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Exactly five years after Phil Angelides’ Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission filed their report on financial sector wrongdoing in the global financial crisis, he continues to ask the Justice Department why none of the executives who oversaw that wrongdoing have been charged.

[B]ecause of the 10-year statute of limitations for financial fraud affecting banks and other types of financial institutions, there is still time to investigate and prosecute crimes committed in 2006 and 2007 -- the final period of wild excess before the mortgage market collapsed. But time is quickly running out.

Accordingly, I have sent a letter to Attorney General Lynch urging DOJ to immediately re-open the investigation into individual misconduct related to the packaging and sale of mortgage securities -- and do so before the statute of limitations on such misconduct expires. How DOJ proceeds over the next 18 months will speak volumes about its commitment to its new policies and to seeing that justice is served.

DOJ already has in its hands the roadmap to systematic impropriety on Wall Street. In 2010, the FCIC made public documents obtained from Clayton Holdings that clearly show, in black and white and in charts, how Wall Street bankers misled investors around the globe about the mortgage securities they were peddling.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Medical Error, Liability, and Murtha:

On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Bernie fans came to hear Greg Dworkin say he won big. And it didn’t even hurt! Who turned out and why Who’s freaking out? Dropping out? Joan McCarter warns of yet another web freedom fight and more GOP obstructionism. Your “smart” toys are spying on you.

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Police in Austin, Texas, shot and killed a naked black youth on February 8, less than one week after an officer in San Antonio shot and killed a black man for holding a cell phone in his hand. According to the Austin Statesman, police are saying its “too early to tell” if the 18-year-old youth—who was naked, by the way—was armed when he was shot in the northeast section of the city.

Before the man was shot, police responded to a call of a suspicious man acting aggressively in the area of the 12000 block of Natures Bend in Northeast Austin. Police were dispatched at 9:57 a.m. and an officer found a naked man in the street, [Austin Police Chief of Staff Brian] Manley said.

Neither the officer who fired his weapon nor the man were immediately identified. However, Manley said the officer has been with Austin Police Department for more than 10 years and was placed on administrative leave, as is standard procedure for officers involved in fatal use of force.

Dashboard camera footage caught a portion of the incident, but the shooting occurred out of frame, Manley said. Audio from that footage recorded the officer ordering the victim to stop repeatedly after he charged at the officer, Manley said.

Austin-Travis County EMS responded to the shooting and transported the victim to St. David’s Round Rock Medical Center. There, the victim died, Manley said.

Monday’s shooting of the naked teenager comes after a San Antonio-based tabloid publisher made—and then withdrew—a threat to publish the names and addresses of police officers. The threat was in response to the shooting death of Antronie Scott on February 4.

In most political families, someone would be telling Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric to shut up right about now. But these are the Trumps, so Junior and Eric are probably hearing something more along the lines of “you tell ‘em, son” for running their respective mouths.

Junior is oppressed by wealth:

“Now, listen, in this country I’m the son of a billionaire, I can’t even have an opinion anymore,” Trump Jr. said on Breitbart News Daily. “I could be Albert Einstein and they would discredit me as a horrible scientist. It doesn’t matter.”

Uh huh. You poor thing, it sounds terrible. And it’s so unfair, Junior said, because his father “made us work” and “I’m the only son of a billionaire who can drive a D10 just because those were the jobs that I had growing up.” Brother Eric, meanwhile, has thoughts about his father's waterboarding plans:

"You see these terrorists that are flying planes into buildings, right? You see our cities getting shot up in California. You see Paris getting shot up," Eric Trump responded. "And then somebody complains when a terrorist gets waterboarded, which quite frankly is no different than what happens on college campuses and frat houses every day."

Okay, fratboy. You try being waterboarded by a CIA interrogator and then let us know how it compares to fraternity hazing.

Say this for Donald Trump (original version): He seems to have been an involved enough parent for his personality to have rubbed off on his kids.

When the late 1960s/early 1970s lyrical group The Last Poets said “New York, New York, The Big Apple … rotten to the core,” many outside of the city thought they were being too harsh. Well, perhaps this will give you a glimpse as to why they said that: Police in the city have been using a “nuisance abatement” law to deny people entry into their homes. Some of these people have been accused of crimes, and sometimes criminal activity was alleged to have taken place in (or near) the residences.

