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Gary Edwards

The Project To Restore America - 0 views

www.theprojecttorestoreamerica.com/...x-the-Banking-System-for-Good-

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel LPB Limited-Purpose-Banking

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Nov 12
     
    Yes, it's a confusing proposal - but not when compared to what we have now; a financial industry run by "To-Big-To-Fail Banks" able to loot the public treasury at will.  Never to Big to Bail, and taxpayers voted for four more years of looting.  Limited Purpose Banking is based on equity.  Which is quite different from the fractional-reserve-lending model used by the To-Big-Fail Banksters. "The history of banking is a long and sorry record of promises that can't be kept - promises that were either overly optimistic or outright fraudulent. Since banks are leveraged, failing to deliver on their promises leads them to collapse. But unlike standard bankruptcies, bank failures produce enormous economic fallout.   There's a reason. Banks not only market financial products. They also make financial markets. Markets, be they for apples or loans, constitute critical public goods whose provision should not be jeopardized.     Making a market -- getting buyers and sellers to meet at the same time and place always represents a feat of coordination. The main purpose of banks is to effect financial coordination - to bring together borrowers and lenders and investors and savers.     When banks fail, particularly large ones, this coordination breaks down. Moreover, bank failures can be contagious. Any given bank's failure raises the prospect that fraud or very poor judgment was at fault and that other banks are engaged in the same practice. This leads to runs on, actually away from, banks in general. In addition, since banks borrow and lend to one another, the failure of bank A can bring bank B down if A owes money to B.     Worst of all, financial collapse, even by a few major financial players can coordinate non-financial companies as well as households on the belief that times are bad. And when millions of separate firms and tens of millions of households start expecting bad times, they take actions to make bad times happen. Thus, the state of confidence, what Key
Paul Merrell

Washington Misses Bigger Picture of New Chinese Bank « LobeLog - 0 views

www.lobelog.com/er-picture-of-new-chinese-bank

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Bibi Netanyahu’s election, persistent violence through much of the Middle East and North Africa, and intensified efforts to forge a nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran topped the news here in Washington this week. But a much bigger story in terms of the future order of global politics was taking place in Europe and Beijing. The story was simply this: virtually all of the closest European allies of the United States, beginning with Britain, defied pressure from Washington by deciding to apply for founding membership in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). This Chinese initiative could quickly rival the World Bank and the Asia Development Bank as a major source of funding for big development projects across Eurasia. The new bank, which offers a serious multilateral alternative to the Western-dominated international financial institutions (IFIs) established in the post-World War II order, is expected to attract about three dozen initial members, including all of China’s Asian neighbors (with the possible exception of Japan). Australia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states are also likely to join by the March 31 deadline set by Beijing for prospective co-founders to apply. Its $50 billion in initial capital is expected to double with the addition of new members, and that amount could quickly grow given China’s $3 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves. More details about the bank can be found in a helpful Q&A here at the Council on Foreign Relations website.
  • Along with the so-called BRICS bank—whose membership so far is limited to Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the AIIB poses a real “challenge to the existing global economic order,” which, of course, Western nations have dominated since the establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the final days of World War II. As one unnamed European official told The New York Times, “We have moved from the world of 1945.” That Washington’s closest Western allies are now racing to join the AIIB over U.S. objections offers yet more evidence that the “unipolar moment” celebrated by neoconservatives and aggressive nationalists 25 years ago and then reaffirmed by the same forces after the 2003 Iraq invasion is well and truly. And yet, these same neoconservatives continue to insist that—but for Obama’s weakness and defeatism—the United States remains so powerful that it really doesn’t have to take account of anyone’s interests outside its borders except, maybe, Israel’s. (That Washington’s closest Western allies are now racing to join the new bank over U.S. objections could also presage a greater willingness to abandon the international sanctions regime against Iran if Washington is seen as responsible for the collapse of the P5+1 nuclear negotiations with Tehran. Granted, Iran’s economy—and its potential as a source of investment capital—is itsy-bitsy compared to China.)
  • Indeed, commentators are depicting US allies’ decision to join the AIIB (see here, here, and here as examples) as a debacle for U.S. diplomacy. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has predictably blamed Obama for defeat, calling it a “case study in declining American influence” (although it also defended Washington’s decision against joining and accused Britain of “appeasing China for commercial purposes.”) What the Journal predictably didn’t mention was a key reason why the administration did not seek membership in the new bank: there was virtually no chance that a Republican-dominated Congress would approve it. Indeed, one reason Beijing launched its initiative and so many of our allies in both Asia and Europe have decided to join is their frustration with Republicans in Congress who have refused to ratify a major reform package designed to give developing countries, including China, a little more voting power on the Western-dominated governing boards of the IMF and the World Bank. The Group of 20 (G20) biggest economic powers actually proposed this reform in 2010, and it doesn’t even reduce Washington’s voting power, which gives it an effective veto over major policy changes in both institutions. As a result of this intransigence, the United States is the only G-20 member that has failed to ratify the reforms, effectively blocking their implementation.
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Mar 15
     
    U.S. global hegemony is rapidly disintegrating as former puppet states in Europe jump from the dwindling dollar economy to the rising remnimbi/ruble BRICS economies. And many of the "stans" south of Russia threatened by U.S. mercenaries provided by the Gulf Coast States are jumping in that direction too, along with Turkey, a NATO member. The Stans involved are oil and natural gas rich; combined with Russian oil and gas, they have enough oil and gas reserves to rival the Gulf Coast States.  The most interesting part to me is the debate now under way in the EU over dropping out of NATO and creating a replacement European mutual defense force that excludes the U.S. I'm beginning to hit some chatter about inviting Russia into that hypoethesized treaty. That makes sense for the EU because it would give Europe the benefit of Russian nuclear deterrence, both in land and submarine-based ICBMs. I'm not convinced that Russia would sign on. Russia is already running joint military exercises with China, which is playing the role of Russia's economic savior at this point. So China might have the final say on that scenario. A pan-Eurasian mutual defense treaty? What would be left of the U.S. Empire without NATO, particularly given that the dollar would surely collapse before such a treaty were signed? The War Party in Congress has only one tool to work with, war, and when all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails. Current U.S. military power is built around the capacity to wage two major wars concurrently, but is very heavily dependent on NATO to do so. I'm not sure at all that the War Party has what it takes to cope with a peaceful group boycott by other NATO members. 
Gary Edwards

Obama To Americans: You Don't Deserve To Be Free - Forbes - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...ns-you-dont-deserve-to-be-free

Obammunism Statism Ayn-Rand-Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them. there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty. Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.
  • Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase. The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights. Radicals for capitalism would, as the Declaration of Independence says, use government only “to secure these rights”–the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. (Yes, I added “property” in there–property rights are inseparable from the other three.) That’s the political philosophy on which Obama is trying to hang the blame for the recent financial crisis and every other social ill. But ask yourself, are we few radical capitalists in charge? Have radical capitalists been in charge at any time in the last, oh, say 100 years?
  • I pick 100 years deliberately, because it was exactly 100 years ago that a gigantic anti-capitalist measure was put into effect: the Federal Reserve System. For 100 years, government, not the free market, has controlled money and banking. How’s that worked out? How’s the value of the dollar held up since 1913? Is it worth one-fiftieth of its value then or only one-one-hundredth? You be the judge. How did the dollar hold up over the 100 years before this government take-over of money and banking? It actually gained slightly in value.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Laissez-faire hasn’t existed since the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. That was the first of a plethora of government crimes against the free market.
  • The typical Republican would never, ever say “the market will take care of everything.” He’d say, “the market will take care of most things, and for the other things, we need the regulatory-welfare state.” They are for individualism–except when they are against it. They are against free markets and individualism not only when they agree with the Left that we must have antitrust laws and the Federal Reserve, but also when they demand immigration controls, government schools, regulatory agencies, Medicare, laws prohibiting abortion, Social Security, “public works” projects, the “social safety net,” laws against insider trading, banking regulation, and the whole system of fiat money.
  • Even you, dear reader, are probably wondering how on earth anyone could challenge things like Social Security, government schools, and the FDA. But that’s not the point. The point is: these statist, anti-capitalist programs exist and have existed for about a century. The point is: Obama is pretending that the Progressive PGR -2.02% Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society were repealed, so that he can blame the financial crisis on capitalism. He’s pretending that George Bush was George Washington.
  • What Obama is indeed responsible for is the injustice of robbing some to (allegedly) benefit others. To the extent that cronyism, not the free market, sets income, that is an injustice to be laid at the statists’ door.
  • There is no such problem as “unemployment” under capitalism. Prices fall to clear the market. Twice the work force could be employed if average wages dropped in half. But that’s nominal wages; with a constant money supply, prices would also fall in half–or slightly more than that. This isn’t just theory. America’s workforce has grown steadily decade after decade, yet the standard of living has risen at the same time. I grant you that the rise has slowed as statist intervention has grown. Think of the phenomenal progress between, say 1900 and 1920 as compared to the minor progress from 1993 to 2013. Most of the progress in the last 20 years has come in the freest area of the economy: electronics and computing.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jan 14
     
    Harry Binswanger defends laissez-faire capitalism, using Ayn Rand Objectivism.
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Jan 14
     
    The major problem with Ayn Rand Objectivism is that it's an "ism." The Utopian ideal it is based on has never existed in reality and likely never will; its principles have never been tested. Moreover, I will argue that Binswanger is incorrect in arguing that the anti-capitalist phenomenon in America began with creation of the Federal Reserve; it dates much farther back. The economic basis for the Revolutionary War was largely the Crown-granted monopolies granted to the first great British "companies" (corporations), which had the effect of forcing North American colonists to pay monopoly rents for common goods and kept American ship owners from importing those goods from elsewhere to sell at a lower price. The Founding Fathers were strongly against privately-owned corporations and government-granted monopolies, with only two exceptions, copyrights for literary works and patents for inventions. The Constitution's prohibition against government-granted monopolies is implicit in its allowance for only two narrowly-defined types. The Founding Fathers' writings explicitly discussed the difference between "natural" monopolies and those created by government or anti-competitive conduct. During the early years of the nation corporations were permitted by the States, but only for public purposes, usually for public works such as bridges or roads for which there was a need to amass capital. These early American corporations were usually chartered only for the time required to complete the public work and to recover the invesment and a small profit, e.g., from tolls for using a bridge or road. Many of the early state constitutions explicitly limited the lifetime of corporations. However, such early opposition to corporations gradually eroded; corporate purposes were expanded, corporations were granted perpetual life, and the corporate form of doing business became much more widespread. Here, it is important to recognize that corporations are market artificialities c
Gary Edwards

Peter Beinart: How Ron Paul Will Change the GOP in 2012 - The Daily Beast - 2 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ll-change-the-gop-in-2012.html

Banksters Ron-Paul Libertarians Peter-Beinart

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Dec 11
     
    Not a big Peter Beinhart fan, but this article explains a large part of the Ron Paul phenom. After a life time as a big C Goldwater-Reagan Constitutional Conservative, this summer i made a full transition to big C Constitutional Libertarian. The tipping point for me was the GAO audit of the Federal Reserve, where they discovered $16.1 Trillion of taxpayer dollars missing from the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel management books. It went to a who's who of international Bankster Cartel members. None of the taxpayer funded "financial collapse of 2008" bailout dollars went to the purposes chartered by their legislation. That includees the TARP $850 Billion, the Obama Stimulous $1 Trillion, and the mega FRBC $16.1 Trillion. No bad debts were purchased and retired. No rotting mortgage securities were swept up and restructured. No shovel ready jobs either. And no one in government or banksterism having caused the financial collapse went to jail. Instead, the perps feasted on the bailout dollars. The debt remains on the books of international Banksters, collecting interest, thirsting for foreclosure. The Bankster Cartel members are flush with cash, but not lending. By law (The Federal Reserve Act of December 23rd, 1913), FRBC members must keep a significant amount of their assets on "reserve" at the Federal Reserve, at 6% interest. In exchange for managing this process and the exploding money supply, the taxpayers of the USA are obligated by law to pay the FRBC 1% per year of (assets under management" (the money supply). Take note: the FRBC takes the 1% per year payment for their services in the form of GOLD!! They will not take payment in the form of paper notes labeled legal tender "Federal Reserve Notes". They only take GOLD. My transition to Constitutional Libertarian begins with a strct reading of the Constitution (the How), the Declaration of Independence, (the Why), and belief in the Rule of Law, not man. The concept of achievi
Gary Edwards

