Tag: ek Politics

Why are Democrats even suggesting the inflation adjustment be reduced? Republicans aren’t asking for it. Not even Paul Ryan’s draconian budget includes it.- Robert Reich

Sigh. So Obama is going with the "chained CPI" thing in his latest proposal – changing the price index used for Social Security cost adjustments. This is, purely and simply, a benefit cut.

Does it make sense in policy terms? No.

…

So what’s this about? The answer, I fear, is that Obama is still trying to win over the Serious People, by showing that he’s willing to do what they consider Serious – which just about always means sticking it to the poor and the middle class. The idea is that they will finally drop the false equivalence, and admit that he’s reasonable while the GOP is mean-spirited and crazy.

But it won’t happen. Watch the Washington Post editorial page over the next few days. I hereby predict that it will damn Obama with faint praise, saying that while it’s a small step in the right direction, of course it’s inadequate – and anyway, Obama is to blame for Republican intransigence, because he could make them accept a Grand Bargain that includes major revenue increases if only he would show Leadership (TM).

Oh, and wanna bet that Republicans soon start running ads saying that Obama wants to cut your Social Security?- Paul Krugman

And why not Paul?  Obama really does want to cut your Social Security.  He just said so.

When what little history we have left is written it will be recorded the Democratic Party had a chance to crush the crazy racist Republican Party like a bug.

And they refused to do it because they basically agree with it’s plutocratic policy of theft from regular citizens.

Any legislator who votes for this will lose their job and THEY DESERVE IT!

‘Electoral Victory’ my ass.

Brittney Griner Deserves A Real NBA Tryout, Not A Publicity Stunt

By Travis Waldron, ThinkProgress

Apr 3, 2013 at 4:54 pm

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told ESPN this morning that his team would consider drafting Brittney Griner, the 6-foot-8 standout for Baylor University’s women’s basketball team, in the second round of June’s NBA Draft.

“If she is the best on the board, I will take her,” Cuban told ESPN’s Tim McMahon Tuesday night. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it already. Would I do it? Right now, I’d lean toward yes, just to see if she can do it. You never know unless you give somebody a chance, and it’s not like the likelihood of any late-50s draft pick has a good chance of making it.”

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That chance, however, should be a real one, not a publicity stunt aimed at selling tickets, as the Jazz selection of Harris admittedly was. The perception of female athletes is already too skewed by an inherently sexist world of sports to give Griner a cynical shot – or worse yet – a cynical spot on the team. Take, for instance, the immediate reaction ESPN received when it promoted Cuban’s comments on Twitter with the hashtag #GrinerNBA.

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The disgusting responses #GrinerNBA received aren’t just aimed at Brittney Griner, though. They’re emblematic of a sports culture, particularly among fans, that simultaneously objectifies the appearances of female athletes and rejects them as incapable athletes. It’s no secret that the bodies of female athletes (and women in general) are objectified in ways that men’s bodies rarely, if ever, are. And women like Griner who don’t fit the “sexy” model are instantly judged as not sufficiently feminine. That helps foster stereotypes of female athletes that create problems in their own sports and drive women and girls not to sports but away from them. It also prevents us from seeing women like Griner as the phenomenal athletes they are, from appreciating their skills and accomplishments as athletic triumphs and not as diminished products because of how they look or because they aren’t playing the men’s game.

That we have so far to go in viewing Griner and other female athletes on their own merits, both as sportswomen and as people, is precisely why her NBA tryout, if it happens, can’t be a cynical stunt. Her success or failure should be based on her merits alone, and if it is, neither Griner nor the NBA will be any worse because of it. Cuban seems sincere. That’s good, because a real chance, no matter success or failure, will continue the fight to slowly break down the barriers and perceptions that face female athletes.

Wall Street wins again

By David Dayen, Salon

Wednesday, Feb 13, 2013 12:26 PM EST

A year ago, President Obama gestured toward the first lady’s box at the State of the Union address at Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York.  Schneiderman had just agreed to co-chair the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities working group, an initiative between state and federal law enforcement officials and bank regulators, designed to investigate and prosecute fraudulent Wall Street activity that led to both the creation of the housing bubble and its collapse. In exchange, Schneiderman dropped his objections to a settlement over some of the banks’ fraudulent post-crash activity, particularly around fraud in foreclosure processing.

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Schneiderman’s “task force” (a generous appellation) was merely a politically motivated shell organization grafted onto that public relations strategy.  This was evident almost from the moment of the announcement, but the coalition of self-proclaimed bank accountability advocates, who had backed the administration into a corner over the lack of prosecutions, decided to align with Schneiderman and his kabuki task force, losing whatever leverage they may have had.  If those same groups who feel “betrayed” and “lied to” had stayed on the outside and shamed those in power into action, we would probably have more accountability today.

