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Since the “financial repression,” the most powerful people have only gotten more powerful. A 2013 Oxfam report found that 80 people had as much wealth as 1/2 of humanity, and a few months later Forbes said the number had dropped to 67. Many of us asked who exactly these people are, and now the list has been released.

Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives "In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."

As readers of WhoWhatWhy know, our site has been one of the very few continuing to explore the fiery death two years ago of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, whose car left a straight segment of a Los Angeles street at a high speed, jumped the median, hit a tree, and blew up.Our original report described anomalies of the crash and surrounding events that suggest cutting-edge foul play—that an external hacker could have taken control of Hastings’s car in order to kill him. If this sounds too futuristic, a series of recent technical revelations has proven that “car hacking” is entirely possible. The latest just appeared this week.

Hackers, seeking to demonstrate the vulnerability of automobiles to remote attacks, were able to largely take over the Jeep Cherokee driven by a writer for the tech magazine Wired:Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.They were able to make his car decelerate suddenly, causing the writer to “narrowly avert death” at the hands of a semi-trailer coming up behind him.In an earlier demonstration, they had been able to do similar things with other vehicles:In the summer of 2013, I drove a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius around a South Bend, Indiana, parking lot while they sat in the backseat with their laptops, cackling as they disabled my brakes, honked the horn, jerked the seat belt, and commandeered the steering wheel.

All of this is increasingly drawing the attention—and action— of the authorities. U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA), members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday seeking to establish federal standards for security and privacy of drivers in today’s computer-laden cars.What we do not hear is any discussion about whether the risk has gone beyond the realm of possibility…to a reality.

The Obama administration fought a legal battle against Google to secretly obtain the email records of a security researcher and journalist associated with WikiLeaks. Newly unsealed court documents obtained by The Intercept reveal the Justice Department won an order forcing Google to turn over more than one year’s worth of data from the Gmail account of Jacob Appelbaum (pictured above), a developer for the Tor online anonymity project who has worked with WikiLeaks as a volunteer. The order also gagged Google, preventing it from notifying Appelbaum that his records had been provided to the government. The surveillance of Appelbaum’s Gmail account was tied to the Justice Department’s long-running criminal investigation of WikiLeaks, which began in 2010 following the transparency group’s publication of a large cache of U.S. government diplomatic cables. According to the unsealed documents, the Justice Department first sought details from Google about a Gmail account operated by Appelbaum in January 2011, triggering a three-month dispute between the government and the tech giant. Government investigators demanded metadata records from the account showing email addresses of those with whom Appelbaum had corresponded between the period of November 2009 and early 2011; they also wanted to obtain information showing the unique IP addresses of the computers he had used to log in to the account.

The Justice Department argued in the case that Appelbaum had “no reasonable expectation of privacy” over his email records under the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Rather than seeking a search warrant that would require it to show probable cause that he had committed a crime, the government instead sought and received an order to obtain the data under a lesser standard, requiring only “reasonable grounds” to believe that the records were “relevant and material” to an ongoing criminal investigation. Google repeatedly attempted to challenge the demand, and wanted to immediately notify Appelbaum that his records were being sought so he could have an opportunity to launch his own legal defense. Attorneys for the tech giant argued in a series of court filings that the government’s case raised “serious First Amendment concerns.” They noted that Appelbaum’s records “may implicate journalistic and academic freedom” because they could “reveal confidential sources or information about WikiLeaks’ purported journalistic or academic activities.” However, the Justice Department asserted that “journalists have no special privilege to resist compelled disclosure of their records, absent evidence that the government is acting in bad faith,” and refused to concede Appelbaum was in fact a journalist. It claimed it had acted in “good faith throughout this criminal investigation, and there is no evidence that either the investigation or the order is intended to harass the … subscriber or anyone else.” Google’s attempts to fight the surveillance gag order angered the government, with the Justice Department stating that the company’s “resistance to providing the records” had “frustrated the government’s ability to efficiently conduct a lawful criminal investigation.”

