AG Holder Could Be Jailed for Ongoing Fast & Furious Cover-up

Tensions are rising quickly in the investigation of the deadly federal gun-running operation “Fast and Furious” as Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice continues to unlawfully withhold subpoenaed documents. The persistent stonewalling prompted Congress to renew its warning that contempt proceedings against top Obama administration officials are imminent if the cover-up does not end.

The Justice Department missed another deadline earlier this month to hand over key information to congressional investigators, asking — yet again — for more time to consider the requests and produce the documents. The media barely noticed. But after a year of stonewalling and cover-ups, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has had just about enough.

In a letter dated February 14, Rep. Issa warned Holder (above) that failure to comply with a congressional subpoena is a violation of federal law. About two thirds of the document categories sought by investigators have been unlawfully withheld without any proper justification, he said, noting that much of what has been handed over was so heavily redacted as to be rendered useless.

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Bradley Manning nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

"As always, there are the usual 'nominees' and some newcomers, some famous and some unknowns, hailing from the four corners of the world," the head of the Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, told AFP.

With 188 individuals and 43 organisations, the number of candidates comes close to last year's record of 241, when the award went to Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, and Yemeni "Arab Spring" activist Tawakkol Karman.

Thousands of people are eligible to submit nominations, including members of parliaments and governments worldwide, university professors, past laureates and members of several international institutes, who had until February 1 to propose candidates.

The Nobel Institute keeps the names of nominees secret for 50 years, but those who are entitled to nominate are allowed to reveal the name of the person or organisation they have proposed.

Among the people known to have been nominated for this year's prize are former US president Bill Clinton, ex-German chancellor Helmut Kohl who led his country's reunification process, and Ukraine's ex-premier and now jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko.

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Kurt Haskell: Witness to Government False Flag Part 4

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Business Forum: Wall Street cartel today at its most dangerous

Sixty-five years ago, in 1947, the U.S. government sued 17 leading Wall Street investment banks, charging them with effectively colluding in violation of antitrust laws.

In its complaint -- which was front-page news at the time -- the Justice Department alleged these firms had created "an integrated, overall conspiracy and combination" starting in 1915 "and in continuous operation thereafter, by which" they developed a system "to eliminate competition and monopolize 'the cream of the business' of investment banking."

The U.S. argued that the top Wall Street investment banks -- including Morgan Stanley (the lead defendant) and Goldman Sachs -- had created a cartel by which, among other things, it set the prices charged for underwriting securities and for providing mergers-and-acquisitions advice, while boxing out weaker competitors from breaking into the top tier of the business and getting their fair share of the fees.

The government argued the big firms placed their partners on their clients' boards of directors, putting them in the best possible position to know when a piece of business was coming down the pike and to make sure that any competitors were given a very hard time should they dare to try to win it.

The government was spot on: The investment-banking business was then a cartel where the biggest and most powerful firms controlled the market and then set the prices for their services, leaving customers with few viable choices for much-needed capital, advice or trading counterparties.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12056/1212519-432.stm?cmpid=news.xml#ixzz1nOKsQipd

How Wall Street Is Raising the Price of Gas

ABC News’ Mark Greenblatt Reports:

Every time you fill up your car with gas, your dollar ends up in the hands of  a wide range of interests from around the world. Some of your money goes to oil companies, some  of what you pay goes to refineries, and more still gets divided up by the gas stations you stop at.

What may surprise you, however, is what one of Wall Street’s top regulators has to say about who else you’re paying: speculators on Wall Street.

Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,  the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, said it’s time to look at home — in addition to overseas — when searching for the reasons why gas prices are on the rise.

“I’m fired up,” Chilton said. “I’m concerned and we have to look after consumers.”

According to Chilton, much of the problem is actually “made in the USA,” created by Wall Street traders who gamble on oil prices.

“There aren’t markets without speculation,” Chilton told ABC News. “It’s the excessive speculation we are concerned about.”

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Occupy's Return From Hibernation

As winter fades, the Occupy Wall Street movement is heating up again. But don’t expect the same focus on physical encampments and rowdy protests. While the blood of the 99 percent is still boiling at the injustice of growing inequality, in organizing meetings and workgroups, cooler heads are prevailing. This is Occupy 2.0—the mainstreaming of momentum.

