The Final Curtain for Bernard Kerik

The rise and fall of Bernard Kerik is less an American chronicle of a rag-to-riches tale with Gatsby-esque overtures, than a story of conventional political cronyism and personal excess.

Born of an alcoholic father and a mother who was a prostitute, Bernard Kerik's early years were filled with military duty and stints in police enforcement and security work in both America and Saudi Arabia.  In the 1990's he became a close ally of former New York city Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for whom he served as personal bodyguard and driver.  Mr. Giuliani advanced Kerik into a senior position in the Corrections Department, from which he went on to become the agency’s commissioner.  Afterward, Mr. Giuliani elevated Mr. Kerik to the position of NYC's 40th police commissioner, a post that he would hold for the final sixteen months of Giuliani's second term in office. In what would become a repeating motif to his behavior, Kerik would ride with a security detail of fellow officers who had been involved in traumatic career activities and participate in typical beat-cop activities; actions that are best described as atypical behavior for the head of New York's police.

After 9/11, Kerik attracted a national spotlight and notoriety for his stoic posturing along aside Mr. Giuliani in what became one of America's most difficult and painful moments in its history.  If Kerik had quietly disappeared from the limelight his reputation and contribution to America would have probably remained untarnished.  However, the administration of George W. Bush, always looking for loyal soldiers for their cause, recruited him with a $140,000 salary to serve in the position of training the new Iraqi police force.

His tenure in Iraq was less than inspiring.  According to the Nation magazine,

• Kerik's oversight of a $50 million police-training contract for the controversial defense contractor DynCorp produced few tangible results.
• Kerik spent $1.2 billion to train 35,000 troops in Jordan even though France and Germany offered to provide training for free. He also bought $20 million worth of rifles and revolvers from Jordan when the weapons could've been obtained for far less in Iraq.
• Kerik hired Iraqi policemen without background checks who later turned out to be hardened criminals. He re-hired policeman formerly employed by Saddam Hussein and bragged of training 37,000 new officers. Currently, roughly a quarter of the force Kerik left in place--a total of 30,000 officers--have been or will soon be fired by the US government and paid $60 million in severance payments, according to the far-from-antiwar New York Post.

According to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Washington Post’s former Baghdad bureau chief:

[Kerik] held precisely two staff meetings during his tenure. His main activity was going on nighttime raids against indeterminate targets accompanied by a shadowy former U.S. colonel and a 100-man Iraqi paramilitary force, and then sleeping most of the day. After accomplishing nothing in three months, training no police forces, he departed.

Upon being vetted by the Bush Administration for the post of Secretary of Homeland Security, his life started to unravel.  As discussed by Allan Lengel of AOL News:

In November [2009], Kerik, 54, pleaded guilty to two counts of tax fraud, one count of making a false statement on a loan application and five separate counts of making false statements to the federal government. Two of the charges related to statements Kerik made to the White House while the Bush administration was considering him to lead the Department of Homeland Security. He also agreed to pay restitution of $187,931.

Kerik admitted that he failed to report the $255,000 value of a renovation done free of charge by a New Jersey contractor that was trying to land a city license. He also admitted that he lied about the renovations and his relationship with the contractor, which had suspected mob ties.

In the end, Kerik's own petty greed, want for material wealth, and personal status, lead him to disaster.  He was sentenced in February 2010 to four years incarceration.

The young must die so Geezers can pay low taxes!

It never ceases to amaze me at how greedy and un-Christian Southerners are. The latest volley of cruelty originates in the state of Arizona, where the possibility of raising taxes and forcing the wretched Geezer-polis of this desert wasteland to invest in their fellow Americans, communities, and infrastructure not linked to killing foreigners is verboten.

Gov. Jan Brewer signed an austere budget that will eliminate health coverage for 47,000 low-income children by eliminating the state's Children’s Health Insurance Program.   The only state in the union willing to do so.  The NY Times states that Arizona, not content to bulldozer over its future citizens, will "roll back Medicaid coverage for childless adults in a move that is expected to eventually drop 310,000 people from the rolls."

The Republican-controlled Legislature furthermore passed a budget that includes deep cuts to both health care and education.

The Medicaid reduction for childless adults rolls back an expansion approved by voters in 2000 and cuts enrollment about 25 percent. The expansion was to be paid for with tobacco settlement dollars, a revenue source that quickly proved inadequate.

