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Paul Merrell

ODNI Erects Cost Barrier to Mandatory Declassification - 1 views

fas.org/...odni-mdr

Dark-State Mandatory-Declassification-Review ODNI fees

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Anyone who submits a mandatory declassification review request to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seeking release of classified records “shall be responsible for paying all fees” resulting from the request, according to a new ODNI regulation. And those fees are considerable. A search for a requested document costs from $20-$72 per hour. Document review runs $40-$72 per hour. And photocopying costs fifty cents per page, the new ODNI regulation said. It was published in the Federal Register on Friday, with a request for public comments. The mandatory declassification review (MDR) process was established by executive order 13526 to permit requests for declassification of information that no longer meets the standards for national security classification. The executive order’s implementing directive states that fees may be charged for responding to MDR requests for classified records. But the proposed ODNI fees seem extravagant on their face. No commercial enterprise charges anything close to fifty cents to photocopy a single page. Neither do most of ODNI’s peer agencies.
  • The Department of Defense permits (though it does not require) DoD agencies to charge fees for search, review and reproduction (pursuant to DoD Manual 5230.30-M). But the DoD schedule of fees is well below the proposed ODNI rate. Instead of fifty cents per page, DoD charges thirteen cents. Instead of up to $72 per hour for search and review, DoD charges no more than $52.60 per hour. ODNI wants $10 for a CD, but DoD asks only $1.25. (See DoD 7000.14-R, Volume 11A, Chapter 4, Appendix 2, Schedule of Fees and Rates, at page 4-13). And while ODNI would make requesters liable for “all fees,” DoD says that “Fees will not be charged if the total amount to process your request is $30.00 or less.” Similarly, at the Department of State, “Records shall be duplicated at a rate of $.15 per page.” In a 2011 rule, the Central Intelligence Agency did mandate a fifty cent per page photocopy fee for MDR requests, as well as a $15 minimum charge. But the CIA policy was suspended in response to public criticism and a legal challenge from the non-profit National Security Counselors. That challenge is still pending.
  • “There is nothing unusual about these [search and review] fees,” CIA told a court in 2014 in response to the legal challenge. “And the reproduction costs are similar to those employed by other agencies.” CIA noted that a National Archives regulation sets reproduction costs as high as 75 cents per page. (Last year it reached 80 cents, although a self-service copier is sometimes available for 25 cents per page.) Furthermore, CIA said in 2014, “neither set of costs reimburses the CIA for the full cost of providing the declassification review service to the requester.”
  • Paul Merrell on 01 Mar 16
     
    Mandatory Declassification Review is now only for the wealthy. Note that the Freedom of Information Act requires that all search and copying fees be waived if the request is in the public interest and the request is for scholarly or news purposes. It looks like Congress should step in here and establish similar requirements for Mandatory Declassification Review. Query, whether the records if sought under both the FOIA and MDR by a scholar or news organization would have to be provided without charge if declassified. 
Gary Edwards

National Restaurant Association Joins Suit against Federal Reserve | NACS Online - News... - 0 views

www.nacsonline.com/...ND0312121.aspx

banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Mar 12
     
    excerpt: The National Restaurant Association has joined a lawsuit challenging the Federal Reserve's final rule on debit card swipe fees, arguing that the Fed did not follow congressional intent to issue regulations that would ensure debit card swipe fees for merchants are "reasonable and proportional" to the cost of processing debit-card transactions. The suit is intended to lower the rates by improving the Fed's rule - not by stopping its implementation. As a result of the Fed's favorable ruling to the big banks and card companies, Visa and MasterCard announced they would raise swipe fees to the Fed's cap on small-ticket transactions ($15 or less). This move hurts small businesses with heavy small-ticket volume, such as the nation's quick-service restaurants. "While the Federal Reserve's rule significantly brought down debit swipe fees for many merchants, some small businesses will pay higher fees on smaller ticket transactions - evidence that the Fed provided card networks like Visa and MasterCard too much latitude to increase rates well above a reasonable and proportional level," said Scott DeFife, executive vice president of policy and government affairs for the National Restaurant Association, in a press release. "Allowing higher fees on small-ticket bills was not the intent of Congress, and the Federal Reserve must reconcile this failure to comply with the law as intended."
Paul Merrell

EXCLUSIVE: Chase to Charge Customers Fees For Handing Cash Deposits - Top US World News... - 0 views

www.occupycorporatism.com/...e-customers-fees-cash-deposits

economy banksters savings-accounts

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Beginning August 1st of this year, JP Morgan & Chase Co. will charge their customers for depositing cash into their accounts. According to an internal document sent to account holders, in less than a month from now “the fee for all types of Cash Deposit Processing (CDP) will be $0.25 per $100 [deposited]. The CDP fee will only apply after you exceed your account’s cash deposit limit.” One reason for Chase to charge their customers a fee on cash deposits may reside in the fact that the major banks are “charging customers who deposit lots of cash.” Wherein Chase is charging customers for every $100 in cash deposited, other banks are charging on every cash deposit of $10,000; or $0.20 on every $100 deposited. Kris Dawsey, economist for Goldman Sachs, warned about banks charging customers fees for simply depositing cash into their account in 2013.
  • When asked about a meeting of the Federal Reserve (Fed) Board and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), wherein it was revealed that the 0.25% annual interest rate on money that the banks keep in the Fed would be reduced, Dawsey said: “One risk is that the move could prompt charges … on bank deposits.” Last November, Kristin Lemkau, spokesperson for JP Morgan & Chase Co said: “We have no intention of charging for retail customer deposits.” However this promise has not been kept. David George, analyst for Robert W. Baird & Co, explains that the financial institutions “would need to find alternative revenue sources to compensate” because of this decline in the Fed’s interest rate and fees on deposits “would be the most likely” option.
  • George said: “Having a bank account is a service, like the water and electric bill. And it has become less and less profitable.” Wayne Abernathy, executive vice president of the American Bankers Association confirmed: “Banks could respond to a drop in the Fed’s interest rate by charging a fee to large business customers that hold millions of dollars in savings accounts. Banks must bear the expense of managing that money.” Analysts say the Durbin Amendment within the Dodd Frank Act which limited fees imposed by merchant retailers onto banks who issue debit cards “has effectively hit consumer-banking revenues pretty hard.” When accessing debits, banks view checking accounts as high-risk and costing “a lot of money” to the banks.
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 14
     
    Remember the days when banks' only source of money to lend was customer deposits?
Paul Merrell

ODNI Will Revise Declassification Fee Policy - 0 views

fas.org/...odni-mdr-revise

Mandatory-Declassification-Review ODNI fees

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • n response to criticism of the hefty fees that could be charged to public requesters in its new Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) rule, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has agreed to modify the rule. The revised rule will adopt the more flexible and forgiving approach used in ODNI’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program. “We will pull back the MDR rule and swap out the fee structure there for the fee structure in the FOIA policy,” said Jennifer Hudson, director of the ODNI Information Management Division. This represents a substantial change. In comments on the rule submitted yesterday by the Federation of American Scientists, we recommended such a change. We noted that the MDR fee schedule was inconsistent in several respects with existing law and policy and, in particular, that it differed from the cost recovery procedures in ODNI’s FOIA program: *     The MDR rule would charge 50 cents per page for photocopying, but ODNI charges only 10 cents per page for responses to FOIA requests. *     The MDR rule would have made requesters responsible “for paying all fees,” but ODNI always waives costs of $10 or lower under FOIA. *     The MDR rule did not provide for discretionary fee waivers for public interest or other reasons, but the FOIA policy does.
  • Now all of these discrepancies will be eliminated. Perhaps most significantly, “We will also make sure that there is room [in the MDR process] for discretion in charging fees,” Ms. Hudson said in an email message. “I’m sure you know from looking at our FOIA reports that we have exercised our discretion to not charge fees quite a bit in the past.” She noted, however, that “The search/review charges are identical” under the proposed MDR rule and under FOIA. “FOIA just breaks [the charges] down into 15 minute increments where the MDR rule is by the hour. The end result is the same.” “At the end of the day, I don’t think it will make as much of a difference as people think,” she said.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Mar 16
     
