WE HAVE A TOTALITARIAN SOCIETY IN THE MAKING AS CORPORATIONS ARE CALLING ALL THE SHOTS AND IT ISN'T GOOD FOR THE MASSES!!!
WE CANNOT PROTECT A COUNTRY THIS LARGE AGAINST AGGRESSIONS....IT WILL BANKRUPT US. WHAT WE ARE SEEING ALREADY IS THE TRADEOFF IN SOCIAL QUALITY FOR SECURITY!!!
WE ARE TRULY SORRY FOR THE VICTIMS OF BOSTON'S BOMBING:
Regarding the Boston bombing and how it relates to the high speed care chase that killed a City Hall employee:
We know jihad is about empire-building....the West used democracy as a code for opening markets for US corporations and many Muslims do not want what they know violates their religion ergo the War on Terror and the War Against Western Aggression. Many Americans are shouting against drone attacks and the collateral damage that kills innocent men, women, and children. The Boston attack will be viewed as collateral damage to those who support the fight against Western Aggression. Since the Muslims are not coming to the West pushing their faith upon us the problem is the West pushing to democratize......grow markets in the Muslim world. So, all of the innocent people who are collateral damage in Muslim nations and in Boston et al are victims of the West's global empire-building. We know know second and third world countries want us out and we know that citizens in both Europe and the US DO NOT WANT GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AS EMPIRES. So why do 99.9% of a population not send these .1% packing?
That brings me locally as we look at Baltimore and even more closely to Charles Village. We have a problem with police brutality and unaccountability that has been heightened by bringing Chief Batts to Baltimore knowing he has decades of doing just that.....brutality and unaccountability and internal secrecy. We can liken this to the military practices in Iraq for example of sweeping a neighborhood for insurgents. You create fear, uncertainty, and take away all access to justice to move people out. That is one part of the anger jihadists have for the US. So, I'm listening to NPR this AM and a very quick announcement of an arrest in the pedestrian death was made. Mind you, the initial report at the time of the accident had officials telling us that there was no police chase and a search of the car had no weapons or drugs. Now we are hearing there was a police chase and the defendant had cocaine in his system. The defendant was charged with manslaughter.....the police who were chasing the care illegally and caused the crash were not mentioned.
Keep in mind that we have the homeless in Baltimore telling all justice advocates that police are planting guns and drugs on them to either scare them away or send them to jail as they 'cleanse' downtown. Keep in mind that we have had over a dozen police incidents of killing citizens that were often unexplained the most vicious being Anderson who was thrown down on his head and kicked to death.....no police charges and the initial report had police saying Anderson stuffed drugs down his throat. I dare think what happened to the medical examiner who declared this a homicide and released these results to the public. All of this abuse is felt primarily by the poor because they have no recourse for justice but the middle-class feel as strongly about this steady growth of police aggression. A few years ago NPR released a poll that showed well over 60% of Americans feared the police and the famous example here in Baltimore is the man who used his cell phone to record the brutality of police against a working class woman .....the police erased the man's recording of the event and harassed him personally making him fearful of retaliation.
My point is all of this is the same.....whether the bombing in Boston by jihadists or local aggression in the name of development....it is all about development and the rich making money. These elite institutions and Third Way think tanks and politicians are the globalists pushing this empire-building that is tearing democracy apart in the West and giving democracy a bad name in second and third world countries.
I want to end with one more analogy going even more local...to Charles Village. The Baltimore Sun had a great article about a black professional couple who a few years ago declared that a small group of bicyclists later found to live in Charles Village harassed them....the couple saying for know reason. It was a he said she said that the couple lost. It seems about that same time 2 bicyclists in Charles Village were attacked and knocked off their bikes. I'm sure the black couple had nothing to do with that but the continuous blatant injustice only creates heightened aggression. It is inevitable. To make matters worse I am walking to work and pass a bank security guard from an International Security Agency.....it looked like military police.
