Category: Evil

I Write Letters

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So, the New York Times has an article where they bemoan the fact that Wall Street financiers could not buy 3 New York State Senate elections for “educational reformers”:

They were the candidates of riches, flush with hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors who believed in the promise of charter schools.

But when the election results came in on Tuesday, all three State Senate candidates supporting education reform — Basil Smikle, Lynn Nunes and Mark H. Pollard — lost by huge margins, with none cracking 30 percent of the total vote in primary contests against union-backed rivals.

The three New York races amounted to some of the country’s first proxy wars between labor groups and Wall Street financiers pushing for education reform, and in the end, the time-tested union machine prevailed.

You see the message here: something is wrong with America if a bunch of rich pukes from Wall Street cannot buy elections in order to privatize an essential public service, in this through for-profit charter schools, and generate taxpayer subsidized profits.

It’s worked so well for prisons, and for military contractors, that we must feed our children to feed the Wall Street beast yet again.

In any case, it pissed me off enough to write a letter to the editor on the subject, which is almost certainly not going to get published:

I found the article one sided. While it is clear that unions played a role in the elections, you make it sound as if this was somehow unfair, while relegating those who donated, “hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street investors” to these candidates who lost as somehow simply being people of good will, “who believed in the promise of charter schools.”

The promise of charter schools that attracts ” Wall Street investors” is its creation of an educational-industrial complex and its associated revenue streams.

There have been numerous studies of charter schools over decades, and they do not meaningfully outperform public schools in properly constructed studies.

There are real problems in our schools, but neither the mindless focus on test scores nor bringing Wall Street profiteers into the equation are the solution.

Jail, please

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Gee, the SEC has determined that Citicorp CEO Chuck Prince and Chairman of the Board, and Clinton era Secretary of the Treasury, Robert Rubin both knew that the numbers that they were feeding investors about their top tranches of mortgage backed securities were crap:

Charles O. “Chuck” Prince and Robert Rubin were among Citigroup Inc. officials who knew 2007 losses were mounting on mortgage assets that U.S. regulators have faulted the bank for not disclosing, a court filing shows.

Prince, the bank’s chief executive officer at the time, and Rubin, who was then chairman, knew the highest-rated segments of subprime mortgage-backed securities were the source of about $200 million in new losses in October 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission said yesterday in a filing at federal court in Washington. In July, the agency accused the bank and two other executives of failing to disclose $40 billion in subprime assets before losses surged. It didn’t target Prince and Rubin.

Bob Rubin has been Gordon Gecko for a very long time, and if the Obama administration wants to show some real commitment to financial reform, ramping up criminal investigations of his behavior would be a very good idea.

If you put a former Secretary of the Treasury in jail, it goes a long way toward cleaning up the system.

SNATCHING DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY

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The Democrats, Again, of course.

After Boehner’s surprise statement, it looks like the Obama White House is trying to take advantage of this, and paint the Republicans with the “Daddy Warbucks” brush and splinter the Republican caucus, which is good, but a aide for the House leadership just said that the house will not vote on the tax cuts, which is significant because the Constitution says that tax bills have to start with the house.

My guess is that this is someone Steny Hoyer’s office, who is attempting to suck up to the Blue Dog types, who are trying to insist on tax cuts for the big donors.

And on the Senate, we have the preening sociopath narcissists Ben Nelson says that he might support a filibuster, while Mr. “That contemptible rat-f%$# who isn’t with us on everything but the war” Joe Lieberman both saying that he will support a filibuster.

What is good politics and good policy right now is for Barack Obama to say that he will veto any bill that grants tax breaks to people making more than a $¼ million.

It would be useful to show that Obama can draw a line in the sand, because at this point, no one believes that he can.

So Now You Can Patent Recipes

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It appears that a French company has patented Plumpy’nut, a fortified peanut butter as a treatment for severe malnutrition:

Should a revolutionary humanitarian food product be protected by commercial patent, when lifting restrictions might save millions of starving children?

That is the moral conundrum at the heart of a bitter transatlantic legal dispute.

On one side are the French inventors of Plumpy’nut, a peanut paste which in the last five years has transformed treatment of acute malnutrition in Africa.

Nutriset, the Normandy-based company, says the patent is needed to safeguard production of Plumpy’nut in the developing world, and to stop the market being swamped by cheap US surpluses.

And on the other side are two American not-for-profit organisations that have filed a suit at a Washington DC federal court to have the patent overturned.

They say they are being stopped by Nutriset from manufacturing similar – and cheaper – peanut-based food products, despite the proven demand from aid agencies.

