Year: 2016

This Would Have Been Unthinkable Just Ten Years Ago

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The Walloonian Parliament just put a stake through the heart of the Canada/EU trade pact:

The EU’s once-mighty trade negotiators never dreamed that their powers would be stripped from them so unceremoniously — and possibly for good.

The Francophone parliament of the Federation of Wallonia-Brussels — only 10 minutes’ walk from EU headquarters — stands to win a place in history for sinking the EU’s landmark trade deal with Canada and potentially for scuppering the European Commission’s ability to lead the world’s biggest trade bloc for many years.

Failure to conclude the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) by this month’s deadline would be a devastating blow to the EU, which has spent seven years working on the tariff-slicing agreement with Ottawa.

………

The Federation of Wallonia-Brussels parliament, which focuses on the cultural and educational concerns of 4.5 million French speakers in Belgium, voted Wednesday evening to reject CETA because of worries about public services and agriculture. Laetitia Naklicki, a spokesperson for Minister-President Rudy Demotte, said this vote meant that the government of the French-speaking community “would not issue its full power for signing CETA to the federal government.”

Unless the Belgian central government can find an imaginative compromise quickly, the EU will be unable to corral the signatures of all 28 EU countries before an EU-Canada summit on October 27. The pressure on Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel is only likely to increase Friday, when another regional assembly, Wallonia, also voted against CETA.

Under Belgium’s complex constitution, all five regional governments must approve the trade deal before the federal government can give consent.

The fact that these deals have become increasingly more difficult to pass, and as such will become far more limited in scope.

This is a good thing.

I really do hope that this is the start of a trend.

The increasing investment of authority in anti-democratic institutions has been a disaster for everyone but the elites staff, and directly benefit from, those institustions.

The Computer is Your Friend

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Facebook was accused of having a liberal bias in its trending news by the flying monkey right wing.

This might be true, but as Stephen Colbert noted, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Facebook’s response was to replace them with an algorythm, and this algorythm has been repeatedly punked:

The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system — and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended — the site has repeatedly promoted “news” stories that are actually works of fiction.

As part of a larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate. On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record.

“I’m not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended,” one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. “It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code.” (The team member, who had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Facebook, spoke on the condition of anonymity.)

………

There was the thinly-sourced story, on Aug. 31, of a Clemson University administrator who kicked a praying man off campus. (The sordid tale, aggregated by a right-wing outlet, has been soundly debunked by the school.)

The next week, on Sept. 8, Facebook promoted a breathless account of the iPhone’s new and literally magical features, sourced from the real news site Firstpost’s satirical Faking News page. The day after, Facebook trended a news release from the “Association of American Physicians and Surgeons” — a discredited libertarian medical organization — as well as a tabloid story claiming that the Sept. 11 attacks were a “controlled demolition.”

………

Last May, however, Facebook faced a torrent of high-profile accusations about political bias on the Trending editorial team — so much so that, in the aftermath, the company decided to tweak the role humans play in approving Trending topics. On Aug. 26, Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news. Where editors were told to independently verify trending topics surfaced by the algorithm, even by cross-referencing “Google News and other news sources,” engineers were told to accept every trending topic linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts..

The previous editorial team could also influence which specific news stories were displayed with each topic, rejecting the story selected by the algorithm if it was “biased,” “clickbait” or irrelevant. Trending’s current quality review team does not vet URLs.

The lessons learned here are two fold:

  • Computers are not there yet.
  • Letting the Talibaptist wing of our citizenry to dictate your news dissemination leads to batsh%$ insane things being flagged as true.

Barack Obama Must Hate Elizabeth Warren

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After a number of conflicts with SEC Chair Mary Jo White, Elizabeth Warren has called for Barack Obama to replace her as head of the SEC with another board member.

