The Front Page Cover
2016 The truth will set you free
Featuring:
Religion contributes more to the economy
than many giant corporations
by Julie Zauzmer
by Julie Zauzmer
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Banks and Banksters: Too Big to Fail or Jail?
Arnold Ahlert: In 2008, when a combination of government mandates severely compounded by Wall Street greed nearly blew up the world's financial system, Congress and the Bush administration conjured up the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to save institutions deemed "too big to fail." Ever since, too big to fail has rendered large financial institutions, and the executives that run them, virtually immune from criminal prosecution. And nothing speaks more forcefully to this reality than the latest scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo.
Two weeks ago, federal regulators revealed the country's third-largest bank spent the last five years opening 1.5 million bank accounts and 565,000 credit card accounts without customer permission. A staggering 5,300 employees were involved in the scam that included using a customer's personal information from a legitimate account to open a bogus one and moving money from one to the other. Workers even created fake email addresses and PIN numbers to facilitate the corruption.
The reason? They were trying to meet sales quotas, even though this practice, known as "sandbagging," resulted in $50 fines for the customer.
Wells Fargo's punishment? The 5,300 employees were terminated, and the bank paid a $185 million fine levied by officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which boasted that "Wells Fargo is paying the largest penalty the CFPB has ever imposed" since its creation following the financial meltdown.
Yet those officials didn't mention a despicable reality revealed by The New York Times, which explained the deal "was classic Wall Street." In short, no matter how egregious the activity, many cases are settled "without a bank having to admit doing anything wrong."
Enter Wells Fargo Chief Executive John Stumpf, who offered the standard faux-mea culpa. "Our goal is to get it right with every customer 100% of the time," he stated. "When we fall short of that goal, I feel accountable and our leadership team feels accountable — and we want all our stakeholders to know that."
Feeling accountable? Stumpf and his senior management team have suffered no consequences whatsoever for the bank's malfeasance. And adding insult to injury, Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo executive who ran the phony accounts unit she resigned from the firm in July, received a $124.6 million golden parachute. At the time, Stumpf referred to Tolstedt as "a standard-bearer of our culture" and "a champion for our customers." Champion sandbagger is more like it.
Moreover, those boastful CFPB officials apparently looked the other way. "Regulators never determined the extent of Tolstedt's knowledge about the abuse, and she was never named directly in the lawsuits brought over it," reports the New York Daily News. "But she took over the division in 2008, meaning she oversaw it for the entirety of the racket."
Even worse, this racket was exposed three years ago by Los Angeles Times reporter E. Scott Reckard, who chronicled the frenzied level of company-pressured "cross-selling" and the concomitant threats of termination that battered employee morale to the point where it led to ethical breaches. "To meet quotas, employees have opened unneeded accounts for customers, ordered credit cards without customers' permission and forged client signatures on paperwork," he revealed.
Three years later, Americans are supposed to believe this scam was the sole handiwork of middle management and staffers, "some of whom were being paid as little as $10 an hour," as the Chicago Sun Times put it.
Hopefully it won't fly. Tomorrow, Stumpf is scheduled to appear at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that will focus on Wells Fargo's sales practices. While he's there, maybe he'll be asked to explain how his insistence there was no incentive to perpetrate this fraud squares with a series of videos — many of which were posted in 2011 — blasting those sales incentives.
Even more important — maybe — the Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to Wells Fargo. Maybe because the DOJ has yet to characterize its involvement as a criminal investigation, without which any subsequent penalties will amount to the aforementioned "classic Wall Street" outcome. And maybe because the DOJ's track record is utterly dismal in that regard. As Fortune revealed in 2013, despite a total of $62.2 billion in fines paid by the nation's six largest banks over three years, and another $24.7 billion needed to settle pending lawsuits, not a single bank has had to admit any wrongdoing, and not one dollar of these billions in fines has been paid by any bank executive. It was shareholders who took all the hits.
Why? The title of a report prepared by the Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee and issued on July 11 says it all. "Too Big to Jail" reveals the depredation of British banking giant HSBC, which laundered nearly $900 million for drug traffickers and processed transactions for Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Myanmar/Burma, despite them being subject to U.S. sanctions. HSBC paid a $2 billion fine — and the DOJ granted the bank a "deferred prosecution" arrangement that amounts to a delay, or no prosecution whatsoever, because it promised to change its behavior.
That would be the same HSBC whose clients donated $81 million to the liar-Clinton Foundation. The same HSBC that in 2013 appointed as a Director of HSBC Holdings ... current FBI Director James Comey.