Folks, we need to send the current crop of politicians packing.....they are Third Way corporate democrats....not democrats really, just posing. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES. IF YOUR LABOR AND/OR JUSTICE ORGANIZATION IS NOT RUNNING CANDIDATES AGAINST INCUMBENTS.....THE LEADERSHIP IS CAPTURED AND NEEDS TO BE REPLACED!!!! If you are unemployed you should make 'politician' your next career!!!
Boston Marathon Explosions: Latest Developments
Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:25:00 -0400 Throughout the day, we'll be updating with the latest news about the two explosions Monday near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blasts killed at least three people — one of them an 8-year-old boy — and injured more than 150. We'll also be publishing related posts as the day continues.
On the morning after explosions ripped through an area packed with runners, spectators, race officials, medical personnel and others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the FBI is heading up the investigation into who was responsible.
The Associated Press reports that the FBI "has served a search warrant on a home in suburban Boston in the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing attack. Massachusetts State Police confirm that a search warrant related to the investigation was served Monday night in Revere, but they haven't said anything else. Some investigators were seen leaving the house early this morning, carrying brown paper bags, plastic trash bags and a duffel bag."
NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports for Morning Edition that investigators are being very cautious about what they reveal and are cautioning that it may be some time before they can say with any certainty who they think was behind the attack. As she's previously reported, they don't want a repeat of what happened after the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, when security guard Richard Jewell was mistakenly blamed. It took years for investigators to determine that the real bomber was Eric Rudolph, an anti-government, anti-abortion serial bomber.
Along with identifying who was responsible, authorities will also be pushing to determine whether the attacks were foreign- or domestic-related.
The investigation will be aided by the hundreds, if not thousands, of potential witnesses and the large number of videos that were being shot, by professionals and spectators, at the time of the explosions. But the scene is also extremely complicated. Abandoned backpacks and other gear left behind by runners and spectators litter the area. Those have to be searched not only for clues, but for explosives.
As of early Tuesday, authorities said they had not yet taken anyone into custody either as a "person of interest" or a suspect.
Among the other early Tuesday reports:
-- The 8-year-old victim was from nearby Dorchester, Mass., according to the Boston Globe.
-- One person could "easily" have been behind the attacks, retired FBI bomb technician Kevin G. Miles tells the Boston Herald.
Our colleagues at WBUR have also resumed their live blogging this morning. They report that "overnight the number of injured rose. At last count, at least 151 are being treated at nearly a dozen hospitals around Boston."
As happens when stories such as this are developing, there will likely be reports that turn out to be mistaken. Monday, for example, authorities at one point said they thought there had also been an explosion at the JFK Library in Boston. But it turned out there had been a fire, not an explosion, and there's no known link at this time to the marathon attacks.
We will focus on news being reported by NPR, other news outlets with expertise and statements from authorities in position to know what's going on. And if some of that information turns out to be wrong, we'll update.
___________________________________________________
SEE WHY THE US CANNOT AFFORD THE LUXURY OF QUALITY OF LIFE FOR ITS CITIZENS?
The U.S. Homeland Security Department's $39 billion budget maintains a commitment to functions such as border and cybersecurity, the White House said.
THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN DEFEND AGAINST THESE KINDS OF ATTACKS AND YET THIRD WAY THINK TANKS ARE HAVING A GROWTH INDUSTRY IN A NATIONAL SECURITY COMPLEX THAT MAKES THE MILITARY COMPLEX LOOK LIKE A SLACKER!
Federal Spending Homeland Security's New $3.9 Billion Headquarters By Devin Leonard April 12, 2013
President Barack Obama is trying to solve big problems in his proposed 2014 budget. His efforts to curtail entitlement spending have gotten most of the headlines. But he also seems determined to complete the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s new headquarters, the largest federal construction project since the Pentagon rose in the 1940s. The cost: $3.9 billion.
The project would unite at a single location nearly all DHS’s 22 divisions devoted to thwarting terrorists and safeguarding the populace from natural and manmade disasters. The site is the campus of St. Elizabeth Hospital, a former federal asylum that was once the home of poet Ezra Pound and John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin. There would be 4.5 million square feet of workspace in the new facility and ample employee parking.
