Obama Should Think Twice About This Clinton Retread

hehe & hold it work out for U.S.  ?                          

Obama Should Think Twice About This Clinton Retread

Attorney General candidate Eric Holder played a key role in the much-maligned pardon of fugitive Marc Rich. (Also, Roger Kimball on Eric Holder, Radical)

by
Jennifer Rubin
Bio

November 18, 2008 -

Reports are circulating that President-elect Barack Obama is considering Eric Holder as his attorney general. Earlier in the year when Holder was placed on Obama’s VP search committee we looked at Holder’s liabilities. Those are an even greater concern now that he is considered for the country’s top law enforcement job.

You may not always agree with his political analysis but Dick Morris, perhaps better than anyone willing to talk about it, knows his Clinton-ology. Morris reminded us that Eric Holder played a leading role in one of the most infamous events of a presidency filled with infamy: the pardon of billionaire fugitive Marc Rich. Morris dubbed candidate Obama’s decision to select Holder as one of three people charged with vice-presidential vetting his “first clear, serious mistake.”
Rich, of course, was the commodities trader who fled the country in 1983 to escape prosecution for tax evasion, racketeering, and trading with the enemy. Rich’s attorneys circumvented normal procedures, took the pardon to the White House attorneys, and gained pardon for their client, whose wife just happened to be a friend and major donor to the Clinton library, the Democratic Party, and Clinton’s legal defense fund. A firestorm ensued as did congressional investigations in which Democrats as well as Republicans excoriated the Clintons’ conduct.
This was not a Republican-contrived controversy. Time reported at the onset of the hearings:

But most see this as a source of bipartisan outrage. Republicans and Democrats alike were dumbstruck by the Rich pardon. The federal prosecutors who indicted Rich are especially livid, particularly because, by definition, Rich appears to be ineligible for a pardon: He never took responsibility for his actions or served any sentence. The congressional panels were called to investigate the path to Rich’s pardon — which, as various documents seem to indicate, did not follow usual channels. In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. pardon attorney Roger Adams says when the White House sent over Rich’s name for pardon consideration — only a few hours before the president was due to leave office — there was never any mention of Rich being a fugitive.

Rep. Henry Waxman declared that it was a “bad precedent, an end run around the judicial process, and appeared to set a double standard for the wealthy and powerful” and that had a Republican president “presided over a pardon process that resembled the chaotic mess that seemingly characterized the final days of the Clinton administration, I would be outraged and would criticize it.”
In a Senate hearing Senator Herb Kohl asked Adams how he viewed the affair:

KOHL: And in this case, do you feel good about that pardon?
ADAMS: All I can tell you, Senator, is that this case was clearly not — this was a very unusual situation. The Rich and [Rich partner Pincus] Green case were not handled anything approaching the normal way. I guess I have a parochial interest in seeing that they — I would prefer that things be handled the normal way. But when a president, for whatever reason, decides not to handle things in an orderly — in a way in conformity with the regulations, there’s very little that I can do about it.

No less than Maureen Dowd remarked that on this one the Clintons

perverted the legal system and may have traded a constitutional power for personal benefit. … The Clintons ran a cash-and-carry White House. They were either hawking stuff or carting it off.

Holder’s role is not in dispute. Without him this travesty would likely not have occurred, as described here:

Mr. Holder, the [Congressional] report says, played a major role, steering Mr. Rich’s lawyers toward Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel. Mr. Rich hired Mr. Quinn, whose Washington contacts and ability to lobby the president made the difference, according to the report. It says that Mr. Holder’s support for the pardon and his failure to alert prosecutors of a pending pardon were just as crucial. …
The panel criticized Mr. Holder’s conduct as unconscionable and cited several problems. It cited his admission last year that he had hoped Mr. Quinn would support his becoming attorney general in a Gore administration.

So to be clear, Holder helped steer the attorney for Rich, a fugitive whose pardon request would likely have been rejected through normal channels due to his status as a fugitive, to the man Holder wanted assistance with in getting his next job. Now there’s a man who knows something about conflicts of interest.
Or, as Dowd put it:

Eric Holder, former No. 2 at Justice and the latest casualty of the Clinton twister, offered lame and contradictory excuses about why he failed to rebut the argument of Jack Quinn, once Mr. Clinton’s White House counsel and Monica apologist. Meanwhile, Mr. Holder was being touted as a possible attorney general in a Gore administration, where Mr. Quinn might be chief of staff. First, Mr. Holder said he did not make a fuss because he did not know who Marc Rich was. Then he said he did not make a fuss because he assumed a pardon would not be granted to a known fugitive.

And then Holder advised the White House that on the pardon — this would be one being sought by the attorney whose help Holder was seeking to get into the Gore administration — he was “neutral, leaning toward favorable.” He made this recommendation, despite the fact that under Department of Justice guidelines, Rich would not have been eligible for a pardon until five years after completing any sentence.
This exchange with Sen. Mike DeWine captures the incredulity with which Holder’s conduct was observed by Congress:

SEN. MIKE DEWINE (R), OHIO: I want to make sure I understand the facts. So you did know that he was a fugitive under the facts as recited to you by Mr. Quinn?

HOLDER: Yes. I knew he was a fugitive.
DEWINE: You knew he was a fugitive, and still you said you didn’t know that you necessarily had any objection to that? Didn’t the fact that he was a fugitive bother you?
HOLDER: Sure it did. What I said to the White House counsel ultimately was that I was neutral on this because I didn’t have a factual basis to make a determination as to whether or not Mr. Quinn’s contentions were in fact accurate, whether or not there had been a change in the law, a change in the applicable Justice Department regulations, and whether or not that was something that would justify the extraordinary grant of a pardon.
DEWINE: So the fact that he was a fugitive did not take it out of the realm of possibility? You didn’t say, “Well, gee, he’s a fugitive, therefore I wouldn’t be in favor of this.” I mean, you come down you’re neutral based on the facts as given to you by Mr. Quinn. I just want to make sure I understand your rationale here, your thought process.
HOLDER: Essentially what I was trying to say, what I tried to convey, was that I didn’t have a basis to make a determination; again, assuming that what Mr. Quinn said — I mean, you’re accurate, I did not reflexively say that I was opposed to this because he was a fugitive, having had that experience with I guess Mr. Preston King, who was a fugitive and who ultimately was granted a pardon that I supported. But I did not think, given the fact that he was a fugitive, that this was ever a matter likely to be successfully concluded from Mr. Rich’s perspective.

