Life in cloud cukoo-land where taking is giving, fraud is synonymous with
business and life is death.
We deserve better than this; government perpetrates fraudulent business and
stokes the death machines of war and terror. However, until the American people move out of
their somnambulistic state, nothing will change. This web page is designed to serve as an alarm
bell, the voice of reality coming out of the box on the nightstand, the wake up call, the 4:30am
timer going off on the coffee maker. The coffee don’t give a soft brown damn whose
nose it goes up.
But after the alarm is shut off and the feet are pushed into the slippers, then
what? We need a get out of prison plan, and that will be the second half of what I will be
discussing here. The good news is, we can and probably will change all of this; the bad news
is, the American populace is still hitting the snooze button. The good news is, . . .still
yet to come.
Mortgage
fraud perpetrators include licensed/registered and non-licensed/registered
mortgage
brokers, lenders, appraisers, underwriters, accountants, real estate agents, settlement attorneys,
land developers, investors, builders, bank account representatives, and trust account
representatives.
Mortgage fraud continued at elevated levels in 2010, consistent with
levels seen in 2009.
Mortgage fraud schemes are particularly resilient, and they readily adapt to economic changes
and modifications in lending practices.
Total dollar losses directly attributed to mortgage
fraud are unknown.
• A continued decrease in loan originations from 2009 to 2010 (and expected through 2012),
high levels of unemployment and housing inventory, lower housing prices, and an increase in
defaults and foreclosures dominated the housing market in 2010. RealtyTrac reported 2.9
million foreclosures in 2010, representing a 2 percent increase in foreclosures since 2009
and
a 23 percent increase since 2008.
• Analysis of available law enforcement and industry data indicates the top states for known
or
suspected mortgage fraud activity during 2010 were California, Florida, New York, Illinois,
Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, Maryland, and New Jersey; reflecting the same
demographic market affected by mortgage fraud in 2009.
• Prevalent mortgage fraud schemes reported by law enforcement and industry in FY 2010
included loan origination, foreclosure rescue, real estate investment, equity skimming, short
sale, illegal property flipping, title/escrow/settlement, commercial loan, and builder bailout
schemes. Home equity line of credit (HELOC), reverse mortgage fraud, and fraud involving
loan modifications are still a concern for law enforcement and industry.
• With elevated levels of mortgage fraud, the FBI has continued to dedicate significant
resources to the threat. In June 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ), to include the FBI,
announced a mortgage fraud takedown referred to as Operation Stolen Dreams. The takedown
targeted mortgage fraudsters throughout the country and was the largest collective
enforcement effort ever brought to bear in combating mortgage fraud.
• The current and continuing depressed housing market will likely remain an attractive
environment for mortgage fraud perpetrators who will continue to seek new methods to
circumvent loopholes and gaps in the mortgage lending market. These methods will likely
remain effective
2010 Mortgage Fraud Report
Year in Review ~Federal Bureau of Investigation, Directorate of Intelligence, Financial Crimes
Intelligence Unit.
The battle lines are forming.
In the last two years, local attorneys working for the small minority of borrowers who contest
foreclosures have reported a wide range of what in spin doctor land would be called irregularities.
These reports were so widespread and consistent as to suggest that malfeasance was endemic,
but without corroborating evidence that these abuses were happening on an institutionalized
basis, it was easy to dismiss them as anecdotal.
The admission by GMAC that it produced improper affidavits, followed
by suspension of foreclosures by GMAC, Chase, and Bank of America in 23 judicial foreclosures
states, is the tip of the iceberg of widespread foreclosure abuses. Yet comparatively few
members of the media have asked the right question: why would servicers and law
firms engage in fraudulent activity on such a widespread basis?
As of Tuesday, August 23, 2011, at least 4,474 members of the U.S.
military have died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated
Press count.