Comey has Long History of Cases Ending Favorable to Clintons - Tea Party News - 0 views

www.teaparty.org/ding-favorable-clintons-174947

Clinton Hillary

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Messages found stored on Clinton’s private email server show that Berger – a convicted thief of classified documents – had been advising Clinton while she served as secretary of state and had access to emails containing classified information. For example, in an email dated Sept. 22, 2009, Berger advised Clinton advised how she could leverage information to make Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more cooperative in discussions with the Obama administration over a settlement freeze.
  • Law firm ties Berger, Lynch, Mills Berger worked as a partner in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1973 to 1977, before taking a position as the deputy director of policy planning at the State Department in the Carter administration. When Carter lost his re-election bid, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson, where he worked until he took leave in 1988 to act as foreign policy adviser in Gov. Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign. When Dukakis was defeated, Berger returned to Hogan & Hartson until he became foreign policy adviser for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. On March 28, WND reported Lynch was a litigation partner for eight years at Hogan & Hartson, from March 2002 through April 2010. Mills also worked at Hogan & Hartson, for two years, starting in 1990, before she joined then President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team, on her way to securing a position as White House deputy counsel in the Clinton administration. According to documents Hillary Clinton’s first presidential campaign made public in 2008, Hogan & Hartson’s New York-based partner Howard Topaz was the tax lawyer who filed income tax returns for Bill and Hillary Clinton beginning in 2004. In addition, Hogan & Hartson in Virginia filed a patent trademark request on May 19, 2004, for Denver-based MX Logic Inc., the computer software firm that developed the email encryption system used to manage Clinton’s private email server beginning in July 2013. A tech expert has observed that employees of MX Logic could have had access to all the emails that went through her account.
  • In 1999, President Bill Clinton nominated Lynch for the first of her two terms as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until she joined Hogan & Hartson in March 2002 to become a partner in the firm’s Litigation Practice Group. She left Hogan & Hartson in 2010, after being nominated by President Obama for her second term as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a position she held until Obama nominated her to serve in her current position as attorney general. A report published April 8, 2008, by The American Lawyer noted Hogan & Hartson was among Hillary Clinton’s biggest financial supporters in the legal industry during her first presidential campaign. “Firm lawyers and staff have donated nearly $123,400 to her campaign so far, according to campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics,” Nate Raymond observed in The American Lawyer article. “Christine Varney, a partner in Hogan’s Washington, D.C., office, served as chief counsel to the Clinton-Gore Campaign in 1992.” While there is no evidence that Lynch played a direct role either in the tax work done by the firm for the Clintons or in linking Hillary’s private email server to MX Logic, the ethics of the legal profession hold all partners jointly liable for the actions of other partners in a business. “If Hogan and Hartson previously represented the Clintons on tax matters, it is incumbent upon U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch to [disclose] what, if any, role she had in such tax matters,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based Judicial Watch.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • HSBC link When Lynch’s nomination as attorney general was considered by the Senate one year ago, as WND reported, the Senate Judiciary Committee examined her role in the Obama administration’s decision not to prosecute the banking giant HSBC for laundering funds for Mexican drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorists. WND was first to report in a series of articles beginning in 2012 money-laundering charges brought by John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president and relationship manager, based on his more than 1,000 pages of evidence and secret audio recordings. The staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on Cruz’s allegations that Lynch, acting then in her capacity as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, engaged in a Department of Justice cover-up. Obama’s attorney general nominee allowed HSBC in December 2011 to enter into a “deferred prosecution” settlement in which the bank agreed to pay a $1.9 billion fine and admit “willful criminal conduct” in exchange for dropping criminal investigations and prosecutions of HSBC directors or employees. Cruz called the $1.92 billion fine the U.S. government imposed on HSBC “a joke” and filed a $10 million lawsuit for “retaliation and wrongful termination.” From 2002 to 2003, Comey held the position of U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the same position held by Lynch. On March 4, 2013, he joined the HSBC board of directors, agreeing to serve as an independent non-executive director and a member of the bank’s Financial System Vulnerabilities Committee, positions he held until he resigned on Aug. 3, 2013, to become head of the FBI.
  • Comey, Fitzgerald and Valerie Plame On Jan. 1, 2004, the Washington Post reported that after Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself and his staff from any involvement in the investigation of who leaked the name of CIA employee Valerie Plame after journalist Robert Novak named her in print as a CIA operative, Comey assumed the role of acting attorney general for the purposes of the investigation. Comey appointed Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a U.S. attorney in Chicago, to act as special counsel in conducting the inquiry into what became known as “Plamegate.” At the time Comey made the appointment, Fitzgerald was already godfather to one of Comey’s children. On April 13, 2015, co-authoring a USA Today op-ed piece, Plame and her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, made public their support for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, openly acknowledging their political closeness to both Hillary and Bill Clinton. The first two paragraphs of the editorial read: We have known Hillary Clinton both professionally and personally for close to 20 years, dating back to before President Bill Clinton’s first trip to Africa in 1998 — a trip that they both acknowledge changed their lives, and gave considerable meaning to their post-White House years and to the activities of the Clinton Foundation. Joe, serving as the National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs, was instrumental in arranging that historic visit. Our history became entwined with Hillary further after Valerie’s identity as a CIA officer was deliberately exposed. That criminal act was taken in retribution for Joe’s article in The New York Times in which he explained he had discovered no basis for the Bush administration’s justification for the Iraq War that Saddam Hussein was seeking yellowcake uranium to develop a nuclear weapon.
  • In January 2016, Chuck Ross in the Daily Caller reported that Hillary Clinton emails made public made clear that one of her “most frequent favor-seekers when she was secretary of state was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a longtime Clinton friend, an endorser of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, and an Africa expert with deep business ties on the continent.” Ross noted that Wilson emailed Clinton on Dec. 22, 2009, seeking help for Symbion Power, an American engineering contractor for whom Wilson consulted, in the company’s bid to pursue a U.S. Agency of International Development contract for work in Afghanistan. In the case of the Afghanistan project, Ross noted, Clinton vouched for Wilson and Symbion as she forwarded the request to Jack Lew, who served then as deputy secretary of state for management and resources. Ross further reported Wilson’s request might also have been discussed with President Obama, as one email indicates. In 2005, Fitzgerald prosecuted Libby, a prominent adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, in the Plame investigation, charging him with two counts of perjury, two counts of making false statements to federal prosecutors and one count of obstruction of justice. On March 6, 2007, Libby was convicted of four of the five counts, and on June 5, 2007, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton to two and a half years in federal prison. On April 6, 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported the publication of New York Times reporter Judith Miller’s memoir “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey” exposed “unscrupulous conduct” by Fitzgerald in the 2007 trial of Libby.
  • WSJ reporter Peter Berkowitz noted Miller “writes that Mr. Fitzgerald induced her to give what she now realizes was false testimony.” “By withholding critical information and manipulating her memory as he prepared her to testify, Ms. Miller relates, Mr. Fitzgerald ‘steered’ her ‘in the wrong direction.’” http://www.wnd.com/2016/07/comey-has-long-history-of-clinton-related-cases/
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jul 16
     
    Bend over and grab your ankles. The rats nest of Clinton operatives in Washington DC is far deeper than anyone ever imagined. "FBI Director James Comey has a long history of involvement in Department of Justice actions that arguably ended up favorable to the Clintons. In 2004, Comey, then serving as a deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, apparently limited the scope of the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger, which left out former Clinton administration officials who may have coordinated with Berger in his removal and destruction of classified records from the National Archives. The documents were relevant to accusations that the Clinton administration was negligent in the build-up to the 9/11 terrorist attack. On Tuesday, Comey announced that despite evidence of "extreme negligence by Hillary Clinton and her top aides regarding the handling of classified information through a private email server, the FBI would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Curiously, Berger, Lynch and Cheryl Mills all worked as partners in the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, which prepared tax returns for the Clintons and did patent work for a software firm that played a role in the private email server Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state. Lynch and Comey both served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. They crossed paths in the investigation of HSBC bank, which avoided criminal charges in a massive money-laundering scandal for which the bank paid a $1.9 billion fine. After Attorney General John Aschroft recused himself in the Valerie Plame affair in 2004, Comey appointed as special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who ended up convicting "Scooter" Libby, a top aide to then Vice President Dick Cheney, of perjury and obstruction of justice. The charge affirmed the accusations of Plame and her former ambassador husband, Joe Wilson - both partisan supporters of Bill and
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 16
     
    The "ethical" situation is far worse than described. Attorney disciplinary rules require that a lawyer, including all lawyers in the same firm, owe a lifetime duty of loyalty to a client, a duty that does not end with representation in a particular matter. Accordingly, Lynch had what the disciplinary rules refer to as an "actual conflict of interest" between her duties of loyalty to both Hillary and the U.S. government that required her withdrawal from representing either in the decision whether to prosecute Hillary. Saying that she would rubber stamp what Comey recommended was not the required withdrawal. Comey is an investigator, not a prosecutor. This was a situation for appointment of a special counsel to represent the Department of Justice in the decision whether to prosecute, not satisfied by rubber stamping Comey's recomendation,.
Gary Edwards

The Stunning Hypocrisy of the U.S. Government - BlackListedNews.com - 1 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden hypocrisy

shared by Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Please read this rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled – how these disclosures have “set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype” – and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he performed an immense public service?
  • The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”.
  • It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens – and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing – rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid.
  • The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.
  • What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing.
  • The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists.
  • It’s the American people.
  • The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true.
  • What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.
  • And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures.
  • What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability.
  • If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.
  • At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face. “These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”
  • “The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”
  • “Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.
  • Gary Edwards on 24 Jun 13
     
    Extremely well linked story from "Washington's Blog" excerpt: "The Government's Hypocrisy Is the Core Problem Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail. There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. are hurting our country. Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles.  If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies,  the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn't need to impose austerity on the people. The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn't be nationalized, because that would be socialism.  Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector - or breaking them up - the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized. Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy.  But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn't really help the homeowner. The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins. Many have pointed out Obama's hypocrisy in slamming Bush's spying programs … and then expanding them  (millions more). And in slamming China's cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing. And - while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country - it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (ba
Paul Merrell

Luxembourg: a tax haven by any other name? | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...luxembourg-tax-haven-name

tax-evasion Luxembourg DG-Competition EC PricewaterhouseCoopers

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • The revelations that global and multinational businesses have been brokering “secret” tax deals with Luxembourg to avoid paying taxes in their home countries, may be the first time an entire country has been implicated in tax avoidance collusion. A cache of leaked agreements uncovered by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) appears to show that major companies have used the tiny EU state to dramatically cut their tax liabilities.
  • The ICIJ’s six-month investigation claims to have found household companies such as Aviva, HSBC, E-on, Tyco, Pepsi, IKEA and Deutsche Bank were among those which had taken advantage of legal tax avoidance schemes in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is routinely named as a tax haven on many of the world’s authoritative lists of tax havens, including the one compiled by me and my two co-authors, Richard Murphy and Christian Chavagneux. But Luxembourg has managed to remain “under the radar” not least because its politicians and bankers have been denying for years that it is, or ever was, a tax haven. The revelations suggest Luxembourg has been playing a double game. Luxembourg has been quick to comply with new regulations proposed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the EU. In 2011, the OECD global forum on transparency and exchange of information commended Luxembourg for introducing new rules governing banking information or information protected by secrecy rules.
  • But at the same time, the revelations show that 340 well-known foreign companies have entered into secret agreements with the Luxembourg authorities, brokered by the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. To take a random example that applies for many of these companies, the ICIJ have a letter to the Luxembourg tax administration written on a PwC letterhead, where FedEx lays down its plan to set up a limited liability company as a tax resident in Luxembourg – so subject in principle to Luxembourg’s corporate income tax. The letter then provides details of a proposed shareholding arrangement that will ensure, I quote, that “neither that Fedex SCS nor its shareholders will be subject to corporate income tax, Municipal Business Tax and Net Wealth tax in Luxembourg”. The letter implies that Luxembourg will serve in effect as a tax haven for Fedex.
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  • There have been a number of other highly publicised tax evasion and avoidance cases recently. For instance, many cases in the US involved branches or even key individuals working in branches of well-known Swiss and Israeli banks in the US, including UBS, Credit Swiss or Bank Leumi, or alternatively branches of American banks in Switzerland. But these tended to involve private firms. The Swiss government professed to have had no knowledge of such activities. Indeed, Swiss law prohibited Swiss banks, whether domestic or international, from providing any information on their clients to the Swiss state. This is a scandal with a difference. The leaked PricewaterhouseCoopers books imply there has been systemic collusion between companies from all over the world and the Luxembourg authorities in flagrant contravention of EU rules. The documents suggest that preferential tax treatments were guaranteed to these companies prior to their incorporation in Luxembourg.
  • This is the first case of suspected collusion between a government and a foreign firm in tax avoidance matters that I am aware of. In that sense, the current scandal places Luxembourg on par with Greece whose officials allegedly provided misleading data on Greek national debt to the Commission. More embarrassingly, all this took place during the time when the current president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, served as the prime minister of Luxembourg from 1995-2013. It is difficult to imagine that the prime minister of such a small state was unaware such deals were taking place. There is a difference between the court of law and the court of public opinion. But we know from recent cases that the EU Commission has tended to follow the court of public opinion with criminal investigations of its own, as was the case of Amazon. It is likely that the Commission will now investigate these leaks and may impose fines on Luxembourg. I doubt Juncker can ride this one out.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Nov 14
     