It’s unlikely to happen, because, after 7 years of coddling banksters and a revolving door that could power Rhode Island, it’s pretty clear that White is doing exactly what Barack Obama wants her to do:

A long-running feud between a leading critic of the finance industry in the Senate and the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission reached a new peak Friday, when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked President Obama to replace SEC chair Mary Jo White.

In a letter to Obama, Warren calls White the “biggest barrier” to progress on a push to force corporations to disclose their political spending, and she says that White “has refused to develop a political spending disclosure rule despite her clear authority to do so.”

“Enough is enough,” Warren writes to Obama, adding: “I respectfully urge you to exercise your unilateral authority under (federal law) to immediately designate another SEC commissioner as Chair of the agency.”

Later, she adds: “While demoting an existing Chair and selecting another from among the agency’s current Commissioners would be an uncommon act, Chair White’s extraordinary, ongoing efforts to undermine the agency’s central mission make such a step necessary.”

Before she became SEC Chairman, she worked at a law firm which represented the financial industry, and her husband continues to work for a similar law firm, and prior her appointment to the Securities and exchange commission, she had no regulatory experience.

Obama knew all of this when he appointed her, which is why, in addition to his hiring of Timothy Geithner, Jacob Lew, Rahm Emanuel, William Daley, I think that Mary Jo White is doing what the President wants.

Obama has never been interested in creating meaningful accountability or reform in Wall Street.

After all, Presidential libraries don’t pay for themselves.

Oh, Snap!

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Harry Reid is retiring from the Senate this year, and his heir apparent Chuck Schumer has apparently been floating out the idea that Evan Bayh should be able to retain his seniority, from his first two terms, even though he has been out of the Senate for the past 6 years.

This would be unprecedented, and liberal heads exploded over this possibility:

A collection of left-leaning groups are mounting a public campaign to push Senate Democrats to make the Banking Committee less friendly to banks.

In a letter sent to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) Thursday, the group specifically urged him to rule out the possibility that Evan Bayh, a former Democrat from Indiana running to regain his old Senate seat, could somehow take control of the panel.
The theory that Bayh, who previously served in the Senate from 1999 to 2011 before not seeking reelection, could leapfrog to the top of the committee has been floating in financial circles for weeks. The thinking goes that Bayh could regain his old seniority from his previous term, placing him ahead of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), currently the top Democrat on the GOP-led panel.

If Democrats regain control of the Senate, the seat currently occupied by Brown would become the chairman’s and would dictate the panel’s agenda. And Schumer, who also sits on the committee, is expected to take over as Senate Majority Leader following the retirement of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Brown has established a reputation as a strong big bank critic, while Bayh, who took jobs with private equity firm Apollo Global Management and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce after leaving office, is viewed as friendly face for the industry.

………

“Granting Bayh seniority from his previous tenure in the Senate and installing him as chair would seemingly be without precedent,” the groups wrote. “The financial industry is floating his name to the media in a brazen, cynical attempt to tilt the Committee’s membership even further toward Wall Street.”

This story would not have been floating around Washington if Schumer weren’t busy floating trial balloons.

Schumer, much like Bayh, is the finance industry’s bitch.

Indiana is one Senate race where I would not be too unhappy if the ‘Phant won.

I Want to Move to Iceland

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And it has nothing to do with Bjork.

It has everything to do with jailing banksters:

Iceland’s Supreme Court has return[ed] a guilty verdict for all nine defendants in the Kaupþing market manipulation case, the court trial for which began in April 2015.

Back in June last year, the Reykjavik District Court found seven of the nine defendants guilty, acquitting two.

By fully financing share purchases with no other surety than the shares themselves, the bankers were accused of giving a false and misleading impression of demand for Kaupþingi shares by means of deception and pretence.

The Supreme Court has now overturned the acquittals, finding Björk Þórarinsdóttir (credit representative at Kaupþing) and Magnús Guðmundsson (former CEO of Kaupthing Luxembourg) also guilty alongside the other seven.

The rule of law:  Iceland has it.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?! Trump has Lost Falwell U?

