(...since 1973, more than 130 death row inmates have been released after wrongful convictions.)
Davis Case Reignites Death Penalty Debate
Friday 03 September 2010
by: Yana Kunichoff, t r u t h o u t | Report
A federal judge in Georgia upheld the murder conviction of death row inmate Troy Davis last week, following a special evidentiary hearing that was ordered by the US Supreme Court to determine whether he was innocent.
The high court took the unusual step of directing the federal judge in charge of the case, US District Judge William Moore, to re-examine it after Davis and his lawyers presented evidence that the reliability of witness statements used by the prosecution was questionable.
Laura Moye, Death Penalty Abolition Campaign director at Amnesty International, called the Davis case, which has received international attention amid claims that an innocent individual may be executed, emblematic of a broken justice system.
"How could you have a system that would put human life on the line like that?" asks Moye about the strong possibility that Davis may be innocent.
Davis was convicted and sentenced to the death penalty for the 1989 shooting death of Savannah Police Officer Mark MacPhail. At issue in the trial is whether Davis was the individual who assaulted a homeless man outside a Burger King restaurant and then shot MacPhail, off duty at the time and working as a security guard, when he attempted to intervene.
The case against Davis was built primarily on eyewitness testimony, and since Davis' conviction, most non-police witnesses have retracted their evidence, saying it was given under duress.
One witness said he lied at the trial when he testified that Davis admitted to the killing, another said he heard another man admit to the crime, and others raised questions about the color of Davis' shirt on the night of the crime.
Of the two main witnesses testifying against Davis, one is the main alternative defendant.
Of the seven recantations, the judge hearing the case concluded that only one was credible. But, he said, it came from a witness who earlier testimony was "patently false," and was, therefore, not relevant to the conviction.
Despite these inconsistencies in witness accounts, Davis' conviction has been heard and upheld at every level of the state and federal court system.
According to Moye, "the leading cause for wrongful convictions is inaccurate and wrongful eyewitness identification."
Amnesty International figures calculate that, since 1973, more than 130 death row inmates have been released after wrongful convictions.
For Moye, "the only way to prevent the execution of an innocent person is to not entrust our government to make a decision about life and death." She advocates an end to the death penalty altogether, a goal the international declaration of human rights also calls for.
But for now, at least 16 deaths are scheduled for the next six months and, in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has borrowed $64 million to build a new death row.
In April 2009, the 11th Circuit Court ruled to deny Davis' appeal to have the newest evidence heard by a jury, a ruling which prompted one of the judges, Rosemary Barkett, to say: "To executive Davis, in the face of a significant amount of proffered evidence that may establish his actual innocence, is unconscionable and unconstitutional."
As Davis' execution date approached, his lawyers called on the Supreme Court to reconsider the issue under a recent ruling, which allows inmates facing certain extraordinary circumstances to file an appeal even after the one-year statute of limitations deadline has expired.
Rather than hear the case, the Supreme Court transferred it to the federal judge, instructing him to "receive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could not have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis'] innocence."
The case was heard by Moore, who has been a federal judge since 1994, and recently stepped down as chief judge for the Southern District of Georgia, choosing to remain on active judge duty rather than take senior status.
Moore issued a 174-page order, following the Supreme Court-suggested evidentiary hearing, finding that Davis is not innocent beyond proven doubt.
"This court concludes that executing an innocent person would violate the Eighth Amendment," the judge wrote. "However, Mr. Davis is not innocent."
The judge said that the new evidence, including the recantations, did not significantly change the balance of proof offered at the original trial. "While Mr. Davis's new evidence casts some additional, minimal doubt on his conviction, it is largely smoke and mirrors," Moore wrote.
"Not all recantations are created equal," Moore said, saying a reasonable juror was more likely to disregard the recantations rather than abandon earlier testimony.
An analysis by Amnesty International notes that the judge found, "most reasonable jurors" would still vote to convict Davis, but that this suggests some jurors would vote to acquit him. To pass a death sentence in Georgia, a unanimous jury is required.
The state of Georgia is likely to seek another execution date for Troy in the near future, according to activists from the Campaign Against the Death Penalty, though his lawyers are also expected to appeal the ruling.
"Troy may be on death row," said Davis' sister Martin Correia, "but he is innocent, and we're going to prove that."
Friday, September 3, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Obama is Muslim & Earth is Flat
Grand Old Islamophobes? Polls Show Widespread Republican Concerns Over Muslims -- And Obama
Evan McMorris-Santoro / Talking Points Memo
September 1, 2010
In a series of respected national polls this summer, great swaths of Republicans -- often encompassing the majority -- have shown themselves to be deeply worried about the prospect of Muslims gaining power in the U.S. and of President Obama's perceived connections to the faith. This isn't a fringy extreme or small but vocal minority. It's huge portions of the party that just recently was defending its use of the filibuster by pointing out all the Democrats who blocked Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s and pooh-poohed the idea of racial insensitivity among tea partiers. And now, lots and lots of Republicans across the nation are on the leading edge of an anti-Muslim paranoia that some U.S. allies abroad believe will harm American relations with the moderate Muslim world.
Meet the new Republican establishment: worried about Muslims, and worried even more that Obama might be one of them.
