Category: Corruption

That Sound You Hear is Millions of Eurozoners Moving Their Money to Swiss Bank Accounts

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Well, we have already seen how the economic crisis is treated around the world.

The tax payers take it on the chin, and the bond holders, who under laws have no claim to payment from bankrupt banks, get all (or nearly all of) their money.

Well, the EU powers that be have taken it a step further, by stealing money from the account holders to pay the bond holders:

European finance ministers have agreed an £8.7bn bailout for Cyprus which includes all Cypriot bank customers handing over up to 10% of their savings.

 Cyprus becomes the fifth country after Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain to turn to the eurozone for financial help amid the region’s debt crisis, but also faces a possible run on its banks as depositors try to avoid losing up to 10% of their savings.

 The savers, half of whom are thought to be Russian, will raise almost €6bn. It is the first time a bailout has included such a measure.

 “I wish I was not the minister to do this,” the Cypriot finance minister, Michael Sarris, said after 10 hours of late-night talks in which eurozone finance ministers agreed the package. “Much more money could have been lost in a bankruptcy of the banking system or indeed of the country.”

 Without a rescue, Cyprus would default and threaten to unravel investor confidence in the eurozone, a renewed confidence fostered by the European Central Bank’s promise last year to do whatever it takes to support the euro.

They do not understand what this means.

Something north of 50% of the deposits in Cypriot banks will be gone in the next few months, going to banks in Germany, Switzerland, or into mattresses.

This comment is delusional:

Such levies break the taboo of hitting bank depositors with losses, but [ Dutch finance minister Jeroen] Dijsselbloem said it would not have otherwise been possible to salvage its financial sector, which is around eight times the size of the economy.

They have just destroyed the financial sector in Cyprus, and perhaps through much of the Euro Zone.

Since the 1930s, in the developed world, at least, deposit insurance that makes the the depositors, at least the smaller ones, whole has been the core of our banking system.

This will likely precipitate a return to the days before the FDIC and its brethren around the world, when people stored kept their wealth in safes, or in commodities like gold, and the (temporarily)better off of members of the EU have just made it insane for anyone to ever put more than a few days walking around money in the banks of any Euro Zone nation. (Except perhaps for Germany and the Netherlands, for now.)

H/t Atrios.

I Worked There for 2 Years

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It looks like the Pentagon will shutter down BAE’s plant in York Pennsylvania for 2 years:

A contentious political battle erupted last year when the Army opted to end production of the Abrams tank. Now the Army faces a repeat, this time, over the Bradley.

The manufacturer of the Army’s Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, BAE Systems, is seeking to persuade the service to reverse a decision to stop work at the company’s assembly line in York, Penn., for three years beginning in 2014.

BAE executives are pleading the case that is often made in these situations: It would be more costly to the government to shut down and reopen the line three years later than it would be to keep it open, even with a reduced workload. Army officials defend their decision as a necessary move to cut costs in the face of declining budgets. They also contend that closing down the BAE plant temporarily should not cause any risk to the force, as the Army owns a large fleet of more than 3,000 Bradleys, most of which have low mileage and have been updated with new weapons and electronics.

What is particularly notable is this map that they included with the story.  It’s a list of where their subcontractors are located:

Seriously, the overpriced stuff that we buy for our military would not be so f%$#ing  overpriced if defense contractors did not play “paint by numbers” with states and Congressional districts to game our politica system.

I’m not sure how to fix this, but this sh%$ needs to end.

Tentacles of the Vampire Squid

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It was nice when the last remaining New England Republican, Christopher Shays, was defeated.

Unfortunately, he was by former Goldman Sachs executive Jim Himes, who is doing his level best to gut the most effective provisions of Dodd Frank: (See also here)

Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes said a provision in the Wall Street reform legislation aimed at limiting taxpayer exposure to risky elements of financial products sold by banks goes too far and must be changed.

