Bringing on Felix Salmon* and Dennis Kelleher to discuss our we need to put some senior banksters in handcuffs was a good move:
*Unfortunately, he was not wearing his Willy Wonka suit.
Category: Corruption
A Baloney Sandwich
Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna, who rose to infamy when he pepper sprayed women who were peacefully behind a police line, has been thrown to the wolves by the city of New York, which is refusing to defend him in civil suits filed against him:
New York City has distanced itself from a high-ranking police official accused of firing pepper spray at Occupy Wall Street protesters, taking the unusual step of declining to defend him in a civil lawsuit over the incident.
The decision means Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna also could be personally liable for financial damages that may arise out of the suit, said lawyers familiar with similar civil-rights claims.
The 29-year veteran has asked a judge to reverse the city. “He wasn’t doing this as Anthony Bologna, mister. He was doing this as Anthony Bologna, deputy inspector, NYPD,” said his lawyer, Louis La Pietra. Mr. Bologna’s union, the Captains Endowment Association, is now covering the cost of his defense.
Mr. Bologna was one of the most contentious public figures to emerge out of frequent clashes between Occupy Wall Street protesters and police officers last fall. A video that purported to show him aiming pepper spray at a group of demonstrators who were being held behind orange netting was widely viewed on the Internet.
Four weeks after the Sept. 24 incident, which allegedly occurred during an unpermitted march that ended in dozens of arrests, an internal investigation found Mr. Bologna in violation of New York Police Department guidelines. He was given a departmental punishment called a command discipline and docked 10 vacation days.
The city’s action is an uncommon occurrence, and I’m wondering if this means that he will start rolling on higher-ups.
This should get interesting.
Good Riddance
In another Friday news dump, we discover that Cass Sunstein will be leaving his position as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.
The man has been a train wreck if you are interested at all in the idea of regulation being a way to protect the public welfare:
“Cass Sunstein is the most well-connected and smartest guy who’s ever held the job,” said Rena Steinzor, president of the Center for Progressive Reform and a professor at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. “But he’s also done untold damage.”
…
Few proposed rules escaped his gaze or his editor’s pen. Of the hundreds of regulations issued by the administration as of late last year, three-quarters were changed at OIRA, often at the urging of corporate interests, according to an analysis from the Center for Progressive Reform, a liberal-leaning group that monitors federal regulation. For rules from the Environmental Protection Agency, the figure was closer to 80 percent, the group found. In virtually every case, the rule was weakened, the group claimed.
Professor Steinzor cited Mr. Sunstein’s role in the killing of the E.P.A.’s proposed tightening of the standard for ozone pollution, the indefinite delay of rules governing coal ash disposal and the withdrawal earlier this year of a proposed update of child agricultural labor standards.
And here is the money quote:
Mr. Sunstein’s recommendations carry extraordinary weight, White House officials said, but the ultimate decisions in those cases were made by the president, his senior political advisers or cabinet officers.
We also have these comments:
“It’s a glorious day,” said Frank O’Donnell, of the group Clean Air Watch. “Sunstein has been a blot on the landscape.”
And from an Obama adversary:
“The Chamber has enjoyed a good working relationship with Cass Sunstein and we wish him well in his return to Harvard Law,” said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Despite its happiness with Sunstein, the agency has spent millions of dollars attacking the president’s policies.
I think that the fact that the US Chamber of Commerce liked him is the best evidence about how harmful he was to the basic idea of regulations that protect the public.
The US Chamber of Commerce is to the idea of good governance and reasonable regulation as Colonel Sanders was to the life span of chickens.
And important thing to remember though is that the Cossacks work for the Czar.
As to the greater meaning to his departure, my guess is that Obama is looking to appeal to the base for the election.
Lieutenant John Pike No Longer Works At UC Davis
Breaking news,
University of California Police Lieutenant John Pike is no longer employed as a police officer:
Lt. John Pike, the UC Davis police officer who became a focal point of last November’s pepper-spraying incident during a campus protest, is no longer employed by the university, a spokesman confirmed late Tuesday.
UC Davis spokesman Barry Shiller said he could not discuss the details of Pike’s departure, but in response to queries from The Bee, he said Pike was no longer employed there as of Tuesday.
“Consistent with privacy guidelines established in state law and university policy, I can confirm that John Pike’s employment with the university ended on July 31, 2012,” Shiller said. “I’m unable to comment further.”
Pike, 39, declined to comment when reached by The Bee as he was sitting in a meeting on campus where he said he was being terminated.
