In a case that has all the ingredients to explode into a national controversy, Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed star prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate whether laws were broken after “paparazzi style” photographs of CIA officers were found in the cell of a Guantanamo inmate accused of financing the 9/11 attacks, Newsweek is reporting.
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, the top official for the ACLU project that provided assistance for the defense of the detainee in question — and hired private investigators to take the photos of CIA officers thought to be involved in torture — said that no laws had been broken.
Note that if someone wants to claim that their confession was the product of torture, it’s essential for a competent defense.
They need to know who these people are and to be able to cross examine them, so as to determine the nature of their treatment, and so the admissibility of their statements.
Last week, the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco sued a throng of Wall Street companies that sold the agency $5.4 billion in residential mortgage-backed securities during the height of the mortgage melee. The suit, filed March 15 in state court in California, seeks the return of the $5.4 billion as well as broader financial damages.
Not also that the quasi-governmental GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are suing too:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may force lenders including Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co. and Citigroup Inc. to buy back $21 billion of home loans this year as part of a crackdown on faulty mortgages.
Interesting times.
Full FHLB statement below fold:
Statement Regarding PLRMBS Litigation March 15, 2010
Today the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco (Bank) filed complaints in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, against nine securities dealers in relation to certain of the Bank’s investments in private-label residential mortgage-backed securities (PLRMBS). The Bank is seeking to rescind its purchases of 134 securities in 113 securitization trusts, for which the Bank originally paid more than $19.1 billion. The Bank’s complaints allege that the dealers made untrue or misleading statements about the characteristics of the mortgage loans underlying the securities.
All of the PLRMBS in the Bank’s mortgage portfolio, including those identified in the complaints filed today, were rated AAA when purchased, based on the information provided by the securities dealers. The Bank employs conservative criteria and guidelines for all its MBS investments. The Bank invests in high-quality financial instruments to facilitate its role as a cost-effective provider of credit and liquidity to its member financial institutions. These investments support the Bank’s mission of promoting housing, homeownership, and community development by providing the Bank with greater financial flexibility in helping members meet the credit needs of their communities during all economic times and in funding the Bank’s Affordable Housing Program and other programs that create affordable housing and promote community economic development.
In filing these complaints, the Bank seeks to continue supporting its mission and to protect the interests of its member shareholders, which include over 400 community banks, credit unions, and savings institutions headquartered in Arizona, California, and Nevada that serve millions of consumers.
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, [note: until 1965, it was called Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition], led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
We should note that Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, did more than ignore allegations, he aggressively pressured priests and lay people to cover up abuse and to not report it to authorities under the penalty of excommunication.
While the statutes of limitation have expired, or at least I think that they have, it’s still obstruction of justice.
Well, it looks like real estate will be the suck for some time to come, as new home sales falling to an all time low, while inventory rose to 9.2 months, up from January’s 8.9 months.
The snowpocalypse might have had a little to do with this, but it has nothing to do with the fact that the Architecture Billings Index falling, since that is all about future residential construction.
On the brighter side, durable orders rose, largely on civil aircraft purchases.
In the “why the hell is this happening?” division, treasuries fell and yields rose in the most recent bond auction, despite the fact that the Greek meltdown would normally encourage a flight to safety, which would bid T-bills up.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has long been a vocal critic of the Democrat’s health reform efforts, but today he started taking credit for some provisions of the bill, and talking up his own role in crafting the legislation.
In a release sent out by his staff to reporters today, Grassley says the bill will “hold tax-exempt hospitals accountable for the federal tax benefits they receive” thanks to his work.
If you recall, Grassley bought into the whole death panel bullsh%$, and spread every lie possible in an attempt to kill the bill, and now he is trying to take credit for the good parts.
Full statement after the break:
M E M O R A N D U M
To: Reporters and Editors
Re: tax-exempt hospitals provisions in new health care law
Da: Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking member of the Committee on Finance, with jurisdiction over taxes, has worked to hold tax-exempt hospitals accountable for the federal tax benefits they receive. The health care legislation signed into law yesterday includes provisions Grassley co-authored to impose standards for the tax exemption of charitable hospitals for the first time. The bill requires that a hospital complete a community needs assessment once every three years and adopt and publicize a financial assistance policy; prohibits billing those who qualify for financial assistance the top rates; and prohibits a hospital from taking extraordinary collection actions if the hospital has not made reasonable efforts to notify patients of its financial assistance policy.
