It's Like Interviewing Nazis About the Falling Crime Rate.

"Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Today, after listening to Talk of the Nation (TOTN), on the decline of crime rates, any doubts I had about NPR being as much an inaccurate, misleading and run of the mill propaganda outlet as Fox News, are gone.  

None other than the chairman of the murky criminal corporation that is Kroll - the privatized CIA Inc., who profited massively from the horror that took place on 9/11, who merged with the secretive industry giant, Marsh McLennan (World Trade Center tenant with 1,700 employees where plane impacted), who made a killing on pre-9/11 inside trading, and who capitalized on the heightened corporate fears of terrorism created by 9/11 - explained this apparent decline in crime to TOTN host, Neal Conan.

It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate - for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation.

Could it be that this "decline" in crime may have something to do with the fact that the thugs are now in charge?  And isn't it funny how NPR covers the so-called declining crime rate; however, totally failed to cover  the NYPD police thugs, including the pepper spraying of several young women standing on the sidewalk while penned in by orange netting, during Occupy Wall Street.  You see how that works.  The thugs are the law.

So, with the exception of "Fresh Air" and a few local broadcasts, NPR is now just another conformist militaristic propaganda machine. Oh sure, they claim they are "listener-sponsored", but in reality, NPR/PBS is in large part financed by grants from corporate donors. Bland, politically-correct, and totally compromised by their sponsors, that's about all you'll get tuning into public radio. So, what's the difference between this and commercial broadcasting? Nothing. All news is now bought and paid for by corporate-think.

Everything in Nazi Germany was clean and orderly; there were no slums; the trains ran on time. By 1938, the crime rate was at an all-time low because repeat offenders were being sent to a concentration camp after they had completed their second sentence. Anyone who did not have a permanent address and some visible means of support was hauled off the Dachau and put to work.

Once again, we can thank Ronald Reagan for it is he who repealed the Fairness Doctrine.

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The Ministry of Truth: Weeding-Out Pre-Criminals for the Secret State.

42-years ago, in 1968, the essential apparatus for a police state was in place...a reporting structure in line with the technology of the day: old-fashioned shoe leather and manila folders.  This organization of activities, functions, processes, etc., was created in order to cover millions of Americans, conducting law-abiding lives. In other words, agents who normally did security checks, also monitored dissent.  7-years later, in 1975, Senator Frank Church headed a congressional commission to investigate widespread abuses by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, laying the groundwork for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.  Imagine that kind of time-frame in today's world!

Senator Church warned about government’s power to turn surveillance technologies on its own citizens, a warning, even more crucial as we transform into the digital age. On the one hand, ultimate first amendment-enabling technology has leveled the playing field like never before. On the other hand, the foundation for an Orwellian type of investigative government exists like never before.

“ . . . the Internet of Things refers to the seamless connection of devices, sensors, objects, rooms, machines, vehicles, etc, through fixed and wireless networks. Connected sensors, devices and tags can interact with the environment and send the information to other objects through machine-to-machine communication . . . The Semantic Web promotes this synergy: even agents that where not expressly designed to work together can transfer data among themselves when the data come with semantics.” -- Internet Governance and critical Internet resources

Anyway, remember the concept of "pre-crime" -  part of the predictive behavior model that describes stopping crimes before they happen - in the movie Minority Report, set in the year 2054? Well, the electronic police state, if not already here, arrived... a few years early.

The stage was set in the 1990s, when the data industry mushroomed. Vast computer systems quietly gathered staggering amounts of personal information we the people willingly feed to cell-phone networks, really surveillance networks, that continuously track us through sensors on ATM machines, credit card readers, the Internet, electronic fingerprint readers, convenient tollbooths that sense transponders on cars, etc.

Then, on 9/11/2001, the largest terrorist attack, on U.S. mainland in history, occurred.  This gave the powers the perfect excuse to merge the government and private data mining companies.  Choicepoint won a $67 million contract with the Justice Department, and other data companies serve/served as a private intelligent operation for the government. As you can see, data is a valuable commodity.

Fast forward 45 days to October 26, 2001, and with very little public debate, lawmakers passed the Patriot Act, dismantling limits Congress created in the 1970s in response to widespread abuse on the monitoring of citizens. National security officials began using the data mining system, Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange (MATRIX)— a powerful tool for tracking terrorists.

