Skip to main content

Home/ Socialism and the End of the American Dream/ Group items tagged fees

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Gary Edwards

Secret White House Email Accounts Uncover IRS-Obama Smoking Gun : palookavillepost.com - 0 views

  • During an investigation of President Barack Hussein Obama’s political appointees and White House aides, FBI agents discovered secret government email accounts they say were used as primary means for Obama’s staff to interact with IRS officials for day-to-day business.
  • Investigators became curious about the possibility of such accounts after Congress requested all emails from the White House regarding the Benghazi, IRS and other scandals, and the White House could only produce a handful of emails that discussed those topics.
  • “We had one of our hackers get into a White House intern’s computer, and that’s where we located a slew of private email accounts not associated with Federal government accounts,” said a spokesman for the powerful federal police agency.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Emails sent to people outside of the secret network of White House email accounts were programmed to automatically be deleted five minutes after opening the message, just like on Mission Impossible. This explains the absence of White House emails received by IRS officials.
  • “The content of the emails is still being reviewed, but it is clear that people inside the White House knew about the IRS targeting conservatives, and that somebody with the nickname “Basketball Jones” was the person who told American forces to stand down during the attacks in Benghazi.”
  • “The White House tried to cover their tracks by saying that former IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman visited the White House 157 times, and that they never used email to communicate,” said the FBI spokesman.
  • Only a few of the emails have been reviewed, but already several of them indicate that President Obama not only knew about the scheme, but he himself ordered the IRS to flood the Tea Party with paperwork and fees.
  • Here is one transcript of a hidden email from an unknown White House aide in April, 2011:
  • “Hey Shulman… What’s up?… Don’t forget BJ(Basketball Jones) wants you to kick up the fees on anyone with Tea Party or Conservative in their names… try to see if you can make them hire expensive tax attorneys too… bog them down with paperwork so they can’t campaign for milk boy(Mitt Romney) or Ru Paul(Ron Paul)… sorry you missed the Easter Egg Hunt… maybe next year… I’d invite you to stay in the Lincoln bedroom but that costs real money… send me a report on how many Tea Party groups quit because of being jerked around…ASAP… Chow!”
  •  
    Although this article has zero credibility and even less reference checking, everyone in America knows that Obama ordered the IRS hit on Tea Party Patriots, Conservatives and Jewish Homeland organizations.  That the IRS admits to violating the Constitutional civil rights of tens of millions of law abviding Americans, and did so in ways that only benefit the Obama re-election campaign is proof enough for anyone who loves liberty.
Gary Edwards

Liberal Activists Worked With AGs to Target Conservatives - 0 views

  • violate “constitutionally protected rights of freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process of law and constitute the common law tort of abuse of process.”
  • ExxonMobil also alleges that Walker’s delegation of his prosecutorial power to a private law firm “likely on a contingency-fee basis” violates basic “due process of law and fundamental fairness,” particularly because that same law firm has “pursued a bitterly contested and contentious litigation in an unrelated lawsuit against ExxonMobil … which could result in a substantial fee award if Cohen Milstein’s client were to prevail.”
  • That raises “substantial doubts about whether that firm should be permitted to serve as the ‘disinterested prosecutor’ whose impartiality is demanded by law and expected by the public.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • ExxonMobil asks the Texas court to declare that the “issuance and mailing of the subpoena” violates various provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law, and the Texas Constitution.
  • . According to The Washington Free Beacon, “a small coalition of prominent climate change activists and political operatives” met on Jan. 8 in a closed door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in Manhattan. Their agenda: taking down oil giant ExxonMobil through a coordinated campaign of legal action, divestment efforts, and political pressure.”
  • A copy of the agenda from that meeting states that two of the common goals of these activists are to “establish in public’s mind [sic.] that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm” and to “delegitimize them as a political actor.” Part of the discussion of their grand strategy was how to include “industry associations, scientists and front groups” in their targeting. And at the top of their list for “legal actions & related campaigns” was state “AGs.”
  • That last goal was apparently put into action. According to Fox News, a series of emails obtained by the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute showed communications between some of these same anti-fossil fuel activists and the attorneys general that are part of this “Green” coalition against climate change dissenters.
  • Some of them secretly briefed state attorneys general before their March press conference on arguments they could present to justify “climate change litigation” and the “imperative of taking action now.” The attorneys general and their staff tried to hide this discussion and coordination with the activists by “using a ‘Common Interest Agreement’… [that] sought to protect as privileged the discussions about defending President Obama’s controversial global warming rules, and going after political opponents using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.”
  • Some state attorneys general have criticized the dangerous and misguided efforts of their inquisitorial peers. As Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry correctly states, they are using “prosecutorial weapons to intimidate critics, silence free speech, or chill the robust exchange of ideas” about a public policy issue. And it is just as malevolent as the burning of books in the society depicted by Bradbury in “Fahrenheit 451.”
  •  
    "In Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel, "Fahrenheit 451," a future society criminalizes the possession of books and burns them in order to suppress any dissenting ideas, opinions, and views. Today, we have state attorneys general trying to implement their own version of "Fahrenheit 451" to criminalize dissent over a disputed, unproven scientific theory: man-induced climate change. Recently, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, unleashed a subpoena on the Competitive Enterprise Institute seeking 10 years' worth of research and communications about climate change. It turns out that same Grand Inquisitor, Claude Walker, has hit ExxonMobil with a similar subpoena that seeks all of that company's communications, conversations, and correspondence with 88 conservative and libertarian think tanks, foundations, and universities, and 54 individual researchers, scientists, and writers."
Teresa Carter

