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Lefty OBAMA,helping FBI coverup,starting CIA secret torture sites,hurting labor..oh yeah real lefty


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LEFTY OBAMA ??
30,000 Criminal Referrals Led to 1,000+ Felony Convictions In Major Fraud Cases During the S&L Crisis … Not Even a SINGLE Prosecution Today, Even Though the 2008 Crisis Was 70 Times Bigger
March 14th, 2014

Fraud Prosecution Stopped the S&L Crisis … But Government REFUSES to Prosecute Fraud Now

The top regulator and prosecutor during the S&L crisis – professor of law and economics, Bill Black – explained at a recent TED talk that 90% of all no-document loans were fraudulent and 90% of appraisals were fraudulently inflated at the insistence of the banks.

Government officials were informed about these fraudulent practices decades ago … and yet did nothing:

In 2000 … the honest appraisers got together a formal petition, begging the government to act, and begging the industry to act, stop stop the epidemic of appraisal fraud [where the banks blacklisted honest appraisers who refused to fraudulently inflate the value of their appraisals.].

***

What about xxxx’s loans? That warning actually comes earlier …. in 1990 ….

The Fed – and only the Federal Reserve – the explicit statutory authority to ban xxxx’s loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan – as chairs of the Fed – do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans, and they were being sold to due the secondary market?

***

Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop xxxx’s loans.

***

What about the response of prosecutors after the crisis? After $11 Trillion dollars in losses? After 10 million jobs [were] lost? A crisis in which the losses and fraud were more than 70 times larger than the Savings and Loan debacle?

In the Savings and Loan debacle, our agency that regulated Savings and Loans – the OTS – made over 30,000 criminal referrals. Produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major.

And that understates the prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create a list of the top 100 fraud schemes – the absolute worst of the worst – nationwide. Roughly 300 Savings and Loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials.

Virtually all of them were prosecuted. We had a 90% conviction rate.

***

Fast forward to the current time. The same agency – Office of Thrift Supervision – which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of xxxx’s loans in the country has made …
zero
criminal referrals.

The Office of Comptroller of the Currency – which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks has made
zero
criminal referrals.

The Fed appears to have made
zero
criminal referrals.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question.

***

We have
zero
prosecutions – [let alone] convictions – of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JBYPcgtnGE&feature=player_embedded

Why does this matter?

Because fraud CAUSED the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis. Numerous Nobel prize winning economists say that we need to prosecute fraud, or else the economy will never stabilize.

Obama is prosecuting fewer financial crimes than under Reagan or either of the Bush presidents.

Indeed, the U.S. government admits that it refuses to do the right thing (it’s more or less official policy).

Instead, the government has done the exact opposite: Helped COVER UP the fraud after it occurred … and ENCOURAGED it in the first place.

Note to libertarian readers: Real free market libertarians

Edited by Steven Gaal
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LEFTY OBAMA ??

The US Military Operations You Didn't Know Existed

Despite claims that our presence in Africa is miniscule, the US military has recently been involved in at least 49 of the 54 nations on the continent.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/03/us-africa-military-operation-obscure

Edited by Steven Gaal
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LEFTY OBAMA ??

OpEdNews Op Eds

3/29/2014 at 11:55:58
The Refusal of Democrats to Recognize that They've 'Been Had'

I am a Democrat, but I hold "Democratic" politicians to the same standards as I do ones who are self-professedly Republicans.

Sadly, only few Democrats do: they refuse to recognize that they voted for a Republican-at-heart in "progressive" sheep's clothing, a conservative who had pretended to be a progressive in order to win the Democratic Presidential nomination.

I learned about this closed-mindedness of liberals, by means of the reader-comments to my recent article at Huffington Post, "Obama: 'I Don't Care About the Public's Welfare'."

