Year: 2020

Powerful Bank CEOs Lead to Money Laundering

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A study shows that the more unchecked authority that bank CEOs have, the more likely that the banks will be involved in money laundering and other criminality.

Obviously, correlation does not prove causation, but ultra-powerful CEOs tend to be indistinguishable from sociopaths, so criminality logically follows their imperative to hit “the numbers”.

We have seen again and again how rock-star CEOs lead to unbalanced people running companies for their own personal benefit and twisted egos:

Banks with powerful CEO’s and smaller, less independent, boards are more likely to take risks and be susceptible to money laundering, according to new research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA).

The study tested for a link between bank risk and enforcements issued by US regulators for money laundering in a sample of 960 publicly listed US banks during the period 2004-2015.

The results, published in the International Journal of Finance and Economics, show that money laundering enforcements are associated with an increase in bank risk on several measures of risk. In addition, the impact of money laundering is heightened by the presence of powerful CEOs and only partly mitigated by large and independent executive boards.

It’s not just banks that need to abolish the Cult of the CEO.

Unhorrible News on Unemployment

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At least to the degree that 1.19 million initial unemployment claims can be called not horrible, because by the standards of before this March, such a number would be considered catestrophic.

I’m wondering what’s going to happen with the unemployment rate tomorrow:

Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week to the lowest since March, offering a ray of hope for an economy still battered by the pandemic.

 Initial jobless claims in regular state programs fell by 249,000 to 1.19 million in the week ended Aug. 1, Labor Department data showed Thursday. That was the largest improvement in almost two months. Continuing claims — the total number of Americans claiming ongoing unemployment benefits in those programs — decreased to 16.1 million in the week ended July 25, the lowest since April.

 Even with the drop, initial claims were more than five times pre-crisis levels. Analysts have cautioned that it could take some time to confirm a sustainable trend in improvement — especially if the expiration of the weekly $600 in federal benefits discouraged some from filing claims. With cumulative job losses numbering in the tens of millions, it will take not just steady improvement in the number of weekly claims, but also in hiring, for the labor market to rebound to any semblance of its pre-pandemic state.

………

The labor market had been showing signs of stalling in recent weeks as a resurgence in virus cases, beginning in mid-June, led a slew of states to halt or even reverse reopenings. That surge has begun to ebb, potentially supporting hiring, but the outlook could deteriorate once again as businesses exhaust funds from the Paycheck Protection Program.

Meanwhile, the extra $600 in weekly jobless benefits that have helped keep incomes and spending afloat in recent months has expired, threatening the fragile economic rebound.

If we don’t see the $600/week coming back soon, we’re going to see massive knock-off effects.

Another Progressive Upset

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What’s more, he came in 3rd, despite out fundraising all of his opponents.

It’s unlikely that Marquita Bradshaw will win the general, this is Tennessee, after all, but it is clear that status quo Democrats are in a place that is not resonating with the voters.

I think that a lot of this comes down to Bernie Sanders energizing the base.

I don’t think that Sanders will run in 2024, but I would like to see AOC run.

She will be 35 in October of 2024, and so she would be constitutionally qualified:

A political novice, Marquita Bradshaw pulled out a surprising victory on Thursday to secure the Democratic nomination for Tennessee’s U.S. Senate race, paving the way for her to take on Bill Hagerty, the winner of a bitter Republican primary battle.

“The progressive movement is undeniable,” Bradshaw tweeted to her followers. “Thank you all so much for your support and this victory. It’s time to put hardworking people first.”

The Memphis Democrat faced four challengers: Robin Kimbrough, James Mackler, Gary Davis and Mark Pickrell. Bradshaw won the race with 35.5% of the vote. Kimbrough had 26.6% and Mackler had 23.8%. Davis and Pickrell trailed with each winning less than 10% of the vote.

………

Still, Bradshaw beat out a better-known and better-funded challenger. Previously, Mackler ran briefly in 2018 for former U.S. Sen. Bob Corker’s seat until former Gov. Phil Bredesen joined the race. He bowed out and endorsed Bredesen.

This time around, Mackler received Bredesen’s endorsement and had already been running a campaign aimed at the two leading Republican candidates. He had the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

………

Bradshaw is an organizer for and involved with local and statewide efforts of the environmental group Sierra Club. Through those efforts she has focused much of her attention on environmental justice, and how, she said, people of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental policy. It’s something she would focus on in the Senate.