(Holder, of course, was not merely “neutral,” but “neutral leaning toward favorable,” so his testimony in this regard was not entirely candid.)
So returning to Holder’s possible selection as Attorney General, the mind reels as to why this person, who participated in a notorious Clinton scandal and himself seemed so oblivious to his own conflict of interest, would be chosen. Is this the New Politics? Or is it a throwback to the Clinton years, the very years Obama is attempting to turn the page on, to put behind us all?
When one looks to the people Obama in turn has selected as mentors (e.g., Reverend Wright, Father Michael Pfleger), friends (e.g., Tony Rezko), and now key advisors (e.g., Eric Holder), voters may begin to question whether Obama possesses the judgment necessary to run an effective and scandal-free administration. If Holder is emblematic of Obama’s personnel decisions and an example of what is to come, the answer is “no.”
Eric Holder, Radical

It’s RICO time! How to Stop the Obama Administration Crime Wave

10 June 2013 http://www.marinkapeschmann.com/2013/06/10/its-rico-time-how-to-stop-the-obama-administration-crime-wave/

Appearing in CFP.
Urgent. While some Tea Party groups testified at the House Ways and Means Committee Hearing last week over the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) abuse of power for targeting and harassing them and approximately 500 other conservative groups when they sought tax-exempt status, if you are looking for a political judicial solution, such as congress, impeachment or a special prosecutor to solve the tsunami of unlawful acts coming out of Washington, you are looking in the wrong place. What the IRS did tilted President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election in his favor.
The bottom line is this. You can’t get justice within the political system in America anymore because the politicians own it. What stopped the mob? The Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). What will stop the Obama administration? RICO.
For years, as documented in The Whistleblower: How the Clinton White House Stayed in Power to Reemerge in the Obama White House & World Stage, there has been a special justice and rights class system for Washington’s ruling elite that doesn’t apply to everyday Americans. It has taken a toxic, crippling grip on America which is why corrupt politicians remain in power and are never held to account.
First, the IRS is not a scandal but a branch of the criminal abuse of power that runs in an octopus-like tree fashion throughout America’s government agencies. It is part of the shady backroom deals that became ObamaCare. Did you think it was a coincidence that ObamaCare dramatically expanded the IRS’s authority, size and budget? Were you surprised when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted she had pressured pharmaceutical companies to support ObamaCare? Who gets to decide who lives and who dies? ObamaCare’s political appointees and perked bureaucrats do. What’s ObamaCare? A forced tax for health services you must pay for or else you will be fined that these politicos and bureaucrats may or may not give you.
In the mob world, the Obama administration’s activities are called shakedowns, kickbacks, extortion, bribes, and payola. The political appointees and bureaucrats are the capos, crew, foot soldiers and wise guys. You get paid if you play. If you don’t pay, you don’t get to play. Security and safety comes at a price and anything goes to stay in power. Let’s call the Obama administration what it is: organized crime and treat it as such. The mob, the political mafia currently known as the Obama administration, has taken over Washington. It’s RICO time.
The federal Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act, written by G. Robert Blakely, a University of Notre Dame law school professor, was enacted in 1970 specifically to target the mob and address the infiltration of legitimate businesses by organized crime.
In the U.S. the act of engaging in criminal activity as a structured group is referred to as “racketeering.”
Today RICO needs to be applied to the political mob that has infiltrated the government agencies and the White House beginning with the IRS and spreading out into other agencies and beyond.
The best part of RICO is that it “provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.” That means State and local lawyers, sheriffs, attorney generals, and prosecutors can bypass the corrupted Federal justice system and start throwing down the gauntlet now. From there it will spread up into D.C. “The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering. It allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes which they ordered others to do or assisted them, closing a perceived loophole that allowed someone who told a man to, for example, murder, to be exempt from the trial because he did not actually do it.”
What stopped the mob? RICO. What can stop the Obama administration? RICO.
Intimidation, threats, whatever, just like the mafia, the Obama administration’s Justice Department has abusively targeted journalists from Fox News and Associated Press for doing their government watchdog job. Popular radio show host, Canada Free Press columnist, Doug Hagmann, who has been diligently reporting on the Benghazi cover-up, has been specifically singled out and targeted by the National Security Agency (NSA). Do not be deceived. What happened to Hagmann is far more serious than has been talked about thus far. The NSA wasn’t simply collecting phone numbers and locations as occurred in the Verizon/NSA case that broke after the Hagmann incident was reported. Instead NSA collected a voice-recorded conversation between two media people. NSA was collecting content. Editors and sources are next. It’s RICO time.
On cue, in predicable damage control-and-distraction form, Washington’s special justice class Attorney General Eric Holder and chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), swooped in to defend the NSA’s collection of phone records of U.S. citizens after the Verizon/NSA case broke. It’s been approved by Congress and going on for years, they said. Then they claimed it helped get terrorists (not the shoe-bomber, Times Square bomber, Fort Hood shooter, Boston Marathon bombers etc. but I digress).
Who is the enemy that Washington is supposedly protecting U.S. citizens from—FOX News, Associated Press reporters, CFP writers/radio show hosts, Christians, returning vets and Conservative terrorists? Shouldn’t the Obama administration be protecting Americans from the al Qaeda /freedom fighter/rebel/terrorists who hate America that they have been arming in Syria to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—which directly led to the Benghazi nation-state attack that killed four Americans? Forgive me, again I digress.
What the Obama administration is doing is dangerously upside down. Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness. As Hagmann’s DHS insider recently put it, “It’s a political dissident list,” the Obama administration is collecting, “not an enemy threat list.” History tells us about what happens next unless this is stopped. It’s RICO time.
Shakedowns, payola, whatever, like the mob, Obama’s Labor Department demanded $1 million from the Associated Press for information about political appointees that the “transparent” administration is supposed to hand over under the Freedom of Information Act. The cardinal rule in journalism is you don’t pay for information. In the Obama White House, if you don’t pay you don’t get to play. This street-thug shakedown tactic is two pronged because the Obama mafia, like the mob world, have actively been silencing and intimidating the journalists, and by extension the whistleblowers and sources who speak to them about government malfeasance. In the mob world, like the Obama administration, they see whistleblowers and sources as rats. It’s RICO time.
Moreover, the “transparent” Obama administration has been using secret government email accounts to avoid scrutiny. They learned well from the Clinton unaccountable, lawless era. What’s the $1 million shakedown going to get the Associated Press anyways? In mob lingo, it’s called “spring cleaning.” It’s RICO time.
In the eyes of the Obama administration, like the mob, they are above the law. Thanks to a corrupted political justice system, as documented in The Whistleblower, a compromised, cowardly Republican Party, who long ago sacrificed the rule of law and their principals to get a seat at the table, the Obama administration, like the Clinton and Bush administrations before them, are above the law. Remember the Republicans have already rolled over on Benghazi. Same goes for let’s-make-a-deal special prosecutors like Special Counsel Judge Kenneth Starr, Robert Fiske, and Robert Ray. (Note: Starr nailed some Clinton team-players. The disposable suckers, useful idiots, and fall guys lower down on the rung. Ask Web Hubbell.) It’s RICO time.
From foot soldier to capo, just like the mob, if you are an Obama administration team player, not afraid to get your hands dirty, and an especially good liar, like United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, you get promoted. Same goes for IRS agents who were also promoted, like Stephen Seok, who signed many of the intimidating letters sent to conservative nonprofits and so forth. It’s RICO time.
How many scandals in the Obama administration will it take to reclassify their activities as a crime wave?
To bypass the corrupted political system to hold the Obama administration accountable, anyone who has been targeted by the IRS, their lawyers should immediately file local civil RICO suits. We know the corruption, despite what the Obama administration tried to make you believe, is not isolated to one rouge IRS office in one city. Civil RICO can be brought at the local levels as a civil action first that doesn’t require the government to participate.
As it evolves, as criminal acts are brought forward through the discovery process, it can lead to a broader prosecution which can be brought to a grand jury at the Federal level. RICO can also nab corrupt, bought-and-paid for Republicans.
“You get a turncoat and some collaborating wiretaps — you get some very compelling testimony,” Blakely, the creator of RICO, said in an interview. “That’s how you can bring down the mob.”

