Category: Justice

William “Dollar Bill” Jefferson Gets 13 Years

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I don’t see the sentence as unjust, this man was aggressively corrupt, and took bribes.

I do wonder though why Randall “Duke” Cunningham, who did far worse, compromising major defense contracts and the operations of the CIA in the process of his corruption only got 7 years?

As to whether it’s a black/white thing, or a Democratic/Republican thing, or Cunningham’s age/health, or his history as a stick jock, I don’t know, but the disparity is troubling.

I’m not saying that Jefferson didn’t get what he deserved. He deserved that, and more.

I’m saying that Cunningham should have gotten more, even with the leniency accorded a guilty plea relative to Jefferson’s conviction.

Remember My Earlier Post on Judges Taking Kickbacks to Send Children to Jail

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The post, from February, is here.

In any case, a judge, the aptly named Arthur Grim, has reviewed the case files, and come away shocked:

The judge who studied Luzerne County’s “cash-for-kids” scheme said yesterday that children’s constitutional rights had been denied and justice perverted “in ways that I would never have dreamed possible.”

 Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, who reviewed transcripts of about 100 cases of juveniles caught up in the scheme, said the scandal grew out of “unfettered power, greed, opportunity, and intimidation.”

here is the kicker though:

Lawyers, court employees, and school officials knew of the scheme, but winked at it for convenience or self-preservation, Grim testified.

This isn’t just a couple of bad judges. Pretty much every lawyer, and every school administrator in Luzerne County ad to know about it.

What’s more, the school administrators used it for their petty vendettas:

He said many school officials supported Ciavarella’s “zero-tolerance” policies toward teenagers no matter how minor the offense.

“When a misbehaving kid was brought to school authorities, they immediately picked up the phone and called the police,” Grim testified. “They did this because they knew that if they did, that child would go before Judge Ciavarella and would be out of their hair as a problem.”

When Hillary Transue was sent before the judge by a vice-principal who pressed charges of harassment about a spoof Facebook page that had her [the vice-principal] collecting Johnny Depp’s used underwear, this person, educator is not the right word, and whoever in the DA’s office who decided to continue with this, knew, that this was going to get a girl thrown in jail because the judge was taking bribes.

The Judge Grim notes:

“We know the people in this community did not consciously choose to stand on the side of injustice at the expense of children. But what was it that made it so hard to do the right thing? Were people afraid? Were they intimidated? By whom? What protections would they have wanted? Where would they have wanted to take the information they had?”

The judge has it wrong. People wanted this. This is what “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” means. It means disproportionate, destructive, evil application of the law, and judges Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan could do this because this is what the people of Luzerne County wanted.

The prosecution loves a “hanging judge”. The principals wanted judges would make problem children go away. The voters wanted “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance“.

They all wanted to hurt children, so long as it was someone else’s child.

Atrios calls them, “Really awful people.” I’m not sure if he means just the judges, or the DA’s office, or perhaps also the school administrators.

Me, I mean everyone in that whole damn county.

If that vice-principal is still working for the school district, the good people of Luzerne county, both of them, should organize an angry mob.

Coda on Kelo

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You remember Kelo v. City of New London? That’s where the city of New London took people’s homes in order to build a business park for Pfizer.

Well, following it’s purchase of Wyeth, they are closing their facility there, (also here) leaving the city with a big honking hole, and Pfizer looking to sell the land, for which it paid nearly nothing, and building.

You know, when you give free sh$# to contemptible greed-heads, this is what they do: They f@#$ you over when it’s convenient.

Needless to say, the plaintiffs in Kelo are as unamused as anyone in this development.

When Do We Prosecute This?

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Yet another example of the fabulous “innovations” that our modern financial industry have given us.

It turns out that when Atlanta had a bond issue, they went to a consultant to review the bids, and this consultant, David Rubin, ruled out the winning bid, costing the City $58,000 by going with the runner up Bank of America.