The Justice Department wanted to keep the surveillance secret largely because of an earlier public backlash over its WikiLeaks investigation. In January 2011, Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks volunteers’ – including Icelandic parlimentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir – were notified by Twitter that the Justice Department had obtained data about their accounts. This disclosure generated widepread news coverage and controversy; the government says in the unsealed court records that it “failed to anticipate the degree of  damage that would be caused” by the Twitter disclosure and did not want to “exacerbate this problem” when it went after Appelbaum’s Gmail data. The court documents show the Justice Department said the disclosure of its Twitter data grab “seriously jeopardized the [WikiLeaks] investigation” because it resulted in efforts to “conceal evidence” and put public pressure on other companies to resist similar surveillance orders. It also claimed that officials named in the subpeona ordering Twitter to turn over information were “harassed” after a copy was published by Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald at Salon in 2011. (The only specific evidence of the alleged harassment cited by the government is an email that was sent to an employee of the U.S. Attorney’s office that purportedly said: “You guys are fucking nazis trying to controll [sic] the whole fucking world. Well guess what. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. EXPECT US.”)

The headline news is that the NSA has surreptitiously “burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture” sold by the world’s largest computer networking companies, including everyone from U.S. mainstays Cisco and Juniper to Chinese giant Huawei. But beneath this bombshell of a story from Der Spiegel, you’ll find a rather healthy bit of irony. After all, the United States government has spent years complaining that Chinese intelligence operations could find ways of poking holes in Huawei networking gear, urging both American businesses and foreign allies to sidestep the company’s hardware. The complaints grew so loud that, at one point, Huawei indicated it may abandon the U.S. networking market all together. And, yet, Der Speigel now tells us that U.S. intelligence operations have been poking holes in Huawei networking gear — not to mention hardware sold by countless other vendors in both the States and abroad. “We read the media reports, and we’ve noted the references to Huawei and our peers,” says William Plummer, a Huawei vice president and the company’s point person in Washington, D.C. “As we have said, over and over again — and as now seems to be validated — threats to networks and data integrity can come from any and many sources.”

Plummer and Huawei have long complained that when the U.S. House Intelligence Committee released a report in October 2012 condemning the use of Huawei gear in telephone and data networks, it failed to provide any evidence that the Chinese government had compromised the company’s hardware. Adam Segal, a senior fellow for China Studies at the Center for Foreign Relations, makes the same point. And now we have evidence — Der Spiegel cites leaked NSA documents — that the U.S. government has compromised gear on a massive scale. “Do I see the irony? Certainly the Chinese will,” Segal says, noting that the Chinese government and the Chinese press have complained of U.S hypocrisy ever since former government contractor Edward Snowden first started to reveal NSA surveillance practices last summer. “The Chinese government has been hammering home what they call the U.S.’s ulterior motives for criticizing China, and there’s been a steady drumbeat of stories in the Chinese press about backdoors in the products of U.S. companies. They’ve been going after Cisco in particular.”

To be sure, the exploits discussed by Der Spiegel are a little different from the sort of attacks Congress envisioned during its long campaign against Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese manufacturer. As Segal and others note, Congress mostly complained that the Chinese government could collaborate with people inside the two companies to plant backdoors in their gear, with lawmakers pointing out that Huawei’s CEO was once an officer in China’s People’s Liberation Army, or PLA, the military arm of the country’s Communist party. Der Spiegel, by contrast, says the NSA is exploiting hardware without help from anyone inside the Ciscos and the Huaweis, focusing instead on compromising network gear with clever hacks or intercepting the hardware as it’s shipped to customers. “For the most part, the article discusses typical malware exploits used by hackers everywhere,” says JR Rivers, an engineer who has built networking hardware for Cisco as well as Google and now runs the networking startup Cumulus Networks. “It’s just pointing out that the NSA is engaged in the practice and has resources that are not available to most people.” But in the end, the two types of attack have the same result: Networking gear controlled by government spies. And over the last six months, Snowden’s revelations have indicated that the NSA is not only hacking into networks but also collaborating with large American companies in its hunt for data.

The latest revelation regarding the National Security Agency doesn't come courtesy of Edward Snowden. A Freedom of Information Act request has confirmed the NSA contracted a French company that makes its money by hacking into computers. It's no secret that the United States government relies on an arsenal of tactics to gather intelligence and wage operations against its adversaries, but a FOIA request filed by Muckrock's Heather Akers-Healy has confirmed that the list of Uncle Sam's business partners include Vupen, a French-based security company that specializes in selling secret codes used to crack into computers. Documents responsive to my request to #NSA for contracts with VUPEN, include 12/month exploit subscription https://t.co/x3qJbqSUpa — Heather Akers-Healy (@abbynormative) September 16, 2013 Muckrock published on Monday a copy of a contract between the NSA and Vupen in which the US government is shown to have ordered a one-year subscription to the firm's “binary analysis and exploits service” last September.