The biggest news from the August 19 Pew pollof national attitudes toward Obama was the huge jump in the number of Americans who now think Obama is a Muslim. Nearly a fifth of the population made the incorrect assumption about Obama's faith, a sizeable increase from the months after Obama was inaugurated. Among Republicans, the number was far higher. Thirty-one percent said Obama was a Muslim, and 39% said they didn't know what religion Obama practices.
Only 27% made the right choice and said Obama is a Christian. Twenty-seven percent is usually the kind of number associated with a fringe element. So what's the takeaway from Pew? Mainstream Republicans -- the ones who make up the bulk of the party -- at best doubt Obama's faith and at worst are completely wrong about it.
And to be a Muslim is not a good thing in the eyes of the Republican mainstream. More than 60% of Republicans surveyed by CBS last month had an unfavorable view of the faith, compared with 25% of Democrats and 39% of the total sample.
So the takeaway is this: a large chunk of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, and more Republicans than not would say that being a Muslim is probably not a great character trait.
(Despite their trepidations about Obama's faith, however, Republican respondents to the Pew poll said Obama isn't using whatever religion they think he does have enough when making decisions. Forty percent of those surveyed said Obama relies "too little" on "religious beliefs to make policy decisions." Go figure.)
Earlier this week came a new poll from Newsweek, suggesting what all that mistaken belief in Obama's faith means for the majority of the GOP. A full 52% of Republicans surveyed by the magazine said Obama "probably" or "definitely sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." Nearly 60% of GOP respondents said "Obama favors the interests of Muslim Americans over other groups of Americans."
The numbers are very different from those of other voting blocs. Just 9% of Democrats said Obama has favored Muslims in his policies (that's the kind of number we generally think of when we think of fringe) and the vast majority of independents (62%) think Obama has been even-handed when it comes to helping Muslims.
Of course, politicians of all stripes have been on the opposition side of the most visible debate about Islam at the moment, that being the planned Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. But it's not a stretch to say Republicans are leading the fight against the project. And, as the polling shows, it's no longer a question that the mainstream GOP is more worried about Islam than other political groups in America.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/grand-old-islamophobes-polls-show-widespread-republican-concern-over-muslims.php?emailed=true
Evan McMorris-Santoro / Talking Points Memo
September 1, 2010
In a series of respected national polls this summer, great swaths of Republicans -- often encompassing the majority -- have shown themselves to be deeply worried about the prospect of Muslims gaining power in the U.S. and of President Obama's perceived connections to the faith. This isn't a fringy extreme or small but vocal minority. It's huge portions of the party that just recently was defending its use of the filibuster by pointing out all the Democrats who blocked Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s and pooh-poohed the idea of racial insensitivity among tea partiers. And now, lots and lots of Republicans across the nation are on the leading edge of an anti-Muslim paranoia that some U.S. allies abroad believe will harm American relations with the moderate Muslim world.
Meet the new Republican establishment: worried about Muslims, and worried even more that Obama might be one of them.
The biggest news from the August 19 Pew pollof national attitudes toward Obama was the huge jump in the number of Americans who now think Obama is a Muslim. Nearly a fifth of the population made the incorrect assumption about Obama's faith, a sizeable increase from the months after Obama was inaugurated. Among Republicans, the number was far higher. Thirty-one percent said Obama was a Muslim, and 39% said they didn't know what religion Obama practices.
Only 27% made the right choice and said Obama is a Christian. Twenty-seven percent is usually the kind of number associated with a fringe element. So what's the takeaway from Pew? Mainstream Republicans -- the ones who make up the bulk of the party -- at best doubt Obama's faith and at worst are completely wrong about it.
And to be a Muslim is not a good thing in the eyes of the Republican mainstream. More than 60% of Republicans surveyed by CBS last month had an unfavorable view of the faith, compared with 25% of Democrats and 39% of the total sample.
So the takeaway is this: a large chunk of Republicans think Obama is a Muslim, and more Republicans than not would say that being a Muslim is probably not a great character trait.
(Despite their trepidations about Obama's faith, however, Republican respondents to the Pew poll said Obama isn't using whatever religion they think he does have enough when making decisions. Forty percent of those surveyed said Obama relies "too little" on "religious beliefs to make policy decisions." Go figure.)
Earlier this week came a new poll from Newsweek, suggesting what all that mistaken belief in Obama's faith means for the majority of the GOP. A full 52% of Republicans surveyed by the magazine said Obama "probably" or "definitely sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world." Nearly 60% of GOP respondents said "Obama favors the interests of Muslim Americans over other groups of Americans."
The numbers are very different from those of other voting blocs. Just 9% of Democrats said Obama has favored Muslims in his policies (that's the kind of number we generally think of when we think of fringe) and the vast majority of independents (62%) think Obama has been even-handed when it comes to helping Muslims.
Of course, politicians of all stripes have been on the opposition side of the most visible debate about Islam at the moment, that being the planned Muslim community center in lower Manhattan. But it's not a stretch to say Republicans are leading the fight against the project. And, as the polling shows, it's no longer a question that the mainstream GOP is more worried about Islam than other political groups in America.
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/grand-old-islamophobes-polls-show-widespread-republican-concern-over-muslims.php?emailed=true
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tea Party RE: Net Neutrality, Unclear on the Concept...
