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.
"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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nearly 40 percent of the CEOs on the highest-paid lists from the past 20 years were eventually "bailed out, booted, or busted."
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.
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.
Summers' record should bar him from the Fed chair. Why is the press letting anonymous administration officials promote him?
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.