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These Private Management Companies sell themselves as residual property management firms. Most of these companies, as it turns out, are in fact off-shore subsidiaries of Private Military Contractors (PMCs). They provide a catchall service. In other words, they regulate how much electrical power and natural gas flows through these areas. They also act as police force, and they act as management for local civil government.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.

The Secret Service sent a reply stating that documents revealing the frequency of such visits were considered presidential records exempt from public disclosure laws. The agency also said it was advised by the Justice Department that the Secret Service was within its rights to withhold the information because of the “presidential communications privilege.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics said it would file suit against the Obama administration as early as today. The group already has sued the administration over its failure to release details about visits from coal industry executives.

A White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said, “We are reviewing our policy on access to visitor logs and related litigation.”

As a candidate, President Obama vowed that in devising a healthcare bill he would invite in TV cameras — specifically C-SPAN — so that Americans could have a window into negotiations that normally play out behind closed doors.

Having promised transparency, the administration should be willing to disclose who it is consulting in shaping healthcare policy, said an attorney for the citizens’ group. In its letter requesting the records, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics asked about visits from Billy Tauzin, president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America; Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans; William Weldon, chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson; and J. James Rohack, president of the American Medical Assn., among others.

“It’s extremely disappointing,” said Anne Weismann, the group’s chief counsel. Obama is relying on a legal argument that “continues one of the bad, anti-transparency, pro-secrecy approaches that the Bush administration had taken. And it seems completely at odds with the president’s commitment . . . to bring a new level of transparency to his government.”

PhRMA, which represents the nation’s drug companies, said it had taken part in two meetings with senior White House officials in the Roosevelt Room. Participants, according to Tauzin, included White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, along with the CEOs of some major drug companies. Both meetings were closed to the public.

Let’s see if I can count this up….

70 day CMBs, $30 billion (tomorrow)
13 week Bills, $32 billion (July 27th)
26 week Bills, $31 billion (July 27th)
52 week Bills, $27 billion (July 28th)
2 year Notes, $42 billion (July 28th)
5 year Notes, $39 billion (July 29th)
7 year Notes, $28 billion (July 30th)
19 year, 6 month TIPS (reopened), $6 billion (July 27th)

That’s two hundred thirty-five billion dollars over the next week!

Almost one quarter of a trillion……. geejus.

I guess you should get while the getting is good, but this is going totally parabolic. That money has to come out of somewhere, by the way, in order for the sale to succeed, which is going to get rather interesting at some point – but exactly where it matters is impossible to know.

I expected that when we crossed the $100 billion threshold in a week the market would throw up all over it, but it didn’t. Now we’ve got the government trying to sell a quarter of a trillion dollars in debt over the next week, the announcement is out there, and while the bond market is selling off to a material degree equities could care less!

“I think that we have stepped back from the abyss. I think we’ve put out the fire,” he said in an interview with PBS, according to a transcript released by the TV station.

But Obama, who is facing declining popularity ratings for the first time in his presidency, said a lot remains to be done to fix the recession-mired US economy.

“The analogy I use sometimes is, we had this beautiful house. And there was a fire. We came in and we had to hose it down. The fire is now out, but what we’ve discovered is, we need some new tuckpointing, the roof’s leaking, the boiler’s out, oh, and by the way, we’re way behind on our mortgage,” Obama said

The work that remains will be undertaken with “the limited resources” that are available, and will take time, Obama said.

“Nobody’s more mindful than I am of the difficult, difficult times that people are feeling right now,” he said.

In touting his administration’s response to the crisis, the president pointed to the financial regulation he hopes to impose to prevent some of the unchecked activities that contributed to the economic freefall.

“The problem that I’ve seen, at least, is you don’t get a sense that folks on Wall Street feel any remorse for taking all these risks; you don’t get a sense that there’s been a change of culture and behavior as a consequence of what has happened.

“And that’s why the financial regulatory reform proposals that we put forward are so important,” Obama said.

But he added that he did not regret his administration’s decision to fund loans to a number of big financial firms deemed too important to the functioning of the financial system to be allowed to collapse.

FBI and IRS rounded up scores of elected officials and several rabbis across the state in what is being described as one of the biggest investigations of its kind in Jersey’s scandal-plagued history.

It appears to be a corruption-related investigation but Justice Department and FBI spokesmen would only say the corruption involved a “high-volume international money-laundering conspiracy.” It is said to involve rabbis in the Syrian Jewish enclave in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey. The probe is said to have started when money transfers drew the interests of the feds who followed the trail back to small-town Jersey corruption.

Among those arrested this morning were Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean), Jersey City Deputy Mayor Leona Beldini, Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, all Democrats, authorities said. Several area rabbis and other community leaders and politicians, including Jersey City Council President Mariano Vega, were brought into custody in connection with this case, officials said.

Officials say separate from the corruption probe, some of the suspects charged today were also connected to an illegal human organ-selling ring. Investigators say some charged would take cash payments to help find organs for sick patients in need of transplants. It’s unclear where the body parts might have come from or how many surgeries may have been done.

The body parts scheme involved kidney transplants, authorities said. Patients in need would pay middle-men to find willing donors in Israel. Investigators said the suspects would then have the donor and patient lie to hospitals that they were related. Hospitals would then do the operation unaware that cash payments were part of the deal. Officials say Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore were allegedly contacted by the suspects for these procedures.

In past years, New Jersey has seen more than 100 corruption-related arrests of public officials. There was no word on the specific charges against those being rounded up today, but a press conference is scheduled for noon.

