One of the prime sources of money for local government has turned out to be traffic fines and court costs for ripped off drivers who become entrapped by traffic patrolmen/state police units who are increasingly operating on quotas and vastly increased fines and costs for traffic violations.
Allstate Corp has sued Bank of America Corp, its Countrywide lending unit and 17 other defendants for allegedly misrepresenting the risks on more than $700 million of mortgage securities it bought from Countrywide.
A major reason for the hang-ups in short sales is that most loans made during the boom were packaged into securities and sold to investors. So it is the investor, not the bank, that has the final word. "It's almost never the bank that's doing it," said Armstrong, the Pasco broker. "They make a deal with us, then send it to the investor, who either approves it or not."
The bulk of Europe's Alliance with Israel is a meticulous documentation of the ways in which a variety of institutions -- the European Union (and its major constituent bodies, the European Parliament, the European Council, the Council of Ministers and the European Commission), North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and various European states -- have, despite superficial commitments to the "peace process," consistently sold out Palestinian rights and interests. And the list is a long one.
For as long as man has pursued power over the masses, mind control has been orchestrated by those who study human behavior in order to bend large populations to the will of a small "elite" group.
Billions of dollars are spent each year in the United States alone on public relations, a little-understood profession that has become a modern propaganda-for-hire industry. "Publicity" was once the work of carnival hawkers and penny-ante hustlers smoking cigars and wearing cheap suits. Today's PR professionals are recruited from the ranks of former journalists, retired politicians and eager-beaver college graduates eager to rise in the corporate world. They hobnob internationally with corporate CEOs, senators and U.S. presidents. PR wizards concoct and spin the news, organize phony "grassroots" front groups, spy on citizens, and conspire with lobbyists and politicians to thwart democracy. In today's electronic age, they use 800-numbers and telemarketing, advanced databases, and "video news releases" -- entire news stories written, filmed and produced by PR firms and transmitted electronically to thousands of TV stations around the world. Canned news from PR firms is designed to be indistinguishable from real news and is increasingly taking its place, used as "story segments" on TV news shows without any attribution or disclaimer indicating that what viewers are seeing is in fact subtle paid advertisements. On the internet as well, PR firms have created slick websites that promise to inform the public while pushing hidden agendas.
This video was originally created to be part of an art exhibit for Exposed the Art Project http://www.exposedtheartproject.org , a multimedia collaboration raising awareness of social issues. The group decided that the message in the Deliberate Dumbing Down of America shouldn't be put on hold. So here it is. The other artists of Exposed the Art Project are: painters Barry Gross and Viktor Safonkin, and photographers Adela Holmes and Presscott McDonald. We picked four themes for our premier—Social Commentary, Spirituality, Metamorphosis and Time and Chance. This is my contribution for Social Commentary.
Where did the Fed get this remarkable power? Central banks are “lenders of last resort,” which means they are authorized to advance as much credit as the system requires. It’s all keystrokes on a computer, and the
supply of this credit is limitless.
Rush Limbaugh, that plutocrat GOP Communist, sneeringly refers to this evil dungeon as “Club Gitmo.” He needs to do some time down there before dropping through the trap. Of course, now that Obama is running Club Gitmo, maybe it has a more sinister aspect.
The military occupation of Gaza was intent upon transferring the sovereignty of the gas fields to Israel in violation of international law. The hidden agenda is the outright confiscation of Palestinian gas fields (see maps below) and the unilateral declaration of Israeli sovereignty over Gaza's maritime areas. This would be implemented through the integration of Gaza's contiguous gas reserves with those of Israel.
In December, a mystery trader – believed to be JP Morgan – cornered the London market in copper, buying between 50pc and 80pc of the London Metal Exchange's supply.
Earlier this month, China revealed the nature of her insatiable appetite for gold: imports surged more than five times compared to 12 months earlier to 209 metric tons. Estimates point to 2010 Chinese gold consumption hitting around 600 tons compared to 610 tons in India.
Like a stealth computer virus covertly morphing into your hard drive, the enemy, aided by its divisions on Wall Street has taken control of our very financial lives without a single shot being fired. Sounds conspiratorial doesn’t it?
What if the current financial crisis was not caused by unforeseen random events, but was instead a carefully orchestrated assault on the US Dollar, designed to cripple the American economy and ultimately gain complete control of the world’s financial markets?
“The reason for the global financial crisis and debt crisis in Europe is that the current international credit rating system does not correctly reveal the debtor’s repayment ability.”
Fitch Ratings' long-term credit ratings are assigned on an alphabetic scale from 'AAA' to 'D', first introduced in 1924 and later adopted and licensed by S&P. (Moody's also uses a similar scale, but names the categories differently.) Like S&P, Fitch also uses intermediate +/- modifiers for each category between AA and CCC (e.g., AA+, AA, AA-, A+, A, A-, BBB+, BBB, BBB-, etc.).
The crash has affected and will continue to affect the value of every stock, bond, exchange-traded fund... every type of investment there is. The Federal Reserve will keep printing money. The dollar will continue to get weaker. The bond market will continue to fall. Interest rates will continue to rise.