    Gee, I'm starting to feel prescient. 
Gary Edwards

Why Bitcoin Matters | Marc Andreessen - 0 views

blog.pmarca.com/...why-bitcoin-matters

Bitcoin Marc-Andreessen pmarca

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • First, Bitcoin at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science – one that builds on 20 years of research into cryptographic currency, and 40 years of research in cryptography, by thousands of researchers around the world. Bitcoin is the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem. To quote from the original paper defining the B.G.P.: “[Imagine] a group of generals of the Byzantine army camped with their troops around an enemy city. Communicating only by messenger, the generals must agree upon a common battle plan. However, one or more of them may be traitors who will try to confuse the others. The problem is to find an algorithm to ensure that the loyal generals will reach agreement.” More generally, the B.G.P. poses the question of how to establish trust between otherwise unrelated parties over an untrusted network like the Internet.
  • The practical consequence of solving this problem is that Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate. What kinds of digital property might be transferred in this way? Think about digital signatures, digital contracts, digital keys (to physical locks, or to online lockers), digital ownership of physical assets such as cars and houses, digital stocks and bonds … and digital money. All these are exchanged through a distributed network of trust that does not require or rely upon a central intermediary like a bank or broker. And all in a way where only the owner of an asset can send it, only the intended recipient can receive it, the asset can only exist in one place at a time, and everyone can validate transactions and ownership of all assets anytime they want.
  • How does this work?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Bitcoin is an Internet-wide distributed ledger. You buy into the ledger by purchasing one of a fixed number of slots, either with cash or by selling a product and service for Bitcoin. You sell out of the ledger by trading your Bitcoin to someone else who wants to buy into the ledger. Anyone in the world can buy into or sell out of the ledger any time they want – with no approval needed, and with no or very low fees. The Bitcoin “coins” themselves are simply slots in the ledger, analogous in some ways to seats on a stock exchange, except much more broadly applicable to real world transactions. The Bitcoin ledger is a new kind of payment system. Anyone in the world can pay anyone else in the world any amount of value of Bitcoin by simply transferring ownership of the corresponding slot in the ledger. Put value in, transfer it, the recipient gets value out, no authorization required, and in many cases, no fees. That last part is enormously important. Bitcoin is the first Internetwide payment system where transactions either happen with no fees or very low fees (down to fractions of pennies). Existing payment systems charge fees of about 2 to 3 percent – and that’s in the developed world. In lots of other places, there either are no modern payment systems or the rates are significantly higher. We’ll come back to that.
  • Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument. It is a way to exchange money or assets between parties with no pre-existing trust: A string of numbers is sent over email or text message in the simplest case. The sender doesn’t need to know or trust the receiver or vice versa. Related, there are no chargebacks – this is the part that is literally like cash – if you have the money or the asset, you can pay with it; if you don’t, you can’t. This is brand new. This has never existed in digital form before. Bitcoin is a digital currency, whose value is based directly on two things: use of the payment system today – volume and velocity of payments running through the ledger – and speculation on future use of the payment system. This is one part that is confusing people. It’s not as much that the Bitcoin currency has some arbitrary value and then people are trading with it; it’s more that people can trade with Bitcoin (anywhere, everywhere, with no fraud and no or very low fees) and as a result it has value.
  • Why would any merchant – online or in the real world – want to accept Bitcoin as payment, given the currently small number of consumers who want to pay with it? My partner Chris Dixon recently gave this example: “Let’s say you sell electronics online. Profit margins in those businesses are usually under 5 percent, which means conventional 2.5 percent payment fees consume half the margin. That’s money that could be reinvested in the business, passed back to consumers or taxed by the government. Of all of those choices, handing 2.5 percent to banks to move bits around the Internet is the worst possible choice. Another challenge merchants have with payments is accepting international payments. If you are wondering why your favorite product or service isn’t available in your country, the answer is often payments.” In addition, merchants are highly attracted to Bitcoin because it eliminates the risk of credit card fraud. This is the form of fraud that motivates so many criminals to put so much work into stealing personal customer information and credit card numbers. Since Bitcoin is a digital bearer instrument, the receiver of a payment does not get any information from the sender that can be used to steal money from the sender in the future, either by that merchant or by a criminal who steals that information from the merchant.
  • What’s the future of Bitcoin?
  • Bitcoin is a classic network effect, a positive feedback loop. The more people who use Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is for everyone who uses it, and the higher the incentive for the next user to start using the technology. Bitcoin shares this network effect property with the telephone system, the web, and popular Internet services like eBay and Facebook. In fact, Bitcoin is a four-sided network effect. There are four constituencies that participate in expanding the value of Bitcoin as a consequence of their own self-interested participation. Those constituencies are (1) consumers who pay with Bitcoin, (2) merchants who accept Bitcoin, (3) “miners” who run the computers that process and validate all the transactions and enable the distributed trust network to exist, and (4) developers and entrepreneurs who are building new products and services with and on top of Bitcoin. All four sides of the network effect are playing a valuable part in expanding the value of the overall system, but the fourth is particularly important.
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Jan 14
     
    WOW! This is the must read article of the year. Great explanation of Bitcoin; what it is, how it works, and why it is so significant. Excellent analysis!
Paul Merrell

Wells Fargo Fined Over Secret Sales Policy to Open Fake Customer Accounts - nsnbc inter... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...to-open-fake-customer-accounts

banksters Wells-Fargo CFPB fraud data-breach student-loans

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has fined Wells Fargo for $100 million based on fraudulent customer account practices. An additional $85 million is to be paid to the city of Los Angeles in California, along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
  • Last year Wells Fargo was sued by employees (current and former) and customers all across the nation for setting up “unwanted accounts, unwarranted fees”. According to the lawsuit, this was “the largest California-based bank violated state and federal laws by misusing confidential information and failing to notify customers when personal information was breached.” Using “aggressive tactics” to coerce new customers, Wells Fargo made it “difficult to correct the mistakes” made by Wells Fargo and return fees to customers because of “high-pressure sales culture set unrealistic quotas, spurring employees to engage in fraudulent conduct to keep their jobs and boost the company’s profits.” Over the course of an extended period of time, “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” There were 1.5 million accounts opened without the authorization of customers and 500,000 credit cards accounts to boot. Wells Fargo has consistently blames “a few rogue employees. Five hundred employees were terminated, according to a Wells Fargo spokesperson. There was no mention of rescinding of bonuses paid to those employees, and there is no clear evidence that executive’s payouts totaling $155 million for “performance based compensation” for 2012 through 2013 was returned to the bank.
  • Those bonuses were administered based on the fraudulent accounts opened without customer approval. In a statement, Wells Fargo expressed belated regret and a sudden desire to “take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request.” The training that caused this problem in the first place was a cross-selling strategy called “Going For Gr-Eight” which is a brochure for employees to push banking products onto households of existing customers to increase fee potential and overall profitability. Wells Fargo “staffers, fearing disciplinary action from managers, begged friends and family members to open ghost accounts” and forged signatures “and falsified phone numbers” of customers who did not want to open an account. This practice drove Wells Fargo’s financial success with an estimated “26% of the company’s revenue was from fee income, including those from credit and debit card accounts, trusts and investments.” The bank not only stole money from customers but “also damage their credit scores” and put some into collections to garner fees “for unauthorized accounts went unpaid”. In case of a complaining customer, Wells Fargo would “sandbag” their customers; meaning “failing to open accounts when requested by customers, and instead accumulating a number of account applications to be opened at a later date.”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Another devious tactic Wells Fargo employed was “bundling” or “incorrectly informing customers that certain products are available only in packages with other products such as additional accounts, insurance, annuities, and retirement plans.” This is not an isolated incident. Wells Fargo has fired 5,300 employees for this same “illegal behavior”. Beyond this questionable business practice, Wells Fargo was previously recognized by the CFPB for misapplying student loan payments in order to increase fee income. In this case, Wells Fargo was fined $3.6 million and forced to pay $410,000 to student loan borrowers for restitution.
Paul Merrell