The figure includes nine military civilians killed in action. At least
3,524 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military's
numbers. The AP count is three fewer than the Defense Department's tally, last updated Tuesday
at 10 a.m. EDT. Since the start of U.S. military operations in Iraq, 32,175 U.S. service
members have been wounded in hostile action, according to the Defense Department's weekly
tally.
The Associated Press
Published Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011
With enactment of the sixth FY2011 Continuing Resolution through March
18, 2011, (H.J.Res.
48/P.L. 112-6) Congress has approved a total of $1.283 trillion for military operations,
base security,
reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care for the three operations
initiated
since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) Afghanistan and other counter terror
operations; Operation Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military bases; and
Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). This estimate assumes that the current CR level continues
through the
rest of the year and that agencies allocate reductions proportionately.
Of this $1.283 trillion total, CRS estimates that Iraq will receive about $806 billion (63%),
OEF $444
billion (35%) and enhanced base security about $29 billion (2%), with about $5 billion that
CRS
cannot allocate (1/2%). About 94% of the funds are for DOD, 5% for foreign aid programs and
diplomatic operations, and 1% for medical care for veterans.
Congressional Research Service The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Other
Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11
Amy Belasco
Specialist in U.S. Defense Policy and Budget
March 29, 2011
Judge Loretta Preska rolled back the clock on mothers seeking justice for straightforward
discrimination.
When Sekiko Garrison told former boss Michael Bloomberg she was pregnant, his answer was
simple: “Kill it.” Allowing mothers flexible work arrangements, he commented, was like allowing
a man time off to practice his golf swing. The CEO who took over when Bloomberg left the company
demanded that managers “get rid of these pregnant bitches” (referring to two women on maternity
leave). The Head of Global Human Resources commented that mothers “belong at home” and that
“women [do] not really [have] a place in the workforce.” The Head of News commented that
“half these f**king people take the [maternity] leave and they don’t even come back. It’s like
stealing money from Mike Bloomberg’s wallet. They should be arrested.” The Head of Global Data
asked, “Who would want to work with an office full of women?”*
And yet Federal Judge Loretta Preska said last
week there was so little evidence of discrimination that she would not allow the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to proceed to trial to try to prove that Bloomberg had
discriminated against mothers. Preska, a pro-business Bush appointee, ended
her opinion with a severe scolding: “At bottom, the EEOC’s theory of this case is about
so-called ‘work-life balance’… [T]he EEOC’s claim…amounts to a judgment that Bloomberg, as
a company policy, does not provide its employee-mothers with a sufficient work-life balance.”
Preska quotes (as binding authority?) former General Electric CEO Jack Welch: “There’s no such
thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”
Where to start? The plaintiffs in this case were not asking for work-life balance. They were
asking that their employer not discriminate against them because they were mothers. Recent
social science suggests that motherhood is the strongest trigger for gender discrimination
in today’s workplace. If you give people identical resumes, one a mother and the other not,
the mother is 79% less likely to be hired, 100% less likely to be promoted, offered an average
of $11,000 less in salary, and held to higher performance and punctuality standards, according
to a study by Shelley Correll, Steve Benard, and In Paik. Note: identical resumes. This
is not a measure of the desire for work-life balance. It’s evidence of extraordinarily strong
discrimination against mothers. And, as the quotes from Bloomberg management demonstrate, discrimination
against mothers is not only very strong. Often, it’s also very open.
Discrimination at Bloomberg appears to have been very open indeed. Yet through a
series of procedural rulings, Judge Preska threw out most of the EEOC’s evidence and then held
that it had so little evidence it could not take the case to trial. First, she rejected the
EEOC’s statistical evidence. Then she threw out statements like those above. Those statements
she could not throw out for technical reasons she simply ignored. (The comments about leave-takers
stealing Mike’s money were not excludable for any of the reasons the judge identified. And
by the way, it is illegal under the Family
and Medical Leave Act to discourage people from taking FMLA leave. Would you be discouraged
by these comments?)
