Month: March 2019

The American People Get It, and Congress Does Not

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Almost half of Americans say Wall Street banks have made the “American Dream” more difficult to attain, according to a national poll released Wednesday that also shows capitalism still has strong support.

The RealClear Opinion Research survey shows 45 percent of Americans say Wall Street and investment firms make it harder for them to achieve the American Dream, while 26 percent say they make no difference and 13 percent say they make the goal easier to win.

Ordinary Americans get it: Wall Street is a bunch of parasites who make their money by running a rigged casino with our retirement money.

I would expect that these poll results will encourage members of the finance industry to increase their political donations, because it takes money to get politicians to tell the voters to go Cheney themselves.

Linkage

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And the Award for Best Use of an Air Horn Goes To:

How can you tell if Mark Zuckerberg is lying?

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That’s easy.

You can tell that he is lying if his lips are moving.

As such, I am highly dubious of any promise that makes, particularly if he is promising enhanced privacy:

If you click enough times through the website of Saudi Aramco, the largest oil producer in the world, you’ll reach a quiet section called “Addressing the climate challenge.” In this part of the website, the fossil fuel monolith claims, “Our contributions to the climate challenge are tangible expressions of our ethos, supported by company policies, of conducting our business in a way that addresses the climate challenge.” This is meaningless, of course — as is the announcement Mark Zuckerberg made today about his newfound “privacy-focused vision for social networking.” Don’t be fooled by either.

………

And so here we are: “As I think about the future of the internet, I believe a privacy-focused communications platform will become even more important than today’s open platforms,” Zuckerberg writes in his road-to-Damascus revelation about personal privacy. The roughly 3,000-word manifesto reads as though Facebook is fundamentally realigning itself as a privacy champion — a company that will no longer track what you read, buy, see, watch, and hear in order to sell companies the opportunity to intervene in your future acts. But, it turns out, the new “privacy-focused” Facebook involves only one change: the enabling of end-to-end encryption across the company’s instant messaging services. Such a tech shift would prevent anyone, even Facebook, outside of chat participants from reading your messages.

That’s it.

Although the move is laudable — and will be a boon for dissident Facebook chatters in countries where government surveillance is a real, perpetual risk — promising to someday soon forfeit to your ability to eavesdrop on over 2 billion people doesn’t exactly make you eligible for sainthood in 2019. It doesn’t help that Zuckerberg’s post is completely absent of details beyond a plan to implement these encryption changes “over the next few years” — which is particularly silly considering Facebook has yet to implement privacy features promised in the wake of its previous mega-scandals.

Not only has Zuckerberg issued similar mea culpas over the years, he has done so on something resembling an annual basis.

These promises have never correlated to meaningful changes in behavior.

Clearly Bernie’s Support Is Limited to White Sexist and Racist Bernie Bros, and (According to Gloria Steinem) the Women Who Want to F%$# Them.

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The most recent poll of voters regarding announced Democratic Presidential candidates shows that Bernie Sanders is leading Kamala Harris by about 2:1 among black Democrats, the next closest candidate:

Three weeks after launching his presidential campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is leading all other announced candidates in support from black voters, a new poll finds. The only potential candidate who polled better with African-Americans than Sanders, according to the poll by Morning Consult, is former Vice President Joe Biden, who has not announced a campaign.

Despite a persistent notion that his supporters are disproportionately white male “bros,” the new survey suggests that Sanders is actually slightly more popular among black Democratic voters than white ones, indicating that the narrative that developed during the 2016 campaign may no longer hold, if it ever did.

Sanders’s support among black voters, at 28 percent, puts him in second place among that demographic, behind Biden, at 32 percent. He trailed Biden 31-25 among whites.

There appears to be a strong class element at play in the finding. The same poll found that the demographics Sanders is least popular with — at 19 and 17 percent, respectively — are Democrats who make more than $100,000 per year and Democrats who have post-graduate degrees (two qualities that typically, if not always, overlap). Because of structural wealth and income gaps, that population is heavily white.

Yes, the headline is David Brock style trolling, and yes, Gloria Steinem actually basically said that on Bill Maher’s show in 2016.

Correction of the Day

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Correction: Last Month, We Called Zuckerberg a Moron. We Apologize. In Fact, He and Facebook Are a Fscking Disgrace

—The Register

 This hed is classic El Reg, and it is completely justified:  We now know that when Facebook claimed that its bogus VPN app only hit about 5% minors, they really meant 10%.

