Category: Evil

Not Enough Bullets: Chrysler/Fiat

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It appears that Fiat may be the employer of record for senior management, and that they will then be “seconded” to Chrysler in order to skirt pay limitations at bailed out firms. (See also here)

In the long run, the real answer is confiscatory taxes at higher levels of remuneration.

Figure bumping the tax rate by 1% at $250K/year and at each $250K break point, with a limit of 85% at income in excess of $13¼ million a year, or 90% at 14½ million a year.

This crap needs to stop. These executives are overpaid by the standards of the world, they will be making more than the Chairman of Fiat, which is taking them over, and they do not deliver value.

The problem is not excessive salaries for senior executives at bailed out firms, it is excessive salaries, period, full stop.

It is theft from the shareholders and the less well remunerated employees, and it is corrosive to society.

Not Enough Bullets: UK Edition

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Of course, because of their strict gun laws, we may have to implant the bullets manually:

City bankers are to reap nearly £7bn in bonuses this spring even though the government has been forced to pump tens of billions into the banks to prevent them collapsing.

The good news is that this is down from its £14.1 billion peak in 2007.

The bad news is that these folks still say that they need this with a straight face.

As my British friend would say, “Fecken bollocks Numpty wankers!!”

Obama Now Comes Out Against Truth Commission

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What the hell is wrong with everyone in Washington?

Meeting with the Democratic leadership on Wednesday night, Mr. Obama said a special inquiry would steal time and energy from his policy agenda, and could mushroom into a wider distraction looking back at the Bush years, people briefed on the discussion said. Mr. Obama, they said, repeated much the same message on Thursday at a bipartisan meeting with Congressional leaders.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, and other top Senate Democrats endorsed Mr. Obama’s view on Thursday, telling reporters at a news conference at the Capitol that they preferred to wait for the results of an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee expected late this year.

It should be noted that senior Senators on the Intel Committee have already been described as having signed off on torture, and as such Rockefeller, Feinstein*, Roberts, etc. have a vested interest in burying this.

The fact is that the American public wants this, the Republicans are going to fight you every step of the way on your agenda anyway, but still, you are determined to kick the can down the road long enough that people will forget.

This is not partisan politics, it is, as Krugman says, a battle for America’s soul, and it appears that the folks inside the Beltway just don’t give a damn

And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

What about the argument that investigating the Bush administration’s abuses will impede efforts to deal with the crises of today? Even if that were true — even if truth and justice came at a high price — that would arguably be a price we must pay: laws aren’t supposed to be enforced only when convenient. But is there any real reason to believe that the nation would pay a high price for accountability?

Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Peter Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care. Steven Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and indeed shouldn’t, be involved. All he would have to do is let the Justice Department do its job — which he’s supposed to do in any case — and not get in the way of any Congressional investigations.

Why this scramble not to investigate. It makes no sense.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Enough Schadenfreude for the Whole Month

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

Two articles on how the rich investment bankers are so upset about people thinking that they are overpaid scumbags, The Wail of the 1%, about how they all feel unjustly vilified, after creating the financial crisis, and still demanding 7 figure bonuses and 7 figure life styles, and Confessions of a Bailout CEO Wife, whose content is pretty much obvious from the title.

It should be noted that the Gawker has an absolutely devastating summary of the latter article. The final lines of which are prize:

Sounds awful. If only there were some good news too. Oh, what, there is? “The good news is that Americans have short attention spans. Before long, some other group will come along to absorb all the frustration and anger.”

Such as: Rich wives.

(emphasis mine)

I’m not an empathic guy, and I don’t feel your pain, I just go Nelson Muntz.

With children going hungry, and ordinary folks who actually work for a living having lost their jobs and their medical coverage, the idea that you are wailing about not being as overpaid to mismanage people’s money fills me with nothing but contempt.

How about you do some real work, physical labor, even if it’s something as simple repaving a road, and then ask yourself: just how onerous is your work, and why do you need to be paid so much to do it?

