January 24, 2012

Fraud and forgery are crimes. Both were committed on an epic scale...

...in the MERS system: millions of mortgage transfer forgeries known to have been committed (extremely actionable and therefore the subject of the outrageous immunity deal the feds are trying to work out with the 50 states).

...by the predatory lenders who opened up the credit spigots for borrowers they knew would default; every witting acceptance of a false loan application is potentially actionable.

...by the paid academic and media stooges of the Wall Street complex who devised models and promoted hype they knew were based on imaginary premises but encouraged people to invest in the lie of perpetual growth in housing prices (a fraud, but here you'd be right to say not actionably criminal - a pity since Cramer and his fancier counterparts at the Ivies have it coming).

...by the market makers who violated fiduciary responsibility to their clients by devising and selling instruments they knew would fail, in some cases were designed to fail - and even betting against them. Actionable, as evidenced by the outrageous immunity deals the SEC has offered in several cases, allowing the scam artists to skate with most of their profits in exchange for paying a small cut in fines and no admission of guilt. Judge Rakoff just rejected one of these.

...by the ratings agencies who took the payoffs and didn't do due diligence before delivering false verdicts on these instruments, without which investors like pension funds could not have been lured into the trap (fraud in commercial speech, and they should be the first entities to be seized and interrogated in unravelling the fraud, being no better than Arthur Andersen)

...by the derivatives sellers and speculators who bet on the whole system to burn down and then lit the match (the biggest fraud of all: setting up a system allowng unlimited and unpayable bets running into the hundreds of trillions, but this one they made sure to make legal beforehand).

The beautiful moment at the start of Inside Job: Nouriel Roubini is asked, "Why do you think there weren't more vigorous investigations into financial frauds?" His marvelously deadpan answer: "Because then they would find the culprits."

THOUSANDS of executives were prosecuted during the S&L frauds of the 1980s. They were caught because of investigations. The whole trick is NOT to investigate, therefore not to discover perpetrators, and for the SEC to offer get-out-of-jail-free immunity deals for peanuts.

January 24, 2012

The deal is not a judiciary matter.

The federal government has for some time now been on the verge of brokering a deal between the 50 State AGs (executive officials: prosecutors) and the MERS banks and creditors to grant them immunity from prosecution for fraud and forgery in their treatment of millions of house titles and mortgages. This activity was the generating fraud of the entire crisis, because by evading state law on property transfer the MERS system allowed the shifting, chopping and recombination of millions of mortgages to create the MBS securities that proved toxic (predictably) and crashed the banking system (a few stages down the line of the same process).

Anyway, it's not a judiciary matter, the federal government is leading the way and most of the AGs are on board and it hasn't happened yet only because of the resistance of New York, California and a handful of others. They are the heroes in this, at least so far: Schneiderman and Harris.

January 23, 2012

Oh, and here's the latest from Human Rights Watch...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101432281



Note that the enforcement failure is an executive failure, entirely.

January 23, 2012

"Political coalitions aren't built and maintained by telling people to shut up."

Yes. It seems people who are ardent but blind in their support for Obama seem to have forgotten that. Many of them will agree with the conventional wisdom that the most important factor in all elections is the undecided, centrist, moderate or independent voter (all of these words are used, though the connotations differ). Now imagine genuinely undecided people wandering in here, expressing their back-and-forth doubts, and in response receiving the equivalent of this: Aha!!! SHUT UP!!!

January 23, 2012

Actually, the problem is with the lack of representation.

Canada, the US and UK all suffer from electing winners, rather than representatives. Whoever gets the most votes, even a minority, gets to be the exclusive holder of an office. 49 percent (or more, given splits) can go screw themselves. They have no representatives. By comparison, in Germany (very stable and prosperous country, I hear), representation is based on actual share of the vote, so that if a party clears the minimum hurdle (5 percent of the vote) they get a representation proportional to their vote share. Eight percent means 8 percent, 41 percent means 41 percent (and not, as in Britain, a 2/3 majority!). Disparate elements of society are (goodness gracious) forced to form coalitions and synthesize solutions that are amenable to more than one party. It's called "proportional representation," but the truth is, it's the only system that merits the name of representative at all. Again: We don't elect representatives, we elect winners who get to do what they want.

January 23, 2012

That's ghastly! Such a policy is new to me.

It's like a dystopian novel. Operation Dumb-Down the Planet.

I suspect you won't find such a policy at the top private schools! What you'll find there is general education and encouragement to reach high, not this over-specialized fully-tracked-to-nowhere insanity of education deform.