I feel compelled to invoke the classic sports film Bull Durham, and call them c%$# suckers who suffer the eventual fate of the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Mixed Emotions

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Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and former  Chairman at Nissan, has been released from jail after 108 days.

He has been charged with tax evasion and embezzlement.

I like the idea that a rich executive is being like the rest of us (good), but I have not doubt that if Ghosn were Japanese, he would have been released on bail about 107 days sooner: (bad)

The former motoring titan Carlos Ghosn extricated himself from custody Wednesday after 108 days in jail.

The Brazil-born former CEO of Renault and chairman of Nissan Motors paid one of the largest bail fees in the history of Japan — 1 billion yen, or $8.9 million — to leave jail in Tokyo.

Flanked by security figures, Ghosn emerged from the jail wearing blue workman’s clothes, a baseball cap, and a face mask as he headed to his new home, a court-approved house in Tokyo.

………

Ghosn’s experience has been a humiliating one for a former CEO who commanded immense respect in the auto world. Ghosn in November was accused of misreporting his salary and compensation having previously held top positions at the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi Motors automotive alliance.

………

Prosecutors in Japan have alleged that the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance chairman and CEO earned a salary of about 10 billion yen, or $88.7 million, from 2011 to 2015 but reported only half of that. Ghosn could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to 10 million yen if found to have committed any wrongdoing.

The whole story is like watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your brand new car.

Elon Musk Is Killing His Workers

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But Hey, They Get Free Frozen Yogurt, So It’s All Good

Have you looked at the Tesla Motors safety record at their palant?

It is Charles Dickens work house bad:

When it comes to building cars in America, most big names have chosen to set up shop in rural states which carry a large presence of automaking production facilities, but not Tesla. Instead, the electric giant set up shop in Fremont, California where it relies on the work of an estimated 15,000 workers and contractors who make building its cars possible.

While the number of active workers may be more than any other manufacturer who produces cars in the US, Tesla has seemingly also discovered that more employees mean more risk to injury that needs to be stymied. In fact, data collected by Forbes shows that Tesla has accumulated more than three times the number of Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) violations that its top 10 competitors amassed from 2014-2018.

A fish rots from the head, and Elon Musk does not give a flying f%$# in a rolling donut about his employees, or labor law, or settlements with the SEC, so this is not a surprise.

If you are thinking of buying a Tesla, remember that some literal blood probably went into is manufacture.

Tweet of the Day

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#BernieInChicago chastizes the crowd for the second day in a row for chanting his name, exclaiming "Nope, no no no, its not about me!"

The crowd then naturally erupts into a #NotMeUs chant with a huge grin on Bernie's face "That's more like it!"#Bernie2020

— Winkle the BernieBro 🌹 (@the_bernie_bro) March 4, 2019

It’s not a surprise that you would hear this from Bernie, but you would never hear this from Hillary, along with running an incompetent and lazy campaign, is why she lost.

Populism, whether real (Bernie) of fake (Donald) derives its power from this.

Being Evil

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I am referring, of course, to Google, which has refused to remove the Absher App, which the House of Saud wrote to, among other things, keep women from traveling freely.

I know that these ratf%$#s think that they are somehow making the world better place, but they aren’t.

They are just another bunch of pimps: (This applies to Apple, as well, they are mentioned in the story.)

Google has declined to remove from its app store a Saudi government app which lets men track women and control where they travel, on the grounds that it meets all their terms and conditions.

Google reviewed the app — called Absher — and concluded that it does not violate any agreements, and can therefore remain on the Google Play store.

The decision was communicated by Google to the office of Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who, with other members of Congress, wrote last week to demand they remove the service.

………

INSIDER last month reported how Absher — an all-purpose app which Saudis use to interact with the state — offers features which allow Saudi men to grant and rescind travel permission for women, and to set up SMS alerts for when women use their passports.

………

Rep. Speier and 13 colleagues in Congress wrote to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 21, demanding that the app be removed.

………

Apple has also not responded to a request for comment from INSIDER.

Rep. Speier told INSIDER: “The responses received so far from Apple and Google are deeply unsatisfactory.”

“As of today, the Absher app remains available in both the Apple App store and the Google Play Store even though they can easily remove it.”