The overlapping threads are that a majority of the individuals affected have not been charged with crimes or have had charges dropped—and are people of color. A recent investigation by ProPublica and the New York Daily News looked at a little over 500 “nuisance abatement” court cases in an 18-month period.

Three-quarters of the cases begin with secret court orders that lock residents out until the case is resolved. The police need a judge’s signoff, but residents aren’t notified and thus have no chance to tell their side of the story until they’ve already been locked out for days. And because these are civil actions, residents also have no right to an attorney.

Perhaps most fundamentally, residents can be permanently barred from their homes without being convicted or even charged with a crime.

A man was prohibited from living in his family home and separated from his young daughter over gambling allegations that were dismissed in criminal court. A diabetic man said he was forced to sleep on subways and stoops for a month after being served with a nuisance abatement action over low-level drug charges that also never led to a conviction. Meanwhile, his elderly mother was left with no one to care for her.

Following the cases to their conclusion, the joint investigation revealed some grim statistics.

The current mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, can pretty much go wherever he wants in the city these days. As a youth however he, and the other residents of the city who were of African descent, could not. They had to use specific restrooms or water fountains and sit in specific sections of theaters. One of those places was the Lyric Theatre. Recently renovated, the designers had to make a choice: remove/hide what had been the “colored” entrance to the theatre, or incorporate it into the $11 million dollar restoration. The decision: they placed a glass door with the words “Historic Colored Entrance” etched into at the poorly lit stairwell to the balcony that was walled off from the main lobby of the theatre. That’s where Black folks had to sit when they patronized the Lyric.

The question of what should be done with the architecture of white supremacy continues to be asked with increasing frequency. The “inequity built into the Lyric Theatre’s very architecture” is reminiscent of other locations, primarily in the Deep South but not exclusively.

Across the South, people are struggling with similar questions: What does a changing region do with the vestiges of back-alley service windows, segregated waiting rooms, dual water fountains and abandoned schools that once formed the skeleton of a society built on oppression?

Northern states have such reminders, too. A black heritage trail in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, includes all-black burial grounds and a plaque which explains that blacks were forced to sit in designated pews in New England churches through the mid-1800s. In Detroit, murals decorate a 6-foot-tall concrete wall built in 1941 to separate a new development meant for whites from an existing black neighborhood.

[...]

“It has become more complicated today because people are more willing to think about the preservation of the architecture of white supremacy,” [Robert] Weyeneth [a University of South Carolina history professor who specializes in preservation] said. “Initially, no one wanted to save these things.”

The question has been asked with increased frequency and volume since the slaying of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in July of 2015. The confessed shooter, 19-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, wore the symbol of the Confederacy and had a Confederate States of America license plate on his vehicle. The New Orleans City Council voted in December to remove four Confederate monuments located throughout the city. In January, a Baltimore City Commission recommended the same for two Confederate monuments in that city. In Georgia, members of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference have advocated for the removal of the Confederate engraving at Stone Mountain. The giant mountain of quartz and granite is the largest bas-relief in the world, depicting Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

The question of what to do with such reminders, and how to do it, will not be answered soon. But it should definitely continue to be asked.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress points out that a new study rightly reiterates what we already know—that people in poorer, developing countries will suffer disproportionately from global warming even though they have contributed little or nothing to the crisis because they have historically been low-level emitters of greenhouse gases.

But the study commissioned by the University of Queensland and Wildlife Conservation Society takes that disproportionality argument too far, Romm writes, when it concludes the world’s biggest carbon polluters (now and historically) will suffer little from the ill effects of climate change:

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, asserts:

Some countries, such as China and the United States of America, are in a win-win position of achieving economic growth through fossil fuel use with few consequences from the resulting climate change, while many other, mostly Island and African, countries suffer low economic growth and severe, negative climate change impacts.

While the second half of that assertion is true, the first half is, quite frankly, absurd. China and the U.S. are both going to suffer devastating consequences from climate change — indeed, we already are.

To repeat, there is no denying the rich countries that still emit gargantuan amounts of carbon pollution have far more resources to deal with global warming changes that have begun. Nor can it be denied that the poor, developing nations will be affected unfairly by the consequences of global warming without having received a just share of the benefits from the vast amount of carbon pollution emitted by others. There is an emissions to vulnerability ratio. And that ratio definitely favors well-to-do nations like the United States. 

