FRAUD CENTRAL: Government Corruption Big Time

Government Corruption Has Become Rampant

Posted on March 30, 2015 by WashingtonsBlog

The Cop Is On the Take

Government corruption has become rampant:

• Senior SEC employees spent up to 8 hours a day surfing porn sites instead of cracking down on financial crimes

• Nuclear Regulatory Commission workers watch porn instead of cracking down on unsafe conditions at nuclear plants

• NSA spies pass around homemade sexual videos and pictures they’ve collected from spying on the American people

• NSA employees have also been caught using their mass surveillance powers to spy on love interests, such as girlfriends, obsessions or former wives … and to eavesdrop on American soldiers’ intimate conversations with their wives back home. And see this  (“routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted” …  “‘Hey, check this out … there’s good phone sex’”)

• An employee of the Transportation Security Administration admitted that TSA agents share – and laugh at – nude scans of passengers.

• Investigators from the Treasury’s Office of the Inspector General found that some of the regulator’s employees surfed erotic websites, hired prostitutes and accepted gifts from bank executives … instead of actually working to help the economy

• The Minerals Management Service – the regulator charged with overseeing BP and other oil companies to ensure that oil spills don’t occur – was riddled with “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity”, which included “sex with industry contacts”

• Agents for the Drug Enforcement Agency had sex parties with prostitutes hired by the drug cartels they were supposed to stop

• Federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Secret Service investigating Bitcoin money laundering extorted and stole over $1 million in Bitcoin

• The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has conspired with big banks to manipulate commodities prices for decades

• The government-sponsored rating agencies committed massive fraud (and see this)

• The Treasury department allowed banks to “cook their books”

• Regulators knew of and allowed the use of debt-hiding accounting tricks by the big banks

• The Secretary of Treasury (Tim Geithner) was complicit in Lehman’s accounting fraud, (and see this)

• The former chief accountant for the SEC says that Bernanke and Paulson broke the law and should be prosecuted

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this. For example, the Federal Reserve turned its cheek and allowed massive fraud, and the SEC has repeatedly ignored accounting fraud. Indeed, Alan Greenspan took the position that fraud could never happen

• Paulson and Bernanke falsely stated that the big banks receiving Tarp money were healthy, when they were not. The Treasury Secretary also falsely told Congress that the bailouts would be used to dispose of toxic assets … but then used the money for something else entirely

• A high-level Federal Reserve official says quantitative easing is “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”

• The SEC has been shredding Wall Street documents for decades to help the big banks cover up their fraud

• The non-partisan Government Accountability Office calls the Fed corrupt and riddled with conflicts of interest. Nobel prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz says the World Bank would view any country which had a banking structure like the Fed as being corrupt and untrustworthy. The former vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said said he worried that the failure of the government to provide more information about its rescue spending could signal corruption. “Nontransparency in government programs is always associated with corruption in other countries, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t be here,” he said

• Arguably, both the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by refusing to close insolvent banks

• Congress may have covered up illegal tax breaks for the big banks

• Police have been busted framing innocent people

• Warmongerers in the U.S. government knowingly and intentionally lied us into a war of aggression in Iraq.  The former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the highest ranking military officer in the United States – said that the Iraq war was “based on a series of lies”. The same is true in Libya and other wars

• The government lied when it said it doesn’t conduct mass surveillance on Americans, and then lied again when it said that spying was aimed at protecting America against terrorists

• The government also lied when it said American doesn’t torture (and see this ), and then lied once again when it said torture was aimed at protecting America against terrorists

• The government made sure that false claims were made about the amount of oil spilled by BP in the Gulf

• The government has framed whistleblowers with false evidence

• The Pentagon falsely smeared USA Today reporters because they investigated illegal Pentagon propaganda

• When one of the most respected radiologists  in America – the former head of the radiology department at Yale University – attempted to blow the whistle on the fact that the FDA had approved a medical device manufactured by General Electric because it put out massive amounts of radiation, the FDA  installed spyware to record his private emails and surfing activities (including installing cameras to snap pictures of his screen), and then used the information to smear him and other whistleblowers

• In an effort to protect Bank of America from the threatened Wikileaks expose of wrongdoing – the Department of Justice told Bank of America to a hire a specific hardball-playing law firm to assemble a team to take down WikiLeaks (and see this)

• The Bush White House worked hard to smear CIA officers,  bloggers and anyone else who criticized the Iraq war

• The FBI smeared top scientists who pointed out the numerous holes in its anthrax case

The biggest companies own the D.C. politicians.  Indeed, the head of the economics department at George Mason University has pointed out that it is unfair to call politicians “prostitutes”.  They are in fact pimps … selling out the American people for a price.

