FIRST – SECURE THE BORDER with Mexico!  It is presently agreed that this is where the problems originated and continues to fester.  New Gingrich is correct as well when he states that no one wants to break up families and start deporting people that have been here for 25 years.  Who is going to check those facts?  A member of the community and church being deported is not a good thing.  What constitutes a member of a church?  Should a agency be assigned to see if the alien is baptized and has a signed tithing offer on record?  In other words, this is ridiculous and as Perry points out – just a philosophical disagreement.

In order to be fair to ALL current citizens of the United States and those that would like to stay legally, I suggest the following:

Forewarned is fair armed – LET IT BE KNOWN THAT HENCEFORTH:
Beginning in 2013 a edict is put forth that if you are inside the United States of America you will:
1. Be able to produce (within 24 hours) a notarized legal Birth Certificate proving your were born here in the United States
2. Be currently in the process of obtaining citizenship (legally enrolled in citizenship classes) in the United States.  A valid, date stamped document shall be proof
3.   Be serving in the United States Military ( which is proof of your citizenship intentions ) and not be discharged until citizenship has been awarded

By the year 2018 ( 5 years notice ) you will be a citizen or be deported.  No exceptions!
No social services should be given to any person that does not have a US birth certificate or legal citizen status.  This includes the family members of person serving in military until citizenship has been deemed earned and awarded to military member.
No lessening of current Immigration laws or statuses to make it easier to become a citizen (2011)
ALL PERSONS WITHIN THE BOUNDARIES OF THE US ARE HEREBY ON NOTICE OF PENDING FUTURE IMMIGRATION LAW
IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSE
2018 – produce birth certificate or completed citizenship documents or be deported!
Ancho babies do not get automatic citizenship.  Parents of such children will pay for the birth of children in US HOSPITALS and become citizens or they and child will be deported before child can enter US PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
All persons presently receiving any form of social services monies from US OR STATE GOVERNMENT AGENCIES shall be responsible for repaying for a minimum of 1 years worth of services or for whatever time they utilized such services for less than one year.  This money shall be automatically taken from all future pay checks until paid in full.  No social services are to be paid to such persons even if passing citizenship requirements until money owed to federal government or state is paid in full.

 
This shall be known as limited rights citizenship – Full Rights Citizenship is granted once monies owed to US are paid in full.
Persons that have lived and worked illegally within the borders of the US that apply for citizenship must have a SPONSOR in order to enroll in citizenship class and become a citizen.

Applicants for citizenship will then be forced to assimilate or be sponsored by family members.  SPONSORS of any person applying for citizenship will be responsible financially for said applicant – the same as any American that has ever married a foreign national.  Sponsor will have to prove financial ability or will not be permitted to stand for or sponsor the applicant.

The more time spent arguing about Illegal Aliens and Immigration laws the longer we will have this problem.

Brian Gray

THE McQUEARY SYNDROME IN AMERICA

A grown man watched as a man raped a young boy in the showers and did nothing.  Oh, lest I forget, he did run home and tell his Daddy.  Daddy told him to report it to his Head Coach.  And then the whole thing died off into “not to be spoken of again” status.  The Head Coach told two other men that were positioned a little further up the ladder.  They then told the President – and the coverup began.

We all know the circumstances of the Penn State Pedophilia case.  We’re mad as hell and can only pray that justice will be swift.  By the way, the man charged with raping multiple boys is out of jail on bail to the tune of $400,000 dollars.  Thats the price to buy the temporary freedom for one of the most heinous acts on fellow humans in decades!  Now get this:  Students actually rioted because the Head Coach was fired.  Then after realizing how ridiculous they looked to the world, they held vigils for the children that were raped.  Such contrition brings a tear to my eye.

What about the damn court system that allowed this (innocent until proven guilty) man out of jail?  Makes for good reading doesn’t it?  Makes an even greater story that takes the big microscope off of our government scams and coverups.  Not a day goes by that doesn’t reveal yet another undeniably criminal act by our political leaders of this nation.

We see these acts:

Libya
Fast n Furious
Fed Gov. suing a state for protecting itself
The Fed audit and money appropriated to foreign countries
The Killing of Jobs Bills while unemployment soars (400K jobs on Canadian Oil Pipeline)
1st Lady goes to Paris on taxpayer dime while America reels in joblessness, homelessness and hunger
Gulf Oil Spill disaster that paid BP to be wrong
After midnight legislation on bills the nation doesn’t want
Election Fraud
Main Stream Media doing a High Tech Lynching on Republican Presidential Candidate
Transparency Promises broken by our President
Normal Vetting Process of our President usurped by media and all politicians (where are the college, health, birth certificates?) – OMG! now I’m a racist Birther!
The building of a Muslim Mosque at Ground Zero
Taxpayer dollars to bail out Fannie and Freddie every year

Hundreds of atrocities that continue to build daily and have been building for decades – yet go unanswered and the perpetrators go unpunished.

Like McQueary, we see these things happen and tell someone.  AND THEN THATS IT!  We sit behind our keyboards and type emails to our friends and bitch about it.  Why?  Because we all know in our hearts that this can not happen in our country and SOMEONE will do something about it later.  The problem is, that “later” never happens.  How can it?  Before the present disaster or criminal act can become old news, another one takes place.  It’s like driving 90 mph down the interstate and staring out the drivers side window.  Our minds fail to process current events when it is deluged daily by our politicians and even the weather.  One good tornado can take Americans minds off of Fast n Furious, Libya, or the Fed Budget.  (which hasn’t been passed in over 900 days)

Occupy Wall Street people had the right idea.  They took their gripe to the streets.  Problem is, they took every idiot, illiterate and totally screwed up person they could find with them.  OR DID THEY?  The press sure made sure to use them as a cover for what was happening behind the doors of the most powerful people in Washington.  If you gather a few thousand people in one place for several days, I can promise you that someone is going to get robbed, raped, shot or get killed in a fight.  There will be at least one idiot that does something as stupid and disgusting as to defecate on our American Flag.  The press will be there and report it, thereby taking the seriousness and the real reason people are angry out of the equation.