“We started this campaign by listening to voters and taking in empirical data in order to shape policy,” she said. “We included them in that process and we got feedback. Moving forward, we can do this together.”

Since she announced her campaign, Bradshaw raised $8,420, according to her most recent Federal Election Commission filing. Comparatively, Mackler raised $2.1 million to run in the race. In that time, he has spent $1.5 million.

Needless to say, I expect that Bradshaw will be “Ghosted” by the DSCC, because controlling the Democratic caucus in the Senate is more important to Chuck Schumer and his Evil Minions™ than it is to control the Senate.

So Not a Surprise

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We now have a report that Facebook fired an employee after the collected information showing that senior executives interfered with the moderation process to protect right-wing sources.

The worst offender appears to be Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s VP of Global Policy, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, but it’s clear that this has to be done with the explicit support and approval Mark Zuckerberg, given that he is a control freak who has complete control of the company.

This is why Dems need to get serious about antitrust with regard to the tech giants after the election:

After months of debate and disagreement over the handling of inflammatory or misleading posts from Donald Trump, Facebook employees want CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain what the company would do if the leader of the free world uses the social network to undermine the results of the 2020 US presidential election.

………

For the past week, this scenario has been a topic of heated discussion inside Facebook and was a top question for its leader. Some 2,900 employees asked Zuckerberg to address it publicly during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, which he partly did, calling it “an unprecedented position.”

………

While there are signs Facebook will stand up to Trump in cases where he violates its rules — as on Wednesday when it removed a video post from the president in which he claimed that children are “almost immune” to COVID-19 — there are others who suggest the company is caving to critical voices on the right. In another recent Workplace post, a senior engineer collected internal evidence that showed Facebook was giving preferential treatment to prominent conservative accounts to help them remove fact-checks from their content.

The company responded by removing his post and restricting internal access to the information he cited. On Wednesday the engineer was fired, according to internal posts seen by BuzzFeed News.

With heightened internal tensions and morale at a low point, concerns about how the company handles fact-checked content have exploded in an internal Workplace group dedicated to misinformation policy.

Last Friday, at another all-hands meeting, employees asked Zuckerberg how right-wing publication Breitbart News could remain a Facebook News partner after sharing a video that promoted unproven treatments and said masks were unnecessary to combat the novel coronavirus. The video racked up 14 million views in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart’s page, though other accounts continued to share it.

………

But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

………

On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.

“A Breitbart escalation marked ‘urgent: end of day’ was resolved on the same day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart’s page and against their domain cleared without explanation,” the employee wrote.

The same employee said a partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for “priority” escalation by Joel Kaplan, the company’s vice president of global public policy. Kaplan once served in George W. Bush’s administration and drew criticism for publicly supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial nomination to the Supreme Court.

………

Past Facebook employees, including Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former global election ads integrity lead, have expressed concerns with Kaplan’s influence over content enforcement decisions. She previously told BuzzFeed News a member of Kaplan’s Washington policy team attempted to influence ad enforcement decisions for an ad placed by a conservative organization.

Facebook did not respond to questions about why Kaplan would personally intervene in matters like this.

These and other interventions appear to be in violation of Facebook’s official policy, which requires publishers wishing to dispute a fact check rating to contact the Facebook fact-checking partner responsible.

“It appears that policy people have been intervening in fact-checks on behalf of *exclusively* right-wing publishers, to avoid them getting repeat-offender status,” wrote another employee in the company’s internal “misinformation policy” discussion group.

Individuals that spoke out about the apparent special treatment of right-wing pages have also faced consequences. In one case, a senior Facebook engineer collected multiple instances of conservative figures receiving unique help from Facebook employees, including those on the policy team, to remove fact-checks on their content. His July post was removed because it violated the company’s “respectful communication policy.”

………

News of his firing caused some Facebook employees to say that they now fear speaking critically about the company in internal discussions. One person said they were deleting old posts and comments, while another said this was “hardly the first time the respectful workplace guidelines have been used to snipe a prominent critic of company policies/ethics.”

………

In other cases, Facebook itself will quietly remove a fact-check applied by one of its partners. That appears to be what happened with a March 25 post from Diamond and Silk. The duo wrote on Facebook, “How the hell is allocating 25 million dollars in order to give a raise to house members, that don’t give a damn about Americans, going to help stimulate America’s economy? Tell me how? #PutAmericansBackToWorkNow.”

