Eric Holder Resigns

Here's John Cassidy at the New Yorker: Why Didn’t Eric Holder Go After the Bankers?

Amid all the coverage of Eric Holder’s resignation, I still haven’t seen a convincing answer to one question: Why didn’t the Justice Department, under his leadership, prosecute some of the senior bankers whose firms were largely responsible for the subprime-mortgage blowup and the Great Recession? It’s a gap in Holder’s record that historians will ponder at the same time they criticize his record on civil liberties, particularly his endorsement of the surveillance state, and praise him for trying to tackle some enduring problems in the American criminal-justice system, such as the imposition of long prison sentences for minor crimes and the scandalously high rates of incarceration, especially among minority groups.

Yes, John, if you ignore the fact that both Holder and Lanny Breuer (Assistant Attorney General, head of the DOJ's Criminal Justice division) came from white shoes criminal defense firm Covington and Burling, it might be difficult to answer that question.

And if you don't mention it in your article, you're doing a disservice to your readers. Scot J. Paltrow (Reuters): Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks.

While Holder and Breuer were partners at Covington, the firm's clients included the four largest U.S. banks - Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo & Co - as well as at least one other bank that is among the 10 largest mortgage servicers.

A particular concern by those pressing for an investigation is Covington's involvement with Virginia-based MERS Corp, which runs a vast computerized registry of mortgages. Little known before the mortgage crisis hit, MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, has been at the center of complaints about false or erroneous mortgage documents.

Court records show that Covington, in the late 1990s, provided legal opinion letters needed to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and several other large banks. It was meant to speed up registration and transfers of mortgages. By 2010, MERS claimed to own about half of all mortgages in the U.S. -- roughly 60 million loans.

But evidence in numerous state and federal court cases around the country has shown that MERS authorized thousands of bank employees to sign their names as MERS officials. The banks allegedly drew up fake mortgage assignments, making it appear falsely that they had standing to file foreclosures, and then had their own employees sign the documents as MERS "vice presidents" or "assistant secretaries."

Covington in 2004 also wrote a crucial opinion letter commissioned by MERS, providing legal justification for its electronic registry. MERS spokeswoman Karmela Lejarde declined to comment on Covington legal work done for MERS.

A President doesn't pick people like Holder and Breuer for the top positions at the DOJ if he wants Wall Street criminals brought to justice...quite the opposite in fact.

That youtube is parody, of course, but it's also your answer, John Cassidy.

The actual Frontline piece was damning enough that Lanny resigned shortly after it was aired. (We needn't cry for him, he's back at Covington in the newly-created role of vice-chairman of the firm, his reward for servicing the clientele while at the DOJ.) And speaking of Bill Black:

William R. Black on Prosecuting Criminal Banker CEOs: Obama and Holder Don’t Even Care Enough to Fake It

P.S. Here's Mario A. Murillo on one of Holder's cases at Covington: Holder, Chiquita and Colombia. I find it notable for mentioning candidate Obama's opposition to our free trade agreement with Colombia as a reason for disappointment with his nomination of Eric Holder. Of course, Our President would forget about his opposition to agreements like this just months after he was sworn in.

Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire and Daily Kos.
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Happy Belated Birthday, War in Afghanistan!

Sorry for not buying you a present.



VOA News

October 7 marks the 11th anniversary of the beginning of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

It has lasted longer than any other war in U.S. history. More than 3,000 international coalition troops have died in the war, including 2,000 Americans. Far more Afghan civilians have died.

Point of order, VOA!

Ronald Reagan, October 14, 1982

Speaking at the Justice Department, Reagan likened his administration’s determination to discourage the flow and use of banned substances to the obstinacy of the French army at the Battle of Verdun in World War I — with a literal spin on the "war on drugs." The president quoted a French soldier who said, "There are no impossible situations. There are only people who think they’re impossible."

And the War on Poverty was kicked off on January 8, 1964

None of these wars are going very well. (Of course, certain individuals and corporations are doing just GREAT, as always.)



