Category: Corruption

This Makes it Even Better

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In news unrelated to the Presidential election, former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison for corruption:


Sheldon Silver was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday, making the former New York Assembly speaker one of the most powerful politicians in the state to be given time behind bars.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni, who also ordered Mr. Silver to pay a fine of $1.75 million and forfeit about $5.3 million he reaped from the criminal schemes of which he was convicted, said she hoped the punishment would serve as a deterrent.

“I hope the sentence I impose on you will make other politicians think twice, until their better angels take over,” said Judge Caproni. “Or, if there are no better angels, perhaps the fear of living out ones golden years in an orange jumpsuit will keep them on the straight and narrow.”

In a brief statement before the sentence was announced, Mr. Silver, 72 years old, said he had let down his family, colleagues and constituents.

“I’m truly, truly sorry for that,” said Mr. Silver, who was found guilty in November of honest-services fraud, extortion, and money laundering.

………

Two of his former Albany colleagues are expected to be sentenced later this month.

Former state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, who in December was found guilty of public-corruption charges including conspiracy, bribery and extortion, is scheduled to be sentenced on May 12. Former state Sen. John Sampson, who was found guilty in July of obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators, is scheduled to be sentenced in Brooklyn federal court May 19.

I’m hoping that this puts enough of a fear of God into Skelos that he flips on Cuomo, because 14 years has gotta be scaring the hell out of him.

Corruption, Baby, Corruption

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And the Clinton Crime Family™ continues apace.
You may recall that Hillary Clinton criticized Bernie Sanders for not raising money for the state parties while she did.

Not so much. It was money laundering:

In the days before Hillary Clinton launched an unprecedented big-money fundraising vehicle with state parties last summer, she vowed “to rebuild our party from the ground up,” proclaiming “when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

But less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by that effort has stayed in the state parties’ coffers, according to a POLITICO analysis of the latest Federal Election Commission filings.

The venture, the Hillary Victory Fund, is a so-called joint fundraising committee comprised of Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee and 32 state party committees. The setup allows Clinton to solicit checks of $350,000 or more from her super-rich supporters at extravagant fundraisers including a dinner at George Clooney’s house and a concert at Radio City Music Hall featuring Katy Perry and Elton John.

The victory fund has transferred $3.8 million to the state parties, but almost all of that cash ($3.3 million, or 88 percent) was quickly transferred to the DNC, usually within a day or two, by the Clinton staffer who controls the committee, POLITICO’s analysis of the FEC records found.

………

But it is perhaps more notable that the arrangement has prompted concerns among some participating state party officials and their allies. They grumble privately that Clinton is merely using them to subsidize her own operation, while her allies overstate her support for their parties and knock Sanders for not doing enough to help the party.

“It’s a one-sided benefit,” said an official with one participating state party. The official, like those with several other state parties, declined to talk about the arrangement on the record for fear of drawing the ire of the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

In fact, the DNC, which has pushed back aggressively on charges that it is boosting Clinton at the expense of other Democrats, has advised state party officials on how to answer media inquiries about the arrangement, multiple sources familiar with the interactions told POLITICO.

“The DNC has given us some guidance on what they’re saying, but it’s not clear what we should be saying,” said the official. “I don’t think anyone wants to get crosswise with the national party because we do need their resources. But everyone who entered into these agreements was doing it because they were asked to, not because there are immediately clear benefits.”

Some fundraisers who work for state parties predict that the arrangement could actually hurt participating state parties. They worry that participating states that aren’t presidential battlegrounds and lack competitive Senate races could see very little return investment from the DNC or Clinton’s campaign, and are essentially acting as money laundering conduits for them. And for party committees in contested states, there’s another risk: They might find themselves unable to accept cash from rich donors whose checks to the victory fund counted toward their $10,000 donation limit to the state party in question — even if that party never got to spend the cash because it was transferred to the DNC.

But it gets even better: It turns out that The Clinton Foundation set up a dummy corporation in Canada to conceal its finances:

Aides to former President Bill Clinton helped start a Canadian charity that effectively shielded the identities of donors who gave more than $33 million that went to his foundation, despite a pledge of transparency when Hillary Rodham Clinton became secretary of state.

 The nonprofit, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada), operates in parallel to a Clinton Foundation project called the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, which is expressly covered by an agreement Mrs. Clinton signed to make all donors public while she led the State Department. However, the foundation maintains that the Canadian partnership is not bound by that agreement and that under Canadian law contributors’ names cannot be made public.

 The foundation cited that restriction last weekend in explaining why it did not disclose $2.35 million in donations from the chairman of Uranium One, the subject of an article in The New York Times last week. The article examined how company executives and shareholders had sold a majority stake in the company — and with it a significant portion of American uranium reserves — to an arm of the Russian government in a deal that required the approval of the United States government.

