"Trump oversees all-time low in white-collar crime enforcement" by Patricia Hurtadoand Chris Dolmetsch Bloomberg News, August 10, 2020
Donald Trump calls himself the ‘‘law-and-order’’ president, but when it comes to white-collar crime, he has overseen a significant decline in enforcement.
The pre$$ organ is a fine one to talk!
The prosecution of securities fraud, antitrust violations, and other such crimes has hit a record low as the pandemic slows the courts, according to one tracking service, but even before the coronavirus, the numbers were falling under the Trump administration.
The average annual number of white-collar defendants was down 26 percent to 30 percent for Trump’s first three years in office from the average under President Barack Obama, according to data from the Justice Department and Syracuse University, respectively. The trend also shows up in fines on corporations, which fell 76 percent from Obama’s last 20 months to Trump’s first 20 months, according to Duke University law professor Brandon Garrett. ‘‘Mr. Trump sets the tone,’’ said John Coffee, a professor at Columbia Law School whose new book, ‘‘Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Crisis of Underenforcement,’’ analyzes the decline.
Trump’s Justice Department has even presided over a plunge in deferred-prosecution agreements, Coffee said. In a DPA, a company is charged with a crime but prosecutors agree to drop the case later if it admits wrongdoing, pays a penalty, and makes required reforms. ‘‘All that is an indication that white-collar crime is not a priority,’’ Coffee said. ‘‘If you want to celebrate corporations as leading our economy and the stock market up higher and higher, you don’t want to indict them.’’
That's why the purveyors of poisonous va¢¢ines have legal immunity from any harm their toxic stew causes.
Prosecutions have been declining for the past decade but have never been so low.
Oh, they were DECLINING for 7 YEARS under Obama, huh?
How di$ingenuous of Bloomberg!
The Justice Department under Trump has shifted its focus from traditional white-collar cases, like big securities prosecutions, to immigration and the sort of corporate espionage targeted by the DOJ’s China Initiative, said Robert Anello, a white-collar defense lawyer in New York. Immigration-related offenses accounted for more than half of federal prosecutions in fiscal 2018, Anello said.
A crackdown on financial fraud starting decades ago spurred reforms and increased corporate compliance, which became ‘‘one of the trademarks of American companies abroad,’’ Anello said. He warned that could now fade with waning vigilance.
Did he $ay that with a $traight face?
If $o, why are we where we are?
The change is clear, according to seven ex-prosecutors who handled securities fraud and asked not to be identified in discussing their former offices’ work. Veterans of the DOJ’s antitrust and fraud divisions have left, and younger lawyers need time to learn how to build a complicated case, they said.
The Internal Revenue Service, too, has suffered from attrition over the years, although it got a budget increase last year. Its Criminal Investigation division helps send people to prison for crimes such as tax evasion, money laundering and identity theft. The agency saw a 36 percent decrease in new criminal investigations from fiscal 2015 to 2019, IRS records show.
Long forgotten, of course, is the Lois Lerner scandal whereby a Nixonian Obama used the FBI to punish the Tea Party, among others.
One factor in the decline in traditional white-collar prosecutions is an important change to what’s known as the Yates memo.
In 2015, under Obama, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates required companies seeking leniency to help develop evidence against their employees and turn over possible suspects.....
That is from the Obama administration that [prosecuted more leakers than all the other presidents in the history of this country combined!
Of course, the double standard is ignored by Bloomberg and the audacity is that Obama is alleged to have been a transparent president (and in a way he was for you could see right through him).
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This article was below and to the right:
"Kodak shares plunge as government loan remains on hold pending probes" by Eric Newcomer Bloomberg News, August 10, 2020
Eastman Kodak Co. shares plunged nearly 28 percent Monday after a federal agency announced it was suspending a $765 million loan to help the former film company produce COVID-19 drugs, pending the outcome of investigations into potential wrongdoing.
The International Development Finance Corporation said in a tweet Friday night that “recent allegations of wrongdoing raise serious concerns. We will not proceed any further unless these allegations are cleared.” Congress and the US Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the deal, and Kodak’s board said Friday it’s also opening a review of the loan disclosure.
