ataxiwardance

thepeoplesrecord:

Thousands of protesters marched through the Mexican capital on Saturday, July 7 against President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, accusing him of buying votes and paying off TV networks for support.

thenewrepublic:

Noam Scheiber on how megabanks corrupt regulators.

“Is it even possible to regulate megabanks in any meaningful sense? After all, if the allegations are true, officials at the Bank of England weren’t sending these hints to Barclays because they took a shine to Barclays’ executives or because they stood to benefit personally if the bank’s share-price rose. They were doing it because they worried that a run on a bank as big as Barclays would destabilize the British economy and wanted to do everything possible to avoid that, even if it meant skirting the rules (again, according to the allegations). 

Which is to say, in order to get corruption in your banking system, you don’t need literal corruption of the Government Official X owns shares in Bank Y variety (or even Official X wants to work at Bank Y after he leaves government). You just need banks big enough so that the bureaucrats keeping an eye on them have nightmares about what happens if the banks fail.”

–– Noam Scheiber, “How Megabanks Corrupt Regulators, LIBOR Edition“ 

ataxiwardance: Corporatist privilege is so integrated into our global financial system that regulators simply understand their role as enablers of a recalcitrant hegemony, rather than policemen over an open market. The new regulatory capture! No bribes required.

This is really where Occupy and Anti-Statists intersect.

I might also recommend Matt Taibbi’s recent post on the LIBOR scandal.

Predators and Professors

“[T]he people who run these banks are encouraged to assume a lot of risky bets, which include pure gambling-type activities. The bankers get the upside when things go well, while the downside risks are largely someone else’s problem. This is a nontransparent, dangerous, government-run subsidy scheme, ultimately involving very large transfers from taxpayers to a few top people in the financial sector.

…

To protect the scheme’s continued existence, global megabanks contribute large amounts of money to politicians … [and] also run a highly sophisticated disinformation/propaganda operation, with the goal of creating at least a veneer of respectability for the subsidies that they receive. This is where universities come in.”

occupyallstreets:

Energy And Commerce Investigation Reveals Obama Secretly Cut A Deal With Lobbyist Group PhRMA On Health Care Reform

It was first reported back in 2009 that the Obama administration cut a deal with the PhRMA to break specific campaign promises he made about health care reform in exchange for PhRMA spending money to politically support the bill. Thanks to some newly revealed emails via Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner we now have more details of how the deal was made.

Nancy DeParle, then director of the White House Office of Health Reform, wrote the following email to PhRMA’s chief lobbyist on June 3, 2009: “Yes – I pushed this to everyone (Messina, Rahm) is in Egypt with POTUS but Phil Schrillo, Dana Singlser and I made decision, based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation on this bill.”

[…]

That September, top PhRMA lobbyist Bryant Hall reported to his coworkers in an email that he “had a good call w Messina,” and wrote: “Confidential: WH is working on some very explicit language on importation to kill it in health care reform. This has to stay quiet.”

Between May and August 2009, as the White House officials and key players in Congress were formulating the national health care law, the Obama administration held ongoing negotiations with PhRMA to secure industry support for the health care law as well as other policy concessions.

A report by the House Energy And Commerce goes into details:

“Documents obtained through the investigation confirm the existence of a deal between the White House and PhRMA. The deal included explicit policy commitments, affirmed in a closed-door meeting at the White House on July 7, 2009…And in its review of the tactics used by the White House, the investigation identified a potent combination of policy threats and private reassurances that industry would be protected against policies it disliked in exchange for support of the legislation and acceptance of other policies. Taken together, these findings help illuminate a previously opaque series of agreements that resulted in a fundamental reshaping of our nation’s health care system.”

Source/Credit

think-progress:

Although a majority of the Senate voted to repeal tax breaks for the big five oil companies, the 51-47 vote fell short of the 60 needed.

Hahaha. I love how achieving Cloture (3/5th of the full Senate) is now functionally equivalent with a majority. GO DEMOCRACY.

Whistleblower says BofA defrauded HAMP

While working at Urban Lending, Mackler said he saw BofA and its loan servicing subsidiary, BAC Homes Loans Servicing LP, implement “business practices designed to intentionally prevent scores of eligible homeowners from becoming eligible or staying eligible for permanent HAMP modification.”

The bank and its agents routinely pretended to have lost homeowners’ documents, failed to credit payments during trial modifications and intentionally misled homeowners about their eligibility for the program, the complaint alleged.

BoA let through just enough HAMP modifications to avert suspicion and allay congressional critics, while not enough to incur any substantial losses to its own bottom line, according to the complaint.

“In other words, BoA has had it both ways. BoA has continued to maximize the value of its mortgage portfolio with anti-HAMP modification practices and managed to make money by committing fraud on homeowner,” the lawsuit said.

NYPD Officer Sent To Psych Ward By Superiors After Reporting Corruption

Graham Rayman at the Village Voice brings us more on officer Adrian Schoolcraft, the modern day Serpico who was sent to a psych ward for reporting on corruption in the NYPD. While working out of the 81st precinct in Brooklyn, Schoolcraft became aware of a pattern of crime victims getting caught up in bureaucratic hurdles that seemed to have purposely been set up to make it hard to report serious crimes. Schoolcraft reported a number of these incidents to investigators. That’s where things take a turn for the insane:

In October 2009, Schoolcraft met with NYPD investigators for three hours and detailed more than a dozen cases of crime reports being manipulated in the district. Three weeks after that meeting-which was supposed to have been kept secret from Schoolcraft’s superiors-his precinct commander and a deputy chief ordered Schoolcraft to be dragged from his apartment and forced into the Jamaica Hospital psychiatric ward for six days.

Officer Schoolcraft is the same man that released two years of recorded roll calls at NYPD precincts, leading to the award winning series by Rayman that has revealed incompetence and corruption in the NYPD. The story of Officer Schoolcraft’s forcible psych detainment was recently released in a 95 page report that vindicated Officer Schoolcraft, who has been suspended without pay for more than two years. He has since filed a lawsuit. The report was actually completed two years ago, and the NYPD has tried to keep it under wraps.