May 2024 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

Healthcare Futures Co. Sues Breakaway Ex-Members In Del.
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Healthcare Futures Co. Sues Breakaway Ex-Members In Del. <https://www.law360.com/health/articles/1838964?nl_pk=6422bbc2-a823-4be5-9a9…> By Jeff Montgomery A company seeking to develop what it described as the first healthcare futures exchange has sued two former managers in Delaware's Court of Chancery for pilfering intellectual property and other resources and then launching a competing venture. Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/health/articles/1838964?nl_pk=6422bbc2-a823-4be5-9a9…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/health/articles/1838964?nl_pk=6422bbc2-a823-4be5-9a9…>

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Bungie Takes Aim At Cheat Code Sellers In Copyright Trial
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Bungie Takes Aim At Cheat Code Sellers In Copyright Trial <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1839173?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> By Rachel Riley Video game studio Bungie kicked off a Seattle copyright trial on Monday by telling federal jurors a group of cheat code sellers deleted financial records and other data and even fabricated a fake press release about the sale of their website to throw Bungie and its attorneys off their scent. Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1839173?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1839173?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…>

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USPTO Says Patent Applicants' Data Was Mistakenly Leaked
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

USPTO Says Patent Applicants' Data Was Mistakenly Leaked <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1838588?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> By Adam Lidgett The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has said it accidentally released certain patent information that shouldn't have been made public during a more than monthlong period, marking another time the office has incorrectly released information. Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1838588?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/cybersecurity-privacy/articles/1838588?nl_pk=3dfd2fd…>

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Idaho, Micron Defend 'Bad Faith' Patent Law At Fed. Circ.
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Idaho, Micron Defend 'Bad Faith' Patent Law At Fed. Circ. <https://www.law360.com/technology/articles/1839037?nl_pk=2bd720dd-746c-4744…> By Adam Lidgett The state of Idaho and Micron Technology Inc. have told the Federal Circuit that Idaho's law barring "bad faith" allegations of patent infringement is constitutional, defending a lower court's ruling that Longhorn IP must pay an $8 million bond under the law. 2 documents attached | Read full article » <https://www.law360.com/technology/articles/1839037?nl_pk=2bd720dd-746c-4744…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.com/technology/articles/1839037?nl_pk=2bd720dd-746c-4744…>

