Just a quick note as follow up to my article this morning. Read this qui tam complaint and see how it corroborates the facts and theories presented on this blog. Note the following quote: ” these mechanisms of fraud were and are interconnected and directly observed by Relator Mackler, who worked with various BOA executives while at Urban Lending Solutions beginning in April 2010. BOA outsources various HAMP obligations to Urban. Upon witnessing the unlawful, fraudulent practices listed above, among others, Mackler brought his concerns to the highest levels of Urban and to executives at Bank of America. Eventually, his objections to these practices led to his termination on March 17, 2011.”
US ATTORNEY GOT THIS DISMISSED BUT ANOTHER ONE IS PENDING IN MASSACHUSETTS UNDER SEAL.
“The manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects offered the nation a window into the stunning military-style capabilities of our local law enforcement agencies. For the past 30 years, police departments throughout the United States have benefitted from the government’s largesse in the form of military weaponry and training, incentives offered in the ongoing “War on Drugs.” For the average citizen watching events such as the intense pursuit of the Tsarnaev brothers on television, it would be difficult to discern between fully outfitted police SWAT teams and the military.
The lines blurred even further Monday as a new dynamic was introduced to the militarization of domestic law enforcement. By making a few subtle changes to a regulation in the U.S. Code titled “Defense Support of Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” the military has quietly granted itself the ability to police the streets without obtaining prior local or state consent, upending a precedent that has been in place for more than two centuries…Eric Freedman, a constitutional law professor from Hofstra University, also calls the ruling “an unauthorized power grab.” According to Freedman, “The Department of Defense does not have the authority to grant itself by regulation any more authority than Congress has granted it by statute.” Yet that’s precisely what it did.””
Copyright Monopoly: Prosecutors in Sweden have sued the root domain registry of .SE domains to kill the domain name of The Pirate Bay. The root registry fights back heavily. This case is important to watch, as it can have thoroughly chilling results for the Internet’s domain name system if criminal secondary liability is established at the DNS level.
Nobody can say that the prosecutors are after justice – they are after results. In the initial lawsuit against IIS, the foundation that manages the root .SE domains, they insisted on an ex parte decision – meaning that they demanded the court to issue a domain seizure order, a final decision in this case, without allowing the accused to speak in their defense. That is not any normal kind of justice.
Just so we’re clear – this is not your average domain registrar, like GoDaddy, EuroDNS, or DomainDiscover. This is the domain registry, the root database of .SE domains, managed by the Swedish Internet Foundation (the IIS), which is the technical back-end to all those domain registrars you see. This makes the prosecutor’s actions even more jaw-dropping.
Why Snake Oil is the Drug of Choice for Ayn Rand Wannabees
Attached are two important papers, one by Stephanie Kelton and the other by Paul Krugman, arguing that it is time to consign austerity economics to the dustbin of history. Both are variations on a theme and are spot on, IMO.
The fundamental problem tamping down the American recovery is excessive debt in the private sector, NOT the government sector. Yet austerity economics ignores this reality and argues speciously for reductions in government spending. The sequester has taken this nonsense to the level of policy lunacy by legislating an abdication of government's primary responsibility –i.e., to make policy decisions, in to law. As Krugman points out there is method to the austerity madness, however.
But madness it is. The attached chart, which I have distributed before, uses Federal Reserve Data to place the real debt problem into a long term perspective. Note the vertical scales are IDENTICAL! Bear in mind, the chart is about 1.5 years out of date and it does not reflect the recent, pre-sequester reductions in Federal Debt discussed below.
Although those of us in the developed nations take potable water for granted the fact is for several billion people it is a major matter of urgent stress. Here is a new technology that may help relieve this problem. Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Biopolymer-reinforced synthetic granular nanocomposites for affordable point-of-use water purification, PNAS, Published online before print May 6, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220222110
I have written extensively about the bias of the media and, particularly, the use of false equivalencies. (For a discussion of this see my esssay: False Equivalencies and the Mediocrity of Nonlocal Consciousness Research Criticism: http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900059-1/fulltext)! . Here is proof of my argument. Click through to see the charts which accompany this piece. They will appall you when you see how incredibly compromised American corporate media has become.
