Bungled Bank Bailout Leaves Behind Righteous Anger

In the year since I stepped down as the special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the sadly predictable consequences of the government’s disparate treatment of Wall Street and Main Street have only become worse. As the banks amass size and power, Main Street continues to get pummeled.

Part of the current economic malaise can be traced directly to Treasury’s betrayal of its promise to use TARP to “preserve homeownership.” The Home Affordable Modification Program has brought little meaningful improvement, with fewer than 800,000 ongoing permanent modifications as of March 31, 2012, a number that is growing at the glacial pace of just 12,000 per month.

In June 2011, Treasury appeared to take a tentative step toward holding the mortgage servicers accountable for the widespread misconduct in the program by pledging to withhold the incentive payments to three of the largest banks -- Wells Fargo (WFC) & Co., Bank of America Corp. (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) -- until they came into compliance with HAMP’s rules.

Released Payments

Treasury couldn’t even keep this modest commitment. Although Wells Fargo had improved its performance and was awarded all of its withheld incentive payments, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America continued to fail to meet the baseline standard.

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Training Exercise on Same Day as Denver Shootings

The tragedy that played out in an Aurora movie theater Friday was ironically paralleled as a classroom learning experience in a medical school in Parker the same day.

Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine is in the middle of holding specialized classes in disaster life support for 150 second-year medical students. Along with response to natural disasters like hurricanes and floods and terrorist attacks, one of the scenarios being used to train the students is how to respond if a shooter fires at people in a movie theater and also uses a bomb in the attack.

"The irony is amazing, just amazing," said Rocky Vista Dean Dr. Bruce Dubin.

He said emergency specialist physicians from Parkland Hospital in Dallas as well as from several other emergency programs around the country are teaching the Advanced Disaster Life Support Training. Rocky Vista is the only medical school in the nation to make that training a part of the curriculum.

"They are trained to respond in every type of disaster," Dubin said.

The shootings in Aurora were incorporated into the teaching Friday, Dubin said.

Read more: Real life shooting imitates training exercise at Parker medical school - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_21126462/real-life-shooting-imitates-training-exercise-at-parker#ixzz21TylTaMH

One Moviegoer With a Gun Could Have Prevented 70 Innocent People From Being Shot

In light of the incident at the Dark Knight premier, it’s worth noting that we as a law abiding society could have prevented the deaths of, at last count, 13 people and the injuries sustained by scores of others.

Anti-gun fanatics will tell us that outlawing guns is the solution. In fact, before the smoke from the gunfire dissipated this morning special interests and politicians werealready calling for more gun control. Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg has asked our Presidential candidates to directly address the issue:

No matter where you stand on the Second Amendment, no matter where you stand on guns, we have a right to hear from both of them, concretely, not just in generalities, specifically, what are they going to do about guns?

No doubt Mr. Bloomberg (and his merry band of government nitwits) would be ecstatic if both candidates supported a Constitutional Convention to eliminate the second amendment.

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Bankers Declare U.S. & Europe Conquered

A recent CNBC clip in which financial analysts admit to viewers that America is under the control of a group of central bankers who are building a world government is a damning insight into how the establishment has dispensed with any pretense of trying to hide their agenda as it is finalized.

During the video, the host asks guests, “Do we all work for central bankers – is this global governance at last – is it one world – the central bankers in charge….aren’t we all just living and dying for what the central banks do?”

“To answer your question, we are absolutely slaves to central banks,” responds the guest.

“We beholden to what central bankers and policy makers do rather than the fundamentals in the economy,” adds another.

This is just one of a deluge of examples where it is now being thrown in our faces that a banking elite is building a world government at the expense of the American people.

From treating the issue as a “conspiracy theory” for decades, the establishment is now tearing away the veil in an effort to force Americans to blithely accept what has been planned all along.

A global government is now being forcefully pushed as the “solution” to all manner of problems, but specifically in relation to financial crises. We are being brainwashed to accept the premise that centralized power in the hands of a tiny elite is the only recourse, and that a one world currency is inevitable.

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The Fed Knew LIBOR Was Corrupt in 2008. So Why Didn’t It Act?