From my conversations with Occupy organizers and supporters, my sense is that the main thrust of organizing energy and attention will go toward Occupy Our Homes— a coalition of Occupy activists joining with existing grassroots groups to support families that are facing foreclosure or have been evicted by big banks. Prioritizing Occupy Our Homes is great choice for two reasons. 

First, the foreclosure crisis is immense and growing. Despite the recent mortgage settlement with state attorneys general that will grant 750,000 foreclosed-upon families a whopping $2,000 each (!), 4.2 million families have already been foreclosed upon during the economic crisis.

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How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street

In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15^th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end "too big to fail" but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled "systemically important" that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

That may be, but there is one bit of bad behavior that Uncle Sam himself does not have the funds to underwrite: the $32 trillion market in credit default swaps (CDS).  Thirty-two trillion dollars is more than twice the U.S. GDP and more than twice the national debt. 

CDS are a form of derivative taken out by investors as insurance against default.  According to the Comptroller of the Currency, nearly 95% of the banking industry’s total exposure to derivatives contracts is held by the nation’s five largest banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs.  The CDS market is unregulated, and there is no requirement that the “insurer” actually have the funds to pay up.  CDS are more like bets, and a massive loss at the casino could bring the house down.

It could, at least, unless the casino is rigged.  Whether a “credit event” is a “default” triggering a payout is determined by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), and it seems that the ISDA is owned by the world’s largest banks and hedge funds.

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FBI and Mainstream Media Silencing the Critics

Last week in one fell swoop the last two remaining critics of Washington/Tel Aviv imperialism were removed from the mainstream media. Judge Napolitano’s popular program, Freedom Watch, was cancelled by Fox TV, and Pat Buchanan was fired by MSNBC. Both pundits had wide followings and were appreciated for speaking frankly.

Many suspect that the Israel Lobby used its clout with TV advertisers to silence critics of the Israeli government’s efforts to lead Washington to war with Iran. Regardless, the point before us is that the voice of the mainstream media is now uniform. Americans hear one voice, one message, and the message is propaganda. Dissent is tolerated only on such issues as to whether employer-paid health benefits should pay for contraceptive devices. Constitutional rights have been replaced with rights to free condoms.

The western media demonizes those at whom Washington points a finger. The lies pour forth to justify Washington’s naked aggression: the Taliban are conflated with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi is a terrorist and, even worse, fortified his troops with Viagra in order to commit mass rape against Libyan women.

President Obama and members of Congress along with Tel Aviv continue to assert that Iran is making a nuclear weapon despite public contradiction by the US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate.

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Debt doomsday may come sooner than expected

The federal government could hit the debt ceiling sooner than expected — and possibly around the November election — according to a report out Friday.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill had hoped that last summer’s deal to end the nasty fight over lifting the debt ceiling would ensure the issue wouldn’t resurface until at least 2013.

But the Bipartisan Policy Center said Friday that the debt-limit doomsday could come earlier than that.

Analysts from the Bipartisan Policy Center projected that the United States will hit its $16.4 trillion debt ceiling between late November 2012 and early January 2013 due to lower-than-expected corporate tax revenues and the recent extension of the payroll tax holiday.

A number of other factors, such as the ongoing financial crises in Europe, volatile gas prices and how quickly the U.S. economy continues to grow could push the debt-ceiling deadline forward or backwards, according to the center.

“When the Budget Control Act of 2011 increased the debt ceiling last August, Congress, the administration, and outside analysts believed that this increase would allow federal borrowing under the limit well into 2013,” the center’s analysts wrote. “Due to unexpected circumstances … that belief appears increasingly likely to have been misguided.”

The current debt level is $15.4 trillion, according to the Treasury Department.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/73260.html#ixzz1nMQqFNIs

Revealed: US Government Program Secretly Injected Citizens with Plutonium, Uranium

In a secret program that is now admitted to be true, the United States government injected unknowing human ‘participants’ with highly toxic plutonium. It sounds like a bizarre torture scenario that you’d expect to see blamed on illegal terror organizations, but the individuals behind this crime are actually doctors working for the United States government. Disregarding the health of innocent citizens, the government testers were eager to see how unknowing participants suffered as a result of secret plutonium injection.

