July 31, 2013

WOW! TURNING THE TABLES: California Town Using EMINENT DOMAIN To Save Homeowners From Banks

A City Invokes Seizure Laws to Save Homes


Banks = Waaa,waaaa, waaaa, waaaa..............




All of the loans in question are tied up in what are called private label securities, meaning they were bundled and sold to private investors. Such loans are generally the most unfavorable to borrowers and the most likely to default, Mr. Gluckstern said. But they are also the most difficult to modify because they are controlled by loan servicers and trustees for the investors, not the investors themselves. If Richmond’s purchase offer is declined, the city intends to use eminent domain to condemn and buy the loans.



The banks and the real estate industry have argued that such a move would be unprecedented and unconstitutional. But Mr. Hockett says that all types of property, not just land and buildings, are subject to eminent domain if the government can show it is needed to promote the public good, in this case fighting blight and keeping communities intact. Railroad stocks, private bus companies, sports teams and even some mortgages have been subject to eminent domain. Opponents, including the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the American Bankers Association, the National Association of Realtors and some big investors have mounted a concerted opposition campaign on multiple levels, including flying lobbyists to California city halls and pressuring Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration to use their control of the mortgage industry to ban the practice.



Tim Cameron, the head of Sifma’s Asset Management Group, said any city using eminent domain would make borrowing more expensive for everyone in the community and divert profits from the investors who now own the loan to M.R.P. and the investors financing the new program. “Eminent domain is used for roads and schools and bridges that benefit an entire community, not something that cherry-picks who the winners are and who the losers are,” he said. Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, has introduced a bill that would prohibit Fannie, Freddie and the F.H.A. from making, guaranteeing or insuring a mortgage in any community that has used eminent domain in this way. Eminent domain supporters say such limits would constitute a throwback to the illegal practice called redlining, when banks refused to lend in minority communities.



Opponents have also employed hardball tactics. In North Las Vegas, a mass mailer paid for by real estate brokers warned that M.R.P. had “hatched a plan to make millions of dollars by foreclosing on homeowners who are current on their payments.” In a letter to the Justice Department, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California complained that the opposition was violating antitrust laws and that one unnamed hedge fund had threatened an investor in the project. But not all mortgage investors oppose the plan. Some have long argued that writing down homeowner debt makes sense in many cases. “This is not the first choice, but it’s rapidly becoming the only choice on how to fix this mess,” said William Frey, an investor advocate.


cont'



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/30/business/in-a-shift-eminent-domain-saves-homes.html?pagewanted=2#h[]

July 31, 2013

Obama Tells Republicans To SHOVE IT As He Implements His Agenda WITHOUT THEM

President Obama is done caring about what congressional Republicans think. The president is meeting with Democrats in order to implement his agenda without them.





In short, the president is telling Republicans to take their obstruction, shove it where the sun doesn’t shine. Nothing enrages obstructionist congressional Republicans more than Obama working around them. The power to obstruct is only power that Republicans have left. John Boehner’s office has already been howling about a presidential power grab on every issue, but this is nothing different from what the Speaker has been saying for more than two years.


Republicans have no one but themselves to blame for their current plight. They could have had a grand bargain on the taxes, the debt, and deficit. They could have worked with the president to modify Obamacare. They could have had a hand in immigration, but each time that the president offered cooperation and compromise, they said no. Republicans have said no so often that President Obama’s only choice is to implement as much of his agenda as possible through executive action.


cont'



http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/31/obama-tells-congress-shove-implements-agenda.html

July 31, 2013

Senators CLAIM Their Votes On Key Issues Are "CLASSIFIED"

WASHINGTON — The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reportedly gave its approval last week to an Obama administration plan to provide weapons to moderate rebels in Syria, but how individual members of the committee stood on the subject remains unknown. There was no public debate and no public vote when one of the most contentious topics in American foreign policy was decided – outside of the view of constituents, who oppose the president’s plan to aid the rebels by 54 percent to 37 percent, according to a Gallup Poll last month. In fact, ask individual members of the committee, who represent 117 million people in 14 states, how they stood on the plan to use the CIA to funnel weapons to the rebels and they are likely to respond with the current equivalent of “none of your business:” It’s classified.



