Category: Corruption

More Like George W. Bush Every Day

No Comments

Barack Obama ignored the formal opinions of senior professional legal staff in the Department of Justice on the Libya campaign:

President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, had told the White House that they believed that the United States military’s activities in the NATO-led air war amounted to “hostilities.” Under the War Powers Resolution, that would have required Mr. Obama to terminate or scale back the mission after May 20.

But Mr. Obama decided instead to adopt the legal analysis of several other senior members of his legal team — including the White House counsel, Robert Bauer, and the State Department legal adviser, Harold H. Koh — who argued that the United States military’s activities fell short of “hostilities.” Under that view, Mr. Obama needed no permission from Congress to continue the mission unchanged.

Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.

If there is a defining legacy of the Obama administration, it may be in the formalization of the Nixonian principle that if the President does it, regardless of the settled law, it’s legal.

Perhaps it’s time to dispense with our unique form of government, and move to a parliamentary one, because if there are no constraints on the executive beyond elections, then the political system must be able to force elections at times like this.

Pass the Popcorn

No Comments

Two of former Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich’s aides have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate Maryland election laws and obstruction of justice relating to robocalls, sent out before polls closed, that suggested that people stay home, because “Governor O’Malley and President Obama have been successful”.

It would be interesting to see what happens if one of them is flipped by prosecutors.

While I don’t think that Bad Hair Bob was involved, he’s really too stupid to be involved in such a plan, I can see his wife, Kendel, giving some sort of assent to the plan.

They Went After Juan Cole?

No Comments

The New York Times has discovered that Bush and His Evil Minions™ set the CIA on distinguished professor, and well known blogger, Juan Cole:

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

In an interview, Mr. Carle said his supervisor at the National Intelligence Council told him in 2005 that White House officials wanted “to get” Professor Cole, and made clear that he wanted Mr. Carle to collect information about him, an effort Mr. Carle rebuffed. Months later, Mr. Carle said, he confronted a C.I.A. official after learning of another attempt to collect information about Professor Cole. Mr. Carle said he contended at the time that such actions would have been unlawful.

It is not clear whether the White House received any damaging material about Professor Cole or whether the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies ever provided any information or spied on him. Mr. Carle said that a memorandum written by his supervisor included derogatory details about Professor Cole, but that it may have been deleted before reaching the White House. Mr. Carle also said he did not know the origins of that information or who at the White House had requested it.

And just in case you are wondering if he is a disgruntled spy who went to the Times, he isn’t. The Times came to him:

Mr. Carle, who retired in 2007, has not previously disclosed his allegations. He did so only after he was approached by The New York Times, which learned of the episode elsewhere. While Mr. Carle, 54, has written a book to be published next month about his role in the interrogation of a terrorism suspect, it does not include his allegations about the White House’s requests concerning the Michigan professor.

My money is on it being someone in Dick Cheney’s office, because it smells like Cheney.

Daniel Ellsburg Says the Most Depressing Thing This Century

No Comments

When he notes that all the crimes committed against him, crimes which were a significant part of the impeachment case that drove Richard M. Nixon from office under threat of impeachment, are now legal:

Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)

He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.

That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst’s office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to “incapacitate me totally” (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama’s executive orders. they have all become legal.

There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon’s bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years.

Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three).

He could only admire Obama’s boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA. [ED Note:  The Drake Case Collapsed, and the government settled on a plea for a no-jail-time misdemeanor]

Drake’s trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend.

While the erosions of civil liberties began under Reagan, and picked up steam under Bush II, it’s clear that that Obama has devoted the power and prestige of his office to further expanding the role of the Presidency and normalizing what are extreme views of executive power.

Obama is like Nixon, without the charm.

Crap

No Comments

On a party line vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has reinstated Scott Walker’s union busting law:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, just hours before a deadline imposed by state legislative Republicans, just reinstated the anti-union law which a district court judge had blocked because it violated state open meetings requirements. They made the novel interpretation that those requirements don’t apply to the legislature.

The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.

The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices – Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks – concurred in part and dissented in part.

Not that I have to tell you this, but the four who signed the majority opinion were all nominated by Republicans, while the three who dissented were all nominated by Democrats.

