The Freedom Revolution Blog

By David Leppard: TimesOnline.co.uk

 

The Home Office has quietly adopted a new plan to allow police across Britain routinely to hack into people’s personal computers without a warrant.

The move, which follows a decision by the European Union’s council of ministers in Brussels, has angered civil liberties groups and opposition MPs. They described it as a sinister extension of the surveillance state which drives “a coach and horses” through privacy laws.

The hacking is known as “remote searching”. It allows police or MI5 officers who may be hundreds of miles away to examine covertly the hard drive of someone’s PC at his home, office or hotel room.

Material gathered in this way includes the content of all e-mails, web-browsing habits and instant messaging.

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SEC watchdog to be questioned about Madoff scandal

MARCY GORDON : AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - The heavy toll of the Bernard Madoff scandal is being brought before Congress Monday as a House panel tries to determine how, despite warnings over a decade to federal regulators, Madoff continued to operate his alleged Ponzi scheme.

"I am a human face on this tragedy," says Allan Goldstein, a retired New York textile distributor.

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Prez-Elect Makes New Pitch, Promises on Job Creation -- Including 600,000 New Government Employees

Jake Tapper : ABC News

In his radio address today, President-elect Obama uses some new language when discussing what he wants the stimulus package to achieve in terms of jobs. First off, he has a name for the package -- the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan."

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"Bank on California" Money Laundering Scheme

 

 

 

The state of California will go bust by March of 2009.  Over the cliff we will go and to make sure there is no looking back, Arnold Schwarzenegger gave us an extra shove in the back – the Bank on California scheme.





This week the Governor has startled even his most adoring followers.  He launched a program called "Bank on California" for the expressed purpose of allowing illegal aliens to open bank account and get loans using the fraudulent Mexican Matricular Consular and Central American "consular identification cards". 

These consular identification cards, which only illegal aliens need, can be purchased for as little as $20 in any big city street corner or for $40 from official Mexican consulate.  In the last few years the Mexican government has put in action a huge fleet of Mexican Consulates on wheels for the purpose of handing out Matricular Consular identification cards in any town and village in American where Mexican illegal aliens can be found.  In some instances American public schools and libraries with administrators sympathetic of illegal aliens and open borders are allowing the mobile consular identification operations to issue these questionable identifications from classrooms and meeting rooms, to the outrage of tax-payer groups.

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Treasury to mull Citi-style rescues

JEANNINE AVERSA : AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Treasury Department opened the door Friday to using a Citigroup-style rescue package to help other troubled financial institutions.

The financial lifeline thrown to Citigroup Inc. (C) in late November involved backing billions in risky assets and providing the banking giant with a fresh capital infusion.

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U.S. governors seek $1 trillion federal assistance

Reuters : Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Governors of five U.S. states urged the federal government to provide $1 trillion in aid to the country's 50 states to help pay for education, welfare and infrastructure as states struggle with steep budget deficits amid a deepening recession.

The governors of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin -- all Democrats -- said the initiative for the two-year aid package was backed by other governors and follows a meeting in December where governors called on President-elect Barack Obama to help them maintain services in the face of slumping revenues.

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Obama to talk stimulus with Hill leaders

Carol E. Lee : Politico

HONOLULU — President-elect Barack Obama will meet with congressional leaders on Monday during his first full day back in Washington in an attempt to assuage rising concerns among Republicans and some Democrats that his economic stimulus plan is too costly and too rushed.

Obama will first sit down with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to discuss the scope and timing of a plan that could cost up to $775 billion, a Democratic source said Thursday.

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Steel Industry, in Slump, Looks to Federal Stimulus

LOUIS UCHITELLE : New York Times

The steel industry, having entered the recession in the best of health, is emerging as a leading indicator of what lies ahead. As steel production goes — and it is now in collapse — so will go the national economy.

That maxim once applied to Detroit’s Big Three car companies, when they dominated American manufacturing. Now they are losing ground in good times and bad, and steel has replaced autos as the industry to watch for an early sign that a severe recession is beginning to lift.

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Chief justice: Inflation outpacing pay for judges

MARK SHERMAN : AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - Chief Justice John Roberts said Wednesday that Congress should be as generous to judges as it already has been to itself, by approving an inflation-related increase in their pay. "I must renew the judiciary's modest petition: Simply provide cost-of-living increases that have been unfairly denied," Roberts said in his annual year-end report on the federal judiciary.

Alone among federal employees, judges will not receive a cost-of-living allowance in 2009. Members of Congress are getting a 2.8 percent boost, worth $4,700. But they refused before Christmas to give an identical increase to judges.