Al Capone mob tactics are in the Obama White House
Did you know that the mob crime syndicate in Washington learned from the very best? Take it from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky, the godfather of community organizing, who dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer. Alinsky apprenticed with notorious mob boss Al Capone. Alinsky’s tactics were mob tactics –just like we have been seeing out of Washington. Just like many of us have been warning would happen since before Barack Obama was elected president. Unfortunately, we have been vindicated. The Chicago mob has taken over America.
In Alinsky’s own words, he learned the mob ways when he first befriended, Big Ed Stash, a professional assassin, and the Capone mob’s top executioner. In a 1972 interview with Playboy, the interviewer asked Alinsky why professional criminals would allow an outsider like him to see how they operated.

Alinsky said: “Why not? What harm could I do them? Even if I told what I’d learned, nobody would listen. They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness sh-t; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail ‘em on an occasional income tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn’t touch their power. Capone was the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn’t any city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren’t afraid of some college kid they’d adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.”

Alinsky was right. Right now Washington is tied up tight as a drum. Simply re-insert “Chicago” with “Washington,” “city” with “America” and the solution is obvious. What stopped the mob? The Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. What will stop the Obama administration? RICO.
Need I say more? Get busy. It’s RICO time.
To help get the RICO solution out there, and fire up your local prosecutors, lawyers and law enforcement personnel please forward this article and check out the BlowtheWhistle’s Store at Zazzle where everything from “You’re going to miss me when O whacks me!” T-shirts and “It’s RICO time” bumper stickers are available.

Stockman Asks for Subpoena of White House, IRS Phone Records Under “Perfectly Legal” PRISM Program

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Dean Garrison

On Tuesday Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) asked the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to subpoena all National Security Agency records of phone calls between employees of the White House and the Internal Revenue Service.
In typical Stockman-style he sarcastically pointed out the obvious stating, “Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying.”
Stockman’s office hand delivered a letter Tuesday afternoon to the Committee’s office requesting a subpoena “of all records of every phone call made from all public and private telephones of all IRS personnel to all public and private telephones of all White House personnel” collected under the NSA’s recently-revealed PRISM program.
“This case must be investigated fully, given admitted wrongdoing by the IRS, its potentially criminal implications and revelations the White House has been less than honest about what they knew and when,” said Stockman.  “Obama says the PRISM program is perfectly legal, so there should be no problem whatsoever in providing the information on White House and IRS phone calls.”
In addition to the hand delivered copy, Stockman’s office also electronically delivered the same letter to the Homeland Security Committee chaired by Rep. Michael McCaul.
Here is the text of Stockman’s letter as addressed to Darrell Issa:

June 11, 2013
The Honorable Darrell Issa
Chairman, House Committee on Government Reform & Oversight
2157 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C.  20515
Chairman Issa:
Thank you for your ongoing efforts to investigate abuses of civil liberties by employees of the Internal Revenue Service.
These abuses seem to indicate a larger, higher pattern of ideologically-driven harassment of Americans which Congress has an obligation to fully investigate with every tool at our disposal.
Frankly I am disappointed by revelations Obama administration personnel have been less than forward about what they knew and when they knew it.
As you know, recent revelations the National Security Agency has been keeping an “ongoing, daily” log of every domestic phone call in the United States.
I respectfully request your Committee subpoena the records of every phone call made from all public and private telephones of all IRS personnel to all public and private telephones of all White House personnel.
If President Obama is collecting such information, he certainly would want us to use it.  If he has nothing to hide he has nothing to be afraid of.
Warmest wishes,
STEVE STOCKMAN
Member of Congress

I can not go a single day without checking Steve Stockman’s congressional site for updates. I am not sure that we could deal with 535 Steve Stockman types in Washington but I would certainly be in favor of having several more like him.
There is never a dull moment with the brash Texan. His points are all very solid but it remains to be seen if they will be taken seriously.
Stockman sums it up perfectly by saying, “If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear.”http://dcclothesline.com/2013/06/12/stockman-asks-for-subpoena-of-white-house-irs-phone-records-under-perfectly-legal-prism-program/

An Infographic to Help Jobless Grads Navigate America’s Decay Before the Collapse and World War 3

Wednesday, June 12, 2013 17:26

(Before It's News)

| WTF News |
The lumpy, uneven outlook for college graduates in America is dubious at best. Total student loan debt is in the $1 trillion range ($1,000,000,000,000) and the 90 day delinquency rate has surpassed that of credit card debt. Approximately $3 billion in student loan debt was written off in the first 3 months of 2013 and the trend is continuing in the same direction.

It should be clear from visiting the Economic Collapse page that the US and global economic system is beyond repair in its current state. The video below is sufficient explanation to the beginner as to why the recovery is an illusion (for the visually inclined) and we are headed for a global war and concurrent economic collapse.
This is an uncomfortable reality but the sooner it is understood, you can prepare for it. Become a prepper as it may be a way to avoid the eventual further decline in US dollar’s value by purchasing real goods that can help you as you develop self sufficiency skills. Your money is earning a negative rate in a checking/savings account due to inflation, so it’s literally rotting anyway, right? The 21st century economy will be different than most of the population expects due to job losses from new advancements, robotics and automation. Developing skills in preparation for the new global scramble for prosperity is something to begin now, like learning a language or mechanical skills.
With that said, SuperScholar.org put together an infographic that can help grads navigate the next steps in the interim.

Source: SuperScholar.org

More helpful stats, courtesy of SuperScholar.org

Oh, The Places You Should Go

As thousands of new college graduates descend upon the job and rental markets, which states and cities will they be most likely to find a job and a place to live?

Finding a Place to Work

The overall U.S. unemployment rate is dropping as the economy continues to recover, but not all states or cities are feeling the recovery the same way. Here is the employment picture around the U.S.:
North Dakota 3.3
Nebraska 3.8
Vermont 4.1
South Dakota 4.3
Iowa 4.9
Utah 4.9
Wyoming 4.9
Oklahoma 5.0
Hawaii 5.1
Virginia 5.3
Minnesota 5.4
Kansas 5.6
Montana 5.6
New Hampshire 5.7
Alaska 6.2
Idaho 6.2
Louisiana 6.2
Massachusetts 6.4
Texas 6.4
Maryland 6.6
Missouri 6.7
New Mexico 6.9
West Virginia 7.0
Colorado 7.1
Maine 7.1
Ohio 7.1
Wisconsin 7.1
Alabama 7.2
Arkansas 7.2
Delaware 7.3
Washington 7.3
Florida 7.5
Arizona 7.9
Pennsylvania 7.9
Tennessee 7.9
Connecticut 8.0
Kentucky 8.0
New York 8.2
Oregon 8.2
Georgia 8.4
South Carolina 8.4
District of Columbia 8.5
Michigan 8.5
Indiana 8.7
New Jersey 9.0
Rhode Island 9.1
North Carolina 9.2
California 9.4
Mississippi 9.4
Illinois 9.5
Nevada 9.7
Metro areas
Midland, TX 3.1
Iowa City, IA 3.5
Lincoln, NE 3.5
Ames, IA 3.6
Bismarck, ND 3.6
Burlington-South Burlington, VT 3.6
Odessa, TX 3.7
Logan, UT 3.9
Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA 4.1
Sioux Falls, SD 4.1

