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In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the tigers, flies and naked officials fleeing China for the US, where corruption is not being cracked down on.

They also discuss the naked pork bun running London and what to expect for the housing bubble if China does crackdown on corruption. In the second half, Max interviews Linda Kaucher, of Stop TTIP, about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) as a plan for permanent neoliberalism and regulatory harmonization. Under the deal, ‘trade irritants’ such as biased national laws will be eradicated via an arbitration panel, which will judge ONLY on free trade criteria. Max notes that David Cameron seems to be benchmarking UK policy against US disasters.

In this episode of the Keiser Report, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the “bullion in the sky” that is the UK housing market in the Year of the Whores, as the BBC accidentally called the Chinese New Year. 

Markets! Finance! Scandal! Keiser Report is a no holds barred look at the shocking scandals behind the global financial headlines. From the collusion between Wall Street and Capitol Hill to the latest banking crime wave, from bogus government economic statistics to rigged stock markets, nothing escapes the eye of Max Keiser, a former stockbroker, inventor of the virtual specialist technology and co-founder of the Hollywood Stock Exchange. With the help of Keiser's co-host, Stacy Herbert, and guests from around the world, Keiser Report tells you what is really going on in the global economy.

Snowden used common web crawler tool to collect NSA files

'NATO 3' found not guilty of terrorism charges.

Defendants in the ‘NATO 3’ trial were found not guilty of terrorism charges on Thursday. The three young men, accused by the state of Illinois of plotting violent acts at the 2012 NATO summit in Chicago, were found guilty on two counts of mob action.

Brian Jacob Church, Brent Betterly and Jared Chase were acquitted of charges including material support for terrorism and conspiracy to commit terrorism.

The defendants were found guilty of two much lesser mob action charges and one count each for possessing an incendiary device to commit arson, which carries the possibility of up to 30 years in prison.

After nearly three weeks of trial proceedings, the jury in the case deliberated for just under eight hours before the verdict was read at around 16:15 CST. Closing arguments lasted around five hours on Thursday.

Illinois state prosecutors and attorneys for the defense said the verdict in the trial would create a clear line between terrorism and violence. In addition, throughout the case, the defense showed how much the supposed plot to use molotov cocktails in Chicago during the 2012 NATO meeting was shepherded by law enforcement, highlighting increased counter-terrorism operations by police in the US that critics say border on entrapment. The defense also warned that dissent should not be conflated with terrorism.

“When your hatred boils over into plots of violence, you've crossed the line — the line that protects us all,”said Assistant State's Attorney John Blakey before jurors on Thursday.

“Is this what the war on terror has come to?” asked attorney Molly Armour, who represents Betterly.

Bond was revoked for all three defendants, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Betterly, 25, Chase, 29, and Church, 22, all of Florida, were arrested two days before the beginning of the NATO summit, in May 2012, for alleged involvement in making Molotov cocktails using four empty beer bottles, gasoline and an undercover police officer’s bandana.

Using recordings from two undercover Chicago police officers, the prosecution alleged that the three men made the explosives with the intent to use them during protests that week.

The defense consistently countered those claims, saying the recordings, in fact, did not prove intent, and that the prosecution was severely overreaching with the use of terrorism charges, which are rare on the state level.

In addition to the NATO summit, the defendants were accused of plotting to damage President Barack Obama’s Chicago headquarters, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home, police precinct stations and one downtown bank.

Prosecutors highlighted certain statements picked up in recordings, including Church’s question to one of the undercover officers during the creation of the Molotovs, “ready to see a police officer on fire?”Church also said at one point that “the city doesn’t know what it’s in for and after NATO it will never be the same.”

For Thursday’s closing comments to jurors, Blakey even gave the three defendants nicknames - Church was “Mr. Cop-on-Fire,” Chase was “Captain Napalm” and Betterly “Professor Molotov” - claiming they were hiding violent actions “behind the legacy of nonviolent protest,” invoking figures like Martin Luther King, Ghandi and Mother Teresa.

“Many reasons to be proud of being an American,” Blakey said, despite the fact that the prosecution entered as evidence statements the defense said were unrelated to the evidence in the case. “You can speak your mind in America,” he added.

Blakey insisted the trio crossed the line into terrorism when they took their discontent with society into planning violent action. He insisted to jurors the three men were not joking about resorting to violence.

The defense said the clandestine recordings showed the three were often stoned, drunk or plainly too obtuse to be terrorists. They said the two undercover cops, Nadia Chikko and Mehmet Uygun, consistently passed alcohol onto the defendants and enthusiastically encouraged them to build the Molotovs in an effort to find a scapegoat after months of sifting through activist groups searching for potential criminal plots.

Chase’s attorney, Thomas Durkin, even took to mocking what the prosecution called tools the three possessed that could be used for terrorism - knives, a sword, a sling shot, a bow and arrow and a throwing star that Church brought to Chicago in a guitar case. Durkin held up the “rinky dink” sling shot in the courtroom Thursday, drawing laughs from those present.

“Tool of the terrorism trade for sure.” he said, adding, “Give me a break.”

The defense insisted that the pursuit of terror charges against the trio belittled actual operations done by authorities on terrorist networks.

“To me it trivializes terrorism — the most serious type of case,” said Michael Deutsch, Church’s attorney.“You think of Al-Qaeda or the people who blew up Oklahoma City. This is not a case of terrorism.”

The defendants are due to appear in court on Feb. 28 for a sentencing hearing.

At a post-verdict press conference, the defense attorneys called Thursday a big loss for the state, saying Illinois prosecutors should answer for bring a politically-motivated case, according to FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola.

