Citigroup announces possible bank holiday

Warns customers it “reserves the right” to delay withdrawals from checking accounts for seven days.

This notice was sent to customers nationwide:

“Effective April 1, 2010, we reserve the right to require (7) days advance notice before permitting a withdrawal from all checking accounts. While we do not currently exercise this right and have not exercised it in the past, we are required by law to notify you of this change,”

Citigroup later claimed that it was a mistake and only applied to residents of Texas.  They later released the following statement:

Citibank has now released the following statement by way of explanation: “When Citibank moved to unlimited FDIC coverage in 2009, we had to reclassify many checking accounts to allow for immediate withdrawals in order to ensure all customers qualified for the additional coverage. When we moved back to standard FDIC coverage with most major banks in 2010, Citibank decided to reclassify those accounts back to make them eligible again for promotional incentives. To do so, Federal Reserve Reg D requires these accounts, called NOW accounts, to reserve the right to require a 7-day notice of withdrawal. We recently communicated this technical requirement to our customers. However, we have never exercised this right and have no plans to do so in the future.” [futureofcapitalism.com]

Detroit schools offer class in how to to work at Walmart

Corporate Personhood: First Amendment Rights

revolutionnot.com

Supreme Court OKs unlimited corporate spending on elections (LA Times)

Reporting from Washington – Overturning a century-old restriction, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that corporations could spend as much as they wanted to sway voters in federal elections.

In a landmark 5-4 decision, the court’s conservative bloc said that corporations had the same right to free speech as individuals, and for that reason the government could not stop corporations from spending to help their favored candidates.

…..

I have so many issues with this that it felt like someone kicked me in the chest. Watching this move through the system was worrisome. This decision has only further solidified the fascist take over of our republic.

I wrote about corporate personhood last year during Sotomayor’s admission into the court. She is very much questioning not just first amendment rights but giving any constitutional rights to corporations.

Once again, the strict constructionist conservative wing of the Supreme Court threw out their ideals and voted to further corporate power and it’s take-over of our government. It’s *($%^ infectious. It’s growing and they have bastardized the US Constitution again.

This is how the strict constructionists strayed to lands beyond from their ideals. Strict Constructionists

“Strict constructionism” is also used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies such as originalism and textualism, which emphasize judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning (or originally intended meaning) of constitutions and laws.

The original intent of the constitution nor the 14th Amendment never even considered corporations as actual people. If they had intended Corporations to have the same constitutional rights as individuals they would have written “People and Corporations” throughout the document. In fact, before corporations had personhood, they needed a charter for organization which needed to be continually renewed by each state. That is the original intent of the Constitution.

There are a few arguments for it:

• Investor protection
• Management protection

There are so many arguments against it:

• They have a LOT money, translating into more and more effective speech for corporations
• They enjoy more rights in the form of lower tax rates and then just on profit. This is like taxing Caucasians 20% and everyone else 25%. Secondly, imagine if actual people were only taxed on what we “save” because all living costs were tax deductible? Also, imagine states fighting for your citizenship by giving you incentives like no state taxes for 10 years? These corporate “people” have preferential laws.
• It is a form of double representation. The investors are already represented as themselves. They vote and can put their own money towards a campaign. If you invest in a company but want another canditate to win other than what is being supported by the corporation, then the corporation is not accurately representing you.
• Corporations make false claims and representations. They use their First Amendment Rights to do great harm to the people. A great example of this is the Tobacco and Cigarette Industry claiming that smoking was safe and funding skewed studies.
• Financial Ratings companies like Standard & Poor and Moody say that their financial ratings are opinion and protected by the First Amendment. So, when they rated toxic assets as AAA they had no liability to their word even though the entire financial industry depends on these ratings accuracy. Giving them accountability may actually force them to give securities proper ratings.
• The Constitution cannot be cherry-picked. A real person cannot only have some right in the constitution. A person MUST have all rights. The problem is that corporations are slaves and cannot vote, to name two important conflicts with corporations having the full rights of the constitution.
• A corporation legally must maximize shareholder value. This is the highest law to the corporation and can even be sued by shareholders if found to not be doing this. These include things that could be “to the detriment of people.” Corporations do not have the same priorities as actual people who exist in reality. Two or three times a day, we eat. Without sufficient food we die. Corporations don’t have these daily existential crises

Solutions:

• Force the court to explain why corporations don’t have full First Amendment Rights as people do. Corporations are “artificial people” after all. Justice Clarence Thomas had the clarity to at least do away with this contradiction.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations are not slaves.
• Force the court to tell us how corporations will participate in voting during an election.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can use a firearm without any other person helping.
• Force the court to tell us how a corporation can be conscripted into a war if we re-instate the draft.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations younger than 21 can possess alcohol.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations don’t have identification cards like passports or driver licenses.
• Force the court to tell us how to imprison a corporation in a jail.
• Force the court to tell us why corporations owned by foreign entities, including foreign governments, can have rights under our constitution.

Any answers to these questions are purely rationalizations.

I don’t believe any of this can be done because a corporation by itself cannot think, learn, or feel. It cannot be thrown in jail for the lack of physical presence. It cannot pull a lever in a voting booth nor mark any paper. A corporation does not need food or water. It doesn’t even need toilet paper. It does not need to breath and cannot ever be hospitalized. A corporation never came out of a vagina (or c-section) nor must it eventually die. It cannot use a firearm. It is not conscious and can only act through proxies.

or we could just,
Remove corporate personhood. Singapore doesn’t have corporate personhood and, while investment and growth is hampered, it still has a thriving economy where the risk of corporations is priced, truly, into its market value.

