A cyber-attack of various government websites by groups of hackers is allegedly underway Tuesday morning, as was warned using social media. A pastebin message begins with, “Let’s hurt them where it’s hurts the most” and the group promises, “Anonymous will make sure that’s this May 7th will be a day to remember” in what the group titles as, #OpUSA. The high profile list of targets includes, Bank of America, Citibank, White House websites, the FBI, among others.

Another message seemingly from a member of one of the hacktivist collectives known as Anonymous states “America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently you have committed war crimes in your own country. You have killed hundreds of innocent children and families with drones, guns, and now bombs. America you have hit thousands of people where it hurts them, now it is our time for our Lulz. For this you shall pay. Obama you have seen the over three billion dollars worth of damage we have done to Israel in operation Israel. It hasn’t even been a few weeks and the anonymous collective has gotten stronger since then.”

As federal government agencies brace themselves for a large-scale attack, a "Hacker's News Bulletin" is linked on Twitter that claims to be a running "List of Websites,Email Accounts affected under #OpUSA; Updating list as defaced,hacked or down."

"A group of mostly Middle East- and North Africa-based criminal hackers are preparing to launch a cyber attack campaign next week known as “OpUSA” against websites of high-profile US government agencies, financial institutions, and commercial entities," reports security blog Krebs on Security. "But security experts remain undecided on whether this latest round of promised attacks will amount to anything more than a public nuisance."

Last month, Anonymous launched #OpIsrael, which promised to “wipe Israel off the internet,” and well, that turned out to be a big #OpFail.

Hold Wall Street Accountable! Occupy Our Homes Week of Action, May 18-25

Via OccupyOurHomes.org and OccupyWallSt.org:

Over the last few years, homeowners and residents around the country have taken a stand against the banks and fought foreclosures and evictions. The growing network of Occupy Our Homes supporters have signed petitions, made phone calls, and showed up to events to help families stay in their homes. Dozens of homeowners around the country have won their fights, but the crisis is far from over.

Communities have been destroyed as millions of families have already lost their homes to foreclosure, while millions more are underwater on their mortgages. The big banks are bigger and more powerful than ever. To date, no high level Wall Street executives have been prosecuted for their crimes, such as mortgage fraud and predatory lending. US attorney general, Eric Holder even admitted recently that in the administration's eyes, the banks are not only ‘too big to fail,’ they're now ‘too big to jail.’

As a new housing bubble fueled by Wall Street speculation is forming, it's clear that the financial industry didn't learn their lesson from the last mess. It's more important than ever for us to take action to demand meaningful relief for homeowners and prosecutions for the criminals at the top. Only through the power of thousands of organized homeowners taking action in the streets can we make the Attorney General and the President listen. Occupy Our Homes, the Home Defenders League, and others are joining fed-up homeowners who are ready to demand action-- join us the week of May 20th.

Over the next two months, Home Defenders from across the country will have an opportunity to tell their stories and fight back. Some will travel to Washington, DC the week of May 20th to make their voice heard directly at the Department of Justice. Join the fight! Sign up now to fight in your city. Scholarships will be available to attend the Department of Justice Action in Washington DC.

Click here to sign up

From Ring of Fire: Papantonio: Are Conservatives Ready To Break Up The Banks?:

For years, Progressives have been fighting to break up the big banks that crashed our economy. And now, they've gotten an unlikely ally in that fight -- The Tea Party. Apparently there are some members in the GOP who actually believe that the too big to fail banks need to be broken apart -- but not for the same reason progressives believe. Mike Papantonio discusses the evolving attitudes of the Tea Party with investigative journalist David Dayen.

Here's more from DDay's column at The American Prospect: Banks Are Too Big to Fail Say ... Conservatives?:

Intellectuals on the right are coming around to the idea that our biggest financial institutions could use a little regulation.

Members of the Federal Reserve don’t usually make the rounds at partisan gatherings. But amid the tri-cornered hats and “#StandWithRand” buttons of last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—the largest annual gathering of conservatives in the country—was Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. In a Saturday morning speech, Fisher quoted Revolutionary War hero Patrick Henry, who once said that while “Different men often see the same subject in different lights,” such quibbling had to be set aside in a time of “awful moment to this country.”

