Aaron Swartz, age 26, suicide.
We cannot know all the reasons behind this, but his harassment by prosecutors was likely a contributing factor.
He was probably targeted because of his high profile opposition to SOPA (see vid). (To its shame, the New York Times does not mention this in the obit)
We have developed a regime where anyone can be harassed, and likely convicted, basically for being “troublesome.”
The term I used a while back, “Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen,” describes this phenomenon.
This is positively brutal:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s departure from the Obama administration invites comparisons with Klemens von Metternich. Metternich was the foreign minister of the Austrian empire who engineered the restoration of the old order and the suppression of democracy across Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.
This was an impressive diplomatic feat – given the widespread popular contempt for Europe’s monarchical regimes. In the same vein, protecting Wall Street from the financial and economic havoc they brought upon themselves and the country was an enormous accomplishment.
Just go read it.
And They Are So Dumb!
You remember how Dick “Army of Dicks” Armey spilled the beans on how he and the rest of FreedomWorks was basically grifting?
Well, it appears that he confused the conservative Media Research Center, and the liberal Media Matters when he spilled the beans:
There’s been a remarkable amount of drama surrounding Dick Armey’s departure from FreedomWorks, culminating Friday with a stunning report from Media Matters, who interviewed the former House Majority Leader directly. Armey had all kinds of interesting insights to share with the progressive group, including tidbits on pay-for-play agreements with Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and the FreedomWorks’ practice of charging activists to attend free events.
Though many of Armey’s revelations should probably be taken with a grain of salt — the former GOP leader seemed confused about some of the details he shared — there was a larger question that puzzled nearly everyone: why in the world was Dick Armey dishing dirt to Media Matters?
The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet, tracked down the answer.Dick Armey had no idea he was speaking to the left-wing Media Matters organization during an interview last week, he told The Daily Caller Tuesday. Instead, Armey thought he was chatting with the conservative Media Research Center. […]
As for who he thought he was speaking to, Armey asked the Daily Caller, “Who’s the guy with the red beard that always does the show where he points out how biased the press is?” Told he seemed to be referring to the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell, who does a weekly “Media Mash” segment on Fox News, Armey said, “Yeah, I thought it was Brent Bozell.”
As the saying goes, “ない愚かさはない薬です”.*
If these guys had half a brain, we’d be in trouble. Of course, if they had half a brain. they would not be movement conservatives.
H/t Crooks and Liars.
*Pronounced in Japanese, “baka ni tsukeru kusuri wanai”, which means, “There is no medicine for stupidity.” Apologies for any inaccuracies in the text, I do not know Japanese.
The only problem is, the suit is being filed by maybe the biggest douchebag of all time, Hank Greenberg (and his company, Starr International), a man who has not only been proven to be corrupt and a fraud, but who perhaps more than anyone else was responsible for the galactic balance-sheet goat-f%$# that caused AIG’s implosion in the first place. If there is such a person as an innocent AIG shareholder who was harmed by the government’s conduct, it sure as hell isn’t Hank Greenberg.
—Matt Taibbi, on Greenberg’s suit against the US because he did not get well paid enough for running AIG into the ground.
(%$# mine)
FWIW, In an unexpected outbreak of sanity AIG has decided not to join Greenberg’s lawauit.
Still, “Galactic Balance Sheet goat f%$#,” that is good, even by Matt’s high standards.
He is on fire when writing about the nature of the bank bailouts:
………
Through behavior like this, the government has turned the entire financial system into a kind of vast confidence game – a Ponzi-like scam in which the value of just about everything in the system is inflated because of the widespread belief that the government will step in to prevent losses. Clearly, a government that’s already in debt over its eyes for the next million years does not have enough capital on hand to rescue every Citigroup or Regions Bank in the land should they all go bust tomorrow. But the market is behaving as if Daddy will step in to once again pay the rent the next time any or all of these kids sets the couch on fire and skips out on his security deposit. Just like an actual Ponzi scheme, it works only as long as they don’t have to make good on all the promises they’ve made. They’re building an economy based not on real accounting and real numbers, but on belief. And while the signs of growth and recovery in this new faith-based economy may be fake, one aspect of the bailout has been consistently concrete: the broken promises over executive pay.