In Mark Zuckerberg’s company, some animals are more equal than others.

Tweet of the Day

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Space exploration is being used by billionaires as a narrative management tool to sell the myth of unlimited expansionism. These guys know ecosystemic collapse is coming at us far faster than their little space dildos can happen but they need the idea of it to keep us at bay.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) August 7, 2020

This is a cynical view of the the oligarchs’ space activities, but there is precedent.

One need only look at all the libraries named after the 19th robber-barons.

Worst Metaphor Ever

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There are any number of reasons to vote for Joe Biden for President.

OK, that is not true. There ara any number of reasons to vote AGAINST Donald Trump.

I honestly cannot think of a reason to vote for Biden beyond, “Have you seen the other guy?”

That being said, describing this decision as the equivalent of break-up sex is just plain wrong for a number of reasons:

  • Making ANYTHING like sex with Joe Biden is not going to motivate anyone, except, perhaps Jill Biden. (Don’t make me quote Jules from Pulp Fiction) 
  • How often do people have breakup sex anyway?  My experience with my partners is that when they want to say goodbye, they don’t exchange bodily fluids.
  • The central thesis of the argument is that, once Trump is defeated, progressives will be given a pass on not supporting Dems in 2 years.  Na ga na happen.  The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will continue to blame every failure on the “left” while treating them like absolute crap.

Please, just stop:

Today I see people whose politics I largely share getting upset about things. Here are Briahna Joy Gray and David Sirota, upset that John Kasich may play a role in the Democratic National Convention. Here is Anand Giridharadas grappling with how to welcome the energy and support of the “Lincoln Project” without ceding power to the very same people who brought us the Iraq War, torture, and predatory mortgages and financial fraud.

The metaphor for how I think that “we” (for a suitably nebulous we) should deal with the 2020 election is “breakup sex”.

Our current relationship with the Democratic Party is intolerable. The people who run the institution do not share our values, at least not in any way that matches the urgency of the catastrophe our world has become. We’ve tried for two Presidential election cycles to reform the party from the inside, using the primary process, and not succeeded, both for reasons fair and foul. Yet the pathology of our first-past-the-post electoral system and the logic of Duverger’s tendency means it would harmful to do the natural thing and form our own political party. Under electoral systems like ours (which it should be among our highest priorities to change) splitting a broad coalition disempowers the entire coalition, handing elections and power to people whose interests and values are so far from our own we would never have been anywhere near a coalition with them. Within the Democratic Party our values are undermined, coopted, sacrificed on the alter of a cynical realism that the well-remunerated realists quietly prefer. If we split from the Democratic Party, we hand power to a coalition that is, at the moment, an unabashedly fascist death cult. Things are tough all over. This is intolerable. We have to find a way out.

I think there is a way out. A fair number of us, described sometimes as “Bernie or bust”, argue that we should withhold our support from the Democratic Party, despite electoral realities, unless they earn our support with candidates and platforms that represent us. Sometimes this is taken a principled stand, to be taken regardless of consequence. But often it is justified in game-theoretical terms: If institutional Democrats know that we are trapped, that we will always hold our noses and vote with them, then we will have no leverage in the party. We have to demonstrate a willingness to accept the short-term risk of spoiling elections in order, over the longer term, to gain bargaining power within the Democratic coalition so that our values and interests actually get represented.

There is a lot to be said for this view, but it is kneecapped when it is put into practice on individualized, atomized terms. Most of us, compelled by the logic of negative partisanship, hold our noses and vote for the “corporate Democrat” who we expect will betray us, but who will probably not murder us like the other guy might. Others vote for Jill Stein or Howie Hawkins, or don’t show up at the polls. The inconsistency dilutes the potential effectiveness of the strategy. If the goal is actually to wield power, our withholding or supplying votes must be a matter of coordinated, collective action rather than individualized expressive choice. We need a union that can credibly threaten to strike, not individuals some of whom rage quit.

