This is a classic reason why the 99% are angry. And it’s anger against injustices like this that are fueling the Occupy movement. There are many more examples of this kind of behavior which is condoned and encouraged by both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Again, it’s a watchdog that is sleeping with the people that it’s supposed to be watching on our behalf. I’m thrilled that this judge is standing up and not agreeing to what has become the status quo: rip the 99% off, get a slap on the wrist, and chuckle while you count the profits you made, even after you pay the penalties. We need more judges like him. And, we should all be thankful that there are still a few journalists who are doing their jobs, like Matt Taibbi.
Matt Taibbi talks about US politics. (photo: Robin Holland)
Finally, a Judge Stands Up to Wall Street
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
10 November 11
ederal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.
The SEC had brought an action against Citigroup for misleading investors about the way a certain package of mortgage-backed assets had been chosen. The case is very similar to the notorious Abacus caseinvolving Goldman Sachs, in which Goldman allowed short-selling billionaire John Paulson (who was betting against the package) to pick the assets, then told a pair of European banks that the “designed to fail” package they were buying had been put together independently. Continue reading →
Rosie stepped on a rattlesnake. It looked just like this. We were walking along a road near our house and she was up in the grass alonside the road. I had her on the leash and saw her jump back out of the corner of my eye. That’s when I saw the snake coiling itself back up after apparently trying to strike Rosie. It was almost invisble in the grass. I had to pull Rosie away from it for obvious reasons. I kept my distance, but I wanted to get a look at it to figure out what it was. As I got a little closer it reared its head back, opened its mouth to show me its fangs and started making noise with its rattle. So, from now on, I will keep Rosie on a very short leash and I will keep my eyes peeled for these nasty reptiles. Reading this, I have discovered that using a tourniquet (which was my first thought) is a bad idea.
Rolling Stone readers picked the top ten songs of the sixties. While I was never a Bob Dylan fan, I agree with the rest of picks. But what’s really great about this article is the video links. There are some great performances here.
Got the car back yesterday. $929 later, it runs much better. Randy at Sport Car Services does great work. A lot of the electrical problems have been fixed, the new brakes feel great, the transmission shifts like it’s brand new. Still to fix: a new steering box and a front end sway bar. Ran out of money.
Heather’s boyfriend, Chris, is looking for a vintage Honda Cub to re-build. That reminded me that I have a photo of my friends and me standing around Jack McLelland’s new Honda 50. That’s what they were called in Canada.
This was taken in Lloydminster, Alberta in 1964. Jack got this for his 14th birthday, the lucky bastard. I thought I was lucky to get my first new bicycle when I was 12. Back then you could get a motorcycle license at 14. You couldn’t drive a car until you turned 16 because, as everyone know, cars are so much more dangerous. I remember Jack and I got this thing up to 75.
We’re really looking forward to enjoying the farm fresh produce and eggs. This one is different from the one we belonged to in Brooklyn. It seems to be organized and run by the farm itself instead of by a community group like New York’s are run. It’ll be interesting to see the differences in the organization and also the quality.
Last night on the Rachel Maddow show she took on the media and their current love affair with Paul Ryan. I think it’s a sign of our lack of journalism and critical thinking that she seems to be one of the few asking these questions.
‘I tried to cover different styles and eras, although it is weighted toward the Fifties. Pop music in Britain used to be filtered through a big machine. With these rec-ords, you got the feeling that it was coming to you directly, with an earthiness that spoke of another existence. John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy — they were also on television. It was considered folk art in Britain. It was slightly patronizing, but the essence of it was out there.”
“I Got to Go” Little Walter, 1955It’s a fast, weird tempo — a train rhythm, because it’s an on-the-move song. Little Walter was a big influence — the Charlie Parker of harmonica.
“First Time I Met the Blues” Buddy Guy, 1960He was a virtuoso. B.B. King and Otis Rush were influential on a lot of British guitar players, but Buddy had more virtuosity and different licks to nick. He had a vocal style that was harsher than everyone else.
“40 Days and 40 Nights” Muddy Waters, 1956It’s got these religious overtones that give it a poignancy. You could have picked so many tracks by him, but this one gives you a shiver when you put it on.
“Stones in My Passway” Robert Johnson, 1937One of the essences of Robert Johnson is the eeriness, and this one illustrates that — the lyrics, the way he delivers it. The thing about blues lyrics is you never know who wrote them. They’re a patchwork of composition — people take a line, embellish it with their own verses. But I never heard anything like this. This seems quite original.
