Author: Marie2

From the US Constitution

“7:  To establish Post Offices and post Roads;

Is that not clear enough?  It’s an enumerated power and duty of the US federal government that’s enshrined in the body of our Constitution.  One not rebuffed by the future states before ratification.  One that has never been altered by an amendment.  And yet, there have been and are forces out in this country and in Congress seeking to subvert this clause for their own profit.

The Koch funded Reason Foundation made it clear in its Annual Privatization Report 2005 what they wanted to do to the US Post Office.

The federal government operates numerous business enterprises that could be converted into publicly traded corporations, including the USPS, Amtrak, and a number of electricity utilities. Other countries have indepth experience in privatizing such services that Congress can use when it moves ahead with reforms.
…
Moving forward calls for privatizing USPS and repealing the first-class mail monopoly that it currently holds…the USPS suffers from a high wage premium (it pays an estimated 21.2 to 35.7 percent more than would a comparable private sector employer, which represents 12 to 20 percent of total costs) and low productivity increases (only 9.2 percent from 1970 to 1999).”

If the intent of these so-called libertarians isn’t clear enough from that, another section of their report is more explicit:

In December Reason co-produced a policy brief with TSAugust, called What’s in the Government’s Attic, on the need for an inventory of federal government land assets to determine what they actually hold. And more importantly what lands and assets are excess, unneeded, or underutilized and could be divested.

Sell off valuable assets, bust unions, cut wages, and raise prices.  The business model of vulture capitalists like Mitt Romney.  Only better because there are no stockholders to get in the way of consummating the deal.  Only a few politicians — and always enough of whom are easily duped and/or bribed to get the deal done.      
Having failed in 2005 to privatize Social Security in a single bound with their oligarchic puppet George W. Bush and having some sense that Americans have a soft spot for their Post office, they succeeded with the longer-term back-door assault on the Post Office with the POSTAL ACCOUNTABILITY AND ENHANCEMENT ACT (H.R. 6407 in December 2006).  What that bill did was guarantee that the USPS would record large paper losses, almost regardless of whatever efficiencies and rate increases it could achieve, for enough years that the public could be convinced that it must be privatized.  Well, except for the components that don’t and can’t pay their own way; those will remain as the US Post Office and paid for out of the public purse.  

Guess the oath of office that all members of Congress take is just a quaint and meaningless exercise because those men and women routinely ignore the promise “protect and defend the Constitution.”  And in this case, Senators acted like weasels in doing so.

 In the wee morning hours of December 8, 2006, the last day of the lame duck Session, the Senate concluded its legislative business with `unanimous consent’ adoption of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA – HR 6407) without any debate or roll call vote. 
…

It wasn’t any better in the House:

Adopted by the House of Representatives 24 hours earlier on a bipartisan voice vote, the Act was touted by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) as `assuring long term viability of the postal service’ that will `satisfy the concerns of postal service employees.’   Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill), now Obama’s Secretary of Transportation, was in the Speaker’s Chair and about to gavel the Act “adopted” when Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind) requested the ayes and nays.  LaHood determined an `insufficient number present’ and announced the Act as “passed’.  …

Guess it’s best that when members of Congress are feeling all bipartisany that they don’t have to go on record when they trash the Constitution to put more money in the pockets of the 1% and less in the pockets of honest working stiffs. And any UPS or Fed-Ex employees that believe they will benefit if the USPS is privatized are ignorant or stupid.

Maybe if US postal workers and their union leaders were out there screaming “The Constitution, the Constitution, the Constitution” along with demanding a repeal of the H.R 6407 poison pill(s) half as loudly and often as the teabaggers and gun-nuts do, the public will get a clue as to all the looting of public treasure that has been going on.  And maybe, just maybe, for the first time in decades, enough of “us” will see what “we” need to do.

Matt Taibbi has been having great fun with the depositions in the MBIA suit against Countrywide/Bank of America.  Banksters don’t normally like to look like idiots, but considering the alternative, shysters, they perhaps calculated that idiot was preferable.  Or maybe they didn’t consider who their adversary is, MBIA’s Jay Brown.  In my long ago and limited professional encounters with Mr. Brown, there was no denying that he was wicked smart.    

