The amount of money MF Global should have segregated for customers may be short by “$1.2 billion or more,” trustee James Giddens said…MF Global was run by former Goldman Sachs & Co chief and New Jersey governor Jon Corzine before its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The bankruptcy came after the New York-based company revealed that it had made a $6.3 billion bet on European sovereign debt.
Eh, it could have been worse. Someone could have made off with a chicken salad sandwich.
It is odd that there remain those on the right who think that the last three years have been some sort of failure or series of mistakes. It’s too bad the economy isn’t doing better, but that’s not the priority of these folks. The priority is making things fairer, according to their enlightened vision.
The most remarkable thing about this administration is not incompetence; it is discipline. (As the man said: “We are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”) They stay relentlessly on their message of the moment, positioning themselves as the reasonable ones in the center, amidst those on the left and right who take irresponsible positions — and all the while they are quietly executing their agenda, moistly through the federal agencies and cabinet departments. Clever, profoundly anti-democratic.
But the playbook is badly out of date. OWS isn’t random; it’s straight from the playbook. No doubt it will metastasize over the next year and show up at Tea Party events and so forth to cause no end of trouble. The most peculiar thing about this exercise is that it is happening at almost precisely the wrong historical moment. The USSR fell almost a generation ago, and the welfare states of Europe are crumbling under the weight of their entitlement burdens. What a bizarre moment to emulate them.
The second most peculiar thing, at least to us, is our discovery of the extent of the corruption. Many years ago we wrote about the temptation to corruption in declining industries such as the legacy media. We had no idea how bad it really is. Congressmen can legally trade on insider information; major media outlets ignore huge scandals when they are politically inconvenient. And on and on.
We don’t think this is going to end well for the left. We think that they total about a third of the electorate. though the media megaphone makes them seem much more populous. It’s not really a 50/50 country when very basic issues are in play. As evidence we point to Independents flipping by 33 points last November after they figured out they had been sold a bill of goods in 2008. However, we do not underestimate the lengths to which those in power will go to remain in power. Frankly, we’re not looking forward to what the next political year is likely to bring.
The NYT editorialized as follows just the other day:
The Occupy Wall Street protest continues to inspire demonstrators across the nation and beyond…As their numbers grow, the protesters seem to be increasingly welcomed…Occupy Wall Street is not merely yelling and screaming. The movement’s progress is heartening for all Americans suffering lost opportunity
It is facile and mistaken to attribute this particular madman’s act directly to Republicans or Tea Party members. But it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger
Physician, heal thyself. Time to refer to the checklist. We live in a world that seems to be precisely 180 degrees out of phase with that of the Times’ editorial board. Taranto has a helpful guide to the activities of the “increasingly welcomed” OWS crowd. We continue not to understand why on earth the Democrat party and its media affiliates choose to associate themselves with these people.
We hear that CBS has made Sharyl Attkisson unavailable for comment. Perhaps CBS is now going to join the New York Times and the Washington Post in being “reasonable” towards the administration. The longer we’ve thought about this, the more disturbing it is.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, but we are. Of course we understand that those press outlets are cheerleaders for the administration. That’s a normal part of the ebb and flow of partisan politics. But Fast and Furious is serious business. It’s not just that the media would be in a frenzy if this happened in a Republican administration. That’s a given. It’s that the senior editors at these newspapers apparently think nothing of the idea of their professional responsibility to be adversarial in such matters.
There is no dignity in being Pravda, even if it means you get invited to a sumptuous dacha on occasion. If the people who are inviting you are crooks, even taking actions that wind up facilitating the killings of US law enforcement officials, why would you accept their offers of access and flattery? Are the usufructs of power really so beguiling? Apparently they are.
CBS Reporter Sharyl Attkisson, who has been the one covering Fast and Furious, described the reaction from the White House and the Department of Justice:
In between the yelling that I received from Justice Department yesterday, the spokeswoman — who would not put anything in writing, I was asking for her explanation so there would be clarity and no confusion later over what had been said, she wouldn’t put anything in writing — so we talked on the phone and she said things such as the question Holder answered was different than the one he asked. But he phrased it, he said very explicitly, “I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks”…
the DOJ woman was just yelling at me. The guy from the White House on Friday night literally screamed at me and cussed at me…the person screaming was Tracy Schmaler, she was yelling not screaming. And the person who screamed at me was Eric Schultz at the White House…
I’m certainly not the one to make the case for DOJ and White House about what I’m doing wrong. They will tell you that I’m the only reporter — as they told me — that is not reasonable. They say the Washington Post is reasonable, the LA Times is reasonable, the New York Times is reasonable, I’m the only one who thinks this is a story, and they think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it.
We just asked what the media would do. Now we know what they’ve been doing. The NYT and the Post are being “reasonable.”
