Category: Corruption

But of Course, It’s Florida…

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Attourneys in the Florida Attorney General’s office were forced to resign with no notice or any opportunity to communicate what they had found:

A lead foreclosure fraud investigator for the state said she and a colleague were forced to resign from the Florida attorney general’s office, unexpectedly ending their nearly yearlong pursuit to hold law firms and banks accountable.

Former Assistant Attorney General Theresa Edwards and colleague June Clarkson had been investigating the state’s so-called “foreclosure mills,” uncovering evidence of legal malpractice that also implicated banks and loan serv­icers.

Despite positive performance evaluations, Edwards said the two were told during a meeting with their supervisor in late May to give up their jobs voluntarily or be let go. Edwards said no reason was given for the move.

“It all happened very abruptly,” said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general’s office for about three years.

The foreclosure investigations were launched under former Attorney General Bill McCollum, but Edwards said she sensed changes were coming under Gov. Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“I think they wanted to put people in there that were more in line with their thinking,” Edwards said.

Bondi’s press secretary said Tuesday that foreclosure investigations are still open and are being personally led or supervised by Division Director Richard Lawson.

Yeah sure. Rick Scott is determined to get to the bottom of rich lawyers cheating ordinary people.

The Newscorp Scandal is Exploding

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It’s not just News of the World it’s the Times of London, specifically the Sunday Times, which hacked personal records of Gordon Brown, including financial records, legal records, and the medical records of his child with Cystic Fibrosis:

Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting to access his voicemail and obtaining information from his bank account and legal file as well as his family’s medical records.

There is also evidence that a private investigator used a serving police officer to trawl the police national computer for information about him. That investigator also targeted another Labour MP who was the subject of hostile inquiries by the News of the World, but it is not confirmed whether News International was specifically involved in trawling police computers for information on Brown.

Separately, Brown’s tax paperwork was taken from his accountant’s office apparently by hacking into the firm’s computer. This was passed to another newspaper.

Additionally, we now have a retired New York City Police officer who has, “alleged he was contacted by News of the World journalists who said they would pay him to retrieve the private phone records of the dead.”

Much of Murdoch’s power comes from the fear that he inspires in authorities, and now that seems to be falling away, and the next few weeks should get very interesting.

Unsurprising News of the Day

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It turns out that academic economists are not interested in their profession adopting a code of ethics:

The world’s largest association of economists is considering ethics guidelines after outrage about undisclosed conflicts of interest, but only a handful of its 18,000 members have bothered to offer any input.

The American Economic Association earlier this year charged a five-person panel with looking into ethics and economics — in part a response to the 2010 documentary “Inside Job” that vilified a number of big-name economists for arguing in favor of deregulation while on Wall Street’s payroll.

The film also notably skewered former Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin, who wrote a glowing paper about Iceland’s financial system in 2006 — for which he was paid by the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce. Two years later, the country’s financial system collapsed.

The panel, chaired by Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow, asked for input from the broader membership, with an end of June deadline, but so far, Solow said, he has received at most a dozen responses.

They then follow with a quote from some pissant by the name of David Card, an Econ prof at UC Berkeley, suggesting that it’s not necessary, because they don’t make that much.

But as Yves Smith wryly observes, “Last I checked, economists are much better paid than other social scientists, and lesser paid professions, like nurses and teachers, have codes of ethics.”

Which Murdoch Is Going to Jail

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Because it has been discovered that Newscorp systematically wiped its email archives of everything relating to their phone hacking activities, which pretty much had to had the assent of James, and probably Rupert, Murdoch:

Police are investigating evidence that a News International executive may have deleted millions of emails from an internal archive in an apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal.

The archive is believed to have reached back to January 2005, revealing daily contact between News of the World editors, reporters and outsiders, including private investigators. The messages are potentially highly valuable both for the police and for the numerous public figures who are suing News International (NI).