 “This is hardly an effort on our part to avoid transparency,” said Maura Pally, acting chief executive of the Clinton Foundation.

 Instead, the foundation said that the partnership was created by the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra to allow Canadian donors to get a tax benefit for supporting his work with Mr. Clinton — a benefit that came with the price of respecting Canada’s privacy laws. On Wednesday, the partnership issued a statement citing a legal opinion that “charitable donors have an expectation and right of privacy.”

 However, interviews with tax lawyers and officials in Canada cast doubt on assertions that the partnership was necessary to confer a tax benefit; an examination shows that for many donors it was not needed, and in any event, since 2010, Canadians could have donated to the foundation directly and received the same tax break. Also, it is not at all clear that privacy laws prohibit the partnership from disclosing its donors, the tax lawyers and officials in Canada said.

 The partnership, established in 2007, effectively shielded the identities of its donors — and the amount they gave — by allowing them to bundle their money together in the offshoot Canadian partnership before it was passed along to Clinton Foundation programs. The foundation, in turn, names only the partnership as the source of those funds.

BTW, one of the things that this appears to have covered up is donations associated with a rather smelly deal involving Rosatom, the Russian atomic energy agency, taking over a large Canadian uranium concern.

In addition to donations to the Clinton Foundation, Bill Clinton got paid a lot to give a talk to Russia bankers as well.

OK, so they are money laundering. I get it. You could do this in Delaware, or Nevada, or Wyoming, or Panama, or the Seychelles, or the Bahamas, but Canada? Laundering money through Canada?

Seriously?

That is just perverse, or as Eric Oram said so famously, “Seriously, I don’t even like working here. They are so weird.”

Guys Like this Need to Sell Cosmetics for a Living

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Admiran (Ret) William McRaven, former head of JSOC, is ranting incoherently about the fact that civilian authority actually exerts authority over the military:

A long-percolating feud between Navy brass and the Senate has erupted into open conflict, with the retired admiral who oversaw the daring 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden publicly accusing lawmakers of harboring deep disrespect for military leaders.

In an unusually blunt column published Sunday in the Tampa Tribune, William H. McRaven, a retired four-star admiral, former Navy SEAL and former commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, blasted members of Congress for a “disturbing trend in how politicians abuse and denigrate military leadership, particularly the officer corps, to advance their political agendas.”

Although McRaven did not single out lawmakers by name, he made clear that he was angry at the Senate for its treatment of Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey, the commander in charge of the Navy’s elite SEAL teams and other commando units. Losey, who formerly served under McRaven, was denied promotion last month and is being forced to retire after several senators from both parties pressured the Navy to hold him accountable for retaliating against multiple whistleblowers.

Calling Losey’s fate a “miscarriage of justice,” McRaven called him “without a doubt one of the finest officers with whom I have ever served. Over the past 15 years no officer I know in the SEAL Teams has given more to this country than Brian.”

Speaking on the Senate floor April 6, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said Rear Adm. Brian L. Losey was “an honored naval officer” but was “a serial retaliator” who deserved to be denied a promotion. (United States Senate)

………

McRaven’s description of Losey as an innocent victim is at odds with the findings of the Defense Department’s inspector general, which concluded that he had repeatedly violated whistleblower-protection laws.

The agency investigated Losey five times after subordinates complained that he had wrongly fired, demoted or punished them during a vengeful but fruitless hunt for a person who had anonymously reported him for a minor travel-policy infraction. After conducting separate investigations that involved more than 100 witnesses and 300,000 pages of emails, the inspector general upheld complaints from three of the five staffers and recommended that the Navy take action against him.

The Navy, however, dismissed the findings that Losey had violated the law and was poised to promote him last fall to become a two-star admiral until details of the case were revealed publicly for the first time in October by The Washington Post. That prompted several senators to object to the Navy’s plans. They turned up the pressure with a variety of legislative tactics until Navy Secretary Ray Mabus relented in March and announced that Losey’s promotion had been nixed. 

The travesty here is not Congress holding a corrupt general accountable.  It is the US Navy refusing to hold a corrupt general accountable.

These attitudes pervade the culture of the senior officer corps(e) in the US military. 

It is an entitled attitude that breeds corruption and incompetence.

Classic Chutzpah

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Darnell Earley, the former emergency manager of Flint, Michigan is trying to get the impoverished town to pay for his legal defense of his poisoning them:

Former Flint emergency manager Darnell Earley tried to bill the cash-strapped city $750 an hour for an attorney to sit with him while he was questioned last month in Washington by a congressional committee and to represent him in ongoing criminal investigations related to the Flint drinking water crisis, records obtained by the Free Press show.

Earley, whose office was searched by state investigators on Feb. 29, and who told the City of Flint on March 11 that he is under criminal investigation in connection with the lead contamination of Flint’s drinking water, wants the city to pay legal fees that already have topped $75,000 and continue to grow, records obtained under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act show.