Seriously, These People Should Be Thrown in a Hole So Deep That They Forget What the Sun Looks Like

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Well, the Senate report on torture is out, and it appears that Rumsfeld and His Evil Minions™ were authorizing torture before the infamous memos justifying such behavior had been drafted, despite the fact that numerous experts on interrogation said that it torture does not work.

Notably, it was based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training which was used to allow captured Americans to resist torture designed to elicit false confessions.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et all did not care. They just wanted to torture out of a combination of sadism and machismo.

That being said, I do like the last line of the article, “If torture occurred before the memo was written, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, and the writing of the memo is potentially criminal.”

In a related note, we now know the answer to the question, “Why waterboard someone 183 times in one month?”

They did it for propaganda purposes, specifically, in order to extract false statements linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein”

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Seriously, these people need to spend the rest of their lives in a SUPERMAX facility.

Living in Bizarro* World

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Because Dick Cheney is demanding that more torture memos be declassified, because his memos, or at least the ones that he wants released, show that torture worked, and got important information.

Not surprising, as Cheney is a master of bureaucratic infighting and the CYA memo

I agree with Dan Froomkin when he says, “Call Cheney’s bluff,” I also think that if he wants memos releases, they should be reports from the agents in place, and not self serving memos from the OVP.

*If you do not know what Bizarro World is, go here, or better yet, read some classic Superman® comic books….Bizarro, and Superman® are a part of basic American cultural literacy.

Prosecution of Torture Architects Has Evolved in Just 2 Days

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I started collecting links on Sunday, and it appears that the the news has developed in a rather interesting manner, with strong statements that there would be no prosecutions, followed by a retreat by the Obama administration following push back from multiple quarters.

On Sunday, we have appearances by administration officials saying that there will be no prosecutions of anyone involved in torture

I asked Emanuel: “The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?”

“He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let’s just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided,” Emanuel said.

What about those who devised the policy, I asked?

“Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.

“And it’s not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: “This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.’ We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don’t use anymore. We banned it.”

(emphasis mine)

Then the pressure mounted to not bury everything, and Obama is now saying that investigating the people who crafted the policy is up to the Department of Justice, and Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas reporting that, “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has discussed naming a senior prosecutor or outside counsel to review whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries–and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.

Once again, showing that, when absolutely forced to by the weight of public opinion, the Obama administration can come around on this.

This is a good thing, because whoever was involved in waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, about 6 times a day, was not following even the Orwellian rules of Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Not Enough Bullets: AIG AND Goldman Sachs

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Gee, it appears that the trustees that were appointed to keep the government from “interfering” in the affairs of AIG when they were taken over managed to select a man who owned over $3 million in stock in Goldman Sachs.

This might explain why AIG CEO Edward Liddy was so eager to pay back Goldman Sachs at 100¢ on those bogus AIG credit default swaps (CDS).

Seriously, just how much corruption and self dealing is Obama/Geithner/Summers going to tolerate before they start looking at criminality?

This is a lot worse than a, “$6000 gold-and-burgundy floral patterned shower curtain,” and the idea that the taxpayer can’t place conditions on aid, because the CEOs will choose their own pay over the well being of the taxpayer is the active and open looting of these companies by senior management.

It should be viewed as a criminal act.

I’m not saying that senior management cannot quit, but I am saying that if they are unwilling to act in the best interest of the shareholders, they should be fired.

What is Wrong with the Village:

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Dana Perino is joining Mark Penn’s PR firm, Burson-Marsteller:

Mr. Penn, the firm’s CEO, said Ms. Perino’s experiences in Mr. Bush’s second term make her a valuable addition to the team of battle-tested public-relations veterans he is assembling. Mr. Penn writes a “Microtrends” column for The Wall Street Journal Online.

Bull. She was clubbed daily like a baby seal.

