Thursday, January 30, 2014

Amanda Knox January 30, 2014

from wsj


y  CONNECT
Updated Jan. 30, 2014 5:32 p.m. ET
Amanda Knox arrives at court during her appeal trial in 2011. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
FLORENCE—An Italian appeals court Thursday found Seattle native Amanda Knox and her Italian former boyfriend guilty of murdering a British student in 2007, the latest twist in a long legal saga that has riveted the media's attention and divided public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic.
After more than 11 hours of deliberations, an eight-person panel of judges and jury members in an appeals court in Florence found Ms. Knox and Raffaele Sollecito guilty of murder and sexual assault.
British student Meredith Kercher was found dead in her apartment in the central Italian town of Perugia in 2007, and police subsequently arrested Ms. Knox, her then-boyfriend Mr. Sollecito and other suspects.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were found guilty of murder by an Italian court on Thursday. The case has been bouncing back and forth through Italy's legal system since 2007. Why did it take so long to reach a verdict? And what happens now? Image: Getty Images
The ruling, however, isn't likely to bring an end to the case, as Italian law allows both sides to appeal. After the verdict was read, the defendants' lawyers said they plan to appeal. Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito have both maintained their innocence.
"I am frightened and saddened by this unjust verdict," said Ms. Knox in a statement. "The evidence and accusatory theory do not justify a verdict of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Rather, nothing has changed. There has always been a marked lack of evidence."
"It's a painful development, but it's simply one development," said Giulia Bongiorno, who represented Mr. Sollecito.
Ms. Kercher's brother Lyle was present with their sister Stephanie for the verdict. The ruling "was the best we could have hoped for," he told reporters. "No matter what the verdict is there will never be a case for celebrating anything."

Background on the Case

U.S. student Amanda Knox, her Italian former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and the trial for the 2007 murder and sexual assault of U.K. student Meredith Kercher.
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The mystery surrounding Ms. Kercher's death and the subsequent trial have electrified public opinion since Ms. Kercher was found dead in an apartment she shared with Ms. Knox in Perugia, a university town in central Italy where both were exchange students. The 21-year-old had been stabbed multiple times and her throat had been slashed, with her body also showing signs of sexual assault, according to the prosecution.
The following year, a court convicted Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast national who had briefly known Ms. Kercher, for her murder, sentencing him to 16 years in prison. The ruling suggested he didn't act alone, though other possible suspects who might have taken part in the murder weren't identified.
Mr. Guede, whose DNA was found on the body, said he was in the apartment but denied killing Ms. Kercher, saying he had been framed by Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito.
In 2009, Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito were convicted of murder and sexual assault. But an appeals court overturned the ruling in 2011. Ms. Knox was freed from prison, where she had spent four years, and returned to Seattle.
Then, in a surprise decision last year, Italy's Supreme Court ordered a retrial, arguing that the reasoning behind the 2011 reversal had been "contradictory." A new trial began in an appeals court in Florence in September.
Ms. Knox, now 26, declined to attend the retrial in Florence, saying she was afraid she wouldn't get a fair trial. Neither she nor Mr. Sollecito, 29, was obliged to attend, but Mr. Sollecito made a few appearances in court. He wasn't present for the verdict, and Italian authorities will take away his passport in the coming days.
On Thursday, the judges handed down a sentence of 25 years in prison for Mr. Sollecito and 28 for Ms. Knox. Ms. Knox's sentence was two years longer than her 2009 sentence, although the judges didn't immediately explain that decision.
Seven years of twists in the case have raised questions about the credibility of Italy's justice system. Some critics in the U.S. blasted the handling of the case as ham-handed and highlighted the multiple appeals and the retrial as emblematic of an intractable and unfair system. The Italian government hasn't commented on the trial, but it has sought to overhaul the system in recent years.
During this retrial, the defense returned to questions about the reliability of forensic evidence that had been raised during the first trial. Back then, experts argued that DNA evidence found on a knife—the alleged murder weapon—was insufficient to link it to Ms. Knox.
Prosecutors instead argued the murder stemmed from an argument between the roommates about cleanliness in the apartment, dropping allegations used in the previous trials that the killing was the result of a sex game gone wrong.
If Ms. Knox wins her next appeal, which will take months to hear, prosecutors can in turn appeal that verdict. But if the American student loses all appeals, Italy could seek her extradition.
It is unclear whether the U.S. would agree to send Ms. Knox back to Italy. In light of the multiple appeals and trials in Italy, a U.S. judge may invoke the principle of double jeopardy, whereby a suspect can't be tried twice for the same crime, say experts.
Instead, Italian law doesn't consider a conviction final until the appeals process has been exhausted regardless of the number of times a defendant has been put on trial.
In an interview with Italian daily la Repubblica earlier this month, Ms. Knox said she would resist extradition if the appeals end in a guilty verdict. "In that case, I will be…a fugitive," she said.
—Joel Millman contributed to this article
Write to Gilles Castonguay at gilles.castonguay@wsj.com
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Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Breaking Bad vs the banksters (plus Obamacare!)