Flint City Councilwoman Jacqueline Poplar reacted with outrage Friday when she learned of the Earley invoices from a Free Press reporter.

“If he did send a bill — shame on him,” Poplar said. “The City of Flint shouldn’t be giving him a dime for legal fees or anything else. I would like him to refund every penny the City of Flint paid him to take us down this road.”

The classic definition of Chutzpah is the child who murders his parents, and demands mercy as an orphan.

Mr. Earley comes pretty close to that standard.

Quote of the Day

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“We thought America was the best in the world,” he said. “But unfortunately this happened, and it made us [think] like American police are the same as our police in Burma.”

—Eh Wah the manager of Klo & Kweh Music Team, a Burmese/Karen band after Oklahoma cops stole $53,000 from him using asset forfeiture,

There is a happy ending here:  After the Washington Post wrote a story about this (link above), the cops and the prosecutors have done the right thing, and dropped the bogus charges, and sent him his money back.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Korbach has managed to so hamstring voter registrations that ⅔ of voter registrations in Kansas are not being processed:

Voting rolls in Kansas are in “chaos” because of the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirements, the American Civil Liberties Union has argued in a court document, noting that about two-thirds of new voter registration applications submitted during a three-week period in February are on hold.

Kansas is fending off multiple legal challenges from voting rights activists, and just months before the state’s August primary, the status of the “dual registration” system remains unclear. Federal judges in separate voter-registration lawsuits unfolding in Kansas and Washington, D.C., could rule at any time. There’s also greater urgency because registrations typically surge during an election year.

Kansas is one of four states, along with Georgia, Alabama and Arizona, to require documentary proof of citizenship — such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers — to register to vote. Under Kansas’ challenged system, voters who registered using a federal form, which hadn’t required proof of U.S. citizenship, could only vote in federal races and not in state or local races. Kansas says it will keep the dual voting system in place for upcoming elections if the courts allow its residents to register to vote either with a federal form or at motor vehicle offices without providing proof of citizenship.

This guy has been engaging in a felony concpiracy to deprive people of their rights for years.

When do we throw his sorry racist ass into a PMITA prison ?

So Not a Surprise

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In all the commotion about the Panama Papers, we tend to ignore the fact that most of the dodgy finance that is used to hide wealth from the tax man occurs right here in the good old US of A, most notably in Wyoming and Delaware.

Well there is a an address in Delaware that is the “Headquarters” of the tax avoidance activities of Donald Trump, the Clintons, and 285,000 other shell corporations:

There aren’t many things upon which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump agree, especially as they court very different Delaware voters ahead of a primary on Tuesday. But the candidates for president share an affinity for the same nondescript two-storey office building in Wilmington. A building that has become famous for helping tens of thousands of companies avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in tax through the so-called “Delaware loophole”.

The receptionist at 1209 North Orange Street isn’t surprised that a journalist has turned up unannounced on a sunny weekday afternoon.

“You know I can’t speak to you,” she says. A yellow post-it note on her computer screen reads “MEDIA: Chuck Miller” with the phone number of the company’s director of corporate communications. Miller can’t answer many questions either, except to say that the company does not advise clients on their tax affairs.

The Guardian is not the first media organisation to turn up at the offices of Corporation Trust Centre, and it’s unlikely to be the last.

The term tax haven may evoke images of exotic locales, but Panama actually ranks as the 13th most attractive spot for hiding assets, while the US lies third.

This squat, yellow brick office building just north of Wilmington’s rundown downtown is the registered address of more than 285,000 companies. That’s more than any other known address in the world, and 15 times more than the 18,000 registered in Ugland House, a five-storey building in the Cayman Islands that Barack Obama called “either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record”.

Officially, 1209 North Orange is home to Apple, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Walmart and dozens of other companies in the Fortune 500 list of America’s biggest companies. Being registered in Delaware lets companies take advantage of strict corporate secrecy rules, business-friendly courts and the “Delaware loophole”, which can allow companies to legally shift earnings from other states to Delaware, where they are not taxed on non-physical incomes generated outside of the state.

………

Both the leading candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have companies registered at 1209 North Orange, and have refused to explain why.

Clinton, who has repeatedly promised that as president she will crack down on “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere”, collected more than $16m in public speaking fees and book royalties in 2014 through the doors of 1209, according to the Clintons’ tax return.

The routine corruption in the United States is mind buggering.

How Utterly Proper

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George Osborne, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, has decided to exempt people that he sees as significant from money laundering regulations:

………

George Osborne this afternoon accepted an amendment to the Financial Services Bill which will see some Politically Exposed Persons and their families exempted from these anti-money laundering rules. Ministers will now “exclude… specified categories of persons” from the list of so-called PEPs, as Osborne says it is “disproportionate” for banks to include MPs and relatives on the watch list. Mossack Fonseca will be able to whisk MPs and their families through the account opening process…

(emphasis original)

And once again, I have to note that this is not The Onion, it is reality ……… reality completely indistinguishable from the the pages of a parody magazine.