I’m not quite sure how corporate protection should look but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

My last point is that this ruling clearly flies in the face of stare-decisis. This was an important aspect to confirming the Supreme Court Judges Alito and Roberts in the Judiciary Committee of Congress.

FCC says you can’t use that wireless mic any more

If you own a wireless mic that operates in the 700 MHz band (between 698 and 806 MHz), as of June 12, 2010, you will be prohibited from using it.  This frequency band is no longer used for analog TV after the switch to digital TV and is now being used by law enforcement and emergency services.

Naturally, the ever-growing police state will need more radio bandwidth for its minions to communicate with each other, especially when operating within the range of your wireless mic, such as in your home, business, or church.

Chris Lyons, manager of technical and educational communications for Shure Microphones, says “The 700 MHz band has been reallocated and the bottom line is that any wireless mic that operates in the 700 MHz band—and that’s a lot of them—needs to be replaced.”

So for the good of the state, and for your own safety, you must throw away that microphone.  There will be no compensation.

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/wirelessmicrophones/

Kucinich calls on Congress to take control of the Fed, end fractional reserve banking system

Dennis Kucinich speaks to the participants of the 2009 American Monetary Institute’s 5th Annual Monetary Reform Conference:

McDonalds, public school lunch beef treated with ammonia

New York Times

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company’s ammonia treatment, and have said it destroys E. coli “to an undetectable level.” They decided it was so effective that in 2007, when the department began routine testing of meat used in hamburger sold to the general public, they exempted Beef Products.

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

…

Carol Guzy/Washington Post

Carl S. Custer, a former U.S.D.A. microbiologist, said he and other scientists were concerned that the department had approved the treated beef for sale without obtaining independent validation of the potential safety risk. Another department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

One of the toughest hurdles for Beef Products was the Agricultural Marketing Service, the U.S.D.A. division that buys food for school lunches. Officials cited complaints about the odor, and wrote in a 2002 memorandum that they had “to determine if the addition of ammonia to the product is in the best interest to A.M.S. from a quality standpoint.”

“It is our contention,” the memo added, “that product should be labeled accordingly.”

Represented by Dennis R. Johnson, a top lawyer and lobbyist for the meat industry, Beef Products prevailed on the question of whether ammonia should be listed as an ingredient, arguing that the government had just decided against requiring another company to list a chemical used in treating poultry.

School lunch officials said they ultimately agreed to use the treated meat because it shaved about 3 cents off the cost of making a pound of ground beef.

U.S Soldiers Are Waking Up!

Fractional reserve, banks, and foreclosures

RevolutionNot.com

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the banking system in the USA and how banks create money out of thin air (if they have the reserves).

Under the fractional reserve system, banks are allowed to create money through a multiple of their reserves. When they create the money, it becomes the reserves for the next bank and so on and so forth. The reason why this is corrupt is because the banks don’t create value. They only create money. They only create money through loans, meaning they own the real value until you pay them back with their fake, newly minted, money

As this crisis continues they have stopped lending…. This has an important side effect. When a bank lends, they create new money. This is the only way a bank will lend because it’s virtually risk free for them. They now see money creation as too risky.

The problem we are running into now is that the banks aren’t creating new money, ahem, they aren’t lending. This can be seen here in the recreated M3:

Recreated M3

As banks continue to go bankrupt, their creation of new money dwindles. The effects of which can be seen in the decreasing M3 over the last few months.

This is why the banks continue to get preferential treatment over average citizens. They create the money. New money is ESSENTIAL to the functioning of our economy.

The reason is quite simple actually. When the bank system loans new money, they don’t lend out the interest payment. Meaning, a new loan must be taken out by the economy in general to pay the interest of that person (or company). Thus, new money is essential to keeping the race going.

Without new money, more and more people won’t be able to pay back their loans. We are already seeing this happen with the never ending “foreclosure crisis.”

Until new money is being created by the banks then there is less and less money to be able to pay the banks their interest.

What’s really cool about this is that the government has been doing EVERYTHING they can to buoy the balance sheets of banks and they still aren’t creating new money. In fact, the banks don’t want government money because they can’t give themselves billions in bonuses.

The decreasing M3 is due to people paying off their loans. This has an amazing effect of causing less money to be in the system. In essence, if all loans were paid off, there would be no money anywhere.

So in the mean time, more foreclosures will occur both in residential and now commercial real estate. The banks will continue to be in bad shape regardless of how much they legally or illegally manipulate their books. This will cause no new money to be issued thus making the problems worse.

All those people talking about a “recovery” have no idea what’s really going on. A company’s balance sheet may look good but until the banks start issuing new money, the public will stay in a world of hurt. Foreclosures will remain high and jobless numbers will keep being massaged downwards.

So what are we to do? Well, the government has been trying to fund projects to inject money into the system. The problem here is that the government is getting the money… from the banks! Our government must pay back the interest on that… meaning…. you, me, our children, grandchildren, and, well, generations will be paying back that money.

If the government actual did the constitutional thing, and took the money creation powers back from the banks and reinstalled it with Congress, we may actually have a chance to make it. As it is, I am very pessimistic about the economy due to the fraudulent ponzi scheme run by the Federal Reserve.

Last note, the Federal Reserve has a mission to have a stable currency and try to maintain high employment. They have failed on both account horribly. They have debased the dollar by 95% over the last century, and unemployment is now 20%+ using actual numbers and not the fudged ones produced by the government. A stable currency would mean 0% inflation/deflation over 100 years. A target of 2% inflation per year is NOT stable. It’s exponential growth.