"Back in 2008, the smart people said we had to bail out the banks — because if we didn't, we'd get an economic catastrophe," writes New York Post columnist Nicole Gelinas. "Maybe. We know what we did get: generations of voters, liberal and conservative, who are disillusioned with capitalism. They can see that the chief of Wells Fargo gets $19.3 million annually to preside over systemic fraud, while they get blots on their credit reports."
We also know what we didn't get: Not a single resignation required in exchange for the $700 billion taxpayer-funded TARP bailout. Thus, it's not just the banks the ruling class considers too big to fail. The bankers themselves who ran the system into the ground also remain conspicuously immune from anything resembling genuine accountability.
In an appearance on CNBC's "Mad Money," Stumpf resisted the suggestion he should resign, telling host Jim Cramer the best thing he could do now is provide leadership for his company.
Really? Stumpf became chairman of Wells Fargo in 2010. Under his "leadership" between then and now, the bank has paid out billions of dollars in fines and lawsuit settlements related to a host of infractions that include fraud, reckless underwriting, improper certification of home loans, and illegal student loan servicing practices.
This nation remains divided over a host of issues. But one suspects an overwhelming majority of Americans on both sides of the political divide are thoroughly disgusted with the reality that there appears to be one set of laws for the ruling class elitists and another set for the rest of us "deplorables." Few things would restore a sense of justice more effectively than tossing the odious concepts of too big to fail and too big to jail on the ash heap of history.
The alternative? Abiding criminal activity mitigated solely by fines. Fines large financial institutions see as little more than the cost of doing business. ~The Patriot Post
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OPINION IN BRIEF
Burt Prelutsky: "Competition is natural to human beings. You see it in ballparks, on school playgrounds, at the Olympics and in the workplace. Humans compete for money, prestige, position, mates, even for prom dates. But Karl Marx, a pinhead who rarely bathed, decided that on his mere say-so, he could reverse thousands of years of human nature. And just in case he couldn’t, he also came up with communism, an inevitable adjunct that supplies a few individuals with the dictatorial power to enforce socialism on the masses. You may have noticed that whenever the eventual failure of socialism is pointed out, be it in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela or even in its less despotic forms, as in Greece, Puerto Rico and Italy, its moronic adherents — Bernie Sanders, for example — insist that socialism itself is perfect, but that it hasn’t yet been done properly. All that’s required to make it work the way it’s supposed to is to have the right person at the helm, someone like, well, themselves. The problem is that along with competing for money, awards and those all-important prom dates, there is another, less benign competition that is constantly taking place. That’s the one involving the despotically inclined who seek to be the bully who gets to boss the rest of us around. Some of those over-achievers have included Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez, Che Guevara, Kim Jong-un and the Ayatollah Khamenei." ~The Patriot Post.
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Justice Department: Requiring Accused
Criminals to Post Bail is Discrimination
by J. Christian Adams
{pjmedia.com} ~ The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division has filed a brief in a federal court arguing that requiring bail, the money accused criminals must post to be released from jail, is discriminatory... To support their legal position, the Justice Department cites studies published by the George Soros funded Open Society Institute. The case is before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involves a man arrested in Calhoun County, Georgia, for public intoxication. Bail was set at $160 and the defendant challenged the bail as unconstitutional. Bail is a condition of release to ensure that accused criminals return for trial. It discourages their flight and helps ensure that the justice system works efficiently and on time. Once the accused criminal appears for trial, the bail is refunded... https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2016/09/16/justice-department-requiring-accused-criminals-to-post-bail-is-discrimination/
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DHS admits refugee fraud ‘easy to commit’
by Stephen Dinan
{washingtontimes.com} ~ Refugee fraud is “easy to commit” and much tougher to detect, Homeland Security officials acknowledged in an internal memo made public by members of Congress... Thursday that challenges the department’s own assurances as it seeks to increase the number of refugees from dangerous countries. The U.S. has relaxed requirements for refugees to prove they are who they say they are, and at times may rely solely on testimony. That makes it easier for bogus applicants to conspire to get approved, according to the department memo, which was obtained by the House Judiciary and Oversight committees. “Refugee fraud is easy to commit, yet not easy to investigate,” the undated memo says...
