Christie's crony corruption throws up another roadblock to 2016

Still not writing Gov. Blowhard off as a 2016 candidate, but I'm pretty sure Christie has lost Hoboken.

Two senior members of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration warned a New Jersey mayor earlier this year that her town would be starved of hurricane relief money unless she approved a lucrative redevelopment plan favored by the governor, according to the mayor and emails and personal notes she shared with msnbc.

Longer at the link. Shorter version: Port Authority hired "a reputable firm" to do a study on redeveloping some prime real estate in lovely Hoboken. It took time to conduct the study.

Finally, in January 2013, the firm – which was tasked with evaluating a 19-block area – concluded that only the three blocks in which the Rockefeller Group had an ownership stake were fit for redevelopment.

The mayor of Hoboken, a Democrat and otherwise a Christie supporter, wasn't willing to simplyn hand over her town to Christie's cronies. And then this happened with the sandy relief funds.

Christie’s people came back with less than 1% of what Hoboken had sought. With $250 million to disburse statewide, just $142,000 went to Hoboken – enough to help defray the cost of one backup generator to power a flood pump. Out of another pool of money for recovery grants – $1.8 billion in all – Hoboken received $200,000.

Meanwhile the Jersey legislature is issuing subpoenas and Christie lawyered up. If another couple mayors come forward, this story isn't going to die any time soon. Nonetheless, Christie is on the road raising money. He's clearly not ready to quit yet. [photo via]

Kochs file suit against Cato Institute

Strange but true. The Koch brothers filed suit against their own think tank yesterday in a bid to seize control of Cato Institute.

Details are sketchy at the moment, but at issue are the Cato holdings of the recently deceased former chairman of Cato, which represent 25% of the shares. It's clear the Kochs want to wrest control of Cato by preventing the grieving widow from gaining control over the shares. It's possible Cato’s current president Edward Crane is siding with the widow, as he is a named defendant. Otherwise, since there's only four shareholders, there would be nothing to litigate and the Kochs would automatically gain majority control under a three person board. Imagine what they could do with that.

Money is certainly not the issue here as the shares are only worth one dollar each. Clearly it's about power. Think Progress has a link to the Koch's complaint and supporting exhibits.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Laffer's Ponzi scheme victims are not amused

In a sane world, this would be the end of Arthur Laffer's influence as an economic pundit. He would be laughed out of town.

HOUSTON (CN) - Fifty-two investors claim fund managers associated with supply-side economist Arthur Laffer took $3.1 million to prop up a Ponzi scheme, then said nothing as their money was "wasted with no reasonable expectation of recovery."

Lead plaintiffs Ronald and Lavonne Ellisor sued David Wallace, Costa Bajjali, and their entities Wallace Bajjali Development Partners LP, Wallace Bajjali Investment Fund II LP, the Laffer Frishberg Wallace Economic Opportunity Fund LP, and Arthur Laffer in Harris County Court.

Laffer is best known for the Laffer Curve, an economic theory that says reducing taxes will increase government revenue. He was a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board during the 1980s.

Sadly, we don't live in a sane world anymore, so I suppose nothing bad will happen to him. His spokespeople say he's no longer affiliated with the defendant firm. I expect he ran "laffing" to the bank with his endorsement fees and didn't lose a penny of his own money on the scam.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Politifact won the news cycle today with their cockamamie choice for Politifact Lie of the Year. They seemed to enjoying the mass condemnation from all corners of the reality based community. I'm pretty sure they were slapping each other on the back at Politfact HQ, assuring each other they must be doing something right since so many people were pissed at them. And look at that traffic spike, would you?

Likewise, the twitter machine was humming with lie of the year analogies and snarky hashtags. I saw a whole lot of laments about the sad demise of Politfact's credibility. And I asked myself, "Where have these people been for the last 12 months?"

I've seen this happen, time and time again. Like so many well intentioned enterprises before them, Polifact started out as a kickass project that did good work. Their unvarnished honesty was refreshing. They built a following. A big following. Eventually they got so big, building the brand became bigger than the mission.

