“Wag the Dog” is the political strategy for a national leader to start a military operation to divert negative attention away from him.  In 1997, Hollywood produced a Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman movie by the same name about an American President caught up in a sex scandal that decides to start a war in the Balkans to distract the public.  Eighteen months later with President Bill Clinton facing a sex scandal, he started a war in the Balkans.  With embattled President Barack Obama facing a scandal about electronic spying on the private lives of almost every voter in America, it should not be surprising that he would make “A decision to provide lethal assistance,” including weapons, ammunition and air support to the Syrian rebels.  Using the Wag the Dog strategy might have worked in the past, but the mushrooming privacy scandal seems destined to continue to grow.

The White House announced that because the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against rebel forces, who are mainly composed of foreign fighters, Syria crossed a “red line” that morally requires the United States to intervene to protect the rebels.  In reality, despite substantial U.S. covert military aid, the rebels’ main northern bastion of Aleppo is now cut off from resupply and in the rebels are in danger of being defeated by the Syrian government.  The situation is very reminiscent of the U.S. military intervention to institute a no-fly zone to stop loyalist forces of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi from capturing Benghazi and ending the Libyan rebellion.

The real White House crisis is taking place in Hong Kong, where defector Edward Snowden is slowly and artfully revealing the breadth and intrusiveness of the U.S. government’s top secret foreign and domestic surveillance programs.  After exposing the National Security Agency’s PRISM program to the British Guardian and Washington Post newspapers that gave U.S. government officials easy access to all data held by Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Skype, Snowden revealed National Security Agency documents to Honk Kong’s liberal South China Morning Press proving NSA is hacking 61,000 computer systems around the world.  The NSA is also active hacking companies, public officials, individuals and the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

The timing of the Snowden’s releases of American spying on China happening during the summit with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has been an unmitigated disaster for the Obama Administration.  The Chinese were shocked two weeks ago when the Administration leaked to the U.S. press that the agenda for the summit would be an attempt to restrict China from corporate espionage and theft of intellectual property in America.  The hypocrisy of Snowden’s disclosures of intrusive spying on China by the U.S. generated an explosion of anti-American anger in Hong Kong.  The city now expects a mass parade this Saturday in support of granting Snowden political asylum.

Bloomberg just reported that thousands of U.S. technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely the with U.S. security agencies to provide sensitive information and in return for access to classified intelligence.  As an example, Microsoft provides intelligence agencies with prior information about bugs in its popular software.

Although Larry Page, chief executive officer of Google Inc., said he had never heard of a program called Prism until after Edward Snowden’s disclosures.  Although Page swore he would never grant the U.S. government direct access to its servers, Bloomberg sources describe Google as a “trusted partners” of the NSA.  In fact the agency’s main surveillance program called Accumulo is built on Google’s proprietary BigTable data-base platform.  Accumulo has “fine-grained” access controls and a server-side programming mechanisms that can modify data that is written to disk on a target data servers.  This provides Prism with “cell-level access labels,” that allows their agents to plant a “Trojan-horse” on the machines of almost any computer users

Google has agreements with CIA, the FBI and branches of the U.S. military that gather data useful for intelligence or cyber-warfare units.  Company executives are motivated not only to help national defense, but to also gain access to espionage on their foreign competition.  Following an attack on his company by Chinese hackers in 2010, Google co-founder and native Russian, Sergey Brin, was provided with highly sensitive government intelligence linking the attack to People’s Liberation Army of China.

The Obama 2012 re-election campaign relied on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign on strategy to unify the “Big –Data” from vast commercial and political databases which micro-targeted which individual voters were likely to support Obama or be open to his message.  They tried to then convert individuals into supporters through personalized contact via Facebook, e-mail, or a knock on the door.  Schmidt described the analytics team as “people scientists” who used Big Data to predict “how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.”  After the election, the analytics team was hired by Google.

The overt intervention of the United States in the Syrian civil war will undoubtedly result in a big spike up in the 93,000 dead and over 1.5 million refugees.  I have not found anyone who can justify why such military intervention is in America’s our national interest.  But after eight days of Edward Snowden’s daily revelations of how the Obama Administration’s eviscerated American’s personal privacy caused the current Newsweek Magazine cover to be titled: “Hit the Road Barack”, a war in Syria may not be enough to distract an unhappy public from the Obama scandals.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

The book follows the failed attempt by a young couple to rebel against policies of omnipresent surveillance and public mind control by a charismatic leader named “Big Brother” in the futuristic American empire named Oceania.  There was a scramble in Hollywood for the movie rights to adapt the book into a scathing rejection of the U.S. military-intelligence-complex.   But the rights were sold in March to a group of President Obama strongest supporters; including Shepard Fairey (artist who created the Obama “Hope” poster), and movie moguls Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

