This is a video of two people being arrested for protesting the NDAA. Which is the recent bill being passed that states the government doesn't have to give you due process. They can detain you indefinitely if they think you are a "terrorist". You should see how broad that definition is. I probably just got put on the list for posting this blog.
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This is a letter written to Congress, signed by the engineers of the internet. If you click on the link you can see all the brilliant people who signed it. I'm sure Congress will pass the bill anyway.
December 15, 2011 | By Parker Higgins and Peter Eckersley
An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress
Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.
We, the undersigned, have played various parts in building a network called the Internet. We wrote and debugged the software; we defined the standards and protocols that talk over that network. Many of us invented parts of it. We're just a little proud of the social and economic benefits that our project, the Internet, has brought with it.
Last year, many of us wrote to you and your colleagues to warn about the proposed "COICA" copyright and censorship legislation. Today, we are writing again to reiterate our concerns about the SOPA and PIPA derivatives of last year's bill, that are under consideration in the House and Senate. In many respects, these proposals are worse than the one we were alarmed to read last year.
If enacted, either of these bills will create an environment of tremendous fear and uncertainty for technological innovation, and seriously harm the credibility of the United States in its role as a steward of key Internet infrastructure. Regardless of recent amendments to SOPA, both bills will risk fragmenting the Internet's global domain name system (DNS) and have other capricious technical consequences. In exchange for this, such legislation would engender censorship that will simultaneously be circumvented by deliberate infringers while hampering innocent parties' right and ability to communicate and express themselves online.
All censorship schemes impact speech beyond the category they were intended to restrict, but these bills are particularly egregious in that regard because they cause entire domains to vanish from the Web, not just infringing pages or files. Worse, an incredible range of useful, law-abiding sites can be blacklisted under these proposals. In fact, it seems that this has already begun to happen under the nascent DHS/ICE seizures program.
Censorship of Internet infrastructure will inevitably cause network errors and security problems. This is true in China, Iran and other countries that censor the network today; it will be just as true of American censorship. It is also true regardless of whether censorship is implemented via the DNS, proxies, firewalls, or any other method. Types of network errors and insecurity that we wrestle with today will become more widespread, and will affect sites other than those blacklisted by the American government.
The current bills -- SOPA explicitly and PIPA implicitly -- also threaten engineers who build Internet systems or offer services that are not readily and automatically compliant with censorship actions by the U.S. government. When we designed the Internet the first time, our priorities were reliability, robustness and minimizing central points of failure or control. We are alarmed that Congress is so close to mandating censorship-compliance as a design requirement for new Internet innovations. This can only damage the security of the network, and give authoritarian governments more power over what their citizens can read and publish.
The US government has regularly claimed that it supports a free and open Internet, both domestically and abroad. We cannot have a free and open Internet unless its naming and routing systems sit above the political concerns and objectives of any one government or industry. To date, the leading role the US has played in this infrastructure has been fairly uncontroversial because America is seen as a trustworthy arbiter and a neutral bastion of free expression. If the US begins to use its central position in the network for censorship that advances its political and economic agenda, the consequences will be far-reaching and destructive.
Senators, Congressmen, we believe the Internet is too important and too valuable to be endangered in this way, and implore you to put these bills aside.
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If you want to hear what a real American sounds like, watch this speech from Ron Paul. This was after the NH primary.
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So Obama's first chief of staff was on the board of Freddie Mac, the one that just resigned was with JPMorgan, and the newest one was with Citigroup. I guess after he quits, Barry will find his replacement at B of A. Maybe Goldman...
New Chief of Staff: Former Hedge Fund Exec. at Citigroup, Made Money Off Mortgage Defaults
5:56 PM, Jan 9, 2012 • By DANIEL HALPER
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President Obama's first chief of staff Rahm Emanuel once sat on the board of troubled federal mortgage giant Freddie Mac. Bill Daley, the president's chief of staff whose departure was announced today, was previously a top executive at financial firm J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. So of course there should be little surprise that Obama's latest chief of staff, announced today by the president himself, also has deep ties to the financial industry himself.
