Obsidian Wings

Your Life is Not Worth Ten Minutes of Perry's Time

by publius

I would like to think that sending a man to die would warrant more than 10 minutes of review by the Governor.  But not in Texas.

The Houston Chronicle adds some more details about how Perry disregarded doubts of Willingham's guilt.  Three days before the execution, Willingham's attorney alerted Perry of a new arson analysis that cast doubt on the conviction.  The ultimate analysis came from a respected arson expert, Dr. Gerald Hurst, who helped exonerate prior death row inmates.

According to the Chronicle, the five-page Hurst report was faxed to Perry at 4:52 PM.  A "few minutes after" 5:00, Perry's office said he would not intervene.  They probably didn't even read it.  The execution occurred about an hour later. 

Perry and the Texas criminal justice system are so enamored of killing people that missing dinner is apparently a greater risk than executing an innocent man.

[UPDATE 11:15:  The Tribune adds more:

Just months before the controversial removal of three members of a state commission investigating the forensics that led to a Texas man's 2004 execution, top aides to Gov. Rick Perry tried to pressure the chairman of the panel over the direction of the inquiry, the chairman has told the Tribune.

More on this article later.]

Not To Blame

by hilzoy

From CNN:

"Thousands of buildings at U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have such poorly installed wiring that American troops face life-threatening risks, a top inspector for the Army says. (...)

"It was horrible -- some of the worst electrical work I've ever seen," said Jim Childs, a master electrician and the top civilian expert in an Army safety survey. Childs told CNN that "with the buildings the way they are, we're playing Russian roulette."

Childs recently returned from Iraq, where he is taking part in a yearlong review aimed at correcting electrical hazards on U.S. bases. He told CNN that thousands of buildings in Iraq and Afghanistan are so badly wired that troops are at serious risk of death or injury.

He said problems are "everywhere" in Iraq, where 18 U.S. troops have died by electrocution since 2003. All deaths occurred in different circumstances and different locations, but many happened on U.S. bases being managed by various military contractors. The Army has has reopened investigations in at least five cases, according to Pentagon sources.

Of the nearly 30,000 buildings the Army's "Task Force Safe" has examined so far, Childs said more than half "failed miserably." And 8,527 had such serious problems that inspectors gave them a "flash" warning, meaning repairs had to be completed in four hours or the facility evacuated.

He said the majority of those buildings were wired by contractor KBR, based in Houston, Texas. KBR has faced extensive criticism from Congress over its performance in the war zone. KBR has defended its performance and argued it was not to blame for any fatalities."

Let's see: inspections disclose "some of the worst electrical work I've ever seen", work that puts people's lives at risk, and has already killed 18 people. The majority of this work was done by KBR. And yet KBR is "not to blame". That's totally plausible! For instance, it could be that after KBR's crack electricians got done wiring the buildings, and after their quality control teams checked and double-checked every last circuit to make sure it was done right, bands of evil gnomes went burrowing around behind the wallboards and switched all the wires around. 

I'll bet all you KBR bashers didn't think of that. But it could have happened! Blame the gnomes!

Seriously: can you imagine what it would be like to be the parents or spouse or child of someone serving in Iraq, hoping against hope that your loved one would make it home, learning that she had died, and then finding out that it wasn't an IED or a sniper that killed her; it was faulty wiring installed by an American company that hadn't bothered to do its job right? 

On the other hand, can you imagine being the kind of person who would decide that despite your company's having gotten billions of dollars in contracts, despite its repeatedly overcharging the government, despite "an impossibly high cost overrun of $436,019,574 on one job, charges of $114,308 for an oil spill cleanup that failed to remove any oil and another set of tasks in which the overruns were 36.9 percent of all costs", you were not going to make sure your company did a good enough job to keep our soldiers from getting killed? 

How, exactly, would you live with yourself?

***

Oops, I forgot to add this:

"Defense contractor KBR Inc., which is under criminal investigation in the electrocution deaths of at least two U.S. soldiers in Iraq, has been awarded a $35 million contract by the Pentagon to build an electrical distribution center and other projects there."

I've tried to find out whether it has been cancelled since then, but if it has, I can't find word of it.