So, breakup sex. I think, in this year of our lord 2020, we should actively, enthusiastically, passionately support the Democratic Party and the prototype institutional Democrat who leads its ticket. They always try to convince us that letting the other team win would be the end of the world, but this year the horde of rabid predators is pretty visible while they are crying wolf. As soon as the election has passed, I think we should form a distinct organization that would not be a political party in the sense of participating in our country’s deeply flawed public primary process, but that would, like a political party, sometimes moot its own candidates for public office and help get them placed on ballots (whether as organization representatives or notional independents). Sometimes is an important word in that description. Most of the time, it hopefully would not. The organization would simply endorse the Democratic party candidate, keeping whole the not-Republican coalition. But, if a high (supermajority) threshold of the membership decides that the Democrat would not represent our values effectively, that the risk of spoiling the election is acceptable given whoever the Republican would be and is outweighed by the possibility our better candidate might win, then we would run that candidate and organize on their behalf with energy and unconflicted enthusiasm. Defecting from the Democratic Party, when it makes sense, makes much more sense as a collective rather than individual choice.

No, just no.

It will never be the right time for the  Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to support the left, and there will never be the right time for the left to hold the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to account.

That is just how the game works.

The Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) will never respect the left.  Nor will they respect a progressive agenda.

Still, with the primary defeats of faux Democrats like Eliot Engel, Lacy Clay, and Joseph Crowley, and the threat to corporate Democrat Richard Neal in Massachutts, it is entirely possible that they can come to fear their base, as the Republican Party Establishment does.

This should be the goal.

Today in Evil

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In an attempt coverup reckless disregard for the safety of their students and their staff, administrators at North Paulding High School in Dallas, GA have suspended students who have reported unsafe and dangerous conditions:

At least two North Paulding High School students have been suspended after sharing images of a school hallway jammed with their mostly maskless peers, and the principal has warned other students against doing the same.

North Paulding High School in Dallas, Ga., about an hour’s drive from Atlanta, was thrust into the national spotlight this week when pictures and videos surfaced of its crowded interior on the first and second days of its first week back in session. The images, which showed a sea of teens clustered together with no face coverings, raised concerns among online commenters and parents over how the district is handling reopening schools during the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Facing a fierce online backlash, Paulding County Schools Superintendent Brian Otott told parents and guardians in a letter that the images “didn’t look good.” But he argued that they lacked context about the 2,000-plus student school, where masks are a “personal choice.”

Certainly, posting to social media from school is a no-no, but listen to this message from the principal where he explicitly states that any criticism will be punished:

#Exclusive recording from North #Paulding High telling kids they will be punished for sharing to social media about conditions. Plus new #COVID19 cases in Cherokee County Schools and a football player in Henry County tests positive… details @cbs46 #Atlanta #backtoschool pic.twitter.com/3o9GFGxlIg

— Jamie S Kennedy (@Jamie_S_Kennedy) August 6, 2020

This is illegal retaliation, and the administrators should be frog-marched out of the school in hand cuffs.

I Still Want to Abolish the Patent Court

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Technically, it’s full name is US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and I have little good to say about this institution.

For that matter, neither does the US Supreme Court, which has taken to overruling the C.A.F.C.’s extreme views on IP on an almost routing basis.

But today, I wholeheartedly approve of their ruling stating that the federal judiciary must cease using the PACER document access system as a cash cow for the courts:

The federal judiciary is overcharging for public access to online court records, an appeals court ruled Thursday in a decision that could result in lower fees to search and download case documents.

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said affordable access to public records is critical for oversight and transparency in the nation’s court system.

“If large swaths of the public cannot afford the fees required to access court records, it will diminish the public’s ability ‘to participate in and serve as a check upon the judicial process — an essential component in our structure of self-government,’ ” wrote Judge Todd M. Hughes, who was joined by Judges Alan D. Lourie and Raymond C. Clevenger III.

The ruling does not eliminate the paywall for the service known as PACER, an acronym for Public Access to Court Electronic Records. But the decision upholds a District Court finding that the current 10 cents per page charge is “higher than necessary to operate” the system. The court limited fees to the amount needed to cover the cost of providing access to docket information online.

………

The lawsuit was filed in 2016 by three nonprofit organizations. The National Veterans Legal Services Program, National Consumer Law Center and Alliance for Justice claimed that the dime-per-page fee unlawfully exceeded the cost of running the system. The cost of storing data has declined since the inception of the courts’ electronic repository in the 1980s, while PACER fees have increased.

The administrative office has used the money to pay for projects such as flat-screen TVs for jurors, to send notices to bankruptcy creditors and to fund a study by Mississippi for its own court system.

