Tag Archives: case

Here’s Why Bank of America’s $17 Billion Settlement Probably Won’t Cost It That Much

by AngelinaLavater Posted on August 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the Justice Department announced a record $17 billion settlement with Bank of America over accusations that the bank—as well as companies it later bought—intentionally misled investors who purchased financial products backed by toxic subprime mortgages. It’s the largest settlement the US government has reached with any company in history, and it is roughly equal to the bank’s total profits over the past three years. But as is the case with similar settlements involving Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America probably won’t end up paying that much.

Potential tax deductions and tricky accounting techniques in deals like this often hide the real cost to banks. The Associated Press explains:

Bank of America will pay $9.65 billion in cash and provide consumer relief valued at $7 billion…Whether cash payments are structured as penalties or legal settlements can determine whether targeted companies can declare them as tax-deductible business expenses. Also, consumer relief is an amorphous cost category: If Bank of America’s deal resembles the department’s previous settlements with JPMorgan and Citigroup, that part could be less costly to the company than the huge figures suggest.

…Much of the relief will come from modifying loans that the banks have already concluded could not be recovered in full. Reducing the principal on troubled loans often just brings the amount that borrowers owe in line with what the banks already know the loan to be worth.

Settlement math also affects the actual cost of the deals, allowing banks to earn a multiple for each dollar spent on certain forms of relief. Under Citi’s deal, for example, each dollar spent on legal aid counselors is worth $2 in credits, and paper losses on some affordable housing project loans can be credited at as much as four times their actual value.

Banks generally regard the consumer relief portion of settlements as “stuff they’re doing anyway,” banking analyst Moshe Orenbuch told the AP.

The Bank of America settlement resolves more than two dozen investigations by prosecutors around the country.

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Here’s Why Bank of America’s $17 Billion Settlement Probably Won’t Cost It That Much

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Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Famous Men (And Their Photographs)

by MonikaNQAmqd Posted on August 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bob Somerby calls my attention to the following bit of psychobabble from Peter Baker and Matt Apuzzo of the New York Times. The subject is a photo released by the White House:

Mr. Holder, 63, is the one leaning forward, both in the photograph released by the White House and on the issues underlying the crisis in Ferguson, Mo. A child of the civil rights era, he grew up shaped by the images of violence in Selma, Ala., and joined sit-ins at Columbia University where protesters renamed an office after Malcolm X. Now in high office, he pushes for policy changes and is to fly on Wednesday to Ferguson to personally promise justice in the case of a black teenager who was fatally shot by a white police officer.

Mr. Obama, 53, is the one seemingly holding back in the White House photograph, contemplative, even brooding, as if seeking to understand how events could get so out of hand. He was too young and removed to experience the turmoil of the 1960s, growing up in a multiracial household in Hawaii and Indonesia. As he now seeks balance in an unbalanced time, he wrestles with the ghosts of history that his landmark election, however heady, failed to exorcise.

Seriously? Take a look at other photographs of Obama when he’s conferring with someone. Take a look at other photographs of any powerful person when they’re conferring with an underling. The boss is the one who’s free to lounge back and relax. The underling is the one who has to lean forward and make his case. This is standard body language. Obama uses it so often that in just the August “Photo of the Day” gallery alone, I count it in three out of four photos where Obama is conferring with other people.

Look, I’ve been there. You want to say something interesting. You need a hook. But come on. If you want to make the case that racial issues are more immediate for Holder than for Obama, go ahead. But don’t pretend that a bog ordinary White House photograph tells you anything. That’s just embarrassing. Before long you’ll be hiring body language “experts” and handwriting “analysts” to help you with your leads. Here be dragons.

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Let Us Now Psychoanalyze Famous Men (And Their Photographs)

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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

by FlorianSmithers Posted on August 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Friday, a federal judge made college sports history when she ruled that the NCAA could not deny players from profiting from the use of their likenesses on TV or in video games. In doing so, Judge Claudia Wilken laid down two rules: (1) Schools can put up to $5,000 a year in a trust for athletes; and (2) they can offer more comprehensive scholarships that cover the full cost of attending college.

