Houston Area Liberty Campaign

By Shahien Nasiripour via Huffingtonpost

NEW YORK — The Federal Reserve on Wednesday reluctantly opened the books on its monumental campaign to save the financial system in the midst of the recent crisis, revealing how it distributed some $3.3 trillion in relief.

The data revealed that the Fed’s aid was scattered much more widely than previously understood. Two European megabanks — Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse — were the largest beneficiaries of the Fed’s purchase of mortgage-backed securities. The Fed’s dollars also flowed to major American companies that are not financial players, including McDonald’s and Harley-Davidson, through unsecured short-term loans.

The measure, initiated in Jan. 2009 to stimulate the flow of credit and keep household borrowing costs low, led the nation’s central bank to purchase more than $1.1 trillion in mortgages packaged into the form of securities. The mortgage bonds are backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the twin mortgage giants now owned by taxpayers.

Deutsche Bank, a German lender, has sold the Fed more than $290 billion worth of mortgage securities, Fed data through July shows. Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, sold the Fed more than $287 billion in mortgage bonds.

The data had previously been secret. It was released Wednesday per the recently-enacted law overhauling Read the rest of this entry »

By Jack Shafer via Slate.com

International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week’s WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.

The recent WikiLeaks release, for example, shows the low regard U.S. secretaries of state hold for international treaties that bar spying at the United Nations. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, systematically and serially violated those treaties to gain an incremental upper hand. And they did it in writing! That Clinton now decries Julian Assange’s truth-telling as an “attack” on America but excuses her cavalier approach to treaty violation tells you all you need to know about U.S. diplomacy.

As WikiLeaks proved last summer, the U.S. military lied about not keeping body counts in Iraq, even though the press asked for the information a million times. Indeed, the history of scandal in America is the history of institutions and individuals routinely surpassing our darkest assumptions of their perfidy.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger via NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) It is now being revealed that US Senators slipped up in a big way when passing the Food Safety Modernization Act on Tuesday: They added what are effectively “new taxes” into the bill, and according to the U.S. Constitution, only the House of Representatives can initiate legislation requiring new taxes.

Thus, the House is now obliged to give this food safety legislation the so-called “blue slip,” meaning that it rejects the law and sends it back to the Senate for yet another vote. This would take time and effort, of course, and the Democrats have very little of either remaining in their lame duck session.

As explained on Wikipedia(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_slip):

“This blue-slipping procedure, done by an order of the House, is routinely completed to enforce its interpretation that the House is the sole body to introduce revenue or appropriations legislation. The failure of the House to consider the legislation means it cannot become a law. This tactic has historically proven to be of great use to the House and, as a practical matter, the Senate does not introduce tax or revenue measures to avoid a blue slip.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Raimondo via Antiwar

Rep. Peter King characterizes WikiLeaks as a “terrorist” organization, but who’s the real terrorist-supporter? Wasn’t it Rep. King who signed a statement of support for the “National Council of Resistance,” a front for the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which appears on the State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations? The MEKhas killed American diplomatic personnel, and is described as a fanatic cult by manyobservers: its supporters, who adhere to a weird combination of Marxism and Islam, were  succored by Saddam Hussein in Iraq before the US invasion, where they still persist (under US guard) to this day.

King’s support for terrorism doesn’t stop there, however: he is also a fervent booster of the “Real IRA,” an Irish Republican terrorist organization that plants bombs andassassinates its enemies. As a supporter of Irish Northern Aid, King lent his name and  prestige to a group that was buying weapons for the “Real” IRA, which were used to murder civilians as well as British government officials and police. Read the rest of this entry »

By BRADLEY OLSON via HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Houstonians may not have had the final word on the city’s red light camera program, which voters rejected in a Nov. 2 referendum.

A lawsuit filed by the city grew more complicated Tuesday when opponents of the devices attempted to intervene in litigation between the city and American Traffic Solutions, or ATS, the Kansas-based company that operated the cameras.

Paul Kubosh, an attorney who along with his brothers bankrolled the effort to convince voters to shut down the camera program, accused Mayor Annise Parker’s administration of purposefully offering a weak defense of the referendum.
Such a strategy could result in allowing the cameras to remain in place and operational, he said.

“It appears to us that the city of Houston is laying down cover for ATS because the citizens don’t like to have their vote challenged by an out-of-state corporation,” Kubosh said. “The city is trying to hide behind a federal judge to keep the cameras up because they need the money.”

The vote created an immediate $10 million hole in the Houston Police Department budget, city officials have said.

Defending the outcome

City Attorney David Feldman emphatically denied Kubosh’s charge, saying the city filed a suit preemptively in order to defend Read the rest of this entry »