Category: Evil

Not Enough Bullets … No Consequences for the Rich Edition

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The New York Times has an article on real estate developers who repeatedly fail and default, but continue to attract other people’s money to their schemes:

Larry Gluck, the apartment building king whose company defaulted on loans in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, recently bought the Windermere Hotel in Manhattan and Tivoli Towers, a subsidized housing complex in Brooklyn.

Ian Bruce Eichner, who lost two major New York skyscrapers to foreclosure in the early 1990s and defaulted on a $760 million loan for a Las Vegas casino resort in 2008, is working on a plan to rescue One Madison Park, a troubled 50-story condominium project.

Even Harry Macklowe, whose $7 billion gamble on seven Midtown skyscrapers at the top of the market almost cost him his entire empire, is out looking for new deals.

Industry lore has it that New York is one of the toughest, most unforgiving real estate markets in the world. The costs are so high, the unions so ornery, the politicians so demanding and the rivalries so fierce, that one false move invites financial disaster.

But the truth is that there have been surprisingly few career fatalities among New York developers, even though they have lost billions of investor dollars on overpriced real estate and have littered the city with unfinished apartment buildings. While a homeowner who lost a house to foreclosure would find it difficult to borrow for years, developers who defaulted on enormous loans have still been able to attract money.

The reasons, experts say, are that there is still plenty of money floating around and that the market has a very short memory.

“You can always find an investor who’ll put up equity with a guy, unless he’s Attila the Hun,” said Daniel Alpert, managing partner at Westwood Capital, a real estate investment bank.

………

This is the very definition of moral hazard, and when someone does this repeatedly, it is not incompetence, it is fraud.

Time to end the bailouts and start prosecuting.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

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Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ are drawing up plans for the indefinite detention of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay:

The White House is preparing an Executive Order on indefinite detention that will provide periodic reviews of evidence against dozens of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, according to several administration officials.

The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.

But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

The law here is clear.

If we are at war, and I understand the argument that the authorization for the use of force might constitute this, then you can detain people without access to the legal process, as prisoners of war, with all the rights pertaining to that status.

This is not about prisoners of war.  This is about the king throwing people in jail on nothing but his word, and it is antithetical to American founding principles, which should be obvious to everyone, except perhaps for the worst constitutional law professor ever.

Another Day, Another Obama Sellout

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So, after some arm twisting, the FCC has passed something it’s calling network neutrality regulations.

Surprise, surprise, it’s another cave to corporate interests, allowing for tiered access in wired service, and what amounts to no protection at all for wireless.

The two most prominent consumer protection organizations, Public Knowledge and Free Press have both condemned the deal.

I would also note that the FCC decided not to define broadband back to a telecommunications service (Title II), and instead have elected to have it remain a data service (Title I) which the courts have already slapped down the FCC about, so not only are these rules toothless, they are almost certainly going to be overturned in court.

Once again, the Obama administration has decided to treat the miscreants, in this case the incumbents who have taken billions in subsidies to make the US last in the developed world on connectivity and cost, as partners to be parleyed with, and given them pretty much what they want.

Just In Case You Wondered How Repugnant Obama’s People Are

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Peter Orzag, in his last column for the New York Times before accepting his bribe from starting his new job with Citigroup, calls for gutting disability insurance because the problem is that people are just lazy malingerers:

Finally, the disability insurance program itself must be reformed. Program administrators understand the need to encourage beneficiaries to return to work, and they have experimented with various incentives. Such initiatives have generally been ineffective, though, because they reach beneficiaries too late, after they have already become dependent on the program and lost their attachment to the work force.

A better approach has been suggested by David Autor of M.I.T. and Mark Duggan of the University of Maryland. In a paper released last week from the Center for American Progress and the Hamilton Project, these economists argue that employers should be required to offer their workers private disability insurance. Such coverage would provide people who have a work-limiting disability with vocational assistance, workplace accommodation and limited wage replacement. All of these benefits would kick in within 90 days of the onset of disability, to avoid the problems with delayed assistance that have plagued efforts to reform public disability insurance. Private employers would have an incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications, because their insurance premiums would rise in response to higher disability rates.

Disabled workers could remain on this privately financed insurance for two years, and then be eligible for the existing public program. The goal would be to minimize long-term dependency, and re-orient the federal disability insurance program toward assisting those who are truly unable to work.

(emphasis mine)

If you do not believe that Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ want to privatize Social Security, you are a fool, because one of his closest confidants is suggesting privatizing disability insurance.