Finding a Place to Live

New graduates don’t always have cash to spare; here’s a look at median rent prices by state as well as the cities with the highest rental vacancy rates:
HI 1,293
CA 1,155
MD 1,108
NJ 1,108
DC 1,059
AK 1,007
CT 1,006
NV 993
VA 989
MA 988
NY 984
FL 952
DE 949
NH 918
WA 911
RI 890
AZ 859
CO 851
VT 829
IL 828
OR 819
GA 800
UT 793
TX 788
MN 757
PA 738
ME 722
NC 720
MI 716
LA 715
WI 708
SC 706
WY 700
ID 694
IN 687
TN 682
NM 680
KS 671
OH 670
MO 668
AL 657
MS 644
NE 644
OK 636
MT 627
KY 613
IA 611
AR 606
ND 564
SD 562
WV 552

Most Places to Rent:

Myrtle Beach SC 33.4%
Fort Walton Beach FL 27.6%
Panama City FL 22.5%
Dalton GA 22%
Gulfport-Biloxi MS 26.9%
Elkhart-Goshen IN 19.3%
Cape Coral-Fort Myers FL 19.2%
Athens GA 18.7%
Jackson TN 18%

Putting It All Together

It’s not just about finding a place to live and a good job; it helps if the job pays well and the place isn’t a dump. So here are the top five states for new graduates*, based on areas with high income, low unemployment and reasonable rents.
1. Wyoming
Unemployment 4.9%
Median rent $700
Median income $47,851
2. Virginia
Unemployment 5.3%
Median rent $989
Median income $44,762
3. New Hampshire
Unemployment 5.7%
Median rent $918
Median income $44,084
4. Minnesota
Unemployment 5.4%
Median rent $757
Median income $42,843
5. North Dakota
Unemployment 3.3%
Median rent $564
Median income $40,596
* Income over $40,000; median rent under $1,000; and unemployment below 6%.

SOURCES:

U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, proximityone.com

Previous NSA Leakers, Thomas Drake And Mark Klein, Speak Out In Defense Of Ed Snowden

from the confirms-what-they-said dept

As US politicians and pundits push each other aside to tar and feather Ed Snowden for revealing some basic facts about NSA surveillance that the politicians and pundits themselves refused to call out for its clear abuse of basic 4th Amendment principles, two of the most important previous leakers of details of NSA surveillance have spoken out in support of Snowden. Thomas Drake, the former NSA employee who blew the whistle on NSA surveillance abuse (and faced decades in jail on trumped up charges that fell apart in court), has pointed out that Snowden's revelations confirm his own claims from before:

The NSA programs that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA's lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:

"The White House has approved the program; it's all legal. NSA is the executive agent."

It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. "You don't understand," I was told. "We just need the data.

Drake also highlights how he did use the "official" whistleblower channels that many are saying Snowden should have used, and look what happened to him:

I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he's been following this for years: he's seen what's happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged – just for raising issues. You're identified as someone they don't like, someone not to be trusted. I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew – about Stellar Wind, billions of dollars in fraud, waste and abuse, and the critical intelligence, which the NSA had but did not disclose to other agencies, preventing vital action against known threats. If that intelligence had been shared, it may very well have prevented 9/11.

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.

The end result was that his whistleblowing didn't do much, but he got arrested because he accidentally kept an almost entirely meaningless document about meeting participants in his home. And, when he was arrested, for just having the list of meeting attendees, he was smeared for causing "exceptionally grave damage to US national security."

Separately, former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, who revealed that he helped install NSA equipment directly within AT&T's network is speaking out about how Snowden, rather than the telcos, deserve retroactive immunity. The telcos broke the law and had to have Congress go back and retroactively make what they did -- which clearly broke the law at the time -- legal. Klein points out how his revelations were brushed off and ignored, while Snowden's revelations confirm a lot of what he said:

"It was clear that the NSA was looking at everything," Klein said. "It wasn't limited to foreign communications."

On Tuesday, Klein said that for a number of reasons, Snowden's disclosures sparked more public outrage than his own revelations did more than seven years ago.

For one thing, Klein said, Snowden had direct access to a secret court order and details of the program, while Klein pieced together the government's surveillance through internal AT&T documents and in discussions with colleagues who worked on the project.

"The government painted me as a nobody, a technician who was merely speculating," said Klein, who made his disclosures after he accepted a buyout and retired from AT&T in 2004. "Now we have an actual copy of a FISA court order. There it is in black and white. It's undisputable. They can't deny that."

Snowden's revelations just add to a pile of existing evidence. Look at what Drake, Klein and other whistleblowers have said over the past decade, and recognize that Snowden is just confirming the things that have already been stated by previous whistleblowers, but which the pundits and politicians tried to brush off as not happening.        

The Rest Of The World Is Absolutely Disgusted With Our Big Brother Spying Methods

By Michael, on June 11th, 2013

The rest of the world has found out that the U.S. government has been listening to their phone calls and watching what they do on the Internet and they do not like it one bit.  Outrage has been pouring in from all over the planet, and one member of the European Parliament is even comparing the NSA to the Stasi.  But instead of stepping back and reevaluating our Big Brother spying methods now that they have been revealed, Barack Obama and other leading members of Congress are defiantly declaring that there is nothing wrong with these methods and that no changes will be made.  The U.S. government is going to continue to invade the privacy of the citizens of the rest of the world as much as it possibly can, and our leaders don't seem to really care what the international response is.  And make no mistake - the goal of the U.S. intelligence community is to literally know everything about everyone.  The chief technology officer of the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following shocking admission back in March: "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever."  He followed that statement up with this gem: "It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human-generated information."  In other words, they want it all, and they nearly have the capacity to gather it all already.  So where does this end?  Will the U.S. intelligence community ever be happy until they have every piece of data on every single person on the entire planet?  Do we really want a government that collects "everything" and hangs on to it "forever"?
Thanks to Edward Snowden, the rest of the globe is starting to understand the extent to which the U.S. government has been spying on them.  Needless to say, a lot of people are extremely upset about this.
In Germany (a country that knows a thing or two about Big Brother tactics), some prominent politicians are publicly denouncing the surveillance that the U.S. government has been doing on their citizens.  In fact, one German politician has accused the U.S. of employing "American-style Stasi methods"...

In a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said reports that the United States could access and track virtually all forms of Internet communication were "deeply disconcerting" and potentially dangerous.
"The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is," she said.
"The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the U.S. administration itself is paramount at this point. All facts must be put on the table."
Markus Ferber, a member of Merkel's Bavarian sister party who sits in the European Parliament, went further, accusing Washington of using "American-style Stasi methods".

In Italy, the government official in charge of data protection, Antonello Soro, said that the surveillance that the NSA is doing "would not be legal in Italy" and would be "contrary to the principles of our legislation and would represent a very serious violation".
In Russia (another country with a long history of using Big Brother tactics), President Vladimir Putin has expressed significant concern about the NSA spying program and there are even rumors that Russia will be offering asylum to Edward Snowden...

