Category: Evil

So After Months of Evidence That Their Lawyers Were Corrupt Bastards…

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The GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have finally fired the foreclosure mill and forged document factory that is the law offices of David J. Stern:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac terminated their relationships with a top Florida foreclosure attorney on Tuesday, one day after the companies began taking back loan files from the firm that has processed thousands of evictions on behalf of the mortgage-finance giants.

Fannie and Freddie dispatched employees on Monday afternoon to begin removing loan files from the law offices of David J. Stern in Plantation, Fla. Those files are needed to process foreclosures, which must be done through courts in Florida.

………

The Stern law firm has been at the center of allegations by the Florida attorney general’s office of improper foreclosure practices and is one of four firms under state investigation. The office has released depositions of former law-firm employees who have alleged that the firm forged notarized documents and that employees signed files without reviewing them in an effort to speed through foreclosure filings.

In those depositions, former employees testified that the firms would go to great lengths to conceal improper practices during regular audits by Fannie and Freddie. A lawyer for Mr. Stern has dismissed the allegations as falsehoods made by disgruntled employees.

Well, it’s a start, though even the most tepid investigation of foreclosure fraud, which is all what Barack Obama would do, is sure to be sabotaged by the new Republican majority in the house, because:

  1. They will favor the banks even when they break the law because laws are for little people.
  2. They favor the Andrew Mellon school of dealing with the economy, foreclosure, and the financial crisis. As Hoover’s Treasury secretary, he suggested, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.”

So all that Daniel J. Stern, Esq. will see is a few bucks less profit, as opposed to disciplinary action from the bar or a criminal investigation.

Nothing to see, move along.

So they Torture a Little Boy, Admit the Testimony Thereby Extracted, Use it to Coerce a Confession, and Sentence Him to 40 Years in Prison

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Only he will actually be out in less than 3 years, since Omar Khadr will be transferred to Canada, and released for time served:

A United States military commission at Guantánamo Bay has sentenced a former child soldier for Al Qaeda to 40 years in prison for war crimes — but he might be released in less than three years, the Defense Department said.

A panel of seven military officers at the American military base in Cuba determined on Sunday that the child soldier, Omar Khadr, 24, should be imprisoned — for terrorism-related offenses he committed in Afghanistan when he was a teenager — until he nearly reaches retirement age.

But that sentence was theoretical. Under the terms of a plea agreement, Mr. Khadr will serve no more than eight years. Moreover, after one year, Mr. Khadr, a Canadian citizen, is likely to be transferred to a prison in Canada, where he would be eligible to apply for parole after serving two years and eight months.

Seriously.

The was a show trial, with a predetermined result specifically to allow face saving on the idea of military commissions.

The proceedings are a travesty of the law and basic decency, and every individual up the chain of command who allowed this case to proceed is guilty of conspiracy to violate both US anti-torture statutes and international treaties to which the United States is a signatory.

Not feeling hopey changey right now.

They Really Are Sociopaths……

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No, I don’t mean the Teabaggers, I mean the beltway pundits.

Case in point, David Broder, who is suggesting that Barack Obama start a war with Iran, because it might be good for the economy and his election prospects. (No direct link, we should not reward such behavior with eyeballs.)

As Scott Horton notes (link above), this clearly demonstrates the, “strongest evidence yet of the moral depravity and sheer nuttiness,” of the WaPo editorial page.

And I am sure that Broder was very proud of what he came up with, it seems so clever, and counter-intuitive, and it means that young men will die.

I bet that it gave the octogenarian psychopath his first stiffie in weeks.

Here is hoping that Keith Olbermann thinks to put him on his “worst” list tonight.

The Most Morally Repugnant Industry on the Face of the Earth

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It’s the private prison industry, which is lobbying for draconian immigrations laws, like Arizona’s “Papers Please” law, because more people in detention means more money for them:

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

The story leads off with a private prison pitching an immigration detention facility for women and children in Benson, Arizona.

There are certain functions that cannot be fobbed off on the private sector, and this is perhaps the most sterling example.