Respondents to it didn't challenge the facts that it summarized, which were damning in the view of any progressive -- and some even in the view of any non-fascist. Instead, these readers listed the good things that Obama has done as President, such as, "Rescuing the Auto Industry." Every President has done some good things. Such readers were simply refusing to believe that Obama is a xxxx and is at least as conservative as he is liberal. Instead, they diverted onto irrelevancies: onto the good things he has done, which have nothing to do with those bad things.

A real progressive doesn't avoid the truth, but instead faces and tries to understand the truth.

For example, the progressive magazine Mother Jones headlined on 25 August 2005, "Bush's Biggest Achievements," and listed four: "Humanitarian Aid in Africa," "Tsunami Relief," "Marine Protections," and "Executive Branch Diversity." Even that man who might have been America's worst-ever President, did some excellent things.

Oddly (and admirably), The American Conservative bannered on 5 February 2009, "Bush's Good Deed," and praised a different action by him, which also happened to be actually a progressive action that he had taken: "Bush's last -- it might seem his only -- good deed: rejection of an Israeli request for overflight permission and perhaps military assistance in bombing Iran's nuclear reactor. There's been very little about this in the mainstream press -- though it's the kind of major incident that history often turns on." That's correct.

Should we assume, therefore, that Bush was a good President? Of course, that would be silly.

My article didn't merely list a few middling-bad things that President Obama has intentionally done: it described many very-bad things he's done (not things done very badly -- very bad things), and then ended the litany with: "Anyone who doubts that Obama is a xxxx (except when addressing banksters in private), whose actual values are often the exact opposite of his sanctimonious public statements, should read not only the IG's report, but, regarding other issues, things such as," and I then linked to six more -- each of which, likewise, entailed Obama's intentionally doing things that were exactly contrary to his publicly expressed (and always more-liberal) stated objectives.

As to the question of why Obama would have entered politics in 1996 as a "Democrat," instead of a "Republican," perhaps the reason for this is he recognized that, after Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," starting in the 1970s, the likelihood for any person with a dark skin-color to win the Republican Presidential nomination was clearly nil; whereas in the Democratic Party, there would be lots of voters who would actually like the idea of voting the first Black into the White House. Being a "Democrat" was thus the only path by which a young black person in 1996 could realistically hope to become the U.S. President. To an ambitious black person entering politics in 1996, being a "Democrat" instead of a "Republican" was a no-brainer choice. And Obama is clearly not a no-brainer person: he could figure this out.

But Obama is no progressive. He isn't even much of a liberal. He is an enormously gifted politician. Unfortunately, part of that gift-set is a phenomenal ability to deceive.

This isn't to say that he's purely a conservative, either. Some of his remarks, such as the famous one about which the Romney campaign headlined against him "You Didn't Build That," were obviously stated by him with an actual progressive intent.

Obama told donors on 24 November 2013, "I'm not a particularly ideological person," and that statement by him was unfortunately true: he has never even thought seriously about his values, his ideology; he just accepts unquestioningly the ones that he has absorbed from the people around him, especially from the aristocrats who enabled him to receive a first-rate education. Not everything that he says is a lie.

Perhaps that will satisfy Obama-bots that he's okay, after all. Far from it.

At best, Obama is a bad President. And I say this as a progressive historian who respects, above all Presidents, the progressive Republican Abraham Lincoln, whose Party transformed into something very different and vastly more conservative practically as soon as he was murdered by an extreme conservative; and as one who respects almost as highly the progressive Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose impact on our entire world was more beneficial than that of any other leader in all of human history (if you consider what would the world be like if Hitler had won?), but who additionally has the unquestionable black mark on his record, of having rounded up and imprisoned Americans of Japanese descent for no good reason.

An authentic progressive applies the same standards, scientific standards, empirical facts, to everything, including human relations. But it seems that many people who consider themselves to be liberal or even progressive, are actually too filled with some kind of tribal loyalty (to "Democrats," in this instance), which prevents them from being that. To the extent they do, they're being conservative.