Tea Partiers Say Net Neutrality Hurts Freedom
Evan McMorris-Santoro | August 16, 2010, 8:42AM
The tea party, a movement whose success on the grassroots level is in many ways attributable to the power of free and open Internet communications, is joining the growing conservative crusade against the FCC's plan to enforce net neutrality on internet service providers. According to one tea partier involved in the effort, the movement is opposing net neutrality because "it's an affront to free speech and free markets."
The push toward an Internet regulated by corporations rather than government seems to be a new part of the tea party agenda, with fears mounting that the Obama administration's push for net neutrality is, essentially, the next cap-and-trade, government health care takeover or any of the myriad other socialist plots of the past year and a half.
As The Hill's Sara Jerome reports, "35 Tea Party groups" across the country have joined a coalition of conservative groups calling on the FCC "not to boost its authority over broadband providers through a controversial process known as reclassification." The coalition recently sent a letter to the FCC calling on the government agency to keep its hand off the Internet.
One of the groups who signed the letter was the Fountain Hills Tea Party in Arizona. Like many, many grassroots tea party groups across the country, Fountain Hills has a Ning social networking site, as well as a more traditional homepage, both key to communicating with members. Supporters of net neutrality often suggest that it's smaller sites like these that would suffer the most under the tiered Internet plan ISPs are expected to establish if no government rules require them to treat all Internet traffic equally.
Much like the Netroots movement, the tea party's communication and information dissemination is fueled by online tools. In addition to Ning, tea partiers are avid tweeters, skypers, YouTubers and Facebookers. Yet their seeming embrace of an Internet divvied up and defined by corporate deals puts them at odds with their Internet-savvy colleagues on the left, who have clamored for net neutrality for years.
Peter Bordow, a leader of the Fountain Hills Tea Party, told me that he's not completely ready to make a firm judgment on net neutrality yet, but he leans toward opposing it. He has some experience with the issue, having provided Internet services to customers in the past. (The letter to the FCC is signed by Jeff Cohen, another leader of Fountain Hills. But Bordow told me that his group "did not, as an organization, sign any position or opinion letter of any kind regarding net neutrality.")
"To be completely honest, I have seen and heard fairly compelling arguments on both sides of this issue," he said Friday. "As a former ISP owner, and strong believer in the free market, I tend to oppose legislation that gives appointed bureaucrats the power to tell (and enforce) how companies design and deliver their services to their customers."
In an email, Bordow broke down his concerns as a web-friendly tea partier when it comes to net neutrality:
It is possible (and may in fact even be predictable) that this ability to selectively throttle traffic could be used to "unfairly" limit certain traffic (Internet destinations) to users. I just don't think it is the Government's responsibility (or within their enumerated powers) to legislate powers to appointed bureaucrats to decide "what is fair".
History shows us again and again that whenever the power to decide "what is fair" is given to Government officials and/or appointed bureaucrats, there is far more propensity and opportunity for abuse of this power. It is only when free citizens and the free market are able to flex their collective purchasing muscle that we can be sure that this power is not abused.
So there you have it: on balance, tea partiers would rather leave companies in charge of the Internet because, as Bordow says, that's safer than another government bureaucracy. Indeed, Jamie Radtke, a leader of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation and another signatory on the letter, told The Hill's Jerome that the Obama administration push for net neutrality was the same kind of government encroachment the tea party movement opposes on fronts like health care and direct intervention in the economy. Radtke said to expect the tea party to become a vocal part of the opposition to net neutrality rules as the debate continues to heat up.
"I think the clearest thing is it's an affront to free speech and free markets," Radtke told the paper. "There are so many assaults on individual liberties -- the EPA, net neutrality, cap-and-trade, card-check; the list goes on -- that sometimes the Tea Party doesn't know where to start its battles."
Check out the letter sent to the FCC (as first published by The Hill) here:
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/35854527
Evan McMorris-Santoro | August 16, 2010, 8:42AM
The tea party, a movement whose success on the grassroots level is in many ways attributable to the power of free and open Internet communications, is joining the growing conservative crusade against the FCC's plan to enforce net neutrality on internet service providers. According to one tea partier involved in the effort, the movement is opposing net neutrality because "it's an affront to free speech and free markets."
The push toward an Internet regulated by corporations rather than government seems to be a new part of the tea party agenda, with fears mounting that the Obama administration's push for net neutrality is, essentially, the next cap-and-trade, government health care takeover or any of the myriad other socialist plots of the past year and a half.
As The Hill's Sara Jerome reports, "35 Tea Party groups" across the country have joined a coalition of conservative groups calling on the FCC "not to boost its authority over broadband providers through a controversial process known as reclassification." The coalition recently sent a letter to the FCC calling on the government agency to keep its hand off the Internet.
One of the groups who signed the letter was the Fountain Hills Tea Party in Arizona. Like many, many grassroots tea party groups across the country, Fountain Hills has a Ning social networking site, as well as a more traditional homepage, both key to communicating with members. Supporters of net neutrality often suggest that it's smaller sites like these that would suffer the most under the tiered Internet plan ISPs are expected to establish if no government rules require them to treat all Internet traffic equally.
Much like the Netroots movement, the tea party's communication and information dissemination is fueled by online tools. In addition to Ning, tea partiers are avid tweeters, skypers, YouTubers and Facebookers. Yet their seeming embrace of an Internet divvied up and defined by corporate deals puts them at odds with their Internet-savvy colleagues on the left, who have clamored for net neutrality for years.
