murder

WATCH: Faces Of Zuccotti Park: The Chef

by The Huffington Post on November 11, 2011

Huffington Post…

This story is part of a series that profiles the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. Sean Dolan, 48, has worked as a chef in a variety of restaurants over the last 30 years, most of them in Providence, R.I. While he’s done everything from line to prep to standard short-order cooking, his favorite is Italian — “tossing saute pans and cooking calamari and veal saltimbocca and chicken parmesan,” he said. But when he was fired from his most recent job in early October, instead of applying for other jobs, Dolan hopped a train to New York City and came straight to Zuccotti Park to join the protesters. He’d heard about the Occupy protest on NPR — he doesn’t read print media much anymore, except for the Providence Phoenix — and wanted to help out anyway he could. Within half an hour of arriving, he was put to work at Occupy Wall Street’s kitchen, serving free hot meals to the people who are taking a stand against corporate privilege in this small city park in lower Manhattan. “The minute I got here, it was like this door opened,” Dolan said. “All of a sudden I was a part of something bigger than myself for the first time in my life. And the passion came back.” Dolan lives with his wife, Patricia, in his hometown of Bellingham, Mass., and spends four or five days a week working in the kitchen at Zuccotti Park, then returns to Massachusetts to recharge. “I find it necessary to recuperate,” he said. “Some of the people living down here … you can see the toll it takes on them.” But Dolan is no wimp. “I plan to keep coming down here every week as long as I’m physically able,” he said. “I want to see some results. The awareness issue is through the roof right now. But I want to see a general strike. … Something that grabs the world by the nuts and says, ‘Yeah!’” Video by Adam Kaufman, editing by Hunter Stuart

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WATCH: Faces Of Zuccotti Park: The Chef

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Goldman Sachs Wins Dismissal Of Lawsuit Alleging It Misled Investors

by on July 21, 2011

Huffington Post…

NEW YORK (Jonathan Stempel) – Goldman Sachs Group Inc won the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing it of causing an investor to become insolvent by fraudulently misleading it about risky debt it expected would tumble in value. In a decision made public on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones in Manhattan said the plaintiff, Basis Yield Alpha Fund, failed to sufficiently show that its investment in the Timberwolf 2007-1 collateralized debt obligation was a “domestic” transaction, entitling it to sue in a U.S. court. She nonetheless gave the Cayman Islands-based fund 30 days to file a new complaint to recover its $56 million loss. Basis had accused Goldman of securities fraud and common law fraud. Bruce Grace, a lawyer for the plaintiff, did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Goldman spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment. Timberwolf was among the securities cited in a scathing U.S. Senate panel report in April that faulted Goldman (GS.N), Deutsche Bank AG (DBKGn.DE) and others for hawking debt they expected to perform poorly. That report said Goldman kept marketing Timberwolf even after Thomas Montag, a top executive who now runs investment banking at Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), told a colleague in an email that Timberwolf was “one shitty deal” [ID:nN14231964] — a phrase quoted in Basis’ complaint and Jones’ opinion. ABACUS Timberwolf had been marketed in the spring of 2007 as a $1 billion investment-grade product, and Basis that June bought $100 million of “triple-A” and “double-A” rated securities at 81 cents on the dollar. But Basis said it did not know there was then an “increased urgency” at Goldman to sell the securities, reflected in the “ginormous” credits it offered sales staff, because the bank feared CDOs would plunge in value. Losses quickly mounted, and Basis began liquidating just two months after its investment. Jones dismissed Basis’ lawsuit after concluding the fund did not allege that “any purchase of sale” took place in the United States, as required under a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision. This was so, she said, even though some of Goldman’s alleged fraudulent statements were made in New York. The judge is also overseeing a separate fraud lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against Goldman Vice President Fabrice Tourre over his role in the sale of a CDO tied to subprime mortgages, Abacus 2007-AC1. Goldman had been a defendant in that case, but last July agreed to pay $550 million to settle with the SEC, without admitting wrongdoing. The case is Basis Yield Alpha Fund (Master) v. Goldman Sachs Group Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 10-04537. (Editing by Gerald E. McCormick and Lisa Von Ahn) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Goldman Sachs Wins Dismissal Of Lawsuit Alleging It Misled Investors

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Hundreds Laid Off At Call Centres In Ontario And Quebec

July 15, 2011

THE CANADIAN PRESS — MONTREAL – Hundreds of workers for call-centre operator IQT Solutions in Quebec and Ontario were laid off without notice on Friday and told they would not be getting their final paycheques. Of the workers losing their jobs, 450 were employed in Laval, Que., while 140 worked in Trois-Rivieres, Que., and 600 in Oshawa, Ont. They were told without warning to gather their personal belongings and leave the premises. Labour laws generally require employers to give two weeks’ notice of a layoff and a minimum of four per cent of salary earned in the last year, generally considered vacation pay. Reeling laid-off employees described the centre closings as savage. The Trois-Rivieres centre was setting up a union before the closure. IQT Solutions provides customer service, sales and technical support services to companies in North America and Europe. It had operated three centres in Canada before Friday. The U.S. company is headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., where it announced in June it would bring 900 jobs during the next five years.

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Efforts To Lower Health Costs, Improve Care

July 15, 2011

At Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare, comparative research made physicians realize that inducing early childbirth in healthy women created unnecessary and costly risks for newborns. Artificially induced deliveries had become an accepted way to make childbirth fit busy personal schedules. The practice has health risks, but the average doctor saw only one or two cases a year wind up in a neonatal intensive care unit. “It was such a low number,” said Greg Poulsen, a senior vice president with the nonprofit system. “In the physician’s own practice, it would be impossible to identify a trend.” About four years ago, Intermountain started comparing data on births induced after a full 39-week pregnancy to births induced one to two weeks early. The results showed the need for intensive care in babies with respiratory problems were twice as high at 38 weeks and five times as high at 37 weeks. “Suddenly, the data was just very clear that we were putting people at risk by doing an induction prior to 39 weeks,” Poulsen said. “And once the docs saw that data, they said: Whoa! We had no idea!” The findings prompted Intermountain to limit induced births for healthy women before 39 weeks in the 18 hospitals with maternity wards within its system. Intermountain has 23 hospitals overall. As a result, about 500 newborns avoided breathing problems and the ICU over the following year, sparing parents the grueling sight of their infant on a ventilator and saving at least $1 million a year in unnecessary medical costs for families and insurers. Fewer inductions also led to fewer caesarean sections. That reduced risk and brought even more savings because C-sections, the most common surgery in the United States, can cost twice as much as vaginal deliveries and lead to medical complications for children. Intermountain, which has 360 doctors delivering babies, said the reduced C-section rate delivered about $46 million in savings compared with the national average in 2008. Poulsen’s story is just one example of the individual efforts to contain costs within the $2.3 trillion U.S. healthcare system. Employers, insurance companies and doctors nationwide are trying to find savings on medical services. But the effort is largely piecemeal so far. Policy experts say a systemic approach is needed to prevent these costs from sinking the economy. While a new U.S. healthcare law includes provisions that might lead to lower spending — such as a focus on preventive medicine and research grants to study the most effective forms of treatment — it’s main goal is to extend access to millions of Americans. Analysts say the country’s leaders are still years away from taking the job of reining in underlying health costs seriously, even as Republicans and Democrats argue over ways to cut government spending on healthcare in deficit talks. BEST HOPE FOR CHANGE “Everybody agrees, from right to left, that something has to be done. If the federal government doesn’t do something, the entire economy will be at risk,” said Susan Tanaka of the nonpartisan New York-based Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Neither lawmakers nor the White House are likely to undertake a new concerted effort to find a solution until after the 2012 presidential election. They are wary of the setbacks that Democrats saw in crafting President Barack Obama’s healthcare law and that Republicans faced after proposing changes to the Medicare program for the elderly. In the interim, the best hope for change might be strategies such as those employed at Intermountain, which seeks to coordinate care through medical teams whose job is to find the best practices for keeping patients healthy and curbing costs. Similar innovations have taken root elsewhere. An example is Group Health Cooperative, a Seattle-based nonprofit system that provides both health insurance and medical care. Its vertical integration — linking doctors, hospitals and insurance coverage in a single system — eliminates the fee-for-service incentives many blame for sky-high healthcare costs elsewhere. The cost of a C-section at a Group Health hospital can average between $7,100 and $9,400, compared with an average statewide range of $15,200 to $21,600, according to data compiled by the Washington State Hospital Association. Health insurance companies such as UnitedHealth Group Inc and Aetna Inc are building incentives for primary and preventive care and acquiring clinics and small networks of physicians to have full control over how healthcare services are delivered. “If we don’t change, it’s a bleak picture. There’s no question. But there are some glimmers of hope,” said Dr. Elliott Fisher of Dartmouth Medical School, a leading voice in healthcare reform. “A year or two from now, we will have a firm foundation to come back to Congress and say there are things you could do now to move further in this direction.” 2013 Healthcare costs make up 16.5 percent of U.S. GDP and are projected to equal more than one-quarter of the economy by 2035, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. By contrast, healthcare costs were only 4.8 percent of GDP in 1960 and 9.8 percent in 1985. The CBO’s 2011 report, which notes it is difficult to make accurate long-term cost projections, warns that spiraling health costs would probably slow only as a result of higher costs, less access for most households and tighter state Medicaid eligibility for poor families, unless U.S. law is changed. Analysts say any deal to close the U.S. government’s $1.4 trillion annual budget deficit would also suffer repercussions if the government took no action to control rising healthcare costs that are driving growth in Medicare and Medicaid. “Failure to address healthcare will make the solution inevitably more painful,” said Paul Ginsburg of the nonpartisan Washington-based Center for Studying Health System Change. “It will mean more spending cuts in other areas. It will eventually, despite what Republicans say, lead to higher tax rates. Because the alternative is a bankrupt country.” The difficulty lies in attacking healthcare costs broadly without hurting individual patients’ access and quality of care. It also raises the prospect of a new showdown between Republicans, who see deregulation and market competition as the best lever for curbing costs, and Democrats who favor government intervention. When might those battles begin? “2013,” said Joseph Antos of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “There’s going to be a hue and cry for somebody to do something. Even Republicans, who used to shy away from health, they’re going to be on this whether they’re the minority or not.” Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Men Account For Most Job Growth During Recovery, While Women Suffer

