Transocean, the firm operating BP’s oil rig that exploded and created a blowout that is threatening most of the US Gulf coast, will make $270m from the loss of the rig because it was insured for more than it was worth.
I thought that this has been illegal since the Marine Insurance Act of 1746.
Obama would only replace him with someone even more hostile to the idea of the rule of law in the pursuit of terrorism cases.*
Money quote:
GREGORY: So, let me– let me unpack that a little bit. What you’d like to see happen is that Congress would pass a law that would say to judges, “Hey, look, in this environment, if we extract information that could be valuable intelligence about another terror plot, about who they’re involved in. Whether they’re connected to the Pakistani Taliban. We want to get all that without them lawyering up and still be able to use that against them in a court of law.” And you need more flexibility to do that, you think?
HOLDER: Yeah, we certainly need more flexibility. And we want the public safety exception to be consistent with– the public safety concerns that we now have in the 21st Century, as opposed to the public safety concerns that we had back in the 1980s.
GREGORY: So, that’s news. I mean, that’s an important development. Would you work with Congress to try to get that new law passed?
HOLDER: Yeah, we want to work with Congress to come up with a way in which we make our public safety exception more flexible. And again, more consistent with the threat– that we face. And yes, this is in fact the big news. This is a proposal that– we’re gonna be making and that we want to work– with Congress about.
GREGORY: So, a new priority for the administration.
HOLDER: It is a new priority.
It’s clear that Barack Obama has made a purely political decision to ape the worst aspects of the Bush administration, because he thinks that it will defuse criticism from the right, which it clearly hasn’t anyway.
This is venal, craven, and just plain un-American, as well as being stupid, because it does not work from a political perspective.
Would that we had some Democrats who were not a bunch of cowards.
H/t Crooks and Liars
*But remember, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
The 4 most knowledgeable journalists at Guantanamo Bay have been banned for “revealing” the identity of one of the witnesses, “Interrogator #1”.
The reason that I put “revealing” in quotes is because the individual in question’s name has been public knowledge for years:
Now the military has taken another great step toward enhancing the credibility of the proceedings by booting four reporters for violating a judge’s secrecy order. Their violation? Publishing the name of a former military interrogator who was a witness at the hearing. The Pentagon has now barred Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard, Globe and Mail reporter Paul Koring and CanWest news service reporter Steven Edwards from covering future military commissions at Gitmo.
And here’s the kicker: The identity of the interrogator had been widely reported before the trial. The name of the individual — known as “Interrogator No. 1″ in the courtroom at Gitmo — had been published during a 2005 court-martial in which he pleaded guilty to prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. And he had also allowed the use of his name in an interview with Shepard (!) in 2008.
BTW, it should be recalled that in the case in question the military is trying a child soldier.
Omar Khadr was 15 when the events in question took place.
Seriously, we have the gang that can’t shoot straight, or more accurately, the gang that is so concerned about managing the message that it’s making the “military tribunals” about as meaningful as Stalin’s show trials.
Welcome to our Gulag in the Caribbean.
I invented a device that makes you read this in your head using my voice!
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has ruled that a lower court erred when it said that the Texas money laundering statute only applied to cash, which led it to dismiss the case against Tom Delay:
Co-defendants of former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay suffered a significant setback Wednesday in their quest to avoid a trial on charges that the trio conspired to launder corporate money during the 2002 elections.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously ruled that the lower state 3rd Court of Appeals erred when it accepted the co-defendants’ arguments that the money laundering law did not apply to them because the funds involved were checks, not cash. The all-Republican court, in effect, said the lower court acted prematurely.
I always thought that the ruling that check cannot be used to money launder was a pretty good indication of just how f%$#ed up justice and the judiciary are in Texas, and it’s nice to see the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which is the state supreme court on criminal matter (the Texas Supreme Court is the supreme court on civil matter), to recognize this.
The interesting thing here is that after his performance in Dancing With the Stars, I think that a Texas jury might be much more willing to convict.
Pass the popcorn.
So, it is now a crime in Arizona to drive while brown, the governor signed the bill.
I would note that while Barack Obama condemned the law, he also made it possible by appointing Janet Napolitano as head of the DHS, because in Arizona, there is no Lt. Governor so Republican Secretary of State Jan Brewer became governor.
So much for outreach to Hispanics by the GOP.
I tend to be a hard-ass on immigration. I tend to refer to them as “illegal,” not “undocumented,” and I favor strict penalties against those who negligently (the current standard is knowingly) employ illegal aliens/
I also understand the reality of the situation, that about ⅓ of illegals in the US entered illegally and overstayed their visas, which means that they are not the stereotypical Hispanic, and that much of the immigration fraud in the US occurs in things like the H1B and L1A visas, who are overwhelmingly not Hispanic, where a significant proportion of the visas are granted in violation of the regulations.
