Wednesday, September 18, 2013

From Hero Greg Palaast

Larry Summers: Goldman Sacked

By Greg Palast, Reader Supported News
18 September 13

oseph Stiglitz couldn't believe his ears. Here they were in the White House, with President Bill Clinton asking the chiefs of the US Treasury for guidance on the life and death of America's economy, when the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers turns to his boss, Secretary Robert Rubin, and says, "What would Goldman think of that?"
Huh?
Then, at another meeting, Summers said it again: What would Goldman think?
A shocked Stiglitz, then Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, told me he'd turned to Summers, and asked if Summers thought it appropriate to decide US economic policy based on "what Goldman thought." As opposed to say, the facts, or say, the needs of the American public, you know, all that stuff that we heard in Cabinet meetings on The West Wing.
Summers looked at Stiglitz like Stiglitz was some kind of naive fool who'd read too many civics books.
R.I.P. Larry Summers
On Sunday afternoon, facing a revolt by his own party's senators, Obama dumped Larry as likely replacement for Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
Until news came that Summers' torch had been snuffed, I was going to write another column about Larry, the Typhoid Mary of Economics. (My first, in The Guardian, 15 years ago, warned that "Summers is, in fact, a colony of aliens sent to Earth to turn humans into a cheap source of protein.")
But the fact that Obama even tried to shove Summers down the planet's throat tells us more about Obama than Summers-and whom Obama works for. Hint: You aren't one of them.
All these Cabinet discussions back in the 1990s requiring the blessing of Goldman Sachs revolved around the Rubin-Summers idea of ending regulation of the US banking system. To free the US economy, Summers argued, all you'd have to do is allow commercial banks to bet government-guaranteed savings on new "derivatives products," let banks sell high-risk sub-prime mortgage securities and cut their reserves against losses.
What could possibly go wrong?
Stiglitz, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, tried to tell them exactly what would go wrong. But when he tried, he was replaced and exiled.
Summers did more than ask Rubin to channel the spirit of Goldman: Summers secretly called and met with Goldman's new CEO at the time, Jon Corzine, to plan out the planet's financial deregulation. I'm not guessing: I have the confidential memo to Summers reminding him to call Corzine.
[For the complete story of that memo and a copy of it, read "The Confidential Memo at the Heart of the Global Financial Crisis".]
Summers, as Treasury official, can call any banker he damn well pleases. But not secretly. And absolutely not to scheme over details of policies that could make a bank billions. And Goldman did make billions on those plans.
Example: Goldman and clients pocketed $4 billion on the collapse of "synthetic collateralized debt obligations"-flim-flam feathers sold to suckers and dimwits i.e. the bankers at RBS.
Goldman also cashed in big on the implosion of Greece's debt via secret derivatives trades permitted by Summers' decriminalization of such cross-border financial gaming.
The collapse of the euro-zone and the US mortgage market caused by Bankers Gone Wild was made possible only by Treasury Secretary Summers lobbying for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act which banned regulators from controlling the 100,000% increase in derivatives assets, especially super-risky "naked" credit-default swaps.
The CMFA was the financial equivalent of a fire department banning smoke alarms.
Summers took over the Treasury's reins from Rubin who'd left to become director of a strange new financial behemoth: The combine of Citibank with and an investment bank, Travelers. The new bank beast went bankrupt and required $50 billion in bail-out funds. (Goldman did not require any bail-out funds–but took $10 billion anyway.)
Other banks-turned-casinos followed Citi into insolvency. Most got bail-outs ... and got Larry Summers–or, at least, Larry's lips for "consulting" or for gold-plated speaking gigs.
Derivatives trader D.E. Shaw paid Summers $5 million for a couple of years of "part-time" work. This added to payments from Citigroup, Goldman and other finance houses, raising the net worth of this once penurious professor to more than $31 million.
Foreclosure fills the Golden Sacks
When Summers left Treasury in 2000, The New York Times reports that a grateful Rubin got Summers the post of President of Harvard University-from which Summers was fired. He gambled away over half a billion dollars of the university's endowment on those crazy derivatives he'd legalized. (Given Summers' almost pathological inability to understand finance, it was most odd that, while President of the university, he suggested that humans with vaginas aren't very good with numbers.)
In 2009, Summers, Daddy of the Deregulation Disaster, returned to the Cabinet in triumph. Barack Obama crowned him "Economics Tsar," allowing Summers to run the Treasury without having to be questioned by Congress in a formal confirmation hearing.
As Economics Tsar in Obama's first term, did Summers redeem himself?
Not a chance.
In 2008, both Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain called for using the $300 billion remaining in the "bail-out' fund for a foreclosure-blocking program identical to the one Franklin Roosevelt had used to pull the US out of the Great Depression. But Tsar Larry would have none of it, although banks had been given $400 billion from the same fund.
Indeed, on the advice of Summers and his wee assistant, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, Obama spent only $7 billon of the $300 billion available to save US homeowners.
What would Goldman think?
As noted, Goldman and clients pocketed billions as a result of Obama's abandonment of 3.9 million families whose homes were repossessed during his first term. While American homeowners were drowning, Tsar Summers torpedoed their lifeboat: a plan to prevent foreclosures by forcing banks to write-off the overcharges in predatory sub-prime mortgages. Notably, Summers' action (and Obama's inaction) saved Citibank billions.
Loan Shark Larry
The deregulation disaster machinery is not done with mangling Americans. While not-for-profit credit unions, lenders of last resort for working people and the poor in the US, have been under legal and political attack, a new kind of banking operation has bubbled out of the minds of the grifters looking for a way to make loan-sharking legit.
One new outfit, for example, called "Lending Club," has figured out a way to collect fees for arranging loans charging as much as 29%. Lending Club claims it cannot and should not be regulated by the Federal Reserve or other banking police. The recent addition to its Board of Directors: Larry Summers.
If you want to know why Obama would choose such a grifter and gamer to head the Fed, you have to ask, Who picked Obama? Ten years ago, Barry Obama was a nothing, a State Senator from the South Side of Chicago.
But then, he got lucky. A local bank, Superior, was shut down by regulators for mortgage shenanigans ripping off Black folk. The bank's Chairwoman, Penny Pritzker was so angry at regulators, she decided to eliminate them: and that required a new President.
The billionaires connected Obama to Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan, but most importantly to Robert Rubin, former Treasury Secretary, but most important, former CEO of Goldman Sachs and mentor of Larry Summers. Without Rubin's blessing and overwhelming fundraising power, Obama would still be arguing over zoning on Halsted Street.
Rubin picked Obama and Obama picks whom Rubin picks for him.
Because, in the end, Obama knows he must choose a Fed chief based on the answer to one question: What would Goldman think?
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Saturday, April 20, 2013

