Octafish
Octafish's JournalThank you for a remarkable post, cleduc.
It should be an OP and every word understood by ALL.
Bill Gates? I always think ''Offshore Loot'' when I hear his name.
David Sirota: Microsoft Admits Keeping $92 Billion Offshore to Reduce Taxes
Pete Brewton: The Mafia, CIA & George Bush
Pete Brewton's book, “The Mafia, CIA & George Bush,” is a must-own for those interested in the workings of the Bush Organized Crime Family. Written by a former Houston Post reporter, the book documents, literally, the way the Mafia, the CIA and those connected and related to George Poppy Bush -- and to the late Lloyd Bentsen -- looted more than 1,000 of the nation’s Savings and Loans institutions — and pretty much got away with it, scot-free.
So, there's that to Alert on.
Justice for Don Siegelman! Alabama Attorney Demands Removal of Federal Judge Mark E Fuller...
Birmingham attorney Donald Watkins tells U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice that federal judge Mark Fuller should be removed from benchBy Kent Faulk
AL.com on August 26, 2014 at 2:00 PM
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Birmingham attorney Donald Watkins has been on a campaign in the past few weeks to see federal judge Mark Fuller removed from the bench in the wake of the judge's arrest on a domestic violence charge in Georgia earlier this month.
On Monday, Watkins stepped up his efforts in a letter to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In that letter, Watkins complains about a "flagrant display of hypocrisy in the federal judiciary in Alabama" that Watkins says is due to the judges' political stripes.
"I will not allow Mark Fuller's sleazy conduct to stain the impeccable record of all of the distinguished men and women who serve this great nation's federal judiciary," Watkins stated in an email to AL.com regarding his letter to Roberts. "As a long-time member of the federal bar, I will do everything within my power to make sure that a violent wife-beater and known philanderer is removed from the federal bench."
SNIP...
"We need one standard of personal and professional integrity for federal judges, and it must apply across-the-board," Watkins tells Roberts in the letter.
"The federal judges who are pushing a double standard for the benefit of criminal defendant Mark Fuller ought to be ashamed of themselves," Watkins wrote. "Wife-beaters, drug and alcohol abusers, philanderers, and liars have no place as judges on the federal bench. Truthful and clean living judges who have respect for women represent the standard we should expect and demand on the bench. No exceptions should be tolerated."
CONTINUED...
http://www.al.com/news/birmingham/index.ssf/2014/08/birmingham_attorney_donald_wat.html
Right on!
The people who warned the US government were ignored by the US government.
One, William K. Black, had worked for the US government prosecuting thousands of criminals during the Savings & Loan crisis during the Reagan-Bush I mis-administrations. Another is Joseph Stiglitz, who warned us about Larry Summers and government by Goldman Sachs. Those are the most important sources for this story. For some reason, you don't know about them or quote them.
GOOGLE "William K. Black" + "Control Fraud" to learn more.
I appreciate that you want to learn, stevenleser, unlike those in the current administration, including officials in the Departments of Treasury and Justice.
How can you claim to be a reporter when you won't even get a second source, stevenleser?
Here's what the FBI man said:
FBI saw threat of loan crisis
A top official warned of widening mortgage fraud in 2004, but the agency focused its resources elsewhere.
August 25, 2008|Richard B. Schmitt | Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible.
"It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004. But, he added reassuringly, the FBI was on the case. "We think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis," he said.
Today, the damage from the global mortgage meltdown has more than matched that of the savings-and-loan bailouts of the 1980s and early 1990s. By some estimates, it has made that costly debacle look like chump change. But it's also clear that the FBI failed to avert a problem it had accurately forecast.
Banks and brokerages have written down more than $300 billion of mortgage-backed securities and other risky investments in the last year or so as homeowner defaults leaped and weakness in the real estate market spread.
SNIP…
Most observers have declared the mess a gross failure of regulation. To be sure, in the run-up to the crisis, market-oriented federal regulators bragged about their hands-off treatment of banks and other savings institutions and their executives. But it wasn't just regulators who were looking the other way. The FBI and its parent agency, the Justice Department, are supposed to act as the cops on the beat for potentially illegal activities by bankers and others. But they were focused on national security and other priorities, and paid scant attention to white-collar crimes that may have contributed to the lending and securities debacle.
Now that the problems are out in the open, the government's response strikes some veteran regulators as too little, too late.
Swecker, who retired from the FBI in 2006, declined to comment for this article.
But sources familiar with the FBI budget process, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the growing fraud problem, say that he and other FBI criminal investigators sought additional assistance to take on the mortgage scoundrels.
They ended up with fewer resources, rather than more.
CONTINUED…
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/aug/25/business/fi-mortgagefraud25
Sometimes it's a good idea to get a lot of sources, stevenleser, especially when it comes to the banksters, crooks and traitors who stiffed the American people with a $16 trillion IOU to the Wall Street casino.
The NSA Search Engine is a Keyhole to You
And it's largely owned and operated by the corporate cronies of War Inc, the BFEE.
