Society's ChildS


Attention

Party like it's 2008: 'Liar loans' making a come-back

snake oil con men
© Hugh
Earlier this year, as the US auto sales miracle unfolded on the back of record loan terms and record high average monthly payments, we continually argued that underwriting standards were likely to deteriorate going forward as competition for the finite pool of creditworthy borrowers heats up.

Helping to drive (no pun intended) the shift towards looser lending standards is the proliferation of the originate-to-sell model - the same originate-to-sell model that helped steer the US housing market right off a cliff in 2007/2008. The concept is simple: if you're making loans with the intention of carrying them on your books, you're likely to care far more about the creditworthiness of the borrower than you are if you're simply going to ship the loans off to Wall Street to be run through the securitization machine and then sold off to investors via MBS [mortgage-backed securities]. That same dynamic is now at play in the market for car loans. Auto-backed ABS issuance should come in at around $125 billion this year - that's up 25% from 2014 and accounts for more than half of total consumer loan-backed supply.

As was the case during the lead up to the housing market collapse, this dynamic embeds an enormous amount of hidden risk in the paper backed by the shoddy loans. This paper is very often highly rated because despite what happened in 2008, the idea still exists that although one risky loan may be properly viewed as a speculative investment, a whole bunch of pooled risky loans are somehow safe as can be.

Comment: Looking back:


Info

Double rainbow over WTC on eve of 9/11 anniversary amazes social media

NY double rainbow
© Gene Blevins / Reuters
An amazing double rainbow has appeared at the place where the World Trade Center used to stand, one day before the anniversary of 9/11, the tragedy that took thousands of lives 14 years ago.

The rainbow appeared over the city at about 8am between rain showers.


Comment: Mother Nature giving us hope?


Pirates

French court finds Monsanto guilty of poisoning farmer with flagship product Roundup

monsanto poison farmer
© Reuters A banner is pictured during a protest against Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, in Rio de Janeiro May 23, 2015. Similar demonstrations took part around the world in May to raise awareness to what the activists claim are dangers surrounding Monsanto's glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup. The poster reads, "Monsanto bio terrorist."
Amid global protests over toxic chemicals, French court rules against US firm.

Similar demonstrations took part around the world in May to raise awareness to what the activists claim are dangers surrounding Monsanto's glyphosate-containing herbicide Roundup. The poster reads, "Monsanto bio terrorist." Reuters

Monsanto, the world's largest seed company, was found guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer by a French court this week. The decision Thursday by an appeal court in Lyon in southeast France upheld a 2012 ruling in which the farmer claimed he suffered neurological problems after working with the U.S. company's Lasso weedkiller, Reuters reported.

The court found Monsanto was "responsible" for the poisoning and ordered the company to "fully compensate" grain grower Paul Francois, who said he suffered memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto's Lasso in 2004. The farmer said he was happy with the ruling. "David can win against Goliath," he said. "And a giant like Monsanto is not above the law."

Comment: It will take a lot more than the ruling of one French court to rein in this psychopathic company. They have friends (and officers and shareholders) in high places.


Heart - Black

Dehumanizing! Refugees at Roszke camp in Hungary fed 'like animals in pen'

Image
© Peter Kohalmi / AFPA migrant woman holds a child and food in a refugee camp near Roszke at the Hungarian-Serbian border on September 11, 2015.
Dramatic footage has emerged showing people at Hungary's main refugee camp on the border with Serbia being fed like wild animals. Crowds of refugees, children and women among them, shout to get the officers' attention, struggling to catch the bread thrown to them through the air.

Some 150 people can be seen at Roszke camp in a fenced-in enclosure inside a big hall as Hungarian police, equipped with helmets and hygiene masks, throw bags of sandwiches at them.

The video was shot secretly by an Austrian volunteer who visited the flashpoint camp earlier this week. The footage, which was uploaded on YouTube late Thursday, had over 25,000 views by Friday afternoon.

"It was like animals being fed in a pen, like Guantanamo in Europe," Alexander Spritzendorfer, whose wife, Michaela filmed the scenes, told AFP. The couple came to Roszke to bring food, clothes and medication to the refugees.

"It was inhumane and it really speaks for these people that they didn't fight over the food despite being clearly very hungry," Michaela Spritzendorfer-Ehrenhauser said.

"It was around 8 o'clock and they were giving dinner to people," she said. "There were maybe 100 people trying to catch these plastic bags with sausages... They were not able to organize a camp and treat them like human beings," Reuters quoted Spritzendorfer-Ehrenhauser as saying.


Comment: See also:


Eye 1

Prison-industrial complex threatens to sue states to get more slave labor

gulag, USA prison, prison industrial complex
In July 2010, a trio of violent inmates managed to escape from a privately owned and operated prison in Arizona, which led to a massive, two-week, multi-state manhunt.

At the time, reports The Huffington Post, state corrections officials demanded that the facility, which is operated by Management & Training Corp., make improvements to security. They stopped sending inmates to what they described as a "dysfunctional" 3,300-bed facility.