Ultimate Option to Obtain Quick Financial Support from Lender! - 0 views

  •  
    With the help of 3 year loans anyone can obtain enough money support in collateral free manner against their low credit status. Lenders provide money with the range of $100 to $1000 without any upfront fees.
Jeremy Stanfords

Car Equity Loans- Avail Ultimate Fiscal Support For Short Time of Period! - 0 views

  •  
    With the help of car equity loans scheme you can acquire necessary amount and get rid of recurring expenditure. You can use the money for your personal; purpose without any hurdle from lender side. All services of this loan deal is available online so anyone can apply from anywhere anytime with no processing fee.
Paul Merrell

NSA Data Will Soon Be Used By Domestic Law Enforcement - 0 views

  • If you’re reading this, then I’m willing to bet that you’ve been called many different names throughout your life. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say they were names like kook, paranoid, conspiracy theorist, alarmist, insane, or gullible. And after this week, you can go by a new name: Vindicated. I’m of course talking about recent revelations from the NSA. Long before Edward Snowden came along, it was no secret that the NSA was spying on everyone without good cause. Anyone who believed that fact was called a conspiracy theorist, but their fears were eventually validated. These same people also understood that the NSA’s surveillance powers would never be used exclusively against terrorists and hostile governments. The power they have is just too tempting for any government. If various government agencies weren’t using the NSA’s surveillance apparatus to solve domestic crimes, it was only a matter of time before it was used for just that.
  • And again, they called us conspiracy theorists for believing that. And again, we were right all long. A while back, we noted a report showing that the “sneak-and-peek” provision of the Patriot Act that was alleged to be used only in national security and terrorism investigations has overwhelmingly been used in narcotics cases. Now the New York Times reports that National Security Agency data will be shared with other intelligence agencies like the FBI without first applying any screens for privacy. The ACLU of Massachusetts blog Privacy SOS explains why this is important: What does this rule change mean for you? In short, domestic law enforcement officials now have access to huge troves of American communications, obtained without warrants, that they can use to put people in cages. FBI agents don’t need to have any “national security” related reason to plug your name, email address, phone number, or other “selector” into the NSA’s gargantuan data trove. They can simply poke around in your private information in the course of totally routine investigations. And if they find something that suggests, say, involvement in illegal drug activity, they can send that information to local or state police. That means information the NSA collects for purposes of so-called “national security” will be used by police to lock up ordinary Americans for routine crimes.
  • Anybody who knows anything about how governments work, should not surprised. You can’t give them any kind of power, and expect them to use it responsibly. You can’t give them any stipulations. Eventually they’ll find a legal loophole to work around any limitations that have been placed on them. In other news, the Pentagon admitted this week that they’ve been deploying military drones over the United States for domestic surveillance purposes. Much like the NSA’s surveillance apparatus, we were assured that drones were for terrorists in faraway lands. Nothing so Orwellian would ever be used against ordinary American citizens at home. Yet here we are, with more to come.
  •  
    The Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a, provides in relevant part: "(a)(4) the term "record" means any item, collection, or grouping of information about an individual that is maintained by an agency, including, but not limited to, his education, financial transactions, medical history, and criminal or employment history and that contains his name, or the identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual, such as a finger or voice print or a photograph[.] ... "(b) Conditions of Disclosure.-No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be- ... "(7) to another agency or to an instrumentality of any governmental jurisdiction within or under the control of the United States for a civil or criminal law enforcement activity if the activity is authorized by law, and if the head of the agency or instrumentality has made a written request to the agency which maintains the record specifying the particular portion desired and the law enforcement activity for which the record is sought[.]" So a separate written request for each "portion" of any individual record that describes the "law enforcement activity for which the record is sought[.]" That doesn't sound like the contemplated unfettered access to bulk raw data. And it gets even better, with a right to sue for any violation, attorney fees and expenses, and a statutory minimum of $1,000 damages per violation just for winning the case.  
Gary Edwards

Mortgage Settlement Term Sheet: Bailout as Reward for Institutionalized Fraud... - 0 views

  •  
    Naked Capitalism continues their rant on the fraudulent and inexcusable Obama Foreclosure gift to the Banksters.  This article details the crimes being committed under the provisions of pooling and servicing agreements relating to a single payment default.  Incredible stuff. excerpt: Now do you see why servicers consistently report than when homeowners miss a payment or two, they proceed pretty much in a straight line to default? Once they miss a payment or start racking up extra charges that you are unaware of, borrowers descend into a designed-by-the-servicer escalating fee black hole, never to emerge.
Gary Edwards

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

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

The Credit Card Gravy Train » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views