Many NCAA watchers have argued that the ruling in O’Bannon v. NCAA doesn’t change much, contrary to what some thought a year ago. For example, schools in the rich, successful power conferences already were moving to beef up scholarships. In the sense that the NCAA suffered a manageable setback, some have argued that it actually came out on top. But, they say, the NCAA might not be so lucky the next time around.

That’s because its upcoming legal battle could kill the governing body as we know it. Representing four former college athletes, big-time sports labor lawyer Jeffrey Kessler is targeting the NCAA and its five biggest conferences—the Atlantic Coast, the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pacific 12, and the Southeastern—in an effort to dismantle the NCAA’s “amateur” system entirely. In a powerfully worded claim, he writes that the defendants “have lost their way far down the road of commercialism,” adding that their refusal to pay student-athletes is “illegal,” “pernicious,” and has brought “substantial damages…upon a host of college athletes whose services have yielded riches only for others.” The offering of scholarship money, he writes, is not nearly enough. “This class action is necessary to end the NCAA’s unlawful cartel, which is inconsistent with the most fundamental principles of antitrust law.”

The athletes represented in Jenkins v. NCAA—all onetime Division I basketball and football players—aren’t seeking damages, but rather an injunction that would make the status quo illegal, open up athlete compensation to market forces, and basically blow up the NCAA as currently constructed.

Michael McCann, director of the Sports and Entertainment Law Institute at the University of New Hampshire, finds that outcome unlikely. “My personal belief is that none of these cases are going to be a death blow to the NCAA,” he said over the phone. If anything, he says, the outcome of O’Bannon boosts the NCAA’s chances in the Jenkins case, especially since Wilken’s decision highlighted the limits of antitrust law and didn’t come out in favor of endorsement deals for high-profile players. “My instinct is that the NCAA probably feels better about winning the Jenkins case than it did before the O’Bannon decision.”

Still, Jenkins is by far the broadest and boldest challenge to the NCAA’s amateurism system yet, and Kessler’s involvement is an enormous boost to the cause. He’s a giant of sports law, having won the fight to secure free agency for NFL players in 1992, and his clients have included the players’ associations of the NFL and NBA, Tom Brady, and Michael Jordan. The NCAA, not to be outdone, has spent $240,000 on its congressional lobbying efforts this year, already shattering past spending records with months left to go in 2014.

Sports Illustrated‘s Andy Staples figures that the outcome of Jenkins, and the future of the NCAA, will come down to the “lifeline” Wilken tossed the NCAA: her opinion that paying college athletes more than a small amount (like $5,000 per year) could harm college sports. If the NCAA’s lawyers can make the case that fans would abandon college sports if athletes were paid pro-level salaries, the association will likely survive. If Kessler can persuade otherwise, then the NCAA as we know it could be history. “The ultimate winner,” Staples writes, “will be the one with best lawyers.”

McCann suggests, however, it may not even come to that. “This is the kind of case that could get settled,” he says. “Maybe it is resolved internally. Maybe the NCAA and conferences will get together and make some changes. The O’Bannon case took five years. This case was filed earlier this year…There may not be a resolution on this for a long time.”

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The Latest Court Case Didn’t End the NCAA As We Know It. The Next One Might.

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An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

by BlairMullah Posted on July 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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Talk about a David and Goliath case. On Monday, a guy from West Virginia who doesn’t want to pay $21 a year for health insurance scored a victory over the Obama administration in a lawsuit that could deprive nearly 5 million Americans of their newly won health care.

In a 2-1 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit sided with plaintiff David Klemencic and gutted a key provision of the Affordable Care Act that provides premium subsidies to millions of low-income Americans. The decision in Halbig v Burwell, a case spearheaded by a battery of conservative groups who backed Klemencic and his co-plaintiffs (many of whom are GOP political operatives), is based on what is essentially a typo in the ACA. The opinion is a symptom of what happens when a dysfunctional Congress can’t manage to do even the simplest part of its job, such as correcting routine drafting errors in legislation.

