Archive for April, 2009

Supreme Court Actually Expands Fourth Amendment Rights!

Posted in Political News, fourth amendment, human rights with tags , on April 22, 2009 by imliberal


From the Criminal Lawyer blog:
In a stunning 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court today reversed its longstanding bright-line rule which had permitted warrantless car searches after an arrest, even when there was no concern for officer safety or the preservation of evidence. The case is Arizona v Gant.Writing for the majority in this important decision, Justice Stevens held that the police may only search the passenger compartment of a vehicle, pursuant to the arrest of a recent occupant, if it is reasonable to believe that the arrested person might access the car while it’s being searched, or that the car contains evidence of the crime for which that person was arrested.

Interestingly, the votes were contrary to common stereotype. The majority, which limited police powers, included the two most right-wing justices in the popular mind, Scalia and Thomas. The minority, which would have expanded police powers, included two fairly liberal justices, Kennedy and Breyer.

The bottom line is it will make it harder for the police to have the automatic right to search your car if you are arrested in your vehicle…….

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Countdown video : Future of U.S. depends on torture accountability

Posted in Political News on April 18, 2009 by imliberal

This is a great indictment on Obama’s decision to immunize torturers and those responsible from prosecution.

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On Torture and Amnesty to the Torturers

Posted in Political News with tags on April 17, 2009 by imliberal

As you have probably heard, four primary torture memos (approving torture of “detainees” who may or may have not done anything remotely dealing with terrorism) by lawyers in the Bush Department of Justice are out.  They are a must read and no, they were not written by Orwell (although you would swear they stole his style from 1984).

Here’s how it goes.  The Bush DOJ lawyers solely relied on the CIA to describe the “techniques” they were using and the effect it had on the detainees.  Do you think the CIA might have exaggerated the lack of harm or the abundance of harm torture caused these human beings?  Ding, ding, ding!  So the Bush DOJ lawyers methodically go through each technique and state categorically that among other things “walling, waterboarding, stress positions, confinement, confinement with insects, sleep deprivation for 11 days, dietary manipulation, and leaving a detainee naked” are all not torture because they do not cause prolonged mental harm according to the CIA!  Got it??  Circular reasoning?  You bet!

The problem is that most of these techniques are defined as torture already by treaties we signed and therefore are OUR law.  Under OUR law, all participants in torture MUST be procecuted (see the Convention against Torture where the nation “must extradite the participant OR submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.”)

But no, says the Obama administration.  We are to look forward and not backwards and turn a blind eye to all this lawless activity.  Will that really help us move forward?  Can bank robbers argue not to prosecute them because they were asked to rob the bank and we must look forward?  Do you see double, triple standards going on here?

Great column to read on these topics at Glenn Greenwald’s column at salon.com.  Click here to read it.

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March of the Ditto-Heads

Posted in Political News with tags , , , on April 15, 2009 by imliberal

by Mike Malloy, mikemalloy.com, April 15, 2009

Shhh . . . .what’s that sound?  Is it the drum beat of democracy or the march of the ditto-heads?  Today is (chuckle) “tea bag” day for Fox “News” fans, a new holiday celebrating the Obama tax cuts, or something.  Poor little things, they don’t really seem to know what they’re protesting.  Perhaps they just remember watching Democrats protest the Very Real and Very Bloody and Very Illegal Iraq invasion and occupation and felt all left out and stuff.

Well, now they’ve got a cause.  Maybe.  No More Taxes! (What?  Obama is going to lower my taxes?) Okay, then No More Government Bailouts! (Huh?  Bush was responsible for the TARP bank bailouts?  He was?  And Fannie and Freddie too?) Well shoot.  Anybody got Glen Beck’s phone number? Hannity’s email addy?  The code to Rush’s earpiece? They’ll tell us why we’re confused!

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Part 4 of I’m Not Sure About Obama: Expert Consensus: Obama Mimics Bush On State Secrets

Posted in Political News, fascism, fourth amendment with tags , , , on April 10, 2009 by imliberal

By Zachary Roth – April 9, 2009, 6:20PM, http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com

Is the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor on issues of secrecy and the war on terror?

