Mini-Me: T-Mobile Criminal Business As Usual — 100s of Millions of Dollars in Bogus Texting Charges

03 Economy, 09 Justice, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government
Who?  Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

T-Mobile took ‘100s of millions of dollars' from bogus txt charges – Feds

Network CEO slams FTC, FCC allegations as baseless

>By Shaun Nichols

The Register,

T-Mobile US was accused today of slapping bogus text-message charges worth hundreds of millions of dollars on customers' bills.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: T-Mobile Criminal Business As Usual — 100s of Millions of Dollars in Bogus Texting Charges”

Andrew Garfield: Afghan Government Indicted for Fraud – Ghani Wins Unless International Community Fails to Run Polls and Contest Massive Fraud by Abdullah and Karzai

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence
Andrew Garfield
Andrew Garfield

Afghanistan On The Brink – The Last Chance For A “Correction”

By Andrew Garfield

Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 10, 2014 – 10:03am

PBI Executive Summary: Significant fraud in first round (at least one seventh of the total votes); 3,000 election staff fired, Afghan government indicted for forbidding polls (the major fraud detection measure) and allowing repeat of massive fraud. New polls indicate Ghani wins easily on demographics alone. If normally standard measures do not counter fraud, election will be polarizing, civil war the outcome, and all investment to date made moot.

Continue reading “Andrew Garfield: Afghan Government Indicted for Fraud – Ghani Wins Unless International Community Fails to Run Polls and Contest Massive Fraud by Abdullah and Karzai”

Eagle: Half of Americans Cannot Afford Rent or Mortgage

03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

Half of Americans can’t afford their house

Over half of Americans (52%) have had to make at least one major sacrifice in order to cover their rent or mortgage over the last three years, according to the “How Housing Matters Survey,” which was commissioned by the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and carried out by Hart Research Associates. These sacrifices include getting a second job, deferring saving for retirement, cutting back on health care, running up credit card debt, or even moving to a less safe neighborhood or one with worse schools.

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SchwartzReport: NSA Collects Millions of Facial Images — and Images of Human Interactions — Each Day

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Idiocy, Military
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

And the surveillance state just keeps oozing out across our lives like a toxic smog. It will soon be possible to track any person, almost anywhere. There is already no problem turning on your phone's camera, or microphone. Moving through any public space will result in multiple images, which are keyed to every electronic interaction you have.

Report: NSA Collects Millions of Facial Images Per Day
DANA FORD – CNN

The National Security Agency is reportedly capturing millions of images per day to feed facial recognition programs. Citing top-secret documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the New York Times reported the agency ‘s reliance on such technology has grown in recent years.

New software allows the NSA to “exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications,” the newspaper said. “The agency intercepts ‘millions of images per day' – including about 55,000 ‘facial recognition quality images' – which translate into ‘tremendous untapped potential,'” the newspaper reported, citing documents from 2011.

SchwartzReport: Matt Taibbi on the Legal Divide — Two Justice Systems — Criminalization of Poverty Among the 99%, Impunity for the 1%

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

This is a very good interview with Matt Taibbi discussing what has happened to the American justice system. One of our myths is that we have the fairest justice system in the world but, like our fantasy that we have the world's freest press, it is a delusion. As with the press we aren't e! ven in the top 25. It is very hard to maintain a healthy democracy if both the government and the people insist upon lying to themselves.

‘It’s Total Moral Surrender”: Matt Taibbi Unloads on Wall Street, Inequality and our Broken Justice System
ELIAS ISQUITH, Assistant Editor – Salon

EXTRACT

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree – even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances. They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 b! illion fine for drug trafficking? People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections … They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.

American Veterans May Become American Guerrillas — Police Planning & Arming Against US Veterans

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, DHS, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military
Who?  Who?
Who? Who?

American Vets May Become American Guerrillas When the SHTF in the USA

Despite what seems like an endless parade of stories about federal government stupidity and malfeasance repetitively emerging over years and decades, there are a few in government who have brains, who think and connect the dots, at least in connection to the ever enlarging presence of American veterans who know tactics and strategy and how to make and use weapons. Such thinkers have, as part of their responsibility to look after the interests of their elite 1% masters, surely recognized, in light of the developments mentioned in this article, the threat American veterans trained in warfare may represent to their elite master's interests as the economy implodes due to their master's machinations:
“In an interview with Fox 59, a Morgan County, Indiana Police Sergeant admits that the increasing militarization of domestic police departments is partly to deal with returning veterans who are now seen as a homegrown terror threat. Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department states, “When I first started we really didn’t have the violence that we see today,” adding, “The weaponry is totally different now that it was in the beginning of my career, plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques…Indiana seems to be a major trial balloon for the militarization of law enforcement given that the Indiana National Guard has also just purchased two military UH-72 Lakota helicopters which will also be used by local police and the DHS for “homeland security missions”. Downing’s claim that armored tanks are necessary to deal with violent crime doesn’t jive with actual statistics which suggest that violent crime is in fact on the decrease.

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