Category Archives: government fraud spending collusion

Infrastructure Plan, Highway Grants Still Fleecing Americans

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Could the American taxpayer get fleeced again on the proposed Trump infrastructure proposal? History and facts says YES. Presently this is just chatter when it comes to improvements, there is no money allocated much less a plan. Draining that swamp is not underway either…

Image result for highway grants

With Billions in Recession-Era Highway Grants, Why Were Improvements Limited?

New research examines why nearly $28 billion of recession-era funding for highway projects didn’t yield greater improvements to the nation’s road network.

Bill Dupor, an assistant vice president and economist in the research division with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, digs into the issue in the reserve bank’s latest quarterly Review.

Dupor looks at $27.5 billion funneled through the Federal Highway Administration as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Most of that amount was directed toward grants for state governments, marking a substantial boost in federal highway aid.

But in years before and after the Recovery Act, according to Dupor, the number of structurally deficient bridges in the U.S. was close to unchanged, as was the number of workers on road and bridge projects. And, he says, over 40 percent of the nation’s population lived in states where the overall value of highway construction spending was lower in 2010 than in 2008.

“Despite the tremendous influx of federal funds, the highway system showed little improvement,” Dupor writes.

Why was this the case? An explanation Dupor offers is that as states received the federal grant funding for road projects, they could decrease their own spending on highway infrastructure—freeing up those state dollars for other uses.

“Since states were facing budget stress from declining tax revenues resulting from the recession, it stands to reason that states had the incentive to do so,” Dupor writes, referring to the shifting of state highway funding to other areas.

He found that 15 states cut their total highway capital spending between 2008 and 2010. For instance, across that timeframe, the amount of state money spent per resident on highway infrastructure went down by $109 in Georgia, $98 in Texas and $73 in Maryland.

President Trump is currently pushing for a $1 trillion infrastructure package that would involve both public and private capital. Some city leaders have argued that, if the federal government ups infrastructure spending, more money should go directly to cities rather than through states.

Dupor’s article is titled, “So, Why Didn’t the 2009 Recovery Act Improve the Nation’s Highways and Bridges?” A full copy can be found here.

*** Obama’s shovel ready jobs….remember that?

Forbes: Those with long memories will recall that the way out of the economic difficulties back a few years was to be that we had a fiscal stimulus. The US was going to borrow a whole bunch of money and invest it in those shovel ready infrastructure projects that simply littered the country side. This would pull us up out of recession pretty darn sharpish and all would be well.

No, really, this was what was going to happen:

As President Obama urges Congress to pass the $800 billion-plus stimulus package, one of his favorite selling points is the thousands of projects nationwide that he calls “shovel ready” — meaning planning is complete, approvals are secured and people could be put to work right away once funding is in place.

There is no formal definition for shovel ready. The Federal Highway Administration says it doesn’t use the phrase. Its preferred term is “ready to go,” according to acting administrator Jeff Paniati.

That means a state has already done the preliminary work for that project, he says.

“They’ve addressed all the environmental requirements as required,” Paniati says. “They’ve done the necessary public outreach. In many cases, the design work is already completed … and that they’re on an approved state list.”

One example of a shovel-ready project is the in the notoriously traffic-clogged suburbs of Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C. The state wants to widen the roads and has done some of the preliminary work, but the project is on hold because Virginia doesn’t have the final $32 million needed to complete it.

The stimulus bill states that for a project to be considered shovel-ready, it must be ready to begin in 90 days. The has a list of almost 19,000 such projects, adding up to almost $150 billion.

I quote at such length as this really was  what was touted as the way out of the then current problems.

FT Alphaville has a nice little chart today showing what actually happened:

Err, yes. The government gears up to massively boost infrastructure spending, borrows $800 billion to go do infrastructure spending and infrastructure spending falls through the floor at the same time.

My conclusion would be rather simple: government’s just not the way to get the job done.

I agree, there are some things that must be done. There are also things that must be done that only government can do: so, let government limit itself to only those things that must be done and can only be done by government. I think we’d be better off working out the rest of it by ourselves quite frankly.

