8 Year Old To Be Charged With Murder

From the NY Times:

ATLANTA — An 8-year-old boy has been charged with murder in Birmingham, Ala., where the police said Tuesday that he had “viciously attacked” a toddler whose mother had left children alone while she visited one of the city’s nightclubs.

The authorities announced their intention to prosecute the boy, who was not identified, nearly a month after the death of 1-year-old Kelci Lewis. The child was found unresponsive on Oct. 11, and a police spokesman said Tuesday that investigators believed the older boy had become violent because the toddler would not stop crying.

“The 8-year-old just recklessly, viciously dealt with the 1-year-old,” the spokesman, Lt. Sean Edwards, said at a news conference on Tuesday, one day after the girl’s mother surrendered to the authorities and was charged with manslaughter.

Lieutenant Edwards said that the mother, Katerra M. Lewis, and a friend had left the home where they were staying late on Oct. 10. Six children, none of them older than 8, remained at the home, and while Ms. Lewis was away, the lieutenant said, her daughter began to cry.

Soon, the police said, the boy began to beat the girl, to whom he was not related. She was found and pronounced dead the next morning, more than eight hours after investigators believe Ms. Lewis returned to the home.

The police said the girl had suffered “severe head trauma, as well as major internal organ damage.”

Ms. Lewis was released from jail on Monday after posting a $15,000 bond, according to a Sheriff’s Office record. She was held, the agency said, for less than 90 minutes.

Lieutenant Edwards said officials thought that the charge against Ms. Lewis might signal to other parents that they could be prosecuted in similar cases.

“Most mothers that I know would have never done something like this,” Lieutenant Edwards said, “but it definitely sends the message that this type of behavior, this type of irresponsibility on behalf of a parent is totally unacceptable.”

The adults leave all these kids in a house by themselves while they go out clubbing, an 8 year old beats a 1 year old to death and they're charging the 8 year old with murder?

The death of the 1 year old at the 8 year old's hands is horrible, but the fault lies with the adults.

They're charging the mother with manslaughter - that's as it should be, since she is at fault for leaving the kid in a house without anybody over the age of 8.

But seriously, charging the 8 year old with murder?

Not De Blasio's Fault

In two months, the NY Post will directly blame this kind of incident on Bill de Blasio:

Blood stained the ice at the Bryant Park rink Saturday night, after a feud over a coat erupted in gunfire and two skaters who had been struck by bullets were rushed to the hospital still wearing their skates.

Screams rose from a crowd of 150 park-goers as four or five shots rang out at just after 11 p.m. The gunman had been sitting at a nearby table before he rose and opened fire into the rink, striking not only his apparent target but a 14-year-old boy who happened to skate into the shooter’s path.

The boy, Adonis Mera, of Manhattan, was struck in the back — and doctors told family members early Sunday that the lower half of his body has gone numb.

“They said he has no feelings from the waist down,” said Mera’s distraught brother, Jorge Arias, 29.

“He was just there to go skating with friends,” the anguished brother said of Adonis, who had been joyfully posting to his Facebook page about being at the rink moments before being shot.

“Bryant dead ass packed!” the boy posted.

“He took out the gun and held it up and squinted like he was aiming,” said one terrified eyewitness, Frances Vasques, 17, of Brooklyn. “He shot three times and ran.”

“The shots went off and people started jumping over the side of the rink,” said another witness, Andres Seixas, 21, of Queens. “They were climbing over each other to get out.”

The gunman, described as in his 20s, and wearing dreadlocks and a green and black North Face jacket, immediately fled the scene with his pals, and was being sought.

He left behind a scene that one eyewitness described as “mayhem.”

Rink staff began shouting for evervone to get down, as skaters hobbled through the skate house to escape, many of them throwing their rental skates at workers and scrambling away in their stocking feet.

“No one could run because they all had skates on,” said Raghuram Krishnamachari, 29, of Brooklyn. “Two minutes later, everyone was gone except one guy lying there on the ice.”

Cops tried to keep everyone in the skate house for questioning, but “people just wanted to get out,” said Halie Colon, 16, of The Bronx.

The gunman’s apparent intended victim, Javier Conteras, 20, of The Bronx, was hit in his hand and hip. Both were rushed to Bellevue Hospital.

Before rising from his seat and opening fire, the gunman was heard to say to the passing Conteras, “Give me your jacket,” a law-enforcement source said.

When Conteras passed by the gunman a second time, “he feels a burning sensation and sees he’s bleeding from the hand and hip,” the source said.

Rattled eyewitnesses told The Post a similar story — a taunt over a coat, gunfire, and then panic at one of Manhattan’s most beloved landmarks.

“He started walking real quick toward the ice, and I heard him say to the two guys with him that he was going to go talk to the guy who tried to steal his coat,” said witness Danny Betances, 15, of The Bronx. “Then he walked by,” Betances remembered. “I saw him holding a gun in his waistband — and then I ran the other way.”

Shocked skater Brenda Sabater, 15, of Manhattan, called the park “the safest place you could be.”

“This is the last place I thought something like this could happen,” she said. “I’ve seen stuff like this happen, but never in a place I felt safe.”

Notice, no mention of Mayor Bloomberg in this article.

After January 1, they'll cover this article much, much differently.

They'll prominently blame it on de Blasio and say we're heading back to the bad ol' days.

They're As Crooked As The Clintons

Sure Weiner wants to fight for the middle class:

A fierce advocate for her husband, Ms. Abedin was among the final holdouts two years ago who insisted that Mr. Weiner hang onto his Congressional seat, even as the cascading scandal sent allies scurrying and prompted Democratic leaders, including Representative Nancy Pelosi and President Obama, to abandon him.

She married Mr. Weiner in 2010 at a ceremony where Mr. Clinton presided and the groom was teased about his future in Gracie Mansion. In recent months, she has been eager to end a difficult period of social exile during which she and her husband were virtually absent from the public eye — and Mr. Weiner’s access to influential circles was often tied to his wife’s close connections with the powerful world of the Clintons.

