So, now Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan, who said that speculative bubbles could never be spotted, and did everything he could to make increased leverage possible, is now saying that, “U.S. banks need to have higher capital.”
It might have meant something 4 years ago, you know, when you were lobbying for lower capital requirements, but now, it’s just trying to protect your so-called legacy.
Just when you thought that the parasites on Wall Street could not come up with a more repulsive way for them to generate commissions, they have created securitization of dead peasant insurance:
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds……
……
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them……..
Paul Volker was once quoted as saying something like the only financial innovation that has benefited society in the past few decades was the ATM machine.
He’s right.
Financial “innovations” should be treated like the FDA treats (or used to treat, before they started taking pharma money for their tests) drugs. It does not hit the market until proven safe and effective.
The reason that Godwin’s law does not apply here is because we are talking about Patrick Buchanan, and, on the 60th anniversary of the start of WWII, he’s writing about how the war really wasn’t Hitler’s fault at all, but the fault of those meddling English.
OK, we know that he is a pro-Nazi kook, and we know that his Dad was involved in the German American Bund, so we can only imagine what little Patty’s dinner table discussions were like, but why does this man have a soap box at MSNBC and other networks?
The issue is not that he is an anti-Semitic and racist kook, it is that mainstream media outlets still feel compelled to give him access?
To quote the late, great Molly Ivins, “The speech was so much better in the original German.”
[on edit] I did not link directly to Pat Buchanan’s article, though I read it, because I did not want to drive page views.
*Which states that, “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1,” with a corollary that, “the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically “lost” whatever debate was in progress.”†
†It should be noted that this law has not been considered to apply exclusively to Usenet discussions for at least a decade, and is applied generally to all forms of electronic text based communications.
Which may make Richard Cohen the stupidest motherf$#%er on the face of the earth, beating out Douglas Feith.
You see, he wants to wring his hands, and say that there should be no prosecutions for torture, because it might work, once.
This ignores the fact that it does not work most of the time, in fact it makes things much worse, because not only does it make potential allies into opponents, but it does not extract reliable information.
Notwithstanding Mr. Cohen’s self-professed, “abhorrence of torture,” this is really about the fact that inside the Washington, DC Beltway, the idea for accountability for crimes is an anathema to the “very serious people.”
He coaches this moral capitulation as his desire for the impossible, “absolute security,” which does not exist sitting in one’s home, or driving on a street, but this is thrown in because it sounds reasonable, and justifies the most heinous of acts.
The reality is that they are completely bereft of morality, and so attached to Sally Quinn’s damn cocktail parties and their access to the politically powerful in the nation, that they endorse criminality and moral indecency on a scale that boggles the mind.
That being said, cheer-leading crimes against humanity and endorsing the idea that there should never be any accountability does not make Richard Cohen a stupid man, it just makes him a war criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity like Julius Streicher or Hassan Ngeze, what makes him the stupidest man in the world is this:
Attorney General Eric Holder has named a special prosecutor to see whether any of the CIA’s interrogators broke the law. Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there. No CIA interrogator can feel safe. The interrogators are about to be interrogated.
(emphasis mine)
While Judith “EC” Miller’s incarceration on contempt of court charges is undoubtedly coercive, and openly so, the intent of the contempt citation and jailing was to extract information about her sources, it was by no means torture.
Anyone conflating incarceration with torture is really, really, mind bogglingly stupid.
Te stoopid….It burns us!!1
It turns out that the discovery that Mark Penn’s use of his Wall Street Journal column to pimp for clients and to trawl for new clients is not an issue for their editorial page.
Not surprising, given that the WSJ has the most venal and dishonest editorial OP/ED section in the United States, though Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post offer some competition in that area.
*I cannot believe that I just said that.†
†That may be the first time that I’ve ever said this about a Democrat.‡
‡But it is Mark “The Human Stain” Penn, so it is not a surprise that he would have earned this distinction.
It appears that the bubble headed bleach blond of DC political coverage, Politico, is reporting that “key conservatives” are warning that liberals may inappropriately politicize Senator Kennedy’s death.