 Himes, a Greenwich resident and member of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee, joined with Republicans from North Carolina and Illinois and a fellow Democrat from New York to introduce the Swaps Regulatory Improvement Act this week that would amend the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. A similar bill has been brought forward in the Senate. An attempt to amend the provision last year failed.

 ………

 As part of the Dodd-Frank Act, banks with access to the Federal Reserve’s overnight lending program and insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would be required to set up independent subsidiaries in order to continue selling the financial instruments, called swaps.

 Underfunded swap positions among big banks and other financial institutions were a major reason for the 2008 financial disaster. Swap trades were not made on any exchanges and many of them were based on mortgages. Fearing bank failures of staggering proportions, Congress bailed out the largest institutions.

So, he’s trying to put tax payers on the hook for the gambles at the big casino yet again.

So, what does this mean? It means that the Democratic leadership will make him head of the DCCC finance committee for the 2014 elections:

Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut will be the new national finance chairman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in the 2014 cycle, according to two well-placed Democratic sources on Capitol Hill.

 Officials announced the new position for Himes, a three-term Democrat from Connecticut, at a morning meeting for members.

Jeebus.  The Vampire Squid owns us all.

Simon Johnson was right when he said that the first step in recovery from the implosion of your finance system is to break grip on power of the elites who  f%$#ed us like a drunk sorority pledge.  (I’m paraphrasing)

Quote of the Day

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Attorney General Eric Holder hails from the corporate law firm Covington and Burling, which has heavy ties to Wall Street. The head of Holder’s criminal division, Lanny Breuer, hails from the same firm. White is a partner at Debevoise and Plimpton and has represented JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and UBS. Her husband, John W. White, is a partner at a Wall Street law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. It’s becoming crystal clear that the problem in America is not bad laws; the problem is finding someone other than deeply conflicted Wall Street lawyers to enforce them.

—Pam Martens

Speaking of Back Loaded Bribery………

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Did you hear the one about the SEC chair who got a choice gig on the GE Board of Directors for protecting the banksters?

Well, now you have:

Mary L. Schapiro is starting to get a taste of opportunities in the private sector after stepping down as chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in December.

General Electric announced on Monday that it had nominated Ms. Schapiro to serve as one of its directors. She will stand for election at the company’s annual meeting on April 24.

The G.E. board position will certainly pay her more than she made in government service. G.E. paid its directors about $250,000 in 2011; at the S.E.C., her annual salary was around $165,000. Presumably, there will be other board positions and job offers, although Ms. Schapiro has not hinted at her future career aspirations.

“Future career aspirations?”

I believe that her “future career aspirations” are spelled “Ka-Ching!“

If we could hook a generator to the revolving door that she is using, we could power the world.

Unfortunately, this is a feature, not a bug of live in the nation’s capitol.

So Not Surprised

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Joe Lieberman has taken a job with the Koch suckers at the American Enterprise Institute.

Digby nails the analysis:

This is a common project of the Right these days. They know that no one likes their ideas. Scarred by the experience in Iraq, few want to do it again in Iran. Few want to eliminate Social Security, give tax breaks to rich, loosen gun laws, or do any of the other things on the Right’s agenda.

So one of the Right’s strategies is to go trolling for morally deficient, easily corrupted neoliberal “Democrats” to assist their efforts at creating a “bipartisan consensus” to override popular will and common sense in the service of the conservative agenda.

I don’t know how much he’s being paid for this, but my guess is that it will be a lot more than he made as a Senator, because that’s how back loaded bribery works.

No promises, but if you toe the line, you know that you get a payoff when you retire.