from redgreenandblue.org



breaking bad vs the banksters
Published on January 27th, 2014 | by Guest Contributor
0

James Howard Kunstler – 

The past two months I’ve taken in all but the final few episodes of Breaking Bad, America’s loathe letter to itself. What a metaphor for a nation’s transition from an ethos of earnest effort to a mood of criminal buffoonery. For you who haven’t tuned in to this cultural artifact, Breaking Bad is a cable TV series about a bland high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who, facing an expensive battle with lung cancer, decides to get into the lucrative business of cooking methamphetamine, the most atrocious recreational drug there is. The series follows his misadventures in the trade.
The really remarkable thing about the series is that the most interesting theme in the long-running story remains completely undeveloped — at least so far to within a few installments of the end. That is, Walter’s existential predicament as a hostage to America’s medical racketeering matrix. For many families like Walter White’s, a cancer diagnosis is tantamount to a parallel judgment of financial ruin.
Like everybody else in America these days, poor Walter just submits to his fleecing. In fact, the blandest moments in the long-running melodrama are the scenes when Walter forks over his massive payments to a grandmotherly-type lady at the hospital billing desk. She’s as sweet as pie, though she also seems rather sweetly surprised that he is actually able to pay his bill. He pays for his treatments, of course, with the income derived from his meth cooking venture. His doctors are portrayed as demigods. There is zero discussion by them of A) the cost of his cancer treatments, and B) the legitimacy of the costs. That’s not their department. He just has to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Which he does, simply by discarding his persona as an earnest schoolteacher and entering the ranks of illicit drugdom. Of course, the series is mostly concerned with the twists, turns, and torments of that transition, and the metaphors in that are also rich as to what America has lately become. For instance, Walter’s success as a criminal stems from his technological skills. He is the meth cooker supremo because his formula is the best, his lab practices are the most exacting, his standards are the highest! Walter White is the Steve Jobs of meth. He puts out the best product and won’t settle for less than perfection.
This jibes nicely with America’s current mood of techno-rhapsodic psychosis, in particular our tendency to ignore all the diminishing returns and blowback from our techno-grandiose endeavors — which range from the magic of shale-oil fracking to the romance of “green” skyscrapers, to high-frequency front-running in the stock markets, to the recruitment of every teenager in America into an obsessive-compulsive cell-phone culture. It’s all good. Walter White’s “ace-in-the-hole” is his science training.
Another winning metaphor is the supernatural amount of cash-money on display in almost every episode once Walter gets rolling in the meth trade, duffle-bags full of exquisite, freshly packed-and-stacked banknotes, so much that tossing a quarter-million here, a quarter million there loses its meaning. The stuff is tossed around like junk mail. This is not inadvertent, of course. It depicts nicely the disintegration of America’s value system: money is everything and nothing. Walter quickly joins the “one percent” earnings-wise. It hardly makes him a better person. His money-making operations are as disgusting as the “innovation” of new swindles among the Too-Big-To-Jail bankers. By mid-way through the series, Walter even has enough petty cash on hand to pay for his brother-in-law’s hospital and rehab bills, after the BOL is shot up by Mexican drug gangsters. The fantastic cost of all that is also ignored.
An additional metaphor is found in Walter’s “employer,” the super-polite neatnik Gustavo Fring, who rules the Albuquerque-based drug empire via a false-front fast-food chain of chicken eateries. Fring is the fantasy of every businessman’s ideal self-image: meticulous, careful, fair, — until Walter White’s buffoonery shoves him over the edge and Gus, too, breaks bad, so to speak, in his own fussy way. And business itself is depicted as the highest-and-best expression of human culture, just as it has been since the reign of Ronald Reagan.
Finally, there is the matter of what the fruits of Walter White’s techno-savy work does to the “consumer” public who buy his product. It turns them into zombies. It’s also almost too obvious to state that the popularity of zombies in American culture has exactly paralleled the financialization of the American economy. That half the action of Breaking Bad takes place in and around automobiles — in the parking-lot wasteland of Albuquerque — is just the cherry on the metaphorical cake. This is who we are.