This is all about the incestuous ways in Washington, DC, and I can think of no better illustration of why the town needs a good muck-raking prosecutor to clean it out.

The Other Matt Has A Good Point About Our Societal Values

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Matthew Yglesias makes a very good point about how we view virtue in our society, specifically that the people at senior levels in the finance giants are not good people.

These are people who are millionaires many times over, and are set for life, and still continue to believe that the only way to induce them to do good is to offer them the opportunity to earn millions more.

In any sane society, this is both evil and insane, as Charlie Sheen’s character so ably noted in the movie Wall Street, “Just how many yachts do you need to water ski behind?”

Now there’s a decent argument out there, familiar from Adam Smith and the whole tradition of economics, that a world full of greedy people isn’t necessarily quite the disaster that pre-modern ethical thinkers would have thought. This is all well and good. True even. But it’s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we’ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus [all things being equal] greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who’s ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it’s very unlikely that the “best” young people were going into finance. And to say that they’re not necessarily good people need not entail that they’re criminals. Simply the fact that the best people are people who aren’t primarily driven by greed.

(emphasis original)

He’s right. What was presented as a statement of perversion in the movie, “Greed is Good,” by Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko character, is now in many places, including, I think, in the minds of Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, is considered to be a big truth.

These are people who are grossly overpaid, and demand gross overpayment, for jobs that involve far less risk, than those of a policeman, or a fireman, or, at a somewhat smaller pay scale, pro football player.

The idea that their all encompassing greed is a good thing indicates that our society’s values are warped, and possibly broken.

Orwell Alive and Well in the Obama Whitehouse

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One of the things that concerns me the most is Obama’s comfort in continuing to support Bush’s assault on basic procedural civil rights because they serve to reinforce the power of what is now his office.

Case in point, the Pentagon’s “privilege review team”, which is now considering charges against a victim of the torture protocols created by the Bush Administration.

What they posted was a cover sheet naming the case, and quoting unclassified portions of a UK court ruling saying that it was up to the US to release it, followed by a version redacted by said privilege review team”, which blacked out everything but the title of their report, which is clearly stamped “unclassified”:

The privilege team argue that by releasing the redacted memo Reprieve has breached the rules that govern Guantánamo lawyers and have made a complaint to the court of “unprofessional conduct”.

Stafford Smith described their actions as intimidation, saying the complaint “doesn’t even specify the rule supposedly breached”.

So, according to someone at the Pentagon, by sending an unclassified document to the president of the United States of America, they are in violation of regulations, and could face as much as 6 months in jail.

Our Man in Afghanistan

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Hamid Karzai, whose incompetence and corruption is such that he is now appealing to the most backward of religious impulses, because there is no other reason to vote for him, has just signed into law a measure that legalizes marital rape:

In a massive blow for women’s rights, the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home, according to UN papers seen by The Independent.

Hamid Karzai, yet another gift that keeps on giving from Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Red Cross Uses the ‘T’ Word

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By the “T” word, I mean that they used the word torture to describe the treatment of detainees by the CIA:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

(emphasis mine)

When do we either start prosecutions, or turn them over the Hague?

I Think That These Financial Machinations Qualify as Financial Terrorism

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It appears that there is a reason why Lawrence Summers seemed to capitulate to AIG’s bonus contracts for its financial products division, as I mentioned yesterday: They specifically wrote the contracts so that the counter-parties could consider it a default and demand an immediate payment if they did not get their bonuses.

So, basically, they wrote blackmail terms into their contract, which seems to me a awful lot like a sysop writing a back door into the computer network, and at least as illegal.

With the Serious Fraud Office in the UK investigating them, as well as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo investigating their bonus, I think that the best alternative at this time is for American authorities to seek their extradition under the terms of the recent treaty.

I think that though of facing the United States generally inhumane prison system will have them folding like overcooked broccoli for the privilege of spending a few years in a British prison.