Those were, in fact, the words Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the committee, used when asked a few days before the approval was granted to clarify her position for her constituents. She declined. It’s a difficult situation, she said. And, “It’s classified.” She was not alone. In a string of interviews over days, members of both the Senate intelligence committee or its equivalent in the House were difficult to pin down on their view of providing arms to the rebels. The senators and representatives said they couldn’t give an opinion, or at least a detailed one, because the matter was classified. It’s an increasingly common stance that advocates of open government say undermines the very principle of a representative democracy.



“It’s like a pandemic in Washington, D.C., this idea that ‘I don’t have to say anything, I don’t have to justify anything, because I can say it’s secret,’” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank. “Classified” has become less a safeguard for information and more a shield from accountability on tough subjects, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Classification can be a convenient pretext for avoiding difficult questions,” he said. “There’s a lot that can be said about Syria without touching on classified, including a statement of general principles, a delineation of possible military and diplomatic options, and a preference for one or the other of them. So to jump to ‘national security secrecy’ right off the bat looks like an evasion.”



Syria is not the only topic where public debate has been the exception because a matter was classified. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., spoke last week about the frustration he felt because he could not tell his constituents that he believed secret rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had expanded the collection of telephone and Internet data far beyond what many in Congress thought they had authorized. “Months and years went in to trying to find ways to raise public awareness about secret surveillance authorities within the confines of classification rules,” Wyden said at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. Had it not been for a leak of a secret court order on the collection of cellphone metadata by former National Security Agency contract worker Edward Snowden, the program might still be beyond discussion, Wyden noted. But the classification barrier may not be as watertight as committee members make it out to be. Senate Resolution 400, which established the intelligence committee in 1976, has a section specifically devoted to committee oversight of the classification system, which is directed by the executive branch. If a member of the committee feels that classified information is of valid public interest, he or she can ask that it be declassified.


cont'


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/30/198097/for-congress-its-classified-is.html#.UfkT8Rbq7oV

July 31, 2013

Glenn Greenwald OWNS Toobin Over Snowden, Manning

Lackey Toobin shovels bullshit at wood-chipper speed......



Is Army Private First Class Bradley Manning a whistleblower or a criminal for releasing thousands of secret State Department documents? CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald debate the topic Tuesday night on CNN. Manning was found guilty in a military court-martial of numerous charges for transferring hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, but was acquitted of the most serious charge against him: aiding the enemy.


Toobin described the verdict as “good,” claiming the charge of aiding the enemy was excessive but agreeing with the other charges against Manning. Greenwald, on the other hand, said Manning only faced prosecution because he was a relatively poor and politically unimportant person. He noted that Bob Woodward had published top secret information without ever fearing charges against him.


But Toobin insisted that Woodword selectively releasing information was completely different than Manning releasing 700,000 secret State Department documents. Greenwald said it was the job of journalists to inform the public what the government was doing. He denied the documents leaked by Manning put anyone in harms way. Greenwald compared Manning to those who leaked information about the Vietnam war and the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.





http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/30/jeffrey-toobin-and-glenn-greenwald-fiercely-battle-over-bradley-manning/

July 30, 2013

BWHAHAHAHA: Chris Christie STABS Rand Paul in His RED STATE 'MOOCHER HEART'

Like a scene from Animal House.....



If there’s one thing that really hurts a red state conservative, it’s reminding them that their states tend to be welfare bums living off of the generosity of prosperous blue states. The 47%, if you will, who won’t take responsibility for themselves. On Tuesday, Republican Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie used that fact to return fire against Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who accused Christie and Republican Representative Peter King of being the reason the government was bankrupt. Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, Christie scoffed at Pauls’ “gimme, gimme, gimme” jabs and reminded everyone that New Jersey is a donor state, according to Politickernj, getting 61 cents back on the dollar while Rand’s Kentucky gets $1.51 for every dollar.