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Limbaugh: nObama Administration The
Catalyst In Creating Nation’s Riot Reflex
by Jack Davis
{westernjournalism.com} ~ President Barack nObama has been one of the catalysts in the nation’s slide from mere racial divisions to reflexive, pointless, unchecked rioting, talk show host Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday... As he commented upon the devastating violence in Charlotte, N.C. after the shooting of a black man by a black police officer, Limbaugh noted that in nObama’s second term, and largely as a result of his actions, “rioting is almost expected now when there is a cop shooting.” During the course of his show, Limbaugh took listeners back to the dawn of the new racial dialogue that began when nObama took office... http://www.westernjournalism.com/limbaugh-obama-administration-catalyst-creating-nations-riot-reflex/
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Proof of liar-Hillary’s Cover-Up
Discovered by Citizen-Journalist!
by Jay Guy
{ipatriot.com} ~ In a day and age when government and media are larger than ever, an America-loving citizen has discovered what the Department of Justice and mainstream media have been unable (or unwillingly) to un-earth... Proof that liar-Hillary Clinton conspired to cover up her “un-wise” use of a private server and email scandal. Through the power of social media, a Twitter user @GOPPollAnalyst has pieced together compelling evidence that has reached the House Oversight Committee who have begun a new investigation. Paul Combetta, the IT specialist hired by liar-Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State, allegedly solicited advice on how to remove liar-Hillary’s name from classified emails. He made his requests from the public at large through the popular message board Reddit under the screen name “stonetear” throughout the summer and fall of 2014 and left more than a few definitive breadcrumbs. In his requests for help from the public at large, Combetta asked for technical advice on how to save or delete old emails as well as how to remove email addresses of an “Unamed VIP Client” from email servers and archives... http://ipatriot.com/proof-hillarys-cover-discovered-citizen-journalist/
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IRS to target 20 million Americans
who didn't buy nObamacare
by WND.com
{wnd.com} ~ Are you one of 20 million uninsured Americans who hasn’t signed up for nObamacare? Then you might be getting a note from the IRS this year “suggesting” you enroll... “Getting a letter from the IRS can be a threatening and nerve-racking experience; it seldom is seen as a suggestion and more of a threat,” Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner wrote in a Forbes column Wednesday. The IRS is reportedly “reaching out” to Americans who claimed an exemption or chose to pay the tax penalty for not purchasing mandatory health insurance. The ploy is intended to “attract” nObamacare enrollees... http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/irs-to-target-20-million-americans-who-didnt-buy-obamacare/
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liar-Hillary tries to
evade Benghazi lawsuit liability
by Bob Unruh
{wnd.com} ~ Responding to a federal court’s ruling that she defaulted in a wrongful-death claim against her by missing a filing deadline, liar-Hillary Clinton is claiming she didn’t know she had been served with a lawsuit until it was too late... The complaint was brought by the parents of two of the Americans killed by Islamic terrorists in Benghazi. WND reported earlier this month that the federal court declared liar-Clinton in default. The ruling, however, did not immediately establish liability, and she has responded to the court that there are several reasons she should be given a pass for missing the deadline...Hog waste http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/hillary-tries-to-evade-benghazi-lawsuit-liability/
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The New York Bomber Was Not a Lone Wolf
by Matthew Levitt
{foreignpolicy.com} ~ It was no surprise that in the first hours after the New York and New Jersey bombing attacks, the culprit was widely suggested to be a “lone wolf.” The term, used to describe an individual inspired by others but acting on his or her own... has become the counterterrorism metaphor-of-choice in the age of the Islamic State. It’s time, however, to put the lone-wolf metaphor, and its associated counterterrorism analysis, out to pasture. According to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, we now live in a world where terrorism is “carried out by those who live among us in the homeland and self-radicalize, inspired by terrorist propaganda on the internet.” But if that diagnosis isn’t wrong, it is incomplete. The New York bomber may have been “self-radicalized,” but it’s very unlikely he was merely “inspired” by terrorist groups...
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The Perils of a Post-ISIS Iraq
by Joost Hiltermann
{foreignpolicy.com} ~ The Islamic State fighters who occupied Sheikh Burhan Mizher al-Assi’s village in northern Iraq did not content themselves with simply blowing up his home... They also destroyed the tombstones erected above his parents’ buried remains in the local cemetery. Assi, a respected Arab member of the elected Kirkuk Provincial Council, is now an internally displaced person (IDP) in Kirkuk after the Islamic State overran a good part of the governorate in June 2014. To add insult to injury, the man who led the destruction of the sheikh’s property was a member of his own tribe, the Obeid. Such traumas have been all too common during the war against the Islamic State. They also highlight a discomfiting fact: In Iraq, the Islamic State is mainly a local problem. The extremist group’s Iraqi contingent has very few foreign fighters and instead reflects the radical turn taken by some in the Sunni Arab community against the existing political order... http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/22/the-perils-of-a-post-isis-iraq/
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Muslim Brotherhood's ties
to the nObama Administration
by SLATER BAKHTAVAR
by SLATER BAKHTAVAR
"Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying
in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration."
