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The same story is running on CNN. There is another story moving on MSM that the FBI has found no evidence of Russian attempts to sway the election between the two candidates, instead being aimed at spreading chaos. Combined with FBI Director Comey's announcement last week that the Hillary email criminal investigation has been reopened, at least three temtative conclusions are suggested: [i] Comey and the FBI have mounted a three-pronged attack on Hillary's election run, on the email front, deFUDding Hillary's claim that Trump has ties with Vladimir Putin, and defanging the Hillary claim that Russia is attempting to elect Donald Trump; [ii] MSM is covering those stories; and [iii[ by implication, those who have real power over the U.S. government have decided they don't want Hillary do win the election. All good news for Trump and bad news for the Clintons.

I'm almost too afraid to look, but the Federal Reserve must be stopped.  Let's see, the Treasury takes in $2 Trillion per year in taxes;  the ruling establishment has tripled the spending, pegging at $3.6 Trillion per year; meaning we have to finance a deficit of $1.6 Trillion per year; and we're facing interest payments on the national debt of $5 Trillion per year with unfunded "social" obligation at $100 Trillion.  Now we find out the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel passed out over $7 Trillion in goodies to member banksters before they secretly passed out $16.2 Trillion to the Cartel to cover the 2008 financial collapse losses. Time to dust off Executive Order 11110, issued by President John F Kennedy five months prior to the coup d'état, giving the Treasury Department the explicit authority to issue silver certificates backed by Treasury silver bullion, if needed.  Basically Order 11110 stripped the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel of it's power to loan money to the US Government at interest.  The Federal Reserve Notes in use would be competing with newly minted US Silver Certificates.   It would be easy enough to pay off the Bankster Cartel interest with official Federal Reserve Notes since there is so much paper out there.  But i would prefer the RiCO statue be invoked, assets seized, and charges of treason levied via the outrageous violations of the 1792 Coinage Act and conspiracy to destroy the dollar.   Many Americans, myself included, have long wondered why We the People would charge ourselves "interest" on money we borrow from our future selves?  Who does that?  But when we discover that the Federal Reserve is about as 'Federal" as Federal Express, the narrative wuickly leads to questions of how did it happen that we turned governance and stewardship of the national currency over to a private cartel of banksters?   Is the Federal Reserve Bankster Act of 1913 constitutional? Hardly.  Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution la

"Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels. The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals. Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University. "We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship." Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol. As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it." The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time

Glenn Greenwald delivers a powerful argument for the hackers of the world to rescue the Internet from NSA and like-minded spy agencies. Plus, "A lot more stories, a lot more documents to come."

Thanks Marbux! "Think of this as a little imperial folly update -- and here's the backstory.  In the years after invading Iraq and disbanding Saddam Hussein's military, the U.S. sunk about $25 billion into "standing up" a new Iraqi army.  By June 2014, however, that army, filled with at least 50,000 "ghost soldiers," was only standing in the imaginations of its generals and perhaps Washington.  When relatively small numbers of Islamic State (IS) militants swept into northern Iraq, it collapsed, abandoning four cities -- including Mosul, the country's second largest -- and leaving behind enormous stores of U.S. weaponry, ranging from tanks and Humvees to artillery and rifles.  In essence, the U.S. was now standing up its future enemy in a style to which it was unaccustomed and, unlike the imploded Iraqi military, the forces of the Islamic State proved quite capable of using that weaponry without a foreign trainer or adviser in sight."

Since the Bretton Woods Agreement was signed in the wake of World War II, the global monetary system has been based on the US dollar. This means that when the Fed decides to create trillions of dollars of inflation, other countries can't simply say, "let them dig their own grave." Instead, because their international transactions are denominated in dollars, they feel a pressure to maintain relatively stable exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. Most countries do this informally and have their own (bad) reasons for maintaining a certain level of inflation. China, however, is more literal in its devotion to the dollar system, perhaps due to its psychology as a new arrival on the world stage. So, in recent history, the People's Bank of China has largely maintained a "peg," by which it currently offers to pay 6.8 RMB for every dollar deposited, no matter how many extra dollars the Fed prints. To put it another way, China, and to a certain extent the entire world, is on a Dollar Standard -- like the Gold Standard, but based on another fiat currency instead of a precious metal. What this also means is that China does not intentionally devalue its currency against the dollar, but only to keep pace with the dollar. As the Fed seeks to blow up the global monetary system, I take comfort in the fact that gold cannot fight a currency war because it is not a currency. Gold is money. Currencies used to be backed by money until the global fiat system was introduced under President Nixon. Fiat currency can be printed at will until the economy collapses, as has happened many times in history. Money is impossible to devalue at the whim of politicians because it is naturally scarce. Even in the ruins of Europe after the Second World War, when there was no central authority and chaos reigned, an ounce of gold was worth what it always had been. Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bernanke-is-engaging-in-the-monetary-equivalent-of-nuclear-war-2010-11?utm_sourc

