Category: Class War

I’m not feeling it

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Insider trading? That’s hardly the worst thing that’s happened over the past few years, and it’s also a civil case, one handled by the SEC, not the Department of Justice. I want to see some bankers sent to prison, not slapped on the hand and fined for less than their annual bonuses. Unless ir results in criminal charges, this is like a parking ticket to these guys — a mere annoyance.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has accused a former director of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble of passing illegal tips about those companies to Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group founder who is to go on trial next week on insider trading charges.

The former director, Rajat K. Gupta, is accused of passing along information on the two companies’ earnings as well as word of Warren E. Buffett’s $5 billion investment in Goldman Sachs in 2008.

As a longtime senior executive at McKinsey & Company, Mr. Gupta, 62, is the most prominent business executive ensnared by the government in a wide-ranging investigation into insider trading on Wall Street. He ran McKinsey from 1994 to 2003 and counts as friends and associates some of the most powerful people in business.

In comparison, many of the defendants charged earlier with insider trading were junior traders and lawyers or midlevel executives. Over the last 18 months, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged 46 people with insider trading; of those, 29 have pleaded guilty.

Joke of the day

~ susie ~ 6 Comments

A unionized public employee, a teabagger and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it.

The CEO reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the teabagger and points to the union guy. “You’d better look out for that guy — he wants a piece of your cookie.”

The teabagger looks at the union worker, knocks the last cookie to the floor, stomps on it and calls the union member a “fucking socialist.”

Kind of like real life!

Wisconsin

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Good news from David Dayen:

Dale Schultz, the Republican State Senator who has been on the fence on the budget repair bill that will strip away public employee collective bargaining rights, will vote against the bill, according to protest organizer leadership. According to the Capitol City Leadership Committee, Schultz told State Sen. Lena Taylor (D) that he’s a no on the bill.

And here’s the bad news: Capitol police were welding the windows shut this morning to make sure protesters didn’t have access to food and supplies.

Blocking access to the Capitol is illegal under the state Constitution.

‘Don’t vilify public workers’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

It’s mild, but it’s something:

Addressing governors from around the country at the White House this morning, President Obama dedicated a moment of his speech to warning them not to vilify public workers.

“I believe that everybody should be prepared to give up something to solve our budget challenges,” Obama said. “In fact, many public employees in your respective states have already agreed to cuts. But let me also say this: I don’t think it does anybody any good when public employees are denigrated or vilified or when their rights are infringed upon.”

Thousands of public employees have protested in Wisconsin and Ohio as Republicans have proposed stripping them of some collective bargaining rights, as part of new state budget plans. Pensions and compensation to unionized state and municipal workers have come under increasing fire from conservatives during the past year.

“We need to attract the best and brightest to public service,” Obama said. “We’re not going to attract the best teachers for our kids if they only make a fraction of what other professions make … Yes, we need a conversation about pensions and Medicare and Medicaid and other promises that we’ve made as a nation, and those will be tough conversations and necessary conversations.”

Not liking that last part, though. If we have to keep promises to bankers to allow them to keep their obscene bonuses, well, you won’t get away with swatting the rest of us away.

Still there

~ susie

While holding the Capitol building doesn’t guarantee a successful outcome for the Wisconsin protesters, it’s pretty clear that the odds of retaining collective bargaining rights drop precipitously if they’re ejected from the building. So this is very good news indeed:

MADISON, Wis. — In a victory — at least a symbolic one — for Wisconsin’s public employee unions, the Capitol authorities announced on Sunday that demonstrators could continue their all-night sleepovers in the building and would not be forcibly ejected or arrested.

Just one day earlier, the state agency that oversees the Capitol police had said that the overnight protests, which have occurred continuously for almost two weeks and have been the heart and soul of the demonstrations in Madison, would cease on Sunday.

The agency is led by an appointee of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, whose plan to strip public employee unions of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights has led to huge rallies in opposition, with as many as 70,000 demonstrators marching around the Madison Statehouse.

Union officials, who had denounced the plan to close the Capitol overnight as an effort to silence critics, called the reversal a capitulation by Mr. Walker’s administration.

“Cooler heads prevailed,” said Jim Palmer, the executive director of the 11,000-member Wisconsin Professional Police Association. “They had said they were going to clear the place out, and then they thought the better of it. Now it’s clear that law enforcement professionals are running the show.”

Officials from both the governor’s office and the Department of Administration, the cabinet-level state agency that had previously called for closing the Capitol, could not be reached for comment.