Reference: Empire of Lies & Secrecy

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom

Robert David SteeleRobert David Steele

Comprehensive Architect, Prime Design

Posted: December 11, 2010 09:11 PM

Empire of Lies & Secrecy

2010-12-12-RonPaul300x198.jpg

Ron Paul, in a short general speech before Congress, carried on C-SPAN and now on YouTube, defended the public service nature of the recent Wikileaks revelations, and asked nine questions. I thought to provide those questions here as a general service, with short commentaries and pointers to a few key books on the related topics of Deceit, Empire, Lies, & Secrecy. At the end I provide links to lists of book reviews across multiple related categories of non-fiction reading.

1 Do the American people deserve to know the truth regarding the on-going war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen?

Continue reading “Reference: Empire of Lies & Secrecy”

Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail

07 Other Atrocities, Articles & Chapters, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

L. Randall Wray: Anatomy of Mortgage Fraud, Part I: MERS's Smoking Gun

L. Randall Wray: Anatomy of Mortgage Fraud, Part II: The Mother of All Frauds

To recap, MERS's own documents demonstrate beyond question:

  1. The notes were never transferred, as required by Federal and NY state law, to the trustees of the REMICs;
  2. At best, the notes were retained by the mortgage servicers as directed by MERS (many never left the mortgage brokers, many of whom are now bankrupt);
  3. MERS claims to own the notes and therefore the mortgages to speed foreclosure;
  4. Actually, MERS does not hold the notes, which are held by servicers, but MERS instead “deputizes” employees of the servicers so that it can claim notes are transferred “in house” to avoid paying recording fees as well as avoiding maintenance of clear chains of title;
  5. On foreclosure, the documents are “disappeared” because they demonstrate the notes were never endorsed and transferred as required by law, with MERS and the servicers filing “lost note affidavits” to dupe the judges into allowing illegal foreclosures to proceed and to dupe securities holders so that they do not demand restitution;
  6. Servicers ensure homeowners default, as they “lose” mortgage payments, credit them to the wrong accounts, or helpfully recommend to homeowners that they stop making payments–all of this is to speed foreclosure to ensure securities holders do not realize they have been duped as they are paid pennies on the dollar for toxic securities;
  7. This also ensures that the investment banks that originated the toxic securities win their credit default swap bets they placed against the homeowners, with favored hedge fund managers like Paulson also winning CDO bets on failures;
  8. The faster the foreclosures can be processed through manufacture of fraudulent documents by Robo-signers, the lower the chance that MERS and all of its clients will be brought to justice.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is perpetuating fraud by refusing to confront the now-documented fraud across all mortgage services.  This should be the central issue in public discourse today.

Reference: Social Networking–The Future (Mark Suster)

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Mark Suster

TechCrunch 5 December 2010

Social Networking: The Future

Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first. This series is an adaptation of a recent talk Suster gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Follow him on Twitter @msuster.

In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! In the second post I explored the current era which covers Web 2.0 (blogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook), Realtime (Twitter), and mobile (Foursquare). Is the game over? Have Facebook & Twitter won or is their another act? No prizes for guessing … there’s always a second (and third, and fourth, and fifth) act in technology.  So where is social networking headed next?  I make eight predictions below.

Phi Beta Iota: As is customary, when persistent links exist, we point to the original.  Below we list the eight points, each point is amplified in the original source that we strongly recommend, along with the first two parts and the video.

1. The Social Graph Will Become Portable

2. We Will Form Around “True” Social Networks: Quora, HackerNews, Namesake, StockTwits

3. Privacy Issues Will Continue to Cause Problems: Diaspora

4. Social Networking Will Become Pervasive: Facebook Connect meets Pandora, NYTimes

5. Third-Party Tools Will Embed Social Features in Websites: Meebo

6. Social Networking (like the web) Will Split Into Layers: SimpleGeo, PlaceIQ

7. Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities: Klout, Sprout Social, CoTweet, awe.sm, (next gen) Buzzd

8. Facebook Will Not be the Only Dominant Player

Read the full original:  Social Networking: The Future

Journal: Wikileaks vs. Empire, Karzai Catch & Release

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Full Story Online

WikiLeaks vs. Empire

Why is this drama important? Not because of “life-threatening” leaks, as claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as described by Garry Wills in Bomb Power, among recent books. It has become the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American democracy itself. The wars in Pakistan and Yemen are secret wars. The war in Afghanistan is dominated by secret US Special Operations raids and killings. The CIA has its own secret army in Afghanistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's entire record in Iraq was classified. And so on, ad nauseam.

And what is the purpose of all the secrecy? As Howard Zinn always emphasized, the official fear was that the American people might revolt if we knew the secrets being kept from us.

Full Story Online

Karzai Catch & Release Program

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his powerful brother are among a number of senior Afghan figures to be accused of ordering the release of high-ranking Taliban fighters so often that the insurgents now run a commission to secure their freedom.

According to Reuters news agency, the practice is so widespread as to counteract the deterrent effect of capture, and pits Mr Karzai and his coterie directly at odds with the Nato strategy in Afghanistan.

