Charlie has always insisted that he never filled out the loan document — his mortgage broker did it, and he was actually a victim of mortgage fraud. (The broker later pleaded guilty to another mortgage fraud.) Indeed, according to a recent court filing by Charlie’s lawyer, the government failed to turn over exculpatory evidence that could have helped Charlie prove his innocence. For whatever inexplicable reason, prosecutors really wanted to nail Charlie Engle. And they did.
Second, though, it seemed incredible to me that with all the fraud that took place during the housing bubble, the Justice Department was focusing not on the banks that had issued the fraudulent loans, but rather on those who had taken out the loans, which invariably went sour when housing prices fell.
As I would later learn, Charlie Engle was no aberration. The current meme — argued most recently by Charles Ferguson, in his new book “Predator Nation” — is that not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. And that is true enough.
But what is also true, and which is every bit as corrosive to our belief in the rule of law, is that the Justice Department has instead taken after the smallest of small fry — and then trumpeted those prosecutions as proof of how tough it is on mortgage fraud. It is a shameful way for the government to act.
Phi Beta Iota: We have learned that the technical term for an out of control government in league with white collar criminals at the top of Wall Street and Main Street is “control fraud.” The Department of Justice has always been lax on white collar criminals, but under the Obama Administration it has become their de facto protector to the point of treason against the public interest.
Thank you, Tom, for that introduction. It was almost exactly a year ago today that my former boss, Secretary Gates, spoke to you on the eve of his departure as Secretary of Defense. In looking back on his tenure as Secretary, he chose to highlight two major themes. The first was his effort to turn the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He spoke to you about his laser-like focus on delivering urgent battlefield needs to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Secretary Gates first hired me in 2009, he told me that the “country’s at war, Ash, but the Pentagon is not.” My job, he explained, was to help him get the Pentagon onto a war footing, especially in acquisition technology and logistics, the part that I was about to take over.
And that has been my focus as well as his, first as AT&L and now as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Under his leadership, we set up a fast lane to get urgent requirements onto the battlefield unhindered by the bureaucracy. We needed better persistent ISR, he said, as did General Petraeus, General Mattis, General McChrystal, General Austin, General Allen. So we worked hard to deliver capabilities like Aerostats with wide-area lenses, and more UAVs, including small UAVs that could be operated by a patrol along their line of march.
“No, Charlotte, I’m the jury now. I sentence you to death.” The roar of the .45 shook the room. Charlotte staggered back a step. “How c-could you?” she gasped. “It was easy.”
– Mickey Spillane, I, The Jury
The news that Barack Obama — a Constitutional scholar and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize — has taken personal charge of lethal US drone hits in Yemen and Pakistan is one of those stories that takes time to sink in.
The New York Times stresses how serious the issue has become. “With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.” It’s no longer a cool video-game experiment; it’s the beginning of robot warfare, and, if history is a lesson, it will have unanticipated consequences and our enemies will learn to counter the weapon with imaginative weapons of their own, including drones. We should expect to be surprised and blindsided. Martin Luther King spoke of it as a futile rising cycle of violence.
Connecting Some Dots: Fukishima, the World Economy and NDAA
The on-going catastrophic, massive release of nuclear radiation from Fukishima offers a high probability of being cataclysmic in its effects and implications for the world economy, the health of millions of people and the continued freedom, such as it is, of US citizens, and may trump by far all other crises, in the light of the article: Fukushima, Washington Hides ‘Black Swan’ of Economic Collapse
Some chilling items from it:
Radioactivity in the west coast of the US:
“Due to increasing reports of nuclear contamination found in pollen across the U.S. West Coast, babies with elevated becquerel levels of nearly 10 times normal (presumably from mother’s milk), and a statistically unusual number of children with flu-like symptoms who won’t respond to conventional medical protocol, the truth about Fukushima could easily break out into a national panic significant enough to trigger an economic collapse of the U.S. economy and dollar, according to Consolo.
That’s “what we found from Freedom of Information Act requests . . . transmissions between the U.S. government, the Chinese, the Russians and the Japanese from the beginning of the disaster until now, and that includes NRC (National Regulatory Commission) transcripts of phone calls,” Consolo explained.
“They were well aware of high the levels were, and that they were coming over here,” she added. “In fact, infants in California were exposed to 40,000 becquerels (symbol Bq: the human body has 4,400 Bq, on average, from decaying potassium) of iodine 131—that causes thyroid cancer—from Mar. 17 to the beginning of April.”
Evidence of government agencies covering up full health effects of Fukishima on US west coast:
“And there was an actual letter that came from the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) telling physicians in California not to put people on potassium iodide (KI),” Consolo continued. “And the only thing that I can draw from that is they didn’t want to panic people; they didn’t want them to know how bad the situation is. But the problem is that the situation is ongoing.
From the U.S. FDA Web site.
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends that all children internally contaminated with (or likely to be internally contaminated with) radioactive iodine take KI, unless they have known allergies to iodine. Children from newborn to 18 years of age are the most sensitive to the potentially harmful effects of radioactive iodine.
Consolo also noted that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suddenly stopped testing rainwater, soil and milk for contamination two weeks following the disaster. But private tests conducted after the EPA stopped its testing, including ones performed by the University of California at Berkeley, in particular, reported “in November, that the levels of cesium in cow’s milk are actually 150 percent higher than they were in April of last year,” she paraphrased.