I am beginning to wish that Guy Fawkes had succeeded in the Gunpowder Plot.

H/t Naked Capitalism

Good Point, But Wrong

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Over at The New Republic, David Dayen observes that observes that that transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s speeches to the Vampire Squid are irrelevant, because she has always been in Wall Street’s pocket anyway:

I don’t want to see the transcripts from Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches.

 ………

 The actual transcript is unnecessary because we already have enough in the public domain to know the real issue with these speeches: the rapport and camaraderie between political leaders and financial institutions, which results in a frame of mind that accepts their arguments and privileges their views. In fact, the best example of this comes from a speech that Clinton habitually touts as an example of her get-tough approach to Wall Street.

 On the stump and in debates, including last week’s in Brooklyn, Clinton highlights a speech she made at Nasdaq in December 2007, in the thick of the foreclosure crisis. “When I was serving as the senator from New York, I did stand up to the banks,” Clinton said last week. “I did make it clear that their behavior would not be excused.”

 In the speech, available here, she castigated Wall Street for “playing a significant role in the current problems,” for fueling irresponsible mortgage lending through securitization, and for having “shifted risk away from people who knew what was going on onto the people who did not.” Clinton has been criticized for this speech, however, because of a few lines where she said “there’s plenty of blame to go around” for the housing bubble, and that “homebuyers who paid extra fees to avoid documenting their income should have known they were getting in over their heads.”

 You can read this as a throwaway nod to personal responsibility, a typical politician’s remark, when the thrust of the speech indicts Wall Street. I would argue that spreading around responsibility for something that was a demonstrably criminal action by lenders fits with Wall Street’s moralizing about deadbeat borrowers who should have known the risks. It’s a form of public shaming. And it arguably led to the lack of accountability we saw for the financial crisis—after all, if everybody is responsible, then ultimately nobody is responsible

 ………

 When something could have been done to pressure mortgage servicers, Hillary Clinton, like many politicians, adopted their argument that they were prevented from helping homeowners. She believed their claims that they were hamstrung, when they weren’t. And I have to believe that’s attributable to proximity, access, and whose arguments get priority of place.

 Wall Street purchases that priority of place simply by donating to campaigns, bringing politicians in for chats, marinating them in its worldview. Finance executives can make very compelling arguments about the complex intricacies of the financial system. They can sound charming and smart and logical. And in a moment of truth, they can get the payoff, when a powerful politician like Hillary Clinton makes a reasonable-sounding statement about mortgage servicers needing legal immunity.

On a strictly factual level, DDay is right:  We do not have to read her transcripts in order to know that she is, always has been, and likely always will be be Wall Street’s stooge.

The only question is whether Hillary and her Evil Minions™ or not she will be a bigger stooge than Barack and his Evil Minions™.

Needless to say, this sucks like 1000 Hoovers all going at once.

That being said, her the fact that she is a suck up to Wall Street means nothing without sound bites for the press to make it a real issue for most of the voting public.

That is the reality of our culture, media, and political system,

Obamacare in a Nutshell

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Marcy Wheeler sees the elephant in the room about Obamacare, and by elephant in the room, I mean Republican thinking:

Partly, though, Obamacare is designed to underinsure people, because there’s a belief that unless people feel the sting of obtaining care, they’ll get too much of it. “Bending the cost curve” under Obamacare is largely driven by increasing the costs of actually using insurance to the end user as opposed to, say, eliminating the many layers of private profit that doesn’t actually improve health care but makes it expensive.

This is the problem at the core of Obamacare, and it is why allowing a Medicare buy in or a public option would have been so helpful.

It would have created an alternative to the contemptible greedheads who Obama shovels money at, and an infrastructure to move onto real publicly funded healthcare.

So Not a Surprise

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And in what might be the last chapter of the lack of investor due diligence that is the blood testing firm Theranos, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has announced that it will ban the top three executives at the firm from the test business:

Theranos, the high-profile clinical laboratory company, had a day of reckoning yesterday. That’s when The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a story revealing that Theranos was sent a letter by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) providing notice of sanctions.

In a letter to Theranos executives, CMS said it is prepared to:

  • revoke the company’s CLIA certificate;
  • impose a fine of $10,000 per day;
  • suspend and cancel the lab’s approval to receive Medicare payments; and
  • impose a two-year ban on the owner, operator, and laboratory director for owning or operating a clinical laboratory.