From 2006-2008, Jack Lew was chief operating officer of Citibank's alternative investments division. And it was his division that made billions of dollars betting "U.S. homeowners would not be able to make their mortgage payments," as the Huffington Post reported.
The piece also reported: “Lew made millions at Citi, including a bonus of nearly $950,000 in 2009 just a few months after the bank received billions of dollars in a taxpayer rescue, according to disclosure forms filed with the federal government. The bank is still partly owned by taxpayers.”
Of course, one should not begrudge Lew his personal, professional, and financial successes. But one might wonder what kind of message the president is sending with this appointment.
“I welcome constructive input from folks in the financial sector. But what we’ve seen so far, in recent weeks, is an army of industry lobbyists from Wall Street descending on Capitol Hill to try and block basic and common-sense rules of the road that would protect our economy and the American people,” Obama said in 2010. “So if these folks want a fight, that’s a fight I’m ready to have.”
In announcing Lew today, the president mentioned his previous work at the State Department and in the Clinton administration. Obama did not mention Lew's past of making billions of dollars for Citibank just a few years ago.
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Now for a few economic points of interest from Stansberry Research.
Overnight deposits at the European Central Bank (ECB) hit another all-time high today of 481.93 billion euro ($613.4 billion)… That beats yesterday's previous record of 463.56 euro. European banks choose to deposit their money with the ECB overnight. As we explained in the January 4 Digest…
Banks are constantly lending money to each other for short, set periods of time (most often, overnight). Banks are required to hold a certain amount of liquid assets at all times to insure against losses. At the end of the day, if a bank is short of funds, it will borrow that money overnight from another bank. On the flip side, some banks have excess liquidity (which is the case with some European banks following the ECB bailout), so they will lend that money overnight to the banks in need.
Deposits hit a record high of 453 billion euro ($591 billion) today. This means banks are choosing the security of overnight deposits at the ECB (which pays 0.25% interest) over lending their cash on interbank markets (which pays 0.396%). In other words, banks don't trust each other…
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If there's anything you hate more than bearish European commentary, it's bearish European commentary from billionaire investor George Soros. Allow me to catch our new subscribers up on our "Soros dilemma"…
In addition to our own market commentary, we also feature opinions from the world's greatest investors, like Bill Gross, Jim Rogers, Jim Chanos… and George Soros, who is one of the wealthiest investors in the world. However, whenever we feature commentary from Soros, our inbox is flooded with hate mail and claims that we're sympathizing with a liberal psychopath… We're not. We just think he's a smart investor. Whatever you think of his political pontifications (and we don't care much about them one way or the other)… he knows the markets and how to make money in them. With that being said…
Soros told an audience in Bangalore, India today, "The crisis in Europe is more serious than the crash of 2008." He believes the world faces the possibility of a "vicious circle" of deflation.
And how is Soros protecting himself? By buying gold. According to Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Soros Fund Management sold almost all its shares in SPDR Gold Trust (GLD) and iShares Gold Trust (IAU) in the first quarter of 2011. His timing was solid, as gold dropped from its highs and the dollar rallied. But Soros started buying again in late 2011, according to financial news site Emerging Money.
Soros seems to be anticipating that a spasm of global deflation will send the central bankers running for the printing press… sending more money to "solve" the problem. So perhaps he's betting on another round of quantitative easing. We are…
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The Federal Reserve announced Monday that household borrowing on credit cards, car loans, student loans, and other kinds of installment debt rose at a 9.9% seasonally adjusted rate in November – the biggest monthly increase since November 2001 (following the events of September 11).
Curiously, IHS Global Insight economist Paul Edelstein told the Wall Street Journal, "Consumer credit growth is a positive sign for the recovery in that it signals increasing demand and willingness to spend."
Increased spending is good for an economy. But increasing borrowing to spend is not. Let's not forget how we got here.
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Source: http://frugaldad.com
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This is just weird right here...
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