………
The implications here go far beyond the question of whether Dimon and Co. committed insider trading by buying and selling stock while they had access to material nonpublic information about the bailouts. The broader and more pressing concern is the clear implication that by failing to act, federal regulators have tacitly approved the nondisclosure. Instead of trusting the markets to do the right thing when provided with accurate information, the government has instead channeled Jack Nicholson – and decided that the public just can’t handle the truth.
………
So what exactly did the bailout accomplish? It built a banking system that discriminates against community banks, makes Too Big to Fail banks even Too Bigger to Failier, increases risk, discourages sound business lending and punishes savings by making it even easier and more profitable to chase high-yield investments than to compete for small depositors. The bailout has also made lying on behalf of our biggest and most corrupt banks the official policy of the United States government. And if any one of those banks fails, it will cause another financial crisis, meaning we’re essentially wedded to that policy for the rest of eternity – or at least until the markets call our bluff, which could happen any minute now.
Other than that, the bailout was a smashing success.
Seriously, just go read, and then scream at your congresscritters.
The US Treasury is now freezing the accounts of cartoonists of mass destruction:
I went to Congo to write a comic book about a terror group — and ended up being labelled a terror supporter myself by the Treasury Department.
The bizarre tale of my graphic novel Army of God, the Lord’s Resistance Army in Congo and Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a window inside a little-known counter-terrorism campaign that captures more than a few innocents in its wide net.
Nearly 12 years since the massive expansion of federal powers in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, OFAC’s collateral damage — myself included — is a reminder that defeating terrorists can come at the cost of our freedom.
It began two years ago. In the fall of 2010 I spent a month in the Democratic Republic of Congo reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army, a brutal Ugandan rebel group that was chased from its homeland and has spent the last decade hiding out in the forests of eastern Congo. Led by charismatic madman Joseph Kony, the LRA pillages farming villages for supplies, kills or mutilates the adults and enslaves the children.
………
In early December our agent wired [artist Tim] Hamilton his share of the advance, but the money never reached the artist’s account. After a few weeks the agent made some calls. “He was told that the party holding the funds was the federal wire fraud unit which suspected that they were laundering funds for a terrorist organization,” Hamilton says.
On one level, it may seem as if it is not a big deal, but it is.
Basically, this means that they can take everything you have with out any recourse at any time, and if they are wrong, or if they are malicious, it does not matter, because they are above the law, because if anything goes wrong, all they need to do is go, “Yadda, yadda, terrorism.”
We have deliberately created a lawless national security state.
The very first person goes to jail over CIA torture, and it’s the whistle-blower:
Looking back, John C. Kiriakou admits he should have known better. But when the F.B.I. called him a year ago and invited him to stop by and “help us with a case,” he did not hesitate.
In his years as a C.I.A. operative, after all, Mr. Kiriakou had worked closely with F.B.I. agents overseas. Just months earlier, he had reported to the bureau a recruiting attempt by someone he believed to be an Asian spy.
“Anything for the F.B.I.,” Mr. Kiriakou replied.
Only an hour into what began as a relaxed chat with the two agents — the younger one who traded Pittsburgh Steelers talk with him and the senior investigator with the droopy eye — did he begin to realize just who was the target of their investigation.
Finally, the older agent leaned in close and said, by Mr. Kiriakou’s recollection, “In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that right now we’re executing a search warrant at your house and seizing your electronic devices.”
On Jan. 25, Mr. Kiriakou is scheduled to be sentenced to 30 months in prison as part of a plea deal in which he admitted violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by e-mailing the name of a covert C.I.A. officer to a freelance reporter, who did not publish it. The law was passed in 1982, aimed at radical publications that deliberately sought to out undercover agents, exposing their secret work and endangering their lives.