The couple live in a spacious Park Avenue apartment owned by a Clinton donor. And it was at a Clinton Global Initiative conference last fall that Mr. Weiner, who at the time was something of a recluse, made one of his few public appearances, drawing stares among the A-list invitees.

In late March, days before he revealed his interest in running for mayor, Mr. Weiner joined his wife and the Clintons in the Dominican Republic for a beach weekend with the fashion designer Oscar de la Renta, who owns a villa there. The former congressman mingled with a boldface crowd that included Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his girlfriend, Diana L. Taylor.

These are people with no principles, no scruples and no morals other than "How do we advance our careers and cash in as much as we can as quickly as we can?"

In that, the Weiners are just like the Clintons.

How did the Clintons, who  had a modest savings and owned no property when Bill first ran for president in 1992 become so wealthy anyway?

Juan Gonzalez: Malcolm Smith Scheme Dumbest Thing Ever

Juan Gonzalez gets this exactly right:

Federal prosecutors allege that state Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) conspired to bribe two key Republican Party bosses in a failed attempt to capture that party’s nomination for mayor.

What could Smith and his alleged co-conspirators possibly have been thinking?

Did they learn nothing from watching a string of fellow lawmakers in Albany and on the City Council carted off to jail?

Did they imagine they could simply fix political races by passing tens of thousands of dollars in unmarked envelopes in shadowy meetings?

Even if this outlandish plan had succeeded and Smith had landed the Republican endorsement, did he really think he could win a Republican primary against far better financed candidates like supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis or former Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota?

And what chance would Smith have on a Republican ticket against any of the Democrats who have been building their campaign organizations for years?

Simply delusional. 

But having watched Smith just a little over the past couple of years after his various charter school scandals (you can see information about two of them here), he had gotten away with his unethical behavior and crookery for so long that perhaps he thought he could get away with this too.

Impunity breeds arrogance and it seems that Malcolm Smith thought he was both immune from accountability and was as arrogant as could be.

Corzine, Top Execs To Get Away With MF Global Robbery

Leave the poor 1% robber barons alone!!!!!! They work really, really hard and sometimes they just, you know make mistakes:

A criminal investigation into the collapse of the brokerage firm MF Global and the disappearance of about $1 billion in customer money is now heading into its final stage without charges expected against any top executives.

After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.

Just more evidence of how crooked and corrupt this country is.

Michael Fiorillo likes to say this is what a banana republic looks like.

He is exactly right.

Must Be The Fault Of Their Teachers

This story from the NY Post brings back memories of old time New York:

A wolf pack of drunken young women “acting stupid” on the downtown No. 6 train after an all-night party stabbed a 63-year-old man yesterday — for having had the nerve to ask them to pipe down, police said.

The man was on his way to work as a vendor near the World Trade Center at about 6:15 a.m., a law-enforcement source told The Post.

“The eight females were acting stupid. He just told them, ‘Relax. Calm down,’ ” the source said.

Instead, one stabbed the man, Ralph Carnegary, in the shoulder. He was in stable condition at Bellevue.

The women were busted on the street near at the 23rd Street station.

A city bus driver who witnessed the arrests said the women, beers in hand, were screaming, “We didn’t do anything.’’

Seven of them, ages 17 to 20, were charged with gang assault, disorderly conduct, rioting, criminal possession of a weapon, menacing and felony assault.

Cops added that they recovered a knife.

The suspects later shouted and cursed at reporters and photographers as they were led to a police van.

Just another example of how "failed" schools and "bad" teachers are bringing about the demise of civil society.

You see, if only these girls had received better schooling from better teachers, they would have been home readying for a productive day at work rather than riding the 6 train with beers in hand at 6:15 AM.

You can trace every problem in society back to "failed" schools and "bad" teachers.

Well, at least the corporate reformers, corporate media and corporate politicians can.

Wall Street Execs Think Criminal Activity Is Part Of Job Description

No surprises here:

A survey of senior executives at financial firms in the U.S. and the U.K., released Monday, found that nearly a quarter of respondents, or 24%, said they consider engaging in unethical or illegal conduct as a necessary ingredient for success in the financial world.

Another 26% said they had either seen or had direct knowledge of wrongdoing.

Worse, 16% of execs admitted they would willingly step over the legal line and commit insider trading — if they knew they could get away with it.

Results of the study, commissioned by law firm Labaton Sucharow, were compiled by anonymously interviewing 500 financial professionals online.

...

The study also found that 30% of respondents felt pressured by their big-buck salaries and bonuses to compromise their ethics or even break the law.

And nearly four in 10, or 39%, felt that their competitors are likely to engage in illegal or unethical activities to get ahead.

No wonder they felt cool to rig LIBOR.

No wonder they get pissed whenever anybody says it's time to "reform" the financial system.

A quarter of Wall Streeters admit that breaking the law is crucial to success in the financial world.

And another 26% said they had either seen or had direct knowledge of criminal activity on the Street.

And those are the ones who admit the truth.

You have to think some of those surveyed didn't.

A rotten, filthy cesspool.

And now they bring their ethics, compensation structure, and evaluation systems to public education.

Rahm Turns Chicago Into Murder Capital Of Country - As Bad As A "Warzone"

The Guardian looks at a rash of violence over the July 4h holiday in the United States:

While Americans across the country celebrated Independence Day on Wednesday, several of the nation's largest cities reported disturbing incidents of violence, with dozens of people shot and many killed.

Chicago was among the worst, with five people killed and 21 wounded in separate shootings Wednesday. By Thursday morning two more people had lost their lives and eight more were injured.

In New York City, meanwhile, 17 people were shot in 13 separate incidents that left three people dead and a police officer wounded. Over the course of roughly four hours, eight people were shot in Brooklyn. The violence persisted into the wee hours of the morning, when NYPD officer Brian Groves was shot in the chest in a Lower East Side stairwell. The officer was saved by his bulletproof vest, and the gunman escaped.