It began in 1945, when an employee at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility was in a car accident. Ebb Cade survived, but was taken in as a human participant in a disturbing study he did not consent to. It is important to note that this man was a fifty-three-year-old African American, as previous government trials have singled out African Americans and other minorities. The racist sterilization programs occurred between 1929 to 1974 under an admitted eugenics programs that officials claimed were ‘creating a better society’. Most victims were poor, black women who were ‘deemed unfit to be parents’. Individuals as young as 10 were sterilized simply for not getting along with schoolmates or being promiscuous, and many parents were misled into sterilizing their children.

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War and neglect leaves 500,000 Afghans homeless: Amnesty

Half a million Afghans displaced by war have been left homeless and struggling to survive because of government and international neglect, Amnesty International said Thursday.

Around 400 people join makeshift shelters around the country every day, Amnesty said in a report entitled “Fleeing war, finding misery”, based on three years of research.

The Afghan government estimates that more than 40 people froze to death this winter, the harshest in 15 years, with at least 28 children dying in camps around Kabul.

The government is “not only looking the other way but even preventing help from reaching them” in an attempt to avoid making the settlements permanent, Amnesty researcher Horia Mosadiq said.

“Local officials restrict aid efforts because they want to pretend that these people are going to go away. This is a largely hidden but horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis,” she said.

The report calls on the government to remove conditions placed on humanitarian aid and on international donors to “ensure that their humanitarian assistance addresses the needs of internally displaced people”.

Kabul alone houses up to 35,000 displaced persons in 30 slum areas around the city, according to the report.

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Precipitation shows nuclear fallout in US from Fukushima

SCIENCE DAILY

Fallout from the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power facility in Japan was measured in minimal amounts in precipitation in the United States in about 20 percent of 167 sites sampled in a new nationwide study. The U.S. Geological Survey led the study as part of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP). Levels measured were similar to measurements made by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in the days and weeks immediately following the March 2011 incidents, which were determined to be well below any level of public health concern.

Many NADP sites are located away from major urban areas so that they are more representative of the U.S. landscape as a whole. This study is complementary to EPA results, and together these data will allow for a better picture of the deposition of radioactive fallout across the United States.

"Japan's unfortunate nuclear nightmare provides a rare opportunity for U.S. scientists to test an infrequently needed national capability for detecting and monitoring nuclear fallout over a wide network," explained USGS director Marcia McNutt. "Had this been a national incident, NADP would have revealed the spatial and temporal patterns of radioactive contamination in order to help protect people and the environment."

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Angry About the National Defense Authorization Act?

Are you still angry about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)? Good. You should be. Are you ready to do something about it? Great! We've just released a new toolkit with resources to help you fight back against the NDAA in your community.

As we've explained before, for the first time in American history, we have a law authorizing the worldwide and indefinite military detention of people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the Constitution, and corrodes our Nation's commitment to the rule of law.

There is substantial public debate around whether the NDAA could be read even to undermine the Posse Comitatus Act and authorize indefinite military detention without charge or trial within the United States. The ACLU does not believe that the NDAA authorizes domestic military detention. But, chillingly, many in Congress think that it should be used in exactly this way.

In the days and weeks leading up to the bill's passage and signing, tens of thousands of you took action through our action center to tell your members of Congress and President Obama that you don't want this president or any future president to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. In the wake of the bill's signing, you pledged your support to fight worldwide indefinite detention for as long as it takes, and you asked us how you can do more.

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Fed Writes Sweeping Rules From Behind Closed Doors

WSJ

By VICTORIA MCGRANE And JON HILSENRATH

The Federal Reserve has operated almost entirely behind closed doors as it rewrites the rule book governing the U.S. financial system, a stark contrast with its push for transparency in its interest-rate policies and emergency-lending programs.

While many Americans may not realize it, the Fed has taken on a much larger regulatory role than at any time in history. Since the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul became law in July 2010, the Fed has held 47 separate votes on financial regulations, and scores more are coming. In the process it is reshaping the U.S. financial industry by directing banks on how much capital they must hold, what kind of trading they can engage in and what kind of fees they can charge retailers on debit-card transactions.

