Insider Trading in Congress

Freddy already posted a link to this but I also just saw it on MSN news. Turns out there's a new book about insider trading in US Politics called Throw Them All Out by Peter Schweizer.

This past Sunday night, Steve Croft of “60 Minutes” exposed how U.S. Congressional critters cheat, lie and benefit from insider trading on defense contracts. He cornered former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi with her investments gained from her inside knowledge of multi-billion dollar contracts.

Pelosi boasts multi-millionaire status along with over 200 other members of Congress. She responded that everything she had done as to investments was legal. In reality, she cheated before a law could be passed to stop the cheating.

Consequently, A long-ignored proposal to ban insider trading by members of Congress gained new traction this week following news stories that reinforced the public's low opinion of Congress.

Creating a direct conflict with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, fellow Democrat Sen. Debbie Stabenow has proposed legislation that would ban members of Congress from using privileged information obtained on Capitol Hill for insider trading on Wall Street.

It reminds me of that movie Distinguished Gentlemen with Eddy Murphy. I like the Duck Hunt scene. He plays a can man gone politician and admits that he did way more sh*t in office than he ever did on the street only the cons he pulled in office were legal. Somehow I think this applies to the Occupy Wall Street protest and continues to give that cause merit. Newt Gingrich reportedly received $1.8 million in consulting fees from Freddie Mac before it was bailed out by taxpayers.

David Johnston's Hunger strike for Occupy

Someone mentioned this guy at the open mike at the Vancouver Occupation and I was surprised I hadn't heard about the story. Seemingly one of the members of the Victoria Occupy has been arrested and has been on a three week hunger strike during his 60 day sentence. Prolific offenders don't even get that much jail time for property theft. He challenged the crown to get a judge to make a ruling on the right to sleep. God love him.

I have mixed feelings about camping in city parks. Homelessness is a genuine concern. Obviously the Occupy Wall Street is a political protest. Many argue that it's becoming a modern Woodstock yet I think the underlining message is important to heed. Corruption on Wall Street is serious. Hiding that with propaganda is self defeating. It raises our taxes and erodes our sovereignty. Pepper spraying protesters, clergy and seniors diminishes all of us. Dorli Rainey is 84 years old. Her photo is a “defining image” of the protest.

Surrey Municipal Election

Saturday is the municipal election and I still have to go through the election booklet to see who all is running. Although I did think Dianne Watts has done some good things for Surrey there have been numerous concerns brought to light after her bizarre and brazen endorsement of George Bush's endorsement of torture and Investment fraud on his recent visit.

Surrey mayoral candidate Ross Buchanan has raised a very valid concern about this new conflict of interest development corporation she created. "Very few people in Surrey are aware that in 2007, Dianne Watts and the Surrey First councillors created a wholly owned development corporation in which the city are the main shareholders," said Buchanan.

"Diane Watts, Coun. Linda Hepner and city manager Murray Dinwoodie sit on the board of directors. How can the mayor and council remain independent of influence when they are sitting on the board of their own development corporation whose goals are at odds with the livability of the entire region?"

Buchanan said the corporation is "riddled with a lack of transparency" and has not been accountable for its activities. "It is highly irregular that the financial statements for the corporation would be consolidated with the city's. It is a separate entity. Requests for detailed accounting are denied," he said. He said valuable city assets have been transferred to the corporation with little or no public consultation.

This is a huge concern. The real cost of Surrey’s $100-million new city hall and the huge budget expansion is another. As we have seen raising taxes is the only way to pay for pork barrel politics and that is what she's endorcing with the gas tax.

It appears that the lovely Laila is endorsing Ross Buchanan for good reason. I think I will too. Watts may well be a shoe in but she did lose my vote over that George Bush fiasco. The Christy Clark like endorsement was shocking. Yet not all the Surrey First candidates are shoe ins. I think my first step is to not vote Surrey First. That will reduce the pork barrel lack of acounatability the Surrey First political party are creating.

Bob Paulson next RCMP commissioner

According to CBC News, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has gone back to the ranks of the Mounties and has chosen Bob Paulson as the next commissioner of the RCMP. The official announcement is expected Wednesday. Three cheers. This was my second choice after Jim Chu. That's way better than appointing a lawyer for the Hells angels to the Supreme Court. What was the president of the Conservative party doing representing the Hells angels anyways?

Hey, Harper did something I agree with. Can you believe that? Miracles never cease. Now if he just arrested Brian Mulroney for the two million dollar settlement he defrauded the Canadian tax payers out of...

A civilian in charge of the RCMP is like having a civilian in charge of your military. It doesn't make sense. Promoting from within does. Bob Paulson isn't in Boy George's corrupt camp of pension fraud either. I am told he was involved with the gang task force in BC before things started to go wrong. I'm told he was competent and did a good job. Let's hope he gets the support he needs to inspect the troops and clean house so we can effectively start dealing with the OMGs in BC once again.

