Category: Corruption

Not Enough Bullets: CEO Pay Disclosure Edition

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What Cee Lo Green Said (NSFW)

It looks like the overpaid CEOs have decided that telling shareholders just how overpaid they are is an unreasonable burden:

US companies face a “logistical nightmare” from a new rule forcing them to disclose the ratio between their chief executive’s pay package and that of the typical employee, lawyers have warned.

The mandatory disclosure will provide ammunition for activists seeking to target perceived examples of excessive pay and perks. The law taps into public anger at the increasing disparity between the faltering incomes of middle America and the largely recession-proof multimillion-dollar remuneration of the typical corporate chief.

S&P 500 chief executives last year received median pay packages of $7.5m, according to executive compensation research firm Equilar. By comparison, official statistics show the average private sector employee was paid just over $40,000.

If you cannot determine the number of employees, and your total payroll (total payroll $/number of employees=average pay) in under 10 minutes, then you aren’t doing your f^%$ing job.

Yes, I know that the actual number is the median salary, so that should only take 15 minutes.

The real problem is not the ratio, it’s that they don’t want the shareholders, who, you know, actually own the damn company, to know how much they are getting paid.

It’s f%$#s like this that make me say to people, “If you plan on going postal, take out upper management first.”

Tom Delay to Be Tried for Corruption in Austin

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He had asked for a change of venue, on the grounds that Austin was “too liberal,”but the judge decided that he could have a fair trial in Travis County, and ruled against moving the trial.

Honestly, thee did not pass the laugh test, but I understand why the defense tried it, it loses them nothing if they lose.

You move a trial when excessive pre-trial publicity taints the jury pool, not because they voted for the other party, and Delay’s corruption got no more coverage in Austin than it did anywhere else.

I’m not sure how this will turn out, but according to the good folks at Talk Left, they are not particularly impressed with Travis County DA (TX law has most corruption prosecutions being conducted by the DA for the Austin area), Donnie Earle, and Delay’s lawyer, Dick DeGuerin, is very good.

Presumption of innocence be damned, this is a man well deserving of a couple of decades of jail time.

Appeals Court Denies Federal Reserve Coverup Bid

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Bloomberg filed a freedom of information act request to get information on the Fed’s bailout of banks and other financial institutions about 2 years ago, and true to form, their response to a perfectly reasonable request for information has been delay and litigation.

They lost at the circuit level, and they lost at the appeals court level, and now the appeals court has denied them an en banc rehearing, so unless the Supreme court deigns to hear the case, they are going to have to turn over the information:

The Federal Reserve will have to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court if it wants to avoid having to disclose details of its emergency lending programs to banks bailed out with taxpayer money during the financial crisis.

The U.S. 2d Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Fed’s motion on Friday to rehear the case in which Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News and News Corp’s Fox News Network sought information on the U.S. central bank’s emergency lending programs that began in late 2007.

The programs, designed to shore up the financial markets, more than doubled the Fed’s balance sheet to well over $2 trillion, especially in the wake of the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.

I am not sure how much of this is just the fetish that the Federal Reserve has for secrecy, and how much is an attempt to cover up behaviors which might be illegal or otherwise appear corrupt.

My guess is that it is a bit of both.

But in either case, absent the Supreme Court taking this up, it appears that we may have some very dull reading of some rather interesting events over the next few months.

Older posts on this are here.

Just how Broken is Our Government?

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Well, how about a lobbying group brazenly using its ability to bribe members of Congress in an attempt to get an industry to target its own customers with onerous positions:

The Recording Industry Association of America said on Monday that current U.S. copyright law is so broken that it “isn’t working” for content creators any longer.

RIAA President Cary Sherman said the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act contains loopholes that allow broadband providers and Web companies to turn a blind eye to customers’ unlawful activities without suffering any legal consequences.

…………

This seems like innocuous whine, the sort that we have heard from the RIAA, the MPAA, the BSA for years, but it’s the threat that caught my eye:

In response to a question from CNET, Sherman said it may be necessary for the U.S. Congress to enact a new law formalizing agreements with intermediaries such as broadband providers, Web hosts, payment processors, and search engines.