From where I sit, Politfact was co-opted a long time ago. Think they started losing their mojo shortly after they won that Pulitzer Prize. I mean, am I really the only one who noticed the increasingly tepid exposures of right wing perfidy and strained reaches to condemn "the other side" too? To borrow from Charles, it appears they have been infected with a terminal case of gutless pissantery. All too often the price of success in what passes for professional journalism today. Sad.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

The Bain of Romney's existence

The super-rich are different from you and me. When they leave a job, they get platinum parachutes. Like, for instance, Willard. Though he left his vulture capitalist corporation some 13 years ago, thanks to a sweetheart exit agreement, Romney is still raking in millions from Bain Capital today. And though nobody is disclosing the details, it's a good bet Willard is paying the capital gains tax rate on that dough, not an ordinary income tax levy like us working class schmucks.

Those would be the special tax breaks Romney is willing to protect to the death while he exercises his plan to slash and burn social safety net programs under the aegis of "fiscal responsibility." The same sort of fiscal responsibility that sent KayBee Toys into bankruptcy after Bain collected their millions in fees for running it into the ground. All those thousands who lost their jobs there and other Bain "managed" companies just need to work a little harder. Sacrifice just a little more to keep those profits rolling in to the "producers" who sent them to the unemployment line.

I mean, Mitt needs that money. "He's running for office, for Pete's sake!"

[photo credit]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

GOP blocks Cordray confirmation vote

No great shock here. The GOPers signaled their intention to kill the CFPB months ago. Not difficult to figure out why either:

The 44 Senate Republicans who signed a letter in May pledging to filibuster any CFPB nominee (plus Sen. Dean Heller who later added his name once appointed to the Senate) have received over $6.5 million from the financial industry in 2011 and nearly $125.6 million over their careers.

The final vote was 53-45.

Not at all surprising that our entrenched political class gets bought off, but I'm always just a little shocked to learn how cheaply they whore themselves out. Then again, I assume they probably find a way to squeeze out a bigger payoff under the table.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Money changes everything

Building on my earlier post about media buys in the 2012 campaign, this cash tally on outside campaign spending reinforces the point about the Citizen United effect and also illustrates the sorry state of political journalism.

In the endless quest for false equivalency, the hed was "Political groups raking in the campaign cash" and the lede read: "Political groups representing the left and the right have already spent an eye-popping $35 million to influence the outcome of the 2012 election, according to an investigation by The Hill."

But read the report and see if you can find the problem:

Those that do not have to disclose their spending that participated in The Hill’s survey include the conservative Crossroads GPS ($20 million total with American Crossroads), American Action Network ($2.8 million total on advocacy and electioneering), Americans for Prosperity ($5 million on ads for federal issue advocacy) and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (less than $1 million). On the Democratic side, Priorities USA has spent slightly less than $1 million, House Majority PAC is at $921,000 after spending some on House special elections, Patriot Majority PAC has doled out $400,000 and Americans United for Change has spent $350,000.

The main drivers of the outside-group spending have been American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, Republican-affiliated groups co-founded by Karl Rove. They have dropped an unprecedented $20 million attacking Democratic Senate candidates and President Obama. Liberal and conservative groups have combined to spend more than $10 million on Senate races alone.

In other words, Democrats are responsible for well under $3 million out of this $35 million that has been disclosed so far. Maybe it's just me, but a more honest hed might have read, "GOP front groups record smashing spending to influence elections." Or something like that.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

The real welfare queens

This is wonky but stunning. How the Fed covered up for the Banksters:

Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.

By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages.

Basically, The Fed helped these guys hide the fact they were dead broke. And they did for Europe too.

I'm no expert. Maybe there no other choice. Have to think a massive global default would have been worse than the meltdown we had, and they claim they didn't lose a cent in the long run. In fact, they say made $13 billion "in interest and fee income."

But still it rankles that that not only was no one ever really held to account for allowing them to overextend in the first place, but no one seems to be all that interested in setting up new strict safeguards to make sure they don't do it again. What rules are proposed wouldn't even take effect until 2015 to 2018. Plenty of time for our political overlords to water them down to complete ineffectiveness. Furthermore, this has been kept a secret for this long at the behest of the Banksters.

Meanwhile, bankster profits are still mostly up and executive bonuses are ever rising while they lay off rank and file workers. And they're lending money to each other while the little guys can't get a tiny loan to save their livelihoods. Nor can they seem to find a few bucks to help underwater and other struggling homeowners.

