Saturday, September 5, 2009

Pentagon Scolds Media & Media Wilts

The Pentagon came right out into the open, leaving the shadows from where they like to control the media, and urged propaganda.

Out in the open they scolded the media for showing a picture of a dying soldier in Afghanistan, and the media dutifully wilted on the vine.

The Pentagon is marketing the war like a commodity, so they do not want disruptions like the photo to upset customers, because they are afraid people will think it is a real place instead of a glory movie I suppose.

The AP is retracting from comments made not too long ago where it had pointed out:
The Bush administration turned the U.S. military into a global propaganda machine while imposing tough restrictions on journalists seeking to give the public truthful reports about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Associated Press chief executive Tom Curley said Friday.

Curley, speaking to journalists at the University of Kansas, said the news industry must immediately negotiate a new set of rules for covering war because "we are the only force out there to keep the government in check and to hold it accountable."
(Warsters Press For Propaganda). That would mean that they no longer intend to keep the Pentagon in check and to hold it accountable?

As if they have any ability to do that since they are owned by war contractors that the Pentagon can control through unaccounted for tax payer dollars, as was pointed out in a recent post.

UPDATE: Ownership of news delivery is shown here.

Friday, September 4, 2009

Internal Struggles Shape The Media

Some look at the media, such as MSNBC, which is owned by segments of the military oil media complex, as was pointed out here and here, and wonder "If it is controlled by right wing entities, why are Olbermann and Maddow allowed to vent their liberal ideology and opinion on their own MSNBC shows?"

The answer is that the only things composed of one element are those elements themselves (e.g. carbon, hydrogen). There is no unitary media, unitary military, or unitary anything except the base elements.

The military has both liberals and conservatives, the quantity of each varying from time to time, so that internal control also varies from time to time.

Which means that the aerospace industry, including GE and other media owned by military industrial media complex corporations have internal struggles and their policy thereby changes from time to time.

This is nothing surprising because the populace itself and the government have the same or similar struggles as a matter of course:
The shape of a post-war Iraq, set to dominate tomorrow's US-British summit in Northern Ireland, is also the subject of fierce wrangling in Washington, with disagreements between Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department on everything from the make-up of an interim Iraqi authority to the control of humanitarian aid funds.
(The Independent). That was one month after the Iraq war began in 2003 when all the bushies were seemingly marching in lockstep.

The same disagreements and struggles take place within the military command structure itself, and that struggle gets better or worse from time to time.

Another thing to consider is that the media giants owned by military oil media complex corporations need legitimate income to cover their illegitimate income from plunder, so the popular shows like Maddow and Olbermann are both a cover and a legitimate income source.

Some report that this type of struggle continues in the Obama Administration.

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

News Week & Prescient Obama

In a past post I heaped some scorn upon Newsweek for coming down on Obama so quickly, concerning the Afghanistan war.

I focused on an article I thought Fareed Zakaria had written before the inauguration since it was published so soon after the inauguration:
Fahreed opines less than two weeks into Obama's administration. What a crock of weak news based upon a convenient amnesia. Since articles and magazines take a while to get ready for press, this was probably written before Obama took office.
(News Weak). In hind sight Fareed is surely in bed with the military to the point he "knows", that is, he is given information which he is directed to write about.

It is like the old retort, "when I want your opinion I will beat it into you".

In that article I pointed out how Fareed was so into the wars, and seemed to delight in them before each one began, and for a short while thereafter.

Fareed's Prescient Obama was the result of him having seen the road map the "career government employees" had drawn for the temps who come and go from election to election.

During an interview with a Kurdish journalist Noam Chomsky probably said it best, since he tends to have a form of prescience we can believe in:
Q. Why do you think people in the U.S. and even in other places of the world have been optimistic about Obama and his administration?

A. Two basic reasons. One is that they are glad to be rid of Bush. The brazen arrogance of his administration and its contemptuous defiance of world opinion drove the US standing in the world to historic lows. Almost any replacement would have been welcomed. The second reason is that Obama presents himself as an appealing person who offers partnership and conciliation, and as a kind of "blank slate" on which people can write their hopes and wishes. The serious question, always, is what is the substance behind the congenial surface? I have written elsewhere about that (as have others), and will not repeat. In brief, he is coming close to fulfilling Condolezza Rice's prediction that his administration will extend the foreign policy of the second Bush term, which took a softer line and less confrontational line on many issues than the first.
(Kurdistani News, emphasis added). I have pointed out that the election was a rejection election, and that the Obama Administration was making a strategic error if they were thinking it was an election based upon Obama's personality alone.

