They hate us for our freedoms!

by: ek hornbeck

Fri Jan 27, 2012 at 09:37:12 AM EST

Or maybe not so much now that we hardly have any left.

Rules of American justice: a tale of three cases
Laws are used to shield egregious crimes while severely punishing those who publicly discuss them
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Tuesday, Jan 24, 2012 4:23 AM Eastern Standard Time

(I)n American justice yesterday, the conclusion came to the criminal process arising from a horrific 2005 incident in which 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were slaughtered in the town of Haditha during American raids conducted in the aftermath of an explosion of a roadside bomb. The Marine Staff Sgt. who ordered his soldiers to "shoot first, ask questions later," Frank Wuterich, was in the midst of a manslaughter trial that could have sent him to prison for life (first-degree murder charges were previously withdrawn by the Government). Instead, prosecutors "offered Wuterich a deal that stopped the proceedings and could mean little to no jail time." Instead, he "pleaded guilty Monday to negligent dereliction of duty" and "now faces no more than three months in confinement." Lest you think that's too lenient: "he could also lose two-thirds of his pay and see his rank demoted to private when he's sentenced."
...
The Rules of American Justice are quite clear:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime - you are guilty of espionage - and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

Just to be clear, let's remind ourselves of just what these "soldiers", "this generation of heroes (that) has made the United States safer and more respected around the world" did-

What happened at Haditha?
By Martin Asser, BBC News
Monday, 10 March 2008

Eyewitness accounts suggest that comrades of TJ Terrazas, far from coming under enemy fire, went on the rampage in Haditha after his death.

Twelve-year-old Safa Younis appears on video saying she was in one of three houses where troops came in and indiscriminately killed family members.

"They knocked at our front door and my father went to open it. They shot him dead from behind the door and then they shot him again," she says in the video.

"Then one American soldier came in and shot at us all. I pretended to be dead and he didn't notice me."

There were eight bodies in the house, including Safa's five siblings, aged between two and 14.

In another house seven people including a child and his 70-year-old grandfather were killed. Four brothers aged 41 to 24 died in a third house. Eyewitnesses said they were forced into a wardrobe and shot.

In the street, US troops gunned down four students and a taxi driver they had stopped at a roadblock set up after the bombing.

According to a witness, they were shot by the side of the road, as they stood with their hands on their heads.

Gee- do you think they could be angry about that?

Marine gets no jail time in killing of 24 Iraqi civilians
By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2012

Jones said he had planned to recommend 90 days in the brig - the maximum as requested by the prosecution - but that the plea bargain approved by Lt. Gen. Thomas Waldhauser had called for no jail time.

"It's difficult for the court to fathom negligent dereliction of duty worse than the facts in this case," Jones told Wuterich.
...
A Marine Corps spokesman said Waldhauser would offer no public explanation of his decision to accept the plea bargain and stipulate that Wuterich receive no jail time.

No jail for marine? Haditha massacre verdict stuns Iraqis.
By Whitney Eulich, Staff writer, The Christian Science Monitor
January 25, 2012

However, the military court's decision to demote Wuterich's rank to private in lieu of jail time is one more blow to the idea of US justice system being a source of guidance or authority in Iraq, according to the Washington Post.

"I was expecting that the American judiciary would sentence this person to life in prison and that he would appear and confess in front of the whole world that he committed this crime, so that America could show itself as democratic and fair," survivor Awis Fahmi Hussein told the Washington Post, showing his scars from a bullet wound to the back.

The Telegraph reports that the ruling is viewed as "...an insult to all Iraqis," while the Associated Press reports that it reopened old wounds - both with the US and the Iraqi government. The predominantly Sunni region has been unable to convince its Shiite-led government to condemn the murders or push to bring those responsible to trial.

In Iraq, Haditha deal another case of injustice
By Raheem Salman and Patrick J. McDonnell, Los Angeles Times
January 25, 2012 at 6:20 AM

"The Americans killed children who were hiding inside the cupboards or under the beds," said Rafid Abdul Majeed Hadithi, 43, a teacher who says he witnessed the 2005 assault by Marines that took the lives of 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. "Was this Marine charged with dereliction of duty because he didn't kill more? Is Iraqi blood so cheap?"
...
"That soldier would be sent to prison for more than three months if he had thrown trash on the streets in America," said Khalid Salman, 45, whose cousin was killed. "This is not new, and it's not new for the American courts that already did little about Abu Ghraib and other crimes in Iraq."
...
Assim Omar al-Hadithi, 40, a relative of another victim, said such a light sentence "shows the lies of the Americans, whether they are judges or members of the military."

Thair Thabit Hadithi, 41, a photographer who says he came upon the scene shortly after the killings, on Tuesday recalled the unrelenting crackle of gunfire, an injured victim bleeding to death outside his house, the black nylon body bags in which Marines placed the corpses.

The Marine Corps initially said 15 Iraqis had been killed in a roadside bombing and that the others perished in a subsequent firefight. None of that was true. Hadithi said he had grisly photos showing the devastation and bloodshed in a poor residential quarter.

Anger in Iraq After Plea Bargain Over 2005 Massacre
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2012

Assim Omar al-Hadithi, 40, a relative of another victim, said that such a light sentence "shows the lies of the Americans, whether they are judges or members of the military."

He continued: "All the world knew that the American soldiers committed crimes in Iraq. We were extensively surprised when we heard the news, and it has made our minds even worse. It is no consolation for the victims' families."

The shadows cast by the Haditha massacre, the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison and the killing of civilians by contractors for Blackwater at a square in Baghdad helped turn Iraqi public opinion against the American presence. An agreement to keep American troops here past 2011 collapsed when Iraqi officials would not agree to extend their immunity from Iraqi prosecution.
...
A number of Americans in high-profile cases have received what many Iraqis regarded as token sentences. In August, the supposed ringleader in the Abu Ghraib abuses, Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., was released early from prison because of good behavior. He had been sentenced to 10 years but served just 6 1/2.

In 2009 charges were dropped against four American military contractors in the killings of the 17 civilians at the square in Baghdad. While a federal court ruling in Washington reopened manslaughter charges against the four, many Iraqis continue to believe that the contractors will never be punished.

Iraqis received Tuesday's plea deal with the same cynicism and anger. "I am not satisfied with the court decision against those killers - they need to be tortured and executed because they killed innocent people," said Tariq Abas al-Najar, 43, a taxi driver in Basra. "If Marines killed a sheep in Europe, the judge would punish them much harsher than for the killing of those innocent Iraqis."

Hot Greece

by: ek hornbeck

Thu Jan 26, 2012 at 12:25:51 PM EST

Yesterday-

The fundamental reality is that their economies can no longer support the inflated, leveraged, fictional values the holders of these worthless scraps of paper demand and the reckoning is going to come from their pockets simply because they're the ones holding the hot potato.

