We were told that Federal Felony Guilty Pleas represented some kind of penalties for JPMorgan and CitiBank engaging in conspiring to illegally manipulate the London Inter Bank Exchange Rate (LIBOR), a benchmark “which underpins over $300 Trillion worth of loans worldwide.” (by comparison Worldwide Annual GDP, every country all put together, is a mere $77 to $106 Trillion).

Well, that was a lie told by the Obama Administration and their Wall St. captive Justice Department.

Obama Administration Finds New Way to Let Criminal Banks Avoid Consequences

David Dayen, The Intercept

Jul. 15 2015, 12:35pm

Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.

HUD’s action is the latest in a series of steps by federal agencies to eliminate real-world consequences for serial financial felons, even as the Obama administration has touted its efforts to hold banks accountable.

In this sense, the guilty plea has become as meaningless to banks as their other ways of resolving criminal charges: out-of-court settlements, or deferred prosecution agreements.

…

On May 20 of this year, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both entered a guilty plea on one felony count of conspiring to rig foreign currency exchange trades, the largest market on the globe.

Five days earlier, on May 15, HUD slipped a notice into the Federal Register, seeking to alter its standard loan-level certification form, known as HUD-92900-A. This form must be filled out for lenders to receive FHA insurance, which reimburses them if the homeowner falls into foreclosure.

On the current HUD-92900-A form, lenders must certify that their firm and its principals “have not, within a three-year period … been convicted of or had a civil judgment rendered against them” for a variety of crimes, including “commission of fraud … violation of Federal or State antitrust statutes or commission of embezzlement, theft, forgery, bribery, falsification or destruction of records, making false statements or receiving stolen property.”

JPMorgan and Citi’s guilty plea would fall under the antitrust statute, and according to Brown, Warren and Waters’ reading of the certification, that would make them ineligible to obtain FHA insurance on their loans.

On the updated form, this language has been excised. The notice in the Federal Register did not even mention the removal, making it impossible to discover without comparing the old form and the proposed form side by side.

…

While many industry observers believe banks should not be punished in one area of their business for the sins in another area, the threat of such consequences could act as an effective deterrent for the parent company to follow the law across its business lines. But if these consequences are habitually waived, the deterrent value becomes irrelevant. The industry has also warned of reduced access to credit if large FHA lenders like JPMorgan Chase and Citi were barred, a perennial objection any time profits are threatened.

“HUD may have good reasons for proposing these changes at this time,” write Brown, Warren and Waters, but “but its Federal Register notice fails to even describe the changes to the certifications on illegal conduct – let alone offer a rationale for them.”

European Neoliberals Crushed the Leftist Party in Greece

By Ed Walker (masaccio), emptywheel

Published July 16, 2015

Wolfgang Schauble, the German Finance Minister, took the position that the previous government had agreed to the austerity program, and the Greeks were stuck with it. When Varoufakis asked if debtor countries should just dispense with elections, Schauble was silent, which Varoufakis interprets to mean it would be great if that could be done. Then came the referendum, a smashing win for rejecting the austerity demands of the Troika. Varoufakis says he had a plan ready to get ready to exit the Euro, but Tsipras rejected it, and moved to capitulation.

So from this we can conclude that what we thought about Europe is true: it is a purely neoliberal state, one in which creditors cannot suffer losses. Either the debtor pays or the taxpayers pay, but the creditors do not lose money. And, of course, by taxpayers, I mean the working class and any remaining middle class. The elites use their control over governments to make sure they don’t pay.

…

The interview with Kouvelakis makes it clear that this was purposeful. He tells us how it looked from the standpoint of the Left Platform, the leftist element of Syriza. He thinks that in June it became clear that the Troika was not negotiating in good faith, and were out to humiliate the people of Greece. Tsipras used the referendum to get himself out of the negotiating trap. He expected the referendum to win, not, as it did, to lose. The decisive factor was the decision by the ECB to force closure of Greek banks, which panicked people.

…

In this Kouvelakis agrees with Varoufakis. He also agrees that their approach was logical and lucid, to use his words. The weakness was their belief in Left Europeanism. Tsipras and Varoufakis both thought that this was a negotiation between partners in the European project.

…

Kouvelakis tells us that this was a class vote. The working class supported the no vote, and the wealthy supported the yes side. The age group 18-24 voted no overwhelmingly. These groups see the EU as hostile, and they are anti-European. They were betrayed by the people they elected.