  • You pay off your credit card balance every month, thinking you are taking advantage of the “interest-free grace period” and getting free credit. You may even use your credit card when you could have used cash, just to get the free frequent flier or cash-back rewards. But those popular features are misleading. Even when the balance is paid on time every month, credit card use imposes a huge hidden cost on users—hidden because the cost is deducted from what the merchant receives, then passed on to you in the form of higher prices. Visa and MasterCard charge merchants about 2% of the value of every credit card transaction, and American Express charges even more. That may not sound like much. But consider that for balances that are paid off monthly (meaning most of them), the banks make 2% or more on a loan averaging only about 25 days (depending on when in the month the charge was made and when in the grace period it was paid). Two percent interest for 25 days works out to a 33.5% return annually (1.02^(365/25) – 1), and that figure may be conservative. Merchant fees were originally designed as a way to avoid usury and Truth-in-Lending laws. Visa and MasterCard are independent entities, but they were set up by big Wall Street banks, and the card-issuing banks get about 80% of the fees. The annual returns not only fall in the usurious category, but they are returns on other people’s money – usually the borrower’s own money!  Here is how it works . . . .
Paul Merrell

Banks pushing for repeal of credit unions' federal tax exemption - Los Angeles Times - 0 views

  • Credit unions have been snatching customers from banks amid consumer frustration over rising fees and outrage over Wall Street's role in the financial crisis.Now banks are fighting back by trying to take away something vital to credit unions — their federal tax exemption.With fast-growing credit unions posing more formidable competition to banks, industry trade groups are pressing the White House and Congress to end a tax break that dates to the Great Depression. "Many tax-exempt credit unions have morphed from serving 'people of small means' to become full-service, financially sophisticated institutions," Frank Keating, president of the American Bankers Assn., wrote to President Obama last month."The time has come to abolish this exemption," Keating said in the letter, which was part of a blitz that included print and radio ads in the nation's capital.
  • Bankers long have complained the tax break is an unfair advantage for large credit unions. Now they see an opportunity to get rid of it as lawmakers begin work on a major overhaul of the tax code that is aimed at eliminating many corporate exemptions and lowering the overall tax rate.The exemption cost $1.6 billion this year in taxes avoided and would rise to $2.2 billion annually in 2018, according to Obama's proposed 2014 budget.In a 2010 report on tax reform, the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board said eliminating the exemption would raise $19 billion over 10 years and remove the credit unions' "competitive advantage relative to other financial institutions" in the tax code.Credit unions said the effort to take away their tax exemption was simply an attempt to stifle competition and remove one of the only checks on bank fees for consumers.And it comes as some in Congress are pushing to loosen regulations on credit unions so they can expand their business further, including legislation that would lift a cap on the amount of money they can lend to businesses.The tax exemption is crucial to credit unions, which by law can't raise capital through public stock offerings the way that banks can, said Fred R. Becker Jr., president of the National Assn. of Federal Credit Unions, a trade group with about 3,800 federally chartered members."They'll have to convert to banks, which is what the banks want," he said. "Then they'd have, for lack of a better term, a monopoly."
  •  
    So instead of competing on quality and service, banksters aim to eliminate the competition grown by disgruntled bankster customers. Unfortunately, corporate lobbying of government officials is exempt from the anti-trust laws, a consequence of (in my opinion, ill-considered) judicial recognition of a corporate First Amendment right of petition. So once again, we have legal fictions acquiring human rights. Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 4 Wheat. 518, 636 (1819) (Marshall, C. J.). ("A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of its creation confers upon it"). May a corporate charter permissibly bestow the rights of citizenship on an imaginary being? According to latter-day justices of the Supreme Court, corporations have First Amendment rights even if it doesn't say so in the corporate charter. See for example, Citizens United v. Federal Election Com'n, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010) (chilling effect on "people" used to justify finding a First Amendment right of wholly imaginary corporations). 
Paul Merrell

WASHINGTON: Americans' personal data shared with CIA, IRS, others in security probe | N... - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON — U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration.
  • The unprecedented creation of such a list and decision to disseminate it widely demonstrate the ease with which the federal government can collect and share Americans’ personal information, even when there’s no clear reason for doing so. The case comes to light amid revelations that the NSA, in an effort to track foreign terrorists, has for years been stockpiling the data of the daily telephone and Internet communications of tens of millions of ordinary Americans. Though nowhere near as massive as the NSA programs, the polygraph inquiry is another example of the federal government’s vast appetite for Americans’ personal information and the sweeping legal authority it wields in the name of national security. “This is increasingly happening – data is being collected by the federal government for one use and then being entirely repurposed for other uses and shared,” said Fred Cate, an Indiana University-Bloomington law professor who specializes in information privacy and national security. “Yet there is no constitutional protection for sharing data within the government.”
  • While the collection of the information likely passes constitutional muster, the federal agencies involved may have violated their own privacy policies by sharing the personal information of people who aren’t government employees, several legal experts agreed.
  •  
    The inter-agency sharing of information described in this article sounds like a straightforward violation of several different sections of the federal Privacy Act. That Act places severe restrictions on inter-agency sharing of information that includes personal identifiers of members of the public, including the requirement of notifying the victims when a violation is discovered. The Act also provides a private right of action for anyone whose rights under the Act are violated with a statutory minimum damages award of $1,500 plus attorney fees and expenses of litigation.   
Paul Merrell

Snowden document shows Canada set up spy posts for NSA - Politics - CBC News - 0 views