Obese Intelligence
The NSA Search Engine
by BINOY KAMPMARK
CounterPunch, Aug. 27, 2014
The Intercept was already getting the intelligence community excited with its revelations that the National Security Agency had decided to mimic inspector Google. Through creating a search engine in the manner of those pro-transparency pioneers, the intelligence community was turning the tables on the very idea of searchable information. Why keep it the operating preserve of the public? The search engine has, as it stands, over 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats.
The revelations have a few implications, the most obvious one confirming the seamless transition between intelligence work on the one hand, and the policing function on the other. The distinction between intelligence communities whose interests are targeting matters foreign to the polity; and those who maintain order within the boundaries of a state in a protective capacity, prove meaningless in this form. The use of ICREACH makes it clear that the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are regular clients and users of the system.
A 2010 memorandum from the Chief of Liaison Support Group at the CIA titled “CIA colleagues enthusiastically welcome NSA training” speaks with praise about those “NSA-ers embedded in CIA’s workspaces”. Indeed, it speaks very highly of the “information sharing” ethos of the NSA within the Intelligence Community, channelling Google’s operating rationale within more secret spaces. Furthermore, in 2010, the relevant data base provided the NSA “and second Party telephony metadata events to over 1000 analysts across 23 US Intelligence Community agencies.”
Those keen on squirreling information into such a data base are no doubt thrilled by the prospects that it can be made available to the “appropriate” sources. ICREACH has become one of the largest, if not largest system for the internal processing and sharing of surveillance records within the United States. It is not, according to The Intercept, connected with the NSA database that stores data on Americans’ phone calls pursuant to s. 215 of the Patriot Act.
The difference between the two accumulated pools of data is one of scope: ICREACH is mammoth in reach, and positively defiant in its push against the law; the database gathered under s. 215 guidelines is minute in comparison, confined to the dangerously pertinent idea of combating terrorism and like threats. ICREACH exists outside the system of court orders, being a creature of Executive Order 12333. The document, instituted by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, was intended to add robustness to the intelligence gathering capabilities of the US intelligence community.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/27/the-nsa-search-engine/
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Those "in the know" have something the rest of us -- the "Little People" -- don't have access to: Inside Information. Judging by the historical record and the revolving door between the secret government and private industry, it doesn't get shared in a way that's best for democracy. No wonder the rich get richer and the rest of the country becomes poorer. And the wars for personal profit and concentrated secret power continue without end.
Jack Paar has a heckuva show in his archive.
The Disappearance of Jimmy HoffaHoffa and the Mob
In 1959 Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of John F. Kennedy who would soon be elected president of the United States, appeared on The Jack Paar Show, America's first late-night television talk show. At the time Bobby Kennedy was chief counsel of the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, better known as the McClellan Committee. Speaking to a national television audience, Kennedy had plenty to say about Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters union, and the crusading young attorney was not afraid to name names.
Sitting across from an attentive Jack Paar, their images broadcast across America in grainy black and white, Kennedy said, "All of our lives are too intricately interwoven with this union to sit passively by and allow the Teamsters under Mr. Hoffa's leadership to create such a superpower in this country—a power greater than the people and greater than the Government... Unless something is done, this country is not going to be controlled by the people but is going to be controlled by Johnny Dio and Jimmy Hoffa and Tony 'Ducks' Corallo."
Except for Hoffa's, those names were probably unfamiliar to most Americans, but the directness of Kennedy's accusation was courageous and remarkable. What public official today would go on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno or The Late Show with David Letterman and point the finger at gangsters, using their real names?
CONTINUED...
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/jimmy_hoffa/2.html
Pruneface
Can we quote you on that? The greatest hits of Coleman Young
Detroit Mayor Coleman Young was certainly one of the more controversial figures to lead the city. People either loved him or hated him, but as more time passes and more facts come to light — such as the Free Press’ investigation “How Detroit went broke” — it is clear that he actually was one of the city’s five best mayors.
But he also is remembered for being one of the more colorful characters to lead the city, and his mouth — and his language — were legendary.
Here are 12 of Young’s greatest hits — or, at least, his greatest family-friendly hits — as excerpted from the book “The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young.” For more, buy the book here from Amazon.com.
SNIP...
On the abandonment of Detroit:
“No other city in America, no other city in the Western world has lost the population at that rate. And what’s at the root of that loss? Economics and race. Or, should I say, race and economics.”
On Ronald Reagan, before the Republican was elected president:
“Pruneface.”
On Ronald Reagan, after the Republican was elected president:
“President Pruneface.”
CONTINUED...
Cass Sunstein doesn't like icky speech that casts government in a bad light.
Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposalCass Sunstein wants the government to "cognitively infiltrate" anti-government groups
GLENN GREENWALD
Salon, Jan. 10, 2010
Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.” In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.
Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.” Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.
SOURCE w/links: http://www.salon.com/2010/01/15/sunstein_2/
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