They call it the, “Wellstone Effect,” which I guess means that a legitimate outpouring of grief over the death of a hero will be used by the America hating right wing, and a complicit press, to create the illusion that real human grief is somehow a sinister conspiracy.
As to those right wingers who are somehow all upset that it appears that Kennedy’s name will now go on the healthcare reform bill, let me say this: Teddy Kennedy was at his worst better than your best at their best: Ronald Reagan was not fit to shine the sole of Ted Kennedy’s shoes with his tongue.
As Spencer Ackerman notes in his review of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture, amidst all the redacted paragraphs, was this:
The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.
The translation from the Orwellian, or perhaps translation to the Orwellian, it’s kind of hard to determine here in this specific instance of extreme Newspeak, but it comes to this:
We can’t release torture victims, nor can we try them, because we tortured them, and they will confirm that they have been tortrued.
Seriously, I think that Eric Arthur Blair is spinning in has grave at the speed of a Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 hard drive.
Or maybe Canada, or Belize, or Iran or Myanmar (Burma); I don’t care, who gets Texas.
The latest bit of wankery of the Texas State Board of Education on the curriculum, where they are looking to replace Thurgood Marshall with Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Focus on the Family, Phyllis Schlafly, the Moron Moral Majority, Rush Limbaugh, Mike Huckabee, and the National Rifle Association makes it pretty clear that the intersection of Texan and American values is pretty much a null set.
I really cannot add anything to Atrios’ analysis, “I guess what bugs me most of all isn’t that they’re trying ram through a conservative-only version of history, it’s that they’re all obviously really f%$#ing stupid.”
So, Tom Ridge tells us now that Bush and His Evil Minions™ manipulated terror alerts for political gain.
But he vehemently denied any such effort while he was in office, and delayed his resignation as head of DHS until after the election.
He knew that it was wrong, but he kept his mouth shut, and now he writes a book, and it’s supposed to make everything hunky dory….It does not.
Mr. Ridge, as I stated only yesterday, I do not take the term “treason” lightly, but it appears to me that your complicity in this affair, when you knew that it was happening, and you know that it was wrong, and you knew that it was damaging to the country, comes awfully close to that term.
Just when I think that Bush and His Evil Minions™ have left me so jaded that they can no longer shock me with their corruption and incompetence, I discover that not only did the CIA have assassination teams, but they outsourced these teams to Blackwater, USA (now Xe):
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.
This is not surprising. Blackwater’s mercenary division, Blackwater Security Consulting (BSC), was founded in 2002 with the obvious goal of cashing in on the paranoia bonanza post 911, and used that, along with the reputation earned by Eric Prince’s father as a reliable supporter of extreme right wing causes, to generate revenues.
Notwithstanding the caveat in the article:
It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.
I think that it’s more likely than not that there was a real intent by the CIA to hire outside contractors as hit-men.
If CIA paramilitary forces needed training, they could get that from any number of military organizations.
After all, as has been discovered in Iraq, Mercenaries are:
So, the most incompetent and brutal of the mercenaries were chosen, probably on the basis of political payback for contributions and a shared Christo-Fascist world view, and the intent was to just turn them loose to kill people without the slightest indication of meaningful supervision.
Great googly moogly.
We need a special prosecutor now.
The New York Times is reporting that all though the bailout process, Hank Paulson was consulting daily, and in some cases hourly, with Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, despite ethics requirements, and promises to Congress during his confirmation hearing, that would mandate that he keep the firm at arm’s length.
What’s more, he did not have similar conversations with any of the other investment firms.
It should be noted that many of these conversations were during the initial resolution of the AIG crisis, where the decision to honor what were clearly fraudulent credit default swap (CDS) contracts kept Goldman, and the rest of the Wall Street solvent, and out of government hands, protecting their high paying jobs.
Seriously, whether or not you want to go after Bush and His Evil Minions™ for things like torture, which we should, this is garden variety corruption, and not criminalizing policy, and should be pursued to the fullest extent of the law.
H/T The Big Picture.
They have made a corporate decision to attempt to destroy Girl Scout cookie sales:
What could Wal-mart possibly do to harm Girl Scouts?