From Hero Will Grigg

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Nationalizing Children



Commissar for Children: Anton S. Makarenko, depicted in a Soviet Postcard



We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. –

Instructions given at a congress of Soviet educators in 1918 (cited in Separating School & State: How to Liberate America’s Families, by Sheldon Richman, pg. xv).

[The Soviet family] is an organic part of Soviet society. Parents are not without authority … but this authority is only a reflection of social authority…. In our country he alone is a man of worth whose needs and desires are the needs and desires of a collectivist…. Our family offers rich soil for the cultivation of such collectivism. –

Soviet family theorist Anton S. Makarenko, The Collective Family, A Handbook for Russian Parents, pgs xi-xii, 42.

If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality…. In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them. –

Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families at the US Department of Health and Human Services, 1993-1996; currently Thornton Bradshaw Professor of Public Police and Management, Harvard Kennedy School; quoted in “The Family: It’s Surviving and Healthy” by Dolores Barclay, Tulsa World, August 21, 1977. 



 Whenever a progressive refers to “investments,” he or she is referring to confiscation of private wealth.

Whenever a progressive invokes the “community,” that term refers to a state-engineered collective in which the individual has no rights.

Whenever a collectivist refers to “public education,” that phrase is shorthand for the process of destroying a child’s developing sense of self-ownership and indoctrinating them in the notion that they are the property of the “community.” This process is also known as “socialization,” which is the indefinable value-added element that supposedly makes “public education” superior to homeschooling.

Whenever an advocate of “public education” refers to “our children,” conscientious parents should take a quick inventory of their arsenals.
Melissa Harris-Perry, a slogan-spewing news reader for the Stalinist media outlet called MSNBC, ran the table of these collectivist nostrums in a recent installment in the network’s “Lean Forward” ad campaign. The “Lean Forward” spots feature various MSNBC luminaries holding forth like Communist Party functionary exhorting the cadres at a “struggle session” in the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Harris-Perry is a collectivist of such passionate conviction that she regards opposition to Obama's radical centralization of power to be a species of sedition. She considers private firearms to be a pestilence, but embraces a vision of social engineering that would require a great amount of gun-related violence by state functionaries. 

Although – or perhaps because -- Harris-Perry is a credentialed academic, she has the odd and annoying habit, so common among adolescents, of ending every statement with a vocal inflection that suggests a question. In her "Lean Forward" ad, she uncorked this specimen of unfiltered collectivist cant:

“We have never invested as much in public education, because we’ve always had a sort of private notion of children – your kid is yours, and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of, `These are our children.’ So part of it is that we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.”



Harris-Perry’s disdain for parental authority is wedded to a denial of the idea that the individual child has a right to self-ownership. During an MSNBC discussion about a North Dakota law that would ban abortion after six weeks, she used the expression “this thing” to refer to the developing fetus and warned that “if this turns into a person, there are economic consequences.” 

It’s important to understand that Harris-Perry’s commitment to legalized abortion doesn’t grow out of a misapplied commitment to individual liberty, but rather her devotion to the collective management of the human population. It’s akin to the view expressed in the early 1970s by then-Rutgers professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the Roe v. Wade ruling was a product of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of.” 

Belief that the unborn human child has a right to be protected against lethal aggression, according to Harris-Perry, is a “faith claim … not associated with science.” However one views that moral proposition, the humanity of the developing individual is an incontestable scientific fact.  The existence of the invisible, intangible abstraction called the “state” is based entirely on faith claims that Harris-Perry is willing to impose through coercion. 
 
Nationalize children: Dr. Bane.

In an essay she wrote for The Nation magazine three years ago – then, as now, she wore her surname fashionably parted in the middle, but in a slightly different style – Harris-Perry described how she catechizes her unfortunate students in the gospel of the Almighty State: 

"I often begin my political science courses with a brief introduction to the idea of `the state.' The state is the entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, force, and coercion. If an individual travels to another country and kills its citizens, we call it terrorism. If the state does it, we call it war. If a man kills his neighbor it is murder; if the state does it it is the death penalty. If an individual takes his neighbor's money, it is theft; if the state does it, it is taxation."

In addition to instructing other people’s children in the fear and admonition of the Divine State, Harris-Perry is eager to see its heretical enemies put to the torch.

"The Tea Party is a challenge to the legitimacy of the U.S. state," Harris-Perry insisted. "When Tea Party participants charge the current administration with various forms of totalitarianism, they are arguing that the government has no right to levy taxes or make policy. Many GOP elected officials offered nearly secessionist rhetoric from the floor of the Congress [during the debate over nationalizing health care]. They joined as co-conspirators with the Tea Party protesters by arguing that this government has no monopoly on legitimacy."

The overt act that made that impious “conspiracy” a prosecutable crime, according to Harris-Perry, was an anti-Obamacare protest in which Tea Party activists heckled Georgia Rep. John Lewis. As an elected official, Lewis is not merely a human being, according to Harris-Perry, but an “embodiment of the state” – or, to use appropriate creedal language, al living  image of the invisible deity.

