Year: 2013

It’s Jobless Thursday!!!

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Initial claims hit a 5 year low, with the 4-week moving average, continuing claims, and emergency claims falling as well.

Additionally, 2nd quarter GDP increase was adjusted up to a 1.7% annual rate (forcast was for 1.0%), though this was because the 1st quarter was revised down from 1.8% to 1.1%, meaning that the end position pretty much matched estimates.

It’s an artifact of the ill advised deal that gave us the sequester, because the federal spending cuts to a large degree offset good numbers from the manufacturing sector.

July job numbers come out tomorrow.

Silvio is Going to Jail

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Italy’s highest court has affirmed his jail sentence:

Italy’s highest court has upheld a prison sentence given to former PM Silvio Berlusconi for tax evasion.

The court also ordered a further judicial review on whether he should be banned from holding public office.

In an emotional video statement, Berlusconi denounced the decision as “based on nothing, and which deprives me of my freedom and political rights”.

The sentence cannot be appealed against further but Berlusconi, 76, is unlikely to go to jail because of his age.

The ruling by Rome’s Court of Cassation came after a three-day hearing. Berlusconi was not in court.

The former prime minister was sentenced to four years in prison at the conclusion of the trial in October last year, though this was automatically reduced to a year under a 2006 pardon law.

Berlusconi is likely to serve house arrest or carry out community service.

Hopefully, this spells the end of his political career.

Now go and break up his television monopoly.

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda, Fabulous Fab Found Liable

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Goldman Sachs mid-level minion Fabrice Tourre was found Civilly liable for fraud related to mortgage backed securities:

A federal jury found former Goldman Sachs executive Fabrice Tourre liable Thursday for duping investors about a shoddy mortgage deal on the eve of the housing market’s crash, the first major court victory for the Securities and Exchange Commission in its quest to hold Wall Street accountable for the 2008 financial crisis.

 After two days of deliberation, the jury decided Tourre — best known by his “Fabulous Fab” nickname — was liable for six of the seven claims pursued by the SEC. The agency had accused the 34-year-old Frenchman of defrauding investors out of $1 billion by selling them a financial product that was secretly designed to fail.

 The trial was one of the few to emerge from the financial crisis, and it cast Tourre as a symbol of Wall Street greed. Only twice before has the SEC brought individuals to trial in cases related to the crisis, and each time ended with lackluster results. The victory this time around is a boon for the agency, which is often criticized as a risk-averse regulator that shies away from court battles in favor of slap-on-the-wrist settlements.

 Tourre was only a mid-level executive at Goldman — not a marquee Wall Street figure, some legal experts noted. Still, the morale boost is likely to build momentum inside the agency as it pursues one of its most prominent targets yet: hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen. Last month, the agency charged Cohen with failing to properly supervise two employees who engaged in insider trading, a case that could potentially end the industry tycoon’s storied career.

Note that there is no possibility of jail time, just a fine, that will be paid after what will likely be endless appeals.

So no real possibility of  getting to testify against higher up.

There are two bits in the article that are particularly important in understanding this:

“You would think the SEC convicted the Al Capone of Wall Street today when all it did was scapegoat a single mid-level Goldman Sachs’ trader who bragged in emails to his girlfriend,” Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of a nonprofit group called Better Markets, said in a statement.

 John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School, said a question still remains: “Why didn’t they go after someone important and not this sacrificial lamb?”

 ………

 Jacob Frenkel, a former SEC enforcement lawyer and former federal prosecutor, said the SEC’s victory came just in time. The five-year statute of limitations is running out on cases from the time of the financial crisis.

So,this is not a beginning, this is an end, and as that it is almost less than nothing, because it allows the banksters and Their Evil Minions™ can point to this, and claim that not everyone skated, even though all they got was a 28 year French number cruncher.

Damn.

Linkage

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Finally a performance, by The Anarchists, my kids band at the Rock Star Jam Summer Music Camp:

Natalie was much more comfortable on stage this year.