Kouvelakis says that the yes supporters, the old guard in Greek politics, collapsed in the wake of the loss. But then Tsipras revived them with his call for a council of political leaders. These people decided to treat the referendum as a vote to continue negotiations, even for capitulation. Kouvelakis feels betrayed by this reversal. After a discussion of internal Greek procedures, Kouvelakis says that the Left Platform will leave Syriza, and that the rightist wing and the rest of the group will more or less unite with those rejected parties to form a party of national unity.

That’s so depressing it’s hard to write. One of the EU demands was replacement of the elected government of Greece. It is a direct rejection of democracy. The EU refuses to work with anyone outside the neoliberal consensus, meaning leftist parties. Syriza was never a revolutionary leftist party, more of a highly reform oriented leftist group, and that’s how Kouvelakis sees the Left Platform. So, by removing the Left Platform, Syriza is now nothing more than the Third Way Democrats: economic destruction of human beings with a nice smile. Large groups of Greeks were willing to do battle with the neoliberals, but they were betrayed, and their misery will go on indefinitely. The destruction of human lives is just the way things are in neoliberal lands.

A Fury Rising as Greek Parliament Votes to Accept Eurozone Agreement

Protests Erupt in Athens As Greece Approves Eurozone Bailout

Protests Erupt Outside of Greek Parliament as It Approves Harsh Austerity Measures in Bailout Deal

Betting on the New York Ferris Wheel to Elevate Staten Island’s Fortunes

By PATRICK McGEEHAN, The New York Times

JULY 8, 2015

With so many moving parts, the wheel’s planners still face many hurdles. But Rich Marin, president and chief executive of the New York Wheel, said financing is not one of them.

His company is close to raising the full $500 million it will need to build the wheel along with a terminal building and parking garage, he said. Nearly one-third of that sum, $150 million, has been collected from 300 Chinese families that invested with the hope of receiving visas that would allow them to live in the United States.

Mr. Marin, who worked on Wall Street for years, said that the wheel “might not have been built” without the Chinese investors, and that their enthusiasm was a “very strong indicator” of the project’s viability. He added that a Chinese tour operator predicted that the wheel would be so popular with tourists from China that it would be wise to include a 600-seat food hall in the terminal.

…

The developers still hope to raise some of the financing for the $350 million project from foreign investors seeking visas through the EB-5 program, Mr. Capoccia said, but he declined to say how much.

…

In Mr. Marin’s offices in Manhattan, some bound copies of renderings of the wheel are titled “The Bloomberg Wheel.” Travis Noyes, the chief marketing officer for the wheel, said the books were intended as a tribute to former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg for championing the project. But Mr. Noyes admitted that he had entertained the idea of signing up Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire, or his company as a sponsor.

First of all it will be another sucky blogging day because unless you’re interested in the Donald (I think he’s a hoot and hope he wins, TMC thinks he’s a disaster and has gone all prepper) or Greece (who knows and if Tspiras really was hoping he’d lose the referendum he should be the first one against the wall) or are convinced that Anonymous is attacking the tools of corrupt capitalism in the form of the NYSE, WSJ, and UAL (we can only wish it were true) instead of it being the logical outcome of their tightfisted parsimony and corporate beancounting ignorance, there isn’t really much new news, at least in science and technology.

However I did discover this sponsored link ad fishing around for material-

New Website Reveals Personal Information Even Google Can’t Find

9:06am Friday, June 5, 2015

Been issued a speeding ticket? Failed to stop at a stop sign? What about your family members? And friends? If you are like most of us, the answer to at least one of those questions is “yes”-the vast majority of us have slipped up at least once or twice.

…

Instant Checkmate aggregates hundreds of millions of publicly available criminal, traffic, and arrest records and posts them online so they can easily be searched by anyone. Members of the site can literally begin searching within seconds, and are able to check as many records as they like (think: friends, family, neighbors, etc. etc.).

…

After that, search all of your family members. If your aunt gets a speeding ticket every month, you’ll know. If your parents have kept arrests hidden from you, you could uncover them instantly.

One of the most interesting aspects of Instant Checkmate is that it shows not only criminal records, but also more general background information like marriage records, divorce records, various types of licenses (medical, firearm, aviation, etc.), previous addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, estimated income levels and even satellite imagery of known addresses-it’s really pretty scary just how much information is in these reports.

Mine?  Not so much.

Oh, I admit (kind of desire actually in a perverse sort of way) that ek hornbeck has left a screaming stain of infamy and obnoxiousness across the Tubz in 10 years of activity, but that’s not my real name.  In the Army they have what is called a “Good Conduct” medal that is jocularly awarded for “years of undiscovered crime” and that’s true enough (though I have never been a member of any armed service).