    Woo-hoo! The IRS and Congress will be interested in this one too.  Now if someone would kindly send the docs to Wikileaks, the nations of the world can prosecute companies for tax evasion. But this time, would you all, pretty please, prosecute some human beings too and no settlements without at least a couple of years behind bars?
Gary Edwards

The Purchase Of Our Republic | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...purchase-our-republic

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government. Today I am publishing a comprehensive and important guest essay, The Purchase of Our Republic, by longtime correspondent Y. Falkson.
  • Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc.  However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite. Those who benefit from this crony capitalist state go to extreme lengths to paper over the reality and convince Americans that the system works, the American Dream is still a reality and that American democracy is in fact democratic. Below I hope to begin to outline some of the underlying dynamics and trends that have evolved in recent decades and led us so far from what we once were. As fun as it would be, the answer is not some evil conspiracy by the Illuminati, but rather the unfortunate result of three long term and mutually reinforcing components that have been attacking the fundamental roots of the structure of our Republic. The first is the increased concentr
  • ation of corporate and private wealth. Both of which are quickly yelled down in the media as anti-free market and class war hysteria. The second is the use of this wealth to capture all three branches of government in order to ensure the continued extraction of capital from the many and to the few.The rich might have climbed the ladder because they earned it, but they have then purchased government to pull up the ladder behind them. The consequence of the first two components is a democracy in name only that represents the very few.
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  • 1. Faux Capitalism = Wealth Consolidation / Income Inequality
  • While there is no true beginning to the story, we can start with the incredible build up and concentration of wealth among corporations in recent decades. The USA now boasts a cartel-like set of corporate titans in almost every industry. It goes beyond, but certainly includes, our Too Biggerer To Fail banks, merged from what was 37 banks in 1995 into a Frankenstein’s monster like 5 (Citigroup, JP Morgan-Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs). In agriculture, Monsanto alone controls over 85% of all corn and soy bean crops, four companies control 83% of the beef market, 66% of the hog market and 58% of the chicken market. So while shopping at the grocery store might appear to be the manifestation of capitalism at its finest, it doesn’t take much digging to look behind the curtain to see how little competition truly exists.
  • When the average American goes to pick up some groceries, they are shopping at Walmart and buying something from P&G that is mostly made of Monsanto corn. Is that true choice? The same story plays out with our news and media (and other industries) where we have gone from 50 companies in 1983 to the big 6 which control over 90% of all media. Is choosing to watch one of 30 news channels, all of which are owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch) a real choice? This is not capitalism and they are not competing, not in the true sense of the word. Along with this consolidation of corporations in recent decades, their senior leaders have taken up a larger and larger piece of the pie at the expense of their employees. In particular, the ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950. Unsurprisingly, Walmart is both the largest employer in the country and the worst CEO pay offender with a ratio of over 1000:1. This is at a time where worker productivity has increased significantly, something that historically correlated with increased pay. But no more. It’s a new twist on the old Soviet saying “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”, but now it’s closer to “we do all of the work and they pretend to pay us”.
  • Private Wealth: As a consequence of the royal tribute we pay to the C-suite class these days, we have likely surpassed the pre-Depression Roaring Twenties in terms of inequality.
  • This, amazingly, has only accelerated since the crisis in 2008 in thanks to bailouts, Quantitative Easing and other gifts from Congress and the Fed. The wealthy 1% and in particular the .01% have now grown their fortunes to levels that tax comprehension and even their ability to spend it (the decisions by a few billionaires such as Bill Gates to essentially donate his fortune is a tacit acknowledgement that our current system over provides wealth to a select few).
  • So what is an incredibly wealthy capitalist CEO of a mega-corporation do once they control their industry and have essentially limitless wealth? Well in a competitive market, the only way to go from the top is down and the only thing that can make that happen is competition. Consequently, competition must be avoided whenever possible.
  • To squash or prevent competition, the oligopolies and oligarchs target their resources on the one place that can make competition illegal, our government.Something to keep in mind the next time you see a corporate billionaire grandstanding about the importance of “Free Markets” when their strategy is quite the opposite. As this capture of the government has taken place we have essentially shifted from capitalism and to crony capitalism. So we now have industries that have mastered the art of faking capitalism by turning our government into one that fakes democracy. This government takeover took time, but the purchase of all 3 branches of government has almost been completed by 2014. You don’t have to take my word for it, luckily that has now been empirically proven in an analysis of over 20 years of government policy where the clear conclusion was that policy makers respond solely to those in the top 90th percentile and essentially ignore the large majority of Americans.
  • 2. Wealthy Purchase of Government Institutions / Elections
  • Purchase of the Executive Branch:
  • Let’s take a step back and take a glimpse at how the government was purchased, beginning with the executive branch. In 1980, Reagan’s election cost less than $300 million. When Bush beat Kerry in 2004, it cost almost 3x times as much, almost $900 Million. 4 years later, the 2008 election cost a record $1.3 Billion. It was in this election where Obama hammered the final nail in the coffin for government funded for elections. Obama, more so than any other candidate in recent decades had the widespread support of millions of small donors, but in the end I guess it wasn’t enough. So when Obama “leaned to the green”, it forever set the precedent that you can’t win without the backing of our nation’s oligarchs. Consequently, the money has only gushed in since as the cost of Obama’s reelection in 2012 skyrocketed to an unfathomable $7 billion. Needless to say this is slightly above the rate of inflation. Our Presidents are now preselected exclusively by a tiny fraction of Americans can have the money to fund what has become necessary for a legitimate run. Summary: Candidates spend years courting the super-rich to build up a multi-billion dollar war chest. Only those who succeed can actually run a campaign that an average American will be aware of. Then Americans get to choose one of the pre-selected “candidates”. No wonder voter turnout is so low… Executive branch, check!
  • – Note that media corporations benefit doubly as they can use their cash to fund elections, but are also the beneficiary of all that money as it is used for campaign spending.
  • Purchase of the Legislative Branch:
  • The process has progressed similarly in Congress. In 1978, outside groups spent $303,000 on congressional races. In 2012 that was up to $457,000,000. That is over 1,500 times the level in 1978. It would be funny, if it was so blatant and terrifying. By many accounts, our “leaders” in Congress spend 50% or more of their time working the phones or fundraisers rather than trying (and failing) to actually do the “people’s business”. Let’s also take a minute to appreciate the hypocrisy of anyone that pretends that the money doesn’t influence our government. Businesses do not give to politicians for charity. This is a payment for services that has proven exceedingly reliable and profitable. The ROI for money invested in purchasing Congressman is what CEO dreams are made of. No wonder the incentive is to invest in Congress rather than R&D or marketing. There are very few places in the world or times in history where you can find ROI’s in the thousands, or even the tens of thousands.
  • Review: Congressmen beg for money to get elected, make sure to vote the way your benefactors would like, consequently get more money to get elected again. If at any point they do lose or quit, they take the big payday to work for those who have been paying them all along. Legislative Branch, Check!
  • In addition, increasingly those who work on Congress (and regulators) were previously employed by these large corporations or expect to work there later. A recent example is Chris Dodd who left the Senate the head lobbyist for Hollywood at the MPAA, the guys behind SOPA and PIPA, but there are many many others.
  • Judicial Branch Endorsement of the Purchase of Government:
  • Last but not least, we have the enabling Judicial Branch. It only took a few purchased presidents to ensure the appointment of a majority of “free market” and “pro-business” judges. For instance, and disgracefully, Clarence Thomas was once legal counsel for Monsanto, but has not once recused himself from any cases involving Monsanto and always votes in their favor. These radicals have now fully endorsed and enabled the influx of money used to purchase the other branches. Specifically, 2 major decisions have completely opened the floodgates, Citizens United and McCutcheon. The first allowed unlimited contributions of corporate money into elections and brought us the notorious declaration that “corporations are people” and that “money is free speech”. This was more recently followed up with the private wealth equivalent in McCutcheon. In this ruling, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of his majority opinion (presumably with a straight face) “… nor does the possibility that an individual who spends large sums may garner influence over or access to elected officials or political parties”. And with this, the Supreme Court has fully endorsed both major sources of immense wealth to purchase our elections and consequently our government. Review: The rich fund Presidential elections, Presidents nominate “business-friendly” judges and then the bought Congress approves their nominations. New judge then votes to ensure even more money is allowed to purchase elections. Judicial Branch, CHECK!
  • 3. A Faux Republic Dependent Upon the Funders and Not the Voters
  • The Founder’s Hope and the Sad Reality:
  • Acknowledging where we are as a country, it is often helpful to look to where we started for some perspective. Unsurprisingly, this type of problem was not overlooked back in the 18th century. In 1776, James Madison stated that his goal was to design a republic in which “powerful interest groups would be rendered incapable of subdoing the general will”. Madison hoped, perhaps naively, that factions would be thwarted by competing with other factions. Sadly, we are now in a time where factions (aka wealthy special interests) subdue the will of the people and ensure the government responds to them alone on those issues where they have a “special interest” and consequently asymmetric stakes in the game (Charles Hugh Smith). As a result, these groups essentially collude to allocate their resources to their own issues, but do not “thwart” or compete with other factions as they do the same. It’s a pretty great system, as long as you’re one of the wealthy few who can use their money to drown out the poor and voiceless many. And just like that, what was once a Republic has become a corrupt shell of its past self. All the signs are still there; votes, elections, campaigns, branches of government, etc., but behind the scenes the only ones represented are those who can afford to be heard.
  • Summary: This massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government, or as Dick Durban once stated, “frankly they [the banks in this case] own the place”. If money = free speech, then those with all the money, have all the free speech.
  • What Might Help? Now that I have likely and thoroughly depressed the reader, let’s bounce around some ideas for what can be done. As stated in the beginning, this is not an unknown problem and many people are promoting a number of ways to fix or at least ameliorate the problem. I will briefly describe just a few which I think provide some direction any of us could easily implement or support.
  • Change the Rules: Laurence Lessig of Harvard Law has put forward a visionary proposal for re-writing the way that campaigns are financed in his book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It. Put simply, he would like to empower every voter with a stipend, say $150 per election to give to whatever candidate or candidates they prefer. If you would like to accept this money, you would need to forgo any other contributions or support (one would hope including the indirect PAC kind). This would actually provide even more money than is used in current elections, but would effectively democratize the funding process. While there would still be a “funding election” that takes place before the actual election, the funding would not be unequally provided. Lessig’s work has only begun, as this sort of bill or likely constitutional reform is nearly impossible to achieve, but he has undertaken and I assume will continue to implement many brave and creative ways of bringing about the change all American’s should support. Most recently he has suggested we begin to fund, ironically enough, a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. It would be funded with the solitary goal of changing how money impacts our elections. Please support them here: www.mayone.us/
  • Change Our Day-to-Day: At the more micro level, Charles Hugh Smith believes that we will inevitably see our overly centralized and inefficient system erode away as it is replaced by more resilient, local and efficient businesses and societies outside of the current system. With that in mind, he recommends that “all anyone can do is the basic things--lower our energy footprint, stay healthy and avoid unnecessary medications and procedures, support local businesses, organic food growers, etc. In other words, what we can do is support local businesses that are part of the emerging economy rather than support corporate cartels.” Your Vote Does Matter: Do you live in Ohio, Florida or New Hampshire? Probably not. Despite what we are told every 4 years, there are actually states outside of the “swing states”, and even more surprising, the very large majority of Americans live in those states where your “vote doesn’t matter”. New Yorkers an Californians all know their state will turn Blue no matter who the candidates are and either don’t vote at all, or often vote for the Blue team in order to feel like they are on the winning side.
  • The truth is that if you see the election as Red vs. Blue, you vote probably doesn’t matter. But here is the trick, if all the people who think their vote didn’t matter decided to vote for whom they might actually believe in, then their votes just might matter.
  • What if all the growing number of “Independents” (who usually still vote Blue), chose to vote for a third party? What if a third party candidate won a state like New York or California? What if that candidate was one whose primary promise to the voters was to champion a change to the role of money in government (perhaps in line with what Lessig proposes)? Would you vote for such a person?I would argue you should. If California alone (with 55 electoral votes) were to vote for a 3rd party that would likely prevent either Red or Blue candidate from winning the requisite 270 electoral votes.
  • Think about the message that would send to both parties. I would predict that both sides would start to bend over backwards for an endorsement from that 3rd party and they would have to get it by taking up the same primary cause for reforming money in government. Consequently, at the root of our corrupted system which is perpetually ignored as both sides might suddenly become the big issue of the election. Then maybe we might begin to turn things around.
  • Sources: Charles Hugh Smith (oftwominds, Surivival+, etc.), Yves Smith (Naked Capitalism, Econned), Laurence Lessig (Republic Lost, multiple TED Talks), Matt Taibbi (blog at Rolling Stone and now at The Intercept), Zero Hedge, John Robb, Max Keiser, Clay Shirky (Cognitive Surplus), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited), George Orwell (1984), Michael Lewis, Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow), James Richards (Currency Wars), Han Joon Chang (23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism) and Joseph Stiglitz (Mismeasuring Our Lives) 
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Catherine Austin Fitts on Moral Investing and the Coming Equity 'Crash... - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...and-the-Coming-Equity-Crash-Up

Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Catherine-Austin-Fitts

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • If you talk about legacy systems and then a breakaway civilization, the legacy systems were financed with debt and if the resources have basically been shifted out and over into "NewCo" then that's going to be an equity model. We're literally coming into what I consider to be a planetary debt for equity swap. So the question for all of us is how do we navigate the turn? When do you leave the bond market and when does the equity increase occur? We've seen North America equity markets rising and the emerging markets falling this year.
  • We're seeing a tremendous divergence in the economy in North America between those portions of the economy that are adapting new technology and growing and the rest of the economy.
  • The other thing I watch is what the divergence means to bond credits and to equity valuations. If you look at the indices you don't really see it. If you look inside the indices you see some enormous splits in quality and value going on.
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  • The slow burn is a world in which for most people income is flat or falling and expenses are steadily rising. It's a debasement scenario. And the reality is the central banks have been able to have a quite liberal monetary policy because we've been able to offset that with labor deflation. So by globalizing labor and instituting technology you have tremendous deflationary pressures, which offset very generous monetary policy.
  • Starting in the '90s a decision was made to move significant amounts of capital out of existing systems in  the developed world and literally trillions of dollars of financial fraud was engineered to do that. As a financial phenomenon it was quite clever and trillions have literally been moved out between the fraud and the bailouts. I think what the Fed has been doing with quantitative easing is running a shredding operation where they buy up the fraudulent mortgage securities paper and are shredding it.
  • If you look at the Treasury, they've run a very tight regulatory process where that money doesn't seep out on Main Street. It's quite phenomenal the way they've managed to control it. I think one of the big questions is where is that money going to go now? It certainly looks to me like a great effort is being made to make sure it goes into equities, sort of keeps the bond market afloat and goes into equities. So I look it as a very political move.
  • You can balance the budget with fiscal measures or you can balance the budget by the Fed just buying bonds and if you look at the Fed's balance sheet, I think they have a much greater capacity to buy bonds. If you look at all the money that was stolen, the breakaway civilization has plenty of money to buy bonds.
  • I would say so far the Fed's policies have worked for what they're intended to do. We've moved a tremendous amount of money out of the economy. We've now basically run through the statute of limitations or done whatever management needed to cut the cords so that what I call the legacy systems can't get the money back. So the financial coup d'état has been successful and now the cover-up is pretty much over and successful.
  • So now you have big decisions. You have two economies. Before this started what I call the legacy systems had $100 trillion of liabilities and $100 trillion of assets – now, I'm just pulling those numbers out of the air – and
  • the coup moved $40 trillion of assets over into NewCo
  • if you will. Now we've got the legacy systems trying to reconcile $60 trillion of assets to $100 trillion of liabilities and there is a long, drawn-out, grinding process by which some people will get 50 cents on the dollar, some people will get zero cents on the dollar, some people will get 100 cents on the dollar. It's just a very difficult, complex and tangled political scene as to how that's going to all happen. Meantime, NewCo, with $40 trillion dollars, is investing and going gangbusters. NewCo is enjoying an unprecedented boom, investing in lots of new technology and new frontiers, including space. So I think the next step is to manage the lowering of expectations in the legacy systems. That's basically what the administration and the Fed are going to be doing for the next couple years, is just gutting their way through retirees' disappointment.
  • There are three things
  • Number one, Obamacare was created to create a framework that would allow significant reduction of costs and benefits under Medicare over time and healthcare over time;
  • Well, the goal of Obamacare is to control.
  • number two, Obamacare was to provide much more control over both the medical establishment and the population at large;
  • and then, three, to do it in a way that will protect corporate profits.
  • in a relatively short period of time US Medicare expenses would be several multiplicities of the GNP.
  • It's clearly a system that makes no economic sense. It's not just that people are aging. If we eat food that has little nutrition and provide healthcare in which pharmaceutical companies are allowed to charge many multiples of what they charge in other countries you're going to get a financial train wreck, which is where we're headed.
  • So I think the goal was to reconcile that and do it in a way that favors corporations and control.
  • If you go around the entire financial ecosystem, they're getting hit within every line by the same pro-centralization policies that ultimately go up to the same people.
  • Do I think it will snuff out the recovery? No. I think it will simply destroy the economics for a whole world of people who were productive.
  • I don't think the banks are fragile. What happened was they were asked to do a job, they did it and now they've taken all the fraudulent paper and sold it to the Fed or torn it up because they had so much in federal credit arbitrage earnings during this period. So I don't think they're fragile.
  • So it certainly puts us in a position where the creditworthiness of a lot of sovereign debt depends on government military might and the ability to debase a variety of players.
  • There's been a lot of regulation to make it easy for Wall Street to control and make it difficult for small businesses to raise and circulate liquid equity. It's one of the areas in the economy where there really has been a very serious conspiracy.
  • if you want to go really fast and prototype and build out infrastructure, the best way to do it is to make capital available to early venture and start-ups.
  • we, as a society, have stopped the markets from working in the start-up and the small business space.
  • If you look at it across all the different tools, from fabrication technology to new composite materials to robotics to lasers, we're reaching a critical mass of the economic costs dropping and the speed of learning accelerating.
  • If you look back at the history of the US stock market you'll see two huge spikes, one in the '20s, one in the '90s, both when very profound new communication and information technology came out.
  • I think we're in danger of another tech bubble. If you look at who's interested in putting money in this and getting lots of prototypes, the last time they did this was in the '90s. They made a fortune on fraud and they used it not only to serve some fundamental economic purposes but they used it to drain out the pension funds and the retail investors.
  • securities convertible into store credits
  • Wall Street doesn't understand about crowdfunding, are the new alignments that are going to be created in terms of circulating knowledge and purchases and money between consumers and entrepreneurs and companies. It's going to create a whole new level of intimacy.
  • I recommend the documentary, "The Naked Brand." It gives a good sense of the worth of that intimacy and the change from a mass media model to much more intimate relationships
  • awakening of global consciousness.
  • in North America there is almost an astonishing lack of transparency about how government money works within the jurisdiction for which we vote for political representation.
  • So if you were going to have proper transparency in America you would have annual financial statements for your congressional district as well as for the whole country.
  • Now, the government has refused since 1995, as required by law, to produce annual financial statements let alone for the places in which you're voting for jurisdiction. And if you're going to have any kind of citizenry accountability or legislator accountability you have to have that kind of transparency and the government has gone to enormous lengths to prevent that kind of transparency while pretending that we're very transparent. So the Internet is going to make it more and more difficult for that absence of transparency to continue or be justified, and that's good.
  • if you have all your assets in the legacy economy and none in the growing economy you're going to suffer.
  • That's number one.
  • Number two, a lot of households have assets which represent liabilities of the legacy economy, whether Social Security, Medicare or others, and one of the things you have to understand is the politics – you need to not get trapped in the politics of stringing people out for those benefits. Do the best you can but don't get lost in the treadmill of trying to get promised benefits that may or may not come true. And to the extent that you can not get financially dependent on those benefits it would be very good.
  • The final thing is, of course, and readers know this if they're reading The Daily Bell, you're dealing in a system that includes a significant amount of corruption and fraud so you just need to be extremely careful about the quality of the people or the enterprises in which you invest or do business with and keep your assets fairly diversified in terms of both areas of the economy, or sectors, and places.
  • Take a look at different predictions that gold is going to increase significantly in value. All those predictions assume that the monetary inflation is going to spill into commodities. And what you're watching instead is the G-7 have been essentially building a corral that forces the horses to run out through the stock market. That's why I call it a crash-up.
  • I think one scenario we're looking at is the possibility of a crash-up scenario where that monetary increase is funneled into the equity markets. One of the most important questions there is, can you get the global population interested in investing in equities? Because the long bond market bull is coming to a close.
  • We have two choices. We can basically write down the debt and go through a huge crunch period or we can have a crash-up in the equity markets.
  • Right after 9/11 – and General Wesley Clark has said this and I experienced it in my tiny little community in Tennessee – we were basically given what the battle plan was going to be – the US military taking over Eurasia. First we were going to go to Afghanistan, then we were going to go to Iraq, then we were going to go to Libya, then we were going to go to Syria and then we're going to Iran. It was all laid out for us and we seem to be following that battle plan, albeit slower than predicted at that time.
  • If we're going to create a global financial system and a one-world currency, you need everybody in the central banking model. You have outliers. We seem to be bringing in all the outliers. As we do, we are trying to checkmate Russia and China within Eurasia, because I think control of Eurasia is essential for maintaining global empire.
  • what we're watching is an effort to bring everybody into a centrally controlled central banking model.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Oct 13
     
    Catherine is a frequent guest on CoastToCoastAM.com, so I've come to know her well.  Although this interview doesn't discuss her ability to see into the future, I know from experience that she is a real visionary hitting the mark at an astounding clip.  Chalk this interview up as a must read.
Paul Merrell

