Here he is showing that Glenn Beck is misleading his viewers on gold because he’s paid by gold companies:
Category: Corruption
I Was Wrong About John Stewart
When I said, or inferred, that Jon Stewart was the only real journalist on cable who did interviews that revealed things from their subjects.
There’s also Stephen Colbert, who is a f$#@ing genius…True dat, see his interview with Matt Taibbi:
Another Jewel from Taibbi
I posted the video of him going over the basics of this article last week, and this week, Matt Taibbi’s full article in Rolling Stone, Obama’s Big Sellout, goes into more detail.
Taibbi is more charitable than I am, because he wonders, “Is he just a rookie in the political big leagues, hoodwinked by Beltway old-timers? Or is the vacillating, ineffectual servant of banking interests we’ve been seeing on TV this fall who Obama really is?”
Cynic that I am, I don’t think that he’s a wet behind the ears politico hoodwinked by Wall Street: Every action that he has taken has been about what makes things easier for Barack Obama, whether it be the banks, or torture, or gay rights, or the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
It’s no surprise then that he goes for the bankers over the ordinary people: The bankers could bankroll someone like Sarah Palin, and the ordinary people have no where else to go.
Taibbi’s article is a blistering indictment of what Barack Obama, and to a lesser extent Barney Frank have been doing, or more accurately not doing, about wall street.
To get a sense of the article, you need only read this paragraph:
The point is that an economic team made up exclusively of callous millionaire-assholes has absolutely zero interest in reforming the gamed system that made them rich in the first place. “You can’t expect these people to do anything other than protect Wall Street,” says Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Republican from Florida. That thinking was clear from Obama’s first address to Congress, when he stressed the importance of getting Americans to borrow like crazy again. “Credit is the lifeblood of the economy,” he declared, pledging “the full force of the federal government to ensure that the major banks that Americans depend on have enough confidence and enough money.” A president elected on a platform of change was announcing, in so many words, that he planned to change nothing fundamental when it came to the economy. Rather than doing what FDR had done during the Great Depression and institute stringent new rules to curb financial abuses, Obama planned to institutionalize the policy, firmly established during the Bush years, of keeping a few megafirms rich at the expense of everyone else.
Though I would say that I enjoyed this slam of “Eddie Haskell” too:
That probably won’t happen anytime soon. But at a minimum, Obama should start on the road back to sanity by making a long-overdue move: firing Geithner. Not only are the mop-headed weenie of a Treasury secretary’s fingerprints on virtually all the gross giveaways in the new reform legislation, he’s a living symbol of the Rubinite gangrene crawling up the leg of this administration. Putting Geithner against the wall and replacing him with an actual human being not recently employed by a Wall Street megabank would do a lot to prove that Obama was listening this past Election Day. And while there are some who think Geithner is about to go — “he almost has to,” says one Democratic strategist — at the moment, the president is still letting Wall Street do his talking.
If you think that eleventy dimensional chess is going on here, you have the political acumen of Little Orphan Annie®.
Now go read the article.
Dana Milbank is a Complete Tool
So, Dana Milbank has one of his Washington Sketch columns in the Kaplan Test Prep Company today, and it’s all about how Max Baucus f%$#ing his employee and then recommending that she be made US Attorney isn’t a big deal because he is, “just too much of a nerd for a sex scandal to stick.”
He then goes on to describe why this should the the strategy of other people involved in sex scandals, including a recent scandal involving a sports figure who is on my list of They Who Must Not Be Named.
You see, it’s no news when a sitting Senator sexually harasses an underling while still married, and then tries to get her appointed to a position of trust within the Department of Justice, but some sports figure chasing skirts, that’s a big deal.
Needless to say, if it had been a real Dem, instead of Max Baucus, Milbank would have been all over the scandal like US Magazine, but because it’s one of the “Moderates,” everything is just ducky:
Yet his colleagues jumped to his defense when word got out Friday night — in contrast to the initial reaction to other senatorial sex scandals. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) immediately announced his “full support” for Baucus.
That’s because he’s not giving blow jobs in a Minneapolis airport bathroom, wearing diapers, or paying hush-money and diverting campaign funds to his mistress’s benefit.
Truth be told, I’m inclined to think that what what John Ensign did was worse: He used both the apparatus of the Senate, and the Apparatus of the Republican Party* to benefit his mistress and her family, while Baucus banged a chippie who worked for him and recommended her for a plum position†.
But as to Larry “Wide Stance” Craig, and David “Diaperman” Vitter, these transgressions did not bear on their official duties beyond the hypocrisy angle.