The Fed is making these sweeping changes—the most dramatic since the Great Depression—almost completely without public meetings. Rather than discussing rules and voting in public, as is done at other agencies with which the Fed often collaborates, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed's four other governors have held just two public meetings since July 2010. On 45 of 47 of the draft or final regulatory measures during that period, they have emailed their votes to the central bank's secretary.

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Did ATF deceive other feds in planning Fast and Furious?

During the planning stages, did the  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives mislead another federal agency about the intent of Operation Fast and Furious and putting guns in the hands of a Mexican drug cartel?

After wrapping up his own review, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, seems to be voicing concern that there may have been deception. He is asking the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General to probe what was happening behind the scenes.

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul

McCaul, chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight & Investigations Subcommittee, spoke on related matters Tuesday night at Rice University’s Baker Institute, not long after he signed a letter to the DHS inspector general requesting an investigation be launched.

The letter asks:

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Syrian tanks attack in Homs, world outrage grows

REUTERS

Tanks pushed into part of the Baba Amro neighborhood which has taken the brunt of the bombardment, activist Abu Imad said.

The plight of Homs and other embattled towns will dominate "Friends of Syria" talks in Tunis on Friday involving the United States, European and Arab countries, Syria's neighbor Turkey and other nations clamoring for President Bashar al-Assad to halt the violence and relinquish power.

Russia, which along with China has vetoed two U.N. Security Council resolutions on Syria, has said it will not attend.

A United Nations report said on Thursday Syrian forces had shot dead unarmed women and children, shelled residential areas and tortured wounded protesters in hospital under orders issued at the "highest levels" of the army and government.

Rockets, artillery and mortar rounds rained on the Inshaat and Baba Amro districts, where Free Syrian Army rebels are entrenched. In the Khalidiya district mosques urged residents to take cover as mortar rounds started falling on the area.

"Explosions are shaking the whole of Homs. God have mercy," Abdallah al-Hadi said from the city.

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Syria: Babaamr section in Homs

Are US taxpayers bailing out big banks again?

CBS NEWS

(MoneyWatch)  U.S. taxpayers may be on the hook to bail out big banks -- again. The Financial Times is reporting that taxpayers will subsidize a large portion of the $25 billion mortgage settlement, which was broken down into two distinct pieces:  

1. $5 billion in cash payments, of which $1.5 billion would go directly to approximately 750,000 borrowers who were wrongly or illegally foreclosed on between September 2008 and December 2011. This is the part where you have heard that borrowers who were wrongly foreclosed on could receive up to $2,000. 

2. $20 billion in "credits" the banks will receive for principal write-downs and other aid to nearly 1 million homeowners at risk of default, up to $20,000 per loan. 

It's part two that's coming under scrutiny. A clause in the provisional agreement allows the banks to use the government's Home Affordable Modification Plan, or HAMP, to cover the principal reductions. Neil Barofsky, the former special inspector-general of the TARP, described the clause as "scandalous." Says Barofsky: "It turns the notion that this is about justice and accountability on its head." 

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Massachusetts town vows to defy indefinite detention law

A small town in Massachusetts says it is “opting out” of a federal law that allows the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens without trial. 

The city of Northampton on Thursday passed a strongly worded resolution (PDF) to protest provisions of the federal government’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which even President Barack Obama said he had “serious reservations” about signing. 

“WHEREAS, the indefinite detention of any person without trial violates the 5th and 6th amendments of the Constitution of the United States, Article III of the Constitution of the United States, and the Posse Comitatus Act,” the resolution stated.

The document went to request that public agencies “uphold the Constitution… when requested or authorized to infringe upon those Constitutionally guaranteed rights by federal agencies acting under detention powers granted by the NDAA.” 

William Newman, the Director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in Western Massachusetts, was at the meeting to support council members. 

“We have a country based on laws and process and fairness,” he told WWLP. “This law is an absolute affront to those principles that make America a free nation.”

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Washington DC: FBI Foils Own Terror Plot (Again)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has once again proven that the only thing Americans need fear, is their own government, with the latest “terror attack” foiled being one entirely of their own design.

Suspect Amine El Khalifi making a courtroom appearance.

USA Today reports that a suspect had been arrested by the FBI who was “en route to the U.S. Capitol allegedly to detonate a suicide bomb.”

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