It is just incredible how quick NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is to throw a temper tantrum whenever anyone dares question his crusade to rid the nation of its remaining civil liberties. In this case, his targets are those that criticize his feudalistic and extraordinarily racist “stop and frisk policy,” which I highlighted last October in my post: The Hunted and the Hated: An Inside Look at the NYPD’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy.
So now that the policy is being questioned in court, Bloomberg has once again transitioned into his usual role as a petulant child. Scott Shackford at Reason.com did a great job covering his latest nonsensical outburst. First he quotes the New York Times:
Speaking at Police Headquarters, Mr. Bloomberg took a swipe at those suing the department in Federal District Court in Manhattan over the stop -and-frisk practices, but he saved his strongest words for legislators and mayoral candidates “playing politics with people’s lives.”
“Look at what’s happened in Boston,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Remember what happened here on 9/11. Remember all of those who’ve been killed by gun violence and the families they left behind.”
Remember Boston! Remember 9/11! This guy has zero shame. All he does is immediately exploit national tragedies to advance his surveillance state agenda.
This article from the New York Times further solidifies the notion that we clearly have no idea what we are doing anywhere, whether it relates to the domestic economy or foreign policy. While the American citizenry remains unemployed and increasingly on food stamps, we are paying tens of millions of dollars to Afghan warlords and drug dealers so that they can build their “dream homes.” My favorite line is: “the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.” Makes sense. We are simply exporting our domestic economic model abroad. From the New York Times:
KABUL, Afghanistan — For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”
Kind of like Corzine at MF Global!
Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.
Payments ordinarily range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, the officials said, though none could provide exact figures.The money is used to cover a slew of off-the-books expenses, like paying off lawmakers or underwriting delicate diplomatic trips or informal negotiations.
It is not clear that the United States is getting what it pays for. Mr. Karzai’s willingness to defy the United States — and the Iranians, for that matter — on an array of issues seems to have only grown as the cash has piled up. Instead of securing his good graces, the payments may well illustrate the opposite: Mr. Karzai is seemingly unable to be bought.
But the C.I.A. has continued to pay, believing it needs Mr. Karzai’s ear to run its clandestine war against Al Qaeda and its allies, according to American and Afghan officials.
For those of you unaware, James Goodale was chief counsel to the New York Times when they published the Pentagon Papers. In this excellent interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, he warns all Americans, in particular journalists, about the significance of the U.S. government’s prosecution of Wikileaks. He notes that what Wikileaks did was no different from what the New York Times did back in the 1970′s. They broke news that the powerful didn’t want exposed. That is the heart and soul of journalism, and if that is criminalized, so will be the profession of journalism itself. It’s a full on attack against free speech. From the CJR:
James Goodale has a message for journalists: Wake up. In his new book, Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 2013), Goodale, chief counsel to The New York Times when its editors published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, argues that President Obama is worse for press freedom than former President Richard Nixon was.
The Obama administration has prosecuted more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, a course critics say is overly aggressive. Former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in a March op-ed that the administration “has a particular, chilling intolerance” for those who leak. If the Obama administration indicts WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act, Goodale argues, the president will have succeeded where Nixon failed by using the act to “end-run” the First Amendment.
Could you talk a bit about President Obama’s approach to classified information and press freedom?
Antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon. He thinks that anyone who leaks is a spy! I mean, it’s cuckoo.
Well, I think it’s very much the same thing. We have a leak of classified information. And by the way — you’ve got to remember [Bradley] Manning’s the leaker. Everyone says Assange is a leaker. He’s not a leaker. He’s the person who gets the information.
“Complaints that active military personnel and National Guard members were losing their homes while deployed in war zones set off national outrage and prompted Congressional hearings in 2011. The case of Sgt. James B. Hurley, a disabled veteran whose home outside Hartford, Mich., was sold two months before he returned from Iraq, dragged through the courts for years, highlighting the devastating effect of foreclosures.”
The above is part of a very depressing theme I have covered in the past. Most recently in my piece from last November titled: Big American Banks Particularly Enjoy Ripping off Active Duty U.S. Soldiers. Today’s post follows up on that one and what we find; unsurprisingly, is that the more you peer behind the curtain, the more filthy the whole thing becomes. That’s precisely why the oligarchs don’t want anyone to peer behind the curtain for too long. From the New York Times:
The nation’s biggest banks wrongfully foreclosed on more than 700 military members during the housing crisis and seized homes from roughly two dozen other borrowers who were current on their mortgage payments, findings that eclipse earlier estimates of the improper evictions.