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After Weeks of Howling by MAGA Republicans for the Chair of the FDIC “to Resign,” a Democrat Delivers the Decisive Stab in the Back
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/05/after-weeks-of-howling-by-maga-repub… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 21, 2024 ~ Senator Sherrod Brown (left); Outgoing FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg (right) Senator Sherrod Brown (left); Outgoing FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg (right) Yesterday, at 10:08 a.m., Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio and the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, sent out a shocking emailed statement to the press indicating that Brown was “calling on the President to immediately nominate a new Chair who can lead the FDIC at this challenging time and for the Senate to act on that nomination without delay.” By 6:27 p.m. the Associated Press was reporting that Martin Gruenberg would step down as Chair of the FDIC and President Joe Biden would announce his nomination to replace him “soon.” The Brown statement was a gut punch to every engaged American and journalist who actually understands what’s at stake here. It was not only a back stab to Gruenberg, it was a back stab to Brown’s highly-respected colleague on the Senate Banking Committee, Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has been fighting to keep the battle for higher capital at the tricked-up-accounting megabanks on Wall Street from getting pushed aside in a suspiciously timed brouhaha over sexual harassment at the FDIC. Lost in this brouhaha is the fact that not one individual at the FDIC has accused Gruenberg himself of engaging in sexual harassment. It should also be noted that the Senate Banking Committee is tasked with providing oversight of the megabanks on Wall Street – where credible allegations of rape, sexual assaults and sexual harassment of women have been brought in giant class action lawsuits for decades. Funny thing is – the Senate Banking Committee Chair has asked no Wall Street megabank CEO to resign over those charges. In fact, we cannot remember one Senate Banking hearing that has been convened in the last 20 years to examine the sexual assault and sexual harassment culture at the Wall Street megabanks. Senator Sherrod Brown also appears to be asleep at the switch over the federal court charges that played out through most of last year when the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands credibly accused megabank JPMorgan Chase of “actively participating” in the sex trafficking of underage girls for the indicted (and now deceased) sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. There is also the disquieting fact that Sherrod Brown’s political campaign coffers are being fattened by Wall Street’s go-to Big Law firms. In the current election cycle, Brown has received political contributions from Cleary Gottlieb lawyers, the law firm that authored the so-called “independent” report on the culture at the FDIC; Jones Day, the law firm that packed the Trump administration with 12 of its law partners on the very day Trump was inaugurated; WilmerHale (which defended JPMorgan Chase in federal court against the sex trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein); Boies Schiller (which represented Jeffrey Epstein’s victim-plaintiffs in their claims against JPMorgan Chase); Mayer Brown;, Wachtell Lipton; Sidley Austin; Sullivan & Cromwell; Skadden Arps; Steptoe & Johnson; Kirkland & Ellis; and numerous others. One of the most repulsive moments of the Senate Banking Committee hearing last Thursday was when Senator Tim Scott, the right-wing Ranking Member of the Committee, berated Gruenberg and told him he should resign. This is the same Tim Scott that has thrown his full support behind Donald Trump’s campaign to re-occupy the Oval Office and have power over the launch codes, notwithstanding that Trump was convicted by a jury for sexually-assaulting E. Jean Carroll as well as allegations against Trump of sexual misconduct by at least 17 other women. This is also the same Senator Tim Scott who counts executives and staff of the Wall Street megabank Goldman Sachs as his campaign’s largest donor base since 2019. (What is a Senator from South Carolina doing with a big donor base in New York’s Wall Street? Parroting scripted text during Senate Banking hearings might offer a clue.) Brown’s press statement yesterday opened by saying he had reviewed the “independent report” from Big Law firm Clearly Gottlieb about the toxic culture at the FDIC. But Wall Street On Parade had sent four members of Brown’s staff our report of May 8 which documented that any report from Clearly Gottlieb could not be considered “independent” because they are aligned with the megabanks that wanted Gruenberg to disappear along with his pivotal vote mandating higher capital rules. Our May 8 report noted the following: “Gruenberg held the deciding vote at the FDIC last July when the bank regulator approved moving forward with proposed new rules to significantly raise the capital levels at the megabanks on Wall Street, particularly those holding trillions of dollars in derivatives off their balance sheet. These include the same banks that secretly received $16 trillion in cumulative emergency loans from the Federal Reserve from December 2007 to July 2010 because they were undercapitalized and teetering on insolvency, as well as receiving billions of dollars in equity infusions from the U.S. taxpayer. They also include the same banks that received trillions of dollars in emergency repo loan bailouts in the last quarter of 2019 and more bailouts during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. “Those megabanks have now banded together to attempt to stop the FDIC, the Federal Reserve, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) from giving the final approval to these higher capital rules. No one is fighting harder than Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase.” We also noted in our May 8 report that was conveyed to Brown’s staff that: “As recently as February of this year, Cleary Gottlieb represented a consortium of the megabanks — Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase Bank, PNC Bank, Truist Bank, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo Bank – in regard to their membership interests in the fintech company that owns and operates Zelle. The payment app has come under withering criticism for frauds and scams taking place on Zelle. “Cleary Gottlieb also notes on its website that it has represented the following as financial advisors in various Merger & Acquisition transactions: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. These are the five Wall Street megabanks with the largest derivatives exposures.” Equally noteworthy, Cleary Gottlieb was involved with helping the megabanks on Wall Street try to gut or water down financial reform following the 2008 financial crisis – the worst financial collapse brought on by Wall Street since the 1930s. We quoted from an article by Noam Scheiber that had appeared in The New Republic in 2010: “While the country was buzzing over the [Obama] inauguration, a group of lobbyists representing its biggest banks assembled in a sleek, wood-paneled conference room at the Washington law firm of Cleary Gottlieb to finalize their counter-strategy on reform…Dimon’s troops had been at the center of the planning for months and helped lead the meeting. “The main component of the strategy involved derivatives, the financial instrument that allows investors to bet on the price movements of other assets, like stocks and bonds… For the five major U.S. dealers that dominate the market — JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — the problem was that derivatives represented billions in annual earnings. They wanted to limit the hit to their bottom line.” We can imagine what both Senator Warren and Martin Gruenberg were thinking yesterday morning when Brown’s statement was released to the press: et tu Brute.

