New E-Mails Show Psychologists’ Approval of Torture

“The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror, according to a new report by a group of dissident health professionals and human rights activists….”

And, another one coming

Last November, the association’s board ordered an independent review of the organization’s role in the interrogation program. That review, led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, is now underway.

“We have been given a mandate by the A.P.A. to be completely independent in our investigation, and that is how we have been conducting our inquiry,” Mr. Hoffman said. “We continue to gather evidence and talk with witnesses and expect to complete the investigation later this spring.”

NY Times

What was that Willie Nelson song?  Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be psychologists….?

Free Markets, Not So Free –Again

Every few weeks we get another example of how the deified Free Markets of the Western World are not so free at all.  Free markets suppose that information about the goods being bought and sold is full, and that all interested parties have access to it, so that a ‘fair’ agreement can be reached between seller and buyer as to its value.

Full knowledge about the goods being sold is the first thing a budding entrepreneur seeks to hide.  The most recent way to do this is through complexification:  make a financial derivative so complex that no one can understand it, then pitch it hard enough and the buyer goes on hope and greed, never mind the knowing.

Books Flash BoysMichael Lewis, in his newest book, Flash Boys, shows us another cohort of free-market fanatics who sell the line and don’t believe in it at all:  high-speed traders.  Throw enough money and technology to sneak a peak and jump the line in trades, making pennies per share for multi-million share trades and a very nice profit happens — at the expense of those who, not knowing, pay a little “value-stolen” tax.

Lewis appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday, March 30, 2014 in a piece called “Is the U.S. Stock market rigged?

High-frequency traders, big Wall Street firms and stock exchanges have spent billions to gain an advantage of a millisecond for themselves and their customers, just to get a peek at stock market prices and orders a flash before everyone else, along with the opportunity to act on it.

Michael Lewis: The insiders are able to move faster than you. They’re able to see your order and play it against other orders in ways that you don’t understand. They’re able to front run your order.

Steve Kroft: What do you mean front run?

Michael Lewis: Means they’re able to identify your desire to, to buy shares in Microsoft and buy ’em in front of you and sell ’em back to you at a higher price. It all happens in infinitesimally small periods of time. There’s speed advantage that the faster traders have is milliseconds, some of it is fractions of milliseconds. But it”s enough for them to identify what you’re gonna do and do it before you do it at your expense.

Steve Kroft: So it drives the price up.

Michael Lewis: So it drives the price up, and in turn you pay a higher price.

Lewis also had a compressed version of the book in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, April 6, 2014  with much more of the technical details of how the skimming worked.

Katsuyama and his team did measure how much more cheaply they bought stock when they removed the ability of some other unknown trader to front-run them. For instance, they bought 10 million shares of Citigroup, then trading at roughly $4 per share, and saved $29,000 — or less than 0.1 percent of the total price. “That was the invisible tax,” Park says. It sounded small until you realized that the average daily volume in the U.S. stock market was $225 billion. The same tax rate applied to that sum came to nearly $160 million a day. “It was so insidious because you couldn’t see it,” Katsuyama says. “It happens on such a granular level that even if you tried to line it up and figure it out, you wouldn’t be able to do it. People are getting screwed because they can’t imagine a microsecond.”

Joe Nocera, at the Times, is impressed with the detective work of the small group who figured out what was happening and came up with a solution, of sorts, to keep the high-speed traders at the same speed as everyone else, though he thinks Lewis tells a story too perfectly at times.

William Alden at the Times’ “Deal Book” has a short precis of the book and alerts us to a live yelling match on CNBC between William O’Brien, the president of the BATS Global Markets exchange, who was clearly enraged and Lewis and Katsuyama.

O’Brien ought to be yelling as investigations of the practice have been begun in multiple places, one of which will certainly make changes to the legality of the peep-hole these traders have enjoyed for years.

It’s all pretty damned interesting.  Probably won’t get people to the barricades but it may be another straw in the growing bale of perception that wealth creation is more and more a rigged game, whose rules are written by the riggers and their hired politicians.

Yee Indicted in Major FBI Sweep

Update: The dollar speaks!  This is about as big, and ugly, as it gets.

Yee, a Democrat who represents half of San Francisco and most of San Mateo County, was one of 26 people ensnared in a five-year federal investigation that targeted Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, a notorious Chinatown gangster who had claimed to have gone straight, officials said.

An outspoken advocate of gun control and open government, Yee is charged with conspiring to traffic in firearms as well as six counts of scheming to defraud citizens of honest services. He has not commented on the allegations.

SF Gate (With many more links)

I am always suspicious about entrapment cases but what is surely true here is that Lee was entrapped by the need not for personal wealth, at least in the beginning, but for campaign money.  The stories about hours spent, arms twisted, promises made in order to make the daily take are enough to fill the Library of Congress — and ought to be doing so.