That assessment does beg the question of how MBIA managed to get snookered by the banksters.  On the other hand, the retired Mr. Brown returned to MBIA when it and other bond insurers such as AMBAC were going down in the initial stages of the financial meltdown and so far has kept it out of the bankruptcy courts.  Based on the forgoing, it was tempting to project that the banksters are at a disadvantage.  What gave me pause was MBIA’s claim: that Countrywide misrepresented its mortgage underwriting standards.  It’s an odd claim for a surety bond insurer – particularly when the surety bond is a financial guarantee.  That suggested to many that prevailing against BAC was a long-shot for MBIA.  Until yesterday.  As reported by Reuters, a court ruled in favor of Assured Guaranty Ltd against Flagstar Bankcorp.

Flagstar Bancorp Inc was ordered on Tuesday to pay $90.1 million to bond insurer Assured Guaranty Ltd in a contract dispute over loans underlying $900 million in mortgage-backed securities.
…

Yves Smith’s reaction to the ruling begins with:

Wow, one of my big assumptions about mortgage putback cases has been turned on its ear, much to the detriment of Bank of America and JP Morgan. If you thought there were pitched legal battles on this front, a key ruling by Judge Jed Rakoff means you ain’t seen nothing yet.

She explains that this and other similar suits are “representation and warranty cases” or “put-back cases” and that bond insurers have “better put-back rights” than investors.  Then she concedes:

The assumption among many who’ve looked at these suits is that they might not be worth all that much in the end. In past putback litigation threats (which until the crisis were settled after some initial rounds of jousting) was that it would be too costly for the plaintiff to make his case.

Why would so many have dismissed the robustness of standard representation and warranty clauses made to surety bond insurance companies?  Have to disagree with Ms. Smith that “it would be too costly for the plaintiff to make the case.”  The plaintiff’s in such cases are insurance companies and most of them are very large and well heeled enough to pursue such actions.  The problem is that it’s rare (unprecedented?) for the “put-back” to come into play before the party that made the rep and warranty was bankrupt.  For example, Enron’s surety bond companies paid out over half a billion dollars, but there was nothing to be recovered from Enron.

Two key elements make the rep and warranty robust.  The onus is on the guarantor to 1) report any material adverse change/development to the surety bond company and 2) “cure”or fix the breach in accordance with the terms of the agreement.  From the ruling in the Assured Guaranty v. Flagstar case:

The sole remedy of . . . [Assured] . . . againstFlagstar for the breach of a representation orwarranty with respect to a Mortgage Loan . . . is[Flagstar’s] obligation, subject to certain cure periods, to accept a transfer of a Mortgage Loan as towhich a breach has occurred and is continuing . . . or to substitute an Eligible Substitute Mortgage Loan[for the defective loan].

Game – Set – Match.  Bravo Judge Rakoff.

Or what comes around – goes around.  Some may recall that what precipitated the fall of AIG was the collateral calls by Goldman Sachs and other banksters.  Those collateral calls were the “cure” remedy the banksters were legally entitled to when AIG breached its agreed to financial condition.  Unfortunately for AIG and fortunately for the banksters, Casano’s little financial products operation sold credit-default swaps and not surety bond insurance.

If Bank of America’s legal team isn’t now sweating, they should be.  As I said earlier, Jay Brown is wicked smart.

The takeaway for me is that I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist.  Oh sure, I never thought that Lance Armstrong was a super cyclist.  But my mind never wandered further than briefly wondering how he doped without detection.  Had I known anything about competitive cycling, it would have been more obvious to me that the team had to have been in on it.  Voicing such thoughts over the past dozen or so years would have put me in the realm of being labeled a conspiracy fruitcake.  A place a try to avoid, particularly when I don’t much care about the actors and their plots to scam the all too willing dupes.  Or dopes as apparently all the sponsors and cycling writers (like Bissinger and Kurtz* were.  (Dare we note how many sports writers fell for the college football hero’s imaginary dead girlfriend story that is currently being called a hoax?  Oh, right Manti Te’O believed that a woman he never met was his girlfriend.)

