The National Law Journal has the article Holder’s Return to Covington Was Six Years in the Making.

Eric Holder Jr. didn’t wear a tie, didn’t stand to speak, didn’t have his security detail hovering when he reintroduced himself to Covington & Burling’s law partners a few weeks ago. He didn’t need to. They already knew him.

The 900-lawyer firm celebrates a homecoming this week as Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, rejoins the firm as a white-collar partner. Covington plans to announce the news Monday, and his official start date will be in September.

“This is home for me,” Holder said. Margaret Richardson, his former chief of staff, also is joining the firm as an of counsel.

Holder, 64, left the U.S. Department of Justice in April after serving for six years. Before that, he had been a partner at Covington from 2001 to January 2009.

I was just saying that perhaps Jimmy Carter was the last honest President we had. Although, I didn’t know what skeletons might have been in his closet, or might have taken up residence sine he left office. Then I read this quote from this article about Holder’s plans for his “new” career..

He said he wouldn’t necessarily model his practice after any other well-regarded Washington lawyer, though he did mention his respect for the practice and law firm involvement of former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti. Civiletti served at the end of the Carter administration as AG, led Venable until 2006 and was the first lawyer in the U.S. to report a $1,000 hourly rate.

Salon has the article Why Eric Holder’s new job is an insult to the American public.

If Las Vegas took bets on whether recently departed Attorney General Eric Holder would return to corporate law firm Covington & Burling, the casinos would have run out of money faster than Greek banks. Newborn infants could have guessed at a homecoming for the former partner at Covington from 2001 to 2009. Last year, Holder bought a condo 300 feet from the firm’s headquarters. The National Law Journal headlined the news, “Holder’s Return to Covington Was Six Years in the Making,” as if acting as the nation’s top law enforcement officer was a temp gig. They even kept an 11th-floor corner office empty for his return.

If we had a more aggressive media, this would be an enormous scandal, more than the decamping of former Obama Administration officials to places like Uber and Amazon. That’s because practically no law firm has done more to protect Wall Street executives from the consequences of their criminal activities than Covington & Burling. Their roster of clients includes every mega-bank in America: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America. Yet Holder has joined several of his ex-employees there, creating a shadow Justice Department and an unquestionable conflict of interest. In fact, given the pathetic fashion in which DoJ limited punishment for those who caused the greatest economic meltdown in 80 years, Holder’s new job looks a lot like his old job.

We won’t have a more aggressive media until the people demand it. How can readers’ demands be more powerful than the corporate medias instincts to protect its own interests? I think that refusing to view or read corporate media except to expose it might get some corporate executive’s attention. I have already cancelled my subscription to The Boston Globe.

The current campaign will saturate this blog with all the links I can find relating to the Holder story. The first post was Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold.

RollingStone has the article Eric Holder, Wall Street Double Agent, Comes in From the Cold. It has the subhead of:

Barack Obama’s former top cop cashes in after six years of letting banks run wild

The article shows the following interview of Matt Taibi on Democracy Now.

This all came to my attention with an email from Credo Action. The main points of that email are in the petition on their web site Tell Congress: Subpoena Eric Holder’s communication with his corporate law firm. There are references to their sources of information in the petition. Here is an excerpt from their explanation.

Worse, it was just reported that the firm, Covington & Burling, has kept an empty 11th floor corner office for Holder awaiting his return. Combined with Holder’s purchase a year ago of a $1.5 million condo just 300 feet from his new office raises serious questions about how long Holder knew he would be getting a major payday from his old firm even while it continued to represent companies under Department of Justice investigation. If the firm and Holder agreed on a future job offer, that alone could violate criminal laws

Now you get a hint as to why Obama is pushing this awful “trade” deal, called TPP despite the majority of Democrats in Congress being dead set against it. I wonder where Obama is going to work when he leaves office. This is the type of behavior we saw from Bill Clinton when he went along with the Republicans to eliminate the Glass-Steagall regulations despite the efforts of the Democrats’, in Congress at that time, to stop him

If you think you want Hillary Clinton as our next president, either you are not paying attention, or you are purposely not looking. If she gets into office and pulls stunts like her husband and Barack Obama have, then don’t come whining to me about how you didn’t know.

I hear talk about how it would be historic for Hillary to be the first woman President. Is that the kind of history we want for this country? The first woman President and more crooked than any male President before her. Just like Obama is going to go down in history as the first black President, and more crooked than any white predecessor.

Naked Capitalism has the story Gaius Publius: The Clinton Campaign Notices the Sanders Campaign, or How to Read the Media.