Fisher described the current time as an era of economic injustice in which the nation’s largest banks threaten our financial stability and act with immunity. He said that the Dodd-Frank financial reform law did not go nearly far enough to fix the problem, and that mega-banks still profited from being “Too Big to Fail.” His solutions included a proposal to limit the total assets held by the biggest financial institutions, keeping them at a size that would make them “small enough to save.” And he called on citizens of all political stripes to join him in this cause. “The American people will be grateful to whoever liberates them from a recurrence of taxpayer bailouts,” Fisher concluded. It was an indication of just how bipartisan the support for breaking up the big banks has become.

It may be surprising that conservatives—whose party just ran a private-equity tycoon for president—would be clamoring for Wall Street banks to be cut down to size. But over the last few years, conservative intellectuals—from economists and central bankers to think-tankers and high-profile pundits—have come to the conclusion that the largest institutions remain Too Big to Fail and that, in ways big and small, receive unfair financial advantages over their smaller rivals. Read on...

The Occupy Sandy website, http://occupysandy.net, has been revamped to help us all better engage in mutual aid with the survivors of the SuperStorm.

In whatever manner you have taken part, it’s important to recognize and remember that the crisis isn't over. Not by a long shot.

Areas hit by Sandy still need volunteers. Please join us.

-- from the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team

Occupy in the News

The Revolution Will Be Augmented: OWS Should Embrace Google Glass

Silicon Angle

Already Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and other protesters have visited the idea of activism and citizen journalism on the front lines of large scale protests by using smartphones and live streaming–but it’s nothing compared to the surveillance capabilities of law enforcement agencies. (ht OWS News Coverage blast: subscribe here).

Free Health Care & Spirited Activism Transform NYC Public Spaces Saturday

Washington Square Public Blog

Occupy Town Square, Strike Debt, and other Occupy Wall Street groups, gathered together Saturday, March 23rd for “Medical Emergency: Life or Debt” with Washington Square Park as the hub.

Cyprus: What Every Occupier Needs to Know

OccupyWallStreet.net

Nicholas Levis from the Alternative Banking Working Group weighs in on the crisis in Cyprus after they rejected a proposed 10 billion European Union bank bailout. Cyprus constitutes “an experiment in total exercise of class power, to see how far a people can be pushed and what might be learned for future cases.”

Mortgage Protesters Occupy Bank in Barcelona

NBC News Photoblog

Members of Mortgage Victims' Platform (PAH), occupy a bank branch during a protest to support neighbors who are facing evictions processes in Barcelona, Spain, on March 19.

Let Me Ascertain You: The Civilians Podcast

By the Civilians

Let Me Ascertain You, from award-winning investigative theater company The Civilians, is a weekly podcast series of performances crafted from interviews with real people about current and controversial topics, including Occupy Wall Street, Atlantic Yards, the adult entertainment industry, Evangelical Christianity, and more. Last week they aired their finale from a 5 part Occupy #S17 series.

Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt Stand in Solidarity With the Community of East Flatbush and the Family of Kimani Gray

OccupyWallSt.org

“Predatory debt, public austerity, emergency restructuring, climate crisis: the disasters of Wall Street hit black and brown people the hardest”. Prior to a solidarity march this Sunday, the following was published - providing details on the rationale of so many occupiers who are supporting the #BrooklynProtest, in a manner that will help provide mutual understanding for solidarity with this neighborhood-led local effort.

Featured Occu-Project of the Week

For over a year now, Occu-Evolve has been holding weekly assemblies and actions focused on "race, class, gender, identity, cultural and structural and direction of the movement.” It was formed out of an ardent commitment to providing outreach to the 99%, particularly people of color, the working class and neighborhood assemblies.

Occu-Evolve’s efforts at this time couldn’t be more timely in light of the tragedy of Kimani Gray and the #BrooklynProtest it has inspired. Check out their Occupy For Kimani (and all victims of police injustice) page for details on “positive, clear, organized and coordinated actions, communication and planning for Justice for Kimani Gray, as well as other victims of unjust and deadly police actions and encounters.”