I now expect the court to find a way to stop the recall elections.

IOKIYAR*

No Comments

So John Edwards has been indicted for potential misuse of campaign funds to hide his affair, but the Department of Justice, despite the the fact that the normally weaselly Senate Ethics Committee was seriously considering expulsion, and referred their files to the DoJ for a criminal investigation, appears to be doing nothing:

“There is no question that I have done wrong,” John Edwards said Friday in front of the North Carolina courtroom where he pleaded not guilty to six counts of violating federal campaign laws. “I take full responsibility for having done wrong.”

But, Edwards said, he did not violate federal law.

“I will regret for the rest of my life the pain and the harm that I have done,” the former Democratic presidential candidate said, “but I did not break the law and I never, ever thought I was breaking the law.

Compare that to the web of conspiracy and money laundering that Senators Ensign and Coburn engaged in, and one begins to wonder why the DoJ is so hands off on that.

My only answer is that Reagan, Bush, and Bush spend an awful lot of time politicizing the Justice Department, and we are now harvesting the fruits of this.

*It’s OK If You Are A Republican.

Now the New York Times is Calling it a Coverup

No Comments
Click for full size

Round up the Usual Suspects

Specifically, they note that in the matter of indicted trader Fabrice Tourre, it appears that he is being singled out as a scape goat, while the SEC is studiously ignoring the fact that he was acting in pretty much the same way as everyone else at Goldman Sachs:

Hundreds of employees worked closely in teams, devising mortgage-based securities — billions of dollars’ worth — that were examined by lawyers, approved by management, then sold to investors like hedge funds, commercial banks and insurance companies.

At one trading desk sat Fabrice Tourre, a midlevel 28-year-old Frenchman who was little known not just outside Goldman but even inside the firm. That changed three years later, in 2010, when he achieved the dubious distinction of becoming the only individual at Goldman and across Wall Street sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for helping to sell a mortgage-securities investment, in one of the hundreds of mortgage deals created during the bubble years.

How Mr. Tourre alone came to be the face of mortgage-securities fraud has raised questions among former prosecutors and Congressional officials about how aggressive and thorough the government’s investigations have been into Wall Street’s role in the mortgage crisis.

The tell here is the fact that he was set up by Goldman, and the SEC, as a patsie is the fact that he was told that he had to use a Goldman Sachs lawyer to represent himself:

In April 2010, when the S.E.C. filed its case against the bank and Mr. Tourre, the young banker told friends that he believed Goldman had been chosen to be the commission’s “case study,” according to several who spoke on the condition that they not be identified. The friends also said they were concerned that Mr. Tourre’s dependence on Goldman for advice and legal counsel was not in his best interest.

In September 2009, for instance, Mr. Tourre told friends he thought he had to use a lawyer from a list of lawyers at three firms that Goldman gave him.

Robert Follie, a lawyer in Paris, said Mr. Tourre told him he was not authorized to use lawyers other than those Goldman selected. Mr. Follie said he cautioned Mr. Tourre that his interests might diverge from Goldman’s, so he should consider hiring his own counsel.

“As a practitioner, I mentioned to him that I felt the risk in the long run was that the lawyer who was acting for him might end up in a near conflict-of-interest situation,” Mr. Follie, whose daughter is friends with Mr. Tourre, said in an interview last December.

After the S.E.C. case was filed in summer 2010, Mr. Follie wondered how Mr. Tourre had wound up as the only defendant. “I felt that somewhere down the line, he must have done or not done the proper things to get out of this. I was personally wondering if he had sufficient representation disassociated from Goldman,” he said.

Mr. van Praag, the Goldman spokesman, said the bank did not impose lawyers on its workers and had not done so on Mr. Tourre. He said that “ultimately the decision is for the individual and counsel to determine whether they are right for each other.”

Well, Mr. van Praag, if that is in fact your real name, I am sure that Goldman management worked scrupulously to ensure that there was no paper trail of them instructing Tourre to take a lawyer who worked for them instead of him, but that is a far cry from what any honest employer would do.

