As part of an ongoing investigation into military mortuary services, the Air Force admits it dumped the partial cremated remains of at least 274 servicemembers in Virginia landfills.

Craig Whitlock and Mary Pat Flaherty of The Washington Post report the dumping was hidden from families who had agreed to allow the military to dispose of their loved ones remains in “a dignified and respectful manner.”

The Air Force halted the practice three years ago, just prior to the 2009 ruling by President Obama to lift the ban on news coverage of fallen troops imposed by George H.W. Bush in 1991. Until then, the mortuary activities of the military were hidden from scrutiny.

The Air Force went on to tell The Post that it cannot say how many remains went to the dump and that to find out it would have to search the records of more than 6,300 servicemembers handled by the mortuary since 2001.
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or is it more likely that with less government we’d see less corporate power?

Philosophically, I don’t think tax evasion is a crime. Nevertheless, this story shows the state of our justice department.

Bradley Birkenfeld, former banker for Swiss giant UBS, blew the whistle on the largest tax-evasion scheme in American’s long U.S. history of people think others should pay for their government programs.

Rather than praising Birkenfeld, the Justice Department gave him a 40-month prison sentence.

However his former colleagues at UBS and thousands of rich American clients that hid away billions of dollars for decades in the Swiss Bank UBS seem to have gotten the opposite treatment.

In fact, the Justice Department let them buy their way out of jail.

UBS pled guilty and paid a $780 million fine, while thousands of U.S. citizens with undisclosed offshore accounts where permitted to belatedly disclose them and pay civil fees and penalties.

Only Birkenfeld, the 44-year-old whistleblower, landed in jail, this is another examples of injustice and hypocrisy in the Obama administration, and if Obama having upwards of 30 former employees of Goldman Sachs and its subsidiaries in his cabinet did not prove our government is controlled by bankers this does. (Read more)

Gold broke below $1,600 an ounce for the first time since early October, as a sharply weaker euro and losses in other markets prompted investors to raise cash by selling precious-metals holdings.

Gold, which has tarnished its image as a haven in recent months by moving in step with riskier assets like stocks and other commodities, tumbled 5% Wednesday as a broad-market rout saw investors shed holdings in favor of cash. (Read more)

Zero Hedge: Gold “Rehypothecation” Unwind Begins: HSBC Sues MF Global Over Disputed Ownership of Physical Gold.
physical gold in the hands of the very same insolvent financial syndicate of daisy-chained underfunded organizations, where the premature (or overdue) end of one now means the end of all, is also just as unsafe, if not more. Which is why we read with great distress a just broken story by Bloomberg according to which HSBC, that other great gold “depository” after JP Morgan (and the custodian of none other than GLD) is suing MG Global “to establish whether he or another person is the rightful owner of gold worth about $850,000 and silver bars underlying contracts between the brokerage and a client.” The notional amount is irrelevant: it could have been $0.01 or $1 trillion: what is very much relevant however, is whether or not MF Global was rehypothecating (there is that word again), or lending, or repoing, or whatever you want to call it, that one physical asset that it should not have been transferring ownership rights to under any circumstances. Essentially, this is at the heart of the whole commingling situation: was MF Global using rehypothecated client gold to satisfy liabilities? The thought alone should send shivers up the spine of all those gold “bugs” who have been warning about precisely this for years. Because the implications could be staggering.

olyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon.

The massive Obama stimulus was supposed to generate millions of jobs, but the $535 million loan guarantee it gave to solar panel maker Solyndra on the eve of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy illustrated the fundamental incompetence of Obama’s neo-Keynesian economic ideology.

Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands of gallons of alternative biofuel in place of standard JP-5 fuel for Navy aircraft — the biggest federal purchase of biofuel ever.

It’s part of the White House’s “we can’t wait for Congress” strategy as the 2012 election year looms. But JP-5 typically costs less than $4 a gallon. . . .

A look at the lucky seller of this environmentalist version of the proverbial $600 Pentagon toilet seat indicates that the move is not just wasteful, but ethically suspect.

As J.E. Dyer noted over the weekend on the Hot Air Green Room, “a member of Obama’s presidential transition team, T. J. Glauthier, is a ‘strategic advisor’ at Solazyme, the California company that is selling a portion of the biofuel to the Navy. Glauthier worked — shock, shock — on the energy-sector portion of the 2009 stimulus bill.” (Read more)

How the hell is this guy the front runner?

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TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Energy Secretary Steven Chu should resign as a result of the disastrous decision to guarantee $537 million in loans to failed solar panel manufacturer Solyndra.

The federal government’s rush to guarantee the loans despite numerous warning signs threatens to cost taxpayers more than $500 million. Career government employees repeatedly warned that this “investment” was flawed from the beginning. Not only was Solyndra betting on an unproven “thin film” technology, but it was trying to compete with a cost structure that was uneconomical even under optimistic assumptions.