Government regulators have become so corrupted and “captured” by those they regulate that Americans know that the cop is on the take.   Institutional corruption is killing people’s trust in our government and our institutions.

Indeed, America is no longer a democracy or republic … it’s officially an oligarchy.

The allowance of unlimited campaign spending allows the oligarchs to purchase politicians more directly than ever.    Moreover, there are two systems of justice in America … one for the big banks and other fatcats, and one for everyone else.

But the private sector is no better … for example, the big banks have turned into criminal syndicates.
Liberals and conservatives tend to blame our country’s problems on different factors … but they are all connected.

The real problem is the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big corporations and big government.

Source

Don't Be Fooled by the Federal Reserve's Anti-Audit Propaganda - By Ron Paul

EDITORIAL

By Ron Paul - March 09, 2015

In recent weeks, the Federal Reserve and its apologists in Congress and the media have launched numerous attacks on the Audit the Fed legislation. These attacks amount to nothing more than distortions about the effects and intent of the audit bill.

Fed apologists continue to claim that the Audit the Fed bill will somehow limit the Federal Reserve's independence. Yet neither Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen nor any other opponent of the audit bill has ever been able to identify any provision of the bill giving Congress power to dictate monetary policy. The only way this argument makes sense is if the simple act of increasing transparency somehow infringes on the Fed's independence.

This argument is also flawed since the Federal Reserve has never been independent from political pressure. As economists Daniel Smith and Peter Boettke put it in their paper "An Episodic History of Modern Fed Independence," the Federal Reserve "regularly accommodates debt, succumbs to political pressures, and follows bureaucratic tendencies, compromising the Fed's operational independence."

The most infamous example of a Federal Reserve chair bowing to political pressure is the way Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns tailored monetary policy to accommodate President Richard Nixon's demands for low interest rates. 

Nixon and Burns were even recorded mocking the idea of Federal Reserve independence.

Nixon is not the only president to pressure a Federal Reserve chair to tailor monetary policy to the president's political needs. In the fifties, President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Fed Chairman William Martin to either resign or increase the money supply. Martin eventually gave in to Ike's wishes for cheap money. 

During the nineties, Alan Greenspan was accused by many political and financial experts – including then-Federal Reserve Board Member Alan Blinder – of tailoring Federal Reserve policies to help President Bill Clinton.

Some Federal Reserve apologists make the contradictory claim that the audit bill is not only dangerous, but it is also unnecessary since the Fed is already audited. 

It is true that the Federal Reserve is subject to some limited financial audits, but these audits only reveal the amount of assets on the Fed's balance sheets. The Audit the Fed bill will reveal what was purchased, when it was acquired, and why it was acquired.

Perhaps the real reason the Federal Reserve fears a full audit can be revealed by examining the one-time audit of the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis authorized by the Dodd-Frank law. This audit found that between 2007 and 2010 the Federal Reserve committed over $16 trillion – more than four times the annual budget of the United States – to foreign central banks and politically influential private companies. Can anyone doubt a full audit would show similar instances of the Fed acting to benefit the political and economic elites?

Some fed apologists are claiming that the audit bill is part of a conspiracy to end the Fed. As the author of a book called End the Fed, I find it laughable to suggest that I, and other audit supporters, are hiding our true agenda. Besides, how could an audit advance efforts to end the Fed unless the audit would prove that the American people would be better off without the Fed? And don't the people have a right to know if they are being harmed by the current monetary system?

For over a century, the Federal Reserve has operated in secrecy, to the benefit of the elites and the detriment of the people. It is time to finally bring transparency to monetary policy by auditing the Federal Reserve.

