Know the Bosses

Lawmaker To SEC Lawyer: "We Thought The Enemy Was Mr. Madoff. I Think It's You"

Madoff whistleblower begs Russian(-Israeli/Ukrainian?) organized crime not to come after him:

ACKERMAN: I'm talking about, when you talk about the Russian mob and organized crime, these are people who invested through European investors or European feeder funds?

MARKOPOLOS: Correct. And I didn't fear of them, and I didn't think they were going to come after me, I want to make this perfectly clear to all those Russian mobsters and Latin American drug cartels out there...

ACKERMAN: You're talking directly to them.

MARKOPOLOS: I was acting on your behalf trying to stop him from zeroing out your accounts. I'm the good guy here. Just like to make that clear

Just how much power does organized crime have over every government in the world?

Markopolos about the SEC:"If you flew the entire SEC staff to Boston, and sat them in Fenway Park, they wouldn't be able to find first base."

Was Bernie Madoff a Mafia Front?

"The Russian Mafiya is into everything from Wall Street to African diamonds... It has compromised governments and threatens the integrity of world banking."

Italian Mafia is Europe's Number One Business

Drug trafficking brings in about 59 billion euros.

Trafficking in illegal waste and similar activities brings in 16 billion euros.

5.8 billion euros were earned from selling arms.

Extortion brings in 92 billion euros

The Bin Laden Family: Organized Criminals?

Many organized criminals have more power than governments. Want some research projects? Google Joaquin Guzman, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, Dawood Ibrahim, Matteo Messina Denaro, Felicien Kabuga....

What really happenned when Merrill was swallowed by BofA?

"As an alleged post 9/11 defense, the War on Terrorism is a gigantic fraud." (Terry Arnold, Deputy Director, Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency Planning)

...A Hoax

UK Judges say the US had forced the UK to suppress information about terror suspects.

Someone told them to take it back

Someone balked at Zinni after he was asked to be the ambassoador to Iraq

Rove: I am ignoring Congress and sticking with my friends in the Justice Department (who have been working not to get Rove, but to get his accusers)

Ex-FBI translator Sibel Edmonds continues to no avail to get attention on organized crime's hold on our politicians.

40% of Japanese investors think there is a risk of a US default

"Cancer bombs"?

Obama says nuclear weapons are not cool

Acid accidentally dumped in City's Water Supply but that's better than what they purposely put there.

Reactions:
In response to yesterday's entry:
"Is it likely that the old-guard liberal establishment will begin to misread and mistrust President Obama as it becomes apparent that he is not following scrupulously in their footsteps?

If his policies continue to approximate a more networked, distributed and collaborative model borrowed from extremely efficient and successfully evolving technology-based projects (such as Wiki*, "open source" platforms, etc.) will it be up to those whom experience has taught the superiority of those models to defend the President from mere top-down Liberal criticism?

Will the world be safer when everyone builds it?

Can President Obama continue in this direction without the vociferous support of partisans of these methods?

Is this, even, what he's attempting? Or has he made it clear in message after message that we who imagine a shared future must begin to take part in creating it?

Hypothetical Question: It's known that the NSA had intelligence, that, if shared with other agencies, might have warned or even averted the 911 attacks; What would happen if we shared intelligence about terrorist objectives, movements and communications - all of it that wouldn't compromise its source and scoured of security sensitive details - with all ally, or even demonstrably neutral governments, much less among our own agencies?

This is only a thought experiment, not a suggestion - could imagining exactly how and why such a plan might succeed of fail in the real world shed any light on ways in which sharing of information might be of advantage to ourselves and the factions of peace - even those who would see the iron domination of the US lessened in the world?

As the structures protected and in some sense founded on bullying, might, superior technology, wealth and power, all of these, collapse, can we imagine a scenario in which we share our way to success?

Where wisdom, information and communication become the common coin, what happens to the doctrine of scarcity on which our old world, now dying, was founded?" (Mark Baldridge)

Your Job:
How is it that organized crime is the number one business in so many parts of the world but yet it's so rarely reported on in our media or talked about by our politicians?

Today, spend a little bit of time investigating organized crime and the overlap between legitimate big businesses and illegal ones -- arms and drug trafficking, money laundering, human trafficking, etc) How can a War on Terror with business ties to organized crime reduce global terrorism with business ties to organized crime? What incentive is there for any business to reduce that which it needs to make it profitable?

There's a reason there is no government oversight over anything (except our phone calls). When business runs government and the business is illegal, is there anything that the citizens of the world do? We can start by throwing out our old stereotypes and spend some time learning about the enormous power over us that illegal business has.

Happy Wednesday!