The problem was that David Rubin had a piece of that Bank of America action, and was not working to the best interests of the city:

Only after the Internal Revenue Service investigated five years later did local officials learn that Rubin’s firm, CDR Financial Products Inc., had entered into a secret side agreement with the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank. CDR’s share would be worth as much as $340,000, based on city and federal records.

“IRS believes that CDR, Bank of America and possibly others may have colluded to fix pricing,” an unidentified Atlanta employee wrote in an undated internal memorandum after city authorities met with IRS investigators in September 2005.

This is a theft of honest services, a felony, and likely a RICO violation too, and it looks like Mr. Rubin is going to jail.

The real problem here is that municipalities are entering into agreements which are too complex for them to evaluate, and so their taxpayers are getting done like a drunk sorority girl on prom night.

An Interesting Take on the Possibility as Tony Blair as EU President

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George Monbiot, at The Grauniad* says it all when he states that, “Making this ruthless liar EU president is a crazy plan. But I’ll be backing Blair.”

He is backing Blair because if he becomes EU President, he must necessarily work from his office in Brussels, and Belgium has acceded to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which means that, unlike in the US and the UK, they can indict him, arrest him, and ship him off to the Hague for trial:

Within the UK, there is no means of prosecuting Blair. In 2006 the law lords decided that the international crime of aggression has not been incorporated into domestic law. But, elsewhere in the world, it has been. In 2006 the professor of international law Philippe Sands warned that “Margaret Thatcher avoids certain countries as a result of the sinking of the Belgrano, and Blair would be advised to do likewise”.

I’m beginning to think that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should be made EU President too.

*According to the Wiki, The Guardian, formerly the Manchester Guardian in the UK. It’s nicknamed the Grauniad because of its penchant for typographical errors, “The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye. It came about because of its reputation for frequent and sometimes unintentionally amusing typographical errors, hence the popular myth that the paper once misspelled its own name on the page one masthead as The Gaurdian, though many recall the more inventive The Grauniad.”

I Was Expecting This

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ACORN has filed suit in Federal Court against the Defund ACORN Act, claiming that it is an unconstitutional bill of attainder.

Well, duh, it is an unconstitutional bill of attainder, as it says clearly in the bill:

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

This Act may be cited as the ‘Defund ACORN Act’.

I figure that any judge with two braincells strike this struck down in about 15 minutes.

Of course, both Bushes and Reagan appointed a lot of folks who lacked the requisite two brain cells, so we will see how it goes.

About F@#$ing Time

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It looks like the IRS has set up a new unit in the organization to go after the tax dodges of the wealthy:

A new Internal Revenue Service enforcement unit targeting the very wealthy will help the tax agency decode partnerships, offshore trusts and other complex techniques used to hide income, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said Monday.

Dubbed the Global High Wealth Industry group, the unit will launch “a small number” of audits of individuals with assets or income in the tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Shulman told an accountants’ trade group. An IRS official said the group would begin work on these initial audits in the next month.

The high-wealth group, housed in the IRS’s large- and medium-sized business division, marks a sharpening of the IRS approach to auditing the very wealthy. Its creation is a response to the complex web of entities and transactions many high-net-worth individuals use to manage their financial affairs.

This is good for a number of reasons:

  • The wealthy are, as Willie Sutton didn’t say, “where the money is.”
  • The tax dodges that they have used have become increasingly more sophisticated, and need a dedicated team with the forensic skills in order to pursue these tax cheats.
  • Allowing rich people to evade taxes is corrosive to society, tax collection, and budget decisions, and create an environment where politicians say that you can’t raise taxes on the rich, because they will just weasel out of them. (see Bush, George W.)
  • If everyone believes that the rich do not pay their share, they will be less inclined to pay their share too, and the cooperation of the taxpayer is crucial to our system working.

Now what they need to do is go go criminal prosecution, with jail time, on the some of the worst offenders.

