'Now that everyone has a media platform, look for even more of the mutual back scratching that comes from tracking favors. Humans have a natural openness to reciprocity. It's a time-honored survival technique, one that allowed us to live together in villages for millenia. Someone who doesn't reciprocate is less likely to be protected by his peers, right? Not only have we been taught reciprocation since birth, but it feels right. It's baked in. The problem occurs when the trading of favors become mercenary, when alert individuals start manipulating the system for personal gain. Suddenly, every favor is suspect, measured and not at all generous. Suddenly all the likes and links and blurbs become nothing but currency, not the honest appraisals of people we can trust. It means that bystanders have trouble telling the difference between honest approval and the mere mutual shilling of traded favors.'

'A threatening attorney must be made to realize that his life is much better returned to intimidating average people. He should want nothing to do with you. You are the pig who enjoys getting dirty. When your name is mentioned to him, it should trigger a recurring nightmare and sudden stomach pain. Remember, attorneys do not want legal problems resolved. Resolution of conflicts dries up his billable hours. He wants as much chaos and destruction as possible. That way he becomes more important. However, it’s amazing how despite a tolerance for causing pain for others he will usually have a very low tolerance for pain himself. Most attorneys have no balls. I make sure I don’t seem like I’m crazy and emotional, I seem crazy and deliberate. No one wants to get into a legal fight with someone who’s crazy and deliberate.' -- I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request. Do you have any evidence to suggest this matter hasn't already been settled in the private?

"A laughable waste of time, effort, and energy."

'In 2008, lawyers Davenport Lyons courted the mainstream media with the news that a court had found a woman guilty of sharing the game Dream Pinball 3D, an action which cost her around £16,000. Anyone with an understanding of these cases knew that something was wrong and now, thanks to yet more information from the leaked ACS:Law emails, we learn that this ‘conviction’ was built on foundations of sand.'

'Friday night the anti-piracy law firm ACS:Law accidentally published its entire email archive online, effectively revealing how the company managed to extract over a million dollars (£636,758.22) from alleged file-sharers since its operation started. On average, 30% of the victims who were targeted paid up, and this money was divided between the law firm, the copyright holder and the monitoring company.'

'The attacks were declared on notorious message-board 4chan and were reportedly in retaliation for anti-piracy efforts against file-sharing websites. Users of 4chan are renowned for online activism and direct action. "Operation Payback", as it was known, was reportedly revenge for the MPAA and RIAA's action against The Pirate Bay. The group has declared it will continue to target other sites involved in anti online piracy activity.'

'In the course of life it is important to avoid letting people get levers on you. The cons learn their victim’s likes and dislikes and personal history, so that they will be able to forge a more “authentic” bond with the victim. Inmates often work in large cabals, colluding in their informational exchange. One other tactic they use is to compliment the guard. Compliments are actually a devastating manipulative tool, because they enhance the ego of the complimented. Because the ego is false, and impermanent, the complimented becomes less grounded in reality... By asking the guard for help, they improve the bond (after all, to help someone is to be of higher status than them – and this nurtures the illusion of the guard that *they* are the ones in charge...) In prison as in real life, if someone doesn’t actively speak up and say something, silence is taken as assent. When human beings touch each other, if the touch is not aggressive, oxytocin is often released, causing a bond to form.'

'Tax resistance may be morally defended on grounds nearly identical to resisting any kind of aggression against oneself. If one is accosted on some city street and threatened, one has the right to defend oneself. The right of self-defense is derivable from the basic right one has to one's life, one that rests on one's nature as a human being as a moral agent. If one carries on in one's life peacefully and is nonetheless attacked, one is justified – has the right to – resist. This also holds if the attack is aimed at confiscating one's resources, even if one misuse these – wastefulness may not be criminalized in a free society unless it involves dumping, imposing it on others, as in pollution. Taxation, which is extortion, has no place, any more than serfdom, in a just legal order so whether it's ethically justified to dodge or avoid it should not pose an insurmountably difficult moral problem.'

'A tiger kidnapping or tiger robbery is a crime in which an abduction forms part of a robbery. A person of importance to the victim is held hostage as collateral until the victim has met the criminal's demands. It is called a tiger kidnapping because of the predatory stalking that precedes it; the crime often requires considerable inside information about the target.'