UPDATE: Hat tip to Warren Terror.



Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.
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White House Will Not Veto Banana Republic Bill

Surprised?



If you imagined that it was Joseph Isadore Lieberman who was sworn into office on Jan 20, 2009, then nothing this Administration has done would come as a surprise.

P.S. Scott Horton

And now for some relief:









(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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Opologists Cheered by Startling Reappearance of Campaign-Mode Obama

President Obama gave a speech yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism Address on August 31, 1910. (Full text at the Guardian.)



And now for some shorters.

Bob Reich: The Barack Obama for whom we voted in 2008 IS BACK!!!

The New York Times: Obama promises change if elected President.

The Washington Post: All very well, but let's hear more about cutting Social Security.

Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker at The War Criminal Post: OMG Obama is so mean to rich people!

And now for something completely different: A dose of facts from Yves Smith at naked capitalism:

The misdirection is blindingly obvious. The claim is that the Administration needs new tools to get tough on banks. No, it has plenty of tools, starting with Sarbanes Oxley. As we’ve discussed at length in earlier posts, Sarbox was designed to eliminate the CEO and top brass “know nothing” excuse. And the language for civil and criminal charges is parallel, so a prosecutor could file civil charges, and if successful, could then open up a related criminal case. Sarbox required that top executives (which means at least the CEO and CFO) certify the adequacy of internal controls, and for a big financial firm, that has to include risk controls and position valuation. The fact that the Administration didn’t attempt to go after, for instance, AIG on Sarbox is inexcusable. The “investigation” done by Andrew Ross Sorkin in his Too Big To Fail (Willumstad not having a good handle on the cash bleed, the sudden discovery of a $20 billion hole in the securities lending portfolio, the mysterious “unofficial vault” with billions of dollars of securities in file cabinets) all are proof of an organization with seriously deficient controls.

But more broadly, it’s blindingly obvious this Administration has never had the slightest interest in doing anything more serious than posture.

Finally, a blood pressure-reducing video:



UPDATE: Here's a couple of items I forgot to include yesterday, and one from today.



Tengrain suggests changing your registration to a third party or Independent.

Last, from Micah Sifry's Twitter:



(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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You're Gonna Drive Me To Drinkin'

H/T BDR

As The Heretik says, the latter parts of the article mention the awfulness of some of Newt's ideas. But there's no excuse for that headline and lede.

In other This Country Is Insane news, here's Women for Cain. And Donald Trump will be moderating a gooper debate (sponsored by Newsmax) in Des Moines on Dec. 27.







Calming Images







UPDATED FOR THE HALIBUT:





Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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Yggy Pop

From my last post:

I was planning to post about Matty Yglesias, using a column Thers referenced and one other. Only just now did I notice that the 'other one' was written by Ezra Klein instead. Go figure!

In my defense, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein wrote essentially the same post within a half hour of each other. Knowing that Yggy was moving to the Washington Post corporation (albeit Slate), I searched WaPo for the topic. Eventually I noticed the authors were different people, thanks to Pinko's entry in the latest Three Bulls! Header Contest. They don't look the same. In any case the WaPo now owns 100% of the hive mind.



From Ezra:

The question is what, if anything, comes next for Occupy Wall Street. The movement has already scored some big wins. As this graph by Dylan Byers showed, they have changed the national conversation. Income inequality is now a top-tier issue. Before Occupy Wall Street, it wasn’t.

Shorter: "OMG, Bloomberg could have ignored OWS, and then we could have done the same!"

Income inequality has been increasing for some time. It isn't some cat that is alive or dead depending on whether or not the likes of Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, or anyone else in the press is forced by OWS to write about it.

Having said that, I don't think 'income inequality' comes close to describing the issues that have created OWS. All that says is some people get a lot less, others get a lot more. This is true, but it leaves the door open for the counterclaim that the OWS is "just jealous of the job creators." (More discussion of the semantics in this thread.)