"When protesters spit on and scream at duly elected representatives of the United States government it is more than an act of racism," snarled Harris-Perry, making a de rigueur – and entirely gratuitous -- reference to Lewis's ethnic background. "It is an act of sedition."

String up the barbed wire, sharpen the guillotine, ready the basement cells of the Lubyanka: There are "seditionists" to be dealt with! 

Like many others of her ideological persuasion, Harris-Perry is a stranger to concision. In describing the totalitarian state’s proprietary claim on children, someone who represented a slightly different strain of collectivism – albeit not as different as Harris-Perry would insist – stated the matter much more tidily almost exactly eighty years ago:

“When an opponent declares, `I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say: `Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in this new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

Those words were spoken on November 6, 1933 by the community-organizing, civilian-disarming, socialized medicine-promoting, government stimulus-peddling, unitary executive who presided over Germany’s National Socialist government. When Harris-Perry and her comrades demand that we "Lean Forward," that's the direction they have in mind.

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WND EXCLUSIVE

Feds admit drying up ammo supplies

Napolitano to Congress: Contract was for up to '1-point-whatever billion' rounds

author-image by Bob Unruh Email | Archive
Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.
At least police departments and other gun owners now know what’s creating a shortage of ammunition across the nation: It IS the federal government, as those online reports, including several at WND, have explained.
Word came just now when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was talking to members of Congress and was asked about the ammunition issue.
There have been a multitude of headlines about massive government purchases of ammunition, so that manufacturers have been unable to keep up with the admittedly rising demand from consumers alarmed that the Obama administration will succeed with its agenda of banning many kinds of firearms.
Napolitano was being asked by Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., about the reports of the purchases, and she explained her department dismissed the concerns when they arose, not feeling it was worth a response.
She said the widely reported purchase of 1.6 billion rounds – enough for many years of a war at the rate ammunition is used by the U.S. military these days – was right. At least she thought so.
“This was a five-year strategic sourcing contract for up to one-point-whatever billion rounds,” she confirmed.
Concerned about surveillance drones, tanks in the streets and gun confiscation? Find out “HOW AMERICA IS BECOMING A POLICE STATE” in this shocking WND special report.
The actual reports have contained the figure 1.6 billion rounds. And calculations done by the Washington Examiner suggest that would be enough for “something like a 24-year supply of ammunition on hand.’
What it is accomplishing is that other consumers of ammunition, from the weekend hunter to police departments, are finding the shelves bare.
For example, Utica, N.Y., police have been told it could take up to 10 months now to get the ammunition they order.
They especially have trouble getting .223 and .45 caliber rounds, those of the type that the government also orders.
In Mobile, Ala., Nick Sagler said, “You can’t find what you need.”
And Jeremy Windle called it an “extreme shortage.”
Ronica Williams, at the Greater Gulf State Fairgrounds gun show, said all of the ordinary supplies are backordered “six months or better.”
In Boca Raton, Fla., the problem is just as bad.
“Right now ammo’s pretty hard to get. People bought everything that was to be bought, They’ve completely cleaned out the supply chain,” said a gunsmith.
In Caldwell, W.Va., retailers said the expense is going up for gun owners, because of the shortage of ammunition. The reporter there suggested it was “ammunition hoarding,” because of talk in Washington about gun regulations, rules, restrictions and requirements.
A range operator said, “I think it’s made more people panic and made more people purchase whatever they can.”
In Catoosa, Okla., law enforcement agencies report paying a lot more for ammunition.
Sgt. Keith Prince said, “America’s in a state of panic right now because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their Second Amendment rights.”
Other points reporting problems:
And in East Texas, operators of a gun shop have taken to making their own ammo to keep up with customers’ demands.
The pushback already has started developing. In Kansas, the governor has signed what’s been called the strongest pro-gun bill in the nation.
The law is designed to counter the push by liberal federal lawmakers for increased restrictions on gun rights. It nullifies any new limits on firearms, magazines and ammunition – whether enacted by Congress, presidential executive order or any agency.
If Congress would have passed the Senate amendment expanding federal background checks, for example, the Kansas law would nullify it in the state.
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, signed Senate Bill 102 into law, which exempts Kansas from any laws the federal government might pass that would infringe on Second Amendment rights.
Specifically, the Kansas law prevents federal law enforcement officials from enforcing any laws restricting Second Amendment rights.
An impressive 32 state legislatures have now introduced pro-Second Amendment “nullification” bills. The progress of the bills can be tracked at the Tenth Amendment Center’s website.
Montana began the trend with its Firearms Freedom Act. The law is currently tied up in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard arguments last month. The Cato and Goldwater Institutes have filed a friend-of-the-court brief, “arguing that federal law doesn’t preempt Montana’s ability to exercise its sovereign police powers to facilitate the exercise of individual rights protected by the Second and Ninth Amendments.”
Even on the national level, the campaign launched by President Obama is tasting the bitter flavor of defeat. Just this week, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate shot down Obama’s effort to control guns in a series of votes.
The votes were on amendments to a bill by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the loss was so bad that Reid immediately removed his entire bill from consideration.
The first, and key, amendment was to expand background checks widely. It failed 54-46 under a requirement of 60 votes for adoption.
Obama was bitter, saying the Senate’s performance, because it did not give him what he wanted, was “shameful.”
One of the few places where significant new gun limits have been adopted is in Colorado, where Democrats control the Senate, House and governor’s office.
But there sheriff’s already are preparing a lawsuit against their own state over the new rules, which they say are unconstitutional and impossible to enforce.
Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said, “The legislators ignored the will of the people and passed these unconstitutional gun laws, and they need to be held accountable for their decision.”
Colorado was a test case for the Obama administration, which dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to lobby for the state limits.
David Kopel, an attorney with the Independence Institute, which will handle a lawsuit against Colorado’s legislation, said the brief is still being prepared, but he expects to file it in the next few weeks.
“We are still working out the details, but there is a very solid case here. We are still working on some of the specifics, however we do feel we have a variety of strong legal claims that are worth bringing to court,” he said.
State officials admitted they were doing the bidding of the White House. In February, Biden flew to the state to strong-arm Democratic lawmakers who were feeling pressure from their constituents to vote against the bills.
“He (Biden) said it would send a strong message to the rest of the country that a Western state had passed gun-control bills,” Tony Exhum, a Democratic lawmaker from Colorado Springs, told the Denver Post.
House Majority Leader Mark Ferrandino, an open homosexual who also pursued a “civil unions” agenda this year, admitted the gun-control bills introduced by fellow Democrats had national implications.
“I was shocked that he called. He said he thought the bills could help them on a national level,” Ferrandino said.
The Colorado gun battle also created a number of opportunities for Democrat gaffes. U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., for example, displayed her ignorance of ammunition magazines.
“I will tell you these are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now they’re going to shoot them; so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot, and there won’t be any more available,” she said.
The Denver Post said DeGette didn’t appear to understand that a firearm magazine can be reloaded with more bullets.
Another notable comment came from state Sen. Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, who scolded a witness opposing one of the gun restrictions.