That being said, Arizona’s new immigration law sucks. (Google news link)
Basically, it’s an excuse for police officers to stop, detain, and arrest people for “driving while Hispanic.”
It’s standard Republican populist bigotry and racism.
Crusiing the innerwebz, a member of the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS discovered the following video of Massey CEO Don Blankenship’s.
It’s short, but you will note that he thinks that agencies attempting to make coal mines safer are as “silly as global warming.”
Well, one of the users, Jolly Reaper, on said the following:
If he doesn’t get whacked by a miner, this nation really is full of pussies.
It’s true.
One of the great tragedies of US culture is that when disgruntled employees go on shooting sprees, they target their coworkers, as opposed to upper management, which should then be followed by a few acquittals.
While any loss of life is tragic, if there was a real fear of death among upper management as to their safety, we would see better management.
It seems that even workers going postal give too much deference to the MBA/Banker types.
Pro Publica, along with the radio folks at Planet Money, have investigated the activities of a hedge fund called Magnetar, which appears to have bankrolled the creation of mortgage backed securities so that they could bet against them.
Note that there are 8 chapters, so you may want to link to the This American Life broadcast, (about 40 minutes) which is less encyclopedic, but rather more streamlined.
Basically, at the end of 2005, it appeared that the housing bubble was moderating, which made people were less interested in investing in the mortgage backed security known as the CDO, because without double digit increases in home prices, the risk levels were higher, and the potential rewards were less.
What Magnetar did was to get banks to write more CDOs by agreeing to buy the worst tranches, the riskiest 3-5% of these instruments, and then everyone else, seeing as how the scum at the bottom of the barrel was taken, would snap up the “higher quality” stuff.
At one point, Magnetar was covering about ½ of the CDO market, and betting against everything that they could get their hands on with credit default swaps (CDS).
And the financial industry noticed their moves into the field, even if they did not know of the CDS bets, to the degree that Business Week predicted that they would be, “shredded”.
The folks at Pro Publica have uncovered emails where they were aggrissively pressuring the agents that they set up for the funds to make them as risky as possible, which makes sense, if you are betting against them.
For what it’s worth, it wasn’t only people like pension funds and municipalities who got burnt by this. J.P. Morgan lost billions by holding onto senior tranches of CDOs that they created for Magnetar, even though it was clear by that time the game that they were playing.
So, why did Morgan do it anyway? Because the people who bought the CDOs generated commissions at the front end, and were then given huge bonuses based on this, so by the time it all went pear shaped, the individual traders had a few tens of millions of dollars in the bank.
By the end of their run, it was so bad that even Moody’s refused to rate their CDOs.
This is deeply and perfidiously corrupt and well organized, and I cannot see why RICO isn’t being applied to anyone who touched this.
But seriously, read the whole thing. It is stunning in its scope and corruption, but this boggles the mind.
This is not taking out insurance on your neighbor’s house and burning it down. Paying for the road out to a sub development so that people will buy houses, and then using a squadron of B-52s to firebomb that development, only that development is our economy.
Remember when I said that Joe Lieberman would be preening to get his face on the Teevee with regard to the new START Treaty?
Well, I was right. He is now calling for what appears to be a massive buildup in European missile defenses and a his desire for an unprovoked nuclear strike on Iran as a condition for his support:
Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” [big shocker there] the Connecticut Independent suggested that he himself would oppose ratification of the START II Treaty that Obama signed in Prague this past week, in part because, he reasoned, the language left America vulnerable to a nuclear Iran.
“I don’t believe that there will be 67 votes to ratify the treaty unless the administration does two things,” Lieberman said. “First: commit to modernize our nuclear stockpile, so as we have less nuclear weapons we know that they are capable if, God forbid, we need them. And secondly, to make absolutely clear that the statements by Russian president [Dmitry] Medvedev at the signing in program, that seemed to suggest that if we continue to build ballistic missile defense in Europe they may pull out of this treaty, is just not acceptable to us. We need that defense to protect our allies and ourselves from Iran.”
Basically, Lieberman is saying that unless Obama threatens Iran with nuclear attack, and promises to build up the ill-conceived European missile defense system, he’ll vote no.
Yes, he’s with on everything but Iraq, thanks for keeping him in the tent and pissing in, Harry and Barack.
This is all about Joe Lieberman getting his ego stroked, and the solution to this problem is to make it clear that there will be consequences if he f%$#s with this, not to stroke his ego: that only makes him worse.