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Maybe these groups who claim to be interested in accountability should have recognized the value of what pressured the White House to set up the diversionary tactic of a task force in the first place: public shaming.  Last month’s Frontline documentary “The Untouchables” has had arguably more of an impact on reviving moribund financial fraud cases than anything else.  Within a couple of weeks of its premiere, the head of the criminal enforcement division, Lanny Breuer, announced he would step down.  Then, DoJ suddenly decided to sue credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s over its conflict of interest in rating clearly fraudulent securities as safe assets, a case it had been investigating for two years.  You can view this as an accident of timing; it seems more like a direct response.  Shaming has done far more than a pretend task force, though that’s admittedly a low bar.  You would think outside pressure groups would have recognized the virtue of outside pressure instead of trying to play an inside game.

President Obama didn’t mention the task force in this year’s State of the Union, though he did say that homeowners now “enjoy stronger protections than ever before.”  He also made reference to a Burmese man, who, in reference to a presidential visit to Rangoon, reportedly said, “There is justice and law in the United States. I want our country to be like that.”  Hopefully they don’t get news about the “task force” in Rangoon; I wouldn’t want to burst the man’s dreams.

The Greatest Disappointment

By Mike Lux, Crooks and Liars

April 01, 2013 06:00 PM

So there are two questions that Obama loyalists might ask about this report. The first is whether all this negativity is truly deserved. The second is, why are Wall Street accountability activists so obsessed with this issue?

On the first question, I am sad to say the answer is mostly yes. If I had been writing the report, I would have been more positive about the accomplishments of CFPB, would have given the administration more credit on a few things in terms of Dodd-Frank and a few of the appointments they have made, would have pointed out that Republicans are doing everything they can to starve regulatory agencies of resources, and being the loyal Democrat I am, I would have written the report more diplomatically. But when you add up all the results of the Obama administration’s dealings with Wall Street, it is hard to avoid the fact that life hasn’t changed much at all for the big banks, and that they continue to make money hand over fist while the rest of the economy is stuck in the mood. It is hard to think of any one of the report’s bullets listed above that aren’t accurate. Most damning of all are these absolutely true words in the report’s conclusion:

“The irony in all this is that the areas in which the Obama Administration has been found most wanting by critics for its handling of Wall Street accountability are not the result of intractable differences with a Congress hamstrung in inaction. Instead, they are areas almost wholly under the sole control of the Administration through its executive powers, and carried out largely through cabinet agencies.“

On the second question, the reason Wall Street activists are so obsessed with the lack of toughness toward Wall Street is that Wall Street is ground zero for the rest of the problems in our economy. These monstrously huge mega-banks completely dominate our economy, siphoning off money that might otherwise go into productive uses in the mainstreet economy so that the big bankers can keep speculating away. And when they screw up in ways that hurt the rest of us, even when they blatantly violate the law, the fact that they are never seriously punished means they have no incentive to stop. Until the Obama administration fixes this problem, the rest of the economy is going to keep suffering, and the risk of future financial meltdowns will keep growing.

Et tu digby?

It means something that Mike would write this. He’s been trying hard for a long time to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on this. It’s tough to go up against Wall Street. But there was no longer any other way to look at this once we heard the Attorney General say this under questioning from the Senate:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy, and I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.

Evidently, federal law enforcement is yet another area in which the Executive Branch has no power — or, at least, feels it is injudicious to use it. This instance of presidential impotence is especially difficult because it pretty much says that even if the congress were to make new laws, the Justice Department still couldn’t enforce them because of these alleged threats to the economy. So we’ll just have to put up with the looting and wait for the house of cards to collapse again. Because otherwise the house of cards will collapse.

The lesser of two evils IS STILL EVIL!  Dave and Cenk were on it.  Where were you?

Last time I looked the Veteran’s Administration was part of the Executive Branch.

Run by…

Oh, you already guessed.  You people are reading ahead.

Too soon?

So you’ve been reading about those bare shelves at WalMart.  Even I thought it was due to their vendors getting tired of being squeezed and late payments (contracts typically call for payment within 90 days of delivery, WalMart waits until the last possible moment to cut a check- always).

Well, there’s another reason that should have occured to me as a former supervisor of shipping and receiving (that’s the fancy title I put on my resume to point out I ran the loading dock and stockrooms, and handled inventory from the back of the truck to the sales floor along with returns to warehouse).

I seldom appeal to expertise, but I’ve seen this first hand.

