bill:politics

This is exactly the kind of result I was talking about when I told people that electing the Bush Crew would be a longterm disaster for our legal system. You can say as often as you like that Samuel Alito is an educated, urbane jurist and I will point to Hein vs. Freedom from Religion Foundation each time.

There is no way to explain the votes here any other way and Justice Souter hammered the nail with this pithy comment in his dissent: “I see no basis for this distinction in either logic or precedent…” What he means is that this decision is not about the underlying issue, whether the Faith-based initiatives violate the Constitution’s Establishment clause, but whether American citizens have the legal standing to sue the government on the issue at all. That is, the majority decided that funding for these programs cannot be challenged because it comes from a general purpose bank account Congress gave the Administration and not from specific legislation (that is, the First Amendment says “Congress shall pass no laws…” and it wasn’t Congress that specifically authorized the expenditures).

I guess we should breathe a small sigh of relief that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, two train wrecks if ever there were any on the SCOTUS, couldn’t convince Alito, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy to join their attempt to completely overturn the precedent allowing at least some suits on this issue.

The anal wordsmithing is completely in line with typical BushCo behavior, though. Tell me you aren’t immediately connecting this with Cheney’s recent claims that his office need not comply with an executive order dealing with oversight of classified information because, he says, his office is not part of the executive branch.

January 20, 2009, cannot get here soon enough.

Michael Bloomberg has resigned from the Republican Party, launching rumors that he’ll run for the presidency as an independent next year even though he issued the standard denials. Can he succeed where John Anderson, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader failed miserably? Can he make the leap from governing a city which, no matter how large, bears no organizational semblance to how things work at the natioal level? I don’t know and he’s certainly done the improbable in the past.

Let’s say he does win. How will he govern, as a practical matter, with no party members to support him in the House or Senate? Even with the Democrats in control of both houses this year, Bush has a completely staffed system to carry legislation and nominations, operate the executive branch departments and grease the wheels as lobbyists. This is a practical problem that I’ve wondered about since voting for Anderson in 1980 and have never seen it answered satisfactorily. Focusing solely on the election, there is also the substantial concern that if the Democrats choose a candidate who doesn’t appeal strongly to the centrist voters a pure centrist like Mayor Mike will drain enough votes to ensure another four Years of the Elephant.

DC politics may be—make that are!—in need of a huge overhaul but unless he follows an electoral victory with the creation of a new party, similar to what Ariel Sharon did in Israel at the end of 2005 and Morihiro Hosokawa did in Japan in 1993 after handing the Liberal Democratic Party their only defeat, or comes to a working arrangement with either the GOP or Dems I don’t see how a Bloomberg Presidency would be anything but a tragic waste of years.

There are so many huge issues that will need attention when we’re finally rid of the Bush Crew that the country cannot lose another four years. So, Mayor Bloomberg, consider this a request from a pragmatic fan: Please keep your word in today’s statements and don’t run.

I’ve been a reasonably happy customer of Wells Fargo for this entire century (damn, doesn’t that sound impressive!) and I suppose they’re more or less as good as any of the other big national banks. Your experience may be different, of course, as the collision of individuals dealt with and company policies create an individual track record so I’m not asserting anything other than my own.

This morning I’m beginning to wonder. Wells Fargo sent me the latest installment of their monthly customer newsletter email and I clicked a link labeled Detect Credit Fraud Early: ID Theft Protection because, hey, who isn’t interested in bank security. The page beings okay, with a headline of “Protect Your Good Credit with Identity Theft Protection” and is short too, covering the program with six bullet points, all less than two narrow lines.

And then I my eyes reached the closer: “Enjoy peace of mind for just $12.99 a month.” That’s right, Wells Fargo expects you, me and Dupree to pay $156 per year for keeping safe what I–and you may feel differently–expect ought to be the normal course of business! Not necessarily by a bank, maybe by the major credit bureaus, but if I had to guess I’d say that Wells Fargo is doing this in some sort of partnership with them.

Credit card companies and banks, here’s a competitive advantage you can offer customers: do this service, maybe minus the personal credit analysis, for free. Make a big deal about it in your advertising and marketing. Most other things being equal I’d sign up and blog you very positively, just drop me a note.

One the one hand we have my old high school chum Christopher Christie taking down the rat bastards who tried to get rich off the backs of investors and employees at Cendant with former Chairman Walter Forbes getting a 12 year jail term, former Vice Chairman E. Kirk Sheldon getting ten years and each ordered to pay restitution of $3.275 billion. They can spend their days in the pen comparing notes with the Rigas men, Jeffrey Skilling and Dennis Kozlowski, remembering the days of $15,000 shower curtains and private jets.

