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Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly

Commentary by David Reilly

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system — apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout — deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.

via Secret Banking Cabal Emerges From AIG Shadows: David Reilly – Bloomberg.com.

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn – Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 – were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.”

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

“Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.”

Monsanto has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is “based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products.”

Monsanto’s GMO Corn Linked To Organ Failure, Study Reveals.

Glenn Beck is being characterized by the establishment as the leader of the freedom movement and yet a closer analysis of his ideology reveals that Beck is nothing more than a fake revolutionary who has supported and is pushing policies that are diametrically opposed to those embraced by true constitutionalists.

Beck and Fox News have hijacked the patriot movement and are leading conservatives and libertarians down a meaningless partisan rabbit hole in a clear attempt to neutralize genuine opposition to the big government agenda of the Obama administration.

via Glenn Beck For Dummies.

The IG report also redacts the amount paid to the telecoms when we already know they were paid $1.8 million a year, and that, in 2008, the FBI asked Congress for $5.3 million for further “funding for the telecommunications industry participation in the Telecommunications Data Collection Center (TDCC).”

The IG Report discusses the unlawful use of exigent letters to obtain phone records of Washington Post and New York Times reporters, but redacts the reporters’ names, the year it took place, and the location where the reporters operated. Yet, in 2008, FBI Director Robert Mueller apologized to the newspapers for the incident, and confirmed that the reporters were the Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima and Indonesian researcher Natasha Tampubolon, and New York Times reporters Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez. These reporters were in the Jakarta bureau, and the incident took place in 2004.

The report reveals that AT&T routinely provided the FBI with the “community of interest” profiles of its customers without any legal process. However, the DOJ redacted a large section of the report that discusses what a “community of interest” is, including an explanatory diagram. Yet, AT&T itself has published several research papers extensively discussing communities of interest. Basically, your community of interest includes the people you call and who call you, and the people with whom this group communicates. It is sometimes refined by frequency or by time period. AT&T even published the Hancock programming language, which AT&T designed to analyze communities of interest, and “sift calling card records, long distance calls, IP addresses and internet traffic dumps, and even track the physical movements of mobile phone customers as their signal moves from cell site to cell site.” AT&T published this graphic, which illustrates AT&T using what they call “guilt by association” to determine fraud within a community of interest (the shaded boxes).

Over Redaction in Audit of FBI’s Use of Illegal Exigent Letters | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The search for alien life forms should be conducted here on Earth rather than in outer space, scientists have claimed.

Published: 7:24AM GMT 25 Jan 2010

The search for aliens should start on earth not outer space, says scientist

Prof Davies said: We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach Photo: GETTY

Professor Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona University will tell a meeting at the Royal Society that the best way of proving that extra-terrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe is to use evidence from earth.

The meeting at the Royal Society, which will include representatives from Nasa, the European Space Agency and the UN Office for Outer space Affairs marks the 5th anniversary of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) programme. Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society will also lead one of the sessions.

Prof Davies said: We need to give up the notion that ET is sending us some sort of customised message and take a new approach.”

He suggested that the search could focus on deserts, volcanic vents, salt-saturated lakes and the dry valleys of Antarctica – places where ordinary life struggles to survive – to find “weird” microbes that belong to a “shadow biosphere“.

The search for aliens should start on Earth not outer space, says scientist – Telegraph.

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression – and they’re about to do it again

MATT TAIBBI Posted Jul 13, 2009 1:49 PM

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush’s last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There’s John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain’s sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in goldenparachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There’s Joshua Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailedout insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone

DOWNLOAD BIG ONCE ODB TRIBUTE MIX

DJ Trew is the head honcho over at Ground Lift Media, and he also is the resident selector every Saturday at Crocodile in Wicker Park, Chicago. He approached me to do an Ol’ Dirty Bastard tribute set at the November edition of his Uberjam 90’s party, and this is what I came up with in the few days prior to the party. 13 of Dirty’s most dancefloor-friendly tunes blended together live. Grab the mix below, and RIP ODB!

via Big Once Music | BIG_ONCE.

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2008 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate , rather the money came from the organization’s PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals’ immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization’s members or employees (and their families). The organization may support one candidate, or hedge its bets by supporting multiple candidates. Groups with national networks of donors – like EMILY’s List and Club for Growth – make for particularly big bundlers.

via Top Contributors to Barack Obama | OpenSecrets.

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The President of the United States is said by some to be the most powerful man in the world — but should he have control of the spread of information.

legislation proposed on April 1 is no joke. The proposed bill would grant President Obama the authority to shut down public and private networks — including the restriction of internet traffic — as part of a cybersecurity emergency plan.

The bill was introduced by West Virginia Democratic Sen. John Rockefeller and Sen. Olympia Snowe, a Republican from Maine. The aim of the bill is to unite both public and private network operators to develop regulations for what to do in case of a cyber attack.

For obvious reasons, many are concerned about what such power could mean if the wrong actions were taken. Leslie Harris, president and CEO at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), said in a NetworkWorld story, “This is pretty sweeping legislation. Seems the President could turn off the Internet completely or tell someone like Verizon to limit or block certain traffic. There is a lot to worry about in this bill.”

While the public sector may be used to more government regulation and involvement, such control will undoubtedly bother corporations. CDT’s Harris added that regulatory rules could force companies to all conform to a similar system, which could hamper security and innovation. For example, if a critical security flaw was found in a mandated system, then the entire network could be susceptible to such a flaw.

Bill Allows Obama Power to Shut Down Internet – Tom’s Hardware