Federal Court Rules that Federal Reserve Cannot Be the Banksters Bitch Over Swipe Fees

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U.S. District Judge Richard Leon just ruled that the Federal Reserve’s rules on debit card swipe fees are too bank friendly and ignore the statutory requirements of Dodd-Frank:

The Federal Reserve disregarded Congress’s intent when deciding how much banks can charge merchants for debit-card transactions, a judge ruled, rejecting Dodd-Frank-imposed regulations governing “swipe” fees.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington ruled today that the Fed didn’t have the authority to set a 21-cent cap on debit-card transactions. Leon said the rule, which has been in effect since October 2011, would remain in place pending new regulations or interim standards.

“The Board has clearly disregarded Congress’s statutory intent by inappropriately inflating all debit card transaction fees by billions of dollars and failing to provide merchants with multiple unaffiliated networks for each debit card transaction,” Leon said in his 58-page ruling.

The groups, in a lawsuit filed in November 2011, said merchants will be “substantially harmed” by the fees the Fed set under the Durbin Amendment, a provision of the Dodd-Frank legislation. The rule went into effect on Oct. 1, 2011.

“The board’s final rule permits banks to recover significantly more costs than permitted by the plain language of the Durbin Amendment and deprives plaintiffs of the benefits of the statute’s anti-exclusivity provisions,” the retailers argued in their complaint.

What?  The law is not friendly enough to the banks, and so the Fed draws up regulations ignoring the law? 

I am so (not) surprised.

The NSA Spying Gets Worse

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Now we have XKeyscore, which “collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’.”

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the internet.

 The latest revelations will add to the intense public and congressional debate around the extent of NSA surveillance programs. They come as senior intelligence officials testify to the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday, releasing classified documents in response to the Guardian’s earlier stories on bulk collection of phone records and Fisa surveillance court oversight.

 ………

 The files shed light on one of Snowden’s most controversial statements, made in his first video interview published by the Guardian on June 10.

 “I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.

 US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”

 But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.

So, either Rep. Rogers knowingly lied, or he was lied to by the state security apparatus.

Yeah, it just keeps getting worse, and there is more to come, at least that is what Senator Ron Wyden said yesterday when he said that, “U.S. intelligence agencies’ violations of court orders on surveillance of Americans is worse than the government is letting on,” which means that even with a incredibly compliant FISA Court (You need to keep them away from toilet paper, because they will sign anything), they be bothered to follow the “law”.

Linkage

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Retta on stereotypes on Conan:

What Ezra Klein Said

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He notes that when pundits talk about “the center”, they are endorsing a radical agenda that is overwhelmingly opposed outside the beltway:

Martin’s article doesn’t define “the center.” But it’s not the center of public opinion. It’s more a reference to an amorphous Washington consensus. Insofar as that concept ever made sense, the idea was that it’s the legislative center, the zone of compromise where things can actually get done. But even that concept has begun to break down in recent years, as that Washington center — what you might call the “Simpson-Bowles center” — no longer holds any weight in Congress.

When you’re judging policy, “good” and “bad” are descriptions that make sense. So are “popular” and “unpopular,” and “likely to pass” and “no chance.” But “the center”? It’s time to retire that one, or at least come up with a more rigorous definition of what we mean when we use it.

Word.

How Torture Comes Home, Part 55

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We now have a report that the CIA is hemorrhaging because its management sucks:

For the Central Intelligence Agency, he was a catch: an American citizen who had grown up overseas, was fluent in Mandarin and had a master’s degree in his field. He was working in Silicon Valley, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country.

The analyst, who declined to be named to shield his association with the CIA, was hired in 2005 into the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence, where he was assigned to dig into Chinese politics. He said he was dismayed to discover that unimpressive managers wielded incredible power and suffered no consequences for mistakes. Departments were run like fiefdoms, he said, and “very nasty internecine battles” were a fixture.

By 2009, he had left the CIA. He now does a similar job for the U.S. military.

CIA officials often assert that while the spy agency’s failures are known, its successes are hidden. But the clandestine organization celebrated for finding Osama bin Laden has been viewed by many of its own people as a place beset by bad management, where misjudgments by senior officials go unpunished, according to internal CIA documents and interviews with more than 20 former officers.

So, how does this relate to torturers?