This article contributed courtesy of the ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Source thedailybell

Politicians Get Billions and Return Trillions to Corporations on "Investment"

Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions

by Bill Allison and Sarah Harkins

Nov. 17, 2014, 9:26 a.m.

Between 2007 and 2012, 200 of America’s most politically active corporations spent a combined $5.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions. A year-long analysis by the Sunlight Foundation suggests, however, that what they gave pales compared to what those same corporations got: $4.4 trillion in federal business and support.

That figure, more than the $4.3 trillion the federal government paid the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients over the same period, is the result of an unprecedented effort to quantify the less-examined side of the campaign finance equation: Do political donors get something in return for what they give?

Four years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court suggested the answer to that question was no. Corporate spending to influence federal elections would not “give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption,” the majority wrote in the landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision.

Sunlight decided to test that premise by examining influence and its potential results on federal decision makers over six years, three before the 2010 Citizens United decision and three after.

We focused on the records of 200 for-profit corporations, all of which had active political action committees and lobbyists in the 2008, 2010 and 2012 election cycles — and were among the top donors to campaign committees registered with the Federal Election Commission. Their investment in politics was enormous. There were 20,500 paying lobbying clients over the six years we examined; the 200 companies we tracked accounted for a whopping 26 percent of the total spent. On average, their PACs, employees and their family members made campaign contributions to 144 sitting members of Congress each cycle.

On average, 144 sitting members of Congress received money from the Fixed Fortune 200 each cycle. Graphic credit: The Sunlight Foundation

After examining 14 million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government. The $4.4 trillion total represents two-thirds of the $6.5 trillion that individual taxpayers paid into the federal treasury.

Welcome to the world of "Fixed Fortunes," a seemingly closed universe where the most persistent and savvy political players not so mysteriously have the ability to attract federal dollars regardless of who is running Washington.

Political change, permanent interests

During the six years we studied, newly elected Democratic majorities took control in the House and Senate. Two years later, the White House shifted from Republican to Democratic control, and two years after that the GOP came back to take the House. The collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 led to massive bailout efforts by the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Board, two massive stimulus bills and the loss of more than eight million jobs. Congress passed laws that overhauled health care insurance and financial industry regulation. Troops surged in Afghanistan and withdrew from Iraq. There were 16 separate “continuing resolutions” to fund the government, a debt ceiling standoff that caused a downgrade in the nation’s credit rating and a “super committee” to wrestle with the federal budget. As middle class Americans lost ground, the Fixed Fortune 200 got what they needed.

What they needed included loans that helped automakers and banks survive the recent recession while many homeowners went under. It included full funding and expansion of federal programs started in the 1930s that, year after year, decade after decade, help prop up prices for agribusinesses and secure trade deals for our biggest manufacturers. It included budget busting emergency measures that funneled extra dollars to everything from defense contractors to public utility companies to financial industry giants. The record suggests that the money corporations spend on political campaigns and Washington lobbying firms is not an unwise investment.

The Fixed Fortune 200 come from a wide range of industries. There are a host of familiar names among them, like Ford Motor Company, McDonald’s and Bank of America, as well as some less famous, like MacAndrews & Forbes, the Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management. (For the complete list, including what they gave and what they got, click here.) There are retailers and investment banks, construction and telecommunications firms, health insurers and gun makers, entertainment conglomerates, banks and pharmaceutical manufacturers, among others.

Out of 20,500 paying lobbying clients, the Fixed Fortune 200 accounted for a whopping 26 percent of the total spent. Graphic credit: The Sunlight Foundation

Overall, the Fixed Fortune 200’s PACs, employees and their family members gave $597 million to political committees and disclosed spending $5.2 billion on lobbying. They make this enormous investment in politics in large part because their businesses are inextricably entwined with government decisions — including spending decisions.

Government as business partner

For example, the federal government issued contracts to purchase goods and services that totaled a little more that $3 trillion during the period; companies among the top 200 corporate political givers won $1 trillion of that, a third of the total. The Treasury Department managed $410 billion in loans and other assistance issued under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, created by Congress to cope with the 2008 financial crisis; of that amount, $298 million, about 73 percent, went to 16 firms among the Fixed Fortune 200. When the Federal Reserve took extraordinary measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it funneled nearly $2.8 trillion through 29 Fixed Fortune firms. The companies that participated the most in politics got huge returns.

