Russian To Judgment, Con't

Spencer Ackerman and his national security reporting team at the Daily Beast have been doing a really stellar job of following the Silicon Valley end of the Trump/Russia connection, and how tech giants like Facebook and Twitter were leveraged by Russian front companies to deliver pro-Trump/anti-Clinton propaganda over social media.  Now the Daily Beast reveals that of course Google was involved too through its extensive web ad network, and through promoted YouTube videos.

According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.” 

These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences. 

“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.” 

Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time. 

It’s reminiscent of the Russian attempts to impersonate a California-based Muslim group and piggyback off of the Black Lives Matter protests to spread the Kremlin’s message. But this time, the Kremlin operation used real people, not just memes and hijacked hashtags.

The discovery of living, breathing, real-life avatars for Kremlin talking points deepens and complicates the emerging picture of how Russian propaganda reached what Facebook alone estimated last week were 10 million users in the United States—a number considered by many outside experts to be a lowball estimate.

We're just now finding out how deep Silicon Valley's rabbit warren goes when it comes to taking Russian propaganda cash, and actively having their ad and promotion algorithms manipulated for maximum advantage.  If companies can micro-target people with SEO and tailor ads for specific products, why can't it be used for political ads?  And if it can be used for political ads, why can't it be used for much darker political purposes?

And yes the Washington Post is following up with the Russian buys extending to Google's ad network, DoubleClick.

Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company's investigation. 

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site. 

The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far. 

Google previously downplayed the problem of Russian meddling on its platforms. Last month, Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville told The Washington Post that the company is "always monitoring for abuse or violations of our policies and we've seen no evidence this type of ad campaign was run on our platforms." 

Nevertheless, Google launched an investigation into the matter, as Congress pressed technology companies to determine how Russian operatives used social media, online advertising, and other digital tools to influence the 2016 presidential contest and foment discord in U.S. society. 

Google declined to provide a comment for this story. The people familiar with its investigation said that the company is looking at a set of ads that cost less than $100,000 and that it is still sorting out whether all of the ads came from trolls or whether some originated from legitimate Russian accounts.

The Russians had this figured out and they executed their attacks flawlessly. And as long as Trump remains in the White House and his GOP enablers remain in charge of Congress, we'll never know to what extent our political system remains compromised, and there's every reason to believe it will remained compromised for the foreseeable future.

If the Kremlin can put people making videos on YouTube, what else is a Russian front at this point?

A Real Corker Of A Fight

The Twitter fight over the weekend between Donald Trump and retiring Tennessee GOP Sen. Bob Corker got pretty heated, Trump accusing Corker of not having the guts to run again in 2018, Corker firing back that the White House was an "adult day care".  It resulted in a brutal Corker interview with the NY Times where the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman said Trump's recklessness would lead to World War III.

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.” 

In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares about our nation.” 

Mr. Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between the president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck, lawmaker, whose support will be critical to the president on tax reform and the fate of the Iran nuclear deal. 

It began on Sunday morning when Mr. Trump, posting on Twitter, accused Mr. Corker of deciding not to run for re-election because he “didn’t have the guts.” Mr. Corker shot back in his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”

The senator, Mr. Trump said, had “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” the president wrote. He also said that Mr. Corker had asked to be secretary of state. “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he wrote. 

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business. 

Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker said in a telephone interview. 

The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump, until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.” 

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Corker’s remarks.

Considering Trump would need Corker's full support on just about anything foreign policy related (Iran, North Korea,  immigration, etc) or just as a reliable vote in general for his tax scheme, pissing Corker off is something that's probably going to cost Trump down the line.

But for Corker to unload like this and confirm that "several of his caucus" feel the same way about Trump is going to make things very uncomfortable for them in the coming days and weeks, as certainly they will be asked if they agree with Corker, and if so, what they plan to do about reining Trump in.

How much of this is kabuki I cannot say, Corker is after all retiring, and that's significant. So is your own party questioning the fitness of a sitting Oval Office occupant to do the job. Whether or not this is the fisrt crack in the dam of Trump support on Capitol Hill remains to be seen, but there certainly now precedent for the Senate GOP to trash Trump openly.

Stay tuned.  Blood is in the water and it's Shark Week.

StupidiNews!