No doubt the anti-tax armada of self-made Geezers will relish the thought that their precious money won't go to the superfluous requirement of having decent health care coverage or education for children.  After all, these people are clearly either just freeloading Mexicans or un-Godly creatures that the Lord himself is endeavouring to punish.

At what point do we stop calling America a civilized country and call it out as an intemperate international hooligan and wastrel. This recession was made, sealed, and delivered by the very people who are now lying in the Arizona sun, casually dispensing with their retirement days. These nabobs of consumerism, who to this day remain contemptuous of anyone who dares to challenge their pseudo-religious doctrine of low-taxes, unregulated capital, and maximum warfare, are to blame for this economic disaster.  The children of Saint Ronnie and his revolution of personal irresponsibility have had their gluttonous feast and are now more than happy to have someone else's children pay the bill.

The Definition of Human Selfishness

Representatives of the human race have voted and decided to liquidate another species in the name of Mammon and short-term economic gain.

Delegates from 175 countries, representing the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, voted on a series of measures to eliminate international trade on the Bluefin Tuna and a variety of other animals that are posed for extinction.  According to the Washington Post,

The adult population of eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna has declined 74 percent over the past half-century, much of it in the past decade, and the population has dropped 82 percent in 40 years in the western Atlantic.

The proposal originally initiated by Monaco and agreed upon by the USA and several EU states, failed to achieve a majority position at the Doha, Qatar conference; with 20 nations in favor, 68 against and 30 cowards abstaining. 

Japan the greatest consumer of worldwide Tuna, imports nearly 80 percent of commercially traded Atlantic bluefin.  Similar to its extensive campaign to dissuade any international body from preventing it from harvesting whales, Japan has used its considerable economic clout to prevent limitations on any trade embargo or harvesting constraints in international waters.  Few deny that the motivations behind their stance are purely commercial.  As Susan Lieberman, director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group said, "This was a case of just plain ignoring the science for short-term economic gain."

Japan is not alone in its posturing; however.  Canada, a country that has made itself into an environmental pariah by its fealty to dirty oil-sands production and the persistent refusal by its conservative government to acknowledge and address climate change, has actively sided with the Japanese on the tuna issue.  Canada's Minster of Fisheries, Gail Shea, applauding the defeat of the trade ban and touting Canada's own policies, which have permitted over the decades the devastation of Atlantic fisheries and the current collapse of Pacific Sockeye Salmon.  So when Canadians say they have a plan to manage fishery stocks, you can be certain that that species will be decimated.

To highlight the absurdity of the entire trade system, consider how Bluefin Tuna is cultured in Spanish waters; as relayed by the BBC.  The fish are initially kept alive in off-shore pens, where they are fed vast amounts of expensively caught fish (around 10-kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1-kg of body weight).  They are then harvested by hand using divers, packaged at a purpose-built factory, and flown -on the same day- to Asian markets.  All this so some silly twit can eat sushi with his/her choice of dipping sauce.

***

Additional background stories and commentary on this subject can be found here, here, and here.

Lehman Brothers engaged in Fraudulent Accounting

There are a great many people who are enamored with the conceit that all that was needed to be done to save the world from the Great Recession, was simply for the US government to have bailed Lehman Brothers out.  The explanations offered by former Lehman Chairman Richard Fuld, was that the bank was undermined by external agents who engaged in rumors, short selling, and stock manipulation that lead to an needless loss of confidence by clients and trading partners.  Such fanciful narratives hold little water now that a court appointed examiner’s report, to determine whether there was any fraud or other wrongdoing before Lehman’s bankruptcy filing, has been issued.  The conclusions are severe.

It is clear that the weapon of choice, as it has been in the past two decades when dealing with massive corporate fraud and malfeasance, has been management's willingness to utilize accounting gimmickry to conceal the actual health of their business.  In the case of Lehman Brothers, the company was already in bad shape by 2007 and as a result "the firm became addicted to a form of repurchase agreement known as Repo-105."

The report, by Anton R. Valukas, clears the air as to the inevitability of the Great-Recession by stating “Lehman was more the consequence than the cause of a deteriorating economic climate.”   Michael Hiltzek of the LA Times in his 17-March article points out:

Government rescue of Lehman, a la Bear Stearns or AIG, was never in the cards -- the firm couldn't find a willing buyer as Bear Stearns had, and unlike AIG it lacked the assets and collateral needed to fund a government bailout loan.

