Oregon Cult.. Nothing is New.

In India, he worked as a small-town philosophy professor until he found enlightenment paid better. He built a thriving enterprise attracting Westerners to his lectures and group therapies. They sought meaning in their lives, escaping the remains of the Vietnam War and a crashing world economy. He mixed in plenty of sexual freedom, ensuring publicity to build his brand.

Government authorities in India cracked down on his group's unseemly and illegal behavior, including smuggling and tax fraud. The guru ran, ending up half a globe away at the Big Muddy Ranch.

The first contingent of Rajneeshees quietly moved to Oregon in summer 1981, but they couldn't escape notice for long.  Resettling in Oregon was the work of his chief of staff, Ma Anand Sheela [Sheela Patel] then 31 years old.   She wasn't after enlightenment. She was quick-witted and hungry for power, the perfect instrument for the guru's ambition.

Sheela intended to do as she wished on their remote 64,000 acres.
The money was paid, the guru packed and hundreds were expecting to be housed and fed. Sheela and the guru were undeterred. In India, trickery and bribery got results. Why would Oregon be any different?

Thousands dressed in red, worked without pay and idolized a wispy-haired man who sat silent before them. They bought one Rolls-Royce after another for the guru --93 in all. Along the way, they made plenty of enemies, often deliberately. 

Hand-picked teams of Rajneeshees had executed the largest biological terrorism attack in U.S. history, poisoning at least 700 people. They ran the largest illegal wiretapping operation ever uncovered. And their immigration fraud to harbor foreigners remains unrivaled in scope. The revelations brought criminal charges, defections, global manhunts and prison time.

They had marked Oregon's chief federal prosecutor for murder,  also stalked the state attorney general, lining him up for death. They contaminated salad bars at numerous restaurants. They spread dangerous bacteria at a grocery store, a public building and at political rally.

To strike at government authority, Rajneeshee leaders considered flying a bomb-laden plane into the county courthouse in The Dalles 16 years before al-Qaida used planes as weapons. And power struggles within Rajneeshee leadership spawned plans to murder even some of their own. The guru's caretaker was to be killed in her bed, spared only by a simple mistake.

The Rajneeshees turned the yawner of comprehensive plans into a page-turning thriller of brazen crimes.

Three months after the aborted Comini plot, the commune collapsed and the Rajneeshees' darkest secrets tumbled out.

It starts with Immigration fraud/Name change....   It always does.  Just a thought.

Wise Up...!

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After an eight-month probe started when police received an anonymous tip, search warrants were served in Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino Counties. Authorities sought evidence of suspected visa and tax fraud. A court affidavit today claimed the website You Win USA Vacation Resort was used to specifically attract pregnant Chinese women.  The women paid $15,000 to $50,000 for housing, food and transportation to medical services as well as visas allowing them to stay in the US legally. The healthcare cost wasn't mentioned, and assumed not paid.

"People who come from China to the United States for the sole purpose of having their children born as American citizens," said Claude Arnold of ICE and Homeland Security in Los Angeles. "These people are told to lie, how to lie, so that their motives for coming to the US wouldn't be questioned."

Authorities also said, according to The Associated Press, that the women were instructed to hide their pregnancies under loose clothing and told to lie about the reasons behind their traveling.

Linda Trust, a resident of one complex involved in the raid, said she'd seen groups of pregnant Chinese women and people bringing food to them.

"I saw a man that had like a big dolly thing piled to [the] ceiling with diapers," Trust told ABC station KABC-TV in Los Angeles.

The alleged ringleaders are accused of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars and could face criminal tax fraud, money laundering and conspiracy charges.

Federal agents with the Departments of Homeland Security, the Internal Revenue Service and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement estimated that since 2013, 400 babies born at one hospital had been linked to the alleged scam.

Immigration, Immigration and Immigration. Money, Money, and Money.

Just a thought.

Obama Care again?

The Court case hinges on the section of the law dealing with the tax subsidies that help people pay for health insurance. It says people who are enrolled in a health care “Exchange established by the state” are eligible. 
The case came about when some Virginians who receive subsidies to buy health insurance on healthcare.gov sued the government, saying they shouldn’t be getting the subsidies. 

