July 2012 archive

TECHNOLOGY & ITS DISCONTENTS

   A Japanese man who claims he’s being defamed by Google’s autocomplete function filed suit against the US-based tech giant in Tokyo. The suit says that entering the man’s name into a search bar leads to a display of candidate words “evoking criminal acts.”

   A Tokyo man who’s upset at DoCoMo’s decision to end its mova 2G service was arrested for placing 964 phonecalls to one of the carrier’s shops in Chiyoda-ku between December and February. The man also visited the store, “yelling angrily and begging for continuation of the service.”

   A huge dock that was set loose by the March 11 tsunami washed up on the coast of Oregon-along with “hundreds of millions of individual organisms, including a tiny species of crab, a species of algae, and a little starfish, all native to Japan.” US scientists are describing the potentially invasive species as a “very clear threat.”

   Proving that a fondness for bureaucratic regulation runs deep in Japanese culture, archaeologists in Fukuoka unearthed strips of wood dating from the 7th century that are believed to be the earliest known evidence of a family registry system.

Welcome to the Stars Hollow Health and Fitness News weekly diary. It will publish on Saturday afternoon and be open for discussion about health related issues including diet, exercise, health and health care issues, as well as, tips on what you can do when there is a medical emergency. Also an opportunity to share and exchange your favorite healthy recipes.

Questions are encouraged and I will answer to the best of my ability. If I can’t, I will try to steer you in the right direction. Naturally, I cannot give individual medical advice for personal health issues. I can give you information about medical conditions and the current treatments available.

You can now find past Health and Fitness News diaries here and on the right hand side of the Front Page.

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I’ve learned a lot about making sorbets from Jacquy Pfeiffer, the founder and dean of student affairs at the French Pastry School in Chicago. He taught me to use a small amount of corn syrup – about 5 percent of the weight of the fruit – to prevent the sorbet from developing ice crystals. A very small amount of honey will also work. I asked him what the least sugar I could get away with is, and he said it depends on the fruit, but as a general rule he uses 15 to 20 percent sugar. I decided to factor the corn syrup and honey into that weight, and my sorbets were beautiful, with great texture.

If you want to use less sugar, the solution for frozen fruit ices would be to make granitas, which by definition have ice crystals. When you make a granita, you freeze the blended fruit mixture in a pan, scraping it with a fork at 30-minute intervals as ice crystals begin to develop around the edges, until it is all frozen but not in a solid block. Any of this week’s recipes can be made as granitas with less sugar.

~Marthe Rose Shulman~

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

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Ezra Klein: 14 reasons why this is the worst Congress ever

This week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. On its own, such a vote would be unremarkable. Republicans control the House, they oppose President Obama’s health reform law, and so they voted to get rid of it.

But here’s the punchline: This was the 33rd time they voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Holding that vote once makes sense. Republicans had promised that much during the 2010 campaign. But 33 times? If doing the same thing twice and expecting a different result makes you insane, what does doing the same thing 33 times and expecting a different result make you?

Well, it makes you the 112th Congress.

Hating on Congress is a beloved American tradition. Hence Mark Twain’s old joke, “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” But the 112th Congress is no ordinary congress. It’s a very bad, no good, terrible Congress. It is, in fact, one of the very worst congresses we have ever had. Here, I’ll prove it: [..]

New York Times Editorial: What They Knew

As the Barclays rate-rigging scandal threatens to engulf other big banks, politicians in Washington and London are asking whether regulators allowed years of manipulation of benchmark interest rates that are tied to trillions of dollars of loans and other transactions worldwide. The answer is hiding in plain sight.

The rate-rigging settlement last month between Barclays and the Department of Justice includes a litany of findings that each side agrees are “true and accurate.” The document says that, in late 2007 and in 2008, Barclays employees raised concerns with the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other officials that Barclays and the other banks involved in setting the key London interbank offered rate, or Libor, were reporting rates that “were too low” and did not accurately reflect the market. It also said that Barclays told regulators it wanted to report “honest rates” and would if other banks did, too.

How did the regulators respond? According to the settlement, the communications from Barclays “were not intended and were not understood as disclosures through which Barclays self-reported misconduct to authorities.”

(an annual tradition)

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

Click on images to enlarge

July 14 is the 195th day of the year (196th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 170 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1790, the citizens of Paris celebrate the constitutional monarchy and national reconciliation in the Fête de la Fédération.

