How the CIA Enriches Warlords, Drug Dealers and the Taliban in Afghanistan

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.

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James Goodale: “Obama Worse than Nixon” on Press Freedom

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.

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More Evidence Emerges of Big Banks Abusing American Military Families

“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.”

– From the recent New York Times article: Banks Find More Wrongful Foreclosures Among Military Members

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.

These four banks just keep popping up in criminal schemes don’t they?

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.

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TBTF Banks Enter Payday Loan Business with 500% Interest Rates

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.

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America in 2013: Florida Football Stadium Named After a Private Prison Company

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 … Read more

French Central Bank Workers Go ON STRIKE

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 … Read more

Is Obama Close to Waging War on Legalized Pot?

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 … Read more

Welcome to the New America: Indebted “Boomerang Parents” Move in with Their Children

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 … Read more

Wired Magazine Editor Steps Down to Focus on Drone Company

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 … Read more

Greek Journalist Issued Arrest Warrant After Publishing Names of Bureaucrats with Swiss Accounts

Kostas Vaxevanis, one of Greece’s most famous investigative journalists, has been issued an arrest warrant for daring to publish a list of high-profile Greeks with Swiss bank accounts; a list that includes “a former Greek culture minister, several employees of the Finance Ministry and a number of business leaders.”  This is very similar to what … Read more