Today-

Hedge Funds Scramble to Unload Greek Debt
By LANDON THOMAS JR., The New York Times
January 25, 2012, 7:29 am

Hedge funds that in the last month or so have purchased an estimated 4 billion euros ($5.2 billion) of beaten down Greek bonds that mature on March 20 are now trying to unload their positions, according to brokers and traders.

That is because it is becoming clear to one and all that Greece - under pressure from its financial backers - is preparing to impose a broad-based haircut that would hit all investors with a loss of 50 percent or more, whether they agree to the deal or not.
...
Starting in December, the counterintuitive, go-long Greece bet was one of the more popular pitches made to funds in New York and London.

Investment banks - Merrill Lynch was particularly aggressive in recommending the trade, investors say - argued that even though Greece was near bankrupt, those who bought the paper maturing in March could double their money when Greece received its latest bailout tranche due that month.
...
Now, with momentum building in Europe for an agreement on a 50 percent-plus haircut to be reached before March 20 - one that would be legally binding on all holders - the smart money is not looking so smart anymore.

Oh, but it gets so much better.

European Central Bank Moves to Avoid Loss on Greek Bonds
By LANDON THOMAS Jr. and JAMES KANTER, The New York Times
Published: January 24, 2012

For months, the proposed debt restructuring deal between Greece and its private sector creditors had excluded the central bank from taking a loss on its Greek bond holdings while banks and hedge funds would have losses of 50 percent or more.
...
Private sector investors, including large European banks and hedge funds, have complained bitterly - and in some cases threatened legal action - over the central bank's insistence that its 55 billion euros in Greek bonds were exempt from the loss that the private sector is facing, which some have estimated at 60 cents on the euro.

The central bank bought the bulk of its Greek bonds in 2010 in a failed attempt to stabilize Greece's collapsing bond market, paying discounted prices of about 70 to 75 cents on the euro. As part of the current talks, the central bank might exchange its current bonds for a different form of Greek debt at a cost similar to that of the distressed bonds.

EU ratchets up pressure with Greek default threat
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor, The Telegraph
9:39PM GMT 24 Jan 2012

The head of the European Commission's economics team Mario Buti said Brussels is prepared to allow credit default swaps (CDS) on Greek bonds to come into play if talks fail to reach a deal that gives Greece enough debt relief to claw its way back to viability. "Triggering CDS may have to be considered," he said.
...
Charlesa Dallara, the head of the International Institute for Finance (IIF) representing creditor banks, said EU officials were playing with fire by talking about default and demanded that the EU stick to the agreement reached last October.

"We put an offer on the table and it remains on the table. All parties need to contribute to the solution. We are wiping off the face of the earth €100bn in existing claims against Greece," he told Bloomberg.

First Act of Greek Default Proceedings Drawing to a Close
Author: Claus Vistesen, EconoMonitor
January 24th, 2012

Let me be clear, absolutely clear, here. Within any conceivably realistic macroeconomic model, there is no way that Greece can reach a stable debt level with moderate growth under these conditions. Under the interest rate scenario noted above (let us say with an average interest rate of 3.8% on the new debt) the nominal interest rate would still be substantially higher than the growth rate of the economy. The only way, the nominal debt level could then be kept stationary is by forcing the fiscal balance into surplus. However, the problem is that this affects the denominator in the debt/GDP calculation by sucking out demand (growth) from an economy already structurally impaired (within a currency union and all that).
...
The deal which now seems to be close to completed by no means closes proceedings. It is very likely in my opinion that private creditors who are currently the only ones being forced to take a haircut due to seniority of the IMF and the ECB will face a near 100% loss on their holdings. The argument is simple. Given the amount of debt held by the ECB and the IMF and the fact that these two institutions are senior debt holders the debt held by private creditors becomes junior debt and thus the tranche which takes the first (and in my opinion likely complete) loss in the event of a default.

Of course, once we reach this point the issue of CDS contracts will rear its head yet again since if a 50-60% haircut can be considered voluntary anything beyond this becomes very difficult to characterize as such. Any rating agency would find it difficult not to classify further losses as a default and thus begins the fun in earnest. And then comes the ECB and IMF's share. It will be political dynamite if the ECB had to print on the liability side to cover losses on the asset side on Greek sovereign debt or if the IMF had to ask its contributors for extra cash to cover for losses on loans made out to Greece or any other economy. Obviously, much will be done to prevent this, but just look at the numbers of Greece's economy and you will see that it is not that outlandish, especially if Greece opts to stay in the euro zone. Finally, Greece only represents the starter here. Any deal agreed to  in Greece will be ardently watched in Ireland and Portugal who will feel they are entitled to the same deal with their private creditors.

Germany Loses Its Grip
By Delusional Economics, Naked Capitalism
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

(I)t is just one symptom of the actual problem. That problem was highlighted overnight with the European flash PMI's. Germany once again outperformed the rest of Europe, France treaded water, admittedly with its head held a little higher, while the periphery of Europe slowly drifts away. The latest Euro PMI was a little better than expected, in some part due to the ECB's actions over the last month or so no doubt, put the forward looking indicators suggest more weakness to come and I expect the divide to grow as Europe slows further. As I have stated previously that the German data is a double edged sword because, although it is good for Germany that its economy is powering, it is a big negative for the rest of Europe because one of the major issues that brought on the crisis in the first place was the competitiveness imbalance of nations under the single currency.
...
So now even if Greece manages a deal to write-off some of its debt the markets will quickly turn their eyes to Portugal who will no doubt require a second bail out, but increasingly a debt restructure as well.

With Spain also struggling and Italy under increasing pressure, the continuation of contagion appears to be taking its toll on the politics of Europe with Germany's ability to control the situation diminishing.
...
Germany also appears to be losing support from even its strongest allies. Last week the Dutch central banker Klaas Knot gave an interview blaming Germany for the failure of the EFSF.
...
To add to that, Luxembourg's new foreign minister gave an interview with German media yesterday in which he called the fiscal compact a 'waste of time and energy'.

Is the failure of austerity-centric policy finally taking its toll on Germany's ability to steer Europe's response to the financial crisis? This would certainly explain why Mario Monti seems so sure that his country will be receiving the fiscal and monetary backstops. The outcomes from next week's EU summit will provide more clues.

Greek Default Assured

by: ek hornbeck

Wed Jan 25, 2012 at 11:48:15 AM EST

Not that I personally think their analysis is all that sound, but the second of the big three rating agencies has announced their intention to declare a CDS triggering event regardless of how the negotiations continue.

As we are constantly reminded by the Banksters, the intent of a Credit Default Swap is as insurance against a default in payments.  In fact they are used to make side bets on outcomes and their notional value almost always exceeds the actual underlying asset by orders of magnitude.

So the question is- will they pay off?