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Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Paul Krugman: The plutocrats are getting nervous

from adn.com

By PAUL KRUGMANJanuary 27, 2014
Rising inequality has obvious economic costs: stagnant wages despite rising productivity, rising debt that makes us more vulnerable to financial crisis. It also has big social and human costs. There is, for example, strong evidence that high inequality leads to worse health and higher mortality.
But there's more. Extreme inequality, it turns out, creates a class of people who are alarmingly detached from reality - and simultaneously gives these people great power.
The example many are buzzing about right now is the billionaire investor Tom Perkins, a founding member of the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Perkins lamented public criticism of the "one percent" -- and compared such criticism to Nazi attacks on the Jews, suggesting that we are on the road to another Kristallnacht.
You may say that this is just one crazy guy and wonder why The Journal would publish such a thing. But Perkins isn't that much of an outlier. He isn't even the first finance titan to compare advocates of progressive taxation to Nazis. Back in 2010 Stephen Schwarzman, chairman and chief executive of the Blackstone Group, declared that proposals to eliminate tax loopholes for hedge fund and private-equity managers were "like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."
And there are a number of other plutocrats who manage to keep Hitler out of their remarks but who nonetheless hold, and loudly express, political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.
I know that sounds strong. But look at all the speeches and opinion pieces by Wall Streeters accusing President Barack Obama -- who has never done anything more than say the obvious, that some bankers behaved badly -- of demonizing and persecuting the rich. And look at how many of those making these accusations also made the ludicrously self-centered claim that their hurt feelings (as opposed to things like household debt and premature fiscal austerity) were the main thing holding the economy back.
Now, just to be clear, the very rich, and those on Wall Street in particular, are in fact doing worse under Obama than they would have if Mitt Romney had won in 2012. Between the partial rollback of the Bush tax cuts and the tax hike that partly pays for health reform, tax rates on the 1 percent have gone more or less back to pre-Reagan levels. Also, financial reformers have won some surprising victories over the past year, and this is bad news for wheeler-dealers whose wealth comes largely from exploiting weak regulation. So you can make the case that the 1 percent have lost some important policy battles.
But every group finds itself facing criticism, and ends up on the losing side of policy disputes, somewhere along the way; that's democracy. The question is what happens next. Normal people take it in stride; even if they're angry and bitter over political setbacks, they don't cry persecution, compare their critics to Nazis and insist that the world revolves around their hurt feelings. But the rich are different from you and me.
And yes, that's partly because they have more money, and the power that goes with it. They can and all too often do surround themselves with courtiers who tell them what they want to hear and never, ever, tell them they're being foolish. They're accustomed to being treated with deference, not just by the people they hire but by politicians who want their campaign contributions. And so they are shocked to discover that money can't buy everything, can't insulate them from all adversity.
I also suspect that today's Masters of the Universe are insecure about the nature of their success. We're not talking captains of industry here, men who make stuff. We are, instead, talking about wheeler-dealers, men who push money around and get rich by skimming some off the top as it sloshes by. They may boast that they are job creators, the people who make the economy work, but are they really adding value? Many of us doubt it - and so, I suspect, do some of the wealthy themselves, a form of self-doubt that causes them to lash out even more furiously at their critics.
Anyway, we've been here before. It's impossible to read screeds like those of Perkins or Schwarzman without thinking of FDR's famous 1936 Madison Square Garden speech, in which he spoke of the hatred he faced from the forces of "organized money," and declared, "I welcome their hatred."
Obama has not, unfortunately, done nearly as much as FDR to earn the hatred of the undeserving rich. But he has done more than many progressives give him credit for - and like FDR, both he and progressives in general should welcome that hatred, because it's a sign that they're doing something right.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2014/01/27/3294264/paul-krugman-the-plutocrats-are.html#storylink=cpy
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Sunday, January 26, 2014

