Occupy Banksters & Crony Capitalism & GREED

*NSA Phone Snooping Cannot Be Challenged in Court, Feds Say
Wired Magazine | David Kravets | 07/19/13

NSA - largest employer in Maryland

The Obama administration for the first time responded to a Spygate lawsuit, telling a federal judge the wholesale vacuuming up of all phone-call metadata in the United States is in the "public interest," does not breach the constitutional rights of Americans and cannot be challenged in a court of law.

... The New York federal district court lawsuit, brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, demands a federal judge immediately halt the spy program the civil rights group labeled as "one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government." ... Read more

Google, CIA Invest in 'Future' of Web Monitoring
Wired Magazine | Noah Shachtman | 07/28-30/10 older

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time -- and says it uses that information to predict the future.   The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."

... U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called "unstructured text" of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units. ... Read more

"Should Goldman And JPMorgan Control Power Plants, Warehouses And Oil Refiners?"
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

No really, that is the actual name of the hearing that the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will hold today in order to "clarify" why banks like Goldman are currently the owners of the largest aluminum warehouse in the US, or why Goldman, JPM and BlackRock are set to control 80% of all copper stores.

As a reminder, as we previewed yesterday, it was the Fed which in 2005 granted said banks permission to do just that. That the Senate should even have to debate such an issue shows not only who is really in control, but how many light years behind the curve US Congress is when even grasping how pervasive and insidious the New Normal cartelization by industry monopolists - because a handful of banks controlling the entire commodity logistics chain is nothing short of an monopoly - has become. It also shows that no amount of regulation can possibly prevent the banks creeping take over of all the key "just in time" supply choke points until such time as everything unwinds, yet remains in the control of the banks. Read more

Selecting The Next Federal Reserve Chair: When And How
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's term expires January 31, 2014. While his continuation as Fed chair cannot be ruled out, he has given no public indications that he plans to seek another term and most market participants - as well as many members of Congress in last week's Humphrey-Hawkins hearings - seem to believe he will retire from public service early next year. ... Read more

Choosing the FED Chairman! - Click to zoom

Ron Paul On "Bernanke's Farewell Tour"
ZeroHedge | author | 07/23/13

Last week Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered what may well be his last Congressional testimony before leaving the Federal Reserve in 2014. Unfortunately, his farewell performance was full of contradictory comments about the state of the economy and the effects of Fed policies on the market. One thing Bernanke inadvertently made clear was that the needs of Wall Street trump Main street, the economy, and sound money.

Quantitative easing (QE) and effectively zero interest rates have created paper prosperity, but now the Fed must continuously assure Wall Street that the QE spigot will not be turned off. Otherwise even the illusion of recovery will disappear. So Bernanke made every effort to emphasize that the economy was not doing well enough to end QE, while lauding the success of Fed policies in improving the economy. ... Read more

Boehner Signals Clash With White House on U.S. Debt Limit
Bloomberg | Roxana Tiron | 07/23/13

House Speaker John Boehner signaled a clash with the White House and the Democratic-led Senate over raising the U.S. borrowing authority later this year.   "We're not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending," Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told reporters in Washington today.

"We will not negotiate over Congress's responsibility to pay the bills that Congress ran up," White House press secretary Jay Carney said today when asked about Boehner's remarks. ... Read more

Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Tuesday, July 23 [14:59]

*DN | Detroit Goes Bankrupt: Will Unelected Manager Pit City's Needs Against Rights of Pensioners? (07/23/13) [18:05]

Drone Strikes 2004-2013 - Click to zoom

*Robert Greenwald | "Koch Brothers Exposed" (08/23/12) [1:00:03]