According to legal sources close to the police inquiry, a senior executive is believed to have deleted “massive quantities” of the archive on two separate occasions, leaving only a fraction to be disclosed. One of the alleged deletions is said to have been made at the end of January, just as Scotland Yard was launching Operation Weeting, its new inquiry into the affair. The allegation directly contradicts NI claims that it is co-operating fully with police in order to expose its history of illegal newsgathering.

The alleged deletion of emails will be of particular interest to the media regulator Ofcom, which said it had asked to be “kept abreast” of developments in the Met’s hacking investigation, so it can assess whether News Corp would pass the “fit and proper” test that all owners of UK television channels have to meet.

So now we have a fairly clear case of obstruction of justice and most, if not all, of the information that was deleted is still likely squirreled away in the system where it can be found with a extensive investigation.

I cannot imagine that this did not go on without the explicit approval of one of the Murdochs.

Wisc ‘Phants Try to Redistrict Ahead of Recall

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Now here’s a surprise.

Facing the possibility of the control of the Senate flipping back to the Democrats with the recall elections, the Republicans are calling a special session to get it done before the August elections/:

Republican leaders released their plan Friday to redraw districts for the Legislature, setting up possible votes on them over the next two weeks and more controversy at the Capitol.

A quick vote would allow GOP lawmakers to approve the maps before recall elections are held this summer that could shift control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats. That would let Republicans lock down advantages at the ballot box for the next 10 years by drawing maps in their favor.

Democrats in the Legislature won’t necessarily have a say in what the maps look like. But a lawsuit has already been filed, meaning a federal court could still weigh in on the process.

A hearing on the new maps is scheduled for Wednesday, and the Legislature could act on it as early as July 19 in extraordinary session.

Somehow, I don’t think that they are particularly sanguine regarding their chances during the recall elections.

The interesting thing here is that redistricting is supposed to be a  sort of bottom up activity in Wisconsin, with local authorities drawing up wards before the legislature draws districts, but they are rushing the process.

I’d love to see their internal polling data, because they are so scared that they are willing to allow a vote on emergency unemployment benefits too.

Rupert Murdoch Craps His Pants

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H/t Calculated Risk for the vid which puts everything in context nicely

In response to revalations that his one of Newscorp’s paper, News of the World, had hacked voice mails of dead soldiers’ families and a missing girl (later found to be murdered), Rupert Murdoch has decided to shutter the 168 year old tabloid:

Beset by a widening phone-hacking scandal, media mogul Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug Thursday on his News of the World, Britain’s best-selling weekly tabloid newspaper, which will shut down after publishing Sunday’s issue.

In a surprise announcement to the paper’s staff, James Murdoch, a top executive of the tabloid’s parent company and son of Rupert Murdoch, said the July 10 paper “will be the last issue of the News of the World.”

The feisty, hugely profitable paper, which has been continuously published for 168 years, “has a proud history of fighting crime, exposing wrong-doing and regularly setting the news agenda for the nation,” James Murdoch said. But those attributes “have been sullied by behavior that was wrong,” he said. “Indeed, if recent allegations are true, it was inhuman and has no place in our company. The News of the World is in the business of holding others to account. But it failed when it came to itself.”

Referring to the phone-hacking scandal, the younger Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer of his father’s News Corp., said the newspaper “failed to get to the bottom of repeated wrongdoing that occurred without conscience or legitimate purpose.” He added, “Wrongdoers turned a good newsroom bad and this was not fully understood or adequately pursued.” He pledged that “those who acted wrongly will have to face the consequences.”

BTW, it’s not just 1 dead girl, it appears that they hacked the phones of parents of some other missing girls.

People have already been arrested, specifically Andy Coulson, former editor in chief of News of the World, and former communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron, as well as Clive Goodman, their former royal editor, who has been arrested on this matter before.

Additionally, it appears that this scandal has queered the deal that Murdoch had to buy satellite TV provider BSkyB, for the near term at least.