The project’s supporters say the price tag is justified. They say it’s not easy to get the various DHS divisions to operate in concert with each other if they are scattered throughout the capital area. At the 2009 groundbreaking, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano herself made the case for the agency’s costly new digs: “It will help us have meetings. It will help us create a culture of ‘one DHS.’”
It didn’t take long for the project to become mired in politics. House Republicans, a number of whom see the DHS as an inefficient and fiscally profligate bureaucracy, were loath to fund the new headquarters fully. A new headquarters for the U.S. Coast Guard, which involved more excavation than any real estate development in the District of Columbia’s history, moved forward. The rest of the endeavor languished, becoming a symbol of Washington dysfunction. The tighter integration that Napolitano promised also remained a work in progress. The DHS is on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s “high risk” list, a distinction it shares with such troubled federal agencies as the U.S. Postal Service.
Now Obama is trying to ensure that the DHS headquarters eventually rises. On Wednesday, the president included $367 million in his budget to continue construction.
Getting the money won’t be easy. In February, one of the DHS’s more persistent naysayers, U.S. Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican, boasted about how he and his fellow party members had curtailed the project. He said he would also like to dismantle much of the DHS.
He’d better act swiftly. If the White House ever gets all the DHS’s divisions on one campus, nobody will want to move them again.
____________________________________________________
CLEARING THE FOG
with Margaret Flowers
WE HAVE MET THE TERRORISTS, AND THEY ARE US
“A man claiming to be the head of a key group fighting the Syrian government has purportedly pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda,” begins a piece at al Jazeera this morning. Since the CIA created al Qaeda, giving it its name in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden was one of theirs, there has been a love-hate relationship. Our government claims al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but appears to have supported al Qaeda terrorists in overthrowing Gadaffi in Libya, claims to have been opposed to al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq, and now appears to be embracing al Qaeda again in attacking the Syrian government.
Without a controlled mass media, it would not be possible to keep the American people fooled in this senseless “war on terrorism,” but there are no mainstream media editorials demanding that the troops be brought home.
____________________________________________
Meanwhile our politicians are looting our coffers as they feed on the profits created by fraud!!!!
Regarding Congressional Ethics:
Congress Repeals Financial Disclosure Requirements For Senior U.S. Officials
by Eyder Peralta
April 12, 2013 4:11 PM
I want to say this. We have a massive movement of tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud over a few decades to offshore accounts that created this huge budget deficit at all levels of government. We have investigative reporters telling us that politicians on Capitol Hill are enriching themselves through Insider Trading....Ben Cardin and Nancy Pelosi just two from Maryland. We all know these pols are carting the loot off just as we hear the autocratic dictators and military juntas wheel our billions of dollars is US foreign and military aid. US TAXPAYERS ARE BEING TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS AS WHAT USED TO BE A JUSTICE DEPARTMENT WORKS TO PROTECT THOSE PEOPLE DOING IT.
So when the media frenzy made public this Insider Trading scandal the response was a well publicized Ethics legislation making it illegal for Federal pols to do that....as if they had to pass a law. Mind you, they didn't pass a law making it illegal for all of the corporate types trading in these Insider deals....just a vaguely written law for pols. As you see from the article above what little Ethics rules were written then have just been rescinded by this covert slipping into current legislation a reversal of Ethics law. How do you prove an elected official is guilty of Insider Trading if you cannot access their personal financial data? Mind you, it wouldn't be the Justice Department coming up with those findings....it is government watchdogs and they are the ones affected by this rescind of law.
We all know we have a Banana Republic on our hands. We listen as we are told no one will challenge these corrupt incumbents. In Maryland it is particularly hard because politics here was crony before crony was popular! It is not impossible to change this though as the masses have overcome time and again. The more public you are....the more you shout loudly and strongly....the more you look locally for candidates to run for all levels of government the faster we will reverse this blip in American democracy!!!
