Tag: ek Politics

Germany Expels Top U.S. Intelligence Officer

By ALISON SMALE and MELISSA EDDY, The New York Times

JULY 10, 2014

“The representative of the U.S. intelligence services at the United States Embassy has been asked to leave Germany,” a government spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement.

“The request occurred against the backdrop of the ongoing investigation by federal prosecutors as well as the questions that were posed months ago about the activities of U.S. intelligence agencies in Germany,” he said. “The government takes the matter very seriously.”

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German officials have been frustrated in their efforts to receive clarification from Washington over allegations of spying that began last year when it was revealed that the National Security Agency had been monitoring the chancellor’s cellphone. Although President Obama has offered assurances that it will no longer happen, revelations last week that a member of the German secret services had been spying for the United States sparked a fresh round of outrage.

On Wednesday, the police searched the Berlin office and apartment of a man suspected of being a spy, federal prosecutors said. They declined to give further information, but the German news media reported that the suspect worked for the Defense Ministry. A ministry spokesman confirmed that it was involved in an investigation.

Oh, that’s right.  In case you missed it the was a second spy, this one in the Defense Department.

Second German government worker suspected of spying for US

Philip Oltermann, The Guardian

Wednesday 9 July 2014 13.20 EDT

Public prosecutors confirmed that the home and office of a defence ministry employee in the greater Berlin area had been searched on Wednesday morning.

They told the Guardian that a search had been conducted “under suspicion of secret agent activity” and that evidence – including computers and several data storage devices – had been seized for analysis. The federal prosecutor’s office confirmed that no arrest had yet been made.

According to Die Welt newspaper, the staffer being investigated is a soldier who had caught the attention of the German military counter-intelligence service after establishing regular contact with people thought to be working for a US secret agency.

The news came just days after a member of the German intelligence agency BND confessed to having passed more than 200 confidential files to a contact at the CIA.

The new case is not thought to be directly related to that of the BND staffer. However, one government insider familiar with the case told Süddeutsche Zeitung that the new case being investigated was “more serious” than that of the BND spy, in which the sold documents are thought to have been of limited value.

So we have the NSA tapping Andrea Merkel’s phone.  A spy at the German intelligence agency.  Another spy in the Defense Department and John Brennan, Director of National Intellegence for the United States and proven liar under oath to Congress calling to try and patch things up.

US officials have been trying to limit the diplomatic fallout, with the CIA’s head, John Brennan, reportedly calling Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, in the wake of the latest spying scandal.

Why John Brennan you ask?  Well because the CIA and the NSA don’t deign to tell Barack Obama about their spying on friendly allied governments.

Spying Case Left Obama in Dark, U.S. Officials Say

By MARK MAZZETTI and MARK LANDLER, The New York Times

JULY 8, 2014

What Mr. Obama did not know was that a day earlier, a young German intelligence operative had been arrested and had admitted that he had been passing secrets to the Central Intelligence Agency.

While Ms. Merkel chose not to raise the issue during the call, the fact that the president was kept in the dark about the blown spying operation at a particularly delicate moment in American relations with Germany has led frustrated White House officials to question who in the C.I.A.’s chain of command was aware of the case – and why that information did not make it to the Oval Office before the call.

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What is particularly baffling to these officials is that the C.I.A. did not inform the White House that its agent – a 31-year-old employee of Germany’s federal intelligence service, the BND – had been compromised, given his arrest the day before the two leaders spoke. According to German news media reports, the agency may have been aware three weeks before the arrest that the German authorities were monitoring the man.

A central question, one American official said, is how high the information about the agent went in the C.I.A.’s command – whether it was bottled up at the level of the station chief in Berlin or transmitted to senior officials, including the director, John O. Brennan, who is responsible for briefing the White House.

Yeah, right.  The BND spy was arrested and in custody and identified as a  CIA spy a full day before the phone call to Merkel.

And Brennan didn’t know?  And Barack Obama didn’t know?

There’s a lovely little bridge in their home town I’d like to sell these propagandists.

Transcript

Transcript

THE POLITICS AND ECONOMICS OF INEQUALITY: A LECTURE TO THE TOP ONE-TENTH OF 1 PERCENT

Robert Reich

Thursday, July 3, 2014

The irony of talking about inequality with an audience composed almost entirely of the richest one-tenth of 1 percent of Americans was not lost on me. When I suggested that we return to the 70 percent income-tax rate on top incomes that prevailed before 1981, many looked as if I had punched them in the gut.