The RIAA would strongly prefer informal agreements inked with intermediaries, Sherman said: “We’re working on [discussions with broadband providers], and we’d like to extend that kind of relationship–not just to ISPs, but [also to] search engines, payment processors, advertisers.”

But, Sherman said, “if legislation is an appropriate way to facilitate that kind of cooperation, fine.”

The basic attitude here is that they can ask Congress to jump, and the only response will be the query, “how high?”

It is a revolting state of affairs.

It should be noted that RIAA chief Cary Sherman later “clarified”, saying that, “A broader law enacted without their cooperation isn’t what the RIAA wants,” which really more a restatement of the the threat than anything else.

I hope that attitudes toward IP, and IP absolutism, are changing slowly. It seems to me that they are, largely as a result of the Blackberry case, when a patent troll nearly shut down the Blackberries in the US, in fact RIM’s inability to separate commercial users from government users is in large part why the troll finally settled, they realized that judges deprived of their “Crackberries” can get stroppy.

Fire Him Now

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I understand that Marine Corps Commandant is retiring in just a few months, but he needs to be fired right now, and lose his pension:

A senior US general has warned President Barack Obama’s deadline to begin pulling troops out of Afghanistan is encouraging the Taliban.

US General James Conway, head of the US Marine Corps, said the deadline was “giving our enemy sustenance”.

Obviously, unlike McCrystal, this isn’t staffers, or the general, denigrating POTUS, this is something far worse. This is a Douglas McCarthur on Korea moment.

This was not an inadvertent slip, this was a deliberate statement made at a Pentagon press conference.

Actually, I would suggest that a criminal investigation of insubordination is called for.

I don’t expect Obama to man up on this one, but the Pentagon has become increasingly hostile to the concept of civilian authority, and this needs to be ended.

No, They Are Cruel People*

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I enjoy reading Felix Salmon, and I generally agree with him, but a few days ago, he had a high level and sort of (no names) off the record briefing senior Treasury Department officials, including Timmy, and they revealed that the failure that is HAMP is actually a success because by stringing desperate home owners along, they managed to milk a few more mortgage payments, and delay foreclosures for a while:

Treasury told Waldman — and told my group of bloggers, too — that HAMP, even if it was a failure, was a success. It might not have helped much in terms of its ostensible stated aim of permanently modifying millions of home loans. But it did help in at least three other ways: it gave temporary tax and payment relief to millions of homeowners; it massively reduced the rate at which homeowners in default were being foreclosed on; and, in the words of Waldman, “it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock”.

We had to save the banks, so if we destroyed a few lives, it was worth it. This is contemptible.

Maybe Andrew Breitbart should cover this, that would get Geithner fired, because Obama trembles at Breitbart’s fury.

Truth be told though, the definitive account is by Steve Waldman, and his account of this exchange is even more damning:

The conversation next turned to housing and HAMP. On HAMP, officials were surprisingly candid. The program has gotten a lot of bad press in terms of its Kafka-esque qualification process and its limited success in generating mortgage modifications under which families become able and willing to pay their debt. Officials pointed out that what may have been an agonizing process for individuals was a useful palliative for the system as a whole. Even if most HAMP applicants ultimately default, the program prevented an outbreak of foreclosures exactly when the system could have handled it least. There were murmurs among the bloggers of “extend and pretend”, but I don’t think that’s quite right. This was extend-and-don’t-even-bother-to-pretend. The program was successful in the sense that it kept the patient alive until it had begun to heal. And the patient of this metaphor was not a struggling homeowner, but the financial system, a.k.a. the banks. Policymakers openly judged HAMP to be a qualified success because it helped banks muddle through what might have been a fatal shock. I believe these policymakers conflate, in full sincerity, incumbent financial institutions with “the system”, “the economy”, and “ordinary Americans”. Treasury officials are not cruel people. I’m sure they would have preferred if the program had worked out better for homeowners as well. But they have larger concerns, and from their perspective, HAMP has helped to address those.

