the rule of law no longer exists in uhmurkah...,

PCR |  Bundy and militiamen, whose count varies from 15 to 150 in the presstitute media, have seized an Oregon office of the BLM as American liberty’s protest against the frame-up of the Hammonds on false charges. As I write the Oregon National Guard and FBI are on the way.

The militiamen have said that they are prepared to die for principles, and the rule of law is one of them. Of course, the presstitute media is making the militiamen into the lawbreakers—and even calling them terrorists—and not the federal government’s illegal prosecution of the Hammonds, whose crime was their refusal to sell their ranch to the government to be included in the Masher National Wildlife Refuge.

If there are only 15 militiamen, there is a good chance that they will all be killed, but if there are 150 armed militiamen prepared for a shootout, the outcome could be different.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of this report of the situation:https://www.superstation95.com/index.php/world/723 The resources required to verify the information in this account of how the government escalated a “crisis” out of the refusal of a family to bend is beyond the resources of this website. However, the story fits perfectly with everything Lawrence Stratton and I learned over the years that we prepared our book on how the law was lost. This account of the persecution of the Hammonds is the way government behaves when government has broken free of the rule of law.

I can attest with full confidence that the United States no longer has a rule of law. The USA is a lawless country. By that I do not mean what conservative Republicans mean, which is, if I understand them, that racial minorities violate law with something close to impunity.

What I mean is that only the mega-banks and the One Percent have legal protection, and that is because these people control the government. For everyone else law is a weapon in the hands of the government to be used against the American people.

The fact that the shield of law no longer exists for American citizens is why, according to US Department of Justice statistics, only 4 percent of federal felonies ever go to trial. Almost the entirety of federal felonies are settled by coerced plea bargains that force defendants to admit to crimes that they did not commit in order to avoid “expanded indictments” that, if presented to the typical stupid, trusting, gullible American “jury of their peers,” would lock them away for hundreds of years.

American justice is a joke. It does not exist. You can see this in the American prison population. “Freedom and Democracy” America not only has the largest percentage of its population in prison than any country on the planet, but also the largest number of prisoners.
If you consider that “authoritarian” China has four times the population of the United States but fewer prisoners, you understand that “authoritarian” China has a more protective rule of law than the United States.

Compared to “freedom and democracy America,” Russia has hardly anyone in prison. Yet, Washington and its media whores have defined the President of Russia as “the new Hitler.”

The only thing we can conclude from the facts is that the United States Government and those ignorant fools who worship it are evil incarnate.

oregon standoff far bigger than fifteen men in a wildlife refuge...,

WaPo |  They say the federal government stripped them of their land and resources. And they’re not alone.

The weekend occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon may seem like the ravings of a small group of armed activists, but it belongs to a much larger movement in the western United States. Lawmakers in at least 11 states have in recent years explored the possibility of taking back federal land in their own way: through their state legislatures.

Before this weekend’s incident, and before the Cliven Bundy confrontation in Nevada in 2014, there was Utah’s H.B. 148. In 2012, Utah passed that bill into law, requiring the federal government turn over the public lands within the state. The law carried little force — the end-of-2014 deadline for the transfer came and went — but it signified the start of a new chapter in the four-decade fight over Western land.

At the time, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) described it as a necessary step.

“This bill creates a mechanism to put the federal government on notice that Utah must be restored to its rightful place as a co-equal partner,” he said in a signing statement. “The federal government retaining control of two-thirds of our landmass was never in the bargain when we became a state, and it is indefensible 116 years later.”

Proponents of the movement say it’s about local control and taking back what rightly belongs to state residents.

Critics fear that reclaiming public land could become a financial burden for states and may be the first step toward the land being sold off or otherwise losing its protected status.

The fight itself stretches back to the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which confirmed the policy of federal retention of public lands. Since then, lawmakers throughout the West have pushed back against the lack of control over land within their borders, including during the famous “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s and 1980s — a movement that counted Ronald Reagan among its supporters.

mormon outlier cliven bundy has fourteen children genetically apt to bite the hand that feeds them...,

motherjones |  As one of the leaders of a band of armed, anti-government activists who have taken over a National Park Service building in Oregon, Ammon Bundy has denounced the "tyranny" of the federal government. And he has brought a new round of attention to the anti-government militia movement that in 2014 rallied behind his father, Cliven Bundy, when the elder Bundy and armed supporters confronted federal agents in Nevada. But not long ago, Ammon Bundy sought out help from the government he now decries and received a federal small-business loan guarantee.