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Treasury Opens Door to Aid for Broad Array of Firms, Industries

Rebecca Christie : Bloomberg

 Jan. 1 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury threw the door open to taxpayer financing for a widening array of companies and industries by drafting broad guidelines on aid to the auto industry.

The Treasury’s guidelines, published yesterday, would let officials provide funds to any company they deem important to making or financing cars. That leaves room for the government to provide money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program beyond loans already committed to General Motors Corp., GMAC LLC and Chrysler LLC.

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US stocks suffer worst year since Great Depression

Alistair Gray : Financial Times

The worst annual performance for Wall Street stocks since the Great Depression ended with a modest rally on the final day of trading as the Federal Reserve pushed ahead with its plan to buy mortgage-backed securities.

The central bank’s plan to buy up to $500bn of mortgage bonds by the middle of 2009 helped spur a 1.4 per cent gain on the day for the S&P, which finished 2008 at 903.25.

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Government aid could save U.S. newspapers, spark debate

Robert MacMillan : Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

Nicastro represents Connecticut's 79th assembly district, which includes Bristol, a city of about 61,000 people outside Hartford, the state capital. Its paper, The Bristol Press, may fold within days, along with The Herald in nearby New Britain.

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Happy banniversary

Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz : Chicago Tribune

In the year since the Illinois smoking ban snuffed out cigarettes in bars, Jake Perry has drastically cut back--not on cigarettes, but on bars.

"It's just not fun anymore," said Perry, 34, who used to hit the bars every weekend and now rarely ventures out.

"You have to go outside, you can't drink your beer while you're smoking a cigarette," he said. "Even nonsmokers you're with get annoyed because suddenly a bunch of people decide to go outside to smoke, so they're left sitting by themselves."

Read More... (and thanks to Radley Balko for highlighting this article on his blog)

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By Caroline Baum: Bloomberg.com

 

The year 2008 will be remembered as one that exposed the fatal flaws in free-market capitalism, sending it to an untimely death.

Or will it?

That capitalism’s obituary is already being written suggests the enemies of the free market were waiting to pounce.

Last week, Arianna Huffington, co-founder of the Huffington Post, wrote that laissez-faire capitalism, “a monumental failure in practice,” should be “as dead as Soviet Communism” as an ideology.

On National Public Radio, Daniel Schorr pronounced “the death of a doctrine” in his year-end review.

All I could think of was Winston Churchill’s assertion about democracy. Capitalism is surely the worst economic system, except for all the others that have been tried.

With its ideology under fire and its practice falsely maligned, it is to the defense of free markets that I devote my final column of the year.

Before you can declare free markets a failure, you have to establish that they exist, says Paul Kasriel, chief economist at the Northern Trust Co. in Chicago.

“We do not have free markets in credit in the U.S. or anywhere else that I know of,” he says. “The price of short- term credit is fixed by central banks. It would only be by accident that a central bank would fix the price of short-term credit” at the precise level that a free market would.

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By James Quinn: SeekingAlpha.com

 

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."

--Historian and writer James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book Epic of America.

Mr. Adams penned these words in the midst of the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in our history. It is timely to reflect on these words, as it appears that the American Dream is slipping further out of reach for most Americans. If the dream of a better life for our future generations is lost, it will truly mark a turning point for our great Republic. The reason the American Dream is slipping away is due to the actions of politicians running our government and bureaucrats running the Federal Reserve. Those with ability who have earned a better life through their hard work, intelligence and integrity should be attaining a higher position in the social order. Instead, our government is rewarding those Americans who have taken unwarranted risks, made brainless decisions, and willingly chose the course of excessive debt to climb the social ladder.

As the politicians scurry to “save” capitalism through the use of communist measures, more Americans are becoming disheartened. The definition of communism according to Webster’s is:

A system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed.

George Bush, Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke have decided to seize money from the vast majority of Americans who lived within their means, utilized debt sparingly, and worked hard to get ahead, and give it to the most appalling failures in our society. They have shoveled billions to banks that operated their businesses like gambling parlors. They have shoveled hundreds of millions to people who bought houses with no money down, interest only mortgages and fraudulent loan applications. They are now rewarding automakers who made the wrong vehicles, pay 30,000 workers per year to not work, and have only been able to “sell” cars by giving them away with 0% financing to anyone who could sign on the dotted line. These acts fit the definition of communism. We are now more communist than China.

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Bernard Madoff — Hiding in plain sight under the cover of SEC regulation

John Berlau : OpenMarket.org

When news broke of Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion worldwide Ponzi scheme, news accounts first portrayed him as a shadowy hedge fund manager outside the scope of regulation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But as the sheer magnitude of the fraud became clearer, so did the picture of Madoff’s place in the Wall Street-Washington world.

