Pity He's Not Dressed Like Queen Victoria

There's only a few people on earth who will get this, but I needed to post this.

1. Go to this iMDB trailer
2. Scan forward to exactly 0:52
3. Press play (the relevant bit ends at 1:00)

For those in the know, I'm just hoping my subconscious mind doesn't get any weirder than that.

So...unbelievably F'ed up.

Worst Person in The World - Atty. Frederick J. Voss

With Olbermann out of action, I figure I'd put up a candidate for WPITW.

I'd mentioned before that I used to edit a legal newsletter. One of its recurring features was a list of attorneys who had broken the law, failed in their professional obligations to their client/profession - or disgraced themselves in a fashion that required discipline.

This issue's star was Atty. Frederick J. Voss of Rhinelander, WI.

Atty. Voss is apparently on a personal quest to become the gold standard of attorney misconduct.

He makes a pretty good case.

Exhibit A - Atty. Voss begins to represent

...a female client with a very extensive history of and treatment for various psychiatric disorders and alcohol dependency. The client's diagnoses include bipolar I disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders, and severe personality disorder with histrionic, borderline, anti-social, and passive-aggressive features.

In the past, a worker at one of her treatment centers engaged in sexual relations with her - and was "fired, criminally prosecuted, and jailed."

This client has major issues. Lots of responsibility there.

Enter Atty. Voss.

Within a year and a half of formally becoming this woman's attorney - he's sleeping with her. This is directly at odds with the code of professional conduct for attorneys, but hey... maybe nobody will find out, right?

Naturally, somebody found out.

Voss was reported to the lawyers regulatory agency, but the client would not file a complaint.

Improper relationship with disturbed client. Check.

Exhibit B Voss is alleged to have forced his client to have sex with him. This incident was reported to the sheriff - who recommended filing charges to the DA. No charges were filed.

Voss goes on the attack:

In an...e-mail to the client's sister, Attorney Voss said that if he were charged criminally, as part of his defense he would introduce into evidence information regarding various incidents involving the client that would not make her look good and that she would not enjoy testifying about in open court.

Voss then contacts two circuit judges telling them the allegations have no merit - he includes details of his clients sexual history. This is before either judge has any case in front of them.

He contacts the client's mother - promising to bring up personal family issues if he is called to testify in court.
He files extraneous embarrassing information about his former client in memorandum.
He pays her money in exchange for signing a self-serving statement he's prepared.

Exhibit C When all this finally blows up into a disciplinary hearing, Voss is shameless in his defense:

The [Office of Lawyer Regulation] noted that Attorney Voss claimed he has sole authority and decision-making power to decide when he is the attorney and when he is not the attorney for a client, and that the client has no right to decide whether there is a continuing attorney-client relationship. Thus, Attorney Voss argued he may end the attorney-client relationship with the client immediately after a hearing on a chapter 51 commitment and that same day may elect to have sexual relations with the client. The OLR said this is a self-serving interpretation of the supreme court rules and in this fact situation, it is particularly egregious and predatory. The OLR noted that the client was the subject of approximately 82 different treatment matters, including mental commitments, out-of-home placements, substance abuse treatments, inpatient placements, and home placements...

¶27 Attorney Voss filed a 109-page post-trial brief which started out by announcing, "[The client] is a manipulative, alcoholic, violent, mentally ill, criminal." Attorney Voss's post-trial brief ended by saying, "No relationship is symmetrical. It is one she wanted to be in. . . . The relationship was as normal as it could be under the circumstances."

And, the court observed:

Throughout this entire disciplinary proceeding, Attorney Voss persisted in attaching to his pleadings hundreds of pages of medical records containing highly sensitive personal information about the client.

In short, ginormous asswad in all respects.

Sadly, for all this asswad-ery, the disciplinary hearing does not translate into criminal charges. The court brought down as much as the disciplinary hammer as they could - suspending Voss' license to practice law for four years and eight months - and fining him over $140,000.

Although this is a staggering amount, the reason the costs escalated to this level is largely because of Attorney Voss's aggressive litigation style. It appears he greatly over-litigated the case and thus it is appropriate to assess the full amount of costs against him.

His license is still good for the next month, so if you know anyone in northern Wisconsin looking for an attorney - you should tell them to stay the hell away from this guy. He's about to lose his primary income and he owes a lot of money. A financially desperate creep is twice as dangerous as the garden variety.