The United States National Security Agency’s super-secret “Q Group” counter-intelligence unit has been desperately trying to find Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former Army soldier and CIA employee holding top-secret security clearances, since he disappeared in May.  Mr. Snowden’s revelations last week to the British newspaper The Guardian of omnipresent surveillance of all the private phone calls, texts, e-mails, VOIP and “snail” mail of Americans is described by one intelligence officer as driving the NSA into “complete freakout mode.  The U.S. Justice Department and Q Group are working with the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) in France to issue a Red Notice that requiring law enforcement in 190 countries to seek to identify, locate and arrest Mr. Snowden and extradite him back to the United States for prosecution.

Despite a worldwide law enforcement dragnet Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Big Brother would envy, Mr. Snowden seems to have completed his mission as the greatest whistleblower since Daniel Ellsberg published the Pentagon Papers in 1971, then disappeared.

The Oceania government of Nineteen Eighty-Four had convinced their citizens to suspend private civil rights in a period of “perpetual war;” similar to our Patriot Act for twelve years of the “War on Terror.”  Big Brother’s propaganda, surveillance, mind control and cult of personality magnified the paranoia in mythical state of Oceania.

Somewhat like Edward Snowden, who was a contractor for our National Security Agency, Winston Smith worked for the Oceania government’s Ministry of Truth, where he altered facts and histories to add credibility to Big Brother’s propaganda narrative.  Like Snowden, Smith secretly harbored anti-government views and eventually rebelled against the narrative.  But after a short period of bliss and freedom, he was betrayed by friends, psychologically tortured into submission, and then betrays his co-conspirator.

As Alistair Heath said: “the ancient Greeks and Romans got there before us; they couldn’t conceivably have dreamt of the internet, of the cloud or of National Security Agency super-computers in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an as yet undiscovered continent, combing through trillions of phone calls, emails and Facebook pages, but they’d already nailed the gist of the issue.  One of the most fundamental questions in political philosophy is as the Roman poet Juvenal first put it, “Who will guard the guardians themselves?”

Edward Snowden was one of approximately 10,000 contractors that have top-secret security clearances and the online computer rights to select and conduct surveillance against any foe of the United States of America, or any foe of Edward Snowden.  As he so eloquently said: “Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector, anywhere… I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President…”

Mr. Snowden is obviously better trained and more sophisticated at evading Uncle Sam than the Winton Smith was at evading Big Brother.  Snowden freely traveled to communist Hong Kong, checked into a luxury hotel down the street from the CIA, then deliver hundreds of documents and sat for many days of interviews with the multiple staff from the Guardian newspaper.

Mr. Edward Snowden justified his actions with a warning: “Even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded. …it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life.”  If Edward Snowden is caught, he will spend decades in prison.    

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON Present:
“The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

Each year the citizens of Pilsen in the Czech Republic celebrate Liberation Festival to commemorate and say thank you to America who liberated the city in World War II.  After eight brutal years, the town of Pilsen revolted against the Nazis on May 5, 1945 and cleared the way for General George Patton and his United States Third Army to charge into Pilsen’s Republic Square on May 6, 1945.

Before the Second World War, the nation of Czechoslovakia had been an independent and economically successful nation in Central Europe.  But in the 1930s, Germany and Russia threatened to take over the nation.  In 1938, Great Britain and France signed the Munich Treaty.  Pilsen and all of northwest Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland was transferred to the Nazis.  British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolph Hitler were nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.  As the thousands of residents of Pilsen fell under military control, Chamberlain told Europeans, “I believe it is peace for our time … Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

In 1948, Czech attempts to join the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan postwar rebuilding were crushed by a coup d’état backed by the Soviet Union.  For the next 41 years, Pilsen would again be subjugated until the fall of the Fall of Communism in 1989.

Pilsen city fathers make tremendous efforts to impress upon today’s young people the meaning of the liberation has for them and what it means to their future to be free Czech citizens.  The festival has music, food and a grand parade to Republic Square, but the stars and stripes of the American flags blanket the city to remind the young of the sacrifices that American World War II veterans made to save their freedom.

“It’s been over 60 years and still they honor the American forces, and have a wonderful celebration,” said Charles Noble, Jr., son of a World War II commander who led troops into Pilsen in May 1945.  The biggest show of community support happens during the convoy of liberty. Thousands literally line the streets here to check out the World War II veterans and the military vehicles.

CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THE PILSEN LIBERATION FESTIVAL PARADE   

Marion Kirkham is one of a handful of the American veterans who made it to this year’s festival.  He served in World War II and has returned to Pilsen for several years in a row in honor of his brother who died fighting to help the Czech people.  He is always amazed at the ongoing outpouring of love and support he and the others receive.
“They lost their freedom so they know what’s it’s like without freedom and now they want to preserve that freedom and they want their children to remember what freedom means.  It’s amazing to me.“  Kirkham and the others rode in World War II Jeeps and tanks restored to full combat functionality by the local Pilsen car clubs.

Crash site and gravestone of Lt. Virgil P. Kirkham, shot down after volunteering to fly his 82nd mission.  Lt. Kirkham was 20-years-old when his P-47 Thunderbolt plane was shot down.  Lt. Kirkham volunteered for the mission over Pilsen that cost him his life.

Zdenka Sladkova at 14 years-old was over whelmed by his heroic  sacrifice for her town and family that she made a vow to care for him and his memory.  For 65 straight years, Zdenka, who is now 79-years-old, has taken on the honor and responsibility for the loving care of Virgil Kirkham’s crash site and his memorial near her home in a forest just outside of Pilsen.

                              CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON Present:
                                    “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show
”Streaming Live Monday  through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com  & www.agenda21radio.com 

Each year the citizens of Pilsen in the Czech Republic celebrate Liberation Festival to commemorate and say thank you to America who liberated the city in World War II.  After eight brutal years, the town of Pilsen revolted against the Nazis on May 5, 1945 and cleared the way for General George Patton and his United States Third Army to charge into Pilsen’s Republic Square on May 6, 1945.

Before the Second World War, the nation of Czechoslovakia had been an independent and economically successful nation in Central Europe.  But in the 1930s, Germany and Russia threatened to take over the nation.  In 1938, Great Britain and France signed the Munich Treaty.  Pilsen and all of northwest Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland was transferred to the Nazis.  British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain and German Chancellor Adolph Hitler were nominated for the Nobel Peace prize.  As the thousands of residents of Pilsen fell under military control, Chamberlain told Europeans, “I believe it is peace for our time … Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

In 1948, Czech attempts to join the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan postwar rebuilding were crushed by a coup d’état backed by the Soviet Union.  For the next 41 years, Pilsen would again be subjugated until the fall of the Fall of Communism in 1989.

Pilsen city fathers make tremendous efforts to impress upon today’s young people the meaning of the liberation has for them and what it means to their future to be free Czech citizens.  The festival has music, food and a grand parade to Republic Square, but the stars and stripes of the American flags blanket the city to remind the young of the sacrifices that American World War II veterans made to save their freedom.

“It’s been over 60 years and still they honor the American forces, and have a wonderful celebration,” said Charles Noble, Jr., son of a World War II commander who led troops into Pilsen in May 1945.  The biggest show of community support happens during the convoy of liberty. Thousands literally line the streets here to check out the World War II veterans and the military vehicles.

CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THE PILSEN LIBERATION FESTIVAL PARADE

Marion Kirkham is one of a handful of the American veterans who made it to this year’s festival.  He served in World War II and has returned to Pilsen for several years in a row in honor of his brother who died fighting to help the Czech people.  He is always amazed at the ongoing outpouring of love and support he and the others receive.
“They lost their freedom so they know what’s it’s like without freedom and now they want to preserve that freedom and they want their children to remember what freedom means.  It’s amazing to me.“  Kirkham and the others rode in World War II Jeeps and tanks restored to full combat functionality by the local Pilsen car clubs.

Crash site and gravestone of Lt. Virgil P. Kirkham, shot down after volunteering to fly his 82nd mission.  Lt. Kirkham was 20-years-old when his P-47 Thunderbolt plane was shot down.  Lt. Kirkham volunteered for the mission over Pilsen that cost him his life.

Zdenka Sladkova at 14 years-old was over whelmed by his heroic  sacrifice for her town and family that she made a vow to care for him and his memory.

For 65 straight years, Zdenka, who is now 79-years-old, has taken on the honor and responsibility for the loving care of Virgil Kirkham’s crash site and his memorial near her home in a forest just outside of Pilsen.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

The average global corporate income tax rate is 25%.   But since President Reagan cut tax rates and eliminated deductions to simplify the tax code in 1986, multi-national corporations’ lobbying of Congress resulted in much higher tax rates and new loopholes and deductions that expanded U.S. Tax Code from 26,300 to 73,608 pages.  Companies whose business is solely in the U.S. — food chains, retailers, railroads, and truckers — are exposed to the full 35% corporate income tax rate (5% more counting state and local taxes), whereas companies with extensive foreign operations or transferrable intellectual property such as pharmaceutical patents and software limit the U.S. corporate taxes they actually pay to an average rate of 26%.