Pike’s 2010 salary was listed as $110,243.12. He has been on paid leave since the debacle unfolded last year, sparking worldwide outrage, numerous investigations and calls for the resignation of UC Davis leaders.
It certainly took long enough, he spent something like 8 months on paid administrative leave, but don’t blame the unions.
He’s a Lieutenant, and management, and so not covered by a labor agreement.
Instead blame an internal police department disciplinary process that is pretty much written by, and for, the benefit of the cops, not the general public.
H/t the Stellar Parthenon BBS for the PhotoShops.
Penn State Gets Slap on the Wrist
Let’s look at the term of the so called punishment:
- A $60 million fine. (For a program routinely generates revenue, not counting alumni donations in the $50 million dollar range).
- Vacating all victories since 1998, which means nothing except that Paterno is no longer the winningest coach in college football.
- A 4 year ban on bowl games.
- Loss of 20 scholarships for the next 4 years.
- Allowing players to transfer into other programs.
The biggest deal is the post season ban. It reduces revenue, and makes recruiting of top level players all but impossible, so everything else is pretty much nothing.
Compare this to SMU, which had the temerity to conspire with boosters to pay its so-called “student athletes”, and had its football program shut down for a year, and their football program has never recovered.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-dufresne-ncaa-penn-state20120723,0,6729566.story
Round Up the Usual Suspects
The operative quote here is, “individual traders“:
American prosecutors and European regulators are close to arresting individual traders over the Libor scandal and charging them with colluding to manipulate global benchmark interest rates, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
Federal prosecutors in Washington DC have recently contacted lawyers representing some of the individuals under suspicion to notify them that criminal charges and arrests could be imminent, said two sources speaking anonymously.
Defence lawyers representing individuals under suspicion said prosecutors have indicated they will begin making arrests and filing charges in the next few weeks. In long-running financial investigations it is not uncommon for prosecutors to contact defence lawyers for individuals before filing charges to offer them a chance to co-operate or take a plea, the lawyers said.
(emphasis mine)
This is looking a lot like a US military investigation of war crimes. The goal is to prosecute at absolutely the lowest level possible, and come down on the little fish like a ton of bricks.
We know how this works. It’s called “looking forward, not back.”
If any one at the VP level is charged, I predict that they will be non-white, south or east Asian.
I Gotta Read This Book
Neil Barkofsky’s book on his experiences monitoring the TARP, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, and the Bush administration comes off better than the Obama administration:
The Huffington Post described a scene in a forthcoming book by Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP, where Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner delivered a string of F-bombs during a discussion about transparency. I’ve read the book, and while that’s an amusing diversion, it’s nowhere near the headline story.
The important moment in the book for me comes conveniently after Barofsky recounts this FDL News item, one of my HAMP horror stories. Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to all sorts of problems like this, with trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky mused that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP, and the issue came up in a meeting with the Treasury Secretary, which was also attended by Elizabeth Warren, then the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel, another TARP watchdog.
Warren asked Geithner repeatedly about HAMP. After several evasions, Geithner said about the banks, “We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them.”
This is a revelatory moment for Barofsky in the book, and should be for everyone reading. Geithner’s concern, first of all, was with how the banks would respond to the program, not how homeowners would respond to it. In fact, homeowners are quite besides the point. Regardless of their situation, they will be one of the 10 million foreclosures, in Geithner’s construction. His goal was merely to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health, mostly through the other parts of the bailout, that enabled them to earn profits.
I will note that the Cossacks work for the Czar, and notwithstanding all the turnover on the economic side of his cabinet, Geithner has been a constant.
This is going on because this is what Obama wants.
Republican Family Values
It appears that a Utah Republican activist, Greg Peterson dabbles in serial date rape as a hobby:
News that a Utah Republican activist is accused of raping four women — two of whom say they were taken to the Heber cabin where the man hosted major political events — caused ripples of unease Thursday throughout the GOP.
Gregory Nathan Peterson has hobnobbed with the likes of Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, Gov. Gary Herbert, U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, and candidates such as 4th District congressional contender Mia Love. [Ed Note:
But for the past 14 months, the 37-year-old Orem man allegedly has led a double life as a serial date-rapist.
Peterson was charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court in Salt Lake City with 23 felony counts, including rape and kidnapping, and two misdemeanors. A jail log indicates U.S. marshals arrested Peterson in his home in Heber and booked him into the Salt Lake County jail. He remained there Thursday in lieu of $750,000 bail.