The stock tumbled as much as 43 percent before being briefly suspended due to excessive volatility. It closed down 27.89 percent at $10.73 Kodak has seen extreme moves in its share price since the development bank loan was officially announced July 28. The SEC is looking into whether the company broke the law by telling some news outlets about the planned loan before informing investors, a person familiar with the matter has said. The regulator is also looking into stock awards granted by Kodak.
The in$ide information u$ually goes the other way, but this is Trump!
The development bank loan was the first of its kind under the Defense Production Act in collaboration with the US Department of Defense. It was intended to speed production of drugs in short supply and those considered critical to treat COVID-19. The loan was pitched by the Trump administration and others as a way to rebuild America’s pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure while restoring the once iconic photography brand.
House Democrats have questioned why the Development Finance Corp. would “support Kodak, an organization that was on the brink of failure in 2012 and was unsuccessful in its previous foray into pharmaceutical manufacturing.”
Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn said in a statement Monday that he was “pleased” the Trump administration had put the loan on hold.....
Oh, good!
I'm glad that $cum is pleased with Trump!
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I'm sure Kodak will redeem the loan, and this article was to the left:
Below and to left:
"This company boasted to Trump about its COVID-19 vaccine. Experts are skeptical" by David Gelles and Heather Murphy New York Times, August 10, 2020
NEW YORK — As the deadly new virus spread globally, Inovio Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech company in Pennsylvania, rushed to develop a vaccine. After announcing promising early results, Inovio’s stock soared more than 1,000 percent. Riding the momentum, the company sold more shares to the public.
It's not that deadly seeing as there is a 99.98% rate of survival that increases everyday due to their infernal tests.
That was 2009, when H1N1, better known as swine flu, was stoking fears of a devastating pandemic. In the years since, Inovio has revealed encouraging news about its work on vaccines for malaria, the Zika virus, and even a “cancer vaccine.” The upbeat declarations have caused the company’s stock price to leap, enriching investors and senior executives.
They usually run out one of these $cams every five years, and I thought COVID was another version at first but they have taken it to another level and accelerated the globalist plot when our guard was done.
Not anymore.
There’s only one catch: Inovio has never actually brought a vaccine to market.
Only one?
Now, with a new pandemic raging, Inovio is working on a new vaccine: for the novel coronavirus. A flurry of positive news releases about its funding and preliminary results have sent Inovio’s shares up by as much as 963 percent — and helped the company attract money from the government and investors. At the same time, Inovio insiders have sold stock, but some scientists and financial analysts question the viability of Inovio’s technology. While there are some early signs of promise with the company’s vaccine, Inovio has released only bare-bones data from the first phase of clinical trials. It is locked in a legal battle with a key manufacturing partner that claims that Inovio stole its technology.
They are using the Micro$oft playbook of Billy G, and they are all making loot while fal$ely inflating the market.
Inovio is obviously no Kodak.
Shareholders have sued Inovio, claiming it has exaggerated its progress on a coronavirus vaccine to inflate its stock price.
NOOOOOO!?
Adding to the challenges, Inovio’s potential vaccine will have to be administered by a gadget — it resembles an electric nose-hair trimmer and is called the Cellectra — that would direct genetic material into millions of patients, and while the company has said that it is part of Operation Warp Speed — the flagship federal effort to quickly produce treatments and vaccines for the coronavirus — Inovio is not on the list of companies selected to receive financial support to mass-produce vaccines.
I think those $nots are the ones who need a trim!
As it tries to defuse the coronavirus crisis, the Trump administration is wagering, in part, on companies — like Moderna and Novavax — with spotty track records and penchants for self-promotion. In June, Inovio received $71 million from the Department of Defense to manufacture its battery-operated Cellectras.
They want to $qua$h us like in$ects, and doesn't it alarm anyone that it is the military behind all this?