July 7, 2011

The recession, famously, hit men hard. It was dubbed the ” mancession ,” with male-dominated industries, like construction and manufacturing, among those shedding the most jobs. The gap in the unemployment rate between men and women grew to a 60-year high . Between December 2007 and June 2009, the official duration of the recession, 6.4 million jobs disappeared, and 74 percent of them were held by men. Now, though, it’s women who are losing out on the recovery. An extensive study from Pew Research, released Wednesday, shows that in the past two years, men have added 768,000 jobs, while women have lost 218,000. In 15 out of 16 economic sectors, men have done better than women in the recovery. Since June 2009, there have been five sectors — including finance, manufacturing, and the federal government — where men gained jobs and women lost them. In five others — among them education and health services, and leisure and hospitality — men gained jobs at a faster rate than women. And in another five sectors, including construction, information, and local government, women lost jobs at a faster rate than men. There was just one sector, state government, where women gained jobs while men lost them. The findings of the Pew report may not come as a complete surprise to some. In January of this year, the economist Heather Boushey noted at Slate that men had far outpaced women in terms of 2010 job growth. “In total throughout 2010,” Boushey wrote , “men gained slightly more than a million jobs, while women gained a paltry 149,000.” The Pew study observes that recoveries don’t usually happen like this. In five periods of recovery since 1970, women either gained jobs faster than men or incurred fewer job losses. The report adds that the current recovery “is the first since 1970 in which women have lost jobs even as men have gained them,” but that “it is not entirely clear why.” Since 2009, men have gained ground in a number of industries. For example, The Washington Post points out that men account for 39 percent of new jobs in health care and education since 2009, even though they’d only held about 23 percent of jobs in those sectors before the recovery. Overall, according the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate is currently 9.5 percent for men and 8.5 percent for women, similar to pre-recession rates, according to the Post . The national unemployment rate is 9.1 percent .

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15 Celebs Who Sucked At Their Pre-Fame Jobs

July 7, 2011

Fame isn’t easy, but real life may be harder for celebs like Jennifer Aniston, who failed miserably as a bike messenger before she hit the big time. Other celebrities like Emma Stone (dog biscuit baker) and Jenna Fischer (phone psychic) apparently failed at normal jobs as well, which means some people may only be good at being famous.

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8 Corporate Logos Tied To The Occult

July 7, 2011

Conspiracy theorists say secret societies are controlling the world and our minds via symbolism that is covertly infused into our brains and popular culture, particularly that of the widely discussed Illuminati. But some conspiracy theorists argue that these symbols are not so secretly placed after all and that if you look closely, you can spot occult icons in corporate logos.

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Fake Money Causes Traffic Nightmare Outside Moscow

July 7, 2011

MOSCOW — Drivers who thought they were on the road to riches caused a huge traffic jam on a 10-lane Moscow highway as they scurried out of their cars to pick up what looked like scattered money. But the Wednesday morning chaos on the Moscow Ring Road was all in vain. Police spokesman Arkady Bashirov says “somebody made a stupid joke” by throwing wads of bookmarks resembling thousand-ruble ($35) notes along a stretch of the road circling Moscow. He says sprinkler trunks were called in to wash away the fakes. A similar traffic jam happened last July – but with real money _when two Moscow officials detained with 10 million rubles ($350,000) in alleged bribe money threw the cash on the road.

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Denver Now Has More Marijuana Dispensaries Than It Does Starbucks

July 7, 2011

In Denver, there are more medical marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks, according to The Daily . Nearly 300 medical marijuana dispensaries have been established for Colorado’s residence since the passing of Amendment 20 in the 2000 general election. And according to The Daily, some of these dispensaries, in order to help bring in business, even offer first-time customers a free joint. The state’s booming Farm-ocology business may be good for other businesses as well, reports MSNBC . Medical marijuana dispensaries have been providing newspapers in areas where they are legal new sources of ad revenue. One such paper, in California, is the Sacramento News and Review , an alternative newspaper. According to a Sacramento KXTV report, the ads from the medical marijuana ads have given the paper enough funds to hire new staff and expand distribution. The ads were so profitable that the paper even started a new supplement called 4-20, reports KXTV. The Sacramento News and Review isn’t the only paper benefiting from the medical marijuana business. The Denver alternative paper Westword has employed the first ever medical marijuana critic, according to The Daily. But that doesn’t mean papers in states like California and Colorado are going to be lining up to accept medical marijuana advertisements, reports KXTV. The reason, Sacramento News and Review ‘s CEO and Publisher Jeff vonKaenel told KXTV, is that other papers fear they would lose money on the venture. “If you ran medical marijuana ads, you would actually lose more other advertisements,” says vonKaenel. “So most all other media decided not to do it.” Watch KXTV report here:

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Merrill Lynch Ordered To Pay Hedge Fund For Losses During Crisis

July 7, 2011

NEW YORK (Joseph A. Giannone and Jochelle Mendonca) – An arbitration panel ordered a Merrill Lynch clearing unit to pay $63.7 million in damages to California hedge fund manager Rosen Capital Partners LP as compensation for losses during the 2008 financial crisis. The panel found Merrill Lynch’s Professional Clearing Corp unit liable for about $63.7 million in compensatory damages plus 9 percent interest accruing from October 7, 2008. It is one of the largest-ever awards granted by FINRA arbitrators. The panel, however, denied punitive damages. Rosen, based in Santa Monica, California, had alleged damages caused by “unexpected margin calls” which caused losses in two hedge funds. The firm sought $90 million plus punitive damages for what it said was breach of contract, fraud and negligence at Merrill. Merrill spokesman William Halldin said on Wednesday the firm disagreed with the arbitration panel, and was considering asking a court to overturn the arbitration panel’s award. “At all times, we met the contractual requirements of our relationship with this sophisticated hedge fund, which sought to blame us for losses during a period of extreme market volatility in October 2008,” he said in an emailed statement. Merrill’s Professional Clearing, according to the unit’s website, “attracts and retains sophisticated and experienced professional, registered broker-dealers by continually developing innovative information management systems.” Rosen’s attorneys were not immediately available for comment. As is customary in arbitrations, the FINRA panel did not explain its ruling. (Reporting by Joe Giannone in New York and Jochelle Mendonca in Bangalore; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Tim Dobbyn) Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions .

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Will Tabloid Scandal Stop Murdoch’s Latest Media Takeover?

July 6, 2011

NEW YORK — Rupert Murdoch has long thrived in opposition, still playing the scrappy outsider who just so happens to run a vast media empire. For over half a century, Murdoch’s thwarted a long list of regulators, media consolidation critics and journalism ethics scolds. He dropped $5 billion on Wall Street Journal -parent Dow Jones in 2007 despite protests that he’d ignore his promises of editorial independence — similar to those he made before purchasing The Times and Sunday Times — once he closed the deal. And, of course, he did . Now, Murdoch’s swashbuckling legacy is being put to a career-defining test, as the 80-year-old News Corp. chairman attempts to take over UK broadcaster BSkyB amid skyrocketing public outrage and increased political pressure surrounding the News of the World phone hacking scandal. BBC business editor Robert Person reported Wednesday that News Corp “will almost certainly have to delay their takeover of BSkyB — at least until it is apparent that the News of the World and News International have been cleaned up.” But could slowing down the machinery of the deal lead to its eventual derailment? That’s not yet clear. However, several long-time Murdoch watchers say the scandal has both tarnished News Corp’s reputation and, for now, helped create a dark cloud over the deal going forward. “The nature of these scandals is that you get to a point where ultimately everybody is touched by it, and everybody’s credibility is undermined, and so there’s no going back,” said Michael Wolff, editorial director of Adweek and author of a probing Murdoch biography . “You can’t repair that.” Wolff acknowledged that the NotW scandal already included celebrities and politicians, but until this week, “what you still didn’t have is that one thing that touched the chord of massive public outrage.” “That chord,” Wolff said, “was touched yesterday.” Since Monday, the Guardian and other news outlets have published damaging reports about tabloid journalists intercepting phone messages sent to a murdered teenage girl and terrorist victims, along with allegations that former NotW editor (and ex-Cameron spin doctor ) Andy Coulson sanctioned payments to police for stories. Rebekah Brooks, the NotW editor at the time of 13-year-old Milly Dowler’s murder and now a top Murdoch hand running News International, faces increasing pressure to resign. Murdoch, however, isn’t throwing Brooks overboard — at least not yet. On Wednesday, Murdoch said that “recent allegations of phone hacking and making payments to police with respect to the News of the World are deplorable and unacceptable,” yet signaled that the paper’s former editor will keep her job. “I have made clear that our company must fully and proactively co-operate with the police in all investigations and that is exactly what News International has been doing and will continue to do under Rebekah Brooks’ leadership,” Murdoch said. “We are committed to addressing these issues fully and have taken a number of important steps to prevent them from happening again.” So while the investigation into one News Corp. entity continues, Murdoch appears prepared to go forward with upping his minority interest into another and completing the takeover. Legally, it’s likely that Murdoch will be able to do that. Whether the move will be politically tenable is another story. Charlie Beckett, who directs POLIS, a journalism initiative by the London School of Economics and Political Science and the London School of Communication, said that if the BSkyB deal collapses it wouldn’t be “for any sensible legal reason,” but because “politicians decided” it should. “If they now unpick this, then Murdoch’s lawyers are going to go to town,” Beckett said. “It’s going to cost the government billions, and also it’s just unfair. You can’t have laws and rules and regulations where you go through the whole process, and then you say because of one scandal we are now introducing this concept that you have to be a ‘fit and proper’ person.” The political fight over who should be held accountable in the phone hacking scandal played out Wednesday in the House of Commons. Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday that there needs to be a public inquiry –- or inquiries –- into British journalism, but opposed Labour Leader Ed Miliband’s calls to bring the BSkyB issue to the Competition Commission, according to the Guardian . “On the issue of BSkyB, what we have done here is followed absolutely to the letter, the correct legal processes,” Cameron said. “That is what the government has to do.” Cameron added that UK communications regulator OfCom will still weigh in on the matter and “make a recommendation about fit and proper person.” Stewart Purvis, a professor of journalism at City University London and former OfCom regulator, said the latest allegations raise serious ethical questions but the law appears to be on News Corp.’s side. He noted that it is too late in the takeover process to hold up the deal over questions of media consolidation, given that Ofcom and the European Commission already dealt with such questions. “[A]t the end of the day the takeover tests are being passed on all sorts of other issues,” Purvis added. “And in law, that’s all that really matters.” Purvis pointed out that Ofcom could still raise the “fit and proper” question even after the deal was approved. It’s that uncertainty, he said, which could explain jittery trading. (BSkyB shares closed 2.1 percent lower at the end of trading in London Wednesday, and shares of NewsCorp. on Wall Street had fallen more than 3 percent by midday trading). “I don’t think anybody believes that suddenly before the deal goes through, there’s going to be another problem,” Purvis said. “They wonder whether there are problems further out that they don’t yet know about. Every day that the News Corp. problem gets bigger, that just creates more uncertainty in the market.” As Murdoch continues in his quest to own BSkyB, shareholders may grow increasingly concerned over public perception that the investigation isn’t leading to accountability. Steven Barnett, a professor of communications at the University of Westminster who’s been petitioning the government over Murdoch’s BSkyB acquisition for more than a year, said “rightly or wrongly, there is a growing sense that a fish rots from the head, and therefore behavior of this kind of unforgivable cruelty could not happen unless it was at least implicitly sanctioned from the very top.” Barnett acknowledged that “no one is suggesting that Rupert was signing checks for private detectives,” but said the fact that phone hacking was considered acceptable “required a measure of implicit, if not approval, then acceptance.” “For many people it is difficult to understand the distinction between behavior like that that is so utterly gross, and allowing even greater power to the same organization to run a major television station,” he said.

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‘Stealth Change’ To Social Security On The Table In Debt Ceiling Talks

July 6, 2011

Last week, President Barack Obama insisted that nothing could be off limits in talks to raise the nation’s debt ceiling. The president was mostly referring to tax increases on the wealthy, which Democrats have been pushing for in the deficit talks, and which Republicans have steadfastly opposed . But it now appears Social Security could be under the knife, according to Talking Points Memo. Over the last few weeks, congressional aides, strategists and advocates have told TPM that a “stealth change” to the Social Security benefit structure is on the table. From TPM: The proposal wouldn’t just impact Social Security benefits. It would also shave off yearly increases in federal pension payouts, and result in somewhat higher tax revenues. But the ratio would be skewed toward benefit cuts by a factor of about 2-to-1 and would represent a financial hit to even the poorest retirees unless they were exempted. Under the current proposal being floated, the benefit cuts could be as high as 9.2 percent. AARP CEO A. Barry Rand, whose organization is a major lobbying group for older Americans, said cuts to Social Security are not acceptable as part of a debt ceiling deal. But last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that AARP has privately conceded that trimming Social Security may be unavoidable. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has said the government has until August 2 to raise the amount Congress can legally borrow. Failure to do so, Geithner warned, could cause an economic crisis.

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Richard (RJ) Eskow: Which Is More "Gangsta" – 50 Cent’s Twitter Stock Pitch or Goldman’s Facebook Deal?

