Monday, September 30, 2013

Looting the Pension Funds All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

wanna know "why"  Our gov. is "stockpiling"  & ????   against the American People !  ...cuz   Mr. & Mrs.  AMERICA ....when you finally realize you've been fucked  by  the dummycocks & republipubes & 'their" "elite" buds  ... that you've BEEN "voting" for all these yrs  ( you know yer kooky ..lesser of 2 evils nuttery )   when ALL yer   $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$  is fucking gone  ... & yer left holding yer dicks & twats ....   & all's you's have left is yer "tin foil hat"   on    :o        you'll    wish to God .... you'd woke the fuck up!  ...   guess i can't ask fer yer vote now ...hummmm            :0        (paid fer by go fuck yer~self ..Oops gov. already did it )   ah um anyway i endorse this  msg  LMMFAO    
Rolling Stone

Looting the Pension Funds

All across America, Wall Street is grabbing money meant for public workers

SEPTEMBER 26, 2013
In the final months of 2011, almost two years before the city of Detroit would shock America by declaring bankruptcy in the face of what it claimed were insurmountable pension costs, the state of Rhode Island took bold action to avert what it called its own looming pension crisis. Led by its newly elected treasurer, Gina Raimondo – an ostentatiously ambitious 42-year-old Rhodes scholar and former venture capitalist – the state declared war on public pensions, ramming through an ingenious new law slashing benefits of state employees with a speed and ferocity seldom before seen by any local government.
Detroit's Debt Crisis: Everything Must Go
Called the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, her plan would later be hailed as the most comprehensive pension reform ever implemented. The rap was so convincing at first that the overwhelmed local burghers of her little petri-dish state didn't even know how to react. "She's Yale, Harvard, Oxford – she worked on Wall Street," says Paul Doughty, the current president of the Providence firefighters union. "Nobody wanted to be the first to raise his hand and admit he didn't know what the fuck she was talking about."
Soon she was being talked about as a probable candidate for Rhode Island's 2014 gubernatorial race. By 2013, Raimondo had raised more than $2 million, a staggering sum for a still-undeclared candidate in a thimble-size state. Donors from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital and JPMorgan Chase showered her with money, with more than $247,000 coming from New York contributors alone. A shadowy organization called EngageRI, a public-advocacy group of the 501(c)4 type whose donors were shielded from public scrutiny by the infamous Citizens United decision, spent $740,000 promoting Raimondo's ideas. Within Rhode Island, there began to be whispers that Raimondo had her sights on the presidency. Even former Obama right hand and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed to Rhode Island as an example to be followed in curing pension woes.
What few people knew at the time was that Raimondo's "tool kit" wasn't just meant for local consumption. The dynamic young Rhodes scholar was allowing her state to be used as a test case for the rest of the country, at the behest of powerful out-of-state financiers with dreams of pushing pension reform down the throats of taxpayers and public workers from coast to coast. One of her key supporters was billionaire former Enron executive John Arnold – a dickishly ubiquitous young right-wing kingmaker with clear designs on becoming the next generation's Koch brothers, and who for years had been funding a nationwide campaign to slash benefits for public workers.
Nor did anyone know that part of Raimondo's strategy for saving money involved handing more than $1 billion – 14 percent of the state fund – to hedge funds, including a trio of well-known New York-based funds: Dan Loeb's Third Point Capital was given $66 million, Ken Garschina's Mason Capital got $64 million and $70 million went to Paul Singer's Elliott Management. The funds now stood collectively to be paid tens of millions in fees every single year by the already overburdened taxpayers of her ostensibly flat-broke state. Felicitously, Loeb, Garschina and Singer serve on the board of the Manhattan Institute, a prominent conservative think tank with a history of supporting benefit-slashing reforms. The institute named Raimondo its 2011 "Urban Innovator" of the year.
The state's workers, in other words, were being forced to subsidize their own political disenfranchisement, coughing up at least $200 million to members of a group that had supported anti-labor laws. Later, when Edward Siedle, a former SEC lawyer, asked Raimondo in a column for Forbes.com how much the state was paying in fees to these hedge funds, she first claimed she didn't know. Raimondo later told the Providence Journal she was contractually obliged to defer to hedge funds on the release of "proprietary" information, which immediately prompted a letter in protest from a series of freaked-out interest groups. Under pressure, the state later released some fee information, but the information was originally kept hidden, even from the workers themselves. "When I asked, I was basically hammered," says Marcia Reback, a former sixth-grade schoolteacher and retired Providence Teachers Union president who serves as the lone union rep on Rhode Island's nine-member State Investment Commission. "I couldn't get any information about the actual costs."
This is the third act in an improbable triple-fucking of ordinary people that Wall Street is seeking to pull off as a shocker epilogue to the crisis era. Five years ago this fall, an epidemic of fraud and thievery in the financial-services industry triggered the collapse of our economy. The resultant loss of tax revenue plunged states everywhere into spiraling fiscal crises, and local governments suffered huge losses in their retirement portfolios – remember, these public pension funds were some of the most frequently targeted suckers upon whom Wall Street dumped its fraud-riddled mortgage-backed securities in the pre-crash years.
Today, the same Wall Street crowd that caused the crash is not merely rolling in money again but aggressively counterattacking on the public-relations front. The battle increasingly centers around public funds like state and municipal pensions. This war isn't just about money. Crucially, in ways invisible to most Americans, it's also about blame. In state after state, politicians are following the Rhode Island playbook, using scare tactics and lavishly funded PR campaigns to cast teachers, firefighters and cops – not bankers – as the budget-devouring boogeymen responsible for the mounting fiscal problems of America's states and cities.
Secrets and Lies of the Bailout
Not only did these middle-class workers already lose huge chunks of retirement money to huckster financiers in the crash, and not only are they now being asked to take the long-term hit for those years of greed and speculative excess, but in many cases they're also being forced to sit by and watch helplessly as Gordon Gekko wanna-be's like Loeb or scorched-earth takeover artists like Bain Capital are put in charge of their retirement savings.
It's a scam of almost unmatchable balls and cruelty, accomplished with the aid of some singularly spineless politicians. And it hasn't happened overnight. This has been in the works for decades, and the fighting has been dirty all the way.
How Wall Street Killed Financial Reform
There's $2.6 trillion in state pension money under management in America, and there are a lot of fingers in that pie. Any attempt to make a neat Aesop narrative about what's wrong with the system would inevitably be an oversimplification. But in this hugely contentious, often overheated national controversy – which at times has pitted private-sector workers who've mostly lost their benefits already against public-sector workers who are merely about to lose them – two key angles have gone largely unreported. Namely: who got us into this mess, and who's now being paid to get us out of it.
The siege of America's public-fund money really began nearly 40 years ago, in 1974, when Congress passed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA. In theory, this sweeping regulatory legislation was designed to protect the retirement money of workers with pension plans. ERISA forces employers to provide information about where pension money is being invested, gives employees the right to sue for breaches of fiduciary duty, and imposes a conservative "prudent man" rule on the managers of retiree funds, dictating that they must make sensible investments and seek to minimize loss. But this landmark worker-protection law left open a major loophole: It didn't cover public pensions. Some states were balking at federal oversight, and lawmakers, naively perhaps, simply never contemplated the possibility of local governments robbing their own workers.
Politicians quickly learned to take liberties. One common tactic involved illegally borrowing cash from public retirement funds to finance other budget needs. For many state pension funds, a significant percentage of the kitty is built up by the workers themselves, who pitch in as little as one and as much as 10 percent of their income every year. The rest of the fund is made up by contributions from the taxpayer. In many states, the amount that the state has to kick in every year, the Annual Required Contribution (ARC), is mandated by state law.
Chris Tobe, a former trustee of the Kentucky Retirement Systems who blew the whistle to the SEC on public-fund improprieties in his state and wrote a book called Kentucky Fried Pensions, did a careful study of states and their ARCs. While some states pay 100 percent (or even more) of their required bills, Tobe concluded that in just the past decade, at least 14 states have regularly failed to make their Annual Required Contributions. In 2011, an industry website called 24/7 Wall St. compiled a list of the 10 brokest, most busted public pensions in America. "Eight of those 10 were on my list," says Tobe.
Among the worst of these offenders are Massachusetts (made just 27 percent of its payments), New Jersey (33 percent, with the teachers' pension getting just 10 percent of required payments) and Illinois (68 percent). In Kentucky, the state pension fund, the Kentucky Employee Retirement System (KERS), has paid less than 50 percent of its ARCs over the past 10 years, and is now basically butt-broke – the fund is 27 percent funded, which makes bankrupt Detroit, whose city pension is 77 percent full, look like the sultanate of Brunei by comparison.
Here's what this game comes down to. Politicians run for office, promising to deliver law and order, safe and clean streets, and good schools. Then they get elected, and instead of paying for the cops, garbagemen, teachers and firefighters they only just 10 minutes ago promised voters, they intercept taxpayer money allocated for those workers and blow it on other stuff. It's the governmental equivalent of stealing from your kids' college fund to buy lap dances. In Rhode Island, some cities have underfunded pensions for decades. In certain years zero required dollars were contributed to the municipal pension fund. "We'd be fine if they had made all of their contributions," says Stephen T. Day, retired president of the Providence firefighters union. "Instead, after they took all that money, they're saying we're broke. Are you fucking kidding me?"
There's an arcane but highly disturbing twist to the practice of not paying required contributions into pension funds: The states that engage in this activity may also be committing securities fraud. Why? Because if a city or state hasn't been making its required contributions, and this hasn't been made plain to the ratings agencies, then that same city or state is actually concealing what in effect are massive secret loans and is actually far more broke than it is representing to investors when it goes out into the world and borrows money by issuing bonds.