Pass the Popcorn

That being said I don’t think that it’s the business repercussions that have Murdoch running scared, it’s the possibility that he finds it likely that he, son James, could shortly be working in the prison laundry next to Conrad Black.

Heh.

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Even though Geithner has denied the rumors that he would be leaving, this hasn’t stopped unnamed sources for floating the names of potential replacements , and this scares the hell out of me:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner would like to leave the Obama administration this fall if economic conditions are stronger and the debt ceiling debate is resolved in a timely manner, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

Possible replacements to be President Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, according to a senior administration official, include Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, and Roger Altman, a prominent investment banker and former deputy Treasury secretary.

So, the front runners are two investment bankers, one of whom co-chaired the cat food commission and launched a full frontal assault on social security, with the hope of delivering that pot of money to Wall Street.

But if you think that the front runners are scary, just look at the B-team:

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, is considered a strong dark-horse candidate.Dimon has said he is not interested in public office but many on Wall Street believe he would accept the job if asked by Obama. But the White House will have to decide whether Dimon, who leads the most successful bank in the U.S., is too closely aligned with Wall Street.

Jamie F%$#ing Diamond.  The man who whines because he doesn’t think that overpaid, incompetent, corrupt, immoral, and very very rich rat f%$#s are having their asses kissed enough?

Is there any limit to the extremes to which Barack Obama and His Clueless Minions™ will go to put their tongues up the anuses of the banksters who have wrecked our economy?

It appears not.

Shoot me now!

Finally, a Lawsuit

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Two Michigan counties have filed lawsuits against many the GSEs accusing them of defrauding them of title transfer fees:

Two Michigan counties, Oakland and Ingham, are suing some of the biggest players in the mortgage industry for what one official called a “fraudulent conspiracy” to avoid paying state and county property transfer taxes.

Oakland County Treasurer Andy Meisner is suing mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the nation’s first federal lawsuit seeking to recoup tax payments never paid on properties that were transferred several times during the height of and during the foreclosure crisis that has gripped the nation over the last few years,

“I do think it’s fraudulent and I do think there is strong evidence to suggest there has been fraud. I do think it is a fraudulent conspiracy,” Meisner said. “We are identfying the people involved and we are systematically working to hold them accountable.”

While Ingham County Register of Deeds Curtis Hertel Jr. would not go so far as to allege a “fraudulent conspiracy” he says that the aim of his lawsuit is to find out just how deep the malfeasance went.

“This is about getting to the truth,” Hertel said Wednesday, standing in front of one of the many foreclosed and empty houses in the city of Lansing. “I believe the crisis has been further exacerbated by a systematic attempt to avoid state transfer taxes in my office.”

Gee, you think?

Not that this lawsuit is only against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and does not reference the fraudulent (at least on a transfer tax basis) conveyances that were done through MERS, which should be at the top of the list, because, as Willie Sutton said, “It’s where the money is.”

In the case of Fannie and Freddie, they are claiming that they are exempt because they are government agencies (they are not), and because there is statute exempting them (I cannot find one).

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Remember, the Banksters Own Our Asses

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That’s why the Federal Reserve almost doubled the interchange fees that banks can charge on debit card swipes, despite the fact that the initial proposal was much higher than what is charged in other industrialized nations:

Responding to an outcry from financial institutions, federal regulators on Wednesday significantly increased a new limit on fees that large banks can charge to merchants for processing debit card purchases, and they delayed the implementation of the cap until October.

The Federal Reserve voted 4-1 to set the limit for so-called swipe fees at 21 cents per transaction, an increase from the 12-cent fee it proposed in December. That fee would have gone into effect next month for large banks with more than $10 billion in assets.

In addition, the Fed on Wednesday allowed debit card issuers to add a fee of .05% of each purchase to cover a portion of fraud losses. That would add 2 cents to a $40 purchase. And debit card issuers could add a 1-cent-per-transaction fee if they undertook tougher fraud prevention policies and procedures.

