Puppet Masters
The Teamsters Union and New York Transit Workers Union have thrown their support behind the Wall Street protests.
Alexander Higgins - reporting live from the protests - notes that United Airlines pilots marched in the protest wearing their full pilot uniforms.
So serious are the allegations against Dominique Baudis, 56, the former mayor of Toulouse, that President Jacques Chirac may be forced to sack him from his post as director of the watchdog Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovision.
Baudis, who was Toulouse's mayor for 18 years until 2001, has been accused by Patrice Alègre, a convicted serial killer, and two former prostitutes of leading a double life as a sadomasochist nicknamed Nenette.
Alègre alleges that Baudi and another man ordered him to retrieve videotapes of orgies that were secretly filmed at a chateau by Claude Martinez, a transvestite. Martinez is said to have planned to use the tapes for blackmail.
Even by French standards, the scandal is a lurid affair and it has reverberated far beyond Toulouse, the capital of cassoulet, aeronautics and French rugby. The whole country has been transfixed by every twist and turn.
Violating the law would result in a $10,000 fine for an organization, and a $1,000 fine and one-year imprisonment for an individual.
The House Oversight, Reform and Ethics Committee adopted the bill, HB 4052, by a 4 to 2 vote along party lines last week. It was first introduced by Republican state Rep. Al Pscholka in January, shortly after he was sworn in to his first term in service to the 79th House District.
The Michigan Education Association, a union representing the state's teachers, said the bill was "political payback" after a conservative activist lost a legal battle over the use [of] a school district's email service for union lobbying efforts. The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled the emails were not subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
"This is more than just another blatant attack on public workers and their unions," the Michigan Education Association said in a statement. "This is an unconstitutional attack on every citizen's right to freedom of speech and freedom of association."
The Livingston Daily noted that the bill cannot be enforced without modifying the state's Freedom of Information Act, which lawmakers so far have not considered doing. Rep. Pscholka said the law would depend on co-workers who report violations by their colleagues.
"At the top of our list of priorities is protecting the right to vote," he said. "We have fought for that for decades in this country and we must continue. There is a concerted, coordinated effort in states as close as Indiana and Wisconsin to deny millions of Americans the right to vote. It is spearheaded by the Koch brothers, and their big money interest."
"Who do they want to keep out of the voting booth? Young people, old people, poor people, people with disabilities, people who live in rural areas - millions of Americans. Judson Phillips, leader of the tea party, thinks voting should be limited to, quote, those who own property, close quote. Isn't that were we started? And to suggest that in a time of record foreclosures."
"If we don't fight to defend the ballot, all of our rights are in jeopardy."
Watch video, courtesy of the ACLU of Illinois, below:

A new construction site in the East Jerusalem settlement site of Gilo, where 1,100 new homes are to be built.
The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, joined a wave of condemnation of Israel's approval of the construction of 1,100 homes in an East Jerusalem settlement on Tuesday, which puts at risk international efforts to persuade Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to return to talks.
The move was "counter-productive to our efforts to resume direct negotiations between the parties", Clinton said. "As you know, we have long urged both sides to avoid any kind of action which could undermine trust, including, and perhaps most particularly, in Jerusalem, any action that could be viewed as provocative by either side."
Either the YesMen have infiltrated Italy's biggest, and most undercapitalied, bank, or the stress of constant, repeated lying and prevarication has finally gotten to the very people who know their livelihoods hang by a thread, and the second the great ponzi is unwound their jobs, careers, and entire way of life will be gone.
Such as the head of UniCredit global securities Attila Szalay-Berzeviczy, and former Chairman of the Hungarian stock exchange, who has written an unbelievable oped in the Hungarian portal Index.hu which, frankly, make Alessio "BBC Trader" Rastani's provocative speech seem like a bedtime story. Only this time one can't scapegoat Szalay-Berzeviczy "naivete" on inexperience or the desire to gain public prominence. If someone knows the truth, it is the guy at the top of UniCredit, which we expect to promptly trade limit down once we hit print.
Among the stunning allegations (stunning in that an actual banker dares to tell the truth) are the following: "the euro is "practically dead" and Europe faces a financial earthquake from a Greek default"... "The euro is beyond rescue"... "The only remaining question is how many days the hopeless rearguard action of European governments and the European Central Bank can keep up Greece's spirits."...."A Greek default will trigger an immediate "magnitude 10" earthquake across Europe."..."Holders of Greek government bonds will have to write off their entire investment, the southern European nation will stop paying salaries and pensions and automated teller machines in the country will empty "within minutes." In other words: welcome to the Apocalypse...

Representatives are asking the FTC to look into the installation of “supercookies” from certain websites onto a user’s computer.
The two lawmakers asked FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz what the agency plans to do about the companies' use of "supercookies"
The supercookies are placed on a user's computer when they visit websites that want to collect personal data. The lawmakers said these super cookies are able to recreate a user's profile after less powerful cookies are deleted.
"We believe this new business practice raises serious privacy concerns and is unacceptable," they wrote in the letter.
It's not enough for the U.S. military to be able to monitor you from afar. The U.S. Army wants its drones to know you through and through, reports Danger Room, and it is imbuing them with the ability to recognize you in a crowd and even to know what you are thinking and feeling. Like a best friend that at any moment might vaporize you with a hellfire missile.
Of a handful of contracts just handed out by the Army, two are notable for their unique ISR capabilities. One would arm drones with facial recognition software that can remember faces so targets can't disappear into crowds. The other sounds far more unsettling: a human behavior engine capable of stacking informant info against intelligence data against other evidence to predict a person's intent. That's right: the act of determining whether you are friend or foe could be turned over to the machines.
That's a bit disquieting whether you are an insurgent warfighter or not. But back to the overarching topic at hand: The U.S. military is pulling in more ISR data than it knows what to do with these days, a lot of it useless noise that's inconsequential to ongoing operations. And, as DR notes, the strategy in Afghanistan has changed from one of winning hearts and minds through nation building projects to targeting specific bad guys.
The bleak diagnosis for the euro appeared in the overseas edition of the People's Daily, the main newspaper of China's ruling Communist Party, in a commentary by a former central bank official and an economist for the state-owned China Development Bank.
"The euro debt crisis has now been going for nearly two years since the end of 2009, and the sovereign debt crisis has spread like the Black Death of the fourteenth century across the euro zone countries," said the commentary, referring to the rodent-borne pandemic that devastated Europe.
Although the commentary in the People's Daily does not reflect a definitive view from China's most senior leaders, it and other comments in the official press suggest the euro zone's successive crises have caused anxiety and debate in Beijing about the impact on China.
This little-known government bank, the Federal Financing Bank [FFB], had a zero balance in 2008 for green energy projects, but now, with little Congressional oversight, it is giving out billions of dollars in loans to White House pet projects often at dirt-cheap interest rates below 1%.
In July alone, the government bank, which had $61 billion in assets, lent nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in taxpayer funds with no Congressional checks and balances.
Plus the bank is funding the insolvent U.S. Post Office; the White House's expensive green car projects at Ford Motor, Nissan and Tesla Motors; a $485 million loan to an expensive solar project that's lost $160 million over the last three years that's backed by Google, BP and Chevron; plus the FFB is funding the teetering HOPE housing bailout program, which gives delinquent mortgage borrowers breaks on their loans.
And according to KPMG's audit report of the bank, the FFB is losing billions of dollars in taxpayer money because it is forgoing collecting interest costs on already inexpensive loans that are financing projects at agencies like the Agriculture Dept.