In January of 2011, I published a scathing expose in Breitbart’s Big Government blog: “President Obama Empowers Jeffrey Immelt as the Ultimate Crony Capitalist,” about the hypocrisy of appointing the Chairman and CEO of General Electric to head the new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  Mr. Immelt had been bragging about the advantages of outsourcing U.S. jobs to China: “The interaction between government and business will change forever.  In a reset economy, the government will be a regulator; and also, an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.”

Just the year before, G.E.’s Tax Department deployed an army of 975 staff and consultants to arrange that G.E. booked its profits outside the U.S. and its losses inside the U.S.  After out-sourcing the bulk of their operations, with worldwide profits of $14.2 billion in 2010, G.E. paid no U.S. corporate income taxes.  From 2010 through 2012, the company only paid U.S. tax at a 3.6% average rate.  With 4,663 stores and 1.3 million American employees, Wal-Mart paid at the average of 33.6% rate over the same period.

Corporations understand that competition drives average profit margins down to about 3.5% of sales.  Manufacturers traditionally have not had much bargaining power with suppliers or vendors in competitive markets.  Consequently, they tended to compete on the net cost of labor, which averaged about 8.5% of sales in the U.S.  Fifteen years ago, Chinese labor costs averaged 5.5%, including transportation to U.S.  With energy costs for OPEC oil about the same at 13.5% of sales, out-sourcing U.S. manufacturing jobs to China enriched profitability from 3.5% to 5.5%, a 60% improvement.

Fifteen years later, the boom in China manufacturing labor demand has driven up Chinese worker wages and driven down U.S. worker wages.  Today labor costs are approximately equal after import costs.  But over that same period, the energy costs for natural gas in the U.S., due to fracking, have plummeted by 75% versus only a 20% decline in China.  This huge U.S. energy cost advantage makes U.S. manufacturing costs substantially cheaper than China and explains why Ford, Michelin Tire Company and Apple are “re-shoring” manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

Last year U.S. Manufacturing jobs rose for the first time in 10 years, due to the combination of labor and energy cost competitiveness.  This trend would be a tsunami, except much of the competitive advantage is wiped out by ludicrously high corporate income tax rates.  If those jobs returned, unemployed workers receiving government benefits would turn into taxpayers and our dual trade and budget deficits would vanish.

President Obama needs to show that he can still lead the country.  I expect him to propose  cutting the top corporate income tax rate from 35% to 28%, in return for Congress eliminating many loopholes.  Such a tax cut would be revenue neutral on the amount of corporate income tax collected, but it would launch the manufacturing tsunami by dramatically improving the competitiveness of “Made in America”

 CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

The Internal Revenue Service scandal has metastasized from “low level” staff in Cincinnati being too thorough auditing a few Tea Parties into a major investigation ensnaring 88 IRS employees as “persons of interest.”  But the scandal has the potential to evolve into a vast left-wing conspiracy to access the federal government’s confidential “Big Data” to swing the election in favor of the President.

Barack Obama applied lessons he learned as a community organizer about the value of building up trust through long listening sessions when he went to law school.  After being chosen one of 80 editors of the prestigious Harvard Law Review, he was elected the first black President by continually reassuring the minority of conservative editors he would protect their interests if they voted for him.  After graduating, he returned to Chicago and politically worked his way up to the U.S. Senate by building coalitions of white, black and brown voters who felt politically snubbed by established candidates.

In February 2007, Obama recruited Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape and a Board Member of Facebook, to develop a national database as a platform for Obama to launch the first Presidential social networking campaign strategy.  Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean had successfully pioneered using the internet to raise small contributions in 2006, but Obama understood that he could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement that would allow people to self-organize around his narrative.

His main opponent, Hillary Clinton, had already committed to spending $23 million on a strategy to replicate the perceived state-of-the-art voter lists, phone banks and direct mail fund-raising deployed by Karl Rove for President George W. Bush’s successful 2000 and 2004 election campaigns.  The Obama campaign merged commercial and political data bases to command “Big-Data” knowledge of the electorate.  Social media at a cost of virtually nothing, allowed the candidate to paint himself as the brilliant “No drama Obama” and paint Hillary as shrill, strident, and with a witch’s cackle for a laugh.