Wal-mart has copied the Girl Scouts’ two best selling cookie types, Thin Mints and Tagalongs.
Wal-mart is selling Fake Girl Scout Cookies.
Wal-mart has fake Girl Scout cookies in ‘beta’ distribution, on their way to a national rollout. Because the cookies are ‘reasonable facsimiles’ of the authentic Girl Scout cookies (I sampled them myself at BlogHer ‘09 last week) and are being sold at an everyday low price, these cookies are poised to snatch cookie sales right out of the hands of the Girl Scouts themselves.
Remember, the funds from girl scout cookie sales go to their programs, things like camping trips, etc.
It must be the uniforms….It reminds Mal-Mart management of unions, so this organization must be crushed.
This is normally not a phrase I use, even with the most annoying members of my family, but I think that for Dick Cheney, it is very clear that his complaints about George W. Bush remove any doubt about the fact, and furthermore it places his comments about the repudiation of his Manichean, and quite frankly delusional, view of the world by the voters in the proper context.
We need to call him a bitch, because to call him anything else grants him a credibility and gravitas that he simply does not deserve.*
The man, who has an uninterrupted record of failure in his life, recommending that Ford dump Rockefeller as VP, moving to contractors in the military, invading Iraq, etc., is now saying that George W. Bush was not hard line enough for him:
“In the second term, he felt Bush was moving away from him,” said a participant in the recent gathering, describing Cheney’s reply. “He said Bush was shackled by the public reaction and the criticism he took. Bush was more malleable to that. The implication was that Bush had gone soft on him, or rather Bush had hardened against Cheney’s advice. He’d showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming. It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times — never apologize, never explain — and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.”
Truth be told, I really think that this is really all about two words, “Scooter Libby,” and Cheney is upset, because he believes that without a full pardon, Libby may some day roll over on his flabby, lily-white ass.
He knows that Omertà means less in politics than it does in the Mafia, which means that it means nothing at all, and it terrifies him.
*Yes, I understand that the social dynamics of the situation, where in order to diminish a man you essentially call him a woman, and in order to diminish a woman, you essentially call her a man,† but you go to war with Dick Cheney with the societal norms you have—not the societal norms you might want or wish to have at a later time.
†See Clinton, Hillary and Pelosi, Nancy.
My apologies, but the city of Amsterdam gives us a righteous take-down of Bill O’Reilly and His Evil Minions’&trade talking points on legalized weed in the Netherlands.
H/t Boing Boing.
BTW, in the comments there, you can find this ditty, Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals….Some hellhole, huh.
Doug Manchester, hotelier and big money backer of “traditional marriage” defender in California, he spent big on proposition 8, is getting a divorce from his wife of 43 years.
What’s more, it appears that he is doing his level best to play hardball with his soon to be ex, draining joint accounts, concealing assets, and stiffing some of his grand children on private school tuitions.
Now, there is some marriage that we can stand behind.
Don’t Make Me Get Out of this Chair!Columnist and deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Jay Bookman notes a contradiction in the arguments of the “Obama will engage in Nazi-style euthanasia™“.
It appears that one of the widely circulated canards is that if Obama gets his way, he will kill the sick and infirm, and Mr. Bookman, being on the mailing list for retarded libertarian magazine Human Events,* received this missive titled Grandmas and Unborn Babies Face Extermination by Obama’s “Health” Care Plan, which cited an editorial in Investors Business Daily, which claimed that:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.†
The problem here, as Mr. Bookman so ably notes, is that Stephen Hawking lives in the UK, and has lived there his entire life, and furthermore, he has, since the age of 6½, had his medical care covered by that very same National Health Service that is allegedly chomping at the bit to kill him.
The folks writing about this are stupid and evil beyond belief.
That being said, while Jay Bookman is an engaging writer, this is not the “Best Snark Evah!!!!“, that distinction is left to the comments on his blog post, specifically the first comment, from one Brad Steel:
I think that I broke something laughing.
*Thankfully, I have avoided this fate.
†You won’t find it there any more, though there is a note there noting the “correction“.