The Fête de la Fédération of the 14 July 1790 was a huge feast and official event to celebrate the establishment of the short-lived constitutional monarchy in France and what people of the time considered to be the happy conclusion of the French Revolution, the outcome hoped for by the monarchiens.

The Fête de la Fédération in Paris was the most prominent event of a series of spontaneous celebrations all over France: from August 1789, Fédérations appeared in towns and countryside; on 5 June 1790, with lots of individual feasts to celebrate the new state of France, a constitutional monarchy. The National Assembly approved the suggestion by the Commune de Paris to organise a “general Federation”. Organised late, it was largely an improvisation. The idea was not to contest the legitimacy of the king Louis XVI, but to show the general will for stable institutions and a national reconciliation and unity. In the words of Jean Sylvain Bailly, astronomer and mayor of Paris: “We suggest that this meeting (…) be sworn on the next 14 July, which we shall all see as the time of liberty: this day shall be spent swearing to uphold and defend it”. Charon, President of the Commune of Paris, stated: “French, we are free! French, we are brothers!”.

The event took place on the Champ de Mars, which was at the time far outside Paris. The place had been transformed on a voluntary basis by the population of Paris itself, in what was recalled as the Journée des brouettes (“Wheelbarrow Day”).

Official Celebration

The feast began as early as four in the morning, under a strong rain which would last the whole day (the Journal de Paris had predicted “frequent downpours”).

14 000 Federated (Fédérés) came from the province, every single National Guard unit having sent two men out of every hundred. They were ranged according to their département under 83 banners. They were brought to the place were the Bastille once stood, and went through Saint-Antoine, Saint-Denis and Saint-Honoré streets before crossing the temporary bridge and arriving at the Champ de Mars. Deputies from other nations, “Swedes, Spaniards, Polacks, Turks, Chaldeans, Greeks, and dwellers in Mesopotamia,” representatives of the human race, “with three hundred drummers, twelve hundred wind-musicians, and artillery planted on height after height to boom the tidings all over France, the highest recorded triumph of the Thespian art.”

A mass was celebrated by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, bishop of Autun under the Ancien Régime. The very popular General marquis de La Fayette, as both captain of the National Guard of Paris and confident of the king, took his oath to the Constitution:

” We swear forever to be faithful to the Nation, to the Law and to the King, to uphold with all our might the Constitution as decided by the National Assembly and accepted by the King, and to protect according to the laws the safety of people and properties, transit of grains and food within the kingdom, the public contributions under whatever forms they might exist, and to stay united with all the French with the indestructible bounds of brotherhood[ ”

It is noticeable that at this time, the French Constitution of 1791 was not yet written; it would only take effect in September 1791. La Fayette was followed by the President of the National Assembly. Eventually, Louis XVI took his oath

” I, King of the French, I swear to use the power given to me by the constitutional law of the State, to maintain the Constitution as decided by the National Assembly and accepted by myself, and to enforce the laws. ”

The style “King of the French”, used for the first time instead of “King of France (and Navarre)”, was an innovation intended to inaugurate a “popular monarchy” which linked the monarch’s title to the people, not to the territory of France.

The Queen rose and showed the Dauphin, future Louis XVII, saying :

” This is my son, who, like me, joins in the same sentiments.[5] ”

With the permission of the National Assembly, a delegation of the United States of America, led by John Paul Jones, founder of the US Navy, joined the feast. It also included Thomas Paine, James Swan, Georges Howell, Benjamin Jarvis, Samuel Blackden, Joel Barlow and William Henry Vernon. The delegation arrived at the Champ de Mars with its flag, the first instance ever of a US flag flown outside of the USA, and was cheered by the people.

Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux / Le Cap d’Agde (135 miles)

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Oh I’m sure it looked exciting with the 5 rider break away and the 4th British stage winner and all, but it was much less than it seemed and the last Mountain stage before the Pyrenees.

This is a Sprinter’s stage, a hot, flat, humid ride by the Med punctuated by an Award point and a category 3 climb at the end.  I can’t see that it will change much anymore than yesterday’s results did.

Today is Bastile Day, a traditional time for French riders to try and make some noise.

General Classification

Coverage is customarily on Vs. (NBC Sports) starting at 8 am with repeats at noon, 2:30 pm, 8 pm, and midnight.  There will be some streaming evidently, but not all of it is free.