Congress Repeals Financial Disclosure Requirements For Senior U.S. Officials
by Eyder Peralta
April 12, 2013 4:11 PM
A tourist takes cover underneath an umbrella while snapping a photo of the U.S. Capitol on March 6, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Joining the Senate, the House of Representatives approved a measure today that repeals a requirement that top government officials post financial disclosures on the Internet.
The House, like the Senate, acted quietly without a vote. Instead, they sent the measure to the president's desk by unanimous consent.
The provision was part of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (Stock), which became law in March of 2012. The act was intended to stop members of congress from profiting from nonpublic information.
, at the time, Sen. Joe Lieberman called the law "the most significant congressional ethics reform legislation to pass Congress in at least five years."
:
"That law mainly addressed conflict-of-interest policies for members of Congress and their staffs, but it also included a requirement that the financial disclosure forms filed by some 28,000 high-ranking federal employees be posted online.
"While those forms are public records, they must be requested individually from employing agencies. The Stock Act envisions online posting first on agency sites and later in a central, searchable database.
"The posting requirement was delayed three times out of concerns about the potential for identity theft and other crimes against career employees, as well as security risks to the government."
The Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for a more open government,
The foundation explained that instead of addressing specific security concerns, Congress has acted broadly.
For instance, they note, the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation are still required to make their financial disclosures public. But the change in law now makes the posting of those disclosures on the Internet optional.
Sunlight adds:
"Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from non-public information (if anyone thinks high level congressional staffers don't have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill) but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.
"Are we going to return to the days when the public can use the Internet to research everything exceptwhat their government is doing? Will Congress, in its twisted wisdom, decide that information is public if journalists, academics, advocates and citizens are forced to dig through file cabinets in basements in Washington, DC to find it? And does anyone think that makes us safer?
"As my colleague Tom Lee , 'This approach is known as 'security through obscurity.' Essentially, the idea is that rather than fixing a system's flaws, you can just make the system opaque or unusable or unpopular enough that those flaws never surface.'"
WE CANNOT PROTECT A COUNTRY THIS LARGE AGAINST AGGRESSIONS....IT WILL BANKRUPT US. WHAT WE ARE SEEING ALREADY IS THE TRADEOFF IN SOCIAL QUALITY FOR SECURITY!!!
WE ARE TRULY SORRY FOR THE VICTIMS OF BOSTON'S BOMBING:
Regarding the Boston bombing and how it relates to the high speed care chase that killed a City Hall employee:
We know jihad is about empire-building....the West used democracy as a code for opening markets for US corporations and many Muslims do not want what they know violates their religion ergo the War on Terror and the War Against Western Aggression. Many Americans are shouting against drone attacks and the collateral damage that kills innocent men, women, and children. The Boston attack will be viewed as collateral damage to those who support the fight against Western Aggression. Since the Muslims are not coming to the West pushing their faith upon us the problem is the West pushing to democratize......grow markets in the Muslim world. So, all of the innocent people who are collateral damage in Muslim nations and in Boston et al are victims of the West's global empire-building. We know know second and third world countries want us out and we know that citizens in both Europe and the US DO NOT WANT GLOBAL CORPORATIONS AS EMPIRES. So why do 99.9% of a population not send these .1% packing?
That brings me locally as we look at Baltimore and even more closely to Charles Village. We have a problem with police brutality and unaccountability that has been heightened by bringing Chief Batts to Baltimore knowing he has decades of doing just that.....brutality and unaccountability and internal secrecy. We can liken this to the military practices in Iraq for example of sweeping a neighborhood for insurgents. You create fear, uncertainty, and take away all access to justice to move people out. That is one part of the anger jihadists have for the US. So, I'm listening to NPR this AM and a very quick announcement of an arrest in the pedestrian death was made. Mind you, the initial report at the time of the accident had officials telling us that there was no police chase and a search of the car had no weapons or drugs. Now we are hearing there was a police chase and the defendant had cocaine in his system. The defendant was charged with manslaughter.....the police who were chasing the care illegally and caused the crash were not mentioned.
