Naked Capitalism has the article David Quentin and Nicholas Shaxson: The “Patent Box” – Proof That the UK is a Rogue State in Corporate Tax.

Perhaps most importantly, it is the very existence of intellectual property rights that spurs innovation, so there is no need for them to have a special extra subsidy. However socially useful a patented technology may or may not be, a patent is a privately-held and transferable monopoly over the commercial exploitation of an idea, and that monopoly only exists because the state chooses to enforce it. Bringing into being and protecting such privately-held monopolies is a way for the state to reward human creativity. Owning such an asset is not something the state needs to subsidize with a tax break; simply owning it should be enough.

This article makes it clearer to me than it ever has been the nature of the fight to protect “intellectual property rights.”  You hear President Obama tout this protection in the trade deals he wants to foist on us.  He excoriates countries like China for not protecting our companies’ “intellectual property rights” inside China.  In fact, “intellectual property rights” has turned into another scam to allow the oligarchs to avoid their fare share of taxes.  They are using this as a weapon against us, and want us to fight for their ability to use it against us.

I received an email from Maura Healey in which she said the following:

Together, we can set the record straight on Martha’s life-long fight for the safety of the children of Massachusetts.
.
.
.
I worked for Martha Coakley in the Attorney General’s office. I saw her fighting against human trafficking. Making our children safer online. Enforcing child labor laws. Keeping families in their homes. Passing an anti-bullying law.

I don’t know where Charlie Baker was, but Martha Coakley was there.

Trust me, if you want a champion for children and families in this state, then we have a clear choice – Martha Coakley.

Here is the video to counteract an ad for Charley Baker that Maura Healey thought was disgusting.

Remember that Charlie Baker is the one who wants to solve Massachusetts ills on the backs of the poor. He is focused on welfare fraud that is tiny, and expects to solve it by insisting that welfare recipients go out and get non-existent jobs. He wants to promote a public housing plan that will boot needy people right out of their homes and make them homeless.

If ever there were a heartless Republican that should not be allowed anywhere near the Governor’s office, this is the one. This is an all out class war of the rich and powerful few against the rest of us. I hope you don’t get tricked onto being a soldier for the other side. If you have hopes of being fairly well off some day, you should know that the Republican plan is not the one that will get you there (at least not if you have any scruples at all.)

New Economic Perspectives has the article A “Perfectly Legal” Scam is Perfectly Unacceptable to Real Bank Supervisors by William K. Black.  Now that you have heard the words of the culprits from my previous posts, let us bring in an expert to tell you exactly what is so wrong with what they did.

Let me give you some excerpts from William Black’s biography from  University of Missouri Kansas City.

Professor Black was litigation director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, deputy director of the FSLIC, SVP and general counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, and senior deputy chief counsel, Office of Thrift Supervision. He was deputy director of the National Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement.

So when you get an explanation of what the Fed bank supervisors did wrong, you know it is the voice of experience from a bank regulator who has done it right.    He explains several episodes of the financial crisis that are peripheral to (but essential background information about) the current brouhaha over Goldman Sachs before he gets into their latest fraud.

In case you don’t get to read the article, I will just show you the excerpt that shows exactly how derelict the bank supervisors were.

So, it’s “apparent” that the deal was a scam. Silva knew it was a scam. His team knew it was a scam. As a former senior banking lawyer/regulator who worked with real supervisors let me assure the reader that there can be real supervisors and that no change in law was required for Silva to block a “perfectly legal” scam designed to “artificially enhance” a bank’s reported “capital.” Such a deal is “unsafe and unsound” and it abets an “unsafe and unsound” act. We would have ordered Goldman to terminate the scam and if its senior managers refused to comply we would have brought a “cease and desist” order against Goldman and a “removal and prohibition” order against the senior managers. We would have won both actions. The federal banking regulators have explicit statutory power to act against “unsafe and unsound” banking practices.

I think the point is that the system including the FED is corrupt.  However, the likes of Rand Paul haven’t a clue as to exactly what is wrong.  If you want a Senator to go after the Fed and try to fix it, Elizabeth Warren is one of the people you want.

The Daily Kos has the article Wendy Davis knocks it out of the park in debate with Greg Abbott which features the video below.

For those with an interest in Texas politics (like those born there, or married to someone who was born their, or who has a daughter that was born there) this is a very hopeful sign of how Texas might be improving.

This is also interesting for those who want an example of a very effective debater. I wonder if the people of Texas are listening.

Elizabeth Warren has posted a comment on her Facebook page about her NPR interview.

