...which would explain their consistent inhumanity to man.
Point being, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled today in FCC v. AT&T(No. 09-1279) that corporations do not have personal privacy rights.
That anything should slow the legal march towards corporate personhood is more than a little stunning, but here's the kicker: The Chief Justice even served up a bit of judicial snark:
The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.
According to a staffer at the Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the legislators are well aware of the partial-veto problem in the current negotiations. Writing a "veto-proof" appropriations bill in Wisconsin is essentially impossible. The Senate could break the collective bargaining provisions off the rest of the bill, making it non-appropriations and thus sheltering it from the governor's black Sharpie -- but that would mean passing a budget repair bill without any mention of collective bargaining at all, a level of independence of which Senate Republicans, with the possible exception of Schultz, have shown no hint. In the end, the Senate would probably have to rely on a handshake agreement with Gov. Walker to leave the bill intact. At this point, what is a handshake from the Governor worth? That depends whether you think the governor would openly defy a bipartisan deal to get his way on collective bargaining. The partial veto is wildly undemocratic, but it's a Wisconsin tradition. I think Walker would probably do it; and it's not clear he would pay any serious political price.
Something tells me that a guy who "thought about" planting troublemakers in the crowd, planned to lure opposition senators to talk for the sole purpose of tricking them into giving him a quorum to pass his bill AND is positioning to lock protesters out of the WI capitol building is not going to have a lot of restraint.
It's February - which sucks without saying so - yet it must be said.
Naturally, it's pledge week.
E's dumped dinner on me, so I indignantly pick up take out that does not involve cheese melted over carbs (on principle) - only to realize later I've merely bought the same ingredients served at room temperature.
So, it was cathartic when I read this bit from Max Silvestri's recap of Top Chef
It's Quick Fire time, and our chefs are greeted by the pumpkinny visage of Paula Deen. Their smiles of delight turn to screams of horror as she eats all six of them, one by one, then picks her teeth with Padma. It is very horrible and the show is canceled forever but in some ways I understand because Paula Deen seems very hungry.
At this stage in the WI union fight, both sides are looking for things to hurl at each other.
Walker's backers would point out that their budget shortfall, is in fact, real.Contrary to what the likes of Rachel Maddow and TPM have been saying.
This is true, although it does not address how WI could have shored up a 6 billion dollar shortfall in the last budget cycle by working with unions - while the projected $3 billion dollar shortfall Wisconsin has now requires a root and branch dismantling of union rights.
Still looking for a straight up answer on that, but while you're chewing on that
The Awl - would like to point out something else about Walker's "Budget Repair Bill"
What has been widely ignored about Walker's bill (in part because of the speed with which he's fisting it down Wisconsin's gullet) is a sneaky provision that paves the way for him to cut, or eliminate, Medicaid and BadgerCare healthcare benefits for low-income people.
And last but perhaps best, The Big Picture (Via GinAndTacos) draws your attention to a provision that will allow the "sale or contractual operation of state-owned heating, cooling, and power plants" and here's the kicker (emphasis courtesy of GaT):
...with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).
That's allowing the state to sell state utility plants (or their operation) without bids, with the understanding that any sale will meet the legal hurdle of being in the public interest.
Does this really sound like the kind of bill that should become law in a mere 5 days?
Late Edit: I guess TBP's link is down. Rortybomb has the post.
...the worst bit is that this language is likely merely to provide an official fig leaf (and therefore effective notice of intent) for actions it is likely Walker could have taken anyhow.
There’s no reason to believe that the private sector will run those plants in a way that is better for the public, and every reason to believe that they will run the plants in a way that is worse (ie, more expensive) for the public. If the state wants to cut such a deal in return for a one-time check, that check had better be enormous. And there’s absolutely no reason to believe that it will be.
You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street...That's all it would take. Just once.
-Former Congressional Aide
"If we don't do this, there will be layoffs. By July 1, when the next budget starts, we'll have to have layoffs of 5,500 state workers plus a similar number of county and city workers...You can't negotiate if you don't have any money -- and we don't have any money. Wer'e not negotiating on the budget."