The first takeaway for CT vigilantes should be that conspiracies are really, really common.  Most are ordinary, inconsequential and limited to a few people.  Often called secrets.   The second takeaway is that the number of conspirators can be large and imposing silence on them for a considerable period of time isn’t all that difficult.  Third, conspiracies are generally organic and not the product of a single master-mind.  That leads to fractured knowledge of the details of the conspiracy amongst the participants.

In “Kill Anything That Moves,” Nick Turse is exposing a conspiracy.  One hidden for decades.  One that killed a multiple of those that died on 9/11.  When Sy Hersh exposed the massacre at My Lai, it rocked this nation more than Abu Ghraib did.  We’ve long known that there was a conspiracy to hide that massacre (with Colin Powell a player in the cover-up).  What angered and perplexed many was the extraordinarily light sentence terms of Lt. Calley’s conviction – less than what Bradley Manning has already endured.  Now, thanks to Nick Turse, we know that My Lai was just the tip of the iceberg.  My Lai was SOP.  Crafted and executed by an unknown number of military and civilian Americans.  No one “master-mind” – but conforming to the ethos of those in charge such as:

GEN. WILLIAM WESTMORELAND: Well, the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is–is not important.

Repulsive – but at the same time oddly familiar.

”We’re dealing with an enemy that has no conscience,” Bush said on the campaign trail last year. ”Today, if you noticed, there was a car bomb near a school. These people are brutal. They — they’re the exact opposite of Americans. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity. We believe in freedom. They have an ideology of hate. And they’re tough, but not as tough as America.”

Or yesterday

“But,” she [Hillary Clinton] added, “when you deal with these relentless terrorists, life is not in any way precious to them.”

Oh, and there was no conspiracy to take this country to war in Iraq – it was nothing but a whole lot of people in high-level, important positions that were duped.  OTOH – 9/11 was a conspiracy with a master-mind, OBL, directing the actors from a remote, foreign location.

*Isn’t Kurtz one the guys that also bought into the GWB WH lies over and over again?

Lumping entitlements, earned benefits, and paid-in earned benefits (edited from the less descriptive “contributed benefits”) into the single category of entitlements is one reason why it’s so difficult to have rational discussions of federal tax and spend social policies.  For too many people, when they hear the word “entitlement,” they think welfare and in the US, welfare has a bad connotation.  

Social Security Retirement income is NOT an entitlement.  It’s a retirement insurance fund to which workers and their employers make contributions.  At a flat (regressive) rate.  It it financially solvent for decades if not forever.  Therefore, discussions of “chained CPI” or fixing a non-existent problem by raising the cap are naive and/or decades premature.  

The disability portion of Social Security is a mix of entitlement and worker contributed insurance.  Beneficiaries that worked before becoming disabled paid into the fund and therefore, those benefits are not an entitlement.  If there is a funding problem with either the insurance or entitlement portions of disability, the US Dept of Treasury has not made the case.

Medicare Part A (HI) – hospitalization – is like Social Security (OASDI).  Workers and employers contribute to the fund, but beneficiary status is based on age and not contributions.  This is not keeping pace with the inflation rate of hospitalization, and unlike OASDI, the earned income cap was removed long ago.

Medicare Part B, C, and D are partial entitlements funded out of general (income tax) revenues.  To access the entitlement, the beneficiary contributes a monthly premium during the period of entitlement.  Premiums cover approximately a quarter of the annual costs to the Medicare program.  Beneficiaries are also personally responsible for deductibles and co-pays.    

Medicaid is a means-tested entitlement program for medical and nursing home care.  Funded out of federal and state general revenues.  

SNAP is a means-tested entitlement program for food.  

VA benefits are a mix of means-tested and/or service connected disability earned benefits and earned benefits.