Vampire Squid Subpoenaed

No Comments

It sounds like a big deal:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the fifth- biggest U.S. bank by assets, was subpoenaed by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office for information on the firm’s activities leading into the credit crisis, two people familiar with the matter said.

The subpoena relates to the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report on Wall Street’s role in the collapse of the financial markets, which accused New York- based Goldman Sachs of misleading buyers of mortgage-linked investments, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry isn’t public.

But it isn’t, because even the most overzealous prosecutor out there, and Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, Jr. is not one of those, would be told in no uncertain terms that any prosecution would destroy our economy, and so it would result in their own destruction (See Spitzer, Eliot) so it will just be a few bucks in fines, and no admission of wrong-doing.

Christie Blinks

No Comments

After claiming that there was no need to reimburse the state for taking a state helicopter to watch his son play baseball (see earlier post), because the pilots need the hours to maintain their current rating, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has agreed to reimburse the state for the cost of the flight:

Reversing course, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reimbursed the state for personal and political travel on a state police helicopter, including a trip to meet with Republicans urging him to consider a presidential run.
Christie, a Republican, personally paid the state treasury $2,151.50 for his use of the chopper on two occasions in the last week to attend his son’s games in a state baseball tournament.

I don’t think that Christie, and his fans amongst the press and the Washington, DC crowd, realize just damaging this will be for him.

First, of course, is the whole “tight with a dollar, unless it applies to him” bit, but the second, and possibly more important, thing is that this lets the air out of his political personae as a “tough guy”, and reveals him to be a just another bully who has no guts when push comes to shove.

If the voters of New Jersey did not get that before, perhaps they do so now.

Another Obama Cave

No Comments

And this time it’s the for profit colleges, who pretend to educate, or at least credential, people:

The Department of Education on Wednesday tightened its regulation of for-profit colleges and other vocational programs that get billions of dollars in federal aid but leave many students with crushing debt and credentials worth little on the job market.

Under the new rules, programs would lose their eligibility to dispense federal student aid — and as a practical matter, be shut down — if, over the next four years, their graduates fail to meet new benchmarks for loan repayment and ratio of debt to income. But amid intense lobbying by the for-profit college industry and pressure from Republican lawmakers, the department significantly eased the rules from an earlier draft: officials said, for example, that no program would lose eligibility until 2015.

“We believe that very few programs will be forcibly closed by our standards,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “We want to give people a chance to reform. As a country, we need this sector to succeed. This is not about ‘gotcha.’ ”

These rules, which try to define how such programs prepare students for “gainful employment,” have been the hardest-fought issue in the debate over exploitive and fraudulent practices in the industry. The colleges and their allies spent $12 million lobbying against the rules since the start of 2010, and this spring, the House passed a budget amendment that would have blocked the department’s work on them. The rules were supposed to be issued last summer, but were delayed after the Education Department received a record 90,000 comments on its draft proposal.

What does this mean? Let’s see what the market thinks:

For-profit colleges rallied as the U.S. Education Department gave the industry more time to comply with rules that will cut off federal aid to institutions whose students struggle the most to repay their government loans.

ITT Educational Services Inc. (ESI) soared 21 percent to $85.67. Career Education Corp. (CECO) rose 5.4 percent to $24.10. Strayer Education Inc. (STRA) gained 19 percent to $144.95. Apollo Group Inc. (APOL) advanced 11 percent to $46.90. DeVry Inc. (DV) rose 15 percent to $61.86.

Corinthian Colleges Inc. (COCO) jumped 27 percent to $5.06. Education Management Corp. (EDMC) increased 22 percent to $24.76. Grand Canyon Education Inc. (LOPE) advanced 9 percent to $13.97. Bridgepoint Education Inc. (BPI) rose 3.4 percent to $24.48. Capella Education Co. (CPLA) climbed 3.3 percent to $49.58.

Washington Post Co. (WPO) , owner of the Kaplan for- profit education business, advanced 5 percent to $426.42.

It’s pretty clear that they took meaningful rules, and gutted them, probably because they figure that a good way to get a bit closer to their $1 billion goal for campaign donations in 2012.

So real reform is replaced with phony reform.  How Hopey Changey.

