Year: 2012

It Aint Just Mortgages that the Banksters are F%$#ing UP

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Once again, the banks sold bad paper, in this case, credit card debts that they knew were not accurate and, and once again, Matt Taibbi has a distills the essence of the matter:

In a story that should be getting lots of attention, American Banker has released an excellent and disturbing exposé of J.P. Morgan Chase’s credit card services division, relying on multiple current and former Chase employees. One of them, Linda Almonte, is a whistleblower whom I’ve known since last September; I’m working on a recount of her story for my next book.

………

The Cliff’s Notes version of the story goes something like this: Late in 2009, Chase’s credit card services division sold a parcel of nearly $200 million worth of credit card judgments to a debt collector at a discount. This common practice in the credit-card industry is a little like a bookie selling the outstanding debts of his delinquent gamblers to a leg-breaker for 25 cents on the dollar. If the leg-breaker gets half the delinquents to pay, the deal works out for both sides — the bookie gets 25 percent of money he wasn’t going to collect, and the leg-breaker makes a 100 percent profit.

Only they did not do even the barest due diligence:

Linda [Almonte] subsequently found an enormous range of errors. Some judgments, she told me, were not judgments at all. In some cases, she said, Chase actually owed the customer money.

When she brought these concerns to her superiors, what do you think their response was? They told her and others to shut up and just sell the stuff anyway. Her boss, Jason Lazinbat, allegedly told her “she had better go along with the plan to sell the misrepresented asset.”
Think of the consequences of this: because Chase was so anxious to make money off this debt sale, countless credit card borrowers would now have collection agents chasing them for money they did not owe. The debt-buyer, too, was victimized by being sold accounts it could not collect on. It is almost impossible to estimate how many man-hours of pointless court proceedings would be lost because of this decision.

You know, this sounds familiar. Just like the foreclosure fraud.

In fact, it sounds like a pattern, a, “pattern of racketeering,” as in RICO, and the burden of proof in RICO, particularly for asset forfeiture, is not that high.

How about it, Barack?

It’s something that you can do in your 2nd term, and you don’t need Congressional approval to do this.

Full Disclosure, I Served in the UMass SGA Senate With Him

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They are finally getting around to sentencing Tony Rudy, one of the final defendants in the Abramoff matter, 6 years after he pled guilty.

The weird thing is that the prosecution and defense have agreed to have the agreed upon facts sealed for national security reasons:

Nearly six years after he pleaded guilty in the Jack Abramoff scandal, a former aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay will likely be sentenced in the near future. But because of a joint motion granted by the federal judge hearing the case against Tony Rudy, the public wouldn’t see the filing listing agreed upon facts in the case.

The reason? National security.

The feds and Rudy’s defense team wrote that the disclosure of “sensitive information related to national security matters” likely “would compromise and negatively impact ongoing intelligence efforts.” They said the sensitive information had “no relationship to the Department of Justice’s investigation of Jack Abramoff or related persons.”

The folks at TPM got a comment from Abramoff about this, and he was pretty stunned by this.

My guess is that he probably did some work for a Persian Gulf monarchy, and the State Department wants it buried, but we’re likely to find out through a leak in the next few months.

Rats Leaving the Sinking Vampire Squid

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So, Greg Smith, who ran equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Goldman Sachs, has resigned today.

Normally, this would not be particularly newsworthy, except for the fact that he published his separation letter on the OP/ED page of the New York Times:

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

Truth be told, I’m not impressed.

This guy as been a Vampire Squidling for over a decade, so I see this as kind of self serving.

If he were claiming law breaking, it would mean something, but he is mostly complaining how the brokers trash talk:

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

He’s not claiming any law breaking (Yeah, right), just that there is a insane macho culture at Goldman that sees the clients more as marks than as partners in success.

How the f%$# can you work at a f%$#ing brokerage for ten f%$#ing years, and not f%$#ing realize that it’s a f%$#ing testosterone f%$#ing hormone filled f%$#ing cesspool after being there two f%$#ing weeks hours.

Seriously, just f%$#!

