(Reuters) - Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday that Congress will allow the country to borrow more by agreeing to increase the $14.3 trillion debt limit.
"Congress will pass an increase in the debt limit," Geithner told PBS Newshour.
Conflicts of interest, excessive risk-taking and failures of government oversight triggered the financial crisis and helped push the country into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, concludes a new report by the U.S. Senate.
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Getty Images The Goldman Sachs booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange |
The two-year, bipartisan probe by the Senate Investigations Subcommittee examined the economic crisis and the role played by Wall Street in creating it.
The Republican and Democrat co-chairs of the committee agree on its findings.
"The report tells an inside story of economic assault that cost millions of Americans their jobs and their homes while wiping out investors, good business and [the] market," said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich).
"It shows without a doubt that lack of ethics in some of our financial institutions who embraced known conflicts of interest to accomplish wealth for themselves, not caring about the outcome for their customers," said Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla).
Much of the 635-page report focuses on the investment banking giantGoldman Sachs and its mortgage-related investments.
Congressional investigators say Goldman [GS 160.17 
A new campaign by Philadelphia officials to reduce sexually transmitted diseases allows children as young as 11 to receive free condoms via mail order, outraging some parents who believe that's too early to start getting physical.
The program, offered by the city's Department of Health, features a website that includes facts on diseases like Chlamydia, gonorrhea and HIV/AIDS, as well as detailed -- and playful -- instructions for young girls on how to use female condoms.
"Every girl is different," TakeControlPhilly.org reads. "Figure out what position works for you. You can stand with one foot on a chair, sit on the edge of a chair, lie down, squat, or for fun, have your partner help you out."
The website, which instructs visitors to use condoms "each and every time," also provides an interface where users can request free male condoms mailed directly to their doorstep.
"Playing it safe just got easier," the website reads. "If you live in Philadelphia and are between the ages of 11 and 19, you can now have condoms mailed directly to you for FREE. Maybe it's difficult for you to stop by one of our sites to pick up condoms. Or maybe you're just shy or feeling weird about picking up condoms."
By Simon Black - Sovereign Man
Did you ever see Minority Report? It’s one of Steven Spielberg’s often forgotten about movies based on the short story by Philip K. Dick. In the movie, pre-couch Tom Cruise plays a police officer in the year 2054 who works for the highly specialized ‘pre-crime’ division.
Using a bizarre array of technology and metaphysics, the pre-crime division sees into the future and stops criminals in their tracks, arresting them before they commit a crime… sometimes before they even think about committing a crime.
This very elaborate and morally ambiguous law enforcement system is predicated on the government determining what your actions and intentions will be, often before you do. It’s not all science fiction.
A number of politicians and bureaucrats in Washington D.C. are seeking to step up the Internal Revenue Service’s powers, and technology, to essentially audit taxpayers before returns are even filed.
In remarks to the National Press Club last week, an IRS spokesman unveiled the agency’s vision for the “look forward” model in which most of the pertinent reporting information for the average taxpayer (W2, 1099, mortgage interest etc.) would be submitted to the IRS well in advance of the individual deadline.
After a massive upgrade in technology, the IRS would be able to pre-calculate what it expects to receive in taxes and instantly reject any return that doesn’t comply with its determination.
This may work fine and well for some wage earners… but start throwing in a few investment accounts, small business income, private partnerships, etc. and things can quickly diverge from the IRS estimates.
Imagine you start a new business on the side of your usual employment this year and take an initial loss due to ancillary startup costs. This wouldn’t factor into the machine’s pre-calculations of your tax liability, so you would be immediately rejected and flagged for additional scrutiny.
Makes you want to run out and start a business, or invest your capital in someone else’s, right? Not exactly.
ABOARD THE CHARLES DE GAULLE – As French navy Rafale and Super Etendard fighter-bombers carrying laser-guided bombs catapulted Wednesday off the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier into a cloudless Mediterranean sky, officers onboard described the difficulties they face: Despite all the modern technology, troops loyal to Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi are harder than ever to identify from the air.
Gadhafi's forces are now expertly camouflaging their units to conceal them from detection and attack from the air, the officers said.
