is lost anyway if the administration is never willing to use it.

 “By failing to take serious action before now even in the face of phenomenal, unprecedented death of workers, U.S. trade officials have already sent the wrong message to Bangladesh,” said Brian Campbell, policy and legal programs director of the International Labor Rights Forum, a workers advocacy group. “It’s time to send a strong signal.”

Mr. Campbell is right.

If you are not willing to have consequences to an employment regime that is corrupt and patently anti-worker (the factory owner has to approve before employees can join a union) because you fear losing leverage, then you never had any leverage to begin with.

If the US revokes the trade status, it is likely that the EU will as well, so this is a big deal, and a well deserved response.

This is not just poor pay and working conditions in Bangladesh, it is also that the state security apparatus murder labor organizers:

Last April, Aminul Islam, a prominent worker advocate, was found dead, his body bearing signs of torture. Reporters in Bangladesh said there was evidence that the government’s security forces might have been tied to the death. No one has yet been arrested. According to American diplomats and labor officials, there has been little progress in the investigation.

It’s not going to happen now, because the Obama administration is populated by “free market mousketeers”, who believe that lowered trade barriers created improved working conditions and worker protections (they don’t Bangladesh, QED), make everyone richer, and keep your daughter from dating that guy with the piercings and tattoos.

How Worship of the Unbridled Market is Taking the United States to 3rd World Nation Status

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Premature babies are dieing of starvation because feeding babies is not profitable enough for sufficient stocks to be maintained:

Because of nationwide shortages, Washington hospitals are rationing, hoarding, and bartering critical nutrients premature babies and other patients need to survive. Doctors are reporting conditions normally seen only in developing countries, and there have been deaths. How could this be allowed to happen?

………

 Except for a mind-boggling problem that Atticus’s [A child born 4 months early, and currently in the NICU] hospital—one of the most prominent in the country—has been powerless to solve: Atticus isn’t receiving some of the critical nutrients he needs to survive.

 Doctors and pharmacists say that because of nationwide shortages caused by a combination of factors—manufacturing problems, a market with few incentives for companies to produce low-profit drugs, and the government’s delayed and inadequate action—thousands of patients are being malnourished.

 ………

 Experts call the nutrient shortage a public-health crisis and a national emergency—and are astounded that the government and manufacturers have let the situation become so dire.

 “Children are dying,” says Steve Plogsted, a clinical pharmacist who chairs the drug-shortage task force of the American Society for Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN). “They’re not getting any calcium or any zinc. Or they’re not getting any phosphorous, and that can lead to heart standstill. I know of a neonate who had seven days without phosphorous, and her little heart stopped.”

 “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire career, and I’ve been a pharmacist for 40-some years,” says Michael Cohen, president of the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP) and a 2005 MacArthur Foundation fellow. “This should never be allowed to happen.”

 There are 300 drug, vitamin, and trace-element shortages in the US, the highest number ever recorded by the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which began tracking national shortages in 2001. Approximately 80 percent of these are generic injectables, or drugs given intravenously.

 ………

 The nutrients in shortage aren’t rare. “We’re talking about zinc, phosphorous, calcium—trace elements,” says CHA president Mark Wietecha. “These aren’t the latest genetically modified drugs or something coming out of modern high-tech environments. These have been around for decades.”

………

 Some hospitals have resorted to bartering with one another to secure even a small supply of nutrients, and many are rationing.

 At least one NICU in the District is administering some trace elements only three days a week instead of seven. At Atticus’s hospital, no patients heavier than 2½ kilograms (5½ pounds), including NICU babies, are getting intravenous phosphorous. “You could have a brand-new, full-term baby and they don’t qualify,” a staff member says. “There are really sick babies and one-, two-, three-year-olds that don’t get anything at all because we’re rationing it for our tiniest preemies.”

 ………

 When Miguel Sáenz de Pipaón, a neonatologist at a prominent hospital in Madrid, arrived in the US for a research visit, he was stunned by the nutrition shortages.

 “It’s crazy,” he says. “That doesn’t happen in Europe.” He noted that the US relies on a 25-year-old lipid emulsion, which is in shortage, while European hospitals use a newer version that’s readily available. Rather than import the newer emulsion, the US has left many patients without any lipids at all.