Whoever wrote, “Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader,” got the crux of the matter.

I will issue a correction if this guy does something like working for a regulator, but my guess is that this is all about providing himself plausible deniability, or possibly pimping a book, or maybe he’s hanging out his own shingle.

Here’s a thousand years on what I’m seeing:

Why I am leaving the Empire, by Darth Vader


H/t FT/Alphavill for the Pic

[update]Matt Taibbi thinks that this guy is for real, so if you want want an opposing opinion, and I think that it is well argued, go read.

Cue Inspector Renault

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I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, that we are now seeing reports that senior managers actively directed their subordinates to robosign and falsify records:

Employees at major banks who churned out fraudulent foreclosure documents, forged signatures, made up fake job titles and falsely notarized paperwork often did so at the behest of their superiors, according to a federal investigation released Tuesday.

It’s well documented that the nation’s biggest banks routinely “robo-signed” legal papers to keep up with the wave of foreclosures brought on by the housing bust. But the new report from the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development reveals that those shoddy practices often came at the direction of managers at the banks, and that employees in some cases were judged by how fast they could get new foreclosure filings out the door.

“I believe the reports we just released will leave the reader asking one question: How could so many people have participated in this misconduct?” David Montoya, HUD inspector general, said in a statement. “The answer: simple greed.”

HUD investigators launched their inquiries soon after news of the banks’ practices caused a national uproar in late 2010, and government officials used their findings as they negotiated a recent landmark $25 billion settlement with the banks.

HUD reviewed foreclosure practices at all five banks involved in the recent settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial. They issued subpoenas, pored over personnel files, conducted interviews with scores of employees and examined the quality control measures — or lack thereof — at the banks’ mortgage servicing units.

Repeatedly, according to the report, investigators were hampered by poor record-keeping at the banks, sluggish responses to requests for documents and an unwillingness to make employees available for interviews or to allow them to answer detailed questions at the virtual foreclosure factories where they worked.

Nevertheless, investigators pieced together a picture of a deeply flawed system riddled with errors, where employees often had little or no training, where managers encouraged wrongdoing and where haste trumped all else.

You know, maybe the banks had poor record-keeping, and responded sluggishly to requests for documents because, you know, they knew that they were aggressively breaking the law.

Stop the looting, and start prosecuting!

So, There Were Primaries Tonight

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Pass the Popcorn

It looks like Santorum won in both Alabama and Mississippi, so the freak show continues, for a while, at least.

That being said, I would say that upon examination of the Mississippi and Alabama Republican primary electorate, a large plurality believe that Obama is a secret Muslim, I would have to say that it should be a positive thing that Romney could not win with those folks.

Seriously, it’s like these states are an open air asylum.

The Krauts Don’t Practice What They Preach

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It looks like the Germans are going to miss their austerity goals this year:

European countries are expected to implement tough austerity measures amid the debt crisis. But Germany isn’t setting a very good example. SPIEGEL has learned that Berlin failed to reach its own austerity goals in 2011. And despite pressuring its neighbors to save, Germany is behind this year too.

As she travels from one European Union summit to the next, Angela Merkel’s constant mantra in recent months has been austerity, austerity, austerity. But apparently the German chancellor hasn’t been quite as strict when it comes to her own country’s budget.

SPIEGEL reports this week that the German government didn’t reach even half of its planned savings in the federal budget. Only 42 percent of the spending cuts named by Merkel’s coalition government, comprised of the conservative Christian Democrats and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, were actually not implemented.

Calculations made by the influential Cologne Institute for Economic Research indicate that only €4.7 billion ($6.16 billion) of the €11.2 billion in austerity measures stipulated by the savings package actually took shape in 2011.

You know, maybe, just maybe, Merkel and allies are a bigger part of the problem than people imagine.

Quote of the Day

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I’ll say what Joe didn’t: The prosecutors need to cut a deal with one of the small fish in order to catch a big (or bigger) fish. Perhaps with MFG’s Treasurer or Comptroller. If it were me, I’d let the Defense bar know that we have 3 potential immunity deals that go to the first takers (with several hi profile exceptions).