In the 2008 financial collapse the chief issuer of these instruments, American International Group, went bankrupt and only massive intervention by the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Reserve Bank allowed them to make good their obligations at face value.

This was Insurance Fraud on a historic scale.  The rules require you to cover your policies.

Because we don't know the actual amount of CDSes it is difficult to predict whether they will be honored or not but that's only the first wave of the problem.  Spain, Portugal, and Italy also face default because of the usurious interest rates currently being demanded and a Greek default is only likely to increase their vulnerability.

European policy makers have shown no indication that they actually understand the magnitude of the difficulty and every response so far has been wrong headed austerity.  The fundamental reality is that their economies can no longer support the inflated, leveraged, fictional values the holders of these worthless scraps of paper demand and the reckoning is going to come from their pockets simply because they're the ones holding the hot potato.

It's coming.  It's coming soon.  A lot of people and institutions that considered themselves quite well off are going to find their estimations substantially reduced.

Greek Debt Talks Still Without Resolution; Bondholders Make Final Offer
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Monday January 23, 2012 6:20 am

The debt talks between Greece and their bondholders, thought to be a done deal late Friday, spilled into the weekend and still found no resolution as of today. The short version is that the creditors want a higher coupon, or interest rate on the new bonds they'll accept in exchange for taking at huge hit on the bonds they currently hold.
...
At a low interest rate, the creditors would then call the deal involuntary, a credit default swaps would trigger. However, according to the Fitch rating agency, there is no such thing as a voluntary debt restructuring, and they would read any deal as a default event. This is why Noriel Roubini says we will see "a credit event" in Greece either way.
...
The bondholders presented what they called their "maximum" offer over the weekend. Charles Dallara, the managing director of the Institute for International Finance, who has been negotiating on behalf of the creditors, said that both sides were at a "crossroads" and the "limits of a voluntary deal." Interestingly, the biggest holdout could be the European Central Bank, which holds 55 billion euros of Greek debt and doesn't want to take any losses on it. The EFSF, the European bailout fund, may have to buy the debt off the ECB at par to get a deal structured.

Greece has already said they would change the terms of the bonds by law, if need be, but then some creditors would hold out and there would be litigation and CDS triggering.

Anything controversial or unmanageable out of Greece would risk contagion elsewhere in Europe, especially in Portugal, probably the next most-threatened country on the periphery. The dangers in Europe are very much apparent here.

S&P: Greek Debt Restructuring Would Be a Default
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Tuesday January 24, 2012 8:55 am

Standard and Poor's has become the second rating agency to say that, regardless of the conclusion of the Greek debt restructuring, they would judge the country as in "selective default". With two rating agencies - Fitch is the other - now on the record about default, it's almost certain that the announcement of the deal, if we ever get one, will trigger credit default swaps.

So I see no point in having the negotiations continue. They were predicated on getting bond holders to accept a voluntary haircut, to avoid the triggering of CDS. That will now be impossible. And the Greek government has the ability to change the law and mandate the new payments on debt. So they might as well just do that, at this point. In truth, there never was a voluntary haircut, anyway. So everyone might as well tell the truth.

An S&P official does not believe that a Greek default event would necessarily lead to contagion in the Eurozone. However, we've seen the cascading effect play out many times in the past year or so. As much as the regulators want to tell themselves they don't foresee a problem, one could be staring them in the face.

In fact, we may already by seeing contagion in the form of Portugal's struggles.

IMF slashes world growth forecast
By Paul Handley (AFP)
3 hours ago

On Monday in Berlin, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde pressed European leaders to build a stronger backstop to prevent the problems in the continent's weakest economies -- Greece, Spain and Portugal -- from pulling down others.

"We need a larger firewall," she said. "Without it, countries like Italy and Spain that are fundamentally able to repay their debts could be forced into a solvency crisis by abnormal financing costs."

The Fund warned against overly sharp budget-balancing by those countries that can afford to move slowly to reduce their deficits.

Otherwise, they will just create more drag on the global economy.

"Decreasing debt is a marathon, not a sprint," said Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's chief economist. "Going too fast will kill growth and further derail the recovery."

The recommendation was pointed at Europe's largest economies Germany, France and Britain, all of which it said would continue to grow this year, albeit at a weak pace.

Germany's economy was seen growing 0.3 percent, France's 0.2 percent, and Britain's 0.6 percent.

The United States, the world's largest economy, was projected to grow 1.8 percent in 2012.

The growth downgrades covered the entire world.

The Greek debt talks fall apart
Felix Salmon, Reuters
Jan 24, 2012 04:33 EST

Remember here that Greece itself is basically just an intermediary, stuck between the Troika (EU, ECB, IMF) on the one hand, which is going to fund its deficits for the foreseeable future and therefore can demand anything it wants, and bondholders, on the other. And the problem is that what's acceptable to the bondholders - a 4% coupon, basically, on restructured debt - is unacceptable to the Troika.
...
In a way, this is a good thing, because it only serves to clarify the fact that Greece is defaulting in a way that's going to make its bondholders very unhappy. All the talk of a "voluntary" restructuring was a way of attempting to paper over that fact, and that paper was always extremely thin. Maybe a bit of honesty will help people face up to reality in a way that they've been very reluctant to do until now.
...
No one thinks of this deal as a "one and done" restructuring. Bailing in the ECB or the EFSF at this point would just be denial: it would encourage the EU to think (or at least to say) that the Greek debt problem was solved for perpetuity, when it clearly isn't. So let's force the private sector to take its big NPV haircut now. And then the next step can come a few years down the road, when Greece discovers it can't pay the Troika what it owes.

Guzzle to Zatch

by: ek hornbeck

Tue Jan 24, 2012 at 12:57:17 PM EST

Foreclosure Fraud Settlement Terms Laid Out, But Holdout AGs Not Signed On
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Saturday January 21, 2012 9:38 am

When I started digging into whether this Monday meeting with HUD and DoJ officials to go over a proposal for a foreclosure fraud settlement was legitimate, I couldn't find one state Attorney General who mattered actually committed to showing up. When I say AGs who "matter," I mean the ones who have been critical of a settlement in the past. I mean the Justice Democrats. I mean Eric Schneiderman in New York, Beau Biden in Delaware, Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, Kamala Harris in California, not to mention the AGs from Hawaii, New Hampshire, Missouri, Mississippi, Maryland, Kentucky, Minnesota, Oregon and Montana who showed up (either themselves or representatives) at the meeting in DC last week to discuss alternatives to a settlement. I mean them. They aren't going to Chicago, by all accounts.
...
My sense is that this settlement proposal comes from the Obama Administration, Iowa AG Tom Miller and the small group of negotiators on the executive committee of state AGs, and pretty much nobody else. There's just no guarantee that any of the Justice Democrats - or any of the Republicans, for that matter - will agree to any of it.