"There are just bullets flying all over the place," said New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg at press conference, as he implored citizens to "stop this craziness."

Gee, I thought your stop-and-frisk polices were putting an end to violence as we know it, Mayor Mike?

Guess not. But Chicago has suffered by far the worst violence:

Indeed Chicago's shootings were an unfortunate reminder of the violence that has gripped the city as of late, where the murder rate has outpaced death tolls in active US war zones. While roughly 2,000 Americans have died since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, more than 5,000 people have been killed by gunfire in Chicago over the same period. As the nation's third largest city, Chicago's murders have spiked 35% since this time last year, with the number of homicides topping the number of US troops killed in Afghanistan in 2012.

The violence in Chicago on Wednesday followed a tragically similar day on Tuesday, that resulted in 16 people shot over a six-hour period, including a 14-year-old boy, a 15-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl who was gunned down while playing at an open fire hydrant.

Responding to the shooting of the young girl, Nakita Collins, a resident of her neighborhood, described the area to the Chicago Sun-Times: "It's become infested with drugs and gang activity."

"We pay taxes and they don't take care of us," she said. "They don't patrol … I just don't think they care."

Of course they don't care.

This is Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, Second City in Barack Obama's America.

Unless you're a banker, a hedge fund manager, or otherwise part of the 1%, they do not give a shit about you.

Not at all.

Rahm is of course blaming all this on the previous mayor.

But the reality is, that's just a scapegoat excuse.

The real reason is, no one in power cares to fix the inequity the country is facing that causes so many (more and more every day) to fall into despair and hopelessness.

That's what happens when you only listen to your hedge fund and bankster buddies and promote their "austerity policies" (i.e., tax breaks and bailouts for corporations and banskters, austerity measures for everybody else.)

Neo-liberals like Rahm just don't know (or seem to care) how bad things are out there for people.

Don't be surprised as the summer goes on if we don't see riots and other outbreaks of violence like the one's Britain saw last summer.

Perhaps that will get there attention.

Unfortunately I imagine they'll just use all of their "anti-terrorism toys" to deal with the problems instead of facing the real problem - the increasing feudalization of the nation.

Andrew Cuomo On The Take

The NY Times reports the following:

A group closely allied with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo received $2 million from gambling interests last December as he developed a proposal to expand casino gambling in New York.

Mr. Cuomo’s support for expanded gambling, which he made a centerpiece of his State of the State address in January, had a profound impact. Within weeks, the Legislature endorsed a constitutional amendment that, if approved once more by lawmakers and then by voters, would allow for seven full-scale, privately owned casinos, potentially worth billions of dollars.

Genting, a subsidiary of Southeast Asia’s largest gambling company, made an additional contribution of approximately $400,000 to the group allied with Mr. Cuomo during 2011. The New York Gaming Association, a trade group founded by Genting and other companies that operate racetracks and electronic slot machines, chipped in the $2 million.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, strongly disputed any suggestion that he was influenced by money from the gambling industry. He noted that he had expressed support for an expansion of casino gambling months before the contributions were made, and that he had diverged from the gaming association on several key issues.

“To try to suggest an improper relationship between the governor and gaming interests is to distort the facts in a malicious or reckless manner,” Richard Bamberger, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said in an e-mail.

Uh, huh - sure all that money had no influence on Cuomo.

Except that the non-profit group Cuomo had his business cronies create for him sure did get a lot of that yummy yummy gambling money:

The contributions went to the Committee to Save New York, a business and labor coalition that raised $17 million and spent nearly $12 million in 2011, much of it on campaign-style television and radio advertisements praising Mr. Cuomo and supporting his proposals to cap property taxes and slash state spending.

Founded by real estate developers and business executives at Mr. Cuomo’s urging shortly after he was elected governor, the committee has rapidly become the biggest spender on lobbying in Albany, providing not only critical backing for Mr. Cuomo but also a counterweight to the labor unions whose money and political muscle have traditionally dominated the Capitol.

The Committee to Save New York defended its fast-growing role in Albany.

“From the inception of C.S.N.Y., we have focused on a reform agenda designed to help create jobs, improve the economy of our state and get state government working for the people again,” said Michael McKeon, a spokesman for the committee. “We are proud of our track record, and if there are people who felt they were getting something more for contributing to C.S.N.Y., then they are simply wrong.”

Because it is organized as a nonprofit social advocacy group, called a 501(c)4, the Committee to Save New York is not required to disclose the sources of its money publicly. But The New York Times learned some details of the group’s financing through a review of public records and interviews with more than two dozen individuals familiar with the group’s activities.

The $2 million from the gaming association appears to have made it the committee’s second largest contributor in 2011, according to a tax return released by the committee last month, which included information on donation amounts but did not identify donors.

The largest donor to the Committee To Save New York was another business-funded organization, the Partnership for New York City.

You can see why Cuomo pursues the policies he does - he is completely beholden to the Wall Street criminals.

But the gambling money, well, that's just like old time graft, really.

Murdoch/Cameron/Hacking Update

Lots of things happening in the ever-growing Murdoch/Cameron/News Corporation scandal - here's a rundown:

Former News of the World editor and Cameron aide Andy Coulson and former News International chief Rebekah Brooks will testify before the Leveson inquiry this week. Coulson has been arrested once in the hacking case, Brooks twice.

The Independent is reporting that a News Corporation lobbyist who has bragged about his close working relationship with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has also worked closely with David Cameron as well, undercutting Tory excuses that the lobbyist was making empty claims:

David Cameron agreed to a meeting with one of Rupert Murdoch's senior executives that was arranged by the lobbyist now at the centre of the Jeremy Hunt scandal, The Independent on Sunday has learnt.

Frédéric Michel, whose numerous emails to Mr Hunt's special adviser have put pressure on the Culture Secretary to resign, set up the secret talks between Mr Cameron and Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain and a member of Mr Murdoch's News Corporation board.

The involvement of Mr Michel, the head of public affairs for News Corp, in such a top-level meeting severely undermines his portrayal by Mr Hunt and the Prime Minister as simply a lobbyist and "Walter Mitty" fantasist.

