Politics Plus

This needs to proceed quickly.

The Justice Department is reviewing whether Goldman Sachs employees may have violated criminal fraud statutes in selling off mortgage securities in the months before the U.S. housing bubble burst, a person familiar with the matter said Thursday.

The department’s inquiry, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was described as preliminary. It was unclear whether it would lead to a full-blown criminal investigation.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the unit described as conducting the review, declined to comment.

Michael DuVally, a Goldman spokesman, said that "given the recent focus on the firm, we are not surprised by the report of an inquiry. We would fully cooperate with any requests for information."

Disclosure of the Justice Department inquiry comes after the April 16 filing of a civil fraud suit by the Securities and Exchange Commission accusing Goldman of allowing a longtime client, the hedge fund Paulson & Co., to pick many of the subprime securities in an offshore deal without telling investors that Paulson planned to bet on their failure. Paulson wound up with a $1 billion profit, while two European banks lost that much on the deal.

Goldman has denied wrongdoing.

On Wednesday, 62 U.S. House members sent a letter asking Attorney General Eric Holder to order a criminal investigation of Goldman and other Wall Street banks who may have misled investors in the lead-up to the subprime mortgage meltdown in the fall of 2008. Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the Ohio Democrat who initiated the letter, also joined liberal activists in delivering to the Justice Department a petition signed by 140,000 Americans calling for a criminal inquiry.

It was unclear when the Justice Department review began…

Inserted from <McClatchy DC>

Lets get to the good part: the sentencing.

Despite all the negative press Arizona has received for the GOP “Show me your papers” law, and despite the financial cost to the state from the swelling Boycott Arizona movement, other states seem poised to jump on the bigotry bandwagon.

I found this table at Think Progress:

Is that spooky, or what?

One thing has been troubling me.  Is the GOP that racist?  I think so.  But the GOP usually goes to extreme ends to hide their from view.  Otherwise, a complete incompetent like Michael Steel could never have become head of the RNC, and certainly could never have survived his many ‘heckuva job, Brownie’ moments. Yet the bigotry in this law is so obvious that I wondered at what they are up to.  Then I read this, and it fell into place.

Don’t be fooled. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law, signed last week, requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are US citizens.

I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning.

What’s new here is not the politicians’ fear of a xenophobic "Teabag" uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, US citizens all, who are daring to vote – and daring to vote Democratic by more than two-to-one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for "Rolling Stone" with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters . . . directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no fewer than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanic, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution?

No, not one.

Which raises the question: Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, non-citizens that Brewer tagged them to be, or just not-quite-white voters given the Jose Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the Western mesas looking for these illegal voters. "We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case."

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the president of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove.

Iglesias’ jurisdiction was next door, in New Mexico, but he told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

"They wanted some splashy pre-election indictments," Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as "Prop 200," which required proof of citizenship to register. It is important to see the Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, as just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Alternet>

With the GOP, the lowest common denominator is always power.  They have a long history of keeping poor and minority voters from exercising their voting rights.  The bill will serve to marginalize millions of Hispanic voters.  Marginalized people tend to disenfranchise themselves.  Feeling that they have no part in this nation, they tend not to vote.  There is nothing that the GOP will not do to take away the voting rights of opposition voters.

I often feel amazed over GOP politicians wrapping themselves in the Constitution, while ignorant of its contents.

Adding more blazing hot kerosene onto the raging fire that is the debate over immigration policy in this country, Representative Duncan Hunter has gone on the record supporting deportation of American-born children of illegal immigrants:

"Would you support deportation of natural-born American citizens that are the children of illegal aliens," Hunter was asked. "I would have to, yes," Hunter said. "… We simply cannot afford what we’re doing right now," he said. "… It takes more than just walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls. …"

Now, at this point, we really ought to turn to what the supreme document of our country, the U.S. Constitution, has to say about who a citizen is:

AMENDMENT XIV

Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Ratified July 9, 1868.

Note: Article I, section 2, of the Constitution was modified by section 2 of the 14th amendment.

Section 1.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Ironic, isn’t it? Conservatives love to talk about the Constitution until they’re blue in the face–until it gets in the way of their anti-immigrant tendencies. Then they’re all too happy to ignore it… [emphasis original]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

Have you also picked up on the irony that the GOP would strip the Presidency from Obama, using the lie that he was born in Kenya, but deport citizens born right here?  In our souls, Hunter?  You, sir, are acting like an ass soul!