The Grabbing Paws of Bear Stearns

(Via The Big Picture)

You've just got to love this article in The Atlantic.

Former Bear Stearns mortgage executives who now run mortgage divisions of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Ally Financial have been accused of cheating and defrauding investors through the mortgage securities they created and sold while at Bear. According to e-mails and internal audits, JPMorgan had known about this fraud since the spring of 2008, but hid it from the public eye through legal maneuvering. Last week a lawsuit filed in 2008 by mortgage insurer Ambac Assurance Corp against Bear Stearns and JPMorgan was unsealed. The lawsuit's supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a "sack of shit."

There's so much awful going on in this that it's fun to break it down.

1) The former firm of Bear Stearns was hip deep in selling bonds backed by lousy mortgages.
2) The mortgages were so lousy, Bear traders were forcing the originators of those loans to buy them back.

So far, not so terrible - if more investment firms forced their crap back on the originators we might have had less of a meltdown.

Enter 3) Bear's servicing division were "sometimes told to falsify loan-level performance data provided to the ratings agencies"

Then 4) The crap loans that are foisted back on their originators at a discount, and the Bear execs Mike Nierenberg (now at BofA) and Jeff Verschleiser (now at Goldman Sachs) pocketed the difference. Here's the Atlantic's Teri Buhl:

The traders were essentially double-dipping -- getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn't have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans -- that claim belonged to bond investors -- but they did so anyway and kept the money.

and the capstone is
5) Bear Stearns went under in March of 2008. We're only just learning about this crap because Ambach sued Bear's new owners, JP Morgan in that same year and the lawsuit just became unsealed.

Why did it take this long to unseal?

JPMorgan did fight tooth and nail for the Ambac suit not to be made public, however, because the firm argued it could damage the reputations of senior bank executives currently working in the industry.

I'll just bet it will.

Who are those execs? The Atlantic helpfully names names:

Individuals named as defendants included: Jimmy Cayne, Alan "ACE" Greenberg, Warren Spector, Alan Schwartz, Thomas Marano, Jeffrey Mayer, Mary Haggerty, Baron Silverstein, Jeffrey Verschleiser, and Michael Nierenberg.

Oh, we could use more articles like this.

Detroit's Rebuttal

(Via Viceland with a H/t to Felix Salmon)

Climbing a hillock for a better view of the grassy wastes surrounding 

Jane Cooper Elementary School. If you move the camera just a few inches to the left you’ll get a bustling,
well-maintained food-packaging plant in frame, so be careful to crop that shit out.

It's dated, but worth a read

Something, Something, Something, Detroit: Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff

Your Very Own Robot Minion

(Via Stack Overflow

I'll just quote this directly, because there's no way to improve on the delivery:

I’m a big fan of annoying my coworkers. Problem is, I don’t have any coworkers because I work remotely from home. An impossible conundrum. Or is it?

Enter Rovio, the wi-fi enabled robotic WebCam.

Oh yeah.....

Motown/Ghost Town

(Via the Etsy Blog)

 

No, this isn't a set from a Terry Gilliam movie. It's Detroit.

AOL Email is Free

Saw this courtesy of Felix Salmon

AOL encourages the belief that its email users need to pay for the service. They don't.

If an AOL email user has a different ISP, they can (naturally) change their AOL settings - but this is not obvious to many AOL users who (famously) are not the most technically savvy.

Business insider has posted a 1-2-3 guide to cutting the AOL financial cord.

The slides reveal UI that is desiged to obscure and confuse users who try this.

Anyways, I'm posting this so I can find it later, should I happen to run across one of these unfortunates.

And AOL? You are even lamer than your reputation suggests.

Shot Across the Bow

(Via Felix Salmon and The Big Picture)

Mary Williams Walsh (and by extension, the New York Times) would like you to think that states may try to declare bankruptcy in the foreseeable future.

That such things are illegal now does not seem to be an issue, nor does the absence of a Congressional bill making such a thing legal.

People are talking about it, Ms. Walsh warns us - and we should be afraid.

More accurately, public employees should be afraid (emphasis mine):

Bankruptcy could permit a state to alter its contractual promises to retirees, which are often protected by state constitutions, and it could provide an alternative to a no-strings bailout. Along with retirees, however, investors in a state’s bonds could suffer, possibly ending up at the back of the line as unsecured creditors.

And Ms. Walsh is using "alter" in the same way that Darth Vader uses it:

I wish to alter your pension. Pray I don't alter it any further.

