NSFW: A promotional ad for "Subwoofer Sauna Night" at the Europa Multiclub, purchased by the Holy See and is reportedly the largest gay sauna in Europe.

Apparently, the Holy See purchased $21 million in shares of a Rome apartment block that's home to Europe’s biggest gay sauna. Cardinal Ivan Dias, head of the Congregation for Evangelization of Peoples, lives in an apartment in the palazzo, mere yards from the sauna's entrance. The Vatican owns 18 apartments total. The sauna is known for its "bear nights," in which, according to its website, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul.”

The Independent:

It is not known, however, if the former archbishop of Bombay has popped downstairs to give spiritual guidances to the clients of the Europa Multiclub, given his belief that gays and lesbians can be cured of their “unnatural tendencies” through the “sacrement of penance”.

The sauna’s website promotes one of its special “bear nights”, with a video in which a rotund, hairy man strips down before changing into a priest’s outfit. It says Bruno, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul”.

There was further embarrassment for the Holy See when the press observed that thanks to generous tax breaks it received from the last Berlusconi government, the church will have avoided hefty payments to the Italian state. The properties are recognised as part of the Holy City.
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Readers on Italian gay websites were quick to make jokes at the cardinals’ expense. One on the Gay.it site quipped: “’Oops, I took the wrong door, I thought it was the chapel.'…If you can’t go to the gay sauna for fear of being seen what do you do if you have millions of Euros stolen from Italians? You buy the apartment block with the sauna inside.”

The Europa Multiclub's website is here, and includes a "virtual tour" feature.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi spoke to Democracy Now! on July 19, where he discussed the pattern of systemic corruption by 16 banks accused of rigging a key global interest rate used in contracts worth trillions of dollars.

The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as Libor, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. Some analysts say it defines the cost of money. Barclays was recently fined $453 million for rigging Libor, and a number of other banks are under investigation. "Ordinary people actually suffered when Libor was manipulated downward, mainly because local governments, municipal governments tended to lose money," Taibbi says. "Even the tiniest manipulation downward, when you’re talking about a thing of this scale, would result in tens of trillions of dollars of losses. The banks weren’t doing this just to make themselves look healthier, they were also doing this just to make money. They were trading against this information in what essentially was the biggest kind of insider trading you could possibly imagine."

Full transcript available here.

"The mob learned from Wall Street," comments Eliot Spitzer on the "cartel-style corruption" behind the Libor scam.

On Current TV's "Viewpoint" recently, host Eliot Spitzer, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone contributing editor, and Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, analyze the Libor interest rate--rigging scandal engulfing the banking industry.

Barclays CEO Bob Diamond recently resigned after the bank was fined $453 million for its part in the scandal, which involved manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor), a key global benchmark for interest rates, by essentially "faking their credit scores," according to Taibbi. And as Taibbi explains, Barclays couldn't have acted alone.
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Kelleher argues that the Libor scandal is proof that the financial industry "is corrupt and rotten to its core." "The same executives [using] the same business model that crashed the entire financial system in '08 are still running these banks," he says.
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"It can't just be Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland. In fact, it can't even be four banks or even five banks," Taibbi says. "Really, in the end it's probably going to come out that it's going to be all of them ... involved in this. And that's what's critical for people to understand: that this is a cartel-style corruption."

For much more on this, start with Matt Taibbi here.

Jack Abramoff, a former lobbyist imprisoned for his role in a wide-ranging Washington corruption scandal, has appeared as a pundit on CNN. The BBC asks "Why have US television networks turned into comeback springboards for disgraced public figures?"

Excellent question, and nice to hear that others wonder the same thing.

Via:

On Thursday, Abramoff joined presenter Soledad O'Brien, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza and others to analyse the recent US Supreme Court decision ratifying President Barack Obama's healthcare reform law.

Introducing Abramoff, O'Brien acknowledged he had spent more than three years in federal prison - then plugged his new book.

She questioned him about the impact of the healthcare decision on the lobbying profession and how lobbyists would seek to influence Congress on the matter.

"Always nice to have you," she concluded. "We appreciate it. Thank you."

What conclusion did they reach?

"The journalistic mission became secondary to using notorious names to attract audiences."

It's an interesting outsiders look at what the BBC refers to as "decline of public moral standards" in American television news. Full article here.

It sounds like CEO Jamie Dimon has some explaining to do...

Reuters:

A U.S. judge has ordered JPMorgan Chase to explain why the court should not force the bank to turn over 25 internal emails demanded as part of an investigation into whether it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) filed a petition in federal court in Washington on Monday asking the court to order the bank to show cause as to why it would not comply with a subpoena issued by the commission as part of its investigation into the bank's power trading.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave the bank until July 13 to submit an explanation as to why the court should not enforce FERC's subpoenas. JPMorgan has asserted the emails are protected by the attorney-client privilege.

I wonder who is going to play Ken Lay in this remake of the Enron scandal?