I mean seriously? They insist that they’re going to boost the economy through infrastructure spending and even when they get the money infrastructure spending falls by by a third or more?

Putin’s Think Tank Crafted 2016 U.S. election Interference – documents

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Image result for Russian Institute for Strategic Studies  Image result for Russian Institute for Strategic Studies

Reuters: A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters’ faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

They described two confidential documents from the think tank as providing the framework and rationale for what U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded was an intensive effort by Russia to interfere with the Nov. 8 election. U.S. intelligence officials acquired the documents, which were prepared by the Moscow-based Russian Institute for Strategic Studies [en.riss.ru/], after the election.

The institute is run by retired senior Russian foreign intelligence officials appointed by Putin’s office.

The first Russian institute document was a strategy paper written last June that circulated at the highest levels of the Russian government but was not addressed to any specific individuals.

It recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama, the seven officials said.

A second institute document, drafted in October and distributed in the same way, warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency, the seven officials said.

The current and former U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the Russian documents’ classified status. They declined to discuss how the United States obtained them. U.S. intelligence agencies also declined to comment on them.

Putin has denied interfering in the U.S. election. Putin’s spokesman and the Russian institute did not respond to requests for comment.

The documents were central to the Obama administration’s conclusion that Russia mounted a “fake news” campaign and launched cyber attacks against Democratic Party groups and Clinton’s campaign, the current and former officials said.

“Putin had the objective in mind all along, and he asked the institute to draw him a road map,” said one of the sources, a former senior U.S. intelligence official.

Trump has said Russia’s activities had no impact on the outcome of the race. Ongoing congressional and FBI investigations into Russian interference have so far produced no public evidence that Trump associates colluded with the Russian effort to change the outcome of the election.

Four of the officials said the approach outlined in the June strategy paper was a broadening of an effort the Putin administration launched in March 2016. That month the Kremlin instructed state-backed media outlets, including international platforms Russia Today and Sputnik news agency, to start producing positive reports on Trump’s quest for the U.S. presidency, the officials said.

Russia Today did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Sputnik dismissed the assertions by the U.S. officials that it participated in a Kremlin campaign as an “absolute pack of lies.” “And by the way, it’s not the first pack of lies we’re hearing from ‘sources in U.S. official circles’,” the spokesperson said in an email.

PRO-KREMLIN BLOGGERS

Russia Today and Sputnik published anti-Clinton stories while pro-Kremlin bloggers prepared a Twitter campaign calling into question the fairness of an anticipated Clinton victory, according to a report by U.S. intelligence agencies on Russian interference in the election made public in January. [bit.ly/2kMiKSA]

Russia Today’s most popular Clinton video – “How 100% of the 2015 Clintons’ ‘charity’ went to … themselves” – accumulated 9 millions views on social media, according to the January report. [bit.ly/2os8wIt]

The report said Russia Today and Sputnik “consistently cast president elect-Trump as the target of unfair coverage from traditional media outlets.”

The report said the agencies did not assess whether Moscow’s effort had swung the outcome of the race in Trump’s favor, because American intelligence agencies do not “analyze U.S. political processes or U.S. public opinion.” [bit.ly/2kMiKSA]

CYBER ATTACKS

Neither of the Russian institute documents mentioned the release of hacked Democratic Party emails to interfere with the U.S. election, according to four of the officials. The officials said the hacking was a covert intelligence operation run separately out of the Kremlin.

The overt propaganda and covert hacking efforts reinforced each other, according to the officials. Both Russia Today and Sputnik heavily promoted the release of the hacked Democratic Party emails, which often contained embarrassing details.

Five of the U.S. officials described the institute as the Kremlin’s in-house foreign policy think tank.

The institute’s director when the documents were written, Leonid Reshetnikov, rose to the rank of lieutenant general during a 33-year-career in Russia’s foreign intelligence service, according to the institute’s website [bit.ly/2oVhiCF]. After Reshetnikov retired from the institute in January, Putin named as his replacement Mikhail Fradkov. The institute says he served as the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service from 2007 to 2016. [bit.ly/2os4tvz]

Reuters was unable to determine if either man was directly involved in the drafting of the documents. Reshetnikov’s office referred questions to the Russian institute.