(emphasis mine)

I think that he is wrong. They are cruel people, and they are evil people, and they know the evil that they do, but they think that the preservation of Wall Street, and its excessive bonuses to be worth perpetrating a fraud on desperate families grasping at straws.

These people were drowning, and they knowingly threw them anvils.

*That is what Atrios said.

Yeah, Sure, Nothing to See Here

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Tell Me That You Do Not Believe That This is a Setup

So, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange goes to Sweden to setup a server, because Swedish laws, and the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness) in the constitution, as well as an offer from the Swedish Pirate Party to host for him.

Wouldn’t you know it, Swedish authorities issued a rape warrant against Mr. Assange, and then withdrew the warrant the next day.

It couldn’t be that the CIA, the Pentagon (DIA), or the DNI were behind these apparently now bogus charges could it?

As Capt Howdy observes, it’s like we are living in that, “horrific thru the looking glass universe where Nixon is serving his 5th term.” (a Watchman reference, and yes, it would now be the 11th term)

As to my legal mind, my guess is that at this moment, some Swedish prosecutor is reviewing the laws on suborning perjury, and hoping that they don’t apply to him.

As a practical matter, I would suggest that the rest of the folks at Wikileaks start dealing with the “Julian Assange commits suicide by shooting himself in the head 3 times and then throws himself off a bridge,” contingency.

Trying to Go B-1 With the F-22

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Lockheed and the USAF have reached an agreement to preserve the F-22 production tooling for future use.

The claim is that this is about, “will be able to repair and modernise the service’s aircraft, or manufacture new Raptors.” (Emphasis mine)

Make no bones about this: This is not about SLEPPing the airframes or upgrades, they don’t need the tooling for this.

They are hoping for a President, SecDef, and Congress will at some point change policy, as Reagan did with the B-1, and this is the sort of insubordinate crap that really needs to be addressed.

In a perfect world, Obama would find out who is behind this, fire them, and take the tooling and sell it for scrap.

In this world, we’ll see the pigs at the trough every year or so for the next decade in an attempt to restart the program.

Trolling for Bribes

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Hamid Karzai is planning to ban the operations of private military contractors (PMCs, aka mercenaries) by the end of this year:

President Hamid Karzai is planning to sign a decree this week ordering the disbanding of all private security forces by the end of the year, his spokesman said Monday.

But it is not clear how the move, which would constitute an extraordinary change in the security makeup of the country, could be carried out. There are at least 24,000 private armed guards in the country, some foreign but most Afghan, and there is no immediately available alternative for the array of crucial tasks they perform.

This being Hamid Karzai, my guess is that this will not be fully implemented in time or in a consistent manner, but that is like saying the sky is blue.

As to the motivations for his doing this, I see three main policy goals here:

  • An attempt to ameliorate some of the outrage among Afghan citizens who are the ones on the wrong ends of the Mercenary’s bullets.
  • He wants to ensure that whoever is allowed to continue will be people whom he has vetted as being supportive of him.
  • Any mercenary operations allowed to continue will have to pay some sort of bribes to him and his family.

I am a cynic on such matters.

No Prosecution for Photographing Unclothed Teens in Their Houses

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Because when a school does it, it’s OK:

Federal authorities announced Tuesday they will not prosecute administrators connected to a webcam spying scandal at a suburban Philadelphia school district.

Prosecutors and the FBI opened an inquiry following a February privacy lawsuit accusing Lower Merion School District officials of spying on students with webcams on the 2,300 district-issued MacBooks. The lawyers who filed the lawsuit claim the district secretly snapped thousands of webcam images of students, including images of youths at home, in bed or even “partially dressed.”

Zane David Memeger, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, said he found no criminal intent in the alleged surveillance.

I cannot understand how there isn’t a trial of someone involved in this.

I guess that the prosecutor decided that high school students have no right to privacy.

Earlier posts are here.

But Will They Roll on Bush and His Evil Minions&trade

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Polish prosecutors are considering charging the former Polish President and PM with war crimes for allowing the CIA to operate gulags in their country:

Polish prosecutors are considering bringing charges of war crimes against the country’s former prime minister and former president over allegations of secret CIA prisons.