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JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon greeted with noisy protests as he prepared to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in 2012. "This man is a crook and needs to go to jail!" yelled one man.

A new Senate report shows that last year JPMorgan Chase, the country's biggest bank, manipulated documents and ignored internal controls as they built up trading losses. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive, also withheld information from regulators. The 300-page report was released the day before the Senate plans to question bank leaders and regulators at a hearing, and "it may also foreshadow a criminal case against employees at the heart of the troubled wager," according to the NYT. “While we have repeatedly acknowledged significant mistakes, our senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone," a spokeswoman for the bank said.

NYT:

Mr. Dimon, whose reputation as an astute manager of risk has been undercut by the trading losses, comes under the harshest criticism yet from the Senate investigators. The chief executive signed off on changes to an internal alarm system that underestimated losses, seemingly contradicting his earlier statements to lawmakers, according to the report.

He is also accused of withholding from regulators details about the investment bank’s daily losses — and then raising “his voice in anger” at a deputy who later turned over the information.

While people close to the matter dispute whether the outburst actually happened, it illustrates a broader problem at JPMorgan: after emerging from the financial crisis in far better shape than rivals, the bank saw itself as being above its regulators. The bank was so filled with hubris, Senate investigators said, that an executive once screamed at examiners and called them “stupid.”

The bipartisan report, citing some of the same private documents that F.B.I. agents are now poring over, also highlighted how JPMorgan managers “pressured” traders to lowball losses by $660 million, a previously undisclosed figure, and then played down the problems to authorities.

With this line from the Times' report, you may start to think that the "too big to fail" could be falling..."After examining hundreds of e-mails and hours of taped phone calls, the people said, federal investigators also plan to interview top JPMorgan executives in the coming weeks, including Mr. Dimon."

But then the next line is a big let down, "While authorities do not suspect the chief executive of wrongdoing, the meetings signal that the case is at an advanced stage."

What a charade.

There is one highlight to come from this; Beginning at 9:30am Friday, Matt Taibbi will be live-blogging a hearing held by Senator Carl Levin's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations who will be grilling J.P. Morgan Chase executives and high-ranking federal regulators in a get-together entitled, "J.P. Morgan Chase "Whale" Trades: A Case History Of Derivatives Risks And Abuses." Bring your popcorn and be there.

Community groups and Occupy Detroit using "any means necessary" to save homes from foreclosure, and keep families from becoming homeless.

A Robin Hood Tax on the banks could raise tens of billions to help protect public services, fight poverty and tackle climate change at home and abroad.

This tax has gathered support from dozens of countries, including Germany, France, South Africa and Brazil. Bill Gates, Archbishop Rowan Williams, the Vatican and 1,000 economists have added their support. Yet the U.K. Government is continuing to resist this growing international pressure to introduce a Robin Hood Tax.

It’s simple: the financial crisis and the recession have left a massive hole in the U.K.’s public finances. Jobs and public services are at risk in the U.K. while many other developed and developing countries face a similar struggle.

But there is another way. Thousands of Robin Hood supporters believe that banks, hedge funds and the rest of the financial sector should pay their fair share to clear up the mess they helped create.

In a nutshell, the big idea behind the Robin Hood Tax is to generate billions of pounds – hopefully even hundreds of billions of pounds. That money will fight poverty in the U.K. and overseas. It will tackle climate change. And it will come from fairer taxation of the financial sector.

A tiny tax on the financial sector can generate £20 billion annually in the U.K. alone. That's enough to protect schools and hospitals. Enough to stop massive cuts across the public sector. Enough to build new lives around the world – and to deal with the new climate challenges our world is facing.

As a result of the financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has calculated U.K. government debt will be 40% higher. That 40% equates to £737 billion pounds, or £28,000 pounds for every taxpayer in the country. Having to pay back that debt means cuts in vital services on which millions of people around the country rely.