No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense In International Law Against Occupie... - 0 views

www.jadaliyya.com/...ave-the-right-to-self-defense-

war & peace Israel Palestine occupation-law

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • On the fourth day of Israel's most recent onslaught against Gaza's Palestinian population, President Barack Obama declared, “No country on Earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” In an echo of Israeli officials, he sought to frame Israel's aerial missile strikes against the 360-square kilometer Strip as the just use of armed force against a foreign country. Israel's ability to frame its assault against territory it occupies as a right of self-defense turns international law on its head.  A state cannot simultaneously exercise control over territory it occupies and militarily attack that territory on the claim that it is “foreign” and poses an exogenous national security threat. In doing precisely that, Israel is asserting rights that may be consistent with colonial domination but simply do not exist under international law. 
  • Admittedly, the enforceability of international law largely depends on voluntary state consent and compliance. Absent the political will to make state behavior comport with the law, violations are the norm rather than the exception. Nevertheless, examining what international law says with regard to an occupant’s right to use force is worthwhile in light of Israel's deliberate attempts since 1967 to reinterpret and transform the laws applicable to occupied territory. These efforts have expanded significantly since the eruption of the Palestinian uprising in 2000, and if successful, Israel’s reinterpretation would cast the law as an instrument that protects colonial authority at the expense of the rights of civilian non-combatants.  
  • International Law places the responsibility upon the commanding general of preserving order, punishing crime, and protecting lives and property within the occupied territory. His power in accomplishing these ends is as great as his responsibility.  The extent and breadth of force constitutes the distinction between the right to self-defense and the right to police. Police authority is restricted to the least amount of force necessary to restore order and subdue violence. In such a context, the use of lethal force is legitimate only as a measure of last resort. Even where military force is considered necessary to maintain law and order, such force is circumscribed by concern for the civilian non-combatant population. The law of self-defense, invoked by states against other states, however, affords a broader spectrum of military force. Both are legitimate pursuant to the law of armed conflict and therefore distinguished from the peacetime legal regime regulated by human rights law. 
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  • Military occupation is a recognized status under international law and since 1967, the international community has designated the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as militarily occupied. As long as the occupation continues, Israel has the right to protect itself and its citizens from attacks by Palestinians who reside in the occupied territories. However, Israel also has a duty to maintain law and order, also known as “normal life,” within territory it occupies. This obligation includes not only ensuring but prioritizing the security and well-being of the occupied population. That responsibility and those duties are enumerated in Occupation Law.  Occupation Law is part of the laws of armed conflict; it contemplates military occupation as an outcome of war and enumerates the duties of an occupying power until the peace is restored and the occupation ends. To fulfill its duties, the occupying power is afforded the right to use police powers, or the force permissible for law enforcement purposes. As put by the U.S. Military Tribunal during the Hostages Trial (The United States of America vs. Wilhelm List, et al.)
  • To equate the two is simply to confuse the legal with the linguistic denotation of the term ”defense.“ Just as ”negligence,“ in law, does not mean ”carelessness” but, rather, refers to an elaborate doctrinal structure, so ”self-defense” refers to a complex doctrine that has a much more restricted scope than ordinary notions of ”defense.“  To argue that Israel is employing legitimate “self-defense” when it militarily attacks Gaza affords the occupying power the right to use both police and military force in occupied territory. An occupying power cannot justify military force as self-defense in territory for which it is responsible as the occupant. The problem is that Israel has never regulated its own behavior in the West Bank and Gaza as in accordance with Occupation Law. 
  • Once armed conflict is initiated, and irrespective of the reason or legitimacy of such conflict, the jus in bello legal framework is triggered. Therefore, where an occupation already is in place, the right to initiate militarized force in response to an armed attack, as opposed to police force to restore order, is not a remedy available to the occupying state. The beginning of a military occupation marks the triumph of one belligerent over another. In the case of Israel, its occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai in 1967 marked a military victory against Arab belligerents.  Occupation Law prohibits an occupying power from initiating armed force against its occupied territory. By mere virtue of the existence of military occupation, an armed attack, including one consistent with the UN Charter, has already occurred and been concluded. Therefore the right of self-defense in international law is, by definition since 1967, not available to Israel with respect to its dealings with real or perceived threats emanating from the West Bank and Gaza Strip population. To achieve its security goals, Israel can resort to no more than the police powers, or the exceptional use of militarized force, vested in it by IHL. This is not to say that Israel cannot defend itself—but those defensive measures can neither take the form of warfare nor be justified as self-defense in international law. As explained by Ian Scobbie:  
  • When It Is Just to Begin to Fight  The laws of armed conflict are found primarily in the Hague Regulations of 1907, the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and their Additional Protocols I and II of 1977. This body of law is based on a crude balance between humanitarian concerns on the one hand and military advantage and necessity on the other. The post-World War II Nuremberg trials defined military exigency as permission to expend “any amount and kind of force to compel the complete submission of the enemy…” so long as the destruction of life and property is not done for revenge or a lust to kill. Thus, the permissible use of force during war, while expansive, is not unlimited.  In international law, self-defense is the legal justification for a state to initiate the use of armed force and to declare war. This is referred to as jus ad bellum—meaning “when it is just to begin to fight.” The right to fight in self-defense is distinguished from jus in bello, the principles and laws regulating the means and methods of warfare itself. Jus ad bellum aims to limit the initiation of the use of armed force in accordance with United Nations Charter Article 2(4); its sole justification, found in Article 51, is in response to an armed attack (or an imminent threat of one in accordance with customary law on the matter). The only other lawful way to begin a war, according to Article 51, is with Security Council sanction, an option reserved—in principle, at least—for the defense or restoration of international peace and security.
  • Noura Erakat
Paul Merrell

Obama to propose legislation to protect firms that share cyberthreat data - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html

surveillance state U.S. digital-privacy legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama plans to announce legislation Tuesday that would shield companies from lawsuits for sharing computer threat data with the government in an effort to prevent cyber­attacks. On the heels of a destructive attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment and major breaches at JPMorgan Chase and retail chains, Obama is intent on capitalizing on the heightened sense of urgency to improve the security of the nation’s networks, officials said. “He’s been doing everything he can within his executive authority to move the ball on this,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss legislation that has not yet been released. “We’ve got to get something in place that allows both industry and government to work more closely together.”
  • The legislation is part of a broader package, to be sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, that includes measures to help protect consumers and students against ­cyberattacks and to give law enforcement greater authority to combat cybercrime. The provision’s goal is to “enshrine in law liability protection for the private sector for them to share specific information — cyberthreat indicators — with the government,” the official said. Some analysts questioned the need for such legislation, saying there are adequate measures in place to enable sharing between companies and the government and among companies.
  • “We think the current information-sharing regime is adequate,” said Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. “More companies need to use it, but the idea of broad legal immunity isn’t needed right now.” The administration official disagreed. The lack of such immunity is what prevents many companies from greater sharing of data with the government, the official said. “We have heard that time and time again,” the official said. The proposal, which builds on a 2011 administration bill, grants liability protection to companies that provide indicators of cyberattacks and threats to the Department of Homeland Security.
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  • But in a provision likely to raise concerns from privacy advocates, the administration wants to require DHS to share that information “in as near real time as possible” with other government agencies that have a cybersecurity mission, the official said. Those include the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s ­Cyber Command, the FBI and the Secret Service. “DHS needs to take an active lead role in ensuring that unnecessary personal information is not shared with intelligence authorities,” Jaycox said. The debates over government surveillance prompted by disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shown that “the agencies already have a tremendous amount of unnecessary information,” he said.
  • The administration official stressed that the legislation will require companies to remove unnecessary personal information before furnishing it to the government in order to qualify for liability protection. It also will impose limits on the use of the data for cybersecurity crimes and instances in which there is a threat of death or bodily harm, such as kidnapping, the official said. And it will require DHS and the attorney general to develop guidelines for the federal government’s use and retention of the data. It will not authorize a company to take offensive cyber-measures to defend itself, such as “hacking back” into a server or computer outside its own network to track a breach. The bill also will provide liability protection to companies that share data with private-sector-developed organizations set up specifically for that purpose. Called information sharing and analysis organizations, these groups often are set up by particular industries, such as banking, to facilitate the exchange of data and best practices.
  • Efforts to pass information-sharing legislation have stalled in the past five years, blocked primarily by privacy concerns. The package also contains provisions that would allow prosecution for the sale of botnets or access to armies of compromised computers that can be used to spread malware, would criminalize the overseas sale of stolen U.S. credit card and bank account numbers, would expand federal law enforcement authority to deter the sale of spyware used to stalk people or commit identity theft, and would give courts the authority to shut down botnets being used for criminal activity, such as denial-of-service attacks.
  • It would reaffirm that federal racketeering law applies to cybercrimes and amends the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by ensuring that “insignificant conduct” does not fall within the scope of the statute. A third element of the package is legislation Obama proposed Monday to help protect consumers and students against cyberattacks. The theft of personal financial information “is a direct threat to the economic security of American families, and we’ve got to stop it,” Obama said. The plan, unveiled in a speech at the Federal Trade Commission, would require companies to notify customers within 30 days after the theft of personal information is discovered. Right now, data breaches are handled under a patchwork of state laws that the president said are confusing and costly to enforce. Obama’s plan would streamline those into one clear federal standard and bolster requirements for companies to notify customers. Obama is proposing closing loopholes to make it easier to track down cybercriminals overseas who steal and sell identities. “The more we do to protect consumer information and privacy, the harder it is for hackers to damage our businesses and hurt our economy,” he said.
  • In October, Obama signed an order to protect consumers from identity theft by strengthening security features in credit cards and the terminals that process them. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said there is concern that a federal standard would “preempt stronger state laws” about how and when companies have to notify consumers. The Student Digital Privacy Act would ensure that data entered would be used only for educational purposes. It would prohibit companies from selling student data to third-party companies for purposes other than education. Obama also plans to introduce a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. And the White House will host a summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection on Feb. 13 at Stanford University.
Gary Edwards

David Skeel: A Nation Adrift From the Rule of Law - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...4184704577588822128122752.html

wsj rule-of-law David-Skeel

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Aug 12
     
    "No one doubts that the coming election will be the most important referendum on the size and nature of government in a generation. But another issue is nearly as important and has gotten far less attention: our crumbling commitment to the rule of law. The notion that we are governed by rules that are transparent and enacted through the legislative process-not by the whims of our leaders-is at the heart of that commitment. If legislators exceed their authority under the Constitution, or if otherwise legitimate laws are misused, courts must step in to prevent or remedy the potential harm. During the 2008 financial crisis, the government repeatedly violated these principles. When regulators bailed out Bear Stearns by engineering its sale to J.P. Morgan Chase, they flagrantly disregarded basic corporate law by "locking up" the transaction so that no other bidder could intervene. When the government bailed out AIG six months later, the Federal Reserve funded the bailout by invoking extraordinary loan powers for what was clearly an acquisition rather than a loan. (The government acquired nearly 80% of AIG's stock.) Two months later, the Treasury Department used money from the $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program fund to bail out the car companies. This was dubious. Under the statute, the funds were to be used for financial institutions. But the real violation came a few months later, when the government used a sham bankruptcy sale to transfer Chrysler to Fiat while almost certainly stiffing Chrysler's senior creditors. According to two leading legal scholars, Eric Posner and Adrian Vermeule, rule-of-law violations are inevitable during a crisis. The executive branch takes all necessary steps, even if that means violating the law, until the crisis has passed. The argument is powerful, and its advocates are correct that presidents and other executive-branch officials often push the envelope during a crisis. Yet pushing the envelope isn't the same thing as f
Paul Merrell

Feds operated yet another secret metadata database until 2013 | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...t-metadata-database-until-2013