Ammon Bundy runs a Phoenix-based company called Valet Fleet Services LLC, which specializes in repairing and maintaining fleets of semitrucks throughout Arizona. On April 15, 2010—Tax Day, as it happens—Bundy's business borrowed $530,000 through a Small Business Administration loan guarantee program. The available public record does not indicate what the loan was used for or whether it was repaid. The SBA website notes that this loan guarantee was issued under a program "to aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace." The government estimated that this subsidy could cost taxpayers $22,419. Bundy did not respond to an email request for comment about the SBA loan.

On Monday, ABC News reported that Bundy and the "militia members occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge set up a roadblock, and two armed members manned a guard tower that is usually used to spot wildfires." Bundy has vowed to occupy the site in Burns, Oregon, for years. He participated in that tense 2014 standoff near his father's ranch; at one point he was tased by federal law enforcement agents for kicking a police dog.

It's not clear what Bundy and his fellow anti-government protesters, who include his brother Ryan, are trying to achieve through their standoff at the wildlife refuge. In an interview posted on his family's Facebook page, Bundy said the group would leave when the federal government allows local ranchers to use their land the way they want to. But he didn't specify what that means.

The takeover began following a protest against a judge's decision to re-sentence an Oregon rancher and his son for arson. The two men admitted to starting blazes that grew out of control, but they maintained they had a right to light these fires to protect their land from invasive species. They have both already served prison time, but a judge determined their sentences were too short. The convicted ranchers have rejected Bundy's takeover of the refuge center, saying Bundy and his comrades do not speak for them. In a December 11 letter, Ammon Bundy and his supporters declared, "We hold compelling evidence that the U.S. Government abused the federal court system" in the case of the convicted ranchers.

banksters can print money but they can't print energy...,

aspo-usa |  “By our calculations it will require additional debt formation of $39 trillion over the next decade to keep petroleum production operating.  Where that funding will originate from, when it is very unlikely to ever be repaid, will be of tantamount importance.  It will take very strong-willed societies to make such sacrifices.  If those sacrifices are not made, the integrated global production system will have disappeared by 2026.  2016 will be witness to the beginning of this event with dramatically increasing closures and bankruptcies throughout the world’s petroleum industry.”  The Hill’s Group — “an association of consulting petroleum engineers and professional project managers”

In 2014, according to the CIA's World Factbook, the GWP [the sum of all Gross Domestic Products in the world] totalled approximately US$107.5 trillion in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), and around US$78.28 trillion in nominal terms.  Which means $39 Trillion over a 10 year period would be a huge fraction of GWP. And all the more huge if I'm right that the next leg down in the Greatest-Ever Depression will be much worse - and much longer-lived -
than the first leg was (the so-called Great Recession).

the fundamental truth that "the big short" was crafted to conceal

comstockfunds |  A reporter asked us about the prospects of the stock market if the Fed raises the Fed Funds rate, since at the time there was a strong possibility of a rise in the rate to around 25 basis points. We explained that, ***in our opinion, the ending of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and increase in Fed Funds will be a significant negative for the stock market. The reporter asked why this is a negative since many times when the Fed raised rates in the past, the stock market also rose. We explained that the difference between the Fed raising rates in the past and today is that raising rates now has a lot more to overcome than in the past. We then explained the difference.***

[big snip]

We believe strongly that the Fed will be to blame for the central bank bubble we find ourselves immersed in presently.  After all, it was the Fed (under Greenspan) that missed the dot com valuations, and it was the Fed that lowered rates to 1% in June of 2003 that brought on the housing bubble with virtually no discipline of the banks and other mortgage lenders. When the credit markets and housing markets imploded in 2007-2008, driving the U.S. into the “great recession”, the Fed resorted to whatever it took to save our economy from collapsing into another depression. As stated previously, the measures the Fed took in the “central bank bubble” and inspired other central bankers to follow our lead (like QE and dramatic increases in the balance sheet) could be worse than the dot com bubble and housing bubble combined.  When this breaks there will be no shortage of business school textbooks about the inter-relationships between these three bubbles.

Another reason we are skeptical about the U.S. economy avoiding a recession in 2016 is because of the [stock market] breadth being as weak as it was in 2015. The top 10 companies in the S&P 500 accounted for virtually all the gains, but were overwhelmed by the 490 stocks that accounted for the decline in the index. This is also true about the number of stocks in the S&P 500 above the 10 day, 150 day and 200 day moving averages. We are also very concerned about the unsustainable path of the entitlements in our country. We have to elect the politicians who can get us on a sustainable path for the promises we made for the Affordable Care Act, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid by increasing the retirement age, means testing, and adjusting for inflation properly (for the ACA we need a program that doesn’t increase the premiums while making sure we increase the participants).