Regardless of your position on the merits of government investments in green energy, you should insist on Chu’s resignation.
Click here to find out more!

As a skeptic, I’m horrified but not surprised at a massive loss of public money in a badly managed firm. But if you think green energy investments are a good idea in general, you should be furious over Solyndra.

Not only did the company hand out $37,000 to $60,000 bonuses to its managers as it spiraled into bankruptcy this summer. Solyndra built a brand-new facility in one of the highest cost locations in America rather than recycling an existing building in a cheaper location, ordered expensive robots that whistled Disney tunes rather than focusing its spending on production, and paid investors dividends even as the company ran short of cash.

As Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Calif., noted, putting taxpayer money in such a firm was “felony dumb.”

Worse, there is little doubt that the decision to guarantee the loans was politicized. The email trail uncovered by congressional investigators demonstrates considerable political pressure from the White House to approve the guarantees, leading some to speculate it was due to the Solyndra connections of Obama donor George Kaiser and his George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Kaiser was a key fundraiser for Obama’s presidential campaign, hosting a 2007 fundraiser at his home that raised more than $250,000. Kaiser’s foundation (which had nearly $4 billion in assets in 2009) was a key investor in Solyndra.

. . . .

Again, Solyndra appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as we learn of more green energy firms with political connections that have received federal loan guarantees and other subsidies.

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The debt ceiling battle led to a compromise. Congress and the President promised to submit to mandatory budget cuts. A bipartisan super committee was set up to put together a package of debt reduction cuts totaling several trillion dollars over supposedly a decade. If the committee deadlocks, the cuts will begin automatically on January 2, 2013. These must be $1.2 trillion in cuts, or $120 billion a year.

As expected by everyone, the committee is deadlocked. The Democrats want $3 trillion in debt reduction, mainly from tax increases. The Republicans will not grant this.

Democratic sources told CNN that at the meeting Tuesday the plan was presented to the 12-member committee by Sen. Max Baucus, D-Montana, the Finance Committee chairman. A majority of the six Democrats on the super committee supported the proposal but sources declined to say which member or members disagreed.

The plan would have made cuts to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, which the Democratic sources described as a major concession from their party. In return Republicans were asked to go along with between $1.2 and $1.3 trillion in new tax revenue.

An unnamed Republican aide expressed anger that some Democrat had leaked the details of the deal to the press. I mean what kind of stab in the back is this? Telling the public what’s in store for them! This is clearly an outrage. It means, the aide said, that the Democrats think the super committee will fail.

Did anyone in his right mind expect it to succeed? The August deal to extend the ceiling and thereby avoid shutting down some government agencies temporarily was based on a sham solution.

The politicians want no responsibility for cuts. There was no record of which Democrats opposed the leaked deal. Some did. Everything is being kept hidden. There is an election year coming up.

This was the first proposed plan. The committee has not gone public with anything in two months. It has a deadline for announcing a plan: November 23. That is less than one month away. If Congress and the President refuse to accept a plan, or if no plan is offered, then cuts will begin a year later.

So, phase one deadlock is here. There is little likelihood that members of the super committee will put their careers on the line and vote publicly for cuts that specific special-interest groups can identify. There would be retaliation in November 2012. (Read more)

Also, land deals.

“Lucas Papademos will be as of tomorrow the new prime minister of the country after the agreement that the outgoing Prime Minister George Papandreou and the opposition head Antonis Samaras reached last night,” reports the Greek daily Ta Nea.

Papademos is a 100% bankster tool. There will never ever be even the suggestion of a referendum on any program the banksters want passed. It will simply be passed.

Papademos is currently a visiting professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He was previously a vice president of the European Central Bank and also served as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

He is a Trilateral Commission member. (Read more economicpolicyjournal.com)

tories of eye-popping waste and abuse of power among Greece’s bureaucrats are legion, including officials who hire their wives, and managers who submit $38,000 bills for office curtains.

The work force in Greece’s Parliament is so bloated, according to a local press investigation, that some employees do not even bother to come to work because there are not enough places for all of them to sit.

But as Europe looks for any sign of hope that Greece is on the road to reform, there are growing concerns about its ability — and willingness — to trim its payroll, a crucial element in bringing expenses under control enough to win continued international financing. (Read more)

I’m pleasantly surprised to see this reported on. Usually, anybody who calls for cuts is condemned as a right wing fascist nut job.

Politicians, with very few exceptions, are the scum of the Earth, and I love it when they’re forced to offer us a little glimpse of it.

I like the part where Eric Holder has to back track and say that he did, in fact, know about the operation. This is not “misunderstanding the question.” This is “L.Y.I.N.G.”