It doesn't exactly sound likely, and it cannot be terribly popular - Welching on a pension promised to workers who have upheld their part of the deal?

You've paid us with years of your life - years that are now gone. I know we'd promised you money, but....well...

Who is leading the push for this?

Let's see:

Discussion of a new bankruptcy option for the states appears to have taken off in November, after [Newt] Gingrich gave a speech about the country’s big challenges, including government debt and an uncompetitive labor market.

“We just have to be honest and clear about this, and I also hope the House Republicans are going to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy,” he said.

I get that the GOP is dusting off the brass knuckles with labor, post election - but does the NYT really have to be their bullhorn for their threats?

What crap.

Crap For Sale, Dear

Bloomberg gets a hold of leaked bank documents and they reveal just what Barry was saying awhile ago: The banks are selling their crap to Freddie and Fannie.

Jonathan Weil does a better summation, though:

The gist of the article by Bob Ivry and Bradley Keoun: Citigroup, the too-big-to-fail bank that got a $45 billion government rescue, was still selling defective mortgages to Freddie Mac at an alarmingly high rate as recently as last year. And taxpayers, who now own Freddie, are on the hook as a result. The details are in an Oct. 25, 2010, internal Freddie Mac memo summarizing the findings of a yearlong quality-control review that ended last September.

...and he helpfully supplies some venom:

So who benefits from this leak? Some of the bosses at the two companies and their government minders must be embarrassed, which can only be good for the rest of us. To the extent that Freddie and Fannie have become a grabfest for the banking industry, that’s something Congress should know when it eventually gets around to rewriting the laws that govern them. Most importantly, though, the public needs to be told when it’s getting ripped off, especially when the government knows it and has no intention of telling us.

More leaks like this one, please.

Hear hear!

I Wonder Where Goldman Got The Idea

Y'know I think emptywheel skewers Goldman's Facebook deal about as well as you can.

 A sample:

FROM: Mr. Lloyd Blankfein
200 West Street
New York, New York

202-555-MOTU

TO: CEO
Chump City, ForeignLand

Dear Sir:

I have been requested by the Facebook Company to contact you for assistance in resolving a matter. The Facebook Company has recently concluded new agreements to share its users’ identities. The contracts have immediately produced moneys equaling US$50,000,000,000. The Facebook Company is desirous of harvesting user identities in other parts of the world, however, because of certain regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission, it is unable to move these funds to another region.

You assistance is requested as a non-American citizen to assist the Facebook Company, and also the Goldman Sachs, in moving these funds out of America. If the funds can be transferred to your name, in your non-United States account, then you can forward the funds as directed by the Facebook Company. In exchange for your accommodating services, the Facebook Company would agree to allow you to retain 10%, or US$5 billion of this amount.

(H/t trainreq)

The Power To Kill

(Via CJR)

When Anthony Graves was arrested for capital murder, he thought it was a practical joke. A surveillance camera in the Brenham, Texas, police station captured Graves shaking his head and smiling. “This is a big mistake,” he said. “Somebody’s messing with me, right?”

It was a mistake, but it wasn’t a joke. Graves, then twenty-six, didn’t know he was about to begin an eighteen-year fight to clear his name of a gruesome crime he did not commit. He would spend most of those years in solitary confinement on death row.

Graves was charged with the brutal murder of six members of the Davis family in Somerville, a small city northwest of Houston. Robert Carter, the absent father of the youngest victim, four-year-old Jason Davis, became the first suspect when he showed up to the family’s funeral with burns on his face and a shaky alibi. But from the investigation’s outset, the police worked from the assumption that Carter couldn’t have committed the horrific murders alone, because multiple weapons had been employed: the victims were attacked with a knife, a hammer, and a gun before the house was set on fire.

When his interrogators pressured him to name an accomplice, Carter, to deflect attention from his wife, also a suspect at the time, offered the name of someone he barely knew: his wife’s cousin, Anthony Graves. Though there was no evidence connecting him to the crimes other than Carter’s accusation, Graves was convicted and sentenced to death.

Carter was executed in May 2000. His last statement from the gurney was a declaration that Graves was innocent. “It was me and me alone…. I lied on him in court,” Carter said, just minutes before being dosed with a lethal injection. Graves remained on death row, his case unexamined.

I read stories like this and wonder just how often the state kills somebody for no reason.

Full story on the Texas Monthly site.

Mumford and Sons

...kick crazy ass.