The subsidies are a critical underpinning of the law [the affordable care act].   It could trigger a death spiral in the exchanges as people who could no longer afford health insurance drop it, especially the young and healthy, leaving a smaller, sicker risk pool and thus skyrocketing rates.

A RAND Corporation study estimated that an adverse ruling would cause 8 million people to lose their coverage and the health insurance premiums of those who hadn’t been getting tax subsidies to rise by 47 percent. In addition, the insurance companies themselves could face insolvency, according to a letter the American Academy of Actuaries sent to Burwell this week. So the stakes are huge. But the case itself is, quite honestly, absurd.

The decision by the Supreme Court may support Obama Care or cause a great celebration to the Virginians. The last will end up terrible for all.                               Just a thought.

Lindt Cafe ..Sydney.

 

The gunman took hostages  at the Lindt Chocolate Café at Martin Place, Sydney. He was well known to authorities and had a history of extremism and mental instability. Man Monis, an Iranian refugee and self-styled sheikh known for sending hate mail to the families of Australian troops killed in Afghanistan. 

According to London-based Persian TV channel, he had fled Iran after taking US$200,000 of his customers' money in his tourism agency. He claimed that his request for asylum followed the detention of his wife and children by Iranian authorities after he espoused liberal views on Islam.

Iran's chief of police, told reporters that Monis had "a dark and long history of violent crime and fraud", before fleeing to Malaysia and then Australia. "
Iran's official News Agency states that  Iran provided information to the Australian government about his criminal record, mental and spiritual status. Despite this, he was granted asylum in Australia.

On 21 April 2013, his wife's body [Pal] was found stabbed 17 times and alight in a Werrington apartment stairwell. His girlfriend  was formally charged with Pal's murder, and Monis was charged with being an accessory before and after the fact to the murder.

On 14 March 2014, he was arrested and charged with sexually and indecently assaulting a young woman who went to his consultancy in Wentworthville, New South Wales, for "spiritual healing".  He claimed he was an expert in "astrology, numerology, meditation and black magic" services. Seven months later,  a further 40 charges were added, including 22 counts of aggravated sexual assault and 14 counts of aggravated indecent assault, allegedly committed against six more women who had visited his business.

^{At what point would the Australian authority kicked him out of the Country?                    Just a thought.}

O'Reilly's reporting.....

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George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian emigrant who befriended Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination.
Bill O'Reilly has repeatedly claimed he "heard" a shotgun blast that killed George in his daughter's home. This claim is implausible and contradicted by his former newsroom colleagues. 

Six people who covered the riots with O’Reilly in California for Inside Edition told the Guardian they did not recall an incident in which, as O’Reilly has claimed, “concrete was raining down on us” and “we were attacked by protesters”.

Accusations that he inflated his recollections of reporting from Argentina at the end of the Falklands war as a correspondent for CBS. The Guardian found he had told differing versions of an apparent encounter at gunpoint with Argentinian forces.

Earlier, Bill O'Reilly settled a sexual harassment lawsuit by his former producer, ending "brutal ordeal". Morelli had earlier predicted that O'Reilly was "going down." He and his client did not dispute the initial demanded of $60 million to settle.

Much of the criticism of O'Reilly has centered on his role as a moralist who has lectured about too much sex in pop culture and has published a children's book in which he warns boys against treating girls abusively.

He is paid a reported $20m a year to host his show.

Just a thought.

Net Neutrality.. Money?

The FCC's proposed net neutrality regulations are widely expected to be approved by a vote along partisan lines.  The controversy comes down to the fact that the FCC's new net neutrality rules reclassify broadband as a public utility.

Proponents of the new rules say regulating the Internet as a utility protects consumers and innovation. Opponents say it stifles innovation and restricts capitalism. Essentially, the debate has become ideological and partisan.

"On one hand you have the Internet companies like Netflix and Facebook who are trying to ensure they have unfettered access to the consumer and that the consumer has unfettered access to them," said analyst Craig Moffett at Moffett Research. "And on the other hand you have companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast who are saying they don't oppose any of the net neutrality-related rules, but the legal framework in order to get there imposes all these burdensome regulations and the risk of government overreach."