Charging documents allege sexual assaults against four women Peterson met in Salt Lake County beginning March 26, 2011. In the first case, the documents allege, he met a woman at a church function and she agreed to go to a movie with him.
But instead of going to a theater, the documents allege, Peterson told the woman he had a gun and took her to his five-bedroom, five-bathroom, 3,000-square-foot cabin in Heber. The documents allege he sexually assaulted the woman and hit her when she did not do as he wished. Peterson drove the woman back to her vehicle the next morning.
Peterson’s Heber cabin is where he has held annual Republican barbecues and gatherings.
The charges allege Peterson met another woman online and she agreed to go to a movie with him July 2, 2011. But this time Peterson threatened to expose the woman’s expired immigration visa and drove her to the Heber cabin, documents allege. Peterson raped and assaulted the woman there, court papers say, then drove her to his mother’s Lewiston residence in Cache County. Peterson and the woman stayed there until July 5. The documents say Peterson took the woman to her home July 8.
On Dec. 11, 2011, Peterson met a West Jordan woman for a lunch date, the documents allege, and at her home he pushed her on a couch and sexually assaulted her.
It’s amazing how fast his former BFFs are falling all over themselves pretending not to know him.
Kafka, Obama Style
The prosecution in the Bradley Manning Wikileaks trial the claims to have proof that he was aiding the enemy, a crime that carries the death penalty, but is refusing to produce any evidence”
The US government claims to have proof that Bradley Manning, the WikiLeaks suspect, knowingly passed state secrets to a location where it was bound to be obtained by enemy groups, a military court in Maryland has heard.
Captain Joe Morrow, a member of the five-strong prosecution team assigned to the case, said that the government would show at court martial that Manning had knowingly “aided the enemy” – the most serious of the 22 charges facing the soldier that carries the death penalty. Morrow said the evidence would show that Manning sent the information to a “very definite place” that he knew was used by the enemy.
He did not mention al-Qaida, though the terrorist network has been explicity named by the prosecution in previous hearings.
The insistence by the US government that it can prove Manning had actual knowledge that the WikiLeaks dump would be used by enemy groups was instantly disputed by the lead defence lawyer, David Coombs. He demanded that the government produce the evidence to which it was alluding.
“We haven’t seen any evidence that the government has provided by discovery that supports any knowledge that the information would be obtained by the enemy,” he said.
Note that if the court accepts this, to quote the ACLU, “the threat of criminal prosecution hangs over any service member who gives an interview to a reporter, writes a letter to the editor, or posts a blog on the internet. In its zeal to throw the book at Manning, the government has so overreached that its ‘success’ would turn thousands of loyal soldiers into criminals.”
I believe that this is one of the goals of this prosecution. When you define laws this broadly, every is a criminal, and so “troublemakers” can be dealt with.
The Good Guys Beat the Borg (For Once)
Specifically, Wikileaks has won a case against Visa for cutting off their credit card donations:
The Reykjavík District Court has ruled that Valitor, formerly known as VISA Iceland, violated contract laws by blocking credit card donations to Wikileaks, according to a press release posted on the whistleblowers’ Twitter account.
The court also ordered that the donation gateway should be reopened within 14 days otherwise Valitor will be forced to pay a fine of $6,200 daily. Valitor CEO Vidar Thorkellsson told Bloomberg, however, that the company would appeal the ruling. He declined to comment further.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said “This is a significant victory against Washington’s attempt to silence WikiLeaks. We will not be silenced. Economic censorship is censorship. It is wrong. When it’s done outside of the rule of law its doubly wrong. One by one those involved in the attempted censorship of WikiLeaks will find themselves on the wrong side of history.”
Most Transparent Administration Ever
Have you heard the latest? The FDA spied on outside critics in an attempt to find out who were the whistleblowers.
The f%$#ing F f%$#ing D f%$#ing A was engaged in a f%$#ing witch hunt and coverup?