To hear Ben Bernanke tell it, the Federal Reserve did everything it should have about the suspicious activity surrounding the LIBOR scandal. Chairman Bernanke informed a Senate committee today that the Fed told everyone it was supposed to when it first suspected the London Interbank Offered Rate was being manipulated by the major banks.

Told is the critical word here. What exactly did the Fed say—and what did they do thereafter—when they began suspecting a problem?

Bernanke testified: "Importantly, it informed all the relevant authorities in both the U.K. and the United States ... and the New York Fed also communicated with the FSA and the Bank of England in the United Kingdom."

But there is dispute about whether the Fed did inform all the relevant parties that the rate was being rigged. Mervyn A. King, governor of the Bank of England, said he did not receive a warning in 2008 that the rate was being gamed. Instead, King says, the Bank of England just got an email from Tim Geithner, who was president of the N.Y. Fed at the time, suggesting reforms to the LIBOR system. Yet it is uncontroverted that, at the time, the Fed had evidence of LIBOR’s integrity problems.

So, issue one: What did the Fed tell other parties, and when?

Issue two: Even if the fed passed along its concerns, there's no evidence of follow up designed to stop the illegal behavior and determine why and how the most important international rate was being manipulated.

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Justice Department Sues Telecom for Challenging National Security Letter

Last year, when a telecommunications company received an ultra-secret demand letter from the FBI seeking information about a customer or customers, the telecom took an extraordinary step — it challenged the underlying authority of the FBI’s National Security Letter, as well as the legitimacy of the gag order that came with it.

Both challenges are allowed under a federal law that governs NSLs, a power greatly expanded under the Patriot Act that allows the government to get detailed information on Americans’ finances and communications without oversight from a judge. The FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs and been reprimanded for abusing them — though almost none of the requests have been challenged by the recipients.

After the telecom challenged its NSL last year, the Justice Department took its own extraordinary measure: It sued the company, arguing in court documents that the company was violating the law by challenging its authority.

That’s a pretty intense charge, according to Matt Zimmerman, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the anonymous telecom.

“It’s a huge deal to say you are in violation of federal law having to do with a national security investigation,” says Zimmerman. “That is extraordinarily aggressive from my standpoint. They’re saying you are violating the law by challenging our authority here.”

The government’s “Jabberwocky” argument – accusing the company of violating the law when it was actually complying with the law – appears in redacted court documents that were released on Wednesday by EFF with the government’s approval. Prior to their release, the organization provided them to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the case Tuesday night.

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Audit the Fed? Bernanke fights back against Ron Paul

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- In what is likely to be the last showdown between Ron Paul and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chairman once again fought back against the Congressman's calls to audit the Federal Reserve.

Rep. Paul, a Republican from Texas and author of "End the Fed", has been trying for years to pass a law that would give Congress the ability to examine the central bank's decision-making process.

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Now, he's closer than ever before, after his colleagues voted last month to finally take up his bill on the House floor. The vote is expected to happen next week.

It's important though not to confuse the aim of the bill with a financial audit. The Federal Reserve's finances are already audited every year by an independent accounting firm. (Last year it was Deloitte and Touche). The central bank also publishes its balance sheet every Thursday online.

Instead, what Paul is aiming for is a full investigation of the way the Fed determines monetary policy.

Those deliberations currently take place behind closed doors. Minutes are released with a three-week lag, and full transcripts are published only five years after the fact.

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Military sued over al-Awlaki Yemen drone death

BBC

Relatives of three Americans killed in drone strikes in Yemen are suing top Pentagon and CIA officials, saying the killings were unconstitutional.

Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan died in September. Awlaki's son Abdulrahman, 16, died in October.

Relatives accuse Defence Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus and two military commanders of approving and directing the strikes.

The legality of US use of drones has been in the spotlight in recent weeks.

Awlaki, a radical Islamist cleric born in the state of New Mexico, was a key figure in the Yemen-based group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). His 16-year-old son was born in Colorado.

Samir Khan was a naturalised US citizen who was involved with Inspire, al-Qaeda's English-language magazine.

The lawsuit was filed by Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar al-Awlaki, alongside Sarah Khan, mother of Samir Khan.

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For the First Time, Canadians Now Richer Than Americans

While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]

If you're thinking the Canadian advantage must be due to exchange rates, think again. The Canadian dollar has actually caught up to the U.S. dollar in recent years.