surveillance state DEA phone-metadata litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • In a new court filing, the Department of Justice revealed that it kept a secret database of telephone metadata—with one party in the United States and another abroad—that ended in 2013. The three-page partially-redacted affidavit from a top Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) official, which was filed Thursday, explained that the database was authorized under a particular federal drug trafficking statute. The law allows the government to use "administrative subpoenas" to obtain business records and other "tangible things." The affidavit does not specify which countries records were included, but specifically does mention Iran. This database program appears to be wholly separate from the National Security Agency’s metadata program revealed by Edward Snowden, but it targets similar materials and is collected by a different agency. The Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources, reported Friday that this newly-revealed program began in the 1990s and was shut down in August 2013.
  • The criminal case involves an Iranian-American man named Shantia Hassanshahi, who is accused of violating the American trade embargo against Iran. His lawyer, Mir Saied Kashani, told Ars that the government has clearly abused its authority. "They’ve converted this from a war on drugs to a war on privacy," he said. "[Hassanshahi] is not accused of any drug crime but they used this drug enforcement information to gather information against him, that's contrary to the law, and we will revisit that. We will bring motions in the court and we will appeal if necessary." Neither the DEA nor the Department of Justice immediately responded to Ars' query as to whether this program is continuing under a different authority.
  • The story begins in 2011, when a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent received a tip about someone who might be in violation of American sanctions against Iran. The source provided an e-mail from an Iranian businessman, Manoucher Sheiki, who was involved in acquiring power grid equipment. A second Homeland Security agent, Joshua Akronowitz, wrote in a 2013 affidavit that he searched Sheiki’s Iranian phone number in this database, but declined to explain exactly what kind of database it was. Akronowitz found that the Iranian number came up exactly one time in the database, and was linked to an 818 number, based in Los Angeles County. That number turned out to be the Google Voice number of Hassanshahi. DHS then subpoenaed Google, and got Hassanshahi’s call log and later, metadata on his Gmail account. By early 2012, the agency found out that he was set to return to Los Angeles from Iran. At LAX Airport, customs agents seized his phone, laptop, thumb drives, camcorder, and SIM cards and sent them to Homeland Security. Last year, Kashani, Hassanshahi’s lawyer, argued that this evidence should be suppressed on account that it was the "fruit of the poisonous tree"—obtained via illicit means. In support of his arguments, Kashani cited an important ongoing NSA-related lawsuit, Klayman v. Obama, which remains the only instance where a judge has order the NSA metadata program to be shut down—that order was stayed pending an appeal. (Earlier this month, Ars explored Klayman and other pending notable surveillance cases.)
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  • In a December 2014 opinion in the Hassanshahi case, US District Judge Rudolph Contreras allowed the evidence, but also required that the government provide a "declaration summarizing the contours of the law enforcement database used by Homeland Security Investigations to discover Hassanshahi’s phone number, including any limitations on how and when the database may be used." To comply with the judge’s order, Robert Patterson, the assistant special agent in charge of the DEA, wrote in the Thursday filing: As noted, this database was a federal law enforcement database. It could be used to query a telephone number where federal law enforcement officials had a reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number at issue was related to an ongoing federal criminal investigation. The Iranian number was determined to meet this standard based on specific information indicating that the Iranian number was being used for the purpose of importing technological goods to Iran in violation of United States law. Previously, the government had not revealed exactly how it began its investigation of Hassanshahi, and only referred cryptically to "[DHS]-accessible law enforcement databases," in Akronowitz’ 2013 and  2014 affidavits.
  • Similarly, other privacy-minded legal experts questioned the government’s tactics in this new revelation. "We just don’t know about the scope of these things, and that’s what’s disturbing," Andrew Crocker, a legal fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. His colleague, Hanni Fakhoury, an EFF attorney who used to be a federal public defender, added that he was "not surprised." "Bulk surveillance technologies and the dangerous legal theories that are used to support them trickle down, and here's a prime example of that," he wrote by e-mail. "The DEA's mandate is of course important but not at the level of national security where as you know there are serious legal questions about the propriety of this collection of phone metadata. And if the DEA has a program like this, it wouldn't surprise me if other agencies do too for other sorts of records the government has claimed it can collect with a subpoena (like bank records)."
  • Patrick Toomey, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, chimed in to say that this indeed was a clear example of government overreach. "This disclosure underscores how the government has expanded its use of bulk collection far beyond the NSA and the national-security context, to rely on mass surveillance in ordinary criminal investigations," he said by e-mail. "It’s now clear that multiple government agencies have tracked the calls that Americans make to their parents and relatives, friends, and business associates overseas, all without any suspicion of wrongdoing," Toomey continued. "The DEA program shows yet again how strained and untenable legal theories have been used to secretly justify the surveillance of millions of innocent Americans using laws that were never written for that purpose."
  • Paul Merrell on 18 Jan 15
     
    The authorizing statute clearly limits the scope of the administrative subpoena authority to drug related criminal investigations. "In any investigation relating to his functions under this subchapter with respect to controlled substances, listed chemicals, tableting machines, or encapsulating machines, the Attorney General may subpena witnesses, compel the attendance and testimony of witnesses, and require the production of any records (including books, papers, documents, and other tangible things which constitute or contain evidence) which the Attorney General finds relevant or material to the investigation."
Paul Merrell

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahama... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas

surveillance state NSA DEA cell-phone-dragnet-recording

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
  • All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.
  • By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.
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  • The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country. MYSTIC was established in 2009 by the NSA’s Special Source Operations division, which works with corporate partners to conduct surveillance. Documents in the Snowden archive describe it as a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks.”
  • If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when. SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact. According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is “deployed against entire networks” in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes “over 100 million call events per day.”
  • When U.S. drug agents need to tap a phone of a suspected drug kingpin in another country, they call up their counterparts and ask them set up an intercept. To facilitate those taps, many nations – including the Bahamas – have hired contractors who install and maintain so-called lawful intercept equipment on their telecommunications. With SOMALGET, it appears that the NSA has used the access those contractors developed to secretly mine the country’s entire phone system for “signals intelligence” –recording every mobile call in the country. “Host countries,” the document notes, “are not aware of NSA’s SIGINT collection.” “Lawful intercept systems engineer communications vulnerabilities into networks, forcing the carriers to weaken,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Host governments really should be thinking twice before they accept one of these Trojan horses.”
  • The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe. But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.” What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”
  • “I seriously don’t think that would be your run-of-the-mill legal interception equipment,” says the former engineer, who worked with hardware and software that typically maxed out at 1,000 intercepts. The NSA, by contrast, is recording and storing tens of millions of calls – “mass surveillance,” he observes, that goes far beyond the standard practices for lawful interception recognized around the world. The Bahamas Telecommunications Company did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails.
  • The proliferation of private contractors has apparently provided the NSA with direct access to foreign phone networks. According to the documents, MYSTIC draws its data from “collection systems” that were overtly installed on the telecommunications systems of targeted countries, apparently by corporate “partners” cooperating with the NSA. One NSA document spells out that “the overt purpose” given for accessing foreign telecommunications systems is “for legitimate commercial service for the Telco’s themselves.” But the same document adds: “Our covert mission is the provision of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence.
  • According to the NSA documents, MYSTIC targets calls and other data transmitted on  Global System for Mobile Communications networks – the primary framework used for cell phone calls worldwide. In the Philippines, MYSTIC collects “GSM, Short Message Service (SMS) and Call Detail Records” via access provided by a “DSD asset in a Philippine provider site.” (The DSD refers to the Defence Signals Directorate, an arm of Australian intelligence. The Australian consulate in New York declined to comment.) The operation in Kenya is “sponsored” by the CIA, according to the documents, and collects “GSM metadata with the potential for content at a later date.” The Mexican operation is likewise sponsored by the CIA. The documents don’t say how or under what pretenses the agency is gathering call data in those countries. In the Bahamas, the documents say, the NSA intercepts GSM data that is transmitted over what is known as the “A link”–or “A interface”–a core component of many mobile networks. The A link transfers data between two crucial parts of GSM networks – the base station subsystem, where phones in the field communicate with cell towers, and the network subsystem, which routes calls and text messages to the appropriate destination. “It’s where all of the telephone traffic goes,” says the former engineer.
  • When U.S. drug agents wiretap a country’s phone networks, they must comply with the host country’s laws and work alongside their law enforcement counterparts. “The way DEA works with our allies – it could be Bahamas or Jamaica or anywhere – the host country has to invite us,” says Margolis. “We come in and provide the support, but they do the intercept themselves.” The Bahamas’ Listening Devices Act requires all wiretaps to be authorized in writing either by the minister of national security or the police commissioner in consultation with the attorney general. The individuals to be targeted must be named. Under the nation’s Data Protection Act, personal data may only be “collected by means which are both lawful and fair in the circumstances of the case.” The office of the Bahamian data protection commissioner, which administers the act, said in a statement that it “was not aware of the matter you raise.” Countries like the Bahamas don’t install lawful intercepts on their own. With the adoption of international standards, a thriving market has emerged for private firms that are contracted by foreign governments to install and maintain lawful intercept equipment. Currently valued at more than $128 million, the global market for private interception services is expected to skyrocket to more than $970 million within the next four years, according to a 2013 report from the research firm Markets and Markets.
  • If the U.S. government wanted to make a case for surveillance in the Bahamas, it could point to the country’s status as a leading haven for tax cheats, corporate shell games, and a wide array of black-market traffickers. The State Department considers the Bahamas both a “major drug-transit country” and a “major money laundering country” (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets. But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
  • The presentation doesn’t say whether the NSA shared the information with the DEA. But the drug agency’s Special Operations Divison has come under fire for improperly using classified information obtained by the NSA to launch criminal investigations – and then creating false narratives to mislead courts about how the investigations began. The tactic – known as parallel construction – was first reported by Reuters last year, and is now under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States? The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements” to SOMALGET. The country’s small population – fewer than 400,000 residents – provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system’s features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system’s operations elsewhere. “From an engineering point of view it makes perfect sense,” says the former engineer. “Absolutely.”
  • SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 “must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons.” In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless. “I think it would be open, whether it was legal or not,” says German, the former FBI agent. “Because we don’t have all the facts about how they’re doing it. For a long time, the NSA has been interpreting their authority in the broadest possible way, even beyond what an objective observer would say was reasonable.” “An American citizen has Fourth Amendment rights wherever they are,” adds Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Nevertheless, there have certainly been a number of things published over the last year which suggest that there are broad, sweeping programs that the NSA and other government agencies are doing abroad that sweep up the communications of Americans.”
  • Legal or not, the NSA’s covert surveillance of an entire nation suggests that it will take more than the president’s tepid “limits” to rein in the ambitions of the intelligence community. “It’s almost like they have this mentality – if we can, we will,” says German. “There’s no analysis of the long-term risks of doing it, no analysis of whether it’s actually worth the effort, no analysis of whether we couldn’t take those resources and actually put them on real threats and do more good.” It’s not surprising, German adds, that the government’s covert program in the Bahamas didn’t remain covert. “The undermining of international law and international cooperation is such a long-term negative result of these programs that they had to know would eventually be exposed, whether through a leak, whether through a spy, whether through an accident,” he says. “Nothing stays secret forever. It really shows the arrogance of these agencies – they were just going to do what they were going to do, and they weren’t really going to consider any other important aspects of how our long-term security needs to be addressed.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    Words fail me.
Gary Edwards

911: Lloyds of London Insurance brokers have sued Citigroup-AMEC et al. in respect of t... - 1 views

www.godlikeproductions.com/...pg1

9_11 911-Conspiracy-facts Lloyd's-of-London 911-Insurance-Fraud

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • We allege the Citigroup-AMEC partners sabotaged the diesel generators to feed fires lit by arsonists on the 11th, 12th or 13th floors of WTC7 where the Securities & Exchange Commission lost between 3,000 to 4,000 files. The SEC files contained evidence of insider trading by Citigroup-AMEC investment bank partners in the shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. The House Financial Services Committee was seeking information about the treatment Citigroup's Salmon Smith Barney investing banking division may have given WorldCom executives. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center and Citigroup says back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in 9/11. Citigroup subsequently paid $2.65 billion to the settlement class which purchased WorldCom securities during the period from April 1999 through June 2002. www.thestreet.com/markets...36925.html www.citigroup.com/citigro...40510a.htm
  • At 5:20 p.m. on 9/11, 7 World Trade Center collapsed in its own footprint at a speed slightly slower than free fall under gravity in a manner consistent with a controlled demolition. Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris pile of WTC #1, 2 and 7. The thermal signature of 32 hot spots, 5 days and 10 days after the collapse, is consistent with all the buildings being rigged for demolition with an incendiary such as thermite.
  • We allege that the Citigroup-AMEC partnership now conspired to remove and destroy evidence of arson before filing bogus property insurance claims in an arrangement with Larry Silverstein and Silverstein Properties, including a claim for a double payment for the destruction of the Twin Towers. "Griffin quotes court documents to the effect that Silverstein had only $14 million invested in the insurance deal for the Twin Towers (compared to 50 times as much by his [off-book] lenders) through limited liability investment vehicles."
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Sep 11
     
    Incredible.  In 2006 Lloyd's of London sued a group comprised of Citigroup, AMEC and GMAC for a "concealed demolition" conspiracy resulting in insurance fraud.  This is complicated, but the key assertion is that World Trade Center building #1, #2, and #7 were rigged for demolition prior to the 9/11/01 attack.  The claim also alleges the involvement of Larry Silverstein, who had purchased these buildings a few months prior to the 9/11 attack, and made the subsequent and fraudulent insurance claim. Based on the Lloyd's of London report: "9/11 - A Citigroup-AMEC insurance fraud on Lloyd's of London?" .. by David Hawkins, Foundation Scholar, Cambridge University, Founder of the Citizen's Association of Forensic Economists at Hawks' CAFE .
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - America's Coming Crackup - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...ltberg-Americas-Coming-Crackup