Half of Federal Agencies Still Use Outdated Freedom of Information Regulations - 0 views

www2.gwu.edu/...NSAEBB460

transparency Obama FOIA-regulations

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Nearly half (50 out of 101) of all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a "presumption of disclosure," according to the new National Security Archive FOIA Audit released today to mark Sunshine Week. Congress amended the Freedom of Information Act in 2007 to prohibit agencies from charging processing fees if they missed their response deadlines, to include new online journalists in the fee waiver category for the media, to order agencies to cooperate with the new FOIA ombudsman (the Office of Government Information Services, OGIS), and to require reports of specific data on their FOIA output, among other provisions co-authored by Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and John Cornyn (R-TX). But half the government has yet to incorporate these changes in their regulations, according to the latest National Security Archive FOIA Audit. After President Obama's "Day One" commitments to open government, Attorney General Eric Holder issued new FOIA guidance on March 19, 2009, declaring that agencies should adopt a "presumption of disclosure," encourage discretionary releases if there was no foreseeable harm (even if technically covered by an exemption), proactively post the records of greatest public interest online, and remove "unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles" from the FOIA process. But five years later, the Archive found a majority of agencies have old regulations that simply ignore this guidance.
  • The Archive's FOIA Audit also highlights some good news this Sunshine Week: New plans from both the House of Representatives and White House have the potential to compel delinquent agencies to update their regulations. "Both Congress and the White House now recognize the problem of outdated FOIA regulations, and that is something to celebrate," said Archive director Tom Blanton. "But new regs should not follow the Justice Department's terrible lead, they must follow the best practices already identified by the FOIA ombuds office and FOIA experts." "If and when this important FOIA reform occurs, open government watchdogs must be vigilant to ensure that the agencies' updated regulations are progressive, rather than regressive, and embrace best practices to ensure that more documents are released to requesters, more quickly" said Nate Jones, the Archive's FOIA coordinator.
  • In 2011, the back-to-back Rosemary Award-winning Department of Justice proposed FOIA regulations that would have — among many other FOIA setbacks — allowed the Department to lie to FOIA requesters, eliminated online-only publications from receiving media fee status, and made it easier to destroy records. After intense pushback by openness advocates, the DOJ temporarily pulled these regulations, and Pustay claimed, "some people misinterpreted what we were trying to do, misconstrued some of the provisions, and didn't necessarily understand some of the fee guidelines." Pustay also claimed — to an incredulous Senate Judiciary Committee — that updating FOIA regulations to conform with the 2007 OPEN Government Act was merely optional and "not required." National Security Archive director Tom Blanton warned in his own 2013 Senate testimony that these terrible "vampire" regulations were not gone for good. This year, Pustay testified that the Department of Justice has indeed resubmitted its FOIA regulations for OMB approval; their content is unknown to the public.
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  • The House of Representatives recently unanimously passed the bipartisan Freedom of Information Act Implementation Act (H.R. 1211), which includes a provision compelling agencies to update their FOIA regulations. The House bill — which now awaits Senate approval — would require each agency to update its FOIA regulations "not later than 180 days after the enactment of this Act." The White House is also addressing the problem of outdated FOIA regulations, albeit in a different manner. In its latest Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, the White House has committed (on paper, at least) to creating one "core FOIA regulation and common set of practices [that] would make it easier for requesters to understand and navigate the FOIA process and easier for the Government to keep regulations up to date." Transparency watchdogs went on alert this week after the Department of Justice's Director of Information Policy Melanie Pustay announced during her Senate testimony on March 11, 2014 that, "My office is leading that project" to create the White House-backed common regulation which, she estimated will be, "a one or two year project." Despite Pustay's pledge that she would accept input from OGIS and the requester community, her Department's history of crafting FOIA regulations has been anything but stellar.
  • As the Department of Justice and other agencies have demonstrated, new regulations do not necessarily make good regulations. As such, the National Security Archive has recommended that any updated FOIA regulations must: mandate that FOIA officers embrace direct communications with requesters; require agencies to receive requests by e-mail and post all responses and documents online; direct agencies to update their FOIA processing software so documents can be posted to any online repository, including the government-sponsored FOIAonline; encourage agencies to join FOIAonline to make their FOIA processing more cost-effective and efficient; stream-line inter and intra-agency "referral" black holes — and keep requesters abreast of where their requests are if the agency does have to refer them; include language encouraging use of the OGIS, which can help requesters and agencies mediate disputes to avoid animosity and costly litigation; end the practice of using fees to discourage FOIA requesters. The Office of Government Information Services — which reviews and comments on agency regulations as they are proposed — has also compiled a list of best practices for agencies to consider while crafting regulations. These include: "let the Freedom of Information Act itself" — and its presumption for disclosure — "be your guide;" bring attorneys, FOIA processors, records managers and IT pros to the table; include your plan for records management and preservation; and alert requesters of their option to contact OGIS for mediation and dispute resolution services.
  • A useful compilation of current agency FOIA regulation language — already on the books — put together by the Center of Effective Government also includes helpful guidelines on preventing the destruction of requested records; narrowly interpreting claims of confidential business information; and clarifying fee waivers and procedures. FOIA experts are currently working to craft model, pro-transparency, CFR-ready language that agencies — or the drafters of government-wide common regulations — can use to bring agencies' Freedom of Information Act regulations up to standard. Watch this space, and then watch the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). "As the staffer who waded through every single federal agencies' FOIA website and CFR chapter to locate their — sometimes hidden — regulations, I learned FOIA officials often say they view their FOIA requesters as customers," said Archive researcher Lauren Harper, "I think easy to find, updated model FOIA regulations are the best way for agencies to demonstrate they truly value their customer service, and the spirit of the FOIA."
  • The National Security Archive has conducted thirteen FOIA audits since 2002. Modeled after the California Sunshine Survey and subsequent state "FOI Audits," the Archive's FOIA Audits use open-government laws to test whether or not agencies are obeying those same laws. Recommendations from previous Archive FOIA Audits have led directly to laws and executive orders which have: set explicit customer service guidelines, mandated FOIA backlog reduction, assigned individualized FOIA tracking numbers, forced agencies to report the average number of days needed to process requests, and revealed the (often embarrassing) ages of the oldest pending FOIA requests. The surveys include:
  • Paul Merrell on 15 Mar 14
     
    Article includes tables indicating which agencies are out of compliance with which FOIA directives. 
Paul Merrell

Lawsuit claiming public being milked for access to court records advances | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...ing-for-court-records-advances

Pacer charges litigation class-action

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • A lawsuit that claims the public is being overcharged by the US government's website for accessing federal court records just took a major step forward. A federal judge overseeing the litigation against PACER, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system, just certified the case as a class action—meaning anybody who has used the service between 2010-2016 might be entitled to refunds if the government loses or settles. Three nonprofits last year brought the suit that claims millions of dollars generated from a recent 25-percent increase in page fees are being illegally spent by a federal agency known as the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO). The cost for access is 10 cents per page and up to $3 a document. Judicial opinions are free.
  • The case is being brought by the National Consumer Law Center, the Alliance for Justice, and the National Veterans Legal Services Program. The organizations claim that, while the fees my not be onerous to some, for others the amount adds up and may hinder public access. What's more, they claim that the fees breach a congressional act—the E-government Act of 2002—requiring that PACER only levy charges that cover the government's cost to maintain the program. Millions of dollars in fees have been diverted to other courthouse projects instead, the suit maintains. The system, once a dial-in phone service, became an Internet portal in 1998. Fees began at 7 cents per page, rose to 8 cents, and now are at 10 cents.
Gary Edwards

Daniel Henninger: It's the Spending, America - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3444804575071323360304024.html

constitutional-conservatism obama-pelosi-reid deficit-debt-disaster

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Feb 10
     
    Anyone who isn't welded to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid ball and chain has their campaign issue for November's election and 2012: spending. Republicans, Lieberman-Bayh Democrats, tea partiers, it doesn't matter. Spending, spending, spending. This is bigger than drill, drill, drill. Way bigger. Finally, after a nonstop, nearly 80-year upward climb, government spending has hit a wall. It didn't seem possible but this is a big wall. It's the American voter. This has been an unforgettable year in the history of American spending. It began with an eye-popping $800 billion stimulus bill that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. Done with that, the Washington Democrats turned to President Obama's health-care reform, which looked big at first, but turned out to be bigger. A well-publicized June estimate of the Senate bill's cost by the Congressional Budget Office put the 10-year price tag at $1.6 trillion. So $800 billion, then a trillion. Dollar signs rocketed into the sky all year: hundreds of billions on various TARP salvage projects, much drawn from some magic stash held by the Federal Reserve. The Obama cap-and-trade bill was going to use an auction to siphon $3.3 trillion from various states to Washington over 40 years. Oh, almost forgot-an FY 2011 $3.8 trillion budget. Some of this was spending, some taxes, some fees. It's all spending. A tax or fee is just a sluice gate that separates private income from the public-spending lake. And in 2009 it was beginning to look as if the politicians were going to blow the dam. California and New York, the nation's first and third most populous states, were in fiscal collapse, with the whole nation watching as once-mighty California (which looks like Greece cubed) actually issued IOUs. On April 15, the tea parties achieved critical mass, then built into a political phenomenon. The New York Times this week gave two full pages to cataloguing tea partier grievances in a way meant to convey the paranoid style in American politi
Paul Merrell