That service, according to the Vupen website, is sold only to government entities, law enforcement agencies and computer response teams in select countries, and provides clients with access to so-called zero-day exploits: newly-discovered security vulnerabilities that the products' manufacturers have yet to discover and, therefore, have had zero days to patch-up. “Major software vendors such as Microsoft and Adobe usually take 6 to 9 months to release a security patch for a critical vulnerability affecting their products, and this long delay between the discovery of a vulnerability and the release of a patch creates a window of exposure during which criminals can rediscover a previously reported but unpatched vulnerability, and target any organization running the vulnerable software,” Vupen says elsewhere on their website. Last year, Vupen researchers successfully cracked Google's Chrome browser, but declined to show developers how they did so — even for an impressive cash bounty. “We wouldn’t share this with Google for even $1 million,” Vupen CEO Chaouki Bekrar told Forbes' Andy Greenberg of the Chrome hack in 2012. “We don’t want to give them any knowledge that can help them in fixing this exploit or other similar exploits. We want to keep this for our customers.”

And why the NSA and other clients may benefit from being privy to these vulnerabilities, knowing how to exploit security holes in adversarial systems is a crucial component to any government's offensive cyber-operations. Last month, the Washington Post published excerpts from the previously secretive “black budget,” a closely guarded ledger listing the funding requests made by America's intelligence community provided by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. According to that document, a substantial goal of the US in fiscal year 2013 was to use a portion of $52.6 billion in secretive funding towards improving offensive cyber-operations.

September the 20th marked the launch of Open Russia, a pro-European political movement spearheaded by former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia’s former wealthiest man was released from prison in December 2013 due to a pardon by Vladimir Putin, after serving close to 10 years in jail following his conviction in 2005.

Although officially convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement, it seems that Khodorkovsky was singled out among the Russian oligarchs due to him using his mass fortune to interfere in domestic Russian politics, in an attempt to overthrow Putin for the benefit of the Western elite. Open Russia is the rebirth of the Open Russia Foundation, which was launched in 2001 by Khodorkovsky to foster animosity in Russia but was later shut down after the tycoon was behind bars. The board of the Open Russia Foundation included two Anglo-American titans, namely Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild, revealing the mindset and intentions of the individuals who steered the foundation.

Khodorkovsky profited immensely from the mass privatisation of state assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, at a time when corruption and back-door deals was the norm in Russia. He was the Chairman and CEO of the Russian based ‘Yakos Oil Company’ from 1997 to 2004, where he acquired an immense fortune leading him to be named the 16th wealthiest person on earth by Forbes magazine in 2004, worth a staggering $15 billion. Immediately after his release from prison at the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky declared on numerous occasions that he had no desire to enter politics. Yet only months after his initial statements he has launched a pro-European political movement within Russia, openly called for the overthrow of Putin in Moscow, announced he would be interested in leading Russia as President in the coming years, as well as asserting that Ukraine is the “model” for Russia to follow in the future. “I feel it imperative that the section of the population that is Europe-centered would have the opportunity to impact the way the country develops…. Without a doubt, Putin’s leaving is one of the necessary elements of Russia being able to take a European path of development…. It’s clear that Ukraine is that model that Russia is ready to accept and it’s precisely for this reason that Putin was so not interested in seeing the success of that revolution”, Khodorkovsky told the Daily Beast in an interview earlier this month.

Ellen H. Brown (WoD) : On December 11, 2014, the US House passed a bill repealing the Dodd-Frank requirement that risky derivatives be pushed into big-bank subsidiaries, leaving our deposits and pensions exposed to massive derivatives losses. The bill was vigorously challenged by Senator Elizabeth Warren; but the tide turned when Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, stepped into the ring. Perhaps what prompted his intervention was the unanticipated $40 drop in the price of oil. As financial blogger Michael Snyder points out, that drop could trigger a derivatives payout that could bankrupt the biggest banks. And if the G20’s new “bail-in” rules are formalized, depositors and pensioners could be on the hook. The new bail-in rules were discussed in my last last article entitled “New G20 Rules: Cyprus-style Bail-ins to Hit Depositors AND Pensioners.” They are edicts of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an unelected body of central bankers and finance ministers headquartered in the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Where did the FSB get these sweeping powers, and is its mandate legally enforceable?