In fact, we believe the Fed’s decisions over the past 20 years were instrumental in the dot com and housing bubbles. In the Fed’s mind they have done everything possible (including increasing their balance sheet from $800 bn. to $4.5tn.) to resurrect the U.S. economy. Instead, their legacy will be tarnished by the outrageous policies that were used over the past 8 years, and [which] in our view, will not result in the salvaging of our economy, but rather what may become one of the greatest destructions of wealth in history.

Guns, God, and Captain Moroni

OPB |  During an April 2014 standoff with federal officials, supporters and members of the Bundy militia cited Book of Mormon passages centering on Captain Moroni. There were also several flags quoting Captain Moroni’s own writing on his “title of liberty.” Often next to American flags, these banners read “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.”

Cliven Bundy - the Nevada Rancher who called on militia and anti-government forces to help him in the showdown with the Bureau of Land Management – cited his own Mormon faith as a reason for what he viewed as a favorable outcome. As quoted by the Salt Lake City Tribune:

“If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?” he asked, noting no one was killed as tensions escalated. “Could those people that stood (with me) without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.”

Those remarks represent the deep commitment to the Bundy brand of faith. Abraham Bundy – Cliven’s great-grandfather – was a deeply religious man who was driven from prior homes first by flood, and then by revolution. He settled what would become Bundyville, home to a one-room schoolhouse and a scattering of homesteads in a harsh stretch of desert.

Ultimately, the small town Abraham Bundy founded would be abandoned, after the Bundy family could not secure water and grazing rights from the federal government.

Bundy has previously said in interviews that relocation played a significant role in shaping his family’s outlook toward the federal government.

Those views are intertwined with Bundy’s faith. Speaking in St. George, Utah, after the standoff with the Bureau of Land Management, Bundy posed these questions to a crowd of mostly conservative Mormons, as reported by the Spectrum of St. George:

“If our (U.S.) Constitution is an inspired document by our Lord Jesus Christ, then isn’t it scripture?” Bundy asked.

“Yes,” a chorus of voices replied.

“Isn’t it the same as the Book of Mormon and the Bible?” Bundy asked.

“Absolutely,” the audience answered.

Militiamen vs BLM

obb |  Some of the leaders of the militia are supporters of the Bundy family in Nevada. Cliven Bundy refused to pay the Bureau of Land Management more than a million dollars in cattle grazing fees.

What resulted was an armed standoff between the BLM and militiamen from around the U.S. who flocked to defend Bundy. Militiamen even shut down I-15 north of Las Vegas as part of the confrontation. 

In YouTube videos posted over the past two months, Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, has made similar statements about the Hammonds – that the family is “being silenced” by federal officers and prosecutors. In one online posting titled a “Redress of Grievances,” Ammon Bundy alleges federal prosecutors are intimidating the Hammonds.

“We have obtained appalling evidence that the U.S. Attorney’s Office threatened the Hammond family with early detention and further punishment if the Hammond family continued to communicate with a certain individual,” Bundy writes. “This evidence…speaks against the U.S. Attorneys [sic] Office in their gross effort to infringe upon the Hammond’s right to free exercise of speech.”

In an interview with OPB, Cliven Bundy said the Hammonds reached out to his family during the past two months and asked for help.

“In public, they haven’t asked for our help,” Bundy told OPB. “In private, we’re still needed. I talked to Dwight Hammond…for probably close to an hour. His conclusion is basically, ‘I do not want to be shot in the head.’ He had fear that if he actually rejected what was going on, and stood up for the abuse in what was going on, there would be somebody who would actually kill him. Fear, is what their problem is.”

Spurred by outcry from the Bundy family, the militia organized a rally in support of the Hammonds for Saturday in Burns, calling out to self-described patriot groups from across the country.

They said it would be a peaceful march. Yet, threats are implied in many of the calls to protest from all quarters.

Ammon Bundy writes that if the Hammonds are imprisoned, “there will be some serious civil unrest.”

And militiaman Ryan Payne said he will do “whatever it takes” to support the Hammonds.