Madoff’s businesses were actually subject to a variety of financial regulations, something Madoff would actually use as a selling point to investors. Last year in a speech, Madoff said, “In today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules.” He registered as an investment adviser in 2006, and had been under the SEC’s extensive regulatory framework for securities broker-dealers since he founded his firm almost 50 years ago.

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Minnesotans line up for a stimulus shot

KEVIN DIAZ : Star Tribune

WASHINGTON - The first big wave of change in the new Obama administration, a roughly $850 billion economic stimulus package, has brought out a swarm of Minnesota officials, businesses and special interest groups vying for a chunk of the nationwide infrastructure buildup.

With President-elect Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Congress poised to embark on the nation's biggest building spree since the interstate highway system was built a half-century ago, road builders and building contractors from every corner of America are sharpening their pencils at the prospect of more work.

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by Stephen Lendman: BaltimoreChronicle.com

 

On June 15, 2007, Ron Paul introduced HR 2755: Federal Reserve Abolition Act. There were no co-sponsors, no further action was taken, and the legislation was referred to the House Committee on Financial Services and effectively pigeonholed and ignored.

It's a bold and needed measure to "abolish the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal reserve banks, to repeal the Federal Reserve Act, and for other purposes."

The bill provides for management of employees, assets and liabilities of the Board during a dissolution period, and more as follows:

• it designates the Director of the Office of Management and Budget to liquidate Fed assets in an orderly and expeditious manner;
• transfer them to the General Fund of the Treasury after satisfying all claims against the Board and any Federal reserve bank;
• assume all outstanding Board and member bank liabilities and transfer them to the Secretary of the Treasury; and
• after an 18-month period, submit a report to Congress "containing a detailed description of the actions taken to implement this Act and any actions or issues relating to such implementation that remain uncompleted or unresolved as of the date of the report."

On November 22, "End the Fed" protests were held in 39 or more cities nationwide (including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, DC), but you'd hardly know it for lack of coverage. Attendee demands were simple and emphatic:

• end a private banking cartel's illegal monopoly control over the nation's money supply and price;
• return that power to the US Treasury as the Constitution mandates;
• end a fiat currency system backed by the waning full faith and credit of the government; and
• return the country to a sound, hard currency monetary system.

"End the Fed! Sound Money for America!" is their slogan, and writer and US policy critic Webster Tarpley puts it well:

"....the privately owned central bank....has been looting and wrecking the US economy for almost a hundred years. We must end a system where unelected, unaccountable cliques of bankers and financiers loyal to names like Morgan, Rockefeller, and Mellon set interest rates and money supply behind closed doors, leading to de-industrialization, mass impoverishment, and a world economic and financial depression of incalculable severity."

In theory, the Fed was established to stabilize the economy, smooth out the business cycle, manage a healthy, sustainable growth rate, and maintain stable prices. In fact, it failed dismally. It contributed to 19 US recessions (including the Great Depression) and significantly to the following equity market declines that accompanied them as measured by the Dow or S & P 500 average - the S &P's inception was 1923; it became the S & P 500 in 1957:

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Global Central Banks Acting In Concert - Disinformation In Financial Dailies To Confuse The People  When The Truth Dawns On Hapless People, There Will Be Blood On The Streets. This Is The Warning By IMF!

by Matthias Chang: FutureFastForward.com

 

INTRODUCTION

The disinformation by the global financial dailies in the last twelve months as to the cause of the global financial tsunami, serve the same purpose as the global mass media when they perpetuated the lies that lulled the people to support the war criminals Bush, Blair and Howard to launch the barbaric war against Iraq and Afghanistan which resulted in the genocide of millions, the mutilation of hundreds of thousands, physically and psychologically, and the devastation of an entire nation.

The wars unleashed thus far, specifically the “War on Terror” was launched to preserve the shadow money-lenders’ political and military power.

This War on Terror is the greatest military sideshow that distracted the great American people from the financial rape and plunder of their economy and the destruction of their Constitution.

Since the summer of 2007, we have witnessed a concerted effort by the world’s central banks and global commercial and investment banks to preserve the shadow money-lenders’ financial power, one that is founded on fraud and structured in every detail as in the infamous Ponzi scheme.

In the last seven years, the Ponzi scheme was globalised by the Shadow Money-Lenders, siphoning hundreds of billions from so-called sophisticated investors and sovereign wealth funds. At its peak, the Ponzi scheme was estimated to be worth over $500 Trillion, with the Credit Default Swap (CDS) portion just under $60 Trillion! 

Hidden behind the headlines of the financial destruction that is sweeping across the globe, lies another story – a dark tale of men who orchestrated the crisis and have amassed enormous wealth and power at the expense of the millions who are now unemployed and whose homes have been foreclosed. This select group of men is in absolute control of the unfolding events.