Customers Flee Wal-Mart Empty Shelves for Target, Costco

By Renee Dudley, Bloomberg Business

Mar 26, 2013 9:47 AM ET

During recent visits … she failed to find more than a dozen basic items, including certain types of face cream, cold medicine, bandages, mouthwash, hangers, lamps and fabrics.

The cosmetics section “looked like someone raided it.”

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“If it’s not on the shelf, I can’t buy it,” she said. “You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are other places to go.”

But, but it’s there in the store!  We have the paperwork to prove it!

“Our in stock levels are up significantly in the last few years, so the premise of this story, which is based on the comments of a handful of people, is inaccurate and not representative of what is happening in our stores across the country,” Brooke Buchanan, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement. “Two-thirds of Americans shop in our stores each month because they know they can find the products they are looking for at low prices.”

Well then where is it?

It’s not as though the merchandise isn’t there. It’s piling up in aisles and in the back of stores because Wal-Mart doesn’t have enough bodies to restock the shelves, according to interviews with store workers.

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At the Kenosha, Wisconsin, Wal-Mart where Mary Pat Tifft has worked for nearly a quarter-century, merchandise ready for the sales floor remains on pallets and in steel bins lining the floor of the back room — an area so full that “no passable aisles” remain, she said. Meanwhile, the front of the store is increasingly barren, Tifft said. That landscape has worsened over the past several years as workers who leave aren’t replaced, she said.

“There’s a lot of voids out there, a lot of voids,” said Tifft, 58, who oversees grocery deliveries and is a member of OUR Walmart, a union-backed group seeking to improve working conditions at the discount chain. “Customers come in, they can’t find what they’re looking for, and they’re leaving.”

Years ago, supervisors drilled a message into employees’ heads: “In the door and to the floor,” Tifft said. That mantra now seems impossible to execute.

…

“The merchandise is in the store, it just can’t make the jump from the shelf in the back to the one in the front,” said Falletta, who works the second shift. “There’s not the people to do it.”

Well why is that do you suppose?

I’m sure you will be reading and watching with great interest today the testimony of Ina Drew in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.

(Annoying auto starting video now below the fold- ek)

The Fail Whale trade is a bit complicated in it’s details, but basically JPMorgan Chase was selling insurance against a basket of corporate bonds that made up a fairly regularly (as these things go) traded index (like the Dow, but not the same companies and not common stock) and was supposedly hedging these bets with actual positions in the underlying assets and making money off the spread between the price for the insurance and the cost of the bonds.

Esoteric but perfectly sound and legal (under today’s laws).

The problem was that in order to manipulate the much smaller market for the insurance and increase the spread by simulating demand (sockpuppets), JPMorgan Chase ended up in a position where it was net bearish on the bonds (i.e. betting there would be a default so it could collect the insurance from itself) thereby increasing its need to obtain bonds in the regular market that it did not totally control in order to offset potential losses should the bonds in fact do better than expected and rise in price.

And then the wolves came in.

You can’t throw large chunks of money around a small casino without somebody noticing and a lot of regular players saw the increase in demand for bonds and started buying them up, raising the price even more and making JPMorgan Chase’s insurance nearly worthless.

Now on the money losing end of the trade JPMorgan Chase tried unwinding it, selling their sockpuppet positions in the insurance for pennies on the dollar and liquidating their hedge assets at what they thought was the top of the underlying market.

Only the wolves were there first and valuations dropped like a stone to their normal equilibrium and JPMorgan Chase ended up with an approximately $6.5 BILLION loss.

Yay for our side.  Way to stick it to the man.

But wait, there’s more.

The funds JPMorgan Chase used were taxpayer insured depositor’s accounts, which is illegal.  Manipulating markets using sockpuppets is illegal.

AND to cover up these crimes JPMorgan Chase started issuing fraudulent statements to Government Regulators, which is illegal; AND TO ITS VERY OWN STOCKHOLDERS AND INVESTORS, which is illegal.

And Jamie Dimon knew all about it and lied to Congress, which is illegal.

Will anyone go to jail?  Who’s naive now Kay?

Senate investigation finds JP Morgan hid mistakes as trade losses grew

Heidi Moore, The Guardian

Friday 15 March 2013 04.38 EDT

JP Morgan’s $6.2bn London Whale trading debacle was born out of secretive trades and creative bookkeeping as the bank attempted to limit losses using a practice that one regulator called “make believe voodoo magic”, a Senate investigation has concluded.

The report by the Senate subcommittee on investigations, published on Thursday, detailed a series of failures in which accounts were hidden and trades were valued incorrectly to minimize losses. It also alleged that regulators were kept in the dark, a head trader’s concerns went unheeded and a $51bn trading portfolio ballooned to $157bn in three months.