Hours later, though, a federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, issued a diametrically opposed decision affirming Obamacare and perhaps setting up a future battle before the Supreme Court.

Here’s the backstory, as I reported last winter:

When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.

That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law…

The Obama administration argues that the language Halbig’s case is premised on is merely a drafting error common in legislation and routinely reconciled after passage. (Indeed, if Congress were functioning normally, such copy mistake would have been corrected by now, but given the level of polarization in that body, it’s been impossible to make such fixes that were once routine.) An amicus brief in the case filed by Families USA, a nonprofit health care advocacy group helping the administration combat some of the bad PR surrounding Obamacare, argues that the plaintiffs are disregarding the vast body of evidence showing that Congress intended for all low-income Americans to be eligible for tax subsidies, regardless of which exchange they used to purchase insurance.

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An Extreme Court Decision Threatens Obamacare

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Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

by Harvey50Gffjqmb Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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After writing about a common misconception regarding a particular scene in Julius Caesar, Mark Kleiman offers a footnote:

Like many Boomers, I had to read Julius Caesar in the 10th grade; not really one of the Bard’s better efforts, but full of quotable passages and reasonably easy to follow. (As You Like It, by contrast, if read rather than watched, makes absolutely no sense to a sixt Shakespeare wrote great musicals.) This would have been a perfect scene to use as an example of dramatic irony. But I doubt my teacher had any actual idea what the passage was about, and the lit-crit we read as “secondary sources” disdained anything as straightforward as explaining what the play was supposed to mean or how the poet used dramatic techniques to express that meaning.

This was my experience too, but in college. I remember enrolling in a Shakespeare class and looking forward to it. In my case, I actually had a fairly good high school English teacher, but still, Shakespeare is tough for high schoolers. This would be my chance to really learn and appreciate what Shakespeare was doing.

Alas, no. I got an A in the class, but learned barely anything. It was a huge disappointment. To this day, I don’t understand why Shakespeare seems to be so difficult to teach. Was I just unlucky?

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Why Can’t We Teach Shakespeare Better?

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Number of Backdoor Searches of NSA Data Too High to Keep Track Of

by KirkGroomawqml Posted on July 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few days ago I mentioned that the House had voted to end “backdoor” searches. These are queries of the NSA’s surveillance database that are targeted at American citizens who were “inadvertently” spied on during surveillance of foreigners, and the NSA would like you to know that these queries are totally legal; not based on any loopholes; and very definitely not “backdoor.”

Be that as it may, Sen. Ron Wyden still wanted to know just how many of these queries take place. In the case of the NSA and the CIA, backdoor queries are allowed only if the goal is related to foreign intelligence gathering. The FBI, however, has no such restriction. They can query all those inadvertent US persons for pretty much any reason at all related to a suspected crime. So how many queries of the NSA database have they made?

There you have it. The FBI has no idea how many time it’s queried the NSA database, though it’s “substantial.” In fact, those records are automatically included every single time the FBI’s database is queried. Nonetheless, nobody should be alarmed because the FBI receives only a “small percentage” of the NSA’s trillions of records, which means they’ve probably received no more than a few billion records.

Nothing to see here, folks. You may go about your business.

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Number of Backdoor Searches of NSA Data Too High to Keep Track Of

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Supreme Court Rules That Even a Sham Recess is Still a Recess

by BradforRitz Posted on June 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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See? If you take President Obama to court over an issue of executive overreach, you might win:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the president’s power to fill high-level vacancies with temporary appointments, ruling in favor of Senate Republicans in their partisan clash with President Barack Obama.

The court’s first-ever case involving the Constitution’s recess appointments clause ended in a unanimous decision holding that Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 without Senate confirmation were illegal.

Republicans had argued that the Senate wasn’t really in recess when Obama made those appointments. Obama argued that, in practice, the Senate was indeed in recess, and simply gaveling open a few pro forma “sessions” during the break didn’t change that. In this case, the justices decided to go with the letter of the law, and Obama lost.

This result doesn’t bother me much. I actually agree with Obama that these pro forma sessions are shams, but sometimes the law allows you to get away with technicalities like this. In any case, it’s good that we have a definitive ruling here.

