Tuesday, August 28, 2012

We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant

We Don’t Need No Stinking Warrant: The Disturbing, Unchecked Rise of the Administrative Subpoena


When Golden Valley Electric Association of rural Alaska got an administrative subpoena from the Drug Enforcement Administration in December 2010 seeking electricity bill information on three customers, the company did what it usually does with subpoenas — it ignored them.

That’s the association’s customer privacy policy, because administrative subpoenas aren’t approved by a judge.

But by law, utilities must hand over customer records — which include any billing and payment information, phone numbers and power consumption data — to the DEA without court warrants if drug agents believe the data is “relevant” to an investigation. So the utility eventually complied, after losing a legal fight earlier this month.

Meet the administrative subpoena (.pdf): With a federal official’s signature, banks, hospitals, bookstores, telecommunications companies and even utilities and internet service providers — virtually all businesses — are required to hand over sensitive data on individuals or corporations, as long as a government agent declares the information is relevant to an investigation. Via a wide range of laws, Congress has authorized the government to bypass the Fourth Amendment — the constitutional guard against unreasonable searches and seizures that requires a probable-cause warrant signed by a judge.

In fact, there are roughly 335 federal statutes on the books (.pdf) passed by Congress giving dozens upon dozens of federal agencies the power of the administrative subpoena, according to interviews and government reports. (.pdf)

“I think this is out of control. What has happened is, unfortunately, these statutes have been on the books for many, many years and the courts have acquiesced,” said Joe Evans, the utility’s attorney.

READ MORE:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-subpoenas/

Friday, August 3, 2012

3rd world country IED terror tactics come to USA

Texas and U.S. facing growing threat of domestic IEDs 
By Stewart Powell

Improvised explosive devices have claimed the lives and limbs of thousands of American soldiers across Iraq and Afghanistan.  And now officials say the devilish devices are posing a growing threat across Texas and the United States.     

 
 The Juarez drug cartel detonated a car bomb on the streets of 
Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, less than a mile from the U.S. border 
on July 15. The use of car bombs represents a new tactic 
in the escalating street violence between drug cartels and 
Mexican authorities, much of it in the cities that hug the 
US border. (DHS)

 
The accused shooter in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre, James Holmes, allegedly deployed IEDs in his apartment, prompting federal law enforcement agencies to look into possible links to domestic or foreign-based terrorism.    

The incident follows disrupted IED attacks in 2010 — a car bomb disarmed in New York City’s Times Square and explosives detected in ink cartridges aboard two U.S.-bound commercial cargo planes. 
  
And with Mexican drug cartels using car bombs in cities bordering Texas, officials along the southwest border are increasingly concerned about ready-to-go devices being smuggled into the United States.  

“The domestic IED threat from both homegrown terrorists and global threat networks is real and presents a significant security challenge for the United States and our international partners,” Army Lt. Gen. Michael Barbero, director of the Pentagon’s so-called Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, warned Congress in classified testimony in mid-July. 
  
Terrorists remain committed to deploying IEDs “in traditional as well as new and creative ways” because the devices remain “a cheap and easily accessible means to achieve high visibility effect,” Barbero says.  
 
The growing concern is prompting urgent cooperation between U.S. military experts who are familiar with the devices and civilian law enforcement officers who are not.    

But legal restrictions on the activities of U.S. armed forces are slowing crucial collaboration, insiders complain. Federal laws dating back to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limit the use of U.S. armed forces in domestic law enforcement and training — impediments some members of Congress are pressing to change.    

The Pentagon’s specialized $1.9 billion-a-year IED organization has “saved many servicemen’s lives by teaching lessons learned in blood on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan,” report Reps. Peter King, R-N.Y., Daniel Lungren, R-Calif., and Michael McCaul, R-Austin, leaders of the House Committee on Homeland Security.    

“Their hard-won knowledge should now be shared with American lawmen facing these same deadly threats at home,” the lawmakers add.    

“To me it’s crazy that the guy who is the expert on IEDs overseas can’t coordinate with the Texas Rangers,” emphasizes McCaul, a former counterterrorism official with the Justice Department. “The military is unable to coordinate with state and local law enforcement, leaving a gaping hole in our security.”    

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw told the Houston Chronicle he’s “concerned” about the widening threat.    