Bradley Manning Speaks

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Somehow or other, the Freedom of the Press Foundation managed to get a tape of Bradley Manning’s statement to the court:

The court-martial proceeding of Bradley Manning has, rather ironically, been shrouded in extreme secrecy, often exceeding even that which prevails at Guantanamo military commissions. This secrecy prompted the Center for Constitutional Rights to commence formal legal action on behalf of several journalists and activists, including myself, to compel greater transparency. One particularly oppressive rule governing the Manning trial has barred not only all video or audio recordings of the proceedings, but also any photographs being taken of Manning or even transcripts made of what is said in court. Combined with the prohibition on all press interviews with him, this extraordinary secrecy regime has meant that, in the two-and-a-half years since his arrest, the world has been prevented, literally, from hearing Manning’s voice. That changes today.

The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), the group I recently helped found and on whose board I sit, has received a full, unedited audio recording of the one-hour statement Manning made in court two weeks ago, and this morning has published that recording in full.

The full audio:

Glenn Greenwald (link) is correct.  The level of paranoia and secrecy is truly bizarre, and when juxtaposed with his pretrial torture (really, that’s what it was), the intent is clear, to create a precedent which criminalizes much of what constitutes investigative journalism.

Shades of Eric Arthur Blair*

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Yep, he looks totally sane

The Judge in the trial of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes is requiring that he be dosed with “truth serum” if his defense team chooses to plead not guilty by reason of insanity:

Legal and medical experts are questioning the decision of a judge in Colorado to allow James Holmes, the suspected gunman in the Aurora cinema shooting, to be tested with a “truth serum” should he plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a “narcoanalytic interview” would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year.

The precise identity of the drug that would be used has not been released, other than a statement that it would be “medically appropriate”, but it would most likely be a short-acting barbiturate such as sodium amytal.

William Shepherd, chair of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association, whose members include both prosecutors and defence lawyers, said that the proposed use of a “truth drug” to ascertain the veracity of a defendant’s plea of insanity was highly unusual in the US. He predicted it would provoke intense legal argument relating to Holmes’s right to remain silent under the fifth amendment of the US constitution.

Gee, you think, Mr. Shepherd?

And then there is this:

The proposed use of a “truth drug” has also prompted a critical response from medical experts. Dr August Piper, a Seattle-based psychiatrist who has used sodium amytal to treat patients who were mute or in a catatonic state and who has written research papers on the subject, said that this was “not a royal road to the truth”.

“First of all, people can still lie under the influence of amytal. More importantly, the person under the influence of the drug is susceptible to outside suggestion.”

Piper also questioned whether such a method could be used to find out the truth of what happened retrospectively. Though short-acting barbiturates might be beneficial in illuminating Holmes’s current state of mind, by opening him up to greater communication, it would be of doubtful use in determining his state of mind at the scene of the shooting eight months ago.

“To try and do this would be unlikely to yield useful information, and could pervert the course of justice by rendering the defendant susceptible to pressure,” Piper said.

This is bizarre.

What the f%$# is the judge thinking? They don’t even pull this crap at Gitmo or the CIA torture gulags.

*George Orwell.

This is Fascinating

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An analysis by Robert Parry suggests that both Watergate and Iran Contra were about covering up collusion to subvert US foreign policy for electoral advantage, something that the less sophisticated amongst us might call treason:

………

A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)

In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

………

Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.

………

So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.

Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials. “It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.

In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. “It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”

When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn’t recall who the “people on high” were who had described the informal clearance of the Israeli shipments but he indicated that “the new players” were the young neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as senior political appointees.

I really don’t think that “treason” is too strong a term here.

The assertion here is that the Watergate break-in was about trying to find files implicating Nixon in deliberately extending the war for electoral advantage, and the arms deliveries to Iran were payback for holding the Tehran embassy hostages from being released until after the elections.

It does provide some context to the “Third Rate Burglary” the brought Nixon down.

There were files on his interference, and he could not find them because a Johnson aide had taken them with him, and he was desperate to ensure that they would not be used against him in the 1972 elections.

Considering the 30,000 American deaths, and the million+ dead Vietnamese, Nixon and his merry band of rat-f%$#ers (their term) had to have been in a panic about this.