• Senate Democrats are rejecting a Trump deal that would reauthorize the DACA immigration program in exchange for a border wall and significant cuts to legal immigration.
• In what appears to have been a planned political stunt, VP Mike Pence stormed out of an NFL game in Indianapolis on Sunday after some players took a knee for the national anthem.
• Iran is promising a "crushing" reponse to the US should the Trump regime decertify the nuclear agreement with Tehran and declare Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist group.
• Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been fired by his studio's board of directors after news of legal settlement with at least eight women over sexual assault.
• Hurricane Nate, now a tropical depression after slamming into the Gulf Coast, made nine named Atlantic hurricanes in 2017, a new record in the satellite era.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment, Con't

Talk about blast from the past: Even former Whitewater prosecutor Ken Starr thinks indictments and plea deals are coming from Mueller's investigation.

Ken Starr, the former independent counsel in the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals during Bill Clinton’s presidency, predicted Saturday that there would likely be indictments in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russia's election meddling. 

“Given what we do know, especially given what happened this summer with respect to the FBI’s intrusion into Paul Manafort’s condominium, in light of the revelations that we’ve seen about General Flynn, I have a sense that there will in fact be indictments,” Starr said on CNN’s “Smerconish," referring to President Trump's former campaign chairman and his first national security adviser, respectively.

Starr said “there may be guilty pleas” in the investigation, and said the indictment of foreign nationals could take place. 

“What I find very interesting … is in light of the information that is now coming out with respect to Russian attempts to influence both the national election and 21 different states, what I expect to see is serious consideration of indicting one or more foreign nationals,” he said.

Which I believe too and have been telling you about for months now, but it's different coming from Starr, who isn't exactly a pal of Democrats these days, but hey, he has problems of his own of a sexual nature.

Listen All Y'All It's Sabotage

The Trump regime isn't even bothering to hide the fact that the goal now is what former Obama administration Medicare/Medicaid chief Andy Slavitt calls "synthetic repeal". 

Much of the enforcement of ACA regulations are at the will of the executive branch, and Trump is doing everything he can to use those regulations to collapse the individual plan markets and force repeal of the law.  Of course, doing so will wreck the country's insurance markets, plunge insurers into chaos, and jack up premiums on pretty much everyone.

But that's the point. Trump's biggest sabotage efforts so far will come next week with a new executive order that will almost certainly devastate health care coverage for millions.

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order next week to start lifting some insurance rules set by his predecessor’s Affordable Care Act in the aftermath of the failed Republican bid to repeal the law, a senior administration official said Saturday. 

The order is aimed at expanding insurance options for Americans who buy coverage on their own or work for a small employer, and would include broad instructions for agencies to explore ways to loosen regulations and potentially lower premiums, as well as looking at three specific areas of health insurance. It has been anticipated by industry officials and political observers in the days since the GOP repeal effort crashed.

Republicans have long contended that the insurance rules set by the 2010 health law, popularly dubbed Obamacare, have driven up premiums in the individual and small group markets, for healthier Americans especially. Democrats and supporters of the law typically counter that the rules have protected consumers from unwittingly buying shoddy products and helped subsidize the costs of sicker Americans. 

Mr. Trump will order three agencies, the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Treasury, to take steps to make it easier for people to band together and buy insurance through “association health plans,” the official said. 

Such plans would in some ways be like large employer’s health plans, subject to some restrictions set by the Affordable Care Act, including a ban on lifetime limits. But they would be free of other regulations, including the requirement that insurance plans cover a set package of benefits. These plans are popular with conservatives; some insurers fear that associations would peel off healthier and younger individuals and leave traditional insurance plans to cover sicker and older customers. 

The president also will order the agencies to start winding back an Obama-era rule curbing coverage known as “short-term medical insurance,” a low-cost but limited-protection option, and allow people to once again buy those plans for up to a year, the official said. 

The Obama administration banned the sale of those plans that offered coverage for more than 90 days, arguing they were inadequate for people’s needs. Some industry officials have pressed the administration to restore them, saying that when marketed honestly they can fit the needs of particular consumers currently priced out of buying the more generous coverage available as a result of the 2010 health-care overhaul. 

In addition, the executive order would order agencies to expand health reimbursement accounts, employer-funded arrangements that employees can use to pay out-of-pocket medical costs and premiums. Obama-era guidance from 2013 had prevented pretax employer dollars in the arrangements from being used to buy health insurance on the individual market. 

The three moves would represent the most substantive step the White House has taken to date in paring back Affordable Care Act rules using administrative powers. They don’t go as far as many critics of the law would like but are likely to be followed by other steps, administration officials said.

The three steps combined would be a nightmare: they would recreate high-risk pools with little coverage and no guaranteed benefits other than catastrophic coverage and allow employers to move employee plans to that model,meaning millions of people would be dodging both the individual mandate and the penalty fee for not having insurance.