Data mining tools like MATRIX create new information by giving investigators the power to discern patterns and apply profiles, thus creating the ability to cut across sales and police records, coming up with links in an instant instead of days, weeks, months and sometimes, years.

So, what's the big deal?

Well, if the FBI suspects one person they are going to try to round up as much information on every single person the suspected person has come into contact with. In other words, "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" transforms from harmless fun to potentially deadly serious.

Why deadly serious?

Everyone is familiar with Google Earth, right? And drones? And the CIA?  Google who knows more about all of us than God is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through the technology behind Google Earth software.   You see, the software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by  In-Q-Tel,  the CIA's semi-private investment company.  This same technology is currently used by U.S. military and intelligence systems for “full-spectrum dominance” of the planet and geospatial intelligence used in drone attacks that kill people.

The CIA and Google are both backing the company, Recorded Future, that monitors the web in real time.  They say  it uses that information to predict the future. The CIA’s semi-private investment company, In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures, the search giant’s business division had partnered-up with Recorded Future, which scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the "invisible links" between people, institutions, actions and incidents, here and now, and the "predicted future".  In-Q-Tel also invested in Visible Technologies, a software firm specializing in monitoring social media.

The ‘Visible’ technology can automatically examine more than a million discussions and posts on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and so forth each day. The technology also ‘scores’ each online item, assigning it a positive, negative or mixed or neutral status, based on parameters and terms set by the technology operators. The information, thus boiled down, can then be more effectively scanned and read by human operators.

Privacy International rated eight countries as 'endemic surveillance societies' and the U.S. is one.

No, this is not the surveillance society George Orwell wrote about. We feed our personal information to Big Brother, voluntarily. Why?  For a variety of conveniences, discounts, and because we don't want to be left out, but we don’t want to know how the electricity gets to the light switch; we just want to flick it on.

The bottom line is that we are fast approaching a genuine surveillance society in the U.S. Already, our every move, transaction, communication is recorded, compiled, and stored away, ready to be accessed and used against us by the authorities on demand. No court order needed.

Links: 

10 Ways We are Being Tracked and Traced

Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of “Resentment Toward Government”

Data Mining and Homeland Security

E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress

Feds Use Pre-Crime To Target Disgruntled Veterans

Google and NSA The world's largest Internet search company and the world's most powerful electronic surveillance organization are teaming up in the name of cybersecurity.

Mind Machine Project at MIT

Pinwale still going strong under Obama.

Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment - debunked the utility of data-ming and link analysis as effective counterterrorism tools.

Recorded Future A White Paper on Temporal Analytics

Social Intelligence - data-mines the social networks to help companies decide if they really want to hire you.”

State Electronic Harrassment or "Cyberstalking" Laws

Top Secret America  investigation disclosed that the government has built a huge, complex and hard to manage national security and intelligence system.  Google supplies mapping and search products to the U.S. secret state and that their employees, outsourced intelligence contractors for the Defense Department, may have filched their customers’ wi-fi data as part of an NSA surveillance project

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Hip-Hop Justice

George Washington University law professor Paul Butler and author of "Let's Get Free: A Hip Hop Theory of Justice," argues that hip hop reveals some difficult truths about America’s system of crime and punishment.

For example, Misunderstood," by Lil Wayne, which talks about the number of African-American men locked up (1 in every 9 black Americans contrasted to 1 in every 100 Americans) and he talks about the reasons why, including for using and selling drugs, a crime that blacks are disproportionately locked up for:

“I was watching TV the other day, right?
Got this white guy on there talking about black guys
Talking about how young black guys are targeted
Targeted by who? America

You see 1 in every 100 Americans are locked up
One in every 9 black Americans are locked up
And see, what the white guy was trying to stress was that
The money that we spend on sending a motherfucker to jail
Would be less to send his or her young ass to college

See, and another thing the white guy was stressing was that
Our jails are populated with drug dealers
You know, crack cocaine? Yeah, stuff like that
Meaning, due to the laws we have on crack cocaine and regular cocaine
The police are only, I don't want to say 'only,' right, but shit
Only logic by riding around in the hood all day and not in the suburbs”

Because crack cocaine is mostly found in the hood
And, um, you know the other thing is mostly found
You know where I'm going

But why bring a motherfucker to jail if it's not gonna stand up in court?
Because this drug ain't that drug
You know level 3, level 4 drug, shit like that
Ha ha ha, mmm hmm, I guess it's all a misunderstanding

