16 Trillion Reasons Why Arrests are Needed! Feb 2/12

16 TRILLION Reasons Why Everyone In Washington, Including The President, Should Be Heading To Prison

Click here: 16 TRILLION Reasons Why Everyone In Washington, Including The President, Should Be Heading To Prison | A Time For

By Gary P Jackson

When I first learned of this, late Thursday, I was so angered I couldn’t even put it into words.  Even now I’m really doing all I can to measure and moderate my tone.  One thing about it, now we know why so many were adamantly opposed to auditing the Fed!

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders [Socialist-VT] reports the first ever top-to-bottom audit of The Fed shows $16 TRILLION in secret “emergency” loans to American and foreign banks and other businesses.  All sympathetic to the democrat party.

Last year, the gross domestic product of the entire U.S. economy was only $14.5 trillion!

These secret loans started during President George W Bush’s last year in office, December 2007, but it was all orchestrated by the Fed.  In fact, many of the people who work for the Fed also have ties to the banks and corporations who got this money.  Still, this doesn’t excuse the democrat controlled Congress, or the Bush administration.

Here’s what Senator Sanders posted on his website:

The first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve uncovered eye-popping new details about how the U.S. provided a whopping $16 trillion in secret loans to bail out American and foreign banks and businesses during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  An amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders to the Wall Street reform law passed one year ago this week directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct the study.  “As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world,” said Sanders.  “This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you’re-on-your-own individualism for everyone else.“

Among the investigation’s key findings is that the Fed unilaterally provided trillions of dollars in financial assistance to foreign banks and corporations from South Korea to Scotland, according to the GAO report.  “No agency of the United States government should be allowed to bailout a foreign bank or corporation without the direct approval of Congress and the president,” Sanders said.

The non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress also determined that the Fed lacks a comprehensive system to deal with conflicts of interest, despite the serious potential for abuse.  In fact, according to the report, the Fed provided conflict of interest waivers to employees and private contractors so they could keep investments in the same financial institutions and corporations that were given emergency loans.

For example, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase served on the New York Fed’s board of directors at the same time that his bank received more than $390 billion in financial assistance from the Fed.  Moreover, JP Morgan Chase served as one of the clearing banks for the Fed’s emergency lending programs.

In another disturbing finding, the GAO said that on Sept. 19, 2008, William Dudley, who is now the New York Fed president, was granted a waiver to let him keep investments in AIG and General Electric at the same time AIG and GE were given bailout funds.  One reason the Fed did not make Dudley sell his holdings, according to the audit, was that it might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest.

To Sanders, the conclusion is simple. “No one who works for a firm receiving direct financial assistance from the Fed should be allowed to sit on the Fed’s board of directors or be employed by the Fed,” he said.

The investigation also revealed that the Fed outsourced most of its emergency lending programs to private contractors, many of which also were recipients of extremely low-interest and then-secret loans.

The Fed outsourced virtually all of the operations of their emergency lending programs to private contractors like JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo.  The same firms also received trillions of dollars in Fed loans at near-zero interest rates.  Altogether some two-thirds of the contracts that the Fed awarded to manage its emergency lending programs were no-bid contracts.  Morgan Stanley was given the largest no-bid contract worth $108.4 million to help manage the Fed bailout of AIG.

A more detailed GAO investigation into potential conflicts of interest at the Fed is due on Oct. 18, but Sanders said one thing already is abundantly clear. “The Federal Reserve must be reformed to serve the needs of working families, not just CEOs on Wall Street.”  
Reform isn't necessary if the Fed is abolished as it should be and as Ron Paul suggests.  It's UNCONSTIUTIONAL AND PRIVATELY OWNED, NOT PART OF OUR GOVERNMENT! (This wasn't in the article, I added that)

To read the GAO report, click here.

Top News Stories Jan 26/12

Today's Feature Stories:

Warrantless Phone Searches & Tavistock ! Jan 19/12

Cdsapi’s Added Comment: Hacking and Surveillance ALERT.   In the era of continuous government, military, and corporate surveillance for purposes of control and sabotage, the “convenient technology” -that everyone seems to feel they can’t live without - has embedded in it some very serious inherent dangers.  In particular, the Smart Cellphone comes with a very high price, of which almost no one is aware.  And this is just one of many devices that are routinely “structurally bugged” internally.
The emphasis on expanding the use of wireless comes from the “elite top” – from those who demand an exceedingly easy “monitoring system”.  Since these operate on “frequencies” that can be monitored very easily with the right equipment, there is nothing that is “private” any more.  Orwell 1986???????
How easily we are induced into giving up our liberty and our privacy – all for expediency, disregarding the “hidden agenda” of complete surveillance in the hands of a criminal mafia.

http://penumbralreport.com /

Police Conduct Warrantless Searches of Smartphones

Police now routinely and with the blessing of the courts in some states are conducting warrantless searches of smart phones.  Currently, the ACLU is seeking records from the Michigan State Police (MSP) which relate to its practice of downloading essentially every piece of information from a citizen’s phone often without a warrant or even a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.  The MSP has denied the reports by some citizens in Michigan that motorists and others are having their cell phones searched during routine stops.  What is not in dispute is the fact that the department is using the Cellebrite UFED Physical Pro an extremely powerful tool that can collect nearly every piece of data stored on the device, even some data which has previously been deleted.

While we are unable to find any Michigan Supreme Court case on the issue, other states have decided its legality.  For instance, in January the California Supreme Court held in People v. Diaz that incident to a lawful arrest, a police officer could search a citizen’s cell phone without a warrant.  Other state supreme courts such as Ohio and Wisconsin have decided the issue differently holding that unless there are some emergency or exigent circumstances such a search violates a citizen’s right to be free from an unreasonable search and seizure.  While it is expected that Diaz’ lawyers will appeal to the United States Supreme Court, there appears to be little interest on the part of the Supremes to offer any guidance on the matter, especially in light of the fact that in 2010 they refused to hear the similar Ohio case, State v. Smith.

Your Smartphone Can Record Keystrokes From Your Desktop

Not only can smartphones be used against you in criminal proceedings, but new evidence is emerging that the devices themselves can be used to spy on other computers. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been successful at testing an interesting hack using the accelerometer which comes standard on smartphones.  The accelerometer is the built-in hardware which tells the phone if it’s being moved or tilted.  Using the device they have been able to read the words and entire sentences typed onto a desktop computer’s keyboard using a smartphone sitting next to it on the desk, and to do so with up to 80 percent accuracy- essentially turning the smartphone into a wireless keylogger.

“We first tried our experiments with an iPhone 3GS, and the results were difficult to read,” said Patrick Traynor, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science.  “But then we tried an iPhone 4, which has an added gyroscope to clean up the accelerometer noise, and the results were much better.  We believe that most smartphones made in the past two years are sophisticated enough to launch this attack.”