The Definitive Word on Hamp

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David Dayen summarizes it in a paragraph:

This is just a truism based on the Treasury Department’s own design for HAMP. Every trial modification payment reads as a default to the credit reporting companies. The Treasury Department could have set it up so that didn’t happen; they chose not to intervene in that reality. All of the money between the trial modification and the original payment that borrowers don’t pay during their trial period gets tacked on as part of the unpaid principal balance at the end. The servicers also tack on late fees. Treasury could have banned that. They chose not to intervene. The servicers can proceed with foreclosure operations during the trial period, arguing that the borrower is in default. They can’t actually foreclose (also in some cases they have). But they can go through the legal process. Treasury could have put a stop to that. They didn’t. Borrowers keep getting told they have to miss a payment to be eligible for HAMP. Treasury actually didn’t put that into the design. But they haven’t sanctioned a single servicer for this or any other violation of the program guidelines. They could have done something. They didn’t.

(emphasis mine, though inspired by Big Tent Democrat‘s similar exercise.)

I think that Mr. Dayen is far more forgiving than I am. He implies that it was combination of incompetence and timidity.

I think that it was actual malice. I think that the Treasury Department deliberately chose to deceive homeowners, because they thought that it would give the banks some breathing space.

Despicable……

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So the military commissions have secured another confession, Omar Khadr.

They shoot a 15 year old, torture and threaten confessions out if him, allow his confessions to be admitted anyway, and now they have coerced a confession out of him by throwing bogus charges at him:

This morning I sat in a U.S. military commissions courtroom in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and watched the first child soldier charged by a Western nation since World War II plead guilty to crimes he was never even accused of. If the guilty plea of Omar Khadr this morning was a face-saving effort by the U.S. government, it was a sad day for the rule of law in the United States.

Omar Khadr is the 24-year-old Canadian who’s spent a third of his life in U.S. custody without trial after being accused of helping his father’s al Qaeda associates build improvised explosive devices when he was just 15. He was taken to Afghanistan from Canada by his father at the age of nine. The lone survivor of a 2002 U.S. assault on an Afghan compound, Khadr was accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier.

But as he entered his guilty plea this morning — after the government agreed he’d serve just one more year at Guantanamo Bay, and an as-yet-unspecified number of years in Canada — it was clear that prosecutors had taken the opportunity to throw the kitchen-sink-full of charges at him – including far more crimes than he’d even been charged with. Most importantly, Khadr pled guilty to the murder of two Afghan soldiers who accompanied U.S. forces in the 2002 assault on the compound. The government has never presented any evidence whatsoever that Khadr was responsible for that.

…………

This is more than morally repugnant.

This sort of treatment of a child forced into battle by adults is is a war crime, and everyone involved in the trial, up to and including the commander-in-chief, Barack Obama are guilty.

Of course, there will never be an accounting, for even the worst of them.

After all, the two greatest mass murderers of the 20th century, Stalin and Mao, died of natural causes while remaining in power.

Because No Matter How Bad it is for the United States, It is Good for the Bankers

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Timothy Geithner has reiterated his support for Bob Rubin’s strong dollar policy:

“It is very important for people to understand that the United States of America and no country around the world can devalue its way to prosperity, to (be) competitive,” Geithner added. “It is not a viable, feasible strategy and we will not engage in it.”

Answering audience questions before the Commonwealth Club of California in Palo Alto, he said the United States needed to “work hard to preserve confidence in the strong dollar.”

The dollar is overvalued, particularly with regard to the Chinese Yuan, and it has been for years.

It’s been overvalued, because it makes the US position as a reserve currency more secure, which means more people paying American bankers to hold their money, even as it increases exports and decreases imports, harming the rest of the country.

Once again, when Timothy Geithner has to choose between the country and the banks, he chooses the banks.

