Friday, May 30, 2014

Donald Sterling sues the NBA for over $1 billion

from cnn
By Brian Todd and Greg Botelho, CNN
updated 7:39 PM EDT, Fri May 30, 2014



CNN) -- Los Angeles Clippers co-owner Donald Sterling made clear he wasn't going away Friday, suing the NBA for more than $1 billion for its decision to ban him for life and force him to sell the franchise.
The lawsuit -- which was provided to CNN by Sterling's lawyer and wasn't unexpected -- marks the latest twist in a case that began last month when TMZ posted a recording in which Sterling made a racist comments. It also comes amid fresh questions about the 80-year-old's mental state, which itself raises the issue of how much control he has or should have with the Clipppers.
Among other allegations, Sterling's camp claims in its lawsuit that the recording that spawned this scandal -- and that recording, it says, is the sole base of the NBA charges against him -- is against California law and that Sterling never violated the NBA's constitution.
The lawsuit also states that "the forced sale of the Los Angeles Clippers threatens not only to produce a lower price than a non-forced sale, but more importantly, it injures competition and forces antitrust injury by making the ... market unresponsive to ... the operation of the free market."

In yet another twist, the NBA announced Friday that June 3 meeting has been canceled due to the pending sale to Ballmer.
It also comes days before an anticipated meeting of the NBA Board of Governors that was set to include a vote that could have forced the Sterlings to give up that team.
 filing in a federal court in California comes a day after Sterling's estranged wife, Shelly, agreed to sell the Clippers to ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for $2 billion."(Sterling believes) that the NBA's forced sale ... would create damages of at least $1 billion, which includes capital gains taxes, unnecessary and increased investment-banking fees, legal and transactional costs, and the loss of all future appreciation in the Los Angeles Clippers franchise value," it adds.
"The NBA, Shelly Sterling and the Sterling Family Trust today resolved their dispute over the ownership of the Los Angeles Clippers," the NBA said in a statement. "... Mrs. Sterling and the Trust also agreed not to sue the NBA and to indemnify the NBA against lawsuits from others, including from Donald Sterling."
Lawyer: Sterling 'doesn't want to fight' with estranged wife
Adding to the intrigue is whether Donald Sterling has standing over the team, not because of the aftermath of his racist comments but because of his mental state.
Two neurologists have deemed Donald Sterling to be mentally incapacitated, two sources with detailed knowledge of the situation told CNN on Friday.
Sterling's lawyer, Maxwell Blecher, firmly shot down this report, calling such a declaration a "vast overstatement." Blecher said the 80-year-old was diagnosed with a "modest mental impairment" or a "slowing down."
"(Sterling is) far from incapacitated," his lawyer said.
According to one of the sources, there is a provision in the Sterling family trust that says if either Donald Sterling or his estranged wife, Shelly Sterling, become mentally incapacitated, then the other becomes the sole trustee.
That could smooth the way for $2 billion deal that Shelly Sterling negotiated with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer for the team.
Asked Friday about such a sale, Blecher said Donald Sterling "is looking at the whole situation and evaluating where to go from here."
"He doesn't want to fight with Shelly. That's the bottom line," Blecher said.
Earlier Friday, Shelly Sterling confirmed the agreement with Ballmer, a sale that would still have to be approved by three-quarters of the NBA's Board of Governors.
"We have worked for 33 years to build the Clippers into a premiere NBA franchise," she said in a statement. "I am confident that Steve will take the team to new levels of success."
Who is Steve Ballmer?
Ballmer is worth $20 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
"I love basketball. And I intend to do everything in my power to ensure that the Clippers continue to win -- and win big -- in Los Angeles," Ballmer said Friday.
Sterlings could make huge profit
Whatever happens with Sterling's lawsuit, there's no question that -- if the sale goes through -- it would mean a huge windfall for him and his family.
The real estate investor bought the Clippers for about $12 million in 1981.
If the deal goes through, it would be the largest sum paid for an NBA franchise. Last month, the Milwaukee Bucks, a team with a losing record in a small television market, sold for $550 million.
While he has faced legal trouble before -- including a wrongful termination lawsuit from the team's longtime general manager Elgin Baylor, which Sterling one -- his status as the Southern California franchise's controlling owner wasn't officially challenged until this spring.
That's when TMZ posted audio of a conversation between Sterling and his friend, V. Stiviano, in which he made racist comments that quickly got the attention of NBA fans, players and executives. Many felt that Sterling didn't help himself when he talked days later with CNN's Anderson Cooper, including his calling out of basketball legend Magic Johnson.
As some corporate sponsors dropped and amid threats that players might boycott, Silver stepped up quickly to ban Sterling and fine him $2.5 million.
Following through on the commissioner's vow, the NBA "initiated a charge" on May 19 seeking to terminate all of Sterling's ownership rights in the franchise.
How Ballmer's $2 billion Clippers deal could pay off

CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Steve Almasy, Mariano Castillo, Poppy Harlow and Kevin Wang contributed to this report.