It would cause insurance rates for everyone else to skyrocket as a result, collapsing the markets for both individual plans and for employer-based plans too, meaning instead of real insurance, employers could offer health savings accounts for junk plans with no real coverage, and have to pay up front for the privilege (and lose the money at the end of the year if they didn't use it for health care).

In other words, it's a direct recipe for blowing up Obamacare and everyone knows it.

Democrats have characterized the effort as potentially sabotaging the consumer protections they set in the ACA, and they have won support from some insurance industry officials. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has said it has concerns. 

Some industry officials say that siphoning off healthier individuals from the existing insurance markets with the promise of skimpier benefits but lower premiums could further undermine those markets, increasing premiums ever more for the sicker, costlier enrollees that remain. 

“Its aim is clearly to do with the pen what Congress wouldn’t—eliminate pre-existing condition protections, essential benefit protections and lifetime caps and turn the ACA into a sparsely available high-risk pool,” said Andy Slavitt, who was the Obama administration’s top official at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Only garbage coverage plans would be available through the ACA, and everyone would suffer.

But again, that's the point.

They Came Back Of Course

Actual Nazi Richard Spencer decided to come back to Charlottesville and reopen some old wounds by staging a (much smaller) surprise white supremacist rally in the city's Emancipation Park.  About 30 people showed up, but that was enough for Spencer to start gloating and to give the game away

The group carried tiki torches and chanted "You will not replace us," by a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the park. They also reportedly said, "we will be back." 

"Hello Charlottesville, we're back and we're going to keep coming back. You will not replace us, you will not erase us," a protester on a megaphone said.

"The left wing establishment is built around anti-white policies," Spencer told the group.

The group also chanted "The South will rise again" and "Russia is our friend."

The rally comes less than two months after violence erupted in the town between "Unite the Right" protesters and counter protesters.

The alt-right rally, which was meant to protest the removal of the statue of Lee, reignited the debate over the future of Confederate statues and monuments across the country.

These guys want a bloody civil war, and nobody would benefit more from that than Moscow.  The whole group of these jackasses are backed by Putin and the manipulation is so obvious it's painful, but our government is compromised so badly by the Russians now that there's not much we can do other than weather the storm.

In case there was any doubt as to whom Spencer is taking his orders from.

Sunday Long Read: Perfecting The Dog Whistle

If you want to know what banished White House racist rabble-rouser Steve Bannon and his Boy Wonder Milo Yiannopoulos are up to after two-shirt Steve got booted over his little confab in Charlottesville this summer, it turns out that the pair of slimeballs have plenty of help spreading their message of hate from Silicon Valley techbros.

In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK.

But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right, he was merely referring to “computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.”

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

And the cache of emails — some of the most newsworthy of which BuzzFeed News is now making public — expose the extent to which this machine depended on Yiannopoulos, who channeled voices both inside and outside the establishment into a clear narrative about the threat liberal discourse posed to America. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.

"I have said in the past that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about," Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "But everyone who knows me also knows I'm not a racist. As someone of Jewish ancestry, I of course condemn racism in the strongest possible terms. I have stopped making jokes on these matters because I do not want any confusion on this subject. I disavow Richard Spencer and his entire sorry band of idiots. I have been and am a steadfast supporter of Jews and Israel. I disavow white nationalism and I disavow racism and I always have.”

He added that during his karaoke performance, his "severe myopia" made it impossible for him to see the Hitler salutes a few feet away.

Steve Bannon, the other Breitbart employees named in the story, and the Mercer family did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Like all the new media success stories, Breitbart’s alt-right platform depends on the participation of its audience. It combusts the often secret fury of those who reject liberal norms into news, and it doesn’t burn clean.

Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America.

And folks, these are some ugly sins being put on display.  Milo was the charismatic point man selling neo-Nazi snake oil, Klan "economic anxiety" and Bell Curve social engineering to like-minded folks in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and he is very, very good at it.  He packaged it as the "alt-right" and Bannon sold it for the Breitbart masses to help Trump.  And his help covers the whole cast of characters, including our good friend Teddy Beale and Evil Chuck Johnson, as well as Richard Spencer and Andrew "weev" Aurenheimer and their crew of actual goddamn Nazis.

But let's not forget the real goal of this packaging and marketing of rancid white supremacy to the masses. 

All this helped to put Trump in the White House.