We are going to have to prepare for a different kind of election, possibly in a different place because my district may be eliminated. We are going to have to organize in a different way, now. The question will remain: Where?
Ignore the recent excuses. Henry Kissinger's entire career was a series of massacres and outrages. Now, however, it seems we do know the excuses and the rationalizations. Here's one, from David Harris of the American Jewish Committee: "Perhaps Kissinger felt that, as a Jew, he had to go the extra mile to prove to the president that there was no question of where his loyalties lay." And here's another, from Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League: "The anti-Jewish prejudice which permeated the Nixon presidency and White House undoubtedly created an environment of intimidation for those who did not share the president's bigotry. Dr. Kissinger was clearly not immune to that intimidation." Want more?
Mixing Freemasons with Jewish bankers such as Baron Rothschild and world Zionism, the Metropolite said that there is a conspiracy to enslave Greece and Christian Orthodoxy. He also accused international Zionism of trying to destroy the family unit by promoting one-parent families and same-sex marriages.
Jews such as "Rockefeller, Rothschild and Soros control the international banking system that controls globalization," the Metropolite also said.
Israel says it won't participate in the 10th anniversary commemoration of a U.N. conference on racism that singled out Israel for criticism and likened Zionism to racism.
WE DESTROY SOVEREIGN COUNTRIES LIKE IRAQ - John PERKINSi) ECONOMIC HIT-MEN [to destroy the Sovereign Economy!]ii) "JACKALS"iii) COVERT/OVERT WAR [as in PAKISTAN/SYRIA/IRAN in 2010]
Read THE GRAND CHESSBOARD by Zbigniew BRZEZINSKI [Strategic Adviser to David ROCKEFELLER PhD and to BH OBAMA (aka Barry SOETORO (Indonesian Connection)(Kenyan Connection)(see US Attorney Philip Berg) - the first "POTUS" {President Of The US} to be a NATURALISED CITIZEN - NOT a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN in Flagrant Breach of Article 2 of the US Constitution)].
The irony here is that as legitimate avenues for exposing not classified information but valid, documented concerns about government operations are blocked, the more attractive routes such as WikiLeaks become.
In September 2009, the SEC’s Office of Inspector General issued a report critical of the agency’s compliance with the FOIA and made ten recommendations. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro said a year later in testimony before Congress that nine of the recommendations had been completed by the SEC. CREW requested records related to several of those steps.
The brick warehouse is not just a warehouse. Drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone's personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire.
Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency's training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.
As the fire raged, the Deepwater Horizon buckled. More than 110 people escaped the rig on April 20, but 11 men died. Photographs of the burning rig were provided to The Times by a worker on a nearby boat who asked not to be identified.
The Deepwater Horizon had a number of defenses against blowouts. But members of the crew hesitated at critical moments and failed to coordinate a response in three key areas.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
It will be years before the public sees any of the recovered e-mails because they will now go through the National Archives' process for releasing presidential and agency records. Presidential records of the Bush administration won't be available until 2014 at the earliest. The 22 million e-mails "would never have been found but for our lawsuits and pressure from Capitol Hill," said Anne Weismann, chief counsel for CREW. "It was only then that they did this reanalysis and found as a result that there were 22 million e-mails that they were unable to account for before."
Commenting on the report, Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero said, “Today, the Federal Government does not consistently manage its records and information – particularly its electronic records – well enough to meet business needs, protect rights or assure accountability, and ensure the continued preservation and access of permanently valuable records.
The White House used flawed methodology to identify those days that had low volumes of e-mails. The organizations sent letters on Monday to the U.S. Archivist, the White House counsel, the federal chief information officer, and the administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, asking them to resolve a governmentwide problem of poor e-mail management.
Lawmakers and witnesses agreed the reliance on e-mail makes it difficult for federal employees to discern the difference between personal and professional messages, and then decide which work-related messages should be saved. Rules governing what should and should not be archived are "fuzzy," said Carol Brock, a representative of ARMA International, a nonprofit records management association.
One of the previously “sensitive” documents released confirms the Bush White House failed to take action on a 2005/2006 plan to use backup tapes to restore hundreds of days of missing email, and shows the plan would have cost a fraction of what the White House eventually spent on restoring far less email (OAP00026112). Part of the document is a May 10, 2006 memo describing the analysis that identified the hundreds of days of missing email and listing four options for restoring them from backup tapes. The option for restoring all of the missing days would have cost about $2.4 million, according to the memo...
By the end of the Bush administration more than $10 million had been spent on the restoration process, and the Obama White House has spent millions more on it.
89.4% of emails restored from backup tapes for the 21 selected days were completely missing from the Bush archived email records for those same days. Further, 3.9% of emails in the archived records for those days were not found on backup tapes, indicating yet more problems with the system the Bush White House used for archiving its electronic records. Based on these very disturbing results and the many flaws in the methodology used by the Executive Office of the President, CREW and the Archive reiterated to the Archivist their request that all of the missing Bush-era emails be restored.