On its website, the Russian institute describes itself as providing “expert appraisals,” “recommendations,” and “analytical materials” to the Russian president’s office, cabinet, National Security Council, ministries and parliament. [bit.ly/2pCBGpR]

On Jan. 31, the websites of Putin’s office [bit.ly/2os9wMr] and the institute [bit.ly/2oLn9Kd] posted a picture and transcript of Reshetnikov and his successor Fradkov meeting with Putin in the Kremlin. Putin thanked Reshetnikov for his service and told Fradkov he wanted the institute to provide objective information and analysis.

“We did our best for nearly eight years to implement your foreign policy concept,” Reshetnikov told Putin. “The policy of Russia and the policy of the President of Russia have been the cornerstone of our operation.”

(Reporting by Ned Parker and Jonathan Landay, additional reporting by Warren Strobel and Arshad Mohammed; Editing by David Rohde and Ross Colvin)

*** In part:

The wide range of scientific work is ensured by the structural subdivision of the

RISS into the Research Center of CIS countries, Center for Asia and the Middle

East Research, the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies (‘geographical departments’),

Center for Economic Research, Centre for Defense Studies as well as the Humanitarian

Research Center (functional departments).8 The latter represents a

new department, introduced almost simultaneously with the Presidential Decree

of 2009 and it is preoccupied with “the contentious issues of the foreign relations

history and the role of the religious factor.”9 Its introduction has added a new task

of “counteracting the falsification of history in the post-Soviet space”10 to RISS

scientific activities which are determined by the need of the Russian government

to provide strategic interests in the post-Soviet space. Here, there is a serious element

of propaganda for Russian state interests. Upon the whole, we can conclude

that the Presidential Decree of 2009 has turned the RISS into a useful tool providing

abundant data and research for an appropriate “articulation of the strategic

directions of the state policy in the sphere of national security.”  Read more here.

 

Slave Labor Markets in Libya and Beyond

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So, the United Nations reports this but so what? Is anyone at the United Nations taking action? Never heard anything out of the Obama White House either, did you? How about out of the Hillary Clinton or John Kerry State Department? Anything? Did WikiLeaks cables include any of this? Nah….

That whole Hillary Libya operation did not work out well at all, the country remains in a tailspin.

Migrant Smuggling – a deadly business

Currently, data is too scattered and incomplete to paint an accurate picture of numbers of people who are smuggled each year and the routes and methods used by those who smuggle them. Still, available evidence reveals the following trends and patterns:

  • Criminals are increasingly providing smuggling services to irregular migrants to evade national border controls, migration regulations and visa requirements. Most irregular migrants resort to the assistance of profit-seeking smugglers. As border controls have improved, migrants are deterred from attempting to illegally cross them themselves and are diverted into the hands of smugglers.
  • Migrant smuggling is a highly profitable business in which criminals enjoy low risk of detection and punishment. As a result, the crime is becoming increasingly attractive to criminals. Migrant smugglers are becoming more and more organized, establishing professional networks that transcend borders and regions.
  • The modus operandi of migrant smugglers is diverse. Highly sophisticated and expensive services rely on document fraud or ‘visa-smuggling’. Contrasted with these are low cost methods which often pose high risks for migrants, and have lead to a dramatic increase in loss of life in recent years.
  • Migrant smugglers constantly change routes and modus operandi in response to changed circumstances often at the expense of the safety of the smuggled migrants.
  • Thousands of people have lost their lives as a result of the indifferent or even deliberate actions of migrant smugglers.

These factors highlight the need for responses to combat the crime of migrant smuggling to be coordinated across and between regions, and adaptable to new methods. In this regard, UNODC seeks to assist countries in implementing the  Smuggling of Migrants Protocol while promoting  a comprehesensive response to the issue of migrant smuggling.

  More here. Has anyone heard from the African American community on this issue at all?

Image result for slave labor markets  PBS

Back in 2013, the UN essentially reported the same conditions in North Korea.