The Administration is trying to put the squeeze on the state AGs, particularly California, dangling $10 billion in "aid" in the deal. The aim, as Marcy Wheeler writes, is to increase pressure on Kamala Harris to agree to the settlement. The core issues haven't changed, however. Harris called the settlement inadequate last year and it remains just as inadequate. This is a $25 billion settlement when there is $700 billion in negative equity in the country. This is a settlement that, according to HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, will help 1 million homeowners, when 10.7 million are underwater and millions of others have been wrongfully foreclosed upon. This is a settlement that could put $17 billion of credits toward principal reduction (the rest of the money would go to legal aid, refis, short sales, token payoffs to foreclosed borrowers, and penalties), when there is more than twice as much sitting unused in an account as part of HAMP.

And these credits would get paid mostly by the owners of mortgage-backed securities, investors rather than the banks themselves.
...
According to previous reports, investors would not have approval on the modifications. So the majority of the settlement, where banks get the release of liability, would get paid with other people's money. Servicers actually make out because they would reimburse themselves for the loan modifications, taking money that would otherwise go to the investors. The investors, in short, would get massively screwed by this deal.

But again, I've seen no evidence that anyone outside of the small circle of the Administration and the AGs on the executive committee negotiating the deal actually agree to it. Call it the 12-state deal, rather than the 50-state one. This is only closer to getting done in the sense that the folks who have wanted to cave all along are ready to do so.

Speaking of caving, why on earth would the Obama Administration in general and Eric Holder in particular want to do that?

Insight: Top Justice officials connected to mortgage banks
By Scot J. Paltrow, Reuters
Fri Jan 20, 2012 9:31am EST

(Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, head of the Justice Department's criminal division, were partners for years at a Washington law firm that represented a Who's Who of big banks and other companies at the center of alleged foreclosure fraud, a Reuters inquiry shows.

The firm, Covington & Burling, is one of Washington's biggest white shoe law firms. Law professors and other federal ethics experts said that federal conflict of interest rules required Holder and Breuer to recuse themselves from any Justice Department decisions relating to law firm clients they personally had done work for.
...
As Reuters reported in 2011, public records show large numbers of mortgage promissory notes with apparently forged endorsements that were submitted as evidence to courts.

There also is evidence of almost routine manufacturing of false mortgage assignments, documents that transfer ownership of mortgages between banks or to groups of investors. In foreclosure actions in courts mortgage assignments are required to show that a bank has the legal right to foreclose.

In an interview in late 2011, Raymond Brescia, a visiting professor at Yale Law School who has written about foreclosure practices said, "I think it's difficult to find a fraud of this size on the U.S. court system in U.S. history."

Holder has resisted calls for a criminal investigation since October 2010, when evidence of widespread "robo-signing" first surfaced. That involved mortgage servicer employees falsely signing and swearing to massive numbers of affidavits and other foreclosure documents that they had never read or checked for accuracy.
...
On Wednesday, John O'Brien Jr., register of deeds in Salem, Mass., announced that he had sent 31,897 allegedly fraudulent foreclosure-related documents to Holder. O'Brien said he asked for a criminal investigation of servicers and their law firms that had filed the documents because they "show a pattern of fraud," forgery and false notarizations.

Corrupt guzzle to zatch (look it up).

Update: More good news?

Iowa AG Miller Claims No Foreclosure Fraud Settlement This Week
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Monday January 23, 2012 2:55 pm

Perhaps Tom Miller, the head of the executive committee negotiating a foreclosure fraud settlement, is feeling a little too much heat today.
...
(L)et's just go back to what this is all about, because it has very little to do with the usual media storylines and narratives running about. Somewhere along the lines the financial industry stopped keeping the records they were legally required to keep to ensure that they had standing to foreclose on borrowers. Instead of untangling the mess, they participated in a cover-up, by fabricating documents and affidavits on a mass scale to sucker courts into allowing foreclosures. That is no different than criminal theft. If I came into a courtroom looking to foreclose on a homeowner, and my proof of ownership was a plastic bag with the words "I OWNZ THAT" scrawled on it, that would be little different, under the eyes of the law, from what the banking industry has done over the last decade. Strip away all the complexities in the law and that's what you're left with.

So state and federal regulators attempting to settle with banks for stealing homes are really violently upsetting any pretense of a rule of law in America. Setting aside the fact that the penalty is completely inadequate and there's no indication that banks will actually follow through on the specifics, some things are more important than a financial settlement can provide. The current group of big banks and loan servicers broke the richest market in the world, the residential US housing market. They really do need to pay for this. Because if they don't, they will continue to violate the law as they have been doing unchecked for the past several years.

The lights will be burning late tonight as they frantically re-write the State of the Union.

Good.

SOPA/PIPA Dead! Next Target NDAA Section 1021: Call Supporting H.R. 3785

by: jaktober

Sun Jan 22, 2012 at 10:02:55 AM EST

The January 18th Internet Strike and Representative Calls/Visits worked! SOPA and PIPA were effectively killed. But that doesn't mean the War is over. Life and Democracy are ongoing "battles." Feeding yourself one day doesn't mean you are fed for life. You must continue to work for food, and you must continue to work for Democracy, Liberty, Freedom and Representation.

Rep. Paul has introduced a bill to repeal section 1021 from the NDAA, the section that allows for U.S. Citizens to be detained without due process of law (4th Amendment). Feb. 3rd is a day of action protesting the NDAA. Let's join forces and make it a day of protest and action, call your representatives and ask them to support H.R. 3785.

Going forward, we must all be active and call our representatives as much as possible, for each new bill and piece of legislation that we oppose or support.

http://freeindependentsun.com/...

But, if not...

by: ek hornbeck

Fri Jan 20, 2012 at 04:47:03 AM EST

I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren't fit to live.

You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause--and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you're afraid that you will lose your job, or you're afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand.

Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.

Who are the victims of civil liberties assaults and Endless War?
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Monday, Jan 16, 2012 7:29 AM

Part of the debate over the last couple weeks among progressives regarding political priorities, the Obama presidency, the Ron Paul candidacy and the like has entailed a litany of accusations - smears - hurled at those of us who insist on the prioritization of issues of war and civil liberties abuses, and who vocally highlight the ways in which the Democratic Party generally and President Obama specifically have been so awful on these matters. Some Democratic loyalists have explicitly argued that contrasting Obama with Ron Paul on these issues is warped because issues of war and civil liberties are, at best, ancillary concerns, while others have gone so far as to claim that only racial and/or gender bias - white male "privilege" - would cause someone to use the Paul candidacy to highlight how odious Obama has been in these areas.