But I stressed it’s not a zero-sum game, and they’d do better with a smaller share of a rapidly-growing economy – growing because the vast middle class and the poor had the purchasing power to get the economy back on track – than they’re doing with a large share of an economy that’s barely growing at all.

It’s crucial that America’s most powerful and privileged understand what’s happening, and why they must support fundamental reform.

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

by Frederick Douglass

July 5, 1852

The fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable- and the difficulties to he overcome in getting from the latter to the former are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together; and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence I will proceed to lay them before you.

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God speed the year of jubilee

The wide world o’er!

When from their galling chains set free,

Th’ oppress’d shall vilely bend the knee,

And wear the yoke of tyranny

Like brutes no more.

That year will come, and freedom’s reign.

To man his plundered rights again

Restore.

God speed the day when human blood

Shall cease to flow!

In every clime be understood,

The claims of human brotherhood,

And each return for evil, good,

Not blow for blow;

That day will come all feuds to end,

And change into a faithful friend

Each foe.

(h/t Black Agenda Report)

Full text below.

Obama Consults a “Wide Variety of Economists” – Just Not Those Who Got it Right

William Black, New Economic Perspectives

July 3, 2014

Obama is already well into the lame duck phase of his presidency, so this is simply a PR exercise.  The message Obama wants to send is the same one he has sounded throughout his presidency.  He is open to economic views from the parts of the political spectrum that range from the hard right to the mild left.

Obama is not open to hearing the economic views of anyone who got the crisis correct or anyone his advisors consider to the left of Paul Krugman (who is mildly left in economic terms).  James Galbraith (.pdf) captured the first point brilliantly in an essay about a Krugman column.  Krugman was making the correct point that conservative economists had gotten the crisis wrong and, in passing, mentioned less than a handful of economists he considered to have gotten it right.  Galbraith stressed Krugman’s lack of interest in what economists got the crisis right and Krugman’s failure to list the economists who had actually gotten it right and had theoretical explanations for the causes of the crisis that had proved accurate in multiple crises.

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Obama’s current set of luncheon meetings with economists includes economists that range from the hard right to Krugman on the “responsible” left.  The article portrays this as “tapping a broad array of ideological views.”  It fails to “tap,” however, anyone who actually got the crisis correct and anyone remotely as far left as the economists Obama chose to speak with on the hard right.  Economists such as James Galbraith were once on the fringes of Obama’s economic team (pre-inauguration).  Galbraith is a bit to the left of Krugman, but he is nowhere near as far from the center as are several of the hard right economists Obama chose to talk with about economic policy.  The same is true of Dean Baker, Randy Wray, and Stephanie Kelton.  Our friends at U. Mass. – Amherst are about as far to the left as folks like Kevin Hassett are to the right.  The real difference, the thing sure to exclude Galbraith, Baker, Wray, and Kelton from Obama’s luncheon list, is that they have committed the unforgivable sin of having been proved correct (again) about big finance and the crisis.  There is, of course, no chance that Obama will ever invite any of us, much less our friends at Amherst, to lunch to discuss economic policy.

To be fair, what the Red Cross will tell you is that if they have excess donations for a particular crisis they feel free, morally justified even, taking those funds and re-purposing them to fill needs just as urgent but less popular.

Now you may agree or disagree with that position on it’s own merits but what those of us who have been in the charity game know is that they spend lavishly on their own pet priorities and compensation and perks for their professional staff and board memembers.

And if you don’t believe me why are they acting like scam artists?

Red Cross: How we spent Sandy money is a “trade secret”

Justin Elliott (ProPublica), Salon

Saturday, Jun 28, 2014 08:00 AM EST

Just how badly does the American Red Cross want to keep secret how it raised and spent over $300 million after Hurricane Sandy?

The charity has hired a fancy law firm to fight a public request we filed with New York state, arguing that information about its Sandy activities is a “trade secret.”

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The documents include “internal and proprietary methodology and procedures for fundraising, confidential information about its internal operations, and confidential financial information,” wrote Gabrielle Levin of Gibson Dunn in a letter to the attorney general’s office.

If those details were disclosed, “the American Red Cross would suffer competitive harm because its competitors would be able to mimic the American Red Cross’s business model for an increased competitive advantage,”  Levin wrote.

