Elizabeth Warren was required to work overtime to fight off massive doses of ignorance and hostility delivered by well-paid shills for the banking industry posing as representatives of the People.
Or maybe not. Dan Froomkin reports on recent findings by university researchers who found that representatives beat the market by 6 percent while senators beat the market by 10 percent:
What's their secret? The report speculates, but does not conclude, it could have something to do with the ability members of Congress have to trade on non-public information or to vote their own pocketbooks -- or both.
Today, Barack Obama pardoned eight people. They included people convicted of drug offenses and a woman accused of evading bank reporting requirements. Bradley Birkenfeld, an American banker who formerly worked for UBS, Switzerland's largest bank, was not among the eight people pardoned. The information Birkenfeld voluntarily provided to the federal government in 2007 led to the government's "uncovering the biggest tax fraud in U.S. history." Perhaps Birkenfeld (photo here) was intentionally overlooked because pardoning him would remind the public that he is sitting in prison for no good reason, after attempting to report tens of thousands of rich tax cheat to the federal government. Birkenfeld's problem is that he is not a celebrity, or wealthy or a sport star or a politician, like many of the thousands of tax cheats he tried to bring to the attention of an uninterested federal government. Birkenfeld continues to sit in prison in Schuylkill Pennsylvania, while the United States continues to wage its war on whistle-blowers (and see here). Several additional links on whistle-blower abuse here.
Glenn Greenwald points to three extraordinary events this week that earn Barack Obama the title of Surveillance President. These events dovetail with the President's previous conduct aimed at furthering government secrecy at the expense of an informed citizenry. These events also need to be seen in the context of Obama's War on whistleblowers, as reported by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. "[T]he Obama Administration has pursued leak prosecutions with a surprising relentlessness. . . . [I]t has been using the Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national-security leaks—more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous Administrations combined." But that is just the beginning. Here's one more excerpt from The New Yorker:
Jack Balkin, a liberal law professor at Yale, agrees that the increase in leak prosecutions is part of a larger transformation. “We are witnessing the bipartisan normalization and legitimization of a national-surveillance state,” he says. In his view, zealous leak prosecutions are consonant with other political shifts since 9/11: the emergence of a vast new security bureaucracy, in which at least two and a half million people hold confidential, secret, or top-secret clearances; huge expenditures on electronic monitoring, along with a reinterpretation of the law in order to sanction it; and corporate partnerships with the government that have transformed the counterterrorism industry into a powerful lobbying force. Obama, Balkin says, has “systematically adopted policies consistent with the second term of the Bush Administration.”
[caption id="attachment_18134" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Kgtoh at Dreamstime (with permission)"]
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But back to the three recent events:
1. Top congressional leaders agreed Thursday to a four-year extension of the Patriot Act;
2. The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual's Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation; and
3. The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges in a lawsuit filed Thursday that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel violated federal open-records laws by refusing to release its legal opinion that concludes that the FBI may obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process, a watchdog group asserts.
Welcome to the United States of Surveillance.
The United States now has a new official language, as reported by The Onion:
Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language