Time to Go Long on Fig Newtons

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The American Medical Association has decided to reclassify marijuana.

It is currently a schedule 1 controlled substance, meaning dangerous, with no medical use, and the AMA, bowing to reality, has decided that it should be legal to at least test the stuff:

The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.

The nation’s largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997 that marijuana should remain a Schedule I controlled substance, the most restrictive category, which also includes heroin and LSD.

In changing its policy, the group said its goal was to clear the way to conduct clinical research, develop cannabis-based medicines and devise alternative ways to deliver the drug.

Hopefully, the progress towards sanity involving THC will continue, and perhaps, I could then go back to one of the activities of my college days.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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The New York Times is now reporting that mercenary corporation Blackwater (now Xe) approved over a million dollars in bribes to Iraqi officials in order to continue to operate in Iraq:

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country, and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

So they violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and, if you go down further, it looks like they were paying off victims and witnesses in order to secure their silence during the FBI investigation.

Srsly, prosecushuns, now!

Breaking: Bear Stearn Fund Managers Not Guilty

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Graphic h/t Calculated Risk

It was clear that they were putting lipstick on a pig, but under the law at the time, it was not outrageous enough to justify a conviction, it appears that hawking their funds while dissing it privately, along with also, in one case, selling those said funds like a maniac, ain’t enough to prove guilt.

You see, the standard at the time was, “suitable,” which means that they cannot put a client in a clearly improper investment, but they can consider things like their sales commissions and bonuses as a part of the decision, as opposed to the “fiduciary” standard, which requires the agent to act solely in the best interest of the client:

“Buried in President Obama’s proposed regulatory overhaul is a change that could upend Wall Street: Brokers would be held to a higher “fiduciary” standard that would compel them to place their client’s interests ahead of their own.

Currently, brokers are only required to offer investments that are “suitable,” which means they can’t put clients in inappropriate investments, such as a highly risky stock for an 80-year-old grandmother. The move could change the way products are sold and marketed and even how brokers are compensated.”

…

But requiring brokers to operate under a fiduciary standard could force them to offer products that are less costly and more tax-efficient. They will have to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, such as any fees they may get for favoring one product over another. That could mean clients will be offered fewer proprietary products if the broker can find a lower-cost option elsewhere.

Unfortunately, at this point this:

  • Has not been implemented
  • Applies to a retail broker only
  • The proposal appears to continue to allow a firm to penalize a broker who acts in the best interest of their client: see Penalty Box.

In any case, I think that proving wrongdoing under a fiduciary standard will be much easier, as it should be.

These guys dicked with their clients mercilessly for their own personal benefit, they just didn’t quite, they just did not cross the line to illegal.

Under a fiduciary standard, it probably would.

Italian Conviction of CIA Kidnappers Means Nothing

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The fact that Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans in absentia for kidnapping Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr really has very little meaning, even with sentences of up to 8 year in prison.

It sounds significant, until you realize that the senior Italian officials who were in on this were acquitted by reason of state security:

Charges were also dropped against five Italians, including the former head of the Sismi military intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, because evidence against them violated state secrecy rules.

So the senior people in the Italian state security apparatus, the ones who could say no, get off Scott free.

Some lower level operatives, however, got hung out to dry for following orders:

However, the judge sentenced two more junior Sismi agents to three years in prison as accomplices, indicating Italian authorities were aware of the abduction.

How is “Lynndie England” spelled in Italian?

The Galleon Insider Trading Scandal Spreads

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So now, we are seeing more prominent people tied into this.

This time it’s, “Richard Grodin, formerly of SAC, one of the country’s most well-respected and largest hedge funds.”

What is going on here is that authorities used wire taps, a change in the area of securities fraud, and it looks like a double digit percentage of Wall Street was in it at some level.

My guess is that this sort of behavior is in fact endemic to the street, and that this is the tip of the iceberg.

My concern is that the wire taps might not be the part of a securities investigation, but instead were a result of a investigation of Raja Rajaratnam’s ties to the LTTE terrorists.