The examiner said Lehman used accounting gimmicks and had been insolvent for weeks before it filed for bankruptcy in September 2008.

The facts that have emerged to the public in the past week reveal a management structure that was either woefully incompetent or despite protestations, colluded with their independent accountants (i.e. Ernst & Young) to introduce an accounting maneuver, in the form of Repo-105’s, that hid more than $50 Billion.  In a conventional scenario, these assets would remain on a company’s books; however, Lehman’s booked them as a sale.  The reason for their actions was simple.  Pressured by investors and regulators to substantially reduce the company’s overall leverage, they repeatedly engaged in these clandestine manipulations to stave off collapse. 

In the end, Lehman Brothers was not destroyed by external forces, but by pre-eminent hubris.  Lehman’s had procedures and rules that would limit the company’s exposure to risk; however, when these obstacles were encountered it is clear they were simply ignored.  Furthermore, when Matthew Lee, Senior VP Finance Division, who was in charge of global balance sheet and legal entity accounting, brought up these irregularities with management and Ernst & Young accountants, he was quickly terminated.

Hiltzek draws a circle around the most egregious practices and malcontents in this sordid exhibition of capitalistic cannibalism:

One is the folly of relying on self-discipline and self-regulation in the financial markets. The credit-rating firms were utterly useless in appraising Lehman's true condition. Ernst & Young's dereliction seems so extreme that it deserves harsh punishment, maybe even extinction.

Since the markets have returned to their 2008 highs and no real reform has been legislated or implemented, everything is fine and there clearly is no need for the public to be further disturbed by the criminality of the perpetual fraud-mongers of Wall Street.

Wachovia involved in Mexican drug trade laundering

Wachovia Bank, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo & Co. in the subsequent tumult of the 2008 financial crisis, has over the past several years been the subject of a number of criminal and security related investigations relating to fraud, corruption, and questionable business practices.  For example, in 2007 Wachovia was identified in a lawsuit that it had indirectly participated and directly permitted "fraudulent telemarketers to use the bank’s accounts to steal millions of dollars from unsuspecting victims."

Documents from that lawsuit now show that Wachovia had long known about allegations of fraud and that the bank, in fact, solicited business from companies it knew had been accused of telemarketing crimes.  Internal Wachovia e-mail, for example, show that high-ranking employees at the nation’s fourth-largest bank frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through its accounts.

According to the NY Times, Wachovia was making enormous profits from charges associated with the operation of these fraud-engaging accounts.  Linda Pera, a Wachovia executive, wrote in an internal memo that “We are making a ton of money from them."

It therefore comes as no surprise to learn that Wachovia, in its zeal for profits and its internal policies for dispensing with ethical and legal responsibilities, has been engaged in the laundering of Mexican drug money.  The NY Times reports that the bank "will forfeit $110 million, representing the proceeds of illegal narcotics sales that were laundered through the bank" and will pay an additional $50 million fine to the Treasury, as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.

The federal prosecutor in Miami began an investigation about three years ago, focusing on the supposed role of a Wachovia unit in processing illegal money transfers for Mexican exchange houses along the border between the United States and Mexico... Exchange houses in Mexico are part of the global remittance business that allows immigrants in the United States to send money back to relatives in Latin America. Federal officials say drug traffickers have used the money transfer business as a way to move cash around.

When it comes to corporations engaging is despicable and completely unethical behavior a simple slap on the wrist and a nominal fine is the standard.  Perhaps the US government should re-assess its stance, because from my perspective corporate crime, whether it was Enron, Iraqi war profiteers inside the Pentagon, or Wall Street investment houses, the number of crimes continue to escalate and get more grandiose with each passing year.

Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards

According to an article published in Nature Neuroscience (14 March, 2010) and described in Eurekalert!:

The brains of psychopaths appear to be wired to keep seeking a reward at any cost, new research from Vanderbilt University finds. The research uncovers the role of the brain's reward system in psychopathy and opens a new area of study for understanding what drives these individuals.

"This study underscores the importance of neurological research as it relates to behavior," Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said. "The findings may help us find new ways to intervene before a personality trait becomes antisocial behavior."