This is just like prosecuting drug dealers — you pick up the dime bag seller, roll them to the mid-level guy, repeat. Keep doing that until you reach as close to the top as you can get.

Works for pot, crack, robo-signing, and segregated account theft . . .

—Barry Ritholtz on how to prosecute MF Global executives for stealing customer funds

They Can’t Even Give Away Ads on Rush Limbaugh’s Show

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For the next two weeks, his syndicate, Premiere Networks, will be suspending their national ads from his show:

Radio-Info.com reports that Premiere Networks, which syndicates the Rush Limbaugh show, told its affiliate radio stations that they are suspending national advertising for two weeks. Rush Limbaugh is normally provided to affiliates in exchange for running several minutes of national advertisements provided by Premiere each hour. These ads called “barter spots.” These spots are how Premiere makes its money off of Rush Limbaugh and other shows it syndicates.

But without explanation, Premiere has supended these national advertisements for two weeks. Radio-Info.com calls the move “unusual.” The development suggests that Rush Limbaugh’s incessant sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke have caused severe damage to the show.

They are suspending the spots because they cannot give them away right now, and dead air is not a reasonable alternative.

This is a good thing, notwithstanding the concerns from the commentariat about a “slippery slope” of censorship. (Yeah, I’m talking to you Kevin Drum)

It’s pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-liberal hand wringing bullsh%$.

Being on the East Coast, I still hear now and again WBZ’s late night talk radio, which, even though its hosts lean right about 80% of the time is kind of a pre-repeal-of-the-fairness-doctrine relic, and their producers don’t pre-screen for conservative political orthodoxy.

In particular, I remember the late David Brudnoy, who was a conservative, and a libertarian, and one with VERY strongly held beliefs. (He loathed the Clintons)

The fact is that the most extreme of their hosts (like Brudnoy) re to the right about like Ed Schultz is on the left.

What you have on the air on the right wing right now are, to paraphrase Roger Stone, “Rat F%$#ing” political operatives.

If sponsors flee the freak show conservatives, it is an unalloyed good.

To think otherwise is to declare that Rachel Maddow and Glen Beck to be to opposite sides of the same coin.

I have no problems with polemicists, and neither will advertisers.

What is happening now is that sponsors are getting the message now that there are risks to backing the partisan Rat F%$#ers, and this is an unalloyed good.

The Hair of Doom is Arrested

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The Hair of Doom!

Specifically, Rupert Murdoch protege Rebekah Brooks, along with her husband and other Murdoch Staffers:

Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International, the British newspaper division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of obstruction of justice, according to a person with knowledge of the arrest. Her husband, Charlie, a friend of Prime Minister David Cameron from their days at Eton three decades ago, was also arrested, the person said.

The police said in a statement that six people in and outside of London had been arrested on Tuesday as part of Operation Weeting, the criminal investigation into phone hacking and other illegal activities at The News of the World and other newspapers. None have yet been formally charged with crimes; in the British system, charges can be filed months after an arrest, and sometimes not at all.

Following standard procedure, the police statement did not identify those arrested. But a person with knowledge of the arrests said that besides Ms. Brooks and her husband, they included Mark Hanna, the head of security for News International.

The police statement said the six had been arrested between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. and were being interrogated at different police stations on suspicion of “conspiracy to pervert the course of justice,” the British equivalent of obstruction of justice. This could relate to activities like destroying e-mails, computers and other evidence, people with knowledge of the investigation said.

Two former editorial staff members at News International said they had heard from inside the company that the questioning was related to e-mails that were deleted before the police widened their phone hacking investigation last year.

It’s never the crime, it’s the cover-up.

Obama Conspiring to Lock Up Foreign Journalist

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Seriously.

Yemeni journalist proves that military operations in his country are actually US drone strikes, and gets sentenced on trumped up charges to 5 years in prison.

A few months after the kangaroo court, President Saleh had a pardon for him prepared, but Obama pressured him to keep him in prison:

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”

………

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

So, a journalist revealed a US lie, and the worst constitutional law professor ever decides that this guy needs to remain behind bars forever, because he embarrassed our military/intelligence services.