I won’t go deeply into the technical problems with the court’s opinion. But the court got
caught in a time warp. Ten years ago, suits against mothers were often stymied because courts
could not find a suitable “comparator” — a similarly situated pregnant man. Courts eventually
solved this problem by abandoning their search for a comparator, instead allowing plaintiffs
to prove discrimination by introducing evidence of stereotyping (e.g., comments about how mothers
belong at home). But Judge Preska turned back the clock. She not only insisted on comparator
evidence, but rejected the obvious comparison between people who took maternity leave and those
who did not. Instead, she insisted that the plaintiffs compare their salary growth to that
of employees who took leaves of similar length. But healthy men don’t typically take long leaves,
which means that plaintiffs’ salary growth was compared to that of employees who, one assumes,
either were seriously ill, seriously disabled, or else had gone on an extended vacation to
discover themselves in Aruba. Not surprisingly, under these circumstances the significant salary
disparity found by the plaintiff’s expert magically disappeared.
But the most troubling thing about this case is Judge Preska’s confusion about the difference
between work-life balance and discrimination against mothers. “The law does not mandate ‘work-life
balance.’ It does not require companies to ignore employees’ work-family tradeoffs — and they
are tradeoffs — when deciding about employee pay and promotions.” True that.
What employers are not allowed to do is discriminate against mothers on the fast
track because a different group of mothers decided to leave the fast track. If the judge doesn’t
understand that, she needs a refresher course on the basics of anti-discrimination law, set
down in the 1970s. You can’t penalize women who don’t conform to stereotypes just because other
women do conform to them.
If we abandon these basic principles of anti-discrimination law, it’s
open season on mothers. And that’s a really, really devastating setback for women. Studies
show what dooms women economically in the United States is not being a woman — it’s being a
mother. If the courts refuse to protect mothers on the fast track simply because other mothers
decided to leave, we are not going to have gender equality anytime soon. That’s for damn sure.
If Bloomburg is allowed to discriminate in employment against all women who
would be mothers, what chance do our kids have? We are moving ever closer to an age where the
most important thing one can do is contribute to the work force of organized labor. Labor orgainzed
by corporate entities that is; understood that any other kind of organization is the 21st century
equivilance of anathema to the dogma of corporatism. One of the tenets of corporatism is ‘thou
shalt have no personal life outside the domain of the business for whom thou are employed.’
The following article by William Lazonick, shows why and how we and our lawmakers,
have catered to the larger business interests in this country; the result is impovershment
and low incomes for the many and monetary wealth for the few.
By now the story is familiar. For the last decade US-based business
corporations have been engaged in the massive offshoring of good jobs to high-growth, low-wage
areas of the world, especially China and India. In general, these companies have found offshoring
to be immensely profitable. For working people in the United States to gain some benefit from
this globalization process, US-based corporations must repatriate some of their foreign profits
to invest in high value-added job opportunities back home.
Yet prevailing US tax law both encourages
offshoring and discourages the repatriation of profits. In principle, US individuals and corporations
are supposed to pay US taxes on their worldwide income. Through an overseas tax deferral law,
however, a US company does not pay the 35 percent corporation tax on foreign earnings until
it repatriates these profits to the United States. The tax law gives US corporations an added
incentive not only to offshore employment but also to reinvest the earnings of offshored operations
outside the United States.
The deferral law has a long history, dating back to 1960 when the
Eisenhower administration wanted to encourage an expanded US business presence around the world.
From 1961 to 1963, President Kennedy tried, without success, to get rid of the law, arguing
that it resulted in the export of US jobs and deprived the United States of tax revenues. Since
then, the Democrats have tried from time to time to rescind this corporate tax privilege.