The previously undisclosed meeting in November 2009 also shows how Mr Cameron was being assiduously courted by News Corp executives beyond the Murdoch family, as the company was gearing up for its bid to take over BSkyB.

George Osborne and William Hague were also present at the talks, The IoS understands.

The Prime Minister is under increasing pressure over the Leveson inquiry ahead of the appearances this week of the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks and Mr Cameron's ex-communications chief, Andy Coulson.

At the same time, Mr Cameron is struggling to contain open revolt among Conservative MPs over the direction of his party, including pressure from some figures to sideline George Osborne as election strategist, following Boris Johnson's securing of a second term as London Mayor. Mr Johnson's double victory exposes Mr Cameron's weakness as a leader who never crossed the finishing line, say some MPs.

The Daily Mail reports David Cameron has reason to dread Rebekah Brooks' testimony before Leveson:

David Cameron faces the embarrassment of highly personal text messages and emails to and from former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks being revealed this week.

Mrs Brooks and the Prime Minister’s ex-No 10 spin doctor, Andy Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World newspaper over phone hacking, are both due to give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the scandal.

It has been claimed that Mr Cameron was so close to Mrs Brooks that he texted her up to a dozen times a day – and that Mrs Brooks has kept all the communications.

Mr Cameron and Mrs Brooks are said to sign-off some of their text messages to intimate friends with the friendly ‘x’ preferred by many habitual phone texters.

If they did so in messages to each other, it could add to the Government’s growing discomfort over the Leveson disclosures.

According to some sources, Mr Cameron sent text messages of support to Mrs Brooks and her husband, race-horse trainer Charlie Brooks, before she was forced to resign over the phone-hacking affair.

So much for Cameron's claims that he wasn't all that close to News Corporation executives.

The Independent also reports that former Cameron aide Andy Coulson owned News Corporation shares while working for the prime minister at a time when News Corporation was trying to buy up the rest of BSkyB:

Andy Coulson held shares in News Corporation while he was David Cameron's head of communications at Downing Street, at a time when the Government was deciding whether to approve the company's takeover of BSkyB, it is revealed today.

Mr Coulson, who faces a tough time when he gives evidence to the Leveson inquiry this Thursday, was awarded the blue-chip shares as part of his pay-off when he resigned as editor of the News of the World over the phone-hacking scandal in 2007.

The revelation raises difficult questions for the Prime Minister over whether he knew about Mr Coulson's financial interests.

An Independent editorial wonders if Cameron is "competent" enough to stand as prime minister.

And it seems the rest of Britain is wondering the same. Local elections in Britain saw Conservatives and Liberal Democrats swept from power, indicating patience with and support for the coalition government is waning and (perhaps) support for a Labor Party led by Ed Milliband is growing. Hard to know how much loss of support Cameron and the Tories had over the hacking scandal (it's probably very little, actually) but you'd have to say the fallout from the scandal is not helping them much at a time when the economy has fallen into recession again.

And finally, The Guardian says Cameron dare not cast Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation adrift despite the bad smell emanating from the relationship:

The greatest fear is among the Conservatives. Murdoch's decision to release emails that showed how Jeremy Hunt's adviser was facilitating News Corporation's takeover of BskyB was a taste of what may come. Not just Hunt, but Cameron and George Osborne were complicit in promising sweetheart deals to News Corporation. Coulson, Brooks, James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch know it. What is more, the Tory leadership suspects they can prove it.

We are in the absurd position where the Conservatives dare not stop fawning over Murdoch now for fear that he will reveal how they fawned over him in the past.

Should be another interesting week in the News Corporation scandal.

Did New York Post Reporters Engage In Illegal Hacking?

With the news today that Mark Lewis, the British lawyer who successfully battled Rupert Murdoch and News International over illegal phone hacking in Britain, is going to file at least three cases in the United States against News Corporation for phone hacking on U.S. soil, one question comes to mind:

How far does the criminality at News Corporation go?

Looking back, every time there was an allegation of hacking or wrongdoing made against News Corporation/International employees, the company sought to minimize the damage by either denying the allegations or saying they were limited to one individual.

When hacking reports first surfaced in Britain and News International (News Corporation's British subsidiary) was forced to admit that someone at the News of the World had hacked into phones, they blamed the incidents on "one rogue reporter."

Later on, that excuse was made inoperative when it became apparent that hacking was endemic at News of the World, many reporters there had engaged in the practice and News of the World executives knew this.

At that point, News International claimed hacking was limited to the News of the World tabloid (which Murdoch promptly closed) and was not engaged in by employees at any other N.I. papers.

But that excuse was made inoperative when the police arrested a News International employee at News of the World's sibling paper, The Sun, for hacking.

At this point, News Corporation, looking to minimize the damage to just its British tabloids, began turning over reams of evidence to British police that led to the arrests of more Sun employees.

The atmosphere got so toxic at The Sun, as employees felt Rupert Murdoch and his scandal fixer Joel Klein were using them as scandal scapegoats, that Murdoch himself had to fly into London to quell potential rebellion.

Then allegations came that reporters for the Times of London, another Murdoch owned newspaper, had engaged in the hacking of email accounts, further ratcheting up the scandal from reporters at the Murdoch tabloids hacking into phones to reporters at the respected Times of London hacking into email accounts.

The line from News Corporation at this point was hacking and the attendant police bribery, corruption, conspiracy to cover up crimes and destruction of evidence were limited to its British newspapers and were being cleaned up by scandal fixer Joel Klein and News Corporation's new ethical guidelines committee.

But that excuse was made inoperative when it was reported that Sky News, a partially-owned Murdoch TV news channel, had also engaged in illegal hacking of computer accounts.

The excuse executives at Sky News used for the illegal hacking was that the crimes were in the "public interest," though legal experts in Britain say the legal statutes contain no such clause for law breaking.

