Professor Hoppe refers to their type as “beltway libertarians.”

Mark Ames’s article in The Nation that mocks the Cato Institute’s supposed “independence” from its donors provides a few examples (among hundreds more, one can be sure) of what it takes to be a beltway “libertarian.” These include:

- Put the notorious John Yoo, defender of torture and the abolition of civil liberties during Bush’s “war on terra” on your Supreme Court Review editorial board.
- Publicly attack critics of the neocon “war on terra” as “terrorism’s fellow travelers.”
- Call for yet another war by invading Pakistan.
- Call for expanded FBI spying on Americans through warrantless wiretapping.
- Call on Congress to expand and strengthen the odious PATRIOT Act.
- Fire any genuine anti-interventionists on your foreign policy studies staff and force others to resign.
- Hobnob with the likes of Tom DeLay and Dick Armey.
- Pretend to be a “Gay Rights” organization while kissing up to people like Dick Armey who once called Barney Frank “Barney Fag.”
- Boast of how many of your former employees got appointments in the Bush administration.
- Consider the placement of the chief funder of the neocon movement and all of its warmongering, Rupert Murdoch, on your board to be the coup of the century.
- Have employees who give loads of money to Republican Party politicians.
- Hire many former GOP political hacks to pretend to be “policy analysts.”

Two things missing from Ames’s list are: “Wage a vicious and malicious smear campaign against Ron Paul”; and, “After ignoring Ron Paul, the most prominent critic of the Fed in the past thirty years, at your annual monetary conference for 29 years, you finally get around to inviting him to speak there since he has become so enormously popular and will attract a crowd to your boring and predictable conference that no one cares about.” Note: Dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of Fed bureaucrats have spoken at Cato’s annual monetary conference over the years. (Read more)

More than 300 homebuyers accuse California Attorney General Kamala Harris of “doing Bank of America’s bidding” by seizing legal files from their attorney, Mitchell Stein, denying them the right to the legal counsel of their choice.
They say Harris “acted as the pawn of America’s most powerful banks, rather than in the interest of California homeowners,” to silence their attorney in lawsuits against mortgage lenders.
Similar complaints have been filed in Miami and New York. The allegations in this article come from the 54-page complaint in Los Angeles Federal Court.
The plaintiffs claim that Harris’ raid on their attorney’s law firm is an attempt to prevent homeowners from gaining ground in lawsuits against Bank of America and other banks which, they claim, “have committed various types of mortgage fraud and then stolen, or tried to steal, the homes of these plaintiffs in violation of state and federal laws.”
The plaintiffs include more than 300 homeowners from several states who hired Mitchell J. Stein’s law firm to represent them in lawsuits against Bank of America and 13 other financial institutions.
According to the complaint: “On Aug. 17, 2011, defendant Kamala D. Harris, Attorney General for defendant State of California, grossly violated plaintiffs’ civil rights by seizing plaintiffs’ legal files and denying plaintiffs the right to the legal counsel of their choice. (Read more)

A heavily subsidized solar company received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself.

First Solar is the company. The subsidy came from the Export-Import Bank, which President Obama and Harry Reid are currently fighting to extend and expand. The underlying issue is how Obama’s insistence on green-energy subsidies and export subsidies manifests itself as rank corporate welfare. (Read more)

Eurozone finance ministers are holding talks in Brussels aimed at securing a second vital bailout for Greece. France’s Finance Minister Francois Baroin has said all the elements are in place for a deal.

Nick Dunbar, author of The Devil’s Derivatives, revealed how the country turned to investment bank Goldman Sachs for help getting around the deficit rules.

(Story & VIDEO here)

A March 2009 email from a top director at Stratfor (released as part of WikiLeaks’ Global Intelligence Files) shows that former US District Court judge Sam Kent, who has been in prison from May 2009 through November 2011 on an obstruction of justice charge, believed the charges against him were a result of him ruling against Halliburton.

The Kent case saw him accused of “aggravated sexual abuse” and he was later sentenced for lying during the investigation. According to the email, Kent was having lunch of Stratfor director Lauren Goodrich, and said that the Bush Administration’s Justice Department had begun “sniffing around for dirt to throw at me just weeks after I ruled a heavy case against Halliburton.”

The Stratfor analyst “told him he was nuts to rule anything against Halliburton.” (Read more)

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave. (Read more)

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

All government “services”.

Ms. Ramanathan and her husband, Ramesh, along with Sridar Iyengar, set out to change all that in August 2010 when they started ipaidabribe.com, a site that collects anonymous reports of bribes paid, bribes requested but not paid and requests that were expected but not forthcoming.