Some states have been caught in the act of doing this, but the penalties have been so meager that the practice can be considered quasi-sanctioned. For example, in August 2010, the SEC reprimanded the state of New Jersey for serially lying about its failure to make pension contributions throughout the 2000s. "New Jersey failed to provide certain present and historical financial information regarding its pension funding in bond-disclosure documents," the SEC wrote, in seemingly grave language. "The state was aware of . . . the potential effects of the underfunding." Illinois was similarly reprimanded by the SEC for lying about its failure to make its required pension contributions. But in neither of these cases were the consequences really severe. So far, states get off with no monetary fines at all. "The SEC was mistaken if they think they sent a message to other states," Tobe says.
But for all of this, state pension funds were more or less in decent shape prior to the financial crisis of 2008. The country, after all, had been in a historic bull market for most of the 1990s and 2000s and politicians who underpaid the ARCs during that time often did so assuming that the good times would never end. In fact, prior to the crash, state pension funds nationwide were cumulatively running a surplus. But then the crash came, and suddenly states everywhere were in a real, no-joke fiscal crisis. Tax revenues went in the crapper, and someone had to take the hit. But who? Cuts to corporate welfare and a rolled-up-newspaper whack of new taxes on the guilty finance sector seemed a good place to start, but it didn't work out that way. Instead, it was then that the legend of pension unsustainability was born, with the help of a pair of unlikely allies.
Most people think of Pew Charitable Trusts as a centrist, nonpartisan organization committed to sanguine policy analysis and agnostic number crunching. It's an odd reputation for an organization that was the legacy of J. Howard Pew, president of Sun Oil (the future Sunoco) during its early 20th-century petro-powerhouse days and a kind of australopithecine precursor to a Tea Party leader. Pew had all the symptoms: an obsession with the New Deal as a threat to free society, a keen appreciation for unreadable Austrian economist F.A. Hayek and a hoggish overuse of the word "freedom." Pew and his family left nearly $1 billion to a series of trusts, one of which was naturally called the "Freedom Trust," whose mission was, in part, to combat "the false promises of socialism and a planned economy."
The Great American Bubble Machine
Still, for decades Pew trusts engaged in all sorts of worthy endeavors, including everything from polling to press criticism. In 2007, Pew began publishing an annual study called "The Widening Gap," which aimed to use states' own data to show the "gap" between present pension-fund levels and future obligations. The study quickly became a leading analysis of the "unfunded liability" question.
In 2011, Pew began to align itself with a figure who was decidedly neither centrist nor nonpartisan: 39-year-old John Arnold, whom CNN/Money described (erroneously) as the "second-youngest self-made billionaire in America," after Mark Zuckerberg. Though similar in wealth and youth, Arnold presented the stylistic opposite of Zuckerberg's signature nerd chic: He's a lipless, eager little jerk with the jug-eared face of a Division III women's basketball coach, exactly what you'd expect a former Enron commodities trader to look like. Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room and remembers those tapes of Enron traders cackling about rigging energy prices on "Grandma Millie" and jamming electricity rates "right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour" will have a sense of exactly what Arnold's work environment was like.
The People vs. Goldman Sachs
In fact, in the book that the movie was based on, the authors portray Arnold bragging about his minions manipulating energy prices, praising them for "learning how to use the Enron bat to push around the market." Those comments later earned Arnold visits from federal investigators, who let him get away with claiming he didn't mean what he said.
As Enron was imploding, Arnold played a footnote role, helping himself to an $8 million bonus while the company's pension fund was vaporizing. He and other executives were later rebuked by a bankruptcy judge for looting their own company along with other executives. Public pension funds nationwide, reportedly, lost more than $1.5 billion thanks to their investments in Enron.
In 2002, Arnold started a hedge fund and over the course of the next few years made roughly a $3 billion fortune as the world's most successful natural-gas trader. But after suffering losses in 2010, Arnold bowed out of hedge-funding to pursue "other interests." He had created the Arnold Foundation, an organization dedicated, among other things, to reforming the pension system, hiring a Republican lobbyist and former chief of staff to Dick Armey named Denis Calabrese, as well as Dan Liljenquist, a Utah state senator and future Tea Party challenger to Orrin Hatch.
Soon enough, the Arnold Foundation released a curious study on pensions. On the one hand, it admitted that many states had been undercontributing to their pension funds for years. But instead of proposing that states correct the practice, the report concluded that "the way to create a sound, sustainable and fair retirement-savings program is to stop promising a [defined] benefit."
In 2011, Arnold and Pew found each other. As detailed in a new study by progressive think tank Institute for America's Future, Arnold and Pew struck up a relationship – and both have since been proselytizing pension reform all over America, including California, Florida, Kansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Montana. Few knew that Pew had a relationship with a right-wing, anti-pension zealot like Arnold. "The centrist reputation of Pew was a key in selling a lot of these ideas," says Jordan Marks of the National Public Pension Coalition. Later, a Pew report claimed that the national "gap" between pension assets and future liabilities added up to some $757 billion and dryly insisted the shortfall was unbridgeable, minus some combination of "higher contributions from taxpayers and employees, deep benefit cuts and, in some cases, changes in how retirement plans are structured and benefits are distributed."
What the study didn't say was that this supposedly massive gap could all be chalked up to the financial crisis, which, of course, had been caused almost entirely by the greed and wide-scale fraud of the financial-services industry – particularly with regard to state pension funds.
A study by noted economist Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research bore this out. In February 2011, Baker reported that, had public pension funds not been invested in the stock market and exposed to mortgage-backed securities, there would be no shortfall at all. He said state pension managers were of course somewhat to blame, but only "insofar as they exercised poor judgment in buying the [finance] industry's services."
In fact, Baker said, had public funds during the crash years simply earned modest returns equal to 30-year Treasury bonds, then public-pension assets would be $850 billion richer than they were two years after the crash. Baker reported that states were short an additional $80 billion over the same period thanks to the fact that post-crash, cash-strapped states had been paying out that much less of their mandatory ARC payments.
So even if Pew's numbers were right, the "unfunded liability" crisis had nothing to do with the systemic unsustainability of public pensions. Thanks to a deadly combination of unscrupulous states illegally borrowing from their pensioners, and unscrupulous banks whose mass sales of fraudulent toxic subprime products crashed the market, these funds were out some $930 billion. Yet the public was being told that the problem was state workers' benefits were simply too expensive.
In a way, this was a repeat of a shell game with retirement finance that had been going on at the federal level since the Reagan years. The supposed impending collapse of Social Security, which actually should be running a surplus of trillions of dollars, is now repeated as a simple truth. But Social Security wouldn't be "collapsing" at all had not three decades of presidents continually burgled the cash in the Social Security trust fund to pay for tax cuts, wars and God knows what else. Same with the alleged insolvencies of state pension programs. The money may not be there, but that's not because the program is unsustainable: It's because bankers and politicians stole the money.
Still, the public mostly bought the line being sold by Arnold, Pew and other anti-pension figures like the Koch brothers. To most, it didn't matter who was to blame: What mattered is that the money was gone, and there seemed to be only two possible paths forward. One led to bankruptcy, a real-enough threat that had already ravaged places like Vallejo, California; Jefferson County, Alabama; and, this summer, Detroit. In Rhode Island, the tiny town of Central Falls went bust in 2011, and even after a court-ordered plan lifted the town out of bankruptcy in 2012, the "rescue" left pensions slashed as much as 55 percent. "You had guys who were living off $24,000, and now they're getting $12,000," says Day. Though Day and his fellow retirees are still fighting reform, he says other union workers might rather settle than file bankruptcy. Holding up an infamous local-newspaper picture of a retired Central Falls policeman in a praying posture, as though begging not to have his whole pension taken away, Day sighs. "Guys take one look at this picture and that's it. They're terrified."
Such images chilled many public workers into accepting the second path – the kind of pension reform meagerly touted by one-percent-friendly politicians like Gina Raimondo. Anyone could see that "reform" meant giving up cash. But the other parts of these schemes were murkier. Most pension-reform proposals required that states must go after higher returns by seeking out "alternative investments," which sounds harmless enough. But we are now finding out what that term actually means – and it's a little north of harmless.
Looting Main Street: How the Nation's Biggest Banks Are Ripping Us Off
One of the most garish early experiments in "alternative investments" came in Ohio in the late 1990s, after the Republican-controlled state assembly passed a law loosening restrictions on what kinds of things state funds could invest in. Sometime later, an investigation by the Toledo Blade revealed that the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation had bought into rare-coin funds run by a GOP fundraiser named Thomas Noe. Through Noe, Ohio put $50 million into coins and "other collectibles" – including Beanie Babies.
The scandal had repercussions all over the country, but not what you'd expect. James Drew, one of the reporters who broke the story, notes that a consequence of "Coingate" was that states stopped giving out information about where public money is invested. "If they learned anything, it's not to stop doing it, but to keep it secret," says Drew.
Invasion of the Home Snatchers
In fact, in recent years more than a dozen states have carved out exemptions for hedge funds to traditional Freedom of Information Act requests, making it impossible in some cases, if not illegal, for workers to find out where their own money has been invested.
The way this works, typically, is simple: A hedge fund will refuse to take a state's business unless it first provides legal guarantees that information about its investments won't be disclosed to the public. The ostensible justifications for these outrageous laws are usually that disclosing commercial information about hedge funds would place them at a "competitive disadvantage."