"Psychopaths are often thought of as cold-blooded criminals who take what they want without thinking about consequences," Joshua Buckholtz, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology and lead author of the new study, said. "We found that a hyper-reactive dopamine reward system may be the foundation for some of the most problematic behaviors associated with psychopathy, such as violent crime, recidivism and substance abuse."

Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack, fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy.

Icelanders tell UK & Dutch Governments to Screw Themselves!

I was hoping to find a newspaper somewhere, anywhere declaring solidarity with the people of Iceland against the tyranny of the high-priests of high-finance.  But alas nary a headline could be found stating "We are all Icelanders Now!"

To review, in 2008 all three of Iceland's banks collapsed due to their inability to refinance short-term debt and a concomitant run on deposits by European clients who had sought the supposed advantages of high-interest accounts offered by these banks and their Internet subsidiaries (i.e. Icesave).  The commercial collapse crippled the Icelandic economy and precipitated a severe economic recession that devalued the nation's currency by 90%, contracted GDP by 5.5% within the first six-months of 2009, and has already been estimated to exceed 75% of Iceland's GDP in total cost.  

In what may have become the most obscene misuse of legal authority, the government of the UK used anti-terrorism rules to take control of assets held in Britain by Landsbanki Islands hf.  Stephen Timms, financial secretary to the Treasury, said in Britain's Parliament that "To protect U.K. economic interests the government has frozen the funds and financial assets held by Landbanksi."  When Landsbanki failed, the UK government bailed out its citizens deposits.  However, the UK made it clear that it wanted this money returned from the Icelandic government, despite the fact that it never guaranteed the deposits.

In December 2009, the President of Iceland vetoed a bill, pushed by the UK and Netherlands, that would have effectively placed a usurious burden upon the citizens of Iceland by their European counterparts, for what was effectively bad private investments made by Europeans looking for easy money.  According to the Economist magazine:

The Landsbanki debts alone amount to over €12,000 for each of the country’s 320,000 citizens; total debts are approaching 1,000% of GDP. Such sums would take many decades to repay, and would strangle the economy in the meantime.

In addition, the governments of the UK and Netherlands have made both public and private threats that they were willing to force Iceland off the cliff and into financial oblivion.  The threats have including denying Iceland the opportunity for future EU membership and freezing current IMF loans, unless the citizens of the sovereign nation accepted Treaty of Versailles-like repatriations.  For example, the deal would require each Icelander to pay approximately $135 USD a month for eight years; the equivalent of 25% of an average four-member family's salary.

A referendum at the beginning of this month (March 2010) on the specifics of the debt-repayment scheme was rejected by more than 93% of the Icelandic population.  As the Christian Science Monitor notes:

a large portion of voters viewed the deal as an unfair result of their own government's failure to curtail the recklessness of a handful of bank executives, including those who expanded operations to seduce British and Dutch customers with generous returns from online savings.

Furthermore, another perspective is that Icelanders are convinced that the UK/Dutch duo are acting in bad faith and demanding excessive requirements on a country that provided the chieftains of high-capital exactly what they wanted: banking deregulation, pro-business policies, trans-national mobility of capital, and favorable financial products for European clients.  

What the citizens of the West should be saying is that the blackmailing of the people of Iceland by the dunces who have shown themselves equally inept at running their own economies, is not acceptable.  None of these assholes should be telling anyone what to do with their money.  All these bankers and useless government charlatans who turned a blind eye when the priests of high-capital were doing their dirty deeds need to be hung from a tree for facilitating the greatest economic collapse in human-history.  Instead the media has dismissed the issue as a peripheral item about a small and relatively unimportant country that grew too fast and too big.

Stiglitz Calls the US FED Corrupt

Last week Joseph Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and recipient of the Nobel Memorial award in Economics (2001), made a set of explosive criticisms about the Federal Reserve at a public forum on financial reform that has largely been ignored by the mainstream media to date.    Tim Iacono at SeekingAlpha says, with respect to the comments, that they are, "patently obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of how the Federal Reserve system really works, yet, even to me they somehow seemed shocking."

What was it that Stiglitz said?

If we had seen a governance structure that corresponds to our Federal Reserve system, we would have been yelling and screaming and saying that country does not deserve any assistance, this is a corrupt governing structure.