Here is hoping that he gets caught buggering an underage hamster and will be forced to resign.
Now that Wisconsin state law requires teaching about the use of contraceptives in sexual education classes, the Juneau County Distract Attorney is threatening prosecutions of any teacher who teaches these classes, on the theory that teaching kids about condoms, etc. is, “Forcing our schools to instruct children on how to utilize contraceptives encourages our children to engage in sexual behavior, whether as a victim or an offender.”
He is threatening prosecutions for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Expect a baby boom in Juneau County shortly, because those kids will be f%$#ing anyway.
As would be the regulators and judges that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship has assiduously cultivated over the years.*
They would have been tried, convicted, and had a bullet in the base of their skull.
As it is, the Upper Big Branch Mine, where 25 miners have died and 4 are still missing, has a long history of repeated violations, 1,342 since 2005, and 50 just last month is a case of a wealthy business owner buying off the local Mandarins, and then having a very public disaster.
This is classically a situation where the Chinese legal machinery rolls into action and does a few executions for PR.
They’ve done it to corrupt brokers, and it appears that in this case, the model would be to execute Blankenship, the judge, and a few bureaucrats in the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
All in all it would make the world a better place, particularly in the case of Blankenship, whose company has left a trail of avoidable mining disasters behind it.
And then the meds kick in, and I remember that I oppose the death penalty.
*He quite literally bought a West Virginia Supreme Court justice some years back.
Matt Taibbi, once again, this time on how the banks used complex products to rape Jefferson County, Alabama when they wanted to issue debt to upgrade their sewer system:
What happened here in Jefferson County would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for the peculiar alchemy of modern oligarchical capitalism: A mob of corrupt local officials and morally absent financiers got together to build a giant device that converted human sh%$ into billions of dollars of profit for Wall Street — and misery for people like Lisa Pack. [a county employee laid off when the debt exploded]
………And once the giant sh%$ machine was built and the note on all that fancy construction started to come due, Wall Street came back to the local politicians and doubled down on the scam. They showed up in droves to help the poor, broke citizens of Jefferson County cut their toilet finance charges using a blizzard of incomprehensible swaps and refinance schemes — schemes that only served to postpone the repayment date a year or two while sinking the county deeper into debt. In the end, every time Jefferson County so much as breathed near one of the banks, it got charged millions in fees. There was so much money to be made bilking these dizzy Southerners that banks like JP Morgan spent millions paying middlemen who bribed — yes, that’s right, bribed, criminally bribed — the county commissioners and their buddies just to keep their business. Hell, the money was so good, JP Morgan at one point even paid Goldman Sachs $3 million just to back the f%$# off, so they could have the rubes of Jefferson County to fleece all for themselves.
(%$# mine, emphasis original)
I believe that I have described him as this generation’s Hunter S. Thompson, but I was wrong.
He is this generation’s Upton Sinclair, though there is certainly a lot of Thompson in his prose.
It’s a fairly long read, and the twists and turns of the deal, where Morgan Stanley paid a middleman to bribe people, and now will be getting off Scott free, and I really can’t do justice with a summary, so just read the whole thing, and at the end, you will agree with him when he says, “This isn’t capitalism. It’s nomadic thievery.”
I wish that I could write like him.
Dennis Kozlowski, former Tyco CEO has filed a lawsuit against his former company for millions of dollars in retirement benefits:
Ex-Tyco International Ltd. Chief Executive Officer L. Dennis Kozlowski, jailed for stealing millions of dollars, wants a U.S. court to order the company to pay him tens of millions from his retirement account.
Lawyers for Kozlowski filed court papers in which they claim that Tyco breached its retirement agreement by refusing to pay him the lump sum he has demanded. As of October 2008, the value of Kozlowski’s retirement account was $75.9 million, according to the court papers, which are part of a 2002 lawsuit between Tyco and Kozlowski.
Kozlowski, 63, and former Chief Financial Officer Mark Swartz were convicted in 2005 of securities fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records. The jury in New York State Supreme Court found they stole about $137 million from Tyco through unauthorized bonuses and the abuse of company loans.
Because, you see, in the world of the big players, going to jail from stealing from your company doesn’t mean you don’t get your golden parachute.
Seriously, can the just have the bailiff beat the snot out of him in open court?
Tyco’s defense, that, “A ‘faithless servant’ is not entitled to any compensation,” would sound fairly convincing to me, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
Simply put, while I understand and appreciate his desire tosay, “In your face,” to Republicans, who have now appeared to lose the vote, this over-steps the basic bounds of humanity.
