ANOTHER DAMNING REPORT ON THE FBI'S ABUSE OF POWER ACLU ONLINE 29JAN10

Another Damning Report on the FBI’s Abuse of Power
The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released another damning report last week on the FBI’s use of National Security Letters (NSLs).

NSLs allow the FBI to secretly demand sensitive customer information from telephone and internet communications companies, financial institutions and credit agencies—without suspicion or prior judicial approval. The statute was broadly rewritten in the Patriot Act. Anyone who receives an NSL is "gagged," so they can't tell anyone they received one. This violation of the First Amendment enshrined into the Patriot Act has made NSLs the FBI's go-to surveillance tool since 9/11. And they've been abusing this tool repeatedly.

The OIG report released last week is the third report of abuse in the last four years that details the bureau’s flagrant and institutionalized abuse of NSLs. The FBI assures us they have this under control.

For years, Congress has stood by while report after report has been released. The bureau clearly cannot be trusted to police itself, so it’s time to stand up to the FBI's pick-and-choose approach to the rules. Congress must fulfill its oversight role and ensure that this power is reined in.

Congress will soon be voting on reauthorizing three provisions of the Patriot Act, including the NSL provisions. It is time to tell them to rein in the government’s authority to dig through our sensitive information.

>>Take action: Tell your members of Congress to reform the Patriot Act.
http://action.aclu.org/site/R?i=ZvcKWEu2xdcKvetCp1ldxA..

LYNN CHENEY WANTS YOU TO BE AFRAID ACLU 29JAN10

MOVE YOUR MONEY: A NEW YEARS RESOLUTION from THE HUFFINGTON POST 29DEZ09

Take the pledge to Move Your Money!

Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.

Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo -- all of which took billions in taxpayer money -- have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

Meanwhile, America's Main Street community banks -- the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of -- are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

We talked about the outrage of big, bailed-out banks turning around and spending millions of dollars on lobbying to gut or kill financial reform -- including "too big to fail" legislation and regulation of the derivatives that played such a huge part in the meltdown. And as we contrasted that with the efforts of local banks to show that you can both be profitable and have a positive impact on the community, an idea took hold: why don't we take our money out of these big banks and put them into community banks? And what, we asked ourselves, would happen if lots of people around America decided to do the same thing? Our money has been used to make the system worse -- what if we used it to make the system better?

Everyone around the table quickly got excited (granted we are an excitable group), and began tossing out suggestions for how to get this idea circulating.

Eugene, the filmmaker among us, remarked that the contrast between the big banks and the community banks we were talking about was very much like the story in the classic Frank Capra film It's a Wonderful Life, where community banker George Bailey helps the people of Bedford Falls escape the grip of the rapacious and predatory banker Mr. Potter.

It was a lightbulb moment. And, unlike the vast majority of dinner conversations, the excitement over this idea didn't end with dessert. It actually led to something -- thanks in great part to Eugene and his remarkable team, who got to work and, in record time, created a brilliant, powerful, and inspiring video playing off the It's a Wonderful Life concept. Watch it below.

Within a few days, the rest of the pieces fell into place, including an agreement with top financial analysts Chris Whalen and Dennis Santiago, who gave us access to their IRA (Institutional Risk Analytics) database. Using this tool, everyone will be able to plug in their zip code and quickly get a list of the small, solvent Main Street banks operating in their community.

The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the Big Six banks (the four we mentioned earlier, plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it's meant to be. It's neither Left nor Right -- it's populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It's time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don't have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks -- and unlike the big banks they don't provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

Think of the message it will send to Wall Street -- and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won't wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can't count on Congress to fix things. We have to do it ourselves -- and the big banks are the core of the problem. We need to return to the stable, reliable, people-oriented approach of America's community banks.

So watch Eugene's amazing video, then go to www.moveyourmoney.info to learn more about how easy it is to move your money. And pass the idea on to your friends (help make this video -- and this idea -- go viral!).