January 23, 2012

We'll knock over a couple of your bogus propaganda packets...

and let them act as indicators of the general quality. Because you do have the advantage of being very busy with the shovel, and the nature of spin is that every word of bullshit usually takes 10 to correct.

First, and truly odious, is the play on euphemisms about the assassination of US citizens without due process. Actually, your "killing a terrorist," in the government's preferred choice of words, is not incompatible in its literal meaning with the correct description of the same act in plain English: assassinating a US citizen, without due process. The government has long claimed this right ad hoc and repeatedly carried out assassinations by drone on US persons who could have been arrested, without bothering with charges or public presentation of evidence against them other than (in the case of Al-Awlaki) his alleged incitement of violence through words. Now the recent NDAA provides a legislated (if outrageously unconstitutional) basis for the extraordinary powers first claimed on executive privilege (as an extension of "commander-in-chief&quot by the Bush regime. Bit by bit, a legal (again unconstitutional) framework has been created for the suspension of habeas, indefinite dentention without charges or counsel, military law over civilian, if only the targets are designated "terrorist" or associated with "terrorist" under the incredibly squishy definitions that could so label any dissident. These measures must be viewed in the context of a long-running authoritarian push that has continued under both R and D administrations, that among other things has also seen the US turn into the keeper of the world's biggest prison population.

But what's curious in your posting, and what indicates a systematically dubious M.O., is your inclusion of a quote that is supposed to suggest that Human Rights Watch accepts the assassination policy (or "targeted killing," or whatever the euphemism of the week is), so therefore it's all right. As if! But let's play along with the pretense that murder can be justified given enough legitimating statements, and ask instead: Why are you quoting HRW from 2003? Approving a Bush assassination action? At the height of "War on Terror," post-9/11 hysteria and conformity in civil society? What are you trying to say - that if Bush did it first, it's okay? Why 2003? And strangely, why didn't you quote HRW's reaction to a case under Obama, such as the Al-Awlaki case that you start with?

It becomes pretty obvious why you would not quote what Human Rights Watch has said about the Al-Awlaki case, once we look that up:

So one might think your choice of a quote from 2003 was a clumsy attempt to mislead about what rights groups really think about your government's "killing terrorists" who are also US citizens without due process. Even the relatively moderate HRW thinks it will "inevitably" lead to international crimes and worldwide adoption of the savage practice. But what HRW thinks is so easily uncovered that one is forced to the conclusion your suggesting otherwise was a mistake. Right? You'll be correcting this, no?

Anyway, the rest of your pile is more or less in that vein of spin, misrepresentation and use of irrelevancies to distract from the point.

A selection of endorsements for the NATO campaign in Libya are irrelevant to the question of whether the United States government violated the War Powers Act of 1973 with the failure to hold a timely vote on the undeclared action, and really don't help erase the memory of Orwellian claims that it wasn't a war and that US forces weren't involved in hostilities! These presumably because there was no way to credibly represent the several months of continuous bombing as the simple imposition of the "no-fly zone" (another lovely little euphemism) approved in the earlier resolution.

And you keep wanting to dig the hole deeper on the matter of the US withdrawal from Iraq under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement demanded by the Iraqi government in 2008. As everyone in the world knows, the US withdrew official military (as opposed to contract mercenaries) from Iraq in December. This happened under the schedule established under SOFA. The Obama administration's contribution to this process was, first, to attempt to renegotiate SOFA so as to gain an extension of the occupation! And then, after several months of negotiations, when the Iraqi government finally and definitively rejected the idea of granting immunity to US troops past the deadline, the Obama administration dutifully followed the provisions of the treaty. This carrying out of international obligations established prior to 2009 is falsely characterized in the simplistic phrase that "Obama ended the war." Absurdly, you link to news articles about the negotiations to extend the occupation while they were happening, as if it makes a difference that the Iraqi government at points explored the idea. All that matters is that the Iraqi government in the end, under pressure from its people, was against the idea. They were the ones who rejected it, not the USG, and thankfully the USG fulfilled the terms of the treaty. Meanwhile, USG has since 2009 massively expanded operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, sold arms to the Saudi monarchy at a time when it is leading the charge against the Arab Spring, and sold a perpetuation of the gargantuan Bush-era levels of military spending as "defense cuts." The decades-old perpetual global war, radically intensified by Bush, unfortunately continues under Obama. Still, I think the chances are somewhat higher it can be scaled back under Obama than a Republican - assuming more popular pressure to change the insane US spending priorities - which is one reason to support him.

