Bad Deeds for 2-24-2011 – Volume #2

Yes, there are so many Bad Deeds that it took two installments today.

 

Law Firm for U. S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America Planned Dirty-Tricks Campaign Against Journalists and Unions – Two weeks ago, 71,000 emails created by investigators working for Hunton & Williams were leaked by the hacktivist network Anonymous. They showed that the lawyers, on behalf of their clients, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, solicited and conspired with the investigators to engage in a long list of criminal conduct and intentional torts against reporters, NGOs and unions. Dozens of these leaked emails and documents show that the lawyers and investigators actively conspired to engage in “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation,” through the use of “false documents,” “fake personas,” “false information,” and “attacks” to “discredit” NGOs, unions and reporters, including us. The complaint, by cross referencing these emails with criminal statutes listed by the Department of Justice in its manual on “Prosecuting Computer Crimes,” demonstrates that the lawyers “solicited, conspired with and counseled three of its investigative private security firms to engage in domestic spying, fraud, forgery, extortion, cyber stalking, defamation, harassment, destruction of property, spear phishing, destruction of property, identity theft, computer scraping, cyber attacks, interference with business, civil rights violations, harassment, and theft.”

 

U.S. Army General Ordered Psychological Operations Against U S. Senators – The U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in “psychological operations” to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war – and when an officer tried to stop the operation, he was railroaded by military investigators. The orders came from the command of Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops – the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the war. Over a four-month period last year, a military cell devoted to what is known as “information operations” at Camp Eggers in Kabul was repeatedly pressured to target visiting senators and other VIPs who met with Caldwell. When the unit resisted the order, arguing that it violated U.S. laws prohibiting the use of propaganda against American citizens, it was subjected to a campaign of retaliation.

“My job in psy-ops is to play with people’s heads, to get the enemy to behave the way we want them to behave,” says Lt. Colonel Michael Holmes, the leader of the IO unit, who received an official reprimand after bucking orders. “I’m prohibited from doing that to our own people. When you ask me to try to use these skills on senators and congressman, you’re crossing a line.”

 

Republican Governor of NJ Attempting to Bully One of Two Remaining Top African-American Officials from Office According to Public Defender – Accusations from Yvonne Smith Segars, the head of New Jersey’s Office of the Public Defender, state that Chris Christie, New Jersey’s tough Republican Governor.”violated New Jersey law as well as the State and Federal Constitutions,” in his efforts to remove her from her post, and by interfering with the operation of her office. In the letter, She says he’s actively undermining the work of the state’s public defenders by “obstructing…management decisions and by impeding the filling of constitutionally mandated positions.”

Segars accused Christie of “bullying tactics” in an effort to remove her from office. The tactics, according to NJ’s chief Public Defender, included “veiled threats”, “pressure to resign”, “interference with [the] agency’s operations” by thwarting approved promotions, and ordering her press officer to report to the Governor, instead of to her.

 

The Only Financial-Crisis Criminal That Went to Jail Was the One Who Conned Rich People – The financial-crisis saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world’s wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What’s more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even “one dollar” just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick “The Gorilla” Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars.

 

Republicans Don’t Want Protection for You From Predatory Financial Firms – The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an independent agency charged with regulating credit cards, mortgages and other financial products like payday loans. But Republican lawmakers want to take a bite out of the consumer bureau and bring it under their control. So far this month, they’ve launched several efforts aimed at the agency. “Politicizing the funding of bank supervision would be a dangerous precedent,” Elizabeth Warren said in a speech to the Consumer’s Union last week. “It would deprive the CFPB of the predictable funding it will need to examine large and powerful banks consistently and to provide a level playing field with their nonbank competitors.” Warren, a consumer advocate and Harvard University professor working as an adviser to both the White House and Treasury, has had more than 50 one-on-one meetings with lawmakers about the consumer bureau.

 

Fox Business News’ Eric Bolling Gets His Numbers Wrong About Wisconsin Teacher’s Compensation and Makes an Invalid Comparison – In an interview on Feb. 21. 2011, Fox Business News anchor Eric Bolling made a comparison between compensation for Wisconsin teachers and private sector workers. First off, he overstated the teacher’s compensation and understated the private workers compensation. But many statisticians have a more fundamental issue with Bolling’s comparison. In order to be a teacher in Wisconsin, you’ve got to have a 4-year college degree. And 52 percent of Wisconsin teachers also have a master’s degree. That’s much, much higher than the average education level for workers in the private sector. People with higher degrees in education typically get paid more.

A report titled “Out of Balance” by two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors for the National Institute of Retirement Security, found that when “comparable earning determinants,” such as education, are considered, state employees typically earn salaries 11 percent lower than their private sector counterparts. When you consider total compensation — salary plus benefits — the deficit dropped to 6.8 percent (because public employees generally get better benefits packages than those in the private sector).

Another report, by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, found that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8 percent less in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers., The study’s author, Jeff Keefe, issued a policy memo on Feb. 15, 2011, titled “Wisconsin public versus private employee costs: Why compare apples to oranges?”

“Inaccurate comparisons of national and Wisconsin public employee compensation with private sector compensation are circulating in Wisconsin,” Keefe wrote. “These faulty comparisons, showing that public employees in Wisconsin are dramatically overpaid, seem to support legislative efforts to increase benefit contributions by public employees.”

“But when we compare apples to apples, we find that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation than comparable private sector workers,” Keefe wrote. “The comparisons—controlling for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability—demonstrate that full-time state and local public employees earn lower wages and receive less in total compensation (including all benefits) than comparable private sector employees.

 

Republicans at CPAC Stray From the Truth – Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference strayed from the facts. Several potential presidential candidates, congressional leaders and high-profile conservatives spoke at the annual conservative gathering in Washington. Among them:

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky wrongly claimed that Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, during her confirmation hearings, agreed that “the government through the commerce clause could regulate that you eat three vegetables a day.”

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, was wrong by more than 3 million people when he claimed that there are more unemployed Americans than employed Canadians. He also said President Obama “stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history,” but the fact is more jobs were lost in Bush’s last year than under Obama.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was wrong when he said Brazil is “totally energy independent,” and he also vastly overstated the U.S. natural gas supply.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour claimed that Obama “tried to impose the biggest tax increase in American history on small-business owners by letting the Bush tax cuts expire.” But Obama proposed letting cuts expire only for upper-income individuals, most of whom are not small-business owners.

Regards,

Jim