But, as Romm notes, while it’s certainly true that the rich nations have gotten that way in great part from burning fossil fuels whose emissions are heating up the planet, the impacts are already happening to them, too, and these will worsen over time.

The final open enrollment numbers for Obamacare this year are "so-so" in the words of Charles Gaba, but about what the administration had predicted last fall: 12.7 million. But within those respectable but not amazing numbers are some significant gains for a number of states.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eight states saw a significant drop last year in the number of residents going without health insurance, according to a government report out Tuesday that has implications for the presidential campaign.
Politically, the eight states with statistically significant coverage gains in the National Health Interview Survey are a mix of red, blue and purple. They are Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, and New York. Five have GOP governors. […]
 

In addition to the eight states with statistically significant coverage gains, the report named another 10 with notable reductions in the percentage of uninsured residents. However, the changes in these states did not meet the survey's test for statistical significance.

That second group included Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. Seven of those states have Republican governors.

Some of these gains are a reflection of a continuing economic recovery, particularly in the states that haven't yet accepted Medicaid expansion, most notably Florida. Because, yes, the economy has been recovering. And Obamacare hasn't killed jobs.

As Kevin Drum notes, another Republican talking point against Obamacare has spectacularly failed to come true—employers haven't dropped coverage on millions of people. In fact, "total private coverage increased by more than 16 million through the middle of 2015. […] After four years of private coverage hovering around 61 percent of the population, it jumped up to 66 percent within the space of a single year."

Just imagine how it could have succeeded without facing Republican obstruction for the past six years.

If we still had any pretense of enforcing election laws in this country, this could end up being a problem for Trump.

On Friday, Liberty House executive director Keith Howard received a call from a Trump campaign staffer, who conveyed that Trump would like to publicly present them with a six-figure check at a Londonderry rally on Monday, right before the Granite State primary.

Liberty House is one of the veterans' charity groups chosen to benefit from Trump's rally for veterans, the event staged to compete with the Fox News debate that Trump boycotted over Megyn Kelly's perceived rudeness to his royal Trumpness. The problem is that the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity, is ostensibly supposed to be a different beast from the Donald J. Trump political campaign. They’re supposed to stay at arm’s length.

“The campaign utilizing the foundation to help support and promote campaign events is a potential legal problem for both the campaign and the Trump Foundation,” said Larry Noble, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

The value of the work the foundation did to assist the campaign event could be considered an illegal campaign contribution. And the foundation is barred from getting involved in political activity, such as supporting a campaign rally, he continued. “Neither the foundation nor other charities should be working hand-in-hand with the campaign to promote Trump’s campaign events.”

The campaign and Liberty House were eventually able to agree on a method of donation that would not require the charity to appear with Trump, since Liberty House director Keith Howard was concerned that associating his charity with any specific political campaign would endanger the group's nonprofit status. But the more specific question is whether Trump's campaign and Trump's own charitable foundation stepped over the bounds of campaign law by working in tandem to promote, well, Donald Trump.

It's unlikely that anything will come of it, if we're being honest, because we simply do not enforce such laws (as evidence, see CARLY for America.) But maybe at some point it will be the subject of a sternly worded letter?

You have probably seen the photos of the Marco Rubio "robot" protesters that met Rubio at one of his New Hampshire events. You have probably also seen the photos of Rubio campaign staff knocking one down and manhandling another.

“I just felt his hands and arms around my neck,” [progressive activist Aaron Black] told TPM. “I asked, ‘Why are you putting your hands on me?’”

There is video of the event, and the video clearly shows one man forcibly shoving "robot" Black away with a large campaign sign while another, Rubio state campaign chair Cliff Hurst, grabs him around the neck and attempts to either knock him over or pull him backwards.

Or, if you're Hurst, you go with the "He was coming right at me!" defense.

But Hurst cast Black as the aggressor in the run-in, telling Breitbart in an interview that “he just attacked me.”

“We were right crowded together and he just almost knocked me down,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. I mean, he was violent against me.”