In any case, the hacking scandal had now gone from Murdoch's British papers to a TV news channel partially owned by Murdoch. In an additional widening of the scandal, News Corporation has also been accused of hiring hackers to steal the security codes of rival satellite operators and disseminate those codes for free on the Internet to ruin its rivals.

When those allegations surfaced, Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter to deny them as ridiculous and to claim that News Corp. was getting ready to hit back hard against its opponents.

That was last week.

This week, one of its opponents, the lawyer who successfully fought the Murdochs and News International over hacking in Britain (winning settlements for Milly Dowler's family as well as scores of other hacking victims) instead has taken the fight to Murdoch and News Corporation by announcing suits to be filed in the U.S. over hacking on U.S. soil, with at least one of the alleged hackees a U.S. citizen.

At every point in time when News Corporation was faced with allegations of criminal wrongdoing, the Murdochs or their henchmen (including former NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein) claimed the crimes were limited in scope and there was no further wrongdoing to be revealed.

Every one of those excuses by News Corporation was eventually proven inoperative.

Which brings me to the question of whether New York Post (or Wall Street Journal or FOX News) employees have engaged in any hacking or criminal wrongdoing.

News Corporation defenders have maintained that no hacking has occurred in the United States by News Corporation employees at U.S. news outlets.

Even the cases soon to be filed by Lewis are for hacking done by British reporters at the News of the World (though the hacking is alleged to have occurred on U.S. soil.)

But as I have noted above, at every juncture where News Corporation has tried to build a firewall to the scandal and limit the scope and the damage, the fire has breached the wall and spread elsewhere.

We have gone from phone hacking limited to "one rogue reporter" at News of the World to the exposure of widespread phone hacking by many News of the World employees to the spreading of the both phone and computer hacking to The Sun and the The Times of London to the additional spreading of the hacking to a TV operation partially owned by Rupert Murdoch to TV piracy allegations made against News Corporation in Australia, Britain and Italy.

With every excuse or denial made by News Corporation eventually made inoperative by subsequent revelations of criminal wrongdoing, why should we believe that News Corporation employees at the Murdoch-owned New York Post or Wall Street Journal or FOX News haven't engaged in criminal wrongdoing like hacking, bribery, extortion, etc.?

In addition, many News Corporation employees at the Post, Journal, et al. came over from Murdoch's British newspapers where criminal wrongdoing was habitual.

Why should we believe that those News Corporation journalists and employees left their criminal ways back in Britain when they began work at Murdoch's U.S. papers?

So far, betting that every allegation made against News Corporation over hacking, bribery, criminal activity, et al. is actually worse than first revealed would make you a lot of money while believing ANY of the excuses or denials News Corp. has offered in the scandal would lose you a lot of money.

Now that lawsuits are to be filed in the U.S. against News Corporation, there will be a lot of scrutiny to Murdoch's U.S. operations that he has so far avoided.

For whatever reason, the Obama DOJ has seemingly slow-walked its investigation of claims that News Corporation employees hacked into the family members of 9/11 victims, so much so that some family members have become frustrated by the lack of progress in the case.

I have speculated that just as the Obama DOJ didn't want to prosecute any Bushies over torture because of the political fallout such cases would engender, the Obama DOJ is reluctant to pursue a case against News Corp. here in the U.S. over hacking for fear of seeming "political" in an election year by going after the owner of FOX News.

But with Mark Lewis getting ready to file suits in both NY and LA, you can bet that Murdoch will no longer have his scandal firewall in the U.S. and the Obama DOJ will not be able to slow walk their investigation any more.

And as light gets shone onto News Corp's U.S. properties, particularly onto the Wall Street Journal (where publisher Les Hinton resigned as a consequence of the hacking scandal in Britain) and the Post, more criminal wrongdoing by News Corporation employees will be exposed.

So far that has been the case at every juncture of the scandal.

There is no reason to believe that has changed now.

Bloomberg Refuses To Take Responsibility For CityTime Corruption

It's not his fault!!!!!!!!!

Mayor Bloomberg today insisted most of the problem with his scandal-scarred CityTime payroll project was cost over-runs – not corruption.

“The biggest expense was that they started out by underestimating the complexity and cost of the project and then, as they went along, kept adding things. That’s the biggest chunk,” Bloomberg said this morning on his radio show.

He added: “But there was an unconscionable amount of fraud.”

His comments seemed to reject allegations from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who blasted the CityTime project on Monday as “one of the largest and most brazen frauds ever committed against the City of New York.”

Bharara was, at the time, announcing yet another indictment of consultants connected with the computerized payroll project – Reddy and Padma Allen, a husband and wife who co-owned a subcontractor called TechnoDyne L.L.C. That brings the total number of indictments to 11 people and one company, TechnoDyne.

The indictment claims that “virtually the entirety of the more than $600 million that was paid to [the main contractor, Scientific Applications International Corporation] was tainted directly or indirectly by fraud.”

The scandal has tainted Bloomberg’s third term, but he has largely dismissed suggestions that he or his administration is at fault.

“The system is now up and working and it seems to be working,” Bloomberg said on the radio this morning. “There was an enormous amount of fraud. How much it really is, will be, and how much you can recover, you know, you won’t know.”

Wow - the Mayor of Accountability takes no accountability for the CityTime mess.

In fact, he doesn't even agree that it is a mess at all.

Sure, he acknowledges there was corruption and overruns that just couldn't be helped, but overall he thinks the project is just great.

Just great.

Talk about a lack of accountability.

Let's review.

The U.S. attorney said the following about the CityTime project:

The CityTime project was "corrupted to its core."

The fraud was "epic in magnitude, duration and scope."

$600 million dollars of the money the city paid for the project was either directly or indirectly tainted by the criminality.

This crime one of the "most brazen frauds ever committed against New York City."

That's what the U.S. attorney working on the case said about the matter.

11 people have been indicted in the scheme so far.

The U.S. attorney promises more indictments to come.

In Bloomberg's world, this is nothing to blink at.