If the OWS people had of protested any particular act (of which they had hundreds to choose from) instead of showing up with their Socialism, Marxism, Communism posters/signs they may have gotten somewhere. Their intentions were to protest things that were wrong on Wall Street and instead turned it into a challenge against democracy.  They have a right to think whatever they desire, but they have to know that turning their media grabbing attention to attacks on democracy would make them the scourge of the rest of the nation.  What could have been a tidal wave of unity against our political leaders turned into a referendum on socialism.  Now I have to state that for those who think that I am wrong, just look at how the average American views OWS and its participants.  Your argument would be with each other and the press.  Thats how you got portrayed and that was an abject failure.

At the very least – OWS Protesters should be congratulated for having the balls to get out from behind their computers and do something.  No matter how screwed up their organizational skills were, or their message was, at least they tried to do something.  I would have rather tried and failed than to say I never tried. Hopefully a lesson was learned or is presently being learned from this.  The right to vote will no longer save our nation!  Politicians with the press in tow have now become the most powerful machine known to mankind.  They know how to manipulate the masses into a non focused state and keep them there.

We have got to do more than sing to the choir!  People like McQueary, just perpetuate the crimes with their non action.  YOU MATTER!  Your voice and presence are very much needed at the next rally/protest or whatever the event is.  If you don’t speak up, your coach won’t either and your team loses!

Think about it!

They like to refer to us as senior citizens, old fogies, geezers, and in some cases dinosaurs. Some of us are “Baby Boomers” getting ready to retire. Others have been retired for some time. We walk a little slower these days and our eyes and hearing are not what they once were.

We have worked hard, raised our children, worshipped our God and grown old together. Yes, we are the ones some refer to as being over the hill, and that is probably true. But before writing us off completely, there are a few things that need to be taken into consideration.

In school we studied English, history, math, and science which enabled us to lead America into the technological age.

Most of us remember what outhouses were, many of us with firsthand experience. We remember the days of telephone party-lines, 25 cent gasoline, and milk and ice being delivered to our homes. For those of you who don’t know what an icebox is, today they are electric and referred to as refrigerators. A few even remember when cars were started with a crank. Yes, we lived those days.

We are probably considered old fashioned and out-dated by many. But there are a few things you need to remember before completely writing us off. We won World War II, fought in Korea and Viet Nam . We can quote The Pledge of Allegiance, and know where to place our hand while doing so. We wore the uniform of our country with pride and lost many friends on the battlefield. We didn’t fight for the Socialist States of America ; we fought for the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.” We wore different uniforms but carried the same flag. We know the words to the Star Spangled Banner , America , and America the Beautiful by heart and you may even see some tears running down our cheeks as we sing. We have lived what many of you have only read about in history books and we feel no obligation to apologize to anyone for America .

Yes, we are old and slow these days but rest assured, we have at least one good fight left in us. We have loved this country, fought for it, and died for it, and now we are going to save it. It is our country and nobody is going to take it away from us. We took oaths to defend America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that is an oath we plan to keep. There are those who want to destroy this land we love but, like our founders, there is no way we are going to remain silent.

It was the young people of this nation who elected Obama and the Democratic Congress. You fell for the “Hope and Change” which in reality was nothing but “Hype and Lies.” You have tasted socialism and seen evil face to face, and have found you don’t like it after all. You make a lot of noise, but most are all too interested in their careers or “Climbing the Social Ladder” to be involved in such mundane things as patriotism and voting. Many of those who fell for the “Great Lie” in 2008 are now having buyer’s remorse. With all the education we gave you, you didn’t have sense enough to see through the lies and instead drank the ‘Cool-Aid.’ Now you’re paying the price and complaining about it. No jobs, lost mortgages, higher taxes, and less freedom. This is what you voted for and this is what you got. We entrusted you with the Torch of Liberty and you traded it for a paycheck and a fancy house.

Well, youngsters, the Grey Haired Brigade is here, and in 2012 we are going to take back our nation. We may drive a little slower than you would like but we get where we’re going, and in 2012 we’re going to the polls by the millions. This land does not belong to the man in the White House or to the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. It belongs to “We the People” and “We the People” plan to reclaim our land and our freedom. We hope this time you will do a better job of preserving it and passing it along to our grandchildren.

So the next time you have the chance to say the Pledge of Allegiance, Stand up, put your hand over your heart, honor our country, and thank God for the old geezers of the “Grey-Haired Brigade.”

Grey-Haired Brigade Member

“The silver haired head is a crown of glory, if it is found in the way of righteousness.

Proverbs 16:31

Brian Gray

I thought Newt Gingrich did another outstanding job!  Michelle Bachmann made a comeback of sorts but did not get any backup on her play to accuse Perry of taking bribes.  Cain didn’t shoot himself in either foot and responded with humor that always gets peoples attention, so good job to him on that level.

Romney is the established Republican favorite and a lot of people (especially the press) know that the Tea Party people do not like him.  Therefore, the MSM will continue to give him plenty of free press.  Mitt will eventually ensnare Perry to the point of no return and make Dick Morris’s day.  Perry can only hope that Newt doesn’t come after him, which is inevitable in the months to come.

Bachmann or Cain would have a hard time competing with Obama and the liberal machine, especially heads up in a debate.  Santorum would get spanked after he ran out of talking points to hit back with as well.  Newt or Romney could go toe to toe with Obama, but Newt would be the one that can outthink not only BHO but the entire democrat machine.