On the other we have the sleazy Bush team trying to quietly do what they can for supporters and allies before the Democrats run them out of DC. In this instance that means firing US Attorneys like Carol Lam in San Diego before they can bring folks like Republican congressman Jerry Lewis (who is still very popular in France, right?) to trial for giving fat government contracts to businesspeople willing to give fat lobbying and consulting contracts in return. At least Lam convicted ex-Representative Randy Duke for taking a million dollar plus home in exchange for getting a few earmarks into legislation.

I really like this quote the Times has about Lam’s dismissal from the F.B.I. chief in San Diego: “What do you expect her to do? Let corruption exist?â€Â

Update: Richard Koman reports in Silicon Valley Watcher that Kevin Ryan, the US Attorney leading the stock options backdating investigation, is another target of the Bush purge and that “[t]he Department of Justice has asked for resignations of all but one US Attorney in California and Democrats see the moves as at attempt to replace Attorneys who don’t meet the Bush Administration’s conservative litmus test.” Sad, really farking sad.

[This is a Letter to the Editor to the NY Times, which they chose not to publish.]

Editor:

I’m frankly astonished you published this fig leaf of apologia by Phyllis Korkki. For starters, the Times has published many articles over the years on how high income individuals have used and abused tax shelters and other schemes to avoid paying their allegedly high share of taxes, meaning the assertion that “The tax bite from a six-figure bonus is likely to be substantial” is hardly likely to be accurate.

Second, while the $137,000 amount may be accurate in the broadest terms I doubt its meaningful in the context of this discussion since the secretaries, couriers and shipping department staff are hardly likely to get six figure bonuses and ought to be excluded. The true relevant number should be the average bonus paid to partners, executives and other top of the line Wall Streeters and I expect it would be far greater than $137,000.

Finally, the entire short article reeks of condescension. Even if the people getting high six and seven figure bonuses pay out half in taxes then the bonuses are still many multiples of the average American take home earnings each year, with these bonuses coming on top of high salaries, benefits and perks.

If anyone criticizes the New York Times as a card-carrying member of the liberal media, you can correct them by pointing them to Ms. Korkki’s article.

If I was less of a cynic I’d wish for the new Democratic majority in Congress and the Bush Administration, the Sunnis, Shiites and Israelis, the Somalis, Ethiopians, Sudanese, Rwandans, Zimbabweans and Congolese, the Basques, the Koreans, the Pakistanis, Indians, the Tamils and the Sri Lankans to find a true new path to peace, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, Palestine and Israel, and everywhere people are killing each other out of misunderstanding, misplaced anger or envy, or from a sad drive for power in what is, after all, a fleeting moment that we have in this existence.

I’d wish that the greedy corporate leaders would appreciate the immense good fortune they already have and stop trying to grasp every last dollar, Euro or yuan they might possibly reach, and instead turn that drive to lifting up the far less fortunate just a little bit. Partners at Goldman, Sachs and your pals on Wall Street and the hedge funds, I’m particularly pointing at you and your absurd bonuses.
I’d also wish that the leadership of the global energy industry would realize that they’re people first, with family and friends who need a world to live in that hasn’t been ruined by rapacious consumption of what are, after all, limited resources before its too late and the rising seas are lapping up at their office lobbies.
But I am too much of a cynic, so I won’t.

The BBC is reporting that Pakistan’s Assembly has passed a new law amending how rapes are prosecuted, taking them from the religious to the civil courts. Their version of Sharia (Islamic law) required a woman to bring four men to bear witness of her accusation, or else find herself being charged for adultery. You may recall the punishment for adultery in Pakistan is stoning.

While I’m glad to see this development, assuming the upper house of the legislature also passes it and key US ally Dictator/President Pervez Mussharaf signs it, I’m frankly sick at the reaction of the country’s religious leaders. Religious parties boycotted the vote, saying the bill encouraged “free sex” and that the new legislation will be “a harbinger of lewdness and indecency in the country.”

Because, of course, the raped women are responsible for what happened to them. There really are no rapes in Pakistan, despite research from the country’s independent Human Rights Commission showing there are at least 15 a day–the men are honest and true believers and the sex that happens does so because loose women tempt men beyond any reasonable resistance!

This seems to be the same sad line of reasoning that requires Islamic women to wear hijabs and burkas as well require them to be accompanied by a male from their household when out of the home. To do otherwise simply breaks men of their ability to keep their hands, and other body parts, to themselves.

