Bits & PIeces #36

 

 

 

Elizabeth Warren’s new bill that would cut student loan borrowing rates down to those paid by the big banks for their loans is the best piece of legislation to hit the hill in memory. It’s a no brainer, an investment in America’s future. Student loans are now up around 8% and threatening to double. The concept of saddling America’s kids with a lifetime debt so they can get an education is completely counter-productive. We need to educate more of our kids, not less, especially if we are to continue to compete in the global marketplace. Let’s hope that the dumderheads in congress all get behind this intelligent and functional piece of legislation. It shouldn’t be difficult, even for congress to understand the benefits of this piece of legislation. Only the banking interests are against it.

 

 

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It’s bad enough that Eric Holder and the DOJ can’t jail the felonious bankers and their butt boys that are stealing from the American public, or the criminals that were responsible for the home mortgage crisis that all but caused the recent depression but now they have added to their incompetent failures by attacking the victims of their inability to do their job.

 

There have been over 30 arrests and a number of protesters have been unnecessarily tasered by local cops who don’t know how to do their jobs during demonstrations by the Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes, housing advocacy groups trying to get the Attorney general and the DOJ to just do their jobs.

 

Everyone with at least minimal intelligence agrees that Holder is incentivizing the criminals in the financial business to break the law by his ineffectual handling of financial crimes. So Holder’s cowardly reaction seems to be to release the dogs on those demanding that he do his job or stop taking taxpayers money.

 

It really is time for Obama to step in and replace this guy. It’s bad enough that the President has reneged on so many of the areas that he appeared to stand for when he needed our votes. It’s time that he finally did the right thing for the people.

 

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The Koch brothers are all over the news, trying to buy newspapers, using their phony institutions like Heritage to spread lies about everything that will make them money and help destroy democracy and the air we breathe, but where did these robber barons get their cash. The curmudgeon took a look,

 

Big daddy, Fred Koch started the ball rolling by going to Soviet Russia and setting up the Soviet oil business in the thirties. That’s right gang. The Koch brothers father was a communist sympathizer and put them in competition with the U.S. in the oil business, working against the interests of his own country to help the enemy.

 

After he became a millionaire he returned to the U.S.  and used the money that he’d made helping our communist enemies to set up oil businesses here and to found organizations like the John Birch Society, which strangely was as anti-communist and bigoted as one can get.

 

The Koch’s, inherited their money from the old man, creating the second largest corporation in the country, dealing in oil, gas and forest products. Their oil business is one of the top ten polluters in the country and is responsible for over 300 oil spills that have garnered over three hundred million bucks worth of fines.

 

It has been proven that the Koch’s stole oil from native Americans, a case that started when their younger brother Bill, overcome with disgust by his brother’s business and moral degeneracy, turned them in.

 

These are the guys who want to control the American press. Watch your asses people. They just might do it.

 

 

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The little town of Fort Collins Colorado has given up. A few month ago they issued a ban on hydraulic fracking. Now, under threats of lawsuits from Prospect Energy, this small town with no money has caved. But it wasn’t just the threat of the lawsuit that did Fort Collins in. It was the Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper who drove a stake through the heart of this little American town.  He did it by announcing that the state itself, instead of defending the town would move to abolish the ban. This is a crook who accepted $45.000 from the energy industry during his campaign and another $104,000 from real estate interests who will now make millions in the leasing of property to fracking companies. The disgusting and disgraceful John Hickenlooper is exactly what’s wrong with American politics.

 

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A provincial court in British Columbia  has rejected a pipeline project because of environmental shortcomings. The government has stated that it was not satisfied with oil pipeline spill response history or plans. That’s right, fans, they can’t move that shit across their own country so they are trying to move it through ours. Does that tell you anything Mr. President?

 

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So Bush and Cheney took us to war in Iraq to get the oil. How did that work out? Investigation shows that it worked out about as good as their peace plans and their economic guidance of the country.  That’s right folks, China is the big beneficiary of the Iraq oil plans that we had before the war. Part of this is due to the fact that the Chinese are willing to take the oil with a minimum of profit because they need it for their national production. We aren’t getting it because the major oil giants like Exxon, BP and Shell want to, as usual, rape the land and make huge profits, thereby lowering Iraqi profits for oil that they own. It’s very clear that the combination of big oil and big Republicans will eventually destroy the world.

 

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Barak Obama’s choice of Penny Sue Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce is like a flare telling us that Obama has really returned to his  Chicago political roots and is starting to rape of the country. Off the top of my head I can’t think of a worse choice. Pritzker, whose money is inherited, was on the board of her family owned bank, Security Bank of Illinois, when it failed, the largest bank failure in the decade, due to unsound financial activities and predatory lending. The Pritzkers paid the government $460 million in fines. The bank’s uninsured depositors lost over $10 million and it’s failure cost American taxpayers $236 million, but Penny wasn’t done.

 

It seems that Penny, the lady that the President wants to be the Secretary of Commerce can’t add. She proved this by underreporting her 2012 income by $80,000,000 bucks. She said it was a clerical error. Sure it was, Penny. We all make mistakes like that. Unfortunately for Penny , it has come to light that $54 million of that money was tied up in an off-shore trust based in the Bahamas, the kind of trust that is used by wealthy families to avoid paying taxes. So why not reward this rich bitch for trying to get even richer while kids are starving all over the country.

 

 

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Big argument today, among the youngsters on MSNBC over whether Edward Snowden, who leaked the NSA phone intrusion information is a whistleblower or a traitor, This is the same debate that happens after any leak of this kind, see; Bradley Manning, Daniel Ellsberg, Barrett Brown or Julien Assange. It has always seemed to me that the answer to that fairly simple question goes to motive. If the guy giving up the information is getting paid, he’s a traitor but if he’s doing it for altruistic motives, like to reveal something that he sees and knows is wrong then he’s a whistleblower and should be protected, mostly from our own government, that has an overworked aversion to any kind of transparency.

 

The nature of intelligence operations is to be secret. This is based on practical, as well as a psychological reasons. We all know the practical reasons, the psychological ones are slightly harder to nail down. Suffice it to say that it makes all the spies feel more secure if no one knows how they’ve screwed up. This has been particularly obvious in the Bradley Manning case.

 

It seems like they just have to get over this little hill. They have to get used to people sticking their noses in their business as long as they are sticking their own noses into everybody else’s.

 

 

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Fox News is well known for its inaccuracies, sometimes intentional, sometimes not, but this week Roger Ailes, the boss at Fox proved that he’s the tree from which bad apples fall, when he outright lied about two important checkable issues.

 

In a speech accepting an award from the conservative Bradley Foundation, Ailes had the gall to claim that Obamacare would require 16,000 additional IRS agents, fact checked to be blatantly false, and that Obama was unaccounted for on the night of the Benghazi attack. It seems that the only news source that couldn’t account for the President on that night was Fox news. There are published pictures of him meeting with his security team. I wonder what ails Roger. It’s no wonder his organization is considered a joke in news circles, he has all the leadership qualities of a chimpanzee.