• Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
• Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
• The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

(“Your papers, please.”)

• The World Future Council was founded by the Swedish writer and activist Jakob von Uexkull in reaction to politics across the world being dominated by short-term, economic thinking. The idea for a global council was first aired on German radio in 1998. It hit a chord, with German TV immediately expressing an interest in broadcasting the Council’s sessions. In October 2004 the organisation was officially launched in London with funding from private donors in Germany, Switzerland, USA and the UK. Since 2006, the organisation is based in Hamburg, where the World Future Council is registered as a charitable foundation. Further offices are located in London, Brussels, Delhi, and Washington D.C. The Council met for the first time in May 2007 in Hamburg.

an interesting group of policy makers and social engineers.

• For almost ten years Harry Markopolos tried, and failed, to alert regulators and investors of Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion dollar Ponzi scheme.
• In his new book “No One Would Listen”, Markopolos writes of how he and a group of colleagues spent years gathering information about Madoff and sending it to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Initially they hoped it would level the playing field by eliminating a successful rival they believed was engaged in fraud, later it became a mission to bring down a man they believed posed a risk to the entire financial system.
• For Markopolos, a former hedge fund manager and forensic accountant, trying to bring down a man he considered one of the most powerful on Wall Street was one fraught with risks, for his career and family.
• In an extended interview Markopolos speaks about his book, his investigation, his frustration with the regulators and how he feared for his own life.
• Markopolos said he was living under a “death sentence” for ten years. Believing Madoff’s client list included drug cartels and organized crime, Markopolos went to extremes to protect himself and his family, even going so far as to devise a plan to kill Madoff.

The FederalJack Free Ebooks Archive.

Declassified Federal Docs, FOIA Requests, Fiction and Non-Fiction Books, Survival Manuals and more.

Stock up, 2010 is going to be a bumpy ride.

Universal Healthcare Map

Public universal health care around the world (as of December 2009).

BLUE = Single-payer universal health care (16)
GREEN = Public universal health care through other means (51)
GRAY = No universal health care or no data

Just to help put things in perspective, via Wikipedia

criminalwisdom:

WINDMILLS AND WIND MOTORS : HOW TO BUILD AND RUN THEM (1910)
From the Internet Archive, a book on how to build windmills and wind motors. Via No Tech Magazine.

The Boneyard: 22 Billion Dollar Military Cemetery

• The 2,600 acre facility, officially known Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, is home to thousands of outdated aeroplanes and helicopters mothballed by the United States Air Force and other allied forces.
• The 60 year-old facility, the size of 1,300 football pitches and sprawled across the desert in Tucson, Arizona, houses the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) and is America’s only storehouse for out-of-service aircraft.
• Some of the dismantled aircraft include B-52 flying fortresses, F14 Tomcats, seen in the Tom Cruise 80s blockbuster film “Top Gun”, and the A-10 Thunderbolt “tank busters”.

• The European single currency is facing an ‘inevitable break-up’ a leading French bank claimed yesterday.
• Strategists at Paris-based Société Générale said that any bailout of the stricken Greek economy would only provide ‘sticking plasters’ to cover the deep- seated flaws in the eurozone bloc.
• The stark warning came as the euro slipped further on the currency markets and dire growth figures raised the prospect of a ‘double-dip’ recession in the embattled zone.
• Claims that the euro could be headed for total collapse are particularly striking when they come from one of the oldest and largest banks in France - a core founder-member.
• In a note to investors, SocGen strategist Albert Edwards said: ‘My own view is that there is little “help” that can be offered by the other eurozone nations other than temporary, confidence-giving “sticking plasters” before the ultimate denouement: the break-up of the eurozone.’
• He added: ‘Any “help” given to Greece merely delays the inevitable break-up of the eurozone.’
• The French bank’s warning was echoed by Mats Persson, Director of the Open Europe think-tank, which campaigns for reforms in Brussels.
• He said: ‘The eurozone is facing a fully-fledged crisis. The Greece episode has made it painfully clear how flawed the euro project was from the very beginning.
• ‘Even if Greece receives a one-off bailout it would not solve the real problem, which is the huge differences in competitiveness between the eurozone’s richest and poorest members.
• If these differences are to be evened out, the EU would need a single budget and common taxes so it can redistribute resources.

(Single budget and common taxes for all of Europe? How about a ‘euro army’ while we are at it…)

• Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country’s already bloated deficit.

(Anyone surprised GS had a hand in this??)

• GERMAN FOREIGN minister Guido Westerwelle has called for the EU to proceed with plans for a European army under the Lisbon Treaty, which he dubbed “the beginning and not the end” of a common security and defence policy.
• His remarks at the annual Munich Security Conference followed a call by Berlin’s defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg to end what he called Nato’s “absurd” practice of unanimous decision-making.
• Germany’s top diplomat received backing for his plan from his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, who called for a “single European military-political space” in which no one country’s security was sacrificed for another.

(So Germany calls for a Pan-European army, eerie considering the historical precedent of Nazi Germany’s plans….)

Greek civil servants go on strike

• Thousands of Greek civil servants have marched through Athens as they went on a 24-hour strike in protest against the government’s plans to freeze wages, gather more taxes and reform pensions.
• The action on Wednesday left flights grounded and many schools and government offices closed, while public hospitals were expected to only take emergency cases.
• Protests were said to be mostly peaceful apart from in one incident, where police fired tear gas at dozens of people who tried to break a cordon in the capital city.
• The strike comes as the government moves to grapple with a debt crisis that has sent shock waves through the eurozone.
• Greece is suffering from a budget deficit that is four times the European Union limit.
• The socialist government has announced fresh measures to further cut the public salary bill and hike taxes, defying unions with plans to save the state $1.1bn this year.
• “Today, the workers give their reply,” protesters said over loudspeakers in the capital’s central Syntagma Square, where hundreds of pensioners and striking workers began gathering on Wednesday for the demonstrations planned later in the morning.
• “They had promised the rich would pay but instead they take the money from the poor,” Ilias Iliopoulos, general secretary of the public sector umbrella union ADEDY, said.
• The European Commission has voiced concern that Greece’s fiscal crisis could affect other parts of the 16-nation eurozone and EU leaders were due to discuss the issue during a summit in Brussels on Thursday.
• European governments have agreed in principle to support Greece and are considering various options, including bilateral aid, a senior German coalition source said on Tuesday.
• Phillips said that if the EU decided not to help Greece, the other option would be the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
• “The IMF has helped other eastern European countries like Latvia and Hungary over the last year but it hasn’t had to step into the eurozone itself,” he said.
• If it did, that would be a significant humiliation for Greece and for Europe.”
• An unnamed government official quoted by the Financial Times said it was more self-interest than altruism that was driving Berlin.
• “We are thinking about what we should do if the crisis spills from Greece into other euro countries,” the official was quoted as saying.

(If Greece fails the domino effect would be the dreaded double-dip in this global recession.)

Related:

Greece: The Next Too Big to Fail?