Seriously, Why are We Not Jailing these Mother F%$#ers

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Joe Nocera at the New York Times, takes a look at at how Goldman Sachs screwed over eToys when they managed their IPO:

ONCE upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended its first day of trading at $77 a share.

 The eToys initial public offering raised $164 million, a nice chunk of change for a two-year-old company. But it wasn’t even close to the $600 million-plus the company could have raised if the offering price had more realistically reflected the intense demand for eToys shares. The firm that underwrote the I.P.O. — and effectively set the $20 price — was Goldman Sachs.

 After the Internet bubble burst — and eToys, starved for cash, went out of business — lawyers representing eToys’ creditors’ committee sued Goldman Sachs over that I.P.O. That lawsuit, believe it or not, is still going on. Indeed, it has taken on an importance that transcends the rise and fall of one small company during the first Internet craze.

 The plaintiffs charge that Goldman Sachs had a fiduciary duty to maximize eToys’ take from the I.P.O. Instead, Goldman purposely set an artificially low price, so that its real clients, the institutional investors clamoring for the stock, could pocket that first-day run-up. According to the suit, Goldman then demanded that some of those easy profits be kicked back to the firm. Part of their evidence for the calculated underpricing of eToys, according to the plaintiffs’ complaint, was that Lawton Fitt, the Goldman executive who headed the underwriting team and was thus best positioned to gauge the market demand, actually made a bet with several of her colleagues that the price would hit $80 at the opening. (Through a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Fitt declined to comment. Goldman denies that it did anything wrong, about which more shortly.)

 ………

 Earlier this week, I tracked down Toby Lenk, the founder and former chief executive of eToys. Back when the S.E.C. was investigating I.P.O. excesses, the government deposed him. During the deposition, he mostly defended Goldman Sachs, even though he had the uneasy feeling that eToys had been taken advantage of.

 After the deposition, he recalled, the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents. He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients would support the stock. “That’s when I thought, ‘We really got screwed,’” Lenk told me.

 Although the experience still angered him, he now has 14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the country?”

 “What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what they did to the country in 2008,” he said.

The argument of the Vampire Squid* is that this was just business as usual.

The court may agree with them.

If they do, it is not a mark of Goldman’s innocence, but rather it is a mark of how thoroughly corrupt high finance in the United States actually is.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

Oh Crap. NINJA Attack!

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I don’t mean the Japanese master of stealth and deception, I mean that no-documentation mortgages are back, NINJA stands for “No Income, No Job, (and) No Assets” loan.

Basically, all you had to do was fog a mirror.

The new twist is that all you have to do have a live insurance policy that equals the amount of a 10% down payment:

First we got GM subprime interest-free car loans,  then we got subprime ABS securitizations, then we got soaring student loan defaults and delinquencies, then we got the opportunity to sell and short student loan exposure, and now, finally, the credit bubble is complete as FastFunds Financial Corporation is proud to announce that it has acquired exclusive mortgage servicing rights for an “Innovative New Mortgage Product.” Why is it so innovative? Because it requires no credit verification, no credit history, no docs and needs no personal guarantees. In other words, it is the very worst of the worst lending practices we saw in 2006: the NINJA.

But there is a twist: “all that is required to qualify for a mortgage loan is qualifying for a life insurance policy, a down payment that usually amounts to 10% of the purchase price and verification that the borrower has the financial ability to pay the monthly payments.”

In other words: buy life insurance, get a subprime, no doc mortgage for free.

We are completely f%$#ed.

Un-Dirtyword-Believable

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Michael Winston was a high ranking executive who tried to blow the whistle at Countrywide Financial.

He was marginalized, and later fired by Bank of America after they took over the firm.

He filed suit, and was awarded $3.8 million dollars for wrongful termination.

Well, a few weeks after he described the rampant fraud and abuse on the Frontline piece, The Untouchables, the appeals court overturned the verdict based on the facts.

Now I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit,* but even I know that appeals courts are to rule on issues of law, not issues of fact.