“Not only do they have the capability to take action, they have done so previously with the removal of the Living Hope Ministries app, which encouraged users to ‘convert’ LGBTQ individuals, based on its ability to cause harm.”

“Facilitating the detention of women seeking asylum and fleeing abuse and control unequivocally causes harm. I will be following up on this issue with my colleagues,” Rep. Speier said.

Seriously, Apple and Google are one step above slave traders.

Gerald Cotten is Sharing a Condo with Elvis and Andy Kauffman

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If you don’t know who Gerald Cotten is, then you are note a former customer of the Quadriga bitcoin repository.

The official story is that he died in India on December 9, and no one can access the BitCoin stored on the service because only he had the passwords to the service.

Weird, but here is where it gets weirder: Like many BitCoin wallets out there, but much of the deposits is kept offline in something called a “Cold Wallet”, the theory being that if it is offline, no one can hack into it.

The thing is that this means that you have to regularly transfer from a cold to a hot wallet when your customers need it.

A meat-space analogy would be the difference between the teller’s tray and the bank vault.

It appears that the money was never moved, which strongly implies that something hinky was going on with the accounts.

The only two logical conclusions to be reached are either that Mr. Cotton is on the lamb spending his ill-gotten gains, or with exposure of his fraud imminent, he took his own life.

Presented for your consideration:

When Quadriga Fintech Solutions Corp. founder Gerald Cotten died, account holders feared the encrypted access keys needed to recover C$190 million ($143 million) of cryptocurrencies held by the exchange in offline storage could be lost forever.

It looks now like the storage Quadriga is known to have used — dubbed cold wallets — has been empty since April.

………

Ernst & Young identified six cold wallet addresses used by Quadriga to store Bitcoin in the past. Five of those wallets haven’t had any balances since April 2018, and a sixth “appears to have been used to receive Bitcoin from another cryptocurrency exchange account and subsequently transfer Bitcoin to the Quadriga hot wallet” on Dec. 3. The only activity since was an inadvertent transfer of Bitcoin into that sixth wallet last month, which was disclosed earlier.

Crypto investors and exchanges often keep their holdings in cold wallets — typically, physical devices disconnected from the web that can be plugged into a computer when needed since internet-connected hot wallets can be vulnerable to hackers.

A preliminary review of transactions of the six wallets using public blockchain records showed that from April 2014 to approximately April 2018, aggregate Bitcoin month end balances in the identified cold wallets ranged from zero to a peak of 2,776 Bitcoin. The average aggregate month end balance over the four-year period was approximately 124 Bitcoin. Some Bitcoin in the wallets appear to have been transferred to accounts at other crypto exchanges.

………

Another 14 user accounts created outside the normal process were also identified, with deposits artificially created and used for trading. The monitor has reached out to 14 exchanges and received responses so far from four. It didn’t name the exchanges.

It sounds to me like Cotten used BitCoin to play the horses, or, even more disastrously, play the BitCoin markets.

Why Patent Reform is Essential

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 It turns out the scam that was Theranos was heavily supported by what experts would call bullsh%$ patents:

When Patent Office Director Michelle Lee gave that speech, Theranos appeared to be one of the most impressive companies in Silicon Valley. But later that year, the public learned that Holmes hadn’t “proven” anything. Whistleblowers told The Wall Street Journal that Theranos wasn’t even using its own devices for most of its blood testing. Holmes had apparently spent more than a decade building a company based on unrealistic or outright false claims about its revolutionary technology.

For any disaster as large as Theranos, there’s plenty of blame to go around, of course. Both Holmes and former COO Sunny Balwani now face federal fraud charges. Theranos’ star-studded board of directors failed to do adequate oversight. Walgreens ignored warning signs before launching its in-store partnership. Some VCs and journalists were too eager to believe Theranos’ unproven claims.

But the patent system also played an important, and often overlooked, role in the situation. The USPTO gave out patents much too easily, giving Theranos early credibility it didn’t deserve. Theranos then used these patents to attract staff, investors, and business partners. The company would last for 10+ years and burn through half a billion dollars before the truth finally emerged.

………

But Holmes found a more receptive audience at the USPTO. She says she spent five straight days at her computer drafting a patent application. The provisional application, filed in September 2003 when Holmes was just 19 years old, describes “medical devices and methods capable of real-time detection of biological activity and the controlled and localized release of appropriate therapeutic agents.” This provisional application would mature into many issued patents. In fact, there are patent applications still being prosecuted that claim priority back to Holmes’ 2003 submission.