Amanda Collins, 27, of Reno, Nev., was telling her story of being assaulted and explained that had she been carrying a concealed weapon, the incident might have ended differently.
“I just want to say that, actually statistics are not on your side even if you had a gun,” Hudak said. “And, chances are that if you would have had a gun, then he would have been able to get that from you and possibly use it against you.”
Hudak continued, speaking over the committee witness, “The Colorado Coalition Against Gun Violence says that every one woman who used a handgun in self-defense, 83 here are killed by them.”
Finally able to resume her testimony, Collins said, “Senator, you weren’t there. I know without a doubt [the outcome would have been different with a gun].
“He already had a weapon,” she told the meeting of the Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee. “He didn’t need mine.”
Then there was the comment from state Rep. Joe Salazar.
He said that a woman who feels threatened by rape on a college campus doesn’t need to be armed because she can use a call box to get help.
Salazar’s statement came in a debate over a proposal to ban citizens possessing a concealed-carry permit from being armed on university campuses.
“It’s why we have call boxes,” said Salazar, “it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at.
“And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around, or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop a round at somebody.”
WND also has reported that Jim Sitton, who lost multiple family members to a shooting, delivered a message to lawmakers and citizens who advocate restricting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans.
“[I understand] what it’s like to be completely helpless and powerless when someone attacks your family with a gun. … For me, it comes down very simply to, when someone bursts into your home with murderous intent in their heart, wanting to kill you and your family, you have a choice: You either choose to be armed and trained to protect yourself – or you choose not to arm and protect yourself and your family.”
He said congressional plans for more limits are not foolproof. He noted the government had five opportunities to rein in the man who eventually shot and killed his family members and failed.
Meanwhile, a forensic profiler who worked on the disappearance of Natalie Holloway and the double-murder case against O.J. Simpson says it’s clear Obama’s goal is total gun control.
Andrew G. Hodges, M.D., who wrote “The Obama Confession: Secret Fear, Secret Fury,” explained in an analysis of the president’s statements for WND that Obama’s words suggest the unconscious message that “one day the government’s coming for our guns.”
Hodges previously said Obama’s statement “I am not a dictator” actually meant, “I am the dictator president,” and concluded Obama unconsciously confessed to stealing the 2012 election.
On Hodges’ website, Steven A. Egger, associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston, Clear Lake, has written that Hodges’ technique is “becoming the cutting edge of forensic science.”
“Dr. Hodges’ investigation of forensic documents in the Natalee Holloway case indicates that his ‘thoughtprint decoding method’ and ‘reading between the lines’ is, in fact, becoming a major contribution to law enforcement tools used by criminal investigators,” wrote Egger.
Hodges is not new to the field, already having identified killers by studying ransom notes, emails, letters and police interviews to spot secret confessions. He decoded Simpson’s “suicide note” to confirm Simpson had committed a double murder. He deciphered the JonBenet Ramsey ransom note in Boulder, Colo., to identify the child’s killer. He decrypted letters from BTK to predict that he was about to kill again – the only profiler to do so. He studied statements by Joran van der Sloot and Deepak Kalpoe to tie them to the slaying of Holloway. He showed how Casey Anthony secretly confessed to killing her daughter in 200 letters written to a jail mate. He even decoded Bill Clinton’s comments about Monica Lewinsky.
See all the details in Hodges’ book “The Obama Confession.”
Hodges now has looked at Obama’s recent statements about gun control, especially his April 3 appearance in Denver where he insisted on being surrounded by law enforcement officers, leading some police department members to protest they were being used for a political agenda.
“We again pay close attention to his ‘right-brain’ images and his denials for unconscious warnings from his super intelligence, his deeper moral compass which must tell the truth and spot any deception. Deep down his mind’s eye constantly monitors his true motivations,” Hodges explained.
He noted Obama’s statement, “ginned up fear among gun owners that have… nuttin’ to do with the facts but feed into fears about the government.”
“His denial accompanied by images of ‘fear among gun owners’ and ‘facts that feed into fear about the government’ suggest the unconscious message: the facts about Obama indeed lead to fear about the government,” Hodges wrote. “His image of ‘ginned up fear’ suggests his primary tactic in proposing more gun control which, in truth, has nothing to do with the facts.
“We find a key message marker: ‘you hear’ implying ‘hear my deeper message’ – pay close attention to what comes next. The unconscious mind often uses key communication images (e.g. ‘hear’) to underscore a vital message. When he follows with (you hear) ‘I need a gun to protect myself from the government,’ the image itself strongly suggests the Second Amendment to the Constitution – as in citizens need to be armed in case of ‘a government gone wild.’”
Hodges wrote that Obama denies any reason to worry about the government “but we must keep in mind that denial attached to an idea can tell us to keep an eye on that particular idea and consider deception. Denying the very plan he secretly has in mind. For this reason we always contemplate denial as a revelation of the real truth with the cover-up, ‘Let me tell you what I’m not going to do – ‘wink-wink.”
“Obama follows with a second comment of denial and ridicule, ‘(you hear) we can’t do background checks because the government’s going to come take my guns away.’ Again read his condescending denial as a warning of the possibility one day the government’s coming for our guns,” he wrote.
Hodges said, “Read through his denial ‘can’t do background checks’ as an unconscious instruction: do background checks on Obama to see if he personally has intentions for extreme gun control. We can even read the entire sentence as an unconscious confession – no background checks on Obama about gun control because it would reveal his wishes to take our guns away. Indeed it is publicly known from a former fellow law professor at the University of Chicago who Obama dubbed ‘the gun guy’ that Obama doesn’t believe anybody should own a gun,” Hodges wrote.
WND’s reports have included the DHS plans to buy well over a billion rounds in just the past year. Most recently confirmed were plans by the FBI to spend up to $100 million over five years on millions of rounds for its machine guns and pistols.
According to a solicitation revised and released March 25 that WND discovered during routine database research, the FBI is gathering the ammunition “to be carried and fired [by FBI Special Agents] in defense of life” as well as for training purposes.
The ammunition includes a combination of field-ready Glock 9mm rounds as well as reduced-lead training ammo. Weapons listed in the Statement of Work, or SOW, are Glock Model 17, Glock Model 19, Glock Model 26, SIG Sauer P226, SIG Sauer P228, Heckler and Koch MP5 9mm submachine gun (K, A2, A3, SF and SD versions).
“The FBI is the federal government’s principal agency responsible for investigating violations of more than 260 federal statutes,” the SOW points out. “As the investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI Special Agents (SA), in the pursuit of duty, may be involved in high threat assignments where deadly force may be used in the face of violent confrontations.”
Although DHS has not yet awarded contracts in that proposed CBP acquisition, late last year it revealed its intention to buy 250 million rounds of Smith & Wesson .40 ammunition over the life of a five-year contract.
DHS yesterday separately issued a revised solicitation to buy a combination of 100,000 handgun and rifle rounds destined for the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, or FLTC, in Artesia, N.M. It did not disclose the estimated cost.
The department also additionally released another amended procurement notice for 360,000 rounds of jacketed hollow-point .40 caliber training ammo also destined for the Artseia FLTC.
InfoWars.com reported on the initial release of that particular procurement earlier.
Although the estimated cost of the solicitation, likewise, has not been disclosed, DHS last month awarded a $49,000 contract to Grace Ammo LLC for a similar batch of ammo for the Artesia facility.
DHS in January purchased an additional 200,000 rounds of jacketed hollow-point .40 caliber rounds. It awarded a $46,000 contract to Evian Group Inc. in that instance.
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Criminalizing Children at School