Of the 200 corporations we examined, we could sum the financial rewards for 179. Of those, 138 received more from the federal government than they spent on politics, 102 of them received more than 10 times what they spent on politics, and 29 received 1,000 times or more from the federal government than they invested in lobbyists or contributed to political committees via their employees, their family members and their PACs.

As for the other 21 companies on our list, while we could not quantify the financial benefits that some received, we were able to identify them. Some examples:

• Arch Coal lists the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the government corporation that’s the largest public electricity producer, as one of its three biggest customers. TVA does not release data on its coal purchases.
• Forest City Enterprises does not appear as a landlord in the Government Services Agency’s database of federal rental agreements, though its annual report notes that the U.S. government is the third-biggest customer for its pricey New York City office space.
• Occidental Petroleum has leases on federal land to extract natural gas, but the government does not release information on how much that gas is withdrawn or how much it is worth.
• And while the government has so far refused to release information on what retailers get the most purchases via food stamps, Wal-Mart went so far as to acknowledge in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that reductions in the now $78 billion-a-year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — or food stamps — could have a significant impact on the company’s earnings, which totaled $476 billion in its most recent fiscal year.

Of the 200 companies analyzed for Fixed Fortunes, 28 are in what the money in politics research organization the Center for Responsive Politics classifies as the communications and electronics sector, 21 in healthcare, 13 in defense and aerospace, 13 agribusinesses, 11 in energy and natural resources, and 7 in transportation. The biggest sector, accounting for 48 of the 200, was finance, insurance and real estate, which is consistently the largest source of campaign funds for politicians cycle after cycle. Congress and the executive branch have paid particular attention to the industry, approving hundreds of billions in aid to help it weather the financial crisis. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve advanced trillions in credit, which the nation’s central bank hoped would trickle down through the rest of the economy.

Explore the full list of groups in the Fixed Fortune 200

See the full list of corporations — including how much each gave and what they got in return — on our Influence Explorer page. 

Companies with the biggest returns on their political investments include three foreign financial service and banking firms, UBS and Credit Suisse Group from Switzerland, and Deutsche Bank of Germany, all of which benefited from the Treasury Department’s taxpayer-financed rescue of American International Group. Investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as well as commercial banks like JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Bank of America also received far more from government than they put into politics: They benefited from the bailouts of the financial industry undertaken by Treasury and the Federal Reserve. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, both of which disclosed spending more than $10 million each year on lobbying, also made the list. So did McKesson, a pharmaceutical wholesaler that is the biggest vendor for Veterans Affairs, and the Carlyle Group, a wealth management firm started by former government insiders who invest in firms that have significant involvement with government, such as defense, telecommunications and health care.

CONTINUE READING – MUCH MORE DATA > >

While Clinton Hid Emails, $6 Billion Went Missing in Her State Dept.

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Aaron Dykes

(Truthstream Media)

Editor’s Note: Do you think she’ll finally change that Twitter avatar?

The political world is swarming over revelations that Hillary Clinton hid her emails during her time as Secretary of State.

She apparently went so far in shielding her official correspondence from public scrutiny that her team set up the private domain @clintonemail.com, used cover names for family members and reportedly ran a server for the mail client out of her home. Hillary publicly tweeted to dispel concerns about secrecy, dubiously claiming ‘I want the public to see my email.’

But serious concerns have been raised about her trail of secrecy, and the potential for classified information to have been exposed to foreign entities, spies, hackers and the like:

“The former Secretary’s tweet does not answer questions about why this was not done when she left office, the integrity of the emails while she controlled them, the scheme to conceal them, or the failure to provide them in logical course,” said committee spokesman Jamal Ware. (source)

Perhaps the most serious accusation facing Clinton is that she may have breached one of the fundamental tenets of classified information. J William Leonard, former director of the body that keeps watch over executive branch secrets, the Information Security Oversight Office, told the Guardian that if Clinton had dealt with confidential government matters through her personal email, that would have been problematic. “There is no such thing as personal copies of classified information. All classified information belongs to the US government and it should never leave the control of the government.” (source)

After all, it was the infamous hacker ‘Guccifer’ who revealed the @clintonemail.com scheme, not GOP enemies or ‘accountable’ officials in government.

