Shocked by past deals with Italy and Greece, governments are excluding the Wall Street bank from sovereign bond sales.

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European governments are turning their backs on Goldman Sachs, the all-conquering investment bank that has suffered a series of blows to its reputation, capped by the biggest ever fine imposed on a Wall Street firm.

According to data from Dealogic, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have all denied the bank a lead role in their recent sovereign bond sales.

Last Thursday, Goldman agreed to pay a $550m fine to settle US regulators' claims that the bank misled investors in a mortgage-backed security. Goldman admitted that its marketing materials were incomplete, because they failed to state that the same third party that helped choose the assets had taken a bet against them.

But governments have also been shocked at the emergence of past transactions between Goldman and Greece and Italy, where products the bank helped to sell aided both in hiding government debt. Greece, which used Goldman in a bond sale this year, is practically at war with the bank. A sharp contrast with the situation months before, when Goldman bankers dined with the prime minister in a private meeting overlooking the Acropolis. The relationship broke down, though, after news leaked earlier this year that Goldman was about to strike a bond sale deal with China's sovereign fund – which never materialised.

• Continue reading at the Guardian UK

Mr. Huckabee, left, and Carlos Quijas, right, say Mexican soldiers planted two suitcases of marijuana in their truck, then abused them during interrogation, allegations denied by the army.

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CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico—Two Americans were driving back to El Paso, Texas, last December after an afternoon across the border in Ciudad Juárez. A few blocks from the border, they were surrounded by Mexican army trucks and pulled from their Dodge Ram.

Those two men—Shohn Huckabee, 23 years old, and Carlos Quijas, 36—are being held in a Ciudad Juárez jail. They tell a different story about what happened that night. They say Mexican soldiers planted the marijuana in their truck. When they arrived at the military base, they say, they were blindfolded, tied up, hit with rifle butts, shocked with electricity and threatened with death.

José Antonio Bujanda, 21, told the court on Feb. 26 that he saw soldiers pull over Messrs. Huckabee and Quijas while he was washing windows of cars lined up to cross the bridge into Texas. He said he saw soldiers plant the suitcases in Mr. Huckabee's gray Dodge Ram.

"The two soldiers went to their own truck. I saw them take out two suitcases, then put them in the gray truck," he said.

Abraham Antero Torres, a 19-year-old candy seller, testified that he saw the same. "The military men that were behind took out two black traveler's suitcases and put them into the Ram, and that was it," he said.

A third witness, Fernando Monsiváis, another window washer, told the court: "The soldiers put the suitcases in the truck, the young men's truck."

Mr. Bujanda was shot and killed in front of his home by an unknown assailant on July 2. Attempts to reach Messrs. Torres and Monsiváis to comment were unsuccessful.

• Continue reading at the WSJ

(Reuters) - Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who has lived in seclusion since falling ill four years ago, will appear on Cuban television and radio on Monday evening to discuss his theory that the world is on the verge of nuclear war, the Communist Party newspaper Granma said in its Monday online edition.

• Continue reading at Reuters

At the National Governors Association meeting, from left, Phil Bredesen, Deval Patrick, Joe Manchin III and Bob McDonnell.

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BOSTON — In a private meeting with White House officials this weekend, Democratic governors voiced deep anxiety about the Obama administration’s suit against Arizona’s new immigration law, worrying that it could cost a vulnerable Democratic Party in the fall elections. 

While the weak economy dominated the official agenda at the summer meeting here of the National Governors Association, concern over immigration policy pervaded the closed-door session between Democratic governors and White House officials and simmered throughout the three-day event.

At the Democrats’ meeting on Saturday, some governors bemoaned the timing of the Justice Department lawsuit, according to two governors who spoke anonymously because the discussion was private.

“Universally the governors are saying, ‘We’ve got to talk about jobs,’ ” Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee, a Democrat, said in an interview. “And all of a sudden we have immigration going on.”

He added, “It is such a toxic subject, such an important time for Democrats.”

• Continue reading at the NYT

Now, legislation to put a publicly funded system in place is gaining a boost from an unusual set of allies: wealthy donors and corporate executives.

A group of about a dozen former corporate executives and other wealthy individuals has made $5 million in donations and pledges to bankroll a lobbying effort for government financing of House and Senate campaigns, according to David Donnelly, the head of Campaign for Fair Elections and the man leading the effort.