Peter Bordow, a leader of the Fountain Hills Tea Party, told me that he's not completely ready to make a firm judgment on net neutrality yet, but he leans toward opposing it. He has some experience with the issue, having provided Internet services to customers in the past. (The letter to the FCC is signed by Jeff Cohen, another leader of Fountain Hills. But Bordow told me that his group "did not, as an organization, sign any position or opinion letter of any kind regarding net neutrality.")
"To be completely honest, I have seen and heard fairly compelling arguments on both sides of this issue," he said Friday. "As a former ISP owner, and strong believer in the free market, I tend to oppose legislation that gives appointed bureaucrats the power to tell (and enforce) how companies design and deliver their services to their customers."
In an email, Bordow broke down his concerns as a web-friendly tea partier when it comes to net neutrality:
It is possible (and may in fact even be predictable) that this ability to selectively throttle traffic could be used to "unfairly" limit certain traffic (Internet destinations) to users. I just don't think it is the Government's responsibility (or within their enumerated powers) to legislate powers to appointed bureaucrats to decide "what is fair".
History shows us again and again that whenever the power to decide "what is fair" is given to Government officials and/or appointed bureaucrats, there is far more propensity and opportunity for abuse of this power. It is only when free citizens and the free market are able to flex their collective purchasing muscle that we can be sure that this power is not abused.
So there you have it: on balance, tea partiers would rather leave companies in charge of the Internet because, as Bordow says, that's safer than another government bureaucracy. Indeed, Jamie Radtke, a leader of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation and another signatory on the letter, told The Hill's Jerome that the Obama administration push for net neutrality was the same kind of government encroachment the tea party movement opposes on fronts like health care and direct intervention in the economy. Radtke said to expect the tea party to become a vocal part of the opposition to net neutrality rules as the debate continues to heat up.
"I think the clearest thing is it's an affront to free speech and free markets," Radtke told the paper. "There are so many assaults on individual liberties -- the EPA, net neutrality, cap-and-trade, card-check; the list goes on -- that sometimes the Tea Party doesn't know where to start its battles."
Check out the letter sent to the FCC (as first published by The Hill) here:
http://www.scribd.com/mobile/documents/35854527
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
$19.4 Million in pay, $100k in fines for CitiBank Exec.
Where Are The Prosecutions?
SEC Lets Citi Execs Go Free After $40 Billion Subprime Lie
Saturday 31 July 2010
by: Zach Carter | AlterNet | News Analysis
What is the penalty for bankers who tell $40 billion lies? Somewhere between nothing and a rounding-error on your bonus.
The SEC just hit two Citigroup executives with fines for concealing $40 billion in subprime mortgage debt from investors back in 2007. The biggest fine is going to Citi CFO Gary Crittenden, who will pay $100,000 to settle allegations that he screwed over his own investors. The year of the alleged wrongdoing, Crittenden took home $19.4 million. That’s right. Crittenden will lose one-half of one percent of his income from the year he hid a quagmire of bailout-inducing insanity from his own investors. That’s it. No indictment. No prison time. Crittenden doesn’t even have to formally acknowledge any wrongdoing.
In 2007, as financial markets were freaking out about the subprime situation, Citi repeatedly told its investors that it owned just $13 billion in subprime mortgage debt. It was true—if you didn’t count an additional $40 billion in subprime debt that the company was also holding onto.
Citi’s CEO at the time, Chuck Prince, has not been charged with anything. As Yves Smith emphasizes, all of the top financial officers of every major corporation are responsible for the accuracy of their quarterly financial statements. Lying on those statements is a federal crime. This is the sort of thing that securities fraud cases are built around.
The SEC’s own statements about what went on at Citi are damning. If the agency can make this kind of information public, they ought to be pursuing criminal prosecutions. The SEC says that senior Citi management had been collecting information about the company’s subprime situation as early as April 2007, but repeatedly cited the $13 billion figure to investors over the next six months, waiting to acknowledge the additional $40 billion in subprime debt until November 2007. The SEC also says that Crittenden knew the “full extent” of Citi’s subprime situation by September at the latest, but the company continued to cite $13 billion in earnings reports through October.
Citi’s subprime shenanigans had consequences for taxpayers, pushing the company to the brink of total collapse and prompting one of the biggest bailouts of 2008.
Phil Angelides and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission deserve a lot of credit for highlighting the absurdity of Citi’s actions in a hearing on April 7 of this year (the key passage starts on page 368 of this pdf transcript). Angelides’ line of questioning revealed that even Citi’s board knew that the subprime exposure was much greater than what the company was claiming in public. Citi’s board at the time included Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and architect of much of the deregulation that lead to the current crisis who took home $120 million for his work at Citi.
Either the SEC or the Justice Department could be pursuing criminal cases against Citi executives. What does it take to get the Justice Department’s attention on a financial fraud case? You have to launder $380 billion in drug money, and even then, DOJ lets you off with a slap on the wrist. The DOJ caught Wachovia doing just that, and the bank is getting off with a minor fine that won’t even make a dent in it’s second-quarter profits.