By The New York Times | Editorial
19 April 13

he National Rifle Association and President Obama responded to the Newtown, Conn., shootings by recommending that more police officers be placed in the nation's schools. But a growing body of research suggests that, contrary to popular wisdom, a larger police presence in schools generally does little to improve safety. It can also create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds - like cutting class or talking back - that once would have been dealt with by the principal.
Stationing police in schools, while common today, was virtually unknown during the 1970s. Things began to change with the surge of juvenile crime during the '80s, followed by an overreaction among school officials. Then came the 1999 Columbine High School shooting outside Denver, which prompted a surge in financing for specially trained police. In the mid-1970s, police patrolled about 1 percent of schools. By 2008, the figure was 40 percent.
The belief that police officers automatically make schools safer was challenged in a 2011 study that compared federal crime data of schools that had police officers with schools that did not. It found that the presence of the officers did not drive down crime. The study - by Chongmin Na of The University of Houston, Clear Lake, and Denise Gottfredson of the University of Maryland - also found that with police in the buildings, routine disciplinary problems began to be treated as criminal justice problems, increasing the likelihood of arrests.
Children as young as 12 have been treated as criminals for shoving matches and even adolescent misconduct like cursing in school. This is worrisome because young people who spend time in adult jails are more likely to have problems with law enforcement later on. Moreover, federal data suggest a pattern of discrimination in the arrests, with black and Hispanic children more likely to be affected than their white peers.
In Texas, civil rights groups filed a federal complaint against the school district in the town of Bryan. The lawyers say African-American students are four times as likely as other students to be charged with misdemeanors, which can carry fines up to $500 and lead to jail time for disrupting class or using foul language.
The criminalization of misbehavior so alarmed the New York City Council that, in 2010, it passed the Student Safety Act, which requires detailed police reports on which students are arrested and why. (Data from the 2011-12 school year show that black students are being disproportionately arrested and suspended.)
Some critics now want to require greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming. Elsewhere in the country, judges, lawmakers and children's advocates have been working hard to dismantle what they have begun to call the school-to-prison pipeline.
Given the growing criticism, districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.
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8th grade student suspended, arrested over gun t-shirt

Posted: Apr 18, 2013 11:17 PM EDT Updated: Apr 19, 2013 4:27 PM EDT
By Charlo Greene - email
When 8th grade Jared Marcum got dressed for school on Thursday he says he had no idea that his pro-Second Amendment shirt would initiate what he calls a fight over his First Amendment rights.

"I never thought it would go this far because honestly I don't see a problem with this, there shouldn't be a problem with this," Jared said.

It was the image of a gun printed on Jared's t-shirt that sparked a dispute between a Logan Middle School teacher and Jared, that ended with Jared suspended, arrested and facing two charges, obstruction and disturbing the education process, on his otherwise spotless record.
 
