A colleague of mine has stumbled onto some rather intriguing research.
In short, it’s an account almost no one in the country has ever heard about. By one expert’s estimate, only 0.07% of Americans (one in 1,500) has one of these private accounts.
John McCain at one time even held over $1,000,000 inside his own account!
What’s so special about this account? Well, for one, it can let you retire 100% tax-free. You can pass it along to your heirs without paying a dime to the IRS. It also grows your money 3-4 times faster than standard CDs… and, to top it off, you can access your money ANYTIME!
But here’s perhaps the best part: This account is available to nearly anyone… regardless of how much money you have or even if you don’t have any political connections!
My colleague literally invested over $100,000 of his own money into this idea once he was convinced of how good it was.”
About three years ago. Washington Post‘s Reporter,Pulitzer Prize Winner, Dana Priest, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and William Arkin wrote that they found “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.” After nine years of “unprecedented spending,” the intelligence community has become a sector of government so massive that oversight is next to impossible and that it is of questionable benefit to the United States’ security.
That there is even a behemoth of an Intelligence Group is tucked away behind the Public eye.
This Intelligence community is managed by ,
,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counter-terrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the country.
— An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
— In the Washington area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work have been built or are under construction since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”
Worse is that it is not accountable to any one nobody knows how much Budget is allocated to it!
Interview with Dana Priest excerpts.
‘A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post Priest is the author, along with William Arkin, of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Here she takes FRONTLINE through the rapid growth of Top Secret America, which began with an impulse to secrecy and a blank check from Congress in the days after 9/11, and which now employs nearly a million people at 1,900 private companies and 1,300 federal organizations. “These are gigantic edifices that are going to stay,” she says. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on June 18, 2011.
I just think that we have accepted what it is the government says we need to do without questioning how much money it costs, without questioning whether it’s effective or not. And in part we’ve done that because we’ve accepted the secrecy that surrounds it all.
..
The reaction in Congress, which becomes so important in our story, is they really wrote a blank check. … The money flowed out. And there weren’t very many constraints on it at all. There definitely wasn’t any sort of oversight of what was going on with the money, because, again, people were worried. …
And so George Bush, for example, gave the CIA a billion dollars right off the bat, because the CIA was in the best position, not the military, to go after bin Laden and his followers in Afghanistan. And he gave them a billion dollars, and he also ordered the military to do whatever it took to support the CIA. …
They did the same thing with the NSA. Lots of money poured into the National Security Agency, which was the eavesdropper around the world. And they couldn’t grow fast enough. Not only were they asked to eavesdrop in many different places that they weren’t used to doing — not just capitals and not just leaders of countries, which is really what they were doing, mostly, prior to 9/11. They would want to know what a leader was saying or what an opposition group was saying. And they would report those conversations back.
He could be awarded special prize, probably a Congress Medal of Honor!
Story:
Paris may be known as the City of Light, but that title certainly doesn’t mean that visitors are light on spending as Vice President Joe Biden’s one day trip cost taxpayers more than half a million dollars.
When Mr Biden and his hefty entourage stayed in Paris for an evening in early February and it cost $585,000.50 for that single night.
The Vice President likely rented out more than 100 rooms in the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand, though they must not have gotten a group discount rate.
Because the hotel doesn’t offer a Vice Presidential suite, Mr Biden likely enjoyed a title bump as he probably stayed in the two-room Presidential Suite which goes for 2,975 euros per night.
The 1,851-square foot suite features an interconnecting entertainment area, marble bathrooms and ‘upscale’ linens.
The Vice President’s wife, Dr Jill Biden, was traveling with him and their first stop was in Germany, before heading to Paris and finishing the tour in London on February 5.
Expensive handshake: Biden was in Paris for one night and he met with Prime Minister Francois Hollande while there on February 4Le Grande Hotel,Paris.
.
Room in Le Grande Hotel,Pars.
The cost of foreign trips is always a lightning rod for conservatives who balk at the idea of paying so much for government officials to travel.
The National Rifle Association pre-empted Wednesday’s White House announcement on the results of Vice President Joe Biden‘s task force on gun violence prevention byreleasing a controversial ad that targets the president’s family. Amid a widespread backlash, White House press secretaryJay Carney offered a statement: “Most Americans agree that a president’s children should not be used as pawns in a political fight. But to go so far as to make the safety of the president’s children the subject of an attack ad is repugnant and cowardly.”
What got the NRA’s back up, in such controversial fashion? Well, the word on the street was that the announcement on what President Barack Obama would propose as sensible reforms to existing gun laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting would include a stronger background check system, a ban on high-capacity magazines and a renewed effort to pass an assault weapons ban. Naturally, the NRA, which lobbies on behalf of gun manufacturers, is not happy about any of this and released a video Tuesday criticizing Obama for being a “hypocrite” and an “elitist.”
“”Are the president’s kids more important than yours?” the ad asks. “Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school?”
