Tuesday, February 28, 2012
The 5th Amendment:
Wired: Forcing Defendant to Decrypt Hard Drive Is Unconstitutional, Appeals Court Rules
"Forcing a criminal suspect to decrypt hard drives so their contents can be used by prosecutors is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday..."
The Supremes:
What a terrible move by Justice Kagan...
Glenn Greenwald Justice Kagan sides with the Right on Miranda
"...As the lawyer Bmaz at Marcy Wheeler’s blog observes today, 'the decision is a significant further erosion of the critical Constitutional protections embodied in Miranda.' That’s because it 'specifically holds that police are not automatically required to tell prisoners of their legal right to remain silent and have an attorney present when being questioned in prison about another crime.'
But beyond the specifics of this case, one’s views on Miranda have long been a key determinant of where one falls on the jurisprudential spectrum. Miranda rights have long been a prime bugaboo of the authoritarian Right’s complaints about supposedly excessive protections for criminal defendants (Justices Scalia and Thomas, in a 2000 case, actually argued that Miranda should be overruled). Conversely, the recognition of that right was one of the crown jewels of the Warren Court, and its stalwart protection in robust form has been a litmus test for whether one is devoted to Constitutional safeguards to ensure a fair criminal justice system (President Obama has invoked Terrorism to justify the erosion of Miranda). To watch Elena Kagan side with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy and against Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer on such a central and long-standing dispute — the scope of Miranda – does not bode well..."
Targeting Iran:
Raw Story: Wikileaks emails indicate Stratfor discovered Israel already destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities
"Growing concerns over Iran’s nuclear facilities may prove to be all for naught. Officials from the global intelligence company Stratfor allegedly discussed that Israel may have already destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility, according to one of the emails released by Wikileaks Monday...
...'I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago,' one intelligence official wrote in an email dated November 14, 2011. 'The current ‘let’s bomb Iran’ campaign was ordered by the EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home financial problems. It plays also well for the US since Pakistan, Russia and N. Korea are mentioned in the report.'
One other Stratfor official allegedly indicated a similar finding.
'Israeli commandos in collaboration with Kurd forces destroyed few underground facilities mainly used for the Iranian defense and nuclear research projects,' he wrote on November 13, 2011. 'Even if the Israelis have the capabilities and are ready to attack by air, sea and land, there is no need to attack the nuclear program at this point after the commandos destroyed a significant part of it,'..."
Privacy & Technology:
CNet Asia: Facebook denies accessing users' text messages
"Facebook is being accused of snooping on its users' text messages, but the social network says the accusations are inaccurate and misleading.
The company is among a wide-ranging group of Web entities, including Flickr and YouTube, that are using smartphone apps to access text message data and other personal information, according to a Sunday Times report (behind a paywall). The newspaper said Facebook 'admitted' to reading users' text messages during a test of its own messaging service. The report also says information such as user location, contacts list, and browser history are often accessed and sometimes transmitted to third-party companies, including advertisers..."
Food:
Mother Jones: 'Superweeds' Revive an Old, Highly Toxic Herbicide
"Ecologists call it the 'pesticide treadmill': pests like weeds and bugs evolve to resist the poisons designed to destroy them, forcing farmers to apply ever-higher doses or resort to novel poisons.
But Monsanto's empire of Roundup Ready crops—designed to resist lashings of its own herbicide, Roundup—appears on the verge of sending the pesticide treadmill into reverse. As Roundup loses effectiveness, swamped by a galloping plague of resistant superweeds, farmers have already played the card of dramatically boosting Roundup application rates.
Now they're being urged to resort to an herbicide called 2,4-D that first hit farm fields in 1948, and that made up half of the formula for Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant applied to disastrous effect in the Vietnam War..."
Energy:
Daily Camera: Study: Dirty air in Erie linked to gas drilling
"A study showing that Erie exceeds Houston and Los Angeles in the levels of certain air pollutants commonly connected to oil and gas activity became a point of concern for several trustees Tuesday night during a meeting held to formulate local rules for resource extraction.
'I was kind of shocked by the things I heard,' said Trustee Ronda Grassi, after listening to a presentation from a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Steven Brown, a NOAA scientist in Boulder, told the trustees and a roomful of industry experts that an air monitoring study conducted in Erie last winter revealed that levels of butane, ethane and propane -- compounds associated with oil and gas drilling and production -- were 'large.'
