Yes, Democrats scored some big legislative victories in Congress over the last two years, and, as President Obama noted earlier in the week, the Dems were able to overcome “gridlock” (in no small part because they commanded the majority of the House and Senate) and push through some big bills at the end of their 111th session. However, the next two years will be another story, as the GOP gains major ground in both houses and aims for the White House in 2012.
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enlarge Ho, ho, ho, C&Lers! There have been lots of naughty people in the financial industry this year! But instead of a lump of coal, many of them are getting a big bonus check in their stockings! Let’s take a look at some of the yuletide cheer they’ve been spreading lately! NAUGHTY : When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend ski trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks. When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words “Together Forever,” that contained the ashes of her late husband, Robert. The culprit, Ms. Ash soon learned, was not a burglar but her bank. This sort of thing has sadly become somewhat common , although stealing the ashes of this poor woman’s husband was a novel touch that I’m sure had the bank’s public relations staff running for the hills. Even so, some bank representative did their best to put a happy face on this fiasco: [B]anks and their representatives insist that situations like Ms. Ash’s represent just a tiny percentage of foreclosures. That reminds me of the time I got wasted, broke into a nearby army base, hot-wired a tank and drove it straight into a nearby orphanage. And when the judge at my trial asked me if I had anything to say for myself I replied, “But, Your Honor! This incident only represents a tiny percentage of my overall driving record!” Because, like, here’s the thing: This kind of crap shouldn’t happen at all. Period. The fact that it happened even once is a scandal but the fact that it’s happened to multiple people throughout the country shows that the banks simply have no idea what mortgages are and are not on their books anymore. The entire foreclosure process — which was designed very carefully to protect property rights — has become a lawless mess. If we had a smart center-left party in this country, we’d have Democratic representatives and senators scouring the airwaves shrieking at the top of their lungs about banks stealing deceased loved ones’ ashes — you know, the same way GOP congressfolk go on Fox News every night and shriek about some school somewhere in the middle of Nebraska that’s hosting a “Holiday Concert” rather than a Christmas concert. But we don’t so that’s that. NAUGHTY : A lawsuit filed against accounting giant Ernst & Young marks one of the biggest government efforts to date to assign blame for the financial crisis. The suit by Andrew Cuomo, the outgoing New York state attorney general, accuses Ernst & Young of helping Lehman Bros. cover up its declining health in the months before the investment bank’s collapse in September 2008. Cuomo’s complaint, filed in state court, focuses on a set of short-term transactions, begun in 2001, that allowed Lehman to look healthier and less risky when it reported quarterly financial data. The suit accuses Ernst & Young of approving the so-called Repo 105 transactions and signing off on financial reports that did not disclose them. Ernst & Young “sat by silently while Lehman deceived the public,” the complaint says. For those of you who don’t know, Repo 105 is a neat little accounting trick where short-term loans are recorded on the books as “sales.” The money from this “sale” is then used to pay down the company’s debt, making the firm appear less leveraged than it actually is, even though it actually has to repay the debt from the “sale” in very short order. If you perform enough of these transactions close to the end of a given quarter, you can make billions of dollars in liabilities magically vanish for a very short period of time. This is what Cuomo is alleging Ernst & Young helped Lehman do in the lead up to its spectacular crash in 2008. This is definitely a good one to watch. NAUGHTY : As the housing market came crashing down in 2008, the giant mortgage company Fannie Mae took an unprecedented step to help tackle the rising tide of foreclosures. It named an exclusive group of law firms that would help rapidly carry out the unsavory task of filing legal paperwork to remove homeowners from their homes. Today, problems with documents handled by firms on Fannie’s list – and a similar one created by its smaller rival Freddie Mac – are at the heart of federal and state probes over faulty foreclosure practices that now threaten to further undermine the housing market. Fannie and Freddie, the largest mortgage companies, shaped the practices being challenged in courtrooms around the country. They picked law firms that could foreclose fast and paid them based on how many foreclosures they could process. Speed was essential because delays cost the companies money – and, after they were taken over by the government two years ago, meant losses for taxpayers, too. Not only did the companies urge swift foreclosures, but in at least one case Fannie executives also greenlighted working with a firm that they knew firsthand had engaged in legally questionable practices, according to documents and interviews with lawyers and industry officials. Even though conservatives love to blame Fannie and Freddie for everything regarding the 2008 financial crash — after all, completely private companies can’t possibly do anything wrong — that doesn’t mean the two GSEs (and now to GOEs if you want to be precise) are blameless. In this case it seems as though they set the template for how other firms would handle their foreclosures in the wake of the housing crash. The result has been banks breaking into houses and stealing late relatives’ ashes. It would be nice if someone within the government would try to put the people at Frannie who initiated these sorts of practices in jail. You know, rule of law and other