McDONALD'S is Lifting Prices in Poorer Suburbs

Na Girl

Message Sent

American Scofflaw

Are we missing the BIG picture by focusing on “how they did it’?

25+ years ago JFK was boldly and callously assassinated. The Warren Commission Report, authored by Hitler’s personal historian, began the cover-up in earnest. This was aided by Gerald Ford’s intentional lie regarding the point of entry of the bullet.
[See Prez Ford Admitted Doctoring Warren Rpt.]
[More JFK murder trivia.]

Just like the “official” 9/11 Report, also written by an officially unattributed author. It too began the cover-up in earnest.

And, in years yet to be seen, the Engineered Global Economic Collapse occurring now will be dissected and explained for the masses.

But maybe the real message is the one a former “magic bullet” debunker eventually uncovered.

Philadelphia lawyer Vincent Salandria was one of the earliest and best critics of the Warren Commission. Immediately after its Report was issued, he wrote a highly detailed critique for The Legal Intelligencer analyzing how the trajectories and ballistics were all wrong.

In 1975, as Gaeton Fonzi was preparing for work as a government investigator on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he visited Salandria, whom he found dejected about the fruits of a dozen years of research.

Fonzi quotes Salandria in his important book, The Last Investigation:

“I’m afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now.

“We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy.

“Don’t you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to.

“Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny.

“The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear:

“We are in control and no one– not the
President, nor Congress, nor any elected
official — no one can do anything about it.”

What The ???

American Scofflaw

What boggles my mind is, what sane country on the planet would actually want his shoes soiling their sidewalks?

This is a petty, crass, sociopath, who has told the world - and the American people - an extraordinary pack of lies with which to generate two horrendous wars, both of which look as though they're about ready to boil over in South Asia.

These wars have so sapped this country, both in blood and in money, that the national economy is staggering like a punch-drunk fighter, claiming they're OK when they're about to keel over for the count.

And let's not forget the jewels in the crown of the Bush "Legacy"; the legitimizing of torture, the vivisection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the destruction of American civil rights as we used to know them. We have devolved, under Bush's watch, from "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" to the "land of the surveilled, and the home of the cowed.

I cannot think of a country on this planet which wouldn't be painfully embarrassed to have this man, strutting like a popinjay, representing the US on the lecture circuit. Unless, that country was also run by sociopaths who believes that the sun rises and sets in their glory, and that all those people who work desperately longer and longer hours to pay their bills are simply just a never-ending source of tax dollars for the elites' amusement.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. To those who fanatically believed - and still clutch to the belief - that everything Bush has done is absolutely right, I would caution them to remember this.

Let's hope that some of these countries will have the courage to "Just Say NO" to a Bush lecture at one of their venues.

Perhaps the costs of security arrangements, (which will have to be vast, and probably well above what the Secret Service can really do to protect him) may well cause some countries, political, social, and educational entities to have cause to reconsider.

I Doubt It

Гей секретаря

If Obama actually carries through with ending tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs abroad, it will be the first thing he has done I agree with. But, it does not go far enough.
We need to lower taxes in this country to the point where we can be competitive with other nations' manufacturing.

The reason those foreign countries get by with paying their workers less is that it costs less to live there! The United States is one of the most expensive places to live and the reason is the constant uplifts to the cost of everything because of taxation, half of which goes to feed the wear machine.

If we gave up our psychotic need to kill brown people around the world, we could cut all Federal taxes IN HALF and not see any reductions on social service or infrastructure.

That means that Americans would not need to earn as much money to keep the same lifestyle, and could work for wages and salaries more consistent with other industrialized nations.

At bottom there is really only one difference between the economy of the United States and that of other nations and that is the vast sums of money spent by the US on things that kill other people, or sent to Israel so that they can kill other people.

e-mailgary@comcast.net

それは詐欺だ

アメリカの法律違反常習者
日本の科学者は、国連や欧米との劇的な損益は、エネルギー委員会からの新しい報告書で気候変動の仮説を支持している。

3人は5人の研究者は、国連のIPCCのビューでは、最近の温暖化は主に男性の結果です反対の温室効果ガスの排出量は産業した。驚くべきことに、微妙な、微妙な言語などのレポートに典型的な脇に設定されています。

5つの貢献の1つは、古代の占星術をコンピューターの気候モデルを比較します。その他の仮説をサポートするために使用される設定すると、米国の地上気温のデータの不足酷評して、 20世紀半ばからは、明確なトレンドを停止している温暖化を宣言します。

日本社会のエネルギー資源（ JSER ）の報告書は国際的な圧力に驚くほどの非難を、日本のネイティブの海洋と天文学の研究で信任されています。亀裂は、最近登場している欧米の公立科学均一の仮説は、産業界の影響は主に、気候変動に責任を支持している。 1つだけの5つの日本の科学者たちはここでは、男と地球温暖化仮説同意委託した。

JSERは、学術的社会は、エネルギーや資源分野の科学者を代表し、政府の諮問機関として機能しています。レポートの最後の月が掲載され妙にほとんど関心を受けています。そのため、登録する文書の翻訳-西内の任意の形式で表示される最初の委託。以下にいくつかの主要な調査結果があるのです-が、最初は、要約。

Servitude in Scofflaw America

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." -- 13th Amendment to the US Constitution

American Scofflaw

This is a violation of the 13th Amendment.And just to make things perfectly clear, the people engineering this tyranny don’t intend to participate in the misery.

A Democratic Senator from Connecticut has introduced four bills aimed at establishing a groundwork for a system of comprehensive national service.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., says that the legislation will “create the architecture and the structure that will serve as the invitation for everyone to serve.”The Senate bills, co-sponsored by Thad Cochran, R-Miss., are companion legislation to bills Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, introduced Tuesday in the House, calling for increases in federal spending for public service programs.

The legislation would target everyone from schoolchildren to the elderly and aim to create new bases of volunteers beyond the usual young-adult pool of service-program participants, reports The Day.

Two of the bills, named the Summer of Service Act and the Semester of Service Act, are particularly aimed at middle school and high school students and will offer “credits” in return for participation in community-service programs.Some residents and education experts are concerned that such public service programs may become part of student graduation requirements.

Back Off, Jack

Amerian Scofflaw
Dershowitz, Obama and all you other liberals screw the country and leave the Bill of Rights alone. The Second Amendment is not about hunting and it is not about sport shooting. The phrase "Security of a free state" clearly indicates that the arms under discussion are military arms, of necessity equal to power and effectiveness of those that might be used by an invader, whether that invader is a foreign nation or an abusive central government.

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." (Thomas Jefferson Papers p. 334, 1950)

"While the people have property, arms in their hands, and only a spark of noble spirit, the most corrupt Congress must be mad to form any project of tyranny." -- Rev. Nicholas Collin, Fayetteville Gazette (N.C.), October 12, 1789

"[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow citizens." -- The Federalist, No. 29 -- Alexander Hamilton

We live today in the very circumstances Jefferson and Hamilton spoke of; a large central government, broke, in debt, that even now seeks to remove our liberties that we may not resist their looting of our lives to fund their excesses.

The government is already planning how to make you a slave. You must plan how to be free.

