Check It Out for Wednesday, April 22nd
Robert Borosage at Campaign for American's Future calls for giving the Contressional Oversight Panel reviewing the bank bailout subpoena power.
" 'The decisions that are made in the next six months or so are likely to set the economic course of this country for the next 50 years,' says Elizabeth Warren, who chairs the COP, the Congressional Oversight Panel charged with reviewing the banking bailout. 'That's what happened coming out of the Great Depression, and I think that will happen now.'
"So Warren is pushing for Treasury to show us the money. What has been done with the $4 trillion the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporations have poured into the financial houses to date? In February, Warren's committee revealed that Treasury provided the top 10 TARP recipients with a subsidy of $78 billion over the market value of the preferred shares purchased for taxpayers, even while stating publicly that the purchases were made "at par."
"But it has been hard going. This weeks' brief hearing with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner represented the first time a Treasury official appeared before the panel. And repeated requests for documents were met with "prolonged silence," in the words of COP commissioner Damon Silvers, until Treasury finally disgorged 10,000 documents this week.
"Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has added her powerful voice to the call for an independent investigation—something like the 1930s Pecora Commission to probe the excesses and crimes that led to the current financial collapse that cost Americans some 20 percent of their wealth.
"As I've written here, the Pecora Commission, named after its chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora, was the 1930s Senate Banking Committee investigation that exposed the frauds and crimes of Wall Street of that day. Armed with the subpoena power to delve into records and to haul miscreants and barons before the committee, Pecora helped create the record, fuel the public outrage, and gird the congressional courage to put in place real regulation of the banks.
"Will Congress step up? Whether we get this right will depend upon a citizenry outraged enough to demand the congress create an independent investigation with the charter, the capacity, and the sheer chutzpah to expose how Wall Street drove us off the cliff."
Dawn Eviatar at The Washington Independent wrote about unprecedented investigative power given to the FBI by the Bush regime.
"Veterans groups and conservatives roared last week when news broke that the FBI was targeting veterans in a broad probe of extremist groups. But little noise was made in December, when the Bush administration quietly granted the FBI wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.
"The Attorney General Guidelines, proposed last summer and adopted by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, appear to be particularly problematic. Although in the past these guidelines required that the FBI have at least some factual basis for believing that the target of an investigation was engaged in criminal activity, in December 2008, Mukasey instituted new guidelines that authorized the FBI to conduct “assessments” of suspects without requiring any factual basis for suspicion.
"Specifically, the Mukasey guidelines, pa-890.html" style="outline-style: none; outline-width: initial; outline-color: initial; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); line-height: 1.2em; text-decoration: underline; ">purportedly “to prevent future terrorist acts against the American people,” allow the FBI to use physical surveillance; interview a person’s neighbors, landlord, colleagues or friends; recruit and assign informants to attend political or other meetings under false pretenses – essentially to act as an undercover spy; and to retrieve personal data from commercial databases; all without having a factual basis to believe that the target of the investigation has done anything wrong.
“ 'I’m a former FBI agent and I can tell you it’s beyond bizarre,' said Michael German, policy counsel on National Security, Immigration and Privacy with the American Civil Liberties Union, and a 16-year veteran of the FBI.
Robert Scheer at Truthdig writes about the thievery under TARP.
"We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud. The IG’s office already has opened 20 criminal fraud investigations into the $700 billion program, which is now well on its way to a $3 trillion obligation, and the IG predicts many more are coming.
"Special Inspector General Neil M. Barofsky charged that the TARP program from its inception was designed to trust the Wall Street recipients of the bailout funds to act responsibly on their own, without accountability to the government that gave them the money.
"He pointed to the example of AIG, which has acted as a conduit of funds to the banks it had insured without being required to tell the government what it is doing: 'Failure to impose this requirement with respect to the injection of yet another $30 billion into AIG would not only be a failure of oversight, but could call into question the credibility of the government’s efforts.'
"As with the entire banking bailout, the new plan of Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is likely to enrich the very folks who impoverished the rest of us, as the report notes: “The significant government-financed leverage presents a great incentive for collusion between the buyer and seller of the asset, or the buyer and other buyers, whereby, once again, the taxpayer takes a significant loss while others profit.”
Haaretz correspondents Galili and Ravid write that far right wing Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman claims that the US does what Israel tells it to do.
"The Obama Administration will put forth new peace initiatives only if Israel wants it to, said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in his first comprehensive interview on foreign policy since taking office.
" 'Believe me, America accepts all our decisions,' Lieberman told the Russian daily Moskovskiy Komosolets.
"Lieberman granted his first major interview to Alexander Rosensaft, the Israel correspondent of one of the oldest Russian dailies, not to an Israeli newspaper. The role of Israel is to "bring the U.S. and Russia closer,' he declared.
"On Tuesday, Army Radio reported that Lieberman ruled out an Arab peace initiative, after previously announcing that Israel was not bound to the U.S.-backed Annapolis process.
" 'This is a dangerous proposal, a recipe for the destruction of Israel,' he was quoted as telling a closed meeting of senior Foreign Ministry officials."
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