About 80 percent of the more than 400,000 reports to the site tell stories like the ones above of officials and bureaucrats seeking illicit payments to provide routine services or process paperwork and forms.

“I was asked to pay a bribe to get a birth certificate for my daughter,” someone in Bangalore, India, wrote in to the Web site on Feb. 29, recording payment of a 120-rupee bribe in Bangalore. “The guy in charge called it ‘fees’ ” — except there are no fees charged for birth certificates, Ms. Ramanathan said.

Now, similar sites are spreading like kudzu around the globe, vexing petty bureaucrats the world over. Ms. Ramanathan said nongovernmental organizations and government agencies from at least 17 countries had contacted Janaagraha, the nonprofit organization in Bangalore that operates I Paid a Bribe, to ask about obtaining the source code and setting up a site of their own. (Read more)

See My Theory of Bribes.

Yesterday, Coach is Right published facts concerning an avenue which honest and courageous congressional Republicans might follow in their efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the criminal misadventure of Operation Fast and Furious and its subsequent cover-up. The following represents current news of a vastly different approach.

Congressman John Boehner, the House Speaker better known for displays of weeping than of courage, is reportedly cutting a deal with Eric Holder which would provide a “mutually satisfactory” outcome in Barack Obama’s criminal, gun running endeavor Operation Fast and Furious.

Months ago, Boehner prevented Darrell Issa filing a charge of perjury against Holder even after documents proved the Attorney General’s May 4th House testimony concerning the date of his first “acquaintance” with Fast and Furious to be an outright lie. And now the weepy Speaker will OFFICIALLY let the most corrupt Department of Justice head in the nation’s history off the hook for complicity in the Regime’s murderous scheme to savage the 2nd Amendment rights of the American people.

The terms of the betrayal John Boehner is currently putting together:

The Committee will accept the scalps of [Lanny] Breuer and [Jason] Wienstein, DOJ will release enough of the (documents) to condemn them, claim cooperation (thus giving the appearance of recognizing congress’s oversight authority), and Holder will survive – looking like a “leader” for offering them up (along with a few lower level ATF and DOJ folk). The Committee will chalk one in the “Win” column for oversight and holding people accountable. DOJ will have the same for cooperating and accountability.

Lovely, isn’t it! Hundreds are dead, including two American agents. One of those dead, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was literally set up for murder by an FBI INFORMANT who, on December 14th of 2010, accompanied and LED the drug cartel rip gang responsible for Terry’s death. The other victim, ICE Agent Jaime Zapata was NOT PERMITTED by LAW to even possess a weapon with which he might have defended himself from his killers! (Read more)

This is not the exception. This is the nature of government. This is the reason anyone fighting to keep more of the money he earns is called a radical, a racist, an exploiter, etc.

Some members of Congress send tax dollars to companies, colleges and community groups where their spouses, children and parents work as salaried employees, lobbyists or board members, according to an examination of federal disclosure forms and local public records by The Washington Post.

A U.S. senator from South Dakota helped add millions to a Pentagon program his wife evaluated as a contract employee. A Washington congressman boosted the budget of an environmental group that his son ran as executive director. A Texas congresswoman guided millions to a university where her husband served as a vice president.

Those three members are among 16 who have taken actions that aided entities connected to their immediate families. The findings stem from an examination by The Post of all 535 members of the House and Senate, comparing their financial disclosure forms with thousands of public records. The examination uncovered a broad range of connections between the public and private lives of the nation’s lawmakers.

Several of the cases have received previous media attention, raised by local newspapers or campaign opponents, but the practice has continued unabated, The Post found.

Lawmakers said in interviews that the actions they took were not intended to directly benefit their relatives or themselves. Instead, they say, the largesse was meant to assist corporations, educational programs and community organizations that employ, educate and help residents in their congressional districts.

In some cases, the lawmakers sought advice from congressional committees assigned to examine possible conflicts on Capitol Hill. The panels informed them that the practice of earmarking money to the workplaces of relatives is permissible, as long as tax dollars are not going directly to or solely benefitting their husbands, wives, sons or daughters. Several of the lawmakers also certified to congressional committees that neither they nor their immediate family members stood to benefit from the earmark in question.

Members of Congress have more leeway than executive branch officials or individuals in publicly held companies, who operate under stricter conflict-of-interest rules that generally prevent them from taking actions that might benefit businesses or institutions where their relatives work. The legislators set and enforce their own rules, giving themselves broad latitude to take steps that can end up directly benefiting their immediate family.

. . . .