In
June 1976, for example, an attempt to overturn the law narrowly failed in the US Senate. As
observed in the Wall Street Journal just before the Senate vote: “Closing some tax ‘loopholes’
of corporations and the rich is required for its own sake, liberals say, and to help finance
full extension of last year’s tax cuts and an immediate tax break for retired persons.” (From
“Senate Liberals to Renew Attempts at Cut In Tax Benefits for Corporations, the Rich,” June
28, 1976). On the day after the vote, the New York Times reported: “The defeat by a vote of
45 to 44 was another in a series for organized labor and its supporters in the Senate who charge
that thousands of United States jobs are lost because multinationals are encouraged by the
deferral tax advantage to build plants overseas.” (From “Tax Law Retained for Multinationals,”
June 30, 1976).
Fast forward to February 2004 when Sen. John Kerry, a declared candidate
for the Democratic presidential nomination, issued a press release that indicated his objection
to the tax deferral law in no uncertain terms:
My economic policy is not to export American
jobs, but to reward companies for creating and keeping good jobs in America. Unlike the Bush
Administration, I want to repeal every tax break and loophole that rewards any Benedict Arnold
CEO or corporation for shipping American jobs overseas.
The preferred approach of the Bush administration to inducing repatriation
of foreign profits was the Homeland Investment Act as part of the American Job Creation Act
of 2004. It provided a corporate tax rate of 5.25% for profits repatriated in one fiscal year,
with the stipulation that these profits had to be used for investments that create jobs. The
Act expressly prohibited the use of these funds to pay dividends or do stock buybacks. US corporations
responded by repatriating $299 billion in profits in 2005, compared with an average of $62
billion in 2000-2004, and a subsequent decline to $102 billion in 2006.
A study of the impacts
of the tax break by Dhammika
Dharmapala, C. Fritz Foley, and Kristin J. Forbes found, however,
that “[r]ather than being associated with increased expenditures on domestic investment or
employment, repatriations were associated with significantly higher levels of payouts to shareholders,
mainly taking the form of share repurchases. Estimates imply that a $1 increase in repatriations
was associated with an increase in payouts to shareholders of between $0.60 and $0.92, depending
on the specification.” The authors suggest that companies were able to make these distributions
to shareholders without violating the terms of the repatriation legislation by using the repatriated
funds “to pay for investment, hiring, or R&D that was already planned, thereby releasing
[domestic] cash that had previously been allocated for these purposes to be used for payouts
to shareholders.”
A persistent promise in Barack Obama’s campaigns for the Senate in 2004
and the presidency in 2008 was that he would end tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs
overseas. True to his word, in a speech in May 2009, President Obama declared: “It’s a tax
code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if
you create one in Buffalo, New York.” In June 2009, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer responded that
an end to the overseas tax deferral would make “U.S. jobs more expensive” and that if the Obama
administration insisted on changing the tax law, Microsoft would be “better off taking lots
of people and moving them out of the U.S.” In September 2009, the Obama administration met
with US high-tech executives and agreed to shelve the plan to end the tax deferral.
Nevertheless,
in
his State of the Union address on January 27, 2010, President Obama insisted that “it is
time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas and give those
tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America.”
This
tax loophole has not yet been closed. Indeed, in October 2010, John Chambers, chairman and
CEO of Cisco Systems, and Safra Catz, president of Oracle, published an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal in which they sought to counter criticism in the press that US corporations were sitting
on one trillion dollars in cash instead of investing in jobs in the United States. The two
high-tech executives claimed that US corporations were holding the cash in question overseas
and recognized that these funds “could be invested in U.S. jobs, capital assets, research and
development, and more” if US corporations had an incentive to do so. “But,” they continued,
“for U.S. companies such repatriation of earnings carries a significant penalty: a federal
tax of up to 35%. This means that U.S. companies can, without significant consequence, use
their foreign earnings to invest in any country in the world — except here.”