Otherwise, would the world have ever known?

But Wait, There’s More… Much More Being Covered Up

But the emails – if they are ever disclosed to the public – are not the half of it.

They are the proverbial tip of the iceberg of secrecy.

Recall that not even a year ago, it was quietly disclosed that the Hillary Clinton State Dept. “misplaced” more than $6 billion dollars that remain unaccounted for. The Washington Times reported about the losses under Sec. Clinton:

The State Department misplaced and lost some $6 billion due to the improper filing of contracts during the past six years, mainly during the tenure of former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, according to a newly released Inspector General report.

The $6 billion in unaccounted funds poses a “significant financial risk and demonstrates a lack of internal control over the Department’s contract actions,” according to the report.

Truthstream Media.com reported:

The obvious implication here is to cover up corruption and sweetheart deals, such as contracts to spouses and friends, with missing documents in numerous government contracts for the war in Iraq and much more:

The situation “creates conditions conducive to fraud, as corrupt individuals may attempt to conceal evidence of illicit behavior by omitting key documents from the contract file,” the report concluded.

It would seem very little was account for – by definition – since the Clinton State Dept. had a vacancy for the critical Inspector General position, responsible for oversight and department spending, during the ENTIRE 5 year tenure of Hillary Clinton there.

It was the longest vacancy in the entire history of the department. In February 2012, a year before Clinton left office in February 2013, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reported:

The longest vacancy has been at the State Department, which has gone 1,484 days—over four years—without a permanent IG, at a time when the Department has taken on the responsibility and challenge of managing scandal-prone private security contractors in war zones. As of today, there are seven IG positions that have been vacant for more than a year.

So much for the already absurd ‘most transparent administration ever’ claim of the Obama Administration.

That means no one even pretended to keep Sec. Clinton and her department accountable during her reign.

After Hillary stepped down, embroiled in “what difference does make” Benghazi bullsh*t, and John Kerry took over, one Steve A. Linick was appointed as Inspector General of the State Dept. As IG, Linick discovered $6 billion in unaccounted funds “due to improper filing of contracts during the past six years.”

What else will be found – with an as-yet untold covert role by the State Dept. in the meddling of Libya, Egypt, Syria and other players in the Arab Spring uprising, the covert financing of jihadi rebels as well as ISIS, and in the mounting tensions with Russia, China and other key players around the world?

How much more has been kept secret – beyond just emails – that the public will never know about?

But alas, I guess secrecy and the Clintons have long gone together like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jelly or power and abuse.

via truthstreammedia

FCC Net "Neutrality" Passes by a Narrow Margin

So much for sworn oaths, beyond some obtuse frothy babble expect nary a Republican statesman to stand up for the peoples' liberty.

 

Net Neutrality: Beginning of the End of the Internet?

Written by  C. Mitchell Shaw

The FCC voted yesterday to begin regulating the Internet as a public utility under a plan known as Net Neutrality. Let that sink in. The federal government will regulate the Internet in the same way the agency already regulates the telephone and cable television industries — and it calls that "neutral." Having been denied the ability to regulate the Internet in the past because of a lack of authority, the FCC has now simply reclassified the Internet under Title II, and — voilà! — they have the authority to regulate it.

One problem with this action is that the Internet does not belong in the same category as telephones and televisions. It is "other": It has its own category. 

The Internet is the most innovative, pervasive, free, and open form of communication man has ever known. Access to it is more available now than ever before, and an increasing number of people are using it as the primary method for their communications. When used properly, the Internet allows private, anonymous communication in a way that is unrivaled. But beyond that, it is also a marketplace, a research network, an alternative news source, and much, much more. And the Internet is all these things because it grew up largely unhindered by government regulation (read: interference).

With the three-to-two vote of unelected bureaucrats unaccountable to the people, that is changing. It is as sure as can be that Net Neutrality will change the Internet. As the Internet is bogged down in regulation by an agency that has no constitutional authority even to exist, let alone to regulate the Internet, the innovation that birthed and nursed the Net to youthful maturity will be replaced by concerns about compliance with regulations. Instead of answering to the concerns of consumers — as is done in a free market — ISPs (Internet Service Providers — through which a company such as Netflix provides services to Internet users) will begin focusing their attention on lobbying the FCC. The result will be an Internet that has lost its youthful energy and is mired in rules that aren't even known yet.