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The report also concludes that JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, whose bonus was cut in half to $11.5m last year, knew about the sustained trading losses when he dismissed the incident as a “tempest in a teapot” in April 2012.

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The investigation paints a picture of a growing debacle that started with the bank’s attempt to reduce the risk of its trades so that it would have a stronger capital cushion and look powerful to regulators. It started with the overconfidence of traders after a lucky bet made about $400m on the bankruptcy of American Airlines. Drew applauded the traders.

They suffered from that overconfidence when they bet incorrectly on the bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak in January 2012. That kicked off nine straight days of trading losses that cost the bank at least around $50 million. One trader in the CIO told the Senate committee that “they were told not to let an Eastman Kodak-type loss happen again.” As the traders scrambled to keep the trades – which were designed to benefit if there was a financial crisis – they found that the improving bond market worked against them. Between January and March 2012, it didn’t have one profitable day in its CIO portfolio, according to the report.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is accused of hiding information about big losses

By Danielle Douglas, Washington Post

Mar 15, 2013 12:59 AM EDT

Washington dealt a double blow Thursday to JPMorgan Chase as a Senate report accused its iconic chief executive of hiding information about a massive loss from regulators while the Federal Reserve unexpectedly said it had found a “weakness” in the bank’s capital plans.

The twin announcements, both unveiled in the late afternoon, escalates the problems for JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank and arguably its most prestigious. Once viewed as the strongest bank to emerge from the 2008 financial crisis, the firm on Thursday watched its weaker rivals, Bank of America and Citigroup, sail through the Fed’s examination.

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The Senate report is the first to suggest that JPMorgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon was less than forthright with regulators as he learned of the mounting losses. To date, Dimon has acknowledged that the bank failed to manage its risks, which allowed the bad trades to persist.

The report takes the bank to task for hiding losses for three months last year, overstating the value of its trading positions and ignoring red flags. When regulators grew concerned, JPMorgan withheld information about the nature of the portfolio, Senate investigators say.

JPMorgan Report Piles Pressure on Dimon in Too-Big Debate

By Dawn Kopecki, Clea Benson & Hugh Son, Bloomberg News

Mar 15, 2013 10:05 AM ET

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s efforts to hide trading losses, outlined in a Senate report yesterday, probably will ignite debate over whether the largest U.S. bank is too big to manage and ratchet up pressure on Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon to surrender his role as chairman.

Dimon misled investors and dodged regulators as losses escalated on a “monstrous” derivatives bet, according to a 301-page report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The bank “mischaracterized high-risk trading as hedging,” and withheld key information from its primary regulator, sometimes at Dimon’s behest, investigators found. Managers manipulated risk models and pressured traders to overvalue their positions in an effort to hide growing losses.

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The Senate report cited Bloomberg stories published last year disclosing that Dimon, 57, had transformed the CIO in the past five years from a conservative investment operation into a much larger, high-risk trading profit center, and that he exempted the office from rigorous scrutiny.

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JPMorgan’s credit portfolio more than tripled from a net notional size of $51 billion in late 2011 to $157 billion by the time trading was shut down in late March of last year, the report says. Iksil acquired more than $80 billion, or about 50 percent, of a thinly traded credit index, which made it difficult to find buyers, according to the subcommittee.

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Iksil’s book breached all five of the CIO’s internal risk measures, and with increasing frequency from January through April, totaling more than 330 violations, the report said. Instead of investigating the cause or reducing its danger, traders, risk managers and executives criticized the metrics as inaccurate and “pushed for model changes that would portray credit derivative trading activities as less risky,” the report said.

On Jan. 30, 2012, the bank began using a new formula for so-called value at risk that cut Iksil’s estimated possible losses by about half. He had breached the limit under the prior model.

“The new VaR model not only ended the SCP’s breach, but also freed the CIO traders to add tens of billions of dollars in new credit derivatives to the SCP which, despite the supposedly lowered risk, led to additional massive losses,” the report said, referring to the synthetic credit portfolio. That model was later scrapped.

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JPMorgan misled the public by hiding losses, mismarking trades, withholding information from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and “lying to investigators by saying that JPMorgan was fully transparent to regulators regarding the mounting losses when it was not,” (Senator John) McCain told reporters at a press briefing.

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“None of those statements made on April 13 to the public, to investors, to analysts were true,” (Senator Carl) Levin said. “The bank also neglected to disclose on that day that the portfolio had massive positions that were hard to exit, that they were violating in massive numbers key risk limits.”