Meeting the characters in "House of Cards," it's not easy to conceive of people less deserving of federal assistance. In 1997, Bear Stearns helped pioneer the subprime mortgage-backed security by serving as co-underwriter on a $385 million offering. By the mid-2000s, Bear was the leading issuer of such securities and a leader in collateralized debt obligations, which offered even less transparency to investors. Bear was a vertically integrated manufacturer of mortgage chaos, making individual loans to home buyers, servicing the loans, bundling them into pools for investors, marketing the securities and also borrowing huge sums to finance internal hedge funds that held onto these dodgy assets. House of Cards By William D. Cohan (Doubleday, 468 pages, $27.95) Mr. Cohan describes the succession of government policies that encouraged Bear and others to invest so heavily in mortgage finance, from the Fed's easy money to Clinton-era changes to the Community Reinvestment Act requiring more loans to low-income borrowers. But the firm itself deserves the lion's share of the blame for its own collapse. Suggestions to sell some of its risky mortgage assets, or to raise capital, or to consider merger partners were brushed aside in the years and months leading up to the debacle. Paul Friedman, chief operating officer of Bear's fixed-income division, tells Mr. Cohan that "we did this to ourselves. . . . It's our fault for allowing it to get this far, and for not taking any steps to do anything about it."

The new Obama administration needs to understand that greatest heist in history is underway - at least $1 trillion is being transferred from taxpayers to debt holders of failed financial institutions - and take steps to stop it before taxpayers suffer further unnecessary losses. Whitney Tilson explains the financial crisis and makes his recommendation. Rather than sticking it to the taxpayers, these insolvent banks should be put into conservatorship: "..... So what's a better solution? I'm not arguing that BofA (or Citi or WaMu or Fannie or Freddie or AIG or Bear) should have been allowed to go bankrupt - we all saw the chaos that ensued when Lehman went bankrupt. Rather, if a company blows up (and can't find a buyer), the following things should happen: 1) The government seizes it and puts it into conservatorship (as Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG effectively were, to one degree or another); 2) Equity is wiped out (again, as with Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG); 3) However, unlike Fannie, Freddie, IndyMac and AIG (and certainly Citi and BofA), everything in the capital structure except maybe the senior debt is at risk and absorbs losses as they are realized; the government would only provide a backstop above a certain level. This is what happened in the RTC bailout; 4) Over time, in conservatorship, while the businesses continue to operate (no mass layoffs, distressed sales, etc.), the government disposes of the companies in a variety of ways (just as the RTC did via runoff, selling the entire company or piece-by-piece, etc.), depending on the circumstances (as it's doing with AIG and IndyMac, for example - these are good examples, except that the debt holders were protected). ......"

The video, "The Beholden State", has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions' political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state's public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation's and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination-high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes-has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state. How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses-that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state's politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California's unsustainable government.

excerpt:  Democrats, watch out. The Republican Party and especially its Tea Party wing have just acquired a new weapon of mass destruction - and it has nothing to do with any of Congressman Wiener's rogue body parts.  If they deploy this weapon effectively in the next election cycle - a big if - then they have the biggest opportunity to move the country rightward since Ronald Reagan took the oath of office back in 1981. The Tea Party WMD stockpile is currently stored in book form:  Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon. By Gretchen Morgenson, one of America's best business journalists who is currently at The New York Times, and noted financial analyst Joshua Rosner, Reckless Endangerment gives the best available account of how the growing chaos in the mortgage and personal finance markets and the rampant bundling of dubious loans into exotically toxic securities plunged the world, and millions of American families, into the gravest financial crisis since World War Two. It is gripping reading as well, and its explanations are clear enough that readers without any background in finance will have no trouble following the plot.  The villains?  An unholy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic establishment, community organizing groups like ACORN and La Raza, and politicians like Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi and Henry Cisneros.  (Frank got a cushy job for a lover, Pelosi got a job and layoff protection for a son, Cisneros apparently got a license to mint money bilking Mexican-Americans of their life savings in cheesy housing developments.)

Giving Capitalism Its Due :: The head of the Kauffman Foundation on the importance of entrepreneurship. "Then there is the question of the public perception of entrepreneurship. In the most recent survey that the foundation sponsored, pollsters found that 63% of respondents "prefer giving individuals the incentives they need to start their own businesses as opposed to allowing the government to create new jobs directly." Conducted last month, the survey also showed that instead of the government's stimulus package, two-thirds of respondents would prefer "reducing legal barriers and red tape for new business development" as a way to jump-start the economy. Finally, 89% of respondents said that "capitalism is still the best economic system for our country." Despite this popular attitude, Mr. Schramm worries that there is a tendency on the part of some citizens to want the government to prevent market chaos. Prior to the financial meltdown this fall, "I think we were in full tide of entrepreneurial capitalism and now there's an introspection, where the vocabulary is all about regulation and the importance of the government to restart the economy," he says. While Mr. Schramm believes that the government has a role to play, he argues that "historically through the last seven recessions it's been entrepreneurs who essentially restarted the economy."