Sen. Diane Feinstein's Husband Selling Post Offices to Cronies on the Cheap

WHAT A PIECE OF SHIT THIS PERSON IS!

To quote famed short seller David Einhorn: “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” On the “corruption among what passes for our elites” front, this story about self-dealing in the privatization of the Postal Service gives an indication of how bad things really are.

By way of backstory: the Postal Service is being plundered through the device of a completely fabricated financial crisis. The mail provider has been widely declared to be broke, but that’s utter hogwash. Congress has created the appearance of financial ill health via a 2006 measure which astonishingly makes it prepay retiree benefits 75 years in advance. Yes, you read that right. It has to fund benefits now for workers who haven’t even been hired. The Postal Service is the only agency subject to this absurd requirement. If that were eliminated, and the Post Office charged stopped pricing business mail (meaning all that junk you get) at a loss, the Postal Service would be profitable. The Save the Post Office site sets forth the forces behind the campaign to turn the Post Office into a looting opportunity public-private partnership, including Pitney Bowes, DHL, Federal Express, UPS, and USPS supplier Ursa Major.

EastBayExpress, via publishing a section from a new e-book by Peter Byrne calledGoing Postal (um, sadly the same as used by Mark Ames for his important book on workplace shootings), tells us how the husband of powerful Sen. Diane Feinstein, Richard Blum, is feeding at the Postal Service privatization trough. Blum is the chairman of C.B. Richard Ellis (CBRE) which has the exclusive contract to handle sales for the Post Office’s $85 billion of property. Bryne summarizes the finding of his investigation:

• CBRE appears to have repeatedly violated its contractual duty to sell postal properties at or above fair market values.

• CBRE has sold valuable postal properties to developers at prices that appear to have been steeply discounted from fair market values, resulting in the loss of tens of millions of dollars in public revenue.

• In a series of apparently non-arm’s-length transactions, CBRE negotiated the sale of postal properties all around the country to its own clients and business partners, including to one of its corporate owners, Goldman Sachs Group.

• CBRE has been paid commissions as high as 6 percent by the Postal Service for representing both the seller and the buyer in many of the negotiations, thereby raising serious questions as to whether CBRE was doing its best to obtain the highest price possible for the Postal Service.

• Sen. Feinstein has lobbied the Postmaster General on behalf of a redevelopment project in which her husband’s company was involved.

Mind you, Byrne isn’t the first to find serious improprieties. The contract looked sus from the get go: ...

CONTINUE READING HERE!

12 Signs America Is Insane

Chelsea Manning is in jail. Dick Cheney is not. Need we say more?

12. Chelsea Manning is in jail. Dick Cheney is not.

11. The six Wal-Mart heirs possess more wealth than the bottom 40% of families in this country. Or, in other words, six surrealistically-rich people who say they can’t provide decent wages or benefits for their workers have more wealth than roughly 160 million other Americans combined. Much of that Wal-Mart wealth is directly attributable to the ways U.S. taxpayers subsidize the Wal- Mart labor pool, offer tax breaks, and tilt the playing field so that so much wealth flows into those few hands. Six people. Think about that, if your own head isn’t too far up your nether orifice, then think of the people and policies that created such disparity.

10. Michelle Bachmann is on the House Intelligence Committee.

9. The highest-paid public employees in 26 states are college football coaches.

8. Rush Limbaugh has a net worth of nearly a half a billion bucks, and he is the most listened-to ignorance-and-hate-purveyor in the nation, with some 15 million regular listeners. He has two semesters of college under his rather lengthy belt, and according to his mother, he “flunked everything.”

7. College grads in 2011 left college with an average debt load of $26,000 apiece. That figure has gone up since then.

6. Justin Bieber made $55 million in 2012.

5. Doug LaMalfa, Louie Gohmert, Mike Spence, and Darrell Issa all serve or have served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and if you don’t know why those elected representatives constitute an example of our having our heads up our asses, then you’ve probably got yours up yours.

4. The news media actually cover things Donald Trump says.

3. According to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, veterans of the U.S. military are killing themselves at the rate of nearly one per hour. Among American teenagers, suicide is the third-leading cause of death, right behind homicide and accidents.

2. House Republicans have held more than 40 votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but have not proposed a single bill to create jobs.

1. On the morning I was compiling this list, 13 people were shot to death in the nation’s capital. Since terrorists struck the U.S. on 9/11/2001, more than 300,000 Americans have lost their lives to guns—more than 100 times as many people as the number who died when the World Trade Center fell. We’ve spent well over a trillion dollars fighting terrorism, but we live with the threat of random terror in our schools and on our streets on any given day. That’s just the price we pay for “freedom,” I guess. Or so the NRA would have us believe, as they corrupt our politicians and subvert popular support for gun control sanity.

SOURCE

New Shield Law Takes Away More Whistleblower & Journalist Rights

Published on Sep 23, 2013

Congress has been busy drafting a journalist shield law to protect the rights of reporters, but have they just been changing the rules of the game to keep big money media on message and drawing a line to threaten Anonymous and whistleblowers with prosecution? We look at it on the Buzzsaw news clip with Tyrel Ventura and Tabetha Wallace.
Watch the full Buzzsaw video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUyEZ...

