News bits: Public access to federal court decisions, etc.

Federal courts oppose free public 

access to court documents 

Taxpayers pay to maintain court infrastructure and personnel. For years, defenders of the public interest have been trying to get easy free public access to federal court papers. For years, arrogant anti-public interest federal courts have fight hard against free public access. Court tactics now includes fabricating blatant lies about the burdens to provide public access. Techdirt writes:

Free PACER Would Pretty Much Be Free, Says CBO, 

Undercutting Federal Judiciary’s Ridiculous $2 Billion Estimate

For years, attempts have been made to make access to federal court records free. To date, not one of these efforts have been successful. The federal judiciary likes its antiquated cash cow, raking in PACER fees meant to improve and free up (as in “free”) document access and redistributing the profit amongst itself, (illegally) blowing the funds on big screen TVs and furniture for those working at or with access to federal courthouses.

While PACER limps on in its pre-Web 1.0 state, millions of Americans are either unable or unwilling to pay librarian rates for the (lol) reproduction of PDFs at the absurd rate of $0.10/page. This page fee applies to searches (whether or not they’re successful) and docket listings, the latter of which only displays pixels on a screen.

Lawsuits and legislation have, so far, failed to give Americans free access to documents they’ve already paid for once with their tax dollars. The federal judiciary has been the main roadblock to free access, claiming (without facts in evidence) that this paywall is a necessary evil — the only thing keeping the US judiciary system from being repo’ed by… well, that’s not entirely clear.

A bill that sailed through the House following this hilarious display of bad faith by the US court system quoted the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which generated an estimate even lower than the $2 million/year originally stated by legislators.

On net, CBO estimates that enacting H.R 8235 would increase the deficit by $9 million over the 2021-2030 period.

A net loss of less than $1 million per year. So much for the billions claimed by the federal judiciary system.  

As Joe Patrice notes for his article on these findings for Above the Law, the system that’s supposed to serve the public always seems far more interested in serving itself. And if that means charging for things no one in the private sector charges for these days, so be it.

Hosting a document database in 2001 was a costly endeavor. Today, Google gives you that kind of storage for opening a Gmail account. The idea that it cost the court massive amounts of money to maintain PACER was either a lie or a symptom of the courts trying to keep an antiquated system afloat rather than transitioning to a modern approach. Or a bit of both. Or a bit of both and a vested interest in a slush fund.

Federal courts prefer to operate in as much secrecy as possible, "for obvious reasons." Secrecy includes the process used to make decisions in cases. The problem with the "obvious reasons" defense of opacity is that the courts have never stated what those reasons are. As discussed here before, people have been asking for transparency at least since the early 1970s. Courts just ignore it and stonewall. A reasonable interpretation is that the courts are too incompetent, biased and political for most federal judges' comfort. 

The health cost of being a Republican

The Atlantic writes:

How Many Republicans Died Because the GOP Turned Against Vaccines?

Party leaders are unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of their own supporters.

You can find anti-vaxxers in every corner of the country. But by far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats.

.... [Researchers] chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccine, researchers found a 1.6 percentage-point difference in excess death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess death rate. ....

What’s most concerning about all of this is that partisan disparities in death rates were also apparent before COVID. People living in Republican jurisdictions have been at a health disadvantage for more than 20 years. From 2001 to 2019, the death rate in Democratic counties decreased by 22 percent, according to a recent study; in Republican counties, it declined by only 11 percent. In the same time period, the political gap in death rates increased sixfold.

From the Well, duh! Files:

Wall Street is rigged for wealth to flow to the wealthy

Citing an analysis that PBS broadcast in 2013, Wall Street on Parade wrote: 

If you work for 50 years and receive the typical long-term return of 7 percent on your 401(k) plan and your fees are 2 percent, almost two-thirds of your account will go to Wall Street. This was the bombshell dropped by Frontline’s Martin Smith in this Tuesday evening’s PBS program, The Retirement Gamble.