They may have known all of this all along but are as powerless as the rest of us to make all the changes we can believe in.

Getting Caught Is The Only No-No

We have been pointing out the strange and anti-American scenario where war profiteers own the news media, and therefore can more easily form public opinion.

These posts are showing patterns which indicate that something is greatly wrong with this picture.

In this post we are going to focus on mystery financial patterns that have shown up in similar business scenarios.

Looking back, we can see that the primary action which made Bernard Madoff most famous to the everyday citizen was getting caught.

Until that happened, he was just a mysterously successful investor businessman who had his propaganda down very well:
But the mystery broker turns out to be none other than Bernard L. Madoff -- a highly successful and controversial figure on Wall Street, but until now not known as an ace money manager.
(Wall Street Journal, emphasis added). When some expert and astute observers warned that his financial reports were not probable, everyone said "sour grapes" and "it is envy" and thus Madoff went about his "legitimate business" undeterred.

In fact, in the WSJ article cited above, like the sheriff who had Jesse James in a cell but didn't realize it, instead pointing out the cool guns and outfit he was carrying and wearing, the WSJ went on to say:
Mr. Madoff's firm can execute trades so quickly and cheaply that it actually pays other brokerage firms a penny a share to execute their customers' orders, profiting from the spread between bid and asked prices that most stocks trade for.
(ibid). We have pointed out that the same pattern was visible for years leading up to the Enron debacle:
Enron Corp. was named today the “Most Innovative Company in America” for the sixth consecutive year by Fortune magazine.
(One Offspring of Propaganda). That was the story up until the time Enron evaporated, and the only thing left was vapors of disbelief wafting around amongst the cries of anguish of those who Enron financially destroyed.

The same pattern has been showing itself in GE, and it trickles down to those who fancy themselves as journalists in GE's puppet media. The pattern had been spotted in 2002, however, by the real media:
Two weeks before his inauguration, Mr. Bush invited Jack Welch [GE], Ken Lay [Enron] and a bevy of C.E.O.'s down to Texas, and he has always run the White House by the cardinal rules in their playbook. A chief executive can do no wrong.
(NYT, Frank Rich, emphasis added). This was the party to plan the end of the age of robber barons, and then begin the age of plunder.

We pointed out how the military was hurting for money from congress, which works to cover their ponzi scheme (enough money must be coming in from a legitimate source in such schemes to dampen suspicion), and how the Bush wars solved that problem for them.

I was doing some fishing on an educational website, and I came across an interesting discussion by Christopher Oster and Ken Brown, both were staff reporters of The Wall Street Journal.

Both were able observers who had noticed the same "mystery financial figures" in the financial reports of GE, AIG, Enron, and others. We know that AIG and Enron went down not too long after that, so their suspicions certainly merit further consideration. Notice their focus:
New York-based AIG falls into the realm of black-box companies both because of its sheer size and because it is in the insurance industry, which itself is rife with black-box issues.
...
Shining one of its famous light bulbs onto its financial statements would help explain one of the great mysteries of the stock market -- how GE has managed to produce steady earnings growth for better than two decades even though many of its businesses are cyclical in nature.
...
As Wall Street started asking more questions last year about how energy companies were accounting for their trading-floor gains, Williams's then-chief executive, Keith E. Bailey, moved to distance his company from Enron and its opaque accounting, its related-party transactions and what Mr. Bailey described as Enron's aggressive appetite for risk.
(NYU, emphasis). Note that these observations were made before the facts hit the fan, companies went down, and the public gasped at the facts but did not grasp them.

A lot of the "mystery" of how companies closely tied to the Pentagon outflow of money continue along oblivious to the norms of accounting is not really a mystery:
"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

$2.3 trillion — that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.

"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service.

Minnery, a former Marine turned whistle-blower, is risking his job by speaking out for the first time about the millions he noticed were missing from one defense agency's balance sheets. Minnery tried to follow the money trail, even crisscrossing the country looking for records.