Hillary's Hog Love Call

American Scofflaw
This is Hilary's version of that infamous scene from the movie Deliverance

Coin Flip

American Scofflaw

Wow! The US Government just dumped $30,000 in tax debt on your ass and they hope to buy you off by letting you take home an extra $10 per week. And here's the rub; just because they let you take it home right now does NOT mean you get to keep it. Absent a significant tax reduction, you will have to send that $10 back in next year's return, or at best, see that $10 deducted from any refund.

This is a cosmetic change; a public relations maneuver, with no real substance or benefit to it.

Remember the scene in "Take of Two Cities" where the coach runs over the child and the rich owner of the coach tosses a coin out the window to the parents to "pay" for the child?

The coin just got thrown at you.

Screw Already

American Scofflaw

So Citigroup (C) has proposed that the US taxpayer and other preferred shareholders convert up to $75 billion of preferred stock into common stock, thus bolstering the company's tangible equity and putting it in less desperate need of a complete takeover.

And what will the US taxpayer get for this preferred stock conversion? 40% of the company for some of its $45 billion of preferred, say reports. The reports add that Citigroup's goal here is to keep the US's ownership under 50%, so this won't be a de facto nationalization.

Well, that's nice for Citigroup...and another ream-job for taxpayers.

Citigroup's common equity is currently worth $10 billion. If the US were to convert all $45 billion of its preferred at the current stock price, it should end up with 80% of the company, not 40%. If another $30 billion of preferreds converted, the US should end up with just over 50%.

For the US to convert $45 billion of preferred to common and only get 40% of the company, Citigroup's existing common equity would have to be valued at $65 billion, not $10 billion, and the conversion price would have to be about $10 a share. Or the US would only be able to convert $4 billion of its $45 billion, which wouldn't help Citigroup's tangible equity ratio much.

So is that what Citigroup is trying to do here? Persuade the US goverment to convert to common stock at a price miles above the current trading price, screwing the US taxpayer yet again?

Or does Citigroup have some other secret plan up its sleeve?

Strange Dude

The barreleye (Macropinna microstoma) has extremely light-sensitive eyes that can rotate within a transparent, fluid-filled shield on its head. The fish's tubular eyes are capped by bright green lenses. The eyes point upward (as shown here) when the fish is looking for food overhead.

Look Carefully: MEMRI TV is a Scam!!!

American Scofflaw

Look carefully at the logo on the screen. This translation is provided by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, located in Washington DC (and subsidized by the taxpayers) which provides free translations of Arab broadcasts to the western media.

However, MEMRI has been outed as an agent for the Israeli Government. MEMRI was founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a Colonel in the Israeli Intelligence Services. Norman Finkelstein reports MEMRI is a Mossad operation.

In this article which appeared in The Guardian, Brian Whitaker calls MEMRI's impartiality into question.

So, we need to be very careful about this video as the translation might be altered just enough to shift the meaning. Remember when Ahmadinejad said that "Israel's government must vanish from the pages of history" and it was mistranslated into "Israel will be wiped off of the map?" The same might well be happening here. The individual in this video might well be trying to warn us about a false-flag attack which is about to occur to start WWIII.

The Government is Preparing to Make You a Slave

Scold 'em Baby

Scofflaw Delusion

American Scofflaw

Your tax dollars at work, folks; while American vets sleep in our streets.

The knuckleheads who put together the "plan" for the Afghanistan campaign apparently had not one bit of understanding about the history of the people they were going to fight, and managed to have selective amnesia on that little bit in the military tactical books stating that a country cannot possibly win what is a land war from the air.(something I had hoped we would learn from Viet Nam, but apparently haven't.)

All this, coupled with what can only be kindly described as "magical thinking" has lead us to where we are, 7 years on. We have an insurgency which wants its country back, an Afghani president and government so crooked that the people believe that they have to screw their socks on in the morning, and - oh yes - the opium poppy business is booming!

Obama has vowed to placed 17,000 more troops there (which depends on when we can get many of them out of Iraq,), to add to the 30,000 US troops already there. So, we have around 47,000 troops.

US military planners estimate 500,000 troops, including newly trained Afghan National Army soldiers, are needed to secure the country"

500,000...47,000. Less than 10%, even counting NATO-Contributing forces. So ultimately, we've come up with a manpower figure which most likely cannot, and will not, work to hold this country.d

It isn't for no reason that Afghanistan has been characterized as "The Graveyard of Empires".

How Many More, Sir, How Many More?

American Scofflaw

So, I have a close friend who is one of the unfortunate citizens who was laid off due to our failing housing market. This person was laid off over a year ago. They have dutifully filed for their unemployment insurance religiously and recently all of the benefits from the state were exhausted. The agency told this person to continue filing as they were expecting the Stimulus Plan to come through with added benefits. This is where it gets really interesting!

Today, my friend recieved a letter in the mail stating that they were indeed going to be receiving additional benefits through the Stimulus Plan. (I was quite happy to hear that my tax dollars were going to help someone
I knew!) The letter they received today stated that they would be receiving a Citi Debit Card. (Because apparently 45 Billion wasn’t enough?) This card would be funded with the bi-weekly amount from UI and they would be provided with a PIN number to withdraw funds or they were perfectly able to use the card at any retail location that accepted VISA.

All right, so that is the story and now the questions start. Is Citi the only company getting the opportunity to funnel the taxpayers dollars? Is this how the government will start funding all of their projects? Is there an upfront cost to these cards that the government paid to have the cards issued? So many questions, so little time!

I am really not very upset and I don’t know that I think this is a BAD idea, but once again, I feel like the Washington cronyism is once again hard at work. How many of these situations were locked up inside this Stimulus Plan that no one got to read? Every time I turn around, I just keep feeling like Washington is trying to pull a fast one. Why weren’t things like this announced? Why does everything seem so covert? Who is taking care of their buddies under the pretense doing the bidding of “We the people”? What happened to the idea that the laws passed by our government were supposed to be fair and equitable for all? Are banks who have not loaned more money than they should have and made good deals with up-standing consumers given the same opportunity or is this more of the “rewarding the bad behavior” mentality?

If I hear any more on this, I will certainly let you know. What do you think about it? Do you think there should be disclosure on these things? Would you like to know what is in this 1.3 Trillion dollar economic pork pot? I think I would.

Real or Fake???

American Scofflaw
IS THIS A SEA SERPENT?

Nooo?? You Think So, Scofflaw?

American Scofflaw

Princeton, N.J., tax lawyer Robert Kenny says he's paying a steep price for taking on the IRS on behalf of clients: a retaliatory strike that has put his livelihood and his law license at risk.

In a federal court suit, Kenny alleges that when he complained to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that an IRS agent was telling taxpayers to forgo representation, the IRS lodged a professional complaint against him.

Though the suit ... was dismissed, Kenny says he is appealing. According to his suit, Kenny filed three complaints with TIGTA over a three-year period, accusing IRS agent Steven Wald of deterring taxpayers from hiring representatives and, when they did so, trying to interfere with them. ...

[A]n IRS investigation of Kenny's tax records ... uncovered two late-filed returns, for 2001 and 2005 ... Kenny, who is also a CPA, says his failure to obtain an extension was careless but when he realized his error, he filed accurate returns and paid what he owed, well before the IRS began its probe. ...