Alexey Pushkov, head of the Duma's international affairs committee and a vocal US critic, said on Twitter: "By promising asylum to Snowden, Moscow has taken upon itself the protection of those persecuted for political reasons. There will be hysterics in the US. They only recognise this right for themselves."
He continued: "Listening to telephones and tracking the internet, the US special services broke the laws of their country. In this case, Snowden, like Assange, is a human rights activist."

But even more important than what foreign politicians think about the NSA spying scandal is what average people all over the globe think.  This scandal is causing millions of average people all over the planet to look at the United States with disgust and disdain.  How can we hold ourselves out as the "defenders of freedom" to the rest of the globe when we are openly telling them that we are going to spy on them as much as we possibly can?  How do we expect the rest of the world to look at us as "the good guys" when we are selfishly grabbing and recording all of their emails, phone calls and Internet searches without any concern for their privacy whatsoever?
What makes all of this even worse is that our top intelligence officials are making jokes about this scandal.  For example, just check out the wisecracks that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was making at an awards ceremony on Friday...

With the current and past directors of national intelligence at the Omni Shoreham to honor former CIA and National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden, the result in speeches and interviews with intel professionals was a gumbo of outrage, worry and humor.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the black-tie crowd of more than 700 he would “address the elephant in the room” and proceeded, to applause, to denounce “the unauthorized leaks as reprehensible and egregious.” Clapper characterized the program as completely legal, debated and reauthorized by Congress under strict oversight and by court order “to make our nation safe and secure.”
He then cracked a few jokes. “Some of you expressed surprise that I showed up—so many emails to read!” Clapper said. Greeting fellow banqueter John Pistole, the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration who recently reversed a planned policy to permit air travelers to carry certain knives on planes, Clapper said, “John, can I borrow your pocket knife?”

How in the world can he make a joke about reading our emails at a time like this?
This is how arrogant the U.S. intelligence community has become.  They feel like they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
For example, back in March Clapper flat out lied to the U.S. Congress about the surveillance that the NSA is doing.  When he was asked by Senator Ron Wyden if the NSA was collecting any information on the American people, Clapper completely denied it.
The following is from a transcript of that exchange...

"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Oregon Republican Sen. Ron Wyden asked Clapper at the March 12 hearing.
"No, sir," Clapper responded.
"It does not?" Wyden pressed.
Clapper recanted and said: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect -- but not wittingly."

Apparently Clapper must have "forgotten" that the government is forcing all of the big telephone companies to turn over all of their call records to the NSA every single month.
And you know what?  The truth is that the government is not just collecting "metadata" about our phone calls.  The content of our calls is being recorded and stored as well.  Just check out this story from the Blaze...

Hollywood actor Shia LaBeouf in 2008 during an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno detailed how he learned phone calls were allegedly being recorded.
Promoting the film “Eagle Eye,” which according to IMDb shows how “technology of everyday life [is used] to track and control,” LaBeouf told Leno that an FBI consultant for the movie said one in five phone calls made are recorded and logged.
“And I laughed at him,” LaBeouf said.
“And then he played back a phone conversation I’d had two years prior to joining the picture,” LaBouf continued.
Both Leno and LaBeouf concluded it was “extremely creepy.”

The American people, along with the people of the entire planet, deserve the truth about this.
Unfortunately, Barack Obama is certainly not going to tell us the truth, and there will probably only be a half-hearted effort by some members of Congress to get to the bottom of things.
That is why it is going to be important to take this to court, and thankfully a couple of lawsuits are already in the works.
According to U.S. News & World Report, one of these lawsuits is being filed by a former Justice Department prosecutor...

Former Justice Department prosecutor Larry Klayman amended an existing lawsuit against Verizon and a slew of Obama administration officials Monday to make it the first class-action lawsuit in response to the publication of a secret court order instructing Verizon to hand over all phone records of millions of American customers on an "ongoing, daily basis."
Klayman told U.S. News he will file a second class-action lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia targeting government officials and each of the nine companies listed in a leaked National Security Agency slideshow as participants in the government's PRISM program.

And according to USA Today, the ACLU has also filed a lawsuit...

National Security Agency surveillance programs came under more scrutiny Tuesday as the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit and a prominent senator and Internet giant Google called on the Obama administration to disclose more information.
In its lawsuit, the ACLU said an NSA program that harvests phone calls violates the rights of all Americans.
"The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy," said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director.

Hopefully these lawsuits will reveal more details about the spying that has been taking place.
There is also a "bipartisan coalition" of 86 Internet companies and civil liberties organizations that have sent a letter to Congress demanding action on these issues.  You can read the full letter right here.  Some of the organizations involved include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, Mozilla, FreedomWorks, and the Center for Digital Democracy.
Will Congress listen to them?
Probably not.
But at least they are trying to do something about this.
The key will be to get the American people outraged enough about all of this that they won't forget about it in a week or two.  And that is not an easy thing to do.
There have been a couple of public opinion polls taken over the past few days that show some very curious results.  A Rasmussen survey found that 59 percent of Americans are against the government secretly collecting our phone records and only 26 percent are in favor.  But a Washington Post survey found that 56 percent of Americans consider the collecting of our phone records to be "acceptable" and only 41 percent consider the practice to be "unacceptable".
How could those two surveys get such wildly different results?
A lot of it is in the way that they ask the questions.
In the end, our politicians don't really care too much about what the general public thinks anyway.  They are just going to continue to do what they have been doing and the rest of the world will continue to become even more disgusted with us.
We are recklessly destroying our global reputation and our leaders do not even seem to care.  But someday America will need some friends, and when that day arrives we may find that we don't have too many left.

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How can NSA whistleblower Snowden be guilty of treason if the NSA claims it isn't spying on you after all?

naturalnews.com

Originally published June 12 2013

How can NSA whistleblower Snowden be guilty of treason if the NSA claims it isn't spying on you after all?

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) All across the mainstream media, you're hearing Republicans and Democrats accuse Edward Snowden of "treason" for blowing the whistle on the NSA surveillance scandal. Feinstein, Boehner, Bolton and others are all joining in the chorus of the absurd by screaming about how Edward Snowden is a "traitor" to the United States because he betrayed the nation by disclosing highly sensitive secrets.

But at the same time, the NSA claims it isn't spying on you at all. National intelligence director James Clapper says, "The notion that we are trolling through everyone's emails, and voyeuristically reading them, or listening to everyone's phone calls, is on its face absurd. We couldn't do it even if we wanted to, and I assure you, we don't want to."

So then how is Edward Snowden guilty of treason if everything he leaked isn't true?

See, treason can only apply if Snowden's leaks are factually correct. So by claiming he's guilty of treason, people like Sen. Feinstein are actually admitting his leaked PRISM slides are, in fact, correct and true. That's why they're so angry about it...

Because someone can't be guilty of treason for making up their own fictional slides and handing them to the Guardian. That's not treason... that's just a prank. And according to the NSA, Snowden is engaged in nothing more than a giant prank. James Clapper and everyone else in the intelligence apparatus denies the government is spying on you at all. Therefore, Snowden can't be engaged in "treason" because the information he leaked isn't real.

In other words, the two statements that "Snowden is a traitor" and "the information he leaked isn't true" can't both be accurate.

Treason doesn't apply to Snowden even if the information is true

But there's more to this story: "Treason" doesn't apply to Snowden even if the information he leaked is true (which it is, by the way, and that explains why people like Feinstein are frothing at the mouth, freaking out over it).

