Category: Politics As Usual

Let shooting victims sue

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

guns2

Activists are working on restoring the rights of gun victims to sue. Imagine the arrogance that led to Republicans exempting the gun manufacturers in the first place:

A BASIC function of law in a civilized society is to allocate the costs of harm to those who caused it. In the case of a gang shooting or terrorist attack, penalties are imposed on the gang member or terrorist. But what of the person who sold them their weapons?

In 2004, relatives of eight people shot in the Washington-area sniper attacks received $2.5 million dollars from the maker and seller of the rifle used in those shootings. That was a matter of simple justice. But the gun lobby had no use for that kind of justice. They went to work and, the next year, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, severely reducing the legal liability of gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers for reckless acts that send guns to the black market. The National Rifle Association called it “the most significant piece of pro-gun legislation in 20 years.”

This kind of legislation encourages arms dealers to turn a blind eye to the lethal consequences of what they peddle, and rewards their breathtaking irresponsibility.

An executive at one top gun company admitted that it didn’t try to learn whether the dealers who sold its firearms were involved in the black market. “I don’t even know what a gun trafficker is,” he said in a court deposition reviewed by The New York Times.

The 2005 law is just one example of Congressional actions that have reduced gun-industry liability and gutted consumer protections. The result of all this legislation, as Jonathan E. Lowy, director of the legal action project at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has noted, is that a defective BB gun can be recalled, but not a real gun with a similar defect.

Astounding

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

No, really. This is just awful:

When it comes to dashing the hopes of thousands of college-bound African Americans, you’d hardly think of President Obama as a culprit. Maybe the right-wing-dominated Supreme Court. But not Obama, the black Harvard law grad who likes to cite higher education as a path into the middle class and who pledges to make student loans more accessible to black scholars.

And yet, in what United Negro College Fund President Michael Lomax calls “a nasty surprise,” the Obama administration has begun denying student loans to disproportionately large numbers of black parents because of blemished credit histories.

Talk about audacity. Obama blames malfeasance by big banks for plunging the nation into a recession, then bails them out — and proceeds to punish black people for not making it through the economic maelstrom unscathed.

An angry-sounding Obama actually called Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling against a key part of the Voting Rights Act a “setback” for blacks. You want to know what a real setback is, Mr. President? It’s using some bureaucratic fiat to prevent black students from going to college.

Obama declared that he will press for restoration of the portion of the Voting Rights Act the justices ruled on. But let’s face it: He’s a lame duck. Why not leave as part of his legacy tens of thousands of newly minted black college graduates to carry on what is sure to be a decades-long struggle?

“We’re getting calls and e-mails from parents, at least two and three a day, saying the denial of their student loans is a disaster,” said Johnny Taylor, president of the Washington-based Thurgood Marshall College Fund. “You have black students from low-income households about to enter college or already there and pressing towards graduation, persisting just as Obama urged them to do, only to have his administration pull the rug out from under them.”

The last mystery

~ susie

http://youtu.be/F6wjFsfnseI
A recent Taibbi appearance on Washington Journal.

Another stunner from Matt Taibbi, and kudos to Rolling Stone for continuing to support his work. Just make sure to take your blood pressure medicine before you read it. It’s long, but worth it:

What about the ratings agencies?

That’s what “they” always say about the financial crisis and the teeming rat’s nest of corruption it left behind. Everybody else got plenty of blame: the greed-fattened banks, the sleeping regulators, the unscrupulous mortgage hucksters like spray-tanned Countrywide ex-CEO Angelo Mozilo.

But what about the ratings agencies? Isn’t it true that almost none of the fraud that’s swallowed Wall Street in the past decade could have taken place without companies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s rubber-stamping it? Aren’t they guilty, too?

Man, are they ever. And a lot more than even the least generous of us suspected.

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation’s two top ratings companies, Moody’s and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.

In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.

“Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at,” writes one Standard & Poor’s executive. “As you know, I had difficulties explaining ‘HOW’ we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it,” confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. “If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value,” complains another senior S&P man. “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters,” ruminates one more.

Yeah, you know who that Standard & Poor’s exec is? A guy named Elwyn Wong, who’s now working for the U.S. Office of the Comptroller Currency, our top federal banking regulator.

But no one did anything wrong, so move along now.

They almost stole it

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

UPDATE: Confronted with the evidence, Republicans finally admitted defeat. Well done, Texas Dems!

But they may not get away with it. Texas Banana Republicans lied and cheated to break Wendy Davis’s filibuster and pass SB5 last night, but it was 12:01 and the special session ended at midnight. Of course, they can always find a crooked judge to rule in their favor, but you never know. After all, 160K were watching live on YouTube. (First, the Boston Marathon shootings. Now, this. Cable news was nowhere to be found, and Old Media is officially dead.)

“At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues in the room?” — Senator Leticia Van de Putte

The part you missed, though, was when the entire gallery responded to the chair ignoring a female senator on her motion, and sparked a citizens’ filibuster to delay the vote. For more than 10 minutes, they screamed, yelled, clapped and stomped so loud, the Republicons couldn’t hear themselves. As soon as I get a video, I’ll post it.* It was fucking beautiful.

In the meantime, watch this one. It was like this, only a hundred times louder.

And I think they just energized the Democratic base in Texas, too. Go give money, either to the Texas Dems or to Wendy Davis, who stood for all those hours.

*UPDATE: This is from the final ten minutes. Turn that volume all the way up, because that’s what it sounded like on the livestream:

Oh my goodness, they forgot to disclose this?

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The Nation’s Lee Fang with some pertinent information that must have been accidentally misplaced by Dancin’ Dave Gregory during Sunday’s Meet The Press attack on Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald:

On Meet the Press […], shortly after host host David Gregory stunned many by suggesting that The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald should face prosecution, a roundtable of pundits discussed the unfolding Edward Snowden story. Mike Murphy, one of the Meet the Press pundits, mocked Snowden’s attempt to seek asylum, calling him a “so-called whistleblower,” and charging that “it’s never been easier in human history to be a whistleblower” through official means.

There are problems here with both the messenger and the message.

First, the message. In fact, the Obama administration has one of the worst records of any president’s in terms of prosecuting leaks and whistleblowers. Moreover, Snowden had virtually no legal protections as a member of an intelligence agency contractor (Booz Allen Hamilton). In These Times reported that “as part of last year’s Whistleblower’s Protection Enhancement Act, rights for whistleblowers were enhanced for many categories of federal employees, but intelligence employees were excluded from coverage under the act.

Likewise, intelligence workers—both federal and contract employees—were excluded from whistle blower protections offered to military contract employees under the most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).”

But Murphy himself has a stake in this debate that arguably ought to have been disclosed.
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