Recently I’ve taken to calling all “law enforcement” goons reavers. That keeps me from calling them things I’d rather my daughter not repeat. And the term is completely appropriate.

Freddie began increasing these bets dramatically in late 2010, the same time that the company was making it harder for homeowners to get out of such high-interest mortgages.

No evidence has emerged that these decisions were coordinated. The company is a key gatekeeper for home loans but says its traders are “walled off” from the officials who have restricted homeowners from taking advantage of historically low interest rates by imposing higher fees and new rules.

Freddie’s charter calls for the company to make home loans more accessible. Its chief executive, Charles Haldeman Jr., recently told Congress that his company is “helping financially strapped families reduce their mortgage costs through refinancing their mortgages.”

But the trades, uncovered for the first time in an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, give Freddie a powerful incentive to do the opposite, highlighting a conflict of interest at the heart of the company. In addition to being an instrument of government policy dedicated to making home loans more accessible, Freddie also has giant investment portfolios and could lose substantial amounts of money if too many borrowers refinance.

“We were actually shocked they did this,” says Scott Simon, who as the head of the giant bond fund PIMCO’s mortgage-backed securities team is one of the world’s biggest mortgage bond traders. “It seemed so out of line with their mission.”

Read More…

Cato has published a new section on www.downsizinggovernment.org that examines the Department of the Interior.

Interior is not one of the largest departments in terms of spending, but it has huge control over the lands and resources of the western United States. It oversees more than 500 million acres of land through the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and other agencies. The department also houses the Bureau of Reclamation, which distributes subsidized water, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which administers aid programs for American Indians.

Here are some of ideas discussed at www.downsizinggovernment.org/interior:

• Federal Lands: During the nation’s first century, the federal government focused on selling and giving away its lands to individuals, businesses, and state governments. In the 20th century, the government reversed course and began grabbing more land, but federal ownership has not led to sound economic or environment stewardship. A revival of federalism in land policies is long overdue.
• American Indians: The federal government has an appalling record in its dealings with Indian tribes, and since 1824 the Bureau of Indian Affairs has been one of the most mismanaged and destructive of federal agencies. The path to prosperity for Indians is not through federal subsidies and top-down regulations, but through reforms to property rights and other institutions on reservations.
• Water Subsidies: The Bureau of Reclamation operates dams and other water infrastructure in the western states. Its large subsidies for irrigation combined with restrictions on water transfers are contributing to a growing water crisis in many areas. Policymakers should focus on reforms to reduce subsidies, transfer federal infrastructure to state and private ownership, and move towards water trading in open markets.

One interesting thing about reforming the Department of the Interior is that economists and environmentalists share some common ground. Federal policies that set prices for irrigation water, grazing lands, timber, and other resources too low are both economically inefficient and harmful to the environment.

Another interesting thing about Interior is that its long history reveals that special interest lobbying, corruption, and mismanagement are nothing new in Washington. Interior’s troubles have included the “Indian ring” corruption scandals of the 19th century, the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, and Jack Abramoff’s influence peddling during the George W. Bush years.

In 1828, one expert noted that “the derangements in the fiscal affairs of the Indian department are in the extreme… there is a screw loose in the public machinery somewhere.” Fast forward to 2006, and Interior’s Inspector General found that “short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”

Isn’t two centuries of federal bungling and failed policies enough? Policymakers should begin exploring ways to downsize the Department of the Interior.

The entire reason why SOPA’s authors and supporters have the money, influence, and power to put draconian bills like it forward in the first place is because of our daily patronizing of their corporations and the goods and services they provide.

SOPA supporters include the US Chamber of Commerce, the MPAA, and many of the mega-corporations Americans, and indeed people around the world, support on a daily basis. The key to stopping SOPA and the watered down feigned “concession” that will surely follow it is to undermine the unwarranted power and influence of the corporations and financiers backing it in the first place. If Americans withdrew their support from these corporations, if theaters were left empty, if Pepsi and Coke were left collecting dust on the shelves of an empty Walmart, bills like SOPA would not exist, let alone have a chance to be passed into law.

Below is just one letter signed by just one group of these corporations and organizations. Boycott, put out out of business, and replace these corporations with local alternatives.

Sponsors of this letter in support of “rouge sites legislation” include:

3M
Alliance of Automobile Manufactures
American Apparel and Footwear Associations
Autodesk Inc.
Bose Corporation
Broadcast Music Inc (BMI)
Caterpillar
CBS
Council of Fashion Designers of America
Electronic Arts (EA)
Ford Motor Company
GlaxoSmith Kline
Harley-Davidson Motor Company
Johnson & Johnson
L’Oreal
Macmillian
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
National Basketball Association (NBA)
National Football League (NFL)
NBC Universal
News Corporation (Fox News)
NHL
Nike
Nintendo of America
Oakley
Pfizer
PGA of America
Philip Morris International
Reebok
Rite Aid
Rolex
Rosetta Stone
Software & Information Industry Association
Sony
Dow Chemical
McGraw-Hill
Timberland
Walt Disney
Tiffany & Co.
Time Warner
Toshiba
US Chamber of Commerce
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)
Universal Music Group
Viacom
Wal-Mart
Warner Music Group
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)
Xerox Corporation
Zippo Manufacturing

If you can’t live without the endless crass torrent of “bread and circus” as well as trinkets provided by the above mentioned supporters of this corporate-fascist agenda – the literal crafting and backing of legislation of, by, and for corporations -you don’t deserve the freedom you believe yourself entitled to.