At a cost of approximately $.75 to produce and send a mail piece, Clinton’s early financial advantage quickly evaporated as she tried to defend herself from the “negative buzz” that started out on social media and then migrated into main-stream newspapers and television.  Although Obama failed to win as many primary votes as Clinton, he won the nomination by building social media connections and engagement that motivated tens of thousands of his followers to personally show up and dominate caucus voting.

Rather than a traditional political base, Barack Obama assembled a database composed of the names and personal attributes of millions of supporters he could almost instantly engage in a virtual two-way conversation.  This on-line intimacy translated into the off-line behavior that sprouted distributed networks of supporters who set up phone banks, created their own YouTube media clips and helped Obama raise a record-breaking $700 million.  He buried John McCain as a feeble old man to win the Presidency and take control of the U.S. Senate.   After the election, the President elect’s Tuesday night e-mail message to supporters included: “We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next.”

Once in office, the White House and other federal agencies hired large numbers of former campaign staff.  These data professionals would have had statistical analysis access to the massive amount of personal Big Data held by the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, Treasury and IRS.  The new Administration’s first piece of legislation, the $831 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, contained $400 million for the IRS “to accelerate the development and dissemination of research assessing the comparative effectiveness of health care treatments and strategies” in anticipation of the Obamacare roll out.  By nationalizing student loans the Administration expanded lending by 50% and could socially engage college students and young graduates about the “risk” that conservatives wanted to raise interest rates.  By issuing millions of “Obama phones” to low income citizens, the government could track and communicate with this Obama affinity group by text messaging.

The Administration’s “Race to the Top” education competition required the 48 participating states “to provide sign-on portals that allow authorized educators, students (grades 6 through 12), and their families (all grade levels) to log in and view student educational data through data dashboards.”  For the first time the federal government gained access to each student’s name, birth date, parent phone numbers and email addresses, economic status, social security number, race, gender, attendance, special education records, attendance, conduct, grades, and assessment scores.

The Obama 2012 reelection campaign relied on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign on strategy to unify Big Data from the vast commercial and political databases to micro-target which individual voters were likely to support Obama or be open to his message.  They tried to convert these individuals into supporters through personalized contact via Facebook, e-mail, or a knock on the door.  Schmidt described the analytics team as “people scientists” who used Big Data to predict “how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question.”  After the election, the entire analytics team was hired by Google.

As the scandal grows, it appears that the IRS staff across the country broadly discriminating against conservatives and may have retaliated against Obama opponents.  Although the national polls had Mitt Romney tied or slightly ahead on election night, the President was reelected by a statistically improbable 5 million vote margin.  It is my belief that investigators should search the Obama campaign’s Big Data to determine if a vast left wing conspiracy acquired huge amounts of personal data from multiple government agencies to swing the 2012 election in favor of the President Obama.                      

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

Mr. Comey and his wife are both registered Republicans and donated to the Presidential campaigns of U.S. Senator John McCain in 2008 and Governor Mitt Romney in 2012.  Mr. Comey was also the target of tremendous opposition by liberals in 2009, when it was reported by Politico that his name had been included on a “short list” for nominees to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter.  John Brittain of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law stated, “He was deputy attorney general serving in Bush’s administration. He came in with the Bushies.  What makes you think he’d be just an inch or two more to the center than [Chief Justice] Roberts?”

After leaving the FBI, Mr. Comey served as General Counsel of Lockheed Martin and the $145 billion Bridgewater Associates Hedge Fund.  Currently, he serves as a Hertog Fellow on National Security Law at Columbia University Law School and is a Board Member of the Board of HSBC Holdings, the second largest bank in the world.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Comey made a name for himself as the Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division of the New York U.S. Attorney’s Office prosecuting the Gambino Mafia crime family.  He later prosecuted the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing case in Saudi Arabia.  Based on his strong national security credentials, he was promoted in 2002 to be the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and led the 911 terrorist attack investigations.  Two years later, he became the number 2 agent at the FBI and ran the day to day operations for 30,000 employees.

Mr. Comey would replace Robert S. Mueller III, who has served as FBI Director for almost 12 years, after also being appointed by President George W. Bush in September of 2001.  Mr. Mueller, a former highly decorated Marine, is credited transforming the FBI into one of America’s chief weapons in the War on Terror.

In early January 2006, The New York Times, as part of their investigation into alleged illegal domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency, reported that Mr. Comey, who was Acting Attorney General during the March 2004 surgical hospitalization of John Ashcroft, refused to “certify” the legality of unlimited warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.  President George W. Bush had issued the NSA an Executive Order and was seeking Justice Department authority to begin blanket monitoring of phone calls, Internet activity, text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the monitoring took place within the U.S.  Critics claimed that the NSA snooping was an attempt to silence critics of the Bush Administration policies.

