Category: Justice

If Jews Run the Media,They Are Not Competent

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Specifically, they report the story of an Agunah (Literally “Chained Woman) and the resulting protests directed at the ex-husband of a woman who refuses to grant here a religious divorce, a “Get”, which under Jewish law means that they are still married:

This should have been a good New Year’s for Aharon Friedman, a 34-year-old tax counsel for the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. He spent time with his 3-year-old daughter, and could have been thinking about the influence he will have starting Wednesday, when his boss, Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, becomes chairman of the powerful tax-writing committee.

Instead, Mr. Friedman, an Orthodox Jew, finds himself scrutinized in the Jewish press, condemned by important rabbis, and attacked in a YouTube video showing about 200 people protesting outside his Silver Spring, Md., apartment on Dec. 19. They were angered by Mr. Friedman’s refusal to give his wife, Tamar Epstein, 27, a Jewish decree of divorce, known as a get.

What a surprise, a Republican is being a selfish asshole.

While I do understand that he has issues with the custody arrangement, using the get as a way to extract concessions is beneath contempt.

That being said, I am aware of a number of these cases, and while I strongly object to these enforcement of these medieval (actually pre-medieval) religious statutes, I am aware that this happens dozens, if not hundreds of times a year.

What got to me was this paragraph:

Mr. Friedman and Ms. Epstein have been civilly divorced since April and share custody of their daughter, but they are still married according to Jewish law. And without a get neither he nor Ms. Epstein can remarry within the faith. She is considered an agunah, or chained woman.

(emphasis mine)

If the Jews run the New York Times, they are incompetent, because it misses two points:

  • First, if Mr. Reiedman gets civilly remarried, and has a child, a likely thing for a 34 year old Orthodox Jew, the child will not be a mamzer, who would be forbidden from marrying other Jews, while any child that Ms. Epstein has will be a mamzer. (3500 year old religious law is such a joy, huh?)
  • Second, it is possible for Mr. Friedman to get a rabbinical ruling allowing him to take a 2nd wife, while Ms. Epstein cannot.
    • This has been done in some cases where a wife is in a persistent vegetative state, or completely delusional, since a get cannot be granted under those conditions, it requires the knowing receipt of the get by the wife, so permission for a “2nd” wife has been given with the the “1st” wife continue to be financially supported by the husband.
    • In this case though, a rabbi approving a 2nd marriage is basically zero.

This makes the conditions of the Agunah unjust and unfair to the woman in the conflict. It is not, nor has it ever been, an equal imposition on both spouses, and a small amount of research should have made this unfortunate state of affairs quite clear.

Clearly, I need to contact the local president of my ZOG chapter and pass my complaint up the chain.

When Does Antonin Scalia Start to Wear a White Robe?

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He is now saying that absent legislation, there is a private right to discriminate against women:

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not protect against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, according to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

In a newly published interview in the legal magazine California Lawyer, Scalia said that while the Constitution does not disallow the passage of legislation outlawing such discrimination, it doesn’t itself outlaw that behavior:

Seriously, when then Assistant Attorney General wrote that William Renquist wrote that “A judge who is a “strict constructionist” in constitutional matters will generally not be favorably inclined toward claims of either criminal defendants or civil rights plaintiffs,” he wasn’t kidding.

A strict constructionist is a judge who prejudges cases to benefit the powerful and corrupt.  They are results based jurists, and the depressing thing is that Scalia is arguably only the 4th most insane member of the court right now, after Roberts, Alito, and Thomas.

Justice Department seeks tougher CFTC and SEC swaps rules | Reuters

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The DoJ is asking the SEC and CFTC to tighten their rules on ownership of clearing houses for derivatives.

The financial regulators are looking to limit individual members of the clearing houses to 20%, while Justice’s anti-trust regulators want there to be a 40% limit applied to all, “banks and other major swaps players,” in order to prevent 3 or 4 of the big players to create a monopoly situation, in addition to more strictly regulating the boards of these clearing houses.

I’m not sure if it is good news that the DoJ is asking for more, or bad news that the SEC and CFTC asked for so little to start with.

Cover-up

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Seriously, you have a prosecution of an international prostitution ring, and the prosecution is prohibiting the defense from examining parts of the “little black book” that they seized, but not others:

Federal prosecutors are refusing to reveal customers from Oakland County and the 248 area code who hired hookers from a high-priced escort service but are willing to out clients from Detroit, according to federal court records.