Between Newt, Romney, Cain and Bachman, its just a matter of time between now and election day to see which one can survive without turning themselves into a casualty.  Perry can survive the ambush he took tonight but had better be really good between now and the next debate.  Oct. 18th will be crucial for Cain and Perry.  As it looks right now, Newt will happily stand on the sidelines and let the other four shoot it out.  Those 4 have no choice and had better be really, really prepared when they come gunning for him.  I am just waiting for someone to attack Newt about his wife or that park bench thing with Pelosi.  It can be embarrassing for the candidate that makes that mistake.

jmho,

Brian

Here’s how regulation of Wall Street is supposed to work. To begin with, there’s a semigigantic list of public and quasi-public agencies ostensibly keeping their eyes on the economy, a dense alphabet soup of banking, insurance, S&L, securities and commodities regulators like the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), as well as supposedly “self-regulating organizations” like the New York Stock Exchange. All of these outfits, by law, can at least begin the process of catching and investigating financial criminals, though none of them has prosecutorial power.

The major federal agency on the Wall Street beat is the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC watches for violations like insider trading, and also deals with so-called “disclosure violations” — i.e., making sure that all the financial information that publicly traded companies are required to make public actually jibes with reality. But the SEC doesn’t have prosecutorial power either, so in practice, when it looks like someone needs to go to jail, they refer the case to the Justice Department. And since the vast majority of crimes in the financial services industry take place in Lower Manhattan, cases referred by the SEC often end up in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Thus, the two top cops on Wall Street are generally considered to be that U.S. attorney — a job that has been held by thunderous prosecutorial personae like Robert Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani — and the SEC’s director of enforcement.

The relationship between the SEC and the DOJ is necessarily close, even symbiotic. Since financial crime-fighting requires a high degree of financial expertise — and since the typical drug-and-terrorism-obsessed FBI agent can’t balance his own checkbook, let alone tell a synthetic CDO from a credit default swap — the Justice Department ends up leaning heavily on the SEC’s army of 1,100 number-crunching investigators to make their cases. In theory, it’s a well-oiled, tag-team affair: Billionaire Wall Street Asshole commits fraud, the NYSE catches on and tips off the SEC, the SEC works the case and delivers it to Justice, and Justice perp-walks the Asshole out of Nobu, into a Crown Victoria and off to 36 months of push-ups, license-plate making and Salisbury steak.

That’s the way it’s supposed to work. But a veritable mountain of evidence indicates that when it comes to Wall Street, the justice system not only sucks at punishing financial criminals, it has actually evolved into a highly effective mechanism for protecting financial criminals. This institutional reality has absolutely nothing to do with politics or ideology — it takes place no matter who’s in office or which party’s in power. To understand how the machinery functions, you have to start back at least a decade ago, as case after case of financial malfeasance was pursued too slowly or not at all, fumbled by a government bureaucracy that too often is on a first-name basis with its targets. Indeed, the shocking pattern of nonenforcement with regard to Wall Street is so deeply ingrained in Washington that it raises a profound and difficult question about the very nature of our society: whether we have created a class of people whose misdeeds are no longer perceived as crimes, almost no matter what those misdeeds are. The SEC and the Justice Department have evolved into a bizarre species of social surgeon serving this nonjailable class, expert not at administering punishment and justice, but at finding and removing criminal responsibility from the bodies of the accused.

The systematic lack of regulation has left even the country’s top regulators frustrated. Lynn Turner, a former chief accountant for the SEC, laughs darkly at the idea that the criminal justice system is broken when it comes to Wall Street. “I think you’ve got a wrong assumption — that we even have a law-enforcement agency when it comes to Wall Street,” he says.

In the hierarchy of the SEC, the chief accountant plays a major role in working to pursue misleading and phony financial disclosures. Turner held the post a decade ago, when one of the most significant cases was swallowed up by the SEC bureaucracy. In the late 1990s, the agency had an open-and-shut case against the Rite Aid drugstore chain, which was using diabolical accounting tricks to cook their books. But instead of moving swiftly to crack down on such scams, the SEC shoved the case into the “deal with it later” file. “The Philadelphia office literally did nothing with the case for a year,” Turner recalls. “Very much like the New York office with Madoff.” The Rite Aid case dragged on for years — and by the time it was finished, similar accounting fiascoes at Enron and WorldCom had exploded into a full-blown financial crisis. The same was true for another SEC case that presaged the Enron disaster. The agency knew that appliance-maker Sunbeam was using the same kind of accounting scams to systematically hide losses from its investors. But in the end, the SEC’s punishment for Sunbeam’s CEO, Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap — widely regarded as one of the biggest assholes in the history of American finance — was a fine of $500,000. Dunlap’s net worth at the time was an estimated $100 million. The SEC also barred Dunlap from ever running a public company again — forcing him to retire with a mere $99.5 million. Dunlap passed the time collecting royalties from his self-congratulatory memoir. Its title: Mean Business.

Episodes like this help explain why so many Wall Street executives felt emboldened to push the regulatory envelope during the mid-2000s. Over and over, even the most obvious cases of fraud and insider dealing got gummed up in the works, and high-ranking executives were almost never prosecuted for their crimes. In 2003, Freddie Mac coughed up $125 million after it was caught misreporting its earnings by $5 billion; nobody went to jail. In 2006, Fannie Mae was fined $400 million, but executives who had overseen phony accounting techniques to jack up their bonuses faced no criminal charges. That same year, AIG paid $1.6 billion after it was caught in a major accounting scandal that would indirectly lead to its collapse two years later, but no executives at the insurance giant were prosecuted.

All of this behavior set the stage for the crash of 2008, when Wall Street exploded in a raging Dresden of fraud and criminality. Yet the SEC and the Justice Department have shown almost no inclination to prosecute those most responsible for the catastrophe — even though they had insiders from the two firms whose implosions triggered the crisis, Lehman Brothers and AIG, who were more than willing to supply evidence against top executives.