WaMu

by hilzoy

A story about WaMu from the NYT:

"WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers' incomes and assets, according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients.

WaMu gave mortgage brokers handsome commissions for selling the riskiest loans, which carried higher fees, bolstering profits and ultimately the compensation of the bank's executives. WaMu pressured appraisers to provide inflated property values that made loans appear less risky, enabling Wall Street to bundle them more easily for sale to investors.

"It was the Wild West," said Steven M. Knobel, a founder of an appraisal company, Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, that did business with WaMu until 2007. "If you were alive, they would give you a loan. Actually, I think if you were dead, they would still give you a loan."

Here's a charming anecdote:

On another occasion, Ms. Zaback asked a loan officer for verification of an applicant's assets. The officer sent a letter from a bank showing a balance of about $150,000 in the borrower’s account, she recalled. But when Ms. Zaback called the bank to confirm, she was told the balance was only $5,000.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. "She said, 'We don’t call the bank to verify.'" Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: "Too bad."

Apparently, WaMu's CEO got $88 million in compensation between 2001 and 2007. The most charitable description of what he did for all that money is: he provided a textbook example of the principal/agent problem -- the kind of problem you get when someone (say, a CEO) who is supposed to be working for someone else (say, shareholders) decides to throw their interests overboard and rob them blind, and the structure within which he's working is not set up well enough to prevent him from doing so. The less charitable description is: he looted the company.

The most ludicrous part of the NYT story involves a guy who set up a program whereby real estate agents got $10,000 fees for selling option ARMs to people who didn't speak English. These fees were eventually banned because WaMu thought they might be found to be illegal. But the NYT quotes the guy who designed the program as saying: "I don’t think the bank would have let us do the program if it was bad."

Ha. Ha. Ha.

Oblivious

by hilzoy

From the AP:

"Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.

The rewards came even at banks where poor results last year foretold the economic crisis that sent them to Washington for a government rescue. Some trimmed their executive compensation due to lagging bank performance, but still forked over multimillion-dollar executive pay packages.

Benefits included cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management, the AP review of federal securities documents found.

The total amount given to nearly 600 executives would cover bailout costs for many of the 116 banks that have so far accepted tax dollars to boost their bottom lines."

There are all sorts of delightful tidbits in the article. Banks that took bailout funds paid for their executives' private financial advisors, club dues, home security systems, and chauffeurs and leased cars. Here's what passes for an explanation of all this:

"Goldman Sachs' tab for leased cars and drivers ran as high as $233,000 per executive. The firm told its shareholders this year that financial counseling and chauffeurs are important in giving executives more time to focus on their jobs."

I'm sure they're right. But the question is not: do chauffeurs contribute to peace of mind? It's: why should companies who are receiving taxpayer funds because they (meaning their executives) got themselves into deep trouble be paying for these things? Couldn't the executives, who are, after all, very well paid, pay for their own home security systems and financial planners and chauffeurs?

The super-rich seem to me, during the past few decades, to have wafted off into their own alternate universe, in which of course they are entitled to have their employers pay them not just large salaries, not just multi-million dollar bonuses every year, but the bills for everything that ordinary people pay for; in which flying on public airlines seems to them the way taking the public busses seems to much of the middle class; in which any possible contact with what the rest of us take to be reality has been airbrushed away by vast quantities of money.

Under normal circumstances, I'd think: nice work if you can get it, and worry about the effects of massive inequality on public life. But these are not normal times. The very people who are getting these bonuses and chauffeurs and private jets and financial planners have just sent the entire global economy into a nosedive. They have caused massive amounts of money to disappear. They are getting bailed out for their mistakes by the rest of us -- the people who, if we're lucky, get to fly coach, and if we're not, drive across the country or take a bus.

If they had any shame at all, they would stop. More than that: if they had any sense at all of how angry a lot of us are getting, sheer prudence would do the trick. This is our money. We are giving it to them to get all of us out of a problem that they caused. They should bear that in mind, not treat us as if we were one great big cookie jar.

Step Away From That Shredder ...

by hilzoy

The AP, via FDL:

"Dick Cheney's lawyers are asserting that the vice president alone has the authority to determine which records, if any, from his tenure will be handed over to the National Archives when he leaves office in January. (...)

