Archive for Corruption

May
12

Not Your Garden Variety 501(c)3

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After finding that two of Thom Tillis’ staff members were literally in bed with lobbyists, it makes perfect sense to investigate whether ALEC is in flagrante delicto with legislators. News and Observer:

An advocacy group is asking Attorney General Roy Cooper to investigate the tax status of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that counts House Speaker Thom Tillis as one of its top members.

Common Cause sent the letter Tuesday just weeks after it filed a whistleblower complaint against ALEC with the IRS, saying it is operating as a tax-exempt nonprofit while lobbying state legislatures across the country.

“Common Cause has discovered compelling evidence that ALEC is a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity. ALEC’s compliance with state tax, gift, solicitation and lobbying laws should be reviewed by your office and/or appropriate state regulatory authorities,” the letter states. “As attorney general, you’re charged with responsibility for ensuring that North Carolina laws are properly applied and enforced. In view of the overwhelming evidence that ALEC is engaged in lobbying, I urge you to review its compliance with all applicable state laws or to refer this matter to the appropriate state regulatory authorities for their action.”
[...]
ALEC named Tillis, a Republican from the Charlotte area, as one of its state legislators of the year in 2011. The organization is holding a task force meeting in Charlotte on Friday and Saturday to consider “model legislation” for lawmakers to introduce.

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From Joan McCarter at dKos:

And how they’ve done this is remarkable. These “immediate effect” laws are supposed to get a two-thirds majority. That’s numerically impossible in the House, because Republicans don’t have two-thirds majority and Democrats have remained united as a bloc against them. The House Republicans simply ignore the two-thirds part of the law. They hold a separate “immediate effect” vote after voting in a bill, and rather than doing a roll call vote, just simply eyeball the assembly and call it two-thirds.

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Mar
15

Nuking Bridges

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Vampyroteuthis infernalis, lit. "vampire squid from Hell"

Wednesday morning, Goldman Sachs partner Greg Smith resigned via a very public op-ed in the New York Times . He left because Goldman has become a culture without any moral compass. Surprised?

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

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Maybe we need more female AGs.

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Jan
30

CSI: Wall Street

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Several recent reports worth noting on the Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group that President Obama announced in his State of the Union address. Rachel Maddow brought New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman onto her show [timestamp 4:40] to discuss the RMBS Working Group’s charge. Schneiderman and fellow AGs Kamala Harris (CA), Beau Biden (DE), Lisa Madigan (IL), Martha Coakley (MA), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV) have bucked the Justice Department and fellow state AGs who worked to cut a deal on limiting bank investigations earlier this year. Schneiderman, et. al. weren’t about to hand out “Get Out of Jail Free” cards. This pressured the Obama Justice Department to get more serious about holding the banks accountable.

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Categories : Corruption, Economy, Obama
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Jan
27

How Is Your 401K Doing?

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One Dollar In, Fifty-Nine Out

Elsewhere: The thirty big corporations analyzed in this report paid more to lobby Congress than they paid in federal income taxes for the three years between 2008 and 2010, despite being profitable.

Categories : Corruption, National
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Last summer, I asked this question:

Why are millionaires and billionaires targeting public education? For the same reason banksters pimped mortgage loans. For the same reason Wall Street wanted to privatize Social Security. For the same reason Willie Horton Sutton robbed banks.

Answer this question: What is the largest portion of the budget in all 50 states?

A couple of new columns chronicle further moves by what former Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch calls “The Billionaire Boys Club” to take their cut of public education tax dollars.

The New York Times  has a Sunday piece on billionaires using the “leveraging effect” of philanthropic advocacy to steer public policy. Efforts by the billionaire-funded Gates and the Broad Foundations to promote charter schools resulted in the Obama $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” program which, says the Times , prohibits states from limiting the number of charter schools. According to Ravitch, Obama appointed someone from the NewSchools Venture Fund that promotes charter schools to run “Race to the Top.”

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Categories : Corruption, Education
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Nov
26

Even The Language Is Corrupt

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OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH

Immediately and Henceforth,

  • Naked aggression shall be called “preemptive war”
  • Propaganda shall be called “news”
  • State kidnapping shall be called “extraordinary rendition”
  • Water torture shall be called “enhanced interrogation”
  • Arbitrary imprisonment shall be called “extrajudicial detention”
  • Kleptocracy shall be called “privatization”
  • Securities fraud shall be called “derivatives trading”
  • Sitting on the ground shall be called “active resistance”
  • Chemical attacks against sitting civilians shall be called “pain compliance.”

That is all.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

(Cross-posted from Dirty Hippies.)

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Nov
14

A Generation Indicted

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In the Washington Post  over the weekend, a 31 year-old Penn State graduate’s indictment of the preceding generation:

They have failed us, over and over and over again.

I speak not specifically of our parents — I have two loving ones — but of the public leaders our parents’ generation has produced. With the demise of my own community’s two most revered leaders, Sandusky and Joe Paterno, I have decided to continue to respect my elders, but to politely tell them, “Out of my way.”

They have had their time to lead. Time’s up. I’m tired of waiting for them to live up to obligations.

The Iraq war veteran is from the generation that turned out in force in 2008 to elect Barack Obama in hopes of ending the misfeasance of the Bush administration and the corrupt system that birthed it. They were hoping, waiting, for something different, better, but naive enough perhaps to believe the people in charge could repair the damage done by other people in charge.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” became somewhat of a cliche during that campaign. Now maybe, we are seeing signs that they finally believe it.

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Fox News has launched a proxy war on Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) on the taxpayers’ dime by instigating a federal investigation of New York Communities for Change, part of the team behind the successful Occupy the Boardroom. Politico’s Ben Smith reports tonight on an effort by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-1%; net worth $156 million) “to link the defunct community organizing group ACORN to the Occupy Wall Street movement.”

From NewsCorp (home of ‘Hacking on an industrial scale’) and Fox News comes this:

In a letter dated Monday, Issa, R-Calif., called for U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch of the Eastern District of New York to launch a probe into allegations first reported by FoxNews.com that NYCC may have “solicited donations from union members under false pretenses and misappropriated those funds to support the protesters.”

Fox and Fiends’ business model relies on boogie men. So this is the next wave in Fox’s Zombie ACORN narrative that cranked up two weeks ago. They will be, as usual, relentless. NYCC rattled some cages, so Zombie ACORN must die … again.

Michael McAuliff from HuffPost: Read More→