Developing vaccines is hard. In addition to coming up with an effective formula and the funding to produce it, drugmakers need to navigate an obstacle course of government safety checks and rigorous scientific review on a fast enough timeline to stay competitive. The fact that a company like Inovio has never brought a vaccine to market is not necessarily an indictment of its underlying approach to creating vaccines. Otherwise, scientists said, the world would never have technological breakthroughs.
Inovio’s specialty is attempting to develop DNA-based vaccines, which use a virus’s own genes to provoke an immune response, but the company’s decade of attempts have not borne fruit. In fact, no DNA-based vaccine has ever made it to market. While some have produced encouraging results in small animals, they have not proven effective in humans — against the coronavirus or any other disease; nonetheless, the scientific community continues to believe the technology is promising, in part because such gene-based vaccines can be designed quickly. Companies in Korea, India, and Japan are pursuing similar DNA-based coronavirus vaccines.
They have GMOed the plants and the animals, and now they are coming for us!
Inovio’s chief executive, J. Joseph Kim, has said that when the DNA sequence of the coronavirus became public in January, the company was able to immediately engineer a vaccine. Later that month, Inovio secured a $9 million grant from the Coalition of Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, a leading funder of vaccine research.
He's a $elf-$erving liar because they never isolated COVID-19, and it has since mutated to make their alleged va¢¢ine.
In March, Kim — an immunologist who became chief executive of Inovio in 2009 — was invited to participate in a meeting in the White House’s Cabinet Room with President Trump and pharmaceutical executives. At the public meeting, Kim described Inovio as “the leader in coronavirus vaccine development in the world,” adding that it had its own manufacturing capabilities. Kim said that, thanks to “our very innovative, 21st-century platform,” Inovio had been “able to fully construct our vaccine within three hours.” All the company needed now, he told Trump, was the federal government’s support to help scale up manufacturing.
That's beyond Warp Speed!
Inovio’s stock shot up 220 percent. Its market value has gone from less than $500 million at the start of the year to more than $3 billion today.
Shortly after the White House meeting, Inovio announced that it had received a $5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The money would help Inovio test the Cellectra. The devices use electrical pulses to direct DNA into patients’ cells — a technique that experts said is grounded in legitimate science.
As if we would trust pre$$-cited experts and their $elf-$erving $¢ien¢e.
In March, shareholders sued Inovio in federal court in Pennsylvania. Citing Kim’s remarks at the White House and earlier comments he made on Fox Business Network about having created a vaccine, the suit claimed that the company had “capitalized on widespread COVID-19 fears by falsely claiming that Inovio had developed a vaccine.”
Whatever it takes to get that $toick price up, and I'm sure Congre$$ and Clyburn will be looking into this.
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Related:
"Stocks closed mostly higher on Wall Street Monday, nudging the S&P 500 within striking distance of its all-time high set in February....."
Meanwhile, more Americans have never been out of work as the bills keep piling up, and at least Seres' stock soared despite the fact that Haven, the audacious health venture founded by three of America’s most storied companies, once a magnet for top-flight talent, but a string of high-profile departures has left the company’s C-suite all but empty, and as a result, the company that set out to reimagine health care more than two years ago has made virtually no progress in reaching that goal and, by all accounts, may never."
Looks like Berkshire Hathaway, JP Morgan Chase, and Amazon won't be benefitting from telemedicine after all.
Berkshire Bank chief executive departs, No. 2 is put in charge
He's gone because the $mall bank's share price has tumbled by nearly 70 percent since the start of the year.
Judge allows parts of Fish lawsuit to go forward
Also see:
MTA wants Apple to help iPhone users unlock phones without removing masks
You don't want them taking a picture of your face anyway.
Hurricane Isaias expected to cost insurers about $4 billion
I don't want to freak anyone out but unless you are stoned there is something going on with the 5G, and I think it is more than a surveillance dragnet (a lot people pushing the idea that Corona is 5G, but it is probably an overreaction to a flu, right?).
NHTSA to investigate complaints of fires in minivan charging ports
Where does the power to charge come from?
Disney to cut hours as pandemic attendance lower than expected
The Devil's Paradise?