This Explains a Lot

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Many years ago, Yves Smith worked for Goldman Sachs, AKA the Vampire Squid,* and she said that Goldman Sachs is actually a cult:

As important, Goldman is a cult. I say that as a former employee, based not just on my experience a very long time ago (boy, am I getting old, more than 25 years ago) but also on reports I get from recruits and what I can infer from press reports. If anything the firm has become more inward looking over the years

The people there honestly believe that working for Goldman is the most elevated calling (Blankfein’s bizarre-sounding “Doing God’s work” remark no doubt resonated within the firm) and doing anything else is a fall from grace. Seriously. People who exit Goldman typically take a year or two to get over it the deeply-inculcated belief that departure = failure (this isn’t my own response; I’ve had a number of men volunteer that to me). Similarly, the first person I met at Goldman, which was through personal contacts, made it clear he was blocked in her career (his boss was too close to her in age) said he couldn’t possibly work for another firm. It wasn’t that he had assessed the tradeoffs and decided on balance it was still better to stay; he literally recoiled on a psychological level from the idea of departing. That sort of deep indoctrination was not at all unusual.

And people who had managed not to imbibe the Kool Aid were viewed with some suspicion. I left as a pretty junior person; the only reason I was remembered was a woman in investment banking in the early 1980s was an unusual commodity. Someone who checked out my reputation years after my departure said the party line on me was “She could have made partner, but we would have had to break her.”

(emphasis mine)

I kind of thought that it was just ordinary greed, but this revelation says a lot.

In the United States these days, we tend to try to describe everything in terms of profit and loss, with greed as a motivator.

But profit and loss do not describe anything. If they did, then the Randroid nut jobs out there would be right, and discrimination would have ended, because it interferes with the most efficient flow of commerce.

Goldman Sachs is a cult, and really do believe that they are doing God’s work.

This is so f%$#ing creepy.

*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.

QOTD

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I think too often many of us have tried to come up with elaborate financial/economic rationalizations for why the banksters have approached all of this the way they have. The simpler explanation is that they’re sociopathic assholes who think that everyone else must suffer for their mistakes.

—Duncan Black

And yes, my prior post segues very nicely into this.

Kochtopus

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The Koch brothers, who have been using their Stalin derived fortunes* to back the teabaggers, have steadfastly denied any involvement in the movement.

Well, let’s role tape:

David Koch told New York Magazine earlier this year, “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

But the Guardian reports that footage has emerged showing David Koch at the podium during an AFP gala receiving direct and detailed reports from his astroturf AFP army on their efforts to organize tea parties around the nation.

It appears that, “Never been to a tea-party event,” means getting reports from the people you are bankrolling on stage in right wing speak.

*Really, patriarch Fred Koch made his fortune setting up refining for Josef Stalin.

610 Grand, Not Enough

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The lawsuit against the Lower Merion school district for spying on children with webcams has been settled for $610,000:

The Lower Merion School District will pay $610,000 to settle lawsuits over its tracking of student laptop computers, ending an eight-month saga that thrust the elite district into a global spotlight and stirred questions about technology and privacy in schools.

School board members voted unanimously Monday night to pay $185,000 to the two students who claimed the district spied on them by secretly activating the webcams on their laptops.

Someone should have gone to jail over all of this.

The fact that there was not a serious criminal investigation of this, with dozens of school officials under scrutiny is a disgrace.

They Do This Because They Believe that Minorities Should Not Vote

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I have to invoke this when discussing the travails of anyone named “Kirk”.


In any case, let’s roll tape*

That is why Republicans like Mark Kirk spend enormous amounts of time and effort trying to keep minorities from voting.

The difference is that this time, he got caught on tape:

In a private phone conversation that was secretly recorded, Mark Kirk, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois, told state Republican leaders last week about his plan to send “voter integrity” squads to four predominately African American neighborhoods of Chicago “where the other side might be tempted to jigger the numbers somewhat.”

Kirk’s campaign confirmed the candidate was secretly taped last week as he was talking about his anti-voter fraud effort.

Someone taped this discussion, and then released it into the wild.

There are some values of the Republican party that have been present since its founding, like opposition to organized labor, and there are some that are the product of the politically expedient decision to embrace the white racist portion of the electorate with the “Southern Strategy.”

It started with Barry Goldwater, was embraced and extended by Nixon, and finally came to full fruit under Ronald Reagan, who did his best to make bigotry look cool.

In the process, the bigots subsumed the party.

Thus we are left with the Republican definition of “vote fraud”: to them, it means allowing n*gg*rs to vote.