In 2010, the University of California reinvested its pension fund with a venture-capital group called Sequoia Capital, which in turn is a backer of a firm called Think Finance, whose business is payday lending – a form of short-term, extremely high-interest rate lending that's basically loan-sharking without the leg-breaking, and is banned in 15 states and D.C. According to American Banker, Think Finance partnered with a Native American tribe to get around state interest-rate caps; someone borrowing $250 in its "plain green loans" program would owe $440 after 16 weeks, for a tidy annual percentage rate of 379 percent. In a more recent case, the pension fund of L.A. County union workers invested in an Embassy Suites hotel that is trying to prevent janitors and other employees from organizing. California passed a law in 2005 making hedge-fund investments secret.
The American Federation of Teachers this spring released a list of financiers who had been connected with lobbying efforts against defined-benefit plans. Included on that list was hedge-funder Loeb of Third Point Capital, who sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, a group that advocates for an end to these traditional plans for public workers – that is, pensions that promise a guaranteed payout based on one's salary and years of service. When Rhode Island union rep Reback complained about hiring funds whose managers had anti-labor histories, she was told the state couldn't make decisions based on political leanings of fund managers. That same month, Rhode Island moved to disinvest its workers' money from firearms distributors in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting.
Hedge funds have good reason to want to keep their fees hidden: They're insanely expensive. The typical fee structure for private hedge-fund management is a formula called "two and twenty," meaning the hedge fund collects a two percent fee just for showing up, then gets 20 percent of any profits it earns with your money. Some hedge funds also charge a mysterious third fee, called "fund expenses," that can run as high as half a percent – Loeb's Third Point, for instance, charged Rhode Island just more than half a percent for "fund expenses" last year, or about $350,000. Hedge funds will also pass on their trading costs to their clients, a huge additional line item that can come to an extra percent or more and is seldom disclosed. There are even fees states pay for withdrawing from certain hedge funds.
In public finance, hedge funds will sometimes give slight discounts, but the numbers are still enormous. In Rhode Island, over the course of 20 years, Siedle projects that the state will pay $2.1 billion in fees to hedge funds, private-equity funds and venture-capital funds. Why is that number interesting? Because it very nearly matches the savings the state will be taking from workers by freezing their Cost of Living Adjustments – $2.3 billion over 20 years.
"That's some 'reform,'" says Siedle.
"They pretty much took the COLA and gave it to a bunch of billionaires," hisses Day, Providence's retired firefighter union chief.
When asked to respond to criticisms that the savings from COLA freezes could be seen as going directly into the pockets of billionaires, treasurer Raimondo replied that it was "very dangerous to look at fees in a vacuum" and that it's worth paying more for a safer and more diverse portfolio. She compared hedge funds – inherently high-risk investments whose prospectuses typically contain front-page disclaimers saying things like, WARNING: YOU MAY LOSE EVERYTHING – to snow tires. "Sure, you pay a little more," she says. "But you're really happy you have them when the roads are slick."
Raimondo recently criticized the high-fee structure of hedge funds in the Wall Street Journal and told Rolling Stone that "'two and twenty' doesn't make sense anymore," although she hired several funds at precisely those fee levels back before she faced public criticism on the issue. She did add that she was monitoring the funds' performance. "If they underperform, they're out," she says.
And underperforming is likely. Even though hedge funds can and sometimes do post incredible numbers in the short-term – Loeb's Third Point notched a 41 percent gain for Rhode Island in 2010; the following year, it earned -0.54 percent. On Wall Street, people are beginning to clue in to the fact – spikes notwithstanding – that over time, hedge funds basically suck. In 2008, Warren Buffett famously placed a million-dollar bet with the heads of a New York hedge fund called Protégé Partners that the S&P 500 index fund – a neutral bet on the entire stock market, in other words – would outperform a portfolio of five hedge funds hand-picked by the geniuses at Protégé.
Five years later, Buffett's zero-effort, pin-the-tail-on-the-stock-market portfolio is up 8.69 percent total. Protégé's numbers are comical in comparison; all those superminds came up with a 0.13 percent increase over five long years, meaning Buffett is beating the hedgies by nearly nine points without lifting a finger.
Union leaders all over the country have started to figure out the perils of hiring a bunch of overpriced Wall Street wizards to manage the public's money. Among other things, investing with hedge funds is infinitely more expensive than investing with simple index funds. On Wall Street and in the investment world, the management price is measured in something called basis points, a basis point equaling one hundredth of one percent. So a state like Rhode Island, which is paying a two percent fee to hedge funds, is said to be paying an upfront fee of 200 basis points.
How much does it cost to invest public money in a simple index fund? "We've paid as little as .875 of a basis point," says William Atwood, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Investment. "At most, five basis points."
So at the low end, Atwood is paying 200 times less than the standard two percent hedge-fund fee. As an example, Atwood says, the state of Illinois paid a fee of just $57,000 last year on $550 million of public money they put into an S&P 500 index fund, which, again, is exactly the sort of plain-vanilla investment that Warren Buffett used to publicly kick the ass of Wall Street's cockiest hedge fund.
The fees aren't even the only costs of "alternative investments." Many states have engaged middlemen called "placement agents" to hire hedge funds, and those placement agents – typically people with ties to state investment boards – are themselves paid enormous sums, often in the millions, just to "introduce" hedge funds to politicians holding the checkbook.
Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail
In Kentucky, Tobe and Siedle found that KRS, the state pension funds, had paid a whopping $14 million to placement agents between 2004 and 2009. In Atlanta, a member of the city pension board complained to the SEC that the city had hired a consultant, Larry Gray, who convinced the city pension fund to invest $28 million in a hedge fund he himself owned. Raimondo says she never hired placement agents, but the state did pay a $450,000 consulting fee to a firm called Cliffwater LLC.
Doughty says the endless system of highly paid middlemen reminds him of old slapstick comedies. "It's like the Three Stooges," he says. "When you ask them what happened, they're all pointing in different directions, like, 'He did it!'"
How Wall Street Is Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
Even worse, placement agents are also often paid by the alternative investors. In California, the Apollo private-equity firm paid a former CalPERS board member named Alfred Villalobos a staggering $48 million for help in securing investments from state pensions, and Villalobos delivered, helping Apollo receive $3 billion of CalPERS money. Villalobos got indicted in that affair, but only because he'd lied to Apollo about disclosing his fees to CalPERS. Otherwise, despite the fact that this is in every way basically a crude kickback scheme, there's no law at all against a placement agent taking money from a finance firm. The Government Accountability Office has condemned the practice, but it goes on.
"It's a huge conflict of interest," says Siedle.
So when you invest your pension money in hedge funds, you might be paying a hundred times the cost or more, you might be underperforming the market, you may be supporting political movements against you, and you often have to pay what effectively is a bribe just for the privilege of hiring your crappy overpaid money manager in the first place. What's not to like about that? Who could complain?
Once upon a time, local corruption was easy. "It was votes for jobs," Doughty says with a sigh. A ward would turn out for a councilman, the councilman would come back with jobs from city-budget contracts – that was the deal. What's going on with public pensions is a more confusing modern version of that local graft. With public budgets carefully scrutinized by everyone from the press to regulators, the black box of pension funds makes it the only public treasure left that's easy to steal. Politicians quietly borrow millions from these funds by not paying their ARCs, and it's that money, plus the savings from cuts made to worker benefits in the name of "emergency" pension reform, that pays for an apparently endless regime of corporate tax breaks and handouts.
A notorious example in Rhode Island is, of course, 38 Studios, the doomed video-game venture of blabbering, Christ-humping ex-Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who received a $75 million loan guarantee from the state at a time when local politicians were pleading poverty. "This whole thing isn't just about cutting payments to retirees," says syndicated columnist David Sirota, who authored the Institute for America's Future study on Arnold and Pew. "It's about preserving money for corporate welfare." Their study estimates states spend up to $120 billion a year on offshore tax loopholes and gifts to dingbats like Schilling and other subsidies – more than two and a half times as much as the $46 billion a year Pew says states are short on pension payments.
The bottom line is that the "unfunded liability" crisis is, if not exactly fictional, certainly exaggerated to an outrageous degree. Yes, we live in a new economy and, yes, it may be time to have a discussion about whether certain kinds of public employees should be receiving sizable benefit checks until death. But the idea that these benefit packages are causing the fiscal crises in our states is almost entirely a fabrication crafted by the very people who actually caused the problem. It's like Voltaire's maxim about noses having evolved to fit spectacles, so therefore we wear spectacles. In this case, we have an unfunded-pension-liability problem because we've been ripping retirees off for decades – but the solution being offered is to rip them off even more.
Everybody following this story should remember what went on in the immediate aftermath of the crash of 2008, when the federal government was so worried about the sanctity of private contracts that it doled out $182 billion in public money to AIG. That bailout guaranteed that firms like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank could be paid off on their bets against a subprime market they themselves helped overheat, and that AIG executives could be paid the huge bonuses they naturally deserved for having run one of the world's largest corporations into the ground. When asked why the state was paying those bonuses, Obama economic adviser Larry Summers said, "We are a country of law. . . . The government cannot just abrogate contracts."
Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
Now, though, states all over the country are claiming they not only need to abrogate legally binding contracts with state workers but also should seize retirement money from widows to finance years of illegal loans, giant fees to billionaires like Dan Loeb and billions in tax breaks to the Curt Schillings of the world. It ain't right. If someone has to tighten a belt or two, let's start there. If we've still got a problem after squaring those assholes away, that's something that can be discussed. But asking cops, firefighters and teachers to take the first hit for a crisis caused by reckless pols and thieves on Wall Street is low, even by American standards.
This story is from the October 10th, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/looting-the-pension-funds-20130926