"The director looked at me and said 'Why do you care about this stuff?' It took me aback, you know? My supervisor asking me why I care about doing a good job," said Minnery.

He was reassigned and says officials then covered up the problem by just writing it off.
(CBS Evening News). What is being suggested is that foggy accounting at the Pentagon and foggy accounting at GE showing "mysterious profits" are not mysteries but instead are, as Church Lady says, "convenient".

Like when GE and The Carlyle Group get together to get all mavericky with tax dollars originally in the U.S. Treasury.

The SEC internal watchdog reports incompetent agency actions at times when financial ponzi scheme is obvious (Hat tip to Mark). Also found a piece detailing GE being fined by the SEC for improper accounting.

Another Try On Canine Ancestry


Canine scientists have had a hard time getting everyone to accept their hypothesis about when and where our beloved dogs actually came from. I admit to being a bit sceptical when part of the evidence submitted was a Boxer looking dog with a bobbed tail. I will stay on board so long as they do not tell me long tails evolved later during the British Aristocracy era. Anyway, they have narrowed it down to a location in China some 16,000 years ago:
“For the first time ... it is possible to provide a detailed picture of the dog, with its birthplace, point in time, and how many wolves were tamed,” says Peter Savolainen, a biology researcher at KTH. Together with Swedish colleagues and a Chinese research team, he has made a number of new discoveries about the history of the dog. These discoveries are presented in an article in the scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, where it is claimed that the dog appeared 16,000 years ago, in Asia, south of the Yangtze River in China. This is a considerably more specific date and birthplace than had previously been put forward. “Our earlier findings from 2002 have not been fully accepted, but with our new data there will be greater acceptance. The picture provides much more detail,” says Peter Savolainen.
(Science Daily). With cats it is much easier to pinpoint the date. It was shortly after curtains evolved, because we all know that cats can't survive for very long without curtains to claw up and chew on.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

GE Serves The Pentagon On TV Near Yoo

GE looks at the media as one of its tools for selling ideas as if ideas were toothpaste.

This echoes the observation of Professor Noam Chomsky, who said:
One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.

And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries—in Britain and the US—roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control.

And by now these are huge industries. They not only dominate marketing of commodities, but they also control the political system. As anyone who watches a US election knows, it's marketing. It's the same techniques that are used to market toothpaste.

And, of course, there are power systems in place to facilitate this. Throughout history it's been mostly the property holders or the educated classes who've tended to support power systems. And that's a large part of what I think education is—it's a form of indoctrination. You have to reconstruct a picture of the world in order to be conducive to the interests and concerns of the educated classes, and this involves a lot of self-deceit.
(Noam Chomsky, Professor, MIT, emphasis mine). Notice how GE calls various entities "Brands" on its own website:
BRANDS
* Bravo
* CNBC
* Focus Features & Rogue Pictures
* Global Networks
* MSNBC
* Mun2
* NBC Entertainment
* NBC News
* NBC Sports & Olympics
* NBC Universal Television Group
* NBC Universal Television Stations
* SCI FI
* Telemundo
* USA Network
* Universal Parks & Resorts
* Universal Pictures
* Universal Studios Home Entertainment
* iVillage
(General Electric Website, UPDATE: they took the page down to hide this egregious reality, so to see this use The WayBack Machine). The GE website points out that they are also into military contracts in war zones as well as oil, gas, healthcare, and banking.

GE is part and parcel of the military oil media complex once called the military industrial complex.

This blog has a series of posts which show the roots of this system which worships war and deceit, our worst enemy.

The Pentagon needed to help Bush II get elected, to save the military oil complex from becoming a class like the military in other countries of the world:
Until more money arrives, the defense apparatus is literally feeding on its own parts, pinching this and that, scrimping here and there, in order to keep the same Cold War force structure in place and the same lineup of new weapons moving through the pipeline of development. During the Cold War era, the military institution acquired a reflexive appetite for growth that it's now unwilling to give up. Instead, it lumbers toward a self-induced crisis of malnourishment, as when an addict's starving body eats its own liver.
(Is There A Shadow Government - 2, emphasis added). That was the state of the military just as Bush II was being elected, with the help of GE and the GE CEO, Bush II's greatest campaign contributor.