The reason, of course, that Baucus is getting so much support is because there are other Senators out there doing the same thing: i.e. banging staff, not the US Attorney bit, and so the Senate rallies to him, because too many of them have the same vulnerability.
Wanker supreme Dana Milbank rallies to Baucus’ side because he’s an inside the beltway punk, and because he thinks that he’s being witty.
Wanker.
*It’s wrong. I feel schadenfreude because it happened to Republicans, but it’s still wrong.
†Pun intended.
Supreme Court Appears Hostile to Theft of Honest Services Law
One of the ways that federal prosecutors have gone after corruption recently has been with the theft of honest services law enacted in 1988.
The theory behind the law is that if people are taking bribes, they are depriving the taxpayer of their honest services, and so can be prosecuted.
Well, the initial reports from oral arguments indicate that the Supreme Court is not inclined to support the law in its current form:
Justices across the court’s ideological spectrum took turns on Tuesday attacking the law as hopelessly broad and vague.
Justice Steven G. Breyer estimated that there are 150 million workers in the United States and that perhaps 140 million of them could be prosecuted under the government’s interpretation of the law.
Complimenting the boss’s hat “so the boss will leave the room so that the worker can continue to read The Racing Form,” Justice Breyer said, could amount to a federal crime.
I tend to agree, you saw this law being used by Bush and His Evil Minions™ to go after political rivals, on the theory that they were stealing their full performance from their state jobs, because they spent a lot of time serving as state legislators …… Funny how everyone prosecuted was a Democrat, and most of them were black.
The downside is that one of the plaintiffs are crooks and corrupt.
The first plaintiff is Conrad Black, the former Hollinger International CEO, who stole from his company and shareholders to finance a lavish lifestyle, and the other plaintiff, Alaska legislator Bruce Weyhrauch, soliciting lucrative employment from VECO at the same time that he was shepherding their requests from the legislator for taxpayer money.*
Still, seeing how the law has been abused, killing it would be a very good thing.
*A word about Alaska: The taxpayers in Alaska are basically the oil companies, as Alaska relies on oil revenues, and does not collect state income or sales taxes.
No Impeachment for Mark Sanford
It’s kind of a bummer, because it would have been amusing to see how the bad this would have made the Republicans look.
Shadenfreude
Remember when I talked about the folks at AIG who were threatening to leave because the Pay Czar wants to limit their pay to just $½ million?
Well, one of the most vociferous opponents of the pay limits, AIG General Counsel, Anastasia Kelly, has been informed that her services are no longer required.
Considering her history, that, “before joining the bankrupt firm, was a GC at such reputable organizations as MCI/WorldCon (sic) and Fannie Mae,” I’m not sure why anyone would require her services ever.
Heh.
As I’ve said before: The US government is a majority shareholder in the insurance firm, and as such, it should be making it clear to the board of AIG that they would enforce non-compete agreements to the fullest extent of the law.
I Spoke Too Soon
It looks like Barack Obama’s pay Czar will back down on pay restrictions:
Kenneth Feinberg, the U.S. paymaster for rescued companies, will exempt some executives at American International Group Inc. from a $500,000 salary cap after at least five employees threatened to quit because of the limits, people familiar with the matter said.
Feinberg may issue a ruling as early as next week on pay limits for 75 of the bailed-out insurer’s executives, the people said. Last week, five executives said they were prepared to resign if their compensation was significantly cut, according to the people, who declined to be named because the talks are ongoing. Two have since retracted the threat, the people said.
I kind of expected it from “Status Quo O”, change you can’t believe in.
A Good Primer on Why Cap & Trade Sucks
It’s 10:07, and well worth it.
So, In Addition to Screwing With Healthcare Reform and Covering Up Pedophile Priests
The Catholic Church is laundering money:
The Vatican Bank is under investigation for alleged involvement in a money-laundering scheme using accounts at one of Italy’s largest banks, according to a weekly investigative magazine.
Panorama reports that officials from the Bank of Italy’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) have identified transactions worth up to €180 million (£160 million) that allegedly violated anti-money-laundering regulations in accounts held at a UniCredit branch in Via della Conciliazione, next to St Peter’s Basilica. Prosecutors in Rome, led by Nello Rossi and Stefano Rocco Fava, are reported to be working with a special unit of the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian tax police, to investigate the bank — which is formally known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR).
At this rate, I figure that we will discover that the Catholic Church will be fingered as the malevolent power behind the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rating system that determines bowl games in NCAA football.