Police Chief Charged With More Than 130 Violations Has Collected Over $115,000 Without Working A Day This Year

from the the-system's-flaws-exposed-on-a-grand-scale dept

Law enforcement officials are right: crime doesn't pay. Or at least, it doesn't pay enough to get you back out of bed and pounding the pavement. Law enforcement is where the real money is at and best of all, you can be an (allegedly) amoral jerk and still rake in a nice salary without leaving the house… for nine straight months.
Irvington Police Chief Michael Chase hasn’t worked a single day in the past nine months, but a series of legal fits and starts has allowed the town’s suspended top cop to take home roughly $115,000 so far this year, leading to a state investigation, officials said.

Chase was suspended in December 2012 after an investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office accused him of quashing a probe into alleged misconduct by his police officer nephew and charged him with failing to properly supervise his department’s Internal Affairs Unit. Accused of more than 130 violations of Attorney General’s Office guidelines and police department rules, Chase was suspended — with pay — indefinitely.
Chase is scheduled to make $154,272 this year and he's collected three-fourths of that from the sidelines. Why? Because his lawyer has filed for extension after extension, which have prevented disciplinary hearings from taking place -- something that should have happened within 30-45 days according to state guidelines. Chase's lawyer is definitely working harder than Chase, digging himself out from under the "thousands of pages of documents" that 130+ violations bring with them.

In addition to helping his nephew escape misconduct charges, Chase has racked up a variety of violations over the past several years. Here's a few highlights:
[C]hase has been sued by female officers six times since 1998. Court records show the complaints largely dealt with sexual harassment and discrimination

[A]fter a fatal 2009 police pursuit, Chase "refused to fill out a pursuit form as mandated by the Attorney General Guidelines … and stated that he was not involved in the pursuit." As the internal affairs commander, [Andrea] Koontz ordered detectives to investigate Chase, and claims she uncovered video and audio recordings that confirmed his involvement, according to the suit. [This is in addition to her harrassment suit against Chase.]

The prosecutor’s report… found Irvington’s internal affairs unit failed to properly investigate 113 citizen complaints against officers between April and August of last year [2012].

[Chase] ordered on-duty detectives to take his wife's car to be repaired…

The report also suggested Chase used the Internal Affairs Unit to unfairly punish officers he had disagreements with.
Believe it or not, Chase is not being charged with any criminal activity. In fact, the state prosecutors declined to bring any charges against Chase and dumped it all into Police Director Joseph Santiago's lap. Santiago has said Chase "could" lose his job and that suspending him with pay does not violate state guidelines. (No criminal charges, no loss of pay.)

Not only has the legal process dragged on for nine months, but Chase's representation has changed since he was first suspended back in December of 2012. Chase was originally represented by criminal defense attorney Steven Altman, best known for defending Dharun Ravi in the Tyler Clementi cyber-bullying case. Nine months later, he's represented Joseph Donahue, a criminal defense attorney who is one of several "covered" lawyers listed by the New Jersey Policemen's Benevolent Association. Altman's name isn't on the list, which presumably means Chase switched over to a NJPBA-approved representative in order to avail himself of the association's legal defense fund.

Everything checks out legally and Chase is still facing nothing more than allegations, albeit ones that are both numerous and severe. It's hard to argue his pay should be cut off before he receives his day in court, but it's also hard to justify paying out over $100,000 to someone who hasn't worked since December of last year.

There's a whole lot of imperfect systems meshing here and it has put Police Director Santiago in the unenviable position of pissing off the citizens in his jurisdiction. He can't cut off the paychecks without criminal charges and he can't allow Chase to return to work because the allegations are too severe. And you can't blame his defense attorney for wanting to provide the best service for his client, even if wading through thousands of documents is indistinguishable from a stalling tactic when viewed from the outside. What should be of concern is the fact that these abuses went on for so long without intermediate disciplinary measures being enacted, other than a court awarding a former police sergeant $1.4 million and charging Chase with discrimination back in 2007. The fact that the department's Internal Affairs office was (allegedly) compliant means there will need to be some serious housecleaning if the charges stick.

Put it all together and the only one who seems to be making out alright in this deal is the one charged with 100+ violations. That certainly seems wrong but there's really no better option, at least not if you want to continue treating the accused as "innocent until proven guilty." About all anyone can do is hope that if Chase is found guilty, the end result is more than some light wrist slaps and the unimpeded collection of paychecks. Without an effective deterrent, more people in his position are going to realize that the system, while ostensibly working as it should, is easily exploited.