The reason the rules aren't yet known is that FCC Chairman Wheeler decided to keep them secret. He has hinted at the powers the new rules grant to the FCC, though, and they are frightening. In an op-ed piece for Wired on February 4, Wheeler wrote, "My proposal includes a general conduct rule that can be used to stop new and novel threats to the Internet. This means the action we take will be strong enough and flexible enough not only to deal with the realities of today, but also to establish ground rules for the as yet unimagined."

What constitutes "new and novel threats to the Internet" is left to be defined later.

Perhaps as disturbing as the secrecy of the plan is the underhanded method by which it was promoted, using — ironically — the Internet itself. In the "comments" section of many online articles, activists and bots (programs that post while appearing to be real people) posted emotional and factually erroneous appeals for regulation to "save the Internet." One example is this comment that appeared verbatim in the comments section of several stories under several different usernames:

Cable companies need to be regulated. They're working together to prevent having to provide better service or lower prices. The internet in the US is extremely slow and over priced.

My cable/internet costs me $150/month (from Time Warner). Contrast with my other expenses:

- Gym ($11/month from Planet Fitness)
- Mobile Phone ($21/month from TMobile)
- Car insurance ($25/month from Insurance Panda)
- Groceries ($90/month for me)

Yes, that's correct, my gym, cellphone, car insurance, and food COMBINED cost less than my TWC bill.

This will be a win for consumers by increasing competition and expanding infrastructure. Prices drop and speed increases. Profits drop. Aww.

In many comment platforms, visitors to the site can click on a username to see other comments posted by a commenter. Several of the usernames that posted the comment above have no other comments logged. It appears those usernames were created specifically for the purpose of posting that comment.

The purported reasons for the FCC stepping up its regulation of the Internet is that ISPs were "giving preferential treatment" to some services and "discriminating" against others and "creating paid fast lanes on the Internet." It sounds evil. It screams for relief that only Big Government can provide. 

Granted, some ISPs were slowing traffic to sites that provide streaming services for watching movies or downloading large files, while at the same time allowing faster connections to other sites. Also granted, most ISPs were providing faster services for consumers who pay more. But is that wrong? Does it require relief in the form of regulation?

These types of things are normal in a free market. Bandwidth is expensive to maintain, and ISPs must make decisions that are in their best interests as businesses. If some consumers are using a very large amount of the available bandwidth to download large files and stream movies and music, it means that either everything on that connection will slow down for everyone using it, or the ISP will have to increase the bandwidth, and pay for it. The choices are limited. The ISPs can "choke" the speeds to connections to those services that use the most bandwidth; they can charge extra to consumers who desire faster connections; they can raise rates across the board; or they can do a combination of the three.

Following the logic of the arguments in favor of Net Neutrality, a restaurant should charge the same price for an eight-ounce steak as for a 16-ounce steak. 

Just because Customer B has a bigger appetite than Customer A doesn't mean B should pay more, goes the Net Neutrality reasoning. In a free market (one that answers to the realities of cost and profits), the restaurant would have no choice but to offer only a 12-ounce steak and charge the same price as it had for the 16-ounce steak. And that is where these new regulations begin to harm consumers. We will see fewer choices and higher prices as the ISPs focus on lobbying their regulators and passing the costs along to their customers.

Many people live in areas where the demand for high speed Internet is low and have had to suffer with slow connection speeds. They have sat in Starbucks and public libraries and used their Internet connection when they needed a faster connection. Many currently pay about $100 per month for high speed Internet and home security from Comcast because they live in areas where demand is higher. These are their choices. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and as Big Government tries to force one, those who advocated for this are going to figure that out.

Thankfully, it is far from over. The courts can rule against Net Neutrality. Some in Congress are already talking about a bill to set it aside. A future FCC commission could reverse it.