Specifically, Brown said Erie's propane levels exceeded by a factor of 10 those detected in Pasadena, Calif., in 2010..."
Wired: Forcing Defendant to Decrypt Hard Drive Is Unconstitutional, Appeals Court Rules
"Forcing a criminal suspect to decrypt hard drives so their contents can be used by prosecutors is a breach of the Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday..."
The Supremes:
What a terrible move by Justice Kagan...
Glenn Greenwald Justice Kagan sides with the Right on Miranda
"...As the lawyer Bmaz at Marcy Wheeler’s blog observes today, 'the decision is a significant further erosion of the critical Constitutional protections embodied in Miranda.' That’s because it 'specifically holds that police are not automatically required to tell prisoners of their legal right to remain silent and have an attorney present when being questioned in prison about another crime.'
But beyond the specifics of this case, one’s views on Miranda have long been a key determinant of where one falls on the jurisprudential spectrum. Miranda rights have long been a prime bugaboo of the authoritarian Right’s complaints about supposedly excessive protections for criminal defendants (Justices Scalia and Thomas, in a 2000 case, actually argued that Miranda should be overruled). Conversely, the recognition of that right was one of the crown jewels of the Warren Court, and its stalwart protection in robust form has been a litmus test for whether one is devoted to Constitutional safeguards to ensure a fair criminal justice system (President Obama has invoked Terrorism to justify the erosion of Miranda). To watch Elena Kagan side with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts and Kennedy and against Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer on such a central and long-standing dispute — the scope of Miranda – does not bode well..."
Targeting Iran:
Raw Story: Wikileaks emails indicate Stratfor discovered Israel already destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities
"Growing concerns over Iran’s nuclear facilities may prove to be all for naught. Officials from the global intelligence company Stratfor allegedly discussed that Israel may have already destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility, according to one of the emails released by Wikileaks Monday...
...'I think this is a diversion. The Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago,' one intelligence official wrote in an email dated November 14, 2011. 'The current ‘let’s bomb Iran’ campaign was ordered by the EU leaders to divert the public attention from their at home financial problems. It plays also well for the US since Pakistan, Russia and N. Korea are mentioned in the report.'
One other Stratfor official allegedly indicated a similar finding.
'Israeli commandos in collaboration with Kurd forces destroyed few underground facilities mainly used for the Iranian defense and nuclear research projects,' he wrote on November 13, 2011. 'Even if the Israelis have the capabilities and are ready to attack by air, sea and land, there is no need to attack the nuclear program at this point after the commandos destroyed a significant part of it,'..."
Privacy & Technology:
CNet Asia: Facebook denies accessing users' text messages
"Facebook is being accused of snooping on its users' text messages, but the social network says the accusations are inaccurate and misleading.
The company is among a wide-ranging group of Web entities, including Flickr and YouTube, that are using smartphone apps to access text message data and other personal information, according to a Sunday Times report (behind a paywall). The newspaper said Facebook 'admitted' to reading users' text messages during a test of its own messaging service. The report also says information such as user location, contacts list, and browser history are often accessed and sometimes transmitted to third-party companies, including advertisers..."
Food:
Mother Jones: 'Superweeds' Revive an Old, Highly Toxic Herbicide
"Ecologists call it the 'pesticide treadmill': pests like weeds and bugs evolve to resist the poisons designed to destroy them, forcing farmers to apply ever-higher doses or resort to novel poisons.
But Monsanto's empire of Roundup Ready crops—designed to resist lashings of its own herbicide, Roundup—appears on the verge of sending the pesticide treadmill into reverse. As Roundup loses effectiveness, swamped by a galloping plague of resistant superweeds, farmers have already played the card of dramatically boosting Roundup application rates.
Now they're being urged to resort to an herbicide called 2,4-D that first hit farm fields in 1948, and that made up half of the formula for Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant applied to disastrous effect in the Vietnam War..."
Energy:
Daily Camera: Study: Dirty air in Erie linked to gas drilling
"A study showing that Erie exceeds Houston and Los Angeles in the levels of certain air pollutants commonly connected to oil and gas activity became a point of concern for several trustees Tuesday night during a meeting held to formulate local rules for resource extraction.
