Posts tagged: corruption
Here’s your wonky map of the day accompanied by a sort of political junky’s Rorschach test.
Modern Gerrymanders: 10 Most Contorted Congressional Districts
I think I can spot a dinosaur’s face about to eat Chicago. What do you see when you look at the maps?
Swing dancers in Pennsylvania.
Hawks just west of Baltimore.
Looks like BS to me!
Republic Report has released figures documenting the fact that the average member of Congress gets a 1,452% salary hike when she or he leaves office and becomes a corporate lobbyist. They point out that politicians are allowed to negotiate these raises while they are in office, and don’t have to disclose this fact when they’re working on legislation that will benefit their future employers. One of the poster children for this is former Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) who fought against financial reforms to the derivatives market, then joined the board of a derivatives-trading company and was given an advisory role at Goldman Sachs.
Another fantastic Colbert/Stewart SuperPAC ad about SuperPACs.
Washington Mutual’s implosion in 2008 was the biggest bank collapse in U.S. history—are the executives who ran it getting off easy? The FDIC charged three WaMu executives with gross negligence in a civil lawsuit; however, according to The Wall Street Journal, the FDIC is now willing to settle with them for less than 10 percent of the $900 million it originally sought—less than $75 million. Most of that money will be paid not by the executives themselves but by WaMu’s insurers and estates. The Journalsays it’s a “setback” for the FDIC. Still, it is one of the largest settlements since the financial crisis began.
Disappointing settlement which fails to hold accountable those responsible is one of the largest since the financial crisis began… All this in the land of “liberty and justice for all.”
Hey, look! Congressional staffers turn out to be really good at predicting the behavior of stocks that their bosses legislate. Outside Capitol Hill, we might call that “insider trading.” Except US insider trading laws don’t apply to Congress.
Angry yet?
In this week’s issue of Newsweek: Congress is getting rich off Wall Street.
Charts to go with the previous video.
Even as the Occupy protesters are being swept out of their campsites, Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes is exposing the very greed and corruption they are protesting The 60 Minutes team did a great segment tonight on insider trading on the stock market.
Congress: Trading stock on inside information?
A very informative fifteen minutes of video.
*head scratch*
Is there any hypocrisy built into our “system of justice”?
Texas scientists wrote a report detailing the state of the environment in Galveston Bay. Rick Perry-appointed officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality went through the report and systematically deleted every mention of changes to Bay ecology that could be attributed to climate change. Now the scientists are rebelling. All the authors have asked for their names to be removed from the published, censored version of the report, and they’ve shared the original paper with the press. You can see how the report was censored, page-by-page, at Mother Jones.
It surprised me a bit to see this at Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture, but it really makes sense:
To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation.
I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:
1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative processLet’s look at each of these in turn:
So, you have a 90-year-old federal agency that returns $87 for every dollar invested, recommended $50 billion in savings every year, writes over 1,000 reports to Congress every year and had 80 percent of its recommendations over the past five years instituted (at least on paper), all on a budget of half a billion dollars a year - peanuts compared to other government spending. You would think that this agency would get a big atta boy thanks and increased spending from the Congress to hire more staff and find more fraud and waste during these tight budget times.
No such luck. Both chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations committees had suggested cutting the budget of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) enough to cut into the staff that goes out and investigates how the money is spent. It seems to be an odd situation where the Congress would cut its own agency that saves them money, but the clue is who is insisting on the cuts - the appropriators of the money.