The author observed "the defense apparatus" (a.k.a. "military industrial complex") as being an addict to public money, which is synonymous with dangerous, aberrant behaviour.

The Pentagon had the choice of easing the burden of the nation it is sworn to uphold, by dropping the cold war habit, or instead staying addicted and becoming too big to fail - continuing to impoverish the nation.

The Pentagon did not wait long after installing Bush II to begin their wars, which still continue to this day, to fatten them at the expense of millions of Americans who are losing homes, jobs, and healthcare.

We have written some posts exposing some of how the Pentagon, through puppets like MSNBC's Morning Joe, habitually deceives the public.

GE financials looked at here.

The next post in this series is here.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Nanobees For The Birther Wannabees

Those who fancy themselves as the "free press", including Joe The Journo, had a field day trying to glorify the "birthers".

If you don't know who the birthers are, good for you; they are those loud mouths who have a difficult time with the Constitution of the U.S., while at the same time claim to be loyal to it.

They have been ranting that the records of Hawaii are not good enough for them, or for us.

The U.S. Constitution has very clear things to say about records which a state creates, and how others in the other 49 states are to honour such records:
Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.
(Constitution, Article IV, Section I). Of course some of these birthers don't even know they are a state, like Texas for example, where the republican governor there wants to remove "their republic" from the Union.

President Obama has shown his birth certificate officially issued by the State of Hawaii, but they are rebels against the U.S. Constitution instead of defending it.

Why do birthers hate America?

Well, they do not have to keep the brain they have, because nanobees have been tested and hope is on the way:
The researchers attached the major component of bee venom to nano-sized spheres that they call nanobees. In mice, nanobees delivered the bee toxin melittin to tumors while protecting other tissues from the toxin's destructive power. The mice's tumors stopped growing or shrank. The nanobees' effectiveness against cancer in the mice is reported in advance online publication Aug. 10 in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
(Scientific Daily). This is good nanobee news for wannabee birthers who may want to trade their clunker brains in for a better mileage brain.

Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money - 3

In a previous post the case of Bloomberg L.P vs Governors of the Federal Reserve System was discussed.

Details of how the Board works came out, and it was held that the Federal Reserve System is a governmental rather a private entity, and therefore it was subject to the Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"); and that being the case, specifically, the federal court ordered:
1. The Board shall produce forthwith the Remaining Term Reports within five business days of the date hereof;

2. The Board shall search forthwith records at the FRBNY that constitute "Records of the Board" within the meaning of 12 C.F.R. § 261.2(i)(1); and

3. The parties shall confer following their review of the results of the search and inform the Court by letter no later than September 14, 2008 how they propose to proceed.
(Order and Opinion, Preska J., Federal District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan), 8/24/09, page 47).

Immediately the Board asked for a stay, to which the court replied that if would be stayed until the Board applied for and was granted an emergency stay by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. We are awaiting the appellate court decision.

Thus, this issue seems to be headed for the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the new Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor who was recently seated, was a judge.

Then the case is likely to go on up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Sotomayor is now a Justice.

Hopefully the very conservative federal courts, which interestingly have not been as conservative as they are now since the Great Depression era, will require that citizens be informed of what is being done with their tax dollars.

If a veil of secrecy covers the public treasury we can be sure that the plunder this blog has been complaining about will continue until our financial oblivion is complete.

We can also wonder why the administration does not chasten the Board for violating the President's Directive to be more open in FOIA requests.

The next post in this seris is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Morning Joe Takes Law Off The Table - 2

Like Baghdad Bob who could never get reality straight, Joe The Journo ("Mourning Joe"), like Joe The Plumber, is still in mourning that the neoCon manifesto was rejected by the voters.

He simply cannot fathom that his plethora of rubbish journalism did not prevent the reality that liberal ideas were elected instead of his neoCon rant.