Over the last few days, Republicans King Christie have been tearing into Republican Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and his “anti-war” NSA foot pounding, saying he is weakening the Republican Party’s bona fides on national security. So Paul took it to the next level, slamming both King and Christie for being takers who are bankrupting the government. Paul said, “The people who want to criticize me and call me names, they are precisely the same people who are unwilling to cut the spending. They are ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme all my Sandy money now.’ Those are the people who are bankrupting the government and not allowing enough money be left over for national defense.”



So now Christie fires back that if Paul’s state weren’t such a loser welfare state, maybe we wouldn’t be broke. True enough, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called the idea of red states secession from the union a “Confederacy of Takers.” He wrote, “Red states receive, on average, far more from the federal government in expenditures than they pay in taxes. The balance is the opposite in blue states. The secession petitions, therefore, give the opportunity to create what would be, in a fiscal sense, a far more perfect union.” Who can forget Talking Points Memo’s red state welfare status map, using 2010 data they compiled from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Internal Revenue Service:





cont'



http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/30/chris-christie-stabs-rand-paul-red-state-heart-reminding-jersey-donor-state.html

July 30, 2013

WikiLeaks Attorney on Manning Guilty Verdict: BLOWING WHISTLE on U.S. War Crimes is NOT ESPIONAGE

This is a MUST WATCH interview!!........

July 30, 2013

Bradley Manning FOUND NOT GUILTY OF AIDING THE ENEMY

Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was found not guilty on Tuesday morning on charges of knowingly aiding enemies of the U.S. by transferring 750,000 pages of military files to WikiLeaks, the Associated Press reported. Manning was tried on 20 other criminal counts, and offered to plead guilty to most of them, but refused to say he helped the terrorist network al-Qaeda.


Manning requested that the judge, Colonel Denise Lind, have the responsibility of determining the verdict, as opposed to a military jury. His attorney, David Coombs, told the court during his closing argument on July 26 that Manning “He “was hoping to spark worldwide discussion” by leaking the information and shed light on U.S. military policy.


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange defended Manning’s actions in an interview with CNN shortly before the verdict was released.


We call those types of people that are willing to risk — not be a martyr but risk being a martyr — for all the rest of us, we call those people heroes,” Assange told host Jake Tapper. “Bradley Manning is a hero.”



http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/30/bradley-manning-found-not-guilty-of-aiding-the-enemy/

July 30, 2013

"WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A TANK!"

Can you smell the coming stench lurking around the corner?.....




Why is a SWAT team assaulting me? I’m just dancing at a rave?



The George W. Bush administration quickly made it clear that the drug war would once again be fought as a culture war. Bush appointed only one drug czar in his two terms. John Walters was a longtime aide to William Bennett who, like Bennett, took a hard-line, zero-tolerance approach to drugs. But when the 9/11 attacks happened eight months after Bush was inaugurated, they presented a new opportunity. Instead of exploiting the fear of crime or tapping into what remained of anti-counterculture sentiment, they could now exploit the fear of terrorist attacks. They would use the 9/11 attacks for drug war propaganda. And so, starting in the February following the attacks, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) started the “I helped . . . ” campaign, which consisted of commercial and print ads claiming that casual drug users in the United States were supporting the very sorts of terrorists that had attacked America. The television commercials featured a series of young people portrayed as casual drug users. One by one, the young actors rattled off the varieties of atrocity allegedly funded by recreational drug use. “I helped kill a policeman,” one said. “I helped murder families,” said another. “I helped kidnap people’s dads,” said still another. The ads aired during the 2002 Super Bowl, just after a September 11–themed halftime show that featured a running scroll of the names of the 9/11 victims, accompanied by a performance by the band U2. The campaign was not only shamefully exploitative, it was simply false. The claim that casual drug users supported terrorism was dubious at best. To the extent that black market drug purchases in the United States did support terror groups, it was the “black market” part that made it possible. Nearly all of the terror attacks listed on the DEA’s website at the time had been attacks by drug-smuggling groups related to the drug trade, and nearly all had taken place in Latin America and Mexico. The only widely used drug in the United States with any tangible connection to terrorism of the 9/11 variety was heroin, and even that link was tenuous. By the federal government’s own estimates, 82 percent of U.S. heroin came from Mexico and South America. A small percentage was domestically grown, and much of the rest came from a slew of countries in Asia, only a few of which were host to active anti-American terrorist groups. There was just no evidence that Al Qaeda operatives were selling pot to Americans to fund their schemes to slam airplanes into buildings. But that was the line the government was pushing. The DEA would later put on a touring museum exhibit with the same themes. It included pieces of rubble from the World Trade Center.