But Holmes’ 2003 application was not a “real” invention in any meaningful sense. We know that Theranos spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to develop working diagnostic devices. The tabletop machines Theranos focused on were much less ambitious than Holmes’ original vision of a patch. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Holmes’ first patent application was little more than aspirational science fiction written by an eager undergraduate.

So how did Holmes’ unrealistic application lead to real patents, like US Patent No. 7,291,497? If you look through that patent’s application history, you can see that the examiner did review it closely. The examiner made two non-final rejections and two final rejections before eventually allowing the claims. (At the USPTO, a “final” rejection is not really final). The rejections were based on prior art and other technical grounds. What the examiner did not do, however, was ask whether Holmes’ “invention” actually worked.

Two legal doctrines are relevant here. The “utility” requirement of patent law requires that the invention work. And the “enablement” requirement means that the application has to describe the invention with enough detail to allow a person in the relevant field to build and use it. If the applicant herself can’t build the invention with nearly unlimited time and money, it does not seem like the enablement requirement could possibly be satisfied.

………

To answer Professor Grimmelmann’s rhetorical question [What could go wrong with patents being handed out on the “honor system”?] —Theranos is what could go wrong. Holmes’ original patent application became a key part of the company’s mythology. For example, an infamous Fortune article from 2014 reverently tells the story of Holmes staying up late to write her application and suggests that Theranos was founded on that original vision. And if you had visited Theranos’ website in 2014, you would have found an “Our Mission” page that said Holmes left Stanford to “build Theranos around her patents and vision for healthcare.”

Yet more than a decade after Holmes’ first patent application, Theranos had still not managed to build a reliable blood-testing device. By then the USPTO had granted it hundreds of patents. Holmes had been constructing a fantasy world from the minute she started writing her first application, and the agency was perfectly happy to play along.

………

Business Insider wrote that if Theranos had come up with a “killer application” for microfluidics, “that may explain its reluctance to show the patented details that make its technology unique.” This sentence shouldn’t make sense, because patents are public by nature. So “patented details” should be public.

The sentence only makes sense when you realize that the patent bargain is utterly broken. The people who work within the patent system realize it. That’s why no one raised red flags when Theranos received hundreds of patents without telling the scientific community how its machines actually worked.

This is important:  With a very few national security exceptions, patents MUST be public, and of sufficient detail to allow a, “Person having ordinary skill in the art,”  to reproduce the invention.

It is SUPPOSED to be a part of the deal when you award an exclusive license, but the US patent office almost never rejects a patent on being incomprehensible bullsh%$, as it should.

We desperately need to raze the USPTO to the ground, and rebuild it from scratch.

I am a Jew and a Zionist, and I am With Rep. Ilhan Omar

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Her statements about AIPAC, and about the rent-a-crowd outrage machine, are at worst a fairly anodyne statement about the politics over this issue.

They are pretty much the same as Dick Durban’s statement how, “The banks own the place,” in response to the finance industry lobbying Congress.

But it doesn’t matter, the right wing is driving this narrative, and the Democrats are, as always, in the fetal position in the middle of a panic attack.

But the Democrats are still going to put a motion on the floor as a rebuke to Omar.

Seriously, if you took the entire Democratic caucus, I think that you would not be able to assemble one single complete set of testicles.

Portugal’s Solution to Right Wing Populism

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Portugal’s solution is much like Iceland’s solution.

Specifically, they have eschewed German economics and German austerity, and instead have chosen to build up their society, and their societal protections:

Considering the booming economy, dropping unemployment numbers and the return of many once-emigrated young Portuguese citizens, it seems Portugal is on the rise. Facing the policies of socialist Prime Minister António Costa, which include properly supporting the welfare state and investing in the public sector instead of austerity measures, right wing populists don’t stand a chance.

Not too long ago, Portugal stood on the brink of catastrophe: harsh austerity policies and the erosion of labour rights pushed by the conservative government lead to significant rises in poverty and unemployment. The economy dwindled due to the lack of peoples’ spending power.

Today, everything has changed:

“Nowadays, Portugal is considered a prime example among European countries: the economy is booming, unemployment is dropping and investments are rising.”