“Lonely Avenue” Ray Charles, 1956It’s a great tempo, a lovely shuffle. I’ve sung this with the Stones, with other people. Doc Pomus was a good writer, very underrated, although I always rated him highly.
“Cold Shot” Stevie Ray Vaughan, 1984He’s a player who absorbed all of these influences — country, Hendrix licks, but urban too. He has these lazy tempos, like this one. He sits back in the track, in that groove.
“Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” Z.Z. Hill, 1982I never saw him live, but I love this song. There’s a whole genre of blues songs — the jealousy thing, not letting anyone in your house. But in this song, everyone is let in. The wife lets everyone in the house.
“Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” Blind Willie Johnson, 1927He was an itinerant church singer, only did religious themes. He’s got some odd voices. He’s got this growly gospel voice, then this almost effeminate sound, like a woman’s voice. He switches from one to the other. It’s very haunted.
“Forty Four” Howlin’ Wolf, 1954This is a piano blues with a funny time signature. It’s very powerful. It was almost impossible for anyone else to do that voice. He was so far off on some other plane. He had this strange voice — strange everything.
“Going Down” Freddie King, 1971He came to play shows in England a lot, and I used to see him in Los Angeles all the time. This song is great, and different. It’s not just a 12-bar blues — somebody thought about how it’s going to work, with that bass line. It ups the ante from the usual.
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This is an interesting piece from Grist. I have often thought about how nice it would be to be more self sufficient, have a small hobby farm, grow fruits and vegetables, and raise some animals. I don’t think I could kill, or “harvest”, the animals. It’s one thing to give a fleeting thought about the life that the animal lived as you sit down to dinner. It’s another thing to face the reality of killing a creature. I grew up in cattle and farming country. My friends and I used to ride our bikes out to a local slaughterhouse and watch the men do their jobs. As an eight year boy my curiosity outweighed any kid of squeamishness. But not any more. So, with that, here’s a posting by a woman who’s facing a situation she doesn’t want to deal with. What’s even more interesting is the interaction between the commenters to her post.
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It’s a wine emergency! It’s happened to you, admit it. You have a bottle of wine and no way to open it. Maybe it’s because the TSA found your fold up corkscrew in your carry-on, declared it to be a dangerous weapon and gave you a choice of getting on the plane or giving it to them, and when you got to Paris the tire-bouchon boutique was fermé. What to do? Here ya go. It’s en français, but the flickering images are in the universal language of video.
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$5000. That’s what it cost this Welsh couple to build their house in a hillside. Yes, it is possible. From Green Building Elements.
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This is Dennis Kucinich. Remember him? He was marginalized in the 2008 presidential race by the Democratic party and the mainstream media. He is one of the few honest people in U.S. politics and I hope he runs for president again. If I had George Soros kind of money I would bankroll Kucinich. But since I’m a poor layabout, all I can do is encourage him and try to get the word out that he’s still out there, tilting at windmills. Here’s another valiant effort that’s probably destined to fail. From The Raw Story.
Kucinich to force Congress to vote on withdrawing from Afghanistan after news Obama will extend war to 2014
President Obama said he would begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 2011. Now, the Administration says 2011 is still in play, but has begun floating the year 2014 as a more “reasonable” date for the war’s end.
One Congressional Democrat is not happy.
Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) blasted President Barack Obama Wednesday over reports that he is planning to de-emphasize the July 2011 deadline for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan.
“When the new 112th Congress convenes in January, I will immediately enter a privileged resolution that will force Congress to vote on setting a withdrawal date,” Kucinich said. “The withdrawal of our troops must be driven by Congress, not the corrupt president of Afghanistan.”
The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and labyrinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.
This is an excellent piece of reporting in Rolling Stone. It’s very long, and I find it hard to read long articles on the site, so I created a PDF file of the plain text. The link is below.
The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years – and let the world’s most dangerous oil company get away with murder
By Tim Dickinson
Jun 08, 2010 4:30 PM EDT
This article originally appeared in RS 1107 from June 24, 2010.
On May 27th, more than a month into the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, Barack Obama strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House. For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. “They have the technical expertise to plug the hole,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. “It is their responsibility.” The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. “If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?” a reporter asked. “No,” Gibbs replied.
ederal judge Jed Rakoff, a former prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s office here in New York, is fast becoming a sort of legal hero of our time. He showed that again yesterday when he shat all over the SEC’s latest dirty settlement with serial fraud offender Citigroup, refusing to let the captured regulatory agency sweep yet another case of high-level criminal malfeasance under the rug.