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The Curious Money Trail Behind the Supreme Court/Clarence Thomas Decision to Rescue a Federal Agency that Wall Street Hates
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/05/the-curious-money-trail-behind-the-s… Donald Trump, Jones Day Law Firm, Billionaire Charles Koch and the Assault on the CFPB By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 20, 2024 ~ Last Thursday, in a stunning 7-2 win for the little guys and gals in America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau et al v Community Financial Services Association of America, Ltd., et al. Making the decision all the more stunning, it was written by Clarence Thomas, the sitting justice who has been under withering attack in the press for selling out to special interests. (There is speculation that the Thomas name is on the decision to quiet the media uproar against him.) The two dissenting votes came from Justices Samuel Alito (target of a ProPublica investigation in 2023) and Neil Gorsuch, around whom conflicts of interest controversy is also swirling. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been the target of Wall Street lobbyists since before its birth under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 and every year since. Dodd-Frank and the creation of the CFPB came as a Congressional response to the greatest fraudulent wealth transfer from the middle class to the 1 percent since the Wall Street frauds of the late 1920s. Both periods devastated the U.S. economy for years and left millions of Americans unemployed and their savings wiped out. Wall Street megabanks and other bad financial actors are particularly hostile to the fact that the CFPB allows consumers who have been victimized by financial firms, even where small amounts of money are involved, to file a complaint with the CFPB, which then demands a timely written explanation from the alleged wrongdoer. Bad actors dislike the fact that these complaints go into a permanent database at the CFPB, which can be mined by the public, reporters, attorneys and prosecutors looking for patterns of fraud. On May 15 of last year, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, led 144 current and former members of Congress in filing an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case. Their amicus argues that when Congress established the CFPB after the 2008 financial crisis, a judgment was made that the CFPB, like other financial regulators, needed independence from unpredictable annual funding cycles to be effective. As legislated in the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB is funded through the Federal Reserve. Congress maintains oversight authority of the CFPB, and the Director of the agency testifies regularly before Congress. The Community Financial Services Association of America, the opposing front group in the Supreme Court case, which cleverly put the homespun word “Community” in its name, is the evil twin sister of the CFPB. It’s a pool of financial sharks, including payday lenders, who don’t want a well-funded federal investigatory agency looking into their predatory practices against financially-strapped and/or financially unsophisticated Americans. The case arrived at the Supreme Court reeking of stench from a decision handed down by a three-judge panel at the radical right-wing 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. All three judges on the panel (Don Willett, Kurt Engelhardt, and Cory Wilson) were appointed by former President Donald Trump. The 5th Circuit effectively ruled that the CFPB’s funding system, legislated by Congress, was unconstitutional. The tentacles of the former Trump administration and the invisible hands that had an outsized role in setting the agenda for it, fossil fuels billionaire Charles Koch and his corporate law firm, Jones Day, have their fingerprints all over this case. On Trump’s first day in office on January 20, 2017, Jones Day announced that 12 of its law partners were moving into the Trump administration. Among the 12 was Noel Francisco, who became Trump’s Solicitor General. Francisco became one of the five Jones Day lawyers that argued before the Supreme Court for the dodgy front group CFSA that brought this case against the CFPB. CFSA is a nonprofit, which means that at least part of its annual tax filing with the IRS (form 990) is a public document. The 990s show that Jones Day is not just representing CFSA at the Supreme Court but that Jones Day has been its law firm dating back to at least 2016. The annual amounts received by Jones Day from CFSA are as follows: 2021 – $751,150; 2020 – $377,019; 2018 – $571,822; 2017 – $516,150; and 2016 – $574,613. Gutting the funding and power of federal regulatory agencies is something that Charles Koch and his myriad front groups have been attempting to do for the past 40 years. For Wall Street On Parade’s investigative reporting on the insidious ties between Charles Koch and Clarence Thomas (as he sat on the Supreme Court) see here. Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, issued this statement after the Supreme Court decision was released last Thursday: “Wall Street tried to use the courts to kill the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and they failed. Powerful corporate special interests know the CFPB stands up to them, which is why they have been trying to gut the agency for over a decade. Today’s decision protects workers and consumers who don’t have high-paid lobbyists and lawyers to fight their battles for them. We created the CFPB to be their voice, and I will continue to ensure the agency is able to do its job protecting consumers from Wall Street greed.” One of the most outspoken members of Congress when it comes to actively engaging in investigating corruption at the U.S. Supreme Court is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). In a message to constituents last Thursday, Whitehouse wrote this: “This term’s docket is a reminder that the Court has the power to reshape Americans’ daily lives. Yet the highest court in the land still has the lowest ethics standards. “In the Court That Dark Money Built, right-wing donors envelop favored justices in secret gifts, emoluments, and donations. Yet there have been zero repercussions for the right-wing justices caught receiving unreported gifts and accommodations from Republican billionaires with stakes in Court decisions. “Even after all these ethical failures, the Supreme Court still does not have any method of enforcing a code of ethics — something every other federal court has. Not even an investigation. “Then there’s the corrupt judicial fact-finding. This Supreme Court makes up phony facts to arrive at decisions that benefit Republican special interests. Even if we un-packed the Court the billionaires packed, and cleaned up the ethics mess the billionaires have made, the bad decisions based on false facts will live on like zombies. “So, how can the American people trust they’re getting a fair shake in these cases that could fundamentally change life in America? “I’m not sure they can. Not until we fix the ethics problem.” And exactly how can Americans fix the problem? A citizen-focused Congress must be elected in order to pass campaign finance reform that will restore representation in Congress to the people instead of billionaires and corporate interests. And how is that going to happen when out-of-state money from millionaires and billionaires is flooding into Senate and House races that will be decided on November 5? It can happen if every voting age American gets out and votes in November and if every American who can afford it gives at least $5 to the Congressional candidate of their choice.