You see, these were private consultants from the private sector, not unionized employees from the public sector, so really, what's the matter if the project goes nine years over the time it was supposed to be completed and increases from the original $63 million pricetag to somewhere over $700 million dollars?

So what if the consultants working on CityTime extended the project by years in order to steal $600 million dollars?

So what if the company hired to work on the technology project stole $400 million and had no other major clients (in fact, probably wouldn't have existed if not for the CityTime money)?

So what?

In the words of another great manager of government projects, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, "Shit happens!"

Ah, but can you imagine if the $600 million dollars had been stolen by unionized and public employees?

Oy vey, Bloomberg would have been talking all the day long about how crooked the city employees are, what a disgrace the unions are, how everybody involved needs to go to jail, yadda yadda unions suck yadda...

Same goes for what the editorial boards at the tabloids - the Times, the Murdoch Street Journal, the Post and the News.

They NEVER would let this theft - the worst EVER committed against the City of New York - pass with nary a bad word about the crooks, the companies themselves that enabled this thievery or the system that so was so lacking in oversight that the crooks oversaw themselves.

And yet, because these are private consultants working for private companies, well, what can we do about it?

Shit happens, you know?

The double standard applied to this crime is emblematic of our times (as I noted in this earlier post here.)

But $600 million stolen dollars is STILL $600 million stolen dollars.

So here is what ought to happen in this case:

The mayor ought to be arrested himself for criminal negligence in this matter.

Certainly he ought to be called to account and made to publicly state how it was that the worst fraud in the history of New York City was committed on his watch and continued for years after a whistleblower alerted the city to the matter.

And he ought to NOT be allowed to lay off thousands of teachers and close senior centers and firehouses in order to save a few hundred million when he has not only allowed $600 million to be stolen by the private consultants but plans to spend another $900 million on private consultants and tech spending for the NYCDOE next year, a bonanza of corruption and fraud that should not be allowed to go forward without significant scrutiny by outside entities independent of the mayor.

The Mayor of Accountability needs to to be held accountable himself for the corruption in the CityTime case, as well as the DOE corruption that has already seen one outside consultant arrested for stealing $3.6 million and a top DOE official resign because the company she was overseeing was stealing money from the DOE (even as she was sleeping with one of the owners.)

And these are just the crimes that have been revealed so far under Bloomberg's watch.

Remember, Bloomberg doesn't have to give a lot of details about how he spends money in capital projects, so who knows how much money the crooked consultants are getting away with in the no-bid contracts they've been handed by Bloomberg.

It is time for Bloomberg to go.

Time to go, old man.

Bermuda is calling.

And so is Sing Sing.

Enough is enough.

Bloodshed Across City

A bloody night in New York:

Bullets flew across New York City late Saturday and early Sunday, as vicious gunfire left two men dead and 15 people injured in Brooklyn, Queens and Harlem.

Seven separate shootings bloodied Brooklyn alone, including fatal fights in Brownsville and East New York, where a 22-year-old Queens father died.

Anthony McRae, 22, was gunned down about 4:45 a.m. Sunday in front of the Hamzah Deli and Grocery on Rockaway Ave., police said.

He was shot at least four times and cops are reviewing deli surveillance tapes, but do not have any suspects in custody yet.

McRea lived in Far Rockaway and worked two jobs at AT&T and Foot Locker to support his 2-year-old son, Carter, family said.

...

Around midnight, three young teens were also shot in Marine Park, Brooklyn during a spat over a 16-year-old's bike. Three people were injured, one critically.

Less than half an hour later, a shooting at a Prospect-Lefferts Gardens house party left five people wounded. Two men who were denied entrance to the gathering, unloaded about 12:15 a.m. into the crowd of revelers gathered outside 349 Fenimore Street, an eye witness said.

In Brownsville, a 45-year-old man was shot multiple times and died near his home late Saturday night.

Jerry Armstrong, 45, was found with several gun shot wounds on 95th Street about 11 p.m. Saturday.

Two additional shootings left two men wounded in Brooklyn, as did a pair of shootings in Queens. One person was also wounded in Harlem.

Of course none of this happened in the parts of the city where Bloomberg and his cronies live, so it'll be like it never happened.

And of course the city's crime stats are about as reliable as the NYCDOE test score stats and graduation rate data, so when Bloomberg says this city's safer than ever, he's full of shit.

Make no mistake, the city is growing more dangerous by the month.

Going To Be A Long Hot Summer

Already near a 100 degrees in early June.

The economy is tanking again.

Layoffs coming in both the public and private sectors.

Housing market continues to tank.

Food and gas prices are up, though.

So is the crime rate.

And the unemployment rate.

As a student of mine used to jokingly say when I'd ask him why he didn't bring a pen to class, "Times is hard, mistuh, times is hard."

Dunno if any of that has anything to do with this story, but...

A flurry of gunshots were fired into a crowd at a Brooklyn beach Thursday, wounding five people -- two of them gravely, officials said.

The gunfire erupted about 5:20 p.m. on the boardwalk near Brighton Sixth St., as hundreds of teens enjoyed the sand on a day off from school.

Police were still investigating what led to the shooting, questioning at least one person after the mayhem. No one has been arrested.

"It was chaotic," said a 48-year-old woman visiting the beach from Astoria, Queens. "It was hectic. It was panic. We feared for our lives."

A male and a female were rushed to Coney Island Hospital after the shooting. Their conditions were described as very critical. The ages of those two victims weren't immediately available.

Two men, one believed to be in his 20s with gunshot wounds to his ankle and elbow, were taken to Lutheran Medical Center.

"Just watched some idiot kid let off 8 rounds into a crowded beach," read one Tweet by @djslicknick. "Some people have no sense. I'm never going to Brighton Beach again."

Dozens of cops were on the scene hours after the shooting.

Guess we'll learn more later about this.

But the heat, the despair in the air, the anger - it doesn't bode well for the summer.

UPDATE: The NY Post has more:

Five people were shot and wounded — two critically — near Brighton Beach this evening as hundreds of youths swarmed the area with schools closed for "Brooklyn-Queens Day."