Considering the level of damage to our country done by the bankers, we should be going full PATRIOT act on them, because they make Osama bin Laden look like “My Little Pony”.

Breaking: Bernard Kerik Pleads Guilty

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So, the man who Rudy Giuliani mentored to the position of New York City Police Commissioner has copped a plea deal, and pled guilty to on 8 counts, “two counts of tax fraud, one count of making a false statement on a loan application — the most serious — and five separate counts of making false statements to the federal government,” and is likely to be sentenced to 27 to 33 months.

The false statements are in connection to his statements to federal agents when he was being vetted to be head of DHS by Bush and His Evil Minions™.

Basically, he got a $¼ million in renovations for his apartment from a mob tied contractor that he later recommended for city business.

Basically, Giuliani’s right hand man was mobbed up.

This guy was pretty low level until Giuliani decided to smile on him, and it says something about Rudy’s judgment, and could, and should be an issue if he chooses to run for governor.

Zimbabwe Update

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It’s been about 3 weeks, so it’s time to update everyone on the hell hole that Bobby Mugabe made again.

On the bright side, the UK is saying that they will give Zimbabwe $100 million in aid, though I wonder if recent developments (see below) may interfere with this.

First, we have the case of deputy agriculture minister-designate Roy Bennett, who has been imprisoned on what are clearly trumped up charges, with an improperly filed indictment for, “possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry,” a crime that carries the death sentence. (See also here)

While he was finally granted bail, this was one of the proximate causes of Tsvangirai and his MDC-T
disengaging from the ZANU-PF, which means that they are no longer attending cabinet meetings.

It should be noted that Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara and his MDC-M are also participating in the boycott of cabinet meetings.

Tsvangirai is Trying to get the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene on what has increasingly become a phony power sharing arrangement.

Meanwhile, ZANU-PF harassment of the MDC and human rights activists continues apace with raids on MDC offices in Harare (also here) claiming that they were looking for arms…..Shades of Bennett’s kangaroo court.

Inter party talks between the MDC and ZANU-PF have broken off without a resolution, and the human rights situation in the country has gone straight into the twilight zone with Mugabe detaining, and then expelling the “UNHRC special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” Manfred Nowak.

Meanwhile, the Marange diamond fields, which are one of the few sources of hard currency available to Mugabe to keep his supporters paid off, are under a Kimberly process investigation for widespread torture, forced labor, and smuggling, which could lead to ban on the export of their gems.

The reports are that, once again, the Kimberly process will wimp out and do nothing , even after members of the Zimbabwe delegation to the meeting threatened and harassed witnesses at the meeting.

Finally, we have the ZANU-PF ordering the state run media to stop covering any MDC activities.

CIT Declares Bankruptcy

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Note that this is lender to small businesses, CIT, not perennially mismanaged bank CitiGroup, and that once again, US taxpayers will be on the hook for billions, in this case, $2.3 billion in TARP money, but that, “even though CIT was vital to many small businesses that needed financing, the company’s problems did not pose the type of systemic risk that led to the aggressive rescues of Citigroup and Bank of America.”

Which means, I guess, that Goldman Sachs was not a major counter-party, and so had nothing to lose.

Update on Plame Cheney

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Marcy Wheeler is all over this, see here, here, and here, and her conclusion, and mine, is that Cheney told people to out Valerie Plame as a covert operative in order to hurt her husband, Joe Wilson (the non-shouting one).

Now that the grand jury information is out, even mainstream sources, like CBS News, are making it clear that they know that Dick Cheney lied through his teeth to investigators, though it would be nice if they called him a liar, as opposed to being so oblique:

Vice President Dick Cheney told the FBI he had no idea who leaked to the news media that Valerie Plame, wife of a Bush administration critic, worked for the CIA.

An FBI summary of Cheney’s interview from 2004 reflects that the vice president had deep concern about Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador in Africa who said the administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq.