'And surprise-surprise, it has nothing to do with the Euro - it is, once again, to bail out bad speculative bets made by banks: "If the country is not stabilised, the next problem will be the banks," Ackermann [Deutsche, CEO] adding that German banks had "billions in the fire." So once again we have banksters literally putting a gun to government heads and threatening them. When does this stop? It's not like Deutsche Bank (and the rest) didn't know Greece was cooking their books and holding debt off balance sheet! They sold them the swaps to enable the deception! These banksters knew damn well that the nation was in trouble long before there was any public notice of it. So why were they buying Greece's debt? Why didn't they sell it? Why are they stuck with it? Is it because their intention was to shove a gun up the nose of the governments in the Euro Zone - just as our banks did here - and threaten to shoot unless they get bailed out?' -- Classic Tiger Kidnapping scheme.

'Still no inquiry. Still no answers. A trillion pounds has been devoted over the past 18 months to protect Britain's financial system from alleged Armageddon, with not a murmur of value for money. This stupefying sum is more than has ever been spent on any project by any government in British history. We know where the money came from but we do not know if it was necessary, nor who now has it. We know only that, a year on, Britain is experiencing a worse recession than any comparable country. The lack of accountability, the sheer lack of curiosity from the political community, is amazing. Too big to fail has taken a savage toll on the economy. If it was worth it, I would like to see the account. If not, someone should pay. Yet because the policy was backed by all three main parties, there is no questioning, no inquiry. All is silence.' -- Shhh...

'It's "Greenspan times 10," jokes one hedge-fund trader. -- ...they took a short position [on toxic junk]. One month passed, and they lost money. Another month passed — same thing. Finally, the trader just shrugged and decided to change course and buy. "I said, 'Fuck it, let's make some money,'" he recalls. This is the very definition of bubble economics — betting on crowd behavior instead of on fundamentals. -- To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by "performance": Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices — and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. -- Con artists have a word for the inability of their victims to accept that they've been scammed. They call it the "True Believer Syndrome."'

'... Goldman itself has been instrumental in covering up Greece's catastrophic financial state and continues to be a critical factor in any future refinancing efforts on behalf of Greece. In essence, through its conflict of interest, its unshakable negotiating position, and its facility to determine collateral requirements and variation margin, Goldman can expand its previous position of strength from dictating merely AIG and Federal Reserve decision making, to one which determines sovereign policy! This is unmitigated lunacy and a recipe for financial collapse at the global level. This is yet another AIG in the making, with Goldman this time likely threatening to accelerate the collapse not merely of the US financial system, but of the global one, in order to attain virtually infinite negotiating leverage. Of course, the world will not allow a Greece-initiated domino, allowing Goldman to call everyone's bluff once again.'

OBVIOUS FRAUD IS OBVIOUS

'The logic of terrorism is simple. To intimidate a state into action or inaction. If you don't give us what we want, we'll blow something up. Do it - or else. Exactly the same logic has been at work throughout the financial crisis. The state has been terrorized into action - and inaction. Too big to fail is a weapon of economic intimidation - just like a bomb threat. If you don’t give us a bailout, the financial system will fail. If you disclose it, the financial system will fail. You have no option but to give us exactly what we want - cash, now, on our terms. The goal of terrorism is this. To coerce a state into fundamentally betraying it's foundational principles - thus, creating a contradiction within the system itself, causing citizens to lose confidence in their own basic institutions. And by that logic, banks won. Not only did they get trillions in bailouts, now, it turns out, they got secret bailouts.' -- Quelle surprise

'There are so many of these people, and they all have so much to lose.'

"How will this translate into sales and revenue?" - "Yawn." -- (Awesome commentary on how these 'social media celebrities' use threat of their brand snarky 'tribe' to extort client fees.)

'...the moral hazard of rent seeking can be considerable. If "buying" a favorable regulatory environment is cheaper than building more efficient production, a firm will choose the former option, reaping incomes entirely unrelated to any contribution to total wealth or well-being. This results in a sub-optimal allocation of resources — money spent on lobbyists and counter-lobbyists rather than on research and development, improved business practices, employee training, or additional capital goods — which retards economic growth. Claims that a firm is rent-seeking therefore often accompany allegations of government corruption, or the undue influence of special interests. Rent seeking may be initiated by government agents, such agents soliciting bribes or other favors from the individuals or firms that stand to gain from having special economic privileges, which opens up the possibility of exploitation of the consumer.'

