Map of government takedown requests issued to Google/Youtube

Google has created a map page indicating the number of takedown requests received from various countries around the world.  It’s a positive step toward transparency but now if we could just have a description of what was taken down… like the BBC video reporting the collapse of WTC7 20 minutes early.   Trying to keep that little gem from going viral proved futile.  They were taking videos down as fast as they could be uploaded and finally gave up.

The truth will come out and we won’t be silenced.  Actually, scratch that.  I can recall one instance where they actually did permanently and completely eliminate a video from all social video sites.  It was Illuminati henchman Donald Rumsfeld saying “The missile that hit the pentagon.”  I saw that video myself but didn’t save it.  Wish I did, cause they flushed it down a memory hole.  All that remains are written transcripts. If anyone  has a copy of that video I’d be eternally grateful for it.

http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

CNN ranks Detroit among most dangerous cities in world

George Hunter / The Detroit News

Detroit — Third-world countries have nothing on Detroit when it comes to crime, according to a list released this week by a national news organization.

CNN compiled a list of the world’s most dangerous cities, which includes places like Baghdad, Karachi, Pakistan, Beirut — and the Motor City.

The network collected data from Mercer’s global report on personal safety, Foreign Policy magazine’s most recent report on murder rates, and reports by Forbes and security watchdog Citizen’s Council for Public Security (CCSP) to compile the list.

New Orleans was the only other city in the United States to make the dubious list.

Lifelong Detroit resident Sherman Hayes, 79, was not surprised to hear that Detroit was considered among the most dangerous cities in the world.

“On just my street (Lakewood), the other day a man shot a 2-year-old girl during a dope deal; I saw the car zoom by the house,” he said. “Then, a few months ago, a father shot his son in the head over money. That happened just down the street.

“Crime is expected here,” Hayes continued. “It’s like the old westerns — when you hear gunshots, you don’t even pay attention. Someone could get killed right next door and nobody would know.”

CNN’s list was based on things like internal stability and effectiveness of law enforcement, along with official crime statistics and media reports.

Here’s the list, which was presented by CNN in no particular order:

Caracas, Venezuela
Detroit
New Orleans
Juarez, Mexico
Karachi, Pakistan
Cape Town, South Africa
Moscow, Russia
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
Beirut, Lebanon

America’s Obesity Epidemic: Bringing Sideshow Freaks Into The Discussion

Modeledbehavior.com
Thursday ~ April 15th, 2010  by Adam Ozimek

There has been a lot of very thoughtful discussion lately about the obesity epidemic facing this country. All I have to add to this insightful and informed conversation is a comment on and picture of a turn-of-the-century sideshow freak:

This is Chauncy Morlan, and around 100 years ago his obesity was so shocking that people would pay money to see him as he toured the country as a circus “fat man”. I find the unremarkableness of his size to be a telling sign of how we’ve pushed the limits of obesity in the past 100 years. Imagine, if you will, what society would look like if 100 years from now if what passed as spectacularly obese today would not even turn heads at the mall.

Securities and Exchange Commission files civil suit against Goldman Sachs for mortgage fraud

Why is the SEC filing a civil suit as opposed to having the DOJ indict these Wall Street fat cats criminally for insider trading?  At best a civil suit will result in a fine.  At least it’s something, but this is nowhere near the level of action we need to take.

—————–

New York Times
By LOUISE STORY and GRETCHEN MORGENSON

The move marks the first time that regulators have taken action against a Wall Street deal that helped investors capitalize on the collapse of the housing market. Goldman itself profited by betting against the very mortgage investments that it sold to its customers.

The suit also named Fabrice Tourre, a vice president at Goldman who helped create and sell the investment.

The instrument in the S.E.C. case, called Abacus 2007-AC1, was one of 25 deals that Goldman created so the bank and select clients could bet against the housing market. Those deals, which were the subject of an article in The New York Times in December, initially protected Goldman from losses when the mortgage market disintegrated and later yielded profits for the bank.

As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars.

According to the complaint, Goldman created Abacus 2007-AC1 in February 2007, at the request of John A. Paulson, a prominent hedge fund manager who earned an estimated $3.7 billion in 2007 by correctly wagering that the housing bubble would burst.