Keep in mind that we have the homeless in Baltimore telling all justice advocates that police are planting guns and drugs on them to either scare them away or send them to jail as they 'cleanse' downtown. Keep in mind that we have had over a dozen police incidents of killing citizens that were often unexplained the most vicious being Anderson who was thrown down on his head and kicked to death.....no police charges and the initial report had police saying Anderson stuffed drugs down his throat. I dare think what happened to the medical examiner who declared this a homicide and released these results to the public. All of this abuse is felt primarily by the poor because they have no recourse for justice but the middle-class feel as strongly about this steady growth of police aggression. A few years ago NPR released a poll that showed well over 60% of Americans feared the police and the famous example here in Baltimore is the man who used his cell phone to record the brutality of police against a working class woman .....the police erased the man's recording of the event and harassed him personally making him fearful of retaliation.
My point is all of this is the same.....whether the bombing in Boston by jihadists or local aggression in the name of development....it is all about development and the rich making money. These elite institutions and Third Way think tanks and politicians are the globalists pushing this empire-building that is tearing democracy apart in the West and giving democracy a bad name in second and third world countries.
I want to end with one more analogy going even more local...to Charles Village. The Baltimore Sun had a great article about a black professional couple who a few years ago declared that a small group of bicyclists later found to live in Charles Village harassed them....the couple saying for know reason. It was a he said she said that the couple lost. It seems about that same time 2 bicyclists in Charles Village were attacked and knocked off their bikes. I'm sure the black couple had nothing to do with that but the continuous blatant injustice only creates heightened aggression. It is inevitable. To make matters worse I am walking to work and pass a bank security guard from an International Security Agency.....it looked like military police.
Folks, we need to send the current crop of politicians packing.....they are Third Way corporate democrats....not democrats really, just posing. RUN AND VOTE FOR LABOR AND JUSTICE CANDIDATES. IF YOUR LABOR AND/OR JUSTICE ORGANIZATION IS NOT RUNNING CANDIDATES AGAINST INCUMBENTS.....THE LEADERSHIP IS CAPTURED AND NEEDS TO BE REPLACED!!!! If you are unemployed you should make 'politician' your next career!!!
Boston Marathon Explosions: Latest Developments
Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:25:00 -0400 Throughout the day, we'll be updating with the latest news about the two explosions Monday near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blasts killed at least three people — one of them an 8-year-old boy — and injured more than 150. We'll also be publishing related posts as the day continues.
On the morning after explosions ripped through an area packed with runners, spectators, race officials, medical personnel and others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the FBI is heading up the investigation into who was responsible.
The Associated Press reports that the FBI "has served a search warrant on a home in suburban Boston in the investigation into the Boston Marathon bombing attack. Massachusetts State Police confirm that a search warrant related to the investigation was served Monday night in Revere, but they haven't said anything else. Some investigators were seen leaving the house early this morning, carrying brown paper bags, plastic trash bags and a duffel bag."
NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports for Morning Edition that investigators are being very cautious about what they reveal and are cautioning that it may be some time before they can say with any certainty who they think was behind the attack. As she's previously reported, they don't want a repeat of what happened after the bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, when security guard Richard Jewell was mistakenly blamed. It took years for investigators to determine that the real bomber was Eric Rudolph, an anti-government, anti-abortion serial bomber.
Along with identifying who was responsible, authorities will also be pushing to determine whether the attacks were foreign- or domestic-related.
The investigation will be aided by the hundreds, if not thousands, of potential witnesses and the large number of videos that were being shot, by professionals and spectators, at the time of the explosions. But the scene is also extremely complicated. Abandoned backpacks and other gear left behind by runners and spectators litter the area. Those have to be searched not only for clues, but for explosives.
As of early Tuesday, authorities said they had not yet taken anyone into custody either as a "person of interest" or a suspect.
Among the other early Tuesday reports:
-- The 8-year-old victim was from nearby Dorchester, Mass., according to the Boston Globe.
-- One person could "easily" have been behind the attacks, retired FBI bomb technician Kevin G. Miles tells the Boston Herald.
