The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), held its third hearing on the financial crisis today, and up to bat were the credit ratings agencies. These companies — just three players, Moody’s, Fitch and Standard & Poor’s, dominate the market — take financial products issued More…
On Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission made a bombshell announcement: It is charging Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs with civil fraud for failing to reveal to clients that a hedge fund shorting the housing market had engineered the product they were purchasing to fail.
It seems that might More…
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander is up before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning. (As I type, he’s giving his opening statement.) He’s the head of the National Security Agency and he’s been nominated to become the first-ever head of the military’s new Cyber Command. And he’s giving some indication More…
Kerry Killinger was the chairman and chief executive officer of Washington Mutual, the $300 billion savings-and-loan organization, from 1990 until 2008. During his tenure, he made more than $100 million in compensation, including more than $14 million in 2007 and $21 million in 2008 — granted for More…
For the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, it is WaMu week.
Tomorrow, the subcommittee will release more than 500 documents on Washington Mutual, the $300 billion bank that helped fuel the subprime bubble and then collapsed in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. It will also hold a More…
Just released from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.):
Bart Stupak is a public servant of great integrity and genuine conscience. I deeply regret his decision from a public perspective, but I also respect and understand his decision because of the longevity of his service and the tremendous sacrifice that his service
Lt. Choi may not be so satisfied with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to relax “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” enforcement, but it’s being greeted warmly by sponsors of legislation in the Senate to repeal the ban on open gay military service. “I am confident that Secretary Gates More…
I’m not there, but Twitterborne images of openly gay Lt. Dan Choi, a New York National Guardsman, show him and a comrade leading a group of activists to the White House gates in protest of the military’s ban on open gay service. Joe Sudbay of AmericaBlog, who’s on More…
The private security company, renamed Xe Services, objects to my use of the verb “stole” to refer to the guns it got from the U.S. military in Afghanistan in 2008. A letter from its general counsel reads, in part:
Xe Services LLC disagrees with several statements and opinions in
A statement just released by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), whose Senate Armed Services Committee discovered widespread fraud in Blackwater’s previous Afghanistan contract, reacting to the news that the Government Accountability Office has, for the moment, scotched a bid for training Afghan police that could have gone to the More…
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