"These are not 60-cent dollars, but Canadian dollars more or less at par with the U.S. greenback," Globe and Mail's Michael Adams writes.

To add insult to injury, not only are Canadians comparatively better-off than Americans, they're also more likely to be employed. The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent—and dropping—in Canada, while the U.S. is stuck with a stubbornly high rate of 8.2 percent.

Besides a strengthening currency and a better labor market, experts credit the particularly savage fallout from the financial crisis on the U.S. economy and housing market, which torpedoed home values and gutted household wealth.

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IMF sees new global economic peril

An economic slowdown in China and other major developing countries has pulled one of the few remaining props from the world economy, which is already threatened by the financial crisis in Europe and a sluggish U.S. growth.

Strong growth among developing countries, particularly the so-called “BRIC” nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — as well as Mexico and South Africa, had been a bright spot in an otherwise tepid world recovery.

No longer.

Growth is now slowing among those nations as well. And for a variety of reasons, they may not be able to respond with the same intensity as they did after the U.S. financial collapse in 2008, when they pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into government projects and other measures to stimulate their economies.

Those efforts kept their own economies on track and helped ease the recession in the developed world by boosting the demand for exports from countries such as the United States. Sales to China from the United States, for example, jumped more than 80 percent between the first months of 2009 and the first months of 2012.

That rapid run-up is losing steam, prompting the International Monetary Fund on Monday to trim its forecasts for global growth and warn that worse problems may be in the offing.

This could also spell a further drag on the U.S. economy, which is struggling with an 8.5 percent unemployment rate.

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Russia accuses West of blackmail over Syria sanctions

The Russian foreign minister has accused the West of using blackmail to force Moscow to back UN sanctions against Syria. His comments come ahead of talks with UN-Arab League crisis envoy Kofi Annan.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Monday that Western threats to discontinue the UN unarmed observer mission to Syria if Moscow refuses to back sanctions authorizing force in Syria were tantamount to blackmail.

"We are being told to either agree to the approval of a resolution that includes Chapter 7 [which provides for possible sanctions, or we refuse to extend the mandate of the observer mission]," Lavrov told a news conference.

"We view this as a completely counterproductive and dangerous approach," he said.

Lavrov also stressed that Western powers should not expect Russia, a long-term ally of Syria, to be able to convince Syrian President Bashar Assad to step down.

"It is simply unrealistic. And it is not a question of our inclinations, our sympathies or our antipathies," Lavrov said.

"He will not leave power. And this is not because we are protecting him, but becaused there is a very significant part of the Syrian population behind him," he told reporters.

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Roubini: 2013 Perfect Storm May Surpass 2008 Crisis

Could Gold Hit $6,000?

The tax man cometh to police you on health care

The Supreme Court's decision to uphold most of President Barack Obama's health care law will come home to roost for most taxpayers in about 2½ years, when they'll have to start providing proof on their tax returns that they have health insurance.

That scenario puts the Internal Revenue Service at the center of the debate, renewing questions about whether the agency is capable of policing the health care decisions of millions of people in the United States while also collecting the taxes needed to run the federal government.

Under the law, the IRS will provide tax breaks and incentives to help pay for health insurance and impose penalties on some people who don't buy coverage and on some businesses that don't offer it to employees.

The changes will require new regulations, forms and publications, new computer programs and a big new outreach program to explain it all to taxpayers and tax professionals. Businesses that don't claim an exemption will have to prove they offer health insurance to employees.

The health care law "includes the largest set of tax law changes in more than 20 years," according to the Treasury inspector general who oversees the IRS. The agency will have to hire thousands of workers to manage it, requiring significant budget increases that already are being targeted by congressional Republicans determined to dismantle the president's signature initiative.

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Al-Dajjal

There's a lot of symbolism in this video. Did you notice that UBL has the CIA emblem on his outfit?

Israel slams door on UN Human Rights Council over settlement row

Israeli officials say a UN fact-finding mission “will not be allowed to enter” the country and its occupied territories. On Friday, the Geneva-based Human Rights Council appointed three officers to probe Israel’s West Bank settlement activity.

­The UN's top human rights body has commissioned three jurists to find out how Israel's West Bank settlements affect “the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people.” The body called on Tel Aviv “not to obstruct the process of cooperation.”

