December 19, 2013

Christie Allies Get Two-Day Extension On BRIDGE SCANDAL SUBPOENAS

After hiring attorneys, two allies of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) will have two more days to comply with subpoenas issued to them as part of the legislative investigation into the growing scandal over lane closures on the George Washington Bridge that caused days of gridlock in Fort Lee, N.J. Bill Baroni and David Wildstein both resigned from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge, earlier this month amid allegations from Democrats that the lane closures were ordered because Fort Lee's mayor declined to endorse Christie's re-election bid.



Assemblyman John Wisnieswki, who is chairman of New Jersey Assembly Transportation Committee, told TPM he granted Baroni and Wildstein the extension Wednesday to allow the attorneys they recently retained to become familiar with the issue. "I certainly recognize that they've gotten criminal defense counsel involved and they may need a day or so to get up to speed," Wisnieswki said. one of the attorneys asked for an extension until Jan. 10, but "that was not going to fly." The subpoenas demanded all documents and correspondence between members of the Christie administration and Port Authority officials. In addition to Baroni and Wildstein, subpoenas were sent to five other officials. The other officials did not get an extension and must respond Thursday.




cont'



http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/christie-allies-get-two-day-extension-on-traffic-jam-scandal-subpoenas

December 18, 2013

Jamie Dimon’s PERP WALK: Why It Could Be This Year’s Christmas Miracle

Jamie Dimon (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas/AP/Eric Risberg)



The crowd waited impatiently outside 270 Park Avenue, corporate headquarters of JPMorgan Chase. Photographers readied their cameras. Then, the murmuring grew into a low roar. There was CEO Jamie Dimon, accompanied by two FBI agents. His hands were tied behind his back, held together by handcuffs. As flashbulbs popped, the agents guided Dimon into an awaiting vehicle, and drove off to take him into police custody. Christmas miracle? It doesn’t have to be. Even putting aside the rap sheet of crimes committed by JPMorgan Chase over the past several years for which its CEO can be said to be ultimately responsible, just a week ago, Jamie Dimon explicitly violated a federal statute that carries a prison sentence. That he’s a free man today, with no fear of prosecution, doesn’t only speak to our two-tiered system of justice in America. It should color our perceptions of new rules and regulations that supposedly “get tough” on the financial industry, as we recognize that any law is only as strong as the individuals who enforce them.



The law in question that Jamie Dimon violated, by his own admission, can be found in Section 906 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. In the aftermath of the 2001 financial crisis, when corporations like Enron and WorldCom melted down in accounting scandals, Congress passed and George W. Bush signed Sarbanes-Oxley, meant to reform corporate accounting and protect investors through additional disclosures. Section 906 forces corporate CEOs and CFOs (chief financial officers) to add a written certification to every periodic financial statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In this certification, the CEO and CFO must personally attest that the documents submitted to the SEC are accurate, as well as that the corporation has adequate internal controls. That phrase “internal controls” has a very specific meaning, covering the accuracy of all financial reporting, proper risk management, and compliance with all applicable regulations. Under Section 906, if the CEO or CFO knowingly or willfully make false certifications – i.e., if they know the SEC filing contains inaccurate information, or that the company’s internal controls are inadequate – they face fines of up to $5 million, and imprisonment of up to 20 years.



The idea here was to change corporate behavior by putting top executives personally on the hook for any wrongdoing. This would concentrate the minds of CEOs and CFOs, giving them a personal interest in ensuring regulatory and legal compliance. And it would assure investors that all accounting statements filed by the corporation were accurate, and all risks disclosed. We know now that Wall Street firms like JPMorgan Chase routinely violated any number of laws leading up to and after the financial crisis. We know that the risks weren’t disclosed to investors in a timely manner, since multibillion-dollar settlements keep getting announced without warning. And we know enough to infer that the annual statements to the SEC that Jamie Dimon personally signed were inaccurate.