Pathologists and medical laboratory professionals will recognize that these are among the most severe sanctions that CMS can impose on a laboratory under the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Further, clinical pathologists who currently serve as medical directors of CLIA laboratories will find it useful to read the entire letter sent to Theranos on March 18, as it describes how CMS viewed the responses that Theranos provided following a January 25, 2016, letter from CMS describing deficiencies identified during an inspection of the Theranos CLIA lab facility in Newark, California.

………

“After careful review, we have determined that the laboratory’s submission does not constitute a credible allegation of compliance and acceptable evidence of correction for the deficiencies cited during the CLIA recertification and complaint survey completed December 23, 2015, and does not demonstrate that the laboratory has come into Condition-level compliance and abated immediate jeopardy. In general, we find that the statements made in the allegation of compliance and evidence of correction: 1) failed to adequately address the deficient practice cited; 2) are incomplete and failed to meet the criteria of acceptable evidence of correction; 3) do not ensure sustained compliance; and 4) show a lack of understanding of the CLIA requirements.

Less than a year ago, Theranos had a valuation in the billions, because it was promising a new technology that would allow for inexpensive blood tests on just a drop of blood. (A little finger stick)

The technology has never worked, even under the most controlled conditions, like demonstrations to investors, but it was treated like the next big thing for reasons that have never made sense to me.

My guess is that the founder of the company, Elizabeth Holmes, dazzled people with a rather spot on impersonation of Steve Jobs (she only wears black turtle necks), which convinced people who knew better that the nothing-burger business model of dot-coms could be applied to healthcare.

I Will Dine on His Tears, and They Will Be Sweet

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It looks like I Heart Radio, the company known as Clear Channel before Bain Capital looted it, is on the edge of collapse, and it looks like Rush Limbaugh will be facing a far less generous contract when it is renewed:

One of the favorite pastimes for sports fans is commiserating over the worst contract their home team ever made; guffawing over management’s decision to waste tens of millions of dollars for a player who never justified the huge payday. (See: Gilbert Arenas.)

For talk radio, there’s probably only one contract that enters that realm of notoriety: Rush Limbaugh’s eight-year, $400-million deal, signed in the summer of 2008 with his longtime radio employer Premiere Radio Networks.

Owned by Clear Channel Communications, which has since changed its name to iHeartRadio, Premiere’s Limbaugh deal instantly dwarfed any payout in AM/FM history. (Only Howard Stern’s contract with Sirius was larger.) The contract, which included a staggering $100 million signing bonus, never panned out as the wheels began to come off Limbaugh’s radio empire.
This year, his contract is up and the timing couldn’t be worse. The talker is facing ratings hurdles, aging demographics, and an advertising community that increasingly views him as toxic, thanks in part to his days-long sexist meltdown over Sandra Fluke in 2012. (He’s also stumbling through the GOP primary season.)

Concurrently, iHeartRadio’s parent company, iHeartMedia, is heading to court, teetering on bankruptcy. The once-dominant radio behemoth is saddled with $20 billion in debt, thanks to a misguided leveraged takeover engineered by Bain Capital in 2008, the same year the radio giant inked its disastrous Limbaugh deal.

I am so amused that in its own way, Mitt Rmoney’s bucket shop is involved in Limbaugh’s downfall.

I am VERY amused.

Thanks Hillary

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As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton aggressively supported the coup in Honduras.

Now that government has brought back death squads:

Three weeks ago, Honduran activist Gaspar Sanchez spoke at a briefing on Capitol Hill, urging lawmakers to support an impartial investigation into the murder of environmental activist Berta Cáceres.

Cáceres had mobilized native communities to speak out against the Agua Zarca Dam, a hydroelectric project backed by European and Chinese corporations, before being killed by two unknown gunmen last month.

Last week, back in Honduras at a protest outside the Honduran Public Ministry in Tegulcigalpa, Sanchez unfurled a banner demanding justice for Cáceres’s murder.

When nearby soldiers saw him, they dragged him away from the crowd and brutally beat him, stopping only after the crowd of protestors came to his defense.

………

Victor Fernandez, a prominent human rights attorney and lawyer representing the Cáceres family, insisted that her assassination was carried out by either the Honduran government or by “the paramilitary structure of companies.”

“Honduras is the victim of international theft due to its national resources,” said Fernandez, speaking through a translator. “What we have now is our natural resources — minerals, rivers, forest. Cáceres was killed because she was confronting the extractive model.”

Bertha Oliva compared the current situation to the early 1980s, when the CIA funded, armed, and trained Honduran government death squads that murdered hundreds of opposition activists.

………

In 2009, a coup toppled Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who had long been seen as a leftist threat to the interests of international corporations. In 2008, Zelaya blocked a series of hydroelectric dam projects, citing concerns raised by native Hondurans. Less than a year after he was deposed, the new government had already approved 40 dam contracts. When the current President Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in 2013, his slogan was “Honduras is open for business.”