The Rock Machine Down Under

We've talked about this before but since there are so many new readers following the blog now perhaps I should reinforce the history of the club(s). This news article gives a fair analysis of the history of the Rock Machine and explains how the Rock Machine in Australia are fighting with another motorcycle club there called the Rebels.

This facebook page also has a good history of the Rock Machine. It claims that around 1982, Salvatore Cazzetta was a member of a white-supremacist motorcycle gang named the SS, who were based in Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal. A fellow member of the SS was Maurice Boucher, and the two became friends. As leaders of the gang, they became candidates to join the Hells Angels when that gang decided to expand its international operations into Canada.

In March 1985, a Lennoxville, Quebec chapter of the Hells suspected the Laval chapter of wasting drug profits by using too much of the product themselves. The Laval chapter was invited to a Lennoxville chapter party. When the five Laval members arrived, they were ambushed and murdered. Two months later, at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River, divers located the decomposing bodies of the victims wrapped in sleeping bags and tied to weightlifting plates.

OK let's pause there a moment. Salvatore Cazzetta, the founder of the Rock Machine was originally a member of a white supremacists motorcycle gang called the SS along with Mom Boucher. Both groups have a history of involvement with White Supremacy. Cazzetta kinda sounds Spanish but it's Italian.

Salvatore, like many others, was outraged with the betrayal in the Lennoxville massacre. Hells Angels killing their own just because. That's not what the MC movement is about. Mom Boucher and his other pal Biff Hammel didn't have a problem with it. In fact, they used it to their advantage to climb the ladder and get their patches. In fact Biff Hamel was a prospect of the Laval chapter and was present when they executed his sponsors and seized the opportunity for advancement. That's kind of a dirty politician not a loyal friend. Hells angel hitman Yves "Apache" Trudeau was also a member of that chapter but didn't show up for the execution. After they killed his brothers he became a police informant.

Not surprising, Biff Hammel and Maurice Boucher used a similar betrayal to take over the Death Riders by forming an allegiance with some aspiring members of that club who met with them right after their presidents funeral to become a Hells angels puppet club. The betrayal and murder of the Death Riders president helped the Hells angels take over the entire drug trade in Laval.

So get this, years later history repeated itself. The Rock Machine merged with the Bandidios and the Texas head office ordered a hit on the Toronto chapter and another aspiring leader was more than happy to seize the opportunity to murder his own brothers. Another white supremacist murdering his fellow members. Once again the Rock Machine were outraged and broke off on their own. Unfortunately, their ultimate purpose is the same as the Hells angels - to sell drugs. The turf war is a war over drug territory for drug profits.

After the Bandidio massacre, Salvatore Cazzetta went back with his friend Mom Boucher to join the Hells angels and became the president of the Montreal chapter. I kid you not. This would reinforce the rumour in the book The Angels claiming that Maurice "Mom" Boucher at one time paid his "rivals" in the Rock Machine to murder some of his own people who he saw as political threats to his leadership within the club. The author of the book claims to have received the information from an ex Rock Machine member.

Ya gotta wonder about it since Salvatore was his friend and rejoined him once all the political opposition was eliminated letting him become president of the Montreal chapter once and for all.

A Wake up Call

It appears that even my regular readers misunderstood the allegory in my last post. I have decided to continue with the blog and web site. I'm just getting a little bit burned out and need to cut back how much time I spend so I can balance it with some of the finer things in life. Like climbing mountains in winter with snowshoes or paddling up rivers to see the eagles feed off the spawning chum.

I was sincerely thinking of making my previous post my final post. For a while at least. Then as I got to thinking about it I looked up what the military bugle last post was historically all about. The Last Post isn't a final blog post, it is a historic tune on the trumpet played at remembrance day. One of it's purposes is to remember the fallen soldiers in war. Another purpose in the field of the Last Post was after a battle when it was played to gather the wounded so they could regroup.

On Remembrance day the Last Post is played and after a moment of silence is followed by the Rouse which is a wake up call so to speak. Very similar to the First Post which is a call to inspect the troops. On remembrance day we remember the dead and arouse our sense of duty by waking up to the cause.

In the Matrix, Morpheus offered Neo two choices. He could take the blue pill and when he woke up life would be back to normal. Everything would be as it was and he would have no knowledge of the Matrix or that anything else that was amiss. However, if he took the red pill that would waken him from a deep sleep so that he could see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.

When I look at the gang war as well as the political climate that is affiliated with it and enables it, I think we all can agree that the public needs a wake up call. Yet whether or not the public decides to waken from it's apathetic slumber, we all as individuals have to decide what we will do as individuals. Obviously we can't solve all the worlds problems. Yet we can chose to be informed. We can chose to look beyond the official version of things we are fed and make our own decision on the various issues at hand.