Sites of Interest-

• 2012 Le Tour
• Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux / Le Cap d’Agde (135 miles)
• Wikipedia
• Geek Guide (very basic)
• Guardian Interactive Guide

The Stars Hollow Gazette Tags-

• Le Tour
• 2010 Le Tour
• 2011 Le Tour
• 2012 Le Tour

I am not quite ready to start another long series about music just yet, but probably will begin next week.  Due to popular request, Jethro Tull will be the focus when we do get started on that.  I promised something lighter than last week, so here are a few random thoughts about my likes and dislikes in popular culture, past and present.

First of all, today is Friday the 13th.  I am not superstitious, but many folks are.  Not as many as in the past, but still many are.  Interestingly, friggatriskaidekaphobia is of quite recent origin, not being much noticed until late in the 19th century.  Reasons to be afraid of this combination of date and day are quite nonscientific.

Friday has been considered an unlucky day for a long time.  The reasons for this are unclear, but Chaucer mentioned it in the 14th century.  Twelve has always been considered a “good” number (we still use dozens, have twelve hours for each half of the day, and many other examples) and 13 is thus imperfect, and a prime number as well.  One popular idea is that because of Judas, 13 (including Christ) at a table is bad luck.  A similar idea also appears in Norse mythology.  Actually, the numbers 2 and 8 have a more scientific basis for being “good”, since they describe the number of electrons required to acquire the noble gas configuration in the elements.  In any event, I consider any Friday the 13th just another day.

If it weren’t Friday the Thirteenth, you’d think it was April’s Fool. It’s all the usual excuses by the CEO’s and the TBTF banks, “we are just finding it was this bad”

JPMorgan Fears Traders Obscured Losses in First Quarter

JPMorgan Chase, which reported its second-quarter results on Friday, disclosed that the losses on a soured credit bet could mount to more than $7 billion, as the nation’s largest bank indicated that traders may have intentionally tried to conceal the extent of the red ink on the disastrous position. [..]

If the trades, made out of the powerful chief investment office unit in London, had been properly valued, the bank said it would have lost $1.4 billion on the position in the first quarter.

Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive who has consistently reassured investors that the losses would be contained, announced that the bank lost $4.4 billion on the botched trade in the second quarter. So far this year, the bank says it has lost $5.8 billion on the trades in credit derivatives.  [..]

Since announcing the multibillion-dollar mistake, JPMorgan has lost $25 billion in market value.

Jamie Dimon finally admitting what we already knew but still not admitting that the real losses for the bank is closer to $30 billion. He is either the most incompetent CEO or he thinks that we’re all stupid to realize he knew about tis all along.

or  “but Timmy wrote a memo”

Barclays Informed New York Fed of Problems With Libor in 2007

A Barclays employee notified the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April of 2008 that the firm was underestimating its borrowing costs, following potential warning signs as early as 2007 that other banks were undermining the integrity of a key interest rate.

In 2008, the employee said that the move was prompted by a desire to “fit in with the rest of the crowd” and added, “we know that we’re not posting um, an honest Libor,” according to documents that the agency released on Friday. The Barclays employee said that he believed such practices were widespread among major banks.

In response, the New York Fed began examining the matter and passed their findings to other financial authorities, according to the documents.

But the agency’s actions came too late and failed to thwart the illegal activities. By the time of the April 2008 conversation, the British firm had been trying to manipulate the interest rate for three years. And the practice persisted at Barclays for about a year after the briefing with the New York Fed.

Friday’s revelations shed new light on regulators’ role in the rate manipulation scandal. The documents also raise concerns about why authorities did not act sooner to thwart the rate-rigging.

The perp’s figured they were too big to indict and the Justice Department agreed.

In Barclays Inquiry, the Calculation in Making a Deal

The question needs to be faced in the wake of the bank’s admitted efforts to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, known as Libor, the benchmark for countless interest rate determinations and approximately $450 trillion in derivative contracts.

If the Justice Department was looking for a textbook case of white-collar financial crime – including a conspiracy that was flourishing at the height of the financial crisis – this would seem tailor-made. As the facts released by the government make clear, there were two separate but overlapping schemes to manipulate Libor within Barclays. Yet the bank secured a nonprosecution agreement and agreed to pay a penalty of more than $450 million, a comparatively paltry sum for a bank that had more than £32 billion ($50 billion) in revenue in 2011. “The perception so far has been that the regulators have been toothless,” John C. Coffee Jr., professor of law and specialist in white-collar crime at Columbia Law School, told me this week. [..]