Attention regulators: You work for the American people, not for the big banks. Check out my interview with NPR about the recently released Goldman Sachs tapes.

You can listen to her 7 minute interview below.

You can read Transcript: Sen. Warren’s Full NPR Interview On Financial Regulation. The excerpt below is just the tail end of the interview.

Sen. Warren, this is, uh, something that you’re clearly passionate about, but it’s a complicated issue — bank regulation. What would have to happen for it to be a major campaign issue this fall or in 2016?

You know, I think it already is a campaign issue. The way I see this, for everybody who’s running right now in 2014, there’s a fundamental question of whose side you stand on.

You know, the game out there is rigged, and people across this country really get it. And the Goldman Sachs tapes just show it one more time. Little banks have to follow the rules, regular families have to follow the rules, but big financial institutions? Somehow they can manage just to push their regulators aside and go forward.

There’s a — there’s a fundamental question about who this country works for. It can’t just work for those who already have lots of money and lots of power. We’ve got to have a country that works for everybody else.

Should Hillary Clinton address this issue forcefully?

You know, I’d like to see everybody address this issue forcefully. I think it is a very important question, and I’m — I wanna see everybody in on it. Both parties — I think we all should be there.

Do you think that — do you think that your party is going to be able to make an issue of this in the general election coming up in a couple of years?

You know, I’m gonna keep talking about it, and I think there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who will do the same.

Someone needs to be monitoring the FED’s behavior to make sure it is doing its job. Failures like the one uncovered here show that the FED’s right to act without oversight has been abused. Whatever powers of oversight the Congress decides to take on, they must be protected from abuse. We must not forget that House Speaker Jim Wright exerted his influence over the regulators in the Savings and Loan crisis to make them back off from doing their jobs.

This American Life has an article on and a recording of the program 536: The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra.

An unprecedented look inside one of the most powerful, secretive institutions in the country. The NY Federal Reserve is supposed to monitor big banks. But when Carmen Segarra was hired, what she witnessed inside the Fed was so alarming that she got a tiny recorder and started secretly taping.

This story was developed in partnership with Pro Publica. I reported on their coverage in the previous post Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash.

The quibble I had with how the other report ended is thoroughly covered in This American Life audio. This coverage makes it quite clear that Segarra was willing to come out with a public compromise with her supervisors even though she told them in confidence that she did not agree with them.

I hope that Senator Elizabeth Warren makes as big a deal over this issue as she possibly can. As soon as Eric Holder is out of the Department of Justice, perhaps we can get some investigation of this from the highest levels.

It is clear from this, that the people who are concerned about the Fed and “who watches the watchers” are quite right to be demanding more oversight of the Fed. This is not a call to do away with the Fed, nor is it a call to rein them in. It is quite the opposite. It is a recognition that the FED is not doing its job diligently enough. There needs to be a systemic change in the organizational structure that makes it impossible for the FED to hide its failures to do its job.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has the segment “How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing”

Ayn Rand has always been popular with teenagers. She’s something you’re supposed to grow out of like SKA music or handjobs.

The older people who still haven’t figured out what’s wrong with her ideas are in a serious state of arrested development. They have a firm idea on the way the world ought to be without any understanding that the world is nothing like their idea and never can be.

Thanks to Elizabeth St. John for posting this on her Facebook page.

Former Massachusetts Chief Park Ranger Curt Rudge explains why it’s so important to vote Yes on Question 2 on Nov. 4 to stop bottle litter in Massachusetts and expand the Bottle Bill. Big beverage companies are spending over $5 million to say things are fine the way they are–but Ranger Curt has seen bottles without a deposit on them from sports drinks, iced tea, and water are piling up as litter in our beautiful state. He’s seen the damage this litter does to our parks. That’s why we need to vote Yes on Question 2 on November 4. (30 seconds)

As on who lives on a busy rural road, I can attest to what Ranger Curt has to say. The litter I see at the edges of my property has few returnables in it. What little there is is scavenged by people who can make a few cents returning it. The rest just hangs around as litter. I am not about to be the trash collector for the clods who throw this stuff out their windows.

I have been tempted to post the following sign, but I know that would just escalate the war.

The Real News Network has the interview After Eric Holder Resigns, A Look at His Record on Bank Prosecutions.