JP Morgan/Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs may be "too big to fail" -- but they are not too big to feel the impact of hundreds of thousands of people taking action to change a broken financial and political system. Let them gamble with their own money, not yours. Let's turn big banks into smaller banks. We'll all be better off -- and safer -- as a result.

Make it your New Year's resolution to move your money. We can't think of a better way to start 2010.

WATCH:

Too-big-to-fail banks are profiting from bailout dollars and government guarantees, and growing bigger. Tell us which community bank you use, and why.

UPDATE -- Credit Unions: Some commenters have written us suggesting that we also include credit unions. Like the FDIC for banks and thrifts, the National Credit Union Administration insures the deposits of credit unions and is a good resource for financial data on specific institutions. Credit unions do not disclose financial data in the same way as FDIC-insured banks. As a result, credit unions are not presently included in the IRA ratings database, which covers over 8,000 federally insured banks and thrifts. IRA is developing a method to rate credit unions in a way that is comparable to the IRA bank stress ratings. We'll be updating users of "Move Your Money" on this issue early in 2010.

For more info, go to: www.moveyourmoney.info

CHANGE IN THE MIDST OF CRISIS - JIM WALLIS IN SOJOMAIL 28JAN10

Creating Change in the Midst of Crisis: Re-thinking Our Values

In past years at Davos, I often found myself in early morning optional sessions on social responsibility, in small rooms on the third floor of the conference center, with people like Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. But this year, Muhammad and I were on a panel in the main floor in a prime time plenary session at the World Economic Forum called “Re-thinking Values in the Post-Crisis World.” Because of the economic crisis, values have become a central conversation at Davos 2010.

We were joined by several CEOs, and all seemed to agree that underneath the economic crisis is also a crisis of values. Last year at Davos, I said that asking “When will the crisis end” was the wrong question, and the right question to ask was “How will this crisis change us?” So a year later, our panel took up the question of how much we are changing. I said that massive bank bonuses in the face of massive economic suffering were a moral scandal, but they were only the symptom of a deeper erosion of societal values. Many seemed to agree, and the word “greed” was lifted up as a primary cause of this crisis, as were “selfishness” and “short-termism.” The market is supposed to be a means, not an end in itself. The creation of wealth, necessary goods and services, and jobs -- including the goal of helping lift people out of poverty -- were all set aside for the narrowest goals of simply making as much money as possible. I talked about the need to build “a common good economy” with multiple stakeholders and not just shareholders; and Muhammad Yunus explained his concept of “social business” based on “selflessness” instead of selfishness. One CEO said, “the critics of capitalism are now rising up, and this time, they’re not Marxists.”

In his opening address later that day, World Economic Forum founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab warned against the danger of thinking the crisis had passed and quickly getting back to “business as usual.” Schwab said the WEF was committed to “re-thinking our values, re-designing our systems, and re-building our institutions.” If we don’t do that, he said, the financial crisis will become a social crisis.

He then introduced Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, who was surprisingly candid and clear about the causes of this crisis: “the entrepreneur gave way to the speculator” out for a “fast buck.” It was an economics only for “here and now” resulting in a “depreciation of the future.” He asked, “How can we return the economy to the service of humankind?” Sarkozy suggested that it was time to put environmental law, labor law, and health law on the same level as trade law and even to consider taxing financial transactions. Banks, he said, have the job of assessing the risks of lending in order to finance the growth of the economy, not speculating for their own huge profits -- agreeing with President Obama’s efforts to dissuade banks from proprietary speculation.

And the French president specifically said we can no longer “relegate half of humanity to the sidelines” -- a theme I presented earlier in the day to a “social ideas laboratory” of leaders from business, politics, and civil society. I pointed out that even before this crisis, the global economic system was already failing half of God's children -- three billion people living on less than $2 per day. This is the time to bring them in and include them in the global economy.

These were not the issues at the center of discussion at Davos in past years. The shift shows the opportunity within crisis -- one that we dare not miss.