This is a good decision.
More generally, any time that an enforcement agency derives income directly from its basic operations, it is corrosive to good governance.

I’ll Have What She’s Having

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In Case You Don’t Get the Reference

The New York State Attorney General has has filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA for pervasive corruption and self dealing.

When I heard that news, I reacted like Meg Ryan at the deli:

The chief executive of the National Rifle Association and several top lieutenants engaged in a decades-long pattern of fraud to raid the coffers of the powerful gun rights group for personal gain, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday by the New York attorney general, draining $64 million from the nonprofit in just three years.

 In her lawsuit, Attorney General Letitia James called for the dissolution of the NRA and the removal of CEO Wayne LaPierre from the leadership post he has held for the past 39 years, saying he and others used the group’s funds to finance a luxury lifestyle.

 She also asked a New York court to force LaPierre and three key deputies to repay NRA members for the ill-gotten money and inflated salaries that her investigation found they took.

 ………

The attorney general requested that the court bar the four men — LaPierre, general counsel John Frazer, former treasurer Woody Phillips and former chief of staff Joshua Powell — from ever serving in a leadership position for a New York charity in the future.

………

Her investigation, which began in February 2019, found “a culture of self-dealing, mismanagement, and negligent oversight at the NRA that was illegal, oppressive, and fraudulent,” according to a statement by the attorney general’s office.

………

Meanwhile, D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine announced Thursday that his office filed a separate lawsuit against the NRA Foundation, which is based in Washington. Racine accused the organization of being a puppet of the NRA, despite legal requirements that it independently pursue charitable purposes. Instead, Racine said his office found, the foundation repeatedly lent the NRA money to address its rising deficits.

James said at a news conference Thursday that she is seeking to dissolve the NRA because of the brazenness of the group’s violations of law.

“The corruption was so broad, and because they have basically destroyed all the assets of the NRA,” she said. “Enough was enough. . . . No one is above the law, not even the NRA.”

Her office cited as a precedent its previous action against the Trump Foundation, which led Trump to shut down the charity in 2018 amid allegations he used it for his personal benefit.

The irony here is delicious.

………

The lawsuit also claims LaPierre failed to report large sums of personal income to the IRS. James’s office said it found that the NRA chief funneled personal expenses through an outside public relations firm, allowing him to avoid reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal income.

James said Thursday that she was referring those findings to the IRS. She also said that if her office uncovers criminal activity, it will be referred to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

In response, the NRA said Thursday that it was filing its own federal lawsuit against James, alleging that the attorney general has violated the group’s free-speech rights and has been unfairly targeting the gun rights lobby since she began campaigning for the office.

………

“Thoughts and prayers today to the NRA, which is losing money and political power so quickly that by the end of this case, there might not be anything left to dissolve,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action.

(emphasis mine)

This irony is even more delicious.

Experts in tax law said the deep investigation into the NRA’s finances showed the potential for state officials to vigorously enforce nonprofit rules.

………

The Washington Post and other news organizations subsequently revealed how the NRA directed funds to board members and how LaPierre racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique and on foreign travel.

………

A central fraud embedded in NRA finances, James’s suit claims, was a secret agreement to pass questionable expenses through its Oklahoma-based advertising agency, Ackerman McQueen.

………

A very large portion of those hidden expenses were for personal trips and expenses for LaPierre, the New York suit contends. In a deposition in a separate lawsuit last year, LaPierre acknowledged he did not report any of the NRA-paid expenses as personal income to the IRS and claimed they were business expenses.

………

The partnership between the NRA and the public relations firm began to crack after James, then a candidate for New York attorney general, announced in summer 2018 that she planned to launch an investigation into the NRA if she won. LaPierre hired a new law firm, led by then-Ackerman McQueen chief executive Angus McQueen’s estranged son-in-law. That attorney, Bill Brewer, urged that the NRA to audit Ackerman McQueen’s bills in preparation for James’s probe.

I’m hoping that Wayne LaPierre ends up destitute and in prison.

Holy Sh%$.

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There has been a huge explosion in the port of Beruit, apparently from a stock-pile over 2000 tons of ammonium nitrate left by a decrepit and bankrupt Russian freighter many years ago:

Two huge explosions have rocked Beirut, killing at least 78 people, injuring thousands more, and sending an enormous blast wave across the city that shattered windows, knocked down doors and shook buildings.