Secret recordings made of the defendants by the feds paint a classic portrait of Jersey-style corruption.

In April of this year, as a Hoboken councilman and mayoral candidate, the 32-year-old Cammarano, after meeting with a developer who had promised him a bribe of several thousand dollars, said “I wanna make sure that I, you know, you, you’re my man,” emphasizing that he was a proponent of redevelopment, according to court papers.

Later when asked by a “cooperating witness” if his development projects would be sped through the bureaucratic process, Cammarano said, “I promise you… you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be treated like a friend,” according to the court documents.

Defendant Michael Schaffer, a Commissioner with the North Hudson Utilities Authority, told the witness, Cammarano “told me, ‘Michael, the way I operate politics, anybody who helps me, I help them. That’s the way I operate. And if you’re not there the first round, I don’t need ya’ the second round.”

According to the court papers, it’s not quite clear how the international money-laundering scheme is related to corrupt local politics. Two of the Rabbis involved, Mordchai Fish, who served at Congregation Sheves Achim, a synagogue in Brooklyn, and his brother Albert Schwartz, were caught on tape having conversations with the cooperating witness that seemed straight out of a movie script, according to court transcripts:

“I had 25 million from [the bank] – 20 million – that schnookie deal. I gave 20 million to [another bank]. I, I took five million. I sent it offshore..” said the witness, who was reputedly also involved in a counterfeit handbag racket, according to the court papers.

Defendant Issac Rosenbaum, meanwhile, was caught up in a shady organ procurement program, where an undercover FBI agent and the cooperating witness pretended to need a human liver for the undercover’s sick uncle, the feds charge.

“Let me explain this to you,” said Rosenbaum on February 26, 2008 according to the court documents. “It’s illegal to buy [ a liver]. It’s illegal to sell.They are going to investigate him [the donor] not you, not your uncle. He’s going to speak to a social worker and a psychologist to find out why he is doing it… and it is our job to prepare him.”

Asked which European financial institutions received the money, which was handed out by The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a component of the Federal Reserve System, Bernanke responded, “I don’t know.”

“Half a trillion dollars and you don’t know who got the money?” asked Grayson.

As we have previously reported, the destination of trillions in bailout funds remains hidden after the Fed refused to disclose where it had gone despite a lawsuit filed by Bloomberg.

Bernanke said the Fed had a “long standing legal authority” to hand money to foreign banks under section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act, a claim contradicted by Bernanke’s own report, as Grayson soon highlighted.

Grayson said that he had investigated one of the arrangements, a $9 billion dollar package to New Zealand, which works out at $3000 dollars for every citizen of New Zealand.

“Seriously, wouldn’t it have been better to extend that kind of credit to Americans rather than New Zealanders,” said Grayson.

The Congressman then implied that handing money to foreign institutions was unconstitutional, reading from Article I, “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law.”

“Do you think it’s in the spirit of the Constitution for a group like the FOMC to hand out a half a trillion dollars to foreigners without any action by this Congress?” asked Grayson, to which Bernanke responded that Congress had approved it with the Federal Reserve act of 1913. Grayson responded that in 1913, the entire GDP of the U.S. was well under half a trillion dollars.

“Is it safe to say that nobody in 1913 contemplated that a small little group of people would decide to hand out half a trillion dollars to foreigners?,” asked Grayson, to which Bernanke again claimed that the authority had been used numerous times before.

Grayson debunked this claim by pointing to Bernanke’s own report, which stated that the entire amount had been handed out starting from the last quarter of 2007, and the amount given out before that to foreign banks was zero.

…

So the question for you and me is “what do we do?” Are we going to take a vaccine? Are we going to allow our children to be vaccinated? Will we have a choice? How can we organize to make sure that we do? Is self-quarantine a practical option? How would we prepare for it?

What you believe is your responsibility. The time has come to build time into Summer schedules to research options, discuss them with those you trust and make informed decisions about what you believe and what actions you intend to take under a variety of scenarios.

The system, currently in testing, will be geographically distributed in data centers around the country, and it will hold “essentially every kind of data there is,” said Randy Garrett, director of technology for NSA’s integrated intelligence program, at a cloud computing symposium last week at the National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College.

The system will house streaming data, unstructured text, large files, and other forms of intelligence data. Analysts will be able to add metadata and tags that, among other things, designate how securely information is to be handled and how widely it gets disseminated. For end users, the system will come with search, discovery, collaboration, correlation, and analysis tools.

The intelligence agency is using the Hadoop file system, an implementation of Google’s MapReduce parallel processing system, to make it easier to “rapidly reconfigure data” and for Hadoop’s ability to scale.

The NSA’s decision to use cloud computing technologies wasn’t about cutting costs or seeking innovation for innovation’s sake; rather, cloud computing was seen as a way to enable new scenarios and unprecedented scalability, Garrett said. “The object is to do things that were essentially impossible before,” he said.

NSA’s challenge has been to provide vast amounts of real-time data gathered from intelligence agencies, military branches, and other sources of intelligence to authorized users based on different access privileges. Federal agencies have their own systems for sharing information, but many remain disconnected, while community-wide systems like Intellipedia require significant user input to be helpful.

The NSA effort is part of Intelligence Community Directive 501, an effort to overhaul intelligence sharing proposed under the Bush administration. Current director of national intelligence Dennis Blair has promised that intelligence sharing will remain a priority.

“The legacy systems must be modernized and consolidated to allow for data to actually be shared across an enterprise, and the organizations that collect intelligence must be trained and incentivized to distribute it widely,” he said in response to questions from the Senate prior to his confirmation.