For shorting workers on the breaks and lunches, and making them work off the clock, to the tune of $6.5 million dollars.
Note that this is just compensatory damages, and that there will be a jury portion to determine punitive damages…And there are about 70 suits just like this one across the USA.
This is lovely. Now we know were Bush and His Evil Minions™ got their torture ideas:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
(emphasis mine)
So, we used the torture that the Chinese did to our soldiers. That is so delightful.
I would also note that this torture was never intended to get useful information. It was intended to extract false propaganda statements, such as the one that the North Vietnamese extracted from John McCain when he was a prisoner of war.
Rich Toscano, talking about mortgage rates, gives us this little bit of chart fun:
If you take a look, you will notice that the 30 year fixed and 1 year ARM rates change very little relative to the Federal Funds rate as charged set by the Federal Reserve.
It comes down to the fact that the lenders are interested in how interest rates effect them, and even if the rates are low today, they may be higher tomorrow.
If interest rates are 9%, and you have a 30 year fixed mortgage at 6%, you will not be a happy camper.
Thus, you don’t cut all that much when the Fed sets rates really low, because you have to look forward many years.
The 1 year ARM is a bit more amenable to the interest rate cuts, but only a little, since they typically have a limit to how much the rates will go up over time, and you can end up behind the same 8-ball.
This is why the drastic rates cuts instituted by Bernanke aren’t working. People do not believe this to be a long term sustainable solution, so they are not willing to issue cheaper loans.
Hence the term pushing on a string.
So, it appears that the financial services industry is now objecting to pricing assets on their balance sheets at market value, because it makes their balance sheets look pretty sick.
Let’s be clear on this: these companies bought a bunch of highly complex financial instruments, ones that they themselves did not understand, and now no one is willing to buy this toxic waste at anything even remotely near to face value.
Stephen Schwarzman, the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, thinks that the accounting rule, FAS 157, which requires that you place your investments on the books at fair market value, is too high a standard, and that,”the rule is accentuating and amplifying potential losses.”
What is amplifying the rule is traders and senior executives dealing in pixie dust, because they got a commission for doing so.
Note that SOME companies have been doing mark to market for a long time:
But Goldman Sachs proved why FAS 157 works: Goldman has been marking its books to market for years, and as a result, its risk officers were able to hold back its go-go traders from making bad bets when everyone else was throwing their chips last year into the subprime game.
Will no one rid me of these turbulent brokers?
The state is filing suit against the lending giant, alleging predatory lending.
Heck of a purchase, Bank of America.
You now have California, Florida, and Illinois suing you, so that’s probably already double digits of their market share under legal attack.
‘Besluit voor JSF is allang genomen’, or you can read the English translation here.*
While the dutch have attempted to get Eurofighter, Dassault, and SAAB to bid in competition, the problem has always been that they are currently throwing a lot of money at the F-35 JSF that won’t be coming back to them if they buy another aircraft.
They’ve sunk $800 million into this, and unless costs spiral completely out of control, I’d put that at 45%, they are stuck with the plane.
*I don’t speak a word of Dutch. I read a synopsis and used Google to translate the original.
Construction spending is still down, though at an 0.4% seasonally adjusted rate, which is better than the predicted 0.6% rate.
Both oil, still above $140/bbl, and retail gasoline hitting another record.
Part of this is because the dollar is getting pummeled and that tends to drive oil higher.
Being shot down and being a prisoner of war makes one no more qualified to be president than it makes someone who has had a heart attack to be a cardiac surgeon.
If the qualities of pilot skill and personal bravery in combat were critical criteria for being president, we would have Randall “Duke” Cunningham as president, who was arguably one of the top 50 or so combat pilots in US History.
You can read the story. They claim that there are issues of risks to the soldiers and diplomatic repurcussions, but I think that the real reason that they are holding off from authorizing special forces to try to find and apprehend/kill bin Laden is that they want it closer to the November elections.
The unclassified portions of decision by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia regarding Uighur’s imprisoned at Gitmo has now been released. (Background here)
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
……
Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
……
The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.
(emphasis mine)
When you lose David Sentelle on basic human rights, you are off the track. When David Sentelle signs of on a ruling that quotes Lewis Carroll, you are not only off track, you are off planet.
In this case, it’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, who appears to have actively shut down any investigation into the legality of techniques mandated by Rumsfeld.
Another day, another war criminal who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush.
He now has cushy gigs on the boards of military contractors.
He should be in jail awaiting trial.