The letter doesn’t specify who the Red Cross’ “competitors” are.

Why Is the American Red Cross Acting Like Big Business and Not a Charity?

By: BrandonJ, Firedog Lake

Friday June 27, 2014 10:41 pm

The Red Cross is also under investigation by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who said last year 42 percent of donations, at the time, raised by 89 different charities-the Red Cross among them-did not go victims of Hurricane Sandy. Schneiderman, along with others, was able to apply pressure to the Red Cross to donate an additional $6 million to the victims.

As mentioned in the article by Elliot, the use of “trade secrets” by the Red Cross is a peculiar argument by the foundation since charities ordinarily would not be expected to use the exemption. Indeed, the Red Cross is so protective of its structure that it hired Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the law firm New Jersey Governor Chris Christie hired to investigate the”Bridgegate” scandal, ultimately exonerating most of Christie’s staff after the questionable investigation.

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The use of their “business model” is alarming considering this model failed after Hurricane Sandy hit the Mid-Atlantic region. Journalist Sam Knight covered its failures during Hurricane Sandy relief in a recent article highlighting the power Occupy Sandy held during the crisis. In one example, Knight revealed how the Red Cross failed to help move a 90-year-old woman to a warm place, yet it provided a hotel in Manhattan for its volunteers, costing $181,000.

Knight continued on the problems the Red Cross had when distributing aid to the residents affected by the hurricane.

“Just outside the church, another scene of clumsily administered relief was on display. At the nearest intersection, a Red Cross van announced, via megaphone, ‘hot soup!’ to no one in particular. Two blocks in either direction, locals were ladling warm meals to anyone seeking a hearty eat. The truck left not long after arriving. It fed no one,” Knight wrote.

It is difficult to believe any other charity would emulate the “business model” of the American Red Cross in future disasters considering its most recent failure. In fact, they would follow what Occupy Sandy did, as journalist Allison Kilkenny mentioned when reporting on their efforts.

What about Schneiderman’s investigation?

Well, what about it?

New York’s Schneiderman Accepts Red Cross’ “Trade Secrets” Excuse to Hide Sandy Spending

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Posted on July 1, 2014

It’s not clear what to make of an attorney general who opens an investigation and then accepts lame excuses for maintaining secrecy from its target, in this case, the American Red Cross. We’re flagging this example because it exemplifies an effort by organizations to use “trade secrets” as a pretext for hiding more and more of their dealings with governments. This is absurd, since the premise of Federal and state Freedom of Information Act laws is that government records should be open to the public, and that includes records of entities doing business with government agencies. In other words, if you want to have government bodies as your customers, one of the costs of doing business is having your formal interactions with them subject to public review.

The Red Cross has come under repeated criticism for poor performance at its core mission, disaster relief. The charity has an unusual quasi-public role by virtue of obtaining a Congressional charter in 1905 develop a system of emergency relief and disaster prevention. Thus, the Red Cross, as a charity, has long been a monopoly provider of national first/early responder services. No other charity has a similar stature or scope. While the Red Cross also receives a limited amount of funding from FEMA, the far more important aspect of its relationship with government is the considerable prestige and competitive advantage it has gained through its charter, which it had obtained through able performance under its founder Clara Barton in providing assistance in major calamities in the 19th century, such as the Great Fire of 1881 and the Jonestown Flood of 1889. The Red Cross also has a formal role in conjunction with FEMA in providing “mass care, emergency assistance, temporary housing” and other services.

Proof of the Red Cross’ de facto monopoly position comes through the fact that there is no organization to take over its role as its performance has faltered. The Red Cross was criticized for slow responses and waste of funds in 9/11 and Katrina. Congress forced governance changes on the Red Cross in 2007, but that was insufficient to lead to better results in Hurricane Sandy. As New York City readers may know, Occupy Sandy ran rings around the Red Cross in the hardest-hit areas here, particularly Staten Island.

That of course raised the obvious question: the Red Cross had solicited aggressively for funds during and shortly after the hurricane. Where did the $300+ million go? Why weren’t the relief services delivered well?