Our colleagues at WBUR have also resumed their live blogging this morning. They report that "overnight the number of injured rose. At last count, at least 151 are being treated at nearly a dozen hospitals around Boston."
As happens when stories such as this are developing, there will likely be reports that turn out to be mistaken. Monday, for example, authorities at one point said they thought there had also been an explosion at the JFK Library in Boston. But it turned out there had been a fire, not an explosion, and there's no known link at this time to the marathon attacks.
We will focus on news being reported by NPR, other news outlets with expertise and statements from authorities in position to know what's going on. And if some of that information turns out to be wrong, we'll update.
___________________________________________________
SEE WHY THE US CANNOT AFFORD THE LUXURY OF QUALITY OF LIFE FOR ITS CITIZENS?
The U.S. Homeland Security Department's $39 billion budget maintains a commitment to functions such as border and cybersecurity, the White House said.
THERE IS NO WAY WE CAN DEFEND AGAINST THESE KINDS OF ATTACKS AND YET THIRD WAY THINK TANKS ARE HAVING A GROWTH INDUSTRY IN A NATIONAL SECURITY COMPLEX THAT MAKES THE MILITARY COMPLEX LOOK LIKE A SLACKER!
Federal Spending Homeland Security's New $3.9 Billion Headquarters By Devin Leonard April 12, 2013
President Barack Obama is trying to solve big problems in his proposed 2014 budget. His efforts to curtail entitlement spending have gotten most of the headlines. But he also seems determined to complete the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s new headquarters, the largest federal construction project since the Pentagon rose in the 1940s. The cost: $3.9 billion.
The project would unite at a single location nearly all DHS’s 22 divisions devoted to thwarting terrorists and safeguarding the populace from natural and manmade disasters. The site is the campus of St. Elizabeth Hospital, a former federal asylum that was once the home of poet Ezra Pound and John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin. There would be 4.5 million square feet of workspace in the new facility and ample employee parking.
The project’s supporters say the price tag is justified. They say it’s not easy to get the various DHS divisions to operate in concert with each other if they are scattered throughout the capital area. At the 2009 groundbreaking, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano herself made the case for the agency’s costly new digs: “It will help us have meetings. It will help us create a culture of ‘one DHS.’”
It didn’t take long for the project to become mired in politics. House Republicans, a number of whom see the DHS as an inefficient and fiscally profligate bureaucracy, were loath to fund the new headquarters fully. A new headquarters for the U.S. Coast Guard, which involved more excavation than any real estate development in the District of Columbia’s history, moved forward. The rest of the endeavor languished, becoming a symbol of Washington dysfunction. The tighter integration that Napolitano promised also remained a work in progress. The DHS is on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s “high risk” list, a distinction it shares with such troubled federal agencies as the U.S. Postal Service.
Now Obama is trying to ensure that the DHS headquarters eventually rises. On Wednesday, the president included $367 million in his budget to continue construction.
Getting the money won’t be easy. In February, one of the DHS’s more persistent naysayers, U.S. Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican, boasted about how he and his fellow party members had curtailed the project. He said he would also like to dismantle much of the DHS.
He’d better act swiftly. If the White House ever gets all the DHS’s divisions on one campus, nobody will want to move them again.
____________________________________________________
CLEARING THE FOG
with Margaret Flowers
WE HAVE MET THE TERRORISTS, AND THEY ARE US
“A man claiming to be the head of a key group fighting the Syrian government has purportedly pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda,” begins a piece at al Jazeera this morning. Since the CIA created al Qaeda, giving it its name in Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden was one of theirs, there has been a love-hate relationship. Our government claims al Qaeda was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but appears to have supported al Qaeda terrorists in overthrowing Gadaffi in Libya, claims to have been opposed to al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq, and now appears to be embracing al Qaeda again in attacking the Syrian government.
Without a controlled mass media, it would not be possible to keep the American people fooled in this senseless “war on terrorism,” but there are no mainstream media editorials demanding that the troops be brought home.
____________________________________________
Meanwhile our politicians are looting our coffers as they feed on the profits created by fraud!!!!