"It’s a bad combination of guns, heat, beer and angry young men," a police source said, pointing to empty malt liquor bottles strewn all over The Boardwalk.

Guns, heat, beer and angry young men.

Yeah - gonna be a long hot summer.

The Bad Old Days

Lots of high profile murders and violence in NYC this past week had me feeling like it was New York circa 1989.

The Daily News noticed too:

A recent spate of murders in the city combined with a shrinking police force has some officials and residents fearing bloody months ahead.

And the summer hasn't even started yet.

"I think it's only going to get worse with more violence and shootings," said Alyssa Bryan of Brownsville, Brooklyn. "I have a bad feeling about it. Look at what happened already."

Eight people were shot to death across the city between 12:01 a.m. Friday and Monday night, including a mom in the Bronx and a father of two in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has warned for some time that the reduction in the number of officers - from 41,000 in 2001 to 35,400 this year - would eventually have an impact on crime.

That warning stands a good chance of coming true beginning in July, when a Police Academy class typically hits the street, according to City Councilman Peter Vallone (D-Queens). Budget cuts forced the postponement of the class.

"We're not going to have new police officers the rest of the year," said Vallone, who heads the City Council's Public Safety Committee. "Right now, it's clear to the population we do not have the beat cops and bike cops we used to have. And if it's clear to the population, it's clear to the bad guys, as well."

But Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the NYPD's top spokesman, said the spate of murders over the weekend is likely an aberration.

"We see crime peaks and valleys throughout the year that tend to flatten over time," he said.

Police records show murders were down 1% through Sunday, according to the latest NYPD data available. Police reported a much sharper decline through Feb. 23 - a drop of 25%. That means the number of murders have risen at an alarming rate in March, April and May compared with the same period last year.

Eugene O'Donnell, a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the NYPD's shrinking patrol force is worrisome. "We have no reason to believe there can't be slippage back to the bad old days," he said.

What people don't seem to understand is that we don't have money for cops - we only have money for tax cuts for hedge fund managers and money to hire outside consultants and money for data tracking systems.

Geez, what does Bloomberg have to do to get you guys to understand what's what?

Bloomberg = Scandal

How many scandals do we have in Bloomberg's third (illegal) term so far?

Here's a recap:


The Independence Party scandal

The CityTime scandal

The NYPD ticket-fixing scandal

The Willard Lanham Project Connect scandal

The latest DOE/outside consultant scandal

How much lost revenue in the ticket-fixing scandal? I haven't seen a dollar amount yet, but since 400 cops are involved, let's estimate it's pretty significant.

In the CityTime scandal, the project is $700 million over budget and over $80 million of that was stolen by the crooks.

In the Lanham scandal, $3.6 million has been stolen.

In the Haggerty/Independence Party scandal, Bloomberg had $1 million of his own money stolen.

In the latest DOE computer tech scandal, there is no dollar amount yet, but looking at the numbers Juan Gonzalez has dug up on just how much the consultants are overcharging the DOE (inflating labor costs by 600%), again it will be significant.

A lot of money is going up in flames here in NYC courtesy of Bloomberg.

That ought to be brought up when he announces teacher layoffs soon.

Bloomberg Administration Accused Of Conflict Of Interest In Choice Of "Taxi of Tomorrow"

What do you know? Another Bloomberg scandal:

Some politicians are already saying hail no to the city's pick for the "Taxi of Tomorrow."

The city announced Tuesday that it had selected Japanese automaker Nissan to produce the "Taxi of Tomorrow" after submitting a bid based on its NV200 minivan design, as first reported by the Daily News.

But Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Assemblyman Micah Kellner and Public Advocate Bill DiBlasio already called on city Controller John Liu to investigate the selection process, alleging a possible conflict of interest.

A TLC consultant on "Taxi of Tomorrow," automotive design and engineering company Ricardo also has done business with Nissan and Ford, the officials say.

Kellner also blasted the design for not being 100 % handicap accessible - and for looking old-fashioned.

"Who knew that the 'Taxi of Tomorrow' was the delivery van of yesterday?" Kellner said. "Just because you paint a van yellow doesn't make it a taxi."

The letter sent to Comptroller Liu over the potential conflict of interest is here.

Liu is really busy these days looking into all the crookedness that is the Bloomberg administration.

He's auditing the iZone contract with Wireless Generation, the ARIS contract, various other DOE contracts, any contract involving IBM or Verizon - two major city vendors who helped former DOE computer consultant Willard Lanham steal $3.6 million from the city.

And now the Taxi of Tomorrow selection process.

Just how many potential Bloomberg scandals can there be?

You know, after nine years of NOBODY holding Bloomberg or Bloomberg officials accountable for ANYTHING, there are a LOT of potential Bloomberg scandals.

Dana Milbank Discovers How Crooked The Banks Are First Hand

I repost in full for those of you out there who think the banks are only foreclosing upon or mistreating deadbeat customers:

The problem in the nation's housing market now isn't subprime lending. It's subpar lenders.

Last fall, my wife and I refinanced our mortgage with Citibank. Sixty days later, we received a "cancellation notice" from our homeowners insurance company "for non-payment of premium."

Turns out Citibank, which had been collecting hundreds of dollars a month from us to pay the insurer, hadn't made the payments. It was, I later learned, one of the usual tricks mortgage servicers use to squeeze more cash out of their customers. About a month later, I learned of another trick: Citibank informed us that it was increasing our monthly payment by nearly $300.

Along the way, a simple refi became a months-long odyssey: rates misquoted, interest charged on a phantom account, legal documents issued in wrong names, a mortgage officer who disappeared for days at a time (first it was his birthday, then his laptop was in the shop), a bounced check from Citibank's own title company, and the freezing of our bank accounts.

For me, this amounts to no more than the hassle of arguing with Citibank to fix its "mistakes." But consumer advocates tell me these are typical of the screw-ups by the big banks that service home mortgages. And these errors - accidental or otherwise - are driving large numbers of people into default and foreclosure when it otherwise would not have happened.