January 12, 2011

Music was Clarence “50 Cent” Jackson’s second career. News reports say he began dealing crack at the age of twelve, after the murder of his coke-dealer mother. Early tracks like “Ghetto Quran” and “How to Rob” reflect a brutal, street-hustling life, and Jackson has the bullet wounds to match. He’s talented, wildly successful, and I sure wouldn’t mess with him. But when he starts mixing social media with pumped-up investment pitches, 50 Cent is moving into Goldman Sachs territory. “Fitty” reportedly earned millions for touting a stock on Twitter, without disclosing that he owned shares in the company. How does that stack up against Goldman’s own social media deal with Facebook? When you move into the stock market, you’re going where the real gangstas roll. The Message We’re in the middle of a much-needed national dialog about harsh and violent rhetoric, and rappers like 50 Cent have been singled out again for criticism. I’m opposed to music censorship, but I get the concern. Even some of the best rappers glamorize things I despise. Yet even as some politicians wag their fingers at hip-hop criminals, their other hand’s stretched our for campaign cash from corporate lawbreakers. Sometimes the difference between crime on the Mean Streets and crime on Wall Street is just a matter of degree. And don’t think the language and lifestyle can’t get rough on Wall Street. Morgan Stanley’s brokers had a now-famous phrase, used whenever they sold their own clients bad investments: “I ripped his face off.” It was a Goldman Sachs executive who praised another employee for selling Goldman clients on a program he described as a “shitty deal.” (That guy’s now a senior exec at Bank of America.) And the depositions in Goldman’s sex discrimination suit read like the script to a rap video: female employees pressured to join a party in a topless bar, a woman pinned against a wall and forcibly kissed, a Christmas party with female escorts wearing “short black skirts, strapless tops and Santa hats.” Throw in some beats and a few “uh-huh’s” and “yeahs” and you’ve got yourself a video. Fitty Twitters “Ok ok ok my friends just told me stop tweeting about HNHI so that we can get all the money. Hahaha check it out its the real deal.” 50 Cent tweeted about a marginal stock all weekend and into early Monday , calling it “BIG MONEY” and saying “you can double your money right now.” The effect was mindblowing: Jackson’s credited with moving the stock of a company called HNHI by $50 million dollars in one day , even though its own auditor reportedly ” expressed concerns about its financial future .” Fitty didn’t mention that he held 30 million shares of the stock, which he picked up for $750,000 last fall. Yesterday’s surge reportedly netted him somewhere between $8.7 million and $10 million. No wonder so many news accounts repeated the name of his hit album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’. HNHI increased in value by about 200%. Even after it dropped more than 23% today, Jackson was way ahead of the game. Fitty’s attorneys presumably got a little worried, because the disclaimers started appearing late Monday: “HNHI is the right investment for me it might not be for u! Do ur homework,” “I own HNHI stocks thoughts on it are my opinion. Talk to your financial advisor …” Old School How does Fitty’s Twitter run compare with Goldman Sach’s Facebook deal? Goldman consolidated a number of its clients into a single artificial “investor” to get around a legal requirement that any company with more than 500 investors be publicly traded and subject to the regulations that protect investors. Felix Salmon observes that this deal is bigger than many IPOs, but doesn’t have to follow any of the same rules. Goldman sure knows how to create a feeding frenzy. They wouldn’t let anybody into the deal for less than $2 million – a surefire way to make the marks salivate – and touted the deal shamelessly to its clients: “When you have a chance I wanted to find a time to discuss a highly confidential and time sensitive investment opportunity … If you agree not to use information that we reveal to you … I will be able to disclose the name of the company and provide you with more information…” Former Goldmanite Nomi Prins captures the essence of the deal: create an artificial bubble and then “pawn off the overpriced goods on the clients.” As Prins notes, Goldman’s giving itself the option to unload this investment if it goes bad, but is locking its clients in until 2013. Knowing Goldman, they’ll also be shorting Facebook somewhere along the way. The country learned their M.O. afer the last crisis by reviewing their internal emails , and by the cynical and lawless way they played clients in the ABACUS deal. To avoid legal trouble this time around, Goldman’s even disclosed in advance that it may short Facebook. Goldman skims a lot off the top, then lets you buy into a deal so skewed that one of its own funds turned it down. In return, you get to say you own a piece of Facebook. Maybe they’ll even give you a nice certificate you can hang on the wall of your Las Vegas investment property. Blowing Bubbles Is Facebook this year’s version of Vegas real estate? It looks that way. Even the most successful business has a real and an inflated value, after all, and I tend to agree with all the people who say Facebook’s going to fade away like MySpace did. Think about it: Facebook has a badly designed interface, it’s difficult to use, and it continues to irritate and infuriate its customers. Badly-managed companies can thrive for a while, but not forever. And the Goldman deal sidesteps the very public accountability that might encourage Facebook to make the changes it needs. But whatever happens to Facebook, the Goldman deal is a bubble machine designed to inflate its price. And Goldman’s tapped the mother lode: the US government. As Simon Johnson points out, their Facebook investment is backed by the Fed – and therefore by the public’s dollars. 50 Cent may have made a few mil, but the big banks have knocked off Fort Knox. Goldman invested $75 million in Facebook early on through a hedge fund. Now they’re saying they’ve put $450 million of their own money into this deal, but they get that money at the ultra-low Fed rate the government gives them. So they don’t need to earn the same returns their clients do. What’s more, they can unload their investment whenever the bubble deflates and walk away with their “client’s” money one more time. Throw in the $60 million plus they’re charging for the deal, and they’re sitting pretty. Those “lucky” Facebook investors: Goldman will get rich. They’ll die tryin’. Fitty vs. Blankey So how does 50 Cent stack up against Goldman – morally, ethically, and legally? For one thing, Mr. Jackson is not a bank or investment manager and doesn’t claim any special financial expertise. Fitty doesn’t receive low-rate loans through the Fed’s discount window. Neither he nor his company, G-Unit Records, received a Federal bailout. 50 Cent did not receive $13 billion in taxpayer money as a “backdoor bailout” through AIG. (Disclaimer: I used to work at AIG.) And 50 Cent has never paid himself a nickel, much less a huge bonus, after being rescued with Federal funds. Goldman wouldn’t admit that it misled clients about its ABACUS product until it was time to plea bargain its way out of SEC fines and potential criminal charges. Until then Goldman execs congratulated themselves for dumping bad investments on their clients. Now that’s cold . Fitty, on the other hand, copped to his actions right away. On the rhetoric front, 50 Cent’s pretty rough: “I’ll hit your vertebrae, rip through your tissues/your wife on the futon huggin’ the shih tzu.” Goldman’s more genteel – but some of its political allies aren’t. Most of its campaign contributions are placed through intermediaries – in this case, the GOP Senate and Congressional Committees. Some of the candidates funded by these groups have used a lot of violent rhetoric, like threatening “Second Amendment” reactions (i.e., gun violence) to decisions they don’t like,firing guns at targets with their political opponent’s face on it, and suggesting they would issue “hunting permits” for “liberals.” If there’s a difference between this rhetoric and 50 Cent’s, I can’t see it. (And despite all their populist Tea Party rhetoric, these candidates have come through for their Wall Street patrons . ) The chorus to the “shih tzu” song is “I’m laughing all the way to the bank.” But 50 Cent has an actual product – music – so he’s a part of the productive economy, not the financial sector. Curtis Jackson’s a self-made success who came up the hard way, with talent. If Kanye is rap’s F. Scott Fitzgerald, its chronicler of the high life’s pain and pleasure, 50 Cent is its Jim Thompson. He’s the poet of blood and bullets. His raps remind me of what a great jazz bass player once told me about that instrument: that it stands on the bordeline between melody and percussion. 50 Cent raps on the border between prose and percussion. There’s no evidence of criminal behavior in either Curtis Jackson’s Twitter move or Goldman’s Facebook deal. But 50 Cent has proved that the so-called “rational” “free market” is neither. And Goldman has proved that Wall Street is still up to its old tricks, getting rich creating bubbles and then getting even richer as they pop. No, I don’t like the violent language. Or the sexism. Or the glorification of bad behavior. But enough about Wall Street: I don’t like those things in music, either. One of the things worth remembering about language is that it reflects deeper values. If we despise what these words reflect, we shouldn’t tolerate the behavior. Don’t censor music. Regulate banks. _______________________________ (Two videos for your enjoyment: 50 Cent and Lloyd Blankfein. Play them at the same time for the proper effect.)