{familysecuritymatters.org} ~ The above is the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood, and organization founded in Egypt in 1928 for the express purpose of rebuilding human civilization in a form consistent with the customs of Shariah (Islamic) law and instituting a global Muslim paradise... The group's own original bylaws leave little for interpretation, declaring: "The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state." As can be expected, then, the Brotherhood has been an enemy of the free world since its inception, engaging in such malignant acts as aligning itself with the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany during World War II, openly committing terrorist acts on its own, and more recently, supporting other terrorist organizations such as Hamas. By any reasonable measure, the Muslim Brotherhood should be an unambiguous enemy of any American, regardless of political stripe. That is why it's profoundly disturbing to consider that the group has steadily risen in influence within the United States, most particularly within the Democratic party. We see this broadly in the findings of a 2014 analysis that shows Islamist campaign donations overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates over Republicans by a ratio of 12 to 1 since 9/11, but a specific and disturbing example can be found in the person of Huma Abedin, Vice Chairwoman of liar-Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and reportedly longtime personal friend of Mrs. liar-Clinton. Through her family, Abedin has a number of troubling ties to extremist Islam in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Her father is known to have founded the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic publication that has been called a "sharia newspaper" by some. Her mother currently runs it, and Huma herself has worked as an editor on it...
{familysecuritymatters.org} ~ The above is the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood, and organization founded in Egypt in 1928 for the express purpose of rebuilding human civilization in a form consistent with the customs of Shariah (Islamic) law and instituting a global Muslim paradise... The group's own original bylaws leave little for interpretation, declaring: "The Islamic nation must be fully prepared to fight the tyrants and the enemies of Allah as a prelude to establishing an Islamic state." As can be expected, then, the Brotherhood has been an enemy of the free world since its inception, engaging in such malignant acts as aligning itself with the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany during World War II, openly committing terrorist acts on its own, and more recently, supporting other terrorist organizations such as Hamas. By any reasonable measure, the Muslim Brotherhood should be an unambiguous enemy of any American, regardless of political stripe. That is why it's profoundly disturbing to consider that the group has steadily risen in influence within the United States, most particularly within the Democratic party. We see this broadly in the findings of a 2014 analysis that shows Islamist campaign donations overwhelmingly favor Democratic candidates over Republicans by a ratio of 12 to 1 since 9/11, but a specific and disturbing example can be found in the person of Huma Abedin, Vice Chairwoman of liar-Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and reportedly longtime personal friend of Mrs. liar-Clinton. Through her family, Abedin has a number of troubling ties to extremist Islam in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Her father is known to have founded the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic publication that has been called a "sharia newspaper" by some. Her mother currently runs it, and Huma herself has worked as an editor on it...
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State Department: Um,
ISIS Agents Are Posing As Refugees
by COUNTER JIHAD
by COUNTER JIHAD
.{familysecuritymatters.org} ~ US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby has finally confessed to a truth long denied by his leadership: the Islamic State (ISIS) is using refugee flows to infiltrate the West... "I wouldn't debate the fact that there's the potential for ISIS terrorists to try to insert themselves, and we see that in some of the refugee camps in Jordan and in Turkey, where they try to insert themselves into the population," Kirby said. As usual for a member of the nObama administration, Kirby did not note that this admission represents a major departure from the talking points long defended by his leadership and its allies in the press. Last year, the argument was that terrorists among refugees were a statistical nullity. Some went so far as to claim that "not one" terrorist had appeared among refugees resettled since 9/11, a claim that the Washington Post‘s fact checkers gave only two Pinocchios - not because they couldn't find numerous terrorists among refugee populations, but rather because they could cite "technicalities" in determining who qualified as a terrorist... http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/state-department-um-isis-agents-are-posing-as-refugees?f=must_reads
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Religion contributes more to the economy
than many giant corporations
by Julie Zauzmer
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Religion is big business. Just how big? A new study, published by a father-daughter researcher team, says religion is bigger than Facebook, Google and Apple - combined.
The article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion said that the annual revenues of faith-based enterprises - not just churches but hospitals, schools, charities and even gospel musicians and halal food makers - is more than $378 billion a year. And that's not counting the annual shopping bonanza motivated by Christmas.
Georgetown University's Brian Grim and the Newseum's Melissa Grim - in a study sponsored by an organization called Faith Counts, which promotes the value of religion - produced a 31-page breakdown of all the ways religion contributes to the U.S. economy.
