Under the heading of lies and the lying liars who help spread them, a number of right-wing freaks and villains are spreading a series of vile lies about Harold Koh, Yale Law School Dean and yet-to-be-confirmed Obama appointee.
Koh is a highly respected and utterly mainstream figure who the right-wing echo chamber is now accusing of wanting to apply Sharia law in US courts. It’s really ugly stuff and deserves some strong push back. Dahlia has the details.
And as long as we’re on the subject, isn’t it weird how Republicans can’t be out of power for more than a couple months without lacing their political oppositions with hints and vocabulary of armed violence and revolution? I thought so too.
Do you remember this ad?
It’s been knocking around my head for years as a symbol of an era in our recent history. And I just found it on Youtube. It’s an ad for Enron — entitled “Metalman” — that ran not long before the company’s implosion — probably some time in 2000. As you’ll see, it’s a man encased in a confining suit of metal, hobbling his way across tableaus of 90s go-go capitalism, mostly set in Asia. As pure ad making, it’s good stuff. But I always remembered it because it so boldly and expressively captured the ethos of that moment — old, slow, regulation, limits giving way to new, unbounded, deregulated, liberated. ‘Metalman’ is the old sclerotic, regulated past falling behind in the deregulated, faster, freer, richer, better world.
Knowing, as we soon would, that Enron was a colossal scam adds some zing to the morality tale. But this sort of deregulatory chic wasn’t confined to Enron. And it played a sizable role in bringing us where we are today. To understand just where that is and where we may be heading, we need think back and remember that different world …
Perfect: One of the big right-wing opponents to Obama’s health care reform plan is a health care executive with ties to a massive health care fraud scandal in the ’90s. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
“It sometimes seems we have more convictions than conviction.”
Rob Wasinger, candidate for Congress from Kansas.
From Chris Whalen, writing at Barry Ritholtz’s Big Picture blog …
The key point is that neither the public, the Fed nor the Treasury seem to understand is that the CDS contracts written by AIG with these various non-insurers around the world were shams – with no correlation between “fees” paid and the risk assumed. These were not valid contracts as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Economic policy guru Larry Summers claim, but rather acts of criminal fraud meant to manipulate the capital positions and earnings of financial companies around the world.
Indeed, our sources as well as press reports suggest that the CDS contracts written by AIG may have included side letters, often in the form of emails rather than formal letters, that essentially violated the ISDA agreements and show that the true, economic reality of these contracts was fraud plain and simple. Unfortunately, by not moving to seize AIG immediately last year when the scandal broke, the Fed and Treasury may have given the AIG managers time to destroy much of the evidence of criminal wrongdoing.
Before the current AIG meltdown there was the original AIG scandal involving its longtime CEO and chairman Hank Greenberg, who was revered
as a titan of the financial services world before (and to a large degree even after) his ignominious end at the helm. He’s testifying about the AIG mess today on Capital Hill — and you can be sure he’ll be trying to put a lot of distance between himself and AIG Financial Products, even though it originated on his watch and he enjoyed the spoils of its high profitability for years before he stepped down. We’re covering his testimony this morning over at TPMmuckraker.