CBS:

In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.

The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us (One of the biggest independent news sites) Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.

Via Avedon Carol, we find that Blue Cross has told regulators one thing and stockholders another. I guess they were too busy dumping stock to get their story straight.

Look out Paula! Looks like you've got some competition. Although, I confess to being curious: which of you will be better hunting down embarrassing blog comments posted by your boss' political enemies? Shutting down bloggers focused upon issues the rest of the media ignores? Cause that's really what all this mostly unConstitutional and anti-democratic domestic spying monitoring is all about.

WaPo:

The bipartisan initiative [Hold onto your wallets! -- lambert], largely eclipsed in the health-care debate, builds on a trend that is in play among some corporations and that more workers will see in the benefits packages they bring home during this fall's open enrollment. Some employers offer lower premiums to workers who complete personal health assessments; others limit coverage for smokers.

The current legislative effort would take the trend a step further. It is backed by major employer groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. It is opposed by labor unions and organizations devoted to combating serious illnesses, such as the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association.

Critics say employers could use the rewards and penalties to drive some workers out of their health plans.

President Obama and members of Congress have said [and of course, we believe them -- lambert] they are trying to create a system in which no one can be denied coverage or charged higher premiums based on their health status. The insurance lobby has said it shares that goal. However, so-called wellness incentives could introduce a colossal loophole. In effect, they would permit insurers and employers to make coverage less affordable for people exhibiting risk factors for problems such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Or... Whatever! Pre-existing conditions are right back in the game, except now they're called "risk factors." Can anybody seriously believe that the bill won't create a whole industry devoted to finding "risk factors" and denying people care who have them? Or can plausibly be said to have had them, perhaps during rescission? Ectomorphs under the bus! Endomorphs under the bus! Black men have a higher "risk factor" for stroke? Under the bus! People who worked in chemical plants have a higher "risk factor" for cancer? Under the bus! People with blue eyes have a higher "risk factor" for uveal melanoma? Under the bus! Women have a higher "risk factor" for pregnancy? Under the bus!

It's the same old game: Collect premiums, deny care.

This from Susie's blog stuck in my mind:

Mo on 15 Oct 2009 at 6:54 am

I blame the collapse of health care reform in the 90s with the Brittney/Christina/N’Sync/etc. wave of music a few years later. Day jobs that artists generally take stopped paying for health insurance, and parents stopped supporting their twenty-somethings trying for a creative career. Probably is also a big chunk of the reason for the collapse of the indie film scene in the US.

I know we take now that lack of support for anything non-MBA for granted, and the era of grunge soon turned into another bubble. But the early 90s were different.

From the Chicago Tribune (with pictures of the chilldren who died in the fire, the house and stills from the investigation video, as well as of Willingham): As far back as 2004, Rick Perry -- who's now become the target of ABC News and maybe CNN's Anderson Cooper too -- refused to consider the possibility, despite scientific evidence, that he'd ordered an execution for an innocent man to go forward. Two days before a state panel on forensic science was to hear further information -- and start work on a report the final version of which would've come out just about in time to torpedo Goodhair's primary campaign against KBH -- the Governor replaced three members of that panel, including the chair, with political cronies. Guess what?

Burnt Orange Report is asking the question: has Texas' governor, Rick Perry, desperate to keep his job, undertaken Nixonian tactics?

Short answer: Sure looks that way. The Cameron Todd Willingham execution in 2004 has attracted attention -- but there're more examples, and the Willingham case appears now to be the one that's picked up public notice.

From today's Times:

After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge.

Well, I guess that tells us what the smart money thinks about the health care effects of the Democrat's health care insurance reform, right?

Look, I'm not saying that the banksters are planning for peasant die-back (as in Russia); what I am saying is that they're incentivizing themselves for it.

And then there are the details, like the usual rent-seeking behavior:

Dean Baker asks a good question:

The NYT had a bizarre piece in which it reported on the FBI's arrest of a former Goldman Sachs employee because he allegedly stole software from Goldman Sachs which the article says a federal prosecutor claims: "could be used to 'unfairly manipulate' stock prices."

Obama buries the public option, worries about brand image.

Via Marc Ambinder:

Damn straight.

And make no mistake, it is our reality. Our horribly painful reality. Yves shows us systemic reflexivity in action:

The only thing that the Treasury and Fed have succeeded in doing is cheerleading to get stock prices up so that banks could raise equity at not-hugely-dilutive prices. I spoke to a hedge fund manager yesterday who sees this rally as driven by technical and relative performance concerns, not supported by fundamentals. He is also not the first I have heard speculate that the media boosterism, particularly from sources not known for that sort of thing, like Bloomberg, suggests that official pressure has been applied to keep financial news upbeat. He thinks the markets, not just the bond market via Fed intervention, but even equity markets, are being used to try to goose the economy.