The revelation that the Attorney General apparently lied to Congress about Fast and Furious is a matter more serious than Watergate. No one died in Watergate, but a US border patrol agent did as a direct result of Fast and Furious, and there were many other victims as well. The ATF’s funneling vast numbers of US weapons to Mexican drug cartels, common sense suggests, should have been known not only to Holder, but to the Secretary of State and the head of DHS, given national security implications as well as the US’s treaty obligations to Mexico. What did they know, and when did they know it?
The only benign explanation of what took place is colossal stupidity. That dog won’t hunt, in our opinion. The President himself (falsely) claimed in a 2009 speech in Mexico that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border,” and that the US was going to do something about that. So the focus on this issue was at the highest level of the US government.
The least benign explanation of Fast and Furious is that it was a manufactured crisis in the interest of enacting more stringent gun control legislation. You may recall this statement from the campaign trail in September 2008: “If you’ve got a gun in your house, I’m not taking it…Even if I want to take them away, I don’t have the votes in Congress.” Pause to consider that last sentence, which would never be thought or uttered by a gun rights proponent. It is certainly arguable that a clandestinely executed and politically exploited Fast and Furious could have affected some votes in Congress.
The media utterly failed to perform the most basic tasks of journalism in 2008 and beyond. For the most part, they continue to cheerlead today. (It can’t be a pleasant job, even for the few remaining true believers.) Solyndra, Lightsquared and the billions given to companies friendly to the administration’s policies are one thing. Fast and Furious is now in a different category entirely, and a request for a special prosecutor is on the table. It remains to be seen whether mainstream journalists will choose basic professionalism over their ideological preferences.
Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy. The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.
Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel — the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.
I don’t wish to understate it: elements of the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, Homeland Security, and Treasury are responsible for supplying an arsenal to narco-terrorists waging a civil war against an American ally. Our federal government may bear responsibility for at least 200 murders committed with “walked” firearms, in what Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales describes as a “betrayal” of her country…
The Gunwalker conspiracy is the kind of story that journalists dream of breaking their entire careers. It is now in the palms of their hands: a story in which they can make a difference, take down the evil and corrupt, and ensure justice is served. Instead of reporting, however, they are complicit. They have chosen to acquiesce to a clear and obvious evil, an aberration of our most basic values. They are no longer watchdogs
Pshaw! Thy’re up to their eyeballs covering other crime-related stories on the front page.
Vong, 47, left Vietnam in 1982, and after stops in Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong, settled in San Francisco and lived there for 20 years before coming here to open a nail salon with a difference. Her salon offered $30 fish therapy, wherein small fish from China nibble dead skin from people’s feet. Arizona’s Board of Cosmetology decided the fish were performing pedicures, and because all pedicure instruments must be sterilized and fish cannot be, the therapy must be discontinued. Vong lost her more-than-$50,000 investment in fish tanks and other equipment, and some customers. Three of her employees lost their jobs.
It’s not just people who are unemployed but the fish too. Maybe Arizona should team up with the National Science Foundation, which spent half a million dollars on exercise machines for shrimp.
Texas energy company Luminant announced on Monday new burdensome Environmental Protection Agency regulations are forcing it to close several facilities, which will result in about 500 job losses. The company will be idling…two energy generating units. It will also cease extracting lignite from three different Texas mines.
The EPA regulation Luminant cites as too burdensome is the new Cross-State Air Pollution rule, which requires Texas power generators to make “dramatic reductions” in emissions beginning on January 1, 2012.
“We have hundreds of employees who have spent their entire professional careers at Luminant and its predecessor companies,” Luminant CEO David Campbell said in a statement. “At every step of this process, we have tried to minimize these impacts, and it truly saddens me that we are being compelled to take the actions we’ve announced today. We have filed suit to try to avoid these consequences.”
The company said it has been trying to meet the new standards, but won’t be able to do so without closing down several facilities and eliminating 500 jobs.
We have been told directly of frivolous government and union lawsuits to extract concessions from businesses, mergers that government authorities won’t approve until uneconomic “green” costs are accepted by the company, and large corporations that are essentially being subjected to regulatory blackmail if they won’t do certain things for the current administration. None of this is an accident. Instead, it is the game plan for the next 14 months. On the surface it’s all about jobs. Below the surface, it is something else entirely. HT: Ace
Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were among 17 banks sued by the U.S. to recoup $196 billion spent on mortgage-backed securities bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed 17 lawsuits yesterday…
The cases are Federal Housing Finance Agency v. Bank of America Corp. (BAC), 11-CV-6195; FHFA v. Barclays Bank Plc., 11-CV- 6190; FHFA v. Citigroup, 11-CV-6196; FHFA v. Credit Suisse Holdings (USA) Inc., 11-CV-6200; FHFA v. Deutsche Bank AG, 11- CV-6192; FHFA v. First Horizon National Corp., 11-CV-6193; FHFA v. Goldman, Sachs & Co., 11-CV-6198; FHFA v. HSBC North America Holdings Inc., 11-CV-6189; FHFA v. JPMorgan Chase & Co., 11-CV- 6188; FHFA v. Merrill Lynch & Co., 11-CV-6202; FHFA v. Nomura Holding America Inc., 11-CV-6201; FHFA v. SG Americas Inc., 11- CV-6203, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). Also: FHFA v. Ally Financial Inc.; FHFA v. Countrywide Financial Corp.; FHFA v. General Electric Co.; FHFA v. Morgan Stanley, New York State Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan). And: FHFA v. Royal Bank of Scotland, 11-CV-1383, U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut (New Haven).