It smells to high heaven, as the great Matt Taibbi observes:

When I spoke to him last week, Winston was still as amazed and repulsed by what he saw at Angelo Mozilo’s crooked subprime mortgage company as he was when he worked there. Winston, who had worked for years at high-level positions at companies like Motorola and Lockheed before joining Countrywide in the 2000s, described a moment in his first months at the company, when he rolled into the parking lot at the company headquarters.

………

When Winston refused, he was essentially stripped of his normal responsibilities and had his corporate budget slashed. When Bank of America took over the company, Winston’s job was terminated. He sued, and in one of the few positive outcomes for any white-collar whistleblower anywhere in the post-financial-crisis universe, won a $3.8 million wrongful termination suit against Bank of America last February.

Well, just weeks after the PBS documentary aired, the Court of Appeals in the state of California suddenly took an interest in Winston’s case. Normally, a court of appeals can only overturn a jury verdict in a case like this if there is a legal error. It’s not supposed to relitigate the factual evidence.

Yet this is exactly what happened: The court decided that the evidence that Winston was wrongfully terminated was insufficient, and then from there determined that the “legal error” in the original Winston suit against Bank of America and Countrywide was that the judge in the case failed to throw out the jury’s verdict:

In short, having scoured the record for evidence supporting the jury’s verdict on the issue of causation, we have found none. It follows that the trial court erred in denying defendants’ motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict.

The f%$#ing fix is f%$#ing in.

This is a deliberate attempt to chill the activities of any potential whistle blowers.

If this were an isolated incident, I might not assume corruption, but it is not an isolated case.

It seems to be an cultural imperative to punish whistle blowers, as was shown when the only person to go to jail in the UBS tax evasion case was the whistleblower.

I don’t know how this can be fixed, but it needs to be fixed.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Oh No He Didn’t!

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Bob Ney, former Congressman, and felon, wrote a book, and in it he claims that John Boehner promised him a well paying job if he were to end his reelection campaign in his new memoire:

The most inflammatory accusation against Boehner in the book is Ney’s contention that he ended his reelection campaign after winning the primary in 2006 only after Boehner, then the majority leader, summoned the cash-strapped and embattled congressman to his office and told him if he quit the race, Boehner would take care of him. “If you resign the next day, I will personally guarantee you a job comparable to what you are making, and raise legal defense money for you that should bury all this Justice Department problem for you,” Boehner said, according to Ney. He said he pressed Boehner, repeating the terms and getting assurance that the offer was “ironclad.” When Ney called back the next day to accept the deal, he wrote that he again repeated the terms to Boehner, who agreed. “Because of Boehner’s promise, I stepped aside,” he wrote. But Ney said Boehner did not keep his word. “I had been lied to and ditched,” Ney said.

I’m not sure that I can believe that. That would be like claiming that John Boehner was on the floor of the house handing out campaign cash from cigarette manufacturers as they voted on subsidies for tobacco. ……… Wait! ……… What? ……… He did do that?!?! ……… Never mind.

A note about the article: I’m not sure if it is the author, George Condon, or his editor, but what is arguably the most explosive allegation is 7 paragraphs down, under the title, “Disgraced Ex-Congressman Attacks John Boehner in New Book,” and a subhead of, “Bob Ney, who was imprisoned for his role in the Jack Abramoff scandal, has some scores to settle.”

I do understand why someone would hate Bob “Freedom Fries” Ney, (I do) he is/was a nasty piece of work, but burying the lede is not an appropriate response.

Our So Called Press Turned Down Bradley Manning’s Leaks

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I am so not shocked.

Bradley Manning just pled guilty on ten counts of misusing classified information, for his release of documents to Wikileaks, though he continues to maintain that he was not aiding the enemy.