"Make America Great Again" was and still is a racist dog whistle that is all about making white supremacy acceptable again, and Steve Bannon was chief strategist for the Trump campaign and the regime.  His protege, Stephen Miller, is still Trump's chief speechwriter, still packaging and selling white supremacy today.

Pay close attention to hedge fund billionaire tech bro Robert Mercer and his family in this article too.  It's clear they are the bankroll for Bannon and his merry band, and if there's a source of endless dark money and darker social manipulation on the net to market Trump's racism as "populism" it's Mercer. There's a brutal junction between tech and racism, and it was exploited to full effect in 2016. It will be exploited again in 2018 and 2020.

These are who America's leaders are because this is who we have always been: a country built on the exploitation of race and proud of doing so, punctuated by the long, slow fight for justice against it.

Never forget however that these assholes could not have come to power without the people that elected them, and were perfectly okay with white supremacy being the defining characteristic of the Republican party in 2017.  Call them what they are.

These guys turned racist dog whistles into Trump campaign bullhorns, and they won because of it. This is why I will resist them, every day, in this blog and in other ways, until we are rid of them.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

To the surprise of nobody (and especially to long-time readers of ZVTS) the Trump regime is now starting to actively target Black Lives Matter activists as "domestic terrorists". 

As white supremacists prepared to descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, the FBI warned about a new movement that was violent, growing, and racially motivated. Only it wasn’t white supremacists; it was “black identity extremists.” 

Amid a rancorous debate over whether the Trump administration has downplayedthe threat posed by white supremacist groups, the FBI’s counterterrorism division has declared that black identity extremists pose a growing threat of premeditated violence against law enforcement. 

“The FBI assesses it is very likely Black Identity Extremist (BIE) perceptions of police brutality against African Americans spurred an increase in premeditated, retaliatory lethal violence against law enforcement and will very likely serve as justification for such violence,” reads the report, marked for official use only and obtained by Foreign Policy. 

The August 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was the catalyst for widespread anger and violence, the FBI report says, concluding that continued “alleged” police abuses have fueled more violence. 

“The FBI assesses it is very likely incidents of alleged police abuse against African Americans since then have continued to feed the resurgence in ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement,” the report states. 

Some 748 people have been shot and killed by police so far in 2017, including at least 168 African-Americans. 

The report, dated Aug. 3 — just nine days before the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville turned deadly — appears to be the first known reference to “black identity extremists” as a movement. But former government officials and legal experts said no such movement exists, and some expressed concern that the term is part of a politically motivated effort to find an equivalent threat to white supremacists. 

A former senior counterterrorism and intelligence official from the Department of Homeland Security who reviewed the document at FP’s request expressed shock at the language. 

“This is a new umbrella designation that has no basis,” the former official said. “There are civil rights and privacy issues all over this.” 

The concept of “black identity extremists” appears to be entirely new. FP found only five references to the term in a Google search; all were to law enforcement documents about domestic terrorism from the last two months. One of those online references is to law enforcement training on identifying “domestic terror groups and criminally subversive subcultures which are encountered by law enforcement professionals on a daily basis.” 

Among the six acts of premeditated violence linked to black identity extremists — it excludes violence toward police carried out in the normal course of their duties — the reports cites the July 2016 shooting of 11 police officers in Dallas. The shooter, Micah Johnson, was reportedly angry at police violence. 

“Based on Johnson’s journal writings and statements to police, he appeared to have been influenced by BIE ideology,” the FBI report states. The attack took place during a Black Lives Matter protest of police shootings, though the BLM movement is not mentioned by name in the report. 

Yet those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement have voiced concerns about FBI surveillance. 

DeRay McKesson, an activist involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, told FP that the FBI visited his house in the run-up to the Republican National Convention. “I spoke about the FBI visit to my house and the houses of other activists in our final meeting with [President Barack] Obama,” he said. 

“There is a long tradition of the FBI targeting black activists and this is not surprising,” McKesson said.

This is confirmation that the FBI is leveraging the so-called "Ferguson Effect": that forcing police departments to actively deal with racism in their everyday activities somehow creates more crime, into policy.  The framework for doing this is now in place.  All we need now is one more major incident that the feds can blame on Black Lives Matter activists, and the declaration of the group as a terrorist organization will be complete.

I have predicted this several times over the last year, and I will continue to say it now: Trump wants a race war so he can bring down the power of the state on all black people in this country.

This is how it starts.

Banking On A House Of Cards

Our old friends JP Morgan Chase have been up to their old tricks again, and David Dayen's investigation at The Nation finds the bank paid for defrauding homeowners out of billions during the housing crisis by defrauding homeowners out of billions a second time by pretending to pay for it.