………

The first major change occurred during the general election 2015. This was time when the right wing conservative government dismantled the social welfare state piece by piece, which resulted in a furious population voicing their dissatisfaction in the voting booth – causing the conservatives to lose 11 percent of their previous electoral votes.

………

Costa succeeded in uniting the severely split left wing in Portugal, who now support the minority government led by him. At first, observers were pessimistic about the potential of this constellation, predicting a collapse after a few months. Moreover, both the EU and German minister of finances saw a grave mistake in the departure from austerity.

Angela Merkel described the prospect of a radical anti-austerity coalition in Portugal as “very negative”. The president of Portugal went further, calling non-conservative economic policies a “danger to national security” and attempting to keep the old government in power.

………

The Portuguese economy has been booming for 4 years. 2017 marked the largest national economic growth of the century.

The Portuguese are not only showing the feasibility of socially conscious policies, but demonstrating the significant potential for success.

“The budget deficit has dropped to its lowest ever since the change to a democratic system in 1974 – simply because the government re-established and strengthened the social welfare state, leading to the Portuguese people having more money to spend.”

The socialists raised the once slashed wages and pensions, reintroduced paid vacations and retracted many tax raises, all while raising wealth taxes which affect only the rich parts of the population. The government also introduced a property and real estate tax designed not to target the homes of average citizens. Costa’s socialists also put an end to the catastrophic privatizations that were once instructed by the EU and resulted in selling state assets at absurdly low prices.

The Germans have been f%$#ing up Europe with their need to run things since 1914.

Triple the Development Time, and You Might Get Close

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This will not fly in 4 years

India, which took 30 years to develop a lightweight fighter, the Tejas, is now promising that it will be fielding a completely new mid-size derivative of that benighted program.

They are expecting the aircraft to take flight in 2023, with initial qualification following by 2 years.

Considering the fact that this aircraft will be almost completely new, this is a Herculean task.

Given that it is India, where weapon system development proceeds at a pace that makes US defense procurement look like a hummingbird on meth, I doubt it:

Before it became the Tejas Mk. 1, India’s indigenous fighter was the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), intended to replace the MiG-21. As a final operational configuration is approved for the Tejas Mk. 1, the government’s defense technology agency is proposing a larger successor, the Medium Weight Fighter (MWF), or Tejas Mk. 2.

………

The MWF relates to the Tejas Mk. 1 very much as the Saab Gripen E/F does to the Gripen A/B/C/D. The Tejas Mk. 1 is an enlargement using the General Electric F414 engine in place of the F404 in its predecessor and fitted with updated electronics. Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL) builds the Tejas Mk. 1.

Unlike that earlier type but like all Gripens, the MWF has all-moving foreplanes just behind the cockpit, creating a close-coupled canard-delta configuration. With 22,000 lb. thrust available from the F414-INS6 engine, maximum takeoff weight is 30% greater than for the Tejas Mk. 1—17.5 metric tons (38,600 lb.) versus 13.5 metric tons, according to data that the DRDO presented at the Aero India exhibition, held in Bengaluru on Feb. 20-24. Maximum external load is almost doubled, to 6.5 metric tons from the 3.3 metric tons of the Tejas Mk. 1 and improved Mk. 1A, which use the 20,200-lb.-thrust GE F404-IN20. Weapons would include beyond-visual-range air-to-air missiles and standoff precision-guided munitions.

The compound delta wing carries short-range air-to-air missiles on wingtip launch rails, rather than on pylons under the wing as on the Mk. 1, increasing span slightly to 8.5 m (28 ft.). Height also is increased slightly, to 4.86 m. The proposed aircraft will be 14.6 m long, 1.35 m longer than the Tejas Mk. 1. A Mirage-style refueling probe is fitted. Maneuver capability is increased to 9g, versus 8g for the Mk. 1A.

………

“The first prototype is expected to fly by the end of 2023 and we hope to get the initial certification by 2025,” says a DRDO official—though these events hinge on when and if funding is made available.

The Gripen E update involved relocating the landing gear to allow for additional fuel, structural improvements, and adding some hard points.

This is basically a completely new aircraft, with new systems, new flight control laws, and no shared structure to speak of.

This is not going to happen in the time frame described.

