Too big to punish?

By Dan Brooks in corporatocracy 1 Comment

Charles Holliday, Chairman of the Board of Bank of America

The City of Baltimore has filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, alleging that banks deprived the city of millions in investment income by conspiring to fix the London interbank offered rate. Stay with me. Like all aspects of banking except robbery, the Libor is extremely boring. It is the benchmark interest rate at which banks loan money to one another, and it provides the basis for interest calculations on a variety of investments, loans and other financial instruments. When the Libor goes up, banks pay more for cash flow loans, and some investments yield more. When it goes down, banks pay less and some investments yield less. According to Peter Shapiro, an advisor to Baltimore and other municipal investors, “about 75 percent of major cities” have lost money due to Libor manipulation.

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Feel better by disdaining Meghan McCain

By Dan Brooks in Invective 7 Comments

Ethnic friend! Ethnic friend!

Fact: it is okay to be mean to rich people. You probably shouldn’t, since habitually being mean will make you into a bitter, unpleasant person,* but if you must contemn someone it’s better they’re wealthy. Hereditary wealth is the best. To be mean to the self-made millionaire is player hating. To be mean to someone who received wealth (say from her mother’s brewery) and fame/a public platform (say from her father’ failed bid at the presidency) through zero work creates a pleasing symmetry. That person was arbitrarily given a life of absurd privilege, and now she is arbitrarily criticized for failing to be the kid of person who could achieve it on her own. Take Meghan McCain. Her column at the Daily Beast is a weekly anti-advertisement for a Columbia education, and her political analyses combine banal received opinion with false marverickery, like someone ordering off the menu at McDonalds. As Leon Wolf at RedState discovered, she’s ripe for parody. Always remember, though, that rich people have lawyers.

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Further adventures in for-profit ticketing

By Dan Brooks in Fascism 4 Comments

Des Moines exactly as I remember it. Note: not Des Moines.

A few weeks ago, we talked about various cities’ attempts to address revenue problems by selling private companies the right to operate and enforce parking meters. Around the same time, a St. Louis circuit judge ruled against American Traffic Solutions in a class-action suit, finding that the city had overstepped its administrative boundaries by selling ATS the authority to issue over $30 million in traffic tickets. Since 2007, ATS has operated red-light and speeding cameras throughout St. Louis, photographing license plates and sending the tickets to car owners using an automated system. Plaintiffs argued that this system violated due process, a claim that the judge largely rejected, although he acknowledged the possibility that ATS failed to notify ticketed drivers of their right to hearings. Ultimately, his problem with ATS lay with the state of Missouri’s complex and inordinately boring license points system—the ATS computers were not accurately reporting violations to the state Department of Revenue—but I’m going to take a flyer here and say that the Combat! blog audience is more likely to get charged with a crime than to administer the city of St. Louis. So we’re going to talk about that due process thing.

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