Now, here's the state's own fiscal bureau report that wasn't two weeks old when Walker said that. It's reporting that Wisconsin was on track to have a surplus at the end of the year.
However, the data indicates that state and local government employees in Wisconsin are not overpaid. Comparisons controlling for education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability reveal that employees of both state and local governments in Wisconsin earn less than comparable private sector employees. On an annual basis, full-time state and local government employees in Wisconsin are undercompensated by 8.2% compared with otherwise similar private sector workers. This compensation disadvantage is smaller but still significant when hours worked are factored in. Full-time public employees work fewer annual hours, particularly employees with bachelor’s, master’s, and professional degrees (because many are teachers or university professors). When comparisons are made controlling for the difference in annual hours worked, full-time state and local government employees are undercompensated by 4.8%, compared with otherwise similar private sector workers. To summarize, our study shows that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation per hour than comparable full-time employees in Wisconsin’s private sector.
(Also, you can say the same thing about public sector employees in California (7% less than comparable private sector jobs), New Jersey (5.88% less than comparable private sector jobs), Michigan (Equivalent on hours for annual full time), Indiana (5.9% less than comparable private sector jobs).
Full time state and local employees are undercompsensated by (on average) 3.7% less than their private sector counterparts. State government employees are undercompensated by an average of 7.6%.
Again, W. T. F?
If you were being charitable to Gov. Walker - you could suggest that he's being proactive. Wisconsin is facing over a $3 billion dollar shortfall in the next two years. You could say he's starting the budget pain early, so that the state's distant budget woes being to lessen sooner rather than later.
Also, if you were being charitable, you would discount all this much ballyhoo'ed claptrap about Walker calling out the national guard. His comments about that dealt with backfilling essential services (like prison guards) with national guardsmen in the event of walkouts. He's not calling for soldier vs. protester.
But it is hard to credit Walker with anything else. Including collective bargaining in his budget "fix" has the quality of your boss calling a meeting and saying "We're going to need to make some cost cutting moves to make our budget. Also, from now on, my least favorite employees will be required to show up to work without pants. That is all."
W.T.F?
You go after a union's right to have collective bargaining, you are putting them out of business. If there was a net dollar savings for a move like that, you could perhaps justify it. But there isn't. The remaining rationale would perhaps go like this "removing collective bargaining will allow us to take more away from public employees in future - because they won't be allowed to stop us."
Which is something no union can agree to. "Oh, yes, Governor, we agree to give up all future negotiation power on non-wage compensation in exchange for....nothing. Our members will continue to pay us dues despite us allowing this to happen and being powerless to stop further cuts on their benefits."
No. The fact that a conservative governor is telling us he's forced FORCED, he says to carve a chunk out of his political opponents is perhaps the biggest tip off you need that this is about power.
"Normally, I would (twitch) love unions (twitch, twitch) but this economy leaves me no choice, but to try to dismantle them..."
Sure, Governor - that sounds really credible. Now where's that bowl of dicks?
Rachel Maddow had a great piece about the larger picture that Wisconsin's drama plays into.
The short version is - politics in this country is about money funding ground games.
In the 2008 election here are the top groups making outside expenditures, (Excluding Party Committees):
So? It's the marketplace of ideas - right. There was this groundswell against Pres. Obama and his policies and this is what is expected. You could argue that. I'd argue that votes should count more than money - but it's very difficult to separate cash from successful political campaigns.
But the larger issue is that successful political campaigns are now being used to craft legislation that guts their political rivals. Having won office, pols like Gov. Walker (and apparently the rest of the GOP governorship pool) now feels it is time to engrave their current situation in stone. We will make this victory outlast the support that granted it.
And that, is the full extent of what is going on in Madison. A political struggle where elected GOP members try to drive a stake into unions, so the next election will find the GOP without a viable opposition.
You can try that - it is legal - but you should never be able to get away with it.