Nelson-Hultberg Libertarian

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Our government bankers print money today like loons in an asylum spew absurdity. Glib media shills lure us every night into a disgraceful indolence. And our corporations lust like spoiled children after mega-billions of illicit lucre. Cataclysm is coming. No one with a minimal awareness of history, politics and proper economics today has faith that our society can continue much longer at its present level of government privilege and debt accumulation. There is a Grand Piper that must be paid, and he will manifest in any number of scenarios, none of which will be pleasant. One thing is for sure: The next two decades are going to be tumultuous and tragic. The events that unfold will be far more radical than we dare envision today. Paradigms in banking, politics and philosophy will be overturned. Wrenching lifestyle shifts will be forced upon millions. Something akin to what happened in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism in 1991 will take place in America. Our ruling regime will collapse and bring Russian-style economic hardship to us all. How exactly things unfold will depend upon whether the nation's intelligentsia bring themselves to seriously question the shams of statism, or whether the government-media-academy triad is able to continue bamboozling them. What is extremely unnerving is that whoever wins this battle to control the destiny of our country will determine the fate of freedom on the planet for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. A monumental clash of ideology and propriety looms up ahead.
  • Why We Are Disintegrating as a Society
  • America's dilemma is this: We are being propelled toward an Orwellian style despotism that's purpose is to centralize government power in Washington, phase out American sovereignty and move our country as much as possible into subordination to the United Nations and eventually alignment with Canada, Mexico and Central America into a regional government. The world is moving toward the nightmare of Oceana, Eurasia and East Asia in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which will extinguish freedom and merge mankind into a tyrannical egalitarianism. Why is this happening? Such is the influential force of ideology. We are being destroyed because of what historian Clarence Carson called a "collectivist curvature of the mind" that took over our intellectuals back in the early twentieth century. This curvature of the mind functions as the grand fueling mechanism for the goals of government centralization and ending our national sovereignty. It's horrifying, but every year our schools form the "best and the brightest minds" into collectivist apparatchiks to go out in the world and work their way into the power centers of society. The schools do this via false teachings in philosophy, economics, political science and history. This "ideological indoctrination" teaches every new generation that capitalism is an evil, exploitative, racist, warmongering system and must be phased out of modern societies. It teaches that national sovereignty is anachronistic and must be given up. Such indoctrination is being done very subtly and sophisticatedly, but it is a powerful, pervasive theme instilled into all our children from the first grade on.
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  • This is why we have so many bankers, corporate moguls, political statesmen, authors, pundits, artists, publishers and priests working today to undercut the country. Being "the best and the brightest," they were taught in their youth that capitalist America is an evil nation. They, thus, have gone out and risen to positions of power with a globalist worldview that believes economic freedom can't work in the modern day, that American sovereignty is an anachronism belonging to the nineteenth century. Since they are the nation's intelligentsia, they are immensely influential. Their socialist-collectivist worldview is spread to the masses which then elect legislators sympathetic to such irrationality to Congress and the White House.
  • Every one of us has to choose whether we will try to make a difference or give in to indifference. Will we fight to inform our neighbors or succumb to the easy road of apathy? Will we opt for principle or popularity? Will we succumb to the statist thugs on the far left, or fall for the anarchic screwballs on the far right? The "mean" of constitutional sanity beckons to the percipient among us. Will it survive the tumult ahead?
  • All quite clear and horrifying. But how are we, as mere laymen with no access to national media or huge fortunes, to confront this destruction of freedom and sanity in America and throughout the West?
  • We must take a page from the story of the old man and the starfish. After a huge storm had brought a mini-tidal wave to his beach community one night, there were tens of thousands of starfish washed up on the shore that next morning. Amidst the masses of starfish the old man could be seen patiently picking them up and tossing them back into the sea. Along came a young lad in his twenties with green hair, eyebrow rings and a scornful face. He started laughing and mocked the old man with cynical derision. "You have to be crazy, old timer. You can't possibly save those starfish; there's thousands of them. You're wasting your time, you fool. YOU CAN'T MAKE A DIFFERENCE!" The old man looked up at the insolent youth and smiled. He then reached down and picked up one of the struggling starfish and winged it far out into the water, replying to his tormentor, "Made a difference with that one, didn't I?"
  • Making a Difference
  • A Diplomatic Nuisance
  • Not everyone, naturally, has the time and mental wherewithal to forcefully fight the "ideological indoctrination" destroying our country today. But many of us do. Our power lies in our minds and the strength of our personalities. We who possess this inner strength feel compelled to spread the word in any way we can for as long as we live. We feel compelled to wing as many starfish back to life as we can. The apathetic and cynical will scorn all this as senseless, just as the green-haired youth did. They will choose to remain wards of the state and sanction their enslavers. This has always been the nature of most humans. When such wards see others fighting valiantly against seemingly insurmountable odds for the freedom they have scorned, they are subconsciously humiliated because they are not deep in the thick of the fight themselves. They have chosen to avoid the fight and sanction the tyrants who are destroying our way of life. Thus, they must find a way to salve their consciences. That way is to caustically mock the Davids who go up against the Goliaths, to smear the Rolands of Roncesvalles that history hands down to us as heroic exemplars.
  • You the reader have a paramount decision to make regarding all this. It is High Noon for the cause of freedom. Will you fight with the heroic exemplars? If you choose to fight, then your first necessity is to become aware of WHAT is happening and WHY it is happening. That awareness can only be found via fervent curiosity and a commitment to the study of libertarian and conservative literature.
  • Your second duty is to emulate Paul Revere and warn all those in your sphere of influence. You do this by making a diplomatic nuisance of yourself, by pleasantly pestering your comrades to wake up to the elite's usurpations growing by leaps and bounds in our lives. You do it by convincing them that there are grander values in life than shiny new SUVs and country club memberships. There is something called the American way of life that requires personal independence.
  • Time is short. Collectivism steals over us like crack cocaine filters into a ghetto. It devastates everything of worth in its path. All the stoic traditions of strength, all the great lessons of logic, all the revered truths of Nature that have been handed down to us throughout the centuries are being assailed. The weasel-tyrants and their unctuous lackeys have gained control of the intellectual, political and banking power centers of our country, but they can't control the ultimate factor – the truth – because they can't control our minds unless we let them. They can't prohibit defiance. Solzhenitsyn showed us this. They can't extend their enslavement UNLESS WE SANCTION IT!
  • What the elites fear is a populace with the strength of William Wallace fighting King Edward at Sterling Bridge in 1297, the daring of Washington's band crossing the Delaware in the dead of winter. They fear those willing to fight for the original America. Up against such heady citizens, our collectivist tyrants will scatter like feeding jackals in face of approaching hunters. Our job is to build an army of such heady citizens. You can help by joining the cause. Read the books of freedom and sound money, and pass them on as the early Americans did with Common Sense. Bring people to the website where you are reading this essay. Bring them to AFR's website. Bring them to a state of urgency. Bring them to the truth of our Constitution and to the laws of Nature and Nature's God. Nothing other than this kind of effort will suffice. You cannot help truth and freedom by watching moronic TV shows at night. That is how the elites control you. They flood the airwaves with mindless entertainment. It's today's version of Brave New World's "soma for the masses." Today's TV is for zombies and dullards. The same applies to our movies. Next time you're in the theater, look around you at all the hoi polloi stuffing their faces with popcorn and their psyches with over-the top-violence and trashy sex.
  • Aldous Huxley was the first to point out that modern totalitarian regimes leave the "activities of sex" alone, but regiment the "activities of production." This allows those who are servile to think they are still free as they vote away their REAL freedom – their freedom to acquire and keep wealth, to associate with whom they please, to speak and worship as they please. Look around you. There are far more servile people in this human race than there are independent people. This is the reason why dictatorships dominate the history of man; the majority of humans want to be ruled. They want to relinquish their meaningful freedom; it requires too much self-assurance and grit.
  • Logic and History
  • The cause of America is the cause of REAL freedom. It won't be found with the malefic forces of statism on the left, nor with the eccentric cults of anarchism on the right. Both are living death, a fool's game for those devoid of the capacity to see the big picture, i.e., to see that the spectrum of reality is not two-poled, but three-poled with multifarious gradations and a golden mean of truth in between. The nature of human existence is complexity, wrapped up in mystery, contained in inconceivability, subsumed under the power of Truth. We will never create a free society by denying this and ignoring the results of logic and the record of history. This is what statists and anarchists do. REAL freedom is impossible without a grasp of logic and a deep knowledge of history, which teach us that the cornerstones of freedom are equal rights, strictly limited government, gold money and self-reliant people. The statists violate logic and ignore history because they are callous brutes who place power above all and simply don't care. The anarchists violate logic and ignore history because logic and history show their political system to be unworkable.
  • The truths we learn from logic and history are the disinfectants we must hurl into Washington's swamp of political leeches that are sucking all verity from our lives. When the Washington leeches have so stultified our nation that ghastly ruin prevails throughout, then is when the crackup will commence. All readers should take note. A meltdown is coming; a revolution will follow. We must make sure this revolution goes in the direction of the Founding Fathers, not in the direction of the statist left, nor in the direction of the anarchistic right. Statism and anarchism are like the AIDS virus; they will always be deadly to life. It is to Aristotle, Locke and Jefferson that we must turn. They will always be sustaining to life.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 15
     
    Wow, if this article isn't a MUST READ, then nothing is. Spot on call-to-arms. "Nelson Hultberg is a freelance scholar/writer in Dallas, Texas and the Director of Americans for a Free Republic. Nelson's articles have appeared in such publications as American Conservative, Insight, Liberty, The Freeman and The Dallas Morning News, as well as on numerous Internet sites. He is the author of The Golden Mean: Libertarian Politics, Conservative Values. Email: NelsHultberg (at) aol.com."
Paul Merrell

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack | Threat Level | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...freedom-hosting-fbi

surveillance state FBI Tor NSA

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operator, Eric Eoin Marques, had rented the servers from an unnamed commercial hosting provider in France, and paid for them from a bank account in Las Vegas. It’s not clear how the FBI took over the servers in late July, but the bureau was temporarily thwarted when Marques somehow regained access and changed the passwords, briefly locking out the FBI until it gained back control. The new details emerged in local press reports from a Thursday bail hearing in Dublin, Ireland, where Marques, 28, is fighting extradition to America on charges that Freedom Hosting facilitated child pornography on a massive scale. He was denied bail today for the second time since his arrest in July. Freedom Hosting was a provider of turnkey “Tor hidden service” sites — special sites, with addresses ending in .onion, that hide their geographic location behind layers of routing, and can be reached only over the Tor anonymity network. Tor hidden services are used by sites that need to evade surveillance or protect users’ privacy to an extraordinary degree – including human rights groups and journalists. But they also appeal to serious criminal elements, child-pornography traders among them.
  • On August 4, all the sites hosted by Freedom Hosting — some with no connection to child porn — began serving an error message with hidden code embedded in the page. Security researchers dissected the code and found it exploited a security hole in Firefox to identify users of the Tor Browser Bundle, reporting back to a mysterious server in Northern Virginia. The FBI was the obvious suspect, but declined to comment on the incident. The FBI also didn’t respond to inquiries from WIRED today. But FBI Supervisory Special Agent J. Brooke Donahue was more forthcoming when he appeared in the Irish court yesterday to bolster the case for keeping Marques behind bars, according to local press reports. Among the many arguments Donahue and an Irish police inspector offered was that Marques might reestablish contact with co-conspirators, and further complicate the FBI probe. In addition to the wrestling match over Freedom Hosting’s servers, Marques allegedly dove for his laptop when the police raided him, in an effort to shut it down.
  • The apparent FBI-malware attack was first noticed on August 4, when all of the hidden service sites hosted by Freedom Hosting began displaying a “Down for Maintenance” message. That included at least some lawful websites, such as the secure email provider TorMail. Some visitors looking at the source code of the maintenance page realized that it included a hidden iframe tag that loaded a mysterious clump of Javascript code from a Verizon Business internet address. By midday, the code was being circulated and dissected all over the net. Mozilla confirmed the code exploited a critical memory management vulnerability in Firefox that was publicly reported on June 25, and is fixed in the latest version of the browser. Though many older revisions of Firefox were vulnerable to that bug, the malware only targeted Firefox 17 ESR, the version of Firefox that forms the basis of the Tor Browser Bundle – the easiest, most user-friendly package for using the Tor anonymity network. That made it clear early on that the attack was focused specifically on de-anonymizing Tor users. Tor Browser Bundle users who installed or manually updated after June 26 were safe from the exploit, according to the Tor Project’s security advisory on the hack.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Perhaps the strongest evidence that the attack was a law enforcement or intelligence operation was the limited functionality of the malware. The heart of the malicious Javascript was a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable named “Magneto.” A traditional virus would use that executable to download and install a full-featured backdoor, so the hacker could come in later and steal passwords, enlist the computer in a DDoS botnet, and generally do all the other nasty things that happen to a hacked Windows box. But the Magneto code didn’t download anything. It looked up the victim’s MAC address — a unique hardware identifier for the computer’s network or Wi-Fi card — and the victim’s Windows hostname. Then it sent it to a server in Northern Virginia server, bypassing Tor, to expose the user’s real IP address, coding the transmission as a standard HTTP web request.
  • The official IP allocation records maintained by the American Registry for Internet Numbers show the two Magneto-related IP addresses were part of a ghost block of eight addresses that have no organization listed. Those addresses trace no further than the Verizon Business data center in Ashburn, Virginia, 20 miles northwest of the Capital Beltway. The code’s behavior, and the command-and-control server’s Virginia placement, is also consistent with what’s known about the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007. Court documents and FBI files released under the FOIA have described the CIPAV as software the FBI can deliver through a browser exploit to gather information from the target’s machine and send it to an FBI server in Virginia. The FBI has been using the CIPAV since 2002 against hackers, online sexual predators, extortionists, and others, primarily to identify suspects who are disguising their location using proxy servers or anonymity services, like Tor. Prior to the Freedom Hosting attack, the code had been used sparingly, which kept it from leaking out and being analyzed.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13
     