Cracking the illuminati Number Code & Agenda

hey she's cute !  :o  hehe    

Cracking the illuminati Number Code & Agenda

As you all may or may not have noticed I have been talking a lot about all things mathematical lately.  Such as sharing some info with you all about cryptography, algorithms, and of course posting a ton of coded kryptos & binary codes on my FB page.  However, before I get started I would just like to say beforehand that just because the illuminati also loves to do everything by numbers does not at all mean that learning about numerology, and math is considered evil.  It works both ways.  As a matter of fact our entire Universe is built-in a numerical construct, along with all of your computers, cellphones, music that you listen to, and even your brain.  The only difference is what makes something “evil” is when someone takes advantage of these knowledges & wisdom to use it for their own gain at the expense of others.  That is the only difference.  So please, let’s get that dogma out-of-the-way because they won’t have all of the power if you all would just stop feeding them your energy!  Just be AWARE of what is going on is good enough.  One should be smart enough to know what is good or evil to them right?  So I don’t want to waste my time lecturing about good vs evil since that’s also all in your mind anyway because “they” created this duality of good vs evil and its up to you to fall for it or not.   Pretty simple.  Also, once you start seeing things more clearly everything becomes pretty easy to figure out, and you won’t have to be so confused or get stuck in this spiritual warfare anymore, and just enjoy your ascension instead. Innocent
Now, let’s get to the interesting part shall we?  If you want to find the illuminati or figure out who is behind certain events etc just follow the numbers and you’ll find our beloved illuminates there. They sure do love their numbers, and today I’m going to crack their codes for you because hey what do you know? I LOVE NUMBERS TOO!!! Tongue Out  But I would be honored to expose them and share with you all! :D
To make a very long story short:  The Illuminati planned their founding in 1776, right at the beginning of Night 1 of the seventh Wave of Creation. This was indeed the right energetic moment in time to openly start seizing global power. They put the demarcation year of 1776 openly on the US one dollar bill (in Roman numbers). It tells us that Day 1 ends in (about) 1776, which is at the same time the start of Night 1. This claim is very accurate since the actual date of this transition is December 27th, 1775. By writing 1776, meaning January 1st, 1776, there is just a minor difference of only five days, which is a deviation of just 1 percent. That is also probably the reason the Illuminati used this 5 from the five days difference for their founding on the first day of the fifth month (May). That is not all. There is more to this date. The number 8 refers to infinity (¥). There are, for example, 8 geographical directions. The meaning of using three eights is complete infinity, since the meaning of 3 is completely. Since everything has both a yang side and a yin side, two of these triple 8’s are required. That is another reason why the Illuminati put the year 1776 on the US one dollar bill.
888 + 888 = 1776
Their masterpiece (so far) is clearly 9/11. You’ll notice that the number 9 is also very important as this is actually considered what one calls the “GOD CODE.”  I’ll explain more of how that works in another blog. The date of this attack exactly corresponds to the beginning of Day 2 in the eight Wave, making it the perfect day for blocking as much germination of strength based consciousness as possible. The date of 9/11 also matches with the North American emergency telephone number of 9-1-1. This date therefore triggers associations with fear and panic, and clearly not with inner strength. In numerology, which is a system that reveals the numerical root value of both numbers and words as presented below, the 9 represents the Ruler and 11 is the number of Mastery. With 9/11, the Illuminati demonstrated their dominating power, hoping for recognition as ruling master on this planet.  After 911 intermediate days, the Illuminati again demonstrated their power. On March 11th, 2004, they brought terror to Madrid, the capital of Spain. The numerical root of this date is 11, and so is the adding up of 9 plus 1 and 1. In the Netherlands, the would-be Prime Minister Pim Fortuyn was killed on May 6th, 2002, just a few days before the elections. Adding up 5 (May) and 6 gives 11. Even though he was dead, he still received most of the votes. Just like with the murder of John F. Kennedy, the arrested shooter was a scapegoat, blocking the public’s attention for the real killer and the ones responsible for these assassinations. Exactly 911 days after the murder of Pim Fortuyn, another famous Dutchman was brutally murdered on the streets of Amsterdam. The assassination of Theo van Gogh was on November 2nd, 2004. This date of 11/2 corresponds with the Dutch emergency telephone number of 1-1-2. I clearly see the fingerprints of the Illuminati in all these terrorizing events. All dates clearly show the number 11. Literally, Illuminati means ‘Enlightened Ones’, but instead of Lightness, they openly worship the Darkness. Referring to this Darkness, the Bible mentions the number of 666, being the Number of the Beast. Exactly 666 days after the brutal murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, on November 4th, 1995, the British Lady Diana was murdered in Paris, on August 31st, 1997. Rabin’s murder happened in the 11th month and the numerical root of the date of Diana’s murder also is 11. The use of 11 is the trademark of the Illuminati, or should we write this name as I11uminati, with ‘11’ (eleven) instead of ‘ll’ (double el)? The Twin Towers also represented a gigantic 11.
The Illuminati are responsible not only for these murders, but also for many and many more. Proud of their power to do so, they sign their acts of terror with meaningful numbers. The ultimate goal of the Illuminati is to create a New World Order. In the seventh Wave of Creation, they seized power, fully according to the purpose of this Creational Wave, establishing power-based consciousness. In the eighth Wave of Creation, the Illuminati represent the pyramid’s top stone of ‘The Powers That Be’. I n the ninth and final Wave of Creation, we will refer to this pyramid as ‘The Powers That were“.  To me, the left part of the Great Seal of the United States (of America), as displayed on the backside of a US one dollar bill, reveals the bigger picture. Firstly, the Latin phrase ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’, literally meaning a New Order of the Ages, refers to the birth of a new space-time-identity. In that new space-time-identity, our inner vision, also referred to as our third eye, will guide us. That is why after exactly thirteen layers, the top of this pyramid lifts itself up. Since each of these thirteen layers requires 7200 natural days for completion, and the first layer was completed in around the start of 1776 according to the Roman numbers written on it, this lifting of  occurred on July 14th, 2012. God indeed approved (Annuit Coeptis) this lifting of into a new space-time-identity, since it is the sole purpose of the Overall Creation.
satanic_dollar


God, being the Overall Force of Creation, created our Shadow World of increasing space-time-identity to allow consciousness to experience being limited in space, time and identity. We can very well compare our world with a three-dimensional computer game. This metaphorical game has nine hierarchical levels. Our (dynamic) state of consciousness determines on which level we play. Most people play at level 7 and the levels below. The purpose of the current eighth Wave of Creation is to enable humanity to jump up and start also playing at level 8. Next, these level 8 players will start exploring level 9 starting from November 24th, 2011 & still current. Everyone who reaches level 9 before the “End of Times” will move on to a totally new game. I believe I have vaguely hinted at this before in one of my older blogs when I talk about “LEVELING UP.”  Wink   Hence why this is all a big test right now with the whole good vs evil and the sheep being led to the slaughter… those who won’t wake up to their own demons won’t have much time left to do so.  Anyway… That is how I interpret the One Dollar Pyramid. There is solid proof for this interpretation. That proof is present in the numbers. We can picture the total creation as a pyramid of 9 layers each consisting of 13 tones (or stages). In The Great Seal, these numbers are alternated. The pyramid under the All-Seeing-Eye has 13 levels, and the amount of Roman numerals at the bottom level is 9. Next, numerology translates letters into ciphers according to the table below.
illuminatitable

Adding up the cipher values of the words ‘Annuit Coeptis’ results in 58, and 5 plus 8 gives 13. In total, ‘Annuit Coeptis’ also consists of 13 letters. Adding up the cipher values of the words ‘The Great Seal’ results in 49, and 4 plus 9 gives again 13. The words of ‘of the United States’ complete this trinity, because adding up the cipher values of these letters results in 67, and 6 plus 7 again gives 13. All words around the strange pyramid on the back of the one US dollar bill all refer to 13. The amount of layers of this pyramid is 13. The US flag has 13 stripes. Clearly the designers tried to stress the importance of the number 13. The number 13 represents the amount of stages of any process of creation, On the right side on the Great Seal of the United States, we find the Eagle.
us_seal

At the left side, the eagle holds an olive branch with 13 berries, and 13 arrows on the right. There are 13 stars above the eagles head. The ribbon contains 13 letters making up the Latin words ‘E Pluribus Unum’ meaning ‘out of many, one’.  All these hidden messages point in the same direction: 13 becomes 1. That is why the messages are at the 1 US dollar bill. The top-stone of the Illuminati pyramid of power consists of 13 families. Their goal is to become the one and only power of dominance on Terra. Now let us come back to the phenomenon called ‘Elenin’ from the past as we have a similar “ISON” coming up soon… hmmm…  Anyway, The numerological value of this name is 32. Next we find exactly the same numerological value for ‘Leonid’. This means that ‘Leonid Elenin’ is a code for 64, referring to the nascent oneness. The Illuminati also strive to realize this oneness, but then in a totalitarian way. This means that ‘Elenin’ was not an ordinary comet (or officially a cluster comet), like Nasa claims. Please note that also ‘C/2010 X1’ has the numerological value of 13.  I think that ‘Elenin’ was a message helping humanity to evolve her consciousness to the level of oneness or wholeness, and let’s see what’s going on with this so-called comet “ZION” I mean “ISON” coming up soon…. what an interesting world indeed.  So you see? Good guys always win in the end… no matter what.  Except for the sleepers, but let’s hope they wake up soon so they don’t miss the grand finale of things! hehe To be continued……..