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But the troubling part is that Schneiderman, who has proven repeatedly to be an overly cautious prosecutor, took any of the Red Cross’ claims seriously. “Trade secret” status is based on the ability for competitor to do economic damage with the information. The only information in general that a charity possesses of this nature is related to donor giving: who the big donors are, what their giving patterns have been, and what sort of success they’ve had with various types of fundraising campaigns. Particularly for an organization as large and presumably as sophisticated as the Red Cross, that sort of know-how might be valuable, if it really were unique, as opposed to well-known and widely used solicitation and donor-grooming methods.

But with the Red Cross, you have to look at its monopoly provider status. Who can compete with them? The idea that some other organization is hot on its heels and eager to copy its methods is barmy. The closest direct competitor is Médecins Sans Frontières, which is not a player in US disasters, and local charities, which lack the clout and reach. So any claims regarding possible competitive harm should be regarded with extreme skepticism.

Yet Schneiderman took way too much of the Red Cross’ demand for special treatment at face value, and agreed to shield material related to “business strategies, internal operational procedures and decisions, and the internal deliberations and decision-making processes that affect fundraising and the allocation of donations.” I guarantee that like the private equity descriptions of their business strategies in limited partnership agreements that were released to the public, that there’s no special sauce in that, nor in anything else save possibly fundraising. The experts ProPublica quoted in its article also though the Red Cross claims were indefensible.

The good news is that fighting disclosure seems to have backfired on the Red Cross. As Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg wrote.

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As poor as the Red Cross’ conduct is, it should also be shame on Schneiderman for enabling this unjustifiable position. His knuckling under to the Red Cross extends the bad precedent of having private equity contracts with government investors exempted from public scrutiny. Contract bids and terms are also competitively valuable, yet heretofore, no one would have thought it acceptable to keep them from the media and interested citizens. But public officials like Schneiderman are all too willing to accede to private sector secrecy demands, no matter how ludicrous, which will make it easier for these organizations to hide incompetence and looting.

Now don’t get me wrong.  They do a great job at collecting blood and Water Safety instruction, but looting is not too strong a word.

Crossposted from DocuDharma

Obama’s Latest Betrayal of America and Americans in Favor of the Big Banks: TISA

By William K. Black, New Economic Perspectives

Posted on June 24, 2014

The three “de’s” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – has been critical to the three modern U.S. financial crises. The combination is intensely criminogenic and produces the fraud epidemics that drive our crises. The second, and vastly more destructive, phase of the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle is a classic example. The criminogenic environment was the product of each of the three “de’s” and modern executive and professional compensation.

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TISA is designed to replicate, indeed, optimize the criminogenic environment that made fraudulent financial CEOs wealthy by “looting” “their” banks. The (effective) “regulators in the field” figured this out by 1983 – over 30 years ago. We wrote up our findings in great detail. Top economists and top white-collar criminologists studying those findings a decade later (1993) agreed with the findings. Since the original findings in 1983, we have the (prevented) “liar’s” loans crisis of 1991 when federal S&L regulators based in California drove what were then a brand new product called “low doc” loans out of the regulated industry. That “second front” – while the S&L regulators were containing the S&L debacle – was dealt with so effectively that there was no resultant financial crisis. Indeed, it is only with the benefit of the current crisis that we can understand that the containment of the overall S&L debacle (driven primarily by fraudulent commercial real estate loans and investments) and the incipient crisis is liar’s loans prevented a crisis that would have become similar in scope to the current crisis. The S&L debacle was contained before it caused even a minor national recession.

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The TISA draft (Article X.16) is very clear about the second great paradox: bankers must be told everything that regulators are thinking about adopting and have ample opportunity to influence the regulators’ drafting of the rule. But TISA is an international secret that will remain an international secret for five years after it is adopted. Like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the drafts are kept secret even from Congress. Indeed, TISA is “classified” so that those who might blow the whistle on the travesty may be prosecuted.

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TISA’s drafting consists of a meeting of banking thieves who are successfully demanding a return to what Gramlich correctly described as “no cops on the beat.” If the street robbers of the world demanded that we remove the cops on the beat we would be enraged. Bankers and their neoclassical economist allies, however, regularly lobby for just such a boon to elite white-collar criminals. We have millennia of experience with what happens when we give the elites the power to loot with impunity.

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TISA is awful for honest bankers. Effective financial regulators are the essential “cops on the beat.” Only we have shown the ability to break the “Gresham’s” dynamic (bad ethics drives good ethics out of the markets and professions) that fraudulent CEOs create. When we break that dynamic we make it possible for honest bankers to prevail. TISA is good for only one group – dishonest bank executives.