• Continue reading at the WSJ

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What would a Klansman have to do to gain the good favor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)? Since its inception, the KKK has killed thousands, assaulted and maimed exponentially more, rigged elections and terrorized voters and politicians alike. “Sorry” probably wouldn’t cut it. Spending like a drunken sailor, however, might just do the trick.

At least, that’s all it took for the NAACP to abandon its race-baiting long enough to forgive former KKK leader Robert Byrd for the transgressions of his mid-20s.

On Monday the organization released a statement from NAACP President and Chief Executive Benjamin Todd Jealous claiming that Byrd’s life “reflects the transformative power of this nation.”

• Continue reading at the Daily Caller

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More on Byrd's racism:

• Saying Goodbye To A Racist -- The Passing Of Senator Robert Byrd

Ratigan said flatly:

• "As long as there’s been banks and governments, banks and governments have been conspiring to take money from the people.”  What has changed now, he said, is that “we have the ability to engage it directly through fair elections and a free press."

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On most cable newscasts, the people who are writing new financial regulations are called congressmen. But on “The Dylan Ratigan Show” on MSNBC, some are called “banksters.”

That term, a twist on gangsters, tells viewers a lot about Mr. Ratigan, a financial news apostate who has transformed himself into an outspoken opponent of too-big-to-fail banks and the politicians whom he calls their servants. In the recent fight over financial reform, he lent a megaphone to people who wanted an end to “too big to fail,” and he called on viewers to lobby the Senators in his imaginary Bankster Party.

All this from a man who, until recently, hosted a stock-picking show on CNBC, the cable personification of Wall Street. Now Mr. Ratigan, who labels himself a taxpayer advocate, rails against the “vampire” banks who “have assumed control of our government.”

“It’s like being the guy who was running the casino, and then having an awakening and realizing that the casino is what’s killing the country,” Mr. Ratigan said in an interview last week.

On Friday, he concluded that the financial overhaul, which Democrats hope to send to President Obama by the end of the week, would not put a halt to what he calls theft by the banks. The bill is “nothing more than window dressing,” he said. On CNBC, meanwhile, there was almost an audible sigh of relief that the reforms were, as Maria Bartiromo put it, “not as strict as many people had feared.”

Mr. Ratigan said flatly, “As long as there’s been banks and governments, banks and governments have been conspiring to take money from the people.” What has changed now, he said, is that “we have the ability to engage it directly,” through fair elections and a free press. The first step in his playbook, then, is to end the denial about it through his show.

He made headlines online in December when he cut off an interview with a congresswoman after fighting with her over what he called the “private insurance monopoly” that stood to benefit from an overhaul of health care.

“You’re asking your own questions and answering them. You could be your own guest,” Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida, said on the show (Mr. Ratigan later apologized). Most of the time he reins himself in, recognizing, he says, that anger distracts from productive conversations. 

• Continue reading at the NYT

Simmons, best known for his Phat Farm clothing line and Def Jam music label, is also the owner of UniRush, a Cincinnati company that sells a prepaid Visa (V) debit card called RushCard, with about 2.5 million users. Simmons has persuaded lawmakers to exempt his business from a measure that would shift more of the cost of debit-card processing from retailers to the banks.

Unmentioned are the fees Simmons' company imposes for its card, including a $9.95 monthly charge, $3 for activation, $1 for every purchase if a PIN is used, $1 for online bill paying, and 50 cents to check your balance at an ATM. Direct deposits and online account management are free, as is a service that alerts customers when their balances are low. By comparison, check-cashing services can charge $50 to cash a $1,000 paycheck. Such fees have led some to ask whether Simmons is at least as interested in doing well as in doing good. Simmons is "marketing a product that is frankly exploitative of the poor and minorities," says Georgetown University law professor Adam Levitin, who specializes in banking issues. "He's no different than a bank." 

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South Carolina Republican Tim Scott.

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Related reading:

• Rise Of The Black Republican: 32 African American GOP Candidates This Fall -- Most Since Civil War  >>

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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) - Voters in South Carolina nominated a black Republican lawmaker for an open congressional seat Tuesday, rejecting a legendary political name and adding diversity to the national party.

State Rep. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond, an attorney who is son of the one-time segregationist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. Scott, who won the runoff with 69 percent of the vote, is now poised to become the nation's first black GOP congressman since 2003.