Goldman let Mr. Paulson select mortgage bonds that he wanted to bet against — the ones he believed were most likely to lose value — and packaged those bonds into Abacus 2007-AC1, according to the S.E.C. complaint. Goldman then sold the Abacus deal to investors like foreign banks, pension funds, insurance companies and other hedge funds.

But the deck was stacked against the Abacus investors, the complaint contends, because the investment was filled with bonds chosen by Mr. Paulson as likely to default. Goldman told investors in Abacus marketing materials reviewed by The Times that the bonds would be chosen by an independent manager.

“The product was new and complex, but the deception and conflicts are old and simple,” Robert Khuzami, the director of the S.E.C.’s division of enforcement, said in a statement. “Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.”

Mr. Paulson is not being named in the lawsuit. In the half-hour after the suit was announced, Goldman Sachs’s stock fell by more than 10 percent.

In recent months, Goldman has repeatedly defended its actions in the mortgage market, including its own bets against it. In a letter published last week in Goldman’s annual report, the bank rebutted criticism that it had created, and sold to its clients, mortgage-linked securities that it had little confidence in.

“We certainly did not know the future of the residential housing market in the first half of 2007 anymore than we can predict the future of markets today,” Goldman wrote. “We also did not know whether the value of the instruments we sold would increase or decrease.”

The letter continued: “Although Goldman Sachs held various positions in residential mortgage-related products in 2007, our short positions were not a ‘bet against our clients.’ ” Instead, the trades were used to hedge other trading positions, the bank said.

In a statement provided in December to The Times as it prepared the article on the Abacus deals, Goldman said that it had sold the instruments to sophisticated investors and that these securities “were popular with many investors prior to the financial crisis because they gave investors the ability to work with banks to design tailored securities which met their particular criteria, whether it be ratings, leverage or other aspects of the transaction.”

Goldman was one of many Wall Street firms that created complex mortgage securities — known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations — as the housing wave was cresting. At the time, traders like Mr. Paulson, as well as those within Goldman, were looking for ways to short the overheated market.

Such investments consisted of insurance-like policies written on mortgage bonds. If the mortgage market held up and those bonds did well, investors who bought Abacus notes would have made money from the insurance premiums paid by investors like Mr. Paulson, who were negative on housing and had bought insurance on mortgage bonds. Instead, defaults spread and the bonds plunged, generating billion of dollars in losses for Abacus investors and billions in profits for Mr. Paulson.

For months, S.E.C. officials have been examining mortgage bundles like Abacus that were created across Wall Street. The commission has been interviewing people who structured Goldman mortgage deals about Abacus and other, similar instruments. The S.E.C. advised Goldman that it was likely to face a civil suit in the matter, sending the bank what is known as a Wells notice.

Mr. Tourre was one of Goldman’s top workers running the Abacus deal, peddling the investment to investors across Europe. Raised in France, Mr. Tourre moved to the United States in 2000 to earn his master’s in operations at Stanford. The next year, he began working at Goldman, according to his profile in LinkedIn.

He rose to prominence working on the Abacus deals under a trader named Jonathan M. Egol. Now a managing director at Goldman, Mr. Egol is not being named in the S.E.C. suit.

Goldman structured the Abacus deals with a sharp eye on the credit ratings assigned to the mortgage bonds associated with the instrument, the S.E.C. said. In the Abacus deal in the S.E.C. complaint, Mr. Paulson pinpointed those mortgage bonds that he believed carried higher ratings than the underlying loans deserved. Goldman placed insurance on those bonds — called credit-default swaps — inside Abacus, allowing Mr. Paulson to short them while clients on the other side of the trade wagered that they would not fail.

But when Goldman sold shares in Abacus to investors, the bank and Mr. Tourre only disclosed the ratings of those bonds and did not disclose that Mr. Paulson was on other side, betting those ratings were wrong.

Mr. Tourre at one point complained to an investor who was buying shares in Abacus that he was having trouble persuading Moody’s to give the deal the rating he desired, according to the investor’s notes, which were provided to The Times by a colleague who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to release them.

In seven of Goldman’s Abacus deals, the bank went to the American International Group for insurance on the bonds. Those deals have led to billions of dollars in losses at A.I.G., which was the subject of an $180 billion taxpayer rescue. The Abacus deal in the S.E.C. complaint was not one of them.

That deal was managed by ACA Management, a part of ACA Capital Holdings, which changed its name in 2008 to Manifold Capital Holdings.

