Matt Stoller “Obama is the ultimate cynic, a dishonest corporate ladder climbing con artist”

Mat Stoller of Naked Capitalism yanks the clothes off the emperor in chief

 ”Obama is the ultimate cynic, a dishonest, highly reactionary social and corporate ladder climbing con artist.  Obama is the guy who calls a female reporter “sweety”, who plays poker with the guys, and who thinks that his senior advisor’s decision to cash out after making a “modest” salary of $172,000 at the White House is just natural.  He’s the guy who used the rationale that he’s a father of two girls as to why he doesn’t want young women to have access to Plan B.  He was in favor of gay marriage in 1996, flip flopped for political reasons, and then pretended to change his mind as a matter of conscience.  He runs on populism with a worse record than George W. Bush on income inequality.  His narcissism, and the post-modern ironic sense of self-awareness of how his narrative is put together and tended, is his defining character trait.  It’s not just that he’s a liar.  Lyndon Johnson was a liar, but LBJ lied us into a war in Vietnam as well as a war on poverty.  FDR lied all the time, for good and ill.  Obama’s entire edifice is based on lying almost entirely to help sustain his image, with almost no interest in sound policy-making.  Obama understands the threat of climate change, but like the exceptional con artist he is, what happens to others he does not know, or what happens in the future, is irrelevant to him.  He understands banking, and war, and women’s issues, and corruption and Citizens United.  Like a great con artist, he has studied his mark, the American voter, and specifically the Democratic voter, and he undersands which buttons to push.”

Read more at NakedCapitalism.com 

Obama Admin. Urging Appeals Court to Reinstate $1.5 Million File-Sharing Verdict

The Obama administration is putting pressure on a federal appeals court to reinstate a $1.5 million verdict against a Minnesota woman for sharing two dozen songs on Kazaa.

A Minnesota federal judge lowered the verdict to $54,000, ruling that the jury’s award “for stealing 24 songs for personal use is appalling.”

The Copyright Act allows penalties of as much as $150,000 per infringement.

The decision by US District Judge Michael Davis follows the third trial in the Recording Industry Association of America’s lawsuit against Jammie Thomas-Rasset. She is the first file sharer to take an RIAA lawsuit to a jury trial.

Despite the judge’s reduction, Thomas-Rasset appealed the lowered damages verdict, (.pdf) claiming the Copyright Act was unconstitutional because of its large or “excessive” awards. The RIAA on the other hand, claims that judges do not have the power to alter jury awards dealing with copyright infringement.

The Obama administration, which is intervening because the constitutionality of the Copyright Act is at issue, agreed with the RIAA that the act was constitutional.

“The Copyright Act’s statutory damage provision is reasonably related to furthering the public interest in protecting original works of artistic, literary, and musical expression and its constitutionality must therefore be sustained under the applicable, highly deferential standards of judicial review,” the government wrote (.pdf) to the Missouri-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Davis has overturned the judgments of three separate juries in the Thomas-Rasset case dating back to 2007.

The first trial of Thomas-Rasset, of Minnesota, ended with a $222,000 judgment, but Davis declared a mistrial, on the grounds that he’d improperly instructed the jury on a point of law. After the second trial, Davis tentatively reduced the award from $1.92 million to $54,000, and ordered a new trial on damages if the parties didn’t agree to that amount or settle. That third trial ended in the $1.5 million judgement that Davis reduced again.

Judge Davis, the nation’s first judge to reduce the amount of damages in a Copyright Act case, said fairness demanded his decision to reduce the latest award to $2,250 per track.

The RIAA said in a legal filing with the appeals court that Judge Davis’ decision “is fundamentally incompatible both with Plaintiff’s constitutional right to have a jury determine what amount of statutory damages is just, and with the deference due to congressionally authorized awards.”

Most of the thousands of RIAA file sharing cases against individuals settled out of court for a few thousand dollars. The RIAA has ceased its 5-year campaign of suing individual file sharers and, with the Motion Picture Association of America, has convinced internet service providers to take punitive action against copyright scofflaws, including terminating service.

Why Won’t Mitt Romney Provide Specifics on His Tax Plan?

Could it be because he has none?

 

SCHIEFFER: When are you going to tell us where you’re going to get the revenue? Which of the deductions are you going to be willing to eliminate? When are you going to be able to tell us that?

ROMNEY: Well, we’ll go through that process with Congress as to which of all the different deductions and exemptions…My view is that the right way to do that is to limit them for high-income individuals because I want to keep the progressivity of the code. One of the absolute requirements of any tax reform that I have in mind is that people who are the high end, whether you call them the 1 percent, 2 percent, half a percent, the people at the high end will still pay the same share of the tax burden they’re paying now. I’m not looking for a tax cut for the very wealthiest.

BIS Report: Too Big To Fail Banks Take Risks Expecting Tax Payer Bail Outs

The Bank for International Settlements said in its annual report that the world economy remains out of balance, with advanced economies struggling with debt while emerging economies grow strongly but also face risks of boom and bust.

The BIS is an intergovernmental organization of central banks based in Basel, Switzerland. They say banks must be held responsible for their losses and forced to rebuild their finances because the threat from risky bank behavior is growing yet again.

“The world is now five years on from the outbreak of the financial crisis, yet the global economy is still unbalanced and seemingly becoming more so as interacting weaknesses continue to amplify each other,” the BIS said in its 82nd annual report.

“The goals of balanced growth, balanced economic policies and a safe financial system still elude us.”

The financial crisis that began in 2007 revolved around losses suffered by investment funds and banks on mortgage-backed securities in the US while the collapse of investment bank Lehman Brothers led to a global recession in 2008. Governments have put billions into rescuing banks while central banks have slashed interest rates and expanded the supply of money to bolster their economies.

This has led to high unemployment and increased levels of government debt afflicting developed economies. Meanwhile, the 17-countries that use the euro have sunk into a crisis over excessive government debt.

The aftermath, says the BIS, is that governments, banks, and consumers are all trying to cut back on debt at the same time, magnifying each other’s problem as they do so.

Stephen Cecchetti, the head of the BIS’s monetary and economic department, said central banks should not be expected to carry the entire load of supporting growth and debt reduction. “In the middle of all this we find the overburdened central banks, pushed to use what power they have to contain the damage. But there are very clear limits to what central banks can do. “

The U.S. Federal Reserve has cut interest rates to near zero and created new money through purchasing financial assets while the European Central Bank has reduced interest rates to a record low 1.0 percent and made 1 trillion in cheap loans to banks.

The report also emphasized the need for banks to be responsible for their losses, add to their financial buffers and avoid risky practices. Big banks are using high-risk debt – so-called “leveraging” – to magnify any trading gains because they can expect taxpayers to step in and cover their losses.

“Big banks continue to have an interest in driving up their leverage without enough regard for the consequences of failure: because of their systemic weight, they expect the public sector to cover the downside, ” said BIS. “Another worrying sign is that trading, after a brief crisis-induced squeeze, has again become a major source of income for large banks.”

“These conditions are moving the financial sector towards the same high risk profile it had before the crisis.”

Some of the concerns about banks reflected in the BIS report were highlighted last week by the credit ratings downgrade of 15 large banks by Moody’s Investors Service. The credit rating agency cited the banks’ “significant exposure to the volatility and risk of outsized losses inherent to capital markets activities.”

News that J.P. Morgan last month suffered a $2 billion trading loss related to a hedging strategy raised similar concerns.

The BIS said fundamental progress would be secured when the “largest institutions can fail without the taxpayer having to respond” and when the size of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy stays within tight limits.