The Citi settlement is worse than a get-out-of-jail free card for Crittenden, Prince and their cohorts. The SEC actually fined Citi’s shareholders $75 million for the alleged wrongdoing of their executives. For some varieties of corporate misconduct, like Wachovia’s drug money laundering, hitting shareholders with the fine is appropriate. Wachovia’s money laundering operations directly enriched the company and its shareholders. This was not the case with Citi’s subprime scandal. Citi’s executives were hurting their own shareholders. Instead of meting out serious punishment to those executives, the SEC is fining Citi’s shareholders, the very people wronged in the incident.
This deference to the elites who wrecked the economy just keeps playing out. When Bank of America lied to its shareholders about billions of dollars in bonus payments it was about to make, the SEC decided to fine BofA shareholders and let the firm’s executives off the hook. The decision-makers at Wachovia who allowed the firm to funnel drug money despite repeated warnings by whistleblowers have not been indicted. Nobody at Washington Mutual has been indicted despite clear evidence of rampant mortgage fraud at the firm. Lehman Brothers’ repo 105 accounting scam is going unpunished, as are similar schemes at other banks including Bank of America. After much public relations flogging, the SEC let Goldman Sachs off easy.
More than 1,100 bankers went to jail in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis. Massive financial crises simply do not occur without widespread fraud. The failure to prosecute that fraud poses systemic risks for the global economy. With too-big-to-fail behemoths dominating the financial landscape, the prospect of prison is the only serious check on executives interested in cannibalizing the economy for personal gain. If the SEC and the Department of Justice continue to let executives get away with outrageous acts without even taking the case to court, our financial system is doomed to repeat the same excesses and abuses we’ve seen over the past decade. If Crittenden did what the SEC claims he did, he screwed over his own investors and scored a huge bonus in the process. Everybody on Wall Street understands the implications: breaking the law is a great way to make a lot of money. When a class of elites can thumb its nose at the law with impunity, the result is not only a threat to the efficiency of our economy, but a threat to the basic functioning of our democracy.
Zach Carter is AlterNet's economics editor. He is a fellow at Campaign for America's Future, and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine.
SEC Lets Citi Execs Go Free After $40 Billion Subprime Lie
Saturday 31 July 2010
by: Zach Carter | AlterNet | News Analysis
What is the penalty for bankers who tell $40 billion lies? Somewhere between nothing and a rounding-error on your bonus.
The SEC just hit two Citigroup executives with fines for concealing $40 billion in subprime mortgage debt from investors back in 2007. The biggest fine is going to Citi CFO Gary Crittenden, who will pay $100,000 to settle allegations that he screwed over his own investors. The year of the alleged wrongdoing, Crittenden took home $19.4 million. That’s right. Crittenden will lose one-half of one percent of his income from the year he hid a quagmire of bailout-inducing insanity from his own investors. That’s it. No indictment. No prison time. Crittenden doesn’t even have to formally acknowledge any wrongdoing.
In 2007, as financial markets were freaking out about the subprime situation, Citi repeatedly told its investors that it owned just $13 billion in subprime mortgage debt. It was true—if you didn’t count an additional $40 billion in subprime debt that the company was also holding onto.
Citi’s CEO at the time, Chuck Prince, has not been charged with anything. As Yves Smith emphasizes, all of the top financial officers of every major corporation are responsible for the accuracy of their quarterly financial statements. Lying on those statements is a federal crime. This is the sort of thing that securities fraud cases are built around.
The SEC’s own statements about what went on at Citi are damning. If the agency can make this kind of information public, they ought to be pursuing criminal prosecutions. The SEC says that senior Citi management had been collecting information about the company’s subprime situation as early as April 2007, but repeatedly cited the $13 billion figure to investors over the next six months, waiting to acknowledge the additional $40 billion in subprime debt until November 2007. The SEC also says that Crittenden knew the “full extent” of Citi’s subprime situation by September at the latest, but the company continued to cite $13 billion in earnings reports through October.
Citi’s subprime shenanigans had consequences for taxpayers, pushing the company to the brink of total collapse and prompting one of the biggest bailouts of 2008.
Phil Angelides and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission deserve a lot of credit for highlighting the absurdity of Citi’s actions in a hearing on April 7 of this year (the key passage starts on page 368 of this pdf transcript). Angelides’ line of questioning revealed that even Citi’s board knew that the subprime exposure was much greater than what the company was claiming in public. Citi’s board at the time included Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary and architect of much of the deregulation that lead to the current crisis who took home $120 million for his work at Citi.
Either the SEC or the Justice Department could be pursuing criminal cases against Citi executives. What does it take to get the Justice Department’s attention on a financial fraud case? You have to launder $380 billion in drug money, and even then, DOJ lets you off with a slap on the wrist. The DOJ caught Wachovia doing just that, and the bank is getting off with a minor fine that won’t even make a dent in it’s second-quarter profits.
The Citi settlement is worse than a get-out-of-jail free card for Crittenden, Prince and their cohorts. The SEC actually fined Citi’s shareholders $75 million for the alleged wrongdoing of their executives. For some varieties of corporate misconduct, like Wachovia’s drug money laundering, hitting shareholders with the fine is appropriate. Wachovia’s money laundering operations directly enriched the company and its shareholders. This was not the case with Citi’s subprime scandal. Citi’s executives were hurting their own shareholders. Instead of meting out serious punishment to those executives, the SEC is fining Citi’s shareholders, the very people wronged in the incident.