Last May 14, however, he heard from the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility ... [which] accused him of willful failure to file a return, as well as giving false information and attempting to influence an IRS employee by making false accusations. If the charges stick, Kenny can be permanently barred from IRS practice, suspended, censured or fined. In addition, some states will disbar a lawyer whose right to practice before the IRS is revoked, and New Jersey might be one of them, says Kenny.

Last July, after he learned of the OPR action, Kenny filed another complaint with TIGTA, asserting that he had been falsely accused in retaliation for his complaints against Wald. He says he does not know the status of that complaint or of the pending OPR matter. The following month, he sued. ...

He issued a press release when he filed his complaint, raised it on an ABA listserv and spoke with lawyers knowledgeable about that area of the law. One of them is Kevin Thorn, of Williams Mullen in Washington, D.C., who once worked for the OPR and devotes a large part of his practice to representing lawyers and accountants in OPR proceedings.

"Tax practitioners should sit up and take notice of this," he says. There seems to be a connection between Kenny's filing of a TIGTA complaint and the OPR complaint against him, says Thorn ...

New Jersey tax lawyer Dennis Haase [says] ... "I have had clients come to me and say the IRS told them 'you don't need someone to represent you, you only need to produce the records,'" says Haase, of Sweeney Lev in Montclair. "We find it chilling. We find it scary," says Barton Goodeve, an accountant in Peterborough, N.H. ...

The Entire Federal Reserve is a Ponzi Scheme

American Scofflaw

Folks, it's simple.

Folks, the ultimate problem is that the entire federal Reserve system is a pyramid scheme, and now that they have run out of fresh borrowers, the system is collapsing.

They can't fix it.

All they can do is loot what's left and stick you with the mess!

1. Bernie Madoff starts a pyramid scheme which succeeds in generating vast sums of profit for its early investors for almost 15 years.

2. Many of Madoff's investors are pro-Israel foundations and PACs, or individuals who donate to pro-Israel foundations and PACs.

3. The pro-Israel foundations and PACs donate heavily to the campaigns of those candidates willing to sell their souls to Israel for campaign cash.

4. THEREFORE, those pro-Israel politicians in Congress won their seats in part using stolen money.

5. THEREFORE, the Madoff pyramid, until it collapsed, was a major funding mechanism that allowed the Israeli lobby to buy the US Government for the benefit of Israel and to the detriment of the American people.

Unflipping Believable

American Scofflaw
Fast food giant McDonald's has denied workers compensation benefits to a minimum wage employee who was shot when he ejected a customer who had been beating a woman inside the restaurant.

A representative of the administrator for McDonald's workers compensation plan explained that "we have denied this claim in its entirety as it is our opinion that Mr. Haskett's injuries did not arise out of or within the course and scope of his employment."

Nigel Haskett, then aged 21, was working at a McDonald's in Little Rock, Arkansas last summer when he saw a patron, later identified as Perry Kennon, smacking a woman in the face. A surveillance video of the incident, which had been posted to YouTube, was taken down after McDonald's charged copyright infringement, but according to written descriptions of the video, Haskett tackled Kennon, threw him out, and then stood by the door to prevent him from reentering.

Kennon went to his car, returned with a gun, and shot Haskett multiple times. Haskett staggered back into the restaurant and collapsed.

Kennon, who has a long criminal record, was arrested a few days later and charged with first-degree battery. The judge at his arraignment praised Haskett as a hero.

Haskett has since undergone three abdominal surgeries and has incurred over $300,000 in medical bills. McDonald's has declined to comment on their reasons for refusing his claim, because the case is still pending before the Workers Compensation Commission, but according to Haskett's lawyer, Philip M. Wilson:

"McDonald's position now is that during thirty-minute orientation Mr. Haskett and the other individuals going through the orientation were supposedly told that in the event of a robbery or anything like a robbery . . . not to be a hero and simply call 911. Mr. Haskett denies that anything like that was even mentioned during orientation or at any time during his employment with McDonald's."

McDonald's may be on shaky legal ground in their attempt to deny benefits. As explained by the blog "Joe's Union Review," courts have repeatedly ruled that injuries incurred in the course of "good samaritan" acts while on the job are entitled to compensation, especially if they result in good will towards the employer.

"McDonald’s is really living up to it’s reputation as an evil empire," another blog comments. "They’re no longer merely all about moving in on the little guy, or clogging your arteries with fry grease, or making kids big chunkers, but are also now turning on their employees."

Dear Brother

Kick This Man In The Ass

American Scofflaw
mid growing rumors of bank nationalization, which the WSJ and Dow Jones attribute to ChartingStocks.net, the great wealth destroying CEO of Bank of America felt obliged to give an emergency interview yesterday to play down talks of government takeover.

“When you talk about nationalization of Bank of America, it becomes absurd. What it appears to be are a bunch of malicious rumors,” Ken Lewis said in an interview. He went on to say “Our company continues to be profitable…We see no reason why a company that is profitable with strong levels of capital and liquidity and that continues to lend actively should be considered for nationalization.”

Well Ken, let us help you out and give you a few reasons:

1. The US taxpayer has already provided your company with $45 billion in direct capital and another $140 billion to support your most toxic and worthless assets. You’re entire company has a market capitalization of $24 billion, and so, the US taxpayer has already provided Bank of America with enough capital to buy your entire company 8 times over.

2. Were it not for the implied quasi backing of the US government, you would have no access to the credit markets to raise capital. You’ve benefited from a sweetheart deal which allowed you to issue $8 billion in low interest rate debt which is back by the FDIC. Again, transferring more of your companies risk to the public.

3. New Management. Like any good acquirer of companies, people foreign to your company will come in and do away with the “Low hanging fruit.” I can’t think of a better person to start with than you. I understand the extent of the systemic decline of the economy, but you sir have contributed greatly to your companies demise.

You thought it prudent to buy $2 billion of preferred stock from Countrywide which could be converted at $18 per share. After the deal, Countrywide’s shares continued to plummet on “Rumors” of bankruptcy and so you doubled down and invested another $4 billion to buy Countywide financial.

You though it prudent to buy Merrill Lynch, a company riddled in toxic assets, for $50 billion. The deal was announced on a Sunday, when everyone on the street new Merrill wouldn’t be open for business the following Monday without a deal. I’m curious as to your due diligence process? Morgan Stanley’s John Mack just took over Smith Barney for a few billion dollars. Take notes Ken.

Needless to say, a little bit of patience Mr. Lewis, would have gone a long way. Both companies could have been bought for pennies on each of the dollars you wasted if you only waited.

4. Profits. We’re glad that your company is profitable (as you claim) but we, the public, are outraged that you’ve used our money to nationalize your worthless assets while allowing you to keep your profits private. I was against giving your company any money at all, but since you survive only because of the American public, why should you’re shareholders be rewarded privately? Private investors aren’t willing to give you any money.

Black Eric's Agenda

The Gay Secretary

In a speech he gave for Black History Month, Attorney General Eric Holder called America a nation of cowards when it comes to discussing racial matters in a frank manner. In light of the fact that many white voters were instrumental in helping to elect the nation's first African-American president, I can't think of a more incongruous speech nor a more inopportune time for making such comments, ironically, coming out of the mouth of the nation's first African-American Attorney General.