That brings us back to the reason the bank CEOs have demanded that TISA be “classified” and kept from the public and even Congress. Indeed, the plan is to classify its provisions for five years after TISA is adopted. That delay is meant to make it politically possible for TISA to be adopted and then continue to protect heads of state from being thrown out of office by their enraged constituents.

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Ask yourself this question: why would the bankers and heads of state have demanded, and received, “classified” treatment of a document that did not have any confidential information (there are no state secrets, no privacy issues, and nothing of proprietary value in the leaked TISA draft) and made no meaningful restriction on regulation and supervision due to the “nowithstanding” clause of Article 17? The demand for classified treatment makes it inescapable that the bankers and government officials involved in drafting TISA are trying to hide something they believe would outrage the public. The paradox is that the bankers’ and politicians’ rabid fear of disclosure to the public and Congress of TISA’s assault on regulation confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that subparagraph 2 of Article 17 and Article 20 combine to make TISA a grave threat to the global economy, workers, and honest bankers by making the financial world even more criminogenic.

A contrarian view of British involvement in the Great War.

Fixed Soccer Matches Cast Shadow Over World Cup

By DECLAN HILL and JERÉ LONGMAN, The New York Times

MAY 31, 2014

A soccer referee named Ibrahim Chaibou walked into a bank in a small South African city carrying a bag filled with as much as $100,000 in $100 bills, according to another referee traveling with him. The deposit was so large that a bank employee gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Nelson Mandela

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The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.

Although corruption has vexed soccer for years, the South Africa case gives an unusually detailed look at the ease with which professional gamblers can fix matches, as well as the governing body’s severe problems in policing itself and its member federations. The report, at 44 pages, includes an account of Mr. Chaibou’s trip to the bank, as well as many other scenes describing how matches were apparently rigged.

After one match, the syndicate even made a death threat against the official who tried to stop the fix, investigators found.

“Were the listed matches fixed?” the report said. “On the balance of probabilities, yes!”

Inside the Fixing: How a Gang Battered Soccer’s Frail Integrity

By DECLAN HILL, The New York Times

JUNE 1, 2014

The detectives soon discovered that Wilson Raj Perumal, a match fixer from Singapore, was toiling away in Rovaniemi, working with several players, unbeknown to the coach. Mr. Perumal was considered a risk by his associates in a Singaporean match-rigging syndicate, so the group had sent a representative to Finland to tip off the police, Mr. Granat said.

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The match-fixing syndicate Mr. Perumal worked for very effectively exploited soccer’s vulnerabilities. According to European police investigators, the syndicate has manipulated hundreds of professional soccer matches around the world by identifying players and referees ripe for bribery – particularly in countries that pay low wages.

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Mr. Perumal learned his trade in an informal school for match fixers in Singapore, along with Tan Seet Eng, a Singaporean man known widely as Dan Tan. In the early 1990s, they would gather in the stadiums where illegal bookmakers would take bets on the Malaysian-Singaporean soccer league.

The fixers were so successful that a Malaysian Cabinet minister estimated that they succeeded in fixing more than 70 percent of the league’s matches. The corruption was so bad that the Malaysian-Singaporean league collapsed.

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Uncle Frankie taught Mr. Tan and Mr. Perumal the dirty secret of international soccer: Many teams and their personnel are poor, so they often have players, coaches and referees open to bribes.

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With its talented players with little money, Ghana is one of the countries that fixers frequently target at international tournaments, Mr. Nyantakyi said. So he was not surprised when, in 2007, it was discovered that there had been an attempt to fix an international match involving Ghana’s celebrated goalkeeping coach, Abukari Damba, who was working with the Singaporean fixers.

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In February 2013, Europol, the European Union’s police intelligence agency, said the results of 680 matches worldwide from 2008 to 2011, including World Cup qualifying matches and European Champions League matches, were considered suspicious. Mr. Tan’s group did most of this work, investigators said.

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The European investigators determined that Mr. Tan’s syndicate also managed to fix matches played in the United States. In 2010, it persuaded a majority of El Salvador’s national team to throw a game against D.C. United of Major League Soccer as well as an international match against the United States in Miami. Many of the Salvadoran players were subsequently barred for life.