Lebanon’s prime minister, Hassan Diab, said the main blast at Beirut’s port was caused when an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate had been ignited. He said the chemical had been left unsecured for six years in a warehouse, and vowed to punish those responsible.

As the death toll climbed on the discovery of more bodies in the wreckage, at least 4,000 were reported injured. Hundreds of homes were left uninhabitable by the blast which also destroyed huge grain silos, a devastating blow to a country where bread was already scarce and which is dependent on imports by sea.

This is an explosion measured in kilotons, and as shown below, you can see a large hemispherical shockwave that looks like something out an old nuclear weapon tests from the 1950s.

It is stunning.

Another angle of the explosion

Headline of the Day

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Great Touring Bike Deals Coming To An Estate Sale Near You, Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Hopes To Welcome 250,000

—Jalopnik

There are going to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Covid-19 infections directly from this get-together, and then everyone will drive home, carrying it back to their communities.

If you are looking for a cheap Harley, you may want to wait a few weeks.

H/t DC at the Steller Parthenon BBS.

I Missed an Important Internet Anniversary

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exactly one year ago today twitter changed forever pic.twitter.com/ncx2b2YZrO

— mork (@karlmorx) August 4, 2020

Where you were when this guy’s kids were menaced by a sounder (Yes, that is the word) of feral pigs?

I will note that unlike many f%$# ups on Twitter, this did not destroy this guy’s life.

He’s still on Twitter, and Willie McNabb has actually pinned this tweet, so apart from a lot of mocking, there was no harm done.

It’s nice when there is a Twitter sh%$-storm, and no one loses their job or is subject to death threats.

As Zathras Would Say, “At Least There is Symmetry.”

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There was a court hearing for the Florida teen who allegedly hacked dozens of celerity Twitter accounts today, and someone posted porn clips to the Zoom meeting.

Needless to say, this is now in my list as a perfect moment in the history of hacking:


Clearly, Mr. Clark has no F%$#s left to give

Perhaps fittingly, a Web-streamed court hearing for the 17-year-old alleged mastermind of the July 15 mass hack against Twitter was cut short this morning after mischief makers injected a pornographic video clip into the proceeding.

 The incident occurred at a bond hearing held via the videoconferencing service Zoom by the Hillsborough County, Fla. criminal court in the case of Graham Clark. The 17-year-old from Tampa was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of social engineering his way into Twitter’s internal computer systems and tweeting out a bitcoin scam through the accounts of high-profile Twitter users.

………

Notice of the hearing was available via public records filed with the Florida state attorney’s office. The notice specified the Zoom meeting time and ID number, essentially allowing anyone to participate in the proceeding.


All worth it for Florida DA Andrew Warren’s reaction

Even before the hearing officially began it was clear that the event would likely be “zoom bombed.” That’s because while participants were muted by default, they were free to unmute their microphones and transmit their own video streams to the channel.

………

What transpired a minute later was almost inevitable given the permissive settings of this particular Zoom conference call: Someone streamed a graphic video clip from Pornhub for approximately 15 seconds before Judge Nash abruptly terminated the broadcast.

I am very amused by this.

So say we all.

It’s Primary Night

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Actually primary morning, because I was (and still am) waiting for some results.

Despite a significant amount of Democratic Party money, Kris Kobach lost the Republican Party primary for Senate.

Dems figured that Kobach would be the weaker candidate, because his immigration hysteria based snake oil show has clearly passed its “Sell by date”, as evidenced by his continuous failures both as Kansas Secretary of State and as a part of Trump’s voting commision.

The Justice Democrats racked up another scalp as Cori Bush upset incumbent Lacy Clay.

That seat had been in the Clay family since his dad first won the seat in 1968.

Finally, in the race for the House in MI-14, Rashida Tlaib, one of the 4 members of the, “Squad,” is leading by a roughly 2:1 margin but only about  15% of precincts have reported, so it’s still up in the air.

(Update)

It’s been called, and Tlaib walked away with it.

Gee, You Think?

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There was a massive surge in stock trading just before Kodak announced a massive federal loan to make medical reagents for the pandemic.

Elizabeth Warren has noticed this as well:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate potential insider trading surrounding Eastman Kodak’s recent announcement that it would receive a $765 million government loan to start producing the chemical ingredients needed to make pharmaceuticals.