Less than a year later, the company threatened to sue the state, alleging contract violations. Specifically, the company said the state guaranteed the prison would remain at least 97 percent full, and officials argued the company lost $10 million from the reduced inmate population.

Comment: Also see: 'Give me liberty or give my death': The loss of freedom and institution of a corporate police state in the 14 years since 9/11


Telephone

21st Century Fox just bought National Geographic

Image
© JuliusKielaitis/Shutterstock
Since 1888, the National Geographic Society has stood for science, discovery and storytelling. Its yellow-bordered magazine has served as the ultimate stage for award-winning photography, depicting the wonders of the world, and the group has supported pursuits as diverse as the underwater explorations of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees in Tanzania.

Now, the nonprofit organization plans to continue that mission, backed by the Murdoch media empire.

Comment: 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America


Bomb

Florida man arrested for alleged 9/11 memorial bomb plot

Crime scene
© Nancy Wiechec / Reuters
The Justice Department has arrested Florida resident Joshua Ryne Goldberg for allegedly distributing documents on manufacturing explosives as part of a bomb plot for a 9/11 memorial event in Kansas City, Missouri.

US Attorney Lee Bentley announced the arrest on Thursday. Goldberg, 20, was charged with alleged "illegal distribution of information relating to explosives, destructive devices, and weapons of mass destruction." The distribution of such material is considered a federal crime.

According to the criminal complaint, FBI Special Agent William Berry was conducting an investigation into the attack on the May 2015 Mohammed Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas, when he tracked down a Twitter account called "Australi Witness," which was posting tweets calling for an attack on the exhibition.

The Twitter user posted maps of the center and called for people to attack "with your weapons, bombs, or knives." Berry also found a statement by Australi Witness that implied he was in Australia and working with contacts in the US to carry out attacks.

Comment: Smells like maybe another FBI setup: Former U.S. Intelligence officer: 'Every terrorist attack in the U.S. was a false-flag or egged on by the government'


Stormtrooper

How America's police state is rooted in four federal wars

police state
© www.conservativehq.com
Consider the impact on the civil liberties of the American people of four of the non-stop wars that the U.S. government has been waging for a very long time: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on immigrants, and the war on wealth. These four wars have converted what was once a free country into a police state, making the United States the most over-incarcerated nation in the world.

The war on drugs has subjected people to an untold number of searches of persons, homes, businesses, and especially automobiles. This war has served as a convenient excuse to made vast inroads on the protections against unreasonable searches provided by the Fourth Amendment. It would be impossible to calculate the number of people who have been stopped, patted down, and searched, especially without a judicially issued search warrant, in the name of the war on drugs during the past several decades.

The drug war has also brought us asset-forfeiture, a money-making operation for law enforcement that has encouraged the police and the DEA to make warrantless stops of people traveling on the highways, in the hopes of finding a large amount of cash to seize. Additionally, it has encouraged law-enforcement personnel to initiate searches of homes, businesses, and cars in the hopes that some drugs will be found, thereby enabling them to seize the property of the owner.

Comment: A sad State of affairs. We reap what we ignore.


Pistol

Crazy like a cop: Texas police officer fires gun after server tells him to stop groping her

Image
© El Paso Police HandoutMug of psychopathic cop Kenneth Lee SHEKA

A Texas police corporal was arrested on Thursday for allegedly shooting a wall inside a law enforcement convention when a female server rejected his sexual advances.

The incident unfolded at the annual Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas convention, or CLEAT, hosted this week at the El Paso Marriott.


Comment: This occurs at a friggin' cop convention no less! How symbolic.


The El Paso Police Department released a statement immediately following the incident.

"The off duty officer, identified as 28 year old Kenneth Lee SHEKA, was engaged in a conversation with a female server near the hospitality area. Their conversation became inappropriate when SHEKA began making comments of a sexual nature and ultimately touched the female inappropriately as she walked passed him," the statement read.

Comment: "Professional and courteous"?? A more appropriate response from Temple Police Department spokesperson Christopher M. Wilcox would have been:

"We expect our officers to not behave like a psychopath while on or off-duty."

But then he would have been lying.


Sheriff

Lawsuit filed against cop who texted pics of dead man's body after officer-involved shooting

New Mexico state police car
© New Mexico State Police / Facebook
The family of a man shot and killed by New Mexico police is suing the state's Department of Public Safety and one of its officers for taking cellphone pictures of Samuel Pauly, the deceased victim, and texting them to friends.

Officer Mario Vasquez, who was assigned to manage the crime scene but was not involved in the shooting, "took multiple pictures of Samuel Pauly's dead body on his personal cell phone," which he later texted to his friends, the complaint, filed in District Court, said.

The incident, which took place in October 2011, began when Pauly's brother, Daniel, was involved in a road-rage incident with two women in another car on an interstate highway outside of Santa Fe. One of the women called 911 and reported a "drunk driver" who was "swerving all crazy," turning his pickup truck's lights on and off and trying to run them off the road. Daniel claimed that the women were the ones driving dangerously, and that they had followed him off the exit to Glorieta, where he confronted them.

Comment: Another sad example of how the American "Justice" system seems to protect the psychopathic and ponerized police from repercussions and responsibility.