For example, the internal control group designed to manage risk inside the Chief Investment Office where the disastrous London Whale trades were placed only had one employee covering a large trading desk. Traders spent months covering up the massive losses in the trades, clearly displaying ineffective risk management and internal controls. Yet every year, Jamie Dimon signed a form saying the controls were adequate. In fact, in the settlement over the Whale trades, the bank admitted to both misstating financial results and lacking effective internal controls. This should have triggered Section 906. And that’s but one of a host of examples. Perhaps you think this isn’t clear enough, that a jury would never convict Dimon on a Sarbanes-Oxley certification violation, because he couldn’t possibly have known at the time about the inadequate controls. First of all, the entire point of Section 906 is that Dimon and his fellow CEOs should not be able to wriggle off the hook with an “I know nothing” defense. But Dimon took this a step further just last week, providing prosecutors with what should be a smoking gun. As Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil noted, last week Dimon appeared at an investor conference put on by Goldman Sachs. And at this conference, he said, in public, “We have control issues we’ve got to fix. We’re taking an ax to it. We’re going to fix the problems that have been identified.”




cont'


http://www.salon.com/2013/12/18/jamie_dimons_perp_walk_why_it_could_be_this_years_christmas_miracle/

December 17, 2013

Paul Ryan Suggests TYING Keystone Pipeline To Debt Ceiling Vote

att: REUTERS




Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) on Tuesday suggested that Republicans link the next vote to raise the debt ceiling to approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, the Wall Street Journal reported.



In September, Republicans considered demanding approval of the pipeline during any vote on the debt ceiling, but dropped the tactic.




http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/paul-ryan-suggests-tying-keystone-to-debt-ceiling-vote

December 17, 2013

Senate Dems COMPELLED To "EMBRACE THE SUCK" On Budget To Avoid Disaster

"....E-M-B-R-A-C-E...T-H-E...S-U-C-K...."



~snip~

Now that debate has been closed and the Senate has avoided a filibuster on this measure, it seems extremely likely that this will pass the Senate, as only a simple majority is needed to pass it. President Obama has already come out and said he supports the budget and will sign it as soon as it arrives on his desk. The budget passed by a huge margin in the House, as the majority of Republicans and Democrats both voted to pass it. Considering that the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate voted to move this to a final vote, it appears that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) should be able to deliver the simple majority needed even if no Republicans decide to vote for it.



The funny thing here is that Democrats are the ones who had to compromise the most on this budget deal. As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said to her fellow Democrats as the deal was going up for a vote: “Embrace the suck.” Pelosi, Reid and Obama all know that Democrats, and the majority of American people, are getting the short end of the stick on this budget deal. There are no increases taxes to the wealthy or corporations. The spending level is only slightly higher than what Republicans wanted, which was at austerity levels. Some of the sequestration cuts were taken away, but most of that is to the military. Long-term unemployment benefits aren’t included in this deal, angering the majority of Democratic lawmakers.



OK, then why even support this budget? Obviously, the leadership sees this as a way of creating some stability on Capitol Hill and perhaps leading to further improvement in the economy. With the unemployment rate at its lowest in over five years and the economy slowly but surely improving and growing, Democrats don’t want to cause any hit to the economy as things continue to look up. Also, they obviously don’t want another government shutdown like we saw in October. Allowing another shutdown could be seen by voters as doing the same thing Republicans did two months ago, which is shutting down the federal government over ideological reasons. Whether that is correct is beside the point. The American public does not have any further patience for yet another standoff in Washington.





cont'

http://www.politicususa.com/2013/12/17/senate-dems-compelled-embrace-suck-budget-avoid-disaster.html

December 17, 2013

Who Is Financing the SMEARS AGAINST Elizabeth Warren?

~snip~

White and Haberman closed by saying: "The worry on Wall Street is about how far to the left Clinton might have to drift to appease what's been proclaimed the [Elizabeth] 'Warren wing of the Democratic Party' -- the vocal populists buoyed by Elizabeth Warren's tough critiques of Wall Street greed, as well as by the recent election of liberal Mayor Bill de Blasio on their New York home turf. ... And if the banking class is delighted with Clinton lately, the feeling appears mutual. In Manhattan last week, Clinton sat down with the Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein for their second question-and-answer session in the last two months."