Ass Covering: Secretary of the Treasury Edition
So, now that there are an increasing number of people calling for his scalp, Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner is talking tough about the banks:
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner disputed claims by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. executives that the bank could have survived the financial crisis without government help and said it and other Wall Street firms should show some restraint in handing out bonuses this year.
“It is very important that we change the way these executives are paid, the form of compensation, this year,” Geithner said in an interview yesterday for Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” which is being aired throughout the weekend. “We have to end that era of irresponsibly high bonuses.”
So, the guy who, until now, said very little about bank pay, and:
- Continued to support front-running via high-frequency trading
- Supported naked naked credit default swaps (CDS) despite the fact that this sort of insurance were banned 367 years ago because of the danger they posed to the economy.
- Tried to get Sheila Bair fired
Now he’s saying that none of the banks were solvent, and that they all survived only through government largess, and that they are overpaying their staff.
This is all about the calls to can him getting louder, not any “road to Damascus” moment.
Hypocrite
So, Senator Max Baucus (DINO-MT) submitted the name of his former state office director to be US Attorney in Montana to the President.
That’s not so bad, in fact, that’s what passes for normal.
What doesn’t pass for normal is that they are sleeping together, and have been since before both got divorced from their prior spouses. (see also here):
“Senator Baucus is currently in a mature and happy relationship with Melodee Hanes. They are both divorced, and in no way was their relationship the cause of their respective divorces,” Ty Matsdorf, a spokesperson for Baucus, said in a statement to Main Justice.
Yeah, and Larry Craig has a wide stance.
More significantly, they started “dating” in the summer of 2008, and she was working as Baucus’s state director and counsel until spring of this year, which means that he was Cheneying a subordinate, which is sexual harassment, even if the subordinate is willing, if you are not a Senator anyway.
Not Enough Bullets
Yep, here’s another example morality, or lack thereof, of the American “Entrepreneur with someone else’s Money,” usually abbreviated to MBA, class. While executives were running companies, like UAL, LTV, WestPoint Stevens, Polaroid, Reliance Insurance, and Pillowtex into the ground, they were taking hundreds of millions of dollars in salaries:
UAL Corp., US Airways Group Inc. and eight other companies paid executives $350 million in the five years before the U.S. was forced to take over their under-funded employee pension plans, a government report said.
One airline company missed $979 million in required pension contributions while its top three executives took $55.5 million in compensation, and another paid four executives $120.4 million amid two bankruptcies, a Government Accountability Office report today found. Data including dates of the pension terminations, stock awards and pay levels show the unnamed companies were UAL, the parent of United Airlines, and US Airways.
Benefits to retirees were cut in some cases by as much as two-thirds, as executives got salary increases, stock awards, retention bonuses and other pay, the GAO said in a report that studied pension takeovers from 2002 through 2005. Representative George Miller of California is considering legislation that will freeze executive compensation if a company’s rank-and-file pension plan becomes significantly under-funded.
The problem here is that the Federal Pension Guarantee Corporation (FPGC) had to take over their pensions, at what will eventually be a cost of billions to the taxpayers, in addition to cutting pensions of ordinary guys who played by the rules and did their jobs to the best of their abilities.
Here’s an idea: If the FPGC has to take over a pension, they get to claw back anything that senior executives got over the pay of the President of the US for the preceding 10 years.
Then maybe, just maybe, these guys won’t use the pension funds to juice the numbers for this year’s bonuses.
More Ass Covering by the Fed
After decades saying that, “It wasn’t their job,” and that it, “Couldn’t be done,” the Federal Reserve is now casting itself as the nation’s premier bubble fighter:
Not so long ago, Federal Reserve officials were confident they knew what to do when they saw bubbles building in prices of stocks, houses or other assets: Nothing.
Now, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke faces a confirmation hearing Thursday on a second four-year term, he and others at the central bank are rethinking the hands-off approach they’ve followed over the past decade. On the heels of a burst housing-and-credit bubble, Mr. Bernanke now calls financial booms “perhaps the most difficult problem for monetary policy this decade.”
The money quote, which follows, is that, “Mr. Bernanke wants to use his powers as a bank regulator to stamp out bubbles, but the Senate Banking Committee, which will grill him later this week, is considering stripping the Fed of its regulatory power.”
Ben Bernanke does not want to stamp out bubbles, he is just trying to give members of Congress an excuse not to clip his wings.
Another Emirate Gets Boned
It’s Nothing Personal, It’s Just BusinessSo, yet another Gulf emirate has gotten done like a drunk date in prom night.
In this case, it’s Abu Dhabi, who agreed to buy shares of Citi at $31.83, under the terms of a 2 year ole deal, even though the shares are currently trading at $4.10.
