Bonum Certa Men Certa

Another Financial 'Collapse' is Coming, We Need to Facilitate Banking Whistleblowers

Will you help this man?

Rudolf Elmer



Summary: Why the world needs more conscientious people who speak out against banks and show where fraud is used to facilitate pillaging and plundering by plutocrats who 'crash' the economy (privatise/confiscate whatever is still public)

SEVERAL years ago Rudolf Elmer (shown above) gave Wikileaks material which showed serious crimes of banks. In a sense, Wikileaks' technical skills helped combat corruption. This is where geeks can really help fix the world.



For those who don't pay much attention to financial news (by "news" we don't mean channels bankrolled -- indirectly -- by the financial sector), there's indication that the plutocrats will crash the economy again in their never-ending pursuit of total ownership of everything, even what was publicly-owned (nationalised). To give some examples from this month's news, Detroit is being stolen [1] by the rich and powerful (privatisation) and here in Britain the 500-year-old mail service is now being considered for privatisation [2]. China, which sells debt to much of the West, is buying sizeable chunks of Ukraine [3], which is ironic and sad because in the land of tragic famine they now help prevent Chinese famine (as if the problem can be addressed by feeding another nation).

"Pessimists say that there is no way to fight all this corruption and pillaging will always prevail."The rich and powerful are doing extremely well [4,5] (no financial crisis) and the rest of us sink to oblivion [6]. Plutocrats share the religion of greed [7], which they have private meetings about [8] as well as propaganda campaigns [9]. The corporate media is using propaganda right at this very moment in order to usher in a man responsible for the previous financial 'collapse' (Larry Summers) into the Fed [10-15]. Higher education is being relegated again to a luxury of rich kids [16] (perpetuating poverty cycles) and Forbes, perhaps the worst offender when it comes to glorification of greed, allegedly "Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa" [17].

Pessimists say that there is no way to fight all this corruption and pillaging will always prevail. They say that even Occupy protests failed. The truth of the matter is, what we need are the facts; we need to expose the perpetrators and make them step out in shame. For this, we need technical edge and we need to facilitate whistleblowers. They do exist even if at present they are some sort of conscientious objectors who are potential whistleblowers (afraid to ruin future careers). If tools are created and deployed to facilitate secure and private passage of data (the NSA would loathe such a thing with deep conviction and passion), then we will win the information war and leave no crooked executive unaccountable.

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. Forced Bankruptcy and Privatization of the City of Detroit: Law Suit in Federal Court
    This extraordinary hearing had provided only a small window of time for legal action. Many of the people that testified were retirees, city workers, community organizers and professionals who met the deadline set by the Judge Steven Rhodes to submit their objections.


  2. Britain to float Royal Mail within weeks
    Britain embarked on its largest privatization in decades on Thursday as the government unveiled plans to sell the majority of the near 500-year-old state-owned Royal Mail postal service.


  3. China just bought 5% of Ukraine
    China has inked a deal to farm three million hectares (paywall), or about 11, 583 square miles of Ukrainian land over the span of half a century—which means the eastern European country will give up about 5% of its total land, or 9% of its arable farmland to feed China’s burgeoning population.


  4. Rich Man’s Recovery
    A few days ago, The Times published a report on a society that is being undermined by extreme inequality. This society claims to reward the best and brightest regardless of family background. In practice, however, the children of the wealthy benefit from opportunities and connections unavailable to children of the middle and working classes. And it was clear from the article that the gap between the society’s meritocratic ideology and its increasingly oligarchic reality is having a deeply demoralizing effect.


  5. Executive Excess 2013: Bailed out, Booted, and Busted
    Nearly 40 percent of the CEOs on the highest-paid lists from the past 20 years were eventually "bailed out, booted, or busted."


  6. Organized labor's decline in the US is well-known. But what drove it?


  7. Don’t Celebrate Yet
    There is no obvious reason why the Western powers should care whether it was the friends or the family of Mohammed which took over the leadership of his movement upon his death. However there is plainly an agenda led by the USA to support the Sunnis in their spiralling regional conflict with the Shia.

    This is not hard to rationalise. The ultra wealthy members of the Gulf regimes continue to act as the West’s proxies in the region and provide harbour to its neo-imperialist armed forces, while at the same time maintaining themselves a obscurantist version of Islam which would have horrified Mohammed and breaks virtually every precept of the Koran, particularly as regards treatment of women and of minority religions within their territory.


