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From a Sunlight Foundation email:

ADVISORY: CONGRESSMAN STEVE ISRAEL TO INTRODUCE LANDMARK TRANSPARENCY LEGISLATION

WASHINGTON, DC – During Sunshine Week next week, Congressman Steve Israel (NY-02) will introduce The Public Online Information Act (POIA), a banner piece of legislation to require that all public government-held information be available to all Americans online. Congressman Israel will announce his plans for POIA at the press conference next TUESDAY, March 16, 2010 at the United States Capitol. Congressman Israel will be joined by Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation and Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Who: Congressman Steve Israel (NY-02), Ellen Miller, executive director and co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation and Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum

What: Press Conference to announce the Public Online Information Act (POIA)

Where: The House Triangle, located in the grassy triangle on the House side of the U.S. Capitol’s East Front

When: TUESDAY, March 16, 2010 at 1:30 p.m.

Joshua Rosner on Securitization from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo.

Hat tip to Rortybomb, who organzied MMbM, for the link.

Let’s do this:

MMbM + FCF = Financial Reform campaign we need.

Watch the acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Original Score.
View the acceptance speech & more for the Oscar for Best Original Score.

I had people that I worked with all through my life who always told me what you’re doing is not a waste of time.

Learn more about Michael Giacchino.

My creativity had to find an outlet somehow.

After watching, you should be curious about this.

Failure is an option, but fear is not.

Let me think. NO!

At Bloomberg about the UK/Dutch push to get Icelanders to pay them back for Iceland’s banks being idiots with risk:

The bill obliges the island to take on $5.3 billion, or 45 percent of last year’s economic output, in loans from the U.K. and the Netherlands to compensate the two countries for depositor losses stemming from the collapse of Landsbanki Islands hf more than a year ago.

Iceland’s credit rating has been downgraded to junk which will make it extremely expensive and difficult to refinance their debt.
In a wonderfully revengeful type possibly related note – the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative is still alive.

From a recent article in the Sunday Business Post Online:

Iceland has, in the last two years, watched its entire banking sector disappear and its economy pulled into a deep recession.

In trying to understand the causes of the collapse, it has become clear that, not only was it a case of corruption and misapplication of trust, but also a lack of government transparency and a legally-crippled media.

Iceland is in a prime situation – due to the crash – to reconsider where it wants to stand in the coming decades.

Due in part to the nature of the collapse here, it is important for Iceland to take the moral high ground.

Previously here:

Iceland could become the Switzerland of bits.

From HuffPo article entitled Systemic Denial by Larry Lessig:

I was keen to hear just what the strategy was to restore us to some sort of financial sanity. How could we avoid it again? Yet through the course of the morning, I was struck by two very different and very depressing points.

The first is that things are actually much worse than anyone ever talks about….

But the second point was even worse. Expert after expert spoke as if the problems we faced were simple math errors…

This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets — and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right — believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud.

Which is why I’m working on this.

FixCongressFirst.org.
MakeMarketsBeMarkets.org.

From Bloomberg’s Business Week:

“I’ve asked people to think about this, to mull it over, have staffs get back, give us their reaction to these things,” Dodd told reporters after the Washington meeting. “There is no agreement.”

From Bloomberg:

Customers would face higher borrowing rates and other charges, employees might receive less pay, and investors will face lower stock prices, the CBO said.

The agency said the fee would slightly lower the supply of credit and strengthen the competitive position of smaller banks. The fee would probably not have a measurable impact on U.S. economic growth.

The CCH Financial Crisis News Center posts articles about the financial crisis.

About the site:

The CCH Financial Crisis News Center is intended to provide the legal community and others with news and links to vital information on the current financial crisis. Maintained by a staff of attorney-editors, this site helps visitors track ongoing developments in this wide-ranging crisis and the multiple responses from lawmakers and regulatory agencies.

From Walters Kluwer.

Bank Digest
Walters Kluwer CCH Financial Crisis News Center – Forum Explores Causes of the Financial Crisis
The Huffingpost – Questions For Mr. Pandit
OregonLive.com – THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION HOLDS A FORUM TO EXPLORE THE CAUSES OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS, DAY 1 – Part 6
[This is a transcript. Not sure where the other parts are!]

From Craig Mod broken into sections:

Contents

* Good riddance
* Defined by content
* The universal container
* Books we make
* Specimen table
* Recommendations
* Discussion

And yes, the iPad is big part of the article. Coming April 3rd.

But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback…

With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean?

Hat tip Daring Fireball.

Graphic from Sunlight Foundation.

From their article A Brief History of Senate Reconciliation Votes

The process has been used 22 times since 1974. More often than not, these bills have been vehicles for large reforms in the tax code, health care and other social programs from education to welfare.