And as you mentioned, this administration, and Eric Holder in particular, are known for the viciousness of their war against whistleblowers. What the public doesn’t know–and it doesn’t know because of Eric Holder–is that in the three biggest cases involving banks–again, none of them, not a single prosecution of the elite bankers that drove this crisis–all three of those cases, against Citicorp, against JPMorgan, and against Bank of America, were made possible by whistleblowers. Eric Holder was the czar at the Department of Justice press conferences in each of these three cases, and he and the Justice Department officials, the senior Justice Department officials, at those press conferences, never mentioned the role of the whistleblowers–never praised the whistleblowers and never used those press conferences as a forum for asking whistleblowers to come forward. And so your viewers should take a look at the Frontline special on this, where the Frontline producers made clear that as soon as word got out that they were investigating the area, dozens of whistleblowers came forward, and each of them had the same story: the Department of Justice had never contacted them.

This Department of “Justice” seems to have the uncanny knack of going after the innocent and protecting the guilty. I think it is pretty clear that Eric Holder did an excellent job of carrying out the directions of President Obama. If I were a little less cynical, I would be left wondering how this administration could have let us down so badly.

Elizabeth Warren has posted on her Facebook page a commentary on the Propublica article Inside the New York Fed: Secret Recordings and a Culture Clash.  Warren’s comment on the article are:

When regulators care more about protecting big banks from accountability than they do about protecting the American people from risky and illegal behavior on Wall Street, it threatens our whole economy. We learned this the hard way in 2008. Congress must hold oversight hearings on the disturbing issues raised by yesterday’s whistleblower report when it returns in November – because it’s our job to make sure our financial regulators are doing their jobs.

I agree that the story is quite disturbing and seems to be an indication of why our regulatory system is continuing to fail to protect us.  I think that the very reason that inequality has grown faster under Obama than under Bush is exactly the fact that we bailed out the rich but refused to prosecute them for the crimes they committed.

Given what I have just said, I must disagree with the way the article ended.  It cuts the knees out from under their own story about a woman, Segarra, who was hired to be the Goldman Sachs regulator.  Her boss was Silva.  The Santander case was described earlier in the article.

The audio is muddy but the words are distinct. So is the tension. Segarra is in Silva’s small office at Goldman Sachs with his deputy. The two are trying to persuade her to change her view about Goldman’s conflicts policy.

“You have to come off the view that Goldman doesn’t have any kind of conflict-of- interest policy,” are the first words Silva says to her. Fed officials didn’t believe her conclusion — that Goldman lacked a policy — was “credible.”

Segarra tells him she has been writing bank compliance policies for a living since she graduated from law school in 1998. She has asked Goldman for the bank’s policies, and what they provided did not comply with Fed guidance.

“I’m going to lose this entire case,” Silva says, “because of your fixation on whether they do or don’t have a policy. Why can’t we just say they have basic pieces of a policy but they have to dramatically improve it?”

It’s not like Goldman doesn’t know what an adequate policy contains, she says. They have proper policies in other areas.

“But can’t we say they have a policy?” Silva says, a question he asks repeatedly in various forms during the meeting.

Segarra offers to meet with anyone to go over the evidence collected from dozens of meetings and hundreds of documents. She says it’s OK if higher-ups want to change her conclusions after she submits them.

But Silva says the lawyers at the Fed have determined Goldman has a policy. As a comparison, he brings up the Santander deal. He had thought the deal was improper, but the general counsel reined him in.

“I lost the Santander transaction in large part because I insisted that it was fraudulent, which they insisted is patently absurd,” Silva said, “and as a result of that, I didn’t get taken seriously.”

Now, the same thing was happening with conflicts, he said.

A week later, Silva called Segarra into a conference room and fired her. The New York Fed, he told Segarra, who was recording the conversation, had “lost confidence in [her] ability to not substitute [her] own judgment for everyone else’s.”

I commented in the article’s comment section and on the Warren Facebook post:

At the end of the article the quarrel seemed to be over whether or not Goldman had a conflict of interest policy.

Why couldn’t they come to an agreement to say that “Goldman Sachs had a conflict of interest policy, but that it did not comply with Fed guidance”?  Those were her own words.  Why was she so adamant that she could only express her thoughts as “They didn’t have a policy” when she knew how those literal words were so easily refuted?  Her response to that refutation would be the exact words I proposed above.

There is obviously more to this story than can fit in a news article.  However, you do have to wonder why the reporters would put it the way they did in the face of my obvious question which any reasonable editor would have asked?

Am I the only one to see this hole in the case?

I just wish that this strong case about how regulation is being badly managed at the Fed didn’t have this silly ending to detract from the case.  Moreover, it is too bad that the people presenting the case, Propublica and Elizabeth Warren, don’t choose to address this flaw.