The Fed said the new fee for an average transaction would be 24 cents. That’s still a big decrease from the current average swipe fee of 44 cents.

BTW, that “outcry from financial institutions,” they refuse to happens every time someone tries to reduce the ability of the banksters to rob the general public, and the “Responding to”, means that the Fed really has no interest inhelping consumers, they just had to determine the least that they could do to avoid a sh%$ storm.

Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve can bite my shiny metal………

The Mess that Michelle Rhee Left Behind

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The Washington Post has a fascinating profile of respected school principal Bill Kerlina, who quit to bake cupcakes (really):

Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.
He grew to love its students, teachers and — for the most part — its parents.
“If I could lift that school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect,” he said.
Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out.
Principals in the District and other cities leave all the time, for a range of reasons. At least 20 of the District’s 123 public schools will have new leaders when classes begin in late August.The churn is especially heavy at low-performing schools. A 2010 study showed that nearly two-thirds of Chicago’s struggling schools had three or more principals in the past decade.
But Kerlina, a baby-faced 39, is leaving Hearst, not a struggling school in a poor neighborhood. He’s also leaving education altogether after 17 years — to go into the gourmet cupcake business.

Usually, resignations and firings unfold in silence, with officials citing privacy laws and educators reluctant to burn bridges. But a series of interviews with Kerlina offers a rare view of D.C. reform from an insider talking out of school.

He said he is quitting a system that evaluates teachers but doesn’t support their growth, that knuckles under to unreasonable demands from parents, and that focuses excessively on recruiting neighborhood families to a school where most students come from outside the attendance zone.

Generally, people on the way out doen’t talk, but in his case, he’s leaving the biz, so describes the dysfunction in detail:

  • Teacher “accountability” with evaluations, but no meaningful training for teachers to be able to actually meet these standards.
  • Lack of support of principals when dealing with excessively demanding parents.  (Not so sympathetic on this one, as my wife and I are pretty demanding about getting our kids special ed needs addressed.)
  • That he was pressured to whiten his school.

Here is the money quote:

Kerlina signed on just as Rhee was rolling out the IMPACT evaluation system, which called for five classroom observations to assess criteria such as clarity of presentation, content knowledge and ability to teach children with varying skill levels. Some teachers would be held accountable for student growth on standardized tests. Those with poor evaluations were subject to dismissal.

It was a major change.Kerlina said he was surprised when he heard it would not be tried on a pilot basis, which was standard practice in Montgomery. He said he came to believe that the initiative offered virtually no provisions to help teachers improve.

“The reform, in my opinion, is getting rid of people,” he said.

It’s been very clear for a long time that Michelle Rhee was doing pump and dump on the DC Public Schools, she had no plan whatsoever on early childhood education, and her goal was to fire black administrators and teachers in the hope of bringing white students into the school, to create a bump in the test scores.

This is not education reform, this is private equity style asset stripping writ on the public schools.

OCC Gives Another Monica to the Banks

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How bad is this one?

It’s so bad that even Timothy Geithner’s Treasury Department finds it excessive:

The Treasury Department has unexpectedly allied with state regulators and consumer groups in their bid to force the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to dial back its preemption standards.

The Obama administration sent a letter to the OCC this week objecting to a proposal that said Dodd-Frank left preemption standards mostly unchanged. But Treasury said the OCC was ignoring Congressional intent.

“Although Congress adopted a specific preemption standard in Dodd-Frank, the OCC’s rule articulates a preemption standard that is broader than the language of the Dodd-Frank standard,” Treasury General Counsel George Madison wrote to the OCC.

It is relatively unusual for federal agencies to weigh in on another regulators’ proposal, but even more rare in this case. The OCC is nominally a bureau of Treasury, but the administration has only limited oversight of the agency.

