The Ultimate Reaping of What One Sows: Right-Wing Edition
by Glenn Greenwald
Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing “right-wing extremist activity.” The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration” and “groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority.”
Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they’re on the train to FEMA camps. The Right’s leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: “Here we go Again,” protesting that “this seems so nakedly ideological.” Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it’s “Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!” Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS – as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) – now considers the Constitution to be a “subversive manifesto.” Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin’s Hot Air stomps its feet about all “the smears listed in the new DHS warning about ‘right-wing extremism.’”
It’s certainly true that federal police efforts directed at domestic political movements – even ones with a history of inspiring violence in both the distant and recent past – require real vigilance and oversight, and it’s also true that the DHS description of these groups seems excessively broad with the potential for mischief. But the political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS – and the still-creepy phrase “homeland security” – became George Bush’s calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State – from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA “reforms” to massive increases in domestic “counter-Terrorism” programs – are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.
Read the rest of the article
http://www.salon.com/src/pass/sitepass/spon/sitepass_website.html
April 21, 2009
Glenn Greenwald is the author of A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency and How Would a Patriot Act? See his blog Unclaimed Territory.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenwald/greenwald36.html
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Robert Scheer on Grand Theft Treasury
“Thievery Under the TARP” — We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Fund bailout program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090422_thievery_under_the_tarp/
Thievery Under the TARP
Apr 22, 2009
By Robert Scheer
We are being robbed big-time, but you can’t say we haven’t been warned. Not after the release Tuesday of a scathing report by the Treasury Department’s special inspector general, who charged that the aptly named Troubled Asset Relief Fund bailout program is rife with mismanagement and potential for fraud. The IG’s office already has opened 20 criminal fraud investigations into the $700 billion program, which is now well on its way to a $3 trillion obligation, and the IG predicts many more are coming.
Special Inspector General Neil M. Barofsky charged that the TARP program from its inception was designed to trust the Wall Street recipients of the bailout funds to act responsibly on their own, without accountability to the government that gave them the money.
He pointed to the example of AIG, which has acted as a conduit of funds to the banks it had insured without being required to tell the government what it is doing: “Failure to impose this requirement with respect to the injection of yet another $30 billion into AIG would not only be a failure of oversight, but could call into question the credibility of the government’s efforts.”
AIG is just one example in a bailout that has left the financial conglomerates unsupervised as they spend taxpayer money in what the report termed a government program of “unprecedented scope, scale and complexity,” putting the public and the Treasury Department in the dark as to how the money is being used by the very tycoons who got us into this mess. “The American people have a right to know how their tax dollars are being used,” Barofsky wrote in the report, which sharply criticized the government for failing to hold financial institutions accountable.
For all of its criticism of the original program, designed by the Bush administration, the report was equally severe in denouncing the Obama administration’s plan to partner with hedge funds and other private capital groups to buy up the “toxic” holdings of the banks. Charging that the plan carries “significant fraud risks,” the inspector general’s report pointed out that almost all of the risk in this new trillion-dollar plan is being borne by the taxpayers. The so-called private investors would be able to put up money they borrowed from the Fed through “nonrecourse” loans, meaning if the toxic assets purchased prove too toxic and the scheme failed, the private investors could just walk away without repaying the Fed for those loans.
The reason those loans may prove even more toxic than expected and the price paid by this government-underwritten partnership far too high is that the government is purchasing the most suspect of the banks’ mortgage packages. In addition, the plan is to accept at face value the evaluation of those packages by the very same credit-rating firms whose absurdly wrong estimates of the dollar worth of these securities helped create the problem that now haunts the world’s economy. “Arguably, the wholesale failure of the credit rating agencies to rate adequately such securities is at the heart of the securitization market collapse, if not the primary cause of the current credit crisis,” the report found.