The ad continues: “Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he is just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security.”
Gun Free Zones are supposed to protect our children, and some politicians wish to strip us of our right to keep and bear arms. Those same politicians and their families are currently under the protection of armed Secret Service agents. If Gun Free Zones are sufficient protection for our children, then Gun Free Zones should be good enough for politicians.
As of this writing, the petition needs exactly 2,222 signatures to reach the 25,000 threshold required for an official White House response. Just yesterday, the WH announced that the new threshold is 100,000 signatures, but existing petitions will be grandfathered in. I’d say we can manage 2,222 more signatures, can’t we?
If gun-free zones keep people safe, then I can’t think of a person whose safety is more important than the President of the United States. If having a gun in your home increases your risk of getting shot, how can we allow our president and his family to be surrounded by dozens of them? Think of the children.
Recent Connecticut/Sandy Hook and Aurora shootings notwithstanding the Gun Lobby is relentless in thwarting any move to amend or restrict Gun control Laws i n The US.
I posted a Blog on how dangerous the Gun Laws are.
If the Society has not evolved from the fear Psychosis of the Civil War, and has antediluvian Laws Governing Gun Control, one should be happy that there are no shoot outs on a Daily Basis.
The most powerful gun lobby in the United States stood firm on Monday against any additionalrestraints on firearms and ammunition sales – despite a national outcry in the wake of theSandy Hook school massacre.
Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice-president of the National Rifle Association, said on Sundaythat planned legislation to outlaw military-style assault weapons and large-capacity magazineswas “phony” and would not work.
He repeated the NRA’s call to place an armed guard in every school and argued thatprosecuting criminals and fixing the mental health system, rather than gun control, were thesolutions to America’s mass shooting epidemic.
On Dec 14, a disturbed local man, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, killed his mother in their Newtown,Connecticut, home before embarking on a horrific shooting spree at an elementary school.
He blasted his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot dead 20 6- and 7-year oldchildren and six adults with a military-style assault rifle before taking his own life with a handgunas police closed in.
The bloodshed, the latest in a string of mass shootings in the US, has reopened a nationaldebate on the country’s gun laws, which are far more lax than in most other developed nations.
US President Barack Obama said he would support a new bill to ban assault rifles, and putVice-President Joe Biden in charge of a panel looking at a wide range of other measures, fromschool security to mental health.
Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein has pledged to table a bill on Jan 3 that would ban at least100 military-style semi-automatic assault weapons, and would curb the transfer, importationand the possession of such arms.
“I think that is a phony piece of legislation, and I do not believe it will pass for this reason,”LaPierre told NBC’s Meet the Press. “It is all built on lies that have been found out.”(china Daily.com)
Not content with this Statistics is bandied about as to how Guns are not an important factor in Mass Shootings.
“While the mainstream media obsesses over the possibility of gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, a new study puts such incidents, and the idea of anti-Second Amendment legislation, into stark context.
Statistics on US Homicides.
Research published in USA Today stemming from FBI data, reveals that over a five year period ranging from 2006 to 2010, mass killings accounted for only a tiny fraction of homicides, less than 1% to be precise.
The research found that during that time, there were 156 incidents in which four or more people were killed – the classification of a mass killing.
1. Shooting sprees are not rare in the United States.
Mother Jones has tracked and mapped every shooting spree in the last three decades. “Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
2. 15 of the 25 worst mass shootings in the last 50 years took place in the United States.
Time has the full list here. In second place is Finland, with two entries.
3. Lots of guns don’t necessarily mean lots of shootings, as you can see in Israel and Switzerland.*
As David Lamp writes at Cato, “In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel ‘have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States.’”
*Correction: The info is out-of-date, if not completely wrong. Israel and Switzerland have tightened their gun laws substantially, and now pursue an entirely different approach than the United States. More details here. I apologize for the error.
4. Of the 11 deadliest shootings in the US, five have happened from 2007 onward.
That doesn’t include Friday’s shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. The AP put the earlyreported death toll at 27, which would make it the second-deadliest mass shooting in US history.
5. America is an unusually violent country. But we’re not as violent as we used to be.
Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier.
Deaths Due to Assault Graphics
Arguments ping ponging like this, as I said earlier in my post,one is surprised at why there are less killings in the US!
Statistics quoted at the top of the blog is like showing the Statistics of people not affected with Cancer and saying that the threat of Cancer is negligible and medication is unnecessary!
TONIGHT, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward.
It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family, and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.
Tonight, in this election, you, the American people, reminded us that while our road has been hard, while our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves up, we have fought our way back, and we know in our hearts that for the United States of America, the best is yet to come.
I want to thank every American who participated in this election. Whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time – by the way, we have to fix that. Whether you pounded the pavement or picked up the phone, whether you held an Obama sign or a Romney sign, you made your voice heard and you made a difference.