At issue is language used by the OCC to preempt state consumer protection laws. The agency has said it can preempt laws that “obstruct, impair or condition” the business of banking.

But those words were not part of the 1996 Barnett Supreme Court decision, which Dodd-Frank said should be the preemption standard.

In a proposal issued May 26, the OCC dropped the controversial language, but still said its previous rulings stood intact.

In his letter, Treasury’s Madison said that did not make sense.

“The proposed rule validates all prior preemption determinations, including those based on its deleted ‘obstruct, impair or condition’ standard,” Madison wrote. “In our view, this position is contrary to Dodd-Frank.”

Madison said the OCC was trying to ignore the law.

(Emphasis mine)

The fact here is that the head of the OCC’s term ended some time ago, and Obama has allowed the position of the Comptroller of the Currency to remain unfilled, he has not even proposed a successor, and allowed Acting Comptroller of the Currency John Walsh to continue in office when a recess appointment could put someone in place who might actually be interested in, well, you know, regulating.

Seriously, recess appoint someone who is not a corrupt sellout.  Having the Treasury department call them names is not a proactive solution.

Silly Developing Nations, Don’t You Know that the IMF is for White People?

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So, Christine Lagarde has been appointed the new head of the IMF.

What striking about all this is how the powers that be have insisted that they need to have a European in charge, because of the current crises in the Euro zone.

Gee, no one ever said that when it was Indonesia, Mexico, Korea, Malaysia, etc., but once it’s the Euro’s head in the noose, suddenly we need to institute a affirmative action for white people legacy admissions program for the window office at a major international financial agency.

Not Enough Bullets

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Just who do you think that the World Bank would hire as their treasurer? Why it would be the chief risk officer for Lehman when it collapsed:

The World Bank has appointed Madelyn Antoncic as its new vice president and treasurer.

Ms Antoncic served as Lehman Brothers’ chief risk officer from 2002 to 2007 and following the collapse of the bank, stayed on for a year as managing director and senior advisor at the Lehman Estate, helping to maximise value for creditors.

Having begun her career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, she has worked for Goldman Sachs in various posts (including head of market risk management), and for Barclays Capital, before joining Lehman Brothers in 1999.

In her new role, Ms Antoncic will be responsible for maintaining the World Bank’s standing in financial markets and for managing an extensive client advisory, transaction, and asset management business.

Seriously, in the self dealing nepotistic and moronic world in which they live, there is literally nothing that a bankster can do,* that can prevent them from being given high profile high prestige jobs.

There are indications that she was opposed to Lehman’s high risk strategy, but she chose to stay, and get a do-nothing government relations position.

If she, as chief risk officer, was unwilling to leave when she saw what was going on, and she was frozen out, any organization that hires her as treasurer has absolutely no credibility at all.

It’s like putting Charlie Sheen in charge of your chastity and sobriety department.

This is why not prosecuting was such a bad idea. Like bad pennies, people like this keep coming back to do even more harm.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

*As long as you are white anyway. See the fall of Raj Raj Rajaratnam as an illustration.

Senators Call for OCC Head’s Removal

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After pimping for the big banks for the past few years, Acting Comptroller of the Currency John Walsh has finally become so blatant that 3 Senate Dems called for his removal:

On Tuesday, Acting Comptroller of the Currency John Walsh said regulators are in danger of going too far to curb risk-taking by big banks.

Now, some Democratic senators are calling for his head.

Three Senate Democrats – Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Carl Levin of Michigan and Jeff Merkley of Oregon – have publicly called for the White House to replace Mr. Walsh, a Republican, following his speech in London Tuesday.

The lawmakers were particularly rankled by Mr. Walsh’s statements that bank capital requirements – the cushion banks hold against future losses — are already “exceedingly high” and that regulators should be cautious about much more they require the largest banks to hold, something foreign and U.S. regulators are now negotiating.