Those questions were addressed in an article I wrote in June 2009, two months after the FSB was formed, titled “Big Brother in Basel: BIS Financial Stability Board Undermines National Sovereignty.” It linked the strange boot shape of the BIS to a line from Orwell’s 1984: “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The concerns raised there seem to be materializing, so I’m republishing the bulk of that article here. We need to be paying attention, lest the bail-in juggernaut steamroll over us unchallenged. The Shadowy Financial Stability Board Alarm bells went off in April 2009, when the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) was linked to the new Financial Stability Board (FSB) signed onto by the G20 leaders in London. The FSB was an expansion of the older Financial Stability Forum (FSF) set up in 1999 to serve in a merely advisory capacity by the G7 (a group of finance ministers formed from the seven major industrialized nations). The chair of the FSF was the General Manager of the BIS. The new FSB was expanded to include all G20 members (19 nations plus the EU).

Formally called the “Group of Twenty Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors,” the G20 was, like the G7, originally set up as a forum merely for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. What set off alarms was that the new Financial Stability Board had real teeth, imposing “obligations” and “commitments” on its members; and this feat was pulled off without legislative formalities, skirting the usual exacting requirements for treaties. It was all done in hasty response to an “emergency.” Problem-reaction-solution was the slippery slope of coups. Buried on page 83 of an 89-page Report on Financial Regulatory Reform issued by the US Obama administration was a recommendation that the FSB strengthen and institutionalize its mandate to promote global financial stability. It sounded like a worthy goal, but there was a disturbing lack of detail. What was the FSB’s mandate, what were its expanded powers, and who was in charge? An article in The London Guardian addressed those issues in question and answer format:

U.S. strategy is sound. It is to allow the balance of power to play out, to come in only when it absolutely must — with overwhelming force, as in Kuwait — and to avoid intervention where it cannot succeed. The tactical application of strategy is the problem. In this case the tactic is not direct intervention by the United States, save as a satisfying gesture to avenge murdered Americans. But the solution rests in doing as little as possible and forcing regional powers into the fray, then in maintaining the balance of power in this coalition. Such an American strategy is not an avoidance of responsibility. It is the use of U.S. power to force a regional solution. Sometimes the best use of American power is to go to war. Far more often, the best use of U.S. power is to withhold it. The United States cannot evade responsibility in the region. But it is enormously unimaginative to assume that carrying out that responsibility is best achieved by direct intervention. Indirect intervention is frequently more efficient and more effective.

The United States cannot win the game of small mosaic tiles that is emerging in Syria and Iraq. An American intervention at this microscopic level can only fail. But the principle of balance of power does not mean that balance must be maintained directly. Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia have far more at stake in this than the United States. So long as they believe that the United States will attempt to control the situation, it is perfectly rational for them to back off and watch, or act in the margins, or even hinder the Americans. The United States must turn this from a balance of power between Syria and Iraq to a balance of power among this trio of regional powers. They have far more at stake and, absent the United States, they have no choice but to involve themselves. They cannot stand by and watch a chaos that could spread to them. It is impossible to forecast how the game is played out. What is important is that the game begins. The Turks do not trust the Iranians, and neither is comfortable with the Saudis. They will cooperate, compete, manipulate and betray, just as the United States or any country might do in such a circumstance. The point is that there is a tactic that will fail: American re-involvement. There is a tactic that will succeed: the United States making it clear that while it might aid the pacification in some way, the responsibility is on regional powers. The inevitable outcome will be a regional competition that the United States can manage far better than the current chaos.

There is then the special case of the Islamic State. It is special because its emergence triggered the current crisis. It is special because the brutal murder of two prisoners on video showed a particular cruelty. And it is different because its ideology is similar to that of al Qaeda, which attacked the United States. It has excited particular American passions. To counter this, I would argue that the uprising by Iraq’s Sunni community was inevitable, with its marginalization by Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite regime in Baghdad. That it took this particularly virulent form is because the more conservative elements of the Sunni community were unable or unwilling to challenge al-Maliki. But the fragmentation of Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions was well underway before the Islamic State, and jihadism was deeply embedded in the Sunni community a long time ago. Moreover, although the Islamic State is brutal, its cruelty is not unique in the region. Syrian President Bashar al Assad and others may not have killed Americans or uploaded killings to YouTube, but their history of ghastly acts is comparable. Finally, the Islamic State — engaged in war with everyone around it — is much less dangerous to the United States than a small group with time on its hands, planning an attack. In any event, if the Islamic State did not exist, the threat to the United States from jihadist groups in Yemen or Libya or somewhere inside the United States would remain.