Leaving aside the fact that (as I detail in the discussion with Pollitt), numerous women and people of color have made the same points about the vital benefits of Paul's candidacy - voices which these accusers tellingly ignore and silence - these accusations are pure projection. Those who were operating from such privilege would not seek to prioritize issues of war and civil liberties; that's because it isn't white progressives and their families who are directly harmed by these heinous policies. The opposite is true: it's very easy, very tempting, for those driven by this type of "privilege" - for non-Muslims in particular- to decide that these issues are not urgent, that Endless War and civil liberties abuses by a President should not be disqualifying or can be tolerated, precisely because these non-Muslim progressive accusers are not acutely affected by them. The kind of "privilege" these accusers raise would cause one to de-prioritize and accept civil liberties abuses, drone slaughter, indefinite detention and the like (i.e, do what they themselves do), not demand that significant attention be paid to them when assessing political choices.

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak out because I was Protestant.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

-Niemöller

Birmingham Jail-

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

(op. cite)

Where you going this morning, my friends, tell the world that you're going with truth. You're going with justice, you're going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow. But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil.

(h/t welshTerrier2)

Go Vikings!

by: ek hornbeck

Thu Jan 19, 2012 at 13:59:19 PM EST

You have to ask yourself, why give free money to Banksters?

Iceland makes fledgling recovery from its economic meltdown
By Brady Dennis, The Washington Post
Published: January 16

Iceland did what the United States chose not to do - allow its biggest banks to fail and force foreign creditors to take a hike. It did what troubled European nations saddled with massive debts and tethered by the euro cannot do - allow its currency to remain weak, causing inflation but making its exports more desirable and its prices more attractive to tourists.
...
Realizing the peril - and perhaps the fallacy - of trying to rescue the banks, Iceland's government ultimately let them collapse. "No responsible government takes risks with the future of its people, even when the banking system itself is as stake," the prime minister said in an unprecedented address to the nation in October 2008.
...
In the wake of the catastrophe, officials guaranteed deposits of Icelandic citizens but refused to pay off many foreign investors - a controversial move that remains a sore spot here and in Europe. The government created new banks made up of the domestic operations of the failed firms. The old banks, which held foreign assets, are being dismantled and their assets sold, with proceeds going to pay off creditors.
...
The country's debt grew to more than 100 percent of GDP in 2011. But even as government officials made budget cuts in an effort to return to a more sustainable path, they deliberately safeguarded its already-generous social safety net, adding and expanding programs targeted to the most vulnerable groups. In part to offset those measures, the country put in place new taxes on the banking system and on wealthy individuals.
...
Allowing the krona to remain weak has hastened Iceland's return to stability. The country's exports, which feature fish and aluminum, were running about 11 percent higher last year, and the tourism industry also showed an 11 percent increase through November. But struggling countries bound together by the euro, such as Greece and Portugal, don't have the ability to let their currency fluctuate to more favorable levels.

Judging by economic data and by the workaday scenes of life in the capital, the economic engines are turning again. "For a country whose entire financial system collapsed, Iceland is doing remarkably well," said Julie Kozack, the IMF's mission chief for Iceland, adding that the country "is not out of the woods yet."

But wait ek you say, what about all those scary bad no good things the Post reports are the evil consequences of kicking the Bankster's asses out on the street corner to sell apples like, like, like...

LIKE POOR PEOPLE!

Oh, you mean like-

Iceland has weathered the worst of the financial crisis, but its society has yet to solve the identity crisis that followed in its wake.
...
The crisis scarred Iceland's national psyche, and citizens are wrestling with profound questions, not only about how to return to better financial footing but also about what kind of society should emerge.

Well-

Inflation has fallen. Consumers are spending more money. There are new investments in geothermal energy, and the fishing waters remain plentiful. Hammers and power saws have become a familiar sound again in Reykjavik. Fewer Range Rovers clog the streets, but there's no lack of Audis and Mercedes or BMWs.

But ek- SCARRING THE NATIONAL PSYCHE!

Businessmen came and went from Reykjavik in private jets. They bought showy yachts and multimillion-dollar vacation homes. Bankers became a popular and swaggering breed; after all, they were handing out a slew of high-paying jobs and providing a fortune in tax revenue.

"You had to be crazy not to want to become a banker," said Heimir Hannesson, a student council member at the University of Iceland. "You went to college, studied business. You became a millionaire overnight. That was the dream. And for a few years, it was the reality."
...
"What we had before was some sort of irrational exuberance. That has left, and maybe that's a good thing," said Gylfi Magnusson, an Icelandic economist who served as minister of economic affairs after the crash.
...
"The smaller the country gets, the bigger the national pride, the bigger the soul. Here we are on a tiny island, with nothing but our pride," said Hannesson, the student council member.
...
"The modern-day financial Vikings, I think we feel scarred by the reputation they gave us," he said. "Especially among the younger population, there's a desire to do things better and more honorably."

The ONLY Question of any Political Significance in 2012- Part 2

by: ek hornbeck

Tue Jan 17, 2012 at 13:19:31 PM EST

Capitalism Out of the Closet
By Taylor Marsh
13 January 2012

It's a mistake to see the 28-minute video above and think this is just about Mitt Romney. He rightly earns the role of diabolical villain in the video, but what he represents is why Occupy Wall Street rose up in the first place. Romney's a master at playing the Wall Street system, which even the film above stipulates is facilitated by investment bankers who helped Mitt Romney and others like him work the current system that collapsed in 2008, caused the current unemployment rate, but also the hollowing out of the American middle class that started a long time ago.
...
The caterwauling over Mitt Romney tapping the core of American capitalism for his own benefit is rooted in partisanship and doesn't address the wider reality, which is that there are hundreds of Mitt Romneys in this country, many of whom got the Bush tax cut extensions, which Pres. Obama gladly gave and never really mounted a nationwide fight against. If you truly understand the calamity facing our middle class there is no way morally or in good conscience you could possibly back down from this fight, turning it into a war if you have to. Yes, a class war, but when Democrats hail compromise and gut Dodd-Frank or go along to keep things moving how innocent are they for watching what's developed under their own backers and bundlers?

Using Steve Rattner's defense of Mr. Romney and Bain Capital as an example, what are Democratic venture capitalists and heads of holding companies and investment bankers supposed to do in the shadow of this damning video that reveals the sausage making that is our economic system? As Rattner reveals, Democrats in his class can feel his pain and you can bet they're just glad it's Romney and not them.

That Wall Street Democrats are fleeing Obama's side because of hurt feelings and would certainly find common cause in the onslaught that would be unleashed on Mitt Romney if he's the nominee, who is one of their own, is another interesting tidbit of this tale. Sympathy vote, anyone? More likely, they'll send cash.

If Occupy stays relevant, the entire American Corporation class will have to go underground, because Mitt Romney may be the star of the film, but they're mirror images of this man and his methods and we've heard a lot about who's been hurt lately, but now it's in a film reel.
...
That Obama reelect will trumpet the video and all of its parts in the general election season, freaking out their own Democratic version of the Mitt Romney class, is wrought with irony.