  • A top secret document retrieved by American whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals Canada has set up covert spying posts around the world and conducted espionage against trading partners at the request of the U.S. National Security Agency. The leaked NSA document being reported exclusively by CBC News reveals Canada is involved with the huge American intelligence agency in clandestine surveillance activities in “approximately 20 high-priority countries."
  • Sections of the document with the highest classification make it clear in some instances why American spymasters are particularly keen about enlisting their Canadian counterparts, the Communications Security Establishment Canada. "CSEC shares with the NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S," the document says. The briefing paper describes a "close co-operative relationship" between the NSA and its Canadian counterpart, the Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CSEC — a relationship "both sides would like to see expanded and strengthened. "The intelligence exchange with CSEC covers worldwide national and transnational targets."
  • The briefing notes make it clear that Canada plays a very robust role in intelligence-gathering around the world in a way that has won respect from its American equivalents.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The intimate Canada-U.S. electronic intelligence relationship dates back more than 60 years. Most recently, another Snowden document reported by CBC News showed the two agencies co-operated to allow the NSA to spy on the G20 summit of international leaders in Toronto in 2010. But what the latest secret document reveals for the first time is just how expansive Canada's international espionage activities have become.
  • The NSA document depicts CSEC as a sophisticated, capable and highly respected intelligence partner involved in all manner of joint spying missions, including setting up listening posts at the request of the Americans. "CSEC offers resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA," the document states.
  • Aside from compromising the actual intelligence operation, Wark says, an exposed spy mission can imperil Canada's other diplomatic operations — "the political contacts, the trade contacts, the generation of goodwill between the countries and any sense of co-operation." Wark says if a country feels targeted by a Canadian embassy, it can put everyone working there under a cloud of suspicion: “Are they really diplomats or are they spies?” As a result of those risks, Wark says, approval for CSEC to establish a covert spying post at the request of the NSA would have to come from the ministerial level of the Canadian government — or even from the prime minister himself.
  • Canada and the U.S. have long shared security intelligence with sister agencies in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand – the so-called "Five Eyes" partnership. But the latest secret Snowden missive shows CSEC and the NSA becoming physically intertwined. "Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees," the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa. It notes the NSA also supplies much of the computer hardware and software CSEC uses for encryption, decoding and other state-of-the-art essentials of electronic spying needed for "collection, processing and analytic efforts."
  • CSEC employs about 2,000 people, has an annual budget of roughly $450 million and will soon move into an architecturally spectacular new Ottawa headquarters costing Canadian taxpayers almost $1.2 billion. By comparison, the NSA employs an estimated 40,000 people plus thousands of private contractors, and spends over $40 billion a year NSA whistleblower Drake says the problem is that both CSEC and the NSA lack proper oversight, and without it, they have morphed into runaway surveillance. "There is a clear and compelling danger to democracy in Canada by virtue of how far these secret surveillance operations have gone."
  •  
    "'Co-operative efforts include the exchange of liaison officers and integrees,'the document reveals, a reference to CSEC operatives working inside the NSA, and vice-versa." And that fact raises potential U.S. Privacy Act issues. Under the Privacy Act, all U.S. agencies are prohibited from sharing information containing personal identifiers of U.S. citizens with any foreign government and requires that agencies make full disclosure to all persons  whose rights are thus violated. The Act also creates a cause of action for redress by the federal courts, with a minimum $1,500 damages plus attorney's fees and litigation expenses. Note that the other NSA documents show that NSA is sharing U.S. citizens' information that includes personal identifiers with Israeli intelligence. The NSA has been by another statute excused from compliance with some portions of the Privacy Act but not those discussed above.
Paul Merrell