As with the entire banking bailout, the new plan of Obama’s treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, is likely to enrich the very folks who impoverished the rest of us, as the report notes: “The significant government-financed leverage presents a great incentive for collusion between the buyer and seller of the asset, or the buyer and other buyers, whereby, once again, the taxpayer takes a significant loss while others profit.”
At the heart of this potentially massive fraud was the original decision of Henry Paulson, President Bush’s treasury secretary and a former Goldman Sachs chairman, to not require the recipients of the bailout, such as his old firm, to account for how the money was spent. Unfortunately, President Obama’s administration continued that practice.
The only difference is that the amount of public money being put at risk is now far greater, and the hedge funds, which are totally unregulated, have been brought in as the central players. One of the largest of those hedge funds, D.E. Shaw, carried Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, on its payroll to the tune of $5.2 million last year. He may have reason to trust these secretive enterprises that operate beyond the law, but the public does not.
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[Dallas Fed] Houston Economic Update
Tuesday, April 21, 2009 2:44 PM
Houston Economic Update
April 2009
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
http://dallasfed.org/research/update-hou/2009/0902.cfm
U.S. and global recessions have merged with weak energy prices to end Houston’s long expansion. Job growth fell at a 3.2 percent annual rate over the first quarter of this year, while the unemployment rate was up a full percentage point over six months to 6.8 percent. So far, oil-related layoffs have played only a modest role in employment reductions, but continued weakness in natural gas prices may quickly change the pattern for the worse.
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USGAO – 2008 Lobbying Disclosure: Observations on Lobbyists’ Compliance with Disclosure Requirements.
GAO-09-487, April 1.
http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-09-487
Highlights – http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d09487high.pdf
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OCC News Release: OCC Enforcement Actions
Friday, April 17, 2009
OCC Enforcement Actions
WASHINGTON — The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) today released new enforcement actions taken against national banks and individuals currently and formerly affiliated with national banks.
Copies of the final actions are available for download by viewing the searchable database of all public enforcement actions taken since August 1989 at
http://apps.occ.gov/EnforcementActions/ .
You may also submit a request electronically to obtain copies through the OCC’s online FOIA site, https://appsec.occ.gov/publicaccesslink/ .
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The Age of the Unthinkable
By: Joshua Cooper Ramo
“As much as we might wish it, our world is not becoming more stable or easier to comprehend. We are entering, in short, a revolutionary age,” writes Managing Director at Kissinger Associates, Joshua Cooper Ramo, in his brilliant and worldview altering book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It. The author takes the reader on a globe trotting adventure, from the turbulent Middle East to the world of Wall Street high finance, where generally accepted ideas of how the world works are shattered forever.
…
http://tinyurl.com/c6rc5v (blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com)
Also see: http://joshuaramo.com/
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NBC report on NY Times’ five Pulitzers ignores military analysts report
Brian Williams reported that “The New York Times led the way with five [Pulitzer Prizes], including awards for breaking news and international reporting” but did not note that the Times’ David Barstow won for his reporting on the connection between numerous media military analysts and the Pentagon and defense industries.
Read More
http://mediamatters.org/items/200904210002?lid=1011352&rid=26312958
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FOX NEWS’ UNHINGED, IRRATIONAL OBAMA ATTACKS STIR UP VIOLENT RIGHT-WING MILITANTS
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Paranoid anti-government radicals used to have to rely on crude, inefficient methods of communication. Now they have Fox News.
http://tinyurl.com/cducdj (www.alternet.org)
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And now for the important news ….
By Argus Hamilton
Governor Rick Perry told a tea party in Texas Wednesday that Texas can legally secede from the United States. Picture the possibilities. The people in the Cayman Islands would finally have a place to send their money so they can avoid paying taxes.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com
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three thousand words
|
Matt Davies
Journal News Apr 22, 2009 |
Cartoon du Jour – By Khalil: … right to bear arms …
(www.bendib.com)
Tom the Dancing Bug: toxic asset
(imgsrv.gocomics.com)