CFPB Determined to Regulate Billion Dollar Payday Loan Industry - Top US & World News |... - 0 views

www.occupycorporatism.com/...on-dollar-payday-loan-industry

banksters payday-lenders CFPB regulation

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has a new set of rules aimed at preventing payday loan operations from targeting low-income borrowers who will be buried by high fees and rising debt loads. Payday loans are traditionally a loan of $500 or less wherein the borrower “provides a personal check dated on their next payday for the full balance or give the lender permission to debit their bank accounts. The total includes charges often ranging from $15 to $30 per $100 borrowed. Interest-only payments, sometimes referred to as rollovers, are common.” Using these lenders to make ends meet, borrowers are taken advantage of which has traditionally been a state regulatory issue. However now the federal government will be stepping in to curb this extortive multibillion dollar industry. Fees from payday loans can quickly accumulate, causing some borrowers to “lose their bank accounts and cars, or even risk prison time”.
  • Richard Corday, director of the CFPB, said: “Extending credit to people in a way that sets them up to fail and ensnares considerable numbers of them in extended debt traps, is simply not responsible lending.” These new rules cover payday loans, vehicle loans, loans using a car as collateral and various other forms of high-cost lending. Enders will be responsible for making sure debtors can repay the loan in full on time before extending the loan by checking their income, borrowing history, previous financial obligations and any other indicators that the borrower would most likely default or roll over the loan. • A 60 day respite between loans • Lenders must provide affordable repayment options • Loans cannot exceed $500 • Loans cannot have multiple finance charges • Loans cannot use a vehicle as collateral Regulations on interest rates and repayments as a share of income include mandatory capping off to prevent run-a-way fees.
  • Back in February, the CFPB warned about the payday loan industry which is largely unregulated and functions outside of proper oversight and accountability. The CFPB estimates that the $46 billion payday loan or cash advance industry has no oversight, refuses to give full disclosures of interest and fees involved, and takes an annual percentage of an excess of 300% against borrowers. The Consumer Federation of America (CFA) counts 32 states in the US that “permit payday loans at triple-digit interest rates, or with no rate cap at all.” Shockingly 80% of payday loans are rolled over within 14 days while an estimated 50% of these loans are “in a sequence at least 10 loans long.”
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Mar 15
     
    The first sentence if false; no rules have been adopted or even been published. In fact, these aren't even formal rule proposals or advance notice of public rulemaking, all of which must be poublished in the Federal Register, per the Administrative Procedures Act.   The Bureau is still in the information gathering stage.
Paul Merrell

Wells Fargo in Hot Water with US Regulators & Fed After Lawsuit - nsnbc international |... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...s-regulators-fed-after-lawsuit

banksters Wells-Fargo fraud litigation

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Wells Fargo is facing a probe by the Officer of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank (SFFR) into their allegedly unethical business practices.
  • Back in May Wells Fargo was sued by employees (current and former) and customers all across the nation for setting up “unwanted accounts, unwarranted fees”. This lawsuit “contends the largest California-based bank violated state and federal laws by misusing confidential information and failing to notify customers when personal information was breached.” Using “aggressive tactics” to coerce new customers, WF made it “difficult to correct the mistakes” made by WF and return fees to customers because of “high-pressure sales culture set unrealistic quotas, spurring employees to engage in fraudulent conduct to keep their jobs and boost the company’s profits.” Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer said: “In its push for growth, Wells Fargo often elevated its profits over the legal rights of its customers.”
  • For 2 years, Feuer has been investigating how WF “staffers, fearing disciplinary action from managers, begged friends and family members to open ghost accounts” and forged signatures “and falsified phone numbers” of customers who did not want to open an account. This practice drove WF success with an estimated “26% of the company’s revenue was from fee income, including those from credit and debit card accounts, trusts and investments.” WF not only stole money from customers but “also damage their credit scores” and put some into collections to garner fees “for unauthorized accounts went unpaid”. According to the 19-page complaint, WF would “sandbag” their customers; meaning “failing to open accounts when requested by customers, and instead accumulating a number of account applications to be opened at a later date.” Another devious tactic WF employed was “bundling” or “incorrectly informing customers that certain products are available only in packages with other products such as additional accounts, insurance, annuities, and retirement plans.”
Paul Merrell

Trump's Infrastructure Boondoggle - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...umps-infrastructure-boondoggle

economy Trump infrastructure

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Donald Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan is not an infrastructure plan and it won’t put $1 trillion of fiscal stimulus into the economy. It’s basically a scheme for handing over public assets to private corporations that will extract maximum profits via user fees and tolls. Because the plan is essentially a boondoggle, it will not lift the economy out of the doldrums, increase activity or boost growth.  Quite the contrary. When the details of how the program is going to be implemented are announced,  public confidence in the Trump administration is going to wither and stock prices are going to plunge.   This scenario cannot be avoided because the penny-pinching conservatives in the House and Senate have already said that they won’t support any plan that is not “revenue neutral” which means that any real $1 trillion spending package is a dead letter.  Thus, it’s only a matter of time before the Trump’s plan is exposed as a fraud and the sh** hits the fan.
  • Here are more of the details from an article at Slate: “Under Trump’s plan…the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.” (“Donald Trump’s Plan to Privatize America’s Roads and Bridges”, Slate) Normally, fiscal stimulus is financed by increasing the budget deficits, but Maestro Trump has something else up his sleeve.  He wants the big construction companies and private equity firms to stump up the seed money and start the work with the understanding that they’ll be able to impose user fees and tolls on roads and bridges when the work is completed.  For every dollar that corporations spend on rebuilding US infrastructure, they’ll get a dollar back via tax credits, which means that they’ll end up controlling valuable, revenue-generating assets for nothing. The whole thing is a flagrant ripoff that stinks to high heaven.   The corporations rake in hefty profits on sweetheart deals, while the American people get bupkis. Welcome to Trumpworld.  Here’s more background from Trump’s campaign website:
  • “American Energy and  Infrastructure Act Leverages public-private partnerships, and private investments through tax incentives, to spur $1 trillion in infrastructure investment over ten years. It is revenue neutral.” (Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter”) In practical terms, ‘revenue neutral’ means that every dollar of new spending has to be matched by cuts to other government programs.  So, if there are hidden costs to Trump’s plan, then they’ll have to be paid for by slashing funds for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps etc. But, keep in mind, these other programs are much more effective sources of stimulus since the money goes directly to the people who spend it immediately and help grow the economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan doesn’t work like that. A lot of the money will go towards management fees and operational costs leaving fewer dollars to trickle down to low-paid construction workers whose personal consumption drives the economy. Less money for workers means less spending, less activity and weaker growth.
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  • Here’s more on the topic from the Washington Post: “Trump’s plan is not really an infrastructure plan. It’s a tax-cut plan for utility-industry and construction-sector investors, and a massive corporate welfare plan for contractors. The Trump plan doesn’t directly fund new roads, bridges, water systems or airports…. Instead, Trump’s plan provides tax breaks to private-sector investors who back profitable construction projects. … There’s no requirement that the tax breaks be used for … expanded construction efforts; they could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects… Second, as a result of the above, Trump’s plan isn’t really a jobs plan, either. Because the plan subsidizes investors, not projects; because it funds tax breaks, not bridges; because there’s no requirement that the projects be otherwise unfunded, there is simply no guarantee that the plan will produce any net new hiring. … Buried inside the plan will be provisions to weaken prevailing wage protections on construction projects, undermining unions and ultimately eroding workers’ earnings. Environmental rules are almost certain to be gutted in the name of accelerating projects.” (Trump’s big infrastructure plan? It’s a trap. Washington Post) Let’s summarize:  “Trump’s plan” is “massive corporate welfare plan for contractors” and the “tax breaks”…”could all go just to fatten the pockets of investors in previously planned projects.”
  • What part of this plan looks like it will have a positive impact on the economy? None. If Trump was serious about raising GDP to 4 percent, (another one of his promises) he’d increase Social Security payments, beef up the food stamps program, or hire more government workers.  Any one of these would trigger an immediate uptick in activity spurring more growth and a stronger economy.  And while America’s ramshackle bridges and roads may be in dire need of a facelift,  infrastructure is actually a poor way to inject fiscal stimulus which can be more easily distributed  by simply hiring government agents to stand on streetcorners and hand out 100 dollar bills to passersby. That might not fill the pothole-strewn streets in downtown Duluth, but it would sure as hell would light a fire under GDP. So what’s the gameplan here? What’s Trump really up to? If his infrastructure plan isn’t going to work, then what’s the real objective? The objective is to allow wealthy corporations to buy public assets at firesale prices so they can turn them into profit-generating enterprises. That’s it in a nutshell. That’s why the emphasis is on “unconventional financing programs”, “public-private partnerships”, and “Build America Bonds” instead of plain-old fiscal stimulus, jobs programs and deficit spending. Trump is signaling to his pirate friends in Corporate America that he’ll use his power as executive to find new outlets for profitable investment so they have some place to stick their mountain of money. Of course, none of this has anything to do with rebuilding America’s dilapidated infrastructure or even revving up GDP. That’s just public relations bunkum. What’s really going on is a massive looting operation organized and executed under the watchful eye of Donald Trump, Robber Baron-in-Chief.
  • And Infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg. Once these kleptomaniacs hit their stride, they’re going to cut through Washington like locusts through a corn field. Bet on it.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Mar 17
     
