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Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

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All the stocks and bonds you think you own are actually owned by a company you’ve probably never heard of, a company owned by the same people who own the US Federal Reserve.

Originally paper stocks certificates were issued as evidence of ownership by companies to investors purchasing shares. But as trading volume exploded in the late 60′s this manual system didn’t scale. As an increasing number of trades failed due to paper processing backlogs The New York Stock Exchange took the unprecedented steps of closing on Wednesdays in 1968. [.pdf]

In response to the crisis The Central Certificate Service (CCS) was created to electronically settle trades and eliminate the need for share certificates. Although intended as a temporary measure, it is still with us.

Financial assets purchased today aren’t registered in your name; rather they are held in what’s known as street name. Regardless of the assets purchased or the broker used, this name is almost always a successor of CCS, namely The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTC), or some anomalous sounding variant of “Cede & Co”.

Holding assets in excess of $40T (yes, trillion), DTC is the single largest private trust in the world – in fact the largest company you’ve probably never heard of. <

While DTC no doubt provides a critical service - standing behind and insuring the performance of hundreds of thousands of broker / dealers, institutional investors, banks, mutual funds, insurance companies and hedge funds, many people are critical of this quasi-monopoly. While some say a system like DTC facilitates short selling, and and other forms of market manipulation, others claim the interests of American shareholders have been superceded by this system of indirect stock ownership, and the technology now exists to revert to direct ownership of stocks [.pdf].

But, as the business of big business is indeed, big business, whether or not these temporary measures will ever be removed is anyones guess.

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Unless you’re one of those crazy Rainman-like guys who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute, then the cube has caused you some sort of frustration or grief at one point in your life. Well, this new Rubik’s Cube appears even more difficult than its predecessor.

via

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Today is October 24, 2008. On October 24, 1970, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 2626 whereby wealthy countries were encouraged to give a minimum of 0.7 percent of their GNI to developing nations. The target date was the mid-1970s.

Today, only a handful of countries have met that goal: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

Dear world: shame on you!

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“I took on the old politics as usual in Juneau when I stood up to the special interests and the lobbyists and the big oil companies and the good old boys,” Palin told the Republican National Convention in her acceptance speech. She said that as a new governor she “shook things up, and in short order we put the government of our state back on the side of the people.”

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* More than 100 appointments to state posts — nearly 1 in 4 — went to campaign contributors or their relatives, sometimes without apparent regard to qualifications.

* Palin filled 16 state offices with appointees from families that donated $2,000 to $5,600 and were among her top political patrons.

* Several of Palin’s leading campaign donors received state-subsidized industrial development loans of up to $3.6 million for business ventures of questionable public value.

* Palin picked a donor to replace the public safety commissioner she fired. But the new top cop had to resign days later under an ethics cloud. And Palin drew a formal ethics complaint still pending against her and several aides for allegedly helping another donor and fundraiser land a state job.

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An e-mail that a S&P employee wrote to a co-worker in 2006, obtained by committee investigators, said, “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.”

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That pretty much sums it up…

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Freddie Mac, the mortgage lender that was seized by federal regulators, has asked a bankruptcy judge to investigate the whereabouts of $1.2 billion that Lehman Brothers borrowed.

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Freddie Mac loaned the money in two chunks — first $450 million then $750 million — in mid-August.

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Huh? Since when was Freddie Mac a bank or other firm that had free rein to loan money out to various entities? Why would Freddie Mac loan Lehman money? Where was this disclosed in Freddie’s corporate filings? In its quarterly reports? How many more loans have been made, to whom, and why? And why aren’t the executives of Freddie in the dock on this – right now?

(oh, and you may want to read that second link: it makes that case that some people are naked short-selling treasury bills…. wow.

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According to internal documents released at a congressional hearing Tuesday, while rating agencies strenuously defended their independence publicly, some of their top executives acknowledged privately that they faced fundamental conflicts. As one executive at Moody’s, a major credit rating agency, put it following an internal discussion on the implosion of the subprime mortgage market, “These errors make us look either incompetent at credit analysis, or like we sold our soul to the devil for revenue.” The documents lend credibility to charges by Wall Street executives that the rating agencies deserve part of the blame for the current financial crisis. “The story of the credit rating agencies is a story of colossal failure,” said Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is holding a series of hearings to investigate the causes of the market meltdown.

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Police in Denver arrested an ABC News producer today as he and a camera crew were attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel.

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The [Australian] Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography.

Internet providers and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.

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Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”

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Ironically, Senator Conroy has himself accused critics of his filtering policy of supporting child pornography – including Greens Senator Scott Ludlam in Senate Estimates this week.

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However, none of the filters were completely accurate. They allowed access to between 2 per cent and 13 per cent of material that should have been blocked, and wrongly blocked between 1.3 per cent and 7.8 per cent of websites that should have been allowed.

“Why would you want to damage the performance and utility of the internet and not actually keep the bad stuff out anyway,” said John Lindsay, carrier relations manager at Internode.