Un-f%$#ing-believable:
A wide-ranging surveillance operation by the Food and Drug Administration against a group of its own scientists used an enemies list of sorts as it secretly captured thousands of e-mails that the disgruntled scientists sent privately to members of Congress, lawyers, labor officials, journalists and even President Obama, previously undisclosed records show.What began as a narrow investigation into the possible leaking of confidential agency information by five scientists quickly grew in mid-2010 into a much broader campaign to counter outside critics of the agency’s medical review process, according to the cache of more than 80,000 pages of computer documents generated by the surveillance effort.Moving to quell what one memorandum called the “collaboration” of the F.D.A.’s opponents, the surveillance operation identified 21 agency employees, Congressional officials, outside medical researchers and journalists thought to be working together to put out negative and “defamatory” information about the agency.F.D.A. officials defended the surveillance operation, saying that the computer monitoring was limited to the five scientists suspected of leaking confidential information about the safety and design of medical devices.While they acknowledged that the surveillance tracked the communications that the scientists had with Congressional officials, journalists and others, they said it was never intended to impede those communications, but only to determine whether information was being improperly shared.The agency, using so-called spy software designed to help employers monitor workers, captured screen images from the government laptops of the five scientists as they were being used at work or at home. The software tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted, the documents show.The extraordinary surveillance effort grew out of a bitter dispute lasting years between the scientists and their bosses at the F.D.A. over the scientists’ claims that faulty review procedures at the agency had led to the approval of medical imaging devices for mammograms and colonoscopies that exposed patients to dangerous levels of radiation.A confidential government review in May by the Office of Special Counsel, which deals with the grievances of government workers, found that the scientists’ medical claims were valid enough to warrant a full investigation into what it termed “a substantial and specific danger to public safety.”
There is a saying, “A fish rots from the head,” and this is completely in line with the Obama administration’s jihad against whistle blowers.
I Call Coverup and Scapegoating
JP Morgan is now claiming that its traders intentionally deceived them when they lost $2 4.4 5.8 7 billion:
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s announcement that an internal inquiry may show “intent” to misprice trades in a unit that lost $5.8 billion may help a U.S. investigation while putting distance between management and any wrongdoers.
“E-mails, voice tapes and other documents, supplemented by interviews” were “suggestive of trader intent not to mark positions where they believed they could execute,” the bank said in a presentation yesterday as it reported net income fell 9 percent to $4.96 billion. “Traders may have been seeking to avoid showing full amount of losses,” the bank said, noting management had concerns about the integrity of the prices used. The bank didn’t provide evidence to support the allegations.
The U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in New York in May began a probe of the bank’s trading losses, a person familiar with the matter said. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates derivatives trading, are also examining New York-based JPMorgan’s trading activities, according to people familiar with those probes.
Yes, of course, none of it was senior management’s fault, it was all the fault of those damn Eskimos.
Quoting Richard Widmark playing Col. Tad Lawson in Judgement at Nuremberg:
There are no Nazis in Germany, didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans, it was the fault of those damn Eskimos!
This is such a transperent case of cover-your-ass as I have ever seen.
Yes, Geithner Sent Out a Strongly Worded Memo, and Kept LIBOR Fraud Secret
Yes, in response to proof that one of the most critical benchmarks in international finance was being fraudulently manipulated, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner sent a memo, and then followed up by doing ……… absolutely nothing.
What a surprise.
Geithner has always been supportive of allowing the banksters to amass ill gotten gains in order to fill the holes in the balance sheets.
Adventures in Journamalism
The CJR discovers that the the news media repeatedly uncritically quote anti-worker lobbyists to demonstrate things like the fictitious worker shortage:
Two weeks ago The New York Times wheeled out that old chestnut of Great Recession-era economic reporting: Companies can’t find workers, despite high unemployment.
………
But what really sends the BS meter into the red zone is when you learn that the anecdotes are populated with business people with ties to lobbying groups that news organizations, for whatever reason, fail to disclose.
Take one of the Times’s main anecdotes, Drew Greenblatt, who owns a small manufacturing firm in Baltimore called Marlin Steel Wire and who gets his picture in the Times. This was his third NYT hit in three months. Here are Mr. Greenblatt’s other press hits in June: The NBC Nightly News, PBS Newshour (twice), NPR’s Morning Edition, The Hamilton Spectator. So far this year he’s also been on CNN Newsroom and Fox Business (four times), and in the Financial Times, Reuters, and the Associated Press, plus a number of smaller publications. Two years ago, Greenblatt and his company were the focus of a flattering 2,300 word Atlantic profile and a couple of WaPo profiles in 2001 and 2007. This guy is like the Greg Packer of small manufacturers.
………
Undisclosed in any of these stories is the fact that Greenblatt is an executive-committee member of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers, the powerful DC trade lobby. NAM not only pushes Congress for anti-labor policies (like banning picketing), it lobbies for government-funded workforce training programs (“to be led by the business community,” naturally).