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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Shelly Sterling attempting to push through hurried sale of Clippers

from latimes






Los Angeles Clippers co-owner Shelly Sterling is mounting a hurried sale of the team she and her husband have owned for 33 years and could name a prospective new owner of the NBA franchise by the end of the week, a person familiar with the situation said.
Sterling is rushing to sell the team long headed by her husband, Donald, in an attempt to beat a deadline of next Tuesday, when owners of the 30 pro basketball teams will be asked to strip control of the team from both of the Sterlings, after Donald Sterling’s racially charged remarks about blacks.
The developments in the NBA’s biggest ownership crisis came on the same day that a defiant Sterling lashed out at what he called the league’s “illegal termination process.” In a cover letter to the 29-page document, obtained by The Times, Sterling said he had already received offers “in excess of $2.5 billion” for his team. In his response, he criticized the NBA for insisting on his ouster for what he deemed a single illegally-recorded conversation of what he deemed “a lover’s quarrel.”
The series of events suggested a potentially quick resolution to a controversy that appeared as if it might drag on for months or more, though people familiar with the situation cautioned that the sale is far from complete and must be approved by the NBA’s other owners.
The magnitude of the Clippers deal and the field of prospective owners had begun to crystallize Tuesday, with one likely bidder dismissing the $2.5 billion price tag but saying the team would likely go for more than $1 billion. That would be the highest sale price in NBA history, topping the $550 million the Milwaukee Bucks were sold for in April.
One new buyers alliance already came together in recent days when Chicago-based Guggenheim Partners, which bought the Dodgers two years ago for more than $2 billion, agreed to work with a trio of billionaires who previously said they would launch their own bid for the Clippers — Oracle software co-founder Larry Ellison, entertainment magnate David Geffen and mega-entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey.
Another partnership included three principals who have significant ties to major league sports — Tony Ressler, the Los Angeles-based co-founder of the investment firm Ares Management and a minority owner of baseball’s Milwaukee Brewers; Bruce Karsh, co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management and a minority owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors; and Grant Hill, a onetime NBA all-star who finished his career with the Clippers.
Also expected to bid for the team after meeting with Shelly Sterling on Sunday is Steve Ballmer, who stepped down as chief executive of Microsoft in February after leading the software company for 14 years.
Ballmer last year joined a group, led by hedge fund manager Chris Hansen, to bid on the Sacramento Kings and intended to move the team to Seattle. NBA owners voted to reject the proposed move.
Ballmer said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that, if he succeeded in his new bid, he would not attempt to move the Clippers. He said the team would lose much of its value by leaving L.A.
One of the bidders, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of negotiations, said Tuesday that the process would move quickly. “The bids are due Thursday afternoon at 2 p.m.,” the bidder said. “We will probably know who bought the team by Friday.”
Any deal would be contingent on the approval of three-quarters of the NBA’s owners. People familiar with the league’s position said the NBA would continue with the process of removing the Sterlings at a hearing next Tuesday in New York, to keep the pressure on for completion of the sale.
Michael Bass, the NBA’s chief spokesman, reiterated the comments of Commissioner Adam Silver last week: “It would be a preferred outcome if the Sterlings were to voluntarily transfer 100% of the ownership in the team to new owners, rather than to have their ownership in the team terminated.”
Donald Sterling’s wife of 58 years has held half of the team through a family trust but only recently came to the forefront when her husband said he had turned over control to her and would let her attempt to sell the team. Donald Sterling remains the controlling owner of the team in the eyes of the NBA, but league officials said they would not stand in the way of any legitimate sale.
The Clippers had just concluded their most successful regular season and were in the playoffs when Sterling’s racially charged remarks against African Americans were posted on the celebrity website TMZ.
The comments unleashed fury among fans, a threatened boycott by players and the flight of sponsors. Silver fined the owner $2.5 million (which Sterling refused to pay), placed a lifetime ban on him and urged owners to force him out of the league.
Much of the defense that Sterling emailed to the NBA hours before a midnight deadline Tuesday centered on his complaint that he was being taken to task for remarks he made in private to V. Stiviano.
Stiviano, 31, was a frequent companion and sometime assistant to the 80-year-old Sterling. Stiviano has described her relationship with the elderly real estate magnate as platonic, akin to a father and daughter. But Sterling has made clear he was enamored of her and depicted his statements as the result of a “lovers’ quarrel.”
Stiviano has said she routinely made recordings of Sterling and at times used them to try to coach him to be more polite. She said he knew about a recording she made in September 2013, when they argued about an Instagram photo she took with Lakers legend Magic Johnson.
Sterling reiterated in his written defense Tuesday that he did not know Stiviano was recording him. He called the audio “illegally recorded.” California law prohibits recording an individual without that person's permission.
The response went on to claim that Sterling was “distraught” when he made the statements, because Stiviano told him she planned to bring “four gorgeous black guys to the game” and that those strong feelings should be viewed by the NBA as a mitigating factor.
“This was an argument between a jealous man and the woman he loved that should never have left the privacy of the living room,” the response said.
The document further claims that Sterling is hindered from conducting his own investigation of the matter because he’s “locked out of his office at Staples Center" — part of his ban from the league. The response said it did not “believe a court in the United States of America will enforce the draconian penalties imposed on Mr. Sterling in these circumstances.... Indeed, we believe that preservation of Mr. Sterling’s constitutional rights requires that these sham proceedings be terminated in Mr. Sterling's favor.”
Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