The legal tactic was unveiled in records filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit involving the Miami Companions escort service.

………

Paul DeCailly, the attorney for Miami Companions co-owner Greg Carr, flew to Detroit last week to review the black book. He wanted to see the names of clients from Michigan and Ohio, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office said he could see only the names from the 313 and 734 area codes, he said.

“There must be something there they don’t want anybody to see,” DeCailly said Tuesday. “In the 248 area code, a lot of influential people live there: musicians, Detroit’s sports elite, politicians. … It’s the center of a lot of activity in the business community.”

Yep, that’s pretty much what is going on here.

Would that we lived in a less blatantly corrupt nation.

H/t Atrios.

I Think That This is Corruption, Not Stupidity

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One of the more puzzling aspects of the financial meltdown is the complete lack of prosecutions of high level bankers, and Bill Black of New Deal 2.0 explains why:

What has gone so catastrophically wrong with DOJ, and why has it continued so long? The fundamental flaw is that DOJ’s senior leadership cannot conceive of elite bankers as criminals. On Huffington Post, David Heath writes:

Benjamin Wagner, a U.S. Attorney who is actively prosecuting mortgage fraud cases in Sacramento, Calif., points out that banks lose money when a loan turns out to be fraudulent. An investor in loans who documents fraud can force a bank to buy the loan back. But convincing a jury that executives intended to make fraudulent loans, and thus should be held criminally responsible, may be too difficult of a hurdle for prosecutors. ‘It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would be deliberately defrauding themselves,’ Wagner said.”

(emphasis original)

What is going on here is that the prosecutors are assuming that the agents of the financial institutions are perfect agents of those institutions, and that they would never act in their own personal benefit if it were detrimental to their employer in the long term.

This has a number of names, most commonly, it is called the principal agent problem, and the (now unconstitutional) theory of the theft of honest services prosecutions was based on this.

The facts here, though not necessarily the law, are clear:  Various high level agents at financial institutions engaged in activities that were likely to blow up in the long term, but were unlikely to do so before these agents profited from them.

The only question is whether this behavior was merely stupid or negligent, in which case, a life-time ban from the financial industry is warranted, or fraudulent, in which case, incarceration is warranted.

The calculus here is not rocket science, and the fact that prosecutors are sticking to such a transparently false theory is to my mind more of an indication of corruption than it is of stupidity or wrong headedness.

Without jail time, we will see the behavior repeated.

Hell, we are seeing it repeated right now, that’s why the bonuses are so big this year.

Just When You Thought that Mortgage Servicers Could Not Get Any More Evil…

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Now we have reports of them sending in crews to break into houses and change locks when they have not foreclosed on the property, in one case stealing electronics, wine, and beer, and in another, throwing out the ashes of the homeowner’s husband. (surprise, there is now a lawsuit)

It’s clear that something needs to be done about the criminal (breaking and entering and theft) activities of the mortgage services, but it appears that if you are the Federal Reserve, what needs to be done is to fight the rest of the government to protect the people who are breaking the law:

Top policymakers at the Federal Reserve are fighting efforts to rein in widely reported bank abuses, sparking an inter-agency feud with the FDIC and the Treasury Department. The Fed, along with the more bank-friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is resisting moves to craft rules cracking down on banks that charge illegal fees and carry out improper foreclosures. The FDIC supports such rules, according to an FDIC official involved in the dispute.

The new regulations would rein in debt collection, loan modification and foreclosure proceedings at bank divisions called “mortgage servicers.” Servicers have committed widespread fraud in the foreclosure process. While the recent robo-signing of fraudulent documents has received the most attention, consumer advocates have complained about improper fees and servicer mistakes that lead to foreclosure for years.

This is what happens when you put an organization that is chartered to protect and support banks in charge of regulating them.

Instead of reigning in excesses, they validate those excesses, so the Fed is attempting to throw away something like 300 years of established property law so that the banksters can take you house for no reason at all.

Things Get Interesting in New Jersey

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The chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court has set up a hearing on January 19 demanding that the mortgage servicers show cause as to why foreclosures should not be suspended state wide.

It appears that slack mortgage procedures and documentation have reached the notice of judicial authorities in the Garden State.