RIO DE JANEIRO – Five days after Brazil's most lethal school shooting killed 12 children, Senate leaders decided Tuesday to rush a bill that would let the voters decide whether to forbid gun sales in South America's biggest country.
Senate leader Jose Sarney said at a news conference that legislators would treat the matter with urgency so the issue could be put before Brazilian citizens this fall.
The bill would have to be approved by both the Senate and the House before going on the ballot. A similar proposal in 2005 was strongly rejected by voters and kept gun sales legal.
WASHINGTON – The federal government on Wednesday ordered 16 of the nation's largest mortgage lenders and servicers to reimburse homeowners who were improperly foreclosed upon.
Government regulators also directed the financial firms to hire auditors to determine how many homeowners could have avoided foreclosure in 2009 and 2010.
Citibank, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, the nation's four largest banks, were among the financial firms cited in the joint report by the Federal Reserve, Office of Thrift Supervision and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,
The Fed said it believed financial penalties were "appropriate" and that it planned to levy fines in the future. All three regulators said they would review the foreclosure audits.
In the four years since the housing bust, about 5 million homes have been foreclosed upon. About 2.4 million primary mortgages were in foreclosure at the end of last year. Another 2 million were 90 days or more past due, putting them at serious risk of foreclosure.
FORT COLLINS - A clinic in Northern Colorado is advising parents of children who received a pediatric flu shot from their offices to get tested for some blood-borne diseases including HIV, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C after their vaccine syringes were shared between patients.
Med Peds Clinic of Fort Collins sent out a letter on April 6 stating a medical assistant at the office took the pre-measured children's influenza vaccine and only gave half to each child, assuming it was the adult dosage. Children between 6 months and 35 months are only supposed to receive half of the recommended dosage for adults.
Since children are supposed to receive two doses of the pediatric influenza vaccine within a month of each other, the assistant removed the needle from each half-full syringe, assuming it was an adult dose, and replaced it with a sterile needle, but not a new syringe.
Med Peds says she then placed the used syringes in a box marked "second doses," which also contained unused, fully-filled pediatric vaccines.
The clinic says some of the half-used vaccines were then used inadvertently on children returning for their second shot.
The medical assistant has been fired, Med Peds says.
Wayne Madsen Report
Posted April 13, 2011
(April 4, 2011) In yet another indication that America’s democratic experiment is a thing of the past, this editor has received word from a source in a foreign intelligence agency allied with the United States that there has been talk by some within the Obama White House that this editor is under threat. What particular stories have inflamed the White House are not known but the warning conveyed by the source, who has connections within the White House, was stark in its directness: “They want to kill you.”
It was perfectly clear that the phrase was not being used as a figure of speech.
That this development is being reported on April 4 is even more ironic. On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Kr. was assassinated in Memphis during his mission to support striking sanitation workers in the city. Now, we have our first African-American president and a threat to kill a journalist who is most definitely not one of their favorites has been seriously discussed.
Of course, muckraking journalists have been under threat before in America. In 1972, columnist and investigative journalist Jack Anderson had ended up very high on President Richard Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.” Anderson had long been a burr under the political saddle of Nixon and the president blamed Anderson for exposing a number of Nixon’s corrupt activities, including the exposure in 1956 by Anderson and his boss, Drew Pearson, of a loan from Howard Hughes to Nixon’s brother Donald.
In the years before the Watergate scandal broke but at a time when other various scandals in the Nixon administration began to receive the bulldog-like attention of Anderson, who succeeded Pearson as editor of the “Washington Merry-Go-Round column in 1969, there were serious discussions among Nixon aides Charles Colson and G. Gordon Liddy, as well as the CIA’s Dr. Edward Gunn, an expert on poisons, about assassinating the troublesome Anderson.
Scenarios included the use of LSD or poison but Anderson’s Mormon religion and the fact that he did not drink ruled out the use of poisons or LSD in his drink. Staging an automobile accident in which Anderson would be incinerated was also an option. Another scenario considered was one which would have appeared to be a random Washington, DC street mugging in which Anderson would be stabbed or have his throat slit. The plot to assassinate Anderson came to an abrupt halt as Liddy, Colson, and E. Howard Hunt, who had also been involved in the action against Anderson, were exposed in the May 1972 break-in at the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.