Documents produced so far show the Bush White House was lying when officials claimed no emails were ever missing. The record now proves incontrovertibly that Bush administration officials deliberately ignored the problem and, in fact, knowingly allowed it to worsen. Some questions remain unanswered. Why, after the Office of Administration told then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers about the problem and presented her with a plan to restore the emails, did she do nothing? Why did the White House abandon -- at the last minute -- a system it had developed to manage and preserve electronic records, despite having spent millions to create it? Did the Bush White House properly respond to requests for records from the Department of Justice and Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during the investigation into the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA identity?
More than 22 million e-mails have been recovered and more are likely waiting to be found, said Meredith Fuchs, the archive's general counsel. But "I don't think we will ever know whether everything was restored," Fuchs said. The settlement also requires the White House provide a publicly releasable letter "describing in as much detail as possible" the current Executive Office of the President computer systems, including its e-mail, archiving and backup systems. "This document will include a detailed description of the controls in the system that prevents the unauthorized deletion of records," the settlement says.
White House Office of Administration (OA) decides to move from a Lotus Notes e-mail system to a Microsoft Exchange system for the Executive Office of the President (EOP). OA tries a new system to convert and format Microsoft Exchange e-mails into a format for Automated Records Management System (ARMS) processing and storage. ARMS was the e-mail archiving system put in place by the Clinton Administration to archive all of its e-mails so that they would be preserved and searchable. They eventually determine that they cannot continue to use ARMS but decide that the transition to Microsoft Exchange will occur with the existing ARMS while a new archiving project gets underway.
Under the terms of the settlement, the Obama administration agreed that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) will restore a total of 94 days of missing emails, which will then be sent to NARA for preservation and eventual access under either the Presidential Records Act or the Federal Records Act. The dates for restoration were chosen based on email volume and external events because there simply was not enough money to restore all the missing emails. In addition, the EOP will continue to provide CREW and the National Security Archive with records documenting the missing email problem, the response of the Bush White House to that problem, and the options the Bush White House considered for preserving electronic records, but inexplicably rejected.
Once the Obama administration came into office, virtually nothing of the Bush Administration’s WhiteHouse.gov site remained, including items that could have been important forensic resources.
The evidence that the destruction of the WTC was to destroy evidence contained on the 23rd and 24th floors of the North Tower is now incontrovertable. This message is the first revelation of the evidence that makes this conclusion a certainty.
The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.
Pentagon attack cab driver Lloyde England informed us that his wife Shirley Hughes-England works for the FBI. When we asked him what she does for them he remained mysterious and said "She don't talk about it- I don't talk about it." Almost two years later over the phone he told somebody else that she is a "cleaner". This 10 minute short documents statements by Lloyde and his wife Shirley regarding her alleged position with the FBI as well as details regarding the FBI's alleged interaction with Lloyde after the attack.
Against a backdrop of discord and hesitation among its most influential members, European Union leaders held a summit here Thursday and Friday to deal with the growing threat to their common currency, the euro, from debt-mired governments. Because of the differences over what to do, two days of discussions produced only a broad agreement to establish a permanent European rescue account when the current $975 billion emergency fund runs out - in 2013.
Even as it currently is, the amount is the highest in constant dollars (pegged at any given year’s dollar and adjusted for inflation) since 1945, the final year of the Second World War. With recent U.S. census figures at 308 million, next year the Pentagon will spend $2,354 for every citizen of the country at the $725 billion price tag alone.
I’ve collected 50 UNIX / Linux sysadmin related tutorials that we’ve posted so far. This is lot of reading. Bookmark this article for your future reference and read it whenever you get free time.
Israel has for its part never denied that its air force attacked a target in Syria, without ever officially claiming responsibility for the action. Former US president George W Bush recounted in his memoirs that he resisted Israeli pressure to bomb the site. In 2008, current US President Barack Obama said when he was a Democratic hopeful for the White House that Israel was right to bomb the suspected nuclear facility in Syria.
The apes in the films have names, but they also have something else: A racial hierarchy. The blonde-haired orangutans are at the top, ruling the roost. Next in line are the chimpanzees, depicted in the films as having brown hair and light-skinned faces. At the bottom are the gorillas, who have black hair and – yes, you guessed right – black-skinned faces.
Dismissing, vilifying, or even censoring criticism of Barack Obama not only discourages diligent questioning of authority and our responsibility as human beings, but it also works a way to overlook the realities and consequences of US war crimes and complicities in the aforementioned countries.
In most American history classrooms, children are taught that in 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and “discovered America.” In this narrative, Columbus is portrayed as a daring explorer, a courageous leader, and a national hero. It is a narrative that is profoundly romanticized and even mythical, yet despite the historical records and accounts of Columbus’s heinous crimes against indigenous peoples, he is still glorified and honored in American history and culture.
Because of modern alarmist reactions to the word “Palestine,” many non-Arabs and non-Muslims take offense when it is argued that Jesus was a Palestinian. Jesus’ ethnicity, skin color, and culture often accompany this conversation, but few people are willing to acknowledge the fact he was non-European. A simple stroll down the Christmas aisle will show you the dominant depiction of Jesus: a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white man.