Buzzsaw Shorts Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL3NZ...

Buzzsaw Full Episode Playlist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWYXFq...

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Buzzsa...
https://www.facebook.com/thelip.tv

What The Pope Has Said That's Too Dangerous To Talk About - MOC #265 by ...

Published on Sep 23, 2013

Pope Francis is on a roll. And recently he's hit on the third rail - the thing religious leaders are supposed to keep quiet about. Apparently the new Pope has gone rogue.
1) Watch my other video on what the Bible says about money -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr_avl...
2) Music by Marcus Love and Rogerst Charles -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEhga...
3) More on the Pope - http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.p...
4) And even more on the Pope -http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/0...
5) Moment of Clarity activism t-shirts -http://www.skreened.com/momentofclarity

Why Are American Health Care Costs So High?

Published on Aug 20, 2013

In which John discusses the complicated reasons why the United States spends so much more on health care than any other country in the world, and along the way reveals some surprising information, including that Americans spend more of their tax dollars on public health care than people in Canada, the UK, or Australia. Who's at fault? Insurance companies? Drug companies? Malpractice lawyers? Hospitals? Or is it more complicated than a simple blame game? (Hint: It's that one.)

For a much more thorough examination of health care expenses in America, I recommend this series at The Incidental Economist:http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wor...
The Commonwealth Fund's Study of Health Care Prices in the US:http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/med...
Some of the stats in this video also come from this New York Times story: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/hea...

This is the first part in what will be a periodic series on health care costs and reforms leading up to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, in 2014.

Debating Capitalism - Redefining Outdated Terms

(Photo: Emiliano / Flickr)Reasonable conversation about capitalism is possible again. Debates about its strengths and weaknesses resume. The United States’ post-1950 taboo against honestly evaluating capitalism finally is fading. The public increasingly ignores over-the-top celebrations of capitalism as humanity's peak achievement, God's choice, perpetual prosperity generator or guarantor of individual freedom. Politicians, journalists and academics could stop their uncritical cheerleading for capitalism, although most still pay their bills that way.

The reasons are many. Capitalism no longer "delivers the goods" to most Americans. With consumer debt already high, more borrowing can no longer postpone hard times. The "American Dream" slips farther out of reach. As Cold War memories recede, labels like socialism or communism no longer stifle debate. Destroyed cities like Detroit; students with unsustainable debts; declining wages, benefits and job security; and millions unemployed or foreclosed - to them, the usual rationalizations of capitalism seem hollow and ridiculous.

This July's national survey found 26 percent of Americans believing that capitalism is "not working too well" and another 16 percent that capitalism is "not working at all well." Imagine the consequences if a new political party arose to represent those 42 percent by demanding basic changes in the economic system.

However, that survey and resumed debates about capitalism have not yet faced or solved a shared problem. Widespread confusion and disagreement surround what capitalism means and thus what exactly "is not working." This situation weakens the clarity and appeal of solutions offered by capitalism's critics.

A two-dimensional definition of capitalism - as private property plus markets - prevailed for the past 150 years. It neatly contrasted socialism or communism as public property and planning. Privately owned enterprises producing goods and services and free market exchanges of resources and products defined capitalism. State-owned and -operated enterprises and government-planned resource and product distributions defined socialism or communism. Those definitions' inadequacies should have been obvious. They persisted likely because they served leaders in both systems well.

Private capitalists and their supporters demonize government regulations, taxes and public services they oppose as socialism or communism and equate them with atheism, revolution, violence and dictatorship. The old definitions work for them. Keynesians and social democrats advocate government intervention to preserve capitalism by offsetting its excesses and flaws. Because they fear being called communists, they use the old definition (that of communism being total state ownership and planning) to reject communism emphatically. Leaders in countries such as the Soviet Union and China - products and custodians of "revolutions against capitalism" - defined their economies as opposites, negations of capitalism. Polarized definitions - capitalism as private property and markets and socialism or communism as public property and planning - usefully emphasize their difference and distance from capitalism.

Those polarized definitions are now being challenged and displaced. This is partly because of their close associations with socialist and communist economies that imploded and capitalist economies languishing in deep crises. Searches for alternatives to both systems uncovered the old definitions' flaws. New agendas for effective economic change begin with different definitions.

Definitions focused on private versus public property distinguish capitalist from socialist economies poorly. For example, the 1917 Soviet revolution guaranteed private property in land - the agricultural economy's key resource - to millions of peasants. De facto private property comprised the "family plots" alongside collectivized agriculture after 1930. Soviet-style socialisms often did not "abolish" private property. Likewise capitalist economies often did not abolish public property: postal systems, utilities, schools, transport systems, credit agencies and many other sectors remained public enterprises. ...

CONTINUE READING HERE!

9/11 In A Nutshell

Published on Sep 11, 2013

James Corbett of corbettreport.com presents this 5 minute parody of the official conspiracy theory of 9/11. Find out more about the truth of 9/11 at GlobalResearch.ca and CorbettReport.com.