Consolo intimated that the EPA stopped testing because its reports would eventually become available to the public through the inevitable Freedom of Information requests, giving rise to the speculation for the stoppage among many others in the nuclear community as a possible reason for the EPA’s withdrawal and the progressively worsening data it would need to conceal through time.”
Why Obama Took on the Risks of Quickly Signing Anti-Constitutional Legislation:
“And the threat to U.S. national security as well as the implications to the global economy a nuclear contamination multiple-times more devastating than Chernobyl poses to America may have been the impetus for President Obama’s rapid-fire signing of the Executive Orders of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in January and the National Defense Resources Preparedness Act (NDRPA) in March, possibly suggesting that President Obama’s motives for these pair of politically catastrophic actions (during an election year) were, in a sense, mischaracterized as a executive branch power grab by media instead of an unpredictable dialogue that could trigger an immediate crisis of panic if the rational for an obvious abrogation (suspension) of the Constitution were made public.”
In the late 1980s, under the leadership of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the Pentagon began to privatise many of the military's support services that had traditionally be done soldiers, sailors, and airmen — laundries, dining halls, security guards, cleaning latrines, some supply functions, etc. It was argued at the time that this would save money and free up troops for combat duties, thus increasing the tooth-to-tail ratio of our military forces. According to this logic, fact that we were fielding an army that could not feed itself or wash its own laundry was deemed to be a cost-effective contributor to combat power. Of course, the only real result was to transfer another large part of the defense budget to the defense contractors and open up vast new opportunities for price gouging.
It is an undeniable fact that, despite a massive move to privatization of support functions by the Pentagon, the tooth-to-tail ratio continued to get worse during the 1990s and in the subsequent decade, the daily cost per unit of deployed combat power, be it troops marching in the mud, flying hours, ship steaming hours, or tank miles driven, etc continued to increase at a rate much faster than the overall defense budget increased.<
As a result, two relatively low-tempo, small wars (compared to Korea or Vietnam) — i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan — have now cost more than any war America has fought, save WWII (in inflation adjusted dollars). Privatization — the neoliberal panacea for all things according to the adherents of the Chicago School of economics — may have created bloated profits for the MICC, fomented the rise of private armies, like Blackwater, and increased the corruption that naturally takes place among war profiteers, but the result has been a disaster for our nation.<
The below article in Le Monde Diplomatique is a good, albeit disgusting, example of how the privatization of public enterprise works in the real world of America's permanent war economy.
This is the major press conference that AE911Truth held at the occasion of the World Premiere of their powerful myth-shattering documentary “9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out” on May 22, 2012 in Beverly Hills, CA. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth founder, Richard Gage, AIA and AE911Truth supporter and actor, Ed Asner, teamed up to lay into the media in an effort to hold them accountable for their 10-year silence on the subject of the abundant scientific evidence and eyewitness testimony that pulls the rug from under the official story of the destruction of the three World Trade Center towers on 9/11. This new documentary, introduced by Gage, following the press conference hosts 43 technical and building professionals who cite the evidence and call for a new investigation. It also includes 8 psychology professionals who are well versed in the difficult issues that viewers of this film may face when confronting the evidence.
Watch Video Below.
Phi Beta Iota: We are deeply sympathetic about the fact that most Americans, including well-educated Americans and especially well-educated Americans employed by the federal government, simply cannot comprehend this stuff. They live in a dream world, where America can do no wrong, government can be trusted, Dick Cheney deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and Barack Obama earned the one he got for his first ten days in office, etcetera etcetera. If the measure of a nation is the combination of public intelligence and public integrity, the USA is deeply mired in a cesspool of its own making.
Two Ways the Chinese May Take Over the World and the US:
1) Chinese Stuxnet for the Rest of the World
If what this analyst says is true, it paints a truly astonishing in implication and very, very ugly picture of the national security situation in store for most governments – especially in the US:
Current issues. UK officials are fearful that China has the capability to shut down businesses, military and critical infrastructure through cyber attacks and spy equipment embedded in computer and telecommunications equipment. The Stuxnet worm is the most famous and best case example of a cyber attack on a network which wreaked devastation having easily compromised conventional software defensive systems. There have been many cases of computer hardware having backdoors, Trojans or other programs to allow an attacker to gain access or transmit confidential data to a third party. Considerable focus and expense has been invested in software computer networks and system defences to detect and eradicate such threats. However, similar technology with antivirus or anti Trojan capability for hardware (silicon chips) is not available. The computer or network hardware underpins and runs all the software defence systems. If the hardware has a vulnerability then all the energy in defending at the software level is redundant. An effort must be made to defend and detect at the hardware level for a more comprehensive strategy.
Our findings. Claims were made by the intelligence agencies around the world, from MI5, NSA and IARPA, that silicon chips could be infected. We developed breakthrough silicon chip scanning technology to investigate these claims.
We chose an American military chip that is highly secure with sophisticated encryption standard, manufactured in China. Our aim was to perform advanced code breaking and to see if there were any unexpected features on the chip.
We scanned the silicon chip in an affordable time and found a previously unknown backdoor inserted by the manufacturer. This backdoor has a key, which we were able to extract. If you use this key you can disable the chip or reprogram it at will, even if locked by the user with their own key. This particular chip is prevalent in many systems from weapons, nuclear power plants to public transport. In other words, this backdoor access could be turned into an advanced Stuxnet weapon to attack potentially millions of systems. The scale and range of possible attacks has huge implications for National Security and public infrastructure.