David Petraeus, the person who Feinstein said has “suffered enough,” was hired last year by the $73 billion investment fund KKR to be Chairman of its newly created KKR Global Institute, on top of the $220,000/year pension he receives from the U.S. Army and the teaching position he holds at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Let us all pause for a moment to lament the deep suffering of this man, and the grave injustice of inflicting any further deprivation upon him. In 2011, I wrote a book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, that examined the two-tiered justice system prevailing in the U.S.: how the U.S. imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world (both in absolute numbers and proportionally) often for trivial transgressions, while immunizing its political and economic elites for even the most egregious crimes. Matt Taibbi’s book, The Divide, examines the same dynamic with a focus on the protection of economic elites and legal repression of ordinary citizens in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. This latest example from Feinstein is one of the most vivid yet. She wanted Julian Assange – who isn’t even a U.S. citizen and never served in the U.S. Government – prosecuted for espionage for exposing war crimes, and demanded that Edward Snowden be charged with “treason” for exposing illegal eavesdropping which shocked the world. But a four-star general who leaked classified information not for any noble purpose but to his mistress for personal reasons should be protected from any legal consequences.

Long-standing mavens of DC political power literally believe that they and their class-comrades are too noble, important and elevated to be subjected to the rule of law to which they subject everyone else. They barely even disguise it any more. It’s the dynamic by which the Obama administration prosecuted leakers with unprecedented aggression who disclose information that embarrasses them politically while ignoring or even sanctioning the leaks of classified information which politically glorify them. It is, of course, inconceivable that someone like Dianne Feinstein would urge the release of ordinary convicts from prison on the ground that their actions are “in the past” or that they have “suffered enough.” This generous mentality of mercy, forgiveness and understanding - like Obama’s decree that we Look Forward, Not Backward to justify immunity for American torturers - is reserved only for political officials, Generals, telecoms, banks and oligarchs who reside above and beyond the rule of law.

Washington/Wall Street elites are now deep into nuclear war paranoia. A few studies at least hint at the obvious; glaring US strategic weakness. Consider some of the basics: - Russian ICBMs armed with MIRVs travel at about 18 Mach; that is way faster than anything in the US arsenal. And basically they are unbeatable. - The S-400 and S-500 double trouble; Moscow has agreed to sell the S-400 surface-to-air missile system to China; the bottom line is this will make Beijing impermeable to US air power, ICBMs and cruise missiles. Russia, for its part, is already focusing on the state of the art S-500 – which essentially makes the Patriot anti-missile system look like a V-2 from WWII. - The Russian Iskander missile travels at Mach 7 – with a range of 400km, carrying a 700kg warhead of several varieties, and with a circular error probability of around five meters. Translation: an ultimate lethal weapon against airfields or logistic infrastructure. The Iskander can reach targets deep inside Europe. - And then there’s the Sukhoi T-50 PAK FA.

NATO clowns dreaming of a war on Russia would have to come up with an ironclad system to knock out these Iskanders. They don’t have any. Additionally, they would have to face the S-400s, which the Russians can deploy all over the spectrum. Think of a hefty batch of S-400s positioned at the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad; that would turn NATO air operations deep inside Europe into an absolutely horrendous nightmare. On top of it, good ol’ NATO fighter jets cost a fortune. Imagine the effect of hundreds of destroyed fighter jets on an EU already financially devastated and austerity-plagued to death.

Still assuming those NATO clowns would insist on playing war, Moscow has already made it very clear Russia would use their awesome arsenal of 5,000-plus tactical nuclear weapons - and whatever else it takes - to defend the nation against a NATO conventional attack. Moreover, a few thousand S-400 and S-500 systems are enough to block a US nuclear attack.