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At Liberty University, the “University” founded by Jerry Fallwell, and run by his son, Jerry Jr, is now experiencing student protests over the decision of Junior to endorse Donald Trump:

Students at Virginia’s Liberty University have issued a statement against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as young conservatives at some colleges across the country reconsider support for his campaign.

A statement issued late Wednesday by the group Liberty United Against Trump strongly rebuked the candidate as well as the school’s president, Jerry Falwell Jr., for defending Trump after he made vulgar comments about women in a 2005 video.

“Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him,” the statement said. “… He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.” 

I think that this might be a harbinger of the apocalypse.*

I am so glad I took yesterday off from the world.

*Full disclosure, no I don’t think that this is, “A harbinger of the apocalypse.” I don’t actually believe in the apocalypse, the rapture, etc. It is not a part of normative Judaism.

Linkage

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Denis Leary channels the Trump Nation back in 1993:

He gets my Nostradamus award of the day.

Signs of Sanity from the DEA

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Following a torrent of protest that included members of Congress, the DEA has has withdrawn a proposal to put kratom on the Schedule 1 List:

The Drug Enforcement Administration is reversing a widely criticized decision that would have banned the use of kratom, a plant that researchers say could help mitigate the effects of the opioid epidemic.

Citing the public outcry and a need to obtain more research, the DEA is withdrawing its notice of intent to ban the drug, according to a preliminary document that will be posted to the Federal Register Thursday.

The move is “shocking,” according to John Hudak, who studies drug policy at the Brookings Institution. “The DEA is not one to second-guess itself, no matter what the facts are.”

The DEA had announced in August that it planned to place kratom in schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act, the most restrictive regulatory category, as soon as Sept. 30. But since announcing their intent to ban kratom, the “DEA has received numerous comments from members of the public challenging the scheduling action,” acting administrator Chuck Rosenberg wrote in the notice, “and requesting that the agency consider those comments and accompanying information before taking further action.”

(emphasis mine)

5 years ago, no one beyond the NORML crowd would have batted an eyelash, but with the rise of the Marijuana legalization movement, people no longer take the whole “War on Drugs” bullsh%$ as gospel.

This is a very good thing.

This is F%$#ed UP

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In what is appears to me that a completely incoherent ruling, the DC Court of Appeals has ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s organizational structure is unconstitutional:

A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the structure of the U.S. agency charged with guarding consumers’ finances is unconstitutional, fueling an election-year political fight over one of the signature government responses to the 2007-09 financial crisis.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out a $109 million penalty against PHH Corp in 2014, saying the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gives its sole director too much power.

The three-judge panel, though, also sought to remedy the problem by giving the president the power to fire the director, which it said made the position similar to the Attorney General and other constitutionally sanctioned agency heads who answer to the White House.

“The CFPB has dodged the biggest bullet, which is to be declared unconstitutional and have all its prior rules and regulations voided,” said Andrew Sandler, chairman of BuckleySandler law firm.

But he added “lawyers will be looking hard,” at past agency decisions.

The CFPB is expected to request the entire appeals court conduct an “en banc” review of the case. The losing side will likely appeal to the Supreme Court.

This is a seriously f%$#ed up ruling that is akin to the courts rulings in the early 20th century striking down wage, hour, and safety legislation on the basis of a imaginary “Right of Free Contract”*.

As near as I can figure out, this ruling might technically provide a precedent for restructuring the Federal Reserve, but that’s the glass half full view.

Here’s hoping that the court hears an en banc appeal, and overturns this truly incoherent ruling.

*Lochner v. New York, which affirmed the right of an employer to work his employee to death.

Off the grid for the next 26 hours

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Yom Kippur starts in a couple of hours, and I will be busy fasting and atoning for my sins.

I have made the decision that during this time I will not be consuming news in any way shape or form.

This is not a form of atonement, but rather a gift that I am giving myself.

I am so completely sick and tired of trump and Clinton and the whole electoral season that I am considering taking a job as a neutrino detector maintenance technician.

