Stopping Voter Fraud

by Eric Shawn | November 01, 2010

There are multiple watchdogs groups ready to try and prevent voter fraud on Election Day.
The U.S. Department of Justice says it will deploy more than 400 election monitors to 18 states to keep tabs on the electoral process. Their mission is to prevent fraud, intimidation, or voter suppression.
Several states have established their own hotlines, and in New York City voters can even tweet in reports of problems.
Some citizens' groups, like Election Integrity Watch in Minneapolis, plan to deploy their own poll watchers.
"Our mission is to ensure fair and honest elections," said Jeff Davis, a founder of Election Integrity Watch and President of the conservative advocacy group, Minnesota Majority. "Over the course of the last elections here in Minnesota, we have discovered numerous problems, and government officials were reluctant to acknowledge those problems or investigate. We've concluded that it is up to us, we the people, to ensure the integrity of elections."
Just last week authorities in Minnesota charged 47 people with voter fraud from the 2008 election, and Davis believes the actual number is higher this year. They even held a news conference with Ian Hodge, who received an election postal verification card saying he is registered to vote, and listing his polling place. The only problem is that Mr. Hodge is not an American citizen. He's British.
"If people are aware that there are going to be people watching the election process," he says, then "that will maybe dissuade those people who have committed fraudulent voting in the past."
But others fear that such groups can lead to voter intimidation.
Wendy Weiser, of the NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, told Fox News "what we are concerned with is that when there are large scale mobilization around ballot security efforts, they often cross the line and used tactics that have the affect of suppressing legitimate votes. And this has happened time and again and we are worried that this may happen again this time."

Read more: http://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/11/01/stopping-voter-fraud#ixzz148Nzt8YK

Bank of England Head Mervyn King Proposes Eliminating Fractional Reserve Banking

Mervyn King

→ Washington’s Blog
Mervyn King - the governor of the Bank of England - has proposed abolishing fractional reserve banking.
As the BBC noted last week:

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, has tonight made a big intervention into the debate on banking reform. In a speech at Buttonwood, New York, he [listed] much more radical proposals.

1. Forcing the riskiest banks to hold capital "several times the magnitude" of requirements at present.
2. The Volcker rule-style enforced breakup of banks into speculative and non-speculative arms.
3. The "Kotlikoff proposal", which forces banks to match each pool of risks with a requisite amount of capital, preventing losses in one spilling over into another.
4. Stunningly, Mervyn King imagines the "abolition of fractional reserve banking":

"Eliminating fractional reserve banking explicitly recognises that the pretence that risk-free deposits can be supported by risky assets is alchemy. If there is a need for genuinely safe deposits the only way they can be provided, while ensuring costs and benefits are fully aligned, is to insist such deposits do not co-exist with risky assets."

King does not advocate any of these radical plans - but the fact that he goes out of his way to list them, and to place them on the agenda of the UK's Independent Commission on Banking, means that we are not yet at the end of the debate about long-term reform of the banks.

***

Beyond the technicalities, the fact that a central banker in a G7 country is prepared to imagine such outcomes is itself significant.

Moreover, King wrote to Ben Dyson and stated:

You suggest that banks should be forced to conform to the underlying purpose of the 1844 Bank Reform Act. You might be aware that I have said publicly that I think ideas in this spirit - such as those advocated by John Kay - certainly merit serious consideration in the debate as to how we reform our financial system. I remain sympathetic to these views. But as I said in my previous letter, I do not want to prejudice the outcome of the Banking commission's deliberations. Now the Commission has been set up, I think we all should wait to see its conclusions."

As Dyson explains:

The 1844 Bank Charter Act ('Reform' is a typo) was a piece of legislation that prohibited commercial banks from printing paper notes (£1, £5, £10 and so on). Before this law was passed, banks were permitted to print as many paper notes as they wanted, up to the point where they printed too many and went bankrupt (as everyone cashed in their paper notes at once).

That situation should sound very similar to the situation that we have today - we currently allow commercial banks to 'print' money in the form of digital bank deposits (the numbers in your bank account). In the years up to 2007, the banks 'printed' far too much of this digital money, to the extent that they - and the economy - started to collapse.

The 'underlying purpose' of the 1844 Bank Charter Act was to prevent the commercial banks creating money and to restore that privilege to the state. It had become obvious to the government of the day that if banks were allowed to create money, they would keep creating money up until the point where it destabilized the economy, so they could not be trusted with this responsibility.
So, in plain English, Mervyn King appears to be saying:

"I agree that banks should probably be stopped from creating money, and recommend John Kay (or Laurence Kotlikoff's) proposals. But it's not for me to say - let's leave it to the Banking Commission."