And um, I sit back and think, well shit, us young motherfuckers
You know, that 1 in every 9
We're probably only selling the crack cocaine just because we in the hood
And it's not like they're suburbs, we don't the things that you have
Why? Ha, I really don't wanna know that answer

I guess we're just misunderstood huh, yeah
You know we don't have room in the jail now for the real motherfuckers
The real criminals,” – excerpt from Lil Wayne’s “Misunderstood”

Butler gives another example, "Sound of Da Police" by KRS-One. This song, although it’s a critique of the police for racial profiling, Butler says, it’s also a broader, theoretical critique of the way that we construct crime in the United States. KRS-One makes the point that, we, the people, stole our land from Indians, and built up our land with stolen people, therefore the very foundation of our justice system is deeply flawed. How can there be real justice on stolen land?

“That's the sound of da beast. That's the sound of da police…
Change your attitude; change your plan. There can never really be justice on stolen land…
Yeah, officer from overseer. You need a little clarity? Check the similarity. The overseer could stop you what you're doing. The officer will pull you over just when he's pursuing.” -- KRS-One from "Sound of Da Police"

"Danger" by Erykah Badu is the last example Butler gives. The song is about the collateral consequences of prison, about all the people who do time on the outside, mostly women and children. It's not just the person who's being locked up, who's being punished and how the criminal justice system ought to take that into account.

The United States incarcerates a greater share of its population than any other country in the world, but it is particularly high for young black men...so high, that 50% of black men, aged 25-29 have a police record.

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Are We Incarcerating the Wrong Americans? Incarcerated Veterans?

Homeless and incarcerated veterans.
"

I am advocating for a seamless transition in which VA doctors communicate with the physicians at the local, state, and federal level charged with providing medical care to prisoners and ensure Veterans receive the treatment they require," he said in a statement. "We cannot leave them alone in prison until we have made every effort to help them become well and whole again."

In a letter to Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki, Sestak urged that incarcerated veterans get medical care that is coordinated with the Veterans Administration.

All four veterans who met with Sestak today said they struggled with alcohol or substance abuse. One Marine Corp veteran who served a combat tour in Vietnam, said some veterans weren't prepared for what they witnessed in war.

"You develop an attitude that everyday could be your last day," said the veteran, who gave his name as Paul. "The only way to relieve that was to go to town and drink some beer. It was accepted. No one said there was anything wrong with that."

During the Vietname era, the military had fewer resources for veterans suffering mental health problems, and many turned to drinking, he said. Paul, a Lebanon County native who is now 61, is serving 3 to 7 years in SCI Chester prison for vehicular homicide after a drunk-driving accident.

What does the direction of criminal justice policy in America tell us about our nation, ourselves, and even the world in general?

According to a recent study by PEW, prison spending now outpaces everything in the US but Medicaid. That's a lot of money to spend on a bunch of prisoners.

However, when you consider some of the crimes committed, such as, stealing kids’ videos to give away as Christmas presents; lifting a bottle of vitamins; shoplifting a car alarm; creating fraud to obtain undeserved food stamps; robbing a couple of unoccupied houses; possession of four ounces of cocaine; grabbing a slice of pizza from some kids on the beach; taking four chocolate-chip cookies (homeless man); stealing a $3 magazine; possession of 0.03 gram of methamphetamine, etc... our only choice is to lock up the perpetrators of these dangerous crimes and throw away the key. Right? And, that's just what our criminal justice system did. Locked them up and threw away the key, because the aforementioned crimes all have one thing in common...the perpetrators were third time felons.

One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study.

Conviction for three crimes in a row warrants a life sentence, in twenty-six states, with varying degrees of harshness, even for the most minor crimes. The federal government also has "three-strikes and you're out" legislation in place, and there is no judiciary discretion in sentencing these repeat offenders.

As I blogged before, decades of tough-on-crime laws, without any additional financing for prison programs have left prisoners stacked three bunks high in prison gymnasiums and hallways throughout the state of California (National Geographic's Prison Nation), in particular. Nevertheless, growing prison populations and increasing a national trend.

An article on the MA Criminal Defense Attorney blog, about a 23-year old pharmacy tech, who turned himself into the police for stealing 200 Oxycontins. After confessing this and that he took and shared them with friends, he was "charged with trafficking OxyContin and possession with the intent to distribute oxycontins."