The coup was accompanied by a huge rise in political violence. By 2012, state security forces had assassinated more than 300 people, and 34 members of the opposition and 13 journalists had disappeared, according to data compiled by Honduran human rights organizations. The political assassinations added to the emboldened violence from gangs and drug traffickers, making Honduras one of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2012, Reuters reported that it had the highest murder rate of any country.

I know that Clinton claims that she has the experience to be President, to paraphrase the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

Give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Hillary Clinton.
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f%$#ed up during the execution.

Yes, I am comparing her to the Bush administration.

It will Still Be #ASSoL or #ASSLaw

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It appears that in response to the internet discovering the potential initials of the Antonin Scalia School of Law, George Mason is attempting a re-branding:

Days after George Mason University’s law school announced that it was renaming itself after Justice Antonin Scalia, the school is slightly adjusting what it’s calling itself — thanks to unforeseen and unfortunate wordplay.

The name, officially, remains “The Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University” in honor of the late justice who died in February. But on its website and marketing materials, the name now reads: “The Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University”.

That’s no accident.

The first five words of the “School of Law” version form an acronym that has a phonetic resemblance to a vulgarity, a source of amusement for some bloggers and tweeters and a source of non-amusement for George Mason’s administration, which agreed to rename itself after Justice Scalia at the request of an anonymous donor who pledged $20 million.

It’s not going to work.

When Allegheny (aka “Agony”) Airlines changed its name to US Air, it got nicknamed “Useless Air” at the press conference announce the renaming.

You need to embrace this, not try to sweep it under the rug.

I would suggest changing the name the the Scalia Hieratic Institute of Tutalge in Higher Educational Excellence in the Law.*

*Yes, it took me longer to come up with the acronym than it did to write the rest of this.

How Convenient!

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Chris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State, who has been the vociferous opponent of voting rights in the United States, just sent out a Spanish language voter guide with the wrong date for the registration deadline.

If you believe that this was a good faith mistake, I have some mountains in Kansas to sell to you:

The Spanish-language voter guides from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office include two errors about registering to vote in the state, while the English guides do not include the same errors.

The Spanish-language guides said that voters could register up to 15 days before the election, while the English version included the correct deadline, 21 days before the election, as the Daily Kos flagged last week. And while the English guides told voters they could use their passport as a photo ID, the guides in Spanish did not include a passport in the list.

Kobach is notorious for his push to enact strict voter ID laws in the state, impose other voting restrictions, and pursue criminal prosecutions of alleged voting fraud. Kansas faces several challenges to its law requiring proof of citizenship for residents to register to vote.

This was deliberate, and his office should be raided by, and treated as a crime scene by the Feds.

This guy is a bigger threat to America than Osama bin Laden ever was.

Dynastic Politics at Its Finest

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Duncan D. Hunter, the son of Duncan L. Hunter, has been caught spending campaign funds on personal expenses, a federal crime:

Rep. Duncan Hunter — whose spending of campaign funds on video games made national news this week — said on Thursday that he’s cutting short a trip to Israel to return to the United States and rectify that problem and several other mistakes.

“There was no taxpayer money involved, and I take full responsibility,” Hunter, R-Alpine, said by telephone from his trip. “That’s it. I’m going to pay everything back by tomorrow morning, with interest.”

Hunter said he and his wife were the only two holders of his campaign’s credit card, which incurred most of the expenses. As of Thursday morning, he said, he is now the only card-holder.

Hunter’s call came amid a review by The San Diego Union-Tribune of an unusual pattern of expenditures listed on his disclosure forms as personal expenses or mistaken charges “to be paid back.”

Campaign finance reports show $5,339 in such charges during 2015 alone: $1,128 in travel, $1,650 to Hunter’s children’s school in El Cajon, $1,424 for video games and $1,137 paid to an oral and facial surgeon.

The forms list only one personal expense that was actually paid back by Hunter — $169 on Oct. 21, with no indication of which personal expense was being reimbursed. None of the other outstanding charges were listed as repaid, or as an ongoing debt to the campaign for the year-end accounting.

The Union-Tribune was the first to report this week that more than 60 video game transactions totaling $1,302 were being questioned by the Federal Election Commission. News outlets from Esquire to Roll Call picked up the story.

I will note that dynastic politics has a long of enabling corrupt and unqualified, whether we are talking about the Hapsburgs, the any number of the Bush clan, Ron Paul’s idiot son, and **ahem** another prominent Presidential candidate.

Schadenfreude Alert

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Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and his Evil Minions™ are being sued under the RICO statutes:

Gov. Rick Snyder, high ranking former members of his staff and others are the target of a new federal racketeering lawsuit over the city’s water crisis. The lawsuit also targets the city of Flint.

A group of 15 citizens filed the civil lawsuit seeking financial compensation for property damage, loss of business and financial losses attributed to the city’s water crisis; as well as compensatory damages for future medical care and punitive damages.