 The only shortage Sáenz de Pipaón could recall in Spain occurred two years ago when a Canadian factory stopped making trace elements. His hospital pharmacy immediately secured the product from a Swedish manufacturer and had it for patients within two days.

 Hospital staff wonder why the FDA hasn’t already put a process in place to streamline foreign inspections and certifications so that labs abroad can manufacture emergency supplies on short notice.

 Jensen says the FDA is working on it and that imported nutrients will be shipped soon: “It took a long time to find companies willing to do it, mainly because they couldn’t meet US needs and didn’t have the ability to ramp up for the US. The good news is we’ve got different firms willing to do this for phosphates, zinc, and trace elements. We moved as quickly as we could.”

Yes, moved as quickly as they could. (Not)

You can be certain that a (castrated over the past few decades) FDA is consulting with the manufacturers, so as to avoid hurting their business models.

“The FDA has repeatedly told us that the shortages are short-term and that they don’t need to import yet,” says neonatologist Steve Abrams of Texas Children’s Hospital. “There’s been a general sense that this problem will go away if we just wait until next Tuesday, and next Tuesday just hasn’t come for the last 2½ years.

They keep kicking the can down the road, because they, and the congressmen who vote on their budget, ahve been captured by pharma.

All You Need to Know About Barack Obama is that His Crucial Mentor is Penny Pritzker

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Without Penny Pritzker, the scion of the Hyatt hotel chain, Barack Obama would have never achieved anything in politics. She was the first, and arguably the most enthusiastic, big money donor to fund the political career of that guy with the funny name.

The most recent news is that she had to modify the financial disclosure forms that she filed when she was submitted as commerce secretary, because she understated her pay from her consulting by at least $80 million.

What makes this even worse is that these wages were pay to offshore funds to avoid taxes:

And also like many of the plutocrats in America Pritzker has a lot of tax abnormalities involving offshore accounts. But now Prtizker is under fire for providing a false financial disclosure statement which she has since amended.

Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker inadvertently understated a portion of her income by at least $80 million in a disclosure form required for her nomination to be U.S. Commerce secretary and has amended the document.
Forms released online last night by the Office of Government Ethics show that Pritzker earned additional income for consulting work on hundreds of trusts, including family trusts, beyond what she disclosed last week. The omission, discovered by Pritzker’s financial advisers, was due to a clerical error, said Susan Anderson, the nominee’s spokeswoman

Not surprisingly Pritzker makes a nice chunk of change “consulting” with other 1%ers.

Documents released last week show Pritzker received $32.2 million for a decade’s worth of consulting on the restructuring of domestic trusts. The filings released yesterday show she earned at least $80 million for that work, according to Bloomberg’s compilation of the data. The revised total is in addition to the amount reported last week, according to Anderson.

Pritzker, whose family founded Hyatt Hotels Corp, is scheduled to testify on her nomination before the Senate Commerce Committee tomorrow. She disclosed last week that she earned $54 million in consulting fees last year for a similar restructuring of trusts based in the Bahamas, also over 10 years. The Bahamas’ income wasn’t changed in the amended disclosure document.

Just what we need in a Commerce Secretary, someone who knows how to help companies offshore their profits to avoid tax liabilities.

Also, she has a long history of avoiding taxes through arcane instruments and offshoring for her own benefit.

We also have the the fact that she profited at taxpayer expense when she ran Superior Bank into the ground by aggressively pursuing subprime loans.  (Also here)

Also, as head of Hyatt, she has a long history of being virulently anti labor union, (also here.) as well as being a big supporter of Rahm Emanuel’s plans to privatize public education.

And finally there are the longstanding family ties between the family fortune and organized crime.

The reason that this is important is not because of her nomination.  The Commerce Secretary’s job has traditionally been the aggressive support of what is now called “the 1%”.

Her relationship to Barack Obama is important because it defines his entire political career.

It’s why we are not seeing a pursuit of the banksters, and we are seeing a pursuit of a “grand bargain” on Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare, which will have grandma eating cat food.*

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.