What has made the Social Security Retirement Income and Medicare programs so popular is that they have delivered the promised benefits and the beneficiaries view themselves as investor/owners in the programs.  Totally correct on Social Security, but only partially correct with regard to Medicare.  The entitlement portion of Medicare might work better if the beneficiaries didn’t feel, well, so entitled.  Matt Taibbi described the chiselers to a tea:

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

The original design or architecture of each of these programs was rational and solid.  None are perfect.  Whatever defects exist are more the product of unanticipated changes over time that were not sufficiently addressed.  That is one thing that can’t be said of Social Security.  The issue of the “Baby Boomer” retirement bubble was handled decades ago.  (Well, except for the part about properly managing the trust fund.)  Anyone that says otherwise is a liar and a cheat.  

So, when you hear people railing about the cost of “entitlements,” demand that they identify the program.  If they say Social Security, inform them that it’s not an entitlement.  It’s an earned benefit insurance program that beneficiaries have paid for.  It has never contributed a penny to the deficit and it’s not going bankrupt.  If they point to Medicaid, SNAP, or VA benefits, ask which poor sick people we should euthanize, which poor children we should let starve to death, and which veterans we should deny benefits to.  If they point to Medicare, well, socialized medicine would solve that and cut their medical costs in half as a bonus.    

     

From the Detroit Free Press

Romney startled the automotive world during a rally Oct. 25 in Defiance, Ohio, where he said he “saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep — now owned by the Italians — is thinking of moving all production to China.”

Okay, Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Chrysler, LLC, didn’t use the “L” word or specifically call out yet another Romney bold-faced lie, but he walked right up to the line where others that could command public attention have feared to go for the past eighteen months when this country has been subjected to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of lies spewed by Mitt.

“Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand.
“It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.”

It was enough to connect and bloody the bully’s nose.  That it was delivered by the CEO of the successor-owner company to the company that made George Romney a wealthy public figure and made Mitt’s privileged life possible is particularly delicious.
(Have to wonder if team Romney knew that US autoworkers get presidential election days off before doubling down on attacking Jeep in Ohio.)

It wasn’t just the lie but where he repeated it.  Had it been in SC, TN, or TX, his lie would have had his supporters stomping their feet and cheering.  The same folks that almost four years ago were salivating over the prospect of GM and Chrysler being put out of business.  But right  into the belly of swing-state beasts. Pulling out one more fear-mongering lie that worked so well for Kasich and Portman in 2010.  Have no idea how team Romney expected this to work in his favor but doubt they ever considered that a corporation would object to anything Mitt said in his quest for the WH.  Can see that this gambit lost him at least two percentage points in Ohio and that puts him outside the margin required for election fraud to succeed.

Why did it take a corporation that Mitt attempted to malign with a lie to call out him out and be heard?  As Thom Hartman and Lamor Waldron remind us today in, Romney, Richard Nixon, and Las Vegas Cash: A Hidden History Repeats Itself the US press/media has for decades been useless in challenging the big lies of politicians (except when it concerns sex).  Unions have been too decimated over the past fifty years to be heard beyond the ranks of their members, and sometimes not even that far.  Mitt’s damn lies about his record  as Governor of Massachusetts were mostly unchallenged  by his opponents, including Massachusetts and Democratic politicians.  Institutionally and organizationally, there’s nothing in this country to stop a lying demagogue from achieving power except a large corporation.  Hardly a definition of democracy.  And that’s a reason to weep.

In The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism, Rick Perlstein begins with a simple enough observation:

Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity.

Not sure why the NYT chose to notice Romney’s blatant lying when they’ve given practically every serial conservative and Republican liar in the past fifty years a pass, but maybe Mitt told just one too many or one too big for them not to call him out on this.  Too little; too late according to Perlstein.  The culture of lying as virtuous is now deeply rooted in a large segment of the US population.  A population that could easily be described as pathological.  Repeating weird phrases such as “study it out.”

It’s a terrifying and compelling work by Perlstein.  One that should be read in its entirety and not diminished by others cutting and pasting snippets of it regardless of how tempting it is to do that.  It’s also more illuminating than all those poll number reports.      

