There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely.

Milne has no finance background, yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to move more than $350 million in the next year. Unlike PayPal, Dwolla doesn’t take a percentage of the transaction. It only asks for $0.25 whether it’s moving $1 or $1,000.

We interviewed Milne about how he is building a credit card killer and Square rival from the middle of the nation where VCs and press are scarce.

Read more: Business Insider

Strangely, Amazon has just issued a press release saying they support the bill, calling it “a win-win resolution,” according to one Kindle blog, though they may just be hoping to lobby for exemptions from each individual state.

“Instead of a national sales tax, these new taxes will only be imposed at the individual discretion of each separate state legislature, and that’s an area where multi-billion dollar companies like Amazon can still exert a lot of pressure.

Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:

I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.

Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager to condemn contemporary capitalism, as the companies almost systematically heighten some of its current contradictions: the exhaustion of innovative possibilities, the limits of the legal system in guaranteeing property rights, the increasing immiseration of the world workforce.

Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say—as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear.

How did this happen? By seeming to mitigate the problems that neoliberalism creates by shifting economic risk onto workers, social media has been able to colonize the collective consciousness. Facebook, fast fashion, and the like provide new mechanisms of solace, quantifying our connections and influence (and thereby making them more economically useful to us) while enhancing the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more productive, more self-revelatory. Though we may be only one of a thousand friends in everyone else’s networks, that never seems especially important when we’re in the midst of posting new pictures.

In turning to social media for comfort, we’ve become happily dependent on digital devices, as we have come to rely on the accelerated rate of communication and exchange they facilitate. They offer us chances to articulate, evaluate, and augment who we are while archiving our identity-making gestures as a collection we can later fawn over and curate. The archiving makes the self seem richer and more substantial even as it makes it more tenuous. Our identity can never be so strong as to render any particular gesture negligible; it is cumulative at the same time that it is totally discontinuous. This has the effect of allowing everything we do to seem either significant or irrelevant, depending on which view suits our needs. The online repository has gradually become the privileged site of the self, the authorized version that redeems the frustration and desperation incipient with the provisionality of work life, that corrects the errors and discourtesies we commit in our confrontations with the physical world.

Read the full essay at n+1

Silk Road, a digital black market that sits just below most internet users’ purview, does resemble something from a cyberpunk novel. Through a combination of anonymity technology and a sophisticated user-feedback system, Silk Road makes buying and selling illegal drugs as easy as buying used electronics—and seemingly as safe. It’s Amazon—if Amazon sold mind-altering chemicals.

Here is just a small selection of the 340 items available for purchase on Silk Road by anyone, right now: a gram of Afghani hash; 1/8th ounce of “sour 13″ weed; 14 grams of ecstasy; .1 grams tar heroin. A listing for “Avatar” LSD includes a picture of blotter paper with big blue faces from the James Cameron movie on it. The sellers are located all over the world, a large portion from the U.S. and Canada.

Getting to Silk Road is tricky. The URL seems made to be forgotten. But don’t point your browser there yet. It’s only accessible through the anonymizing network TOR, which requires a bit of technical skill to configure.

Silk Road cuts down on scams with a reputation-based trading system familiar to anyone who’s used Amazon or eBay. The user Bloomingcolor appears to be an especially trusted vendor, specializing in psychedelics. One happy customer wrote on his profile: “Excellent quality. Packing, and communication. Arrived exactly as described.” They gave the transaction five points out of five.

ellers feel comfortable openly trading hardcore drugs because the real identities of those involved in Silk Road transactions are utterly obscured. If the authorities wanted to ID Silk Road’s users with computer forensics, they’d have nowhere to look. TOR masks a user’s tracks on the site. The site urges sellers to “creatively disguise” their shipments and vacuum seal any drugs that could be detected through smell. As for transactions, Silk Road doesn’t accept credit cards, PayPal , or any other form of payment that can be traced or blocked. The only money good here is Bitcoins.

Bitcoins have been called a “crypto-currency,” the online equivalent of a brown paper bag of cash. Bitcoins are a peer-to-peer currency, not issued by banks or governments, but created and regulated by a network of other bitcoin holders’ computers. (The name “Bitcoin” is derived from the pioneering file-sharing technology Bittorrent.) They are purportedly untraceable and have been championed by cyberpunks, libertarians and anarchists who dream of a distributed digital economy outside the law, one where money flows across borders as free as bits.