The Senate had executives from Goldman Sachs on the carpet yesterday.  It wasn’t pretty.

The question at the center of Tuesday’s Senate hearing on the role of investment banks in the financial crisis: Are Goldman Sachs bankers criminals or merely a big bunch of jerks?

Put another way: Did the employees of Goldman Sachs deliberately mislead investors by failing to disclose that one of the people creating a certain mortgage-backed security was also betting against it, as a new lawsuit by the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges? Or did they simply recommend mortgage-backed securities to investors, then turn around and bet against them—essentially betting against their own investors?

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations may have failed to prove the former, but it presented a strong case for the latter.

The hearing pitted senators determined to find wrongdoing—they sifted through a five-pound stack of internal e-mails, company memos, letters to investors, and financial statements—against Wall Streeters insisting they were just doing their jobs. As a result, the hearing was less about litigating the SEC case than it was about senators highlighting and assigning blame for the causes of the financial crash.

Committee chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., who as always appeared to have stepped right out of The Pickwick Papers, got right to the point in his introductory remarks: "Goldman Sachs didn’t just make money. It profited by taking advantage of its clients’ reasonable expectation that it would not sell products that it didn’t want to succeed, and that there was no conflict of economic interest between the firm and the customers it had pledged to serve." In other words, Goldman has an obligation to be honest with its customers. And part of that obligation is to tell them what Goldman thinks of the investments it’s selling.

Goldman Sachs didn’t just disagree. The half dozen current and former employees dragged before the panel, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein, took a position so contrary, it’s as if they were speaking a different language. Levin said Goldman was "shorting," or betting against, the housing market. Goldman said it wasn’t—it was merely hedging against its bets that the housing market would succeed—and that its "short" was hardly "big." (The shorts just happened to outweigh the longs.) Levin argued that Goldman was misleading its clients by hiding the fact that it thought subprime securities would fail. Blankfein argued that its clients don’t care what Goldman thinks of the assets it’s selling, even if it were possible to ascertain what all 35,000 Goldman employees "think" of a security. Levin said Goldman has an obligation to disclose how an instrument is created. "I don’t believe there’s a disclosure obligation," Blankfein said… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Slate>

They were unrepentant at every turn.

Are the Goldman Sachs executives testifying at today’s governmental affairs hearing sorry? Do they have regrets about their role in the financial crisis?

Sure doesn’t sound like it.

"Regret to me means something that you feel that you did wrong," said former Goldman partner Dan Sparks. "And I don’t have that."

What I do have though is — we made mistakes in our business, like any business does. And we made some poor business decisions in hindsight.

But did Goldman Sachs play a part in causing the financial crisis?

"I don’t know," Sparks said. "I’d like to think about that and respond. I haven’t thought about that specifically."

What about you, Joshua Birnbaum?

"I would second what Mr. Sparks said," said Birnbaum, former managing director of the banks’ structured products group trading. "We’re all sympathetic to the negative impact to that bubble."

And "to the extent that investment banks and commercial banks may have extended too much credit at certain periods of time," Birnbaum said, "then it’s possible" Goldman played a role.

Michael Swenson — who now holds Birnbaum’s old job — was more definitive.

"We did not cause the financial crisis," he said. "I do not think we did anything wrong."

"There’s things that we wish we could have done better in hindsight, but at the times that we made the decisions, I don’t think we did anything wrong," Swenson said.

And Fabrice Tourre, who boasted by email of selling financial products to a "widow and orphans"?

"I firmly believe that my conduct was correct," Tourre said… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <TPM>

In spite of all this, the GOP blocked financial reform for the second day in a row.  If they want to keep pairing themselves with Bankster behavior, let them.  But, since this merely opens debate,  what does the Repuglican party fear?  I’ll tell you.  There are several progressive amendments waiting.  Once debate starts, the GOP will be forced to either allow up or down votes on them, votes that they would lose, or filibuster issues so specific that they won’t be able to cover up their true position.  The next vote is scheduled for Noon eastern time today.

Then there is the matter of Ben Nelson (DINO-NE).  He sided with the Republicans again.  But Rachel Maddow has exposed his true motive.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The son of a bitch is lining his own pockets.