As Evan Soltas correctly points out at Bloomberg.com, Snowden's leaking of documents:

...wasn't treason under U.S. law. Article III of the Constitution defines it narrowly: It "shall consist only in levying War against'' the U.S., "or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Judges have read that to mean joining enemy military forces or giving them intelligence directly. Snowden did neither. He sent documents to two newspapers.

Even more abhorrently, Sen. Feinstein recently said Snowden was guilty of treason because he "violated his oath as a government employee to uphold the Constitution," reports Breitbart.com.

So wait... the Senator who is on the record as the most vicious aggressor against the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment is now accusing Snowden of violating his oath to the government? Does Feinstein have no memory of her own oath to "protect and defend" the Constitution of the United States of America?

Sen. Feinstein calling Snowden a traitor is a lot like a child rapist calling a serial flasher a pervert.

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Why Obama Cannot Undo the Surveillance Society—But We Can

By Russ Baker on Jun 11, 2013

President Obama, taking a smart political tack in the uproar following several explosive disclosures on NSA domestic spying practices, said he was all in favor of a vigorous public debate—that it would be a “healthy” thing. But calling for a public debate is one thing; actually doing anything to facilitate a truly open discussion, much less acting on what such a discussion might reveal, is quite another.
Today, the New York Times, in a news/analysis article, essentially declared that there was no hope for any kind of restraint of growing government spying on the public. Not if it is up to the people’s representatives.
The Times noted that secrecy rules will prevent robust and open discussion in Congress. It also pointed out that Republicans will mostly stay in line with their traditional allies in the intelligence services—and that Democrats will too, both because they will want to show they did the right thing in voting to authorize the Patriot Act and other relevant legislation, and because during this round, the leader is Obama, a Democrat.
But that’s just the beginning of the difficulties in the way of achieving reform of our incipient surveillance state. The Times goes on to say:

Nor is it clear that political pressure from either Congress or the public will be sufficient to prompt the administration to open the door wider on government surveillance.

When even an establishment-serving entity like the New York Times virtually concedes that there’s no hope for reform even when the vast majority might want it, this is a signal that something is deeply amiss in this society.
Congress Can’t, President Won’t, Which Means….
Of course, there is more to the story.
What the Times and other media will not and perhaps cannot say, is this: not only is Congress impotent in these matters, but it wouldn’t even matter if the president himself chose to act. Here’s why.
As history shows us, when it comes to the overall direction of American governance, absent generally minor tweaks of foreign policy and somewhat more robust swings on certain domestic issues that rouse voting bases (notably things like gay and reproductive rights and, lately, immigration) presidents of both parties rarely deviate from a kind of “consensus” cobbled together by people in academia, media and government, a consensus that almost always serves the interests of a fairly small number of wealthy people and interests. (If you’ve never heard this notion, a visit to one of our remaining public libraries might be in order.)
This is not a partisan issue. It doesn’t matter who is president. No “ordinary American who can dream of one day becoming president” is in a position to alter the basic equation, which would involve bucking the vast military-financial-industrial-academic complex that drives the American economy, funds our political elections and keeps people in line through any means necessary. That’s as true of Obama as it was of Kennedy or Nixon or…fill in the blank. For more on this, see our 2010 piece “What Obama is Up Against.”
“A Bullet For Your Thoughts?”
President Obama, who presumably believed in and hoped to achieve some of the promises he made as a candidate, has no choice but to try and keep people complacent, for he is essentially helpless. This is in part because of the power-brokers to whom he owes his political success—figures from the liberal end of the same status-quo-benefiting money spectrum—bankers, investors, corporate attorneys—who always run things. He has almost no wiggle room.
As we previously reported (see this and this), his efforts to assert himself have not gone well. Notably, when he tried to reduce troops substantially in Afghanistan, a campaign of leaks from high-placed military sources, accommodated by their friends in the media, immediately neutered him. Once it became clear that virtually no one would actually tell the public what had happened in this instance (or bring to the spotlight the tremendous financial stakes in Afghanistan for corporate interests), Obama must have understood what history has in store for him: the legacy of a Carter or a Clinton or perhaps a Ford, followed by the rewards heaped upon a Bill Clinton in the long years remaining in his life.
Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy told the Times, “If President Obama really welcomed a debate, there are all kinds of things he could do in terms of declassification and disclosure to foster it. But he’s not doing any of them.”
And indeed, he could do them in principle, but he cannot do them in reality. One of the many things he supposedly could do, but inexplicably has failed to do, is to declassify the remaining files on the JFK assassination.
If he were to release records on the national security apparatus during this, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of another president, what a powerful statement that would be. And it would perhaps open doors to greater understanding of exactly how and when a military-intelligence clique answering to moneyed interests seized de facto power in this country.
***
But of course he can’t. Study the JFK assassination, the RFK assassination, the MLK assassination. Those bullets were pretty effective messages. Take a look at this video of John F. Kennedy’s Secret Service protection melting away just before he is assassinated. (For a comedian/social commentator’s take on the implicit message, watch this.)
From his first moments in office, as we have reported in the past, Obama has been sent plenty of unsubtle messages himself about the need to tread carefully. (See this and this.)
Once you read those, please think about why the establishment invests so much effort in persuading us that anyone who dares speculate on these matters, or inquire, is a nut to be shunned, ridiculed, penalized.
Why do you think rich people own media outlets, or befriend or seek to influence the owners? Because they are in a perfect position to tell the masses what to worry about, what not to worry about, what they might aspire to change, and what must or will be left as it is.
The preferred and most comfortable roles of the media, Hollywood, publishing, and academia are to get us to focus on individuals and personalities, and to exaggerate their significance—not to focus us on recurring patterns that render those individuals largely irrelevant.
Guess Who “Has the Power”? Surprise!
We all like to believe we are free, and that we determine the direction of this country, but it has seldom been true in the past and it is even less true now.
Many of us find this too upsetting to contemplate, or, given the comforts that financial security affords, confuse economic with political freedom. Either way, blinders are the preferred apparel.
And yet there is real reason to wake up, and pay attention.
The truth is that the “powerful” individuals in whom we invest our hope have little power. But, paradoxically, the individuals who actually have power—or rather could have power—are….ourselves.
Most of us feel better believing we cannot do anything, because then we do not have to do anything. But if each of us did something, even a little, and got a few others to do something, before you knew it, we might actually have democracy.
I remember covering the fall of communism in East Germany. I personally witnessed individuals take action to make sure that the window of opportunity got wider—holding covert meetings, getting onto buses with ski masks to hand out leaflets, signaling resistance to the authorities in small ways so that the establishment workers would themselves begin letting go of the status quo.
If it can happen in one “surveillance society,” it can happen in our “surveillance-society-in-the-making.” Spread the word: freedom is not so bad, once you get used to it.

US Treasury Bonds are Junk Bonds? Is America Defaulting on Its Sovereign Debt? Can You Trust the Wall Street Credit Rating Agencies?

Rating Agency Upgrades US Sovereign Credit Rating: Another Propaganda Attempt to Mislead the Public

By Matthias Chang

Global Research, June 12, 2013

Future Fast Forward

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy

Recently, I wrote an article explaining why US Treasury Bonds are junk bonds and why rating agencies cannot be trusted at all, because they have been up to their eyeballs in fraudulent activities.

