These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• code as a weapon | clusterflock

  “it’s an open source weapon”
  
  computer-​​virus westphalian-​​state-​​woopsie stuxnet cyber­war open-​​warfare

• Towards a The­ory of Cor­po­rate and Finan­cial Sec­tor Sol­i­dar­ity | Rortybomb

  “Spec­u­la­tion: There’s a cri­tique of the reg­u­la­tors and key deci­sion mak­ers dur­ing the cri­sis that invokes cul­tural cap­i­tal and the idea that reg­u­la­tors are social­ized with Wall Street in a way that it is dif­fi­cult for them to exer­cise any type of power over them, to see their inter­ests in con­flict. I won­der if the same is true for the cor­po­rate sec­tor. As the firm goes global, and as the white-​​collar work­force is bro­ken by com­put­er­i­za­tion and glob­al­iza­tion, more and more elite cor­po­rate posi­tions will be filled by those leav­ing Wall Street. (Has this already hap­pened? Data/​Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucra­tive revolv­ing door between cor­po­rate elites and finan­cial elites. As such, any nat­ural checks to finan­cial sec­tor power com­ing from the cor­po­rate mar­ket space is less likely to happen.”
  
  its-​​the-​​unnatural-​​checks-​​that-​​will-​​be-​​interesting bank­ing financial-​​crisis public-​​policy reg­u­la­tion cor­po­ratism finan­cialza­tion social-​​networks cultural-​​assumptions

• The Fed Bails Out the Banks…Again — Credit Slips

  “The les­son here is that if we want seri­ous reg­u­la­tion of banks, we can’t trust it to be done by bank reg­u­la­tors. We’ve seen the Fed and the OCC time and time again bend over back­wards to let the banks out of statu­tory require­ments. We’ve seen this with inac­tion (HOEPA regs), with aggres­sive pre­emp­tion (and OCC is back to its old tricks…). And this isn’t just in the realm of con­sumer finance. This is also in the safety and sound­ness area. I’m not talk­ing about stretched inter­pre­ta­tions of sec­tion 13(3) of the Fed­eral Reserve Act. I’m talk­ing about affil­i­ate trans­ac­tion rules and Prompt Cor­rec­tive Action, cor­ner­stones of the safety-​​and-​​soundness regime. Saule Omarova has a great paper that shows how the Fed granted affil­i­ate trans­ac­tion waivers like a drunken sailor dur­ing the finan­cial cri­sis.  Those were rules that went back to 1932–33 as part of Glass-​​Steagal.   And remem­ber Prompt Cor­rec­tive Action? That was a response to all of the Fed­eral Home Loan Bank Board’s screw ups dur­ing the S&L cri­sis (Who you say? There’s a rea­son the FHLBB doesn’t exist any more…). PCA is clear of a bunch of trip­wires as you can get. The whole point was to make sure that the bank reg­u­la­tors reg­u­lated, not cod­dled. But Bernanke announced that he was sus­pend­ing PCA for the banks dur­ing the finan­cial cri­sis. Only after the stress tests cleared the big banks did PCA get applied to the small banks, and with a ven­gance. What a sorry state of the world we live in where the bank reg­u­la­tors are the last peo­ple we can trust to actu­ally reg­u­late the banks. ”
  
  bankers-​​should-​​start-​​avoiding-​​lampposts-​​right-​​about-​​now public-​​policy leg­is­la­tion financial-​​crisis bank­ing cor­po­ratism

• Rents ver­sus Prof­its in the Finan­cial Reform Bat­tle and Post-​​Industrial Econ­omy | Rortybomb

  “Much of the mod­ern­iza­tion that Marx tri­umphed was a vic­tory of profit-​​makers over rent-​​holders. What Hardt argues is that, as the econ­omy becomes more and more about infor­ma­tion, the cru­cial ends of cap­i­tal hold­ers is to take things that could belong to the com­mons and instead appro­pri­ate them as prop­erty rights and sell them off. The implies a pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of rent-​​holders over profit-​​makers in terms of power over the econ­omy (also imply­ing a regres­sion back from the future that Marx thought would come after profit-​​makers – take that Hegelian Marx­ism!). If we look at some of the major eco­nomic bat­tles tak­ing place, they are over patents, how the risks and rewards of large, sys­tem­i­cally impor­tant public-​​utility style finan­cial insti­tu­tions are dis­trib­uted and who gets to con­trol the resid­ual over the del­e­gated ends of the gov­ern­ment with the mad rush for the pri­va­ti­za­tion of gov­ern­ment resources and respon­si­bil­i­ties. These are all, in some way, about rents. And the bat­tle over these will deter­mine a lot about who gains in the future of the econ­omy. As such, they are the only place where the finan­cial sec­tor and the real econ­omy fight it out.”
  
  financial-​​crisis bankers-​​should-​​start-​​avoiding-​​lampposts-​​right-​​about-​​now intellectual-​​property rent-​​seeking