Bank Settlement Was a Bait and Switch All Along
Labels: Attorneys General, bank fraud, criminal banks, Firedoglake, settlements, wrongful foreclosures
Submit To Propeller
posted by profmarcus at
2/19/2012
Labels: Bank Transfer Day, Firedoglake, Move Your Money, Occupy Reno, protests, snow
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/05/2011
There are many elements of change.
This is a tough one for the Oligarchs. Really. I can’t imagine their contingency plans, and all their think tanks could have come up with this. They expected the riots of 66 and 68, or perhaps they envisioned a charismatic leader who they could discredit. Or assassinate.
Leaderless. Peaceful. Powerful. Old. Young. Right wing. Left wing. Centrists. Black. Latino. White. Asian. Straight. Gay. Military. Anti-war. Blue collar. White collar.
Most of all? Numerous. Really fucking numerous.
And this, my dears, it the tip of the iceberg.
Labels: Firedoglake, leaderless, Occupy Oakland, oligarchy, participative democracy
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/04/2011
On Day 6, the protesters are in transition, moving from figuring out how to sustain themselves to hosting events to discuss the issues. An "open mic" is being planned for about 5 p.m. Saturday so people can speak their mind.
[...]
A large geodesic dome -- from Burning Man -- has been set up near the front of the Moana Pool building. With the dome, at least part of the camp will be visible to passing motorists.
The dome will serve as a media room with computers, Lowell said. Bicycle-powered generators and solar panels are being sought for their energy needs.
With the dome, at least part of the camp will be visible to passing motorists.
[Occupiers] were impressed Mayor Bob Cashell came by himself to talk with them. [A] high-ranking police official asked to be called if any officers give them any trouble for no reason.
About a dozen tents have been set up. Many are on top of pallets so people don't have to sleep on the cold ground. Two RVs on site will be moved along the west edge to serve as a windbreak and will be used as warm-up huts on the coldest nights... .
Firewood and a water buffalo, a water tank on wheels, are their biggest needs. They'd rather not use water in throw-away plastic bottles. Donations have covered the cost of about a dozen portable toilets.
Labels: Bank of America, Firedoglake, Occupy Reno, Reno Gazette Journal, Wells Fargo
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/03/2011
Labels: Firedoglake, has-beens, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, TBogg
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
10/23/2011
Labels: 2012 election, elites, Firedoglake, MOTU, October 2011, social contract, social darwinism, super-rich, two-party system
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
9/30/2011
Amidst the inevitable 9-11 retrospectives, I feel like only the Los Angeles Times is putting the past ten years in the proper perspective. Because the longest-lasting legacy of the 9-11 attacks is clearly the terror industry it spawned. Over the weekend the LAT looked at the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on absurd “security” projects, filling the pockets of contractors, and for little benefit:
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Today’s entry from the LAT is even better, and something I feel we pay too little attention to. In the decade since 9-11, this has become a surveillance state, and the government collects enormous amounts of data on every man, woman and child in America, in all likelihood too much to process. We all know about this, but it’s important to see all that surveillance together in one package:
…the secret domestic intelligence gathering [...] is one of the most significant legacies of Sept. 11. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies now collect, store and analyze vast quantities of digital data produced by law-abiding Americans. The data mining receives limited congressional oversight, rare judicial review and almost no public scrutiny.
Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.
We had one moment where this was subject to any debate at all, during the fight over the FISA amnesty legislation. But that was really about a small portion of the total data collection. Most of the surveillance remains a secret. Ron Wyden and Mark Udall tried to tease out a little more this summer, when they tried to get the intelligence community to admit to how they were misinterpreting the Patriot Act to allow for more data collection. But that never went anywhere. From NSA surveillance to national security letters to the AT&T room on Folsom Street in San Francisco, what bits and pieces we do know about point to a giant network Hoovering up every piece of information you let out into the world digitally.
I appreciate the LA Times highlighting this legacy. Nobody really questions why we’ve deprived American civil liberties to this degree, to protect the homeland from a threat that mirrors the threat posed by full bathtubs. Read the whole story for yourself. This has been an inexorable slide downward for ten years, and it shows no sign whatsoever of letting up.
Labels: ATT, domestic surveillance, Firedoglake, FISA, LA Times, NSA, Patriot Act, surveillance society, warrantless domestic wiretapping
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
8/30/2011
Assange Accuser Worked with US-Funded, CIA-Tied Anti-Castro Group
Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden has a significant history of work with anti-Castro groups, at least one of which is US funded and openly supported by a former CIA agent convicted in the mass murder of seventy three Cubans on an airliner he was involved in blowing up.Anna Ardin (the official complainant) is often described by the media as a “leftist”. She has ties to the US-financed anti-Castro and anti-communist groups. She published her anti-Castro diatribes (see here and here) in the Swedish-language publication Revista de Asignaturas Cubanas put out by Misceláneas de Cuba. From Oslo, Professor Michael Seltzer points out that this periodical is the product of a well-financed anti-Castro organization in Sweden. He further notes that the group is connected with Union Liberal Cubana led by Carlos Alberto Montaner whose CIA ties were exposed here.Quelle surprise, no? Shamir and Bennett went on to write about Ardin’s history in Cuba with a US funded group openly supported by a real terrorist: Luis Posada Carriles.