Who are they?

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By Darryl Robert Schoon: From Gold-Eagle.com     (PDF version at DrSchoon.com)

 

The American Revolution was an extraordinary event. The idea that freedom was an inherent right, that tyranny could be successfully opposed, that government could serve the people, not the few, was truly revolutionary in 1776-as it is today.

The American Revolution, however, has run its course; and unless resuscitated and given new life, the American dream and the dreams of America's founding fathers will soon be only a memory. Dreams rarely come to pass and those that do rarely last. The American dream is no exception.

What happened in 1776 has been subverted by the passage of time and the inconstancy of later generations. Those who rule America today have subverted the principles enumerated in the US Constitution; principles the Founding Father hoped would guide those who followed them through the crises yet to come.

The principles were not many, e.g. fiscal prudence, sound money, separation of church and state and a limited military and limited government. But even those few and clearly stated principles succumbed over the years to the imposition of policies that had given rise to the need to revolt in 1776.

Now, in 2008, tyranny and government excesses are again upon America, but this time it is by America's own hand. The policies of King George III were no more egregious than the policies of President George Bush II.- taxation without real representation, e.g. TARP (80 % Americans opposed), the imposition of policies contrary to the will of the people, e.g. US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan (70 % opposed), and the loss of individual freedoms under the Patriot Act (60 % opposed).

The difference between 1776 and 2008 is that America is now tyrannized not by the King of England but by its own government. Today, the US government does not represent the will of the people. It represents instead the special interests that control the US government through the buying of votes-America is not for sale only because it has already been sold.

The difference between 1776 and 2008 is not only 232 years. It is the difference between the dream of the Founding Fathers and the shadow of that dream in whose increasing darkness Americans now exist.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK IS THE REASON FOR AMERICA'S
FALL FROM POWER AND THE SOURCE OF ITS INCREASING PROBLEMS

Thomas Jefferson warned 200 hundred years ago that if private bankers were allowed to issue America's money, indebtedness, foreclosure and suffering would follow. Yet, in 1913, private bankers gained control over America's money by the passage of the Federal Reserve Act.

We are now suffering for ignoring Jefferson's warnings. Jefferson was right in predicting our problems but his words were overridden by those who had other plans for America, plans that would increase their profits at the expense of the nation.

It is no accident America is now an empty shell of the great economic power it once was. Bled dry by debt imposed by those whose sole intent was to profit, the US is now bankrupt at a time it desperately needs the resources it no longer has.

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The riots have begun.

Civil protest is breaking out in cities across Russia, China, and beyond.

 

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Telegraph.co.uk

Greece has been in turmoil for 11 days. The mood seems to have turned "pre-insurrectionary" in parts of Athens - to borrow from the Marxist handbook.

This is a foretaste of what the world may face as the "crisis of capitalism" - another Marxist phase making a comeback - starts to turn two hundred million lives upside down.

We are advancing to the political stage of this global train wreck. Regimes are being tested. Those relying on perma-boom to mask a lack of democratic or ancestral legitimacy may try to gain time by the usual methods: trade barriers, sabre-rattling, and barbed wire.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, is worried enough to ditch a half-century of IMF orthodoxy, calling for a fiscal boost worth 2pc of world GDP to "prevent global depression".

"If we are not able to do that, then social unrest may happen in many countries, including advanced economies. We are facing an unprecedented decline in output. All around the planet, the people have reacted with feelings going from surprise to anger, and from anger to fear," he said.

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You Know Chrysler is Toast Because..

Mark Cuban : Blog Maverick

The CEO takes out a fullpage ad in the Wall Street Journal today to thank the American Public for “investing” in Chrysler.

Lets see, is there anything more idiotic than spending more than 100k dollars on a full page ad “thanks for letting me waste your money ” ad ? Does it make it worse that its a business publication where the readers might just recognize the stupidity of wasting money on ad dollars that doesn’t even try to sell the product ?  How does it make the next unemployed Chrysler worker feel that  their entire year’s salary just went for  a single, ridiculous ad ?

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Where'd the bailout money go? Shhhh, it's a secret

MATT APUZZO : AP

WASHINGTON (AP) - It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going?

But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it,'" said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to."

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Clinton moves to widen role of State Department

Mark Landler and Helene Cooper : Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON: Even before taking office, Hillary Rodham Clinton is seeking to build a more powerful State Department, with a bigger budget, high-profile special envoys to trouble spots and an expanded role in dealing with global economic issues at a time of crisis.

Clinton is recruiting Jacob Lew, the budget director under President Bill Clinton, as one of two deputies, according to people close to the Obama transition team. Lew's focus, they said, would be on increasing the share of financing that goes to the diplomatic corps.

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