What we need is a different kind of conservation about the country we are going to be in the 21st century and that's not coming from any direction or either political party. The only thing that matters to the partisans is putting their sock puppet in power, while the money men just keep on funneling the system to the top.

It no longer matters who ends up in the White House and Congress anymore, because the Mitt Romneys of this country are the ones really in charge and they won't allow anyone else in, buying politicians and the presidency.

Did I mention collapse of the Euro?

by: ek hornbeck

Mon Jan 16, 2012 at 11:32:40 AM EST

The hard cold fact is unless they print it, there is not enough money in the world to cover Banksters gambling losses.  They have bet on Black, hedged with Red, the wheel has stopped and the ball is now resting in that Green cup marked 00.

Debt talks falter, Greeks warn of disaster
By Dina Kyriakidou, Reuters
Fri Jan 13, 2012 2:13pm EST

"The main problem was the (European Union and International Monetary Fund's) insistence on a coupon lower than 4 percent on the new bonds," the banking source said.

That could mean an accounting loss of more than 70 percent for banks on their books, far more than the actual 50 percent cut in the original value of the old bonds laid down in the original deal.

Under the terms of the October plan, bondholders would take a 50 percent hit on the notional value of the old bonds. But the actual losses on their books depend on coupon and maturity of the new bonds, and could be far higher.

"When you're dealing with a sovereign, you don't have a huge amount of tricks up your sleeve, because if they choose not to pay you there's not an awful lot you can do," said Gary Jenkins, director of Swordfish Research.
...
Without using so called collective action clauses, the participation rate in any debt swap deal could be smaller than needed because many hedge funds would profit more if Greece defaulted because they would get paid in full from insurance.

"A lot of the (old) bonds have traded and are in the hands of the hedge funds. Do you think the governments are going to (pay out) to hedge funds? No way. So people like us, unless we are forced, we don't have an incentive to accept," said a source at a hedge fund, which owns Greek bonds.

Mark to Market can not be avoided forever and Mr. Market is going to have to realize a lot of this paper has a value of exactly zero.  Banks will collapse and if there is any justice there will be crowds on the ledges.

Nations will not suddenly wink out of existence, but Sarkozy and Merkel may find new amounts of time to contemplate their failure.

About that 50 State Fraud Settlement

by: ek hornbeck

Sat Jan 14, 2012 at 11:51:49 AM EST

Big Banks Face Inquiry Over Home Insurance
By LOUISE STORY, The New York Times
Published: January 10, 2012

Mr. Lawsky's office issued 31 subpoenas or other legal notices related to the case in early October, just as the state's insurance and banking departments were merged under his new agency. His office has already turned up instances where mortgage servicing units at large banks steered distressed homeowners into insurance policies up to 10 times as costly as the homeowners' original plans.

In some cases, those policies were offered by affiliates of the banks themselves, raising questions about conflicts of interest; in other cases, there may have been kickbacks between unrelated companies, according to the person briefed on the investigation.
...
The investigation is yet another legal battle for the nation's largest banks and points to the sorts of problems they may continue to face nationwide. The banks, in separate negotiations with federal and state authorities over suspected foreclosure abuses, have been trying to negotiate a settlement with state and federal officials to avoid future investigations, but it is not clear if businesses like home insurance would be covered if a deal were reached.

These policies are called 'forced placement' because homeowners are forced to take them as a condition of the loan.

New York Investigates Forced-Place Insurance Scams
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Wednesday January 11, 2012 7:35 am

I first wrote about forced-place insurance back in November of 2010. Basically, banks who take over the insurance for homeowners whose policies have lapsed end up getting a kickback when the insurer ramps up the price. And the homeowners pay the cost. In some cases, the policies didn't even lapse; the bank assumed the homeowners' insurance costs and steered the borrower into costly deals, adding the balance to principal. Sometimes the servicer just purchased redundant coverage for borrowers who were current on their policies. And this provides yet another incentive for servicers to keep borrowers delinquent: they can take over their insurance in that case, and jack up the price, getting a kickback in the process.

Dodd-Frank made this type of forced-place insurance scam illegal. Yet, despite the fact that we've known about this for years, it takes the New York State Department of Financial Services to run the investigation. Presumably the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, now newly bolstered with the ability to regulate non-bank financial operations like mortgage servicers, can get involved. But Dodd-Frank makes it unclear who is supposed to regulate forced-place insurance scams at the federal level. Until then, we have to rely on the states.

It's just another example of how most bank profits really do come from criminal enterprises. As American Banker reports today, JPMorgan Chase has recently stopped filing consumer debt collection lawsuits, because a whistleblower charged that the bank "falsely overstated the balances of thousands of delinquent accounts it sold to a third party." And, they also found the exact same robo-signing problem we've seen in foreclosure fraud.

Florida AG Office Encouraged to Intervene on Behalf of Foreclosure Fraudster LPS
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Wednesday January 11, 2012 8:15 am

The invaluable Abigail Field has a long piece about Pam Bondi, the Florida AG, incidentally a member of the executive committee on the foreclosure fraud settlement led by Iowa AG Tom Miller, and her ties to the foreclosure industry in Florida. These include the usual financial ties, but also the sense that the Florida AG's office was a no-go zone for investigations against banks, servicers and the entities that pushed foreclosure fraud. And Field uncovers a long history of this.

The Economic Crimes Division of that office habitually ignored or dismissed crimes happening in the state. And in one case, they lobbied an AG in another state on behalf of the target of a national investigation.

The story concerns Lender Processing Services (LPS), the foreclosure document processor currently under indictment in Nevada for its practices. Michigan's Republican Attorney General, Bill Schuette, issued criminal subpoenas to LPS in June of last year. And Lisa Epstein, the foreclosure fraud blogger, obtained through a public records request communications between LPS' attorneys at Baker & McKenzie and the Florida AG's office. In them, Baker & McKenzie asks the Florida AG to help them persuade Schuette to switch his subpoenas from criminal to civil ones.
...
Joan Meyer is a partner for Baker & McKenzie; Victoria Butler works in the AG's office. She asks in the first email to "catch up" about the Michigan criminal subpoenas, and adds that "These public announcements can deeply impact LPS's business operations and stock price and seem unnecessary if the AGs who issue them have already agreed to a meeting. Wondering if there's anything we can do." The meeting she refers to is part of the wider foreclosure fraud investigation.

In the second email, Meyer adds that "Sue Sanford from the Michigan AG's Office is going to call you about the State AG meeting with LPS. She may ask about converting her investigation from criminal to civil. If you are comfortable, please encourage her to join the civil group. I would like to share information with her and get her up to date regarding the information we provided at the meeting but thus far cannot because of the criminal restrictions."

This is a lawyer for LPS encouraging one AG office to lobby another, to get criminal subpoenas converted to civil ones. This came at a time when LPS was under active investigation by the state of Florida.

