From the special report on NSA surveillance to the president:
Recommendation 31:
(1) Governments should not use surveillance to steal industry
secrets to advantage their domestic industry;
(2) Governments should not use their offensive cyber capabilities
to change the amounts held in financial accounts or otherwise
manipulate the financial systems;
During the Bush administration, there were several national demonstrations concerning immigration --- each one knocking the news item of the day completely off the national news, and each time that news item was: warrantless wiretapping!
By warrantless wiretapping, they referred to the eavesdropping on emails, wire transfers, all forms of data transmission, computer systems, etc.
Both of these marches were organized by Spanish-language radio stations. The next obvious question is: who owned those Spanish-language radio stations?
At that time they were owned by the largest private equity/leveraged buyout firm around, the Blackstone Group. Founded by David Rockefeller's protégé, Peter G. Peterson, with seed money from Rockefeller, along with co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, a Yalie Skull & Bones member, chosen for that fraternity by a group of upperclass men including one George W. Bush.
Curious that the senator who ardently pushed for legal immunity for AT&T and the other telecoms from warrantless wiretapping was none other than Sen. Jay Rockefeller!
Today, the Blackstone Group is the single largest landlord in America, owning some 41,000 rental homes. Their latest financial scam is to issue a rental home-based security.
Amazing, given that revenue streams --- from those rental homes --- to pay investors will be diverted from normal expenses: upkeep and normal home maintenance, property taxes, homeowner's insurance, etc., etc., etc.
(And that's assuming all the rental homes are fully paid for --- no monies going towards paying off the mortgage lenders and/or banks.)
Just does not compute! ! ! !
The Blackstone Group enjoys a nefarious past: buying and shutting down oil refineries to drive up the price of oil; speculating on oil and energy futures during the 2007 - 2008 period (when the paper price of oil rose to 13.8 times higher than its actual physical price), broker on the World Trade Center deal prior to the 9/11 attacks, and mortgage holder of record of WTC Building 7, and after the 9/11 attacks, overseer of the $1 billion captive insurance fund awarded to Blackstone from the US government, ostensibly to help out the families of the victims of 9/11; leveraged buyouts across the US healthcare sector, driving up the price of healthcare from 2000 - 20008, and, taking Blackstone Group public, as in on the New York Stock Exchange, while somehow still ONLY paying capital gains rate on taxes, when legally they should be paying the higher corporate tax rate!
Recommendation 31 begs the question: on whose behalf was NSA manipulating financial systems and accounts?
Was it Monsanto?
The Blackstone Group?
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley?
GE and AT&T?
Or all of the above?
Recently, the news reported that the Obama Administration is suppressing a $40 million report on illegal CIA torture --- been suppressed for about a year now.
John Kiriakou was charged with treason and is now in jail for leaking information that implicated the CIA in illegal torture --- most notably torture of innocents, as the CIA would pay Afghanistani warlords per Taliban they handed over to them, and said unscrupulous warlords would round up innocent villagers (perhaps they liked the looks of their wives, daughters, etc.) and sell them to the equally unscrupulous CIA.
There were multiple reasons the CIA did this: they could point to their capturing the enemy, plus it afforded them a large and unaccountable revenue stream --- for each payment made for an innocent villager, a so-called Taliban, who knows how much money the CIA agents would pocket and keep?
Just as the salaries offered for torture specialists ("professional interrogators") were quite handsome --- $163,000 starting salary, as abstracted from help wanted ads.
Would that $40 million report on the CIA's illegal torture validate Mr. Kiriakou's actions while invalidating his harsh jail sentence?
Most probably --- which is why Barack Obama is suppressing this report!
Wonder who received that $40 million for that suppressed report?
There are simply too many jackholes in the CIA, NSA, DIA and Pentagon who are embezzling and stealing gobs and gobs of taxpayer monies.
The Special Inspector General's Iraqi Reconstruction Report (SIGIR report), clearly indicated the large number of officers, senior noncoms, various contractors involved in such thievery at the volunteer military level --- and the numbers would only increase should a real forensic audit ever be undertaken of the CIA, NSA and DIA!
Hope and change? Transparency in government or greater and endless corruption from our latest presidential administration?
Sources:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/929267/review-group-exec-summary-and-recs.pdf
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2013-12-12_rg_final_report.pdf
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part3
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/26/the-nsa-paid-to-steal-your-private-data/