    Taking down the entire Freedom Hosting service because some content was kiddie porn is reminiscent of the U.S. government's proxy take-down of Mega-Upload in New Zealand. Such actions that disable legitimate users or deny access to their data are in my opinion violative of the 1st and 4th Amendments.  It suppresses the Freedom of Speech and seizes more than the 4th Amendment allows.  That our own government would use malware for surveillance purposes under any circumstance is just plain chilling.
Paul Merrell

Netanyahu: Peace talks require at least another year | The Times of Israel - 0 views

www.timesofisrael.com/-require-at-least-another-year

war & peace Israel U.S. foreign policy Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • etting to a peace agreement with the Palestinians would take at least another year of negotiations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in remarks aired Sunday, while promising that Jerusalem will not give up its “security and national needs” in any deal
  • Netanyahu said a framework deal being drafted by the Americans, which he recently said will only represent Washington’s positions, could offer “a possible path to advance the talks.” But a final status deal would still be a long way off. “It will take at least a year to see the talks through to their conclusion,” he said, adding that the Palestinians may reject the American framework plan.
  • A sign of the pressure Netanyahu is under to show his commitment to the talks came in a rebuke-filled interview US President Barack Obama gave to Bloomberg, in which he denounced continued settlement construction, warned that the US might no longer be able to protect Israel in the international arena, and predicted that “the window is closing for a peace deal.” According to the interviewer, columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama was prepared to tell Netanyahu at the White House meeting on Monday last week that if the Israeli prime minister failed to endorse the framework document for the peace talks, Israel “could face a bleak future — one of international isolation and demographic disaster.” Netanyahu downplayed the significance of the US president’s remarks. “I don’t get disappointed or insulted. If I did I wouldn’t be able to function, and I’m already serving my ninth year [as PM],” he said. He also pointed to distinctly more upbeat rhetoric from the US president during their White House meeting.
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  • “The things President Obama said at the beginning of our meeting in the White House, and then during the meeting, were remarkably different. So the question is what’s preferable: To have a critical interview and a positive meeting, or the other way around? I prefer the positive meeting,” he said. Asked if the politics of Israel’s ruling coalition, which includes parties vocally opposed to any deal that sees an Israeli withdrawal from any part of the West Bank, would be an obstacle to accepting the American framework proposal, Netanyahu rejected the idea. “I don’t think so. People understand that when entering the negotiations, Israel is holding to its positions. [The framework proposal] is a document, not a signed agreement, but will be an American document with American positions. The Americans are saying, ‘Look, this is a platform over which you can start to debate.’” The current nine-month round of talks agreed to by both sides is slated to end by late April. US Secretary of State John Kerry has called for the talks to continue after that deadline.
  • During the interview, Netanyahu refused to reject outright a new settlement construction freeze or unilateral withdrawal, though he noted these measures were unsuccessful in the past. Regarding the freeze, he noted “we’ve already done a freeze” in 2010. “Did it deliver anything? I don’t see the point. “I haven’t agreed or committed to pass a decision on a freeze,” he said. “I don’t think it serves a purpose.” Speaking to Channel 2 in remarks aired Friday, Netanyahu said Israel would have to give up some settlements in a future peace deal. “Of course some of the settlements won’t be part of the deal, everyone understands that,” Netanyahu said. “I will make sure that [number] is as limited as possible, if we get there.” He pledged that no Israeli would be “abandoned.” He also argued against – but refused to outright reject, despite prodding from interviewer Chico Menashe – a unilateral withdrawal similar to the 2005 Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip. “I prefer not to reach such possibilities, but to advance in negotiations. So far, unilateralism hasn’t proven itself. It didn’t create stability and security, but rather [brought about] Iran’s capture of every tract we left. We haven’t gotten anything good from this, only a lot of rockets.”
  • Paul Merrell on 12 Mar 14
     
    According to Bibi, Obama did not deliver the message he said he would the day before his meeting with Bibi. But with two liars involved in a secret conversation, who knows what was said?
Paul Merrell

New federal database will track Americans' credit scores, financial history | Police St... - 0 views

www.policestateusa.com/...mortgage-database

surveillance state FHFA database Big-Data

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has given notice of its intent to database a large number of very personal data points on every American who possesses a mortgage — which may include as many as 227 million Americans.   These points include things like financial histories, credit card balances, credit scores, personal demographics, lists of assets and property, family information, and more. Assembled with the help of the the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the database’s stated purpose is for research and modeling.  The agencies have been collecting data for modeling for years, but the addition of many new pieces of personally identifiable information is a reversal of previously stated policy.
  • The database will include very specific and personal information on the borrowers and co-borrowers.  According to the Federal Register Notice on April 16, 2014, the database includes: Individual’s name, address, and phone number; Individual’s Social Security Number; Individual’s gender, race, ethnicity, and religion; Individual’s marital status; Individual’s household composition (number and ages of males, females, children); Individual’s household income; Individual’s credit score; Individual’s education records; Individual’s military status/records; Individual’s employment status/records; Individual’s bank account numbers; List of individual’s “financial events in the last few years”; List of individual’s “life events in the last few years”;
  • List of individual’s other assets/wealth; Individual’s current mortgage balance; Individual’s current monthly mortgage payment; Individual’s payment delinquency records; Individual’s bankruptcy records; Individual’s credit card numbers; Individual’s credit card balances; Individual’s credit card charge limit and the highest balance charged; Individual’s minimum payments due on all loans; Attributes of the property (square footage, number of rooms, lot size…); Sale price and down payment of the property; Mortgage information (dates, interest rate, amount, loan servicer…);
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  • As one could imagine, a trove of information like this would be an identity thief’s paradise.  As Rep. Randy Neugebauer said to the Washington Examiner, “If someone were to breach that system, they could very easily steal somebody’s identity.” Like so many parts of the federal government, the National Mortgage Database was never authorized by Congress and was certainly not authorized by the constitution.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14
     
    More government Big Data madness.
Joseph Skues

Noam Chomsky: The Real Reasons the U.S. Enables Israeli Crimes and Atrocities | World |... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/..._israeli_crimes_and_atrocities

chomsky

shared by Joseph Skues on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • But the major change in relationships took place in 1967. Just take a look at USA aid to Israel. You can tell that right off. And in many other respects, it’s true, too. Similarly, the attitude towards Israel on the part of the intellectual community -- you know, media, commentary, journals, and so on -- that changed very sharply in 1967, from either lack of interest or sometimes even disdain, to almost passionate support. So what happened in 1967?
  • And Nasserite secular nationalism was considered a serious threat, because it was recognized that it might seek to take control of the immense resources of the region and use them for regional interest, rather than allow them to be centrally controlled and exploited by the United States and its allies. So that was a major issue.
  • While the U.S. was mired in Southeast Asia at the time -- it was right at the time, a little after the Cambodia invasion and everything was blowing up -- the U.S. couldn't do a thing about it. So, it asked Israel to mobilize its very substantial military forces and threaten Syria so that Syria would withdraw. Well, Israel did it. Syria withdrew. That was another gift to U.S. power and, in fact, U.S. aid to Israel shot up very sharply -- maybe quadrupled or something like that -- right at that time. Now at that time, that was the time when the so-called Nixon Doctrine was formulated.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • which will protect the Arab dictatorships from their own populations or any external threat.
  • what were called “cops on the beat” by Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense
  • A part of the Nixon Doctrine was that the U.S., of course, has to control Middle-East oil resources -- that goes much farther back -- but it will do so through local, regional allies
  • military industry is very close to Israeli
  • Pakistan
  • Israel
  • that was sometimes called the periphery strategy: non-Arab states protecting the Arab dictatorships from any threat,
  • primarily the threat of what was called radical nationalism -- independent nationalism -- meaning taking over the armed resources for their own purposes.
  • But, anyway, that “cop” [Iran] was lost and Israel's position became even stronger in the structure that remained.
  • through the '80s Congress, under public pressure, was imposing constraints on Reagan's support for vicious and brutal dictatorship
  • Congress blocked i
  • which the Reagan administration was strongly supporting
  • So] that it [could] support South-African apartheid and the Guatemalan murderous dictatorship and other murderous regimes, Reagan needed a kind of network of terrorist states to help out, to evade the congressional and other limitations, and he turned to, at that time, Taiwan, but, in particular, Israel. Britain helped out. And that was another major service.
  • By far the most rabid pro-Israel newspaper in the country is the Wall Street Journal
  • the journal of the business community, and it reflects the support of the business world for Israel, which is quite strong
  • high-tech investment in Israe
  • a whole network
  • probably it's carried out terrorist acts, but by the standards of the U.S. and Israel, they're barely visible
  • Intel, for example, is building its next facility for construct development of the next generation of chips in Israel.
  • Most Jewish money goes to Democrats and most Jews vote Democratic
  • Republican Party is much more strongly supportive of Israeli power and atrocities than the Democrats are
  • AIPAC, which is a very influential lobby
  • there's Christian Zionism
  • they're facing virtually no opposition. Who's calling for support of the Palestinians?  
  • the occupation and the blockade on Gaz
  • , the occupation of East Jerusalem
  • the West Bank
  • here were free elections in Palestine in January 2006
  • recognized to be free
  • Israel and the United States instantly, within days, undertook perfectly public policies to try to punish the Palestinians for voting the wrong way in a free election
  • you couldn't see a more dramatic illustration of hatred and contempt for democracy unless it comes out the right way.    
  • tried to carry out a military coup to overthrow the elected government. Well, it failed. Hamas won and drove Fatah out of the Gaza Strip. Now, here, that's described as a demonstration of Hamas terror or something. What they did was preempt and block a U.S.-backed military coup
  • The terrorist list has been a historic joke, in fact, a sick joke
  • Up until 1982, Iraq -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- was on the terrorist list. 
  • 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the terrorist list. Why? Because they were moving to support Iraq, and, in fact, the Reagan administration and, in fact, the first Bush administration strongly supported Iraq right through its worst – Saddam, right through his worst atrocities. In fact, they tried to ... they succeeded, in fact, in preventing even criticism of condemnation of the worst atrocities, like the Halabja massacre -- and others
  • So they removed Iraq from the terrorist list because they wanted to support one of the worst monsters and terrorists in the region, namely Saddam Hussein.
  • Turkey
  • The main reason why Hezbollah is on the terrorist list is because it resisted Israeli occupation of Southern Lebanon and, in fact, drove Israel out of Southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation -- that's called terrorism. In fact, Lebanon has a national holiday, May 25th, which is called Liberation Day. That's the national holiday in Lebanon commemorating, celebrating the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in year 2000, and largely under Hezbollah attack.  
  • which would be a major competitor in Egypt's elections, if Egypt permitted democratic elections,
  • The Egyptian dictatorship -- which the U.S. strongly backs, Obama personally strongly backs -- doesn't permit anything remotely like elections and is very brutal and harsh
  • I mean, Europe, the non-aligned countries -- the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States, which includes Iran -- have all accepted the international consensus on the two-state settlement
  • They chose expansion.  The crucial question is what would the United States do? Well, there was an internal bureaucratic battle in the U.S., and Henry Kissinger won out. He was in favor of what he called “stalemate.” A stalemate meant no negotiations, just force.
  • So, sure, if Israel continues to settle in the occupied territories -- illegally, incidentally, as Israel recognized in 1967 (it's all illegal; they recognized it) -- it's undermining the possibilities for the viable existence of any small Palestinian entity. And as long as the United States and Israel continue with that, yes, there will be insecurity
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