(The criminal division said its agreement with Barclays was reached in conjunction with the antitrust division.)

And this is why Richard Diamond and Jamie Dimon have nothing to worry about and the world is still being screwed.

Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force is the umbrella group for the RMBS (Residential Mortgage-Backed Security) Task Force. Remember that task force that was so gleefully announced by President Obama in his State of the Union address in January, appointing New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to participate? Yeah, that one. It’s been under the radar for the most part and as yet has inadequate staff no office space or even a phone number.

The gang at FireDogLake has been relentless in tracking down what he FFETF and the RMBS have and haven’t done. My FDL contributor massacio has been a wizard at uncovering new releases that claim the groups are making progress when in reality the Obama DOJ is refusing to go after the big fish:

Like every one else who is following the refusal of the Obama Administration and its cowardly prosecutors to investigate Wall Street for crimes in the run-up to the Great Crash, I figured this was just a name given to a collection of prosecutors around the country who were already working on fraud cases.

The official website of the FFETF confirms this. [..]

I’ve gone back through February looking at the press releases, and this is a fair sample of the work of the FFETF. There is not a single case related to fraud in the creation, sale or operation of real estate mortgage-backed securities, the frauds that led to the Great Crash. The FFETF is a random collection of people working on cases that can be tied to financial fraud.

The FFETF and its 20 subpoenas and its 50 or more personnel and whatever else we hear from them are a sham. Wall Street has nothing to fear from the FFETF and its co-chair, Eric Schneiderman.

Richard (RJ) Eskow points out that Wall St. has nothing to fear from these task forces or for that matter from Attorney General Eric Holder:

Confidential sources say that the President’s much-touted Mortgage Fraud Task Force is being starved for vital resources by the Holder Justice Department. Political insiders are fearful that this obstruction will threaten Democrats’ chances at the polls. Investigators and prosecutors from other agencies are expressing their frustration as the ever-rowing list of documented crimes by individual Wall Street bankers continues to be ignored. [..]

A growing number of people are privately expressing concern at the Justice Department’s long-standing pattern of inactivity, obfuscation, and obstruction. Mr. Holder’s past as a highly-paid lawyer for a top Wall Street firm, Covington and Burling, is being discussed more openly among insiders. Covington & Burling was the law firm which devised the MERS shell corporation which has since been implicated in many cases of mortgage and foreclosure fraud. [..]

But there’s no evidence that Mr. Holder’s Justice Department has mounted a serious effort to investigate bank crime. Its first, much-touted “coordinated effort” to crack down on mortgage fraud turned out to be a PR trick, not a law enforcement effort, which the Columbia Journalism Review described with the headline, “The Obama Administration’s Financial-Fraud Stunt Backfires.” That’s not the kind of press a President wants to see repeated in an election year.

“Democrats have been having good luck painting Romney as the candidate of the one percent,” said one observer. “But that could change quickly with a few bad headlines.”

While nobody we spoke with was willing to raise the subject of a Holder resignation, they did insist that time was running out for the Attorney General to show concrete results.

Without criminal investigations and indictments, bankers will continue to commit crimes. The LIBOR scandal, which implicates a number of leading banks, proves that. The Justice Department’s inaction is putting the world economy at risk by allowing bankers to continue their reckless and illegal behavior.

The clock is ticking on many of these case since there is a five year statute of limitations under federal law for civil charges. There is now mounting evidence that Obama administration is letting that statute of limitations expire on the criminal charges, too. David Dayen at FDL News reports that he spoke with Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, concerning the Justice Department stonewalling prosecutions of securitization abuses. He asked Miller about the coalition of housing advocates charging the Justice Department with stonewalling the investigation and denying it critical resources:

Miller, who at one point was a potential choice to be the executive director of the working group, said that he had not personally spoken with anyone involved in the task force since he missed out on the position in late February/early March. But as an interested observer, he made a few points. “It does appear that the task force is really not doing anything that the various agencies weren’t doing already,” Miller said. “They’re just saying they are doing it as part of this task force.”

And Miller added something else, that members of the various agencies associated with the working group have acknowledged this in conversations with members of Congress. Miller cautioned that he hadn’t heard this from agency officials personally, but that other members have. [..]

