November 30th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could
potentially engage in one of the largest federal power grabs we have ever
seen.
At the FCC’s November meeting – note the coincidental date of choice,
AFTER the impending election – three unelected bureaucrats (of five) could
simply vote themselves rulers of 1/6th of our entire economy – the
information and technology sector.
Meaning the Internet that you currently enjoy – that has been a marvel of
economic and information innovation and success – will be subject to vast
new governmental regulations. You didn’t elect these people – but they
are on the verge of electing themselves Internet overlords.
November 30th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could potentially engage in one of the largest federal power grabs we have ever seen.
After two years of this Presidential Administration and this Congress, that is saying an awful lot about an awful lot.
And what’s worse, the FCC would be doing it without Congress weighing in. At the FCC’s November meeting – note the coincidental date of choice, AFTER the impending election – three unelected bureaucrats (of five) could simply vote themselves rulers of 1/6th of our entire economy – the information and technology sector.
NEW YORK (AP, Michelle Conlin) — In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage servicing departments hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in “foreclosure expert” jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.
In depositions released Tuesday, many of those workers testified that they barely knew what a mortgage was. Some couldn't define the word “affidavit.” Others didn't know what a complaint was, or even what was meant by personal property. Most troubling, several said they knew they were lying when they signed the foreclosure affidavits and that they agreed with the defense lawyers' accusations about document fraud.
Phi Beta Iota: This just makes us sick–millions of lives–tens of millions of lives–destroyed by criminal misbehavior on the part of banks, and the government was nowhere to be seen–certainly not looking out for the public interest.
This one book will explain more history than any other I have ever read. South Pole Sends.
Phi Beta Iota: The public is starting to do to the Rothschilds, Central Banks, and the Federal Reserve what plane spotters did to CIA rendition flights. We support truth & reconciliation; we do NOT support revenge or expropriation of illicit assets. The ill-gotten gains of the Rothschilds and the banks that front for them, notably the Federal Reserve, are a drop in the bucket compared to the infinite wealth that the five billion poor can create if these parasitic “elites” will just get out of the way. So that is the deal: stay out of the way and keep what you have. Interfere with the emergence of the global community of informed participatory democracy, and the deal is off.
This time the big banks and mortgage servicing companies, with their long, one-sided fine print contracts, may have outsmarted themselves. The newspaper headlines and the network television news are blazing news of the erupting fraudulent foreclosure process. This long-overdue coverage is generating public visibility and suddenly hundreds of thousands of foreclosures may be questioned due to what one commentator delicately called “flawed paperwork.”
Ralph Nader
That is a euphemism for fraudulently executed contracts violative of state laws regarding home title changes. Read full article online….
At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report – or it left out key information, backing up assertions that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified a year before 9/11.
Atta is believed to have been the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. Claims about how early Atta first tripped the radar of the Department of Defense date back to 2005, but those claims never made it into the Inspector General's report. The report was completed in 2006 and, until now, has been available only in a version with the names of virtually all of the witnesses blacked out.
No Plane, No Seats, No Bodies, No Luggage....Go Figure...
IBD: Did We Know About Mohamed Atta? Why would the Pentagon buy and destroy copies of a book by a former Army intelligence officer? Could it be perhaps because it contained information on how the 9/11 attacks might have been prevented?
The impulse to dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory is overwhelming. Yet the fact is that the Pentagon bought and destroyed 10,000 copies of a book, “Operation Dark Heart,” written by Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, a Bronze Star recipient and career Army intelligence officer, that contained a chapter on a pre-9/11 intelligence operation, Able Danger.
Tip of the Hat to the Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO)
Phi Beta Iota: The precision hit allegedly wiped out all the computers holding all the forensic evidence on the missing $2.3. trillion that Rumsfeld was being grilled on the day before, 10 September, by Cynthia McKinney. One day, between this and the $240 billion “settled” without record, this will be known as the Mother of All Atrocities.
In what i2 called a “multiyear scheme of fraud and industrial espionage,” Palantir knowingly used fraudulently obtained software to design new intelligence products that would help Palantir compete directly and…
One of the most interesting open source information documents in some time….the day will come when the beltway bandits are brought to justice as well, one can only hope that happens before they go bankrupt.
Economic historians have long recognized that one of the biggest mistakes deepening and prolonging the Great Depression was the establishment of beggar-thy-neighbour policy wars, like trying to protect domestic production by imposing protective tariffs. But these tariffs hurt everyone, because the reduction in world trade depressed demand and production to a greater extent than tariffs protected production. The US contribution to this debacle was the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed by Congress and signed into law in June 1930. Smoot-Hawley raised the already high tariffs of the US by an average tariff by 20%. This prompted retaliatory — i.e., beggar-thy-neighbour — tariff increases in about two dozen other countries, thereby contributing materially to a collapse of world trade by two-thirds between 1930 and 1934 and materially worsening the global depression. FDR began to reverse course by reducing tariffs in 1934, but the damage was done. Some historians have argued that nationalistic beggar-thy-neighbor policies in the Depression's early years contributed to the rise in political extremism in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US.
The information contained in the attached report by Professor Michael Hudson suggests beggar-thy-neighbor policies are again raising their ugly heads. This time, they are taking the form of the predatory financial policies evolved by the US and its copycats in the Eurozone, who are trying to handoff the pain to each other and others in the world economy. Whereas Smoot-Hawley related directly to the real economy of production and consumption, and in that sense was at least theoretically related to the well being of the working class, the predatory financing policies described below are both parasitic and speculative. They benefit an already wealthy financial class that does not produce things. Moreover, the pattern of speculation described below may be even more dangerous economically, because, it is being financed by the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy, which like TARP, has the effect of postponing inevitable asset revaluations (downward) and debt liquidations, thereby feeding a festering cancer that is threatening to metastasize into a full-blown global debt deflation — i.e., a collapse of demand and consumer confidence via a massive repudiation and/or liquidation of debts.
Ominously, like the 1930s, right-wing political extremism is again on the march, but this time that extremism is evolving more rapidly in the US than in Europe.
I urge you to read the attached report carefully and … fasten your seat belts.
October 11, 2010
A CounterPunch Special Report
“Who Needs an Army When You Can Obtain the Usual Objective (Monetary Wealth and Asset Appropriation) Simply by Financial Means?”
What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1 per cent interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.
Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means? All that is required is for central banks to accept dollar credit of depreciating international value in payment for local assets. Victory promises to go to whatever economy’s banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources. The key is to persuade foreign central banks to accept this electronic credit.
Phi Beta Iota: The obvious global response could be–should be–the immediate nationalization and expropriation of all US corporate “assets” derived from a history of predatory capitalism in the context of virtual colonialism and unilateral militarism. This means that the US stock market will crash again. It could mean that domestically the US could begin to see local movement expropriating land from absentee landlords such as the mega-agriculture companies that have destroyed agriculture, communities, and the land. These are interesting times. Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information, lacks integrity, and has zero focus on “the public interest.”
Witnesses in Defense Department Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings.