To purchase something on Silk Road, you need first to buy some Bitcoins using a service like Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange. Then, create an account on Silk Road, deposit some bitcoins, and start buying drugs. One bitcoin is worth about $8.67, though the exchange rate fluctuates wildly every day. Right now you can buy an 1/8th of pot on Silk Road for 7.63 Bitcoins. That’s probably more than you would pay on the street, but most Silk Road users seem happy to pay a premium for convenience.

Why are we banking on banks to a promote economic recovery? HBO’s “Too Big To Fail” should have been about banksters “too big to jail.”

This week the financial crisis finally went prime time in the form of a big budget HBO docudrama called “Too Big To Fail.”

It was a well-acted docudrama focused on the BIG Men and some women in the banks and in government who tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again up on that wall to prevent a total economic collapse when panic dried up credit and financial institutions faced failure.

Based on the work of a New York Times reporter, it offered a skillfully-made but conventional narrative which, like most TV shows, showcase events but miss their deeper context and background.

We heard all the explanations, save one.

There was greed, ambition, ego and money lust. There were personal rivalries and ideological battles, parochial agendas and narrow self-interest. There was panic on THE Street and in the halls of mighty institutions. In many ways, the program recycled and made an official narrative compelling viewing. In the end, everyone was to blame so no one was to blame.

BUT … what was missing was any notion of intentionality and premeditation, almost no mention of systemic fraud and  crime, that one word that sums up what really happened for those millions of Americans who have lost jobs and homes. We never saw victims or felt their pain and bewilderment. We were never shown how a shadow banking system emerged or how the finance industry worked with their counterparts in finance and insurance to transfer wealth from the poor and middle class to the super rich,

When I was but a precocious lad, my elementary school encouraged students to take out a savings account at the nearby Dime Bank in the Bronx. We were each given a bankbook and taught to put in $.50 a week to show us how to build wealth by being thrifty. It was with a sense of pride that I watched my balance grow.

It may have been peanuts in the scheme of things, but to me, it was the way to plan for the future.

At the same time, in those year I watched TV shows glamorize the bank robbing antics of a man named Willie Sutton who also staged jail breaks wearing masks and costumes. When he was asked why he robbed banks, he responded famously, “That’s where the money is.”

And it still is, except in our era, the banks are robbing us.

That’s because what’s now called the “financial services sector” has gone from about 30 percent of our economy to over 60 percent. Through a process called financialization, they have transformed how all business is done.

Making money from money soon began to surpass making money from making things. What we were never warned about was the danger of getting too deeply in debt, or how the economy was shifting from production to consumption.

Private equity, credit swaps, derivative deals and collateralized debt obligations soon drove the economy. Markets became captives of high performance trading by powerful computers.

When Wall Street became the defacto capital of the country, the bankers accrued more power than the politicians who they bought up with impunity. Their lobbying power deregulated the economy and decriminalized their activities. They killed many of the reforms enacted during the New Deal designed to protect the public. They built a shadow (and shadowy) banking system beyond the reach of the law.

And now, here we are, in 2011, five years after the meltdown of 2007, four years after the crash of 2008 and the passage of the TARP bailout that pumped money into their treasuries at taxpayer expense. Since then, there has been a steady parade of scandals and the disclosures that have come out since every week more banks close and or consolidate and run into problems with regulators.

Take “my” old bank in the Bronx. It has been through as many changes as I have been. A website on bank histories runs it down:

Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
04/12/1859 NYS Chartered Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn
09/10/1930 Acquire By Merger Navy Savings Bank
06/30/1970 Name Change To Dime Savings Bank of New York, The
09/30/1979 Acquire By Merger Mechanics Exchange Savings Bank
07/01/1980 Acquire By Merger First Federal S & L Assoc. of Port Washington
08/01/1981 Acquire By Merger Union Savings Bank of New York
06/23/1983 Convert Federal Dime Savings Bank of NY, FSB
01/07/2002 Purchased By Washington Mutual Inc.
01/07/2002 Name Change To Washington Mutual Bank

And then, of course, some years later, Washington Mutual itself, went bust and was bought up for a song by JP Morgan Chase. Here are some of the latest headlines about the bank now known as WAMU:

WaMu Agrees On Post-Bankruptcy Control — Reuters

WaMu, Shareholders, Biggest Creditors Said to Settle …‎ – Bloomberg

WaMu Shareholders Are Offered $25M-Plus To Drop Claims – Puget Sound Business Journal

On the day I wrote this commentary, the New York Times reported:

“The nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders have steadily amassed real estate empires, acquiring a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump and create a further drag on the economic recovery.