As Atrios often says, it's their world. We're just living in it. If you can call the current state of the middle class living. More like barely surviving at this point. And they wonder why everyone hates "Washington, DC."

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Nothing unethical to see here

When last we saw Darrell Issa he was using his position to advance his own business interests and sending love letters to Big Business asking what he could he do to make them happy. Today, we get an answer to the latter. Think Progress reveals the crooked Congressman Issa hired an undercover agent to run interference on regulatory oversight of his Wall St. cronies.

Has Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) turned the House Oversight Committee into a bank lobbying firm with the power to subpoena and pressure government regulators? ThinkProgress has found that a Goldman Sachs vice president changed his name, then quietly went to work for Issa to coordinate his effort to thwart regulations that affect Goldman Sachs’ bottom line.

Haller, as he is now known, went by the name Peter Simonyi until three years ago. Simonyi adopted his mother’s maiden name Haller in 2008 just as he was leaving Goldman Sachs as a vice president of the bank’s commodity compliance group. In a few short years, Haller went from being in charge of dealing with regulators for Goldman Sachs to working for Congress in a position where he made official demands from regulators overseeing his old firm.

It’s not the first time Haller has worked the revolving door to help out Goldman Sachs.

I expect Mr. Haller took a big pay cut to move over to "public service." Willing to bet he got an hellva severance package from Goldman Sachs to cover the difference. Or do you think he's working on a performance based kickbacks?

Profile in Corruption

I do so love me some for real, investigative journalism. As part of an ongoing series, NYT takes on Darrell Issa:

Even as he has built a reputation as a forceful Congressional advocate for business, Mr. Issa has bought up office buildings, split a holding company into separate multimillion-dollar businesses, started an insurance company, traded hundreds of millions of dollars in securities, invested in overseas funds, retained an interest in his auto-alarm company and built up a family foundation.

As his private wealth and public power have grown, so too has the overlap between his private and business lives, with at least some of the congressman’s government actions helping to make a rich man even richer and raising the potential for conflicts.

Of course, they pull their punches a bit. Potential for conflicts? Looks like glaringly obvious conflicts to me.

Most politicians at least go through the motions of selling off some interests or setting up blind trusts. Hell, even Cheney did that. And I'm sure you'll recall that it was Issa who wrote a love letter to 150 businesses and trade groups asking them to tell him which regulations they would like him to get rid of. But still, good to see NYT enter this stuff into the narrative, even if the TV media is likely to ignore it in favor of some trivial bullshit about Obama's little bus tour or the latest hijinks of the hopeful GOPers.

Die faster lazy poor people

Dear Florida Voters: If you elect a guy who defrauds Medicare he going to keep gaming the system. Hence, Republican governor Rick Scott's latest scheme:

Scott and Florida Republicans are currently trying to enact a sweeping Medicaid reform bill that would give HMOs and other private health care companies unprecedented control over the government health care program for the poor. Among the companies that stand to benefit from the bill is Solantic, a chain of urgent-care clinics aimed at providing emergency services to walk-in customers. The Florida governor founded Solantic in 2001, only a few years after he resigned as the CEO of hospital giant Columbia/HCA amid a massive Medicare fraud scandal. In January, he transferred his $62 million stake in Solantic to his wife, Ann Scott, a homemaker involved in various charitable organizations. [...]

The majority of Medicaid patients receive care through private companies and HMOs, but under Florida's bill such firms would end up having vast new authority over the program, with great leeway to limit access to services or reduce benefits. The bill would also put a hard cap on the amount of money that these managed care companies could spend on Medicaid, which advocates say could particularly harm disabled and elderly patients who require costlier long-term care.

In other words, the "die quickly" health care plan. Like the person who waited four months to get a biopsy on a throat cancer because of the convoluted HMO authorization requirements.

Also, Scott just "signed an executive order requiring random drug testing of many state employees and applicants for state jobs" and is pushing for a bill to require drug testing of welfare applicants. I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that Solantic is also in the business of drug testing. But his spokesmen claim there's no conflict of interest.