Although I have attempted to pattern WMR after Anderson’s and Pearson’s “Merry-Go-Round” column, I do not have the luxury of newspaper syndicators or a Pulitzer Prize, all of which Anderson could rely on as firewalls between him and those in the White House who wanted to kill him.
I ran the information about the warning from the foreign intelligence source by some African-Americans in Washington who have worked with Obama White House officials. Their response was less than encouraging. The bottom line is that the White House engages in the type of “gangster politics” for which their home base of Chicago has become infamous.
Although I have taken precautions in covering post-genocide Rwanda, child trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia, the “loss” of nuclear weapons at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, the gunning down by police of CIA asset Tony Carnaby in Houston, the story of “Washington Madam” Deborah Jeane Palfrey, and BP’s activities on the Gulf Coast in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and President Obama’s and incoming Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s past activities in Chicago, those measures were temporary and lasted for as long as I was in the field.
However, I have absolutely no desire to constantly be in fear of the type of a White House-directed or -tolerated hit like that discussed by Nixon aides on Anderson who had the benefit of a degree of support from his syndicate and the newspapers who carried his column, which included The Washington Post.
Preliminary plans are being made to continue the investigative journalism of this website from a safer vantage point abroad and in an environment that provides basic protection for press freedom. Unfortunately, the United States is no longer a safe place for independent journalists. Today, President Obama kicked off his 2012 presidential campaign in a web video message. Without a Democratic primary challenger, it can be safely assumed that the White House will pull out every arrow in its quiver to suppress negative information about Obama. The mere fact that the announcement of Obama’s re-election came on the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King shows that Obama will shamelessly attach himself to the legacy of the much-revered African-American leader with whom he shares no cultural legacy of historical African-Americans with their family histories of slavery in the South and sharecropping. Nor would King, if alive today, approve of any of Obama’s pro-war and pro-corporate policies.
With a second Obama term a likelihood, iIt only makes sense, therefore, that the reporting on the “new America” be conducted from a more secure location.
There is an interesting postscript to this story. Not once, during the eight years of the Bush administration, did I ever receive such a credible and direct threat. In fact, after WMR’s stories about marital friction between Bush and First Lady Laura Bush received national media attention, there was a communication from a close friend of Mrs. Bush that if I laid off her marital situation, I would be given a major scoop. Knowing that no one should ever cut a deal with the Bush family or their friends, I kindly declined the offer. But whereas the Bush White House was prepared to offer a carrot, the Obama administration appears to favor the stick or another lethal weapon of choice.
While JPMorgan Chase appears to have had a good first quarter, its earnings show evidence that a massive credit contraction is underway.
"Total loans declined from $693 billion to $686 billion, or 1%, with a 3% decline in consumer loans (every area was lower)," Mike Mayo of Credit Agricole reports.
Earlier this month, we learned from the minutes of the Federal Reserve that credit contracted "substantially" in January and February. Now we have the JPMorgan[JPM 46.10
A 3 percent decline in consumer loans is pretty extreme. While this might be good for the long-run—households are repairing their balance sheets by taking on less debt—it is definitely not a good sign for near term economic growth. Declining consumer credit could push us into another recession—or be evidence that one has already begun.
Guess what? The Democrats and the Republicans are both lying to us again. So what else is new? The truth is that the great "budget crisis" which supposedly took us to the verge of a government shutdown was just a whole bunch of political theater. Even the Associated Press is declaring that our politicians used"accounting sleight of hand"to reach the $38.5 billion budget cut figure. Not that $38.5 billion was an impressive number to begin with. $38.5 billion would just be one percent of the federal budget. But once you strip away the accounting charades, the real budget cut number is somewhere around 14 trillion dollars. It turns out that the "budget cuts" include money left unspent from previous years, earmarks that were going nowhere, unused census money and programs that Obama was already planning to cut. The more you examine the "budget deal", the more it becomes obvious that the Republicans and the Democrats had no intention of doing anything serious about our debt problems. The U.S. government is still going to run a record-setting budget deficit in 2011 and both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame.
So should we be surprised that our politicians have been lying to us again?
Of course not.