Scott, 44, owns an insurance business and became the first black Republican in the South Carolina Legislature in more than a century when elected two years ago. Before that, he served 13 years on Charleston County Council and was elected chairman four times.

He's now the favorite in the coastal 1st District, which has elected a Republican congressman for three decades. He would become the first black Republican congressman since Oklahoma's J.C. Watts retired in 2003.

Scott grew up in poverty in North Charleston, his parents divorcing when he was 7. His mother, Frances, worked 16 hours a day raising Scott and a brother and Scott regularly introduce her at campaign events.

Scott also credits a mentor with helping him turn around his life at a time he was in danger of flunking out of high school. He said John Moniz, a conservative entrepreneur who ran a Chick-fil-A, changed his outlook on life.

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They might as well ban oral sex while they're at it.  Wait, that's already in the platform.  I'm not kidding.

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The Texas Republican Party gives a whole new meaning to the word conservative.

The GOP there has voted on a platform that would ban oral and anal sex. It also would give jail sentences to anyone who issues a marriage license to a same-sex couple (even though such licenses are already invalid in the state).

“We oppose the legalization of sodomy,” the platform says. “We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.”

The Lone Star state initially passed a law barring sodomy in 1860. Violators faced anywhere from five to 15 years in prison. The ban was overturned in 2003.

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Continue reading at the NY Daily News  >>

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Forget AIG for a moment. Forget Freddie and Fannie, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Lehman Brothers. Imagine a company much bigger. Imagine a company that at the end of this year will have spent $400 billion more than it has taken in. Worse, imagine that the company's accounting is so bad, the $400 billion doesn't even begin to cover the whole of this company's liabilities.

In fact, the company deliberately chooses to use what's known as "cash accounting" rather than the more accurate accrual accounting. Cash accounting looks at how much cash the company has on hand, regardless of future liabilities. It's like saying if you have $75 dollars in your checking account right now, you're $75 in the black, never mind that you've deferred your car payment, quit your job, and have a rent check due at the end of the month.

The company also practices dirty accounting tricks like "forward funding," "advance funding," and "delayed obligations," deceptive tricks that hide its precipitous finances from auditors and its investors.

This company routinely borrows from its workers' pension plan to pay off its debt. Its accountants then claim that because the company owes the borrowed money to its own pensioners and not to outside creditors, the resulting hole in the pension plan doesn't really count as a liability. Sometimes, the company's executives neglect to pass a budget at all. When that happens, they keep the company running with "emergency expenditures," which its accountants don't consider real expenditures for records-keeping purposes, even though they're paid with real money.

By now, you've probably guessed where I'm headed. I'm not really talking about any private company. I'm talking about your federal government. If any private corporation employed the same accounting tricks Congress and the White House use to hide the government's massive debt and financial liabilities, its board and executive officers would all be in prison. In the government, it's common practice. And that's not even considering the funding of our two ongoing wars, which somehow emanates from outside the normal budget process.

If the government were required to abide by the same accounting standards as private industry, its debt would be in the trillions, not billions. Last May, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said that the government's unfunded liability for Social Security and Medicare alone comes to a staggering $99.2 trillion, or $330,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. It's an impossible figure.

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Continue reading at Reason  >>

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Somali pirates do not randomly attack vessels in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean; they rather select their targets via the help of a london-based consultant group.

"Well-placed informers" constantly update control centers in Somalia, which ultimately give the pirates information about ships, their cargo and their routes, the Guardian reported citing a European military intelligence document obtained by a Spanish radio station, Cadena SER.

The information obtained by the pirates through the "consultants" was in some cases so extensive that they even included the vessel's blueprints and the nationalities of those on board.

"The information that merchant ships sailing through the area volunteer to various international organizations is ending up in the pirates' hands," Cadena SER reported citing the document.

Once aboard the hijacked ships, the pirates would maintain contact with their informants, as has been confirmed by at least one targeted shipping company, the Guardian reported.

The document also mentions that the pirates seem to be avoiding vessels flying the British flag, allegedly to evade drawing the attention of the UK police - a precautionary measure to protect their london-based accomplices.

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In Arizona, Hector Maldonado says he ran into trouble with his bosses because he objected to what he claims was his employer's habit of faking financial information to qualify customers for loans they couldn't afford. One manager, Maldonado alleged in a lawsuit, cursed and threatened him after he came forward with information documenting dishonest lending practices.