I just want it to stop.

Posted via mobile.

More Evidence of Our Clusterf%$# in Syria

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The US remains focused largely on its credibility in the Syrian conflict.

There are no meaningful goals, it promulgates fictions and allies itself with a state sponsor of terrorism (the House of Saud) as well as al Qaeda affiliate al Nusra (now Fateh al-Sham) in an increasingly incoherent quest by parts of the US state security apparatus (Dod &CIA) to overthrow the Assad regime while other elements are making half hearted efforts at damage mitigation.

It has created a situation where Bashir al Assad is the best alternative available for the US, the EU, and anyone not interested in the thousand year old great game between Shia and Sunni Muslims, which is a pretty good indication of just how thoroughly this pooch has been screwed.

And now we have some more repercussions of our failure to have any policy beyond mindless dick swinging, as Russia and Turkey have signed a gas pipeline deal, a part of a significant rapprochement between the two regimes:

The Russian and Turkish leaders have agreed to intensify military and intelligence contacts after a meeting in Istanbul.

President Vladimir Putin also said he and Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed on the need for aid to get to the northern Syrian city of Aleppo.

The two countries have signed a deal to construct two pipelines to send Russian gas under the Black Sea to Turkey.

Ties were strained after Turkey downed a Russian military jet last year.

But speaking at a joint news conference with Mr Putin, Mr Erdogan said he was confident that the normalisation of relations would take place rapidly.

Unlike Russia, Turkey is a member of Nato, but both countries currently have uneasy relations with the West and are also facing economic challenges.

………

This is a developing alliance defined as much by what Turkey and Russia oppose as by what unites them.

Both feel isolated. Both have taken a decidedly authoritarian turn in their politics. Both have significant tensions with Washington. And both have strategic stakes in Syria with Moscow and Ankara well aware of the need to deal with the other if these interests are to be protected.

It’s something of a rapid reversal though. Less than a year ago Turkey shot down a Russian warplane and relations went into the freezer. But self-interest, notably Turkey’s “post-coup attempt” resentment at Washington and the shifting balance of military advantage in Syria, gives this unlikely pairing a certain logic.

………

One pipeline will be for Turkish domestic consumption, the other will supply southeastern Europe, bypassing Ukraine.

(emphasis mine)

This is a lose-lose for the United States.

In addition to Syria going pear shaped, it means that the situation in the Ukraine has moved against the US agenda.

Russia, at far smaller cost, has been far more successful in both Syria and the Ukraine, and they have done so because they have realistically defined their essential interests, and only taken those actions that directly benefit those interests.

By contrast, US efforts have been a toxic mix of hubris and incompetence.

The Darkside of Obamacare

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This is Grim

The problem with the PPACA is that it relies to a large degrees on the better angels of the insurance companies.

You probably notice the problem here. The Venn diagram of “Insurance Companies” and “Better Angels” is a null set:

The health care costs that Americans pay out-of-pocket are rising–both in total amount, which is perhaps not a surprise, but also as a share of incomes, which is perhaps more disturbing. Ann Foster discusses the pattern in “Household healthcare spending in 2014,”  written as a “Beyond the Numbers” short essay for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (August 2016, vol. 5, no. 13). She has lots of details of spending in particular areas, but here’s an overall figure showing out-of-pocket spending by households as a total amount (left axis) and as share of total expenditures (right-hand axis).

 Part of the reason for this rise is that more Americans have health care insurance with high deductibles: that is, the amount you pay out of pocket before the insurance kicks in. Here’s some information from the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation 2016 Employer Health Benefits Survey.  The report notes:

“[T]he share of covered workers in plans with a general annual deductible has increased significantly over time: from 55% in 2006, to 74% in 2011, to 83% in 2016, as have the average deductible amounts for covered workers in plans with deductibles: from $584 in 2006, to $991 in 2011, to $1,478 in 2016.”