Former president Aleksander Kwasniewski and former prime minister Leszek Miller, who held office between 2001 and 2004, may stand trial before the State Tribunal, a court specifically designed to try Poland’s top officials, Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported on Wednesday (4 August).

The court’s prosecutor wants to ask the speaker of parliament to initiate the criminal procedure against the two men. The case would first have to go to a parliamentary committee and then to the lower house of parliament, which would decide whether or not to press charges, the news report says.

One hopes that eventually we find someone who is willing to sing on this, and the Shrub and the Smiler will end up in the dock.

It does seem that this is all beginning to unravel, and perhaps we are near a point where revelations breed further revelation.

2 Snaps Up to Senator Schumer

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He just made the obvious point that the current H1B program does not serve the needs of the American people:

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that the H-1B program has created “multinational temp agencies” that undercut U.S. wages and discourage students from entering tech fields.

Schumer said the H-1B program has morphed into program used to hire foreign tech workers “willing to accept less pay than their American counterparts.” He spoke on the Senate floor in advance of its approval Thursday of $600 million for border security that includes an H-1B visa fee increase.

He’s right, of course. The program is not about finding people who cannot be found in the US, it’s about importing cheap labor.

The rise in the H-1B fees is perhaps the best part of the law, thought, of course, the foreign body shops are apoplectic about this, claiming that “The US is giving a very strong signal foreigners are not welcome.”

My heart bleeds borscht for them, but they should consider themselves lucky: I would set a soft cap of something like 50K a year visas, and raise the rates when the number of applications exceed this.

As an alternative, you could go with a bidding system, with something like quarterly auctions, which would raise the cost from a $2,500 fee

The new law added $2000 for firms that have more than 50% non citizen/green card workforces, which is still too low.

The First Shoe Drops on Torture………

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Remember the torture tapes that the CIA had destroyed on the watch of Porter Goss, the most corrupt CIA chief ever?

Well, some of the tapes missed the degausser:

The interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, a key figure in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was recorded several times while he was being questioned in Morocco by local intelligence officers, according to a U.S. official. The disclosure resolves a mystery over what are thought to be the only existing recordings from the CIA’s secret detention program.

The two videotapes and an audiotape do not show any use of what the CIA has called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the official said. Human rights groups have described the CIA’s methods as torture.

“The tapes, which were made and found years ago, show a guy sitting at a desk answering questions,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of ongoing investigations.

Still, the disclosure adds a new wrinkle to the public understanding of the documentation of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The destruction of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogation and confinement of senior al–Qaeda figures at CIA secret prisons around the world is the subject of a criminal probe. Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the directorate of operations at the agency, issued an order to destroy the recordings in November 2005 as the CIA’s detention and interrogation program came under intense public and congressional scrutiny.

There are likely more tapes out there, and I would hope that the good (i.e. not-torturer) CIA agents who know where they are will get them to people who will do something (Yes, I know, Obama already said no prosecutions) about this.

Seeing as how one of the claims of the Binalshibh defense team is that he’s got a screw loose, these tapes may go a long way towards settling that issue as well.

The CIA claims that there was no torture harsh interrogation techniques in the tapes.

Blago: A Swing and a Miss

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A hung jury on 23 of the 24 counts, and a conviction on lying to an FBI agent:

The jury is finally in on Rod Blagojevich — and the verdict is decidedly undecided.

A federal jury of six men and six women just returned a split verdict against the former governor, convicting him on only one of the 24 criminal corruption counts he faced.

Verdict reached: Blagojevich brothers arrive in court The Blago blog: Latest updates Complete coverage of the Blagojevich trial

The governor was found guilty of giving a false statement to federal agents.

In a courthouse where prosecutors win more than 90 percent of the time and after listening to a treasure trove of secretly recorded conversations, the jury couldn’t reach a unanimous decision on the other 23 counts.

So, the lesson here is that maybe US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is not all that, which I kind of figured when all he got out of Plamegate was Scooter Libby lying to federal officers (funny similarity there).