Miller also noted that the statutes of limitations, at least on criminal fraud claims, have almost certainly run out. “I said a few weeks ago that the clock on the statute of limitations was ticking like Marisa Tomei’s biological clock in My Cousin Vinny,” Miller said. “If there have not been extensions worked out in private negotiations, and if the law is that the statute runs from occurrence rather than discovery, it’s probably the case that most statutes have expired.”

And unless we forget our erstwhile Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, maybe up to his ears in the multi-trillion dollar LIBOR fraud:

The flames of the Libor scandal have been creeping up under the feet of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Evidence showed that the New York Fed found out about the rate-rigging from Barclays and other banks in 2007, when Geithner was still the bank President. This appeared to display regulatory impotence in the face of massive fraud. Geithner had to respond. And he did with a classic version of CYA. [..]

Geithner passed the documents around to anyone who wanted them last night. If there can be something less than the bare minimum, a two-page document to the Bank of England – not the banks implicated in the rate-rigging over which the NY Fed has control, but some other regulator – would be it. He didn’t speak out publicly, he didn’t use his regulatory power over the banks he had authority and in defense of the stateside financial products calculated using the Libor benchmark rate, he just wrote a memo.

The memo says that the Bank of England should “eliminate the incentive to misreport” Libor on the part of the banks. So there’s no doubt in the minds of the regulators that there was misreporting going on.

Timmy’s excuse for doing nothing now is that he did nothing then

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will release on Friday documents showing it took “prompt action” four years ago to highlight problems with the benchmark interest rate known as Libor and to press for reform, an official at the regional U.S. central bank said on Wednesday.

As early as 2007, the New York Fed may have discussed problems with the setting of the London Interbank Offered Rate with Barclays Plc, the British bank currently at the center of the Libor scandal and investigation

Well, Timmy did send a memo.

Let’s Talk Turkey About Greece

Ian Welsh

2012 May 26

• Start gun-running and other black market activities up.  European gun-running currently goes through Albania.  Greece has much better ports.  If the Euros don’t like it, they can militarize Greece’s borders at a cost much higher than feeding the Greeks.
• Become a full on black-hole for banking.  If anyone wants to store money in Greece, they can.  No questions asked, no forms needed.
• Make deals with other “pariah” and semi-pariah nations.  Start with Iran and Russia for oil (Iran will be happy to give oil in exchange for black market help).  Make a deal with various 2nd world nations for food, start with Argentina, they have no reason to love the IMF or the European Union, which promised to “punish” them for nationalizing oil in Argentina.  In exchange Greece can offer use of their fleet, for cheap, and port rights for the Russian navy.  They’ve wanted a true warm water port for some time.  Offer them a nice island in the Med with a 30 year lease.

Europe’s Downturn Creates Unlikely Smugglers

By STEPHEN CASTLE and DOREEN CARVAJAL, The New York Times

Published: July 11, 2012

For years, law enforcement officers and smugglers have played cat and mouse in Europe, where contraband cigarettes are stashed in everything from furniture shipments to loads of Christmas trees. But Europe’s four-year-old economic crisis is expanding the black market for cigarettes, robbing European Union nations of valuable revenue and drawing in a new class of smugglers.

…

Hard facts about this smuggling trade are found in the lowliest places: the garbage. In annual surveys, financed by cigarette companies, researchers fan out to major cities in 27 European nations and collect crumpled cigarette packs. In turn those packs are analyzed by laboratories to determine how many are bought across the counter and how many are counterfeit. Some boxes are so meticulously produced in China, Dubai or Eastern Europe that they contain bogus tax stamps for different nations.

The latest results of the garbage scavenging showed the black market competition had increased to record levels. In Spain, illicit sales last year soared 300 percent to more than 4.6 billion cigarettes. In the struggling region of Andalusia, they showed, contraband cigarettes commanded 20 percent of the market.

In Ireland, smugglers are robust competitors with legal cigarette companies, reaching more than 17 percent. Over all, black market cigarettes continued a steady climb for the fifth straight year, topping 10 percent of consumption or 65 billion cigarettes, according to the annual report issued in June by KPMG for Philip Morris International.

…

“A lot of people perceive this as a ‘Robin Hood’ type of fraud and that the ordinary person in the street, who has a lot less money these days, is gaining the benefit,” said Austin Rowan, head of the unit responsible for cigarette smuggling at OLAF, the European Union’s Anti-Fraud Office. “But this trade is financing organizations that are involved in other activities including drugs smuggling.”