One of the central conceits of Obamacare is that if “Consumers”* have “Skin in the game” it will constrain healthcare costs.

This ignores the looting by insurance companies, pharma, as hospitals, as well as the fact that the price of medicine in all forms is ruinously expensive in relation to every other industrialized nation on the face of the earth.

Obama, and the rest of his nudge theory† obsessed free market mousketeers, are completely captured by the Chicago School world view.

I would note that the Chicago boys have been wrong about everything since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocked over that damn lantern.

*Consumers, never citizens, because we have no significance beyond consumption.
†Nudge theory posits that by making small market based influences, you can accomplish anything without significant government intervention.‡
‡It’s also almost complete bullsh%$.

Oh Snap

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It appears that the European Commission got a legal opinion about the ISDS (Investor State Dispute System) that is central to the TTIP, the TPP, the CETA, and they were told that it was illegal under EU law.

We cannot be certain, but the fact that the EC is refusing to release the opinion and they are now being sued over this:

The European Commission faces an EU court battle to keep secret its lawyers’ analysis on whether the controversial investor-state-dispute (ISDS) clause in draft trade deals with the USA and Canada is illegal.

ClientEarth, an NGO of environmental lawyers, has slapped the Commission with a lawsuit after applying for the legal opinion using EU transparency rules.

It received heavily redacted documents that make it impossible to see the analysis of whether ISDS is legal under EU law. The redactions will be embarrassing for an institution that regularly claims to be the most transparent in the world and far more so than national governments.

ISDS is controversial because critics argue it will allow powerful multinationals to sue governments in international tribunals, which can have a chilling effect on their willingness to regulate in the public interest.

The Commission claims that the black-out is needed to protect its negotiations with the US on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) but that will now be tested by judges in the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg. The executive is mandated by member states to handle free trade agreement talks.

………

Were the Commission to be ultimately forced to publish analysis that found ISDS was incompatible with EU law, it could call the much-debated TTIP deal into question.

A legal precedent would also be set but the Commission would be able to appeal any decision to the European Court of Justice, which has so far resisted calls to issue an opinion on the clause’s legality.

………

The London-based NGO argues that ISDS is a “discriminatory legal tool” that creates an alternative legal system and may not be compatible with EU law.

The German Association of Judges and European Association of Judges have also expressed strong reservations. The Belgian parliament of Wallonia has called on the ECJ to give an opinion on the issue.

Lets be clear on this:  Secrecy here is not about negotiating positions.  It is about deceiving the general public and promulgating a deal which will hurt ordinary folk for the benefit of banksters and other rent seekers.

The Wonders of Capitalism and Competition

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Google has decided to use the DMCA to lock out manufacturers who make hardware that is compatible with competing platforms from accessing Chromcast:

A closed-door unveiling of the forthcoming Google Home smart speaker platform included the nakedly anticompetitive news that vendors whose products support Amazon’s Echo will be blocked from integrating with Google’s own, rival platform.

These platforms are typically designed to allow their vendors to invoke Section 1201 of the DMCA, which makes it a felony to change their configurations in unauthorized ways, meaning that Google could convert its commercial preference (“devices either support Google Home or Amazon Echo, but not both”) into a legal right (“we can use the courts and the police to punish people who make products that let you expand your device’s range of features to support whichever platform you choose to use”).

This is our modern economy: The free market has been supplanted by parasitic rent seeking.

The DMCA is merely one example of this. It permeates our economy.

We see it in our IP regulations, our finance system, and our so-called “free trade” deals.

It’s money for nothing, and these rents are redirected toward our political process to buy more direct and indirect subsidies.

The only question is how it ends:  with an outbreak of sanity, or madame la guillotine.

Well, That Only Took Fifteen Years

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After over a decade of reports that many of the prisoners at Guantanamo were jailed on faulty information, we are finally getting something approaching an official acknowledgment of this fact:

The “Dirty 30” probably weren’t all Osama bin Laden bodyguards after all. The “Karachi 6” weren’t a cell of bombers plotting attacks in Pakistan for al-Qaida. An Afghan man captured 14 years ago as a suspected chemical weapons maker was confused for somebody else.