I Wonder When the Bubble Will Burst

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One of the subtexts of internet media has been repeated indications that the phenomenally detailed and extensive date that they use to sell is complete garbage.

It now appears that one of the central tenets of big data, detailed location data, is, “It’s a Ponzi scheme.”

When juxtaposed with things like Facebook’s bogus pivot to video*, I am increasingly convinced that the entire foundation of the modern internet data economy is complete garbage, where voluminous data serves to obscure rather than to reveal:

Advertisers are scrutinizing their data pools more than ever in programmatic advertising. In the latest installment of Confessions, in which we exchange anonymity for honesty, we spoke to an executive at a location data vendor who said most of what those companies sell is fraudulent.

………

How much of the location data in the market is fake?
I met with a programmatic leader at one of the agency networks recently who asked my firm to help him verify the location data in the bid stream because they believe up to 80 percent or more of the lat-long data available there is fake. No one has stopped to think about where that data has come from and why a publisher would choose to sell it all to a vendor who is going to build a business on top of their data. What’s actually happening is these ad tech vendors are trying to pad out the limited data they already own with other data sets from competitive vendors or other unknown sources. Most reputable publishers would rather use their data across their own business than sell it to ad tech vendors, as the revenue potential is greater against their own content.

Does the data even work?
Who goes into a shop with their phone in-hand looking at a publisher site? That’s not how people behave when they’re shopping. And yet there are location data vendors who are selling data sets of people who are more likely to go into a shop after seeing an ad. Additionally, there are players in market that are pumping exchanges with this fraudulent data to satisfy demand from advertisers who want to know that someone visited their store after seeing an ad.

Am I the only one who thinks that a vigorous (but fair) enforcement of federal and state fraud statutes would have half of Silicon Valley management in the dock?

*Facebook Overestimated Key Video Metric for Two Years (Wall Street Journal)

Be Still My Beating Heart

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Israelis were confronted with a rude new reality on Friday: a prime minister running for re-election while facing indictment for corruption.

While there were hints that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be losing support, his right-wing allies appeared to be sticking with him and no one was foolish enough to write off a politician who still retains a strong base and has shown Houdini-like skill in escaping seemingly impossible jams before.

The only certainty was that Israel was in for a wild ride between now and the April 9 ballot, with analysts predicting that the country’s political scene — loud, fractious and heated at the best of times — would become only more divisive as Mr. Netanyahu, who is seeking a fourth consecutive term, fights for his political life.

“He splits the nation,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, an expert in public opinion at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv. “His are the politics of polarization and exaggeration. If he got any more polarizing he’d fall off the planet.”

………

After the announcement by the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, on Thursday that he intends to indict Mr. Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, polls have pointed to a growing shift away from Mr. Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party and toward Mr. Gantz, whose military record could inoculate him against Mr. Netanyahu’s strongest line of attack, that he is the only one who can protect Israel’s security.

………

The details of three separate, but interconnected, corruption cases in which Mr. Netanyahu is a suspect were spread over a 57-page document released by the Justice Ministry on Thursday.

It included a chart with a monthly breakdown of the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cigars and Champagne supplied to the Netanyahus by a Hollywood producer and a millionaire businessman; back-room dealings with the publisher of a rival newspaper, Yediot Ahronot; and a dinner with an Israeli telecommunications mogul that led to a yearslong “give and take” relationship, as Mr. Mandelblit put it, with Mr. Netanyahu allegedly exchanging lucrative regulatory favors for positive coverage.

………

The announcement on Thursday was an interim step in the prosecution. Mr. Netanyahu is now entitled to a hearing to challenge the charges before a formal indictment can be handed down.

I expect Netanyahu’s campaign to get even more negative than it already has, which, considering the fact that he has officially thrown his lot in with fascist racists labeled terrorist by the United States, is saying quite a lot.

The next month might very well be the ugliest in the history of Israeli politics.

Deregulation Fail, Banking Edition

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Why we cannot build anything anymore

It turns out that the deregulation of banking had the effect of reallocating resources away from productive investment and toward speculation:

In academic and policy circles there is deep mistrust of public sector involvement in credit allocation, much more than in the credit allocation decisions made by commercial banks. This mistrust continues, despite the financial crisis of 2007–08 demonstrating the huge dangers of a deregulated credit market. Whilst, post-crisis, financial regulators have begun to develop policies aimed at reducing lending in certain sectors, calls for proactively directing finance to support desirable sectors of the economy have largely been ignored.