Total cost to the U.K. of financial crisis in terms of lost output according to the IMF was 27% of 2008 GDP.

So it's time for justice. It's time for justice for ordinary families and businesses. For the one in five British families faced with a choice between buying food or paying the heating bill. For the millions of people around the world forced into poverty by a financial crisis they did absolutely nothing to bring about.

The Robin Hood Tax is justice. The banks can afford it. The systems are in place to collect it. It won't affect ordinary members of the public, their bank accounts or their savings. It's fair, it's timely, and it's possible.

It is an idea for which the time has come.

Short sales end with the homeowner out of the home. This is the most common "penalty" on banks in the mortgage settlement.

Bloomberg News:

While the banks are stepping up efforts to help borrowers stay in their homes, they are still spending most of the settlement on short sales and forgiveness of home-equity loans that allow them to take bad loans off their books. Profits from new lending are increasing even as regulators enforce penalties for modification missteps and foreclosures pursued with fraudulent or missing documents. Last year, mortgage revenue at the four largest lenders -- Bank of America, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), and U.S. Bancorp --surpassed the amount they spent on consumer settlements and investor demands they buy back faulty loans.

“The banks have shown a knack for sidestepping government attempts to have them redress their role in the foreclosure crisis and keep people in their homes,” said Arthur Wilmarth, a law professor at George Washington University in the nation’s capital. “A lot of these efforts end up helping the banks, not the homeowners.”

Lets recap: The Big Banks pay a small (Small in Banker dollars, anyways) "penalty" *cough* to the DOJ for fraudulent foreclosure practices, and agree to review their own foreclosures and decide which homeowners will receive aid from the "penalty" funds paid to the DOJ that are allotted to homeowner aid. Then typically, the Banks are going to punish the homeowner with a short sale of their home that A) Results in the homeowner losing their home, and destroys their credit. B)Helps the Bank complete their obligation to the DOJ. and C)Allows the Bank further forgiveness by erasing home equity loans from their books.

The Big Banks have struck a Trifecta with Eric Holder's Department of in-Justice. For troubled homeowners, there is homelessness and despair, and just a small glimmer of hope.

China's Army might be training the country's next crop of cyberhackers. An investigation by Mandiant, a U.S.-based computer security firm, found that many of the attacks on American corporations and government agencies are coming from a clandestine People’s Liberation Army base on the outskirts of Shanghai. The report found that many members of China's most sophisticated hacking groups are working from around that area, and it's likely that they are run by army officers or contract workers.

NYT:

The building off Datong Road, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and a wine importer, is the headquarters of P.L.A. Unit 61398. A growing body of digital forensic evidence — confirmed by American intelligence officials who say they have tapped into the activity of the army unit for years — leaves little doubt that an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around the white tower.

An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the military unit’s headquarters. The firm was not able to place the hackers inside the 12-story building, but makes a case there is no other plausible explanation for why so many attacks come out of one comparatively small area.

“Either they are coming from inside Unit 61398,” said Kevin Mandia, the founder and chief executive of Mandiant, in an interview last week, “or the people who run the most-controlled, most-monitored Internet networks in the world are clueless about thousands of people generating attacks from this one neighborhood.”

Other security firms that have tracked “Comment Crew” say they also believe the group is state-sponsored, and a recent classified National Intelligence, issued as a consensus document for all 16 of the United States intelligence agencies, makes a strong case that many of these hacking groups are either run by army officers or are contractors working for commands like Unit 61398, according to officials with knowledge of its classified content.

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Senator Elizabeth Warren's (D-Mass.) meeting with bank regulators Thursday left bankers reeling, after the politician questioned why regulators had not prosecuted a bank since the financial crisis.

At one point, Warren asked why big banks' book value was lower, when most corporations trade above book value, saying there could be only two reasons for it."*

Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed bank regulators by aggressively hammering one simple question: why have they not prosecuted a single bank since the financial crisis? Wall Street is reeling, perhaps they aren't enjoying someone finally treating them like the crooks they are?

Cenk Uygur and Ben Mankiewicz break it down.