Thursday, June 28, 2012

Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare - Conservative Reaction Absurd

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ACLU of Maryland Lawsuit Uncovers Maryland State Police Spying Against Peace and Anti-Death Penalty Groups | American Civil Liberties Union


ACLU of Maryland Lawsuit Uncovers Maryland State Police Spying Against Peace and Anti-Death Penalty Groups

July 17, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                   
CONTACT: media@aclu-md.org

BALTIMORE – The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland today made public what it called "shocking" documents obtained through a Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) lawsuit, revealing that the Maryland State Police (MSP) engaged in covert surveillance of local peace and anti-death penalty groups for over a year from 2005-2006. The organization expressed alarm at the incomprehensible spying revealed in 43 pages of summaries and computer logs, none of which refer to criminal or even potentially criminal acts, other than a few isolated references to plans for completely nonviolent civil disobedience.
ACLU of Maryland Executive Director Susan Goering blasted the program as "Un-American," and said, "I fear that the documents released today, which the MSP wrongfully withheld for almost two years, may be only the tip of the proverbial iceberg."
Goering continued: "The documents show that the MSP engaged in surveillance operations against peaceful activists similar to those abandoned in the 1970s with the end of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's infamous COINTELPRO program. The ACLU will soon file additional requests under the Maryland Public Information Act to assess other activities and targets of the MSP's ‘Homeland Security and Intelligence Division' and will seek legislative reforms to ensure this kind of improper spying never happens again."
"In our America, you should be able to attend a meeting about an issue you care about without having to worry that government spies are entering your name into a database used to track alleged terrorists and drug traffickers," said David Rocah, Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Maryland. "Americans have the right to peaceably assemble with others of a like mind and speak out about what they believe in. For undercover police officers to spend hundreds of hours entering information about lawful political protest activities into a criminal database is an unconscionable waste of taxpayer dollars and does nothing to make us safer from actual terrorists or drug dealers."
The documents obtained in the MPIA lawsuit reveal that for 14 months, MSP's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division sent covert agents to infiltrate the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a peace group, the Coalition to End the Death Penalty (CEDP), and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans. The agents collectively spent at least 288 hours on their surveillance over the 14-month period.  An agent also joined the electronic listserv of the CEDP under an alias using a spoof email address. Agents from the Division monitored private organizing meetings, public forums and events held in several churches, as well as anti-death penalty rallies outside the state's SuperMax facility in Baltimore and in Lawyer's Mall in Annapolis.
Despite the fact that reports from these events consistently said that activists acted lawfully at all times, the agents continued to recommend that the spying continue. Reports of this surveillance were sent to at least seven federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including the National Security Agency, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Anne Arundel County police departments, and the state General Services police. Logs of the surveillance do not contain any reports of illegal activity, but rather consist entirely of reports on the groups' and individuals' lawful political activities.
The MSP's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division also appears to have been working to specially track the activities of at least one individual activist, Max Obuszewski, who was entered into the "Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area" (HIDTA) database.  That database, which is funded by the federal government, was intended to facilitate information sharing among federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies engaged in drug interdiction. In December 2006, Congress modified the federal law to allow HIDTA funds to be used to assist in terrorism investigations as well. The entry for Mr. Obuszewski indicates that the "Primary Crime" linked to him in the database is "Terrorism-Anti Govern[ment], and the "Secondary Crime" is "Terrorism – Anti-War Protestors" – which are outlandish and blatantly false accusations.
Mr. Obuszewski, a client of the ACLU and a well known peace activist from Baltimore, is a lifelong pacifist. He engages in principled civil disobedience and strongly believes in and promotes nonviolence.  Needless to say, there is nothing at all in any of the reports that links Mr. Obuszewski to any violent crime, much less drug trafficking or terrorism. Rather, all of his activities reported in the database concern lawful First Amendment activity, or non-violent civil disobedience, including a report about a meeting between activists and Rep. Benjamin Cardin in 2005 in which they asked him to support a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.
"As a long-time peace activist who is familiar with our government's past history of surveillance of dissidents, I surmised that groups involved in First Amendment activities would be watched and infiltrated after 9/11," said Max Obuszewski, a client of the ACLU. "With the growth of the surveillance state after 9/11, it was evident that government agencies would come looking for groups and individuals engaged in peaceful protest activity and label them terrorists. So in all honesty, I was not surprised to be informed that I was wrongfully labeled a terrorist."
In 1976, following revelations of the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program), the Federal Bureau agreed to limit its spying to situations in which criminal conduct was suspected. But after 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft rewrote the guidelines so that "for the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the FBI is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public, on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally." Yet even under those draconian rules, much of the spying apparently conducted by the MSP would have been forbidden. In addition, the Ashcroft rules cautioned that "no information obtained from such visits shall be retained unless it relates to potential criminal or terrorist activity." Clearly information has been retained by the MSP that does not relate to any unlawful acts.
Attorneys representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Kit Pierson and Richard Rinkema from the Washington, DC office of the law firm Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe LLP, donating their time pro bono, and ACLU of Maryland staff attorney David Rocah.
Go online to see the MSP documents and read further background about the case:
www.aclu-md.org/aPress/Attachments/MSP_Documents.pdf