If it's like that now, what's it going to be like before the midterms and in 2012?

Texas' legislature hammered out some bills including one mandating a 3-foot clearance between passing cars and bicycles during their 2009 session. Just days after taking a fall from his bike that broke his collarbone, Rick Perry vetoed this bill. Burnt Orange report, like me, wondered why. At least one Texan's done more than wonder. She filed a FOIA, which revealed very few letters, emails or phone calls opposing the bill -- but one of them was written by a Kenneth Bain, who might be a TAMU classmate of Perry's and/or the father of a man currently out on bail for a double-fatality car-vs.-bike crash. The Dallas Morning News carried a photo of the SUV that killed two bicyclists last year.

Police say he hit and killed Mansfield bicyclists Meredith Hatch, 38, and 36-year-old Mike Alfaro. The pair, who were members of a cycling group, was out near Joe Pool Lake training

Gee, I wonder why? Politico (via alert reader MOBlue at TalkLeft):

After weeks of talk, the White House began circulating draft legislation Wednesday spelling out President Barack Obama's proposal that Congress surrender much of its authority over payment rates for Medicare to a new executive agency.

Bloomberg asks the obvious question:

This brings us to the strange tale of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Sergey Aleynikov.

Aleynikov, 39, is the former Goldman computer programmer who was arrested on theft charges July 3 as he stepped off a flight at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey. That was two days after Goldman told the government he had stolen its secret, rapid-fire, stock- and commodities-trading software in early June during his last week as a Goldman employee. Prosecutors say Aleynikov uploaded the program code to an unidentified Web site server in Germany.

It wasn’t just Goldman that faced imminent harm if Aleynikov were to be released, Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Facciponti told a federal magistrate judge at his July 4 bail hearing in New York. The 34-year-old prosecutor also dropped this bombshell: “The bank has raised the possibility that there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways.”

How could somebody do this? The precise answer isn’t obvious -- we’re talking about a black-box trading system here. And Facciponti didn’t elaborate. You don’t need a Goldman Sachs doomsday machine to manipulate markets, of course. A false rumor expertly planted using an ordinary telephone often will do just fine. In any event, the judge rejected Facciponti’s argument that Aleynikov posed a danger to the community, and ruled he could go free on $750,000 bail. He was released July 6.

All this leaves us to wonder: Did Goldman really tell the government its high-speed, high-volume, algorithmic-trading program can be used to manipulate markets in unfair ways, as Facciponti said? And shouldn’t Goldman’s bosses be worried this revelation may cause lots of people to start hypothesizing aloud about whether Goldman itself might misuse this program?

Good question.

Via (Zero Hedge (Matt Taibbi (the great Avedon))) this intriguing little nugget:

Everyone who is anyone on Wall Street has at some point used the Goldman 360 portal whether for research, news, keeping a track of prime brokerage portfolio or, disturbingly, for trading, via the REDI Plus 9.0 platform (now loaded with enhanced algo trading features to make life for you, dear soon to be frontran Goldman client, so much easier). A second widely accepted Wall Street concept is that a disclaimer is the last thing that anyone reads, if ever. Yet after taking a close look at the Goldman disclaimer for the 360 portal, which is an umbrella waiver or all downstream websites, including REDI, one discovers the following gem:

Monitoring by GS: Your use of the products and services on this Web site may be monitored by GS, and that the resulant information may be used by GS for its internal business purposes or in accordance with the rules of any applicable regulatory or self-regulatory organization.

One second: by using Goldman 360 a client voluntarily allows Goldman to provide keystroke by keystroke data of everything the client does, even if that includes launching trades via REDI, to Goldman for the internal business purposes? The third thing everyone on Wall Street agrees on is that "internal business purposes" usually (and in Goldman's case, almost exclusively) means proprietary trading.
Are Goldman 360 clients (in)voluntarily signing off a release to be front ran by Goldman on any portal-based trade?

Fascinating story from the Asia Times (via Yves):

Italy’s financial police (Guardia italiana di Finanza) has seized US bonds worth US 134.5 billion from two Japanese nationals at Chiasso (40 km from Milan) on the border between Italy and Switzerland.* They include 249 US Federal Reserve bonds worth US$ 500 million each, plus ten Kennedy bonds and other US government securities worth a billion dollar each.