Democrats, Republicans signal standoff over debt ceiling almost certain

from foxnews



FILE: Dec. 18, 2012: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C.AP
A top Democrat and Republican on Sunday signaled that the upcoming debt-ceiling negotiations, as widely anticipated, will be another Washington showdown.
The negotiations in October put the country at risk of running out of money and not being able to pay its debt, with Republicans eventually dropping their demands for spending cuts and other concessions and accepting a deal to suspend the debt ceiling through Feb. 7.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer told “Fox News Sunday” that President Obama will “not pay ransom” for getting Congress to fulfill its duty to increase the ceiling and that members should “spare the country the drama.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said later on the show that Obama’s demand for a no-strings-attached deal to raise the debt ceiling, now at about $17 trillion, in the coming weeks is “irresponsible” and that demands from Congress have been the pattern for 50 years.
“I think the president is taking an unreasonable position,” the Kentucky Republican said.
Pfeiffer and McConnell’s remarks are not the first in recent weeks about a potential fiscal standoff like the one in October that also partially shut down the federal government for 16 days but are perhaps the most pointed.
Late last week, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said a similar effort by Republicans in 2011 hurt the economy and that raising the debt ceiling is “something that is Congress’ responsibility and ought to be acted on without drama and without delay.”
McConnell suggested the congressional Republicans might ask that the Obama administration approve the completion of the Keystone XL pipeline as part of the negotiations.
He also said he sees the negotiations as an opportunity for Washington lawmakers to “accomplish something for the country,” not as a partisan battle.

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Friday, January 24, 2014

Eric Cantor's Excellent Davos Adventure: No Money For Unemployment Benefits, But Plenty For Congressmen Going To Alps

from huffpost



Posted:   |  Updated: 01/24/2014 2:16 pm EST
DAVOS, Switzerland -- Fresh from Washington, where he played a leading role in preventing the extension of emergency unemployment benefits for Americans mired in joblessness, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor appeared to be enjoying one of the perks of his own employment: a sumptuous breakfast in this ski resort in the Swiss Alps, where he was attending the World Economic Forum.
On Friday morning, Cantor occupied a table in the back of the Kongress Hotel restaurant, the snow-covered mountains behind him, as he jovially discussed with his communications director Rory Cooper plans to give the Obama administration fresh grief for its seemingly nonexistent Syria policy.
Back in the states, Cantor and his Republican Party like to present themselves as old-school fiscal conservatives who eschew unnecessary expenditures in the interest of streamlining government and limiting the public debt. Republicans have long opposed extending unemployment benefits -- which can be the difference between basic sustenance and homelessness for people who depend upon them -- in part by arguing that spending needs to be limited.
So I approached Cantor's table and asked him who was paying for his trip. He took in a breath, grinned sheepishly and said, "I paid for this," gesturing at a table bearing the remnants of a buffet breakfast whose offerings included smoked salmon, croissants, freshly squeezed orange juice, assorted Swiss cheeses and mineral water.
eric cantor table
Cantor's table had ordered a bottle of San Pellegrino water, plus a Coca Cola and a cappuccino, all of this running 94.70 Swiss francs, around $105 -- a bit more than a third of the maximum $378 a week a jobless person can draw in benefits in Cantor's home state of Virginia. A receipt left on the table showed that the bill was paid for with an American Express card.
And who paid for the rest of his visit to Davos, a veritable Disneyland of ostentatious cocktail parties underwritten by global banks, technology companies and other well-heeled concerns?
Cantor took a glance sideways. "It's an official trip," he said, leaving it at that, and presumably confirming that taxpayers paid.
At which point, Cooper, now agitated, grabbed Cantor like an old person caught in a burning building and thrust him out of the restaurant, bumping me on the way out, though not before proffering a business card. "You can contact me to request an interview," Cooper said.
But what was the answer to the question I asked as Cantor sped past? Is it really appropriate to spend what is presumably taxpayer money on such a trip, when back at home the government supposedly cannot find a few hundred dollars a week for people trying to feed children and put gas in cars to get to job interviews?
I might as well have been asking the mountains. Cantor was gone.
A couple of weeks ago, Cantor took to the floor of the House to press the new Republican line on cutting unemployment benefits, one that seeks to sound better than heartless chintziness for struggling people: Now it's all about positive thinking.
"We have been trying to focus this Congress on getting back to a more optimistic view of what the economy can do," he said. "It is about jobs. It is about growth. Our focus is on employment, not unemployment."
Apparently, it worked. Thanks to the power of positive thinking, the economy delivered at least one American to rewarding work -- Eric Cantor, punching the clock in Davos, while taxpayers picked up the tab.
eric cantor receipt
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Stocks plunge on fears over emerging markets

