Via Goodbye America (in a photo)
I received an email from a reader informing me about an interesting email she had just received. According to this email from the CEO of an independent TV station, the FCC is using your tax dollars to buy up every independent TV station in the country with the purported purpose to “improve” cell phone service and video on demand. My bullshit meter immediately flashes red.
We already know five corporations control 80% of the broadcasting outlets in this country and collude with the government and Wall Street to keep the sheep ignorant with ruling class sanctioned propaganda. We also know the government wants to control the internet through the FCC, using SOPA. Now we find out the government is using your tax dollars to buy up and eliminate independent TV stations across the country. They couldn’t possibly be attempting to squelch dissenting viewpoints from reaching the public. Could they?
Do you think your tax dollars should be used to reduce your ability to hear dissenting opinions?
Last week, we conducted a series of conference calls regarding MiND’s role in the broadcasting community, offering a unique combination of international, music, documentary and short-form programming. As we are contemplating some changes, we have decided to schedule two more viewer-input telephone conference calls and two public forums to be held at the MiND office. I hope you will find an hour to join us (the schedule is below).
Recently, the FCC (the Federal government agency which controls TV and radio licenses) contacted every TV station in the U.S. The FCC wants to purchase many TV broadcast licenses in order to supply wireless telephone carriers (such as Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, etc.) with additional bandwidth. This bandwidth will enable better cell phone service and improved video-on-demand on mobile devices.
As you may know, our TV license is owned and operated by a nonprofit organization. The decision to continue as a broadcaster will be made by our organization’s Board of Directors. This is completely our organization’s decision. The government agency is simply making an offer to all television stations in the country; some stations will choose to accept the offer, and some will not.
The television industry is changing. Many of the programs seen on MiND’s channels are available from other sources. As a result, we are asking questions about the best way to serve the public interest: in the digital era, operating a television station is one of several available options.
If we decide to stop broadcasting, we plan to invest the funds to develop new and exciting forms of public media for television, the Internet and other venues. Regardless of whether we continue to operate a TV station, our mission remains the same: to help people learn and understand the world.
And if we decide to stop broadcasting, we plan to find a new home for most of the programs and MiND channels so that you will be able to continue to watch them with minimal interruption.
If you are interested in joining us for one of these conversations by phone or in person, please send an email with the subject line “Public Forum RSVP” to [email protected] and include the following information:
(1) Name
(2) Zip Code
(3) Email address
(4) Session you would like to attend:
If you have questions, or would like to schedule an individual conversation with me, please send an email to the above address and we’ll set up a time to talk.
Thank you for watching the MiND channels, and for your willingness to participate in this important decision.
Best,
Howard Blumenthal
CEO, MiND: Media Independence
By Brianna Ehley,
The Fiscal Times
September 15, 2014
While the eyes of the world are on Iraq and President Obama’s plans to defeat ISIS, the chief auditor in charge of overseeing the U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan has a warning to policy makers: Don’t forget about the other war-torn country that has already cost hundreds of billions of dollars and has serious problems with corruption and sustainability.
So far, the United States has poured more than $104 billion into Afghanistan reconstruction efforts – that’s more than all the money spent on reconstructing Europe after World War II. Much of that money, as auditors have noted, has been lost to waste, fraud and abuse. In 2010, SIGAR accountants told The Fiscal Times they could only account for less than 10 percent of that money.
That’s a shocking sum, especially since Congress has already authorized another $16 billion to spend in Afghanistan in the next few years. Still, despite spending an “unprecedented” amount of money to rebuild this country, it has no strategy to weed out corruption – leaving hundreds of billions of tax dollars vulnerable, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) told an audience at Georgetown University on Friday.
“This is astonishing, given that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt countries in the world and a country that the United States is spending billions of dollars in,” the auditor said. He added that “things could get worse with the drawdown” that is scheduled for the end of 2015.
It’s not just corruption that threatens to derail all of the gains the U.S. has made in the country. Afghanistan, as Sopko noted, has a major problem with sustainability.
Right now, the United States and other international donors fund more than 60 percent of Afghanistan’s national budget of around $7.6 billion. Last year, for example, the Afghan government raised $2 billion in revenues; the rest came from foreign aid, mostly from the United States.
Sopko says in the next few years, the Afghan National Security Forces are going to require a force of 374,000 – at a cost of roughly $5 billion a year. “At these levels, if the Afghan government were to dedicate all of its domestic revenue toward sustaining the Afghan army and police, it still could only pay for about a third of the cost. Moreover, all other costs from paying civil servants to maintaining all roads, schools, hospitals and other non-military infrastructure would also have to come from international donors,” Sopko said. “The bottom line is, it appears we’ve created a government that the Afghans simply cannot afford.”
Sopko is known for being extremely critical of the government agencies involved in reconstruction efforts. He told the audience that the U.S. government has failed to address Afghanistan’s corruption and sustainability issues – which threaten to “jeopardize every gain” the U.S. has made. Meanwhile, he said the government’s counter-narcotics effort has also been a failure and if unaddressed could completely derail any progress the U.S. has made.