Italian authorities have not yet determined whether they are real or fake, but if they are real the attempt to take them into Switzerland would be the largest financial smuggling operation in history; if they are fake, the matter would be even more mind-boggling because the quality of the counterfeit work is such that the fake bonds are undistinguishable from the real ones.

Either way!

What caught the policemen’s attention were the billion dollar securities. Such a large denomination is not available in regular financial and banking markets. Only states handle such amounts of money.

The question now is who could or would counterfeit or smuggle these non-negotiable bonds.

Now the beauty part!

In order to stop money laundering [like that would ever happen in Italy!] Italian law sets a ceiling of 10,000 euros per person for importing or exporting money without declaring it. The penalty for violating the law is 40 per cent of the money seized.

If the certificates were real, for Italy it would be like hitting the jackpot. The fine alone would amount to US$ 38 billion, five times the estimated cost of rebuilding quake-devastated Abruzzi region.** It would help Italy’s eliminate its public deficit.

If the certificates are fakes the two Japanese nationals could get a very lengthy jail sentence for fraud. ...

And now the ugly part...

Some important international financial newspapers had already reported on the existence of ‘funny money’ circulating on parallel, i.e. unofficial, financial markets.

Interesting idea, indeed. I mean, US$ 134.5 billion isn't chump change. That's 2.68 Madoff Units (US$ 50 billion), and, as always, the question is how many more Madoffs are out there? And if there's a lot of money out there that's even more fake than toxic derivatives, and some of the Madoffs are sovreign states... Well, it doesn't bear thinking about.

And an excellent media critique:

What a great tribute to Dr. Tiller - way to time an announcement, Obama! ABORTION FOE TO LEAD HHS FAITH-BASED OFFICE.

Under George W. Bush, the faith-based centers didn't play a policy role. But Obama has expanded the faith-based project to include a policy side, and one of its chief goals is to reduce the need for abortion...While the administration favors reducing the need for abortion by reducing unintended pregnancies, Kelley has made clear that she seeks instead to reduce access to abortion.

A giant step backward for women - quite a change, and again, not the one we were expecting.

I'm not usually this pessimistic about life in Texas, but we're subject to the whims of a once-every-two-years House and Senate at the State level. Like any State, we're also at the mercy of the monied interests.

“This is like a shell game, moving hazardous toxic PCBs from one sensitive location to another,” said Dr. Neil Carman, a chemist with Sierra Club’s Lone Star chapter. “We are concerned about contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer and other aquifers in this dry region of Texas that needs to protect and conserve water for drinking and agricultural uses.”

There would have been a problem if the stress tests had been done before the quarter ended, but now that the quarter has actually ended, come to find out the banks were in "better shape" than anyone thought. How con-v-e-n-i-e-n-t! Though they'll still need more of our money. Of course.

And two hundred (count 'em, 200) examiners -- why, I'm sure that's enough to detect any amount of accounting control fraud! Not.

Awesome catch at LOLFed:

"The latest in the mainstreaming of financial fail: Topps is including a “World’s Biggest Hoaxes, Hoodwinks and Bamboozles” series in its 2009 Allen & Ginter’s cards: (link)

Continued.

"Word has it Madoff has been demoted to a common, and will be tucked into

just wow.

Circuit court judge, county clerk, and election officials among eight indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, 2006

FURTHER UPDATE: Having now reviewed the indictment, as linked above, here are some additional details on the alleged conspiracy which included election fraud though the buying and selling of votes to be cast in a certain way, with the aid of one of the defendants who served as a poll worker during the Early Voting period. Also, at the polling place on Election Day with aid of poll workers, drafted as both Democratic and Republican judges, to elect a slate of candidates --- some of them bribed --- the conspirators would manipulate the votes of "qualified voters" at the voting machines themselves.

The new President has come out with a proposal to reduce the VA budget that I find utterly appalling. He's going to bill veterans' non-VA insurance to pay for the vets' combat injuries. To my mind this is a betrayal of the veterans and a refusal to honor the government's contract with service members that's on par with anything the reprehensible Bush 43 proposed. Call your Congress members and denounce this!!

Charter schools and the attack on public education

According to U.S. Census data, well over $800 billion is spent on education, public and private, at all levels in the United States each year.20 This makes it roughly the same size as the U.S. trade deficit with China. The private sector wants to get its hands on this money. Along with politicians, it is determined to break the power of the teachers’ unions and to attack one of the last bastions of decently paid American workers. The budget problems resulting from the current recession will provide them cover in doing this.