………
A couple of weeks ago, blogger Steve M. at Balloon Juice and No More Mister Nice Blog caught NPR and NBC talking to the same small businessman, Joe Olivo, about how Obama’s health care law is keeping him from hiring for his printing business. Turns out Olivo’s quite the active member of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the big right-wing, pro-corporate lobbying group that was the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case against Obamacare, which is called National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. His NFIB connections, needless to say, weren’t disclosed by either broadcast. And Steve M. caught NPR going back to the well a week later, with yet another anti-Obamacare Olivo interview with no disclosure of his lobbying ties.
This is hardly the first time this has happened with Olivo.
………
Here’s how you should assume this works, because it’s how it very often does: A journalist is on deadline on a story and needs an anecdote to make it feel “real” with some color—preferably someone who will add balance and/or support the journalist’s thesis. A speed-dialed call is made to industry flacks to supply a quotable small-business person…and, voilà!
That’s the quick-and-easy way, which is how readers get political activists presented misleadingly as random businessmen.
Take incompetence, mix it with laziness, and a little nudge from their corporate task-masters, and it’s no wonder that I find that the best sources for news about America are foreign.
Least surprising News of the Day
It turns out that his syndicate, Premeir Radio Networks, hires ringers to call into his show:
One of the common refrains in the media world is that Rush Limbaugh has the largest audience in talk radio. He is eager to capitalize on this, multiple times per episode in fact. But how true is this claim?
Limbaugh is one of several radio hosts syndicated through Premiere Radio Networks, including right-wing darlings such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck as well as known liberal voices such as Randi Rhodes and the Reverend Jesse Jackson. One of the features for Premiere syndicated shows is a service Premiere On Call, a phone banking service for voice talent. What this means is, they hire people to call in. If you ever listened to one of the shows distributed by Premiere, you may find yourself impressed at how a caller would bring up a subject which then the host would have a perfect response to, like a perfect pitch in a baseball game to allow the home run hit. Premiere On Call’s hiring standards appear to be focused on hiring people able to generate accents, vocal inflections, or other ways to enable re-use of the same voice actor multiple times without being identified as such.
Limbaugh obtained the largest audience during an era when audience count was made by manually filled out diaries, a practice which has been slowly phased out over the past few years, as detailed electronic tracking became available. Once the detailed tracking was available, Rush’s ratings dropped significantly, by over a third. With an estimated weekly audience of 15 million users now, that comes to an average of less than 3,000 listeners per station, not very good ratings at all. For comparison, left-wing giant Ed Schultz on Jones Radio Network sports an estimated 8,000 listeners per station. To get these numbers, we took the totals given from Talkers Magazine and cross-referenced with the number of stations that carry each show. Rush is carried on over 10x as many stations as Big Eddie. Even though Rush’s overall listenership is high, the number per station is low.
………He gained these stations originally due to an arrangement system whereby these stations were given his show, for free, in exchange for 15 minutes of advertising space. It was a win-win for these small stations, effectively adding filler to the stations airwaves in a non-prime spot.
What a surprise, the nation’s leading spokesman for recreational Oxycontin use appears to be running a pump and dump ratings scheme.
How is Penn State Like the Catholic Church?
Their attempts to cover up child rape are so heinous that even the hiring of the hactackular Louis Freeh to run the investigation cannot mitigate the truth:
The independent panel investigating Pennsylvania State University’s role in the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal has determined that the school’s top leaders, including legendary football coach Joe Paterno, tried to cover up the abuse for 14 years.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who led the investigation, outlined the findings of the panel’s 162-page report in prepared remarks released in advance of a 10 a.m. news conference in Philadelphia.
The report is available at www.philly.com/freeh
“The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized,” Freeh said.
Naming Paterno, former Penn State President Graham Spanier, former Athletic Director Tim Curley and Gary Schultz, a university vice president once in charge of the campus police, Freeh said they “never demonstrated, through actions or words, any concern for the safety and well-being of Sandusky’s victims until after Sandusky’s arrest.”
To state the obvious, if this had been curling, or for that matter college Baseball, they would have turned this matter over to the police over a decade ago.
There is no better case to be made that big ticket athletic programs are a corrupt and corrupting influence on higher education, and they need to be excised from higher education, either by the schools themselves, or by the IRS pulling tax exempt status from these programs.
I Can Has Prosecushuns?
The New York Bank of the Federal reserve has known since at least 2007, which means that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has known since at least 2007, that the banks were manipulating the LIBOR numbers:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York may have known as early as August 2007 that the setting of global benchmark interest rates was flawed. Following an inquiry with British banking group Barclays Plc in the spring of 2008, it shared proposals for reform of the system with British authorities.