Hannibal Burress confronts Granny Goodness because Slick Willie makes Cosby look like a piker

CNN |  Bill Clinton isn't heading back to the campaign trail until Monday, but Hillary Clinton faced some shouted questions about his past conduct on Sunday.

Katherine Prudhomme-O'Brien, a Republican state representative here who has made a name for herself confronting candidates, repeatedly heckled Clinton during her first town hall of 2016, telling reporters after the event that she wanted to confront Clinton about claims the former president committed sexual assault against Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey.

“I was a Democrat, but I became a Republican because of this, because of this stuff. Because of what I saw happen in the Clinton years, the hypocrisy of so-called women who fight for women,” said Prudhomme-O’Brien, who has interrupted Clinton events previously.

Bill Clinton’s past recently surfaced as a campaign topic yet again, as Donald Trump, in particular, raised past allegations and the Monica Lewinsky scandal in an attempt to drag down Clinton's wife. Last week, after Hillary Clinton called out his alleged “penchant for sexism,” Trump warned that her husband’s infidelity and the Clinton marriage as a whole were “fair game.” He later called Bill Clinton “one of the great abusers of the world.”

But Clinton herself didn’t bite on Sunday, instead telling Prudhomme-O’Brien, who repeatedly yelled over other questioners, “You are very rude, and I’m not going to ever call on you."

a new political system has emerged in uhmurkah

billmoyers |  Have you ever undertaken some task you felt less than qualified for, but knew that someone needed to do? Consider this piece my version of that and let me put what I do understand about it in a nutshell: based on developments in our post-9/11 world, we could be watching the birth of a new American political system and way of governing for which, as yet, we have no name.

And here’s what I find strange: the evidence of this, however inchoate, is all around us and yet it’s as if we can’t bear to take it in or make sense of it or even say that it might be so.

Let me make my case, however minimally, based on five areas in which at least the faint outlines of that new system seem to be emerging: political campaigns and elections; the privatization of Washington through the marriage of the corporation and the state; the de-legitimization of our traditional system of governance; the empowerment of the national security state as an untouchable fourth branch of government; and the demobilization of “we the people.”

Whatever this may add up to, it seems to be based, at least in part, on the increasing concentration of wealth and power in a new plutocratic class and in that ever-expanding national security state. Certainly, something out of the ordinary is underway and yet its birth pangs, while widely reported, are generally categorized as aspects of an exceedingly familiar American system somewhat in disarray.

at least I appreciate the shoeprint of the hon.bro.preznit's 13 B brogan in nutinyahoo's ass...,

mondoweiss | The president approved the wiretaps.

Privately, Mr. Obama maintained the monitoring of Mr. Netanyahu on the grounds that it served a “compelling national security purpose,” according to current and former U.S. officials.

That’s right; there’s a compelling national interest in stopping the Israel lobby.

Many have said that President Obama lacks spine? Well, it sure looks like the leak to reporters Adam Entous and Danny Yadron came from the administration, and it’s hard to believe that a leak of this magnitude was not approved by the president. Just when the Israel lobby thought that it was starting to get back to business as usual, the Obama administration has reminded them that something has fundamentally changed in the U.S.-Israel relationship. Not only did we beat the lobby and Israel on the Iran Deal, but: we’re exposing your tactics, and patriotic Americans are going to be very upset by what they see.

Remember that Obama in his highlight moment of the Iran Deal told Americans it would be an “abrogation of my constitutional duty” to defer to Israel’s interests on the Iran Deal. You’d think it would be a scandal that the Israeli PM was intriguing with Republicans — and surely some Democrats– in the way the WSJ has documented; but instead the official reaction is likely to be how outrageous it was for Obama and the NSA to be listening in on the supposed only democracy in the Middle East.

irrational population control by and among ruthless medieval tards sitting adjacent to our oil...,

ncr-iran |  Iran's fundamentalist regime is setting the stage for the mass execution of a large number of Sunni political prisoners in the notorious Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) Prison in Karaj, north-west of Tehran.

In recent days many Sunni prisons in Hall 10 of Ward 4 of the prison have been moved to another hall, according to received reports. The remaining prisoners in Hall 10 all have death sentences.

The segregation of the death-row political prisoners has caused deep anguish and concern among them and their relatives that the regime is preparing to soon carry out their executions.

At least 27 Sunni death-row political prisoners in Gohardasht (Rajai-Shahr) have had their sentences upheld by the regime's Supreme Court.

They have been charged with a variety of the fundamentalist regime's bogus offences, including "acting against national security," "propaganda against the state," "spreading corruption on earth," and "Moharabeh" (waging war against God).