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Wow!  For a moderately interested observer of San Francisco politics this comes as a surprise.

State Sen. Leland Yee has been indicted for public corruption as part of a major FBI operation Wednesday morning spanning the Bay Area, law-enforcement sources said, casting yet another cloud of corruption over the Democratic establishment in the state Legislature and torpedoing Yee’s aspirations for statewide office in California.

Mercury News

Toxic Contributions Foul Democracy’s Air

The photo of Paris, below, gripped by a week-long smog could as well be of the air of Democracy in the United States.  In one more report of hidden financial corruption, but an especially damning one, Nicholas Confessore at the NY Times, shines a light through the smog in Utah.

It is the nightmare scenario for those who worry that the modern campaign finance system has opened up new frontiers of political corruption: A candidate colludes with wealthy corporate backers and promises to defend their interests if elected. The companies spend heavily to elect the candidate, but hide the money by funneling it through a nonprofit group. And the main purpose of the nonprofit appears to be getting the candidate elected.

But according to investigators, exactly such a plan is unfolding in an extraordinary case in Utah, a state with a cozy political establishment, where business holds great sway and there are no limits on campaign donations.

Public records, affidavits and a special legislative report released last week offer a strikingly candid view inside the world of political nonprofits, where big money sluices into campaigns behind a veil of secrecy. The proliferation of such groups — and what campaign watchdogs say is their widespread, illegal use to hide donations — are at the heart of new rules now being drafted by the Internal Revenue Service to rein in election spending by nonprofit “social welfare” groups, which unlike traditional political action committees do not have to disclose their donors.

Thailand Comes off Boil to Slow Simmer

BANGKOK — In what appeared to be a major retreat by the movement to overthrow the Thai government, protesters on Friday said they were abandoning their campaign to shut down Bangkok and would dismantle their blockades of major intersections set up in January.

The leader of the main protest group, Suthep Thaugsuban, told a dwindling number of supporters on Friday night that he apologized for the inconveniences of the blockades and that demonstrators would adopt a new strategy to disrupt the government from a new base in central Bangkok. A statement by the broader protest movement said intersections would be unblocked by Monday “as a token of our appreciation.”

The protesters’ retreat came after an escalation of violence in recent weeks and a rare speech by the powerful head of Thailand’s army on Monday. In the speech he distanced himself from the protest movement’s goals and emphasized the importance of adhering to the country’s Constitution.

NY Times: Fuller

HOWEVER

That order has incensed Buddha Issara who heads his own protest camp at a sprawling government complex in north Bangkok.

He vowed on Saturday to keep protesting even if other sites in the city close.

“I was angry with Suthep’s announcement. We have lost blood and lives and for what? To end it all now?,” said Buddha Issara who is in daily contact with Suthep by telephone but said he does not follow the head protest leader’s orders.

“I will still stay here until national reforms are in place. Suthep can do what he wants.”

Reuters: Sawitta Lefevre

A Buddhist monk reads newspapers inside Lumpini Park where anti-government protesters have set up their tents in Bangkok

A Buddhist monk reads newspapers inside Lumpini Park where anti-government protesters have set up their tents in Bangkok

 

Perhaps this demand by the National Anti-Corruption Commission that the PM appear before it, has something to do with the opposition scale back.  If the point is to disable to current government and attract voters away from it a new tool might do a better job than the old one of stopping daily life in the capitol.

Bangkok, Feb 27: Thailand’s anti-graft body today summoned embattled Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra over charges related to a populist rice-pledging scheme, as anti- government protesters demand her ouster amid deadly violence. The charges relate to a controversial rice subsidy scheme that paid farmers above the market price and has run out of funds, adding to Yingluck’s woes as farmers demand their money.
… The NACC says Yingluck ignored warnings that the rice scheme was fostering corruption and causing financial losses. She could face a five year ban from politics if found guilty.

Read more at:

Poisoning the Children

Not only does the Mafia shoot, strangle or dump into river those who cross them, they sow the land with worse than Roman salt in Carthage, millions and millions of tons of toxic waste, reaping dumping fees and sowing death by cancer for their own children and those of their neighbors.

It’s not that it hasn’t been known, but knowing is finally finding its feet.

A group of 13 women who claim their children died of cancer after being poisoned by tons of toxic waste dumped in their region by the local mafia met with Italy’s president Wednesday.

They traveled to Rome from their towns around Naples as representatives of some 150,000 mothers who sent Italian President Giorgio Napolitano postcards with photos of their dead or cancer-stricken children in the hope that he might put an end to the environmental crimes that have been perpetrated in their region for decades.

“We are want truth and justice,” said one of the mothers, Pina Leana, at the presidential palace Wednesday. “We want facts, not empty words.

WorldNews

mafia-dump-waste

In 1997 a hearing was held about the dumping, taking testimony from a one-time member of the Casalesi clan near Naples. It was so detailed and implicated so many in the government it has been sealed until October of 2013.