I just spoke with Governor Romney and I congratulated him and Paul Ryan on a hard-fought campaign. We may have battled fiercely, but it’s only because we love this country deeply and we care so strongly about its future. From George to Lenore to their son Mitt, the Romney family has chosen to give back to America through public service. And that is a legacy that we honor and applaud tonight. In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.
I want to thank my friend and partner of the last four years, America’s happy warrior, the best vice president anybody could ever hope for, Joe Biden.
And I wouldn’t be the man I am today without the woman who agreed to marry me 20 years ago. Let me say this publicly. Michelle, I have never loved you more. I have never been prouder to watch the rest of America fall in love with you too as our nation’s first lady.
Sasha and Malia – before our very eyes, you’re growing up to become two strong, smart, beautiful young women, just like your mom. And I am so proud of you guys. But I will say that for now, one dog’s probably enough.
To the best campaign team and volunteers in the history of politics – the best, the best ever – some of you were new this time around, and some of you have been at my side since the very beginning.
But all of you are family. No matter what you do or where you go from here, you will carry the memory of the history we made together. And you will have the lifelong appreciation of a grateful president. Thank you for believing all the way – to every hill, to every valley. You lifted me up the whole day, and I will always be grateful for everything that you’ve done and all the incredible work that you’ve put in.
I know that political campaigns can sometimes seem small, even silly. And that provides plenty of fodder for the cynics who tell us that politics is nothing more than a contest of egos or the domain of special interests. But if you ever get the chance to talk to folks who turned out at our rallies and crowded along a rope line in a high school gym or — or saw folks working late at a campaign office in some tiny county far away from home, you’ll discover something else.
You’ll hear the determination in the voice of a young field organizer who’s working his way through college and wants to make sure every child has that same opportunity. You’ll hear the pride in the voice of a volunteer who’s going door to door because her brother was finally hired when the local auto plant added another shift.
You’ll hear the deep patriotism in the voice of a military spouse who’s working the phones late at night to make sure that no one who fights for this country ever has to fight for a job or a roof over their head when they come home.
That’s why we do this. That’s what politics can be. That’s why elections matter. It’s not small, it’s big. It’s important. Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy. That won’t change after tonight. And it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty, and we can never forget that as we speak, people in distant nations are risking their lives right now just for a chance to argue about the issues that matter, the chance to cast their ballots like we did today.
But despite all our differences, most of us share certain hopes for America’s future.
We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers, a country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all of the good jobs and new businesses that follow.
We want our children to live in an America that isn’t burdened by debt, that isn’t weakened up by inequality, that isn’t threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.
We want to pass on a country that’s safe and respected and admired around the world, a nation that is defended by the strongest military on earth and the best troops this world has ever known but also a country that moves with confidence beyond this time of war to shape a peace that is built on the promise of freedom and dignity for every human being.
We believe in a generous America, in a compassionate America, in a tolerant America open to the dreams of an immigrant’s daughter who studies in our schools and pledges to our flag – to the young boy on the south side of Chicago who sees a life beyond the nearest street corner – to the furniture worker’s child in North Carolina who wants to become a doctor or a scientist, an engineer or an entrepreneur, a diplomat or even a president.
That’s the – that’s the future we hope for.
That’s the vision we share. That’s where we need to go — forward. That’s where we need to go.
Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path. By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock, resolve all our problems or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward.
But that common bond is where we must begin. Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over. And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you. I have learned from you. And you’ve made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead.
Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours.
And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together — reducing our deficit, reforming out tax code, fixing our immigration system, freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We’ve got more work to do.
But that doesn’t mean your work is done. The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us; it’s about what can be done by us together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self- government. That’s the principle we were founded on.
This country has more wealth than any nation, but that’s not what makes us rich. We have the most powerful military in history, but that’s not what makes us strong. Our university, our culture are all the envy of the world, but that’s not what keeps the world coming to our shores. What makes America exceptional are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth, the belief that our destiny is shared – that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations, so that the freedom which so many Americans have fought for and died for come with responsibilities as well as rights, and among those are love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.
I am hopeful tonight because I have seen this spirit at work in America. I’ve seen it in the family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors and in the workers who would rather cut back their hours than see a friend lose a job. I’ve seen it in the soldiers who re-enlist after losing a limb and in those SEALs who charged up the stairs into darkness and danger because they knew there was a buddy behind them watching their back. I’ve seen it on the shores of New Jersey and New York, where leaders from every party and level of government have swept aside their differences to help a community rebuild from the wreckage of a terrible storm.
And I saw it just the other day in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd, listening to that father’s story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes because we knew that little girl could be our own.
And I know that every American wants her future to be just as bright. That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president.
And tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope.
I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.
America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunities and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founding, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, abled, disabled, gay or straight. You can make it here in America if you’re willing to try.
I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.
And together, with your help and God’s grace, we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on earth. Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.
You must be logged in to post a comment.