Jared's father Allen Lardieri says he's angry he had to rush from work to pick his son up from jail over something he says was blown way out of proportion.

"I don't' see how anybody would have an issue with a hunting rifle and NRA put on a t-shirt, especially when policy doesn't forbid it," Lardieri said.

The Logan County School District's dress code policy prohibits clothing that displays profanity, violence, discriminatory messages and more but nowhere in the document does it say anything about gun images.

"He did not violate any school policy," Lardieri reiterates.  "He did not become aggressive."

Now, Lardieri says he's ready to fight until the situation is made right.

"I will go to the ends of the earth, I will call people, I will write letters, I will do everything in the legal realm to make sure this does not happen again," Lardieri said.

Logan City Police did confirm that Jared had been arrested and charged today.

13 news tried contacting the Logan County School District but has not heard anything back.

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Friday, April 19, 2013

The Wheels Come Off Obamacare

By on 4.15.13 @ 6:09AM
Bureaucrats bungle implementation while health care costs skyrocket.
As a rule, I avoid the weekly news magazines. They are filled with bad fiction disguised as “reporting,” and if I really feel the need to read mediocre prose I can always rely on the work of America’s growing horde of creative-writing professors. Nonetheless, I recently stumbled across a post in Time’s Swampland blog titled, “Obamacare Incompetence,” and succumbed to morbid curiosity. It seems that Joe Klein, a usually reliable Democrat hack, is deeply unhappy with the slow and clumsy implementation of the “Affordable Care Act.”
Klein’s post focuses primarily on the implosion of Obamacare’s exchanges. Pointing out that the President’s apparatchiks squandered three full years during which they should have been hard at work preparing for the advent of these insurance “marketplaces,” Klein laments their failure to do so with the following piece of Solomonic wisdom: “This is a really bad sign.” Indeed it is. And Klein isn’t the only advocate of Obamacare to finally notice that this hopelessly Byzantine health care “reform” law is an implementation nightmare.
Even the Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) has admitted as much. But, whereas Klein correctly assigns responsibility to the President, Commissar Sebelius places the blame on evil Republicans: “It is very difficult when people live in a state where there is a daily declaration, ‘We will not participate in the law.’” Other Democrats have been more candid. Senator Jay Rockefeller, who played an important role in getting the law passed, called Obamacare “so complicated that if it isn’t done right the first time, it will just simply get worse.”
And it most emphatically isn’t getting done right the first time. Not only has the go-live date for the insurance exchanges been pushed back a year, a wide variety of the law’s other key provisions have either been delayed or simply abandoned. The most conspicuous of the latter category was the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports (CLASS) Act. This program was so badly designed that Kathleen Sebelius admitted HHS couldn’t pay for it and one of its own administrators speculated that it might collapse. It was repealed in January.
Another moribund provision of Obamacare is the “Basic Health Plan,” included in the law to give states the flexibility to provide coverage for low-income residents unable to afford employer coverage or qualify for Medicaid. Democrat Senator Maria Cantwell is so frustrated with administration foot dragging on this provision that she has announced her opposition to Obama’s nominee to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), Marilyn Tavenner: “Ms. Tavenner definitely will not have my support.”
Senator Cantwell was also among the thirty-three Democrats who voted with all of the Senate Republicans last month to repeal Obamacare’s job-killing 2.3 percent excise tax on manufacturers and importers of medical devices. This vote was toothless as a practical matter because, as Daniel Horowitz explains, “They know that this is only an amendment to a massive budget bill that will never have the force of law.… If 33 Democrats really supported repeal, they could force Harry Reid to bring it to the floor as a standalone bill.”
Still, the vote was not meaningless. These Democrat Senators know that Obamacare is still profoundly unpopular with the public. Indeed, yet another poll was released in early April showing that only 41 percent of American voters approve of the law and that a mere 15 percent expect it to help them personally. Despite the virtual blackout by the major broadcast media of bad news concerning Obamacare, including the medical device vote, the implementation delays and even the survey just cited, the public understands that the law is already failing.
Even the much-touted Obamacare provision that we were told would eliminate the “pre-existing condition” scourge is proving to be a bust. According the Heritage Foundation, the Obama Administration estimated that 375,000 people would enroll in the pre-existing conditions insurance plan (PCIP). “But as of January 2013, over two-and-a-half years since the plan began, only 107,139 were enrolled—less than 29 percent of original projections.” And yet the program is running out of money, forcing the HHS bureaucrats to suspend enrollment.
It hardly needs saying that this failure, like everything else associated with Obamacare, is incredibly expensive: “In a 2012 report, the Administration conceded that claims’ costs had been 2.5 times greater than they had anticipated.” This is of a piece with the “Affordable Care Act” in general. When Obamacare was first shoved down our throats, we were told that it would cost $898 billion. Now the projected cost is $1.6 trillion. Meanwhile, many of its taxes are now in effect and it is forcing health insurance premiums through the roof.
What we are left with, then, is a big-government vampire that will drain our personal and public coffers without delivering on its most important promises. Where will all this end? To quote Joe Klein again, “One thing is clear: Obamacare will fail if [President Obama] doesn’t start paying more attention to the details of implementation.… And, in a larger sense, the notion of activist government will be in peril.” Here’s hoping that the President continues to focus on his golf game and delegates Obamacare implementation to his creatures.

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For Detroit, a Crisis of Bad Decisions and Crossed Fingers

By and
Published: March 11, 2013
DETROIT — This city was already sinking under hundreds of millions of dollars in bills that it could not pay when a municipal auditor brought in a veteran financial consultant to dig through the books. A seasoned turnaround man and former actuary with Ford Motor Co., he was stunned by what he found: an additional $7.2 billion in retiree health costs that had never been reported, or even tallied up.
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Cindy Darrah, a Detroit resident since 1967, protesting the emergency manager decision last week.