"The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law," according to a court filing by Cheney's office with the U.S. District Court on Dec. 8.

Cheney is being sued by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group that is trying to ensure that no presidential records are destroyed or handled in a way that makes them unavailable to the public.

The 1978 Presidential Records Act requires all presidential and vice presidential records to be transferred to the National Archives immediately upon the end of the president's last term of office and gives the archivist responsibility to preserve and control access to presidential records. The law ended the tradition of private ownership of presidential papers, opening White House records to the public and historians. (...)

But the law is unclear on how disagreements will be decided about the preservation of disputed records, said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists.

"Decisions that are made in the next couple of weeks may prove irrevocable. If records are held from the archivist now they may never be recovered," Aftergood said.

A judge in September ordered Cheney to preserve all his records while the suit continued."

Someone needs to make sure that Cheney carries out that order. Cheney is exactly the sort of person who could decide to shred his documents and say to a judge: Go ahead, hold me in contempt. I dare you.

If he is not prosecuted, that will be bad enough. But if he destroys the record of his time in office, then we may never learn what he was actually up to when he claimed to be serving us, at our expense. A crucial part of the record of how our government was systematically perverted will be lost, and we will not be able to learn from it how to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. We cannot let that happen. Too much depends on it.

Happy Birthday!

by hilzoy

Guess whose birthday it is today? Rod Blagojevich's! So I thought I'd send a special birthday YouTube to the birthday boy:

Yes, I know: he's actually out on bail. Nonetheless, this seemed like an appropriate birthday message. So, Rod Blagojevich: Happy birthday -- from jail!

Blagojevich

by hilzoy

Since everyone else has already noted the salient points from Rod Blagojevich's Epic Fail -- the appalling idea of selling a Senate seat, the utter boneheadedness, the total lack of conscience -- I'll just take that all as read, and highlight one bit of the charging documents (pdf). This is from p. 70; Blagojevich is discussing his criteria for choosing Illinois' next Senator.

"Later on November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with JOHN HARRIS. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that his decision about the open Senate seat will be based on three criteria in the following order of importance: "our legal situation, our personal situation, my political situation. This decision, like every other one, needs to be based upon on that. Legal. Personal. Political." HARRIS said, "legal is the hardest one to satisfy." ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that his legal problems could be solved by naming himself to the Senate seat."

So: three criteria: his legal situation, his personal situation, his political situation. Nowhere on that list are the interests of the people of Illinois, the country, various candidates' qualifications to be Senator, their judiciousness or wisdom, or any of the other things that one might think relevant to the choice of a US Senator.

It's just him, him, him. Never the people he was elected to serve, or the nation.

Blagojevich is, of course, entitled to the presumption of innocence. But if the allegations in the charging documents are true, I hope he has a delightful and extended stay in our nation's penitentiaries, and that he serves as a cautionary example to any other politicians contemplating selling out our interests.

Oh, and one more thing: it's clearer than ever to me that Obama and the Congress should give Patrick Fitzgerald the job of investigating the Bush administration's war crimes. Give him complete freedom from interference, and let the chips fall where they may.

"A Culture Of Ethical Failure"

by hilzoy

From the NYT, the Interior Department's Inspector General seems to have found a lot of unusually blatant corruption:

"In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” besets the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch."

Why am I not surprised?

Here's an account of just one of the officials involved:

"The report said that from April 2002 to June 2003, Mr. Smith improperly used his position with the royalty program to help a technical services firm seek deals with the same oil and gas companies. The services firm paid Mr. Smith more than $30,000 for asking the oil companies to hire it, the report said.

Mr. Smith requested and received approval to take on the outside work, but the report says he misled the office into thinking he would be performing technical consulting, rather than marketing the firm to companies with which he also conducted official business

The report accuses Mr. Smith of improperly accepting gifts from the oil and gas industry, of engaging in sex with two subordinates, and of using cocaine that he purchased from his secretary or her boyfriend several times a year between 2002 and 2005. He sometimes asked for the drugs and received them in his office during work hours, the report alleges.