It's very reassuring to know that the top guy at the Bank of England understands the root of the issue and is promoting solutions that would go a long way to addressing it. Both John Kay and Laurence Kotlikoff's proposals would prevent commercial banks from creating money (or 'issuing credit') for their own benefit at the expense of the wider economy and the public.

Ironically, while King is proposing the potential elimination of fractional reserve banking (i.e. a return to 100% reserves), Ben Bernanke has proposed the elimination of all reserve requirements (i.e. requiring no reserves):

The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system.

SPUN-employment

Networks twist unemployment reports to boost Obama, bash Bush.

• By Dan Gainor
• Wednesday, October 27, 2010 4:24 PM EDT
• Media Research Center

Spinning the Numbers When Conservatives in Charge: During the year leading up to the 2005-06 mid-term elections, the economy was strong and unemployment never went above 5 percent. That wasn’t how the media reported it. Negative reports and stories spun negatively accounted for 58 percent of the stories (38 out of 65).
Spinning the Numbers When Left in Charge: Despite the near 10 percent unemployment throughout the year leading to the 2009-10 elections, positive reports and stories spun positively accounted for 52 percent of the stories (46 out of 88).


Just days before the mid-term elections and jobs remain the major campaign issue. Unemployment stands at 9.6 percent with nearly 15 million people out of work. Gallup’s analysis argues things are even worse, with unemployment hitting 10 percent again – a number voters wouldn’t see until the Friday after the election. As Gallup explained, it’s “up sharply from 9.4% in mid-September and 9.3% at the end of August.” That means heartache and struggle across the United States.

That’s not the story being told this election. What voters are left with are false impressions from the broadcast news shows – that somehow the worst unemployment in 25 years is not that bad. CNBC’s Steve Liesman called it “self-sustaining job growth,” on NBC’s April 2, 2010 “Nightly News.”

That’s also exactly the opposite of how those same networks handled low unemployment during the last mid-term election. Then, with a Republican in the White House, journalists worked hard at undermining the positive news with the possibility that bad things might occur.

Read the entire report

How the Republican Congress will abandon Tea Party ideas and legislate toward the center.

Slate.com
By Jacob Weisberg

Posted Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010, at 6:54 AM ET

In the likely event that Republicans capture control of one or both houses of Congress next week, the new leaders will face a strategic question. Should they pursue the agenda of the Tea Party movement that brought them to power? Or should they try to mollify their party's base with gestures and symbols, without taking its radical ideology too seriously? While they'll never discuss this problem honestly, indications point in the latter direction. That is, the GOP's congressional leadership will feint right while legislating closer to the center.

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With Obama, the Future of Israel Looks Bleak

Friday, 29 Oct 2010 12:19 PM

Newsmax.com

By: Frank Gaffney

Earlier this year, President Obama drove U.S.-Israeli relations — to use one of Obama's oft-employed analogies — into a ditch.

Arguably, ties between the two countries were never more strained than last spring when Obama serially insulted the elected leader of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vilified his country, and tried to euchre it into making territorial, political, and other ill-advised concessions to Arabs determined as ever to destroy the Jewish state.

Unfortunately, what the president has in mind for Israel after the election next week will make his previous treatment of the Jewish State look like the good old days.

To be sure, ties between the United States and Israel, far and away America's most important and loyal friend in the Middle East, have improved lately from the nadir to which Obama plunged them since he took office.

That has nothing to do, however, with a change of heart or agenda on the part of the president and his administration.

Rather, it is a reflection of a cynical calculation forced upon the Obama White House by its panicked congressional allies. Already laboring under the backbreaking burden of their association with a president and his agenda that have become huge liabilities, Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party's leader persisted in his assault on Israel.

Public letters and private conversations had the desired effect: Barack Obama began treating his Israeli counterpart with a modicum of respect and the optics of a restarted peace process — however short-lived or doomed — helped conjure up an image of a renewed partnership between the two nations.

Make no mistake about it, though: Once the 2010 elections are behind him, it is a safe bet that Obama will revert to form by once again exhibiting an unmistakable and ruthless determination to bend Israel to his will.

Worse yet, he will be able to take advantage of a vehicle for effecting the so-called "two-state solution," no matter how strenuously Israel and its friends in Washington object: The Palestinians will simply unilaterally declare themselves a state and ask for international recognition, and Obama will accede to that request.

A number of the particulars involved in this gambit are unclear at the moment. For example, will the Palestinians announce the borders of their state to be the 1967 cease-fire lines, in which case large Israeli population centers (defiled as "settlements") will be inside a nation that is certain to be, to use Hitler's phrase, judenrein (free of Jews)?

How will the Hamas-stan of Gaza be connected to the currently PLO-run West Bank in a way that will make them "contiguous" without bisecting the Jewish state and ensuring that Hamas does not take over the rest of the so-called "Palestinian authority"?