This is, as the Vice President is wont to say, a big f%$#ing deal.

Not only is there the prospect of an indeterminate foreclosure moratorium in a populous state with expensive real estate, but the judge has explicitly placed the burden of proof on the banksters.

As Harold Feld says, “Stay Tuned”.

Cuomo Files Suit Against Ernst and Young Over Lehman Collapse

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Matt Taibbi is all over this, and while the suit is civil and not criminal, and so a loss would not put the accounting firm in the same position as Arthur Anderson, which was shut down as a result of a criminal conviction stemming from the collapse of Enron. (Since reversed, but they are still dead)

Basically, it comes down to a way that Lehman used an arcane financial instrument called a “Repo 105″ to conceal its debt, and his example is spot on”

These Repo 105 transactions are just loans that Ernst and Young and Lehman Brothers conspired to book as revenue from sales. If I go to you and I ask you to lend me a hundred bucks to pay for Knicks tickets, that’s a loan, and you and I and the SEC and every investor on Wall Street all know I’m in debt to you, that I owe you a hundred bucks.

Here’s how Lehman Brothers paid for their Knicks tickets: a week before the game, they went to you and offered to you “sell” you their worthless puke-stained lava lamp for a hundred bucks, with the understanding that two days after the Knicks game, it would come back and “buy” the lamp back for the same $100 (plus a small commission for your trouble). And when Lehman pocketed that $100 from the initial transaction, they decided to call that not borrowing but a true sale, i.e. they booked that hundred bucks as revenue from an honest sale of a worthless piece-of-sh%$ lava lamp.

In 2007 and 2008 Lehman would do this before the end of every quarter. They would “sell” billions of dollars of assets, typically bonds, to various companies, and use that money to pay down debt before the quarter’s end, so that they didn’t look so flat-ass broke to investors. Then, a week or so after the end of the quarter, they would go out and borrow more money, and then “buy” the assets back. The reasons they did this were myriad, but in most cases the assets they were “selling” were depressed in value at the time and could not have been sold at anything like face value had they really gone out on the market and tried. So instead of really “selling” these items on their balance sheet, they worked together with other companies to jury-rig these “repurchase” agreements that looked like sales but were actually loans.

(%$ mine)

There are two possibilities here for Ernst & Young:  Either they were negligent, and hence they owe damages, or they complicit, in which case they are criminally liable, and could suffer the same fate as Anderson .

My hope is that the accounting firm will turn on former Lehman executives, most notably Dick Fuld, to get out from under, and we may see our first big banker criminal case as a result.

My fear is that this will be another 8 figure fine with no criminal prosecutions.

EU Court Rules that Irish Abortion Law Violates Human Rights Standards

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I would argue that this is a another example of how Ireland is a 3rd world nation masquerading as a modern one by virtue of geography, but that critique would apply to the US as well:

Ireland’s constitutional ban on abortion violates the rights of pregnant women to receive proper medical care in life-threatening cases, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday in a judgment that harshly criticized Ireland’s long inaction on the issue.

The judgment from the Strasbourg, France-based court will put Ireland under pressure to draft a law extending limited abortion rights to women whose pregnancies represent a potentially fatal threat to their own health.

A right to receive proper medical care?

Well, that doesn’t exist here either.

Assange Granted Bail

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Basically, the terms of his bail amount to house arrest:

Britain’s high court today granted bail to Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is wanted in Sweden for questioning over allegations of rape.

Mr Justice Duncan Ouseley agreed with a decision by City of Westminister magistrates court earlier in the week to release Assange on strict conditions: £200,000 cash deposit, with a further £40,000 guaranteed in two sureties of £20,000, and strict conditions on his movement.

This is good news, but we are hearing more reports of the US looking for ways to indict him, this time by ginning up a conspiracy case:

Federal prosecutors, seeking to build a case against the WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange for his role in a huge dissemination of classified government documents, are looking for evidence of any collusion in his early contacts with an Army intelligence analyst suspected of leaking the information.

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

It should be noted that these activities, cultivating and providing a source a way to get his information to you, are staples in the diet of investigative journalism.

Any prosecution under these circumstances would be an full frontal assault on freedom of the press, which is profoundly disturbing to anyone who cares at all about the Constitution.

Unfortunately, I think that this sort of assault on the press, and by extension leaking, appears to be something that Barack Obama, who must have been the worst professor of Constitutional law ever, really would like to do.