For years, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) has supported a Pentagon program called Starbase that teaches science, math and engineering skills to children in dozens of locations around the country.

Johnson is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Pentagon’s budget. In 2008, Johnson, along with seven other senators, added $4 million to the Starbase budget.

At the time, Johnson’s wife, Barbara, was paid an annual salary of $80,000 as a contract employee to evaluate the program. From 2005 to September, she worked for the Spectrum Group, a lobbying and consulting firm in Alexandria, that has a $1 million Pentagon contract to monitor Starbase. A social worker and educator, Barbara Johnson was also assigned to manage its Web site.

. . . .

Rep. Ed Pastor (D-Ariz.) is a member of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which has jurisdiction over the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Energy Department agency is tasked with securing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile and preventing nuclear proliferation.

During the past six years, the congressman has directed the agency to send millions to fund the scholarship program for at-risk high school students headed by his daughter in Arizona. She earns $75,774 a year.

Pastor obtained a $1 million federal grant for the Achieving a College Education program at the Maricopa Community Colleges about four years before his daughter, Laura, was hired as its director in 2005. Since that time, Pastor has earmarked about $4 million from the nuclear agency for the program, records show.

Pastor said he’s proud of the earmarks and pointed out that he has sent money to educational programs across his congressional district in Phoenix. Maricopa’s ACE program provides financial support to high school students who are in danger of not graduating, enabling them to take classes and summer camps to build math and science skills and attend college. While the money goes to the program, Pastor said his daughter’s salary is covered by the college.

“The perception is that you helped your daughter, but if you evaluate the kids who benefited from this, it was worth doing,” the congressman said. “I believe thousands of kids have a better life today because of this program.”

Pastor said he was searching to find ways to support the ACE scholarship program in 2005, when one of his colleagues on the appropriations committee said the nuclear security administration had grants available to fund programs at historically black colleges.

. . . .

The Post found a pattern of members of Congress who earmarked funds for colleges where their relatives were employed or on boards.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) has championed millions in earmarks to the University of Houston while her husband, Elwyn C. Lee, has helped to run the school as a senior administrator.

The congresswoman or her staff have met with other top university officials to discuss funding for school programs.

“We greatly appreciate the Congresswoman’s support over the years and hope that she can help us again this year with these requests,” a school official wrote to a staff assistant for the lawmaker in May 2011, according to internal e-mails obtained through a public records request.

Elwyn Lee has worked at the university since 1978. Twenty years later, he had risen to dual executive roles: vice president of student affairs for the university and vice chancellor of student affairs for the university system. Last March, he was named the university’s vice president for community relations and institutional access.

Since 1994, his salary has almost doubled, to $210,491 a year.

Jackson Lee, who took office in 1995, discloses her husband’s job on her financial disclosure form. She has helped obtain four congressional earmarks for the school totaling about $5.3 million since 2009, according to the university.

In 2009, she co-sponsored two earmarks to the university: $2.4 million for a “National Wind Energy Center,” and $476,000 for a “Center for Clean Fuels and Power Generation.” In 2010, she sponsored a $400,000 earmark to the university for teacher training and professional development and co-sponsored an additional $2 million for the wind center.

Last fiscal year, according to her Web site, she sought $16.5 million more for the university that was blocked by the earmark moratorium.

. . . .

As a member of the House education committee, Rep. Robert E. Andrews (D-N.J.) has secured six earmarks worth $3.3 million for a scholarship program at Rutgers School of Law in Camden.

His wife, Camille Spinello Andrews, is an associate dean of the law school “in charge of enrollment, scholarships, and special legal programs,” according to the school’s Web site.

More than half the earmarks were secured prior to 2007, before the House began to require that the spending measures be publicly disclosed. The new rules prompted Andrews to seek an ethics opinion that year. The committee concluded there was no conflict because his wife did not have an “ownership interest” in the law school and the earmarks did not “affect the spouse’s salary.”

The following year, one of Andrews’s political opponents turned the earmarks into a campaign issue. Andrews continued to earmark money for the law school scholarship program, filing certifications that stated “neither I nor my spouse has any financial interest in the project.”

. . . .

From 2007 to 2009, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah)requested earmarks worth more $1.5 million for Weber State University in Ogden. Subsequent to those requests but before $1.25 million of them were ultimately secured, the university hired the congressman’s son Shule Bishop as a lobbyist. He serves as director of government relations. The congressman said the earmarks to Weber posed no conflict because none were requested when his son worked there and his son lobbies the state legislature, not Congress.

“There is no connection,” Rob Bishop said.

His spokeswoman, Melissa Subbotin, added that the congressman and his staff interact with Weber’s Washington lobbyist, not Shule Bishop.