Court Rebukes White House Over "Secret Law" - Secrecy News - 1 views

  • DC District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle yesterday ordered the Obama Administration to release a copy of an unclassified presidential directive, and she said the attempt to withhold it represented an improper exercise of “secret law.” The Obama White House has a “limitless” view of its authority to withhold presidential communications from the public, she wrote, but that view is wrong. “The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight– to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law’,” Judge Huvelle wrote in her December 17 opinion. “The Court finds equally troubling the government’s complementary suggestion that ‘effective’ governance requires that a President’s substantive and non-classified directives to Executive Branch agencies remain concealed from public scrutiny,” she wrote.
  • The directive in question, Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 6, “is a widely-publicized, non-classified Presidential Policy Directive on issues of foreign aid and development that has been distributed broadly within the Executive Branch and used by recipient agencies to guide decision-making,” the Judge noted. “Even though issued as a directive, the PPD-6 carries the force of law as policy guidance to be implemented by recipient agencies, and it is the functional equivalent of an Executive Order.” “Never before has a court had to consider whether the [presidential communications] privilege protects from disclosure under FOIA a final, non-classified, presidential directive.”
  • Several significant points emerge from this episode. First, President Obama’s declared commitment to “creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government” has not been internalized even by the President’s own staff. This latest case of “unbounded” secrecy cannot be blamed on the CIA or an overzealous Justice Department attorney. It is entirely an Obama White House production, based on a White House policy choice. Second, and relatedly, it has proved to be an error to expect the executive branch to unilaterally impose transparency on itself. To do so is to ignore, or to wish away, the Administration’s own conflicting interests in secrecy and disclosure.  Instead, it is the role of the other branches of government to check the executive and to compel appropriate disclosure.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Significantly, Judge Huvelle insisted on examining the document herself in camera instead of simply relying on the Administration’s characterization of the document.  Having done so, she found that it “is not ‘revelatory of the President’s deliberations’ such that its public disclosure would undermine future decision-making.” She criticized the government for “the unbounded nature” of its claim. “In the government’s view, it can shield from disclosure under FOIA any presidential communication, even those — like the PPD-6 — that carry the force of law, simply because the communication originated with the President…. The Court rejects the government’s limitless approach….”
  • An official Fact Sheet on PPD-6 (which has not yet been released) is available here. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently pursuing release of another presidential directive, the Bush Administration’s NSPD-54 on cyber security. In October, Judge Beryl Howell unexpectedly ruled that that directive was exempt from disclosure because, she said, it was not an “agency record” that would be subject to the FOIA.  Her opinion came as a surprise and was not persuasive to everyone. In a footnote in yesterday’s ruling, Judge Huvelle said that the arguments over the two directives were sufficiently distinguishable that “this Court need not decide if it will follow Judge Howell’s rationale”– suggesting that if pressed, she might not have done so.  Yesterday, EPIC filed a notice of its intent to appeal the decision.
  • DC District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle yesterday ordered the Obama Administration to release a copy of an unclassified presidential directive, and she said the attempt to withhold it represented an improper exercise of “secret law.” The Obama White House has a “limitless” view of its authority to withhold presidential communications from the public, she wrote, but that view is wrong. “The government appears to adopt the cavalier attitude that the President should be permitted to convey orders throughout the Executive Branch without public oversight– to engage in what is in effect governance by ‘secret law’,” Judge Huvelle wrote in her December 17 opinion. “The Court finds equally troubling the government’s complementary suggestion that ‘effective’ governance requires that a President’s substantive and non-classified directives to Executive Branch agencies remain concealed from public scrutiny,” she wrote.
  •  
    Outrageous. I read the court's opinion. This happened only because: [i] federal judges are reluctant to impose sanctions on government attorneys; and [ii] government attorneys know that. In all my years of legal practice, I read only one court opinion where an assistant U.S. attorney was sanctioned and instead of the normal sanction of paying the other side's attorney fees and expenses of litigation, the judge just awarded a $500 sanction. That is also why litigating against the Feds is such a chore; you spend half your time shooting down blatantly implausible arguments. That's far less of a problem when facing attorneys who are in private practice. But so much for Obama's "transparency" platform; this was the result of the Obama Administration itself asserting a preposterous privilege claim supported only by ridiculous arguments, no more than a delaying action.  
Paul Merrell

Wells Fargo charged with opening accounts without customers' permission - May. 5, 2015 - 0 views

  • Wells Fargo is accused of opening up accounts and credit cards in customers' names without their authorization. The accounts are being opened by Wells Fargo employees under pressure to meet unrealistic sales goals and quotas, according to the civil complaint filed by the Los Angeles City Attorney.
  • The complaint charges that bank employees opened new accounts for existing customers without their authorization, in order to meet sales quotas. The employees also allegedly transferred money from customers' authorized accounts to pay fees on the unauthorized accounts. When fees on unauthorized accounts went unpaid, some customers were placed into collection. Others had negative information placed on their credit reports as a result. The complaint, filed in California Superior Court on Monday, seeks a $2,500 fine for every unauthorized account, and seeks to have all of the money taken from customers returned. It did not estimate how much those penalties could cost the bank. Wells Fargo said it would "vigorously defend" itself from the suit. But the statement it issued did not deny or even address whether its employees opened unauthorized accounts as charged.
Paul Merrell

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons  :    Informat... - 0 views