During the presidential campaign, Obama criticized Bush for being too quick to invoke the state secrets claim. But last Friday, his Justice Department filed a motion in a warrantless wiretapping lawsuit, brought by the digital-rights group EFF. And the Obama-ites took a page out of the Bush DOJ’s playbook by demanding that the suit, Jewel v. NSA, be dismissed entirely under the state secrets privilege, arguing that allowing it go forward would jeopardize national security.

Coming on the heels of the two other recent cases in which the new administration has asserted the state secrets privilege, the motion sparked outrage among civil libertarians and many progressive commentators. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald wrote that the move “demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used.” MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann called it “deja vu all over again”. An online petition — “Tell Obama: Stop blocking court review of illegal wiretapping” — soon appeared.

Not having Greenwald’s training in constitutional law (and perhaps lacking Olbermann’s all-conquering self-confidence), we wanted to get a sense from a few independent experts as to how to assess the administration’s position on the case. Does it represent a continuation of the Bushies’ obsession with putting secrecy and executive power above basic constitutional rights? Is it a sweeping power grab by the executive branch, that sets set a broad and dangerous precedent for future cases by asserting that the government has the right to get lawsuits dismissed merely by claiming that state secrets are at stake, without giving judges any discretion whatsoever?

In a word, yes.

Ken Gude, an expert in national security law at the Center for American Progress, supported the administration’s invocation of the state secrets claim when it was made earlier this year in an extraordinary rendition case. But its position in Jewel is “disappointing,” Gude told TPMmuckraker, calling himself “frustrated.”

Gude confirmed that the Obama-ites were taking the same position as the Bushies on state secrets questions. “They’ve taken the maximalist view that the judge has hardly any role in determining whether national security” would be compromised by the release of classified information,” he said. “There’s going to be people who are very unhappy, and justifiably so.”

He added: “I’m very uncomfortable with the notion that the people who get to decide [whether national security would be jeopardized] is the government.”

Gude’s general view was echoed by Amanda Frost, an associate professor at Washington College of Law who has written extensively about issues of government transparency. Frost made clear that she hadn’t followed the Jewel case, but called the Obama administration’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in a similar high-profile wiretapping case involving an Oregon-based Arabic charity “indefensible.” The NSA, she said, has already acknowledged the existence of the wiretapping program, and some of its details are publicly known, so the claim that national security would be jeopardized merely by allowing the trial to proceed doesn’t hold water. The government is making that argument in both the Oregon case and Jewel.

Not everyone agrees. Stewart Baker, a former top lawyer with the Bush Department of Homeland Security, told TPMmuckraker that there can be an inherent conflict between protecting national security and allowing lawsuits to go forward. “It isn’t possible to litigate these cases and still have classified programs,” said Baker, who worked in the Carter administration and was chief counsel to the National Security Counsel under Presidents Geirge H. W. Bush and Clinton. He added of the Obama team: “I think they made the right call.”

But that seems to be the minority view. In an email to the Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin — who himself calls the Obama administation’s position “utterly un-American” — Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law at the Library of Congress, writes:

“1. The administration defends the state secrets privilege on the ground that it would jeopardize national security if classified documents were made available to the public. No one argues for public disclosure of sensitive materials. The issue is whether federal judges should have access to those documents to be read in their chambers.”2. If an administration is at liberty to invoke the state secrets privilege to prevent litigation from moving forward, thus eliminating independent judicial review, could not the administration use the privilege to conceal violations of statutes, treaties, and the Constitution? What check would exist for illegal actions by the executive branch?”

And writing on Slate, the noted conservative constitutional scholar Bruce Fein notes:

President Obama pledged to restore the rule of law. But the state-secrets-privilege wars with that promise.

That looks like a pretty broad consensus in opposition to the Obama administration’s position. And it’s the opposite of change we can believe in.

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Paul Krugman: Nationalize the banks

Posted in Economics, Political News with tags , , on April 10, 2009 by imliberal
We’re going to have to do it, so let’s get on with it
Tuesday, February 24, 2009, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09055/951102-109.stm

Comrade Greenspan wants us to seize the economy’s commanding heights.

OK, not exactly. What Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman — and a staunch defender of free markets — actually said was, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” I agree.

