This is a consequence of the Citizens United case, and the ruling was that independent advocacy groups can raise donations of any size, striking the $5000 limits but the disclosure requirements stand, and, in a separate ruling, the contribution limit remains for party organizations
The Republican National Committee is promising an appeal of the latter ruling.
It is not an unalloyed bad day for campaign finance reform, but on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 3-4.
And once again, it’s a swing and a miss, because once again, it’s an attempt to use the carrot on banks, a rather generous payout for principal reductions, along with giving banks an incentive to shovel their most toxic mortgages to the FHA, as opposed to a stick, in the hope that house prices somehow recover.
They won’t ever that is what “post bubble” means.
But once again, Larry Summers* and His Evil Minions™bailing out the banks, not the homeowners. The goal is to keep the toxic nature of the mortgages off of the banks’ books.
Little things, like banning prepayment penalties, which lock people into bad mortgages, and allowing mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy (cram down), would give lenders the incentive to deal fairly.
But that’s not gonna happen.
*But remember, the Cossacks work for the Czar.
OK, so Blanche Lincoln is polling horribly against her Republican opponents, who basically have the name recognition of Cranston Snord†, she is in favor of the banks, and the health insurance companies, and now she is running robocalls accusing her Democratic primary Bill Halter opponent of taking union money:
The Senators phone survey first asks how the constitutient feels about Lt. Gov. Halter. The survey then goes on to ask the constitutient if they are aware that the Lt. Governor has accepted money from unions.
Note that the distinguished lady from Arkansas has taken well over $½ million in labor PAC money in her career, despite the fact that she has been the Senator from Walmart, and now that labor unions are supporting her opponent, they are, of course portrayed as the font of all evil.
Seriously, I understand the desire to support a loyal Democrat who might be a conservative, but given her record on labor issues, healthcare, etc., she’s a disloyal Democrat.
Note that Mr. Halter is on my Act Blue Page, I support Bill Halter for Senate.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, supports Blanche Lincoln: he has formally endorsed her.
*Originally, I was going to say, “With t**s,” but I decided that that is insufficiently sensitive new age guy.
†Who, you ask, is Cranston Snord? And that is, of course, my point.
Well, they just revised down the 4th quarter GDP numbers down again, to a 5.6% annual rate, the earlier estimate had been 5.9%.
On the brighter side, incomes rose faster than GDP, which gives a boost to the idea that some sort of recovery is going on.
Meanwhile, in high fiance, Ambac’s dance of death continues, with the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) ruling that the regulator action yesterday constitutes a trigger for bankruptcy CDS contracts.
Meanwhile, the apparrent resolution of the Greek crisis has pushed the US dollar down on reduced demand for safe havens, and oil prices fell marginally.
It will reduce strategic weapons levels from 2200 to 15-1600, which is a good thing, though I have no clue whatsoever how it will make it through the Senate, where 67 votes are required.
That would need all the Dems and 8 Republicans to vote for it, and I don’t see that happening.
Well, it looks like the issue with a possible default by Greece has been resolved, for a while at least, by a joint action of the EU and the IMF.
I think that this puts to rest the idea that Greece will leave the Euro, for a while at least, but the real problem is that the Germans have structured the Euro with the goal of furthering their mercantilist export driven goals, much as the Chinese have with the Yuan, and the solution here is not to kick the Greeks out of the Euros, but to kick the Germans out of the Euro.
Simply put, the German desire for new export markets has made them push aggressively for countries to join the monetary union before it is prudent, and to encourage them to do so by providing economic aid and by overvaluing the sovereign currency.
Unfortunately, this creates asymmetries that are creating the problems that we have now, and it will be a tough thing to avoid something like the downfall of European Exchange Rate Mechanism that occurred when George Soros, “Broke the Bank of England.”
The problem is that, absent the labor mobility that exists in the United States, where one need neither a work permit nor to learn a new language, these asymmetries will persist.
This has been further reinforced by the efforts of Europhiles to jump-start the mechanisms of European integration through direct and indirect subsidies to entice new members to join prematurely.
Damn ………… I gotta make this a longer form, and submit it to Marketplace as a guest editorial.
It was in a patch of water that is disputed by the DPRK and the ROK, but right now the South Korean authorities are saying that it’s not clear if the sinking was the result of hostile activity.
Should be an interesting next few days.
It’s jobless Thursday, and initial jobless claims fell by 14K to 442,000, though it should be noted that a change to seasonal adjustments accounted for 11K of that 14 K.
The less noisy 4 week moving average fell by 11K to 453,750, and continuing claims fell by 54K to 4.65 million, the lowest number in 1¼ years.
All in all, good news, but we are still not at a number where we would see real job growth.
In the intersection of real estate and finance, we have 13.6% of US mortgages being delinquent in the 4th quarter of 2009, up by 0.9% from the 3rd quarter.