  • All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where money has replaced the vote, where corporate lobbyists write legislation and the laws, where chronic unemployment and underemployment, along with inadequate public transportation, sever people in marginal communities from jobs, and where the courts are a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state, this demands a sustained, nationwide revolt. “Organizing boycotts, work stoppages inside prisons and the refusal by prisoners and their families to pay into the accounts of phone companies and commissary companies is the only weapon we have left,” said Amos Caley, who runs the Interfaith Prison Coalition, a group formed by prisoners, the formerly incarcerated, their families and religious leaders.
  • These boycotts, they said, will be directed against the private phone, money transfer and commissary companies, and against the dozens of corporations that exploit prison labor. The boycotts will target food and merchandise vendors, construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a host of other contractors that profit from mass incarceration. The movement will also call on institutions, especially churches and universities, to divest from corporations that use prison labor. The campaign, led by the Interfaith Prison Coalition, will include a call to pay all prisoners at least the prevailing minimum wage of the state in which they are held. (New Jersey’s minimum wage is $8.38 an hour.) Wages inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. A prisoner in New Jersey makes, on average, $1.20 for eight hours of work, or about $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour. Over a similar period, phone and commissary corporations have increased fees and charges often by more than 100 percent. There are nearly 40 states that allow private corporations to exploit prison labor. And prison administrators throughout the country are lobbying corporations that have sweatshops overseas, trying to lure them into the prisons with guarantees of even cheaper labor and a total absence of organizing or coordinated protest.
  • Corporations currently exploiting prison labor include Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, AutoZone, Bank of America, Bayer, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Caterpillar, Chevron, the former Chrysler Group, Costco Wholesale, John Deere, Eddie Bauer, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, Fruit of the Loom, GEICO, GlaxoSmithKline, Glaxo Wellcome, Hoffmann-La Roche, International Paper, JanSport, Johnson & Johnson, Kmart, Koch Industries, Mary Kay, McDonald’s, Merck, Microsoft, Motorola, Nintendo, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sarah Lee, Sears, Shell, Sprint, Starbucks, State Farm Insurance, United Airlines, UPS, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Wal-Mart and Wendy’s.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “Prisoner telephone rates in New Jersey are some of the highest in the country,” Caley said. “Global Tel Link charges prisoners and their families $4.95 for a 15-minute phone call, which is about two and a half times the national average for local inmate calling services.”
  • Prison phone services are a $1.2-billion-a-year industry. Prisoners outside New Jersey are charged by Global Tel Link, which makes about $500 million a year, as much as $17 for a 15-minute phone call. A call of that duration outside a prison would cost about $2. If a customer deposits $25 into a Global Tel Link phone account, he or she must pay an additional service charge of $6.95. And Global Tel Link is only one of several large corporations that exploit prisoners and their families. JPay is a corporation that deals in privatized money transfers to prisoners. It controls money transfers for about 70 percent of the prison population. The company charges families that put money into prisoners’ accounts additional service fees of as much as 45 percent. JPay generates more than $50 million a year in revenue. The Keefer Group, which controls prison commissaries in more than 800 public and private prisons, and which often charges prisoners double what items cost outside prison walls, makes $41 million a year in profit.
  • Prisons, to swell corporate profits, force prisoners to pay for basic items including shoes. Prisoners in New Jersey pay $45 for a pair of basic Reebok shoes—almost twice the average monthly wage. If a prisoner needs an insulated undergarment or an extra blanket to ward off the cold at night he must buy it. Packages from home, once permitted, have been banned to force prisoners to buy grossly overpriced items at the commissary or company-run store. Some states have begun to charge prisoners rent. This gouging is burying many prisoners and their families in crippling debt, debt that prisoners carry when they are released from prison. The United States has 2.3 million people in prison, 25 percent of the world’s prison population, although we are only 5 percent of the world’s population. We have increased our prison population by about 700 percent since 1970. Corporations control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. And corporate prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to corporate-run prisons. And slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
  • Vast sums are at stake. The for-profit prison industry is worth $70 billion. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs. And, as in the wider society, while members of a tiny, oligarchic corporate elite each are paid tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the workers who generate these profits live in misery.  “It is an abomination that prisoners are paid 22 cents an hour, $1.20 cents a day,” Larry Hamm told the Newark meeting. “Every prisoner should get the minimum wage of New Jersey, $8.38 per hour.”
  •  
    Why pay a liveable wage to American workers if you can get prison labor for less than market prices in Bangla Desh? The prison telephone racket has bothered me for many years. The FCC authorized no-limit telephone charges for prisoners and their families on the simplistic grounds of, "well, they prisoners who have reduced civil rights anyway. But it ignored that most prison phone calls are collect calls to families on the outside, who are not prisoners and still have their full civil rights. The for-profit prison industry is a prime example of not thinking things through before privatizing a formerly government function. Privatization creates a lobby for the industry, as Americans have learned all to well with the privatization of most Dept. of Defense work other than actual combat.   Already, for profit prison industries are showing up in state legislatures to demand longer prison sentences. They were the prime movers behind the "mandatory minimum sentence" movement, which has stuffed prisons to overflowing. 
Gary Edwards

Predatory lending with a smiley face; How tax payer subsidized "loan modification" prog... - 0 views

  •  
    They say California is a harbinger of the future. If so, we should all be thinking about possible safe havens. The article begins with a description of loan modification seminars attended by the same mortgage brokers whose predatory lending practices got us into this fix. At the seminars, these predators learn how to make even more money off of the exact same clients they pushed off the ledge. It's all about fees and high pressure churning techniques. With one very big difference: Obama is banking on tax payer funded "loan modifications" to help struggling homeowners. The ugly truth is that mortgage brokers are the real winners. Just like mortgage brokers, loan mod companies are under no obligation to act in borrowers' financial interests, short- or long-term. Under California's model contract, which brokers are encouraged to emulate in their dealings with borrowers, almost any change to a mortgage is an acceptable result, whether or not it saves a borrower money. And while the client has to accept the proposed deal in order for the company to get paid in full, the sales forces at these firms are veterans of pressure pitches to people in tough financial situations. Both Carlson and a spokesman for Mortgage Bailout Assistance indicate that their clients almost invariably take the offers they are given. The proverbial fox is helping the hens hold on to their coops, and not just in California. Seventeen states now have laws on the books effectively banning "foreclosure consultants," but most make an exception for mortgage brokers. As consumer complaints about fraudulent loan mod operations proliferate across the country, other government officials, including New York's City Council, are now following California's lead and exploring the creation of an official registry of mod brokers.
Gary Edwards

Everyone in Washington DC Knows that Obama is Ineligible for Office : Candian Free Press - 0 views

  •  
    Wow.  This issue isn't going to go away.  This summary sticks to the Obama birth issues, and stays out of the further complications raised by Obama's Indonesian citizenship that was never converted to American.  Nor does it tag Obama's problems of being officially registered as a recipient of foreign student aid!  Recently released records fully document that Barack Obama received college financial aid in the US as a 'foreign student from Indonesia'.  Records from Columbia and Harvard are not available.  But there is the troublesome issue that while an undergrad at Columbia, Obama and two of his Muslim pals obtained a travel visa to Indonesia and Pakistan.  At the the time, these visa's were not available to American Citizens!   excerpt:  Members from all three branches of the Federal government already know that Barack Hussein Obama is ineligible for the office of President. National leaders, to include members of the US Supreme Court, already know that Barack Hussein Obama is not a "natural born citizen" of the United States of America, and therefore, is ineligible for the office he currently holds. (See JB's new article on The Bottom Line on Natural Born Citizen) What they don't know is how long it will take for most Americans to figure it out, or what to do about it. The diversionary search for an authentic birth certificate is ongoing and Obama has now spent in excess of $2 million in legal fees to keep that search alive.
Gary Edwards