And certainly you should not be able to pretend that this is about anything other than power.
“MERS’s position that it can be both the mortgagee and an agent of the mortgagee is absurd, at best.”
Grossman said parties coming to him to seek to lift the automatic ban on legal claims in cases involving MERS will have to show they own both the mortgage and the note.
They've taken their page down now - this image was from Google's cache - but here's the relevant bit:
Premiere On Call is our new custom caller service. We supply voice talent to take/make your on-air calls, improvise your scenes or deliver your scripts.
Using our simple online booking tool, specify the kind of voice you need, and we'll get your the right person fast. Unless you request it, you won't hear that same voice again for at least two months, ensuring the authenticity of your programming for avid listeners.
A loose translation would be "Would you like callers to your radio shows to say what you want, rather than what they want? All it takes is money and a complete lack of integrity!"
Liz has asked Premier on Call which of their shows use the service.
I'd imagine they're going to decline to answer - but wouldn't that be a fine slice of information for their listeners to have? It's one thing to stage a call for a prank - it is quite another to fake a call to support your ideology, or to appear popular.
So asks CJR's Ryan Chittum - and if you're not interested in the HBGary story- check your pulse.
It goes like this:
An exec named Aaron Barr at a computer security firm named HBGary mouths off in the financial times that he has discovered the identities of key members of the hacking group Anonymous. Anonymous' most recent claim to fame was the denial of service attacks against credit card companies who blocked transactions to Wikileaks.
Days later the Anonymous group hacks HBGary's website, email accounts, and numerous other accounts using SQL-injection, social engineering, and other published exploits. Mind you, HBGary is a computer security firm.
Anonymous takes over the HBGary website, leaks tens of thousands of internal emails to the web (which you can now search and read), leaks their source code and internal files - then deletes their backup servers.
They they flame HBGary using Aaron Barr's own twitter account.
That's just the opener.
The emails for HBGary reveal that HBGary was offering its services to Bank of America's law firm, Hunton & Williams (along with two other security firms Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies) to smear and discredit Wikileaks and its supporters, among them Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald
Wikileaks has suggested they are about to unload a trove of internal documents for a large bank - and has mentioned acquiring the hard drive of a Bank of America exec.
And it gets better.
Ryan Chittum throws in this little tidbit:
A look through Factiva shows only one media hit for HBGary Federal in the last two years before the flurry of the past week. And it’s a very interesting one. This from SC Magazine, which covers IT security (emphasis mine):
HBGary Federal, provider of classified security services to the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community, has partnered with Palantir Technologies, maker of analytics platforms. HBGary’s team of researchers will leverage Palantir’s analysis tool suite to provide enhanced threat intelligence.
...Americans tend to distinguish between benefits they feel they've earned -- Social Security, say -- and benefits they consider giveaways. It's not a very useful distinction, but it's a convenient, and thus a powerful, one. We have a vast welfare state for the middle and upper classes, but the politics of it are entirely different.
For instance: Among the more mind-blowing facts about the health-care system is that the tax break we give to employer-provided insurance dwarfs the cost of the entire Affordable Care Act -- and, if you want to take the concept a bit further, this means those of us who don't get insurance from our employers are being forced, even mandated, to pay for those of us who are. But this break is largely uncontroversial in American politics, while subsidies to help people who can't afford health insurance are extremely controversial.
Easily the most mindrending bit of Radiolab I've heard yet. Finding Emilie. It starts with a 21 year old art student named Alan talking about he and his girlfriend Emilie waking up on the morning of October 8th, 2010.
Alan: She would take the bike and I would take the train.
Jad: What was the morning like?
Alan: It was a beautiful day it was...you know, the sun was low in the sky so there were...you know, long shadows. I strapped on her helmet and adjusted it. Took her bike out for her. We kissed each other goodbye, and said 'I love you' and I watched her ride down the street. In this early morning and then y'know, [whistles] on I went, down into the subway.
Jad: Six hours later, he's working in the studio, doing some sculpture and he gets a call - from a cop.