JoAnne Kloppenberg Concedes Wisconsin Supreme Court Race

No Comments

She made some noises about electoral reforms in the unspecified future, but absent an adversarial proceeding with full discovery, i.e. a full legal challenge which she eschewed, it’s not gonna happen.

If the election were just about a difference in philosophy, as opposed to the explicit statements by David Prosser that he would specifically support Scott Walker’s agenda, perhaps there could be an excuse for playing nice, but in this case there is no such excuse.

There were clearly extensive and pervasive irregularities, particularly in Waukesha County, and even in a losing effort, exposing the corruption and incompetence of that county clerk is an independent good that any officer of the court should pursue.

Feh on her.

What is it With ‘Phants Governors and Helos?

No Comments
Click for full size

Not Just a Helo, but a Big MoFo Helo

First, it was Jane Swift, and now everyone’s Republican asshole “it” girl Chris Christie, who took a state police medevac helicopter to his son’s baseball game, so that he could get back in time to talk with some wealthy Iowa donors:

A brand-new State Police helicopter was Gov. Chris Christie’s ride of choice yesterday as he traveled to and from his son’s baseball game in Bergen County.

His office won’t say where he came from or where he went afterward. But about an hour and 10 minutes after leaving the game, Christie arrived, by car, at the governor’s mansion in Princeton to meet with a group of Iowa businessmen trying to recruit him for a presidential run.

The use of state helicopters has opened New Jersey governors to criticism for decades, especially when it did not involve official state business.

“It is a means of transportation that is occasionally used as the schedule demands. This has historically been the case in prior administrations as well, and we continue to be judicious in limiting its use,” said Christie’s spokesman Michael Drewniak in an e-mail. He declined to answer additional questions.

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, right, “Judiciious in limiting its use.”

It gets better though, that fat f%$# couldn’t even be bothered to walk from where he landed to the ball park:

As the game at St. Joseph Regional High School in Montvale was about to begin, a noise from above distracted the spectators who watched the 55-foot-long helicopter buzz over the trees in left field, circle the outfield and land in an adjacent football field. Christie left the helicopter and got into a black car with tinted windows that drove him about 100 yards to the baseball field. The governor watched from the bleachers as his eldest son, Andrew, played starting catcher for Delbarton School. Christie played the position of catcher in high school as well.

He’s governor after all, you cannot let his foot touch the ground.

The thing here is that Christie has a long history of this sort of crap, 4 star hotels, buying off people that he’s run down going the wrong way on a one way street, etc.

Of course, while he was running for governor, the press ignored this, so one wonders whether he’s going to finally lose the undeserved man crush that they have on him.

I Got Nothing, Roll Jon Stewart

No Comments

Over the past few days, it appears that Congressman Anthony Weiner has been fingered* as having sent a picture of his package (underwear clad) on Twitter.

The evidence, as near as I can tell is that someone, with the active aid of right wing Rat F%$#er Andrew Breitbart, is Rat F%$#ing, because that is what Rat F%$#ers do.

Basically, I have nothing to add beyond what Jon Stewart, who actually swam with Weiner in his Younger days, and notes that his recollection is that, “This cat had a lot more Anthony and a lot less weiner.”

Just watch it.

I so envy The Daily Show writing staff.
*Pun not intended.

The DoJ Has Been Thoroughly Politicized by Republicans Since 1980

No Comments

Investigative reporter Murray Waas, has a rundown of John Ensign’s law breaking, and the fact that the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute him, or Tom Coburn, who is hip deep in the web of back door payoffs, coverups, and a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

But, as Nicole Belle observes, they have still found time to indict John Edwards for paying off a mistress.

What we need to understand here is that since Ronald Reagan, successive Republican administrations have done their level best to politicize the DoJ, and it’s worked.

The professional staff of the Justice Department is no longer professional.

I do not know what the fix is, but Obama’s decision to allow 2nd rate political hacks from the Bush administration to remain on staff, even though civil service regulations were flouted, was exactly the wrong thing to do.

And It Will End With “Settled Without Any Admission of Wrongdoing”

No Comments

Because, notwithstanding the recent move by the CFTC to sue oil speculators for market manipulation, I do not believe that there will be a vigorous investigation of criminal wrongdoing by any arm of the Obama administration.