The bill also requires the IRS to review the tax-exempt status of each hospital every three years; requires Treasury and Health and Human Services to submit an annual report to Congress on the level of charity care, bad debt expenses and the unreimbursed costs of means-tested and non-means-tested government programs; and requires Treasury and HHS to provide a report in five years on the trends on the items reported on an annual basis.
Grassley made the following comment on the advancement of these provisions.
“Tax-exempt hospitals don’t have many measures of accountability for their special status. The law hasn’t given them much direction, and so they’ve defined standards for themselves. Sometimes that’s resulted in providing very little charitable patient care or other community benefits, failing to publicize charitable care to patients, charging indigent, uninsured patients more than insured patients, and using very aggressive collection practices. The Government Accountability Office and others, including the former IRS commissioner, have said for a long time that there is often no discernible difference between the operations of taxable and tax-exempt hospitals. These new provisions are modeled after principles and polices that the Catholic Health Association has had in place for years. I appreciate the association’s willingness to have honest, forthright conversations about charitable hospitals’ activities. The provisions take steps to differentiate tax-exempt hospitals from for-profit hospitals and provide further transparency about tax-exempt hospitals’ fulfilling their charitable mission. Congress, the IRS, and the public will now have additional tools and information to ensure that charitable hospitals act charitably.”
The provisions enacted in the new health care law are the result of Grassley’s leadership on tax-exempt organizations’ accountability and transparency, including hospitals. In 2005, he sent letters of inquiry to some of the nation’s largest tax-exempt hospitals. In 2006, he convened a hearing and released a summary of the hospitals’ responses. In 2007, he released a staff discussion draft of potential legislative reforms and convened a roundtable of experts to discuss the potential reforms. In 2008, he followed up with letters of inquiry to more hospitals and received a report he’d requested from the Government Accountability Office. In 2009, he drafted legislative reforms and succeeded in persuading the Democratic majority to include several of the reforms in the new health care law.
In fact, it is predictable that threats and vandalism will result.
What isn’t predictable, I guess, is that the frothing at the mouth crowd would get the address wrong and so instead, this would go to the Congressman’s brother:
U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother received a threatening letter in the mail on the same day that someone apparently severed a gas line at the home in Ivy.
Two conservative Tea Party activists posted the address of the home on the Internet on Monday, mistakenly believing it was the home of the congressman. One of the activists urged others to “drop by” and “express their thanks” for Perriello’s vote in favor of health care reform.
Tuesday evening, Perriello’s brother’s family smelled gas and discovered the propane line of a gas-powered grill on their screened-in porch had been slashed.
In the mail, they found a letter addressed to the congressman that Perriello’s office described as “threatening.”
The FBI and local authorities are investigating.
This is shouting fire in a crowded theater, and it is clear that the vandal wanted a fire and possibly an explosion.
It’s a specific invocation to violence, and honestly it should be treated as such.
This was the equivalent of burning a cross on his lawn, and the intent is to terrorize.
Hopefully the authorities will use every legal avenue available to pursue both the people who are engaging in these actions, and those who are making specific invocations to pursue specific individuals.
As an aside, I think that whoever cut his brother’s gas line just took a dicey seat for the Democrats to hold, Periello won a squeaker only because of the Obama landslide, and made Congressman Tom Periello the favorite.
Basically, him a hero. Just campaigning normally will now be perceived by his constituents an act of bravery.
I’m not sure if this is true, but it certainly has a ring of “truthiness” to it.
It should be noted that feeling angry and powerless is good for talk media, and talk media, like forms of communication, so folks like Limbaugh and Beck are crying all the way to the bank.
He wonders about what caused stock market capitalization to grow so much relative to GDP starting in the late 1980s.
I think that the answer is simple: The US government started to subsidize stock purchases, specifically the IRA and the 401(K), and it drew more money in to the markets, and that money bid up asset prices.