In Cuba she interacted with the feminist anti-Castro group Las damas de blanco (the Ladies in White). This group receives US government funds and the convicted anti-communist terrorist Luis Posada Carriles is a friend and supporter. Wikipedia quotes Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo as saying that “the so-called Ladies in White defend the terrorism of the United States.”Who is Luis Posada Carriles? He’s a mass murderer, and former CIA agent.
Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles (born February 15, 1928) (nicknamed Bambi by some Cuban exiles)[1] is a Cuban-born Venezuelan anti-communist extremist. A former Central Intelligence Agency agent,[2] Posada has been convicted in absentia of involvement in various terrorist attacks and plots in the Americas, including: involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed seventy-three people;[3][4] admitted involvement in a string of bombings in 1997 targeting fashionable Cuban hotels and nightspots;[5][6][7] involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion; [and] involvement in the Iran-Contra affair…Luis Posada Carilles is so evil that even the Bush administration wanted him behind bars:
In 2005, Posada was held by U.S. authorities in Texas on the charge of illegal presence on national territory before the charges were dismissed on May 8, 2007. On September 28, 2005 a U.S. immigration judge ruled that Posada cannot be deported, finding that he faces the threat of torture in Venezuela.[11] His release on bail on April 19, 2007 had elicited angry reactions from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments.[12] The U.S. Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was “an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks”, a flight risk and a danger to the community.[7]Who is Julian Assange’s chief accuser in Sweden? She’s a gender equity officer at Uppsula University – who chose to associate with a US funded group openly supported by a convicted terrorist and mass murderer. She just happens to have her work published by a very well funded group connected with Union Liberal Cubana – whose leader, Carlos Alberto Montaner, in turn just happened to pop up on right wing Colombian TV a few hours after the right-wing coup in Honduras. Where he joined the leader of the failed coup in Ecuador to savage Correa, the target of the coup. Montnaner also just happened to vociferously support the violent coup in Honduras, and chose to show up to sing the praises of the Honduran junta. Jean-Guy Allard, a retired Canadian journalist who now writes for Cuba’s Gramma, captured the moment
A strange pair appeared on NTN 24, the right-wing Colombian television channel aligned to the Fox Broadcasting Company the U.S. A few hours after the coup attempt in Quito, Ecuador, CIA agent Carlos Alberto Montaner, a fugitive from Cuban justice for acts of terrorism, joined with one of the leaders of the failed Ecuadorian coup, ex-Lieutenant Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, to attack President Rafael Correa…On the margin of his media news shows, Montaner’s is known for his fanatic support of the most extreme elements of the Cuban-American mafia.
Last year, in the wake of the coup d’état against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, June 28, he became an fervent supporter of the dictator Roberto Micheletti, along with U.S. Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and another Cuban-American terrorist and CIA collaborator, Armando Valladares.
Montaner showed up repeatedly in Tegucigalpa to “defend human rights,” and at the same time to applaud the fascist Honduran regime when it unleashed its police on demonstrations by the National Resistance Front.
Oh…and the “rape” charge that’s smeared Julian Assange’s name around the world? On Thursday James D. Catlin, the Melbourne barrister who represented Assange in London, wrote:
Apparently having consensual sex in Sweden without a condom is punishable by a term of imprisonment of a minimum of two years for rape. That is the basis for a reinstitution of rape charges against WikiLeaks figurehead Julian Assange that is destined to make Sweden and its justice system the laughing stock of the world and dramatically damage its reputation as a model of modernity.Sweden’s Public Prosecutor’s Office was embarrassed in August this year when it leaked to the media that it was seeking to arrest Assange for rape, then on the same day withdrew the arrest warrant because in its own words there was “no evidence”. The damage to Assange’s reputation is incalculable. More than three quarters of internet references to his name refer to rape. Now, three months on and three prosecutors later, the Swedes seem to be clear on their basis to proceed. Consensual sex that started out with a condom ended up without one, ergo, the sex was not consensual.