“We are talking about millions of tons,” Schiavone, formerly head of administration for the Mafia organization, told the parliamentarians. “I also know that trucks came from Germany carrying nuclear waste.” The operations took place under the protection of darkness and were guarded by Mafiosi in military police uniforms, he said. He showed Italian justice officials the location of many of the dumpsites because, as he put it in 1997, the people in those areas are at risk of “dying of cancer within 20 years.”

numerous officials at all levels must have known about Schiavone’s warnings since the mid-1990s — and ignored them.

The pressure is particularly great on the following players:

  • Giorgio Napolitano was Italy’s interior minister at the time and thus ultimately in charge of the investigation. Today, he is the country’s president.
  • Gennaro Capoluongo was, according to Schiavone, in a helicopter that went on a tour of some of the toxic waste dumps. Today, he is Italy’s Interpol head.
  • Alessandro Pansa was head of mobile units for the Italian police force at the time. Now he is head of the Italian State Police.
  • Nicola Cavaliere was with the criminal police at the time and was involved in the case, according to Schiavone. Today is the deputy head of Italy’s domestic intelligence service.

Der Spiegel

and more at the NY Times

Right Wing Castigator Faces the Law

This is really fun:

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza is set to be arraigned at noon ET on Friday in a Manhattan federal courthouse after being charged with campaign finance fraud.

D’Souza faces a maximum of seven years in prison

According to an indictment filed by Bharara, D’Souza allegedly made contributions in the other people’s names to a U.S. Senate candidate in 2012. The indictment didn’t name the candidate, but TPM has confirmed it was Republican contender Wendy Long, who lost to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

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For a bit more about his ethical problems. see this at the Daily Beast.

Money out of Politics: Amend the Constitution

A coalition is demanding that the US Constitution be amended—a reform sufficient to prevent the High Court from transforming American democracy into a dollarocracy.

“I’ll grant that it’s not easy. Amending the Constitution should not be easy,” says Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, which has been a key player in the movement. “But in just four years, we’ve brought what many deemed a pipe dream into the mainstream.”

People for the American Way president Michael Keegan agrees.

While there is no question that “the deeply misguided Citizens United ruling four years ago brought immeasurable harm to our democracy,” Keegan says, “it also inspired a re-energized national movement to get big money out of politics.”

That movement has accomplished more than all but the most optimistic reformers could have imagined on January 21, 2010.

Sixteen American states have formally demanded that Congress recognize that the Constitution must be amended in order to re-establish the basic American premise that “money is property and not speech, and [that] the Congress of the United States, state legislatures and local legislative bodies should have the authority to regulate political contributions and expenditures…”

Common Dreams

16 state demanding is a long way way from 34 states signing (2/3rds necessary) to amend the constitution.  It will take a tidal wave of popular sentiment — enough to unseat not only Tea Partiers but some of their lobbyist replacements– before any such think can happen.  But Trusts and Corporations were broken up and new legislation put in place in the early 1900s with the help of muckraking Ida Tarbell, William Allen White, Frank Norris and others.  It can be done again.

Court of Appeals Lifts the Curtain on Rogue Judge

Former U.S. District Judge Richard Cebull, of Montana, sent emails to personal and professional contacts that showed disdain for blacks, Indians, Hispanics, women, certain religious faiths, liberal political leaders, and some emails contained inappropriate jokes about sexual orientation, the Judicial Council of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found.

 Many of the emails also related to pending issues that could have come before Cebull’s court, such as immigration, gun control, civil rights, health care and environmental issues, the council found in its March 15, 2013, order.
Cebull retired at the end of last March, after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals council, showed him their findings.  Once off the bench, the record was sealed — leaving the public without knowledge of years of very very injudicious behavior.

That prompted Judge Theodore McKee, the chief judge of the 3rd U.S. Circuit, to file a petition with the national Judicial Conference’s Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability, asking the committee to review the council’s work and publish the original March 15 order.

Judge McKee argued that the 9th Circuit council’s subsequent rulings inappropriately concealed its original findings.

Good for Judge McKee and good, belatedly, for the council.  It turns out that

…hundreds of other inappropriate messages [were sent] from his federal email account, according to the findings of a judicial review panel released Friday.

SF Gate: Matt Volz/AP

Turkey: The Corruption Hounds of the Internet

“In Turkey as elsewhere in the Middle East, the explosion of Internet-based media outlets has surpassed the ability of the government to control information completely. When Nazli Ilicak, a longtime journalist here, lost her job recently at the pro-government newspaper Sabah after emerging as a strong voice against the government’s handling of the corruption inquiry, she said she would simply keep up her criticism on Twitter and on independent websites.
“I have 500,000 followers,” she said in a recent television appearance. “That’s more than Sabah’s circulation.”

http://nyti.ms/1aazgml