In the case of Lehman Brothers, the SEC had a chance six months before the crash to move against Dick Fuld, a man recently named the worst CEO of all time by Portfolio magazine. A decade before the crash, a Lehman lawyer named Oliver Budde was going through the bank’s proxy statements and noticed that it was using a loophole involving Restricted Stock Units to hide tens of millions of dollars of Fuld’s compensation. Budde told his bosses that Lehman’s use of RSUs was dicey at best, but they blew him off. “We’re sorry about your concerns,” they told him, “but we’re doing it.” Disturbed by such shady practices, the lawyer quit the firm in 2006.

Then, only a few months after Budde left Lehman, the SEC changed its rules to force companies to disclose exactly how much compensation in RSUs executives had coming to them. “The SEC was basically like, ‘We’re sick and tired of you people fucking around — we want a picture of what you’re holding,’” Budde says. But instead of coming clean about eight separate RSUs that Fuld had hidden from investors, Lehman filed a proxy statement that was a masterpiece of cynical lawyering. On one page, a chart indicated that Fuld had been awarded $146 million in RSUs. But two pages later, a note in the fine print essentially stated that the chart did not contain the real number — which, it failed to mention, was actually $263 million more than the chart indicated. “They fucked around even more than they did before,” Budde says. (The law firm that helped craft the fine print, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, would later receive a lucrative federal contract to serve as legal adviser to the TARP bailout.)

Budde decided to come forward. In April 2008, he wrote a detailed memo to the SEC about Lehman’s history of hidden stocks. Shortly thereafter, he got a letter back that began, “Dear Sir or Madam.” It was an automated e-response.

“They blew me off,” Budde says.

Over the course of that summer, Budde tried to contact the SEC several more times, and was ignored each time. Finally, in the fateful week of September 15th, 2008, when Lehman Brothers cracked under the weight of its reckless bets on the subprime market and went into its final death spiral, Budde became seriously concerned. If the government tried to arrange for Lehman to be pawned off on another Wall Street firm, as it had done with Bear Stearns, the U.S. taxpayer might wind up footing the bill for a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in concealed compensation. So Budde again called the SEC, right in the middle of the crisis. “Look,” he told regulators. “I gave you huge stuff. You really want to take a look at this.”

But the feds once again blew him off. A young staff attorney contacted Budde, who once more provided the SEC with copies of all his memos. He never heard from the agency again.

“This was like a mini-Madoff,” Budde says. “They had six solid months of warnings. They could have done something.”

Three weeks later, Budde was shocked to see Fuld testifying before the House Government Oversight Committee and whining about how poor he was. “I got no severance, no golden parachute,” Fuld moaned. When Rep. Henry Waxman, the committee’s chairman, mentioned that he thought Fuld had earned more than $480 million, Fuld corrected him and said he believed it was only $310 million.

The true number, Budde calculated, was $529 million. He contacted a Senate investigator to talk about how Fuld had misled Congress, but he never got any response. Meanwhile, in a demonstration of the government’s priorities, the Justice Department is proceeding full force with a prosecution of retired baseball player Roger Clemens for lying to Congress about getting a shot of steroids in his ass. “At least Roger didn’t screw over the world,” Budde says, shaking his head.

Fuld has denied any wrongdoing, but his hidden compensation was only a ripple in Lehman’s raging tsunami of misdeeds. The investment bank used an absurd accounting trick called “Repo 105″ transactions to conceal $50 billion in loans on the firm’s balance sheet. (That’s $50 billion, not million.) But more than a year after the use of the Repo 105s came to light, there have still been no indictments in the affair. While it’s possible that charges may yet be filed, there are now rumors that the SEC and the Justice Department may take no action against Lehman. If that’s true, and there’s no prosecution in a case where there’s such overwhelming evidence — and where the company is already dead, meaning it can’t dump further losses on investors or taxpayers — then it might be time to assume the game is up. Failing to prosecute Fuld and Lehman would be tantamount to the state marching into Wall Street and waving the green flag on a new stealing season.

The most amazing noncase in the entire crash — the one that truly defies the most basic notion of justice when it comes to Wall Street supervillains — is the one involving AIG and Joe Cassano, the nebbishy Patient Zero of the financial crisis. As chief of AIGFP, the firm’s financial products subsidiary, Cassano repeatedly made public statements in 2007 claiming that his portfolio of mortgage derivatives would suffer “no dollar of loss” — an almost comically obvious misrepresentation. “God couldn’t manage a $60 billion real estate portfolio without a single dollar of loss,” says Turner, the agency’s former chief accountant. “If the SEC can’t make a disclosure case against AIG, then they might as well close up shop.”

As in the Lehman case, federal prosecutors not only had plenty of evidence against AIG — they also had an eyewitness to Cassano’s actions who was prepared to tell all. As an accountant at AIGFP, Joseph St. Denis had a number of run-ins with Cassano during the summer of 2007. At the time, Cassano had already made nearly $500 billion worth of derivative bets that would ultimately blow up, destroy the world’s largest insurance company, and trigger the largest government bailout of a single company in U.S. history. He made many fatal mistakes, but chief among them was engaging in contracts that required AIG to post billions of dollars in collateral if there was any downgrade to its credit rating.

St. Denis didn’t know about those clauses in Cassano’s contracts, since they had been written before he joined the firm. What he did know was that Cassano freaked out when St. Denis spoke with an accountant at the parent company, which was only just finding out about the time bomb Cassano had set. After St. Denis finished a conference call with the executive, Cassano suddenly burst into the room and began screaming at him for talking to the New York office. He then announced that St. Denis had been “deliberately excluded” from any valuations of the most toxic elements of the derivatives portfolio — thus preventing the accountant from doing his job. What St. Denis represented was transparency — and the last thing Cassano needed was transparency.