One has to wonder, then, how men such as myself manage it, in the decadent American society where women flaunt uncovered skin anywhere one looks. I’m 45 years old and somehow lived all these years without forcing a woman to have sex against her will and, as far as I know, neither has male of my acquaintance. Which is not to say none of the women I know have been raped, sadly several have suffered this terrible violation. Fortunately, none of them required four (male) witnesses to ‘prove’ the crime occurred.

Showing that corporate criminals are starting to get the proper rewards, Judge Glasser sentenced former Computer Associates Chairman and CEO Sanjay Kumar to 12 years in prison for his part in a $2.2B accounting fraud that would have taken a weaker company down Enron-style. CA’s chief financial officer, head of worldwide sales, general counsel and three other executives have already admitted their guilt related to the accounting scandal and the company also agreed to pay $225 million in shareholder restitution.

The Nobel committee made a good decision this week in awarding this year’s Peace Prize to Mohammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, which Yunus founded 30 years ago, for their pioneering work in bringing micro-loans to aspiring entrepreneurs. I do wonder why it was the peace and not the economics award, but that’s just a quibble.

I first read about the Bangladeshi’s work a few years ago on MetaFilter and was suitably impressed. By seeding local groups with small amounts of cash, loans of a few dollars, generally under the equivalent of US$100, are made that completely change the financial prospects of impoverished people.

And, of course, these rising tides do spread as their money recirculates in the form of additional loans as each is repaid and new spending to other businesses in the town and region. Not fast but very effective.

Massachusetts is one of those late primary states and voters yesterdaydecided to pit an African-American man (Democrats) and white female (Republicans) against each other to be the state’s next Governor and either will be the first of their category to be elected to the office. Sounds great, eh?

What got to me, though, was this assertion by Republican candidate Kerry Healey in her acceptance speech: “This election will bring change to Massachusetts  but what kind of change? We will have an option: Will we have two-party democracy and balance on Beacon Hill or go back to a time when the people’s business was done behind closed doors.”

Is she serious? Her description seems better suited to her party’s behavior in our nation’s capital than of a state government which has had a Republican governor for the last 16 years. Vice President Cheney, SecDef Rumsfeld and other Republicans large and small gave speeches and interviews during this election season all over the place trying to associate Democratic candidates with terrorists and appeasers so they can keep control of both houses of Congress, along with the Executive Branch.

Two party democracy isn’t a good idea when its the Republicans who’d lose total control (e.g., DC) but just fine when they need to stop the Democrats from gaining it. As usual, the Elephants will stoop to any rhetorical trick to get what they want.

Beautiful, heartaching, swinging country version by the Burns Sisters of Little Steven’s I am a Patriot provides the soundtrack for a video view of last summer’s Cindy Sheehan-led peace protests in Crawford, Texas. The song is so appropriate and never more so than when Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are giving speeches claiming that people like me, who disagree with their tactics and policies, are either traitors or providing sustenance to the terrorists. As if their oh so precious Bible were not the only document they possess written down by man but whispered by their Almighty!

(Tech note: I initially attempted to embed the video in this post for your convenience but despite trying a couple of WordPress plugins couldn’t make it work; the fault is mine, I’m sure, and not the plugin authors’.)

I listened to our esteemed psuedo-President give 15 minutes of vague, stern yet feel good yammering on the drive home from work tonight. Much of what he said was difficult to disagree with, that America cannot stand by as terrorists seek to kill our citizens and tear our nation down, that people the world over should have free governments which serve them rather than repress and control them.

But these are straw man arguments, punching at paper bags rather than working for the unity Bush claims we must have. So here are three questions, the answers to which are not subject to handwaving, asked as if he’d held a press conference or town hall meeting:

Where are the mainstream media reporters, who after all are the ones who have access, on asking these questions? I admit this is just a guess but I don’t believe the White House would issue me, or Karl, or Garret a press pass for the next press conference.

Somehow I don’t think the Dave Packard or Bill Hewlett would duck the blame for actions taken by people working directly for them. After all, this isn’t like asking a corporate chairperson to put her neck in the noose for something done four levels away. But HP Chair Patricia Dunn today defended her role in an inquiry into a boardroom leak that has led the California Attorney General to open an investigation, and said she has no plans to resign unless asked by the board.

Dunn said she did not know private investigators hired by the computer maker had used questionable tactics to access private phone records of board directors and journalists.”Our board certainly had no idea” of the privacy breaches, Dunn said in an interview on Friday, adding, “This problem won’t recur.”