In a blast from the past, we have a development in the slow motion immolation of the monoliner insurers with the largest of the bond insurers, Ambac, had the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance take control of roughly $35 billion of insurance contracts on residential mortgages.
They have direct the troubled insurance company to segregate these contracts into separate accounts.
You arrogant ass. You’ve killed us!Just so you know, it appears that the financial weapon of mass destruction, the Credit Default Swap is rearing its ugly head once again, as the segregation of accounts may constitute a “default” under the terms of the credit default swap contracts on these assets.
Seriously, this sh%$ is going to destroy us if we don’t get a handle on it. (Cue captain Tupolev)
Finally, in currency the Euro has rebounded slightly off its low on reports of an imminent solution for the Greek crisis, though these concerns were still enough to push oil prices down.
The House of Representatives just approved the minor changes to reconciliation side car.
Note that, once again, the public option got left on the sidelines.
The Senate said that they had more than 50 votes for it, and the House is supposed to have more than 217 for it, and with the tweak, it could have been put in, but it wasn’t.
Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Barack Obama agreed to kill the public option very early in this process:
For months I’ve been reporting in The Huffington Post that President Obama made a backroom deal last summer with the for-profit hospital lobby that he would make sure there would be no national public option in the final health reform legislation. (See here, here and here). I’ve been increasingly frustrated that except for an initial story last August in the New York Times, no major media outlet has picked up this important story and investigated further.
John Walker at FDL notes the shifting reasons for killing the public option, and draws what I think is the accurate explanation:
It is foolish to believe that a President, Senate Majority Leader, and Speaker of the House with historically large majorities couldn’t get a public option–which roughly 65% of the country supported–if they really wanted one. Clearly, if they all really wanted to include a public option, they could have done it using reconciliation. To accept their many different excuses of powerlessness requires one to completely suspend reality.
Occam’s razor teaches us the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Here, the simplest explanation is that, months ago, Obama promised to kill the public option as part of a secret deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, and that for months he lied to the American people about supporting the public option while working behind the scenes to stop it.
So, when exactly does that changing the way Washington works thing start again?
(emphasis mine)
Indeed.
He has been fired as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
It probably has something to do with his recent comments about the Republican party’s missteps.
Fellow pariah right winger Bruce Bartlett actually invoked Stalin in his comments on the affair, though he wimped out and only used the “S” word in his URL. “groupthink-right-would-make-stalin-proud.”
Bartlett notes that the AEI “experts” on healthcare had been muzzled:
Since, he [Frum] is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.
It is noteworthy that Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal calls it a resignation, which even the Washington Post did not try to foist off on their readers.
Here is Mr. Frum’s letter of resignation:
Dear Arthur [Brooks, AEI President],
This will memorialize our conversation at lunch today. Effective immediately, my position as a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute is terminated. I appreciate the consideration that delays my emptying of my office until after my return from travel next week. Premises will be vacated no later than April 9.
I have had many fruitful years at the American Enterprise Institute, and I do regret this abrupt and unexpected conclusion of our relationship.
Very truly yours,
David Frum
And the WSJ says that he “quit”.
According to polls, the American public thinks that Wall Street and the big banks are evil and they want them flayed and staked to anthills:
Most people interviewed in the Bloomberg National Poll say they don’t like Wall Street, banks or insurance companies and favor letting the government punish bankers who helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
OK, so maybe I exaggerate a bit, but it has the ring of truthiness, and they did not ask about flaying or anthills in the poll.
Even less shocking is the response of the banks to the news of these attitudes, a brand new PR campaign:
One of Wall Street’s main lobbying groups is starting an image-improvement campaign aimed at showing the financial industry as trustworthy and a positive force after more than a year of being chastised in Washington.
You know, if you stopped making your goal f%$#ing the ordinary American, people might like you more.
In an attempt to provide evidence of torture, attorneys defending detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere, have been providing pictures of likely torturers to their clients for identification, and Eric Holder has decided to criminally investigate the attorneys for doing their jobs:
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.
And still Yoo and Bybee walk free.
The Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) is suing banks that made dodgy mortgage loans and then misrepresented them:
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, 2010Today 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.
The Catholic Church should consider controlling what their priests do with their bodies:
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.
In any case, the Greek problems have driven the dollar up and oil down.
On the other hand, things are good in New Zealand, if you don’t mind all the rain, with Kiwi GDP growing 0.8% (about a 3.2% annual rate) last quarter.
Charles Grassley, who took less than 24 hours to take credit for the good parts of the healthcare bill:
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.
You tell me, if you post someone’s address on line, and suggest that people “drop by” and “express their thanks” in response to a Congressman’s vote on healthcare, the resultant threatening mail and a cut gas line are foreseeable.
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.
Heh.
Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox.
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.
H/t Barry Ritholtz
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.