Instead of celebrating the election of Barack Obama as a historical milestone in the nation's history, Holder characterizes his ascension to the presidency as dealing, "with the reality of electing an African American as our President for the first time." An odd choice of words. Could he not have simply acknowledged the significance of this achievement to the effect that discrimination against blacks has been markedly reduced?

Probably not, and here's why: Holder is a member of that liberal constituency group that I would characterize as "the perpetually aggrieved." No matter the extent of the progress America has made in eradicating the past sins of racism or discrimination, any such efforts will always be deemed incomplete, demonstrating the need for further erosion of our liberties to satisfy their undefined standards of perfection. For those like Holder, discrimination that occurred in the past will always be sufficient justification for remedial action to be administered by the heavy hand of government in the present and eternally into the future. Exactly what conditions would satisfy Holder to the effect that we are no longer a racist country? He doesn't say.

Many of those who share Holder's sentiments were part of the lynch mob who were perfectly happy to find the members of the Duke Lacrosse Team guilty before any of the facts were known simply by virtue of their skin color and because the alleged circumstances of the case conveniently fit their preferred template of America as a racist country. Speaking of "cowardly", did Holder speak out against the despicable treatment meted out to the innocent members of the Lacrosse team by the media and Duke University as aiders and abettors of a racially-motivated monstrous hoax? Did he condemn prominent African-American leaders who all too eagerly jumped on the bandwagon?

If he wants frank discussions about race then he should be prepared to defend the continued practice of quota hiring system and a racial spoils system. Is Holder, like the Democratic Party, inextricably tied to the practice of identity politics? One could make the plausible argument that Barack Obama were he white would have been laughed off the stage if he tried to run for president based on his razor thin resume and scant qualifications as a "community organizer."

Obama enjoyed unparalleled advantages by virtue of his skin color, as have all beneficiaries of affirmative-action/quota hiring policies. Perhaps Holder can explain to us exactly how was Obama's race a hindrance to his running for president?

Holder addresses the issue of affirmative action by stating:

There can, for instance, be very legitimate debate about the question of affirmative action. This debate can, and should, be nuanced, principled and spirited. But the conversation that we now engage in as a nation on this and other racial subjects is too often simplistic and left to those on the extremes who are not hesitant to use these issues to advance nothing more than their own, narrow self interest.

Thus, Holder acknowledges that legitimacy of debating the need for affirmative action, but, in the same breath paints those who oppose it as belonging on the "extremes" and are interested in using it to advance their self-interest. Sounds like a cowardly way to have a frank discussion about race if you're going to stigmatize those who oppose reverse discrimination as racist.

Holder may call for a "frank" discussion on race, but as long as he and his fellow travellers in the media continue to invoke the race card, which Obama wielded so skillfully in the past election, no one will oblige him in his plea for candor when latent charges of "racism" will always act as to preclude an intellectually honest and enlightening debate. In terms of defining the permissible contours of debate on many issues of race, as long as there exists one standard for whites and a completely different one for blacks, any ensuing discussion will be nothing more than an exercise in futility.

The Reason For All This

American Scofflaw
This holiday season the multiplexes, the art houses and the glossy for-your-consideration ads in publications like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter will be overrun with Nazis.

A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar season tradition, but 2008 offers an abundance of peaked caps and riding breeches, lightning-bolt collar pins and swastika armbands, as an unusually large cadre of prominent actors assumes the burden of embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.

The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.

The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?

David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in "Adam Resurrected," Paul Schrader's new film. In "The Reader," directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer's "Valkyrie," wears the uniform of the Third Reich though his character, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was not a true-believing Nazi but rather a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

And of course there will be plenty of room on screen for the victims and survivors of Hitler's regime. Adam, the title character in "Adam Resurrected," is a Berlin nightclub performer, played by Jeff Goldblum, who finds himself, after enduring the camps, confined to an Israeli asylum. And in Edward Zwick's "Defiance," Daniel Craig plays Tuvia Bielski, the real-life leader of a group of Jewish partisans who fought the Germans in the forests of Belarus. Meanwhile, the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust - most prominently represented on American screens in recent years by "The Counterfeiters," which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February, and earlier aspirants like "Downfall" and "Black Book" - continued this autumn with the U.S. releases of "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand," two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.

The moral imperatives imposed by the slaughter of European Jews are Never Again and Never Forget, which mean, logically, that the story of the Holocaust must be repeated again and again. But the sheer scale of the atrocity - the six million extinguished lives and the millions more that were indelibly scarred, damaged and disrupted - suggests that the research, documentation and imaginative reconstruction, the building of memorials and museums, the writing of books and scripts, no matter how scrupulous and exhaustive, will necessarily be partial, inadequate and belated. And this tragic foreknowledge of insufficiency, which might be inhibiting, turns out, on the contrary, to spur the creation of more and more material.

Shortly after the war the German critic T.W. Adorno declared that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." This observation has frequently been interpreted, aphoristically, as a fiat of silence, a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools are what we have to work with. The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann's epic documentary "Shoah," Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and Peter Eisenmann's Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism.

To describe these as masterpieces is not especially controversial, but it is also, as Adorno perhaps anticipated, somehow unseemly. If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also incubate the ambition to achieve such greatness, and thus open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity. Worse, the aura that still surrounds this topic - the sense that it must be treated with a special measure of tact and awe - can be appropriated by clumsy, sentimental and meretricious films or books. Thus the immodest indecency of a movie like Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning "Life Is Beautiful" was, during its initial period of triumph, deflected onto those with the temerity to criticize it.

And a similar defense is invoked, explicitly or implicitly, so routinely that it calls forth cynicism. Why do opportunistic, clever young novelists gravitate toward magic-realist depictions of the decidedly unmagical reality of the Shoah? For the same reason that actors preen and leer in jackboots and epaulets, or for the same reason that filmmakers commission concrete barracks and instruct their cinematographers to filter out bright, saturated colors. To win prizes of course.
Winslet said as much on an episode of "Extras": "I've noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar." She was joking, of course, though her appearance in "The Reader" suggests that the joke is funny because it's often true. Why else do you suppose all the movies listed at the beginning of this article, including "The Reader," are coming out in November and December? Not because Hanukkah is coming.

The television miniseries "Holocaust" is nobody's idea of a masterpiece, but its broadcast, in 1979, on West German state television was a decisive event in that nation's reckoning with its culpability. It is estimated that more than half of the adult German population watched the series.

Subsequently, according to the historian Tony Judt, "Germans would be among the best-informed Europeans on the subject of the Shoah and at the forefront of all efforts to maintain public awareness of their country's singular crime." The French conscience may have been stirred by superior movies - "The Sorrow and the Pity," "Shoah" - but France was much slower to acknowledge the full measure of its complicity.

And in the United States "Schindler's List" in 1993 was a similar watershed. Though the Holocaust was not a central event in U.S. history, "Schindler's List," even more than "Holocaust," made it into one by turning it into the basis of a Hollywood epic. Buying a ticket was treated almost as a moral duty.

"Schindler's List" undoubtedly gave rise to a new pedagogical and commemorative impulse. It also, however, helped to domesticate the Holocaust by making it a fixture of American middlebrow popular culture. Which I don't mean entirely as a criticism, since that culture is better than a lot of the alternatives. But Hollywood trades in optimism, redemption and healing, and its rendering of even the most appalling realities inevitably converts their dire facts into its own shiny currency.