There is not one corporation listed above that society could not live without and in many cases replace with decentralized, superior local alternatives. Freedom is not simply voicing your opposition or choosing representatives to do so on your behalf. Freedom is also about the responsibility to keep in check the creation of unwarranted power and influence garnered from your daily payments in attention, money, time, and energy to corporations that would seek to impose their will upon society using the very mechanisms of governance designed solely for the people’s benefit.

Identity the source of power behind bills like SOPA, and indeed many of the government policies wrecking our society, miring us in endless war, and leaving us in economic destitution.Boycott them, and replace them. We cannot be blamed for the greed and depravity of the global corporate-financier elite, but we can be blamed for fueling their megalomania on a daily basis.

The owners of Babylon restaurant in Lowell, Massachusetts, were understandably shaken last Wednesday when a man hurled a 20-pound rock through the window of the downtown Iraqi eatery, fearing he may have acted out of hate.

Now, a group of war veterans are sending a message that they won’t tolerate hate against the eatery by pledging to fill every seat in the restaurant, the Lowell Sun reports.

“This solidarity gives us the courage to stand,” Babylon owner Leyla Al-Zubaydi told the Sun. “There is no more fear in my heart because there are such nice people behind us.”

Al-Zubaydi said her family was terrified that the incident was motivated by hate. According to the International Institute of New England, Al-Zubaydi and her father, Ahmed Al-Zubaidi are political refugees who fled to the United States in January, 2011.

A journalist, Al-Zubaidi had become a target of the government because his work criticized Saddam Hussein, the Boston Globe reported in a profile last year.

A victim of hate crimes in his home country, Al-Zubaydi told the Sun that when his restaurant was threatened last week, it brought his wife to tears and made her consider the possibility of closing the restaurant for good.

Luckily, as soon as he heard about the incident, Vietnam veteran Patrick Scanlon, coordinator of the Greater Boston chapter of the Veterans for Peace, organized the rally for the following Tuesday and was delighted to be joined by a number of veterans in the area who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With Lowell Mayor Patrick Murphy by their side, the vets took turns holding signs for the sit-in and eating at the restaurant. By 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, more than 100 people had come in to eat at the restauraunt, Al-Zubaydi told the Sun.

Lowell police have since identified the man who threw the stone and say he has confessed to the crime, but claimed not to have known the restaurant was owned by Iraqis. He is scheduled to be summoned from his home in New Hampshire later this month to appear in court on misdemeanor charges.

In a surprise move today, Representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, effectively killing the bill. This move was most likely due to several things. One of those things is that SOPA and PIPA met huge online protest against the bills. Another reason would be that the White House threatened to veto the bill if it had passed. However, it isn’t quite time yet to celebrate, as PIPA(the Senate’s version of SOPA) is still up for consideration.

The online protests about the bill were surprising and large. They ranged anywhere from callng Representatives, companies, and senators to get them to change their mind, to actively moving domain’s away from and targeting the business model of the companies that supported/lobbied for the bill. GoDaddy lost well over 100,000 domains in the space of about 10 days due to their involvement with these bills, along with other various targets. Reddit in particular has been influential in turning the tide against SOPA and PIPA, and is a good demonstration of how the Internet enables Democracy.

PIPA is less well known than SOPA, but the provisions are basicly the same. It still includes the same DNS blocking and censoring system that the original SOPA did, just without the SOPA name. There are around 40 co-sponsors of the bill in the Senate so far, with no word on how many senators support the bill in addition to that. There will most likely need to be 60 votes in the Senate in order to invoke cloture and end an almost guaranteed filibuster.

Continue reading on Examiner.com House Kills SOPA – Denver Computers | Examiner.com LINK`http`www.examiner.com/computers-in-denver/house-kills-sopa#ixzz1jdhWgjAW`color: rgb(0, 51, 153); text-decoration: none; `LINK

Williamson County, Texas, District Attorney John Bradley is the winner of our 2011 Worst Prosecutor of the Year award. It was a tight four-way race for the first day. North Carolina DA Tracey Cline then broke open a small lead on day two, before Bradley closed on the final day of voting.

A few updates on Bradley: On January 4, UPI reported that the Texas State Bar cleared Bradley of any ethics violations for spending 20 years fighting the DNA test that kept Michael Morton in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. This isn’t terribly surprising. State bars are notoriously lax at disciplining misbehaving prosecutors.