This deference to the elites who wrecked the economy just keeps playing out. When Bank of America lied to its shareholders about billions of dollars in bonus payments it was about to make, the SEC decided to fine BofA shareholders and let the firm’s executives off the hook. The decision-makers at Wachovia who allowed the firm to funnel drug money despite repeated warnings by whistleblowers have not been indicted. Nobody at Washington Mutual has been indicted despite clear evidence of rampant mortgage fraud at the firm. Lehman Brothers’ repo 105 accounting scam is going unpunished, as are similar schemes at other banks including Bank of America. After much public relations flogging, the SEC let Goldman Sachs off easy.
More than 1,100 bankers went to jail in the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis. Massive financial crises simply do not occur without widespread fraud. The failure to prosecute that fraud poses systemic risks for the global economy. With too-big-to-fail behemoths dominating the financial landscape, the prospect of prison is the only serious check on executives interested in cannibalizing the economy for personal gain. If the SEC and the Department of Justice continue to let executives get away with outrageous acts without even taking the case to court, our financial system is doomed to repeat the same excesses and abuses we’ve seen over the past decade. If Crittenden did what the SEC claims he did, he screwed over his own investors and scored a huge bonus in the process. Everybody on Wall Street understands the implications: breaking the law is a great way to make a lot of money. When a class of elites can thumb its nose at the law with impunity, the result is not only a threat to the efficiency of our economy, but a threat to the basic functioning of our democracy.
Zach Carter is AlterNet's economics editor. He is a fellow at Campaign for America's Future, and a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Wall Street's attempt to cut Social Security and Medicare
Derailing the Wall Street Attack on Social Security
Monday 10 May 2010
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Emboldened by the fact that none of them have gone to jail for their role in the financial crisis, the Wall Street gang is now gunning for Social Security and Medicare, the country's most important safety net programs. Led by investment banker Pete Peterson, this crew is spending more than a billion dollars to convince the public that slashing these programs is the only way to protect our children and grandchildren from poverty.
Peterson has so much money to spend on this crusade that he can't even use it all up in the normal practice of buying think tank studies that support his position. Therefore he has sought out other mechanisms to support his attack. For example, he has funded a nationwide propaganda push called "America Speaks," which is designed to get ordinary citizens to agree with his Social Security slashing plans by giving them such a limited range of options to deal with scary deficit projections that they have no alternative [http://usabudgetdiscussion.org/]
Peterson is also funding a high school curriculum in the hopes of indoctrinating the nation's young with his quest. He has even created a news service called the "Fiscal Times". The Fiscal Times intends to plant deficit scare stories in newspapers that are desperate for copy now that they have downsized their news staffs. Peterson's son assembled the staff from the large group of journalists displaced by the collapse of the newspaper industry.
Peterson even funded the creation of a game "budget ball" to convince young people that taking away grandma and grandpa's Social Security and Medicare can be fun. Of course we haven't said a word about all the politicians of both political parties that this crew owns.
When kids get scared watching a horror flick, we tell them to repeat: "it's only a movie." As the Peterson gang ramps up its anti-Social Security and Medicare crusade, it is important to remember: "it's just Wall Street propaganda."
They have lots of ways to make the deficits and debt look really really scary. Remember, these are professionals, just like the folks that make those Hollywood horror flicks. But, knowledge of some basic facts will protect you and your children.
First, there are no remotely plausible projections that do not show that our children and grandchildren will be far wealthier on average than we are today. The standard projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that real wages will be more than 50 percent higher in 2040 (after adjusting for inflation) than they are today. This means that even if our children faced a huge 5 percentage point increase in taxes, they would still be left with 40 percent more income on average than do workers today.
Insofar as our children face a threat of declining living standards it is from the growing inequality, which is redistributing most income gains upward. If the trend towards increasing inequality continues than many young people will have lower standards of living than their parents. However, intra-generational inequality gets little attention from Pete Peterson and his Wall Street gang.
The near-term (next 10 years) budget projections show deficits that will be comparable to what we had in the 80s and early 90s, once the economy recovers from the collapse of the housing bubble. The deficits projected for late in this decade are largely attributable to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the extra interest burden created by borrowing for these wars and the Bush tax cuts, as well as the deficits needed to boost the economy out of recession. The story of profligate spending – apart from on these wars – is an invention of the Wall Street gang.
Finally, the really big deficit horror stories coming from this crew are derived from projections that our broken health care system just keeps getting worse. The United States already spends more than twice as much per person on health care as the average for other wealthy countries. This gap to projected to grow ever larger over coming decades.
More than half of all health care spending is paid for through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, therefore if these health care projections prove accurate, we will have very serious budget problems. Of course, we will also have enormous economic problems since no one will have any money left over after paying for their health care.