The jurors in the case have reportedly expressed disinterest in divulging much of their decision process."We don't ever ever want to speak to the media,” they expressed, according to DNAinfo.com’s Chicago courts reporter Erin Meyer. 

State Dept. contractor to go to jail under Espionage Act for tipping off journalist

Hijacking Ukraine’s Revolution, HSBC’s Laundry List, & Willful Blindness

The US Treasury

The US Treasury on Friday was forced to enact ‘emergency measures’ after spending its borrowed time and money. By month’s end, Uncle Sam’s piggy bank will be down to just $50 billion, US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew warned Congress.

By now, hand-wringing warnings that the US Treasury is about to go bust brings to mind the story of the little boy who cried wolf so many times that everybody eventually ignored him – much to his tragic demise. 

The reality, however, is that the problems gripping the US government and its profligate spending is no fairy tale: The US government will have exhausted its emergency funds by the end of February unless Congress can once again conjure up the political will and public patience to pass a new budget deal. 

Under the budget agreement passed by Congress in October, the debt limit was suspended on February 7. Beginning on Saturday, the debt limit goes back to its current level of $17.2 trillion. 

In the event that Congress fails to agree on that amount by February 27, the US government will be forced to default on its debt obligations, a move that would have no small impact on global markets. 

"If Treasury has insufficient cash on hand, it would be impossible for our nation to meet all of its obligations for the first time in history," Lew told lawmakers. 

Congress has raised the debt ceiling three times since 2011. 

The last risk of American financial insolvency happened in October 2013 when the Republicans forced the shutdown of the government over what they believed was excessive government spending. A global financial earthquake was diverted at the eleventh hour when the Democrats and Republicans passed a resolution postponing the debt. 
The political showdown left the United States with the economic equivalent of a black eye: Its first credit downgrade in history. 
This time around, the Treasury Secretary warned, US politicians don’t have the luxury of time on their side simply because the US Treasury is spending more money than it is receiving. To further the burden, the US is heading into its annual tax season, when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will start paying tax refunds. 
The Treasury may be forced to take extraordinary measures – like suspending investments in the retirement funds of federal employees, for example – that will certainly attract public criticism. Lew did not provide any clear indication as to when the Treasury will exhaust its borrowing capacity. 
"Based on our best and most recent information, however, we are not confident that the extraordinary measures will last beyond Thursday, February 27," Lew said. "At that point, Treasury would be left with only the cash on hand and any incoming revenue to meet our country's commitments." 
Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., incited partisan bickering when she called the approaching deadline "another round of Republican debt limit drama."
"We're now at a point when the Treasury Department will have to take extraordinary measures to ensure the United States can continue to make the payments it owes, including Social Security checks and even tax refunds," she said, as quoted by USA Today. "There's no reason to drag this out any longer." 

Google, Facebook, Microsoft hire first anti-NSA lobbyist in Washington

Technology powers like Apple and Google have coalesced to register a lobbyist in Washington to focus on government surveillance reform in an effort to maintain credibility following NSA spying disclosures that often implicated them as accomplices.

On Thursday AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo formed the“Reform Government Surveillance” coalition, motivated to influence policy in the nation’s capital. The new coalition hired Monument Policy Group, which has previously worked with Microsoft and LinkedIn, to handle the lobbying operations.

After the beginning of spying revelations - supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden - the companies often chose to stay quiet about desired reforms, if they weren’t already forced to by the US, as has been the case with transparency efforts. But as it has become more apparent that surveillance disclosures have had or could have an impact on their business interests, the companies have chosen to act.

In late June, the US Department of Justice relented, albeit in a modest manner, to tech companies’ requests to reveal more information about how much data is demanded of them by government surveillance operations. The companies will now be able to report on national security letters - in which information is demanded independent of court authority - as well as requests ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. Yet how they report will be limited to broad numerical ranges on the volume of orders and the number of accounts affected.

The companies had been barred from revealing even that amount of limited insight into its cooperation with the US. Silicon Valley, faced with questions about their own trustworthiness and culpability since early Snowden disclosures in June, has increasingly spoken out about it desire to provide more insight into how user data was handled and how easy it has been for the US government to legally, and illegally, access private information.

Countries overseas, especially in Europe, have floated the idea of demanding tech companies be subject to new counter-NSA privacy rules that would require them have servers within a country’s border in order to supply services there. Such a data “localization” measures would mean significant cost expenditures the companies are, to no surprise, not enthused about.

According to Politico, the companies have increased advocacy for surveillance reform and more government transparency in each quarterly lobbying report since the National Security Agency disclosures began.

On Thursday, Twitter slammed the US for its transparency practices despite the new opportunities afforded the tech companies in revealing how often they are asked to comply with government surveillance efforts. It called the Justice Department’s offer a violation of First Amendment rights.

“Allowing Twitter, or any other similarly situated company, to only disclose national security requests within an overly broad range seriously undermines the objective of transparency,” Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s Global Legal Policy manager wrote in a blog post.

The companies’ efforts to boost transparency may come just in time, as the Washington Post reported Thursday that the NSA is seeking to expand court orders to compel wireless phone companies that currently do not offer the government its records to now do so, anonymous US officials said.

Meanwhile, current and former government officials claim the NSA is not collecting as much domestic phone metadata as has been reported. As of last summer, technological advancements and popularity growth of smartphones is supposedly limiting the NSA’s collection efforts. In 2006, the agency claimed it could handle nearly all of Americans’ phone metadata. Now, anonymous officials told the Washington Post that the NSA accesses and stores only as much as 30 percent.