What is most interesting that in his statement, Manning said that he want to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Politico, and was blown off:

While he was on leave from Iraq and staying in the Washington area in January 2010 he contacted the Washington Post and asked would it be interested in receiving information that he said would be “enormously important to the American people”. He spoke to a woman who said she was a reporter but “she didn’t seem to take me seriously”.

 The woman said, according to Manning’s account, that the paper would only be interested subject to vetting by senior editors.

 Despairing of that route, Manning turned to the New York Times. He called the public editor of the paper but only got voicemail.

 He then tried other numbers on the paper but also got put through to voicemail, and though he left a message with his Skype contact details, nobody called him back. Manning added he had also contemplated going to the website Politico, but harsh weather prevented him.

What’s more, there is an allegation that The Washington Post had, and sat on, the collateral murder video:

But the WikiLeaks Twitter account (and by the way, mark me down as saying it’s a safe bet that Julian Assange is its primary scribe) also let loose this officious-looking tweet earlier today:

Statement: Washington Post had Collateral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.

Curious. I asked Kris Coratti, the Washington Post’s communications director, what was up. She emailed me this flat denial:

The Washington Post did not have the video, nor did we sit on anything.

There is a wrinkle to this tale. David Finkel, a Washington Post reporter, did elaborately describe the events of the day partially captured by the video in “Good Soldiers,” his book published in September 2009, based on his time embedded with an infantry battalion on the ground near the shootings. (WikiLeaks published its version of the video in April 2010.)

So a few years before Wikileaks got it, Finkle was writing descriptions which clearly imply that he had seen the video.

Finkle’s defense is that whatever he had, was just for his book, not the paper:

Finkel gave me a call this morning, ready to add a bit more context.

 “The idea that The Washington Post possessed something, or sat on something, is just absurd,” said Finkel.

 “I was primarily there as a book author. I was on book leave from The Washington Post,” Finkel told me. “I’m not trying to be oblique here, but that was my role there.”

So, the guy who was, and is, employed the The Washington Post, makes what sounds like direct quotes from the videos, was somehow in Iraq on his own ticket, and had nothing to do with the paper when he saw the videos.

Yeah, right.

For the Times and Politico, it’s pretty clear that Manning did a half-assed job of contacting them, but it’s also pretty clear that WaPo knew of the video for years before it showed up on Wikileaks.

In Death, Robert Bork Admits to Rank Hypocrisy

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It turns out that he took a bribe from Richard Nixon to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal:

Robert Bork says President Richard Nixon promised him the next Supreme Court vacancy after Bork complied with Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973.

Bork’s recollection of his role in the Saturday Night Massacre that culminated in Cox’s firing is at the center of his slim memoir, “Saving Justice,” that is being published posthumously by Encounter Books. Bork died in December at age 85.

Bork writes that he didn’t know if Nixon actually, though mistakenly, believed he still had the political clout to get someone confirmed to the Supreme Court or was just trying to secure Bork’s continued loyalty as his administration crumbled in the Watergate scandal.

President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the high court in 1987. The nomination failed in the Senate.

Robert Bork, in addition to being f%$# nuts, was a corrupt Cox sacker.

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that he die not make it to the Supreme Court.

What PZ Myers Said

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He suggests that the buying spree of hospitals by the Catholic church is a stealth assault on reproductive rights and needs to be stopped:

Imagine if you lived in a town where the only hospital was owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and you were in a car accident — you’ve got a ruptured spleen, you’re bleeding internally, and your life is at risk. The surgeon is going to go in and stitch up and cauterize everything, but you’re warned that they don’t keep any kind of blood supply in the hospital, and they refuse to do blood transfusions — they have an in-house professional ethicist (who is a Jehovah’s Witness, of course) who rejects the morality of exchanging sacred blood, and the administrators have signed an agreement with the church to never, under any circumstances, carry out blood transfusions.

 If you need a blood transfusion, they say, don’t worry, the ambulance will take you to a different hospital…50 miles away. You, unfortunately, are in shock, you’ve got a gusher pouring blood into your body cavity, and this is not an option. You get to die.