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo uncovered the foreclosures while analyzing mortgages as part of a multibillion-dollar settlement deal with federal authorities, according to people with direct knowledge of the findings. In January, regulators ordered the banks to identify military members and other borrowers who were evicted in violation of federal law.
The analysis, which was turned over to regulators in recent days, provides the first detailed glimpse into the extent of wrongful foreclosures amid the collapse of the housing market. While lenders previously acknowledged that they relied on faulty documents to push through foreclosures, the banks claimed borrowers were rarely evicted by mistake, including military personnel protected by federal law.
If you thought the TBTF banks couldn’t stoop any lower, think again. If this doesn’t prove without a shadow of a doubt that the more you coddle and bailout the big banks, the more brazen, criminal and out of control they become. I guess entering the slumlord business and running the food stamp program just wasn’t good enough. In their latest scheme, we find that JP Morgan (of course), Bank of America and Wells Fargo (Uncle Warren’s pet) are at the center of what can only be called a global loan-sharking business that prays on destitute American citizens. Basically, the way the scam works is payday lenders set up shop overseas in locations such as Granada, Belize or the Isle of Man in order to avoid various state laws against payday loans. The key link in the chain are the TBTF crony banks who process the loans and facilitate the interest charges, which can be well over 500%. So what’s in it for the banks? Huge fees of course. Absolutely disgusting, but par for the course for these guys. From the New York Times:
Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent.
With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide caps on interest rates.
While the banks, which include giants like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, do not make the loans, they are a critical link for the lenders, enabling the lenders to withdraw payments automatically from borrowers’ bank accounts, even in states where the loans are banned entirely. In some cases, the banks allow lenders to tap checking accounts even after the customers have begged them to stop the withdrawals.
For the banks, it can be a lucrative partnership. At first blush, processing automatic withdrawals hardly seems like a source of profit. But many customers are already on shaky financial footing. The withdrawals often set off a cascade of fees from problems like overdrafts.
Some state and federal authorities say the banks’ role in enabling the lenders has frustrated government efforts to shield people from predatory loans— an issue that gained urgency after reckless mortgage lending helped precipitate the 2008 financial crisis.
As much as any event in recent years that epitomizes America’s descent into a decrepit gulag state in which doing the right thing and building a healthy and productive culture takes a back seat to money and profits at all costs, plastering the name of a for-profit prison company on a new football stadium passes the test. I guess for a country that has 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the world’s prisoners, and that provides favorable tax breaks for private prisons, this is just the natural progression of things. Hey, at least the stock market is up! Move over religion, equities are the new opiate of the masses.
From Businessweek:
The GEO Group (GEO) is a for-profit prison company based in Boca Raton, Fla., that calls itself “the world’s leading provider of correctional and detention management and community reentry services to federal, state and local government agencies.” It can also call itself the world’s leading provider of Florida Atlantic University Owls football, having paid $6 million to put its name on the school’s stadium.
The deal, as the New York Times points out, is unusual for a sponsorship space that’s normally reserved for soft drinks, airlines, and banks. The GEO Group’s customers are governments, not consumers. And it’s a company whose publicity strategy normally involves staying quiet. (As when, in 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU National Prison Project alleged in a class action lawsuit that a youth detention center GEO Group used to operate in Mississippi was home to “rampant contraband brought in by guards, sex between female guards and male inmates, inadequate medical care, prisoners held inhumanely in isolation, guards brutalizing inmates and inmate-on-inmate violence that was so brutal it led to brain damage.”)
As long as the pigskin keeps flying, and the $70 million that Florida Atlantic University spent building the stadium doesn’t go to waste, who cares? After all: This. Is. America.
This might be the best economic stimulus that could ever come to France. The only shame of it all is that they waited until after France went “totally bankrupt.” All we need now is for all Central Bankers globally to go on a permanent strike so that the rest of us can rebuild the society they destroyed. From the New York Times:
PARIS — The French central bank is going on strike.
More than 1,500 employees were demonstrating Tuesday in Paris, union officials said, in a protest against a restructuring of the Banque de France that is expected to result in the loss of about 2,500 jobs by 2020. The bank currently employs around 13,000 full-time workers.
I guess now we know the answer to the question: How many Central Planners does it take to bankrupt France? 13,000
I believe that election day 2012 will go down in U.S. history as an extremely important event. No, not because in its national apathy the citizens re-elected a crony capitalist puppet as President. Rather, because it was the day when two states overwhelmingly rejected the Federal Prohibition on marijuana. Of course, I am referring to Amendment 64 in Colorado and Initiative 502 in Washington State, which legalize pot for recreational use.