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Paul Jay: Canadian Gold Company Sues El Salvador for $100 Million

June 20, 2010

Canadian mining company, Pacific Rim, is in court suing the government of El Salvador for 100 million dollars. It claims that by not awarding the company an exploitation permit for its proposed gold mine, the tiny country is in breach of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (known as CAFTA). Canada is not a signatory to the trade agreement, so the Vancouver-based company is filing the suit through it’s US subsidiary, Pac Rim Cayman, which it moved from the Cayman Islands to Nevada in December 2007. In the slim coverage that has come out around the case, few have attempted to answer the question as to how the case got this far? How did the dispute travel from the hills of Northern El Salvador to the halls of Washington, DC? One year ago today, teacher Marcelo Rivera disappeared. His body was found two weeks later at the bottom of a well, miles away from his home in the town of San Isidro. His body was found with clear signs of torture, such as missing fingernails. San Isidro is also home to Pacific Rim’s flagship property, El Dorado, which the company has been fighting to open for years. Rivera was a key leader in the grassroots anti-mining movement that has stood in the way of that mine. Why did so many of the people of San Isidro oppose the Canadian mine? Ask Marcelo Rivera’s brother Miguel, who was in Washington, DC last month for the start of the CAFTA hearing at the World Bank. He’s not allowed to participate in the trial, nor even sit in on it, despite knowing the case better than any of the DC-based lawyers in the room. While in DC Miguel goes from meeting, to interview, to press conference, being asked to provide details on the various ways he and his community feel they have been affected by the proposed mine. He tells of radio journalists receiving death threats, a priest attacked while driving his car, mayors admitting they accepted money from the company. The stories are endless. Miguel describes the gold mining process including the use of cyanide, release of heavy metals like arsenic and mercury, loss of water access – El Salvador is already tied with Haiti for the least access to potable water in the hemisphere. He tells of how he and his brother decided to oppose the project after a trip to a gold mine in neighboring Honduras. He talks of the horrific skin defects he saw on the babies in Honduras’ Siria Valley. Why isn’t San Isidro’s mine open today? How did a community of poor farmers create a movement with enough support that it pressured the government of El Salvador to refuse to permit Pacific Rim’s mining operation? Miguel speaks of Wilfred Lainez. A hip-hop artist known as MC Lethal, Lainez is legally blind from untreated glaucoma. He has captured the energy of San Isidro’s youth with his rhymes about the dangers of mining and other social issues in the community. Miguel chuckles as he tells of the time Pacific Rim sponsored a soccer tournament in the community. Marcelo, Miguel, and others put in a team wearing jerseys that said “No to Mining” on the back. Much to the company’s chagrin, the team won the tournament, thereby ruining the company’s planned photo-op with the winners. He talks proudly of the mural painted by local youths at one of San Isidro’s highway entrances. It depicts a bulldozer with a Canadian flag looking over a post-mining apocalypse of dead trees and dry rivers. On the other side is a farmer leaving town with his emaciated cow and a businessman counting his gold bricks. The farmer is presumably headed to the overcrowded city, or to work in the United States or Canada. It must be noted that Pacific Rim has never been directly linked to the murder of Marcelo Rivera, or the two other anti-Pacific Rim activists who were killed in 2009. Pacific Rim has stated they had no involvement of any kind in the murders. Ramiro Rivera (no relation), declared in an interview with The Real News in May of 2008 that he expected to be killed for his opposition to mining, and that he was already receiving death threats. He survived 8 shots in the back in August 2009. In December he was shot dead while under police protection. Ramiro told us in 2008 that the violence was a result of the money Pacific Rim pumped into communities. He accused the company of hiring his friends and family as promoters, and buying-off mayors and police. The other activist murdered was Dora Sorto Recinos, she was 8-months pregnant at the time she was shot dead. She was killed one year and a half after her husband Santos lost two fingers in a machete attack at the hands of a neighbour who had been hired to promote Pacific Rim. But Ramiro and Dora were more than victims they were active participants. Before their murders, they helped organize three road blockades that successfully stopped company drilling equipment from entering their region. With meager resources, El Salvador’s anti-mining activists pressured not one, but two Salvadoran presidents to refuse Pacific Rim’s permits. Now they find themselves continuing their battle in Washington, fighting a “free trade” agreement that allows an international corporation to punish their country for taking a stand in defense of its people. Will Pacific Rim be successful in using the World Bank trial to punish El Salvador, collecting 100 million dollars? The public health system in El Salvador runs just over 350 million dollars annually, by far the largest single item in the budget. Will the Canadian government hide behind the myth of Canada the righteous global citizen, or will it take on the actuality of the global abuses of the Canadian mining industry? Sixty percent of the world’s mining companies are registered in Canada, yet there is not a single Canadian law regulating their activities abroad. This blog was written together with my colleague at TRNN, Jesse Freeston. You can watch Jesse’s report on the Pacific Rim controversy here .

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Laurence J. Kotlikoff: The Trouble with Mark Miller’s Trouble With Retirement Calculators

April 30, 2010

In his recent blog, “The Trouble with Retirement Planning Calculators,” Mark Miller references a report by the Society of Actuaries of 12 calculators that “had a host of problems.” One of these calculators is ESPlanner (Economic Security Planner), which provides economics-based planning. I know this calculator very well since I developed it through my company. None of the problems referenced by Mark pertain at all to our software. If Mark had read the Society of Actuaries study carefully, he would have realized that, with a couple arguable exceptions, each time they pointed out a problem, they also said our software didn’t have that problem. The Society wasn’t in the business of endorsing a particular program, but one can read between Turner’s lines about what program he feels is best, but that requires actually reading their report. Let me make this more precise by referencing the six problems Mark identifies. 1. Social Security Projections. Most retirees get a third or more of retirement income from Social Security. Yet many retirement calculators don’t gather the detailed information needed to project these benefits accurately, Turner says. “They often project Social Security income using a bare minimum of information: typically your current earnings, your age, and the year you expect to retire,” he says. The Social Security Administration offers the best projection tool, customized to your actual earnings history. What Turner said is correct. What Mark said about Social Security’s own benefit calculations is not. Turner is right that every calculator, but one (namely ESPlanner), makes incredibly crude Social Security benefit calculations because they don’t ask users to input their precise past covered earnings history or their projected future covered earnings. ESPlanner does precisely this and then proceeds to calculate survivor, child, retiree, divorcee, mother and father, and spousal benefits taking into account earnings reductions, early retirement reductions, delayed retirement credits, family benefit maximums, recomputations of benefits, windfall elimination provisions, offset provisions, and the list goes on. In contrast, Social Security doesn’t calculate for you your spousal, child, retiree, divorce, mother or father, or survivor benefits. It only calculates your retirement benefit. And when it does this, either on line or in the annual benefit statement it sends us, Social Security provides anything but “the best projection.” Had Mark done his homework, he’d have learned that Social Security projects zero economy-wide real wage growth and zero inflation in all future years. This is clearly a highly unrealistic assumption. Social Security makes this assumption because it’s afraid that people will compare their future benefit with their current pay and infer a higher replacement rate than will actually end up being the case because their earnings will also likely grow through retirement. So for younger people, in particular, Social Security is significantly understating their likely future benefit. 2. Rate-of-Return Assumptions. Three of the free calculators used pre-set future investment rate-of-return assumptions that you can’t change, and their percentages varied widely. One, created by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration, assumed a 5 percent average annual return from 401(k)s; several others assumed 10 percent. If a calculator won’t let you choose your anticipated rate of return, either be sure you’re comfortable with its assumption or walk away. ESPlanner lets you set your annual return and also lets you change it. And if you run the Monte Carlo simulations, the mean return can change every year based on what you said you’ll be holding. 3. Life Expectancy. It’s impossible to know how long you’ll live, of course. On average, 65-year-old men can expect to live another 17 years, and women another 20 years. Some calculators, the study found, automatically input life expectancy figures. But they fail to account for differences by race, income, and gender. And they also don’t take into consideration that you or your spouse might live longer than the averages. Life expectancy is not the right planning horizon, period. It’s maximum age of life. You have to plan to live to your maximum age for the simple reason that you might. Maximum age of life is what ESPlanner uses. 4. Housing. The calculators make very different assumptions about what you’ll do with your house at retirement. “Some assume you won’t liquidate your home; others assume you will sell and downsize,” Turner says. Very few of the tools analyze the impact on your finances of carrying a mortgage into retirement. ESPlanner is innocent of all these charges. Among the free calculators reviewed, only the U.S. Department of Labor calculator lets you plug in home equity when calculating your retirement assets. This statement by Mark is not true. We have a free version of ESPlanner available at www.eplanner.com/basic that lets you enter your home equity for both your primary and vacation homes. And the paid version lets you change your primary and vacation home (lets you move) twice in the future. 5. Inflation. None of the free calculators — and few of the professional tools — listed inflation as a retirement-planning risk. Some of the tools let you plug in just one percentage forecast, even though inflation can fluctuate widely over time. Others put in their own default inflation rate, ranging from 2.3 to 4.6 percent. That spread can make a huge difference in how much the purchasing power of your assets will shrink over a 25-year retirement. ESPlanner lets you enter changes in future inflation rates and encourages you to do What Ifs. 6. Spouses. Few of the free calculators helped couples forecast retirement income for a surviving spouse. They rarely let users enter separate information for both spouses and run numbers with differing life expectancies for them, for example. When the calculators recommended annuities for retirement income (most didn’t), none suggested buying one with a survivor’s benefit. Not guilty as charged. ESPlanner makes extremely precise calculations for survivors. Indeed, you can kill off your spouse at any age and see in very fine detail how you will do in every future year after the murder. An example of our being hyper anal here is calculating federal and state taxes in extremely fine detail separately for each year the survivor might be alive, conditional on the age the other spouse dies (or is murdered).