Horace Greeley’s advice, “Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.” was far from new when he penned that in 1865.  Although the “growing up with the country part” was likely construed as “make a fortune.”  

What’s fascinating is that for those that did go west and make a fortune, they quickly went East.  Taking their newly acquired wealth with them to put it on display.  New York City was the number one wealth magnet and it ate up not a few fortunes.

Once such individual was William A. Clark.  Less than twenty years after heading west and within a few years settling in Montana, he and his family were living part of the year in New York and Paris.  He was a widower and empty-nester when he began the construction of his Manhattan mansion.  Almost thirteen years and ten million dollars (over $200 million in current dollars) later, this was the castle he built:    

It was razed shortly after his death in 1925.  Hardly a unique fate for late nineteenth and early twentieth century NYC mansions, although Clark’s may have been the costliest and shortest standing mansion to see wrecking-ball.  It was both ostentatious and hideous, and like other wealth barons of his time, Clark wasn’t known for being kind and generous.  There is one feature of his house is worth pondering:

…[it included] 35 servants’ rooms with men’s quarters to the east and female rooms in the western wing…

The lives of his household staff were likely not pleasant and I’m not suggesting a return to that standard.  However, how many of the cooks, housekeepers, chauffeurs, nannies and all the other laborers that make the lives of NYC elites possible today, live in places far from work and subject to the worst impacts of severe weather events?

And who will be picking up the tab for the clean-up and rebuilding in locations that shouldn’t have been built on in the first place.  The cost to build the Tame the Sea barriers the residents will demand?  To preserve the way of life for the David Koch’s and David Rockefeller’s of NYC?        

 

Nick Thorpe reported for BBC on the response to the arrest of Mladic in Sarajevo last year.

There is a lightness in the air, a mood of celebration among Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) about the arrest. But Muki – short for Muamera – says she can no longer share it.

“First reaction was, right, good news,” she says.

“But then, as I turned on the TV and watched all the footage… the scenes from the war… it brought back all the bad memories, stuff that I normally have flashbacks and nightmares about, that I and everybody [else] tries to block out. So it is not a happy day for me.”
…

In an extended broadcast of the interview with Maki or another young woman (one I can’t find), the interviewee stated that she thought everyone in Sarajevo suffered from PTSD and they all do their best to just go on.  She concluded with a statement that on balance the capture of Mladic was good but it wasn’t without a new cost to the victims of Serbian war crimes.
I flashed back to that interview after reading Steven D’s diary GOP Candidate: “Incest Is So Rare” at dKos and Damnit Janet’s comments. In particular:

I’m spinning back to the need for vengence and that’s not me.  I can’t be that person.  

I’m angry because no matter what it always boils down to the fucking fact that I was raped.  

I’m more than that.

For some large population of Americans, it always “boils down the the fucking fact” that they were sexually assaulted and all will carry with them some degree of PTSD.  It required extraordinary courage and a not insignificant number of tears for so many women and men to observe the legal proceedings against Jerry Sandusky.  That was an experience much like what Maki said about the arrest of Mladic.  Painful but on balance worth it.

What the GOP has been doing for the past year to sexual assault victims is nothing short of cruel and unusual: trigger sexual assault PTSD flashbacks.  Torture.  Perhaps one of their “think-tanks” contracted with
Mitchell-Jessen & Associates psychologists on expanding their torture techniques to a mass population.  Grind it through a Luntz word-salad-spinner and out comes whole new categories of rape such as “legitimate rape,” “honest rape, and “emergency rape.”  Terms that undermine decades of feminist efforts to destimatize victims of sexual assault.  Terms designed to empower bullies and harm real victims.  Confident that victims are too confused and/or pained by the attacks to repel them fully.  Confident that the range of the emotional effects of sexual assault protects the aggressors from any united and concerted backlash from the victims and their supporters.

The fact that the GOP elites and moneybags aren’t distancing themselves from their mouth-breathing front men engaging in the ritual torture of sexual assault victims suggests that they’re seeing a long-term winner.  

“First they came for ….”

The torture genie is out of the bottle.

 

But for what?  