The thing that smells really bad to me about this, beyond the nasty, chilling snoopery, is that Dunn and the HP board knew about the seemingly illegal behavior since at least its May board meeting–four months ago–and yet we’re just finding out now. At least one board member, Tom Kleiner (an HP executive himself before co-founding the legendary Kleiner, Perkins VC firm), had the grace and guts to resign when he learned of the misdeeds; apparently he “ratted out” Dunn and the rest, who preferred to sweep things under the rug, by informing numerous prosecutors and regulators.

Dunn may not plan to resign but I hope that someone else gets to make that decision. As we’re beginning to see in the stock options scandal, corporate leaders are no longer quite as invulnerable and unaccountable as in years past.

CNN Money: HP Chair: Lying, or incompetent. “At Enron, WorldCom, Tyco … this type of conversation probably happened in one way or another. It shouldn’t happen anymore. So which is it? You are either lying now and did actually know what was going on with the phone records … or the whole corporate upheaval of the past three years totally blew by you.”

From the Interesting People mail list, the recent London bomb scare has almost certainly got the real Al Qaeda laughing so hard they’ve wet themselves. Twice. As Perry E. Metzger, a computer security expert whose gone back to school to study chemistry, analyzes the liquid bomb plot and concludes by saying:

“At some point, we’re going to have to accept that there is a difference between real security and Potemkin security (or Security Theater as Bruce Schneier likes to call it), and a difference between realistic threats and uninteresting threats. I’m happy that the police caught these folks even if their plot seems very sketchy, but could we please have some sense of proportion?”

Frankly, more or less the same thoughts (without the extensive chemical explanation) had occured to me as I watched TV clips of people tossing good stuff in the trash bins because the security regime went more than a bit bonkers. All the politicians and NeoCon pundits screaming about how this would have been a tragedy beyond imagining just set off too many buttons for me. Of course, more people are dying every couple of weeks in places like Darfur (from intertribal violence) and South Asia (from floods and earthquakes and train derailments) than would have if this plot was real and succeeded but they aren’t American or British. So who gives a fuck, right?

[via Semiologic]

John Robb had a post today on the latest developments in the police v. PCC battle in Sao Paulo and reminded me I was saving up some material to blog on Brazil, to follow up this post from a couple of weeks ago.

A good friend of mine, born in Massachusetts but fluent in Portuguese and married to a lovely Brazilian woman, said to me the other day: “Brazil is like a big carcass being ripped apart by hyeanas.” The PCC problem in Sao Paulo is just one part of it, and probably the lesser.

The bigger problem, as discussed in my previous entry, is the completely lawless destruction of the Amazon. Not to go all ecowarrier but for the near future this will probably have a larger global impact and is being driven by a simpler motivation, greed. The government won’t step in effectively because the necessary individuals are corrupted and external intervention is a non-starter due to Brazilian nationalism.

To a degree, the PCC and Amazonian issues are driven by the same underlying cause: Brazil is a country with a tiny, ultra-wealthy ruling elite, who think nothing of jetting to Miami for a hairdo and dinner, and a huge improverished peasant class, millions of whom live in cardboard and newspaper shantytowns called invasions with no water or sewage
treatment and minimal electricity provided by illegal taps.

Two of the commonly cited examples of economic success are widespread use of ethanol and exported beef; even proud Brazilians will brag on them at parties. Both, however, are actually causing much more harm than good. To provide grazing for the always increasing cattle herds and farm land to grow the corn and grain to feed them and produce the ethanol, more and more land is required.

Where is the land coming from? Criminals and corrupt politicians! Even Lula da Silva, the left winger elected President in 2002 on promises to reform the system and dig the country out from under the thumb of the IMF and World Bank, has found it impossible to put a dent in the system. Da Silva’s re-election this October, considered a lock weeks ago, is now under severe pressure from a renegade senator even further to the left who split off from the ruling party because it failed to deliver on the 2002 platform.

Guns are as, or perhaps even more, freely available in Brazil as in the United States. Over the last 20 years groups of armed men have simply shown up in the Amazon and the nation’s countryside, chopped down as many of the beautiful old growth hard wood trees as they could carry off and set fire to the rest to clear the land for ranchers or farmers. Politicians and police are paid to do nothing and the ones who refuse the payola are killed or transferred to ineffectual postings.

