Bankers Use ATM Fees To Assault The Public

("P" for Piggie?)

OUTRAGEOUS!!!!!!

And yet...so not surprising considering that JP Morgan is probably one of the biggest hogs at the banking trough...

From Business Insider
"JP Morgan has started testing $5 fees in Illinois and $4 fees in Texas for withdrawals at Chase ATMs by non-Chase customers, the WSJ reported.

They aren't alone -- this is reportedly symptomatic of the whole industry, which is changing their ATM policies to earn more fees to replace the cash lost in other areas of a retail bank because of FinReg.

According to the WSJ, "Dodd-Frank is limiting some charges that banks can slap onto consumer accounts, and they’re making up for it in other ways... scrambling to replace billions of dollars in revenue expected to be lost from new federal regulations on overdraft charges and debit cards."

How depressing. The regulations installed to help the man and woman on the street, are now working against them.

And in case you think you'll be immune because you're not with Chase, apparently out of the $7.1 billion banks earned last year in fees, $3 billion was garnered from charging their own customers for using another bank's ATM."

Read more: Business Insider

Dirty Immigration Prosecutor Gets 17 Year Sentence

Kind of a shame that this man didn't receive the full 30 year sentence that prosecutors were asking for. Yes, defense can cry boo-hoo and claim the sentence is harsher than what some murderers get but that is comparing apples to oranges and one has nothing to do with the other. This dirty prosecutor - this officer of the court, paid to represent we the people - assisted in bringing an untold number of illegal criminals into this country to live off our system, to pose a threat to who knows how many cities and communities - we will likely never know the total damage this greedy bastard caused us. So yes, I say again, it's a damn shame that he was not sentenced to the maximum extent of the law and forced to trade 30 years of his existence in exchange for the crimes he committed against America and We The People...

By John North, KABC Los Angeles - 

There was a sentencing Monday, for a once-prominent attorney for immigration and customs enforcement.

He was convicted of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the very people he was supposed to be prosecuting.

Constantine Kallas was a federal immigration attorney, a prosecutor. Casino surveillance video showed him about to get a $20,000 bribe to get a green card for an illegal immigrant. Kallas was convicted for this bribe and 35 other federal crimes.

Prosecutors believe Kallas received $950,000 in cash bribes over five years. In federal court Monday he was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison.

"He essentially engaged in a conspiracy as a prosecutor to engage in criminal acts with the people he was charged to prosecute," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Raymond Aghaian.

Kallas' attorney Dean Steward said the sentence was too stiff; he argued for seven years. Prosecutors wanted 30 years.

Full Story

Make Wall St. Pay’ campaign debuts by occupying bank branch, House speaker’s office

A new campaign by a national network of activists kicked off Monday morning with a splash as it led hundreds of fed up homeowners in a series of protests that brought business to a halt at a major bank and the House speaker's office.

The National People's Action network picked Monday to launch the "Make Wall Street Pay" campaign thanks to another show in town: the National Association of Attorneys General's Convention in Washington, D.C.



Read More here

Bankers Looting Nations Through World Bank/IMF

The World Bank/IMF is owned and controlled by NM Rothschild & Sons plus 30 to 40 of the wealthiest people in the world. For over 150 years they have planned to take over the planet through money. The former chief economist of the World Bank, Joe Stiglitz, was fired in 2000. He pointed out to top executives that every country the IMF/World Bank forced their way into ended up with a crashed economy, a destroyed government, and some even broke out in riots. Former President of the World Bank/IMF Sir James Wolfensohn, would not comment on his dismissal.

Before Joe Stiglitz was fired he took a large stack of secret documents out of the World Bank.

These secret documents from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund reveal that the IMF required nations:

1. To sign secret agreements containing 111 destructive items.

2. To agree to sell off their key assets – water, electric, gas, etc.

3. To agree to take economic steps which are devastating to the nations involved.

If they do not agree to these steps they are cut-off from all international Import/Export. If you can’t borrow money in the international marketplace, no one can survive, whether you are people, corporations or countries. If that doesn’t work they overthrow the government and rewrite history.