Thus "Schindler's List," for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed, including documentaries and some foreign films, have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction. When death dominates these films - as it does in "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," an apt successor to "Life Is Beautiful" - it is spiritualized and rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment.

More often the reality of mass death gives way to yet another affirmation of life, and even faithfully rendered true stories are bent into conformity with familiar patterns, themes and conventions: forbidden love; noble sacrifice; victory against the odds. The Holocaust is more accessible than ever, and more entertaining.

At the same time it is receding from living memory, which may by itself explain the recent burst of cinematic and literary interest. The movies I find most interesting, most authentic, either address this painful process directly, measuring the distance between our time and the 1930s and '40s rather than recreating that era faithfully in every detail, or else cleave to the particulars of a single story. Thus Roman Polanski's "Pianist" and Lajos Koltai's "Fateless," though both tales of survival, register the absurdity and abnormality of survival in the manner of the first-person literary works on which they are based.

"A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand" are meditations on what it means to remember. It is no coincidence that both take place in France, where the habit and policy of forgetting endured until quite recently. In those films, full of unresolved feelings of grief, tenderness and bewilderment, French Jews born after World War II try to figure out what the annihilation of their parents' world means to them. In both cases the past is both painfully pressing and, mercifully but maddeningly, out of reach.

And in both cases the filmmakers explore not only strong feelings but also complicated ideas. The sensations associated with the Holocaust have become perhaps too easy to evoke, given the power of cinema to dispense fear, pity, sorrow and relief through sound, image and pageantry.

This has been the route taken by most English-language films about the Holocaust, and also some of their slick European counterparts, like "Black Book" and "The Counterfeiters." But "A Secret" and "One Day You'll Understand" represent another strain in European and Israeli film, one that may reflect a deeper cultural difference. In the United States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out - in art, in politics and in the society as a whole.

It seems right that movies about a difficult subject should themselves be difficult. But the fate of difficult movies with subtitles, usually, is to slip in and out of American theaters without leaving much of a trace. The big Holocaust movies of the big movie season will make more of an impression, allowing audiences vicarious immersion in a history that they, nonetheless, keep at a safe, mediated difference, even as they risk bathos and overreach in the process. We don't have to ask what the Holocaust means to us since the movies answer that question for us.

For American audiences a Holocaust movie is now more or less equivalent to a western or a combat picture or a sword-and-sandals epic - part of a genre that has less to do with history than with the perceived expectations of moviegoers. This may be the only, or at least the most widely available, way of keeping the past alive in memory, but it is also a kind of forgetting.

Черный осел Забастовки

American Scofflaw

The newest twist on government bailouts commenced officially today with relief for your irresponsible neighbor. You are now paying forhis greed and stupidity, and perhaps even the Hummer and Corvette he bought withhis home equity loan that he'll never re-pay. Yes, you arefooting the billfor hisvehicles as well. It's all pooled capital. Hepurchased near the top with no money down, got a $200k home equity ATM, bought all his toys, walked away from the house and both mortgages last year when prices plummeted. No recourse. Even worse, before walking away, he secured a mortgage on a newer home 2 blocks away that was a short sale. His credit score was still outstanding after all. He got in the newer house for 50% less than he paid for the 1 across the street from you. His credit is damaged now from the walkaway, but in 3 years that will disappear. And guess what, his new short sale purchase now qualifies for mortgage assistance under Team Obama's Plan to Save the Asshats.

Since the Mortgage Foreclosure Bailout Plan was announced Wednesday the outrage has been palpabe. For most taxpayers, the ongoing bank and auto bailouts, though more costly and extremely un-popular, do not resonate personally in their lives. But bailing out an irresponsible neighbor who purchased more house than he could afford is understood by everyone. Including our most maligned housing sub-group, renters, all of whom made an incredibly intelligent choice NOT to participate in the real estate bubble game, yet now are being asked to subsidize the mistakes of those who did. Considering that renters already get shafted by the unfair tax subsidies given to homeowners, this proposal accomplishes nothing further than reminding them how worthless they are in the eyes of Washington. Where is the change, Mr. Obama. Every day your administration feels more like the last 20 years of Bush-Clinton incest.

Splain, please

American Scofflaw

Hillary Clinton’s financial disclosure for the year 2007 shows that the former first lady liquidated her entire equity portfolio, approximately $20 million, in may 2007. Her market timing was almost perfect as she sold all of her stocks only 500 points and 5 months before the market peak. Is Senator Clinton a star investor or did she know something?

Past Insider Trading Allegations
Hillary Clinton has been suspiciously lucky before. In 1979, the then First Lady of Arkansas, scored big by placing a $1,000 investment in a cattle futures contract, which returned $100,000 only a few months later. The transaction did become the subject of considerable controversy as accusations of insider trading surfaced.

Marshall Magazine, a publication of the Marshall School of Business, did a study regarding the probability of her successful trades and had this to say:

These results are quite remarkable. Two-thirds of her trades showed a profit by the end of the day she made them and 80 percent were ultimately profitable. Many of her trades took place at or near the best prices of the day.
Only four explanations can account for these remarkable results. Blair may have been an exceptionally good trader. Hillary Clinton may have been exceptionally lucky. Blair may have been front-running other orders. Or Blair may have arranged to have a broker fraudulently assign trades to benefit Clinton’s account.

Those of us who’ve been in the business have an idea of what occurred. In those days, all trades were made via hand written tickets. The broker would take the orders from his/her client in the morning and submit them at the end of the trading day. Keep in mind that clients had no way of knowing the actual prices because there was no internet to look them up on. They relied completely on their broker. It was very easy for the broker to give his “better” clients the better price by writing their name on the order ticket which coincided with the better price. Considering that Hillary trades were usually at or near the best price of the day tells me she got favorable treatment from her broker. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that favors were made to the First Lady client. I should mention that Mrs. Clinton denied any wrongdoing and she was never charged with a crime relating to this.

2007: Hillary dumps all of her stocks
Below is a list of Mrs. Clinton’s stock transactions for 2007 (courtesy of opensecrets.org). Notice that there are about 170 transactions which are all sells. The transactions included a few bonds but 90% were stock. Notice further that there were no buy transactions -NONE.

This information is easily available. Elected officials must disclose their financial holdings each year. If you’re wondering what she did with the proceeds of the sales, the answer is cash. She shows up to $50 million in cash on deposit, and a few hundred thousand dollars in US treasury/Agency bonds.

One has to wonder why anyone with such incredible talent for trading would ever waste their time in politics?

Crazy, Howard

Alright let's get the ball rolling. We must make the internet more "Obama" friendly, there are a whole bunch of conservatard sites that criticize our president. I have been assured by Sec of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano that she will take steps to make the internet more friendly but she needs sites that should be banned. Please brainstorm here

Sincerely,

Howard Dean M.D.