…

The vice president said he probably discussed Wilson with Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, but told the FBI he would not have talked to Rove about Wilson’s wife.

Cheney’s denials that he talked about Plame are among the few things in the lengthy interview with the FBI that Cheney appeared certain about. He repeatedly said he could not recall key events. Among them, he said he did not recall discussing Wilson’s wife with Libby before her CIA employment was publicly revealed by conservative columnist Robert Novak in mid-July 2003.

Evidence at Libby’s criminal trial showed that Cheney had told Libby about Wilson’s wife in mid-June 2003.

(emphasis mine)

Unfortunately, there is no appetite for pursuing actions that border on treason.

Unfortunately, we have to deal with the Washington, DC we have, not the Washington, DC you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Here’s a Shocker

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It appears that Bank of America and its subsidiary Countrywide Home Loans are routinely destroying mortgage documents:

Bank of America and Countrywide Home Loans destroyed mortgage documents, and “recreate” them by “insert(ing) data as they see fit,” to cover up their own failure to keep records – or their fraud – according to a federal RICO class action.

“To cover up the servicing mistakes and fraud and misrepresentation in the servicing of a consumer escrow, Defendants ‘recreate’ letters, insert data as they see fit, and fail to produce the entire HUD complaint form. This way, a consumer is left in the dark about the fraud that occurred to them,” the complaint states.

Lead plaintiff Kim Gorham says that when she sent a letter seeking information about her escrow account, she was informed that it had been “destroyed by a letter opener.”

After repeated requests, Gorham, who is blind, received her purported escrow analysis, but it was “100 percent illegible,” according to the complaint. The defendants knew that Gorham was legally blind, the complaint states.

She says that getting a “clear and concise” statement from the defendants has been an “impossible task.”

Countrywide routinely responded to customers’ requests for records by claiming they were “unavailable or destroyed,” according to the complaint.

The lawsuit alleges that the records were destroyed, “in an attempt to suppress damaging information.”

While not every lawsuit has merit, and a defendant should be presumed innocent, this certainly justifies a hearty, “Hoocoodanode?”

BoA will be paying for acquiring Countrywide for decades to come.

New York Times Calls Out Obama on Torture

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Their editorial board just called out Obama as Bush II on torture and secrecy.

OP/EDs generally don’t mean much, but I think that the Times, at least in its unsigned editorials, is a barometer of a certain segment of the population, or at least that segment that doesn’t live inside the DC Beltway, and as such, this could mean a trend.

I’d give it about 5 to 1 against it being a trend, but a week ago, I would have said 20 to 1.

And Speaking of Stupid

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Yes, it appears that the US Chamber of Commerce, in a desperate bid for wankitude, had decided to sue the Yes Menfor their phony press release and press conference where they announced that the Chamber would support global warming legislation.

Here is a video of the press conference, complete with a real CoC representative bursting in and calling them out.

With the lawsuit, it will go viral:

Inouye to Propose Changes to Franken Anti-Rape Amendment?

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Well, we know that appears that defense contractors really hate Al Franken’s amendment limiting their ability to use binding arbitration to keep things like rapes of employees and discrimination cases from appearing from in open court.

Well, it now appears that, in addition to the 30 pro rape Republicans and the Obama administration, there are now reports Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye is looking at stripping out the amendment.

This would be regrettable, because the law currently supports the rights of defense contractors to gang rape a woman and lock her in a box, and so the law needs to be changed.

I contacted his office, and have not heard any response at press time yet.

Full text of Franken’s amendment after break:

Sec. 8104. (a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any existing or new Federal contract if the contractor or a subcontractor at any tier requires that an employee or independent contractor, as a condition of employment, sign a contract that mandates that the employee or independent contractor performing work under the contract or subcontract resolve through arbitration any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention.
(b) The prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply with respect to employment contracts that may not be enforced in a court of the United States.