“By their actions, Nutriset are preventing malnourished children from getting what they need to survive. It is as simple as that,” said Mike Mellace, of the San Diego-based Mama Cares Foundation.

I will spare you the picture of the severely malnourished child in the article, but it appears to me that this patent is not only morally indefensible, but also a very real expansion of IP law to an area where it had not previously applied, recipes, which are rather famously not covered by copyright (see here), and the patent appears to be rather broad, covering pretty much every nut based food with milk in it, which would include the Nutella from which Plumpy’nut was originally derived.

The problem here is that the other potential players in this market (EVIL term, that) are all small not for profits who would be driven to extinction with a loss in a patent court.

One solution here is to make patents like civil rights law, and allow people to file suit before infringing, for the same reason that they do with civil rights suits: because the chilling effect occurs even if no one breaks the law.

Feds Sue Sheriff Joe Arpaio

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They have had a civil rights investigation of his department since (at least) 2009, and he has refused to turn over documents, so the DoJ has filed suit against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

Seeing as how it’s pretty clear that the Sheriff’s office is guilty, Arpaio has campaigned on harassing people on the basis of their ethnicity, one hopes that they get the documents, and an injunction, before Sheriff Joe goes and abuses his power to go Jim Crow on Hispanic voters this year.

Lifelong Peonage and Are the Main Feature

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Click for Ginormous Graphic

Barry Ritholtz has a useful infographic showing just how education loans have become the latest way that the banks keep us in debt slavery.

Note that the value of outstanding student loans is now larger than that of credit card debt, and its holders cannot discharge it through bankruptcy, ever.

This goes hand in hand with changes in the job market, where jobs that do not require a college to degree require a college degree to get, along with the explosion of for-profit schools that make false promises of a career in order to get you to overpay for trade school.

It really is remarkable just how predatory our society has become.

Not Enough Bullets: CEO Pay Disclosure Edition

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What Cee Lo Green Said (NSFW)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Term is Ethnic Cleansing

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2 Words Left Unsaid

Rachel Maddow talks about the housing situation in New Orleans, and makes the point that the elimination of much of the subsidized housing for the poor was intended to reduce the availability of housing for the poor, and generally black, residents of the Crescent City.

John Aravosis references Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” but there is a far uglier term for this: Ethnic cleansing.

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A better recruiting tool Osama never had

It appears that there is a company that carts around decommissioned missiles and jet cockpits to hospitals and the like, in order to amuse the children.

They actually have filed for a patent for their business model, “Business Promotion Via Mobile Interactive Aviation Museum,” yet another indication that our IP system is badly out of whack.

Of course, that’s just one bad patent out of hundreds that are granted every month by the over worked USPTO, which would ordinarily not merit much comment.

What does merit comment is the fact that they are donating dummy missiles for demonstrations that the bigots opposing the 51 Park Islamic center are holding.

Remember That Alan Simpson Was Always Thus, and Obama Picked Him

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So, a few weeks back, Anal Alan Simpson, the co-chair of Barack Obama’s so called “Cat Food Commission,” ostensibly charged with reducing the deficit, but in reality given a mandate to trim Social Security, hence leaving seniors surviving on cat food,* was referring to recipients of the pension program as “Lesser People,” in society.

That was pretty offensive, but Barack Obama knows his way around Washington, and he knows who and what Alan Simpson is, and so I figured that he selected him to co-chair the committee because he wants to cut Social Security.

Today however, I look back at that truly repugnant statement by former Senator Simpson as a high water mark on his civility, because in an email exchange with the president of the Older Woman’s League in which he ridiculed her organization and its membership, and described Social Security as a, “Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits.”

By this, he means that he thinks that every single American who might be eligible for the program is in his mind a moocher.

Of course, we now see the non-apology apology:

I can see that my remarks have caused you anguish, and that was not my intention. I certainly did not intend to diminish your hard work for the Older Women’s League. I know you care deeply about strengthening Social Security, and so do I, just as deeply. I remember your testimony at our public hearing in June about the importance of retirement security for women. Over the last 40 years, I have had my size 15 feet in my mouth a time or two. To quote my old friend and colleague, Senator Lloyd Bentsen, when I make a mistake, “It’s a doozy!”

You see, it’s not his fault, it’s her fault for being offended, and Simpson is just a good old boy who sometimes misspeaks.