It is a dire situation to be at the mercy of big government where something this important is concerned. It is time, as The New American's Joe Wolverton has observed, to force "the federal beast back inside its constitutional cage."

via thenewamerican

CIA Contractor: We Fabricated ISIS

Posted by Sean Adl-Tabatabai

Former CIA contractor Steven Kelley has said on record that ISIS/ISIL are a fabricated terrorist group made and funded by the CIA in the United States.

According to the video description:

“This is a completely fabricated enemy,” he said in a phone interview with Press TV from Anaheim, California on Thursday.

“The funding is completely from the United States and its allies and for people to think that this enemy is something that needs to be attacked in Syria or Iraq is a farce because obviously this is something that we create it, we control and only now it has become inconvenient for us to attack this group as a legitimate enemy,” Kelley added.

He made the remarks as US President Barack Obama is under pressure to seek congressional approval before expanding Washington’s military air campaign against ISIL targets from Iraq into neighboring Syria.

The Pentagon has already launched at least 100 airstrikes on ISIL positions in northern Iraq since Obama authorized the use of force against the terrorist group earlier this month.

The White House insists it does not need explicit congressional authorization for those operations because they are intended to protect American personnel and interests inside the Arab country.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that Obama “will not hesitate to use his authority” to keep Americans safe, but added that the president was “committed to coordinating and consulting with Congress” on a decision to hit ISIL targets in Syria.

“If you want to get to the root of the problem and remove this organization, the first thing they need to do is to remove the funding and take care of entities responsible for the creation of this group,” Kelley said.

“I believe that this ISIS group would probably go away, would be easily defeated by the armies of [Syrian President] Bashar Assad,” he said.

via yournewswire

New Republican Senate Intelligence Chairman Wants to Bury CIA Torture Reports

You already know what we will confirm: This bloke would never have been awarded a chairmanship had the Republican congressional syndicate not already believed Burr to be immoral and relied upon to do any cover-ups as instructed. 

This strategy has worked its magic well for the Republican mafia, and shall do so again in the general presidential election in 2016.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 New Republican Senate Intelligence Chairman Wants to Bury CIA Torture Reports

Friday, January 23, 2015

Sen. Richard Burr (photo 

Jim R. Bounds, AP)

The Senate Intelligence Committee has a new chairman, and he wants to protect the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from details of its use of torture last decade on terrorism suspects.

Senator Richard Burr (R-North Carolina) sent a letter to the Obama administration demanding it return copies of the committee’s investigative report on the CIA torture program.

The report was produced under the previous chair, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who authorized the public release of only a portion of the full report last month that revealed allegations of abuse by CIA officials and accusations that they may have lied about the effectiveness of the program. But copies of the entire 6,900-page report were delivered to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other agencies.

In his letter, Burr requested “that all copies of the full and final report in the possession of the executive branch be returned immediately.”

Burr’s move is “apparently aimed at keeping the full version of the report from being released to the public,” according to The Washington Post. The executive branch, which received many of the report copies, is subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, while the Senate is not.

Not surprisingly, Feinstein was against the move. “I strongly disagree that the administration should relinquish copies of the full committee study, which contains far more detailed records than the public executive summary,” Feinstein said in a statement, according to The Guardian.

“Doing so would limit the ability to learn lessons from this sad chapter in America’s history and omit from the record two years of work, including changes made to the committee’s 2012 report following extensive discussion with the CIA.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff, Steve Straehley

To Learn More:

The CIA Found That the CIA Lied About Torture, and Now Republicans Want Them to Take It Back (by Joan McCarter, Daily Kos)

Chairman of the Intelligence Panel Calls for Return of Full Torture Report (by Greg Miller, Washington Post)

Wyden Wants Full Torture Report Released (by Andrew Clevenger, The Bulletin)

CIA Torture Report Architect Denounces Republican Attempt to Claw Back Copies (by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian)

CIA Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was Inflated (by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times)

Richard Burr Takes CIA Report Fight to Senate Referee (by Burgess Everett, Politico)

The Wrong Senator to Oversee the CIA (by Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic)

Senate Report Rejects Claim that Torture Helped Search for Bin Laden (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Rectal Feeding, Chaining Diapered Detainees to the Ceiling, Torture of 26 Wrongly Imprisoned…Is This What Americans Do? (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)