I never cease to be amazed at how "the voters" can't seem to remember for more than ten minutes that if you give Republicans power, they will use it to enrich only themselves at the taxpayers' expense.

Dana Milbank finds his empathy

I've been wondering for a while what they did with the real Dana Milbank. Now I see, thanks to David Dayen, that the old Dana Milbank got a big dose of cold reality in dealing with a refi at Citibank. Apparently it was quite an awakening.

But Milbank gets quite a bit right in this piece. He realizes that servicers have no concern over foreclosures and in fact have the financial incentive to foreclose over a modification. He understands the illegal fee laddering and the forced-place insurance scandal and robo-signing and all the other illegal activities which have become endemic to the servicers. He sees that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would be in a position to rein in the worst of these abuses if they don’t have their funding and responsibilities stripped away by House Republicans and handed over to the Office of Bank Advocacy Office of Comptroller of the Currency. And this is a fine conclusion:


My wife and I are reasonably savvy consumers – she has a brand-name MBA, and I began my career as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal – but we were no match for a bungling bank. After five months of trying, we still haven’t been able to resolve all of Citibank’s mistakes – nearly all of them, curiously, in the bank’s favor [...]

That so much can go wrong with such a simple refinance doesn’t bode well for the 5.5 million homeowners in default (on top of the 3 million already foreclosed). It’s impossible to know for sure, but by some estimates, half of them are victims of some form of servicers’ errors.

“What happened to you,” Ira Rheingold of the National Association of Consumer Advocates told me, “happens to people every single day.” And it will continue, with its resulting drag on the economy, unless and until the big banks can be brought to heel.

Not celebrating Milbank's misfortune here at all, but grateful that he is now an eyewitness. Universe knows the only way to change the prevailing Village narrative is for the insulated class to actually feel the greedy "invisible hand of the free market" reach deep into their own pockets.

[Big thanks to Avedon at The Sideshow for the kind link.]

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Protesters converge on Koch brother's confab

Kind of feel like I'm in a 60s flashback this week what with all the protesting going on. Of course, most eyes are turned to Egypt but here at home, over a thousand activists gathered outside the gates of a exclusive resort where the Koch brothers were hosting one of their periodic con-cons. These invitation only events where the rich and powerful scheme to take over the world have formerly operated under the radar, but no more.

David Dayen in an eye-witness account reports 25 were intentionally arrested but overall it was a peaceful protest. The LAT and NYT has more coverage and quotes from the crowd, who were chanting "this is only the beginning."

Thinking it's a tiny step forward that a "lefty" protest is being covered by the major media who found it easy to ignore hundreds of thousands of peace protesters only a few years ago. Also finding it mildly amusing and entirely appropriate that this con-con is being held in a town called Rancho Mirage. Considering how much their success in fooling the rubes relies entirely on smoke and mirrors, what could be more appropriate?

[Big thanks to "A Writer at Balloon Juice", (formerly DougJ DougJson), for the kind link.]

[Thanks also to Elspeth at The Atlantic Wire for the kind link.]

Commission's Report Blames the Banksters

You'll recall the GOPers tried to defuse this by issuing their dissent a few weeks ago, but now the official report has been released and it blames the Banksters:

WASHINGTON — The 2008 financial crisis was an “avoidable” disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street, according to the conclusions of a federal inquiry.

The commission that investigated the crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans.

“The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done,” the panel wrote in the report’s conclusions, which were read by The New York Times. “If we accept this notion, it will happen again.”

It also knocks down the bulk of the "it's all the fault of Frannie/Freddie and irresponsible borrowers myth" that the GOPers have been relentlessly pushing since the meltdown happened.

Don't expect anything much will come of this but it's good to see some reality injected into the conversation anyway.

The Revolving Door

Sigh. This is why our government bailed out the banksters and no bigwig responsible for the meltdown will ever go to jail.

Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.

Treasury Department still owns 11 percent of the bank. So it's all very cozy and one expects Mr. Orzag will receive compensation in keeping with his experience, or shall we say, inside connections to the powers that currently hold the White House.

Also, too, not too difficult to predict which bank might be saved if another worldwide meltdown occurs. Not necessarily such a remote possibility considering the mess in Europe.