His administration is more vociferously hostile toward leaks and leakers than Bush/Cheney ever was.

Of course, this is why this administration is allowing the leaker, PFC Bradley Manning to be tortured pre-trial, because they want to coerce an accusation against Assange.

Remember That Justice Department Crackdown of Financial Fraud?

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Round up the usual suspects

It’s all theater, with a bunch of run of the mill low level grifters being rounded up being sold as real law enforcement:

The “Broken Trust” target list resembles that of the President’s “Interagency Financial Task Force,” which has concentrated on minor criminals while studiously avoiding the big (and still deadly) fish (see “A Banker Can’t Get Arrested In This Town”). Most of the Task Force’s indictments involved a category of financial criminal we call “ABB” — “anybody but bankers.” There were software entrepreneurs, family investment firms, some Florida retirement advisors … even a fraudulent psychic who claimed he could predict stock performance! (And no, it wasn’t Jim Cramer.)

Holder’s list of alleged “Broken Trust” victories is a similarly Faginesque assemblage of small-time grifters. It would make an ideal cast of characters for a Damon Runyon story or a Bertolt Brecht musical: There’s a Miami-based Ponzi schemer who used his loot to buy basketball tickets and make yacht payments, a retired Ohio cop who scammed fellow police officers and some firefighters, and the New Jersey hustler who scammed people so he could buy three luxury cars and two country club memberships.

This is clearly top down policy.

You see it from Treasury, you see it from the Department of Justice, you see it from Obama’s entire domestic policy team.

And Now the US Military is Torturing Its Own Soldiers

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Specifically PFC Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking documents to Wikileaks:

Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old U.S. Army Private accused of leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, has never been convicted of that crime, nor of any other crime. Despite that, he has been detained at the U.S. Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia for five months — and for two months before that in a military jail in Kuwait — under conditions that constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and, by the standards of many nations, even torture. Interviews with several people directly familiar with the conditions of Manning’s detention, ultimately including a Quantico brig official (Lt. Brian Villiard) who confirmed much of what they conveyed, establishes that the accused leaker is subjected to detention conditions likely to create long-term psychological injuries.

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a “Maximum Custody Detainee,” the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day — for seven straight months and counting — he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he’s barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he’s being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not “like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole,” but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

It should be noted that this sort of treatment produces profound long term damage to mind that is akin to traumatic brain injury.

This is deliberate punitive torture, and its purpose is two fold:

  • To serve as a warning to other whistle blowers.
  • To coerce false testimony that can be used to prosecute Julian Assange.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America, which is a lot like George W. Bush Dick Cheney’s America, only less respect for due process and transparency.

You can donate to PFC Manning’s defense fund here.

The Cossacks Work for the Czar

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After spending trillions bailing out banks, and billions paying the banks to pretend not to foreclose on people under the HAMP program, it now turns out that the Treasury Department is refusing to cut loose any money for legal aid for people facing foreclosure:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has authorized big payouts to banks in an effort to encourage mortgage modifications, but is preventing borrowers in danger of losing their homes from accessing legal assistance under the Obama administration’s foreclosure relief plan — even when banks are wrongfully or fraudulently attempting evictions.

As of August, the administration’s foreclosure prevention program — which had paid a total of $231.5 million to banks — had paid nothing specifically for borrower’s legal fees, despite the urging of congressional Democrats who say legal funding is critical to easing the crisis.

Democrats from foreclosure-battered states are pushing new legislation that would overrule Geithner’s edict, but the legislation is doomed this session with apathy from leadership in both parties and a packed lame duck calendar.

It’s easy to blame Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner for all of this, but the reality is that he is Barack Obama’s man, and he is where he is because Barack Obama wants him there, coddling bankers and defrauding homeowners.

Julian Assange Granted Bail

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We are all Julian Assange

But the Swedish prosecutors promptly appealed the decision, meaning that he spends at least another 48 hours in custody, which in his case means rather harsh isolation.

On the other hand, it appears that reports of a grand jury investigating an indictment under the 1917 espionage act may be baseless.

Truth be told, a good prosecutor can find an sitting already sitting grand jury, and Mr. Assange from a legal perspective is certainly a ham sandwich.

Were I a prosecutor, I would not begin any process until Assange were in Sweden, where extraditions appears to be more likely than in the UK.