Still, when I read this:

After oil prices surged past $100 a barrel in 2008, suspicions that traders had manipulated the market led to Congressional hearings and regulatory investigations. But they produced no solid cases in the record run-up in gasoline prices.

But on Tuesday, federal commodities regulators filed a civil lawsuit against two obscure traders in Australia and California and three American and international firms.

The suit says that in early 2008 they tried to hoard nearly two-thirds of the available supply of a crucial American market for crude oil, then abruptly dumped it and improperly pocketed $50 million.

The regulators from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission would not say whether the agency was conducting any other investigations into oil speculation. With oil prices climbing again this year, President Obama has asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to set up a working group to look into fraud in oil and gas markets and “safeguard against unlawful consumer harm.”

In the case filed Tuesday, the defendants — James T. Dyer of Australia, Nicholas J. Wildgoose of Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., and three related companies, Parnon Energy of California, Arcadia Petroleum of Britain and Arcadia Energy, a Swiss company — have told regulators they deny they manipulated the market.

If the United States proves the claims, the defendants may give up $50 million in profits that were believed to be made as a result of the manipulation and also pay a penalty of up to $150 million.

The commodities agency says the case involves a complex scheme that relied on the close relationship between physical oil prices and the prices of financial futures, which move in parallel.

In a matter of a few weeks in January 2008, the defendants built up large positions in the oil futures market on exchanges in New York and London, according to the suit, filed in the Federal Court in the Southern District of New York.

At the same time, they bought millions of barrels of physical crude oil at Cushing, Okla., one of the main delivery sites for West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for American oil, the suit says. They bought the oil even though they had no commercial need for it, giving the market the impression of a shortage, the complaint says. 

It made me smile.

Remember, It’s Only Censorship if It’s a Government

No Comments

So Murdoch owned Sky Italia dropping Current TV because it hired Keith Olbermann:

Former Vice President Al Gore’s Current TV cable network has claimed Rupert Murdoch’s Italian satellite TV company dropped the network in Italy because it hired liberal politics news anchor Keith Olbermann.

Imagine that.

If there is a lesson to the travails of Silvio Berlusconi, it is that private unregulated mass media outlets are a cancer on democracy, and Rupert Murdoch is just another example of this.

Matt Taibbi is Wrong

4 Comments

This Ain’t a “Pass the Popcorn” moment

Matt Taibbi notes that Eric Schneiderman, the New York State Attorney General is investigating irregularities in securitization of mortgage loans, and he is doing a happy dance at what looks like slam dunk at a real investigation, and prosecution, of the malefactors at the center of the financial crisis:

This investigation has the potential to be a Mother of All Nightmares situation for the banks for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the decision to go after the securitization process is a total prosecutorial bullseye. This is the ugly heart of the wide-scale fraud scheme of the bubble era. Again, the business model during this time was a giant bait-and-switch scam. Sleazy lenders like Countrywide and New Century first created huge masses of bad loans, committing every conceivable kind of fraud to get people into loans (from doctoring income statements with white-out to phonying FICO scores to engineering fake appraisals). They then moved the bad loans quickly to the big banks, which pooled them and chopped them up (this is the “securitization” process), sprinkled hocus-pocus math on them, and them sold them to suckers around the world as AAA-rated securities.

The questions Schneiderman will seek to answer are these: did the banks securitize loans they knew were fraudulent, throwing the rotten mortgages into the stew before serving them to customers? Did they also commit insurance fraud by duping the bond insurers (known as “monoline” insurers) into thinking the mortgages were not as risky as they really were? And did they participate in the fraud scheme on a more basic level by lending huge amounts of money to the Countrywides of the world, knowing that they in turn would immediately use that money to create the bad loans? In other words, did the banks finance the fraud in addition to brokering it?

(emphasis original)

He’s right on the basic facts, but he’s wrong on what happens next.

There very well may be a settlement, with no admission of wrongdoing, but in terms for real consequences towards the Vampire Squid and the rest of the universe on Wall Street, nothing meaningful is going to happen.