Phi Beta Iota: The Taliban has a one advantage over Karzai–while they both share the revenue from the Afghanistan drug crop and the naive Americans happy to fund corruption in all forms, the Taliban has the added funding channel of the Pakistani ISI, which has been ripping off the CIA for over a billion a year for the past twenty years.  In a minor aside, Department of State employees have been forbidden to read any of the documents being made available to the public.  Next they will be forbidden to read foreign newspapers lest this treasonous act cause them confusion or cognitive dissonance given the sharp contrast between the “party line” (pun intended) and reality.  No room for diversity of view here–reality is what we say it is, because we say so.

Reference: WikiLeaks–Punishment of the Innocent by the Unwitting Begins

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Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Memo FYI.  It is security theater that will simply end up withdrawing functionality from loyal employees who have hard jobs to do with computers.  MA

Phi Beta Iota: This may be the most meaningless document we have seen in our history.

See Also from Same Source:

Journal: DoD, WikiLeaks, JCS, Security Ad Naseum…

One Page Online

See Also:

Journal: Wikileaks Inspires Panetta, Raises Mouse Turd Count

Journal: US Intelligence versus WikiLeaks

Journal: Wikileaks, the US, the UN, & The Rule of Law

Journal: Traitor to Some, Hero to Others

Secrecy News Extract: DIA Seeks to Classify Reality

SECRECY NEWS: Over-Classification & Whistleblowers

Worth a Look: Secrecy as Fraud (2002)

Review: Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy

Review: Nation of Secrets–The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life

Reference: 1996 Testimony to Moynihan Commisson

Reference: 1996 Hill Testimony on Secrecy

1993 TESTIMONY on National Security Information

Reference: Legitimate Grievances by Robert Steele

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As we all observe with stunning detachment the symbiotic continuance of Bush-Obama Democratic-Republican support to the Wall Street looting of America led by Goldman Sachs, whose executives continue to “own” the Department of the Treasury and the Bank of New York (Federal Reserve), I believe it helpful to itemize some legitimate grievances that could inspire State by State nullification of federal mandates and regulations, and perhaps a few secessions, with Cascadia, Vermont, Hawaii, and Alaska being well positioned to abandon a compact that no longer serves the United STATES of America, nor We the People.

I am indebted to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and founder of the Middlebury Institute, for teaching me about the urgency and relevance of the secessionist movements, and the detailed reflections that they have published, reflections that I point to here for the common good.

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES (Domestic)

The Chattanooga Declaration of 2007 (7 Points)

Core Point:  Liberty can only survive if political power is returned from the banks and corporations that have corrupted the federal government, to local communities and States.  The American Empire is no longer a nation or a republic, but has become a tyrant aggressive abroad and despotic at home.

The Burlington Declaration of 2006 (5 points)

Core Point: Any political entity has the right to separate itself from a larger body of which it is a part and peaceably to establish its independence as a free and legitimate state in the eyes of  the world.  Governments are instituted among peoples, deriving their just powers power from the consent of the governed, and whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the legitimate goals of life, liberty, prosperity, and self-determination, it is the right of the people in democratic fashion to aleter or abolish it, and to institute new government in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

The Logic of Secession: Three Tines to a Trident (A Manifesto by Kirkpatrick Sale)

Core Point: In the face of a rigged game in which two parties have conspired to corrupt, manipulate, and generally monopolize power, third party politics will not work.  Only secession will allow for the emergence of a restored Republic once the federal government and its two-party tyranny are made irrelevant (and starved of revenue).

In Defense of Vermont's Secession from the Union (A Manifesto by Keith Brunner)

Core Point:  Vermont was its own country before it joined the Union, and nothing in the Constitution of the United STATES of America precludes secession from this voluntary compact [Lincoln violated the Constitution in multiple ways, most Americans simply have not learned the truth of the matter].  The American Empire is economically, politically, cultural, and especially environmentally unsustainable, and far from fixing itself, is just getting worse.  When a government of people who have no moral authority are in the possession of enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, in the position to dominate the global economy for their own interests, and continually and foolishly pace the needs of the “economic system” above the needs of the natural world, the time for action cannot be put off any longer.

LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES (Anti-Americanism)

In sound support of the above, I have itemized a list of the behaviors and conditions that have inspired anti-Americanism.  Each is, without exception, a betrayal of the public trust and grounds for abolishing the present political criminal enterprise that has hijacked the federal government and the public treasury on behalf of its banking and corporate masters.   Each of these high crimes and misdemeanors justifying impeachment is derived from one or more works on non-fiction.

Reference: The Modern Big Picture–Two Minds

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Extract from Conclusion in the Above:  I have observed the World Game as a student-participant, and wish it well. I have also observed Bob Pickus's work, as a student-participant in Turn Toward Peace, and wish him well. There are still other alternatives, but whichever road leads us faster into a world without war, what I gain most from Pickus and Fuller is their sense of the Big Picture. No one else can match their indefatigable and comprehensive efforts to see the problem whole, and to steer the world's energy into a grand design of peace.

See Also:

Who's Who in Collective Intelligence

Who's Who in Peace Intelligence

BigPictureSmallWorld

BigPicture Consulting

Design Science Lab

Global Education Lab

EarthGame