If anything, there was a stronger argument that the country’s antidrug efforts were sponsoring terrorism. In May 2001—just four months before September 11—the U.S. State Department announced a $43 million aid gift to Afghanistan, which at the time was ruled by the Taliban. The grant was intended to be used to compensate Afghan farmers who had been hurt by a Taliban edict (encouraged by the United States) banning the cultivation of opium poppies. Of course, the edict didn’t really stop the heroin from flowing out of Afghanistan. It simply enabled the Taliban to consolidate heroin production so that more of the revenue went directly to the regime. The United States had also given aid to support a drug war in Thailand that included government “death squads” that human rights groups accused of carrying out as many as four thousand extrajudicial executions of suspected drug offenders. U.S. aid had also gone to right-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia that were accused of mass human rights abuses. From a broader view, the ads weren’t all that different from prior attempts to associate drugs and intoxicants with whatever bogeyman the country happened to be facing at the time. But by tying even casual drug users to terrorism so soon after one of the most horrific attacks on U.S. soil in the country’s history—particularly an attack that took the lives of so many police officers—the federal government afforded drug cops yet more moral license to treat suspected drug offenders as enemy combatants not as citizens with rights. Bush also continued Clinton’s assault on medical marijuana. In the 2000 campaign, Bush had promised a federalist approach to the issue—he had said he would leave it to the states to decide. That promise didn’t last long. It quickly became clear that, like Clinton before him, Bush would give no quarter to sick people using pot in states that had legalized it for treatment. The aggressive raids that began during the Clinton administration increased, in both number and intensity.




The result was the perverse spectacle of armed federal cops taking down medical facilities and their patients. On September 5, 2002, for example, federal agents raided the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, California. Suzanne Pfeil, a post-polio patient who couldn’t walk without leg braces and crutches, told columnist Mitch Albom that she awoke to find federal agents pointing assault rifles at her head. They yelled at her to get up. She said she couldn’t. They yelled at her some more. She explained, again, that she was crippled. They finally handcuffed Pfeil to her bed, then moved on to other patients. Because she was allergic to many classes of drugs, Pfeil smoked marijuana to alleviate muscle and nerve pain brought on by her condition. On the same day, federal agents also raided the home of the facility’s owners, Valerie and Michael Coral. A DEA SWAT team decked out in flak jackets and M-16s stormed the house, shoved Valerie Coral to the ground, and put a gun to her head. She was cuffed, arrested, and taken to a federal detention center, still wearing her pajamas. When asked if such heavy-handed tactics were necessary given that Valerie Coral was hardly a dangerous drug kingpin, DEA spokesman Will Glaspy replied, “We target drug traffickers. There is no such term as ‘medical marijuana,’ except as created by the marijuana lobby.” A week later, agents raided the Genesis 1:29 medical cannabis dispensary and the grower that supplied it. California attorney general Bill Lockyer was angry, protesting, “A medical marijuana provider such as the Santa Cruz collective represents little danger to the public and is certainly not a concern which would warrant diverting scarce federal resources.” The heavy-handed federal enforcement on medical providers wasn’t limited to marijuana. As fears about prescription opioid painkillers started to take root in the media in the early 2000s, the DEA began targeting doctors, and it has been doing so ever since. These are professionals with medical degrees, practices, offices, and patients, singled out for allegedly overprescribing a certain class of drugs. There’s still a debate over whether overprescribing these drugs—as defined by drug cops, not other doctors—should even be a crime, and whether some of the doctors were even overprescribing in the first place. Those questions aside, it’s hard to fathom why it would be necessary to send SWAT teams to storm their homes and offices, subjecting their families and patients to the violence and volatility of a typical raid.