LEGAL DOCUMENTS:
7.17.08 letter to Governor O'Malley
National ACLU Report: "No Real Threat"
Northern California Report on Government Monitoring of Political Activity
Complaint
Exhibit A: Log indicating surveillance of BERN activities
1.10.07 letter from MSP
9.7.07 letter from ACLU to MSP
12.18.07 letter from MSP
To read ACLU-MD’s original FOIA and MPIA requests:
www.aclu-md.org/aPress/Press%202006/082906_FOIA.html
For more information about government spying on ordinary Americans:
www.aclu.org/safefree/spyfiles/index.html





ACLU of Maryland Lawsuit Uncovers Maryland State Police Spying Against Peace and Anti-Death Penalty Groups | American Civil Liberties Union

Saturday, June 23, 2012

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The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News | Rolling Stone


The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia

How America's biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy - until they were caught on tape

June 21, 2012 11:20 AM ET
national affairs
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won't hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you're probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government's massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo.
But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.
In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.
USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we've seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordi­nated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – "an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," as one former regulator described it.
More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world's most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.
But USA v. Carollo marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America's gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption. In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show.
1. THE SCAM
This was no trial scene from popular lore, no Inherit the Wind or State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson. No gallery packed with rapt spectators, no ceiling fans set whirring to beat back the tension and the heat, no defense counsel's resting a sympathetic hand on the defendant's shoulder as opening statements commence. No, the setting for USA v. Carollo reflected the bizarre alternate universe that exists on Wall Street. Like so many court cases involving big banks, the proceeding looked more like a roomful of expensive lawyers negotiating a major corporate merger than a public search for justice.
The trial began on April 16th in a federal court in Lower Manhattan. The courtroom, an aerielike setting 23 stories up, offered a panoramic view of the city and the East River. Though the gallery was usually full throughout the three-plus weeks of testimony, the spectators were not average citizens come to witness how they had been robbed blind by America's biggest banks. Instead, there were row after row of suits – other lawyers eager to observe a long-awaited case, one that could influence the outcome in a handful of civil suits pending across the country. In fact, the defendants themselves, whom the trial would reveal as easily replaceable cogs in a much larger machine of corruption, were barely visible from the gallery, obscured by the great chattering congress of prosecution and defense attorneys.
Only the presence of the mostly nonwhite and elderly jury, which resembled the front pew of a Harlem church, served as a reminder that the case had any connection to the real world. Even reporters from most of the major news outlets didn't bother to attend. The judge in the trial, the right honorable and amusingly cantankerous Harold Baer, acknowledged that the case was not likely to set the public's pulse racing. "It is unlikely, I think, that this will generate a lot of media publicity," Baer sighed to the jury in his preliminary instructions.
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Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-scam-wall-street-learned-from-the-mafia-20120620#ixzz1yeOlLSre



The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia | Politics News | Rolling Stone