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Statements and regulatory filings by the bank “raise questions about the timeliness, completeness and accuracy of information” given to investors, the committee said in a section on securities laws and their requirements about disclosing information. The Securities and Exchange Commission has been conducting its own investigation of the bank’s losses.

The evidence suggests the bank “initially mischaracterized or omitted mention” of the portfolio’s problems partly because it “likely understood the market would move against it if even more of those facts were known,” the report says.

(h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Live-Blogging Senate Hearing Tomorrow, When J.P. Morgan Chase Will Be Torn a New One

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

POSTED: March 14, 5:00 PM ET

Why should we care if a private bank, or more to the point a private banker like Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, loses a few billion here and there? What business is it of ours? And why did we have to have congressional hearings about it last year?

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What the report describes is an epic breakdown in the supervision of so-called “Too Big to Fail” banks.

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If the information in the report is correct, Chase followed the behavioral model of every corrupt/failing hedge fund this side of Bernie Madoff and Sam Israel, only it did it on a much more enormous scale and did it with federally-insured deposits. The fund used (in part) federally-insured money to create, in essence, a kind of super high-risk hedge fund that gambled on credit derivatives, and just like Sam Israel did with his Bayou fund, when it got in trouble, it resorted to fudging its numbers in order to disguise the fact that it was losing money hand over fist.

Chase for years hid the very existence of this operation from banking regulators and lied about the purpose of the fund (saying it was purely a hedging operation when it stopped being a hedge and instead became a wild directional gamble), and it also changed the way it calculated the fund’s value once it started to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Even worse, the bank’s own internal auditors signed off on the phoney-baloney accounting of this Synthetic Credit Portfolio (SCP), at one point allowing it to claim $719 million in losses when the real number was closer to $1.2 billion.

How did they do this? In the years leading up to January of 2012, Chase used a standard, plain-vanilla method to price the derivative instruments in its portfolio. The method was known as “mid-market pricing”: if on any given day you had a range of offers for a certain instrument – the “bid-ask” range – “mid-market pricing” just meant splitting the difference and calling the value the numerical middle in that range.

But in the beginning of 2012, Chase started to lose lots of money on the derivatives in its SCP, and just decided to change its valuations, that they weren’t in the business of doing “mids” anymore.

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If you can fight through the jargon, what this basically means is that Chase decided to go into the fiction business and invent a new way to value its crazy-ass derivative bets, using, among other things, a computerized model the company designed itself called “P&L predict” which subjectively calculated the value of the entire fund toward the end of every business day.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same story we’ve heard over and over again in the financial-scandal era, from Enron to WorldCom to Lehman Brothers – when the going gets tough, and huge companies start to lose money, they change their own accounting methodologies to hide their screw-ups, passing the buck over and over again until the mess explodes into the public’s lap.

Emily and Richard think watching MSNBC and Current make them “liberal”.

Read my blogs?  Nobody ever does.  Why should I expect more?  And Brookings?  Heh.

Very Serious == Constantly Wrong and unpunished for it.

(h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Marches of Folly

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: March 17, 2013

Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.

Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake – that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war – having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted – left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.

So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.

The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents – but they were out of the mainstream.

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What we should have learned from the Iraq debacle was that you should always be skeptical and that you should never rely on supposed authority. If you hear that “everyone” supports a policy, whether it’s a war of choice or fiscal austerity, you should ask whether “everyone” has been defined to exclude anyone expressing a different opinion. And policy arguments should be evaluated on the merits, not by who expresses them; remember when Colin Powell assured us about those Iraqi W.M.D.’s?

Iraq War: An Eight-Year Massive Crime-But the US Political Class & Press Ask, ‘Was It Worth It?’

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday March 18, 2013 12:29 pm

Let’s stay away from discussion of whether war was a “mistake” or not. It cannot be a “mistake” because the administration of President George W. Bush did not just happen to stumble into Iraq and bomb it with a campaign of “shock and awe.” The administration spent months constructing a case for war knowing there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein posed any imminent threat yet they fabricated arguments to convince government agencies, the political class, the press and the public that this was a war that had to be waged. All of which makes the war a crime, not a mistake.

There should be reflection on the crime that was the Iraq war. Throughout the week, government documents revealing the conspiracy and corruption should be highlighted. Stories from Iraqis who were subjected to bombings, torture, arbitrary detention, night raids, Iraqi security forces backed by the US that conducted themselves as death squads, abusive and exploitative private contractors, corruption that propped up Iraq’s ruling elites, etc, should all receive attention.

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President Barack Obama’s administration, Congress and others in government do not want to see a real outpouring of empathy and remorse for what happened. That would undermine the idea of America, the myth of  the country being a force for good in the world.