So he incessantly continues his propaganda campaign financed under the covers by the Pentagon, through General Electric, his uber-boss and a war profiteer:
Throughout 2001, California Congressman Henry Waxman accused [GE CEO] Welch of intervening in NBC's 2000 election night coverage and pressuring the network to prematurely declare Bush the winner. Welch admitted he attended an election night party at NBC's headquarters and that he cheered for Bush but denied interfering with coverage decisions. When the major network and cable news division heads were called before Congress in January 2001 to account for the election night debacle, the president of NBC News offered Waxman access to internal videotapes made of Welch on election night, only to withdraw the offer just days later.
(Center For Public Integrity, under General Electric, windfalls of war). Joe The Journo's bosses have profited mightily from the wars, so negative publicity about torture hurts the bottom line of the world's largest corporation, which is not above committing crime to further its war profiteering:
In 1990, GE was "convicted of defrauding the Defense Department by overcharging the Army for a battlefield computer system." (Fortune, 9/5/94) GE paid $30 million in criminal and civil fines.

In 1992, GE "pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, money laundering and corrupt business practices in connection with its sale of military jet engines to Israel," the Washington Post reported (7/23/92). "Bob Pettit, general counsel to the FCC, said today that such convictions are 'relevant' for the commission to consider, but do not result in automatic loss of license," the paper noted.

GE currently faces anti-trust charges "of a scheme by GE executives to rig prices with DeBeers Consolidated Mines, the secretive South African cartel that controls much of the world's diamond production." (Fairfield County Business Journal, 5/25/92)

Most recently have come revelations of illegal reporting at Kidder Peabody, GE's investment subsidiary, which resulted in the dismissal of Kidder CEO Michael Carpenter -- who was brought in from another GE division by Welch in 1989 to put Kidder in order. "Like it or not, the scandals at Kidder Peabody were brought on by GE's management," Fortune asserted (9/5/94).

A February 1994 report of the Project on Government Oversight found that GE had 16 instances of fraudulent activity against the government since 1990 -- the most of any company listed (Daily Citizen, 3/14/94). Such revelations led Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter, to note, "If the law were 15 strikes and you're out, GE would be banned."

The FCC is particularly concerned with questionable activity before other government agencies, since this might indicate a willingness to deceive the FCC. Despite GE's unsavory record, formal challenges have rarely been made to its ownership of the NBC licenses. Such cases were to be raised in a hearing against NBC by National Capital Communications Inc., which was filing a competing application for WRC-TV, NBC's D.C. affiliate. But NBC and NCCI made a deal whereby NBC would pay $295,000 (ostensibly for legal costs) to NCCI, in return for NCCI dropping its challenge Television Digest, 5/24/93).
(Felons On The Air). The current cover-up of where taxpayer money went during the bailout lust for lucre fest and the AIG plunder is bound to cross GE's bow somewhere along the line. Most likely in the Iraq plunder [that page is no longer available, so here is The Wayback Machine copy].

Anyway this morning Barn Oracle, who holds Joe the Journo's hand along with neoCon Pat "I'm not a crook" Buchanan, said in so many words that the CIA and FBI cannot function if they are held accountable to laws concerning torture.

Crims & Crooks think alike.

The Addiction That Trumps Terrorism

There is talk that the Lockerbie bomber, convicted for terrorism, was released because of the addiction to oil:
"The wider negotiations with the Libyans are reaching a critical stage and, in view of the overwhelming interests for the United Kingdom, I have agreed that in this instance the (prisoner transfer agreement) should be in the standard form and not mention any individual," the Sunday Times quoted Straw as writing.
(UK News Daily). The hypothesis here is that where there is smoke there is fire.

If individuals instead of nations were doing such things, trading captives for drugs, there would be criminal prosecutions.

We seem to have entered an age where nations are let off the hook for crimes, except perhaps during wars when war crimes are committed; but even that may be falling by the wayside, because the U.S. is failing and refusing to prosecute its citizens for war crimes.

Such addiction is a serious national disease and it may in fact be associated with national demented mental conditions.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money - 2

In a previous post the stage was set for a series of posts concerning the Federal Reserve Board's (the "Board") refusal to honour a Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") request made by Bloomberg L.P., and the subsequent lawsuit.

It was pointed out in that original post that subsequent posts would deal with the specific issues of the case.