IG Report Whitewashes Firing of Foreclosure Fraud Investigators in Florida
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Monday January 9, 2012 7:22 am

June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards were career lawyers in the South Florida office of the Attorney General, economic crimes division. Back during the dark days of 2010, Clarkson and Edwards were the most aggressive law enforcement officials, from the top down, in identifying and investigating the web of foreclosure fraud, particularly the stew that emerged in Florida, with bogus documents, forgeries, go-go foreclosure mills valuing speed over accuracy, and document processing companies providing menus for law firms to finish off the theft of homes from borrowers.

Much of the information Clarkson and Edwards got into the public sphere motivated the investigations and lawsuits we see today. At the end of 2010, Clarkson and Edwards prepared a Power Point Presentation, called Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases. That Power Point, bringing together all the types of document fraud seen in Florida foreclosure courts, had a profound impact. I described it at the time as "a full pictorial history of the past decade in the mortgage industry, complete with actual shots of improper mortgage assignments. They show the same name of a bank officer being written four different ways, clearly forged. They show stamps from notarizations that expired before they were used to certify foreclosure documents."
...
McCollum left the AGs office in January, replaced by a different Republican, Pam Bondi. At the same time, the longtime director of the economic crimes division left, and Richard Lawson, a former defense attorney for white collar criminals - mainly bank officials - came in. As Lawson acknowledges in his statement to the IG report (more on that in a minute), he received complaints from the lawyers of several of the defendants in Clarkson and Edwards' cases, in particular Lender Processing Services (LPS), which was part of a multistate investigation at the time.

Lawson immediately went to work criticizing Clarkson and Edwards' conduct, disputing their claims, savaging the work of their office, and micromanaging their investigations (but only the foreclosure fraud investigations, not their other work). By May they were out, fired by Lawson and Bondi. They were given 90 minutes to pack up their things and leave the office, and lost access to all their files and emails.

This looked suspiciously like a politically motivated firing. Advocates for homeowners, along with the group Progress Florida and a couple Democratic lawmakers, urged an investigation. Two days before state Rep. Darren Soto and state Sen. Eleanor Sobel asked the Justice Department to investigate, Bondi personally requested an investigation, outsourcing it to the inspector general for the state's Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Atwater, a Republican former member of the state legislature. That report came out late Friday, and it completely exonerated the AG's office for the Clarkson and Edwards firing. "During the course of the inquiry there was no specific allegation of wrongdoing made by any person, and no discovery of evidence of wrongdoing on the part of anyone involved in the matter," the report concludes.
...
The media has accepted the narrative that this IG report cleared Bondi of any wrongdoing in the firing. But it really just raises more questions. Why were so many attorneys defending targets of investigations talking to the head of the economic crimes division? Why was he listening to their concerns over his own investigators in his office? Why was Lawson faulting Clarkson and Edwards for a failure to do "independent investigations to confirm third party complaints" when he was accepting third party complaints from the targets of the investigations?

Thomas Perrelli, DoJ Point Person on Foreclosure Fraud Settlement, Stepping Down by March
By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake
Thursday January 12, 2012 6:17 am

I keep hearing from everyone "in the know" that these foreclosure fraud settlement talks are just about wrapped up. Surely everyone's just practicing their signatures for the big signing ceremony, right? Except that there hasn't really been any news on the settlement for a few weeks. And now the number 3 at the Justice Department, Thomas Perrelli, the central figure running the talks from the federal government side, will step down in a couple months.
...
Aside from the obvious fact that there's not going to be a number three at Justice for the next year, because Obama made four recess appointments over the holiday break and Republicans are so mad about it they're going to retaliate as soon as they get back from vacation, Marcy Wheeler writes that this "sets a finite deadline" for the foreclosure fraud settlement. I actually think it seals its fate. No deadline has yet been responded to on the settlement. Aside from the half-dozen or so Democrats who aren't on board, there are plenty of Republicans who don't want to see the banks take any penalty at all. The talks haven't even gotten around to that persuasion stage, as there remain outstanding issues with the banks in terms of the nature of the penalties and the level of release from liability.

Green Party of California Anniversary "Money Bloom": February 4, 2012

by: jaktober

Thu Jan 12, 2012 at 15:00:45 PM EST

http://freeindependentsun.com/...

This can start a trend of Money Blooms for the year, as I have proposed ideas for one each month in the article. I will be in Massachusetts next month, Philadelphia in March, and D.C. in April, so I'd like to help organize following Money Blooms for those Green Party affiliates as I travel. After that we can do a Money Bloom for the Green Party Presidential Candidate (after the convention), then start organizing Blooms for Congressional Candidates, leading to a National Green Party Money Bloom on the Winter Solstice to help guide us into the new 26,000 year cycle (getting a bit new age, I know...).

Hypocrisy

by: ek hornbeck

Thu Jan 12, 2012 at 12:54:55 PM EST

Attentive readers know I don't much respect it.  To pretend to have a standard and yet not hold yourself or people you support to the same is a flat out LIE!

I don't mince words either.

See yourself in this mirror?  Stop being an asshole then.

The evil of indefinite detention and those wanting to de-prioritze it
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon
Sunday, Jan 8, 2012 6:18 AM Eastern Standard Time

As we head into Election Year, there is an increasingly common, bizarre and self-evidently repellent tactic being employed by some Democratic partisans against those of us who insist that issues like indefinite detention (along with ongoing killing of civilians in the Muslim world) merit high priority. The argument is that to place emphasis on such issues is to harm President Obama (because he's responsible for indefinite detention, substantial civilian deaths, and war-risking aggression) while helping competing candidates (such as Gary Johnson or Ron Paul) who vehemently oppose such policies. Thus, so goes this reasoning, to demand that issues like indefinite detention and civilian deaths be prioritized in assessing the presidential race is to subordinate the importance of other issues such as abortion, gay equality, and domestic civil rights enforcement on which Obama and the Democrats are better. Many of these commentators strongly imply, or now even outright state, that only white males are willing to argue for such a prioritization scheme because the de-prioritized issues do not affect them. See here (Megan Carpentier), here (Katha Pollitt) and here (Dylan Matthews) as three of many examples of this grotesque accusatory innuendo.

There are numerous glaring flaws with this divisive tactic. For one, it relies on a full-scale, deliberate distortion of the argument being made; demanding that issues like indefinite detention, civilian deaths and aggressive war be given high priority in the presidential race does not remotely advocate the de-prioritization of any other issues. For another, many women and ethnic and racial minorities - as well as gay Americans - are making similar arguments about the need for these issues to receive substantial attention in the election.