In 2009 President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize before doing much of anything. Since then he has initiated two wars, first in Libya and now in Iraq and Syria, and escalated another, in Afghanistan. Alas, he has demonstrated that it is bad to start wars unnecessarily, but even worse to wage wars foolishly. The administration appears to have lost its collective mind. The president has added ground forces to the battle in Iraq and the military has suggested introducing thousands more. His officials reportedly have decided to focus on overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the name of fighting the Islamic State. It is hard to know which of these ideas is worse.

Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street. “The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting." As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.

Walker is not alone: He is one of 19 top fundraisers for George W. Bush -- known as “Pioneers” and “Rangers” -- whose financial firms received state business from Jeb Bush’s administration in Tallahassee. In all, an International Business Times’ review of government documents shows Jeb Bush oversaw Florida directing at least $1.7 billion of state workers’ retirement money to the financial firms of his elder brother’s major donors. As Jeb Bush oversaw the State Board of Administration (SBA) that runs Florida’s massive public pension system, the state shifted billions of dollars into higher-risk, higher-fee alternative investments, benefiting the same sector of the investment industry he would work in upon leaving office. Many of those state deals delivered returns that fell short of projections. Roughly 20 percent of that system’s 53 private investment deals during Bush’s governorship went to companies that employed his brother’s Pioneers. Those financial firms, in turn, delivered more than $5 million of campaign cash to George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee and Jeb Bush’s Republican Party of Florida. (Click here to see the full list of Bush Pioneers whose firms received Florida pension investments from Jeb Bush’s administration).

Ethics experts say the connection between Bush family donors and Florida pension deals raises questions about whether the investments were properly insulated from political influence. “If not an actual conflict of interest, these examples would provide fodder for apparent conflicts of interest,” said Common Cause Florida’s Peter Butzin. “Those folks who give … expect something in return. And if that something in return is not blatantly sending business their way or resulting in a particular vote, it most certainly is at least providing an opportunity for access, to get the foot in the door, so that they can make the case with that official.” Jeb Bush’s aides did not respond to questions from IBTimes, and Walker declined to comment for this story. Dennis MacKee, an SBA spokesperson, said the agency’s “elected Trustees do not now, nor did they during Governor Bush’s term, participate in the selection of individual investments.” MacKee’s statement conflicts with emails reviewed by IBTimes that show that, as governor, Jeb Bush was deeply involved in the state’s investment decisions, periodically brokering conversations between Florida officials and individual financial firms, including one whose top executive was a longtime Bush family donor.

In a rare moment of honesty, a Western news outlet, Forbes, admits that the people of Crimea expressed their legitimate will in last year’s referendum when they voted to abandon Ukraine and rejoin Russia, an inconvenient truth for the U.S. State Department and press corps, writes Robert Parry.

Photos Oli Scarff/Getty Images NEW YORK (CNNMoney) —Donald Trump has responded to the Saudi billionaire who called him a "disgrace ... to all America."

On Friday, Trump called Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal "dopey" and accused him of wanting "to control our U.S. politicians with daddy's money." Trump said he wouldn't be controlled if he was elected.Bin Talal's tweet, which Trump was responding to, also encouraged the Republican front runner to drop out of the race for president.Bin Talal's tweet came after Trump's recent proposal to keep Muslims out of the U.S.Prince Bin Talal owns 5% of Twitter -- he's the second biggest shareholder behind former CEO and co-founder Evan Williams.Bin Talal is also the 34th richest person in the world, according to Forbes. In July, he announced he would be donating his roughly $32 billion fortune to charity after his death.

The United States has "not contained" the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the nation's top military officer said Tuesday, contradicting President Obama's remarks last month about the terror group."We have not contained" ISIS, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told lawmakers at a House Armed Services Committee hearing. ADVERTISEMENTThe comment runs counter to what the president said days before ISIS launched a string of attacks across Paris. "I don't think they're gaining strength. What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain, and we have contained them," Obama told ABC News. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communication, later said the president's remarks applied specifically to Iraq and Syria. Dunford said ISIS has been "tactically" contained in areas they have been since 2010 but added, "Strategically they have spread since 2010." His remarks were in response to questioning by Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) on whether ISIS has been contained at any time since 2010. Dunford added that ISIS posed a threat beyond Iraq and Syria to countries such as Egypt, Nigeria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon and Jordan. 