All told, they own more than 872,000 homes as a result of the groundswell in foreclosures, almost twice as many as when the financial crisis began in 2007, according to RealtyTrac.”

To whom does the Times turn for expertise on the subject, but a key former operative at Washington Mutual who was with the bank in the go-go era of shoveling out sub-prime mortgages?  Now, he gives advice on risk management:

“These shops are under siege; it’s just a tsunami of stuff coming in,” said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual’s servicing unit from 2004 to 2006 and now advises financial institutions on risk management. “Lenders have a strong incentive to clear out inventory in a controlled and timely manner, but if you had problems on the front end of the foreclosure process, it should be no surprise you are having problems on the back end.”

What were people’s homes are now “inventory” to be stockpiled even though it has a negative cumulative effect on economic recovery of the housing market.

The banks that are increasingly despised and blamed for their role in engineering the financial disaster, are now trying to play nice to change their negative image.

Explains the Times:

“Conscious of their image, many lenders have recently started telling real estate agents to be more lenient to renters who happen to live in a foreclosed home and give them extra time to move out before changing the locks.

‘Wells Fargo has sent me back knocking on doors two or three times, offering to give renters money if they cooperate with us,’ said Claude A. Worrell, a longtime real estate agent from Minneapolis who specializes in selling bank-owned property. ‘It’s a lot different than it used to be.’”

So, they are still foreclosing, but with a smile. Is it a ‘lot different than it used to be’?

Just last month, Huffington Post reported:

“Top executives at Washington Mutual actively boosted sales of high-risk, toxic mortgages in the two years prior to the bank’s collapse in 2008, according to emails published in a wide-ranging Senate report that contradicts previous public testimony about the meltdown.”

“The voluminous, 639-page report on the financial crisis from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations singles out Washington Mutual for its decision to champion its subprime lending business, even as executives privately acknowledged that a housing bubble was about to burst.”

The truth is that most of the bigger banks have emerged from the financial crisis stronger than ever, with executives cashing in with higher salaries and bigger bonuses. That old saying about criminals who “laughed all the way to the bank” has to be revised because, in this case, they never left the bank.

More shocking has been the largely passive response by our government and prosecutors. At last, the Attorney General of New York is said to be investigating but none of the big bankers have yet gone to jail or suffered for the scams and frauds they committed. Most of the State officials, who vowed to offer the banks the absence of aggressive federal actions, have backed down.

So what can “we the people” do? We can do nothing and watch more of what’s left of our wealth vanish, or we can join others in demanding a “jailout,” not a bailout.

A well-known international banker was just arrested for a high profile alleged sex crime, but not one of possibly thousands have been prosecuted for well documented financial crimes.

Where are the political leaders and activist groups willing to “fight the power” and demand accountability and transparency on Wall Street?

Why are so many us banking on a financial recovery to bring back jobs and a modicum of justice created by the very people and institutions responsible for the crisis?

And why didn’t I learn about these dangers when I first discovered the wonderful world of banking? Isn’t that what schools are for?

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofo

A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).

I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.

At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over a million dollars. And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The prices looked random — suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?

Read More: it is NOT Junk

A garlic storage in Changgilri, Uiseong County, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. Photo: Robert (CC)

Whoever says money doesn’t grow on trees was right. In South Korea it grows in garlic fields. BBC reports:

South Korean police have dug up a stash of 11bn won ($10m, £6.2m), most of it buried in a garlic field, reports say.

The money is believed to be the proceeds of an illegal internet gambling operation, for which one of two brothers is already in jail.

Their brother-in-law helped out by burying the cash, and then helped himself to some of it, police said.

When he then accused a landscaper of stealing a chunk of cash, police moved in and unearthed it, they said.

Television footage has shown police pulling out two dozen containers, each brimming with cash.

According to the police version of the story, the brother-in-law, a 52-year-old man identified only as Mr Lee, bought the garlic field in south-western Gimje.

His gambling relatives had felt pressured by police investigations and asked for his help in hiding the money, Yonhap news agency reported.

[Continues at BBC News]