'I was kind of shocked by the things I heard,' said Trustee Ronda Grassi, after listening to a presentation from a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Steven Brown, a NOAA scientist in Boulder, told the trustees and a roomful of industry experts that an air monitoring study conducted in Erie last winter revealed that levels of butane, ethane and propane -- compounds associated with oil and gas drilling and production -- were 'large.'
Specifically, Brown said Erie's propane levels exceeded by a factor of 10 those detected in Pasadena, Calif., in 2010..."
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Food:
The food industry is allowed to treat all sugar the same on labels.
NPR Science Friday: Should Sugar Be Regulated Like Alcohol?
"Writing in the journal Nature, UCSF pediatrician Robert Lustig and colleagues suggest regulating sugar just like alcohol and tobacco—with taxes and age limits, for example—due to what they call the 'toxic' effects of too much sweet stuff. Education, they say, is not enough...
...LUSTIG: All right, let's define what we're talking about. All food is inherently good. There is no bad food. God wouldn't do that to us. It's what we do to the food that's a problem. And what we do to the food, unfortunately, is a big problem. And it's not just the addition of sugar, that's a primary issue, but it's also the removal of fiber.
And the reason why fiber is so important is because it actually delays the absorption of sugar so that your liver has a chance to catch up. So it's both a dose phenomenon and a flux phenomenon. Both are going on at the same time.
The goal is to keep your liver healthy because when your liver is healthy, that means you're healthy. When your liver is healthy, your pancreas doesn't have to make as much insulin in order to make the liver do its job. That lowers levels of insulin throughout the body. And for the most part, that has been the single biggest problem that we have seen in not just nutrition science but endocrinology.
This phenomenon call metabolic syndrome is hyperinsulinemia, high insulin levels, insulin resistance, driving all of these chronic metabolic diseases that we know about: Type 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension, lipid problems, heart disease, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease and likely early data suggests cancer and dementia, as well...
...when you see sugar on the side of a package, that could be one of six different things. It could be glucose or dextrose, which is - for lack of a better comparison what you would find in Karo syrup. You don't see people going around chugging Karo syrup. It's not even that sweet.
It could be gallactose, which is a component of milk sugar, which is converted to glucose in the liver almost immediately. It could be fructose, which is the sweet aspect of sugar, the thing that actually makes us go seeking it. And that's the one that's metabolized completely differently. Or it could be a combination of glucose and glucose - that's called maltose, that's what you find in beer.
It could be glucose and gallactose, that's lactose, that's milk sugar. Or it could be glucose and fructose, and that's called sucrose, and that's cane table sugar, the stuff you put in your coffee.
Every one of those is recorded in that total sugars that's on the nutrition label, and you're not allowed to know which it is because the Food and Drug Administration allowed the food industry to basically combine them all together in an effort to basically confuse the public...
our current food supply is so glutted with fructose, that is added sugar, sugar that was put there very specifically for the food industry's purposes, both for palatability and for shelf life, that it has now created a toxic - basically a toxic side effect in our livers, driving all of these chronic metabolic diseases.
And the only thing that can reverse this is reduction in consumption. The question is how does one do that when, number one, the food industry is making money hand over fist because of this; number two, the federal government supports this because we export sugar all over the world. Six percent of all our exports are food, and they certainly don't want to admit to the rest of the world that there's a problem with added sugars in food because, you know, we'll stand to lose quite a bit of money...
...We as human beings really only had sugar available to us one month a year, it's called harvest time. And the fruit would fall to the ground, we'd gorge on it, consume it like crazy. That would increase our adiposity, it would increase our fat stores very specifically.
And then what would come after that? Four months of winter, no food at all. And so putting on those extra pounds in advance of a four-month famine was actually adaptive and actually let us make it through winter so that we could repeat the cycle all over again. It was actually metabolically and evolutionary adaptive.
The problem is that we now have a maladaptive situation because sugar is available 24/7, 365 in amounts that has never been known to man previously. How do we know this is true? Because the orangutans in Papua New Guinea have what are known as masting fruit orgies every January when harvest time comes, and the food falls to the ground, and they do exactly the same thing. We assume that this must be the reason sugar was put here for us in the first place..."
False Optimism In War In Our Name:
Michael Hastings: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read
"Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. 'How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?'...
Here is the report's damning opening lines: 'Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.' Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is 'open source' – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. 'If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,' Davis writes. 'It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II,'..."