After JPMorgan’s deceitful activities in the housing market helped trigger the 2008 financial crash that cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes, and life savings, punishment was in order. Among a vast array of misconduct, JPMorgan engaged in the routine use of “robo-signing,” which allowed bank employees to automatically sign hundreds, even thousands, of foreclosure documents per day without verifying their contents. But in the United States, white-collar criminals rarely go to prison; instead, they negotiate settlements. Thus, on February 9, 2012, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the National Mortgage Settlement, which fined JPMorgan Chase and four other mega-banks a total of $25 billion. 

JPMorgan’s share of the settlement was $5.3 billion, but only $1.1 billion had to be paid in cash; the other $4.2 billion was to come in the form of financial relief for homeowners in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. The settlement called for JPMorgan to reduce the amounts owed, modify the loan terms, and take other steps to help distressed Americans keep their homes. A separate 2013 settlement against the bank for deceiving mortgage investors included another $4 billion in consumer relief. 

A Nation investigation can now reveal how JPMorgan met part of its $8.2 billion settlement burden: by using other people’s money. 

Here’s how the alleged scam worked. JPMorgan moved to forgive the mortgages of tens of thousands of homeowners; the feds, in turn, credited these canceled loans against the penalties due under the 2012 and 2013 settlements. But here’s the rub: In many instances, JPMorgan was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned.
The alleged fraud is described in internal JPMorgan documents, public records, testimony from homeowners and investors burned in the scam, and other evidence presented in a blockbuster lawsuit against JPMorgan, now being heard in US District Court in New York City. 

JPMorgan no longer owned the properties because it had sold the mortgages years earlier to 21 third-party investors, including three companies owned by Larry Schneider. Those companies are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit; Schneider is also aiding the federal government in a related case against the bank. In a bizarre twist, a company associated with the Church of Scientology facilitated the apparent scheme. Nationwide Title Clearing, a document-processing company with close ties to the church, produced and filed the documents that JPMorgan needed to claim ownership and cancel the loans. 

JPMorgan, it appears, was running an elaborate shell game. In the depths of the financial collapse, the bank had unloaded tens of thousands of toxic loans when they were worth next to nothing. Then, when it needed to provide customer relief under the settlements, the bank had paperwork created asserting that it still owned the properties. In the process, homeowners were exploited, investors were defrauded, and communities were left to battle the blight caused by abandoned properties. JPMorgan, however, came out hundreds of millions of dollars ahead, thanks to using other people’s money. 

“If the allegations are true, JPMorgan screwed everybody,” says Brad Miller, a former Democratic congressman from North Carolina who was among the strongest advocates of financial reform on Capitol Hill until his retirement in 2013.

They forgave mortgages they didn't actually own.

That's fraud, plain and simple.  And this time, somebody might actually pay for it.

In an unusual departure from most allegations of financial bad behavior, there is strong evidence that Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s CEO and chairman, knew about and helped to implement the mass loan-forgiveness project. In two separate meetings in 2013 and 2014, JPMorgan employees working on the project were specifically instructed not to release mortgages in Detroit under orders from Dimon himself, according to internal bank communications. In an apparent public-relations ploy, JPMorgan was about to invest $100 million in Detroit’s revival. Dimon’s order to delay forgiving the mortgages in Detroit appears to have been motivated by a fear of reputational risk. An internal JPMorgan report warned that hard-hit cities might take issue with bulk loan forgiveness, which would deprive municipal governments of property taxes on abandoned properties while further destabilizing the housing market. 

Did Dimon also know that JPMorgan, as part of its mass loan-forgiveness project, was forgiving loans on properties it no longer owned? No internal bank documents confirming that knowledge have yet surfaced, but Dimon routinely takes legal responsibility for knowing about his bank’s actions. Like every financial CEO in the country, Dimon is obligated by law to sign a document every year attesting to his knowledge of and responsibility for his bank’s operations. The law establishes punishments of $1 million in fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years for knowingly making false certifications. 

Dimon signed the required document for each of the years that the mass loan-forgiveness project was in operation, from 2012 through 2016. Whether or not he knew that his employees were forgiving loans the bank no longer owned, his signatures on those documents make him potentially legally responsible.

I would very much like to see Jaime Dimon spend the rest of his natural life in a very, very small prison cell, and I hope this is the reason why.