The people who lived on the land head for Sao Paulo, Rio and the other big cities where nothing but more misery awaits them. The hovels, which can spring up over night, grow into the huge tracts known as favelas. Brazil’s most brilliant futebol players, Ronaldinho and Robinho being the latest global superstars in a line going back to Pele, often emerge from these ghettos but other than the dozens who escape via sports each year few residents have little such hope.

Except, of course, through crime. My friend says that middle class Brazilians travel between home and work, shopping or school in constant fear of carjackings, kidnappings or worse, windows closed, doors locked and guards opening electric gates at the last possible moment and for the shortest time span so no one can sneak inside.

The recent actions of the First Command of the Capital (PCC) gang, the focus of Robb’s attention, is an early indicator that the largest country in South America may soon become the next failed state in our hemisphere, joining Columbia and Peru, but with horrifically more serious consequences than increased drug trafficking.

Though I ought to expect crap like this, I’m still surprised when the Bush Administration pulls stunts like putting a journalist in jail for refusing to give up videotape he made of a protest last summer in San Francisco. The guy was blogging right up until the court hearing from whence he was sent to the stir.

Really unbelievable and yet a totally transparent ploy. California law protects the press so–on the flimsiest of connective tissue–the fact that the SFPD gets federal funding, the Justice Department jumped in and brought the case in federal court. Of course the judge had to go along with it and he did.

The other question I have is whether the major media outlets will jump on Wolff’s story as they did in the celebrated Judith Miller fiasco. Coverage by the local daily is not the same, but we need to hold the government accountable for yet another board in our fence of rights pulled away.

The good news is that the I.R.S. is reviewing companies involved in the options backdating scandal and will go after corrupt corporations and executives whenever a case can be made, which with any luck ought to be even more often than the S.E.C can get criminal convictions on securities violations. As the saying goes, Capone never did time for murder.

If it turns out that Sun Microsystems took this liberty in the one grant I got from them the feds can count on an updated tax return–and Sun can expect a lawsuit looking to recoup any money involved.

The S.E.C., though, wiped out a big chunk of goodwill when they “waived nearly $15 million in payments from Scott Sullivan, former WorldCom CFO, and two other executives who were jailed over the $11 billion fraud that drove the company into bankruptcy.” The money was to come from bonuses he was illegally awarded so why should the fine be waived? If the answer is that Sullivan spent the money on lawyers then I think he should have been stuck with a public defender, same as any other indigent defendent.

Not wanting to be topped, the Republicans in Congress are making a shallow election year ploy to score points with less well off supporters through a minimum wage increase, all the way to a whole $7.25 in hour in three small, annual steps. Though this is the first increase they’ve come close to passing in 10 years the real beneficiaries of the bill are–knock me over with a feather–the ultra-wealthy.

Amazing how they can spin the legislation since the real meat of it is $310 billion in tax cuts. That’s right, Bush and his crew are trying to hide yet another attempt to whack the estate tax though fortunately the Democrats have enough votes to block passage in the Senate. House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) admitted as much by saying he thought the tax cuts would make the medicine of the minimum wage increase go down easier!

Todd Huffman, an Oregon pediatrician, really says it well:

“Families that work hard and full-time shouldn’t be poor in America. This November, Americans need to elect politicians of every stripe who will support a living family income, who will put poverty relief ahead of tax relief for the rich, and who will put the interests and needs of America’s workers ahead of corporations and wealthy estate-owners. In the fight against poverty, there’s no Republican or Democrat way - there’s only the right way. We have the wallet - can we find the will?”

Amazon: Going, going….

“Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern hemisphere and could massively accelerate global warming with incalculable consequences.”

The massive collision of many negative threads of our modern life summed up in a single black swan. [via garret]

America: from Freedom to Fascism

Determined to find the law that requires American citizens to pay income tax, producer Aaron Russo (”The Rose,” “Trading Places”) set out on a journey to find the evidence. This film which is neither left, nor right-wing is a startling examination of government. It exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America since 1913 when the Federal Reserve system was fraudulently created. Through interviews with U.S. Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents and tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, and the national identity card which becomes law in May 2008. This ID card will use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips which are essentially homing devices used to track people. This film shows in great detail and undeniable facts that America is moving headlong into a fascist police state. Wake up!

After watching the two trailers available I think Russo has gone off the deep end. Maybe it was too many years in Hollywood. This movie, self-described as a documentary, seems to be little more than an update of the income tax denier movement with national ID paranoia added in. The movie repeats the assertion that there is no constitutionally valid federal statute which provides for the federal income tax and that the Real ID act wil be the final straw in transforming America into a fascist state controlled by the bankers and corporate elite.