Perhaps that's not as bad as being a Republican, but it can turn out to be worse than being a Republican if what it means is that one will vote for a conservative like Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, which will mean that the nation will "choose" a conservative President no matter what.

Our main obligation as progressives is to do everything we can to assure that one of the two Parties' Presidential nominees will be a progressive; because, if we fail to do that, then we will have failed the country.

Anyone who relies upon a third-party candidate to deliver the nation a progressive as a serious contender for President, is entertaining a fantasy, not a strategy, because the two political parties are ideologically polarized so that the Democrat will inevitably be less fascist than the Republican, and no third-party candidate will stand a chance to win unless he's a billionaire who can fund his own campaign, which won't happen. (Nader's efforts, especially to get onto the states' ballots, were funded largely by big-money Republican donors, and it gave them a Bush "win" in 2000, so that's what happens when progressives bury their heads in the sand: bad news that turns into catastrophic history.)

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LEFTY OBAMA ??

UPDATE: To Well Sourced List of Examples of Obamas Lying, Lawbreaking, Corruption, Cronyism, Etc.*(Now at 694)*

(SEE LINK above)

==========

Every President, every politician, and every human being tells lies and engages in acts of hypocrisy. But Barack Obama does these things to a far greater degree than anyone else that I have ever known of. His campaign promises were so much better sounding than anyone else’s – no lobbyists in his administration, waiting five days before signing all non-emergency bills so people would have time to read them, putting health care negotiations on C-SPAN, reading every bill line by line to make sure money isn’t being wasted, prosecution of Wall St. criminals, ending raids against medical marijuana in states where it’s legal, high levels of transparency. Obama’s promises of these wonderful things sounded inspiring and sincere. They sounded so much better than the promises of any other President. So when Obama broke these promises, it felt so much worse than when other Presidents broke their promises.

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LEFTY OBAMA ??

======================

President Gollum’s ‘Precious’ Secrets

February 16, 2015

===

Exclusive: Despite promises of “openness,” President Obama has treated information that could inform American democracy like Tolkien’s character Gollum coveted his “precious” ring. Obama is keeping for himself analyses that could change how the public sees the crises in Syria and Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

====

President Barack Obama promised a “transparent” administration, reviving democracy by letting Americans see into the inner workings of their government as much as possible, an implicit criticism of the excessive secrecy of his predecessor, George W. Bush. But instead Obama’s presidency has been one of the most opaque and deceptive in modern history.

Not only has Obama continued to wrap the carry-over anti-terrorism wars in maximum secrecy but he has taken unprecedented steps to shut down leaks by prosecuting whistleblowers who talk to the press. And, he has left standing his administration’s misleading rushes to judgment on key issues after U.S. intelligence analysts have refined or reversed the first impressions.

Whether on the Syrian sarin attack in 2013 or pivotal incidents in the Ukraine crisis – who was behind the sniper attacks in Kiev last Feb. 20 and who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 last July 17 – Obama has withheld evidence developed by U.S. government analysts rather than undercut the propaganda value of the initial accusations.

In the sarin incident, Secretary of State John Kerry and others rushed to blame President Bashar al-Assad’s government – bringing the U.S. military to the brink of war – and similarly the State Department exploited the two most iconic events of the Ukraine crisis by blaming then-President Viktor Yanukovych for the sniper killings and Russia and ethnic Russian rebels for shooting down MH-17 killing all 298 people onboard.

After the State Department had squeezed out the propaganda value of those accusations, U.S. intelligence analysts came to more detailed conclusions with their findings conflicting with the hasty finger-pointing after the events. But instead of refining or correcting the record, the Obama administration typically went silent, leaving the initial impressions in place even when the President knew better.

In the context of Ukraine, I asked one senior administration official about this behavior and he responded that Russia held most of the advantages there by nature of proximity and history but that one advantage the United States wielded was “information warfare” – and it made no sense to surrender that edge by withdrawing accusations that had put Russian President Vladimir Putin on the defensive.

