Just a flyby to add this item from American Banker yesterday about Schneiderman’s ponderifications and the unholy snares and traps set in the national settlement that were explicitly designed to delay and obstruct his ability to sue for breach of the agreement.

F’rinstance, this gem:

Despite Schneiderman’s announcement Monday of his intention to sue B of A and Wells, the details of the settlement limit his ability to act independently. Any state wishing to enforce provisions of the settlement in an action against one of the servicers has to provide notice of 21 days, at the end of which time a monitoring panel of authorities from various states can choose to be the official party bringing the action. (Schneiderman’s office said he provided such notice on Friday.)

If the panel declines participation, Schneiderman will then have to wait 21 additional days to bring the action on behalf of his state.

Additionally, there are legal questions about whether Schneiderman can act without Smith, since another provision of the settlement allows banks to correct flaws in implementing the deal before a legal action is filed.

“The question is whether that process still has to go forward before New York can sue,” said a source familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “That’s still an open question. It’s uncertain whether [Schneiderman] has the authority to sue, and if he does he has to wait at most 42 days.”

Whaaaa? Seriously, wtf? Who was the genius who agreed to that crap?

first item under “Politics USA” on classified Senate report on torture uses broken link. Correct link is here to Salon item about preznit withholding torture report.

I am hours late, and a little lazy, so I haven’t read comments below yours @22, but this sounds very elegant, and is a concept I never heard of before. Single-payer banking, like single-payer health insurance. It’s almost like we should nationalize the essential parts of the banking system.

Crap! How did I miss that? When I looked at it this morning there weren’t any comments, so I guess I just assumed it was coming up. Now there’s 158 comments! How does that happen? Maybe I wasn’t logged in when I first opened the link. Would comments be hidden on Book Salon if I’m not logged in? huh

Thank you so much for planting the flag for anti-capitalist legal defense (progressive attorneydom?). Whenever I feel myself on the verge of giving up the fight, or going insane, I come here to the Lake to find your posts. I hope we can get the same kind of sanity-preservation services out of the Book Salon with Robert Kuttner later this afternoon.

This is an important story, but note that Politico will use any sign of a shift against austerity to slip in its stealth tax cutting agenda. Tax increases on the wealthy do not have anywhere near the same demand-reduction effect as tax increases on workers and the middle class, who spend most of their income. Politico and Tim Kaine will brush over that minor fact. I pray to dogg Van Hollen isn’t equally corrupted, but only time will tell. We do need increased revenue, because we do need additional stimulus to create jobs. The wealthy must be forced to pay a greater share of the tax burden.

It’s worth reading all the way to the end of the NYT story quoted at the top of this post.

If a U.S. corporation did this, it would be indicted, and at least a few of its executives would go to jail. A global mega-bank, of course, would only suffer “deferred prosecution,” but there would be some consequences. This makes it look like the CIA has completely run amok:

Afghan officials said the practice grew out of the unique circumstances in Afghanistan, where the United States built the government that Mr. Karzai runs. To accomplish that task, it had to bring to heel many of the warlords the C.I.A. had paid during and after the 2001 invasion.

By late 2002, Mr. Karzai and his aides were pressing for the payments to be routed through the president’s office, allowing him to buy the warlords’ loyalty, a former adviser to Mr. Karzai said.

Then, in December 2002, Iranians showed up at the palace in a sport utility vehicle packed with cash, the former adviser said.

The C.I.A. began dropping off cash at the palace the following month, and the sums grew from there, Afghan officials said.

Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures. The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.

It continues:

Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it, Afghan and Western officials said, though they would not identify any by name.

That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations. “They’ll work with criminals if they think they have to,” one American former official said.

Interestingly, the cash from Tehran appears to have been handled with greater transparency than the dollars from the C.I.A., Afghan officials said. The Iranian payments were routed through Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff. Some of the money was deposited in an account in the president’s name at a state-run bank, and some was kept at the palace. The sum delivered would then be announced at the next cabinet meeting. The Iranians gave $3 million to well over $10 million a year, Afghan officials said.

When word of the Iranian cash leaked out in October 2010, Mr. Karzai told reporters that he was grateful for it. He then added: “The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices.”

At the time, Mr. Karzai’s aides said he was referring to the billions in formal aid the United States gives. But the former adviser said in a recent interview that the president was in fact referring to the C.I.A.’s bags of cash.

No one mentions the agency’s money at cabinet meetings. It is handled by a small clique at the National Security Council, including its administrative chief, Mohammed Zia Salehi, Afghan officials said.