The NRA Election

So 78% of American households do not own a gun, and 3% of Americans account for 50% of guns owned in this country.  If you split the 2016 vote among gun-owning households and those who do not, Clinton would have won every state except West Virginia (Wyoming doesn't have enough data) among non-gun owners, and Trump would have won every state except for Vermont among gun-owners.



Here's your Two Americas right here.

One side literally has all the weapons, and is completely incompatible with the other.

But the gun owners completely control our country politically.

Last Call For Trump's War On Women, Con't

Donald Trump has failed to repeal Obamacare, but it doesn't mean he can't sabotage it from the inside out.  Today, the regime has all but ended contraception coverage requirements for employee health plans and will allow pretty much all employers to drop coverage of birth control, effective now.

The Trump administration is relaxing an Obama-era requirement that nearly all employers offer health insurance that covers a wide array of contraceptive methods. 

New regulations released Friday significantly broaden the types of companies and organizations that can request an exemption from that rule. This could lead to many American women who currently receive no-cost contraception having to pay out of pocket for their medication. 

The new rules take effect immediately. And they allow large, publicly traded companies to seek an exemption from the birth control requirement if they have a religious or moral objection to providing such coverage. The Obama administration barred these large businesses from such exemptions. 

“This provides an exemption, a limited one, for those with religious or moral convictions implicated by the contraceptive mandate,” an HHS official said in a Friday morning briefing with reporters previewing the rule. 

HHS projects that “99.9 percent of women” will be unaffected by these changes but gave little explanation of how it came to that data point. Officials did note that only a few hundred small businesses have so far raised religious or moral objections against the requirement by filing lawsuits. 

But it is possible that larger publicly traded companies could join their ranks as the exemption gets widened. And the rule itself is blunt about the possible effect, noting that “These final rules will result in some enrollees in plans of exempt entities not receiving coverage or payments for contraceptive services.”

Which is the point.  Your boss now gets to control whether or not the company's health coverage will cover contraception.  I would imagine a number of small businesses would jump at the chance, and don't be surprised if Fortune 1000 companies follow suit.

The worst news is that the legal battle that is coming may already have been lost.

Women’s health groups, including the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for Reproductive Rights, have been preparing to file lawsuits against the regulation, based on an earlier draft that Vox obtained in late May. 

The new rules have been designed specifically to guard against those expected challenges, a source familiar with their drafting told Vox. The Trump administration technically released two separate rules: one broadening the religious exemption and one creating a new moral exemption from the mandate. The reason is that if a court were to strike down one rule in a lawsuit, the other would likely still stand. 

“Bifurcating the rule into two separate parts is like a severability clause on steroids,” Nicholas Bagley, a health law professor at the University of Michigan, said. “It's signaling in the strongest possible terms that the agency independently wants both parts of the rule to remain in place, even if one, or part of one, is invalidated.” 

That strategy should be effective, forcing opponents to chase two targets. “The courts,” Bagley said, “will almost certainly respect that policy choice.”

It's not looking good at this point, especially as House Republicans passed a federal 20-week abortion ban.

It might be time to break out the red dresses and white habits sooner rather than later.

Tim Murphy's Law, Con't

Looks like Murphy's Law caught up with Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy in a gigantic way after the story of multiple affairs and at least one request for a mistress to get an abortion (a big no-no if you're a MAGA Republican) broke earlier in the week.

Now Murphy's career appears to be completely over, ending in his resignation from Congress and rumors of campaign finance violations, abuse of staffers, and more.

Rep. Tim Murphy, a staunch anti-abortion advocate, thought he could withstand the media furor that engulfed him after reports that he’d encouraged his extramarital lover to end her apparent pregnancy. 

He was wrong. 

Just one day after announcing he would retire after the 2018 election, Murphy reversed course and told Speaker Paul Ryan he was resigning effective Oct. 21. Murphy’s abrupt decision ended a 15-year career on Capitol Hill in a shocking manner. The 65-year-old Pennsylvania Republican was so safe in his conservative district that Democrats hadn’t even fielded an opponent against him during the past two election cycles. 

Ironically, Murphy’s swift collapse came not because of text messages he sent to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair, encouraging her to have an abortion as first reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday. In fact, fears among senior Republicans about a potential wave of negative stories on how Murphy ran his congressional office were what ultimately pushed him out the door. 

Multiple top House Republicans during the past 24 hours pressured Murphy to resign once it became clear that the House Ethics Committee might have to investigate allegations tied to his reported mistreatment of staffers. Numerous GOP sources were aware of systemic problems in Murphy’s office, including high staff turnover, which had been the topic of gossip and speculation for years. 