Another clue that something was amiss with AIGFP’s portfolio came when Goldman Sachs demanded that the firm pay billions in collateral, per the terms of Cassano’s deadly contracts. Such “collateral calls” happen all the time on Wall Street, but seldom against a seemingly solvent and friendly business partner like AIG. And when they do happen, they are rarely paid without a fight. So St. Denis was shocked when AIGFP agreed to fork over gobs of money to Goldman Sachs, even while it was still contesting the payments — an indication that something was seriously wrong at AIG. “When I found out about the collateral call, I literally had to sit down,” St. Denis recalls. “I had to go home for the day.”

After Cassano barred him from valuating the derivative deals, St. Denis had no choice but to resign. He got another job, and thought he was done with AIG. But a few months later, he learned that Cassano had held a conference call with investors in December 2007. During the call, AIGFP failed to disclose that it had posted $2 billion to Goldman Sachs following the collateral calls.

“Investors therefore did not know,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission would later conclude, “that AIG’s earnings were overstated by $3.6 billion.”

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, they’re just not telling people,’” St. Denis says. “I knew. I had been there. I knew they’d posted collateral.”

A year later, after the crash, St. Denis wrote a letter about his experiences to the House Government Oversight Committee, which was looking into the AIG collapse. He also met with investigators for the government, which was preparing a criminal case against Cassano. But the case never went to court. Last May, the Justice Department confirmed that it would not file charges against executives at AIGFP. Cassano, who has denied any wrongdoing, was reportedly told he was no longer a target.

Shortly after that, Cassano strolled into Washington to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. It was his first public appearance since the crash. He has not had to pay back a single cent out of the hundreds of millions of dollars he earned selling his insane pseudo-insurance policies on subprime mortgage deals. Now, out from under prosecution, he appeared before the FCIC and had the enormous balls to compliment his own business acumen, saying his atom-bomb swaps portfolio was, in retrospect, not that badly constructed. “I think the portfolios are withstanding the test of time,” he said.

“They offered him an excellent opportunity to redeem himself,” St. Denis jokes.

In the end, of course, it wasn’t just the executives of Lehman and AIGFP who got passes. Virtually every one of the major players on Wall Street was similarly embroiled in scandal, yet their executives skated off into the sunset, uncharged and unfined. Goldman Sachs paid $550 million last year when it was caught defrauding investors with crappy mortgages, but no executive has been fined or jailed — not even Fabrice “Fabulous Fab” Tourre, Goldman’s outrageous Euro-douche who gleefully e-mailed a pal about the “surreal” transactions in the middle of a meeting with the firm’s victims. In a similar case, a sales executive at the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank got off on charges of insider trading; its general counsel at the time of the questionable deals, Robert Khuzami, now serves as director of enforcement for the SEC.

Another major firm, Bank of America, was caught hiding $5.8 billion in bonuses from shareholders as part of its takeover of Merrill Lynch. The SEC tried to let the bank off with a settlement of only $33 million, but Judge Jed Rakoff rejected the action as a “facade of enforcement.” So the SEC quintupled the settlement — but it didn’t require either Merrill or Bank of America to admit to wrongdoing. Unlike criminal trials, in which the facts of the crime are put on record for all to see, these Wall Street settlements almost never require the banks to make any factual disclosures, effectively burying the stories forever. “All this is done at the expense not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth,” says Rakoff. Goldman, Deutsche, Merrill, Lehman, Bank of America … who did we leave out? Oh, there’s Citigroup, nailed for hiding some $40 billion in liabilities from investors. Last July, the SEC settled with Citi for $75 million. In a rare move, it also fined two Citi executives, former CFO Gary Crittenden and investor-relations chief Arthur Tildesley Jr. Their penalties, combined, came to a whopping $180,000.

Throughout the entire crisis, in fact, the government has taken exactly one serious swing of the bat against executives from a major bank, charging two guys from Bear Stearns with criminal fraud over a pair of toxic subprime hedge funds that blew up in 2007, destroying the company and robbing investors of $1.6 billion. Jurors had an e-mail between the defendants admitting that “there is simply no way for us to make money — ever” just three days before assuring investors that “there’s no basis for thinking this is one big disaster.” Yet the case still somehow ended in acquittal — and the Justice Department hasn’t taken any of the big banks to court since.

All of which raises an obvious question: Why the hell not?

Gary Aguirre, the SEC investigator who lost his job when he drew the ire of Morgan Stanley, thinks he knows the answer.

Last year, Aguirre noticed that a conference on financial law enforcement was scheduled to be held at the Hilton in New York on November 12th. The list of attendees included 1,500 or so of the country’s leading lawyers who represent Wall Street, as well as some of the government’s top cops from both the SEC and the Justice Department.

Criminal justice, as it pertains to the Goldmans and Morgan Stanleys of the world, is not adversarial combat, with cops and crooks duking it out in interrogation rooms and courthouses. Instead, it’s a cocktail party between friends and colleagues who from month to month and year to year are constantly switching sides and trading hats. At the Hilton conference, regulators and banker-lawyers rubbed elbows during a series of speeches and panel discussions, away from the rabble. “They were chummier in that environment,” says Aguirre, who plunked down $2,200 to attend the conference.

Aguirre saw a lot of familiar faces at the conference, for a simple reason: Many of the SEC regulators he had worked with during his failed attempt to investigate John Mack had made a million-dollar pass through the Revolving Door, going to work for the very same firms they used to police. Aguirre didn’t see Paul Berger, an associate director of enforcement who had rebuffed his attempts to interview Mack — maybe because Berger was tied up at his lucrative new job at Debevoise & Plimpton, the same law firm that Morgan Stanley employed to intervene in the Mack case. But he did see Mary Jo White, the former U.S. attorney, who was still at Debevoise & Plimpton. He also saw Linda Thomsen, the former SEC director of enforcement who had been so helpful to White. Thomsen had gone on to represent Wall Street as a partner at the prestigious firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell.