  8. Fears of Changing Global Economy Underscore G20 Summit


  9. Bill Black: Not with a Bang but a Whimper – the SEC Enforcement Team’s Propaganda Campaign
    The New York Times has one of those “inside” stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting. This genre involves the media reporting gravely (and uncritically) the administration’s claims that its failure to prosecute any elite for the largest and most destructive financial frauds in history actually demonstrates the exceptional ethical rectitude of the non-prosecutors and non-enforcers. Journalists, unlike alchemists, can transmute dross into gold. In the NYT’s account a pathetic failure of competence, integrity, and courage at the SEC is reimagined as a fantastic triumph of vigor and ethics on the part of the SEC enforcement attorney who refused to seek to hold Lehman’s senior officers accountable for their violations but otherwise became the scourge of elite frauds. In the end, he is promoted for his dedication to “justice” and is now the anti-enforcement leader of the SEC’s enforcement group.


  10. The media's disgraceful acquiescence to Larry Summers' White House boosters
    Summers' record should bar him from the Fed chair. Why is the press letting anonymous administration officials promote him?


  11. Larry Summers and Financial Crises: Is He Being Graded on Attendance?
    In short, if we look at Larry Summers track record in dealing with crises it is pretty abysmal. But on attendance, he gets an "A."


  12. Joseph Stiglitz: Why Janet Yellen, Not Larry Summers, Should Lead the Fed


  13. The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis
    The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.

    The memo is authentic.


  14. Failing Up to the Fed, A Reporters' Guide to the Paper Trail Surrounding Larry Summers
    The Washington Post's Ezra Klein reports that Larry Summers is the "overwhelming favorite" of the Obama team for the job as Federal Reserve chairman. To convince the American public that one of the chief architects of the 2008 financial crisis should be the chief regulator of the U.S. financial system, supporters of Summers have their work cut out for them.


  15. FIVE YEARS AFTER LEHMAN’S: DID WE LEARN ANYTHING?


    Or, at least, not much. While it would be nice to believe that Larry Summers had to withdraw from the race to take over the Fed because of his substantial role in creating the global financial collapse, I think it had more to do with his outsized personality. Before you start celebrating his defeat remember that Goldman Sachs still must approve any choice and President Obama may yet choose one of its anointed candidates over Janet Yellin.


  16. The student loan bubble is starting to burst
    The largest bank in the United States will stop making student loans in a few weeks.

    JPMorgan Chase has sent a memorandum to colleges notifying them that the bank will stop making new student loans in October, according to Reuters.


  17. Forbes Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa
    I got a lot of letters from folks this week about an online column for Forbes written by a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger (if that's a nom de plume, it's not bad, although I might have gone for "Harry Kingbanger" or "Harry Wandwanker"). The piece had the entertainingly provocative title, "Give Back? Yes, It's Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%" and contained a number of innovatively slavish proposals to aid the beleaguered and misunderstood rich, including a not-kidding-at-all plan to exempt anyone who makes over a million dollars from income taxes.


Recent Techrights' Posts

15 Countries Where Yandex is Already Seen to be Bigger Than Microsoft (in Search)
Georgia, Syrian Arab Republic, Cyprus, Moldova, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Belarus, Turkey, and Russia
FSF Has Made It Halfway to Its Target (Funding Goal) a Week Before Christmas Day
$400,000 definitely seems reachable now, especially if they extend the "deadline"
 