 “It is essential that all state troopers be skilled in the detection and interdiction of (devices), precursor chemicals and component parts,” McCraw told the Houston Chronicle by email.   

Texas Rangers and DPS criminal investigation agents have training “to detect IEDs and their components in the course of their investigations, whether the targets are Mexican cartels or serial murderers,” McCraw added.    

DPS also has been working with the FBI to establish an explosive ordnance disposal team “to increase the state’s ability to address IEDs throughout the state,” as well as obtaining Department of Homeland Security training in IED recognition and post-blast investigation.    

DPS tactical response teams also have attended programs at Fort Hood where the U.S. Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit teaches disposal techniques, once explosives are discovered.    

Yet the Pentagon’s premiere organization combating IEDs overseas still cannot directly train civilian law enforcement officers even though its experts have become the worldwide experts on IEDs in the face of 127,683 IED attacks in Iraq and 60,832 IED attacks in Afghanistan over the last nine years.    

The weapons claimed the lives of 3,058 of the 6,535 killed in action by mid-July — or 47 percent of GI fatalities.   

“Deeper cooperation is absolutely essential,” insists McCaul, a former deputy state attorney general and a lawmaker working to eliminate bureaucratic obstacles. “I think military and government lawyers are being a too cautious. We want to fix that.”


http://blog.chron.com/txpotomac/2012/07/texas-and-u-s-facing-growing-threat-of-domestic-ieds/

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Think Socialism isnt here yet? Think again... and follow the money:


Follow the money trail.  The US spends 1,700 billion (1.7 trillion) annually now on socialist / welfare and general treasury money-moving type programs, about 500 billion on defense, and only about 500 billion on all other programs combined. 

Yes, more than 60% of what the Federal Government spends is on things NOT authorized by the US constitution.
By Tyler Durden

The following chart from today's TBAC presentation slidedeck should put to bed all debate of not only what the US government spends its money on (of which about half is generated through tax collection and half is borrowed primarily from either China or the Fed), but also what the trends in current year spending are compared to 2011. In summary: of the 4 biggest categories HHS (Medicare & Madicaid), Social Security or together Welfare, Treasury and Defense, Welfare is higher, Treasury is higher, and Defense is not only lower, but has lost to Treasury as the third biggest expense category year to date.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/what-us-government-spends-it-money

The depression is here

The depression is here — it’s just invisible
Commentary: The crash wasn’t sudden, but it’s still a tragedy

By AL LEWIS

DENVER (MarketWatch) — The Great Depression that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claims to have averted has been part of the background radiation of our economy since at least 2008.
It’s just that like radiation — it’s invisible. 

We’ve called it the recovery, the jobless recovery, the slogging recovery and more recently the fading recovery. We’ve measured modest growth in our nation’s gross domestic product to record that our so-called Great Recession ended in June 2009. And now we are saying that if this disappointing growth suddenly disappears, as currently feared, we will be in a new recession. 


There is nothing more depressing than hearing about a new recession when you haven’t fully recovered from the last one. I take heart in suspecting that in a still-distant future, historians will look back with clarity and call this whole rotten period a depression. 

The precise definition of a depression, of course, remains as debatable as anything else in the field of economics. By some definitions, it is a long-term slump in economic activity, often characterized by unusually high unemployment, a banking crisis, a sovereign-debt crisis, surprising bankruptcies and other horrible symptoms we can find in the headlines almost every day.
It is easy to avoid seeing all of these events as constituting a depression if you somehow have kept your livelihood intact all this time. But it’s important to remember that not everyone has to stand in a bread line during a depression. 

Nearly one out of seven Americans receives food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s more than 44 million people. If they all stood in a line and someone photographed them using black-and-white film, they easily could be mistaken for people from the 1930s. Instead, they go to a grocery store and spend their credits like money. There isn’t even a social stigma to make them stand out as any more glum or destitute than anybody else.

Fed, ECB meet to tackle global economy 

Markets have risen on hopes that the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank will make moves to spur global growth following two meetings on economic policy. Michael Derby reports on Markets Hub. Photo: Bloomberg.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that America’s poverty rate likely has hit levels not seen since the 1960s. Surveying several economists and academicians, the wire service predicted the official poverty rate would come in as high as 15.7% when the Census Bureau releases it in September. That would wipe out all the gains of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. 

