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Jason Leopold is becoming a world class expert in digging up important information via the FOIA process.
“We Are Living in the World Occupy Made”: New York City Voters Elect Mayor Who Vows to Tax the Rich
Who knew?!
New York Fed Chief Discovers the Glaringly Obvious!
The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Thursday that some of America’s largest financial institutions appear to lack respect for the law, a potentially explosive charge against an industry already roiling from numerous government investigations into alleged wrongdoing.
William Dudley, one of the nation’s top banking regulators whose organization helps oversee Wall Street banks including JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, made the comment during a speech focused on the problems posed by banks perceived to be “too big to fail,” and possible solutions to correct them.
But in an abrupt turn, Dudley suggested that regulators may be stymied by "cultural" issues that have negatively affected the nation's biggest banks.
“Collectively, these enhancements to our current regime may not solve another important problem evident within some large financial institutions -- the apparent lack of respect for law, regulation and the public trust," he said.
“There is evidence of deep-seated cultural and ethical failures at many large financial institutions,” he continued. “Whether this is due to size and complexity, bad incentives, or some other issues is difficult to judge, but it is another critical problem that needs to be addressed.”
[See if you can spot the head of the New York Federal Reserve in this video:]
Who knew too?! This is presented as some kind of new idea by people who tried, to some extent, in their liberal gatekeeper land, to pretend Occupy or the Robin Hood movement didn't exist.
Obama Brags About Falling Deficit as Jobs Disappear and Public Investment Falls to Post-WWII Low
President Obama brags that the deficit is falling at the fastest rate in 60 years. It’s true, and it’s terrible news for the economy. As economist Dean Baker (who was a guest on Moyers & Company last week) put it, “celebrating the sharp drop in the deficit… is a bit like celebrating a sunny day in a region suffering from drought.” ...
So while the deficit is indeed shrinking fast, the CBO estimates that the austerity package known as “the sequester” will cost the American economy 1.6 million jobs through the end of next year. ...
The jobs we’re hemorrhaging due to spending cuts aren’t the whole story. According to a study by the conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation, uncertainty resulting from lurching from one contrived fiscal “crisis” to another has cost the economy another 900,000 jobs since the tea partiers came roaring into Congress in 2010.
Hegemony Abroad Requires a Security State at Home
"There was medical experimentation that was very scary to be subjected to.” And yet, hyperpartisans here throw fits when someone sarcastically gives a Nazi salute after the kos kops swarm their diary yet again, but do they throw fits about torture and "medical experimentation" perpetrated by the US military and intelligence machine under two administrations? Do you ever see the same people here throwing fits about that? Do you see people with noble tributes to the Constitution in their sig line throwing fits about the massive surveillance machine that is crushing that same Constitution? Do you see them throwing fits about "double tap" drone strikes where first responders are deliberately killed after they run out to help people injured in the first drone strike, something that is clearly defined as a war crime? So do they ever throw dkos fits about that? We all know the answer to that. No, they don't throw fits about that. They throw fits about people who dissent or step over the line to call out whiffs of McCarthyism, fascism and right-wing authoritarianism on a blog. Because that is a much higher priority for the kos kops. It's a high priority to single out specific users and troll them relentlessly. It's a priority to create new unwritten rules about very specific words, phrases, concepts, actions that are out of bounds and many times these are things that nobody in the real world has declared out of bounds. The club rules turn the place into a mine field for new users or anyone unfamiliar with these unwritten rules. And of course, they are not applied consistently. If the kos kops or their friends do things, that's okay but if someone they don't like does it, all hell breaks loose, if they feel like it.
Judge Demands US Gov't Hand Over Secret Docs Detailing Gitmo Torture
On Wednesday, a judge presiding over the trial of the five alleged 9/11 plotters currently held at Guantánamo Bay ordered the U.S. government to submit previously undisclosed Red Cross documents that detail the conditions of prisoners at the secretive military prison, referred to by a former detainee as "a black hole where supposedly no laws apply." ...
Meanwhile, former Guantánamo detainee David Hicks, convicted of “providing material support to terrorism,” broke his gag order on Wednesday to speak out against the tortuous conditions he experienced in the six years he spent detained at the prison and to file an appeal against his former conviction with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights in a bid to clear his name.
Hicks, an Australian native who was taken into custody by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and was one of the first detainees at Guantanamo, claims he was coerced into a plea deal under the impression that it was "the only way to get out of Guantánamo and escape the ongoing abuse and torture" there, CCR reports.
“That ranges from typical physical beatings to a whole range of psychological ploys," Hicks told RT in an interview this week. "There was medical experimentation that was very scary to be subjected to.”
“Myself and everyone else were tortured on a daily basis,” Hicks said.
Google engineer accuses NSA and GCHQ of subverting 'judicial process'
Anti-hacking expert claims British spy agency is 'even worse' than NSA for tapping private networks between Google's centres
A British engineer who works on anti-hacking systems at Google has furiously accused the UK and US spying agencies of "industrial scale subversion of the judicial process" by tapping the company's internal networks.
Mike Hearn, who says he worked for two years on the networks that replicate Google data between its different computing centres, says that "GCHQ [the British surveillance centre] turns out to be even worse than the NSA [the US National Security Agency]". He added that he joined an American colleague, Brandon Downey, "in issuing a giant fuck you to the people [at the NSA and GCHQ] who made these slides".
His complaint follows the revelation by the Washington Post of slides leaked by Edward Snowden which show that GCHQ tapped the private networks between Google's centres in order to monitor traffic.
Hearn, a senior engineer at Google since 2010, complains that "nobody at GCHQ or the NSA will ever stand before a judge and answer for this industrial-scale subversion of the judicial process".
The Washington Post slides show that GCHQ has been tapping into private optic fibre cables, which Google leases from Level 3 Communications to coordinate its data stores between Finland, Dublin and Belgium, in order to monitor traffic and extract data. Hearn says that one of the slides "shows a database recording a user login as part of this [anti-hacking] system" – itself prima facie evidence that the tapping occurred.
Westminster Whitewash: UK spy chiefs deny data harvesting, say Snowden aided Al-Qaida
FAA Releases Initial Plan on Increased Domestic Drone Use
The Federal Aviation Administration has released an initial plan for domestic drones to be used more widely by 2015. The rules require agencies that will oversee drone testing to release plans for privacy, but it does not lay out what the practices should be. In a statement, an American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel called for "concrete restrictions on how data from drones can be used and how long it can be stored." According to the FAA, more than 80 law enforcement agencies are already authorized to use drones.
Obama apologizes to people who lost health insurance over Obamacare
President Barack Obama will apologize to individual health care buyers who have lost their insurance care policies after the implementation of the Affordable Care Act in footage released by NBC News on Thursday night.
“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” Obama told NBC correspondent Chuck Todd. ... The interview comes on the heels of NBC’s report that Obama’s administration knew the majority of individual buyers would lose their policies, despite his repeated assurances that they would be able to keep their plans.
Action
Stop Watching Us.
The revelations about the National Security Agency's surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights. We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA's spying programs.
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Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
The Evening Blues
The battle between Eric Alterman and Max Blumenthal continues, with Rosie Gray of Buzzfeed doing her usual smear hit pieces, her specialty, whether they're full of lies or not, she has no slimy shame.
Why was the Secret Service making notes about Aaron's mental health?
More like "Unite Neoliberals"
WTF? Or maybe Hagel's job is to try to calm down the IC since they are throwing fits about Obama not defending them.
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