Upon its passage, I wrote a piece titled: Colorado Legalizes Marijuana: Your Move Eric Holder. I knew right away that the Federales would not be pleased by this law. I also knew that, contrary to popular myth, Obama isn’t “liberal” in any sense of the word and in fact he has demonstrated highly authoritarian characteristics throughout his Presidency and an uncanny willingness to lie repeatedly. So I assumed his reaction would be aggressive, because for him this issue isn’t about marijuana, but rather Federal (his own) power versus the power of his “subjects.”
We learn from the New York Times that the administration is indeed looking to get tough:
WASHINGTON — Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.
Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response.
The Obama administration declined to comment on the deliberations, but pointed to a statement the Justice Department issued on Wednesday — the day before the initiative took effect in Washington — in the name of the United States attorney in Seattle, Jenny A. Durkan. She warned Washington residents that the drug remained illegal.
So what are the Federales considering?
One option is for federal prosecutors to bring some cases against low-level marijuana users of the sort they until now have rarely bothered with, waiting for a defendant to make a motion to dismiss the case because the drug is now legal in that state.
A more aggressive option is for the Justice Department to file lawsuits against the states to prevent them from setting up systems to regulate and tax marijuana, as the initiatives contemplated.
Another potential avenue would be to cut off federal grants to the states unless their legislatures restored anti-marijuana laws, said Gregory Katsas, who led the civil division of the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration.
This is going to be an incredible drama to watch unfold, and in many ways I wouldn’t mind seeing Obama get aggressive on this issue because it will be such a huge political blunder. Not only was the vote overwhelming in favor of legalization in my state of Colorado (55% voted yes and it received more votes that Obama did in the state), but a very high percentage of Democrats support legalization and does he really want to start off his second term by marginalizing the remaining supporters he hasn’t already as a result of his horrible track record on civil liberties, banker bailouts and aggressive foreign policy? It’s not just Democrats though. A Rasmussen poll in May showed that 56% of those surveyed nationwide were in favor of legalization. Obama would just be fighting the inevitably culturally, protecting Mexican drug cartel profits and in the end just look like a fool.
Even more than a States rights versus Federal power issue, this is about democracy versus authoritarianism. Obama pushing back hard on the will of the people will only further expose the sham that is his Presidency for more to see.
I also discussed this issue on my recent appearance of Capital Account, which you can watch here.
A very sad article from the New York Times, but I can’t say I’m really surprised. In the ultimate irony, in many cases throughout America it is actually parents that are forced to move in with their kids due to the piles of student loans taken out on their behalf. We are officially a nation of unemployed debt slaves. Aren’t you glad we bailed out Wall Street?
From the New York Times:
It has been six years since Ms. Fitzgerald — broke, unemployed and in default on the $18,000 in loans she took out for Jenni’s college education — became a boomerang mom, moving into her daughter’s townhouse apartment in Hingham, Mass.
In the first three months of this year, the number of borrowers of student loans age 60 and older was 2.2 million, a figure that has tripled since 2005. That makes them the fastest-growing age group for college debt. All told, those borrowers owed $43 billion, up from $8 billion seven years ago, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Almost 10 percent of the borrowers over 60 were at least 90 days delinquent on their payments during the first quarter of 2012, compared with 6 percent in 2005. And more and more of those with unpaid federal student debt are losing a portion of their Social Security benefits to the government — nearly 119,000 through September, compared with 60,000 for all of 2007 and 23,996 in 2001, according to the Treasury Department’s Financial Management Service.
The consequences of such debt can be dire because borrowers over 60 have less time — and fewer opportunities — than younger borrowers to get their financial lives back on track. Some, like Ms. Fitzgerald, are forced to move in with their children. Others face an unexpectedly pinched retirement. Still others have gone into bankruptcy, after using all their assets to try to pay the student debt, which is difficult to discharge under any circumstances.
I don’t know how much abuse people will take before they start fighting back. We’ll find out in the coming years.
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired Magazine, has decided to leave in order to focus on the drone company that he has been developing. This is just another really sad sign of the times and a reflection of what I call the “ghetto economy” that dominates the U.S. landscape today. Such an economy centers around financial ponzi schemes created by banksters, political corruption, war-profiteering, private prisons and the surveillance state.
From the New York Times:
Mr. Anderson, who joined Wired in 2001, said on Friday that he would leave by the end of the year to work full time on running his start-up, 3D Robotics, which is based in San Diego. According to the company’s Web site, it designs personal drones for private customers.
Mr. Anderson said he used a drone to check out the Google campus. Drones, he said, “don’t get bored. They don’t charge overtime. They’re not unionized.”