Two of the government’s top cops were there as well: Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Robert Khuzami, the SEC’s current director of enforcement. Bharara had been recommended for his post by Chuck Schumer, Wall Street’s favorite senator. And both he and Khuzami had served with Mary Jo White at the U.S. attorney’s office, before Mary Jo went on to become a partner at Debevoise. What’s more, when Khuzami had served as general counsel for Deutsche Bank, he had been hired by none other than Dick Walker, who had been enforcement director at the SEC when it slow-rolled the pivotal fraud case against Rite Aid.

“It wasn’t just one rotation of the revolving door,” says Aguirre. “It just kept spinning. Every single person had rotated in and out of government and private service.”

The Revolving Door isn’t just a footnote in financial law enforcement; over the past decade, more than a dozen high-ranking SEC officials have gone on to lucrative jobs at Wall Street banks or white-shoe law firms, where partnerships are worth millions. That makes SEC officials like Paul Berger and Linda Thomsen the equivalent of college basketball stars waiting for their first NBA contract. Are you really going to give up a shot at the Knicks or the Lakers just to find out whether a Wall Street big shot like John Mack was guilty of insider trading? “You take one of these jobs,” says Turner, the former chief accountant for the SEC, “and you’re fit for life.”

Fit — and happy. The banter between the speakers at the New York conference says everything you need to know about the level of chumminess and mutual admiration that exists between these supposed adversaries of the justice system. At one point in the conference, Mary Jo White introduced Bharara, her old pal from the U.S. attorney’s office.

“I want to first say how pleased I am to be here,” Bharara responded. Then, addressing White, he added, “You’ve spawned all of us. It’s almost 11 years ago to the day that Mary Jo White called me and asked me if I would become an assistant U.S. attorney. So thank you, Dr. Frankenstein.”

Next, addressing the crowd of high-priced lawyers from Wall Street, Bharara made an interesting joke. “I also want to take a moment to applaud the entire staff of the SEC for the really amazing things they have done over the past year,” he said. “They’ve done a real service to the country, to the financial community, and not to mention a lot of your law practices.”

Haw! The line drew snickers from the conference of millionaire lawyers. But the real fireworks came when Khuzami, the SEC’s director of enforcement, talked about a new “cooperation initiative” the agency had recently unveiled, in which executives are being offered incentives to report fraud they have witnessed or committed. From now on, Khuzami said, when corporate lawyers like the ones he was addressing want to know if their Wall Street clients are going to be charged by the Justice Department before deciding whether to come forward, all they have to do is ask the SEC.

“We are going to try to get those individuals answers,” Khuzami announced, as to “whether or not there is criminal interest in the case — so that defense counsel can have as much information as possible in deciding whether or not to choose to sign up their client.”

Aguirre, listening in the crowd, couldn’t believe Khuzami’s brazenness. The SEC’s enforcement director was saying, in essence, that firms like Goldman Sachs and AIG and Lehman Brothers will henceforth be able to get the SEC to act as a middleman between them and the Justice Department, negotiating fines as a way out of jail time. Khuzami was basically outlining a four-step system for banks and their executives to buy their way out of prison. “First, the SEC and Wall Street player make an agreement on a fine that the player will pay to the SEC,” Aguirre says. “Then the Justice Department commits itself to pass, so that the player knows he’s ‘safe.’ Third, the player pays the SEC — and fourth, the player gets a pass from the Justice Department.”

When I ask a former federal prosecutor about the propriety of a sitting SEC director of enforcement talking out loud about helping corporate defendants “get answers” regarding the status of their criminal cases, he initially doesn’t believe it. Then I send him a transcript of the comment. “I am very, very surprised by Khuzami’s statement, which does seem to me to be contrary to past practice — and not a good thing,” the former prosecutor says.

Earlier this month, when Sen. Chuck Grassley found out about Khuzami’s comments, he sent the SEC a letter noting that the agency’s own enforcement manual not only prohibits such “answer getting,” it even bars the SEC from giving defendants the Justice Department’s phone number. “Should counsel or the individual ask which criminal authorities they should contact,” the manual reads, “staff should decline to answer, unless authorized by the relevant criminal authorities.” Both the SEC and the Justice Department deny there is anything improper in their new policy of cooperation. “We collaborate with the SEC, but they do not consult with us when they resolve their cases,” Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer assured Congress in January. “They do that independently.”

Around the same time that Breuer was testifying, however, a story broke that prior to the pathetically small settlement of $75 million that the SEC had arranged with Citigroup, Khuzami had ordered his staff to pursue lighter charges against the megabank’s executives. According to a letter that was sent to Sen. Grassley’s office, Khuzami had a “secret conversation, without telling the staff, with a prominent defense lawyer who is a good friend” of his and “who was counsel for the company.” The unsigned letter, which appears to have come from an SEC investigator on the case, prompted the inspector general to launch an investigation into the charge.

All of this paints a disturbing picture of a closed and corrupt system, a timeless circle of friends that virtually guarantees a collegial approach to the policing of high finance. Even before the corruption starts, the state is crippled by economic reality: Since law enforcement on Wall Street requires serious intellectual firepower, the banks seize a huge advantage from the start by hiring away the top talent. Budde, the former Lehman lawyer, says it’s well known that all the best legal minds go to the big corporate law firms, while the “bottom 20 percent go to the SEC.” Which makes it tough for the agency to track devious legal machinations, like the scheme to hide $263 million of Dick Fuld’s compensation.

“It’s such a mismatch, it’s not even funny,” Budde says.