In this November New York Times profile that I didn’t catch when researching Bradley to nominate him, Bradley actually shows some contrition, going so far as to say the DNA results in the Morton case—which, again, he fought like to prevent from ever happening—have changed him. I hope that’s the case, but I’m inclined to think that after the Morton case, after having once advised another prosecutor to seek plea agreements that allow evidence to be destroyed so it can’t be tested in the future on an innocence claim, and after doing all he could to bury any investigation into the Cameron Todd Willingham case, Bradley’s period of penance should probably last more than a few months.

Nevertheless, even after all of that, last year Bradley was still elected to the board of directors (PDF) of the National District Attorneys Association. (Nominee Anita Alvarez is also on the board.) I don’t know if his election was the result of obliviousness to the controversy surrounding Bradley or a way of symbolically defying Bradley’s detractors. Either way, it really doesn’t speak well of the organization’s membership. Or at least of its voting membership.

Bradley is up for reelection for his current DA position. His critics have adopted an amusing way to protest his candidacy: They’re hanging bandannas from Bradley’s campaign sings. The DNA that eventually cleared Michael Morton was taken from a bandanna left at the crime scene.

A few updates from the other 2011 nominees:

• Someone from the office of Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood appears to becleaning up his Wikipedia page.
• Hood is also seeking to “undo” Haley Barbour’s controversial end-of-term pardons, and has won an injunction on the pardons from a state circuit court judge.
• Cline, the Durham, North Carolina, DA, again attempted to have a judge removed from one of her cases, alleging bias and conspiracy. She was again denied.
• Prince William County, Virginia, State’s Attorney Paul Ebert has been called in as a “special prosecutor” in another high-profile case.

by Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica

The public outcry over the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act seems to have gotten so loud that even members of Congress can hear it. On Thursday we covered the news that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) was expressing second thoughts about SOPA’s DNS provisions. He said he changed his mind after he “heard from a number of Vermonters” on the issue.

On Friday, several Republicans started backpedaling as well.

SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced that he would be pulling the DNS-blocking provisions from his own bill. “After consultation with industry groups across the country, I feel we should remove Domain Name System blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that the Committee can further examine the issues surrounding this provision,” Smith said in a Friday statement.

Meanwhile, six GOP senators who served on the Senate Judiciary Committee (which unanimously approvedthe legislation last year) wrote a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to postpone a vote on PIPA to give them more time to study the legislation.

“We strongly believe that the theft of American intellectual property is a significant problem that must be addressed,” they wrote. But since the Judiciary Committee last considered the legislation, “we have increasingly heard from a large number of constituents and other stakeholders with vocal concerns about possible unintended consequences of the proposed legislation, including breaches in cybersecurity, damaging the integrity of the Internet, costly and burdensome litigation, and dilution of First Amendment rights.”

The current plan for the full Senate to consider the bill on January 24 “may not permit us to work through many of the concerns that have been raised,” they warned.

Read the rest at this link.

The absurdity of America today never ceases to amaze. In fact, it has become so elaborate that one might even suggest it has reached a kind of poetic symmetry. When a protest group is willing to stick their necks out to expose the horror of the National Defense Authorization Act and its open door strategy for unconstitutional arrest and indefinite detainment of American citizens, I have to stand up and applaud. This is the kind of protest we need to see all over the country. Of course, any establishment system which is willing to dissolve the inherent liberties of its citizens certainly isn’t going to stand by quietly while they blatantly point out the injustice. The Grand Central Terminal action featured in the video below is a perfect example of the swift and immediate stifling of peaceful dissent by an increasingly totalitarian government:

Responses to the event vary. Most people who have actually been exposed to the facts on the NDAA have expressed utter disgust and fury. Rightly so. Some, however, have taken the old elitist mantra, perpetuated effectively by the Neo-Cons in their heyday, that if you are not for the system, then you are a danger to society. Not surprisingly, there are still plenty of useful idiots out there buzzing about like parasites in search of blood.

For those who would applaud these arrests, and suggest that they are well deserved, I would have to ask very pointedly; why?

Is it right to crush free speech as long as the message is offensive to you personally? Do peaceful protestors really present a legitimate threat to our national stability? Are they truly more dangerous than a corrupt government hellbent on assassinating the legal protections of our natural rights which have existed for centuries? Would any supporter of the jackboot methodology like to explain to me in a coherent manner why they believe their skewed world view should be shielded from sincere questions? Please, I can’t wait to witness the kind of ridiculous mental gymnastics required to make such arguments palatable. If this kind of ignorance wasn’t so destructive, it might actually be entertaining.

The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter if these activists were in Grand Central Terminal, on the streets, or busting through the doors of the Oval Office. While New York authorities will attempt to argue property loopholes in free speech protections for Grand Central, or national security because of the vulnerability of the terminal, really, this has nothing to do with either. This is about the removal of American voices from a room, and nothing more. If the message is going to be suppressed by the mainstream media, and shrugged off by representatives, then protesters must go to where the people are, and make the truth heard by whatever means necessary.

Ultimately, activism is about disturbing people’s normal mundane routines and shocking them out of their pop-culture stupor, even if for a moment. If we aren’t allowed to do that without constant police intervention, then the First Amendment is not being served, and then, my friends, we have a problem, a problem which should be forced down the throat of government with even more public action.