The role of the Fed is likely to raise questions about whether it and other authorities took enough action to address concerns they had about the way Libor rates were set, or whether their struggle to keep the banking system afloat through the financial crisis meant the issue took a backseat.
A New York Fed spokesperson said in a statement that “in the context of our market monitoring following the onset of the financial crisis in late 2007, involving thousands of calls and emails with market participants over a period of many months, we received occasional anecdotal reports from Barclays of problems with Libor.
“In the spring of 2008, following the failure of Bear Stearns and shortly before the first media report on the subject, we made further inquiry of Barclays as to how Libor submissions were being conducted. We subsequently shared our analysis and suggestions for reform of Libor with the relevant authorities in the UK.”
The Fed knew that any misstatement of LIBOR would have significant effects on Trillions of dollars of loans and derivatives, and that the manipulation of this rate would allow banks to steal money from their customers.
While the LIBOR is a matter for the British to regulate, it is, after all, the London Interbank Offered Rate, its use as a benchmark by American institutions in American markets, was a matter for the Federal Reserve.
The fact that the Fed did not even issue a warning about this is criminally negligent.
I so want to see Tim Geithner frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Thanks Angela, things have gotten so bad in EU that Europeans engaging in sham marriages to get permanent residency visa in Brazil:
For Rafael and Mariana, their days are now dominated by final arrangements for their upcoming marriage. He wants to bring his clothes over to her place. Before he does it, she wants to rearrange her apartment to open more space. At first sight, they do not necessarily seem to be a good fit for each other. But when asked, their friends swear they are deeply in love.
Anxious, Rafael hopes to be married in two months at most. The ceremony will be simple, only civil. After signing all the documents, there will be a kiss: a good-bye kiss. He will move back home and wait until he finds the right person to be at his side —a guy, probably.
Mariana*, 36, is a Brazilian housemaid. Rafael*, 31, is a Spanish university student waiting for a permanent visa to stay in Brazil. Their union will be one more in the growing numbers of fake marriages that foreigners use to be able to gain residency here.
“I’m a bit afraid, but I know three Germans in Rio and an American in São Paulo who did the same,” he says. “I could look for a job in Germany, where I was before I lost my job. But Europe is getting worse and worse, while the situation here is just the opposite.”
It really is the goal of the austerians to make their societies 3rd world nations, and it appears that they are succeeding.
Verizon Sucks
And I am speaking now as a Verizon customer (FIOS).
You see, they are claiming that they have a first amendment right to censor your internet access:
Last week, Verizon filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit laying out their various and sundry complaints against the Federal Communications Commission’s Open Internet Order, which put net neutrality regulations in place for Internet service providers. The telecom giant is suing to have the FCC’s order thrown out, and one of their legal arguments is raising more than a few eyebrows. Verizon, per the court document, considers itself your Internet editor. Or your Internet editor-in-waiting.
It goes like this: the Open Internet Order says that Verizon, as a provider of broadband Internet, can’t block or slow access to (legal) online content because they disagree with its message or are being paid by an outside party to do so. This is essentially how the internet has operated since its inception, and the Open Internet Order is intended to prevent ISPs like Verizon from becoming gatekeepers. Verizon, however, argues that it has the constitutionally protected right to decide which content you, as a Verizon customer, can access — that it is no different from a newspaper editor:
Of course, when they are sued, they claim to be mere dumb pipes, and scream “safe harbor.”
C%$# sucking pig felching rat bastards.
Least Shocking News of the Day
Wall Street executives believes that their employees cannot succeed without breaking the law:
If the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes were to go out with his lantern in search of an honest man today, a survey of Wall Street executives on workplace conduct suggests he might have to look elsewhere.
A quarter of Wall Street executives see wrongdoing as a key to success, according to a survey by whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow released on Tuesday.
In a survey of 500 senior executives in the United States and the UK, 26 percent of respondents said they had observed or had firsthand knowledge of wrongdoing in the workplace, while 24 percent said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful.
Sixteen percent of respondents said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it, according to Labaton Sucharow. And 30 percent said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law.
Truth be told, I’m surprised the number is so low.
The cynic in me says that most of the roughly ¾ who disagreed were lying because that’s what they do.
The realist in me says that most of the roughly ¾ who disagreed able to deduce the purpose of the survey, and determine that their, and their companies’ needs were, and then gave an answer that served those interests.
The optimist in me says that most of the roughly ¾ who disagreed have access to some really good drugs.