Poverty is another word for joblessness, and our economy hasn’t been generating enough decent-paying jobs for many years. Globalization, technology, outsourcing, immigration and the schemes of financiers have taken their toll. No one is certain when jobs will come back, and many of the jobs that remain don’t pay anywhere near what, say, your average failing CEO gets paid. 

“Half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year,” noted Peter Edelman, author of “So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America” in a recent New York Times piece. “We’ve been drowning in a flood of low-wage jobs for the last 40 years.” 

If you don’t want to call this epidemic of rising poverty an invisible depression, call it the golden age of unemployment. Today’s laid-off workers can collect unemployment benefits for up to 99 weeks, staying off the public’s radar as an economic distress signal. Over that time, they often lose confidence, their skills degrade, and they can slip into the ranks of America’s chronically unemployed — where they no longer will be counted in the nation’s official unemployment rate, now at 8.2%. 

What are the societal effects of millions of people sidelined for so many years on end? College graduates, looking to launch careers, end up working at Starbucks. Middle-aged professionals apply to temp agencies for gigs they once considered beneath themselves. The nearly retired simply retire early. Even if we could return to full employment tomorrow, the drag of all these idled lives could affect generations.
As the economy reels, the national debt approaches $16 trillion, and we hear fears of Congress jumping off a fiscal cliff by year-end. Many states and local governments are struggling with massive deficits, too. Three California cities have filed bankruptcies. 

U.S. companies are warning of slower growth amid Europe’s meltdown, yet the Dow Jones Industrial Average has crossed the 13,000 mark, and some observers are predicting new highs for the index soon.
The rising stock market is as counterintuitive as interest rates falling to new lows after the U.S. lost its triple-A debt rating last year. It isn’t that investors aren’t wary. It’s just that every place else makes them more wary. This isn’t the definition of a recovery.

The real estate market also seems to be doing a good job of masking the true condition of the economy. Overwhelmed banks are slow to foreclose on homes, sometimes letting borrowers live in their homes without payments for more than a year. The result is a shadow inventory of homes nobody can count accurately. On the commercial real estate side, banks and investment trusts are slow to take markdowns, too. The shiny, new stuff may still sell. But the old stuff sports “For Lease” signs. 

The cure for our battered economy has been to allow our disasters to occur more slowly through taxpayer bailouts and extraordinary interventions from the Fed. So far, this strategy has worked. We have averted a sudden crash in favor of a depressingly slower one. At least if you don’t look, you may not have to see it.

 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-depression-is-here-its-just-invisible-2012-08-01?reflink=MW_GoogleNews&google_editors_picks=true

More proof that the central banks will ETWAKI

Prominant Investor, Irked Over Central Banks, Quits the Business


Investing Legend Louis Bacon Has Had Enough Of Algos And Central Planners, Calls It Quits

By Tyler Durden

Markets are toast as Louis Bacon plans to give back 25% of his fund to investors as "liqudity and opportunities have become more constrained." As Bloomberg notes, Bacon is struggling to make money in his typically macroeconomic trend exploiting fund as "the risk on / risk off environment appears to be an abiding presence that has keep engagement low." Macro funds lost an average of 1.3 percent in the first six months of the year. 
Bacon, pointed out that "Markets are increasingly distorted by central banks’ attempts to squeeze drops of growth from an over-indebted private sector across much of the developed world." The U.S. markets are hindered by "a caustic political environment and an anti-business administration," he said. 
U.S. banks have retreated from making markets in many securities because of the Dodd-Frank legislation, which limits them from trading for their own accounts. Bacon added that 'in some Kafkaesque absurdity,' the rule is "named after the two high protectors from regulatory oversight of perhaps the most egregious of U.S. financial miscreants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

Bacon pulls no punches as he goes after inept regulators in Europe and the US, and describes the state of affairs as "Disaster Economics, where assets are valued based on their ability to withstand a lurking disaster as opposed to what they may yield or earn, is now the prism through which investors are pricing markets." And perhaps most 'distorted' is the credit market where trading in individual corporate credits has also been 'decimated' he said. "I shudder to think of the stress that is going to occur during the new credit liquidation cycle."


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/investing-legend-louis-bacon-has-had-enough-algos-and-central-planners-calls-it-quits