More important, it's irrational in the extreme to argue that self-interest or "privilege" would cause someone to want to prioritize issues like indefinite detention and civilian causalities given that the civil liberties and anti-war advocates being so accused are extremely unlikely themselves to be affected by the abuses they protest. For the most part, it isn't white males being indefinitely detained, rendered, and having their houses and cars exploded with drones - the victims of those policies are people like Boumediene, or Gulet Mohamed, or Jose Padilla, or Awal Gul, or Sami al-Haj, or Binyam Mohamed, or Afghan villagers, or Pakistani families, or Yemeni teenagers.

Put another way, when you spend the vast bulk of your time working against the injustices imposed almost exclusively on minorities and the marginalized - as anyone who works on these war and civil liberties issues by definition does - it's reprehensible for someone to deploy these sorts of accusatory tactics, all in service of the shallow goal of partisan loyalty enforcement. Those who were actually driven primarily by privileged self-interest would want to de-prioritize these issues in a presidential campaign, not insist on their vital importance.

And that is this real point here: what's so warped about those who employ this tactic for partisan ends is how easily it could be used against them, rather than by them. All of the authors of the three accusatory examples linked above (Carpentier, Pollitt, and Matthews) - as well as most of those Democrats who have now sunk to explicitly arguing that such matters are unimportant - are white and non-Muslim.
...
I don't employ or endorse that wretched reasoning, but those who do - such as the authors of the above-linked accusations - should have it applied to them and their own political priorities; they deserve to reap what they are sowing.

Economists really ARE greedy assholes

by: ek hornbeck

Mon Jan 09, 2012 at 13:51:31 PM EST

Via Felix Salmon there is this story about how Economists are upset that restaurant reservations might not be commanding Maximum Market Value!

My feeling is that the restaurant is the smart one, while the economists are being naive.

For one thing, real people don't think in terms of opportunity cost - especially not when they're the lucky winners of a restaurant-reservations lottery. Dan Ariely did research on this at Duke University: he found that once Duke students won the lottery giving them the opportunity to buy sought-after tickets to the university's basketball game, they valued those tickets at ten times more than the students who lost the lottery.

What's really going on here, I think, is that the vast majority of people who get tickets hold on to them, go to the restaurant, and eat a wonderful meal for which they paid a reasonable sum. And then there's a tiny number of people who get tickets, and either discover they can't use them for some reason, or decide that they're going to try to flip them for profit.
...
The most important thing in being a restaurateur of a high-end establishment is exceeding expectations; if you auction off tickets, then the price of tickets will naturally gravitate to and possibly past the point at which you can't do that any longer. That's why Next is right to worry about "our sense of value for the meal" - because the chances are that their sense is going to be your sense too. If they think a meal isn't worth more than say $200, and they start selling tickets to that meal at $400 apiece, then they're setting their customers up for disappointment; I can't imagine Achatz would ever want that.

Do the handful of people who currently buy tickets for $500 or $3,000 walk away disappointed? Maybe not: there's a good chance those people aren't particularly price-sensitive. But when you move away from those people and use the market to set prices for all your customers, big dangers lurk. As Alan Vanneman says, markets are largely foreign to the human imagination. And since restaurant-goers are human, we don't want to upset them with market mechanisms if doing so is unnecessary.

Why we can't have nice things

by: ek hornbeck

Sun Jan 08, 2012 at 12:16:46 PM EST

Bond Exotica Gains Favor in Era of Low Rates
By Sarah Mulholland, Bloomberg News
Jan 4, 2012 5:33 AM ET

So-called esoteric asset-backed securities issuance may soar 12.9 percent to $35 billion, compared with debt linked to more traditional collateral such as auto and credit-card loans, which will grow 8.75 percent to $87 billion, according to a forecast from Credit Suisse Group AG.
...
Esoteric bonds make up 16 percent of the $620 billion market for asset-backed securities outstanding, with debt tied to credit card, student and auto loans accounting for the rest, according to data from Wells Fargo.
...
Wells Fargo's recommendations for 2012 include debt backed by timeshare payments and fleets of rental cars, according to a Dec. 6 report from analysts led by John McElravey in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A disadvantage of esoteric bonds for investors is that they can be hard to sell because they don't trade frequently. As a result, investors require the additional yield, said Barclays Capital's Wishengrad.

Double digit returns on investment are guaranteed neither by the Constitution nor the Bible and even Freshwater Shamen don't contend they are risk free.

Yes, There Are Voices On the Left

by: Michael Kwiatkowski

Thu Jan 05, 2012 at 12:10:51 PM EST

I agree with almost everything he says in today's column, especially regarding the tendency by faux-progressives to label anyone who disagrees with their twisted viewpoint crazy.  Jeff Tiedrich over at Smirking Chimp said people who think the DLC is still in charge were crazy after I pointed out that yes, they do still run the Democrats, but refused to respond further when I pointed out all the DLC hacks littering Obama's regime.

There is one thing, however, I disagree with about Greenwald's post.  He implies there is no left-wing candidate running for president who voices the concerns of the left.

the most important point to make about Drum's response is that he never bothers to identify the alternatives to Paul's candidacy when it comes to challenging these bipartisan pieties. If Paul is such an inadequate vehicle for having these ideas heard - and everyone pointing to the benefits of Paul's candidacy, especially on the Left, understands perfectly what his faults are - why doesn't Drum unveil the roster of national political figures with a serious platform who are making these points instead?

The answer is obvious: there are none. There are, to be sure, some very good, isolated members of Congress, and there are some genuinely superb Congressional candidates (like long-time anti-war activist and corporate-media critic Norman Solomon, who I'd genuinely love to see elected to Congress). But it is major-party presidential candidates who dominate political discourse, especially in election years. I really would like for someone to tell me: who else is going to inject this particular, extraordinarily important critique of American imperialism and exceptionalism into mainstream political discourse?

Actually, there are a number of them.  Jill Stein, who ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2010, is running for the Green Party nomination, and Rocky Anderson is running on the newly formed Justice Party ticket.  Now, regardless of what Glenn Greenwald or anyone else thinks of their chances of winning (this largely because the corporate-owned media's and mainstream blogs' deliberate exclusion of such candidates in their campaign coverage deprives the voting public of even the knowledge that they're running for office), the fact is that they are present on the national stage.  The unfortunate truth is that if there is a lack of left-wing candidates, it's because no one bothers to report about them objectively - what coverage exists is only in the most derisive, dismissive terms.  But then these same sources bemoan that there is no one on the left espousing leftist principles.

The saddest part of American politics isn't that left-wing candidacies and the issues they raise for discussion are excluded.  It's that even left-wing voices in the supposedly independent media join in that exclusion.  If only Greenwald and other left-wing media figures would objectively cover the Green, Justice, Progressive, Socialist, and Working Families candidates and their campaigns.  Then we would see voters given real alternatives in elections.  That's because we can only vote based on the information we are given, and if we're denied the knowledge that left-wing candidates are even running for public office, how then are we to vote, if at all?

So how about it, Glenn?