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SFO Seizes Cash In Bank Account Linked To Nigerian Bribery
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

SFO Seizes Cash In Bank Account Linked To Nigerian Bribery <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838963?nl_pk=a94fc…> By Christopher Crosby Britian's anti-corruption agency has seized more than £36,000 ($46,000) from the former managing director of an African state-owned banknote printing company after prosecutors traced the money to a bribery scheme. Read full article » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838963?nl_pk=a94fc…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838963?nl_pk=a94fc…>

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Autonomy CEO Reaped $516M From HP Acquisition, Jurors Told
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Autonomy CEO Reaped $516M From HP Acquisition, Jurors Told <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1839082?nl_pk=a94fc…> By Bonnie Eslinger Ex-Autonomy CEO Michael Lynch took home more than $516 million from the software company's $11.7 billion sale to HP, an FBI agent testified Monday as the government's last witness in a trial over allegations Lynch duped HP into overpaying to buy the company. Read full article » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1839082?nl_pk=a94fc…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1839082?nl_pk=a94fc…>

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Step Up Action On Financial Abuse, FCA Tells Firms
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Step Up Action On Financial Abuse, FCA Tells Firms <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838802?nl_pk=a94fc…> By Alex Davidson The Financial Conduct Authority has called on regulated firms to take further steps to stop financial abuse of individuals through manipulation of banking or insurance products as it looks through the lens of the Consumer Duty. Read full article » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838802?nl_pk=a94fc…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838802?nl_pk=a94fc…>

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Crypto 'Inventor' Used Court As Vehicle For Fraud, Judge Says
by Gunnar Larson 21 May '24

21 May '24

Crypto 'Inventor' Used Court As Vehicle For Fraud, Judge Says <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838801?nl_pk=a94fc…> By Lucia Osborne-Crowley A London court ruled Monday that the man who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto in a weekslong trial lied extensively and committed forgery "on a grand scale," finding that the computer scientist had used the courts as a "vehicle for fraud." Read full article » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838801?nl_pk=a94fc…> | Save to favorites » <https://www.law360.co.uk/financial-services-uk/articles/1838801?nl_pk=a94fc…>

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