Wall Street's counter-attack against Senator Elizabeth Warren (here being mentioned yet again along with mayor-elect Bill de Blasio) came in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal , on December 2nd, when two Republican-Democratic proponents of cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler, both heads of the long-time Clinton-backing Third Way organization (a think tank), headlined "Opinion: Cowan and Kessler: Economic Populism Is a Dead End for Democrats : The de Blasio-Warren Agenda Won't Travel." These Hillary-supporters linked NYC's new anti-megabank mayor-elect with U.S. Senator Warren, and even listed his name before hers, probably so as to blur their real intention and sole actual target here, which was Elizabeth Warren, whose appeal to core Democratic voters presents the only substantial threat to Hillary Clinton's Presidential train, which is now leaving the station.



Cowan-Kessler opened: "If you talk to leading progressives these days, you'll be sure to hear this message: The Democratic Party should embrace the economic populism of New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts [U.S.] Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Such economic populism, they argue, should be the guiding star for Democrats heading into 2016." Amazingly, these Wall Street fronts (Cowan and Kessler) let slip there that though they mentioned first the mere "Mayor-elect," their real focus was actually on the 2016 Presidential race: Hillary's expected Presidential-nomination contest against not "Massachusetts Sen.," but Massachusetts' U.S. Sen., Warren. They continued: "Nothing could be more disastrous for Democrats."



Who, then, are these two conservative "Democratic" front-men, Cowan and Kessler? They are the two top officials, and co-founders, of the think tank, Third Way, which is associated with the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been built up by Bill Clinton in order to provide Wall Street a way to control things even when Republicans are not in power. If the electorate, for whatever reason, fail to vote for Wall Street's preferred candidate (almost always the Republican), then the Government can still be bought by them, so long as they pay the price: donating to Third Way, DLC "Democrats," who eschew "economic populism," and who are more deferential to the big-money men than real Democrats would tolerate being. In other words: these Third Way, DLC, people represent the "Democratic" Establishment, not the Democratic voters who lack the wealth to buy "their" Government.




cont'


http://www.opednews.com/articles/Who-Is-Financing-the-Smear-by-Eric-Zuesse-Elizabeth-Warren_Hillary-Clinton_Occupy-Wall-Street_Wall-Street-131216-50.html

December 17, 2013

Rachel Maddow: Chris Christie ‘ROTTEN & VINDICTIVE' Political PAYBACK SCANDAL Deepens

This story just might be the little turd nugget that brings the shithouse down.......



Not only did a high school friend of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) lack both a resume and a job description for work at the center of a political mystery, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said on Monday, but the man has become a nuisance for people reporting on his suspected activities. “Something rotten and vindictive and petty has been going on in New Jersey,” Maddow said. Maddow explained that David Wildstein, who resigned on Dec. 6 after being revealed as the person who ordered the suspicious closing of two lanes on the George Washington Bridge in September 2013, was paid more than $150,000 a year to serve as Christie’s “director of interstate capital projects” at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a position that had no job description attached.


The New Jersey Star-Ledger reported that no resume for Wildstein was turned over by the Port Authority in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the newspaper for state employees in Wildstein’s salary range.





Speculation has mounted that Wildstein’s order was a rebuke to the Mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Mark Sokolich (D) after Sokolich refused to endorse Christie during his recent re-election campaign. The move strangled traffic in Fort Lee for nearly a week. Maddow also pointed out that Wildstein has bought and registered more than 50 internet domain names, many of them named after people who have reported on him or the investigation into his actions, and even other Port Authority officials — a legal, though annoying practice known as “cyber-squatting.”



cont'


http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/16/rachel-maddow-chris-christie-rotten-and-vindictive-political-payback-scandal-deepens/

December 17, 2013

Democrats GAVE Paul Ryan An Inch and Now He Is Trying to TAKE A MILE

There is an idiom, “Give somebody an inch and they’ll take a mile” that means if you allow someone to behave badly at all, they will start to behave very badly; especially when it involves making concessions. One can excuse someone for making concessions to a party they believe will not take the act of conceding as a sign of weakness, start behaving very badly, and take more until there is nothing left to take, but there is no excuse for conceding anything to bad actors dedicated to taking everything. Such is the state of Democrats who made concessions to Republicans in the recent bicameral negotiations resulting in a bad budget agreement that House Democrats approved to avert a government shutdown in January. The agreement typifies the idiom that because Democrats gave Paul Ryan and Republicans an inch, they will take a mile, and that is what Ryan said yesterday before the agreement is even approved in the Senate and signed by the President setting it in stone for two years.