The pseudo-public (and therefore pseudo-private) Federal Reserve has long pretended to the serve the public interest, while hansomely filling the vaults of the banks to whom they are supposed to supervise and regulate.  Since the the inception of the Great-Recession libertarians, progressive-liberals, and an assortment of economists have been asking tough questions about the conduct and competency of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and the entire Federal Reserve system, which to date has blocked, scuttled, or diluted any attempts to allow transparent examination of its activities.  I too have been questioning the basis for the US Federal Reserve system (here, here, and here) for some time, and Stiglitz's comments, which I do not consider hyperbole, are a refreshing anodyne to the usual mealy-mouthed platitudes offered by the MSM on why meaningful examination of the Fed and financial system reform cannot occur.

The Unbearable Greed of AIG

In Hannah Arendt's chronology of Adolf Eichmann's trial by the State of Israel for his crimes against the Jewish people during the Second World War, it was clear that Eichmann thought of himself as a victim of chance who was not  directly accountable for the horrendous criminality pursued by the Third Reich.  In a recent Washington Post article titled, "Transcript reveals anger of AIG employees toward politicians, public" one can observe the same dismisal of accountability and latent victimization conjured by AIG employees and the perpetrators of one of the greatest economic meltdowns in human civilization.

To contextualize, AIG (American International Group Inc.) prior to September 2008, as listed by Forbes magazine, was the 18th largest publicly owned corporation in the world.  The company had been the largest underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance in the USA.  Due to the company's involvement in the sale of credit protection in the form of credit default swaps (CDSs) on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and a swift downgrade in its credit-rating, precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG suffered a liquidity crisis.  The American government driven by the perception that a global economic collapse would ensue if AIG failed, supplied the company with $180 billion in loans, stock investments and other commitments from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

According to the WaPo, employees of AIG were less than enthusiastic of the public pillorying of  their beloved corporation in the months after the bailout.  Hannah Arendt explained that in bureaucracies there is a diffusion of responsibility due to the collective nature of the enterprise.  As a result, because most bureaucrats do not directly control the nature of how decisions are made, nor do they frequently control how those decisions are executed, these people do not accept personal responsibility for their contributions to what in the end are systematic failures of judgement and ethics.

Consider some of their statements:

One employee doing his best Adolf Eichmann imitation said, "I will stand behind every action I have taken in this company from Day One."

Another jackal of high-finance had this to say of the American public, the US government, and the corporate welfare that had saved his/her job, "To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved."

Upon hearing that NY State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo was investigating AIG for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to employees and was threatening to disclose the names of these individuals to the public, employees claimed that were being "blackmailed" and subject to "extortion."

The greed-heads shrieked that their windfalls were deserved and that the entire scapegoating process reeked of McCarthyism and "un-American" policies!

The reality is that these people will never accept that they are the one's responsible for the economic catastrophe that has befallen the entire planet.  In their mind it is the government's fault for allowing minorities to buy homes they could not afford.  It is never charlatans like themselves who are to blame for the greed and undisciplined excesses of their company.  It is someone else's fault, and as in the case of all narcissistic sociopaths, it is they who claim to be the real victims.

Keep hoping AIG and fiends, your dream of a global economic collapse may still happen.

Pole Dancing: A potential Olympic Sport

I'll have to admit I don't really watch any women's sports; in fact I rarely watch any sports.  While I think female sports is something to be pursued and awarded, I don't believe those sports like boxing, muscle-building, and other sports that attempt to emulate the physical strengths of men are necessarily the best outlets that highlight female athleticism.

I'll have to also admit that when I think of pole dancing I don't think of athletics; but there are those that do.  Twisting, contorting, and moving provocatively for the crowd won Katerina Witt a gold medal at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Female sexuality when coupled with raw talent has catapulted many women to international fame.  Anna Kournikova was never a great tennis player, but she did appeal to many male fans with her above average appearance.

So the thought of women pole dancing for the "gold" versus dollar bills slipped into a garter, doesn't strike me as obtuse.  No one doubts that a great deal of physical strength, endurance, and talent is necessary for the event.  So why then if sports dominated by prepubescent children as in gymnastics or sports that are dominated by artistic merit like figure skating, shouldn't pole dancing at least be given a chance to entertain the masses while allowing the ladies to strut their stuff.

According to pole dance advocates, "After a great deal of feedback from the pole-dance community, many of us have decided that it’s about time pole fitness is recognized as a competitive sport, and what better way for recognition than to be part of the 2012 Olympics held in London."