Month: August 2015

Lois Lerner Emails Released – She Exclaimed: “Lincoln Should Have Let the South Go…”

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Remember Lois Lerner? How could you forget. She’s the former head of the IRS’ Exempted Organizations division who was caught using the agency to target Americans based on their political views.

Well we now have snippets from some of her email conversations, and it becomes crystal clear that she targeted conservatives because, well, she really hates conservatives. Clearly the type of person who should be placed in a position of governmental power.

From the Hill:

Lois Lerner, the central figure in the IRS targeting controversy, called Abraham Lincoln the country’s worst president in an email disclosed in a bipartisan Senate report, according to USA Today.

“Look my view is that Lincoln was our worst president not our best,” Lerner wrote in an email dated March 6, 2014.

Lerner, the former IRS director of Exempted Organizations, joked in one email that the 16th president should have just let the South secede, rather than fighting the Civil War.

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How the Policies of U.S. Ally Egyptian Dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Have Led to a Surge in ISIS Recruitment

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Oh ISIS. The latest existential enemy that we are supposed to relinquish all of our civil liberties in order to battle. The terror group that has everyone so afraid, yet no one asks where they came from, and why their ranks continue to grow.

Here at Liberty Blitzkrieg, we have asked those questions, and the clear answer is that ISIS arose out of the chaotic power vacuum created by the U.S. government’s unprovoked war in Iraq. But it’s worse than that. Far worse. Some of the biggest funders of ISIS from the very beginning, were represented by America’s Middle East “allies.” This is something I highlighted last year in the post: America’s Disastrous Foreign Policy – My Thoughts on Iraq. Here’s an excerpt:

But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.

“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”

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Video of the Day – Battle Royale as Rand Paul Spars with Chris Christie

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There’s nobody running for President under the GOP ticket that I could even consider supporting other than Rand Paul. Although I’ve become disillusioned with him as of late, particularly with the way his campaign is being managed, he did an excellent job defending the 4th Amendment in the Republican debate last night against the incredibly corrupt, neocon thug Chris Christie.

What’s so amusing about the exchange is that Christie couldn’t talk for one minute about NSA surveillance without lying. He stated that:

I was appointed U.S. attorney by President Bush on September 10th, 2001, and the world changed enormously the next day, and that happened in my state.

Now here’s the truth from EmptyWheel:

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Brazil’s President Has Approval Rating of 8%, Worst Since Military Dictatorship

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All is not well in Brazil. This is definitely something to keep an eye on:

From Business Insider:

Dilma Rousseff is now Brazil’s most unpopular democratically elected president since a military dictatorship ended in 1985, says a poll out Thursday that put her approval rating at eight percent.

Seventy-one percent of those questioned in the Datafolha survey said they disapprove of the way Rousseff is doing her job, up six points since June. Her approval rating is down from 10 percent.

And two-thirds would like to see her impeached.

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Video of the Day – Patrick Byrne Unveils tØ at the NASDAQ

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If you have any interest in how Bitcoin, fintech, and decentralized ledgers generally could disrupt trading and settlement of financial instruments on global markets, make sure to take the time to watch this video.

Fascinating stuff:

For related articles, see:

After Testing the Technology, NASDAQ Will Use Bitcoin Blockchain

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Giant New York Hedge Fund Och-Ziff Under Investigation For Bribery in $100 “Loan” to Zimbabwe Dictator Mugabe

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One of the most interesting articles I published last year, but one that failed to receive the attention it deserved, was related to a $100 million “loan” to Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator Robert Mugabe, in which Wall Street firms played a key role. The post was titled, The Bailout of Robert Mugabe – How Wall Street Money Led to Intimidation, Torture and Death in Zimbabwe. Here are a few excerpts:

Four days later, Camec announced it was using the money it raised to purchase a joint venture with the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp., or ZMDC, Mugabe’s state-owned mining company. The joint venture owned the platinum stakes on the Great Dyke that had been taken back just a few weeks earlier from Anglo American. The price included $5 million in cash; Camec issued shares to partners whose identities were shielded by a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands; and $100 million to Mugabe’s government. Camec said the $100 million was a cash loan “to comply with its contractual obligations to the government of Zimbabwe” for the platinum claims. It said the money would be repaid out of ZMDC’s share of future platinum earnings. Camec’s balance sheets for the period make clear that funding for the platinum rights came from the private transactions involving Och-Ziff.