Hillary Clinton Continues to Coverup Benghazi

yea you's dummycocks ..will "vote" fer the "hag"  lol        could u just imagine  ..that  ?  chris's  "other" leg will "tingle"   LOL         ain't that right ...tingles ?     chris "i got an uncomfortable feeling in my ass "  math~sauce~son    LMMFAO     ( laughing my motherfucking ass off )              ...back to you "tingles"     (in the back ground~producer )    wait ,wait ? what did he just say ?  :0 

Hillary Clinton Continues to Coverup Benghazi

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Hillary Clinton Continues to “Whitewash” Benghazi in New York Magazine Interview
Dear Conservative Friend,
Even while the congressional investigations were being conducted, FOX News came out with an exclusive report about many weapons, vehicles and supplies were stolen by Libyan jihadists.  In fact, according to Fox News, a former American-built training camp, abandoned (not destroyed) by U.S. forces which left the country after the Benghazi debacle, has now been over-run and is being used by jihadists to train terrorists!
The Obama administration response to Benghazi remains horrendous, at best.
At Thursday’s Congressional investigation, Democratic Congressmen walked out of the room while victim families were testifying.  While at the same time, Hillary Clinton granted an interview with the New York Magazine which continued to “whitewash” the entire Benghazi scandal!
The advanced U.S. weapons stolen are not some small cache.  It is enormous.  State Department and military sources tell of dozens of military armed “Humvees” which contain sensitive GPS navigation equipment, 100 Glock pistols, more than 100 M4 rifles, night-vision goggles, and other military equipment.”
According to one source, “It’s not just the equipment…it’s the capability!  You are giving these dangerous groups the capability that only a few nations are capable of. Already, assassinations are picking up in Tripoli and there are major worries that the militias are using this stolen equipment to their advantage.  All these militias are tied into terrorist organizations and are tied to (salafists).”
Let me see if I understand this completely—MILLIONS of your taxpayer dollars are now being used in Benghazi to train terrorists!! 
What more can go wrong through the Benghazi cover-up?
This past week, House Committees held THREE hearings about the Benghazi scandal:  House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Thursday morning and the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday afternoon.
What is really outrageous is that Democratic Congressmen began to walk out of the room while parents of two of the four men killed in the Benghazi attack on September 11, 2012 testified.  It was not only rude, but disrespectful to heroes who were slain.
Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, who was the first found at the Benghazi compound, tearfully asserted: “No one in the government has told me anything!  Everything I’ve found, and I mean anything, I found by going on the Internet and asking questions.  It’s been true living hell living through this without any answers!”
The drone saw it all.  No response.  No rescue team went.  No military action or intervention by US forces at all.  That adds up to only one end – a STAND DOWN ORDER! President Obama and company signed Ambassador Stevens death certificate on September 11, 2012.
Charles Woods, the father of Tyronne Woods, a former Navy SEAL murdered in Benghazi, said also that he knows little more about what happened than he did one year ago!  He claimed: “There are people out there that have firsthand knowledge, and public testimony is necessary so the voters have the truth so they can protect the freedom of America.”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), chairman of the House Committee Oversight and Government Reform, promised both parents that he would not end the committee’s investigation until all their questions were answered!  You need to demand answers from Congress today!
Notify Congress that they MUST appoint a Special Prosecutor and a Select Committee to get to the very bottom of this Benghazi Scandal that has cost FOUR American lives!
Former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Mike Mullen were also grilled by Congressional Committee Members this past Thursday.  These two chaired an independent review panel on the September 11, 2012 attack on the Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.  This attack killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans:  Sean Smith, U.S. Foreign Service Information Management Officer, Glen Doherty, Navy SEAL and Tyronne S. Woods, Navy SEAL.
hillary3
Rep. John Mica (R-FL) asked why former Secretary of State and Tom Donilon, former National Security Adviser, were not interviewed.  Pickering claimed that they were not involved in Benghazi decisions on security; to which Congressman Mica retorted: “If the secretary wasn’t involved, I must be on another planet!”
The Associated Press reports: “Gen. Martin Dempsey, Mullen's successor as top U.S. general, rejected the stand-down claim at a Senate hearing in June. The Republican-led House Armed Services Committee endorsed that position after a classified hearing with other senior officials in July. Mullen rejected the charge as well multiple times Thursday, saying it would have been impossible for any military assets to make it to Benghazi in time to make a difference.”
hillary4
Benghazi, over one year ago!
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post obviously distorted the Commission probe of Benghazi.  True-to-form as is the left-wing press, Milbank (taking the Obama administration position) claims that the Benghazi debacle is a “phony scandal.”  She writes: “It’s a pity that those seeking answers on Benghazi can’t focus on what really matters: Could anything have been done to prevent the deaths of the four men lost in Benghazi that night? And what can be done to make sure such a thing never happens again?”
But other Commission members have a different, yet compassionate approach to Benghazi, much different that Milbank.  Wayne Simmons, a former CIA agent for 27 years talked about the slain patriots from Benghazi: “So you can only imagine, I suspect, how I must have been feeling and guys like me must have been feeling when we were reliving and continue to relive what we know in our heart of hearts, what the final moments were like for these guys to go through. Because if they were close enough to each other at some point, those warriors turned and looked into each other’s eyes and they knew it was over. That tears my heart out, angers me, disgusts me, knowing that there were decision makers in the United States at the very highest levels, including the White House, that had an opportunity, we believe, to change that course. To have that look that those men gave each other, be saved for another day, and maybe never. But it didn’t work out that day for those guys. They realized they were sold out. They knew help was not coming. It is absolutely the most horrifying thought you could ever imagine.”
Notify Congress that they MUST appoint a Special Prosecutor and a Select Committee to get to the very bottom of this Benghazi Scandal that has cost FOUR American lives!
Even the liberal-leaning Washington Post wrote: “There are many more substantive questions regarding Clinton and Benghazi, including why she couldn’t be bothered to represent the administration on the Sunday talk shows on Sept. 16, instead leaving that task to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice, who bombed. And those conspiracy-theory-producing talking points: Clinton reportedly played little or no role in their evolution. Why?”
By the way, The California man behind the anti-Muslim film that President Obama and Susan Rice originally blamed will soon be released from prison, stemming from an unrelated charge.
hillary5
Yet, a possible front-runner for the Democratic Party for President in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues to “whitewash” her role in Benghazi!
I guess the term “whitewash” could also mean LIE!!
This past weekend, Hillary Clinton granted an interview to New York Magazine.  Even though the liberal interview ignored most of Hillary’s Benghazi mistakes, it went on to say:
“Hillary might have left the State Department unsullied by controversy if not for the Benghazi episode, in which the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other consulate staffers were killed in an attack on the U.S. consulate. The NATO intervention in Libya was the most important foreign intervention of her tenure, and a seemingly successful one, but the lack of security in Benghazi and the confusion over how the incident occurred set off a heated Republican attack on Clinton’s handling of the disaster, and she was roasted on the cable-news spit for weeks. In January, she took responsibility for the deaths of the four Americans before Congress—while also questioning her inquisition, snapping at a Republican congressman, ‘What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.’
“Benghazi will be the go-to bludgeon for Republicans if and when Clinton tries using her experience at State to run for president. It is a reminder that Clinton, despite the cool, centrist façade she has developed in the past four years, is only a misstep away from being a target of partisan rage once again.
“Regardless of the facts, Republicans are liable to use Benghazi as a wedge to pry back her stately exterior, goading her into an outburst, once again revealing the polarizing figure that saw vast right-wing conspiracies and tried ginning up government health care against the political tides of Newt Gingrich.”
Congress MUST appoint a Special Prosecutor and a Select Committee to get to the very bottom of this Benghazi Scandal that has cost FOUR American lives!
Lies . . . muzzled under threat of being suspended are CIA employees . . . the intimidation . . . administration stonewalling . . . stonewalling . . . a genuine cover-up!
Regardless, and it was painfully and tearfully related by parents this past week in Congress of those who have been murdered over one year ago, ANSWERS ARE NOT FORTHCOMING!
Why?
If my son or daughter was murdered by terrorists at a U. S. Consulate, I would want answers!  And not have to wait for MORE than one year!!
Please help get to the truth of the Benghazi debacle NOW.  Please fax today!
Sincerely,
Joe Otto
Conservative Daily