But also, mainstream insider corporations are completely aligned with the insider game for the obvious reason — they’re part of it. No one inside the game wants to see it damaged. Hayes and Maddow, as people, may or may not prefer Sanders over Clinton, but MSNBC has a clear favorite and if you listen carefully and consistently, it shows. Their owners, and all of the other big media owners, can’t afford (literally afford, as in, there’s major money at stake) to play this one straight. You may find some unskewed reporting, but not a lot of it.

This article thoroughly uncovers the way news is subtly, and not so subtly, biased in favor of the insiders. The gist of the story shouldn’t surprise anyone, but the detail is interesting.

My project to write a replacement for Quicken was getting to the point where I decided I needed some version control of my software. I have used many flavors of this kind of software during my career. I think the first was DEC’s C(ode) M(anagement) S(ystem) – CMS. I have also used SCCS, RCS, CVS, and Cleartool. Rather than just use one of the tools I have used before, I decided to look into what is current. I have heard a lot about GIT. I decided to give it a try.

There is a book out, Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub and published by Apress. This should give you more idea of what GIT is, if you don’t already know.

I had GIT up and running very quickly, but there were a few operations that I was used to that I could not figure out how to do. All of the documentation that I could find on the web assumed you understood a key concept that I wasn’t getting. It finally dawned on me what the issue was, so I drew a picture to clarify the idea. If you are a GIT beginner, you might find it helpful.

My issue was that I had two cloned repositories and I wanted to update one from the work in the other. At the time, I had not created a hub, and didn’t know why I would need one. Now I see that the clone repositories aren’t really meant to talk to each other. Their common means of communication is only through the hub. It is possible to set up a local hub. It only took me 39 different commands to do it. Only the last 4 of those commands were necessary.

Politicus USA has the article Bernie Sanders Terrifies Wall Street By Vowing To Keep Them Out Of His Cabinet. Quoting from an interview with Jake Tapper, the article had the following:

Sanders: Unlike many other presidents, they — my Cabinet would not be dominated by representatives of Wall Street. I think Wall Street has played a horrendous role in recent years in negatively impacting our economy and in making the rich richer.

There are a lot of great public servants out there, great economists who for years have been standing up for the middle class and the working families of this country who know that it is an international embarrassment that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth.

However, even the liberal Politicus USA has to throw in a comment that shows how little about Bernie Sanders they comprehend.

If Sanders were to be somehow elected, it would be Wall Street’s biggest nightmare come true. The problem that he would have in governing is the same that President Obama currently faces. If Republicans still control all or any part of Congress after the 2016 election, the Sanders agenda would go nowhere.

In response to this, I replied with the following:

I will add my voice to all the others to point out that even Politicus USA doesn’t get Bernie Sanders. You have a question for him, and he has the answer, but you don’t ask it of him.

Bernie Sanders sent an email to his followers explaining the great mistake that Obama made when he took office. The email promises that Sanders will not make the same mistake.

To paraphrase the email, when Obama took office, he essentially told the huge political organization that he had built to win the race, “You can go home now. I’ll take it from here. I’ll just negotiate on my own with Boner and McConnell.” Many of us tried to catch his attention to tell him what a big mistake he was making. After many years in office, Obama never did figure it out.

Not only has Sanders remarked on this great blunder, but thousands if not millions of Obama supporters noted it too. How can Obama be so blind, given his level of intelligence?

Any comparison of Bernie Sanders to our current President and worst negotiator the world has ever seen is a gross “misunderestimation” of Bernie Sanders.

Now that I have your attention (the “for dummies” phrase seems to be very successful for selling books), I am going to use the simplest example that I can think of to make this point.

Supposing someone asks you, or you ask yourself, how much do I have in the stock market? If you own 1,000 shares (just to use a round number) of various stocks, that’s about the only thing you can say for sure about what you “have” in the stock market. But supposing your questioner is more persistent, and wants to know how much money you have. The logical thing to do would be to look up the stock prices of each company, multiply each price by the number of stocks you own in that company, and then total it up. That is called marking your portfolio to market.

If the average price were $10, you would say, I have $10,000 in the stock market. If you are a small investor, and the stock market is not very volatile, you could probably sell your 1,000 shares right at the moment and realize your $10,000 (minus stock trading fees and taxes).

Now, suppose the extreme case where everybody decided to sell all their shares at the same time, and the only person willing to buy them would only pay $0.01 per share. You’d be lucky to clear anywhere near $10.00.

Where did the other $9,990.00 go? You can’t even say that it went up in smoke, because there is not even the slightest physical trace of that money. So did that money ever really exist?