North Korea’s hidden labor camps exposed: A new UN panel is vowing to hold North Korea’s Kim regime to ‘full accountability’ for decades of mass crime and murder. Will Pyongyang face ICC indictment?  More here from CS Monitor.

The Global Slavery Index also provides insight into the estimated absolute numbers of people in modern slavery, in 162 countries. When the estimated number of enslaved people is considered in absolute terms as a single factor, the country ranking shifts considerably.

The countries with the highest numbers of enslaved people are India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, Thailand, Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Taken together, these countries account for 76% of the total estimate of 29.8 million in modern slavery.

The country with the largest estimated number of people in modern slavery is India, which is estimated to have between 13,300,000 and 14,700,000 people enslaved. The India country study suggests that while this involves the exploitation of some foreign nationals, by far the largest proportion of this problem is the exploitation of Indians citizens within India itself, particularly through debt bondage and bonded labour.

The country with the second highest absolute numbers of enslaved is China, with an estimated 2,800,000 to 3,100,000 in modern slavery. The China country study5 suggests that this includes the forced labour of men, women and children in many parts of the economy, including domestic servitude and forced begging, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and forced marriage.

The country with the third highest absolute number in modern slavery is Pakistan, with an estimated 2,000,000 to 2,200,000 people in modern slavery. Read the 2013 report here.

 

 

Pro-Globalist College Radicals a Product of IB?

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This is how CBS reported the protests over the weekend at Berkeley.

So, these protestors cover their faces, they are in fact recruited and the pool of students highly agree on issues like being anti-American. pro-globalism and anti-war. It was taught to them in public education beginning as early as Kindergarten. (by the way, ‘kindergarten’ is a German word).

Image result for international baccalaureate  IBO

So, what is the point here?  Read this summary as a primer.

Students enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program are taught they are elitists and exceptional over other student programs such at Advanced Placement.

High schoolers who have embraced IB’s global educational philosophy can elect to earn an IB diploma, which is recognized by colleges around the world.

IB is primarily an international program – there are nearly 4,000 IB schools in close to 150 countries, according to the program’s website.  

Notable alumni (per Wikipedia)

***

Related reading: International Baccalaureate Undermines U.S. Founding Principles

It’s time to re-affirm our founding and end the use of taxpayer funds for the IB program.

In the United States, criticism of the IBDP has centered on the vague claim that it is anti-American, according to parents anonymously quoted in The New York Times, who objected to the program’s funding from UNESCO in its early years. The base cost is considered to be higher than other programs.[81] In 2012, the school board in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, voted to eliminate all IB programmes in the district because of low participation and high costs.[83]

UNESCO, a United Nations division is in charge of your child’s education and is that okay with you?

Its declared purpose is to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through educational, scientific, and cultural reforms in order to increase universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and human rights along with fundamental freedom proclaimed in the United Nations Charter.

Although controversial, UNESCO’s aim is “to contribute to the building of peace, the eradication of poverty, sustainable development and intercultural dialogue through education, the sciences, culture, communication and information”. Other priorities of the organization include attaining quality Education For All and lifelong learning, addressing emerging social and ethical challenges, fostering cultural diversity, a culture of peace and building inclusive knowledge societies through information and communication.

So, read deeper on this as a summary white paper gives you great help on the topic and further explains just what is happening in education and the genesis of the willing demonstrators we see across college campuses today. Thanks to the ‘Truth about IB’ for all the years of hard work, research and truth.

Have you met Professor Tim Anderson?

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Still Che-zy after all these years You think American universities are Marxist? Check out this professor. If you can stand it, check out the video below.

Note the shirt and poster..

Sydney, April 12, 2017:

Australian university students really need Hezbollah’s take on the Syrian conflict. Because Hezbollah will totally give them the inside scoop.

Why are we paying this idiot?

Assad-loving academic Tim Anderson uses his human rights lectures to spruik his book and hand out pamphlets urging students to attend a conference on Syria which includes a seminar on the war from Hezbollah’s perspective.

The Sydney University academic, who has repeatedly visited Syria as a guest of Bashar al-Assad’s government, used his food security lecture yesterday to take aim at the media as part of a conspiracy involving three US administrations.