The Post-Gazette had reported on a June 2017 memo in which Murphy’s longtime chief of staff, Susan Mosychuk, warned the Pennsylvania Republican that he was mistreating and “harassing” staff, causing 100 percent turnover. 

But Mosychuk is a source of controversy herself. 

A number of former Murphy staffers told POLITICO that it was Mosychuk’s behavior that drove them to leave Murphy's office. And these ex-aides said the combination of Murphy and Mosychuk — who had a close personal relationship, according to GOP lawmakers and staffers — made the situation intolerable. Mosychuk was promoted to Murphy’s chief of staff in 2004, just a year after becoming his legislative director.

This story is a mess: both Mosychuk and Murphy were apparently awful to their employees and staffers left in droves only to be replaced and the new people leaving as well.

Ex-staffers said Mosychuk kept white noise machines throughout Murphy’s congressional office so constituents waiting in the front room couldn’t hear her screaming. If Mosychuk was angry at staffers, she would make them take the stairs instead of the elevator, so they couldn’t ride with her, according to one former employee who witnessed it. 

Mosychuk would even call staffers out of their bathroom breaks to demand they return to the office, or yell at them for taking too long to use the restroom. Many younger aides did not take lunch breaks, eating at their desks because they were scolded for leaving. One new employee quit after just a couple days because he was dressed down for using a paper clip instead of a staple on a briefing packet, multiple sources said. 

“It was one of the worst places I have ever worked in my life. There was screaming. Intimidation. Nothing you ever did was right,” Nick Rodondo, Murphy’s former district director, told Pittsburgh radio station KDKA’s “Marty Griffin Show.” 

Rodondo said the two of them were fond of each other — he said he saw them feed each other at events — but terrible to many others. 

“Susan Mosychuk was no better than [Murphy]. She wrote that memo to cover her butt," he continued. "I know, Marty. I know what these people are like. To call them creeps is an affront to creeps.”

This went from normal Republican hypocrisy to full-blown meltdown in just a couple of days, and believe me, I'm glad to see Murphy gone.  Democrats absolutely need to find a way to get this seat back in the Age of Trump if they're ever going to take back the House.

Iran It Into The Ground

Tang the Conqueror is about to unilaterally blow up President Obama's Iranian nuclear deal, wrecking our relations with the nations that supported us on the agreement and absolutely putting Iran on a North Korea-style path to a nuclear weapon.

President Trump plans to announce next week that he will “decertify” the international nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is not in the national interest of the United States and kicking the issue to a reluctant Congress, people briefed on an emerging White House strategy for Iran said Thursday. 

The move would mark the first step in a process that could eventually result in the resumption of U.S. sanctions against Iran, which would blow up a deal limiting Iran’s nuclear activities that the country reached in 2015 with the U.S. and five other nations. 

Trump is expected to deliver a speech, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 12, laying out a larger strategy for confronting the nation it blames for terrorism and instability throughout the Middle East.

Under what is described as a tougher and more comprehensive approach, Trump would open the door to modifying the landmark 2015 agreement he has repeatedly bashed as a raw deal for the United States. But for now he would hold off on recommending that Congress reimpose sanctions on Iran that would abrogate the agreement, said four people familiar with aspects of the president’s thinking.

Remember, the US didn't go into this alone, all five permanent members of the UN Security Council supported this deal, plus Germany (the so-called P5+1) which means if we sink the deal, we leave them in the lurch too.

That would start a 60-day congressional review period to consider the next steps for the United States. On its own, the step would not break the agreement among Iran, the United States and other world powers, but would start a clock on resuming sanctions that the United States had lifted as its part of the deal.

The administration has begun discussing possible legislation to “strengthen” the agreement, congressional aides and others said. That is the “fix it or nix it” approach suggested by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a leading Republican hawk on Iran.

It is an uncertain prospect, and many supporters of the deal consider it a dodge.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said last month that he will not reopen the deal for negotiation. 

Separately, representatives of Iran, China and Russia told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the same thing during a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly session, two senior diplomats familiar with that meeting said.

So the deal would fall apart for sure, and there would be no reason for anyone to trust the Trump regime or the word of the US again in future negotiations, not that anyone would after Trump sank the Paris Climate Agreement.

We're rapidly joining the ranks of international pariahs, easily making us the most dangerous rogue state on Earth with our massive military and huge nuclear arsenal, not to mention our dangerous loose cannon of a leader.

As I've said before, when does the rest of the world move to act to contain us?

StupidiNews!