But even beyond that, the system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner or later jumps ship for those fat NBA contracts. Or, conversely, graduates of the big corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in government service for a year or two. Many of those appointments are inevitably hand-picked by lifelong stooges for Wall Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. “The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we’re not ready to believe it,” says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. “He’s really fucking us over like that? Really? That’s really a JP Morgan guy, really?”

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would “demean the seriousness” of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It’s not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they’re sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let’s not even make them say they’re sorry. That’s too mean; let’s just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don’t make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don’t ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What’s next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don’t feel real; you don’t see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They’re crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let’s steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They’re attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone’s claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

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Lets take a look at some of the particulars of this failed coup:

Democrats were angling to win GOP-held seats to capture control of the upper chamber. Before the election, Republicans held a 19-14 majority in the state Senate. With a victory Democrats had hoped to build momentum for a planned effort to recall Governor Walker. Walker, who was elected in November with strong support from tea party activists, can’t be recalled until after he serves a year in office.

Governor Walker set off a firestorm in January when he moved to curtail the collective bargaining rights of most state employees. With majorities in both houses of the Legislature, Walker and his GOP allies voted to limit raises for public employees except police and firefighters to the rate of inflation, bar unions from deducting dues from workers’ paychecks and force them to hold a new certification vote every year.

Republicans retained four of the six state Senate seats that were in jeopardy in Tuesday’s recall elections in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported. Democrats won two seats but needed three to take control.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus applauded the results of the Tuesday vote.  ”Today, Wisconsin voters rejected the reckless spending of Wisconsin Democrats and the downgrade-inducing policies of their Washington counterparts. They have given their seal of approval to Republicans’ successful efforts to balance the budget and ensure a healthy economy,” Priebus said. Priebus also stated that the RNC is focusing on get-out-the-vote efforts and won’t run television ads.  Conservative groups like Club for Growth and Americans for Prosperity (not the RNC) are spending millions of dollars on ads attacking the Democrats.

A spokeswoman for the RNC said by this weekend the Wisconsin Republican Party will have contacted 500,000 voters in the state. Priebus’ comments came on the same day that We Are Wisconsin, a coalition of national unions and others, announced that it had made 1 million voter contacts since the start of the recall efforts.

Meanwhile:

Two other political action committees, Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America, said they spent $100,000 last week on a television ad against Republican Sen. Luther Olsen (R-Ripon). The groups announced Friday they plan to spend another $150,000 to air an ad targeting Republican Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) and to extend the Olsen ad. Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said they hope to spend $250,000 more by the end.

Total spending on the eight recall campaigns by the candidates and outside groups combined is projected to go as high as $30 million.

The Republican Party won this election recall and the people of Wisconsin once again told the Unions and liberals that they are not welcome. However, lets take a look at the effort put forth by the Republican National Committee.

Reince Priebus the former Chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party and now the National Chairman for the RNC stated his commitment to the struggle was to work on the “get out the vote” efforts and that they would not be running ads on television!  A spokeswoman for the RNC had the audacity to brag about making half a million “contacts” while a Union coalition claimed to make 1 (one) Million contacts!

According to Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, in Wisconsin to attend and support rallies:  When Tea Party Express, Tea Party Nation, Patriot Action Network and FreedomWorks went to Wisconsin for the Restoring Common Sense Tour, the State GOP told candidates and campaigns to stay away from the Tea Party.  The day the State of Wisconsin held a primary on Scott Walker, where was Scott Walker?   He was in Florida! As the tour rolled through Wisconsin, we made nine stops.  At over half of the stops, we did not even have the candidate there who we were supporting! Why?  Because the Wisconsin State GOP had told them to stay away. The Tea Party Express tour was, among other things, a fantastic get out the vote effort.  What has the GOP been doing to get out the vote?  In Wisconsin, I saw zero effort by the GOP to get the vote out.Where were the GOP superstars?  Where was Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan?  He was AWOL.  Scott Walker, who received standing ovations from the crowds, was AWOL. Where was Senator Ron Johnson?  Where were any of the Presidential candidates?   Where was the RNC?  The candidates should have broken away from Iowa for at least a day and helped out.  This is a team effort.  It is not all about the individual candidate. The only GOP Congressman to show up at any of these events was Reid Ribble.  He is a great American and a great Republican.   He stepped up where so many others would not.”  http://bit.ly/n9QSTd

Judson Phillips calls it the way it is and not the way some would want to hear it.  But at least he is not afraid to speak the truth and call out anyone or group.  It seems to me that the very movement and people that helped put those Wisconsin politicians in office were abandoned by the State Republican Party.  While the Tea Party made every effort to support these politicians during a recall election that could have brought a downfall to the state of Wisconsin, they did so with the backs of the GOP turned toward them.  It appears to me that Reince Priebus made the decisions not to back the 6 Republicans that could have lost their seats, with RNC money for television ads.  No, he left that up to the Tea Parties and other Republican PAC’s.  So what do you suppose was so important to the RNC Chairman that he would gamble this election on?

Tea Party movement people are not very pleased with this.

“Nuff said”

Brian Gray

With these organizations gone, we could eliminate the federal income tax (for real economic stimulus). Then all these federal government fat cats would have to get real jobs like the rest of us – probably without the 10 holidays a year.

THESE ORGANIZATIONS PRODUCE NOTHING-THEY JUST LEECH AND TRANSFER WEALTH FROM ONE CLASS TO ANOTHER BY FORCE OF TAXATION.

ANY WONDER WHY WE’RE BROKE???… THIS LIST DOES NOT INCLUDE ANY MILITARY or DEFENSE PROGRAMS OR THEIR SUBSIDIARIES.  IT ALSO DOES NOT INCLUDE LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT BRANCHES SUCH AS EXECUTIVE, LEGISLATIVE, JUDICIAL, AND MANY OTHERS.

HERE IT IS…

Personal Income Tax Division of the IRS

National Endowment for the Arts (Can’t sell your art privately?)