The federal government wasn’t even pretending anymore. Alleged “states’ rights” supporters like Asa Hutchison, the head of DEA appointed by Bush in 2001, and Attorney General John Ashcroft were making an example of these doctors, these dispensaries, and the people who owned, supplied, and patronized them. The guns and commando tactics were completely unnecessary. No reasonable person believed that Suzanne Pfeil or Valerie Coral was going to take out a couple of DEA agents in a suicidal blaze of glory. Most of the dispensaries were operating openly, within state law. Bush, Walters, Hutchison, Ashcroft, and the rest of the administration’s drug policy team were using state-sanctioned violence to make a political point. “We’re going to have our own tank,” Keene, N.H., Mayor Kendall Lane whispered to Councilman Mitch Greenwald during a December 2011 city council meeting. It wasn’t quite a tank. But the quaint town of 23,000—home to just two murders since 1999—had just accepted a $285,933 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to purchase a Bearcat, an eight-ton armored personnel vehicle made by Lenco Industries, Inc. Since the September 11 attacks, Homeland Security has been handing out anti-terrorism grants like parade candy, giving cities and towns across the country funds to buy military-grade armored vehicles, guns, armor, aircraft, and other equipment. Companies like Lenco have thrived, creating yet another class of government hardware contractors, and a new interest group to lobby Washington to ensure the process of police militarization continues.

cont'



http://www.salon.com/2013/07/30/why_is_a_swat_team_assaulting_me_im_just_dancing_at_a_rave/

July 30, 2013

Ohio Bank Still REFUSING TO PAY For STEALING Everything From Woman's Home

Banks entitled to be above the Law!!
Who does the Bank think should pay for THEIR mistake??...


The Ohio bank that broke into a woman's home and mistakenly took all her possessions is apologizing—but not paying her for her stuff. First National Bank of Wellston admits that it had no right to be in Katie Barnett's home, since it was her neighbor who was being foreclosed. But the bank doesn't think it should have to pay for everything it took and trashed, sold, or gave away:



Seriously. Should we all have to keep receipts for everything we buy in case a bank breaks into our homes and steals everything? And do we have to keep the receipts in safe deposit boxes at that, to be sure those aren't stolen, too? I guess all those safe deposit boxes would be a big new source of income for banks like First National, so probably the bank's officers think that's a reasonable solution. If you needed an exhibit of just how above the law banks have become, this is it. First National Bank broke into Katie Barnett's house and stole all her things, and not only are we not talking about someone going to jail, but the bank is being allowed to quibble over whether it will pay her back for the full value of what it stole.


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/29/1227453/-Ohio-bank-still-refusing-to-pay-for-stealing-everything-from-woman-s-home



SIGN PETITION:

Tell First National Bank to pay Katie Barnett restitution for breaking into her house


"I don’t have receipts for all of my stuff. I wasn’t expecting a bank to come and to accidently repossess my house and throw it all away. And second, if I did, where do you think it would be? In my house with all my belongings?"