In Michigan, Matthew Manley claims his coworkers saddled customers with bigger loans by slipping unapproved charges into the deals. One manager, Manley alleges in his own lawsuit, urged him to target vulnerable customers - referring to the elderly as "people with oxygen tanks" and African Americans as "the dumb blacks."

In the wake of the nation's mortgage meltdown, Maldonado and Manley's allegations sound familiar. But the pair weren't employed in the subprime mortgage business. They worked for car dealers. They are among 20 former auto dealership insiders from Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois and Hawaii who describe a culture in which forged documents, hidden fees and other questionable practices were tools of the trade. These accounts, provided in court records and in interviews with the Center for Public Integrity, paint an unflattering portrait of the on-the-ground realities of auto financing.

The abuses alleged by the former insiders mirror some of the tactics that gave the mortgage industry a bad name and prompted consumer advocates and lawmakers to push for the creation of a federal consumer financial protection agency. Now, as Senate and House negotiators try to come to agreement on the final shape of a sweeping financial reform bill, car dealers and their critics are clashing over whether the dealers should be excused from oversight by the consumer-protection bureau.

Congressional negotiators are expected to take up the auto dealer carve-out issue on Tuesday.

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The Obama administration has a lot of fights on its hands. Putting aside real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there's the battle against leaking oil in the Gulf, the struggle against 9.7 percent unemployment across the country, and clashes over the president's agenda on Capitol Hill. Despite all that, the White House has found time to issue a new declaration of war, this time against an unlikely enemy: the state of Arizona.

The Justice Department is preparing to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. The president has stiffed Gov. Jan Brewer's call for meaningful assistance in efforts to secure the border. And the White House has accused Arizona's junior senator, Republican Jon Kyl, of lying about an Oval Office discussion with the president over comprehensive immigration reform. Put them all together, and you have an ugly state of affairs that's getting uglier by the day.

First, the lawsuit. Last week, Brewer was appalled to learn the Justice Department's intentions not from the Justice Department but from an interview done by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with an Ecuadorian TV outlet. "It would seem to me that if they were going to file suit against us," Brewer told Fox News' Greta van Susteren last week, "they definitely would have contacted us first and informed us before they informed citizens ... of another nation."

But they didn't.

"There certainly seems to be an underlying disrespect for the state of Arizona," says Kris Kobach, the law professor and former Bush administration Justice Department official who helped draft the Arizona law. Kobach points out that during the Bush years, several states openly flouted federal immigration law on issues like sanctuary cities and in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Respecting the doctrines of comity and federalism, the Bush administration didn't sue. Now, when Arizona passes a measure that is fully consistent with federal law, the Obama administration, says Kobach, "goes sprinting to the courthouse door."

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Continue reading at the Washington Examiner  >>

Mexican drug cartels have set up shop on American soil, maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona from which their scouts can monitor every move made by law enforcement officials, federal agents tell Fox News. 

The scouts are supplied by drivers who bring them food, water, batteries for radios -- all the items they need to stay in the wilderness for a long time.  

Click here for more on this story from Adam Housley.

“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement," said an agent who patrols the area and asked not to be named. "We (federal border agents), as well as the Pima County Sheriff Office and the Bureau of Land Management, can attest to that.”  

Much of the drug traffic originates in the Menagers Dam area, the Vekol Valley, Stanfield and around the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation. It even follows a natural gas pipeline that runs from Mexico into Arizona. 

In these areas, which are south and west of Tucson, sources said there are “cartel scouts galore” watching the movements of federal, state and local law enforcement, from the border all the way up to Interstate 8.      

“Every night we’re getting beaten like a pinata at a birthday party by drug, alien smugglers," a second federal agent told Fox News by e-mail. "The danger is out there, with all the weapons being found coming northbound…. someone needs to know about this!” 

The agents blame part of their plight on new policies from Washington, claiming it has put a majority of the U.S. agents on the border itself. One agent compared it to a short-yardage defense in football, explaining that once the smugglers and drug-runners break through the front line, they're home free.    

“We are unable to work any traffic, because they have us forward deployed," the agent said. "We are unable to work the traffic coming out of the mountains. That traffic usually carries weapons and dope, too, again always using stolen vehicles.”

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