The day before the loan was announced, more than 1 million shares of Kodak’s stock traded hands compared with a daily average of 236,479 over the past year, Warren (D-Mass.) said in a letter to SEC Chair Jay Clayton. The company’s stock price rose about 20 percent that day, July 27, and increased more than 200 percent the next day, July 28, when the loan was announced.

Warren also noted that shortly before the announcement, James Continenza, Kodak’s executive chairman, purchased about 46,700 shares. The purchase “while the company was involved in secret negotiations with the government over a lucrative contract raises questions about whether these executives potentially made investment decisions based on material, non-public information derived from their positions,” Warren said.

………

The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that the SEC had opened an investigation of the circumstances surrounding the announcement of Kodak’s loan.

The SEC declined to comment on Warren’s letter and the WSJ report of an investigation.

While there are indications that Kodak insiders were involved, but my money is on Trump administration officials being involved in this as well, because corruption about the only thing that Trump and Evil Minions™ do at all well.

Linkage

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The Karen Meme Channel on Youtube.  Yet another sign that our society is in decline. Cannot watch more than about 15 seconds of any of these:

I Guess That These Gladiators Are Not So Eager to Die

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Derek Jeter founded The Players Tribune in 2014 to give athletes a forum to write about issues important to them. It’s where basketball player Elena Delle Donne disclosed her struggle with Lyme disease; where volleyballer Merete Lutz discussed what it was like to be in South Korea during the pandemic; and where numerous Black athletes have published their reflections on #BlackLivesMatter.

On Sunday, it served as the sports equivalent of Martin Luther’s church door. A group of college football players from the Pac-12 Conference, which includes schools such as Stanford, Washington and Oregon, posted a series of extraordinary demands that they said would have to be met or they would boycott the coming season.

The proximate cause for this potential work stoppage — and yes, that’s what it would be, a work stoppage — is the pandemic. Even though the virus continues to surge in much of the country — and many universities have become fearful about opening their campuses to students in the fall — the power conferences still seem intent on having a football season. There is simply too much money at stake to pull the plug. At all the top football schools, players have been on campus for weeks now, participating in “voluntary” workouts.

………

And the Pac-12 players, empowered by #BlackLivesMatter and handed tremendous leverage thanks to Covid-19, concluded that they would never have a better opportunity to force the system to change.

After a preamble that lays out all the ways they are exploited (“Because immoral rules would punish us for receiving basic necessities and compensation …”), they list a series of ambitious demands, only a few of which have to do with Covid-19 prevention measures. They call for coaches and administrators in the Pac-12 to reduce their “excessive pay” and for schools to restore the nonrevenue sports that have been cut because of the pandemic. They want the conference to set aside 2% of its revenue, which “would be directed by players to support financial aid for low-income Black students, community initiatives, and development programs for college athletes on each campus.”

There have been hundreds of players who have come down with Coronavirus, and the college’s response is to force them to sign liability waivers.

If there is a more corrupt organization in the United States than the NCAA, I haven’t seen it yet.

Stock Options Don’t Exercise Themselves

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Despite profits cratering like a Boeing 737 MAX with an Indonesian pilot, the captains of industry in the United States are continuing their stock buy-backs unabated.

This is not about preserving shareholder value, this is about keeping those executives stock options above water.  It is corrupt, and arguably fraud:

Corporate America is finding it hard to kick the share buyback habit, even after the US slipped into its worst recession in decades.

Total buybacks are expected to drop this year as the downturn caused by coronavirus saps corporate profits, prompting many US blue-chips to suspend or cut back share repurchases. Yet companies in the S&P 500 that have reported second-quarter earnings so far have reduced the number of their outstanding shares by an average of 0.3 per cent from the previous quarter, according to calculations from Credit Suisse.

Updates showed that some of the largest US multinationals continued to buy back their own stock or even accelerated stock repurchases.

………

David Lebovitz, global market strategist for JPMorgan Asset Management, noted that the buybacks were “not happening everywhere”, but were “driven by specific sectors and stocks”. He added that financial and materials companies were potentially more willing to engage in buybacks through the downturn, because their stocks have not advanced as much as companies in other sectors since the lows in March.

Mr. Lebovitz is lying, and he knows it.

This is about executives boosting their own bottom line, not the company’s.