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.
“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.
On the Second Anniversary of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla, Turkish Court Indicts Senior Israeli Military Officials in Murders of Nine Passengers
By Ann Wright
Two years ago I was a passenger on the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla which was sailing to break the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza. I watched from a small boat called the Challenger 1, as a much larger boat, the Mavi Marmara, with almost 600 passengers, was brutally attacked by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) commandos. 30 minutes later, our boat was attacked.
Using snipers from helicopters Israeli commandos shot many of the passengers on the exposed top deck of the ship. Other commandos in boats fired live ammunition, as well as percussion grenades, into all levels of the ship. As commandos repelled down from helicopters and boarded the ship, they executed at point blank range 5 passengers, including a 19 year old American citizen Furkan Dogan, whose body had five bullets including one to the back of his head. 9 persons, 8 Turkish citizens and one American citizen, were murdered and 50 others were wounded. One severely wounded Turkish man later died after being in a coma for many months.
Each of the six ships in the flotilla was attacked by IDF commandos. Passengers on the ships were shot with tasers and beaten by commandos. Potentially lethal paintballs were shot into the faces of passengers narrowly missing eyes and soft parts of the skull.
The problem is they don't have much to offer, other than going along. Corporate profits need to be sustained and attending (not fixing) the Cyber world appears to be the new way of doing it. And as a side note, it is the Congressional-cyber-industrial complex……since Congree allocates the funding and reaps the lobbyist's support…
As Congress boosts spending on cybersecurity and mulls over new data safety requirements on private industry, some companies stand to get rich.
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and other defense and tech companies have been lobbying Capitol Hill about the growing cyberthreats to national security and corporate America, but they also make millions of dollars each year selling a variety of cybersecurity programs, tools and solutions to government and business.
Some lawmakers say the legislative push has spawned a “cyber-industrial complex.”
“I believe these bills will encourage the development of an industry that profits from fear and whose currency is Americans’ private data,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), speaking on the Senate floor last week in opposition to pending cybersecurity legislation. “These bills create a cyber-industrial complex that has an interest in preserving the problem to which it is the solution.”
The online threats of the digital age — stolen state secrets, hacked personal computers and more — may pose serious, real and novel challenges to the federal government and private sector alike.
But the reaction to those threats has been far more old school: Companies in several different industries are aggressively playing the legislative lobbying game as part of their larger market strategy.
And it’s paying off in millions of dollars of federal contracts alone.
The Bilderbergers now post the participant list on their “official” website. In the past, moles inside the organization would release the secretive list to journalists.
Bilderberg Meetings Chantilly, Virginia, USA, 31 May-3 June 2012
Final List of Participants Including General Keith Alexander, D/NSA and D/Cyber-Command
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.
The authenticity of the Zapruder film and of the other home movies purportedly taken of the assassination in Dealey Plaza has been hotly contested since I (Jim Fetzer) first organized and moderated the first Zapruder Film Symposium during the JFK Lancer Conference in 1996. We have accumulated an enormous quantity of confirming evidence since that time, where those who want to know what actually happened are better off reading the compilation of witness reports from those who were present, which John P. Costella, Ph.D., has compiled, “What happened on Elm Street? The Eyewitnesses Speak”, than they are watching the extant version of the film. Indeed, John, who earned his Ph.D. in electromagnetism and is an expert on the laws of optics and the physics of moving objects, has a brilliant visual introduction to the study of Zapruder film fakery, “JFK Assassination Film Hoax: A Simple Introduction”.
Some of the most stunning proof of alteration comes from one of the most prominent figures in the extant film, Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent who was assigned to protect Jackie Kennedy. As the volley of shots that blew JFK’s brains out to the back rear is virtually complete, Hill rushed forward to protect Jackie. As he has consistently maintained for nearly fifty years now, he climbed up on the limo, where she was reaching across the trunk to pick up a chunk of Jack’s skull and brains, pushed her back down into the seat, lay cross her and JFK’s body, peered into a massive, fist-sized hole in the back of his head, and gave his colleagues a “thumbs d0wn”, all before the limousine had reached the Triple Underpass. Yet, in the Zapruder film and the complementary photograph shown here–which also has to have been fabricated–we only see him climbing on the back of the limo and reaching out toward Jackie before it zooms toward Parkland Hospital and passes beneath the underpass. What Clint Hill has been reporting–in written reports as well as during spoken presentations–contradicts the extant version of the film.