“Mr. Walsh’s latest comments provide further evidence that he is not interested in leading an agency charged with ensuring the safety and soundness of our financial institutions,” Mr. Reed said in a statement. Mr. Reed, a senior member of the Senate Banking panel which oversees the OCC, went on to call for the Obama administration “to fundamentally re-think the OCC’s leadership and ensure that American taxpayers are never again on the hook for Wall Street’s misdeeds.”

Mr. Levin, who leads an investigative committee that investigated the 2008 financial crisis, said it is “past time for the president to nominate new leadership at the OCC to protect American families and businesses from the excesses of Wall Street.”

When Yves Smith wrote, “OCC Gives Banks Another Blow Job,”  she was spot on.

It was past time to ditch him, and for that matter, to ditch the whole OCC,  in January 2009, but he he’ll keep Walsh, for the same reason that Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner is Obama’s secretary of the treasury.

More Evidence That We Live in a Feudal Society

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This time, it’s the credit report bureaus who are practicing Droit du seigneur* on us without lube:

The credit rating bureaus, whose reports influence everything from credit cards to mortgages to job offers, have a two-tiered system for resolving errors — one for the rich, the well-connected, the well-known and the powerful, and the other for everyone else.

The three major agencies, Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, keep a V.I.P. list of sorts, according to consumer lawyers and legal documents, consisting of celebrities, politicians, judges and other influential people. Those on the list — and they may not even realize they are on it — get special help from workers in the United States in fixing mistakes on their credit reports. Any errors are usually corrected immediately, one lawyer said.

For everyone else, disputes are herded into a largely automated system. Their complaints are often electronically ferried to a subcontractor overseas, where a worker spends, on average, about two minutes figuring out the gist of the matter, boiling it down to a one-to-three-digit computer code that signifies the problem — “account not his/hers,” for example — and sending a dispute form to the creditor to investigate. Many times, consumer advocates say, the investigation translates to a perfunctory check of its records.

“The legal responsibility of the credit reporting agencies and of the creditors is well established,” said Leonard Bennett, a consumer lawyer in Newport News, Va. “There is a requirement that they do meaningful research and analysis, and it is almost never done.”

For the rest of us, it’s all just serfdom.

*Droit du seigneur is the apparently mythical practice of granting the lord of the manor the right to deflower new brides on their wedding night.

This is the Legacy of Arne Duncan

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You know, the guy who ran the Chicago schools, and was chosen to run the Department of Education, where he has gone full in on bashing teachers supporting the for-profit educational industrial complex.

Well. I’m not sure if he set the tone in the Chicago School district, or was just a product of it, but the fact that the Chicago Public Schools froze teacher salaries while jacking up pay for senior executives:

Though they voted last week to rescind four percent pay raises for teachers and union school workers, the Chicago Board of Education today is expected to approve salaries for the newly installed Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other top executives that, by and large, mark substantial increases over their predecessors’ pay.

As the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday, Brizard’s base salary – $250,000 – tops former CPS head Ron Huberman’s salary by $20,000 – and is the highest pay rate for any city executive excluding the city’s new police chief, Garry McCarthy. It is also an annual salary nearly $40,000 higher than the head of New York City’s school system, though less than the public schools chiefs in Los Angeles and other cities.

Salaries for the other four executives are less dramatic, but still more than their Daley administration predecessors. New Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, who is slated to rake in $195,000, is making $2,150 more than the former education officer. New Chief of Staff Andrea Saenz, who will be paid $165,000 annually, is making $49,000 more than those who came before. CPS chief administrative officer Tim Cawley and communications officer Becky Carroll are slated to take in $35,833 and $34,617 base salary increases over their Daley counterparts, earning $215,000 and $165,000 salaries respectively.

So their goal is to make American schools more like the banks.

They sh%$ on the workers, and extract as much money as possible out of the enterprise to overpay the incompetent rat-f%$#s in charge.