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Is it worth it that the US invaded and left behind a country where torture is pervasive? Is it worth it that the US only worsened sectarian tensions and even played groups against each other to get results desired and now that is fueling violence? Is it worth it that all war crimes committed in Iraq have gone unpunished; that few responsible for murder and torture have been held accountable, particularly those who were serving as high-ranking government officials and authorized or looked the other way when such acts were committed?

Not only did Iraq war hawks push America into war, but the House and Senate, including Democrats, authorized war. The media notoriously signed on to the war. People in power who could have spoken up and sections of society that could have been more outspoken were silent.

No persons have ever been held accountable for the war. The organization of a truth commission, where Bush administration officials and others complicit or responsible for the criminal Iraq war are exposed and shamed, has not occurred.

So last year TheMomCat and my doggie friend and I went to an Irish Festival and I insisted on picking up this cheap tacky shamrock pin.

This is why.

You can listen to it here.

Well, maybe not them but I certainly am.  The U.S. Government is finally showing signs of regulating Arctic drilling.  In a blistering report Secretary of the Interior Salazar has forced Shell to resubmit plans for Arctic Ocean oil exploration before they’re allowed to start again, further putting into question the profits to a company that has had to cancel the 2013 season already due to catastrophic equipment failure.

When last I wrote 2 of their 4 main pieces of equipment were on a slow boat to South Korea and one had been crushed like a bug.

In recent developments-

Shell barred from returning to drill for oil in Arctic without overhaul

Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Thursday 14 March 2013 20.13 EDT

Shell “screwed up” drilling for oil in Arctic waters and will not be allowed back without a comprehensive overhaul of its plans, the Obama administration said on Thursday.

A government review found the oil company was not prepared for the extreme conditions in the Arctic, which resulted in a series of blunders and accidents culminating in the New Year’s Eve grounding of its drill rig.

Shell announced a “pause” in Arctic drilling last month. But Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, told a reporters’ conference call that the company will not be allowed to return without producing a much more detailed plan, one tailored specifically to the harsh Arctic conditions.

“Shell will not be able to move forward into the Arctic to do any kind of exploration unless they have this integrated management plan put in place,” said Salazar, in one of his last acts before standing down as interior secretary. “It’s that plain and simple.”

The findings of the review could mean further costs and delays for Shell, which has spent years and $4.5bn securing permits to drill in Arctic waters.

Salazar on Arctic drilling: ‘Shell screwed up in 2012’

By Kim Murphy, Los Angeles Times

March 14, 2013, 6:15 p.m.

“Shell screwed up in 2012, and we’re not going to let them screw up whenever they [resume] … unless they have these systems in place,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said after a new report found that Shell’s contractors were repeatedly ill-prepared to meet the demands of operating in the harsh Arctic environment.

“Before Shell is allowed to move forward, they’re going to have to show to the Department of Interior that they have met the standards that have been required,” Salazar said.

Although Shell has spent nearly $5 billion preparing to drill in the oil and gas-rich Chukchi and Beaufort seas – the most promising oil reserves in the U.S., outside the Gulf of Mexico – the company was unable to fully drill a single well during its initial season.

…

Salazar said the company would be required to submit a comprehensive plan describing each phase of its operations, from preparations through demobilization. The department will also require a full, third-party management system audit to ensure the company’s systems are “appropriately tailored for Arctic conditions.”

Report says Shell unprepared for Arctic drilling

AP

Posted on March 14, 2013

Environmental groups were quick to criticize the 30-page report, calling it insufficient despite recognizing Shell’s failings as unacceptable. The groups also knocked the Interior Department for failing to take responsibility for letting a company that was not ready for the challenges it met proceed in the first place.

“By and large, the review told us two things we already knew: Companies are woefully unprepared for the remote and unforgiving Alaskan waters, and our government improperly awarded Shell approvals to operate there,” Susan Murray, Oceana’s Pacific deputy vice president, said in a statement. “The Arctic Ocean is unique and important. Americans deserve better care and stewardship than oil companies or the government have provided.”

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Shell spent $2.1 billion on petroleum leases in the Chukchi Sea in 2008 and estimates that it has spent $5 billion on Arctic drilling. The company contends that it can drill safely. Its two drill ships completed top-hole drilling on two wells last year, but the company was bedeviled by problems.

The company’s spill response plan required that a response barge arrive on site before drill bits dug into petroleum-bearing zones. That never happened. A containment dome, a key piece of equipment, was damaged in testing off the Washington coast.

Seasonal ice in the Chukchi Sea delayed Shell vessels from moving north. When Chukchi drilling began in September, a major ice floe forced Shell’s drill ship off a prospect less than 24 hours later.