You now have a number of advocacy groups calling for his resignation, saying, with a lot of justification, that this shows that Simpson has already pre-decided this matter, while the AARP has indirectly done so as well:

The vast majority of the 310 million Americans he insulted – particularly 156 million women and younger Americans for whom the traditional pension will be a relic of history – don’t have access to the type of traditional pension retirement security that Sen. Simpson has from his decades in Congress. Perhaps that’s why his comments demonstrate a woeful disconnect from or disinterest in the challenges facing many American families for whom Social Security is literally a lifeline.

“Sen. Simpson’s most recent departure from reality would be easy to dismiss if not for his position co-leading a Presidential commission that will likely recommend changes to Social Security. Sen. Simpson’s remarks not only cross the line of good judgment, but they undermine the serious work of the commission and give us little confidence the commission can fairly look at important programs such as Social Security.”

I am not going to join into any dead pool on Simpson. He’s going to stay on the board, because Barack Obama wants him on the board, and given his long history on the social safety net, the only reason that Barack Obama wanted him is because he wants to gut the program.

Expect the deficit commission to propose a few token taxes, no defense cuts, and draconian cuts to programs that help the needy, because that’s how the White House rolls.

*In the interest of health, I would suggest that people eat dog food, and not cat food. Cats because they are one of the few true carnivores, do not need the complex carbohydrates and fats that people, and dogs do. As such, dog food is better for you than cat food because it provides carbs and essential fatty acids. A dog can go blind if it is fed on cat food, but a cat lives just fine on dog food. The phenomenon is known as rabbit starvation.

No, They Are Cruel People*

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

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

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

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

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

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

(emphasis mine)

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

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

*That is what Atrios said.

Yeah, Sure, Nothing to See Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Few More People on the Right Side of 51 Park

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And they are Democrats.

Senator Al Franken:

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) is slamming conservative opposition to the Muslim community center project near Ground Zero in New York City — the city where he formerly resided for many years — calling the attacks against it “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.”

And Congressman Charlie Rangel:

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) came out in support of the proposed Cordoba House Islamic community center two blocks from Ground Zero yesterday, saying that he’s “kind of proud that they’re sticking to their guns and saying this is where they would want to worship.”

Also, lesser plaudits to Nancy Pelosi, who suggested that the anti-Islamic Center movement might be AstroTurf, though she walked it back a bit later in the day.

No Prosecution for Photographing Unclothed Teens in Their Houses

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier posts are here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Surprise, Harry Reid Chooses Cowardice Over American Values

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He’s called for the Lower Manhattan Islamic center to move:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now spoken out on the Muslim community center in New York — saying that while the organizers are free to construct the project, it should be moved somewhere else.

“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Senator Reid respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built some place else,” said a statement from Reid spokesman Jim Manley. “If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 911, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation.”

If he weren’t running against Sharron Angle, I’d be rooting for the Republican.

Of course, he is running against Sharron Angle, so I am merely ambivalent.

Of course, it’s so transparently craven that it probably hurt him more, but cowardice when it is both self-destructive and stupid appears to be a basic Democratic Party value.

Torturing a 15 Year Old Boy and Using the Confession Extracted Against Him, That’s the American Way

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So says Barack Obama on the Omar Khadr military tribunal:

Military commissions were one of those Bush/Cheney policies which provoked virtually universal outrage among progressives and Democrats back in the day when executive power abuses and rule of law transgressions were a concern. The Obama administration’s claim that the commissions are now improved to the point that they provide a forum of real justice is being put to the test — and blatantly failing — with the first such commission to be held under Obama: that of Omar Khadr, accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 which killed an American solider in Afghanistan, when Khadr was 15 years old. This is the first trial of a child soldier held since World War II, explained a U.N. official who condemned these proceedings. The commission has already ruled that confessions made by Khadr which were clearly obtained through coercion, abuse and torture will be admitted as evidence against him. Prior to the commencement of Khadr’s “trial,” the commission ruled in another case that the sentence imposed on a Sudanese detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi — convicted as part of a plea bargain of the dastardly crime of being Osama bin Laden’s “cook” — will be kept secret until he is released. What kind of country has secret sentences?

I get it. Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™ know that this is wrong, but they don’t want to spend the political capital or make the political risks to stop this.

This is worse the Bush and Cheney, because they saw torture and kangaroo courts as an independent good, but the Obama administration is doing this because they are worried about attacks that are happening anyway.

I will repeat what I said earlier, I am so writing in “Howard Dean,” in the 2012 general, and I don’t care if some it’s some recombinant DNA Chimera combination of Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, I am voting for whoever opposes him in the primary.

This is just evil, and should this ever see justice in the Hague, everyone in the chain of command today, right to the very top, should be put in the dock.