Truly repulsive.

Just When Thought that the ‘Phants Could Not Get Any More Repulsive…

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The Republicans in Arizona are trying to pass a bill allowing your employer to fire women for using birth-control pills for ……… birth control:

Law Will Allow Employers to Fire Women for Using Whore Pills

A proposed new law in Arizona would give employers the power to request that women being prescribed birth control pills provide proof that they’re using it for non-sexual reasons. And because Arizona’s an at-will employment state, that means that bosses critical of their female employees’ sex lives could fire them as a result. If we could harness the power of the crappy ideas coming out of the state of Arizona, we could probably power a rocket ship to the moon, where there are no Mexicans or fertile wombs and everyone can be free to be as mean a cranky asshole as they want at all times! Arizona Heaven!

Because allowing employers to afflict their hatred of women on their employees is freedom!

Seriously, this people, and I mean people, the sponsor, is a woman, Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, have an attitude towards women that makes the Taliban look like the editorial staff of Cosmopolitian.

They really hate the idea of women having any sort of freedom.

I have a suggestion for dealing these rat-f%$#s, that we go classic Greek theater on their asses.

More specifically, I suggest that their significant others go Lysistrata on their asses.

Heh

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It looks like Rush’s going postal is causing significant blow-back for all of the hate jocks:

Rush Limbaugh made the right-wing talk-radio industry, and he just might break it.

Because now the fallout from the “slut” slurs against Sandra Fluke is extending to the entire political shock-jock genre.

Premiere Networks, which distributes Limbaugh as well as a host of other right-wing talkers, sent an email out to its affiliates early Friday listing 98 large corporations that have requested their ads appear only on “programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).”

This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.

They have a right to speak.

They don’t have a right to make millions of dollars a year to do so.

Morons.

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So, Gary Trudeau storyline for this week involves old white men in Texas torturing women who need abortions.

Editors who are not now, and were probably never were, journalists, have pulled the strip for this week.

The Portland Oregonian, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, among others, though the Athens Georgian Banner-Herald takes for their reason:

Given that the Georgia General Assembly is considering an abortion bill — House Bill 954, sponsored by Rep. Doug McKillip, R-Athens, which would prohibit abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy — I made a unilateral decision not to publish the “Doonesbury” strips intended for publication this week. Quite simply, I thought there was a real possibility that readers might confuse the topic of this week’s “Doonesbury” with Georgia’s proposed abortion legislation, and I didn’t want to add any confusion to the ongoing concerns, pro and con, about House Bill 954.

So you are afraid that people looking at the old white guys in Texas going all Handmaiden’s Tale on women might somehow be conflated with old white guys in Georgia going all Handmaiden’s Tale on women.

In any case, as a result of the censorship by these cowards, his strip is getting gallons of ink.

I’ll be following it this week, that’s for sure.

BTW, according to Romenesko, on Thursday, we see the line, “By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape.”

War Breaks People and Institutions

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A US Sargent walked miles from his base to an Afghan village, where he proceeded house to house executing civilians:

Stalking from home to home, a United States Army sergeant methodically killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children, in a rural stretch of southern Afghanistan early on Sunday, igniting fears of a new wave of anti-American hostility, Afghan and American officials said.

Residents of three villages in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province described a terrifying string of attacks in which the soldier, who had walked more than a mile from his base, tried door after door, eventually breaking in to kill within three separate houses. The man gathered 11 bodies, including those of 4 girls younger than 6, and set fire to them, villagers said.

Coming after a period of deepening public outrage, spurred by the Koran burning by American personnel last month and an earlier video showing American Marines urinating on dead militants, the possibility of a violent reaction to the killings added to a feeling of siege here among Western personnel. Officials described growing concern over a cascade of missteps and offenses that has cast doubt on the ability of NATO personnel to carry out their mission and has left troops and trainers increasingly vulnerable to violence by Afghans seeking revenge.

It’s just wonderful. An NCO loses it, and we’re all concerned that the locals might get all pissy about being murdered.