In more than six decades of fraught interaction between the agency and the news media, John Kiriakou is the first current or former C.I.A. officer to be convicted of disclosing classified information to a reporter.
This is about scaring people out of being whistle-blowers.
This is about the “most open administration in history” doing its level best to create a completely secret and unaccountable executive.
This is why I call Barack Obama the worst constitutional law professor ever.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, Richard Nixon was the worst president the US had from 1933 to 1973 1974, and the best president the US had from 1969 through 2013.
If that does not make you depressed, then I want whatever it is that you are smoking.
Yesterday, I heard the news that the 271 year old Swiss bank, Weglin, was shut down following a US Department of Justice investigation into their actions supporting tax evasion and money laundering.
It sounded too good to be true, and , as Yves Smith so eloquently points out, it was too good to be true.
The Nickel version is that the bank’s asserts were transferred to another entity, Raiffeisen, and the proceeds likely given to the owners in the weeks power to its being shut down.
Finally, the DoJ is saying NOTHING about whether the got information about the accounts, and the people who used them too avoid taxes.
This its a pretty good tell that they hour no data: If they had, they would be trumpeting it to the heavens, because they would thereby induce people to turn themselves in.
Go read the while thing, including the reader comments.
Posted via mobile.
In the latest case, we have patent trolls trying to extort money from small businesses for using scanners:
When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.
If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.
………
“[Hill] was very cordial and very nice,” he told Ars. “He said, if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document—we have a patent that covers that as a process.”
t didn’t seem credible that Hill was demanding money for just using basic office equipment exactly the way it was intended to be used. So Vicinanza clarified:
“So you’re claiming anyone on a network with a scanner owes you a license?” asked Vicinanza. “He said, ‘Yes, that’s correct.’ And at that point, I just lost it.”
The kicker is that the these folks were using newspapers’ “best places to work” lists to send out dunning letters.
Seriously, we need to just stop issuing patents until the system is fixed.
H/t Kevin Drum.
Not this, nor next year, will the Former Greek finance minister face criminal charges:
Greece’s coalition government called on Monday for the indictment of former Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou for allegedly removing the names of three of his relatives from a list of Swiss bank account holders whose tax records were to be re-examined.
Seventy-one deputies from the three-party coalition signed the proposal to indict Papaconstantinou for allegedly tampering with a public document and breach of duty — offenses that would carry a maximum 10-year jail term, according to legal experts.
Papaconstantinou, 51, served as finance minister between 2009 and 2011 in the previous Socialist government. But his party, which is part of the new conservative-led administration, is backing the proposed indictment.
The former minister has angrily denied the allegations, insisting the names were removed without his knowledge.
Not gonna happen.
It’s not gonna happen because if he is put in the dock, he will talk, and if he talks, he will implicate most of the corrupt Greek ruling class, as well as the German and British banksters who were complicit in the fraud.
As an aside, for next year, can we please have our newsmakers have easier to spell names next year?
And by that, I mean throwing our f%$#ing bankers into f%$#ing jail:
Two former executives at an Icelandic bank which collapsed in the 2008 financial meltdown were sentenced to jail on Friday for fraud which led to a 53 million euro loss, in the first major trial of Icelandic bankers linked to the crisis.
All three of the small North Atlantic island’s top banks collapsed in quick succession in October 2008 due to big debts incurred during a rapid overseas expansion.
Glitnir was the first to fall after the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused international credit markets to freeze up.
A Reykjavik court sentenced Glitnir’s former chief executive, Larus Welding, and former head of corporate finance, Gudmundur Hjaltason, each to nine months in jail, of which six months were suspended for two years. They had denied the charges.
Prosecutors said the two approved a loan to a company which owned shares in Glitnir so that the company could in turn repay a debt to Morgan Stanley.