Matt Taibbi: Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All
"So the foreclosure settlement is through.
A few weeks back, I was optimistic about it – I had been worried that it was going to contain broad liability waivers for all sorts of activities, and I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that its scope had essentially been narrowed to robosigning offenses.
However, now that the settlement is finalized, and I've had time to think about it and talk to people who know far more than I do about this, I'm feeling pretty queasy.
It feels an awful lot like what happened here is the nation's criminal justice honchos collectively realized that a thorough investigation of the problem would require resources they simply do not have, or are reluctant to deploy, and decided to accept a superficially face-saving peace offer rather than fight it out.
So they settled the case in a way that reads in headlines like it's a bite out of the banks, but in fact is barely even that. There will be little in the way of real compensation for stuggling homeowners, and there are serious issues in the area of the deal's enforceability. In fact, about the only part of the deal we can be absolutely sure will be honored in full is the liability waiver for the robosigning offenses.
With the rest of it -- collecting on the settlement, enforcement of the decrees, all the stuff put in there to balance the deal in the consumer's direction -- there will be an uphill battle from this point forward to get the banks to comply. The banks meanwhile have no such uphill battle. They will get the full benefit of the deal (a release from costly litigation) from the moment the ink is dry.
Really this looks like America's public prosecutors just wilted before the prospect of a long, drawn-out conflict with an army of highly-paid, determined white-shoe banker lawyers. The message this sends is that if you commit crimes on a large enough scale, and have enough high-priced legal talent sitting at the negotiating table after you get caught, the government will ultimately back down, conceding the inferiority of its resources..."
The food industry is allowed to treat all sugar the same on labels.
NPR Science Friday: Should Sugar Be Regulated Like Alcohol?
"Writing in the journal Nature, UCSF pediatrician Robert Lustig and colleagues suggest regulating sugar just like alcohol and tobacco—with taxes and age limits, for example—due to what they call the 'toxic' effects of too much sweet stuff. Education, they say, is not enough...
...LUSTIG: All right, let's define what we're talking about. All food is inherently good. There is no bad food. God wouldn't do that to us. It's what we do to the food that's a problem. And what we do to the food, unfortunately, is a big problem. And it's not just the addition of sugar, that's a primary issue, but it's also the removal of fiber.
And the reason why fiber is so important is because it actually delays the absorption of sugar so that your liver has a chance to catch up. So it's both a dose phenomenon and a flux phenomenon. Both are going on at the same time.
The goal is to keep your liver healthy because when your liver is healthy, that means you're healthy. When your liver is healthy, your pancreas doesn't have to make as much insulin in order to make the liver do its job. That lowers levels of insulin throughout the body. And for the most part, that has been the single biggest problem that we have seen in not just nutrition science but endocrinology.
This phenomenon call metabolic syndrome is hyperinsulinemia, high insulin levels, insulin resistance, driving all of these chronic metabolic diseases that we know about: Type 2 diabetes, obesity, hypertension, lipid problems, heart disease, fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease and likely early data suggests cancer and dementia, as well...
...when you see sugar on the side of a package, that could be one of six different things. It could be glucose or dextrose, which is - for lack of a better comparison what you would find in Karo syrup. You don't see people going around chugging Karo syrup. It's not even that sweet.
It could be gallactose, which is a component of milk sugar, which is converted to glucose in the liver almost immediately. It could be fructose, which is the sweet aspect of sugar, the thing that actually makes us go seeking it. And that's the one that's metabolized completely differently. Or it could be a combination of glucose and glucose - that's called maltose, that's what you find in beer.
It could be glucose and gallactose, that's lactose, that's milk sugar. Or it could be glucose and fructose, and that's called sucrose, and that's cane table sugar, the stuff you put in your coffee.
Every one of those is recorded in that total sugars that's on the nutrition label, and you're not allowed to know which it is because the Food and Drug Administration allowed the food industry to basically combine them all together in an effort to basically confuse the public...
our current food supply is so glutted with fructose, that is added sugar, sugar that was put there very specifically for the food industry's purposes, both for palatability and for shelf life, that it has now created a toxic - basically a toxic side effect in our livers, driving all of these chronic metabolic diseases.