I wrote that what I am stating may seem outlandish but it reflected reality – that the US as well as its ally in crime, the United Kingdom (UK) are bankrupt. Very few economists dare assert such a conclusion because it would be a death sentence for their careers.
So, who can you trust anymore?
But, does it require so much courage to expose the ugly truth when there are so much evidence to support what I have stated in my articles which can be gathered even from the mainstream media?
It was taboo to suggest before the Global Financial Tsunami that America was a bankrupt state and does not deserve an AAA rating. Yet, it took a rating agency from China in early 2011 to break the taboo,
China’s Dagong credit rating agency says the U.S has already defaulted. As AFP reports:

“‘In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting… Washington had already defaulted on its loans by allowing the dollar to weaken against other currencies – eroding the wealth of creditors including China, Mr Guan said.”

This follows on the heels of German credit rating agency Feri’s downgrade of U.S. bonds a full notch – from AAA to AA – saying:

“The U.S. government has fought the effects of the financial market crisis primarily by an increase in government debt. We do not see that there is sufficient attention being paid to other measures,” said Dr. Tobias Schmidt, CEO of Feri Rating & Research AG. “Our rating system shows a deterioration in economic health, so the downgrading of the credit ratings of U.S. is warranted.”
I would suggest that Dagong and Feri were rather generous in their rating for obvious reasons (China being one of the largest creditor cannot afford to trigger an immediate collapse of US bonds). If a country has defaulted, its credit standing cannot be rated as AAA. It is a junk debtor, no two ways about it!

If Joe Six-Packs defaults on a loan, no banks, credit-card companies etc. would extend further credit facilities. Period!
In November, 2011, the Guardian reported as follows:

Dagong, which has maintained a pessimistic outlook on US fiscal policy, has been leading the charge to downgrade US debt over the last 12 months, lowering the US rating from AA to A+ a year ago.
In August it downgraded US debt again, to A. Days later, Standard & Poor’s followed in its wake, becoming the first western agency to downgrade US debt after the threat of a default was narrowly avoided following weeks of political squabbling in Washington over whether President Obama should be allowed to raise the US debt ceiling.

So, why are the so-called economists so reluctant to tell the simple truth? Why are these economists not writing articles to expose the ugly truth and save Joe Six-Packs from having their hard-earned money from being wiped out by inflation and confiscations etc.?
The reason is simple. They have sold their souls.
And this cowardice is unforgivable because the taboo has already been broken – two agencies have exposed the reality. So, is my article stating that US Treasury Bonds are junk bonds really that outlandish?? Even the S&P down- graded the US albeit not to junk status!
The above downgradings were made even before the massive QEs by Bernanke. The financial status has not changed for the better since the down- grades, in fact it has gotten worse and have caused panics and dissension within the ranks of the financial elites.
Bloomberg reported that,

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher, one of the most vocal critics of quantitative easing by the central bank, called for a reduction in the $85 billion in monthly asset purchases while saying he sees an end to a three-decade bull market in bonds.

In an interview with Forbes, Alan Greenspan, former FED Governor said,

We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it’s usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced, either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.”

Given the fact that US cannot mathematically repay its debts at all in the next fifty years, how can any reasonable man and or economist not conclude that the US Treasury Bonds are indeed junk bonds?
If anyone still believes in the fancy economic fairytale dished out by presstitudes, financial harlots etc. they deserve to be wiped out.
The situation gets more absurd as only a few days ago, the S&P rating agency upgraded US from negative to stable because:

Under our criteria, the credit strengths of the U.S. include its resilient economy, its monetary credibility, and the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s key reserve currency.  Similarly, in our view, the U.S.’s credit weaknesses, compared with higher rated sovereigns, include its fiscal performance, its debt burden, and the effectiveness of its fiscal policymaking.  We are affirming our ‘AA+/A-1+’ sovereign credit ratings on the U.S.  We are revising the rating outlook to stable to indicate our current view that the likelihood of a near-term downgrade of the rating is less than one in three.

By what measure is S&P saying that the US economy is resilient?
By what measure is S&P saying that there is monetary credibility when even Alan Greenspan is calling for a scale back of QE?
How can there be any credibility when the US is paying for its imports with digitally printed money, which in turn is recycled back into US treasury bonds and other US$ assets and repays the outstanding debts with more digitally printed money? In crude terms, its pays for imports with US$ toilet paper money and repays its debts with more US$ toilet paper money. It still remains as the world largest debtor!
On the other hand, China being the largest creditor to the US has been downgraded by Moody’s. Reuters reported that,
Moody’s Investors Service affirmed China’s government’s bond rating of Aa3 but cut the outlook to stable from positive, the second pessimistic revision by a foreign ratings agency this month.
Yet, these US rating agencies have been involved up to their eye-balls in fraudulent activities which was one of the major factors that contributed to the Global Financial Tsunami.
So, why are people still relying on such rating agencies for their investment decisions especially when they have been charged for fraudulent activities as in the case of S&P?
In February, 2013, the Economist reported,

A complaint filed in a Los Angeles federal court charged S&P with intentionally making “limited, adjusted and delayed updates” to its rating criteria and analytical models during a key period stretching from 2004 and 2007. This footdragging, the complaint alleges, led to overly favourable ratings for structured debt securities, which in turn produced massive losses for those investors who bought the highest-rated securities, and in particular for the Western Federal Corporate Credit Union (WesCorp), which ultimately failed.

Huffington Post elaborated,

According to the lawsuit, S&P recognized that home prices were sinking and that borrowers were having trouble repaying loans. Yet these facts weren’t reflected in the safe ratings S&P gave to complex real-estate investments known as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, the lawsuit alleges.