quaint notions like that. NAUGHTY : Deutsche Bank agreed to pay $553 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing on Tuesday, settling a long-running investigation into tax shelter fraud that prosecutors say generated billions of dollars in bogus tax benefits. In an agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, Deutsche Bank will avoid prosecution for helping 2,100 customers evade taxes through 2,300 financial transactions. The arrangements, which took place between 1996 and 2002, helped wealthy Americans report more than $29 billion in fraudulent tax losses, according to the Justice Department. “This settlement marks another victory in the long effort to stop financial institutions, law firms and accounting firms from designing and marketing abusive tax shelters, and facilitating those who use them,” said Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been investigating tax shelters for nearly a decade. What always amazes me about stuff like this is that rich people bother resorting to illegal methods to avoid paying taxes when in reality there are many perfectly legal ways to do it. I’m actually sorta surprised that the government bothered to clamp down on these sorts of practices at all since we’ve heard time and again that forcing rich people to pay any extra in taxes will make them cry and they’ll feel too sad to create jobs and all of Western Civilization will collapse. But good on the U.S. Attorney’s Office for doing its job. It makes me happy to see the government do useful things that don’t involve giving Paris Hilton a tax cut. That’s all I got for today, kids! I’ll see you next week – have a Merry Christmas!* *Yes, Fox News, I said it! Now stop hounding those poor school teachers throwing holiday parties!
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Axl Dominguez awoke early Wednesday to a bumping sound and looked out the window to a scary sight: Plastic trash cans floating down the flooded street. And then the water came rushing into his house as storms sock southern California. (Dec. 22)
Continue reading …enlarge In one of the most condescending and paternalistic Supreme Court opinions in recent memory, Justice Anthony Kennedy in April 2007 upheld a federal late term abortion ban on the grounds that “some women come to regret their choice.” 18 months later, an exhaustive study of 20 years of research concluded that there is no evidence to support the mythical “post-abortion syndrome” hyped by anti-abortion forces – and regurgitated by Justice Kennedy in Gonzales v. Carhart . And now, a new analysis has demolished 2009 “research” which posited a link between abortion and subsequent mental health problems for women. Julia Steinberg of the University of California at San Francisco and Lawrence Finer of the Guttmacher Institute found that: The findings of a 2009 study by Priscilla Coleman et al–which claimed that women who had reported an abortion were at an increased risk of several anxiety, mood and substance use disorders, compared with women who had never had an abortion–are not replicable. Steinberg and Finer’s analysis, just published online in Social Science & Medicine, examined the same dataset as Coleman et al. (the National Comorbidity Survey) and found that in every case, the proportions of women experiencing mental health problems reported by Coleman were much larger, sometimes more than five times as large, as Steinberg and Finer’s results. The Coleman findings were also inconsistent with several other published studies using the same dataset and sample. “We were unable to reproduce the most basic tabulations of Coleman and colleagues,” Steinberg noted, concluding, “This suggests that their results are substantially inflated.” And the Coleman findings, Steinberg pointed out, “were logically inconsistent with other published research.” Like the massive study from Johns Hopkins two years ago. That research reviewed 21 studies involving 150,000 women . The team’s systematic analysis of the highest quality studies in terms of methodology showed “few, if any, differences between women who had abortions and their respective comparison groups in terms of mental health.” In contrast, only the studies with “studies with the most flawed methodology” found any negative long-term, mental health impact. In its report , the researchers pointed out that, “the U.S. Supreme Court, while noting that ‘we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon,’ cited adverse mental health outcomes for women as part of the rationale for limiting late term abortions.” It is Justice Kennedy’s dependence on his unproven claim of post-abortion syndrome that the Johns Hopkins team concluded today was wholly without foundation: “The best research does not support the existence of a ‘post-abortion syndrome’ similar to post-traumatic stress disorder,” Dr. Robert Blum, who led the study published in the journal Contraception, said in a statement. Sadly, distorting science to advance a political agenda perfectly describes Justice Kennedy’s jaw-dropping Carhart opinion . Reversing the Court’s position on so-called partial birth abortion just seven years after it struck down a similar Nebraska law, Kennedy swept away Justice Breyer’s previous exception for “for the preservation of the…health of the mother.” Derisively referring to physicians as “abortion doctors” and with callous disregard for the health of American women, Kennedy in the 5-4 majority opinion decreed that father knows best. (His 2000 dissent in Stenberg v. Carhart used the incendiary term “abortionist” no fewer than 13 times.) As the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recalled : “Respect for human life finds an ultimate expression in the bond of love the mother has for her child,” Kennedy intoned. This is one of those sentences about women’s essential natures that are invariably followed by an explanation of why the right at stake needs to be limited. For the woman’s own good, of course. Kennedy continues: “While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.” No reliable data? No problem! The State has “ethical and moral concerns