And the only thing that can reverse this is reduction in consumption. The question is how does one do that when, number one, the food industry is making money hand over fist because of this; number two, the federal government supports this because we export sugar all over the world. Six percent of all our exports are food, and they certainly don't want to admit to the rest of the world that there's a problem with added sugars in food because, you know, we'll stand to lose quite a bit of money...
...We as human beings really only had sugar available to us one month a year, it's called harvest time. And the fruit would fall to the ground, we'd gorge on it, consume it like crazy. That would increase our adiposity, it would increase our fat stores very specifically.
And then what would come after that? Four months of winter, no food at all. And so putting on those extra pounds in advance of a four-month famine was actually adaptive and actually let us make it through winter so that we could repeat the cycle all over again. It was actually metabolically and evolutionary adaptive.
The problem is that we now have a maladaptive situation because sugar is available 24/7, 365 in amounts that has never been known to man previously. How do we know this is true? Because the orangutans in Papua New Guinea have what are known as masting fruit orgies every January when harvest time comes, and the food falls to the ground, and they do exactly the same thing. We assume that this must be the reason sugar was put here for us in the first place..."
False Optimism In War In Our Name:
Michael Hastings: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read
"Earlier this week, the New York Times’ Scott Shane published a bombshell piece about Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan. According to the Times, the 48-year-old Davis had written an 84-page unclassified report, as well as a classified report, offering his assessment of the decade-long war. That assessment is essentially that the war has been a disaster and the military's top brass has not leveled with the American public about just how badly it’s been going. 'How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?'...
Here is the report's damning opening lines: 'Senior ranking U.S. military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the U.S. Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.' Davis goes on to explain that everything in the report is 'open source' – i.e., unclassified – information. According to Davis, the classified report, which he legally submitted to Congress, is even more devastating. 'If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,' Davis writes. 'It would be illegal for me to discuss, use, or cite classified material in an open venue and thus I will not do so; I am no WikiLeaks guy Part II,'..."
Matt Taibbi: Why the Foreclosure Deal May Not Be So Hot After All
"So the foreclosure settlement is through.
A few weeks back, I was optimistic about it – I had been worried that it was going to contain broad liability waivers for all sorts of activities, and I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that its scope had essentially been narrowed to robosigning offenses.
However, now that the settlement is finalized, and I've had time to think about it and talk to people who know far more than I do about this, I'm feeling pretty queasy.
It feels an awful lot like what happened here is the nation's criminal justice honchos collectively realized that a thorough investigation of the problem would require resources they simply do not have, or are reluctant to deploy, and decided to accept a superficially face-saving peace offer rather than fight it out.
So they settled the case in a way that reads in headlines like it's a bite out of the banks, but in fact is barely even that. There will be little in the way of real compensation for stuggling homeowners, and there are serious issues in the area of the deal's enforceability. In fact, about the only part of the deal we can be absolutely sure will be honored in full is the liability waiver for the robosigning offenses.
With the rest of it -- collecting on the settlement, enforcement of the decrees, all the stuff put in there to balance the deal in the consumer's direction -- there will be an uphill battle from this point forward to get the banks to comply. The banks meanwhile have no such uphill battle. They will get the full benefit of the deal (a release from costly litigation) from the moment the ink is dry.
Really this looks like America's public prosecutors just wilted before the prospect of a long, drawn-out conflict with an army of highly-paid, determined white-shoe banker lawyers. The message this sends is that if you commit crimes on a large enough scale, and have enough high-priced legal talent sitting at the negotiating table after you get caught, the government will ultimately back down, conceding the inferiority of its resources..."
Monday, February 06, 2012
Romney & The Poor:
It is clear that the man's millions have affected his ability to think outside of his own wealthy experience.
Paul Krugman: Romney Isn’t Concerned
"...Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.
Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are 'doing fine.' After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?...
...Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember 'compassionate conservatism'? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were."
It is clear that the man's millions have affected his ability to think outside of his own wealthy experience.
Paul Krugman: Romney Isn’t Concerned
"...Mr. Romney’s position seems to be that we need not worry about the poor thanks to programs that he insists, falsely, don’t actually help the needy, and which he intends, in any case, to destroy.
Still, I believe Mr. Romney when he says he isn’t concerned about the poor. What I don’t believe is his assertion that he’s equally unconcerned about the rich, who are 'doing fine.' After all, if that’s what he really feels, why does he propose showering them with money?...