The decision, taken outside the regular decision-making process, meant Glitnir was too exposed to the company and cost the bank at least 53.7 million euros (43 million pounds), the prosecution said.
It’s a good idea, even if it force me to spell Reykjavik properly.
H/t Americablog.
Case in point, HSBC, which was literally laundering drug cartel money.
It will not be criminally prosecuted because it is too big to fail:
State and federal authorities decided against indicting HSBC in a money-laundering case over concerns that criminal charges could jeopardize one of the world’s largest banks and ultimately destabilize the global financial system.
Instead, HSBC announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to a record $1.92 billion settlement with authorities. The bank, which is based in Britain, faces accusations that it transferred billions of dollars for nations like Iran and enabled Mexican drug cartels to move money illegally through its American subsidiaries.
While the settlement with HSBC is a major victory for the government, the case raises questions about whether certain financial institutions, having grown so large and interconnected, are too big to indict. Four years after the failure of Lehman Brothers nearly toppled the financial system, regulators are still wary that a single institution could undermine the recovery of the industry and the economy.
But the threat of criminal prosecution acts as a powerful deterrent. If authorities signal such actions are remote for big banks, the threat could lose its sting.
Behind the scenes, authorities debated for months the advantages and perils of a criminal indictment against HSBC.
Some prosecutors at the Justice Department’s criminal division and the Manhattan district attorney’s office wanted the bank to plead guilty to violations of the federal Bank Secrecy Act, according to the officials with direct knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The law requires financial institutions to report any cash transaction of $10,000 or more and to bring any dubious activity to the attention of regulators.
Given the extent of the evidence against HSBC, some prosecutors saw the charge as a healthy compromise between a settlement and a harsher money-laundering indictment. While the charge would most likely tarnish the bank’s reputation, some officials argued that it would not set off a series of devastating consequences.
A money-laundering indictment, or a guilty plea over such charges, would essentially be a death sentence for the bank. Such actions could cut off the bank from certain investors like pension funds and ultimately cost it its charter to operate in the United States, officials said.
Seriously. Burn, motherf%$#er burn.
If there is no rule of law, the banks don’t matter.
H/t Matt Stoller.
Notwithstanding a systematic pattern of harassment and coercion by the Satmar Hasidic community, the mother and daughter stood firm, and so-called counsellor Nechemya Weberman was convicted of sexual abuse over 3 years of a girl starting when she was twelve”
Sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community has long been hidden. Victims who came forward were intimidated into silence; their families were shunned; cases were dropped for a lack of cooperation.
But on Monday, a State Supreme Court jury in Brooklyn delivered a stunning victory to prosecutors and victims’ advocates, convicting a 54-year-old unlicensed therapist who is a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg of repeatedly sexually abusing a young girl who had been sent to him for help.
“The veil of secrecy has been lifted,” said Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney. “The wall that has existed in parts of these communities has now been broken through. And as far as I’m concerned, it is very clear to me that it is only going to get better for people who are victimized in these various communities.”
The case against the therapist, Nechemya Weberman, was a significant milestone for Mr. Hynes, whose office has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against sexual abusers in the borough’s large and politically connected ultra-Orthodox community.
The verdict represented the first time Mr. Hynes’ office has won a conviction of a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community of Williamsburg for child sexual abuse.
The case also offered a glimpse of the Satmar community’s shadowy efforts to enforce rigid codes of behavior — particularly for young girls — by allowing so-called modesty committees to intimidate girls for wearing revealing clothing or using cellphones, and requiring parents to send children judged to be breaking rules to religious counselors, many of whom are not licensed and charge high fees.
Perhaps even more significant than the Brooklyn DA managing to crack the ultra-orthodox Omertà (code of silence) in order to get a conviction, but that he also issued an informal warning against any further harassment of the victim or her family by the community.
BTW, the halacha (Jewish law) is clear here: It is required that these allegations be taken to civil courts, because a Beit Din (religious court) has no authority beyond moral persuasion in the US.