In a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) working paper, co-authored with Dutch economists Dirk Bezemer and Lu Zhang and Frank van Lerven, we examine the theoretical, historical and empirical evidence around credit policy and its effects on the allocation of credit.

Our motivation, aside from the crisis, is the remarkable ‘debt shift’ in advanced economies over the past 40 years which has seen banks move away from their primary textbook role of lending to non-financial firms to support productive investment. Whilst total bank credit has roughly doubled relative to GDP since the early 1970s in advanced economies, the share of credit supporting firms has actually fallen, from 60% to 40%. The vast expansion in lending has been mainly to support households to buy houses and, to a lesser extent, consumer goods and the purchase of financial assets.

………

These new empirical findings support a much older body of theory that argues that credit markets, left to their own devices, will not optimise the allocation of resources. Instead, following Joseph Schumpeter’s, Keynes’ and Hyman Minsky’s arguments, they will tend to shift financial resources away from real-sector investment and innovation and towards asset markets and speculation; away from equitable income growth and towards capital gains that polarises wealth and income; and away from a robust, stable growth path and towards fragile boom-busts cycles with frequent crises.

The only people who benefit from this are the banksters, and the politicians seeking political donations.

H/t naked capitalism

Bernie Sanders Walking the Walk

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Bernie Sanders is all over the strike at Wabtec in Erie, PA.

GE sold the plant to Wabtec a few days ago, and Wabtec has attempted to invalidate the union agreement: (Full disclosure, I worked there from 1994-1996)

When 1,700 members of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America Locals 506 and 618 struck at the sprawling Wabtec locomotive plant in Erie, Pennsylvania, Tuesday morning, they got an immediate show of solidarity from one of the most prominent political figures in the United States.

“Americans are sick and tired of corporate America and their wealthy CEOs ripping off working families,” announced Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, in a tweet dispatched shortly after the picket line was established. “I’m proud to stand with the locomotive manufacturing workers of @ueunion Local 506 and 618 in their fight against GE/Wabtec to maintain decent wages and working conditions.”

That’s the right response from a contender for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Democrats have to stand in outspoken solidarity with workers, especially when their unions are struggling to preserve manufacturing jobs and maintain fair wages in historic urban and industrial centers such as Erie.

………

The strike in Erie pits a union with deep roots in Western Pennsylvania and American manufacturing against a powerful multinational corporation—Webtec (Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation)—that, after taking charge this week of a former GE Transportation manufacturing facility, has refused to maintain existing protections for workers. “We are extremely disappointed that the company could not see its way to agree to continue the terms and conditions that we have worked under for decades. Their refusal leaves us with no choice but to go out on strike to protect our members’ and our children’s future,” says UE Local 506 president Scott Slawson.

According to UE: “Wabtec’s terms and conditions, which they imposed when they took over the plant on Monday, include the introduction of mandatory overtime and arbitrary schedules, wage reductions of up to 38 percent for recalled and newly-hired workers, and the right to use temporary workers for up to 20 percent of the work in the plant.”

………

Sanders has been in the thick of this fight. Last week, he wrote Wabtec CEO Raymond Betler a letter that called out the new boss for trying to squeeze concessions out of workers. “Let’s be clear,” noted Sanders. “Wabtec is not a poor company. It is not going broke. Through the first three quarters of last year, Wabtec made a $256 million profit and had enough money to give you a $3.5 million compensation package.”

“Corporate executives must not use the merger between GE and Wabtec to hurt workers,” wrote the senator, who argued that “the Wabtec/GE merger should not be used to take away the hard-fought gains UE has achieved over the past several decades.”

Sanders promised to “provide my full support and solidarity to the workers at this plant to ensure that they achieve a fair and equitable collective bargaining agreement.” And he has done just that, using his considerable social-media presence and public appearances (including a CNN Town Hall event Monday night) to focus attention on what he has described as a struggle that has meaning for “working Americans everywhere.”

From the rest of the voluminous Democratic Presidential field?  **Crickets**

To a large degree, my experience at GE Transportation Systems (GETS) (now Wabtec) is responsible for my political move left in my middle age.

It was a contentious labor environment, and management, primarily the big bosses at the Connecticut headquarters loathed the union, and the workers.

I wholeheartedly support the strikers.