Actually, there is a broader lesson: Don’t talk to law enforcement if you think that there is the vaguest possibility that you are a target, even minor misstatements get thrown into the mix.

FWIW, I don;t think that Rahm will testify at the inevitable retrial, there is simply no “there” there.

I still cannot figure out how the prosecution screwed the pooch this badly, but I haven’t followed the minutiae, and most of what I have heard have been prosecution statements, so I won’t 2ndguess the jury.

IP and Protecting the Incumbent Players

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Once again, the Obama administration has gone for a maximalist position on IP, and they are looking at making radio stations start paying license fees to performers, aka a “public performance right”:

The recording industry scored a significant victory today with news that the Obama administration will provide its “strong support” for the Performance Rights Act. The bill would force over-the-air radio stations to start coughing up cash for the music they play; right now, the stations pay songwriters, but not the actual recording artists.

I will say that this is a basically fair, since web broadcasters, satellite radio have to pay these fees, and the status of Radio is a historical artifact dating back something like 70 years.

The record distributors love this, and the radio stations (rather unsurprisingly) hate this law.

This, in and of itself, is neither surprising, nor particularly interesting to me.

What is interesting is that the RIAA is trying to cut a Verizon/Google type deal on this:

Music labels and radio broadcasters can’t agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays. But the two sides can agree on this: Congress should mandate that FM radio receivers be built into cell phones, PDAs, and other portable electronics.

The Consumer Electronics Association, whose members build the devices that would be affected by such a directive, is incandescent with rage. “The backroom scheme of the [National Association of Broadcasters] and RIAA to have Congress mandate broadcast radios in portable devices, including mobile phones, is the height of absurdity,” thundered CEA president Gary Shapiro. Such a move is “not in our national interest.”

This is really pretty absurd. If you have an MP3 player, you can play the song that you want, and not tune into the repetitive crap that comes out of the increasingly conglomerate dominated commercial FM airwaves, though I could see listening to a sporting event.

On a deeper level though, this is profoundly disturbing, because it shows how blatant the incumbents in various segments of our society have become in divvying up the spoils through as privileged participants in the legislative process.

If people really want to change the tenor of Washington, they should start by taking on this sort of corruption head on, and get to Republicans and Democrats calling each other names later.

Another Place Where Obama is Doubling Down on Bush Policies…

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Education, where the Bush era assault on public schools and teachers unions continues apace, so despite the demonstrated fact that charter schools do not produce better results, and despite the fact that the focus on testing has produced widespread fraud, Obama is doubling down with privatizing education in the same way the Dick Cheney privatized core military functions.

What’s more, a former George H.W. Bush Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch, is now denouncing these policies:

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, I think that what happened in New York City is—shows that the direction he’s taking is wrong, because everything he is proposing in Race to the Top and also in his blueprint will rely on exactly the kinds of methods that led to a massive fraud in New York state—that is, that Race to the Top is requiring states to judge teachers by the student test scores, and we now know, based on this immense fraud in the city and in the state of New York, that the test scores are not reliable. So teachers will be judged by unreliable data, and we’re going to dismantle the teaching profession in pursuit of this mechanical fix that won’t work.

If there is lower class of scum than the war profiteers like Halliburton, who profit off our wars, it’s the Education profiteers like the Edison schools, who profit off our children.

There might be an excuse if this crap worked, but it doesn’t, and since No Child Left Behind was implemented, the racial and economic gaps between children have widened, because the educational reform establishment believes that the only thing that needs to be done to fix schools is to f%$# teachers.

Our Man in Afghanistan

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Afghan President Hamid Karzai is attempting to seize control of the anti-corruption probes in Afghanistan (also here):

Obama administration officials fear that a move by Afghan President Hamid Karzai to assert control over U.S.-backed corruption investigations might provoke the biggest crisis in U.S.-Afghan relations since last year’s fraud-riddled election and could further threaten congressional approval of billions of dollars in pending aid.

I wonder why? It couldn’t be that anyone that he knows, or is close to him, is corrupt, could it?

For this puke, we lost 3 soldiers today.