This situation should emphasize the urgency of fixing the health care system, but the Peterson Wall Street gang instead sees it as a reason to yelp about the budget deficit. Fixing the health care system would mean hurting the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful interest groups aligned with the Wall Street gang. It is easy to design policies that would substantially reduce costs. However, the Peterson Wall Street gang would rather take away Medicare and Social Security benefits from retired workers than take away profits from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
As we get further into the year, the Wall Street crew is planning to escalate their propaganda. But don't let them scare you – the problem is that too much money is going to people like them, not Medicare, Social Security and other key programs that support the public.
http://www.truthout.org/derailing-wall-street-attack-social-security59340
Monday 10 May 2010
by: Dean Baker, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
Emboldened by the fact that none of them have gone to jail for their role in the financial crisis, the Wall Street gang is now gunning for Social Security and Medicare, the country's most important safety net programs. Led by investment banker Pete Peterson, this crew is spending more than a billion dollars to convince the public that slashing these programs is the only way to protect our children and grandchildren from poverty.
Peterson has so much money to spend on this crusade that he can't even use it all up in the normal practice of buying think tank studies that support his position. Therefore he has sought out other mechanisms to support his attack. For example, he has funded a nationwide propaganda push called "America Speaks," which is designed to get ordinary citizens to agree with his Social Security slashing plans by giving them such a limited range of options to deal with scary deficit projections that they have no alternative [http://usabudgetdiscussion.org/]
Peterson is also funding a high school curriculum in the hopes of indoctrinating the nation's young with his quest. He has even created a news service called the "Fiscal Times". The Fiscal Times intends to plant deficit scare stories in newspapers that are desperate for copy now that they have downsized their news staffs. Peterson's son assembled the staff from the large group of journalists displaced by the collapse of the newspaper industry.
Peterson even funded the creation of a game "budget ball" to convince young people that taking away grandma and grandpa's Social Security and Medicare can be fun. Of course we haven't said a word about all the politicians of both political parties that this crew owns.
When kids get scared watching a horror flick, we tell them to repeat: "it's only a movie." As the Peterson gang ramps up its anti-Social Security and Medicare crusade, it is important to remember: "it's just Wall Street propaganda."
They have lots of ways to make the deficits and debt look really really scary. Remember, these are professionals, just like the folks that make those Hollywood horror flicks. But, knowledge of some basic facts will protect you and your children.
First, there are no remotely plausible projections that do not show that our children and grandchildren will be far wealthier on average than we are today. The standard projections from the Congressional Budget Office show that real wages will be more than 50 percent higher in 2040 (after adjusting for inflation) than they are today. This means that even if our children faced a huge 5 percentage point increase in taxes, they would still be left with 40 percent more income on average than do workers today.
Insofar as our children face a threat of declining living standards it is from the growing inequality, which is redistributing most income gains upward. If the trend towards increasing inequality continues than many young people will have lower standards of living than their parents. However, intra-generational inequality gets little attention from Pete Peterson and his Wall Street gang.
The near-term (next 10 years) budget projections show deficits that will be comparable to what we had in the 80s and early 90s, once the economy recovers from the collapse of the housing bubble. The deficits projected for late in this decade are largely attributable to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the extra interest burden created by borrowing for these wars and the Bush tax cuts, as well as the deficits needed to boost the economy out of recession. The story of profligate spending – apart from on these wars – is an invention of the Wall Street gang.
Finally, the really big deficit horror stories coming from this crew are derived from projections that our broken health care system just keeps getting worse. The United States already spends more than twice as much per person on health care as the average for other wealthy countries. This gap to projected to grow ever larger over coming decades.
More than half of all health care spending is paid for through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, therefore if these health care projections prove accurate, we will have very serious budget problems. Of course, we will also have enormous economic problems since no one will have any money left over after paying for their health care.
This situation should emphasize the urgency of fixing the health care system, but the Peterson Wall Street gang instead sees it as a reason to yelp about the budget deficit. Fixing the health care system would mean hurting the insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful interest groups aligned with the Wall Street gang. It is easy to design policies that would substantially reduce costs. However, the Peterson Wall Street gang would rather take away Medicare and Social Security benefits from retired workers than take away profits from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
As we get further into the year, the Wall Street crew is planning to escalate their propaganda. But don't let them scare you – the problem is that too much money is going to people like them, not Medicare, Social Security and other key programs that support the public.
http://www.truthout.org/derailing-wall-street-attack-social-security59340
Sunday, May 2, 2010
"SHOW US YOUR PAPERS"
"SHOW US YOUR PAPERS", is downright UN-AMERICAN!
It's wrong in Arizona (click here to take action to protest Arizona's new immigration law) and it would be wrong for the rest of the county too:
Dems spark alarm with call for national ID card
By Alexander Bolton - 04/30/10
A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.
It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.
“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.
“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.
“America’s broken immigration system needs real, workable reform, but it cannot come at the expense of privacy and individual freedoms,” Calabrese added.
The ACLU said “if the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law, every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted.”
A source at one pro-immigration reform group described the proposal as “Orwellian.”
But Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.
“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.
“People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin added. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”
Implementing a nationwide identification program for every worker will be a difficult task.
The Social Security Administration has estimated that 3.6 million Americans would have to visit SSA field offices to correct mistakes in records or else risk losing their jobs.
Angela Kelley, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the biometric identification provision “will give some people pause.”
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/95235-democrats-spark-alarm-with-call-for-national-id-card
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It's wrong in Arizona (click here to take action to protest Arizona's new immigration law) and it would be wrong for the rest of the county too:
Dems spark alarm with call for national ID card
By Alexander Bolton - 04/30/10
A plan by Senate Democratic leaders to reform the nation’s immigration laws ran into strong opposition from civil liberties defenders before lawmakers even unveiled it Thursday.