This is not so much a gamble as a certainty: under a 2 percent 401(k) fee structure, almost two-thirds of your working life will go toward paying obscene compensation to Wall Street; a little over one-third will benefit your family – and that’s before paying taxes on withdrawals to Uncle Sam.

To put it another way – you work for Wall Street. You are their slave, their lackey and as long as their toadies dominate in Congress, nothing is going to change on the legislative front to stop the looting. 

In an update a few days ago, Wall Street on Parade wrote:

The Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, announced in June that he was going to tackle the structure of the U.S. stock market – ostensibly to make it fairer to the little guy. His plans were released last Wednesday in a mountain of paper that even Wall Street veterans are having difficulty digesting. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)

While the overall thrust of the proposed changes appears to be to provide more transparency to order execution, the proposals fail to address key structural issues that have allowed the U.S. stock market to operate as an institutionalized wealth transfer system — moving vast sums of money from the pockets of average Americans to the richest one percent.

The New York Stock Exchange was at one time the most respected stock exchange in the world. It’s now become a pay-to-play venue for hedge funds, high frequency traders and Wall Street mega banks. In 2014 we found a Google cache of a promotional piece the NYSE had directed at high frequency traders. It boasts that it is offering a “fully managed co-location space next to NYSE Euronext’s US trading engines in the new state-of-the-art data center.” The NYSE says it is for “High frequency and proprietary trading firms, hedge funds and others who need high-speed market access for a competitive edge.”  

Lewis wrote for the paperback version of “Flash Boys,” released in 2015, Lewis puts a dollar figure on the cost to public pensions managed by just one money manager:

“In 2014, this giant money manager bought and sold roughly $80 billion in U.S. stocks. The teachers and firefighters and other middle-class investors whose pensions they managed were collectively paying a tax of roughly $240 million a year for the benefit of interacting with high-frequency traders in unfair markets.” 

Another area that seriously undermines the credibility of U.S. markets are the Dark Pools operated by the mega banks on Wall Street. The SEC is allowing the trading units of these banks – which have been charged with colluding on prices with each other in the past – to trade each other’s stocks in the dark as well as to make thousands of dark trades each week in the stock of their very own bank. (See our report: Wall Street Banks Are Trading in Their Own Company’s Stock: How Is This Legal?)

One scam is to locate internet servers close to NYSE servers. Those servers get trade data and information from NYSE servers before other servers farther away can get the same information. That short time lag, about 0.2 second [1], is enough time to execute stock trades before the public can become aware of the same information and act on it. That information imbalance is the “competitive edge” that high frequency or high speed traders need to game the system. Elizabeth Warren criticized the practice like this: 

Traders have good days and bad days. Some days they make good trades and they make lots of money and some days they have bad trades and they lose a lot of money. But high frequency traders have only good days.

In its recent IPO filing, the high frequency trading firm, Virtu, reported that it had been trading for 1,238 days and it had made money on 1,237 of those days…The question is that high frequency trading firms aren’t making money by taking on risks. They’re making money by charging a very small fee to investors.

What do those investors pay a small fee for? Information that no one else has access to. That is why just about every day is a good day for people who can pay to play the high speed trading game. For context, what does a 0.2 second time advantage provide to the US economy? Does it create wealth, or does it merely transfer it from average people and groups to wealthy businesses and elite investors? 

These issues apparently are significantly bipartisan. Both neoliberal Democrats and brass knuckles capitalist Republicans have built and defended this system of large-scale theft from the public to a few elites and corporations. Both congress and Wall Street are corrupt pay-to-play institutions that usually work more for the wealthy than for the public interest.

Footnote: 

1. The Week elaborated on the co-location of NYSE servers with private interest servers:

Does co-location increase speed?

Yes. The physical proximity to the exchange server reduces the time from when a firm’s buy or sell order is entered and when it’s executed. “By co-locating,” says Adam Afshar of Hyde Park Global, a high-speed trading firm, “we are able to take 21 milliseconds off our trades. In the past, 21 milliseconds was a trivial matter. Now it’s a pivotal matter.” Several academic studies have found that shaving even one millisecond off every trade can be worth $100 million a year to a large, high-speed trading firm.