...Which brings us back to Mr. Romney’s lack of concern. You can say this for the former Massachusetts governor and Bain Capital executive: He is opening up new frontiers in American politics. Even conservative politicians used to find it necessary to pretend that they cared about the poor. Remember 'compassionate conservatism'? Mr. Romney has, however, done away with that pretense.
At this rate, we may soon have politicians who admit what has been obvious all along: that they don’t care about the middle class either, that they aren’t concerned about the lives of ordinary Americans, and never were."
Friday, February 03, 2012
The Banksters Who Wrecked The Economy:
The repeal of Glass-Steagall (thanks to Pres. Clinton, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers & Congress) and poor fiscal policy and deregulation mantra of Bush/GOP allowed this to happen. The banks & investment banks not only received a mere slap on the wrist, but the heads of these very institutions actually received bonuses for destroying the world economy. How can their continuing to do business be justified under the Rule Of Law?
NY Times: S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks
"Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up its investigations of Wall Street in the last decade, the agency has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments specifically meant to apply to fraud cases.
By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example, and to avoid liability from lawsuits if their financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.
An analysis by The New York Times of S.E.C. investigations over the last decade found nearly 350 instances where the agency has given big Wall Street institutions and other financial companies a pass on those or other sanctions. Those instances also include waivers permitting firms to underwrite certain stock and bond sales and manage mutual fund portfolios.
JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has 'a strong record of compliance with securities laws.' Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which merged in 2009, have settled 15 fraud cases and received at least 39 waivers..."
The repeal of Glass-Steagall (thanks to Pres. Clinton, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers & Congress) and poor fiscal policy and deregulation mantra of Bush/GOP allowed this to happen. The banks & investment banks not only received a mere slap on the wrist, but the heads of these very institutions actually received bonuses for destroying the world economy. How can their continuing to do business be justified under the Rule Of Law?
NY Times: S.E.C. Is Avoiding Tough Sanctions for Large Banks
"Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission has stepped up its investigations of Wall Street in the last decade, the agency has repeatedly allowed the biggest firms to avoid punishments specifically meant to apply to fraud cases.
By granting exemptions to laws and regulations that act as a deterrent to securities fraud, the S.E.C. has let financial giants like JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America continue to have advantages reserved for the most dependable companies, making it easier for them to raise money from investors, for example, and to avoid liability from lawsuits if their financial forecasts turn out to be wrong.
An analysis by The New York Times of S.E.C. investigations over the last decade found nearly 350 instances where the agency has given big Wall Street institutions and other financial companies a pass on those or other sanctions. Those instances also include waivers permitting firms to underwrite certain stock and bond sales and manage mutual fund portfolios.
JPMorganChase, for example, has settled six fraud cases in the last 13 years, including one with a $228 million settlement last summer, but it has obtained at least 22 waivers, in part by arguing that it has 'a strong record of compliance with securities laws.' Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, which merged in 2009, have settled 15 fraud cases and received at least 39 waivers..."
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Corporate Interest vs Public Interest
Keeping this information from the U.S. Coast Guard ought to be grounds for BP's corporate charter being pulled.
NY Times: BP Feared Spill of 3.4 Million Gallons a Day
"On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in internal e-mails that if the well was not protected by the blowout preventer, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day — an amount a million gallons more than what the government later said it believed had spilled daily from the site.
The e-mail conversation, which BP agreed to release on Friday as part of federal court proceedings, suggests that BP managers recognized the potential of the disaster in its early hours, and that company officials sought to make sure that its model-developed information was not shared with outsiders.
The e-mails also suggest that BP was having heated discussions with the Coast Guard over the potential of the oil spill..."
Keeping this information from the U.S. Coast Guard ought to be grounds for BP's corporate charter being pulled.
NY Times: BP Feared Spill of 3.4 Million Gallons a Day
"On the day the Deepwater Horizon sank, BP officials warned in internal e-mails that if the well was not protected by the blowout preventer, crude oil could burst into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of 3.4 million gallons a day — an amount a million gallons more than what the government later said it believed had spilled daily from the site.
The e-mail conversation, which BP agreed to release on Friday as part of federal court proceedings, suggests that BP managers recognized the potential of the disaster in its early hours, and that company officials sought to make sure that its model-developed information was not shared with outsiders.
The e-mails also suggest that BP was having heated discussions with the Coast Guard over the potential of the oil spill..."