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Don McNay: The "Don’t Ever Give Up" Business Plan

March 23, 2010

Here I am, on the road again. Here I am, up on the stage. Here I go, playing the star again. Here I go, turn the page -Bob Seger “Don’t Give Up. Don’t ever give up.” -Jim Valvano Seth Godin, who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs be productive, says that business people never realize that with a little bit of push, they can move past a seeming dead end and reach business success. I hope that is true in my case. In January, 2008, I released my second book, Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers and What to Do When You Win the Lottery. Although it was critically acclaimed, it didn’t sell nearly as well as my first book, The Unbridled World of Ernie Fletcher, which had come out in 2006. The Fletcher book came out in October and had large crowds at the book signings. The Gambler book came out in January and it snowed every time we had an event. The Fletcher book came out as the economy was booming. Gambler came out as the economy was collapsing. I knew when the economy was turning, better than Ben Bernanke knew (who has never seemed to know where the economy is going, anyway). People would brave the elements to come to events, but would not buy anything. I could see in their eyes that they wanted a book but couldn’t afford it. I stopped marketing the book — a big mistake. I started working on a third book about why people blow “Big Money.” That book will be out later this year. Along with writing my weekly column, I started contributing to Huffington Post in 2008. That gave me a large, worldwide audience. When I joined Huffington, both of my books started selling again. Especially the Gambler book. It sold moderately well and stayed in stores. Then fate came into play. In the form of a dead lottery winner. In 2006, Abraham Shakespeare won $16.9 million in the Florida lottery. This year, they found his body buried five foot deep and under concrete. A new-found “friend and adviser” has been charged with his murder. After his death, I did a number of interviews about the trouble many lottery winners have holding onto their money. It’s a topic covered extensively in the Gambler book. One Sunday, I found myself quoted in hundreds of major newspapers and on television stations around the world. Suddenly, the Gambler book got hot. Now we are launching an “encore” book tour. As the son of a son of a gambler, it’s time for me to “double down” and do the kind of full-blown book tour that we should have done two years ago. Early indications are that the book tour will be a big success The ups and downs of Son of a Son of a Gambler taught me a lot about life and a lot about myself. It’s ironic that I quit on a book where my father was a central character. Dad and former North Carolina State coach and ESPN announcer, Jim Valvano, were roughly the same age and diagnosed with cancer at roughly the same time. Dad avidly followed Valvano’s courageous fight against cancer. Jimmy V was his hero. On the day of dad’s funeral, Jimmy V was given the inaugural Arthur Ashe Courage and Humanitarian Award. (I’ve included a link to it, below.) In one of the most inspiring talks I have ever heard, Valvano told us, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” It took a while for Jimmy V’s message to hit, but I’m glad it did. When I decided to have a “double down” book tour, I compared it to Bob Seger’s song “Turn the Page.” It was a regional hit before Seger became a worldwide star. When Seger hit it big with “Night Moves,” “Turn the Page” found a new audience. Just like I think Son of a Son of a Gambler will find a new audience. The big lesson is one that any business, or person, needs to learn. Don’t give up when the initial feedback is negative. I almost did. I’m glad I kept referencing the book and telling the tale of wayward lottery winners. Now it is getting noticed. I’m hoping that doubling down turns out to a winning hand for Son of a Son of a Gambler. ESPY Speech and Jimmy V Foundation: http://www.jimmyv.org/remembering-jim/espy-awards-speech.html Don McNay, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CSSC is one of the world’s leading authorities in helping people deal with “Big Money” issues. McNay is an award winning, syndicated financial columnist and Huffington Post Contributor. You can read more about Don and his upcoming book tour at www.donmcnay.com McNay founded McNay Settlement Group, a structured settlement and financial consulting firm, in 1983 and Kentucky Guardianship Administrators LLC in 2000. You can read more about both at www.mcnay.com McNay has Master’s Degrees from Vanderbilt and the American College and is in the Eastern Kentucky University Hall of Distinguished Alumni. McNays on tour promoting his latest book Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers and What to Do When You Win The Lottery McNay is a lifetime member of the Million Dollar Round Table and has four professional designations in the financial services field.

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Ireland Arrests Seven in Overseas Murder Plot Probe Linked to Cartoonist

March 9, 2010

By Dara Doyle and Colm Heatley March 9 (Bloomberg) — Irish police arrested seven people in Cork and Waterford in connection with an investigation into a conspiracy to murder an individual in another country. Irish police have “been working closely with law enforcement agencies in the United States and in a number of European countries,” the police said in a statement today, without giving additional details. The arrests, which took place in counties Waterford and Cork, are in connection with an investigation into a conspiracy to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, RTE reported today, without saying where it got the information. Vilks depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog and Al-Qaeda offered $100,000 for the murder of Vilks in 2007, the broadcaster said. All those arrested are being detained under section 50 of the criminal justice act, which allows them to be detained for as long as seven days, a police spokesman who declined to be identified, said by phone. The arrested includes four men and three women, RTE said. To contact the reporter on this story: Dara Doyle at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net Colm Heatley in Belfast at cheatley@bloomberg.net

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Ireland Arrests Seven in Overseas Murder Plot Probe Linked to Cartoonist

March 9, 2010

By Dara Doyle and Colm Heatley March 9 (Bloomberg) — Irish police arrested seven people in Cork and Waterford in connection with an investigation into a conspiracy to murder an individual in another country. Irish police have “been working closely with law enforcement agencies in the United States and in a number of European countries,” the police said in a statement today, without giving additional details. The arrests, which took place in counties Waterford and Cork, are in connection with an investigation into a conspiracy to murder Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, RTE reported today, without saying where it got the information. Vilks depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog and Al-Qaeda offered $100,000 for the murder of Vilks in 2007, the broadcaster said. All those arrested are being detained under section 50 of the criminal justice act, which allows them to be detained for as long as seven days, a police spokesman who declined to be identified, said by phone. The arrested includes four men and three women, RTE said. To contact the reporter on this story: Dara Doyle at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net Colm Heatley in Belfast at cheatley@bloomberg.net

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Fred Redmond: Taking a Stand Against Hate: Hotels Bar American Renaissance