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Sunday, May 25, 2014

The Verdict - Paul Newman

from youtube







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Friday, May 23, 2014

California mother charged Friday with murdering three kids, attempted murder of children's grandmother

from nydailynews

Carol Coronado remains hospitalized after police found her nude in bed in her Los Angeles County home. She was holding a knife, surrounded by the bloodied bodies of her kids.



Friday, May 23, 2014, 7:35 PM



 
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
 
Friday, May 23, 2014, 7:35 PM
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Carol Coronado, 30, was charged Friday with three counts of murder for the stabbing deaths of her three children in Los Angeles County.FACEBOOKCarol Coronado, 30, was charged Friday with three counts of murder for the stabbing deaths of her three children in Los Angeles County.
The California mother found naked in bed with the bloodied bodies of her three children has been charged with murder in each of the deaths.
Carol Coronado, 30, was discovered Tuesday by her mother. The woman appeared dazed, was covered in blood, holding a knife and surrounded by the bodies of her daughters, ages 3, 2 and 2 months old, according to KABC-TV.
Neighbors said the grandmother had rushed over after Coronado called her and said she was going crazy. Coronado was also charged with attempting to murder her mother.
Coronado’s husband was home at the time, but was outside working.

'She Killed My Babies': Dad of 3 Girls Allegedly Killed By Mother...

Rodolfo Coronado, the husband of the woman accused of killing her three young daughter is speaking out about the horrible discovery. According to police,...

She remains hospitalized in a jail ward.
ON A MOBILE DEVICE? CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO.



 
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
 
Friday, May 23, 2014, 7:35 PM
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Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Banking On Banksters