Fat Boy Speaks

Read It And Weep, Scofflaw

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

• #1. Over One Million Iraqi Deaths Caused by US Occupation
• # 2 Security and Prosperity Partnership: Militarized NAFTA
• # 3 InfraGard: The FBI Deputizes Business
• # 4 ILEA: Is the US Restarting Dirty Wars in Latin America?
• # 5 Seizing War Protesters’ Assets
• # 6 The Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
• # 7 Guest Workers Inc.: Fraud and Human Trafficking
• # 8 Executive Orders Can Be Changed Secretly
• #9 Iraq and Afghanistan Vets Testify
• # 10 APA Complicit in CIA Torture
• # 11 El Salvador’s Water Privatization and the Global War on Terror
• # 12 Bush Profiteers Collect Billions From No Child Left Behind
• # 13 Tracking Billions of Dollars Lost in Iraq
• # 14 Mainstreaming Nuclear Waste
• # 15 Worldwide Slavery
• # 16 Annual Survey on Trade Union Rights
• # 17 UN’s Empty Declaration of Indigenous Rights
• # 18 Cruelty and Death in Juvenile Detention Centers
• # 19 Indigenous Herders and Small Farmers Fight Livestock Extinction
• # 20 Marijuana Arrests Set New Record
• # 21 NATO Considers “First Strike” Nuclear Option
• # 22 CARE Rejects US Food Aid
• # 23 FDA Complicit in Pushing Pharmaceutical Drugs
• # 24 Japan Questions 9/11 and the Global War on Terror
• # 25 Bush’s Real Problem with Eliot Spitzer

You Can't Make This Up

American Scofflaw

A 60 year old doctor invested $100,000 he had in an IRA with a FINRA broker.

The broker put the funds into an after-tax account, triggering a $35,000 tax liability.

Over the next 14 months, during which time the S&P 500 increased in value, the portfolio lost a whopping $86,000, reducing its value to $14,000.

This is not surprising given the amount of trading by the broker. His commissions were so huge that the account would have had to earn 31% just to break even! The broker used margin to generate even more trades.

The stocks in the portfolio were 600% more volatile (risky) than the S&P 500.

Before any Judge or jury, the investor would have recovered his losses and most likely would have received a meaningful award of punitive damages.

Not before the FINRA arbitration panel.

They found that the broker had to pay back only the tax liability caused by the transfer of the IRA to a taxable account.

Now for the unbelievable part.

This "impartial" FINRA arbitration panel concluded that the broker did nothing else wrong. No unsuitability. No excessive trading. They gave him a clean bill of health.

Just another day at the office, ripping off investors with impunity. Instead of being drummed out of the industry, he is happily back in his office high fiving his fellow brokers.

So much for FINRA "self-regulation."

Gimme

Lie of the Day

By ROBERT BRYCE
For years, the US has been inundated with claims that it should follow Brazil’s lead on biofuels. These arguments have largely been made by a small, but influential group of neoconservatives who claim that the US should quit using oil altogether. They claim that using more ethanol – produced from sugar cane, or corn, or some other substance – will impoverish OPEC and America will once again be returned to prosperity.


But these claims wither in the face of a story by Clemens Hoges in the January 22 issue of the German magazine Der Spiegel. Hoges writes that sugar cane “is considered an effective antidote to climate change, but hundreds of thousands of Brazilian plantation workers harvest the cane at slave wages.” The story is one of several published in recent years that have exposed the brutality of the Brazilian sugar cane fields. But before looking at Der Spiegel’s coverage, let’s do a quick review of the Brazilian ethanol boosters.

Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times has frequently advocated the mirage of “energy independence.” And he has cited Brazil as a model. In an August 2005 column, he conflated the issues of oil and terrorism “we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism: our soldiers and the fascist terrorists,” he wrote. He went on to claim that many of the technologies needed for energy independence are “already here – from hybrid engines to ethanol.” He then quoted Gal Luft, the neoconservative who heads the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and created Set America Free, a group that advocates “energy independence.” Luft claimed that Brazil’s success in cutting its oil imports was due to the fact that the South American country was “bringing hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to live happily together in the same fuel tank.” In Luft’s view, ethanol has brought “Brazil close to energy independence” and insulated it from higher oil prices.

(Luft’s claim completely ignores the fact that since 1980, Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, has been growing its oil production by an average of 9 percent per year thanks to its offshore drilling prowess. Since 1998, Brazil has doubled its oil production and is now producing about 2 million barrels of oil per day. Neither Friedman nor Luft bothered to mention that fact.)

In late 2005, in a speech to the National Press Club, Pennsylvania governor Edward Rendell said that “No longer is investing in alternative fuels a fringe idea….Brazil is perhaps the world’s greatest success story. Due to 30 years of hard work, research and investment, Brazil will not need one drop of imported oil this time next year. If anyone suggests to you that these ideas aren’t ready for prime time and cost too much, they are living in the past.” Mr. Rendell, you are lying, sir.


A big reality check is in order.

First and foremost, over the past two years, 14 studies have found a direct link between the ethanol scam and higher food prices.

Second, Brazil is not the epicenter of ethanol production, the US is. In 2008, the US produced about 9.1 billion gallons of the fuel, all of it from corn. Brazil produced about 6.8 billion gallons. And while sugar cane may be a far better feedstock that corn, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and energy balance, the key issue is one of labor. While US corn is harvested mechanically, the Brazilian sugar cane is harvested almost exclusively by hand. And it is dangerous, back-breaking work.

In 2007, London’s The Guardian newspaper ran a story which quoted human rights activists who said that the men who harvest sugar cane for ethanol production “are effectively slaves” and that Brazil’s ethanol industry was “a shadowy world of middle men and human rights abuses.” It cited figures provided by a Catholic nun, Sister Ines Facioli, who runs a support network in a small town about 200 miles west of São Paolo. She claimed that between 2004 and 2006, 17 cane workers died due to overwork or exhaustion. One laborer, Pedro Castro, told the Guardian’s Tom Phillips, that the hot climate, combined with the heavy protective clothing needed to protect his body from the sharp machete blades used to cut the cane, was like working “inside a bread oven.”

For their work, the average cane worker gets paid about $1 for every ton of sugar cane they cut. They often work 12-hour shifts. Their housing, according to Phillips’ article, consists of “squalid, overcrowded ‘guest houses’ rented to them at extortionate prices by unscrupulous landlords.” The average cane cutter makes less than $200 per month. And some, it appears, make nothing at all.

Obama's Army

American Scofflaw

Pentagon commanders often speak of a "revolution in military affairs" when summing up the technological advances that allow them to stalk enemies by satellite, fire missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles, and protect U.S. soldiers with night-vision goggles, but they rarely explain the social and logistical changes that have accompanied this revolution.

Today, U.S. soldiers are drawn from a video-game culture that embraces computers on the battlefield, even as the U.S. Army bears ever less relation to the draft armies that did the island-hopping in the Pacific in World War II or fought jungle battles in Vietnam. Indeed, the personnel that Obama will soon visit in Iraq and Afghanistan is generally supplied with hot food and showers around the clock in combat zones in the same way they might be on a Stateside base – by workers like Savuwati.

Undoubtedly, an Obama administration could begin to cut some of the notorious fat out of the contracts that make that possible, including multi-million dollar overcharges. Obama's potential budget trimmers could, for example, take whistleblowers inside KBR and the Pentagon seriously when they report malfeasance and waste.