Let's let Chief Judge Preska explain the fundamentals of the case:
This action concerns whether the Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA"), 5 U.S.C. § 552, compels the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the "Board"), when responding to FOIA requests, to search for records held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ("FRBNY") and the applicability of FOIA Exemptions 4 and 5 to certain records currently in the Board's possession. This dispute first arose when Bloomberg L.P. ("Bloomberg") reporters Mark Pittman and Craig Torres each submitted FOIA requests (the "FOIA Requests") to the Board requesting information about the Federal Reserve System's extraordinary actions taken in early 2008, during one of the worst financial crises in the history of this nation.
(Order and Opinion, Preska J., Federal District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan), 8/24/09, page 1). In layman's terms Bloomberg felt that this information should be available to the public since public money is being used, but the Board (like Dick Cheney on public energy policy) felt that the people did not need to know because they would panic.

Street rumour on the internet has it that the Federal Reserve Board is a private entity.

So, in this post we will dispense with that notion, using the judge's factual record.

Some do not get the obvious reality that private entities are not subject to federal FOIA requests, and the case would have failed on those grounds alone had a private party been sued under FOIA.

The judge did the homework and so we can all benefit from the discussion of the Board that was provided in the opinion:
A brief overview of the Federal Reserve System structure is helpful for understanding the circumstances of this action. The Federal Reserve System is the Central Bank of the United States. It is composed of the Board, located in Washington, D.C., and the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks (the "FRBs"). The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions 3 (9th ed., June 2005) [hereinafter P&F]. Collectively, the Board and the FRBs fulfil the four overriding purposes of the Federal Reserve System: conducting the nation's monetary policy, supervising and regulating banking institutions, maintaining the stability of financial systems and markets, and providing financial services to major financial actors. See id. at 1-2. The Federal Reserve System considers itself to be an independent central bank because its decisions do not require ratification by the President or executive branch officials. Id at 3. The system is, however, subject to oversight by congress. Id.

While together the Board and the FRBs comprise the Federal Reserve System, they have independent mandates and responsibilities. The Board is a federal agency tasked with, inter alia, supervising or regulating the operations of the FRBs, reviewing and approving changes to interest rates charged by the FRBs and overseeing loans among and by the FRBs. Id. at 4; see also 12 U.S.C. § 248. An additional component of the Federal Reserve System is the Federal Open Market Committee ("FOMC"), a separate governmental agency that shares offices with the Board. See 12 U.S.C. § 263. The FOMC is made up of the members of the Board, the president of the FRBNY, and presidents of four other FRBs, who serve on a rotation basis. P&F at 3. "The FOMC oversees open market operations, which is the main tool used by the Federal Reserve to influence overall monetary and credit conditions." Id.

The FRBs, on the other had, are semi-autonomous institutions with private funding and independent corporate structures.[Fn 1: Statutes and regulations often refer to the FRBs as "fiscal agents" of the Government. See, e.g., 12 U.S.C. § 391; 31 C.F.R. § 210.7.] Congress chartered the FRBs and granted them distinct powers, apart from the powers granted to the Board, such as the power to sue and be sued in their own names, to make contracts, to appoint officers, hire and fire employees and prescribe bylaws through their boards of directors. See 12 U.S.C. §§ 341-361. FRBs do not receive appropriated funds from Congress but rather generate funds from stock issuances to depository institutions in their districts. See 12 U.S.C. §§ 222, 282, 321, 341. Each FRB has a nine member board of directors, six of whom are elected by shareholder banks within the FRB's district and three appointed by the Board. See 12 U.S.C. §§ 301-302. The FRBs' role within the Federal Reserve System is generally supportive of the Board, "carrying out a variety of System functions, including operating a nationwide payments system, distribution the nation's currency and coin, supervising and regulating member banks and bank holding companies, and serving as banker for the U.S. Treasury." P&F at 4. The FRBs give all revenue in excess of expenses to the U.S. Treasury. 12 U.S.C. § 289.