Think about this, with unemployment at a generational high, and new entrants to the work force unable to find jobs, Orzag wants something akin to insurance recission teams, the people who kicked cancer patients out of health insurance programs, to hound people who are on disability.

Basically, every person who is on disability is someone who is not competing with a kid fresh out of high school or college looking for their first job.

That’s what, having “incentive to prevent their workers from having to file disability applications,” means. It means allowing employers to use coercion to intimidate sick people so that they do not file claims.

This is how Peter Orzag rolls, and this is how Timmy Geithner rolls, and this is how Lawrence Summers rolls.

This is not a mistake.  These are people who the President chose to execute his agenda, and the agenda is seriously right wing by any sane standard.  (Note here that “sane standard” and “Republican Party” had a messy divorce in the 1990s.)

And Now the US Military is Torturing Its Own Soldiers

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Specifically PFC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

It should be noted that this sort of treatment produces profound long term damage to mind that is akin to traumatic brain injury.

This is deliberate punitive torture, and its purpose is two fold:

  • To serve as a warning to other whistle blowers.
  • To coerce false testimony that can be used to prosecute Julian Assange.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, which is a lot like George W. Bush Dick Cheney’s America, only less respect for due process and transparency.

You can donate to PFC Manning’s defense fund here.

The Cossacks Work for the Czar

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After spending trillions bailing out banks, and billions paying the banks to pretend not to foreclose on people under the HAMP program, it now turns out that the Treasury Department is refusing to cut loose any money for legal aid for people facing foreclosure:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has authorized big payouts to banks in an effort to encourage mortgage modifications, but is preventing borrowers in danger of losing their homes from accessing legal assistance under the Obama administration’s foreclosure relief plan — even when banks are wrongfully or fraudulently attempting evictions.

As of August, the administration’s foreclosure prevention program — which had paid a total of $231.5 million to banks — had paid nothing specifically for borrower’s legal fees, despite the urging of congressional Democrats who say legal funding is critical to easing the crisis.

Democrats from foreclosure-battered states are pushing new legislation that would overrule Geithner’s edict, but the legislation is doomed this session with apathy from leadership in both parties and a packed lame duck calendar.

It’s easy to blame Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner for all of this, but the reality is that he is Barack Obama’s man, and he is where he is because Barack Obama wants him there, coddling bankers and defrauding homeowners.

And Here’s Another Shocker from Barack Obama

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It turns out that his pay freeze proposal will cripple the staffing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said this week that exceptions may have to be made to President Barack Obama’s proposed pay freeze in order to effectively implement the Wall Street reform bill.

………

Frank said on Thursday he would support providing exemptions to the pay freeze if regulatory agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CTFC), can show they are needed to hire the appropriate talent.

………

In July, SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro announced that her agency intends to hire 374 new employees in 2011. She also indicated that to meet the requirements set out in the Dodd-Frank bill, the agency will need to hire up to 800 staff in total.

Mr. Frank, you are being naive. The fact that the pay freeze cripples agencies that regulate the big banks is not a bug, it’s a feature.

Surely, after all he has done to protect the big banks, you can’t think that he will allow the regulatory agencies to staff up with competent and motivated people to actually reign them in?

Silly Congressman, don’t you know that laws are for whistle-blowers, not bankers!

Why Reaching Across the Aisle is a Stupid Idea

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Arizona Republican John Kyle has announced that he will not allow a vote on the START treaty unless the Democrats capitulate on tax cuts for people making more than $¼ million a year.

I am not disappointed by Kyle, I expect this behavior from post-Reagan Republicans. What does disappoint me is the behavior of Barack Obama, who continues to think that he can dazzle them with his awesomeness and reach across the aisle.

As my brother notes, “Since being ‘nice’ doesn’t work, a sane course might include not being nice….“

Quote of the Day

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Courtesy of Zach Carter:

So Paul Krugman’s prediction of zombie banks creating a drag on the economy has not come true. The reality is, in fact, much worse. Krugman foresaw zombie banks that didn’t lend due to capital concerns, preventing the recovery from getting off the ground. We’re seeing plenty of that, but we’re also seeing zombie banks actively prey on the economy through the foreclosure process in an effort to repair their balance sheets. The zombie banks aren’t just failing to boost the economy, they’re actively sabotaging it.

Go read the rest.