This is good news and good policy, though Bush thanking himself and John McCain for the bill is particularly disingenuous, when both of fought against this tooth and nail.
So it now appears that these no bid oil service contracts were drawn up by a, “A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team.”
This confirms what was already suspected, that the deal was done by and for the US, and not for the owners of this oil, the Iraqi people.
I think that this will be in the long run a good thing for the EU. The behavior of the EU nations, particularly Sarkozy in France, suggesting that the Irish must re vote their referendum plays into all the worst stereotypes of the EU as a fundamentally anti-Democratic institution.
The fact that Polish President Lech Kaczynski is refusing to sign the treaty pretty much puts a stake in the heart of all these efforts, and makes it far more likely that other governments will take similar actions, because they now have political cover.
The point is very simple: If you want to forge a governance document, and what you come up with is so complex that literally no one in the world fully understands all of it, and your response to failed referenda to approve it is simply to restructure the agreement so that there is very little public input, you are being an idiot.
When your policy is rejected by the people that you ostensibly represent, taking the people that you ostensibly represent out of the picture is dangerously misguided.
Really, REALLY weak.
The logic was circuitous, and and the fire was just not there.
I believe that Charlie Pierce was right when he worried that Keith may be wearing out the batteries on hiss special comments.
While I think that it was accurate, it was just a realistic listing of what was going on politically, without any of the fire that you normally get.
on edit:
You can get a clip and a transcript of the special comment at Crooks and Liars. Interestingly enough, unlike most of his special comments, it reads better than it shows.
Well, we are now finding that major technology players are forming patent cartels in order to defend themselves against patent trolls.
They have created Allied Security Trust, a non profit, that will aggressively buy up anything that might look like a valid patent to protect its members, currently, Verizon, Google ., Cisco , Ericsson, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard Co.
They throw a bunch of money in the pot, and they get a non-exclusive to whatever Allied Security Trust buys, and then the patents are resold.
It’s about a $5 million buy in.
As a start, congress needs to ban patents on software and business plans, which were never necessary, and on genes and species (though not gene splicing technologies) because it is unconscionable.
Additionally, they should change the law to allow people who think that a patent is invalid to file suit, as opposed to waiting for a suit to be filed, because, much like civil rights law, where a suit can be filed against a law without a complaint filed by the authorities, this allows people to fight the chilling effects of bad patents.
It would also help if the special patent appeals court were disbanded, as it has gone off the rails, which is why the Supreme Court is slapping it down on a regular basis now.
I’ve been saying this for a while, but as I am an engineer, not an economist, dammit,*, but still, I have to wonder why it’s taken so long for the Bank for International Settlements to see that the world economy is in serious trouble, with a possibility of a world wide recession.
When one considers spiking oil prices and a new record for gasoline prices, the news is not going to be good.
Given the dollar’s rather unclear future, along with increased Euro-Zone inflation, which implies more rate hikes, and hence downward pressure on the dollar, things are pretty twitchy out there.
The Chicago Purchasing Manager Index is up, to 49.6 from 49.1 last month, but any number below 50 still represents a contraction.
We can wait for tomorrow’s Institute for Supply Management’s June manufacturing survey to get a better picture.
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
His statement on Face the Nation, “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president,” is both devastating and complex.
After all that, finding out that Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr accusing the Republican Party and John McCain of being lying jackals is sort of an anti-climax, but it’s nice to see him piling on.
Well, it looks like the deal to swap swap child murderer Samir Kantar for the remains of two Israeli soldiers has hit a snag, Olmert is insisting that there can be no deal without the return of Ron Arad.
The first thing that I will say is that I think that these deals for hostages are counter productive, even moreso when the hostages are dead. Releasing Samir Kantar, who killed a 4 year old girl, for some bones is indefensibly stupid.
Bring Ron Arad into the question however, creates an entirely new dynamic.
Arad has been Israel’s Judge Crater, Amelia Earhart, etc., and his status, and there is some evidence is that he is still alive, has been a focus of public concerns for over two decades now.
If he stands tough and there is no deal, Olmert wins politically, because of the public interest in the Arad manner. If he stands tough and gets back bones, he wins politically for the same reason. If Arad comes back alive, Olmert wins the next election even if he is in prison.
It is a masterful political move.
Lousy statecraft, but very good politics.
I am hoping for this.
I am not hoping for this because I think that Romney would be a bad candidate, I am hoping for this because the press hates Mitt Romney so much that they heckled him during their campaign, and I want to see what the press does if McCain chooses him, because it is a slap in their face.