Now, there is no doubt this guy made a big mistake, but does he deserve anywhere from two to ten years in the state prison? Does he pose more danger to society than, let's say, Dick Cheney? I don't know...ask the guy who took one of his bullets to the face, or the people over in Iraq. What about W? A Wall Street banker? Or the pharmaceutical industry?

Well, the answer is yes to all of the above. Why? Because, he didn't win the gene pool lottery. He should just be grateful the state of MA is not one of the 26 "three strikes and you're out" states, just in case this was his third offense.

"My brother was put away for half a gram of cocaine. He was an addict, but he had a job, he had a family, and he never hurt anyone. Now he is buried alive, and he won't get out until he is 80." Jose Verduzgo, a warehouse laborer.

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Bushido Culture, AIG Bonuses, Wall Street and Accountability

"Your Highness, if you believe I am your enemy. Command me. And I will gladly take my life." - Tom Cruise in "The Last Samurai"

Senator Chuck Grassley needs to take a refresher course in Japanese culture. Hara-kiri, ritualistic suicide, common amongst samurai warriors in feudal Japan's Bushido culture, pretty much died out a while back. In addition, Bushido is associated with seven virtues, these being: Gi (Rectitude), Yu (Courage), Jin (Benevolence), Rei (Respect), Makoto (Honesty), Meiyo (Honor), and Chugi (Loyalty), all of which are an anathema to Wall Street culture.

While it's true, that after World War II, business employees followed something similar to Bushido Code, where company loyalty was considered extremely important, businessmen did not commit hara-kiri when they failed to uphold company policy, they simply resigned their positions.

So, back to reality. Behind the scenes, as outrage over AIG bonuses grow, investigators are in looking into whether there are grounds for criminal prosecution — not just in the AIG case, but across the broad spectrum of Wall Street and corporate America. Why? Well, in the case of AIG, the reason is that AIG agreed to dole out millions of dollars in bonuses, early last year, despite multi-billion dollar losses, that either they knew about, or should have known about.

Yesterday, in response to a subpoena, documents received by Connecticut attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, show over $218 million, paid out in AIG bonuses. From that total, "at least $1 million were paid to 73 people, and five received more than $4 million."

How much did AIG know at the time that they made this decision? How will we find out? Well, the CEO of every publicly traded company is required to make a statement to the shareholders, every quarter, and as the economy worsens, it becomes more difficult to remain positive without, giving false testimony. However, if it's found that, there is a huge discrepancy between what’s been said in private conversation, emails, etc. and what's been said to shareholders, the CEO opens himself up for prosecution which could result in civil fraud, and possibly even criminal fraud, if the company goes into bankruptcy.

According to Roger Parloff, senior editor at Fortune magazine, author of the article, Wall Street: It's Payback Time, the head of the financial products unit, a.k.a., credit default swaps, made a statement that he did not see how they could lose a dollar on their portfolios back in 2007 and 2008. As it turns out, even if the bonds do not default, which many have not, the threat, of default, alone, is enough to require AIG pay out billions of dollars in order to secure the other party's interest. In and of itself, that is enough to destroy the company.

Post Enron and Serbian Oxley, the US Sentencing Commission created more severe punishments under the federal sentencing guidelines for white-collar offenses, which in this case, includes anything from ordinary stock fraud to insider trading to "Bernie Madoff" sized ponzie schemes. Federal sentencing guidelines for securities fraud links the length of a prison term to the size of the size of the financial loss to the public.

So, we're talking life sentences, here, because CEO’s - most of whom are in their 50s or 60s - of publicly traded corporations who engage in some type of crime involving securities fraud, can face up to a life sentence if financial losses are $2.5 million or higher. In today's market, that 's pocket change.

What about the contract obligations that Larry Summers claims are sacred? Why can't we call into question, the validity of these contracts? It's extremely likely that these contracts were induced via fraud, or that fraud was committed by the employees receiving bonuses.

Michael H. Trotter, in his article, AIG and taxpayers' money, brings up some very interesting points regarding “insurable interest” and the legality of the contracts involved:

However, the more important issue is what is AIG doing with the credit default swaps (CDSs) it issued to purchasers that did not have an “insurable interest” in the debt insured? These purchasers without an insurable interest don't lose anything except the “premium” they paid when they bought their swap, but they stand to make a lot of money on the gamble they have taken. An excellent case can be made that these CDSs unrelated to insurable interests are void as a matter of public policy for the same reason “Joe Doe” can't take out an insurance policy on my life. The rule of law should be and probably is: “No loan, no loss to insure.”