Having deftly
transformed an existing government tax concession to US corporations into a tax penalty on
US corporations, Chambers and Catz noted that, among other things, repatriated profits could
“provide needed stability for the equity markets because companies would expand their activity
in mergers and acquisitions, and would pay dividends or buy back stock.” To lure the $1 trillion
back to the United States, they proposed a 5% tax on repatriated profits that would yield the
US government a quick $50 billion, which could then “be used to help put America back to work…[by
giving] employers — large or small — a refundable tax credit for hiring previously unemployed
workers (including recent graduates).” “Such a program,” they crowed (their plan having saved
their companies 30% in taxes on foreign profits), “could help put more than two million Americans
back to work at no cost to the government or American taxpayers. How’s that for a good idea?”
Along with other business executives, Chambers presented his “good idea”
directly
to President Obama at the White House on December 15, 2010. In mid-January 2011, Treasury
Secretary Tim Geithner met with a dozen CFOs who pushed for an end to taxes on foreign profits
on the grounds that it would make US companies more competitive internationally. In his State
of the Union address on January 25, 2011, Obama mentioned innovation 11 times, but made no
mention of the repeal of the tax deferral law to help finance it. Instead, he just exhorted
Congress to simply the tax system: “Get rid of loopholes. Level the playing field. And use
the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years — without adding
to our deficit.” This past July, in Congress, the “Gang of Six”, lobbied by the Business Roundtable,
pushed for an end to the taxation of foreign profits.
With this kowtowing to corporate interests
and their constant quest for “maximizing shareholder value,” it is no wonder that neither Obama
nor Congressional Democrats can come up with a jobs plan. Like it or not, the US economy is
an autocratic corporate economy in which the CEOs of major corporations must take the lead
in investing in innovation and job creation for a jobs plan to have a significant and sustainable
impact. That was true in the era of Dwight D. Eisenhower and it is true in the era of Barack
H. Obama. Back then, however, US corporations were still focused on investing in the US economy,
and they had not yet succumbed to the debilitating ideology that corporations should be run
in the name of shareholder value. Top corporate executives, not President Obama or Congress,
are the ones who control the resources to create jobs in the business sector and pay the taxes
to support job creation in the government sector. These business leaders have, however, taken
a hike on the nation, and indeed even on the working people and taxpayers who built the very
business organizations that have made them so incredibly powerful and rich.
William Lazonick is director of the UMass Center for Industrial Competitiveness and president
of The
Academic-Industry Research Network. His book, Sustainable
Prosperity in the New Economy? Business Organization and High-Tech Employment in the
United States (Upjohn Institute 2009) was awarded the 2010 Schumpeter Prize.
Honor among thieves? Securitized
mortgage trustees may be takento court by Association of Mortgage Investors (AMI )
To understand the article below, and the full implications of how BOfA could
face billions more in losses, a background of information on securitization needs to be obtained. “Securitization
is a complex series of financial transactions designed to maximize cash
flow and reduce risk for debt originators. This is achieved when assets, receivables or financial
instruments are acquired, classified into pools, and offered as collateral for third-party
investment. Then, financial instruments are sold which are backed by the cash flow or value of
the underlying assets.” The securitization process then creates an inner sanctum of safety
that investors (by the way, could be your pension fund that is up for ransom here) trust to have
a wall of protection from the vicissitudes and hurly burly of the average fincial situation. Guess
what? When investors get to the inner sanctum, there's no Ark of the Covenent, just a bronze calf-the
goods ain't there. Why? Because the likes of BOfA never put nuthin' in the lock box. "ha, ha, fooled
ya!" No mortgages, no; not hide nor hair. Just air. To add insult to injury the promised goods that
ought to be there (but ain't) are nuthin' more than tarnished bronze anyhow.
The
Bank of America settlement isn't enough for some burned mortgage investors. Now a group of them wants the big banks to clean up their acts, or else face another
lawsuit.
FORTUNE -- Investors in mortgage-backed securities who got cleaned out
during the housing bust aren't going to take their losses lying down. The first act of investor
revolt was organized by Kathy Patrick, a little-known litigator who led her clients to a proposed
$8.5 billion settlement from Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon. The second act
began on July 21, and it attempts a far more transformational outcome than the BofA/BNY deal.