I’ve spent much of my professional life as a psychiatrist helping women (and men) who are survivors of sexual violence. Rape is a hideous crime. Yet in Assange’s case his alleged victim – the gender equity officer at Uppsula University – chose to throw a party for her alleged assailant – after they’d had the sex that even Swedish prosecutors concede was consensual. Barrister Caitlin again:
[The] phenomena of social networking through the internet and mobile phones constrains Swedish authorities from augmenting the evidence against Assange because it would look even less credible in the face of tweets by Anna Ardin and SMS texts by Sofia Wilén boasting of their respective conquests after the “crimes”.In the case of Ardin it is clear that she has thrown a party in Assange’s honour at her flat after the “crime” and tweeted to her followers that she is with the “the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”. Go on the internet and see for yourself. That Ardin has sought unsuccessfully to delete these exculpatory tweets from the public record should be a matter of grave concern. That she has published on the internet a guide on how to get revenge on cheating boyfriends ever graver. The exact content of Wilén’s mobile phone texts is not yet known but their bragging and exculpatory character has been confirmed by Swedish prosecutors. Neither Wilén’s nor Ardin’s texts complain of rape.
Small world, isn’t it? Julian Assange is the human face of Wikileaks – the organization that’s enabled whistle-blowers to reveal hideous war crimes and expose much of America’s foreign policy to the world.
He just happens to meet a Swedish woman who just happens to have been publishing her work in a well-funded anti-Castro group that just happens to have links with a group led by a man at least one journalist describes as an agent of the CIA: the violent secret arm of America’s foreign policy.
And she just happens to have been expelled from Cuba, which just happens to be the global symbol of successful defiance of American foreign policy.
And – despite her work in Sweden upholding the human right of gender equity – in Cuba she just happens to end up associating with a group openly supported by an admitted CIA agent who himself committed mass murder when he actively participated in the terrorist bombing of a jetliner carrying a Cuban sports team…an act that was of a piece with America’s secret foreign policy of violent attacks against Cuban state interests.
And now she just happens – after admittedly consensual sex – to have gone to Swedish authorities to report the sex ended without a condom…which just happens to be the pretext for Interpol to issue a “Red Notice” informing the world’s police forces of charges against Julian Assange.
Who just happens to be the man America’s political class – the people who run America’s foreign policy – have been trying to silence. And who happens to be the man some of them have been calling to have murdered.
With a lust for vengeance like that, one could be forgiven for concluding they’ve just happened to have taken a page from Anna’s revenge manual.
Labels: CIA, Cuba, Firedoglake, Julian Assange, rape, Sweden, Wikileaks
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/05/2010
FAA and NORAD Changed Records to Accord with Cheney Lies
F.A.A. and Norad records [show] that a day after a Sept. 17 White House briefing, both agencies suddenly altered their chronologies to produce a coherent timeline and story that “fit together nicely with the account provided publicly by Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz and Vice President Cheney.”
We’ve know for a long time that the FAA records, in particular, were politicized. Given already documented proof that Cheney lied to hide the fact that he violated the chain of command on 9/11 it’s not surprising that that politicization served Dick Cheney’s false narrative of leadership.
But we can add this book to the long list of proof that Cheney’s a big liar trying to hide his own incompetence.
Labels: 9/11 Commission, 9/11 conspiracy theories, Firedoglake, John Farmer, Marcy Wheeler, New York Times
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
11/14/2009
Labels: Countdown, emptywheel, Firedoglake, illegal spying, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, NSA, Oxdown Gazette, Russell Tice, warrantless domestic wiretapping
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
1/21/2009
Tell Harry Reid To Support
Chris Dodd's Filibuster!
Dear Senator Reid: I am outraged by your efforts to enable the Bush administration and telecoms to escape all accountability for their illegal spying on American citizens. I am appalled by your refusal to recognize the "hold" placed by Sen. Chris Dodd on the Cheney/Rockefeller bill to expand warrantless eavesdropping and provide telecoms immunity, especially given the reverence with which you treat "holds" asserted by GOP Senators. And I am truly disappointed that you have treated in such a cavalier manner revelations that the Bush administration has simply broken the law in how it has spied on Americans.
Sadly, your legacy as Senate Majority Leader thus far is one of extreme weakness and failure. It is astonishing to watch one capitulation after the next to a President who is widely discredited and historically unpopular and whose administration is patently corrupt. Your constituents did not send you to Washington to enable the Bush administration's behavior, but rather to act as an important check on that behavior. Your role as Senate Majority Leader is to impose limits on the President's misconduct, not to enable and endorse it. You are profoundly failing in all of your core duties.
More than ever, America needs principled and courageous leadership, and you are uniquely situated to provide it. Please start doing so. You can begin by joining in Chris Dodd's filibuster of the horrific Senate Intelligence Committee bill and by urging your caucus members to do the same.
Labels: Bush Administration, capitulation, Firedoglake, FISA, Harry Reid, Republicans, retroactive immunity, telecommunications companies, warrantless domestic wiretapping
Submit To Propellerposted by profmarcus at
12/17/2007
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