But could Obama dismiss KBR's army, even if he wanted to? Will Obama really be willing to ask American volunteer soldiers to give up the bacon, romaine lettuce, and roast turkey that they have come to expect in a war zone? And even if he could do so, those are only the luxuries. Keep in mind that, on U.S. bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, every single item, from beans to bullets, is shipped using contractors like PWC of Kuwait and Maersk of Denmark. In the last two decades, the U.S. military has even divested itself of the hardware and people that would allow it to move tanks around the world, relying instead on contractors to do such work.

The White House website states that "Obama and Biden support plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 soldiers and the Marine Corps by 27,000 Marines. Increasing our end strength will help units retrain and re-equip properly between deployments and decrease the strain on military families." As part of the same policy statement, the site claims the new administration will reform contracting by creating "transparency for military contractors," as well as restoring "honesty, openness, and commonsense to contracting and procurement" by "rebuilding our contract officer corps."

Nowhere, however, does that website suggest that the new administration will work toward ending, or even radically cutting back, the use of contractors on the battlefield, or that those 92,000 new soldiers and Marines are going to fill logistics battalions that have been decimated in the last two decades. What we already know of the military policies of the new administration suggests instead that President Obama wants to expand U.S. military might. So don't be surprised if the new LOGCAP contract, a $150 billion 10-year program that began on September 20, 2008, remains in place, with some minor tinkering around the edges to provide value for taxpayer money. KBR's army, it seems, will remain on the march.

The Scofflaw Scoop

American Scofflaw

Sit your child down, and gently explain to your child that the destruction of the Twin Towers on 911 was part of a global, overarching strategy by elements within the intelligence communities, global financial elite, both in the United States and Israel, to initiate a war against humanity; utilizing the fear generated in the world by the 911 attacks to foment the formation of a global police state, a New World Order, composed of a hierarchy of a handful of billionaire oligarchs sitting on top of billions of poor, living in Mumbai-type slums, providing a control-matrix within which the elite would run the world, without fear of retribution for their acts of tyranny.

Gently explain to your child, for they will now be afraid, that 911 was a "false-flag" terrorist act. That false-flag terrorist acts are acts of mass-murder using bombs, chemicals, diseases, etc...against innocent populations, children, to instill mass hysteria, but then in the ensuing confusion, blame these atrocious acts against a third party to deflect responsibility away from the real culprits; and then use the fear generated for some ulterior purpose. In the case of 911, Osama bin Laden was blamed for the attacks, along with his organization, al Qaeda, a secret army created by the CIA that fought the Russians in Afghanistan, the Serbs in Kosovo, and in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrians; and in the aftermath of fear, the global elite, led by the Bush administration, began the work of installing the police state that now exists in the United States (Homeland Security), Britain, Australia, and France.

As added background, tell your babies that 911-type terrorism has evolved, historically, to its present form, dating from the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1896, and has been used by the U.S. and other countries to control the innate need for people everywhere to freely express themselves and be self-determined. That controlling them, making them more fearful and compliant, was necessary so international corporations could control markets, labor, production and distribution without fear of unions, living wages, environmental protection laws, taxes or fear of being arrested for crimes against humanity, like drug running or child sex tourism.

If your children are now crying hystericlly, take the time to calm them down, and then as part of your presentation to your children, it would be wise to explain to them that much of modern tension in the world, muslim world, and the west is rooted in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the U.S. led overthrow of the Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. That the islamic fundamentalism that has swept the middle east and central asia was just a reaction, a blowback, from these two events; and that part of the strategies laid out in the post-planning process of 911 false-flag attacks was to follow Israeli foreign policy aims, destroying the infrastructure of the muslim world, create a greater Israel from parts of the muslim middle east and, at the same time, opening up markets for corporations, for resources like oil in these muslim countries, for the Koran strictly forbids usury and taking advantage of the weak and the helpless; and then, ultimately, acting to undermine the governments of Russian and China, with color-code revolutions, as they are "competitors" to the corporations run by the global elite, and the New World Order the "elite" wish to impose upon the world.

Lastly, explain to your now terrified, comatose children, that the current global economic melt-down was another act of terror, part of the strategy of fear enacted by elite-run global central banks: siphoning billions of dollars from the Pentagon, Iraq crony contacts, from the central banks of the United States and Europe, in the aftermath of the CDO melt-down, to off-shore island bank accounts and in Israel, as part of the strategy of global mass-hysteria; so that the world would blindly go along into the New World Order. That mommy cannot now find a job, as there are none, so she has to work as a prostitute in order to feed her babies.

Obama Wins Again, Baby!

This Why You Drop A Dime, People

American Scofflaw

Thomas Francis Leamy was reported missing a few days ago after he checked himself out of the VA hospital.

His body was found by a pedestrian traveling through the area adjacent to the Wilshire exit off the 305 freeway. The good Samaritan who reported finding the body subsequently “was arrested for refusing to identify himself and being on the freeway illegally.”

Well way to go CHP, getting all the cooperative and helpful yet private citizens off the street. Since when do free people have to identify themselves to law enforcement? Police routinely cover their badges, especially when suppressing free speech oops, I mean doing ‘crowd control’.

Well, I’ll tell you one thing for sure, you won’t catch me reporting ANYTHING to the police anytime soon.

Don't Buy That Crap About A Substitute For The Gas Tax

American Scofflaw
A tentative plan to overhaul Massachusetts' transportation system by using GPS chips to charge motorists a quarter-cent for every mile behind the wheel has angered some drivers.

"It's outrageous, it's kind of Orwellian, Big Brotherish," said Sen. Scott Brown, R-Wrentham, who drafted legislation last week to prohibit the practice. "You'd need a whole new department of cronies just to keep track of it."

But a "Vehicle Miles Traveled" program like the one the governor may unveil this week has already been tested , with positive results , in Oregon.

Governors in Idaho and Rhode Island, as well as the federal government, also are talking about such programs. And in North Carolina, a panel suggested in December the state start charging motorists a quarter-cent for every mile as a substitute for the gas tax.

"The Big Brother issue was identified during the first meeting of the task force that developed our program," said Jim Whitty, who oversees innovation projects for the Oregon Department of Transportation. "Everything we did from that point forward, even though we used electronics, was to eliminate those concerns."

A draft overhaul transport plan prepared for Gov. Deval Patrick says implementing a Vehicle Miles Traveled system to replace the gas tax makes sense. "A user-based system, collected electronically, is a fair way to pay for our transportation needs in the future," it says.

Patrick, who had yet to settle on any of the ideas contained in the draft, told reporters last week, "I like any idea that is faster, cheaper, simpler."

The idea behind the program is simple: As cars become more fuel efficient or powered by electricity, gas tax revenues decline. Yet the cost of building and maintaining roads and bridges is increasing. A state could cover that gap by charging drivers precisely for the mileage their vehicles put on public roads.

"There needs to be a new way of thinking about, `How do we pay for all of this?'" said Richard Dimino, president of A Better City, a business-friendly group that considers transportation issues.

"One of the ways is thinking about the automobile like a utility: When we turn on our automobile and use it, we would be charged like we do when we turn on the lights and we start using electricity."

In Oregon, the state paid volunteers who let the transportation department install GPS receivers in 300 vehicles. The device did not transmit a signal , which would allow real-time tracking of a driver's movements , but instead passively received satellite pings telling the receiver where it was in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates.

The state used those coordinates to determine when the vehicle was driving both within Oregon and outside the state. And it measured the respective distances through a connection with the vehicle's odometer.