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Mayor Dave Bing in his office in February.
“The city must take some drastic steps,” the consultant, John Boyle, warned the City Council in delivering his report at a public meeting in 2005. Among the options he suggested was filing for bankruptcy.
“I thought all hell would break loose — I thought the flag would finally be raised,” Mr. Boyle recalled in an interview last week. But his warning drew little notice. “It was utterly astounding,” he said.
The financial crisis that has made Detroit one of the largest cities ever to face mandatory state oversight was decades in the making, a trail of missteps, of trimming too little, too late, of hoping that deep-rooted structural problems would turn out to be cyclical downturns that might melt away as the economy picked up.
Some factors were out of the city’s control. As auto industry jobs moved elsewhere over the decades, for example, Detroit lost much of its affluent tax base. Lower than expected state revenue sharing did not help, nor did corruption allegations in the administration of Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a mayor who resigned in 2008 and was convicted on Monday of racketeering and other federal charges.
But recent findings from a state-appointed review team and interviews with past and present city officials also suggest a city that over the years was remarkably badly run.
The state review team found in recent months that the city’s main courthouse had $280 million worth of uncollected fines and fees. No one could tell the team how many police officers were patrolling the streets, even though public safety accounted for a little more than half the budget. The city was borrowing from restricted funds and keeping unclaimed property that it was required to turn over to the state. In some city departments, records were “basically stuff written on index cards,” as one City Council member put it.
“This was bad decisions piled on top of each other,” Gary Brown, the Detroit City Council president pro tem, said the other day. “It has all been a strategy of hope. You keep borrowing where every piece of collateral is already leveraged. You have no bonding capacity — you’re at junk status. You’re overestimating revenues and not managing the resources. Now the chickens have come home to roost.”
Once the nation’s fourth-largest city, Detroit had grown up around the auto industry, booming right along with it in the 1950s. City workers gained ground with pay increases intended to keep pace with those the United Auto Workers won for its members, analysts said.
“It was easy to do so back in the 1950s,” said Joseph L. Harris, Detroit’s former auditor general. “The city had 1.8 million residents then.”
But as auto jobs moved elsewhere and the region aged, Detroit’s labor costs — retiree health care costs, especially — ballooned.
At the same time, officials papered over growing deficits with more borrowing. Finally Detroit’s legal debt limit, which is linked to the total value of real estate in the city, fell when the mortgage bubble burst and property values plunged. Today the city says its debt limit is $1 billion, and it has effectively lost its ability to issue debt in the name of its taxpayers.
When a city cannot borrow, it cannot function; New York City showed that in 1975, Cleveland in 1978. But even as Detroit has approached the critical limit, some city leaders have seemed unaware, quarreling over smaller, symbolic issues like whether to lease a city-owned park to the state.
“It is peeling an onion,” Mayor Dave Bing said of his growing understanding after he took office in 2009 of the depths of the city’s financial woes. “You dig and you dig and you dig, and you really start to find out how bad the problem was. “
Mr. Bing knew plenty about the city’s struggles before taking office and ran on a platform of reversing the spiraling finances. Still, within his first six months in office, the city came close to not making payroll.
“That’s a scary moment,” he recalled in an interview. “You’ve got people living from paycheck to paycheck, week to week, and you’re about to run out of cash. You can only imagine what kind of impact that that’s going to have just on the life of the average person.”
The big structural imbalance was hard to see building up, because until 2008, when a new accounting rule took effect, cities like Detroit were not required to keep track of their workers’ lifelong health care bills. That is why Mr. Boyle found a $7.2 billion promise that no one knew about. Detroit’s general-obligation debt to its bondholders, by contrast, was a little less than $1 billion that year, safely within the city’s legal debt limit, then $1.4 billion.
But while the numbers are particularly grim here, the basic story line is hardly unique. The same path, long and slow, can be found from Providence, R.I., to Stockton, Calif.
To preserve cash, the city resorted to increasing its workers’ future pensions at contract time, instead of raising their pay. That helped balance the immediate budgets, but set up a time bomb sure to explode as more workers retired.
The cost of the retirees’ pensions also grew because of an inflation-protection feature that compounds every year. Detroit cannot renege on paying the benefits, at least outside of bankruptcy, because the State Constitution makes it unlawful to reduce pensions after public workers earn them.
By the 2000s, Detroit was borrowing to solve budget shortfalls. Meanwhile, property tax revenues fell, not just because of departing residents, but also as values fell and some people quit paying. The city has reported collecting 84 percent of property tax levied, but a Detroit News analysis suggests a collection rate closer to half of property owners.
In recent years, city officials have made deep cuts in staff and operations, leaving residents complaining of darkened streetlights, slow police response times and bus delays. But while cutting workers can help reduce the current year’s costs, it moves many of those people into the ranks of retirees, putting heavy long-term pressure on Detroit’s two public pension funds.
By late 2011, a sense of crisis descended on Detroit. In November, Mayor Bing, a Democrat, addressed the city on live television, warning that Detroit would run out of money without concessions from unions, layoffs and privatization. A month later, Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, called for a review of Detroit’s finances, a first step in cases where the state is preparing to send an emergency financial manager.
City officials held off further intervention by committing to a legal agreement with the state in 2012 that laid out measures to save money. By fall, a board overseeing the agreement said progress was moving too slowly. While City Council members are contesting the matter during a hearing in Lansing on Tuesday, Mr. Snyder’s administration is preparing to name an emergency manager within days. Mr. Bing says his administration has drawn up a plan to spare the city, though he acknowledges that it has yet to be fully put into effect.
Under Michigan law, the emergency manager would ultimately have the authority to remove local elected officials from most financial decision making, change labor contracts, close or privatize departments, and even recommend that Detroit enter bankruptcy proceedings, a possibility that experts say raises the prospect of the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history, at $14 billion worth of long-term obligations.
None of the decisions, experts here say, will be simple, and some wonder whether Detroit can be saved at all. Some 700,000 residents now live in this vast 139-square-mile city that once was home to nearly two million people. That number may fall to close to 600,000 by 2030 before the population begins to rise again, one regional planning group projects. By pushing costs into the future while its population is shrinking, Detroit has left the people least able to pay with the biggest share of its bills.
“Detroit is a microcosm of what’s going on in America, except America can still print money and borrow,” Mr. Boyle said.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 12, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: For Detroit, a Crisis Born of Bad Decisions and Crossed Fingers.
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Staring Armageddon in the Face But Hiding It With Official Lies

by Paul Craig Roberts
PaulCraigRoberts.org
Recently by Paul Craig Roberts: What If?
 