For 30 years, people who make money with their money have had the government tilt the table in their favor. Everyone else has gotten the short end of the stick. This has happened through tax policy, deregulation and approval of merger after merger, trade policy, and through chipping away at the the social safety net. And of course, our government comes to the rescue of the Randroid Masters of the Universe when the bets they've made with their too-big-to-fail banks turn out the the wrong way.

And it's also been accompanied by judicial inequality. One law for the plutocrats, and another for everyone else.

DOJ has obtained ten convictions of senior insiders of mortgage lenders (all from one obscure mortgage bank) v. over 1000 felony convictions in the S&L debacle. DOJ has not conducted an investigation worthy of the name of any of the largest accounting control frauds. DOJ is actively opposing investigating the systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs).

The elections of 2006 and 2008 did not change this in any way. Banks still own the place, and both parties curry their favor.

But we have plenty of law enforcement focused on peaceful members of OWS attempting to exercise their rights to free speech.





I see plenty of skepticism around the innertoobz as to what OWS will eventually accomplish. I have a lot more faith in OWS than I have in Obama and the Democrats.



UPDATE: At Naked Capitalism, Andrew Haldane, Executive Director, Financial Stability, Bank of England and Vasileios Madouros, Economist in the Financial Stability directorate of the Bank of England:

In fact, high pre-crisis returns to banking had a much more mundane explanation. They reflected simply increased risk-taking across the sector. This was not an outward shift in the portfolio possibility set of finance. Instead, it was a traverse up the high-wire of risk and return. This hire-wire act involved, on the asset side, rapid credit expansion, often through the development of poorly understood financial instruments. On the liability side, this ballooning balance sheet was financed using risky leverage, often at short maturities.
...
There is a second, equally important, reason why the measured value-added of the financial sector in the national accounts may be seriously over-stated. We now know that the risk being taken by banks was not in fact borne by them, fully or potentially even partially. Instead it has been borne by society.

That is why GDP today lies below its pre-crisis level. And it is why government balance sheets, relative to GDP, are set to double as a result of the crisis in many countries.
...
Elsewhere, we have sought to estimate those implicit subsidies to banking arising from its too big-to-fail status. For the largest 25 or so global banks, the average annual subsidy between 2007-2010 was hundreds of billions of dollars; on some estimates it was over $1 trillion (Haldane 2011). This compares with average annual profitability of the largest global banks of about $170 billion per annum in the five years ahead of the crisis.

(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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Rock You Like A Herman Cain

If Wall Street got the idea that Obama was no longer in their back pocket, you'd see a serious GOP run for President. For now, having these fools bark and bray about "Socialism" while B.H.O. collects his pay is all they need.



(Cross-posted at Whiskey Fire. Mouse over pics for captions, and click them for larger versions.)
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June 8, 1967 - USS Liberty

June 8, 1967


Here is an article about it in the BBC, dated June 8, 2007: Why did Israel Attack the USS Liberty?

"It was a series of blunders by both the United States and Israel that resulted in a terrible tragedy and nothing more," says Jay Cristol, a federal judge and author of the book The Liberty Incident.

"All the official reports came to the same conclusion."

Well then, since our government would never lie to us, this must be what happened.

Here's an article in the Chicago Tribune, dated October 2, 2007: New revelations in attack on American spy ship

Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.

Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.

And here's what Ray McGovern has to say.

To their discredit, top Navy brass went along, and the Liberty survivors were threatened with court martial and prison if they so much as mentioned to their wives what had actually happened. They were enjoined as well from discussing it with one another. As Liberty crewman Don Pageler put it, "We all headed out after that, and we didn't talk to each other."

The circumstances were ready-made for serious Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I don't know whether the attack on the USS Liberty was an accident or not. I do know that we can't trust our government to tell us the truth about it. This is shameful, as has been the treatment of the ship's sailors.
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I read the news today oh, boy

Here are two items juxtaposed in today's Google News.



Got that? We need to keep tax breaks for our biggest and most profitable corporations (tax breaks that were instituted to encourage drilling and exploration long ago, when energy prices were low). But Tom Coburn is quitting the already silly "Gang of Six" because they won't cut spending on regular Americans enough. It's insane to cut domestic spending when unemployment is 9%. Unemployment will surely rise even more, perhaps putting us back into a double-dip recession (or worse).