Ryan, the new face of “compassionate conservatism,” went on Fox News yesterday and said what many predicted the GOP would do when Congress must act to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debts; extract more concessions from Democrats. Ryan said, “We as a caucus — along with our Senate counterparts — are going to meet and discuss what it is we’re going to want out of the debt limit. We don’t want nothing out of this debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we’re going to accomplish out of this debt limit fight.” Ryan even revealed that Republicans were planning on concessions they will demand for doing their Constitutional duty and pay debts Congress already ran up; in part for billions in oil, church, and agriculture subsidies, but that is another story. According to Ryan, Republicans will decide what their list of concessions and ransom demands as a payment for raising the debt limit will be when House and Senate Republicans “meet in our retreats after the holidays and discuss exactly what it is we’re going to get for this.” Ryan even had the temerity to complain that “One of the problems and concerns I have with the debt limit is: We don’t know when it’s going to hit. Jack Lew, the treasury secretary, has ultimate discretion on when this could occur. So the timing of this is very much in doubt.” Apparently unlike most working Americans, Republicans get to enjoy a couple of weeks of underserved time off from work during their holiday hiatus and cannot depend on Treasury Secretary Lew to give them a firm date that may interfere with their plans to draw up their list of ransom concessions from Democrats during their retreats.



Democrats already conceded more than an inch to Republicans in the budget agreement, but as the saying goes, give them most of the Path to Prosperity budget proposals, and they will take the rest during the debt ceiling crisis in 2014. Democrats already gave them steeper spending cuts than Ryan’s barbaric budget called for, let them keep 99.6% of their precious sequester in place, enacted cuts to entitlement programs, let them take unemployment benefits from 1.3 million jobless Americans, and gave them $41 billion in federal employee and veteran’s pensions. Yes, it is more than “an inch” worth of concessions, but it informed Republicans they could take more in 2014 in the form of Path to Prosperity ransom demands. Sadly, although Democrats gave Republicans more cuts than Ryan’s budget demanded, the real damage is due when they hold the debt ceiling hostage.



Maybe Democrats don’t remember what the Path to Prosperity entailed, but they will get a stark reminder when Republicans hand over their list of demands to do their jobs and pay the debts they racked up over the past 12 years. Debt for unfunded tax cuts for the rich, two unfunded wars, hundreds of billions in no-bid contracts to Cheney’s company Halliburton, and a prohibitively expensive gift to big pharma in Bush’s Medicare prescription plan. What Ryan did not get in the budget agreement was Medicare privatization, steep cuts to Social Security, raising the retirement age, deep cuts to Medicaid, $133 billion in cuts to SNAP (food stamps), tax hikes on the poor, and massive tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Those items will be on the list of concessions Republicans demand in exchange for raising the debt ceiling that many, many Americans fail to understand is fundamentally unconstitutional.



cont'


http://www.politicususa.com/2013/12/16/democrats-gave-paul-ryan-inch-mile.html

December 16, 2013

How Far Would Bank of America Go To SCREW DISTRESSED HOMEOWNERS?

A Bloomberg investigation has uncovered a secret office created by Bank of America called "the Office of the CEO and President" set up ostensibly to handle complaints homeowners trying to refinance in the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program. But when frustrated homeowners, and members of Congress and regulators, finally reached what they thought was the pinnacle of BoA where something might just be done to help them, they were really being shuffled off to a contractor site, Urban Lending, whose primary job appears to have been delaying the process until the homeowners could be forced into foreclosure. Urban Lending was one of the vendors hired to clear a huge backlog of complaints, at least 15,000 of them, that Bank of America had amassed. It was specifically "brought in to handle grievances from lawmakers and regulators on behalf of borrowers, also operated a mail-processing center for HAMP documents."