Source: http://www.conservative-daily.com/2013/09/29/hillary-clinton-continues-to-coverup-benghazi/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hillary-clinton-continues-to-coverup-benghazi

KROKODIL WITH THE DEVIL

KILLER KROK

KROKODIL WITH THE DEVIL

It was just two weeks ago and I finally found my way into a theater to see the film World War Z. I know that most of the critics that watched it panned it as being very slow and plodding film. I must admit that it seemed to be a film that was dragging a bit, but I began to understand why it was made that way.
The film was an attempt to demonstrate how a plague is not immediately realized and that there really doesn’t have to be a drawn out explanation as to why the plague exists, there just has to be a point where people finally realize that the plage has arrived and that many people will be a bit hesitant or even in denial about the existence of an oncoming plague.
It was not made clear what the marauding humans were. It was just known that they would writhe in pain, scream at others and have seizures. In some case we saw them attack and as usual eat human flesh, but of course that is given in any Zombie film.
However there now a true model of the so called Zombie apocalypse and it is happening in a place that is out of our immediate sight. The frightening thing is that it may be eventually seen here in the United States and when it is, it will be the most terrifying thing we could ever imagine.
What I am going to share with you may sound as though it has come from a science fiction novel, or a script for a sequel of World War Z, however it most certainly isn’t and the remarkable truth is that the truth is unbelievable.
When we speak of the end of the world, we always think of some grandiose finality, we imagine the greatest doom scenarios imagined. When we think of the end of the world we usually dream dreams, or imagine devastating scenarios that are usually in the middle of the event.
The reason I say this is because we always hear people say that they are dreaming of the fireballs, the earthquakes, the asteroids and the tidal waves bringing everything down into a devastating end.
The dreams never are about how it all begins.
I will tell you that what is left out of those dreams is that the day of the end of the world begins like any other ordinary day. We wake up, we shower, dress and make coffee. We take a quick sip, get the kids ready for school, and then we get into the long wait in traffic.
We turn on the radio. The morning crew on the Rock Station are making juvenile jokes, the conservative talk host is attacking Obama care, and as you punch through the buttons you hear that worn out “Somebody that I used to know” song. Before you can tune out, a news story comes on.
A reporter is saying that something peculiar is happening in Russia. It is not all that clear because the reporters are saying that the people there are walking the streets and their flesh is falling off of them.
You wonder if they have been victims of some nuclear accident or some pathogen.
Then it becomes even more shocking. It is reported that the people whose flesh is rotting off their bodies, actually have done this to themselves. It is reported that they injected into their bodies a concoction of codeine, paint thinner, gasoline, and other chemicals in order to get high. However, after they have done this, their skin turns green, appears to be scaly like a reptile and begins to eat the flesh of the victim.
Sounds unbelievable, but it is happening now and it is believed that the strange serum that Russians are injecting into their bodies has now arrived in the United States.
It is an addictive and dangerous drug called Krokodil.
Many people are unaware that since 1979 heroin use in Russia has increased since the Afghanistan war. By the time Communism fell it is reported that 20 per cent of Russians were hooked on heroin.
There were horror stories out of Russia that ex-addicts were building coffins for their addicted friends and religious cults would spring up taking advantage of the addicts. The heroin of course was expensive and there was a need to create a drug where the high was comparable but cheaper.
The result is Krokodil a drug that eats the junkie, literally.
Krokodil, crocodile in Russian, gets its name because of what it does to the skin. The drug makes the user’s skin look reptilian as it turns green, becomes scaly and tough like the skin of crocodiles. This change occurs around the site of injection.
graphic warning
Graphic Content Image 1 Click to View
Graphic Content Image 2 Click to View
Graphic Content Image 3 Click to View
Graphic Content Image 4 Click to View
The reason the drug is being used is because addicts who are impoverished cannot afford a hit of heroin. In Russia the cost is about $100.00. A batch of Krokodil which is made by using headache pills lased with codeine and thinned with either gasoline or paint thinner can cost only $10.00.
Russia has an estimated two million drug addicts and drug treatment centers have been packed with users who are riddled with sores, some even have the bones exposed as the skin literally rots off of their frame. An estimated 100,000 users are called “homemade” users. They cook their own drugs because the high is cheap quick and it kills even quicker.
Krokodil also known as desomorphine literally rots the flesh from veins out because of the acidic nature of the serum that is injected. The combination of these chemicals often causes gangrene, making it necessary to amputate the affected regions.
The frightening part is that this drug has escaped the confines of Russia and is now here in the United States.
According to KLTV news, Arizona Doctors are saying that two patients were admitted to Banner’s Poison Control Center showing signs consistent with the published accounts from Russian accounts of the drug’s effects. The center would not comment on the status of the patients, nor will they comment on whether the drug’s popularity may be growing stateside.
A story in Time Magazine published from 2011 estimated that there were between, “a few hundred thousand and a million people,” addicted to the substance in Russia alone. In 2009, Russian drug control services seized over 65 million doses of the drug.
Now that it has arrived stateside it couldn’t have come at a worse time. We now know that the so called war on drugs has failed. There has been talk of decriminalizing marijuana. The truth as bad is it sounds has it that we could see marijuana being ignored and young people being exposed to a homemade drug the creates a high similar to heroin.
It can be cooked and made cheaper and spread out to the poor. This would immediately trigger a new and bolder war against drugs and all the more reason for spying on innocent people.
We would see the Federal Government going over states’ heads to continue criminally prosecuting drug use and using drugs such as Krokodil as a scapegoat for more harsh laws.
Are we not realizing this is not a criminal problem but a medical one? Waging a war on addiction and addicts has not worked at all . Treatment and access to healthcare and addiction counseling is needed in order for us to beat this. It looks as if the war on drugs has resulted in this sort of desperate move because those who want a high will find a way to get it. Addiction as you can see is not a choice, but the body’s response to altering brain chemistry.
The arrival of this drug is a result of the so called success of stopping access to heroin.
In the United States we have been told that the way to curb the drug problem is simple, we criminalize the use and make the drug difficult for users to obtain. However it is obvious that Krokodil was created for two reasons, easy availability and cost.
Heroin became impossible to obtain in Russia after the war. This bred a need and the chemists went to work.
Now, in the U.S. the idea of outlawing a drug and reducing its supply has been the course of action in the drug war. It has not worked. If we see more draconian laws and we see a reduced supply of heroin, we may see a pandemic of Krokodil users in the United States.
Cooking Krokodil using Hydrocodone or Codeine would be no more difficult than cooking meth from Sudafed. At the moment there have been ID checks in Pharmacies when under aged kids by fingernail polish remover. In most states it is difficult to buy Sudafed over the counter.
Can you imagine the crackdown on the distribution in pain meds if Krokodil becomes a major street drug like in Russia?
Think about it, Krokodil is frightening on many levels. In fact if someone cooks up a batch of Krokodil they have rendered useless all of the efforts to criminalize heroin. Not to mention given those whom they distribute to 6-18 months of a euphoric high that masks that fact that the victim is literally turning into a zombie before they die.
This extreme case I believe will not turn the attitudes of authorities. They will continue to believe that the approach we are doing now is sufficient.
The frightening part is so did Russia.
If American addicts turn to Krokodil and use it until they rot away, it will be quite apparent that no criminalization, Punishment or regulation will cure the demonic addiction. Treatment and an evaluation of health care and Psychiatry practices should be the issue.
The Affordable Care Act and politically charged debate about the drug war is most certainly useless against addiction. It must be addressed in order to curb what some call a Zombie apocalypse.