Of course, I like simple answers, and I am not a stock broker or an economist, so I would appreciate hearing alternate theories.
It turns out that when Pay Czar Ken Feinberg cut the pay of executives at bailed out firms, there was no rush for the exits:
For months, Wall Street banks and the troubled automakers feverishly protested that their top executives would flee if they were not lavishly rewarded for their talents. New data, however, suggests the departures were more of a trickle than a flood.
Of the 104 senior executives whose pay was set by the federal pay regulator in the last two years, 88 executives, or nearly 85 percent, are still with the companies even though their pay was drastically cut back, according to people briefed on the government data.
There are a number of reasons, including the fact that these”super geniuses” are really pretty toxic, and for the most part, really not much special.
Additionally, if you are getting “only” $2 million a year, you can still live pretty well on that, even in Manhattan, and it’s a pain looking for a job ………… Trust me on this one, it’s a real pain looking for a job.
And 15% turnover in 2 years, that might actually be less than normal.
Fourteen years after California decided marijuana could be used as a medicine and ignited a national movement, the state is likely to vote on whether to take another step into the vanguard of drug liberalization: legalizing the controversial weed for fun and profit.
On Wednesday, Los Angeles County elections officials must turn in their count of valid signatures collected in the county on a statewide legalization initiative. The number is virtually certain to be enough to qualify the initiative for the November ballot, according to a tally kept by state election officials.
………
The 10-page California initiative would allow anyone 21 or older to possess, share and transport up to an ounce for personal use and to grow up to 25 square feet per residence or parcel. It would allow local governments, but not the state, to authorize the cultivation, transportation and sale of marijuana and to impose taxes to raise revenues.
This last bit is particularly savvy.
By virtue of the gridlock in Sacramento, though this gridlock is a function of California voters and the initiative petition process in the first place, the state government is distrusted and despised, but by allowing local governments to license and tax, it would have the advantage of being an immediate benefit to localities.
By classical, I mean a really old classic, the comedy Lysistrata, which was first performed in 411 BCE:
Bart, if you want to reduce abortions, vote to fully fund family planning and comprehensive sex education. Otherwise, shut the hell up. We don’t care what you think about our wombs.
Women in Michigan should hang a closed sign across their hoo-hoo’s until Stupak is either voted out of Congress or grows a vagina of his own. I mean it. Really.
Brilliant!
If you have the money (I don’t), go to Matthew Saroff’s Act Blue Page, and throw a few bucks at Connie Saltonstall, who is challenging him in the primary.
The news in in real estate so far this week, with U.S. commercial real e3state prices rising for the 3rd straight month, though, as the Graph pr0n clearly shows, if you own commercial property, and you need to roll over your 5 year mortgage, you are still in a world of hurt, as you are at least 30% under water.
Google has shut down its Google.cn site and is redirecting users to Google.com.hk, where it will offer uncensored Chinese-language search services. The company will maintain a research and development organization in China as well as a sales office, it announced Monday.
“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard,” Google said in a statement. “We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced–it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”
It’s the right thing to do, and, I think, the good long term business decision.
Obviously, the Chinese “Great Wall” firewall will still censor once you click on the links, but with Google.hk actually see the links.
Because the Talibaptists make good coin selling babies, and so they want to have a good supply of pregnant women, particularly white pregnant women, without options, so that they can cover a few medical bills, and then extracting fees from desperate parents:
American websites currently offer[ ] mouth-watering incentives to would-be buyers. “Delivery within four months”, “Discounts of up to $19,000”, they proclaim. If it were cars they were selling this would not seem odd, but it’s babies that are for sale – bright, smiling newborns to tempt the childless into parting with about £20,000.
There is no shame in treating babies like any other purchase in America, where the adoption industry is largely privatized… (“Why adoption is so easy in America” Telegraph.co.uk 10/31/07)
………
The Brits have also rightly pointed to U.S. restrictions on birth control and abortion as a contributing to “marketable” infants in the U.S. The religious right’s imposed morality is perfectly partnered with those whose livelihoods depend upon the redistribution of children.