None of that is front-page news:
Markey-Kennedy race looks to be a dead heat heading into final stretch
Also see:
Kennedy and Markey clash at debate
I'm told "as vote nears, Markey, who found himself on the defensive more than Kennedy, emphasized his role in crafting the Green New Deal climate change plan and sparking a broader movement of millions of young people “that is going to change our country and our planet,” while characterizing Kennedy as less progressive and less experienced than himself. “I represent experience and change at the same time,” Markey said.
Markey is for the mon$trou$ Green New Deal, so Round 1 to Kennedy.
Markey got most heated when he went on the attack against Kennedy for the recent arrival of a super PAC backing the 39-year-old challenger with millions of dollars in TV ads, including the first negative TV ad of the campaign, which went on air over the weekend. The 74-year-old incumbent raised the prospect that Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy II, is helping fund the super PAC.
Why is he complaining?
That's how the Kennedy's got to where they are, old man Joe.
Round 2: Kennedy.
Jabbing his finger, he continued to press Kennedy to “tell your father” not to spend on negative ads. (Markey’s Internet-savvy supporters quickly started using the hashtag #TellYaFatha on Twitter.) Markey cut off Kennedy’s attempts to interject that he had publicly disavowed negative ads. “Have you told your father that?” Markey demanded. “I’ve said that publicly many times,” Kennedy began. “Have you told your father that?” Markey shot back, and shot back again, until the moderator told Markey to let Kennedy respond.
Ooooh, treating him like a petulant child is Marky. How distasteful.
Round 3: Kennedy
Kennedy hit back, and Markey seemed to deflate a bit when a few minutes later Kennedy said Markey shouldn’t complain about negative campaign tactics when his own supporters have sent horrible messages on social media, including a tweet that said “ ‘Lee Harvey [Oswald] got the wrong Kennedy’ … and not a word coming from you” or your campaign, Kennedy said."
WOW, what a LOW BLOW by the MARKEY PEOPLE!
That is reprehensible!
On the minu$ side for Kennedy was the since-removed information that the while pro-Kennedy pack was organized by Mindy Myers, a top aide to Warren and Clinton crony, while three largest individual donations to the pro-Markey PAC came from wealthy businessmen, at least two of whom are billionaires (Bloomberg must be one).
Related:
"US senators from Massachusetts are asking for support from federal public health officials as the state braces for more cases of eastern equine encephalitis, a rare mosquito-borne illness that killed six residents in an outbreak last year and has infected one Plymouth County boy this summer. Last year’s EEE outbreak was the state’s worst in more than 50 years, and already this year is looking like it could set new records, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey said in a letter to Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Last summer, EEE surged across the United States, with 38 cases nationwide — up from the usual half a dozen cases,” Warren and Markey said. “Massachusetts was one of the states hit hardest, with 12 cases and 6 fatalities. Because typical EEE outbreaks last for two to three years, high case counts are likely to continue.”
Just what are they raining down on us for an overhyped threat?
Also see:
"So it looks like Alex Morse’s long-shot congressional campaign to oust Richie Neal is pretty much shot. The University of Massachusetts Amherst is investigating allegations that Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, used his position as an adjunct professor to initiate inappropriate relationships with students. The story, broken by The Collegian, the UMass student newspaper, is a campaign killer. Morse, 31, predicts he will be vindicated, insisting that all the relationships were consensual — conveniently overlooking that as a mayor, congressional candidate, and darling of the progressive movement, he holds considerably more power than the younger men he sought out for relationships, and if there is a clear red line at all universities, it is that teachers don’t pursue students romantically. A chastened Morse said he understood why some of those who previously endorsed him would want to withdraw their endorsements, but on Sunday, a more combative Morse said he was staying in the race and complained that he is being singled out and held to a different standard for being an openly gay man....."
Can you read morse code?
Related:
Mitchell Adams, former state official recalled for social conscience, dies at 75
He was Morse's role model, and the pair of sly foxes are natural allies and are like predatory sharks as even gays admit they are sick and drowning in perversion before leaving you stranded on the beach with a Happy Meal.
Looks to me like he flat-out lied, and that can no longer be forgiven.
