Linkage

Trader Describes How Dishonesty Pays in Finance, Big Time (Naked Capitalism)
Woman wins $18.6 lawsuit against Equifax, who refused to correct clear and obvious errors in her credit report (Oregonian)
Germany ends spy pact with US and UK after Snowden (BBC)
Colorado attorney turned whistle-blower alleges foreclosure abuses (The Denver Post)

Adam Smith was apparently a dirty pinko:



H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Mexico's President Drinks the Free Market Mousketeer Koolaid

It's not a surprise, the energy companies have been trying to get ownership stakes in the state owned Mexican oil company, Pemex, for years, so it was only matter of time before a useful idiot was elected to the Mexican presidency, the useful idiot in this case being Enrique Peña Nieto:

If Mexico had a crown jewel, it would be the giant state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Year after year, it has poured billions of dollars into the state treasury, historically paying for schools, hospitals, dams, highways, ports and more.

The seizure of foreign oil companies 75 years ago that created the company is a cause for annual celebrations affirming Mexico's fierce sense of independence from outside interference.

Yet even as the country's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, credits Pemex with building the nation, his administration acknowledges that the notoriously inefficient conglomerate is in trouble: If it is not opened to private and foreign investment, Mexico, the world's ninth-largest oil producer, will become a net energy importer by 2020, officials say.

As Peña Nieto moves ahead with a plan to overhaul Pemex, he is navigating the most perilous political minefield of his young presidency. He is toying with taboos and challenging revered perceptions surrounding the nation's top revenue earner. And he is meeting with impassioned opposition.

At the back of a recent rally for Pemex, Jesus Castillo Sanchez, a 46-year-old handyman, waved a giant Mexican flag as if he'd just taken a hill in battle. Booting the foreign oil companies in 1938 "gave Mexico its true independence from the great powers," Castillo said. "After [the foreigners] bring their oil platforms, they will bring their armies and their troops."

The president is expected to introduce landmark energy reform legislation, including proposals addressing Pemex, as early as this week.

………

The government and industry experts contend that Mexico needs advanced technical expertise from outside companies to find and retrieve oil and gas from deep water and shale-rock formations that are believed to hold more than half the country's estimated 14 billion barrels of reserves.

But "Pemex is not allowed … to choose associations … to reduce the level of risk that you run" in deep-water exploration, Carlos Morales Gil, Pemex director of exploration and production, said in an interview. "What Pemex needs is budget autonomy and flexibility" to form joint ventures, he said.

If you look at the Deepwater Horizon case, you will notice that BP doesn't know much of anything about oil drilling.

They hire Halliburton and Slumberger (who took one look at the well, and left) for their drilling expertise, and Transocean to operate the rig.

Oil companies no longer have much in the way of technical expertise, they outsourced those during the oil downturn in the late 1980s.

As to the money to go after harder to reach oil, Pemex clearly needs some reforms, it is a wasteful and bloated bureaucracy.

As to the fixes, the first one comes to mind would be an expansion of their refining facilities, so that Pemex would not have to import (and subsidize) fuel for internal consumption.

But one need only look at the disastrous privatization of British rail to understand that this is a solution that has everyone losing but the foreign firms.

If you bring in foreign investors, oil and gas drilling in Mexico is going to end up looking like Nigeria.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

It looks like the Feds are probably responsible for hacking an online anonymity service:

Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.

The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal “drive-by” hack attack, but nobody’s calling in the FBI this time. The FBI is the prime suspect.

“It just sends identifying information to some IP in Reston, Virginia,” says reverse-engineer Vlad Tsyrklevich. “It’s pretty clear that it’s FBI or it’s some other law enforcement agency that’s U.S.-based.”

If Tsrklevich and other researchers are right, the code is likely the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007.

………

By midday Sunday, the code was being circulated and dissected all over the net. Mozilla confirmed the code exploits a critical memory management vulnerability in Firefox that was publicly reported on June 25, and is fixed in the latest version of the browser.

Though many older revisions of Firefox are vulnerable to that bug, the malware only targets Firefox 17 ESR, the version of Firefox that forms the basis of the Tor Browser Bundle – the easiest, most user-friendly package for using the Tor anonymity network.

“The malware payload could be trying to exploit potential bugs in Firefox 17 ESR, on which our Tor Browser is based,” the non-profit Tor Project wrote in a blog post Sunday. “We’re investigating these bugs and will fix them if we can.”

The inevitable conclusion is that the malware is designed specifically to attack the Tor browser. The strongest clue that the culprit is the FBI, beyond the circumstantial timing of Marques’ arrest, is that the malware does nothing but identify the target.

Anyone want to guess who is behind this?