Guardian |  Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr risks worsening sectarian tensions, the US has warned, joining a chorus of critics from the west and the Middle East who have condemned the killing.

As protesters in Tehran reacted with fury by setting fire to the Saudi embassy, US state department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement that the US was “particularly concerned” that al-Nimr’s execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced.”

He said the US was calling on Saudi Arabia to ensure fair judicial proceedings and permit peaceful expression of dissent while working with all community leaders to defuse tensions after the executions.

The killing of Nimr, a vocal critic of Saudi Arabia’s ruling royal family, caused international outrage and a serious escalation of diplomatic tensions in the region, with unrest predicted in Shia-majority areas.

In Tehran, protesters broke into the Saudi embassy in the early hours of Sunday morning and started fires before being dispersed by the police. Iran’s foreign ministry called on protesters to respect the diplomatic premises, according to the Entekhab news website, and called for calm.

British politicians and the leaders of Iraq and Iran were among others who condemned the killing of Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia cleric opposed to the Riyadh regime who was among 47 people executed on Saturday by the Saudi Arabian Sunni authorities.

the new york times downplayed the influence of money in politics

mediamatters | The New York Times downplayed the impact of the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling and dismissed the influence of money in politics by ignoring record-breaking spending of outside groups, the role of large donor political contributions, and dark money in the 2014 midterm election.

A December 9 New York Times Magazine article entitled "Who Wants to Buy a Politician?" argued that the "forecast that a flood of money would follow" the 2010 Citizens United ruling has largely not come to fruition. Author Binyamin Appelbaum noted that "spending has declined in each of the last two congressional elections" and argued that spending on campaign elections is "economically inefficient" because campaign spending has little impact on election outcomes:

[T]he 2012 presidential election, which recorded $2.6 billion in campaign spending, underperformed many forecasts. And spending has declined in each of the last two congressional elections. Candidates and other interested parties spent $3.7 billion on this year's midterms, down from an inflation-adjusted total of $3.8 billion in 2012, which was less than the $4 billion spent in2010, according to the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

[...]

[B]uying elections is economically inefficient. Most voters, like most consumers, have defined preferences that are difficult for advertisers to shift. Chevron spent roughly $3 million during a recent campaign backing, certain City Council candidates in Richmond, Calif., where it operates a major refinery. Voters instead chose a slate of candidates who want to raise taxes. "Campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes, regardless of who does the spending," the University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt concluded in a 1994 paper. He found that spending an extra $100,000 in a House race might be expected to increase a candidate's vote total by about 0.33 percentage points. Investors appear to agree that companies can't make money by investing in political campaigns. A 2004 study found that changes in campaign-finance laws had no discernible impact on the share prices of companies that made donations.Appelbaum points to small donor contributions to argue that the majority of donations are not meant as an influencing factor:

Most campaign money, after all, comes in smaller chunks from individual donors. People who gave $3 to Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008 could not have reasonably expected that their small contributions would influence the future president. Even those who give larger sums rarely contribute the maximum allowed by law, as might be expected of someone trying to buy influence. Instead, individual contributions have increased over time merely in proportion to personal income.

But this argument obscures the especially outsized role large donors have in elections and downplays the proportion of large donations to overall campaign spending. The Sunlight Foundation found that in 2012, the median contribution from this group of elite donors was $26,584. Demos, a progressive public policy think tank, analyzed campaign finance data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics and found that most campaigns in 2014 were actually fueled by big donors:

Just 50 individuals and their spouses accounted for more than a third of the total money raised by Super PACs this cycle.  Many candidates, including some whose individual contribution totals reach into the millio

Granny Goodness peddles political influence like Bubba and Cooter peddle meth...,

zerohedge | Obviously, the potential exists for those paying for the speeches to use the lucrative events as a way to gain undue influence over what goes on in Washington. For instance, some suggest there may be a connection between a $200,000 payment made to Bill Clinton by Goldman Sachs in 2011 and the bank’s efforts to lobby the State Department ahead of legislation involving the Export-Import Bank which was set to provide a loan that would end up financing the purchase of millions of dollars in aircraft from a company partially owned by Goldman.

On Thursday, WSJ is out with a fresh look at the connection between Clinton's State Department and her husband's speaking tour. 

"More than two dozen companies and groups and one foreign government paid former President Bill Clinton a total of more than $8 million to give speeches around the time they also had matters before Mrs. Clinton’s State Department," The Journal says, adding that "fifteen of them also donated a total of between $5 million and $15 million to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the family’s charity." 