*The “tape” is actually illegal, as Illinois, like Maryland is a 2 party consent state, but that is largely irrelevant to the fact that a rock got turned over, and the slime beneath was revealed.

What Atrios Said:

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When Atrios notes that Barack Obama had nearly complete freedom in designing the Home Affordable Modification Program. The money was allocated largely without strings, and he was free to do anything short of throwing it from a helicopter, or as he so pithily notes, “This program did not require President Snowe to sign off.

Still, as David Dayen at FDL notes, the program was designed to benefit banks and loan servicers, and in fact paid for the sort of foreclosure abuses and law-breaking at the expense of home owners in peril.

This is more than a policy failure, it is a deliberate betrayal of the basic ideals of liberalism, and an embrace of Bush/Cheney style crony capitalism.

If anything comes from the current foreclosure implosion, it will be in spite of the Obama administration, not because of it.

This May be the Future of America

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And Ayn Rand is smiling in hell.

You have probably heard the story, a fire department sitting idly by while someone’s house burns, because the homeowner had not bought a subscription.

The story is not quite as straightforward as it first appears, since the fire department is run and funded by the city of South Fulton, while the resident, Gene Cranick, lives in the county, so this is not a case of a governmental unit failing its citizenry, but rather it’s governmental units failing society as a whole.

Most at fault is Obion County’s Republican dominated government, which has steadfastly refused to create some sort of county-wide system because of the $30 or so a year that it would cost households.

It is Republican governance in a nutshell.

Not Enough Bullets

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So, once again, Congress refuses to act, so billionaire hedge fund managers can continue to pay less in taxes than the janitors who clean their offices:

Once again a key piece of news has passed virtually without comment.

While the entire nation argues over nonsense like the WTC Mosque, Rick Sanchez, and, yes, blue-red culture war stuff like the Tea Party, congress yesterday quietly took a knee on the “carried interest” tax question. In doing so they decided not to take a vote on changes already approved by both houses that would scale back perhaps the most preposterous tax break in the entire federal code, one that leaves hedge-fund gazillionaires like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson paying less than half the top tax rate paid by most middle and upper-middle class Americans.

In case you don’t recognize the writing style, it’s Matt Taibbi, and I suggest that you read the whole article, because he communicates the disgust that I feel far more cogently that I ever could.

These Contemptible F%$#s Are Our Betters?

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Worst Conference Call Ever!

Ireland held a conference call on its debt, and due to an error in the settings, comments from the other participants were heard across the call.

So what did this collection of hedge funds and other investment firms do?

They crudely heckled the Finance Minister of a sovereign nation:

Mr Lenihan had been speaking for less than two minutes on Friday before a mistake by Citigroup meant that the bank’s clients were all able to be heard on the line.

Between 200 and 500 investors are understood to have been on the call, and as they realised their lines were not muted many began to heckle Mr Lenihan.

Some traders began making what one banker on the call described as “chimp sounds”, while another cried out “dive, dive”. A third man said “short Ireland” before adding “why not short Citi too?”

As the call descended into chaos, with one participant heard to say “this is the worst conference call ever”, Citigroup officials shut down the line.

We are not dealing with competent financial professionals here. We are dealing with hyper-competitive frat boys with brains the size of walnuts who are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence.

This is why these people need to be “hit like a piñata with a stick,” because they are incompetent, overpaid, self-obsessed, morons who have the ability to destroy our economy.

Letting them do what they want is like giving opposable thumbs, assault weapons and espresso to rabid wolverines.

It won’t end well.

In the Annals of the Repulsive……

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They are just off of I-88, in case you want to leave a flaming bag of sh%$ on the town hall doorstep

The town of Sidney, New York has earned a special place in the annals of perfidity.

There is a small community of Muslims on a farm in this town of 5,993.

They also have a small cemetary, which was approved by the town council a few years ago, but after what appears to be years of harassment from the authorities, town supervisor Bob McCarthy wants a court order to force the bodies to be exhumed and removed from the property.

It is people like Bob McCarthy who make me despair for the future of America.

That sound you her is Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville spinning in his grave.