When a driver pulled into a predetermined service station, the pump linked electronically with the receiver, downloaded the number of miles driven in Oregon and then charged the driver a fee based on the distance. The gas tax they would have paid was reduced by the amount of the user fee. Drivers continued to be charged gas tax for miles driven outside Oregon.

Under such systems, one of which is already used in London, drivers are charged more for entering a crowded area during rush hour than off-peak periods.

"What the mileage charge does, if it's structured properly, is simply charge for the basic responsibility of people to pay for the amount of wear they put on the state's roads," said Whitty, whose state is still considering the mechanics of broadening the program.

More Scofflaws If You Need Them

American Scofflaw
From the U.S. Postal Service to the Executive Office of the President, thousands of federal workers have not paid their 2007 federal income taxes.

The Internal Revenue Service is trying to collect billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from nearly half a million federal employees. According to IRS records, 171,549 current federal workers did not voluntarily pay their federal income taxes in 2007. The same is true for 37,752 active duty military and nearly 200,000 retired civilian and military personnel.

Documents obtained by WTOP through the Freedom of Information Act show 449,531 federal employees and retirees did not pay their taxes for a total of $3,586,784,725 in taxes owed last year.

Each year the IRS tracks the voluntary compliance rate of all federal workers and retirees. The percentage of employees and retirees who are delinquent has gone up and down over the past five years, but the amount unpaid has increased each year topping $3.5 billion for the first time in 2007.

The agency with the most delinquent employees is the U.S. Postal Service. With more than 747,000 employees, the postal service is the largest employer in the federal government, but with a 4.16 percent delinquency rate, it is a full 1 percent above the average compliance rate this year.

The IRS would not provide comparable data for the general population. But a spokesperson for the IRS did supply the delinquency rate for IRS employees — less than 1 percent. The IRS is the only federal agency where an employee can be fired for not paying his taxes.

The Executive Office of the President, which includes the White House, has 58 employees who did not pay $319,978…

In fact, 152,554 of the delinquent feds have entered into payment plans. Nevertheless, $2.7 billion remains uncollected.

Other notable agencies with high delinquency rates include the Smithsonian Institution, where nearly 5.5 percent of the employees didn’t pay their taxes. On Capitol Hill, more than 1,000 workers are on the list. The Government Printing Office has the highest percentage of delinquent employees with 7.23 percent.

Pay Up, Dear

American Scofflaw
Alaska officials have told Gov. Sarah Palin she must pay back taxes on the thousands of dollars she received in state per diem funds while living at her home in Wasilla.

The Washington Post first reported last September that Palin had billed the state for nearly $17,000 worth of meals and other living expenses while staying in her own home during the first 19 months of her administration, even though the official governor’s residence is in Juneau.

The news clouded Palin’s self-styled image as a small government reformer, just weeks after she was tapped as John McCain’s running mate. At the time, Palin’s office said the governor was entitled to the payments.

Isn't It Funny

המזכיר של הומואים

What puzzles me is that humankind has known, from the time of the inquisition, that torture doesn't get you the truth: it gets the person being tortured to admit to anything to get the torture to stop.

So what is the dynamic of what went on here? Simply put, people in power were able to sadistically injure and humiliate by proxy ,and smugly believed that they would never, ever have to face the consequences.

Every member of the Bush administration involved with ordering and approving torture should be at the Hague for war crimes trials.

However, that is just about as likely to happen as for pigs to fly.

But unless, and until, this happens, the United States will remain quite a different country from the country in which we grew up, one in which the use of torture as an instrument of interrogation is accepted, and has become the norm.

That moment, from the White House on down, when torture became "normalized was the moment this government lost any credentials as a moral leadership for either its citizens or the world.

And do you think for one moment the US government isn't going to do this to American citizens, naturalized or otherwise, if they think they can get away with it?!?

Better think again.

Ballad of Bernie

UBS As Scofflaw

American Scofflaw

Switzerland's biggest bank, UBS, is to pay $780m (£547m) to the US authorities to avoid a criminal prosecution for helping thousands of wealthy Americans avoid tax by hiding their money in secret bank accounts.

In a settlement announced last night, UBS admitted breaking American law by participating in a scheme to defraud the US internal revenue service. The long-running case went to the heart of Switzerland's tradition of bank privacy. The US justice department had accused UBS of actively encouraging Americans to use its bank accounts to avoid paying tax.

In a highly unusual move, UBS has agreed to hand over the names and account details of certain American clients to the US government. It will pay $380m in disgorgement of profits and $400m to make up for unpaid tax.

UBS's chairman, Peter Kurer, said the bank "sincerely regrets" compliance failures identified in the case: "We accept full responsibility for these improper activities."

He said UBS was still committed to privacy: "Client confidentiality, to which UBS remains committed, was never designed to protect fraudulent acts."

Under US law, Americans are supposed to declare all foreign bank accounts containing more than $10,000. According to prosecutors, some 20,000 Americans had private accounts at UBS containing $20bn between 2002 and 2007. Some 17,000 of these accounts were concealed from the tax authorities.

UBS's reputation took a beating last year when a former private banking executive, Bradley Birkenfeld, pleaded guilty to helping a billionaire client evade tax. Birkenfeld made a series of lurid allegations about UBS's tactics.

The Wonderful World of Fake

American Scofflaw
Okay, he's crazy, so throw him in the asylum!

NoBama Por favor, NoBama!!!

The Gay Secretary

We the People are no longer in control of this government, which still, blindly and smugly, claims to work, and act, in our name.

Some time back in this country's beginnings, there was the cry of "taxation without representation" as big reason for people to join the Patriot movement against the British.

Unfortunately, we have come to yet another age of "taxation without representation".

Yes, we do have elections, and appear to hold our collective breath that the "lesser of two evils" will ultimately be chosen.

But unfortunately Congress has become both the handmaiden and enabler of the huge corporate interests which bankroll them. So it really doesn't matter who wins: the corporate interests always trump the interests of the individuals and the country.

Take a good look at what "your" government has been doing; spending billions of money it didn't (and doesn't) have to pursue "wars without end" , which will, at the end of the day, fall on the backs of every working taxpayer, desperately trying to stay afloat.

And about those Bush and Obama "Bailouts"; the only folks who have, and continue to be, bailed out are the irresponsible buffoons who created the mess in the first place, believing that their "superiority" to every day working people makes it right for us to shoulder the financial burden of their mistakes.

And how much will this much ballyhooed Obama "stimulus going to be paid by every taxpayer? Congrats: You've just been handed a cool $30,000 more in taxes to pay, courtesy of this legislation, which your alleged legislators are hell-bent on getting passed!!

Taxation without true representation?!?

Think about it: when the hell were your financial interests represented here?

The short answer is, they weren't. All you are is an unlimited source of tax revenue that can be squeezed from you to the point of bare survival.

Harry's BIG, BIG Screw UP

Гей секретаря

Если Гарри Markopolos приняли все его доказательства о Берни Madoff и поставить его на блоге, а не представлять его SEC, есть хорошие шансы, которые были бы в конце Madoff там.

Все время Markopolos разговаривала WSJ, пытаясь заставить их выполнить рассказ о Madoff, было бы гораздо лучше провели создание анонимных Wordpress блог и просто ввода информации и анализа там сам.