Today the Boston Globe reports they they succceeded in getting the Norfolk Probate and Family Court to unseal a 1991 post-divorce financial lawsuit brought by  Maureen Sullivan Stemberg against Tom Stemberg, former owner and CEO of Staples.  The Boston Globe dropped  the action to remove the gag order to confidentiality agreement the parties signed in the case to the displeasure of Ms. Stemberg’s attorney Gloria Allred (corrected.  

The background for those unfamiliar with the facts:

Tom Stemberg separated from his wife in February 1987.  The Stembergs reached a financial settlement and their divorce was finalized in June 1988.  Sullivan-Stemberg received 500,000 shares of Staples and the house with a large mortgage.  Mr. Stemberg retained 567,000 shares of Staples.  The private company stock for purposes of the divorce was valued at $2.25/share and on that basis the major asset split between the Stembergs would appear to be 50/50.  Sullivan-Stemberg sold 175,000 shares for $2.25/share and a couple months later sold an additional 80,000 shares for $2.48/share.

The Staples’ IPO took place in April 1989 with an initial offer price of $19.00/share.  That subsequent event led to Sullivan-Stemberg’s 1990 lawsuit and Mitt Romney testifying on behalf of Stemberg that the 1988 stock valuation was fair and reasonable.  The Stembergs reaching an agreement in the lawsuit  may or may not have said anything about the 1988 stock valuation, and therefore, neither confirmed nor disputed Romney’s testimony which appears to have been an opinion based on Bain Capital’s investments in Staples beginning in January 1986.

So, once again, what has the Boston Globe been digging for in this this post-divorce lawsuit?

Evidence of Bain finanacial activities on behalf of Staples that valued the stock at more than $2.50/share?  Or documentation of the IPO in preparation before the Stembergs property settlement agreement?  Or simply 1987 evidence refuting

Romney described Staples as dysfunctional at the time — a place with “surly” employees and slow checkout times.

Do hope this gets more interesting.    

[Update] What I said above about the divorce division of the Stemberg’s stock in Staples isn’t accurate. Boston Globe now reports that Sullivan Stemberg received 500,000 shares of Class D stock that was issued at the request of Stemberg to facilitate his divorce. AP reports a slightly different version of the transaction:

…
Under a plan approved by Romney and other board members in 1988, Maureen Sullivan Stemberg was given 500,000 shares of Staples common stock, then awarded a special “D” class of stock in exchange for those shares. …

The details of the special “D” class stock aren’t currently available. However, based on what is known nothing nefarious can be read into this transaction. There could be any number of valid reasons for such a transaction that had no impact on Sullivan-Stemberg’s financial share of Staples.

Before getting to that, suggest reading the Truth-Out article Employees of Romney Family’s Secret Bank Tied to Fraud, Money Laundering and Drug Cartels .  Plenty of disturbing any juicy bits in it.

One thing that caught my attention was this:

…According to Iran-Contra Whistleblower Al Martin (Lt. Cmdr. USNR ret.) “Anything with the name Stanford on it belonged to Secord”. When finally brought to trial, Stanford employed the same defense attorney, Dick DeGuerin, as Iran-Contra defendant Oliver North.

Had almost forgotten about ole Richard Secord.  Where’s he been?  Well, since nobody asked, beginning in 2002, he’s been the CEO of Computerized Thermal Imaging, Inc. (COIB) Located in Ogden, Utah.  It’s sort of went under at some point.  Old SEC filings might be informative.

What may be more interesting is SEC Acts Against 379 Companies Largest Massive Trading Suspension in History.  COIB is on the list.

…
According to the SEC, pump-and-dump schemes are among the most common types of fraud involving microcap companies. Perpetrators will tout a thinly-traded microcap stock through false and misleading statements about the company to the marketplace. After purchasing low and pumping the stock price higher by creating the appearance of market activity, they dump the stock to make huge profits by selling it into the market at the higher price.
…

Wonder if there was some unusual activity that prompted the SEC to act.  

 

[Update]: More food for thought:
Was Mitt Romney Running His Own Bankruptcy Ring?