Martin Shkreli, a boastful pharmaceutical executive who came under withering criticism for price gouging vital drugs, denied securities fraud charges on Thursday following an early morning arrest, and was freed on a $5 million bond. While the 32-year-old has earned a rare level of infamy for his brazenness in business and his personal life, what he was charged with had nothing to do with skyrocketing drug prices. He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another. “Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference.

Evan Greebel, a New York lawyer, who is alleged in the federal indictment to have helped Shkreli in his schemes, was also arrested and charged. Like Shkreli, he pleaded not guilty, and he was freed on a $1 million bond. Both men and their lawyers declined to comment after their court appearance.

Read the full text of the indictment here In the federal indictment and a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, authorities say Shkreli began losing money and lying to investors from the time he began managing money. In his mid-20s, he got nine investors to place $3 million with him and at one point he had only $331. Securities fraud is hardly unheard of on Wall Streeet and the amounts involved here are nowhere near on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But Shkreli’s case has drawn such attention because of his defiant price-gouging and his own up-by-the-bootstraps history. The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who did janitorial work and raised him and his brothers in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli seemed at first to embody the American dream and then to mock it. After dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, he worked as an intern for Jim Cramer’s hedge fund as a 17-year-old and quickly impressed with his ability to call stocks. He created hedge funds, taught himself biology and, after earning a BA at Baruch College in New York City, began hedge funds investing in biotech.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly."

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department's "failure to correct system deficiencies." The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments.  No information is given about these 170 transactions.  In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments  were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude. The July 2016 report states, "In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter." An appendix to the July 2016 report shows $2 trillion in changes to the Army General Fund balance sheet due to unsupported adjustments. On the asset side, there is $794 billion increase in the Army's Fund Balance with the U.S. Treasury.  There is also an increase of $929 billion in the Army's Accounts Payable. This information raises additional major questions. First, what is the source of the additional $794 billion in the Army's Fund Balance? This adjustment represents more than six times appropriated spending.  Second, do these transfers represent a flow of funds to the Army beyond those authorized by Congress? Third, were these funds authorized and if so when and by whom? Fourth, what is the source of these funds? Finally, the $929 billion in Accounts Payable appears to represent an amount owed for items or services purchased on credit. What entities have received or will receive payment?

While de-certifying would not withdraw the U.S. from the deal, it would give Congress 60 days to decide whether or not to reimpose the sanctions on Iran that were suspended by it. According to a new poll from YouGov, Americans are at odds with the president's stance with most of the public supporting the nuclear deal. The research found that 56 percent of the public approve of the agreement, of which 31 percent strongly approve and 25 percent somewhat approve. Only 19 percent of those polled said they disapprove of it. Broken down by party, 68 percent of Democrats support the deal while a surprisingly large 22 percent share have no opinion on the matter. A slight 51 percent majority of Republicans are also in favor of the agreement while 23 percent are against it. YouGov also found that support for the nuclear deal doesn't necessarily mean Americans like or trust Iran with 44 percent regarding the country as a U.S. enemy.

In its latest budget request, the Trump administration is asking for a near-record $750 billion for the Pentagon and related defense activities, an astonishing figure by any measure. If passed by Congress, it will, in fact, be one of the largest military budgets in American history, topping peak levels reached during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. And keep one thing in mind: that $750 billion represents only part of the actual annual cost of our national security state. There are at least 10 separate pots of money dedicated to fighting wars, preparing for yet more wars, and dealing with the consequences of wars already fought. So the next time a president, a general, a secretary of defense, or a hawkish member of Congress insists that the U.S. military is woefully underfunded, think twice. A careful look at U.S. defense expenditures offers a healthy corrective to such wildly inaccurate claims. Now, let’s take a brief dollar-by-dollar tour of the U.S. national security state of 2019, tallying the sums up as we go, and see just where we finally land (or perhaps the word should be “soar”), financially speaking.

Final tally: $1.2542 trillion So, our final annual tally for war, preparations for war, and the impact of war comes to more than $1.25 trillion — more than double the Pentagon’s base budget. If the average taxpayer were aware that this amount was being spent in the name of national defense — with much of it wasted, misguided, or simply counterproductive — it might be far harder for the national security state to consume ever-growing sums with minimal public pushback. For now, however, the gravy train is running full speed ahead and its main beneficiaries — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and their cohorts — are laughing all the way to the bank.