 ………

 So why are Catholics allowed to buy up and impose Catholic dogma on hospitals? Is it because their ignorant dogma does the greatest harm to women (especially those slutty ones who have sex) and bizarre rules about reproduction don’t directly harm men?

 But Catholics are buying up hospitals all over the country. They’ve got declining attendance, they’re closing churches, they’re having trouble recruiting priests, but they’ve still got buckets of money, and they’re using that money to impose control in another way — by taking over your health care.

His conclusion is 100% spot on:

Don’t let Catholics control your hospitals. Keep the church out of your health care decisions. Make Catholic Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) illegal — individuals may follow them at their personal discretion, but no health care facility gets to impose them on their patients, especially when they defy the law.

Your religious freedom does not include the right to impose your views on me.

Obamacare Fail

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Employers are required to cover children, but not spouses, and they are looking at canceling coverage on spouses to save money:

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health.

While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These “spousal carve-outs,” or “working spouse provisions,” generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse’s plan.

Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

But when employers drop spouses, they often lose more than just the one individual, when couples choose instead to seek coverage together under the other partner’s employer. Terre Haute, which pays $6 million annually to insure nearly 1,200 people including employees and their family members, received more than 20 new plan members when a local university, bank and county government stopped insuring spouses, according to Bennett. “We have a great plan, so they want to be on ours. All we’re trying to do is level the playing field here,” he says.

It’s a race to the bottom. Whee!

This was foreseeable.  

Adverse selection/the race to the bottom are the most salient feature of our current healthcare clusterf%$#.  To assume that insurance providers would not avail themselves of every opportunity to benefit from this is policy malpractice.

But Of Course

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The National Futures Association, the organization responsible for “self-regulating” the industry, wanted to ban Jon Corzine from the group for life.

They had a problem though, it turns out that the former head of the non-bankrupt MF Global was not a member:

The comedian vowed to avoid “any club that would accept me as one of its members.” Mr. Corzine, the former Democratic senator who ran MF Global until it collapsed in 2011, faced expulsion from a group to which he did not even belong.

The National Futures Association, the futures industry’s self-regulatory group, convened on Thursday to consider a lifetime ban of Mr. Corzine. Two of the group’s newest board members championed the plan as retribution for Mr. Corzine’s role in the demise of MF Global, which improperly took $1.6 billion from its customers before filing for bankruptcy.

If a majority of the board members voted yes, the group would have moved to hold a hearing over Mr. Corzine’s status before enacting the ban.

But when the board emerged from its meeting late on Thursday, the group issued a cryptic statement suggesting that Mr. Corzine could not be so easily ostracized because of, well, a small flaw in the plan: “Mr. Corzine is not currently a member of N.F.A.,” the board’s chairman declared in the statement.

………

His plan to expel Mr. Corzine grew from mounting frustration over the slowly developing federal investigation into MF Global. After more than a year of investigating Mr. Corzine, regulators and criminal investigators have not filed any charges, feeding concerns that Mr. Corzine will escape unscathed.

Of course, he’s going to emerge unscathed.

Silly rabbit, consequences are for little people.

Tell Me That This Is Not a Bribe

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Jack Lew, Obama’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, appears to have a deal with his current employer, Citigroup, that looks an awful lot like a bribe:

Jack Lew is the nominee for Treasury secretary whose own bonus as an investment banker was bailed out by the Treasury Department when it rescued Citigroup Inc. (C) in 2008. He owes much to America’s taxpayers. He should also be grateful to Citigroup for agreeing to let him rejoin the government without suffering much for it financially.

An intriguing revelation from Lew’s Senate confirmation hearing last week was that he stood to be paid handsomely by Citigroup if he left the company for a top U.S. government job, under his 2006 employment agreement with the bank. The wording of the pay provisions made it seem, at least to me, as if Citigroup might have agreed to pay Lew some sort of a bounty to seek out, and be appointed to, such a position.