Last week, the Association of Mortgage Investors (AMI) sent a firm but
polite letter to all the "major trustees" for mortgage-backed securities, inviting
the trustees to do their jobs and offering to work with them if the trustees did. AMI did not
respond to a request for comment. Although the letter's recipients are unknown, the largest
trustees are JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Deutsche Bank (DB), US Bank (USB), Wells Fargo (WFC) and
Bank of New York (BK). Backing up the invitation was the implicit threat that AMI would sue
the trustees for "look[ing] the other way and remain[ing] uninvolved," even as widespread
and profound violations of the securities' contracts became known.
Specifically, AMI accuses
the trustees of failing to force mortgage originators and securitizers into buying back all
the loans that weren't up to the promised standards or even giving investors sufficient information
about the loans. AMI also claims that mortgage servicers were flagrantly violating the securitization
contracts, and the trustees were obligated to fire them if the servicers didn't clean up their
acts. Although AMI backs its charges with 10 pages of footnoted descriptions, the letter wasn't
a formal demand intended to clear the way for near-term litigation, as the Patrick letter was.
Instead, AMI maintains a big-picture focus and claims to pursue lofty
goals. AMI wants "to
develop and implement mortgage and housing policy that keeps homeowners in their homes while
promoting the availability of financing for home purchases." To do that, AMI says, all
the issues with the 2005-2008 vintage private-label mortgage-backed securities have to be resolved
in an investor-friendly way. Only then can the private-label securitization market get going
again, which is essential for a housing recovery, according to AMI. To that end, AMI invites
the trustees to work with it to develop best practices to deal with the lousy MBS. AMI expects
to finish developing such practices next quarter.
Will the banks play ball?
Since the letter wasn't a formal threat of
imminent litigation, why should the trustees pay attention and join forces with AMI? For starters,
the more the trustees know and yet remain on the sidelines, the more their potential liability
grows. Second, AMI reminded the Trustees that if they cooperate in enforcing the securities'
contracts, the investors had to pay the Trustees' legal and other costs. Third, AMI claims
to represent investors with "approximately $300 billion of MBS assets under management,
including a significant portion of the nation's first lien mortgages residing in private label
RMBS." That's a huge number, but it's hard to parse its exact meaning. To force trustees
to act, shareholders typically have to hold 25% of the voting rights in any given trust. Since
Patrick's group of investors claimed to be 25% owners of 115 trusts while owning "only" $16.5
billion in assets, surely the AMI's holdings of nearly 20 times that amount means it can speak
on behalf of many more trusts. How many trusts, and which ones, is notably missing from the
letter.
So are any trustees going to play ball? Maybe. But they all have potentially
deep conflicts of interest. Take JPMorgan Chase. Chase is one of the largest mortgage servicers,
it originated a lot of risky loans, and it swallowed Bear Stearns. Chase would have a lot of
potential liability for those actions if the effort AMI is trying to organize succeeds. The
bank also faces potential liability by not responding to AMI, but how does that trustee liability
to compare to what Chase would presumably face on the originator, securitizer and servicer
sides?
Do such conflicts of interest have an impact on trustees' willingness
to fight for investors? Looking at the Bank of New York/BofA proposed deal, it sure seems so.
The core conflict between BNY's interests and the investors' is simply that BNY is a big trustee
with one massive client: Bank of America. Surely BofA would start using a different trustee
if BNY really went after BofA on behalf of the investors. Investors objecting to the BNY/BofA
deal have raised other serious concerns too. Given the conflicts, the paltry sum of $8.5 billion
for claims by over 500 securitized BNY/Countrywide trusts is more understandable.
Chase declined
to comment through its spokesman Thomas Kelly, as did Bank of New York through spokesman Kevin
Heine. US Bank and Deutsche Bank did not return requests for comment.