Comments and questions: (1) in the sub-prime debacle, everyone involved either looked the other way or had his hand in the cookie jar, so either throw them all in jail or move on; (2) as Roger Kimball noted, the government would do well to look in the mirror; (3) admittedly this is a great jobs program for lawyers, but exactly how is this going to help the housing industry and mortgage lending?
Bonus question: if the government wins the lawsuit, which part of the government will collect the $196 billion and which part of the government will bail out the banks to the tune of $196 billion?
We probably disagree with Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter on a variety of policy matters, but the 3000 word address he delivered from the pulpit of the Mount Carmel Baptist Church is remarkable. Rich Lowry has a précis.
When an airline loses a passenger’s baggage, the customer shouldn’t have to pay the air carrier’s rising luggage fees, said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. He said if airlines don’t start reimbursing their rising fees when passengers’ bags are lost, he’ll introduce a bill to force the issue.
The Democrat says that under a new rule airlines would only have to reimburse their baggage fees if the luggage is lost forever. That rule is scheduled to take effect in August. The fees range from $25 to $100. Schumer insists that airlines should voluntarily refund the fees upon request to passengers when their checked bags don’t arrive when they do.
(Oddly enough, there are already vast bureaucratic resources devoted to this very topic.) We’re certainly glad that enough of the serious problems of the US have been solved for the Senate to take up this this vital issue.
Any bill that starts out by claiming to be balanced, bi-partisan and comprehensive is inherently trying to be deceptive. Balanced means it raises taxes, and bi-partisan means it more-or-less enshrines the status quo. But the dead giveaway is “comprehensive.”
Of necessity, “comprehensive” means “we’re kicking the can down the road.” There is not the time, let alone the will, for any plan to be comprehensive — the details of what needs to be done are so vast that the claim to be comprehensive is ludicrous.
Only No means No. Only a cut is a cut. Plenty of actual cuts have been proposed from time to time. How about this as a rule in debt-ceiling debate: House members should vote against any bill with an adjective in its title.
This would be a welcome addition to the boring ceremonial name-calling in the US budget negotiations. Notice the subdued color of the uniforms. Our recommendation is that one US political party wear bright orange jumpsuits, as befits their casual relationship with fiscal discipline, and the other side wear…….even brighter orange jumpsuits. Politics and the economy in 2011.
you learn how James Johnson, the erstwhile CEO of Fannie Mae built it into a colossus that gradually jettisoned all prudence in lending and vastly enriched himself and a bunch of cronies. He also suborned powerful legislators like Barney Frank, the powerful Massachusetts Democrat. And, lastly, he looked on and encouraged Wall Street firms to do the same and used that as justification to increase the scale of his own operations. And, Oh! I almost forgot, he also admonished fresh graduates to pursue their careers with “honesty and integrity”. When Johnson left Fannie Mae, a senior executive recalled “…we always won, we took no prisoners and we faced little organized political opposition.” He continued to be politically influential and was an adviser to the current president until forced to resign because it surfaced that he had received sweetheart loans from a leading purveyor of toxic financial junk.
Did you ever feel that “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” is the norm on Wall Street? Consider this: Stephen Friedman, former CEO of Goldman Sachs was a director of Fannie Mae when the directors improperly allowed company executives to set earnings targets that they could meet. Federal investigators concluded that “As a direct result, senior management reaped ongoing and extensive financial rewards through accounting manipulation.” Johnson was then inducted to the board of Goldman Sachs — when Hank Paulson became CEO — and promptly made chair of the compensation committee. He dispensed some of the richest paychecks on Wall Street and these became the norm as other firms played catch-up. In fact, Johnson chaired the compensation committees of every board he sat on.
Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide, was a good friend of Johnson’s and used his methods to grow the cancer that was Countrywide. The company made it a policy to give sweetheart loans to persons in power — these VIP loans were informally known as Friends of Angelo loans. Richard Holbrooke got such a loan. So did Senators Chris Dodd, Kent Conrad and Barbara Boxer. So did Donna Shalala, former head of Health and Human Services and Alfonso Jackson, secretary of HUD. And Countrywide hired sons and daughters and relatives of the influential and made sure that they were not fired during mass layoffs.
Round about Christmas Eve 2008 the NYT did a 5000 word piece that blamed the mortgage disaster on the “White House Philosophy” of that era. Of course it was obvious even then that this looked like the greatest bi-partisan heist of all time, and that appears to be been proven out, since nobody has gone to jail. Silly us! We thought No Income Verification meant that the banks had very clever computer data bases, and not that everyone and his brother were being invited to participate in the fraud.