After Mr. Comey’s refusal to certify the Executive Order, Andrew H. Card Jr., White House Chief of Staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House Counsel and future Attorney General, made an emergency visit to George Washington University Hospital, in an unsuccessful attempt to win approval directly from Ashcroft for the program.  Mr. Comey went to the hospital to give Ashcroft support to withstand White House pressure.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May of 2007, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III stated that he agreed with Mr. Comey’s position and that both men were prepared to resign if the White House ignored the Department of Justice’s opinion on the illegality of NSA wiretapping.  Faced with a Constitutional crisis and a public relations nightmare, President Bush reluctantly agreed to significant reductions to the surveillance program’s scale and breadth.

The White House’s willingness to nominate a pro-privacy advocate as FBI Director, at a time the Administration is mired in multiple scandals over trashing privacy, demonstrates the desperate need of the Administration to try to regain the public trust.  Nominating Mr. Comey may be useful for the Obama Administration to remind Americans that the Bush Administration also tried to trample privacy rights.  But with revelations that a key IRS manager took the Fifth Amendment and the Senate Judiciary Committee may seek indictment of Attorney General Eric Holder for perjury, a tuff new Republican FBI Director may soon be investigating the Administration.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

Currently all states have veterans preferences in hiring and absolute preferences for disabled veterans.  Prominently located on their Civil Service website is a statement that New Jersey “values the contributions that our veterans have made, and continue to make, for our country’s freedom and for other nations around the world.  As such, New Jersey’s merit system provides absolute veterans preference in employee selection. This means that qualified veterans are placed at the top of an open competitive employment list ahead of non-veterans regardless of their scores.”

On May 17, 2013, the New Jersey Civil Service Commission held a public hearing on “revisions” to hiring procedures for the State of New Jersey.  Currently, qualified veterans are placed at the top of an open competitive employment lists ahead of non-veterans.  Disabled veterans are also placed on promotional lists according to their scores, plus a certain number of points advantage.      Disabled veterans and veterans are placed on promotional lists according to their scores, but they have preference over non-veterans when they are at the top of a certification list for an appointing authority.

The United States Office of Personnel Management administers entitlement to veterans’ preferences in employment under Title 5, United States Code, and oversees other statutory employment requirements in Titles 5 and 38.  Currently all states provide veterans preferences in hiring and absolute preferences in hiring for disabled veterans.  Employees are hired and promoted based on examinations, but Civil Service preferences governing hiring and promotion have created millions of public service jobs for veterans across our nation.

There appears to have been significant political pressure brought to bear in New Jersey to “eliminate” Civil Service preferences and adopt hiring outcomes to avoid discrimination against gays, women, and other minority groups.  Under the changes, some jobs would be grouped together as part of a “band;” allowing managers to move employees from one position to another without the need for exams.  The state says that will streamline promotions and save money.

ALFI is concerned, since the majority of veterans historically have been male, the Civil Service changes would result in a dramatic impact on the hiring and promotion of military veterans.  Such changes would open the door to crony favoritism and political patronage.  The Communication Workers of America, New Jersey’s largest public workers’ union, are also cautioned that the new Civil Service rule changes may violate the New Jersey State Constitution.

Clearly, these monumental changes in New Jersey hiring procedures were not thoroughly vetted by veterans’ support groups.  The New Jersey Civil Service Commission held only one public hearing on the matter — and none of the commission’s members were present.

Due to lack of communications, less than a dozen individual veterans and no organized veterans support group attended the Civil Service Commission hearing.  Joseph Fornarotto, Commander of the Belleville-Nutley, New Jersey Disabled American Veterans warned after learning of the meeting: “With these rules, Gov. Christie is stabbing veterans in the back.”  He added that veterans need help in landing jobs and not the lack of it.

Since ALFI started inquiring about this issue, Michael Drewniak, spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie’s office, said the idea that the proposal will eliminate or diminish veterans’ preference is “simply false.”  But members of Christie’s own political party are now increasingly skeptical of the changes.  Former state Sen. Peter Inverso released a statement today calling for the Civil Service Commission to hold more hearings on the proposal.  “I think there is a possible win-win scenario because as a former civil service employee, I know the frustration of waiting for promotional exams to be performed, front line employees wait for a long bureaucratic test process which delays promotion and needed staff to supervisors who remain short-staffed,” Cook said. “We just need to make sure the process protects veterans and is fair to all involved.”