Seriously man, you use the music of ABBA to chastise Republicans?
You do know that doing so is but one step away from napalming baby kittens!
Baby Kittens, do you hear me, Napalming Baby Kittens!!!!
You’ve done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you NO sense of DECENCY?
The fact that they were screaming “f****t” at Representative Barney Frank, and screamed, “n***er” at Representative, and civil rights icon, John Lewis:
Civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) and fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Andre Carson (D-IN) related a particularly jarring encounter with a large crowd of protesters screaming “kill the bill”… and punctuating their chants with the word “nigger.”
………
And that wasn’t an isolated incident. Early this afternoon, standing outside a Democratic whip meeting in the Longworth House office building, I watched Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) make his way out the door, en route to the neighboring Rayburn building. As he rounded the corner toward the exit, wading through a huge crowd of tea partiers and other health care protesters, an elderly white man screamed “Barney, you faggot”–a line that caused dozens of his confederates to erupt in laughter.
They are doing this because they can, and they have wanted to for years, but feel that the level of social disapprobation involved in such an act in different contexts will be too great.
Post racial society my ass.
Seriously, why cannot we see this on real news programs?
(10:39)
If I could write half as well as Stewart and his crew, hell, I’d be a f%$#ing amazing writer.
Can we throw Assurant Health in jail for attempted murder:
In May, 2002, Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina, learned he had contracted HIV. The news, of course, was devastating, but Mitchell believed that he had one thing going for him: On his own initiative, in anticipation of his first year in college, he had purchased his own health insurance.
Shortly after his diagnosis, however, his insurance company, Fortis, [now Assurant] revoked his policy. Mitchell was told that without further treatment his HIV would become full-blown AIDS within a year or two and he would most likely die within two years after that.
…………
Previously undisclosed records from Mitchell’s case reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy. As was the case with Mitchell, their insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all, according to the court documents and interviews with state and federal investigators.
…………
In the motions, [presiding judge, Michael G. ] Nettles not only strongly denied Fortis‘ claims but condemned the corporation’s conduct.
“There was evidence that Fortis‘ general counsel insisted years ago that members of the rescission committee not record the identity of the persons present and involved in the process of making a decision to rescind a Fortis health insurance policy,” Nettles wrote.
Elsewhere in his order, Nettles noted that there were no “minutes of actions, votes, or any business conducted during the rescission committee’s meeting.”
The South Carolina Supreme Court, in upholding the jury’s verdict in the case in a unanimous 5-0 opinion, said that it agreed with the lower court’s finding that Fortis destroyed records to hide the corporation’s misconduct. Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal wrote: “The lack of written rescission policies, the lack of information available regarding appealing rights or procedures, the separate policies for rescission documents” as well as the “omission” of other records regarding the decision to revoke Mitchell’s insurance, constituted “evidence that Fortis tried to conceal the actions it took in rescinding his policy.”
They were engaging in actions in which they knew that they were defrauding their customers, a felony, and they knew that there was a significant livelihood of death resulting, which makes this felony murder, and perhaps 1st degree murder .
It’s nice that Mr. Mitchell got his money, but the company and its agents need to go to jail.
BTW, this is Murray Waas reporting this, and I would argue that he is one of the 5 best investigative reporters out there.
The usual suspects, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and News Busters (Scott Whitlock & Tim Graham), who decided that it was somehow ethically good to smear an 11 year old boy who simply said, that he did not want other little boys to lose their mothers because of a lack of health insurance.
Why anyone buys any products from people who advertise with them is beyond me.
These are evil people, and not only should we not patronize their sponsors, we shouldn’t piss on them if they are on fire.
</rant>
So, it’s official, the Texas Board of Education has excised Thomas Jefferson from their history books, and replaced him with religious fundamentalist John Calvin. (See also here)
We also have an attempt to rehabilitate red-baiter Joe McCarthy, and poster child for sex without partners Newt Gingrich, and it gets really, really, stupid.
Seriously let’s give them back to Mexico, and let the federales pry their guns from their cold, dead fingers.
The case here is very simple, contractors at Shield Group Security reported illegal arms sales and smuggling by the firm to US authorities.
When the fled to the US Embassy, they were then taken into custody and tortured by the US Army, using techniques that Rumsfeld specifically authorized.
U.S. District Judge Wayne Andersen has ruled that their lawsuit can proceed.
The principle here is fairly simple: You can sue a police officer for brutality or false arrest, but not a prosecutor for deciding to pursue a case.
In this case Rumsfeld specifically authorized brutality.
Here’s hoping that Rummy spends his remaining days in penury.