Naked Capitalism has been writing for some time about how the SEC’s chief of enforcement, Robert Khuzam, has been hostile to the idea of actual enforcement, particularly with regards to reports from whistle blowers, but the latest case is indisputably corrupt:
Two days ago, we said it was time to fire the SEC’s chief of enforcement Robert Khuzami, who has not provided the tough policing warranted by the biggest financial crisis in the agency’s history. Our call was based on compelling evidence of failure. Specifically, a year and a half after Dodd Frank created a $450 million whistleblower fund, which Khuzami confirmed had produced hundreds of high quality leads, the agency had taken only one referral far enough to merit a payout, that of a measley $50,000. We stressed that this was an astonishing lapse:
… whistleblowers are insiders and therefore should in many cases have access to the sort of internal documents that would serve to substantiate conduct and save the SEC a ton of time. In other words, this should be a prime, potentially its best, source of leads, since the SEC would be further along in case development if any of these tips had meat (ie, both damning info and on target with a clear violation).
We didn’t anticipate that the story of Khuzami’s negligence would blow so big so quickly. Today, the Financial Times reported that three separate whistleblowers charged that Deutsche Bank had mismarked up to $12 billion in exposures to make it look healthier in 2008 and 2009 than it was, yet the agency had not acted on these allegations. And this level of window dressing most assuredly would make a difference.
………
Khuzami’s position is hopelessly conflicted. He was general counsel for the Americas for Deutsche from 2004 to 2009, so this behavior took place on his watch. Although he has recused himself from this probe, that’s inadequate. Recusal does not work when the people working on the matter in the end have the party with the conflict as their boss. They can’t pursue any real dirt that could implicate him without hurting themselves. If it came to naught, they’d still fear the risk of reprisal if he survived. And if he were forced to leave, they’d be faced with a new boss who might not be at all to their liking.
The only way to have an effective investigation is either to have Khuzami resign or to have the matter handed off to a completely independent firm (and even that’s a stretch, both from the agency side, and from the dearth of firms with decent securities law expertise that would be willing to face off against a major bank. Just as with the bankruptcy bar, you either work for the banks [the creditors] or against them [for the debtors]). It’s also a wee bit too cozy that Deutsche’s current general counsel is also a former SEC head of enforcement. And KPMG, the accountant that blessed all this highly dubious financial footwork, and Fried Frank, which led an investigation initiated by Deutsche and apparently found nothing much wrong, also don’t come out looking very good.
When you look Republican investigations of alleged Obama corruption, what is clear is that they are trying to gin up a false bullsh%$ like Benghazi and “Fast and Furious”.
This one is real, and it’s an accusation that would serve to benefit the Republicans politically, and unlike the investigatory theater that Darryl Issa favors.
Additionally, such an investigation might lead the white house to get tougher with the banksters, because it is clear that one of the administration’s conceits, notwithstanding the rapidly spinning revolving door (Elizabeth Fowler anyone?), is that they are a model of probity, and this, along with the political consequences, might produce some meaningful action.
A man in the process of breaking up with his wife, and alleged that she was involved with laundering money transfers to Switzerland, and the bank got him committed to a mental hospital for ten years:
A German man committed to a high-security psychiatric hospital after being accused of fabricating a story of money-laundering activities at a major bank is to have his case reviewed after evidence has emerged proving the validity of his claims.
In a plot worthy of a crime blockbuster, Gustl Mollath, 56, was submitted to the secure unit of a psychiatric hospital seven years ago after court experts diagnosed him with paranoid personality disorder following his claims that staff at the Hypo Vereinsbank (HVB) – including his wife, then an assets consultant at HVB – had been illegally smuggling large sums of money into Switzerland.
Mollath was tried in 2006 after his ex-wife accused him of causing her physical harm. He denied the charges, claiming she was trying to sully his name in the light of the evidence he allegedly had against her. He was admitted to the clinic, where he has remained against his will ever since.