“The congressman has been working on behalf of Weber State since he was first elected, which far predates his son’s employment there,” Subbotin noted, adding that the congressman has given earmarks to other universities in Utah.

. . . .

Since joining Congress in 2005, Rep. Daniel Lipinski has continued his father’s tradition of funding projects in Illinois as a member of the same committee. Along the way, the Chicago Democrat has helped to send federal tax dollars to a client of his father’s lobbying practice, Capricorn Communications.

Daniel Lipinski, along with other members of the Illinois congressional delegation, secured $2.5 million in earmarks since taking office for rail projects that are overseen by the Chicago Transit Authority. The CTA is one of William Lipinski’s lobbying clients and has paid the former congressman $766,330.20 in fees since 2007, according to the transit agency. Lipinski’s earmarks for his father’s client were first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times in 2010.

The CTA said in a statement that William Lipinski helps the agency with congressional contacts outside of the Illinois delegation on the House and Senate transportation committees. Other members of the Illinois congressional delegation have also earmarked money for CTA-related projects.

. . . .

Between 2005 and 2010, Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) helped secure $21.9 million in earmarks to six clients of Alcalde & Fay, a lobbying firm that employs her daughter, The Post found. During that time, the clients paid the firm more than $1 million in fees to represent them before Congress, records show.

Other earmarks by Brown have been previously reported. She was the sole sponsor of $1.79 million in earmarks to a seventh client, the Community Rehabilitation Center. At the time, her daughter, Shantrel Brown, worked as a lead lobbyist on behalf of the center, the Florida Times-Union reported in 2010.

. . . .

Sen. Bill Nelson, a fellow Democrat from Florida, joined Brown as a co-sponsor of a $750,000 earmark for the rehabilitation center in 2010. When he later discovered that Brown’s daughter was a lobbyist for the center, he decided to withdraw his support.

“We try to do our due diligence. The center had the backing of many community leaders,” Nelson spokesman Bryan Gulley told The Post. “But when we learned her daughter was involved in lobbying for the center, that raised enough concerns that we no longer supported the project.” (Read more)

Most military acquisitions are malpractice. Some just cost us miserable taxpayers more than others.

Of all the stinking heaps of corruption in Washing DC, I don’t think any reeks worse that military acquisitions — that’s because there’s just a gigantic myth of noble military service to hide behind.

From Air Force magazine:

F-35 Concurrency was “Acquisition Malpractice”: In retrospect, hurrying the F-35 strike fighter into production was, to say the least, a big mistake, according to the Pentagon’s acquisition executive nominee. “Putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice. It should not have been done. But we did it,” said Frank Kendall, acting acquisition czar, during a Center for Security and International Studies-sponsored address in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Kendall said the department made “optimistic predictions” when it started production that it had good-enough design tools and simulations and modeling such that it wouldn’t have to worry about discovering problems with the aircraft in testing. That “was wrong and now we’re paying the price,” he said. The F-35 program “is probably an extreme example” of transitioning from development to production too early, said Kendall. On the bright side, all three F-35 variants “are making progress,” he noted. “We’re committed to that program. It is the future of tactical air for the Department of Defense.” Further, “we don’t, at this point, see anything that would preclude continuing production at a reasonable rate,” he said. (CSIS’ transcript of event) [emphasis added]

They put the most expensive plane *EVER* into production before a test flight???

See also: US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Washington Whispers reported on the African trip.

First lady Michelle Obama’s family trip to South Africa and Botswana in June cost taxpayers well over $424,000, according to new accounting based on Air Force manifests obtained by Judicial Watch, a taxpayer watchdog group.

The use of Air Force aircraft alone for the June 21-27 trip cost $424,142, said the group, and that doesn’t include the food, lodging, and ground transportation for the 21 family and staff members.

The daughters were listed as senior staff. (Read more)

As part of an ongoing investigation into military mortuary services, the Air Force admits it dumped the partial cremated remains of at least 274 servicemembers in Virginia landfills.

Craig Whitlock and Mary Pat Flaherty of The Washington Post report the dumping was hidden from families who had agreed to allow the military to dispose of their loved ones remains in “a dignified and respectful manner.”

The Air Force halted the practice three years ago, just prior to the 2009 ruling by President Obama to lift the ban on news coverage of fallen troops imposed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Until then, the mortuary activities of the military were hidden from scrutiny.

The Air Force went on to tell The Post that it cannot say how many remains went to the dump and that to find out it would have to search the records of more than 6,300 servicemembers handled by the mortuary since 2001.
(Read more)