As you try to tell me that the FED cannot create money out of nothing whenever it decides to, compare that to what mark-to-market did. Mark-to-market is only a concept. It is not even an actual thing with any physical embodiment. No building, no people, and no equipment make up something called mark-to-market. You might say it’s all in our minds. Now you understand what money is worth and how it is valued.

Oh, and what is that $10,000 you could have realized? If you go to the store, you might be able to buy 10,000 candy bars. Or if inflation is running rampant, maybe you can’t. So the people who rail against fractional reserve banking because it let’s banks “create money”, so what else is new? Why don’t you outlaw mark-to-market from creating any money? Can you put mark-to-market in jail if it won’t comply?

Observer News has the article Berniemania! Why Is Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders So Popular?

A very interesting article. One bit of insanity on the Observer’s part in an otherwise very sane article was the following which shows that even some experts don’t really understand the money system.

Some of his proposals, like making all public colleges free, may have unintended consequences.

“You put a lot of stress on the public system, to say you’re going to take away the tuition base. You can’t ensure government funding to make up for it,” said Sharyn O’Halloran, an economist at Columbia University’s School of Public Affairs. “If I’m sitting here trying to allocate scarce resources to benefit society, the economy, I have to allocate them in the most efficient way … if I give a rich kid a free education, I haven’t improved social welfare.”

She just does not understand what scarce resources she needs to be allocating. The colleges and universities are already there. The professors are already there. When we create our own money, this is not a scarce resource. Even if you don’t believe that, perhaps the FED could take back some of the trillions of dollars it created to give to the wealthy, and instead spend it where it will do some good. The stock market bubble the FED has created is temporary. An education is much more permanent.

By the way, if you don’t believe that US money is not a scarce resource in the US, then how do you account for the objective fact that the FED created trillions of dollars to prop up the banks and the rich? All this money, didn’t even create any inflation with the possible exception of stock market prices. I don’t hear rich people complaining about that kind of inflation, do you? (Although I do worry about that kind of inflation, and so should you.)

The FED never should have pumped that liquidity into the economy this way when it has been known for over 75 years that this strategy is not one that stimulates the economy under the then current conditions. When there is no industrial expansion worth investing in because industry is already too big for the shrinking customer base, inserting that much money into the hands of the rich does not expand industry. It does expand stock prices, though. Where else are rich people going to put their money? They either do believe in the greater fool theory, or they think they can get out before the other fools bring the market crashing down.

In case you are wondering, government buying stuff does stimulate the economy. Someone has to produce the actual goods that the government is buying. The government makes up for the shrinking customer base in the private sector. It can do that because we know from the lesson the FED gave us, that US money cannot be in short supply in the US if the FED is willing to do its job.

Naked Capitalism has the article Obama in Retreat Thanks to Elizabeth Warren-Led Opposition to Plan to Appoint Another Corporate Stooge as SEC Commissioner. The article’s opening remarks set the stage for praising what Elizabeth Warren and allies are doing to thwart the Presiden’t plans to weaken regulation.

As readers may know, Obama’s plan to keep the already weak SEC in its role as a rubber stamp to Big Finance is going pear-shaped. Via some unexpected good fortune (Obama owing a favor to Rhode Island senator Jack Reed and Senate conventions that nominations of Senate staffers get approved) the SEC wound up with a new commissioner, Kara Stein, who actually knows a thing or two about banking and has been willing to declare war on a chairman from her own party, Mary Jo White. Stein has been more effective than someone in her spot would normally be by virtue of White being so badly conflicted as to be required to sit out many commission votes, and Stein allying regularly with fellow Democrat commissioner Luis Aguilar to block unduly Wall-Street-friendly measures.

But Obama appeared ready to restore status quo ante by virtue of having Aguilar’s term expire this year. That would allow him to install a more business-toadying replacement.

If you ever needed proof about how dangerous another Obama like President would be, this is another red flag waving in front of you.

We now have one Presidential candidate who recognizes the danger of the excessive power that Wall Street and the big banks have, and how they use it to flaunt the law. His opponent as President might do wonderful, showy things to keep your attention away from the hidden goodies she gives away to the big money interests. People noted that only a strongly anti-communist Republican like Nixon could open the doors to diplomatic relations with China. In the same vein, only a purported Democrat will be able to get away with massive gifts to the big money interests.

Slate has an article quoting from a translation of a German magazine article. Thomas Piketty Explains Why the Germans Are Being Massive Hypocrites About Greece’s Debt.

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

If they can publish this in Germany, why can’t our lame stream media pick this up and give it the same amount of play they are giving to their false stories about this? What a silly question.

Thanks to Margaret Darling for posting this on Facebook.