Democratic leaders have proposed requiring every worker in the nation to carry a national identification card with biometric information, such as a fingerprint, within the next six years, according to a draft of the measure.
The proposal is one of the biggest differences between the newest immigration reform proposal and legislation crafted by late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
The national ID program would be titled the Believe System, an acronym for Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.
It would require all workers across the nation to carry a card with a digital encryption key that would have to match work authorization databases.
“The cardholder’s identity will be verified by matching the biometric identifier stored within the microprocessing chip on the card to the identifier provided by the cardholder that shall be read by the scanner used by the employer,” states the Democratic legislative proposal.
The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil liberties defender often aligned with the Democratic Party, wasted no time in blasting the plan.
“Creating a biometric national ID will not only be astronomically expensive, it will usher government into the very center of our lives. Every worker in America will need a government permission slip in order to work. And all of this will come with a new federal bureaucracy — one that combines the worst elements of the DMV and the TSA,” said Christopher Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel.
“America’s broken immigration system needs real, workable reform, but it cannot come at the expense of privacy and individual freedoms,” Calabrese added.
The ACLU said “if the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law, every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted.”
A source at one pro-immigration reform group described the proposal as “Orwellian.”
But Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who has worked on the proposal and helped unveil it at a press conference Thursday, predicted the public has become more comfortable with the idea of a national identification card.
“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.
“People understand that in this vulnerable world, we have to be able to present identification,” Durbin added. “We want it to be reliable, and I think that’s going to help us in this debate on immigration.”
Implementing a nationwide identification program for every worker will be a difficult task.
The Social Security Administration has estimated that 3.6 million Americans would have to visit SSA field offices to correct mistakes in records or else risk losing their jobs.
Angela Kelley, vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, said the biometric identification provision “will give some people pause.”
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/95235-democrats-spark-alarm-with-call-for-national-id-card
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------
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Marijuana Legalization by David Sirota
Marijuana Legalization: The Pay-Any-Price Principle
Saturday 10 April 2010
by: David Sirota, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed
No doubt this was why the economic case against the Iraq invasion failed. To many, the war debate seemed to pose a binary question: debt or mushroom clouds? And when itís a scuffle between money arguments and security arguments (even dishonest security arguments), security wins every time.
Call this the Pay-Any-Price Principle -- an axiom that has impacted all of America's wars, and now, most poignantly, its War on Drugs. When faced with criticism of budget-busting prosecution and incarceration costs, law enforcement agencies and private prison interests have successfully depicted their cause as a willingness to pay any price to jail dealers of hard narcotics.
Of course, data undermine that story line. In 2008, the FBI reported that 82 percent of drug arrests were for possession -- not sales or manufacturing -- and almost half of those arrests were for marijuana, not hard drugs.
Fortunately, these numbers are seeping into the public consciousness. Gallup's latest survey shows record support for marijuana legalization, as more Americans see the Drug War for what it really is: an ideological and profit-making crusade by the Arrest-and-Incarceration Complex against a substance that is, according to most physicians, less toxic than alcohol.
Considering both the public opinion shift and the facts about marijuana, this should be the moment that drug policy reformers drop their budget attacks and flip the security argument on their opponents -- specifically, by pointing out how safety is actually compromised by the status quo.
The good news is that some activists are making this very case.
Last week, students at 80 colleges asked their schools to reduce penalties for marijuana possession so that they are no greater than penalties for alcohol possession. It's a request with safety in mind: According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, alcohol use by college kids contributes to roughly 1,700 deaths, 600,000 injuries and 97,000 sexual assaults every year. By contrast, "The use of marijuana itself has not been found to contribute to any deaths, there has never been a single fatal marijuana overdose in history (and) all objective research on marijuana has also concluded that it does not contribute to injuries, assaults, sexual abuse, or violent or aggressive behavior," as the group Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation notes.
"It's time we stop driving students to drink and let them make the rational, safer choice to use marijuana," said one student.
Now the bad news: Not every reformer is on message.
In California, where polls show most citizens support cannabis legalization, The New York Times reports that backers of a legalization ballot measure "will not dwell on assertions of marijuana's harmlessness" but "rather on (the) cold cash" pot can generate for depleted state coffers.
The problem is not these advocates' facts -- California officials confirm that legal marijuana could generate more than $1 billion in tax revenue. The problem goes back to the Pay-Any-Price Principle.
By downplaying the argument about giving society a safer alternative to alcohol, California's legalization advocates are letting drug warriors reclaim the language of security, to the point where even liberal Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer's campaign now trumpets her opposition to the initiative on the grounds that "she shares the (safety) concerns of police chiefs, sheriffs and other law enforcement officials."
A career politician, Boxer understands that if this battle reverts to the old tax-revenue-versus-safety fight, voters will choose safety. In other words, she gets the Pay-Any-Price Principle.
To maximize this opportune moment for drug policy changes, every reformer must appreciate that principle, too -- and finally confront it head on.
David Sirota is the author of the best-selling books "Hostile Takeover" and "The Uprising." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado and blogs at OpenLeft.com. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com or follow him on Twitter @davidsirota.
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