When the drilling season ended, the Coast Guard announced that it had found 16 safety violations on the Noble Discoverer, which drilled in the Chukchi, when it docked in Seward, Alaska. The Coast Guard has turned over its investigation of the vessel to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The problems crested in late December when the drill vessel Kulluk, a circular barge with a diameter as long as nearly three basketball courts, broke away from its towing vessel on its way to a shipyard in Washington state.

It ran aground off a remote Alaska Island near Kodiak Island and requires repairs.

Interior Dept. Warns Shell on Arctic Drilling

By JOHN M. BRODER, The New York Times

Published: March 14, 2013

The Interior Department conducted an urgent review of Shell’s operations after a disastrous 2012 drilling season notable for ship groundings, environmental and safety violations, the failure of a spill-containment system, weather delays and other mishaps.

The review, completed last week, concluded that Shell had failed in a wide range of basic operational tasks, like supervision of contractors that performed critical work, including towing one of the company’s two drilling rigs. That rig, the Kulluk, ran aground on Sitkalidak Island in Alaska on New Year’s Eve and is now headed to Asia for extensive repairs. No oil was spilled and there were no serious injuries.

The report was harshly critical of Shell management, which has acknowledged that it was unprepared for the problems it encountered operating in the unforgiving Arctic environment. The report did not single out individual managers.

The 32-page study also faulted government agencies, including the Interior Department and the Coast Guard, for failing to anticipate some of the problems Shell faced, including accidents involving both drilling rigs as they traveled to and from drill sites in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

“Government still has a lot to learn,” said Mr. Salazar, who will soon step down and is expected to be replaced by President Obama’s nominee, Sally Jewell, chief executive of Recreational Equipment Inc. in Seattle. “The Arctic is a very difficult environment to operate in. Shell is one of the most resource-capable companies in the world and it still encountered a whole host of problems trying to operate up there.”

“It doesn’t mean that exploration cannot continue,” Mr. Salazar said. “But I think the cardinal lesson is that moving forward on any Arctic exploration needs the comprehensive integration we attempted to bring to last summer and will attempt to do an even better job of in the future.”

(h/t Susie Madrak @ Crooks & Liars)

Sheila Bair, FDIC Chair June 2006 – July 2011.

In major policy shift, scores of FDIC settlements go unannounced

By E. Scott Reckard, Los Angeles Times

March 11, 2013, 4:05 a.m.

Three years ago, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. collected $54 million from Deutsche Bank in a settlement over unsound loans that contributed to a spectacular California bank failure.

The deal might have made big headlines, given that the bad loans contributed to the largest payout in FDIC history, $13 billion. But the government cut a deal with the bank’s lawyers to keep it quiet: a “no press release” clause that required the FDIC never to mention the deal “except in response to a specific inquiry.”

…

Deutsche Bank, now the world’s largest, settled to resolve claims that subsidiary MortgageIT sold shaky loans to Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank, which imploded under the weight of risky mortgages and construction loans. The IndyMac failure – considered one of the early events that helped usher in the 2008 financial meltdown – caused a scene reminiscent of the grim bank failures of the 1930s, with panicked depositors lining up outside branches trying to reclaim their money.

Overall, the FDIC collected $787 million in settlements by pressing civil claims related to bank failures from 2007 through 2012 – a fraction of its total losses.

…

“In the old days, the regulators made it a point to embarrass everyone, to call attention to their role in bank failures,” said former bank examiner Richard Newsom, who specialized in insider-abuse cases for the FDIC in the aftermath of the S&L debacle. The goal was simple: “to make other bankers scared.”

Newsom said he couldn’t understand the shift, unless the agency doesn’t “want people to know how little they are settling for.”

…

(FDIC spokesman David) Barr says attorneys representing the FDIC make clear to the defendants that, although it will not publicize settlements, it also cannot legally keep them secret.

The ban on secret settlements was a provision in one of the laws passed after the S&L crisis. Although the measure doesn’t require the FDIC to call attention to settlements, nondisclosure agreements like that with Deutsche Bank violate “the spirit of the law,” said Sausalito, Calif., attorney Bart Dzivi, a former Senate Banking Committee aide who drafted the provision.

FDIC Under Scrutiny For Not Announcing Settlements

By: DSWright, Firedog Lake

Tuesday March 12, 2013 8:06 am

The clause is added to keep the regulator quiet on reputation damaging legal settlements. Typically settlements are announced by regulators in hopes of deterring would be law breakers but the FDIC has changed its previous policy without explicitly stating why.

…

What an odd game. During the Savings and Loan Crisis a law was passed banning secret settlements which means no matter how poorly the FDIC is negotiating with criminal bankers they can not agree to keep the settlement secret. Instead the FDIC merely agrees not to announce the deals in hopes that no one looks for the information.