It's a bad situation - and the new majority in the House is poised to make it even worse.

Republicans are aiming to repeal the Home Affordable Modification Program, the Obama administration's main response to the foreclosure crisis. The program, by all accounts, has been disappointing, helping only about 600,000 homeowners of the 3 million to 4 million projected. But its failure, watchdog groups say, was caused by the mortgage servicers' ineptitude - lost paperwork, bad accounting and the like - and lack of concern about whether the mortgages they service (but don't own) go into default. Rather than crack down on the banks, the House Republicans would kill the one program that, at least in theory, gives borrowers some chance of avoiding foreclosure.

"If you take that away, you've got nothing," says Julia Gordon, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. "The servicers can just do whatever they want."

That's the last thing the struggling housing market needs. Because banks quickly resell mortgages, they don't much care how the loans perform; their job is to extract the maximum in fees.

This is how we wound up with the robo-signing scandal, in which servicers erroneously forced homeowners into foreclosure. This, too, is why there has been an epidemic of misapplied payments, bogus fees and mismanagement of escrow accounts for tax and insurance. If a borrower's homeowners insurance lapses, the servicer can "force-place" the borrower with a more expensive insurer, sometimes receiving kickbacks.

The nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank legislation, could rein in these abuses - which explains why the banks, in concert with House Republicans, have been working to strip funding and responsibility from the new agency. This, combined with the repeal of Obama's foreclosure program, would leave the mortgage servicers supervised only nominally by the anemic Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

My wife and I are reasonably savvy consumers - she has a brand-name MBA, and I began my career as a business reporter for the Wall Street Journal - but we were no match for a bungling bank. After five months of trying, we still haven't been able to resolve all of Citibank's mistakes - nearly all of them, curiously, in the bank's favor.

Of all the miscues, the highlight was when we were handed, at closing, a large check that we didn't want for a new home-equity line of credit. I tried to redeposit it into the home-equity account but was told that the account did not yet exist. I tried to deposit it into my checking account, and the check was returned unpaid - while interest accrued.

That so much can go wrong with such a simple refinance doesn't bode well for the 5.5 million homeowners in default (on top of the 3 million already foreclosed). It's impossible to know for sure, but by some estimates, half of them are victims of some form of servicers' errors.

"What happened to you," Ira Rheingold of the National Association of Consumer Advocates told me, "happens to people every single day." And it will continue, with its resulting drag on the economy, unless and until the big banks can be brought to heel.

Good to see this story show up in the bastion of conventional wisdom - the Washington Post - and see it happen to a certified member of the Village Elite.

Perhaps now other Village Eliters will be less inclined to take the part of the banksters over the poor schulbs getting screwed over by them every day.

NYU Students Carry Most Debt Of Any Private College In Country

NYU students take to Washington Square to protest debt levels at the college:

NYU students have a lot of debt and they are sick of it, apparently. Earlier this afternoon a group of students raged (peacefully) against the machine in Washington Square Park, donning masks and t-shirts on which they had written how much they owe. The aim was to bring attention to the fact that NYU's students carry a cumulative $659 million in debt, the highest in the country for a non-profit college or university.

The majority of the peaceful demonstration revolved around those in attendance donning masks and shirts emblazoned with their debt while standing very, very still for a few moments. It was organized by NYU Local and MTV's Andrew Jenks.

The Local's EIC Charlie Eisenhood—who spoke in the park about the burdens of student debt without blaming anyone—had some high hopes. Before it he told the Washington Square News that "I'd like NYU to feel compelled to put out a statement both on their own policy on financial aid and maybe what we could do nationally. If anybody who could offer a solution, it should be NYU." We'll find out soon enough if NYU takes the bait.

Yeah, the brain trust at NYU was too busy buying up downtown real estate to respond to the protest.

They did, however, raise tuition and fees just a little bit to cover the higher real estate costs (the market's up these days, you know!)

So Much For Performance-Based Pay On Wall Street

The hedge fund managers and Wall Streeters are screaming that teachers need to be held accountable through performance-based pay schemes that use student test scores as a basis for compensation.

They say this is only fair because everywhere else in the economy these days people are paid based upon performance, not some lockstep pay ladder.

The Wall Streeters and hedge fundies say this is especially so in business and on Wall Street where the only thing that matters is performance.

But of course, that's just self-serving jive:

Intent on fixing a banking system that contributed heavily to the recent financial crisis, lawmakers and regulators pushed Wall Street to overhaul its pay practices. Big banks responded by shifting more compensation into stock, a move intended to align employees’ interests more closely with those of investors and discourage excessive risk-taking.

But it turns out that executives have a way to get around those best-laid plans. Using complex investment transactions, they can limit the downside on their holdings, or even profit, as other shareholders are suffering.

More than a quarter of Goldman Sachs’s partners, a highly influential group of around 475 top executives, used these hedging strategies from July 2007 through November 2010, according to a New York Times analysis of regulatory filings. The arrangements were intended to protect their personal portfolios when the firm’s stock was highly volatile, especially at the height of the crisis.

In some cases, executives saved millions of dollars by using these tactics. One prominent Goldman investment banker avoided more than $7 million in losses over a four-month period.

Such transactions are at the center of a debate over whether Wall Street executives should be allowed to hedge their stock holdings. The concern with hedging is that executives can easily break the ties between compensation and company performance. Employees who hedge their holdings are less concerned about a falling share price. That’s why the government barred top executives at banks that received multiple bailouts from using the strategies until they paid back the funds.

“Many of these hedging activities can create situations when the executives’ interests run counter to the company,” said Patrick McGurn, a governance adviser at RiskMetrics, which advises investors. “I think a lot of people feel this doesn’t have a place in a compensation structure.”

More broadly, critics say, the practice of hedging represents another end run around financial reform.

Just business as usual from the criminals on Wall Street and at the hedge funds.

Do unto themselves what they would not do unto others.