Three cheers to Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson (pictured) who just put the criminally corrupt National Arbitration Forum (NAF) out of business.
As of the end of this week, they will no longer be accepting any cases on consumer disputes under a consent decree.
The NAF, the favorite venue for credit card and cell phone company kangaroo courts, argues that they did not have the resources to defend themselves in this case, but the reality is that they do not have the facts to defend themselves in this case:
….In one case, NAF ordered a woman to pay the credit card company MBNA almost $8000 because she had the same name as another woman who owed MBNA money. Conversely, when a Harvard Law Professor named Elizabeth Bartholet, who used to work part-time as an NAF arbitrator, handed down a single decision against a credit card company she was immediately stripped of her caseload by NAF at the request of the credit card industry.
….
Unfortunately, NAF was vulnerable to this kind of attack because the evidence against it was so overwhelming–not every forced arbitration company has a Harvard Law professor prepared to testify about how they were strongarmed into shafting consumers–so it remains to be seen whether another, equally offensive company will emerge to fill the void (a bill, currently pending in Congress, would end the practice of forced arbitration in consumer and employment contracts altogether). Even so, the near-total demise of NAF is one of the most important pro-consumer developments in decades; for the first time in years, credit card companies may actually have to follow the law.
When a member of the Harvard Law faculty gets kicked for ruling for the consumer once, it will be hard impossible to get a jury not to throw your sorry asses in jail.
Pam Martens of Counter Punch properly calls the mandatory arbitration system Judicial Apartheid, and she also notes that the NAF was quite literally owned by the bill collection agencies like Mann Bracken, Wolpoff & Abramson, and Eskanos & Adler, and testimony that, “Management meetings in which personnel were instructed to call arbitrators and tell them, prior to the release of the decision to the parties to the arbitration, to change decisions they had issued that found against the Famous Parties [credit card companies].”
There is a bill in Congress to put an end to this, but I am not inclined to believe that it will see the light of day, and in any case, the people behind this need to go to jail, not just be put out of business.
Previous posts are here.
It appears that after the obscene profits, generated by risk taking that is being bankrolled by an implicit federal guarantee, Goldman Sachs has deigned to accept the US Treasury’s price offer on the sale of their stock warrants. (See also here and here)
I think that someone there realized that when people were referring to them as, “That great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,*” that it was time to throw a few crusts to the peasants government of the United States of America.
As a result of their unprecedented generosity, the chattering classes are once again singing their praises.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for this bon mot, it was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
We now know, because DCIA Panetta has told Congress, that the CIA had a secret program running for almost 8 years, and that they did not inform Congress of this, as required by law, on the orders of Dick Cheney.
It’s even gotten Dianne Feinstein,* who is generally remarkably hospitable to secrecy and executive authority saying that this was a clear violation of the law.
At this point all indications are that Cheney was setting up a death squad that would answer only to him.
Theoretically, it would only be used against al Qaeda, but remember that Bush and His Evil Minions™ defined “returning to terrorism”† as publishing an OP/ED in the New York Times.
I have no clue as to why it did not go forward, but we can be thankful about that, because they would have gotten it horribly wrong, because that is what the Bush administration did time and time again.‡
The thing is though, this is precisely the sort of thing that Cheney wanted to do, because it made him feel powerful, whether it worked or not.
They tortured because it gave Cheney and Rumsfeld a stiffy.§
It’s torture all over again: Now that the reports are coming out, it turns out that sugarless cookies worked better than torture, and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tennant knew this, but they were objectively pro-torture.
They wanted to do this, because it made them feel powerful, and ordering murders would have done the same thing.
The real question here is what stopped them, and the only answer that I have is that someone told them they could be in the cross hairs if they tried this, and that they, and theirs, were softer targets Osama.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
†Except, of course, the “Tipton 3” were never terrorists in the first place.
‡Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:
But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:
- It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
- It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
- It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.
Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.
§Sorry for that mental image.
I figure that he will be sworn in before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and lie about what he and his staff did, because he’s Goldman Sachs, and knows that there are no consequences for this if you are Goldman Sachs.