If we permit hedge funds or other gamblers to take out CDSs on the debt of a public company, it gives the gamblers an incentive to kill the company that issued the debt. This can be done in a variety of ways including short-selling (why hasn't the Securities and Exchange Commission reinstated the up-tick rule?), spreading of rumors and saying nasty things about a company's products or services, and none of this is in the public interest. The voiding of these contracts would greatly reduce the size of the CDS problem and the problems at AIG. Has either the new management of AIG or our Treasury Department even considered the possibilities?

What would be the amount of AIG's credit default swap obligations if all of the contracts without an insurable interest were canceled? We have been told that the face amount of these contracts outstanding greatly exceed the amount of debt outstanding to be insured. That tells us that well over half of AIG's obligations on these contracts are likely to be unenforceable, which would greatly reduce AIG's financial obligations. For instance, the newspapers report that Goldman Sachs has been one of the principal beneficiaries of the CDS payments to date. Goldman Sachs seems an unlikely candidate to have loaned large amounts to companies that have been unable to pay it back, especially in light of its bets on the decline of the collateralized debt obligation market.

We need to know how much money has been paid by AIG to the owners of credit default swap contracts without an insurable interest and to whom it has been paid.
[...]
Are credit default swaps insurance? Almost certainly! If the debt you insured goes bad, you are entitled to collect the amount of loss you have insured from a third party that issued the policy. The investment and legal geniuses who dreamed up this product went to great lengths to camouflage it to avoid regulation under the insurance laws. Hence we have credit default swaps instead of insurance policies and we have counterparties instead of insureds, but the end result is the same.

As to the enforceability of the bonuses paid to the employees of AIG's Financial Products division, there is an excellent column by Professor Lawrence A. Cunningham of the George Washington University Law School in the March 18, 2009, edition of The New York Times that sets forth the legal issues and theories that should be considered. Among the issues to be considered are the performance of each employee under his or her contract, grounds to terminate the employee for cause, did the employee withhold important information for the employer, did the employee commit fraud, and is AIG functionally insolvent? The government should have insisted that the bonuses be withheld until all of these issues could have been properly addressed in a court of law.

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FBI Bank Crime Stats

Everything you want to know about statistics on bank robberies from violations by type of institution to loot taken and recovered to number/race/sex of perpetrators to occurrences by day of week/time of day to type of financial institution office to location of financial institution office to security devices used during crime to security devices functions to modus operandi used.

Any statistical information furnished is subject to change upon the investigation of bank robbery incidents which occurred during the second quarter of 2007.

The BCS provides a nationwide view of bank robbery crimes based on statistics contributed by FBI field offices responding to bank robberies or otherwise gathered when provided to the FBI from local and state law enforcement.

Statistics were recorded as of 07/25/2007, at FBI Headquarters.

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It's OK to Hate Gay People?

It should come as no surprise that Mr. Bush and the Republican Party think it's OK to hate this group of Americans. Mr. Bush and friends are making sure "gay-bashing" remain alive and well in this here country.

Hate crime legislation exists to protect marginalized Americans from violence because members of minority groups are more likely to be targeted for this type of crime. But when our own government has no qualms about "bashing" this group (LGBT) of Americans, especially when Bush, Cheney and Rove want to focus our attention elsewhere, there is little to no chance that they will support a bill that condemns their strategy for success.

There is no question that people in the LGBT community have always been a target of hate crime and continue to be an "acceptable" scapegoat of haters today; this group, in particular, need the extra protection this law provides.

"Hate crimes" affect a group or community of people rather than an individual, therefore having greater impact than a crime committed against an one person. The victim of a hate crime acts as a symbol of the community that person represents and sends a clear message that any person associated with that group could be next. It's an act of terrorism and we know how strongly the President feels about terrorism, so why does the President object to legislation that will aid in curtailing terrorism against this group of Americans? Maybe because "gay bashing" is what enabled this administration to "accomplish" all that they have "accomplished".

"A White House spokesman has reiterated that President Bush will veto Congressional efforts to extend federal hate crimes legislation to cover gender identity and sexual orientation."

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