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| The Earth is my bitch |
Under the ongoing storm of corruption, people often feel that they do not have time to figure out what to believe.
Because, every level of life in Petroleum Civilization suffers from corruption.
In the sense that the U.S. congress cannot agree as to whether or not we should accelerate the world forward into oblivion, starve "the government of the people, by the people, and for the people," deny the fast approaching horsemen of the apocalypse, deny oblivion by ecocide, facilitate the suicide of yet another society, or even the big one: help with the extinction of the human species.
It all turns, according the leader of the pact, on whether God is destroying all the animals, trees, rivers, reservoirs, environment and climate, or whether an ostensibly less-wise humanity is (Inhofe's One Man Troofiness Crusade).
Anyway, on today's date in 2009, I posted a piece about The Corrupting of America, in a context where innocent children were being falsely convicted and sent to private prisons to be screwed, literally and figuratively:
The Corrupting of America
Is it any wonder that a nation, which for close to 100 years has increasingly relied on deceit to push policy, would eventually collapse into corruption?
Wherever you look, whenever you hear, and when you read in current news there is corruption. Our local officials, military generals, financial officials like Madoff, election officials, and on and on, are exhibiting the type of ho-hum everyday corruption a banana republic would have.
Our behaviour defines what we are, and that behaviour says we are becoming a corrupt banana republic:
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court said today that it will overturn the convictions of up to 1,200 juveniles in the wake of a corruption scandal that is sending two county judges to jail for more than seven years.(USA Today, emphasis added [it was censured, so here is the Wayback Machine Copy]). Judges sending kids to jail so corrupt private prisons can profit. That is as low as a banana republic gets.
Last month, veteran Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to taking $2.6 million in kickbacks to send juveniles to privately run detention centers.
The FBI director testified this week that the FBI has thousands of corruption investigations going on.
He said that the FBI is saturated with corruption investigations, and has already prosecuted thousands of officials for corruption.
He said that the FBI is running out of resources with which to investigate and prosecute such corruption.
This daily corruption plague has now reached into The US Department of Treasury and again into your tax dollars, to wit:
A top bank regulator has been placed on leave pending a Treasury Department investigation into regulators' approval of backdated cash infusions for troubled thrifts.(Huffington Post). A year ago in May 2008, under Bush II regime Treasury Secretary Paulson (who was able to receive over a hundred million dollars tax free for coming to Treasury) it became obvious to The Office of Thrift Supervision that IndyBank was going down.
The Office of Thrift Supervision said Thursday that its acting director, Scott Polakoff, was placed on leave "pending a review by the Department of the Treasury of the OTS' August 2008 actions related to post-period capital contributions."
For some reason Scott Polakoff backdated capital infusions that added up to a thousand times more than the AIG bonuses.
That "small" (by comparison to this $18 billion) AIG amount was enough to drive the nation into anger. Will there be a thousand times more anger now?
Anyway, back to the story. This backdating of cash infusions by Polakoff would allow the IndyBank people to spend the $18 billion in the way they wanted to before the FDIC attained the authority to take over and freeze assets and accounts.
They could selectively take care of "special people" but not others. They could pick and choose as if they had done it "a while back".
It does not look good to say the least. Actually no corruption or deceit by the government looks good does it?
by Dire Straits, (lyrics), excerpt:
"Yes it's no use saying that you don't know nothing
It's still gonna get you if you don't do something
Sitting on a fence that's a dangerous course
Oh, you could even catch a bullet from the peace-keeping force
Even the hero gets a bullet in the chest
Oh yeah, once upon a time in the west"
The next post in this series is here.
"Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is poised to help Shell clear a major hurdle in its effort to resume drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean, despite opposition from her hometown of Seattle, where the company’s drilling fleet would be moored at the city’s port.
ReplyDeleteAll nine members of the Seattle City Council signed a letter on Monday calling on Jewell to block the Arctic drilling, said Councilmember Mike O’Brien, who spearheaded the effort."
(link)
These are off topic and fyi:
ReplyDeleteThe Toxins That Threaten Our Brains
Leading scientists recently identified a dozen chemicals as being responsible for widespread behavioral and cognitive problems. But the scope of the chemical dangers in our environment is likely even greater. Why children and the poor are most susceptible to neurotoxic exposure that may be costing the U.S. billions of dollars and immeasurable peace of mind.
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/the-toxins-that-threaten-our-brains/284466/?single_page=true
Court Accepts DOJ’s ‘State Secrets’ Claim to Protect Shadowy Neocons: a New Low
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/26/new-low-obama-doj-federal-courts-abusing-state-secrets-privilege/
A truly stunning debasement of the U.S. justice system just occurred through the joint efforts of the Obama Justice Department and a meek and frightened Obama-appointed federal judge, Edgardo Ramos, all in order to protect an extremist neocon front group from scrutiny and accountability. The details are crucial for understanding the magnitude of the abuse here.
"Libruls" protecting "neoCons" seems contrived at first blush, however, in a culture where politicians serve themselves rather than the people, it seems plausible.
DeleteThat there are toxins which impact upon official behavior seems to be a certainty (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 4).
Only toxic minds would produce toxic chemicals in the first place.
The origin of toxic behavior, then, is not chemicals that are produced by way of that toxic behavior.
No, the origin of toxic behavior is a dynamic that takes place in the cognition of who or what produces those toxic chemicals (The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere).
Thereafter, of course, there could be subsequent recursion whereby the chemicals produced engender further toxic damage to mental processes that impact upon behavior.