Links 19/12/2024: Nurses Besieged by "Apps", More Harms of Social Control Media Illuminated
Links for the day
Links 19/12/2024: Magnitude 7.3 Earthquake and Privacy Camp
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/12/2024: Port Of Miami Explosion, TurboQOA, Gnus
Links for the day
Fake Articles About 'Linux'
Dated yesterday
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 18, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 18, 2024
[Meme] The Master Churnalist
Speaking of press releases being passed off as "journalism"
Spamnil's TFiR: Still Pretending Press Releases Are 'Articles' (TFiR 'Originals' as Plagiarism or Fluff)
Same as last year
Links 18/12/2024: Zakir Hussain Dies, TuneIn Layoffs
Links for the day
Links 18/12/2024: Karate Love and Advent of Code
Links for the day
Windows (or Microsoft) Has Become the "One Percent" (Market Share) in Chad
How long before it falls below 1%?
Arvind Krishna, IBM's CEO, Will Eventually Suck Up to Donald Trump Like His Predecessor Did or the Watson Family Did With Adolf Hitler
Literally Hitler
Being a Geek Need Not Mean Being Sedentary
"In the past 18 months," Berkholz writes, "I’ve lost 75 pounds and gone from completely sedentary to fit, while minimizing the effort to do so (but needing a whole lot of persistence and grit)."
GAFAM Kissing the Ring of the Mafia Don
"resistance" to dictatorship and defenders of democracy?
Slop Spaghetti From the Chef, Second Time Today
Fresh slop ready out the oven!
IBM - Like Microsoft - Lies About the Number of People It's Laying Off (Several Tens of Thousands, Not Counting R.T.O. "Silent" Layoffs and Contractors/Perma-Temps)
How many waves of silent layoffs have we seen so far at IBM this year?
Links 18/12/2024: EU Launches Probe Into TikTok (At Last!)
Links for the day
Links 18/12/2024: Doha/Qatar Trafficking, Bloat Comfort Zone, and Advent of Code 2024
Links for the day
Saving What's Left of Decent and Independent Journalism on the Web
We increasingly (over time) try to make local copies (hosted on our server) of important documents; it's hard to rely on third parties
[Meme] Microsoft's Latest Marketing Pitch
"Stop Being Poor; buy a new PC with TPMs"
In South Africa, a Very Large Nation, Web Developers Can Already Ignore Microsoft Browsers (Edge Measured Below 3% in 55 Nations)
The dumb assumption you must naively test with Microsoft browsers is no longer applicable in a lot of places
Open Source Initiative (OSI) is the Voice of Bill Gates and Satya Nadella
Not hard to see what they've done with the money
Microsoft Boasts That Its (Microsoft-Sponsored) "Open Source AI" Propaganda Got Cited in Media (That's Just What the Money Did)
This is a grotesque openwashing campaign
In Many Places Around the World, Perhaps as Expected, Yandex is Nearly Bigger Than Microsoft (Like in Several African Countries)
Microsoft may soon fall to "third place" in search
Keeping Productive This Christmas
We've (pre)paid for hosting till almost January 2026 and fully back on the saddle
IBM and Canonical Leave Money on the Table Because Microsoft Pays Them Not to Compete and Instead Market Windows, WSL, Microsoft 'Clown Computing', and TPMs
Where are the regulators?
Other Editors Who Agree "Hey Hi" (AI) is Just Hype But Won't Say So Publicly as It Might Upset Key Sponsors
Some media would gladly participate in a scam to make money
Brian Fagioli's Latest "Linux" Article Appears to be Fake
Another form of plagiarism/ripoff using bots?
IBM (and Red Hat) is a Patent Troll, Still Leveraging Software Patents to Extract Money Out of Other Companies by Suing Them
Basically, when it comes to patents, IBM is demonstrably part of the problem, not the solution
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, December 17, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, December 17, 2024
[Meme] When the People Who Falsely Accuse You of Pedophilia Turn Out to be Projecting
When you attack something or someone using falsehoods, as happens a lot to Richard Stallman (RMS), there's risk that the attacks will backfire, badly
In Some Countries, Such as Greece, Almost 80% of Windows Users Are on Vista 10 and About 85% Need to Move to GNU/Linux for Security Patches
Vista 11 was a failure
[Meme] They Don't Want the Public to Know What "Responsible Encryption" Really Means
They also blame "China" for their own back doors (because China learned how to exploit those)
The Linux Foundation's Certificate Authority (CA) Significantly and Suspiciously Raises the Number of Certificates It Issues (Quantity Increase/Inflation) by Lessening Their Lifetime in the Name of 'Security' (That Barely Makes Sense!)
LE made 3 months the "standard" for most, soon to become just 6 days instead of 6 months?
Why I Continue to Believe That at the End Software Freedom Will Win
a short and incomplete list of factors which I believe contribute to the sentiment that we can - and will - win the battles over hearts and minds in the "Tech" realm
Links 17/12/2024: More China Sanctions, GOP Scheming to Prop Up Fentanylware (TikTok)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/12/2024: The Streisand Effect and Productivity-systems Desiderata
Links for the day
Technology: rights or responsibilities? - Part X
By Dr. Andy Farnell
Links 17/12/2024: More "Tesla Autopilot" and "Hey Hi" (AI) Blunders
Links for the day
Instead of Promoting GNU/Linux (or Ubuntu) Ahead of Vista 10's EoL Canonical is Marketing Microsoft's Proprietary Software
It's like Canonical employs people who work for Microsoft, not for Canonical
Links 17/12/2024: Many Abuses by Microsoft and War Updates From Ukraine
Links for the day
Content Management Systems (CMS) Bloat/ Static Site Generators (SSG) Trouble
some Web site management stories
DEI Room at fedoraproject.org Pretty Much Dead
We're not against diversity but against its weaponisation by greedy people who do not value diversity at all
The "Latest Technology News" at BetaNews is Slop About Slop
This is at the very top of the "news" (front page) at the moment
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, December 16, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, December 16, 2024