Goldman at first intended for the deal to contain $2 billion of mortgage exposure, according to the deal’s marketing documents, which were given to The Times by an Abacus investor.

On the cover of that flip-book, it says that the mortgage bond portfolio would be “selected by ACA Management.”

In that flip-book, it says that Goldman may have long or short positions in the bonds. It does not mention Mr. Paulson or say that Goldman was in fact short.

The Abacus deals deteriorated rapidly when the housing market hit trouble. For instance, in the Abacus deal in the S.E.C. complaint, 84 percent of the mortgage bonds underlying it were downgraded by rating agencies just five months later, according to a UBS report.

It takes time for such mortgage investments to pay out for investors who short them, like Mr. Paulson. Each deal is structured differently, but generally, the bonds underlying the investment must deteriorate to a certain point before short-sellers get paid. By the end of 2007, Mr. Paulson’s credit hedge fund was up 590 percent.

Mr. Paulson’s firm, Paulson & Company, is paid a management fee and 20 percent of the annual profits that its funds generate, according to a Paulson investor document from late 2008 titled “Navigating Through the Crisis.”

Artificial Sweeteners Alter How Body Handles Real Sugar

Legislation would bar taxpayer bailouts of derivatives ponzi schemes

April 15 (Bloomberg) — Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and their biggest rivals would be forced to wall off derivatives trading operations from their commercial banks under a measure to be introduced by Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Blanche Lincoln, a congressional aide said.

Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, will propose a “no-bailout provision” as part of an overhaul of derivatives regulation she plans to unveil today, according to the aide, who declined to be identified because the plan isn’t public. The measure aims to ensure banks don’t endanger depositors’ money with risky trading of over-the-counter derivatives, the aide said.

The proposal is already drawing opposition from banks that dominate the $605 trillion over-the-counter market. Derivatives regulation being weighed by Congress could cost JPMorgan from “$700 million to a couple billion dollars,” Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive officer, said yesterday during a conference call with analysts.

“I imagine their lobbyists have already contacted their best contacts in the government,” said Darrell Duffie, a finance professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

The five biggest dealers in the largely unregulated market — all commercial banks — earned $28 billion from derivatives trading last year, according to reports collected by the Federal Reserve and people familiar with the matter.

Tougher Than Obama

Lincoln’s provision would bar swaps dealers from taking advantage of the Federal Reserve’s discount lending window, emergency liquidity functions and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s deposit guarantee.     “It eliminates all of the advantages with the affiliation with an insured depository institution, which are profound,” said Karen Petrou, managing partner of Washington-based research firm Federal Financial Analytics Inc.

President Barack Obama met with House and Senate leaders at the White House yesterday, pushing them to finish work on the regulatory legislation he proposed last June. He said the bill must include strong oversight of the derivatives market, which he described as an “enormously risky” part of the shadow economy.

Lincoln’s bill is tougher than what Obama has proposed for derivatives oversight and could complicate efforts to pass a broader regulatory overhaul bill, lawmakers said yesterday. It would have to be approved by the Agriculture Committee and then incorporated into the broader regulatory-reform bill drafted by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd. Dodd’s was approved by the banking panel last month on a 13-10 vote without Republican support.

Moderate Democrat

Lincoln, a moderate Democrat who has campaigned in Arkansas on her independence from party leadership, is facing a tough primary election fight, with members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party like MoveOn.org attacking her for being too close to Wall Street.

Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, expressed frustration that a deal between Lincoln and Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the Agriculture panel’s top Republican, had fallen apart under White House pressure. Gregg indicated the derivatives bill wouldn’t get Republican support.

“Obviously all bets are off,” said Gregg, who spent months in Banking Committee negotiations that failed to yield agreement on derivatives language.

Republicans signaled that they will oppose Dodd’s bill, which they said won’t prevent taxpayers from having to prop up failed financial firms in the event of a future economic crisis.

“It’s a bill that actually guarantees future bailouts of Wall Street banks,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell old reporters after meeting with Obama.

Spin Offs

Along with forcing commercial banks to spin off their swaps dealers to a different corporate entity, Lincoln’s derivatives legislation would bar dealers, exchanges, clearinghouses and other swaps-market participants from being able to take advantage of emergency lending from the Fed, according to the aide.