But recent evidence brought to the attention of state prosecutors shows that money-laundering activities were indeed practiced over several years by members of staff at the Munich-based bank, the sixth-largest private financial institute in Germany, as detailed in an internal audit report carried out by the bank in 2003. The report, which has now been posted online, detailed illegal activities including money-laundering and aiding tax evasion. A number of employees, including Mollath’s wife, were subsequently sacked following the bank’s investigation.
………
Asked why the bank kept the report to itself and did not approach the authorities, the spokeswoman added: “In 2003 HVB initiated extensive investigations via internal audits in response to information provided by Mr Mollath on transactions that had taken place a long time before … It was determined that employees had acted contrary to their instructions regarding Swiss banking transactions”.
But while the findings, it said, had resulted in sackings, the audit “did not produce sufficient evidence indicating criminal conduct … that would have made a criminal charge seem appropriate”.
If you believe that the banks had nothing to do with his commitment, you are naive.
This is Bavaria, the heart of the German right wing, and doing the banks’ bidding is pretty much a requirement for civil servants there, so I have no doubt that Hypo Vereinsbank decided to act like Stalin’s NKVD.
H/t Naked Capitalism.
This is the natural result of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision:
The “American” in American Petroleum Institute, the country’s largest oil lobby group, is a misnomer. As I reported for The Nation in August, the group has changed over the years, and is now led by men like Tofiq Al-Gabsani, a Saudi Arabian national who heads a Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Aramco) subsidiary, the state-run oil company that also helps finance the American Petroleum Institute. Al-Gabsani is also a registered foreign agent for the Saudi government.
New disclosures retrieved today, showing some of API’s spending over the course of last year, reveal that API used its membership dues (from the world’s largest oil companies like Chevron and Aramco) to finance several dark money groups airing attack ads in the most recent election cycle.
Last year, API gave nearly half a million to the following dark money groups running political ads against Democrats and in support of Republicans:
• $50,000 to Americans for Prosperity’s 501(c)(4) group, which ran ads against President Obama and congressional Democrats.
• $412,969 to Coalition for American Jobs’ 501(c)(6) group, a front set up by API lobbyists to air ads for industry-friendly politicians, including soon to be former Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).
• $25,000 to the Sixty Plus Association’s 501(c)(4), which ran ads against congressional Democrats.
Jack Gerard, the president of API, was a close ally to the Mitt Romney campaign. Like the US Chamber of Commerce, API is one of several large trade associations that has spent heavily in support of Republican candidates.
Seriously, I’d rather have Greece’s Fascist Golden Dawn party involved in our politics than the House of Saud.
Dick Armey just got an $8 million golden handshake from FreedomWorks:
Dick Armey left the deep-pocketed tea party group he helped build over a clash with a top lieutenant who Armey and others in the organization believed was using the group’s resources to pad his pockets, POLITICO has learned.
Armey received an $8 million buyout to step down as chairman of FreedomWorks at the end of last month, but the dispute between him and the group’s president, Matt Kibbe, is still straining the organization.
An $8 f%$#ing million severance?
I need to become a conservative Republican rat f%$#er.
The money might be worth my immortal soul.
The inestimable Murray Waas uncovers the fact that Wall Street’s “favorite private eye” engaged in a systematic spying and character assassination in support of Alan Stanford’s Ponzi scheme:
In 2006, Allen Stanford had yet to be identified as the mastermind of one of the largest and longest-running Ponzi schemes in U.S. history, but he faced mounting pressure.
Federal securities examiners were pushing for an investigation into his investment operation, which tens of thousands of soon-to-be victims had entrusted with nearly $7 billion. Some of the Texas financier’s own employees were threatening to tell authorities what they knew about his fraud.
Stanford was so concerned that a former senior State Department official named Jonathan Winer might expose his colossal con game that he ordered an investigation into Winer’s private life, according to Stanford’s previously secret records obtained by McClatchy.