Thus, in this Orwellian world that seems to have swallowed America’s major institutions, what mattered most was how “information” – including false or misleading propaganda – could be deployed for geopolitical purposes even if it also involved deceiving the U.S. public. Or, one might say, especially if it deceived the U.S. public.

‘Perception Management’

This attitude toward manipulating rather than informing the American people has a long and grim history. For instance, President Lyndon Johnson won congressional support for his disastrous Vietnam War escalation by citing the Tonkin Gulf incident, a false claim about North Vietnamese aggression which has since been debunked but still is used historically by the Defense Department to justify the millions killed in that conflict.

After the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, President Ronald Reagan set up inter-agency task forces devoted to the concept of “perception management,” essentially how to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and get back into line behind U.S. military interventions abroad, a CIA-inspired campaign that proved stunningly successful. [see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Victory of ‘Perception Management.’”]

Last decade, the American people got their perceptions managed once more regarding Iraq’s non-existent WMD, leading to another catastrophic war which continues to spread chaos and death across the Middle East to this day. One might think that with that bloody history, President Obama would want to fulfill his promises of “transparency.”

According to a memorandum instructing Executive Branch department heads, Obama wrote: “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

Instead, Obama has clamped down more than ever on openness and transparency, including the prosecution of more government whistleblowers than all the previous presidents combined and sitting on U.S. intelligence reports that would change how Americans understand major international crises.

By and large, Obama has continued the excessive secrecy of President George W. Bush, including withholding from the American people 28 pages of the 2002 congressional investigation into the 9/11 attack that relate to Saudi financing for al-Qaeda terrorists.

Obama also has refused to give the U.S. public access to the updated intelligence analyses of more current crises, including the near American military entry into the Syrian civil war in 2013 and the potential nuclear showdown with Russia over Ukraine in 2014. So, even when American lives are being put at risk by rushes to judgment, Obama doesn’t believe that the people have a right to know the facts.

The Pathology of Secrecy

I spoke with one person who has known Obama since he was a senator from Illinois who suggested the President is fearful that if he does release these secrets and some negative consequences result that he’ll be blamed. In order words, Obama in practice is too scared to live up to his commitment about “transparency.”

Another less generous explanation is that Obama is at heart an elitist who likes to surround himself with secrets but doesn’t want to share them with common citizens who are best treated like the proverbial mushrooms kept in the dark and fertilized.

Or put differently, Obama is like the character Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings series who is entranced by the power of the One Ring and obsessively pursues it, what he calls “my Precious.” In that analogy, Obama can’t part with his precious secrets despite his promises to the American people about government openness.

Surely, Obama does get warnings against letting the public in on what the U.S. government knows about pivotal events. Government bureaucrats can always find reasons to keep information secret. But presidents have the ultimate say in what is kept secret and what is released.

And, except for a flurry of disclosures immediately after taking office, including Bush’s legal memos justifying torture, Obama has done less about opening up the federal government’s archives than many recent presidents. For instance, President Bill Clinton declassified Cold War-era files on U.S. participation in Guatemala’s decades of brutal repression.

Obama has shown less enthusiasm for giving Americans back their history. More importantly, however, Obama has withheld crucial information about current crises, such as the Syrian sarin attack and events that drove the Ukrainian civil war. [see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case” and “The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case.”]

In both areas, his administration rushed to judgment based on fragmentary information and – as more detailed data became available challenging the earlier claims – Obama clamped down on what the American people were allowed to hear.

Much like the Tonkin Gulf case, war hawks in the U.S. government found the misimpressions useful, so they didn’t want to correct the record. All the better to get an edge on foreign “adversaries” and manage the perceptions of the American people.

And, for whatever his reasons, President Obama couldn’t let go of his “Precious.”

======================================================================

======================================================================

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Edited by Steven Gaal
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