Alan: And he just said, 'Emily Liegossiaux' she had an accident. She's at Belleview, this is the address.' And I said 'Oh. I mean, do you have any more information?' He just told me that it was bad. I was, like, carrying a bunch of stuff and I just dropped everything and started running.
Bad is quite the understatement. At the hospital, the doctors had (to quote her mother) "opened her abdomen and they had taken her intestines out and put them on top of her body so that she could breathe."
That's not even the gripping part. It only gets more intense from there.
It took nine years to even get an autopsy performed. While the autopsy report determined that the death was a homicide - personnel changes at the coroner's office short circuited a formal change to Chandra's cause of death.
NPR puts the original death certificate online in a fine example of journalistic WTF.
It'll be interesting to see how this case develops - because the first draft makes the coroner's office look pretty terrible.
The disparity between what people think happens at their county coroner's office - and what is actually going on nationwide is pretty astonishing. I don't think anyone believes that CSI is true to life, but to read accounts of coroners who are unlicensed - even blind for God's sake - is just mind boggling.
Frontline and ProPublica have given this topic both barrels in the last week.
I'll just quote this directly, because it's just too perfect:
Which reminds me of another tax issue, this one with college sports. The New York Times reported this in a story this weekend:
Federal law permits taxpayers to deduct annually 80 percent of a donation for premium seating or luxury suites. All other contributions, including those for scholarships and capital projects, are 100 percent deductible.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Anybody who thinks the plutocrats haven't captured the tax code is living in fantasyland.
Oh, look. Banks may have found a new way to screw with public pensions: by overcharging them for foreign exchange transactions.
[S]tates are looking into whether certain banks charged state pension funds the most expensive foreign-exchange price during the day when a trade took place, rather than the rate the bank paid--and when currencies were sold, paid them the lowest price for the day.
So, the GOP would like to renege on promises made to pensioners - and banks managing the money owed to pensioners have been siphoning the money when nobody's looking.
It's starting to look like the only people who have trouble getting money out of public pensions - are pensioners.
Yes, perhaps that would be best... for JPMorgan, that is.
The money quote comes from a JPM employee referring to a meeting agenda where the bank was discussing its dealings with Bernie Madoff.
News accounts have long pointed out that Madoff could not have been doing what he was doing without leaving all kinds of traces. One of the traces he was leaving behind was a total lack of account activity. Madoff claimed that his accounts were small, that the bulk of his money was tied up in all the trades he was making for his customers.
Only with a Ponzi scheme, you aren't making trades - the money is just sitting around waiting for a withdrawal (by Madoff or one of his customers/dupes). Bernie didn't keep the money in a matress, he kept it in a bank. JPMorgan Chase, to be precise.
The bank “had only to glance at the bizarre activity” in the Madoff accounts “to realize that Madoff was not operating a legitimate business,” the trustee asserted in the suit. The money coming in was not from the sale of securities, and the money going out was not for the purchase of securities — at a time when Mr. Madoff was supposedly making billions of dollars in trades as part of his investment strategy, ...
What does JPMorgan do?
Nothing. No calls to the SEC, no black listing - JPM continues to do deals with Madoff, even as their own risk people are screaming for them to pull the plug.
And here's a nice tidbit: Madoff was apparently into money laundering for wealthy clients -
According to [Madoff trustee Irving Picard], the flow of money just between the Madoff accounts and [a single] customer’s accounts should have set off warning bells at the bank.
On a single day in 2002, Mr. Madoff initiated 318 separate payments of exactly $986,301 to the customer’s account for no apparent reason, the trustee reported. In December 2001, Mr. Madoff’s account received a $90 million check from the customer’s account “on a daily basis,” according to the lawsuit.
Mr. Picard’s complaint does not speculate about the purpose of the transactions.
The transfers should have caused the bank’s money-laundering software to start flashing, Mr. Picard’s complaint asserted.
Yet another revelatory and embarrassing lawsuit that names names.
What does it take to get indictments in this country, anyway?