Of course, while this is going on, the internet is still being roiled by attacks on both sides of the issue, with Anonymous emerging from 4chan to hit the financial and IT companies that cut Wikileaks off, and other hackers going after Wikileaks, in a game of dueling DDOS attacks.

Hanging over all this is Assange’s poison pill file, which has been distributed to tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people, waiting for the decryption key that will be distributed if anything happens to him or Wikileaks by a dozen or so of his colleagues.

And then there is the absurdity that Amazon, after tossing Wikileaks from their servers, is now selling copies of the cables for the Kindles.

In the mean time, here are the crucial government secrets that we now know as a result of the cables:

Of course there is some truly sensitive and shocking information out there, specifically that, the DPRK (North Korea) was willing to take significant steps to  reassure the US and the ROK (South Korea) in exchange for an Eric Clapton concert in Pyongyang.

Merciful heavens, we can’t let the citizenry know about that.

The final word on this is Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s, “EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time.“

Federal Judge Rules Insurance Mandate Unconstitutional

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Note however, that the judge, Henry E. Hudson, is a well known serious wingnut, and even he did not have the stones to issue an injunction, nor did he rule the rest of the law unconstitutional, and two other Federal District Court judges dismissed the cases pretty much before the ink was dry on those petitions.

Of course, this does mean that it is likely to make it to the Supreme Court, where Justice Roberts is busy trying to recreate the bogus “Freedom of Contract“. (See also Schechter).

In any case, the Obama administration’s response is predictable:

The administration acknowledges that if the insurance requirement falls before taking effect in 2014, related changes would necessarily collapse with it, most notably provisions that would prevent insurers from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions or charging them discriminatory rates.

Once again, the Obama administration is capitulating before the fight has even started.

Let’s assume that the Supreme Court rules the mandate unconstitutional.  What happens then is that, if nothing is done, the insurance industry is in risk of collapse in the very short term (less than 18 months).

It’s time to ask for single payer, or a public option, not to wring your hands and repeal the bill.

With the threat of a veto, and the ensuing collapse of health insurers across the US, you can get some decent non-insurance company friendly provisions, like the public option and a repeal of ERISA preemption.

But of course, in Obama’s world, the predators that are the health insurance industry are “partners” to be protected, not a profit driven source of pain and suffering, so he will go to the mat for them.

Sergey Aleynikov Guilty

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He is the computer programmer who was charged with stealing Goldman Sach’s high frequency trading software.

Here are the New York Times and Wall Street Journal stories.

The Times version has a video (unfortunately not embeddable) of Fordham University law professor Joel Reidenbert, who basically says that what would ordinarily be a civil matter, a potential breach of confidentiality agreements, was made into a criminal case to make an example of the “US Attorney doing the heavy lifting for Goldman.”

He doesn’t come out and say it, but I infer from his that this was a hit by the US Department of Justice, with the active and aggressive collusion of federal judge Denise Cote, to do the Vampire Squid’s* bidding, as the article notes, “During the two-week trial, Judge Denise L. Cote closed the courtroom to the public several times to protect Goldman’s proprietary source code,” and “Before dismissing the panel, Judge Cote warned them that if they were going to speak about the case, they must not discuss anything related to Goldman’s code.”

It stinks to high heaven.

*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.

Federal Judge Judge Spanks Ag Department and Monsanto

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In August U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, in response to the suit by environmentalists, issued a ruling that no new genetically modified “roundup ready” sugar beets be planted until a full environmental impact statement has been filed.

The US Department of Agriculture, never a big one for following the law, then issued permits to plant them anyway.

In response to this the judge has ruled that the crops must be destroyed.

This is what happens when you metaphorically call the judge a cock sucker.

The appeals court has stayed the ruling pending a review, but my guess is that they will be inclined to go along with the judge’s decision.

Judges hate it when you ignore their orders.  They think that it’s illegal or something.

Come to think of it, it is illegal or something.

Assange Jailed

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Note that he has not been charged, and the warrant is for an interview, a British magistrate has ordered Julian Assange held without bail after he turned himself in voluntarily.

Tell me that the fix is not in here.

Of course, the fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, have his ITEOD* file, and some number probably greater than 10 people have the code to decrypt those unredacted files has got to give the people pursuing him cause to pause.

*In The Event Of Death.