from wordpress



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Banking On Banksters

I was gloomy as I saw what happened in 2008 and thereafter: the very financiers who had stolen all the money, were given trillions, to replace what they had stolen. It was as inconceivable as the worst horrors of history, but it proceeded.
In exchange the crooks did not even have to recognize they had been wrong. When it dawned on our unworthy leaders that it looked bad, all this giving from the poor to the richest fortunes in the world, they invented something else: easing money creation for top banks, so that they could “reimburse” the Public: that’s called “Quantitative Easing” (or “the Twist”, or…)
It’s a pleasure to now have Paul Krugman seeing the light, six years later, in “Springtime For Bankers”.  Oh, don’t jump for joy, yet. No, Paul is not seeing the light about “Quantitative Easing”, that’s still beyond what he can conceive at this point. But he has finally seen that the exalted status of banking itself is the problem, and, more generally that:
…”economic policy since the onset of the financial crisis has been a dismal failure. It’s true that we avoided a full replay of the Great Depression. But employment has taken more than six years to claw its way back to pre-crisis levels — years when we should have been adding millions of jobs just to keep up with a rising population. Long-term unemployment is still almost three times as high as it was in 2007; young people, often burdened by college debt, face a highly uncertain future.
Now Timothy Geithner, who was Treasury secretary for four of those six years… thinks he did a heckuva job.
He’s not unique in his self-approbation. Policy makers in Europe, where… a number of countries are in fact experiencing Depression-level distress, have even less to boast about. Yet they too are patting themselves on the back.
How can people feel good about track records that are objectively so bad?…
In both Europe and America, economic policy has to a large extent been governed by the implicit slogan “Save the bankers, save the world” — that is, restore confidence in the financial system and prosperity will follow…
Mr. Geithner’s book is devoted to a defense of the U.S. financial bailout, which he sees as a huge success story — which it was, if financial confidence is viewed as an end in itself… But where is the rebound in the real economy? Where are the jobs? Saving Wall Street, it seems, wasn’t nearly enough. Why?
One reason for sluggish recovery is that U.S. policy “pivoted,” far too early, from a focus on jobs to a focus on budget deficits. Mr. Geithner denies that he bears any responsibility for this pivot, declaring “I was not an austerian.” In his version, the administration got all it could in the face of Republican opposition. That doesn’t match independent reporting, which portrays Mr. Geithner ridiculing fiscal stimulus as “sugar” that would yield no long-term benefit.
But fiscal austerity wasn’t the only reason recovery has been so disappointing… there was, arguably, a lot the Obama administration could have done to reduce debt burdens without Congressional approval. But it didn’t; it didn’t even spend fundsspecifically allocated for that purpose. Why? According to many accounts, the biggest roadblock was Mr. Geithner’s consistentopposition to mortgage debt relief — he was, if you like, all for bailing out banks but against bailing out families…
…leading experts on this subject are the economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi, whose just-published book “House of Debt” argues very much the contrary. On their blog, Mr. Mian and Mr. Sufi point outthat Mr. Geithner’s arithmetic on the issue seems weirdly wrong — order of magnitude wrong — giving much less weight to the role of debt in holding back spending than the consensus of economic research…
In the end, the story of economic policy since 2008 has been that of a remarkable double standard. Bad loans always involve mistakes on both sides — if borrowers were irresponsible, so were the people who lent them money. But when crisis came, bankers were held harmless for their errors while families paid full price.
And refusing to help families in debt, it turns out, wasn’t just unfair; it was bad economics. Wall Street is back, but America isn’t, and the double standard is the main reason.”
Some hold that Timothy Geithner is creep central. This plutocrat got his jobs because of his connections, and is now president of “private equity” (understand: conspiracy-plutocratic central) firm Warburg Pincus. Obama was forced to select the 2008 crisis maker Geithner over his spiritual father, the extremely well connected Lawrence Summers, because Summers’ towering reputation as a sexist, derivatives and plutocratic fiend, was so colossal that even the powers that be cringed.
It’s true that, as chief of the New York Fed, Geithner was the prime proximal architect of the 2008 crisis, so hell could not have been in better hands.
Last week, the New York Times censored by comments about “glaciers disintegrating”, probably because the message that the melting would go faster by one order of magnitude than announced, did not go down well.
This time, one deigned to publish me (progress: in the past such a comment on finance would have been censored). Here it is (beefed up):
“Save the bankers, save the world?” It is worse than that. The bankers are who create the money, and they do so, by re-distributing it, to whom, and what, they feel worthy.
The financial crisis 2008 revealed that bankers had lent the money to unprofitable projects, on such a scale that banks went bankrupt.  In the European Union, and the USA.
It’s true some of the money, in the USA, was lent directly to families who could not pay back anymore the debts they had incurred. How did this happen on such a scale? Because those millions of home owners had been tricked into incurring these debts by misrepresenting the payments those people would have to make.
Thus the bankers behaved like gangsters. However, in spite of the colossal misery they caused, none of these gangsters was prosecuted.
Moreover, bankers had also created a lot of money they lent for highly leverage financial derivatives operations that went very wrong (they went wrong, in part because, by all betting that what they thought could not happen would not happen, the bankers made sure that it would happen). An example of this hedging gone wrong is the bankruptcy of American International Group, AIG (that cost nearly 200 billion dollars).
The futility of separating one side of the Atlantic from the other was made blatant by AIG. The specific unit of AIG that leveraged AIG into oblivion was operating from London.
Highly leverage derivatives was another way bankers went wrong. Those derivatives, in particular the financial ones, dwarf the real economy.  This means the banks are financing a virtual economy, not the real one.
The same phenomenon festers in Europe. The money was not lost for everybody, though: the richest have got much richer.
Rogue bankers create money for themselves and their friends. The public is then asked to bring fresh money to refloat the banks that the bankers and their friends just stole. Then innocent entities get accused (subprime mortgage holders, the Euro, etc.)
In New York, one, just one junior trader was prosecuted for the 2008 crash. He was French, of course. In France Jerome Kerviel was condemned to three years in jail (and initially a multi-billion dollar fine), for having, allegedly,  lied to his employer.
It has not struck the corrupt mind of “justice” that it’s a corrupt organization that allows just one man to trade 80 billion dollars. A corrupt organization in a corrupt system.
Kerviel indeed vociferously asserts that there was an extensive conspiracy to protect Societe’ Generale, one of the world’s biggest bank.
Meanwhile American justice pursues criminally some Swiss bankers. Swiss bankers are from a country small enough to eat raw. French bankers are another matter, and American bankers are, naturally untouchable (American banks are made to pay fines… from QE).
The European economy has been ravaged to give as much money to the bankers and their accomplices as what they had just stolen. And this “austerity” is still going on. Tellingly, in Europe, only the far left and far right parties are starting to understand the extent and nature of the theft, and talk about it. No wonder that they will progress in the European elections, because, increasingly, people are starting to understand the truth. Hey, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman is nearly there!
The bankers have been saved. The world is therefore still at their mercy.  “Save the bankers, save the world” is in truth: ”Save the gangsters, save the world”. This financial plutocracy is there to stay, We The People are left to pray. On our knees.
Patrice Aymé



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