The federal government sold your Social Security Number for FIVE dollars

Guest Post by Simon Black

The federal government sold your Social Security Number for FIVE dollars

Welcome to our Friday roll up, where we highlight the most absurd and concerning stories we are following this week.

Equifax fined $700 million… for 147 million person data breach

Do you remember back in 2017 when Equifax (the giant consumer credit agency) admitted that it had been breached?

Hackers broke into Equifax’s databases and stole personal and financial records of 147 million people.

And we’re talking EVERYTHING– names, addresses, Social Security Numbers… all the ingredients that an identity thief needs to destroy your life.

Continue reading “The federal government sold your Social Security Number for FIVE dollars”

This Isn’t A Joke! The IRS Just Hired Equifax To Safeguard Taxpayer Data

Tyler Durden's picture

 

Just hours after Equifax CEO Rick Smith wrapped up his testimony before the House Energy and Commerce committee – the first in a series of Congressional “fact-finding missions” about the hack – Politico reported that the IRS last week awarded the disgraced credit monitoring bureau with a $7.25 no-bid contract even as the company struggled to address suspicions that it mislead investors and customers by withholding information about one of the most damaging data breaches in US history.

Continue reading “This Isn’t A Joke! The IRS Just Hired Equifax To Safeguard Taxpayer Data”

BREAKING BAD (DEBT) – EPISODE TWO

‘If you’re committed enough, you can make any story work. I once told a woman I was Kevin Costner, and it worked because I believed it’ Saul Goodman – Breaking Bad

“As calamitous as the sub-prime blowup seems, it is only the beginning. The credit bubble spawned abuses throughout the system. Sub-prime lending just happened to be the most egregious of the lot, and thus the first to have the cockroaches scurrying out in plain view. The housing market will collapse. New-home construction will collapse. Consumer pocketbooks will be pinched. The consumer spending binge will be over. The U.S. economy will enter a recession.”Eric Sprott – 2007

In Part One of this article I provided the background of how our current debt saturated economy got to this point of ludicrousness. The “crazy” bloggers, prophets of doom, and analysts who could do basic math were warning of an impending financial crisis in 2006 and 2007, which would be caused by the issuance of hundreds of billions in subprime slime by the Too Big To Trust Wall Street shysters. Subprime mortgages, auto loans, and credit card lines provided the kindling for the 2008 conflagration.

Under normal circumstances we wouldn’t have seen such irrational, reckless, greedy behavior from Wall Street for another generation. But, Wall Street didn’t have to accept the consequences of their actions. They were bailed out and further enriched by their puppets at the Federal Reserve, the lackey politicians they installed in Washington D.C., and on the backs of honest, hard-working, tax paying Americans. The lesson they learned was they could continue to take excessive, reckless, unregulated risks without concern for losses, downside, or consequences.

In reality, the Fed and government have worked in tandem with Wall Street to create the subprime economic recovery. The scheme has been to revive the bailed out auto industry by artificially boosting sales through dodgy, low interest, extended term debt. With the Feds taking over the entire student loan market, they have doled out hundreds of billions to kids who don’t have the educational skills to succeed in college, in order to keep them out of the unemployment calculation.

That’s why you have a 5.7% unemployment rate when 41% of the working age population (102 million people) is not working. The appearance of economic recovery has been much more important to the ruling class than an actual economic recovery for average Americans, because the .1% have made out like bandits anyway. Who has benefited from the $650 billion of student loan and auto debt disseminated by the oligarchs in the last four years, the borrowers or lenders?

Continue reading “BREAKING BAD (DEBT) – EPISODE TWO”