It would also increase protections for clients by requiring swaps dealers to treat them as a fiduciary — obligating them to put customers’ interests ahead of the company’s, the aide said.

The measure requires most over-the-counter derivatives to be traded on exchanges or through clearinghouses. Companies that use swaps to hedge the cost of materials or other non-investment purposes would be exempted from the requirements, the aide said.     Like the Volcker rule, which would ban commercial banks from proprietary trading, the wall-off provision would separate derivatives trading from traditional banking activities such as taking deposits and making loans.

Cheaper Funding

It is also an effort to crack down on the possibility that banks would use cheaper funding provided by deposits insured by the FDIC. to subsidize their trading activities, the aide said.

The proposal, which would affect 25 to 30 banks that trade derivatives, is likely to generate strong opposition, analysts said. Along with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, the other three banks that control almost all swaps trading are Morgan Stanley, Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.    “With 97 percent of OTC derivatives housed in the five biggest banks, it tells you how critical it is for the business model to be affiliated with a really big bank,” said Petrou of Federal Financial Analytics.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, speaking at the White House yesterday, said Lincoln’s plan was promising.

“Based on what she has laid out in public, it looks like a very strong bill, very close to where we are,” Geithner said.

To contact the reporters on this story: Robert Schmidt in Washington at rschmidt5@bloomberg.net; Phil Mattingly in Washington at pmattingly@bloomberg.net.

Which Veggie Burgers Were Made With a Neurotoxin?

Mother Jones — By Kiera Butler
Mon Apr. 12, 2010 2:30 AM PDT

This is about the time of year when I start keeping packages of veggie burgers in the freezer, just in case of an impromptu barbecue. In the past, I haven’t had much fake meat brand loyalty: I’ve found that once I smother my hunk of textured vegetable protein in barbeque sauce, all soy patties are pretty much created equal. But after reading a recent investigation by the Cornucopia Institute, I’m going to be a lot more picky: The food and agriculture nonprofit found that most non-organic veggie burgers currently on the market are made with the chemical hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and neurotoxin.

In order to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers, manufacturers of soy-based fake meat like to make their products have as little fat as possible. The cheapest way to do this is by submerging soybeans in a bath of hexane to separate the oil from the protein. Says Cornucopia Institute senior researcher Charlotte Vallaeys, “If a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or texturized vegetable protein, you can be pretty sure it was made using soy beans that were made with hexane.”

If you’ve heard about hexane before, it was likely in the context of gasoline—the air pollutant is also a byproduct of gas refining. But in 2007, grain processors were responsible for two-thirds of our national hexane emissions. Hexane is hazardous in the factory, too: Workers who have been exposed to it have developed both skin and nervous system disorders. Troubling, then, that the FDA does not monitor or regulate hexane residue in foods. More worrisome still: According to the report, “Nearly every major ingredient in conventional soy-based infant formula is hexane extracted.”

The Cornucopia Institute found that a number of popular veggie burgers were made with hexane. The list (pdf, page 37, and below) is longer than you might think:

Amy’s Kitchen
Boca Burger, conventional
Franklin Farms
Garden Burger
It’s All Good Lightlife
Morningstar Farms
President’s Choice
Taste Above
Trader Joe’s
Yves Veggie Cuisine

Hexane-free products:
Boca Burgers “Made with organic soy”
Helen’s Kitchen
Morningstar “Made with organic”
Superburgers by Turtle Island
Tofurky
Wildwood

Also worth noting: Products labeled “organic” aren’t allowed to contain any hexane-derived ingredients, but that rule doesn’t apply to foods that are labeled “made with organic ingredients.” For more on soy sourcing, plus a list of popular “made with organic ingredients”-labeled protein bars that are made with hexane, read the Cornucopia Institute’s full study, “Behind the Bean.”

Olbermann and SPLC spook conflate patriot groups, religious extremists

W. T. F.  Now Keith Olbermann is working with the SPLC and shilling for DHS? This is such precisely orchestrated propaganda.  I wonder how many takes it took to get Olbermann’s scowl just right when he says “even the president” GASP!

I especially like how they use the Hutaree mugshot comp complete with fbi trainer “who made explosives for them” (reported by CNN) and fail to even point him out. Olbermann is such a sellout for allowing this SPLC clown to conflate patriot groups like Oath Keepers with these fed-run religious extremists.

(Federal Jack/YouTube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u1mktbolgg