The concern is the risk that Title II regulation, even with all sorts of carve-outs or "forbearance" on certain parts, will lead toward price regulation.

Some are making great money now and they are against it.

Just a thought.

Driven... part 2..Pao

Fletcher delivered a speech built around the theme “What are the chances?”  that the nation would elect its first black President or that a Fletcher Fellow would read her poem at the Inauguration? He acknowledged his wife, the venture capitalist Ellen Pao, and their 6-month-old daughter, Matilda.

What are the chances, he asked, that he’d be there that day with his beautiful wife?

This last note elicited warm laughter. His friends all knew that Fletcher had, for years, openly dated a man, Hobart “Bo” Fowlkes, an employee of his investment firm, who helped plan the party but was not in attendance. But in the span of a year beginning in the summer of 2007, Fletcher and Pao had met, married, and started a family. The event was infused with a powerful dose of “hope and change.”

Nearly four years later much has changed for Fletcher and Pao though not for the better. After achieving coveted positions in the rarefied world of finance, Fletcher and Pao each filed sensational lawsuits that now jeopardize their careers, no matter the outcome.

Fletcher, 46, sued the iconic Dakota apartment building, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, accusing the board of racial discrimination after it questioned his ability to pay for an additional unit in the complex. The lawsuit triggered a series of events that ultimately led to the bankruptcy of one of Fletcher’s funds and investigations by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Then, just as Fletcher’s predicament was intensifying, Pao, 43, sued her employer, the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, for sexual discrimination, alleging that her superiors ignored her complaints of maltreatment by some male colleagues and curtailed her career for raising the issues.

The truth is stranger than fiction.  See part 1.  

Just a thought.

Getting ugly..!!

Crude oil prices plunged to a six-year low in a potentially painful threat to oil-exporting nations that rely on crude to power their economies. 

Many analysts believe that oil prices between $30 and $40 per barrel are a real possibility.  Oil traders are placing bets on oil sinking as low as $20 a barrel.

Oil prices are still looking for a floor, in part because the persistent mismatch between global supply and demand continues. 

Prices in the $40-per-barrel are starting to seriously test the economics of many operations. That’s because unlike other new sources of oil production such as Canada’s tar sands  U.S. tight-oil production relies on continuous drilling of wells.

Ultimately, the big risk to the U.S. economy lies in just how that yin and yang play out. Cheaper oil will hurt energy producers, the industry and some banks.

The drop would essentially extends the Federal Reserve’s policy of priming the economy with easy money and sets the stage for a harder landing sometime next year.

Just a thought.

Minimum Wage

Walmart, which employs 1.3 million in the U.S. alone, plans to boost its minimum pay to $9 an hour by April and $10 an hour by Feb. 1, 2016. The current federal standard is $7.25. 

That would generate long-awaited wage inflation, the lack of which has been a main contributor to the lackluster post-recession economic recovery in the U.S., the worst since the Great Depression.

"What Wal-Mart has done is set the new benchmark for employee pay for big-box stores.  It might be cooler to work at a Wal-Mart, where you get training and a higher pay,". "It could spread to the big-box retailers, and throughout the mall."

Wal-Mart's announcement comes after a solid two years of lobbying both from worker advocate groups and President Barack Obama's.

Walmart and other low wage companies' workers cost U.S. taxpayers $ billions in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing.

This is a good business decision to reduce turn around, better employment Poole, satisfaction of the employees and better customer service. Just a thought. 

Irrelevant...

I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani reportedly said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up this way ...... .......   and I was brought up through love of this country

He doesn’t talk about America the way John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did, about America’s greatness and exceptionalism,”  He added that the commander-in-chief has been influenced by communists since his youth.

Giuliani implied he was the only one with the chutzpah to call out Obama, saying: “Somebody has to raise these issues with the president. Somebody has to have the courage to stand up.”

Giuliani said that his office had received some death threats over the phone. “But he did not say whether he alerted police and CNN has no way of confirming that,” “The majority of phone calls were supportive.”

Rudy Giuliani wants a little love, but most likely just some attention, from the president of the United States of America. [Huff Post].

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Just a thought.