Kroll Inc., an international corporate intelligence firm that Stanford had retained for over a decade, obliged. Tom Cash, a Miami-based a managing director of Kroll, soon informed Stanford in an email that he was looking into whether Winer’s ex-wife was a lesbian, according to the internal documents obtained by McClatchy.
………
They looked into the sexual orientation of Winer’s ex-wife, and Stanford used the information collected to blackmail regulators, politicians, and journalists.
What’s more, it worked:
SEC examiners concluded as early as 1997 that Stanford was running a massive Ponzi scheme, agency records show. But Stanford was able to stall the opening of any formal inquiry for a full decade, much like the man behind the only bigger U.S. Ponzi scheme, Bernard Madoff.
The biggest whopper told by Kroll, when a representative says that “its employees had no clue they were helping to conceal the second-biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history.”
No, they were told to collect information so that Stanford could blackmail people, and it’s clear from the emails from Stanford that this was what he charged them to do.
Sorry, but that dog don’t hunt.
Even if they did not have specific information about Stanford being a fraud, they had to have known from what he wanted that he intended to use this information for to extort silence from people.
H/t Felix Salmon.
Seriously, when a cop is convicted of torture, a pardon is not a good way to resolve the issue:
More than 200 judges across Spain have come out publicly to manifest their anger with the Popular Party (PP) government over its decision to pardon four Catalan police officers who were found guilty of torturing a man who they mistakenly believed was an assailant.
“The government’s decision is an improper one in a democracy; illegitimate and unethical. For that reason, we cannot just stand back and not raise our voices against the abuses committed in the right to pardon and warn of their effects, which are devastating,” reads a statement released by the judges.
Among those who signed the document are Supreme Court Justices Perfecto Andrés and Joaquín Giménez, and a senior member of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Margarita Robles.
The four members of the Mossos d’Esquadra were convicted and sentenced in 2008 for torturing the suspect they had arrested. Their convictions had been upheld by the Supreme Court.
………
In February, the Cabinet reduced their sentences to two years and gave them suspensions from the force rather than banning them for life as the court had ruled. It was a decision designed to prevent any of the four from serving time; in Spain jail terms of two years or less handed down to first-time offenders are habitually converted into suspended sentences.A Barcelona provincial court, which advised the government that it was against the partial pardons, decided that the four officers must serve the remainder of their time in prison. In response the Cabinet last week decided on full pardons and agreed to give them fines.
So, these guys get to be cops again in 2 years.
You just know that they will have enthusiastic support of their fellow officers, so being back on the beat (pun not intended) is highly likely.
This sort of sh%$, abusive police officers and the craven politicians who support them in order to appear “tough on crime” is why you need a strong constitution and a strong judiciary.
You cannot ever trust the police to protect your rights as a citizen.
So Spanish banks lied to their customers, selling them preferred shares and telling them that they were government insured accounts, and now the EU is requiring that they get wiped out as part of a bailout:
Yves here. We’ve flagged in earlier posts how the Spanish banking crisis had the potential to become destabilizing politically, as if Spain wasn’t already at considerable risk of upheaval. Spanish depositors were pushed to convert their deposits into preference shares, which they were told were just as safe. That of course was never true.
This was a simple desperation move by the banks to save their own skins, customers be damned, by raising equity from the most unsophisticated source to which they had access. And now that that gambit failed, these shareholders are due to have those investments wiped out unless the Spanish authorities can cut a deal to spare them. The conditions of a bank rescue, which Spain did try to resist, was to have equity holders wiped out, or at least haircut. And that plan is now about to be set in motion. Having losses imposed on small savers who were in many cases conned by their own bank to buy these preference shares is going to do serious harm as well as further delegitimate the government.
Remember that quote from the Icelandic President? It’s only two posts down.
He’s right: bail out the people and jail the bankers.