- Katie Barnett of McArthur, Ohio


Sign our petition to Eric Emmert, president and CEO of First National Bank of Wellston, demanding that they reimburse a minimum of $18,000 to Katie Barnett.


http://campaigns.dailykos.com/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=510

July 30, 2013

The Lady VANISHES: How a Disgraced CIA Agent “DISAPPEARED”

He came and he went: that was the joke that circulated in 1979 when 70-year-old former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller had a heart attack and died in his Manhattan townhouse in the presence of his evening-gown-clad 25-year-old assistant. In a sense, the same might be said of retired CIA operative Robert Seldon Lady. Recently, Lady proved a one-day wonder. After years in absentia — poof! — he reappeared out of nowhere on the border between Panama and Costa Rica, and made the news when Panamanian officials took him into custody on an Interpol warrant. The CIA’s station chief in Milan back in 2003, he had achieved brief notoriety for overseeing a la dolce vita version of extraordinary rendition as part of Washington’s Global War on Terror. His colleagues kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Muslim cleric and terror suspect, off the streets of Milan, and rendered him via U.S. airbases in Italy and Germany to the torture chambers of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. Lady evidently rode shotgun on that transfer.



His Agency associates proved to be the crew that couldn’t spook straight. They left behind such a traceable trail of five-star-hotel and restaurant bills, charges on false credit cards, and unencrypted cell phone calls that the Italian government tracked them down, identified them, and charged 23 of them, Lady included, with kidnapping. Lady fled Italy, leaving behind a multimillion-dollar villa near Turin meant for his retirement. (It was later confiscated and sold to make restitution payments to Nasr.) Convicted in absentia in 2009, Lady received a nine-year sentence (later reduced to six). He had by then essentially vanished after admitting to an Italian newspaper, “Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.” Last week, the Panamanians picked him up. It was the real world equivalent of a magician’s trick. He was nowhere, then suddenly in custody and in the news, and then — poof again! — he wasn’t. Just 24 hours after the retired CIA official found himself under lock and key, he was flown out of Panama, evidently under the protection of Washington, and in mid-air, heading back to the United States, vanished a second time.




State Department spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters on July 19th, “It’s my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States.” So there he was, possibly in mid-air heading for the homeland and, as far as we know, as far as reporting goes, nothing more. Consider it the CIA version of a miracle. Instead of landing, he just evaporated. And that was that. Not another news story here in the U.S.; no further information from government spokespeople on what happened to him, or why the administration decided to extricate him from Panama and protect him from Italian justice. Nor, as far as I can tell, were there any further questions from the media. When TomDispatch inquired of the State Department, all it got was this bit of stonewallese: “We understand that a U.S citizen was detained by Panamanian authorities, and that Panamanian immigration officials expelled him from Panama on July 19. Panama’s actions are consistent with its rights to determine whether to admit or expel non-citizens from its territory.”





When Lady was first detained, there was a little flurry of news stories and a little frisson of tension. Would a retired CIA agent convicted of a serious crime involving kidnapping and torture be extradited to Italy to serve his sentence? But that tension had no chance to build because (as anyone might have predicted) luck was a Lady that week. After all, the country that took him into custody on that Interpol warrant was a genuine rarity in a changing Latin America. It was still an ally of the United States, which had once built a canal across its territory, controlled its politics for years, and in 1989 sent in the U.S. military to forcefully sort out those politics once again. Italy wanted Lady back and evidently requested that Panama hand him over (though the countries had no extradition treaty). But could anyone be surprised by what happened or by the role Washington clearly played in settling Lady’s fate? If you had paid any attention to the global pressure Washington was exerting in an “international manhunt” to get Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower it had already charged under the draconian Espionage Act, back to its shores, you knew which direction Robert Seldon Lady would be heading when he hit the nearest plane out of Panama — and I don’t mean Italy.


cont'




http://www.salon.com/2013/07/29/u_s_chased_down_snowden_but_let_cia_operative_robert_seldon_lady_disappear_partner/