I imagine every undercover operative we have in the world is considering new employment. The idea is that they are working UNDER COVER and their job is to be friendly and associate with terrorists, now they can be killed if they are discovered by the terrorists or unrecognized by their own country. This will surely be a comfort to all involved!!! Perhaps Johm McCain can release their names to the media so will not happen? This would all be goofy, if it weren't so damn serious.

ACH fraud: Why criminals love this con

Quote article: Fraud involving the Automated Clearing House (ACH—hence the term ACH fraud) Network, which is used by financial institutions to handle direct deposits, checks, bill payments and cash transfers between businesses and individuals, is becoming an increasingly popular way for hackers to siphon money out of the bank accounts of unsuspecting victims.

Fraudsters only need two pieces of information to pull off ACH fraud; a checking account number and a bank routing number. They typically obtain the information with a targeted phishing email that tricks the victim into running malicious software which then allows criminals to install keylogging software and steal bank account passwords.

How pervasive is this crime? According to a report late last year from the FBI, there has been approximately $100 million in attempted losses due to ACH fraud as of October 2009. The FBI reports it is seeing several new victim complaints and cases opened every week.

This article goes on to tell how it is done...very interesting..very scary at how easy it is.

http://www.csoonline.com/article/603461/ach-fraud-why-criminals-love-thi...
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I have had experience with this problem...but luckily..it was for relatively insignificant amounts and I caught it and had the bank investigate and correct the problem. The bank won't tell you any details of their "investigation" so one is pretty much kept in the dark about it. I don't do on-line banking. I pay all my bills by writing checks..but just about a month before I experienced the ACH transfers on my bank statement I had mailed some bills in an over filled outside mail box just before Christmas. I suspected the checks were most likely stolen (the creditors didn't get the checks) and I put a stop payment on them.

Note: both the checking account number and the routing numbers are on the checks. So, all someone has to do is just look at your check, even a blank check, and they have all the info they need to do an ACH transfer out of your account into a dummy one they set up. But, at least, they have to see your check...if they hack your account on-line they don't need to see your check even. Many of these hackers get away with it and many people don't even know they've been ripped off until it's too late to do anything about it.

The best case I can make for drone strikes against people by name is to invoke Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

To defend these strikes, you must claim that the targets are either rebels or invaders. Rebellion applies to citizens of the United States, and Invasion applies to non-citizens. On the invasion side, I think we'd have to require that they actually entered U.S. territory without permission of the U.S. government.

German citizens, during the time of the death camps in Nazi Germany, all claim they didn't know what was going on either. Despite the fact that American soldiers could all smell the stench of the camps from several miles around them the towns that were within that radius all 'just couldn't believe that their government would do such a thing'. Nobody would admit, perhaps even to themselves, that such a horrible thing was going on right under their noses. They too thought they were too civilized, too modern, to do such things. How could their very own government be so murderous and callous? Just doesn't happen, right? When something smells so bad it's time to hold your noses and open your eyes to find out the truth and hold your government responsible and prosecute the bully boys in brown shirts, perhaps, before they haul us all off to some death camp.

9/11 stinks to holy hell and the perpetrators in the US have left a slime trail so unmistakable that you almost have to be blind and very ignoring of the facts (I think the term is 'ignorant') to keep your blinders on to what our very own government (or dominant forces within and without our government) has done. There are many web sites, many very much like Architects and Engineers for 911 truth...that present much of the evidence...just read and watch the videos they provide. Too bad so many people 'just don't want to know'...won't even look. It's called cognitive dissonance. It's just what the German citizens in Nazi Germany had it seems.

Think.. if the US is obviously quite willing to murder so many hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in the Middle East...so willing to send thousands of American men and women soldiers out to die over there (and that's not counting all of the many more who are physically or mentally scarred for life) then how can you believe that they wouldn't murder several thousand American civilians right here in America as a false flag operation that they rightly calculated would frighten us out of being able to hold those criminals accountable for their decades long fleecing of Americans and a complete dominance over us? How can you believe that they won't start using those drones, that they are flying over Americans right now, won't one day be armed and used to murder people in the streets or in our homes?

They scared us right out of our liberties and freedoms right into a world of domestic surveillance, clamping down on a citizen's right to demonstrate, special renditions, torture camps, assassination of American citizens decided upon by Herr Obama's White House death squad panel, death drones coming to a city near you...and much, much more. When you start to smell the stench don't just hide your heads in the sand. Your ignorance will adversely affect our future, your children's future. Right now, it looks like none of us really have a future. It'll only get worse!

Let's ask our Libertarian friends if they would like to discuss all the places that their philosophy has shown itself to be successful. (Outside a work of literary fiction.) Then we can ask about places like Chile, Iraq and the good ol' US where they failed big time when they got a chance to bring about their paradise. I'm sure their ideas would work if there weren't so many psychopaths at the top. However, I'm guessing the perfect market can't actually exist until perfect humans are available to (not) run it.