The $100 million figure mentioned above that flowed directly to Zimbabwe’s brutal dictator Robert Mugabe was more than just a cash infusion to a corrupt dictator. Rather, it was a veritable political lifeline to a desperate and vulnerable despot. Facing defeat in the initial round of elections to the opposition, and with the nation’s currency hyper-inflating, the only thing he had at his disposal were valuable platinum assets that were at the time held by Anglo American Platinum. So Mugabe did what any desperate tyrant would do. He expropriated the assets from Anglo-American and immediately put them on the market to raise money to crush his opposition. Enter Wall Street.

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U.S. Government Enthusiastically Tweets About Arm Sales to the Brutal and Autocratic Egyptian Regime

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In case you’ve been living under a geopolitical rock for the last couple of years, you’d know that despite a brief period of time during which Egypt appeared headed toward a democratic form of government, it went from one brutal dictator to another. As was the case during Hosni Mubarak’s decades of rule, this is precisely how the U.S. government likes it. So much so, that U.S. officials are not only selling arms to the latest despot, General Abdelfattah al-Sisi, but they are actively bragging about it on Twitter.

Glenn Greenwald reports at the Intercept:

The Egyptian regime run by the despotic General Abdelfattah al-Sisi is one of the world’s most brutal and repressive. Last year, Human Rights Watch documented that that Egyptian “security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.” Just two months ago, the group warned that the abuses have “escalated,” and that Sisi, “governing by decree in the absence of an elected parliament, ha[s] provided near total impunity for security force abuses and issued a raft of laws that severely curtailed civil and political rights, effectively erasing the human rights gains of the 2011 uprising that ousted the longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.”

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TBTF Mega Banks Lowering Downpayments and Credit Standards to Keep High End Housing Market Going

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What do you do when even wealthy people begin to face an increasingly hard time purchasing a home in a vertical market completely disconnected from income trends? You reduce downpayments and lower credit standards, of course.

Where have we seen this story before…

From the Wall Street Journal:

The nation’s largest bank by assets plans to announce Wednesday that it is lowering the minimum credit score and down payment it requires for mortgages as big as $3 million.

The New York firm’s moves follow similar steps at Bank of AmericaCorp., Wells Fargo & Co. and other banks on requirements for “jumbo” mortgages—those that exceed $417,000 in most parts of the country or $625,500 in pricier markets. At the same time, some big banks are backing away from smaller loans where they see higher regulatory costs and litigation risks.

Guess it’s gonna be shipping container apartments for everyone else.

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Land of the Free – Crying 8-Year-Old with Disabilities Shackled in Handcuffs at Kentucky School

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In the lawsuit, joined by the Children’s Law Center, the ACLU accuses the sheriff’s department and Sumner of violating both federal and state laws that prohibit the forceful restraint of children unless the pupil is presenting an imminent and real threat to their own or someone else’s safety. The suit alleges that by being shackled for so long the child suffered pain and trauma that exacerbated his diagnosed conditions of ADHD and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the video, shot last November by a staff member of the public school in which the third grader was studying, Sumner can be seen applying the handcuffs around SR’s biceps as the boy’s wrists are too small to restrain. “You can do what we have asked you to do, or you can suffer the consequences,” the police officer tells the child.

– From the Guardian article: Kentucky Sheriff ‘Steadfastly’ Defends Officer who Handcuffed 8-Year-Old

Just in case you’re keeping score at home:

Number of U.S. bank executives in handcuffs: 0

Number of helpless children with mental disabilities in handcuffs: 1

More from the Guardian:

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Chart of the Day – Americans are NOT Happy

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Readers of this site don’t need me to tell you, but the following statistics from the Wall Street Journal prove that despite record stock prices and non-stop propaganda, fewer and fewer people are believing the hype.

We learn that:

On a benchmark measure of Americans’ unease, 65% of those surveyed said the country is on the wrong track. That is the highest level of unease since November 2014, and nears the levels seen at other historical moments of voter discontent.

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