Regarding Congressional Ethics:
Congress Repeals Financial Disclosure Requirements For Senior U.S. Officials
by Eyder Peralta
April 12, 2013 4:11 PM
I want to say this. We have a massive movement of tens of trillions of dollars in corporate fraud over a few decades to offshore accounts that created this huge budget deficit at all levels of government. We have investigative reporters telling us that politicians on Capitol Hill are enriching themselves through Insider Trading....Ben Cardin and Nancy Pelosi just two from Maryland. We all know these pols are carting the loot off just as we hear the autocratic dictators and military juntas wheel our billions of dollars is US foreign and military aid. US TAXPAYERS ARE BEING TAKEN TO THE CLEANERS AS WHAT USED TO BE A JUSTICE DEPARTMENT WORKS TO PROTECT THOSE PEOPLE DOING IT.
So when the media frenzy made public this Insider Trading scandal the response was a well publicized Ethics legislation making it illegal for Federal pols to do that....as if they had to pass a law. Mind you, they didn't pass a law making it illegal for all of the corporate types trading in these Insider deals....just a vaguely written law for pols. As you see from the article above what little Ethics rules were written then have just been rescinded by this covert slipping into current legislation a reversal of Ethics law. How do you prove an elected official is guilty of Insider Trading if you cannot access their personal financial data? Mind you, it wouldn't be the Justice Department coming up with those findings....it is government watchdogs and they are the ones affected by this rescind of law.
We all know we have a Banana Republic on our hands. We listen as we are told no one will challenge these corrupt incumbents. In Maryland it is particularly hard because politics here was crony before crony was popular! It is not impossible to change this though as the masses have overcome time and again. The more public you are....the more you shout loudly and strongly....the more you look locally for candidates to run for all levels of government the faster we will reverse this blip in American democracy!!!
Congress Repeals Financial Disclosure Requirements For Senior U.S. Officials
by Eyder Peralta
April 12, 2013 4:11 PM
A tourist takes cover underneath an umbrella while snapping a photo of the U.S. Capitol on March 6, 2013 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Joining the Senate, the House of Representatives approved a measure today that repeals a requirement that top government officials post financial disclosures on the Internet.
The House, like the Senate, acted quietly without a vote. Instead, they sent the measure to the president's desk by unanimous consent.
The provision was part of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (Stock), which became law in March of 2012. The act was intended to stop members of congress from profiting from nonpublic information.
, at the time, Sen. Joe Lieberman called the law "the most significant congressional ethics reform legislation to pass Congress in at least five years."
:
"That law mainly addressed conflict-of-interest policies for members of Congress and their staffs, but it also included a requirement that the financial disclosure forms filed by some 28,000 high-ranking federal employees be posted online.
"While those forms are public records, they must be requested individually from employing agencies. The Stock Act envisions online posting first on agency sites and later in a central, searchable database.
"The posting requirement was delayed three times out of concerns about the potential for identity theft and other crimes against career employees, as well as security risks to the government."
The Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for a more open government,
The foundation explained that instead of addressing specific security concerns, Congress has acted broadly.
For instance, they note, the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation are still required to make their financial disclosures public. But the change in law now makes the posting of those disclosures on the Internet optional.
Sunlight adds:
"Not only does the change undermine the intent of the original bill to ensure government insiders are not profiting from non-public information (if anyone thinks high level congressional staffers don't have as much or more insider information than their bosses, they should spend some time on Capitol Hill) but it sets an extraordinarily dangerous precedent suggesting that any risks stem not from information being public but from public information being online.
"Are we going to return to the days when the public can use the Internet to research everything exceptwhat their government is doing? Will Congress, in its twisted wisdom, decide that information is public if journalists, academics, advocates and citizens are forced to dig through file cabinets in basements in Washington, DC to find it? And does anyone think that makes us safer?
"As my colleague Tom Lee , 'This approach is known as 'security through obscurity.' Essentially, the idea is that rather than fixing a system's flaws, you can just make the system opaque or unusable or unpopular enough that those flaws never surface.'"
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