And on, and on. 

Of course the Clinton's deny there's any connection despite the rather obvious parallels and convenient timing. "No evidence exists" to link any actions taken by Mrs. Clinton’s State Department to organizations hosting Mr. Clinton’s speeches, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon told The Journal.

Yes, "no evidence exists," other than the $8 million Bill made from speeches made to companies who had "matters pending" with Hillary's State Department. That's just a coincidence. 

Don't worry though - none of this will happen if Hillary wins the White House. Bill says that although he'll still give speeches "on subjects [he's] interested in," he "doesn't think" he'll accept any payment.

any attack on trump's words applies directly to granny and bill's deeds

NYTimes |  Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?

Modern America is a society in which a growing share of income and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people, and these people have huge political influence — in the early stages of the 2016 presidential campaign, around half the contributions came from fewer than 200 wealthy families. The usual concern about this march toward oligarchy is that the interests and policy preferences of the very rich are quite different from those of the population at large, and that is surely the biggest problem.

But it’s also true that those empowered by money-driven politics include a disproportionate number of spoiled egomaniacs. Which brings me to the current election cycle.

puzzlin' evidence - welcome to year ten of subrealist head slappery...,

few things as satisfying as hearing that pig squeal when he gets caught under the gate...,

theintercept |  What happened to all the dismissive lectures about how if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide? Is that still applicable? Or is it that these members of the U.S. Congress who conspired with Netanyahu and AIPAC over how to sabotage the U.S. government’s Iran Deal feel they did do something wrong and are angry about having been monitored for that reason?

I’ve always argued that on the spectrum of spying stories, revelations about targeting foreign leaders is the least important, since that is the most justifiable type of espionage. Whether the U.S. should be surveilling the private conversations of officials of allied democracies is certainly worth debating, but, as I argued in my 2014 book, those “revelations … are less significant than the agency’s warrantless mass surveillance of whole populations” since “countries have spied on heads of state for centuries, including allies.”

But here, the NSA did not merely listen to the conversations of Netanyahu and his top aides, but also members of the U.S. Congress as they spoke with him. And not for the first time: “In one previously undisclosed episode, the NSA tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant,” the New York Times reported in 2009.

The NSA justifies such warrantless eavesdropping on Americans as “incidental collection.” That is the term used when it spies on the conversations of American citizens without warrants, but claims those Americans weren’t “targeted,” but rather just so happened to be speaking to one of the agency’s foreign targets (warrants are needed only to target U.S. persons, not foreign nationals outside of the U.S.).

This claim of “incidental collection” has always been deceitful, designed to mask the fact that the NSA does indeed frequently spy on the conversations of American citizens without warrants of any kind. Indeed, as I detailed here, the 2008 FISA law enacted by Congress had as one of its principal, explicit purposes allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans’ conversations without warrants of any kind. “The principal purpose of the 2008 law was to make it possible for the government to collect Americans’ international communications — and to collect those communications without reference to whether any party to those communications was doing anything illegal,” the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer said.  “And a lot of the government’s advocacy is meant to obscure this fact, but it’s a crucial one: The government doesn’t need to ‘target’ Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications.”  Fist tap Dale.  

chiraq to the potomac: fish rots from the head

newyorker |  It’s hard to remember a time when Rahm Emanuel wasn’t a Democratic Party superstar. Go back to 1991, when the thirty-two-year-old took over fund-raising for Bill Clinton. He  was soon renowned for making the staff come to work on Sundays, shrieking into the phone to donors things like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”—and, not incidentally, helping Clinton afford the blitz of TV commercials that saved him from the Gennifer Flowers scandal, clearing his course to the White House. The legend continued through this past April, when Rahm—in Chicago and D.C., he’s known by that single name—won a second term as the mayor of Chicago in a come-from-behind landslide.

Now the sins of Emanuel are finally catching up with him. Lucky for him, however, the compounding police-shooting scandal has erased from the news a peccadillo from this past November: the mayor’s press team was eavesdropping and recording reporters while they interviewed aldermen critical of the mayor. A spokesman responded to the press by saying that their only intent was also “to make sure reporters have what you need, which is exactly what you have here.” That made no sense. But then so much of the legend of Rahm Emanuel’s brilliant career makes little sense. The bigger question, perhaps, is what this says about a political party and the political press that bought the legend in the first place.

the greatest threat to your species...,

antimedia |  During a Reddit AMA, he argued that the future is wrought with the peril of rampant inequality expedited by an automated machine-based global economic system.