Under ek my record of shame is easily discernible, under my real name not at all.  Google doesn’t find me in it’s first 100 results and this service suggests 5 individuals, none of them me, and at that with the head start of the state I reside in.

Oh sure, if you happen to know my address you can get it on Google Maps, my phone number is pretty hard because it’s registered to my business, not to me.  I’ve had my occasional run ins with Johnny Law, traffic tickets and such, but apparently they are not electronically available.

So why am I so despised and yet so hidden?  It’s simple enough and I certainly encourage you to take these steps unless you are already compromised (and I’ll have some advice on how to fix that below).

I have never used my real name on the Tubz except in business situations (unavoidable if you want to buy stuff) and my credit cards are all business.  Personal stuff I pay for in cash.  Since there’s hardly any point to keeping your money in a bank at 0% I use one only where I must.

I belong to no social networking sites except Facebook (and blogs).  All of my accounts lead to blind e-mails and when requested for personal information I lie my ass off.  None of your damn business anyway.  There is no page in my real name and even ek doesn’t have one.  If you are my friend you know my friends only name (no, it’s not my real one) and that is strictly policed for privacy using independent accounts I haven’t revealed to anybody, to the average enquirer there is my Avatar and Background- that’s it.

Now what I’m mostly concerned about is casual harassment from companies that want to sell me stuff and people I’ve pissed off with my sentiments (you ‘Good Germans’ and rapist apologists know who you are).  Surprisingly I still maintain my Welcome New Users mailbox so if you hate me enough you can direct your spam there where I can report it troll.

Nothing is going to conceal you from a government agency with sufficient interest so you might as well give up on that, but it’s impressive the amount of hassle and garbage you can avoid if you’re reasonably careful.

That’s all well and good, but I’m hopelessly exposed.

Say goodby to all that.  What I mean is that you must abandon all your old accounts except as curiosities and contact points.  Change your IP or get a VPN.  Change your bank, preferably to a small credit union.  Change your name if necessary (marriage is good for that and hardly raises an eyebrow, better yet get gay married).

Most importantly and hardest to do, you have to change your habits and the people you’re associated with.  Not that I would, but if I were to sock dK in a serious way (I have half a dozen accounts I have access to, I don’t use them because dK is boring and silly) the very last thing I’d do is show up in the Daily Show diary posting as if nothing had changed.

As a matter of fact I got bit by troll hunting the other day at European Tribune.  BruceMcF had said it was a good place to keep up on Greece and I hadn’t visited for a really long time.  When I tried to log in I found out I had never registered.  Ok- ek hornbeck, I’m not ashamed of my history, I have a body of work and I called out people who were assholes and bullies (that includes you Denise and you too Meteor).

In my introductory comment I mentioned my association with some past members of ET which generated the instant “How is it that this n00b knows these figures from our past?  He must be a witch!”

Well, you know, better late than never.

Anyway my point is if I were looking to sock I would have been very careful indeed not to say anything which would indicate I had any experience at all other than what you’d randomly find in a casual Google covering the past couple of weeks.  As it is I’m not very interested in being anyone except ek at this point nor do I have a need to.

Science Oriented Video

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Reaching Pluto, and the End of an Era of Planetary Exploration, by Dennis Overbye, The New York Times
• This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a Big Rip, by Hannah Devlin, The Guardian
• No alien life on Philae comet, by Stuart Clark, The Guardian
• Measuring research: what are the units of assessment?, by Stephen Curry, The Guardian
• Why your smartphone takes better photographs than the Hubble space telescope, by Monica Grady, The Guardian
• Who is Wendy and why is this dinosaur named after her?, By Will Dunham, Reuters
• What’s Inside Saturn Moon Enceladus? Geyser Timing Gives Hints, By Charles Q. Choi, Space.com
• The Science Behind Why You Can’t Read in the Car, By Gianni Jaccoma, Huffington Post
• Mean Machines: US & Japan Mega-Robots to Battle, By Elizabeth Palermo, Live Science
• Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says – but it funded deniers for 27 more years, by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

The NYSE shutdown prompts irrepressible, apocalyptic glee: “In Zuccotti Park, Goldman Sachs boys build a squatters city out of Hermes gift boxes”

by Scott Timberg, Salon

Wednesday, Jul 8, 2015 02:59 PM EST

“I’m here in FiDi reporting from the front lines of the financial meltdown, wearing a flak jacket woven from golden parachutes #NYSEdown”

In another, “In Zuccotti Park, Goldman Sachs boys build a squatters city out of Hermes gift boxes, communicate in wiggling fingers #NYSE”

…

What does this all tell us? Well, partly it’s that many Americans hate the stock market and the corporate airlines. The former helped crash the economy a few years back and has for decades siphoned money from the nation at large and sent it to the very richest in a sick reversal of trickle-down economics. The people who work there make enormous sums even while the middle-class works harder and harder and sees its wages stagnate.