So that's all the time we have for this task now, because as usual it takes more effort to correct false spin than to spin it. Except for the way that you managed to import your Ron Paul obsession into this thread. That's your perogative, but you shall kindly refrain henceforth from repeating the falsehood that I have a "fondness" for Ron Paul. I have no fondness for Ron Paul, and have never said I did. That's your invention. What I have noted, repeatedly, is the exceptional rage that the mere existence of this second-tier Republican presidential candidate causes in establishment liberals (something also evident in your many posts). My hypothesis has been that this rage is not because of his right-wing positions, which are no worse than those of Gingrich or Romney (who do not inspire as much rage as frequently). Rather, many liberals who wish to bury all criticism of the US government (as long as the current administration is a "D&quot seem unable to stand the cognitive dissonance of being outflanked by this Confederate right-winger on vital, life-or-death questions of the drug war (with its victims here and abroad in the millions), the unsustainable USG global empire that is bankrupting the nation and bringing instability and carnage to distant countries, and fundamental rights of due process (like, the crazy 13th century idea that you gotta actually present charges and put a citizen on trial and get a conviction before you get to assassinate him with a missile! Oh no!).

January 22, 2012

How would you have reacted if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

Conor Friedersdorf, of The Atlantic, responding to Andrew Sullivan's cover-column for Newsweek.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/print/2012/01/dear-andrew-sullivan-why-focus-on-obamas-dumbest-critics/251528/

How would you have reacted in 2008 if any Republican ran promising to do the following?

(1) Codify indefinite detention into law; (2) draw up a secret kill list of people, including American citizens, to assassinate without due process; (3) proceed with warrantless spying on American citizens; (4) prosecute Bush-era whistleblowers for violating state secrets; (5) reinterpret the War Powers Resolution such that entering a war of choice without a Congressional declaration is permissible; (6) enter and prosecute such a war; (7) institutionalize naked scanners and intrusive full body pat-downs in major American airports; (8) oversee a planned expansion of TSA so that its agents are already beginning to patrol American highways, train stations, and bus depots; (9) wage an undeclared drone war on numerous Muslim countries that delegates to the CIA the final call about some strikes that put civilians in jeopardy; (10) invoke the state-secrets privilege to dismiss lawsuits brought by civil-liberties organizations on dubious technicalities rather than litigating them on the merits; (11) preside over federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries; (12) attempt to negotiate an extension of American troops in Iraq beyond 2011 (an effort that thankfully failed); (14) reauthorize the Patriot Act; (13) and select an economic team mostly made up of former and future financial executives from Wall Street firms that played major roles in the financial crisis.

SNIP

It isn't that I object to Sullivan backing Obama's reelection if his GOP opponent runs on bringing back torture. Is he the lesser of two evils? Maybe so.

Without a doubt. But...

But lauding him as a president who has governed "with grace and calm" and "who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name"? If indefinite detention, secret kill lists, warrantless spying, a war on whistleblowers, violating the War Powers Resolution, and abuse of the state secrets privilege don't fit one's definition of "scandal," what does? If they're peripheral flaws rather than central, unacceptable transgressions, America is doomed to these radical, illiberal policies for the foreseeable future.

All of which is to say: If you want to fight for change, your political participation can't be limited to a choice between the only two parties in an election that have any chance of winning, in an act that generally take less than an hour. The fight must be about the issues, every day, not merely for or against a leader who is very likely to play the establishment game no matter what he or she claims.

January 21, 2012

So? Does this justify the Democrats' decision to exclude the public option...

from the health insurance bill?

No, obviously.

I've got an idea for your next thread: Court trials for criminal charges in which defendants have counsel and see the evidence against them and are judged by a jury of their peers are also not dead! Many of these happen every year! So what's all this whinin' and complainin' about indefinite detention and the NDAA suspension of due process, habeas corpus, right to defense and all that other stuff that stops good guys from nabbin' bad guys? (It can only be due to pro-Republican plots by Paulbots motivated by sheer hatred of Obama to pose as liberals criticizing him from "the left"!!!)

January 21, 2012

Does it take genius to target children with clowns and toys?

Sure, the quality of propaganda can vary. But if you're going to get very small children clamoring for bad food, aren't chutzpah and disregard for humanity more important than how smart you are? I would think true genius would consist in refusing to market slop to babes, and otherwise doing the right thing. Let's say, withdrawing from the market altogether and offering the restaurants to local operators? (Some of them might offer worse menus, most of them are bound to be better.) I think that would be genius, and what you're describing is mere cunning.