We agree!

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
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Shulman testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that while serving as IRS Commissioner, he had inadvertently ignored 132 letters from members of Congress, was unaware and 42 major press stories on the issue, and never discussed any IRS discrimination of conservatives when he visited the White House on average once every two weeks.  When Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan reminded Shulman that he told Congress last year, “I can give you assurances nothing is going on, everything is wonderful, we’re not targeting conservative groups”.  Shulman answered: “I am absolutely telling you the truth today.”

For someone with such a poor memory, Mr. Shulman has an impressive background.  He holds a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center.   In 1997 at the age of 30, he was appointed Chief of Staff to the National Commission on Restructuring the Internal Revenue Service, where he pushed the implementation of mandatory electronic filing of all tax returns.  In 2000, he moved to the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc., the private organization assigned governmental powers to perform regulatory oversight of securities dealers to protect investors from fraud.

As a computer whiz-kid, Shulman made a name for himself modernizing NASD technology to facilitate the explosive growth of commercial bank trading of derivatives and junk bonds.  In the NASD’s 2006 Annual Report, Vice Chairman Shulman highlighted his leadership in developing the NASD’s computerized system to monitor for fraudulent trading practices: “We engineered our revolutionary TRACE system to shine light on formerly opaque market.”

Douglas Shulman would also have worked closely with Bernie Madoff, former Chairman of National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), who served as Chairman of the powerful NASDAQ Trading Committee and key developer of their computerized trade dissemination technology that allowed NASDAQ firms to compete with NYSE members.  With the support of the NASD, on November 1, 2006 NASDAQ merged with the Bond Market Association in 2006 to form SIFMA.

In July 2007, FINRA became the successor to the NASD and took over rulemaking authority for the New York Stock Exchange.  As Vice Chairman and in charge of technology, Douglas Shulman would have been directly involved with “professional and contract services” agreement that outsourced “operation of TRACE and the OTC Equities business by NASDAQ on behalf of FINRA.”

The Madoff family dominated SIFMA with multiple Boards seats, donated $56,000 to SIFMA directly and paid tens of thousands of dollars to sponsor SIFMA industry meetings in support of expanding OTC risk trading.  Madoff’s niece Shana was a persuasive voice on the Executive Committee of SIFMA’s Compliance & Legal Division.

In 2004 Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, informed her supervisor, Branch Chief Mark Donohue review of Madoff found numerous inconsistencies and recommended further questioning.  However, no action was taken.  Shortly thereafter Donohue’s boss, Assistant Director of the SEC Eric Swanson, married Shana Madoff.

Given encouragement from FINRA and lax SEC enforcement, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities by 2008 was siphoned off 9%, about $740 million, a day of the 2008 daily New York Stock Exchange trading volume by paying rebates to other brokerage firms for their customers’ orders in hopes of profiting from the spread between bid and asked prices.

Despite being a donor to the Democrat National Committee, Douglas Shulman was nominated by Republican President George W. Bush and confirmed by the Senate as IRS Commissioner on Friday March 14, 2008.  Four day later, the legendary Bear Stearns Brokerage firm collapsed and the U.S. Federal Reserve was forced to take responsibility for $29 billion of its toxic sub-prime assets.  Then Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008 with another $29 billion in losses.  On December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff notified the FBI that his investment firm was all “one big lie” and a Ponzi scheme.  Although Madoff had reported over $65 billion in trading profits to FINRA, he pleaded guilty to 11 felonies and actually embezzling $18 billion for hundreds of investors.

Banks, the federal government and investors suffered horrific losses associated with Douglas Shulman’s tenure as Vice Chairman of FINRA.  At a 2010 IRS  seminar Shulman said: “To borrow an expression whose roots date back to the Middle Ages, Time and tide wait for no man,” to explain that some things were beyond his control.  He continued on that theme this week when he refused to apologize to Congress for IRS wrong-doing.  But Shulman did acknowledge that he was “dismayed” and “saddened” after reading the inspector general’s report.  For Madoff victims and now IRS victims, “saddened and dismayed” does not make restitution.

CHRISS STREET & PAUL PRESTON
Present: “The Agenda 21 Radio Talk Show”
Streaming Live Monday through Friday at 10 to Noon http://www.kcnr1460.com/
Follow Blogs: www.chrissstreetandcompany.com & www.agenda21radio.com

The ability of the VA and their 300,000 employees to provide service-related benefits has virtually collapsed.  Congressional revelations confirm that over the last four years delays newly returning veterans face before receiving disability compensation and benefits are far longer than the 273 days the agency had acknowledged.  But inspection of their internal data reveals that for first-time claims, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wait is between 316 and 327 days.