Either the Feds get involved, and block Schneiderman, or he gets destroyed like Eliot Spitzer was, or he, or the state of New York, gets bought off, but we are not going to see the laws applied to people like this, despite pervasive criminality involved, because we live in their world, and they just rent it back to us.

Here Is a Shocker

No Comments

The Registrar of Deeds for Guilford County, North Carolina, Greensboro and environs, after hearing horror stories about fraudulent loans, decided to go through his own deeds, and went through all the deeds transferred from 2006 to 2010.

The results? That in a cursory examination, well over half of the deeds were in some manner fraudulent:

But Jeff Thigpen, the register of deeds in Guilford County, North Carolina, a county of about 465,000 in the center of the state (the largest city is Greensboro), decided to survey all the mortgage documents submitted to his office by DocX, a notorious “mortgage mill” that processes documents on behalf of lenders, between August 2006 and April 2010. He was inspired by a 60 Minutes investigation revealing numerous forgeries, backdating, and other false information on mortgage documents. “When I saw that [story], I was basically on fire,” Thigpen says. “‘I know this material is in my office, I’ve got to find it, I’ve got to get it out.'”

Out of the 6,100 documents Thigpen examined, 4,500 showed signature irregularities. The name of one DocX employee, Linda Green, who was acting as a vice president for several major banks, was forged 15 different ways on the Guilford County documents, rendering them invalid. Thigpen’s investigation was one of the first systematic assessments of mortgage document fraud in the entire country, certainly more robust than anything conducted by state and federal regulators.

Thigpen, as well as his Essex County equivalent John O’Brien, have been making as much of a stink as they can about this, they have asked the Iowa Attorney General, Tom Miller, to hold off on his proposed national settlement pending a real investigation. (some older posts here)

That would be the right thing to do, of course, but considering the fact that Miller is angling for some sort of position in the Obama administration, and the Obama administration is as interested in pursuing the banks for wrong doing as they are in pursuing Dick Cheney for outing a CIA agent, I don’t expect that there will ever be a meaningful investigation of Bankster wrongdoing.

Is Angela Merkel the George W. Bush of the Eu?

No Comments

It appears that Ms. Merkel doesn’t realize that she’s not bailing out the Greeks, she’s bailing out the German banks who are owed the money, but she’s still being a hard-ass and virtually assuring that we will see defaults, as well as worsening social unrest:

Also at issue was the technical operation of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the permanent euro zone bailout fund due to come into force in mid-2013.

As ministers prepared to tackle the increasingly precarious financial situation in Greece, Dr Merkel made clear her resistance to any debt restructuring by the country.

Addressing students in Berlin, Dr Merkel said private sovereign creditors should not bear losses until the ESM starts its work.

“It would raise incredible doubts of our credibility if we simply were to change the rules in the middle of the first programme,” Dr Merkel said.

The rise in dissatisfaction with the EU, and the rise on nationalistic, and frequently xenophobic, parties in the EU is a direct result of the fact that it is being run as a support group for the banks, who, after all, were the ones who f%$#ed up everything in the first place.

I stick with my original statement on the Euro Zone: the country that needs to leave is not any of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain), but Germany, which has increasingly seen the Euro as a way to artificially deflate its currency for export purposes, both within and outside of the EU.

They are a predatory exporter, only marginally better than China.

John ensign

No Comments

First, his former best friend, and the husband of the woman that John Ensign f%$#ed, Doug Hampton, has been indicted for violating lobbying laws and conflict of interest laws.

The could get interesting if he decides to drop a dime on Ensign and the rest of his co-conspirators.

It does appear though that John Ensign is incredibly busted, since the normally toothless Senate Ethics committee voted to make a criminal referral to the DoJ, and the special prosecutor they appointed to investigated recommended that he be expelled from the Senate.

BTW, speaking of co-conspirators, it appears that Senator Coburn was hip deep in negotiating the specifics of the payoffs to Hampton and his wife.

Assuming that the Department of Justice has the stomach for it pulling on this string* will unravel a lot more than just a Senator boinking a staffer.

Pass the popcorn.

*I think that they don’t because of their mishandling of the Ted Stevens prosecution and because of a general Obama administration policy to let things slide when they involve Republican law breaking.