Here in a very clear exegetic essay Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz spells out the whole sordid story of the attempt by corporations to patent and own life forms.
Lives versus Profits JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, PHD, Nobel Laureate Economist – Project Syndicate
Here in one essay the true dimensions of the corruption of The U.S. Department of Agriculture by Monsanto is made clear.
It is a brutal fact that no country benefited more from war during in the 2oth Century than the United States. World War I enriched and invigorated the US economy, and the self destruction of the 19th Century European state system left the US as the world's mightiest industrial power. World War II ended the Great Depression, put the US on a pathway to unparalleled world military power, and set the stage a long economic boom that created a rich middle class that, not withstanding its recent hardening of the arteries, remains unprecedented in world history. Pearl Harbour excepted, neither war visited any significant destruction on the American homeland.
While we think of war in terms of our sacrifices, it may surprise readers to learn that the United States suffered fewer military deaths in WWII than Yugoslavia, an allied country not usually thought of in the NASCAR mentality of the United States as being a major player that war. In fact, hundreds of millions of people — mostly civilians — died in the wars (and their aftermath) of the 20th Century, while the United States in comparison paid a relatively minor price in lives lost and a vanishingly small price in terms of material destruction wrought at home.
Indeed the most traumatic material destruction and highest number of civilian deaths suffered on the US mainland since the dawn of the unprecedented state violence of the 20th Century were caused by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September of 2001 (the nearby NYSE was closed for only a week and the Pentagon never shut down). While horrific and psychologically devastating in themselves, these attacks were a horrendous crime, not an act of war.
Moreover, when viewed in the grand sweep of the preceding 100 years, the material and human destruction of 9-11 was pinprick compared to that visited on the trenches in Flanders, the Somme, and Verdun, the cities of Nanking and Warsaw, London and Coventry, Hamburg and Berlin and Dresden, Leningrad and Stalingrad and Minsk, or in the fire bombing raids on Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the now forgotten destruction of every city in North Korea, of millions of civilians killed by bombing (and sanctions) in North Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even casual readers of history know this summary just scratches the surface of carnage wrought by 20 Century warfare — carnage which, by the grace of good fortune, pretty much bypassed the people and land of the United States. Perhaps some American even think this good fortune is a kind of entitlement. Is it not surprising that President Bush's call on the American people to keep consuming and living the good life when he asked Congress to authorize a global war of terror in our national response to the crime of 9-11 was so well received?
None of these facts denigrates the bravery and sacrifice of the American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who fought and died in the wars of the last 100 years, but they are facts nevertheless, and they provide a backdrop against which the strength our national character is measured by others.
Nor should we be surprised, given this history of good fortune, that many leaders and opinion makers in America, especially strategic wannabees like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina or the armchair strategists in the Heritage Foundation (which receives a lot of grant money from arms merchants who benefit from war), treat war as a cavalier endeavor. Nothing typifies this cavalier attitude so much today as the loose talk about bombing Iran's nuclear reactors (unless it be an intervention in Syria). The attached essay puts this kind of warmongering talk into a perspective appropriate to those who, unlike most Americans during the 20th Century, would be on the receiving end of such an attack.
Watergate eventually became the story of two young rookie reporters who exposed and took down a president.
Try to think of another major story in your lifetime where the reporters themselves took center stage, and in the process nearly eclipsed their own work. Odd.
One of them, Bob Woodward, expanded his fame. The powers-that-be permitted him to go on and, with extraordinary access, write books criticizing future presidents. Woodward became the in-house attack dog. Mr. Limited Hangout.
The other reporter, Carl Bernstein, faded into relative obscurity. Well, he began connecting journalists to the CIA. That wasn't a smart career move. That was, perhaps, a case of biting the hand that had fed him.
To learn why Richard Nixon was really blown out of the White House, you could begin with the infamous Nazi chemical/pharmaceutical cartel, IG Farben. The cartel that pushed Hitler over the top into power in Germany.
Phi Beta Iota: For the convenience of our professionals reluctant to click through, the entire post is reproduced below. We believe that the assassination of JFK, the cover up by LBJ, and the fact that the Bush and Rockefeller families got away with it, was the beginning of the decline of responsible politics (the art of satisficing the needs of all) in the USA. There is serious matter for reflection in this post.