Bullshit! He tries to argue the current tax take on bonuses is worth the ongoing obliteration of the GBP and that we're supposed to believe that the City of London now constitutes the ENTIRE UK economy and so every morally hazardous extortion scam can go on unchallenged! -- At least he fingers the government and the BoE as responsible for this fraud: 'Mr Darling, it was not the taxpayer that “put their hand into their pocket” to bail out any banks — it was you who put your hand in our pockets. One of the elements that doubtless irks the British government is that by flooding the capital markets with money — via so-called quantitative easing — it has itself engineered the conditions in which so astute a trader as Goldman can make thumping profits.'

"When it suits Wall Street to have a deflationary episode, like we saw at the end of 2008, they can open the window into their off balance sheet of trillions of debt and scare congress into forking over more funds. Then when the money is forked over, they shut that window and they say, 'don't look behind the curtain anymore, there's nothing there.' Then prices stabilize because the panic that they created subsides and they claim they did something positive and they're worth billions of bonuses. -- We have an economy that exists between two worlds: one is an off balance sheet world of infinite debt; and one is an unregulated, off-the-books, non-accountable, non-elected, non-entity that's not part of the official government: the Federal Reserve, that has $20tn of credit expansion at the flick of a switch. -- The black exchanges and the unregulated derivative world is at least 10x bigger than the visible world. This is basically the financial antimatter that's ruling the visible world."

"When it suits Wall Street to have a deflationary episode, like we saw at the end of 2008, they can open the window into their off balance sheet of trillions of debt and scare congress into forking over more funds. Then when the money is forked over, they shut that window and they say, 'don't look behind the curtain anymore, there's nothing there.' Then prices stabilize because the panic that they created subsides and they claim they did something positive and they're worth billions of bonuses. -- We have an economy that exists between two worlds: one is an off balance sheet world of infinite debt; and one is an unregulated, off-the-books, non-accountable, non-elected, non-entity that's not part of the official government: the Federal Reserve, that has $20tn of credit expansion at the flick of a switch. -- The black exchanges and the unregulated derivative world is at least 10x bigger than the visible world. This is basically the financial antimatter that's ruling the visible world."

Millhouse: "The reality is slightly more nuanced." -- Max: "The reality is people are dying because of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wall St Jihadists!"

Max: "The word is fraud; they're hiding losses." -- Millhouse: "I wouldn't be that critical; the banking system is a policy tool." -- Max: "When other countries hear this gobbledegook doublespeak, they say, 'We're gonna dump the dollar...'" -- Millhouse: "THEY CAN'T!" -- ORLY?

'And so the guns come out blazing. The Clearing House Association, another name for all the banks that were bailed out over the past year with the generous contributions from all of you, dear taxpayers, are now threatening with another instance of complete systemic collapse if Bloomberg's lawsuit is allowed to proceed unchallenged, let alone if any of the "Audit The Fed" measures are actually implemented. In a nutshell - the banks want their complete opacity cake and eat it too, or else, the racket goes, the transparency that will somehow promote massive rumor mongering will again destroy capitalism. In the meantime, the Ken Lewises of the world can continue touting how stable their businesses are based on optimistic future projections, while implicitly, they continue to survive merely thanks to the cash granted them by you, taxpayers.'

Busted.

'Our source says it "is becoming assumed throughout the industry that AIG FP finding new ways to roll over" -- which is to say, using bailout money to offer counterparties on its trades generous terms in closing out its contracts... While he did not want to name names or go into detail about any specific transactions, he said we should watch for signs of AIG FP employees being rewarded for their generosity with jobs working for their old counterparties...' -- AIG employees are like, "YES WE CAN."

'... intellectual intolerance is in the DNA of the creditor mentality because it cannot withstand awareness and understanding of its destructive effects. The “miracle of compound interest” is not achievable in practice beyond the short run. To pretend that it may form the basis for a sustainable model of wealth creation does violence to rationality and economic logic. This is why the economic theory that creditors prefer – and subsidize – is learned ignorance propagated by useful idiots. Its role is to distract attention from society’s most important economic dynamics, those of finance and property polarization via debt, evidently on the premise that what is not seen or analyzed will not be regulated or taxed. One is reminded of Baudelaire’s quip: “The devil wins at the point where he convinces people that he does not exist.” A “free market” for rentiers thus is one “free” of alternative ideas.' -- An awesome read of economic history. 'The Ascent of Money' with a moral compass.