February 2, 2010

A Washington, D.C. area hotel last week closed its doors to a racist convention that had booked rooms under the benign-sounding name “American Renaissance” conference. Now all American hotels and conference centers should follow that lead, because in the U.S. renaissance means overcoming bigotry. American Renaissance conducts a biannual conference that promotes racial and religious hatred. This year one of its guest speakers at the February conference is to be Nick Griffin , a convicted criminal who heads the British National Party, a white separatist group that contends immigrants are causing the “genocide” of “indigenous” white Britons. The hotel canceled the booking after several groups asked it not to serve as host to a hate hoedown. Those groups will monitor the organization’s attempts to secure another meeting place. They include the United Steelworkers; One People’s Project , which describes itself as a resource for those fighting fascism; and the Mormon Worker , a newspaper based in Provo, Utah. As a union that promotes diversity and inclusion, the United Steelworkers finds the doctrine and language of Griffin and American Renaissance reprehensible. The American Renaissance Web site contends, for example: “Virtually no whites anywhere are willing to break taboos about racial differences in IQ, the costs of ‘diversity,’ or the challenges of non-white immigration.” It specifies: “Gentlemen will wear jackets and ties to all conference events.” Apparently women are not invited. It also tacitly acknowledges the offensiveness of its message by offering attendees tags bearing false names, which it describes as “war names”: “We will prepare name tags in advance; please call us if you would like to use a nom de guerre. ” That link to violence is not accidental. By inviting Nick Griffin, the group embraced a criminal whose organization is connected to numerous violent — even deadly — acts. In 1998, Griffin was convicted of inciting racial hatred with articles that denied the Holocaust. He received a suspended nine-month prison term. At the trial he said, “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat.” Griffin has cited neo-fascist Robert Fiore as a major BNP influence. Fiore is a convicted criminal and member of the Italian terrorist organization implicated in the 1980 Bologna bombing that killed 85 people. Among the criminals associated with the BNP are David Copeland, a former member sentenced to 50 years for setting off explosives that killed three people and injured 139; former BNP candidate Roderick Rowley, who was sentenced to prison on 14 charges of making and distributing obscene images of children, and BNP election agent Kevin Hughes who was sentenced to two years in prison for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker. Griffin and the BNP were admired by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James W. von Brunn, who killed a security guard when he opened fire in the Washington museum lobby last year. Brunn, a white supremacist who was convicted and imprisoned earlier for an armed attempt to kidnap Federal Reserve Board members, went to see Griffin speak when the BNP leader lectured in the U.S. previously. Brunn wrote on his blog that although he had misgivings about Griffin allowing Jews to join the BNP: “My hat is off to this fighting white man, Nick Griffin, for the incredible victories for White Britain which his hard work, rhino-thick skin against [Jewish media] criticism, and inspired leadership have made possible. . . . Hail the white leader, Nick Griffin!” Brunn died in prison in January awaiting his murder trial. Griffin himself is again facing the potential of imprisonment, this time over the BNP’s racist constitution. A British court ordered him to change the document so that it no longer bars admission of Asians, blacks and members of other ethnic minorities. The BNP constitution also says: “The British National Party stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make-up of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948.” Griffin suggests non-whites be paid to leave Britain and return to their countries of origin. It’s not clear how that would work for minorities who’ve lived in Britain for generations. The court initially set the end of January as a deadline for the constitutional change, but has given Griffin two more weeks to comply. This convict connected to so many other criminals apparently received a visa to enter the U.S. How likely is it that he would he have gotten one if he were a Muslim endorsing the “cleansing” of Christians? Hotels and conference centers have every right to shun the likes of Griffin and American Renaissance. Refusing to provide a forum for hate is not a denial of First Amendment free speech rights. Griffin and the American Renaissance are free to spew their race- and religion-based venom in any public park or on any private property owned by a like-minded bigot.

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`Avatar’ Is Top Film for Seventh Straight Week, Exceeding $2 Billion Sales

January 31, 2010

By Esme E. Deprez Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — “Avatar” was the top film in the U.S. and Canada for the seventh weekend in a row, becoming the first movie to surpass $2 billion in combined global and domestic ticket sales. James Cameron’s 3-D sci-fi adventure earned $30 million in U.S. and Canadian theaters this weekend, Hollywood.com Box- Office said today in a statement. The film has taken in $2.04 billion worldwide since its Dec. 18 release by News Corp. ’s 20th Century Fox, according to Hollywood.com. “Avatar” may eclipse the $600.8 million domestic record of “Titanic” on Feb. 2 or 3, Hollywood.com said. Cameron, maker of the two top-grossing movies of all time, has the chance to augment his filmmaking legacy with the Academy Award nominations on Feb. 2. “Avatar” won the Golden Globe for best dramatic feature and surpassed the $1.84 billion record set by his Oscar-winning 1997 production, “Titanic,” last week. “It’s an amazing achievement, any big movie like this can open well, but to hold on seven weeks later means people really like the film and are recommending it,” Gitesh Pandya , editor of Box Office Guru LLC, said in an interview. “To make this much when your movie is so old is unheard of.” “Edge of Darkness,” Mel Gibson’s first starring role since 2002’s “Signs,” opened at No. 2 with sales of $17.1 million for Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Gibson plays a homicide detective investigating the murder of his daughter. The romantic comedy “When in Rome” opened in third place, taking in $12.1 million in sales for Walt Disney Co. Kristen Bell, playing alongside Josh Duhamel, stars as a New Yorker who travels to Italy to find love. ‘Tooth Fairy’ and ‘The Rock’ The “Tooth Fairy,” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, held steady at fourth place, taking in $10 million. “The Book of Eli,” the post-apocalyptic thriller featuring Denzel Washington , slid to fifth place from third with $8.8 million in sales for Warner Bros. “Legion,” a horror thriller starring Paul Bettany and Tyrese Gibson, fell to sixth place from second in two weeks of release bringing in a total of $28.6 million for Sony Corp. News Corp. ranks first among the six major studios in U.S. ticket sales this year, with $387 million as of Jan. 28, according to researcher Box Office Mojo. Time Warner is second at $206.2 million. Weekend sales for the top 12 films rose 4.3 percent to $107.4 million from $103 million a year earlier, Hollywood.com said. Year-to-date receipts total $1.05 billion, up 5.1 percent from a year earlier. Attendance is also up 5.1 percent. The following table has figures provided by studios to Hollywood.com. The amounts are based on actual ticket sales from Jan. 29 and yesterday and estimates for today. To contact the reporters on this story: Esme E. Deprez in New York at edeprez@bloomberg.net ;

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Iran Says U.S., Israeli Agencies May Be Behind Bombing Death of Physicist

January 12, 2010

By Ladane Nasseri and Ali Sheikholeslami Jan. 12 (Bloomberg) — An Iranian nuclear scientist was killed today by a remote-controlled bomb outside his Tehran home. The government and the country’s opposition movement claimed that the professor, Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, was one of their supporters. The explosive device was planted on a motorcycle in front of Ali-Mohammadi’s home in the Qeytarieh neighborhood, state-run Press TV said. State media said the man was a professor of nuclear physics, and a statement published on the presidential Web site accused U.S. elements of being behind the killing. The opposition Rahesabz Web site said Ali-Mohammadi campaigned with other academics in favor of Mir Hossein Mousavi , a former prime minister who ran against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the disputed June election. “Signs of evil by the triangle of the Zionist regime, the U.S. and their mercenaries in Iran can be seen in this terrorist incident,” Ramin Mehmanparast, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, was cited as saying by the state-run Fars news agency. “Such terrorist acts and the elimination of the country’s nuclear scientists will certainly not halt the scientific and technological process.” In Washington, the White House and the State Department rejected the Iranian accusation. “The idea the U.S. had anything to do with the murder in Tehran today is absurd,” Gordon Duguid , a department spokesman, told reporters. Mossad, CIA Cited The U.S. and its allies suspect Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons, while the Persian Gulf country says it wants the technology for peaceful purposes. State television identified the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s Mossad as having possible involvement. Separately, Press TV said the killing may be linked to Israel’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear development. Ali-Mohammadi didn’t work for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, according to a statement on the organization’s Web site. The Web site of the University of Tehran’s physics department describes Ali-Mohammadi as a professor of elementary particle physics and lists more than 50 academic articles on his Web page. The professor was heading to work at about 7:30 a.m. when the blast took place, Iranian media said. Television footage showed a destroyed motorbike and the body of the dead scientist being taken away. No Arrests There have been no arrests in the case, Tehran Prosecutor- General Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi told the state-run Iranian Students News Agency. Fars said the Kingdom Assembly of Iran, a political group that seeks to end Iran’s religious rule, took responsibility for the bombing in a statement. The claim was rejected in a report on Tondar.org, a Web site that is linked with the group. The killing of Ali-Mohammadi was “a terrorist act by anti- revolutionary elements,” state television said. He was “a revolutionary,” it said, a term used by the government to describe individuals who are loyal to the country’s Shiite Muslim leadership. Ali-Mohammadi’s name appears on a list of Iranian academics who supported Mousavi before the June presidential ballot. Iran has been in political turmoil since Ahmadinejad’s re- election seven months ago, which provoked the biggest street protests since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He denies allegations by opponents that the vote was rigged. Anti-government demonstrations flared up again last month in Tehran and other major cities, prompting a crackdown by security forces that authorities said had left eight people dead. To contact the reporters on this story: Ladane Nasseri in Beirut at lnasseri@bloomberg.net ; Ali Sheikholeslami in London at alis2@bloomberg.net .