Where Wikileaks does good

While I continue to think the Julian Assange's latest document dump did more harm than good, exposing corporate corruption is a leak I can support:

The founder of whistle-blower website WikiLeaks plans to release tens of thousands of internal documents from a major U.S. bank early next year, Forbes Magazine reported on Monday. [...]

"We have one related to a bank coming up, that's a megaleak. It's not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it's either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it," Assange said in the interview posted on the Forbes website.

He declined to identify the bank, describing it only as a major U.S. bank that is still in existence.

[The referenced Forbes article on Assange at this link.]

This is a situation where the small intrigues could add up to a big scandal that actually changes something for the better. And to be fair, Anne Laurie reminds me that he's done this before:

Over the last four years he has been so busy embarrassing various governments, from Washington to the corrupt Kenyan regime of Daniel arap Moi, that many forget the corporate scandals already on WikiLeaks’ trophy wall. In January 2008 the site posted documents alleging that the Swiss bank Julius Baer hid clients’ profits from even the Swiss government, concealing them in what seemed to be shell companies in the Cayman Islands. The bank filed a lawsuit against WikiLeaks for publishing data stolen from its clients. Baer later dropped the suit—but managed to stir up embarrassing publicity for itself. The next year WikiLeaks published documents from a pharma trade group implying that its lobbyists were receiving confidential documents from and exerting influence over a World Health Organization project to fund drug research in the developing world. The resulting attention helped crater the WHO project…

I forgot about the Swiss bank thing and I barely heard about the WHO project. Don't think anyone went to jail over it though, did they? That would be my goal if I had Julian's resources.

Meanwhile, as I said in comments below, if Assange wants to hack the US government, I think it would be much more useful to expose the sausage making inside the Senate. We need a shakeup there most of all.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]

Recession is over -- on Wall Street

Unless you're a WSJ subscriber, don't bother to click the link, it's behind the paywall, but here's the money quote:

About three dozen of the top publicly held securities and investment-services firms—which include banks, investment banks, hedge funds, money-management firms and securities exchanges—are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits this year, a 4% increase from the $139 billion paid out in 2009, according to the survey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the 35 firms.

A lot of these people deserved to be indicted. Instead they're handsomely rewarded for gaming the system for their own profit. This is why the voters are pissed off at Democrats. Scapegoating Bernie Madoff for an entire industry's de facto criminality wasn't enough. A few more frogmarches would have gone a long way to sating the public anger.

The Kochtopus

If you missed the New Yorker article on the Koch Brothers, I recommend it for your Sunday reading. Frank Rich has a decent summary, but to get the full impact you really should read the full New Yorker piece. It's so dense, it's hard to pull quotes but here's just one:

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Really. Read it all. Under the heading, know thine enemy, the gory details on how they're systematically trying to destroy every progressive gain of the last century is valuable knowledge.

Fight over Financial Regulation Heats Up

I'm about to do a longer post for the DetNews on this story, which I'm sure readers here are already following. But if you're looking for pushback in your arguments with conservatives and Republicans who are of course against it, since the Democrats are for it and the GOPers have an eye on those lovely Wall St donations, Krugman has the goods today.

So proposed reform legislation gives regulators “resolution authority,” which basically means giving them the ability to deal with the likes of Lehman in much the same way that the F.D.I.C. deals with conventional banks. Who could object to that?

Well, Mr. McConnell is trying. His talking points come straight out of a memo Frank Luntz, the Republican political consultant, circulated in January on how to oppose financial reform. “Frankly,” wrote Mr. Luntz, “the single best way to kill any legislation is to link it to the Big Bank Bailout.” And Mr. McConnell is following those stage directions.

As the good Doctor says, you can be sure, "Wall Street isn’t lobbying to prevent future bank bailouts. If anything, it’s trying to ensure that there will be more bailouts." Which should be obvious but the tea pot tantrumists in your life can never see the truth through the haze of outrage that surrounds them.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]

Banging on the banksters

Good Krugman column about the Robber Barons of Wall St. Read it all but the closer is the quote of the day.

Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.

Really. These people are parasites on society and it's not a symbiotic relationship. They're total bloodsuckers, sucking the life out of everything that was once good about the entrepreneurial spirit.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]