Except the actual video doesn't show anything of the sort. It doesn't show "robot" Black so much as lifting a finger towards Hurst, as (1) his vision is so obstructed he likely couldn't even see Hurst before Hurst grabbed him and (2) he was holding up a paper sign at the time.

So let's see. We've got Rubio campaign officials knocking over protesters, and then we've got a Rubio campaign official whining to conspiracy outlet Breitbart that despite what the video shows, the exact opposite thing happened so shut up.

Sounds about right. It seems the Rubio campaign is inheriting his trademark twitchiness.

Spotlight on Green News & Views (previously known as the Green Diary Rescue) appears twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here is the most recent previous Green Spotlight. More than 24,635 environmentally oriented stories have been rescued to appear in this series since 2006. Inclusion of a story in the Spotlight does not necessarily indicate my agreement with or endorsement of it.

OUTSTANDING GREEN STORIES

In Defense of Farmers/Ranchers written by Nodin: “My first diary contains an image of the Shideler Ranch where I spent a lot of hours as a kid bucking bales of hay, herding cattle or just plain doing gruntwork on fencing or stockyard cleaning. I want to give you a fairer perception of the small farmer/rancher across America, one that is not in any way exemplified by the Bundys of recent notoriety. This diary contains my own experiences for the most part, along with paraphrasing those of my extended farming/ranching family. The rancher in the picture is my old family friend, Barry Shideler (recently deceased) and his wife Marilyn. [...] Small farmers and ranchers are a severely endangered species with the rise of phenomenally huge Agra. My friend Barry pastured his own cattle and the ranch did lease BLM land for grazing. Barry’s great grandpa had a 99 year lease on the land so I would imagine that lease expired about the time Barry inherited the entire responsibility. I don’t know if it was renewed but my guess is it had to be or the ranch would not have survived. The lease cost used to be manageable, but I suspect it has grown right along with taxes, both of which cut into profits a rancher might make which are all too often not enough for expenses that continually rise.”

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court deals a severe blow to humanity's future. Google it written by citisven: “Those are the exact words of a text message I got from one of my friends at the EPA last night, in response to this: In a major setback for President Obama’s climate change agenda, the Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to combat global warming by regulating emissions from coal-fired power plants. It puts yesterday’s New York Times headline into a larger context of what the Supreme Court’s decision to issue a stay on the Obama Administration’s efforts to regulate coal powered plants could really mean. If this holds, it’s not only going to derail the EPA’scomprehensive efforts to clean up the worst CO2 emitters in this country, but the effects of this reckless decision will ripple throughout the world, right into the painstaking details of an already fickle climate agreement negotiated in Paris. If the US has to renege on its commitment to get serious about curbing its own emissions, it is quite possibly going to undo the thousands upon thousands of pieces put into place across the global board like a flick of the first domino.”

Order a copy of Eat More Comics: The Best of The Nib, 300 pages of political cartoons, comics journalism and essays. Follow me on Twitter at @MattBors.

The city council in Ferguson, Missouri, voted unanimously on Tuesday, February 8 to accept a consent decree negotiated with the Department of Justice regarding its policing and court practices .  Well … kind of. Sort of. 

The city council added seven amendments to the DOJ’s consent decree, which members say are just a teeny tiny part of the hundreds of requirements they had spent several months negotiating. It appears however, that those amendments are for cover in case Ferguson disbands its police department. And disbanding its police department would wipe out the majority of the consent decree with the DOJ.

The city sent out a press release announcing its vote and listing the seven proposed amendments. That press release, which also lists the main points of the Department of Justice’s consent decree requirements, can be viewed here.

Of the seven amendments the Ferguson City Council wants, the ones that appear to be the stickiest are (i) and (iv), which state thus:

(i) the agreement contain no mandate for the payment of additional salary to police department or other city employees;

(iv) the terms of the agreement shall not apply to other governmental entities or agencies who, in the future, take over services or operations currently being provided by the City of Ferguson

The DOJ’s consent decree wants salaries of police officers in Ferguson to be competitive with salaries elsewhere. The city is taking exception to the pay raise. More significantly, however: if Ferguson were to disband its police department, policing would have to be provided by some other municipality. Ferguson’s city council does not want the terms of the consent decree to apply to whatever new entity provides policing services, characterizing it mainly as a cost-saving measure.