But, if proof is further needed that such US rating agencies are criminal enterprises, look no further than the illuminating article by Marshall Auerback, “Ban the Credit Rating Agencies”. He wrote,
Ban the credit ratings agencies!
Firms like Standard & Poor, charged with fraud by the DOJ, are criminally incompetent and serve no public purpose
Is Eric Holder’s “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” Department of Justice finally getting serious about investigating fraud on Wall Street? At first glance, it would seem so, given the news that the Department of Justice has filed civil fraud charges against the nation’s largest credit-ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, accusing the firm of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck.
On the one hand, there is no question that without the credit rating agencies the Wall Street guys would not have been able to pull off this colossal heist against the American people, and the ratings agencies cannot be excused. In fact, Standard & Poor’s employees openly joked about the company’s willingness to rate deals “structured by cows” and sang and danced to a mock song inspired by“Burning Down the House” before the 2008 global financial collapse, according to the DOJ lawsuit.
On the other, the ratings agencies are simply the gift wrappers. DOJ has yet to go after the banksters who created these packages in the first place and who seem to be in the clear as a result of a series of unconscionably low settlements recently reached with the Justice Department.
I suppose we ought to be grateful for these baby steps in the right direction. The ratings agencies themselves have admitted to US government inquiries recently that they took money in return for ratings that were not based on any fundamental assessments other than the cash they were being paid. They have lied about the risk of default in many corporate cases and then marked down debt when the game was up further destabilizing the financial system. Hence, to say that their behavior was at the heart of the great crisis is absolutely correct.
Of course, that inevitably begets the obvious question: what took you so long and why leave it at S&P? As early as September 2004, the FBI warned that there was an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud and predicted that it would cause a financial crisis if it were not stopped. It was not contained. Everyone agrees that the mortgage fraud epidemic expanded massively after the FBI warning and still not one Wall Street figure of any note has gone to jail.
Under Treasury Secretary Geithner, and the Keystone Cops of the Department of Justice, led by Eric Holder and Lanny Breuer, we established a doctrine of “too big to jail” for the very institutions which perpetrated massive frauds on millions of Americans.
Those who called for regulations that would take even that most minimal of steps necessary to re-establish the rule of law and restore our nation’s democracy and financial stability were essentially ignored. Geithner’s express rationale was that the financial system’s extreme fragility made vigorous investigations of the elite frauds too dangerous, in effect giving the banksters a get-out-of-jail-free card and in effect enshrining crony capitalism and imperiling our economy, our democracy, and our national integrity.
So what’s changed? Well, obviously one has to ask if the departure from Treasury of Mr. Geithner, along with the ignominious resignation of the odious Lanny Breuer at the DOJ heralds a new approach, or are there are other motives in mind?
There is a school of thought which suggests that this lawsuit is an attempt by the US government to intimidate the ratings agencies against any further US debt downgrades. If so, it’s a pretty stupid shakedown. The truth is that sovereign governments like the US empower these agencies simply by listening to them, in the same way they listen to the IMF, and put the interests of these undemocratic and crooked agencies ahead of their own national interests.
In our economy, the Federal Reserve sets interest rates, not the bond markets, although the latter may impact on the prices and yields of longer-term investment assets.
But in general, the Bank of Japan showed in the period from the mid-1990s onward that they can keep interest rates very low (zero) and issue as much government debt as they wanted even in the face of consistent credit rating agency downgrades, by organizations of dubious ethics.
So when a government stands up to the agencies, the impact is likely to be minimal. Here’s another idea: they can just outlaw them. This may seem draconian, but consider that the FDIC puts criminally run banks out of business all of the time. It’s hard to see why the ratings agencies, as their enablers, should be treated any differently. The reality is that the so-called Big Three – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s — were all criminally incompetent. They prostituted themselves in a pay-to-play scheme in which they would give to garbage securities any rating sellers desired, so long as the assessed fees were sufficiently high.
At a very minimum one would have thought we could introduce reforms that would align incentives, with buyers of rated securities paying for assessment of risk. The ratings agencies like S&P never actually looked at any of the mortgages that collateralized the securities they rated (it was all too pedestrian for them). As we now know from internal emails, they neither checked the loan tapes (the data provided by borrowers), nor the expertise in rating mortgages (all of their experience was in rating corporate and government debt), nor took the time to assess credit risk …
Sadly, Congress and the Obama administration, in their deliberations to “reform” our financial system via Dodd-Frank, did nothing then to reform the ratings agencies. They worried that somehow, by introducing widespread reforms to the ratings agencies, they would reduce business for the monopolies. Hence, the bill contains no significant changes required of ratings agencies, which are encouraged to continue pimping their ratings.
Perhaps this lawsuit signals a chance. In any case, it is time to wean the private financial markets off these agencies by eliminating their role as gatekeepers to the thousands of financial products on which they provide in their Papal-like declarations. It’s time to leave it to individual institutions themselves to do their own credit analysis. We should go further and simply make them illegal, and mandate that all financial institutions with access to the Fed’s lending as well as any financial institution with Treasury guarantees on liabilities (such as FDIC insurance) would be prohibited from selling or buying any derivatives. All assets would be carried on bank books through maturity — with full exposure to interest rate, currency and default risk. That provides the correct incentives to protected lending institutions as opposed to relying on some flimsy rationale provided by a highly conflicted rating agency.
If our pension funds, and financial fiduciaries truly think they need an objective third-party agency to rate Wall Street paper, then at a minimum Congress and the President should be required to purchase ratings services from arms-length professionals, with the top three monopolists specifically excluded because they have demonstrated their inability to provide unbiased ratings.
Furthermore, make ratings agencies liable for improper ratings, imposing a fiduciary responsibility to actually evaluate any instruments that are rated.
Better yet, prohibit banks and other government-protected institutions from buying this crap in the first place or prosecute them to the full extent of the law for using them to rip off millions of American consumers. If we’re going to go after the gift wrappers, we might as well go after the original source of the fraud in the first place as well. In that regard, one can hope that yesterday’s lawsuit signals a fresh approach by the Holder Department of Justice, but don’t hold your breath waiting for it.
There you have it!
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!
Still having doubts that US Treasury Bonds are junk bonds? If so, you are beyond redemption for you insist on burying your head in the sand.

PRISM: Big Brother Government is Now in the Open

Jun 10th, 2013 | 

For years at here Vigilant Citizen, I’ve been posting articles about the extreme amount of Big-Brotherish surveillance that is happening in the United States and the world. While some have dismissed these stories as “paranoid conspiracy theories”, recent revelations about the NSA’s project PRISM prove that there were no theories involved – just plain facts.
PRISM is a top-secret program that allows the NSA to directly access the servers of numerous online services and to obtain all kinds of information about its users. Since the story came out, some services such as Facebook denied any involvement with this program, stating that the NSA does not have access to their servers. The Guardian has however published leaked top-secret PowerPoint slides used to trained NSA agents that clearly state that 1- The NSA can directly access these servers and 2- Most major providers are directly involved in the program. Here are the slides.

This slide clearly states “Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers”.

Here we see that no stone is left unturned by NSA spies: E-mails, video and voice chats, file transfers and social networking are all targeted. Yes, even Skype calls can be spied on by agents.

Here we see the exact time where each provider joined PRISM. The 1st one to join? Microsoft. In the light of my recent article on Microsoft’s gaming console Xbox One, this is not surprising. Now that it has been confirmed that the Xbox One will require an internet connection EVERY 24 hours, it is quite possible that the data collected by the console (audio and video) will be transferred right to NSA servers.

One might ask: Where does this enormous amount of data get processed? In 2012, I posted an article entitled The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center which stated:

“When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility will encompass 1 million square feet, including four 25,000-square-foot areas to house endless rows of high-powered servers. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. The incredible processing power of this facility will be used to scan e-mails, phone calls, text messages, tweets or any other kind of communication. As a former NSA officer states, while holding his thumb and forefinger close together “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

I guess that the “turnkey totalitarian state” is now fully effective.
The whistleblower that leaked this story is named Ed Snowden and the US Government is looking to severely prosecute him. Here’s a YouTube video of him describing how what’s happening now is WORSE than the novel 1984.
Note this part.

“Because even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made. Every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis, to derive suspicion from an innocent life, and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”

So to those who say “If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t worry”. You’re wrong. Dead wrong. And, to be honest, it is this kind of attitude that will destroy whatever is left of liberty and privacy in the U.S. and the world. Furthermore, if you are outside of the United States – especially in countries such as Canada, UK or Australia – do not think that you’re safe. The elite knows no national boundaries and what has be revealed in the United States is most likely already happening in many other countries.
It is seriously time to wake up and to let people know that privacy, freedom and democracy are in serious jeopardy here. There is no speculation, no “tin foil hats” and no conspiracy theory. This is what’s happening right now and, if you value your freedom, you better do something about it and get your voice heard.