………

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, April 6, in Flint U.S. District Court, alleges Snyder, his former Chief of Staff Dennis Muchmore and others attempted to balance the Flint city budget through a pattern of racketeering activity.

“He wants to run the state like a business,” attorney Marc J. Bern said of Snyder. “Well. The citizens of Flint, as shareholders in the corporation of the state of Michigan, I don’t think they were treated in an appropriate way.”

The lawsuit alleges that officials misrepresented the suitability of the Flint River water as the city’s drinking water source for roughly two years and billed Flint residents at rates that were the highest in the nation for water that was unusable, resulting in the city’s budget deficit being reversed.

………

The complaint names Snyder, Muchmore, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality and multiple members of its staff, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services and members of its staff, the City of Flint and members of its public works department, multiple engineering companies that were hired to evaluate the city’s water system, former Mayor Dayne Walling and three of the city’s former emergency managers.

………

The suit claims officials committed mail fraud by continuing to mail water bills to Flint residents, which they allege fraudulently misrepresent that the city is providing safe, clean water to its residents.

They further allege officials continued to make statements claiming the water was safe despite being aware of growing concerns over the quality of the water.

The lawsuit also alleges the defendants committed wire fraud by allowing residents to pay their water bills online or with credit cards despite knowing the water was toxic.

A RICO lawsuit requires attorneys to prove that the wrongdoing was part of an ongoing enterprise. If successful, the law allows triple the amount of damages to be paid.

I’m not generally fan of the expansive use of the Rico statutes, but this does appear to be a reasonable use of the law.

H/t Charlie Pierce

Your Panama Papers Update

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Bernie Sanders Predicted this in 2011


There appears to be a dearth of US money launderers reported

Rather unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders is noting his opposition, and Hillary Clinton’s support for the trade deal in his campaign:

Responding to the 11.5 million documents leaked this week showing how a Panama law firm helped some of the world’s wealthiest people establish offshore tax havens on the Central American country — the so-called Panama Papers — Bernie Sanders on Tuesday vowed to end the Panama Free Trade Agreement, tying Hillary Clinton to the same policies that he claimed fostered the practice.

 “The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes,” the Vermont senator said in a statement released through his campaign, adding that he has been opposed to it “from day one.”

 Vowing to use his authority as president to “terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months,” Sanders said his administration would “conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes.”

 “If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.

 Sanders also said that he had correctly predicted that the passage of the trade deal “would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore.”

 “I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared,” he said, before pivoting to Clinton. “My opponent, on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.”

It is not an unreasonable indictment of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s record on so called free trade agreements.

In what might be a perfect example of Chutzpah, the state of Wyoming, a shell corporation factory that has one corporation for every 4½ residents, has initiated an investigation of a Wyoming based law firm at the center of the scandal:

The Wyoming arm of the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers global scandal is under investigation by Wyoming state officials for failing to maintain required statutory information about companies registering there, Secretary of State Ed Murray said Wednesday.

 Upon learning of the Panama Papers, a massive leak of secret offshore company data reported on by McClatchy and more than 100 other media partners around the globe, Wyoming initiated an audit of 24 companies registered in the state by the law firm Mossack Fonseca and its partners, he said.

 “The audit concluded around noon on Monday, April 4th, and determined that M.F. Corporate Services Wyoming LLC failed to maintain the required statutory information for performing the duties of a registered agent under Wyoming law,” Murray said in a statement.

 The state followed immediately with administrative action, demanding that required information be provided.

 “Subsequently, M.F. Corporate Services did provide the information,” the secretary of state’s office said, adding that Murray also briefed law enforcement that day. “This investigation of this matter is ongoing.”

This is near toxic levels of hypocrisy.

In an interesting twist of fate, Ken Silverstien, then a reporter at The Intercept was all over the story of Mossack Fonseca 14 months ago, though his employer refused to publish it, so he published on Vice.com.

And then Pierre Omidyar, the publisher of The Intercept, got in his face.

.@MarkAmesExiled FYI @pierre wouldn’t pub story but demanded my fee from VICE. Oh well, at least I’m not in Moscow https://t.co/pZT7qr14yt

— Ken Silverstein (@KenSilverstein1) April 4, 2016

I wonder if perhaps the eBay founder (Omidyar) might have some “interesting” corporate structures for his billions.

The reporting this far seems to be what Yves Smith calls, “The Intercept model, not [the] Wikileaks model“.  See also Craig Murray’s critique of the coverage thus far.

Almost all the reporting thus far, with the exception of Icelands now former PM, has been directed primarily at regimes hostile to the west, with most of the coverage being screaming about Vladimir Putin.

Also note that Suddeutsche Zeitung brought in International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
Not also the picture in the tweet.