What do you mean how it will happen? He will grow a pair and push it through to make it happen. Damn it.

We all gotta grow some nuts for the gipper to help him make it happen. Damn it.
Remember – you’re speech is free.

From Politico:

The small donors who are the targets of direct marketing are described under the heading “Visceral Giving.” Their motivations are listed as “fear;” “Extreme negative feelings toward existing Administration;” and “Reactionary.”

Major donors, by contrast, are treated in a column headed “Calculated Giving.”

Their motivations include: “Peer to Peer Pressure”; “access”; and “Ego-Driven.”

You would think people would be more terrified of the unregulated $600T CDS market that eclipses global GDP of $60T.

It would be impossible to argue with the quality of the panel and the discussion that took place. As many participants pointed out, including James Chanos:

We will not get real regulatory reform until the public gets behind it.

Talking is old school – action is required.

The narrative to get the people involved is what’s important which was also pointed out by several panelists, and by media questions from the audience.

How to improve the narrative so the masses raise hell is what has been challenging. Personally, I can not comprehend how the average person does not realize the risks we currently face.

The quick critique of the Conference as viewed by someone on the web:

1. About 95 people at most watched it. At least according to the data from Ustream. I’d suggest not showing a number unless you know it would be in at least the thousands.
2. The live feed from uStream was horrible. Sound poor. Could hear people whispering while presenters were speaking and also during the Q&A at the end.
3. Website – please do not use Flash! Or at least, use it at the bare minimum.
4. If you are going to use Flash to offer important links from the home page, improve the navigation and usability for users.
5. Watching on Bloomberg TV didn’t seem possible.

Example action steps to move forward:

1. Use data presented at Make Markets Be Markets to create a simple message to get a campaign going like Fix Congress First.
2. Open source community help Sunlight Foundation find raw data to improve transparency and social data discovery so someone like the FCIC is motivated to find the truth and prosecute.
3. Find artists who will create the narrative to reach the masses to ensure reform is written right, and passed.

Check out the groovy website the Sunlight Foundation set up to see who visits the Whitehouse:

Acting on the online release of visitor data provided by the White House, Sunlight Labs mechanically matched the names of White House visitors to names in OpenSecrets.org, FollowTheMoney.org, LittleSis.org, Google and Wikipedia.

They use Socrata.com:

With the Social Data Platform, audiences visualize and search datasets directly within your website, engage in a social discussion, access data via API, and propagate your datasets across social networks, like Twitter.

So they say, governments lie, banksters lie. So it’s up to us to protect our Benjamins obviously.

From the WSJ:

There’s no small irony in the fact that the same governments that once took advantage of derivatives peddled by international financiers to help conceal their true financial condition are now claiming to be the victims of the same banks’ dealings in the derivatives market. But the blame-the-bankers theme in the nascent sovereign-debt panic is of a piece with the banker-baiting that came in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Once again, our political class has been all too eager to find someone else to blame for its own economic mismanagement.

Start your own bank:

Most jurisdictions impose heavy regulation on the banking sector and entry requirements are often designed to discourage the establishment of new banks.

BUT:

With your own financial institution you can legally engage in activities such as….

Screw that. Start your own hedge fund so you can:

Our most popular fund structure can be used to engage in any type of trading and investment activity without being subject to any taxation or reporting requirements on worldwide income.

If this is not a joke – it’s now official – your cash, so called retirement funds – are worthless.

Betting on the Blind Side:

He wanted a more direct tool for betting against subprime-mortgage lending. On March 19, 2005, alone in his office with the door closed and the shades pulled down, reading an abstruse textbook on credit derivatives, Michael Burry got an idea: credit-default swaps on subprime-mortgage bonds.

The caption of the photo at the link is:

Dr. Michael Burry in his home office, in Silicon Valley. “My nature is not to have friends,” Burry concluded years ago. “I’m happy in my own head.”

And, Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow:

Larry Fink may be the most powerful man in the post-bailout economy. His giant BlackRock money-management firm controls or monitors more than $12 trillion worldwide—including the balance sheets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the toxic A.I.G. and Bear Stearns assets taken over by the U.S. government last year.

You don’t read the fine print do you?

From The Economist:

Mobile-phone operators, meanwhile, analyse subscribers’ calling patterns to determine, for example, whether most of their frequent contacts are on a rival network. If that rival network is offering an attractive promotion that might cause the subscriber to defect, he or she can then be offered an incentive to stay…

The best way to deal with these drawbacks of the data deluge is, paradoxically, to make more data available in the right way, by requiring greater transparency in several areas.

Hat tip comment at The Big Picture.