Wanker of the Day

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David Streitfeld, a reporter for the New York Times just released an article
claiming a 62 year backlog of foreclosures.

The problem is that the story is based on fairly bogus stats, and the source of the stats, and for that matter, the source of pretty much the entire story, is Lender Processing Services (LPS), which is currently the target of multiple lawsuits, for defrauding investors, and (literally!!!!) having a price sheet on the web for forged documents through its DocX subsidiary (some background here)

So, this guy took a press release from what is allegedly one of the most corrupt and criminal organizations involved in the mortgage mess and phoned in an article.

Time for a blogger ethics panel.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Fortas Was Forced to Resign for Less Than Thomas Did

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Of course, the Nixon justice department was willing to threaten to file a bogus prosecution against his wife to grease the skids, but Clarence Thomas relationship with right wing real-estate developer, who bankrolled his charities and his wife’s lobbying job:

Clarence Thomas was here promoting his memoir a few years ago when he bumped into Algernon Varn, whose grandfather once ran a seafood cannery that employed Justice Thomas’s mother as a crab picker.

Mr. Varn lived at the old cannery site, a collection of crumbling buildings on a salt marsh just down the road from a sign heralding this remote coastal community outside Savannah as Justice Thomas’s birthplace. The justice asked about plans for the property, and Mr. Varn said he hoped it could be preserved.

“And Clarence said, ‘Well, I’ve got a friend I’m going to put you in touch with,’ ” Mr. Varn recalled, adding that he was later told by others not to identify the friend.

The publicity-shy friend turned out to be Harlan Crow, a Dallas real estate magnate and a major contributor to conservative causes. Mr. Crow stepped in to finance the multimillion-dollar purchase and restoration of the cannery, featuring a museum about the culture and history of Pin Point that has become a pet project of Justice Thomas’s.

The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.

So he paid Thomas’ wife’s salary, set up a museum that is an homage to Clarence Thomas, and gave free access to his private jet, as well as gifting him a $19,000 bible, and putting him up at “retreats” (Want some more caviar with your Dom Perignon?) ……… Nothing to see here, move along.

And then there was a $15,000 gift from the American Enterprise Institute, a frequent amicus filer in Supreme Court cases ……… America, what a country.

BTW, some background on comparisons between Clarence Thomas and Abe Fortas here.

BTW, the point person in the House of Representatives on Thomas’ethical lapses was Anthony Weiner ……… Imagine that.

Finally, Some Legislative Pushback on Patent Trolls

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You know that it gets weird when the banksters are on the side of the good guys:

For years and much to their frustration, big banks have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to a tiny Texas company to use a patented system for processing digital copies of checks, making Claudio Ballard, the inventor of the system, a wealthy man and the bank industry’s biggest patent foe.

After years of fighting Mr. Ballard at the federal Patent Office, in court and across a negotiating table, the banks went to see one of their best friends in Congress, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who inserted into a patent overhaul bill a provision that appears largely aimed at helping banks rid themselves of the Ballard problem. The Senate passed the bill easily in March.

The proposal would allow banks to get a federal re-examination of certain patents that they have been accused of infringing, specifically limited to “a financial product or service.” The language is now included in a bill that may come to a vote in the House of Representatives as early as Wednesday. While at least two House members have moved to strip the provision from the bill, bank lobbyists have worked hard to defeat previous attempts to remove it.

Mr. Schumer and the Financial Services Roundtable, a business group that pushed the measure, say the provision is not focused on any one company but more broadly at “meritless litigation over patents of dubious quality,” as Steve Bartlett, the president of the Roundtable, said at a House hearing.

The depressing fact is that this is just a lobbying power play, rather than a realization that IP in all forms is about benefiting society, and  not about determining who gets an undeserved payoff that they can use to make campaign donations.

Business patents, gene patents, and software patents, do not serve to encourage innovation, they simply create government sanctioned monopolies, and the profits generated has now seized the political process.