………

Lew’s employment agreement with Citigroup said his “guaranteed incentive and retention award” wouldn’t be paid if he quit his job, with limited exceptions. One was if he left Citigroup “as a result of your acceptance of a full-time high level position with the United States government or regulatory body.” This applied if he left “prior to the payment of any incentive and retention award for performance year 2008 or thereafter.” Such an award wasn’t guaranteed but would be consistent with the company’s practice, the document said.

A similar provision concerned his stock-based compensation. If Lew left in 2008 or afterward to accept a high-level U.S. government position, all of his outstanding equity awards, including restricted stock, would vest immediately, the document said. Alternatively, Citigroup had the option of paying Lew the cash equivalent of any shares he forfeited upon leaving. The terms didn’t mention other kinds of public-service work, such as a midlevel U.S. government job, a position in municipal or state government, or working at a nonprofit organization such as a university.

The payoff here is very clear: You go and work for the government, and you are our boy, bought and paid for.

First, the Cayman Islands accounts, and now this.

This guy is going to be an even bigger creature of the Wall Street banksters than than Geithner was.

This is deeply corrupt, in reality if not by law, but I think that the Obama administration sees this as a feature, not a bug.

The New York Times Notices that the Bank Settlements are Bullsh%$

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You see, they are making modifications to 2nd mortgages while continuing to foreclose on 1st mortgages.

This might sound like a meaningless difference, but banks are given credit for modifying a 2nd mortgage, but in the event of a foreclosure, they are subordinate to 1st mortgages, and so are wiped out.

This means that the foreclosure modification means nothing, though the banks get credit for it anyway:

In January, federal regulators announced an $8.5 billion agreement with 10 mortgage servicers to settle claims of foreclosure abuses, including bungled loan modifications and the wrongful evictions of borrowers who were either current on their payments or making reduced monthly payments.

Under the deal, announced by the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the mortgage servicers will pay $3.3 billion to borrowers who went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010 and an additional $5.2 billion to reduce the principal or the monthly payments of borrowers in danger of losing their homes.

………

The problem involves second mortgages, which millions of homeowners took out during the housing bubble. It’s estimated that as much as a quarter of all mortgage debt in the United States is in the form of second mortgages. Some of these loans were taken out to finance home improvements; others were part of a subprime product known as an “80/20 mortgage,” in which 80 percent of the purchase price was covered by a first, adjustable-rate mortgage, and the remainder by a second mortgage, often with a much higher interest rate.

The second mortgages have given the banks a loophole: each dollar a bank forgives goes toward fulfilling its obligation under last year’s settlement. But many lenders have made it a point to almost exclusively modify secondary loans while all but ignoring the troubled, larger primary mortgages.

It’s a real problem: when it comes to keeping your home, it’s the first mortgage that counts.

………

Why would a bank forgive a second mortgage completely but move forward with foreclosure on the first mortgage?

Surprisingly, such a tactic often makes sense for banks. When a lender forecloses on a first mortgage, the house in question is typically sold at auction. If the house is worth less than the loan amount, the bank gets only part of its money back. But after the sale, of course, there’s no asset left to pay off any of the second loan. The holder of that second loan — which has lower priority than the holder of the first — gets nothing.

So a lender can forgive a second mortgage — which in the event of foreclosure would be worthless anyway — and under the settlement claim credits for “modifying” the mortgage, while at the same time it or another bank forecloses on the first loan. The upshot, of course, is that the people the settlement was designed to protect keep losing their homes.

I would note here that the author, Elizabeth M. Lynch who is a lawyer who provides free civil legal aid,is being rather charitable:  she thinks that the banksters are taking advantage of loopholes in the settlement.

I believe that the intention of the deal on the part of the Fed and the OCC was to create a meaningless “Potemkin Agreement”.  They never intended to create better behavior.

Their goal was to indemnify the banks and to generate some propaganda to deflect moves toward real accountability.