that justify a special prohibition,” Kennedy argued, because “it is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound when she learns” the details of the abortion procedure. As Marcus suggests, Kennedy’s mantra of “no data, no problem” was never justifiable as a matter of either law or science, and to be sure, is no longer operative. Unfortunately, that comes too late for the reproductive rights of American women. In the wake of their victories with so-called partial birth abortion laws and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, abortion foes continue to push legislation advancing pseudo-scientific (and unsubstantiated) claims about ” fetal pain ” and as well as so-called ” post-abortion syndrome .” As the AP reported two weeks ago , abortion opponents are pushing lawmakers in Kansas, Maryland and Oklahoma to emulate a Nebraska law which “outlaws abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on the disputed claim that fetuses can feel pain after that point.” Other states look to enact fraudulent health warnings and burdensome new regulations on the operation of family planning centers, laws which have left the entire state of Mississippi with a single abortion clinic. And four states – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma – now needlessly require mandatory ultrasound procedures for all women seeking an abortion. Only the 2008 Election Day defeats of the McCain/Palin ticket and draconian abortion restrictions on the ballot in South Dakota, Colorado and California prevented a further abrogation of women’s reproductive rights that might have taken a generation to undo. As the New York Times detailed, those setbacks will be no barrier to a renewed anti-abortion crusade by the new Republican majority in the House. The latest research shows that once again the enemies of reproductive freedom for American women do not have science on their side. Sadly, Justice Anthony Kennedy is another matter. (This piece also appears at Perrspectives .)
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photo via flickr There are a lot predators in Congress, so maybe it’s not a total surprise that the Senate has joined the House to protect sharks by banning shark finning, the brutal practice of cutting off a shark’s fin and throwing its body back into the sea. Specifically, the ” Shark Conservation Act ” prevents vessels from coming back to land with only fins and with no sharks attached to them. No word yet if President Obama will sign the bill…. Read the full story on TreeHugger
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White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that the President’s recent legislative accomplishments were the result of bipartisanship in the interest of the American people, not just the actions of democrats. (Dec. 22)
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Image credit houseplans.com Dan Gregory, editor of Houseplans.com , writes that Lester Walker, author of American Shelter and a Little House of My Own, now has his plans for sale on the site. It is a lovely little 250 square foot design, from a talented and well known architect. A set of plans costs $ 2500… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Images via Blue Water Satellite Using satellites helps us monitor everything from animal migrations to forest cover to water supply levels. And now Blue Water Satellite has come up with another perfect use — monitoring toxic blooms of blue-green algae in lakes, rivers and reservoirs. Blue-green algae makes news as a foul-smelling killer found everywhere from China to
Continue reading …Despite the soul-sucking process, this Congress has been one of the most productive and effective in recent history. Here’s a clip from the Washington Post in January, 2010: …this Democratic Congress is on a path to become one of the most productive since the Great Society 89th Congress in 1965-66, and Obama already has the most legislative success of any modern president — and that includes Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson. The deep dysfunction of our politics may have produced public disdain, but it has also delivered record accomplishment. The productivity began with the stimulus package , which was far more than an injection of $787 billion in government spending to jump-start the ailing economy. More than one-third of it — $288 billion — came in the form of tax cuts, making it one of the largest tax cuts in history, with sizable credits for energy conservation and renewable-energy production as well as home-buying and college tuition. The stimulus also promised $19 billion for the critical policy arena of health-information technology, and more than $1 billion to advance research on the effectiveness of health-care treatments. In 2010, we’ve had Wall Street regulatory reform, repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the new START treaty appears to have the votes for ratification, food safety bill was passed, student loan reform, extension of tax credits in the stimulus bill benefiting the poor and middle class for two more years, and we may yet still get a 9-11 responders bill passed in some form. These are not small accomplishments. And yet . Health care and Wall Street reform were far from the only shows in town. People will remember the 111th Congress as the best and most consequential of most of our lifetimes. And for those of us that had a front row seat? It was appalling, depressing, spirit-deadening, and completely sub-optimal. Go figure. I think it is best not to watch too closely. Perhaps so. Or, assuming the new tea party House of Representatives doesn’t de-fund everything as they’re wont to do, we might actually begin to see the benefits kick in, and begin to understand how significant it really was.
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Republican-leaning states will gain at least a half dozen House seats thanks to the 2010 census, which found the nation’s population growing more slowly than in past decades but still shifting to the South and West.
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