The case for nationalization rests on three observations.

First, some major banks are dangerously close to the edge — in fact, they would have failed already if investors didn’t expect the government to rescue them if necessary.

Second, banks must be rescued. The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.

Third, while banks must be rescued, the U.S. government can’t afford, fiscally or politically, to bestow huge gifts on bank shareholders.

Let’s be concrete here. There’s a reasonable chance — not a certainty — that Citi and BofA, together, will lose hundreds of billions over the next few years. And their capital, the excess of their assets over their liabilities, isn’t remotely large enough to cover those potential losses.

Arguably, the only reason they haven’t already failed is that the government is acting as a backstop, implicitly guaranteeing their obligations. But they’re zombie banks, unable to supply the credit the economy needs.

To end their zombiehood the banks need more capital. But they can’t raise more capital from private investors. So the government has to supply the necessary funds.

But here’s the thing: The funds needed to bring these banks fully back to life would greatly exceed what they’re currently worth. Citi and BofA have a combined market value of less than $30 billion, and even that value is mainly if not entirely based on the hope that stockholders will get a piece of a government handout. And if it’s basically putting up all the money, the government should get ownership in return.

Still, isn’t nationalization un-American? No, it’s as American as apple pie.

Lately the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has been seizing banks it deems insolvent at the rate of about two a week. When the FDIC seizes a bank, it takes over the bank’s bad assets, pays off some of its debt, and resells the cleaned-up institution to private investors. And that’s exactly what advocates of temporary nationalization want to see happen, not just to the small banks the FDIC has been seizing, but to major banks that are similarly insolvent.

The real question is why the Obama administration keeps coming up with proposals that sound like possible alternatives to nationalization, but turn out to involve huge handouts to bank stockholders.

For example, the administration initially floated the idea of offering banks guarantees against losses on troubled assets. This would have been a great deal for bank stockholders, not so much for the rest of us: Heads they win, tails taxpayers lose.

Now the administration is talking about a “public-private partnership” to buy troubled assets from the banks, with the government lending money to private investors for that purpose. This would offer investors a one-way bet: If the assets rise in price, investors win; if they fall substantially, investors walk away and leave the government holding the bag. Again, heads they win, tails we lose.

Why not just go ahead and nationalize? Remember, the longer we live with zombie banks, the harder it will be to end the economic crisis.

How would nationalization take place? All the administration has to do is take its own planned “stress test” for major banks seriously, and not hide the results when a bank fails the test, making a takeover necessary. Yes, the whole thing would have a Claude Rains feel to it, as a government that has been propping up banks for months declares itself shocked, shocked at the miserable state of their balance sheets. But that’s OK.

And once again, long-term government ownership isn’t the goal: Like the small banks seized by the FDIC every week, major banks would be returned to private control as soon as possible. The finance blog Calculated Risk suggests that instead of calling the process nationalization, we should call it “preprivatization.”

The Obama administration, says Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, believes “that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go.” So do we all. But what we have now isn’t private enterprise, it’s lemon socialism: Banks get the upside but taxpayers bear the risks. And it’s perpetuating zombie banks, blocking economic recovery.

What we want is a system in which banks own the downs as well as the ups. And the road to that system runs through nationalization.

Paul Krugman is a syndicated columnist for The New York Times.

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Part 3 of I’m Not so Sure about Obama: Obama’s Top Economic Adviser Is Greedy and Highly Compromised

Posted in Economics, Political News with tags , , on April 10, 2009 by imliberal

By Matt Taibbi, True/Slant. Posted April 10, 2009, www.alternet.org

Among the payoffs Larry Summers received: $45K from Merrill Lynch days before he joined Obama’s team. And it gets worse.

“But Summers, a leading architect of the administration’s economic policies and response to the global recession, appears to have collected the most income. Financial institutions including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch paid Summers for speaking appearances in 2008. Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.” — Washingtonpost.com

So I guess that $45,000 speaking fee from Merrill Lynch wasn’t technically a bribe because Summers wasn’t named to Obama’s economic transition team until Nov. 24 — a full 12 days later. I’m sure Larry Summers had absolutely no inkling whatsoever that he was going to be one of the key advisers to the new administration on Nov. 12.