“The U.S. has already spent nearly $7.6 billion to combat the opium industry. Yet, by every conceivable metric, we’ve failed,” Sopko said.
Sopko and his team frequently churn out scathing reports highlighting the failures of the Defense and the State Departments in Afghanistan – and many of them receive a wide swath of media attention. This has unsurprisingly sparked some tension between the auditors and officials from the departments being audited who routinely have problems with the IG’s findings. They say that responding to IG reports “chews up countless hours, and that the inspector general’s work ultimately undermines the effort to build stronger civilian institutions here by creating the impression that the United States is simply pouring money down the well,” The New York Times reported.
Sopko says, “SIGAR welcomes publicity because publicity gives our reports and work impact in this town and in Kabul and around the world.” He added, “I admit, some ambassadors and generals and nameless, faceless bureaucrats and contractors are unhappy with the fact we get press coverage, even though our two-person press shop pales in comparison to the squadrons of PR people at Embassy Kabul, ISAF, or the Pentagon. But that is the cost of transparency and open government.”
– See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/09/15/Eyes-ISIS-America-s-104B-Afghanistan-Failing#sthash.riTYbKt6.dpuf
Hat tip Boston Bob
This is called Obama compassion. Use your tax dollars to expand the Free Shit Army, produce more ignorant entitlement serfs, and bolster the Democratic voting rolls. Do it for the children!!!!
Work harder and pay more taxes so Obama can create his diversity paradise. Now get to work!!!!
Handed over the transom by Double-M and also spotted here.
An ad for foster parents for illegal immigrant children in California promises $6,054 per month for those who sign up and successfully complete the 45-day approval process. The migrant children ad appeared in a Penny Saver in Murrieta. As previously reported by The Inquisitr, hundreds of protesters stopped busloads of illegal aliens from being transported into the town for holding and ultimate release.
The foster immigrant children ad was placed by the Crittenton Services and Foster Family Agency – FFA. The Murrieta Penny Saver notice said the agency was looking for families to provide homes for both American foster children and “unaccompanied refugee minors.”
The Orange County foster family organization provides services for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.
Sounds like a good deal. Of course, President Obama will be long gone when the piper will be paid. That’s not what I say, that’s what the CBO says:
Earlier today, the Congressional Budget Office released its updated long-term budget projection, and there is not a lot of black ink in that report. CBO estimates that, despite receiving record revenue gobbled up from the private economy, the Treasury will continue to run enormous deficits over the next 25 years. By 2039, the public share of the debt is projected to rise from 74% of GDP to 106%…
…So what does all of this mean? Who cares about some banal numbers on a federal balance sheet?
Contrary to the perception of many policy-makers, the national debt is not some abstract problem that will only affect future generations once investors no longer trust the security of federal treasures. As CBO explains (page 10), this is an immediate and near-term problem…
…the relatively-low annual payments for interest on the debt, hovering around $230 billion a year, are only a temporary reprieve due to historically low interest rates. According to Investors’ Business Daily, “if Washington had to pay the average interest now that it paid in 2000 (6.4%), it would be paying $500 billion more each year to stay afloat.”
Sadly, Americans are used to navigating opportunities and challenges based upon instant gratification or imminent danger. Warning voters about the threat of our national debt to the future of their grandchildren is not enough. Conservatives need to make the case that the current level of debt is a mitigating factor to current economic growth and that it will continue to diminish their wages and job opportunities.
But, by all means, let’s continue importing hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, largely illiterate, and desperately poor folks from the Third World! That should help!
Hat tip: BadBlue News.
Who could have predicted this? Oh Yeah – Me.
I wrote Subprime Auto Nation in September of 2012. GM and the rest of the slimeball auto industry utilized the free money being pumped out by the Federal Reserve to hawk their vehicles to every LeBron, Lakeisha, and Jamal in West Philly and the rest of Obama Welfare Nation with subprime auto loans out the yazoo. What could possibly go wrong providing seven year financing on $40,000 Cadillacs to people without jobs, without prospects, with sub 100 IQs, and long histories of defaulting on loans?
Considering Ally Financial, the number one dispenser of this subprime slime, was owned by Obama and the Feds until a few months ago, you have your answer. They used your tax money to get their voters in the latest models from that QUALITY IS OPTIONAL Government Motors union loving car company that has recalled more cars in the last few months than it sold in the previous two years.
Do you find it interesting that Obama and his minions, along with their co-conspirators on Wall Street decided to IPO Ally Financial back to the public just as the bad debt was beginning to roll in on this subprime slime? The underwriters for this joke of a company were Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital.
Wall Street has packaged these worthless pieces of paper into derivative sacks of shit and sold them to their clients, little old ladies, and pension funds. Does this ring a bell? They’ve done exactly what they did with subprime mortgages. EXACTLY. It worked so well the first time.