Despite the huge increase in funding, staffing at the VA’s 58 regional offices only increased by less than 300 people since September 2010 – even as the volume of new claims increased dramatically.  The average increase in delayed claims processing seems grim, but veterans filing for the first-time in America’s major population centers wait twice as long, with delays of 642 days in New York, 619 days in Los Angeles and 542 days in Chicago.  Those veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits grew from 11,000 in 2009 to 245,000 this December.  The error rate for claims processing now hovers around 14% and an average of 53 veterans die each day waiting for their benefits, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.

“I’m not surprised at the number of us that kill ourselves … You just get so hopeless”, said Lincoln Capstick an unemployed Iraq War veteran in Indiana, where the average wait is 612 days.  His electricity was cut off three times while he waited for the VA to grant a disability claim for traumatic brain injury, headaches and a variety of leg and knee injuries sustained when was run over in the desert near the Iraq-Kuwait border.  Veteran’s Administration reports that 22 veterans commit suicide every day.

The Veterans’ Administration blamed the backlog on a 455,000 increase in the number of claims filed due to an uptick in returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and veterans requesting compensation for PTSD and Gulf War illness.  But the average veteran wait time for filing disability fell by more than a third under President George W. Bush, despite more than 320,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans filing disability claims.

The VA’s disability claims crisis has been compounded by the department’s in-house effort to develop a high-tech Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS) promising to streamline claims processing throughput by 40 to 65%.  But according to a strongly worded report from the department’s Office of the Inspector General; after spending $537 million on the Web-based system, 97% of all veterans’ claims remain on hard-copy paper.  The Inspector General also warned the weight of paper files at their Winston-Salem, N.C., office had compromised the structural integrity of the building.

The project is designed around the twelve “Agile Manifesto” principals for adaptive software development that includes “Sustainable Development”. Since the crushing report was released this January, the top two VA technology officers retired, saying they had accomplished their goals.

Congress has been getting bi-partisan heat from their constituents and has thrown lots of money at the VA to address the backlog.  But last week a new VA scandal broke out when it was revealed that Michael Moreland, the top regional administrator of a Pittsburgh hospital where an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease sickened 21 veterans and killed at least five, was given a bonus of $62,000 as a Presidential Distinguished Rank Award.  The award goes out to no more than 1% of federal executives and provides winners with a cash bonus equal to 35% of their salary.  If Mr. Moreland retires this year, he will be able to count the award towards his life-time pension payments.

The American people need to rally to the defense of our veterans.  It is time for each member of Congress to show up and commit to taking personal ownership of the dangerous activities that have taken place at their local Veteran’s Administration locations.  Each of us must stand up in reverence for the sacrifices that our military women and men make and CLICK THIS LINK TO GET CONTACT INFORMATION TO CALL OR WRITE YOUR CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATIVE TO FIX THE VA!

McQueen lived a rather tumultuous childhood that involved his father’s leaving him and his mother when he was just six months, living with his grandparents until he was eight, being physically abused by his step father, living life on the streets with his mother for a certain period, and being sent to the California Junior Boys Republic where he started to grow into the man he was supposed to be.

After jumping from one job to another, he joined the Marines. He was promoted to private first class quickly and was assigned to an armored unit as a tank driver.  But because of repeatedly succumbing to his rebellious nature, he was busted back to private seven times. Shore patrol caught him after two weeks of staying with his girlfriend carrying an expired weekend pass resulting in unauthorized absence.  He also resisted arrest which led to his spending time in brig for 41 days.

McQueen finally decided to embrace the Marines Corps’ discipline and to improve himself.  Over the next three years he conducted himself to be a true military man.  He risked his life saving five Marines in an Arctic exercise by pulling them from a tank before it broke through the permafrost and sank into the icy depths of the sea.  As reward for his exemplary service, he was also assigned as an honor guard for former President Harry Truman’s yacht.

After his honorable discharge in 1950, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to study acting at the Sanford Meisner’s Neighborhood Playhouse in North Hollywood, California and took on various acting jobs that eventually led him to fame.

Steve McQueen’s greatest role was ”The Cooler King” in The Great Escape, a 1963 American film about an escape by Allied prisoners of war from a German POW camp during World War II.  The film cost $3.8 million, an enormous amount of money at the time.  But the profit was considered colossal when the film earned $11,744,471 at the box office.  Steve McQueen died a U.S. Marine in his heart in 1980 at the age of 50.