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Germany’s Top Nazi-Hunter Finds `Best Break’ in Years in Brazilian Archive

November 27, 2009

By Patrick Donahue and Brian Parkin Nov. 27 (Bloomberg) — German investigators trying to track down Nazi criminals before they die may have had their “best break” in years after discovering a trove of Brazilian immigration files more than half a century old. Kurt Schrimm , the top German justice official hunting Nazi fugitives, said his team stumbled on archives identifying “several hundred” Germans who moved to Brazil in the decade after World War II and who may be linked to Nazi crimes. Though only a fraction is still likely to be alive, Schrimm plans to follow up on the lead with Brazilian officials. “The discovery will probably be our most important find in recent times,” Schrimm said in an interview Nov. 24 from his office in the southwestern German city of Ludwigsburg. Schrimm kicked off research in Brazil in July and will report again on findings after his team returns there in March. The trial starting Nov. 30 of alleged death-camp guard John Demjanjuk in Munich underscores Schrimm’s effort to hunt down remaining Nazi criminals even if the search yields “order- takers, not givers” 76 years after Adolf Hitler took power. Demjanjuk, who is charged with aiding in the murder of 27,900 inmates in the Sobibor Nazi death camp in 1943, is the biggest catch yet for Schrimm, who took his job nine years ago expecting to close shop. Instead, Schrimm, 60, a senior prosecutor in Stuttgart, doubled staff at the Central Office of State Judiciaries for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes from four to eight investigators — now down to seven. As the number of clues filed to the office dwindled through the 1990s, Schrimm pressed the Central Office to seek new leads. Soviet Archives Those leads included sifting through 1945 war trial documents from Soviet archives involving German prisoners of war and Soviet collaborators. A military-history archive in Prague was found to contain complete files on the Nazi Waffen-SS up to 1943. In 1990, Italian court documents on SS atrocities were discovered after having disappeared in the 1950s. The Brazilian files focus on suspected Nazi criminals entering on provisional passports. Schrimm and his team followed up leads from a Brazilian source who came across letters warning the authorities of Nazis trying to slip into the country with travel documents issued by the Red Cross . Little was done to bar their entry, Schrimm said. South American Refuge South America became the refuge of several high-ranking Nazi officers after the Third Reich’s collapse, including Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, death-camp doctor Josef Mengele and Gestapo member Klaus Barbie. While Eichmann and Barbie were caught and tried, Mengele died in Brazil in 1979. Eichmann, captured in Argentina, was hanged in Israel in 1962; Barbie, extradited by Bolivia, died in a French jail in 1991. “As hopeful as we are about the Brazil findings, just 5 percent of the suspects may still be alive and able to stand trial,” Schrimm said. “The Nazi commanders are all dead, but that doesn’t make the crimes of their younger subordinates any less prosecutable.” The Central Office conducts pre-investigations that are then handed over to state prosecutors once evidence is sufficient for a formal probe. Schrimm’s unit currently has about 20 investigations open. Efforts Graded Schrimm’s Central Office works alongside such organizations as the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center . The Wiesenthal Center graded Germany with a “B” in its 2009 ranking of efforts to bring Nazi criminals to justice. The U.S. received an “A.” Schrimm dismissed the rating, saying his Central Office doesn’t like “being graded like a school kid.” “As long as there’s a possibility that these people are alive, we’ll continue our work,” Schrimm said in an earlier, Aug. 21 interview in his office, a baroque structure built in 1790 to house a prison. “I never would have thought it’d be nine years already — and it will still be some time in the future.” Schrimm, whose team taps on computers in two work rooms, gave a tour of one of the dusty file spaces piled to the ceiling with dog-eared documents detailing Nazi crimes that took place more than six decades ago. The quiet setting was a far cry from the 1960s and 1970s, when the unit was at its busiest tracking down Nazis. Since its foundation in 1958, the Central Office has conducted more than 7,400 investigations. The case against Demjanjuk came about after an investigator accidentally stumbled on a report on the Internet that the U.S. was seeking to revoke his passport. Demjanjuk’s name was known because he had been convicted in 1988, charged with being the Treblinka death-camp guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” –only to be acquitted in 1993 by Israel’s Supreme Court after doubt about his identity emerged. The Central Office, suspicious about his true identity, followed up on clues gained from already scheduled visits to Israel and the U.S. Once Schrimm’s team assembled what it thought was enough information to convict, they turned it over to state prosecutors. “A few years ago nobody talked about Demjanjuk any more — he fell into the memory hole,” Schrimm said. To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Donahue in Berlin at at pdonahue1@bloomberg.net , or Brian Parkin in Berlin at at bparkin@bloomberg.net .

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David Fiderer: The Moral Compass Missing From The Greatest Trade Ever

November 16, 2009

John Paulson was dissatisfied. The marketplace had not satiated his appetite for placing bets against subprime mortgage securities.

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Polanski’s Art No Shield for Sex Crime With Child: Ann Woolner

September 30, 2009

Commentary by Ann Woolner Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) — Roman Polanski is an enormously talented film director who has suffered tragedy time and again. He is also an admitted child molester who fled the U.S. rather than face punishment. In the wake of his arrest in Switzerland last weekend at the request of California prosecutors, supporters seem to believe his art should absolve him of responsibility for his crime and for fleeing from the law. We like to say in America that no man is above the law, not even a president. But when it comes to Polanski, his supporters say it’s an outrage that the California prosecutors don’t forgive and try to forget, as his victim has. After all, this is a great artist. “A man of such talent, recognized throughout the world, recognized especially in the country that arrests him — all this is not very pleasant,” French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said. The fact that authorities picked him up when he landed in Zurich to accept an industry award aggravates the ire. “It seems inadmissible,” reads one petition signed by scores of filmmakers and actors, almost all of them men, “that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.” Polanski’s supporters point out it has been 32 years since the crime, during which he has given the world some of the most haunting and emotionally provocative films made. Fearing Judge As for running from the law, a 2008 documentary reported he did so because he had reason to fear a showboating sentencing judge would reject the prosecution’s recommendation for probation. And while we’re getting this part of the argument out of the way, let me add that spending government resources, especially California’s sparse ones, pursuing a 32-year-old case which the victim wants dismissed, hardly seems wise. But the rest of the facts are these. Polanski, then 44, took a 13-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house for a photo shoot when the actor was absent. There, Polanski gave her Champagne, a Quaalude, took a dip in a hot tub with her and had sex with her. More specifically, he raped her twice and performed oral sex, against her protests, however meek, “because I was afraid of him,” she told a grand jury. You can’t read her testimony without realizing how young she was and how malleable to suggestion from this accomplished man 31 years older than she. He should have done time, and lots of it, for taking advantage of her like he did. Guilty Plea But the girl, Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer), wanted to avoid a trial, so Polanski admitted guilt to illegal intercourse and the prosecutor dropped the other five charges. He spent 42 days in jail, which would have been his entire punishment under an agreement his lawyer worked out with the district attorney. But Judge Laurence Rittenband was overheard the day before sentencing bragging at his country club that he would send Polanski away for the rest of his life, according to the documentary. So the director left his Mercedes at Los Angeles International Airport and fled to his native France, where he holds dual citizenship and where he has lived the past three decades. So let’s say the now-dead judge let his love of publicity overtake his sense of justice. Rittenband’s interviews with reporters while the case was pending and his remarks at the country club would surely have been grounds for removing him from the case. In fact, Rittenband was eventually kicked off the still- open case. Public Interest The scarier thing for Polanski would have been that even a wise judge would have been well within his legal authority to reject the plea deal, which is, after all, an agreement between opposing sides. Just because adversaries agree doesn’t mean the deal is in the public’s interest. That is why we have judges. And that is why U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff threw out a $33 million settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Bank of America Corp., for example. And from a criminal justice perspective, you have to pause at the leniency of a 42-day sentence for sex with a 13-year-old girl, made more vulnerable by drugs and alcohol. Samantha Geimer has told reporters she long ago got over the trauma and wishes the prosecution would drop the case. Representing the People Prosecutors should consider victims’ wishes but not be dictated by them. The district attorney represents the people of the state, not any one victim. Besides, Polanski was arrested and held for extradition specifically because he fled the reach of the law, not because of the underlying crime. And that is a slap in the face to the whole system. Yes, the system is flawed. And you can’t blame Polanski for wanting to just leave. The ghoulish coverage of the murder of his first wife, Sharon Tate, and the media orgy that followed his sex crime no doubt was intolerable. Besides, he had already lived as a fugitive under more difficult circumstances, fleeing a Polish ghetto as a child after his mother’s death in Auschwitz. The shame is that it has taken this long to sort everything out. The blame for that lies with Polanski for refusing to answer for evading the law. Celebrate the man’s talent, honor his contributions to filmmaking. However gifted he is, Polanski’s art can’t serve as a reason to ignore his terrible crime or his refusal to answer for it. ( Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.) To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net .

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