The final terms of JPMorgan’s mortgage fraud settlement with the Department of Justice was announced yesterday. It is not all that it is cracked up to be, but that has not stopped reporters from touting the deal as a record settlement and the result of a tough negotiation. One particularly extreme example is the front …
Kevin Connor
Posts by Kevin Connor
Who’s who at Cuomo’s Buffalo fundraiser
Andrew Cuomo is in Buffalo today for a $1000-per-head fundraiser that is expected to raise $500,000 for the governor’s war chest, which at $28 million is much, much larger than that of any other gubernatorial candidate in the country. Cuomo will be met by an anti-fracking protest. …
Geithner does the Rubin Shuffle
The cooling-off period is over for former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who is joining the private equity firm Warburg Pincus as president and managing director. Geithner had initially joined the Council on Foreign Relations as a senior fellow after leaving the Treasury Department early this year. He had taken several plum speaking engagements at Wall …
Stink Tanks Exposed
This week the Center for Media and Democracy released a new report exposing the corporate backing and extreme right wing agenda of the State Policy Network, a coalition of state policy think tanks. The inspiration for the organization came from Ronald Reagan, who suggested to South Carolina businessman Thomas Roe that there should be organizations …
How to research elite social clubs on LittleSis, from Manhattan to Buffalo and beyond
Elite social clubs do not make headlines all that often, and when they do they are typically discussed in a cultural context. See this 2011 New York Times piece on the Core Club, for instance, which appeared in the Fashion & Style section. The opening fixates on a Birkin handbag which “sells for about the …
Who funds the suicide caucus?
The shutdown prompted some interesting analyses of the ascendant right-wing fringe. Tom Lind, Doug Henwood, and Bill Black have all weighed in with takes on the country’s bizarre political dynamic, and certainly there is more to come. One way to gain some more insight into what’s going on: follow the money and look at where …
JPMorgan negotiates through the revolving door
It is quickly becoming clear that JPMorgan’s tentative $13 billion settlement with the Department of Justice is not the massive, overly-punitive sanction that some press reports have made it out to be. The weaknesses in the deal may be explained in part by the fact that in arranging the settlement, JPMorgan was negotiating through the …
Dudley’s daybook goes dark
In the wake of a report from ProPublica that the New York Fed fired a senior bank examiner for challenging inadequacies in Goldman Sachs’ management of conflict of interests, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at the daily schedules of the New York Fed’s president, William Dudley, a Goldman alum. Dudley …
Opponents of minimum wage increase in NYS tap a notorious tobacco lobbyist
Opponents of the proposed minimum wage increase in New York State have tapped a notorious tobacco and fast food lobbyist to help them make their case. One of Berman’s industry front groups, the Employment Policies Institute, published an op-ed in the Buffalo News last week that argued that an increase in the minimum wage would …
The Committee to Frack New York?
New York State governor Andrew Cuomo has gotten a major assist during his first year and a half in office from an outside lobbying group known as the Committee to Save New York, a coalition of corporate elites that advocates for austerity policies and specializes in taking to the airwaves to heap praise on the …
In Latest Sign of Trouble, Chesapeake Energy Hires Lehman Spin Doctor
In the latest sign that massive natural gas fracker Chesapeake Energy is in deep trouble, the company has retained George Sard, the CEO of Sard Verbinnen. Sard was described as a “spinmeister of the apocalypse” by Portfolio magazine in April 2009, because he has worked as a PR consultant for so many high-profile clients in …
The Summers “Aura of Wrongness”
Larry Summers, former Obama economic adviser and a leading candidate for World Bank president, neatly sums up the problem of regulatory capture in Washington, reflecting on his time at the Clinton Treasury: It was the practice of the Treasury to take advice from investment banks on bond market issues from others with a stake in …