A central feature of the FRBs is their administration of the discount window lending program ("DW"), meant to relieve pressures on the interbank funds market and a means for providing emergency liquidity to qualifying depository institutions during times of systemic stress. (See Decl. of Susan E. McLaughlin ¶ 5.) "Access to discount window credit is established by rules set by the [Board], and loans are made at interest rates set by the [FRBs] and approved by the Board. Depository institutions decide to borrow based on the level of the lending rate and their liquidity needs." P&F at 31. While the Board regulates DB lending, see 12 U.S.C. § 347b, the Board has no input or involvement in the administration of specific DW loan requests. (Decl. of Susan E. McLaughlin ¶ 8.) FRBs publish DW interest rates, but information on the names of depository institution borrowers, collateral pledged by the borrowers, individual loan amounts, or the specific type of DB program borrowed from is not publicly disclosed. (Id. ¶ 9.) At least with respect to the FRBNY, loan and collateral documentation relating to each DW loan is maintained at the bank, and that information is maintained on a need-to-know basis. (Id.)
...
The Board is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, promulgates regulations regarding FOIA compliance, and maintains designated personnel to respond to FOIA requests. See 12 C.F.R. §§ 261.12-.17. The FOMC also considers itself a separate governmental agency for FOIA purposes and publishes FOIA regulations. See 12 U.S.C. § 263; 12 C.F.R. §§ 271.1-271.9.
(ibid, pages 1 - 7, emphasis added). This clears up the false notion promulgated by wackos on the Internet that the Federal Reserve System is a private entity.

As a matter of law it is a governmental agency subject to FOIA.

A following post will discuss what the court ordered the Federal Reserve System to disclose.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Political Origins Discovered - Plasmodia

This is the weekend rebel science post which we do from time to time. Scientists seem to have discovered the origin of some politicians, however, what is still uncertain at this time is whether only United Kingdom politicians originated in plasmodia, or whether some United States politicians did too:
“Most people’s idea of a computer is a piece of hardware with software designed to carry out specific tasks [e.g. a robot]. This mould, or plasmodium, is a naturally occurring substance with its own embedded intelligence. It propagates and searches for sources of nutrients [campaign funds] and when it finds such sources it branches out in a series of veins of protoplasm. The plasmodium is capable of solving complex computational tasks [as long as they are self serving], such as the shortest path between points [e.g. C Street & Capitol Hill] and other logical calculations [how much campaign dough do I get]. Through previous experiments we have already demonstrated the ability of this mould to transport objects. By feeding it oat flakes, it grows tubes which oscillate and make it move in a certain direction carrying objects with it [takes perks home during recess]. We can also use light or chemical stimuli to make it grow in a certain direction [influence peddling]. “This new plasmodium robot, called plasmobot, will sense objects, span them in the shortest and best way possible, and transport tiny objects along pre-programmed directions. The robots will have parallel inputs and outputs, a network of sensors and the number crunching power of super computers. The plasmobot will be controlled by spatial gradients of light, electro-magnetic fields and the characteristics of the substrate on which it is placed [e.g. talking point scripts from headquarters]. It will be a fully controllable and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer.”
(Science Daily, comments added). Clearly this describes politicians who work to enrich themselves through lobbyists rather than remain faithful to their people.

Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money

In a series of posts I want to show that the federal robe wearers who control money want to hide some of the economic facts from us.

There have been scores of posts on this blog alleging that we have exited the age of robber barons in the U.S. and entered the new age of the plunder barons.

For example, we followed the trail of bailout money rendered to AIG through a maze of shadow corporations to foreign nations where your tax dollars ended up.

We floated the notion that the military oil complex controls the flow of tax money, from you to them, through the devices of the federal banking system, etc., but primarily as James Madison said, through The Office Of The President.

Of course, President Madison was talking about wartime, when the nation was at war, which has been our status for almost a decade now, when he said:
In war, the public treasuries are to be unlocked; and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them.
(What Is America's Greatest Enemy). I suppose that the age of plunder having begun, as the graphs show, during the Bush II regime's lying to get the U.S. into war should come as no surprise, then.

The economic disaster that followed left millions homeless, jobless, and left us with a federal deficit we and our children will pay for in the next generations.

Bottom line: this blog alleges that we as a people have been plundered.

A lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court, Southern District of New York, at Manhattan, titled Bloomberg L.P. vs. Governors of the Federal Reserve System sought, through The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), to get hold of documents showing where bailout and other federal money was going.

The government fought hard to keep all that information secret, but failed and lost the case, which has now been appealed to the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, from which Justice Sotomayor was chosen for the Supreme Court of the U.S. recently.

In following posts I will discuss documents, beginning with the Judge's 47 page opinion, explaining why she, the Chief Judge of that District Court, felt the public had a right to know where taxpayer dollars were being spent and why.

The next post in this seris is here.