It likewise makes perfect sense that Merrill Lynch, a company just months removed from having to be rescued from bankruptcy by an 11th-hour, pseudo-state-subsidized buyout by Bank of America, would decide to spend $45,000 on a speaking appearance by Summers because, well, they really valued his economic expertise and his proven ability to rally the troops with his stirring rhetoric.

It certainly had nothing to do with the fact that a) it was eight days after a Democrat was elected to the presidency; b) Summers had a long history of being one of the key policymakers in Democratic Party politics; and c) Merrill was absolutely not going to survive more than a few more months unless taxpayers forked over another 20 billion or so to cover the giant hole in Merrill’s balance sheet that was, at that time, still being hidden from Bank of America and its shareholders.

And how about that $135,000 appearance for Goldman Sachs in April, when Summers was already involved with Democratic Party politics again? That wasn’t a surreptitious campaign contribution at all!

But you have to give Goldman credit: it sure is thorough. It literally leaves no stone unturned.

One has to love the sequence of events here. Back in 2004, Goldman chief Hank Paulson goes to SEC chief William Donaldson and petitions to have lending restrictions relaxed for the top five investment banks. Donaldson rolls over, the restrictions are relaxed, and it’s a disaster, as the top five banks immediately overleverage themselves — two of the five, Bear Stearns and Lehman, would actually collapse, at least partially as a result of being insanely overleveraged.

In the midst of this disaster, Paulson is named Treasury secretary. He does nothing about the worsening financial crisis until it is far too late, then allows one of Goldman’s biggest competitors, Lehman, to fail while at the same time intervening on a huge scale to save AIG, which just happens to owe Goldman a ton of money.

When AIG is bailed out, its government regulator is not in the room, but the new chief of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, is. In fact, Goldman Sachs ultimately receives about $13 billion of the money paid to AIG by the government in the bailout, reportedly getting paid 100 cents on the dollar for its AIG exposure, despite the fact that the bank claimed it wasn’t going to suffer severe losses if AIG collapsed.

Later, another former Goldman executive, Ed Liddy, is installed as head of AIG — which just happens to get bailed out twice more, the last time to the tune of $30 billion.

The last two bailouts of AIG take place after a former Goldman chief, Robert Rubin (who, incidentally, helped start this mess by ramming through a series of i-banker wet-dream deregulatory moves as Treasury secretary for Clinton in the 1990s), is named to the Obama transition team, joining Summers (who had already taken $135,000 from Goldman that year) and Timothy Geithner (a protege of another Goldman alum, John Thain, former president and chief operating officer and notorious scumbag).

When it comes time for new Treasury Secretary Geithner to name a chief of staff, he chooses Mark Patterson, who is less than a year removed from working as a lobbyist for … Goldman Sachs. Patterson’s great contribution to society as a Goldman lobbyist was opposing a 2007 measure introduced in the Senate by presidential candidate Barack Obama to rein in executive compensation.

I remember watching Obama the presidential candidate give a speech in Mason City, Iowa, in 2007. Obama had made a big show of not having registered lobbyists working for his campaign, and he promised that lobbyists “won’t work in my White House.” The line was a hit and became part of Obama’s stump speech. I must have heard it two dozen times.

A little over a year later, he put a registered lobbyist of a bailed-out investment bank into a job whose primary responsibility is administering bailout money.

It gets worse. According to a Glenn Greenwald piece I just read, even Gary Gensler is a former Goldman employee. That absolutely blows my mind. Genlser is Obama’s choice to head the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose purview is the derivatives market. The CFTC was the battleground where ages ago Rubin, Summers, and then-Rubin aide Gensler teamed up to whack CFTC chief Brooksley Born, who had serious concerns about the burgeoning derivatives market, in particular the credit-default swap market. Rubin overturned Born’s recommendations, and derivatives were freed from most regulation. That economic Alamo led almost directly to the AIG disaster.

Think about this for a moment. A former Goldman chief, Rubin, presses the CFTC to deregulate a type of derivative contract whose chief benefit to an investment bank like Goldman is that it allows it to lend more — the CDS being most useful as a tool to move investment risk off a bank’s balance sheet.