    Mike Whitney always tells it like it is.
Gary Edwards

Sheriff…Time to arrest members of Congress! | Scanned Retina Blog - 0 views

scannedretina.com/...-to-arrest-members-of-congress

Rico-Giron IRS Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Income-Tax

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Title 26, USC, is a private law that applies to “U.S. corporate ‘citizens’”, all employees of the corporation identified at 28 USC, section 3002.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13
       
      There is no explanation or quote to explain Title 26 and 28 USC, section 3002!  At the least we should be provided with a link here.
  • When the Sheriff seizes property from a Citizen under the non-authority of the IRS agent, the Sheriff has committed a Second Degree Felony, Conversion of Property.
  • Tyranny is defined as:
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  • Dominance through threat of punishment and violence, oppressive rule, abusive government, cruelty and injustice. What better definition than this fits the abusive IRS.
  • Title 12, USC
  • The Federal Reserve Notes in use are mere evidence of a debt.
  • The legal definition of “dollar” is “a gold or silver coin of a specific weight and with specific markings
  • The Federal Reserve Banking system is a private cartel that has usurped the authority of the Congress to coin Money.
  • Article I, section 8, we find that only Congress was given the authority “To coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
  • The Federal Reserve Act is a “private law” passed by four Congressmen after the Congressional session closed in December of 1913.
  • The “Killing Blow”, the coup de grace[pronounced gra] was delivered upon the American People by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 by removing the Gold Standard from the American economy.  FDR assisted the FRB in heisting the gold supply from this country right out from under our noses. 
  • If you still refuse to pay, the IRS will file a document called a “Notice of Federal Tax Lien” in the local County Clerk’s office.
  • a “Notice” is not the “Lien” itself. The “Lien” is a totally separate and distinct document from the “Notice”.
  • The County Clerk, through abysmal ignorance files the “Notice of Federal Tax Lien” as if it was an actual “Lien”. These are two separate and distinct documents. The County Clerk never requests the actual “Lien” from the IRS agent.
  • The Seventh Amendment of the Bill of Rights of this Constitution for the united States of America guarantees you the Right of Trial by Jury in any controversy where the amount shall exceed twenty dollars.
  • You have never owed any money to the IRS. The IRS is simply the enforcer, the debt collector for the Federal Reserve Banking System. However, because you are using a private credit system, wherein the medium of exchange are fancy pieces of paper called Federal Reserve Notes, you owe the Federal Reserve Bank a “user fee”.
  • All the current paycheck garnishments in the entire country could be stopped by having your employer request the above mentioned documents, to wit:
  • A copy of the Driver’s License of the IRS agent A copy of the “Pocket Commission” showing the authority of the IRS agent A copy of the assessment shown on form 23C against the American Citizen A copy of the “Abstract of the Court Judgment” that verifies that you had a trial by jury.
  • As Sheriff of San Miguel County, I will provide educational classes to the County Clerk and the employers who are currently garnishing wages and paychecks to identify areas where they may have broken the law and unwittingly stolen their employees Federal Reserve Notes and thus committed “Conversion of Property”, a second degree felony. Furthermore, I will work closely with the County Clerk through education and knowledge so that the Clerk can stop breaking the law and committing financial terrorism against the Citizens of San Miguel County.
  • When the Citizens of San Miguel County elect me as their new Sheriff in town, I will ban the IRS from San Miguel County, and if I catch an IRS agent within the boundaries of the county, without my permission, I will arrest them for TRESPASSING.
  • In the 1950’s, with the stroke of the pen, the BIR was transformed into the current notorious IRS and brought onto the 50 united States.
  • The IRS is formerly the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) situated in and with authority only in the Philippine Islands (Trust Fund # 61), and moved into Puerto Rico (Trust Fund # 62).
  • Here it is in a nutshell. The IRS is a private, debt collection agency for the private banking system known as the Federal Reserve Bank. The IRS is not a government agency. I repeat, the IRS is not a government agency. Never has been, never will be.
  • This was done without any Congressional authority whatsoever.
  • the IRS is the “Private, debt collection agency for the private banking system known as the Federal Reserve Banks”.
  • Title 26, Internal Revenue Code, is the “Debt Collection Manual” for the IRS.  This manual has nothing with “Constitutitonal Rights”.
  • The IRS does not collect an “income tax”.  The IRS is simply collecting a user fee due to the Federal Reserve Banks because we, Americans, are using a private credit systeem.
  • Title 26, United States Code, is “non-positive” law, which means that no American Citizen is subject to it.  However, all “U.S. citizens” are subject to it.  In order to understand “U.S. citizen” you must go to 28 USC, section 3002.
  • Most American Citizens have voluntarily given up their Sovereignty in exchange for “immunities and privileges” of the 14th Amendment.
  • Paul Merrell on 08 Jun 13
     
    On accessing federal law, two sites to bookmark: Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, http://www.law.cornell.edu/lii/get_the_law Justia.com, http://www.justia.com/ A further resource, the Jureeka extension for Chrome and Firefox will automatically link legal citations in your brower's display to the corresponding web pages on the LII site. http://www.law.cornell.edu/jureeka/download/
Gary Edwards

Political Editors: Dick Morris Corrects the Record on Hillary Clinton - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/44049

