Co-opting the Naive by Controlling Their Figurehead

[cyu]

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/04/tarp-bailout-overseer-tarp-losing-money-funds-to-help-not-being-disbursed.html

It is a widely held misconception that TARP will make a profit. The most recent cost estimate for TARP is a loss of $60 billion. Taxpayers are still owed $118.5 billion

A fund to support homeowners has disbursed just 3 percent of its budget and aided only 30,640 homeowners in two years

it doesn’t take a PhD to guess that using bailout funds to buy gold toilet seats and prostitutes is not the best way to stimulate the economy

Republicans think the bailouts were a bad idea by an eight-to-one margin. 34% of those in the president’s party say the bailouts were a good idea

[cyu]

http://dailybail.com/home/report-five-senior-goldman-sachs-execs-gave-130k-to-obama-vi.html

Holder and Breuer both came to the DOJ from Covington & Burling, a “top-tier Washington law firm” with a client list that includes financial firms like Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, CitiBank, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, ING, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Wilmington Trust.

Michigan Democratic Sen. Carl Levin “proposed that the DOJ criminally investigate Goldman Sachs for its handling of the Abacus 2007-AC1 transaction”

Levin’s subcommittee and the Federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission both made formal referrals to the DOJ for investigation

Nothing happened. But, over the course of the rest of 2011, Obama went on a massive fundraising drive down Wall Street. “By the fall of 2011, Obama had collected more donations from Wall Street than any of the Republican candidates, and employees at Bain Capital had donated more than twice as much to Obama as they did to [Mitt] Romney

“In the weeks before and after the Senate report on Goldman Sachs, several Goldman executives and their families made contributions to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities and some contributors maxed out at the largest individual donation allowed, $35,800.”

“Five senior Goldman Sachs executives wrote more than $130,000 in checks to the Obama Victory Fund. Two of these executives had never donated to Obama before

[cyu]

http://www.thestreet.com/print/story/11665082.html

our governments, the banking cabal, and the Corporate Media have assured us that they knew the appropriate approach for fixing the economies that they had previously crippled with their own mismanagement.

What was Iceland's approach? Iceland gave the banksters nothing.

bankers told us that no amount of suffering (for the Little People) was too great in order to make sure that the Bond Parasites got paid at 100 cents on the dollar. Iceland told the Bond Parasites they would get what was left over, after the people had been taken care of

When Plutarch wrote 2,000 years ago "an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all Republics," he was not parroting socialist dogma (1,500 years before the birth of Socialism).

neither the Corporate Media nor their Banker Masters would have allowed this clear acknowledgment that Iceland was right and we were wrong to appear within its own pages, unless it felt secure in the knowledge that all the remaining Debt Slaves had been crippled beyond their capacity to ever escape this economic oppression.

After two elections, the combination of fear and propaganda bullied the long-suffering Greek people into choosing another Traitor Government -- which had expressly pledged itself to reinforcing the bonds of economic slavery. When the Slaves vote for slavery, the Slave Masters can afford to gloat.

we get the Big Lie. Our Traitor Governments were acting honestly and honourably; and Iceland's success and our failure was yet another "surprise which no one could have predicted."

when an economic strategy of People before Parasites succeeds that there is nothing the least-bit "surprising" about this. promoting the health of Parasites is only good for the Parasites themselves.

[cyu]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/31/obama-justice-department-immunity-bush-cia-torturer

The Obama administration's full-scale whitewashing of the crimes by Bush officials is now complete. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the closing without charges of the only two cases under investigation relating to the US torture program.

On 16 April 2009, Obama decreed absolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush department of justice.

On several occasions, Holder had leaked that he was horrified by detainees who were severely injured by torture or even killed by it – there were more than 100 detainees who died while in US custody – and that he could not, in good conscience, simply sweep all of that under the rug. But less than two years later, Holder announced that of the more than 100 cases, there would be no charges brought in any of them – except two.

One involved Gul Rahman, who froze to death in a secret CIA prison known as the "Salt Pit", after he was beaten, stripped, and shackled to a cement wall in freezing temperatures.

The other was Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in CIA custody after he was beaten, stripped, had cold water poured on him, and shackled to the wall. It was al-Jamadi's ice-packed body which was infamously photographed with a smiling Sgt Charles Granier standing over it giving the thumbs-up sign. A US military autopsy declared al-Jamadi's death a homicide due to "blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration".

those are the two cases which the DOJ announced it was closing without any charges of any kind. despite the findings of General Antonio Taguba, "there is no longer any doubt as to whether the administration has committed war crimes" and "the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

it is done even in the face of General Barry McCaffrey's observation: "We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the CIA."

Obama's top officials secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done.

those who blow the whistle on such crimes continue to be pursued by the same administration with unprecedented aggression.

[cyu]

Wolves in sheep's clothing

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-23/the-real-reason-for-the-decline-of-american-unions.html

survey data show that workers’ desire to join unions has been growing since the 1980s, and a majority of nonunion workers would now vote for union representation if given the opportunity.

Canada has gone through many of the same economic and social changes as the U.S. since the middle of the 20th century, yet it hasn’t seen the same precipitous decline in unionization. The unionization rate in the U.S. and Canada followed fairly similar paths from 1920 to the mid-1960s, at which point they began to diverge drastically.

Differences in labor law and public policy are at the root of this disparity. Canadian law is simply far more hospitable to unions. In the U.S., the time between the petition and the election often stretches to months, and sometimes for longer than a year.

there is an important difference in how the two countries deal with illegal obstruction of union drives. In general, Canada handles such charges much more quickly than the U.S., where they often aren’t resolved until long after a union drive is over.

In the U.S., card-check authorization, quicker handling of illegal-obstruction charges and first-contract arbitration were all incorporated into the Employee Free Choice Act. Although Obama supported this act while campaigning, his administration has so far shown little interest in promoting it