One thing's for certain:
AMI's letters are only the beginning, and the second act of investor revolt will take weeks
if not months to develop. AMI signaled it wouldn't be committing to a course of action until
at least the third quarter, when it expects to finish figuring out precisely how it wants to
handle the situation. Which banks cooperate and which don't will say a lot about their internal
liability calculus.
The
leader of the pack in terms of fraudlently representing the value of securitized
mortgages has to be Bank Of America. The problem here is not really about the financial system,
the article at the end of the link above shows the issue is- Do we have a legal system
left in this country or is our present, so called legal system just organized thuggery? Thuggery
it is by the decision of the power centers in Washington who control the Attorney General's
office. Barak
Obama is not the leader of the that pack of thugs, however, he is being led around by the
nose by the thugs.
Results of daily Trolling: Research links rise in Falluja birth defects
and cancers to US assault
Iraq Research links rise in Falluja birth defects and cancers to US assault •
Defects in newborns 11 times higher than normal •
Wednesday 5 January
2011 The story below reported the authors of a study as saying that birth defects in the Iraqi
city of Falluja could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults in 2004, and added by
way of background that this suggestion might add to the dispute over whether rounds containing
depleted uranium have residual effects. But a line of explanation went wrong in saying that
such rounds "contain ionising radiation
to burst through armour". As
readers with expertise in this area noted, it is not the
radiation emitted by this substance that makes it penetrate armour. Rather, depleted uranium
is used because of its density and its melting point, one of whose effects is to produce heat
and therefore fires or explosions upon high-speed impact.
A study examining the causes of a
dramatic spike in birth defects in the Iraqi city of Falluja has for the first time concluded
that genetic damage could have been caused by weaponry used in US assaults that took place
six years ago.
The research, which will be published next week, confirms earlier estimates
revealed by the Guardian of a major, unexplained rise in cancers and chronic neural-tube, cardiac
and skeletal defects in newborns. The authors found that malformations are close to 11 times
higher than normal rates, and rose to unprecedented levels in the first half of this year –
a period that had not been surveyed in earlier reports.
The findings, which will be published
in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, come prior to a much-anticipated
World Health Organisation study of Falluja's genetic health. They follow two alarming earlier
studies, one of which found a distortion in the sex ratio of newborns since the invasion of
Iraq in 2003 – a 15% drop in births of boys.
The fearfully awful face of tyranny is revealed. The Pentagon of Power shows
itself to be steeped in cruelty of the worst kind. This Pentagon is supported and maintained
with my tax dollars which I still pay. I consider the option of not paying those on a daily
basis. True concepts of justice place demands on my mind to turn those considerations into
actions and force my employer to place my paycheck outside of the standard tax deduction procedures.
Where did all the tough regulators go?
| |
Sugaoka told a
Japanese network that TEPCO had instructed him to “erase” the flaws, but he
ultimately wrote a whistleblowing letter to METI, which resulted in the temporary 17 TEPCO reactors,
including ones at the plant in Fukushima.
“I guess, just, you know, they're not being open to
the public.
They should be more open to the public,” said Sugaoka.
“Everything
is always kept a secret”. |
I have on several occasions done in depth reporting of current affairs . Since the
Gulf Oil Disaster, caused
by BP’s negligence in handling the Deepwater Horizon exploration rig to TEPCO’s disaster
at Fukushima, I have discovered one overarching feature: governments around the world are wrapping
a veil of secrecy around their relationships with corporate entities, particularly when those
operations are dangerous to life, limb and property of the average person. The United States
government, led
by President Obama, protected BP as much as could be done, from the scrutiny of investigative
reporters. The Japanese government has also attempted to wrap a veil of secrecy around Fukushima
to protect TEPCO from the onslaught of critical reporting. The fact that both disasters
cost untold harm to millions of people, the environment and destroyed many ecological relationships;
these facts have not been fully admitted to or discussed openly by the governments involved.