Now the shit is being fed into the fan. Guess who will be sprayed with the shit.
Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man blog,
We have commented a few times on the slightly diffuse character of the echo bubble, which has infected a great many nooks and crannies of the economy. One of the areas which has experienced an enormous boom was the sub-prime auto loan sector. It seems however that the party in this sub-sector of the bubble economy is in the process of ending.
“A three-year lending boom to car buyers with spotty credit that helped push auto sales to a six-year high is starting to show signs of overheating.
The percentage of loans packaged into securities that are more than 30 days late rose 1.43 percentage points to 7.59 percent in the 12 months ended September 30, according to Standard & Poor’s. That’s the highest in at least three years, the data released last week by the New York-based ratings company show.
“We’re at this inflection point,” Amy Martin, an analyst at S&P, said by telephone. “Now that they are opening the lending spigot, it’s only natural that losses are starting to rise.”
Underwriting standards began to decline amid five years of Federal Reserve stimulus that set off a race for higher-yielding assets, spurring a surge in issuance of bonds tied to subprime auto loans. That breathed life into a car-finance business that had contracted in the wake of the credit crisis, attracting new lenders and private-equity firms such as Blackstone Group LP with cheap funding and high margins.
Delinquencies on subprime auto loans are likely to have increased more during the fourth quarter, the holiday period when consumers typically stretch their budgets, according to S&P. That’s poised to increase losses that bondholders will take from defaults on the debt, which stood at 6.92 percent at the end of September after falling to as low as 4.15 percent in 2011, S&P data show.
“Many lenders have told us that their performance in recent years exceeded their expectations,” Martin wrote in a report last month. “We are now hearing that they expect losses to trend upward to more normal levels this year and next.”
[…]
Subprime lenders have found cheap funding in the bond market, with $17.6 billion of asset-backed securities tied to subprime auto loans issued last year, more than double the $8 billion sold in 2010, according to Barclays Plc. About $3.6 billion of the securities have been offered this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
(emphasis added)
We wonder of there is any pie Blackstone doesn’t have a finger in these days… Anyway, it seems investors in these loans – after enjoying above average returns for a good while – must now brace for growing losses. That ‘underwriting standards have declined’ is really no surprise – that is what happens when the Federal Reserve prints wagon-loads of money and pressures short term interest rates to zero. In fact, this decline in lending standards was arguably one of the main goals of the policy.
However, what interests us about this development is mainly this: it shows that the credit bubble is beginning to fray at the edges. Every downturn starts with a seemingly innocuous report about things ‘suddenly’ and ‘unexpectedly’ going wrong in a relatively obscure corner of the market. We find ourselves reminded of how sub-prime real estate credit troubles began to show up for the first time in February of 2007, leading to the often repeated mantra that this particular disturbance in the force was ‘well contained’.
That is however never how it works – in the end, it is all one big interconnected market. When troubles begin to show up at one end of it, they soon tend to begin to spread.
A car repo notice – at least the repo sector can expect a boom now.
Good-bye overpriced SUV piece of junk – it was nice to know ye while it lasted …
One should certainly keep both eyes open henceforth; more anecdotal evidence of this type is likely to emerge in coming months, especially if the Fed continues with its ‘QE tapering’ course. Once problems become visible in one obscure corner of the low grade credit markets, it is often a warning sign for the entire market and economy.
The US has been sending a stream of taxpayer’s dollars into Afghanistan, claiming the money’s needed to improve infrastructure and living conditions. But the latest auditing reports indicate most of this money – amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars – has been outright wasted or swallowed by corruption. RT’s Lucy Kafanov assesses the results.
The stupidity of government drones is so pervasive that it burns.
January 15, 2014; Pueblo Chieftain (Associated Press)
An interesting debate in Colorado concerning marijuana shops was just resolved in a way that goes against what the owners of pot stores wanted. Colorado’s Republican legislators proposed to add stores that sell recreational or medical marijuana to the list of places where recipients of public assistance couldn’t use their EBT cards at ATMs.
The storeowners actually agreed with the GOP proposal, primarily because they didn’t want to invite unnecessary federal scrutiny that might come with concerns about improper cash withdrawals on these government-issued cards. Already prohibited sites for the use of EBT cards for ATM cash withdrawals are casinos, liquor stores, gun shops, and, due to federal law, strip clubs.
However, Democrats on the State, Veterans, and Military Affairs Committee voted along party lines to allow the use of public assistance cards on ATMs in pot shops. Their reasoning is that many neighborhoods are “banking deserts” with few bank outlets and few ATMs. State Senator Irene Aguilar (D-Denver) explained, “I’m not comfortable limiting that access until I’m certain we’ve done that due diligence to make sure people can access their benefits when they need to.” Advocates for the poor agreed, suggesting, as did Terry Scanlon of the Colorado Center on Law & Policy, that they saw the legislation as “unnecessary regulation that could prevent access to benefits needed by low-income Coloradans.”