'Being defeated by debt is as deadly as outright military warfare. Faced with loss of their property and means of self-support, many citizens will get sick, lead lives of increasing desperation and die early if they do not repudiate most of the fraudulently offered loans of the past five years. They know that it lacks the money to pay, but they are quite willing to take payment in the form of foreclosure on the nation’s natural resources, land and housing, and a mortgage on the next few centuries of its future. If this sounds like the spoils of war, it is – and always has been. Debt bondage is the name of this game. And the major weapon in this conflict of interest is how people perceive it.' --- Rape, in perpetuity. (Truly awesome article with loads of european history.)

'Meet the bankers and brokers responsible for the financial crisis - and the officials who let them get away with it -- #The Arsonist: JOE CASSANO. WAS: Chief of AIG Financial Products (2001-2008) WHAT HE DID: Blew a $500 billion hole in fabric of the universe by placing massive bet on the bubble economy with money he didn't have. WORST MOVE: In August 2007 told investors his CDS deals could not lose even "$1"; lost $352 million that quarter. NOW: Enjoying his $280 million in earnings.' -- Check the illustrations.

Quoting WaPo: 'The president held himself up as an example, saying that he had not yet renovated the Oval Office and was still using George W. Bush's furniture, even noting the stains on the carpet. He urged the banks to show comparable "constraint and responsibility," adding that the nation had undergone a cultural shift.' -- 'So let me get this straight. Banking elite, and other government insiders, defrauded savings accounts, pension funds, charitable funds and municipal funds here and around the globe by trading in worthless financial instruments; they manipulated markets and destroyed legitimate businesses along the way; and THEN, when that wasn't enough, they plundered the public purse in the chaos and panic surrounding the crash that they themselves caused. And the President asks them to kindly refrain from buying new carpet? President Obama. Step away from the Goldman Sachs banker and smell the Revolution brewing! People are angry. "Squeeze" the oligarchs. My suggestion: RICO'

'Geithner has just written a put option. Will the government sell you a put option? Nope, you're not rich enough. Only hedge funds are eligible. It is a transfer of wealth from you...to the guys that need it least. That's not economic democracy. It's economic feudalism: the heart of a new cold war.'

"The probable outcome of the Geithner plan is going to make today's crisis look like a zit on the face of the Elephant Man. The Geithner plan is the most radical - and radically toxic - cure for a financial disease in recent history. From an organizational point of view, it is nothing short of revolution: a financial coup d'etat. The Geithnerconomy is a kind of financial Frankenstein: run by hedge funds, leveraged by the public, whose interests overlap by only 20%. The problem of toxic incentives hasn't gone away: in fact, the Geithner plan institutionalizes and explodes it, like a biological weapon infecting an entire country. The result of the financial coup d'etat is a Great Divergence: we we have two economies running in parallel: capitalism for the poor, and socialism for the rich. The former essentially subsidizes the latter endlessly and perpetually." -- Is. This. Real?

"People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations. ... what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers." -- Casino Gulag (Max Keiser). Includes a lucid summary of the AIG/Goldman bailout/extortion scheme and of the Federal Reserve's belligerent autonomy.

"The site, as described by BusinessWeek, appears to operate as a defacto blackmail racket: Your "friends" submit "hilarious" pictures of you, often filched from Facebook. If you are in a picture and want it removed, you have to become a member of the site, which costs $20 per month or $50 per year. Best part: Your "friend" earns a kickback of $10 or $20 if his picture causes you to pay the membership fee. Better to accept the inevitable: Celebrity has been so devalued and democratized that we all have to learn to play the PR games of famous people. That means flooding the market with flattering pictures and blog posts (the equivalent of magazine puff pieces); bullying hostile bloggers and scandal websites (as celebrity flacks do with tabloids and other disfavored publications); and paying the occasional bribe, in the form of anything from flirting to a free lunch to cold, hard cash..." -- Real sick.

"The overall value of sterling against a basket of currencies tumbled last week to 80.4p — its lowest point for 13 years — ahead of the latest interest rate move by the Bank of England, which cut rates to a 50-year low of 2 per cent on Thursday. The falling interest rate is one factor that has driven investors away from the pound, as returns on cash deposited in the UK shrink, as well as concerns over the outlook for the British economy." -- Extortion.