Whoever is ultimately behind this, it's been farmed out to a contractor, "According to Domaintools, the malware’s command-and-control IP address in Virginia is allocated to Science Applications International Corporation. Based in McLean, Virginia, SAIC is a major technology contractor for defense and intelligence agencies, including the FBI." (SAIC refused comment)

SAIC isn't doing this on its own.  Someone in the government is paying them to do this.

As  to whether or not there is a court order authorizing the FBI to plant malware on thousands of people's machines, possibly, but we will never know, since it is almost certainly been finessed through the FISA court somehow..

This is the Best Political Slam I've Ever Heard

That's Gotta Hurt!

And yes, I'm including Winston Churchill's best slams^* in my calling this the best.

Even more surprising is that it comes from a woman, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is running against Mitch McConnell for Senate in 2014, as women are frequently subjected to a double standard on such thing. (A man is assertive, and a woman is a bitch, etc.)

At a political staple of Kentucky politics, a barbecue at a small hamlet known as Fancy Farm, Grimes let fly:

But in her speech, Grimes didn’t shy from attacking McConnell directly, painting him as an obstructionist who’s been in Washington too long, as her own supporters chanted, “Ditch Mitch.”

“If the doctors told Sen. McConnell that he had a kidney stone, he’d refuse to pass it,” Grimes said, in her most memorable zinger of her six-minute speech.

While McConnell left after his likely Democratic opponents’ speech, not staying to hear his GOP primary opponent at the end of the program, Grimes welcomed Bevin to the race, joking that he was glad to see the “GOP nominee had shown up.”

That is going to leave a mark!

^*A couple of Churchill's more famous insults:

One day shortly after the Second World War ended, Winston Churchill and Labour Party Prime Minister Clement Attlee encountered one another at the urinal trough in the House of Common’s men’s washroom. Attlee arrived first. When Churchill arrived, he stood as far away from him as possible. Attlee said, “Feeling standoffish today, are we, Winston?” Churchill said: “That’s right. Every time you see something big, you want to nationalize it.”

………

Lady Astor: Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink.
Churchill: Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.

Busy Day

Sharon's Uncle & Aunt visited, my phone went balls up (I'm using Sharon's old phone), and Open Space Arts had their last show of the season, followed by a cast party, and I was getting some of the non-drivers to and from that.

And did I mention that I was fashioned into filming the show?

Busy, so no blogging tonight.

Posted via mobile.

My Laundry Hamper has Grown Eyes

Kaw-oot!

Posted via mobile.

The Corrupt Educational Industrial Complex In a Nutshell

Tony Bennet, who has been Florida commissioner of Education of 7 months just got fired resigned because it was discovered that he fabricated the ratings of a politically connected Charter school at his last position:

A national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education resigned as Florida education commissioner Thursday, amid allegations that when he ran Indiana’s schools, he changed the state grade of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

In a resignation letter that surprised many, Tony Bennett dismissed the brewing scandal as “malicious and rooted in unfounded allegations” but said that it had created “a distraction from important work” and that he was leaving his post immediately.

The move came two days after the Associated Press reported that it had acquired e-mails written by Bennett in 2012, while he was running Indiana’s schools, in which he directed his staff to change the state grade for Christel House Academy. The charter school was founded by Christel DeHaan, who has given more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including $130,000 to Bennett.

The school, which had been kindergarten through eighth grade, added grades nine and 10 in 2012, and test scores from the new students were low enough to pull down the school’s rating from an A to a C on an A-to-F scale.

At Bennett’s direction, staff used a loophole in regulations and removed the scores of ninth- and 10th-graders, bringing the school’s grade back up to an A. Bennett has said that changing the grade made the rating system credible because he knew Christel House to be a high-performing school.

The Indiana State Teachers Association thinks otherwise. “It’s time to call the Tony Bennett letter-grading scandal exactly what it is — cheating,” union officials wrote in a statement. “There are no excuses for the actions taken by Bennett and his staff, as revealed in the string of e-mails, other than favoritism, cronyism, self-interest and hubris — none of which has a place in public school policymaking.”

He lost his last job in Indiana when voters tossed his sorry ass out in the 2012 elections, because the voters saw through his bullsh%#.

But Republicans, and the educational reform establishment didn't see his bullsh%$.

Case in point, the biggest stars in the anti-teacher pro-privatization education establishment,  Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, and Bush's  Chiefs for Change coalition, all just just offered a full throated endorsement of this ratf%$#.

This is not a an anomaly.   We now know that Rhee's "success" was built on altered tests, and the former head of the Atlanta schools, Beverly Hall, has been literally been charged with racketeering.

The goal of people like this is to destroy the public schools and the teachers' unions, so that private operators and their Wall Street backers can make bank, not to help our kids.

There are real problems with the education that our children receive in the US, but the biggest problem is that there are more poor children in the US, and the poverty is more intense, than in the rest of the industrialized world.

Wall Street and Their Evil Minions^™ cannot help with that.

In fact, their role in our economy has to been to exacerbate these problems.