An ongoing review shows the U.S. intelligence community has been debunking long-held myths about some of the “worst of the worst” at Guantanamo, some of them still held today. The retreat emerges in a series of unclassified prisoner profiles released by the Pentagon in recent years, snapshots of much larger dossiers the public cannot see, prepared for the Periodic Review Board examining the Pentagon’s “forever prisoner” population.

………

The documents also offer a window into the wobbly world of early war-on-terror intelligence gathering and analysis where a suspicion built on circumstances of capture gelled into allegations of membership in a terror cell that on reflection more than a decade later probably didn’t exist. In a series of interviews, intelligence sources — including people who served at Guantanamo at the time — blamed bad intelligence on a combination of urgency to produce, ignorance about al-Qaida and Afghanistan at the prison’s inception and inexperience in the art of investigation and analysis.

“It was clear early on that the intelligence was grossly wrong,” said Mark Fallon, a retired 30-year federal officer who between 2002 and 2004 was Special Agent in Charge of the Department of Defense’s Criminal Investigation Task Force. Most “weren’t battlefield captives,” he said, calling many “bounty babies” — men captured by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantanamo “on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate.”

………

Fallon was responsible for some interrogations and evaluating intelligence with an eye toward prosecution by military commission. Now, more than decade later, he is in the final stages of publishing a book of his criticisms and said in a recent interview that it’s no surprise that early prisoner profiles are imploding under Periodic Review Board scrutiny.

“That’s why people are so successful doing cold case homicide cases,” he said. “People make decisions based on what they knew then. I don’t want to say that the facts changed. The facts grew. When you’re working cases, cases evolve. As you get additional facts, you interpret it differently.”

Guantanamo has been a complete fiasco.

We have the wrong people there, and it has served as one of the most effect recruiting tools for terrorists.

Remember When I Said That Hillary’s Secrecy Backfired?

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Now the Wikileaks email releases detailing Hillary Clinton’s speeches to the Wall Street banks have pissed off Bernie Sanders something fierce.

This was foreseeable, and it was a direct result of her unwillingness to get ahead of the story and release the transcripts over the last 2½ months.

I know that politicians are not inclined to admit failure and move on, but the cover-up is always worse than the original mistake:

Supporters of former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Saturday expressed anger and vindication over leaked comments made by Hillary Clinton to banks and big business that appeared to confirm their fears about her support for global trade and tendency to cozy up to Wall Street.

Clinton, who needs Sanders’ coalition of young and left-leaning voters to propel her to the presidency, pushes for open trade and open borders in one of the speeches, and takes a conciliatory approach to Wall Street, both positions she later backed away from in an effort to capture the popular appeal of Sanders’ attacks on trade deals and powerful banks.

The excerpts of remarks by the former secretary of state, made in 2013 and 2014 in closed-door meetings where audiences paid to attend, were published online on Friday by WikiLeaks, which sourced them to the email account of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman.

………

“This is a very clear illustration of why there is a fundamental lack of trust from progressives for Hillary Clinton,” said Tobita Chow, chair of the People’s Lobby in Chicago, which endorsed Sanders in the primary election.

………

“That is a big concern and this certainly doesn’t help,” said Larry Cohen, chair of the board of Our Revolution, a progressive organization formed in the wake of Sanders’ bid for the presidency, which aims to keep pushing the former candidate’s ideas at a grassroots level. “It matters in terms of turnout, energy, volunteering, all those things.”

Anyone with two brain cells, and a knowledge of the relationship between Wall Street and the Clintons (Bob Rubin anyone?) knew that this was the case, but Hillary Clinton has handled this in the absolutely worst possible way, and this is not the first time.

The past is prelude, and this does not bode well for a future Clinton administration.