In May, 2007 Evangelical Christians organizations such as Focus on the Family and pastors from across the nation held a three-day summit in Colorado. members of to promote adoption via a media blitz.
While there are any number of people who do good work in adoption, there is a lot of money sloshing around, and it’s driving the way that business is done, and the Mega-churches and their ilk are taking their tithes, which keeps the pastors in SUV’s and business jets, I guess.
I think that it is clear that there is a lot more that needs to be done, and I am reasonably sure that Barack Obama won’t do much.
I think that he has to create the appearance of support on the side-car, because otherwise, he will have the every Democrat in House of Representatives out for payback, but beyond that, I think that he has his paper to sign, and he won’t do much beyond this.
His strategy, as it has been in finance reform, has been to buy off the market malefactors, and so I think that attempts to further improve the system, whether it is Grayson’s Medicare buy in, or Kucinich’s elimination of ERISA preemption will likely be opposed.
Of course, it will be sold as the, “time not being right,” much as he has done with the repeal of DADT, the ENDA, the EFCA, etc.
I would note that my predictive record sucks, and perhaps he will surprise me.
If this is all that Obama will do with healthcare, than we have just seen him make his own flight suit speech, but if he supports further improvements, then, as the fucking* Vice President of the United States accidentally said into a live microphone, “This is a big fucking deal.”
Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus told reporters today that there may be “one or two” changes to the health care reconciliation bill, meaning it could be sent back to the House for another vote.
“Anything is possible. We’ve constructed this thing so well … maybe one or two but they’re so minor they’re almost not even worth mentioning,” Baucus said.
Any changes to the bill, even minor, will send it back to the House for another vote there before it can go to the president’s desk.
But it seems that either he got the face time on camera that he wanted, or someone threatened to disembowel him with a rusty spoon:
Late update: But Conrad now says he’s confident there won’t be changes.
“We’ve found additional precedent that supports our view that nothing is Byrd-able,” he said, referring to the Byrd rule on which legislation may be passed under reconciliation.
Kudos to whoever put a horse’s head in his bed.
*I consider myself to be a fairly profane writer, though mu rule is to %$# out my swear words, but fuck it, if the Vice President can drop the F-bomb today, than so can I. †Yes, this T-shirt is for sale from Zazzle.com.
Ex-Tyco International Ltd. Chief Executive Officer L. Dennis Kozlowski, jailed for stealing millions of dollars, wants a U.S. court to order the company to pay him tens of millions from his retirement account.
Lawyers for Kozlowski filed court papers in which they claim that Tyco breached its retirement agreement by refusing to pay him the lump sum he has demanded. As of October 2008, the value of Kozlowski’s retirement account was $75.9 million, according to the court papers, which are part of a 2002 lawsuit between Tyco and Kozlowski.
Kozlowski, 63, and former Chief Financial Officer Mark Swartz were convicted in 2005 of securities fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records. The jury in New York State Supreme Court found they stole about $137 million from Tyco through unauthorized bonuses and the abuse of company loans.
Because, you see, in the world of the big players, going to jail from stealing from your company doesn’t mean you don’t get your golden parachute.
Seriously, can the just have the bailiff beat the snot out of him in open court?
Tyco’s defense, that, “A ‘faithless servant’ is not entitled to any compensation,” would sound fairly convincing to me, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*
The president of the National Organization for Women said her group is “incensed” about the impasse-breaking deal between President Obama and a group of anti-abortion Catholic Democrats that seems likely to allow historic health-care reform legislation to pass the House later Sunday night, saying the planned presidential executive order “breaks faith with women.”
………
NARAL Pro-Choice America shared NOW’s objections. “On a day when Americans are expected to see passage of legislation that will make health care more affordable for more than 30 million citizens, it is deeply disappointing that Bart Stupak and other anti-choice politicians would demand the restatement of the Hyde amendment, a discriminatory law that blocks low-income women from receiving full reproductive-health care,” NARAL President Nancy Keenan said in a statement.
You know, it was clear during the primaries that Barack Obama’s commitment to reproductive rights was tepid at best based on his record in the Illinois State Senate, and senior executives at Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW ignored this, and never pressed him on his record.
Of course, once he was the nominee, tepid and ineffectual support was better than that reproductive rights horror-show that is the Republican party.
That being said, being thrown under the bus was predictable, and whining now is just lame.
Here’s hoping that the Barny Frank – slightly less weak tea – bill prevails in conference committee, though if the Dems were smart, they would use finance reform as a way to get the Republicans to vote for the fat cat Wall Street bankers, and then use those votes as a cudgel in November.
But that would require that Democrats find their spines, which I think is unlikely.
They do not realize that having a backbone is something that voters place a huge value on, perhaps even more than philosophy and policy.
That’s why the leading candidate in the Republican primary in Alan Grayson’s district is Alan Grayson, because voters vote for politicians with guts.
Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Reserve officials were warned by a leading Wall Street rival that Lehman Brothers was incorrectly calculating a key measure of its financial health months before its collapse in 2008, people familiar with the matter say.
Former Merrill Lynch officials said they contacted regulators about the way Lehman measured its liquidity position for competitive reasons.
…
he findings raise questions over what federal regulators knew about Lehman’s accounting and when they knew it. In the account given by the Merrill officials, the SEC, the lead regulator, and the New York Federal Reserve were given warnings about Lehman’s balance sheet calculations as far back as March 2008.
Former and current Fed officials say even in the competitive world of Wall Street, it is unusual for rival bankers to relay such concerns to the Fed.
It takes an awful lot to get one investment bank to rat out another, the first rule of Wall Street is never tell the regulators, and and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, president Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, as well as the SEC, which was largely deferring to the NY Fed, decided to ignore it.
As Lehman Brothers careened toward bankruptcy in 2008, the New York Federal Reserve Bank came to its rescue, sopping up junk loans that the investment bank couldn’t sell in the market, according to a report from court-appointed examiner Anton R. Valukas.
The New York Fed, under the direction of now-Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, knowingly allowed itself to be used as a “warehouse” for junk loans, the report says, even though Fed guidelines say it can only accept investment grade bonds.
Meanwhile, the Fed and Geithner both strongly oppose a congressional measure to authorize an independent audit of the central bank and its lending facilities. The provision passed the House but is under attack in the Senate, where Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) says he hopes to stop it.
Without an audit, the Fed is able to conceal the specifics of what it holds on its balance sheet. If the Lehman deal is any indication, the Fed is hiding billions of dollars in toxic loans on its books.
“The Fed legally is forbidden from taking such assets. There’s a legal requirement that the Fed’s assets be investment grade,” Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) told HuffPost. Grayson, who is the cosponsor of the Grayson-Paul Audit the Fed measure that passed the House, said the Lehman scandal shows precisely why such an audit is needed.
Seriously, he cheated on his taxes, he’s aided and abetted the pervasive accounting fraud at Lehman, and he’s still in the bank’s pocket.
I understand that his successor will face a filibuster, but please, fire him, and go with a recess appointment.
It doesn’t matter that he knows where the bodies are buried if he’s a part of the gang what murdered the economy, and he’s still working flashing gang symbols to Dimon and Blankfien.
These loans are guaranteed by the US government, and now, only the US Government will make them:
Legislation hailed by supporters as the most significant change to college student lending in a generation passed the House on Sunday night.
The student aid initiative, which House Democrats attached to their final amendments to the health-care bill, would overhaul the student loan industry, eliminating a $60 billion program that supports private student loans with federal subsidies and replacing it with government lending to students. The House amendments will now go to the Senate.
By ending the subsidies and effectively eliminating the middleman, the student loan bill would generate $61 billion in savings over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
Most of those savings, $36 billion, would go to Pell grants, funding an era of steady and predictable increases in the massive but underfunded federal aid program for needy students. Smaller portions would go toward reducing the deficit and to various Democratic priorities, including community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and caps on loan payments.
Of course, there is a more general problem with the student loan program, which is that student loans, and federal student aid programs, when juxtaposed with the collusion of the top schools on tuition and financial aid, have led to the costs of higher education significantly outpacing inflation.
Dodd’s weak tea financial reform