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed.” Hawking continued, “Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”

Predictably, a dramatic response thread followed. Many commenters agreed with Hawking and denounced the globalist oligarchy that is currently consolidating wealth at an unprecedented rate. Responses ranged from calls for a “bloody revolution” to references to the recent films Elysium, Wall-E, and Zeitgeist 2: Addendum. One commenter invoked the anarcho-syndicalist political views of linguist Noam Chomsky.

The main theme of the discussion centered around the automation of labor and how that would affect the human workforce and the global economy. Hawking seems to believe that our current trajectory will make such automation a death knell for the working classes, with the bourgeoisie machine owners exerting total economic control over human civilization. One commenter strongly disagreed with Hawking, referencing recent Journal of Economic Perspective articles and claiming “technology has never, will never, and simply cannot result in structural unemployment.”
 

The comment thread is a treasure trove of wide-ranging ideas that include:

~The efficacy, or lack thereof, of voting

~A “universal basic income”

~Microeconomics

~Techno-socialism, with “an open source decentralized consensus algorithm for the masses”

~A post-scarcity society run by strong artificial intelligence

why there is no peace on earth

davidstockman |  After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

The world had descended into what had been a 77-year global war, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into the world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.

To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.

I have elaborated more fully on this proposition in “The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson’s War“, but the seminal point cannot be gainsaid. The end of the cold war meant world peace was finally at hand, yet 25 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.

In fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation’s capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war; they ensure endless waste on armaments and the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st century high tech warfare and the terrorist blowback it inherently generates among those upon which the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.

So there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-year war ended. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.

So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.

In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1990 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night.

In fact, during the past 25 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.

Back then a few months after the slaughter had been unleashed, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, singing and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell.

The truthful answer is that there was no good reason. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.

The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time for the same reasons. Historians can readily name the culprits from 100 years ago, such as the German general staff’s plan for a lightening mobilization and strike on the western front called the Schlieffen Plan or Britain’s secret commitments to France to guard the North Sea while the latter covered the Mediterranean.

Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastisized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.

is the big short intended to hide a bigger story?

zerohedge |  Need some help with this movie. Seems like the movie created the idea that the system as a whole is corrupt and put most of the blame on the rating agencies, and totally bypasses the US government and Federal Reserve, with only a scant mention in the credits that Burry tried to contact the White House and tell them how he figured it out ultimately leading to him being audited four times and being visted by the FBI. 

The main scene that seems to dump the most blame came with Baum and his numbers guy pushing the old lady at Standards and Poor's into saying "if we don't give the banks the rating they want they go down the street to moodys". The movie makes alot of top people look like bafoons who didn't know what was going on like the Bear Sterns guy on stage with Baum as the stock is plumitting saying he would "buy moar". 

All three groups that the movie follows who made a bunch of money on the "big short" are all shown as doing so because of Burry who they portrayed as an idiot savant type who can single handidly digest unlimited numbers while everyone else (Government, Federal Reserve, Freddie Mae, Banks, Investment firms, hedge funds, regulators, etc) are asleep at the wheel. I'm sorry something seems amiss here!! 

Consider me totally ignorant about the finer details of banking, finance, housing, etc, but it seems almost comical that the Federal Reserve Bank whose primary function is setting the feds fund rate did not have a complete model of the impact that rate would have on mortgages in the US? A central theme in the movie is the cascadding effect of the default of sub prime mortgages.

The collapse happens in the last year of Bush's presidency with the most unpopular bill TARP being signed as he is leaving office with no hope of re-election. The bailout is presented only very briefly as Baum speaks in low key amazement that they are going to bail out the banks. Just lucky timing I guess that the largest financial bailout in history and the financial collapse happended a few months before a very unpopular president leaves office and is going to hand over the reigns to the first black president. 

Sure there is the revolving door between SEC and financial firms referenced in the film with the red head in vegas who is trying to bed goldman guys, but her cluelessness is tied to the SEC not being funded when she is asked why they are not paying attention to the ratings of MBS.