The selective nature of releases to this point also raises the issue that those in the files but not yet exposed may be likely targets for blackmail: (Moon of Alabama)

A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted “leak” of such data to several NATO supporting news organization and a US government financed “Non Government Organization” is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor.

Both Murray and MoA are implying that the US/NATO state security apparatus are somehow involved in the release of this data.

I have not made up my mind, but if we don’t see some prominent western names in the releases in the next few weeks, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson doesn’t count, then I will be much more inclined to take their view.

This Really Does Sound Like Another Rat-F%$#ing

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It appears that the surge in Democratic Party registrations in New York State that the Sanders campaign is being bungled by the authorities:

Since shortly before the late deadline to register to vote in the April 19th presidential primary in New York, state Board of Elections spokesman Tom Connolly said his office has been fielding nearly 100 calls a day from voters who are “pissed off” about their registration status, for one reason or another. On social media, there are dozens of reports from voters who say they checked their registration online recently and found that their party affiliation had been switched, which is disqualifying because New York’s primaries are closed, or that that their registration couldn’t be found altogether.

We could not verify the details of the majority of those accounts, but the discoveries alarmed many would-be voters, most of them seemingly Bernie Sanders supporters. Sanders fans are already on tenterhooks over long lines at the polls in Arizona, which the Justice Department is now investigating, and polling place electioneering by former president Bill Clinton in Illinois and Massachusetts, which local election officials declared proper, among other factors that they argue have skewed the primary process for Hillary Clinton.

Apparently my voter registration (less than a year old) has been purged. Way to go #NewYork

— Dan Haefeli (@danhaefeli) April 4, 2016


At the New York Board of Elections, Connolly said that his office looks into all complaints, and though the volume has been higher this year than his office has ever seen, “I’ve yet to come upon any example of any kind of mal-intent or inappropriate change of a voter’s record.” (Emphasis mine)

Rather, he said, the increased call volume can be explained by heightened interest in this year’s primary and New York’s newfound relevance to the nomination. As for the complaints themselves, the circumstances vary, but he said there’s a rational explanation for each instance of seeming irregularity. For one, he explained that the complaints are largely coming from Democrats—”a lot” of them Sanders supporters. (There have also, he noted, been some Donald Trump supporters who are angry that they missed the deadline to change their party to Republican.) Because many voters only turn out for presidential elections, and Democrats didn’t have a primary in 2012, it has been eight years since many people thought about their registration, he said.

………

In another instance of New York state confusion, Bernie Sanders supporter Jonathan Carrillo, a Long Island resident who makes a living DJing under the name Jase, registered as a Democrat the week of the deadline and, last Friday, checked his registration online and found himself listed as a Republican. This would make him ineligible to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary. Having followed the news and online chatter about irregularities in other states’ primaries, it occurred to Carrillo to record part of his call to the Nassau County Board of Elections.

In subsequent conversations, election workers pulled his file and found that a 2013 DMV form shows he chose Republican when getting a license, something he seriously doubts.

“I think it’s very unlikely that back in 2013 I randomly decided to join the Republican Party against my interest and while opposing their views,” he said. “I would never do this intentionally.”

Am I the only one who thinks that this is not entirely innocent incompetence?

Is there Nothing Which Financial “Innovations” Cannot Crapify?

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It appears that the latest innovation proposed is, “Securitizing Loans for Large Health Care Expenses.”

I did not think that we could make healthcare delivery worse in the United States.

To quote Rick Blaine, “I was misinformed.”

I saw this headline in Kaiser Health News — “Mortgages For Expensive Health Care? Some Experts Think It Can Work” — so I said, “Nah,” and ignored it for a couple days, but then I clicked through to the academic paper Kaiser linked to — if “academic” has any meaning, the times being what they are — and I couldn’t find any tells that it was a parody or some kind of sick joke, so yeah. It’s for real! The paper is called “Buying cures versus renting health: Financing health care with consumer loans,” by Vahid Montazerhodjat, David M. Weinstock, and Andrew W. Lo, and it was published in Science Translational Medicine (STM), February 24, 2016. First, I’ll present the author’s scheme, and after briefly showing how it conforms to the simple rules of neoliberalism, I’ll look at potential scope creep if the proposal is implemented, debt-cropping, and the possibility of predatory servicing. I’ll conclude with a 30,000-foot view of the scheme’s implications. (I’m afraid I’m thinking of this post in terms of somebody who’s take out one of these loans — a consumer patient — rather from the finance perspective that Yves would offer. That said, readers with more nuts-and-bolts knowledge of securization than I have — like most of you — please feel free to chime in; that’s why I’m describing the scheme first.)

The article goes further into the details, and each detail is more and more horrifying.

Really horrifying:  Repossessing your kidney horrifying.

It is a descent into what Matt Stoller calls, “Debtcropping,” which is, as he notes, “An instrument of political and economic control.”