Mr. Salehi, though, is better known for being arrested in 2010 in connection with a sprawling, American-led investigation that tied together Afghan cash smuggling, Taliban finances and the opium trade. Mr. Karzai had him released within hours, and the C.I.A. then helped persuade the Obama administration to back off its anticorruption push, American officials said.

After his release, Mr. Salehi jokingly came up with a motto that succinctly summed up America’s conflicting priorities. He was, he began telling colleagues, “an enemy of the F.B.I., and a hero to the C.I.A.”

That Canada oil minister clown is named Joe Oliver. He is a complete ass-hat. He had the balls to come to our country and denounce our top climate change scientist, as if we all give a flying fuck what Joe Oliver thinks about anything. I was tempted to start screaming filthy names at all Canadians, until I noticed that environmentalists in Joe Oliver’s own country are taking apart his loony logic and planning pipeline protests in Quebec.

Pickering is saying Obama is a war criminal for ordering renditions, just as much as Bush & Clinton were war criminals for also ordering renditions. We need to deal with this.

Has WaPo published any other writer who accused preznit of being a war criminal? This is a first, AFAIK. I think it’s a bombshell which is disappearing down the memory hole because of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Title 18 USC section 2441(c) then provides as follows:

(c) Definition.— As used in this section the term “war crime” means any conduct—

(1) defined as a grave breach in any of the international conventions signed at Geneva 12 August 1949, or any protocol to such convention to which the United States is a party;

(2) prohibited by Article 23, 25, 27, or 28 of the Annex to the Hague Convention IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed 18 October 1907;

(3) which constitutes a grave breach of common Article 3 (as defined in subsection (d)) when committed in the context of and in association with an armed conflict not of an international character; or

(4) of a person who, in relation to an armed conflict and contrary to the provisions of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices as amended at Geneva on 3 May 1996 (Protocol II as amended on 3 May 1996), when the United States is a party to such Protocol, willfully kills or causes serious injury to civilians.

By linking to 18 USC 2340, 2340A and 2340B and to 18 USC 2441, Pickering gave us a road map to current criminal law making it a war crime to violate the convention against torture. He then said in the next graf that preznit ordered renditions which violated the Convention Against Torture. The Convention Against Torture is part of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, incorporated in the description of “Common Article 3 violations” listed in 18 USC 2441(d)(1)(A).

Pickering’s second prescription in his column linked to above, directly preceding the one I think is the bombshell, said this:

Second, Congress needs to work with the administration to close the loopholes that allowed torture to occur under a pretense of legality. In 2009, Obama signed an executive order giving interrogators clear instructions about permissible techniques. But future presidents could reverse course with the stroke of a pen — and no public notice.

To ensure that cannot happen, the federal Anti-Torture Statute should be amended to make clear that the deliberate infliction of severe pain and suffering is torture — regardless of the duration of the torment being inflicted. The War Crimes Act should be amended to make clear that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees is a federal crime even when it falls short of torture. Instead of being told to rely on secret legal memos or doctors’ unethical monitoring of brutal interrogation sessions, interrogators should be given unambiguous orders that all detainees are to be treated in strict compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which is the basic provision of international law outlawing torture. And there should be clear, public rules ensuring prompt access to detainees by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

His references to the Anti-Torture Statute and to the War Crimes Act were live links to provisions of the U.S. criminal code, which I will attempt to post in the next comment.

Pickering is accusing preznit of being a war criminal. I have attempted to cite the criminal code provisions Pickering cited, but those portions of my comments disappear into the ether.

Are we allowed to post a comment saying Obama is a war criminal?

A co-author of the report dropped this bombshell in WaPo on Tuesday:

Third, the United States must not transfer detainees to torture in other countries. Such transfers, known as “renditions,” have occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — despite the fact that they violate the Convention Against Torture. In part, this is because of a policy of reliance on “diplomatic assurances” from other countries that detainees would not be tortured, despite clear evidence that these assurances were not credible. In part, this is because the United States has refused to acknowledge that the prohibition against transfers to torture is legally binding outside of U.S. territory. Both must change.

And yet, with just a few dollars from each of us, we can run virtual campaigns like this one to defeat Catfood version 2.0, despite the plutocrats’ payoffs to the politicians. Because the politicians know that money doesn’t vote, voters vote.

Well, survival is the most personal motivation.

Anybody who thinks we are just a bunch of idealist hippies has no idea what we are accomplishing over here by the Lake. We have defeated several relentless campaigns by the plutocrats to steal our Social Security money, on which they have expended hundreds of millions of dollars. We have had repeated success, for at least eight years (since Shrub’s first privatization maneuvers).

the feral rich

Sounds like Hunter Thompson! He always warned us the rich turn into raging baboons whenever they sense a threat to their money or their power.