…

But why not announce it? Isn’t the point of settling in the first place to punish the guilty but avoid costly trials? Sending a press release is practically free and lets everyone know that certain practices will not be tolerated by regulators. Secret deterrence is a contradiction in terms and an open invitation to continue treating crime as a business expense.

FDIC Hides "Scores" of Bank Settlements Since 2007

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

The FDIC’s excuse is unpersuasive. It amounts to, “well, we publicize big settlements, why bother with these?”

In fact, this practice is yet another gimmie for banks. First, by not publicizing the settlement, it saves the target embarrassment. But far more important, it also helps them escape private litigation. A claimant has a much more persuasive suit if he can tell a judge or jury, “Look, XYZ bank engaged in this conduct, we have proof in the form of an FDIC settlement.” Mind you, it doesn’t mean for every settlement you have private litigants lurking in the wings, but given how many investors lost money in a big way during the crisis, you’d have to think that in a meaningful percentage of cases, hard evidence that a bank engaged in a particular form of prohibited behavior would be very useful to private parties.

The worst is that these secret settlements look to have become institutionalized. The only rationale I can think of (and it’s not great) is that the FDIC became overly concerned about exposing weak banks to litigation, and once it established the new pattern, it’s been unwilling or unable to roll it back. But in the S&L crisis, when the FDIC had so many dead banks drop in its lap that it had to go to Congress for additional funding, it didn’t hold back.

Which Aspect of the FDIC’s Litigation Failures is the Most Embarrassing and Damaging?

By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on March 12, 2013

The article contains four key facts we did not know about the FDIC’s leadership and its litigation director.  The only question is which of these … facts provides the most revealing insight into the disgrace that the FDIC has become.  The first fact is that the banks and bank officers can now cut deals with the FDIC designed to keep their settlements secret.  What that tells us is that the FDIC’s leaders are indifferent or clueless about deterrence and earning public respect for the integrity of the FDIC’s efforts to hold the officers who drove the crisis accountable.

The second key fact that we learned from the article is that the size of the settlements, for some of the most culpable fraudulent mortgage lenders, is so embarrassingly low that the FDIC’s litigators and investigators have proven to be an embarrassing failure.

…

The third fact that emerges is that the FDIC’s real purpose in entering into these settlements crafted to try to keep the public from learning about them is not to secure a higher settlement but to protect the FDIC leadership from embarrassment for their failures of nerve, competence, and any understanding of the overriding need to ensure that no executive walks away making a profit from fraudulent lending.

The fourth fact that emerges is that the FDIC does not understand how a banking regulator and its litigators must deal with control fraud.  It is fine for the FDIC to lose half its litigated cases against the senior officers who run control frauds where its wins lead to large awards that remove any gains the controlling officers received from the bank.  What the “C-suite” defendants need to understand is the moral certainty that the FDIC will, as a matter of principle, never agree to a settlement that leaves a non-judgment proof controlling officer with wealth he gained by leading the bank to make fraudulent liar’s loans.  When elite defendants engage in fraud the banking regulators’ paramount task is not to maximize the expected value of the recovery – it is to deter future frauds because control fraud causes catastrophic losses and drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises.  The defendants need to know that the FDIC will be remorseless in litigating against the senior officers running control frauds.

Bank Shots

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire

March 13, 2013 at 9:00AM

I’m not sure what’s more breathtakingly arrogant — that there are members of the government who look the people straight in the eye and tell them that, no, nothing’s going to be done, despite the fact that you and I and the streetlamp know precisely who the crooks are, and what they did, and what should happen to them, or that there are members of government who insist that doing nothing about any of it is to act in the public good. It is one the little tin drums at this place that, too often, our elected leaders seem to believe that The American People are made of ribbon candy. Don’t prosecute Nixon. The country needs “closure.” Don’t chase Iran-Contra too hard. The country “can’t afford” another failed presidency. Don’t arraign the liars and fantasts who brought on the ruin that is the Iraq war. Look forward. Not back. Self-government gets infantilized and the crooks skate.

Call me crazy, but if some operation gets so big that it renders its crimes untouchable by the civil authorities, when power immunizes the criminals, then something’s too big to be allowed to exist. And if the institutions that are supposed to protect us from those crimes, through the customary mechanism of punishing the criminals in such a sway as to discourage other people from becoming criminals, are so worried that protecting us will do us more harm than good, then we’ve fallen through the looking glass to a place where self-government is rendered subject to a simple protection racket. I’d consider most of these guys more respectable if they threw firebombs or broke people’s kneecaps.