F%$# the Federal Reserve

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The Federal Reserve, in response to repeated instances of wrongdoing and fraud by banks against mortgage owners, has decided to issue a new regulation gutting the right of rescission for fraudulent activities, citing “compliance costs”:

Hundreds of consumer, civil rights, legal services, community and labor groups and private and public interest attorneys representing homeowners, along with the coalition Americans for Financial Reform, urged the Federal Reserve Board to withdraw a proposed rule that would destroy a key legal tool to unwind illegal loans and avoid foreclosure.

“We are astonished that, with the nation facing its greatest foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression, the Board’s proposal would eliminate the single most powerful legal tool that homeowners currently have to stop wrongful foreclosures, the federal right to rescind an illegal loan,” said Margot Saunders, Counsel to the National Consumer Law Center.

Basically, what rescission says is that if the loan was fraudulent, then the contract is broken, the lender cannot foreclose, and all interest, penalties, and fees revert to the homeowner, though the lender is still due his principal………Eventually.

The Fed’s proposed new rule says that you can get rescission only after the principal has been repaid in full, essentially gutting that right, it allows for much larger misstatements by the bank as to the estimated monthly payments and in the total amount of the loan.

Additionally, they are proposing changed the rule on reverse mortgages that forbade issuers to require the purchase of another product as a condition for that loan, so now, so long as it is at least 10 days from the issuance of the reverse mortgage, it will be hunky dory, which has the AARP seriously pissed off.

This is egregious enough that the New York Times inveighed against this change in regulation.

I’m mad enough to agree with Ron Paul, and suggest that we shutter the Federal Reserve completely, or at least transform it from a quasi-private entity into one that is more responsive to politics.

Actually, my preferred position is to leave it in charge of monetary policy and money supply, and strip all regulatory powers from it, since it has shown itself to be completely unwilling and unable to create or enforce balanced regulations on the banks.

I Am So Glad That I Do Not Live 15 Miles Further East

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Because if I did, the biggest wanker in Congress would be my Congresscritter:

A conservative Maryland physician elected to Congress on an anti-Obamacare platform surprised fellow freshmen at a Monday orientation session by demanding to know why his government-subsidized health care plan takes a month to kick in.

Republican Andy Harris, an anesthesiologist who defeated freshman Democrat Frank Kratovil on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reacted incredulously when informed that federal law mandated that his government-subsidized health care policy would take effect on Feb. 1 – 28 days after his Jan. 3rd swearing-in.

“He stood up and asked the two ladies who were answering questions why it had to take so long, what he would do without 28 days of health care,” said a congressional staffer who saw the exchange. The benefits session, held behind closed doors, drew about 250 freshman members, staffers and family members to the Capitol Visitors Center auditorium late Monday morning,”.

“Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” added the aide, who was struck by the similarity to Harris’s request and the public option he denounced as a gateway to socialized medicine.

Andy Harris campaigned non-stop against government run healthcare, but that’s only for people who aren’t him, I guess.

Because Doing the Right Thing is Too Hard

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So, once again, after taking a bit of heat from Republicans, Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ are looking to cave on a core value.

Only this time, it is not a core value of the Democratic party, but rather a core value which our nation was founded, the idea that the King’s power to simply imprison indefinitely on a whim is an anathema to a civilized society:

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.

The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.

The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.

The White House has made it clear that President Obama will ultimately make the decision, and a federal prosecution of Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators has not been ruled out, senior officials said. Still, they acknowledge that a trial is unlikely to happen before the next presidential election and, even then, would require a different political environment.

You see, even after they tried a child soldier using laws that were made up after the actions, and using evidence derived from torture, Republicans are still saying bad things about them, so now, they will now just stop trials altogether.

Due process is just too politically inconvenient.

There is a point where moral cowardice crosses a line, and becomes actively evil, and emulating the practices of the worst despots in history out of electoral consideration is way over that line.

Rotten to the Core

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Happy Veterans Day

Not only is the US military is pressuring our own soldiers to get them to sign documents admitting to a pre-existing “Personality Disorder” when they are injured in combat, so that they are not eligible for disability, now we have testimony that they tortured at least one soldier for the requisite signature.

This is a rather profoundly unsettling 9 minutes and 37 seconds.

What the Dickens??!?!?

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And yes, I mean the author, as in in the Scrooge quote, “Are There No Prisons? Are There No Workhouses?”

The new Conservative government in the UK is going Charles Dickens on the unemployed:

Ministers have defended their plans to force the long-term unemployed to do manual work or lose benefits.

Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander told the BBC the idea was not to “punish or humiliate” but to get people back into the habit of working.

But the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said the changes could drive people “into a downward spiral of uncertainty, even despair”.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is to unveil the plans this week.

Under the plan, claimants thought to need “experience of the habits and routines of working life” could be put on 30-hour-a-week placements.

Anyone refusing to take part or failing to turn up on time could have their £65 Jobseekers’ Allowance stopped for at least three months.

Of course, the Tories like this because they hate poor people, and their coalition partners, the Lib-Dems love this, because it hearkens back to a time when they had political relevance, those halcyon days before World War I.

With unemployment at the highest levels since the great depression, and unemployment in the UK among the highest in western Europe.

As Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman notes, “But she said the government needed to understand that to get people back into work, there had to be jobs for them to go to – and at the moment there were five people chasing each vacancy.”

I think that Labour doesn’t get it. The Conservatives plan to destroy enough so that people will be ready to dismantle the National Health Service for something more disastrously like the US system.

The barbarians are not at the gates, the barbarians are in the gate.

I can haz prosecutions?

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George W. Bush just admitted that he specifically authorized waterboarding, which is unequivocally torture under US law:

Human rights experts have long pressed the administration of former president George W. Bush for details of who bore ultimate responsibility for approving the simulated drownings of CIA detainees, a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.

In a memoir due out Tuesday, Bush makes clear that he personally approved the use of that coercive technique against alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an admission the human rights experts say could one day have legal consequences for him.

In his book, titled “Decision Points,” Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about still-pending terrorist plots against the United States. Bush writes that his reply was “Damn right” and states that he would make the same decision again to save lives, according to a someone close to Bush who has read the book.

Bush previously had acknowledged endorsing what he described as the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques – a term meant to encompass irregular, coercive methods – after Justice Department officials and other top aides assured him they were legal. “I was a big supporter of waterboarding,” Vice President Richard B. Cheney acknowledged in a television interview in February.

George W. Bush has just confessed publicly to a criminal conspiracy, and Barack Obama and Eric “Place” Holder need to (God I hate this term) “Man Up” and begin a criminal investigation.

What we also need to understand that in both Bush’s and Cheney’s talk about torture, the never suggest that they got actionable intelligence, nor that they even expected to get actionable intelligence from torture.

There are vague claims of “saving lives”, but if those were true, they would have been declassified or leaked years ago.

They didn’t authorize torture because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t.

They didn’t get actionable intelligence, because they would have trumpeted it.

They had no belief that it would generate actionable intelligence.

They did this because they it mad them feel tough. They deliberately authorized the infliction of pain in order to derive pleasure and self worth.

This is the very definition of Sadism.

What a Whiny Bitch!!

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So, after nearly 3,000 Americans are killed by terrorists, he leads into a war against Iraq on false pretenses, a number of the White House staff out a clandestine CIA Operative, he allows a city to drown, and, “Here, watch this swing,” George W. Bush thinks that the worst day of his Presidency was when George Bush, still thin-skinned as ever, is still stewing of Kanye West:

MATT LAUER: You remember what he said?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes, I do. He called me a racist.

MATT LAUER: Well, what he said, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: That’s — “he’s a racist.” And I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, “I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business.” It’s another thing to say, “This man’s a racist.” I resent it, it’s not true, and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my Presidency

MATT LAUER: This from the book. “Five years later I can barely write those words without feeling disgust.” You go on. “I faced a lot of criticism as President. I didn’t like hearing people claim that I lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction or cut taxes to benefit the rich. But the suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Katrina represented an all time low.”

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah. I still feel that way as you read those words. I felt ’em when I heard ’em, felt ’em when I wrote ’em and I felt ’em when I’m listening to ’em.

MATT LAUER: You say you told Laura at the time it was the worst moment of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Yes. My record was strong I felt when it came to race relations and giving people a chance. And– it was a disgusting moment.

I will actually agree with Bush that the criticism was wrong. What George W. Bush doesn’t care about is poor people, white or black.

Of course, the idea that he was more offended by the accusation of racism than he was about treason (outing CIA agent Valerie Plame), or incompetence (Katrina), or lying about weapons of mass destruction (Iraq) and killing thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, or dropping the ball before 911, is a meaningful tell.

You see, he felt that the accusation by Kanye West was unfair, but that the other criticisms had some merit, because even saw that there was an element of truth to them.

Still, what a remarkably small and petty man.