PHARMAGEDDON MATRIX EXPOSING THE MEDICAL DICTATORSHIP

pharmageddon

PHARMAGEDDON MATRIX
EXPOSING THE MEDICAL DICTATORSHIP

I know that recently the mainstream media has been focusing on the defunding of Obamacare and how it is being made to appear that there is an attack on the President and the whole issue of how this is a burden on everyone.
On the surface we only see a small part of what this is really about and that is the encroachment of the medical surveillance state and the frightening notion of health being a bargaining chip in the newly formed medical dictatorship.
The problem that truly affects us is the notion that when it comes to health we can all be placed in a “one size fits all” program that is controlled by heavy handed politicians and economists that want only the best care for themselves and care that is barely good enough for the American people.
The biggest offender in all of this is the drug industry and big pharmaceutical companies that pay millions of dollars in campaign interests and TV advertisements that are coordinated by the Whitehouse.
The investment according to a recent report totals an estimated $70 million dollars in funding for the Health care act advertising campaign and another $150 million dollars in TV placement and advertising.
This is estimated to generate at least $20 Billion in revenue. Sadly that revenue is generated to pimp what some call dangerous medicines and reduce competition for alternatives that may be safer and better for the patient.
This puts life expectancy at risk for all Americans for the sake of profit.
The Life Extension Foundation commissioned a study in 2001 regarding the efficiency of health care in the United States. What they found was shocking. While it has been agreed for some time now that the leading cause of death in America is heart disease, which was estimated to cause 700,000 deaths the newest number one killer was iatrogenocide meaning deaths caused by the “health care” industry.
The study concluded that diseases and health problems caused by the medical industry had neared 800,000.
The Affordable Care Act forces us into literally institutionalizing the number 1 killer in America.
It is estimated that there are 900,000 physicians in the United States. These physicians can cause about 120,000 to 225,000 accidental deaths each year. Many of these deaths are caused by well intentioned “cures.” These deaths are called “Unintentional Injuries”” by the CDC.
There is also the situation in medical practices where the cure, or the solution to an aliment seems to be far worse than having the disorder itself. For example, there are drugs that are given to people in order to make them feel better, but have side effects. So a doctor will prescribe them another drug to counter act the effects of the first drug. This creates a way for doctors and drug companies to make money off of keeping you sick. It is simple, put a patient on a drug that continually requires re-examination, testing and prescription renewal. This is where the cure becomes worse than the initial treatment. It is common and in some cases deadly.
There is a theory moving around the internet that whenever we hear about the latest mass shooter or murder suicides in the news that the mainstream media bends over backwards to avoid reporting that the killer may have been on SSRI’s or antipsychotic drugs.
The claim is that the media outlets are receiving revenue from big pharma sponsorships and therefore refuse to take this issue to the people.
However USA today recently reported that one of the most abused iatrogenic artifacts is ant-psychotics that have been prescribed in older patients for dementia. Some are going as far as claiming that this is a way to kill off older patients with plausible deniability making them less of a burden on healthcare.
That is not all, there also seems to be abuses in prescribing antibiotics for colds and unneeded colonoscopies or even cancer misdiagnosis.
It is being reported that doctors who overprescribe the medications and procedures are doing what they think might help, often without first trying safer or more effective alternatives. The question is whether or not these drugs and procedures are necessary and whether or not the business end of health care takes precedent over the care in the health care industry.
The United States has a passion for pills, being the world’s biggest users of psychotropic drugs, consuming 60 per cent of them. And pharmaceutical firms keep cashing in on the multibillion-dollar market, even if it costs people’s health.
America is regarded as a country with a extraordinary appetite for consumption. Today, a widespread fondness for pharmaceuticals has turned the US into a nation of pill-poppers.
With over $14 billion in annual sales, antipsychotics remain the top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the US.
The number of children consuming antipsychotic medication has doubled in the past decade. Millions of American adolescents are taking drugs like Adderall, doled out by doctors to treat hyperactivity.
Not only are we drugging ourselves and drugging our kids, we are now drugging our pets with anti-psychotics as well.
We are doing this because we somehow trust that what we are putting in our bodies is for our own good even though we have not been told of lawsuits and fraud being drawn against the drug industry.
Pfizer the pharmaceutical giant paid $2.3 billion to settle civil and criminal allegations over illegally marketing a drug called Bextra. It was the largest healthcare fraud settlement and criminal fine in US history. That being said, the fine amounted to less than three weeks of Pfizer’s drug sales.
Bextra was approved in 2001 by the Food and Drug Administration to treat arthritis and menstrual cramps. The drug was not approved for the treatment of acute pain, nor was it shown to be any more powerful than ibuprofen. But Pfizer instructed its drug pimps to tell doctors that the drug could be used to treat acute and surgical pain and at doses well above those approved, even though the drug’s dangers which included kidney, skin and heart risks increased with the dose, the government charged. The drug was withdrawn in 2005 because of its risks to the heart and skin.
The unfortunate thing is that while we are being forced into the nightmare of Obama care, there seems to be a lack in investigations into health care fraud and cases where drugs and treatments are killing Americans.
We would see huge savings in government health programs if we had better enforcement.
The problem that can also be exposed is how the patient is the suspect and victim when it comes to obtaining the right medications to heal and or control pain.
Many Americans do not know that if they are using a controlled substance for pain relief or a drug that may be considered a risk they have reason to be paranoid. The reason is simple: from doctor to pharmacy to your home, you may or may not know that you are now subject to wire taps and undercover spies that may be informants to the DEA.
In fact, one of the informants could be your doctor. Doctors are now being pressured into assuming that all of their patients are drug seekers. If you have been subjected to urine tests, pain agreements, interrogation and impromptu “pill counts” where you are asked to bring in your bottle to the office, then you will know that you along other patients are suspected of abusing or selling their medications.
It is because some doctors are afraid of an audit where officials have threatened to take practices away if the doctors don’t do as they are told.
As prescription drug abuse has risen, the DEA has come under increasing pressure from Congress to show it is containing the problem. A report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said the DEA had not shown its strategy was working and called for clearer performance measures.
Their solution was to employ the very methods used to track and spy on so-called potential terror suspects.
This raises the real issue of Government Overreach and whether or not you can safely be treated without the threat of being flagged, tracked or interrogated by the DEA.
The irony of debate over what is best for Americans is with its healthcare industry that is now being pounded into submission and becoming more of a medical dictatorship.
We are debating who will be appointed to officiate over the cull and iatrogenocide.
It can be argued that whatever Americans decide about healthcare we are merely opening the dialogue for the extension of the welfare state and a mandate that when you reach a certain point in your life, you may not be worthy to continue based on iatrogenic plans and eugenics directives that all sound like plot points in some Orwellian nightmare story or Huxley’s chemical enslavement.
On top of our threat of accidental death comes a penalty based healthcare proposal being filibustered now as opposed to a debt based proposal where graded repayment would be based on income. There are many health care businesses that do that now where sliding scale payments are a relief from declaring health bankruptcy or being turned away when procedures are life saving and expensive.
Now the health care industry knows that the American people will be forced to buy their product, so the question is, what gives them the incentive to improve or even care about the reality of iatrogenic artifacts?
For those that are not true believers in this plan—they have , as they say in the movies ways of making you turn to the “dark side.”
Under Obamacare, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is implementing a “Navigator” program, which provides millions of dollars to non-profit groups nationwide to hire “Navigators” who will advise Americans on their Obamacare health “options” based on the sensitive information provided.
This sensitive information includes social security numbers, income levels, employment history and home addresses, all of which are more than enough to steal Americans’ identities for complete access to their credit and financial resources.
These so called “navigators” will canvas neighborhoods by going door to door and taking information like a “medical census” that is not required and yet people will think it is because people who appear to be authorities will demand information and many Americans will fall for it under the new medical dictatorship.
Always remember throughout history we have seen many instances of federal intervention. Having that intervention in our health care will most certainly not fix the problems because most federal intervention failed to fix the problems it was supposedly created to solve.
Obviously this particular meddling will create new problems, leading to calls for even more new federal interventions more rights taken away, privacy violations and more deaths created by a healthcare industry that is headed for a virtual pharmageddon.