Come on nachos, I am one of the kindest people around. Sometimes the hardest yet kindest thing you can do for someone is to say NO. Have you ever been a parent?

LeMoyne, don't believe the communist progressive caucus on these numbers. Look it up for yourself And also look up the massive tax bill that Exxon and Chevron have paid over the last ten years, I think you will be stunned. Let me help you out with just 2011:

ExxonMobil in 2011 made $27.3 billion in cash payments for income taxes. Chevron paid $17 billion and ConocoPhillips $10.6 billion. And not only were these the highest amounts in absolute terms, when compared with the rest of the 25 most profitable U.S. companies (see our slideshow for the full rundown of who paid what), the trio also had the highest effective tax rates. Exxon’s tax rate was 42.9%, Chevron’s was 48.3% and Conoco’s was 41.5%. That’s even higher than the 35% U.S. federal statutory rate, which is already the highest tax rate among developed nations.

(The lowest taxpayers among the most profitable companies? Automakers Ford and GM, despite $20 billion and $9 billion in net income, respectively, paid a scant $270 million and $570 million in taxes — simply because they have billions in previous-year losses to balance against recent profits.)

I would agree with bnunez - A big NO to both questions. But seeing how the Merkley - Udall Filibuster reform bill was handled, I would suspect it's business as usuall in the House & Senate. Don't expect any progressive changes.

Hooray for the OP that brings the Balancing Act to light!!! The Congressional Progressive Caucus has been proposing real solutions to the 'problems' of US for years, and they have been soundly ignored by the mainstream corporate media and our political duopoly all the while. The CPC Budget for All and People's Budget are markedly different from and score better than the D and R budgets. The CPC budgets also pursue policies that a majority of Americans want - they place people, jobs and the future before banks, warmaking and corporate tax breaks.

Some of the details of the Balancing Act are in the executive sumary at cpc.grijalva.house.gov...

@ Global - you can 'throw around' numbers but the CPC Representatives and their staffers have written hundreds of sections based on budget facts:

Quote CPC: End Fossil Fuel Subsidies ($94 billion) – Secs. 301-311

Repeals tax breaks, financial assistance, exploration and development expensing, preferential tax treatment of royalties, and domestic manufacturing deductions, for oil, natural gas, and coal producers. Despite the fossil fuel industries being among the most profitable on earth, the U.S. government gives them tens of billions of dollars in subsidies through the tax code. The five largest U.S. oil companies earned about $1 trillion in profits over the past decade, yet in recent years, companies like Exxon Mobil and Chevron paid zero federal income taxes. These subsidies distort markets and are detrimental to creating a clean energy economy, reducing our reliance on oil, and cutting carbon pollution.

Those defending the use of drones conveniently overlook the fact that (1) they kill scores of innocents, (2) they execute people without due process. There is no justification for either. Drone operators are terrorists and cowards.

"Dianhow" argues: "Drone attacks have killed mamy AL Quada who 's only mission is to KILL AS MANY AMERICANS AS THEY CAN." "Mrohrer" says "I would prefer the drone attack to sending our men and women overseas to take care of a terrorist." Russell Vaughan says "The people who are being taken out are planning to kill Americans."

I have no sympathy for these arguments because our unwarranted, unprovoked aggression against other countries only strengthens organizations like Al Queda (sp?) and justifies their existence. If we'd only get the hell out of these countries and stop occupying them, stealing from them, killing their people and so on, they wouldn't be on a mission to kill us would they? (HELLO.) And killing people because you think they might do something to us is friggin' insane. How do you know what someone is planning to do unless they carry out those plans?! And since when does membership in an organization justify the death penalty?!! Can't you people, for once, imagine how you would react if this situation were reversed; if our country were invaded by Afghanis or Iraqis who kicked in the doors of our houses and murdered our families, raped our women, tortured us, urinated on our dead bodies, and attacked us with drones? Has it ever occurred to you that we might be the terrorists?

Were it not for these abuses and unprovoked acts of aggression, on our nickel and in our names, there never would have been a 9-11. We can thank our Military Industrial Complex for creating all these enemies with a justified hatred towards us, making us targets of that hatred. Long as our leader perpetuate a foreign policy based on the premise that our lives are more valuable than other people's, we can expect more of the same, and with only our leaders to blame. - Aliceinwonderland

Businesses, thanks to absurdly generous tax cuts, are sitting on a TREMENDOUS amount of money. They have more money than they'd ever had. What they don't have is CUSTOMERS, BUYERS, SHOPPERS. Therefore, there is NO REASON for them to invest in the economy - unless they want to lose their investment. Taxes have NOTHING to do with it.

The top 2%, my man, are NOT the "job creators". You, I, the consumer is.

If what you say is true why wasn't the Clinton era a period of recession?