Most of us would agree that if we are going to address the gang war, reform the police, fix the judicial system, repair the prison system and confront the crooks on Wall street that embezzle pensions, we need to look to a political solution. I submit that the US Constitution is a marvelous political model to accomplish that task. Yet many misquote, misunderstand and manipulate the Constitution to promote their own welfare above that of others. The pledge of the preamble states:

"We the People, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution. I got a kick out of how Michael Moore pointed out it doesn't say the word Capitalism anywhere in the Constitution but it does say "We", "Union" and "general Welfare." He jokingly said that sounds more like the other ism. It's not but the point is promoting the general welfare striving to create a more perfect union is not a Communist plot to take over the free world. We've been had by the Kings and Queens of Wall Street.

Remember those old Schoolhouse Rock commercials about the Constitution? That was back when they had commercials for kids teaching them grammar. How about that old I'm just a bill song explaining how a bill becomes a law. There's one about the real Boston Tea party. The one Sara Palin missed about the ride of Paul Revere and one about the 19th Amendment.

There's a more modern rendition of the Bill of Rights which is similar to our Charter of Rights in Canada. There's an interesting founding fathers rap as well. I know Canada has a different history than the United States. Our forefathers were loyalists. Yet democracy, free speech, lawful assemble, these are unalienable rights to which we all aspire. So which will it be, the blue pill or the red pill?

Last Post

This was going to be my Last Post. Instead it's going to be my First Post. First and Last. I shall explain. The Last Post is a bugle tribute to a fallen solider. The First Post is the bugle call for inspection. The Rouse is simply a wake up call.

I've got another vindictive fruitcake in my grill threatening to post my picture, home address and the name of my daughter online, knowing full well what harm that would put my daughter in. I never did like the idea of being anonymous. It is being a bitch. I fully admit it. Yet so is threatening to rape my daughter. That is off the hook. The reason I decided to do this anonymously was to protect my family and to protect my former associations. I am responsible for what I post. No one else is. Threatening someones family is low life. Yet that is what it has come to.

Me, I'm an old man. My kids are all grown up. What happens to me doesn't matter any more. What happens to them does. So we all make choices and we all live with the consequences of those choices. The theme behind the movie Braveheart was Every man dies, not every man really lives. To that I might add, every man dies but some are already dead before they go to the grave. I shall explain.

It is no secret that I don't like liars and I don't like crack dealers. People who lie about selling crack really piss me off. I saw a kid buy some crack in Surrey central from a Hells Angel associate. Then I saw him turn his girlfriend over to the crack dealer who was trying to get the girl alone with half a dozen dirty crackheads. She looked about 14 years old. Younger than my daughter. That kind of stuff makes me come unglued. If I saw that and didn't say anything about that, I would be dead already.

There has been some bizarre things come out at the Pickton inquiry. Accusations of police officers blackmailing prostitutes. Claims of off duty police officers attending parties at Piggy's Palace. We know the Hells Angels had a grow op on site. We know Dave Pickton was a Hells Angels associate. If I knew the Hells Angels and the police had anything to do with the murders on the Pickton farm and I didn't say anything about it, I would be dead already.

If I knew the Hells Angels were using violence to take over all the grow ops in BC and if I knew the Hells Angels were using violence against anyone who was selling pot or anything else in their area and didn't say anything about it, I'd already be dead inside. So my Last Post is indeed a wake up call and a call to inspection. Let's inspect the troops and lets expose the lies. We owe it to the missing women and we owe it to ourselves.

Ottawa Police Videos

More videos released of police brutality in Ottawa lock ups. Six incidents in total. "We have a problem. There's not doubt about it." Gilles Larochelle Acting Ottawa Police Chief.

Constable Ravinder Dosanjh's trial

December 15 2003 Constable Ravinder Dosanjh was suspended with pay by Victoria police in connection with an ongoing investigation. Police Cheif Paul Battershill later says the suspension was in connection to a drug investigation and the raids at the legislature.

In a dramatic and riveting video recording made by the RCMP anti-corruption squad, Const. Ravinder (Rob) Dosanjh looked wan and drained when confronted with the results of a six-month investigation into his family ties and honesty.

He steadfastly maintained throughout the Dec. 15, 2003 interview with RCMP Insp. Don Adam that he did not compromise any case or leak information to his relative, accused drug-dealer, Mandeep Singh Sandhu. "I'm not involved," Dosanjh stammered. "I know the difference between right and wrong. At least I think I do. I see what you got. It's not looking good." He appeared devastated by the accusations.

Sandhu's home was raided Dec. 9, 2003, and he and eight others face federal drug conspiracy charges involving cross-border trafficking. Six days later, Dosanjh was arrested and suspended from his job with pay. A year later he was charged and fired.