The largest chunk of that $378 billion tally comes from faith-based health-care systems. Religious groups run many of the hospitals in the United States; Catholic health systems alone reportedly account for 1 in 6 hospital beds in the country.
Then there are churches and congregations themselves. Based on prior censuses of U.S. bodies of worship, the Grims looked at 344,894 congregations, from 236 different religious denominations (217 of them Christian, and others ranging from Shinto to Tao to Zoroastrian). Collectively, those congregations count about half the American population as members. The average annual income for a congregation, the study said, is $242,910.
Most of that income comes from members' donations and dues, meaning Americans give $74.5 billion to their congregations per year, the study said.
Religious charities also contribute to the economy. By far the largest faith-based charity, according to the study, is Lutheran Services of America, with an annual operating revenue of about $21 billion. The study counted 17 more faith-based charities, all among Forbes's 50 biggest charities in America, with revenues ranging from $300 million (Cross International) to $6.6 billion (YMCA USA).
Almost all the charities are Christian, except for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with an annual operating revenue of $400 million.
Religious revenues also include faith-based colleges and universities, where 2 million students pay more than $46.7 billion in tuition annually, the study said. The tally includes tuition revenues for religious elementary through high schools as well, plus the Christian book industry, sales of Christian music, the Christian cable networks EWTN and CBN and the $1.9 billion halal food industry that caters to faithful Muslim consumers. The study counted $12.5 billion in annual sales of traditional kosher foods, but not the $300 billion in food sold that has a kosher certification but, like everything from Oreos to Coca-Cola, is generally purchased by non-Jewish consumers.
The study suggested all sorts of other ways one could count the contribution of religion to the U.S. economy - the revenues of faith-linked businesses such as Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, the box office profits of religious blockbuster movies such as "Heaven Is for Real," even the household income of millions of Americans who run their financial lives guided by their faiths.
But sticking just to the direct profits of faith, religion comes out as highly lucrative - a larger chunk of the country's $16 trillion GDP, the Grims pointed out, than many giant corporations.
The article in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion said that the annual revenues of faith-based enterprises - not just churches but hospitals, schools, charities and even gospel musicians and halal food makers - is more than $378 billion a year. And that's not counting the annual shopping bonanza motivated by Christmas.
Georgetown University's Brian Grim and the Newseum's Melissa Grim - in a study sponsored by an organization called Faith Counts, which promotes the value of religion - produced a 31-page breakdown of all the ways religion contributes to the U.S. economy.
The largest chunk of that $378 billion tally comes from faith-based health-care systems. Religious groups run many of the hospitals in the United States; Catholic health systems alone reportedly account for 1 in 6 hospital beds in the country.
Then there are churches and congregations themselves. Based on prior censuses of U.S. bodies of worship, the Grims looked at 344,894 congregations, from 236 different religious denominations (217 of them Christian, and others ranging from Shinto to Tao to Zoroastrian). Collectively, those congregations count about half the American population as members. The average annual income for a congregation, the study said, is $242,910.
Most of that income comes from members' donations and dues, meaning Americans give $74.5 billion to their congregations per year, the study said.
Religious charities also contribute to the economy. By far the largest faith-based charity, according to the study, is Lutheran Services of America, with an annual operating revenue of about $21 billion. The study counted 17 more faith-based charities, all among Forbes's 50 biggest charities in America, with revenues ranging from $300 million (Cross International) to $6.6 billion (YMCA USA).
Almost all the charities are Christian, except for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, with an annual operating revenue of $400 million.
Religious revenues also include faith-based colleges and universities, where 2 million students pay more than $46.7 billion in tuition annually, the study said. The tally includes tuition revenues for religious elementary through high schools as well, plus the Christian book industry, sales of Christian music, the Christian cable networks EWTN and CBN and the $1.9 billion halal food industry that caters to faithful Muslim consumers. The study counted $12.5 billion in annual sales of traditional kosher foods, but not the $300 billion in food sold that has a kosher certification but, like everything from Oreos to Coca-Cola, is generally purchased by non-Jewish consumers.
The study suggested all sorts of other ways one could count the contribution of religion to the U.S. economy - the revenues of faith-linked businesses such as Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A, the box office profits of religious blockbuster movies such as "Heaven Is for Real," even the household income of millions of Americans who run their financial lives guided by their faiths.
But sticking just to the direct profits of faith, religion comes out as highly lucrative - a larger chunk of the country's $16 trillion GDP, the Grims pointed out, than many giant corporations.
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