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From Reuters -

AIG disclosed on Sunday that European banks including Deutsche Bank and France's Societe Generale were among the biggest beneficiaries of the taxpayer bailout of the insurer.

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From Michael Parenti -

"...it should be the government making direct investments. The government should go directly into production. It should be the government that’s building housing. It should be the government that gives healthcare."

From the LA Times -

Pakistani authorities today placed opposition leader Nawaz Sharif under house arrest, a day after putting the armed forces on alert amid an escalating power struggle with former allies.

U.S. diplomatic efforts to defuse the political crisis intensified as the Pakistani government pledged anew to block a massive opposition rally in the capital on Monday. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton separately telephoned President Asif Ali Zardari and Sharif on Saturday, urging both sides to show restraint, according to spokesmen for the two camps. Zardari's office said Clinton promised U.S. support for democracy in Pakistan.

Word of Sharif's house arrest came from a spokesman, Pervez Rashid, who said hundreds of police surrounded the party leader's residence at dawn, hours after he delivered a trademark fiery speech to supporters in Lahore. Pakistani television reports said Sharif's politician brother, Shahbaz, had also been confined in the city of Rawalpindi, adjacent to Islamabad.

In a sign of the disarray within Zardari's government, a key aide, Information Minister Sherry Rehman, was in seclusion after reports that she had tendered her resignation. Rehman was a close associate of Zardari's late wife, ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Many of Bhutto's friends and backers have distanced themselves from the actions of the government, which in recent days has arrested opponents and placed restrictions on political rallies.

The Obama administration is also keeping a wary eye on the seeming ascendancy of Sharif, who has less of a pro-Western bent than Zardari, as well as tighter links with Islamist parties.

An angry backlash against the Supreme Court ruling by supporters of the popular Sharif coincided with plans by a nationwide lawyers movement to stage protests demanding the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, who was fired by Musharraf. Now the two causes have in effect merged.

Most of the dozens of judges fired by Musharraf have been returned to the bench, and Zardari promised to reinstate the remainder but has not done so. The president is widely believed to fear that Chaudhry would reinstate corruption cases against him.

Zardari has also delayed giving up extraordinary powers that Musharraf accorded himself as president, including the ability to dissolve parliament.

From Ken Silverstein -

One of the most common charges hurled by the opponents of Charles Freeman Jr., who yesterday withdrew as chair of the Obama administration’s National Intelligence Council, was that he “headed a Saudi-funded Middle East advocacy group in Washington.” I’ve written about the influence of money on think tanks and think it’s a valid point of concern, but let’s put this assertion in perspective.

Freeman headed the Middle East Policy Council. I’m not sure how much Saudi money flows to the think tank, but it can’t be much. I checked the firm’s non-profit disclosure form for 2007 and its total receipts for the year were $731,000, and it had assets of $1.3 million. Freeman was paid $87,000 that year.

Compare that to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a conservative think tank that is overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and whose board includes Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and Martin Peretz. Its receipts for 2007 came to $11.9 million, and it had $26.5 million in assets. Robert Satloff, the institute’s executive director, was paid $307,000. Dennis Ross, now the Obama administration’s special adviser on Iran, was paid $208,000 for duties as a “Distinguished Fellow.”

Then there’s the equally pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute, from where a number of prominent Bush Administration employees came. It had assets of $77 million in 2006 (the last year for which I could find its disclosure form at the Foundation Center), and receipts of $56 million.

None of these groups list funders on their websites, nor are they required to list them on disclosure reports. (AEI says it doesn’t disclose donors; the Washington Institute’s press contact was out today.) The Israeli government doesn’t (as far as I know) back AEI or WINEP, but conservative foundations do and it’s hard to imagine that pro-Israeli organizations and individuals aren’t kicking in large sums as well.

So why is the Middle East Policy Council any more intellectually corrupt than AEI or WINEP? And why is employment at the former a bar to government employment, but a job at the last two is not?

From the Nation -

Rush Limbaugh offers Democrats an irresistible target as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, but for my money, Rick Scott is the man who best embodies the spirit of the current conservative opposition. The name may not exactly be a household word, or it may ring a faint bell, but Politico recently reported that the millionaire Republican would be heading up Conservatives for Patients' Rights (CPR), a new group that plans to spend around $20 million to kill President Obama's efforts at healthcare reform.

Having Scott lead the charge against healthcare reform is like tapping Bernie Madoff to campaign against tighter securities regulation. You see, the for-profit hospital chain Scott helped found--the one he ran and built his entire reputation on--was discovered to be in the habit of defrauding the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

This is the man who will be delivering what Politico called the "pro-free-market message."

A Texas lawyer who shared a business partner with George W. Bush, Scott started his health company, Columbia Hospital Corporation, in 1987. Its growth was meteoric, expanding from just a few hospitals to more than 1,000 facilities in thirty-eight states and three other countries in 1997. As his firm gobbled up chains, like the Frist family's Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), it became the largest for-profit hospital chain in the country. By 1994, Columbia/HCA was one of the forty largest corporations in America, and Scott had acquired a reputation as the Gordon Gecko of the healthcare world. "Whose patients are you stealing?" he would ask employees at his newly acquired hospitals.

He promised to put nonprofit hospitals--which he insisted on referring to as "nontaxpaying" hospitals--out of business and touted his company's single-minded pursuit of profit as a model for the nation's entire healthcare system. "What's happening in Washington is not healthcare reform," he told the New York Times in 1994. "Healthcare reform is happening in the marketplace."

The press portrayed Scott as a guru to be admired and feared, "a private capitalist dictator," in the words of one Princeton health economist.

"Other hospitals were intimidated," recalls John Schilling, who worked for Columbia/HCA in the 1990s. Scott was "like the bully that would come into town and if you didn't sell to him or partner with him, he would open up shop across the street from you and put you out of business."

Not long after joining the company in 1993 as the supervisor of reimbursement for the Fort Myers, Florida, office, Schilling noticed things weren't quite kosher. "They were looking for ways to maximize reimbursement...which ultimately would improve the bottom line."

One way they did this was to fudge the costs on their Medicare expense reports. They were "basically keeping two sets of books," says Schilling. The company would maintain an internal expense report, what it called a "reserve" report, which accurately tallied its expenses. "And then they would have a second report, which...they would file with the government, which was more aggressive." That report would "include inflated costs and expenses they knew weren't allowable or reimbursable. The one they filed with government might claim $5 million and the reserve would claim $4.5." Columbia/HCA would pocket the difference.

It wasn't just happening in Florida, and it wasn't just fraudulent Medicare expense reports. Around the country, dozens of whistle-blowers like Schilling stepped forward to file lawsuits under the False Claims Act, charging the company with sundry forms of chicanery: kickbacks to doctors in exchange for referrals, illegal deals with homecare agencies and filing false data about the use of hospital space.

By 1997 the FBI was investigating Columbia/HCA. Days after agents raided company facilities armed with search warrants, Scott was forced to resign. In 2000 the company pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to pay the government $840 million. Other civil settlements would follow, ultimately totaling a staggering $1.7 billion, making it the largest fraud case in American history.

But in Washington there's no such thing as permanent disgrace, and as the healthcare debate heats up, Scott has established himself as a go-to source for reporters looking to hear from the opposition. He's been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He's been on Fox, of course, railing against President Obama's efforts to control healthcare costs. He appeared on CNN, where (as Media Matters noted) host Jessica Yellin never saw fit to notify viewers that the man she introduced as running "a media campaign to limit government's role in the healthcare system" once ran a company that profited mightily from ripping off that government.