This guy was married with 3 kids, 38 years old, and had 11 years service.

11 straight years of war broke this guy, and is in the process of breaking our military.

We are seeing a rot, and its effecting what is arguably the most critical and irreplaceable part of our military, our NCP corps.

Kind of a Working Sunday

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I’m looking up a number of patents.

I’ve been checking out some patents in a matter completely uninvolved  to my day job.  (I’m trying to see if I possess the expertise to qualify as an expert witness)

Here’s another good idea for patent reform:  How about requiring that they not be written in the most obtuse manner possible?

Not Enough Bullets…

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And Louis Freeh is at again, trying to make sure that the money stolen by the banks from MF Global customers stays stolen.

In this case, he is attempting to pay hush money large bonuses to MF global executives:

Three top executives at MF Global Holdings Ltd kept on since the commodities firm’s collapse could receive performance-based bonuses under a retention plan being prepared by a court-appointed trustee, people close to the trustee said.

Trustee Louis Freeh plans to ask a bankruptcy judge to approve the employment agreements, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan is still being crafted.

The plan will include bonus payouts for Chief Operating Officer Bradley Abelow, General Counsel Laurie Ferber and Chief Financial Officer Henri Steenkamp if they meet certain targets.

The formation of a plan does not necessarily mean bonuses will ultimately be paid or that the executives will earn as much total compensation as they have in the past.

Still, it has garnered attention from at least one key politician. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement it was “hard to believe that Mr. Freeh would consider bonuses to these select few while customers and investors are still trying to recoup their losses.”

Because, of course the people who stole the money in the first place.

Seriously, the casual corruption of Loius Freeh and His Evil Minions™, which are in tern a reflection of the endemic levels of corruption of our financial system, just boggle the mind.

It’s got me agreeing with a Republican Congressman, Timothy Johnson, wants blood:

I would wager the combined assets of these executives, along with those of Mr. Jon Corzine, would go a long way towards paying back their customers. That’s what would happen in the world I grew up in.

And on the other end, where we have another trustee allegedly trying to recover money for account holders, we have the other end of the bankster protection racket:

MF Global Inc.’s trustee asked futures customers to release claims on the defunct brokerage in return for money they are owed, demanding an “unwarranted” transfer of legal rights, a group of customers said.

The customers, including William Fleckenstein, Thomas Wacker and Summit Trust Co., said in a court filing yesterday that they were notifying the judge supervising the firm’s liquidation of their “concern” in case he wasn’t aware that trustee James Giddens had mailed his demands to some customers along with his determination of their claims. One of Giddens’s demands may require customers to release claims made in class- action lawsuits, they said.

“It may be interpreted to release claims being asserted in the numerous class action lawsuits filed by aggrieved customers,” the customers said in the filing. “It could also potentially be asserted as a bar to recovery by some or all of the defendants joined in these lawsuits, including claims in the suits against parties alleged to be responsible for the misappropriation of customer funds.”

I’m not sure which is worse, the level of corruption, or the brazenness with which they operate.

H/t Atrios.

It Appears that Hypocrisy is Required for Conservatism

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Hoocoodanode? The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against Obamacare that is most likely to make it to the Supreme Court went bankrupt over medical bills, dumping those costs on the rest of us:

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama’s healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.

Brown “doesn’t have insurance. She doesn’t want to pay for it. And she doesn’t want the government to tell her she has to have it,” said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation’s case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills. Those bills could change Brown from a symbol of proud independence into an example of exactly the problem the healthcare law was intended to address.

………

The business federation, along with other critics of the law, calls the insurance mandate a “threat to individual liberty” that violates the Constitution.

Obama administration lawyers argue that the requirement is justified because everyone, sooner or later, needs healthcare. Those who fail to have insurance are at high risk of running up bills they cannot pay, sticking the rest of society with the cost, they argue. Brown’s situation, they say, is a perfect example of exactly that kind of “uncompensated care that will ultimately be paid by others.”

Seriously.  The hypocrisy is mind boggling.