He also handed students information on the conference which promoted a talk by his colleague Jay Tharappel, who met with a senior Assad cabinet minister in 2015.

‘Syria hoax’: Sydney University at centre of pro-Assad push

One of Australia’s most prestigious universities has become the centre of a movement that believes Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has been framed by the West for last week’s chemical weapons attack.

The University of Sydney is standing by a controversial senior lecturer, Tim Anderson, who has dismissed the sarin gas attack in the Idlib Province as a “hoax” and called Syria’s six-year civil war a “fiction” perpetrated by the US “to destroy an independent nation”.

Fairfax Media can reveal Dr Anderson is just one among a number of Australian academics who have formed a pro-Assad outfit called the Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies, based in Sydney, to counter “censorship” by their universities.

The centre was formed “after concern that many Western academic bodies constrain, censor and marginalise counter-hegemonic or anti-imperial research and discussion, due to their close ties with government and corporate sponsors”.

In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets with Australian ...In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad meets with Australian professor Tim Anderson and a delegation including academics, researchers and activists in Damascus in 2013.  Photo: HOPD

As well as Dr Anderson, its editorial board consists of Luis Angosto-Ferrandez, another Sydney University senior lecturer, Drew Cottle from Western Sydney University, Rodrigo Acuna at Macquarie University and a number of other academics, including two from East Timor.

Next week the Centre will hold a two-day conference at the University of Sydney, including a discussion of the Syrian conflict “from Hezbollah’s perspective”. The event is endorsed by the University of Sydney Union-funded Political Economy Society.

An enthusiastic supporter of the Syrian state and lifetime radical, Dr Anderson was convicted in 1990 over the 1978 Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney, but acquitted the following year. He has travelled to Syria several times to meet with Assad.

After his most recent pro-Assad tweets were reported by the ABC’s Media Watch and News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, Dr Anderson and his supporters labelled the reports “fake news” and launched extraordinary personal attacks on a journalist involved.

Sydney University senior lecturer Tim Anderson (centre) believes Bashar al-Assad has been framed.Sydney University senior lecturer Tim Anderson (centre) believes Bashar al-Assad has been framed. Photo: Facebook

Jay Tharappel, who tutors human rights in the same Sydney University department as Dr Anderson, called News Corp journalist Kylar Loussikian “traitorous scum who desperately wants a second Armenian genocide”. Loussikian is of Armenian background.

Mr Tharappel defended the remarks when contacted by Fairfax Media on Tuesday. “If people like him wage war on our post-colonial homeland then I will wage war against them,” he said. “They can choose to fight me and I will fight them … with words.”

The University of Sydney said it was aware the CCHS was due to host next week’s conference on campus, and noted it did not provide financial or administrative support to the centre.

Dr Anderson told Fairfax Media the CCHS had “zero budget” and its mission was to create a “virtual library” of literature in support of sovereignty and self-determination.

A spokeswoman said the university did not endorse Dr Anderson’s statements but was committed to free speech for academic staff in their area of expertise.

“This means tolerance of a wide range of views, even when the views expressed are unpopular or controversial,” she said. In a statement, the student-run Political Economy Society also said it would continue to endorse the event “at this time”.

Dr Anderson has stated on Twitter that US presidents George Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are the real “masterminds of Middle East terrorism”. He stood by those comments on Tuesday. “Absolutely. The evidence is overwhelming,” he said.

Dr Anderson has also written a book, The Dirty War on Syria, published by the Montreal-based Centre for Research on Globalisation. The centre has been dismissed by PolitiFact and the Associated Press as a website that promotes conspiracy theories.

Mr Trump last week authorised the US firing 59 Tomahawk missiles at the Syrian airfield from which he said the deadly chemical attack was launched. The Assad regime has denied responsibility, while ally Russia said the Syrian army hit rebel-owned chemicals on the ground.

Asked about the matter while in India on Tuesday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he had not been briefed on Dr Anderson’s activities, but reiterated his support for the US air strikes and condemned the Assad regime’s “horrendous criminal conduct”.