   
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US economy created 236,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.
Where are these alleged jobs? The BLS says 48,000 were created in construction. That is possible, considering that revenue-starved real estate developers are misreading the housing situation.
Then there are 23,700 new jobs in retail trade, which is hard to believe considering the absence of consumer income growth and the empty parking lots at shopping malls.
The real puzzle is 20,800 jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries. This is the first time in the years that I have been following the jobs reports that there has been enough employment for me to even notice this category.
The BLS lists 10,900 jobs in accounting and bookkeeping, which, as it is approaching income tax time, is probably correct; 21,000 jobs in temporary help and business support services; 39,000 jobs in health care and social assistance; and 18,800 jobs in the old standby–waitresses and bartenders.
That leaves about 50,000 jobs sprinkled around the various categories, but not in numbers large enough to notice.
The presstitute media attributed the drop in the headline unemployment rate (U3) to 7.7% from 7.9% to the happy jobs report. But Rex Nutting at Market Watch says that the unemployment rate fell because 130,000 unemployed people who have been unable to find a job and became discouraged were dropped out of the U3 measure of unemployment. The official U6 measure which counts some discouraged workers shows an unemployment rate of 14.3%. Statistician John Williams’ measure, which counts all discourage workers (people who have ceased looking for a job), is 23%.
In other words, the real rate of unemployment is 2 to 3 times the reported rate.
Nutting believes that the U3 unemployment rate has become too politicized to have any meaning. He suggests using instead the work force participation rate. This rate is falling substantially, reflecting the discouragement that occurs from inability to find jobs.
John Williams (shadowstats.com) says that distortions in seasonal factor adjustments overstate monthly payroll employment by about 100,000 jobs. The jobs data that is not seasonally adjusted shows about 1.5 million fewer jobs in the economy.
In a recent communication, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the rigged official annual rate of consumer inflation (CPI) of 1.6% is in fact, as measured by the official US government methodology of 1990, 9.2%. In other words, the rate of inflation is 5.75 times greater than the reported rate. If Williams is correct, the interest rate on bonds is extremely negative.
Over the years the official measure of inflation has been altered in two ways. One is the introduction of substitution for what formerly was a constant weighted basket of goods. In the former measure, if a price of an item in the basket (index) rose, the CPI rose by the weight of that item in the basket.
In the substitution-based measure, if a price of an item in the basket goes up, the item is removed from the basket, and a cheaper item is put in its place. For example, if the price of New York strip steak rises, the new CPI will substitute the price of a cheaper cut.
In this new measure, inflation is held down by measuring not a fixed standard of living but a declining standard of living.
The other adjustment used to restrain the measure of inflation is to re-classify many price rises as “quality improvements.” Price rises declared to be quality improvements do not translate into a higher measure of inflation. In other words, if a product rises in price, the price increase or some portion of it can be assigned to improved quality, not to a rise in component or energy costs. As the incentive is to hold down the inflation measure in order to save money for the government on Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments, quality improvements are over-estimated.
Consumers have to pay the higher prices, and as incomes, except for the 1 percent, are not growing, higher product prices, regardless of whether they are or are not quality improvements, mean a lower standard of living for the 99 percent.
The understated new measure of inflation allows the government to show real GDP growth and thus the end of the December 2007 recession, and it allows the government to show in the latest report real retail sales again matching the pre-recession level. However, when measured correctly, as by statistician John Williams, the true picture of retail sales shows a steep decline from 2007 through 2009 and bottom bouncing since.
The reason real retail sales cannot recover is that real average weekly earnings continues its downward path. Earlier in this new century, the lack of income growth for the bulk of the US population was masked by a rise in consumer debt. Americans borrowed to spend, and this kept the economy going until the point was reached that consumers had more debt than they could service.
John Williams report of real average weekly earnings shows that Americans are taking home less purchasing power than they did in the 1960s and 1970s.
Reflecting the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, the price of gold and silver in dollars has risen dramatically during the Bush and Obama regimes.
For the last year or two the Federal Reserve and its dependent banks have operated to cap the price of gold at around $1,750. They do this by selling naked shorts in the paper speculative gold market.
There are two gold markets. One is a market for physical possession by individuals and central banks. The rising demand in the physical bullion market points to a rising price for gold.
The other market is the speculative paper market in which financial institutions bet on the future gold price. By placing large amounts of shorts, this market can be used to suppress price rises in the physical market. The Federal Reserve, which can print money without limit, can cover any losses on its agents’ paper contracts.
It is important to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy to suppress the bullion price. If the prices of gold and silver continue to rise relative to the US dollar, the Fed cannot keep the prices of bonds high and interest rates low. If the dollar is widely perceived to be declining in value in relation to gold, the price of dollar-denominated assets will also decline, including bonds. If the dollar loses value, the Fed loses control over interest rates, and the US financial bubble pops, with hell to pay.
To forestall armageddon, the Fed and its dependent banks cap the price of gold.
The Fed’s fix is temporary, and as the Fed continues to create ever more dollars, the price of gold will eventually escape the Fed’s control as will interest rates and inflation.
The Fed has produced a perfect storm that could consume the US and perhaps the entire Western world.
March 12, 2013
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2013 Paul Craig Roberts
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