Seems like the point of this movie is to leave most watching it (the massess) with the impression that the system is just a mess and made up of greedy people. This just reinforces what I think most people already think. If there is a bigger story in regards to the timing of the collapse coming at the end of the Bush presidency, with the political capital of Obama to over see the coming QEs and the overall takeover of the economy that was provided by the TARP and related legislation, that story is burried in this story of Burry the savant. (I'm not attacking Burry, don't know a thing about him other than this movie)

Hollywoods story is that one idiot savant single handely figured out some corruption in the ratings of securities and made a big bet and won a billion or so as millions lost. Seems like this story, while significant and outrageous and interesting, is designed to hide a bigger story.

how warren buffett intentionally targets and preys on the least of these...,

seattletimes |  After a few years living with her sister, Rose Mary Zunie, 59, was ready to move into a place of her own.

So, on an arid Saturday morning this past summer, the sisters piled into a friend’s pickup truck and headed for a mobile-home sales lot here just outside the impoverished Navajo reservation.

The women — one in a long, colorful tribal skirt, another wearing turquoise jewelry, a traditional talisman against evil — were steered to a salesman who spoke Navajo, just like the voice on the store’s radio ads.

He walked them through Clayton-built homes on the lot, then into the sales center, passing a banner and posters promoting one subprime lender: Vanderbilt Mortgage, a Clayton subsidiary. Inside, he handed them a Vanderbilt sales pamphlet.

“Vanderbilt is the only one that finances on the reservation,” he told the women.

His claim, which the women caught on tape, was a lie. And it was illegal.

It is just one in a pattern of deceptions that Clayton has used to help extract billions from poor customers around the country — particularly people of color, who make up a substantial and growing portion of its business.

The company is controlled by Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest men, but its methods hardly match Buffett’s honest, folksy image: Clayton systematically pursues unwitting minority homebuyers and baits them into costly subprime loans, many of which are doomed to fail, an investigation by The Seattle Times and BuzzFeed News has found.

Clayton’s predatory practices have damaged minority communities — from rural black enclaves in the Louisiana Delta, across Spanish-speaking swaths of Texas, to Native American reservations in the Southwest. Many customers end up losing their homes, thousands of dollars in down payments, or even land they’d owned outright.

Over the 12 years since Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Homes Inc., the company has grown to dominate virtually every aspect of America’s mobile-home industry. It builds nearly half the new manufactured homes sold in this country every year, making it the most prolific U.S. homebuilder of any type. It sells them through a network of more than 1,600 dealerships. And it finances more mobile-home loans than any other lender by a factor of more than seven.

In minority communities, Clayton’s grip on the lending market verges on monopolistic: Last year, according to federal data, Clayton made 72 percent of the loans to black people who financed mobile homes.

The company’s in-house lender, Vanderbilt Mortgage, charges minority borrowers substantially higher rates, on average, than their white counterparts. In fact, federal data shows that Vanderbilt typically charges black people who make over $75,000 a year slightly more than white people who make only $35,000.

rule of law: creative exploitation of the least of these...,

WaPo |  Rex Muller has had lots of tenants over the years, but none quite like Terrence Taylor. He moved into a house miles outside of town but couldn’t drive. He was 30 years old but played with toy cars. His face was badly disfigured by burns, but attractive women often accompanied him. Muller nonetheless trusted Taylor more than most. He had lots of money.

When Taylor moved from Fairfax County to Muller’s Martinsburg, W.Va., townhouse in 2012, agreeing to pay $870 in monthly rent, he flashed an insurance document bearing impressive numbers. It said New York Life Insurance was paying him $10,000 every month as a result of a lawsuit settled in 1989. Muller learned that a malfunctioning electric heater had burst into flames when Taylor was a boy, leaving him disfigured — and rich. His settlement would pay him many millions of dollars over the course of his life.

Two years later, in June 2014, Muller watched as a local deputy knocked at Taylor’s door. Muller had just taken his tenant, who had not paid rent in three months, to court and evicted him. He stepped into the darkened home as Taylor, an amputee, descended the stairs and, without a word, limped past him on a prosthetic leg.

Taylor had left behind a mess of toys, dirty dishes and cards written by “go-go girls,” Muller recalled. Strange documents were strewn across the kitchen table. “It was a lot of legal mumbo-jumbo,” Muller said. “A lot of lawyer talk.”

The landlord, however, understood enough to know the tenant had been doing a lot of business deals. “He was selling off his loan,” Muller reasoned.

Not quite. What Taylor had been selling, chunk by chunk, for pennies on the dollar, was a settlement that had a lifetime expected payout of $31.5 million. In numerous deals approved in Virginia courts over two years, Taylor sold everything owed to him through 2044 and was now broke and homeless.

How did this happen, Muller said he wondered as he picked through the detritus.