Hillary Political-Corruption

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Then Bill discusses Hillary’s legal career at the Rose Law firm. He doesn’t mention that she made partner when he was elected governor and was only hired when he got elected as attorney general. "He makes as if it was a public service job — it wasn’t. Her main job was to get state business, and she got tens-of-millions of dollars of state business, then hid her participation and the fees by taking an extra share of non-state business to compensate for the fees on state business that she brought in. Her other job was to call the state banking commissioner any time one of her banks got into trouble to get them off.
  • "Bill speaks at length how Hillary was a mother, juggling career and family, taking Chelsea to soccer games and stuff — that’s non-sense. Hillary was a mother but Chelsea in the Arkansas governor’s mansion had a staff of nannies and agents to drive her around and people to be with her, and Hillary didn’t have to bother with any of that. All of that was paid for by the state. "He says she became the warrior in chief over the family finances and that was true, and the result is she learned how to steal. "She accepted a $100,000 bribe from the poultry industry in return for Bill going easy on regulating them, despite new standards. Jim Blair, the poultry lobbyist, gave her $1,000 to invest in the Futures Market and lined up seven to eight other investors and their winnings were all deposited into Hillary’s account. She made $100,000 in a year and she was out. That essentially was a bribe.
  • ”[She did] a phony real-estate deal for Jim McDougal and the Madison Bank to deceive the federal regulators by pretending someone else was buying the property. She was called before a grand jury in 1995 about that but, conveniently, the billing records were lost, couldn’t be found and there wasn’t proof that she worked on it.
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  • “Bill talks about her work on the health care task force but doesn’t say the reason it didn’t pass was the task force was discredited because the meetings were all held in secret. A federal judge forced them open and fined the task force several hundred thousand dollars because of their secrecy. "He says that after the health care bill failed in 1994, Hillary went to work on adopting each piece of it piecemeal — mainly health insurance for children. "That is completely the opposite of the truth. The fact is when that bill failed, I called Hillary and I suggested that she support a proposal by Republican Bob Dole that we cover children, and she said, ‘We can’t just cover one part of this. You have to change everything or change nothing.’ Then in 1997 when I repeated that advice to Bill Clinton, we worked together to pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program. I found a lot of the money for that in the tobacco settlement that my friend Dick Scruggs was negotiating.
  • "Then Bill extols her record in the U.S. Senate. In fact, she did practically nothing. There were seven or eight bills that she introduced that passed; almost all of were symbolic — renaming a courthouse, congratulating a high school team on winning the championship. There was only one vaguely substantive bill, and that had a lot of co-sponsors of whom Hillary was just one.
  • "Then he goes to her record in the State Department and manages to tell that story without mentioning the word Benghazi, without mentioning her secret emails, without mentioning he was getting tens of millions — $220 million in speaking fees in return for favorable actions by the State Department.
  • "Also totally lacking in the speech was anything about the war on terror — terror is a word you don’t hear at the Democratic Convention. "Bill says that Hillary passed tough sanctions on Iran for their nuclear program. The opposite is true. "Every time a tough sanction bill was introduced by Senators Menendez or Kirk, Hillary would send Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman to Capital Hill to testify against it and urge it not to pass, and it was over Hillary’s objections that those sanctions were put into place.
  • ”[Liberal columnist] Maureen Dowd called the speech by Bill Clinton “air brushed.” “It was a hell of a lot more than that — it was fiction. (Also see Morris’s comments after Clinton’s DNC acceptance speech. "It’s strategy and message will be interdicted by reality at every turn. … She basically has no message. … Her entire campaign is, ‘I’m a woman and I am running against Donald Trump. … She bean her speech by saying let’s compromise and work together. Is there any woman in the world less likely to compromise?”)
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jul 16
     
    "Dick Morris is a nationally recognized political campaign adviser, analyst and author. He was the senior political adviser to Bill Clinton before and after his occupation of the White House. He was campaign manager of Clinton's 1996 re-election, and the architect of his successful "triangulation" rhetorical ruse. Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos said of Morris, "No single person had more power over [Bill Clinton]." This week, in a message entitled "What Bill Left Out, Morris corrected the record regarding Clinton's glowing remarks about Hillary Clinton, her personal attributes and professional achievements. Morris's insights into the Clintons are priceless. What follows is a transcript of Morris's comments: "Bill Clinton talked at length about Hillary's idealistic work in college and law school, but he omits that she was defending the Black Panthers who killed security guards; they were on trial in New Haven. She monitored the trial while she was in law school to find evidence that could be grounds for reversal in the event they were convicted. "That summer she went to work for the True-Haft (SP) law firm in CA, headed by True Haft who is the head of the CA Communist Party and that's when she got involved with Saul Alinsky, who became something of a mentor for the rest of her life. "Then Bill says that she went off to Massachusetts and he went to Arkansas, and eventually Hillary followed her heart to join him in Arkansas. He omits that she went to work for the Watergate Committee and was fired from that job for taking home evidence and hiding documents that they needed in the impeachment inquiry. Then she took the DC Bar exam and flunked it, she went to Arkansas because that is the only bar exam she could pass. "He talked about how in the 1970's she took all kinds of pro-bono cases to defend women and children. In her memoirs, she cites one which was a custody case and that's it. In fact, in 1975 she represen
Paul Merrell

Credit unions fight back against tax repeal efforts - Business Monday - MiamiHerald.com - 0 views

www.miamiherald.com/...unions-fight-back-against.html

banksters credit-unions Congress Obama lobbying Competition

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • At the moment, it’s a war of words, but very soon the debate to tax credit unions will hit the streets. This week, credit union supporters from South Florida and throughout the country will descend on Washington, D.C. to “Hike the Hill” and meet with lawmakers to stress the importance of keeping in place the federal tax exemption for credit unions. The debate is nothing new. For years, the big banks have lobbied Congress to repeal the tax exemption status. This time around, they declared war. Earlier this year, the American Bankers Association began advertising its anti-credit union message throughout Washington, and last month ABA executives wrote letters to President Barack Obama and Congress requesting a repeal of the tax exemption status. The ABA and their lobbyists complain that the growing financial stature of credit unions throughout the country proves that they should be taxed like banks. They even refer to the tax exemption as a government “expenditure,” which they claim should be eliminated as part of a larger tax reform and budget reduction package.
  • What the bankers fail to mention was that credit unions only hold 6 percent of all the financial assets in the United States while banks hold 93 percent. They also fail to mention that 96 million Americans are satisfied members of credit unions, and that for every dollar in new taxes the government might gain, it would be eliminating $10 of credit union member benefits. The Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 established the tax-exemption status of credit unions because the structure and goals of credit unions are far different from traditional banks. All credit unions are designated as not-for-profit, which means any and all profits made are redistributed back to credit union members in the form of higher interest rates on savings accounts and reduced fees. They offer loans at the lowest possible interest rates because their mandate is to cultivate community development by assisting working families, low income households, small businesses and the middle class.Banks operate very differently. Led by small groups of shareholders who seek to maximize return on their investment, they raise fees regardless of how much profit they accumulate. They offer loans at the highest possible interest rate because their mandate is to make money, not to assist anyone, including and especially the middle class. (It wasn’t long ago we learned this the hard way as predatory banks helped fuel the Great Recession.) The truth is, big banks want one thing and one thing only: to get bigger. They want to merge and grow and rack-in record profits so they can grow even bigger. Credit unions are the only thing standing in the way of an oligarchy of a few major banks from controlling all of the deposited funds in the country. Their pursuit to tax credit unions is aimed at eliminating their only competition so they can be free to charge as much interest and fees as they wish without restraint.
Gary Edwards

The obscure legal system that lets corporations sue countries | Claire Provost and Matt... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...rtations-sue-states-ttip-icsid

ISDS TTIP Banksters World-Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Every year on 15 September, thousands of Salvadorans celebrate the date when much of Central America gained independence from Spain. Fireworks are set off and marching bands parade through villages across the country. But, last year, in the town of San Isidro, in Cabañas, the festivities had a markedly different tone. Hundreds had gathered to protest against the mine. Gold mines often use cyanide to separate gold from ore, and widespread concern over already severe water contamination in El Salvador has helped fuel a powerful movement determined to keep the country’s minerals in the ground. In the central square, colourful banners were strung up, calling on OceanaGold to drop its case against the country and leave the area. Many were adorned with the slogan, “No a la mineria, Si a la vida” (No to mining, Yes to life). On the same day, in Washington DC, Parada gathered his notes and shuffled into a suite of nondescript meeting rooms in the World Bank’s J building, across the street from its main headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. This is the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID): the primary institution for handling the cases that companies file against sovereign states. (The ICSID is not the sole venue for such cases; there are similar forums in London, Paris, Hong Kong and the Hague, among others.) The date of the hearing was not a coincidence, Parada said. The case has been framed in El Salvador as a test of the country’s sovereignty in the 21st century, and he suggested that it should be heard on Independence Day. “The ultimate question in this case,” he said, “is whether a foreign investor can force a government to change its laws to please the investor as opposed to the investor complying with the laws they find in the country.”
  • Most international investment treaties and free-trade deals grant foreign investors the right to activate this system, known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), if they want to challenge government decisions affecting their investments. In Europe, this system has become a sticking point in negotiations over the controversial Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal proposed between the European Union and the US, which would massively extend its scope and power and make it harder to challenge in the future. Both France and Germany have said that they want access to investor-state dispute settlement removed from the TTIP treaty currently under discussion. Investors have used this system not only to sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights. Multinationals have sued to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and “expected future profits”. The number of suits filed against countries at the ICSID is now around 500 – and that figure is growing at an average rate of one case a week. The sums awarded in damages are so vast that investment funds have taken notice: corporations’ claims against states are now seen as assets that can be invested in or used as leverage to secure multimillion-dollar loans. Increasingly, companies are using the threat of a lawsuit at the ICSID to exert pressure on governments not to challenge investors’ actions.
  • “I had absolutely no idea this was coming,” Parada said. Sitting in a glass-walled meeting room in his offices, at the law firm Foley Hoag, he paused, searching for the right word to describe what has happened in his field. “Rogue,” he decided, finally. “I think the investor-state arbitration system was created with good intentions, but in practice it has gone completely rogue.”
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  • The quiet village of Moorburg in Germany lies just across the river from Hamburg. Past the 16th-century church and meadows rich with wildflowers, two huge chimneys spew a steady stream of thick, grey smoke into the sky. This is Kraftwerk Moorburg, a new coal-fired power plant – the village’s controversial next-door neighbour. In 2009, it was the subject of a €1.4bn investor-state case filed by Vattenfall, the Swedish energy giant, against the Federal Republic of Germany. It is a prime example of how this powerful international legal system, built to protect foreign investors in developing countries, is now being used to challenge the actions of European governments as well. Since the 1980s, German investors have sued dozens of countries, including Ghana, Ukraine and the Philippines, at the World Bank’s Centre in Washington DC. But with the Vattenfall case, Germany found itself in the dock for the first time. The irony was not lost on those who considered Germany to be the grandfather of investor-state arbitration: it was a group of German businessmen, in the late 1950s, who first conceived of a way to protect their overseas investments as a wave of developing countries gained independence from European colonial powers. Led by Deutsche Bank chairman Hermann Abs, they called their proposal an “international magna carta” for private investors.
  • In the 1960s, the idea was taken up by the World Bank, which said that such a system could help the world’s poorer countries attract foreign capital. “I am convinced,” the World Bank president George Woods said at the time, “that those … who adopt as their national policy a welcome [environment] for international investment – and that means, to mince no words about it, giving foreign investors a fair opportunity to make attractive profits – will achieve their development objectives more rapidly than those who do not.” At the World Bank’s 1964 annual meeting in Tokyo, it approved a resolution to set up a mechanism for handling investor-state cases. The first line of the ICSID Convention’s preamble sets out its goal as “international cooperation for economic development”. There was sharp opposition to this system from its inception, with a bloc of developing countries warning that it would undermine their sovereignty. A group of 21 countries – almost every Latin American country, plus Iraq and the Philippines – voted against the proposal in Tokyo. But the World Bank moved ahead regardless. Andreas Lowenfeld, an American legal academic who was involved in some of these early discussions, later remarked: “I believe this was the first time that a major resolution of the World Bank had been pressed forward with so much opposition.”
  • now governments are discovering, too late, the true price of that confidence. The Kraftwerk Moorburg plant was controversial long before the case was filed. For years, local residents and environmental groups objected to its construction, amid growing concern over climate change and the impact the project would have on the Elbe river. In 2008, Vattenfall was granted a water permit for its Moorburg project, but, in response to local pressure, local authorities imposed strict environmental conditions to limit the utility’s water usage and its impact on fish. Vattenfall sued Hamburg in the local courts. But, as a foreign investor, it was also able to file a case at the ICSID. These environmental measures, it said, were so strict that they constituted a violation of its rights as guaranteed by the Energy Charter Treaty, a multilateral investment agreement signed by more than 50 countries, including Sweden and Germany. It claimed that the environmental conditions placed on its permit were so severe that they made the plant uneconomical and constituted acts of indirect expropriation.
  • With the rapid growth in these treaties – today there are more than 3,000 in force – a specialist industry has developed in advising companies how best to exploit treaties that give investors access to the dispute resolution system, and how to structure their businesses to benefit from the different protections on offer. It is a lucrative sector: legal fees alone average $8m per case, but they have exceeded $30m in some disputes; arbitrators’ fees at start at $3,000 per day, plus expenses.
  • Vattenfall v Germany ended in a settlement in 2011, after the company won its case in the local court and received a new water permit for its Moorburg plant – which significantly lowered the environmental standards that had originally been imposed, according to legal experts, allowing the plant to use more water from the river and weakening measures to protect fish. The European Commission has now stepped in, taking Germany to the EU Court of Justice, saying its authorisation of the Moorburg coal plant violated EU environmental law by not doing more to reduce the risk to protected fish species, including salmon, which pass near the plant while migrating from the North Sea. A year after the Moorburg case closed, Vattenfall filed another claim against Germany, this time over the federal government’s decision to phase out nuclear power. This second suit – for which very little information is available in the public domain, despite reports that the company is seeking €4.7bn from German taxpayers – is still ongoing. Roughly one third of all concluded cases filed at the ICSID are recorded as ending in “settlements”, which – as the Moorburg dispute shows – can be very profitable for investors, though their terms are rarely fully disclosed.
  • “It was a total surprise for us,” the local Green party leader Jens Kerstan laughed, in a meeting at his sunny office in Hamburg last year. “As far as I knew, there were some [treaties] to protect German companies in the [developing] world or in dictatorships, but that a European company can sue Germany, that was totally a surprise to me.”
  • While a tribunal cannot force a country to change its laws, or give a company a permit, the risk of massive damages may in some cases be enough to persuade a government to reconsider its actions. The possibility of arbitration proceedings can be used to encourage states to enter into meaningful settlement negotiations.
  • A small number of countries are now attempting to extricate themselves from the bonds of the investor-state dispute system. One of these is Bolivia, where thousands of people took to the streets of the country’s third-largest city, Cochabamba, in 2000, to protest against a dramatic hike in water rates by a private company owned by Bechtel, the US civil engineering firm. During the demonstrations, the Bolivian government stepped in and terminated the company’s concession. The company then filed a $50m suit against Bolivia at the ICSID. In 2006, following a campaign calling for the case to be thrown out, the company agreed to accept a token payment of less than $1. After this expensive case, Bolivia cancelled the international agreements it had signed with other states giving their investors access to these tribunals. But getting out of this system is not easily done. Most of these international agreements have sunset clauses, under which their provisions remain in force for a further 10 or even 20 years, even if the treaties themselves are cancelled.
  • There are now thousands of international investment agreements and free-trade acts, signed by states, which give foreign companies access to the investor-state dispute system, if they decide to challenge government decisions. Disputes are typically heard by panels of three arbitrators; one selected by each side, and the third agreed upon by both parties. Rulings are made by majority vote, and decisions are final and binding. There is no appeals process – only an annulment option that can be used on very limited grounds. If states do not pay up after the decision, their assets are subject to seizure in almost every country in the world (the company can apply to local courts for an enforcement order).
  • While there is no equivalent of legal aid for states trying to defend themselves against these suits, corporations have access to a growing group of third-party financiers who are willing to fund their cases against states, usually in exchange for a cut of any eventual award.
  • Increasingly, these suits are becoming valuable even before claims are settled. After Rurelec filed suit against Bolivia, it took its case to the market and secured a multimillion-dollar corporate loan, using its dispute with Bolivia as collateral, so that it could expand its business. Over the last 10 years, and particularly since the global financial crisis, a growing number of specialised investment funds have moved to raise money through these cases, treating companies’ multimillion-dollar claims against states as a new “asset class”.
  • El Salvador has already spent more than $12m defending itself against Pacific Rim, but even if it succeeds in beating the company’s $284m claim, it may never recover these costs. For years Salvadoran protest groups have been calling on the World Bank to initiate an open and public review of ICSID. To date, no such study has been carried out. In recent years, a number of ideas have been mooted to reform the international investor-state dispute system – to adopt a “loser pays” approach to costs, for example, or to increase transparency. The solution may lie in creating an appeals system, so that controversial judgments can be revisited.
  • Brazil has never signed up to this system – it has not entered into a single treaty with these investor-state dispute provisions – and yet it has had no trouble attracting foreign investment.
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 15
     
    "Luis Parada's office is just four blocks from the White House, in the heart of K Street, Washington's lobbying row - a stretch of steel and glass buildings once dubbed the "road to riches", when influence-peddling became an American growth industry. Parada, a soft-spoken 55-year-old from El Salvador, is one of a handful of lawyers in the world who specialise in defending sovereign states against lawsuits lodged by multinational corporations. He is the lawyer for the defence in an obscure but increasingly powerful field of international law - where foreign investors can sue governments in a network of tribunals for billions of dollars. Fifteen years ago, Parada's work was a minor niche even within the legal business. But since 2000, hundreds of foreign investors have sued more than half of the world's countries, claiming damages for a wide range of government actions that they say have threatened their profits. In 2006, Ecuador cancelled an oil-exploration contract with Houston-based Occidental Petroleum; in 2012, after Occidental filed a suit before an international investment tribunal, Ecuador was ordered to pay a record $1.8bn - roughly equal to the country's health budget for a year. (Ecuador has logged a request for the decision to be annulled.) Parada's first case was defending Argentina in the late 1990s against the French conglomerate Vivendi, which sued after the Argentine province of Tucuman stepped in to limit the price it charged people for water and wastewater services. Argentina eventually lost, and was ordered to pay the company more than $100m. Now, in his most high-profile case yet, Parada is part of the team defending El Salvador as it tries to fend off a multimillion-dollar suit lodged by a multinational mining company after the tiny Central American country refused to allow it to dig for gold."
Joseph Skues

Brown proposes big cuts to higher education - San Jose Mercury News - 0 views

www.mercurynews.com/...ci_17057898

brown proposes cuts college

shared by Joseph Skues on 10 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • As many as 350,000 students could be turned away in 2011-12 if Brown's proposal passes, he said.
  • 011 could be the first year tuition comprises a larger portion of the university's budget than state funds."This is a sad day for California," Yudof said in a written statement. "The crossing of this threshold transcends mere symbolism and should be profoundly disturbing to all Californians."
  • The average student would pay about $1,080 per year, still the nation's lowest fees by far.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Brown also proposed a 38-percent fee hike -- from $26 per unit to $36 -- at the community colleges, although he acknowledged that financial aid would cover the added cost for nearly half the 2.8 million or so students. The average student would pay about $1,080 per year, still the nation's lowest fees by far
  • Close to one-fifth of community-college students drop out after the third week
  • cut costs by counting students later than the third week of class,
  • As many as 350,000 students could be turned away in 2011-12 if Brown's proposal passes, he said.
  • he proposed cutbacks most likely will look much like those of two years ago, when UC imposed unpaid furloughs and shortened library hours, said Steve Boilard, higher-education chief for the state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office.
  • The proposed cutbacks most likely will look much like those of two years ago, when UC imposed unpaid furloughs and shortened library hours,
  • having more professors teach rather than conduct research.
Paul Merrell

Wall Street is Taking Over America's Pension Plans - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-wall-street-story-one-talking

banksters public-pension-funds

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • Coverage of the midterm elections has, understandably, focused on the shift in political power from Democrats toward Republicans. But behind the scenes, another major story has been playing out. Wall Street spent upwards of $300M to influence the election results. And a key part of its agenda has been a plan to move more and more of the $3 trillion dollars in unguarded government pension funds into privately managed, high-fee investments — a shift that may well constitute the biggest financial story of our generation that you’ve never heard of.
  • But Wall Street’s agenda goes beyond any one election cycle. It has been fighting to turn public pensions into private profits for quite some time, steering retirement nest eggs into investments that are complex, charge hefty fees, and that generate big profits for management firms. And it has been succeeding. Of the $3 trillion in public assets currently in pension funds throughout the country, almost a quarter of that has already found its way into so-called “alternative investments” like hedge funds, private equity and real estate. That translates to roughly $660 billion of public money now under private management, invested in assets that are often arcane and opaque but that offer high management and placement fees to Wall Street financiers.
  • If all this wasn’t egregious enough, a huge preponderance of evidence suggests that this massive transfer of wealth from public to private management is having a corrupting effect on the political process. Sirota’s reporting seems to have particularly touched a nerve with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who has described Sirota as “a hack” and “not a journalist”. It’s not difficult to see why Christie isn’t a fan. Earlier this year, Sirota wrote that… 43 financial firms managing New Jersey pension money have spent a total of $11.6 million on contributions to New Jersey politicians… Many of those donations have gone directly to Gov. Christie’s election campaign … Additionally, many of the contributions came either just before or just after the Christie administration awarded the firms multi-million-dollar pension management contracts. Those 43 firms ended up managing around $14 billion dollars of state pension money, a take that serves as a timeless reminder of the great rewards that can derive from catering to the needs of receptive politicians.
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  • Christie’s tenure as New Jersey governor has been particularly emblematic of the extent of Wall Street’s reach into the public sphere. Among other things, he installed a private equity investor as the state’s pension overseer and publicly lied about the manner in which pension fund investment decisions are made. Ironically enough, he’s defended these practices in his own state while criticizing Democrats for utilizing them through his position as chair of the Republican Governor’s Association.
Paul Merrell

One of the World's Safest Places for Banking Is Rocked by Scandals - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...lm-banking-industry-1528092559

banksters Australia criminal-prosecution

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Commonwealth Bank of Australia ’s oversight of money transfers from that account to Lebanon last year was among many failures cited by the Australian federal government’s financial intelligence agency in its nearly US$530 million fine of the bank on Monday. If approved, the fine—meant to settle a lawsuit brought by the agency and founded on breaches of the country’s Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Act—would be the largest corporate civil penalty ever paid in Australia. Australia’s banks have long held a reputation for being among the world’s safest for investors. But a series of scandals over the past year has rocked the country’s top financial institutions. Commonwealth Bank has seen separate penalties for conduct in alleged interest-rate rigging and bad governance. On Friday, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd. said it would defend against criminal prosecution for alleged cartel conduct in a 2015 capital raising. A public inquiry into the sector, launched last autumn by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has heard accusations against Australia’s leading financial firms of inappropriate lending, collecting fees from dead customers for financial advice and lying to regulators. The tribunal has already claimed several big scalps. Beginning in late April, the chief executive, chairman and several board members at Australia’s largest wealth management company, AMP Ltd. , resigned after the company admitted it had misled regulators and been slow to compensate customers for fees charged for financial advice it didn’t deliver.
  • Disoriented investors now fear tighter regulation of a sector that has reliably returned a run of record annual underlying profits and solid dividends. The government has already beefed up penalties for corporate wrongdoing, including prison time, and strengthened the corporate regulator’s investigative powers. Commonwealth Bank shares recently tumbled to 5-year lows.
  • Those mistakes included not assessing the inherent risk of so-called intelligent deposit machines before mid-2015. Commonwealth Bank also didn’t limit the number of times that customers could deposit money each day, or create reports on thousands of deposits of A$10,000 (US$7,569) or more at the machines. These flaws created an architecture that money launderers could exploit, the financial-intelligence agency said.
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  • ANZ last month said it would scrap sales-based bonuses for financial planners while paying compensation in about 9,000 cases where it had provided inappropriate advice. And the banking industry has agreed to binding changes around conduct, including tightened background checks for employees and improved transparency around fees.
Gary Edwards

Operation Sleeping Giant: "Breaking The Silver Manipulation Barrier" by Brandon Smith - 0 views

operationsleepinggiant.com

Brandon-Smith GOLD Sir-Charles SiLVER Currency-basket Priced-in-Gold

shared by Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 11 Jan 13
     
    Written in August of 2011, this article continues to be an important guideline to understanding Gold and Silver prices, and the efforts of Banksters to manipulate these competing forms of monetary exchange to the US Dollar.  Good stuff.  And i did write Brandon a proposal for a mobile application connecting PayPal to the Storage Vault Depositories he sites in this article (based on the GOLD app design i provided to Tino in 2008). excerpt: China Competes With The Comex As of this summer China now has its own Comex, called the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange. The exchange opened for trade on May 18th (the CME's incredible margin hikes in silver began only weeks before, which suggests to me that they were trying to preempt the positive effects the HKMEX would have on metals). The HKMEX moved into action only five months after the Chinese Pan American Gold Exchange was instituted. The exchange issues its own ETF's in gold and silver. These securities, though, are not based on leverage or derivatives like most Comex based ETFs. The bottom line; the Comex global monopoly on commodities trade is over: How To Break The Barrier Methods for smaller investors to fight back against the market manipulations of large banks have been sparse, and often limited to desperate appeals to the CFTC and the government, who are bought and paid for, and who have no intention of ever stopping global financiers from dragging their unwashed behinds across the face of the planet. Relying on bureaucrats to mend the wounds they themselves encouraged or inflicted is foolhardy, to say the least. Top down solutions are NOT an option now, and I'm not sure if they ever were. This leaves us with only one other choice; to fix the problem with our own hands from the bottom up. This is, of course, easier said than done… In the case of silver manipulation, what we are faced with is an unprecedented effort to subvert and suppress an alternative system so that the mainstream system can continue to
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