It’s nothing personal, and Citi and its ilk have been doing this to the US public, and the US taxpayer for decades now.
Matt Taibbi on Obama
He essentially says that it’s Robert Rubin’s friends and disciples who are running the White House bailout effort, largely for the benefit of ……wait for it……wait for it……wait for it……wait for it…… Robert Rubin’s friends and disciples!
He connects the dots and concludes, accurately IMNSHO, that the goal of the Obama and His Evil Minions™ is to implement a “permanent bailout mechanism” for the biggest 20 or so financial institutions in the United States, which will mean that they will have more access to cheaper capital than any competitors, which will allow them to accumulate more money and power, allowing to exert further influence over government……Rinse……Lather……Repeat.
H/t zero hedge.
Sheila Dixon Guilty of Embezzlement
So, herroner may not be herroner much longer:
Jurors in the theft trial of Sheila Dixon convicted the Baltimore mayor Tuesday on a single charge of taking gift cards intended for the city’s poor.
Although Dixon was acquitted of a felony theft charge, her misdemeanor conviction could force her from office.
Jurors deliberated more than six days after hearing the Democrat was accused of using or keeping $630 worth of gift cards. She allegedly solicited most of the cards from a wealthy developer and then bought electronics at Best Buy, clothes at Old Navy and other items at Target.
The jury convicted her on one count of fraudulent misappropriation by a fiduciary and acquitted her on two counts of felony theft and one count of misconduct in office. Jurors failed to reach a verdict on another count of fraudulent misappropriation by a fiduciary. The conviction carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, but prosecutors have not decided whether they will seek jail time.
Is it just me, or is this a remarkably small bit of graft with which to sink one’s own career?
Also note that some point she gets removed from office:
Under state law, Dixon would be suspended at sentencing if the conviction is related to her official duties. She would be removed permanently if she loses all her appeals. City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake is in line to be elevated to the mayor’s office, and remaining council members would pick a new president.
I kind of figured that there would be a conviction when she did not testify. Notwithstanding the constitution saying that refusal to testify cannot be used against you, Juries generally do convict when the defendant does not testify.
Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead
Mary Beth Buchanan is no longer the US attorney for Western Pennsylvania.
The fact that she was still serving on January 22 is a blot on the Obama administration and the justice department. She went on politically motivated prosecutions and fishing expedition, and was the moron who decided to prosecute Tommy Chong for selling bongs.
I understand the need for continuity, but she is a political hack and a nutcase, and justice is better served by kicking her out on day one, not waiting 10 months.
Her, you sack, and appoint an interim USA.
Yeah, I Kind of Missed this Over Thanksgiving
Click for full size
2009
H/t Wall St. Jackass
You know, that entire implosion of Dubai World thing over the past week.
I think that it is clear that Dubai was created with a lot of other people’s money. (see pics)
What’s more, these people got pretty good returns for their investments.
The fact that everyone is shocked that high return investments are risky is to ignore a basic fact of investment.
Tobin Harshaw of the New York times thinks that this indicates that this points to greater fragility in the world financial markets than was previously believed, which I file under, “After Lehman, I thought we knew that it was all a house of cards.”
Felix Salmon also notes that once again, investors were surprised when a broke creditor admitted it, because, after all it looks bad:
I remember the days when investors felt that in the world of emerging markets, publicly-traded bonds were implicitly senior to bank loans. But those days came to an end in the late 1990s with bond defaults in Pakistan, Ukraine, and Ecuador — and they’ve never returned. And it’s not even obvious at this point that restructuring loans is easier than restructuring bonds.
It was nuts then, and it’s nuts now. If you are getting a lot of interest it is because you are lending to a poor credit risk.
I would also note that in this case, “broke” does not mean illiquid, but insolvent, meaning that a short respite to get cash flow back does not work, and it has been clear for some time that Dubai has borrowed well in excess of any assets that it possesses.
One of the more interesting developments here is that many of these debts are neither bank loans nor bonds, but rather the rather arcane, though nominally publicly traded, Islamic financial instrument called the sukuk (Arabic: صكوك), and I have no clue as to the jurisprudence of the default of such an instrument….I don’t think that anyone has a clue as to how this will play out, at least not on such a grand scale.
I think that the repercussions in Islamic finance, both in how resolution is handled, and the willingness of investors to buy those instruments, will play out for decades.
In terms of a bail out, it appears that the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates is going to help make lenders whole, but the government of Dubai is saying that it will not guarantee Dubai World’s debt, so things are still rather fluid, to put it mildly.