What Is Bitcoin - 0 views

  •  
    That GOLD! app for iOS and Android is looking pretty good :)  C'mon Tino.  Now is the time.  Link to Priced-in-gold (http://pricedingold.com) excerpt: You may be dreaming of a gold backed dollar, or just everyone carrying around clinking gold coins in their pockets, but a rising community has a different idea. It's called Bitcoin, and it's a peer-to-peer currency that can be used to exchange goods and services online, digital and otherwise, without fees. In order to get Bitcoins, you need to exchange other currencies for Bitcoins (like dollars, euros, or pounds) at places like Mt.Gox. You can also sell goods and services online for Bitcoins. Some examples of Bitcoin stores include online gaming credits, pet wear, and coffee (more examples here). OR, you can create a new 'block,' which is a series of transactions, and you will receive 50 bitcoins. This is very rare, however, and the value of creating a new block will decrease over time. The idea behind Bitcoin is that it is a peer-to-peer exchange system, with an established and predictable rate of currency production. The creation of bitcoins is restricted by an algorithm, so the currency's worth cannot be modified by any actor (banks, central banks, treasuries). Individuals are involved in "mining" for Bitcoins, but it is extremely costly and requires significant computing power. Bitcoins could theoretically act as a store of value in the event of further inflation and devaluation of the U.S. dollar or other currencies.
Gary Edwards

We The Stupid - Ann Barnhardt on the National Debt Ceiling SCAM - 0 views

  •  
    If your angry over the National Debt Ceiling Scam, you're not alone. Ann Barnhardt is fist pounding furious. And with good reason. This is going to be a long battle. One thing i do disagree with her on though is where Obama will borrow the money to fund the $2.4 Trillion debt increase. She's right that no country in the world has $2.4 Trillion to lend us. But the Banksters have plenty! Two weeks ago the GAO released the results of the first time ever inventory of the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel. They found that the FRBC had created $16.1 Trillion of our money between 2009 and 2010, and passed that money to member Banksters, international Bankster associates, and too-big-to-fail Wall Street gamblers; at near zero percent interest. Combined with the the US TARP bailout, and the AiG - Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac bailouts, the total cost of converting Bankster debt to USA Taxpayer debt tops out at over $23.4 Trillion. The Banksters are flush with dollars, but what are they going to invest in? It's said that the Federal Reserve owns somewhere between 70%- 80% of the US Treasury issued debt. The way this happens however is that the Federal Reserve first "lends" (at near 0%) created dollars to member Banksters. Then the Banksters purchase the Treasuries at 3.25% and up depending on the payout period per note. In effect, American Taxpayers get to borrow back their own money while paying the Banksters a hefty, risk free handling fee of at least 3.25%. So, with $16.1 Trillion sloshing around, and not much too invest in, the Banksters really need Obama to borrow $2.4 Trillion, and spend a whole lot more. At some point this ponzi scheme will collapse, but not today. Least ways not until the Banksters can launder that $16.1 Trillion freebi. My guess is that the Banksters would like to turn the $16.1 Trill into 3.25% bonds, and then into land, indentured tax obligations (inter-generational), and investments in debt free third world countries - where the
  •  
    "- where the game of new world order begins anew. Jaded, cynical, but very much awake and aware...... ~ge~" Sorry, Diigo truncated the comment but only for the Group "End of the American Dream" post. My bookmark actually has the entire comment. Very strange, and i think it's something that might be reported to Maggie. What i have found out is that if you use the diigo plug-in, your comments will be unexpectedly truncated. I've lost losts of stuff over the years. Then i switched to the Chrome plug-in "Share This". There is no truncation, except in the Group view of a post!!! So, the question for Maggie is, "Why are the Group comments to a bookmark unexpectedly truncated?"
Gary Edwards

How JP Morgan Took Over All Kentucky's Financial Services, And Why You Should Be Scared... - 0 views

  • Writing in response to the JP lawsuit on his Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi lamented that big banks were getting away with crimes that, when pulled off by blue-collar muscle outfits like the mob (and they are), result in lengthy jail sentences. Fraud on the part of JP Morgan and other corporate banks, he concluded, is “not going to stop until people start doing hard time for these crimes.”
  •  
    On July 1, JP Morgan Chase became the Commonwealth's bank. As the state's official depository, JP now receives all deposits, writes all checks and makes all wire transfers on the $12-15 billion that flow through Kentucky state government in the course of a fiscal year. It will cut payroll checks, receive federal and other funds earmarked for the state, and disburse educational or transportation or any other funds to their appropriate monetary endpoints. For its trouble, the bank will receive $1.3 million in state fees and the ability to re-lend idle state funds out to customers for private gain. Yes, you should be worried. JP's decade A global corporation with more than $2 trillion in assets and operations in 60 countries, JP Morgan Chase has been a major figure in the ongoing global financial crisis. As one of the largest private banks in the U.S., the bank made incredible amounts of money by underwriting many of the questionable loans (sub-prime, zero down, adjustable rate) that fueled the American housing bubble. It then made even more money by packaging hundreds of these shitty loans into a single "product," a mortgage backed security, which it sold like Twinkies to pious religious non-profits, filthy-rich hedge fund managers, municipal fire-fighters, retired auto-workers, and the like, each security effectively putting these groups on the hook-and not JP-for the shitty loans that it had helped create. When, inevitably, individual homeowners began to default on their loans, thereby triggering the stock market collapse of 2008, JP Morgan found a way to make money on that, too, by buying insurance (known as credit default swaps) on the shitty securities of shitty mortgages that it had sold to unwitting investors. For good measure, the U.S. government handed the corporation $25 billion in TARP funds, $30 billion in U.S. treasury backing to purchase bankrupt Bear Stearns (previously a global leader in mortgage backed securities), and the biggest chun
Paul Merrell