Because the torturers are people who are not that good at their jobs. If they were good, they wouldn’t have to break the law to create the illusion of results. (A quick Google shows that torture does not work)

Of course, between the torture fetishists of Bush and His Evil Minions™, and the torture apologists of Obama and His Evil Minions™, torture has become a ticket that you need to punch to advance in “the agency”.

So, because successive White Houses have institutionalized torture, they have also institutionalized incompetent agents who become incompetent managers who are fearful that their lack of ability will be exposed.

We have incentivized torture, incompetence, and corruption for people who want to have intelligence as a career path.

This is Beyond Orwell’s Wildest Imaginings

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In his seminal work 1984, he coined the idiom, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

Well, Obama and His Evil Minions™ have done this one better, and they claim that the list of people that we are at war with is classified:

Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning’s trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different “enemies,” with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and… mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that’s no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we’re at war with wasn’t just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we’re actually at war with would do “serious damage to national security.” The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more.………

If the UK were to hook up a generator to the grave of Eric Arthur Blair, they could power all of Europe, because he is surely spinning in his grave at unbelievable speed.

Linkage

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Pic of the day:  Why conservatives hate New York City Bike Share:

One of the Worst of the Blue Dogs Gets a Free Pass

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Bill Halter, who nearly defeated the despicable Blanche Lincoln in the 2010 Arkansas Democratic Primary, has decided to withdraw from the race for Governor, leaving the race to one of the Dlue Doggingist of the Blue Dogs, Mike Ross.

It appears that the proximate cause is anemic fund raising.

My guess is that this is payback from the Clintons, who have not “gotten over” his challenge to Lincoln. (She would have lost anyway, the polls were clear on that.)

This sucks.

More Adventures of the New Party of Jefferson Davis

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Paul Krugman notes that the current attempts by Congressional Republicans to use the threat of a government shutdown to roll back Obanmacare mirrors the actions of the South when they tried to destroy the United States.

You see, Marco Rubio is now claiming that Obama wants to shut down government because he will not end his health care plan.

As Krugman notes, Lincoln nailed this at his Cooper Union speech over 150 years ago:

Under all these circumstances, do you really feel yourselves justified to break up this Government unless such a court decision as yours is, shall be at once submitted to as a conclusive and final rule of political action? But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

To be sure, what the robber demanded of me – my money – was my own; and I had a clear right to keep it; but it was no more my own than my vote is my own; and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.

The party of Lincoln has become the party of Jefferson Davis.

A New Definition of Chutzpah………

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Know your meme

Yes, John Pike, infamous as the Pepper Spray cop in Berkeley, who subsequently became a meme, and is now a poster boy for the banality of evil, has now filed for workmans’ comp:

The former UC police officer who was internationally condemned for pepper-spraying demonstrators at UC Davis is seeking workers’ compensation, saying he suffered psychiatric injury as a result of the November 2011 incident.

 John Pike has a settlement conference set for Aug. 13 in Sacramento, according to the state Department of Industrial Relations’ website and an Associated Press report.

 Pike was fired in July 2012, eight months after a task force investigation found that his action was unwarranted.

I’m beginning to think that the only folks out there with a bigger sense of entitlement than Congressional Republicans Newt Gingrich are bad cops.

Whenever the worm turns, and the scrutiny that they apply to others is applied to them, they employ every trick in the book to avoid justly deserved consequences.

The Joys of Children are Without Number

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We took Natalie to  Camp Tizmoret Shoshana, a Jewish performing arts camp.

It is at Capitol Camp, about 50 miles from home.

So, we packed up in the morning, and drove her to camp.

100+ miles round trip, and then Sharon and Charlie had to get ready for their performances at Open Space Arts this afternoon.

Only Natalie forgot a few things: her music theory notebook, Portman (her marionette), and her towels.

Then, after the play, we get a text that she had also forgotten her asthma inhaler.

So, instead of getting her stuff to her tomorrow, we had to go back tonight.

So, back we went, another 2 hour round trip.

At one point, we drove through a thunderstorm that felt like the apocalypse.

We had zero visibility, and the almost constant lightning had the wipers strobing across the windshield.

We are now headed back home (Sharon is driving), finally.

I swear, Natalie would forget her own head if it weren’t attached.

Linkage

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Libertarian Paradise: