[Daily Caller] The new CEO of Wells Fargo, Tim Sloan, urged President-elect Donald Trump to consider making regulatory changes at an industry conference Tuesday morning.
Wells Fargo got slapped with a $185 million fine from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in September for issuing 565,000 lines of credit and opening 1.5 million bank accounts for customers without their consent. Bank employees even went so far as to fake email addresses for their customers to sign them up for banking services in order to pad numbers. Some 14,000 of those credit accounts accrued over $400,000 in fees.
Yes Mr. Sloan, I can certainly see where you are coming from.
#1
Yes, less fines for the company (and stockholders) in return for long prison sentences and confiscatory fines to CEO and their minions who do these things. Till I see the latter in practice, we can hold off on the former.
[Free Beacon] Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said in an interview with RT that she is afraid Russia and Saudi Arabia will build oil pipelines through the United States while Donald Trump is president.
Kleeb brought up her concern while speaking with host Ed Schultz about the the ongoing controversy surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline project and her strong opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline.
"You know what Trump is saying, that he’s going to get rid of the executive order that requires the State Department to review any pipeline that crosses our U.S. border," Kleeb said. "And that’s obviously very dangerous because if he does that, that means a pipeline from Saudi Arabia, Russia, whoever that wants to cross into the United States would literally have no federal oversight, no review, no environmental review. No federal agency right now other than the State Department reviews those pipelines when it crosses one of our borders, so he’s being reckless."
Schultz is currently a host on RT, a television network funded by the Russian government that critics argue is a propaganda tool of the Kremlin.
#2
Indirectly yes. You screw around in the world driving oil prices up. Others are going to go looking for cheaper and more secure sources to keep them operating in a oil oriented world. Who's causing the problems? Ergo, Russia and Saudi Arabia will build the pipelines through the U.S. It's a feature, not a bug.
#5
"...And in other news, the chairman of the Nebraska Democratic Party has come out at as a complete moron, bringing strong protests from the Moron-American community. But first - Jerry with sports!"
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
12/07/2016 12:07 Comments ||
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#6
Wannna' get really scared? Understand that she was absolutely serious.
[Guardian] Donald Trump: 'We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes.'
Donald Trump has laid out a US military policy that would avoid interventions in foreign conflicts and instead focus heavily on defeating the Islamic State militancy.
"We will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with," the president-elect said on Tuesday night in Fayetteville, near Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina.
"Instead our focus must be on defeating terrorism and destroying Isis, and we will."
#2
A Google search reveals little media coverage of this announcement, which apparently repeats one made five days ago, which did make it into one US paper - Washington Examiner
So why didn't David Muir cover this story? [rhetorical] Wins 1000 gratuitous snark points.
Posted by: Bobby ||
12/07/2016 7:27 Comments ||
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#3
I'd make an exemption in that dumping your population on us is considered an act of war warranting removing the responsible regimes (ie ruling caste).
#4
So we're gonna topple the government of Mexico? Of course, it is an act of war when their people flood our country, a very disorganized war but war none the less. Still I think I like the wall better. And shoot to kill anybody who tries to get over it. But then if the Mexican government falls of its own weight I'll be OK with that too.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/07/2016 11:20 Comments ||
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#5
I'm a little uneasy with this ISIS business. It looks to me like an Arab problem best resolved by Arabs. How do you even define defeating them? They'll just scatter and reconstitute themselves somewhere else. Meddling is what got us into so many of these messes in the first place. Just make sure that none of them get into the United States.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
12/07/2016 11:26 Comments ||
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#6
The absolute rejection of Jeb! should have been a solid clue...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
12/07/2016 11:53 Comments ||
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#8
I'm a little uneasy with this ISIS business. It looks to me like an Arab problem best resolved by Arabs. How do you even define defeating them?
The Arabs could not have long stood against ISIS on their own -- we saw what it looked like when they tried.
I would define defeat as killing enough of them that the rest surrender, then put them on chain gangs to rebuild the communities they despoiled. Then put them on lifetime probation with automatic death penalty for breaking it, plus additional punishments or exile for their nearest relations -- no ten year maximum hudna before returning to the jihad, or supporting jihad, for them.
#9
The problem is the vast majority of SUNNI Arabs are a bit sympathetic to ISIS. It's the leadership that fears ISIS and are trying to befriend the Tiger until someone else can take care of it.
Once I had hope Turkey could responsibly handle the region, now I think the Kurds and the Israel are the only ones worth a damned (far more than a damned) but neither one is in a position to get involved.
So defend Israel and the Kurds and let the Arabs deal with it.
#10
And Mexico, we should have put a proper government in place decades ago. A third of Mexicans want to come to the US (according to CNN) so we haven't seen anything yet.
#11
You have to bear in mind that the major reason the government of Mexico endures is because any of their citizens who are of the "not gonna take it" mentality are encouraged to move elsewhere, as in the US. The border has been their safety valve.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
12/07/2016 17:31 Comments ||
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#12
ed in texas, I've been saying that for years. A wall cuts that off and will force Mexico to fix themselves.
A wall thus indirectly helps 122 million people and is the human solution. Allowing the status quo of illegals and sending money back helps the oligarchs at the expense of the poorest (generally Mexicans of Indian heritage).
[DAWN] IT was the massacre of children that resurrected the capital punishment in Pakistain. Even as the bodies of innocent children from the Army Public School, Beautiful Downtown Peshawar ...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire. , were being retrieved and buried by their distraught family members, the government decided that the death penalty, unenforced for several years, would be reinstituted again.
The massacre had left a country in mourning; there was rage, there was helplessness, and the resolution to kill those who had killed -- and not only those who had massacred the APS children -- seemed like the way forward. Under the logic of desperation, it was assumed that resolutely resuming the killing of killers would be a better path for the country.
Except that a good number of those killed or on death row may not have killed at all. Recently, the Supreme Court of Pakistain acquitted a man named Mohammad Anar, who had been sentenced to death in 2005 before his penalty was commuted to life imprisonment in 2011. The reason for the acquittal was simple: the eyewitness whose testimony had been the basis of Mohammad Anar’s conviction and subsequent sentencing was known to have been four to five acres away at the time of the crime. According to the FIR filed, the witness said he had rushed to the house of the victim when he heard shouting and screaming while he was milking his cow.
This version of events, which should have made the charge against Mohammad Anar dubious from the outset, was ignored by the trial court. As pointed out by Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, who headed the three-member bench of the SC examining the case, it made no sense how the witness and others who lived at a distance from the scene of the crime arrived there with such speed and saw the crime being committed but did nothing to stop it.
The SC’s decision comes in the footsteps of several other cases in which death sentences by lower courts have been commuted and in certain cases (such as Mohammad Anar’s) even led to complete exoneration and acquittal.
Last month, just before Mohammad Anar’s acquittal, a man named Mazhar Farooq was acquitted by the SC after having served a 24-year sentence for the 1992 murder of a student.
The court’s attentions have not always come in time to save innocent people in Pakistain’s prisons. In late October, the SC heard the case of two brothers, Ghulam Sarwar and Ghulam Qadir. As in Mohammad Anar’s case, the court found serious discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony that was offered in support of convicting the two brothers, and exonerated them. It was too late, however. When the authorities went to locate the men, it was found that they had already been executed in 2015.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/07/2016 00:00 ||
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#1
When the authorities went to locate the men
Clearly a cry for embedded RFID and active trackers.
[DAWN] FOUR months after he ’disappeared’, Wahid Baloch has been reunited with his family. The social activist, writer and small-scale publisher is believed to have been detained by unidentified security officials on July 26 on the outskirts of Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... , setting off a frightening, though wearingly familiar, process of recovery for his shocked family. Local police initially refused to register an FIR, government agencies expressed an inability or unwillingness to help trace Mr Baloch, rights groups took up his case -- and through it all, the only thing that was known with some certainty was that Mr Baloch had become a missing person because he was an advocate for the Baloch people. Yet, no charges were framed against Mr Baloch and indeed there was no official acknowledgement that he was in the custody of the security apparatus. Now, with his release on Monday, Mr Baloch is once again a free man -- and the number of missing persons in the country has been reduced by one.
It is too early to know if the release of Mr Baloch has anything to do with the change in command in the military and a possible rethink of some security policies. What is evident though is that a rethink is needed. The extrajudicial handling of those suspected of being involved in militancy or supporting krazed killer causes is not only unconstitutional, it is a system prone to abuse, and that creates further problems from a security perspective. When it comes to Balochistan ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... -related missing persons, the numbers themselves are in dispute. Baloch activists claim thousands have gone missing; rights groups suggest a lower but still considerable number; and the state unofficially acknowledges a small number of detained individuals. The figures, however, belie an intractable problem: the missing persons issue has fuelled, rightly, a sense of Baloch grievance -- a narrative that has helped sustain the low-level Baloch insurgency.
Rooted in political disaffection, the Baloch insurgency cannot have a purely military solution. But because Balochistan abuts the Taliban heartland in Afghanistan and the province has geostrategic importance -- now wrapped in the language and projects of CPEC -- the military establishment views Balochistan through a security prism. The militarised approach to security and state-driven development was once again on display yesterday as army chief Gen Qamar Bajwa travelled to Quetta. In his choice of words and the thrust of his comments, Gen Bajwa was almost indistinguishable from the last three army chiefs. Yet, Mr Baloch is with his family once again, so perhaps the softest of rethinks is being effected. Political governments, both at the centre and in Balochistan, should also consider their own role in the marginalisation of civilians in Balochistan and try and work with the new military leadership to formulate a more effective, humane and people-driven policy for the province.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[DAWN] IT took 37 long years, but a historic wrong is finally on course to being set right. On Monday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... announced he had given his approval to rename the National Centre for Physics at Islamabad’s Quaid-e-Azam University after Dr Abdus Salam, who in 1979 became Pakistain’s first ever Nobel laureate by winning the prestigious international award in the physics category. The premier also approved a grant of five annual fellowships in Dr Salam’s name at overseas universities for Pak doctoral candidates in physics. That it has taken nearly four decades for this country to honour a globally renowned scientist who was one of its own, is a sad reflection of the priorities that hold sway here, and that have diminished our standing in the world. For Dr Salam was an Ahmadi, a persecuted minority in Pakistain, and his faith rather than his towering achievements was the yardstick by which he was judged. His desire to use his fame to drive the engine of scientific research in his native country was spurned; the self-appointed defenders of the faith in Pakistain were determined not to let this land be ’sullied’ by the priceless gift of knowledge that Dr Salam wanted to bring to it.
In countries less blinded by prejudice and bigotry, Dr Salam’s would have been an inspirational story, a staple of school textbooks, and a name displayed on many a scientific institute of learning -- but that would have been a Pakistain we have not known for decades now. Born into a family of modest financial means in Jhang, Punjab, Dr Salam’s academic brilliance took him all the way to Cambridge where he won the Adams Prize for distinguished research in mathematics. To put that in perspective, the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking is another recipient. Despite his pioneering work during the course of a career that contributed to the theoretical framework of even recent scientific discoveries, Dr Salam remained ’tainted’ by his religious affiliation in his homeland. While the state’s move to give Dr Salam his due is very welcome, despite coming 20 years after his death, it is worth pointing out that we treat our only other Nobel laureate, Malala Yousafzai ...a Pashtun blogger and advocate for girls' education from Mingora, in Swat. She is esteemed as an ambassador of international good will, even though she can't go home lest some fellow in a turban shoots her in the head again... , in a similarly dismissive manner and for equally perverse, though different, reasons.Perhaps Paks should ask themselves, why do we manifest such unthinking hostility towards fellow citizens when their achievements are feted by the rest of the world?
Posted by: Fred ||
12/07/2016 00:00 ||
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[1 views]
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[PJ] In the midst of all the euphoria concerning Mr. Trump’s election to the presidency, the president-elect has suggested that a possible role for his son-in-law Jared Kushner might be to broker a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Arabs.
One hopes that Trump and Kushner do not, in fact, waste any time pursuing this will-o’-the-wisp. Four major, intractable obstacles stand in the way of any conceivable peace agreement; until they have gone away, there is no prospect.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Daily Caller] The new CEO of Wells Fargo, Tim Sloan, urged President-elect Donald Trump to consider making regulatory changes at an industry conference Tuesday morning.
[Free Beacon] Nebraska Democratic Party chair Jane Kleeb said in an interview with RT that she is afraid Russia and Saudi Arabia will build oil pipelines through the United States while Donald Trump is president.