Doesn't anyone care? (Video posted by M. Bouffant)


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Robobama's SOTU Tomorrow

Any Predictions?


And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.

And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all from you, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it.


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Letter to the NY Times - Vitriol in Politics

Dear Mr. Brisbane (E-mail: public@nytimes.com)

I am writing to draw your attention to an article in the N.Y. Times on Saturday, "Bloodshed Puts New Focus on Vitriol in Politics" by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike.

The authors make the statement, "Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence."

This is an example of false equivalence. There is one end of the ideological spectrum that has made a fetish of guns and "2nd Amendment solutions" to political disputes, and that end is represented by the G.O.P. The authors mention Sarah Palin's target map, and the Tea Party disruptions at health care Towns Halls in 2009.

There are many more examples the authors could have used. For instance, on November 29, 2010, U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, circulated a PowerPoint presentation to his colleagues in which he compared the Obama administration to the Nazi regime in Germany and likened himself to Gen. George Patton, bragging, "Put anything in my scope and I will shoot it."

Where are the examples of this sort of rhetoric coming from the left? As Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, "Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P."

When you blame everyone, you hold no one accountable. The G.O.P. has gone too far, and they ought to be called to account for their violent rhetoric.
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Matt Bai Lies

"centrist reformers in both parties" - Ha ha, try the veal!


In other words, my job as an NYT propagandist is to help make sure the Democrats don't get crazy and try to use the government to help anyone beyond the richest 1 or 2 percent of Americans. (Not that there was much risk of this happening.)


Let's see: One side has said things like "The tax cuts will pay for themselves", "The Iraq war will pay for itself" and "Reagan proved deficits don't matter", and the other has been right about everything for the last 3 decades. So just the same thing, right Matt?


Matt, you dissembling asshole, Christine Romer estimated that the total stimulus needed was 1.2 - 1.4 trillion. The Obama Administration, as usual, pre-negotiatied that figure down to 800 million, and then (as usual) got played by the Republicans...1/3 of this amount was turned into tax cuts. Tax cuts for the rich have a recent historical record (aka the last three decades) of neither paying for themselves nor creating jobs. Of course you don't tell your readers this, because you are a lying asshole.


Noun
* S: (n) Fically Conservative (as used by Village Propagandists): One who votes for tax cuts for the wealthy, wars for oil and defense company profits, and deregulation that lead to trillions in debt. But they will vote against extending benefits for the jobless when unemployment is at 10%, thus earning tongue baths from the likes of Matt Bai.


The charitable explanation would be that Matt Bai has been asleep, Rip Van Winkle style, for the past two years. But Occam's Razor says he is lying again.


The national debt is near the top of any list of voter concerns at the moment... Which poll shows this, Matt Bai? I'm guessing it includes Tom Friedman's cab driver, David Brooks' Applebees salad bar attendant, the guests at Sally Quinn's last dinner party, and no one else.


Social Security has nothing to do with either the debt or the mission of this commission. The fact that they include cutting it in their shameless report gives the whole game away.

Matt Bai tells lies that advance the interests of America's plutocrat class. George Carlin reported more information in 3 minutes than Matt Bai has (or ever will) in his entire pathetic, scum-sucking lifetime.


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A day late and a dollar short

I know we're all sick of the polly ticks, but I've got one more thing to say before getting back to the important business of posting orb pictures. "Let's blame The Left/FireDogLake/etc. for everything" is getting on my last nerve.

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M-O-O-N, that spells Moran

P.S. I will get rich and retire on my Sorosbucks™.

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WaPoop Musings

P.S. That link: Why the Hacks Hate Michael Hastings
by Barrett Brown

(Hanx to M.B. for drawing my attention to Barrett Brown's post, it is well worth reading.)

P.P.S. Totally related:



REUPDATE!!11!: Lesson in sucky Ombudspantsing


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