Ukraine's Made-in-USA Finance Minister | Consortiumnews - 0 views

  • Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, a former U.S. State Department officer who was granted Ukrainian citizenship only this week, headed a U.S. government-funded investment project for Ukraine that involved substantial insider dealings, including $1 million-plus fees to a management company that she also controlled. Jaresko served as president and chief executive officer of Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) with $150 million to spur business activity in Ukraine. She also was cofounder and managing partner of Horizon Capital which managed WNISEF’s investments at a rate of 2 to 2.5 percent of committed capital, fees exceeding $1 million in recent years, according to WNISEF’s 2012 annual report.
  • Based on the data from WNISEF’s 2012 annual report, it also appeared that the U.S. taxpayers had lost about one-third of their investment in WNISEF, with the fund’s balance at $98,074,030, compared to the initial U.S. government grant of $150 million. Given the collapsing Ukrainian economy since the Feb. 22 coup, the value of the fund is likely to have slipped even further. (Efforts to get more recent data from WNISEF’s and Horizon Capital’s Web sites were impossible Friday because the sites were down.) Beyond the long list of “related party transactions” in the annual report, there also have been vague allegations of improprieties involving Jaresko from one company insider, her ex-husband, Ihor Figlus. But his whistle-blowing was shut down by a court order issued at Jaresko’s insistence. John Helmer, a longtime foreign correspondent in Russia, disclosed the outlines of this dispute in an article examining Jaresko’s history as a recipient of U.S. AID’s largesse and how it enabled her to become an investment banker via WNISEF, Horizon Capital and Emerging Europe Growth Fund.
  • Helmer wrote: “Exactly what happened when Jaresko left the State Department to go into her government-paid business in Ukraine has been spelled out by her ex-husband in papers filed in the Chancery Court of Delaware in 2012 and 2013. … “Without Figlus and without the US Government, Jaresko would not have had an investment business in Ukraine. The money to finance the business, and their partnership stakes, turns out to have been loaned to Figlus and Jaresko from Washington.” According to Helmer’s article, Figlus had reviewed company records in 2011 and concluded that some loans were “improper,” but he lacked the money to investigate so he turned to Mark Rachkevych, a reporter for the Kyiv Post, and gave him information to investigate the propriety of the loans. “When Jaresko realized the beans were spilling, she sent Figlus a reminder that he had signed a non-disclosure agreement” and secured a temporary injunction in Delaware on behalf of Horizon Capital and EEGF to prevent Figlus from further revealing company secrets, Helmer wrote.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Jaresco, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Kiev after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has said that Western NIS Enterprise Fund was “funded by the U.S. government to invest in small and medium-sized businesses in Ukraine and Moldova – in essence, to ‘kick-start’ the private equity industry in the region.” While the ultimate success of that U.S.-funded endeavor may still be unknown, it is clear that the U.S. AID money did “kick-start” Jaresco’s career in equity investments and put her on the path that has now taken her to the job of Ukraine’s new finance minister. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko cited her experience in these investment fields to explain his unusual decision to bring in an American to run Ukraine’s finances and grant her citizenship.
  • The substantial U.S. government sum invested in Jaresco’s WNISEF-based equity fund also sheds new light on how it was possible for Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland to tally up U.S. spending on Ukraine since it became independent in 1991 and reach the astounding figure of “more than $5 billion,” which she announced to a meeting of U.S.-Ukrainian business leaders last December as she was pushing for “regime change” in Kiev. The figure was so high that it surprised some of Nuland’s State Department colleagues. Several months later – after a U.S.-backed coup had overthrown Yanukovych and pitched Ukraine into a nasty civil war – Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs Richard Stengel cited the $5 billion figure as “ludicrous” Russian disinformation after hearing the number on Russia’s RT network.
  • Stengel, a former Time magazine editor, didn’t seem to know that the figure had come from a fellow senior State Department official. Nuland’s “more than $5 billion” figure did seem high, even if one counted the many millions of dollars spent over the past couple of decades by U.S. AID (which puts its contributions to Ukraine at $1.8 billion) and the U.S.-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has financed hundreds of projects for supporting Ukrainian political activists, media operatives and non-governmental organizations. But if one looks at the $150 million largesse bestowed on Natalie Jaresco, you can begin to understand the old adage that a hundred million dollars here and a hundred million dollars there soon adds up to real money.
  •  
    The Ukraine coup government just keeps getting more and more absurdly corrupt. 
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 84 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page