On the other hand, the related ruling on a tea party hobbyhorse—that virtually all recess appointments are illegal anyway because the only real recess is the annual end-of-year break—is more problematic. This one struck me as completely ridiculous and contrary to 200 years of precedent, but the court rejected it only by a 5-4 margin. That’s four votes for an entirely invented bit of nonsense, and that’s not a good sign.

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Supreme Court Rules That Even a Sham Recess is Still a Recess

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Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

by JamaalChampagne Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest from the Supreme Court:

Police may not search the smartphones of people who are put under arrest unless they have a warrant, the Supreme Court has ruled, a unanimous and surprising victory for privacy advocates.

The justices, ruling in cases from California and Massachusetts, said the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” prevents a police officer from examining a cellphone found on or near a person who is arrested.

See? I told you the Supreme Court was a remarkably agreeable place. And in this case, they were remarkably agreeable even though lower courts had split on this issue and it could easily have broken down along normal left (yay civil liberties!) and right (yay law enforcement!) lines. Instead, all nine of the justices did the right thing. For a brief moment, we can all celebrate.

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Supreme Court Unanimously Supports Common Sense in Cell Phone Search Case

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This GOP Senate Candidate’s Company Paid Millions to Women in Discrimination Cases

by ElmaVillanueva Posted on May 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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With Republicans trying to avoid a repeat of 2012’s Todd Akin disaster and retake the Senate, the Georgia GOP establishment was happy to see David Perdue, a self-funded businessman, leading in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s Senate primary. Compared to gaffe machines such as Rep. Paul Broun, who has pushed personhood for zygotes, and Rep. Phil Gingrey, who defended Akin’s “legitimate rape” comment, the former Dollar General CEO seemed unlikely to introduce fraught gender issues into the general election—where Michelle Nunn, the likely Democratic nominee, is polling well against the GOP field.

But Perdue’s record on women’s issues—specifically, whether women are entitled to equal pay for equal work—is far from clean. In 2006, three years into Perdue’s four-plus years as Dollar General’s CEO, federal investigators at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that female store managers who worked for the company he ran “were discriminated against,” and “generally were paid less than similarly situated male managers performing duties requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility.” A year later, separate from that investigation, thousands of female managers who were paid less than their male counterparts joined a class action suit against the company—which Dollar General eventually settled, paying the women more than $15 million.

“Dollar General has set up a pay system which permits stereotypes about men and women to be used in judging their pay, performance, and salary needs,” female Dollar General managers claimed in sworn statements. “This includes stereotypes about men being the breadwinner, head of the household, or just more deserving because they are men.”

The case began on March 7, 2006, when Janet Calvert, the former manager of a Dollar General in Alabama, sued the company for paying her less than male managers. Dollar General, which was still under Perdue’s leadership, tried and failed to prevent other female employees from joining Calvert and suing as a class. By 2008, more than 2,100 current and former employees had joined a certified a class open to women who worked as store managers for Dollar General between November 30, 2004 and November 30, 2007. (Perdue was CEO from April 2003 to summer 2007.)

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This GOP Senate Candidate’s Company Paid Millions to Women in Discrimination Cases

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Wye Oak Is Back, and They’re Not Playing it Safe

by Lavon5225vx Posted on May 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wye Oak
Shriek
Merge

When a bandleader’s side project starts to influence her primary job, that sometimes means the original group has run out of steam and is headed for mothballs. Happily, that isn’t the case with the Baltimore folk-pop duo Wye Oak. Singer Jenn Wasner has returned from her detour in the groove-oriented Dungeonesse with renewed energy, rejoining Andy Stack to create Wye Oak 2.0, which replaces guitars with synths. The result is a deceptively subtle—and pleasing—blend of old and new. You can dance to the songs on Shriek, sometimes, but a look beneath the shiny surface reveals the same inventive melodies and thoughtful lyrics that made Wye Oak so rewarding in the first place. While purists might object, Wasner and Stack have done the band and its listeners a service by refusing to play it safe.

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Wye Oak Is Back, and They’re Not Playing it Safe

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