• The 2017 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons for their work in over 100 countries towards the end of nuclear proliferation.
• Flooding and storm surge from Tropical Storm Nate has already killed 22 in Central America, the storm is headed for the Gulf of Mexico and the Florida panhandle by early next week.
• Donald Trump called a Thursday White House meeting with Pentagon officials "the calm before the storm" as possible responses to situations in Iran and North Korea were discussed.
• Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria are expected to weigh heavily on September job numbers due out today, but analyst says October's numbers should rebound sharply.
• Miami Beach police have arrested the man behind a parody Twitter account of a police spokesman, charging with the third-degree felony of impersonating a police officer.

Last Call For Russian To Judgment

You would think that given the allegations against our good friends in Russia that the Trump regime would be steaming mad at Moscow and ready to start demanding answers.  Alas, that has yet to happen even as evidence keeps piling up that the Russians have largely succeeded at happily destroying America's intelligence capability for decades.

Hackers working for the Russian government stole details of how the U.S. penetrates foreign computer networks and defends against cyberattacks after a National Security Agency contractor removed the highly classified material and put it on his home computer, according to multiple people with knowledge of the matter.

The hackers appear to have targeted the contractor after identifying the files through the contractor’s use of a popular antivirus software made by Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, these people said. 

The theft, which hasn’t been disclosed, is considered by experts to be one of the most significant security breaches in recent years. It offers a rare glimpse into how the intelligence community thinks Russian intelligence exploits a widely available commercial software product to spy on the U.S. 

The incident occurred in 2015 but wasn’t discovered until spring of last year, said the people familiar with the matter. 

The stolen material included details about how the NSA penetrates foreign computer networks, the computer code it uses for such spying and how it defends networks inside the U.S., these people said. 

Having such information could give the Russian government information on how to protect its own networks, making it more difficult for the NSA to conduct its work. It also could give the Russians methods to infiltrate the networks of the U.S. and other nations, these people said. 

The breach is the first known incident in which Kaspersky software is believed to have been exploited by Russian hackers to conduct espionage against the U.S. government. The company, which sells its antivirus products in the U.S., had revenue of more than half a billion dollars in Western Europe and the Americas in 2016, according to International Data Corp. By Kaspersky’s own account it has more than 400 million users world-wide. 

The revelation comes as concern over Russian infiltration of American computer networks and social media platforms is growing amid a U.S. special counsel’s investigation into whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign sought or received assistance from the Russian government. Mr. Trump denies any impropriety and has called the matter a “witch hunt.” 

Intelligence officials have concluded that a campaign authorized by the highest levels of the Russian government hacked into state election-board systems and the email networks of political organizations to damage the candidacy of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. 

A spokesman for the NSA didn’t comment on the security breach. “Whether the information is credible or not, NSA’s policy is never to comment on affiliate or personnel matters,” he said. He noted that the Defense Department, of which the NSA is a part, has a contract for antivirus software with another company, not Kaspersky. 

In a statement, Kaspersky Lab said it “has not been provided any information or evidence substantiating this alleged incident, and as a result, we must assume that this is another example of a false accusation.” 

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov in a statement didn’t address whether the Russian government stole materials from the NSA using Kaspersky software. But he criticized the U.S. government’s decision to ban the software from use by U.S. agencies as “undermining the competitive positions of Russian companies on the world arena.”

I've long said that Kaspersky Labs could have been a Putin intel front, I warned you guys about them two years ago and surprise, that's when the theft took place.  Now we absolutely know that's the case, because the Russians have now hit us not just once (Edward Snowden), not just twice (Harold Martin) but now three times with this yet-to-be-named contractor who got his data hoovered up by Kaspersky Labs.

No wonder the Russians were able to pull off the soft coup of the century and install Donald Trump in the White House.  They had the keys to the front door, back door, and every side door in sight, and every time they opened one they found more keys waiting to be handed over.  And yeah, the guy who has to shoulder the blame for that?

Barack Obama.  I'm sorry to say it, but he messed up.  Badly.  Fatally so, in fact.  We'll be paying for this for the rest of my lifetime, I suspect.  Once would be a mistake, twice is an unfortunate coincidence, but three times is enemy action as they say, and he got rolled along with our entire country.

He lost the first major war of the 21st century without firing a shot.  Maybe that's harsh, but look at the hell we're in today.  There's a lot of blame to go around, and he has to get his share of it.

Don't get me wrong, Donald Trump is a traitor, period.  But Obama made this far too easy for Moscow to win.