from latimes


The Dow suffers its worst loss in seven months on growth worries as Fed eases stimulus.

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The Dow Jones industrial average suffered a 2% drop of 318.24 points Friday, the worst one-day plummet since June of last year. Above, traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.(Spencer Platt, Getty Images / January 24, 2014)
January 24, 2014, 7:05 p.m.
NEW YORK — Wall Street took a drubbing for the second straight day as investors worry that an economic slowdown in emerging markets could trigger a correction in stocks.
The Dow Jones industrial average suffered a drop of 318.24 points Friday, the worst one-day plummet since June of last year. The blue-chip index has plunged almost 500 points during the two-day rout, and follows big drops in European and Asian markets.
Investors were rattled by a confluence of problems around the world: A dour economic report in China, political unrest in Turkey and financial turmoil in Argentina. But one of the biggest concerns is that the Federal Reserve's tightening of easy-money policies could hurt emerging market economies.
The Federal Reserve's stimulus programs benefited risky assets such as stocks, boosting the Dow 27% last year. They also lifted stocks in emerging markets around the globe. But the central bank's pullback now has investors wondering whether those countries can stand on their own.
Some on Wall Street believe a long-overdue correction could be ahead. Since Jan. 1, the Dow has retreated 4% — still below the 10% that's considered correction territory. Investors have yanked out $625 billion from stocks this month overall, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 Total Market Index.
"We had way too much complacency at the end of last year," said Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx Group in New York. "You layer those things on together and it's made for an incredibly rocky start of the year."
On Friday, the Dow tumbled 318.24 points, or nearly 2%, to 15,879.11. The index shed 175.99 points on Thursday.
The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 38.17 points, or 2.1%, to 1,790.29. The technology-focused Nasdaq composite shed 90.70 points, or 2.2%, to 4,128.17.
Markets overseas also fell, with the Stoxx Europe 600 index declining 2.4% and the Nikkei shedding 2% during the session.
As investors dumped currencies and bonds of emerging market countries, they plowed into traditional safe havens.
Bonds of developed countries rallied. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 2.72% from 2.78% the previous day. The 10-year note is off recent highs of about 3% as investors drive up its price (bond yields fall when prices rise).
"There was a lot of liquidity … that just kept the party going overseas," said Karyn Cavanaugh, a market strategist at ING U.S. Investment Management. "Now that the word is out that the Fed is tapering — and indeed they are tapering — there are worries that the liquidity is going to dry up and that people are pulling their money back."
One area the U.S. markets aren't getting much help from is corporate earnings — at least so far.
Investors have been closely watching fourth-quarter results as a potential catalyst for stocks. Analysts expect 5.9% year-over-year earnings growth for the average company in the S&P 500, according to research firm S&P Capital IQ.
That's lower than the 9.6% profit growth predicted in October, according to S&P Capital IQ.
"While they're certainly encouraging, they haven't been blowing the doors off anybody's expectations," said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at BMO Private Bank.
Still, some professional investors were careful to avoid sounding alarmist with the stock market's recent drops. Strong bull markets often endure bruising, short-lived retreats, they note.
Either way, the increased volatility is a sign that markets are getting used to a new reality.
"For the last four years we've had the world's central banks providing a lot of liquidity into the financial system, and that has smoothed over a lot of bumps," Colas said. "Now that markets understand that that era is coming to an end, those bumps are now visible again."


http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-us-stocks-20140125,0,5540513.story#ixzz2rNhxZ7j2
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