The outcome on both disasters at this time is showing an evil willingness to place human lives
and the lives of all living things before the swinging, gnashing teeth of the corporate directors
for their consumption. We are less than pawns in the game, we are fodder for the machine of enterprise
development.
There for, when Yves
Smith pens an editorial on poverty and wealth in American society,
I was after first reading not able to place it anywhere in the landscape outlined above. After
some consideration, I decided the topic of economic injustice does need to be dealt with and
is one with a continuous move towards inequality that is a part of the political landscape in
an ever increasing dynamic. Nuclear power plants and their widespread usage present us with many
problems, the first one being how to decommission the most dangerous ones still in use and replacing
them with sources of alternative energy. The
phenomena of Peak Oil drives the corporate oil exploration machine to take increasing risks
and do further damage to our environment and destroy ecological relationships - a dead porpoise
can’t
perform as a high level predator. Determining whether we have the truth on the Gulf of Mexico is
more than merely a semantic game. I am a firm believer in the following proposition
The contributions to this volume include the recognition and exploitation
of the obvious phylogenetic fact that human brains have evolved primarily as organs of social organization.
~Reclaiming Cognition Núñez and Freeman 1999
The topic then is not so much what the truth is but
how the truth is determined-how is it that we know what topics of discussion are important? Currently,
the determination of whose truths we are discussing lies in the hands of the corner offices of
the corporate enterprises. Abject poverty (less than enough caloric intake to cover basal metabolic
processes, inadequate clothing and scarcity of clean drinking water) is the lot of over one-third
of the world's population and some of those unfortunate people live in the United States. We should
not be using destitution as a comparison for income levels. Yet, many enterprises are hoarding
cash and forcing people off the payroll while attempting to cut benefits and pay. Meanwhile some
of these same industrial leaders-BP and TEPCO being notable examples, work at creating a secret
work world, virtual realms of secrecy and tyranny, while they destroy the environment and ecological
relationships. Corporate entities working Economic impovershment are then indentical with or part
of the same family with those working environmental destruction.
By reviewing the annual reports (2005-2007) of President Bush’s Council
of Economic Advisors (CEA) I learned that the Council had some interest in fraud, but no understanding
of elite fraud and its implications for the economy.The reports
make sad reading. They deny the developing crisis entirely and they do so for reasons
that reflect badly on economics and economists The
tragedy is that the CEA discussion of the theory of financial regulation embraces three of
the most useful theoretical insights – adverse selection, lemon’s markets, and the centrality
and criticality of sound underwriting to the survival of lending institutions. These theories
are interrelated and they are essential components of control fraud theory. . .
. The CEA addressed three forms of informational defects that banks helped reduce. The CEA began
by discussing “adverse selection.” Adverse selection was the key to understanding and preventing
the developing crisis. In the lending context, adverse selection arises when a lender’s policies
selectively encourage lending to borrowers who pose greater credit risks that are unknown or
underestimated by the lender. Adverse selection can be one of the consequences of “asymmetrical
information.” (Adverse selection also poses a serious risk to honest insurance companies.) Because
the lender does not know (and therefore is not compensated for) the full extent of the risk of
default adverse selection produces a “negative expected value” for lenders. In plain English,
they lose money. For a residential mortgage lender, adverse selection is fatal because the loans
are so large and the loan proceeds are fully disbursed at closing. It is essential to understand
that adverse selection is not equivalent to credit risk. A mortgage lender makes money by taking
prudent credit risks. Banks “underwrite” prospective borrowers and collateral in order to identify,
understand, quantify, and price credit risk. Prudent underwriting minimizes adverse selection.
Mortgage lenders that fail to underwrite create severe adverse selection and fail. Honest home
lenders would never gut their underwriting standards and create adverse selection.
More on the Securitization
process with some great explanatory graphics. However, the article is dated as it was written
when the blush was on the rose for what was felt to be a wonderful new tool for creating more
'money'.