The latter has gone from being a bit stodgy but reliable to a hectic and unpleasant way to travel – all the delays and cancellations and the charging for things that used to be free, like baggage, bad food, leg room, and easy check-in. Air travel is now only bearable if you are rich enough to pay for first-class or various kinds of “platinum” treatment – in this way they resemble American life in general.

In other words, both Wall Street and airlines deserve our wrath and mockery. As  the hacker in the sky surveys its next targets, maybe the NSA, Fox News and medical insurance companies will come next.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push?

Yanis Varoufakis, The Guardian

Monday 6 July 2015 13.11 EDT

The red button

If you press it, chancellor, the euro crisis ends immediately, with a general rise in growth throughout Europe, a sudden collapse of debt for each member state to below its Maastricht limit, no pain for Greek citizens (or for the Italians, Portuguese, etc), no guarantees for the periphery’s debts (states or banks) to be provided by German and Dutch taxpayers, interest rate spreads below 3% throughout the eurozone, a diminution in the eurozone’s internal imbalances, and a wholesale rise in aggregate investment.

The yellow button

If you press it, chancellor, the situation in the eurozone remains more or less as it is for a decade. The euro crisis continues to bubble along, albeit in a controlled fashion. While the probability of a break-up, which will be a calamity for Germany, remains non-trivial, the chances are that, if you push the yellow button, the eurozone will not break up (with a little help from the European Central Bank), German interest rates will remain extremely low, the euro will be nicely depressed (‘nicely’ from the perspective of German exporters), the periphery’s spreads will be sky-high (but not explosive), Italy and Spain will enter deeper into a debt-deflationary spiral that sees to a reduction of their national income by 15% over the next three years, France shall slip steadily into quasi-insolvency, GDP per capita will rise slowly in the surplus countries and fall precipitously in the periphery. As for the first “fallen” nations (Greece, Ireland and Portugal), they shall become little Latvias, or indeed Kosovos: devastated lands (after the loss of between 25% and 40% of national income, a massive exodus of their skilled labour) on which our people will holiday and buy cheap real estate. In aggregate, if you choose the yellow button, chancellor, eurozone unemployment will remain well above UK and US levels, investment will be anaemic, growth negative and poverty on the up and up.

Which button do you think, dear reader, the chancellor would want to push?

Yup, populism is extreme.

Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece

by Neil Irwin, The New York Times

JULY 5, 2015

The fact is that the time for those debates is over for now; we’re in a realm of power politics, not substantive economic policy debates.

The choice for leaders of Germany, France and the rest of Europe will look something like this:

If they tolerate the Greek government’s demands, they will be setting a bad example for every other country that might wish to challenge the strictures of the European Union, telling voters in Portugal and Spain and Italy that if they make enough fuss, and elect extremist parties, they too will get a much sweeter deal. It would send the signal that a country can borrow all it likes, walk away from those debts and make the rest of Europe pay the bill, as long as it is intransigent enough.

If they refuse the Greek government’s demands and cut off funds, the Greek banking system will collapse and the country will no longer be part of the eurozone, sending a signal that the European Union is deeply fragile. Greece would sidle closer to a hostile Russia. A modern European democracy – indeed, the original democracy – could well collapse into something chaotic and unstable. Oh, and all this may end up costing the rest of Europe more money than even the most generous of bailouts, as Greece would default on its obligations outright rather than merely restructure them.

Essentially, European leaders must decide if their frustration with Greece and fear of a bad precedent are strong enough that they are willing to take a giant step in the other direction, by withholding further euros from Greece.

Sunday, Greek voters faced their crucial moment of decision, and they were clear: They are willing to risk the euro to avoid more austerity. Now it is Ms. Merkel and the other leaders of Europe who face a ticking clock and a decision that will ripple through history.

They are worried by democracy.

Good.

Ok.  So I haven’t been very sanguine about Team USA’s prospects in the World Cup but in my defense though they came through the ‘Group of Death’ they didn’t look all that impressive against Colombia and China is what we Mets fans charitably call “rebuilding”.

And then they thumped Germany, the #1 team in the World.

Umm… that was a convincing victory, it convinced me.

We will beat Japan and avenge our loss in 2011.  They are committed to a ground/passing game and we have many more tools.  No 2 – 2 Penalty Shoot Out this time, we will crush them like bugs.