Read More Here

The United States of McAmerica

My last article covered a few of the “acts” that ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council; a special interest conservative right leaning organization) has helped our legislators to write and implement across the country. What I outlined previously were merely a few examples of their good works put out by their Criminal Justice/Homeland Security task forces. While I focus on ALEC in much of my writing, please keep in mind that ALEC is but one of a hundred or so groups who work behind the scenes in D.C. to buy off our politicians and force policies that meet their own political and profit driven agendas. I tend to single out ALEC only because they are one of the most prominent groups and there are numerous connections between ALEC, private prison corporations, declining education and our ever tightening and restrictive ‘tough on crime’ laws…but I cannot emphasize enough that they are just one of the players and takers of the big profit pie that our lawmakers gorge themselves on.

For this article, I am going to highlight some of the ways ALEC (and other outside influences) has helped our educational system along. Since there seems to be a direct connection between education and incarceration, this is an important piece of how politicians and CEOs are legislating profits for prison industry. Let’s face it, very few ‘hardened criminals’ have college degrees and if our government wanted high achievements from our schools, we’d damn well have high achieving schools, don’t you think?  

From ALEC’s webpage on their education task force:

Each year, the Task Force releases an annual Report Card on American Education. One of ALEC's flagship publications, the Report Card takes a comprehensive look at the state of public education all across our country. Based on a variety of indicators, the Report Card consistently shows no direct correlation between conventional measures of education inputs, such as expenditures per pupil and teacher salaries, and educational outputs, such as average scores on standardized tests.

As always, the Task Force will continue to focus on those policies that hold teachers accountable for the education they are providing as well as developing new ideas on how businesses can become partners in educating the next generations of our children.

We’ve already seen the wonders of bringing businesses into our prisons, now they want to do the same to our schools? Pardon me if I don’t jump up and down in excitement over this idea.

Here is more from ALEC’s page:

“Our Model Legislation

Resolution Supporting the Principles of No Child Left Behind”

Apparently NCLB has been a smashing success for those who profit from filling up cellblocks. Pink said it best with, “No child gets left behind, we’re not dumb and we’re not blind; they’re all sitting in your cells, while you pave the road to hell…”

When you read more closely into parts of NCLB here is what is written into the fine print, and again, this is straight off of ALEC’s page:

“Focus on Achievement: NCLB not only promotes—and fully funds—innovative reforms in public education, but the law also holds schools accountable for their own success. For the first time in history, states must prove that they are yielding academic results before the federal government hands over the money. When achievement is not up to standard, the federal and state governments expect them to focus on how they can improve public education standards.”

Back the hell up. Schools that are doing poorly get cut off from federal aid.

The (Un)American Legislative Exchange Council

It is common knowledge that today in the United States millions of people are incarcerated in detention centers, county jails and prisons. What is not such common knowledge are the deep and insidious ties between those who write our laws and those who profit from them. Connections run to much deeper levels than the majority of Americans are aware of, far beyond what seems to have become acceptable by way of contributions and corruption within our government.

In a very brief nutshell, this is how the US prison system currently operates:

There are two major Corporations that run privately operated prison facilities and detention centers; GEO and CCA. There are other, smaller players but these are the two largest. Both trade on the NYSE and their value is determined by the number of beds they keep filled.

The GEO Group, Inc. was initially founded as a division of The Wackenhut Corporation in 1984 under the name of Wackenhut Corrections (WCC). They have acquired a few other companies along the way and today they operate facilities across the globe including Australia, Africa and the UK. They are the folks that run the ICE Detention Center in CO as well as GITMO.

From GEO’s webpage, “We design, construct, finance and manage jails, state and federal prisons, special-purpose institutions, and immigration and detention centers.”  Their profit? Well, according to their page, “Our revenue at year-end 2007 was $1.024 billion, and net income was $41.845 million.”

CCA founded the private corrections management industry more than 25 years ago, establishing industry standards for future-focused, forward-thinking correctional solutions...or so they say.

From CCA’s webpage, “We manage, design, build and own more than 66 correctional facilities and detention centers from coast to coast, in small cities, metropolitan areas and destinations in between.”

What few people realize is that GEO and CCA are both members of ALEC.