Then another Goldman chief, Paulson, pushes for further relaxation of lending limits. Then Goldman jumps head first into the housing bubble, buying tens of billions in CDS protection to hedge its crazy investments. This massive explosion in lending by banks like Goldman, fueled in part by the use of derivatives like CDS and fueled still more by the 2004 change in rules, puts an enormous strain on the economy, leading to giant holes blown in its hull by the end of 2007 and on through 2008.

It follows that when Goldman’s chief partner in those CDS deals, AIG, collapses as part of this wave of crashes, Paulson — now Treasury secretary — rushes to the rescue, pumping billions in taxpayer money into AIG that is quickly funneled to Goldman. Then a Goldman alum is put in charge of AIG, while another bunch of Goldman alums funnels still more bailout money to AIG, and yet another Goldman alum is put in charge of regulating the derivatives market that is the focus of most of the bailout efforts.

In the midst of all of this, something amazing happens. Goldman Sachs, along with Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and a host of other “troubled” banks, reports a profit for its first quarter in 2009! How and why that happened is another fascinating story, for another time. For now, the only thing to remember is that all the ones who got us into this mess — Rubin, Summers, Goldman in general — are now being put in charge of the cleanup by a president who spent most of 18 months on the campaign trail pledging to end the influence of money in politics.

Add this to the obscene giveaway that is the toxic assets program Geithner has just devised (Goldman Sachs “expressed interest in participating in the plan as an investor,” according to the Wall Street Journal), and you have an amazing situation. Between the Bush and Obama administrations, you have a bailout program that has now figured three ways to funnel money to Goldman Sachs: via AIG, via TARP and now via this trillion-dollar “public-private investment program,” which basically lends huge amounts of money to investors and provides guarantees against heavy losses. It’s free money, state-subsidized profiteering at its most naked.

I hear all the time from people who complain that it’s naive to wonder why we put Wall Street executives in charge of policing Wall Street — that this is actually quite a sensible policy, because we need people with experience in that world making these decisions.

The reason people say this has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the fact that the financial markets are intimidatingly complex. When Enron buys a seat at the table to conduct energy policy under the Bush administration, everyone knows what that is. When Reagan hires notorious union busters to run the National Labor Relations Board, everyone knows what that is. And when we hire investment bankers to run banking policy, and put investment bankers in charge of handing out bailout money to investment banks, we ought to know what that is. But for some reason we don’t seem to see it the same way, not as clearly.

In my mind this officially ends the Obama honeymoon. I can maybe see one or two of these creeps in key positions. But this many — it’s an undeniable pattern. He put William Lynn, a former Raytheon lobbyist, in the Pentagon as deputy defense secretary. A lot of people squawked about Obama’s early lean toward John Brennan as CIA director because of his role in establishing the “enhanced interrogation” policies, but to me more significant was the fact that Brennan was the former chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, which is sort of like the chamber of commerce of intelligence contractors.

Most importantly, I’m sensing in these economic appointments a kind of drearily cynical parsing of the approval-ratings situation — Obama knows he’s still flying high with the “Yes We Can!” T-shirt crowd and knows that most people simply are not going to give a shit if he packs his Treasury Department with Goldman alums and lobbyists, despite the fact that he explicitly promised to do otherwise.

Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

© 2009 True/Slant All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/136008/



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Capitalism is Dead!

Posted in Political News with tags , on April 6, 2009 by imliberal
Capitalism is Dead

Capitalism is Dead

Read this great article to see the opportunities and the causes in the death of capitalism:  “Too Big to Save: The End of Financial Capitalism.”

Riddle me this.  How can we pour enough money into the banks when ” the value of global financial assets is several times the size of global gross national product (GDP).”  In other words, even if we gave up every single penny to the banks, it would never satisfy their debt.  Any comments about mark to B.S. instead of mark to marketing?

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The Big Takeover

Posted in Economics, Political News with tags , , on April 6, 2009 by imliberal

“The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution”

MATT TAIBBIPosted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM, www.rollingstone.com

Great article about the “economic” crisis — explains CDOs and CDSs in common sense language and shows this is also a power and political crisis. Click here for article.


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