Also unclear is precisely how Obama will handle the sticky issue of extending U.S. recognition of Palestine. Will he want to parallel Harry Truman's direct and immediate endorsement of the establishment of Israel in 1948? Or will he do it more disingenuously, as former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton speculated in The Wall Street Journal last week, by having the United States abstain from an approving vote by the United Nations Security Council?

The hope behind the latter would be that Team Obama and its partisans will somehow avoid retribution from Israel's friends, both Democrats and others, both here and abroad.

The truth is that, either way, Obama will have dealt Israel a potentially mortal blow. Without control of the high ground and water aquifers of the West Bank, the Jewish state is simply indefensible and unsustainable.

Some may suggest that international forces (perhaps led by the United States) should be deployed in the areas Jews have historically known as Judea and Samaria so as to ensure that they are not used to harm Israelis in the low-lying areas to the west.

We have seen how such arrangements work in practice in Lebanon, though — which is to say not well.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.

Why Is Indiana Putting Armed Security Guards Into 36 Unemployment Offices Across The State?

theeconomiccollapseblog.com

Did you ever think that things in America would get so bad that we would need to put armed guards into our unemployment offices?  Well, that is exactly what is happening in Indiana.  Armed security guards will now be posted at all 36 full-service unemployment offices in the state of Indiana.  So why is this happening now?  Well, Indiana Department of Workforce Development spokesman Marc Lotter says that the agency is bringing in the extra security in anticipation of an upcoming deadline when thousands upon thousands of Indiana residents could have their unemployment benefits cut off.  But it is not just the state of Indiana that could have a problem.  In fact, one recent study found that approximately 2 million Americans will lose their unemployment insurance benefits during this upcoming holiday season unless Congress authorizes another emergency extension of benefits by the end of November.  At this point, however, that is looking less and less likely.
So perhaps all the states will have to start putting armed security guards in their unemployment offices.  The truth is that frustration among unemployed Americans is growing by the day.

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Fraud Caused the 1930s Depression and the Current Financial Crisis

Washington's Blog
October 29,2010

Robert Shiller - one of the top housing experts in the United States - says that the mortgage fraud is a lot like the fraud which occurred during the Great Depression. As Fortune notes:

Shiller said the danger of foreclosuregate -- the scandal in which it has come to light that the biggest banks have routinely mishandled homeownership documents, putting the legality of foreclosures and related sales in doubt -- is a replay of the 1930s, when Americans lost faith that institutions such as business and government were dealing fairly.

The former chief accountant of the S.E.C., Lynn Turner, told the New York Times that fraud helped cause the Great Depression:

The amount of gimmickry and outright fraud dwarfs any period since the early 1970's, when major accounting scams like Equity Funding surfaced, and the 1920's, when rampant fraud helped cause the crash of 1929 and led to the creation of the S.E.C.

Economist Robert Kuttner writes:

In 1932 through 1934 the Senate Banking Committee, led by its Chief Counsel Ferdinand Pecora, ferreted out the deeper fraud and corruption that led to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

Similarly, Tom Borgers refers to:

The 1930s’ Pecora Commission, which investigated the fraud that led to the Great Depression ....

Professor William K. Black writes:

The original Pecora investigation documented the causes of the economic collapse that led to the Great Depression. It ... established that conflicts of interest and fraud were common among elite finance and government officials.

The Pecora investigations provided the factual basis that produced a consensus that the financial system and political allies were corrupt.

Moreover, the Glass Steagall Act was passed because of the fraudulent use of normal bank deposits for speculative invesments. As the Congressional Research Service notes:

In the Great Depression after 1929, Congress examined the mixing of the “commercial” and “investment” banking industries that occurred in the 1920s. Hearings revealed conflicts of interest and fraud in some banking institutions’ securities activities. A formidable barrier to the mixing of these activities was then set up by the Glass Steagall Act.

Economist James K. Galbraith wrote in the introduction to his father, John Kenneth Galbraith's, definitive study of the Great Depression, The Great Crash, 1929:

The main relevance of The Great Crash, 1929 to the great crisis of 2008 is surely here. In both cases, the government knew what it should do. Both times, it declined to do it. In the summer of 1929 a few stern words from on high, a rise in the discount rate, a tough investigation into the pyramid schemes of the day, and the house of cards on Wall Street would have tumbled before its fall destroyed the whole economy. In 2004, the FBI warned publicly of "an epidemic of mortgage fraud." But the government did nothing, and less than nothing, delivering instead low interest rates, deregulation and clear signals that laws would not be enforced. The signals were not subtle: on one occasion the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision came to a conference with copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. There followed every manner of scheme to fleece the unsuspecting ....

This was fraud, perpetrated in the first instance by the government on the population, and by the rich on the poor.
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The government that permits this to happen is complicit in a vast crime.

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