National Wild Horse and Burro Program (Huh?)

Dept. of Education

Dept of Energy

FEMA (a corrupt organization if there ever was one–leave it to charities)

FDIC (a sham program with only a fraction of funds needed to save banks)

Freddy Mac & Fannie Mae (helped cause present economic conditions)

Administration on Aging (AoA)

Administration for Children and Families (ACF)

Administration on Developmental Disabilities (ADD)

Administration for Native Americans (ANA)

Children’s Bureau (CB)

Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB)

Head Start Bureau (HSB)

Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI)

Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP)

Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE)

Office of Community Services Block Grant (OCS)

Office of Family Assistance (OFA)

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)

Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)

President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities (PCPID)

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR)

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)

Indian Health Service (IHS)

National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Office for Civil Rights (OCR)

Office of Minority Health (OMH)

Program Support Center (PSC)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Admin.(SAMHSA)

Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT)

Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (CFBCI)

Employees’ Compensation Appeals Board (ECAB)

Employment Standards Administration (ESA)

The Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS)

Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP)

Wage and Hour Division (WHD)

Employment and Training Administration (ETA)

Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA)

Women’s Bureau (WB)

Job Corps

Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs

Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs

Internet Access and Training Program

Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs

Bureau of Human Resources

Bureau of Information Resource Management

Bureau of Intelligence and Research

Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs

Bureau of International Organization Affairs

Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation

Bureau of Legislative Affairs

Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs

Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs

Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations

Bureau of Political-Military Affairs

Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration

Bureau of Public Affairs

Bureau of Resource Management

Bureau of South Asian Affairs

Bureau of Verification, Compliance, and Implementation

Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs

Counterterrorism Office (which produces the Patterns of Global Terrorism report)

National Foreign Affairs Training Center (former Foreign Service Institute)

Office of International Information Programs

Office of the Legal Adviser

Office of Management Policy

Office of Protocol

Office of the Science and Technology Adviser

Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons

Office of War Crimes Issues (They blew the Bush war crimes)

Car Allowance Rebate System (Cash for Clunkers)

Cash for Appliances Program

Bureau of the Public Debt

Community Development Financial Institution Fund (CDFI)

FHA

HUD

INDEPENDENT AGENCIES Of the U.S. GOVERNMENT;

National health and insurance system

African Development Foundation

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP)

Agency for International Development (USAID)

American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC)

Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC)

U.S. Arctic Research Commission (USARC)

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (EVIL WAR-MONGERS)

US Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR)

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)

Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS)

Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA)

Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC)

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

Export-Import Bank of the United States (ExIm)

Farm Credit Administration (FCA)

Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

Federal Election Commission (FEC)

Federal Maritime Commission

Federal Mine Safety & Health Review Commission (FMSHRC)

Federal Reserve System (a pseudo government, semi-private organization)

Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Foreign Claims Settlement Commission of the United States (FCSC)

General Services Administration (GSA)

Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)

Inter-American Foundation (IAF)

International Trade Commission (ITC)

Learn and Serve America (LSA)

National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC)

National Credit Union Administration (NCUA)

National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

National Ice Center (NIC)

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) (NRPC)

National Science Foundation (NSF)

National Transportation Research Center (NTRC)

Office of Government Ethics (OGE)(LOT OF GOOD THEY DO)

Office of Personnel Management (OPM)

Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC)

Selective Service System (SSS)

Senior Corps

Small Business Administration (SBA)

Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC)

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

United States Trade and Development Agency (TDA)

BOARDS AND COMMISSIONS;

Financial crisis inquiry commission

Administrative Committee of the Federal Register

American Battle Monuments Commission

Appalachian Regional Commission

Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board (Access Board)

Arctic Research Commission

Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Interagency Coordinating Committee

Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation

Broadcasting Board of Governors

Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board

Chief Acquisition Officers Council

Chief Financial Officers Council

Chief Human Capital Officers Council

Chief Information Officers Council

Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee

Commission of Fine Arts

Commission on International Religious Freedom

Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (Helsinki Commission)

Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States

Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction

Committee for Purchase from People Who Are Blind or Severely Disabled

Committee for the Implementation of Textile Agreements

Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States

Coordinating Council on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Delaware River Basin Commission

Denali Commission

Endangered Species Committee

Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board

Federal Advisory Committees

Federal Executive Boards

Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council

Federal Financing Bank

Federal Geographic Data Committee

Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds (GOTTA LOVE THAT ONE!)

Federal Interagency Committee on Education

Federal Interagency Council on Statistical Policy

Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer

Federal Library and Information Center Committee

Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation

Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor Commission

Indian Arts and Crafts Board

Interagency Alternative Dispute Resolution Working Group

Interagency Council on Homelessness

Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin

J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board

James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation

Japan-United States Friendship Commission

Joint Board for the Enrollment of Actuaries

Joint Fire Science Program

Marine Mammal Commission

Migratory Bird Conservation Commission

Millennium Challenge Corporation

Mississippi River Commission

Morris K. Udall Foundation: Scholarship and Excellence in National Environmental Policy

National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare

National Indian Gaming Commission

National Park Foundation

Northwest Power Planning Council

Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board

Presidio Trust

Regulatory Information Service Center

Social Security Advisory Board

Susquehanna River Basin Commission

Taxpayer Advocacy Panel

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Veterans Day National Committee

Vietnam Educational Foundation

White House Commission on Presidential Scholars – “Presidential Scholars Program”

White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance

SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM (Pay back-with interest to all who want to opt out, but continue to fund those in or near retirement). THIS COULD BE DONE WITH MONEY PRESENTLY USED TO INVADE AND OCCUPY FOREIGN LANDS.

On the outside chance that someone will disagree with anything on this list, let me be the first to say “I don’t care if you agree with it or not.”

AGAIN…ANY WONDER WHY WE’RE BROKE???