This resonated harshly with Israel, who took no time to dub the mission “biased and flawed,” vowing not to support the officials.

"The fact-finding mission will find no cooperation in Israel, and its members will not be allowed to enter Israel and the territories,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor. “Its existence embodies the inherent distortion that typifies the UN Human Rights Council's treatment of Israel and the hijacking of the important human rights agenda by non-democratic countries.”

Israel cut all ties with the council in March after the 47-nation body passed a resolution establishing the settlement probe. Israel accuses the commission of a “disproportionate focus” on Israel.

"The establishment of this mission is another blatant expression of the singling out of Israel in the UNHRC," a Foreign Ministry statement said on Friday.

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Hooded

Amnesty International - Hooded from Camille Herren on Vimeo.

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Why American workers are worse off today

At 8.2%, June's unemployment rate is slightly lower than January's 8.3%, but workers aren't better off.

FORTUNE – Despite promising signs earlier this year, America's jobless picture today is actually worse than many of us thought.

In January, the unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in three years, signaling that better days in the dizzying world of job hunting were on the horizon. But the biggest skeptics didn't buy the good news. They blamed unusually warm weather for the better jobs statistics.

And it looks like the skeptics were right, at least according to the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report released Friday. Unlike the reports of the past few months, June's statistics is considered a much cleaner read of the state of the jobs market. At 8.2%, June's unemployment rate is slightly lower than January's 8.3%, but workers aren't better off.

If anything, given expectations in January that the job market was well on its way to firmer footing, a few signs (some from The Wall Street Journal's Ben Casselman) point that the unemployed face a more difficult road ahead.

For one, there aren't more people working today than earlier this year, when the unemployment rate saw some of its sharpest declines in recent years. Whereas the employment-to-population ratio stood at 58.5% in January, it stayed flat at 58.6% in June. Prior to the Great Recession, the ratio was at around 63%.

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US Airforce pilots practice Drone tracking on civilian cars

Holloman Air Force Base, at the eastern edge of New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, 200 miles south of Albuquerque, was once famous for the daredevil maneuvers of those who trained there. In 1954, Col. John Paul Stapp rode a rocket-propelled sled across the desert, reaching 632 miles per hour, in an attempt to figure out the maximum speed at which jet pilots could safely eject. He slammed on the brakes and was thrust forward with such force that he had to be hauled away on a stretcher, his eyes bleeding from burst capillaries. Six years later, Capt. Joseph Kittinger Jr., testing the height at which pilots could safely bail out, rode a helium-powered balloon up to 102,800 feet. He muttered, “Lord, take care of me now,” dropped for 13 minutes 45 seconds and broke the record for the highest parachute jump.

Today many of the pilots at Holloman never get off the ground. The base has been converted into the U.S. Air Force’s primary training center for drone operators, where pilots spend their days in sand-colored trailers near a runway from which their planes take off without them. Inside each trailer, a pilot flies his plane from a padded chair, using a joystick and throttle, as his partner, the “sensor operator,” focuses on the grainy images moving across a video screen, directing missiles to their targets with a laser.

Holloman sits on almost 60,000 acres of desert badlands, near jagged hills that are frosted with snow for several months of the year — a perfect training ground for pilots who will fly Predators and Reapers over the similarly hostile terrain of Afghanistan. When I visited the base earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at.

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TSA Demands Bizarre New Power To Test Drinks Purchased In Airports

In a bizarre and insufficiently explained expansion of the TSA’s power, the federal agency is now demanding the right to test drinks purchased by passengers after they have already passed through airport security.

“Passengers say their problem is not with the rules at the airport. They understand why drinks are not allowed through security, but when they buy one while they wait for their flight, they say the TSA should not ask to test it,” reports KJCT8.

Rules on taking liquids through airport security, passed in the aftermath of the highly dubious attempted “liquid bombing” incident back in 2006 (which completely collapsed in court), have already been savaged as pointless and unnecessary. Mothers are forced to drink their own breast milk in a procedure that seems to be designed to achieve little else than humiliating the traveler.

In one incident earlier this year, working mother Amy Strand was even made to pump breast milk into empty feeding bottles before being allowed through security.

Expanding those rules to include drinks purchased after passengers have already passed through security is absurd.

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