Ravinder Singh Dosanjh is accused of counselling his cousin, Mandeep Sandhu, to lie to police about the source of $30,000 that was seized by investigators during a raid of Mr. Sandhu's house on Dec. 9, 2003. The court heard that police believe the cash is drug money.

The Sandhu raid was part of a larger investigation into drugs, money laundering and organized crime that, on Dec. 28, 2003, led police to the legislative offices of David Basi and Bob Virk, top aides in the Liberal government.

Mr. Sandhu was part of a group of B.C. Liberal Party fixers who were known in political circles as "Basi's Boys." One of their strengths was the ability to quickly sign up supporters for candidates.

In court yesterday, defence lawyer Ian Donaldson argued that while his client admitted in the witness box that he told Mr. Sandhu to lie to police, he never intended for him to follow through on the advice.

Ravinder Dosanjh has "vast property interests". Dosanjh is director of Dosam Developments Ltd., which lists its address as 4487 Densmore Ave. in Victoria. Corrections officer Jarnail Samra is co-director of the business. Dosanjh is listed as an additional owner of a single-family home at 1289 Walnut St. in Victoria, assessed at $167,900. Samra, a worker with the Children's and Family Ministry, is listed as the owner.

He is also listed as owner of 2163 West Weiler Ave., in North Saanich assessed at $310,000. Mandeep S. Sandhu, a courier, is listed as an additional owner. Mandeep Sandhu is his cousin caught with $30,000 police beleive was drug money that Dosanjh told him to lie about where it came from.

From the interview we are told: "This [$35,000] is drug money he's talking about, and you're talking about it," Adam added. Dosanjh choked up and, for a moment, it appeared he was going to break down emotionally. "You okay?" the empathetic Mountie asked.

"I'm fine," Dosanjh replied. "It's probably drug money." He paused, then conceded: "I'm sure it's drug money." "This sounds like you're partners," Adam said. "It's criminal is what it is. . . . Full partners' discussion, that's what this is. . . . It's beyond stupid." Dosanjh said: "My head's spinning right now trying to recall. I would not tell [Sandhu] about a search warrant and jeopardize an investigation like that." Basi-Virk Trial Timeline.

Basi's impared charge held over

My oh my, BC Mary is a wealth of information. She quotes a Times Colonist article about how the shortage of judges has resulted in Impaired cases tossed due to clogged courts. This is another reason why Stephen Harper's lopsided crime bill is preventing us from addressing violent crime.

... In 2005, the provincial court had 143 judges. The current provincial court judge count is 127. Victoria provincial court used to have 13 to 14 full-time judges. It now has the equivalent of 91⁄2 judges. The lack of court resources also led to another impaired driving case being adjourned twice this week.

Aneal Basi, an accused in the B.C. Rail matter, was stopped for impaired driving on Nov. 29, 2008. His first court appearance was on Jan. 15, 2009. The defence requested adjournments of the first two trial dates — March 10 and Sept. 9, 2010 — because the B.C. Rail matter was before the courts.

After the charges against Basi in the B.C. Rail matter were stayed, a new trial was set for July 20, this year, but the trial could not proceed because of an issue over the disclosure of documents.

The case was adjourned until Thursday, but two other cases were on the list for trial in that courtroom. The Crown chose to proceed with a two-day sexual assault trial because expert witnesses from Vancouver were waiting to testify. The Basi case was adjourned until Friday, when it was adjourned again due to lack of court time and resources. A new date is to be set Nov. 15.

"There's cause for concern that if the matter is not set for trial quickly, there's a real possibility the charge will be stayed for overly long delay," said Crown prosecutor Nils Jensen.

As for the RCMP's involvement in the Pickton case, Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug LePard testified that VPD investigators were never told that the Mounties had interviewed Robert Pickton in 2000. VPD investigators also weren’t told about what the Mounties learned during their questioning of Pickton, he said. “It was obviously of great interest to the VPD and it was inexplicably not shared with the VPD,” LePard said. He also said VPD investigators also were not informed that the Pickton interview was going to happen.

At the time, Coquitlam RCMP had jurisdiction to investigate Pickton because of an active investigation stemming from a 1997 attack on a prostitute, LePard said. The woman died in hospital but was revived. Pickton was charged with attempted murder and unlawful confinement but the charges were dropped by the Crown in 1998.

LePard testified that after the 1997 attack by Pickton, the RCMP seized his clothing, which was kept in a storage locker and was not tested for DNA until 2004 — two years after Pickton’s arrest for murder. Police then learned that the DNA of two missing women — Cara Ellis and Andrea Borhaven — was also found on Pickton’s jacket and boots.

Vancouver police had received two tips in July and August 1998 that Pickton was responsible for the death of one and maybe all of the women who were going missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. LePard recalled that in September 1999, an RCMP officer had attempted to call Pickton to arrange an interview but reached Pickton’s brother, Dave Pickton, who suggested they were really busy with work.