It's really worth reading the entire Bloomberg story just to get the breadth and the scope of BoA's wrong-doing. One nice illustration is the warehouse with unopened mail piled up to the ceiling, where "time-sensitive documents such as pay stubs grew stale." That caused homeowners to have to repeatedly resubmit documentation. It also caused them to have to pay thousands more in fees and in fines because of the delays. One former employee of Urban Lending called the warehouse a "black hole" in his unsuccessful suit against BoA for intentionally denying HAMP modifications to lenders who were qualified.



cont'


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/16/1263148/-How-far-would-Bank-of-America-go-to-screw-distressed-nbsp-homeowners

December 16, 2013

It's The Senate Conservatives' TURN TO FLIRT With A Government SHUTDOWN

The only thing standing between the United States government and a shutdown is the whim of a group of conservative Republicans. But this time, there's a twist! They're in the Senate. The compromise budget plan brokered last week by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan and Washington Sen. Patty Murray passed the House by a wide margin, with three-quarters of Republicans voting for it. House Speaker John Boehner was incredulous at the idea that far-right groups might continue to hold a deal hostage. But the measure only needed a majority to pass in Boehner's chamber. In the filibuster-everything Senate, the bar is higher — giving conservatives an excellent chance to make their voices heard.



Last week, Republican Senate leaders announced that they planned to filibuster the measure. (If the bill were an actual budget resolution instead of a policy agreement, Senate rules prohibit any such filibuster. Oh well!) According to Politico, the chamber is getting close to the 60 votes it needs to overcome end the filibuster and proceed to a vote, only one Republican vote shy of the number needed. So Tea Party groups — incensed at the fee increases included in the deal and the reductions to the sequester — have begun a campaign to lobby those senators. "The GOP controlled House sold us up the river," the TeaParty.net site reads. "Do not continue to stand for this nonsense! Tell them NO NEW TAXES!"



According to Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, the architect of the no-tax pledge who's now chained to that rock like Prometheus, the fee increases are not a tax. As we explained last week, the increases apply largely to airline tickets. And that, Norquist says, doesn't count. The agreement "structures the TSA ticket fee not as a tax," but as an "offsetting receipt." So: "this fee straddles the line between a tax increase and a user fee without technically crossing into tax hike territory – nevertheless, it should be replaced with spending cuts." This important linguistic distinction, it seems, has so far failed to assuage conservative concerns.



For his part, Ryan, the Republican primarily responsible for the deal, is rising to the defense of the sequestration cuts. On Fox News Sunday, he defended the sequestration reductions — which, in effect, allow more government spending. "In just the next two years, 70 percent of the sequester is intact," he pointed out. "Ninety-two percent of the sequester over the life of the sequester is intact. The Democrats came into this thing saying 'get rid of the entire sequester.'" Which obviously didn't happen.




cont'


http://www.thewire.com/politics/2013/12/its-senate-conservatives-turn-flirt-government-shutdown/356193/

December 16, 2013

Warren Raising Funds AGAINST McCONNELL

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) is raising money to oust Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and balance the Senate’s gender disparity. Warren, a star among the party’s liberal base, called on supporters to give money to Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in an e-mail shared among potential supporters Saturday. The e-mail was also circulated earlier in the week. “Right now, the polls in Kentucky are tied — and you can bet that Mitch McConnell and his powerful friends will spend whatever it takes to beat Alison and win control of the Senate,” Warren wrote.



Warren’s assistance in Kentucky helps make up for the absence of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who signaled Friday who would not raise money for McConnell’s opponent. "I don't think she needs much of my help. She seems to be doing pretty well,” he told Bloomberg Television. Relations between Reid and McConnell have been at a low point since November when the Democratic leader used a controversial tactic known as the nuclear option to strip Republicans of the power to filibuster nominees. The left-leaning website Daily Kos reported on Warren’s fundraising e-mail earlier in the week.



Warren is also raising funds for Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who is running for Senate in Georgia, and West Virginia Secretary of State Natalie Tennant, a Senate candidate in that state. “The Republicans running against Michelle are all fighting with one another to decide which will be the most ultra-right wing extremist in the Senate,” Warren wrote. “We already have plenty of Senators carrying the flag for the Tea Party, we don't need another one.”






cont'


http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/fundraising/193172-sen-warren-makes-fundraising-push-against-mcconnell