Here's them doing The Cave

(H/t to NG & MG... good pick)

Some Contracts are More Unbreakable Than Others

Couldn't agree more:

It is fascinating to see how the public narrative in the media has gradually shifted over the past year from Wall Street’s sociopathic practices (which were directly responsible for the creation of the crisis) to the alleged greed of public employee unions and their pension benefits, many of which were the product of agreed wage negotiation packages in which unions were receiving these pension benefits in lieu of increased wage benefits.

During 2008, we were told that the government’s hands were tied and that sanctity of contracts had to be honored. This was when the Federal Reserve authorized 100% payouts to the likes of Goldman Sachs on AIG’s credit default swaps (in effect allowing the Fed to act as an extra budgetary vehicle of the Treasury, which is a violation of the Constitution and shows how patently false the Fed’s claims of independence are). But I don’t seem to recall many Wall Street types going on about the sanctity of contracts when agreements with the UAW were reworked to save GM or now when public employee union pension benefits are under attack. The argument seems to be that the states are suffering from a genuine solvency crisis in which everybody has to make sacrifices, including the “greedy” unions. So why should big financial firms, which would otherwise have been toast but for the munificence of the suffering American taxpayer, be any different?

That's Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, posting on Naked capitalism

Somebody Ought to Beat His Ass

(Via TPM)

In an apparent bid to out-crazy the gunman, the infamous publicity-whore preacher intends to protest the funeral of nine-year old Tulsa shooting victim, Christina Green.

And other victims as well.

Un-be-effing-lievable.

Score One For Sanity

The good news: Massachusetts recognizes the rule of law in foreclosures.

The bad news: That this, truly, is news :

(Bloomberg) U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co. lost a foreclosure case in Massachusetts’s highest court that will guide lower courts in that state and may influence others in the clash between bank practices and state real-estate law. The ruling drove down bank stocks.

The state Supreme Judicial Court today upheld a judge’s decision saying two foreclosures were invalid because the banks didn’t prove they owned the mortgages, which he said were transferred into two mortgage-backed trusts without the recipients’ being named.

I mean, really - a ruling that banks can't foreclose if they cannot prove they ownsa mortgage should not be news.

Yet it is.

At least the ruling was right. Let's see how the banks push back on this.

(H/t The Big Picture)

GSE = Everybody's Whipping Boy

While Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae have been erroneously blamed for starting the financial crisis - they certainly are due for their share of abuse.

The AP had a story yesterday about how Bank of America and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had come to an agreement over bad loans.

BofA had sold Freddie and Fannie total crap, and they had the right to order BofA to buy back loans that didn't meet its underwriting standards. The deal they just reached amounted to $1.28 billion for Freddie and $1.52 billion for Fannie.

That seemed low to me - I remember discussions of figures north of $100 billion.

According to Barry BofA's exposure to Freddie's putbacks amounts to about $127 billion.

So, BofA gets to keep over $120 billion dollars that it owes Freddie.

Which means that the GSE continue to be (as Barry puts it) the backdoor bailout vehicle of choice for Washington.

• Ship the bank's crap to a GSE who will agree to terms that no thinking business would take.
• Then pour tax dollars into the GSE to keep them afloat when the crap loans fail
• Finally, everyone can launch a rousing chorus of how inefficient GSEs are and how the banks are better at lending and managing risk.

I expect the same Wall Street apologists who blame the crisis on GSE will be only too happy to join in.

Long Term Investors

(Via Naked Capitalism)

Michael Hudson tells us that investors are hanging onto stocks and foreign currency investments longer.

Now the bad news:

Take any stock in the United States. The average time in which you hold a stock is--it's gone up from 20 seconds to 22 seconds in the last year. Most trades are computerized. Most trades are short-term. The average foreign currency investment lasts--it's up now to 30 seconds, up from 28 seconds last month.

Think about that for a second. What kind of market efficiency is there when positions are held for less time than it takes to describe them?

Here's a more granular observation from The Daily Finance's Peter Cohan:

The market is now controlled by short-term traders, rather than the long-term investors for whom these arguments might have some relevance. Specifically, 70% of trading volume on the major exchanges is conducted by high-frequency traders who hold a stock for an average of 11 seconds. Only a handful of market players have the real-time data needed to make these short-term trades.

That's 70% of trading volume happening at a rate that outstrips humanity's ability to absorb, comprehend, analyze, and react.

Remember that figure the next time some idiot tries to tell you that the Dow's latest hiccup is due to X or Y in the news.