The report also says that Mr. Smith lied to investigators about these and other incidents, and that he urged the two women subordinates to mislead the investigators as well."

One person has already pled guilty to a felony, and the reports recommend prosecuting another, as well as taking administrative action against several more, "including either firing them or banning them for life from certain positions." To give you a sense of how bad it is, the guy just described is not one of them.

Apparently, one of the reports also contains this memorable phrase: "sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length." Indeed.

It's an interesting image, but I wish no inspector general of our government had had occasion to write it.

Close Your Eyes

by hilzoy

Is there any corner of the Bush administration -- any at all -- that isn't hopelessly corrupt? Actually, don't answer that...

"Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.

But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.

In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.

As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.

That same year, Medicare officials told Congress that they had succeeded in driving down the cost of fraud in medical equipment to $700 million.

Some lawmakers and Congressional staff members say the irregularities that the inspector general found were tantamount to corruption and raise broader questions about the credibility of other Medicare figures.

“This is outrageous,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who has repeatedly credited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with reducing improper expenditures. “If heads don’t roll, you can’t change the culture of this organization,” he added."

If you don't so much as try to detect fraud, you won't catch it. If you don't catch it, it will increase -- and why not, when you can get free money without risking anything? If it increases, not only do our costs go up, the apparent cost of expanding government programs to help the uninsured goes up as well, expanding those programs looks more expensive than it really is, and so the likelihood that we will actually do something to help people who are reduced to pulling out their rotting teeth with pliers goes down.

I want these people out of my government now.

Crooks

by hilzoy

From the Times of London, via ThinkProgress:

"A lobbyist with close ties to the White House is offering access to key figures in George W Bush’s administration in return for six-figure donations to the private library being set up to commemorate Bush’s presidency.

Stephen Payne, who claims to have raised more than $1m for the president’s Republican party in recent years, said he would arrange meetings with Dick Cheney, the vice-president, Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, and other senior officials in return for a payment of $250,000 (£126,000) towards the library in Texas.

Payne, who has accompanied Bush and Cheney on several foreign trips, also said he would try to secure a meeting with the president himself. (...)

During an undercover investigation by The Sunday Times, Payne was asked to arrange meetings in Washington for an exiled former central Asian president. He outlined the cost of facilitating such access.

“The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library,” said Payne, who sits on the US homeland security advisory council. (...)

Payne said the balance of the $750,000 would go to his own lobbying company, Worldwide Strategic Partners (WSP).

Asked by an undercover reporter who the politician would be able to meet for that price, Payne said: “Cheney’s possible, definitely the national security adviser [Stephen Hadley], definitely either Dr Rice or . . . I think a meeting with Dr Rice or the deputy secretary [John Negroponte] is possible . . .

“The main thing is that he [the Asian politician] comes, and he’s well received, that he meets with high-level people . . . and we send positive statements made back from the administration about ‘This guy wasn’t such a bad guy, many people have done worse’.”"

You can watch the video here: the sound is soft, but it's clearly audible. Payne also says that he should be able to get not just meetings, but positive statements about the unnamed politician and his record, from the administration, in exchange for this money. The politician who allegedly wants the meetings is not named, but seems to be an exiled former President of Kyrgyzstan. I don't think there is more than one such person. (Note that the article presents no evidence that that former President had any knowledge of this offer.)

ThinkProgress also has a useful rundown of Payne's background: he was Bush's personal travel aide during his father's 1988 Presidential campaign, serves on the President's Homeland Security Advisory Council, was a Bush Pioneer (raised over $100,000) in 2000, and a Ranger (raised over $200,000) in 2004. And according to his biography (this text appears on a whole bunch of websites):

"Mr. Payne often travels officially in advance of and with the President and Vice President, including trips to Europe, the Mid-East, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan and Korea."

So he's not some random guy throwing out promises. He is absolutely in a position to arrange access for people. To my mind, though, the fact that he claims to be in a position to arrange statements from the administration about the situation in Kyrgyzstan, and the record of the unnamed former President, is worse.

***

There's also this bit: Payne says that he doesn't think he can arrange a meeting with Bush, since "he doesn’t meet with a lot of former Presidents these days; I don’t think he meets with hardly anyone." That would explain a lot.