But if something is not done about our soaring debt it is absolutely going to crash our financial system.
According to the IMF, the U.S. government will have to borrow an amount of money equivalent to 29 percent of GDP this year alone in order to finance its budget deficit and its maturing debt.
That is what you call a crisis.
But neither political party seems the least bit serious about the national debt.
The Republicans are proposing even more tax cuts without saying how they are going to pay for them, and they even tucked an increase in military spending into the "budget cut" deal.
The Democrats don't seem to want to cut much of anything. In fact, most Democrats seem to believe that government debt is not much of a crisis at all.
Our politicians love to talk about "cutting the budget", but nothing ever gets done. Both parties have been promising us "fiscal responsibility" for decades but both parties have never delivered.
Sadly, the American people have not held our politicians responsible for this.
This latest episode just reveals how much of a joke Washington D.C. has become. In the 8 days leading up to the "historic" $38.5 billion budget deal, the U.S. national debt increased by $54.1 billion dollars.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, has spoken her mind on the nature of government and the farce we call elections. She says the latter don’t matter.
Madame Pelosi made her comment during a speech at Tufts University in Massachusetts. She addressed establishment Republicans directly and told them to take back their party from upstart Tea Party activists. She said:
To my Republican friends: take back your party. So that it doesn’t matter so much who wins the election, because we have shared values about the education of our children, the growth of our economy, how we defend our country, our security and civil liberties, how we respect our seniors. Because there are so many things at risk right now — perhaps in another question I’ll go into them, if you want. But the fact is that elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do… But when it comes to a place where there doesn’t seem to be shared values then that can be problematic for the country, as I think you can see right now. (Emphasis added.)
See a video of Pelosi’s comments here.
Pelosi basically said the will of the people should not be allowed to get in the way of the mandates of the state and the elite that own and control it. Republicans need to take control of the party and put an end to the growing calls for fiscal sanity in government. The very existence of the warfare-welfare state is at stake.
Jessica, 16, told KIRO Radio's Dori Monson Showthat a week before spring break, the students commit to a week-long community service project. She decided to volunteer in a third grade class at a public school, which she would like to remain nameless.
"At the end of the week I had an idea to fill little plastic eggs with treats and jelly beans and other candy, but I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that," Jessica said.
She was concerned how the teacher might react to the eggs after of a meeting earlier in the week where she learned about "their abstract behavior rules."
Mark Sircus
Infowars.com
April 13, 2011
“The troubled nuclear plant… is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable,” according to a confidential NRC assessment.
Japan said it is considering expanding the area covered by a compulsory evacuation order, with no immediate end in sight to the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. At this point we should all sit up and take notice of what is happening and what could all so easily happen.
“The core at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear reactor has melted through the reactor pressure vessel,” Rep. Edward Markey told a House hearing on the disaster. “I have been informed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the core has gotten so hot that part of it has probably melted through the reactor pressure vessel.” America’s NRC said that some of the core of a stricken Japanese reactor had probably leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of the containment structure, implying that the damage was even worse than previously thought.
Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian that at least part of the molten core, which includes melted fuel rods and zirconium alloy cladding, seemed to have sunk through the steel “lower head” of the pressure vessel around reactor no. 2. “The indications we have, from the reactor to radiation readings and the materials they are seeing, suggest that the core has melted through the bottom of the pressure vessel in unit two, and at least some of it is down on the floor of the drywell,” Lahey said.
On April 5, Times writers James Glanz and William Broad headlined, “U.S. Sees Array of New Threats at Japan’s Nuclear Plant,” saying: American engineers warned “that the troubled nuclear plant… is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable,” according to a confidential NRC assessment.
April Gallop's lawsuit went ahead this week with George Bush's cousin sitting in judgment. He'll play a major part in deciding whether the case goes forward or dies. (http://truthandshadows.wordpress.com)
(CNSNews.com) – House Republicans will fall approximately $20 billion short of their commitment to hold non-defense, discretionary spending for fiscal year 2011 to 2008 levels.
According to House Appropriations Committee sources, the fiscal 2011 budget deal reached by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Obama last Friday will push non-defense discretionary spending $20 billion higher than the 2008 level House Republicans had promised voters.
